The World For Sale, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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"By your Chief."
"'Ay bor', by my Chief! I had my wrongs, and I had my rights, and you
were mine by Romany law. It was for me here to claim you--here where a
Romany and his wife were alone together!"
His eyes were fixed searchingly on hers, as though he would read the
effect of his words before he replied, and his voice had a curious, rough
note, as though with difficulty he quelled the tempest within him. "I
have my rights, and you had spat upon me," he said with ferocious
softness.
She did not blench, but looked him steadily in the eyes.
"I knew what would be in your mind," she answered, "but that did not keep
me from coming. You would not bite the hand that set you free."
"You called me a wolf a minute ago."
"But a wolf would not bite the hand that freed it from the trap. Yet if
such shame could be, I still would have had no fear, for I should have
shot you as wolves are shot that come too near the fold."
He looked at her piercingly, and the pupils of his eyes narrowed to a
pin-point. "You would have shot me--you are armed?" he questioned.
"Am I the only woman that has armed herself against you and such as you?
Do you not see?"
"Mi Duvel, but I do see now with a thousand eyes!" he said hoarsely.
His senses were reeling. Down beneath everything had been the thought
that, as he had prevailed with other women, he could prevail with her;
that she would come to him in the end. He had felt, but he had declined
to see, the significance of her bearing, of her dress, of her speech, of
her present mode of life, of its comparative luxury, its social
distinction of a kind which lifted her above even the Gorgios by whom she
was surrounded. A fatuous belief in himself and in his personal powers
had deluded him. He had told the truth when he said that no woman had
ever appealed to him as she did; that she had blotted out all other women
from the book of his adventurous and dissolute life; and he had dreamed a
dream of conquest of her when Fortune should hand out to him the key of
the situation. Did not the beautiful Russian countess on the Volga flee
from her liege lord and share his 'tan'? When he played his fiddle to the
Austrian princess, did she not give him a key to the garden where she
walked of an evening? And this was a Romany lass, daughter of his
Chieftain, as he was son of a great Romany chief; and what marvel could
there be that she who had been made his child wife, should be conquered
as others had been!
"'Mi Duvel', but I see!" he repeated in a husky fierceness. "I am your
husband, but you would have killed me if I had taken a kiss from your
lips, sealed to me by all our tribes and by your father and mine."
"My lips are my own, my life is my own, and when I marry, I shall marry a
man of my own choosing, and he will not be a Romany," she replied with a
look of resolution which her beating heart belied. "I'm not a pedlar's
basket."
"'Kek! Kek'! That's plain," he retorted. "But the 'wolf' is no lamb
either! I said I would not go till your father set me free, since you had
no right to do so, but a wife should save her husband, and her husband
should set himself free for his wife's sake"--his voice rose in fierce
irony--"and so I will now go free. But I will not take the word to the
Romany people that you are no more of them. I am a true Romany. I
disobeyed my 'Ry' in coming here because my wife was here, and I wanted
her. I am a true Romany husband who will not betray his wife to her
people; but I will have my way, and no Gorgio shall take her to his home.
She belongs to my tent, and I will take her there."
Her gesture of contempt, anger and negation infuriated him. "If I do not
take you to my 'tan', it will be because I'm dead," he said, and his
white teeth showed fiercely.
"I have set you free. You had better go," she rejoined quietly.
Suddenly he turned at the doorway. A look of passion burned in his eyes.
His voice became soft and persuasive. "I would put the past behind me,
and be true to you, my girl," he said. "I shall be chief over all the
Romany people when Duke Gabriel dies. We are sib; give me what is mine. I
am yours--and I hold to my troth. Come, beloved, let us go together."
A sigh broke from her lips, for she saw that, bad as he was, there was a
moment's truth in his words. "Go while you can," she said. "You are
nothing to me."
For an instant he hesitated, then, with a muttered oath, sprang out into
the bracken, and was presently lost among the trees.
For a long time she sat in the doorway, and again and again her eyes
filled with tears. She felt a cloud of trouble closing in upon her. At
last there was the sound of footsteps, and a moment later Gabriel Druse
came through the trees towards her. His eyes were sullen and brooding.
"You have set him free?" he asked.
She nodded. "It was madness keeping him here," she said.
"It is madness letting him go," he answered morosely. "He will do harm.
