“PLEASE, I want to go, too, Jim.”
Jim swung round and caught the child up in his arms. “Say, how dare you
call your father Jim--eh, tell me that?”
“It’s what mummy calls you--it’s pretty.”
“I don’t call her ‘mummy’ because you do, and you mustn’t call me Jim
because she does--do you hear?” The whimsical face lowered a little,
then the rare and beautiful dark blue eyes raised slowly, shaded by the
long lashes, and the voice said demurely, “Yes--Jim.”
“Nancy--Nancy,” said a voice from the corner in reproof, mingled with
suppressed laughter. “Nancy, you musn’t be saucy. You must say ‘father’
to--”
“Yes, mummy. I’ll say father to--Jim.”
“You imp--you imp of delight,” said Jim, as he strained the dainty
little lass to his breast, while she appeared interested in a wave of
his black hair, which she curled around her finger.
Sally came forwards with the little parcel of sandwiches she had been
preparing, and put them in the saddle-bags lying on a chair at the
door, in readiness for the journey Jim was about to make. Her eyes were
glistening, and her face had a heightened colour. The three years
which had passed since she married had touched her not at all to her
disadvantage, rather to her profit. She looked not an hour older;
motherhood had only added to her charm, lending it a delightful gravity.
The prairie life had given a shining quality to her handsomeness, an air
of depth and firmness, an exquisite health and clearness to the colour
in her cheeks. Her step was as light as Nancy’s, elastic and buoyant--a
gliding motion which gave a sinuous grace to the movements of her
body. There had also come into her eyes a vigilance such as deaf people
possess, a sensitive observation imparting a deeper intelligence to the
face.
Here was the only change by which you could guess the story of her life.
Her eyes were like the ears of an anxious mother who can never sleep
till every child is abed; whose sense is quick to hear the faintest
footstep without or within; and who, as years go on, and her children
grow older and older, must still lie awake hearkening for the late
footstep on the stair. In Sally’s eyes was the story of the past three
years: of love and temptation and struggle, of watchfulness and yearning
and anxiety, of determination and an inviolable hope. Her eyes had a
deeper look than that in Jim’s. Now, as she gazed at him, the maternal
spirit rose up from the great well of protectiveness in her and engulfed
both husband and child. There was always something of the maternal in
her eyes when she looked at Jim. He did not see it--he saw only the
wonderful blue, and the humour which had helped him over such difficult
places these past three years. In steadying and strengthening Jim’s
will, in developing him from his Southern indolence into Northern
industry and sense of responsibility, John Appleton’s warnings had
rung in Sally’s ears, and Freddy Hartzman’s forceful and high-minded
personality had passed before her eyes with an appeal powerful and
stimulating; but always she came to the same upland of serene faith and
white-hearted resolve; and Jim became dearer and dearer.
The baby had done much to brace her faith in the future and comfort her
anxious present. The child had intelligence of a rare order. She would
lie by the half-hour on the floor, turning over the leaves of a book
without pictures, and, before she could speak, would read from the pages
in a language all her own. She made a fairy world for herself, peopled
by characters to whom she gave names, to whom she assigned curious
attributes and qualities. They were as real to her as though flesh and
blood, and she was never lonely, and never cried; and she had buried
herself in her father’s heart. She had drawn to her the roughest men in
the troop, and for old Sewell, the grim sergeant, she had a specially
warm place.
“You can love me if you like,” she had said to him at the very start,
with the egotism of childhood; but made haste to add, “because I love
you, Gri-Gri.” She called him Gri-Gri from the first, but they knew only
long afterwards that “gri-gri” meant “grey-grey,” to signify that she
called him after his grizzled hairs.
What she had been in the life-history of Sally and Jim they both knew.
