The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 2

Though she must know soon, none of us had the heart to tell her; and not out of pity alone, but because with her must die out the last spark by which we warmed ourselves.

But there came a morning--I write it as of a time long ago, and yet it was but yesterday, praise be unto G.o.d!--there came a morning when I awoke and found that two of our men had died in the plight, of frost and famine. They must be hidden before my mistress discovered aught; and so before her hour of waking we weighted and dropped the bodies overside into deep water; for the ice had not yet wholly closed about us. Now as I stooped, I suppose that my legs gave way beneath me. At any rate, I fell; and in falling struck my head against the bulwarks, and opened my eyes in that unending dusk to find the lady Mette stooping over me.

Then somehow I was aware that she had called for wine to force down my throat, and had been told that there was no wine; and also that with this answer had come to her the knowledge, full and sudden, of our case.

Better had we done to trust her than to hide it all this while, for she turned to Ebbe, who stood at her shoulder, and "Is not this the feast of Yule?" she asked. My master bent his head, but without answering.

"Ah!" she cried to him. "Now I know what I have longed to know, that your love is less than mine, for you can love yet be doubtful of miracles; while to me, now that I have loved, no miracle can be aught but small." She bowed herself over me. "Art dying, old friend?

Look up and learn that G.o.d, being Love, deserts not lovers."

Then she stooped and gathered, as I thought, a handful of snow from the deck; but lo! when she pressed it to my lips, and I tasted, it was heavenly manna.

And looking up past her face I saw the ribbons of the North Lights fade in a great and wide sunlight, bathing the deck and my frozen limbs.

Nor did they feel it only, but on the wind came the noise of bergs rending, springs breaking, birds singing, many and curious. And with that, as I am a sinful man, I gazed up into green leaves; for either we had sailed into Paradise or the timbers of the _White Wolf_ were swelling with sap and pus.h.i.+ng forth bough upon bough. Yea, and there were roses at the mast's foot, and my fingers, as I stretched them, dabbled in mosses. While I lay there, breathing softly, as one who dreams and fears to awake, I heard her voice talking among the noises of birds and brooks, and by the scent it seemed to be in a garden; but whether it spake to me or to Ebbe I knew not, nor cared. "The Lord is my Shepherd, and guides me," it said, "wherefore I lack nothing.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me by comfortable streams: He reviveth my soul. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no harm: Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me." But, a little after, I knew that the voice spake to my master, for it said: "Let us go forth into the field, O beloved: let us lodge in the villages: let us get up betimes to the vineyard and see if the vine have budded, if its blossom be open, the pomegranates in flower. Even there will I give thee my love." Then looking again I saw that the two had gone from me and left me alone.

But, blessed be G.o.d, they took not away the vision, and now I know certainly that it is no cheat. For here sit I, dipping my pen into the unfrozen ink, and, when a word will not come, looking up into the broad branches and listening to the birds till I forget my story. It is long since they left me; but I am full fed, and the s.h.i.+p floats pleasantly.

After so much misery I am as one rocked on the bosom of G.o.d; and the pine resin has a pleasant smell.

[1] The courts.h.i.+p of Ebbe, the poor esquire of Nebbegaard, and the maiden Mette is a traditional tale of West Jutland. A version of it was Englished by Thorpe from Carit Etlar's "_Eventyr og Folkesagen fra Jylland_": but this, while it tells of Ebbe's adventures at the "Bride-show," and afterwards at the hunting-party, contains no account of the lovers' escape and voyage, or of the miracle which brought them comfort at the last. Indeed, Master Kurt contradicts the common tale in many ways, but above all in his ending, wherein (although he narrates a miracle) I find him worthy of belief.

SINDBAD ON BURRATOR.

I heard this story in a farmhouse upon Dartmoor, and I give it in the words of the local doctor who told it. We were a reading-party of three undergraduates and a Christ Church don. The don had slipped on a boulder, two days before, while fis.h.i.+ng the river Meavy, and sprained his ankle; hence Dr. Miles's visit. The two had made friends over the don's fly-book and the discovery that what the doctor did not know about Dartmoor trout was not worth knowing; hence an invitation to extend his visit over dinner. At dinner the talk diverged from sport to the ancient tin-works, stone circles, camps and cromlechs on the tors about us, and from there to touch speculatively on the darker side of the old religions: hence at length the doctor's story, which he told over the pipes and whisky, leaning his arms upon the table and gazing at it rather than at us, as though drawing his memories out of depths below its polished surface.

It must be thirty--yes, thirty--years ago (he said) since I met the man, on a bright November morning, when the Dartmoor hounds were drawing Burrator Wood. Burrator House in those days belonged to the Rajah Brooke--Brooke of Sarawak--who had bought it from Harry Terrell; or rather it had been bought for him by the Baroness Burdett Coutts and other admirers in England. Harry Terrell--a great sportsman in his day--had been loth enough to part with it, and when the bargain was first proposed, had named at random a price which was about double what he had given for the place. The Rajah closed with the sum at once, asked him to make a list of everything in the house, and put a price on whatever he cared to sell. Terrell made a full list, putting what seemed to him fair prices on most of the furniture, and high ones-- prohibitive he thought--on the sticks he had a fancy to keep. The Rajah glanced over the paper in his grand manner, and says he, "I'll take it all." "Stop! stop!" cried Terrell, "I bain't going to let you have the bed I was married in!" "As you please; we'll strike out the bed, then," the Rajah answered. That is how he took possession.

