The World For Sale, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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He answered the question himself. "I'd start again in a different way if
I could," he said musingly, his face towards the girl. "It's easy to say
that, but I would. It isn't only the things you get, it's how you use
them. It isn't only the things you do, it's why you do them. But I'll
never have a chance now; I'll never have a chance to try the new way. I'm
done."
Something almost savage leaped into her eyes--a wild, bitter protest, for
it was her tragedy, too, if he was not to regain his sight. The great
impulse of a nature which had been disciplined into reserve broke forth.
"It isn't so," she said with a tremor in her voice. All that he--and
she--was in danger of losing came home to her. "It isn't so. You shall
get well again. Your sight will come back. To-morrow; perhaps to-day,
Hindlip, the great oculist comes from New York. Mr. Warbeck, the Montreal
man, holds out hopes. If the New York man says the same, why despair?
Perhaps in another month you will be on your feet again, out in the
world, fighting, working, mastering, just as you used to do."
A sudden stillness seemed to take possession of him. His lips parted; his
head was thrust forwards slightly as though he saw something in the
distance. He spoke scarcely above a whisper.
"I didn't know the New York man was coming. I didn't know there was any
hope at all," he said with awe in his tones.
"We told you there was," she answered.
"Yes, I know. But I thought you were all only trying to make it easier
for me, and I heard Warbeck say to Rockwell, when they thought I was
asleep, 'It's ten to one against him.'"
"Did you hear that?" she said sorrowfully. "I'm so sorry; but Mr. Warbeck
said afterwards--only a week ago--that the chances were even. That's the
truth. On my soul and honour it's the truth. He said the chances were
even. It was he suggested Mr. Hindlip, and Hindlip is coming now. He's on
the way. He may be here to-day. Oh, be sure, be sure, be sure, it isn't
all over. You said your life was broken. It isn't. You said my life had
been broken. It wasn't. It was only the wrench of a great change. Well,
it's only the wrench of a great change in your life. You said I gained
everything in the great change of my life. I did; and the great change in
your life won't be lost, it will be gain, too. I know it; in my heart I
know it."
With sudden impulse she caught his hand in both of hers, and then with
another impulse, which she could not control, she caught his head to her
bosom. For one instant her arms wrapped him round, and she murmured
something in a language he did not understand--the language of the
Roumelian country. It was only one swift instant, and then with shocked
exclamation she broke away from him, dropped into a chair, and buried her
face in her hands.
He blindly reached out his hand towards her as if to touch her.
"Mother-girl, dear mother-girl--that's what you are," he said huskily.
"What a great, kind heart you've got!"
She did not reply, but sat with face hidden in her hands, rocking
backwards and forwards. He understood; he tried to help her. There was a
great joy in his heart, but he dared not give it utterance.
"Please tell me about your life--about that great change in it," he said
at last in a low voice. "Perhaps it would help me. Anyhow, I'd like to
know, if you feel you can tell me."
For a moment she was silent. Then she said to him with an anxious note in
her voice: "What do you know about my life-about the 'great change,' as
you call it?"
He reached out over the coverlet, felt for a sock which he had been
learning to knit and, slowly plying the needles, replied: "I only know
what Jethro Fawe told me, and he was a promiscuous liar."
"I don't think he lied about me," she answered quietly. "He told you I
was a Gipsy; he told you that I was married to him. That was true. I was
a Gipsy. I was married to him in the Romany way, when I was a child of
three, and I never saw him again until here, the other day, on the
Sagalac."
"You were married to him as much as I am," he interjected scornfully.
"That was a farce. It was only a promise to pay on the part of your
father. There was nothing in that. Jethro Fawe could not claim on that."
"He has tried to do so," she answered, "and if I were still a Gipsy he
would have the right to do so from his standpoint."
"That sounds silly to me," Ingolby remarked, his fingers moving now more
quickly with the needles. "No, it isn't silly," she said, her voice
almost as softly monotonous as his had been when he told her of his life
a little while before. It was as though she was looking into her own mind
and heart and speaking to herself. "It isn't silly," she repeated. "I
don't think you understand. Just because a race like the Gipsies have no
country and no home, so they must have things that bind them which other
people don't need in the same way. Being the vagrants of the earth, so
they must have things that hold them tighter than any written laws made
by King or Parliament. Unless the Gipsies kept their laws sacred they
couldn't hold together at all. They're iron and steel, the Gipsy laws.
