In the West the two years flew. Time seemed to go faster there, because
life was more strenuous. Harold, being mainly alone, found endless work
always before him. From daylight to dark labour never ceased; and for
his own part he never wished that it should. In the wilderness, and
especially under such conditions as held in Northern Alaska, labour is
not merely mechanical. Every hour of the day is fraught with danger in
some new form, and the head has to play its part in the strife against
nature. In such a life there is not much time for thinking or brooding.
At first, when the work and his surroundings were strange to him, Harold
did many useless things and ran many unnecessary risks. But his
knowledge grew with experience. Privations he had in plenty; and all the
fibre of his body and the strength of his resolution and endurance were
now and again taxed to their utmost. But with a man of his nature and
race the breaking strain is high; and endurance and resolution are
qualities which develop with practice.
Gradually his mind came back to normal level; he had won seemingly
through the pain that shadowed him. Without anguish he could now think,
remember, look forward. Then it was that the kindly wisdom of the
American came back to him, and came to stay. He began to examine himself
as to his own part of the unhappy transaction; and stray moments of
wonderment came as to whether the fault may not, at the very base, have
his own. He began to realise that it is insufficient in this strenuous
world to watch and wait; to suppress one's self; to put aside, in the
wish to benefit others, all the hopes, ambitions, cravings which make for
personal gain.
Thus it was that Harold's thoughts, ever circling round Stephen, came
back with increasing insistence to his duty towards her. He often
thought, and with a bitter feeling against himself that it came too late,
of the dying trust of her father:
'Guard her and cherish her, as if you were indeed my son and she your
sister . . . If it should be that you and Stephen should find that there
is another affection between you remember I sanction it. But give her
time! I trust that to you! She is young, and the world is all before
her. Let her choose . . . And be loyal to her, if it is another! It may
be a hard task; but I trust you, Harold!'
Here he would groan, as all the anguish of the past would rush back upon
him; and keenest of all would be the fear, suspicion, thought which grew
towards belief, that he may have betrayed that trust. . . .
At first the side of this memory personal to his own happiness was
faintly emphasised; the important side was of the duty to Stephen. But
as time went on the other thought became a sort of corollary; a timid,
halting, blushing thought which followed sheepishly, borne down by
trembling hope. No matter what adventure came to him, the thought of
neglected duty returned ever afresh. Once, when he lay sick for weeks in
an Indian wigwam, the idea so grew with each day of the monotony, that
when he was able to crawl out by himself into the sunshine he had almost
made up his mind to start back for home.
Luck is a strange thing. It seems in some mysterious way to be the
divine machinery for adjusting averages. Whatever may be the measure of
happiness or unhappiness, good or evil, allotted to anyone, luck is the
cause or means of counter-balancing so that the main result reaches the
standard set.
From the time of Harold's illness Dame Fortune seemed to change her
attitude to him. The fierce frown, nay! the malignant scowl, to which he
had become accustomed, changed to a smile. Hitherto everything seemed to
have gone wrong with him; but now all at once all seemed to go right. He
grew strong and hardy again. Indeed, he seemed by contrast to his late
helplessness to be so strong and hard that it looked as if that very
illness had done him good instead of harm. Game was plentiful, and he
never seemed to want. Everywhere he went there were traces of gold, as
though by some instinct he was tracking it to its home. He did not value
gold for its own sake; but he did for the ardour of the search. Harold
was essentially a man, and as a man an adventurer. To such a man of such
a race adventure is the very salt of existence.
The adventurer's instinct took with it the adventurer's judgment; Harold
was not content with small results. Amidst the vast primeval forces
there were, he felt, vast results of their prehistoric working; and he
determined to find some of them. In such a quest, purpose is much. It
was hardly any wonder, then, that in time Harold found himself alone in
the midst of one of the great treasure-places of the world. Only labour
was needed to take from the earth riches beyond the dreams of avarice.
But that labour was no easy problem; great and difficult distance had to
be overcome; secrecy must be observed, for even a whisper of the
existence of such a place would bring a horde of desperadoes. But all
these difficulties were at least sources of interest, if not in
themselves pleasures. The new Harold, seemingly freshly created by a
year of danger and strenuous toil, of self-examining and humiliation, of
the realisation of duty, and--though he knew it not as yet--of the
dawning of hope, found delight in the thought of dangers and difficulties
to be overcome. Having taken his bearings exactly so as to be safe in
finding the place again, he took his specimens with him and set out to
find the shortest and best route to the nearest port.