Jim regarded her with an almost superstitious feeling. Sally was his
strength, his support, his inspiration, his bulwark of defence; Nancy
was the charm he wore about his neck--his mascot, he called her. Once,
when she was ill, he had suffered as he had never done before in his
life. He could not sleep nor eat, and went about his duties like one
in a dream. When his struggles against his enemy were fiercest, he
kept saying over her name to himself, as though she could help him. Yet
always it was Sally’s hand he held in the darkest hours, in his brutal
moments; for in this fight between appetite and will there are moments
when only the animal seems to exist, and the soul disappears in the
glare and gloom of the primal emotions. Nancy he called his “lucky
sixpence,” but he called Sally his “guinea-girl.”
From first to last his whimsicality never deserted him. In his worst
hours, some innate optimism and humour held him steady in his fight. It
was not depression that possessed him at the worst, but the violence of
an appetite most like a raging pain which men may endure with a smile
upon their lips. He carried in his face the story of a conflict, the
aftermath of bitter experience; and through all there pulsed the glow
of experience. He had grown handsomer, and the graceful decision of his
figure, the deliberate certainty of every action, heightened the force
of a singular personality. As in the eyes of Sally, in his eyes was a
long reflective look which told of things overcome, and yet of dangers
present. His lips smiled often, but the eyes said: “I have lived, I have
seen, I have suffered, and I must suffer more. I have loved, I have been
loved under the shadow of the sword. Happiness I have had, and golden
hours, but not peace--never peace. My soul has need of peace.”
In the greater, deeper experience of their lives, the more material side
of existence had grown less and less to them. Their home was a model
of simple comfort and some luxury, though Jim had insisted that Sally’s
income should not be spent, except upon the child, and should be saved
for the child, their home being kept on his pay and on the tiny income
left by his mother. With the help of an Indian girl, and a half-breed
for outdoor work and fires and gardening, Sally had cared for the house
herself. Ingenious and tasteful, with a gift for cooking and an educated
hand, she had made her little home as pretty as their few possessions
would permit. Refinement covered all, and three or four-score books were
like so many friends to comfort her when Jim was away; like kind and
genial neighbours when he was at home. From Browning she had written
down in her long sliding handwriting, and hung up beneath Jim’s
looking-glass, the heartening and inspiring words:
“One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.”
They had lived above the sordid, and there was something in the nature
of Jim’s life to help them to it. He belonged to a small handful of men
who had control over an empire, with an individual responsibility and
influence not contained in the scope of their commissions. It was a
matter of moral force and character, and of uniform, symbolical only of
the great power behind; of the long arm of the State; of the insistence
of the law, which did not rely upon force alone, but on the certainty of
its administration. In such conditions the smallest brain was bound to
expand, to take on qualities of judgment and temperateness which
would never be developed in ordinary circumstances. In the case of
Jim Templeton, who needed no stimulant to his intellect, but rather a
steadying quality, a sense of proportion, the daily routine, the command
of men, the diverse nature of his duties, half civil, half military,
the personal appeals made on all sides by the people of the country for
advice, for help, for settlement of disputes, for information which
his well-instructed mind could give--all these modified the romantic
brilliance of his intellect, made it and himself more human.
It had not come to him all at once. His intellect at first stood in his
way. His love of paradox, his deep observation, his insight, all made
him inherently satirical, though not cruelly so; but satire had become
pure whimsicality at last; and he came to see that, on the whole,
the world was imperfect, but also, on the whole, was moving towards
perfection rather than imperfection. He grew to realise that what seemed
so often weakness in men was tendency and idiosyncrasy rather than evil.
And in the end he thought better of himself as he came to think better
of all others. For he had thought less of all the world because he had
thought so little of himself. He had overestimated his own faults, had
made them into crimes in his own eyes, and, observing things in others
of similar import, had become almost a cynic in intellect, while in
heart he had remained, a boy.
In all that he had changed a great deal. His heart was still the heart
of a boy, but his intellect had sobered, softened, ripened--even in this
secluded and seemingly unimportant life; as Sally had said and hoped it
would. Sally’s conviction had been right. But the triumph was not yet
achieved. She knew it. On occasion the tones of his voice told her, the
look that came into his eyes proclaimed it to her, his feverishness and
restlessness made it certain. How many a night had she thrown her arm
over his shoulder, and sought his hand and held it while in the dark
silence, wide-eyed, dry-lipped, and with a throat like fire he had held
himself back from falling. There was liquor in the house--the fight
would not have been a fight without it. She had determined that he
should see his enemy and meet him in the plains and face him down; and
he was never many feet away from his possible disaster. Yet for long
over three years all had gone well. There was another year. Would he
last out the course?