They can't be stretched, and they can't be twisted. They can only be
broken, and then there's no argument about it. When they are broken,
there's the penalty, and it has to be met."
Ingolby stopped knitting for a moment. "You don't mean that a penalty
could touch you?" he asked incredulously.
"Not for breaking a law," she answered. "I'm not a Gipsy any more. I gave
my word about that, and so did my father; and I'll keep it."
"Please tell me about it," he urged. "Tell me, so that I can understand
everything."
There was a long pause in which Ingolby inspected carefully with his
fingers the work which he was doing, but at last Fleda's voice came to
him, as it seemed out of a great distance, while she began to tell of her
first memories: of her life by the Danube and the Black Sea, and drew for
him a picture, so far as she could recall it, of her marriage with
Jethro, and of the years that followed. Now and again as she told of some
sordid things, of the challenge of the law in different countries, of the
coarse vagabondage of the Gipsy people in this place or in that, and some
indignity put upon her father, or some humiliating incident, her voice
became low and pained. It seemed as if she meant that he should see all
she had been in that past, which still must be part of the present and
have its place in the future, however far away all that belonged to it
would be. She appeared to search her mind to find that which would
prejudice him against her. While speaking with slow scorn of the life
which she had lived as a Gipsy, yet she tried to make him understand,
too, that, in the days when she belonged to it, it all seemed natural to
her, and that its sordidness, its vagabondage did not produce repugnance
in her mind when she was part of it. Unwittingly she over-coloured the
picture, and he knew she did.
In spite of herself, however, some aspects of the old life called forth
pictures of happy Nature, of busy animal life of wood and glen and stream
and footpath which was exquisite in its way. She was in spirit at one
with the multitudinous world of nature among which so many men and women
lived, without seeing or knowing. It was all undesignedly a part of
herself, and she was one of a population in a universal nation whose
devout citizen she was. Sometimes, in response to an interjection from
Ingolby, deftly made, she told of some incident which revealed as great a
poetic as dramatic instinct. As she talked, Ingolby in his imagination
pictured her as a girl of ten or twelve, in a dark-red dress, brown curls
falling in profusion on her shoulders, with a clear, honest, beautiful
eye, and a face that only spoke of a joy of living, in which the small
things were the small things and the great things were the great: the
perfect proportion of sane life in a sane world.
Now and again, carried away by the history of things remembered, she
visualized scenes for him with the ardour of an artist and a lover of
created things. He realized how powerful a hold the old life still had
upon her. She understood it, too, for when at last she told of the great
event in England which changed her life, and made her a deserter from
Gipsy life; when she came to the giving of the pledge to a dying woman,
and how she had kept that pledge, and how her father had kept it,
sternly, faithfully, in spite of all it involved, she said to him:
"It may seem strange to you, living as I live now in one spot, with
everything to make life easy, that I should long sometimes for that old
life. I hate it in my heart of hearts, yet there's something about it
that belongs to me, that's behind me, if that tells you anything. It's as
though there was some other self in me which reached far, far back into
centuries, that wills me to do this and wills me to do that. It sounds
mad to you of course, but there have been times when I have had a wild
longing to go back to it all, to what some Gorgio writers call the pariah
world--the Ishmaelites."
More than once Ingolby's heart throbbed heavily against his breast as he
felt the passion of her nature, its extraordinary truthfulness, making it
clear to him by indirect phrases that even Jethro Fawe, whom she
despised, still had a hateful fascination for her. It was all at variance
to her present self, but it summoned her through the long avenues of
ancestry, predisposition; through the secret communion of those who,
being dead, yet speak.
"It's a great story told in a great way," he said, when she had finished.
"It's the most honest thing I ever heard, but it's not the most truthful
thing I ever heard. I don't think we can tell the exact truth about
ourselves. We try to be honest; we are savagely in earnest about it, and
so we exaggerate the bad things we do, and we often show distrust of the
good things we do. That's not a fair picture. I believe you've told me
the truth as you see it and feel it, but I don't think it's the real
truth. In my mind I sometimes see an oriel window in the college where I
spent three years. I used to work and think for hours in that oriel
window, and in the fights I've been having lately I've looked back and
thought I wanted it again; wanted to be there in the peace of it all,
with the books, and the lectures, and the drone of history, and the
drudgery of examinations; but if I did go back to it, three days'd sicken
me, and if you went back to the Gipsy life three days'd sicken you."
