CHAPTER I.

Transcriber’s Note

Italic text displayed as: _italic_

LUCIUS DAVOREN

LONDON:

ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

LUCIUS DAVOREN

OR

PUBLICANS AND SINNERS

A Novel

BY THE AUTHOR OF

‘LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET’

ETC. ETC. ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

[Illustration: Decoration]

LONDON

JOHN MAXWELL AND CO.

4 SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET

1873

[_All rights reserved_]

This Book is Inscribed

TO

VISCOUNT MILTON, M.P. F.R.G.S.

ETC.

IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE AID DERIVED FROM HIS

ADMIRABLE BOOK OF TRAVELS,

‘THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE OVERLAND,’

TO WHICH THE AUTHOR IS INDEBTED FOR THE

SCENERY IN THE PROLOGUE.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

Prologue:—In the Far West.

CHAP. PAGE

I. ‘WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT’ 1

II. ‘MUSIC HATH CHARMS’ 10

III. HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL 34

IV. ‘ALL’S CHEERLESS, DARK, AND DEADLY’ 47

V. ‘O, THAT WAY MADNESS LIES’ 57

Book the First.

I. LOOKING BACKWARDS 71

II. HOMER SIVEWRIGHT 95

III. HARD HIT 132

IV. ‘O WORLD, HOW APT THE POOR ARE TO BE PROUD!’ 155

V. ‘I HAD A SON, NOW OUTLAW’D FROM MY BLOOD’ 171

VI. ‘BY HEAVEN, I LOVE THEE BETTER THAN MYSELF’ 193

VII. ‘SORROW HAS NEED OF FRIENDS’ 213

VIII. GEOFFREY INCLINES TO SUSPICION 227

IX. SOMETHING TOO MUCH FOR GRATITUDE 245

X. A DAUGHTER’S LOVE, AND A LOVER’S HOPE 259

XI. THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SCOUNDREL 270

XII. LUCIUS HAS AN INTERVIEW WITH A FAMOUS PERSONAGE 293

XIII. HE FEARS HIS FATE TOO MUCH 307

LUCIUS DAVOREN

Prologue:—In the Far West.

CHAPTER I.

‘WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT.’

Winter round them: not a winter in city streets, lamplit and glowing,

or on a fair English countryside, dotted with cottage-roofs, humble

village homes, sending up their incense of blue-gray smoke to the

hearth goddess; not the winter of civilisation, with all means and

appliances at hand to loosen the grip of the frost-fiend: but winter in

its bleakest aspect, amid trackless forests, where the trapper walks

alone; winter in a solitude so drear that the sound of a human voice

seems more strange and awful than the prevailing silence; winter in a

pine-forest in British North America, westward of the Rocky Mountains.

It is December, the bleakest, dreariest month in the long winter; for

spring is still far off.

Three men sit crouching over the wood-fire in a roughly-built log-hut

in the middle of a forest, which seems to stretch away indefinitely

into infinite space. The men have trodden that silent region for many

a day, and have found no outlet on either side, only here and there

a frozen lake, to whose margin, ere the waters were changed to ice,

the forest denizens came down to gorge themselves with the small fish

that abound there. They are travellers who have penetrated this dismal

region for pleasure; yet each moved by a different desire. The first,

Lucius Davoren, surgeon, has been impelled by that deep-rooted thirst

of knowledge which in some minds is a passion. He wants to know what

this strange wild territory is like—this unfamiliar land between Fort

Garry and Victoria, across the Rocky Mountains—and if there lies not

here a fair road for the English emigrant. He has even cherished the

hope of some day pushing his way to the northward, up to the ice-bound

shores of the polar sea. He looks upon this trapper-expedition as

a mere experimental business, an education for grander things, the

explorer’s preparatory school.

So much for Lucius Davoren, surgeon without a practice. Mark him as

he sits in his dusky corner by the fire. The hut boasts a couple of

windows, but they are only of elk-skin, through which the winter light

steals dimly. Mark the strongly-defined profile, the broad forehead,

the clear gray eyes. The well-cut mouth and resolute chin are hidden

by that bushy untrimmed beard, which stiffens with his frozen breath

when he ventures outside the hut; but the broad square forehead, the

Saxon type of brow, and clear penetrating eyes, are in themselves

all-sufficient indications of the man’s character. Here are firmness

and patience, or, in one word, the noblest attribute of the human

mind—constancy.

On the opposite side of that rude hearth sits Geoffrey Hossack, three

years ago an undergraduate at Balliol, great at hammer-throwing and the

long jump, doubtful as to divinity exam., and with vague ideas trending

towards travel and adventure in the Far West as the easiest solution of

_that_ difficulty. Young, handsome, ardent, fickle, strong as a lion,

gentle as a sucking dove, Geoffrey has been the delight and glory of

the band in its sunnier days; he is the one spot of sunlight in the

picture now, when the horizon has darkened to so deep a gloom.

The last of the trio is Absalom Schanck, a native of Hamburg, small and

plump, with a perennial plumpness which has not suffered even from

a diet of mouldy pemmican, and rare meals of buffalo or moose flesh,

which has survived intervals of semi-starvation, blank dismal days when

there was absolutely nothing for these explorers to eat.

At such trying periods Absalom is wont to wax plaintive, but it is not

of turtle or venison he dreams; no vision of callipash or callipee, no

mocking simulacrum of a lordly Aberdeen salmon or an aldermanic turbot,

no mirage picture of sirloin or Christmas turkey, torments his soul;

but his feverish mouth waters for the putrid cabbage and rancid pork of

his fatherland; and the sharpest torture which fancy can create for him

is the tempting suggestion of a certain boiled sausage which his soul

loveth.

He has joined the expedition with half-defined ideas upon the subject

of a new company of dealers in skins, to be established beyond the

precincts of Hudson’s Bay; and not a little influenced by a genuine

love of exploration, and a lurking notion that he has in him the stuff

that makes a Van Diemen.

From first to last it is, and has been, essentially an amateur

expedition. No contribution from the government of any nation has

aided these wanderers. They have come, as Geoffrey Hossack forcibly

expresses the fact, ‘on their own hook.’ Geoffrey suggests that

they should found a city, by and by, after the manner of classical

adventurers: whence should arise in remote future ages some new Empire

of the West.

‘Hossack’s Gate would be rather a good name for it,’ he says, between

two puffs of his meerschaum; ‘and our descendants would doubtless be

known as the Hossackides, and the Davorenides, and do their very best

to annihilate one another, you know, Lucius.’

‘We Chermans have giv more names to blaizes than you Englishers,’

chimes in Mr. Schanck with dignity. ‘It is our dalend to disgover.’

‘I wish you’d disgover something to eat, then, my friend Absalom,’

replies the Oxonian irreverently; ‘that mouthful of pemmican Lucius

doled out to us just now has only served as a whet for my appetite.

Like the half-dozen Ostend oysters they give one as the overture to a

French dinner.’

‘Ah, they are goot the oysders of Osdend,’ says Mr. Schanck with a

sigh, ‘and zo are ze muzzles of Blankenberk. I dreamt ze ozer night I

vas in heafen eading muzzles sdewed in _vin de madère_.’

‘Don’t,’ cries Geoffrey emphatically; ‘if we begin to talk about

eating, we shall go mad, or eat each other. How nice you would be,

Schanck, stuffed with chestnuts, and roasted, like a Norfolk turkey

dressed French fashion! It’s rather a pity that one’s friends are

reported to be indigestible; but I believe that’s merely a fable,

designed as a deterring influence. The Maories cannibalised from the

beginning of time; fed in and in, as well as bred in and in. One

nice old man, a chieftain of Rakiraki, kept a register of his own

consumption of prisoners, by means of a row of stones, which, when

reckoned up after the old gentleman’s demise, amounted to eight hundred

and seventy-two: and yet these Maories were a healthy race enough when

civilisation looked them up.’

Lucius Davoren takes no heed of this frivolous talk. He is lying on the

floor of the log-hut, with a large chart spread under him, studying it

intensely, and sticking pins here and there as he pores over it. He has

ideas of his own, fixed and definite, which neither of his companions

shares in the smallest degree. Hossack has come to these wild regions

with an Englishman’s unalloyed love of adventure, as well as for a

quiet escape from the trusting relatives who would have urged him

to go up for Divinity. Schanck has been beguiled hither by the fond

expectation of finding himself in a paradise of tame polar bears and

silver foxes, who would lie down at his feet, and mutely beseech him

to convert them into carriage-rugs. They are waiting for the return of

their guide, an Indian, who has gone to hunt for the lost trail, and to

make his way back to a far distant fort in quest of provisions. If he

should find the journey impossible, or fall dead upon the way, their

last hope must perish with the failure of his mission, their one only

chance of succour must die with his death.

Very shrunken are the stores which Lucius Davoren guards with jealous

care. He doles out each man’s meagre portion day by day with a Spartan

severity, and a measurement so just that even hunger cannot dispute his

administration; the tobacco, that sweet solacer of weary hours, begins

to shrink in the barrel, and Geoffrey Hossack’s lips linger lovingly

over the final puffs of his short black-muzzled meerschaum, with a

doleful looking forward to the broad abyss of empty hours which must be

bridged over before he refills the bowl. Unless the guide returns with

supplies there is hardly any hope that these reckless adventurers will

ever reach the broad blue waters of the Pacific, and accomplish the end

of that adventurous scheme which brought them to these barren regions.

Unless help comes to them in this way, or in some fortuitous fashion,

they are doomed to perish. They have considered this fact among

themselves many times, sitting huddled together under the low roof of

their log-hut, by the feeble glimmer of their lantern.

Of the three wanderers Absalom Schanck is the only experienced

traveller. He is a naturalised Englishman, and a captain in the

merchant navy; having traded prosperously for some years as the owner

of a ship—a sea-carrier in a small way—he had sold his vessel, and

built himself a water-side villa at Battersea, half Hamburgian, half

nautical in design; a cross between a house in Hamburg and half-a-dozen

ships’ cabins packed neatly together; everything planned with as strict

an economy of space as if the dainty little habitation were destined to

put to sea as soon as she was finished. As many shelves and drawers and

hatches in the kitchen as in a steward’s cabin; stairs winding up the

heart of the house, like a companion-ladder; a flat roof, from which

Mr. Schanck can see the sunset beyond the westward-lying swamps of

Fulham, and which he fondly calls the admiral’s poop.

But even this comfortable habitation has palled upon the mind of the

professional rover. Dull are those suburban flats to the eye that for

twenty years has ranged over the vast and various ocean. Absalom has

found the consolation of pipe and case-bottle inadequate; and with

speculative ideas of the vaguest nature, has joined Geoffrey Hossack’s

expedition to the Far West.

CHAPTER II.

‘MUSIC HATH CHARMS.’

Ten days go by, empty days of which only Lucius Davoren keeps a record,

in a journal which may serve by and by for a history of the ill-fated

expedition; which may be found perchance by some luckier sportsmen in

years to come, when the ink upon the paper has gone gray and pale,

and when the date of each entry has an ancient look, and belongs to a

bygone century; nay, when the very fashion of the phrases is obsolete.

Lucius takes note of everything, every cloud in the sky, every red

gleam of the aurora, with its ghostly rustling sound, as of phantom

trees shaken by the north wind. He finds matter for observation where

to the other two there seems only an endless blank, a universe that

is emptied of everything except the unvarying pine-trees rising dark

against a background of everlasting snow.

Geoffrey Hossack practises hammer-throwing with an iron crowbar,

patches the worn-out sleighs, makes little expeditions on his own

account, and discovers nothing, except that he has a non-geographical

mind, and that, instead of the trapper’s unerring instinct, which

enables him to travel always in a straight line, he has an unpleasant

tendency to describe a circle; prowls about with his gun, and the

scanty supply of ammunition which Davoren allows him; makes traps for

silver foxes, and has the mortification of seeing his bait devoured by

a wolverine, who bears a life as charmed as that Macbeth was promised;

and sometimes, but alas too seldom, kills something—a moose, and once a

buffalo. O, then what a hunter’s feast they have in the thick northern

darkness! what a wild orgie seems that rare supper! Their souls expand

over the fresh meat; they feel mighty as northern gods, Odin and Thor.