At first the thought of the great stake for which she was playing in
terms of currency, with the head of Jim’s father on every note, was much
with her. The amazing nature of the offer of five millions of dollars
stimulated her imagination, roused her; gold coins are counters in the
game of success, signs and tokens. Money alone could not have lured her;
but rather what it represented--power, width of action, freedom to help
when the heart prompted, machinery for carrying out large plans, ability
to surround with advantage those whom we love. So, at first, while
yet the memories of Washington were much with her, the appeal of the
millions was strong. The gallant nature of the contest and the great
stake braced her; she felt the blood quicken in her pulse.
But, all through, the other thing really mastered her: the fixed idea
that Jim must be saved. As it deepened, the other life that she had
lived became like the sports in which we shared when children, full of
vivacious memory, shining with impulse and the stir of life, but not to
be repeated--days and deeds outgrown. So the light of one idea shone in
her face. Yet she was intensely human too; and if her eyes had not been
set on the greater glory, the other thought might have vulgarised her
mind, made her end and goal sordid--the descent of a nature rather than
its ascension.
When Nancy came, the lesser idea, the stake, took on a new importance,
for now it seemed to her that it was her duty to secure for the child
its rightful heritage. Then Jim, too, appeared in a new light, as
one who could never fulfil himself unless working through the natural
channels of his birth, inheritance, and upbringing. Jim, drunken and
unreliable, with broken will and fighting to find himself--the waste
places were for him, until he was the master of his will and emotions.
Once however, secure in ability to control himself, with cleansed brain
and purpose defined, the widest field would still be too narrow for his
talents--and the five, yes, the fifty millions of his father must be
his.
She had never repented having married Jim; but twice in those three
years she had broken down and wept as though her heart would break.
There were times when Jim’s nerves were shaken in his struggle against
the unseen foe, and he had spoken to her querulously, almost sharply.
Yet in her tears there was no reproach for him, rather for herself--the
fear that she might lose her influence over him, that she could not
keep him close to her heart, that he might drift away from her in the
commonplaces and monotony of work and domestic life. Everything so
depended on her being to him not only the one woman for whom he cared,
but the woman without whom he could care for nothing else.
“Oh, my God, give me his love,” she had prayed. “Let me keep it yet a
little while. For his sake, not for my own, let me have the power to
hold his love. Make my mind always quiet, and let me blow neither hot
nor cold. Help me to keep my temper sweet and cheerful, so that he will
find the room empty where I am not, and his footsteps will quicken when
he comes to the door. Not for my sake, dear God, but for his, or my
heart will break--it will break unless Thou dost help me to hold him. O
Lord, keep me from tears; make my face happy that I may be goodly to his
eyes, and forgive the selfishness of a poor woman who has little, and
would keep her little and cherish it, for Christ’s sake.”
Twice had she poured out her heart so, in the agony of her fear that
she should lose favour in Jim’s sight--she did not know how alluring she
was, in spite of the constant proofs offered her. She had had her will
with all who came her way, from governor to Indian brave. Once, in a
journey they had made far north, soon after they came, she had stayed
at a Hudson’s Bay Company’s post for some days, while there came news
of restlessness among the Indians, because of lack of food, and Jim had
gone farther north to steady the tribes, leaving her with the factor and
his wife and a halfbreed servant.
