The Lane That Had No Turning, Complete - Gilbert Parker
Henri kept to his compact, drink for drink, sport for sport. One year the
crops were sold before they were reaped, horses and cattle went little by
little, then came mortgage, and still Henri never wavered, never
weakened, in spite of the Cure and all others. The brothers were always
together, and never from first to last did Henri lose his temper, or
openly lament that ruin was coming surely on them. What money Fabian
wanted he got. The Cure's admonitions availed nothing, for Fabian would
go his gait. The end came on the very spot where the compact had been
made; for, passing the lime-kiln one dark night, as the two rode home
together, Fabian's horse shied, the bank of the river gave way, and with
a startled "Ah, Henri!" the profligate and his horse were gone into the
river below.
Next month the farm and all were sold, Henri Paradis succeeded the old
lime-burner at his post, drank no more ever, and lived his life in sight
of the old home.
THE WOODSMAN'S STORY OF THE GREAT WHITE CHIEF
The old woodsman shifted the knife with which he was mending his
fishing-rod from one hand to the other, and looked at it musingly, before
he replied to Medallion. "Yes, m'sieu', I knew the White Chief, as they
called him: this was his"--holding up the knife; "and this"--taking a
watch from his pocket. "He gave them to me; I was with him in the Circle
on the great journey."
"Tell us about him, then," Medallion urged; "for there are many tales,
and who knows which is the right one?"
"The right one is mine. Holy, he was to me like a father then! I know
more of the truth than any one." He paused a moment, looking out on the
river where the hot sun was playing with all its might, then took off his
cap with deliberation, laid it beside him, and speaking as it were into
the distance, began:
"He once was a trader of the Hudson's Bay Company. Of his birth some said
one thing, some another; I know he was beaucoup gentil, and his heart, it
was a lion's! Once, when there was trouble with the Chipp'ways, he went
alone to their camp, and say he will fight their strongest man, to stop
the trouble. He twist the neck of the great fighting man of the tribe, so
that it go with a snap, and that ends it, and he was made a chief, for,
you see, in their hearts they all hated their strong man. Well, one
winter there come down to Fort o' God two Esquimaux, and they say that
three white men are wintering by the Coppermine River; they had travel
down from the frozen seas when their ship was lock in the ice, but can
get no farther. They were sick with the evil skin, and starving. The
White Chief say to me: 'Galloir, will you go to rescue them?' I would
have gone with him to the ends of the world--and this was near one end."
The old man laughed to himself, tossed his jet-black hair from his
wrinkled face, and after a moment, went on: "There never was such a
winter as that. The air was so still by times that you can hear the
rustle of the stars and the shifting of the northern lights; but the cold
at night caught you by the heart and clamp it--Mon Dieu, how it clamp! We
crawl under the snow and lay in our bags of fur and wool, and the dogs
hug close to us. We were sorry for the dogs; and one died, and then
another, and there is nothing so dreadful as to hear the dogs howl in the
long night--it is like ghosts crying in an empty world. The circle of the
sun get smaller and smaller, till he only tramp along the high edge of
the north-west. We got to the river at last and found the camp. There is
one man dead--only one; but there were bones--ah, m'sieu', you not guess
what a thing it is to look upon the bones of men, and know that--!"
Medallion put his hand on the old man's arm. "Wait a minute," he said.
Then he poured out coffee for both, and they drank before the rest was
told.
"It's a creepy story," said Medallion, "but go on."
"Well, the White Chief look at the dead man as he sit there in the snow,
with a book and a piece of paper beside him, and the pencil in the book.
The face is bent forward to the knees. The White Chief pick up the book
and pencil, and then kneel down and gaze up in the dead man's face, all
hard like stone and crusted with frost. I thought he would never stir
again, he look so long. I think he was puzzle. Then he turn and say to
me: 'So quiet, so awful, Galloir!' and got up. Well, but it was cold
then, and my head seemed big and running about like a ball of air. But I
light a spirit-lamp, and make some coffee, and he open the dead man's
book--it is what they call a diary--and begin to read. All at once I hear
a cry, and I see him drop the book on the ground, and go to the dead man,
and jerk his fist as if to strike him in the face. But he did not
strike."
