The World For Sale, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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With as much information as he needed, Jowett made his way back to
Lebanon, when, at the approach to the bridge, he met Fleda hurrying with
bent head and pale, distressed face in his own direction. Of all Western
men none had a better appreciation of the sex that takes its toll of
every traveller after his kind than Aaron Jowett. He had been a real buck
in his day among those of his own class, and though the storm of his
romances had become but a faint stirring of leaves which had tinges of
days that are sear, he still had an eye unmatched for female beauty. The
sun which makes that northern land a paradise in summer caught the
gold-brown hair of Gabriel Druse's daughter, and made it glint and shine.
It coquetted with the umber of her eyes and they grew luminous as a
jewel; it struck lightly across the pale russet of her cheek and made it
like an apple that one's lips touch lovingly, when one calls it "too good
to eat." It made an atmosphere of half-silver and half-gold with a touch
of sunrise crimson for her to walk in, translating her form into melting
lines of grace.
Jowett knew that Druse's daughter was on her way to the man who had
looked once, looked twice, looked thrice into her eyes and had seen there
his own image; and that she had done the same; and that the man, it might
be, would never look into their dark depths again. He might speak once,
he might speak twice, he might speak thrice, but would it ever be the
same as the look that needed no words?
When he crossed Fleda Druse's pathway she stopped short. She knew that
Jowett was Ingolby's true friend. She had seen him often, and he was
intimately associated with that day when she had run the Carillon Rapids
and had lain (for how long she never dared to think) in Ingolby's arms in
the sight of all the world. First among those who crowded round her at
Carillon that day were Jowett and Osterhaut, who had tried to warn her.
"You are going to him?" she said now with confidence in her eyes, and by
the intimacy of the phrase (as though she could speak of Ingolby only as
him) their own understanding was complete.
"To see how he is and then to do other things," Jowett answered.
There was silence for a moment in which they moved slowly forward, and
then she said: "You were at Barbazon's last night?"
"When that Gipsy son of a dog gave him away!" he assented. "I never heard
anything like the speech Ingolby made. He had them in the throat. The
Gipsy would have had nothing out of it, if it hadn't been for the
horseshoe. But in spite of the giveaway, Ingolby was getting them where
they were soft-fairly drugging them with good news. You never heard such
dope. My, he was smooth! The golden, velvet truth it was, too. That's the
only kind he has in stock; and they were sort of stupefied and locoed as
they chewed his word-plant. Cicero must have been a saucy singer of the
dictionary, and Paul the Apostle had a dope of his own you couldn't buy,
but the gay gamut that Ingolby run gives them all the cold good-bye."
She held herself very still as he spoke. There was, however, a strange,
lonely look in her eyes. The man lying asleep in the darkness of body and
mind yonder was not really her lover, for he had said no word direct of
love to her, and she knew him so little, how could she love him? Yet
there was something between them which had its authority over their
lives, overcoming even that maiden modesty which was in contrast to the
bold, physical thing she had done in running the Carillon Rapids those
centuries ago when she was young and glad-wistfully glad. So much had
come since that day, she had travelled so far on the highway of Fate,
that she looked back from peak to peak of happening to an almost
invisible horizon. So much had occurred and she felt so old this morning;
and yet there was in her heart the undefined feeling that she must keep
her radiant Spring of life for the blind Gorgio if he needed it-if he
needed it. Would he need it, robbed of sight and with his life-work
murdered?
She shuddered as she thought of what it meant to him. If a man is to
work, he must have eyes to see. Yet what had she to do with it, after
all? She had no right to go to him even as she was going. Yet had she not
the right of common humanity? This Gorgio was her friend. Did not the
world know that he had saved her life?
As they came to the Lebanon end of the bridge, Fleda turned to Jowett
and, commenting on his description of the scene at Barbazon, said: "He is
a great man, but he trusts too much and risks too much. That was no place
for him."
"Big men like him think they can do anything," Jowett replied, a little
ironically, subtly trying to force a confession of her preference for
Ingolby.
He succeeded. Her eye lighted with indignation. She herself might
challenge him, but she would not allow another to do so.
"It is not the truth," she rejoined sharply. "He does not measure himself
against the world so. He is like--like a child," she added.
"It seems to me all big men are like that," Jowett rejoined; "and he's
the biggest man the West has seen. He knows about every man's business as
though it was his own. I can get a margin off most any man in the West on
a horse-trade, but I'd look shy about doing a trade with him. You can't
dope a horse so he won't know. He's on to it, sees it-sees it like as if
it was in glass. Sees anything and everything, and--" He stopped short.
