“‘O son of man, behold!If thou shouldest stumble on the nameless trail,The trail that no man rides,Lift up thy heart,Behold, O son of man, thou hast a helper near!“‘O son of man, take heed!If thou shouldst fall upon the vacant plain,The plain that no man loves,Reach out thy hand,Take heed, O son of man, strength shall be given thee!“‘O son of man, rejoice!If thou art blinded even at the door,The door of the Safe Tent,Sing in thy heart,Rejoice, O son of man, thy pilot leads thee home?’
“I never seemed to be alone after that—call it what you will, fancy or delirium. My head was so light that it appeared to spin like a star, and my feet were so heavy that I dragged the whole earth after me. My Indians seldom spoke. I never let them drop behind me, for I did not trust their treacherous natures. But in the end, as it would seem, they also had but one thought, and that to reach Fort Ungava; for there was no food left, none at all. We saw no tribes of Indians and no Esquimaux, for we had not passed in their line of travel or settlement.
“At last I used to dream that birds were singing near me,—a soft, delicate whirlwind of sound; and then bells all like muffled silver rang through the aching, sweet air. Bits of prayer and poetry I learned when a boy flashed through my mind; equations in algebra; the tingling scream of a great buzz-saw; the breath of a racer as he nears the post under the crying whip; my own voice dropping loud profanity, heard as a lad from a blind ferryman; the boom! boom! of a mass of logs as they struck a house on a flooding river and carried it away....
“One day we reached the end. It was near evening, and we came to the top of a wooded knoll. My eyes were dancing in my head with fatigue and weakness, but I could see below us, on the edge of the great bay, a large hut, Esquimau lodges and Indian tepees near it. It was the Fort, my cheerless prison-house.”
He paused. The dog had been watching him with its flaming eyes; now it gave a low growl, as though it understood, and pitied. In the interval of silence the storm without broke. The trees began to quake and cry, the light snow to beat upon the parchment windows, and the chimney to splutter and moan. Presently, out on the bay they could hear the young ice break and come scraping up the shore. Fawdor listened a while, and then went on, waving his hand to the door as he began: “Think! this, and like that always: the ungodly strife of nature, and my sick, disconsolate life.”
“Ever since?” asked Pierre. “All the time.”
“Why did you not go back?”
“I was to wait for orders, and they never came.”
“You were a free man, not a slave.”
“The human heart has pride. At first, as when I left the governor at Lachine, I said, ‘I will never speak, I will never ask nor bend the knee. He has the power to oppress; I can obey without whining, as fine a man as he.’”
“Did you not hate?”
“At first, as only a banished man can hate. I knew that if all had gone well I should be a man high up in the Company, and here I was, living like a dog in the porch of the world, sometimes without other food for months than frozen fish; and for two years I was in a place where we had no fire,—lived in a snow-house, with only blubber to eat. And so year after year, no word!”
“The mail came once every year from the world?” “Yes, once a year the door of the outer life was opened. A ship came into the bay, and by that ship I sent out my reports. But no word came from the governor, and no request went from me. Once the captain of that ship took me by the shoulders, and said, ‘Fawdor, man, this will drive you mad. Come away to England,—leave your half-breed in charge,—and ask the governor for a big promotion.’ He did not understand. Of course I said I could not go. Then he turned on me, he was a good man,—and said, ‘This will either make you madman or saint, Fawdor.’ He drew a Bible from his pocket and handed it to me. ‘I’ve used it twenty years,’ he said, ‘in evil and out of evil, and I’ve spiked it here and there; it’s a chart for heavy seas, and may you find it so, my lad.’
“I said little then; but when I saw the sails of his ship round a cape and vanish, all my pride and strength were broken up, and I came in a heap to the ground, weeping like a child. But the change did not come all at once. There were two things that kept me hard.”
“The girl?”
“The girl, and another. But of the young lady after. I had a half-breed whose life I had saved. I was kind to him always; gave him as good to eat and drink as I had myself; divided my tobacco with him; loved him as only an exile can love a comrade. He conspired with the Indians to seize the Fort and stores, and kill me if I resisted. I found it out.”
“Thou shalt keep the faith of food and blanket,” said Pierre. “What did you do with him?”
“The fault was not his so much as of his race and his miserable past. I had loved him. I sent him away; and he never came back.”
“Thou shalt judge with the minds of twelve men, and the heart of one woman.”
“For the girl. There was the thing that clamped my heart. Never a message from her or her brother. Surely they knew, and yet never, thought I, a good word for me to the governor. They had forgotten the faith of food and blanket. And she—she must have seen that I could have worshipped her, had we been in the same way of life. Before the better days came to me I was hard against her, hard and rough at heart.”
“Remember the sorrow of thine own wife.” Pierre’s voice was gentle.
