“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.