IV
IV
Jim made his journey in good weather with his faithful dogs alone, and came into the camp of the Creesarmed with only a revolver. If he had gone with ten men, there would have been an instant mêlée, in which he would have lost his life. This is what the chief had expected, had prepared for; but Jim was more formidable alone, with power far behind him which could come with force and destroy the tribe, if resistance was offered, than with fifty men. His tongue had a gift of terse and picturesque speech, powerful with a people who had the gift of imagination. With five hundred men ready to turn him loose in the plains without dogs or food, he carried himself with a watchful coolness and complacent determination which got home to their minds with great force.
For hours the struggle for the murderer went on, a struggle of mind over inferior mind and matter.
Arrowhead was a chief whose will had never been crossed by his own people, and to master that will by a superior will, to hold back the destructive force which, to the ignorant minds of the braves, was only a natural force of defence, meant a task needing more than authority behind it. For the very fear of that authority put in motion was an incentive to present resistance—to stave off the day of trouble. The faces that surrounded Jim were thin with hunger, and the murder that had been committed by the chief had, as its origin, the foolish replies of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s man to their demand for supplies. Arrowhead had killed him with his own hand.
But Jim Templeton was of a different calibre. Although he had not been told it, he realized that, indirectly, hunger was the cause of the crime and might easily become the cause of another; for their tempers were sharper even than their appetites. Upon this he played; upon this he made an exhortation to the chief. He assumed that Arrowhead had become violent because of his people’s straits, that Arrowhead’s heartyearned for his people and would make sacrifice for them. Now, if Arrowhead came quietly, he would see that supplies of food were sent at once, and that arrangements were made to meet the misery of their situation. Therefore, if Arrowhead came freely, he would have so much in his favor before his judges; if he would not come quietly, then he must be brought by force; and if they raised a hand to prevent it, then destruction would fall upon all—all save the women and children. The law must be obeyed. They might try to resist the law through him, but, if violence was shown, he would first kill Arrowhead, and then destruction would descend like a wind out of the north, darkness would swallow them, and their bones would cover the plains.
As he ended his words a young brave sprang forward with hatchet raised. Jim’s revolver slipped down into his palm from his sleeve, and a bullet caught the brave in the lifted arm. The hatchet dropped to the ground.
Then Jim’s eyes blazed, and he turned a look of anger on the chief, his face pale and hard, as he said: “The stream rises above the banks; come with me, chief, or all will drown. I am master, and I speak. Ye are hungry because ye are idle. Ye call the world yours, yet ye will not stoop to gather from the earth the fruits of the earth. Ye sit idle in the summer, and women and children die round you when winter comes. Because the game is gone, ye say. Must the world stand still because a handful of Crees need a hunting-ground? Must the makers of cities and the wonders of the earth, who fill the land with plenty—must they stand far off, because the Crees and their chief would wander over a million acres, for each man a million, when by a hundred—ay, by ten—each white man would live in plenty and make the land rejoice? See! Here is the truth. When the Great Spirit draws the game away so that the hunting is poor, ye sit down and fillyour hearts with murder, and in the blackness of your thoughts kill my brother. Idle and shiftless and evil ye are, while the earth cries out to give you of its plenty, a great harvest from a little seed, if ye will but dig and plant, and plough and sow and reap, and lend your backs to toil. Now hear and heed. The end is come. For this once ye shall be fed—by the blood of my heart, ye shall be fed! And another year ye shall labor, and get the fruits of your labor, and not stand waiting, as it were, till a fish shall pass the spear or a stag water at your door, that ye may slay and eat. The end is come, ye idle men. O chief, hearken! One of your braves would have slain me, even as you slew my brother—he one, and you a thousand. Speak to your people as I have spoken, and then come and answer for the deed done by your hand. And this I say that right shall be done between men and men. Speak.”
Jim had made his great effort, and not without avail. Arrowhead rose slowly, the cloud gone out of his face, and spoke to his people, bidding them wait in peace until food came, and appointing his son chief in his stead until his return.
“The white man speaks truth, and I will go,” he said. “I shall return,” he continued, “if it be written so upon the leaves of the Tree of Life; and if it be not so written, I shall fade like a mist, and the tepees will know me not again. The days of my youth are spent, and my step no longer springs from the ground. I shuffle among the grass and the fallen leaves, and my eyes scarce know the stag from the doe. The white man is master—if he wills it we shall die; if he wills it we shall live. And this was ever so. It is in the tale of our people. One tribe ruled, and the others were their slaves. If it is written on the leaves of the Tree of Life that the white man rule us forever, then it shall be so, I have spoken. Now, behold, I go.”
