They carried the unconscious girl into the dim-lighted apartment of
the curtained windows, and laid her on the divan. Wishkobun,
hastily summoned, unfastened the girl's dress at the throat.
"It is a faint," she announced in her own tongue. "She will
recover in a few minutes; I will get some water."
Ned Trent wiped the moisture from his forehead with his
handkerchief. The danger he had undergone coolly, but this
overcame his iron self-control. Galen Albret, like an anxious
bear, weaved back and forth the length of the couch. In him the
rumble of the storm was but just echoing into distance.
"Go into the next room," he growled at the Free Trader, when
finally he noticed the latter's presence.
Ned Trent hesitated.
"Go, I say!" snarled the Factor. "You can do nothing here." He
followed the young man to the door, which he closed with his own
hand, and then turned back to the couch on which his daughter lay.
In the middle of the floor his foot clicked on some small object.
Mechanically lie picked it up.
It proved to be a little silver match-safe of the sort universally
used in the Far North. Evidently the Free Trader had nipped it
from his pocket with his handkerchief, The Factor was about to
thrust it into his own pocket, when his eye caught lettering
roughly carved across one side. Still mechanically, he examined it
more closely, The lettering was that of a man's name. The man's
name was Graehme Stewart.
Without thinking of what he did, he dropped the object on the small
table, and returned anxiously to the girl's side, cursing the
tardiness of the Indian woman. But in a moment Wishkobun returned.
"Will she recover?" asked the Factor, distracted at the woman's
deliberate examination.
The latter smiled her indulgent, slow smile. "But surely," she
assured him in her own tongue, "it is no more than if she cut her
finger. In a few breaths she will recover. Now I will go to the
house of the Cockburn for a morsel of the sweet wood [camphor]
which she must smell." She looked her inquiry for permission.
"Sagaamig--go," assented Albret.
Relieved in mind, he dropped into a chair. His eye caught the
little silver match-safe, He picked it up and fell to staring at
the rudely carved letters.
He found that he was alone with his daughter--and the thoughts
aroused by the dozen letters of a man's name.
All his life long he had been a hard man. His commands had been
autocratic; his anger formidable; his punishments severe, and
sometimes cruel. The quality of mercy was with him tenuous and
weak. He knew this, and if he did not exactly glory in it, he was
at least indifferent to its effect on his reputation with others.
But always he had been just. The victims of his displeasure might
complain that his retributive measures were harsh, that his
forgiveness could not be evoked by even the most extenuating of
circumstances, but not that his anger had ever been baseless or the
punishment undeserved. Thus he had held always his own
self-respect, and from his self-respect had proceeded his iron and
effective rule.
So in the case of the young man with whom now his thoughts were
occupied. Twice he had warned him from the country without the
punishment which the third attempt rendered imperative. The events
succeeding his arrival at Conjuror's House warmed the Factor's
anger to the heat of almost preposterous retribution perhaps--for
after all a man's life is worth something, even in the wilds--but
it was actually retribution, and not merely a ruthless proof of
power. It might be justice as only the Factor saw it, but it was
still essentially justice--in the broader sense that to each act
had followed a definite consequence. Although another might have
condemned his conduct as unnecessarily harsh, Galen Albret's
conscience was satisfied and at rest.
Nor had his resolution been permanently affected by either the
girl's threat to make away with herself or by his momentary
softening when she had fainted. The affair was thereby
complicated, but that was all. In the sincerity of the threat he
recognized his own iron nature, and was perhaps a little pleased at
its manifestation. He knew she intended to fulfil her promise not
to survive her lover, but at the moment this did not reach his
fears; it only aroused further his dogged opposition.
The Free Trader's speech as he left the room, however, had touched
the one flaw in Galen Albret's confidence of righteousness.
Wearied with the struggles and the passions he had undergone, his
brain numbed, his will for the moment in abeyance, he seated
himself and contemplated the images those two words had called up.
