“The journey to the village of Pont Croix was that of a man walking over
graves. Every step sent a pang to my heart,--a boy of twenty-one, grown
old in a moment. It was not that I had gone a little lame from a hurt
got on the expedition with the governor, but my whole life seemed
suddenly lamed. Why did I go? Ah, you do not know how discipline gets
into a man’s bones, the pride, the indignant pride of obedience! At that
hour I swore that I should myself be the governor of that Company one
day,--the boast of loud-hearted youth. I had angry visions, I dreamed
absurd dreams, but I did not think of disobeying. It was an unheard-of
journey at such a time, but I swore that I would do it, that it should
go into the records of the Company.
“I reached the village, found the Indians, and at once moved on to the
settlement where we were to stay that night. Then my knee began to pain
me. I feared inflammation; so in the dead of night I walked back to the
village, roused a trader of the Company, got some liniment and other
trifles, and arrived again at St. Saviour’s before dawn. My few clothes
and necessaries came in the course of the morning, and by noon we were
fairly started on the path to exile.
“I remember that we came to a lofty point on the St. Lawrence just
before we plunged into the woods, to see the great stream no more. I
stood and looked back up the river towards the point where Lachine lay.
All that went to make the life of a Company’s man possible was there;
and there, too, were those with whom I had tented and travelled for
three long months,--eaten with them, cared for them, used for them all
the woodcraft that I knew. I could not think that it would be a young
man’s lifetime before I set eyes on that scene again. Never from that
day to this have I seen the broad, sweet river where I spent the three
happiest years of my life. I can see now the tall shining heights of
Quebec, the pretty wooded Island of Orleans, the winding channel, so
deep, so strong. The sun was three-fourths of its way down in the west,
and already the sky was taking on the deep red and purple of autumn.
Somehow, the thing that struck me most in the scene was a bunch of
pines, solemn and quiet, their tops burnished by the afternoon light.
Tears would have been easy then. But my pride drove them back from my
eyes to my angry heart. Besides, there were my Indians waiting, and the
long journey lay before us. Then, perhaps because there was none nearer
to make farewell to, or I know not why, I waved my hand towards the
distant village of Lachine, and, with the sweet maid in my mind who had
so gently parted from me yesterday, I cried, ‘Good-bye, and God bless
you.’”
He paused. Pierre handed him a wooden cup, from which he drank, and then
continued:
“The journey went forward. You have seen the country. You know what it
is: those bare ice-plains and rocky unfenced fields stretching to all
points, the heaving wastes of treeless country, the harsh frozen lakes.
God knows what insupportable horror would have settled on me in
that pilgrimage had it not been for occasional glimpses of a gentler
life--for the deer and caribou which crossed our path. Upon my soul, I
was so full of gratitude and love at the sight that I could have thrown
my arms round their necks and kissed them. I could not raise a gun at
them. My Indians did that, and so inconstant is the human heart that I
ate heartily of the meat. My Indians were almost less companionable to
me than any animal would have been. Try as I would, I could not bring
myself to like them, and I feared only too truly that they did not like
me. Indeed, I soon saw that they meant to desert me,--kill me, perhaps,
if they could, although I trusted in the wholesome and restraining fear
which the Indian has of the great Company. I was not sure that they were
guiding me aright, and I had to threaten death in case they tried to
mislead me or desert me. My knee at times was painful, and cold, hunger,
and incessant watchfulness wore on me vastly. Yet I did not yield to
my miseries, for there entered into me then not only the spirit of
endurance, but something of that sacred pride in suffering which was the
merit of my Covenanting forefathers.
“We were four months on that bitter travel, and I do not know how it
could have been made at all, had it not been for the deer that I had
heart to eat and none to kill. The days got shorter and shorter, and we
were sometimes eighteen hours in absolute darkness. Thus you can imagine
how slowly we went. Thank God, we could sleep, hid away in our fur bags,
more often without a fire than with one,--mere mummies stretched out
on a vast coverlet of white, with the peering, unfriendly sky above us;
though it must be said that through all those many, many weeks no cloud
perched in the zenith. When there was light there was sun, and the
courage of it entered into our bones, helping to save us. You may think
I have been made feeble-minded by my sufferings, but I tell you plainly
that, in the closing days of our journey, I used to see a tall figure
walking beside me, who, whenever I would have spoken to him, laid a
warning finger on his lips; but when I would have fallen, he spoke to
me, always in the same words. You have heard of him, the Scarlet Hunter
of the Kimash Hills. It was he, the Sentinel of the North, the Lover of
the Lost. So deep did his words go into my heart that they have remained
with me to this hour.”
