There is a raised bench of two broad steps, covered with red cloth, running, like a great circular dais, around the curious old ballroom of the Oban Gathering. The effect of it is strikingly to enthrone the matron and the dowager, who hold that bench from eleven until five o'clock in the morning. Impressive, important women, gowned in rich stuffs, and of varying ages, from that one coming in beauty to the meridian of life, to that one arriving in wisdom at its close.
The very word bench, applied to this raised seat, is apt and suggestive. The significance of the term presents itself in a sense large and catholic. The judges of the King's Bench do not deal in any greater measure with the problems of human destinies than do the judges of this one. That dowager, old and wise, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes following some youth whirling a débutante down the long ballroom, weighing carefully his lineage, his income, his social station, will presently deliver an opinion affecting, more desperately, life and lives than any legal one pronounced by my lord upon his woolsack. Here on this bench, while music clashes and winged feet dance, are destinies made and unmade by women who have sounded life and got its measure; who are misled by no illusions; who know accurately into what grim realities the path of every mortal presently descends. There is no tribunal on this earth surpassing in varied and practical knowledge of life these judges of the Red Bench.
This ball is the chiefest function of the Oban Gathering. Here one finds the dazzling splendor which this northern durbar in every other feature strikingly lacks; gowns of Redfera, Worth, Monsieur Paquin; the picturesque uniform of Highland regiments. Every Scottish chief in the dress tartan of his clan, with his sporran, his bright buckles, his kilt; with his stockings turned down over the calf of the leg and his knees bare. All moving in one saturnalia of color; in whirling dances, foursomes, eight-somes, reels, quick as jig steps, deliberate and stately as minuets, to the music of pipers, stepping daintily like cats on opposite sides of the hall; as though on some night of license all the brigands of opera bouffe danced at Versailles with the court beauties of Louis, and around this moving, twining, sometimes shouting, fantastic masquerade, the Red Bench.
0147
And yet there is here no masquerade. This dress of the Highland chief, to the stranger fancy and theatric, has been observed in distant quarters of the world, to attend thus fancy and thus theatric upon the bitterness of death, in slaughter pens at night, under the rush of Zulus, in butchered squares, at midday, sweltering in the Soudan; and of an antiquity anterior to legend—worn by his father's father when he charged, screaming, against Caesar.
At two o'clock on this night Caroline Childers came up out of the crowded ballroom for a moment's breathing, and sat down on the Bed Bench. She was accompanied by the Duke of Dorset, one of the few men to be seen anywhere in plain evening clothes, except Cyrus Childers, who had but now taken the Marchesa Soderrelli in to supper. The Duke sat on the step below the girl, at her feet. On either side this bench stretched the red arc of its circle. Below it innumerable dancers whirled. This girl, her dark hair clouding her face, her wide dark eyes distinguishing the delicate outlines of her mouth and chin, resembled some idealized figure of legend.
One from a distant country, coming at this moment to the entrance of the hall, would have stopped there, wondering, with his shoulder resting against the posts of the doorway. Suppose him to have come ashore on this night, lost, after shipwreck and strange wanderings, after the sea had been over him, uncertain that he lived yet, he would have seen here that fairy sister of Arthur, dark haired, dreamy, wonderful, like this girl. Her council, old, wise, magnificent, sitting on this Red Bench, and below a fantastic dancing company. He would have believed himself come upon this hall through the deeps of green water, into that vanished kingdom, situate by legend, between the Land's End and the isles of Scilly.
The Duke of Dorset, his broad back to the girl, his bronze face looking down on the crowded ballroom, was speaking, slowly, distinctly, like one pronouncing a conclusion.
"I understand now," he said, "why it has become the fashion to attend these Gatherings. It is the only place in the world where gentlemen wear the dress and do the dances of the aborigines."
The girl replied with a question, "You have traveled in many countries, then?"
"In most Eastern countries," said the Duke, "and I have seen nowhere anything like this. These fantastic steps, these striking costumes, this weird music is splendidly, is impressively barbaric."
But the girl was thinking of another matter. "Have you ever visited any Western countries?" she said.
"Not the continent of North America," replied the Duke.
"Then," she said, "you must come to visit me."
These words startled the Duke of Dorset. He had heard not a little of American disregard of conventions, but he was in no sense prepared for this abrupt, remarkable invitation.
"Then you will come to visit me!" spoken quietly, surely, like one in authority, by a girl under twenty, apparently but yesterday from the gardens of a convent. He could not imagine a girl of Italy, of France, of Austria, speaking words like those. A girl on the continent of Europe giving such an invitation would be mad, or something infinitely worse. Evidently all standards known to the people of the old world were unfitted to these people of the new.