Jim had conquered, and together they sped away with the dogs through the sweet-smelling spruce woods where every branch carried a cloth of white, and the only sound heard was the swish of a blanket of snow as it fell to the ground from the wide webs of green, or a twig snapped under the load it bore. Peace brooded in the silent and comforting forest, and Jim and Arrowhead, the Indian ever ahead, swung along, mile after mile, on their snow-shoes, emerging at last upon the wide, white prairie.
A hundred miles of sun and fair weather, sleeping at night in the open in a trench dug in the snow, no fear in the thoughts of Jim, nor evil in the heart of the heathen man. There had been moments of watchfulness, of uncertainty, on Jim’s part, the first few hours of the first night after they left the Cree reservation; but the conviction speedily came to Jim that all was well; for the chief slept soundly from the moment he lay down in his blankets between the dogs. Then Jim went to sleep as in his own bed, and, waking, found Arrowhead lighting a fire from a little load of sticks from the sledges. And between murderer and captor there sprang up the companionship of the open road which brings all men to a certain land of faith and understanding, unless they are perverted and vile. There was no vileness in Arrowhead. There were no handcuffs on his hands, no sign of captivity; they two ate out of the same dish, drank from the same basin, broke from the same bread. The crime of Arrowhead, the gallows waiting for him, seemed very far away. They were only two silent travellers, sharing the same hardship, helping to give material comfort to each other—in the inevitable democracy of those far places, where small things are not great nor great things small; where into men’s hearts comes the knowledge of thethings that matter; where, from the wide, starry sky, from the august loneliness, and the soul of the life which has brooded there for untold generations, God teaches the values of this world and the next.
One hundred miles of sun and fair weather, and then fifty miles of bitter, aching cold, with nights of peril from the increasing chill, so that Jim dared not sleep lest he should never wake again, but die benumbed and exhausted! Yet Arrowhead slept through all. Day after day so, and then ten miles of storm such as come only to the vast barrens of the northlands; and woe to the traveller upon whom the icy wind and the blinding snow descended! Woe came upon Jim Templeton and Arrowhead, the heathen.
In the awful struggle between man and nature that followed, the captive became the leader. The craft of the plains, the inherent instinct, the feeling which was more than eyesight became the only hope. One whole day to cover ten miles—an endless path of agony, in which Jim went down again and again, but came up blinded by snow and drift, and cut as with lashes by the angry wind. At the end of the ten miles was a Hudson Bay Company’s post and safety; and through ten hours had the two struggled toward it, going off at tangents, circling on their own tracks; but the Indian, by an instinct as sure as the needle to the pole, getting the direction to the post again, in the moments of direst peril and uncertainty. To Jim the world became a sea of maddening forces which buffeted him; a whirlpool of fire in which his brain was tortured, his mind was shrivelled up; a vast army rending itself, each man against the other. It was a purgatory of music, broken by discords; and then at last—how sweet it all was, after the eternity of misery!—“Church bells and voices low,” and Sally singing to him, Nancy’s voice calling! Then, nothing but sleep—sleep, a sinking down millionsof miles in an ether of drowsiness which thrilled him; and after—no more.
None who has suffered up to the limit of what the human body and soul may bear can remember the history of those distracted moments when the struggle became one between the forces in nature and the forces in man, between agonized body and smothered mind, yet with the divine intelligence of the created being directing, even though subconsciously, the fight.
How Arrowhead found the post in the mad storm he could never have told. Yet he found it, with Jim unconscious on the sledge and with limbs frozen, all the dogs gone but two, the leathers over the Indian’s shoulders as he fell against the gate of the post with a shrill cry that roused the factor and his people within, together with Sergeant Sewell, who had been sent out from headquarters to await Jim’s arrival there. It was Sewell’s hand which first felt Jim’s heart and pulse, and found that there was still life left, even before it could be done by the doctor from headquarters, who had come to visit a sick man at the post.
For hours they worked with snow upon the frozen limbs to bring back life and consciousness. Consciousness came at last with half delirium, half understanding; as, emerging from the passing sleep of anæsthetics, the eye sees things and dimly registers them before the brain has set them in any relation to life or comprehension.
But Jim was roused at last, and the doctor presently held to his lips a glass of brandy. Then from infinite distance Jim’s understanding returned; the mind emerged, but not wholly, from the chaos in which it was travelling. His eyes stood out in eagerness.
“Brandy! brandy!” he said, hungrily.
With an oath Sewell snatched the glass from the doctor’s hand, put it on the table, then stooped to Jim’sear and said, hoarsely: “Remember—Nancy. For God’s sake, sir, don’t drink!”