'Ay bor', he will! I might have known--women are chicken-hearted. I ought
to have put him out of the way, but I have no heart any more--no heart; I
have the soul of a rabbit."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Saw how futile was much competition
When you strike your camp, put out the fires
THE WORLD FOR SALE
By Gilbert Parker
BOOK II
VIII. THE SULTAN
IX. MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN
X. FOR LUCK
XI. THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN
XII. "LET THERE BE LIGHT"
XIII. THE CHAIN OF THE PAST
XIV. SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
XV. THE WOMAN FROM WIND RIVER
XVI. THE MAYOR FILLS AN OFFICE
XVII. THE MONSEIGNEUR AND THE NOMAD
XVIII. THE BEACONS
XIX. THE BEEPER OF THE BRIDGE
CHAPTER VIII
THE SULTAN
Ingolby's square head jerked forwards in stern inquiry and his eyes
fastened those of Jowett, the horsedealer. "Take care what you're saying,
Jowett," he said. "It's a penitentiary job, if it can be proved. Are you
sure you got it right?"
Jowett had unusual shrewdness, some vanity and a humorous tongue. He was
a favourite in both towns, and had had the better of both in
horse-dealing a score of times.
That did not make him less popular. However, it was said he liked low
company, and it was true that though he had "money in the bank," and
owned a corner lot or so, he seemed to care little what his company was.
His most constant companion was Fabian Osterhaut, who was the common
property of both towns, doing a little of everything for a living, from
bill-posting to the solicitation of an insurance agent.
For any casual work connected with public functions Osterhaut was
indispensable, and he would serve as a doctor's assistant and help cut
off a leg, be the majordomo for a Sunday-school picnic, or arrange a
soiree at a meeting-house with equal impartiality. He had been known to
attend a temperance meeting and a wake in the same evening. Yet no one
ever questioned his bona fides, and if he had attended mass at Manitou in
the morning, joined a heathen dance in Tekewani's Reserve in the
afternoon, and listened to the oleaginous Rev. Reuben Tripple in the
evening, it would have been taken as a matter of course.
He was at times profane and impecunious, and he had been shifted from one
boarding-house to another till at last, having exhausted credit in
Lebanon, he had found a room in the house of old Madame Thibadeau in
Manitou. She had taken him in because, in years gone by, he had nursed
her only son through an attack of smallpox on the Siwash River, and
somehow Osterhaut had always paid his bills to her. He was curiously
exact where she was concerned. If he had not enough for his week's board
and lodging, he borrowed it, chiefly of Jowett, who used him profitably
at times to pass the word about a horse, or bring news of a possible
deal.
"It's a penitentiary job, Jowett," Ingolby repeated. "I didn't think
Marchand would be so mad as that."
"Say, it's all straight enough, Chief," answered Jowett, sucking his
unlighted cigar. "Osterhaut got wind of it--he's staying at old Mother
Thibadeau's, as you know. He moves round a lot, and he put me on to it. I
took on the job at once. I got in with the French toughs over at Manitou,
at Barbazon's Tavern, and I gave them gin--we made it a gin night. It
struck their fancy--gin, all gin! 'Course there's nothing in gin
different from any other spirit; but it fixed their minds, and took away
suspicion.
"I got drunk--oh, yes, of course, blind drunk, didn't I? Kissed me, half
a dozen of the Quebec boys did--said I was 'bully boy' and 'hell-fellow';
said I was 'bon enfant'; and I said likewise in my best patois. They
liked that. I've got a pretty good stock of monkey-French, and I let it
go. They laughed till they cried at some of my mistakes, but they weren't
no mistakes, not on your life. It was all done a-purpose. They said I was
the only man from Lebanon they wouldn't have cut up and boiled, and they
was going to have the blood of the Lebanon lot before they'd done. I
pretended to get mad, and I talked wild. I said that Lebanon would get
them first, that Lebanon wouldn't wait, but'd have it out; and I took off
my coat and staggered about--blind-fair blind boozy. I tripped over some
fool's foot purposely, just beside a bench against the wall, and I come
down on that bench hard. They laughed--Lord, how they laughed! They
didn't mind my givin' 'em fits--all except one or two. That was what I
expected. The one or two was mad. They begun raging towards me, but there
I was asleep on the bench-stony blind, and then they only spit fire a
bit. Some one threw my coat over me. I hadn't any cash in the pockets,
not much--I knew better than that--and I snored like a sow. Then it
happened what I thought would happen. They talked. And here it is.
They're going to have a strike in the mills, and you're to get a toss
into the river. That's to be on Friday. But the other thing--well, they
all cleared away but two. They were the two that wanted to have it out
with me. They stayed behind. There was I snoring like a locomotive, but
my ears open all right.
