HE REVIEWS HIS MARRIAGE, AND IS PUT TO THE TEST
It was the first week in June; for a fortnight John Granger had been a
married man. He was now removed a sufficiently just distance from his
bachelor-hood to be able to estimate the value of the change which
this new step had wrought in his career.
Its true worth to him had been that it had converted him from a
Londoner in Keewatin into a man of the Northland. This might mean,
though it need not, that he had retrograded to a lower type; at all
events it meant that he was robbed of his excuse for considering
himself an exile, bearing himself rebelliously toward his environment,
and being unhappy. By joining himself to Peggy by the rites of the
Roman Church, he had made an irrevocable choice, had slammed the door
of opportunity and return to civilisation in his own face, and had
adopted as his country a land where no one has any use for money or
for time, and where nothing could ever again be of very much
importance. He had not realised all that a fortnight ago when, at the
bidding of the Jesuit, he had made this girl his wife; but since he
had lived in her company he had come to realise. Mercifully there is
no situation, however bad, which may not develop the peculiar virtue
whereby it can be endured. He had learnt his virtue by observing
Peggy, an Indian virtue at that--stolidity. In a great lonely
territory, where men say good-bye to one another for twelve months at
a stretch, and sometimes forever, they arrive at a philosophy of life
which consists in waiting very patiently and unambitiously for the
next thing which the good God may send. To attain this sort of
quietness a man must be quite hopeless, for so long as he hopes he is
liable to disappointment. Also he must live each day as though it were
his first, for to remember things past is to court regret. He must
permit himself to know none of the extremes of emotion, either of joy
or of sadness; to this end he must consider himself as a non-partisan
in life, a careless spectator before whose eyes the groping shadows
pass. The traffic of words is a labour, and a more frequent cause of
misunderstanding than of interpretation--therefore it is wiser, if
peace be desired, to keep always silent. Where a gesture will do the
work of a word, let a gesture suffice.
All this Granger had learnt during the fortnight which he had lived
with his wife; in watching her, he had studied to forego his former
turbulence of mind as a thing most foolish, and had determined to sink
down into the dull acceptance of a destiny against which it was
profitless to contend--a kind of resigned contentment. If he was to be
hanged to-morrow for Strangeways' death, that was no reason why he
should disturb himself to-day; if that was to happen, it would come to
pass in any case,--nothing that he might do or say could prevent it.
The momentary pain of dying is usually much less intense than the
hours of cowardly suffering which men bring upon themselves by
prevising the anguish of their last departure, so he told himself. So
to-day he sat outside his store in the sunshine and smoked his pipe,
the freest and silentest man in all Keewatin, and, he would have had
himself believe, the most stably contented.
That night, when he had left Pere Antoine and had gone to consult the
dead man at the bend, had been the turning-point in his frenzy. It
seemed to him, as he looked back, to have happened long ago when he
was little more than a child, at a time before his enlightenment, when
he had supposed very foolishly that he was of importance to God and to
his fellow-men. Now he had come to know that he was of no importance
even to himself. He blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it vanish in
the air; in other days he would have smiled, but it was not worth the
effort now. The relation of that whiff of tobacco-smoke to the
unplumbed space, throughout which it would be dispersed, was about the
same as that of his present existence to the rest of the world.
When, having said good-bye to Strangeways, he had followed the Man
with the Dead Soul back to the store, he had made up his mind to the
inevitable, and had been prepared to greet Peggy with a certain
display of joy. Before ever he could put his thought into action, his
intention had been repelled. As he had drawn nearer to the crazy
wooden pier which ran out from Murder Point, he had seen the shadowy
shapes of the trapper and his daughter, bending down, unloading their
canoe, moving slowly hither and thither through the night. As he had
come up, he had hailed them. To his call Beorn had made no reply, had
only turned his head and nodded, while Peggy, stooping over a pile of
furs, had thrown him the customary salutation of the Cree Indian to
the white man, used both on arrival and departure, "Watchee"--which is
a corruption of "What cheer." No other words of greeting had passed
between them, and he, when he had landed, had set to work at once to
help them with their unlading. When that was finished and the furs had
been carried up to the store, they had raised their tent, kindled
their fire, brewed their black tea, cooked their bacon, and gone to
rest. Granger had so far intruded on their reserve as to ask them to
spend the night in his store, but his invitation had been ungraciously
refused with a shake of the head.
