Northern Lights

by Gilbert Parker

Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions, and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases which had passed through his hands—one a man with his neck broken, who had lived for six months afterward.

“Broken as a man’s neck is broken by hanging—dislocation, really—the disjointing of the medulla oblongata, if you don’t mind technicalities,” he said. “But I kept him living just the same. Time enough for him to repent in and get ready to go. A most interesting case. He was a criminal, too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if you can, to the last inch of resistance.”

The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden’s eyes were screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to Varley’s remarks. There was a long minute’s silence. They were all three roused by hearing a light footstep on the veranda.

Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway. Finden caught a glimpse of a woman’s figure, and, without a word, passed abruptly from the dining-room, where they were, into the priest’s study, leaving Varley alone. Varley turned to look after him, stared, and shrugged his shoulders.

“The manners of the West,” he said, good-humoredly, and turned again to the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest’s voice. Presently there was another voice—a woman’s. He flushed slightly and involuntarily straightened himself.

“Valerie,” he murmured.

An instant afterward she entered the room with the priest. She was dressed in a severely simple suit of gray, which set off to advantage her slim, graceful figure. There seemed no reason why she should have been called the little widow of Jansen, for she was not small, but she was very finely and delicately made, and the name had been but an expression of Jansen’s paternal feeling for her. She had always had a good deal of fresh color, but to-day she seemed pale, though her eyes had a strange disturbing light. It was not that they brightened on seeing this man before her; they had been brighter, burningly bright, when she left the hospital, where, since it had been built, she had been the one visitor of authority—Jansen had given her that honor. She had a gift of smiling, and she smiled now, but it came from grace of mind rather than from humor. As Finden had said, “She was forever acting, and never doin’ any harm by it.”

Certainly she was doing no harm by it now; nevertheless, it was acting. Could it be otherwise, with what was behind her life—a husband who had ruined her youth, had committed homicide, had escaped capture, but who had not subsequently died, as the world believed he had done, so circumstantial was the evidence. He was not man enough to make the accepted belief in his death a fact. What could she do but act, since the day she got a letter from the Far North, which took her out to Jansen, nominally to nurse those stricken with smallpox under Father Bourassa’s care, actually to be where her wretched husband could come to her once a year, as he had asked with an impossible selfishness?

Each year she had seen him for an hour or less, giving him money, speaking to him over a gulf so wide that it seemed sometimes as though her voice could not be heard across it; each year opening a grave to look at the embalmed face of one who had long since died in shame, which only brought back the cruellest of all memories, that which one would give one’s best years to forget. With a fortitude beyond description she had faced it, gently, quietly, but firmly faced it—firmly, because she had to be firm in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would have killed her. And after the first struggle with his unchangeable brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her. He had kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present coarse, hard life, where pleasures were few and gross. The free Northern life of toil and hardship had not refined him. He greedily hung over this treasure, which was not for his spending, yet was his own—as though in a bank he had hoards of money which he might not withdraw.

So the years had gone on, with their recurrent dreaded anniversaries, carrying misery almost too great to be borne by this woman mated to the loathed phantom of a sad, dead life; and when this black day of each year was over, for a few days afterwards she went nowhere, was seen by none. Yet, when she did appear again, it was with her old laughing manner, her cheerful and teasing words, her quick response to the emotions of others.