Burrator House, as I daresay you know, faces across the Meavy upon Burrator Wood; and the wood, thanks to Terrell, had always been a sure draw for a fox. I had tramped over from Tavistock on this particular morning,--for I was new to the country, a young man looking around me for a practice, and did not yet possess a horse,--and I sat on the slope above the house, at the foot of the tor, watching the scene on the opposite bank. The fixture, always a favourite one, and the Rajah's hospitality--which was n.o.ble, like everything about him--had brought out a large and brightly-dressed field; and among them, in his black coat, moved Terrell on a horse twice as good as it looked. He had ridden over from his new home, and I daresay in the rush of old a.s.sociations had forgotten for the while that the familiar place was no longer his.

The Rajah, a statue of a man, sat on a tall grey at the covert's edge, directly below me; and from time to time I watched him through my field-gla.s.s. He had lately recovered from a stroke of paralysis, and was (I am told) the wreck of his old self; but the old fire lived in the ashes. He sat there, tall, lean, upright as a ramrod, with his eyes turned from the covert and gazing straight in front, over his horse's ears, on the rus.h.i.+ng Meavy. He had forgotten the hounds; his care for his guests was at an end; and I wondered what thoughts, what memories of the East, possessed him. There is always a loneliness about a great man, don't you think? But I have never felt one to be so terribly--yes, terribly--alone as the Rajah was that morning among his guests and the Devons.h.i.+re tors.

"Every inch a king," said a voice at my elbow, and a little man settled himself down on the turf beside me. I set down my gla.s.ses with a start.

He was a spare dry fellow of about fifty, dressed in what I took for the working suit of a mechanic. Certainly he did not belong to the moor.

He wore no collar, but a dingy yellow handkerchief knotted about his throat, and both throat and face were seamed with wrinkles--so thickly seamed that at first glance you might take them for tattoo-marks; but I had time for a second, for without troubling to meet my eyes he nodded towards the Rajah.

"I've cut a day's work and travelled out from Plymouth to get a sight of him; and I've a wife will pull my hair out when I get home and she finds I haven't been to the docks to-day; and I've had no breakfast but thirty grains of opium; but he's worth it."

"Thirty grains of opium!" I stared at him, incredulous. He did not turn, but, still with his eyes on the valley below us, stretched out a hand. It's fingers were gnarled, and hooked like a bird's claw, and on the little finger a ruby flashed in the morning sunlight--not a large ruby, but of the purest pigeon's-blood shade, and in any case a stone of price.

"You see this? My wife thinks it a sham one, but it's not. And some day, when I'm drunk or in low water, I shall part with it--but not yet.

You've an eye for it, I see,"--and yet he was not looking towards me,-- "but the Rajah, yonder, and I are the only two within a hundred miles that can read what's in the heart of it."

He gazed for a second or two at the stone, lifted it to his ear as if listening, and lowering his hand to the turf, bent over it and gazed again. "Ay, _he_ could understand and see into you, my beauty!

_He_ could hear the little drums tum-a-rumbling, and the ox-bells and bangles tinkling, and the shuffle of the elephants going by; _he_ could read the l.u.s.t in you, and the blood and the sun flickering and licking round the _kris_ that spilt it--for it's the devil you have in you, my dear. But we know you--he and I--he and I. Ah! there you go," he muttered as the hounds broke into cry, and the riders swept round the edge of the copse towards the sound of a view-halloo. "There you go,"

he nodded after the Rajah; "but ride as you will, the East is in you, great man--its gold in your blood, its dust in your eyelids, its own stink in your nostril; and, ride as you will, you can never escape it."

He clasped his knees and leaned back against the slope, following the grey horse and its rider with idolatrous gaze; and I noted that one of the clasped hands lacked the two middle fingers.

"You know him?" I asked. "You have seen him out there, at Sarawak?"

"I never saw him; but I heard of him." He smiled to himself. "It's not easy to pa.s.s certain gates in the East without hearing tell of the Rajah Brooke."

For a while he sat nursing his knee while I filled and lit a pipe.

Then he turned abruptly, and over the flame of the match I saw his eyes, the pupils clouded around the iris and, as it were, withdrawn inward and away from the world. "Ever heard of Cagayan Sulu?" he asked.

"Never," said I. "Who or what is it?"

"It's an island," said he. "It lies a matter of eighty miles off the north-east corner of Borneo--facing Sandakan, as you might say."

"Who owns it?"