Hope rekindles in every breast; the moody silence which has well-nigh

grown habitual to them in the gloom of these hungry hopeless days,

melts into wild torrents of talk. They are moved with a kind of rapture

engendered of this roast flesh, and recognise the truth of Barry

Cornwall’s dictum, that a poet should be a high feeder.

The grip of the frost-fiend tightens upon them; the brief days flit by

ghostlike, only the long nights linger. They sit in their log-hut in a

dreary silence, each man seated on the ground, with his knees drawn up

to his chin, and his back against the wall. Were they already dead, and

this their sepulchre, they could wear no ghastlier aspect.

They are silent from no sullen humour. Discord has never risen among

them. What have they to talk about? Swift impending death, the sharp

stings of hunger, the bitterness of an empty tobacco-barrel. Their

dumbness is the dumbness of stoics who can suffer and make no moan.

They have not yet come to absolute starvation; there is a little

pemmican still, enough to sustain their attenuated thread of life for

a few more days. When that is gone, they can see before them nothing

but death. The remains of their buffalo has been eaten by the wolves,

carefully as they hid it under the snow. The region to which they have

pushed their way seems empty of human life—a hyperborean chaos ruled by

Death. What hardy wanderer, half-breed or Indian, would venture hither

at such a season?

They are sitting thus, mute and statue-like, in the brief interval

which they call daylight, when something happens which sets every

heart beating with a sudden violence—something so unexpected, that

they wait breathless, transfixed by surprise. A voice, a human voice,

breaks the dead silence; a wild face, with bright fierce eyes peers in

at the entrance of the hut, from which a bony hand has dragged aside

the tarpaulin that serves for a screen against the keen northern winds,

which creep in round the angle of the rough wooden porch.

The face belongs to neither Indian nor half-breed; it is as white as

their own. By the faint light that glimmers through the parchment

windows they see it scrutinising them interrogatively, with a piercing

scrutiny.

‘Explorers?’ asks the stranger, ‘and Englishmen?’

Yes, they tell him, they are English explorers. Absalom Schanck of

course counts as an Englishman.

‘Are you sent out by the English government?’

‘No, we came on our own hook,’ replies Geoffrey Hossack, who is the

first to recover from the surprise of the man’s appearance, and from

a certain half-supernatural awe engendered by his aspect, which has a

wild ghastliness, as of a wanderer from the under world. ‘But never

mind how we came here; what we want is to get away. Don’t stand there

jawing about our business, but come inside, and drop that tarpaulin

behind you. Where have you left your party?’

‘Nowhere,’ answers the stranger, stepping into the hut, and standing

in the midst of them, tall and gaunt, clad in garments that are half

Esquimaux, half Indian, and in the last stage of dilapidation, torn

mooseskin shoes upon his feet, the livid flesh showing between every

rent; ‘nowhere. I belong to no party—I’m alone.’

‘Alone!’ they all exclaim, with a bitter pang of disappointment. They

had been ready to welcome this wild creature as the forerunner of

succour.

‘Yes, I was up some thousand miles northward of this, among icebergs

and polar bears and Dog-rib Indians and Esquimaux, with a party of

Yankees the summer before last; and served them well, too, for I know

some of the Indian lingo, and was able to act as their interpreter. But

the expedition was a failure. Unsuccessful men are hard to deal with.

In short, we quarrelled, and parted company; they went their way, I

went mine. There’s no occasion to enter into details. It was winter

when I left them—the stores were exhausted, with the exception of a

little ammunition. They had their guns, and may have found reindeer or

musk oxen, but I don’t fancy they can have come to much good. They

didn’t know the country as well as I do.’

‘You have been alone nearly a year?’ asks Lucius Davoren, interested in

this wild-looking stranger. ‘How have you lived during that time?’

‘Anyhow,’ answers the other with a careless shrug of his bony

shoulders. ‘Sometimes with the Indians, sometimes with the

Esquimaux—they’re civil enough to a solitary Englishman, though they

hate the Indians like poison—sometimes by myself. As long as I’ve a

charge for my gun I don’t much fear starvation, though I’ve found

myself face to face with it a good many times since I parted with my

Yankee friends.’

‘Do you know this part of the country?’

‘No; it’s beyond my chart. I shouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t lost my

way. But I suppose, now I am here, you’ll give me shelter.’

The three men looked at one another. Hospitality is a noble virtue, and

a virtue peculiarly appropriate to the dwellers in remote and savage

regions; but hospitality with these men meant a division of their few

remaining days of life. And the last of those days might hold the

chance of rescue. Who could tell? To share their shrunken stores with

this stranger would be a kind of suicide. Yet the dictates of humanity

prevailed. The stranger was not pleasant to look upon, nor especially

conciliating in manner; but he was a fellow sufferer, and he must he

sheltered.

‘Yes,’ says Lucius Davoren, ‘you are welcome to share what we have.

It’s not much. A few days’ rations.’

The stranger takes a canvas bag from his neck, and flings it into a

corner of the hut.

‘There’s more than a week’s food in that,’ he says; ‘dried reindeer,

rather mouldy, but I don’t suppose you’re very particular.’

‘Particular!’ cried Geoffrey Hossack, with a groan. ‘When I think of

the dinners I have turned up my nose at, the saddles of mutton I have

despised because life seemed always saddle of mutton, I blush for the

iniquity of civilised man. I remember a bottle of French plums and a

canister of Presburg biscuits that I left in a chiffonier at Balliol.

Of course my scout consumed them. O, would I had those toothsome cates

to-day!’

‘Balliol!’ says the stranger, looking at him curiously. ‘So you’re a

Balliol man, are you?’

There was something strange in the sound of this question from an

unkempt savage, with half-bare feet, in ragged mooseskin shoes. The

newcomer pushed aside the elf-locks that overhung his forehead, and

stared at Geoffrey Hossack as he waited for the answer to his inquiry.

‘Yes,’ replied Geoffrey with his usual coolness, ‘I have had the honour

to be gated occasionally by the dons of that college. Are you an Oxford

man?’

‘Do I look like it?’ asks the other, with a harsh laugh. ‘I am nothing;

I come from nowhere: I have no history, no kith or kin. I fancy I

know this kind of life better than you do, and I know how to talk to

the natives, which I conclude you don’t. If we can hold on till this

infernal season is over, and the trappers come this way, I’ll be your

interpreter, your servant, anything you like.’

‘If!’ said Lucius gravely. ‘I don’t think we shall ever see the end of

this winter. But you can stay with us, if you please. At the worst, we

can die together.’

The stranger gives a shivering sigh, and drops into an angular heap in

a corner of the hut.

‘It isn’t a lively prospect,’ he says. ‘Death is a gentleman I mean

to keep at arm’s length as long as I can. I’ve had to face him often

enough, but I’ve got the best of it so far. Have you used all your

tobacco?’

‘Every shred,’ says Geoffrey Hossack dolefully. ‘I smoked my last pipe

and bade farewell to the joys of existence three days ago.’

‘Smoke another, then,’ replies the stranger, taking a leather pouch

from his bosom, ‘and renew your acquaintance with pleasure.’

‘Bless you!’ exclaims Geoffrey, clutching the prize. ‘Welcome to our

tents! I would welcome Beelzebub if he brought me a pipe of tobacco.

But if one fills, all fill—that’s understood. We are brothers in

misfortune, and must share alike.’

‘Fill, and be quick about it,’ says the stranger. So the three fill

their pipes, light them, and their souls float into Elysium on the

wings of the seraph tobacco.

The stranger also fills and lights and smokes silently, but not with a

paradisiac air, rather with the gloomy aspect of some fallen spirit,

to whose lost soul sensuous joys bring no contentment. His large dark

eyes—seeming unnaturally large in his haggard face—wander slowly round

the walls of the hut, mark the bunks filled with dried prairie grass,

and each provided with a buffalo robe. Indications of luxury these.

Actual starvation would have reduced the wanderers to boiling down

strips of their buffalo skins into an unsavoury soup. Slowly those

great wan eyes travel round the hut. Listlessly, yet marking every

detail—the hunting knives and fishing tackle hanging against the

wall, Geoffrey’s handsome collection of rifles, which have been the

admiration of every Indian who has ever beheld them. The stranger’s

gaze lingers upon these, and an envious look glimmers in his eyes.

Signs of wealth these. He glances at the three companions, and wonders

which is the man who finds the money for the expedition, and owns these

guns. There could hardly be three rich fools mad enough to waste life

and wealth on such wanderings. He concludes that one is the dupe, the

other two adventurers, trading, or hoping to trade, upon his folly.

His keen eye lights on Hossack, the man who talked about Balliol. Yes,

he has a prosperous stall-fed look. The other, Lucius, has too much

intelligence. The little German is too old to spend his substance upon

so wild a scheme.

Those observant eyes of the stranger’s have nearly completed their

circuit, when they suddenly fix themselves, seem visibly to dilate, and

kindle with a fire that gives a new look to his face. He sees an object

hanging against the wall, to him as far above all the wonders of modern

gunnery as the diamonds of Golconda are above splinters of glass.

He points to it with his bony finger, and utters a strange shrill

cry of rapture—the ejaculation of a creature who by long solitude, by

hardship and privation, and the wild life of forests and deserts, has

lapsed into an almost savage condition.

‘A fiddle!’ he exclaims, after that shrill scream of delight has melted

into a low chuckling laugh. ‘It’s more than a year since I’ve seen a

fiddle, since I lost mine crossing the McKenzie river. Let me play upon

it.’

This in a softer, more human tone than any words he had previously

spoken, looking from one to the other of the three men with passionate

entreaty.

‘What! you play the fiddle, do you?’ asked Lucius, emptying the ashes

from his pipe with a long sigh of regret.

‘It is yours, then?’

‘Yes; you can play upon it, if you like. It’s a genuine Amati. I have

kept it like the apple of my eye.’

‘Yes, and it’s been uncommonly useful in frightening away the Indians

when they’ve come to torment us for fire-water,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We

tried watering the rum, but that didn’t answer. The beggars poured a

few drops on the fire, and finding it didn’t blaze up, came back and

blackguarded us. I only wish I’d brought a few barrels of turpentine

for their benefit. Petroleum would have been still better. _That_

would meet their ideas of excellence in spirituous liquors. They

like something that scorches their internal economy. They led us a

nice life as long as we had any rum; but the violin was too much for

them. They’re uncommonly fond of their own music, and would sometimes

oblige us with a song which lasted all night, but they couldn’t stand

Davoren’s sonatas. Tune up, stranger. I’m rather tired of De Beriot

and Spohr and Haydn myself. Perhaps you could oblige us with a nigger

melody.’

The stranger waited for no farther invitation, but strode across the

narrow hut, and took the violin case from the shelf where it had been

carefully bestowed. He laid it on the rough pine-wood table, opened it,

and gazed fondly on the Amati reposing in its bed of pale-blue velvet;

the very case, or outer husk, a work of art.

Lucius watched him as the young mother watches her first baby in the

ruthless hands of a stranger. Would he clutch the fiddle by its neck,

drag it roughly from its case, at the hazard of dislocation? The

surgeon was too much an Englishman to show his alarm, but sat stolid

and in agony. No; the unkempt stranger’s bony claws spread themselves

out gently, and embraced the polished table of the fiddle. He lifted it

as the young mother lifts her darling from his dainty cradle; he put it

to his shoulder and lowered his chin upon it, as if in a loving caress.

His long fingers stretched themselves about the neck; he drew the bow

slowly across the strings. O, what rapture even in those experimental

notes!

Geoffrey flung a fresh pine-log upon the fire, as if in honour of the

coming performance. Absalom sat and dozed, dreaming he was in his cuddy

at Battersea, supping upon his beloved sausage. Lucius watched the

stranger, with a gaze full of curiosity. He was passionately fond of

music, and his violin had been his chief solace in hours of darkest

apprehension. Strange to find in this other wanderer mute evidence of

the same passion. The man’s hand as it hugged the fiddle, the man’s

face as it bent over the strings, were the index of a passion as deep

as, or deeper than, his own. He waited eagerly for the man to play.

