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
Ingolby shut the door quietly behind him, and motioned the minister to a
chair beside the table. Tripple sank down, mechanically smiling, placed
his hat on the floor, and rested his hands on the table. Ingolby could
not help but notice how coarse the hands were--with fingers suddenly
ending as though they had been cut off, and puffy, yellowish skin that
suggested fat foods, or worse.
Ingolby came to grips at once. "You preached a sermon last night which no
doubt was meant to do good, but will only do harm," he said abruptly.
The flabby minister flushed, and then made an effort to hold his own.
"I speak as I am moved," he said, puffing out his lips. "You spoke on
this occasion before you were moved--just a little while before,"
answered Ingolby grimly. "The speaking was last night, the moving comes
today."
"I don't get your meaning," was the thick rejoinder. The man had a
feeling that there was some real danger ahead.
"You preached a sermon last night which might bring riot and bloodshed
between these two towns, though you knew the mess that's brewing."
"My conscience is my own. I am responsible to my Lord for words which I
speak in His name, not to you."
"Your conscience belongs to yourself, but your acts belong to all of us.
If there is trouble at the Orange funeral to-morrow it will be your
fault. The blame will lie at your door."
"The sword of the Spirit--"
"Oh, you want the sword, do you? You want the sword, eh?" Ingolby's jaw
was set now like a millstone. "Well, you can have it, and have it now. If
you had taken what I said in the right way, I would not have done what
I'm going to do. I'm going to send you out of Lebanon. You're a bad and
dangerous element here. You must go."
"Who are you to tell me I must go?"
The fat hands quivered on the table with anger and emotion, but also with
fear of something. "You may be a rich man and own railways, but--"
"But I am not rich and I don't own railways. Lately bad feeling has been
growing on the Sagalac, and only a spark was needed to fire the ricks.
You struck the spark in your sermon last night. I don't see the end of it
all. One thing is sure--you're not going to take the funeral service
to-morrow."
The slack red lips of the man of God were gone dry with excitement, the
loose body swayed with the struggle to fight it out.
"I'll take no orders from you," the husky voice protested. "My conscience
alone will guide me. I'll speak the truth as I feel it, and the people
will stand by me."
"In that case you WILL take orders from me. I'm going to save the town
from what hurts it, if I can. I've got no legal rights over you, but I
have moral rights, and I mean to enforce them. You gabble of conscience
and truth, but isn't it a new passion with you--conscience and truth?"
He leaned over the table and fastened the minister's eyes with his own.
"Had you the same love of conscience and truth at Radley?"
A whiteness passed over the flabby face, and the beady eyes took on a
glazed look. Fight suddenly died out of them.
"You went on a missionary tour on the Ottawa River. At Radley you toiled
and rested from your toil--and feasted. The girl had no father or
brother, but her uncle was a railway-man. He heard where you were, and he
hired with my company to come out here as a foreman. He came to drop on
you. The day after he came he had a bad accident. I went to see him. He
told me all; his nerves were unstrung, you observe. He meant to ruin you,
as you ruined the girl. He had proofs enough. The girl herself is in
Winnipeg. Well, I know life, and I know man and man's follies and
temptations. I thought it a pity that a career and a life like yours
should be ruined--"
A groan broke from the twitching lips before him, and a heavy sweat stood
out on the round, rolling forehead.
"If the man spoke, I knew it would be all up with you, for the world is
very hard on men of God who fall. I've seen men ruined before this,
because of an hour's passion and folly. I said to myself that you were
only human, and that maybe you had paid heavy in remorse and fear. Then
there was the honour of the town of Lebanon. I couldn't let the thing
take its course. I got the doctor to tell the man that he must go for
special treatment to a hospital in Montreal, and I--well, I bought him
off on his promising to keep his mouth shut. He was a bit stiff in terms,
because he said the girl needed the money. The child died, luckily for
you. Anyhow I bought him off, and he went. That was a year ago. I've got
all the proofs in my pocket, even to the three silly letters you wrote
her when your senses were stronger than your judgment. I was going to see
you about them to-day."
He took from his pocket a small packet, and held them before the other's
face. "Have a good look at your own handwriting, and see if you recognize
it," Ingolby continued.
But the glazed, shocked eyes did not see. Reuben Tripple had passed the
several stages of horror during Ingolby's merciless arraignment, and he
had nearly collapsed before he heard the end of the matter. When he knew
that Ingolby had saved him, his strength gave way, and he trembled
violently. Ingolby looked round and saw a jug of water. Pouring out a
glassful, he thrust it into the fat, wrinkled fingers.
