"OUFF."
The hour which saw Mary Selby thus lapping herself in her simple joys,
was the same which witnessed the brewing of the storm destined to
wreck and scatter them. A premonition must have been upon her
spirits--that impalpable tremor and exhilaration preceding a
catastrophe which whets the perceptions to intenser enjoyment before
the destroying assault, like advancing fire which illumines, expands,
and glorifies ere it leaps on its prey and turns it into smoke and
ashes. It is certain at least that her spirits overstepped the limit
of their tranquil wont. She turned over the piles of music with her
husband in search of something to sing, but the measured graces of the
older works were all too serious for her mood.
"Your masters are prosy, George," she cried; "I could not settle down
to sing them to-night. Let us have that new duet from the 'Grand
Duchesse.'"
"From Bach to Offenbach," he answered. "What a leap! You really are
exuberant to-night. What next?"
Five or six miles away, on the lake-like broadening of the river which
stretches upward from Lachine, a canoe was drifting under the lee of
the wooded islands, and in it sat Ralph Herkimer. Remaining in town
through the summer to watch the fluctuations of the gold-room--it was
during the American war--he betook himself each afternoon to Lachine,
to exchange the dust of streets for the breezy coolness of the water.
He had been fishing, and Paul, an Indian from the Indian village of
Caughnawaga near by, managed the canoe. His fishing had not prospered.
It seemed indifferent to him, indeed, whether he got "bites" or not,
but still from time to time he made a cast of the line, with his eyes
brooding on the water where the slackened current drifted lazily by,
with its rhythmic ripples flickering in the reddening light. The sun
went down behind heavy banks of cloud, and the grey twilight stole
silently up with that listening stillness which makes audible the
murmur of the stream, a sound unnoticed in the garish hurry of noon
when the world is vocal with a hundred noises, but heard at eve when
other things with life have sunk to sleep.
The canoe hung idly among the gathering shadows of the shore where the
waters were black and oily in the shelter of the wooded islands; but
Ralph took no heed of the twilight closing in. The coolness, the
drowsy movement, and the murmur soothed him, and his thoughts flowed
freely in their wonted channels. They were like the streams we read of
which run over golden sands, for they were all about money, shares,
stocks, margins, shorts, longs, bulling and bearing the market, with
sunny visions of a hundred per cent. glittering remotely, like islands
of the blest, and with banks of contingency drifting in between. Then
his memory wandered to the fortune he had missed, and which should
surely have been left to him, his father's only son, and the only male
shoot of the family tree. To think of so much money being deliberately
left past him!---tied up for twenty years to wait for heirs unborn at
the time of Gerald's death. He snorted and moved restlessly in his
seat as he thought of it, till the jerking of his limbs disturbed the
unstable equilibrium of the canoe, and he only composed and controlled
himself in time to avoid a ducking from the rolling over of the
lightly-poised craft. Paul raised his hand and caught the water with
his paddle at the same instant, relapsing into his impassive wont so
soon as the accident was averted.
"Too bad!" muttered Ralph, when the disturbance of his nerves had
subsided, and his thoughts fell back into their channel. "If the old
man would none of me personally, there was my boy, and he bears his
name and is a Herkimer--nearer to him, surely, than the music master's
brat; and she a girl, too, as it turns out!" Then his thoughts grew
deep again--sank into silence, as the rivers in a limestone country
disappear into the ground, and thread mysterious miles through caves
of night and blackness.
He whipped the waters with his line, letting it drift anon and
forgetting to draw it in even when an infatuated bass caught hold and
jerked and struggled till he got away again, and even the apathetic
Paul looked up surprised; but then, the ways of the pale faces are not
as those of the red man, so he merely grunted, and became quiescent
again as before.
"Too bad!" Ralph muttered again. "Only a life between my boy and a
million!--it will be nearer three millions by the end of the twenty
years--just one life between my Gerald and all that; and what a
life! Only a year old--incapable of knowing anything about it, or
taking any satisfaction out of it. A girl, too, at that. Child of an
organ-grinder. Nobody worth knowing will ever care to know her. Of
what use can a million of dollars be to such as she?" Here with a
groan and a snort the black waters of unwholesome thought sunk down
again out of sight, and out of ken of the thinker, if that were
possible, for--under the devil's guidance shall we call it?--one will
sometimes avert the eyes from the working and festering of his own
soul with a sense of conventional shame (hypocrisy is like the polar
frosts which strike a yard or two down into the ground), and still
with the back turned as it were to the evil thought, as a man must
continue to do within himself if he would retain his own good opinion,
there will be a furtive peering glance cast down and backward into the
deeper depths, awaiting till some deeper down conscience is overcome,
which is not the admitted self at all, yet the vanquishment of which
will be so good an excuse for dropping the moral barriers in the upper
stratum of admitted consciousness. To that wave of unstemmable
temptation, a cyclone as it were to which nature in her strength
succumbs, and the best of men may yield, lifting their heads again
after it, like palm trees when the tempest has passed over, and
saying, "A storm; a convulsion beyond human might to withstand; for
yielding to that, who can be blamed? Let us spread our draggled
plumage wide to dry. The gale is over, and we shall soon be as
honorable as before."