Presently there arose in that low hut a long-drawn wailing sound; a

minor chord, that seemed like a passionate sob of complaint wrung

from a heart newly broken; and with this for his sole prelude the

stranger began his theme. What he played, Lucius strove in vain to

discover. His memory could recall no such music: Wilder, stranger,

more passionate, more solemn, more awful than the strain which Orpheus

played in the under world, was that music: more demoniac than that

diabolical sonata which Tartini pretended to have composed in a dream.

It seemed extemporaneous, for it obeyed none of the laws of harmony,

yet even in its discords was scarcely inharmonious. There was melody,

too, through all—a plaintive under-current of melody, which never

utterly lost itself, even when the player allowed his fancy its wildest

flights. The passionate rapture of his haggard, weather-beaten face

was reflected in the passionate rapture of his music; but it was not

the rapture of joy; rather the sharp agony of those convulsions of

the soul which touch the border-line of madness; like the passion of

a worshipper at one of those Dionysian festivals in which religious

fervour might end in self-slaughter; or like the ‘possession’ of some

Indian devil-dancer, leaping and wounding himself under the influence

of his demon god.

The three men sat and listened, curiously affected by that strange

sonata. Even Absalom Schanck, to whom music was about as familiar a

language as the Cuneiform character, felt that this was something out

of the common way; that it was grander, if not more beautiful, than

those graceful compositions of De Beriot or Rode wherewith Lucius

Davoren had been wont to amuse his friends in their desolate solitude.

Upon Lucius the music had a curious effect. At first and for some time

he listened with no feeling but the connoisseur’s unmixed delight.

Of envy his mind was incapable, though music is perhaps the most

jealous of the arts, and though he felt this man was infinitely his

superior—could bring tones out of the heart of that Amati which no

power of his could draw from his beloved instrument.

But as the man played on, new emotions showed themselves upon Lucius

Davoren’s countenance—wonder, perplexity; then a sudden lighting up of

passion. His brows contracted; he watched the stranger with gleaming

eyes, breathlessly, waiting for the end of the composition. With the

final chord he started up from his seat and confronted the man.

‘Were you ever in Hampshire?’ he asked, sharply and shortly.

The stranger started ever so slightly at this abrupt interrogatory, but

showed no farther sign of discomposure, and laid the fiddle in its case

as tenderly as he had taken it thence ten minutes before.

‘Hampshire, Massachusetts?’ he inquired. ‘Yes, many a time.’

‘Hampshire in England. Were you in that county in the year ’59?’ asked

Lucius breathlessly, watching the stranger as he spoke.

‘I was never in England in my life.’

‘Ah,’ said Lucius with a long-drawn sigh, which might indicate either

disappointment or relief, ‘then you’re not the man I was half inclined

to take you for. Yet that,’ dropping into soliloquy, ‘was a foolish

fancy. There may be more than one man in the world who plays like a

devil.’

‘You are not particularly complimentary,’ returned the stranger,

touching the violin strings lightly with the tips of his skeleton

fingers, repeating the dismal burden of his melody in those pizzacato

notes.

‘You don’t consider it a compliment. Rely upon it, if Lucifer played

the fiddle at all, he’d play well. The spirit who said, “Evil, be thou

my good,” would hardly do anything by halves. Do you remember what

Corelli said to Strengk when he first heard him play? “I have been

called Arcangelo, but by heavens, sir, you must be Arcidiavolo.” I

would give a great deal to have your power over that instrument. Was

that your own composition you played just now?’

‘I believe so, or a reminiscence; but if the latter, I can’t tell you

its source. I left off playing by book a long time ago; but I have a

reserve fund of acquired music—chiefly German—and I have no doubt I

draw upon it occasionally.’

‘Yes,’ repeated Lucius thoughtfully, ‘I should like to play as you do,

only—’

‘Only what?’ asked the stranger.

‘I should be inclined to fancy there was something

uncomfortable—uncanny, as the Scotch say—lurking in the deep waters of

my mind, if my fancies took the shape yours did just now.’

‘As for me,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, with agreeable candour, ‘without

wishing either to flatter or upbraid, I can only say that I feel as if

I had been listening to a distinguished member of the royal orchestra

in Pandemonium—the Paganini of Orcus.’

The stranger laughed—a somewhat harsh and grating cachinnation.

‘You don’t like minors?’ he said.

‘I was a minor myself for a long time, and I only object to the

species on the score of impecuniosity,’ replied Geoffrey. ‘O, I beg

your pardon; you mean the key. If that composition of yours was

minor, I certainly lean to the major. Could you not oblige us with a

Christy-minstrel melody to take the taste out of our mouths?’

The stranger deigned no answer to that request, but sat down on the

rough log which served Lucius for a seat, and made a kind of settle by

the ample fireplace. With lean arms folded and gaze bent upon the fire,

he lapsed into thoughtful silence. The blaze of the pine-logs, now

showing vivid tinges of green or blue as the resin bubbled from their

tough hide, lit up the faces, and gave something of grotesque to each.

Seen by this medium, the stranger’s face was hardly a pleasant object

for contemplation, and was yet singular enough to arrest the gaze of

him who looked upon it.

Heaven knows if, with all the aids of civilisation, soap and water,

close-cut hair, and carefully-trimmed moustache, the man might not

have been ranked handsome. Seen in this dusky hovel, by the changeful

light of the pine-logs, that face was grotesque and grim as a study by

Gustave Doré; the lines as sharply accentuated, the lights and shadows

as vividly contrasted.

The stranger’s eyes were of darkest hue; as nearly black as the human

eye, or any other eye, ever is: that intensest brown which, when in

shadow, looks black, and when the light shines upon it seems to emit

a tawny fire, like the ray which flashes from a fine cat’s-eye. His

forehead was curiously low, the hair growing in a peak between the

temples. His nose was long, and a pronounced aquiline. His cheek-bones

were rendered prominent by famine. The rest of his face was almost

hidden by the thick ragged beard of densest black, through which his

white teeth flashed with a hungry look when he talked or smiled. His

smile was not a pleasant one.

‘If one could imagine his Satanic majesty taking another promenade,

like that walk made famous by Porson, and penetrating to these

hyperborean shores—and why not, when contrast is ever pleasing?—I

should expect to behold him precisely in yonder guise,’ mused Geoffrey,

as he contemplated their uninvited guest from the opposite side of the

hearth. ‘But the age has grown matter-of-fact; we no longer believe

in the pleasing illusions of our childhood—hobgoblins, Jack and the

Beanstalk, and old Nick. Gunpowder and the printing press, as somebody

observes, have driven away Robin Goodfellow and the fairies.’

Lucius sat meditative, staring into the fire. That wild minor theme

had moved him profoundly, yet it was not so much of the music that he

thought as of the man. Five years ago he had heard the description

of music—which seemed to him to correspond exactly with this—of an

amateur whose playing had the same unearthly, or even diabolical

excellence. Certainly that man had been a pianist. And then it was too

wild a fancy to conceive for a moment that he had encountered that man,

whom he had hunted for all over England, and even out of England, here

in this primeval forest. Destiny in her maddest sport could hardly have

devised such a hazard. No, the thought was absurd; no doubt an evidence

of a brain enfeebled by anxiety and famine. Yet the fancy disturbed him

not the less.

‘Unless Geoff stalks another buffalo before long, I shall go off my

head,’ he said to himself.

He brooded upon the stranger’s assertion that he was a Southern

American, and had never crossed the Atlantic; an assertion at variance

with the fact of his accent, which was purely English. Yet Lucius

had known American citizens whose English was as pure, and he could

scarcely condemn the man as a liar on such ground as this.

‘The description of that man’s appearance might fit this man,’ he

thought; ‘due allowance being made for the circumstances under which

we see him. Tall and dark, with a thin lissom figure, a hooked nose,

a hawk’s eye; that was the description they gave me at Wykhamston; I

had it from three separate people. There is no palpable discrepancy,

and yet—bah, I am a fool to think of it! Haven’t I had trouble of mind

enough upon this score, and would it do any good to her—in her grave,

perhaps—if I had my wish: if God gave me the means of keeping the

promise I made five years ago, when I was little more than a boy?’

Lucius’s thoughts rambled on while the stranger sat beside him, with

brooding eyes fixed, like his, upon the flare of the pine-logs.

‘By the way,’ said Lucius presently, rousing himself from that long

reverie, ‘when my friend yonder spoke of Balliol, you pricked up your

ears as if the name were familiar to you. That’s odd, since you have

never been in England.’

‘I suppose there is nothing especially odd in my having had an English

acquaintance in my prosperous days, when even Englishmen were not

ashamed to know me. One may be familiar with the name of a college

without having seen the college itself. I had a friend who was a

student at Balliol.’

‘I wonder whether he was the man who wrote “_Aratus sum!_” upon one of

the tables in the examiners’ room after they ploughed him,’ speculated

Geoffrey idly.

‘I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Stranger,’ said Lucius presently,

struggling with the sense of irritation caused by that wild fancy which

the stranger’s playing had inspired, ‘it’s all very well for us to

give you a corner in our hut. As good or evil fortune brought you this

way, we could hardly be so unchristian as to refuse you our shelter;

God knows it’s poor enough, and death is near enough inside as well as

outside these wooden walls; but even Christianity doesn’t oblige us to

harbour a man without a name. That traveller who fell among thieves

told the Samaritan his name, rely upon it, as soon as he was able to

say anything. No honest man withholds his name from the men he breaks

bread with. Even the Indians tell us their names; so be good enough to

give us yours.’

‘I renounced my own name when I turned my back upon civilisation,’

answered the stranger doggedly; ‘I brought no card-case to this side

of the Rocky Mountains. If you give me your hospitality,’ with a

monosyllabic laugh and a scornful glance round the hut, ‘solely on

condition that I acquaint you with my antecedents, I renounce your

hospitality. I can go back to the forest and liberty. As you say, death

could not be much farther off out yonder in the snow. If you only want

my name for the purposes of social intercourse, you can call me what

the Indians call me, a sobriquet of their own invention, “Matchi

Mohkamarn.”’

‘That means the Evil Knife, I believe,’ said Lucius; ‘hardly

the fittest name to inspire confidence in the minds of a man’s

acquaintance. But I suppose it must do, since you withhold your real

name.’

‘I am sure you are welcome to our pasteboards,’ said Geoffrey,

yawning; ‘I have a few yonder in my dressing-bag—rather a superfluous

encumbrance by the way, since here one neither dresses nor shaves.

But I have occasionally propitiated ravening Indians with the gift

of a silver-topped scent-bottle or pomatum-pot, so the bag _has_

been useful. Dear, dear, how nice it would be to find oneself back

in a world in which there are dressing-bags and dressing-bells, and

dinner-bells afterwards! And yet one fancied it so slow, the world of

civilisation. Lucius, is it not time for our evening pemmican? Think

of the macaroons and rout-cakes we have trampled under our heels

in the bear-fights that used to wind up our wine-parties; to think

of the anchovy toasts and various devils we have eaten—half from

sheer gluttony, half because it was good form—when we were gorged

like Strasburg geese awaiting their euthanasia. Think how we have

rioted, and wasted and wallowed in what are called the pleasures of

the table; and behold us now, hungering for a lump of rancid fat or

a tallow-candle, to supply our exhausted systems with heat-giving

particles!’

CHAPTER III.

HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL.

The slow days pass, but the guide does not return. Geoffrey’s sporting

explorations have resulted only in a rare bird, hardly a mouthful for

one of the four starving men, though they divide the appetising morsel

with rigid justice, Lucius dissecting it with his clasp-knife almost as

carefully as if it were a subject.

‘To think that I should live to dine on a section of wood-partridge

without any bread-sauce!’ exclaimed Geoffrey dolefully. ‘Do you know,

when I put the small beast in my bag I was sorely tempted to eat him,

feathers and all! Indeed, I think we make a mistake in plucking our

game. The feathers would at least be filling. It is the sense of a

vacuum from which one suffers most severely; after all it can’t matter

much what a man puts inside him, so long as he fills the cavity. Do

you remember that experimental Frenchman who suggested that a hungry

peasantry should eat grass? The suggestion was hardly popular, and the

mob stuffed the poor wretch’s mouth with a handful of his favourite

pabulum, when they hung him to a convenient lamp-post in ’93. But I

really think the notion was sensible. If there were a rood of pasture

uncovered by the perpetual snow I should imitate Nebuchadnezzar, and go

to grass!’