Jim’s head fell back, the fierce light went out of his eyes, the face became grayer and sharper. “Sally—Nancy—Nancy,” he whispered, and his fingers clutched vaguely at the quilt.
“He must have brandy or he will die. The system is pumped out. He must be revived,” said the doctor. He reached again for the glass of spirits.
Jim understood now. He was on the borderland between life and death, his feet were at the brink. “No—not—brandy, no!” he moaned. “Sally—Sally, kiss me,” he said, faintly, from the middle world in which he was.
“Quick, the broth!” said Sewell to the factor, who had been preparing it. “Quick, while there’s a chance.” He stooped and called into Jim’s ear: “For the love of God, wake up, sir. They’re coming—they’re both coming—Nancy’s coming. They’ll soon be here.” What matter that he lied?—a life was at stake.
Jim’s eyes opened again. The doctor was standing with the brandy in his hand. Half madly Jim reached out. “I must live until they come,” he cried; “the brandy—ah, give it! Give it—ah, no, no, I must not,” he added, gasping, his lips trembling, his hands shaking.
Sewell held the broth to his lips. He drank a little, yet his face became grayer and grayer; a bluish tinge spread about his mouth.
“Have you nothing else, sir?” asked Sewell, in despair.
The doctor put down the brandy, went quickly to his medicine-case, dropped into a glass some liquid from a phial, came over again, and poured a little between the lips; then a little more, as Jim’s eyes opened again; and at last every drop in the glass trickled down the sinewy throat.
Presently as they watched him the doctor said: “It will not do. He must have brandy. It has life—food—in it.”
Jim understood the words. He knew that if he drank the brandy the chances against his future were terrible. He had made his vow, and he must keep it. Yet the thirst was on him; his enemy had him by the throat again, was dragging him down. Though his body was so cold, his throat was on fire. But in the extremity of his strength his mind fought on—fought on, growing weaker every moment. He was having his last fight. They watched him with an aching anxiety, and there was anger in the doctor’s face. He had no patience with these forces arrayed against him.
At last the doctor whispered to Sewell, “It’s no use; he must have the brandy, or he can’t live an hour.”
Sewell weakened; the tears fell down his rough, hard cheeks. “It’ll ruin him—it’s ruin or death.”
“Trust a little more in God and in the man’s strength. Let us give him the chance. Force it down his throat—he’s not responsible,” said the physician, to whom saving life was more than all else.
Suddenly there appeared at the bedside Arrowhead, gaunt and weak, his face swollen, the skin of it broken by the whips of storm.
“He is my brother,” he said, and, stooping, laid both hands, which he had held before the fire for a long time, on Jim’s heart. “Take his feet, his hands, his legs, and his head in your hands,” he said to them all. “Life is in us; we will give him life.”
He knelt down and kept both hands on Jim’s heart, while the others, even the doctor, awed by his act, did as they were bidden. “Shut your eyes. Let your life go into him. Think of him, and him alone. Now!” said Arrowhead, in a strange voice.
He murmured, and continued murmuring, his bodydrawing closer and closer to Jim’s body, while in the deep silence, broken only by the chanting of his low, monotonous voice, the others pressed Jim’s hands and head and feet and legs—six men under the command of a heathen murderer.
The minutes passed. The color came back to Jim’s face, the skin of his hands filled up, they ceased twitching, his pulse got stronger, his eyes opened with a new light in them.
“I’m living, anyhow,” he said, at last, with a faint smile. “I’m hungry—broth, please.”
The fight was won, and Arrowhead, the pagan murderer, drew over to the fire and crouched down beside it, his back to the bed, impassive and still. They brought him a bowl of broth and bread, which he drank slowly, and placed the empty bowl between his knees. He sat there through the night, though they tried to make him lie down.
As the light came in at the windows, Sewell touched him on the shoulder and said, “He is sleeping now.”
“I hear my brother breathe,” answered Arrowhead. “He will live.”
All night he had listened, and had heard Jim’s breath as only a man who has lived in waste places can hear. “He will live. What I take with one hand I give with the other.”
He had taken the life of the factor; he had given Jim his life. And when he was tried three months later for murder, some one else said this for him, and the hearts of all, judge and jury, were so moved they knew not what to do.
But Arrowhead was never sentenced, for, at the end of the first day’s trial, he lay down to sleep and never waked again. He was found the next morning still and cold, and there was clasped in his hands a little doll which Nancy had given him on one of her many visitsto the prison during her father’s long illness. They found a piece of paper in his belt with these words in the Cree language: “With my hands on his heart at the post I gave him the life that was in me, saving but a little until now. Arrowhead, the chief, goes to find life again by the well at the root of the tree.How!”