Next day Pere Antoine had married them, after which he had departed,
promising, however, to return before the summer was out. Granger had
said nothing more to him either concerning Spurling or the death of
Strangeways, except to insist that the warrant for the arrest,
together with the letters and locket which had been found, should be
left with himself; nevertheless, he had been well aware that these
things were largely responsible for the hurry of the priest's
departure. At first he had not been surprised at the silence of Peggy,
for he had grown accustomed to the shy modesty of women who are
Indian-bred. The women of Keewatin accept it as their fate that they
are born to be subservient to men--to be their burden-bearers. But at
the end of a few days, when her demeanour had shown no sign of change,
he had become a little curious. In the early part of the year the
white blood that was in her had been more manifest, and because of it
she had been proud. When she had insisted that he should marry her, if
he would live with her, the reason she had given him for her demand
had been _because her blood was white_. Since then she had journeyed
into the winter-wilderness with the menfolk of her family, like any
other Indian or half-breed girl, and in the primeval solitariness of
the land the red blood of her mother had asserted itself; the hand of
her native deity had been laid upon her mouth, staying her flow of
words, the shyness of the forest-gods had entered into her eyes, and
the Lord God of Women had stooped her shoulders, causing her to carry
her head less bravely, binding the hereditary burden of the red woman
upon her back. She had unlearned in those few months all the conceits
of self-respect which she had been taught in the school at Winnipeg,
and had reverted to the ancient type from which she was sprung,--the
river Indian. Granger, as he watched her, guessed all this, for had
not he himself been parted from his old traditions?--and he had not
known Keewatin till he was a grown man. Well, these people had lived
there longer than he had! They should know what was best suited to
their circumstance, he told himself; and so, without questioning or
combatting their social methods, he resigned himself to accept their
modes of life.
It was a strange wedding that he had had--very different from the kind
he had planned for himself in the heat of his passion, when he was a
younger man. And this was a strange woman whom he must call his
wife--one who worked for him tirelessly with her head and hands, but
who appeared to crave for none of his affection, and with whom he
could have not a moment's conversation; the exchange of a few
monosyllables and signs in the course of a day seemed to be the most
that he might expect. Yet, because of her meekness and faithfulness,
and her ready willingness to serve, he was conscious of a growing
protective quality of love for her. If he could prevent himself from
adopting her reticence, he promised himself that he would gather her
whole heart into his own by and by.
He did not as yet realise that the mere fact that he could feel thus
towards her, when no speech had passed between them, was an indication
that she was communicating herself in a more vigorous and sincerer
language than that of words. This difference between them, that he
expected her to use her lips to explain her personality, and that she,
far from imagining that she was silent, believed herself to be in her
deeds most eloquent, was one of the few traits remaining to him of the
street-born man.
As an example of their reservedness was the fact that, though Eyelids,
Peggy's brother, had set out on the winter hunt and had not returned,
no explanation of his delay had been forthcoming, nor had Granger
summoned up the energy to inquire for himself. On their first arrival
he had felt distinctly curious as to his whereabouts. Had he come
across traces of Spurling and gone in pursuit of him? Had he heard
from some stray Indian that Spurling was an outlaw, with a price upon
his head? Had Beorn, having found that his cache at the Forbidden
River had been broken into, dispatched his son to follow up the thief
and exact revenge? Or was Spurling dead, and had Eyelids killed him,
for which reason he was afraid to come back?
For the first few days after his marriage these questions and answers
had been continually running through his head; but since he had learnt
the lesson that nothing was of much importance, he had almost ceased
to care. Why should he trouble to inquire? If he did, he might get no
reply; and if he was answered, the probability was that his only gain
would be something fresh to worry about. The unreturning of Eyelids
was one small detail of the total unreality, the dream which he had
once taken so seriously, which in former times he had called life; and
of that dream the arrival and flight of Spurling were the nightmare.
