THE END OF THE TRAIL
When Marion was about leaving with her husband for the railway station,
she sought out Lali, and found her standing half hidden by the curtains
of a window, looking out at little Richard, who was parading his pony up
and down before the house. An unutterable sweetness looked out of
Marion's eyes. She had found, as it seemed to her, and as so many have
believed until their lives' end, the secret of existence. Lali saw the
glistening joy, and responded to it, just as it was in her being to
respond to every change of nature--that sensitiveness was in her as
deep as being.
"You are very happy, dear?" she said to Marion. "You cannot think how
happy, Lali. And I want to say that I feel sure that you will yet be as
happy, even happier than I. Oh, it will come--it will come. And you
have the boy now-so fine, so good."
Lali looked out to where little Richard disported himself; her eyes
shone, and she turned with a responsive but still sad smile to Marion.
"Marion," she said gently, "the other should have come before he came."
"Frank loves you, Lali."
"Who knows? And then, oh, I cannot tell! How can one force one's heart?
No, no! One has to wait, and wait, even if the heart grows harder, and
one gets hopeless."
Marion kissed her on the cheek and smiled. "Some day soon the heart will
open up, and then such a flood will pour out! See, Lali. I am going
now, and our lives won't run together so much again ever, perhaps. But I
want to tell you now that your coming to us has done me a world of good--
helped me to be a wiser girl; and I ought to be a better woman for it.
Good-bye."
They were calling to her, and with a hurried embrace the two parted, and
in a few moments the bride and bridegroom were on their way to the new
life. As the carriage disappeared in a turn of the limes, Lali vanished
also to her room. She was not seen at dinner. Mackenzie came to say
that she was not very well, and that she would keep to her room. Frank
sent several times during the evening to inquire after her, and was told
that she was resting comfortably. He did not try to see her, and in this
was wise. He had now fallen into a habit of delicate consideration,
which brought its own reward. He had given up hope of winning her heart
or confidence by storm, and had followed his finer and better instincts--
had come to the point where he made no claims, and even in his own mind
stood upon no rights. His mother brought him word from Lali before he
retired, to say that she was sorry she could not see him, but giving him
a message and a commission into town the following morning for their son.
Her tact had grown is her strength had declined. There is something in
failing health--ill-health without disease--which sharpens and refines
the faculties, and makes the temper exquisitely sensitive--that is, with
people of a certain good sort. The aplomb and spirited manner in which
Lali had borne herself at the wedding and after, was the last flicker of
her old strength, and of the second phase in her married life. The end
of the first phase came with the ride at the quick-set hedge, this with
a less intent but as active a temper.
The next morning she did not appear at breakfast, but sent a message to
Frank to say that she was better, and adding another commission for town.
All day, save for an hour on the balcony, she kept to her room, and lay
down for the greater part of the afternoon. In the evening, when Frank
returned, his mother sent for him, and frankly told him that she thought
it would be better for him to go away for a few weeks or so; that Lali
was in a languid, nervous state, and she thought that by the time he got
back--if he would go--she would be better, and that better things would
come for him.
Frank was no longer the vain, selfish fellow who had married Lali--
something of the best in him was at work. He understood, and suggested
a couple of weeks with Richard at their little place in Scotland. Also,
he saw his wife for a little while that evening. She had been lying
down, but she disposed herself in a deep chair before he entered. He was
a little shocked to see, as it were all at once, how delicate she looked.
He came and sat down near her, and after a few moments of friendly talk,
in which he spoke solicitously of her health, he told her that he thought
of going up to Scotland with Richard for a few weeks, if she saw no
objection.
She did not quite understand why he was going. She thought that perhaps
he felt the strain of the situation, and that a little absence would be
good for both. This pleased her. She did not shrink, as she had so
often done since his return, when he laid his hand on hers for an
instant, as he asked her if she were willing that he should go.
