V.

Bird walked up and down the room, talking; he seemed overjoyed with the

chance, and as if he could not forego it for a moment. "Well, sir, I

wish that I could say as much! But I have been here forty years, hoff

and on. I am born at Quebec"--in his tremulous inattention, Northwick

was aware that the man had said the same thing to him all those years

before, with the same sidelong glance for the effect of the fact upon

him--"and I came here when I was twenty. Now I am sixty. Hall the

Americans know me. I used to go into the bush with them for bear. Lots

of bear in the bush when I first came; now they get pretty scarce. I

have the best moose-dog. But I don't care much for the hunting now; I am

too hold. That's a fact. I am sixty; and forty winters I 'ave pass at

Haha Bay. You know why it is call Haha Bay? It is the hecho. Well, I

don't hear much ha-ha nowadays round this bay. But it is pretty here in

the summer; yes, very pretty. Prettier than Chicoutimi; and more gold in

the 'ills."

He let his bold, gay eye rest confidently on Northwick, as if to say he

knew what had brought him there, and he might as well own the fact at

once; and Northwick tried to get his mind to grapple with his real

motive. But his mind kept pulling away from him, like that unruly horse,

and he could not manage it. He knew, in that self which seemed apart

from his mind, that it would be a very good thing to let the man suppose

he was there to look into the question of the mines; but there was

something else that seemed to go with that intention; something like a

wish to get away from the past so remotely and so completely that no

rumor of it should reach him till he was willing to let it; to be absent

from all who had known him so long that no one of them would know him if

he saw him. He was there not only to start a pulp-mill, but to grow a

beard that should effectually disguise him. He recalled how he had

looked with that long beard in his dream; he put his hand to his chin

and felt the eight days' stubble there, and he wondered how much time it

would take to grow such a beard.

Bird went on talking. "I know that Chicoutimi Company. I told Markham

about the gold when he was here for bear. He is smart; but he don't know

heverything. You think he can make it pay with that invention? I doubt,

me. There is one place in those 'ills," and Bird came closer to

Northwick, and dropped his voice, "where you don't 'ave to begin with

the tailings. I know the place. But what's the good? All the same, you

want capital."

He went to the shelf in the wall above the stove, and took a pipe, which

he filled with tobacco, and then he drew some coals out on the stove

hearth. But before he dropped one of them on his pipe with his horny

thumb and finger, he asked politely, "You hobject to the smoking?"

Northwick said he did not, and Bird said, "It is one of three things you

can do here in the winter; smoke the pipe, cut the wood, court the

ladies." Northwick remembered his saying that before, too, and how it

had made his wife laugh. "I used to do all three. Now I smoke the pipe.

Well, while you are young, it is all right, and it is fun in the woods.

But I was always 'omesick for Quebec, more or less. You know what it is

to be 'omesick."

The word pierced Northwick through the vagary which clothed his

consciousness like a sort of fog, and made his heart bleed with

self-pity.

"Well, I been 'omesick forty years, and I don't know what for, any more.

I been back to Quebec; it is not the same. You know 'ow they pull down

those city gate? What they want to do that for? The gate did not keep

the stranger hout; it let them in! And there were too many people dead!

Now I think I am 'omesick just to get away from here. If I had some

capital--ten, fifteen thousand dollars--I would hopen that mine, and

take out my hundred, two hundred thousand dollar, and then, Good-by,

Haha Bay! I would make it hecho like it never hecho before. I don't want

nothing to work up the tailings of my mine, me! There is gold enough

there to pay, and I can hire those _habitans_ cheap, like dirt. What is

their time worth? The bush is cut away: they got nothing to do. It is

the time of a setting 'en, as you Americans say, their time."

Bird smoked away for a little while in silence, and then he seemed

aware, for the first time, that Northwick had not taken off his wraps,

and he said, hospitably, "I 'ope you will spend the night with me here?"

Northwick said, "Thank you, I don't know. Is it far to Chicoutimi?" He

knew, but he asked, hoping the man would exaggerate the distance, and

then he would not have to go.

