IV.

In the morning, Northwick did not want to rise; but he forced himself;

and that day he made the rest of the stage to Baie St. Paul. It snowed,

but he got through without much interruption. The following day,

however, the drifts had blocked the roads so that he did not make the

twenty miles to Malbaie till after dark. He found himself bearing the

journey better than he expected. He was never so tired again as that

first day after St. Anne. He did not eat much or sleep much, but he felt

well. The worst was that the breach between his will and his mind seemed

to grow continually wider: he had a sense of the rift being like a chasm

stretching farther and farther, the one side from the other. At first

his mind worked clearly but disobediently; then he began to be aware of

a dimness in its record of purposes and motives. At times he could not

tell where he was going, or why. He reverted with difficulty to the fact

that he had wished to get as far as possible, not only beyond pursuit,

but beyond the temptation to return voluntarily and give himself up. He

knew, in those days before the treaty, that he was safe from

extradition; but he feared that if a detective approached he would yield

to him, and go back, especially as he could not always keep before

himself the reasons for not going back. When from time to time these

reasons escaped him, it seemed as if nothing could be done to him in

case he went home and restored to the company the money he had brought

away. It needed a voluntary operation of logic to prove that this

partial restitution would not avail; that he would be arrested, and

convicted. He would not be allowed to go on living with his children in

his own house. He would be taken from them, and put in prison.

He made an early start for Tadoussac, after a wakeful night. His driver

wished to break the forty mile journey midway, but Northwick would not

consent. The road was not so badly drifted as before, and they got

through a little after nightfall. Northwick remembered the place because

it was here that the Saguenay steamer lay so long before starting up the

river. He recognized in the vague night-light the contour of the cove,

and the hills above it, with the villages scattered over them. It was

twenty years since he had made that trip with his wife, who had been

nearly as long dead, but he recalled the place distinctly, and its

summer effect; it did not seem much lonelier now than it seemed in the

summer. The lamps shone from the windows where he had seen them then,

when he walked about a little just after supper; the village store had a

group of _habitans_ and half-breeds about its stove, and there was as

much show of life in the streets as there used to be at the same hour

and season in the little White Mountain village where his boyhood was

passed. It did not seem so bad; if Chicoutimi was no worse he could live

there well enough till he could rehabilitate himself. He imagined

bringing his family there after his mills had got successfully going;

then probably other people from the outside world would be living there.

He ate a hearty supper, but again he did not sleep well, and in the

night he was feverish. He thought how horrible it would be if he were to

fall sick there; he might die before he could get word to his children

and they reach him. He thought of going back to Quebec, and sailing for

Europe, and having his children join him there. They could sell the

place at Hatboro', and with what it brought, and with what he had, they

could live comfortably in some cheap country which had no extradition

treaty with the United States. He remembered reading of a defaulter who

went to a little republic called San Marino, somewhere in Italy, and was

safe there; he found the President treading his own grape vats; and it

cost nothing to live there, though it was dull, and the exile became so

homesick that he returned and gave himself up. He wondered that he had

not thought of that place before; then he reflected that no ships could

make their way from Quebec to the sea before May, at the earliest. He

would be arrested if he left any American port, or arrested as soon as

he reached England. He remembered the advertisement of a line of

steamships between Quebec and Brazil; he must wait for the St. Lawrence

to open, and go to Brazil, and in the morning must go back to Quebec.

But in the morning he felt so much better that he decided to keep on to

Chicoutimi. He could not bear the thought of being found out by

detectives at Quebec, and by reporters who would fill the press with

paragraphs about him. He must die to the world, to his family, before he

could hope to revisit either.

The morning was brilliant with sunlight, and the glare of the snow hurt

his eyes. He went to the store to get some glasses to protect them, and

he bought some laudanum to make him sleep that night, if he should be

wakeful again. It was sixty miles to Haha Bay, but the road on the

frozen river was good, and he could do a long stretch of it. From

Rivière Marguerite, he should travel on the ice of the Saguenay, and the

going would be smooth and easy.

All the landscape seemed dwarfed since he saw it in that far-off summer.