No one of all these happenings had ever been--they were unactual: and
the chances were that even he himself was no reality.
Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead Soul as he was called, was a
fitting tutor to a pupil of this philosophy. Compared with him, his
daughter was a whirlwind of words; the lesson of silence, which she
taught by her behaviour, she had first learnt from her father on the
winter trail--in the presence of his stern taciturnity she appeared a
garrulous amateur.
Whence he had originally come, no one had ever persuaded him to tell.
On his first arrival in the district, which was reported to have taken
place nearly forty years ago, for the first two years he was said to
have conducted himself more or less like a normal man. At that time he
must have been near mid-life, for he was now well past seventy to
judge by his appearance. Even then, on his first coming, something had
happened, which he did not care to talk about, which made him glad of
the dreary seclusion of Keewatin. It had been generally supposed that
he was badly wanted by Justice, for having shot his man in a border
hold-up, or for deeds of violence in some kindred escapade.
At any rate, he had set about his living in Keewatin in earnest, as
though he had determined to stay there. Having attached himself to the
Hudson Bay Company, he soon proved himself to be an expert trapper,
and a man who, for his reckless courage, was to be valued. Promotion
seemed certain for him and, despite the fact that he had joined the
Company late in life, the likelihood of his attaining a factorship in
the end was not improbable. It was then, after he had won the
confidence of his employers, that he had taken that journey to the
North, through an unexplored country, from which he had come back
dazed and dreary-eyed, so that it seemed as though he must have met
with some dire calamity in the winter desolation, one from which few
men would have escaped alive, which had robbed him of his reason. When
they had asked him where he had journeyed, "Far, far," was all he
would reply. And when, hoping to satisfy their curiosity by a less
direct method, they had questioned him, "What did you see up there?"
"Blackness--it was dark," was the most that he would answer them.
Because of these answers there were some who supposed that, emulating
Thomas Simpson, he had penetrated into the Arctic Circle and had gazed
upon the frozen quiet of an undiscovered ocean. He had wrested from
God the secret which He was anxious to withhold, they said, and God in
vengeance had condemned him to be always silent. But the Indians
explained his condition more readily, speaking in whispers about him
around camp-fires among themselves. The last place at which he had
been seen by anyone on that journey was at the mouth of the Forbidden
River, along whose banks it was commonly believed stretched the
villages and homes of manitous, and souls of the departed. The Crees
asserted that this was not the first man who, to their knowledge, had
wandered up that river and had thus returned. Some few of their
boldest hunters had from time to time set out and, roving further
afield than their brethren, had likewise trespassed all unaware within
the confines of the spirit-land. So they said that Beorn had been to
the Land of Shadows, and that, by reason of his surpassing strength,
he had contrived to escape; but that he had left his soul behind him
there, and it was only his body which had come back.
From that day he had been known as _The Man with the Dead Soul_.
Gradually, as the years went by, the deathly vacancy had gone out of
his eyes, but he had remained a man separated from living men. He
rarely spoke, but from the first his peculiarities had made no
difference to his expertness as a trapper--he was more skilful, white
man though he was, than many of the Crees themselves. All the strength
which should have been spent upon his soul seemed to have gone to
preserving the perfection of his body. For a man of his years, he was
surprisingly vigorous and erect--no labour could tire him. This, said
the Indians, was the usual sign of bodies which lived on when their
souls were dead. He was much feared, and his influence in the district
was great; in gaining him as a partisan, Granger had achieved a
triumph over Robert Pilgrim, and had improved his status among the
native trappers more than could have been possible by any other single
act.
Beorn was reverenced as a kind of minor deity; no wish of his, however
silently expressed, was ever denied by an Indian. When he had chosen
Peggy's mother to be his wife, it had been done merely by the raising
of his hand. Straightway the girl's father had driven her
panic-stricken forth from his camp, compelling her to go to this
strange bridegroom, lest a curse should fall upon his tribe. To her,
if absence of cruelty is kindness, he had been uniformly kind. Love is
not necessary to an Indian marriage, so she had not been too unhappy.