The Marchesa Soderrelli was right when she thought him to have found here in the bay of Oban something which he had not believed to exist. He was wholly unable to place and classify this girl. She was strange, new, unbelievable. He felt himself as perplexed and astonished as if, on the border of the Sahara, he had come upon a panther like that one imagined by Balzac; or by accident, in some remote jungle of Hindustan, a leopard with wings. Instinctively he swung around his great shoulders and looked up into her face. There was nothing in that face to indicate that these words were other than ordinary. The girl sat straight as a pine, her chin lifted, her face shadowed by her dark hair, illumined by her dark eyes, imperious, as though these men in spangled coats, in bare knees, as though these women in rich colors, danced before her as before a Sheba. Instantly, as under the medium of this picture, the Duke of Dorset got a new light flashed onto those jarring words. Persons accustomed to be obeyed spoke sometimes like that. He sat a moment, silent, looking at the girl before he opened his mouth to reply; in that moment his opportunity departed.
The young girl arose. "The heat is oppressive," she said; "let us go out." And he followed her, skirting the crowds of dancers.
The door from the ballroom led first into a long scantily furnished antechamber, hung in yellow, and then into the street. This chamber, now deserted, is, during the early hours of the ball, packed with women. Here, by a local custom, they remain until partners for their entire card have been selected. This room has been called facetiously "The Market." Because, here, in open competition, the debutante must win her place, and the veteran hold that which she has already won.
The two went through this room out into the street. The night, like those of this north country in summer, was in no sense dark. The sky was brightened, as in other countries it appears at dawn or twilight; one standing in the street could easily read the lines of a newspaper. The street was not deserted; others, oppressed by the heat and fatigue of the ballroom, had come out into the cool night. The pair walked slowly down toward the sea. They passed, now and then, a couple returning, and here and there, some girl and a Highlander seated on the step of a silent house; the man's kilt spread out to protect his companion's gown from the stone.
They came presently upon a bench under the wall of a garden, and sat down there, looking out on the sea. The hay below the town blinked with lights; every yacht was illumined; some were hung from their masts with many colored lamps, others were etched in outline by strings of light, following their contour. The sea, meeting the horizon, was broken here and there with flecks of white, increasing with the distance; as though sirens sported—timid, modest sirens, flashing but an arm or the tip of a white shoulder where any human eye could see it, but in the security of distance tumbling their bodies in abandon.
Within the ballroom the Duke of Dorset had been able to regard this girl in a certain detached aspect, but here, now, on this bench before the sea, that sense of something intimate and personal assailed his faculties and possessed them. And there came with it a subtle illusion of the unreal creeping over the world, a faint insidious something, like the first effects of opium that one strives to drive away by dashing the face with water. And the source of this vague compelling dream, the thing from which it issued, or the thing toward which, from far-off, mysterious sources, it approached, was this woman—this woman seated here beside him, this slender, exquisite girl.
This sudden, dominating impulse the man strongly resisted, but while he held it thus, he feared it. It was like those bizarre impulses which sometimes seize on the human mind and which, while we know them to be wild and fantastic, we feel that if we remain we shall presently accomplish them. He was glad when the girl spoke.
"I love the sea," she said. Her face was lifted, the breath of the water seemed to move the cloudy mass of her hair gently, as though it wished to caress it. "It makes me feel that all the things which we are taught are only old wives' tales, nevertheless, after all, are somehow true. Before the sea, I believe that the witches and the goblins live. I believe the genii dwell in their copper pots. I believe that somewhere, in the out-of-the-way places of the world, they all remain—these fairy people."
She turned slowly toward her companion.
"Tell me," she said, "when you have traveled through the waste places of the earth, have you never come on a trail of them? Have you never found a magician walking in the desert? Or have you never looked into the open door of a hut, in some endless forest, and seen a big yellow-haired witch weaving at a loom; or in the bed of some dried-up river, a hideous dwarf, squatting on a rock, boiling a pot of water?"
"I have never found them," said the man.
"No," said the girl, "you would never find them. One never does find them, I suppose. But, did you nevernearlyfind them? Did you never, in some big, lonely land at night, when everything was still, did you never catch some faint, eerie murmur, some wisp of music, some vague sound?"