"It is eleven mile, but the road is bad. Drifted."

"I will wait till to-morrow," said Northwick, and he began to unswathe

and unbutton, but so feebly that Bird noticed.

"Allow me!" he said, putting down his pipe, and coming to his aid. He

was very gentle and light-handed, like a woman; but Northwick felt one

touch on the pouch of his belt, and refused further help.

He let his host carry his two bags into the next room for him; the bag

that he had brought with the few things from home, when he pretended

that he was coming away for a day or two, and the bag that he had got in

Quebec to hold the things he had to buy there. When Bird set them down

beside his bed he could not bear to see the bag from home, and he pushed

it under out of sight. Then he tumbled himself on the bed, and pulled

the bearskin robe that he found on it up over him, and fell into a thin

sleep, that was not so different from his dim waking that he was sure it

had been sleep when Bird came back with a lamp.

"Been 'aving a little nap?" he asked, looking gayly down on Northwick's

bewildered face. "Well, that is all right! We have supper, now, pretty

soon. You hungry? Well, in a 'alf-hour."

He went out again, and Northwick, after some efforts, made out to rise.

His skull felt sore, and his arms as if they had been beaten with hard

blows. But after he had bathed his face and hands in the warm water Bird

had brought with the lamp, he found himself better, though he was still

wrapped in that cloudy uncertainty of himself and of his sleeping or

waking. He saw some pictures about on the coarse, white walls: the Seven

Stations of the Cross, in colored prints; a lithograph of Indians

burning a Jesuit priest. Over the bed's head hung a chromo of Our Lady,

with seven swords piercing her heart; beside the bed was a Parian

crucifix, with the figure of Christ writhing on it.

These things made Northwick feel very far and strange. His simple and

unimaginative nature could in nowise relate itself to this alien faith,

this alien language. He heard soft voices of women in the next room, the

first that he had heard since he last heard his daughters'. A girl's

voice singing was severed by a door that closed and then opened to let

it be heard a few notes more, and again closed.

But he found Bird still alone in the next room when he returned to it.

"Well, now, we go to supper as soon as Father Étienne comes. He is our

curate--our minister--here. And he eats with me when he heat anywhere. I

tell 'im 'e hought to have my appetite, if he wants to keep up his

spiritual strength. The body is the foundation of the soul, no? Well,

you let that foundation tumble hin, and then where you got you' soul,

heigh? But Father Étienne speaks very good English. Heducate at Rome. I

am the only other educated man at Haha Bay. You don't 'appen to have

some papers in you' bag? French? English? It is the same!"

"Papers? No!" said Northwick, with horror and suspicion. "What is in the

papers?"

"That is what I like to find hout," said Bird, spreading his hands with

a shrug.

The outer door opened, and a young man in a priest's long robe came in.

Bird introduced his guest, and Northwick shook hands with the priest,

who had a smooth, regular face, with beautiful, innocent eyes, like a

girl's. He might have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine; he had the spare

figure of a man under thirty who leads an active life; his features were

refined by study and the thought of others. When he smiled the innocence

of his face was more than girlish, it was childlike. Points of light

danced in his large, soft, dark eyes; an effect of trusting, alluring

kindness came from his whole radiant visage.

Northwick felt its charm with a kind of fear. He shrank away from the

priest, and at the table he left the talk to him and his host. They

supped in a room opening into a sort of wing; beyond it was a small

kitchen, from which an elderly woman brought the dishes, and where that

girl whom he heard singing kept trilling away as if she were excited,

like a canary, by the sound of the frying meat.

Bird said, by way of introduction, that the woman was his niece; but he

did not waste time on her. He began to talk up his conjecture as to

Northwick's business with the priest, as if it were an ascertained fact.