Sometimes in the past few weeks she had almost hated him. Now she was
a little sorry for him, but she said that of course he must go; that no
doubt it was good that he should go, and so on, in gentle, allusive
phrases. The next evening she came down to dinner, and was more like
herself as she was before Frank came back, but she ate little, and before
the men came into the drawing-room she had excused herself, and retired;
at which Mrs. Lambert shook her head apprehensively at herself, and made
up her mind to stay at Greyhope longer than she intended.
Which was good for all concerned; for, two nights after Frank and Richard
had gone, Mackenzie hurried down to the drawing-room with the news that
Lali had been found in a faint on her chamber floor. That was the
beginning of weeks of anxiety, in which Mrs. Lambert was to Mrs. Armour
what Marion would have been, and more; and both to Lali all that mother
and sister could be.
Their patient was unlike any other that they had known. Feverish,
she had no fever; with a gentle, hacking cough, she had no lung trouble;
nervous, she still was oblivious to very much that went on around her;
hungering often for her child, she would not let him remain long with her
when he came. Her sleep was broken, and she sometimes talked to herself,
whether consciously or unconsciously they did not know. The doctor had
no remedies but tonics--he did not understand the case; but he gently
ventured the opinion that it was mostly a matter of race, that she was
pining because civilisation had been infused into her veins--the old
insufficient theory.
"Stuff and nonsense!" said General Armour, when his wife told him.
"The girl bloomed till Frank came back. God bless my soul! she's falling
in love, and doesn't know what it is."
He was only partly right, perhaps, but he was nearer the truth than the
dealer in quinine and a cheap philosophy of life. "She'll come around
all right, you'll see. Decline--decline be hanged! The girl shall live,
--damn it, she shall!" he blurted out, as his wife's eyes filled with
tears.
Mrs. Lambert was much of the same mind as the general, but went further.
She said to Mrs. Armour that in all her life she had never seen so sweet
a character, so sensitive a mind--a mind whose sorrow was imagination.
And therein the little lady showed herself a person of wisdom. For none
of them had yet reckoned with that one great element in Lali's character
--that thing which is the birthright of all who own the North for a
mother, the awe of imagination, the awe and the pain, which in its finest
expression comes near, very near, to the supernatural. Lali's mind was
all pictures; she never thought of things in words, she saw them; and
everything in her life arrayed itself in a scene before her, made vivid
by her sensitive soul, so much more sensitive now with health failing,
the spirit wearing out the body. There was her malady--the sick heart
and mind.
A new sickness wore upon her. It had not touched her from the day she
left the North until she sang "The Chase of the Yellow Swan" that first
evening after Frank's return. Ever since then her father was much in her
mind--the memory of her childhood, and its sweet, inspiring friendship
with Nature. All the roughness and coarseness of the life was refined
in her memory by the exquisite atmosphere of the North, the good sweet
earth, the strong bracing wind, the camaraderie of trees and streams and
grass and animals. And in it all stood her father, whom she had left
alone, in that interminable interval between the old life and the new.
Had she done right? She had cut him off, as if he had never been--her
people, her country also; and for what? For this--for this sinking
sense, this failing body, this wear and tear of mind and heart, this
constant study to be possible where she had once been declared by the
world to be impossible.
One night she lay sleeping after a rather feverish day, when it was
thought best to keep the child from her. Suddenly she waked, and sat up.
Looking straight before her, she said:
"I will arise, and will go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father,
I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be
called Thy son."
She said nothing more than this, and presently lay back, with eyes wide
open, gazing before her. Like this she lay all night long, a strange,
aching look in her face. There had come upon her the sudden impulse to
leave it all, and go back to her father. But the child--that gave her
pause. Towards morning she fell asleep, and slept far on into the day,
a thing that had not occurred for a long time.
At noon a letter arrived for her. It came into General Armour's hands,
and he, seeing that it bore the stamp of the Hudson's Bay Company, with
the legend, From Fort St. Charles, concluded that it was news of Lali's
father. Then came the question whether the letter should be given to
her. The general was for doing so, and he prevailed. If it were bad
news, he said, it might raise her out of her present apathy and by
changing the play of her emotions do her good in the end.
