“Fingall! Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!”
A grey mist was rising from the river, the sun was drinking it
delightedly, the swift blue water showed underneath it, and the top of
Whitefaced Mountain peaked the mist by a hand-length. The river brushed
the banks like rustling silk, and the only other sound, very sharp and
clear in the liquid monotone, was the crack of a woodpecker’s beak on a
hickory tree.
It was a sweet, fresh autumn morning in Lonesome Valley. Before
night the deer would bellow reply to the hunters’ rifles, and the
mountain-goat call to its unknown gods; but now there was only the wild
duck skimming the river, and the high hilltop rising and fading into the
mist, the ardent sun, and again that strange cry--
“Fingall!--Oh, Fingall! Fingall!”
Two men, lounging at a fire on a ledge of the hills, raised their eyes
to the mountain-side beyond and above them, and one said presently:
“The second time. It’s a woman’s voice, Pierre.” Pierre nodded, and
abstractedly stirred the coals about with a twig.
“Well, it is a pity--the poor Cynthie,” he said at last.
“It is a woman, then. You know her, Pierre--her story?”
“Fingall! Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!”
Pierre raised his head towards the sound; then after a moment, said:
“I know Fingall.”
“And the woman? Tell me.”
“And the girl. Fingall was all fire and heart, and devil-may-care.
She--she was not beautiful except in the eye, but that was like a flame
of red and blue. Her hair, too--then--would trip her up, if it hung
loose. That was all, except that she loved him too much. But women--et
puis, when a woman gets a man between her and the heaven above and the
earth beneath, and there comes the great hunger, what is the good! A man
cannot understand, but he can see, and he can fear. What is the good! To
play with life, that is not much; but to play with a soul is more than a
thousand lives. Look at Cynthie.”
He paused, and Lawless waited patiently. Presently Pierre continued:
Fingall was gentil; he would take off his hat to a squaw. It made no
difference what others did; he didn’t think--it was like breathing to
him. How can you tell the way things happen? Cynthie’s father kept the
tavern at St. Gabriel’s Fork, over against the great saw-mill. Fingall
was foreman of a gang in the lumberyard. Cynthie had a brother--Fenn.
Fenn was as bad as they make, but she loved him, and Fingall knew it
well, though he hated the young skunk. The girl’s eyes were like two
little fire-flies when Fingall was about.
“He was a gentleman, though he had only half a name--Fingall--like
that. I think he did not expect to stay; he seemed to be waiting
for something--always when the mail come in he would be there; and
afterwards you wouldn’t see him for a time. So it seemed to me that he
made up his mind to think nothing of Cynthie, and to say nothing.”
“Fingall! Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!”
The strange, sweet, singing voice sounded nearer. “She’s coming this
way, Pierre,” said Lawless.
“I hope not to see her. What is the good!”
“Well, let us have the rest of the story.”
“Her brother Fenn was in Fingall’s gang. One day there was trouble. Fenn
called Fingall a liar. The gang stopped piling; the usual thing did not
come. Fingall told him to leave the yard, and they would settle some
other time. That night a wicked thing happened. We were sitting in the
bar-room when we heard two shots and then a fall. We ran into the other
room; there was Fenn on the floor, dying. He lifted himself on his
elbow, pointed at Fingall--and fell back. The father of the boy stood
white and still a few feet away. There was no pistol showing--none at
all.
“The men closed in on Fingall. He did not stir--he seemed to be thinking
of something else. He had a puzzled, sorrowful look. The men roared
round him, but he waved them back for a moment, and looked first at the
father, then at the son. I could not understand at first. Someone pulled
a pistol out of Fingall’s pocket and showed it. At that moment Cynthie
came in. She gave a cry. By the holy! I do not want to hear a cry like
that often. She fell on her knees beside the boy, and caught his head
to her breast. Then with a wild look she asked who did it. They had just
taken Fingall out into the bar-room. They did not tell her his name, for
they knew that she loved him.
“‘Father,’ she said all at once, ‘have you killed the man that killed
Fenn?’
“The old man shook his head. There was a sick colour in his face.
“‘Then I will kill him,’ she said.
“She laid her brother’s head down, and stood up. Someone put in her hand
the pistol, and told her it was the same that had killed Fenn. She took
it, and came with us. The old man stood still where he was; he was like
stone. I looked at him for a minute and thought; then I turned round and
went to the bar-room; and he followed. Just as I got inside the door,
I saw the girl start back, and her hand drop, for she saw that it was
Fingall; he was looking at her very strange. It was the rule to empty
the gun into a man who had been sentenced; and already Fingall had heard
his, ‘God-have-mercy!’ The girl was to do it.
“Fingall said to her in a muffled voice, ‘Fire--Cynthie!’
“I guessed what she would do. In a kind of a dream she raised the pistol
up--up--up, till I could see it was just out of range of his head, and
she fired. One! two! three! four! five! Fingall never moved a muscle;
but the bullets spotted the wall at the side of his head. She stopped
after the five; but the arm was still held out, and her finger was on
the trigger; she seemed to be all dazed. Only six chambers were in the
gun, and of course one chamber was empty. Fenn had its bullet in his
lungs, as we thought. So someone beside Cynthie touched her arm, pushing
it down. But there was another shot, and this time, because of the push,
the bullet lodged in Fingall’s skull.”
Pierre paused now, and waved with his hand towards the mist which hung
high up like a canopy between the hills.
“But,” said Lawless, not heeding the scene, “what about that sixth
bullet?”
“Holy, it is plain! Fingall did not fire the shot. His revolver was
full, every chamber, when Cynthie first took it.”
“Who killed the lad?”