"Yes, I know. Three hours would sicken me. But what might not happen in
those three hours! Can't you understand?"
Suddenly she got to her feet with a passionate exclamation, her clenched
hands went to her temples in an agony of emotion. "Can't you understand?"
she repeated. "It's the going back at all for three days, for three
hours, for three minutes that counts. It might spoil everything; it might
kill my life."
His face flushed, crimsoned, then became pale; his hands ceased moving;
the knitting lay still on his knee. "Maybe, but you aren't going back for
three minutes, any more than I'm going back to the oriel window for three
seconds," he said. "We dreamers have a lot of agony in thinking about the
things we're never going to do--just as much agony as in thinking about
the things we've done. Every one of us dreamers ought to be insulated. We
ought to wear emotional lightning-rods to carry off the brain-waves into
the ground.
"I've never heard such a wonderful story," he added, after an instant,
with an intense longing to hold out his arms to her, and a still more
intense will to do no such wrong. A blind man had no right or title to be
a slave-owner, for that was what marriage to him would be. A wife would
be a victim. He saw himself, felt himself being gradually devitalized,
with only the placid brain left, considering only the problem of hourly
comfort, and trying to neutralize the penalties of blindness. She must
not be sacrificed to that, for apart from all else she had greatness of a
kind in her. He knew far better than he had said of the storm of emotion
in her, and he knew that she had not exaggerated the temptation which
sang in her ears. Jethro Fawe--the thought of the man revolted him; and
yet there was something about the fellow, a temperamental power, the
glamour and garishness of Nature's gifts, prostituted though they were,
finding expression in a striking personality, in a body of athletic
grace--a man-beauty.
"Have you seen Jethro Fawe lately?" he asked. "Not since"--she was going
to say not since the morning her father had passed the sentence of the
patrin upon him; but she paused in time. "Not since everything happened
to you," she added presently.
"He knows the game is up," Ingolby remarked with forced cheerfulness. "He
won't be asking for any more."
"It's time for your milk and brandy," she said suddenly, emotion
subsiding and a look of purpose coming into her face. She poured out the
liquid, and gave the glass into his hand. His fingers touched hers.
"Your hands are cold," she said to him. "Cold hands, warm heart," he
chattered.
A curious, wilful, rebellious look came into her eyes. "I shouldn't have
thought it in your case," she said, and with sudden resolve turned
towards the door. "I'll send Madame Bulteel," she added. "I'm going for a
walk."
She had betrayed herself so much, had shown so recklessly what she felt,
and yet, yet why did he not--she did not know what she wanted him to do.
It was all a great confusion. Vaguely she realized what had been working
in him, but yet the knowledge was dim indeed. She was a woman. In her
heart of hearts she knew that he did care for her, and yet in her heart
of hearts she denied that he cared.
She was suddenly angry with herself, angry with him, the poor blind man,
back from the Valley of the Shadow. She had not reached the door,
however, when Madame Bulteel entered the room.
"The doctor from New York has come," she said, holding out a note from
Dr. Rockwell. "He will be here in a couple of hours."
Fleda turned back towards the bed.
"Good luck!" she said. "You'll see, it will be all right."
"Certainly I'll see if it's all right," he said cheerfully. "Am I tidy?
Have I used Pears' soap?" He would have his joke at his own funeral if
possible.
"There are two hours to get you fit to be seen," she rejoined with
raillery, infected by his cheerfulness in spite of herself. "Madame
Bulteel is very brave. Nothing is too hard for her!"
An instant later she was gone, with her heart telling her to go back to
him, not to leave him, but yet with a longing stronger still driving her
to the open world, to which she could breathe her trouble in great gasps,
as she sped onward through the woods and by the river. To love a blind
man was sheer madness, but in her was a superstitious belief that he
would see again. It prevailed against the doubts and terrors. It made her
resent his own sense of fatality, his own belief that he would be in
darkness all his days.
In the room where he awaited the verdict of the expert, he kept saying to
himself:
"She would have made everything else look cheap--if it could have been."