At length he came to the port and set quietly about finding men. This he
did very carefully and very systematically. Finally, with the full
complement, and with ample supply of stores, he started on his expedition
to the new goldfields.
It is not purposed to set out here the extraordinary growth of Robinson
City, for thus the mining camp soon became. Its history has long ago
been told for all the world. In the early days, when everything had to
be organised and protected, Harold worked like a giant, and with a system
and energy which from the first established him as a master. But when
the second year of his exile was coming to a close, and Robinson City was
teeming with life and commerce, when banks and police and soldiers made
life and property comparatively safe, he began to be restless again. This
was not the life to which he had set himself. He had gone into the
wilderness to be away from cities and from men; and here a city had
sprung up around him and men claimed him as their chief. Moreover, with
the restless feeling there began to come back to him the old thoughts and
the old pain.
But he felt strong enough by this time to look forward in life as well as
backward. With him now to think was to act; so much at least he had
gained from his position of dominance in an upspringing city. He quietly
consolidated such outlying interests as he had, placed the management of
his great estate in the hands of a man he had learned to trust, and
giving out that he was going to San Francisco to arrange some business,
left Robinson City. He had already accumulated such a fortune that the
world was before him in any way he might choose to take.
Knowing that at San Francisco, to which he had booked, he would have to
run the gauntlet of certain of his friends and business connections, he
made haste to leave the ship quietly at Portland, the first point she
touched on her southern journey. Thence he got on the Canadian Pacific
Line and took his way to Montreal.
What most arrested his attention, and in a very disconcerting way, were
the glimpses of English life one sees reproduced so faithfully here and
there in Canada. The whole of the past rushed back on him so
overpoweringly that he was for the moment unnerved. The acute feeling of
course soon became mitigated; but it was the beginning of a
re-realisation of what had been, and which grew stronger with each mile
as the train swept back eastward.
At first he tried to fight it; tried with all the resources of his strong
nature. His mind was made up, he assured himself over and over again.
The past was past, and what had been was no more to him than to any of
the other passengers of the train. Destiny had long ago fulfilled
itself. Stephen no doubt had by now found some one worthy of her and had
married. In no dream, sleeping or waking, could he ever admit that she
had married Leonard; that was the only gleam of comfort in what had grown
to be remorse for his neglected duty.
And so it was that Harold An Wolf slowly drifted, though he knew it not,
into something of the same intellectual position which had dominated him
when he had started on his journeying and the sunset fell nightly on his
despairing face. The life in the wilderness, and then in the dominance
and masterdom of enterprise, had hardened and strengthened him into more
self-reliant manhood, giving him greater forbearance and a more practical
view of things.
When he took ship in the _Dominion_, a large cargo-boat with some
passengers running to London, he had a vague purpose of visiting in
secret Norcester, whence he could manage to find out how matters were at
Normanstand. He would then, he felt, be in a better position to regulate
his further movements. He knew that he had already a sufficient disguise
in his great beard. He had nothing to fear from the tracing of him on
his journey from Alaska or the interest of his fellow-passengers. He had
all along been so fortunate as to be able to keep his identity concealed.
The name John Robinson told nothing in itself, and the width of a whole
great continent lay between him and the place of his fame. He was able
to take his part freely amongst both the passengers and the officers.
Even amongst the crew he soon came to be known; the men liked his
geniality, and instinctively respected his enormous strength and his
manifest force of character. Men who work and who know danger soon learn
to recognise the forces which overcome both. And as sufficient time had
not elapsed to impair his hardihood or lower his vast strength he was
facile princeps. And so the crew acknowledged him; to them he was a born
Captain whom to obey would be a natural duty.
After some days the weather changed. The great ship, which usually
rested even-keeled on two waves, and whose bilge keels under normal
conditions rendered rolling impossible, began to pitch and roll like a
leviathan at play. The decks, swept by gigantic seas, were injured
wherever was anything to injure. Bulwarks were torn away as though they
had been compact of paper. More than once the double doors at the head
of the companion stairs had been driven in. The bull's eye glasses of
some of the ports were beaten from their brazen sockets. Nearly all the
boats had been wrecked, broken or torn from their cranes as the great
ship rolled heavily in the trough, or giant waves had struck her till she
quivered like a frightened horse.
At that season she sailed on the far northern course. Driven still
farther north by the gales, she came within a short way of south of
Greenland. Then avoiding Moville, which should have been her place of
call, she ran down the east of Britain, the wild weather still
prevailing.