Wendling came to Fort Anne on the day that the Reverend Ezra Badgley and an unknown girl were buried. And that was a notable thing. The man had been found dead at his evening meal; the girl had died on the same day; and they were buried side by side. This caused much scandal, for the man was holy, and the girl, as many women said, was probably evil altogether. At the graves, when the minister’s people saw what was being done, they piously protested; but the Factor, to whom Pierre had whispered a word, answered them gravely that the matter should go on: since none knew but the woman was as worthy of heaven as the man. Wendling chanced to stand beside Pretty Pierre.
“Who knows!” he said aloud, looking hard at the graves, “who knows!... She died before him, but the dead can strike.”
Pierre did not answer immediately, for the Factor was calling the earth down on both coffins; but after a moment he added: “Yes, the dead can strike.” And then the eyes of the two men caught and stayed, and they knew that they had things to say to each other in the world.
They became friends. And that, perhaps, was not greatly to Wendling’s credit; for in the eyes of many Pierre was an outcast as an outlaw. Maybe some of the women disliked this friendship most; since Wendling was a handsome man, and Pierre was never known to seek them, good or bad; and they blamed him for the other’s coldness, for his unconcerned yet respectful eye.
“There’s Nelly Nolan would dance after him to the world’s end,” said Shon McGann to Pierre one day; “and the Widdy Jerome herself, wid her flamin’ cheeks and the wild fun in her eye, croons like a babe at the breast as he slides out his cash on the bar; and over on Gansonby’s Flat there’s—”
“There’s many a fool, ‘voila,’” sharply interjected Pierre, as he pushed the needle through a button he was sewing on his coat.
“Bedad, there’s a pair of fools here, anyway, I say; for the women might die without lift at waist or brush of lip, and neither of ye’d say, ‘Here’s to the joy of us, goddess, me own!’”
Pierre seemed to be intently watching the needlepoint as it pierced up the button-eye, and his reply was given with a slowness corresponding to the sedate passage of the needle. “Wendling, you think, cares nothing for women? Well, men who are like that cared once for one woman, and when that was over—But, pshaw! I will not talk. You are no thinker, Shon McGann. You blunder through the world. And you’ll tremble as much to a woman’s thumb in fifty years as now.”
“By the holy smoke,” said Shon, “though I tremble at that, maybe, I’ll not tremble, as Wendling, at nothing at all.” Here Pierre looked up sharply, then dropped his eyes on his work again. Shon lapsed suddenly into a moodiness.
“Yes,” said Pierre, “as Wendling, at nothing at all? Well?”
“Well, this, Pierre, for you that’s a thinker from me that’s none. I was walking with him in Red Glen yesterday. Sudden he took to shiverin’, and snatched me by the arm, and a mad look shot out of his handsome face. ‘Hush!’ says he. I listened. There was a sound like the hard rattle of a creek over stones, and then another sound behind that. ‘Come quick,’ says he, the sweat standin’ thick on him; and he ran me up the bank—for it was at the beginnin’ of the Glen where the sides were low—and there we stood pantin’ and starin’ flat at each other. ‘What’s that? and what’s got its hand on ye? for y’ are cold as death, an’ pinched in the face, an’ you’ve bruised my arm,’ said I. And he looked round him slow and breathed hard, then drew his fingers through the sweat on his cheek. ‘I’m not well, and I thought I heard—you heard it; what was it like?’ said he; and he peered close at me. ‘Like water,’ said I; ‘a little creek near, and a flood comin’ far off.’ ‘Yes, just that,’ said he; ‘it’s some trick of wind in the place, but it makes a man foolish, and an inch of brandy would be the right thing.’ I didn’t say no to that. And on we came, and brandy we had with a wish in the eye of Nelly Nolan that’d warm the heart of a tomb.... And there’s a cud for your chewin’, Pierre. Think that by the neck and the tail, and the divil absolve ye.”
During this, Pierre had finished with the button. He had drawn on his coat and lifted his hat, and now lounged, trying the point of the needle with his forefinger. When Shon ended, he said with a sidelong glance: “But what did you think of all that, Shon?”