“Truly, to think hardly of no woman should be always in a man’s heart. But I have known only one woman of my race in twenty-five years!”
“And as time went on?”
“As time went on, and no word came, I ceased to look for it. But I followed that chart spiked with the captain’s pencil, as he had done it in season and out of season, and by and by I ceased to look for any word. I even became reconciled to my life. The ambitious and aching cares of the world dropped from me, and I stood above all—alone in my suffering, yet not yielding. Loneliness is a terrible thing. Under it a man—”
“Goes mad or becomes a saint—a saint!” Pierre’s voice became reverent.
Fawdor shook his head, smiling gently. “Ah no, no. But I began to understand the world, and I loved the north, the beautiful hard north.”
“But there is more?”
“Yes, the end of it all. Three days before you came I got a packet of letters, not by the usual yearly mail. One announced that the governor was dead. Another—”
“Another?” urged Pierre—“was from Her. She said that her brother, on the day she wrote, had by chance come across my name in the Company’s records, and found that I had been here a quarter of a century. It was the letter of a good woman. She said she thought the governor had forgotten that he had sent me here—as now I hope he had, for that would be one thing less for him to think of, when he set out on the journey where the only weight man carries is the packload of his sins. She also said that she had written to me twice after we parted at Lachine, but had never heard a word, and three years afterwards she had gone to India. The letters were lost, I suppose, on the way to me, somehow—who can tell? Then came another thing, so strange, that it seemed like the laughter of the angels at us. These were her words: ‘And, dear Mr. Fawdor, you were both wrong in that quotation, as you no doubt discovered long ago.’ Then she gave me the sentence as it is in Cymbeline. She was right, quite right. We were both wrong. Never till her letter came had I looked to see. How vain, how uncertain, and fallible, is man!”
Pierre dropped his cigarette, and stared at Fawdor. “The knowledge of books is foolery,” he said slowly. “Man is the only book of life. Go on.”
“There was another letter, from the brother, who was now high up in the Company, asking me to come to England, and saying that they wished to promote me far, and that he and his sister, with their families, would be glad to see me.”
“She was married then?”
The rashness of the suggestion made Fawdor wave his hand impatiently. He would not reply to it. “I was struck down with all the news,” he said. “I wandered like a child out into a mad storm. Illness came; then you, who have nursed me back to life.... And now I have told all.”
“Not all, bien sur. What will you do?”
“I am out of the world; why tempt it all again? See how those twenty-five years were twisted by a boy’s vanity and a man’s tyranny!”
“But what will you do?” persisted Pierre. “You should see the faces of women and children again. No man can live without that sight, even as a saint.”
Suddenly Fawdor’s face was shot over with a storm of feeling. He lay very still, his thoughts busy with a new world which had been disclosed to him. “Youth hungers for the vanities,” he said, “and the middle-aged for home.” He took Pierre’s hand. “I will go,” he added. “A door will open somewhere for me.”
Then he turned his face to the wall. The storm had ceased, the wild dog huddled quietly on the hearth, and for hours the only sound was the crackling of the logs as Pierre stirred the fire.
“No, no, m’sieu’ the governor, they did not tell you right. I was with him, and I have known Little Babiche fifteen years—as long as I’ve known you.... It was against the time when down in your world there they have feastings, and in the churches the grand songs and many candles on the altars. Yes, Noel, that is the word—the day of the Great Birth. You shall hear how strange it all was—the thing, the time, the end of it.”
The governor of the great Company settled back in a chair, his powerful face seamed by years, his hair grey and thick still, his keen, steady eyes burning under shaggy brows. He had himself spent long solitary years in the wild fastnesses of the north. He fastened his dark eyes on Pierre, and said: “Monsieur Pierre, I shall be glad to hear. It was at the time of Noel—yes?”
Pierre began: “You have seen it beautiful and cold in the north, but never so cold and beautiful as it was last year. The world was white with sun and ice, the frost never melting, the sun never warming—just a glitter, so lovely, so deadly. If only you could keep the heart warm, you were not afraid. But if once—just for a moment—the blood ran out from the heart and did not come in again, the frost clamped the doors shut, and there was an end of all. Ah, m’sieu’, when the north clinches a man’s heart in anger there is no pain like it—for a moment.”
“Yes, yes; and Little Babiche?”