Galloir stopped, and lighted his pipe, and was so long silent that
Medallion had to jog him into speaking. He puffed the smoke so that his
face was in the cloud, and he said through it: "No, he did not strike. He
get to his feet and spoke: 'God forgive her!' like that, and come and
take up the book again, and read. He eat and drunk, and read the book
again, and I know by his face that something more than cold was clamp his
heart.
"'Shall we bury him in the snow?' I say. 'No,' he spoke, 'let him sit
there till the Judgmen'. This is a wonderful book, Galloir,' he went on.
'He was a brave man, but the rest--the rest!'--then under his breath
almost: 'She was so young--but a child.' I not understand that. We start
away soon, leaving the thing there. For four days, and then I see that
the White Chief will never get back to Fort Pentecost; but he read the
dead man's book much. . . ."
"I cannot forget that one day. He lies down looking at the world--nothing
but the waves of snow, shining blue and white, on and on. The sun lift an
eye of blood in the north, winking like a devil as I try to drive Death
away by calling in his ear. He wake all at once; but his eyes seem
asleep. He tell me to take the book to a great man in Montreal--he give
me the name. Then he take out his watch--it is stop--and this knife, and
put them into my hands, and then he pat my shoulder. He motion to have
the bag drawn over his head. I do it. . . . Of course that was the end!"
"But what about the book?" Medallion asked.
"That book? It is strange. I took it to the man in Montreal--tonnerre,
what a fine house and good wine had he!--and told him all. He whip out a
scarf, and blow his nose loud, and say very angry: 'So, she's lost both
now! What a scoundrel he was! . . .' Which one did he mean? I not
understan' ever since."
UNCLE JIM
He was no uncle of mine, but it pleased me that he let me call him Uncle
Jim.
It seems only yesterday that, for the first time, on a farm "over the
border," from the French province, I saw him standing by a log outside
the wood-house door, splitting maple knots. He was all bent by years and
hard work, with muscles of iron, hands gnarled and lumpy, but clinching
like a vise; grey head thrust forward on shoulders which had carried
forkfuls of hay and grain, and leaned to the cradle and the scythe, and
been heaped with cordwood till they were like hide and metal; white
straggling beard and red watery eyes, which, to me, were always hung with
an intangible veil of mystery--though that, maybe, was my boyish fancy.
Added to all this he was so very deaf that you had to speak clear and
loud into his ear; and many people he could not hear at all, if their
words were not sharp-cut, no matter how loud. A silent, withdrawn man he
was, living close to Mother Earth, twin-brother of Labour, to whom
Morning and Daytime were sounding-boards for his axe, scythe, saw, flail,
and milking-pail, and Night a round hollow of darkness into which he
crept, shutting the doors called Silence behind him, till the impish page
of Toil came tapping again, and he stepped awkwardly into the working
world once more. Winter and summer saw him putting the kettle on the fire
a few minutes after four o'clock, in winter issuing with lantern from the
kitchen door to the stable and barn to feed the stock; in summer sniffing
the grey dawn and looking out on his fields of rye and barley, before he
went to gather the cows for milking and take the horses to water.
For forty years he and his worn-faced wife bowed themselves beneath the
yoke, first to pay for the hundred-acre farm, and then to bring up and
educate their seven children. Something noble in them gave them ambitions
for their boys and girls which they had never had for themselves; but
when had gone the forty years, in which the little farm had twice been
mortgaged to put the eldest son through college as a doctor, they faced
the bitter fact that the farm had passed from them to Rodney, the second
son, who had come at last to keep a hotel in a town fifty miles away.
Generous-hearted people would think that these grown-up sons and
daughters should have returned the old people's long toil and care by
buying up the farm and handing it back to them, their rightful refuge in
the decline of life. But it was not so. They were tenants where they had
been owners, dependants where they had been givers, slaves where once
they were, masters. The old mother toiled without a servant, the old man
without a helper, save in harvest time.
But the great blow came when Rodney married the designing milliner who
flaunted her wares opposite his bar-room; and, somehow, from the date of
that marriage, Rodney's good fortune and the hotel declined. When he and
his wife first visited the little farm after their marriage the old
mother shrank away from the young woman's painted face, and ever
afterwards an added sadness showed in her bearing and in her patient
smile. But she took Rodney's wife through the house, showing her all
there was to show, though that was not much. There was the little parlour
with its hair-cloth chairs, rag carpet, centre table, and iron stove with
black pipes, all gaily varnished. There was the parlour bedroom off it,
with the one feather-bed of the house bountifully piled up with coarse
home-made blankets, topped by a silk patchwork quilt, the artistic labour
of the old wife's evening hours while Uncle Jim peeled apples and strung
them to dry from the rafters. There was a room, dining-room in summer,
and kitchen dining-room in winter, as clean as aged hands could scrub and
dust it, hung about with stray pictures from illustrated papers, and a
good old clock in the corner "ticking" life, and youth, and hope away.
