The Translation of a Savage, Complete - Gilbert Parker
"I cannot go without it," he persisted. "I am waiting for my commission
from you."
She dropped her hand from the flower with a little impatient motion. She
was tired, her head ached, she wanted to be alone. "Why are you
enigmatical?" she said. Then quickly: "I wish I knew what is in your
mind. You play with words so."
She scarcely knew what she said. A woman who loves a man very much is not
quick to take in the absolute declaration of that man's love on the
instant; it is too wonderful for her. He felt his check flush with hers,
he drew her look again to his. "Marion! Marion!" he said. That was all.
"Oh, hush, some one is coming!" was her quick, throbbing reply. When they
parted a half-hour later, he said to her: "Will you give me my commission
to go to Greyhope?"
"Oh no, I cannot," she said very gravely; "but come to Greyhope-when I go
back."
"And when will that be?" he said, smiling, yet a little ruefully too.
"Please ask Mrs. Townley," she replied; "she is coming also."
Marion, knew what that commission to go to Greyhope meant. But she
determined that he should see Lali first, before anything irrevocable was
done. She still looked upon Frank's marriage as a scandal. Well, Captain
Vidall should face it in all its crudeness. So, in a week or less, Marion
and Mrs. Townley were in Greyhope.
Two months had gone since Lali arrived in England, and yet no letter had
come to her, or to any of them, from Frank. Frank's solicitor in London
had written him fully of her arrival, and he had had a reply, with
further instructions regarding money to be placed to General Armour's
credit for the benefit of his wife. Lali, as she became Europeanised,
also awoke to the forms and ceremonies of her new life. She had overheard
Frank's father and mother wondering, and fretting as they wondered, why
they had not received any word from him. General Armour had even called
him a scoundrel, which sent Frank's mother into tears. Then Lali had
questioned Mackenzie and Colvin, for she had increasing shrewdness, and
she began to feel her actual position. She resented General Armour's
imputation, but in her heart she began to pine and wonder. At times, too,
she was fitful, and was not to be drawn out. But she went on improving in
personal appearance and manner and in learning the English language. Mrs.
Townley's appearance marked a change in her. When they met she suddenly
stood still and trembled. When Mrs. Townley came to her and took her hand
and kissed her, she shivered, and then caught her about the shoulders
lightly, but was silent. After a little she said: "Come--come to my
wigwam, and talk with me."
She said it with a strange little smile, for now she recognised that the
word wigwam was not to be used in her new life. But Mrs. Townley
whispered: "Ask Marion to come too."
Lali hesitated, and then said, a little maliciously: "Marion, will you
come to my wigwam?"
Marion ran to her, caught her about the waist, and replied gaily: "Yes,
we will have a pow-wow--is that right--is pow-wow right?"
The Indian girl shook her head with a pretty vagueness, and vanished with
them. General Armour walked up and down the room briskly, then turned on
his wife and said: "Wife, it was a brutal thing: Frank doesn't deserve to
be--the father of her child."
But Lali had moods--singular moods. She indulged in one three days after
the arrival of Marion and Mrs. Townley. She had learned to ride with the
side-saddle, and wore her riding-dress admirably. Nowhere did she show to
better advantage. She had taken to riding now with General Armour on the
country roads. On this day Captain Vidall was expected, he having written
to ask that he might come. What trouble Lali had with one of the servants
that morning was never thoroughly explained, but certain it is, she came
to have a crude notion of why Frank Armour married her. The servant was
dismissed duly, but that was after the contre-temps.
It was late afternoon. Everybody had been busy, because one or two other
guests were expected besides Captain Vidall. Lali had kept to herself,
sending word through Richard that she would not "be English," as she
vaguely put it, that day. She had sent Mackenzie on some mission. She sat
on the floor of her room, as she used to sit on the ground in her
father's lodge. Her head was bowed in her hands, and her arms rested on
her knees. Her body swayed to and fro. Presently all motion ceased. She
became perfectly still. She looked before her as if studying something.