“For ten years he carried the mails along the route of Fort St. Mary, Fort O’Glory, Fort St. Saviour, and Fort Perseverance within the circle-just one mail once a year, but that was enough. There he was with his Esquimaux dogs on the trail, going and coming, with a laugh and a word for anyone that crossed his track. ‘Good-day, Babiche’ ‘Good-day, m’sieu’.’ ‘How do you, Babiche?’ ‘Well, thank the Lord, m’sieu’.’ ‘Where to and where from, Babiche?’ ‘To the Great Fort by the old trail, from the Far-off River, m’sieu’.’ ‘Come safe along, Babiche.’ ‘Merci, m’sieu’; the good God travels north, m’sieu’.’ ‘Adieu, Babiche.’ ‘Adieu, m’sieu’.’ That is about the way of the thing, year after year. Sometimes a night at a hut or a post, but mostly alone—alone, except for the dogs. He slept with them, and they slept on the mails—to guard: as though there should be highwaymen on the Prairie of the Ten Stars! But no, it was his way, m’sieu’. Now and again I crossed him on the trail, for have I not travelled to every corner of the north? We were not so great friends, for—well, Babiche is a man who says his aves, and never was a loafer, and there was no reason why he should have love for me; but we were good company when we met. I knew him when he was a boy down on the Chaudiere, and he always had a heart like a lion-and a woman. I had seen him fight, I had seen him suffer cold, and I had heard him sing.
“Well, I was up last fall to Fort St. Saviour. Ho, how dull was it! Macgregor, the trader there, has brains like rubber. So I said, I will go down to Fort O’Glory. I knew someone would be there—it is nearer the world. So I started away with four dogs and plenty of jerked buffalo, and so much brown brandy as Macgregor could squeeze out of his eye! Never, never were there such days—the frost shaking like steel and silver as it powdered the sunlight, the white level of snow lifting and falling, and falling and lifting, the sky so great a travel away, the air which made you cry out with pain one minute and gave you joy the next. And all so wild, so lonely! Yet I have seen hanging in those plains cities all blue and red with millions of lights showing, and voices, voices everywhere, like the singing of soft masses. After a time in that cold up there you are no longer yourself—no. You move in a dream. Eh bien, m’sieu’, there came, I thought, a dream to me one evening—well, perhaps one afternoon, for the days are short—so short, the sun just coming over a little bend of sky, and sinking down like a big orange ball. I come out of a tumble of little hills, and there over on the plains I saw a sight! Ragged hills of ice were thrown up, as if they’d been heaved out by the breaking earth, jutting here and there like wedges—like the teeth of a world. Alors, on one crag, shaped as an anvil, I saw what struck me like a blow, and I felt the blood shoot out of my heart and leave it dry. I was for a minute like a pump with no water in its throat to work the piston and fetch the stream up. I got sick and numb. There on that anvil of snow and ice I saw a big white bear, one such as you shall see within the Arctic Circle, his long nose fetching out towards that bleeding sun in the sky, his white coat shining. But that was not the thing—there was another. At the feet of the bear was a body, and one clawed foot was on that body—of a man. So clear was the air, the red sun shining on the face as it was turned towards me, that I wonder I did not at once know whose it was. You cannot think, m’sieu’, what that was like—no. But all at once I remembered the Chant of the Scarlet Hunter. I spoke it quick, and the blood came creeping back in here.” He tapped his chest with his slight forefinger.
“What was the chant?” asked the governor, who had scarce stirred a muscle since the tale began. Pierre made a little gesture of deprecation. “Ah, it is perhaps a thing of foolishness, as you may think—”
“No, no. I have heard and seen in my day,” urged the governor.
“So? Good. Yes, I remember, you told me years ago, m’sieu’....
“The blinding Trail and Night and Cold are man’s: mine is the trailthat finds the Ancient Lodge. Morning and Night they travel withme; my camp is set by the pines, its fires are burning—are burning.The lost, they shall sit by my fires, and the fearful ones shallseek, and the sick shall abide. I am the Hunter, the Son of theNorth; I am thy lover where no man may love thee. With me thoushalt journey, and thine the Safe Tent.
“As I said, the blood came back to my heart. I turned to my dogs, and gave them a cut with the whip to see if I dreamed. They sat back and snarled, and their wild red eyes, the same as mine, kept looking at the bear and the quiet man on the anvil of ice and snow. Tell me, can you think of anything like it?—the strange light, the white bear of the Pole, that has no friends at all except the shooting stars, the great ice plains, the quick night hurrying on, the silence—such silence as no man can think! I have seen trouble flying at me in a hundred ways, but this was different—yes. We come to the foot of the little hill. Still the bear not stir. As I went up, feeling for my knives and my gun, the dogs began to snarl with anger, and for one little step I shivered, for the thing seem not natural. I was about two hundred feet away from the bear when it turned slow round at me, lifting its foot from the body. The dogs all at once come huddling about me, and I dropped on my knee to take aim, but the bear stole away from the man and come moving down past us at an angle, making for the plain. I could see his deep shining eyes, and the steam roll from his nose in long puffs. Very slow and heavy, like as if he see no one and care for no one, he shambled down, and in a minute was gone behind a boulder. I ran on to the man—”
The governor was leaning forward, looking intently, and said now: “It’s like a wild dream—but the north—the north is near to the Strangest of All!”