"Drink and pull yourself together," he said sternly. The shaken figure
straightened itself, and the water was gulped down. "I thank you," he
said in a husky voice.
"You see I treated you fairly, and that you've been a fool?" Ingolby
asked with no lessened determination.
"I have tried to atone, and--"
"No, you haven't had the right spirit to atone. You were fat with vanity
and self-conceit. I've watched you."
"In future I will--"
"Well, that rests with yourself, but your health is bad, and you're not
going to take the funeral tomorrow. You've had a sudden breakdown, and
you're going to get a call from some church in the East--as far East as
Yokohama or Bagdad, I hope; and leave here in a few weeks. You
understand? I've thought the thing out, and you've got to go. You'll do
no good to yourself or others here. Take my advice, and wherever you go,
walk six miles a day at least, work in a garden, eat half as much as you
do, and be good to your wife. It's bad enough for any woman to be a
parson's wife, but to be a parson's wife and your wife, too, wants a lot
of fortitude."
The heavy figure lurched to the upright, and steadied itself with a force
which had not yet been apparent.
"I'll do my best--so help me God!" he said and looked Ingolby squarely in
the face for the first time.
"All right, see you keep your word," Ingolby replied, and nodded
good-bye.
The other went to the door, and laid a hand on the knob.
Suddenly Ingolby stopped him, and thrust a little bundle of bills into
his hand. "There's a hundred dollars for your wife. It'll pay the expense
of moving," he said.
A look of wonder, revelation and gratitude crept into Tripple's face. "I
will keep my word, so help me God!" he said again.
"All right, good-bye," responded Ingolby abruptly, and turned away.
A moment afterwards the door closed behind the Rev. Reuben Tripple and
his influence in Lebanon. "I couldn't shake hands with him," said Ingolby
to himself, "but I'm glad he didn't sniffle. There's some stuff in
him--if it only has a chance."
"I've done a good piece of business, Berry," he said cheerfully as he
passed through the barber-shop. "Suh, if you say so," said the barber,
and they left the shop together.
CHAPTER IX
MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN
Promptly at nine o'clock Jethro Fawe knocked at Ingolby's door, and was
admitted by the mulatto man-servant Jim Beadle, who was to Ingolby like
his right hand. It was Jim who took command of his house, "bossed" his
two female servants, arranged his railway tours, superintended his
kitchen--with a view to his own individual tastes; valeted him, kept his
cigars within a certain prescribed limit by a firm actuarial principle
which transferred any surplus to his own use; gave him good advice,
weighed up his friends and his enemies with shrewd sense; and protected
him from bores and cranks, borrowers and "dead-beats."
Jim was accustomed to take a good deal of responsibility, and had more
than once sent people to the right-about who had designs on his master,
even though they came accredited. On such occasions he did not lie to
protect himself when called to account, but told the truth
pertinaciously. He was obstinate in his vanity, and carried off his
mistakes with aplomb. When asked by Ingolby what he called the Governor
General when he took His Excellency over the new railway in Ingolby's
private car, he said, "I called him what everybody called him. I called
him 'Succelency.'" And "Succelency" for ever after the Governor General
was called in the West. Jim's phonetic mouthful gave the West a roar of
laughter and a new word to the language. On another occasion Jim gave the
West a new phrase to its vocabulary which remains to this day. Having to
take the wife of a high personage of the neighbouring Republic over the
line in the private car, he had astounded his master by presenting a bill
for finger-bowls before the journey began. Ingolby said to him, "Jim,
what the devil is this--finger-bowls in my private car? We've never had
finger-bowls before, and we've had everybody as was anybody to travel
with us." Jim's reply was final. "Say," he replied, "we got to have 'em.
Soon's I set my eyes on that lady I said: 'She's a finger-bowl lady.'"
"'Finger-bowl lady' be hanged, Jim, we don't--" Ingolby protested, but
Jim waved him down.
"Say," he said decisively, "she'll ask for them finger-bowls--she'll ask
for 'em, and what'd I do if we hadn't got 'em."
She did ask for them; and henceforth the West said of any woman who put
on airs and wanted what she wasn't born to: "She's a finger-bowl lady."
