The World For Sale, Complete - Gilbert Parker
Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23
A cry of fury rang out from the Orangemen behind, and a dozen men rushed
forward, but Gabriel Druse acted with the instant decision of a real
commander. Seeing that it would be a mistake to arrest Marchand at that
moment, he raised the struggling figure of the wrecker above his head
and, with Herculean effort, threw him up over the heads of the Frenchmen
in front of him.
So extraordinary was the sight that, as if fascinated, the crowd before
and behind followed the action with staring eyes and tense bodies. The
faces of all the contending forces were as concentrated for the instant,
as though the sun were falling out of the sky. It was so great a feat,
one so much in consonance with the spirit of the frontier world, that
gasps of praise broke from both crowds. As though it were a thunderbolt,
the Manitou roughs standing where Marchand was like to fall, instead of
trying to catch him, broke away from beneath the bundle of falling
humanity, and Marchand fell on the dusty cement of the bridge with a dull
thud, like a bag of bones.
For a moment there was no motion on the part of either procession.
Banners drooped and swayed as the men holding them were lost in the
excitement.
Time had only been gained, however. There was no reason to think that the
trouble was over, or that the special constables who had gathered close
behind Gabriel Druse would not have to strike heavy blows for the cause
of peace.
The sudden appearance of a new figure in the narrow, open space between
the factions in that momentary paralysis was not a coincidence. It was
what Jowett had planned for, the factor for peace in which he most
believed.
A small, spare man in a scarlet cassock, white chasuble, and black
biretta, suddenly stole out from the crowd on the Lebanon side of the
bridge, carrying the elements of the Mass. His face was shining white,
and in the eyes was an almost unearthly fire. It was the beloved
Monseigneur Lourde.
Raising the elements before him toward his own people on the bridge, he
cried in a high, searching voice:
"I prayed with you, I begged you to preserve the peace. Last night I
asked you in God's name to give up your disorderly purposes. I thought
then I had done my whole duty; but the voice of God has spoken to me. An
hour ago I carried the elements to a dying woman here in Lebanon, and
gave her peace. As I did so the funeral bell rang out, and it came to me,
as though the One above had spoken, that peace would be slain and His
name insulted by all of you--by all of you, Catholic and Protestant.
God's voice bade me come to you from the bed of one who has gone hence
from peace to Peace. In the name of Christ, peace, I say! Peace, in the
name of Christ!"
He raised the sacred vessel high above his head, so that his eyes looked
through the walls of his uplifted arms. "Kneel!" he called in a clear,
ringing voice which yet quavered with age.
There was an instant's hush, and then great numbers of the crowd in front
of him, toughs and wreckers, blasphemers, turbulent ones and evil-livers,
yet Catholics all, with the ancient root of the Great Thing in them, sank
down; and the banners of the labour societies drooped before the symbol
of peace won by sacrifice.
Even the Orangemen bared their heads in the presence of that Popery which
was anathema to them, which they existed to combat, and had been taught
to hate. Some, no doubt, would rather have fought than have had peace at
the price; but they could not free their minds from the sacred force
which had brought most of the crowd of faction-fighters to their knees.
With a wave of the hand, Gabriel Druse ordered the cortege forward, and
silently the procession with its yellow banners and its sable, drooping
plumes moved on.
Once on its way again, Willy Welsh and his silver-cornet band struck up
the hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light." It was the one real coincidence of the
day that this moving hymn was written by a cardinal of the Catholic
Church. It was also an irony that, as the crowd of sullen Frenchmen
turned back to Manitou, the train bearing the Mounted Police, for whom
the Mayor had sent to the capital, steamed noisily in, and redcoats
showed at its windows and on the steps of the cars.
The only casualty that the day saw was the broken arm and badly bruised
body of Felix Marchand, who was gloomily helped back to his home across
the Sagalac.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE BEACONS
There were few lights showing in Lebanon or Manitou; but here and there
along the Sagalac was the fading glimmer of a camp-fire, and in
Tekewani's reservation one light glowed softly like a star. It came from
a finely-made and chased safety-lantern given to Tekewani by the
Government, as a symbol of honour for having kept the braves quiet when
an Indian and half-breed rising was threatened; and to the powerless
chief it had become a token of his authority, the sign of the Great White
Mother's approval. By day a spray of eagle's feathers waved over his
tepee, but the gleam of the brass lantern every night was like a sentry
at the doorway of a monarch.