The Master Gorgio could no longer see, and his henchman flushed like a
girl at his "break"; though, as a horse-dealer, he had in his time
listened without shame to wilder, angrier reproaches than most men
living.
She glanced at him, saw his confusion, forgave and understood him.
"It was not the horseshoe, it was not the Gipsy," she returned. "They did
not set it going. It would not have happened but for one man."
"Yes, it's Marchand, right enough," answered Jowett, "but we'll get him
yet. We'll get him with the branding-iron hot."
"That will not put things right if--" she paused, then with a great
effort she added: "Does the doctor think he will get it back and that--"
She stopped suddenly in an agitation he did not care to see and he turned
away his head.
"Doctor doesn't know," he answered. "There's got to be an expert. It'll
take time before he gets here, but--" he could not help but say it,
seeing how great her distress was--"but it's going to come back. I've
seen cases--I saw one down on the Border"--how easily he lied!--"just
like his. It was blasting that done it--the shock. But the sight come
back all right, and quick too--like as I've seen a paralizite get up all
at once and walk as though he'd never been locoed. Why, God Almighty
don't let men like Ingolby be done like that by reptiles same's
Marchand."
"You believe in God Almighty?" she said half-wonderingly, yet with
gratitude in her tone. "You understand about God?"
"I've seen too many things not to try and deal fair with Him and not try
to cheat Him," he answered. "I see things lots of times that wasn't ever
born on the prairie or in any house. I've seen--I've seen enough," he
said abruptly, and stopped.
"What have you seen?" she asked eagerly. "Was it good or bad?"
"Both," he answered quickly. "I was stalked once--stalked I was by night
and often in the open day, by some sickly, loathsome thing, that even
made me fight it with my hands--a thing I couldn't see. I used to fire
buckshot at it, enough to kill an army, till I near went mad. I was
really and truly getting loony. Then I took to prayin' to the best woman
I ever knowed. I never had a mother, but she looked after me--my sister,
Sara, it was. She brought me up, and then died and left me without
anything to hang on to. I didn't know all I'd lost till she was gone. But
I guess she knew what I thought of her; for she come back--after I'd
prayed till I couldn't see. She come back into my room one night when the
cursed 'haunt' was prowling round me, and as plain as I see you, I saw
her. 'Be at peace,' she said, and I spoke to her, and said, 'Sara-why,
Sara' and she smiled, and went away into nothing--like a bit o' cloud in
the sun."
He stopped, and was looking straight before him as though he saw a
vision.
"It went?" she asked breathlessly.
"It went like that--" He made a swift, outward gesture. "It went and it
never came back; and she didn't either--not ever. My idee is," he added,
"that there's evil things that mebbe are the ghost-shapes of living men
that want to do us harm; though, mebbe, too, they're the ghost-shapes of
men that's dead, but that can't get on Over There. So they try to get
back to us here; and they can make life Hell while they're stalking us."
"I am sure you are right," she said.
She was thinking of the loathsome thing which haunted her room last
night. Was it the embodied second self of Jethro Fawe, doing the evil
that Jethro Fawe, the visible corporeal man, wished to do? She shuddered,
then bent her head and fixed her mind on Ingolby, whose house was not far
away. She felt strangely, miserably alone this morning. She was in that
fluttering state which follows a girl's discovery that she is a woman,
and the feeling dawns that she must complete herself by joining her own
life with the life of another.
She showed no agitation, but her repression gave an almost statuesque
character to her face and figure. The adventurous nature of her early
life had given her a power to meet shock and danger with coolness, and
though the news of Ingolby's tragedy had seemed to freeze the vital
forces in her, and all the world became blank for a moment, she had
controlled herself and had set forth to go to him, come what might.
As she entered the street where Ingolby lived, she suddenly realized the
difficulty before her. She might go to him, but by only one right could
she stay and nurse him, and that right she did not possess. He would, she
knew, understand her, no matter how the world babbled. Why should the
world babble? What woman could have designs upon a blind man? Was not
humanity alone sufficient warrant for staying by his side? Yet would he
wish it? Suddenly her heart sank; but again she remembered their last
parting, and once more she was sure he would be glad to have her with
him.
It flashed upon her how different it would have been, if he and she had
been Romanys, and this thing had happened over there in the far lands she
knew so well. Who would have hinted at shame, if she had taken him to her
father's tan or gone to his tan and tended him as a man might tend a man?