"I have heard," replied the man, "far out in the Sahara, in that unknown country beyond the Zar'ez, which is simply an ocean of huge motionless billows of sand, at night in the endless valleys of this dry sea, I have heard the beating of a drum. No one understands this tiny, fantastic drumming. It is said to be the echo of innumerable grains of sand blown against the hard blades of desert grasses, but no one knows. The Arabs say it is the dead. I suppose it is a sort of sound mirage."
"Oh, no," replied the girl, "it is not the dead; I know what it is. It is the little drums of the fairy people traveling in the desert, hunting a land where they may not be disturbed. We have driven them out of the forest, and away from the rivers and the hills. Poor little people, how they must hate the hot yellow sand, when they remember the cool wood, and the bright water, and the green hills! I am sure that if you had crept out toward that sound you would have seen the tiny drummers, in their quaint scarlet caps, beating their little drums to awake the fairy camp, and you would have seen the moon lying on this camp, and the cobweb tents, and all the little carts filled with their household things."
The fresh salt air seemed to vitalize her face; her eyes, big, vague, dreamy, looked out on the sea; her hands were in her lap; her body unmoving. She was like a child absorbed in the wonder of a story.
"But the others," she said, "the magicians and the witches and the wicked kings and the beautiful princesses, they would live in cities. Have you not nearly found these cities? Have you not seen the turrets and the spires and the domes of them mirrored in the shimmering heat of some far-off waste horizon? Or have you not looked up suddenly in some barren country of great rocks and beheld a walled town with fantastic towers and then, when you advanced, found it only a trick of vision? That would be one of their cities."
All at once the man recalled a memory. A memory that suddenly presented itself, as though it were a fragment of some big luminous conception that he could not quite get hold of. A memory that was like a familiar landmark come upon in some unknown country where one was lost. He leaned forward.
"On the coast of Brittany," he said, "there is a great dreary pool of the sea like dead water, and one looking into it can see faintly far down walls of ancient masonry, barely visible. The peasants say that this is a submerged city. The king of it was old and wicked, and God sent a saint to say that He would destroy the city. And the king replied, 'Am not I, whom you can see, greater than God, whom you cannot see?' And he was tenfold more wicked. And God wearied of his insolence; and one night the saint appeared before the king and said, 'God's wrath approaches.' And he took the king's daughter by the hand and went to the highest tower of the palace. And a stranger, who had entered the city on this day, arose up and followed them, not because he feared God, but because he loved the king's daughter. And suddenly the sea entered and filled the city. And the saint and the king's daughter escaped walking on the water. And the stranger tried to follow and he did follow, staggering and sinking in the water to his knees.
"Well, one summer night my uncle slept at the little house of a curé on this coast of Brittany, and in the night he arose and went out of the house, and the curé heard the latch of the door move, and he got up and followed. When he came to this pool he saw my uncle walking in the sea and he was lurching like a man whose feet sank in the sand. The curé was alarmed and he shouted, and when he shouted, my uncle went suddenly down as though he had stepped off a ledge into deep water, but he came up and swam to the shore. The curé asked him why he had left his bed and come down to this dead pool. My uncle was confused. He hesitated, excused himself, and finally answered that the night was hot and he wished to bathe in the sea."
"And your uncle," said the girl, "was he—was he young then?"
"Yes," replied the man, "he was young. He was as young as I am."
"And was he like you?"
"I am very like him," replied the man. "The servants used to say that he got himself reborn."
"And the woman," said the girl, "what was she like?"
The man leaned over toward the motionless figure of the girl.
"The story says," he replied, "that her hair was like spun darkness and her eyes like the violet core of the night.'"
Suddenly, from the almost invisible warship etched in lights, with the jarring scream of a projectile, a rocket arose and fled hissing into the sky.
The man and the girl sprang up. The tense moment was shattered as by a blow. They remained without a word, looking down at the sea. A second rocket arose, and another as the warship added its bit of glitter to the gala night.
They returned slowly, walking side by side, without speaking, toward the Gathering hall. The salt air had wilted the girl's gown. It clung to her slim figure, giving it that appealing sweetness that the damp night gives to the body of a woman. The street was now empty. The reel of Tullough had drawn in the kilted soldier and his sweetheart.
Presently the man spoke, "How little," he said, "your brother is like you."
"I have no brother," replied the girl.
The man stopped. "No brother?" he said. "Then—then who was that man—that man whose picture is in the yacht there?"
He looked down at the girl standing there in the gray dawn in the empty street; her hair loosened and threatening to tumble down; her slender face alluring like a flower, and for background, the weird, eerie morning of the North lying on a deserted city.