There was the buttery off that, with its meagre china and crockery, its
window looking out on the field of rye, the little orchard of winter
apples, and the hedge of cranberry bushes. Upstairs were rooms with no
ceilings, where, lying on a corn-husk bed, you reached up and touched the
sloping roof, with windows at the end only, facing the buckwheat field,
and looking down two miles towards the main road--for the farm was on a
concession or side-road, dusty in summer, and in winter sometimes
impassable for weeks together. It was not much of a home, as any one with
the mind's eye can see, but four stalwart men and three fine women had
been born, raised, and quartered there, until, with good clothes, and
speaking decent English and tolerable French, and with money in their
pockets, hardly got by the old people, one by one they issued forth into
the world.
The old mother showed Rodney's wife what there was for eyes to see, not
forgetting the three hives of bees on the south side, beneath the parlour
window. She showed it with a kind of pride, for it all seemed good to
her, and every dish, and every chair, and every corner in the little
house had to her a glory of its own, because of those who had come and
gone--the firstlings of her flock, the roses of her little garden of
love, blooming now in a rougher air than ranged over the little house on
the hill. She had looked out upon the pine woods to the east and the
meadow-land to the north, the sweet valley between the rye-field and the
orchard, and the good honest air that had blown there for forty years,
bracing her heart and body for the battle of love and life, and she had
said through all, Behold it is very good.
But the pert milliner saw nothing of all this; she did not stand abashed
in the sacred precincts of a home where seven times the Angel of Death
had hovered over a birth-bed. She looked into the face which Time's
finger had anointed, and motherhood had etched with trouble, and said:
"'Tisn't much, is it? Only a clap-board house, and no ceilings upstairs,
and rag carpets-pshaw!"
And when she came to wash her hands for dinner, she threw aside the
unscented, common bar-soap, and, shrugging her narrow shoulders at the
coarse towel, wiped her fingers on her cambric handkerchief. Any other
kind of a woman, when she saw the old mother going about with her twisted
wrist--a doctor's bad work with a fracture--would have tucked up her
dress, and tied on an apron to help. But no, she sat and preened herself
with the tissue-paper sort of pride of a vain milliner, or nervously
shifted about, lifting up this and that, curiously supercilious, her
tongue rattling on to her husband and to his mother in a shallow, foolish
way. She couldn't say, however, that any thing was out of order or
ill-kept about the place. The old woman's rheumatic fingers made corners
clean, and wood as white as snow, the stove was polished, the tins were
bright, and her own dress, no matter what her work, neat as a girl's,
although the old graceful poise of the body had twisted out of drawing.
But the real crisis came when Rodney, having stood at the wood-house door
and blown the dinner-horn as he used to do when a boy, the sound floating
and crying away across the rye-field, the old man came--for, strange to
say, that was the one sound he could hear easily, though, as he said to
himself, it seemed as small as a pin, coming from ever so far away. He
came heavily up from the barn-yard, mopping his red face and forehead,
and now and again raising his hand to shade his eyes, concerned to see
the unknown visitors, whose horse and buggy were in the stable-yard. He
and Rodney greeted outside warmly enough, but there was some trepidation
too in Uncle Jim's face--he felt trouble brewing; and there is no trouble
like that which comes between parent and child. Silent as he was,
however, he had a large and cheerful heart, and nodding his head he
laughed the deep, quaint laugh which Rodney himself of all his sons
had--and he was fonder of Rodney than any. He washed his hands in the
little basin outside the wood-house door, combed out his white beard,
rubbed his red, watery eyes, tied a clean handkerchief round his neck,
put on a rusty but clean old coat, and a minute afterwards was shaking
hands for the first time with Rodney's wife. He had lived much apart from
his kind, but he had a mind that fastened upon a thought and worked it
down until it was an axiom. He felt how shallow was this thin, flaunting
woman of flounces and cheap rouge; he saw her sniff at the brown
sugar-she had always had white at the hotel; and he noted that she let
Rodney's mother clear away and wash the dinner things herself. He felt
the little crack of doom before it came.
