THE WORLD FOR SALE
By Gilbert Parker
CONTENTS
[ INTRODUCTION ]
[ NOTE ]
[ PRELUDE ]
[ CHAPTER I. ] "THE DRUSES ARE UP!”
[ CHAPTER II. ] THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND
[ CHAPTER III. ] CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS
[ CHAPTER IV. ] THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE
[ CHAPTER V. ] "BY THE RIVER STARZKE... IT WAS SO DONE”
[ CHAPTER VI. ] THE UNGUARDED FIRES
[ CHAPTER VII. ] IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE
[ CHAPTER VIII. ] THE SULTAN
[ CHAPTER IX. ] MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN
[ CHAPTER X. ] FOR LUCK
[ CHAPTER XI. ] THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN
[ CHAPTER XII. ] "LET THERE BE LIGHT”
[ CHAPTER XIII. ] THE CHAIN OF THE PAST
[ CHAPTER XIV. ] SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
[ CHAPTER XV. ] THE WOMAN FROM WIND RIVER
[ CHAPTER XVI. ] THE MAYOR FILLS AN OFFICE
[ CHAPTER XVII. ] THE MONSEIGNEUR AND THE NOMAD
[ CHAPTER XVIII. ] THE BEACONS
[ CHAPTER XIX. ] THE KEEPER OF THE BRIDGE
[ CHAPTER XX. ] TWO LIFE PIECES
[ CHAPTER XXI. ] THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
[ CHAPTER XXII. ] THE SECRET MAN
[ CHAPTER XXIII. ] THE RETURN OF BELISARIUS
[ CHAPTER XXIV. ] AT LONG LAST
[ CHAPTER XXV. ] MAN PROPOSES
[ CHAPTER XXVI. ] THE SLEEPER
[ CHAPTER XXVII. ] THE WORLD FOR SALE
INTRODUCTION
‘The World for Sale’ is a tale of the primitive and lonely West and North, but the primitiveness and loneliness is not like that to be found in ‘Pierre and His People’. Pierre’s wanderings took place in a period when civilization had made but scant marks upon the broad bosom of the prairie land, and towns and villages were few and far scattered. The Lebanon and Manitou of this story had no existence in the time of Pierre, except that where Manitou stands there was a Hudson’s Bay Company’s post at which Indians, half-breeds, and chance settlers occasionally gathered for trade and exchange-furs, groceries, clothing, blankets, tobacco, and other things; and in the long winters the post was as isolated as an oasis in the Sahara.
That old life was lonely and primitive, but it had its compensating balance of bright sun, wild animal life, and an air as vivid and virile as ever stirred the veins of man. Sometimes the still, bright cold was broken by a terrific storm, which ravaged, smothered, and entombed the stray traveller in ravines of death. That was in winter; but in summer, what had been called, fifty years ago, an alkali desert was an everlasting stretch of untilled soil, with unsown crops, and here and there herds of buffalo, which were stalked by alert Red Indians, half-breeds, and white pioneer hunters.
The stories in ‘Pierre and His People’ were true to the life of that time; the incidents in ‘The World for Sale’, and the whole narrative, are true to the life of a very few years ago. Railways have pierced and opened up lonely regions of the Sagalae, and there are two thriving towns where, in the days of Pierre, only stood a Hudson’s Bay Company’s post with its store. Now, as far as eye can see, vast fields of grain greet the eye, and houses and barns speckle the greenish brown or Tuscan yellow of the crop-covered lands, while towns like Lebanon and Manitou provide for the modern settler all the modern conveniences which science has given to civilized municipalities. Today the motor-car and the telephone are as common in such places as they are in a thriving town of the United Kingdom. After the first few days of settlement two things always appear—a school-house and a church. Probably there is no country in the world where elementary education commands the devotion and the cash of the people as in English Canada; that is why the towns of Lebanon and Manitou had from the first divergent views. Lebanon was English, progressive, and brazenly modern; Manitou was slow, reactionary, more or less indifferent to education, and strenuously Catholic, and was thus opposed to the militant Protestantism of Lebanon.
It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the wastes. I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central figure of my story. He was highly educated, well born, and carefully brought up. He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new country—intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision. He had an original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to do in new countries, he looked far ahead. Yet he had to face what pioneers and reformers in old countries have to face, namely the disturbance of rooted interests. Certainly rooted interests in towns but a generation old cannot be extensive or remarkable, but if they are associated with habits and principles, they may be as deadly as those which test the qualities and wreck the careers of men in towns as old as London. The difference, however, between the old European town and the new Western town is that differences in the Western town are more likely to take physical form, as was the case in the life of Ingolby. In order to accentuate the primitive and yet highly civilized nature of the life I chose my heroine from a race and condition more unsettled and more primitive than that of Lebanon or Manitou at any time. I chose a heroine from the gipsy race, and to heighten the picture of the primitive life from which she had come I made her a convert to the settled life of civilization. I had known such a woman, older, but with the same characteristics, the same struggles, temptations, and suffering the same restriction of her life and movements by the prejudice in her veins—the prejudice of racial predilection.
Looking at the story now after its publication, I am inclined to think that the introduction of the gipsy element was too bold, yet I believe it was carefully worked out in construction, and was a legitimate, intellectual enterprise. The danger of it was that it might detract from the reality and vividness of the narrative as a picture of Western life. Most American critics of the book seem not to have been struck by this doubt which has occurred to me. They realize perhaps more faithfully than some of the English critics have done that these mad contrasts are by no means uncommon in the primitive and virile life of the West and North. Just as California in the old days, just as Ballaret in Australia drew the oddest people from every corner of the world, so Western towns, with new railways, brought strange conglomerations into the life. For instance, a town like Winnipeg has sections which represent the life of nearly every race of Europe, and towns like Lebanon and Manitou, with English and French characteristics controlling them mainly, are still as subject to outside racial influences as to inside racial antagonisms.
I believe The World for Sale shows as plainly as anything can show the vexed and conglomerate life of a Western town. It shows how racial characteristics may clash, disturb, and destroy, and yet how wisdom, tact, and lucky incident may overcome almost impossible situations. The antagonisms between Lebanon and Manitou were unwillingly and unjustly deepened by the very man who had set out to bring them together, as one of the ideals of his life, and as one of the factors of his success. Ingolby, who had everything to gain by careful going, almost wrecked his own life, and he injured the life of the two towns by impulsive acts.
The descriptions of life in the two towns are true, and the chief characters in the book are lifted out of the life as one has seen it. Men like Osterhaut and Jowett, Indians like Tekewani, doctors like Rockwell, priests like Monseigneur Fabre, ministers like Mr. Tripple, and ne’er-do-weels like Marchand may be found in many a town of the West and North. Naturally the book must lack in something of that magnetic picturesqueness and atmosphere which belongs to the people in the Province of Quebec. Western and Northern life has little of the settled charm which belongs to the old civilization of the French province. The only way to recapture that charm is to place Frenchmen in the West, and have them act and live—or try to act and live—as they do in old Quebec.
That is what I did with Pierre in my first book of fiction, Pierre and His People, but with the exception of Monseigneur Fabre there is no Frenchman in this book who fulfils, or could fulfil, the temperamental place which I have indicated. Men like Monseigneur Fabre have lived in the West, and worked and slaved like him, blest and beloved by all classes, creeds, and races. Father Lacombe was one of them. The part he played in the life of Western Canada will be written some day by one who understands how such men, celibate, and dedicated to religious life, may play a stupendous part in the development of civilization. Something of him is to be found in my description of Monseigneur Fabre.
NOTE
This book was begun in 1911 and finished in 1913, a year before war broke out. It was published serially in the year 1915 and the beginning of 1916. It must, therefore, go to the public on the basis of its merits alone, and as a picture of the peace-life of the great North West.
PRELUDE
Harvest-time was almost come, and the great new land was resting under coverlets of gold. From the rise above the town of Lebanon, there stretched out ungarnered wheat in the ear as far as sight could reach, and the place itself and the neighbouring town of Manitou on the other side of the Sagalac River were like islands washed by a topaz sea.
Standing upon the Rise, lost in the prospect, was an old, white-haired man in the cassock of a priest, with grey beard reaching nearly to the waist.
For long he surveyed the scene, and his eyes had a rapt look.
At last he spoke aloud:
“There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills;
his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city
like grass upon the earth.”
A smile came to his lips—a rare, benevolent smile. He had seen this expanse of teeming life when it was thought to be an alkali desert, fit only to be invaded by the Blackfeet and the Cree and the Blood Indians on a foray for food and furs. Here he had come fifty years before, and had gone West and North into the mountains in the Summer season, when the land was tremulous with light and vibrating to the hoofs of herds of buffalo as they stampeded from the hunters; and also in the Winter time, when frost was master and blizzard and drift its malignant servants.
Even yet his work was not done. In the town of Manitou he still said mass now and then, and heard the sorrows and sins of men and women, and gave them “ghostly comfort,” while priests younger than himself took the burden of parish-work from his shoulders.
For a lifetime he had laboured among the Indians and the few whites and squaw-men and half-breeds, with neither settlement nor progress. Then, all at once, the railway; and people coming from all the world, and cities springing up! Now once more he was living the life of civilization, exchanging raw flesh of fish and animals and a meal of tallow or pemmican for the wheaten loaf; the Indian tepee for the warm house with the mansard roof; the crude mass beneath the trees for the refinements of a chancel and an altar covered with lace and white linen.
A flock of geese went honking over his head. His eyes smiled in memory of the countless times he had watched such flights, had seen thousands of wild ducks hurrying down a valley, had watched a family of herons stretching away to some lonely water-home. And then another sound greeted his ear. It was shrill, sharp and insistent. A great serpent was stealing out of the East and moving down upon Lebanon. It gave out puffs of smoke from its ungainly head. It shrieked in triumph as it came. It was the daily train from the East, arriving at the Sagalac River.
“These things must be,” he said aloud as he looked. While he lost himself again in reminiscence, a young man came driving across the plains, passing beneath where he stood. The young man’s face and figure suggested power. In his buggy was a fishing-rod.
His hat was pulled down over his eyes, but he was humming cheerfully to himself. When he saw the priest, he raised his hat respectfully, yet with an air of equality.
“Good day, Monseigneur” (this honour of the Church had come at last to the aged missionary), he said warmly. “Good day—good day!”
The priest raised his hat and murmured the name, “Ingolby.” As the distance grew between them, he said sadly: “These are the men who change the West, who seize it, and divide it, and make it their own—
“‘I will rejoice, and divide Sichem: and mete out the valley of
Succoth.’
“Hush! Hush!” he said to himself in reproach. “These things must be. The country must be opened up. That is why I came—to bring the Truth before the trader.”
Now another traveller came riding out of Lebanon towards him, galloping his horse up-hill and down. He also was young, but nothing about him suggested power, only self-indulgence. He, too, raised his hat, or rather swung it from his head in a devil-may-care way, and overdid his salutation. He did not speak. The priest’s face was very grave, if not a little resentful. His salutation was reserved.
“The tyranny of gold,” he murmured, “and without the mind or energy that created it. Felix was no name for him. Ingolby is a builder, perhaps a jerry-builder; but he builds.”
He looked across the prairie towards the young man in the buggy.
“Sure, he is a builder. He has the Cortez eye. He sees far off, and plans big things. But Felix Marchand there—”
He stopped short.
“Such men must be, perhaps,” he added. Then, after a moment, as he gazed round again upon the land of promise which he had loved so long, he murmured as one murmurs a prayer:
“Thou suferedst men to ride over our heads: we went through fire and
water, and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place.”
CHAPTER I. “THE DRUSES ARE UP!”
“Great Scott, look at her! She’s goin’ to try and take ‘em!” exclaimed Osterhaut, the Jack-of-all-trades at Lebanon.
“She ain’t such a fool as all that. Why, no one ever done it alone. Low water, too, when every rock’s got its chance at the canoe. But, my gracious, she is goin’ to ride ‘em!”
Jowett, the horse-dealer, had a sportsman’s joy in a daring thing.
“See, old Injun Tekewani’s after her! He’s calling at her from the bank. He knows. He done it himself years ago when there was rips in the tribe an’ he had to sew up the tears. He run them Rapids in his canoe—”
“Just as the Druse girl there is doin’—”
“An’ he’s done what he liked with the Blackfeet ever since.”
“But she ain’t a chief—what’s the use of her doin’ it? She’s goin’ straight for them. She can’t turn back now. She couldn’t make the bank if she wanted to. She’s got to run ‘em. Holy smoke, see her wavin’ the paddle at Tekewani! Osterhaut, she’s the limit, that petticoat—so quiet and shy and don’t-look-at-me, too, with eyes like brown diamonds.”
“Oh, get out, Jowett; she’s all right! She’ll make this country sit up some day-by gorry, she’ll make Manitou and Lebanon sit up to-day if she runs the Carillon Rapids safe!”
“She’s runnin’ ‘em all right, son. She’s—by jee, well done, Miss Druse! Well done, I say—well done!” exclaimed Jowett, dancing about and waving his arms towards the adventurous girl.
The girl had reached the angry, thrashing waters where the rocks rent and tore into white ribbons the onrushing current, and her first trial had come on the instant the spitting, raging panthers of foam struck the bow of her canoe. The waters were so low that this course, which she had made once before with her friend Tekewani the Blackfeet chief, had perils not met on that desperate journey. Her canoe struck a rock slantwise, shuddered and swung round, but by a dexterous stroke she freed the frail craft. It righted and plunged forward again into fresh death-traps.
It was these new dangers which had made Tekewani try to warn her from the shore—he and the dozen braves with him: but it was characteristic of his race that, after the first warning, when she must play out the game to the bitter end, he made no further attempt to stop her. The Indians ran down the river-bank, however, with eyes intent on her headlong progress, grunting approval as she plunged safely from danger to danger.
Osterhaut and Jowett became silent, too, and, like the Indians, ran as fast as they could, over fences, through the trees, stumbling and occasionally cursing, but watching with fascinated eyes this adventuress of the North, taking chances which not one coureur-de-bois or river-driver in a thousand would take, with a five thousand-dollar prize as the lure. Why should she do it?
“Women folks are sick darn fools when they git goin’,” gasped Osterhaut as he ran. “They don’t care a split pea what happens when they’ve got the pip. Look at her—my hair’s bleachin’.”
“She’s got the pip all right,” stuttered Jowett as he plunged along; “but she’s foreign, and they’ve all got the pip, foreign men and women both—but the women go crazy.”
“She keeps pretty cool for a crazy loon, that girl. If I owned her, I’d—”
Jowett interrupted impatiently. “You’d do what old man Druse does—you’d let her be, Osterhaut. What’s the good of havin’ your own way with one that’s the apple of your eye, if it turns her agin you? You want her to kiss you on the high cheek-bone, but if you go to play the cat-o’-nine-tails round her, the high cheek-bone gets froze. Gol blast it, look at her, son! What are the wild waves saying? They’re sayin’, ‘This is a surprise, Miss Druse. Not quite ready for ye, Miss Druse.’ My, ain’t she got the luck of the old devil!”
It seemed so. More than once the canoe half jammed between the rocks, and the stern lifted up by the force of the wild current, but again the paddle made swift play, and again the cockle-shell swung clear. But now Fleda Druse was no longer on her feet. She knelt, her strong, slim brown arms bared to the shoulder, her hair blown about her forehead, her daring eyes flashing to left and right, memory of her course at work under such a strain as few can endure without chaos of mind in the end. A hundred times since the day she had run these Rapids with Tekewani, she had gone over the course in her mind, asleep and awake, forcing her brain to see again every yard of that watery way; because she knew that the day must come when she would make the journey alone. Why she would make it she did not know; she only knew that she would do it some day; and the day had come. For long it had been an obsession with her—as though some spirit whispered in her ear—“Do you hear the bells ringing at Carillon? Do you hear the river singing towards Carillon? Do you see the wild birds flying towards Carillon? Do you hear the Rapids calling—the Rapids of Carillon?”
Night and day since she had braved death with Tekewani, giving him a gun, a meerschaum pipe, and ten pounds of beautiful brown “plug” tobacco as a token of her gratitude—night and day she had heard this spirit murmuring in her ear, and always the refrain was, “Down the stream to Carillon! Shoot the Rapids of Carillon!”
Why? How should she know? Wherefore should she know? This was of the things beyond the why of the human mind. Sometimes all our lives, if we keep our souls young, and see the world as we first saw it with eyes and heart unsoiled, we hear the murmuring of the Other Self, that Self from which we separated when we entered this mortal sphere, but which followed us, invisible yet whispering inspiration to us. But sometimes we only hear It, our own soul’s oracle, while yet our years are few, and we have not passed that frontier between innocence and experience, reality and pretence. Pretence it is which drives the Other Self away with wailing on its lips. Then we hear It cry in the night when, because of the trouble of life, we cannot sleep; or at the play when we are caught away from ourselves into another air than ours; when music pours around us like a soft wind from a garden of pomegranates; or when a child asks a question which brings us back to the land where everything is so true that it can be shouted from the tree-tops.
Why was Fleda Druse tempting death in the Carillon Rapids?
She had heard a whisper as she wandered among the pine-trees there at Manitou, and it said simply the one word, “Now!” She knew that she must do it; she had driven her canoe out into the resistless current to ride the Rapids of Carillon. Her Other Self had whispered to her.
Yonder, thousands of miles away in Syria, there were the Hills of Lebanon; and there was one phrase which made every Syrian heart beat faster, if he were on the march. It was, “The Druses are up!” When that wild tribe took to the saddle to war upon the Caravans and against authority, from Lebanon to Palmyra, from Jerusalem to Damascus men looked anxiously about them and rode hard to refuge.
And here also in the Far North where the River Sagalac ran a wild race to Carillon, leaving behind the new towns of Lebanon and Manitou, “the Druses were up.”
The daughter of Gabriel Druse, the giant, was riding the Rapids of the Sagalac. The suspense to her and to those who watched her course—to Tekewani and his braves, to Osterhaut and Jowett—could not be long. It was a matter of minutes only, in which every second was a miracle and might be a catastrophe.
From rock to rock, from wild white water to wild white water she sped, now tossing to death as it seemed, now shooting on safely to the next test of skill and courage—on, on, till at last there was only one passage to make before the canoe would plunge into the smooth water running with great swiftness till it almost reached Carillon.
Suddenly, as she neared the last dangerous point, round which she must swing between jagged and unseen barriers of rock, her sight became for an instant dimmed, as though a cloud passed over her eyes. She had never fainted in her life, but it seemed to her now that she was hovering on unconsciousness. Commending the will and energy left, she fought the weakness down. It was as though she forced a way through tossing, buffeting shadows; as though she was shaking off from her shoulders shadowy hands which sought to detain her; as though smothering things kept choking back her breath, and darkness like clouds of wool gathered about her face. She was fighting for her life, and for years it seemed to be; though indeed it was only seconds before her will reasserted itself, and light broke again upon her way. Even on the verge of the last ambushed passage her senses came back; but they came with a stark realization of the peril ahead: it looked out of her eyes as a face shows itself at the window of a burning building.
Memory shook itself free. It pierced the tumult of waters, found the ambushed rocks, and guided the lithe brown arms and hands, so that the swift paddle drove the canoe straight onward, as a fish drives itself through a flume of dragon’s teeth beneath the flood. The canoe quivered for an instant at the last cataract, then responding to Memory and Will, sped through the hidden chasm, tossed by spray and water, and swept into the swift current of smooth water below.
Fleda Druse had run the Rapids of Carillon. She could hear the bells ringing for evening service in the Catholic Church of Carillon, and bells-soft, booming bells-were ringing in her own brain. Like muffled silver these brain-bells were, and she was as one who enters into a deep forest, and hears far away in the boscage the mystic summons of forest deities. Voices from the banks of the river behind called to her—hilarious, approving, agitated voices of her Indian friends, and of Osterhaut and Jowett, those wild spectators of her adventure: but they were not wholly real. Only those soft, booming bells in her brain were real.
Shooting the Rapids of Carillon was the bridge by which she passed from the world she had left to this other. Her girlhood was ended—wondering, hovering, unrealizing girlhood. This adventure was the outward sign, the rite in the Lodge of Life which passed her from one degree of being to another.
She was safe; but now as her canoe shot onward to the town of Carillon, her senses again grew faint. Again she felt the buffeting mist, again her face was muffled in smothering folds; again great hands reached out towards her; again her eyes were drawn into a stupefying darkness; but now there was no will to fight, no energy to resist. The paddle lay inert in her fingers, her head drooped. She slowly raised her head once, twice, as though the call of the exhausted will was heard, but suddenly it fell heavily upon her breast. For a moment so, and then as the canoe shot forward on a fresh current, the lithe body sank backwards in the canoe, and lay face upward to the evening sky.
The canoe sped on, but presently it swung round and lay athwart the current, dipping and rolling.
From the banks on either side, the Indians of the Manitou Reservation and the two men from Lebanon called out and hastened on, for they saw that the girl had collapsed, and they knew only too well that her danger was not yet past. The canoe might strike against the piers of the bridge at Carillon and overturn, or it might be carried to the second cataract below the town. They were too far away to save her, but they kept shouting as they ran.
None responded to their call, but that defiance of the last cataract of the Rapids of Carillon had been seen by one who, below an eddy on the Lebanon side of the river, was steadily stringing upon maple-twigs black bass and long-nosed pike. As he sat in the shade of the trees, he had seen the plunge of the canoe into the chasm, and had held his breath in wonder and admiration. Even at that distance he knew who it was. He had seen Fleda only a few times before, for she was little abroad; but when he had seen her he had asked himself what such a face and form were doing in the Far North. It belonged to Andalusia, to the Carpathians, to Syrian villages.
“The pluck of the very devil!” he had exclaimed, as Fleda’s canoe swept into the smooth current, free of the dragon’s teeth; and as he had something of the devil in himself, she seemed much nearer to him than the hundreds of yards of water intervening. Presently, however, he saw her droop and sink away out of sight.