The letter was given to her in the afternoon. She took it apathetically,
but presently, seeing where it was from, she opened it hurriedly with a
little cry which was very like a moan too. There were two letters inside
one from the factor at Fort Charles in English, and one from her father
in the Indian language. She read her father's letter first, the other
fluttered to her feet from her lap. General Armour, looking down, saw a
sentence in it which, he felt, warranted him in picking it up, reading
it, and retaining it, his face settling into painful lines as he did so.
Days afterwards, Lali read her father's letter to Mrs. Armour. It ran:
My daughter,
Lali, the sweet noise of the Spring:
Thy father speaks.
I have seen more than half a hundred moons come like the sickle and
go like the eye of a running buck, swelling with fire, but I hear
not thy voice at my tent door since the first one came and went.
Thou art gone.
Thy face was like the sun on running water; thy hand hung on thy
wrists like the ear of a young deer; thy foot was as soft on the
grass as the rain on a child's cheek; thy words were like snow in
summer, which melts in richness on the hot earth. Thy bow and arrow
hang lonely upon the wall, and thy empty cup is beside the pot.
Thou art gone.
Thou hast become great with a great race, and that is well. Our
race is not great, and shall not be, until the hour when the Mighty
Men of the Kimash Hills arise from their sleep and possess the land
again.
Thou art gone.
But thou hast seen many worlds, and thou hast learned great things,
and thou and I shall meet no more; for how shall the wise kneel at
the feet of the foolish, as thou didst kneel once at thy father's
feet?
Thou art gone.
High on the Clip Claw Hills the trees are green, in the Plain of the
Rolling Stars the wings of the wild fowl are many, and fine is the
mist upon Goldfly Lake; and the heart of Eye-of-the-Moon is strong.
Thou art here.
The trail is open to the White Valley, and the Scarlet Hunter hath
saved me, when my feet strayed in the plains and my eyes were
blinded.
Thou art here.
I have friends on the Far Off River who show me the yards where the
musk-ox gather; I have found the gardens of the young sable, and my
tents are full of store.
Thou art here.
In the morning my spirit is light, and I have harvest where I would
gather, and the stubble is for my foes. In the evening my limbs are
heavy, and I am at rest in my blanket. The hunt is mine and sleep
is mine, and my soul is cheerful when I remember thee.
Thou art here.
I have built for thee a place where thy spirit comes. I hear thee
when thou callest to me, and I kneel outside the door, for thou art
wise, and thou speakest to me; but thee as thou art in a far land I
shall see no more. This is my word to thee, that thou mayst know
that I am not alone. Thou shalt not come again, as thou once went;
it is not meet. But by these other ways I will speak to thee.
Thou art here.
Farewell. I have spoken.
Lali finished reading, and then slowly folded up the letter. The writing
was that of the wife of the factor at Fort Charles--she knew it. She
sat for a minute looking straight before her. She read her father's
allegory. Barbarian in so much as her father was, he had beaten this
thing out with the hammer of wisdom. He missed her, but she must not
come back; she had outgrown the old life--he knew it and she was with
him in spirit, in his memory; she understood his picturesque phrases,
borrowed from the large, affluent world about him. Something of the
righteousness and magnanimity of this letter passed into her, giving her
for an instant a sort of peace. She had needed it--needed it to justify
herself, and she had been justified. To return was impossible--she had
known that all along, though she had not admitted it; the struggle had
been but a kind of remorse, after all. That her father should come to
her was also impossible--it was neither for her happiness nor his. She
had been two different persons in her life, and the first was only a
memory to the second. The father had solved the problem for her. He too
was now a memory that she could think on with pleasure, as associated
with the girl she once was. He had been well provided for by her
husband, and General Armour put his hand on hers gently and said:
"Lali, without your permission I have read this other letter."