It came about three o'clock. He did not return to the rye-field after
dinner, but stayed and waited to hear what Rodney had to say. Rodney did
not tell his little story well, for he foresaw trouble in the old home;
but he had to face this and all coming dilemmas as best he might. With a
kind of shamefacedness, yet with an attempt to carry the thing off
lightly, he told Uncle Jim, while, inside, his wife told the old mother,
that the business of the hotel had gone to pot (he did not say who was
the cause of that), and they were selling out to his partner and coming
to live on the farm.
"I'm tired anyway of the hotel job," said Rodney. "Farming's a better
life. Don't you think so, dad?"
"It's better for me, Rod," answered Uncle Jim, "it's better for me."
Rodney was a little uneasy. "But won't it be better for me?" he asked.
"Mebbe," was the slow answer, "mebbe, mebbe so."
"And then there's mother, she's getting too old for the work, ain't she?"
"She's done it straight along," answered the old man, "straight along
till now."
"But Millie can help her, and we'll have a hired girl, eh?"
"I dunno, I dunno," was the brooding answer; "the place ain't going to
stand it."
"We'll get more out of it," answered Rodney. "I'll stock it up, I'll put
more under barley. All the thing wants is working, dad. Put more in, get
more out. Now ain't that right?"
The other was looking off towards the rye-field, where, for forty years,
up and down the hillside, he had travelled with the cradle and the
scythe, putting all there was in him into it, and he answered, blinking
along the avenue of the past:
"Mebbe, mebbe!"
Rodney fretted under the old man's vague replies, and said: "But darn it
all, can't you tell us what you think?"
His father did not take his eyes off the rye-field. "I'm thinking," he
answered, in the same old-fashioned way, "that I've been working here
since you were born, Rod. I've blundered along, somehow, just boggling my
way through. I ain't got anything more to say. The farm ain't mine any
more, but I'll keep my scythe sharp and my axe ground just as I always
did, and I'm for workin' as I've always worked as long as I'm let to
stay."
"Good Lord, dad, don't talk that way! Things ain't going to be any
different for you and mother than they are now. Only, of course--" He
paused.
The old man pieced out the sentence: "Only, of course, there can't be two
women rulin' one house, Rod, and you know it as well as I do."
Exactly how Rodney's wife told the old mother of the great change Rodney
never knew; but when he went back to the house the grey look in his
mother's face told him more than her words ever told. Before they left
that night the pink milliner had already planned the changes which were
to celebrate her coming and her ruling.
So Rodney and his wife came, all the old man prophesied in a few brief
sentences to his wife proving true. There was no great struggle on the
mother's part; she stepped aside from governing, and became as like a
servant as could be. An insolent servant-girl came, and she and Rodney's
wife started a little drama of incompetency, which should end as the
hotel-keeping ended. Wastefulness, cheap luxury, tawdry living, took the
place of the old, frugal, simple life. But the mother went about with
that unchanging sweetness of face, and a body withering about a fretted
soul. She had no bitterness, only a miserable distress. But every slight
that was put upon her, every change, every new-fangled idea, from the
white sugar to the scented soap and the yellow buggy, rankled in the old
man's heart. He had resentment both for the old wife and himself, and he
hated the pink milliner for the humiliation that she heaped upon them
both. Rodney did not see one-fifth of it, and what he did see lost its
force, because, strangely enough, he loved the gaudy wife who wore gloves
on her bloodless hands as she did the house-work and spent numberless
afternoons in trimming her own bonnets. Her peevishness grew apace as the
newness of the experience wore off. Uncle Jim seldom spoke to her, as he
seldom spoke to anybody, but she had an inkling of the rancour in his
heart, and many a time she put blame upon his shoulders to her husband,
when some unavoidable friction came.
A year, two years, passed, which were as ten upon the shoulders of the
old people, and then, in the dead of winter, an important thing happened.
About the month of March Rodney's first child was expected. At the end of
January Rodney had to go away, expecting to return in less than a month.