For an instant he did not realize what had happened, and then, with angry self-reproach, he flung the oars into the rowlocks of his skiff and drove down and athwart the stream with long, powerful strokes.
“That’s like a woman!” he said to himself as he bent to the oars, and now and then turned his head to make sure that the canoe was still safe. “Do the trick better than a man, and then collapse like a rabbit.”
He was Max Ingolby, the financier, contractor, manager of great interests, disturber of the peace of slow minds, who had come to Lebanon with the avowed object of amalgamating three railways, of making the place the swivel of all the trade and interests of the Western North; but also with the declared intention of uniting Lebanon and Manitou in one municipality, one centre of commercial and industrial power.
Men said he had bitten off more than he could chew, but he had replied that his teeth were good, and he would masticate the meal or know the reason why. He was only thirty-three, but his will was like nothing the West had seen as yet. It was sublime in its confidence, it was free from conceit, and it knew not the word despair, though once or twice it had known defeat.
Men cheered him from the shore as his skiff leaped through the water. “It’s that blessed Ingolby,” said Jowett, who had tried to “do” the financier in a horsedeal, and had been done instead, and was now a devout admirer and adherent of the Master Man. “I saw him driving down there this morning from Lebanon. He’s been fishing at Seely’s Eddy.”
“When Ingolby goes fishing, there’s trouble goin’ on somewhere and he’s stalkin’ it,” rejoined Osterhaut. “But, by gol, he’s goin’ to do this trump trick first; he’s goin’ to overhaul her before she gits to the bridge. Look at him swing! Hell, ain’t it pretty! There you go, old Ingolby. You’re right on it, even when you’re fishing.”
On the other-the Manitou-shore Tekewani and his braves were less talkative, but they were more concerned in the incident than Osterhaut and Jowett. They knew little or nothing of Ingolby the hustler, but they knew more of Fleda Druse and her father than all the people of Lebanon and Manitou put together. Fleda had won old Tekewani’s heart when she had asked him to take her down the Rapids, for the days of adventure for him and his tribe were over. The adventure shared with this girl had brought back to the chief the old days when Indian women tanned bearskins and deerskins day in, day out, and made pemmican of the buffalo-meat; when the years were filled with hunting and war and migrant journeyings to fresh game-grounds and pastures new.
Danger faced was the one thing which could restore Tekewani’s self-respect, after he had been checked and rebuked before his tribe by the Indian Commissioner for being drunk. Danger faced had restored it, and Fleda Druse had brought the danger to him as a gift.
If the canoe should crash against the piers of the bridge, if it should drift to the cataract below, if anything should happen to this white girl whom he worshipped in his heathen way, nothing could preserve his self-respect; he would pour ashes on his head and firewater down his throat.
Suddenly he and his braves stood still. They watched as one would watch an enemy a hundred times stronger than one’s self. The white man’s skiff was near the derelict canoe; the bridge was near also. Carillon now lined the bank of the river with its people. They ran upon the bridge, but not so fast as to reach the place where, in the nick of time, Ingolby got possession of the rolling canoe; where Fleda Druse lay waiting like a princess to be waked by the kiss of destiny.
Only five hundred yards below the bridge was the second cataract, and she would never have waked if she had been carried into it.
To Ingolby she was as beautiful as a human being could be as she lay with white face upturned, the paddle still in her hand.
“Drowning isn’t good enough for her,” he said, as he fastened her canoe to his skiff.
“It’s been a full day’s work,” he added; and even in this human crisis he thought of the fish he had caught, of “the big trouble,” he had been thinking out as Osterhaut had said, as well as of the girl that he was saving.
“I always have luck when I go fishing,” he added presently. “I can take her back to Lebanon,” he continued with a quickening look. “She’ll be all right in a jiffy. I’ve got room for her in my buggy—and room for her in any place that belongs to me,” he hastened to reflect with a curious, bashful smile.
“It’s like a thing in a book,” he murmured, as he neared the waiting people on the banks of Carillon, and the ringing of the vesper bells came out to him on the evening air.
“Is she dead?” some one whispered, as eager hands reached out to secure his skiff to the bank.
“As dead as I am,” he answered with a laugh, and drew Fleda’s canoe up alongside his skiff.
He had a strange sensation of new life, as, with delicacy and gentleness, he lifted her up in his strong arms and stepped ashore.
CHAPTER II. THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND
Ingolby had a will of his own, but it had never been really tried against a woman’s will. It was, however, tried sorely when Fleda came to consciousness again in his arms and realized that a man’s face was nearer to hers than any man’s had ever been except that of her own father. Her eyes opened slowly, and for the instant she did not understand, but when she did, the blood stole swiftly back to her neck and face and forehead, and she started in dismay.
“Put me down,” she whispered faintly.
“I’m taking you to my buggy,” he replied. “I’ll drive you back to Lebanon.” He spoke as calmly as he could, for there was a strange fluttering of his nerves, and the crowd was pressing him.
“Put me down at once,” she said peremptorily. She trembled on her feet, and swayed, and would have fallen but that Ingolby and a woman in black, who had pushed her way through the crowd with white, anxious face, caught her.
“Give her air, and stand back!” called the sharp voice of the constable of Carillon, and he heaved the people back with his powerful shoulders.
A space was cleared round the place where Fleda sat with her head against the shoulder of the stately woman in black who had come to her assistance. A dipper of water was brought, and when she had drunk it she raised her head slowly and her eyes sought those of Ingolby.
“One cannot pay for such things,” she said to him, meeting his look firmly and steeling herself to thank him. Though deeply grateful, it was a trial beyond telling to be obliged to owe the debt of a life to any one, and in particular to a man of the sort to whom material gifts could not be given.
“Such things are paid for just by accepting them,” he answered quickly, trying to feel that he had never held her in his arms, as she evidently desired him to feel. He had intuition, if not enough of it, for the regions where the mind of Fleda Druse dwelt.
“I couldn’t very well decline, could I?” she rejoined, quick humour shooting into her eyes. “I was helpless. I never fainted before in my life.”
“I am sure you will never faint again,” he remarked. “We only do such things when we are very young.”
She was about to reply, but paused reflectively. Her half-opened lips did not frame the words she had been impelled to speak.
Admiration was alive in his eyes. He had never seen this type of womanhood before—such energy and grace, so amply yet so lithely framed; such darkness and fairness in one living composition; such individuality, yet such intimate simplicity. Her hair was a very light brown, sweeping over a broad, low forehead, and lying, as though with a sense of modesty, on the tips of the ears, veiling them slightly. The forehead was classic in its intellectual fulness; but the skin was so fresh, even when pale as now, and with such an underglow of vitality, that the woman in her, sex and the possibilities of sex, cast a glamour over the intellect and temperament showing in every line of her contour. In contrast to the light brown of the hair was the very dark brown of the eyes and the still darker brown of the eyelashes. The face shone, the eyes burned, and the piquancy of the contrast between the soft illuminating whiteness of the skin and the flame in the eyes had fascinated many more than Ingolby.
Her figure was straight yet supple, somewhat fuller than is modern beauty, with hints of Juno-like stateliness to come; and the curves of her bust, the long lines of her limbs, were not obscured by her absolutely plain gown of soft, light-brown linen. She was tall, but not too commanding, and, as her hand was raised to fasten back a wisp of hair, there was the motion of as small a wrist and as tapering a bare arm as ever made prisoner of a man’s neck.
Impulse was written in every feature, in the passionate eagerness of her body; yet the line from the forehead to the chin, and the firm shapeliness of the chin itself, gave promise of great strength of will. From the glory of the crown of hair to the curve of the high instep of a slim foot it was altogether a personality which hinted at history—at tragedy, maybe.
“She’ll have a history,” Madame Bulteel, who now stood beside the girl, herself a figure out of a picture by Velasquez, had said of her sadly; for she saw in Fleda’s rare qualities, in her strange beauty, happenings which had nothing to do with the life she was living. So this duenna of Gabriel Druse’s household, this aristocratic, silent woman was ever on the watch for some sudden revelation of a being which had not found itself, and which must find itself through perils and convulsions.
That was why, to-day, she had hesitated to leave Fleda alone and come to Carillon, to be at the bedside of a dying, friendless woman whom by chance she had come to know. In the street she had heard of what was happening on the river, and had come in time to receive Fleda from the arms of her rescuer.
“How did you get here?” Fleda asked her.
“How am I always with you when I am needed, truant?” said the other with a reproachful look. “Did you fly? You are so light, so thin, you could breathe yourself here,” rejoined the girl, with a gentle, quizzical smile. “But, no,” she added, “I remember, you were to be here at Carillon.”
“Are you able to walk now?” asked Madame Bulteel.
“To Manitou—but of course,” Fleda answered almost sharply.
After the first few minutes the crowd had fallen back. They watched her with respectful admiration from a decent distance. They had the chivalry towards woman so characteristic of the West. There was no vulgarity in their curiosity, though most of them had never seen her before. All, however, had heard of her and her father, the giant greybeard who moved and lived in an air of mystery, and apparently secret wealth, for more than once he had given large sums—large in the eyes of folks of moderate means, when charity was needed; as in the case of the floods the year before, and in the prairie-fire the year before that, when so many people were made homeless, and also when fifty men had been injured in one railway accident. On these occasions he gave disproportionately to his mode of life.
Now, when they saw that Fleda was about to move away, they drew just a little nearer, and presently one of the crowd could contain his admiration no longer. He raised a cheer.
“Three cheers for Her,” he shouted, and loud hurrahs followed.
“Three cheers for Ingolby,” another cried, and the noise was boisterous but not so general.
“Who shot Carillon Rapids?” another called in the formula of the West.
“She shot the Rapids,” was the choral reply. “Who is she?” came the antiphon.
“Druse is her name,” was the gay response. “What did she do?”
“She shot Carillon Rapids—shot ‘em dead. Hooray!”
In the middle of the cheering, Osterhaut and Jowett arrived in a wagon which they had commandeered, and, about the same time, from across the bridge, came running Tekewani and his braves.
“She done it like a kingfisher,” cried Osterhaut. “Manitou’s got the belt.”
Fleda Druse’s friendly eyes were given only for one instant to Osterhaut and his friend. Her gaze became fixed on Tekewani who, silent, and with immobile face, stole towards her. In spite of the civilization which controlled him, he wore Indian moccasins and deerskin breeches, though his coat was rather like a shortened workman’s blouse. He did not belong to the life about him; he was a being apart, the spirit of vanished and vanishing days.
“Tekewani—ah, Tekewani, you have come,” the girl said, and her eyes smiled at him as they had not smiled at Ingolby or even at the woman in black beside her.
“How!” the chief replied, and looked at her with searching, worshipping eyes.
“Don’t look at me that way, Tekewani,” she said, coming close to him. “I had to do it, and I did it.”
“The teeth of rock everywhere!” he rejoined reproachfully, with a gesture of awe.
“I remembered all—all. You were my master, Tekewani.”
“But only once with me it was, Summer Song,” he persisted. Summer Song was his name for her.
“I saw it—saw it, every foot of the way,” she insisted. “I thought hard, oh, hard as the soul thinks. And I saw it all.” There was something singularly akin in the nature of the girl and the Indian. She spoke to him as she never spoke to any other.
“Too much seeing, it is death,” he answered. “Men die with too much seeing. I have seen them die. To look hard through deerskin curtains, to see through the rock, to behold the water beneath the earth, and the rocks beneath the black waters, it is for man to see if he has a soul, but the seeing—behold, so those die who should live!”
“I live, Tekewani, though I saw the teeth of rocks beneath the black water,” she urged gently.
“Yet the half-death came—”
“I fainted, but I was not to die—it was not my time.”
He shook his head gloomily. “Once it may be, but the evil spirits tempt us to death. It matters not what comes to Tekewani; he is as the leaf that falls from the stem; but for Summer Song that has far to go, it is the madness from beyond the Hills of Life.”
She took his hand. “I will not do it again, Tekewani.”
“How!” he said, with hand upraised, as one who greets the great in this world.
“I don’t know why I did it,” she added meaningly. “It was selfish. I feel that now.”
The woman in black pressed her hand timidly.
“It is so for ever with the great,” Tekewani answered. “It comes, also, from beyond the Hills—the will to do it. It is the spirit that whispers over the earth out of the Other Earth. No one hears it but the great. The whisper only is for this one here and that one there who is of the Few. It whispers, and the whisper must be obeyed. So it was from the beginning.”
“Yes, you understand, Tekewani,” she answered softly. “I did it because something whispered from the Other Earth to me.”
Her head drooped a little, her eyes had a sudden shadow.
“He will understand,” answered the Indian; “your father will understand,” as though reading her thoughts. He had clearly read her thought, this dispossessed, illiterate Indian chieftain. Yet, was he so illiterate? Had he not read in books which so few have learned to read? His life had been broken on the rock of civilization, but his simple soul had learned some elemental truths—not many, but the essential ones, without which there is no philosophy, no understanding. He knew Fleda Druse was thinking of her father, wondering if he would understand, half-fearing, hardly hoping, dreading the moment when she must meet him face to face. She knew she had been selfish, but would Gabriel Druse understand? She raised her eyes in gratitude to the Blackfeet chief.
“I must go home,” she said.
She turned to go, but as she did so, a man came swaggering down the street, broke through the crowd, and made towards her with an arm raised, a hand waving, and a leer on his face. He was a thin, rather handsome, dissolute-looking fellow of middle height and about forty, in dandified dress. His glossy black hair fell carelessly over his smooth forehead from under a soft, wide-awake hat.
“Manitou for ever!” he cried, with a flourish of his hand. “I salute the brave. I escort the brave to the gates of Manitou. I escort the brave. I escort the brave. Salut! Salut! Salut! Well done, Beauty Beauty—Beauty—Beauty, well done again!”
He held out his hand to Fleda, but she drew back with disgust. Felix Marchand, the son of old Hector Marchand, money-lender and capitalist of Manitou, had pressed his attentions upon her during the last year since he had returned from the East, bringing dissoluteness and vulgar pride with him. Women had spoiled him, money had corrupted and degraded him.
“Come, beautiful brave, it’s Salut! Salut! Salut!” he said, bending towards her familiarly.
Her face flushed with anger.
“Let me pass, monsieur,” she said sharply.
“Pride of Manitou—” he apostrophized, but got no farther.
Ingolby caught him by the shoulders, wheeled him round, and then flung him at the feet of Tekewani and his braves.
At this moment Tekewani’s eyes had such a fire as might burn in Wotan’s smithy. He was ready enough to defy the penalty of the law for assaulting a white man, but Felix Marchand was in the dust, and that would do for the moment.
With grim face Ingolby stood over the begrimed figure. “There’s the river if you want more,” he said. “Tekewani knows where the water’s deepest.” Then he turned and followed Fleda and the woman in black. Felix Marchand’s face was twisted with hate as he got slowly to his feet.
“You’ll eat dust before I’m done,” he called after Ingolby. Then, amid the jeers of the crowd, he went back to the tavern where he had been carousing.
CHAPTER III. CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS
A word about Max Ingolby.
He was the second son of four sons, with a father who had been a failure; but with a mother of imagination and great natural strength of brain, yet whose life had been so harried in bringing up a family on nothing at all, that there only emerged from her possibilities a great will to do the impossible things. From her had come the spirit which would not be denied.
In his boyhood Max could not have those things which lads prize—fishing-rods, cricket-bats and sleds, and all such things; but he could take most prizes at school open to competition; he could win in the running-jump, the high-jump, and the five hundred yards’ race; and he could organize a picnic, or the sports of the school or town—at no cost to himself. His finance in even this limited field had been brilliant. Other people paid, and he did the work; and he did it with such ease that the others intriguing to crowd him out, suffered failure and came to him in the end to put things right.
He became the village doctor’s assistant and dispenser at seventeen and induced his master to start a drug-store. He made the drug-store a success within two years, and meanwhile he studied Latin and Greek and mathematics in every spare hour he had—getting up at five in the morning, and doing as much before breakfast as others did in a whole day. His doctor loved him and helped him; a venerable Archdeacon, an Oxford graduate, gave him many hours of coaching, and he went to the University with three scholarships. These were sufficient to carry him through in three years, and there was enough profit-sharing from the drug-business he had founded on terms to shelter his mother and his younger brothers, while he took honours at the University.
There he organized all that students organize, and was called in at last by the Bursar of his college to reorganize the commissariat, which he did with such success that the college saved five thousand dollars a year. He had genius, the college people said, and after he had taken his degree with honours in classics and mathematics they offered him a professorship at two thousand dollars a year.
He laughed ironically, but yet with satisfaction, when the professorship was offered. It was all so different from what was in his mind for the future. As he looked out of the oriel window in the sweet gothic building, to the green grass and the maples and elms which made the college grounds like an old-world park, he had a vision of himself permanently in these surroundings of refinement growing venerable with years, seeing pass under his influence thousands of young men directed, developed and inspired by him.
He had, however, shaken himself free of this modest vision. He knew that such a life would act like a narcotic to his real individuality. He thirsted for contest, for the control of brain and will; he wanted to construct; he was filled with the idea of simplifying things, of economizing strength; he saw how futile was much competition, and how the big brain could command and control with ease, wasting no force, saving labour, making the things controlled bigger and better.
So it came that his face was seen no more in the oriel window. With a mere handful of dollars, and some debts, he left the world of scholarship and superior pedagogy, and went where the head offices of railways were. Railways were the symbol of progress in his mind. The railhead was the advance post of civilization. It was like Cortez and his Conquistadores overhauling and appropriating the treasures of long generations. So where should he go if not to the Railway?
His first act, when he got to his feet inside the offices of the President of a big railway, was to show the great man how two “outside” proposed lines could be made one, and then further merged into the company controlled by the millionaire in whose office he sat. He got his chance by his very audacity—the President liked audacity. In attempting this merger, however, he had his first failure, but he showed that he could think for himself, and he was made increasingly responsible. After a few years of notable service, he was offered the task of building a branch line of railway from Lebanon and Manitou north, and northwest, and on to the Coast; and he had accepted it, at the same time planning to merge certain outside lines competing with that which he had in hand. For over four years he worked night and day, steadily advancing towards his goal, breaking down opposition, manoeuvring, conciliating, fighting.
Most men loved his whimsical turn of mind, even those who were the agents of the financial clique which had fought him in their efforts to get control of the commercial, industrial, transport and banking resources of the junction city of Lebanon. In the days when vast markets would be established for Canadian wheat in Shanghai and Tokio, then these two towns of Manitou and Lebanon on the Sagalac would be like the swivel to the organization of trade of a continent.
Ingolby had worked with this end in view. In doing so he had tried to get what he wanted without trickery; to reach his goal by playing the game according to the rules, and this policy nonplussed his rivals and associates. They expected secret moves, and he laid his cards on the table. Sharp, quick, resolute and ruthless he was, however, if he knew that he was being tricked. Then he struck, and struck hard. The war of business was war and not “gollyfoxing,” as he said. Selfish, stubborn and self-centred he was in much, but he had great joy in the natural and sincere, and he had a passionate love of Nature. To him the flat prairie was never ugly. Its very monotony had its own individuality. The Sagalac, even when muddy, had its own deep interest, and when it was full of logs drifting down to the sawmills, for which he had found the money by interesting capitalists in the East, he sniffed the stinging smell of the pines with elation. As the great saws in the mills, for which he had secured the capital, throwing off the spray of mangled wood, hummed and buzzed and sang, his mouth twisted in the droll smile it always wore when he talked with such as Jowett and Osterhaut, whose idiosyncrasies were like a meal to him; as he described it once to some of the big men from the East who had been behind his schemes, yet who cavilled at his ways. He was never diverted from his course by such men, and while he was loyal to those who had backed him, he vowed that he would be independent of these wooden souls in the end. They and the great bankers behind them were for monopoly; he was for organization and for economic prudence. So far they were necessary to all he did; but it was his intention to shake himself free of all monopoly in good time. One or two of his colleagues saw the drift of his policy and would have thrown him over if they could have replaced him by a man as capable, who would, at the time, consent to grow rich on their terms.
They could not understand a man who would stand for a half-hour watching a sunset, or a morning sky dappled with all the colours that shake from a prism; they were suspicious of a business-mind which could gloat over the light falling on snow-peaked mountains, while it planned a great bridge across a gorge in the same hour; of a man who would quote a verse of poetry while a flock of wild pigeons went whirring down a pine-girt valley in the shimmer of the sun.
On the occasion when he had quoted a verse of poetry to them, one of them said to him with a sidelong glance: “You seem to be dead-struck on Nature, Ingolby.”
To that, with a sly quirk of the mouth, and meaning to mystify his wooden-headed questioner still more, he answered: “Dead-struck? Dead-drunk, you mean. I’m a Nature’s dipsomaniac—as you can see,” he added with a sly note of irony.
Then instantly he had drawn the little circle of experts into a discussion upon technical questions of railway-building and finance, which made demands upon all their resources and knowledge. In that conference he gave especial attention to the snub-souled financier who had sneered at his love of Nature. He tied his critic up in knots of self-assertion and bad logic which presently he deftly, deliberately and skilfully untied, to the delight of all the group.
“He’s got as much in his ten years in the business as we’ve got out of half a life-time,” said the chief of his admirers. This was the President who had first welcomed him into business, and introduced him to his colleagues in enterprise.
“I shouldn’t be surprised if the belt flew off the wheel some day,” savagely said Ingolby’s snub-souled critic, whose enmity was held in check by the fact that on Ingolby, for the moment, depended the safety of the hard cash he had invested.
But the qualities which alienated an expert here and there caught the imagination of the pioneer spirits of Lebanon. Except those who, for financial reasons, were opposed to him, and must therefore pit themselves against him, as the representatives of bigger forces behind them, he was a leader of whom Lebanon was combatively proud. At last he came to the point where his merger was practically accomplished, and a problem arising out of it had to be solved. It was a problem which taxed every quality of an able mind. The situation had at last become acute, and Time, the solvent of most complications, had not quite eased the strain. Indeed, on the day that Fleda Druse had made her journey down the Carillon Rapids, Time’s influence had not availed. So he had gone fishing, with millions at stake—to the despair of those who were risking all on his skill and judgment.
