The talk went on all night in Northwick's head between those two
Frenchmen, who pretended to be of contrary opinions, but were really
leagued to get the better of him, and lure him on to put his money into
that mine. In the morning his fever was gone; but he was weak, and he
could not command his mind, could not make it stay by him long enough to
decide whether any harm would come from remaining over a day before he
pushed on to Chicoutimi. He tried to put in order or sequence the
reasons he had for coming so deep into the winter and the wilderness;
but when he passed from one to the next, the former escaped him.
Bird looked in with his blue woollen bonnet on his head, and his pipe in
his mouth, and he removed each to ask how Northwick was, and whether he
would like to have some breakfast; perhaps he would like a cup of tea
and some toast.
Northwick caught eagerly at the suggestion, and in a few minutes the tea
was brought him by a young girl, whom Bird called Virginie; he said she
was his grand-niece, and he hoped that her singing had not disturbed the
gentleman: she always sang; one could hardly stop her; but she meant no
harm. He stayed to serve Northwick himself, and Northwick tried to put
away the suspicion Bird's kindness roused in him. He was in such need of
kindness that he did not wish to suspect it. Nevertheless, he watched
Bird narrowly, as he put the milk and sugar in his tea, and he listened
warily when he began to talk of the priest and to praise him. It was a
pleasure, Bird said, for one educated man to converse with another; and
Father Étienne and he often maintained opposite sides of a question
merely for the sake of the discussion; it was like a game of cards where
there were no stakes; you exercised your mind.
Northwick understood this too little to believe it; when he talked, he
talked business; even the jokes among the men he was used to meant
business.
"Then you haven't really found any gold in the hills?" he asked, slyly.
"My faith, yes!" said Bird. "But," he added sadly, "perhaps it would not
pay to mine it. I will show you when you get up. Better not go to
Chicoutimi to-day! It is snowing."
"Snowing?" Northwick repeated. "Then I can't go!"
"Stop in bed till dinner. That is the best," Bird suggested. "Try to get
some sleep. Sleep is youth. When we wake we are old again, but some of
the youth stick to our fingers. No?" He smiled gayly, and went out,
closing the door softly after him, and Northwick drowsed. In a dream
Bird came back to him with some specimens from his gold mine. Northwick
could see that the yellow metal speckling the quartz was nothing but
copper pyrites, but he thought it best to pretend that he believed it
gold; for Bird, while he stood over him with a lamp in one hand, was
feeling with the other for the buckle of Northwick's belt, as he sat up
in bed. He woke in fright, and the fear did not afterwards leave him in
the fever which now began. He had his lucid intervals, when he was aware
that he was wisely treated and tenderly cared for, and that his host and
all his household were his devoted watchers and nurses; when he knew the
doctor and the young priest, in their visits. But all this he perceived
cloudily, and as with a thickness of some sort of stuff between him and
the fact, while the illusion of his delirium, always the same, was
always poignantly real. Then the morning came when he woke from it, when
the delirium was past, and he knew what and where he was. The truth did
not dawn gradually upon him, but possessed him at once. His first motion
was to feel for his belt; and he found it gone. He gave a deep groan.
The blue woollen bonnet of the old hunter appeared through the open
doorway, with the pipe under the branching gray moustache. The eyes of
the men met.
"Well," said Bird, "you are in you' senses at last!" Northwick did not
speak, but his look conveyed a question which the other could not
misinterpret. He smiled. "You want you' belt?" He disappeared, and then
reappeared, this time full length, and brought the belt to Northwick.
"You think you are among some Yankee defal_ca_tor?" he asked, for sole
resentment of the suspicion which Northwick's anguished look must have
imparted. "Count it. I think you find it hall right." But as the sick
man lay still, and made no motion to take up the belt where it lay
across his breast, Bird asked, "You want me to count it for you?"
Northwick faintly nodded, and Bird stood over him, and told the
thousand-dollar bills over, one by one, and then put them back in the
pouch of the belt.
"Now, I think you are going to get well. The doctor 'e say to let you
see you' money the first thing. Shall I put it hon you?"
Northwick looked at the belt; it seemed to him that the bunch the bills
made would hurt him, and he said, weakly, "You keep it for me."