Graehme Stewart! That man he had first met at Fort Rae over twenty
years ago. It was but just after he had married Virginia's mother.
At once his imagination, with the keen pictorial power of those who
have dwelt long in the Silent Places, brought forward the other
scene--that of his wooing. He had driven his dogs into Fort la
Cloche after a hard day's run in seventy-five degrees of frost.
Weary, hungry, half-frozen, he had staggered into the fire-lit
room. Against the blaze he had caught for a moment a young girl's
profile, lost as she turned her face toward him in startled
question of his entrance. Men had cared for his dogs. The girl
had brought him hot tea. In the corner of the fire they two had
whispered one to the other--the already grizzled traveller of the
silent land, the fresh, brave north-maiden. At midnight, their
parkas drawn close about their faces in the fearful cold, they had
met outside the inclosure of the Post. An hour later they were
away under the aurora for Qu'Apelle. Galen Albret's nostrils
expanded as he heard the _crack, crack, crack_ of the remorseless
dog-whip whose sting drew him away from the vain pursuit. After
the marriage at Qu'Apelle they had gone a weary journey to Rae, and
there he had first seen Graehme Stewart.
Fort Rae is on the northwestward arm of the Great Slave Lake in the
country of the Dog Ribs, only four degrees under the Arctic Circle.
It is a dreary spot, for the Barren Grounds are near. Men see only
the great lake, the great sky, the great gray country. They become
moody, fanciful. In the face of the silence they have little to
say. At Port Rae were old Jock Wilson, the Chief Trader; Father
Bonat, the priest; Andrew Levoy, the _metis_ clerk; four Dog Rib
teepees; Galen Albret and his bride; and Graehme Stewart.
Jock Wilson was sixty-five; Father Bonat had no age; Andrew Levoy
possessed the years of dour silence. Only Graehme Stewart and
Elodie, bride of Albret, were young. In the great gray country
their lives were like spots of color on a mist. Galen Albret
finally became jealous.
At first there was nothing to be done, but finally Levoy brought to
the older man proof of the younger's guilt. The harsh traveller
bowed his head and wept. But since he loved Elodie more than
himself--which was perhaps the only redeeming feature of this sorry
business--he said nothing, nor did more than to journey south to
Edmonton, leaving the younger man alone in Fort Rae to the White
Silence. But his soul was stirred.
In the course of nature and of time Galen Albret had a daughter,
but lost a wife. It was no longer necessary for him to leave his
wrong unavenged. Then began a series of baffling hindrances which
resulted finally in his stooping to means repugnant to his open
sense of what was due himself. At the first he could not travel to
his enemy because of the child in his care; when finally he had
succeeded in placing the little girl where he would be satisfied to
leave her, he himself was suddenly and peremptorily called east to
take a post in Rupert's Land. He could not disobey and remain in
the Company, and the Company was more to him than life or revenue.
The little girl he left in Sacre Coeur of Quebec; he himself took
up his residence in the Hudson Bay country. After a few years,
becoming lonely for his own flesh and blood, he sent for his
daughter. There, as Factor, he gained a vast power, and this power
he turned into the channels of his hatred. Graehme Stewart felt
always against him the hand of influence. His posts in the
Company's service became intolerable. At length, in indignation
against continued injustice, oppression, and insult, he resigned,
broken in fortune and in prospects. He became one of the earliest
Free Traders on the Saskatchewan, devoting his energies to enraged
opposition of the Company which had wronged him. In the space of
three short years he had met a violent and striking death; for the
early days of the Free Trader were adventurous. Galen Albret's
revenge had struck home.
Then in after years the Factor had again met with Andrew Levoy.
The man staggered into Conjuror's House late at night, He had
started from Winnipeg to descend the Albany River, but had met with
mishap and starvation. One by one his dogs had died. In some
blind fashion he pushed on for days after his strength and sanity
had left him. Mu-hi-kun had brought him in. His toes and fingers
had frozen and dropped off; his face was a mask of black
frost-bitten flesh, in which deep fissures opened to the raw. He
had gone snow-blind. Scarcely was he recognizable as a human being.