It was Jim who opened the door to Jethro Fawe, and his first glance was
one of prejudice. His quick perception saw that the Romany wore clothes
not natural to him. He felt the artificial element, the quality of
disguise. He was prepared to turn the visitor away, no matter what he
wanted, but Ingolby's card handed to him by the Romany made him pause. He
had never known his master give a card like that more than once or twice
in the years they had been together. He fingered the card, scrutinized it
carefully, turned it over, looked heavenward reflectively, as though the
final permission for the visit remained with him, and finally admitted
the visitor.
"Mr. Ingolby ain't in," he said. "He went out a little while back. You
got to wait," he added sulkily, as he showed the Romany into Ingolby's
working-room.
As Jim did so, he saw lying on a chair a suit of clothes on top of which
were a wig and false beard and moustache. Instantly he got between the
visitor and the make-up. The parcel was closed when he was in the room a
half-hour before. Ingolby had opened it since, had been called out, and
had forgotten to cover the things up or put them away.
"Sit down," Jim said to the Romany, still covering the disguise. Then he
raised them in his arms, and passed with them into another room,
muttering angrily to himself.
The Romany had seen, however. They were the first things on which his
eyes had fallen when he entered the room. A wig, a false beard, and
workman's clothes! What were they for? Were these disguises for the
Master Gorgio? Was he to wear them? If so, he--Jethro Fawe--would watch
and follow him wherever he went. Had these disguises to do with
Fleda--with his Romany lass?
His pulses throbbed; he was in an overwrought mood. He was ready for any
illusion, susceptible to any vagary of the imagination.
He looked round the room. So this was the way the swaggering, masterful
Gorgio lived?
Here were pictures and engravings which did not seem to belong to a new
town in a new land, where everything was useful or spectacular. Here was
a sense of culture and refinement. Here were finished and unfinished
water-colours done by Ingolby's own hand or bought by him from some
hard-up artist earning his way mile by mile, as it were. Here were books,
not many, but well-bound and important-looking, covering fields in which
Jethro Fawe had never browsed, into which, indeed, he had never entered.
If he had opened them he would have seen a profusion of marginal notes in
pencil, and slips of paper stuck in the pages to mark important passages.
He turned from them to the welcome array of weapons on the walls-rifles,
shotguns, Indian bows, arrows and spears, daggers, and great
sheath-knives such as are used from the Yukon to Bolivia, and a sabre
with a faded ribbon of silk tied to the handle. This was all that Max
Ingolby had inherited from his father--that artillery sabre which he had
worn in the Crimea and in the Indian Mutiny. Jethro's eyes wandered
eagerly over the weapons, and, in imagination, he had each one in his
hand. From the pained, angry confusion he felt when he looked at the
books had emerged a feeling of fanaticism, of feud and war, in which his
spirit regained its own kind of self-respect. In looking at the weapons
he was as good a man as any Gorgio. Brains and books were one thing, but
the strong arm, the quick eye, and the deft lunge home with the sword or
dagger were better; they were of a man's own skill, not the acquired
skill of another's brains which books give. He straightened his shoulders
till he looked like a modern actor playing the hero in a romantic drama,
and with quick vain motions he stroked and twisted his brown moustache,
and ran his fingers through his curling hair. In truth he was no coward;
and his conceit would not lessen his courage when the test of it came.
As his eyes brightened from gloom and sullenness to valiant enmity, they
suddenly fell on a table in a corner where lay a black coffin-shaped
thing of wood. In this case, he knew, was the Sarasate violin.
Sarasate--once he had paid ten lira to hear Sarasate play the fiddle in
Turin, and the memory of it was like the sun on the clouds to him now. In
music such of him as was real found a home. It fed everything in him--his
passion, his vanity; his vagabond taste, his emotions, his
self-indulgence, his lust. It was the means whereby he raised himself to
adventure and to pilgrimage, to love and license and loot and spying and
secret service here and there in the east of Europe. It was the
flagellation of these senses which excited him to do all that man may do
and more.
He was going to play to the masterful Gorgio, and he would play as he had
never played before. He would pour the soul of his purpose into the
music--to win back or steal back, the lass sealed to him by the Starzke
River.
"Kismet!" he said aloud, and he rose from the chair to go to the violin,
but as he did so the door opened and Ingolby entered.
"Oh, you're here, and longing to get at it," he said pleasantly.
He had seen the look in the eyes of the Romany as he entered, and noted
which way his footsteps were tending. "Well, we needn't lose any time,
but will you have a drink and a smoke first?" he added.
He threw his hat in a corner, and opened a spirittable where shone a half
dozen cut-glass, tumblers and several well-filled bottles, while boxes of
cigars and cigarettes flanked them. It was the height of modern luxury
imported from New York, and Jethro eyed it with envious inward comment.