Her eyes immediately flashed. She rose quickly to her feet, went to her
wardrobe, and took out her Indian costume and blanket, with which she
could never be induced to part. Almost feverishly she took off the
clothes she wore and hastily threw them from her. Then she put on the
buckskin clothes in which she had journeyed to England, drew down her
hair as she used to wear it, fastened round her waist a long red sash
which had been given her by a governor of the Hudson's Bay Company when
he had visited her father's country, threw her blanket round her
shoulders, and then eyed herself in the great mirror in the room. What
she saw evidently did not please her perfectly, for she stretched out her
hands and looked at them; she shook her head at herself and put her hand
to her cheeks and pinched them, they were not so brown as they once were,
then she thrust out her foot. She drew it back quickly in disdain.
Immediately she caught the fashionable slippers from her feet and threw
them among the discarded garments. She looked at herself again. Still she
was not satisfied, but she threw up her arms, as with a sense of pleasure
and freedom, and laughed at herself. She pushed out her moccasined foot,
tapped the floor with it, nodded towards it, and said a word or two in
her own language. She heard some one in the next room, possibly
Mackenzie. She stepped to the door leading into the hall, opened it, went
out, travelled its length, ran down a back hallway, out into the park,
towards the stables, her blanket, as her hair, flying behind her.
She entered the stables, made for a horse that she had ridden much, put a
bridle on him, led him out before any one had seen her, and, catching him
by the mane, suddenly threw herself on him at a bound, and, giving him a
tap with a short whip she had caught up in the stable, headed him for the
main avenue and the open road. Then a stableman saw her and ran after,
but he might as well have tried to follow the wind. He forthwith
proceeded to saddle another horse. Boulter also saw her as she passed the
house, and, running in, told Mrs. Armour and the general. They both ran
to the window and saw dashing down the avenue--a picture out of Fenimore
Cooper; a saddleless horse with a rider whose fingers merely touched the
bridle, riding as on a journey of life and death.
"My God, it's Lali! She's mad--she's mad! She is striking that horse! It
will bolt! It will kill her!" cried the general.
Then he rushed for a horse to follow her. Mrs. Armour's hands clasped
painfully. For an instant she had almost the same thought as had Marion
on the first morning of Lali's coming; but that passed, and left her
gazing helplessly after the horse-woman. The flying blanket had
frightened the blooded horse, and he made desperate efforts to fulfil the
general's predictions.
Lali soon found that she had miscalculated. She was not riding an Indian
pony, but a crazed, high-strung horse. As they flew, she sitting superbly
and tugging at the bridle, the party coming from the railway station
entered the great gate, accompanied by Richard and Marion. In a moment
they sighted this wild pair bearing down upon them with a terrible
swiftness.
As Marion recognised Lali she turned pale and cried out, rising in her
seat. Instinctively Captain Vidall knew who it was, though he could not
guess the cause of the singular circumstance. He saw that the horse had
bolted, but also that the rider seemed entirely fearless. "Why, in
Heaven's name," he said between his teeth, "doesn't she let go that
blanket!"
At that moment Lali did let it go, and the horse dashed by them, making
hard for the gate. "Turn the horses round and follow her," said Vidall to
the driver. While this was doing, Marion caught sight of her father
riding hard down the avenue. He passed them, and called to them to hurry
on after him.
Lali had not the slightest sense of fear, but she knew that the horse had
gone mad. When they passed through the gate and swerved into the road, a
less practised rider would have been thrown. She sat like wax. The pace
was incredible for a mile, and though General Armour rode well, he was
far behind.
Suddenly a trap appeared in the road in front of them, and the driver,
seeing the runaway, set his horses at right angles to the road. It served
the purpose only to provide another danger. Not far from where the trap
was drawn, and between it and the runaway, was a lane, which ended at a
farmyard in a cul-de-sac. The horse swerved into it, not slacking its
pace, and in the fraction of a minute came to the farmyard.
But now the fever was in Lali's blood. She did not care whether she lived
or died. A high hedge formed the cul-de-sac. When she saw the horse
slacking she cut it savagely across the head twice with a whip, and drove
him at the green wall. He was of too good make to refuse it, stiff as it
was. He rose to it magnificently, and cleared it; but almost as he struck
the ground squarely, he staggered and fell--the girl beneath him. He had
burst a blood-vessel. The ground was soft and wet; the weight of the
horse prevented her from getting free. She felt its hoof striking in its
death-struggles, and once her shoulder was struck. Instinctively she
buried her face in the mud, and her arms covered her head.