The tops of the interminable solitudes that walled the river in on both

sides appeared lower, as if the snow upon them weighed them down, but

doubtless they had grown beyond their real height in his memory. They

had lost the mystery of the summer aspect when they were dimmed with

rain or swathed in mist; all their outlines were in plain sight, and the

forests that clothed them from the shore to their summits were not that

unbroken gloom which they had seemed. The snow shone through their

stems, and the inky river at their feet lay a motionless extent of

white. As his carriole slipped lightly over it, Northwick had a

fantastic sense of his own minuteness and remoteness. He thought of the

photograph of a lunar landscape that he had once seen greatly magnified,

and of a fly that happened to traverse the expanse of plaster-like white

between the ranges of extinct volcanoes.

At times the cliffs rose from the river too sheer for the snow to lodge

on; then their rocky faces shone harsh and stern; and sometimes the

springs that gushed from them in summer were frozen in long streams of

ice, like the tears bursting from the source of some Titanic grief.

These monstrous icicles, blearing the visage of the rock, which he

figured as nothing but icicles, affected Northwick with an awe that he

nowhere felt except when his driver slowed his carriole in front of the

great Capes Trinity and Eternity, and silently pointed at them with his

whip. He had no need to name them, the fugitive would have known them in

another planet. It was growing late; the lonely day was waning to the

lonely night. While they halted, the scream of a catamount broke from

the woods skirting the bay between the capes, and repeated itself in the

echo that wandered from depth to depth of the frozen wilderness, and

seemed to die wailing away at the point where it first tore the silence.

Here and there, at long intervals, they passed a point or a recess where

a saw-mill stood, with a few log houses about it, and with signs of

human life in the smoke that rose weakly on the thin, dry air from their

chimneys, or in the figures that appeared at the doorways as the

carriole passed. At the next of these beyond the capes, the driver

proposed to stop and pass the night, and Northwick consented. He felt

worn out by his day's journey; his nerves were spent as if by a lateral

pressure of the lifeless desert he had been travelling through, and by

the stress of his thoughts, the intensity of his reveries. His mind ran

back against his will, and dwelt with his children. By this time, long

before this time, they must be wild with anxiety about him; by this time

their shame must have come to poison their grief. He realized it all,

and he realized that he could not, must not help them. He must not go

back to them if ever he was to live for them again. But at last he asked

why he should live, why he should not die. There was laudanum enough in

that bottle to kill him.

As he walked up from the carriole at the river's edge to the door of the

saw-miller's cabin, he drew the cork of the vial, and poured out the

poison; it followed him a few steps, a black dribble of murder on the

snow, that the miller's dog smelt at and turned from in offence. That

night he could not sleep again; toward morning, when all the house was

snoring, he gave way to the sobs that were bursting his heart. He heard

the sleepers, men and dogs, start a little in their dreams; then they

were still, and he fell into a deep sleep.

They let him sleep late; and he had a dream of himself, which must have

been caused by the nascent consciousness of the going and coming around

him. People were talking of him, and one said how old he was; and

another looked at his long, white beard which flowed down over the

blanket as far as his waist. He told them that he wore it so that they

should not know him when he got home; and he showed them how he could

take it off and put it on at pleasure. He started awake, and found his

carriole driver standing over him.

"You got you' sleep hout, no?"

"What time is it?" said Northwick, stupidly, scanning the man to make

sure that it was he, and waiting for a full sense of the situation to

reach him.

"Nine o'clock," said the man, and he turned away.

Northwick got up, and found the place empty of the men and dogs. A

woman, who looked like a half-breed, brought him his breakfast of fried

venison and bean-coffee; her little one held by her skirt, and stared at

him. He thought of Elbridge's baby that he had seen die. It seemed ages

ago. He offered the child a shilling; it shyly turned its face into its

mother's dress. The driver said, "'E do'n' know what money is, yet," but

the mother seemed to know; she showed her teeth, and took it for the

child. Northwick sat a moment thinking what a strange thing it was not

to know what money was; it had never occurred to him before; he asked

himself a queer question, What was money? The idea of it seemed to go to

pieces, as a printed word does when you look steadily at it, and to have

no meaning. It affected him as droll, fantastic, like a piece of

childish make-believe, when the woman took some more money from him for

his meals and lodging. But that was the way the world was worked. You

could get anything done for money; it was the question of demand and

supply; nothing more. He tried to think where money came in when he went

out to see Elbridge's sick boy; when Elbridge left the dead child to

drive him to the station. It was something else that came in there; but

that thing and money were the same, after all: he had proved his love

for his children by making money for them; if he had not loved them so

much he would not have tried to get so much money, and he would not have

been where he was.