Not that Ralph could be called a hypocrite in the vulgar sense. For
why? He troubled himself little about morals of any kind, that not
being, as he said, his particular "fad." But there is a righteousness
which is not ecclesiastical. There are decencies of life for us all,
and a standard of right and wrong, which it is _base_ to contravene
even when we put on speculative airs and question the Church's
teachings. Right is always right, and wrong wrong, decency decent, and
baseness contemptible, even if there were no God in heaven, and no
account to render at the last day; and there are thoughts which a man
must turn his back on when they pass through his mind, if he would
continue to enjoy his own respect.
There is a way of seeing sidewise, however, when the eyes are
averted--a policy of reconciliation between doing and eschewing, when
deeds at once vile and profitable are under consideration--and I fear
me much this luckless Ralph Herkimer had found out the trick of it.
His thoughts, at all events, sank down deep into those sunless
channels where even he himself declined wittingly to follow them
though keeping watch. He whipped the water more briskly than before,
and stared intently at the end of his line; but somehow he did not
lose the thread of his reflections; he kept on thinking all the time
and even with more and more intentness, though still he made pretence
to himself of ignoring the whole of the deep-down discussion--till it
was finished, that is--then he succumbed, as who may not, under
sufficient temptation? It is a question of price or number. Ralph
yielded before the flashing glory of _millions of dollars!_ So Danæ
may have stretched her arms, erewhile so chaste and cold, to welcome
Jove when drest in that disguise he sought the mercenary maid. Was not
gold divine? And has it not continued ever since to be the same? Even
Miss Judy can appraise to a cent the good to be achieved with part in
saving souls, and still leave unexpressed the balance--the pride and
finery which what remains will bring the priests and priestesses of
Goody.
Millions of dollars! That was the burden and refrain which repeated
itself over and over in Ralph's mind; and it ought by right to be his.
Was not he grandson of the father of this childless Gerald who had
made the money? The only grandson too, and the only person through
whom future generations of Herkimers could connect themselves with
this fortune? And Gerald to pass him over! Gerald who talked so much
about Shropshire, and all the rest of it, things of which he (Ralph)
knew nothing--old Uncle Gerald who would not hear, even, of Aunt
Mary's marrying a music master. That the old man's money should be
tied up for twenty years and then handed over to this very music
master's brats. Gerald could not have meant it; notwithstanding the
little unpleasantness which occurred when he (Ralph) returned from
Natchez, and Gerald refused to admit him to his presence. The bequest
must have been merely a threat which the imprudent old man had
supposed so terrible that nobody would brave it. If he could have
dreamed that Mary would defy him, and marry all the same, he would
have made a different disposition of his property altogether. What he
meant was to go on governing his relations after death as he had ruled
them while in life.
There seemed at the moment a pathos to this hard and worldly-minded
Ralph, swinging and oscillating silently in the fading light, with air
and tinted greyness all around, and only the heaving, quivering
reflections upon which he swung beneath; there seemed a pathos in it,
and he felt a sympathy with the vanished and disappointed maker
of the fortune, or rather with the straying misdirected wealth.
If he had lived, how different all would have been; and Ralph
looked out into the empty evening air, feeling as if he might
catch some shadowy glimpse of a disembodied presence, which
would look on him friendly-wise, and which he would have greeted--oh,
so reverently!--the revisiting shadow of a millionaire, come back
regretfully to make amends to an ill-used relative whom the glamour of
life and the flesh had led him to misjudge. Ralph felt he could meet
his uncle in a fitting spirit, friendly, forgiving, and open to any
suggestions the other state might have enlightened him to make; for
was he not doing his best to remedy the unfortunate and injudicious
dispositions of the will? Had he not already taken the best advice in
the province to remedy them, and been told that the will was good,
sure, fast, and without flaw--that it would stand, and there was no
remedy?
