The World For Sale, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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Now she slept again, with the murmur of the Sagalac in her ears, and
there was a smile at her lips. If one could have seen her through the
darkness, one would have said that she was like some wild creature of a
virgin world, whom sleep had captured and tamed; for, behind the
refinement which education and the vigilant influence with which Madame
Bulteel had surrounded her, there was in her the spirit of primitive
things: of the open road and the wilderness, of the undisciplined and
vagrant life, however marked by such luxury as the ruler of all the
Romanys could buy and use in pilgrimage. There was that in her which
would drag at her footsteps in this new life.
For a full hour or more she slept, then there crept through the fantasies
of sleep something that did not belong to sleep--again something from the
wakeful world, strange, alien, troubling. At first it was only as though
a wind stirred the air of dreams, then it was like the sounds that gather
behind the coming rage of a storm, and again it was as though a
night-prowler plucked at the sleeve of a home-goer. Presently, with a
stir of fright and a smothered cry, she waked to a sound which was not of
the supernatural or of the mind's illusions, but no less dreadful to her
because of that. In some cryptic way it was associated with the direful
experience through which she had just passed.
What she heard in the darkness was a voice which sang there by her
window--at it or beneath it--the words of a Romany song.
It was a song of violence, which she had heard but a short time before in
the trees behind her father's house, when a Romany claimed her as his
wife:
"Time was I went to my true love,
Time was she came to me--"
Only one man would sing that song at her window, or anywhere in this
Western world. This was no illusion of her overwrought senses. There,
outside her window, was Jethro Fawe.
She sat up and listened, leaning on one arm, and staring into the
half-darkness beyond the window, the blind of which she had not drawn
down. There was no moon, but the stars were shining brightly, relieving
the intensity of the dark. Through the whispering of the trees, and
hushing the melancholy of a night-bird's song, came the wild low note of
the Romany epic of vengeance. It had a thrill of exultation. Something in
the voice, insistent, vibrating, personal, made every note a thrust of
victory. In spite of her indignation at the insolent serenade, she
thrilled; for the strain of the Past was in her, and it had been fighting
with her all night, breaking in upon the Present, tugging at the cords of
youth.
The man's daring roused her admiration, even as her anger mounted. If her
father heard the singing, there could be no doubt that Jethro Fawe's doom
would be sealed. Gabriel Druse would resent this insolence to the
daughter of the Ry of Rys. Word would be passed as silently as the
electric spark flies, and one day Jethro Fawe would be found dead, with
no clue to his slayer, and maybe no sign of violence upon him; for while
the Romany people had remedies as old as Buddha, they had poisons as old
as Sekhet.
Suddenly the song ceased, and for a moment there was silence save for the
whispering trees and the night-bird's song. Fleda rose from her bed, and
was about to put on her dressing-gown, when she was startled by a voice
loudly whispering her name at her window, as it seemed.
"Daughter of the Ry of Rys!" it called.
In anger she started forward to the window, then, realizing that she was
in her nightgown, caught up her red dressing-gown and put it on. As she
did so she understood why the voice had sounded so near. Not thirty feet
from her window there was a solitary oak-tree among the pines, in which
was a seat among the branches, and, looking out, she could see a figure
that blackened the starlit duskiness.
"Fleda--daughter of the Ry of Rys," the voice called again.
She gathered her dressing-gown tight about her, and, going to the window,
raised it high and leaned out.
"What do you want?" she asked sharply.
"Wife of Jethro Fawe, I bring you news," the voice said, and she saw a
hat waved with mock courtesy. In spite of herself, Fleda felt a shiver of
premonition pass through her. The Thing which had threatened her in the
night seemed to her now like the soul of this dark spirit in the trees.
Resentment seized her. "I have news for you, Jethro Fawe," she replied.
"I set you free, and I gave my word that no harm should come to you, if
you went your ways and did not come again. You have come, and I shall do
nothing now to save you from the Ry's anger. Go at once, or I will wake
him."
"Will a wife betray her husband?" he asked in soft derision.
Stung by his insolence, "I would not throw a rope to you, if you were
drowning," she declared. "I am a Gorgio, and the thing that was done by
the Starzke River is nothing to me. Now, go."
"You have forgotten my news," he said: "It is bad news for the Gorgio
daughter of the Romany Ry." She was silent in apprehension. He waited,
but she did not speak.
"The Gorgio of Gorgios of the Sagalac has had a fall," he said.