“I knelt down and lifted him up in my arms, all a great bundle of furs and wool, and I got my hand at last to his wrist. He was alive. It was Little Babiche! Part of his face was frozen stiff. I rubbed out the frost with snow, and then I forced some brandy into his mouth, good old H.B.C. brandy,—and began to call to him: ‘Babiche! Babiche! Come back, Babiche! The wolf’s at the pot, Babiche!’ That’s the way to call a hunter to his share of meat. I was afraid, for the sleep of cold is the sleep of death, and it is hard to call the soul back to this world. But I called, and kept calling, and got him on his feet, with my arm round him. I gave him more brandy; and at last I almost shrieked in his ear. Little by little I saw his face take on the look of waking life. It was like the dawn creeping over white hills and spreading into day. I said to myself: What a thing it will be if I can fetch him back! For I never knew one to come back after the sleep had settled on them. It is too comfortable—all pain gone, all trouble, the world forgot, just a kind weight in all the body, as you go sinking down, down to the valley, where the long hands of old comrades beckon to you, and their soft, high voices cry, ‘Hello! hello-o!’” Pierre nodded his head towards the distance, and a musing smile divided his lips on his white teeth. Presently he folded a cigarette, and went on:
“I had saved something to the last, as the great test, as the one thing to open his eyes wide, if they could be opened at all. Alors, there was no time to lose, for the wolf of Night was driving the red glow-worm down behind the world, and I knew that when darkness came altogether—darkness and night—there would be no help for him. Mon Dieu! how one sleeps in the night of the north, in the beautiful wide silence!... So, m’sieu’, just when I thought it was the time, I called, ‘Corinne! Corinne!’ Then once again I said, ‘P’tite Corinne! P’tite Corinne! Come home! come home! P’tite Corinne!’ I could see the fight in the jail of sleep. But at last he killed his jailer; the doors in his brain flew open, and his mind came out through his wide eyes. But he was blind a little and dazed, though it was getting dark quick. I struck his back hard, and spoke loud from a song that we used to sing on the Chaudiere—Babiche and all of us, years ago. Mon Dieu! how I remember those days—
“‘Which is the way that the sun goes?The way that my little one come.Which is the good path over the hills?The path that leads to my little one’s home—To my little one’s home, m’sieu’, m’sieu’!’
“That did it. ‘Corinne, ma p’tite Corinne!’ he said; but he did not look at me—only stretch out his hands. I caught them, and shook them, and shook him, and made him take a step forward; then I slap him on the back again, and said loud: ‘Come, come, Babiche, don’t you know me? See Babiche, the snow’s no sleeping-bunk, and a polar bear’s no good friend.’ ‘Corinne!’ he went on, soft and slow. ‘Ma p’tite Corinne!’ He smiled to himself; and I said, ‘Where’ve you been, Babiche? Lucky I found you, or you’d have been sleeping till the Great Mass.’ Then he looked at me straight in the eyes, and something wild shot out of his. His hand stretched over and caught me by the shoulder, perhaps to steady himself, perhaps because he wanted to feel something human. Then he looked round slow-all round the plain, as if to find something. At that moment a little of the sun crept back, and looked up over the wall of ice, making a glow of yellow and red for a moment; and never, north or south, have I seen such beauty—so delicate, so awful. It was like a world that its Maker had built in a fit of joy, and then got tired of, and broke in pieces, and blew out all its fires, and left—ah yes—like that! And out in the distance I—I only saw a bear travelling eastwards.”
The governor said slowly:
And I took My staff Beauty, and cut it asunder, that I might breakMy covenant which I had made with all the people.
“Yes—like that.” Pierre continued: “Babiche turned to me with a little laugh, which was a sob too. ‘Where is it, Pierre?’ said he. I knew he meant the bear. ‘Gone to look for another man,’ I said, with a gay look, for I saw that he was troubled. ‘Come,’ said he at once. As we went, he saw my dogs. He stopped short and shook a little, and tears came into his eyes. ‘What is it, Babiche?’ said I. He looked back towards the south. ‘My dogs—Brandy-wine, Come-along, ‘Poleon, and the rest—died one night all of an hour. One by one they crawl over to where I lay in my fur bag, and die there, huddling by me—and such cries—such cries! There was poison or something in the frozen fish I’d given them. I loved them every one; and then there was the mails, the year’s mails—how should they be brought on? That was a bad thought, for I had never missed—never in ten years. There was one bunch of letters which the governor said to me was worth more than all the rest of the mails put together, and I was to bring it to Fort St. Saviour, or not show my face to him again. I leave the dogs there in the snow, and come on with the sled, carrying all the mails. Ah, the blessed saints, how heavy the sled got, and how lonely it was! Nothing to speak to—no one, no thing, day after day. At last I go to cry to the dogs, “Come-along! ‘Poleon! Brandy-wine!”—like that! I think I see them there, but they never bark and they never snarl, and they never spring to the snap of the whip.... I was alone. Oh, my head! my head! If there was only something alive to look at, besides the wide white plain, and the bare hills of ice, and the sun-dogs in the sky! Now I was wild, next hour I was like a child, then I gnash my teeth like a wolf at the sun, and at last I got on my knees. The tears froze my eyelids shut, but I kept saying, “Ah, my great Friend, my Jesu, just something, something with the breath of life! Leave me not all alone!” and I got sleepier all the time.