But that was Ingolby. Thinking was the essence of his business, not Time. As fishing was the friend of thinking, therefore he fished in Seely’s Eddy, saw Fleda Druse run the Carillon Rapids, saved her from drowning, and would have brought her in pride and peace to her own home, but that she decreed otherwise.
CHAPTER IV. THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE
Gabriel Druse’s house stood on a little knoll on the outskirts of the town of Manitou, backed by a grove of pines. Its front windows faced the Sagalac, and the windows behind looked into cool coverts where in old days many Indian tribes had camped; where Hudson’s Bay Company’s men had pitched their tents to buy the red man’s furs. But the red man no longer set up his tepee in these secluded groves; the wapiti and red deer had fled to the north never to return, the snarling wolf had stolen into regions more barren; the ceremonial of the ancient people no longer made weird the lonely nights; the medicine-man’s incantations, the harvest-dance, the green-corn-dance, the sun-dance had gone. The braves, their women, and their tepees had been shifted to reservations where Governments solemnly tried to teach them to till the field, and grow corn, and drive the cart to market; while yet they remembered the herds of buffalo which had pounded down the prairie like storm-clouds and given their hides for the tepee; and the swift deer whose skins made the wigwam luxurious.
Originally Manitou had been the home of Icelanders, Mennonites, and Doukhobors; settlers from lands where the conditions of earlier centuries prevailed, who, simple as they were in habits and in life, were ignorant, primitive, coarse, and none too cleanly.
They had formed an unprogressive polyglot settlement, and the place assumed a still more primeval character when the Indian Reservation was formed near by. When French Canadian settlers arrived, however, the place became less discordant to the life of a new democracy, though they did little to make it modern in the sense that Lebanon, across the river, where Ingolby lived, was modern from the day the first shack was thrown up.
Manitou showed itself antagonistic to progress; it was old-fashioned, and primitively agricultural. It looked with suspicion on the factories built after Ingolby came and on the mining propositions, which circled the place with speculation. Unlike other towns of the West, it was insanitary and uneducated; it was also given to nepotism and a primitive kind of jobbery; but, on the whole, it was honest. It was a settlement twenty years before Lebanon had a house, though the latter exceeded the population of Manitou in five years, and became the home of all adventuring spirits—land agents, company promoters, mining prospectors, railway men, politicians, saloon keepers, and up to-date dissenting preachers. Manitou was, however, full of back-water people, religious fanatics, little farmers, guides, trappers, old coureurs-de-bois, Hudson’s Bay Company factors and ex-factors, half-breeds; and all the rest.
The real feud between the two towns began about the time of the arrival of Gabriel Druse, his daughter, and Madame Bulteel, the woman in black, and it had grown with great rapidity and increasing intensity. Manitou condemned the sacrilegiousness of the Protestants, whose meeting-houses were used for “socials,” “tea-meetings,” “strawberry festivals,” and entertainments of many kinds; while comic songs were sung at the table where the solemn Love Feast was held at the quarterly meetings. At last when attempts were made to elect to Parliament an Irish lawyer who added to his impecuniousness, eloquence, a half-finished University education, and an Orangeman’s prejudices of the best brand of Belfast or Derry, inter-civic strife took the form of physical violence. The great bridge built by Ingolby between the two towns might have been ten thousand yards long, so deep was the estrangement between the two places. They had only one thing in common—a curious compromise—in the person of Nathan Rockwell, an agnostic doctor, who had arrived in Lebanon with a reputation for morality somewhat clouded; though, where his patients in Manitou and Lebanon were concerned, he had been the “pink of propriety.”
Rockwell had arrived in Lebanon early in its career, and had remained unimportant until a railway accident occurred at Manitou and the resident doctors were driven from the field of battle, one by death, and one by illness. Then it was that the silent, smiling, dark-skinned, cool-headed and cool-handed Rockwell stepped in, and won for himself the gratitude of all—from Monseigneur Lourde, the beloved Catholic priest, to Tekewani, the chief. This accident was followed by an epidemic.
That was at the time, also, when Fleda Druse returned from Winnipeg where she had been at school for one memorable and terrible six months, pining for her father, defying rules, and crying the night through for “the open world,” as she called it. So it was that, to her father’s dismay and joy in one, she had fled from school, leaving all her things behind her; and had reached home with only the clothes on her back and a few cents in her pocket.
Instantly on her return she had gone among the stricken people as fearlessly as Rockwell had done, but chiefly among the women and children; and it was said that the herbal medicine she administered was marvellous in its effect—so much so that Rockwell asked for the prescription, which she declined to give.
Thus it was that the French Canadian mothers with daughters of their own, bright-eyed brunettes, ready for the man-market, regarded with toleration the girl who took their children away for picnics down the river or into the woods, and brought them back safe and sound at the end of the day. Not that they failed to be shocked sometimes, when, on her wild Indian pony, Fleda swept through Manitou like a wind and out into the prairie, riding, as it were, to the end of the world. Try as they would, these grateful mothers of Manitou, they could not get as near to Fleda Druse as their children did, and they were vast distances from her father.
“There, there, look at him,” said old Madame Thibadeau to her neighbour Christine Brisson—“look at him with his great grey-beard, and his eyes like black fires, and that head of hair like a bundle of burnt flax! He comes from the place no man ever saw, that’s sure.”
“Ah, surelee, men don’t grow so tall in any Christian country,” announced Christine Brisson, her head nodding sagely. “I’ve seen the pictures in the books, and there’s nobody so tall and that looks like him—not anywhere since Adam.”
“Nom de pipe, sometimes-trulee, sometimes, I look up there at where he lives, and I think I see a thousand men on horses ride out of the woods behind his house and down here to gobble us all up. That’s the way I feel. It’s fancy, but I can’t help that.” Dame Thibadeau rested her hands—on her huge stomach as though the idea had its origin there.
“I’ve seen a lot of fancies come to pass,” gloomily returned her friend. “It’s a funny world. I don’t know what to make of its sometimes.”
“And that girl of his, the strangest creature, as proud as a peacock, but then as kind as kind to the children—of a good heart, surelee. They say she has plenty of gold rings and pearls and bracelets, and all like that. Babette Courton, she saw them when she went to sew. Why doesn’t Ma’m’selle wear them?”
Christine looked wise and smoothed out her apron as though it was a parchment. “With such queer ones, who knows? But, yes, as you say, she has a kind heart. The children, well, they follow her everywhere.”
“Not the children only,” sagely added the other. “From Lebanon they come, the men, and plenty here, too; and there’s that Felix Marchand, the worst of all in Manitou or anywhere.”
“I’d look sharp if Felix Marchand followed me,” remarked Christine. “There are more papooses at the Reservation since he come back, and over in Lebanon—!” She whispered darkly to her friend, and they nodded knowingly.
“If he plays pranks in Manitou he’ll get his throat cut, for sure. Even with Protes’ants and Injuns it’s bad enough,” remarked Dame Thibadeau, panting with the thought of it.
“He doesn’t even leave the Doukhobors alone. There’s—” Again Christine whispered, and again that ugly look came to their faces which belongs to the thought of forbidden things.
“Felix Marchand’ll have much money—bad penny as he is,” continued Christine in her normal voice. “He’ll have more money than he can put in all the trouser legs he has. Old Hector, his father, has enough for a gover’ment. But that M’sieu’ Felix will get his throat cut if he follows Ma’m’selle Druse about too much. She hates him—I’ve seen when they met. Old man Druse’ll make trouble. He don’t look as he does for nothing.”
“Ah, that’s so. One day, we shall see what we shall see,” murmured Christine, and waved a hand to a friend in the street.
This conversation happened on the evening of the day that Fleda Druse shot the Carillon Rapids alone. An hour after the two gossips had had their say Gabriel Druse paced up and down the veranda of his house, stopping now and then to view the tumbling, hurrying Sagalac, or to dwell upon the sunset which crimsoned and bronzed the western sky. His walk had an air of impatience; he seemed disturbed of mind and restless of body.
He gave an impression of great force. He would have been picked out of a multitude, not alone because of his remarkable height, but because he had an air of command and the aloofness which shows a man sufficient unto himself.
As he stood gazing reflectively into the sunset, a strange, plaintive, birdlike note pierced the still evening air. His head lifted quickly, yet he did not look in the direction of the sound, which came from the woods behind the house. He did not stir, and his eyes half-closed, as though he hesitated what to do. The call was not that of a bird familiar to the Western world. It had a melancholy softness like that of the bell-bird of the Australian bush. Yet, in the insistence of the note, it was, too, a challenge or a summons.
Three times during the past week he had heard it—once as he went by the market-place of Manitou; once as he returned in the dusk from Tekewani’s Reservation, and once at dawn from the woods behind the house. His present restlessness and suppressed agitation had been the result.
It was a call he knew well. It was like a voice from a dead world. It asked, he knew, for an answering call, yet he had not given it. It was seven days since he first heard it in the market-place, and in that seven days he had realized that nothing in this world which has ever been, really ceases to be. Presently, the call was repeated. On the three former occasions there had been no repetition. The call had trembled in the air but once and had died away into unbroken silence. Now, however, it rang out with an added poignancy. It was like a bird calling to its vanished mate.
With sudden resolution Druse turned. Leaving the veranda, he walked slowly behind the house into the woods and stood still under the branches of a great cedar. Raising his head, a strange, solemn note came from his lips; but the voice died away in a sharp broken sound which was more human than birdlike, which had the shrill insistence of authority. The call to him had been almost ventriloquial in its nature. His lips had not moved at all.
There was silence for a moment after he had called into the void, as it were, and then there appeared suddenly from behind a clump of juniper, a young man of dark face and upright bearing. He made a slow obeisance with a gesture suggestive of the Oriental world, yet not like the usual gesture of the East Indian, the Turk or the Persian; it was composite of all.
He could not have been more than twenty-five years of age. He was so sparely made, and his face being clean-shaven, he looked even younger. His clothes were the clothes of the Western man; and yet there was a manner of wearing them, there were touches which were evidence to the watchful observer that he was of other spheres. His wide, felt, Western hat had a droop on one side and a broken treatment of the crown, which of itself was enough to show him a stranger to the prairie, while his brown velveteen jacket, held by its two lowest buttons, was reminiscent of an un-English life. His eyes alone would have announced him as of some foreign race, though he was like none of the foreigners who had been the pioneers of Manitou. Unlike as he and Gabriel Druse were in height, build, and movement, still there was something akin in them both.
After a short silence evidently disconcerting to him, “Blessing and hail, my Ry,” he said in a low tone. He spoke in a strange language and with a voice rougher than his looks would have suggested.
The old man made a haughty gesture of impatience. “What do you want with me, my Romany ‘chal’?” he asked sharply.—[A glossary of Romany words will be found at the end of the book.]
The young man replied hastily. He seemed to speak by rote. His manner was too eager to suit the impressiveness of his words. “The sheep are without a shepherd,” he said. “The young men marry among the Gorgios, or they are lost in the cities and return no more to the tents and the fields and the road. There is disorder in all the world among the Romanys. The ancient ways are forgotten. Our people gather and settle upon the land and live as the Gorgios live. They forget the way beneath the trees, they lose their skill in horses. If the fountain is choked, how shall the water run?”
A cold sneer came to the face of Gabriel Druse. “The way beneath the trees!” he growled. “The way of the open road is enough. The way beneath the trees is the way of the thief, and the skill of the horse is the skill to cheat.”
“There is no other way. It has been the way of the Romany since the time of Timur Beg and centuries beyond Timur, so it is told. One man and all men must do as the tribe has done since the beginning.”
The old man pulled at his beard angrily. “You do not talk like a Romany, but like a Gorgio of the schools.”
The young man’s manner became more confident as he replied. “Thinking on what was to come to me, I read in the books as the Gorgio reads. I sat in my tent and worked with a pen; I saw in the printed sheets what the world was doing every day. This I did because of what was to come.”
“And have you read of me in the printed sheets? Did they tell you where I was to be found?” Gabriel Druse’s eyes were angry, his manner was authoritative.
The young man stretched out his hands eloquently. “Hail and blessing, my Ry, was there need of printed pages to tell me that? Is not everything known of the Ry to the Romany people without the written or printed thing? How does the wind go? How does the star sweep across the sky? Does not the whisper pass as the lightning flashes? Have you forgotten all, my Ry? Is there a Romany camp at Scutari? Shall it not know what is the news of the Bailies of Scotland and the Caravans by the Tagus? It is known always where my lord is. All the Romanys everywhere know it, and many hundreds have come hither from overseas. They are east, they are south, they are west.”
He made gesture towards these three points of the compass. A dark frown came upon the old man’s forehead. “I ordered that none should seek to follow, that I be left in peace till my pilgrimage was done. Even as the first pilgrims of our people in the days of Timur Beg in India, so I have come forth from among you all till the time be fulfilled.”
There was a crafty look in the old man’s eyes as he spoke, and ages of dubious reasoning and purpose showed in their velvet depths.
“No one has sought me but you in all these years,” he continued. “Who are you that you should come? I did not call, and there was my command that none should call to me.”
A bolder look grew in the other’s face. His carriage gained in ease. “There is trouble everywhere—in Italy, in Spain, in France, in England, in Russia, in mother India”—he made a gesture of salutation and bowed low—“and our rites and mysteries are like water spilt upon the ground. If the hand be cut off, how shall the body move? That is how it is. You are vanished, my lord, and the body dies.”
The old man plucked his beard again fiercely and his words came with guttural force. “That is fool’s talk. In the past I was never everywhere at once. When I was in Russia, I was not in Greece; when I was in England, I was not in Portugal. I was always ‘vanished’ from one place to another, yet the body lived.”
“But your word was passed along the roads everywhere, my Ry. Your tongue was not still from sunrise to the end of the day. Your call was heard always, now here, now there, and the Romanys were one; they held together.”
The old man’s face darkened still more and his eyes flashed fire. “These are lies you are telling, and they will choke you, my Romany ‘chal’. Am I deceived, I who have known more liars than any man under the sky? Am I to be fooled, who have seen so many fools in their folly? There is roguery in you, or I have never seen roguery.”
“I am a true Romany, my Ry,” the other answered with an air of courage and a little defiance also.
“You are a rogue and a liar, that is sure. These wailings are your own. The Romany goes on his way as he has gone these hundreds of years. If I am silent, my people will wait until I speak again; if they see me not they will wait till I enter their camps once more. Why are you here? Speak, rogue and liar.” The wrathful old man, sure in his reading of the youth, towered above him commandingly. It almost seemed as though he would do him bodily harm, so threatening was his attitude, but the young Romany raised his head, and with a note of triumph said:
“I have come for my own, as it is my right.”
“What is your own?”
“What has been yours until now, my Ry.”
A grey look stole slowly up the strong face of the exiled leader, for his mind suddenly read the truth behind the young man’s confident words.
“What is mine is always mine,” he answered roughly. “Speak! What is it I have that you come for?”
The young man braced himself and put a hand upon his lips. “I come for your daughter, my Ry.” The old man suddenly regained his composure, and authority spoke in his bearing and his words. “What have you to do with my daughter?”
“She was married to me when I was seven years of age, as my Ry knows. I am the son of Lemuel Fawe—Jethro Fawe is my name. For three thousand pounds it was so arranged. On his death-bed three thousand pounds did my father give to you for this betrothal. I was but a child, yet I remembered, and my kinsmen remembered, for it is their honour also. I am the son of Lemuel Fawe, the husband of Fleda, daughter of Gabriel Druse, King and Duke and Earl of all the Romanys; and I come for my own.”
Something very like a sigh of relief came from Gabriel Druse’s lips, but the anger in his face did not pass, and a rigid pride made the distance between them endless. He looked like a patriarch giving judgment as he raised his hand and pointed with a menacing finger at Jethro Fawe, his Romany subject—and, according to the laws of the Romany tribes, his son-in-law. It did not matter that the girl—but three years of age when it happened—had no memory of the day when the chiefs and great people assembled outside the tent of Lemuel Fawe when he lay dying, and, by the simple act of stepping over a branch of hazel, the two children were married: if Romany law and custom were to abide, then the two now were man and wife. Did not Lemuel Fawe, the old-time rival of Gabriel Druse for the kinship of the Romanys, the claimant whose family had been rulers of the Romanys for generations before the Druses gained ascendancy—did not Fawe, dying, seek to secure for his son by marriage what he had failed to get for himself by other means?
All these things had at one time been part of Gabriel Druse’s covenant of life, until one year in England, when Fleda, at twelve years of age, was taken ill and would have died, but that a great lady descended upon their camp, took the girl to her own house, and there nursed and tended her, giving her the best medical aid the world could produce, so that the girl lived, and with her passionate nature loved the Lady Barrowdale as she might have loved her own mother, had that mother lived and she had ever known her. And when the Lady Barrowdale sickened and died of the same sickness which had nearly been her own death, the promise she made then overrode all other covenants made for her. She had promised the great lady who had given her own widowed, childless life for her own, that she would not remain a Gipsy, that she would not marry a Gipsy, but that if ever she gave herself to any man it would be to a Gorgio, a European, who travelled oftenest “the open road” leading to his own door. The years which had passed since those tragic days in Gloucestershire had seen the shadows of that dark episode pass, but the pledge had remained; and Gabriel Druse had kept his word to the dead, because of the vow made to the woman who had given her life for the life of a Romany lass.
The Romany tribes of all the nations did not know why their Ry had hidden himself in the New World; they did not know that the girl had for ever forsworn their race, and would never become head of all the Romanys, solving the problem of the rival dynasties by linking her life with that of Jethro Fawe. But Jethro Fawe had come to claim his own.
Now Gabriel Druse’s eyes followed his own menacing finger with sharp insistence. In the past such a look had been in his eyes when he had sentenced men to death. They had not died by the gallows or the sword or the bullet, but they had died as commanded, and none had questioned his decree. None asked where or how the thing was done when a fire sprang up in a field, or a quarry, or on a lonely heath or hill-top, and on the pyre were all the belongings of the condemned, being resolved into dust as their owner had been made earth again.
“Son of Lemuel Fawe,” the old man said, his voice rough with authority, “but that you are of the Blood, you should die now for this disobedience. When the time is fulfilled, I will return. Until then, my daughter and I are as those who have no people. Begone! Nothing that is here belongs to you. Begone, and come no more!”
“I have come for my own—for my Romany ‘chi’, and I will not go without her. I am blood of the Blood, and she is mine.”
“You have not seen her,” said the old man craftily, and fighting hard against the wrath consuming him, though he liked the young man’s spirit. “She has changed. She is no longer Romany.”
“I have seen her, and her beauty is like the rose and the palm.”
“When have you seen her since the day before the tent of Lemuel Fawe now seventeen years ago?” There was an uneasy note in the commanding tone.
“I have seen her three times of late, and the last time I saw her was an hour or so since, when she rode the Rapids of Carillon.”
The old man started, his lips parted, but for a moment he did not speak. At last words came. “The Rapids—speak. What have you heard, Jethro, son of Lemuel?”
“I did not hear, I saw her shoot the Rapids. I ran to follow. At Carillon I saw her arrive. She was in the arms of a Gorgio of Lebanon—Ingolby is his name.”
A malediction burst from Gabriel Druse’s lips, words sharp and terrible in their intensity. For the first time since they had met the young man blanched. The savage was alive in the giant.
“Speak. Tell all,” Druse said, with hands clenching.
Swiftly the young man told all he had seen, and described how he had run all the way—four miles—from Carillon, arriving before Fleda and her Indian escort.
He had hardly finished his tale, shrinking, as he told it, from the fierceness of his chief, when a voice called from the direction of the house.
“Father—father,” it cried.
A change passed over the old man’s face. It cleared as the face of the sun clears when a cloud drives past and is gone. The transformation was startling. Without further glance at his companion, he moved swiftly towards the house. Once more Fleda’s voice called, and before he could answer they were face to face.
She stood radiant and elate, and seemed not apprehensive of disfavour or reproach. Behind her was Tekewani and his braves.
“You have heard?” she asked reading her father’s face.
“I have heard. Have you no heart?” he answered. “If the Rapids had drowned you!”
She came close to him and ran her fingers through his beard tenderly. “I was not born to be drowned,” she said softly.
Now that she was a long distance from Ingolby, the fact that a man had held her in his arms left no shadow on her face. Ingolby was now only part of her triumph of the Rapids. She tossed a hand affectionately towards Tekewani and his braves.
“How!” said Gabriel Druse, and made a gesture of salutation to the Indian chief.
“How!” answered Tekewani, and raised his arm high in response. An instant afterwards Tekewani and his followers were gone their ways.
Suddenly Fleda’s eyes rested on the young Romany who was now standing at a little distance away. Apprehension came to her face. She felt her heart stand still and her hands grow cold, she knew not why. But she saw that the man was a Romany.
Her father turned sharply. A storm gathered in his face once more, and a murderous look came into his eyes.
“Who is he?” Fleda asked, scarce above a whisper, and she noted the insistent, amorous look of the stranger.
“He says he is your husband,” answered her father harshly.
CHAPTER V. “BY THE RIVER STARZKE... IT WAS SO DONE”
There was absolute silence for a moment. The two men fixed their gaze upon the girl. The fear which had first come to her face passed suddenly, and a will, new-born and fearless, possessed it. Yesterday this will had been only a trembling, undisciplined force, but since then she had been passed through the tests which her own soul, or Destiny, had set for her, and she had emerged a woman, confident and understanding, if tremulous. In days gone by her adventurous, lonely spirit had driven her to the prairies, savagely riding her Indian pony through the streets of Manitou and out on the North Trail, or south through coulees, or westward into the great woods, looking for what: she never found.