Her heart beat fast for an instant, and then the presentiment came to her
that the man spoke the truth. In the presence of the accomplished thing,
she became calm.
"What has happened?" she asked quietly.
"He went prowling in Manitou, and in Barbazon's Tavern they struck him
down."
"Who struck him down?" she asked. It seemed to her that the night-bird
sang so loud that she could scarcely hear her own voice.
"A drunken Gorgio," he replied. "The horseshoe is for luck all the world
over, and it brought its luck to Manitou to-night. It struck down a young
Master Gorgio who in white beard and long grey hair went spying."
She knew in her heart that he spoke the truth. "He is dead?" she asked in
a voice that had a strange quietness.
"Not yet," he answered. "There is time to wish him luck."
She heard the ribald laugh with a sense of horror and loathing. "The hand
that brought him down may have been the hand of a Gorgio, but behind the
hand was Jethro Fawe," she said in a voice grown passionate again. "Where
is he?" she added.
"At his own house. I watched them take him there. It is a nice
house--good enough for a Gorgio house-dweller. I know it well. Last night
I played his Sarasate fiddle for him there, and I told him all about you
and me, and what happened at Starzke, and then--"
"You told him I was a Romany, that I was married to you?" she asked in a
low voice.
"I told him that, and asked him why he thought you had deceived him, had
held from him the truth. He was angry and tried to kill me."
"That is a lie," she answered. "If he had tried to kill you he would have
done so."
Suddenly she realized the situation as it was--that she was standing at
her window in the night, scantily robed, talking to a man in a tree
opposite her window; and that the man had done a thing which belonged to
the wild places which she had left so far behind.
It flashed into her mind--what would Max Ingolby think of such a thing?
She flushed. The new Gorgio self of her flushed, and yet the old Romany
self, the child of race and heredity had taken no exact account of the
strangeness of this situation. It had not seemed unnatural. Even if he
had been in her room itself, she would have felt no tithe of the shame
that she felt now in asking herself what the Master Gorgio would think,
if he knew. It was not that she had less modesty, that any stir of sex
was in her veins where the Romany chal was concerned; but in the life she
had once lived less delicate cognizance was taken of such things, and
something of it stayed.
"Listen," Jethro said with sudden lowering of the voice, and imparting
into his tones an emotion which was in part an actor's gift, but also in
large degree a passion now eating at his heart, "you are my wife by all
the laws of our people. Nothing can change it. I have waited for you, and
I will wait, but you shall be mine in the end. You see to-night--'Mi
Duvel', you see that fate is with me! The Gorgio has bewitched you. He
goes down to-night in that tavern there by the hand of a Gorgio, and the
Romany has his revenge. Fate is always with me, and I will be the gift of
the gods to the woman that takes me. The luck is mine always. It will be
always with me. I am poor to-day, I shall be rich to-morrow. I was rich,
and I lost it all; and I was poor, and became rich again. Ah, yes, there
are ways! Sometimes it is a Government, sometimes a prince that wants to
know, and Jethro Fawe, the Romany, finds it out, and money fills his
pockets. I am here, poor, because last year when I lost all, I said, 'It
is because my Romany lass is not with me. I have not brought her to my
tan, but when she comes then the gold will be here as before, and more
when it is wanted.' So, I came, and I hear the road calling, and all the
camping places over all the world, and I see the patrins in every lane,
and my heart is lifted up. I am glad. I rejoice. My heart burns with
love. I will forget everything, and be true to the queen of my soul. Men
die, and Gabriel Druse, he will die one day, and when the time comes,
then it would be that you and I would beckon, and all the world would
come to us."
He stretched out a hand to her in the half-darkness. "I send the blood of
my heart to you," he continued. "I am a son of kings. Fleda, daughter of
the Ry of Rys, come to me. I have been bad, but I can be good. I have
killed, but I will live at peace. I have cursed, but I will speak the
word of blessing. I have trespassed, but I will keep to my own, if you
will come to me."
Suddenly he dropped to the ground, lighting on his feet like an animal
with a soft rebound. Stretching up his arms, he made soft murmuring of
endearment.
