Not until afterward did David realize how terribly his announcement of
Tavish's death must have struck into the soul of Father Roland. For a
few seconds the Missioner did not move. He was wide awake, he had heard,
and yet he looked at David dumbly, his two hands gripping his blanket.
When he did move, it was to turn his face slowly toward the end of the
cabin where the thing was hanging, with only the wall between. Then,
still slowly, he rose to his feet.
David thought he had only half understood.
"Tavish--is dead!" he repeated huskily, straining to swallow the
thickening in his throat. "He is out there--hanging by his neck--dead!"
_Dead!_ He emphasized that word--spoke it twice.
Father Roland still did not answer. He was getting into his clothes
mechanically, his face curiously ashen, his eyes neither horrified nor
startled, but with a stunned look in them. He did not speak when he went
to the door and out into the night. David followed, and in a moment they
stood close to the thing that was hanging where Tavish's meat should
have been. The moon threw a vivid sort of spotlight on it. It was
grotesque and horrible--very bad to look at, and unforgettable. Tavish
had not died easily. He seemed to shriek that fact at them as he swung
there dead; even now he seemed more terrified than cold. His teeth
gleamed a little. That, perhaps, was the worst of it all. And his hands
were clenched tight. David noticed that. Nothing seemed relaxed about
him.
Not until he had looked at Tavish for perhaps sixty full seconds did
Father Roland speak. He had recovered himself, judging from his voice.
It was quiet and unexcited. But in his first words, unemotional as they
were, there was a significance that was almost frightening.
"At last! She made him do that!"
He was speaking to himself, looking straight into Tavish's agonized
face. A great shudder swept through David. _She!_ He wanted to cry out.
He wanted to know. But the Missioner now had his hands on the gruesome
thing in the moonlight, and he was saying:
"There is still warmth in his body. He has not been long dead. He hanged
himself, I should say, not more than half an hour before we reached the
cabin. Give me a hand, David!"
With a mighty effort David pulled himself together. After all, it was
nothing more than a dead man hanging there. But his hands were like ice
as he seized hold of it. A knife gleamed in the moonlight over Tavish's
head as the Missioner cut the rope. They lowered Tavish to the snow, and
David went into the cabin for a blanket. Father Roland wrapped the
blanket carefully about the body so that it would not freeze to the
ground. Then they entered the cabin. The Missioner threw off his coat
and built up the fire. When he turned he seemed to notice for the first
time the deathly pallor in David's face.
"It shocked you--when you found it there," he said. "_Ugh!_ I don't
wonder. But I ... David, I didn't tell you I was expecting something
like this. I have feared for Tavish. And to-night when the dogs and
Mukoki signalled death I was alarmed--until we found the fire in the
stove. It didn't seem reasonable then. I thought Tavish would return.
The dogs were gone, too. He must have freed them just before he went out
there. Terrible! But justice--justice, I suppose. God sometimes works
His ends in queer ways, doesn't He?"
"What do you mean?" cried David, again fighting that thickening in his
throat. "Tell me, Father! I must know. Why did he kill himself?"
His hand was clutching at his breast, where the picture lay. He wanted
to tear it out, in this moment, and demand of Father Roland whether this
was the face--the girl's face--that had haunted Tavish.
"I mean that his fear drove him at last to kill himself," said Father
Roland in a slow, sure voice, as if carefully weighing his words before
speaking them. "I believe, now, that he terribly wronged some one, that
his conscience was his fear, and that it haunted him by bringing up
visions and voices until it drove him finally to pay his debt. And up
here conscience is _mitoo aye chikoon_--the Little Brother of God. That
is all I know. I wish Tavish had confided in me, I might have saved
him."
"Or--punished," breathed David.
"My business is not to punish. If he had come to me, asking help for
himself and mercy from his God, I could not have betrayed him."
He was putting on his coat again.
"I am going after Mukoki," he said. "There is work to be done, and we
may as well get through with it by moonlight. I don't suppose you feel
like sleep?"
David shook his head. He was calmer now, quite recovered from the first
horror of his shock, when the door closed behind Father Roland. In the
thoughts that were swiftly readjusting themselves in his mind there was
no very great sympathy for the man who had hanged himself. In place of
that sympathy the oppression of a thing that was greater than
disappointment settled upon him heavily, driving from him his own
personal dread of this night's ghastly adventure, and adding to his
suspense of the last forty-eight hours a hopelessness the poignancy of
which was almost like that of a physical pain. Tavish was dead, and in
dying he had taken with him the secret for which David would have paid
with all he was worth in this hour. In his despair, as he stood there
alone in the cabin, he muttered something to himself. The desire
possessed him to cry out aloud that Tavish had cheated him. A strange
kind of rage burned within him and he turned toward the door, with
clenched hands, as if about to rush out and choke from the dead man's
throat what he wanted to know, and force his glazed and staring eyes to
look for just one instant on the face of the girl in the picture. In
another moment his brain had cleared itself of that insane fire. After
all, would Tavish kill himself without leaving something behind? Would
there not be some kind of an explanation, written by Tavish before he
took the final step? A confession? A letter to Father Roland? Tavish
knew that the Missioner would stop at his cabin on his return into the
North. Surely he would not kill himself without leaving some work for
him--at least a brief accounting for his act!