“Can you not guess? There had been words between the father and the
boy: both had fierce blood. The father, in a mad minute, fired; the
boy wanted revenge on Fingall, and, to save his father, laid it on the
other. The old man? Well, I do not know whether he was a coward, or
stupid, or ashamed--he let Fingall take it.”
“Fingall took it to spare the girl, eh?”
“For the girl. It wasn’t good for her to know her father killed his own
son.”
“What came after?”
“The worst. That night the girl’s father killed himself, and the two
were buried in the same grave. Cynthie--”
“Fingall! Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!”
“You hear? Yes, like that all the time as she sat on the floor, her
hair about her like a cloud, and the dead bodies in the next room. She
thought she had killed Fingall, and she knew now that he was innocent.
The two were buried. Then we told her that Fingall was not dead. She
used to come and sit outside the door, and listen to his breathing, and
ask if he ever spoke of her. What was the good of lying? If we said he
did, she’d have come in to him, and that would do no good, for he wasn’t
right in his mind. By and by we told her he was getting well, and
then she didn’t come, but stayed at home, just saying his name over to
herself. Alors, things take hold of a woman--it is strange! When Fingall
was strong enough to go out, I went with him the first time. He was all
thin and handsome as you can think, but he had no memory, and his eyes
were like a child’s. She saw him, and came out to meet him. What does a
woman care for the world when she loves a man? Well, he just looked
at her as if he’d never seen her before, and passed by without a sign,
though afterwards a trouble came in his face. Three days later he was
gone, no one knew where. That is two years ago. Ever since she has been
looking for him.”
“Is she mad?”
“Mad? Holy Mother! it is not good to have one thing in the head all the
time! What do you think? So much all at once! And then--”
“Hush, Pierre! There she is!” said Lawless, pointing to a ledge of rock
not far away.
The girl stood looking out across the valley, a weird, rapt look in her
face, her hair falling loose, a staff like a shepherd’s crook in one
hand, the other hand over her eyes as she slowly looked from point to
point of the horizon.
The two watched her without speaking. Presently she saw them. She gazed
at them for a minute, then descended to them. Lawless and Pierre rose,
doffing their hats. She looked at both a moment, and her eyes settled on
Pierre. Presently she held out her hand to him. “I knew you--yesterday,”
she said.
Pierre returned the intensity of her gaze with one kind and strong.
“So--so, Cynthie,” he said; “sit down and eat.”
He dropped on a knee and drew a scone and some fish from the ashes. She
sat facing them, and, taking from a bag at her side some wild fruits,
ate slowly, saying nothing. Lawless noticed that her hair had become
grey at her temples, though she was but one-and-twenty years old. Her
face, brown as it was, shone with a white kind of light, which may, or
may not, have come from the crucible of her eyes, where the tragedy of
her life was fusing. Lawless could not bear to look long, for the fire
that consumes a body and sets free a soul is not for the sight of the
quick. At last she rose, her body steady, but her hands having that
tremulous activity of her eyes.
“Will you not stay, Cynthie?” asked Lawless very kindly.
She came close to him, and, after searching his eyes, said with a smile
that almost hurt him, “When I have found him, I will bring him to your
camp-fire. Last night the Voice said that he waits for me where the mist
rises from the river at daybreak, close to the home of the White Swan.
Do you know where is the home of the White Swan? Before the frost comes
and the red wolf cries, I must find him. Winter is the time of sleep.
“I will give him honey and dried meat. I know where we shall live
together. You never saw such roses! Hush! I have a place where we can
hide.”
Suddenly her gaze became fixed and dream-like, and she said slowly: “In
all time of our tribulation, in all time of our wealth, in the hour of
death, and in the Day of Judgment, Good Lord, deliver us!”
“Good Lord, deliver us!” repeated Lawless in a low voice. Without
looking at them, she slowly turned away and passed up the hill-side, her
eyes scanning the valley as before.
“Good Lord, deliver us!” again said Lawless. “Where did she get it?”
“From a book which Fingall left behind.”
They watched her till she rounded a cliff, and was gone; then they
shouldered their kits and passed up the river on the trail of the
wapiti.
One month later, when a fine white surf of frost lay on the ground, and
the sky was darkened often by the flight of the wild geese southward,
they came upon a hut perched on a bluff, at the edge of a clump of
pines. It was morning, and Whitefaced Mountain shone clear and high,
without a touch of cloud or mist from its haunches to its crown.
They knocked at the hut door, and, in answer to a voice, entered. The
sunlight streamed in over a woman, lying upon a heap of dried flowers
in a corner. A man was kneeling beside her. They came near, and saw that
the woman was Cynthie.
“Fingall!” broke out Pierre, and caught the kneeling man by the
shoulder. At the sound of his voice the woman’s eyes opened.
“Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!” she said, and reached up a hand.
Fingall stooped and caught her to his breast: “Cynthie! poor girl! Oh,
my poor Cynthie!” he said. In his eyes, as in hers, was a sane light,
and his voice, as hers, said indescribable things.
Her head sank upon his shoulder, her eyes closed; she slept. Fingall
laid her down with a sob in his throat; then he sat up and clutched
Pierre’s hand.
“In the East, where the doctors cured me, I heard all,” he said,
pointing to her, “and I came to find her. I was just in time; I found
her yesterday.”
“She knew you?” whispered Pierre.
“Yes, but this fever came on.” He turned and looked at her, and,
kneeling, smoothed away the hair from the quiet face. “Poor girl!” he
said; “poor girl!”
“She will get well?” asked Pierre.
“God grant it!” Fingall replied. “She is better--better.”
Lawless and Pierre softly turned and stole away, leaving the man alone
with the woman he loved.
The two stood in silence, looking upon the river beneath. Presently a
voice crept through the stillness. “Fingall! Oh, Fingall!--Fingall!”
It was the voice of a woman returning from the dead.