Humanity would have been the only convention; there would have been no
sex, no false modesty, no babble, no reproach. If it had been a man as
old as the oldest or as young as Jethro Fawe it would have made no
difference.
As young as Jethro Fawe! Why was it that now she could never think of the
lost and abandoned Romany life without thinking also of Jethro Fawe? Why
should she hate him, despise him, revolt against him, and yet feel that,
as it were by invisible cords, he drew her back to that which she had
forsworn, to the Past which dragged at her feet? The Romany was not dead
in her; her real struggle was yet to come; and in a vague but prophetic
way she realized it. She was not yet one with the settled western world.
As they came close to Ingolby's house she heard marching footsteps, and
in the near distance she saw fourscore or more men tramping in military
order. "Who are they?" she asked of Jowett.
"Men that are going to see law and order kept in Lebanon," he answered.
CHAPTER XIV
SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
A few hours later Fleda slowly made her way homeward through the woods on
the Manitou side of the Sagalac. Leaving Ingolby's house, she had seen
men from the ranches and farms and mines beyond Lebanon driving or riding
into the town, as though to a fair or fete-day. Word of anticipated
troubles had sped through the countryside, and the innate curiosity of a
race who greatly love a row brought in sensation-lovers. Some were
skimming along in one-horse gigs, a small bag of oats dangling beneath
like the pendulum of a great clock. Others were in double or
triple-seated light wagons--"democrats" they were called. Women had a bit
of colour in their hats or at their throats, and the men had on clean
white collars and suits of "store-clothes"--a sign of being on pleasure
bent. Young men and girls on rough but serviceable mounts cantered past,
laughing and joking, and their loud talking grated on the ear of the girl
who had seen a Napoleon in the streets of his Moscow.
Presently there crossed her path a gruesomely ugly hearse, with glass
sides and cheap imitation ostrich plumes drawn by gorged ravens of horses
with egregiously long tails, and driven by an undertaker's assistant,
who, with a natural gaiety of soul, displayed an idiotic solemnity by
dragging down the corners of the mouth. She turned away in loathing.
Her mind fled to a scene far away in the land of the Volga when she was a
child, where she had seen buried two men, who had fought for their
insulted honour till both had died of their wounds. She remembered the
white and red sashes and the gay scarfs worn by the women at the burial,
the jackets with great silver buttons worn by the men, and the
silver-mounted pistols and bright steel knives in the garish belts. She
saw again the bodies of the two gladiators, covered with crimson robes,
carried shoulder-high on a soft bed of interlaced branches to the graves
beneath the trees. There, covered with flowers and sprigs and evergreens,
ribbons and favours, the kindly earth hid them, cloaked for their long
sleep, while women wept, and men praised the dead, and went back to the
open road again cheerily, as the dead would have them do.
If he had died--the man she had just left behind in that torpid sleep
which opiates bring--his body would have been carried to his last home in
just such a hideous equipage as this hearse. A shiver of revolt went
through her frame, and her mind went to him as she had seen him lying
between the white sheets of his bed, his hands, as they had lain upon the
coverlet, compact of power and grace, knit and muscular and vital--not
the hand for a violin but the hand for a sword.
As she had laid her hand upon his hot forehead and over his eyes, he had
unconsciously spoken her name. That had told her more of what really was
between them than she had ever known. In the presence of the catastrophe
that must endanger, if not destroy the work he had done, the career he
had made, he thought of her, spoke her name.
What could she do to prevent his ruin? She must do something, else she
had no right to think of him. As though her thoughts had summoned him,
she came suddenly upon Felix Marchand at a point where her path resolved
itself into two, one leading to Manitou, the other to her own home.
There was a malicious glint in the greenish eyes of the dissolute
demagogue as he saw her. His hat made a half-circle before it found his
head again.
"You pay early visits, mademoiselle," he said, his teeth showing
rat-like.
"And you late ones?" she asked meaningly.
"Not so late that I can't get up early to see what's going on," he
rejoined in a sour voice.
"Is it that those who beat you have to get up early?" she asked
ironically.
"No one has got up earlier than me lately," he sneered.
"All the days are not begun," she remarked calmly.
"You have picked up quite an education since you left the road and the
tan," he said with the look of one who delivers a smashing blow.
"I am not yet educated enough to know how you get other people to commit
your crimes for you," she retorted.
"Who commits my crimes for me?" His voice was sharp and even anxious.
"The man who told you I was once a Gipsy--Jethro Fawe."
