Murder Point Part 13

He constructed for himself a picture of an ivied manor-house, terraced and with an old-world garden lying round about it, where her childhood had been spent and where she had grown to girlhood. He told himself that there must have been a river somewhere near, and he imagined her as stretched upon its banks in the summer shadows. And he thought of the schoolhouse in London, and the little heart-weary child who had penned that letter there. He re-read it, and then once again re-read it, suffering the same agony of longing for things irrecoverable which this small creature had suffered years ago, who was now beyond all knowledge of pain. What a mystery it was that across that expanse of s.p.a.ce and years her letter should have drifted down to him, from London to Keewatin, carried over the last few yards of its journey in the breast of a man who was already dead. It made him feel less of an exile that a miracle like that could happen--it was almost as though she herself had appealed to him from the hidden world. It made him ask himself that question, which so many had asked before him, "_And are we really ever dead_?"

Pere Antoine stirred, rose up and walked over to the window, where he stood in the shadow, outside the circle of the lamp's rays, with his back turned toward the younger man. There was something which he wanted to say, but which he found difficult to express. Granger guessed that, and so he said, "Antoine, you are thinking of _her_ to-night. She must have lived very long ago. Was she anything like the portrait of this young girl?"

There was silence. Then, still gazing away from him, his long lean figure blocking out the moonlight, the priest returned, "All white women seem alike to one who has lived long in Keewatin. Yet that face did seem very like to hers; but it is many years ago now, and I may not remember her well. She died; and she was everything that was of worth to me in this world. I begin to fear that she is all that I count of highest value in the next."

"But why fear? I should not fear that."

"Because, being a missionary, with me it should be otherwise. I became a Jesuit through distrust of myself. I knew, when she had been taken from me, that because of my despair, if I did not bind myself strongly to that which was highest, I should sink to that which was worst. And I knew that if I sank to that which was worst, she would be lost to me throughout all eternity. So, in order that G.o.d might give her to me again in a future world, I strove to bribe Him; I asked that I might be sent to this hardest of all fields of missionary labour, hoping that thus I might acquire merit. Since then a new doubt has come to haunt me, has been with me half a century; the fear lest the life which I have led may count for nothing, may be regarded as only sinfulness, because I have done G.o.d's work for her sake rather than for the sake of His Christ, and that therefore as a punishment to me she may still be withheld. Ah, I have fought against her memory, trying to cling only to G.o.d! That has been useless. So I have gone on doing my best for my fellow-men, hoping that He may overlook the motive, and judging only by the work, may give me my reward in the end,--may allow me to be with her."

"Antoine, I am a sinful man and one who is little qualified to judge of G.o.d's purposes, but I think that He will grant you your request.

But if you, with all your goodness, are banished from her whom you loved most on earth, how can I hope for success?"

Then the Jesuit turned round and faced him. "It was because I feared for your success that I mentioned my own trouble," he said. "You are planning to do a thing which is right in marrying this half-breed girl--you owe it to her and to G.o.d, inasmuch as you have lived with her. But you will be doing her a greater wrong than if you were to leave her unmarried, if, when you have made her your wife, you think only of the dead white woman. When the turmoil of living is over, you want to meet and be worthy of the woman who wrote those letters, you tell me; your best chance of success in that desire is in trying to forget her in this world, by giving all your affection to the woman who is your wife, and trusting to G.o.d's goodness to give you the rewards which He knows that you covet after death. Don't make my mistake--it means torture in this life, and, perhaps, disappointment in the next. Be true to the choice which you have made, and leave the rest to G.o.d's mercy. I have not been strong enough to do all that I advise, for, though I love Christ, I am shamed into owning, old man though I am, that I more often do His work in the hope of re-meeting with a woman who is dead than out of loyalty to Christ Himself."

"Pere Antoine, you do not judge kindly of your own actions as Christ would judge of them; you Catholics, in making Christ G.o.d, forget that He also was a lonely man. I think it is not as a G.o.d, but as a peasant that He will judge us, having knowledge of what we have suffered--if He judges us at all. It is more likely that He will just be sorry for us, that we ever thought that He would judge us."