She did not appear curious. She was thinking still of her father's
letter to her. She nodded abstractedly. "Lali," he continued, "this
says that your father wished that letter to be written to you just as he
said it at the Fort, on the day of the Feast of the Yellow Swan. He
stood up--the factor writes so here--and said that he had been thinking
much for years, and that the time had come when he must speak to his
daughter over the seas--"
General Armour paused. Lali inclined her head, smiled wistfully, and
held up the letter for him to see. The general continued:
"So he spoke as has been written to you, and then they had the Feast of
the Yellow Swan, and that night--" He paused again, but presently, his
voice a little husky, he went on: "That night he set out on a long
journey,"--he lifted the letter and looked at it, then met the serious
eyes of his daughter-in-law," on a long journey to the Hills of the
Mighty Men; and, my dear, he never came back; for, as he said, there was
peace in the White Valley, and he would rest till the world should come
to its Spring again, and the noise of its coming should be in his ears.
Those, Lali, are his very words."
His hand closed on hers, he reached out and took the other hand, from
which the paper fluttered, and clasped both tight in his own firm grasp.
"My daughter," he said, "you have another father." With a low cry, like
that of a fawn struck in the throat, she slid forward on her knees beside
him, and buried her face on his arm. She understood. Her father was
dead. Mrs. Armour came forward, and, kneeling also, drew the dark head
to her bosom. Then that flood came which sweeps away the rust that
gathers in the eyes and breaks through the closed dikes of the heart.
Hours after, when she had fallen into a deep sleep, General Armour and
his wife met outside her bedroom door.
"I shall not leave her," Mrs. Armour said. "Send for Frank. His time
has almost come."
But it would not have come so soon had not something else occurred. The
day that he came back from Scotland he entered his wife's room, prepared
for a change in her, yet he did not find so much to make him happy as he
had hoped. She received him with a gentleness which touched him, she let
her hand rest in his, she seemed glad to have him with her. All bars had
been cast down between them, but he knew that she had not given him all,
and she knew it also. But she hoped he did not know, and she dreaded the
hour when he would speak out of his now full heart. He did not yet urge
his affection on her, he was simply devoted, and watchful, and tender,
and delightedly hopeful.
But one night she came tapping at his door. When he opened it, she said:
"Oh come, come! Richard is ill! I have sent for the doctor."
Henceforth she was her old self again, with a transformed spirit, her
motherhood spending itself in a thousand ways. She who was weak bodily
became now much stronger; the light of new vigour came to her eyes; she
and her husband, in the common peril, worked together, thinking little
of themselves, and all of the child. The last stage of the journey to
happiness was being passed, and if it was not obvious to themselves,
the others, Marion and Captain Vidall included, saw it.
One anxious day, after the family doctor had left the sick child's room,
Marion, turning to the father and mother, said: "Greyhope will be itself
again. I will go and tell Richard that the danger is over."
As she turned to do so, Richard entered the room. "I have seen the
doctor," he began, "and the little chap is going to pull along like a
house afire."
Tapping Frank affectionately on the arm, he was about to continue, but
he saw what stopped him. He saw the last move in Frank Armour's tragic-
comedy. He and Marion left the room as quickly as was possible to him,
for, as he said himself, he was "slow at a quick march"; and a moment
afterwards the wife heard without demur her husband's tale of love for
her.
Yet, as if to remind him of the wrong he had done, Heaven never granted
Frank Armour another child.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Every man should have laws of his own
Flood came which sweeps away the rust that gathers in the eyes
How can one force one's heart? No, no! One has to wait
Man or woman must not expect too much out of life
May be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else
Men are shy with each other where their emotions are in play
Prepared for a kiss this hour and a reproach the next
Romance is an incident to a man
Simply to have death renewed every morning
To sorrow may their humour be a foil
We want to get more out of life than there really is in it
Who can understand a woman?
Worth while to have lived so long and to have seen so much