Her instinct had told her this was so. But had Jethro told all? She
thought not. It would need some catastrophe which threw him off his
balance to make him speak to a Gorgio of the inner things of Romany life;
and child--marriage was one of them.
He scoffed. "Once a Gipsy always a Gipsy. Race is race, and you can't put
it off and on like--your stocking."
He was going to say chemise, but race was race, and vestiges of native
French chivalry stayed the gross simile on the lips of the degenerate.
Fleda's eyes, however, took on a dark and brooding look which, more than
anything else, showed the Romany in her. With a murky flood of resentment
rising in her veins, she strove to fight back the half-savage instincts
of a bygone life. She felt as though she could willingly sentence this
man to death as her father had done Jethro Fawe that very morning.
Another thought, however, was working and fighting in her--that Marchand
was better as a friend than an enemy; and that while Ingolby's fate was
in the balance, while yet the Orange funeral had not taken place and the
strikes had not yet come, it might be that he could be won over to
Ingolby. Her mind was thus involuntarily reproducing Ingolby's policy, as
he had declared it to Jowett and Rockwell. It was to find Felix
Marchand's price, and to buy off his enmity--not by money, for Marchand
did not need that, but by those other coins of value which are individual
to each man's desires, passions and needs.
"Once a Frenchman isn't always a Frenchman," she replied coolly,
disregarding the coarse insolence of his last utterance. "You yourself do
not now swear faith to the tricolour or the fleur-de-lis."
He flushed. She had touched a tender nerve.
"I am a Frenchman always," he rejoined angrily. "I hate the English. I
spit on the English flag."
"Yes, I've heard you are an anarchist," she rejoined. "A man with no
country and with a flag that belongs to no country--quelle affaire et
quelle drolerie!"
She laughed. Taken aback in spite of his anger, he stared at her. How
good her French accent was! If she would only speak altogether in that
beloved language, he could smother much malice. She was beautiful
and--well, who could tell? Ingolby was wounded and blind, maybe for ever,
and women are always with the top dog--that was his theory. Perhaps her
apparent dislike of him was only a mood. Many women that he had conquered
had been just like that. They had begun by disliking him--from Lil Sarnia
down--and had ended by being his. This girl would never be his in the way
that the others had been, but--who could tell?--perhaps he would think
enough of her to marry her? Anyway, it was worth while making such a
beauty care for him. The other kind of women were easy enough to get, and
it would be a piquant thing to have one irreproachable affaire. He had
never had one; he was not sure that any girl or woman he had ever known
had ever loved him, and he was certain that he had never loved any girl
or woman. To be in love would be a new and piquant experience for him. He
did not know love, but he knew what passion was. He had ever been the
hunter. This trail might be dangerous, too, but he would take his
chances. He had seen her dislike of him whenever they had met in the
past, and he had never tried to soften her attitude towards him. He had
certainly whistled, but she had not come. Well, he would whistle again--a
different tune.
"You speak French much?" he asked almost eagerly, the insolence gone from
his tone. "Why didn't I know that?"
"I speak French in Manitou," she replied, "but nearly all the French
speak English there, and so I speak more English than French."
"Yes, that's it," he rejoined almost angrily again. "The English will not
learn French, will not speak French. They make us learn English, and--"
"If you don't like the flag and the country, why don't you leave it?" she
interrupted, hardening, though she had meant to try and win him over to
Ingolby's side.
His eyes blazed. There was something almost real in the man after all.
"The English can kill us, they can grind us to the dust," he rejoined in
French, "but we will not leave the land which has always been ours. We
settled it; our fathers gave their lives for it in a thousand places. The
Indians killed them, the rivers and the storms, the plague and the fire,
the sickness and the cold wiped them out. They were burned alive at the
stake, they were flayed; their bones were broken to pieces by stones--but
they blazed trails with their blood in the wilderness from New Orleans to
Hudson's Bay. They paid for the land with their lives. Then the English
came and took it, and since that time--one hundred and fifty years--we
have been slaves."
"You do not look like a slave," she answered, "and you have not acted
like a slave. If you were to do the things in France that you've done
here, you wouldn't be free as you are to-day."
"What have I done?" he asked darkly.
"You were the cause of what happened at Barbazon's last night,"--he
smiled evilly--"you are egging on the roughs to break up the Orange
funeral to-day; and there is all the rest you know so well."
"What is the rest I know so well?" He looked closely at her, his long,
mongrel eyes half-closing with covert scrutiny.
"Whatever it is, it is all bad and it is all yours."
