Northern Lights, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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"Flood! Oh, my God, Flood!" The voice was broken.
"You've got to stay here, and you're to remember not to get the funk,
even if I don't come before midnight. I'll be here then, if I'm alive. If
you don't keep your word--but, there, you will." Both hands gripped the
graceful shoulders of the miscreant like a vice.
"So help me, Flood," was the frightened, whispered reply, "I'll make it
up to you somehow, some day. I'll pay you back."
Rawley caught up his cap from the table. "Steady--steady. Don't go at a
fence till you're sure of your seat, Dan," he said. Then with a long look
at the portrait on the wall, and an exclamation which the other did not
hear, he left the room with a set, determined face.
......................
"Who told you? What brought you, Flood?" the girl asked, her chin in her
long, white hands, her head turned from the easel to him, a book in her
lap, the sun breaking through the leaves upon her hat, touching the
Titian hair with splendour.
"Fate brought me, and didn't tell me," he answered, with a whimsical
quirk of the mouth, and his trouble lurking behind the sea-deep eyes.
"Wouldn't you have come if you knew I was here?" she urged archly.
"Not for two thousand dollars," he answered, the look of trouble
deepening in his eyes, but his lips were smiling. He had a quaint sense
of humour, and at his last gasp would have noted the ridiculous thing.
And surely it was a droll malignity of Fate to bring him here to her
whom, in this moment of all moments in his life, he wished far away. Fate
meant to try him to the uttermost. This hurdle of trial was high indeed.
"Two thousand dollars--nothing less?" she inquired gaily. "You are too
specific for a real lover."
"Fate fixed the amount," he added drily. "Fate--you talk so much of
Fate," she replied gravely, and her eyes looked into the distance. "You
make me think of it too, and I don't want to do so. I don't want to feel
helpless, to be the child of Accident and Destiny."
"Oh, you get the same thing in the 'fore-ordination' that old Minister
M'Gregor preaches every Sunday. 'Be elect or be damned,' he says to us
all. Names aren't important; but, anyhow, it was Fate that led me here."
"Are you sure it wasn't me?" she asked softly. "Are you sure I wasn't
calling you, and you had to come?"
"Well, it was en route, anyhow; and you are always calling, if I must
tell you," he laughed. Suddenly he became grave. "I hear you call me in
the night sometimes, and I start up and say 'Yes, Di!' out of my sleep.
It's a queer hallucination. I've got you on the brain, certainly."
"It seems to vex you--certainly," she said, opening the book that lay in
her lap, "and your eyes trouble me to-day. They've got a look that used
to be in them, Flood, before--before you promised; and another look I
don't understand and don't like. I suppose it's always so. The real
business of life is trying to understand each other."
"You have wonderful thoughts for one that's had so little chance," he
said. "That's because you're a genius, I suppose. Teaching can't give
that sort of thing--the insight."
"What is the matter, Flood?" she asked suddenly again, her breast
heaving, her delicate, rounded fingers interlacing. "I heard a man say
once that you were 'as deep as the sea.' He did not mean it kindly, but I
do. You are in trouble, and I want to share it if I can. Where were you
going when you came across me here?"
"To see old Busby, the quack-doctor up there," he answered, nodding
towards a shrubbed and wooded hillock behind them.
"Old Busby!" she rejoined in amazement. "What do you want with him--not
medicine of that old quack, that dreadful man?"
"He cures people sometimes. A good many out here owe him more than
they'll ever pay him."
"Is he as rich an old miser as they say?"
"He doesn't look rich, does he?" was the enigmatical answer.
"Does any one know his real history? He didn't come from nowhere. He must
have had friends once. Some one must once have cared for him, though he
seems such a monster now."
"Yet he cures people sometimes," he rejoined abstractedly. "Probably
there's some good underneath. I'm going to try and see."
"What is it. What is your business with him? Won't you tell me? Is it so
secret?"
"I want him to help me in a case I've got in hand. A client of mine is in
trouble--you mustn't ask about it; and he can help, I think--I think so."
He got to his feet. "I must be going, Di," he added. Suddenly a flush
swept over his face, and he reached out and took both her hands. "Oh, you
are a million times too good for me!" he said. "But if all goes well,
I'll do my best to make you forget it."
"Wait--wait one moment," she answered. "Before you go, I want you to hear
what I've been reading over and over to myself just now. It is from a
book I got from Quebec, called 'When Time Shall Pass'. It is a story of
two like you and me. The man is writing to the woman, and it has things
that you have said to me--in a different way."
