Northern Lights, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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The invincibles had seen Tim coming, but they had determined to make a
sure thing of it, and would themselves do what was necessary with the
impostor, and take no chances. So they pressed their horses, and he saw
them swallowed by the trees, as darkness gathered. Changing his course,
he entered the familiar hills, which he knew better than any pioneer of
Jansen, and rode a diagonal course over the trail they would take. But
night fell suddenly, and there was nothing to do but to wait till
morning. There was comfort in this--the others must also wait, and the
refugee could not go far. In any case, he must make for settlement or
perish, since he had left behind his sheep and his cow.
It fell out better than Tim hoped. The Pioneers were as good hunters as
was he, their instinct was as sure, their scouts and trackers were many,
and he was but one. They found the Faith Healer by a little stream,
eating bread and honey, and, like an ancient woodlander drinking from a
horn--relics of his rank imposture. He made no resistance. They tried him
formally, if perfunctorily; he admitted his imposture, and begged for his
life. Then they stripped him naked, tied a bit of canvas round his waist,
fastened him to a tree, and were about to complete his punishment when
Tim Denton burst upon them.
Whether the rage Tim showed was all real or not; whether his accusations
of bad faith came from so deeply wounded a spirit as he would have them
believe, he was not likely to tell; but he claimed the prisoner as his
own, and declined to say what he meant to do.
When, however, they saw the abject terror of the Faith Healer as he
begged not to be left alone with Tim--for they had not meant death, and
Ingles thought he read death in Tim's ferocious eyes--they laughed
cynically, and left it to Tim to uphold the honour of Jansen and the
Pioneers.
As they disappeared, the last thing they saw was Tim with his back to
them, his hands on his hips, and a knife clasped in his fingers.
"He'll lift his scalp and make a monk of him," chuckled the oldest and
hardest of them.
"Dat Tim will cut his heart out, I t'ink-bagosh!" said Nicolle Terasse,
and took a drink of white-whiskey. For a long time Tim stood looking at
the other, until no sound came from the woods, whither the Pioneers had
gone. Then at last, slowly, and with no roughness, as the terror-stricken
impostor shrank and withered, he cut the cords.
"Dress yourself," he said shortly, and sat down beside the stream, and
washed his face and hands, as though to cleanse them from contamination.
He appeared to take no notice of the other, though his ears keenly noted
every movement.
The impostor dressed nervously, yet slowly; he scarce comprehended
anything, except that he was not in immediate danger. When he had
finished, he stood looking at Tim, who was still seated on a log plunged
in meditation.
It seemed hours before Tim turned round, and now his face was quiet, if
set and determined. He walked slowly over, and stood looking at his
victim for some time without speaking. The other's eyes dropped, and a
greyness stole over his features. This steely calm was even more
frightening than the ferocity which had previously been in his captor's
face. At length the tense silence was broken.
"Wasn't the old game good enough? Was it played out? Why did you take to
this? Why did you do it, Scranton?"
The voice quavered a little in reply. "I don't know. Something sort of
pushed me into it."
"How did you come to start it?"
There was a long silence, then the husky reply came. "I got a sickener
last time--"
"Yes, I remember, at Waywing."
"I got into the desert, and had hard times--awful for a while. I hadn't
enough to eat, and I didn't know whether I'd die by hunger, or fever, or
Indians--or snakes."
"Oh, you were seeing snakes!" said Tim grimly.
"Not the kind you mean; I hadn't anything to drink--"
"No, you never did drink, I remember--just was crooked, and slopped over
women. Well, about the snakes?"
"I caught them to eat, and they were poison-snakes often. And I wasn't
quick at first to get them safe by the neck--they're quick, too."
Tim laughed inwardly. "Getting your food by the sweat of your brow--and a
snake in it, same as Adam! Well, was it in the desert you got your taste
for honey, too, same as John the Baptist--that was his name, if I
recomember?" He looked at the tin of honey on the ground.
"Not in the desert, but when I got to the grass-country."
"How long were you in the desert?"
"Close to a year."
Tim's eyes opened wider. He saw that the man was speaking the truth.
"Got to thinking in the desert, and sort of willing things to come to
pass, and mooning along, you, and the sky, and the vultures, and the hot
hills, and the snakes, and the flowers--eh?"
"There weren't any flowers till I got to the grass-country."
"Oh, cuss me, if you ain't simple for your kind! I know all about that.
And when you got to the grass-country, you just picked up the honey, and
the flowers, and a calf, and a lamb, and a mule here and there, 'without
money and without price,' and walked on--that it?"
The other shrank before the steel in the voice, and nodded his head.
"But you kept thinking in the grass-country of what you'd felt and said
and done--and willed, in the desert, I suppose?"
Again the other nodded.
"It seemed to you in the desert, as if you'd saved your own life a
hundred times, as if you'd just willed food and drink and safety to come;
as if Providence had been at your elbow?"