He peered far off into the shadows, and around on either hand. There
was nothing but a gradual failing in the light--neither sound nor
vision--only, over against him, let the canoe turn as it might, there
sat the Indian Paul, an image brown and still, with dull, quiescent
eyes, gazing into nowhere, ready at a moment to flash into fire and
life, but absent until wanted; plainer than the unseen vision in his
thoughts, yet less to be understood--a mute and dusky image of the
unknowable. The dark unwinking eyes gleamed with no thought or
intelligence; they looked out seemingly beyond, and burned, or rather
smouldered, like coals abstracted from the nether fire, awaiting the
gust of passion to rouse the slumbering blaze. Black like the mirrors
used by necromancers, they showed back, when he looked in them, his
own soul stripped of conventional trappings, looking out of them into
himself, and seeming to have gathered active evil in their dusky
depths--a wish to guide the dubious hand of Fate which deals the cards
promiscuously as though her eyes were bandaged, and influence the
falling of the aces and kings, just one place now and then to the
right or left. We would all like to do that, if we could--just a
little--and bring out more clearly as we think, the poetical justice
of Time; but it comes right in the end, of itself, without our help,
and "if it tarry," as the Prophet says, "wait for it;" it is for the
best.
Ralph is impatient, however; and it is not, besides, poetic justice
that he is thinking of. Nothing so abstract. It is money, good and
lawful coin of the realm, and it is himself and his children, he
thinks, who should have it. Gerald, too, he takes it, having attained
to that clearer insight which is gained beyond the grave, must wish it
likewise, and if the inheritance under that most pernicious will can
be turned aside, he feels that he will be fulfilling the present and
maturer wishes of the testator. The law may say otherwise; but what of
the law? There is a higher law! We have all heard of it, though
generally, let us hope, when the issue was unconnected with the
possession of dollars. Gerald must have heard of the higher law. Here
was a case involving money, and when one comes to money what is more
sacred? The forger "gets twenty years" for his crime against property;
the culpable homicide five. _His_ fault is only against life, and by
good fortune he may escape with a rebuke from the court.
Ralph had been meditating and considering, calmly, earnestly, and at
length, in a way he was not accustomed to consider, and out here amid
evening's impressive silence, where the brooding peace suggested
presences far enough removed at other times in the common hubbub of
life; and he felt--what? That he must not give in, or acquiesce in a
fiddler's children getting all that money!
"The higher fitness" was he to call it?--and old Gerald himself,
who must be near, he was sure, though he could not gain speech of
him--must disapprove the misapplication of so many dollars. But how to
remedy that ill-judged will? If Mary Herkimer, it said, should so far
forget herself as to marry the organist, then the money was to remain
accumulating in Jordan's hands for twenty years, and after that was to
be paid to her children, secured only against the organist by the
provision that in case they died unmarried it should come to the
children of Ralph. And Mary had a child. But the child might die. A
tremor passed through him at the idea. Or how would it be, he set
himself to consider, if the child were lost? Children do get lost
sometimes, and he raised himself in the canoe to shake off any
oppressiveness that might attach to the idea. Suppose the child were
lost--one may innocently suppose anything--suppose it could not be
found, and never _were_ found. What then? After a time it would be
unreasonable to keep the next in succession out of his property; and
this next--his blood tingled to think of it--was his own boy Gerald, a
quiet, gentle little boy, such as strangely sometimes is given to an
unscrupulous father, as if to try how far he will venture to use the
facile tool. If ever _his_ Gerald fell heir to property, Ralph made
sure of being able to dispose of it; it seemed to him that it would be
like money settled on his wife, which he could still use, though no
creditor could lay hands on--a cake quite different from that in the
children's proverb, which one can both eat and have at the same time.
But at present, to arrange for Mary's child getting--_lost_, seemed
the pressing question. There would be time enough to influence his
boy's plastic mind afterwards.
The infant's plastic mind need not be taken into account, the infant
being only a year old. There were no impressions inscribed on it so
far, and it would be some time yet before it acquired any. "Get it
away now," he told himself, "and it can do nothing for its own
restoration. In a week or two it will have forgotten its mother and
there will be no troublesome memories in after life tempting it to
suspect and try to unravel a mystery in its fate. Yet how, and through
whom, to manage it?" His eyes wandered questioningly over the extent
of waters, heaving with regulated swell, suggestive of life and
personality and thought; but never an answer came back to him out of
the sullen grey. His eye swept the horizon and the distant shore, and
at last it rested on the apathetic face of his companion; Still as a
mask, and showing not a sign of what might be behind, any more than
the swaying tide on which they hung betrayed the mysteries of the pool
beneath. The man's long straight hair, and the swarthy skin suggestive
of a life apart from civilization, could not but call up the wish that
the child could become of these. Wooden, hard, and cold, with his
bead-like eyes half closed, were the little one in hands like his it
would be as safe as if it were in another planet; thinking such
thoughts as it must, in Iroquois, understanding Canadian French, and
with only enough English to beg or trade with strangers. Paul he knew
as restless, and in some sort a vagabond, attending those who hired
him on fishing or hunting expeditions, at times joining the Governor
of Hudson's Bay as a canoe-man, on his journeys to Fort William, or
wandering on the Ottawa from one Indian settlement to another. If he
would only undertake to superintend the fortunes of this inconvenient
infant, it would become a waif indeed, and lost beyond restoration.