"No, I don't talk like a book, but I know a star in a dark night when I
see it," he answered, with a catch in his throat.
"Hush," she said, catching his hand in hers, as she read, while all
around them the sounds of summer--the distant clack of a reaper, the
crack of a whip, the locusts droning, the whir of a young partridge, the
squeak of a chipmunk--were tuned to the harmony of the moment and her
voice:
"'Night and the sombre silence, oh, my love, and one star shining!
First, warm, velvety sleep, and then this quick, quiet waking to
your voice which seems to call me. Is it--is it you that calls?
Do you sometimes, even in your dreams, speak to me? Far beneath
unconsciousness is there the summons of your spirit to me? . . .
I like to think so. I like to think that this thing which has come
to us is deeper, greater than we are. Sometimes day and night there
flash before my eyes--my mind's eyes--pictures of you and me in
places unfamiliar, landscapes never before seen, activities
uncomprehended and unknown, bright, alluring glimpses of some second
being, some possible, maybe never-to-be-realised future, alas! Yet
these swift-moving shutters of the soul, or imagination, or reality
--who shall say which?-give me a joy never before felt in life. If
I am not a better man for this love of mine for you, I am more than
I was, and shall be more than I am. Much of my life in the past was
mean and small, so much that I have said and done has been unworthy
--my love for you is too sharp a light for my gross imperfections of
the past! Come what will, be what must, I stake my life, my heart,
my soul on you--that beautiful, beloved face; those deep eyes in
which my being is drowned; those lucid, perfect hands that have
bound me to the mast of your destiny. I cannot go back, I must go
forwards: now I must keep on loving you or be shipwrecked. I did
not know that this was in me, this tide of love, this current of
devotion. Destiny plays me beyond my ken, beyond my dreams.
O Cithaeron! Turn from me now--or never, O my love! Loose me
from the mast, and let the storm and wave wash me out into the sea
of your forgetfulness now--or never! . . . But keep me, keep me,
if your love is great enough, if I bring you any light or joy; for I
am yours to my uttermost note of life.'"
"He knew--he knew!" Rawley said, catching her wrists in his hands and
drawing her to him. "If I could write, that's what I should have said to
you, beautiful and beloved. How mean and small and ugly my life was till
you made me over. I was a bad lot."
"So much hung on one little promise," she said, and drew closer to him.
"You were never bad," she added; then, with an arm sweeping the universe,
"Oh, isn't it all good, and isn't it all worth living?"
His face lost its glow. Over in the town her brother faced a ruined life,
and the girl beside him, a dark humiliation and a shame which would
poison her life hereafter, unless--his look turned to the little house
where the quack-doctor lived. He loosed her hands.
"Now for Caliban," he said.
"I shall be Ariel and follow you-in my heart," she said. "Be sure and
make him tell you the story of his life," she added with a laugh, as his
lips swept the hair behind her ears.
As he moved swiftly away, watching his long strides, she said proudly,
"As deep as the sea."
After a moment she added: "And he was once a gambler, until, until--" she
glanced at the open book, then with sweet mockery looked at her
hands--"until 'those lucid, perfect hands bound me to the mast of your
destiny.' O vain Diana! But they are rather beautiful," she added softly,
"and I am rather happy." There was something like a gay little chuckle in
her throat.
"O vain Diana!" she repeated.
.......................
Rawley entered the door of the but on the hill without ceremony. There
was no need for courtesy, and the work he had come to do could be easier
done without it.
Old Busby was crouched over a table, his mouth lapping milk from a full
bowl on the table. He scarcely raised his head when Rawley
entered--through the open door he had seen his visitor coming. He sipped
on, his straggling beard dripping. There was silence for a time.
"What do you want?" he growled at last.
"Finish your swill, and then we can talk," said Rawley carelessly. He
took a chair near the door, lighted a cheroot and smoked, watching the
old man, as he tipped the great bowl towards his face, as though it were
some wild animal feeding. The clothes were patched and worn, the
coat-front was spattered with stains of all kinds, the hair and beard
were unkempt and long, giving him what would have been the look of a
mangy lion, but that the face had the expression of some beast less
honourable. The eyes, however, were malignantly intelligent, the hands,
ill-cared for, were long, well-shaped and capable, but of a hateful
yellow colour like the face. And through all was a sense of power, dark
and almost mediaeval. Secret, evilly wise and inhuman, he looked a being
apart, whom men might seek for help in dark purposes.