She had listened, fascinated in spite of herself by the fire and meaning
of his words. She felt that in most part it was true, that it was meant;
and, whatever he was, he was yet a man offering his heart and life,
offering a love that she despised, and yet which was love and passion of
a kind. It was a passion natural to the people from whom she came, and to
such as Jethro Fawe it was something more than sensual longing and the
aboriginal desire of possession. She realized it, and was not wholly
revolted by it, even while her mind was fleeing to where the Master
Gorgio lay wounded, it might be unto death; even while she knew that this
man before her, by some means, had laid Ingolby low. She was all at once
a human being torn by contending forces.
Jethro's drop to the ground broke the sudden trance into which his words
had thrown her. She shook herself as with an effort of control. Then
leaning over the window-sill, and, looking down at him, now grown so
distinct that she could see his features, her eyes having become used to
the half-light of the approaching dawn, she said with something almost
like gentleness:
"Once more I say, you must go and come no more. You are too far off from
me. You belong to that which is for the ignorant, or the low, the vicious
and the bad. Behind the free life of the Romany is only the thing that
the beasts of the field have. I have done with it for ever. Find a Romany
who will marry you. As for me, I would rather die than do so, and I
should die before it could come to pass. If you stay here longer I will
call the Ry."
Presently the feeling that he had been responsible for the disaster to
Ingolby came upon her with great force, and as suddenly as she had
softened towards this man she hardened again.
"Go, before there comes to you the death you deserve," she added, and
turned away.
At that moment footsteps sounded near, and almost instantly there emerged
from a pathway which made a short cut to the house, the figure of old
Gabriel Druse. They had not heard him till he was within a few feet of
where Jethro Fawe stood. His walking had been muffled in the dust of the
pathway.
The Ry started when he saw Jethro Fawe; then he made a motion as though
he would seize the intruder, who was too dumbfounded to flee; but he
recovered himself, and gazed up at the open window.
"Fleda!" he called.
She came to the window again.
"Has this man come here against your will?" he asked, not as though
seeking information, but confirmation of his own understanding.
"He is not here by my will," she answered. "He came to sing the Song of
Hate under my window, to tell me that he had--"
"That I had brought the Master Gorgio to the ground," said Jethro, who
now stood with sullen passiveness looking at Gabriel Druse.
"From the Master Gorgio, as you call him, I have just come," returned the
old man. "When I heard the news, I went to him. It was you who betrayed
him to the mob, and--"
"Wait, wait," Fleda cried in agitation. "Is--is he dead?"
"He is alive, but terribly hurt; and he may die," was the reply.
Then the old man turned to the Romany with a great anger and
determination in his face. He stretched out an arm, making a sign as
cabalistic as that which Fleda had used against her invisible foe in the
bedroom.
"Go, Jethro Fawe of all the Fawes," he said. "Go, and may no patrins mark
your road!"
Jethro Fawe shrank back, and half raised his arm, as though to fend
himself from a blow.
The patrin is the clue which Gipsies leave behind them on the road they
go, that other Gipsies who travel in it may know they have gone before.
It may be a piece of string, a thread of wool, a twig, or in the dust the
ancient cross of the Romany, which preceded the Christian cross and
belonged to the Assyrian or Phoenician world. The invocation that no
patrins shall mark the road of a Romany is to make him an outcast, and
for the Ry of Rys to utter the curse is sentence of death upon a Romany,
for thenceforward every hand of his race is against him, free to do him
harm.
It was that which made Jethro Fawe shrink and cower for a moment. Fleda
raised her hand suddenly in protest to Gabriel Druse.
"No, no, not that," Fleda murmured brokenly to her father, with eyes that
looked the pain and horror she felt. Though she repudiated the bond by
which the barbarian had dared to call her wife, she heard an inner voice
that said to her: "What was done by the Starzke River was the seal of
blood and race, and this man must be nearer than the stranger, dearer
than the kinsman, forgiven of his crimes like a brother, saved from
shame, danger or death when she who was sealed to him can save him."
She shuddered as she heard the inner voice. She felt that this Other Self
of her, the inner-seeing soul which had the secret of the far paths, had
spoken truly. Even as she begged her father to withdraw the sentence, it
flashed into her mind that the grim Thing of the night was the dark
spirit of hatred between Jethro Fawe and the Master Gorgio seeking
embodiment, as though Jethro's evil soul detached itself from his body to
persecute her.
At her appeal, Jethro raised his head. His courage came back, the old
insolent self-possession took hold of him again. The sentence which the
Ry had passed was worse than death (and it meant death, too), for it made
him an outcast from his people, and to be outcast was to be thrown into
the abyss. It was as though a man without race or country was banished
into desolate space. In a vague way he felt its full significance, and
the shadow of it fell on him.