Ralph sighed with profound relief as the idea passed through his mind.
There had been another shadowy suggestion present there all the
afternoon, which he had been contemplating as it were with averted
eyes, shuddering to consider or reduce to shape, yet refusing to
dismiss it, harbouring it as one may an outlaw, whom it would be
confusion to acknowledge as a guest. If Paul would undertake the
business, the child might live out its life as a squaw among the
wigwams of the upper Ottawa, without troubling any one. Exposure to
the weather would bronze her to the hue of the other children of the
wilderness; and if not, there are few bands now-a-days in which there
are not half-breeds, proving that all men are of one blood, and that
time and circumstances alone are needed to blend the races into a
common stream. How infinitely more satisfactory this would be than any
fatal accident which could be devised! Yes! it must be done, and Ralph
looked up to his companion and in his most friendly tone said,--"Paul."
Instantly the bead-like eyes awoke and turned upon him, sharp and
interrogative. The propitiatory modulation had not escaped the
delicate ear, bred from infancy to catch and interpret the faintest
whisper of the forest--the rustle of a leaf disturbed by passing game,
or the stroke of a wing raising eddies in the stagnant air. Since Paul
had grown to be a man whiskey and dollars had become the game of his
eagerest pursuit, and the mood of the white man he served for the time
was the hunting ground where these were to be run down. That something
was wanted of him he knew by the extra friendliness of tone. What
Englishman having hired him would speak so softly if he did not want
something beyond the stipulated services, something of value, and
something which he wished to gain cheaply?
"Ouff," was his answer, dubiously interrogative, and altogether
non-committal as to whether he would be interested in what was to
follow.
"Have you got children?"
"No," with a slight head-shake.
"Would you not like to have one?"
"Papoose come plenty soon."
"Then you have a wife."
"Got squaw;" but still he looked out impassively over the water.
"Would she like to keep a child for me? do you think?--good pay, you
know."
"Pay-Ouff?" The words was clearly interrogative now, and the beady
eyes returned from their wandering, and settled on the speaker.
"A healthy child twelve months old--would make a lusty squaw. She can
make anything of it she likes. No questions will be asked, you know."
"Yours?"
"Not exactly. But I have an interest in the child."
"How much money?"
"Fifty dollars, as soon as she has done the job."
The beady eyes kindled into animation, and the lips grew moist, but
the Indian sat motionless as before, and waited in silence for what
was to come.
"She will have to _take_ the child, you know. It will not be hard for
her to get it at this time of year, when the nurse is out of doors
with it most of the time; on the steps, at the garden gate, or down
the street. She can easily take it away from the nurse, a little slip
of a French girl. A strong Indian woman could easily knock her down
and run away with the child under her blanket. Only she must not be
caught or the child brought back. You must send her to some
reservation far away--up West, say--the farther West the better. I
will pay as soon as she gets clear off. But you must not mix me up in
the thing, mind that! That is why I offer to pay so much for the job."
"Much for job? Ouff. Le Père Théophile--the judge court--prison long
time. Ouff!" and he shook his head slowly.
"You must send her where the curé's admonitions will not reach her.
Send her to Brantford, or up the Ottawa; you know better than I do
where. You can do a good deal with fifty dollars, you know, Paul."
"Ouff. And send 'way my squaw. Fidèle good squaw."
"Chut! Paul, you rascal! You have plenty more sweethearts you know;
and they do not marry you so tight as us white men."
Paul grunted. "The Père Théophile very strict. Make squaw confess
right up. Poor Fidèle go to prison--all found out. Paul sent to Isle
aux Noix--you too, then."
"Stuff, man! No fear of your letting yourself be caught. Send your
squaw away at once, before she has time to go near her priest."
"Police?"
"Not much fear of _them_, if you are half sharp. But, let me see. It
might not be a bad idea if she changed clothes with some other girl
before she started West. One squaw is so like another in white folks'
eyes. It might turn pursuit in a wrong direction while she is getting
away."
"Ouff," Paul grunted again, but nothing more. The two dusky shadows
swung silently on the dim bosom of the waters, whitening now beneath
the glimmer of the rising moon.
"See here, Paul," Ralph said at last; "I shall be better than my word
after all. Here are ten dollars in hand, for you. Come round to my
office as soon as the work is done and your squaw safely off, and I
will pay you your fifty dollars. Now land us. We shall take first
train to the city. We must not be seen together, so will take
different cars. Wait for me in the shadow of the cabstand, and I will
go up town with you and point out the house."
"Ouff," again was the only answer, but as Paul's long arm stretched
out to snatch the money, and under a deft stroke or two of the paddle
the canoe shot swiftly down stream to the landing, Ralph understood
that the bargain was struck.