“It is late,” said Sir William, nervously.
“What does it matter? It is once in a lifetime,” she answered sadly.
Gaston took up the thread:
“Now I come to what will shock you even more, perhaps. So, be prepared. I don’t know how many days went, but at last I had three visitors—in time I should think: a Moravian missionary, and an Esquimaux and his daughter. I didn’t tell the missionary about Jock—there was no use, it could do no good. They stayed four weeks, and during that time one of the crazy men died. The other got better, but had to be watched. I could do anything with him, if I got my eye on him. Somehow, I must tell you, I’ve got a lot of power that way. I don’t know where it comes from. Well, the missionary had to go. The old Esquimaux thought that he and his daughter would stay on if I’d let them. I was only too glad. But it wasn’t wise for the missionary to take the journey alone—it was a bad business in any case. I urged the man that had been crazy to go, for I thought activity would do him good. He agreed, and the two left and got to the Mission Station all right, after wicked trouble. I was alone with the Esquimaux and his daughter. You never know why certain things happen, and I can’t tell why that winter was so weird; why the old Esquimaux should take sick one morning, and in the evening should call me and his daughter Lucy—she’d been given a Christian name, of course—and say that he was going to die, and he wanted me to marry her” (Lady Belward exclaimed, Sir William’s hands fingered the chair-arm nervously) “there and then, so that he’d know she would be cared for. He was a heathen, but he had been primed by the missionaries about his daughter. She was a fine, clever girl, and well educated—the best product of their mission. So he called for a Bible. There wasn’t one in the place, but I had my mother’s Book of the Mass. I went to get it, but when I set my eyes on it, I couldn’t—no, I couldn’t do it, for I hadn’t the least idea but what I should bid my lady good-bye when it suited, and I didn’t want any swearing at all—not a bit. I didn’t do any. But what happened had to be with or without any ring or book and ‘Forasmuch as.’ There had been so much funeral and sudden death that a marriage would be a godsend anyhow. So the old Esquimaux got our two hands in his, babbled away in half-English, half-Esquimaux, with the girl’s eyes shining like a she-moose over a dying buck, and about the time we kissed each other, his head dropped back—and that is all there was about that.”
Gaston now kept his eyes on his listeners. He was aware that his story must sound to them as brutal as might be, but it was a phase of his life, and, so far as he could, he wanted to start with a clean sheet; not out of love of confidence, for he was self-contained, but he would have enough to do to shepherd his future without shepherding his past. He saw that Lady Belward had a sickly fear in her face, while Sir William had gone stern and hard.
He went on:
“It saved the situation, did that marriage; though it was no marriage you will say. Neither was it one way, and I didn’t intend at the start to stand by it an hour longer than I wished. But she was more than I looked for, and it seems to me that she saved my life that winter, or my reason anyhow. There had been so much tragedy that I used to wonder every day what would happen before night; and that’s not a good thing for the brain of a chap of twenty-one or two. The funny part of it is that she wasn’t a pagan—not a bit. She could read and speak English in a sweet old-fashioned way, and she used to sing to me—such a funny, sorry little voice she had—hymns the Moravians had taught her, and one or two English songs. I taught her one or two besides, ‘Where the Hawthorn Tree is Blooming,’ and ‘Allan Water’—the first my father had taught me, the other an old Scotch trader. It’s different with a woman and a man in a place like that. Two men will go mad together, but there’s a saving something in the contact of a man’s brain with a woman’s. I got fond of her, any man would have, for she had something that I never saw in any heathen, certainly in no Indian; you’ll see it in women from Iceland. I determined to marry her in regular style when spring and a missionary came. You can’t understand, maybe, how one can settle to a life where you’ve got companionship, and let the world go by. About that time, I thought that I’d let Ridley Court and the rest of it go as a boy’s dreams go. I didn’t seem to know that I was only satisfied in one set of my instincts. Spring came, so did a missionary, and for better or worse it was.”
Sir William came to his feet. “Great Heaven!” he broke out.
His wife tried to rise, but could not.
“This makes everything impossible,” added the baronet shortly.