At Peggy's birth, having first borne him a son, she had died. The
little girl had been brought up and cared for by the silent man; the
shy tenderness she expressed for him went far to prove that she, at
least, had discovered something more vital within him than could be
expected to reside in the body of a man whose soul was dead. His
sending of her to the school in Winnipeg had shown that he was not so
forgetful as he seemed to be of the outside world which he had left.
This last act had come as a great surprise to all who knew him; but
they had contrived to retain their old opinion of him by asserting
that this was the doing of Pere Antoine.
Only on rare occasions had Beorn let any of his secrets out; when he
got drunk he recovered his power of speech, or, as the Indians said,
for a little space his soul returned. This had happened less and less
frequently of recent years. It was well remembered by old-timers at
God's Voice how once, in the early morning in Bachelors' Hall, at the
end of a night's carousal, when the trappers and traders from the
distant outposts had made their yearly pilgrimage to the fort bringing
in their twelve months' catch of furs, Beorn, under the influence of
rum, had risen uninvited, and, to the consternation of his intoxicated
companions, had trolled forth a verse from a fighting mining ballad.
As well might the statue of Lord Nelson climb down from its monument
in Trafalgar Square and, with the voice of a living man, commence to
address a London crowd. The verse which he sang ran as follows; to the
few who were aware, it solved the mystery of an important portion of
his hidden early history:
"The Ophir on the Comstock
Was rich as bread and honey;
The Gould and Curry, farther south,
Was raking out the money;
The Savage and the others
Had machinery all complete,
When in came the Groshes
And nipped all our feet."
When he had completed the verse, he had slowly gazed round and caught
the look of amaze which had dawned in the countenances of his drunken
associates. He had come to himself and grown sober. Suddenly an
expression of intense fear and hatred had shot into his eyes; without
saying another word, he had turned his back on the company and gone
out into the early morning, floated his canoe, and fled as one who was
pursued for his life. That verse had explained many of Beorn's
eccentricities to one of those who had heard it, and he had told the
rest. Its singing had meant that, sometime in the early sixties, Beorn
had taken part in the gold-rush to the Comstock, and had worked and
prospected in the Nevada mines.
This was his solitary glaring indiscretion in all the course of his
forty years spent in Keewatin. Though he had had many opportunities
since then to repeat the event when under the influence of liquor, he
had allowed nothing more of any importance to escape his lips. He had
never spent much time at God's Voice, only turning up at the end of
his hunt to dispose of his catch of furs, after which he would vanish
into the wilderness again. He avoided on every occasion and was
restless in the company of men. Very rarely was he encountered on his
hunting-trips by any of the Indians or trappers. When once he had set
out, he was not seen again until he returned of his own choice. The
few times that he had been met, he was far to the northward, about
the point where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join, whence they
flow on together till they tumble their crowded waters into the
freedom of the Hudson Bay. Because it was always in this locality that
he had been met, a rumour got abroad that, when his body was not
dwelling among living men, it journeyed up the Forbidden River, to
reunite with his exiled soul in the habitations of the dead.
Granger had listened to all these reports from time to time, but he
had paid small heed to them; he was certain in his own mind that,
should he live solitarily in Keewatin for forty years, as Beorn had
done, a similar web of legend would be woven about himself. The man's
conduct was to him self-explanatory; in his early manhood he had
committed some passionate wrong, and had fled into the wilderness to
escape the penalty, only to find that the executioner was there before
him--the Silence, and that the enduring of loneliness was a more cruel
punishment than any that an earthly judge could have measured out. The
boat was one and the same which carried Beorn, Spurling, and himself.
He promised himself that, by and by, as in the case of Peggy, he would
break through Beorn's silence, get to know the man, plunge deep down
till he held his heart in his hand.
So he sat outside his store in the June sunlight, oblivious of himself
and the passage of Time, lifted high above the strife, and
impartially, like an ancient deity, reviewed the lives of men.
