Her advent to Jansen was propitious. Smallpox in its most virulent form
had broken out in the French-Canadian portion of the town, and, coming
with some professional nurses from the East, herself an amateur, to attend
the sufferers, she worked with such skill and devotion that the official
thanks of the Corporation were offered her, together with a tiny gold
watch, the gift of grateful citizens. But she still remained on at Jansen,
saying always, however, that she was "going East in the spring."
Five years had passed, and still she had not gone East, but remained
perched in the rooms she had first taken, over the Imperial Bank, while
the town grew up swiftly round her. And even when the young bank manager
married, and wished to take over the rooms, she sent him to the
right-about from his own premises in her gay, masterful way. The young
manager behaved well in the circumstances, because he had asked her to
marry him, and she had dismissed him with a warning against challenging
his own happiness--that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was galled
the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been
thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of
self-preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all
were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the
wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all
that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favor? But
for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the
self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on
the sidewalk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to
romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-ring; yet this
only made her more popular. Jansen's admiration was at its highest,
however, when she rode in the annual steeplechase with the best horsemen
of the province. She had the gift of doing as well as of being.
"'Tis the light heart she has, and slippin' in and out of things like a
hummin'-bird, no easier to ketch and no longer to stay," said Finden, the
rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Bourassa, the huge
French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark weeks
of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer gayety.
She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words
were full of raillery and humor, yet there was ever a gentle note behind
all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears as she bent over
some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.
"Bedad! as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel," added
Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, "but a heart no
bigger than a marrowfat pea--selfishness, all self. Keepin' herself for
herself when there's many a good man needin' her. Mother o' Moses, how
many! From Terry O'Ryan, brother of a peer, at Latouche, to Bernard Bapty,
son of a millionaire, at Vancouver, there's a string o' them. All pride
and self; and as fair a lot they've been as ever entered for the Marriage
Cup. Now isn't that so, father?"
Finden's brogue did not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his
commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on
the family estate in Galway.
Father Bourassa fanned himself with the black broadbrim hat he wore, and
looked benignly but quizzically on the wiry, sharp-faced Irishman.
"You t'ink her heart is leetla. But perhaps it is your mind is not so
big enough to see--_hien_?" The priest laughed noiselessly, showing
white teeth. "Was it so selfish in Madame to refuse the name of
Finden--_n'est-ce pas_?"
Finden flushed, then burst into a laugh. "I'd almost forgotten I was one
of them--the first almost. Blessed be he that expects nothing, for he'll
get it sure. It was my duty, and I did it. Was she to feel that Jansen did
not price her high? Bedad, father, I rose betimes and did it, before anny
man should say he set me the lead. Before the carpet in the parlor was
down, and with the bare boards soundin' to my words, I offered her the
name of Finden."
"And so--the first of the long line! _Bien_, it is an honor." The priest
paused a moment, looked at Finden with a curious reflective look, and then
said, "And so you t'ink there is no one; that she will say yes not at
all--no?"
They were sitting on Father Bourassa's verandah, on the outskirts of the
town, above the great river, along which had travelled millions of bygone
people, fighting, roaming, hunting, trapping; and they could hear it
rushing past, see the swirling eddies, the impetuous currents, the
occasional rafts moving majestically down the stream. They were facing the
wild North, while civilization was hacking and hewing and ploughing its
way to newer and newer cities, in an empire ever spreading to the Pole.
Finden's glance loitered on this scene before he replied. At length,
screwing up one eye, and with a suggestive smile, he answered: "Sure, it's
all a matter of time, to the selfishest woman. 'Tis not the same with
women as with men; you see, they don't get younger--that's a point.
But"--he gave a meaning glance at the priest--"but perhaps she's not going
to wait for that, after all. And there he rides, a fine figure of a man,
too, if I have to say it!"
"M'sieu' Varley?" the priest responded, and watched a galloping horseman
to whom Finden had pointed till he rounded a corner of a little wood.
"Varley, the great London surgeon, sure! Say, father, it's a hundred to
one she'd take him if--"
There was a curious look in Father Bourassa's face, a cloud in his eyes.