CHAPTER XXI
THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
The last rays of the setting sun touched the gorgeous Autumn woods with a
loving, bright glow, and the day stole pensively away into a purple bed
beyond the sight of the eyes. From a lonely spot by the river, Fleda
watched the westering gleam until it vanished, her soul alive to the
melancholy beauty of it all. Not a human being seemed to be within the
restricted circle of her vision. There were only to be seen the deep
woods, in myriad tints of bronze and red and saffron, and the
swift-flowing river. Overhead was the Northern sky, so clear, so
thrilling, and the stars were beginning to sparkle in the incredibly
swift twilight which links daytime and nighttime in that Upper Land.
Lonely and delicately sad it all looked, but there was no feeling of
loneliness among those who lived the life of the Sagalac. Many a man has
stood on a wide plain of snow, white to the uttermost horizon, or in the
yellow-brown grass of the Summer prairie, empty of all human life so far
as eye could see, and yet has felt no solitude. It is as though the air
itself is inhabited by a throng of happy comrades whispering in the
communion of the invisible world.
As a child Fleda had often gazed upon just such scenes, lonely and
luminous, but she was only conscious then of a vague and pleasant awe, a
kindly confusion, which, like the din of innumerable bees, lulled wonder
to sleep. Even as a child, however, something of what it meant had
pierced her awe and wonder. Once as she crossed a broken, bare mountain
of Roumania she had seen a wild ass perched upon a high summit gazing, as
it were, over the wide valley, where beneath, among the rocks, other wild
asses wandered. There was something so statue-like in this immovable wild
creature that Fleda had watched it till it was hid from her view by a
jutting rock. But the thing which made a lasting impression, drawing her
nearer to nature-life than all that had chanced since she was born, was
the fact that on returning, hours after, the wild ass was still standing
upon the summit of the hill, still gazing across the valley. Or was it
gazing across the valley? Was there some other vision commanding its
sight?
So a young wife not yet a mother loses herself for hours together in a
vista of unexplored experience. Fleda had passed on, out of sight of the
wild ass on the hills, but for ever after the memory of it remained with
her and the picture of it sprang to her eye innumerable times. The
hypnotized wild thing--hypnotized by its own vague instincts, or by
something outside itself-became to her as the Sphinx to the Egyptian, the
everlasting question of existence.
Now, as she watched the day fleeing, and night with swift stealthiness
coming on, that unforgettable picture of the Roumanian hills came to her
again. The instinct of those far-off days which had been little removed
from the finest animal intelligence had now developed into thought. Brain
and soul strove to grasp what it all meant, and what the revelation was
between Nature and herself. Nature was so vast; she was so insignificant;
changes in its motionless inorganic life were imperceptible save through
the telescopes of years; but she, like the wind, the water, and the
clouds, was variable, inconstant. Was there any real relation between the
vast, imperturbable earth, its seas, its forests, its mountains and its
plains, its life of tree and plant and flower and the men and women
dotted on its surface? Did they belong to each other, or were mankind
only, as it were, vermin infesting the desirable world? Did they belong
to each other? It meant so much if they did belong, and she loved to
think they did. Many a time she kissed the smooth bole of a maple or
whispered to it; or laid her cheek against a mossy rock and murmured a
greeting in the spirit of a companionship as old as the making of the
world.
On the evening of this day of her destiny--carrying the story of her own
fate within its twenty-four hours--she was in a mood of detachment from
life's routine. As at a great opera, a sensitive spirit loses itself in
visions alien to the music and yet born of it, so she, lost in this
primeval scene before her, saw visions of things to be.
If Ingolby's sight came back! In her abstraction she saw him with sight
restored and by her side, and even in that joy her mind felt a hovering
sense of invasion, no definite, visible thing, but a presence which made
shadow. Suddenly oppressed by it, she turned back into the woods from the
river-bank to make for home. She had explored nearly every portion of
this river-country for miles up and down, but on this evening, lost in
her dreams, she had wandered into less familiar regions. There was no
chance of her being lost, so long as she kept near to the river, and
indeed by instinct and not by thought or calculation she made her way
about at all times. Turned homeward, she walked for about a quarter of a
mile, retreading the path by which she had come. It was growing darker,
and, being in unfamiliar surroundings, she hurried on, though she knew
well what course to take. Following the bank of the river she would have
increased her walk greatly, as the stream made a curve at a point above
Manitou, and then came back again to its original course; so she cut
across the promontory, taking the most direct line homeward.