V
V
On the evening of the day that Arrowhead made his journey to “the well at the root of the tree” a stranger knocked at the door of Captain Templeton’s cottage; then, without awaiting admittance, entered.
Jim was sitting with Nancy on his knee, her head against his shoulder, Sally at his side, her face alight with some inner joy. Before the knock came to the door Jim had just said, “Why do your eyes shine so, Sally? What’s in your mind?” She had been about to answer, to say to him what had been swelling her heart with pride, though she had not meant to tell him what he had forgotten—not till midnight. But the figure that entered the room, a big man with deep-set eyes, a man of power who had carried everything before him in the battle of life, answered for her.
“You have won the stake, Jim,” he said, in a hoarse voice. “You and she have won the stake, and I’ve brought it—brought it.”
Before they could speak he placed in Sally’s hands bonds for five million dollars.
“Jim—Jim, my son!” he burst out. Then, suddenly, he sank into a chair and, putting his head in his hands, sobbed aloud.
“My God, but I’m proud of you—speak to me, Jim. You’ve broken me up.” He was ashamed of his tears, but he could not wipe them away.
“Father, dear old man!” said Jim, and put his hands on the broad shoulders.
Sally knelt down beside him, took both the great hands from the tear-stained face, and laid them against her cheek. But presently she put Nancy on his knees.
“I don’t like you to cry,” the child said, softly; “but to-day I cried too, ’cause my Indian man is dead.”
The old man could not speak, but he put his cheek down to hers. After a minute, “Oh, but she’s worth ten times that!” he said, as Sally came close to him with the bundle he had thrust into her hands.
“What is it?” said Jim.
“It’s five million dollars—for Nancy,” she said.
“Five—million—what—?”
“The stake, Jim,” said Sally. “If you did not drink for four years—never touched a drop—we were to have five million dollars.”
“You never told him, then—you never told him that?” asked the old man.
“I wanted him to win without it,” she said. “If he won, he would be the stronger; if he lost, it would not be so hard for him to bear.”
The old man drew her down and kissed her cheek. He chuckled, though the tears were still in his eyes.
“You are a wonder—the tenth wonder of the world!” he blurted.
Jim stood staring at the bundle in Nancy’s hands. “Five millions—five million dollars!” he kept saying to himself.
“I said Nancy’s worth ten times that, Jim.” The old man caught his hand and pressed it. “But it was a damned near thing, I tell you,” he added. “They tried to break me and my railways and my bank. I had to fight the combination, and there was one day when I hadn’t that five million dollars there, nor five. Jim, they tried to break the old man! And if they’d brokenme, they’d have made me out a scoundrel to her—to this wife of yours who risked everything for both of us—for both of us, Jim; for she’d given up the world to save you, and she was playing like a soul in hell for heaven. If they’d broken me, I’d never have lifted my head again. When things were at their worst I played to save that five millions—her stake and mine; I played for that. I fought for it as a man fights his way out of a burning house. And I won—I won. And it was by fighting for that five millions I saved fifty—fifty millions, son. They didn’t break the old man, Jim. They didn’t break him—not much.”
“There are giants in the world still,” said Jim, his own eyes full. He knew now his father and himself, and he knew the meaning of all the bitter and misspent life of the old days. He and his father were on a level of understanding at last.
“Are you a giant?” asked Nancy, peering up into her grandfather’s eyes.
The old man laughed, then sighed. “Perhaps I was once, more or less, my dear,” saying to her what he meant for the other two—“perhaps I was; but I’ve finished. I’m through. I’ve had my last fight.”
He looked at his son. “I pass the game on to you, Jim. You can do it. I knew you could do it as the reports came in this year. I’ve had a detective up here for four years. I had to do it. It was the devil in me. You’ve got to carry on the game, Jim; I’m done. I’ll stay home and potter about. I want to go back to Kentucky, and build up the old place, and take care of it a bit—your mother always loved it. I’d like to have it as it was when she was there long ago. But I’ll be ready to help you when I’m wanted, understand.”
“You want me to run things—your colossal schemes? You think—?”