“Think! There it was! What’s the use of thinkin’? There’s many a trick in the world with wind or with spirit, as I’ve seen often enough in ould Ireland, and it’s not to be guessed by me.” Here his voice got a little lower and a trifle solemn. “For, Pierre,” spoke he, “there’s what’s more than life or death, and sorra wan can we tell what it is; but we’ll know some day whin—”
“When we’ve taken the leap at the Almighty Ditch,” said Pierre, with a grave kind of lightness. “Yes, it is all strange. But even the Almighty Ditch is worth the doing: nearly everything is worth the doing; being young, growing old, fighting, loving—when youth is on—hating, eating, drinking, working, playing big games. All is worth it except two things.”
“And what are they, bedad?”
“Thy neighbour’s wife and murder. Those are horrible. They double on a man one time or another; always.”
Here, as in curiosity, Pierre pierced his finger with the needle, and watched the blood form in a little globule. Looking at it meditatively and sardonically, he said: “There is only one end to these. Blood for blood is a great matter; and I used to wonder if it would not be terrible for a man to see his death coming on him drop by drop, like that.” He let the spot of blood fall to the floor. “But now I know that there is a punishment worse than that... ‘mon Dieu!’ worse than that,” he added.
Into Shon’s face a strange look had suddenly come. “Yes, there’s something worse than that, Pierre.”
“So, ‘bien?’”
Shon made the sacred gesture of his creed. “To be punished by the dead. And not see them—only hear them.” And his eyes steadied firmly to the other’s.
Pierre was about to reply, but there came the sound of footsteps through the open door, and presently Wendling entered slowly. He was pale and worn, and his eyes looked out with a searching anxiousness. But that did not render him less comely. He had always dressed in black and white, and this now added to the easy and yet severe refinement of his person. His birth and breeding had occurred in places unfrequented by such as Shon and Pierre; but plains and wild life level all; and men are friends according to their taste and will, and by no other law. Hence these with Wendling. He stretched out his hand to each without a word. The hand-shake was unusual; he had little demonstration ever. Shon looked up surprised, but responded. Pierre followed with a swift, inquiring look; then, in the succeeding pause, he offered cigarettes. Wendling took one; and all, silent, sat down. The sun streamed intemperately through the doorway, making a broad ribbon of light straight across the floor to Wendling’s feet. After lighting his cigarette, he looked into the sunlight for a moment, still not speaking. Shon meanwhile had started his pipe, and now, as if he found the silence awkward,—“It’s a day for God’s country, this,” he said: “to make man a Christian for little or much, though he play with the Divil betunewhiles.” Without looking at them, Wendling said, in a low voice: “It was just such a day, down there in Quebec, when It happened. You could hear the swill of the river, the water licking the piers, and the saws in the Big Mill and the Little Mill as they marched through the timber, flashing their teeth like bayonets. It’s a wonderful sound on a hot, clear day—that wild, keen singing of the saws, like the cry of a live thing fighting and conquering. Up from the fresh-cut lumber in the yards there came a smell like the juice of apples, and the sawdust, as you thrust your hand into it, was as cool and soft as the leaves of a clove-flower in the dew. On these days the town was always still. It looked sleeping, and you saw the heat quivering up from the wooden walls and the roofs of cedar shingles as though the houses were breathing.”
Here he paused, still intent on the shaking sunshine. Then he turned to the others as if suddenly aware that he had been talking to them. Shon was about to speak, but Pierre threw a restraining glance, and, instead, they all looked through the doorway and beyond. In the settlement below they saw the effect that Wendling had described. The houses breathed. A grasshopper went clacking past, a dog at the door snapped up a fly; but there seemed no other life of day. Wendling nodded his head towards the distance. “It was quiet, like that. I stood and watched the mills and the yards, and listened to the saws, and looked at the great slide, and the logs on the river: and I said ever to myself that it was all mine—all. Then I turned to a big house on the hillock beyond the cedars, whose windows were open, with a cool dusk lying behind them. More than all else, I loved to think I owned that house and what was in it.... She was a beautiful woman. And she used to sit in a room facing the mill—though the house fronted another way—thinking of me, I did not doubt, and working at some delicate needle-stuff. There never had been a sharp word between us, save when I quarrelled bitterly with her brother, and he left the mill and went away. But she got over that mostly, though the lad’s name was, never mentioned between us. That day I was so hungry for the sight of her that I got my field-glass—used to watch my vessels and rafts making across the bay—and trained it on the window where I knew she sat. I thought, it would amuse her, too, when I went back at night, if I told her what she had been doing. I laughed to myself at the thought of it as I adjusted the glass.... I looked.... There was no more laughing.... I saw her, and in front of her a man, with his back half on me. I could not recognise him, though at the instant I thought he was something familiar. I failed to get his face at all. Hers I found indistinctly. But I saw him catch her playfully by the chin! After a little they rose. He put his arm about her and kissed her, and he ran his fingers through her hair. She had such fine golden hair—so light, and it lifted to every breath. Something got into my brain. I know now it was the maggot which sent Othello mad. The world in that hour was malicious, awful....