"I think," she said, "there is a forgotten portion of your legend. I think that saint of God saved the princess from something more than death."
When the Duke of Dorset came into the hotel dining room at ten o'clock for breakfast, he met a hall boy, calling his name and "letter please," after the manner of the English hostelry. He sat down at a table, thrust a knife under the flap of the letter and ripped it open. He took out the folded paper within and bent it back across his fingers. The paper was an outline map of the Pacific Coast of the United States. Merely a tracing like those maps used commonly on liners to indicate the day's run. It was marked with a cross in ink, at a point off the coast of Oregon, and signed across the bottom "Caroline Childers."
The Duke arose and went over to the window. The white yacht, lying last night at anchor, was going now out of the bay of Oban, the smoke pouring from her stacks. The gulls attended her, the sun danced on her painted flanks, and the green water, boiling under lace, ran hissing in two furrows, spreading like a V from her screw. The Duke remained standing in the window, his shoulders thrown loosely forward, his hand clenched and resting on the sill, the open map in his fingers. The yacht saluted the warship, dipping her colors, and turned westward slowly into the channel. Her proportions descended gradually into miniature. The smoke crawled lazily in thinner whisps along the sky landward from her funnels. The sea was a pot of molten glass, green as verdigris far down under the light, and polished on the surface like a crystal. Over this water, easily, without a sound, without the swinging of a davit, the yacht moved out slowly to the sea like something crawling on a mirror.
The Duke of Dorset was not prepared for this sudden departure of the yacht. Certain vague detached impressions had, during the night, got themselves slowly into form. Certain incidents, apparently unrelated, had moved one around the other into a sort of sequence. He was beginning to see, he thought, to what end certain events were on the way.
For fully twenty minutes the Duke stood in the window watching the departing yacht, his jaw thrust forward, the muscles of his face hardening, his clinched fingers bearing heavily on the sill. Then, he turned back slowly, deliberately, into the dining room, folded the map, put it into his pocket, went out to the clerk's cage, paid his bill with a five-pound note, ordered his luggage sent at once to the railway station, and went down the steps of the hotel into the street.
The visitors overland to Oban were in exodus; lorries passed him piled high with black leather trunks, boxes, bags, and traveling rugs; old women passed, sallow, haggard from the nights' chaperoning; girls, worn out and sleepy; men looking a stone thinner from seven hours of dancing; Highlanders in kilts, pipers, sailors, crowded around the doors of public houses, blinking in the sun. From behind these doors came oaths, bits of ribald songs, the unsteady voices of the drunken.
Here and there a yacht lifting its anchor steamed slowly out of the bay following that first one, now visible only as a picture etched on the horizon. Stupid sea birds, their shoulders drawn up, their beaks drooping, stood about the beach, or eyed leisurely the line of salvage thrust up by the tide. At the dock the day boat for Fort William and the north was taking on its cargo, and on mid deck, as a sort of lure, a little thin man with a wizened receding face was picking out swinging modern waltzes on a zither. His fingers moving nimbly as a monkey's, and his face following in sympathy his fingers with little nods and jerks, inconceivably grotesque.
The Duke went into the train shed, got a seat in a compartment and returned to Doune. He was not, on this day, annoyed by the asperities of travel, although the whole train south was packed, like a Brighton coach with trippers. He sat crowded on either side by a loose-jointed baronet and his equally masculine wife, who snapped at each other across him like trapped timber wolves. An old lady of some country house, raw with her long vigil, lectured her niece on the personal supervision of luggage.
And by the door a betartaned female slept audibly, unconscious that she rode south badged by two clans between which, after many hundred years, lies still the bitterness of death; her cap Glencoe MacDonald, her skirt a dress plaid of the Glen Lion Campbells; not since the massacre had one person worn the two of them.
It was a hard, uncomfortable journey after a night on one's feet, but the annoyance of it did not reach inward to the Duke of Dorset. He sat oblivious to this environment. He was holding here a review of the last two days and nights; as he visualized their incidents he seemed to come, now and then, upon events indicating a certain order, as though directed by some authority invisible behind the machinery of the world. The coming of this girl to Oban seemed something cleaner to a purpose than a mere whim of chance. And yet, looked at from another point of view, it was a mere coincidence. This review was like work expended on a cipher, or rather characters that might or might not be cipher. Characters set thus by accident and meaning nothing, or by design, with a story to be read.
