It was eighteen days after. In the shadow of a little island of pines,
that lies in a shivering waste of ice and snow, the White Guard were
camped. They were able to do this night what they had not done for
days--dig a great grave of snow, and building a fire of pine wood
at each end of this strange house, get protection and something like
comfort. They sat silent close to the fires. Jaspar Hume was writing
with numbed fingers. The extract that follows is taken from his diary.
It tells that day’s life, and so gives an idea of harder, sterner days
that they had spent and must yet spend, on this weary journey.
December 25th.--This is Christmas Day and Camp twenty-seven. We
have marched only five miles to-day. We are eighty miles from Great
Fish River, and the worst yet to do. We have discovered no signs.
Jeff Hyde has had a bad two days with his frozen foot. Gaspe
Toujours helps him nobly. One of the dogs died this morning.
Bouche is a great leader. This night’s shelter is a god-send.
Cloud-in-the-Sky has a plan whereby some of us will sleep well. We
are in latitude 63deg 47’ and longitude 112deg 32’ 14”. Have worked
out lunar observations. Have marked a tree JH/27 and raised cairn
No. 3.
We are able to celebrate Christmas Day with a good basin of tea and
our stand-by of beans cooked in fat. I was right about them: they
have great sustaining power. To-morrow we will start at ten
o’clock.
The writing done, Jaspar Hume put his book away and turned towards the
rest. Cloud-in-the-Sky and Late Carscallen were smoking. Little could be
seen of their faces; they were snuffled to the eyes. Gaspe Toujours was
drinking a basin of tea, and Jeff Hyde was fitfully dozing by the fire.
The dogs were above in the tent--all but Bouche, who was permitted to be
near his master. Presently the sub-factor rose, took from a knapsack a
small tin pail, and put it near the fire. Then he took five little cups
that fitted snugly into each other, separated them, and put them also
near the fire. None of the party spoke. A change seemed to pass over the
faces of all except Cloud-in-the-Sky. He smoked on unmoved. At length
Hume spoke cheerily: “Now, men, before we turn in we’ll do something in
honour of the day. Liquor we none of us have touched since we started;
but back there in the fort, and maybe in other places too, they will
be thinking of us; so we’ll drink a health to them, though it’s but a
spoonful, and to the day when we see them again!”
The cups were passed round. The sub-factor measured out a very small
portion to each. They were not men of uncommon sentiment; their lives
were rigid and isolated and severe. Fireside comforts under fortunate
conditions they saw but seldom, and they were not given to
expressing their feelings demonstratively. But each man then, save
Cloud-in-the-Sky, had some memory worth a resurrection.
Jaspar Hume raised his cup; the rest followed his example. “To absent
friends and the day when we see them again!” he said; and they all
drank. Gaspe Toujours drank solemnly, and, as though no one was near,
made the sign of the cross; for his memory was with a dark-eyed,
soft-cheeked habitant girl of the parish of Saint Gabrielle, whom he had
left behind seven years before, and had never seen since. Word had come
from the parish priest that she was dying, and though he wrote back in
his homely patois of his grief, and begged that the good father would
write again, no word had ever come. He thought of her now as one for
whom the candles had been lighted and masses had been said.
But Jeff Hyde’s eyes were bright, and suffering as he was, the heart in
him was brave and hopeful. He was thinking of a glorious Christmas Day
upon the Madawaska River three years agone; of Adam Henry, the blind
fiddler; of bright, warm-hearted Pattie Chown, the belle of the ball,
and the long drive home in the frosty night.
Late Carscallen was thinking of a brother whom he had heard preach his
first sermon in Edinburgh twenty years before. And Late Carscallen, slow
of speech and thought, had been full of pride and love of that brilliant
brother. In the natural course of things, they had drifted apart, the
slow and uncouth one to make his home at last in the Far North, and to
be this night on his way to the Barren Grounds. But as he stood with the
cup to his lips he recalled the words of a newspaper paragraph of a
few months before. It stated that “the Reverend James Carscallen,
D.D., preached before Her Majesty on Whitsunday, and had the honour of
lunching with Her Majesty afterwards.” Remembering that, Late Carscallen
rubbed his left hand joyfully against his blanketed leg and drank.
Cloud-in-the-Sky’s thoughts were with the present, and his “Ugh!” of
approval was one of the senses purely. Instead of drinking to absent
friends he looked at the sub-factor and said: “How!” He drank to the
subfactor.
Jaspar Hume had a memory of childhood; of a house beside a swift-flowing
river, where a gentle widowed mother braced her heart against misfortune
and denied herself and slaved that her son might be educated. He had
said to her that some day he would be a great man, and she would be paid
back a hundredfold. And he had worked hard at school, very hard. But one
cold day of spring a message came to the school, and he sped homewards
to the house beside the dark river down which the ice was floating,--he
would remember that floating ice to his last day, and entered a quiet
room where a white-faced woman was breathing away her life. And he fell
at her side and kissed her hand and called to her; and she waked for a
moment only and smiled on him, and said: “Be good, my boy, and God
will make you great.” Then she said she was cold, and some one felt
her feet--a kind old soul who shook her head sadly at him; and a voice,
rising out of a strange smiling languor, murmured: “I’ll away, I’ll away
to the Promised Land--to the Promised Land.... It is cold--so cold--God
keep my boy!” Then the voice ceased, and the kind old soul who had
looked at him, pityingly folded her arms about him, and drawing his
brown head to her breast, kissed him with flowing eyes and whispered:
“Come away, laddie, come away.”