“I don’t think. I’m old enough to know,”
WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
The arrogant Sun had stalked away into the evening, trailing behind him banners of gold and crimson, and a swift twilight was streaming over the land. As the sun passed, the eyes of two men on a high hill followed it, and the look of one was like a light in a window to a lost traveller. It had in it the sense of home and the tale of a journey done. Such a journey this man had made as few have ever attempted and fewer accomplished. To the farthermost regions of snow and ice, where the shoulder of a continent juts out into the northwestern arctic seas, he had travelled on foot and alone, save for his dogs, and for Indian guides who now and then shepherded him from point to point. The vast ice-hummocks had been his housing; pemmican, the raw flesh of fish, and even the fat and oil of seals had been his food. Ever and ever through long months the everlasting white glitter of the snow and ice, ever and ever the cold stars, the cloudless sky, the moon at full, or swung like a white sickle in the sky to warn him that his life must be mown like grass. At night to sleep in a bag of fur and wool, by day the steely wind, or the air shaking with a filmy powder of frost; while the illimitably distant sun made the tiny flakes sparkle like silver—apoudreday, when the face and hands are most like to be frozen, and all so still and white and passionless, yet aching with energy. Hundreds upon hundreds of miles that endless trail wentwinding to the farthest Northwest. No human being had ever trod its lengths before, though Indians or a stray Hudson’s Bay Company man had made journeys over part of it during the years that have passed since Prince Rupert sent his adventurers to dot that northern land with posts and forts and trace fine arteries of civilization through the wastes.
Where this man had gone none other had been of white men from the western lands, though from across the wide Pacific, from the Eastern world, adventurers and exiles had once visited what is now known as the Yukon Valley. So this man, browsing in the library of his grandfather, an Eastern scholar, had come to know; and for love of adventure, and because of the tale of a valley of gold and treasure to be had, and because he had been ruined by bad investments, he had made a journey like none ever essayed before. And on his way up to those regions, where the veil before the face of God is very thin and fine, and men’s hearts glow within them, where there was no oasis save the unguessed deposit of a great human dream that his soul could feel, the face of a girl had haunted him. Her voice—so sweet a voice that it rang like muffled silver in his ears, till, in the everlasting theatre of the pole, the stars seemed to repeat it through millions of echoing hills, growing softer and softer as the frost hushed it to his ears—had said to him late and early, “You must come back with the swallows.” Then she had sung a song which had been like a fire in his heart, not alone because of the words of it, but because of the soul in her voice, and it had lain like a coverlet on his heart to keep it warm:
“Adieu! The sun goes awearily down,
The mist creeps up o’er the sleepy town,
The white sail bends to the shuddering mere,
And the reapers have reaped and the night is here.
“Adieu! And the years are a broken song,
The right grows weak in the strife with wrong,
The lilies of love have a crimson stain,
And the old days never will come again.
“Adieu! Where the mountains afar are dim
’Neath the tremulous tread of the seraphim,
Shall not our querulous hearts prevail,
That have prayed for the peace of the Holy Grail?
“Adieu! Sometime shall the veil between
The things that are and that might have been
Be folded back for our eyes to see,
And the meaning of all shall be clear to me.”
It had been but an acquaintance of five days while he fitted out for his expedition, but in this brief time it had sunk deep into his mind that life was now a thing to cherish, and that he must indeed come back; though he had left England caring little if, in the peril and danger of his quest, he ever returned. He had been indifferent to his fate till he came to the Valley of the Saskatchewan, to the town lying at the foot of the maple hill beside the great northern stream, and saw the girl whose life was knit with the far North, whose mother’s heart was buried in the great wastes where Sir John Franklin’s expedition was lost; for her husband had been one of the ill-fated if not unhappy band of lovers of that civilization for which they had risked all and lost all save immortality. Hither the two had come after he had been cast away on the icy plains, and, as the settlement had crept north, had gone north with it, always on the outer edge of house and field, ever stepping northward. Here, with small income but high hearts and quiet souls, they had lived and labored.
And when this newcomer from the old land set his face northward to an unknown destination, the two women had prayed as the mother did in the old dayswhen the daughter was but a babe at her knee, and it was not yet certain that Franklin and his men had been cast away forever. Something in him—his great height, his strength of body, his clear, meditative eyes, his brave laugh—reminded her of him, her husband, who, like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, had said that it mattered little where men did their duty, since God was always near to take or leave as it was His will. When Bickersteth went, it was as though one they had known all their lives had passed; and the woman knew also that a new thought had been sown in her daughter’s mind, a new door opened in her heart.
And he had returned. He was now looking down into the valley where the village lay. Far, far over, two days’ march away, he could see the cluster of houses, and the glow of the sun on the tin spire of the little mission church where he had heard the girl and her mother sing, till the hearts of all were swept by feeling and ravished by the desire for “the peace of the Holy Grail.” The village was, in truth, but a day’s march away from him, but he was not alone, and the journey could not be hastened. Beside him, his eyes also upon the sunset and the village, was a man in a costume half-trapper, half-Indian, with bushy gray beard and massive frame, and a distant, sorrowful look, like that of one whose soul was tuned to past suffering. As he sat, his head sunk on his breast, his elbow resting on a stump of pine—the token of a progressive civilization—his chin upon his hand, he looked like the figure of Moses made immortal by Michael Angelo. But his strength was not like that of the man beside him, who was thirty years younger. When he walked, it was as one who had no destination, who had no haven toward which to travel, who journeyed as one to whom the world is a wilderness, and one tent or one hut is the same as another, and none is home.