He sighed. "London, it is ver' far away," he remarked, obliquely.
"What's to that? If she is with the right man, near or far is nothing."
"So far--from home," said the priest, reflectively, but his eyes furtively
watched the other's face.
"But home's where man and wife are."
The priest now looked him straight in the eyes. "Then, as you say, she
will not marry M'sieu' Varley--_hein_?"
The humor died out of Finden's face. His eyes met the priest's eyes
steadily. "Did I say that? Then my tongue wasn't making a fool of me,
after all. How did you guess I knew--everything, father?"
"A priest knows many t'ings--so."
There was a moment of gloom, then the Irishman brightened. He came
straight to the heart of the mystery around which they had been
manoeuvring. "Have you seen her husband--Meydon--this year? It isn't his
usual time to come yet."
Father Bourassa's eyes drew those of his friend into the light of a new
understanding and revelation. They understood and trusted each other.
[Illustration: "AS PURTY A WOMAN, TOO--AS PURTY AND AS STRAIGHT BEWHILES"]
"_Helas!_ He is there in the hospital," he answered, and nodded toward a
building not far away, which had been part of an old Hudson Bay Company's
fort. It had been hastily adapted as a hospital for the smallpox victims.
"Oh, it's Meydon, is it, that bad case I heard of to-day?"
The priest nodded again and pointed. "_Voila_, Madame Meydon, she is
coming. She has seen him--her hoosban'."
Finden's eyes followed the gesture. The little widow of Jansen was coming
from the hospital, walking slowly toward the river.
"As purty a woman, too--as purty and as straight bewhiles. What is the
matter with him--with Meydon?" Finden asked, after a moment.
"An accident in the woods--so. He arrive, it is las' night, from Great
Slave Lake."
Finden sighed. "Ten years ago he was a man to look at twice--before he did
_It_ and got away. Now his own mother wouldn't know him--bad 'cess to him!
I knew him from the cradle almost. I spotted him here by a knife-cut I
gave him in the hand when we were lads together. A divil of a timper
always both of us had, but the good-nature was with me, and I didn't drink
and gamble and carry a pistol. It's ten years since he did the killing,
down in Quebec, and I don't suppose the police will get him now. He's been
counted dead. I recognized him here the night after I asked her how she
liked the name of Finden. She doesn't know that I ever knew him. And he
didn't recognize me--twenty-five years since we met before! It would be
better if he went under the sod. Is he pretty sick, father?"
"He will die unless the surgeon's knife it cure him before twenty-four
hours, and--"
"And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this
is two hundred miles from nowhere! It looks as if the police'll never get
him, eh?"
"You have not tell any one--never?"
Finden laughed. "Though I'm not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight as
anny. There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the one
that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets."
"So you t'ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon is
sick--_hein_?"
"Oh, I think--"
Finden stopped short, for a horse's hoofs sounded on the turf beside the
house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the corner
and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.
He lifted his hat to the priest. "I hear there's a bad case at the
hospital," he said.
"It is ver' dangerous," answered Father Bourassa; "but, _voila_, come in!
There is something cool to drink. Ah, yes, he is ver' bad, that man from
the Great Slave Lake."
Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions,
and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases
which had passed through his hands--one a man with his neck broken, who
had lived for six months afterward.
"Broken as a man's neck is broken by hanging--dislocation, really--the
disjointing of the _medulla oblongata_, if you don't mind technicalities,"
he said. "But I kept him living just the same. Time enough for him to
repent in and get ready to go. A most interesting case. He was a criminal,
too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if you can, to the
last inch of resistance."
The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden's eyes were
screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to Varley's
remarks. There was a long minute's silence. They were all three roused by
hearing a light footstep on the veranda.
Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway. Finden
caught a glimpse of a woman's figure, and, without a word, passed abruptly
from the dining-room, where they were, into the priest's study, leaving
Varley alone. Varley turned to look after him, stared, and shrugged his
shoulders.
"The manners of the West," he said, good-humoredly, and turned again to
the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest's voice. Presently
there was another voice--a woman's. He flushed slightly and involuntarily
straightened himself.