On the boarded floor of the shack he could hear the moccasined feet of
Peggy moving busily to and fro, as she prepared the meal. They had
netted some white-fish over night, so their larder was freshly
supplied. On the edge of the pier, which ran out from the Point,
Beorn sat, mending one of his traps. Along the top of the roof perched
a row of whisky-jacks, most impertinent of birds, who, when a man has
carried his food almost to his mouth, will flash down, light on his
hand, and, before he knows that they have arrived, filch away the
morsel. Somewhere across the river a whippoorwill kept on uttering its
plaintive cry, as it were Beorn's lost soul come back, pleading
insistently for permission to take up its residence in his body once
again. And over against the farther bank a brood of yellow ducklings
swam in and out among the rushes, hidden behind which their mother
watched and waited. The noon came on apace, the shadows shortened, and
everything grew silent; over forest and river a restful stillness
settled down. If the Last Chance would always look like that it would
be almost habitable. Had it been placed in any country where there
were men, it would be considered beautiful just now. Ah, well, after
he had been married a few years, he would have his children running
hither and thither, laughing and chattering, about the Point; then it
would be in his own choice to make of his environment what he liked.
Gazing whimsically forward to such a time he could conceive that, were
he given the opportunity to return to civilisation, by some curious
turn of the wheel of fortune, he might prefer to stay; that such an
opportunity might be possible, it would first be necessary that he
should have been acquitted from all suspicion concerning the death of
Strangeways.
It was easy to be optimistic on such a day; there was a cleanness of
youth about the appearance of this newly awakened world which reacted
on the watcher's mind.
Peggy had come out from the shack and was seated on the threshold;
even she was conscious of a certain elation, for she was humming to
herself one of those endless, tuneless, barbaric Indian airs which
only take on the pretence of music when they are assisted by the
stamping of many feet, and the clapping of many hands. When Granger
turned his head in her direction, she lowered her eyes, and her
singing ceased. He had not meant that she should do that; he was
merely wondering whether she was really a pretty girl and whether, if
he were to take her back with him to England, she would be seen as
beautiful by London eyes. London eyes! What had they ever seen that
was essentially beautiful and free? They could judge of the latest
fashion in hats, and of the proper size of the laced-in waist; but
what had they ever seen of the naked, sinuous grace of the human body
as God made it and had meant that it should be seen? Of nakedness and
simplicity, and all things genuine, the civilised man had been taught
to be ashamed. No, no, to-day, in the sunshine, he felt sure that he
would not return to the insincerity, artificiality, and the
blinkered-eyes of the town, were he given his choice. He wanted to
breathe cleanness, and to see God's hand at work, and to be _a man_;
in London, or any other city, individuality and all these things would
be denied. He could be very happy now, he believed; now that he was
not lonely any longer, because he had a wife. He wished that he could
find a language in which to tell her these things. But he feared to
speak; he knew that as yet, just returned from the winter-trail, she
would not understand.
While he had been thinking, she had slowly raised her eyes; she was
not looking at him, but northeast, down-river, toward the bend.
Turning suddenly, he caught the direction of her gaze. Glancing down
to the pier, he discovered that Beorn's eyes were also turned that
way. What were they waiting for? What were they anticipating? Was it
the return of Eyelids that made them so expectant? During the past
fourteen days he had often caught them thus waiting and gazing, as
though stoically prepared for news of whatever kind. He suspected that
they had some secret which they were not willing to share with
him--this would account to an extent for Peggy's reticence. But what
secrets of importance could they have, dwelling as they did on the
Last Chance? Probably Eyelids' delay was only a matter of traps and
furs which had been cached. Then, as he watched Peggy, he saw a look
partly of fear, partly of bewilderment, spread over her face. She
glanced down to her father; he was still gazing in the same direction,
towards the bend, and she, seeing him rise to his feet and wave his
hand, following his example, also rose up and waved. Granger was on
his feet immediately, that so he might see more clearly; turning his
eyes down-river, he watched steadfastly in the direction in which the
father and daughter gazed. He saw nothing that was not customary; it
seemed to him that he must have looked too late.
"What is it, Peggy?" he broke out.