Like two ships meeting hull to hull on the wide seas, where a few miles of water will hide them from each other, whose ports are thousands of miles apart, whose courses are not the same, they two had met, the elder man, sick and worn and near to death, in the poor hospitality of an Indian’s tepee. John Bickersteth had nursed the old man back to strength, and had brought him southward with him—a silent companion, who spoke in monosyllables, who had no conversation at all of the past and little of the present, but who was a woodsman and an arctic traveller of the most expert kind, who knew by instinct where the best places for shelter and for sleeping might be found, who never complained, and was wonderful with the dogs. Close as their association was, Bickersteth had felt concerning the other that his real self was in some other sphere or place toward which his mind was always turning, as though to bring it back.
Again and again had Bickersteth tried to get the old man to speak about the past, but he had been met by a dumb sort of look, a straining to understand. Once or twice the old man had taken his hands in both of his own and gazed with painful eagerness into his face, as though trying to remember or to comprehend something that eluded him. Upon these occasions the old man’s eyes dropped tears in an apathetic quiet, which tortured Bickersteth beyond bearing. Just such a look he had seen in the eyes of a favorite dog when he had performed an operation on it to save its life—a reproachful, non-comprehending, loving gaze.
Bickersteth understood a little of the Chinook language, which is familiar to most Indian tribes, and he had learned that the Indians knew nothing exact concerning the old man; but rumors had passed from tribe to tribe that this white man had lived forever in the farthest North among the arctic tribes, and that hepassed from people to people, disappearing into the untenanted wilderness, but reappearing again among stranger tribes, never resting, and as one always seeking what he could not find.
One thing had helped this old man in all his travels and sojourning. He had, as it seemed to the native people, a gift of the hands; for when they were sick a few moments’ manipulation of his huge, quiet fingers vanquished pain. A few herbs he gave in tincture, and these also were praised; but it was a legend that when he was persuaded to lay on his hands and close his eyes, and with his fingers to “search for the pain and find it, and kill it,” he always prevailed. They believed that, though his body was on earth, his soul was with Manitou, and that it was his soul which came into him again, and gave the Great Spirit’s healing to the fingers. This had been the man’s safety through how many years—or how many generations—they did not know; for legends regarding the pilgrim had grown and were fostered by the medicine-men, who, by giving him great age and supernatural power, could, with more self-respect, apologize for their own incapacity.
So the years—how many it was impossible to tell, since he did not know or would not say—had gone on; and now, after ceaseless wandering, his face was turned toward that civilization out of which he had come so long ago—or was it so long ago?—one generation, or two, or ten? It seemed to Bickersteth at times as though it were ten, so strange, so unworldly was his companion. At first he thought that the man remembered more than he would appear to acknowledge, but he found that after a day or two everything that happened as they journeyed was also forgotten.
It was only visible things, or sounds, that appeared to open the doors of memory of the most recent happenings. These happenings, if not varied, were ofcritical moment, since, passing down from the land of unchanging ice and snow, they had come into March and April storms and the perils of the rapids and the swollen floods of May. Now, in June, two years and a month since Bickersteth had gone into the wilds, they looked down upon the goal of one at least—of the younger man who had triumphed in his quest up in these wilds abandoned centuries ago.
With the joyous thought in his heart that he had discovered anew one of the greatest gold-fields of the world, that a journey unparalleled had been accomplished, he turned toward his ancient companion, and a feeling of pity and human love enlarged within him. He, John Bickersteth, was going into a world again where—as he believed—a happy fate awaited him; but what of this old man? He had brought him out of the wilds, out of the unknown—was he only taking him into the unknown again? Were there friends, any friends anywhere in the world, waiting for him? He called himself by no name, he said he had no name. Whence came he? Of whom? Whither was he wending now? Bickersteth had thought of the problem often, and he had no answer for it save that he must be taken care of, if not by others, then by himself; for the old man had saved him from drowning; had also saved him from an awful death on a March day when he fell into a great hole and was knocked insensible in the drifting snow; had saved him from brooding on himself—the beginning of madness—by compelling him to think for another. And sometimes, as he looked at the old man, his imagination had caught the spirit of the legend of the Indians, and he had cried out, “O soul, come back and give him memory—give him back his memory, Manitou the mighty!”