But he came back in the night and sat beside her, and remained there
till the sun grew bright, and then through another day and night,
until they bore her out of the little house by the river to the frozen
hill-side.
Sitting here in this winter desolation Jaspar Hume once more beheld
these scenes of twenty years before and followed himself, a poor
dispensing clerk in a doctor’s office, working for that dream of
achievement in which his mother believed; for which she hoped. And
following further the boy that was himself, he saw a friendless
first-year man at college, soon, however, to make a friend of Clive
Lepage, and to see always the best of that friend, being himself so
true. At last the day came when they both graduated together in science,
a bright and happy day, succeeded by one still brighter, when they both
entered a great firm as junior partners. Afterwards befell the meeting
with Rose Varcoe; and he thought of how he praised his friend Lepage
to her, and brought him to be introduced to her. He recalled all those
visions that came to him when, his professional triumphs achieved, he
should have a happy home, and happy faces by his fireside. And the face
was to be that of Rose Varcoe, and the others, faces of those who should
be like her and like himself. He saw, or rather felt, that face clouded
and anxious when he went away ill and blind for health’s sake. He did
not write to her. The doctors forbade him that. He did not ask her to
write, for his was so steadfast a nature that he did not need letters
to keep him true; and he thought she must be the same. He did not
understand a woman’s heart, how it needs remembrances, and needs to give
remembrances.
Hume’s face in the light of this fire seemed calm and cold, yet behind
it was an agony of memory--the memory of the day when he discovered that
Lepage was married to Rose, and that the trusted friend had grown famous
and well-to-do on the offspring of his brain. His first thought had been
one of fierce determination to expose this man who had falsified all
trust. But then came the thought of the girl, and, most of all, there
came the words of his dying mother, “Be good, my boy, and God will make
you great”; and for his mother’s sake he had compassion on the girl, and
sought no restitution from her husband. And now, ten years later, he
did not regret that he had stayed his hand. The world had ceased to call
Lepage a genius. He had not fulfilled the hope once held of him. Hume
knew this from occasional references in scientific journals.
And now he was making this journey to save, if he could, Lepage’s life.
Though just on the verge of a new era in his career--to give to the
world the fruit of ten years’ thought and labour, he had set all behind
him, that he might be true to the friendship of his youth, that he might
be clear of the strokes of conscience to the last hour of his life.
Looking round him now, the debating look came again into his eyes. He
placed his hand in his breast, and let it rest there for a moment. The
look became certain and steady, the hand was drawn out, and in it was a
Book of Common Prayer. Upon the fly-leaf was written: “Jane Hume, to her
dear son Jaspar, on his twelfth birthday.”
These men of the White Guard were not used to religious practices,
whatever their past had been in that regard, and at any other time they
might have been surprised at this action of their leader. Under some
circumstances it might have lessened their opinion of him; but his
influence over them now was complete. They knew they were getting nearer
to him than they had ever done; even Cloud-in-the-Sky appreciated that.
Hume spoke no word to them, but looked at them and stood up. They all
did the same, Jeff Hyde leaning on the shoulders of Gaspe Toujours. He
read first, four verses of the Thirty-first Psalm, then followed the
prayer of St. Chrysostom, and the beautiful collect which appeals to the
Almighty to mercifully look upon the infirmities of men, and to stretch
forth His hand to keep and defend them in all dangers and necessities.
Late Carscallen, after a long pause, said “Amen,” and Jeff said in a
whisper to Gaspe Toujours: “That’s to the point. Infirmities and dangers
and necessities is what troubles us.”
Immediately after, at a sign from the sub-factor, Cloud-in-the-Sky began
to transfer the burning wood from one fire to the other until only hot
ashes were left where a great blaze had been. Over these ashes pine
twigs and branches were spread, and over them again blankets. The word
was then given to turn in, and Jeff Hyde, Gaspe Toujours, and Late
Carscallen lay down in this comfortable bed. Each wished to give way to
their captain, but he would not consent. He and Cloud-in-the-Sky wrapped
themselves in their blankets like mummies, covering the head completely,
and under the arctic sky they slept alone in an austere and tenantless
world. They never know how loftily sardonic Nature can be who have not
seen that land where the mercury freezes in the tubes, and there is
light but no warmth in the smile of the sun. Not Sturt in the heart
of Australia with the mercury bursting the fevered tubes, with the
finger-nails breaking like brittle glass, with the ink drying instantly
on the pen, with the hair fading and falling off, would, if he could,
have exchanged his lot for that of the White Guard. They were in a
frozen endlessness that stretched away to a world where never voice of
man or clip of wing or tread of animal is heard. It is the threshold to
the undiscovered country, to that untouched north whose fields of white
are only furrowed by the giant forces of the elements; on whose frigid
hearthstone no fire is ever lit; where the electric phantoms of a
nightless land pass and repass, and are never still; where the magic
needle points not towards the north but darkly downward; where the sun
never stretches warm hands to him who dares confront the terrors of
eternal snow.
The White Guard slept.