She swung round slowly, giving herself time to make her face
expressionless; it was evident that she had forgotten his presence in
her excitement.
"Nothing," she said, and turning about, passed into the darkness of
the house.
Granger did not like it. When there are only three of you, one of whom
is your wife, to whom you have been married only a fortnight, it is
not pleasant to be the one left out. He had thought at first that they
might be on the lookout for York boats, which might soon be expected
to pass by on their way from the House of the Crooked Creek to God's
Voice. But one does not wave his hand to a York boat which is not yet
in sight. It seemed certain to him now that Eyelids was in the
vicinity, signalling to them secret information, which they were eager
to keep from himself. Had they stumbled across the grave of
Strangeways, and wondered what it meant? A grave more or less in
Keewatin does not usually trouble a living man; nevertheless, he ought
to have told them about it and have explained about Spurling. He would
tell them his secret presently, and get them to tell him theirs in
exchange. In the meanwhile, he would watch the bend.
There was no sound of footsteps in the shack. Turning his head very
slowly, so that it could hardly be seen to turn, he could perceive the
shadow of Peggy out of the tail of his eye from where he sat; she was
standing behind the window, a little way back from the panes so that
he might not discover her, and she was also watching. If this system
of spying were to go on for long, there would soon be an end to his
dreams of freedom and marital peace at Murder Point. Already he was
inclined to revise his opinion as to what he would do, were he given
the opportunity for escape to a becitied and more populous land. The
more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he would
choose to escape. A half-breed girl who was almost pure Indian in her
manners--and Peggy seemed that to him now--could never be a fitting
companion for an educated white man. He'd been something more than a
fool to marry her. The entire business was a farce, from start to
finish; and then he remembered that nearly every farce ends in
someone's tragedy.
He was interrupted in his bitterness by a shout from up-river. While
they had been all engaged in watching the northeast, a swift canoe,
carrying two men, had stolen in from the west. It was approaching the
pier; before he had time to get down, its occupants had landed and
were shaking hands with Beorn effusively, emitting low, hoarse cries
of "Watchee. Watchee."
As he descended the mound, he scanned their travelling outfit, that he
might guess their errand. They carried no cargo, nor was their canoe
the broad-built, slate-coloured conveyance of the Hudson Bay Company;
it was birch-bark, constructed for speed, and carried in the bow a
miniature sail. They must be the bearers of a letter, or of important
verbal tidings.
He shook hands with them in silence, nor did he ask them at once to
deliver to him their message, well knowing from unhappy experience
that to attempt to hurry an Indian is to cause him to delay. Instead,
he set about doing them favours, that so they might be the more
willing to oblige him. He led the way up to his store and, displaying
to them his wares, told them to choose themselves each a present.
There were gaudy shawls, beflowered muslin dress-lengths, rifles,
watches, clocks, suits of clothing and city head-gear, probably
misfits or the refuse of a bankrupt's stock which Wrath had bought
cheap, all of them long since out of date; there were even battered
dolls and children's toys lying about mixed up with canned goods and
groceries--a miscellaneous array. Arranged along one wall were all the
implements of the trapper's trade and the articles of common use,
such as kettles, pans, enamel cups and plates, coils of rope, etc.
With the inborn thriftlessness of the Indian, at the articles of
essential worth they only glanced, after which they turned aside from
them. Not until an hour had passed did one of the men make up his mind
to take a top-hat for his present, broad-brimmed and dusty, from off
which most of the silk was worn--a relic, perhaps, of the outside
respectability with which one of the Winnipeg partners had been wont
to clothe himself years since, when he went to church and still had
hopes that one day he might live to see himself an honest man. But the
second visitor could find nothing that met with his approval; now that
his companion was owner of the top-hat, he felt that of all things,
sacks of flour, rifles, sails, knives, that was the one and only
present which he would have chosen. Granger was losing patience,
though he did not dare to show it. There were so many tidings which
that letter, if letter it was, might contain--news concerning
Spurling, Strangeways, his mother, Mordaunt. To cut his suspense short
by a few minutes he was willing to pay almost any price. Still the
Indian procrastinated and seemed to be more and more inclined to
become obstinate and offended. Transgressing the usual rule of a
trading-store, he had seated himself on a pile of nets and was
striking a match to light his pipe.