"Valerie," he murmured.
An instant afterward she entered the room with the priest. She was dressed
in a severely simple suit of gray, which set off to advantage her slim,
graceful figure. There seemed no reason why she should have been called
the little widow of Jansen, for she was not small, but she was very finely
and delicately made, and the name had been but an expression of Jansen's
paternal feeling for her. She had always had a good deal of fresh color,
but to-day she seemed pale, though her eyes had a strange disturbing
light. It was not that they brightened on seeing this man before her; they
had been brighter, burningly bright, when she left the hospital, where,
since it had been built, she had been the one visitor of authority--Jansen
had given her that honor. She had a gift of smiling, and she smiled now,
but it came from grace of mind rather than from humor. As Finden had said,
"She was forever acting, and never doin' any harm by it."
Certainly she was doing no harm by it now; nevertheless, it was acting.
Could it be otherwise, with what was behind her life--a husband who had
ruined her youth, had committed homicide, had escaped capture, but who had
not subsequently died, as the world believed he had done, so
circumstantial was the evidence. He was not man enough to make the
accepted belief in his death a fact. What could she do but act, since the
day she got a letter from the Far North, which took her out to Jansen,
nominally to nurse those stricken with smallpox under Father Bourassa's
care, actually to be where her wretched husband could come to her once a
year, as he had asked with an impossible selfishness?
Each year she had seen him for an hour or less, giving him money, speaking
to him over a gulf so wide that it seemed sometimes as though her voice
could not be heard across it; each year opening a grave to look at the
embalmed face of one who had long since died in shame, which only brought
back the cruellest of all memories, that which one would give one's best
years to forget. With a fortitude beyond description she had faced it,
gently, quietly, but firmly faced it--firmly, because she had to be firm
in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would have killed
her. And after the first struggle with his unchangeable brutality it had
been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had come a faint
understanding of the real situation and of her. He had kept his side of
the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old luxurious, indulgent
life, with its refined vices, and this present coarse, hard life, where
pleasures were few and gross. The free Northern life of toil and hardship
had not refined him. He greedily hung over this treasure, which was not
for his spending, yet was his own--as though in a bank he had hoards of
money which he might not withdraw.
So the years had gone on, with their recurrent dreaded anniversaries,
carrying misery almost too great to be borne by this woman mated to the
loathed phantom of a sad, dead life; and when this black day of each year
was over, for a few days afterwards she went nowhere, was seen by none.
Yet, when she did appear again, it was with her old laughing manner, her
cheerful and teasing words, her quick response to the emotions of others.
So it had gone till Varley had come to follow the open-air life for four
months, after a heavy illness due to blood-poisoning got in his surgical
work in London. She had been able to live her life without too great a
struggle till he came. Other men had flattered her vanity, had given her a
sense of power, had made her understand her possibilities, but nothing
more--nothing of what Varley brought with him. And before three months had
gone, she knew that no man had ever interested her as Varley had done. Ten
years before, she would not have appreciated or understood him, this
intellectual, clean-shaven, rigidly abstemious man, whose pleasures
belonged to the fishing-rod and the gun and the horse, and who had come to
be so great a friend of him who had been her best friend--Father Bourassa.
Father Bourassa had come to know the truth--not from her, for she had ever
been a Protestant, but from her husband, who, Catholic by birth and a
renegade from all religion, had had a moment of spurious emotion, when he
went and confessed to Father Bourassa and got absolution, pleading for the
priest's care of his wife. Afterward Father Bourassa made up his mind that
the confession had a purpose behind it other than repentance, and he
deeply resented the use to which he thought he was being put--a kind of
spy upon the beautiful woman whom Jansen loved, and who, in spite of any
outward flippancy, was above reproach.
In vital things the instinct becomes abnormally acute, and, one day, when
the priest looked at her commiseratingly, she had divined what moved him.