Presently, however, she became conscious of other people in the wood
besides herself. She saw no one, but she heard breaking twigs, the stir
of leaves, the flutter of a partridge which told of human presence. The
underbrush was considerable, darkness was coming on, and she had a sense
of being surrounded. It agitated her, but she pulled herself together,
stood still and admonished herself. She called herself a fool; she asked
herself if she was going to be a coward. She laughed out loud at her own
apprehension; but a chill stole into her blood when she heard near
by--there was no doubt about it now--mockery of her own laughter. Then
suddenly, before she could organize her senses, a score of men seemed to
rise up from the ground around her, to burst out from the bushes, to drop
from the trees, and to storm upon her. She had only time to realize that
they were Romanys, before scarfs were thrown around her head, bound
around her body, and, unconscious, she was carried away into the deep
woods.
When she regained consciousness Fleda found herself in a tent, set in a
kind of prairie amphitheatre valanced by shrubs and trees. Bright fires
burned here and there, and dark-featured men squatted upon the ground,
cared for their horses, or busied themselves near two large caravans, at
the doors or on the steps of which now and again appeared a woman.
She had waked without moving, had observed the scene without drawing the
attention of a man--a sentry--who sat beside the tent-door. The tent was
empty save for herself. There was little in it besides the camp-bed
against the tent wall, upon which she lay, and the cushions supporting
her head. She had waked carefully, as it were: as though some inward
monitor had warned her of impending danger. She realized that she had
been kidnapped by Romanys, and that the hand behind the business was that
of Jethro Fawe. The adventurous and reckless Fawe family had its many
adherents in the Romany world, and Jethro was its head, the hereditary
claimant for its leadership.
Notwithstanding the Ry of Rys' prohibition, there had drawn nearer and
ever nearer to him, from the Romany world he had abandoned, many of his
people, never, however, actually coming within his vision till the
appearance of Jethro Fawe. Here and there on the prairie, to a point just
beyond Gabriel Druse's horizon, they had come from all parts of the
world; and Jethro, reckless and defiant under the Sentence, and knowing
that the chances against his life were a million to one, had determined
on one bold stroke which, if it failed, would make his fate no worse,
and, if it succeeded, would give him his wife and, maybe, headship over
all the Romany world. For weeks he had planned, watched and waited,
filling the woods with his adherents, secretly following Fleda day by
day, until, at last, the place, the opportunity, seemed perfect; and here
she lay in a Romany tan once more, with the flickering fires outside in
the night, and the sentry at her doorway. This watchman was not Jethro
Fawe, but she knew well that Jethro was not far off.
Through the open door of the tent, for some minutes, her eyes studied the
segment of the circle within her vision, and she realized that here was
an organized attempt to force her back into the Romany world. If she
repudiated the Gorgio life and acknowledged herself a Romany once again,
she knew her safety would be secured; but in truth she had no fear for
her life, for no one would dare to defy the Ry of Rys so far as to kill
his daughter. But she was in danger of another kind--in deep and terrible
danger; and she knew it well. As the thought of it took possession of
her, her heart seemed almost to burst. Not fear, but anger and emotion
possessed her. All the Romany in her stormed back again from the past. It
sent her to her feet with a scarcely smothered cry. She was not quicker,
however, than was the figure at the tent door, which, with a half-dozen
others, sprang up as she appeared. A hand was raised, and, as if by
magic, groups of Gipsies, some sitting, some standing, some with the
Gipsy fiddle, one or two with flutes, began a Romany chant in a high,
victorious key, and women threw upon the fire powders from which flamed
up many coloured lights.
In a moment the camp was transformed. From the woods around came
swarthy-faced men, with great gold rings in their ears and bright scarfs
around their necks or waists, some of them handsome, dirty and insolent;
others ugly, watchful, and quiet in manner and face; others still most
friendly and kind in face and manner. All showed instant respect for
Fleda. They raised their hands in a gesture of salutation as a Zulu chief
thrusts up a long arm and shouts "Inkoos!" to one whom he honours. Some,
however, made the sweeping Oriental gesture of the right hand, palm
upward, and almost touching the ground--a sign of obedience and infinite
respect. It had all been well arranged. Skilfully managed as it was,
however, there was something in it deeper than theatrical display or
dramatic purpose.