"Whether I judge kindly or not, will you try to take my advice? I have told you a secret to-night which never, since I came to Keewatin, have I told to any man. And I have told you that I may save you. Believe me, if you cannot love your daily companions for their own sake in this world, whoever and wherever they are, you will fail to find love for your own sake in the next--and to love well, whatever you love you must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end."

Granger moved restlessly, but remained silent; then he sat still and thought. Pere Antoine also said nothing, for he knew that the man before him was reasoning his way toward a decision upon which all his happiness must depend.

But to Granger the problem appeared quite otherwise; it seemed to him that he was being asked to abandon another pleasantness for the sake of Peggy, a half-breed girl, for whom he had been prepared already to sacrifice his career. To be sure, his career was not of much value at present, and didn't seem a large thing to sacrifice; but then, when it comes to giving anything away, even the most thorough-paced pessimist is capable of turning optimist about its worth.

Since he had become certain of Mordaunt's death, he had vaguely planned out for himself a course of spiritual debauchery, though he would not have applied to it such a word. He had expected to marry Peggy Ericsen, and to live with the memory of the woman for whom he had really cared. His wife was to have been the servant of his comfort and desires, and the dead woman the companion of his mind and daily round. So he hoped, by keeping Mordaunt near him in his thoughts, to qualify himself for attaining her after death, and to atone for his apostasy in marrying a different woman while yet on earth. Throughout all his reasoning ran a streak of madness, of which he himself was totally unaware. And now, when he had completed arrangements to his own satisfaction, here came this Jesuit telling him that such a course of action savoured of adultery, and would probably end in the eternal separation of Mordaunt from himself.

Presently he heard a sound of moving. He looked up. Antoine was standing before him, on the outer edge of the light which was thrown by the lamp, appearing huge and prophetic against the background of dwarfed shadows which crawled over wall and ceiling, crowding behind him. His awe for the office of the man returned to him, blotting out the equality which the past few hours of confession had brought about.

Once more he recalled how it was said that le Pere had been seen walking in the wilderness, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. He looked like that now. Granger, made conscious of his own premeditated wrong-doing, shrank back before him. Yet the words which Pere Antoine uttered were very simple: "I am an old man, and I knew what I was saying," was all he said.

Granger rose to his feet. "I'm going out," he said. "I'll return in a little while and give you my decision."

He pa.s.sed out from the close stale air of the shack into the starlight; he could be nearer G.o.d there. A low, leisurely wind was journeying over the forest, crooning softly to itself as it went.

Dominant over all other sounds, as was ever the case at Murder Point, the wash of the ongoing river was to be heard--even in winter, when every other live thing had ceased to stir, it was not silent. But now, in the early summer of the northern year, it laughed uproariously and clapped its hands against the banks in its pa.s.sage, as if the water were calling to the land, "Good-bye, old fellow; you won't see me again for many a century. It was the end of the ice age when last we parted." To Granger the shouting of the river was for all the world like that of a troop-s.h.i.+p departing for a distant country. "Farewell, farewell," it cried. The sound of its going made him weary with a sense of world-wideness; if he was left behind to-day, when once he had joined himself to a daughter of that country, he would be forever left behind. But he had come outside not to reargue his way over the old ground, but to decide. To do that he must be alone, quite solitary; and there, just outside the shack, he was all too conscious of Pere Antoine's eyes.

Slowly he commenced to descend the Point toward the river-bank. As he went, a new desire sprang up within him--to speak with Strangeways; if possible to make a compact and extort some approving sign from that dead man. Stepping into the canoe, he pushed off lightly and set out for the bend. The nearer he drew, the sterner his face became; he was thinking of what he should say, and one has to be careful in what he says in speaking with a man who is dead. Soon he came in sight of the flimsy little cross which they had raised, and saw the stones which they had piled above the body, s.h.i.+ning white and grey in the moonlight; then with a twist of the paddle his canoe shot in toward the bank and the prow grated on the ice. Granger stepped out and beached his craft above the water's edge. With slow deliberate steps he went forward till he stood above the grave. There, with his hands clasped behind him and his head bowed, he waited for a few minutes listening, half expecting that something would happen. When nothing stirred, he went upon his knees, as if he prayed, placing his lips so near to the grave that sometimes they touched the stones and mould; and so he began to speak to the man imprisoned beneath the ground.