"It was like a dream, and it stayed with me. I had to think in the desert
things I'd never thought before," was the half-abstracted answer.
"You felt good in the desert?" The other hung his head in shame.
"Makes you seem pretty small, doesn't it? You didn't stay long enough, I
guess, to get what you were feeling for; you started in on the new racket
too soon. You never got really possessed that you was a sinner. I expect
that's it."
The other made no reply.
"Well, I don't know much about such things. I was loose brought up; but
I've a friend"--Laura was before his eyes--"that says religion's all
right, and long ago as I can remember my mother used to pray three times
a day--with grace at meals, too. I know there's a lot in it for them that
need it; and there seems to be a lot of folks needing it, if I'm to judge
by folks down there at Jansen, specially when there's the laying-on of
hands and the Healing Springs. Oh, that was a pigsty game, Scranton, that
about God giving you the Healing Springs, like Moses and the rock! Why, I
discovered them springs myself two years ago, before I went South, and I
guess God wasn't helping me any--not after I've kept out of His way as I
have. But, anyhow, religion's real; that's my sense of it; and you can
get it, I bet, if you try. I've seen it got. A friend of mine got it--got
it under your preaching; not from you; but you was the accident that
brought it about, I expect. It's funny--it's merakilous, but it's so.
Kneel down!" he added, with peremptory suddenness. "Kneel, Scranton!"
In fear the other knelt.
"You're going to get religion now--here. You're going to pray for what
you didn't get--and almost got--in the desert. You're going to ask
forgiveness for all your damn tricks, and pray like a fanning-mill for
the spirit to come down. You ain't a scoundrel at heart--a friend of mine
says so. You're a weak vessel, cracked, perhaps. You've got to be saved,
and start right over again--and 'Praise God from whom all blessings
flow!' Pray--pray, Scranton, and tell the whole truth, and get it--get
religion. Pray like blazes. You go on, and pray out loud. Remember the
desert, and Mary Jewell, and your mother--did you have a mother,
Scranton--say, did you have a mother, lad?"
Tim's voice suddenly lowered before the last word, for the Faith Healer
had broken down in a torrent of tears.
"Oh, my mother--O God!" he groaned.
"Say, that's right--that's right--go on," said the other, and drew back a
little, and sat down on a log. The man on his knees was convulsed with
misery. Denton, the world, disappeared. He prayed in agony. Presently Tim
moved uneasily, then got up and walked about; and at last, with a
strange, awed look, when an hour was past, he stole back into the shadow
of the trees, while still the wounded soul poured out its misery and
repentance.
Time moved on. A curious shyness possessed Tim now, a thing which he had
never felt in his life. He moved about self-consciously, awkwardly, until
at last there was a sudden silence over by the brook.
Tim looked, and saw the face of the kneeling man cleared, and quiet and
shining. He hesitated, then stepped out, and came over.
"Have you got it?" he asked quietly. "It's noon now."
"May God help me to redeem my past," answered the other in a new voice.
"You've got it--sure?" Tim's voice was meditative. "God has spoken to
me," was the simple answer. "I've got a friend'll be glad to hear that,"
he said; and once more, in imagination, he saw Laura Sloly standing at
the door of her home, with a light in her eyes he had never seen before.
"You'll want some money for your journey?" Tim asked.
"I want nothing but to go away--far away," was the low reply.
"Well, you've lived in the desert--I guess you can live in the
grass-country," came the dry response. "Good-bye-and good luck,
Scranton."
Tim turned to go, moved on a few steps, then looked back.
"Don't be afraid--they'll not follow," he said. "I'll fix it for you all
right."
But the man appeared not to hear; he was still on his knees.
Tim faced the woods once more.
He was about to mount his horse when he heard a step behind him. He
turned sharply--and faced Laura. "I couldn't rest. I came out this
morning. I've seen everything," she said.
"You didn't trust me," he said heavily.
"I never did anything else," she answered.
He gazed half-fearfully into her eyes. "Well?" he asked. "I've done my
best, as I said I would."
"Tim," she said, and slipped a hand in his, "would you mind the
religion--if you had me?"
THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN
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
favour? 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 side-walk 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
humming-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 gaiety.
She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words
were full of raillery and humour, 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 manny a good man needin' her. Mother o' Moses, how
manny! 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 not so big
enough to see--hein?" 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 parlour
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 honour." 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 veranda, 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, where civilisation 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 the 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 humour 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
maneuvering. "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.
"Helas! He is there in the hospital," he answered, and nodded towards a
building not far away, which had been part of an old Hudson's 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 towards 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 recognised 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 recognise 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-humouredly, 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 afterwards she entered the room with the priest. She was
dressed in a severely simple suit of grey, 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 colour, 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 honour. She had a gift of smiling,
and she smiled now, but it came from grace of mind rather than from
humour. As Finden had said, "She was for ever 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. Afterwards 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.