However it was, she drove him into a corner with a question to which he
dare not answer yes, but to which he might not answer no, and did not; and
she realized that he knew the truth, and she was the better for his
knowing, though her secret was no longer a secret. She was not aware that
Finden also knew. Then Varley came, bringing a new joy and interest in her
life, and a new suffering also, for she realized that if she were free,
and Varley asked her to marry him, she would consent.
But when he did ask her, she said no with a pang that cut her heart in
two. He had stayed his four months, and it was now six months, and he
was going at last--to-morrow. He had stayed to give her time to learn to
say yes, and to take her back with him to London; and she knew that he
would speak again to-day, and that she must say no again; but she had
kept him from saying the words till now. And the man who had ruined
her life and had poisoned her true spirit was come back broken and
battered. He was hanging between life and death; and now--for he was
going to-morrow--Varley would speak again.
The half-hour she had just spent in the hospital with Meydon had tried her
cruelly. She had left the building in a vortex of conflicting emotions,
with the call of duty and of honor ringing through a thousand other voices
of temptation and desire, the inner pleadings for a little happiness while
yet she was young. After she married Meydon, there had only been a few
short weeks of joy before her black disillusion came, and she had realized
how bitter must be her martyrdom.
When she left the hospital, she seemed moving in a dream, as one
intoxicated by some elixir might move unheeding among event and accident
and vexing life and roaring multitudes. And all the while the river
flowing through the endless prairies, high-banked, ennobled by living
woods, lipped with green, kept surging in her ears, inviting her, alluring
her--alluring her with a force too deep and powerful for weak human nature
to bear for long. It would ease her pain, it said; it would still the
tumult and the storm; it would solve her problem, it would give her peace.
But as she moved along the river-bank among the trees, she met the little
niece of the priest, who lived in his house, singing, as though she was
born but to sing, a song which Finden had written and Father Bourassa had
set to music. Did not the distant West know Father Bourassa's gift, and
did not Protestants attend Mass to hear him play the organ afterward? The
fresh, clear voice of the child rang through the trees, stealing the
stricken heart away from the lure of the river:
"Will you come back home, where the young larks are singin'?
The door is open wide, and the bells of Lynn are ringin';
There's a little lake I know,
And a boat you used to row
To the shore beyond that's quiet--will you come back home?
"Will you come back, darlin'? Never heed the pain and blightin',
Never trouble that you're wounded, that you bear the scars of fightin';
Here's the luck o' Heaven to you,
Here's the hand of love will brew you
The cup of peace--ah, darlin', will you come back home?"
She stood listening for a few moments, and, under the spell of the fresh,
young voice, the homely, heart-searching words, and the intimate sweetness
of the woods, the despairing apathy lifted slowly away. She started
forward again with a new understanding, her footsteps quickened. She would
go to Father Bourassa. He would understand. She would tell him all. He
would help her to do what now she knew she must do, ask Leonard Varley to
save her husband's life--Leonard Varley to save her husband's life!
When she stepped upon the veranda of the priest's house, she did not know
that Varley was inside. She had no time to think. She was ushered into the
room where he was, with the confusing fact of his presence fresh upon her.
She had had but a word or two with the priest, but enough for him to know
what she meant to do, and that it must be done at once.
Varley advanced to meet her. She shuddered inwardly to think what a
difference there was between the fallen creature she had left behind in
the hospital and this tall, dark, self-contained man, whose name was
familiar in the surgeries of Europe, who had climbed from being the son of
a clockmaker to his present distinguished place.
"Have you come for absolution, also?" he asked, with a smile; "or is it to
get a bill of excommunication against your only enemy--there couldn't be
more than one?"
Cheerful as his words were, he was shrewdly observing her, for her
paleness and the strange light in her eyes gave him a sense of anxiety. He
wondered what trouble was on her.
"Excommunication?" he repeated.
The unintended truth went home. She winced, even as she responded with
that quaint note in her voice which gave humor to her speech. "Yes,
excommunication," she replied; "but why an enemy? Do we not need to
excommunicate our friends sometimes?"
"That is a hard saying," he answered, soberly.
Tears sprang to her eyes, but she mastered herself, and brought the crisis
abruptly.
"I want you to save a man's life," she said, with her eyes looking
straight into his. "Will you do it?"