"What do you want--medicine?" he muttered at last, wiping his beard and
mouth with the palm of his hand, and the palm on his knees.
Rawley looked at the ominous-looking bottles on the shelves above the old
man's head; at the forceps, knives, and other surgical instruments on the
walls--they at least were bright and clean--and, taking the cheroot
slowly from his mouth, he said:
"Shin-plasters are what I want. A friend of mine has caught his leg in a
trap."
The old man gave an evil chuckle at the joke, for a "shin-plaster" was a
money-note worth a quarter of a dollar.
"I've got some," he growled in reply, "but they cost twenty-five cents
each. You can have them for your friend at the price."
"I want eight thousand of them from you. He's hurt pretty bad," was the
dogged, dry answer.
The shaggy eyebrows of the quack drew together, and the eyes peered out
sharply through half-closed lids. "There's plenty of wanting and not much
getting in this world," he rejoined, with a leer of contempt, and spat on
the floor, while yet the furtive watchfulness of the eyes indicated a
mind ill at ease.
Smoke came in placid puffs from the cheroot--Rawley was smoking very
hard, but with a judicial meditation, as it seemed.
"Yes, but if you want a thing so bad that, to get it, you'll face the
devil or the Beast of Revelations, it's likely to come to you."
"You call me a beast?" The reddish-brown face grew black like that of a
Bedouin in his rage.
"I said the Beast of Revelations--don't you know the Scriptures?"
"I know that a fool is to be answered according to his folly," was the
hoarse reply, and the great head wagged to and fro in its smarting rage.
"Well, I'm doing my best; and perhaps when the folly is all out, we'll
come to the revelations of the Beast." There was a silence, in which the
gross impostor shifted heavily in his seat, while a hand twitched across
the mouth, and then caught at the breast of the threadbare black coat
abstractedly.
Rawley leaned forward, one elbow on a knee, the cheroot in his fingers.
He spoke almost confidentially, as to some ignorant and misguided
savage--as he had talked to Indian chiefs in his time, when searching for
the truth regarding some crime:
"I've had a lot of revelations in my time. A lawyer and a doctor always
do. And though there are folks who say I'm no lawyer, as there are those
who say with greater truth that you're no doctor, speaking technically,
we've both had 'revelations.' You've seen a lot that's seamy, and so have
I. You're pretty seamy yourself. In fact, you're as bad a man as ever
saved lives--and lost them. You've had a long tether, and you've swung on
it--swung wide. But you've had a lot of luck that you haven't swung high,
too."
He paused and flicked away the ash from his cheroot, while the figure
before him swayed animal-like from side to side, muttering.
"You've got brains, a great lot of brains of a kind--however you came by
them," Rawley continued; "and you've kept a lot of people in the West
from passing in their cheques before their time. You've rooked 'em,
chiselled 'em out of a lot of cash, too. There was old Lamson--fifteen
hundred for the goitre on his neck; and Mrs. Gilligan for the cancer--two
thousand, wasn't it? Tincture of Lebanon leaves you called the medicine,
didn't you? You must have made fifty thousand or so in the last ten
years."
"What I've made I'll keep," was the guttural answer, and the talon-like
fingers clawed the table.
"You've made people pay high for curing them, saving them sometimes; but
you haven't paid me high for saving you in the courts; and there's one
case that you haven't paid me for at all. That was when the patient
died--and you didn't."
The face of the old man became mottled with a sudden fear, but he jerked
it forwards once or twice with an effort at self-control. Presently he
steadied to the ordeal of suspense, while he kept saying to himself,
"What does he know--what--which?"
"Malpractice resulting in death--that was poor Jimmy Tearle; and
something else resulting in death--that was the switchman's wife. And the
law is hard in the West where a woman's in the case--quick and hard. Yes,
you've swung wide on your tether; look out that you don't swing high, old
man."
"You can prove nothing; it's bluff;" came the reply in a tone of malice
and of fear.
"You forget. I was your lawyer in Jimmy Tearle's case, and a letter's
been found written by the switchman's wife to her husband. It reached me
the night he was killed by the avalanche. It was handed over to me by the
post-office, as the lawyer acting for the relatives. I've read it. I've
got it. It gives you away."
"I wasn't alone." Fear had now disappeared, and the old man was fighting.
"No, you weren't alone; and if the switchman and the switchman's wife
weren't dead and out of it all; and if the other man that didn't matter
any more than you wasn't alive and hadn't a family that does matter, I
wouldn't be asking you peaceably for two thousand dollars as my fee for
getting you off two cases that might have sent you to prison for twenty
years, or, maybe, hung you to the nearest tree."