His mind fought away from his control, as the sledge slipped along over

the frozen river again. It was very cold, but the full sun on his head

afflicted him like heat. It was the blaze of light that beat up from the

snow, too. His head felt imponderable; and yet he could not hold it up.

It was always sinking forward; and he woke from naps without being sure

that he had been asleep.

He intended to push through that day to Chicoutimi; but his start was so

late that it seemed to him as if they would never get to Haha Bay. When

they arrived, late in the afternoon, all sense of progress thither faded

away; it was as if the starting and stopping were one, or contained in

the same impulse. It might be so if he kept on eleven miles further to

Chicoutimi, but he would not be able to feel it so at the beginning; the

wish could involve its accomplishment only at the end. He said to

himself that this was unreasonable; it was a poor rule that would not

work both ways.

This ran through his mind in the presence of the old man who bustled out

of the door of the cabin where his carriole had stopped. It was larger

than most of the other cabins of the place, which Northwick remembered

curiously well, some with their logs bare, and some sheathed in

birch-bark. He remembered this man, too, when his white moustache, which

branched into either ear, was a glistening brown, and the droop of his

left eyelid was more like a voluntary wink. But the gayety of his face

was the same, and his welcome was so cordial, that a fear of recognition

went through Northwick. He knew the man for the talkative Canadian who

had taken him and his wife a drive over the hills around the bay, in the

morning, when their boat arrived, and afterwards stopped with them at

this cabin, and had them in to drink a glass of milk. Northwick's wife

liked the man, and said she would like to live in such a house in such a

place, and should not be afraid of the winter that he told her was so

terrible. It was almost as if her spirit were there; but Northwick said

to himself that he must not let the man know that he had ever seen him

before. The resolution cost him something, for he felt so broken and

weak that he would have liked to claim his kindness as an old

acquaintance. He would have liked to ask if he still caught wild animals

for showmen, and how his trade prospered; if he had always lived at Haha

Bay since they met. But he was the more decided to ignore their former

meeting because the man addressed him in English at once, and apparently

knew him for an American. Perhaps other defaulters had been there

before; perhaps the mines had brought Americans there prospecting.

"Good morning, sir!" cried the Canadian. "I am glad to see you! Let me

'elp you hout, sir. Well, it is a pleasure to speak a little English

with some one! The English close hup with the river in the autumn, but

it open early this year. I 'ope you are a sign of many Americans. They

are the life of our country. Without the Americans we could not live.

No, sir. Not a day. Come in, come in. You will find you' room ready for

you, sir."

Northwick hung back suspiciously. "Were you expecting me?" he asked.

"No one!" cried the man, with a shrug and opening of the hands. "But

hall the travellers they stop with Bird, and where there are honly two

rooms, 'eat with one stove between the walls, their room is always

ready. Do me the pleasure!" He set the door open, and bowed Northwick

in. "Baptiste!" he called to the driver over his shoulder, "take you'

'orse to the stable." He added a long queue of unintelligible French to

his English, and the driver responded, "Hall right."

"I am the only person at Haha Bay who speaks English," he said, in the

same terms he had used twenty years before, when he presented himself to

Northwick and his wife on their steamboat, and asked them if they would

like to drive before breakfast. "But you must know me? Bird--_Oiseau_?

You have been here before?"

"No," said Northwick, with one lie for all. The man, with his cheer and

gayety, was even terribly familiar; and Northwick could have believed

that the room and the furniture in it were absolutely unchanged. There

was the little window that he knew opened on the poor vegetable garden,

with its spindling corn, and its beans for soup and coffee. There was

the chair his wife had sat in to look out on the things; but for the

frost on the pane he could doubtless see them growing now.

He sank into the chair, and said to himself that he should die there,

and it would be as well, it would be easy. He felt very old and weak;

and he did not try to take off the wraps which he had worn in the

sledge. He wished that he might fall so into his grave, and be done with

it.