“After a time—it seemed ages, she and everything had receded so far—I went... home. At the door I asked the servant who had been there. She hesitated, confused, and then said the young curate of the parish. I was very cool: for madness is a strange thing; you see everything with an intense aching clearness—that is the trouble.... She was more kind than common. I do not think I was unusual. I was playing a part well, my grandmother had Indian blood like yours, Pierre, and I was waiting. I was even nicely critical of her to myself. I balanced the mole on her neck against her general beauty; the curve of her instep, I decided, was a little too emphatic. I passed her backwards and forwards, weighing her at every point; but yet these two things were the only imperfections. I pronounced her an exceeding piece of art—and infamy. I was much interested to see how she could appear perfect in her soul. I encouraged her to talk. I saw with devilish irony that an angel spoke. And, to cap it all, she assumed the fascinating air of the mediator—for her brother; seeking a reconciliation between us. Her amazing art of person and mind so worked upon me that it became unendurable; it was so exquisite—and so shameless. I was sitting where the priest had sat that afternoon; and when she leaned towards me I caught her chin lightly and trailed my fingers through her hair as he had done: and that ended it, for I was cold, and my heart worked with horrible slowness. Just as a wave poises at its height before breaking upon the shore, it hung at every pulse-beat, and then seemed to fall over with a sickening thud. I arose, and acting still, spoke impatiently of her brother. Tears sprang to her eyes. Such divine dissimulation, I thought—too good for earth. She turned to leave the room, and I did not stay her. Yet we were together again that night.... I was only waiting.”
The cigarette had dropped from his fingers to the floor, and lay there smoking. Shon’s face was fixed with anxiety; Pierre’s eyes played gravely with the sunshine. Wendling drew a heavy breath, and then went on.
“Again, next day, it was like this-the world draining the heat.... I watched from the Big Mill. I saw them again. He leaned over her chair and buried his face in her hair. The proof was absolute now.... I started away, going a roundabout, that I might not be seen. It took me some time. I was passing through a clump of cedar when I saw them making towards the trees skirting the river. Their backs were on me. Suddenly they diverted their steps—towards the great slide, shut off from water this last few months, and used as a quarry to deepen it. Some petrified things had been found in the rocks, but I did not think they were going to these. I saw them climb down the rocky steps; and presently they were lost to view. The gates of the slide could be opened by machinery from the Little Mill. A terrible, deliciously malignant thought came to me. I remember how the sunlight crept away from me and left me in the dark. I stole through that darkness to the Little Mill. I went to the machinery for opening the gates. Very gently I set it in motion, facing the slide as I did so. I could see it through the open sides of the mill. I smiled to think what the tiny creek, always creeping through a faint leak in the gates and falling with a granite rattle on the stones, would now become. I pushed the lever harder—harder. I saw the gates suddenly give, then fly open, and the river sprang roaring massively through them. I heard a shriek through the roar. I shuddered; and a horrible sickness came on me.... And as I turned from the machinery, I saw the young priest coming at me through a doorway!... It was not the priest and my wife that I had killed; but my wife and her brother....”
He threw his head back as though something clamped his throat. His voice roughened with misery. “The young priest buried them both, and people did not know the truth. They were even sorry for me. But I gave up the mills—all; and I became homeless... this.”
Now he looked up at the two men, and said: “I have told you because you know something, and because there will, I think, be an end soon.” He got up and reached out a trembling hand for a cigarette. Pierre gave him one. “Will you walk with me”? he asked.
Shon shook his head. “God forgive you,” he replied, “I can’t do it.”
But Wendling and Pierre left the hut together. They walked for an hour, scarcely speaking, and not considering where they went. At last Pierre mechanically turned to go down into Red Glen. Wendling stopped short, then, with a sighing laugh, strode on. “Shoo has told you what happened here”? he said.
Pierre nodded.