Granger gazed round his stock in desperation, endeavouring to discover
something, whatever its value, which would be acceptable.
A sudden inspiration came to him. Reaching up to a shelf, he took down
an oblong box, about nine inches in length, adjusted several parts of
it on the inside, wound it up with a key which was in the back, and
set it on the counter. A whirring, coughing noise was heard, as though
a creature hidden inside was clearing its throat to prevent itself
from choking; after a few seconds of this, a voice, so thin and
whispering that it seemed impossible that it should ever have come
from a person who owned a chest, commenced to sing with an atrocious
perversion of the vowels,
"Sife in the h'arms of Jesus,
Sife on 'is gentle breast,
There by 'is love o'ershadowed
Sweetly my soul shall rest."
He cut it short at the end of one verse, for he could endure no more
of that--the tears were in his eyes. Ugly as the dialect was in itself
and often as it had revolted him in former days, there was something
hauntingly pathetic about it when combined with religion, and sung in
Keewatin by that weakling voice; the London voice, shut up in the
mildewed box, was an exile like himself. When he was a child, he had
heard his mother sing those words, and that was at a time when he
believed in the faith which they expressed. For him there was now no
overshadowing God--only a careless, and perhaps unconscious, tyrant.
But he had accomplished his purpose, for the Indian was won over and
beaming with pleasure. Gramo-phones had not been long introduced into
the district as articles of trade; as yet only the chiefs and most
successful trappers could purchase them. To own one was equivalent to
keeping a butler in civilisation. Seeing the greed in the man's eyes,
he told him that he could have it so soon as he had declared his
business and delivered his message.
This promise caused the oracle to work. Diving his hand beneath his
shirt, the Indian drew forth a pouch which was slung about his neck,
and, opening it, produced from it a letter. Then snatching up his
play-thing, he and his companion, proud in his top-hat, went outside
to build their fire, and to make their camp, leaving the trader to
himself.
Granger rose up and made fast the door behind them, so that he might
be undisturbed. Now that he held within his hand the solution to the
problem of their visit, he was willing to postpone the fuller
knowledge lest it should make him sad. Sitting himself down on the
edge of the counter he drew forth his pipe and filled it slowly; and
when that was done, still more slowly commenced searching for a match,
found it at last and kindled the tobacco. He looked at the address; it
was in Wrath's handwriting, but the envelope bore no stamp--it had
evidently been sent up by him in haste over the entire six hundred and
eighty miles by private carrier. That meant that the news was
important, for such means of transit were expensive. Breaking the
seal, he found a letter enclosed, which had been addressed to him in
care of Wrath; it also was unstamped, but it bore in the left-hand
corner the name of his mother's firm of London solicitors. About it
was folded a note from Wrath himself, which read:
DEAR GRANGER,
The enclosed letter arrived here by yesterday's mail.
It was accompanied by a letter to myself from some
London lawyers, urging me to deliver it into your hands
in the quickest possible time, regardless of expense.
Carrying out my instructions, I am sending it up to
you by private messengers; heaven knows how long it
would take to get to you, were I to send it any other
way. Of course I shall dock the cost of its transit
from your salary, which means that if you don't have a
good year's trade, I sha'n't have much to pay you.
Yours,
CHARLES E. WRATH.
His mother's lawyers! That meant that his mother had relented, and was
anxious to have him home again. His heart leapt at the thought--and
then he remembered that there were Peggy and the death of Strangeways
as obstacles to his return.
He undid the wrapping of the lawyer's letter and, as he read, the
blood went from his face. It was to tell him, in formal language, that
his mother was dead, and that, if he would fulfil certain conditions,
he was to become heir to the property which she had left. The estate
was valued at fifteen thousand pounds. The conditions were, that he
was to return to England within four months from the writing of this
letter, and take up his permanent residence there. If for any reason
he should be unwilling or unable to agree to these terms, the money
was to be divided among certain charities which his mother had named
in her will. That was all. So the chance for which he had waited had
come at last, and he was unable to take it--and his mother was dead!