“I saw him once in the White Valley,” Pierre said in a low voice. “What
was it he said to you?”
The other drew a long breath, and a smile rested on his lips. Then,
slowly, as though liking to linger over them, he repeated the words of
the Scarlet Hunter:
“‘O son of man, behold!
If thou shouldest stumble on the nameless trail,
The trail that no man rides,
Lift up thy heart,
Behold, O son of man, thou hast a helper near!
“‘O son of man, take heed!
If thou shouldst fall upon the vacant plain,
The plain that no man loves,
Reach out thy hand,
Take heed, O son of man, strength shall be given thee!
“‘O son of man, rejoice!
If thou art blinded even at the door,
The door of the Safe Tent,
Sing in thy heart,
Rejoice, O son of man, thy pilot leads thee home?’
“I never seemed to be alone after that--call it what you will, fancy or
delirium. My head was so light that it appeared to spin like a star,
and my feet were so heavy that I dragged the whole earth after me. My
Indians seldom spoke. I never let them drop behind me, for I did not
trust their treacherous natures. But in the end, as it would seem, they
also had but one thought, and that to reach Fort Ungava; for there was
no food left, none at all. We saw no tribes of Indians and no Esquimaux,
for we had not passed in their line of travel or settlement.
“At last I used to dream that birds were singing near me,--a soft,
delicate whirlwind of sound; and then bells all like muffled silver rang
through the aching, sweet air. Bits of prayer and poetry I learned when
a boy flashed through my mind; equations in algebra; the tingling scream
of a great buzz-saw; the breath of a racer as he nears the post under
the crying whip; my own voice dropping loud profanity, heard as a lad
from a blind ferryman; the boom! boom! of a mass of logs as they struck
a house on a flooding river and carried it away....
“One day we reached the end. It was near evening, and we came to the
top of a wooded knoll. My eyes were dancing in my head with fatigue
and weakness, but I could see below us, on the edge of the great bay, a
large hut, Esquimau lodges and Indian tepees near it. It was the Fort,
my cheerless prison-house.”
He paused. The dog had been watching him with its flaming eyes; now it
gave a low growl, as though it understood, and pitied. In the interval
of silence the storm without broke. The trees began to quake and cry,
the light snow to beat upon the parchment windows, and the chimney to
splutter and moan. Presently, out on the bay they could hear the young
ice break and come scraping up the shore. Fawdor listened a while, and
then went on, waving his hand to the door as he began: “Think! this,
and like that always: the ungodly strife of nature, and my sick,
disconsolate life.”
“Ever since?” asked Pierre. “All the time.”
“Why did you not go back?”
“I was to wait for orders, and they never came.”
“You were a free man, not a slave.”
“The human heart has pride. At first, as when I left the governor at
Lachine, I said, ‘I will never speak, I will never ask nor bend the
knee. He has the power to oppress; I can obey without whining, as fine a
man as he.’”
“Did you not hate?”
“At first, as only a banished man can hate. I knew that if all had gone
well I should be a man high up in the Company, and here I was, living
like a dog in the porch of the world, sometimes without other food for
months than frozen fish; and for two years I was in a place where we had
no fire,--lived in a snow-house, with only blubber to eat. And so year
after year, no word!”
“The mail came once every year from the world?” “Yes, once a year the
door of the outer life was opened. A ship came into the bay, and by that
ship I sent out my reports. But no word came from the governor, and
no request went from me. Once the captain of that ship took me by the
shoulders, and said, ‘Fawdor, man, this will drive you mad. Come away to
England,--leave your half-breed in charge,--and ask the governor for a
big promotion.’ He did not understand. Of course I said I could not go.
Then he turned on me, he was a good man,--and said, ‘This will either
make you madman or saint, Fawdor.’ He drew a Bible from his pocket and
handed it to me. ‘I’ve used it twenty years,’ he said, ‘in evil and out
of evil, and I’ve spiked it here and there; it’s a chart for heavy seas,
and may you find it so, my lad.’