"Strangeways," he said, "you know everything about me now, and you ought to understand. I want to act fairly by you. I didn't do that in your lifetime; if I had, you might not now be dead. I ought to have warned you about the ice at first, and I ought to have told you the truth about Spurling; then you might have believed me. But I did try my best to save you in the end. Pere Antoine says that I may get hanged for your death; but I don't mind that so very much, if I can only act fairly by you now."

He paused to hear whether there was any sound of movement underground; when he heard none, he knew that the dead man was listening and waiting eagerly for what would come next. Crouching still nearer, so that he might narrow the s.p.a.ce between them, "Strangeways, are you listening?" he said. "We both loved her, and neither of us won her in this world; but because you are dead, you are nearer to her now than I am. I want you to promise me to do nothing till I have come."

And still when he halted, waiting for his answer, nothing stirred.

Presently he spoke again. "I have a reason for asking which, if you remember anything of what you suffered in this life, you should understand. To save myself from madness, I must have a companion, and so I am going to marry a woman of this country. In order that I may live well with her, and even in order to marry her, I must pledge my word to forget Mordaunt while I am in this world. Now do you understand? I cannot pledge my word until you have promised me that you will do nothing until I am also dead." He fell forward over the grave and lay there silent. His brain had become numb; he could fas.h.i.+on no more words--perhaps in the interval which elapsed he slept. Then it seemed to him that the chambers within his brain were lighted up, so that pressing his face against the crannies and between the stones he could look right down, and see distinctly the narrow bed of the grave whereon the body of Strangeways rested. The eyes of the body were open and the lips were working, trying to say something. By watching the lips he discovered that they kept on repeating, over and over, one word; then he read that that word was _revenge_. "I cannot, I cannot," he whispered. "I have promised G.o.d that I will not; and, moreover, to take revenge on Spurling would be to remember her."

Was it that he moved as he slept, or did the thing which he thought he saw actually occur! Some stones slipped from off the mound and, to his eyes looking down into the grave, it seemed that Strangeways' hand began to grope frantically after the locket which had been about his neck, and that, finding it missing, his face became angry and he strove to rise, causing the stones to fall and the ground to tremble.

Granger jumped up, and stood there shaking with his hands clenched and his head thrown back, prepared.

"Will you answer me?" he cried in despair. "Don't you know how I suffer? If you consent to what I have asked of you, give me a sign? If nothing happens, I shall know that you are cruel and do not care."

When he had waited in vain some seconds, he lost his nerve and his courage. Kneeling beside the grave he commenced to weep, smoothing the stones with his hands coaxingly like a child, and whispering, "Give me a sign. Give me a sign. Give me a sign."

Suddenly he paused in his pleading. The rustling of water against a travelling prow, and sound of paddles thrust in, forced back, and withdrawn, struck upon his ears. He threw himself full length along the ground; he did not want to be discovered there. Stealing up-stream from the northward, creeping close in to the opposite bank to avoid the current, came a canoe, sitting deep in the water, heavily laden with furs; the stern-paddle was held by a tall and thickly bearded man, and in the prow, even at that distance and in that shadowy light, it was possible to make out that the second figure was that of a girl.

Granger recognised them immediately, and knew that the Man with the Dead Soul and his daughter had returned. He also noticed that Eyelids was not there. They did not see him, but quickly vanished round the bend.

When all was silent and lonely again, Granger arose. "It is a sign,"

he said. Standing above the grave, before departing he spoke once more with the man who lay buried there. "Strangeways, you may rest quiet now," he said. "Though I cannot revenge her as you have desired, we can both, in our separate ways, be true to her."