“And you know what came once when you walked with me.... The dead can strike,” he added. Pierre sought his eye. “The minister and the girl buried together that day,” he said, “were—”
He stopped, for behind him he heard the sharp, cold trickle of water. Silent they walked on. It followed them. They could not get out of the Glen now until they had compassed its length—the walls were high. The sound grew. The men faced each other.
“Good-bye,” said Wendling; and he reached out his hand swiftly. But Pierre heard a mighty flood groaning on them, and he blinded as he stretched his arm in response. He caught at Wendling’s shoulder, but felt him lifted and carried away, while he himself stood still in a screeching wind and heard impalpable water rushing over him. In a minute it was gone; and he stood alone in Red Glen.
He gathered himself up and ran. Far down, where the Glen opened to the plain, he found Wendling. The hands were wrinkled; the face was cold; the body was wet: the man was drowned and dead.
“Divils me darlins, it’s a memory I have of a time whin luck wasn’t foldin’ her arms round me, and not so far back aither, and I on the wallaby track hot-foot for the City o’ Gold.”
Shon McGann said this in the course of a discussion on the prosperity of Pipi Valley. Pretty Pierre remarked nonchalantly in reply,—“The wallaby track—eh—what is that, Shon?”
“It’s a bit of a haythen y’ are, Pierre. The wallaby track? That’s the name in Australia for trampin’ west through the plains of the Never-Never Country lookin’ for the luck o’ the world; as, bedad, it’s meself that knows it, and no other, and not by book or tellin’ either, but with the grip of thirst at me throat and a reef in me belt every hour to quiet the gnawin’.” And Shon proceeded to light his pipe afresh.
“But the City o’ Gold-was there much wealth for you there, Shon?”
Shon laughed, and said between the puffs of smoke, “Wealth for me, is it? Oh, mother o’ Moses! wealth of work and the pride of livin’ in the heart of us, and the grip of an honest hand betunewhiles; and what more do y’ want, Pierre?”
The Frenchman’s drooping eyelids closed a little more, and he replied, meditatively: “Money? No, that is not Shon McGann. The good fellowship of thirst?—yes, a little. The grip of the honest hand, quite, and the clinch of an honest waist? Well, ‘peut-etre.’
“Of the waist which is not honest?—tsh! he is gay—and so!”
The Irishman took his pipe from his mouth, and held it poised before him. He looked inquiringly and a little frowningly at the other for a moment, as if doubtful whether to resent the sneer that accompanied the words just spoken; but at last he good-humouredly said: “Blood o’ me bones, but it’s much I fear the honest waist hasn’t always been me portion—Heaven forgive me!”
“‘Nom de pipe,’ this Irishman!” replied Pierre. “He is gay; of good heart; he smiles, and the women are at his heels; he laughs, and they are on their knees—Such a fool he is!”
Still Shon McGann laughed.
“A fool I am, Pierre, or I’d be in ould Ireland at this minute, with a roof o’ me own over me and the friends o’ me youth round me, and brats on me knee, and the fear o’ God in me heart.”
“‘Mais,’ Shon,” mockingly rejoined the Frenchman, “this is not Ireland, but there is much like that to be done here. There is a roof, and there is that woman at Ward’s Mistake, and the brats—eh, by and by?”
Shon’s face clouded. He hesitated, then replied sharply: “That woman, do y’ say, Pierre, she that nursed me when the Honourable and meself were taken out o’ Sandy Drift, more dead than livin’; she that brought me back to life as good as ever, barrin’ this scar on me forehead and a stiffness at me elbow, and the Honourable as right as the sun, more luck to him! which he doesn’t need at all, with the wind of fortune in his back and shiftin’ neither to right nor left.—That woman! faith, y’d better not cut the words so sharp betune yer teeth, Pierre.”
“But I will say more—a little—just the same. She nursed you—well, that is good; but it is good also, I think, you pay her for that, and stop the rest. Women are fools, or else they are worse. This one? She is worse. Yes; you will take my advice, Shon McGann.” The Irishman came to his feet with a spring, and his words were angry.
“It doesn’t come well from Pretty Pierre, the gambler, to be revilin’ a woman; and I throw it in y’r face, though I’ve slept under the same blanket with ye, an’ drunk out of the same cup on manny a tramp, that you lie dirty and black when ye spake ill—of my wife.”