The heavy body pulled itself together, the hands clinched. "Blackmail-you
think I'll stand it?"
"Yes, I think you will. I want two thousand dollars to help a friend in a
hole, and I mean to have it, if you think your neck's worth it."
Teeth, wonderfully white, showed through the shaggy beard. "If I had to
go to prison--or swing, as you say, do you think I'd go with my mouth
shut? I'd not pay up alone. The West would crack--holy Heaven, I know
enough to make it sick. Go on and see! I've got the West in my hand." He
opened and shut his fingers with a grimace of cruelty which shook Rawley
in spite of himself.
Rawley had trusted to the inspiration of the moment; he had had no
clearly defined plan; he had believed that he could frighten the old man,
and by force of will bend him to his purposes. It had all been more
difficult than he had expected. He kept cool, imperturbable, and
determined, however. He knew that what the old quack said was true--the
West might shake with scandal concerning a few who, no doubt, in remorse
and secret fear, had more than paid the penalty of their offences. But he
thought of Di Welldon and of her criminal brother, and every nerve, every
faculty was screwed to its utmost limit of endurance and capacity.
Suddenly the old man gave a new turn to the event. He got up and,
rummaging in an old box, drew out a dice-box. Rattling the dice, he threw
them out on the table before him, a strange, excited look crossing his
face.
"Play for it," he said in a harsh, croaking voice. "Play for the two
thousand. Win it if you can. You want it bad. I want to keep it bad. It's
nice to have; it makes a man feel warm--money does. I'd sleep in
ten-dollar bills, I'd have my clothes made of them, if I could; I'd have
my house papered with them; I'd eat 'em. Oh, I know, I know about
you--and her--Diana Welldon! You've sworn off gambling, and you've kept
your pledge for near a year. Well, it's twenty years since I
gambled--twenty years. I gambled with these then." He shook the dice in
the box. "I gambled everything I had away--more than two thousand
dollars, more than two thousand dollars." He laughed a raw, mirthless
laugh. "Well, you're the greatest gambler in the West. So was I-in the
East. It pulverised me at last, when I'd nothing left--and drink, drink,
drink. I gave up both one night and came out West.
"I started doctoring here. I've got money, plenty of money--medicine,
mines, land got it for me. I've been lucky. Now you come to bluff me--me!
You don't know old Busby." He spat on the floor. "I'm not to be bluffed.
I know too much. Before they could lynch me I'd talk. But to play you,
the greatest gambler in the West, for two thousand dollars--yes, I'd like
the sting of it again. Twos, fours, double-sixes--the gentleman's game!"
He rattled the dice and threw them with a flourish out on the table, his
evil face lighting up. "Come! You can't have something for nothing," he
growled.
As he spoke, a change came over Rawley's face. It lost its cool
imperturbability, it grew paler, the veins on the fine forehead stood
out, a new, flaring light came into the eyes. The old gambler's spirit
was alive. But even as it rose, sweeping him into that area of fiery
abstraction where every nerve is strung to a fine tension, and the
surrounding world disappears, he saw the face of Diana Welldon, he
remembered her words to him not an hour before, and the issue of the
conflict, other considerations apart, was without doubt. But there was
her brother and his certain fate, if the two thousand dollars were not
paid in by midnight. He was desperate. It was in reality for Diana's
sake. He approached the table, and his old calm returned.
"I have no money to play with," he said quietly. With a gasp of
satisfaction, the old man fumbled in the inside of his coat and drew out
layers of ten, fifty, and hundred-dollar bills. It was lined with them.
He passed a pile over to Rawley--two thousand dollars. He placed a
similar pile before himself.
As Rawley laid his hand on the bills, the thought rushed through his
mind, "You have it--keep it!" but he put it away from him. With a
gentleman he might have done it, with this man before him, it was
impossible. He must take his chances; and it was the only chance in which
he had hope now, unless he appealed for humanity's sake, for the girl's
sake, and told the real truth. It might avail. Well, that would be the
last resort.
"For small stakes?" said the grimy quack in a gloating voice.
Rawley nodded and then added, "We stop at eleven o'clock, unless I've
lost or won all before that."
"And stake what's left on the last throw?"
"Yes."