The Gorgio had the world on his key-chain! Every door would open to
him--that was written on his face--unless Fate stepped in and closed all
doors!
The door of Fleda's heart had already been opened, but he had not yet
made his bed in it, and there was still time to help Fate, if her mystic
finger beckoned.
Jethro nodded in response to Ingolby's invitation to drink. "But I do not
drink much when I play," he remarked. "There's enough liquor in the head
when the fiddle's in the hand. 'Dadia', I do not need the spirit to make
the pulses go!"
"As little as you like then, if you'll only play as well as you did this
afternoon," Ingolby said cheerily. "I will play better," was the reply.
"On Sarasate's violin--well, of course."
"Not only because it is Sarasate's violin, 'Kowadji'!"
"Kowadji! Oh, come now, you may be a Gipsy, but that doesn't mean that
you're an Egyptian or an Arab. Why Arabic--why 'kowadji'?"
The other shrugged his shoulders. "Who can tell I speak many languages. I
do not like the Mister. It is ugly in the ear. Monsieur, signor, effendi,
kowadji, they have some respect in them."
"You wanted to pay me respect, eh?"
"You have Sarasate's violin!"
"I have a lot of things I could do without."
"Could you do without the Sarasate?"
"Long enough to hear you play it, Mr.--what is your name, may I ask?"
"My name is Jethro Fawe."
"Well, Jethro Fawe, my Romany 'chal', you shall show me what a violin can
do."
"You know the Romany lingo?" Jethro asked, as Ingolby went over to the
violin-case.
"A little--just a little."
"When did you learn it?" There was a sudden savage rage in Jethro's
heart, for he imagined Fleda had taught Ingolby.
"Many a year ago when I could learn anything and remember anything and
forget anything." Ingolby sighed. "But that doesn't matter, for I know
only a dozen words or so, and they won't carry me far."
He turned the violin over in his hands. "This ought to do a bit more than
the cotton-field fiddle," he said dryly.
He snapped the strings, looking at it with the love of the natural
connoisseur. "Finish your drink and your cigarette. I can wait," he added
graciously. "If you like the cigarettes, you must take some away with
you. You don't drink much, that's clear, therefore you must smoke. Every
man has some vice or other, if it's only hanging on to virtue too tight."
He laughed eagerly. Strange that he should have a feeling of greater
companionship for a vagabond like this than for most people he met. Was
it some temperamental thing in him? "Dago," as he called the Romany
inwardly, there was still a bond between them. They understood the glory
of a little instrument like this, and could forget the world in the light
on a great picture. There was something in the air they breathed which
gave them easier understanding of each other and of the world.
Suddenly with a toss Jethro drained the glass of spirit, though he had
not meant to do so. He puffed the cigarette an instant longer, then threw
it on the floor, and was about to put his foot on it, when Ingolby
stopped him.
"I'm a slave," he said. "I've got a master. It's Jim. Jim's a hard
master, too. He'd give me fits if we ground our cigarette ashes into the
carpet."
He threw the refuse into a flower-pot.
"That squares Jim. Now let's turn the world inside out," he proceeded. He
handed the fiddle over. "Here's the little thing that'll let you do the
trick. Isn't it a beauty, Jethro Fawe?"
The Romany took it, his eyes glistening with mingled feelings. Hatred was
in his soul, and it showed in the sidelong glance as Ingolby turned to
place a chair where he could hear and see comfortably; yet he had the
musician's love of the perfect instrument, and the woods and the streams
and the sounds of night and the whisperings of trees and the ghosts that
walked in lonely places and called across the glens--all were pouring
into his brain memories which made his pulses move far quicker than the
liquor he had drunk could do.
"What do you wish?" he asked as he tuned the fiddle.
Ingolby laughed good-humouredly. "Something Eastern; something you'd play
for yourself if you were out by the Caspian Sea. Something that has life
in it."
Jethro continued to tune the fiddle carefully and abstractedly. His eyes
were half-closed, giving them a sulky look, and his head was averted. He
made no reply to Ingolby, but his head swayed from side to side in that
sensuous state produced by self-hypnotism, so common among the
half-Eastern races. By an effort of the will they send through the nerves
a flood of feeling which is half-anaesthetic, half-intoxicant. Carried
into its fullest expression it drives a man amok or makes of him a
howling dervish, a fanatic, or a Shakir. In lesser intensity it produces
the musician of the purely sensuous order, or the dancer that performs
prodigies of abandoned grace. Suddenly the sensuous exaltation had come
upon Jethro Fawe. It was as though he had discharged into his system from
some cells of his brain a flood which coursed like a stream of soft fire.