While she and the factor’s wife were alone in the yard of the post one
day, an Indian--chief, Arrowhead, in warpaint and feathers, entered
suddenly, brandishing a long knife. He had been drinking, and there was
danger in his black eyes. With a sudden inspiration she came forward
quickly, nodded and smiled to him, and then pointed to a grindstone
standing in the corner of the yard. As she did so, she saw Indians
crowding into the gate armed with knives, guns, bows, and arrows. She
beckoned to Arrowhead, and he followed her to the grindstone. She
poured some water on the wheel and began to turn it, nodding at the now
impassive Indian to begin. Presently he nodded also, and put his knife
on the stone. She kept turning steadily, singing to herself the while,
as with anxiety she saw the Indians drawing closer and closer in from
the gate. Faster and faster she turned, and at last the Indian lifted
his knife from the stone. She reached out her hand with simulated
interest, felt the edge with her thumb, the Indian looking darkly at her
the while. Presently, after feeling the edge himself, he bent over the
stone again, and she went on turning the wheel still singing softly. At
last he stopped again and felt the edge. With a smile which showed her
fine white teeth, she said, “Is that for me?” making a significant sign
across her throat at the same time.
The old Indian looked at her grimly, then slowly shook his head in
negation.
“I go hunt Yellow Hawk to-night,” he said. “I go fight; I like marry you
when I come back. How!” he said and turned away towards the gate.
Some of his braves held back, the blackness of death in their looks.
He saw. “My knife is sharp,” he said. “The woman is brave. She shall
live--go and fight Yellow Hawk, or starve and die.”
Divining their misery, their hunger, and the savage thought that had
come to them, Sally had whispered to the factor’s wife to bring food,
and the woman now came running out with two baskets full, and returned
for more. Sally ran forward among the Indians and put the food into
their hands. With grunts of satisfaction they seized what she gave, and
thrust it into their mouths, squatting on the ground. Arrowhead looked
on stern and immobile, but when at last she and the factor’s wife sat
down before the braves with confidence and an air of friendliness, he
sat down also; yet, famished as he was, he would not touch the food. At
last Sally, realising his proud defiance of hunger, offered him a little
lump of pemmican and a biscuit, and with a grunt he took it from her
hands and ate it. Then, at his command a fire was lit, the pipe of peace
was brought out, and Sally and the factor’s wife touched their lips to
it, and passed it on.
So was a new treaty of peace and loyalty made with Arrowhead and
his tribe by a woman without fear, whose life had seemed not worth a
minute’s purchase; and, as the sun went down, Arrowhead and his men went
forth to make war upon Yellow Hawk beside the Nettigon River. In this
wise had her influence spread in the land.
.......................
Standing now with the child in his arms and his wife looking at him with
a shining moisture of the eyes, Jim laughed outright. There came upon
him a sudden sense of power, of aggressive force--the will to do. Sally
understood, and came and laughingly grasped his arm.
“Oh, Jim,” she said playfully, “you are getting muscles like steel. You
hadn’t these when you were colonel of the Kentucky Carbineers!”
“I guess I need them now,” he said, smiling, and with the child still in
his arms drew her to a window looking northward. As far as the eye could
see, nothing but snow, like a blanket spread over the land. Here and
there in the wide expanse a tree silhouetted against the sky, a tracery
of eccentric beauty, and off in the far distance a solitary horseman
riding towards the postriding hard.
“It was root, hog, or die with me, Sally,” he continued, “and I rooted
... I wonder--that fellow on the horse--I have a feeling about him. See,
he’s been riding hard and long-you can tell by the way the horse drops
his legs. He sags a bit himself.... But isn’t it beautiful, all that out
there--the real quintessence of life.”
The air was full of delicate particles of frost on which the sun
sparkled, and though there was neither bird nor insect, nor animal, nor
stir of leaf, nor swaying branch or waving grass, life palpitated in
the air, energy sang its song in the footstep that crunched the frosty
ground, that broke the crusted snow; it was in the delicate wind that
stirred the flag by the barracks away to the left; hope smiled in the
wide prospect over which the thrilling, bracing air trembled. Sally had
chosen right.
“You had a big thought when you brought me here, guinea-girl,” he added
presently. “We are going to win out here”--he set the child down--“you
and I and this lucky sixpence.” He took up his short fur coat. “Yes,
we’ll win, honey.” Then, with a brooding look in his face, he added:
“‘The end comes as came the beginning,
And shadows fail into the past;
And the goal, is it not worth the winning,
If it brings us but home at the last?
