A Romany of the Snows Part 30

When he had been told, he turned towards the Fort, and silently they made their way to it. At the door he turned and said to Lawless, "My name--to you--is Detmold."

The greeting between Jacques and his sombre host was notable for its extreme brevity; with Shon McGann for its hesitation--Shon's impressionable Irish nature was awed by the look of the man, though he had seen some strange things in the north. Darkness was on them by this time, and the host lighted bowls of fat with wicks of deer's tendons, and by the light of these and the fire they ate their supper. Parfaite beguiled the evening with tales of the north, always interesting to Lawless; to which Shon added many a shrewd word of humour--for he had recovered quickly from his first timidity in the presence of the stranger.

As time went on Jacques saw that their host's eyes were frequently fixed on Sir Duke in a half-eager, musing way, and he got Shon away to bed and left the two together.

"You are a singular man. Why do you live here?" said Lawless. Then he went straight to the heart of the thing. "What trouble have you had, of what crime are you guilty?"

The man rose to his feet, shaking, and walked to and fro in the room for a time, more than once trying to speak, but failing. He beckoned to Lawless, and opened the door. Lawless took his hat and followed him along the trail they had travelled before supper until they came to the ridge where they had met. The man faced the north, the moon glistening coldly on his grey hair. He spoke with incredible weight and slowness:

"I tell you--for you are one who understands men, and you come from a life that I once knew well. I know of your people. I was of good family--"

"I know the name," said Sir Duke quietly, at the same time fumbling in his memory for flying bits of gossip and history which he could not instantly find.

"There were two brothers of us. I was the younger. A ship was going to the Arctic Sea." He pointed into the north. "We were both young and ambitious. He was in the army, I the navy. We went with the expedition.

At first it was all beautiful and grand, and it seemed n.o.ble to search for those others who had gone into that land and never come back. But our ship got locked in the ice, and then came great trouble. A year went by and we did not get free; then another year began.... Four of us set out for the south. Two died. My brother and I were left--"

Lawless exclaimed. He now remembered how general sympathy went out to a well-known county family when it was announced that two of its members were lost in the Arctic regions.

Detmold continued: "I was the stronger. He grew weaker and weaker. It was awful to live those days: the endless snow and cold, the long nights when you could only hear the whirring of meteors, the bright sun which did not warm you, nor even when many suns, the reflections of itself, followed it--the mocking sun dogs, no more the sun than I am what my mother brought into the world.... We walked like dumb men, for the dreadful cold fills the heart with bitterness. I think I grew to hate him because he could not travel faster, that days were lost, and death crept on so pitilessly. Sometimes I had a mad wish to kill him. May you never know suffering that begets such things! I laughed as I sat beside him, and saw him sink to sleep and die.... I think I could have saved him. When he was gone I--what do men do sometimes when starvation is on them, and they have a hunger of h.e.l.l to live? I did that shameless thing--and he was my brother!... I lived, and was saved."

Lawless shrank away from the man, but words of horror got no farther than his throat. And he was glad afterwards that it was so; for when he looked again at this woful relic of humanity before him he felt a strange pity.

"G.o.d's hand is on me to punish," said the man. "It will never be lifted.

Death were easy: I bear the infamy of living."

Lawless reached out and caught him gently by the shoulders. "Poor fellow! poor Detmold!" he said. For an instant the sorrowful face lighted, the square chin trembled, and the hands thrust out towards Lawless, but suddenly dropped.

"Go," he said humbly, "and leave me here. We must not meet again... I have had one moment of respite.... Go."

Without a word, Lawless turned and made his way to the Fort. In the morning the three comrades started on their journey again; but no one sped them on their way or watched them as they went.

THE PILOT OF BELLE AMOUR

He lived in a hut on a jutting crag of the Cliff of the King. You could get to it by a hard climb up a precipitous pathway, or by a ladder of ropes which swung from his cottage door down the cliff-side to the sands. The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour. The cliff was huge, sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness. If you travelled back from its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador, you would add step upon step of barrenness and austerity.

Only at seasons did the bay share the gloom of the cliff. When out of its shadow it was, in summer, very bright and playful, sometimes boisterous, often idle, coquetting with the sands. There was a great difference between the cliff and the bay: the cliff was only as it appeared, but the bay was a shameless hypocrite. For under one shoulder it hid a range of reefs, and, at a spot where the shadows of the cliff never reached it, and the sun played with a grim kind of joy, a long needle of rock ran up at an angle under the water, waiting to pierce irresistibly the adventurous ship that, in some mad moment, should creep to its sh.o.r.es.

The man was more like the cliff than the bay: stern, powerful, brooding.