There was silence for a moment, in which Rawley seemed to grow older, and
a set look came to his mouth--a broken pledge, no matter what the cause,
brings heavy penalties to the honest mind. He shut his eyes for an
instant, and, when he opened them, he saw that his fellow-gambler was
watching him with an enigmatical and furtive smile. Did this Caliban have
some understanding of what was at stake in his heart and soul?
"Play!" Rawley said sharply, and was himself again. For hour after hour
there was scarce a sound, save the rattle of the dice and an occasional
exclamation from the old man as he threw a double-six. As dusk fell, the
door had been shut, and a lighted lantern was hung over their heads.
Fortune had fluctuated. Once the old man's pile had diminished to two
notes, then the luck had changed and his pile grew larger; then fell
again; but, as the hands of the clock on the wall above the blue medicine
bottles reached a quarter to eleven, it increased steadily throw after
throw.
Now the player's fever was in Rawley's eyes. His face was deadly pale,
but his hand threw steadily, calmly, almost negligently, as it might
seem. All at once, at eight minutes to eleven, the luck turned in his
favour, and his pile mounted again. Time after time he dropped
double-sixes. It was almost uncanny. He seemed to see the dice in the
box, and his hand threw them out with the precision of a machine. Long
afterwards he had this vivid illusion that he could see the dice in the
box. As the clock was about to strike eleven he had before him three
thousand eight hundred dollars. It was his throw.
"Two hundred," he said in a whisper, and threw. He won.
With a gasp of relief, he got to his feet, the money in his hand. He
stepped backward from the table, then staggered, and a faintness passed
over him. He had sat so long without moving that his legs bent under him.
There was a pail of water with a dipper in it on a bench. He caught up a
dipperful of water, drank it empty, and let it fall in the pail again
with a clatter.
"Dan," he said abstractedly, "Dan, you're all safe now."
Then he seemed to wake, as from a dream, and looked at the man at the
table. Busby was leaning on it with both hands, and staring at Rawley
like some animal jaded and beaten from pursuit. Rawley walked back to the
table and laid down two thousand dollars.
"I only wanted two thousand," he said, and put the other two thousand in
his pocket.
The evil eyes gloated, the long fingers clutched the pile, and swept it
into a great inside pocket. Then the shaggy head bent forwards.
"You said it was for Dan," he said--"Dan Welldon?"
Rawley hesitated. "What is that to you?" he replied at last.
With a sudden impulse the old impostor lurched round, opened a box, drew
out a roll, and threw it on the table.
"It's got to be known sometime," he said, "and you'll be my lawyer when
I'm put into the ground--you're clever. They call me a quack.
Malpractice--bah! There's my diploma--James Clifton Welldon. Right
enough, isn't it?"
Rawley was petrified. He knew the forgotten story of James Clifton
Welldon, the specialist, turned gambler, who had almost ruined his own
brother--the father of Dan and Diana--at cards and dice, and had then
ruined himself and disappeared. Here, where his brother had died, he had
come years ago, and practised medicine as a quack.
"Oh, there's plenty of proof, if it's wanted!" he said. "I've got it
here." He tapped the box behind him. "Why did I do it? Because it's my
way. And you're going to marry my niece, and 'll have it all some day.
But not till I've finished with it--not unless you win it from me at dice
or cards. . . . But no"--something human came into the old, degenerate
face--"no more gambling for the man that's to marry Diana. There's a
wonder and a beauty!" He chuckled to himself. "She'll be rich when I've
done with it. You're a lucky man--ay, you're lucky."
Rawley was about to tell the old man what the two thousand dollars was
for, but a fresh wave of repugnance passed over him, and, hastily
drinking another dipperful of water, he opened the door. He looked back.
The old man was crouching forward, lapping milk from the great bowl, his
beard dripping. In disgust he swung round again. The fresh, clear air
caught his face.
With a gasp of relief he stepped out into the night, closing the door
behind him.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "NORTHERN LIGHTS":
Babbling covers a lot of secrets
Being a man of very few ideas, he cherished those he had
Beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule
Don't go at a fence till you're sure of your seat
Even bad company's better than no company at all
Future of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer
I like when I like, and I like a lot when I like
I don't think. I'm old enough to know
It ain't for us to say what we're goin' to be, not always
Knew when to shut his eyes, and when to keep them open
Nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of a favourite
Self-will, self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him
That he will find the room empty where I am not
The temerity and nonchalance of despair
The real business of life is trying to understand each other
Things in life git stronger than we are
Tyranny of the little man, given a power
We don't live in months and years, but just in minutes
What'll be the differ a hundred years from now
You've got blind rashness, and so you think you're bold