This conversation had occurred in a quiet corner of the bar-room of the Saints’ Repose. The first few sentences had not been heard by the others present; but Shon’s last speech, delivered in a ringing tone, drew the miners to their feet, in expectation of seeing shots exchanged at once. The code required satisfaction, immediate and decisive. Shon was not armed, and some one thrust a pistol towards him; but he did not take it. Pierre rose, and coming slowly to him, laid a slender finger on his chest, and said:
“So! I did not know that she was your wife. That is a surprise.”
The miners nodded assent. He continued:
“Lucy Rives your wife! Hola, Shon McGann, that is such a joke.”
“It’s no joke, but God’s truth, and the lie is with you, Pierre.”
Murmurs of anticipation ran round the room; but the half-breed said: “There will be satisfaction altogether; but it is my whim to prove what I say first; then”—fondling his revolver—“then we shall settle. But, see: you will meet me here at ten o’clock to-night, and I will make it, I swear to you, so clear, that the woman is vile.”
The Irishman suddenly clutched the gambler, shook him like a dog, and threw him against the farther wall. Pierre’s pistol was levelled from the instant Shon moved; but he did not use it. He rose on one knee after the violent fall, and pointing it at the other’s head, said coolly: “I could kill you, my friend, so easy! But it is not my whim. Till ten o’clock is not long to wait, and then, just here, one of us shall die. Is it not so?” The Irishman did not flinch before the pistol. He said with low fierceness, “At ten o’clock, or now, or any time, or at any place, y’ll find me ready to break the back of the lies y’ve spoken, or be broken meself. Lucy Rives is my wife, and she’s true and straight as the sun in the sky. I’ll be here at ten o’clock, and as ye say, Pierre, one of us makes the long reckoning for this.” And he opened the door and went out.
The half-breed moved to the bar, and, throwing down a handful of silver, said: “It is good we drink after so much heat. Come on, come on, comrades.”
The miners responded to the invitation. Their sympathy was mostly with Shon McGann; their admiration was about equally divided; for Pretty Pierre had the quality of courage in as active a degree as the Irishman, and they knew that some extraordinary motive, promising greater excitement, was behind the Frenchman’s refusal to send a bullet through Shon’s head a moment before.
King Kinkley, the best shot in the Valley next to Pierre, had watched the unusual development of the incident with interest; and when his glass had been filled he said, thoughtfully: “This thing isn’t according to Hoyle. There’s never been any trouble just like it in the Valley before. What’s that McGann said about the lady being his wife? If it’s the case, where hev we been in the show? Where was we when the license was around? It isn’t good citizenship, and I hev my doubts.”
Another miner, known as the Presbyterian, added: “There’s some skulduggery in it, I guess. The lady has had as much protection as if she was the sister of every citizen of the place, just as much as Lady Jane here (Lady Jane, the daughter of the proprietor of the Saints’ Repose, administered drinks), and she’s played this stacked hand on us, has gone one better on the sly.”
“Pierre,” said King Kinkley, “you’re on the track of the secret, and appear to hev the advantage of the lady: blaze it—blaze it out.”
Pierre rejoined, “I know something; but it is good we wait until ten o’clock. Then I will show you all the cards in the pack. Yes, so, ‘bien sur.’”
And though there was some grumbling, Pierre had his way. The spirit of adventure and mutual interest had thrown the French half-breed, the Irishman, and the Hon. Just Trafford together on the cold side of the Canadian Rockies; and they had journeyed to this other side, where the warm breath from the Pacific passed to its congealing in the ranges. They had come to the Pipi field when it was languishing. From the moment of their coming its luck changed; it became prosperous. They conquered the Valley each after his kind. The Honourable—he was always called that—mastered its resources by a series of “great lucks,” as Pierre termed it, had achieved a fortune, and made no enemies; and but two months before the day whose incidents are here recorded, had gone to the coast on business. Shon had won the reputation of being a “white man,” to say nothing of his victories in the region of gallantry. He made no wealth; he only got that he might spend. Irishman-like he would barter the chances of fortune for the lilt of a voice or the clatter of a pretty foot.
Pierre was different. “Women, ah, no!” he would say, “they make men fools or devils.”
His temptation lay not that way. When the three first came to the Pipi, Pierre was a miner, simply; but nearly all his life he had been something else, as many a devastated pocket on the east of the Rockies could bear witness; and his new career was alien to his soul. Temptation grew greatly on him at the Pipi, and in the days before he yielded to it he might have been seen at midnight in his but playing solitaire. Why he abstained at first from practising his real profession is accounted for in two ways: he had tasted some of the sweets of honest companionship with the Honourable and Shon, and then he had a memory of an ugly night at Pardon’s Drive a year before, when he stood over his own brother’s body, shot to death by accident in a gambling row having its origin with himself. These things had held him back for a time; but he was weaker than his ruling passion.