His only companions were the Indians, who in summer-time came and went, getting stores of him, which he in turn got from a post of the Hudson's Bay Company, seventy miles up the coast. At one time the Company, impressed by the number of skins brought to them by the pilot, and the stores he bought of them, had thought of establishing a post at Belle Amour; but they saw that his dealings with them were fair and that he had small gain, and they decided to use him as an unofficial agent, and reap what profit was to be had as things stood. Kenyon, the Company's agent, who had the Post, was keen to know why Gaspard the pilot lived at Belle Amour. No white man sojourned near him, and he saw no one save now and then a priest who travelled silently among the Indians, or some fisherman, hunter, or woodsman, who, for pleasure or from pure adventure, ran into the bay and tasted the hospitality tucked away on a ledge of the Cliff of the King.

To Kenyon, Gaspard was unresponsive, however adroit the catechism.

Father Corraine also, who sometimes stepped across the dark threshold of Gaspard's hut, would have, for the man's soul's sake, dug out the heart of his secret; but Gaspard, open with food, fire, blanket, and tireless attendance, closed like the doors of a dungeon when the priest would have read him. At the name of good Ste. Anne he would make the sacred gesture, and would take a blessing when the priest pa.s.sed from his hut to go again into the wilds; but when pressed to disclose his mind and history, he would always say: "M'sieu', I have nothing to confess."

After a number of years the priest ceased to ask him, and he remained with the secret of his life, inscrutable and silent.

Being vigilant, one would have seen, however, that he lived in some land of memory or antic.i.p.ation, beyond his life of daily toil and usual dealing. The hut seemed to have been built at a point where east and west and south the great gulf could be seen and watched. It seemed almost ludicrous that a man should call himself a pilot on a coast and at a bay where a pilot was scarce needed once a year. But he was known as Gaspard the pilot, and on those rare occasions when a vessel did anchor in the bay, he performed his duties with such a certainty as to leave unguessed how many deathtraps crouched near that sh.o.r.e. At such times, however, Gaspard seemed to look twenty years younger. A light would come into his face, a stalwart kind of pride sit on him, though beneath there lurked a strange, sardonic look in his deep eyes--such a grim furtiveness as though he should say: "If I but twist my finger we are all for the fishes." But he kept his secret and waited. He never seemed to tire of looking down the gulf, as though expecting some ship.

If one appeared and pa.s.sed on, he merely nodded his head, hung up his gla.s.s, returned to his work, or, sitting by the door, talked to himself in low, strange tones. If one came near, making as if it would enter the bay, a hungry joy possessed him. If a storm was on, the joy was the greater. No pilot ever ventured to a ship on such rough seas as Gaspard ventured for small profit or glory.

Behind it all lay his secret. There came one day a man who discovered it.

It was Pierre, the half-breed adventurer. There was no point in all the wild northland which Pierre had not touched. He loved it as he loved the game of life. He never said so of it, but he never said so of the game of life, and he played it with a deep subterranean joy. He had had his way with the musk-ox in the Arctic Circle; with the white bear at the foot of Alaskan Hills; with the seal in Baffin's Bay; with the puma on the slope of the Pacific; and now at last he had come upon the trail of Labrador. Its sternness, its moodiness pleased him. He smiled at it the comprehending smile of the man who has fingered the nerves and the heart of men and things. As a traveller, wandering through a prison, looks upon its grim cells and dungeons with the eye of unembarra.s.sed freedom, finding no direful significance in the clank of its iron, so Pierre travelled down with a handful of Indians through the hard fastnesses of that country, and, at last, alone, came upon the bay of Belle Amour.

There was in him some antique touch of refinement and temperament which, in all his evil days and deeds and moments of shy n.o.bility, could find its way into the souls of men with whom the world had had an awkward hour. He was a man of little speech, but he had that rare persuasive penetration which unlocked the doors of trouble, despair, and tragedy.

Men who would never have confessed to a priest confessed to him. In his every fibre was the granite of the Indian nature, which looked upon punishment with stoic satisfaction.

In the heart of Labrador he had heard of Gaspard, and had travelled to that point in the compa.s.s where he could find him. One day when the sun was fighting hard to make a pathway of light in front of Gaspard's hut, Pierre rounded a corner of the cliff and fronted Gaspard as he sat there, his eyes idling gloomily with the sea. They said little to each other--in new lands hospitality has not need of speech. When Gaspard and Pierre looked each other in the eyes they knew that one word between them was as a hundred with other men. The heart knows its confessor, and the confessor knows the shadowed eye that broods upon some ghostly secret; and when these are face to face there comes a merciless concision of understanding.

"From where away?" said Gaspard, as he handed some tobacco to Pierre.

"From Hudson's Bay, down the Red Wolf Plains, along the hills, across the coast country, here."

"Why?" Gaspard eyed Pierre's small kit with curiosity; then flung up a piercing, furtive look. Pierre shrugged his shoulders.

"Adventure, adventure," he answered. "The land"--he pointed north, west, and east--"is all mine. I am the citizen of every village and every camp of the great north."

The old man turned his head towards a spot up the sh.o.r.e of Belle Amour, before he turned to Pierre again, with a strange look, and said: "Where do you go?"