He began looking about the cabin again, swiftly and eagerly at first,
for if Tavish had written anything he would beyond all doubt have placed
the paper in some conspicuous place: pinned it at the end of his bunk,
or on the wall, or against the door. They might have overlooked it, or
possibly it had fallen to the floor. To make his search surer David
lowered the lamp from its bracket in the ceiling and carried it in his
hand. He went into dark corners, scrutinized the floor as well as the
walls, and moved garments from their wooden pegs. There was nothing.
Tavish had cheated him again! His eyes rested finally on the chest. He
placed the lamp on a stool, and tried the lid. It was unlocked. As he
lifted it he heard voices indistinctly outside. Father Roland had
returned with Mukoki. He could hear them as they went to where Tavish
was lying with his face turned up to the moon.
On his knees he began pawing over the stuff in the chest. It was a third
filled with odds and ends--little else but trash; tangled ends of
_babiche_, a few rusted tools, nails and bolts, a pair of half-worn shoe
packs--a mere litter of disappointing rubbish. The door opened behind
him as he was rising to his feet. He turned to face Mukoki and the
Missioner.
"There is nothing," he said, with a gesture that took in the room. "He
hasn't left any word that I can find."
Father Roland had not closed the door.
"Mukoki will help you search. Look in his clothing on the wall. Tavish
must surely have left--something."
He went out, shutting the door behind him. For a moment he listened to
make sure that David was not going to follow him. He hurried then to the
body of Tavish, and stripped off the blanket. The dead man was terrible
to look at, with his open glassy eyes and his distorted face, and the
moonlight gleaming on his grinning teeth. The Missioner shuddered.
"I can't guess," he whispered, as if speaking to Tavish. "I can't
guess--quite--what made you do it, Tavish. But you haven't died without
telling me. I know it. It's there--in your pocket."
He listened again, and his lips moved. He bent over him, on one knee,
and averted his eyes as he searched the pockets of Tavish's heavy coat.
Against the dead man's breast he found it, neatly folded, about the size
of foolscap paper--several pages of it, he judged, by the thickness of
the packet. It was tied with fine threads of _babiche_, and in the
moonlight he could make out quite distinctly the words, "For Father
Roland, God's Lake--Personal." Tavish, after all, had not made himself
the victim of sudden fright, of a momentary madness. He had planned the
affair in a quite business-like way. Premeditated it with considerable
precision, in fact, and yet in the end he had died with that stare of
horror and madness in his face. Father Roland spread the blanket over
him again after he had placed the packet in his own coat. He knew where
Tavish's pick and shovel were hanging at the back of the cabin and he
brought these tools and placed them beside the body. After that he
rejoined David and the Cree.
They were still searching, and finding nothing.
"I have been looking through his clothes--out there," said the
Missioner, with a shuddering gesture which intimated that his task had
been as fruitless as their own. "We may as well bury him. A shallow
grave, close to where his body lies. I have placed a pick and a shovel
on the spot." He spoke to David: "Would you mind helping Mukoki to dig?
I would like to be alone for a little while. You understand. There are
things...."
"I understand, Father."
For the first time David felt something of the awe of this thing that
was death. He had forgotten, almost, that Father Roland was a servant of
God, so vitally human had he found him, so unlike all other men of his
calling he had ever known. But it was impressed upon him now, as he
followed Mukoki. Father Roland wanted to be alone. Perhaps to pray. To
ask mercy for Tavish's soul. To plead for its guidance into the Great
Unknown. The thought quieted his own emotions, and as he began to dig in
the hard snow and frozen earth he tried to think of Tavish as a man, and
not as a monster.
In the cabin Father Roland waited until he heard the beat of the pick
before he moved. Then he fastened the cabin door with a wooden bolt and
sat himself down at the table, with the lamp close to his bent head and
Tavish's confession in his hands. He cut the _babiche_ threads with his
knife, unfolded the sheets of paper and began to read, while Tavish's
mice nosed slyly out of their murky corners wondering at the new and
sudden stillness in the cabin and, it may be, stirred into restlessness
by the absence of their master.
* * * * *
The ground under the snow was discouragingly hard. To David the digging
of the grave seemed like chipping out bits of flint from a solid block,
and he soon turned over the pick to Mukoki. Alternately they worked for
an hour, and each time that the Cree took his place David wondered what
was keeping the Missioner so long in the cabin. At last Mukoki intimated
with a sweep of his hands and a hunch of his shoulders that their work
was done. The grave looked very shallow to David, and he was about to
protest against his companion's judgment when it occurred to him that
Mukoki had probably digged many holes such as this in the earth, and had
helped to fill them again, so it was possible he knew his business.
After all, why did people weigh down one's last slumber with six feet of
soil overhead when three or four would leave one nearer to the sun, and
make not quite so chill a bed? He was thinking of this as he took a last
look at Tavish. Then he heard the Indian give a sudden grunt, as if some
one had poked him unexpectedly in the pit of the stomach. He whirled
about, and stared.
Father Roland stood within ten feet of them, and at sight of him an
exclamation rose to David's lips and died there in an astonished gasp.
He seemed to be swaying, like a sick man, in the moonlight, and impelled
by the same thought Mukoki and David moved toward him. The Missioner
extended an arm, as if to hold them back. His face was ghastly, and
terrible--almost as terrible as Tavish's, and he seemed to be
struggling with something in his throat before he could speak. Then he
said, in a strange, forced voice that David had never heard come from
his lips before:
"Bury him. There will be--no prayer."
He turned away, moving slowly in the direction of the forest. And as he
went David noticed the heavy drag of his feet, and the unevenness of his
trail in the snow.