Vain lamentations! Vainer still those long arguments by the pine-log

fire, in which, with map and compass, they travel over again the

journey which has been so disastrous—try back, and find where it was

they lost time—how they let slip a day here, half a week there, until

the expedition, which should have ended with last September, occupied

a period they had never dreamed of, and left them in the bleak bitter

winter: their trail lost, alone in a trackless forest, the snow rising

higher around them day by day, until even the steep bank upon which

they have built their log-hut stands but a few feet above the universal

level.

From first to last the journey has been attended by misfortune as well

as mistake. They had set forth on this perilous enterprise fondly

hoping they could combine pleasure for themselves, with profit to their

fellow-creatures, and by this wild adventure open up a track for

future emigrants—a high road in the days to come from the shores of

the Atlantic to the Pacific—a path by which adventurers from the old

world should travel across the Rocky Mountains to the gold-fields of

the new world. They had started with high hopes—or Lucius had at least

cherished this dream above all thought of personal enjoyment—hopes

of being reckoned among the golden band of adventurers whose daring

has enlarged man’s dominion over that wide world God gave him for

his heritage—hopes of seeing their names recorded on that grand

muster-roll which begins with Hercules, and ends with Livingstone.

They had started from Fort Edmonton with three horses, two guides, and

a fair outfit; but they had left that point too late in the year, as

the guardians of the fort warned them. They were entreated to postpone

their attempt till the following summer, but they had already spent

one winter in camp between Carlton and Edmonton, and the two young men

were resolutely set against farther delay. Absalom Schanck, much more

phlegmatic, would have willingly wintered at the fort, where there was

good entertainment, and where he could have smoked his pipe and looked

out of window at the pine-tops and the snow from one week’s end to

another, resigned to circumstances, and patiently awaiting remittances

from England. But to Lucius Davoren and Geoffrey Hossack the idea of

such loss of time was unendurable. They had both seen as much as they

cared to see of the trapper’s life during the past winter. Both were

eager to push on to fresh woods and pastures new, Geoffrey moved by

the predatory instincts of the sportsman, Lucius fevered by the less

selfish and more ambitious desire to discover that grand highway which

he had dreamed of, between the two great oceans. The star which guided

his pilgrimage was the lodestar of the discoverer. No idle fancy, no

caprice of the moment, could have tempted him aside from the settled

purpose of his journey. But a mountain-sheep—the bighorn—or a wild

goat, seen high up on some crag against the clear cold sky, was magnet

enough to draw Geoffrey twenty miles out of his course.

Of the two guides, one deserted before they had crossed the range,

making off quietly with one of their horses—the best, by the way—and

leaving them, after a long day and night of wonderment, to the

melancholy conviction that they had been cheated. They retraced their

way for one day’s journey, sent their other guide, an Indian, back some

distance in search of the deserter, but with no result. This cost them

between three and four days. The man had doubtless gone quietly back

to Edmonton. To follow him farther would be altogether to abandon their

expedition for this year. The days they had already lost were precious

as rubies.

‘_En avant!_’ exclaimed Geoffrey.

‘Excelsior!’ cried Lucius.

The German was quiescent. ‘I zink you leat me to my deaths,’ he said;

‘but man must die one time. Gismet, as the Durks say. They are wise

beobles, ze Durks.’

The Indian promised to remain faithful, ay, even to death; of which

fatal issue these savages think somewhat lightly; life for them mostly

signifying hardship and privation, brightened only by rare libations

of rum. He was promoted from a secondary position to the front rank,

and was now their sole guide. With their cavalcade thus shrunken they

pushed bravely on, crossed the mountains by the Yellow Head Pass,

looked down from among snow-clad pinnacles upon the Athabasca river,

rushing madly between its steep banks, and reached Jasper House, a

station of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which they found void of all human

life, a mere shell or empty simulacrum; in the distance a cheering

object to look upon, promising welcome and shelter; and giving neither.

For Hossack, that mighty mountain range, those snow-clad peaks,

towering skyward, had an irresistible attraction. He had done a good

deal of Alpine climbing in his long vacations, had scaled peaks which

few have ever succeeded in surmounting, and had made his name a

household word among the Swiss guides, but such a range as this was

new to him. Here there was a larger splendour, an infinite beauty. The

world which he had looked down upon from Mont Blanc—lakes, valleys,

and villages dwarfed by the distance—was a mere tea-board landscape, a

toy-shop panorama, compared with this. He drew in his breath and gazed

in a dumb rapture,

‘Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes,

He stared at the Pacific.’

Here, again, they lost considerable time; for even Davoren’s

stronger mind was beguiled by the glory of that splendid scene. He

consented to a week’s halt on the margin of the Athabasca, climbed

the mountain-steeps with his friend, chased the bighorn with footstep

light and daring as the chamois-hunter’s; and found himself sometimes,

after the keen pleasures of the hunt, with his moccasins in rags, and

his naked feet cut and bleeding, a fact of which he had been supremely

unconscious so long as the chase lasted. Sometimes, after descending

to the lower earth, laden with their quarry, the hunters looked upward

and saw the precipices they had trodden, the narrow cornice of rock

along which they had run in pursuit of their prey—saw, and shuddered.

Had they been really within a hair’s-breadth of death?

These were the brightest days of their journey. Their stores were yet

ample, and seemed inexhaustible. They feasted on fresh meat nightly;

yet, with a laudable prudence, smoked and dried some portion of

their prey. In the indulgence of their sporting propensities they

squandered a good deal of ammunition. They smoked half-a-dozen pipes

of tobacco daily. In a word, they enjoyed the present, with a culpable

shortsightedness as to the future.

This delay turned the balance against them. While they loitered, autumn

stole on with footstep almost impalpable, in that region of evergreen.

The first sharp frost of early October awakened Lucius to a sense of

their folly. He gave the word for the march forward, refusing to listen

to Geoffrey’s entreaty for one day more—one more wild hunt among those

mighty crags between earth and sky.

The sea-captain and Kekek-ooarsis, their Indian guide, had been

meritoriously employed during this delay in constructing a raft for the

passage of the Athabasca, at this point a wide lake whose peaceful

waters spread themselves amid an amphitheatre of mountains.

While they were getting ready for the passage of the river they were

surprised by a party of half-breeds—friendly, but starving. Anxious

as they were to husband their resources, humanity compelled them

to furnish these hapless wanderers with a meal. In return for this

hospitality, the natives gave them some good advice, urging them on

no account to trust themselves to the current of the river—a mode of

transit which seemed easy and tempting—as it abounded in dangerous

rapids. They afforded farther information as to the trail on ahead,

and these sons of the old and new world parted, well pleased with one

another.

Soon after this began their time of trial and hardship. They had

to cross the river many times in their journey—sometimes on rafts,

sometimes fording the stream—and often in imminent peril of an abrupt

ending of their troubles by drowning. They crossed pleasant oases of

green prairie, verdant valleys all abloom with wild flowers, gentian

and tiger lilies, cineraria, blue borage—the last-lingering traces of

summer’s footfall in the sheltered nooks. Sometimes they came upon

patches where the forest-trees were blackened by fire, or had fallen

among the ashes of the underwood. Sometimes they had to cut their way

through the wood, and made slow and painful progress. Sometimes they

lost the trail, and only regained it after a day’s wasted labour. One

of their horses died—the other was reduced to a mere skeleton—so rare

had now become the glimpses of pasture. They looked at this spectral

equine with sad prophetic eyes, not knowing how long it might be before

they would be reduced to the painful necessity of cooking and eating

him; and with a doleful foreboding that, when famine brought them to

that strait, the faithful steed would be found to consist solely of

bone and hide.

So they tramped on laboriously and with a dogged patience till they

lost the trail once more; and this time even the Indian’s sagacity

proved utterly at fault, and all their efforts to regain it were

vain. They found themselves in a trackless ring of forest, to them

as darksome a circle as the lowest deep in Dante’s Inferno, and here

beheld the first snow-storm fall white upon the black pine-tops. Here,

in one of their vain wanderings in search of the lost track, they came

upon a dead Indian, seated stark and ghastly at the foot of a giant

pine, draped in his blanket, and bent as if still stooping over the

ashes of the fire wherewith he had tried to keep the ebbing life warm

in his wasted clay. This gruesome stranger was headless. Famine had

wasted him to the very bone; his skin was mere parchment, stretched

tightly over the gaunt skeleton; the whitening bones of his horse

bestrewed the ground by his side. How he came in that awful condition,

what had befallen the missing head, they knew not. Even conjecture

was here at fault. But the spectacle struck them with indescribable

horror. So too might they be found; the skeleton horse crouched dead at

their feet, beside the ashes of the last fire at which their dim eyes

had gazed in the final agonies of starvation. This incident made them

desperate.

‘We are wasting our strength in a useless hunt for the lost track,’

said Lucius decisively. ‘We have neither the instinct nor the

experience of the Indian. Let us make a log-hut here, and wait for the

worst quietly, while Kekek-ooarsis searches for the path, or tries to

work his way back to the fort to fetch help and food. He will make

his way three times as fast when he is unencumbered by us and our

incapacity. We may be able to ward off starvation meanwhile with the

aid of Geoff’s guns. At the worst, we only face death. And since a man

can but die once, it is after all only a question of whether we get

full or short measure of the wine of life.

‘And come he slow or come he fast,

It is but Death who comes at last.’

‘Brezisely,’ said the Hamburgher. ‘It is drue. A man can but die one

time—Gismet. Yet ze wine of life is petter zan ze vater of death, in

most beoble’s obinion.’

Kekek-ooarsis had been absent nearly five weeks at the time of the

stranger’s appearance, and the length of his absence had variously

affected the three men who waited with a gloomy resignation for his

return, or the coming of that other stranger, Death. At times, when

Geoffrey’s gun had not been useless, when they had eaten, and were

inclined to take a somewhat cheerful view of their situation, they

told each other that he had most likely recovered the lost track at a

considerable distance from their hut, and had pushed on to the fort,

to procure fresh horses and supplies. They calculated the time such a

journey to and fro must take him, allowed a wide margin for accidental

delays, and argued that it was not yet too late for the possibility of

his return.

‘I hope he hasn’t cut and run like that other beggar,’ said Geoffrey.

‘It was rather a risky thing to trust him with our money to buy the

horses and provender. Yet it was our only resource.’

‘I believe in his honesty,’ replied Davoren. ‘If he deserts us, Death

will be the tempter who lures him away. These Indians have nobler

qualities than you are inclined to credit them with. Do you remember

that starving creature who came to our hut by the Saskatchewan one day

while we were out hunting, and sat by our hearth, famishing amidst

plenty, for twelve mortal hours, and did not touch a morsel till we

returned and offered him food? I’ll forfeit my reputation as a judge of

character, if Kekek-ooarsis tries to cheat us. That other fellow was a

half-breed.’

‘The Greeks weren’t half-breeds,’ said Geoffrey, whose reading had of

late years been chiefly confined to the Greek historians and the more

popular of the French novelists, ‘yet they were the most treacherous

ruffians going. I don’t pin my faith on your chivalrous Indian.

However, there’s no use in contemplating the gloomiest side of the

question. Let’s take a more lively view of it, and say that he’s frozen

to death in the pass, with our money intact in his bosom, exactly where

you sewed it into his shirt.’

Thus they speculated; the German venturing no opinion, but smoking the

only obtainable substitute for tobacco in stolid silence. Indeed, when

hard pressed by his companions, he admitted that he had never had any

opinion. ‘Vat is ze goot ov obinions?’ he demanded. ‘Man is no petter

vor zem, and it is zo much vasted lapour of prain. I do not know how

to tink. Zomedimes I have ask my froints vat it is like, tinking. Zey

gannot tell me. Zey tink zey tink, put zey to not tink.’

CHAPTER IV.

‘ALL’S CHEERLESS, DARK, AND DEADLY.’

The stranger, having had their exact circumstances laid before him,

took the gloomiest view of the position. The first deep fall of snow

had occurred a week after the guide’s departure. If he had not ere that

time regained a track, with landmarks familiar to his eye, all hope of

his having been able to reach the fort was as foolish as it was vain.

‘For myself,’ said the stranger, ‘I give him up.’