The Pipi was a young and comparatively virgin field; the quarry was at his hand. He did not love money for its own sake; it was the game that enthralled him. He would have played his life against the treasury of a kingdom, and, winning it with loaded double sixes, have handed back the spoil as an unredeemable national debt.
He fell at last, and in falling conquered the Pipi Valley; at the same time he was considered a fearless and liberal citizen, who could shoot as straight as he played well. He made an excursion to another field, however, at an opportune time, and it was during this interval that the accident to Shon and the Honourable had happened. He returned but a few hours before this quarrel with Shon occurred, and in the Saints’ Repose, whither he had at once gone, he was told of the accident. While his informant related the incident and the romantic sequence of Shon’s infatuation, the woman passed the tavern and was pointed out to Pierre. The half-breed had not much excitableness in his nature, but when he saw this beautiful woman with a touch of the Indian in her contour, his pale face flushed, and he showed his set teeth under his slight moustache. He watched her until she entered a shop, on the signboard of which was written—written since he had left a few months ago—Lucy Rives, Tobacconist.
Shon had then entered the Saints’ Repose; and we know the rest. A couple of hours after this nervous episode, Pierre might have been seen standing in the shadow of the pines not far from the house at Ward’s Mistake, where, he had been told, Lucy Rives lived with an old Indian woman. He stood, scarcely moving, and smoking cigarettes, until the door opened. Shon came out and walked down the hillside to the town. Then Pierre went to the door, and without knocking, opened it, and entered. A woman started up from a seat where she was sewing, and turned towards him. As she did so, the work, Shon’s coat, dropped from her hands, her face paled, and her eyes grew big with fear. She leaned against a chair for support—this man’s presence had weakened her so. She stood silent, save for a slight moan that broke from her lips, as Pierre lighted a cigarette coolly, and then said to an old Indian woman who sat upon the floor braiding a basket: “Get up, Ikni, and go away.”
Ikni rose, came over, and peered into the face of the half-breed. Then she muttered: “I know you—I know you. The dead has come back again.” She caught his arm with her bony fingers as if to satisfy herself that he was flesh and blood, and shaking her head dolefully, went from the room. When the door closed behind her there was silence, broken only by an exclamation from the man.
The other drew her hand across her eyes, and dropped it with a motion of despair. Then Pierre said, sharply: “Bien?”
“Francois,” she replied, “you are alive!”
“Yes, I am alive, Lucy.”
She shuddered, then grew still again and whispered: “Why did you let it be thought that you were drowned? Why? Oh, why”? she moaned.
He raised his eyebrows slightly, and between the puffs of smoke, said:
“Ah yes, my Lucy, why? It was so long ago. Let me see: so—so—ten years. Ten years is a long time to remember, eh?”
He came towards her. She drew back; but her hand remained on the chair. He touched the plain gold ring on her finger, and said:
“You still wear it. To think of that—so loyal for a woman! How she remembers, holy Mother!... But shall I not kiss you, yes, just once after eight years—my wife?”
She breathed hard and drew back against the wall, dazed and frightened, and said:
“No, no, do not come near me; do not speak to me—ah, please, stand back, for a moment—please!”
He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and continued, with mock tenderness:
“To think that things come round so! And here you have a home. But that is good. I am tired of much travel and life all alone. The prodigal goes not to the home, the home comes to the prodigal.” He stretched up his arms as if with a feeling of content.
“Do you—do you not know,” she said, “that—that—”
He interrupted her:
“Do I not know, Lucy, that this is your home? Yes. But is it not all the same? I gave you a home ten years ago—to think, ten years ago! We quarrelled one night, and I left you. Next morning my boat was found below the White Cascade—yes, but that was so stale a trick! It was not worthy of Francois Rives. He would do it so much better now; but he was young then; just a boy, and foolish. Well, sit down, Lucy, it is a long story, and you have much to tell, how much—who knows?” She came slowly forward and said with a painful effort:
“You did a great wrong, Francois. You have killed me.
