“From where away?” said Gaspard, as he handed some tobacco to Pierre.
“From Hudson’s Bay, down the Red Wolf Plains, along the hills, across the coast country, here.”
“Why?” Gaspard eyed Pierre’s small kit with curiosity; then flung up a piercing, furtive look. Pierre shrugged his shoulders.
“Adventure, adventure,” he answered. “The land”—he pointed north, west, and east—“is all mine. I am the citizen of every village and every camp of the great north.”
The old man turned his head towards a spot up the shore of Belle Amour, before he turned to Pierre again, with a strange look, and said: “Where do you go?”
Pierre followed his gaze to that point in the shore, felt the undercurrent of vague meaning in his voice, guessed what was his cue, and said: “Somewhere, sometime; but now only Belle Amour. I have had a long travel. I have found an open door. I will stay—if you please—hein? If you please?”
Gaspard brooded. “It is lonely,” he replied. “This day it is all bright; the sun shines and the little gay waves crinkle to the shore. But, mon Dieu! sometimes it is all black and ugly with storm. The waves come grinding, booming in along the gridiron rocks”—he smiled a grim smile—“break through the teeth of the reefs, and split with a roar of hell upon the cliff. And all the time, and all the time,”—his voice got low with a kind of devilish joy,—“there is a finger—Jesu! you should see that finger of the devil stretch up from the bowels of the earth, waiting, waiting for something to come out of the storm. And then—and then you can hear a wild laugh come out of the land, come up from the sea, come down from the sky—all waiting, waiting for something! No, no, you would not stay here.”
Pierre looked again to that point in the shore towards which Gaspard’s eyes had been cast. The sun was shining hard just then, and the stern, sharp rocks, tumbling awkwardly back into the waste behind, had an insolent harshness. Day perched garishly there. Yet now and then the staring light was broken by sudden and deep shadows—great fissures in the rocks and lanes between. These gave Pierre a suggestion, though why, he could not say. He knew that when men live lives of patient, gloomy vigilance, they generally have something to watch and guard. Why should Gaspard remain here year after year? His occupation was nominally a pilot in a bay rarely touched by vessels, and then only for shelter. A pilot need not take his daily life with such brooding seriousness. In body he was like flexible metal, all cord and muscle. He gave the impression of bigness, though he was small in stature. Yet, as Pierre studied him, he saw something that made him guess the man had had about him one day a woman, perhaps a child; no man could carry that look unless. If a woman has looked at you from day to day, something of her, some reflection of her face, passes to yours and stays there; and if a child has held your hand long, or hung about your knees, it gives you a kind of gentle wariness as you step about your home.
Pierre knew that a man will cherish with a deep, eternal purpose a memory of a woman or a child, when, no matter how compelling his cue to remember where a man is concerned, he will yield it up in the end to time. Certain speculations arranged themselves definitely in Pierre’s mind: there was a woman, maybe a child once; there was some sorrowful mystery about them; there was a point in the shore that had held the old man’s eyes strangely; there was the bay with that fantastic “finger of the devil” stretching up from the bowels of the world. Behind the symbol lay the Thing what was it?
Long time he looked out upon the gulf, then his eyes drew into the bay and stayed there, seeing mechanically, as a hundred fancies went through his mind. There were reefs of which the old man had spoken. He could guess from the colour and movement of the water where they were. The finger of the devil—was it not real? A finger of rock, waiting as the old man said—for what?