Her spirit was no longer the vague thing driving here and there with pleasant torture. It had found freedom and light; what the Romany folk call its own ‘tan’, its home, though it be but home of each day’s trek. That wild spirit was now a force which understood itself in a new if uncompleted way. It was a sword free from its scabbard.
The adventure of the Carillon Rapids had been a kind of deliverance of an unborn thing which, desiring the overworld, had found it. A few hours ago the face of Ingolby, as she waked to consciousness in his arms, had taught her something suddenly; and the face of Felix Marchand had taught her even more. Something new and strange had happened to her, and her father’s uncouth but piercing mind saw the change in her. Her quick, fluttering moods, her careless, undirected energy, her wistful waywardness, had of late troubled and vexed him, called on capacities in him which he did not possess; but now he was suddenly aware that she had emerged from passionate inconsistencies and in some good sense had found herself.
Like a wind she had swept out of childhood into a woman’s world where the eyes saw things unseen before, a world how many thousand leagues in the future; and here in a flash, also, she was swept like a wind back again to a time before there was even conscious childhood—a dim, distant time when she lived and ate and slept for ever in the field or the vale, in the quarry, beside the hedge, or on the edge of harvest-fields; when she was carried in strong arms, or sat in the shelter of a man’s breast as a horse cantered down a glade, under an ardent sky, amid blooms never seen since then. She was whisked back into that distant, unreal world by the figure of a young Romany standing beside a spruce-tree, and by her father’s voice which uttered the startling words: “He says he is your husband!”
Indignation and a bitter pride looked out of her eyes, as she heard the preposterous claim—as though she were some wild dweller of the jungle being called by her savage mate back to the lair she had forsaken.
“Since when were you my husband?” she asked Jethro Fawe composedly.
Her quiet scorn brought a quiver to his spirit; for he was of a people to whom anger and passion were part of every relationship of life, its stimulus and its recreation, its expression of the individual.
His eyelids trembled, but he drew himself together. “Seventeen years ago by the River Starzke in the Roumelian country, it was so done,” he replied stubbornly. “You were sealed to me, as my Ry here knows, and as you will remember, if you fix your mind upon it. It was beyond the city of Starzke three leagues, under the brown scarp of the Dragbad Hills. It was in the morning when the sun was by a quarter of its course. It happened before my father’s tent, the tent of Lemuel Fawe. There you and I were sealed before our Romany folk. For three thousand pounds which my father gave to your father, you—”
With a swift gesture she stopped him. Walking close up to him, she looked him full in the eyes. There was a contemptuous pride in her face which forced him to lower his eyelids sulkily.
He would have understood a torrent of words—to him that would have regulated the true value of the situation; but this disdainful composure embarrassed him. He had come prepared for trouble and difficulty, but he had rather more determination than most of his class and people, and his spirit of adventure was high. Now that he had seen the girl who was his own according to Romany law, he felt he had been a hundred times justified in demanding her from her father, according to the pledge and bond of so many years ago. He had nothing to lose but his life, and he had risked that before. This old man, the head of the Romany folk, had the bulk of the fortune which had been his own father’s and he had the logic of lucre which is the most convincing of all logic. Yet with the girl holding his eyes commandingly, he was conscious that he was asking more than a Romany lass to share his ‘tan’, to go wandering from Romany people to Romany people, king and queen of them all when Gabriel Druse had passed away. Fleda Druse would be a queen of queens, but there was that queenliness in her now which was not Romany—something which was Gorgio, which was caste, which made a shivering distance between them.
As he had spoken, she saw it all as he described it. Vaguely, cloudily, the scene passed before her. Now and again in the passing years had filmy impressions floated before her mind of a swift-flowing river and high crags, and wooded hills and tents and horsemen and shouting, and a lad that held her hand, and banners waved over their heads, and galloping and shouting, and then a sudden quiet, and many men and women gathered about a tent, and a wailing thereafter. After which, in her faint remembrance, there seemed to fall a mist, and a space of blankness, and then a starting up from a bed, and looking out of the doors of a tent, where many people gathered about a great fire, whose flames licked the heavens, and seemed to devour a Romany tent standing alone with a Romany wagon full of its household things.
As Jethro Fawe had spoken, the misty, elusive visions had become living memories, and she knew that he had spoken the truth, and that these fleeting things were pictures of her sealing to Jethro Fawe and the death of Lemuel Fawe, and the burning of all that belonged to him in that last ritual of Romany farewell to the dead.
She knew now that she had been bargained for like any slave—for three thousand pounds. How far away it all seemed, how barbaric and revolting! Yet here it all was rolling up like a flood to her feet, to bear her away into a past with its sordidness and vagabondage, however gilded and graded above the lowest vagabondage.
Here at Manitou she had tasted a free life which was not vagabondage, the passion of the open road which was not an elaborate and furtive evasion of the law and a defiance of social ostracism. Here she and her father moved in an atmosphere of esteem touched by mystery, but not by suspicion; here civilization in its most elastic organization and flexible conventions, had laid its hold upon her, had done in this expansive, loosely knitted social system what could never have been accomplished in a great city—in London, Vienna, Rome, or New York. She had had here the old free life of the road, so full of the scent of deep woods—the song of rivers, the carol of birds, the murmuring of trees, the mysterious and devout whisperings of the night, the happy communings of stray peoples meeting and passing, the gaiety and gossip of the market-place, the sound of church bells across a valley, the storms and wild lightnings and rushing torrents, the cries of frightened beasts, the wash and rush of rain, the sharp pain of frost, and the agonies of some lost traveller rescued from the wide inclemency, the soft starlight after, the balm of the purged air, and “rosy-fingered morn” blinking blithely at the world. The old life of the open road she had had here without anything of its shame, its stigma, and its separateness, its discordance with the stationary forces of law and organized community.
Wild moments there had been of late years when she longed for the faces of Romany folk gathered about the fire, while some Romany ‘pral’ drew all hearts with the violin or the dulcimer. When Ambrose or Gilderoy or Christo responded to the pleadings of some sentimental lass, and sang to the harpist’s strings:
“Cold blows the wind over my true love,
Cold blow the drops of rain;
I never, never had but one sweetheart;
In the green wood he was slain,”
and to cries of “Again! ‘Ay bor’! again!” the blackeyed lover, hypnotizing himself into an ecstasy, poured out race and passion and war with the law, in the true Gipsy rant which is sung from Transylvania to Yetholm or Carnarvon or Vancouver:
“Time was I went to my true love,
Time was she came to me—”
The sharp passion which moved her now as she stood before Jethro Fawe would not have been so acute yesterday; but to-day—she had lain in a Gorgio’s arms to-day; and though he was nothing to her, he was still a Gorgio of Gorgios; and this man before her—her husband—was at best but a man of the hedges and the byre and the clay-pit, the quarry and the wood; a nomad with no home, nothing that belonged to what she was now a part of—organized, collective existence, the life of the house-dweller, not the life of the ‘tan’, the ‘koppa’, and the ‘vellgouris’—the tent, the blanket, and the fair.
“I was never bought, and I was never sold,” she said to Jethro Fawe at last “not for three thousand pounds, not in three thousand years. Look at me well, and see whether you think it was so, or ever could be so. Look at me well, Jethro Fawe.”
“You are mine—it was so done seventeen years ago,” he answered, defiantly and tenaciously.
“I was three years old, seventeen years ago,” she returned quietly, but her eyes forced his to look at her, when they turned away as though their light hurt him.
“It is no matter,” he rejoined. “It is the way of our people. It has been so, and it will be so while there is a Romany tent standing or moving on.”
In his rage Gabriel Druse could keep silence no longer.
“Rogue, what have you to say of such things?” he growled. “I am the head of all. I pass the word, and things are so and so. By long and by last, if I pass the word that you shall sleep the sleep, it will be so, my Romany ‘chal’.”
His daughter stretched out her hand to stop further speech from her father—“Hush!” she said maliciously, “he has come a long way for naught. It will be longer going back. Let him have his say. It is his capital. He has only breath and beauty.”
Jethro shrank from the sharp irony of her tongue as he would not have shrunk before her father’s violence. Biting rejection was in her tones. He knew dimly that the thing he shrank from belonged to nothing Romany in her, but to that scornful pride of the Gorgios which had kept the Romany outside the social pale.
“Only breath and beauty!” she had said, and that she could laugh at his handsomeness was certain proof that it was not wilfulness which rejected his claims. Now there was rage in his heart greater than had been in that of Gabriel Druse.
“I have come a long way for a good thing,” he said with head thrown back, “and if ‘breath and beauty’ is all I bring, yet that is because what my father had in his purse has made my ‘Ry’ rich”—he flung a hand out towards Gabriel Druse—“and because I keep to the open road as my father did, true to my Romany blood. The wind and the sun and the fatness of the field have made me what I am, and never in my life had I an ache or a pain. You have the breath and the beauty, too, but you have the gold also; and what you are and what you have is mine by the Romany law, and it will come to me, by long and by last.”
Fleda turned quietly to her father. “If it is true concerning the three thousand pounds, give it to him and let him go. It will buy him what he would never get by what he is.”
The old man flashed a look of anger upon her. “He came empty, he shall go empty. Against my commands, his insolence has brought him here. And let him keep his eyes skinned, or he shall have no breath with which to return. I am Gabriel Druse, lord over all the Romany people in all the world from Teheran to San Diego, and across the seas and back again; and my will shall be done.”
He paused, reflecting for a moment, though his fingers opened and shut in anger. “This much I will do,” he added. “When I return to my people I will deal with this matter in the place where Lemuel Fawe died. By the place called Starzke, I will come to reckoning, and then and then only.”
“When?” asked the young man eagerly.
Gabriel Druse’s eyes flashed. “When I return as I will to return.” Then suddenly he added: “This much I will say, it shall be before—”
The girl stopped him. “It shall be when it shall be. Am I a chattel to be bartered by any will except my own? I will have naught to do with any Romany law. Not by Starzke shall the matter be dealt with, but here by the River Sagalac. This Romany has no claim upon me. My will is my own; I myself and no other shall choose my husband, and he will never be a Romany.”
The young man’s eyes suddenly took on a dreaming, subtle look, submerging the sulkiness which had filled him. Twice he essayed to speak, but faltered. At last, with an air, he said:
“For seventeen years I have kept the faith. I was sealed to you, and I hold by the sealing. Wherever you went, it was known to me. In my thoughts I followed. I read the Gorgio books; I made ready for this day. I saw you as you were that day by Starzke, like the young bird in the nest; and the thought of it was with me always. I knew that when I saw you again the brown eyes would be browner, the words at the lips would be sweeter—and so it is. All is as I dreamed for these long years. I was ever faithful. By night and day I saw you as you were when Romany law made you mine for ever. I looked forward to the day when I would take you to my ‘tan’, and there we two would—”
A flush sprang suddenly to Fleda Druse’s face, then slowly faded, leaving it pale and indignant. Sharply she interrupted him.
“They should have called you Ananias,” she said scornfully. “My father has called you a rogue, and now I know you are one. I have not heard, but I know—I know that you have had a hundred loves, and been true to none. The red scarfs you have given to the Romany and the Gorgio fly-aways would make a tent for all the Fawes in all the world.”
At first he flung up his head in astonishment at her words, then, as she proceeded, a flush swept across his face and his eyes filled up again with sullenness. She had read the real truth concerning him. He had gone too far. He had been convincing while he had said what was true, but her instinct had suddenly told her what he was. Her perception had pierced to the core of his life—a vagabondage, a little more gilded than was common among his fellows, made possible by his position as the successor to her father, and by the money of Lemuel Fawe which he had dissipated.
He had come when all his gold was gone to do the one bold thing which might at once restore his fortunes. He had brains, and he knew now that his adventure was in grave peril.
He laughed in his anger. “Is only the Gorgio to embrace the Romany lass? One fondled mine to-day in his arms down there at Carillon. That’s the way it goes! The old song tells the end of it:
“‘But the Gorgio lies ‘neath the beech-wood tree;
He’ll broach my tan no more;
And my love she sleeps afar from me,
But near to the churchyard door.
‘Time was I went to my true love,
Time was she came to me—‘”
He got no farther. Gabriel Druse was on him, gripping his arms so tight to his body that his swift motion to draw a weapon was frustrated. The old man put out all his strength, a strength which in his younger days was greater than any two men in any Romany camp, and the “breath and beauty” of Jethro Fawe grew less and less. His face became purple and distorted, his body convulsed, then limp, and presently he lay on the ground with a knee on his chest and fierce, bony hands at his throat.
“Don’t kill him—father, don’t!” cried the girl, laying restraining hands on the old man’s shoulders. He withdrew his hands and released the body from his knee. Jethro Fawe lay still.
“Is he dead?” she whispered, awestricken. “Dead?” The old man felt the breast of the unconscious man. He smiled grimly. “He is lucky not to be dead.”
“What shall we do?” the girl asked again with a white face.
The old man stooped and lifted the unconscious form in his arms as though it was that of a child. “Where are you going?” she asked anxiously, as he moved away.
“To the hut in the juniper wood,” he answered. She watched till he had disappeared with his limp burden into the depths of the trees. Then she turned and went slowly towards the house.
CHAPTER VI. THE UNGUARDED FIRES
The public knew well that Ingolby had solved his biggest business problem, because three offices of three railways—one big and two small—suddenly became merged under his control. At which there was rejoicing at Lebanon, followed by dismay and indignation at Manitou, for one of the smaller merged railways had its offices there, and it was now removed to Lebanon; while several of the staff, having proved cantankerous, were promptly retired. As they were French Canadians, their retirement became a public matter in Manitou and begot fresh quarrel between the rival towns.
Ingolby had made a tactical mistake in at once removing the office of the merged railway from Manitou, and he saw it quickly. It was not possible to put the matter right at once, however.
There had already been collision between his own railway-men and the rivermen from Manitou, whom Felix Marchand had bribed to cause trouble: two Manitou men had been seriously hurt, and feeling ran high. Ingolby’s eyes opened wide when he saw Marchand’s ugly game. He loathed the dissolute fellow, but he realized now that his foe was a factor to be reckoned with, for Marchand had plenty of money as well as a bad nature. He saw he was in for a big fight with Manitou, and he had to think it out.
So this time he went pigeon-shooting.
He got his pigeons, and the slaughter did him good. As though in keeping with the situation, he shot on both sides of the Sagalac with great good luck, and in the late afternoon sent his Indian lad on ahead to Lebanon with the day’s spoil, while he loitered through the woods, a gun slung in the hollow of his arm. He had walked many miles, but there was still a spring to his step and he hummed an air with his shoulders thrown back and his hat on the back of his head. He had had his shooting, he had done his thinking, and he was pleased with himself. He had shaped his homeward course so that it would bring him near to Gabriel Druse’s house.
He had seen Fleda only twice since the episode at Carillon, and met her only once, and that was but for a moment at a Fete for the hospital at Manitou, and with other people present—people who lay in wait for crumbs of gossip.
Since the running of the Rapids, Fleda had filled a larger place in the eyes of Manitou and Lebanon. She had appealed to the Western mind: she had done a brave physical thing. Wherever she went she was made conscious of a new attitude towards herself, a more understanding feeling. At the Fete when she and Ingolby met face to face, people had immediately drawn round them curious and excited. These could not understand why the two talked so little, and had such an every-day manner with each other. Only old Mother Thibadeau, who had a heart that sees, caught a look in Fleda’s eyes, a warm deepening of colour, a sudden embarrassment, which she knew how to interpret.
“See now, monseigneur,” she said to Monseigneur Lourde, nodding towards Fleda and Ingolby, “there would be work here soon for you or Father Bidette if they were not two heretics.”
“Is she a heretic, then, madame?” asked the old white-headed priest, his eyes quizzically following Fleda.
“She is not a Catholic, and she must be a heretic, that’s certain,” was the reply.
“I’m not so sure,” mused the priest. Smiling, he raised his hat as he caught Fleda’s eyes. He made as if to go towards her, but something in her look held him back. He realized that Fleda did not wish to speak with him, and that she was even hurrying away from her father, who lumbered through the crowd as though unconscious of them all.
Presently Monseigneur Lourde saw Fleda leave the Fete and take the road towards home. There was a sense of excitement in her motions, and he also had seen that tremulous, embarrassed look in her eyes. It puzzled him. He did not connect it wholly with Ingolby as Madame Thibadeau had done. He had lived so long among primitive people that he was more accustomed to study faces than find the truth from words, and he had always been conscious that this girl, educated and even intellectual, was at heart as primitive as the wildest daughter of the tepees of the North. There was also in her something of that mystery which belongs to the universal itinerary—that cosmopolitan something which is the native human.
“She has far to go,” the priest said to himself as he turned to greet Ingolby with a smile, bright and shy, but gravely reproachful, too.
This happened on the day before the collision between the railway-men and the river-drivers, and the old priest already knew what trouble was afoot.
There was little Felix Marchand did which was hidden from him. He made his way to Ingolby to warn him.
As Ingolby now walked in the woods towards Gabriel Druse’s house, he recalled one striking phrase used by the aged priest in reference to the closing of the railway offices.
“When you strike your camp, put out the fires,” was the aphorism.
Ingolby stopped humming to himself as the words came to his memory again. Bending his head in thought for a moment, he stood still, cogitating.
“The dear old fellow was right,” he said presently aloud with uplifted head. “I struck camp, but I didn’t put out the fires. There’s a lot of that in life.”
That is what had happened also to Gabriel Druse and his daughter. They had struck camp, but had not put out the camp-fires. That which had been done by the River Starzke came again in its appointed time. The untended, unguarded fire may spread devastation and ruin, following with angry freedom the marching feet of those who builded it.
“Yes, you’ve got to put out your fires when you quit the bivouac,” continued Ingolby aloud, as he gazed ahead of him through the opening greenery, beyond which lay Gabriel Druse’s home. Where he was the woods were thick, and here and there on either side it was almost impenetrable. Few people ever came through this wood. It belonged in greater part to Gabriel Druse, and in lesser part to the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Government; and as the land was not valuable till it was cleared, and there was plenty of prairie land to be had, from which neither stick nor stump must be removed, these woods were very lonely. Occasionally a trapper or a sportsman wandered through them, but just here where Ingolby was none ever loitered. It was too thick for game, there was no roadway leading anywhere, but only an overgrown path, used in the old days by Indians. It was this path which Ingolby trod with eager steps.
Presently, as he stood still at sight of a ground-hog making for its hiding-place, he saw a shadow fall across the light breaking through the trees some distance in front of him. It was Fleda. She had not seen him, and she came hurrying towards where he was with head bent, a brightly-ribboned hat swinging in her fingers. She seemed part of the woods, its wild simplicity, its depth, its colour-already Autumn was crimsoning the leaves, touching them with amber tints, making the woodland warm and kind. She wore a dress of golden brown which matched her hair, and at her throat was a black velvet ribbon with a brooch of antique paste which flashed the light like diamonds, but more softly.
Suddenly, as she came on, she stopped and raised her head in a listening attitude, her eyes opening wide as if listening, too—it was as though she heard with them as well; alive to catch sounds which evaded capture. She was like some creature of an ancient wood with its own secret and immemorial history which the world could never know. There was that in her face which did not belong to civilization or to that fighting world of which Ingolby was so eager a factor. All the generations of the wood and road, the combe and the river, the quarry and the secluded boscage were in her look. There was that about her which was at once elusive and primevally real.
She was not of those who would be lost in the dust of futility. Whatever she was, she was an independent atom in the mass of the world’s breeding. Perhaps it was consciousness of the dynamic quality in the girl, her nearness to naked nature, which made Madame Bulteel say that she would “have a history.”
If she got twisted as she came wayfaring, if her mind became possessed of a false passion or purpose which she thought a true one, then tragedy would await her. Yet in this quiet wood so near to the centuries that were before Adam was, she looked like a spirit of comedy listening till the Spirit of the Wood should break the silence.
Ingolby felt his blood beat faster. He had a feeling that he was looking at a wood-nymph who might flash out of his vision as a mere fantasy of the mind. There shot through him the strangest feeling that if she were his, he would be linked with something alien to the world of which he was.
Yet, recalling the day at Carillon when her cheek lay on his shoulder and her warm breast was pressed unresistingly against him, as he lifted her from his boat, he knew that he would have to make the hardest fight of his life if he meant not to have more of her than this brief acquaintance, so touched by sensation and romance. He was, maybe, somewhat sensational; his career had, even in its present restricted compass, been spectacular; but romance, with its reveries and its moonshinings, its impulses and its blind adventures, had not been any part of his existence.
Hers were not the first red lips which, voluntarily or involuntarily, had invited him; nor hers the first eyes which had sparkled to his glances; and this triumphant Titian head of hers was not the only one he had seen.
When he had taken her hand at the Hospital Fete, her fingers, long and warm and fine, had folded round his own with a singular confidence, an involuntary enclosing friendliness; and now as he watched her listening—did she hear something?—he saw her hand stretch out as though commanding silence, the “hush!” of an alluring gesture.
This assuredly was not the girl who had run the Carillon Rapids, for that adventuress was full of a vital force like a man’s, and this girl had the evanishing charm of a dryad.
Suddenly a change passed over her. She was as one who had listened and had caught the note of song for which she waited; but her face clouded, and the rapt look gave way to an immediate distress. The fantasy of the wood-nymph underwent translation in Ingolby’s mind; she was now like a mortal, who, having been transformed, at immortal dictate was returning to mortal state again.
To heighten the illusion, he thought he heard faint singing in the depths of the wood. He put his hands to his ears for a moment, and took them away again to make sure that it was really singing and not his imagination; and when he saw Fleda’s face again, there was fresh evidence that his senses had not deceived him. After all, it was not strange that some one should be singing in that deepest wood beyond.
Now Fleda moved forward towards where he stood, quickening her footsteps as though remembering something she must do. He stepped out into the path and came to meet her. She heard his footsteps, saw him, and stood still abruptly.