"Well, they give the thing away. One of 'em had just come from Felix
Marchand and he was full of it. What was it? Why, the second night of the
strike your new bridge over the river was to be blown up. Marchand was to
give these two toughs three hundred dollars each for doing it."
"Blown up with what?" Ingolby asked sharply.
"Dynamite."
"Where would they get it?"
"Some left from blasting below the mills."
"All right! Go on."
"There wasn't much more. Old Barbazon, the landlord, come in and they
quit talking about it; but they said enough to send 'em to gaol for ten
years."
Ingolby blinked at Jowett reflectively, and his mouth gave a twist that
lent to his face an almost droll look.
"What good would it do if they got ten years--or one year, if the bridge
was blown up? If they got skinned alive, and if Marchand was handed over
to a barnful of hungry rats to be gnawed to death, it wouldn't help. I've
heard and seen a lot of hellish things, but there's nothing to equal
that. To blow up the bridge--for what? To spite Lebanon, and to hurt me;
to knock the spokes out of my wheel. He's the dregs, is Marchand."
"I guess he's a shyster by nature, that fellow," interposed Jowett. "He
was boilin' hot when he was fifteen. He spoiled a girl I knew when he was
twenty-two, not fourteen she was--Lil Sarnia; and he got her away
before--well, he got her away East; and she's in a dive in Winnipeg now.
As nice a girl--as nice a little girl she was, and could ride any broncho
that ever bucked. What she saw in him--but there, she was only a child,
just the mind of a child she had, and didn't understand. He'd ha' been
tarred and feathered if it'd been known. But old Mick Sarnia said hush,
for his wife's sake, and so we hushed, and Sarnia's wife doesn't know
even now. I thought a lot of Lil, as much almost as if she'd been my own;
and lots o' times, when I think of it, I sit up straight, and the thing
freezes me; and I want to get Marchand by the scruff of the neck. I got a
horse, the worst that ever was--so bad I haven't had the heart to ride
him or sell him. He's so bad he makes me laugh. There's nothing he won't
do, from biting to bolting. Well, I'd like to tie Mr. Felix Marchand,
Esquire, to his back, and let him loose on the prairie, and pray the Lord
to save him if he thought fit. I fancy I know what the Lord would do. And
Lil Sarnia's only one. Since he come back from the States, he's the
limit, oh, the damnedest limit. He's a pest all round-and now, this!"
Ingolby kept blinking reflectively as Jowett talked. He was doing two
things at once with a facility quite his own. He was understanding all
Jowett was saying, but he was also weighing the whole situation. His mind
was gone fishing, figuratively speaking. He was essentially a man of
action, but his action was the bullet of his mind; he had to be quiet
physically when he was really thinking. Then he was as one in a dream
where all physical motion was mechanical, and his body was acting
automatically. His concentration, and therefore his abstraction, was
phenomenal. Jowett's reminiscences at a time so critical did not disturb
him--did not, indeed, seem to be irrelevant. It was as though Felix
Marchand was being passed in review before him in a series of aspects. He
nodded encouragement to Jowett to go on.
"It's because Marchand hates you, Chief. The bump he got when you dropped
him on the ground that day at Carillon hurts still. It's a chronic
inflammation. Closing them railway offices at Manitou, and dislodging the
officials give him his first good chance. The feud between the towns is
worse now than it's ever been. Make no mistake. There's a whole lot of
toughs in Manitou. Then there's religion, and there's race, and there's a
want-to-stand-still and leave-me-alone-feeling. They don't want to get
on. They don't want progress. They want to throw the slops out of the top
windows into the street; they want their cesspools at the front door;
they think that everybody's got to have smallpox some time or another,
and the sooner they have it the better; they want to be bribed; and they
think that if a vote's worth having it's worth paying for--and yet
there's a bridge between these two towns! A bridge--why, they're as far
apart as the Yukon and Patagonia."
"What'd buy Felix Marchand?" Ingolby asked meditatively. "What's his
price?"
Jowett shifted with impatience. "Say, Chief, I don't know what you're
thinking about. Do you think you could make a deal with Felix Marchand?
Not much. You've got the cinch on him. You could send him to quod, and
I'd send him there as quick as lightning. I'd hang him, if I could, for
what he done to Lil Sarnia. Years ago when he was a boy he offered me a
gold watch for a mare I had. The watch looked as right as could be--solid
fourteen-carat, he said it was. He got my horse, and I got his watch. It
wasn't any more gold than he was. It was filled--just plated with
nine-carat gold. It was worth about ten dollars."