It was a solace to his wounded spirit; it allayed the smart of
subjection; made him feel himself a ruler in retirement, even as Gabriel
Druse was a self-ordained exile.
These two men, representing the primitive nomad life, had been drawn
together in friendship. So much so, that to Tekewani alone of all the
West, Druse gave his confidence and told his story. It came in the
springtime, when the blood of the young bucks was simmering and, the
ancient spell was working. There had preceded them generations of hunters
who had slain their thousands and their tens of thousands of wild animals
and the fowls of the air; had killed their enemies in battle; had seized
the comely women of their foes and made them their own. No thrill of the
hunter's trail now drew off the overflow of desire. In the days of rising
sap, there were only the young maidens or wives of their own tribe to
pursue, and it lacked in glory. Also in the springtime, Tekewani himself
had his own trials, for in his blood the old medicine stirred. His face
turned towards the prairie North and the mountain West where yet remained
the hunter's quarry; and he longed to be away with rifle and gun, with
his squaw and the papooses trailing after like camp-followers, to eat the
fruits of victory. But that could not be; he must remain in the place the
Great White Mother had reserved for him; he and his braves must assemble,
and draw their rations at the appointed times and seasons, and grunt
thanks to those who ruled over them.
It was on one of these virginal days, when there was a restless stirring
among the young bucks, who smelled the wide waters, the pines and the
wild shrubs; who heard the cry of the loon on the lonely lake and the
whir of the wild duck's wings, who answered to the phantom cry of ancient
war; it was on such a day that the two chiefs opened their hearts to each
other.
Near to the boscage on a little hill overlooking the great river, Gabriel
Druse had come upon Tekewani seated in the pine-dust, rocking to and fro,
and chanting a low, sorrowful refrain, with eyes fixed on the setting
sun. And the Ry of Rys understood, with the understanding which only
those have who live close to the earth, and also near to the heavens of
their own gods. He sat down beside the forlorn chief, and in the silence
their souls spoke to each other. There swept into the veins of the Romany
ruler something of the immitigable sadness of the Indian chief; and, with
a sudden premonition that he also was come to the sunset of his life, his
big nomad eyes sought the westering rim of the heavens, and his breast
heaved.
In that hour the two men declared themselves to each other, and Gabriel
Druse told Tekewani all that he had hidden from the people of the
Sagalac, and was answered in kind. It seemed to them that they were as
brothers who were one and who had parted in ages long gone; and having
met were to part and disappear once more, beginning still another trail
in an endless reincarnation.
"Brother," said Tekewani, "it was while there was a bridge of land
between the continents at the North that we met. Again I see it. I forgot
it, but again I see. There was war, and you went upon one path and I upon
another, and we met no more under all the moons till now."
"'Dordi', so it was and at such a time," answered the Ry of Rys. "And
once more we will follow after the fire-flies which give no light to the
safe places but only lead farther into the night."
Tekewani rocked to and fro again, muttering to himself, but presently he
said:
"We eat from the hands of those who have driven away the buffalo, the
deer, and the beaver; and the young bucks do naught to earn the joy of
women. They are but as lusting sheep, not as the wild-goat that chases
its mate over the places of death, till it comes upon her at last, and
calls in triumph over her as she kneels at his feet. So it is. Like tame
beasts we eat from the hand of the white man, and the white man leaves
his own camp where his own women are, and prowls in our camps, so that
not even our own women are left to us."
It was then that Gabriel Druse learned of the hatred of Tekewani for
Felix Marchand, because of what he had done in the reservation, prowling
at night like a fox or a coyote in the folds.
They parted that hour, believing that the epoch of life in which they
were and the fortunes of time which had been or were to come, were but
turns of a wheel that still went on turning; and that whatever chanced of
good or bad fortune in the one span of being, might be repaired in the
next span, or the next, or the next; so, through their creed of
reincarnation, taking courage to face the failure of the life they now
lived. Not by logic or the teaching of any school had they reached this
revelation, but through an inner sense. They were not hopeful and
wondering and timid; they were only sure. Their philosophy, their
religion, whether heathen or human, was inborn. They had comfort in it
and in each other.