THE OLD MAN SHOOK HIS HEAD. THOUGH NOT WITH UNDERSTANDING
THE OLD MAN SHOOK HIS HEAD. THOUGH NOT WITH UNDERSTANDING
Looking on the old man now, an impulse seized him. “Dear old man,” he said, speaking as one speaks to a child that cannot understand, “you shall never want while I have a penny, or have head or hands to work. But is there no one that you care for or that cares for you, that you remember, or that remembers you?”
The old man shook his head, though not with understanding, and he laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and whispered:
“Once it was always snow, but now it is green, the land. I have seen it—I have seen it once.” His shaggy eyebrows gathered over, his eyes searched, searched the face of John Bickersteth. “Once, so long ago—I cannot think,” he added, helplessly.
“Dear old man,” Bickersteth said, gently, knowing he would not wholly comprehend, “I am going to ask her—Alice—to marry me, and if she does, she will help look after you, too. Neither of us would have been here without the other, dear old man, and we shall not be separated. Whoever you are, you are a gentleman, and you might have been my father or hers—or hers.”
He stopped suddenly. A thought had flashed through his mind, a thought which stunned him, which passed like some powerful current through his veins, shocked him, then gave him a palpitating life. It was a wild thought, but yet why not?—why not? There was the chance, the faint, far-off chance. He caught the old man by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes, scanned his features, pushed back the hair from the rugged forehead.
“Dear old man,” he said, his voice shaking, “do you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that you may be of those who went out to the Arctic Sea with Sir John Franklin—with Sir John Franklin, you understand. Did you know Sir John Franklin?—is it true, dear old boy?—is it true? Are you one that has lived to tell the tale? Did you know Sir John Franklin?—is it—tell me, is it true?”
He let go the old man’s shoulders, for over the face of the other there had passed a change. It was strained and tense. The hands were outstretched, the eyes were staring straight into the west and the coming night.
“It is—it is—that’s it!” cried Bickersteth. “That’s it—oh, love o’ God, that’s it! Sir John Franklin—Sir John Franklin, and all the brave lads that died up there! You remember the ship—the Arctic Sea—the ice-fields, and Franklin—you remember him? Dear old man, say you remember Franklin?”
The thing had seized him. Conviction was upon him, and he watched the other’s anguished face with anguish and excitement in his own. But—but it might be, it might be her father—the eyes, the forehead are like hers; the hands, the long hands, the pointed fingers. “Dear old man, did you have a wife and child, and were they both called Alice—do you remember? Franklin!—Alice! Do you remember?”
The old man got slowly to his feet, his arms outstretched, the look in his face changing, understanding, struggling for its place, memory fighting for its own, the soul contending for its mastery.
“Franklin—Alice—the snow,” he said, confusedly, and sank down.
“God have mercy!” cried Bickersteth, as he caught the swaying body and laid it upon the ground. “He was there—almost.”
He settled the old man against the great pine stump and chafed his hands. “Man, dear man, if you belong to her—if you do, can’t you see what it will mean to me? She can’t say no to me then. But if it’s true, you’ll belong to England and to all the world, too, and you’ll have fame everlasting. I’ll have gold for her and for you, and for your Alice, too, dear old man. Wake up now and remember if you are Dyke Allingham, who went with Franklin to the silent seas of the Pole. If it’syou, really you, what wonder you lost your memory! You saw them all die, Franklin and all, die there in the snow, with all the white world round them. If you were there, what a travel you have had, what strange things you have seen! Where the world is loneliest, God lives most. If you get close to the heart of things, it’s no marvel you forgot what you were, or where you came from; because it didn’t matter; you knew that you were only one of thousands of millions who have come and gone, that make up the soul of things, that make the pulses of the universe beat. That’s it, dear old man. The universe would die, if it weren’t for the souls that leave this world and fill it with life. Wake up! Wake up, Allingham, and tell us where you’ve been, and what you’ve seen.”
He did not labor in vain. Slowly consciousness came back, and the gray eyes opened wide, the lips smiled faintly under the bushy beard; but Bickersteth saw that the look in the face was much the same as it had been before. The struggle had been too great, the fight for the other lost self had exhausted him, mind and body, and only a deep obliquity and a great weariness filled the countenance. He had come back to the verge, he had almost again discovered himself; but the opening door had shut fast suddenly, and he was back again in the night, the incompanionable night of forgetfulness.