“I said little then; but when I saw the sails of his ship round a cape
and vanish, all my pride and strength were broken up, and I came in a
heap to the ground, weeping like a child. But the change did not come
all at once. There were two things that kept me hard.”
“The girl?”
“The girl, and another. But of the young lady after. I had a half-breed
whose life I had saved. I was kind to him always; gave him as good to
eat and drink as I had myself; divided my tobacco with him; loved him as
only an exile can love a comrade. He conspired with the Indians to seize
the Fort and stores, and kill me if I resisted. I found it out.”
“Thou shalt keep the faith of food and blanket,” said Pierre. “What did
you do with him?”
“The fault was not his so much as of his race and his miserable past. I
had loved him. I sent him away; and he never came back.”
“Thou shalt judge with the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one
woman.”
“For the girl. There was the thing that clamped my heart. Never a
message from her or her brother. Surely they knew, and yet never,
thought I, a good word for me to the governor. They had forgotten the
faith of food and blanket. And she--she must have seen that I could have
worshipped her, had we been in the same way of life. Before the better
days came to me I was hard against her, hard and rough at heart.”
“Remember the sorrow of thine own wife.” Pierre’s voice was gentle.
“Truly, to think hardly of no woman should be always in a man’s heart.
But I have known only one woman of my race in twenty-five years!”
“And as time went on?”
“As time went on, and no word came, I ceased to look for it. But I
followed that chart spiked with the captain’s pencil, as he had done
it in season and out of season, and by and by I ceased to look for any
word. I even became reconciled to my life. The ambitious and aching
cares of the world dropped from me, and I stood above all--alone in my
suffering, yet not yielding. Loneliness is a terrible thing. Under it a
man--”
“Goes mad or becomes a saint--a saint!” Pierre’s voice became reverent.
Fawdor shook his head, smiling gently. “Ah no, no. But I began to
understand the world, and I loved the north, the beautiful hard north.”
“But there is more?”
“Yes, the end of it all. Three days before you came I got a packet of
letters, not by the usual yearly mail. One announced that the governor
was dead. Another--”
“Another?” urged Pierre--“was from Her. She said that her brother, on
the day she wrote, had by chance come across my name in the Company’s
records, and found that I had been here a quarter of a century. It
was the letter of a good woman. She said she thought the governor had
forgotten that he had sent me here--as now I hope he had, for that would
be one thing less for him to think of, when he set out on the journey
where the only weight man carries is the packload of his sins. She also
said that she had written to me twice after we parted at Lachine, but
had never heard a word, and three years afterwards she had gone to
India. The letters were lost, I suppose, on the way to me, somehow--who
can tell? Then came another thing, so strange, that it seemed like
the laughter of the angels at us. These were her words: ‘And, dear
Mr. Fawdor, you were both wrong in that quotation, as you no doubt
discovered long ago.’ Then she gave me the sentence as it is in
Cymbeline. She was right, quite right. We were both wrong. Never till
her letter came had I looked to see. How vain, how uncertain, and
fallible, is man!”
Pierre dropped his cigarette, and stared at Fawdor. “The knowledge of
books is foolery,” he said slowly. “Man is the only book of life. Go
on.”
“There was another letter, from the brother, who was now high up in the
Company, asking me to come to England, and saying that they wished to
promote me far, and that he and his sister, with their families, would
be glad to see me.”
“She was married then?”
The rashness of the suggestion made Fawdor wave his hand impatiently. He
would not reply to it. “I was struck down with all the news,” he said.
“I wandered like a child out into a mad storm. Illness came; then you,
who have nursed me back to life.... And now I have told all.”
“Not all, bien sur. What will you do?”
“I am out of the world; why tempt it all again? See how those
twenty-five years were twisted by a boy’s vanity and a man’s tyranny!”
“But what will you do?” persisted Pierre. “You should see the faces of
women and children again. No man can live without that sight, even as a
saint.”
Suddenly Fawdor’s face was shot over with a storm of feeling. He lay
very still, his thoughts busy with a new world which had been disclosed
to him. “Youth hungers for the vanities,” he said, “and the middle-aged
for home.” He took Pierre’s hand. “I will go,” he added. “A door will
open somewhere for me.”
Then he turned his face to the wall. The storm had ceased, the wild
dog huddled quietly on the hearth, and for hours the only sound was the
crackling of the logs as Pierre stirred the fire.