"Not all," he retorted coolly. "You forget your Gipsy friend. He did his
part last night, and he's still free."
They had entered the last little stretch of wood in which her home lay,
and she slackened her footsteps slightly. She felt that she had been
unwise in challenging him; that she ought to try persistently to win him
over. It was repugnant to her, still it must be done even yet. She
mastered herself for Ingolby's sake and changed her tactics.
"As you glory in what you have done, you won't mind being responsible for
all that's happened," she replied in a more friendly tone.
She made an impulsive gesture towards him.
"You have shown what power you have--isn't that enough?" she asked. "You
have made the crowd shout, 'Vive Marchand!' You can make everything as
peaceful as it is now upset. If you don't do so, there will be much
misery. If peace must be got by force, then the force of government will
get it in the end. You have the gift of getting hold of the worst men
here, and you have done it; but won't you now master them again in the
other way? You have money and brains; why not use them to become a leader
of those who will win at last, no matter what the game may be?"
He came close to her. She shrank inwardly, but she did not move. His
greenish eyes were wide open in the fulness of eloquence and desire.
"You have a tongue like none I ever heard," he said impulsively. "You've
got a mind that thinks, you've got dash and can take risks. You took
risks that day on the Carillon Rapids. It was only the day before that
I'd met you by the old ford of the Sagalac, and made up to you. You
choked me off as though I was a wolf or a devil on the loose. The next
day when I saw Ingolby hand you out to the crowd from his arms, I got
nasty--I have fits like that sometimes, when I've had a little too much
liquor. I felt it more because you're the only kind of woman that could
ever get a real hold on me. It was you made me get the boys rampaging and
set the toughs moving. As you say, I can get hold of a crowd. It's not
hard--with money and drink. You can buy human nature cheap. Every man has
his price they say--and every woman too--bien sur! The thing is to find
out what is the price, and then how to buy. You can't buy everyone in the
same way, even if you use a different price. You've got to find out how
they want the price--whether it's to be handed over the counter, so to
speak, or to be kept on the window-sill, or left in a pocket, or dropped
in a path, or dug up like a potato, with a funny make-believe that fools
nobody, but just plays to the hypocrite in everyone everywhere. I'm
saying this to you because you've seen more of the world, I bet, than one
in a million, even though you're so young. I don't see why we can't come
together. I'm to be bought. I don't say that my price isn't high. You've
got your price, too. You wouldn't fuss yourself about things here in
Manitou and Lebanon, if there wasn't something you wanted to get. Tout
ca! Well, isn't it worth while making the bargain? You've got such gift
of speech that I'm just as if I'd been drugged, and all round, face,
figure, eyes, hair, foot, and girdle, you're worth giving up a lot for.
I've seen plenty of your sex, and I've heard crowds of them talk, but
they never had anything for me beyond the minute. You've got the real
thing. You're my fancy. You've been thinking and dreaming of Ingolby.
He's done. He's a back number. There's nothing he's done that isn't on
the tumble since last night. The financial gang that he downed are out
already against him. They'll have his economic blood. He made a splash
while he was at it, but the alligator's got him. It's 'Exit Ingolby,'
now."
She made a passionate gesture, and seemed about to speak, but he went on:
"No, don't say anything. I know how you feel. You've had your face turned
his way, and you can't look elsewhere all at once. But Time cures quick,
if you're a good healthy human being. Ingolby was the kind likely to draw
a girl. He's a six-footer and over; he spangled a lot, and he smiled
pretty--comme le printemps, and was sharp enough to keep clear of women
that could hurt him. That was his strongest point after all, for a
little, sly sprat of a woman that's made eyes at you and led you on, till
you sent her a note in a hurry some time with some loose hot words in it,
and she got what she'd wanted, will make you pay a hundred times for the
goods you get. Ingolby was sharp enough to walk shy, until you came his
way, and then he lost his underpinning. But last night got him in the
vitals--hit him between the eyes; and his stock's not worth ten cents in
the dollar to-day. But though the pumas are out, and he's done, and'll
never see his way out of the hole he's in"--he laughed at his grisly
joke"--it's natural to let him down easy. You've looked his way; he did
you a good turn at the Carillon Rapids, and you'd do one for him if you
could. I'm the only one can stop the worst from happening. You want to
pay your debt to him. Good. I can help you do it. I can stop the strikes
on the railways and in the mills. I can stop the row at the Orange
funeral. I can stop the run on his bank and the drop in his stock. I can
fight the gang that's against him--I know how. I'm the man that can bring
things to pass."