She did not make a sound, but a hand went to her bosom quickly, as though to quiet her heart or to steady herself. He had broken suddenly upon her intent thoughts, he had startled her as she had been seldom startled, for all her childhood training had been towards self-possession before surprise and danger.
“This is not your side of the Sagalac,” she said with a half-smile, regaining composure.
“That is in dispute,” he answered gaily. “I want to belong to both sides of the Sagalac, I want both sides to belong to each other so that either side shall not be my side or your side, or—”
“Or Monsieur Felix Marchand’s side,” she interrupted meaningly.
“Oh, he’s on the outside!” snapped the fighter, with a hardening mouth.
She did not reply at once, but put her hat on, and tied the ribbons loosely under her chin, looking thoughtfully into the distance.
“Is that the Western slang for saying he belongs nowhere?” she asked.
“Nowhere here,” he answered with a grim twist to the corner of his mouth, his eyes half-closing with sulky meaning. “Won’t you sit down?” he added quickly, in a more sprightly tone, for he saw she was about to move on. He motioned towards a log lying beside the path and kicked some branches out of the way.
After slight hesitation she sat down, burying her shoes in the fallen leaves.
“You don’t like Felix Marchand?” she remarked presently.
“No. Do you?”
She met his eyes squarely—so squarely that his own rather lost their courage, and he blinked more quickly than is needed with a healthy eye. He had been audacious, but he had not surprised the garrison.
“I have no deep reason for liking or disliking him, and you have,” she answered firmly; yet her colour rose slightly, and he thought he had never seen skin that looked so like velvet-creamy, pink velvet.
“You seemed to think differently at Carillon not long ago,” he returned.
“That was an accident,” she answered calmly. “He was drunk, and that is for forgetting—always.”
“Always! Have you seen many men drunk?” he asked quickly. He did not mean to be quizzical, but his voice sounded so, and she detected it.
“Yes, many,” she answered with a little ring of defiance in her tone—“many, often.”
“Where?” he queried recklessly.
“In Lebanon,” she retorted. “In Lebanon—your side.”
How different she seemed from a few moments ago when she stood listening like a nymph for the song of the Spirit of the Wood! Now she was gay, buoyant, with a chamois-like alertness and a beaming vigour.
“Now I know what ‘blind drunk’ means,” he replied musingly. “In Manitou when men get drunk, the people get astigmatism and can’t see the tangledfooted stagger.”
“It means that the pines of Manitou are straighter than the cedars of Lebanon,” she remarked.
“And the pines of Manitou have needles,” he rejoined, meaning to give her the victory.
“Is my tongue as sharp as that?” she asked, amusement in her eyes.
“So sharp I can feel the point when I can’t see it,” he retorted.
“I’m glad of that,” she replied with an affectation of conceit. “Of course if you live in Lebanon you need surgery to make you feel a point.”
“I give in—you have me,” he remarked.
“You give in to Manitou?” she asked provokingly. “Certainly not—only to you. I said, ‘You have me.’”
“Ah, you give in to that which won’t hurt you—”
“Wouldn’t you hurt me?” he asked in a softening tone.
“You only play with words,” she answered with sudden gravity. “Hurt you? I owe you what I can not pay back. I owe you my life; but as nothing can be given in exchange for a life, I cannot pay you.”
“But like may be given for like,” he rejoined in a tone suddenly full of meaning.
“Again you are playing with words—and with me,” she answered brusquely, and a little light of anger dawned in her eyes. Did he think that he could say a thing of that sort to her—when he pleased? Did he think that because he had done her a great service, he could say casually what belonged only to the sacred moments of existence? She looked at him with rising indignation, but there suddenly came to her the conviction that he had not spoken with affronting gallantry, but that for him the moment had a gravity not to be marred by the place or the circumstance.
“I beg your pardon if I spoke hastily,” he answered presently. “Yet there’s many a true word spoken in jest.”
There was a moment’s silence. She realized that he was drawn to her, and that the attraction was not alone due to his having saved her at Carillon; that he was not taking advantage of the thing which must ever be a bond between them, whatever came of life. When she had seen him at the Hospital Fete, a feeling had rushed over her that he had got nearer to her than any man had ever done. Then—even then, she felt the thing which all lovers, actual, or in the making, feel—that they must do something for the being who to them is more than all else and all others. She was not in love with Ingolby. How could she be in love with this man she had seen but a few times—this Gorgio. Why was it that even as they talked together now, she felt the real, true distance between them—of race, of origin, of history, of life, of circumstance? The hut in the wood where Gabriel Druse had carried Jethro Fawe was not three hundred yards away.
She sighed, stirred, and a wild look came in her eyes—a look of rebellion or of protest. Presently she recovered herself. She was a creature of sudden moods.
“What is it you want to do with Manitou and Lebanon?” she asked after a pause in which the thoughts of both had travelled far.
“You really wish to know—you don’t know?” he asked with sudden intensity.
She regarded him frankly, smiled, then she laughed outright, showing her teeth very white and regular and handsome. The boyish eagerness of his look, the whimsical twist of his mouth, which always showed when he was keenly roused—as though everything that really meant anything was part of a comet-like comedy—had caused her merriment. All the hidden things in his face seemed to open out into a swift shrewdness and dry candour when he was in his mood of “laying all the cards upon the table.”
“I don’t know,” she answered quietly. “I have heard things, but I should like to learn the truth from you. What are your plans?”
Her eyes were burning with inquiry. She was suddenly brought to the gateways of a new world. Plans—what had she or her people to do with plans! What Romany ever constructed anything? What did the building of a city or a country mean to a Romany ‘chal’ or a Romany ‘chi’, they who lived from field to field, from common to moor, from barn to city wall. A Romany tent or a Romany camp, with its families, was the whole territory of their enterprise, designs and patriotism. They saw the thousand places where cities could be made, and built their fires on the sites of them, and camped a day, and were gone, leaving them waiting and barren as before. They travelled through the new lands in America from the fringe of the Arctic to Patagonia, but they raised no roof-tree; they tilled no acre, opened no market, set up no tabernacle: they had neither home nor country.
Fleda was the heir of all this, the product of generations of such vagabondage. Had the last few years given her the civic sense, the home sense? From the influence of the Englishwoman, who had made her forsake the Romany life, had there come habits of mind in tune with the women of the Sagalac, who were helping to build so much more than their homes? Since the incident of the Carillon Rapids she had changed, but what the change meant was yet in her unopened Book of Revelations. Yet something stirred in her which she had never felt before. She had come of a race of wayfarers, but the spirit of the builders touched her now.
“What are my plans?” Ingolby drew along breath of satisfaction. “Well, just here where we are will be seen a great thing. There’s the Yukon and all its gold; there’s the Peace River country and all its unploughed wheat-fields; there’s the whole valley of the Sagalac, which alone can maintain twenty millions of people; there’s the East and the British people overseas who must have bread; there’s China and Japan going to give up rice, and eat the wheaten loaf; there’s the U. S. A. with its hundred millions of people—it’ll be that in a few years—and its exhausted wheat-fields; and here, right here, is the bread-basket for all the hungry peoples; and Manitou and Lebanon are the centre of it. They will be the distributing centre. I want to see the base laid right. I’m not going to stay here till it all happens, but I want to plan it all so that it will happen, then I’ll go on and do a bigger thing somewhere else. These two towns have got to come together; they must play one big game. I want to lay the wires for it. That’s why I’ve got capitalists to start paper-works, engineering works, a foundry, and a sash-door-and-blind factory—just the beginning. That’s why I’ve put two factories on one side of the river and two on the other.”
“Was it really you who started those factories?” she asked incredulously.
“Of course! It was part of my plans. I wasn’t foolish enough to build and run them myself. I looked for the right people that had the money and the brains, and I let them sweat—let them sweat it out. I’m not a manufacturer; I’m an inventor and a builder. I built the bridge over the river; and—”
She nodded. “Yes, the bridge is good; but they say you are a schemer,” she added suggestively.
“Certainly. But if I have schemes which’ll do good, I ought to be supported. I don’t mind what they call me, so long as they don’t call me too late for dinner.”
They both laughed. It was seldom he talked like this, and never had he talked to such a listener before. “The merging of the three railways was a good scheme, and I was the schemer,” he continued. “It might mean monopoly, but it won’t work out that way. It will simply concentrate energy and: save elbow-grease. It will set free capital and capacity for other things.”
“They say there will be fewer men at work, not only in the offices but on the whole railway system, and they don’t like that in Manitou—ah, no, they don’t!” she urged.
“They’re right in a sense,” he answered. “But the men will be employed at other things, which won’t represent waste and capital overlapping. Overlapping capital hits everybody in the end. But who says all that? Who raises the cry of ‘wolf’ in Manitou?”
“A good many people say it now,” she answered, “but I think Felix Marchand said it first. He is against you, and he is dangerous.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Oh, if any fool said it, it would be the same!” he answered. “That’s a fire easily lighted; though it sometimes burns long and hard.” He frowned, and a fighting look came into his face.
“Then you know all that is working against you in Manitou—working harder than ever before?”
“I think I do, but I probably don’t know all. Have you any special news about it?”
“Felix Marchand is spending money among the men. They are going on strike on your railways and in the mills.”
“What mills—in Manitou?” he asked abruptly. “In both towns.”
He laughed harshly. “That’s a tall order,” he said sharply. “Both towns—I don’t think so, not yet.”
“A sympathetic strike is what he calls it,” she rejoined.
“Yes, a row over some imagined grievance on the railway, and all the men in all the factories to strike—that’s the new game of the modern labour agitator! Marchand has been travelling in France,” he added disdainfully, “but he has brought his goods to the wrong shop. What do the priests—what does Monseigneur Lourde say to it all?”
“I am not a Catholic,” she replied gravely. “I’ve heard, though, that Monseigneur is trying to stop the trouble. But—” She paused.
“Yes—but?” he asked. “What were you going to say?”
“But there are many roughs in Manitou, and Felix Marchand makes friends with them. I don’t think the priests will be able to help much in the end, and if it is to be Manitou against Lebanon, you can’t expect a great deal.”
“I never expect more than I get—generally less,” he answered grimly; and he moved the gun about on his knees restlessly, fingering the lock and the trigger softly.
“I am sure Felix Marchand means you harm,” she persisted.
“Personal harm?”
“Yes.”
He laughed sarcastically again. “We are not in Bulgaria or Sicily,” he rejoined, his jaw hardening; “and I can take care of myself. What makes you say he means personal harm? Have you heard anything?”
“No, nothing, but I feel it is so. That day at the Hospital Fete he looked at you in a way that told me. I think such instincts are given to some people and some races. You read books—I read people. I wanted to warn you, and I do so. This has been lucky in a way, this meeting. Please don’t treat what I’ve said lightly. Your plans are in danger and you also.” Was the psychic and fortune-telling instinct of the Romany alive in her and working involuntarily, doing that faithfully which her people did so faithlessly? The darkness which comes from intense feeling had gathered underneath her eyes, and gave them a look of pensiveness not in keeping with the glow of her perfect health, the velvet of her cheek.
“Would you mind telling me where you got your information?” he asked presently.
“My father heard here and there, and I, also, and some I got from old Madame Thibadeau, who is a friend of mine. I talk with her more than with any one else in Manitou. First she taught me how to crochet, but she teaches me many other things, too.”
“I know the old girl by sight. She is a character. She would know a lot, that woman.”
He paused, seemed about to speak, hesitated, then after a moment hastily said: “A minute ago you spoke of having the instinct of your race, or something like that. What is your race? Is it Irish, or—do you mind my asking? Your English is perfect, but there is something—something—”
She turned away her head, a flush spreading over her face. She was unprepared for the question. No one had ever asked it directly of her since they had come to Manitou. Whatever speculation there had been, she had never been obliged to tell any one of what race she was. She spoke English with no perceptible accent, as she spoke Spanish, Italian, French, Hungarian and Greek; and there was nothing in her speech marking her as different from the ordinary Western woman. Certainly she would have been considered pure English among the polyglot population of Manitou.
What must she say? What was it her duty to say? She was living the life of a British woman, she was as much a Gorgio in her daily existence as this man be side her. Manitou was as much home—nay, it was a thousand times more home—than the shifting habitat of the days when they wandered from the Caspians to John o’ Groat’s.
For years all traces of the past had been removed as completely as though the tide had washed over them; for years it had been so, until the fateful day when she ran the Carillon Rapids. That day saw her whole horizon alter; that day saw this man beside her enter on the stage of her life. And on that very day, also, came Jethro Fawe out of the Past and demanded her return.
That had been a day of Destiny. The old, panting, unrealized, tempestuous longing was gone. She was as one who saw danger and faced it, who had a fight to make and would make it.
What would happen if she told this man that she was a Gipsy—the daughter of a Gipsy ruler, which was no more than being head of a clan of the world’s transients, the leader of the world’s nomads. Money—her father had that, at least—much money; got in ways that could not bear the light at times, yet, as the world counts things, not dishonestly; for more than one great minister in a notable country in Europe had commissioned him, more than one ruler and crowned head had used him when “there was trouble in the Balkans,” or the “sick man of Europe” was worse, or the Russian Bear came prowling. His service had ever been secret service, when he lived the life of the caravan and the open highway. He had no stable place among the men of all nations, and yet secret rites and mysteries and a language which was known from Bokhara to Wandsworth, and from Waikiki to Valparaiso, gave him dignity of a kind, clothed him with importance.
Yet she wanted to tell this man beside her the whole truth, and see what he would do. Would he turn his face away in disgust? What had she a right to tell? She knew well that her father would wish her to keep to that secrecy which so far had sheltered them—at least until Jethro Fawe’s coming.
At last she turned and looked him in the eyes, the flush gone from her face.
“I’m not Irish—do I look Irish?” she asked quietly, though her heart was beating unevenly.
“You look more Irish than anything else, except, maybe, Slav or Hungarian—or Gipsy,” he said admiringly and unwittingly.
“I have Gipsy blood in me,” she answered slowly, “but no Irish or Hungarian blood.”
“Gipsy—is that so?” he said spontaneously, as she watched him so intently that the pulses throbbed at her temples.
A short time ago Fleda might have announced her origin defiantly, now her courage failed her. She did not wish him to be prejudiced against her.
“Well, well,” he added, “I only just guessed at it, because there’s something unusual and strong in you, not because your eyes are so dark and your hair so brown.”
“Not because of my ‘wild beauty’—I thought you were going to say that,” she added ironically and a little defiantly. “I got some verses by post the other day from one of your friends in Lebanon—a stock-rider I think he was, and they said I had a ‘wild beauty’ and a ‘savage sweetness.’”
He laughed, yet he suddenly saw her sensitive vigilance, and by instinct he felt that she was watching for some sign of shock or disdain on his part; yet in truth he cared no more whether she had Gipsy blood in her than he would have done if she had said she was a daughter of the Czar.
“Men do write that kind of thing,” he added cheerfully, “but it’s quite harmless. There was a disease at college we called adjectivitis. Your poet friend had it. He could have left out the ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ and he’d have been pleasant, and truthful too—no, I apologize.”
He had seen her face darken under the compliment, and he hastened to put it right.
“I loved a Gipsy once,” he added whimsically to divert attention from his mistake, and with so genuine a sympathy in his voice that she was disarmed. “I was ten and she was fifty at least. Oh, a wonderful woman! I had a boy friend, a fat, happy, little joker he was; his name was Charley Long. Well, this woman was his aunt. When she moved through the town people looked twice. She was tall and splendidly made, and her manner—oh, as if she owned the place. She did own a lot—she had more money than any one else thereabouts, anyhow. It was the tallest kind of a holiday when Charley and I walked out to the big white house-golly, but it was white—to visit her! We didn’t eat much the day before we went to see her; and we didn’t eat much the day after, either. She used to feed us—I wish I could eat like that now! I can see her brown eyes following us about, full of fire, but soft and kind, too. She had a great temper, they said, but everybody liked her, and some loved her. She’d had one girl, but she died of consumption, got camping out in bad weather. Aunt Cynthy—that was what we called her, her name being Cynthia—never got over her girl’s death. She blamed herself for it. She had had those fits of going back to the open-for weeks at a time. The girl oughtn’t to have been taken to camp out. She was never strong, and it was the wrong place and the wrong time of year—all right in August and all wrong in October.
“Well, always after her girl’s death Aunt Cynthy was as I knew her, being good to us youngsters as no one else ever was, or could be. Her tea-table was a sight; and the rest of the meals were banquets. The first time I ever ate hedgehog was at her place. A little while ago, just before you came, I thought of her. A hedgehog crossed the path here, and it brought those days back to me—Charley Long and Aunt Cynthy and all. Yes, the first time I ever ate hedgehog; was in Aunt Cynthy’s house. Hi-yi, as old Tekewani says, but it was good!”
“What is the Romany word for hedgehog?” Fleda asked in a low tone.
“Hotchewitchi,” he replied instantly. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is right,” she answered, and her eyes had a far-away look, but there was a kind of trouble at her mouth.
“Do you speak Romany?” she added a little breathlessly.
“No, no. I only picked up words I heard Aunt Cynthy use now and then when she was in the mood.”
“What was the history of Aunt Cynthy?”
“I only know what Charley Long told me. Aunt Cynthy was the daughter of a Gipsy—they say the only Gipsy in that part of the country at the time—who used to buy and sell horses, and travel in a big van as comfortable as a house. The old man suddenly died on the farm of Charley’s uncle. In a month the uncle married the girl. She brought him thirty thousand dollars.”
Fleda knew that this man who had fired her spirit for the first time had told his childhood story to show her the view he took of her origin; but she did not like him less for that, though she seemed to feel a chasm between them still. The new things moving in her were like breezes that stir the trees, not like the wind turning the windmill which grinds the corn. She had scarcely yet begun to grind the corn of life.
She did not know where she was going, what she would find, or where the new trail would lead her. The Past dogged her footsteps, hung round her like the folds of a garment. Even as she rejected it, it asserted its power, troubled her, angered her, humiliated her, called to her.
She was glad of this meeting with Ingolby. It had helped her. She had set out to do a thing she dreaded, and it was easier now than it would have been if they had not met. She had been on her way to the Hut in the Wood, and now the dread of the visit to Jethro Fawe had diminished. The last voice she would hear before she entered Jethro Fawe’s prison was that of the man who represented to her, however vaguely, the life which must be her future—the settled life, the life of Society and not of the Saracen.
After he had told his boyhood story they sat in silence for a moment or two, then she rose, and, turning to him, was about to speak. At that instant there came distinctly through the wood a faint, trilling sound. Her face paled a little, and the words died upon her lips. Ingolby, having turned his head as though to listen, did not see the change in her face, and she quickly regained her self-control.
“I heard that sound before,” he said, “and I thought from your look you heard it, too. It’s funny. It is singing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s singing,” she answered.
“Who is it—some of the heathen from the Reservation?”
“Yes, some of the heathen,” she answered.
“Has Tekewani got a lodge about here?”
“He had one here in the old days.”
“And his people go to it still-was that where you were going when I broke in on you?”
“Yes, I was going there. I am a heathen, also, you know.”
“Well, I’ll be a heathen, too, if you’ll show me how; if you think I’d pass for one. I’ve done a lot of heathen things in my time.”
She gave him her hand to say good-bye. “Mayn’t I go with you?” he asked.
“‘I must finish my journey alone,’” she answered slowly, repeating a line from the first English book she had ever read.
“That’s English enough,” he responded with a laugh. “Well, if I mustn’t go with you I mustn’t, but my respects to Robinson Crusoe.” He slung the gun into the hollow of his arm. “I’d like much to go with you,” he urged.
“Not to-day,” she answered firmly.
Again the voice came through the woods, a little louder now.
“It sounds like a call,” he remarked.
“It is a call,” she answered—“the call of the heathen.”
An instant after she had gone on, with a look half-smiling, half-forbidding, thrown over her shoulder at him.
“I’ve a notion to follow her,” he said eagerly, and he took a step in her direction.
Suddenly she turned and came back to him. “Your plans are in danger—don’t forget Felix Marchand,” she said, and then turned from him again.
“Oh, I’ll not forget,” he answered, and waved his cap after her. “No, I’ll not forget monsieur,” he added sharply, and he stepped out with a light of battle in his eyes.
CHAPTER VII. IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE
As Fleda wound her way through the deeper wood, remembering the things which had just been said between herself and Ingolby, the colour came and went in her face. To no man had she ever talked so long and intimately, not even in the far-off days when she lived the Romany life.
Then, as daughter of the head of all the Romanys, she had her place apart; and the Romany lads had been few who had talked with her even as a child. Her father had jealously guarded her until the time when she fell under the spell and influence of Lady Barrowdale. Here, by the Sagalac, she had moved among this polyglot people with an assurance of her own separateness which was the position of every girl in the West, but developed in her own case to the nth degree.
Never before had she come so near—not to a man, but to what concerned a man; and never had a man come so near to her or what concerned her inmost life. It was not a question of opportunity or temptation—these always attend the footsteps of those who would adventure; but for long she had fenced herself round with restrictions of her own making; and the secrecy and strangeness of her father’s course had made this not only possible, but in a sense imperative.
The end to that had come. Gaiety, daring, passion, elation, depression, were alive in her now, and in a sense had found an outlet in a handful of days—indeed since the day when Jethro Fawe and Max Ingolby had come into her life, each in his own way, for good or for evil. If Ingolby came for good, then Jethro Fawe came for evil. She would have revolted at the suggestion that Jethro Fawe came for good.
Yet, during the last few days, she had been drawn again and again towards the hut in the wood. It was as though a power stronger than herself had ordered her not to wander far from where the Romany claimant of herself awaited his fate. As though Jethro knew she was drawn towards him, he had sung the Gipsy songs which she and Ingolby had heard in the distance. He might have shouted for relief in the hope of attracting the attention of some passer-by, and so found release and brought confusion and perhaps punishment to Gabriel Druse; but that was not possible to him. First and last he was a Romany, good or bad; and it was his duty to obey his Ry of Rys, the only rule which the Romany acknowledged. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him,” he would have said, if he had ever heard the phrase; but in his stubborn way he made the meaning of the phrase the pivot of his own action. If he could but see Fleda face to face, he made no doubt that something would accrue to his advantage. He would not give up the hunt without a struggle.