He seemed to be considering the question. "Well," he answered slowly, "if you asked the Spanish Government I suppose they'd tell you the King of Spain; but that's a lie. If you asked the natives--the Hadji Hamid, for instance--you'd be told it belonged to them; and that's half a lie.

And if you asked the Father of Lies he might tell you the truth and call me for witness. I lost two fingers there--the only English flesh ever buried in those parts--so I've bought my knowledge."

"How did you come there?" I asked,--"if it's a fair question."

He chuckled without mirth. "As it happens, that's _not_ a fair question. But I'll tell you this much, I came there with a bra.s.s band."

I began to think the man out of his mind.

"With the instruments, that is. I'd dropped the bandmaster on the way.

Look here," he went on sharply, "the beginning is funny enough, but I'm telling you no lies. We'll suppose there was a s.h.i.+p, a British man-of-war--name not necessary just now."

"I think I understand," I nodded.

"Oh no, you don't," said he. "I'm not a deserter--at least not exactly--or I shouldn't be telling this to you. Well, we'll suppose this s.h.i.+p bound from Labuan to Hong-Kong with orders to keep along the north side of Borneo, to start with, and do a bit of exploring by the way. This would be in 'forty-nine, when the British Government had just taken over Labuan. _Very_ good. Next we'll suppose the captain puts in at Kudat, in Marudu Bay, to pay a polite call on the Rajah there or some understrapper of the Sultan's, and takes his s.h.i.+p's band ash.o.r.e by way of compliment, and that the band gets too drunk to play 'Annie Laurie.'"

He chuckled again. "I never saw such a band as we were, down by the water's edge; and O'Hara, the bandmaster, took on and played the fool to such a tune, while we waited for the boat to take us aboard, that for the very love I bore him I had to knock him down and sit on him in a quiet corner.

"While I sat keeping guard on him I must have dropped asleep myself; for the next I remember was waking up to find the beach deserted and the boat gone. This put me in a sweat, of course; but after groping some while about the foresh.o.r.e (which was as dark as the inside of your hat), I tripped over a rope and so found a native boat. O'Hara wouldn't wake, so I just lifted him on board like a sack, tossed in his cornet and my bombardon, tumbled in on top of them, and started to row for dear life towards the s.h.i.+p's light in the offing.

"But the Rajah, or rather his servants, had filled us up with a kind of sticky drink that only begins to work when you think it about time to leave off. I must have pulled miles towards that s.h.i.+p, and every time I cast an eye over my shoulder her light was s.h.i.+ning just as far away as ever. At last I remember feeling sure I was bewitched, and with that I must have tumbled off the thwart in a sound sleep.

"When I awoke I had both arms round the bombardon; there wasn't a sight of land, or of the s.h.i.+p, anywhere; and, if you please, the sun was near sinking! This time I managed to wake up O'Hara. We had splitting headaches, the pair of us; but we s.n.a.t.c.hed up our instruments and started to blow on them like mad. Not a soul heard, though we blew till the sweat poured down us, and kept up the concert pretty well all through the night. You may think it funny, and I suppose we did amount to something like a joke--we two bandsmen booming away at the Popular Airs of Old England and the Huntsmen's Chorus under those everlasting stars. You wouldn't say so, if you had been the audience when O'Hara broke down and began to confess his sins.

"Luckily the sea kept smooth, and next morning I took the oars in earnest. We had no compa.s.s, and I was famished; but I stuck to it, steering by the sun and pulling in the direction where I supposed land to lie. O'Hara kept a look-out. We saw nothing, however, and down came the night again.

"Though the hunger had been gnawing and griping me for hours, yet-- dog-tired as I was--I curled myself at the bottom of the boat and slept, and dreamed I was on board s.h.i.+p again and in my hammock. A sort of booming in my ears awoke me. Looking up I saw daylight around--clear morning light and blue sky--and right overhead, as it were, a great cliff standing against the blue. And there in the face of day O'Hara sat on the thwart, tugging like mad, now cricking his neck almost to stare up at the cliff, and now grinning down at me in silly triumph.

"With that I caught at the meaning of the sound in my ears.

'You infernal fool!' I shouted, staggering up and making to s.n.a.t.c.h the paddle from him. 'Get her nose round to it and back her!' For it was the noise of breaking water.

"But I was too late. Our boat, I must tell you, was a sort of Dutch pram, about twelve feet long and narrowing at the bows, which stood well out of water; handy enough for beaching, but not to be taken through breakers, by reason of its sitting low in the stern. O'Hara, as I yelled at him, pulled his starboard paddle and brought her (for these prams spin round easily) almost broadside on to a tall comber. As we slid up the side of it and hung there, I had a glimpse of a steep clean fissure straight through the wall of rock ahead; and in that instant O'Hara sprawled his arms and toppled overboard. The boat and I went by him with a rush. I saw a hand and wrist lifted above the foam, but when I looked back for them they were gone--gone as I shot over the bar and through the cleft into smooth water. I shouted and pulled back to the edge of the breakers; but he was gone, and I never saw him again.

"I suppose it was ten minutes before I took heart to look about me.