Bickersteth saw that the travail and strife had drained life and energy, and that he must not press the mind and vitality of this exile of time and the unknown too far. He felt that when the next test came the old man would either break completely, and sink down into another and everlasting forgetfulness, or tear away forever the veil between himself and his past, and emerge into a long-lost life. His strength must be shepherded, and he must be kept quiet and undisturbed until they came to the town yonder in the valley, over which the nightwas slowly settling down. There two women waited, the two Alices, from both of whom had gone lovers into the North. The daughter was living over again in her young love the pangs of suspense through which her mother had passed. Two years since Bickersteth had gone, and not a sign!
Yet, if the girl had looked from her bedroom window, this Friday night, she would have seen on the far hill a sign; for there burned a fire beside which sat two travellers who had come from the uttermost limits of snow. But as the fire burned—a beacon to her heart if she had but known it—she went to her bed, the words of a song she had sung at choir-practice with tears in her voice and in her heart ringing in her ears. A concert was to be held after the service on the coming Sunday night, at which there was to be a collection for funds to build another mission-house a hundred miles farther north, and she had been practising music she was to sing. Her mother had been an amateur singer of great power, and she was renewing her mother’s gift in a voice behind which lay a hidden sorrow. As she cried herself to sleep the words of the song which had moved her kept ringing in her ears and echoing in her heart:
“When the swallows homeward fly,
And the roses’ bloom is o’er—”
But her mother, looking out into the night, saw on the far hill the fire, burning like a star, where she had never seen a fire set before, and a hope shot into her heart for her daughter—a hope that had flamed up and died down so often during the past year. Yet she had fanned with heartening words every such glimmer of hope when it came, and now she went to bed saying, “Perhaps he will come to-morrow.” In her mind, too, rang the words of the song which had ravished her ears that night, the song she had sung the night before herown husband, Dyke Allingham, had gone with Franklin to the Polar seas:
“When the swallows homeward fly—”
As she and her daughter entered the little church on the Sunday evening, two men came over the prairie slowly toward the town, and both raised their heads to the sound of the church-bell calling to prayer. In the eyes of the younger man there was a look which has come to many in this world returning from hard enterprise and great dangers, to the familiar streets, the friendly faces of men of their kin and clan—to the lights of home.
The face of the older man, however, had another look. It was such a look as is seldom seen in the faces of men, for it showed the struggle of a soul to regain its identity. The words which the old man had uttered in response to Bickersteth’s appeal before he fainted away—“Franklin—Alice—the snow”—had showed that he was on the verge; the bells of the church pealing in the summer air brought him near it once again. How many years had gone since he had heard church-bells? Bickersteth, gazing at him in eager scrutiny, wondered if, after all, he might be mistaken about him. But no, this man had never been born and bred in the Far North. His was a type which belonged to the civilization from which he himself had come. There would soon be the test of it all. Yet he shuddered, too, to think what might happen if it was all true, and discovery or reunion should shake to the centre the very life of the two long-parted ones.
He saw the look of perplexed pain and joy at once in the face of the old man, but he said nothing, and he was almost glad when the bell stopped. The old man turned to him.
“What is it?” he said. “I remember—” but he stopped suddenly, shaking his head.
An hour later, cleared of the dust of travel, the two walked slowly toward the church from the little tavern where they were lodged. The service was now over, but the concert had begun. The church was full, and there were people in the porch; but these made way for the two strangers; and, as Bickersteth was recognized by two or three present, place was found for them. Inside, the old man stared round him in a confused and troubled way, but his motions were quiet and abstracted, and he looked like some old viking, his workaday life done, come to pray ere he went hence forever. They had entered in a pause in the concert, but now two ladies came forward to the chancel steps, and one with her hands clasped before her, began to sing:
“When the swallows homeward fly,
And the roses’ bloom is o’er,
And the nightingale’s sweet song
In the woods is heard no more—”
It was Alice—Alice the daughter—and presently the mother, the other Alice, joined in the refrain. At sight of them Bickersteth’s eyes had filled, not with tears, but with a cloud of feeling, so that he went blind. There she was, the girl he loved. Her voice was ringing in his ears. In his own joy for one instant he had forgotten the old man beside him and the great test that was now upon him. He turned quickly, however, as the old man got to his feet. For an instant the lost exile of the North stood as though transfixed. The blood slowly drained from his face, and in his eyes was an agony of struggle and desire. For a moment an awful confusion had the mastery, and then suddenly a clear light broke into his eyes, his face flushed healthily and shone, his arms went up, and there rang in his ears the words:
“Then I think, with bitter pain,
Shall we ever meet again
When the swallows homeward fly?”
“Alice!—Alice!” he called, and tottered forward up the aisle, followed by John Bickersteth.
“Alice, I have come back!” he cried again.