He sat very still and motionless. The flies drummed against the
panes--they also were captives. Outside, across the river, the
whippoorwill continued to cry, demanding entrance into Beorn's body
because it was his soul. Peggy came to the door, tried to open it,
rattled the latch and announced that the meal was ready: he took no
notice of her, and presently she went away. For hours he sat like a
man of stone, making no pretence at thinking; of one fact only was he
aware, that with both hands, for the want of a little patience, he had
thrown away all his chances of return. He was lost--lost--lost.
As the hours dragged by the flies grew tired of trying to escape, and
the whippoorwill of calling; the whole world fell silent. He wished
that the darkness might come, so that he might hide himself; but in
June time, on the Last Chance River, it is never utterly night. When
the sun has sunk from the sky the sunset lingers, gradually working
round toward the dawn; through the summer months, as if to make amends
for the long dark winter days, it always leaves a little torch of
promise burning somewhere along the horizon. The perpetual brightness
of the world outside seemed to jeer him; it was as careless in its way
as the winter had been of the solitariness of his soul.
But at last the shadows lengthened in the store, and through the
dusty, cobwebbed window he could see that the sky had grown indigo and
grey. So his mother was dead, and he would never look on her again.
They had not understood one another, and now, with whatever longing he
might desire it, he could never explain. He had abandoned her for the
sake of his father's quest, that he might seek out El Dorado--and this
was the wage of his sacrifice, thirty, perhaps forty long years of
life at Murder Point, shared in the company of a squaw, a hurried
burial one day, and an unnoticed grave.
He could not accept the conditions set forth in the lawyer's letter
and return to London in the two months which remained--there were the
Mounted Police to prevent him, and there was Peggy. He had chosen his
own path in life, and he must follow it without complaint to the
bitter end. He tried to think himself back into the opinion of the
morning, when he had fancied that he preferred the Last Chance River
to any other place. He could not think that now; he knew that it was
no more than a consoling lie. Then he ceased to think and grew drowsy.
He was aroused by the faint and far-away sound of singing. The dusk
had gathered and it must be nearing midnight. He was stiff from
sitting so long in a cramped position; he rose to his feet and rubbed
his eyes. The window was ruddy with the shifting light of the Indians'
camp-fire; occasionally, when the flame shot up, its brightness stole
across the ceiling and illumined the walls of the store. He listened;
the tune that was sung seemed to him familiar and puzzled him, for he
was not fully awake. Drifting through the stillness of the northern
twilight, at an hour when even the beasts of the forests held their
breath because of God's nearness and His solemnity, there reached his
ears the vulgar strutting tones of a music-hall singer's voice:
"As I walked through Leicester Square
With my most magnificent air,
You should hear the girls declare
'Why, he's a millionaire;'
And they turn around and sigh,
And they wink the other eye,
'He's the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.'"
The coarse suggestiveness of the words, the cheap passions which they
implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by
the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience
by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total
uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came vividly home to him.
He did not stop to reason, or to trace his repugnance to its
source--to his native hostility to the impurity and strengthlessness
of multitudes of creatures who arrogantly boast that they are
civilised--he was too angry for that. He was only conscious that a
vain and impertinent echo of the town had, by his instrumentality,
found its way into and vilified the secret refuge of God's austerity.
Tearing back the bolts from the storehouse door and lifting the latch,
he rushed out into the cool half-light.
Half-way between himself and the pier he saw the Indians' camp-fire,
with four figures squatting round, two of which were Peggy's and
Beorn's. Running down the descent, he burst into their midst, seized
the offending gramophone and crushed it down with his heel into the
flames. His foot was scorched, but he did not care for that. When his
work was accomplished, turning savagely upon his spectators he said,
"I'll teach you to offend God's silence," and strode away, leaving
them staring after him through the shadows, terrified and amazed.
Suddenly he returned; there was a gentler look upon his face. Going up
to where Peggy sat, he took her by the hand, and, without a word, led
her out of the circle of firelight towards the shack.