“‘I was sinking, sinking, so quiet and easy, when all at once I felt something beside me; I could hear it breathing, but I could not open my eyes at first, for, as I say, the lashes were froze. Something touch me, smell me, and a nose was push against my chest. I put out my hand ver’ soft and touch it. I had no fear, I was so glad I could have hug it, but I did not—I drew back my hand quiet and rub my eyes. In a little I can see. There stand the thing—a polar bear—not ten feet away, its red eyes shining. On my knees I spoke to it, talk to it, as I would to a man. It was like a great wild dog, fierce, yet kind, and I fed it with the fish which had been for Brandy-wine and the rest—but not to kill it! and it did not die. That night I lie down in my bag—no, I was not afraid! The bear lie beside me, between me and the sled. Ah, it was warm! Day after day we travel together, and camp together at night—ah, sweet Sainte Anne, how good it was, myself and the wild beast such friends, alone in the north! But to-day—a little while ago—something went wrong with me, and I got sick in the head, a swimming like a tide wash in and out. I fall down-asleep. When I wake I find you here beside me—that is all. The bear must have drag me here.’”
Pierre stuck a splinter into the fire to light another cigarette, and paused as if expecting the governor to speak, but no word coming, he continued: “I had my arm around him while we talked and come slowly down the hill. Soon he stopped and said, ‘This is the place.’ It was a cave of ice, and we went in. Nothing was there to see except the sled. Babiche stopped short. It come to him now that his good comrade was gone. He turned, and looked out, and called, but there was only the empty night, the ice, and the stars. Then he come back, sat down on the sled, and the tears fall.... I lit my spirit-lamp, boiled coffee, got pemmican from my bag, and I tried to make him eat. No. He would only drink the coffee. At last he said to me, ‘What day is this, Pierre?’ ‘It is the day of the Great Birth, Babiche,’ I said. He made the sign of the cross, and was quiet, so quiet! but he smile to himself, and kept saying in a whisper: ‘Ma p’tite Corinne! Ma p’tite Corinne!’ The next day we come on safe, and in a week I was back at Fort St. Saviour with Babiche and all the mails, and that most wonderful letter of the governor’s.”
“The letter was to tell a factor that his sick child in the hospital at Quebec was well,” the governor responded quietly. “Who was ‘Ma p’tite Corinne,’ Pierre?”
“His wife—in heaven; and his child—on the Chaudiere, m’sieu’. The child came and the mother went on the same day of the Great Birth. He has a soft heart—that Babiche!”
“And the white bear—so strange a thing!”
“M’sieu’, who can tell? The world is young up here. When it was all young, man and beast were good comrades, maybe.”
“Ah, maybe. What shall be done with Little Babiche, Pierre?”
“He will never be the same again on the old trail, m’sieu’!”
There was silence for a long time, but at last the governor said, musing, almost tenderly, for he never had a child: “Ma p’tite Corinne!—Little Babiche shall live near his child, Pierre. I will see to that.”
Pierre said no word, but got up, took off his hat to the governor, and sat down again.
“What’s that, Pierre?” said Sir Duke Lawless, starting to his feet and peering round.
“Hush!” was Pierre’s reply. “Wait for the rest.... There!”
“King of my heart, king of my heart, I am out on the trail of thy bugles.”
Sir Duke was about to speak, but Pierre lifted a hand in warning, and then through the still night there came the long cry of a bugle, rising, falling, strangely clear, echoing and echoing again, and dying away. A moment, and the call was repeated, with the same effect, and again a third time; then all was still, save for the flight of birds roused from the desire of night, and the long breath of some animal in the woods sinking back to sleep.
Their camp was pitched on the south shore of Hudson’s Bay, many leagues to the west of Rupert House, not far from the Moose River. Looking north was the wide expanse of the bay, dotted with sterile islands here and there; to the east were the barren steppes of Labrador, and all round them the calm, incisive air of a late September, when winter begins to shake out his frosty curtains and hang them on the cornice of the north, despite the high protests of the sun. The two adventurers had come together after years of separation, and Sir Duke had urged Pierre to fare away with him to Hudson’s Bay, which he had never seen, although he had shares in the great Company, left him by his uncle the admiral.