“Killed you, Lucy, my wife! Pardon! Never in those days did you look so charming as now—never. But the great surprise of seeing your husband, it has made you shy, quite shy. There will be much time now for you to change all that. It is quite pleasant to think on, Lucy.... You remember the song we used to sing on the Chaudiere at St. Antoine? See, I have not forgotten it—
“‘Nos amants sont en guerre,Vole, mon coeur, vole.’”
He hummed the lines over and over, watching through his half-shut eyes the torture he was inflicting.
“Oh, Mother of God,” she whispered, “have mercy! Can you not see, do you not know? I am not as you left me.”
“Yes, my wife, you are just the same; not an hour older. I am glad that you have come to me. But how they will envy Pretty Pierre!”
“Envy—Pretty-Pierre,” she repeated, in distress; “are you Pretty Pierre? Ah, I might have known, I might have known!”
“Yes, and so! Is not Pretty Pierre as good a name as Francois Rives? Is it not as good as Shon McGann?”
“Oh, I see it all, I see it all now!” she said mournfully. “It was with you he quarrelled, and about me. He would not tell me what it was. You know, then, that I am—that I am married—to him?”
“Quite. I know all that; but it is no marriage.” He rose to his feet slowly, dropping the cigarette from his lips as he did so. “Yes,” he continued, “and I know that you prefer Shon McGann to Pretty Pierre.”
She spread out her hands appealingly.
“But you are my wife, not his. Listen: do you know what I shall do? I will tell you in two hours. It is now eight o’clock. At ten o’clock Shon McGann will meet me at the Saints’ Repose. Then you shall know.... Ah, it is a pity! Shon was my good friend, but this spoils all that. Wine—it has danger; cards—there is peril in that sport; women—they make trouble most of all.”
“O God,” she piteously said, “what did I do? There was no sin in me. I was your faithful wife, though you were cruel to me. You left me, cheated me, brought this upon me. It is you that has done this wickedness, not I.” She buried her face in her hands, falling on her knees beside the chair.
He bent above her: “You loved the young avocat better, eight years ago.”
She sprang to her feet. “Ah, now I understand,” she said. “That was why you quarrelled with me; why you deserted me. You were not man enough to say what made you so much the—so wicked and hard, so—”
“Be thankful, Lucy, that I did not kill you then,” he interjected.
“But it is a lie,” she cried; “a lie!”
She went to the door and called the Indian woman. “Ikni,” she said. “He dares to say evil of Andre and me. Think—of Andre!”
Ikni came to him, put her wrinkled face close to his, and said: “She was yours, only yours; but the spirits gave you a devil. Andre, oh, oh, Andre! The father of Andre was her father—ah, that makes your sulky eyes to open. Ikni knows how to speak. Ikni nursed them both. If you had waited you should have known. But you ran away like a wolf from a coal of fire; you shammed death like a fox; you come back like the snake to crawl into the house and strike with poison tooth, when you should be with the worms in the ground. But Ikni knows—you shall be struck with poison too, the Spirit of the Red Knife waits for you. Andre was her brother.”
He pushed her aside savagely: “Be still!” he said. “Get out-quick. ‘Sacre’—quick!”
When they were alone again he continued with no anger in his tone: “So, Andre the avocat and you—that, eh? Well, you see how much trouble has come; and now this other—a secret too. When were you married to Shon McGann?”
“Last night,” she bitterly replied; “a priest came over from the Indian village.”
“Last night,” he musingly repeated. “Last night I lost two thousand dollars at the Little Goshen field. I did not play well last night; I was nervous. In ten years I had not lost so much at one game as I did last night. It was a punishment for playing too honest, or something; eh, what do you think, Lucy—or something, ‘hein?’”
She said nothing, but rocked her body to and fro.
“Why did you not make known the marriage with Shon?”
“He was to have told it to-night,” she said.
There was silence for a moment, then a thought flashed into his eyes, and he rejoined with a jarring laugh, “Well, I will play a game to-night, Lucy Rives; such a game that Pretty Pierre will never be forgotten in the Pipi Valley—a beautiful game, just for two. And the other who will play—the wife of Francois Rives shall see if she will wait; but she must be patient, more patient than her husband was ten years ago.”
“What will you do—tell me, what will you do?”
“I will play a game of cards—just one magnificent game; and the cards shall settle it. All shall be quite fair, as when you and I played in the little house by the Chaudiere—at first, Lucy,—before I was a devil.”