But, in the middle of February, the woman's sacred trouble came before
its time. And on that day there fell such a storm as had not been seen
for many a year. The concession road was blocked before day had well set
in; no horse could go ten yards in it. The nearest doctor was miles away
at Pontiac, and for any man to face the journey was to connive with
death. The old mother came to Uncle Jim, and, as she looked out of a
little unfrosted spot on the window at the blinding storm, told him that
the pink milliner would die. There seemed to be no other end to it, for
the chances were a hundred to one against the strongest man making a
journey for the doctor, and another hundred to one against the doctor's
coming.
No one knows whether Uncle Jim could hear the cries from the
torture-chamber, but, after standing for a time mumbling to himself, he
wrapped himself in a heavy coat, tied a muffler about his face, and went
out. If they missed him they must have thought him gone to the barn, or
in the drive-shed sharpening his axe. But the day went on and the old
mother forgot all the wrongs that she had suffered, and yearned over the
trivial woman who was hurrying out into the Great Space. Her hours seemed
numbered at noon, her moments measured as it came towards sundown, but
with the passing of the sun the storm stopped, and a beautiful white
peace fell on the world of snow, and suddenly out of that peace came six
men; and the first that opened the door was the doctor. After him came
Uncle Jim, supported between two others.
Uncle Jim had made the terrible journey, falling at last in the streets
of the county town with frozen hands and feet, not a dozen rods from the
doctor's door. They brought him to, he told his story, and, with the
abating of the storm, the doctor and the villagers drove down to the
concession road, and then made their way slowly up across the fields,
carrying the old man with them, for he would not be left behind.
An hour after the doctor entered the parlour bedroom the old mother came
out to where the old man sat, bundled up beside the fire with bandaged
hands and feet.
"She's safe, Jim, and the child too," she said softly. The old man
twisted in his chair, and blinked into the fire. "Dang my soul!" he said.
The old woman stooped and kissed his grey tangled hair. She did not
speak, and she did not ask him what he meant; but there and then they
took up their lives again and lived them out.
THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH
No one ever visited the House except the Little Chemist, the Avocat, and
Medallion; and Medallion, though merely an auctioneer, was the only
person on terms of intimacy with its owner, the old Seigneur, who for
many years had never stirred beyond the limits of his little garden. At
rare intervals he might be seen sitting in the large stone porch which
gave overweighted dignity to the house, itself not very large.
An air of mystery surrounded the place: in summer the grass was rank, the
trees seemed huddled together in gloom about the houses, the vines
appeared to ooze on the walls, and at one end, where the window-shutters
were always closed and barred, a great willow drooped and shivered; in
winter the stone walls showed naked and grim among the gaunt trees and
furtive shrubs.
None who ever saw the Seigneur could forget him--a tall figure with
stooping shoulders; a pale, deeply lined, clean-shaven face, and a
forehead painfully white, with blue veins showing; the eyes handsome,
penetrative, brooding, and made indescribably sorrowful by the dark skin
around them. There were those in Pontiac, such as the Cure, who
remembered when the Seigneur was constantly to be seen in the village;
and then another person was with him always, a tall, handsome youth, his
son. They were fond and proud of each other, and were religious and good
citizens in a highbred, punctilious way.
At that time the Seigneur was all health and stalwart strength. But one
day a rumour went abroad that he had quarrelled with his son because of
the wife of Farette the miller. No one outside knew if the thing was
true, but Julie, the miller's wife, seemed rather to plume herself that
she had made a stir in her little world. Yet the curious habitants came
to know that the young man had gone, and after a few years his having
once lived there had become a mere memory. But whenever the Little
Chemist set foot inside the tall porch he remembered; the Avocat was kept
in mind by papers which he was called upon to read and alter from time to
time; the Cure never forgot, because when the young man went he lost not
one of his flock but two; and Medallion, knowing something of the story,
had wormed a deal of truth out of the miller's wife. Medallion knew that
the closed, barred rooms were the young man's; and he knew also that the
old man was waiting, waiting, in a hope which he never even named to
himself.
One day the silent old housekeeper came rapping at Medallion's door, and
simply said to him: "Come--the Seigneur!"
Medallion went, and for hours sat beside the Seigneur's chair, while the
Little Chemist watched and sighed softly in a corner, now and again
rising to feel the sick man's pulse or to prepare a cordial. The
housekeeper hovered behind the high-backed chair, and when the Seigneur
dropped his handkerchief--now, as always, of the exquisite fashion of a
past century--she put it gently in his hand.