They were camped in a hollow, to the right a clump of hardy trees, with no great deal of foliage, but some stoutness; to the left a long finger of land running out into the water like a wedge, the most eastern point of the western shore of Hudson’s Bay. It was high and bold, and, somehow, had a fine dignity and beauty. From it a path led away north to a great log-fort called King’s House.
Lawless saw Pierre half rise and turn his head, listening. Presently he, too, heard the sound-the soft crash of crisp grass under the feet. He raised himself to a sitting posture and waited.
Presently a tall figure came out of the dusk into the light of their fire, and a long arm waved a greeting at them. Both Lawless and Pierre rose to their feet. The stranger was dressed in buckskin, he carried a rifle, and around his shoulder was a strong yellow cord, from which hung a bugle.
“How!” he said, with a nod, and drew near the fire, stretching out his hands to the blaze.
“How!” said Lawless and Pierre.
After a moment Lawless drew from his blanket a flask of brandy, and without a word handed it over the fire. The fingers of the two men met in the flicker of flames, a sort of bond by fire, and the stranger raised the flask.
“Chin-chin,” he said, and drank, breathing a long sigh of satisfaction afterwards as he handed it back; but it was Pierre that took it, and again fingers touched in the bond of fire. Pierre passed the flask to Lawless, who lifted it.
“Chin-chin,” he said, drank, and gave the flask to Pierre again, who did as did the others, and said “Chin-chin” also.
By that salutation of the east, given in the far north, Lawless knew that he had met one who had lighted fires where men are many and close to the mile as holes in a sieve.
They all sat down, and tobacco went round, the stranger offering his, while the two others, with true hospitality, accepted.
“We heard you over there—it was you?” said Lawless, nodding towards Point o’ Bugles, and glancing at the bugle the other carried.
“Yes, it was I,” was the reply. “Someone always does it twice a year: on the 25th September and the 25th March. I’ve done it now without a break for ten years, until it has got to be a sort of religion with me, and the whole thing’s as real as if King George and John York were talking. As I tramp to the point or swing away back, in summer barefooted, in winter on my snowshoes, to myself I seem to be John York on the trail of the king’s bugles. I’ve thought so much about the whole thing, I’ve read so many of John York’s letters—and how many times one of the King’s!—that now I scarcely know which is the bare story, and which the bit’s I’ve dreamed as I’ve tramped over the plains or sat in the quiet at King’s House, spelling out little by little the man’s life, from the cues I found in his journal, in the Company’s papers, and in that one letter of the King’s.”
Pierre’s eyes were now more keen than those of Lawless: for years he had known vaguely of this legend of Point o’ Bugles.
“You know it all,” he said—“begin at the beginning: how and when you first heard, how you got the real story, and never mind which is taken from the papers and which from your own mind—if it all fits in it is all true, for the lie never fits in right with the square truth. If you have the footprints and the handprints you can tell the whole man; if you have the horns of a deer you know it as if you had killed it, skinned it, and potted it.”
The stranger stretched himself before the fire, nodding at his hosts as he did so, and then began:
“Well, a word about myself first,” he said, “so you’ll know just where you are. I was full up of life in London town and India, and that’s a fact. I’d plenty of friends and little money, and my will wasn’t equal to the task of keeping out of the hands of the Jews. I didn’t know what to do, but I had to go somewhere, that was clear. Where? An accident decided it. I came across an old journal of my great-grandfather, John York,—my name’s Dick Adderley,—and just as if a chain had been put round my leg and I’d been jerked over by the tipping of the world, I had to come to Hudson’s Bay. John York’s journal was a thing to sit up nights to read. It came back to England after he’d had his fill of Hudson’s Bay and the earth beneath, and had gone, as he himself said on the last page of the journal, to follow the king’s buglers in ‘the land that is far off.’ God and the devil were strong in old John York. I didn’t lose much time after I’d read the journal. I went to Hudson’s Bay house in London, got a place in the Company, by the help of the governor himself, and came out. I’ve learned the rest of the history of old John York—the part that never got to England; for here at King’s House there’s a holy tradition that the real John York belongs to it and to it alone.”
Adderley laughed a little. “King’s House guards John York’s memory, and it’s as fresh and real here now as though he’d died yesterday; though it’s forgotten in England, and by most who bear his name, and the present Prince of Wales maybe never heard of the roan who was a close friend of the Prince Regent, the First Gentleman of Europe.”
“That sounds sweet gossip,” said Lawless, with a smile; “we’re waiting.”