Twice a day Gabriel Druse had placed food and water inside the door of the hut and locked him fast again, but had not spoken to him save once, and then but to say that his fate had not yet been determined. Jethro’s reply had been that he was in no haste, that he could wait for what he came to get; that it was his own—‘ay bor’! it was his own, and God or devil could not prevent the thing meant to be from the beginning of the world.
He did not hear Fleda approach the hut; he was singing to himself a song he had learned in Montenegro. There the Romany was held in high regard, because of the help his own father had given to the Montenegrin people, fighting for their independence, by admirable weapons of Gipsy workmanship, setting all the Gipsies in that part of the Balkans at work to supply them.
This was the song he sang
“He gave his soul for a thousand days,
The sun was his in the sky,
His feet were on the neck of the world
He loved his Romany chi.
“He sold his soul for a thousand days,
By her side to walk, in her arms to lie;
His soul might burn, but her lips were his,
And the heart of his Romany chi.”
He repeated the last two lines into a rising note of exultation:
“His soul might burn, but her lips were his,
And the heart of his Romany chi.”
The key suddenly turned in the lock, the door opened on the last words of the refrain, and, without hesitation, Fleda stepped inside, closing the door behind her.
“‘Mi Duvel’, but who would think—ah, did you hear me call then?” he asked, rising from the plank couch where he had been sitting. He showed his teeth in a smile which was meant to be a welcome, but it had an involuntary malice.
“I heard you singing,” she answered composedly, “but I do not come here because I’m called.”
“But I do,” he rejoined. “You called me from over the seas, and I came. I was in the Balkans; there was trouble—Servia, Montenegro, and Austria were rattling the fire-irons again, and there was I as my father was before me. But I heard you calling, and I came.”
“You never heard me call, Jethro Fawe,” she returned quietly. “My calling of you is as silent as the singing of the stars, where you are concerned. And the stars do not sing.”
“But the stars do sing, and you call just the same,” he responded with a twist to his moustache, and posing against the wall. “I’ve heard the stars sing. What’s the noise they make in the heart, if it’s not singing? You don’t hear with the ears only. The heart hears. It’s only a manner of speaking, this talk about the senses. One sense can do the same as all can do and a Romany ought to know how to use one or all. When your heart called I heard it, and across the seas I came. And by long and by last, but I was right in coming.”
His impudence at once irritated her and provoked her admiration. She knew by instinct how false he was, and how a lie was as common with him as the truth; but his submission to her father, his indifference to his imprisonment, forced her interest, even as she was humiliated by the fact that he was sib to her, bound by ties of clan and blood apart from his monstrous claim of marriage. He was indeed such a man as a brainless or sensual woman could yield to with ease. He had an insinuating animal grace, that physical handsomeness which marks so many of the Tziganies who fill the red coats of a Gipsy musical sextette! He was not distinguished, yet there was an intelligence in his face, a daring at his lips and chin, which, in the discipline and conventions of organized society, would have made him superior. Now, with all his sleek handsomeness, he looked a cross between a splendid peasant and a chevalier of industry.
She compared him instinctively with Ingolby the Gorgio, as she looked at him. What was it made the difference between the two? It was the world in a man—personality, knowledge of life, the culture of the thousand things which make up civilization: it was personality got from life and power in contest with the ordered world.
Yet was this so after all? Tekewani was only an Indian brave who lived on the bounty of a government, and yet he had presence and an air of command. Tekewani had been a nomad; he had not been bound to one place, settled in one city, held subservient to one flag. But, no, she was wrong: Tekewani had been the servant and child of a system which was as fixed and historical as that of Russia or Spain. He belonged to a people who had traditions and laws of their own; organized communities moving here and there, but carrying with them their system, their laws and their national feeling.
There was the difference. This Romany was the child of irresponsibility, the being that fed upon life, that did not feed life; that left one place in the world to escape into another; that squeezed one day dry, threw it away, and then went seeking another day to bleed; for ever fleeing from yesterday, and using to-day only as a camping-ground. Suddenly, however, she came to a stop in her reflections. Her father, Gabriel Druse, was of the same race as this man, the same unorganized, irresponsible, useless race, with no weight of civic or social duty upon its shoulders—where did he stand? Was he no better than such as Jethro Fawe? Was he inferior to such as Ingolby, or even Tekewani?
She realized that in her father’s face there was the look of one who had no place in the ambitious designs of men, who was not a builder, but a wayfarer. She had seen the look often of late, and had never read it until now, when Jethro Fawe stared at her with the boldness of possession, with the insolence of a soul of lust which had had its victories.
She read his look, and while one part of her shrank from him as from some noisome thing, another part of her—to her dismay and anger—understood him, and did not resent him. It was the Past dragging at her life. It was inherited predisposition, the unregulated passions of her forebears, the mating of the fields, the generated dominance of the body, which was not to be commanded into obscurity, but must taunt and tempt her while her soul sickened. She put a hand on herself. She must make this man realize once and for all that they were as far apart as Adam and Cagliostro. “I never called to you,” she said at last. “I did not know of your existence, and, if I had, then I certainly shouldn’t have called.”
“The Gorgios have taken away your mind, or you’d understand,” he replied coolly. “Your soul calls and those that understand come. It isn’t that you know who hears or who is coming—till he comes.”
“A call to all creation!” she answered disdainfully. “Do you think you can impress me by saying things like that?”
“Why not? It’s true. Wherever you went in all these years the memory of you kept calling me, my little ‘rinkne rakli’—my pretty little girl, made mine by the River Starzke over in the Roumelian country.”
“You heard what my father said—”
“I heard what the Duke Gabriel said—‘Mi Duvel’, I heard enough what he said, and I felt enough what he did!”
He laughed, and began to roll a cigarette mechanically, keeping his eyes fixed on her, however.
“You heard what my father said and what I said, and you will learn that it is true, if you live long enough,” she added meaningly.
A look of startled perception flashed into his eyes. “If I live long enough, I’ll turn you, my mad wife, into my Romany queen and the blessing of my ‘tan’.”
“Don’t mistake what I mean,” she urged. “I shall never be ruler of the Romanys. I shall never hear—”
“You’ll hear the bosh played-fiddle, they call it in these heathen places—at your second wedding with Jethro Fawe,” he rejoined insolently, lighting his cigarette. “Home you’ll come with me soon—‘ay bor’!”
“Listen to me,” she answered with anger tingling in every nerve and fibre. “I come of your race, I was what you are, a child of the hedge and the wood and the road; but that is all done. Home, you say! Home—in a tent by the roadside or—”
“As your mother lived—where you were bornwell, well, but here’s a Romany lass that’s forgot her cradle!”
“I have forgotten nothing. I have only moved on. I have only seen that there is a better road to walk than that where people, always looking behind lest they be followed, and always looking in front to find refuge, drop the patrin in the dust or the grass or the bushes for others to follow after—always going on and on because they dare not go back.”
Suddenly he threw his cigarette on the ground, and put his heel upon it in fury real or assumed. “Great Heaven and Hell,” he exclaimed, “here’s a Romany has sold her blood to the devil! And this is the daughter of Gabriel Druse, King and Duke of all the Romanys, him with ancestor King Panuel, Duke of Little Egypt, who had Sigismund, and Charles the Great, and all the kings for friends. By long and by last, but this is a tale to tell to the Romanys of the world!” For reply she went to the door and opened it wide. “Then go and tell it, Jethro Fawe, to all the world. Tell them I am the renegade daughter of Gabriel Druse, ruler of them all. Tell them there is no fault in him, and that he will return to his own people in his own time, but that I, Fleda Druse, will never return—never! Now, get you gone from here.”
The sunlight broke through the trees, and fell in a narrow path of light upon the doorway. A little grey bird fluttered into the radiance and came tripping across the threshold; a whippoorwill called in the ashtrees; and the sweet smell of the thick woodland, of the bracken and fern, crept into the room. The balm of a perfect evening of Summer was upon the face of nature. The world seemed untroubled and serene; but in this hidden but two stormy spirits broke the peace to which the place and the time were all entitled.
After Fleda’s scornful words of release and dismissal, Jethro stood for a moment confounded and dismayed. He had not reckoned with this. During their talk it had come to him how simple it would be to overpower any check to his exit, how devilishly easy to put the girl at a disadvantage; but he drove the thought from him. In the first place, he was by no means sure that escape was what he wanted—not yet, at any rate; in the second place, if Gabriel Druse passed the word along the subterranean wires of the Romany world that Jethro Fawe should vanish, he would not long cumber the ground.
Yet it was not cowardice or fear of consequences which had held him back; it was a staggering admiration for this girl who had been given to him in marriage so many years ago. He had fared far and wide in his adventures and amours when he had gold in plenty; and he had swung more than one Gorgio woman in the wild dance of sentiment, dazzling them by the splendour of his passion. The fire gleaming in his dark eyes lighted a face which would have made memorable a picture by Guido. He had fared far and wide, but he had never seen a woman who had seized his imagination as this girl was doing; who roused in him, not the old hot desire, but the hungry will to have a ‘tan’ of his own, and go travelling down the world with one who alone could satisfy him for all his days.
As he sat in this improvised woodland prison he had had visions of a hundred glades and valleys through which he had passed in days gone by—in England, in Spain, in Italy, in Roumania, in Austria, in Australia, in India—where his camp-fires had burned. In his visions he had seen her—Fleda Fawe, not Fleda Druse—laying the cloth and bringing out the silver cups, or stretching the Turkey rugs upon the ground to make a couch for two bright-eyed lovers to whom the night was as the day, radiant and full of joy. He had shut his eyes and beheld hillsides where abandoned castles stood, and the fox and the squirrel and the hawk gave shade and welcome to the dusty pilgrims of the road; or, when the wild winds blew in winter, gave shelter and wood for the fire, and a sense of homeliness among the companionable trees.
He had seen himself and this beautiful Romany ‘chi’ at some village fair, while the lesser Romany folk told fortunes, or bought and sold horses, and the lesser still tinkered or worked in gold or brass; he had seen them both in a great wagon with bright furnishings and brass-girt harness on their horses, lording it over all, rich, dominant and admired. In his visions he had even seen a Romany babe carried in his arms to a Christian church and there baptized in grandeur as became the child of the head of the people. His imagination had also seen his own tombstone in some Christian churchyard near to the church porch, where he would not be lonely when he was dead, but could hear the gossip of the people as they went in and out of church; and on the tombstone some such inscription as he had seen once at Pforzheim—“To the high-born Lord Johann, Earl of Little Egypt, to whose soul God be gracious and merciful.”
To be sure, it was a strange thing for a Romany to be buried in a Gorgio churchyard; but it was what had chanced to many great men of the Romanys, such as the high-born Lord Panuel at Steinbrock, and Peter of Kleinschild at Mantua—all of whom had great emblazoned monuments in Christian churches, just to show that in all-levelling death they condescended from high estate to mingle their ashes with the dust of the Gorgio.
He had sought out his chieftain here in the new world in a spirit of adventure, cupidity and desire. He had come like one who betrays, but he acknowledged to a higher force than his own and to superior rights when Gabriel Druse’s strong arm brought him low; and, waking to life and consciousness again, he was aware that another force also had levelled him to the earth. That force was this woman’s spirit which now gave him his freedom so scornfully; who bade him begone and tell their people everywhere that she was no longer a Romany, while she would go, no doubt—a thousand times without doubt unless he prevented it—to the swaggering Gorgio who had saved her on the Sagalac.
She stood waiting for him to go, as though he could not refuse his freedom. As a bone is tossed to a dog, she gave it to him.
“You have no right to set me free,” he said coolly now. “I am not your prisoner. You tell me to take that word to the Romany people—that you leave them for ever. I will not do it. You are a Romany, and a Romany you must stay. You belong nowhere else. If you married a Gorgio, you would still sigh for the camp beneath the stars, for the tambourine and the dance—”
“And the fortune-telling,” she interjected sharply, “and the snail-soup, and the dirty blanket under the hedge, and the constable on the road behind, always just behind, watching, waiting, and—”
“The hedge is as clean as the dirty houses where the low-class Gorgios sleep. In faith, you are a long way from the River Starzke!” he added. “But you are my mad wife, and I must wait till you’ve got sense again.”
He sat down on the plank couch, and began to roll a cigarette once more.
“You come fitted out like a Gorgio lass now, and you look like a Gorgio countess, and you have the manners of an Archduchess; but that’s nothing; it will peel off like a blister when it’s pricked. Underneath is the Romany. It’s there, and it will show red and angry when we’ve stripped off the Gorgio. It’s the way with a woman, always acting, always imagining herself something else than what she is—if she’s a beggar fancying herself a princess; if she’s a princess fancying herself a flower-girl. ‘Mi Duvel’, but I know you all!”
Every word he said went home. She knew that there was truth in what he said, and that beneath all was the Romany blood; but she meant to conquer it. She had made her vow to one in England that she loved, and she would not change. Whatever happened, she had finished with Romany life, and to go back would only mean black tragedy in the end. A month ago it was a vow and an inner desire which made her determined; to-day it was the vow and a man—a Gorgio whom she had but now left in the woods, gazing after her with the look which a woman so well interprets.
“You mean you won’t go free from here? Because I was a Romany, and wish you no harm, I have come here to-day to let you go where you will—to go back to the place where the patrins show where your people travel. I set you free, and you say what you think will hurt and shame me. You have a cruel soul. You would torture any woman till she died. You shall not torture me. You are as far from me as the River Starzke. I could have let you stay here for my father to deal with, but I have set you free. I open the door for you, though you are nothing to me, and I am no more to you than one of the women you have fooled and left to eat the vile bread of the forsaken. You have been, you are a wolf—a wolf.”
He got to his feet again, and the blood rushed to his face, so that it seemed almost black. A torrent of mad words gathered in his throat, but they choked him, and in the pause his will asserted itself. He became cool and deliberate.
“You are right, my girl, I have sucked the orange and thrown the skin away, and I’ve picked flowers and cast them by, but that was before the first day I saw you as you now are. You were standing by the Sagalac looking out to the west where the pack-trains were travelling into the sun over the mountains, and you had your hand on the neck of your pony. I was not ten feet away from you, behind a juniper-bush. I looked at you, and I wished that I had never seen a woman before and could look at the world as you did then—it was like water from a spring, that look. You are right in what you say. By long and by last I had a hard hand, and when I left what I’d struck down I never looked back. But I saw you, and I wished I had never seen a woman before. You have been here alone with me with that door shut. Have I said or done anything that a Gorgio duke wouldn’t do? Ah, God’s love, but you were bold to come! I married you by the River Starzke; I looked upon you as my wife; and here you were alone with me! I had my rights, and I had been trampled underfoot by your father—”
“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.”
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.
“There’s an infernal lie here about me,” he replied. “They say that I—”
He proceeded to explain the misstatement, as Ingolby studied the paper carefully, for Rockwell was a man worth any amount of friendship.
“It’s a lie, of course,” Ingolby said firmly as he finished the paragraph. “Well?”
“Well, I’ve got to deal with it.”
“You mean you’re going to deny it in the papers?”
“Exactly.”
“I wouldn’t, Rockwell.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No. You never can really overtake a newspaper lie. Lots of the people who read the lie don’t see the denial. Your truth doesn’t overtake the lie—it’s a scarlet runner.”
“I don’t see that. When you’re lied about, when a lie like that—”
“You can’t overtake it, Boss. It’s no use. It’s sensational, it runs too fast. Truth’s slow-footed. When a newspaper tells a lie about you, don’t try to overtake it, tell another.”
He blinked with quizzical good-humour. Rockwell could not resist the audacity. “I don’t believe you’d do it just the same,” he retorted decisively, and laughing.
“I don’t try the overtaking anyhow; I get something spectacular in my own favour to counteract the newspaper lie.”
“In what way?”
“For instance, if they said I couldn’t ride a moke at a village steeplechase, I’d at once publish the fact that, with a jack-knife, I’d killed two pumas that were after me. Both things would be lies, but the one would neutralize the other. If I said I could ride a moke, nobody would see it, and if it were seen it wouldn’t make any impression; but to say I killed two mountain-lions with a jack-knife on the edge of a precipice, with the sun standing still to look at it, is as good as the original lie and better; and I score. My reputation increases.”
Nathan Rockwell’s equilibrium was restored. “You’re certainly a wonder,” he declared. “That’s why you’ve succeeded.”
“Have I succeeded?”
“Thirty-three-and what you are!”
“What am I?”
“Pretty well master here.”
“Rockwell, that’d do me a lot of harm if it was published. Don’t say it again. This is a democratic country. They’d kick at my being called master of anything, and I’d have to tell a lie to counteract it.”
“But it’s the truth, and it hasn’t to be overtaken.”
A grim look came into Ingolby’s face. “I’d like to be master-boss of life and death, holder of the sword and balances, the Sultan, here just for one week. I’d change some things. I’d gag some people that are doing terrible harm. It’s a real bad business. The scratch-your-face period is over, and we’re in the cut-your-throat epoch.”
Rockwell nodded assent, opened the paper again, and pointed to a column. “I expect you haven’t seen that. To my mind, in the present state of things, it’s dynamite.”
Ingolby read the column hastily. It was the report of a sermon delivered the evening before by the Rev. Reuben Tripple, the evangelical minister of Lebanon. It was a paean of the Scriptures accompanied by a crazy charge that the Roman Church forbade the reading of the Bible. It had a tirade also about the Scarlet Woman and Popish idolatry.
Ingolby made a savage gesture. “The insatiable Christian beast!” he growled in anger. “There’s no telling what this may do. You know what those fellows are over in Manitou. The place is full of them going to the woods, besides the toughs at the mills and in the taverns. They’re not psalm-singing, and they don’t keep the Ten Commandments, but they’re savagely fanatical, and—”
“And there’s the funeral of an Orangeman tomorrow. The Orange Lodge attends in regalia.”
Ingolby started and looked at the paper again. “The sneaking, praying liar,” he said, his jaw setting grimly. “This thing’s a call to riot. There’s an element in Lebanon as well that’d rather fight than eat. It’s the kind of lie that—”
“That you can’t overtake,” said the Boss Doctor appositely; “and I don’t know that even you can tell another that’ll neutralize it. Your prescription won’t work here.”
An acknowledging smile played at Ingolby’s mouth. “We’ve got to have a try. We’ve got to draw off the bull with a red rag somehow.”
“I don’t see how myself. That Orange funeral will bring a row on to us. I can just see the toughs at Manitou when they read this stuff, and know about that funeral.”
“It’s announced?”
“Yes, here’s an invitation in the Budget to Orangemen to attend the funeral of a brother sometime of the banks of the Boyne!”
“Who’s the Master of the Lodge?” asked Ingolby. Rockwell told him, urging at the same time that he see the Chief Constable as well, and Monseigneur Lourde at Manitou.
“That’s exactly what I mean to do—with a number of other things. Between ourselves, Rockwell, I’d have plenty of lint and bandages ready for emergencies if I were you.”
“I’ll see to it. That collision the other day was serious enough, and it’s gradually becoming a vendetta. Last night one of the Lebanon champions lost his nose.”
“His nose—how?”
“A French river-driver bit a third of it off.”
Ingolby made a gesture of disgust. “And this is the twentieth century!”
They had moved along the street until they reached a barber-shop, from which proceeded the sound of a violin. “I’m going in here,” Ingolby said. “I’ve got some business with Berry, the barber. You’ll keep me posted as to anything important?”
“You don’t need to say it. Shall I see the Master of the Orange Lodge or the Chief Constable for you?” Ingolby thought for a minute. “No, I’ll tackle them myself, but you get in touch with Monseigneur Lourde. He’s grasped the situation, and though he’d like to have Tripple boiled in oil, he doesn’t want broken heads and bloodshed.”
“And Tripple?”
“I’ll deal with him at once. I’ve got a hold on him. I never wanted to use it, but I will now without compunction. I have the means in my pocket. They’ve been there for three days, waiting for the chance.”
“It doesn’t look like war, does it?” said Rockwell, looking up the street and out towards the prairie where the day bloomed like a flower. Blue above—a deep, joyous blue, against which a white cloud rested or slowly travelled westward; a sky down whose vast cerulean bowl flocks of wild geese sailed, white and grey and black, while the woods across the Sagalac were glowing with a hundred colours, giving tender magnificence to the scene. The busy eagerness of a pioneer life was still a quiet, orderly thing, so immense was the theatre for effort and movement. In these wide streets, almost as wide as a London square, there was room to move; nothing seemed huddled, pushing, or inconvenient. Even the disorder of building lost its ugly crudity in the space and the sunlight.
“The only time I get frightened in life is when things look like that,” Ingolby answered. “I go round with a life-preserver on me when it seems as if ‘all’s right with the world.’”
The violin inside the barber-shop kept scraping out its cheap music—a coon-song of the day.
“Old Berry hasn’t much business this morning,” remarked Rockwell. “He’s in keeping with this surface peace.”
“Old Berry never misses anything. What we’re thinking, he’s thinking. I go fishing when I’m in trouble; Berry plays his fiddle. He’s a philosopher and a friend.”
“You don’t make friends as other people do.”
“I make friends of all kinds. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a kind of kinship with the roughs, the no-accounts, and the rogues.”
“As well as the others—I hope I don’t intrude!”
Ingolby laughed. “You? Oh, I wish all the others were like you. It’s the highly respectable members of the community I’ve always had to watch.”