"No, no, no," Fleda repeated hoarsely, with that new sense of
responsibility where Jethro was concerned.
Jethro's eyes were turned upon her now. In the starlit night, just
yielding to the dawn, she could faintly see his burning look, could feel,
as it were, his hands reach out to claim her; and she felt that while he
lived she was not wholly free. She realized that the hand of nomad,
disorderly barbarism was dragging her with a force which was inhuman, or,
maybe, superhuman.
Gabriel Druse could know nothing of the elements fighting in his
daughter's soul; he only knew that her interest in the Master Gorgio was
one he had never seen before, and that she abhorred the Romany who had
brought Ingolby low. He had shut his eyes to the man's unruliness and his
daughter's intervention to free him; but now he was without pity. He had
come from Ingolby's bedside, and had been told a thing which shook his
rugged nature to its centre--a thing sad as death itself, which he must
tell his daughter.
To Fleda's appeal he turned a stony face. There was none of that rage in
his words which had marked the scene when Jethro Fawe first came to claim
what he could not have. There was something in him now more deadly and
inevitable. It made him like some figure of mythology, implacable,
fateful. His great height, his bushy beard and stormy forehead, the eyes
over which shaggy eyebrows hung like the shrubs on a cliff-edge, his face
lined and set like a thing in bronze--all were signs of a power which, in
passion, would be like that of OEdipus: in the moment of justice or doom
would, with unblinking eyes, slay and cast aside as debris is tossed upon
the dust-heap.
As he spoke now his voice was toneless. His mind was flint, and his
tongue was but the flash of the flint. He looked at his daughter for a
moment with no light of fatherhood in his face, then turned from her to
Jethro Fawe with slow decision and a gesture of authority. His eyes
fastened on the face of the son of Lemuel Fawe, as though it was that old
enemy himself.
"I have said what I have said, and there is no more to be spoken. The
rule of the Ry will be as water for ever after if these things may be
done to him and his. For generations have the Rys of all the Rys been
like the trees that bend only to the whirlwind; and when they speak there
is no more to be said. When it ceases to be so, then the Rys will vanish
from the world, and be as stubble of the field ready for the burning. I
have spoken. Go! And no patrins shall lie upon your road."
A look of savage obedience and sullen acquiescence came into Jethro
Fawe's face, and he took off his hat as one who stands in the presence of
his master. The strain of generations, the tradition of the race without
a country was stronger than the revolt in his soul. He was young, his
blood was hot and brawling in his veins, he was all carnal, with the
superior intelligence of the trained animal, but custom was stronger than
all. He knew now that whatever he might do, some time, not far, his doom
would fall upon him suddenly, as a wind shoots up a ravine from the
desert, or a nightbird rises from the dark.
He set his feet stubbornly, and raised his sullen face and fanatical
eyes. The light of morning was creeping through the starshine, and his
features showed plainly.
"I am your daughter's husband," he said. "Nothing can change that. It was
done by the River Starzke, and it was the word of the Ry of Rys. It
stands for ever. There is no divorce except death for the Romany."
"The patrins cease to mark the way," returned the old man with a swift
gesture. "The divorce of death will come."
Jethro's face grew still paler, and he opened his lips to speak, but
paused, seeing Fleda, with a backward look of pity and of horror, draw
back into the darkness of her room.
He made a motion of passion and despair. His voice was almost shrill when
he spoke. "Till that divorce comes, the daughter of the Ry of Rys is
mine!" he cried sharply. "I will not give my wife to a Gorgio thief. His
hands shall not caress her, his eyes shall not feed upon her--"
"His eyes will not feed upon her," interrupted the old man, "So cease the
prattle which can alter nothing. Begone."
For a moment Jethro Fawe stood like one who did not understand what was
said to him, but suddenly a look of triumph and malice came into his
face, and his eyes lighted with a reckless fire. He threw back his head,
and laughed with a strange, offensive softness. Then, waving a hand to
the window from which Fleda had gone, he swung his cap on his head and
plunged into the trees.
A moment afterwards his voice came back exultingly, through the morning
air:
"But a Gorgio sleeps 'neath the greenwood tree
He'll broach my tan no more:
And my love, she sleeps afar from me
But near to the churchyard door."
As the old man turned heavily towards the house, and opened the outer
door, Fleda met him.