"What was the mare worth?" asked Ingolby, his mouth twisting again with
quizzical meaning.
"That mare--she was all right."
"Yes, but what was the matter with her?"
"Oh, a spavin--she was all right when she got wound up--go like Dexter or
Maud S."
"But if you were buying her what would you have paid for her, Jowett?
Come now, man to man, as they say. How much did you pay for her?"
"About what she was worth, Chief, within a dollar or two."
"And what was she worth?"
"What I paid for her-ten dollars."
Then the two men looked at each other full in the eyes, and Jowett threw
back his head and laughed outright--laughed loud and hard. "Well, you got
me, Chief, right under the guard," he observed.
Ingolby did not laugh outright, but there was a bubble of humour in his
eyes. "What happened to the watch?" he asked.
"I got rid of it."
"In a horse-trade?"
"No, I got a town lot with it."
"In Lebanon?"
"Well, sort of in Lebanon's back-yard."
"What's the lot worth now?"
"About two thousand dollars!"
"Was it your first town lot?"
"The first lot of Mother Earth I ever owned."
"Then you got a vote on it?"
"Yes, my first vote."
"And the vote let you be a town-councillor?"
"It and my good looks."
"Indirectly, therefore, you are a landowner, a citizen, a public servant,
and an instrument of progress because of Felix Marchand. If you hadn't
had the watch you wouldn't have had that town lot."
"Well, mebbe, not that lot."
Suddenly Ingolby got to his feet and squared himself, and his face became
alight with purpose. His mind had come back from fishing, and he was
ready now for action. His plans were formed. He was in for a fight, and
he had made up his mind how, with the new information to his hand, he
would develop his campaign further.
"You didn't make a fuss about the watch, Jowett. You might have gone to
Felix Marchand or to his father and proved him a liar, and got even that
way. You didn't; you got a corner lot with it. That's what I'm going to
do. I can have Felix Marchand put in the jug, and make his old father,
Hector Marchand, sick; but I like old Hector Marchand, and I think he's
bred as bad a pup as ever was. I'm going to try and do with this business
as you did with that watch. I'm going to try and turn it to account and
profit in the end. Felix Marchand's profiting by a mistake of mine--a
mistake in policy. It gives him his springboard; and there's enough dry
grass in both towns to get a big blaze with a very little match. I know
that things are seething. The Chief Constable keeps me posted as to
what's going on here, and pretty fairly as to what's going on in Manitou.
The police in Manitou are straight enough. That's one comfort. I've done
Felix Marchand there. I guess that the Chief Constable of Manitou and
Monseigneur Lourde and old Mother Thibadeau are about the only people
that Marchand can't bribe. I see I've got to face a scrimmage before I
can get what I want."
"What you want you'll have, I bet," was the admiring response.
"I'm going to have a good try. I want these two towns to be one. That'll
be good for your town lots, Jowett," he added whimsically. "If my policy
is carried out, my town lot'll be worth a pocketful of gold-plated
watches or a stud of spavined mares." He chuckled to himself, and his
fingers reached towards a bell on the table, but he paused. "When was it
they said the strike would begin?" he asked.
"Friday."
"Did they say what hour?"
"Eleven in the morning."
"Third of a day's work and a whole day's pay," he mused. "Jowett," he
added, "I want you to have faith. I'm going to do Marchand, and I'm going
to do him in a way that'll be best in the end. You can help as much if
not more than anybody--you and Osterhaut. And if I succeed, it'll be
worth your while."
"I ain't followin' you because it's worth while, but because I want to,
Chief."
"I know; but a man--every man--likes the counters for the game." He
turned to the table, opened a drawer, and took out a folded paper. He
looked it through carefully, wrote a name on it, and handed it to Jowett.
"There's a hundred shares in the Northwest Railway, with my regards,
Jowett. Some of the counters of the game."
Jowett handed it back at once with a shake of the head. "I don't live in
Manitou," he said. "I'm almost white, Chief. I've never made a deal with
you, and don't want to. I'm your man for the fun of it, and because I'd
give my life to have your head on my shoulders for one year."
"I'd feel better if you'd take the shares, Jowett. You've helped me, and
I can't let you do it for nothing."
"Then I can't do it at all. I'm discharged." Suddenly, however, a
humorous, eager look shot into Jowett's face. "Will you toss for it?" he
blurted out. "Certainly, if you like," was the reply.
"Heads I win, tails it's yours?"
"Good."
Ingolby took a silver dollar from his pocket, and tossed. It came down
tails. Ingolby had won.