He delayed a moment to have what he had said confirmed; but this time no token either of dissent or approval was vouchsafed.

CHAPTER XII

HE REVIEWS HIS MARRIAGE, AND IS PUT TO THE TEST

It was the first week in June; for a fortnight John Granger had been a married man. He was now removed a sufficiently just distance from his bachelor-hood to be able to estimate the value of the change which this new step had wrought in his career.

Its true worth to him had been that it had converted him from a Londoner in Keewatin into a man of the Northland. This might mean, though it need not, that he had retrograded to a lower type; at all events it meant that he was robbed of his excuse for considering himself an exile, bearing himself rebelliously toward his environment, and being unhappy. By joining himself to Peggy by the rites of the Roman Church, he had made an irrevocable choice, had slammed the door of opportunity and return to civilisation in his own face, and had adopted as his country a land where no one has any use for money or for time, and where nothing could ever again be of very much importance. He had not realised all that a fortnight ago when, at the bidding of the Jesuit, he had made this girl his wife; but since he had lived in her company he had come to realise. Mercifully there is no situation, however bad, which may not develop the peculiar virtue whereby it can be endured. He had learnt his virtue by observing Peggy, an Indian virtue at that--stolidity. In a great lonely territory, where men say good-bye to one another for twelve months at a stretch, and sometimes forever, they arrive at a philosophy of life which consists in waiting very patiently and unambitiously for the next thing which the good G.o.d may send. To attain this sort of quietness a man must be quite hopeless, for so long as he hopes he is liable to disappointment. Also he must live each day as though it were his first, for to remember things past is to court regret. He must permit himself to know none of the extremes of emotion, either of joy or of sadness; to this end he must consider himself as a non-partisan in life, a careless spectator before whose eyes the groping shadows pa.s.s. The traffic of words is a labour, and a more frequent cause of misunderstanding than of interpretation--therefore it is wiser, if peace be desired, to keep always silent. Where a gesture will do the work of a word, let a gesture suffice.

All this Granger had learnt during the fortnight which he had lived with his wife; in watching her, he had studied to forego his former turbulence of mind as a thing most foolish, and had determined to sink down into the dull acceptance of a destiny against which it was profitless to contend--a kind of resigned contentment. If he was to be hanged to-morrow for Strangeways' death, that was no reason why he should disturb himself to-day; if that was to happen, it would come to pa.s.s in any case,--nothing that he might do or say could prevent it.

The momentary pain of dying is usually much less intense than the hours of cowardly suffering which men bring upon themselves by prevising the anguish of their last departure, so he told himself. So to-day he sat outside his store in the suns.h.i.+ne and smoked his pipe, the freest and silentest man in all Keewatin, and, he would have had himself believe, the most stably contented.

That night, when he had left Pere Antoine and had gone to consult the dead man at the bend, had been the turning-point in his frenzy. It seemed to him, as he looked back, to have happened long ago when he was little more than a child, at a time before his enlightenment, when he had supposed very foolishly that he was of importance to G.o.d and to his fellow-men. Now he had come to know that he was of no importance even to himself. He blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it vanish in the air; in other days he would have smiled, but it was not worth the effort now. The relation of that whiff of tobacco-smoke to the unplumbed s.p.a.ce, throughout which it would be dispersed, was about the same as that of his present existence to the rest of the world.

When, having said good-bye to Strangeways, he had followed the Man with the Dead Soul back to the store, he had made up his mind to the inevitable, and had been prepared to greet Peggy with a certain display of joy. Before ever he could put his thought into action, his intention had been repelled. As he had drawn nearer to the crazy wooden pier which ran out from Murder Point, he had seen the shadowy shapes of the trapper and his daughter, bending down, unloading their canoe, moving slowly hither and thither through the night. As he had come up, he had hailed them. To his call Beorn had made no reply, had only turned his head and nodded, while Peggy, stooping over a pile of furs, had thrown him the customary salutation of the Cree Indian to the white man, used both on arrival and departure, "Watchee"--which is a corruption of "What cheer." No other words of greeting had pa.s.sed between them, and he, when he had landed, had set to work at once to help them with their unlading. When that was finished and the furs had been carried up to the store, they had raised their tent, kindled their fire, brewed their black tea, cooked their bacon, and gone to rest. Granger had so far intruded on their reserve as to ask them to spend the night in his store, but his invitation had been ungraciously refused with a shake of the head.