The Duke of Dorset came on this evening to his house, with the problem still turning in his mind. The mystery lying about the Marchesa Soderrelli when she appeared at Old Newton was now clear enough. To give herself a certain importance at Biarritz, she had boasted an acquaintance with him. She had promised to produce him at Oban. She had sought thus to attach herself to these wealthy Americans. It was a bit of feminine strategy, but could he condemn it? An atmosphere of pity lay about the Marchesa Soderrelli. The Marquis of Soderrelli, earning his damnation, had been paid off at God's window—he was dead now—and she was free. And she had come forth, like that Florentine, from hell, her beauty fading, her youth required of her. She was no lay figure of drama, plotting behind a domino. She was only a tired woman, whose youth a profligate had squandered, making what she could, with courage, of the fragments. Was it any wonder, then, that she kept fast hold of this new hand, that she sought, with every little artifice, to bind this girl to her?
In his heart he could find no criticism for her. He found rather a certain admiration for this woman, who swam with such courage after her galleon was sunk; who presented herself, not as wetting the ashes of her life with tears, but as blowing on the embers of her courage.
When the Duke of Dorset reached his house every physical thing there seemed to present an unfamiliar aspect. The form of nothing had changed, but the essence of everything had changed. He seemed to arrive, awakened, in a place which he had hitherto inhabited in a sort of somnambulism. There lay about the house an atmosphere of loneliness—of desolation. There was no physical reason for this change; it was as though the peace of his house had been removed by some angered prophet's curse. He seemed, somehow, to have come within the circle of an invisible magic, wherein old, hidden, mysterious influences labored at some great work. He had stepped out of the world into this circle at Oban. What was there about this dark-haired, slender girl that effected this sorcery? On the instant, as at a signal, he felt the pull of some influence as old and resistless as that drawing the earth in its orbit.
He stood that night at the window looking out at the white fairy village beyond the Ardoch, and suddenly he realized that all of his life he had been comparing other women with this girl. He had not understood this. He had not understood that he was comparing them with anyone, but he was. When he had gauged the charming qualities of a woman, he had gauged them against a standard. And now, he saw what that standard was.
But before he had seen, wherefrom had he the knowledge of this standard? Wherefrom, indeed! For a moment the idea seemed like some new and overpowering conception, then he remembered, that from this thing—this very thing—the ancients had drawn the conclusion that the soul of man had existed before he was born. And he recalled fragments of the argument.
"A man sees something and thinks to himself, 'This thing that I see aims at being like some other thing, but it comes short, and cannot be like that other thing; it is inferior'; must not the man who thinks that have known, at some previous time, that other thing, which he says that it resembles and to which it is inferior?"
And the memory of that old legend, which had come so strikingly into his mind, in the moment, with the girl before the sea, returned to him. Was there truth shadowing in this fable? And there attended it the recollection of that insolent, aggressive face which he had seen on the yacht, and the girl's words as they returned along the deserted street. But with it came the feeling that this man was in himself nothing, he was only the creature, the receptive creature of that strange, powerful old man's design. And he seemed to know an ancient enemy in this old man, and to move again in some dim, forgotten struggle.
He determined to set out at once for Canada. A big, open, primeval land, with its bright rivers, its mountains, its deserts, would cleanse him of these fancies.
The Duke of Dorset was mistaken when he imagined that a new land would rid him of these fancies. To remove a passion to the desert, a wise man hath written, is but to raise it to its triumph.
He had gone directly to Quebec, and from there traveled swiftly across Canada to the Pacific Coast. In Vancouver he was soon wearied, restless, overcome with ennui. His rifle and its ammunition lay unpacked in an ordinary traveling box. The lure of the mountains, the rivers, the silent barren places, had somehow departed from before him.
In this mood he met the Captain of His Majesty's gunboat, theCleavewaive. He had known this man in the East; for a fortnight they had stalked tigers in the mountainous country south of the Amur. The man was by nature a hunter. The forest was in his blood. Life by rote and the narrow discipline of the service irked him. His idea of paradise was not unlike that of the Dakota.
Fourteen days in the wilderness bring men of any station to a certain understanding for life. The talk ran on big game killed here and there, in out-of-the-way places of the earth, and memories of that fortnight in Manchuria. Such conversations are not apt to run for long without touching a little on the future. It came out presently that the gunboat was about to make its annual run, south along the coast of the United States, in the general interest of British shipping, and to show the flag.