This man, who was henceforth known among them as Matchi, a contraction

of the sobriquet bestowed on him by the Indians, fell into his place

in that small circle easily enough. They neither liked him nor

trusted him. But he had plenty to say for himself, and had a certain

originality of thought and language that went some little way towards

dispelling the deep gloom that surrounded them. In their wretched

position, any one who could bring an element of novelty into their life

was welcome. The desperation of his character suited their desperate

circumstances. In a civilised country they would have shut their doors

in his face. But here, with Death peering in at their threshold, this

wild spirit helped them to sustain the horrors of suspense, the dreary

foreboding of a fatal end.

But there was one charm in his presence which all felt, even the

phlegmatic German. With Lucius Davoren’s violin in his hand, he could

beguile them into brief forgetfulness of that grisly spectre watching

at the door. That passionate music opened the gates of dreamland.

Matchi’s _répertoire_ seemed inexhaustible: but everything he played,

even melodies the world knows by heart, bore the stamp of his own

genius. Whatever subject of Corelli, or Viotti, or Mozart, or Haydn,

formed the groundwork of his theme, the improvisatore sported with

the air at pleasure, and interwove his own wild fancies with the

original fabric. Much that he played was obviously his own composition,

improvised as the bow moved over the strings; wild strains which

interpreted the gloom of their surroundings; dismal threnodies in which

one heard the soughing of the wind among the snow-laden pine-branches;

the howling of wolves at sunrise.

He proved no drone in that little hive, but toiled at such labour as

there was to be done with a savage energy which seemed in accord with

his half-savage nature. He felled the pine-trunks with his axe, and

brought new stores of fuel to the hut. He fetched water from a distant

lake, where there was but one corner which the ice had not locked

against him. He slept little, and those haggard eyes of his had a

strange brightness and vivacity as he sat by the hearth and stared into

the fire which his toil had helped to furnish.

Though he talked much at times, but always by fits and starts, it was

curious to note how rarely he spoke directly of himself or his past

life. Even when Lucius questioned him about his musical education, in

what school he had learned, who had been his master, he contrived to

evade the question.

‘There are some men who have not the knack of learning from other

people, but who must be their own teachers,’ he said. ‘I am one of

those. Shut me up in a prison for ten years, with my fiddle for my only

companion, and when I come out I shall have discovered a new continent

in the world of music.’

‘You play other instruments,’ hazarded Lucius; ‘the cello?’

‘I play most stringed instruments,’ the other answered carelessly.

‘The piano?’

‘Yes, I play the piano. A man has fingers; what is there strange in his

using them?’

‘Nothing; only one wonders that you should be content to hide so many

accomplishments in the backwoods.’

Matchi shrugged his lean shoulders.

‘There are a thousand various reasons why a man should grow tired of

his own particular world,’ he said.

‘To say nothing of the possibility that a man’s own particular world

may grow tired of him,’ returned Lucius.

Instead of himself and his own affairs—that subject which exalts

the most ungifted speaker into eloquence—the stranger spoke of men

and manners, the things he had seen from the outside as a mere

spectator; the books he had read, and they were legion. Never was a

brain stocked with a more heterogeneous collection of ideas. Queer

books, out-of-the-way books, had evidently formed his favourite study.

Geoffrey heard, and was amused. Lucius heard, and wondered, and

rendered to this man that unwilling respect which we give to intellect

unallied with the virtues.

Thus three days and nights went by, somewhat less slowly than the

days had gone of late. On the morning of the fourth the stranger grew

impatient—paced the narrow bounds of his hut like an imprisoned jaguar.

‘Death lies yonder, I doubt not,’ he said, pointing to the forest,

‘while here there is the possibility—a mere possibility—that we may

outlive our troubles; that some luckier band of emigrants may come this

way to succour us before we expire. But I tell you frankly, my friends,

that I can’t stand this sort of life three days longer—to sit down and

wait for death, arms folded, without so much as a pipe of tobacco to

lull the fever in one’s brain. _That_ needs a Roman courage which I

possess not. I shall not trouble your hospitality much longer.’

‘What will you do?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘Push ahead. I have my chart here,’ touching his forehead. ‘I shall

push on towards the Pacific with no better guide than the stars. I can

but perish; better to be frozen to death on the march—like a team of

sleigh-dogs I saw once by the Saskatchewan, standing stark and stiff in

the snow, as their drivers had left them—than to sit and doze by the

fire here till Death comes in his slowest and most hideous shape—death

by famine.’

‘You had better stay with us and share our chances,’ said Lucius; ‘our

guide may even yet return.’

‘Yes,’ answered Matchi, ‘at the general muster roll, with the rank and

file of the dead.’

His words were strangely belied ere that brief day darkened into

night. The four men were sitting huddled round the fire, smoking their

final pipe—for Matchi had now shared among them the last remnant of

his tobacco—when a curious hollow cry, like the plaintive note of a

distressed bird, was heard in the distance.

Lucius was the first to divine its meaning.

‘Kekek-ooarsis!’ he cried, starting to his feet. ‘He has come back at

last. Thank God! thank God!’

The call was repeated, this time distinctly human.

‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey, ‘that’s the identical flute.’

He ran to the door of the hut. Lucius snatched up one of the blazing

pine-branches from the hearth, and went out, waving this fiery brand

aloft, and shouting in answer to the Indian’s cry. In this moment of

glad surprise and hope the man’s return meant succour, comfort, plenty.

Too soon were they to be undeceived. He emerged from among the shadowy

branches, half limping, half crawling towards them across the snow,

which was solid enough to bear that light burden without the faintest

impression on its frozen surface. He came into the glare of the

pine-branch, a wasted ghastly figure, more spectral than their own—the

very image and type of famine.

He came back to them empty-handed. No dogs or horses followed him. He

came, not to bring them the means of life, but to die with them.

The faithful creature crawled about them like a dog, hugged their

knees, laid his wasted body at their feet, looked up at them with

supplicating eyes, too feeble for words. They carried him into the

hut, put him by the fire, and gave him food, which he devoured like a

famished wolf.

Restored by that welcome heat and food, he told them his adventures;

how he had striven in vain to regain the track and make his way back

to the fort; how, after weary wanderings, he had found himself at

last among a little band of Indians, whose camp lay northward of

the Englishmen’s hut, and who were as near famine as they. Here he

had fallen ill with frostbite and rheumatism, but had been kindly

succoured by the Indians, not of his tribe. He had lain in one of their

shelters—not worthy to be dignified even by the name of hut—for a long

time, how long he knew not, having lost consciousness during the

period, and thus missed his reckoning. With recovery came the ardent

desire to return to them, to show them that he had not betrayed his

trust. The bank-notes sewn into his garments had escaped observation

and pillage, supposing the Indians inclined to plunder their guest. He

asked them to sell him provisions that he might take to his masters,

tried to tempt them with liberal offers of payment, but they had

unhappily nothing to sell. Buffalo had vanished from that district,

the lakes and rivers were frozen. The Indians themselves were living

from hand to mouth, and hardly living at all, so meagre was their fare.

Convinced at last that the case was hopeless, Kekek-ooarsis had left

them to return to the hut—a long and difficult journey, since in his

efforts to regain the road, to the fort he had made a wide circuit.

Only fidelity—the dog’s faithful allegiance to the master he loves—had

brought him back to that hunger-haunted dwelling.

‘I cannot help you,’ he said piteously in his native language; ‘I have

come back to die with you.’

‘One more or less to die makes little difference,’ answered the

stranger, speaking the man’s exact dialect with perfect fluency. ‘Let

us see if we cannot contrive to live. You have failed once in your

endeavour to find your way back to the fort. That is no reason you

should fail a second time. Few great things have been done at the first

attempt. Get your strength back, my friend, and you and I will set out

together as soon as you are fit for the journey. I know something of

the country; and with your native eyes and ears to help me, we could

hardly fail.’

Kekek-ooarsis looked up at him wonderingly. He was not altogether

favourably impressed by the stranger’s appearance, if one might judge

by his own countenance, which expressed doubt and perplexity.

‘I will do whatever my masters bid me,’ he said submissively.

His masters let him rest, and eat, and bask in the warmth of the

pine-logs for two days; after which he declared himself ready to set

out upon any quest they might order.

The stranger had talked them into a belief in his intelligence being

superior to that of the guide; and they consented to the two setting

out together to make a second attempt to find the way to the fort. In

a condition so hopeless it seemed to matter very little what they did.

Anything was better than sitting, arms folded, as the stranger had

said, face to face with death.

But Lucius was now chained to the hut by a new tie. The day after the

Indian’s return, Geoffrey, the light-hearted, the fearless, had been

struck down with fever. Lucius had henceforward no care so absorbing as

that which bound him to the side of his friend. The German looked on,

phlegmatic but not unsympathising, and made no moan.

‘I shall gatch ze fefer aftervarts, no tout,’ he said, ‘and you vill

have dwo do nurse. Hart ubon you.’

CHAPTER V.

‘O, THAT WAY MADNESS LIES.’

The fever raged severely. Delirium held Geoffrey’s brain in its hideous

thraldom. Horrid sights and scenes pursued him. He looked at his

friend’s face with blank unseeing eyes, or looked and beheld something

that was not there—the countenance of an enemy.

Lucius felt himself now between two fires—disease on one side, famine

on the other. Between these two devastators death seemed inevitable.

Absalom Schanck, sorely wasted from his native plumpness, sat by the

hearth and watched the struggle, resigned to the idea of his own

approaching end.

Geoffrey’s illness reduced them to a far worse situation than they had

been in before, since he was their chief sportsman, and had done much

to ward off starvation. Lucius took his gun out for a couple of hours

every morning, leaving the invalid in Absalom’s charge, and prowled

the forest in search of game. But with the exception of one solitary

marten, whose tainted flesh had been revolting even to their hunger,

his wanderings had been barren of everything but disappointment.

Matchi and the guide had been gone a week, when Lucius set out one

morning more desperate than usual, hunger gnawing his entrails, and

worse than hunger, a fear that weighed upon his heart like lead—the

fear that before many days were gone Geoffrey Hossack would have

set forth upon a longer and a darker journey than that they two had

started upon together, in the full flush of youth and hope, a year and

a half ago. He could not conceal from himself that his friend was in

imminent danger—that unless the fever, for which medicine could do so

little, abated speedily, all must soon be over. Nor could he conceal

from himself another fact—namely, that the stores he had doled out

with such a niggard hand would not yield even that scanty allowance

for twenty-four hours longer. A sorry frame of mind in which to stalk

buffalo or chase the moose!

Again Fortune was unkind. He wandered farther than usual in his

determination not to go back empty-handed. He knew but too well that

in Geoffrey’s desperate state there was nothing his experience could

do that Absalom’s ignorance could not do as well. In fact there was

nothing to be done. The patient lay in a kind of stupor. Only the

gentle nursing-mother Nature could help him now.

He came upon a circular patch of prairie in the heart of the forest,

and surprised a lean and lonely buffalo, the first he had seen for more

than a month. The last had been shot by Geoffrey some days before the

guide’s departure on his useless journey. The animal was scratching

in the snow, trying to get at the scanty herbage under that frozen

surface, when Lucius came upon it. His footsteps, noiseless in his

moccasins, did not startle the quarry. He stole within easy range,

and fired. The first shot hit the animal in the shoulder; then came a

desperate chase. The buffalo ran, but feebly. Lucius fired his second

barrel, this time at still closer quarters, and the brute, gaunt and

famished like himself, rolled head downwards on the snow.

He took out his hunting-knife, cut out the tongue and choicer morsels,

as much as he could carry, and then with infinite labour buried his

prey in the snow, meaning to return next morning with Absalom to fetch

the remainder; provided always that the snow kept his secret, and

wolves or wolverines did not devour his prize in the interval. He was

able to carry away with him food that would serve for more than a

week. No matter how hard or skinny the flesh might be,—it was flesh.

Darkness had closed round him when these labours were finished,

but stars shone faintly above the pine-tops: and he carried a

pocket-lantern which he could light on emergency. Where was he? That

was the first question to be settled. He found some difficulty in

recalling the track he had taken. Great Heaven! if he had strayed too

far afield, and should find return impossible! Geoffrey yonder dying,

without his brotherly arm to support the drooping head, his loving

hand to wipe the brow on which the death-damps gathered! The very

thought made him desperate. He looked up at the stars, his only guides,

shouldered his burden, and walked rapidly in that direction which he

supposed the right one.