Adderley continued: “John York was an honest man, of wholesome sport, jovial, and never shirking with the wine, commendable in his appetite, of rollicking soul and proud temper, and a gay dog altogether—gay, but to be trusted, too, for he had a royal heart. In the coltish days of the Prince Regent he was a boon comrade, but never did he stoop to flattery, nor would he hedge when truth should be spoken, as ofttimes it was needed with the royal blade, for at times he would forget that a prince was yet a man, topped with the accident of a crown. Never prince had truer friend, and so in his best hours he thought, himself, and if he ever was just and showed his better part, it was to the bold country gentleman who never minced praise or blame, but said his say and devil take the end of it. In truth, the Prince was wilful, and once he did a thing which might have given a twist to the fate of England. Hot for the love of women, and with some dash of real romance in him too, else even as a prince he might have had shallower love and service,—he called John York one day and said:
“‘To-night at seven, Squire John, you’ll stand with me while I put the seal on the Gates of Eden;’ and, when the other did not guess his import, added: ‘Sir Mark Selby is your neighbour—his daughter’s for my arms to-night. You know her, handsome Sally Selby—she’s for your prince, for good or ill.’
“John York did not understand at first, for he could not think the Prince had anything in mind but some hot escapade of love. When Mistress Selby’s name was mentioned his heart stood still, for she had been his choice, the dear apple of his eye, since she had bloomed towards womanhood. He had set all his hopes upon her, tarrying till she should have seen some little life before he asked her for his wife. He had her father’s Godspeed to his wooing, for he was a man whom all men knew honest and generous as the sun, and only choleric with the mean thing. She, also, had given him good cause to think that he should one day take her to his home, a loved and honoured wife. His impulse, when her name passed the Prince’s lips, was to draw his sword, for he would have called an emperor to account; but presently he saw the real meaning of the speech: that the Prince would marry her that night.”
Here the story-teller paused again, and Pierre said softly, inquiringly:
“You began to speak in your own way, and you’ve come to another way—like going from an almanac to the Mass.”
The other smiled. “That’s so. I’ve heard it told by old Shearton at King’s House, who speaks as if he’d stepped out of Shakespeare, and somehow I seem to hear him talking, and I tell it as he told it last year to the governor of the Company. Besides, I’ve listened these seven years to his style.”
“It’s a strange beginning—unwritten history of England,” said Sir Duke musingly.
“You shall hear stranger things yet,” answered Adderley. “John York could hardly believe it at first, for the thought of such a thing never had place in his mind. Besides, the Prince knew how he had looked upon the lady, and he could not have thought his comrade would come in between him and his happiness. Perhaps it was the difficulty, adding spice to the affair, that sent the Prince to the appeal of private marriage to win the lady, and John York always held that he loved her truly then, the first and only real affection of his life. The lady—who can tell what won her over from the honest gentleman to the faithless prince? That soul of vanity which wraps about the real soul of every woman fell down at last before the highest office in the land, and the gifted bearer of the office. But the noble spirit in her brought him to offer marriage, when he might otherwise have offered, say, a barony. There is a record of that and more in John York’s Memoirs which I will tell you, for they have settled in my mind like an old song, and I learned them long ago. I give you John York’s words written by his own hands:
“‘I did not think when I beheld thee last, dearest flower of the world’s garden, that I should see thee bloom in that wide field, rank with the sorrows of royal favour. How did my foolish eyes fill with tears when I watched thee, all rose and gold in thy cheeks and hair, the light falling on thee through the chapel window, putting thy pure palm into my prince’s, swearing thy life away, selling the very blossoms of earth’s orchards for the brier beauty of a hidden vineyard! I saw the flying glories of thy cheeks, the halcyon weather of thy smile, the delicate lifting of thy bosom, the dear gaiety of thy step, and, at that moment, I mourned for thy sake that thou wert not the dullest wench in the land, for then thou hadst been spared thy miseries, thou hadst been saved the torture-boot of a lost love and a disacknowledged wifedom. Yet I could not hide from me that thou wert happy at that great moment, when he swore to love and cherish thee, till death you parted.
“Ah, George, my prince, my king, how wickedly thou didst break thy vows with both of us who loved thee well, through good and ill report—for they spake evil of thee, George; ay, the meanest of thy subjects spake lightly of their king—when with that sweet soul secretly hid away in the farthest corner of thy kingdom, thou soughtst divorce from thy later Caroline, whom thou, unfaithful, didst charge with infidelity. When, at last, thou didst turn again to the partner of thy youth, thy true wife in the eyes of God, it was too late. Thou didst promise me that thou wouldst never take another wife, never put our dear heart away, though she could not—after our miserable laws—bear thee princes. Thou didst break thy promise, yet she forgave thee, and I forgave thee, for well we knew that thou wouldst pay a heavy reckoning, and that in the hour when thou shouldst cry to us we might not come to thee; that in the days when age and sorrow and vast troubles should oppress thee, thou wouldst long for the true hearts who loved thee for thyself and not for aught thou wudst give, or aught that thou wert, save as a man.