And then she knew no more.
When she came to, she was in the carriage within the gates of Greyhope,
and Marion was bending over her. She suddenly tried to lift herself, but
could not. Presently she saw another face--that of General Armour. It was
stern, and yet his eyes were swimming as he looked at her.
"How!" she said to him--"How!" and fainted again.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Being young, she exaggerated the importance of the event
His duties were many, or he made them so
Men must have their bad hours alone
Most important lessons of life--never to quarrel with a woman
Sympathy and consolation might be much misplaced
These little pieces of art make life possible
Think of our position
Who never knew self-consciousness
You never can make a scandal less by trying to hide it
THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE
By Gilbert Parker
Volume 2.
VI. THE PASSING OF THE YEARS
VII. A COURT-MARTIAL
VIII. TO EVERY MAN HIS HOUR
IX. THE FAITH OF COMRADES
CHAPTER VI
THE PASSING OF THE YEARS
Lali's recovery was not rapid. A change had come upon her. With that
strange ride had gone the last strong flicker of the desire for savage
life in her. She knew now the position she held towards her husband: that
he had never loved her; that she was only an instrument for unworthy
retaliation. So soon as she could speak after her accident, she told them
that they must not write to him and tell him of it. She also made them
promise that they would give him no news of her at all, save that she was
well. They could not refuse to promise; they felt she had the right to
demand much more than that. They had begun to care for her for herself,
and when the months went by, and one day there was a hush about her room,
and anxiety, and then relief, in the faces of all, they came to care for
her still more for the sake of her child.
As the weeks passed, the fair-haired child grew more and more like his
father; but if Lali thought of her husband they never knew it by anything
she said, for she would not speak of him. She also made them promise that
they would not write to him of the child's birth. Richard, with his sense
of justice, and knowing how much the woman had been wronged, said that in
all this she had done quite right; that Frank, if he had done his duty
after marrying her, should have come with her. And because they all felt
that Richard had been her best friend as well as their own, they called
the child after him. This also was Lali's wish. Coincident with her
motherhood there came to Lali a new purpose. She had not lived with the
Armours without absorbing some of their fine social sense and dignity.
This, added to the native instinct of pride in her, gave her a new
ambition. As hour by hour her child grew dear to her, so hour by hour her
husband grew away from her. She schooled herself against him.--At times
she thought she hated him. She felt she could never forgive him, but she
would prove to him that it was she who had made the mistake of her life
in marrying him; that she had been wronged, not he; and that his sin
would face him with reproach and punishment one day. Richard's prophecy
was likely to come true: she would defeat very perfectly indeed Frank's
intentions. After the child was born, so soon as she was able, she
renewed her studies with Richard and Mrs. Armour. She read every morning
for hours; she rode; she practised all those graceful arts of the toilet
which belong to the social convention; she showed an unexpected faculty
for singing, and practised it faithfully; and she begged Mrs. Armour and
Marion to correct her at every point where correction seemed necessary.
When the child was two years old, they all went to London, something
against Lali's personal feelings, but quite in accord with what she felt
her duty.
Richard was left behind at Greyhope. For the first time in eighteen
months he was alone with his old quiet duties and recreations. During
that time he had not neglected his pensioners,--his poor, sick, halt, and
blind, but a deeper, larger interest had come into his life in the person
of Lali. During all that time she had seldom been out of his sight, never
out of his influence and tutelage. His days had been full, his every hour
had been given a keen, responsible interest. As if by tacit consent,
every incident or development of Lali's life was influenced by his
judgment and decision. He had been more to her than General Armour, Mrs.
Armour, or Marion. Schooled as he was in all the ways of the world, he
had at the same time a mind as sensitive as a woman's, an indescribable
gentleness, a persuasive temperament. Since, years before, he had
withdrawn from the social world and become a recluse, many of his finer
qualities had gone into an indulgent seclusion. He had once loved the
world and the gay life of London, but some untoward event, coupled with a
radical love of retirement, had sent him into years of isolation at
Greyhope.