“‘While far through the pain of waste places
We tread, ‘tis a blossoming rod
That drives us to grace from disgraces,
From the fens to the gardens of God!’”
He paused reflectively. “It’s strange that this life up here makes you
feel that you must live a bigger life still, that this is only the wide
porch to the great labour-house--it makes you want to do things. Well,
we’ve got to win the stake first,” he added with a laugh.
“The stake is a big one, Jim--bigger than you think.”
“You and her and me--me that was in the gutter.”
“What is the gutter, dadsie?” asked Nancy.
“The gutter--the gutter is where the dish-water goes, midget,” he
answered with a dry laugh.
“Oh, I don’t think you’d like to be in the gutter,” Nancy said solemnly.
“You have to get used to it first, miss,” answered Jim. Suddenly Sally
laid both hands on Jim’s shoulders and looked him in the eyes. “You must
win the stake Jim. Think--now!”
She laid a hand on the head of the child. He did not know that he was
playing for a certain five millions, perhaps fifty millions, of dollars.
She had never told him of his father’s offer. He was fighting only for
salvation, for those he loved, for freedom. As they stood there,
the conviction had come upon her that they had come to the last
battle-field, that this journey which Jim now must take would decide
all, would give them perfect peace or lifelong pain. The shadow of
battle was over them, but he had no foreboding, no premonition; he had
never been so full of spirits and life.
To her adjuration Jim replied by burying his face in her golden hair,
and he whispered: “Say, I’ve done near four years, my girl. I think I’m
all right now--I think. This last six months, it’s been easy--pretty
fairly easy.”
“Four months more, only four months more--God be good to us!” she said
with a little gasp.
If he held out for four months more, the first great stage in their
life--journey would be passed, the stake won.
“I saw a woman get an awful fall once,” Jim said suddenly. “Her bones
were broken in twelve places, and there wasn’t a spot on her body
without injury. They set and fixed up every broken bone except one. It
was split down. They didn’t dare perform the operation; she couldn’t
stand it. There was a limit to pain, and she had reached the boundary.
Two years went by, and she got better every way, but inside her leg
those broken pieces of bone were rubbing against each other. She tried
to avoid the inevitable operation, but nature said, ‘You must do it, or
die in the end.’ She yielded. Then came the long preparations for the
operation. Her heart shrank, her mind got tortured. She’d suffered
too much. She pulled herself together, and said, ‘I must conquer this
shrinking body of mine, by my will. How shall I do it?’ Something within
her said, ‘Think and do for others. Forget yourself.’ And so, as they
got her ready for her torture, she visited hospitals, agonised cripple
as she was, and smiled and talked to the sick and broken, telling them
of her own miseries endured and dangers faced, of the boundary of human
suffering almost passed; and so she got her courage for her own trial.
And she came out all right in the end. Well, that’s the way I’ve felt
sometimes. But I’m ready for my operation now whenever it comes, and
it’s coming, I know. Let it come when it must.” He smiled. There came
a knock at the door, and presently Sewell entered. “The Commissioner
wishes you to come over, sir,” he said.
“I was just coming, Sewell. Is all ready for the start?”
“Everything’s ready, sir, but there’s to be a change of orders.
Something’s happened--a bad job up in the Cree country, I think.”
A few minutes later Jim was in the Commissioner’s office. The murder of
a Hudson’s Bay Company’s man had been committed in the Cree country.
The stranger whom Jim and Sally had seen riding across the plains
had brought the news for thirty miles, word of the murder having been
carried from point to point. The Commissioner was uncertain what to do,
as the Crees were restless through want of food and the absence of game,
and a force sent to capture Arrowhead, the chief who had committed the
murder, might precipitate trouble. Jim solved the problem by offering to
go alone and bring the chief into the post. It was two hundred miles to
the Cree encampment, and the journey had its double dangers.
Another officer was sent on the expedition for which Jim had been
preparing, and he made ready to go upon his lonely duty. His wife
did not know till three days after he had gone what the nature of his
mission was.