After that day Gabriel Druse always set a light in his window which
burned all night, answering to the lantern-light at the door of
Tekewani's home--the lights of exile and of an alliance which had behind
it the secret influences of past ages and vanished peoples.
There came a night, however, when the light at the door of Tekewani's
tepee did not burn. At sunset it was lighted, but long before midnight it
was extinguished. Looking out from the doorway of his home (it was the
night after the Orange funeral), Gabriel Druse, returned from his new
duties at Lebanon, saw no light in the Indian reservation. With anxiety,
he set forth in the shine of the moon to visit it.
Arrived at the chief's tepee, he saw that the lantern of honour was gone,
and waking Tekewani, he brought him out to see. When the old Indian knew
his loss, he gave a harsh cry and stooped, and, gathering a handful of
dust from the ground, sprinkled it on his head. Then with arms
outstretched he cursed the thief who had robbed him of what had been to
him like a never-fading mirage, an illusion blinding his eyes to the
bitter facts of his condition.
To his mind all the troubles come to Lebanon and Manitou had had one
source; and now the malign spirit had stretched its hand to spoil those
already dispossessed of all but the right to live. One name was upon the
lips of both men, as they stood in the moonlight by Tekewani's tepee.
"There shall be an end of this," growled the Romany.
"I will have my own," said Tekewani, with malediction on the thief who
had so shamed him.
Black anger was in the heart of Gabriel Druse as he turned again towards
his own home, and he was glad of what he had done to Felix Marchand at
the Orange funeral.
CHAPTER XIX
THE KEEPER OF THE BRIDGE
"Like the darkness of the grave, which is darkness itself--"
Most of those who break out of the zareba of life, who lay violent hands
upon themselves, do so with a complete reasoning, which in itself is
proof of their insanity. It may be domestic tragedy, or ill-health, or
crime, or broken faith, or shame, or insomnia, or betrayed
trust--whatever it is, many a one who suffers from such things, tries to
end it all with that deliberation, that strategy, and that cunning which
belong only to the abnormal.
A mind which has known a score or more of sleepless nights acquires an
invincible clearness of its own, seeing an end which is without
peradventure. It finds a hundred perfect reasons for not going on, every
one of which is in itself sufficient; every one of which knits into the
other ninety and nine with inevitable affinity.
To the mind of Ingolby came a hundred such reasons for breaking out of
life's enclosure, as the effect of the opiate Rockwell had given him wore
off, and he regained consciousness. As he did so, someone in the room was
telling of that intervention of Gabriel Druse and the Monseigneur at the
Orange funeral, which had saved the situation. At first he listened to
what was said--it was the nurse talking to Jim Beadle with no sharp
perception of the significance of the story; though it slowly pierced the
lethargy of his senses, and he turned over in the bed to face the
watchers.
"What time is it, Jim?" he asked heavily. They told him it was sunset.
"Is it quiet in both towns?" he asked after a pause. They told him that
it was.
"Any telegrams for me?" he asked.
There was an instant's hesitation. They had had no instructions on this
point, and they hardly knew what to say; but Jim's mind had its own
logic, and the truth seemed best to him now. He answered that there were
several wires, but that they "didn't amount to nothin'."
"Have they been opened?" Ingolby asked with a frown, half-raising
himself. It was hard to resign the old masterfulness and self-will.
"I'd like to see anybody open 'em 'thout my pe'mision," answered Jim
imperiously. "When you's asleep, Chief, I'm awake; and I take care of
you' things, same as ever I done. There ain't no wires been opened, and
there ain't goin' to be whiles I'm runnin' the show for you."
"Open and read them to me," commanded Ingolby. Again Ingolby was
conscious of hesitation on Jim's part. Already the acuteness of the blind
was possessing him, sharpening the senses left unimpaired. Although Jim
moved, presumably, towards the place where the telegrams lay, Ingolby
realized that his own authority was being crossed by that of the doctor
and the nurse.
"You will leave the room for a moment, nurse," he said with a brassy
vibration in the voice--a sign of nervous strain. With a smothered
protest the nurse left, and Jim stood beside the bed with the telegrams.
"Read them to me, Jim," Ingolby repeated irritably. "Be quick."
They were not wires which Ingolby should have heard at the time, when his
wound was still inflamed, when he was still on the outer circle of that
artificial sleep which the opiates had secured. They were from Montreal
and New York, and, resolved from their half-hidden suggestion into bare
elements, they meant that henceforth others would do the work he had
done. They meant, in effect, that save for the few scores of thousand
dollars he had made, he was now where he was when he came West.