His tutelar relations with Lali had reopened many an old spring of
sensation and experience. Her shy dependency, her innocent
inquisitiveness, had searched out his remotest sympathies. In teaching
her he had himself been re-taught. Before she came he had been satisfied
with the quiet usefulness and studious ease of his life. But in her
presence something of his old youthfulness came back, some reflection of
the ardent hopes of his young manhood. He did not notice the change in
himself. He only knew that his life was very full. He read later at
nights, he rose earlier in the morning. But unconsciously to himself, he
was undergoing a change. The more a man's sympathies and emotions are
active, the less is he the philosopher. It is only when one has withdrawn
from the more personal influence of the emotions that one's philosophy
may be trusted. One may be interested in mankind and still be
philosophical--may be, as it were, the priest and confessor to all
comers. But let one be touched in some vital corner in one's nature, and
the high, faultless impartiality is gone. In proportion as Richard's
interest in Lali had grown, the universal quality of his sympathy had
declined. Man is only man. Not that his benefactions as lord-bountiful in
the parish had grown perfunctory, but the calm detail of his interest was
not so definite. He was the same, yet not the same.
He was not aware of any difference in himself. He did not know that he
looked younger by ten years. Such is the effect of mere personal sympathy
upon a man's look and bearing. When, therefore, one bright May morning,
the family at Greyhope, himself excluded, was ready to start for London,
he had no thought but that he would drop back into his old silent life,
as it was before Lali came, and his brother's child was born. He was not
conscious that he was very restless that morning; he scarcely was aware
that he had got up two hours earlier than usual. At the breakfast-table
he was cheerful and alert. After breakfast he amused himself in playing
with the child till the carriage was brought round. It was such a morning
as does not come a dozen times a year in England. The sweet, moist air
blew from the meadows and up through the lime trees with a warm,
insinuating gladness. The lawn sloped delightfully away to the flowered
embrasures of the park, and a fragrant abundance of flowers met the eye
and cheered the senses. While Richard loitered on the steps with the
child and its nurse, more excited than he knew, Lali came out and stood
beside him. At the moment Richard was looking into the distance. He did
not hear her when she came. She stood near him for a moment, and did not
speak. Her eyes followed the direction of his look, and idled tenderly
with the prospect before her. She did not even notice the child. The same
thought was in the mind of both--with a difference. Richard was wondering
how any one could choose to change the sweet dignity of that rural life
for the flaring, hurried delights of London and the season. He had
thought this a thousand times, and yet, though he would have been little
willing to acknowledge it, his conviction was not so impregnable as it
had been.
Mrs. Francis Armour was stepping from the known to the unknown. She was
leaving the precincts of a life in which, socially, she had been born
again. Its sweetness and benign quietness had all worked upon her nature
and origin to change her. In that it was an out-door life, full of
freshness and open-air vigour, it was not antagonistic to her past. Upon
this sympathetic basis had been imposed the conditions of a fine social
decorum. The conditions must still exist. But how would it be when she
was withdrawn from this peaceful activity of nature and set down among
"those garish lights" in Cavendish Square and Piccadilly? She hardly knew
to what she was going as yet. There had been a few social functions at
Greyhope since she had come, but that could give her, after all, but
little idea of the swing and pressure of London life.
At this moment she was lingering over the scene before her. She was
wondering with the naive wonder of an awakened mind. She had intended
many times of late saying to Richard all the native gratitude she felt;
yet somehow she had never been able to say it. The moment of parting had
come.
"What are you thinking of, Richard?" she said now. He started and turned
towards her.
"I hardly know," he answered. "My thoughts were drifting."
"Richard," she said abruptly, "I want to thank you."
"Thank me for what, Lali?" he questioned.
"To thank you, Richard, for everything--since I came, over three years
ago."
He broke out into a soft little laugh, then, with his old good-natured
manner, caught her hand as he did the first night she came to Greyhope,
patted it in a fatherly fashion, and said:
"It is the wrong way about, Lali; I ought to be thanking you, not you me.
Why, look what a stupid old fogy I was then, toddling about the place
with too much time on my hands, reading a lot and forgetting everything;
and here you came in, gave me something to do, made the little I know of
any use, and ran a pretty gold wire down the rusty fiddle of life. If
there are any speeches of gratitude to be made, they are mine, they are
mine."