Northwick fancied his advantage in leaving him to it. They discussed the

question of gold in the hills, which the young father treated as an old

story of faded interest, and Bird entered into with the fervor of fresh

excitement. The priest spoke of the poor return from the mines at

Chaudière, but Bird claimed that it was different here. Northwick did

not say anything: he listened and watched them, as if they were a pair

of confidence-men trying to work him. The priest seemed to be anxious to

get the question off the personal ground into the region of the

abstract, and Northwick believed that this was part of his game, a ruse

to throw him from his guard, and commit him to something. He made up his

mind to get away as early as he could in the morning; he did not think

it was a safe place.

"Very well!" the priest cried, at one point. "Suppose you had the

capital you wish. And suppose you had taken out all the gold you say is

there, and you were rich. What would you do?"

"What I do?" Bird struck the table with his fist. "Leave Haha Bay

to-morrow morning!"

"And where would you go?"

"Go? To Quebec, to London, to Paris, to Rome, to the devil! Keep going!"

The young father laughed a laugh as innocent as his looks, and turned

with a sudden appeal to Northwick. "Tell me a little about the rich men

in your land of millionnaires! How do they find their happiness? In

what? What is the secret of joy that they have bought with their money?"

"I don't know what you mean," said Northwick, with a recoil deeper into

himself after the first flush of alarm at being addressed.

"Where do they live?"

Northwick hesitated, and the priest laid his hand on Bird's shoulder, as

if to restrain a burst of information from him.

"I suppose most of them live in New York."

"All the time?"

"No. They generally have a house at the seaside, at Newport or Bar

Harbor, for the summer, and one at Lenox or Tuxedo for the fall; and

they go to Florida for the winter, or Nice. Then they have their

yachts."

"The land is not large enough for their restlessness; they roam the sea.

My son," said the young priest to the old hunter, "you can have all the

advantage of riches at the expense of a gypsies' van!" He laughed again

in friendly delight at Bird's supposed discomfiture; and touched him

lightly, delicately, as before. "It is the same in Europe; I have seen

it there, too." Bird was going to speak, but the priest stayed him a

moment. "But how did your rich people get their millions? Not like those

rich people in Europe, by inheritance?"

"Very few," said Northwick, sensible of a remnant of the pride he used

to feel in the fact, hidden about somewhere in his consciousness. "They

made it."

"How? Excuse me!"

"By manufacturing, by speculating in railroad stocks, by mining, by the

rise in land-values."

"What causes the land to rise in value?"

"The demand for it. The necessity."

"Oh! The need of others. And when a man gains in stocks, some other man

loses. No? Do the manufacturers pay the operatives all they earn? Are

the miners very well paid and comfortable? I have read that they are

miserable. Is it so?"

Northwick was aware that there were good and valid answers to all these

questions which the priest seemed to be asking rather for the confusion

of Bird than as an expression of his own opinions; but in his dazed

intelligence he could not find the answers.

Bird roared out, "Haw! Do not regard him! He is a man of the other

world--an angel--a mere imbecile--about business!" The priest threw

himself back in his chair and laughed tolerantly, showing his beautiful

teeth. "All those rich men they give work to the poor. If I had a few

thousand dollars to hopen up that place in the 'ill, I would furnish

work to every man in Haha Bay--to hundreds. Are the miners more

miserable than those _habitans_, eh?"

"The good God seems to think so," returned the priest, seriously. "At

least, he has put the gold in the rocks so that you cannot get it out.

What would you give the devil to help you?" he asked, with a smile.

"When I want to make a bargain with the devil, I don't come to you, Père

Étienne; I go to a notary. You ever hear, sir," said Bird, turning to

Northwick, "about that notary at Montreal--"

"I think I will go to bed," said Northwick, abruptly. "I am not feeling

very well--I am very tired, that is." He had suddenly lost account of

what and where he was. It seemed to him that he was both there and at

Hatboro'; that there were really two Northwicks, and that there was a

third self somewhere in space, conscious of them both.

It was this third Northwick whom Bird and the priest would have helped

to bed if he had suffered them, but who repulsed their offers. He made

shift to undress himself, while he heard them talking in French with

lowered voices in the next room. Their debate seemed at an end. After a

little while he heard the door shut, as if the priest had gone away.

Afterwards he appeared to have come back.