"What did you mean when you said that Ingolby's eyes would not feed upon
me?" she asked in a low tone of fear.
A look of compassion came into the old man's face. He took her hand.
"Come and I will tell you," he said.
CHAPTER XII
"LET THERE BE LIGHT"
In Ingolby's bedroom, on the night of the business at Barbazon's Tavern,
Dr. Rockwell received a shock. His face, naturally colourless, was almost
white, and his eyes were moist. He had what the West called nerve. That
the crisis through which he had passed was that of a friend's life did
not lessen the poignancy of the experience. He had a singularly reserved
manner and a rare economy of words; also, he had the refinement and
distinction of one who had, oforetime, moved on the higher ranges of
social life. He was always simply and comfortably and in a sense
fashionably dressed, yet there was nothing of the dude about him, and his
black satin tie gave him an air of old-worldishness which somehow
compelled an extra amount of respect. This, in spite of the fact that he
had been known as one who had left the East and come into the wilds
because of a woman not his wife.
It was not, however, strictly true to say that he had come West because
of a woman, for it was on account of three women, who by sudden
coincidence or collusion sprang a situation from which the only relief
was flight. In that he took refuge, not because he was a coward, but
because it was folly to fight a woman, or three women, and because it was
the only real solution of an ungovernable situation. At first he had
drifted from one town to another, dissolute and reckless, apparently
unable to settle down, or to forget the unwholesome three. But one day
there was a terrible railway accident on a construction train, and
Lebanon and Manitou made a call upon his skill, and held him in bondage
to his profession for one whole month. During this time he performed two
operations which the surgeons who had been sent out by the Railway
Directors at Montreal declared were masterpieces.
When that month was up he was a changed man, and he opened an office in
Lebanon. Men trusted him despite his past, and women learned that there
was never a moment when his pulses beat unevenly in their presence.
Nathan Rockwell had had his lesson and it was not necessary to learn it
again. To him, woman, save as a subject of his skill, was a closed book.
He regarded them as he regarded himself, with a kindly cynicism. He never
forgot that his own trouble could and would have been avoided had it not
been for woman's vanity and consequent cruelty. The unwholesome three had
shared his moral lapse with wide-open eyes, and were in no sense victims
of his; but, disregarding their responsibility, they had, from sheer
jealousy, wrecked his past, and, to their own surprise, had wrecked
themselves as well. They were of those who act first and then think--too
late.
Thus it was that both men and women called Rockwell a handsome man, but
thought of him as having only a crater of exhausted fires in place of a
heart. They came to him with their troubles--even the women of Manitou
who ought to have gone to the priest.
He moved about Lebanon as one who had authority, and desired not to use
it; as one to whom life was like a case in surgery to be treated with
scientific, coolness, with humanity, but not with undue sympathy; yet the
early morning of the day after Ingolby had had his accident at Barbazon's
Hotel found him the slave of an emotion which shook him from head to
foot. He had saved his friend's life by a most skilful operation, but he
had been shocked beyond control when, an hour after the operation was
over, and consciousness returned to the patient in the brilliantly
lighted room, Ingolby said:
"Why don't you turn on the light?"
It was thus Rockwell knew that the Master Man, the friend of Lebanon and
Manitou, was stone blind. When Ingolby's voice ceased, a horrified
silence filled the room for a moment. Even Jim Beadle, his servant,
standing at the foot of the bed, clapped a hand to his mouth to stop a
cry, and the nurse turned as white as the apron she wore.
Dumbfounded as Rockwell was, with instant professional presence of mind
he said:
"No, Ingolby, you must be kept in darkness a while yet." Then he whipped
out a silk handkerchief from his pocket. "We will have light," he
continued, "but we must bandage you first to keep out the glare and
prevent pain. The nerves of the eyes have been injured."
Hastily and tenderly he bound the handkerchief round the sightless eyes.
Having done so, he said to the nurse with unintentional quotation from
the Gospel of St. John, and a sad irony: "Let there be light."
It all gave him time to pull himself together and prepare for the moment
when he must tell Ingolby the truth. In one sense the sooner it was told
the better, lest Ingolby should suddenly discover it for himself.
Surprise and shock must be avoided. So now he talked in his low, soothing
voice, telling Ingolby that the operation had put him out of danger, that
the pain now felt came chiefly from the nerves of the eye, and that quiet
and darkness were necessary. He insisted on Ingolby keeping silent, and
he gave a mild opiate which induced several hours' sleep.