"Richard," she said very quietly and gravely, "I owe you more than I can
ever say--in English. You have taught me to speak in your tongue enough
for all the usual things of life, but one can only speak from the depths
of one's heart in one's native tongue. And see," she added, with a
painful little smile, "how strange it would sound if I were to tell you
all I thought in the language of my people--of my people, whom I shall
never see again. Richard, can you understand what it must be to have a
father whom one is never likely to see again--whom, if one did see again,
something painful would happen? We grow away from people against our
will; we feel the same towards them, but they cannot feel the same
towards us; for their world is in another hemisphere. We want to love
them, and we love, remember, and are glad to meet them again, but they
feel that we are unfamiliar, and, because we have grown different
outwardly, they seem to miss some chord that used to ring. Richard,
I--I--" She paused.
"Yes, Lali," he assented--"yes, I understand you so far; but speak out."
"I am not happy," she said. "I never shall be happy. I have my child, and
that is all I have. I cannot go back to the life in which I was born; I
must go on as I am, a stranger among a strange people, pitied, suffered,
cared for a little--and that is all."
The nurse had drawn away a little distance with the child. The rest of
the family were making their preparations inside the house. There was no
one near to watch the singular little drama.
"You should not say that," he added; "we all feel you to be one of us."
"But all your world does not feel me to be one of them," she rejoined.
"We shall see about that when you go up to town. You are a bit morbid,
Lali. I don't wonder at your feeling a little shy; but then you will
simply carry things before you--now you take my word for it! For I know
London pretty well."
She held out her ungloved hands.
"Do they compare with the white hands of the ladies you know?" she said.
"They are about the finest hands I have ever seen," he replied. "You
can't see yourself, sister of mine."
"I do not care very much to see myself," she said. "If I had not a maid I
expect I should look very shiftless, for I don't care to look in a
mirror. My only mirror used to be a stream of water in summer," she
added, "and a corner of a looking-glass got from the Hudson's Bay fort in
the winter."
"Well, you are missing a lot of enjoyment," he said, "if you do not use
your mirror much. The rest of us can appreciate what you would see
there."
She reached out and touched his arm.
"Do you like to look at me?" she questioned, with a strange simple
candour.
For the first time in many a year, Richard Armour blushed like a girl
fresh from school. The question had come so suddenly, it had gone so
quickly into a sensitive corner of his nature, that he lost command of
himself for the instant, yet had little idea why the command was lost. He
touched the fingers on his arm affectionately.
"Like to look at you--like to look at you? Why, of course we all like to
look at you. You are very fine and handsome and interesting."
"Richard," she said, drawing her hands away, "is that why you like to
look at me?"
He had recovered himself. He laughed in his old hearty way, and said:
"Yes, yes; why, of course! Come, let us go and see the boy," he added,
taking her arm and hurrying her down the steps. "Come and let us see
Richard Joseph, the pride of all the Armours."
She moved beside him in a kind of dream. She had learned much since she
came to Greyhope, and yet she could not at that moment have told exactly
why she asked Richard the question that had confused him, nor did she
know quite what lay behind the question. But every problem which has life
works itself out to its appointed end, if fumbling human fingers do not
meddle with it. Half the miseries of this world are caused by forcing
issues, in every problem of the affections, the emotions, and the soul.
There is a law working with which there should be no tampering, lest in
foolish interruption come only confusion and disaster. Against every such
question there should be written the one word, "Wait."
Richard Armour stooped over the child. "A beauty," he said, "a perfect
little gentleman. Like Richard Joseph Armour there is none," he added.
"Whom do you think he looks like, Richard?" she asked. This was a
question she had never asked before since the child was born. Whom the
child looked like every one knew; but within the past year and a half
Francis Armour's name had seldom been mentioned, and never in connection
with the child. The child's mother asked the question with a strange
quietness. Richard answered it without hesitation.
"The child looks like Frank," he said. "As like him as can be."
"I am glad," she said, "for all your sakes."
"You are very deep this morning, Lali," Richard said, with a kind of
helplessness. "Frank will be pretty proud of the youngster when he comes
back. But he won't be prouder of him than I am."