The Captain of theCleavewaive, finding the Duke bored and at leisure, asked him to come on this cruise. He wished the Duke to accept for a certain close and personal reason. A larger importance would attach to the cruise from his presence, and this was to be thought of, but to do the man justice, this was not primarily his object. He was one of those men who, prevented by necessity from living the life that he longed for, sought constantly his experiences of it at second hand. Since he must needs thus follow the sea, he craved, with a consuming hunger, the taste of conversation running on the forest, the plain, the trackless mountain. The Duke of Dorset had lived in all of its richness, the very life which this man, had his destiny been open, would have chosen for himself.
For the hope then of talk running on these delectable experiences, he labored to win over the Duke to this voyage. He was not hopeful that he would succeed, and so he was surprised when the Duke finally accepted his invitation.
The Captain of theCleaveivaive, having got his guest aboard, at first, took nothing from this fortune. The Duke of Dorset was now, strangely, no longer that mighty hunter with whom he had talked at Vancouver. On the gunboat he was a silent, reserved, impenetrable Englishman, hedged about by distances which no inferior could cross, meeting every advance with courtesy and silence. He talked conventionally, he looked over the gunboat at the Captain's invitation, noticed the structure of it, and made a word or two of comment when it seemed to be expected.
On the first evening of the voyage the Captain labored to draw him into conversation, but the manner of the Duke was now polite and formal, and the Captain, seeking a way inward to the man, was always turned deftly aside, until presently he gave over the effort.
The gunboat was delayed by heavy seas. The second day passed like the evening of the first, to the discomfiture of this ship's Captain. The Duke of Dorset was silent, courteous, and interested only in the sea. He sat in his deck chair watching through the afternoon the long polished swells—black, smooth as ebony, and rhythmic—in the hollows of which the sea birds rode. And at night, watching the uncanny mystery of this iron shell wrestling its way through the sea, shouldered from one side to the other, heaved up and pitched forward, assailed with every trick, and artifice, and cunning, with steady lifting and savage desperate rushes; the sea always failing to throw this black invader fairly on his shoulders, but never for one instant, never for one fraction of an instant, ceasing to assail him. And always, as it failed, growling, snarling, sputtering with a rage immeasurable and hideous. Then, when the moon opened like a red door, skyward out of the world, the sea changed as under some enchantment; a golden river welled up on the horizon and ran down toward that one looking seaward from his chair. On the instant he was in a kingdom of the fairy, and illusions, fantastic, unreal, took on under this magic the very flesh and blood of life.
On this second night of the run the Duke of Dorset, sitting alone on the deck, put his hand into his pocket, took out the map that Caroline Childers had sent to him at Oban, tore off the strip at the bottom on which her name was written, pulled that strip deliberately to bits, and tossed the scraps of paper over into the sea. Then he arose, walked across the deck into the cabin of the navigating officer, and put the map down on the table before that officer.
"Lieutenant," he said, "how near is this point, marked here in ink, to the ship's course?"
The officer got out his charts, located the point, and made roughly an estimate of the distance.
"We pass this point, sir."
"On what day?" inquired the Duke.
"On to-morrow morning, sir," replied the officer.
"I thank you," replied the Duke of Dorset. "I wish to be put ashore there." Then he went out.
It is a theory that good fortune travels usually close on the heels of despair. The Captain of theCleavewaive, as his boat ran south, verified that theory. The Duke of Dorset sat with him for the remainder of this night in his cabin, and in the smoke of it, the talk ran constantly on the wilderness. He was again, as under the sprinkling of some magic water, that primordial man of the wild, whom the Captain so extravagantly envied.
In the cabin, while the moon walked on the water, and the great swells slipped one over the other silently, and that sinister desperate wrestling went endlessly on, the Duke of Dorset charmed and thrilled this sailor with the soul of a Dakota. He led him, panting with fatigue, through the vast, silent forests of Lithuania, day after day, in a path cut down like a ditch by the hoofs of a hundred beasts, one following the other—beasts, that the hunter, now himself a beast, running with the rifle in his hand, his hair caked with dirt, his body streaming with sweat, his heart lusting to kill, could never gain on.
He led him, shriveling with thirst, down the beds of lost rivers, where there was no green thing, no thing with a drop of moisture, only the dull red earth baking eternally under a sun that stood always above it like a disk of copper.
He led him, chattering with cold, across bleak steppes where the wind blew like a curse of God, set there to see that no man passed that way and lived; blew and blew, until it became a thing hideous and maddening, a thing damnable and accursed, coming out of a hell that froze; and the hunter, driven mad, his face raw, his hands bleeding, his bones aching to the marrow, no longer able to go forward, sat on the earth with his head between his knees and howled.