During their enforced idleness, Geoffrey and Lucius had made themselves

tolerably familiar with the aspect of the forest within a radius of

ten miles or so from their hut. They knew the course of the river,

and its tributary streams. They had even cut rude avenues through the

pine-wood, in their quest of fuel, cutting down trees in a straight

line at a dozen yards apart, leaving six feet or so of the trunk

standing, like a rude pillar; so that within half a mile of their

encampment there were on every side certain roughly-marked approaches.

But to-night Lucius had lost ken of the river, and knew himself to be a

good ten miles from any tree that he or Geoffrey had ever hewn asunder.

He stopped after about half-an-hour’s tramp; felt himself at fault;

lighted his lantern, and looked about him.

An impenetrable forest; a scene of darksome grandeur, gigantic

pine-trees towering skyward, laden with snow; but over all a dreadful

monotony, that made the picture gloomy as the shores of Acheron. Nor

could Lucius discover any landmark whereby he might steer his course.

He stopped for some minutes, his heart beating heavily. It was not the

fear of peril to himself that tormented him. His mind—rarely a prey to

selfish fears—was full of his dying friend.

‘To be away at such a time!’ he thought; ‘to have shared all the

brightest hours of my youth with him, and not to be near him at the

last!’

This was bitter. He pushed on desperately, muttering a brief prayer;

telling himself that Heaven could not be so cruel as to sever him from

the friend who was dear as a brother, who represented to him all he had

ever known of brotherly love.

He paused suddenly, startled by a sight so unexpected that his

arm dropped nerveless, and his burden fell at his feet. A light

in the thick forest; the welcome glare of a traveller’s fire. Not

the far-spreading blaze of conflagration, the devouring flames

stretching from tree to tree—a spectacle he had seen in the course

of his wanderings—but the steady light of a mighty fire of heaped-up

pine-logs; a fire to keep wolves and grisly bears at bay, and to defy

the blighting presence of the frost-fiend himself.

Lucius resumed his burden, and made straight for the fire. A wide and

deep circle, making a kind of basin, had been dug out of the snow. In

the centre burned a huge fire, and before it a man lay on his stomach,

his chin resting on his folded arms, lazily watching the blazing logs;

a man with wild hair and wilder eyes; a man whose haggard face even the

red glow of the fire could not brighten.

‘What!’ cried Lucius, recognising him at the first glance; ‘have you

got no farther than this, Matchi? A sorry result of your boasted

cleverness! Where’s the Indian?’

‘I don’t know,’ the other answered shortly. ‘Dead, perhaps, before

this. We quarrelled and parted two days ago. The man’s a knave and a

ruffian.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Lucius. ‘He persevered, I suppose; pushed

on towards the fort, and you didn’t. That’s the meaning of your

quarrel.’

‘Have it so, if you like,’ returned the stranger with scornful

carelessness. Then seeing that Lucius still stood upon the edge of the

circle—a bank of snow—looking down at him, he lifted his dark eyes

slowly, and returned the gaze.

‘Have things brightened with you since we parted company?’ he asked.

‘How should they brighten, unless Providence sent some luckier

wanderers across our track?—not a likely event at this time of year.

No, the aspect of our affairs has darkened to the deepest gloom.

Geoffrey Hossack is dying of fever.’

‘Amidst universal cold—strange anomaly!’ said the other, in his hard

unpitying voice. ‘But since death seems inevitable for all of us, I’d

gladly change lots with your friend—burn with fever—and go out of this

world unconscious. It is looking death in the face that tortures me: to

lie here, looking into that fire, and calculate the slow but too swift

hours that stand between me and—annihilation. _That_ gnaws my vitals.’

Lucius looked down at the strongly-marked passionate face, half in

scorn, half in pity.

‘You can see no horizon beyond your grave under these pine-trees,’ he

said. ‘You do not look upon this life as an education for the better

life that is to succeed it?’

‘No. I had done with that fable before I was twenty.’

A hard cruel face, with the red fire shining in it—the face of a

man who, knowing himself unfit for heaven, was naturally disposed

to unbelief in a future, which for this dark soul could only mean

expiation.

‘Can you help me to find my way back to the hut?’ Lucius asked, after a

meditative pause.

‘Not I. I thought I was a hundred miles from it. I have been wandering

in a circle, I suppose.’

‘Evidently. Where did you leave Kekek-ooarsis?’

The stranger looked at him doubtfully, as if hardly understanding the

drift of the question. Lucius repeated it.

‘I don’t know. There is no “where” in this everlasting labyrinth. We

disagreed, and parted—somewhere!’

Lucius Davoren’s gaze, wandering idly about that sunken circle in

the snow, where every inch of ground was fitfully illuminated by the

ruddy glare of the pine-logs, was suddenly attracted by an object that

provoked his curiosity—a little heap of bones, half burnt, at the edge

of the fire. The flame licked them every now and then, as the wind blew

it towards them.

‘You have had a prize, I see,’ he said, pointing to these bones.

‘Biggish game! How did you manage without a gun?’

‘A knife is sometimes as good as a gun!’ said the other, without

looking up. He stretched out his long lean arm as he spoke, and pushed

the remainder of his prey farther into the fire.

In a moment—before the other was aware—Lucius had leaped down into the

circle, and was on his knees, dragging the bones back out of the fire

with his naked hands.

‘Assassin! devil!’ he cried, turning to the stranger with a look of

profoundest loathing: ‘I thought as much. These are human bones. This

is the fore-arm of a man.’

‘That’s a lie,’ the other answered coolly. ‘I snared a wolf, and

stabbed him with my clasp-knife.’

‘I have not worked in the dissecting-room for nothing,’ said Lucius

quietly. ‘Those are human bones. You have staved off death by murder.’

‘If I had, it would be no worse than the experience of a hundred

shipwrecks,’ answered the other, glancing from Lucius to his gun, with

an air at once furtive and ferocious, like some savage beast at bay.

‘I have half a mind to shoot you down like the wolf you are,’ said

Lucius, rising slowly from his knees, after throwing the bones back

into the blaze.

‘Do it, and welcome,’ answered the stranger, casting off all reserve

with a contemptuous tone, that might be either the indifference of

desperation or mere bravado. ‘Famine knows no law. I have done only

what I daresay you would have done in my situation. We had starved,

literally starved—no half rations, but sheer famine—for five days, when

I killed him with a sudden stroke of my hatchet. I cut off one arm, and

buried the rest of him—yonder, under the snow. I daresay I was half-mad

when I did it. Yet it was a mercy to put him out of his misery. If he

had been a white skin, I should have tossed up with him which was to

go, but I didn’t stand on punctilio with a nigger. It may be my turn

next, perhaps. Shoot me, and welcome, if you’ve a mind to waste a

charge of powder on so miserable a wretch.’

‘No,’ said Lucius, ‘no one has made me your judge or your executioner.

I leave you to your conscience. But if ever you darken the threshold of

our hut again—be your errand what it may—by the God above us both, you

shall die like a dog!’

Matchi’s keen eyes followed the vanishing form of his accuser, and his

thin lips shaped themselves into a triumphant grin.

‘You didn’t inquire about the money the Indian carried,’ he muttered.

‘_That_ was my real motive. Better to be thought a cannibal than a

thief. And with that money I can begin life again if ever I get clear

of this forest.’

* * * * *

Lucius Davoren spent that night in the forest, by a fire of his own

kindling, after having put some distance between himself and that other

wanderer. He recruited exhausted nature with a buffalo steak, and then

sat out the night by his lonely fire; sometimes dozing, more often

watching, knowing not when murder might creep upon him with stealthy

footfall across the silent snow. Morning came, however, and the night

had brought no attack. By daylight he regained the lost trail, found

his way back to the hut, laden with his spoil, and to his unspeakable

joy found a change for the better in the sick man.

‘I have gaven him his traft, bongdual,’ said Mr. Schanck, pointing to

the empty medicine bottle, ‘and he is gooller; he bersbires. Dat is

goot.’

‘Von der Stirne heisse,

Rinnen muss der Schweiss.’

Yes, perspiration had arisen, nature’s healing dew; not the awful

damps of swift-coming death. Lucius knelt by the rough bed, and thanked

God for this happy change. How sweet was prayer at such a moment! He

thought of that murderous wretch in the forest, waiting for the death

he had sought to defer by famine’s last loathsome resource; that

revolting expedient which it was horror to think of—a lost wretch

without a hope beyond the grave, without belief in a God.

On his knees, his breast swollen by the rapture of gratitude and glad

surprise, Lucius thought of that wretch almost with pity.

He made a strong broth with some of the buffalo flesh, and fed his

patient by spoonfuls. To rally from such prostration must needs be a

slow process; but once hopeful of his friend’s recovery, Lucius was

content to wait for the issue in quiet confidence.

He told Absalom his adventure in the forest, the hideous discovery of

the faithful Indian’s fate.

‘Vat for a man! And vhen he has digesded the Indian, and feels again

vhat boor Geoffrey used to gall a vaguum, he vill gome and ead us,’

said the German despondently.

‘He will not cross this threshold. What! do you think I would let that

ravening beast approach _him_?’ pointing to the prostrate figure on the

bed. ‘I have told him what I should do if he came here. He knows the

penalty.’

‘You vould gill him?’

‘Without one scruple.’

‘I tink you are in your right,’ answered Absalom tranquilly. ‘It is an

onbleasant itea do be eaden.’

Two days passed slowly. Geoffrey rallied. Very slow was the progress

towards recovery—almost imperceptible to the non-professional eye, but

it was progress. Lucius perceived it, and was thankful. He had not

slept since that night in the forest, but watched all night beside the

patient’s bed—his gun within reach of his hand, loaded with ball.

On the third night of his watch, when Geoffrey had been wandering a

little, and then had fallen into a placid slumber, there came a sound

at the door—a sound that was neither the waving of a pine-branch nor

the cry of bird or beast; a sound distinctly human.

Lucius had barricaded his door with a couple of pine-trunks, placed

transversely, like a St. Andrew’s cross. The door itself was a

fragile contrivance (three or four roughly-hewn planks nailed loosely

together), but the St. Andrew’s cross made a formidable barrier.

He heard the door tried with a rough impatient hand. The pine-trunks

groaned, but held firm. The door was shaken again; then, after a

moment’s pause, the same impatient hand shook the little parchment

window. This offered but a frail defence; it rattled, yielded, then,

after one vigorous thrust, burst inward, and a dark ragged head and

strong bony shoulders appeared in the opening.

‘I am starving,’ cried a hoarse voice, faint, yet with a strange force

in its hollow tones. It was the voice of the man who called himself

Matchi. ‘Give me shelter—food—if you have any to give. It is my last

chance,’ he gasped breathlessly.

He widened the space about him with those strong desperate arms, and

made as if he would have leapt into the hut. Lucius raised his gun,

cocked it, and took aim deliberately, without an instant’s hesitation.

‘I told you what would happen if you came here,’ he said, and, with the

words, fired.

The man fell backwards, dragging the thin parchment window and some

part of its fragile framework with him. His death-clutch had fastened

on the splintered wood. A wild gust of north-east wind rushed in

through the blank space in the log wall, but Lucius Davoren did not

feel it.

‘Great God!’ he asked himself, a slow horror creeping through his

ice-cold veins, ‘was that a murder?’

END OF THE PROLOGUE.

Book the First.

CHAPTER I.

LOOKING BACKWARDS.

Behold, O reader, the eastern end of the great city; a region strange

beyond all measure to the dwellers in the west; a low flat marshy

district, where the land and the river seem to have become entangled

with each other in inextricable confusion, by reason of manifold creeks

and creeklets, basins, and pools, which encroach upon the shore, and

where the tall spars of mighty merchantmen and giant emigrant-ships

rise cheek by jowl with factory chimneys; where the streets are dark

and narrow, and the sound of engines hoarsely labouring greets the ear

at every turn; where the staple commodity seems to be ship-biscuit;

where the shipchandler has his stronghold; where the provision-dealer

has his storehouse, in which vast hoards of dried meats and tinned

provisions, pickles, and groceries are piled from floor to ceiling

and from cellar to garret; a world in which the explorer stumbles

unawares upon ropewalks, or finds himself suddenly involved in a cloud

of bonnetless factory girls, thick as locusts in Arabia, who jibe and

flout at the stranger. Roads there are, broad and airy enough, which

lead away from the narrow streets and the stone basins, the quays,

the docks, the steam-cranes, and tall ships—not to the country, there

seems no such thing as country accessible from this peculiar world—but

to distant marshes and broader water; roads fringed with dingy houses,

and here and there a factory, and here and there a house of larger

size and greater pretension than its neighbours, shut in by high walls

perchance, and boasting an ancient garden; a garden where the tall elms

were saplings in the days when kings went hunting on the Essex coast

yonder; and when this east-end of London had its share of fashion and

splendour.

Perhaps of all these broader thoroughfares, Shadrack-road was the

shabbiest. It had struggled into existence later than the rest, and

in all its dismal length could boast but one of those substantial old

red-brick mansions whose occasional appearance redeemed the commonness

of the other high roads. There was a sprinkling of humble shops, a

seamen’s lodging-house, a terrace or two of shabby-genteel houses,

three-storied, with little iron balconies that had never been painted

within the memory of man; poor sordid-looking little houses, which were

always putting bills in their smoke-darkened windows, beseeching people

to come and lodge in them. There were a few modern villas, of the

speculative-builders’ pattern, whose smart freshness put to shame their

surroundings; and one of these, a corner one, with about half a perch

of garden-ground, was distinguished by a red lamp and a brass-plate, on

which appeared the following inscription:

MR. LUCIUS DAVOREN,

_Surgeon_.

Here Lucius Davoren had begun the battle of life; actual life, in all

its cold reality; hard and common and monotonous, and on occasion

hopeless; a life strangely different from the explorer’s adventurous

days, from the trapper’s lonely commune with nature in the trackless

pine-woods; a life wherein the veriest dreamer could find scant margin

for poetry; a life whose dull realities weigh down the soul of man

as though an iron hand were laid upon his brain, grinding out every

aspiration for better things than the day’s food and the night’s

shelter.

He stands alone in the world; there is comfort at least in that. Let

the struggle be sharp as it may, there is no cherished companion to

share the pain. Let poverty’s stern grip pinch him never so sharply, he

feels the pinch alone. Father, mother, the child sister, whom he loved

so dearly fifteen years ago, are all dead. Their graves lie far away in

a Hampshire churchyard, the burial-place of that rural village of which

his father was Rector for thirty years of his unambitious life.

He has another sister, but she was counted lost some years ago, and to

think of her is worse than to think of the dead. In all those years,

from the time when he was a lad just emancipated from Winchester school

to this present hour, he has never been heard to speak her name; but he

keeps her in his memory nevertheless, and has the record of her hapless

fate hidden away in the secret-drawer of his desk, with a picture of

the face whose beauty was fatal.

She was his favourite sister, his senior by two years, fond and

proud of him, his counsellor and ally in all things; like himself,

passionately fond of music; like himself a born musician. This charm,

in conjunction with her beauty, had made her the glory and delight

of a small provincial circle, which widened before her influence.

Wykhamston society was the narrowest and stiffest of systems; but the

fame of Janet Davoren’s beauty and Janet Davoren’s voice travelled

beyond the bounds of Wykhamston society. In a word, Miss Davoren was

taken notice of by the county. The meek old Rector, with his pleasant

face, and bald head scantily garnished with iron-gray hair, was made to

emerge from retirement, in order to gratify the county. He was bidden

to a ball at the Marquis of Guildford’s; to a private concert at Sir

Horatio and Lady Veering Baker’s; to dinners and evening parties twenty

miles away from the modest Rectory. Miss Davoren was even invited to

stay at Lady Baker’s; and, going ostensibly for a few days, remained

her ladyship’s guest for nearly a month. They were all so fond of the

dear girl, Lady Baker informed the Rector.

‘_I_ am not good enough, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Davoren, when the

Marchioness and the Baronet’s wife, after calling upon her, and being

intensely civil for fifteen minutes, ignored her in their cards of

invitation. ‘Never mind, Stephen, if you and Janet enjoy yourselves,

I’m satisfied; and it’s lucky they haven’t invited me, for I’ve nothing

to wear but my old black satin and the Indian scarf, and _they’d_

never do for the Castle or Lady Veering Baker’s. They’re well enough

in Wykhamston, where people are accustomed to them.’

So the Rector’s worthy wife, who had supreme control of the family

purse, arrayed her handsome daughter in the prettiest dresses the

Wykhamston milliner could achieve, and ornamented the girl’s dark hair

with camelias from the little greenhouse, and was content to sit at

home and wonder what the grand Castle folks thought of her Janet, and

whether her dear old man was having an agreeable rubber; content to sit

up late into the night, while the rectory handmaidens snored in their

attic chambers, till the creaky old covered wagonette brought home the

revellers, when she would sit up yet another hour to hear the tidings

of her darling’s triumphs; what songs she had sung, what dances she had

danced, and all the gracious things that had been said of her and to

her.

About this time, the idea that Miss Davoren was destined to make a

splendid marriage became a fixed belief in the minds of the Rector’s

family, from the head thereof to the very cook who cooked the dinner,

always excepting the young lady herself, who seemed to take very little

thought of anything but music; the organ which she played in the old

church; the old-fashioned square piano in the rectory drawing-room.

It did not seem possible to the simple mind of Mrs. Davoren that all

this admiration could result in nothing; that her daughter could be

the cynosure of every eye at Guildford Castle, the acknowledged belle

at Lady Veering Baker’s musical evenings, and yet remain plain Janet

Davoren, or be reduced to the necessity of marrying a curate or a

struggling country surgeon. Something must come of all this patronage,

which had kindled the fire of jealousy in many a Wykhamston breast. But

when the fond mother ventured to suggest as much to the girl herself,

she was put off with affectionate reproof.

‘Dearest mother, can you be so innocent as not to see that all this

notice means nothing more than the gratification of the moment? The

Marchioness and Lady Baker had happened to hear that I sing tolerably,

and as the common run of amateur music is not worth much, thought they

might as well have me. It only cost the trouble of calling upon you,

and pretending to be interested in your poultry and papa’s garden. If

this were London, and they could get professional singers, they would

not have taken even so much trouble as that about me.’

‘Never mind what the Marchioness and Lady Baker mean,’ said the mother;

‘I am not thinking of them, but of the people you meet there; the

young men who pay you such compliments, and crowd round you after your

songs.’

Janet laughed, almost bitterly, at this speech and at the mother’s

eager look, full of anticipated triumph.

‘And who will go back to their own world and forget my existence, when

they leave Hampshire,’ she said.

‘But there must be some whose attentions are more marked than others,’

urged Mrs. Davoren; ‘county people, perhaps. There is that Mr.

Cumbermere, for instance, who has an immense estate on the borders of

Berkshire. I’ve heard your papa talk of him; quite a young man, and

unmarried. Come, Janet, be candid with your poor old mother. Isn’t

there one among them all who seems a little in earnest?’

‘Not one among them, mother,’ the girl answered, looking downward with

a faint, faint sigh, so faint as to escape even the mother’s ear; ‘not

one. They all say the same thing, or the same kind of thing, in just

the same way. They think me rather good-looking, I believe, and they

seem really to like my singing and playing. But they will go away and

forget both, and my good looks as well. There is not one of them ever

so little in love with me; and if I were in love with one of them I

might almost as well be in love with all, for they are all alike.’

This was discouraging, but the mother still cherished her dream;

cherished it until the bitter hour of awakening—that fatal hour in

which she learned from a letter in the girl’s own hand that Janet had

abandoned home, friends, reputation—the very hope of heaven, as it

seemed to the heartbroken father and mother—to follow the fortunes of

a villain, of whose identity they had not the faintest idea, whose

opportunities for the compassing of this deadly work would seem to have

been of the smallest.

The girl’s letter—passionate, despairing, with a wild and deep despair

which told how desperate had been the conflict between love and

duty—gave no hint of her betrayer’s name or place in the world.

The letter was somewhat vaguely worded. There are some things which

no woman could write. Janet Davoren did not tell them that she went

of her own free will to perdition. But so much despair could hardly

accompany an innocent passion; sorrow so deep and hopeless implied

guilt. To the Rector and his wife there seemed no room for doubt. They

read and re-read the long wild appeal for forgiveness or oblivion; that

their only daughter, the pride and idol of both, might be pardoned or

forgotten. They weighed every word, written with a swift impetuous

hand, blotted by remorseful tears, but no ray of hope shone between the

lines. They could arrive at but one miserable conclusion. The girl had

accepted dishonour as the cost of a love she was too weak to renounce.

The letter was long, wild, recklessly worded; but in all there was no

clue to the traitor.

The Rector and his wife made no outcry. They were even heroic enough

to suppress all outward token of their grief, lest their little world

should discover the cruel truth. The father went about his daily

work pale and shaken, but calm of aspect. The only noticeable fact

in his life was that from this day forth he neglected his garden and

his poultry-yard. His innocent delight in Dorking fowls and standard

rose-trees perished for ever with his daughter’s disappearance. The

mother wept in secret, and suffered not so much as a single tear to be

seen by her household.

The servants were told that Miss Davoren had gone upon a visit to some

friends in London. Janet had left the house in the early morning,

unseen by any one except the lad who attended to the garden, and him

she had employed to convey a small portmanteau to the railway station.

The manner of her departure therefore had been commonplace enough;

but the servants were accustomed to hear a good deal of preliminary

discussion before any movement of the family, and wondered not a little

that there should have been nothing said about Miss Davoren’s departure

beforehand, and that she should have gone away so early, before any

one was up, and without so much as a cup of tea, as the cook remarked

plaintively.

The wretched father and mother read that farewell letter till every

word it contained seemed written on their hearts, but it helped them

in no manner towards the knowledge of their daughter’s fate. They went

over the names in their own little circle; the half-dozen or so of

young men—more or less unattractive—who were on visiting terms at the

Rectory; but there was no member of Wykhamston society they could for a

moment consider guilty: and indeed, the answer to every suspicion was

obvious in the fact that every member of that small community was in

his place: the curate going his quiet rounds on a hog-maned pony; the

unmarried doctor scouring the neighbourhood from breakfast to tea-time

in his travel-worn dog-cart; the lawyer’s son true to the articles that

bound him to his father’s service; the small landowners and gentlemanly

tenant-farmers of the immediate vicinity to be seen as of old at

church and market-place. No, there was no one the Rector could suspect

of act or part in his darling’s flight.

A little later, and with extreme caution, he ventured to inquire

among certain of his parishioners if any stranger had been seen about

Wykhamston within the last month or so. He contrived to put this

question to a well-to-do corn-chandler, the chief gossip of the little

town, in a purely conversational manner.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Huskings the corn-chandler, assenting to a general

remark upon the dulness that had prevailed of late in Wykhamston, ‘the

place has been quiet enough. It ain’t much of a place for strangers at

the best of times, unless it’s one of them measuring chaps that come

spying about, with a yard measure, after a new railway, that’s to take

everybody away from the town and never bring nobody to it, and raise

the price of meat and vegibles. There was that horgan-playin’ chap at

the George the other day; what _he_ come for nobody could find out,

for he didn’t measure nothing; only poked about the old church on

workadays, and played the horgan. But of course you’d know all about

him from Miss Davoren, as must have seen him sometimes when she went to

practise with the coheer.’

The Rector’s sad face blanched a little. This was the man!

‘No,’ he said, somewhat falteringly, ‘my daughter never spoke of him;

or if she did I didn’t take any notice. She’s away now for a little

time, staying with friends in London. She may have told us about him; I

don’t remember.’

‘Strange old gentleman, the Rector!’ Mr. Huskings remarked to his wife

afterwards; ‘such a nervous way with him lately; breaking fast, I’m

afeard.’

‘Miss Davoren could hardly have missed seein’ of him,’ he answered. ‘He

were always about the church, when he warn’t fishin’, but he were a

great hand at fishin’. Rather a well-looking chap, with dark eyes and

long dark hair; looked summat like a furriner, but spoke English plain

enough in spite of his furrin looks.’

‘Young?’ asked the Rector.

‘Might be anything betwixt twenty-five and thirty-five.’

‘And a gentleman, I suppose?’