When Jim had finished reading them, Ingolby sank back on the pillows and
said quietly:
"All right, Jim. Put them in the drawer of the table and I'll answer them
to-morrow. I want to get a little more sleep, so give me a drink, and
then leave me alone--both nurse and you--till I ring the bell. There's a
bell on the table, isn't there?"
He stretched out a hand towards the table beside the bed, and Jim softly
pushed the bell under his fingers.
"That's right," he added. "Now, I'm not to be disturbed unless the doctor
comes. I'm all right, and I want to be alone and quiet. No one at all in
the room is what I want. You understand, Jim?"
"My head's just as good to get at what you want as ever it was, and you
goin' have what you want, I guess, while I'm on deck," was Jim's reply.
Jim put a glass of water into his hand. He drank very slowly, was indeed
only mechanically conscious that he was drinking, for his mind was far
away.
After he had put the glass down, Jim still stood beside the bed, looking
at him.
"Why don't you go, as I tell you, Jim?" Ingolby asked wearily.
"I'm goin'"--Jim tucked the bedclothes in carefully--"I'm goin', but,
boss, I jes' want to say dat dis thing goin' to come out all right
bime-by. There ain't no doubt 'bout dat. You goin' see everything, come
jes' like what you want--suh!"
Ingolby did not reply. He held out his hand, and black fingers shot over
and took it. A moment later the blind man was alone in the room.
The light of day vanished, and the stars came out. There was no moon, but
it was one of those nights of the West when millions of stars glimmer in
the blue vault above, and every planet and every star and cluster of
stars are so near that it might almost seem they could be caught by an
expert human hand. The air was very still, and a mantle of peace was
spread over the tender scene. The window and the glass doors that gave
from Ingolby's room upon the veranda on the south side of the house, were
open, and the air was warm as in Midsummer. Now and then the note of a
night-bird broke the stillness, but nothing more.
It was such a night as Ingolby loved; it was such a night as often found
him out in the restful gloom of the trees, thinking and brooding,
planning, revelling in memories of books he had read, and in dreaming of
books he might write-if there were time. Such a night insulated the dark
moods which possessed him occasionally almost as effectively as fishing
did; and that was saying much.
But the darkest mood of all his days was upon him now. When Rockwell
came, soon after Jim and the nurse left him, he simulated sleep, for he
had no mind to talk; and the doctor, deceived by his even breathing, had
left, contented. At last he was wholly alone with his own thoughts, as he
desired. From the moment Jim had read him the wires, which were the real
revelation of the situation to which he had come, he had been travelling
hard on the road leading to a cul-de-sac, from which there was no egress
save by breaking through the wall. Never, it might have seemed, had his
mind been clearer, but it was a clearness belonging to the abnormal. It
was a straight line of thought which, in its intensity, gathered all
other thoughts into its wake, reduced them to the control of an
obsession. It was borne in on his mind that his day was done, that
nothing could right the disorder which had strewn his path with broken
hopes and shattered ambitions. No life-work left, no schemes to
accomplish, no construction to achieve, no wealth to gain, no public good
to be won, no home to be his, no woman, his very own, to be his
counsellor and guide in the natural way!
As myriad thoughts drove through his brain on this Indian-summer night,
they all merged into the one obsession that he could no longer stay. The
irresistible logic of the brain stretched to an abnormal tenuity, and an
intolerable brightness was with him. He was in the throes of that intense
visualization which comes with insomnia, when one is awake yet apart from
the waking world, where nothing is really real and nothing normal. He had
a call to go hence, and he must go. Minute after minute passed, hours
passed, and the fight of the soul to maintain itself against the
disordered mind went on. All his past seemed but part of a desert, lonely
and barren and strange.
In the previous year he had made a journey to Arizona with Jowett, to see
some railway construction there, and at a ranch he had visited he came
upon some verses which had haunted his mind ever since. They fastened
upon his senses now. They were like a lonesome monotone which at length
gave calm to his torturing reflections. In his darkness the verses kept
repeating themselves:
"I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still
There was Winter in my world and in my heart:
A breath came from the mesa and a message stirred my will,
And my soul and I arose up to depart.