The Captain of theCleavewaive, set thus living the life he longed for, forgot to be astonished at the strange course which the Duke of Dorset had elected to follow. When the navigating officer had carried to him the Duke's direction, he had been greatly puzzled. There was better hunting in British Columbia than here, some deer and a bear now and then, but nothing to tempt a man over seas with his gun cases. But the mystery of it was a thing inconsequential beside the pleasing fortune which this changed plan carried individually to him, and he easily left it. He was living, through the medium of this man's adventures, vicariously, that big, open, alluring life of the first man running with the wolf in the morning of the world. He was harking back with joy to those elements, primal and savage, by virtue of which all things fight desperately to live. These things were not to be found in books, they were not to be invented, they were known only to those haunting the waste places of the earth.
The Captain of the Cleavewaive was, then, pleased to carry out any plan of his guest. He was quite willing to go into the coast at the point selected by the Duke of Dorset, or at any point within a reasonable run.
At sunrise, the gunboat, turning due east out of her course, anchored off a little bay on the Oregon coast of the United States. The mountains came, at this point, down to the sea; a great chain rising landward and covered with firs, standing a primeval forest. The bay was a perfect miniature harbor protected by a crooked finger of the mountain; the inner border of this finger was a sea wall with steps coming down to the water. A small, gray-stone house, not unlike a gamekeeper's lodge, stood behind this wall on the summit of the finger, flanked by two giant firs, lifting their brown, naked bodies, without a limb, two hundred feet into the sky.
The Captain of theCleavewaivehesitated to put the Duke ashore in a place so evidently deserted. He pointed out that the bay was merely a private yacht harbor, used doubtless in summer, but now in the autumn abandoned for the winter. There was no boat of any kind to be seen in the bay, and no evidence that the place was inhabited. But the Duke was unmoved in his determination to go ashore at this point; and his boxes were got up from his cabin. While these preparations went forward, the Captain, searching the coast with his glass, saw a man come out from behind the stone house on the summit of the promontory. The man stopped when he observed the gunboat, looked at it a moment under the palm of his hand, and came down with long swinging strides to the point on the sea wall where the stone steps descended into the water.
When the Duke came ashore at this point, the man swinging along the sea wall was already there. He stood back some twenty feet from the landing, waiting until the sailors should bring the Duke's boxes up the stone: stairway, and return to the gunboat. Then he spoke, nodding his head to the Duke: "Good mornin', stranger," he said, in a big deliberate voice that drew out each word as though it were elastic, stretching from his throat over his tongue to his teeth.
The Duke, standing on the sea wall among his boxes, regarded the man with an interest, every moment visibly increasing. He had never until this day, in any country, come upon this type of peasant. The man was past sixty, but indefinitely past it; one could not say how old he was. He might have been five or ten, or only a year or two beyond it. He was big-boned, slouchy, and powerful; his eyes, mild and blue; his face, sinewy and weather-beaten; he wore a shirt without a collar, and fastened at the throat with a big white button; suspenders, hand knitted of blue wool; and trousers tucked into the tops of enormous cowhide boots. His head was covered with a big felt hat, rain-stained, sweat-stained, and mould-stained, until it was a color that no maker ever dreamed of.
The Duke returned the salutation and inquired if he were on the estate of Mr. Cyrus Childers.
"He calls it his'n," replied the native, "but to my notion no man owns the mountains."
The Duke's interest increased. "Are you a servant of Mr. Childers?" he asked.
The man's mouth drew down into a long firm slit.
"Well, no, stranger," he answered, "I don't use that air word 'servant,' except when I pray to God Almighty."
"Ah!" said the Duke, and he remembered that he was in the United States of America.
The native went on with the conversation, "I reckon," he said, "you're on your way over to the big house."
The Duke divined the man's meaning, and explained that he had come ashore from the departing gunboat, under the impression that there was a village here, and some means of transportation to the residence of Mr. Childers. In reply the mountaineer talked deliberately for perhaps five minutes. Much of the idiom was to the Duke unintelligible, but he understood from it that this bay was a private yacht harbor, that the yacht was on the Atlantic Coast, that the keeper's lodge here was closed, and that Mr. Childers's residence was not near to this point, as he expected, but farther inland. The Duke inquired the distance from the coast.
The native screwed up the muscles on one side of his face, "Hit's a right smart step," he said.
The Duke was reassured, "You mean," he ventured, "three or four miles?"
The mountaineer seemed to ponder the thing a moment seriously, then he answered, "Well," he said, "I reckon hit's furder than three or four mile. I reckon hit's purty nigh on to forty-eight mile."