His face grew grave and eager. "I want you to save a man's happiness," he
answered. "Will you do it?"
"That man yonder will die unless your skill saves him," she urged.
"This man here will go away unhappy and alone, unless your heart befriends
him," he replied, coming closer to her. "At sunrise to-morrow he goes." He
tried to take her hand.
"Oh, please, please," she pleaded, with a quick, protesting gesture.
"Sunrise is far off, but the man's fate is near, and you must save him.
You only can do so, for Doctor Hadley is away, and Doctor Brydon is sick,
and in any case Doctor Brydon dare not attempt the operation alone. It is
too critical and difficult, he says."
"So I have heard," he answered, with a new note in his voice, his
professional instinct roused in spite of himself. "Who is this man? What
interests you in him?"
"To how many unknown people have you given your skill for nothing--your
skill and all your experience to utter strangers, no matter how low or
poor! Is it not so? Well, I cannot give to strangers what you have given
to so many, but I can help in my own way."
"You want me to see the man at once?"
"If you will."
"What is his name? I know of his accident and the circumstances."
She hesitated for an instant, then said, "He is called Draper--a trapper
and a woodsman."
"But I was going away to-morrow at sunrise. All my arrangements are made,"
he urged, his eyes holding hers, his passion swimming in his eyes again.
"But you will not see a man die, if you can save him?" she pleaded, unable
now to meet his look, its mastery and its depth.
Her heart had almost leaped with joy at the suggestion that he could not
stay; but as suddenly self-reproach and shame filled her mind, and she had
challenged him so. But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man she
loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken away
from her every dear illusion of her life and heart? By every right of
justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if she
had never seen him. He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged in the
mire her unspotted life--unspotted, for in all temptation, in her
defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while
at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with a
weeping heart and laughing lips. Had she not longed for a little home with
a great love, and a strong, true man? Ah, it had been lonely, bitterly
lonely! Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom she could
not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law to atone for
his crime. She was punished for his crimes; she was denied the exercise of
her womanhood in order to shield him. Still she remembered that once she
had loved him, those years ago, when he first won her heart from those so
much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly; and this memory
had helped her in a way. She had tried to be true to it, that dead, lost
thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her, and now, lying
with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent ghost.
"Ah, you will not see him die?" she urged.
"It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man," he said, his
determined dark eyes searching hers, for she baffled him. If she could
feel so much for a "casual," why not a little more feeling for him?
Suddenly, as he drew her eyes to him again, there came the conviction that
they were full of feeling for him. They were sending a message, an
appealing, passionate message, which told him more than he had ever heard
from her or seen in her face before. Yes, she was his! Without a word
spoken she had told him so. What, then, held her back? But women were a
race by themselves, and he knew that he must wait till she chose to have
him know what she had unintentionally conveyed but now.
"Yes, I am moved," she continued, slowly. "Who can tell what this man
might do with his life if it is saved! Don't you think of that? It isn't
the importance of a life that's at stake; it's the importance of living;
and we do not live alone, do we?"
His mind was made up. "I will not, cannot promise anything till I have
seen him. But I will go and see him, and I'll send you word later what I
can do or not do. Will that satisfy you? If I cannot do it, I will come to
say good-bye."
Her face was set with suppressed feeling. She held out her hand to him
impulsively, and was about to speak, but suddenly caught the hand away
again from his thrilling grasp and, turning hurriedly, left the room. In
the hall she met Father Bourassa.
"Go with him to the hospital," she whispered, and disappeared through the
doorway.
Immediately after she had gone, a man came driving hard to bring Father
Bourassa to visit a dying Catholic in the prairie, and it was Finden who
accompanied Varley to the hospital, waited for him till his examination of
the "casual" was concluded, and met him outside.
"Can it be done?" he asked of Varley. "I'll take word to Father
Bourassa."
"It can be done--it will be done," answered Varley, absently. "I do not
understand the man. He has been in a different sphere of life. He tried to
hide it, but the speech--occasionally! I wonder."
"You wonder if he's worth saving?"