“‘When thou didst proclaim thy purpose to take Caroline to wife, I pleaded with thee, I was wroth with thee. Thy one plea was succession. Succession! Succession! What were a hundred dynasties beside that precious life, eaten by shame and sorrow? It were easy for others, not thy children, to come after thee, to rule as well as thee, as must even now be the case, for thou hast no lawful child save that one in the loneliest corner of thy English vineyard—alack! alack! I warned thee George, I pleaded, and thou didst drive me out with words ill-suited to thy friend who loved thee.
“‘I did not fear thee, I would have forced thee to thy knees or made thee fight me, had not some good spirit cried to my heart that thou wert her husband, and that we both had loved thee. I dared not listen to the brutal thing thou hintedst at—that now I might fatten where I had hungered. Thou hadst to answer for the baseness of that thought to the King of kings, when thou wentest forth alone, no subject, courtier, friend, wife, or child to do thee service, journeying—not en prince, George; no, not en prince! but as a naked soul to God.
“‘Thou saidst to me: “Get thee gone, John York, where I shall no more see thee.” And when I returned, “Wouldst thou have me leave thy country, sir?” thou answeredst: “Blow thy quarrelsome soul to the stars where my farthest bugle cries.” Then I said: “I go, sir, till thou callest me again—and after; but not till thou hast honoured the child of thy honest wedlock; till thou hast secured thy wife to the end of her life against all manner of trouble save the shame of thy disloyalty.” There was no more for me to do, for my deep love itself forbade my staying longer within reach of the noble deserted soul. And so I saw the chastened glory of her face no more, nor evermore beheld her perfectness.’”
Adderley paused once more, and, after refilling his pipe in silence, continued:
“That was the heart of the thing. His soul sickened of the rank world, as he called it, and he came out to the Hudson’s Bay country, leaving his estates in care of his nephew, but taking many stores and great chests of clothes and a shipload of furniture, instruments of music, more than a thousand books, some good pictures, and great stores of wine. Here he came and stayed, an officer of the Company, building King’s House, and filling it with all the fine things he had brought with him, making in this far north a little palace in the wilderness. Here he lived, his great heart growing greater in this wide sinewy world, King’s House a place of pilgrimage for all the Company’s men in the north; a noble gentleman in a sweet exile, loving what he could no more, what he did no more, see.
“Twice a year he went to that point yonder and blew this bugle, no man knew why or wherefore, year in, year out, till 1817. Then there came a letter to him with great seals, which began: ‘John York, John York, where art thou gone, John York?’ There followed a score of sorrowful sentences, full of petulance, too, for it was as John York foretold, his prince longed for the ‘true souls’ whom he had cast off. But he called too late, for the neglected wife died from the shock of her prince’s longing message to her, and when, by the same mail, John York knew that, he would not go back to England to the King. But twice every year he went to yonder point and spoke out the King’s words to him: ‘John York, John York, where art thou gone, John York?’ and gave the words of his own letter in reply: ‘King of my heart, king of my heart, I am out on the trail of thy bugles.’ To this he added three calls of the bugle, as you have heard.”
Adderley handed the bugle to Lawless, who looked at it with deep interest and passed it on to Pierre. “When he died,” Adderley continued, “he left the house, the fittings, and the stores to the officers of the Company who should be stationed there, with a sum of money yearly, provided that twice in twelve months the bugle should be blown as you have heard it, and those words called out.”
“Why did he do that?” asked Lawless, nodding towards the point.
“Why do they swing the censers at the Mass?” interjected Pierre. “Man has signs for memories, and one man seeing another’s sign will remember his own.”
“You stay because you like it—at King’s House?” asked Lawless of Adderley.
The other stretched himself lazily to the fire and, “I am at home,” he said. “I have no cares. I had all there was of that other world; I’ve not had enough of this. You’ll come with me to King’s House to-morrow?” he added.
To their quick assent he rejoined: “You’ll never want to leave. You’ll stay on.”
To this Lawless replied, shaking his head: “I have a wife and child in England.”
But Pierre did not reply. He lifted the bugle, mutely asking a question of Adderley, who as mutely replied, and then, with it in his hand, left the other two beside the fire.
A few minutes later they heard, with three calls of the bugle from the point afterwards, Pierre’s voice: “John York, John York, where art thou gone, John York?”
Then came the reply:
“King of my heart, king of my heart, I am out on the trail of thy bugles.”