The Duke of Dorset laughed over his own astonishment. He was beginning to like this new type of peasant, who spoke of forty-eight miles as "a right smart step," who thought no man owned the mountains, and who reserved the word "servant" exclusively for his prayers.
The man looked seriously at the smiling face of the Duke and repeated the substance of his first query. "I reckon," he said, "you're a-wantin' to git over to the big house."
"I should like it," replied the Duke, "but the prospect does not seem favorable."
"I might give you a lift," the man replied hesitatingly, a bit timidly, as though he asked rather than offered a favor.
The words attached themselves to no exact meaning in the Duke's mind, but he understood the intent of them.
"Have you a cart here?" he said.
"No," replied the man, shaking his head; "I hain't got no cyart, but I've got a mewel." Then he pointed to the Duke's boxes. "If you leave them air contraptions," he went on, "you kin ride the mewel an' I'll walk; but if them air contraptions has got to go, we'll load'em on the mewel, and both of us walk." Then, he added, jerking his head over his shoulder, "She's back there in the bushes."
The Duke, following the line indicated by this gesture and expecting to see there a donkey, saw such a domestic animal as he had never before this day observed in the service of the human family. It was a mule at least seventeen hands high, big-boned and gaunt like its owner; the hair worn off bare to the skin in great patches on the beast's flanks and withers—marks of the plow. The mule seemed to the Duke to have fallen into the same listless slovenly attitude as that which marked so strikingly the carriage of its master. The resemblance between the two seemed a thing come slowly by intimate association through a lifetime, a thing brought forth by common environment. The beast's trappings were no less distinctive; the bridle was made of rope, smaller than one's little finger, without brow-band or throat-latch, merely a head loop fastened to a bit; the saddle was a skeleton wood frame covered with rawhide; across this saddle hung a gunny sack with something in either end of it.
The Duke looked at the lank beast and then down at his articles of luggage. "Do you think your animal can carry these boxes?" he said.
The mountaineer made a contemptuous gesture. "Jezebel will tote them traps an' not turn a hair," he answered; "hit's the hoofin' hit I'm apesterin' about."
The latter part of this remark the Duke did not wholly follow. While he hesitated to embarrass this good-natured person by inquiring what he meant, the man came over and lifted the various boxes, one after the other, in his big sun-tanned hands. Then he stepped hack, and rested these big hands on his hips. "Yes," he drawled, "if you git wore out, I kin pack 'em an' you kin ride a spell."
The Duke understood now, and he was utterly astonished. This curious person actually thought of carrying these boxes, in order that he might ride the mule. He realized also within the last five minutes, that the usual manner of speech to a servant was conspicuously out of place here. That this man, big and elemental, required a relation direct and likewise elemental. The Duke stepped down at once into that primitive relation. He walked over directly in front of the mountaineer. "Look at me closely," he said, "do I look like a man who would ride while another man walked and carried his luggage?"
The mountaineer ran his mild-blue eyes over the Duke's big sinewy shoulders, then he moved over his woolen braces a trifle with his thumb.
"You mightn't be toughened to it," he said, apologetically.
The Duke doubled his right arm up in its good tweed sleeve, and presented it to the mountaineer's fingers. The muscles under that sleeve sat together, compact and hard as bunches of ivory. Doubt and anxiety departed slowly from the man's face. He made no comment. He removed his hand from the Duke's arm and set off to bring his mule. In a few minutes he returned with that animal and a piece of tarred rope which he had got from some boathouse back of the keeper's lodge.
He lifted the sack from the saddle and set it carefully down. "I'll pack that," he said, by way of explanation, "hit'll jist balance me." And he began to tie pieces of the luggage to the saddle; but the Duke of Dorset instantly took over this part of the preparation for the journey. He had adjusted loads to cavalry horses in India, to donkeys in' the Caucasian Mountains, to hairy vicious ponies in Russia, and he knew how to lay the pack so it would sit snug and firm to the beast. It was fortunate that he stood on this morning an expert in this craft, for the boxes made a difficult pack to manage with the primitive saddle.
When it was done the mountaineer tested it with his big forefinger hooked between the beast's belly and the rope. He arose from the test with an approving nod, glanced at the sun, standing over bay, and spoke his word of comment.
"Hit's a purty job," he said, "an' we better be a-hoofin' it." And this time the Duke of Dorset understood that expressive idiom.
The man lifted his sack tenderly onto his shoulder, slipped the rope bridle over his arm, and set out along the sea wall eastward toward the mountain.