In the pleasurable pain of such a mood he drew his bow across the strings
with a sweeping stroke, and then, for an instant, he ran hither and
thither on the strings testing the quality and finding the range and
capacity of the instrument. It was a scamper of hieroglyphics which could
only mean anything to a musician.
"Well, what do you think of him?" Ingolby asked as the Romany lowered the
bow. "Paganini--Joachim--Sarasate--any one, it is good enough," was the
half-abstracted reply.
"It is good enough for you--almost, eh?"
Ingolby meant his question as a compliment, but an evil look shot into
the Romany's face, and the bow twitched in his hand. He was not Paganini
or Sarasate, but that was no reason why he should be insulted.
Ingolby's quick perception saw, however, what his words had done, and he
hastened to add: "I believe you can get more out of that fiddle than
Sarasate ever could, in your own sort of music anyhow. I've never heard
any one play half so well the kind of piece you played this afternoon.
I'm glad I didn't make a fool of myself buying the fiddle. I didn't, did
I? I gave five thousand dollars for it."
"It's worth anything to the man that loves it," was the Romany's
response. He was mollified by the praise he had received.
He raised the fiddle slowly to his chin, his eyes wandering round the
room, then projecting themselves into space, from which they only
returned to fix themselves on Ingolby with the veiled look which sees but
does not see--such a look as an oracle, or a death-god, or a soulless
monster of some between-world, half-Pagan god would wear. Just such a
look as Watts's "Minotaur" wears in the Tate Gallery in London.
In an instant he was away in a world which was as far off from this world
as Jupiter is from Mars. It was the world of his soul's origin--a place
of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and
green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of
vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive
with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts. It was a place where birds sang
divinely, yet where obscene fowls of prey hovered in the blue or waited
by the dying denizens of the desert or the plain; where dark-eyed women
heard, with sidelong triumph, the whispers of passion; where sweet-faced
children fled in fear from terrors undefined; where harpies and
witch-women and evil souls waited in ambush; or scurried through the
coverts where men brought things to die; or where they fled for futile
refuge from armed foes. It was a world of unbridled will, this, where the
soul of Jethro Fawe had its origin; and to it his senses fled
involuntarily when he put Sarasate's fiddle to his chin this Autumn
evening.
From that well of the First Things--the first things of his own life, the
fount from which his forebears drew, backwards through the centuries,
Jethro Fawe quickly drank his fill; and then into the violin he poured
his own story--no improvisation, but musical legends and classic
fantasies and folk-breathings and histories of anguished or joyous haters
or lovers of life; treated by the impressionist who made that which had
been in other scenes to other men the thing of the present and for the
men who are. That which had happened by the Starzke River was now of the
Sagalac River. The passions and wild love and irresponsible deeds of the
life he had lived in years gone by were here.
It was impossible for Ingolby to resist the spell of the music. Such
abandonment he had never seen in any musician, such riot of musical
meaning he had never heard. He was conscious of the savagery and the
bestial soul of vengeance which spoke through the music, and drowned the
joy and radiance and almost ghostly and grotesque frivolity of the
earlier passages; but it had no personal meaning to him, though at times
it seemed when the Romany came near and bent over him with the ecstatic
attack of the music, as though there was a look in the black eyes like
that of a man who kills. It had, of course, nothing to do with him; it
was the abandonment of a highly emotional nature, he thought.
It was only after he had been playing, practically without ceasing, for
three-quarters of an hour, that there came to Ingolby the true
interpretation of the Romany mutterings through the man's white,
wolf-like teeth. He did not shrink, however, but kept his head and
watched.
Once, as the musician flung his body round in a sweep of passion, Ingolby
saw the black eyes flash to the weapons on the wall with a malign look
which did not belong to the music alone, and he took a swift estimate of
the situation. Why the man should have any intentions against him, he
could not guess, except that he might be one of the madmen who have a
vendetta against the capitalist. Or was he a tool of Felix Marchand? It
did not seem possible, and yet if the man was penniless and an anarchist
maybe, there was the possibility. Or--the blood rushed to his face--or it
might be that the Gipsy's presence here, this display of devilish
antipathy, as though it were all part of the music, was due, somehow, to
Fleda Druse.