"My corner lot against double the shares?" Jowett asked sharply, his face
flushed with eager pleasure. He was a born gambler.
"As you like," answered Ingolby with a smile. Ingolby tossed, and they
stooped over to look at the dollar on the floor. It had come up heads.
"You win," said Ingolby, and turning to the table, took out another
hundred shares. In a moment they were handed over.
"You're a wonder, Jowett," he said. "You risked a lot of money. Are you
satisfied?"
"You bet, Chief. I come by these shares honestly now."
He picked up the silver dollar from the floor, and was about to put it in
his pocket.
"Wait--that's my dollar," said Ingolby.
"By gracious, so it is!" said Jowett, and handed it over reluctantly.
Ingolby pocketed it with satisfaction.
Neither dwelt on the humour of the situation. They were only concerned
for the rules of the game, and both were gamesters in their way.
After a few brief instructions to Jowett, and a message for Osterhaut
concerning a suit of workman's clothes, Ingolby left his offices and
walked down the main street of the town with his normal rapidity,
responding cheerfully to the passers-by, but not encouraging evident
desire for talk with him. Men half-started forward to him, but he held
them back with a restraining eye. They knew his ways. He was responsive
in a brusque, inquisitive, but good-humoured and sometimes very droll
way; but there were times when men said to themselves that he was to be
left alone; and he was so much master of the place that, as Osterhaut and
Jowett frequently remarked, "What he says goes!" It went even with those
whom he had passed in the race of power.
He had had his struggles to be understood in his first days in Lebanon.
He had fought intrigue and even treachery, had defeated groups which were
the forces at work before he came to Lebanon, and had compelled the
submission of others. All these had vowed to "get back at him," but when
it became a question of Lebanon against Manitou they swung over to his
side and acknowledged him as leader. The physical collision between the
rougher elements of the two towns had brought matters to a head, and
nearly every man in Lebanon felt that his honour was at stake, and was
ready "to have it out with Manitou."
As he walked along the main street after his interview with Jowett, his
eyes wandered over the buildings rising everywhere; and his mind reviewed
as in a picture the same thinly inhabited street five years ago when he
first came. Now farmers' wagons clacked and rumbled through the prairie
dust, small herds of cattle jerked and shuffled their way to the
slaughter-yard, or out to the open prairie, and caravans of settlers with
their effects moved sturdily forward to the trails which led to a new
life beckoning from three points of the compass. That point which did not
beckon was behind them. Flaxen-haired Swedes and Norwegians;
square-jawed, round-headed North Germans; square-shouldered,
loose-jointed Russians with heavy contemplative eyes and long hair,
looked curiously at each other and nodded understandingly. Jostling them
all, with a jeer and an oblique joke here and there, and crude chaff on
each other and everybody, the settler from the United States asserted
himself. He invariably obtruded himself, with quizzical inquiry, half
contempt and half respect, on the young Englishman, who gazed round with
phlegm upon his fellow adventurers, and made up to the sandy-faced Scot
or the cheerful Irishman with his hat on the back of his head, who showed
in the throng here and there. This was one of the days when the emigrant
and settlers' trains arrived both from the East and from "the States,"
and Front Street in Lebanon had, from early morning, been alive with the
children of hope and adventure.
With hands plunged deep in the capacious pockets of his grey jacket,
Ingolby walked on, seeing everything; yet with his mind occupied
intently, too, on the trouble which must be faced before Lebanon and
Manitou would be the reciprocating engines of his policy. Coming to a
spot where a great gap of vacant land showed in the street-land which he
had bought for the new offices of his railway combine--he stood and
looked at it abstractedly. Beyond it, a few blocks away, was the Sagalac,
and beyond the Sagalac was Manitou, and a little way to the right was the
bridge which was the symbol of his policy. His eyes gazed almost
unconsciously on the people and the horses and wagons coming and going
upon the bridge. Then they were lifted to the tall chimneys rising at two
or three points on the outskirts of Manitou.
"They don't know a good thing when they get it," he said to himself. "A
strike--why, wages are double what they are in Quebec, where most of 'em
come from! Marchand--"
A hand touched his arm. "Have you got a minute to spare, kind sir?" a
voice asked.
Ingolby turned and saw Nathan Rockwell, the doctor. "Ah, Rockwell," he
responded cheerfully, "two minutes and a half, if you like! What is it?"
The Boss Doctor, as he was familiarly called by every one, to identify
him from the newer importations of medical men, drew from his pocket a
newspaper.