The fiddle-song came squeaking out upon the sunny atmosphere. It arrested the attention of a man on the other side of the street—a stranger in strange Lebanon. He wore a suit of Western clothes as a military man wears mufti, if not awkwardly, yet with a manner not wholly natural—the coat too tight across the chest, too short in the body. However, the man was handsome and unusual in his leopard way, with his brown curling hair and well-cared-for moustache. It was Jethro Fawe.
Attracted by the sound of the violin, he stayed his steps and smiled scornfully. Then his look fell on the two figures at the door of the barber-shop, and his eyes flashed.
Here was the man he wished to see—Max Ingolby, the man who stood between him and his Romany lass. Here was a chance of speaking face to face with the man who was robbing him. What he should do when they met must be according to circumstances. That did not matter. There was the impulse storming in his brain, and it drove him across the street as the Boss Doctor walked away, and Ingolby entered the shop. All Jethro realized was that the man who stood in his way, the big, rich, masterful Gorgio was there.
He entered the shop after Ingolby, and stood for an instant unseen. The old negro barber with his curly white head, slave-black face, and large, shrewd, meditative eyes was standing in a corner with a violin under his chin, his cheek lovingly resting against it, as he drew his bow through the last bars of the melody. He had smiled in welcome as Ingolby entered, instantly rising from his stool, but continuing to play. He would not have stopped in the middle of a tune for an emperor, and he put Ingolby higher than an emperor. For one who had been born a slave, and had still the scars of the overseer’s whip on his back, he was very independent. He cut everybody’s hair as he wanted to cut it, trimmed each beard as he wished to trim it, regardless of its owner’s wishes. If there was dissent, then his customer need not come again, that was all. There were other barbers in the place, but Berry was the master barber. To have your head massaged by him was never to be forgotten, especially if you found your hat too small for your head in the morning. Also he singed the hair with a skill and care, which had filled many a thinly covered scalp with luxuriant growth, and his hair-tonic, known as “Smilax,” gave a pleasant odour to every meeting-house or church or public hall where the people gathered. Berry was an institution even in this new Western town. He kept his place and he forced the white man, whoever he was, to keep his place.
When he saw Jethro Fawe enter the shop he did not stop playing, but his eyes searched the newcomer. Following his glance, Ingolby turned round and saw the Romany. His first impression was one of admiration, but suspicion was quickly added. He was a good judge of men, and there was something secluded about the man which repelled him. Yet he was interested. The dark face had a striking racial peculiarity.
The music died away, and old Berry lowered the fiddle from his chin and gave his attention to the Romany.
“Yeth-’ir?” he said questioningly.
For an instant Jethro was confused. When he entered the shop he had not made up his mind what he should do. It had been mere impulse and the fever of his brain. As old Berry spoke, however, his course opened out.
“I heard. I am a stranger. My fiddle is not here. My fingers itch for the cat-gut. Eh?”
The look in old Berry’s face softened a little. His instinct had been against his visitor, and he had been prepared to send him to another shop-besides, not every day could he talk to the greatest man in the West.
“If you can play, there it is,” he said after a slight pause, and handed the fiddle over.
It was true that Jethro Fawe loved the fiddle. He had played it in many lands. Twice, in order to get inside the palace of a monarch for a purpose—once in Berlin and once in London—he had played the second violin in a Tzigany orchestra. He turned the fiddle slowly round, looking at it with mechanical intentness. Through the passion of emotion the sure sense of the musician was burning. His fingers smoothed the oval brown breast of the instrument with affection. His eyes found joy in the colour of the wood, which had all the graded, merging tints of Autumn leaves.
“It is old—and strange,” he said, his eyes going from Berry to Ingolby and back again with a veiled look, as though he had drawn down blinds before his inmost thoughts. “It was not made by a professional.”
“It was made in the cotton-field by a slave,” observed old Berry sharply, yet with a content which overrode antipathy to his visitor.
Jethro put the fiddle to his chin, and drew the bow twice or thrice sweepingly across the strings. Such a sound had never come from Berry’s violin before. It was the touch of a born musician who certainly had skill, but who had infinitely more of musical passion.
“Made by a slave in the cotton-fields!” Jethro said with a veiled look, and as though he was thinking of something else: “‘Dordi’, I’d like to meet a slave like that!”
At the Romany exclamation Ingolby swept the man with a searching look. He had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill. Was the man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here? Had it anything to do with Gabriel Druse and his daughter? But no—what was there strange in the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle? Here and there in the West during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany faces. He looked to see the effect of the stranger’s remark on old Berry.
“I was a slave, and I was like that. My father made that fiddle in the cotton-fields of Georgia,” the aged barber said.
The son of a race which for centuries had never known country or flag or any habitat, whose freedom was the soul of its existence, if it had a soul; a freedom defying all the usual laws of social order—the son of that race looked at the negro barber with something akin to awe. Here was a man who had lived a life which was the staring antithesis of his own, under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was constricted to the limits of an estate; who was at the will of one man, to be sold and trafficked with like a barrel of herrings, to be worked at another’s will—and at no price! This was beyond the understanding of Jethro Fawe. But awe has the outward look of respect, and old Berry who had his own form of vanity, saw that he had had a rare effect on the fellow, who evidently knew all about fiddles. Certainly that was a wonderful sound he had produced from his own cotton-field fiddle.
In the pause Ingolby said to Jethro Fawe, “Play something, won’t you? I’ve got business here with Mr. Berry, but five minutes of good music won’t matter. We’d like to hear him play—wouldn’t we, Berry?”
The old man nodded assent. “There’s plenty of music in the thing,” he said, “and a lot could come out in five minutes, if the right man played it.”
His words were almost like a challenge, and it reached to Jethro’s innermost nature. He would show this Gorgio robber what a Romany could do, and do as easily as the birds sing. The Gorgio was a money-master, they said, but he would find that a Romany was a master, too, in his own way. He thought of one of the first pieces he had ever heard, a rhapsody which had grown and grown, since it was first improvised by a Tzigany in Hungary. He had once played it to an English lady at the Amphitryon Club in London, and she had swooned in the arms of her husband’s best friend. He had seen men and women avert their heads when he had played it, daring not to look into each other’s eyes. He would play it now—a little of it. He would play it to her—to the girl who had set him free in the Sagalac woods, to the ravishing deserter from her people, to the only woman who had told him the truth in all his life, and who insulated his magnetism as a ground-wire insulates lightning. He would summon her here by his imagination, and tell her to note how his soul had caught the music of the spheres. He would surround himself with an atmosphere of his own. His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness and his lust should fill the barber’s shop with a flood which would drown the Gorgio raider. He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously. Then suddenly he leaned his cheek to the instrument and drew the bow across the strings with a savage softness. The old cottonfield fiddle cried out with a thrilling, exquisite pain, but muffled, as a hand at the lips turns agony into a tender moan. Some one—some spirit—in the fiddle was calling for its own.
Five minutes later-a five minutes in which people gathered at the door of the shop, and heads were thrust inside in ravished wonder—the palpitating Romany lowered the fiddle from his chin, and stood for a minute looking into space, as though he saw a vision.
He was roused by old Berry’s voice. “Das a fiddle I wouldn’t sell for a t’ousand dollars. If I could play like dat I wouldn’t sell it for ten t’ousand. You kin play a fiddle to make it worth a lot—you.”
The Romany handed back the instrument. “It’s got something inside it that makes it better than it is. It’s not a good fiddle, but it has something—ah, man alive, it has something!” It was as though he was talking to himself.
Berry made a quick, eager gesture. “It’s got the cotton-fields and the slave days in it. It’s got the whip and the stocks in it; it’s got the cry of the old man that’d never see his children ag’in. That’s what the fiddle’s got in it.”
Suddenly, in an apparent outburst of anger, he swept down on the front door and drove the gathering crowd away.
“Dis is a barber-shop,” he said with an angry wave of his hand; “it ain’t a circuse.”
One man protested. “I want a shave,” he said. He tried to come inside, but was driven back.
“I ain’t got a razor that’d cut the bristle off your face,” the old barber declared peremptorily; “and, if I had, it wouldn’t be busy on you. I got two customers, and that’s all I’m going to take befo’ I have my dinner. So you git away. There ain’t goin’ to be no more music.”
The crowd drew off, for none of them cared to offend this autocrat of the shears and razor.
Ingolby had listened to the music with a sense of being swayed by a wind which blew from all quarters of the compass at once. He loved music; it acted as a clearing-house to his mind; and he played the piano himself with the enthusiasm of a wilful amateur, who took liberties with every piece he essayed. There was something in this fellow’s playing which the great masters, such as Paganini, must have had. As the music ceased, he did not speak, but remained leaning against the great red-plush barber’s chair looking reflectively at the Romany. Berry, however, said to the still absorbed musician: “Where did you learn to play?”
The Romany started, and a flush crossed his face. “Everywhere,” he answered sullenly.
“You’ve got the thing Sarasate had,” Ingolby observed. “I only heard him play but once—in London years ago: but there’s the same something in it. I bought a fiddle of Sarasate. I’ve got it now.”
“Here in Lebanon?” The eyes of the Romany were burning. An idea had just come into his brain. Was it through his fiddling that he was going to find a way to deal with this Gorgio, who had come between him and his own?
“Only a week ago it came,” Ingolby replied. “They actually charged me Customs duty on it. I’d seen it advertised, and I made an offer and got it at last.”
“You have it here—at your house here?” asked old Berry in surprise.
“It’s the only place I’ve got. Did you think I’d put it in a museum? I can’t play it, but there it is for any one that can play. How would you like to try it?” he added to Jethro in a friendly tone. “I’d give a good deal to see it under your chin for an hour. Anyhow, I’d like to show it to you. Will you come?”
It was like him to bring matters to a head so quickly.
The Romany’s eyes glistened. “To play the Sarasate alone to you?” he asked.
“That’s it-at nine o’clock to-night, if you can.”
“I will come—yes, I will come,” Jethro answered, the lids drooping over his eyes in which were the shadows of the first murder of the created world.
“Here is my address, then.” Ingolby wrote something on his visiting-card. “My man’ll let you in, if you show that. Well, good-bye.”
The Romany took the card, and turned to leave. He had been dismissed by the swaggering Gorgio, as though he was a servant, and he had not even been asked his name, of so little account was he! He could come and play on the Sarasate to the masterful Gorgio at the hour which the masterful Gorgio fixed—think of that! He could be—a servant to the pleasure of the man who was stealing from him the wife sealed to him in the Roumelian country. But perhaps it was all for the best—yes, he would make it all for the best! As he left the shop, however, and passed down the street his mind remained in the barber-shop. He saw in imagination the masterful Gorgio in the red-plush chair, and the negro barber bending over him, with black fingers holding the Gorgio’s chin, and an open razor in the right hand lightly grasped. A flash of malicious desire came into his eyes as the vision shaped itself in his imagination, and he saw himself, instead of the negro barber, holding the Gorgio chin and looking down at the Gorgio throat with the razor, not lightly, but firmly grasped in his right hand. How was it that more throats were not cut in that way? How was it that while the scissors passed through the beard of a man’s face the points did not suddenly slip up and stab the light from helpless eyes? How was it that men did not use their chances? He went lightly down the street, absorbed in a vision which was not like the reality; but it was evidence that his visit to Max Ingolby’s house was not the visit of a virtuoso alone, but of an evil spirit.
As the Romany disappeared, Max Ingolby had his hand on the old barber’s shoulder. “I want one of the wigs you made for that theatrical performance of the Mounted Police, Berry,” he said. “Never mind what it’s for. I want it at once—one with the long hair of a French-Canadian coureur-de-bois. Have you got one?”
“Suh, I’ll send it round-no, I’ll bring it round as I come from dinner. Want the clothes, too?”
“No. I’m arranging for them with Osterhaut. I’ve sent word by Jowett.”
“You want me to know what it’s for?”
“You can know anything I know—almost, Berry. You’re a friend of the right sort, and I can trust you.”
“Yeth-’ir, I bin some use to you, onct or twict, I guess.”
“You’ll have a chance to be of use more than ever presently.”
“Suh, there’s gain’ to be a bust-up, but I know who’s comin’ out on the top. That Felix Marchand and his roughs can’t down you. I hear and see a lot, and there’s two or three things I was goin’ to put befo’ you; yeth-’ir.”
He unloaded his secret information to his friend, and was rewarded by Ingolby suddenly shaking his hand warmly.
“That’s the line,” Ingolby said decisively. “When do you go over to Manitou again to cut old Hector Marchand’s hair? Soon?”
“To-day is his day—this evening,” was the reply.
“Good. You wanted to know what the wig and the habitant’s clothes are for, Berry—well, for me to wear in Manitou. In disguise I’m going there tonight among them all, among the roughs and toughs. I want to find out things for myself. I can speak French as good as most of ‘em, and I can chew tobacco and swear with the best.”
“You suhly are a wonder,” said the old man admiringly. “How you fin’ the time I got no idee.”
“Everything in its place, Berry, and everything in its time. I’ve got a lot to do to-day, but it’s in hand, and I don’t have to fuss. You’ll not forget the wig—you’ll bring it round yourself?”
“Suh. No snoopin’ into the parcel then. But if you go to Manitou to-night, how can you have that fiddler?”
“He comes at nine o’clock. I’ll go to Manitou later. Everything in its own time.”
He was about to leave the shop when some one came bustling in. Berry was between Ingolby and the door, and for an instant he did not see who it was. Presently he heard an unctuous voice: “Ah, good day, good day, Mr. Berry. I want to have my hair cut, if you please,” it said.
Ingolby smiled. The luck was with him to-day so far. The voice belonged to the Rev. Reuben Tripple, and he would be saved a journey to the manse. Accidental meetings were better than planned interviews. Old Berry’s grizzled beard was bristling with repugnance, and he was about to refuse Mr. Tripple the hospitality of the shears when Ingolby said: “You won’t mind my having a word with Mr. Tripple first, will you, Berry? May we use your back parlour?”
A significant look from Ingolby’s eyes gave Berry his cue.
“Suh, Mr. Ingolby. I’m proud.” He opened the door of another room.
Mr. Tripple had not seen Ingolby when he entered, and he recognized him now with a little shock of surprise. There was no reason why he should not care to meet the Master Man, but he always had an uncanny feeling when his eye met that of Ingolby. His apprehension had no foundation in any knowledge, yet he had felt that Ingolby had no love for him, and this disturbed the egregious vanity of a narrow nature. His slouching, corpulent figure made an effort to resist the gesture with which Ingolby drew him to the door, but his will succumbed, and he shuffled importantly into the other room.
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.
The music swelled to a swirling storm, crashed and flooded the feelings with a sense of shipwreck and chaos, through which a voice seemed to cry-the quiver and delicate shrillness of one isolated string—and then fell a sudden silence, as though the end of all things had come; and on the silence the trembling and attenuated note which had quivered on the lonely string, rising, rising, piercing the infinite distance and sinking into silence again.
In the pause which followed the Romany stood panting, his eyes fixed on Ingolby with an evil exaltation which made him seem taller and bigger than he was, but gave him, too, a look of debauchery like that on the face of a satyr. Generations of unbridled emotion, of license of the fields and the covert showed in his unguarded features.
“What did the single cry—the motif—express?” Ingolby asked coolly. “I know there was catastrophe, the tumblings of avalanches, but the voice that cried-the soul of a lover, was it?”
The Romany’s lips showed an ugly grimace. “It was the soul of one that betrayed a lover, going to eternal tortures.”
Ingolby laughed carelessly. “It was a fine bit of work. Sarasate would have been proud of his fiddle if he could have heard. Anyhow he couldn’t have played that. Is it Gipsy music?”
“It is the music of a ‘Gipsy,’ as you call it.”
“Well, it’s worth a year’s work to hear,” Ingolby replied admiringly, yet acutely conscious of danger. “Are you a musician by trade?” he asked.
“I have no trade.” The glowing eyes kept scanning the wall where the weapons hung, and as though without purpose other than to get a pipe from the rack on the wall, Ingolby moved to where he could be prepared for any rush. It seemed absurd that there should be such a possibility; but the world was full of strange things.
“What brought you to the West?” he asked as he filled a pipe, his back almost against the wall.
“I came to get what belonged to me.”
Ingolby laughed ironically. “Most of us are here for that purpose. We think the world owes us such a lot.”
“I know what is my own.”
Ingolby lit his pipe, his eyes reflectively scanning the other.
“Have you got it again out here—your own?”
“Not yet, but I will.”
Ingolby took out his watch, and looked at it. “I haven’t found it easy getting all that belongs to me.”
“You have found it easier getting what belongs to some one else,” was the snarling response.
Ingolby’s jaw hardened. What did the fellow mean? Did he refer to money, or—was it Fleda Druse? “See here,” he said, “there’s no need to say things like that. I never took anything that didn’t belong to me, that I didn’t win, or earn or pay for—market price or ‘founder’s shares’”—he smiled grimly. “You’ve given me the best treat I’ve had in many a day. I’d walk fifty miles to hear you play my Sarasate—or even old Berry’s cotton-field fiddle. I’m as grateful as I can be, and I’d like to pay you for it; but as you’re not a professional, and it’s one gentleman to another as it were, I can only thank you—or maybe help you to get what’s your own, if you’re really trying to get it out here. Meanwhile, have a cigar and a drink.”
He was still between the Romany and the wall, and by a movement forward sought to turn Jethro to the spirit-table. Probably this manoeuvring was all nonsense, that he was wholly misreading the man; but he had always trusted his instincts, and he would not let his reason rule him entirely in such a situation. He could also ring the bell for Jim, or call to him, for while he was in the house Jim was sure to be near by; but he felt he must deal with the business alone.
The Romany did not move towards the spirit-table, and Ingolby became increasingly vigilant.
“No, I can’t pay you anything, that’s clear,” he said; “but to get your own—I’ve got some influence out here—what can I do? A stranger is up against all kinds of things if he isn’t a native, and you’re not. Your home and country’s a good way from here, eh?”
Suddenly the Romany faced him. “Yes. I come from places far from here. Where is the Romany’s home? It is everywhere in the world, but it is everywhere inside his tent. Because his country is everywhere and nowhere, his home is more to him than it is to any other. He is alone with his wife, and with his own people. Yes, and by long and by last, he will make the man pay who spoils his home. It is all he has. Good or bad, it is all he has. It is his own.”
Ingolby had a strange, disturbing premonition that he was about to hear what would startle him, but he persisted. “You said you had come here to get your own—is your home here?”
For a moment the Romany did not answer. He had worked himself into a great passion. He had hypnotized himself, he had acted for a while as though he was one of life’s realities; but suddenly there passed through his veins the chilling sense of the unreal, that he was only acting a part, as he had ever done in his life, and that the man before him could, with a wave of the hand, raise the curtain on all his disguises and pretences. It was only for an instant, however, for there swept through him the feeling that Fleda had roused in him—the first real passion, the first true love—if what such as he felt can be love—that he had ever known; and he saw her again as she was in the but in the wood defying him, ready to defend herself against him. All his erotic anger and melodramatic fervour were alive in him once more.
He was again a man with a wrong, a lover dispossessed. On the instant his veins filled with passionate blood. The Roscian strain in him had its own tragic force and reality.
“My home is where my own is, and you, have taken my own from me, as I said,” he burst out. “There was all the world for you, but I had only my music and my wife, and you have taken my wife from me. ‘Mi Duvel’, you have taken, but you shall give back again, or there will be only one of us in the world! The music I have played for you—that has told you all: the thing that was music from the beginning of Time, the will of the First of All. Fleda Druse, she was mine, she is my wife, and you, the Gorgio, come between, and she will not return to me.”
A sudden savage desire came to Ingolby to strike the man in the face—this Gipsy vagabond the husband of Fleda Druse! It was too monstrous. It was an evil lie, and yet she had said she was a Romany, and had said it with apparent shame or anxiety. She had given him no promise, had pledged no faith, had admitted no love, and yet already in his heart of hearts he thought upon her as his own. Ever since the day he had held her in his arms at the Carillon Rapids her voice had sounded in his ears, and a warmth was in his heart which had never been there in all his days. This waif of barbarism even to talk of Fleda Druse as though he was of the same sphere as herself invited punishment-but to claim her as his wife! It was shameless. An ugly mood came on him, the force that had made him what he was filled all his senses. He straightened himself; contempt of the Ishmael showed at his lips.
“I think you lie, Jethro Fawe,” he said quietly, and his eyes were hard and piercing. “Gabriel Druse’s daughter is not—never was—any wife of yours. She never called you husband. She does not belong to the refuse of the world.”
The Romany made a sudden rush towards the wall where the weapons hung, but two arms of iron were flung out and caught him, and he was hurled across the room. He crashed against a table, swayed, missed a chair where rested the Sarasate violin, then fell to the floor; but he staggered to his feet again, all his senses in chaos.
“You almost fell on the fiddle. If you had hurt it I’d have hurt you, Mr. Fawe,” Ingolby said with a grim smile. “That fiddle’s got too much in it to waste it.”
“Mi Duvel! Mi Duvel!” gasped the Romany in his fury.
“You can say that as much as you like, but if you play any more of your monkey tricks here, my Paganini, I will wring your neck,” Ingolby returned, his six feet of solid flesh making a movement of menace.
“And look,” he added, “since you are here, and I said what I meant, that I’d help you to get your own, I’ll keep my word. But don’t talk in damned riddles. Talk white men’s language. You said that Gabriel Druse’s daughter was your wife. Explain what you meant, and no nonsense.”
The Romany made a gesture of acquiescence. “She was made mine according to Romany law by the River Starzke seventeen years ago. I was the son of Lemuel Fawe, rightful King of all the Romanys. Gabriel Druse seized the headship, and my father gave him three thousand pounds that we should marry, she and I, and so bring the headship to the Fawes again when Gabriel Druse should die; and so it was done by the River Starzke in the Roumelian country.”
Ingolby winced, for the man’s words rang true. A cloud came over his face, but he said nothing. Jethro saw the momentary advantage. “You did not know?” he asked. “She did not tell you she was made my wife those years ago? She did not tell you she was the daughter of the Romany King? So it is, you see, she is afraid to tell the truth.”