Pierre followed his gaze to that point in the sh.o.r.e, felt the undercurrent of vague meaning in his voice, guessed what was his cue, and said: "Somewhere, sometime; but now only Belle Amour. I have had a long travel. I have found an open door. I will stay--if you please--hein? If you please?"

Gaspard brooded. "It is lonely," he replied. "This day it is all bright; the sun shines and the little gay waves crinkle to the sh.o.r.e. But, mon Dieu! sometimes it is all black and ugly with storm. The waves come grinding, booming in along the gridiron rocks"--he smiled a grim smile--"break through the teeth of the reefs, and split with a roar of h.e.l.l upon the cliff. And all the time, and all the time,"--his voice got low with a kind of devilish joy,--"there is a finger--Jesu! you should see that finger of the devil stretch up from the bowels of the earth, waiting, waiting for something to come out of the storm. And then--and then you can hear a wild laugh come out of the land, come up from the sea, come down from the sky--all waiting, waiting for something! No, no, you would not stay here."

Pierre looked again to that point in the sh.o.r.e towards which Gaspard's eyes had been cast. The sun was shining hard just then, and the stern, sharp rocks, tumbling awkwardly back into the waste behind, had an insolent harshness. Day perched garishly there. Yet now and then the staring light was broken by sudden and deep shadows--great fissures in the rocks and lanes between. These gave Pierre a suggestion, though why, he could not say. He knew that when men live lives of patient, gloomy vigilance, they generally have something to watch and guard. Why should Gaspard remain here year after year? His occupation was nominally a pilot in a bay rarely touched by vessels, and then only for shelter. A pilot need not take his daily life with such brooding seriousness.

In body he was like flexible metal, all cord and muscle. He gave the impression of bigness, though he was small in stature. Yet, as Pierre studied him, he saw something that made him guess the man had had about him one day a woman, perhaps a child; no man could carry that look unless. If a woman has looked at you from day to day, something of her, some reflection of her face, pa.s.ses to yours and stays there; and if a child has held your hand long, or hung about your knees, it gives you a kind of gentle wariness as you step about your home.

Pierre knew that a man will cherish with a deep, eternal purpose a memory of a woman or a child, when, no matter how compelling his cue to remember where a man is concerned, he will yield it up in the end to time. Certain speculations arranged themselves definitely in Pierre's mind: there was a woman, maybe a child once; there was some sorrowful mystery about them; there was a point in the sh.o.r.e that had held the old man's eyes strangely; there was the bay with that fantastic "finger of the devil" stretching up from the bowels of the world. Behind the symbol lay the Thing what was it?

Long time he looked out upon the gulf, then his eyes drew into the bay and stayed there, seeing mechanically, as a hundred fancies went through his mind. There were reefs of which the old man had spoken. He could guess from the colour and movement of the water where they were. The finger of the devil--was it not real? A finger of rock, waiting as the old man said--for what?

Gaspard touched his shoulder. He rose and went with him into the gloomy cabin. They ate and drank in silence. When the meal was finished they sat smoking till night fell. Then the pilot lit a fire, and drew his rough chair to the door. Though it was only late summer, it was cold in the shade of the cliff. Long time they sat. Now and again Pierre intercepted the quick, elusive glance of his silent host. Once the pilot took the pipe from his mouth, and leaned his hands on his knees as if about to speak. But he did not.

Pierre saw that the time was ripe for speech. So he said, as though he knew something: "It is a long time since it happened?"

Gaspard, brooding, answered: "Yes, a long time--too long." Then, as if suddenly awakened to the strangeness of the question, he added, in a startled way: "What do you know? Tell me quick what you know."

"I know nothing except what comes to me here, pilot,"--Pierre touched his forehead, "but there is a thing--I am not sure what. There was a woman--perhaps a child; there is something on the sh.o.r.e; there is a hidden point of rock in the bay; and you are waiting for a ship--for the ship, and it does not come--isn't that so?"

Gaspard got to his feet, and peered into Pierre's immobile face. Their eyes met.

"Mon Dieu!" said the pilot, his hand catching the smoke away from between them, "you are a droll man; you have a wonderful mind. You are cold like ice, and still there is in you a look of fire."

"Sit down," answered Pierre quietly, "and tell me all. Perhaps I could think it out little by little; but it might take too long--and what is the good?"

Slowly Gaspard obeyed. Both hands rested on his knees, and he stared abstractedly into the fire. Pierre thrust forward the tobacco-bag.

His hand lifted, took the tobacco, and then his eyes came keenly to Pierre's. He was about to speak.... "Fill your pipe first," said the half-breed coolly. The old man did so abstractedly. When the pipe was lighted, Pierre said: "Now!"

"I have never told the story, never--not even to Pere Corraine. But I know, I have it here"--he put his hand to his forehead, as did Pierre--"that you will be silent." Pierre nodded.