"Hall right," said Bird, and he took it away. He went out with a proud
air, as if he felt honored by the trust Northwick had explicitly
confirmed, and sat down in the next room, so as to be within call.
Northwick made the slow recovery of an elderly man; and by the time he
could go out of doors without fear of relapse, there were signs in the
air and in the earth of the spring, which when it comes to that northern
land possesses it like a passion. The grass showed green on the low bare
hills as the snow uncovered them; the leaves seemed to break like an
illumination from the trees; the south wind blew back the birds with its
first breath. The jays screamed in the woods; the Canadian nightingales
sang in the evening and the early morning when he woke and thought of
his place at Hatboro', where the robins' broods must be half-grown by
that time. It was then the time of the apple-blossoms there; with his
homesick inward vision he saw the billowed tops of his orchard, all
pink-white. He thought how the apples smelt when they first began to
drop in August on the clean straw that bedded the orchard aisles. It
seemed to him that if he could only be there again for a moment he would
be willing to spend the rest of his life in prison. As it was, he was in
prison; it did not matter how wide the bounds were that kept him from
his home. He hated the vastness of the half world where he could come
and go unmolested, this bondage that masked itself as such ample
freedom. To be shut out was the same as to be shut in.
In the first days of his convalescence, while he was yet too weak to
leave his room, he planned and executed many returns to his home. He
went back by stealth, and disguised by the beard which had grown in his
sickness, and tried to see what change had come upon it; but he could
never see it different from what it was that clear winter night when he
escaped from it. This baffled and distressed him, and strengthened the
longing at the bottom of his heart actually to return. He thought that
if he could once look on the misery he had brought upon his children he
could bear it better; he complexly flattered himself that it would not
be so bad in reality as it was in fancy. Sometimes when this wish
harassed him, he said to himself, to still it, that as soon as the first
boat came up the river from Quebec, he would go down with it, and
arrange to surrender himself to the authorities, and abandon the
struggle.
But as he regained his health, he began to feel that this was a rash and
foolish promise: he thought he saw a better way out of his unhappiness.
It appeared a misfortune once more, and not so much a fault of his. He
was restored to this feeling in part by the respect, the distinction
which he enjoyed in the little village, and which pleasantly recalled
his consequence among the mill-people at Ponkwasset. When he was
declared out of danger he began to receive visits of polite sympathy
from the heads of families, who smoked round him in the evening, and
predicted a renewal of his youth by the fever he had come through
safely. Their prophecies were interpreted by Bird and Père Étienne, as
with one or other of these he went to repay their visits. Everywhere,
the inmates of the simple, clean little houses, had begun early to
furbish them up for the use of their summer boarders, while they got
ready the shanties behind them for their own occupancy; but everywhere
Northwick was received with that pathetic deference which the poor
render to those capable of bettering their condition. The secret of the
treasure he had brought with him remained safe with the doctor and the
priest, and with Bird who had discovered it with them; but Bird was not
the man to conceal from his neighbors the fact that his guest was a
great American capitalist, who had come to develop the mineral,
agricultural, and manufacturing interests of Haha Bay on the American
scale; and to enrich the whole region, buying land of those who wished
to sell, and employing all those who desired to work. If he was
impatient for the verification of these promises by Northwick, he was
too polite to urge it; and did nothing worse than brag to him as he
bragged about him. He probably had his own opinion of Northwick's
reasons for the silence he maintained concerning himself in all
respects; he knew from the tag fastened to the bag Northwick had bought
in Quebec that his name was Warwick, and he knew from Northwick himself
that he was from Chicago; beyond this, if he conjectured that he was the
victim of financial errors, he smoothly kept his guesses to himself and
would not mar the chances of good that Northwick might do with his money
by hinting any question of its origin. The American defaulter was a sort
of hero in Bird's fancy; he had heard much of that character; he would
have experienced no shock at realizing him in Northwick; he would have
accounted for Northwick, and excused him to himself, if need be. The
doctor observed a professional reticence; his affair was with
Northwick's body, which he had treated skilfully. He left his soul to
Père Étienne, who may have had his diffidence, his delicacy, in dealing
with it, as the soul of a Protestant and a foreigner.