Ingolby’s knitted bulk heaved with desire to injure. “Your wife—you melodious sinner! Do you think such tomfoolery has any effect in this civilized country? She is about as much your wife as I am your brother. Don’t talk your heathenish rot here. I said I’d help you to get your own, because you played the fiddle as few men can play it, and I owe you a lot for that hour’s music; but there’s nothing belonging to Gabriel Druse that belongs to you, and his daughter least of all. Look out—don’t sit on the fiddle, damn you!”
The Romany had made a motion as if to sit down on the chair where the fiddle was, but stopped short at Ingolby’s warning. For an instant Jethro had an inclination to seize the fiddle and break it across his knees. It would be an exquisite thing to destroy five thousand dollars’ worth of this man’s property at a single wrench and blow. But the spirit of the musician asserted itself before the vengeful lover could carry out his purpose; as Ingolby felt sure it would. Ingolby had purposely given the warning about the fiddle, in the belief that it might break the unwelcome intensity of the scene. He detested melodrama, and the scene came precious near to it. Men had been killed before his eyes more than once, but there had been no rodomontade even when there had been a woman in the case.
This Romany lover, however, seemed anxious to make a Sicilian drama out of his preposterous claim, and it sickened him. Who was the fellow that he should appear in the guise of a rival to himself! It was humiliating and offensive. Ingolby had his own kind of pride and vanity, and they were both hurt now. He would have been less irritable if this rival had been as good a man as himself or better. He was so much a gamester that he would have said, “Let the best man win,” and have taken his chances.
His involuntary strategy triumphed for the moment. The Romany looked at the fiddle for an instant with murderous eyes, but the cool, quiet voice of Ingolby again speaking sprayed his hot virulence.
“You can make a good musician quite often, but a good fiddle is a prize-packet from the skies,” Ingolby said. “When you get a good musician and a good fiddle together it’s a day for a salute of a hundred guns.”
Half-dazed with unregulated emotion, Jethro acted with indecision for a moment, and the fiddle was safe. But he had suffered the indignity of being flung like a bag of bones across the room, and the microbe of insane revenge was in him. It was not to be killed by the cold humour of the man who had worsted him. He returned to the attack.
“She is mine, and her father knows it is so. I have waited all these years, and the hour has come. I will—”
Ingolby’s eyes became hard and merciless again. “Don’t talk your Gipsy rhetoric. I’ve had enough. No hour has come that makes a woman do what she doesn’t want to do in a free country. The lady is free to do what she pleases here within British law, and British law takes no heed of Romany law or any other law. You’ll do well to go back to your Roumelian country or whatever it is. The lady will marry whom she likes.”
“She will never marry you,” the Romany said huskily and menacingly.
“I have never asked her, but if I do, and she said yes, no one could prevent it.”
“I would prevent it.”
“How?”
“She is a Romany: she belongs to the Romany people; I will find a way.”
Ingolby had a flash of intuition.
“You know well that if Gabriel Druse passed the word, your life wouldn’t be worth a day’s purchase. The Camorra would not be more certain or more deadly. If you do anything to hurt the daughter of Gabriel Druse, you will pay the full price, and you know it. The Romanys don’t love you better than their rightful chief.”
“I am their rightful chief.”
“Maybe, but if they don’t say so, too, you might as well be their rightful slave. You are a genius in your way. Take my advice and return to the trail of the Gipsy. Or, there’s many an orchestra would give you a good salary as leader. You’ve got no standing in this country. You can’t do anything to hurt me except try to kill me, and I’ll take my chance of that. You’d better have a drink now and go quietly home to bed. Try and understand that this is a British town, and we don’t settle our affairs by jumping from a violin rhapsody to a knife or a gun.” He jerked his head backwards towards the wall. “Those things are for ornament, not for use. Come, Fawe, have a drink and go home like a good citizen for one night only.”
The Romany hesitated, then shook his head and muttered chaotically.
“Very well,” was the decisive reply. Ingolby pressed a bell, and, in an instant, Jim Beadle was in the room. He had evidently been at the keyhole. “Jim,” he said, “show the gentleman out.”
But suddenly he caught up a box of cigars from the table and thrust it into the Romany’s hands. “They’re the best to be got this side of Havana,” he said cheerily. “They’ll help you put more fancy still into your playing. Good night. You never played better than you’ve done during the last hour, I’ll stake my life on that. Good night. Show Mr. Fawe out, Jim.”
The Romany had not time to thrust back the cigars upon his host, and dazed by the strategy of the thing, by the superior force and mind of the man who a moment ago he would have killed, he took the box and turned towards the door, taking his hat dazedly from Jim.
At the door, however, catching sight of the sly grin on the mulatto servant’s face, his rage and understanding returned to him, and he faced the masterful Gorgio once again.
“By God, I’ll have none of it!” he exclaimed roughly and threw the box of cigars on the floor of the room. Ingolby was not perturbed. “Don’t forget there’s an east-bound train every day,” he said menacingly, and turned his back as the door closed.
In another minute Jim entered the room. “Get the clothes and the wig and things, Jim. I must be off,” he said.
“The toughs don’t get going till about this time over at Manitou,” responded Jim. Then he told his master about the clothes having been exposed in the room when the Romany arrived. “But I don’t think he seen them,” Jim added with approval of his own conduct. “I got ‘em out quick as lightning. I covered ‘em like a blanket.”
“All right, Jim; it doesn’t matter. That fellow’s got other things to think of than that.”
He was wrong, however. The Romany was waiting outside in the darkness not far away—watching and waiting.
CHAPTER X. FOR LUCK
Felix Marchand was in the highest spirits. His clean-shaven face was wrinkled with smiles and sneers. His black hair was flung in waves of triumph over his heavily-lined forehead; one hand was on his hip with brave satisfaction, the other with lighted cigarette was tossed upwards in exultation.
“I’ve got him. I’ve got him—like that!” he said transferring the cigarette to his mouth, and clenching his right hand as though it could not be loosed by an earthquake. “For sure, it’s a thing finished as the solder of a pannikin—like that.”
He caught up a tin quart-pot from the bar-counter and showed the soldered bottom of it.
He was alone in the bar of Barbazon’s Hotel except for one person—the youngest of the officials who had been retired from the offices of the railways when Ingolby had merged them. This was a man who had got his position originally by nepotism, and represented the worst elements of a national life where the spoils system is rooted in the popular mind. He had, however, a little residue of that discipline which, working in a great industrial organization, begets qualms as to extreme courses.
He looked reflectively at the leaden pot and said in reply: “I’d never believe in anything where that Ingolby is concerned till I had it in the palm of my hand. He’s as deep as a well, and when he’s quietest it’s good to look out. He takes a lot of skinning, that badger.”
“He’s skinned this time all right,” was Marchand’s reply. “To-morrow’ll be the biggest day Manitou’s had since the Indian lifted his wigwam and the white man put down his store. Listen—hear them! They’re coming!”
He raised a hand for silence, and a rumbling, ragged roar of voices could be heard without.
“The crowd have gone the rounds,” he continued. “They started at Barbazon’s and they’re winding up at Barbazon’s. They’re drunk enough to-night to want to do anything, and to-morrow when they’ve got sore heads they’ll do anything. They’ll make that funeral look like a squeezed orange; they’ll show Lebanon and Master Ingolby that we’re to be bosses of our own show. The strike’ll be on after the funeral, and after the strike’s begun there’ll be—eh, bien sur!”
He paused sharply, as though he had gone too far. “There’ll be what?” whispered the other; but Marchand made no reply, save to make a warning gesture, for Barbazon, the landlord, had entered behind the bar.
“They’re coming back, Barbazon,” Marchand said to the landlord, jerking his head towards the front door. The noise of the crowd was increasing, the raucous shouts were so loud that the three had to raise their voices. “You’ll do a land-office business to-night,” he declared.
Barbazon had an evil face. There were rumours that he had been in gaol in Quebec for robbery, and that after he had served his time he had dug up the money he had stolen and come West. He had started the first saloon at Manitou, and had grown with the place in more senses than one. He was heavy and thick-set, with huge shoulders, big hands, and beady eyes that looked out of a stolid face where long hours, greed and vices other than drink had left their mark. He never drank spirits, and was therefore ready to take advantage of those who did drink. More than one horse and canoe and cow and ox, and acre of land, in the days when land was cheap, had come to him across the bar-counter. He could be bought, could Barbazon, and he sold more than wine and spirits. He had a wife who had left him twice because of his misdemeanours, but had returned and straightened out his house and affairs once again; and even when she went off with Lick Baldwin, a cattle-dealer, she was welcomed back without reproaches by Barbazon, chiefly because he had no morals, and her abilities were of more value to him than her virtue. On the whole, Gros Barbazon was a bad lot.
At Marchand’s words Barbazon shrugged his shoulders. “The more spent to-night, the less to spend to-morrow,” he growled.
“But there’s going to be spending for a long time,” Marchand answered. “There’s going to be a riot to-morrow, and there’s going to be a strike the next day, and after that there’s going to be something else.”
“What else?” Barbazon asked, his beady eyes fastened on Marchand’s face.
“Something worth while-better than all the rest.” Barbazon’s low forehead seemed to disappear almost, as he drew the grizzled shock of hair down, by wrinkling his forehead with a heavy frown.
“It’s no damn good, m’sieu’,” he growled. “Am I a fool? They’ll spend money to-night, and tomorrow, and the next day, and when the row is on; and the more they spend then, the less they’ll have to spend by-and-by. It’s no good. The steady trade for me—all the time. That is my idee. And the something else—what? You think there’s something else that’ll be good for me? Nom de Dieu, there’s nothing you’re doing, or mean to do, but’ll hurt me and everybody.”
“That’s your view, is it, Barbazon?” exclaimed Marchand loudly, for the crowd was now almost at the door. “You’re a nice Frenchman and patriot. That crowd’ll be glad to hear you think they’re fools. Suppose they took it into their heads to wreck the place?”
Barbazon’s muddy face got paler, but his eyes sharpened, and he leaned over the bar-counter, and said with a snarl: “Go to hell, and say what you like; and then I’ll have something to say about something else, m’sieu’.”
Marchand was about to reply angrily, but he instantly changed his mind, and before Barbazon could stop him, he sprang over the counter and disappeared into the office behind the bar.
“I won’t steal anything, Barbazon,” he said over his shoulder as he closed the door behind him.
“I’ll see to that,” Barbazon muttered stolidly, but with malicious eyes.
The front door was flung open now, and the crowd poured into the room, boisterous, reckless, though some were only sullen, watchful and angry. These last were mostly men above middle age, and of a fanatical and racially bitter type. They were not many, but in one sense they were the backbone and force of the crowd, probably the less intelligent but the more tenacious and consistent. They were black spots of gathering storm in an electric atmosphere.
All converged upon the bar. Two assistants rushed the drinks along the counter with flourishes, while Barbazon took in the cash and sharply checked the rougher element, who were inclined to treat the bar as a place for looting. Most of them, however, had a wholesome fear of Barbazon, and also most of them wished to stand well with him—credit was a good thing, even in a saloon.
For a little time the room was packed, then some of the more restless spirits, their thirst assuaged, sallied forth to taste the lager and old rye elsewhere, and “raise Cain” in the streets. When they went, it became possible to move about more freely in the big bar-room, at the end of which was a billiard-table. It was notable, however, that the more sullen elements stayed. Some of them were strangers to each other. Manitou was a distributing point for all radiations of the compass, and men were thrown together in its streets who only saw one another once or twice a year-when they went to the woods in the Fall or worked the rivers in the Summer. Some were Mennonites, Doukhobors and Finlanders, some Swedes, Norwegians and Icelanders. Others again were birds of passage who would probably never see Manitou in the future, but they were mostly French, and mostly Catholic, and enemies of the Orange Lodges wherever they were, east or west or north or south. They all had a common ground of unity—half-savage coureurs-de-bois, river-drivers, railway-men, factory hands, cattlemen, farmers, labourers; they had a gift for prejudice, and taking sides on something or other was as the breath of the nostrils to them.
The greater number of the crowd were, however, excitable, good-natured men, who were by instinct friendly, save when their prejudices were excited; and their oaths and exclamations were marvels of droll ingenuity. Most of them were still too good-humoured with drink to be dangerous, but all hoped for trouble at the Orange funeral on principle, and the anticipated strike had elements of “thrill.” They were of a class, however, who would swing from what was good-humour to deadly anger in a minute, and turn a wind of mere prejudice into a hurricane of life and death with the tick of a clock. They would all probably go to the Orange funeral to-morrow in a savage spirit. Some of them were loud in denunciation of Ingolby and “the Lebanon gang”; they joked coarsely over the dead Orangeman, but their cheerful violence had not yet the appearance of reality.
One man suddenly changed all that. He was a river-driver of stalwart proportions, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and with loose corded trousers tucked into his boots. He had a face of natural ugliness made almost repulsive by marks of smallpox. Red, flabby lips and an overhanging brow made him a figure which men would avoid on a dark night.
“Let’s go over to Lebanon to-night and have it out,” he said in French. “That Ingolby—let’s go break his windows and give him a dip in the river. He’s the curse of this city. Holy, once Manitou was a place to live in, now it’s a place to die in! The factories, the mills, they’re full of Protes’ants and atheists and shysters; the railway office is gone to Lebanon. Ingolby took it there. Manitou was the best town in the West; it’s no good now. Who’s the cause? Ingolby’s the cause. Name of God, if he was here I’d get him by the throat as quick as winkin’.”
He opened and shut his fingers with spasmodic malice, and glared round the room. “He’s going to lock us out if we strike,” he added. “He’s going to take the bread out of our mouths; he’s going to put his heel on Manitou, and grind her down till he makes her knuckle to Lebanon—to a lot of infidels, Protes’ants, and thieves. Who’s going to stand it? I say-bagosh, I say, who’s going to stand it!”
“He’s a friend of the Monseigneur,” ventured a factory-hand, who had a wife and children to support, and however partisan, was little ready for that which would stop his supplies.
“Sacre bapteme! That’s part of his game,” roared the big river-driver in reply. “I’ll take the word of Felix Marchand about that. Look at him! That Felix Marchand doesn’t try to take the bread out of people’s mouths. He gives money here, he gives it there. He wants the old town to stay as it is and not be swallowed up.”
“Three cheers for Felix Marchand!” cried some one in the throng. All cheered loudly save one old man with grizzled hair and beard, who leaned against the wall half-way down the room smoking a corncob pipe. He was a French Canadian in dress and appearance, and he spat on the floor like a navvy—he had filled his pipe with the strongest tobacco that one man ever offered to another. As the crowd cheered for Felix Marchand, he made his way up towards the bar slowly. He must have been tall when he was young; now he was stooped, yet there was still something very sinewy about him.
“Who’s for Lebanon?” cried the big river-driver with an oath. “Who’s for giving Lebanon hell, and ducking Ingolby in the river?”
“I am—I am—I am—all of us!” shouted the crowd. “It’s no good waiting for to-morrow. Let’s get the Lebs by the scruff to-night. Let’s break Ingolby’s windows and soak him in the Sagalac. Allons—allons gai!”
Uproar and broken sentences, threats, oaths, and objurgations sounded through the room. There was a sudden movement towards the door, but the exit of the crowd was stopped by a slow but clear voice speaking in French.
“Wait a minute, my friends!” it cried. “Wait a minute. Let’s ask a few questions first.”
“Who’s he?” asked a dozen voices. “What’s he going to say?” The mob moved again towards the bar.
The big river-driver turned on the grizzled old man beside the bar-counter with bent shoulders and lazy, drawling speech.
“What’ve you got to say about it, son?” he asked threateningly.
“Well, to ask a few questions first—that’s all,” the old man replied.
“You don’t belong here, old cock,” the other said roughly.
“A good many of us don’t belong here,” the old man replied quietly. “It always is so. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Manitou. You’re a river-driver, and you don’t live here either,” he continued.
“What’ve you got to say about it? I’ve been coming and going here for ten years. I belong—bagosh, what do you want to ask? Hurry up. We’ve got work to do. We’re going to raise hell in Lebanon.”
“And give hell to Ingolby,” shouted some one in the crowd.
“Suppose Ingolby isn’t there?” questioned the old man.
“Oh, that’s one of your questions, is it?” sneered the big river-driver. “Well, if you knew him as we do, you’d know that it’s at night-time he sits studyin’ how he’ll cut Lebanon’s throat. He’s home, all right. He’s in Lebanon anyhow, and we’ll find him.”
“Well, but wait a minute—be quiet a bit,” said the old man, his eyes blinking slowly at the big riverdriver. “I’ve been ‘round a good deal, and I’ve had some experience in the world. Did you ever give that Ingolby a chance to tell you what his plans were? Did you ever get close to him and try to figure what he was driving at? There’s no chance of getting at the truth if you don’t let a man state his case—but no. If he can’t make you see his case then is the time to jib, not before.”
“Oh, get out!” cried a rowdy English road-maker in the crowd. “We know all right what Ingolby’s after.”
“Eh, well, what is he after?” asked the old man looking the other in the eye.
“What’s he after? Oof-oof-oof, that’s what he’s after. He’s for his own pocket, he’s for being boss of all the woolly West. He’s after keeping us poor and making himself rich. He’s after getting the cinch on two towns and three railways, and doing what he likes with it all; and we’re after not having him do it, you bet. That’s how it is, old hoss.”
The other stroked his beard with hands which, somehow, gave little indication of age, and then, with a sudden jerk forward of his head, he said: “Oh, it’s like that, eh? Is that what M’sieu’ Marchand told you? That’s what he said, is it?”
The big river-driver, eager to maintain his supreme place as leader, lunged forward a step, and growled a challenge.
“Who said it? What does it matter if M’sieu’ Marchand said it—it’s true. If I said it, it’s true. All of us in this room say it, and it’s true. Young Marchand says what Manitou says.”
The old man’s eyes grew brighter—they were exceedingly sharp for one so old, and he said quite gently now:
“M. Marchand said it first, and you all say it afterwards—ah, bah! But listen to me; I know Max Ingolby that you think is such a villain; I know him well. I knew him when he was a little boy and—”
“You was his nurse, I suppose!” cried the Englishman’s voice amid a roar of laughter.
“Taught him his A-B-C-was his dear, kind teacher, eh?” hilariously cried another.
The old man appeared not to hear. “I have known him all the years since. He has only been in the West a few years, but he has lived in the world exactly thirty-three years. He never willingly did anybody harm—never. Since he came West, since he came to the Sagalac, he’s brought work to Lebanon and to Manitou. There are hundreds more workmen in both the towns than there were when he came. It was he made others come with much money and build the factories and the mills. Work means money, money means bread, bread means life—so.”
The big river-driver, seeing the effect of the old man’s words upon the crowd, turned to them with an angry gesture and a sneer.
“I s’pose Ingolby has paid this old skeesicks for talking this swash. We know all right what Ingolby is, and what he’s done. He’s made war between the two towns—there’s hell to pay now on both sides of the Sagalac. He took away the railway offices from here, and threw men out of work. He’s done harm to Manitou—he’s against Manitou every time.”
Murmurs of approval ran through the crowd, though some were silent, looking curiously at the forceful and confident old man. Even his bent shoulders seemed to suggest driving power rather than the weight of years. He suddenly stretched out a hand in command as it were.
“Comrades, comrades,” he said, “every man makes mistakes. Even if it was a mistake for Ingolby to take away the offices from Manitou, he’s done a big thing for both cities by combining the three railways.”
“Monopoly,” growled a voice from the crowd. “Not monopoly,” the old man replied with a ring to his voice, which made it younger, fresher. “Not monopoly, but better management of the railways, with more wages, more money to spend on things to eat and drink and wear, more dollars in the pocket of everybody that works in Manitou and Lebanon. Ingolby works, he doesn’t loaf.”
“Oh, gosh all hell, he’s a dynamo,” shouted a voice from the crowd. “He’s a dynamo running the whole show-eh!”
The old man seemed to grow shorter, but as he thrust his shoulders forward, it was like a machine gathering energy and power.
“I’ll tell you, friends, what Ingolby is trying to do,” he said in a low voice vibrating with that force which belongs neither to age nor youth, but is the permanent activity uniting all ages of a man. “Of course, Ingolby is ambitious and he wants power. He tries to do the big things in the world because there is the big thing to do—for sure. Without such men the big things are never done, and other men have less work to do, and less money and poorer homes. They discover and construct and design and invent and organize and give opportunities. I am a working man, but I know what Ingolby thinks. I know what men think who try to do the big things. I have tried to do them.”
The crowd were absolutely still now, but the big river-driver shook himself free of the eloquence, which somehow swayed them all, and said:
“You—you look as if you’d tried to do big things, you do, old skeesicks. I bet you never earned a hundred dollars in your life.” He turned to the crowd with fierce gestures. “Let’s go to Lebanon and make the place sing,” he roared. “Let’s get Ingolby out to talk for himself, if he wants to talk. We know what we want to do, and we’re not going to be bossed. He’s for Lebanon and we’re for Manitou. Lebanon means to boss us, Lebanon wants to sit on us because we’re Catholics, because we’re French, because we’re honest.”
Again a wave of revolution swept through the crowd. The big river-driver represented their natural instincts, their native fanaticism, their prejudices. But the old man spoke once more.
“Ingolby wants Lebanon and Manitou to come together, not to fall apart,” he declared. “He wants peace. If he gets rich here he won’t get rich alone. He’s working for both towns. If he brings money from outside, that’s good for both towns. If he—”
“Shut your mouth, let Ingolby speak for himself,” snarled the big river-driver. “Take his dollars out of your pocket and put them on the bar, the dollars Ingolby gives you to say all this. Put them dollars of Ingolby’s up for drinks, or we’ll give you a jar that’ll shake you, old wart-hog.”
At that instant a figure forced itself through the crowd, and broke into the packed circle which was drawing closer upon the old man.