Was this peculiar softness to his last tones assumed or real? She looked at him inquiringly; but he moved away to the window, and stood gazing down the hillside towards the town below. His eyes smarted.
“I will die,” she said to herself in whispers—“I will die.” A minute passed, and then Pierre turned and said to her: “Lucy, he is coming up the hill. Listen. If you tell him that I have seen you, I will shoot him on sight, dead. You would save him, for a little, for an hour or two—or more? Well, do as I say; for these things must be according to the rules of the game, and I myself will tell him all at the Saints’ Repose. He gave me the lie there, and I will tell him the truth before them all there. Will you do as I say?”
She hesitated an instant, and then replied: “I will not tell him.”
“There is only one way, then,” he continued. “You must go at once from here into the woods behind there, and not see him at all. Then at ten o’clock you will come to the Saints’ Repose, if you choose, to know how the game has ended.”
She was trembling, moaning, no longer. A set look had come into her face; her eyes were steady and hard. She quietly replied: “Yes, I shall be there.”
He came to her, took her hand, and drew from her finger the wedding-ring which last night Shon McGann had placed there. She submitted passively. Then, with an upward wave of his fingers, he spoke in a mocking lightness, but without any of the malice which had first appeared in his tones, words from an old French song:
“I say no more, my ladyMironton, Mironton, Mirontaine!I say no more, my lady,As nought more can be said.”
He opened the door, motioned to the Indian woman, and, in a few moments, the broken-hearted Lucy Rives and her companion were hidden in the pines; and Pretty Pierre also disappeared into the shadow of the woods as Shon McGann appeared on the crest of the hill.
The Irishman walked slowly to the door, and pausing, said to himself: “I couldn’t run the big risk, me darlin’, without seein’ you again, God help me! There’s danger ahead which little I’d care for if it wasn’t for you.”
Then he stepped inside the house—the place was silent; he called, but no one answered; he threw open the doors of the rooms, but they were empty; he went outside and called again, but no reply came, except the flutter of a night-hawk’s wings and the cry of a whippoorwill. He went back into the house and sat down with his head between his hands. So, for a moment, and then he raised his head, and said with a sad smile: “Faith, Shon, me boy, this takes the life out of you! the empty house where she ought to be, and the smile of her so swate, and the hand of her that falls on y’r shoulder like a dove on the blessed altar-gone, and lavin’ a chill on y’r heart like a touch of the dead. Sure, nivir a wan of me saw any that could stand wid her for goodness, barrin’ the angel that kissed me good-bye with one foot in the stirrup an’ the troopers behind me, now twelve years gone, in ould Donegal, and that I’ll niver see again, she lyin’ where the hate of the world will vex the heart of her no more, and the masses gone up for her soul. Twice, twice in y’r life, Shon McGann, has the cup of God’s joy been at y’r lips, and is it both times that it’s to spill?—Pretty Pierre shoots straight and sudden, and maybe it’s aisy to see the end of it; but as the just God is above us, I’ll give him the lie in his throat betimes for the word he said agin me darlin’. What’s the avil thing that he has to say? What’s the divil’s proof he would bring? And where is she now? Where are you, Lucy? I know the proof I’ve got in me heart that the wreck of the world couldn’t shake, while that light, born of Heaven, swims up to your eyes whin you look at me!”
He rose to his feet again and walked to and fro; he went once more to the doors; he looked here and there through the growing dusk, but to no purpose. She had said that she would not go to her shop this night; but if not, then where could she have gone and Ikni, too? He felt there was more awry in his life than he cared to put into thought or speech. He picked up the sewing she had dropped and looked at it as one would regard a relic of the dead; he lifted her handkerchief, kissed it, and put it in his breast. He took a revolver from his pocket and examined it closely, looked round the room as though to fasten it in his memory, and then passed out, closing the door behind him. He walked down the hillside and went to her shop in the one street of the town, but she was not there, nor had the lad in charge seen her.
Meanwhile, Pretty Pierre had made his way to the Saints’ Repose, and was sitting among the miners indolently smoking. In vain he was asked to play cards. His one reply was, “No, pardon, no! I play one game only to-night, the biggest game ever played in Pipi Valley.” In vain, also, was he asked to drink. He refused the hospitality, defying the danger that such lack of good-fellowship might bring forth. He hummed in patches to himself the words of a song that the ‘brules’ were wont to sing when they hunted the buffalo: