Time after time Tord thought that someone went behind him. He often
looked round. Sometimes he stopped to listen, but he understood that
it was the leaves and the wind, and went on. As soon as he started
on again, he heard someone come dancing on silken foot up the slope.
Small feet came tripping. Elves and fairies played behind him. When
he turned round, there was no one, always no one. He shook his fists
at the rustling leaves and went on.
They did not grow silent for that, but they took another tone. Then
began to hiss and to pant behind him. A big viper came gliding. Its
tongue dripping venom hung far out of its mouth, and its bright body
shone against the withered leaves. Beside the snake pattered a wolf,
a big, gaunt monster, who was ready to seize fast in his throat when
the snake had twisted about his feet and bitten Him in the heel.
Sometimes they were both silent, as if to approach him unperceived,
but they soon betrayed themselves by hissing and panting, and
sometimes the wolf's claws rang against a stone. Involuntarily Tord
walked quicker and quicker, but the creatures hastened after him.
When he felt that they were only two steps distant and were preparing
to strike, he turned. There was nothing there, and he had known it
the whole time.
He sat down on a stone to rest. Then the dry leaves played about his
feet as if to amuse him. All the leaves of the forest were there:
small, light yellow birch leaves, red speckled mountain ash, the
elm's dry, dark-brown leaves, the aspen's tough light red, and the
willow's yellow green. Transformed and withered, scarred and torn
were they, and much unlike the downy, light green, delicately shaped
leaves which a few months ago had rolled out of their buds.
"Sinners," said the boy, "sinners, nothing is pure in God's eyes.
The flame of his wrath has already reached you."
When he resumed his wandering, he saw the forest under him bend
before the storm like a heaving sea, but in the path it was calm.
But he heard what he did not feel. The woods were full of voices.
He heard whisperings, wailing songs, coarse threats, thundering
oaths. There were laughter and laments, there was the noise of many
people. That which hounded and pursued, which rustled and hissed,
which seemed to be something and still was nothing, gave him wild
thoughts. He felt again the anguish of death, as when he lay on the
floor in his den and the peasants hunted him through the wood. He
heard again the crashing of branches, the people's heavy tread, the
ring of weapons, the resounding cries, the wild, bloodthirsty noise,
which followed the crowd.
But it was not only that which he heard in the storm. There was
something else, something still more terrible, voices which he could
not interpret, a confusion of voices, which seemed to him to speak in
foreign tongues. He had heard mightier storms than this whistle
through the rigging, but never before had he heard the wind play on
such a many-voiced harp. Each tree had its own voice; the pine did
not murmur like the aspen nor the poplar like the mountain ash.
Every hole had its note, every cliff's sounding echo its own ring.
And the noise of the brooks and the cry of foxes mingled with the
marvellous forest storm. But all that he could interpret; there were
other strange sounds. It was those which made him begin to scream
and scoff and groan in emulation with the storm.
He had always been afraid when he was alone in the darkness of the
forest. He liked the open sea and the bare rocks. Spirits and
phantoms crept about among the trees.
Suddenly he heard who it was who spoke in the storm. It was God, the
great Avenger, the God of justice. He was hunting him for the sake
of his comrade. He demanded that he should deliver up the murderer
to His vengeance.
Then Tord began to speak in the midst of the storm. He told God what
he had wished to do, but had not been able. He had wished to speak
to Berg Rese and to beg him to make his peace with God, but he had
been too shy. Bashfulness had made him dumb. "When I heard that the
earth was ruled by a just God," he cried, "I understood that he was a
lost man. I have lain and wept for my friend many long nights. I
knew that God would find him out, wherever he might hide. But I
could not speak, nor teach him to understand. I was speechless,
because I loved him so much. Ask not that I shall speak to him, ask
not that the sea shall rise up against the mountain."
He was silent, and in the storm the deep voice, which had been the
voice of God for him, ceased. It was suddenly calm, with a sharp sun
and a splashing as of oars and a gentle rustle as of stiff rushes.
These sounds brought Unn's image before him. The outlaw cannot have
anything, not riches, nor women, nor the esteem of men. If he should
betray Berg, he would be taken under the protection of the law. But
Unn must love Berg, after what he had done for her. There was no way
out of it all.
When the storm increased, he heard again steps behind him and
sometimes a breathless panting. Now he did not dare to look back,
for he knew that the white monk went behind him. He came from the
feast at Berg Rese's house, drenched with blood, with a gaping
axe-wound in his forehead. And he whispered: "Denounce him, betray
him, save his soul. Leave his body to the pyre, that his soul may be
spared. Leave him to the slow torture of the rack, that his soul may
have time to repent."
Tord ran. All this fright of what was nothing in itself grew, when
it so continually played on the soul, to an unspeakable terror. He
wished to escape from it all. As he began to run, again thundered
that deep, terrible voice which was God's. God himself hunted him
with alarms, that he should give up the murderer. Berg Rese's crime
seemed more detestable than ever to him. An unarmed man had been
murdered, a man of God pierced with shining steel. It was like a
defiance of the Lord of the world. And the murderer dared to live!
He rejoiced in the sun's light and in the fruits of the earth as if
the Almighty's arm were too short to reach him.
He stopped, clenched his fists and howled out a threat. Then he ran
like a madman from the wood down to the valley.
* * * * *
Tord hardly needed to tell his errand; instantly ten peasants were
ready to follow him. It was decided that Tord should go alone up to
the cave, so that Berg's suspicions should not be aroused. But where
he went he should scatter peas, so that the peasants could find the
way.
When Tord came to the cave, the outlaw sat on the stone bench and
sewed. The fire gave hardly any light, and the work seemed to go
badly. The boy's heart swelled with pity. The splendid Berg Rese
seemed to him poor and unhappy. And the only thing he possessed, his
life, should be taken from him. Tord began to weep.
"What is it?" asked Berg. "Are you ill? Have you been frightened?"
Then for the first time Tord spoke of his fear. "It was terrible in
the wood. I heard ghosts and saw spectres. I saw white monks."
"'Sdeath, boy!"
"They crowded round me all the way up Broad mountain. I ran, but
they followed after and sang. Can I never be rid of the sound? What
have I to do with them? I think that they could go to one who needed
it more."
"Are you mad to-night, Tord?"
Tord talked, hardly knowing what words he used. He was free from all
shyness. The words streamed from his lips.
"They are all white monks, white, pale as death. They all have blood
on their cloaks. They drag their hoods down over their brows, but
still the wound shines from under; the big, red, gaping wound from
the blow of the axe."
"The big, red, gaping wound from the blow of the axe?"
"Is it I who perhaps have struck it? Why shall I see it?"
"The saints only know, Tord," said Berg Rese, pale and with terrible
earnestness, "what it means that you see a wound from an axe. I
killed the monk with a couple of knife-thrusts."
Tord stood trembling before Berg and wrung his hands. "They demand
you of me! They want to force me to betray you!"
"Who? The monks?"
"They, yes, the monks. They show me visions. They show me her, Unn.
They show me the shining, sunny sea. They show me the fisherman's
camping-ground, where there is dancing and merry-making. I close my
eyes, but still I see. 'Leave me in peace,' I say. 'My friend has
murdered, but he is not bad. Let me be, and I will talk to him, so
that he repents and atones. He shall confess his sin and go to
Christ's grave. We will both go together to the places which are so
holy that all sin is taken away from him who draws near them.'"
"What do the monks answer?" asked Berg. "They want to have me saved.
They want to have me on the rack and wheel."
"Shall I betray my dearest friend, I ask them," continued Tord. "He
is my world. He has saved me from the bear that had his paw on my
throat. We have been cold together and suffered every want together.
He has spread his bearskin over me when I was sick. I have carried
wood and water for him; I have watched over him while he slept; I
have fooled his enemies. Why do they think that I am one who will
betray a friend? My friend will soon of his own accord go to the
priest and confess, then we will go together to the land of
atonement."
Berg listened earnestly, his eyes sharply searching Tord's face.
"You shall go to the priest and tell him the truth," he said. "You
need to be among people."
"Does that help me if I go alone? For your sin, Death and all his
spectres follow me. Do you not see how I shudder at you? You have
lifted your hand against God himself. No crime is like yours. I
think that I must rejoice when I see you on rack and wheel. It is
well for him who can receive his punishment in this world and escapes
the wrath to come. Why did you tell me of the just God? You compel
me to betray you. Save me from that sin. Go to the priest." And he
fell on his knees before Berg.
The murderer laid his hand on his head and looked at him. He was
measuring his sin against his friend's anguish, and it grew big and
terrible before his soul. He saw himself at variance with the Will
which rules the world. Repentance entered his heart.
"Woe to me that I have done what I have done," he said. "That which
awaits me is too hard to meet voluntarily. If I give myself up to
the priests, they will torture me for hours; they will roast me with
slow fires. And is not this life of misery, which we lead in fear
and want, penance enough? Have I not lost lands and home? Do I not
live parted from friends and everything which makes a man's
happiness? What more is required?"
When he spoke so, Tord sprang up wild with terror. "Can you repent?"
he cried. "Can my words move your heart? Then come instantly! How
could I believe that! Let us escape! There is still time."
Berg Rese sprang up, he too. "You have done it, then----"
"Yes, yes, yes! I have betrayed you! But come quickly! Come, as
you can repent! They will let us go. We shall escape them!"
The murderer bent down to the floor, where the battle-axe of his
ancestors lay at his feet. "You son of a thief!" he said, hissing
out the words, "I have trusted you and loved you."
But when Tord saw him bend for the axe, he knew that it was now a
question of his own life. He snatched his own axe from his belt and
struck at Berg before he had time to raise himself. The edge cut
through the whistling air and sank in the bent head. Berg Rese fell
head foremost to the floor, his body rolled after. Blood and brains
spouted out, the axe fell from the wound. In the matted hair Tord
saw a big, red, gaping hole from the blow of an axe.
The peasants came rushing in. They rejoiced and praised the deed.
"You will win by this," they said to Tord.
Tord looked down at his hands as if he saw there the fetters with
which he had been dragged forward to kill him he loved. They were
forged from nothing. Of the rushes' green light, of the play of the
shadows, of the song of the storm, of the rustling of the leaves, of
dreams were they created. And he said aloud: "God is great."
But again the old thought came to him. He fell on his knees beside
the body and put his arm under his head.
"Do him no harm," he said. "He repents; he is going to the Holy
Sepulchre. He is not dead, he is not a prisoner. We were just ready
to go when he fell. The white monk did not want him to repent, but
God, the God of justice, loves repentance."
He lay beside the body, talked to it, wept and begged the dead man to
awake. The peasants arranged a bier. They wished to carry the
peasant's body down to his house. They had respect for the dead and
spoke softly in his presence. When they lifted him up on the bier,
Tord rose, shook the hair back from his face, and said with a voice
which shook with sobs,--
"Say to Unn, who made Berg Rese a murderer, that he was killed by
Tord the fisherman, whose father is a wrecker and whose mother is a
witch, because he taught him that the foundation of the world is
justice."
IV
THE PRINCESS BOB AND HER FRIENDS*
BRET HARTE
*Reprinted by permission of, and by special arrangement with Houghton
Mifflin Co.
She was a Klamath Indian. Her title was, I think, a compromise
between her claim as daughter of a chief and gratitude to her
earliest white protector, whose name, after the Indian fashion, she
had adopted. "Bob" Walker had taken her from the breast of her dead
mother at a time when the sincere volunteer soldiery of the
California frontier were impressed with the belief that extermination
was the manifest destiny of the Indian race. He had with difficulty
restrained the noble zeal of his compatriots long enough to convince
them that the exemption of one Indian baby would not invalidate this
theory. And he took her to his home,--a pastoral clearing on the
banks of the Salmon River,--where she was cared for after a frontier
fashion.
Before she was nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness
of the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker. As a playfellow of the young
Walkers she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was
inefficient. She lost the former in the trackless depths of a
redwood forest; she basely abandoned the latter in an extemporized
cradle, hanging like a chrysalis to a convenient bough. She lied and
she stole,--two unpardonable sins in a frontier community, where
truth was a necessity and provisions were the only property. Worse
than this, the outskirts of the clearing were sometimes haunted by
blanketed tatterdemalions with whom she had mysterious confidences.
Mr. Walker more than once regretted his indiscreet humanity; but she
presently relieved him of responsibility, and possibly of
blood-guiltiness, by disappearing entirely.
When she reappeared, it was at the adjacent village of Logport, in
the capacity of housemaid to a trader's wife, who, joining some
little culture to considerable conscientiousness, attempted to
instruct her charge. But the Princess proved an unsatisfactory pupil
to even so liberal a teacher. She accepted the alphabet with great
good-humour, but always as a pleasing and recurring novelty, in which
all interest expired at the completion of each lesson. She found a
thousand uses for her books and writing materials other than those
known to civilized children. She made a curious necklace of bits of
slate-pencil, she constructed a miniature canoe from the pasteboard
covers of her primer, she bent her pens into fish-hooks, and tattooed
the faces of her younger companions with blue ink. Religious
instruction she received as good-humouredly, and learned to pronounce
the name of the Deity with a cheerful familiarity that shocked her
preceptress. Nor could her reverence be reached through analogy; she
knew nothing of the Great Spirit, and professed entire ignorance of
the Happy Hunting-Grounds. Yet she attended divine service
regularly, and as regularly asked for a hymn-book; and it was only
through the discovery that she had collected twenty-five of these
volumes and had hidden them behind the woodpile, that her connection
with the First Baptist Church of Logport ceased. She would
occasionally abandon these civilized and Christian privileges, and
disappear from her home, returning after several days of absence with
an odour of bark and fish, and a peace-offering to her mistress in
the shape of venison or game.
To add to her troubles, she was now fourteen, and, according to the
laws of her race, a woman. I do not think the most romantic fancy
would have called her pretty. Her complexion defied most of those
ambiguous similes through which poets unconsciously apologize for any
deviation from the Caucasian standard. It was not wine nor amber
coloured; if anything, it was smoky. Her face was tatooed with red
and white lines on one cheek, as if a fine-toothed comb had been
drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but for the good-humour that
beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone in her white teeth,
would have been repulsive. She was short and stout. In her scant
drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque, and her
more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly
scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, in moments
of contemplation.
I think I have already shown enough to indicate the incongruity of
her existence with even the low standard of civilization that
obtained at Logport in the year 1860. It needed but one more fact to
prove the far-sighted political sagacity and prophetic ethics of
those sincere advocates of extermination to whose virtues I have done
but scant justice in the beginning of this article. This fact was
presently furnished by the Princess. After one of her periodical
disappearances--this time unusually prolonged--she astonished Logport
by returning with a half-breed baby of a week old in her arms. That
night a meeting of the hard-featured serious matrons of Logport was
held at Mrs. Brown's. The immediate banishment of the Princess was
demanded. Soft-hearted Mrs. Brown endeavoured vainly to get a
mitigation or suspension of the sentence. But, as on a former
occasion, the Princess took matters into her own hands. A few
mornings afterwards a wicker cradle containing an Indian baby was
found hanging on the handle of the door of the First Baptist Church.
It was the Parthian arrow of the flying Princess. From that day
Logport knew her no more.
It had been a bright clear day on the upland, so clear that the
ramparts of Fort Jackson and the flagstaff were plainly visible
twelve miles away from the long curving peninsula that stretched a
bared white arm around the peaceful waters of Logport Bay. It had
been a clear day upon the seashore, albeit the air was filled with
the flying spume and shifting sand of a straggling beach whose low
dunes were dragged down by the long surges of the Pacific and thrown
up again by the tumultuous tradewinds. But the sun had gone down in
a bank of fleecy fog that was beginning to roll in upon the beach.
Gradually the headland at the entrance of the harbour and the
lighthouse disappeared, then the willow fringe that marked the line
of Salmon River vanished, and the ocean was gone. A few sails still
gleamed on the waters of the bay; but the advancing fog wiped them
out one by one, crept across the steel-blue expanse, swallowed up the
white mills and single spire of Logport, and, joining with
reinforcements from the marshes, moved solemnly upon the hills. Ten
minutes more and the landscape was utterly blotted out;
simultaneously the wind died away, and a death-like silence stole
over sea and shore. The faint clang, high overhead, of unseen brent,
the nearer call of invisible plover, the lap and wash of
undistinguishable waters, and the monotonous roll of the vanished
ocean, were the only sounds. As night deepened, the far-off booming
of the fog-bell on the headland at intervals stirred the thick air.
Hard by the shore of the bay, and half hidden by a drifting
sand-hill, stood a low nondescript structure, to whose composition
sea and shore had equally contributed. It was built partly of logs
and partly of driftwood and tarred canvas. Joined to one end of the
main building--the ordinary log-cabin of the settler--was the
half-round pilot-house of some wrecked steamer, while the other gable
terminated in half of a broken whaleboat. Nailed against the boat
were the dried skins of wild animals, and scattered about lay the
flotsam and jetsam of many years' gathering,--bamboo crates, casks,
hatches, blocks, oars, boxes, part of a whale's vertebræ, and the
blades of swordfish. Drawn up on the beach of a little cove before
the house lay a canoe. As the night thickened and the fog grew more
dense, these details grew imperceptible, and only the windows of the
pilot-house, lit up by a roaring fire within the hut, gleamed redly
through the mist.
By this fire, beneath a ship's lamp that swung from the roof, two
figures were seated, a man and a woman. The man, broad-shouldered
and heavily bearded, stretched his listless powerful length beyond a
broken bamboo chair, with his eyes fixed on the fire. The woman
couched cross-legged upon the broad earthen hearth, with her eyes
blinkingly fixed on her companion. They were small, black, round,
berry-like eyes, and as the firelight shone upon her smoky face, with
its one striped cheek of gorgeous brilliancy, it was plainly the
Princess Bob and no other.
Not a word was spoken. They had been sitting thus for more than an
hour, and there was about their attitude a suggestion that silence
was habitual. Once or twice the man rose and walked up and down the
narrow room, or gazed absently from the windows of the pilot-house,
but never by look or sign betrayed the slightest consciousness of his
companion. At such times the Princess from her nest by the fire
followed him with eyes of canine expectancy and wistfulness. But he
would as inevitably return to his contemplation of the fire, and the
Princess to her blinking watchfulness of his face.
They had sat there silent and undisturbed for many an evening in fair
weather and foul. They had spent many a day in the sunshine and
storm, gathering the unclaimed spoil of sea and shore. They had kept
these mute relations, varied only by the incidents of the hunt or
meagre household duties, for three years, ever since the man,
wandering moodily over the lonely sands, had fallen upon the
half-starved woman lying in the little hollow where she had crawled
to die. It had seemed as if they would never be disturbed, until
now, when the Princess started, and, with the instinct of her race,
bent her ear to the ground.
The wind had risen and was rattling the tarred canvas. But in
another moment there plainly came from without the hut the sound of
voices. Then followed a rap at the door; then another rap; and then,
before they could rise to their feet, the door was flung briskly open.
"I beg your pardon," said a pleasant but somewhat decided contralto
voice, "but I don't think you heard me knock. Ah, I see you did not.
May I come in?"
There was no reply. Had the battered figurehead of the Goddess of
Liberty, which lay deeply embedded in the sand on the beach, suddenly
appeared at the door demanding admittance, the occupants of the cabin
could not have been more speechlessly and hopelessly astonished than
at the form which stood in the open doorway.
It was that of a slim, shapely, elegantly dressed young woman. A
scarlet-lined silken hood was half thrown back from the shining mass
of the black hair that covered her small head; from her pretty
shoulders drooped a fur cloak, only restrained by a cord and tassel
in her small gloved hand. Around her full throat was a double
necklace of large white beads, that by some cunning feminine trick
relieved with its infantile suggestion the strong decision of her
lower face.
"Did you say yes? Ah, thank you. We may come in, Barker." (Here a
shadow in a blue army overcoat followed her into the cabin, touched
its cap respectfully, and then stood silent and erect against the
wall.) "Don't disturb yourself in the least, I beg. What a
distressingly unpleasant night! Is this your usual climate?"