‘His clothes was fust-class, and he paid his way honourable. Had the

best rooms over yonder,’ with a jerk of his head in the direction

of the George, ‘and tipped everybody ’andsome. He warn’t here above

a month or six weeks; but he hired a pianner from Mr. Stammers, up

street, and there he’d sit by the hour together, Mrs. Capon told me,

strum, strum, strum. “Music that made you feel creepy-crawly like,”

says Mrs. Capon; “not a good hearty tune as you could understand, but

meandering and meandering like till you felt as if you’d gone to sleep

in a cathedral while the organ was playin’,” says Mrs. Capon.’

Music! Yes, that was the spell which had lured his child to her ruin.

Nothing less than that fatal magic, which had held her from her

babyhood, could have been strong enough to beguile that poor young soul.

‘Did you hear the man’s name?’ asked the Rector.

‘I heerd it, sure enough, sir; but I never were a good hand at

remembering names. Mrs. Capon ud tell you in a moment.’

‘No, no,’ exclaimed the Rector nervously; ‘I’ve no curiosity; it’s of

no importance. Good-afternoon, Huskings. You—you may send me a sack of

barley;’ this with a little pang, remembering what a joyless business

his poultry-yard had become of late.

He went ‘up street’ to Mr. Stammers, who kept a little music-shop and

let out pianos.

‘You’d better look in at the Rectory and tune the piano before my

daughter comes home, Stammers,’ said the Rector, with a bitter pain at

his heart, and then sat down in the chair by Mr. Stammers’ door—set

wide open on this warm afternoon—a little out of breath, though the

High-street from the corn-merchant’s door to the music-seller’s was a

dead level.

‘Yes, sir. Miss Davoren away, sir? I thought I missed her at church

last Sunday. Mr. Filby’s playing don’t come anything nigh hers. What a

wonderful gift she has, sir! The Marchioness was up town yesterday—they

are at the Castle for a week, ong parsong—and drew up here to give an

order. I made bold to show her the little fantasia I took the liberty

to dedicate to Miss Davoren. She smiled so sweet when she saw the name.

“You’ve reason to be proud of your Rector’s daughter, Mr. Stammers,”

she said; “such a lovely young lady, and such a fine musician! I wish I

had time to call at the Rectory.” And then she arst after your ’elth,

sir, and your good lady’s, and Miss Davoren’s, quite affable, just

before she drove away. She was drivin’ her own ponies.’

‘She was very good,’ said Mr. Davoren absently. O, vain delight in

earthly pomp and pride! The notice of these magnates of the land had

not saved his child from destruction; nay, perhaps had been, in some

unknown manner, the primary cause of her fall.

‘Yes, you had better tune the piano, Stammers,’ he went on, with a

feeble sigh. ‘She will like to find it in good tune when she comes

back. By the way, you let a piano to the gentleman at the George the

other day—Mr.—’

‘Mr. Vandeleur,’ said Stammers briskly. ‘Let him the best piano I

have—a brand-new Collard—at thirty shillings a month, bein’, as it

was, a short let. And wonderful it was to hear him play upon it, too!

I’ve stood on the staircase at the George half an hour at a stretch,

listenin’ to him.’

‘A fine musician?’ inquired the Rector, with another sigh. Fatal music,

deadly art!

‘Fine isn’t the word, sir. There’s a many fine musicians, as far

as pianoforte playing goes,’ with a little conscious air of inward

swelling, as of a man who numbered himself among these gifted ones. ‘I

don’t think there’s anythink of Mozart’s, or ’Andels, or ’Aydn’s, or

Beethoven’s—that’s the king of ’em all, is Beethoven—you could put a

name to that I wouldn’t play at sight; but I don’t rank myself with Mr.

Vandeleur, the gentleman at the George, for all that.’

‘What is the difference?’

Mr. Stammers tapped his forehead.

‘There, sir; there’s where the difference lies. I ’aven’t ’is ’ead.

Not but what I had a taste for music when I was that ’igh,’ indicating

the altitude of a foot and a half from the floor, ‘and was took notice

of by the gentry of these parts in consequence, my father bein’, as

you are aware, sir, a numble carpenter. But I ’aven’t the ’ead that

man ’as. To hear him ’andle Beethoven, sir, the Sonater Pathetick, or

the “Moonlight,” wonderful! And not that alone. There was sonaters and

fugues he played, sir—whether they was his own composition or wasn’t,

I can’t say; but they were fugues and sonaters I never heard before,

and I don’t believe mortal man ever wrote ’em. They outraged all the

laws of ’armony, sir. Why, there was consecutive fifths in ’em as thick

as gooseberries, and yet they was as fine as anythink in Mozart. Such

music! It turned one’s blood cold to hear him. If you could fancy the

old gentleman playing the piano—which, bein’ a clergyman, of course you

wouldn’t give your mind to—you could fancy him playing like that.’

‘An eccentric style?’ inquired the Rector.

‘Eccentric! It was the topsy-turviest kind of thing I ever heard in my

life. Yet if that man was to play in public, he’d take the town by

storm; they’d run after him like mad.’

‘Do you think he is a professional performer?’

‘Hardly; he hadn’t the professional way with him. I’ve seen plenty of

the profession, havin’ managed for all the concerts that have been

given in Wykhamston for the last twenty years. No; and a professional

wouldn’t dawdle away close upon six weeks in a small country town such

as this. No; what I take him for is a wealthy amateur—a gentleman that

had been living a little too fast up in London, and come down here to

freshen himself up a bit with country air and quiet.’

‘How did he spend his time?’

‘In the church, a good bit of it, playing the organ. He used to get the

keys from old Bopolt, the clerk. I wonder you didn’t hear of it, sir.’

‘No,’ said the Rector, ‘they told me nothing.’ This with a sigh so

deep, so near akin to a groan, that it smote the heart of the lively

Stammers.

‘I’m afraid you’re tired, sir, this ’ot day—tryin’ weather—so

changeable; the thermumitor has gone up to eighty-one, Farren’s heat.

Can I get you a glass of water, sir, with a dash of somethink, if I

might take the liberty?’

‘Thank you, Stammers; no, it’s nothing. I’ve been a little worried

lately. Bopolt had no business to admit any one into the church

habitually.’

‘I daresay Mr. Vandeleur made it worth his while, sir. He was quite a

gentleman, I assure you. And it wasn’t as if you was in the ’abit of

keepin’ the sacramential plate in the vestry.’

‘There are other things that a man can steal,’ said the Rector moodily;

‘more precious things than paten or chalice. But no matter. I don’t

suppose Bopolt meant any harm, only—only he might have told me.

Good-afternoon, Mr. Stammers.’

‘Do you feel yourself strong enough for the walk ’ome, sir? You look

rather pale—overcome by the ’eat.’

‘Yes, yes; quite strong. Good-afternoon;’ and Stephen Davoren plodded

his way down the shadeless High-street till he came to a little court

leading to the church; Wykhamston Church being, for some reason or

other, hidden away at the back of the High-street, as though it were an

unsightly thing, and only approachable by courts and alleys.

Old John Bopolt, the parish clerk, quavering and decrepit after the

manner of rural clerks, had his habitation in the court which made the

isthmus of communication between the High-street and the churchyard.

He rose hastily from his tea-table at sight of his Rector, and made

a little old-world bow, while Mrs. Bopolt and Mrs. Bopolt’s married

daughter, and the married daughter’s Betsy Jane, an unkempt girl of

fourteen or so, huddled together with a respectful and awestricken air

before that dignitary.

‘Bopolt,’ said the Rector, in a sterner tone than he was wont to use,

‘what right had you to allow the church to be made a lounging-place for

idle strangers?’

‘A lounging-place, sir! I never did any such-like thing. There was

no lounging went on, to my knowledge; but I’ve been in the habit

of showing the monniments occasionally, as you know, sir, to any

respectable stranger, and the rose winder over the south door.’

‘Showing the monuments; yes, that’s one thing. But to let a stranger

have the key habitually—’

‘Meanin’ the gentleman at the George, sir,’ faltered the clerk, with

an embarrassed air. ‘He was quite the gentleman; and Mr. Filby, the

organist, sir, knew as he was in the ’abit of playin’ the organ for

a ’our or so, and left the keys for him regular, did Mr. Filby, and

says to me, “John, whenever Mr. Vandeleur at the George likes to play

the organ, he’s free and welcome, and you can tell him so, with my

respects.”’

‘He bribed you, I suppose?’ said Mr. Davoren.

‘He may have given me a trifle at odd times as some recompensation for

my trouble in opening the door for him, sir. I don’t wish to deceive

you; and if I’d thought for a moment there was any harm, I’d have cut

my fingers off sooner than open the churchdoor for him. But I made

certain as you knew, sir, more particularly as I’d seen Miss Davoren go

into the church more than once when Mr. Vandeleur was there.’

‘Of course,’ said the Rector, without flinching, ‘she had her choir

work to attend to. Well, John, there’s no use in being angry about a

mistake; only remember the church is not a place for the amusement of

amateur musicians. Good-afternoon.’

The family, who had looked on in unspeakable awe during this brief

dialogue, now began to breathe freely again, and a kettle, which

had been sputtering destruction over Mrs. Bopolt’s bright fender

unregarded, was now snatched off the top bar by that careful matron,

who had not dared to move hand or foot in the presence of an offended

Rector.

Stephen Davoren walked slowly homeward, a little more sick at heart

than when he began his voyage of discovery. Other people had known the

seducer; other people had seen his daughter go into the church to meet

her tempter, polluting that sacred place by the conflict of an earthly

passion. Other people had guessed something of the dreadful truth,

perhaps. He only had been blind.

The thought of this, that his little world might be in the secret of

his sad story, helped to break his heart. If it had not been broken by

the mere fact of his daughter’s ruin, it would have been crushed by the

weight of his own shame. He could not look the world in the face any

more. He tried to do his duty manfully, preached the old sound homely

sermons; but when he spoke of sin and sorrow, he seemed to speak of his

lost daughter. He went among his poor, but the thought of Janet set

his wits wandering in the midst of his simple talk, and he would make

little feeble speeches, and repeat himself helplessly, hardly knowing

what he said.

His parishioners perceived the change, and told each other that the

Rector was breaking fast; it was a pity Miss Davoren was away: ‘She’d

have cheered him up a bit, poor old gentleman.’

Lucius came home from Winchester later in the year—his school course

ended, and the winner of a scholarship which would help him at the

university—came home to hear the story of his sister’s flight, his

Janet, the sister whose genius and beauty had been his highest pride.

He took the news of this calamity more quietly than his father and

mother had dared to hope; insisted upon hearing every detail of the

event, but said little.

‘You made inquiries about this man, this Mr. Vandeleur, of course,

father?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ answered the Rector in his despondent way, ‘I wrote to

Harwood—you remember my old friend Harwood, the solicitor?—and set

him to work, not telling him the whole story, as you may suppose. But

it resulted in nothing. I put an advertisement into the _Times_, too,

imploring your sister—’ with a little husky noise before the word, as

if he would fain have uttered his missing girl’s name but could not,

‘imploring her to come back, offering forgiveness, affection, silence,

so worded that none but she could understand. I think she must have

left England, Lucius. I do not believe she would have left that appeal

unanswered.’

‘Vandeleur!’ said Lucius quietly; ‘an assumed name, no doubt. Some

scoundrel she met at the Castle, or at Lady Baker’s. Vandeleur, I pray

God I may come across him before I’m many years older.’

This was all he said, and from this time forth he never pronounced his

sister’s name. He saw how far this grief had gone towards shortening

his father’s life, how dark a cloud it had spread over his mother’s

declining years. A twelvemonth later, and both were gone; the father

dying suddenly one bright spring morning of heart-disease, organic

disorder of long standing, but who shall say how accelerated by that

bitter trouble? The faithful wife drooped from the day of her husband’s

death, and only four months afterwards sank quietly to her rest,

thankful that her journey was ended, placidly happy in the secure hope

of a swift and easy passage to the better land, where she would find

the partner of her life waiting for her, the little daughter who died

years ago greeting her with loving welcome.

And thus Lucius Davoren had been left quite alone in the world in the

first year of his university life, two years before he came up to

London to walk the hospitals, and just five years before he started for

America with Geoffrey Hossack.