From such a man in extremity could come nothing but the truth, so
Galen Albret believed him. Before Andrew Levoy died that night he
told of his deceit. The Factor left the room with the weight of a
crime on his conscience. For Graehme Stewart had been innocent of
any wrong toward him or his bride.
Such was the story Galen Albret saw in the little silver match-box.
That was the one flaw in his consciousness of righteousness; the
one instance in a long career when his ruthless acts of punishment
or reprisal had not rested on rigid justice, and by the irony of
fate the one instance had touched him very near. Now here before
him was his enemy's son--he wondered that he had not discovered the
resemblance before--and he was about to visit on him the severest
punishment in his power. Was not this an opportunity vouchsafed
him to repair his ancient fault, to cleanse his conscience of the
one sin of the kind it would acknowledge?
But then over him swept the same blur of jealousy that had resulted
in Graehme Stewart's undoing. This youth wooed his daughter; he
had won her affections away. Strangely enough Galen Albret
confused the new and the old; again youth cleaved to youth, leaving
age apart. Age felt fiercely the desire to maintain its own. The
Factor crushed the silver match-box between his great palms and
looked up. His daughter lay before him, still, lifeless.
Deliberately he rested his chin on his hands and contemplated her.
The room, as always, was full of contrast; shafts of light,
dust-moted, bewildering, crossed from the embrasured windows,
throwing high-lights into prominence and shadows into impenetrable
darkness. They rendered the gray-clad figure of the girl vague and
ethereal, like a mist above a stream; they darkened the dull-hued
couch on which she rested into a liquid, impalpable black; they
hazed the draped background of the corner into a far-reaching
distance; so that finally to Galen Albret, staring with hypnotic
intensity, it came to seem that he looked upon a pure and
disembodied spirit sleeping sweetly--cradled on illimitable space.
The ordinary and familiar surroundings all disappeared. His
consciousness accepted nothing but the cameo profile of marble
white, the nimbus of golden haze about the head, the mist-like
suggestion of a body, and again the clear marble spot of the hands.
All else was a background of modulated depths.
So gradually the old man's spirit, wearied by the stress of the
last hour, turned in on itself and began to create. The cameo
profile, the mist-like body, the marble hands remained; but now
Galen Albret saw other things as well. A dim, rare perfume was
wafted from some unseen space; indistinct flashes of light spotted
the darknesses; faint swells of music lifted the silence
intermittently. These things were small and still, and under the
external consciousness--like the voices one may hear beneath the
roar of a tumbling rapid--but gradually they defined themselves.
The perfume came to Galen Albret's nostrils on the wings of
incensed smoke; the flashes of light steadied to the ovals of
candle flames; the faint swells of music blended into
grand-breathed organ chords. He felt about him the dim awe of the
church, he saw the tapers burning at head and foot, the clear, calm
face of the dead, smiling faintly that at last it should be no more
disturbed. So had he looked all one night and all one day in the
long time ago. The Factor stretched his arms out to the figure on
the couch, but he called upon his wife, gone these twenty years.
"Elodie! Elodie!" he murmured, softly. She had never known it,
thank God, but he had wronged her too. In all sorrow and sweet
heavenly pity he had believed that her youth had turned to the
youth of the other man. It had not been so. Did be not owe her,
too, some reparation?
As though in answer to his appeal, or perhaps that merely the sound
of a human voice had broken the last shreds of her swoon, the girl
moved slightly. Galen Albret did not stir. Slowly Virginia turned
her head, until finally her wandering eyes met his, fixed on her
with passionate intensity. For a moment she stared at him, then
comprehension came to her along with memory. She cried out, and sat
upright in one violent motion.
"He! He!" she cried. "Is he gone?"
Instantly Galen Albret had her in his arms.
"It is all right," he soothed, drawing her close to his great
breast. "All right. You are my own little girl."