I heard the desert calling; and I knew that over there,
In an olive-sheltered garden where the mesquite grows,
Was a woman of the sunrise, with the starshine in her hair,
And a beauty that the almond-blossom blows.
In the night-time when the ghost-trees glimmered in the moon,
Where the mesa by the watercourse was spanned,
Her loveliness enwrapped me like the blessedness of June,
And all my life was thrilling in her hand.
I hear the desert calling, and my heart stands still;
There is Summer in my world and in my heart;
A breath comes from the mesa, and a will beyond my will
Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart."
This strange, half-mystic song of the mesa and the olive-groves, of the
ghost-trees and the moon, kept playing upon his own heated senses like
the spray from a cooling stream, and at last it quieted him. The dark
spirit of self-destruction loosened its hold.
His brain had been strained beyond the normal, almost unconsciously his
fingers had fastened on the pistol in the drawer of the table by his bed.
It had been there since the day when he had travelled down from
Alaska--loaded as it had been when he had carried it down the southern
trail. But as his fingers tightened on the little engine of death, from
the words which had been ringing in his brain came the flash of a
revelation:
". . . And a will beyond my will
Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart."
A will beyond his will! It was as though Fleda's fingers were laid upon
his own; as though she whispered in his ear and her breath swept his
cheek; as though she was there in the room beside him, making the
darkness light, tempering the wind of chastisement to his naked soul. In
the overstrain of his nervous system the illusion was powerful. He
thought he heard her voice. The pistol slipped from his fingers, and he
fell back on the pillow with a sigh. The will beyond his will bound his
footsteps.
Who can tell? The grim, malign experience of Fleda in her bedroom with
the Thing she thought was from beyond the bounds of her own life; the
voice that spoke to Ingolby, and the breath that swept over his cheek
were, perhaps, as real in a sense as would have been the corporeal
presence of Jethro Fawe in one case and of Fleda Druse in the other. It
may be that in very truth Fleda Druse's spirit with its poignant
solicitude controlled his will as he "rose up to depart." But if it was
only an illusion, it was not less a miracle. Some power of suggestion
bound his fleeing footsteps, drew him back from the Brink.
He slept. Once the nurse came and looked at him and returned to the other
room; and twice Jim stole in silently for a moment and retired again to
his own chamber. The stars shone in at the doors that opened out from the
quiet room into the night, the watch beside the bed ticked on, the
fox-terrier which always slept on a mat at the foot of the bed sighed in
content, while his master breathed heavily in a sleep full of dreams that
hurried past like phantasmagoria--of a hundred things that had been in
his life, and that had never been; of people he had known, distorted,
ridiculous and tremendous. There were dreams of fiddlers and barbers, of
crowds writhing in passion in a room where there was a billiard-table and
a lucky horseshoe on the wall. There were dreams that tossed and mingled
in one whirlpool vision; and then at last came a dream which was so cruel
and clear that it froze his senses.
It was the dream of a great bridge over a swiftflowing river; of his own
bridge over the Sagalacof that bridge being destroyed by men who crept
through the night with dynamite in their hands.
With a hoarse, smothered cry he awoke. His eyes opened wide. His heart
was beating like a hammer against his side. Only the terrier at his feet
heard the muttered agony. With an instinct all its own, it slipped to the
floor.
It watched its master get out of bed, cross the room and feel for a coat
along the wall--an overcoat which he used as a dressing-gown at times.
Putting it on hastily, with outstretched hands Ingolby felt his way to
the glass doors opening on the veranda. The dog, as though to let him
know he was there, rubbed against his legs. Ingolby murmured a soft,
unintelligible word, and, in his bare feet, passed out on to the veranda,
and from there to the garden and towards the gate at the front of the
house.
The nurse heard the gate click lightly, but she was only half-awake, and
as all was quiet in the next room, she composed herself in her chair
again with the vain idea that she was not sleeping. And Jim the faithful
one, as though under a narcotic of fate, was snoring softly beside the
vacant room. The streets were still. No lights burned anywhere so far as
eye could see. But now and then, in the stillness through which the river
flowed on, murmuring and rhythmic, there rose the distant sounds of
disorderly voices. Ingolby was in a state which was neither sleep nor
waking, which was in part delirium, in part oblivion to all things in the
world save one--an obsession so complete, that he moved automatically
through the street in which he lived towards that which led to the
bridge.