Next day Pere Antoine had married them, after which he had departed, promising, however, to return before the summer was out. Granger had said nothing more to him either concerning Spurling or the death of Strangeways, except to insist that the warrant for the arrest, together with the letters and locket which had been found, should be left with himself; nevertheless, he had been well aware that these things were largely responsible for the hurry of the priest's departure. At first he had not been surprised at the silence of Peggy, for he had grown accustomed to the shy modesty of women who are Indian-bred. The women of Keewatin accept it as their fate that they are born to be subservient to men--to be their burden-bearers. But at the end of a few days, when her demeanour had shown no sign of change, he had become a little curious. In the early part of the year the white blood that was in her had been more manifest, and because of it she had been proud. When she had insisted that he should marry her, if he would live with her, the reason she had given him for her demand had been _because her blood was white_. Since then she had journeyed into the winter-wilderness with the menfolk of her family, like any other Indian or half-breed girl, and in the primeval solitariness of the land the red blood of her mother had a.s.serted itself; the hand of her native deity had been laid upon her mouth, staying her flow of words, the shyness of the forest-G.o.ds had entered into her eyes, and the Lord G.o.d of Women had stooped her shoulders, causing her to carry her head less bravely, binding the hereditary burden of the red woman upon her back. She had unlearned in those few months all the conceits of self-respect which she had been taught in the school at Winnipeg, and had reverted to the ancient type from which she was sprung,--the river Indian. Granger, as he watched her, guessed all this, for had not he himself been parted from his old traditions?--and he had not known Keewatin till he was a grown man. Well, these people had lived there longer than he had! They should know what was best suited to their circ.u.mstance, he told himself; and so, without questioning or combatting their social methods, he resigned himself to accept their modes of life.

It was a strange wedding that he had had--very different from the kind he had planned for himself in the heat of his pa.s.sion, when he was a younger man. And this was a strange woman whom he must call his wife--one who worked for him tirelessly with her head and hands, but who appeared to crave for none of his affection, and with whom he could have not a moment's conversation; the exchange of a few monosyllables and signs in the course of a day seemed to be the most that he might expect. Yet, because of her meekness and faithfulness, and her ready willingness to serve, he was conscious of a growing protective quality of love for her. If he could prevent himself from adopting her reticence, he promised himself that he would gather her whole heart into his own by and by.

He did not as yet realise that the mere fact that he could feel thus towards her, when no speech had pa.s.sed between them, was an indication that she was communicating herself in a more vigorous and sincerer language than that of words. This difference between them, that he expected her to use her lips to explain her personality, and that she, far from imagining that she was silent, believed herself to be in her deeds most eloquent, was one of the few traits remaining to him of the street-born man.

As an example of their reservedness was the fact that, though Eyelids, Peggy's brother, had set out on the winter hunt and had not returned, no explanation of his delay had been forthcoming, nor had Granger summoned up the energy to inquire for himself. On their first arrival he had felt distinctly curious as to his whereabouts. Had he come across traces of Spurling and gone in pursuit of him? Had he heard from some stray Indian that Spurling was an outlaw, with a price upon his head? Had Beorn, having found that his cache at the Forbidden River had been broken into, dispatched his son to follow up the thief and exact revenge? Or was Spurling dead, and had Eyelids killed him, for which reason he was afraid to come back?

For the first few days after his marriage these questions and answers had been continually running through his head; but since he had learnt the lesson that nothing was of much importance, he had almost ceased to care. Why should he trouble to inquire? If he did, he might get no reply; and if he was answered, the probability was that his only gain would be something fresh to worry about. The unreturning of Eyelids was one small detail of the total unreality, the dream which he had once taken so seriously, which in former times he had called life; and of that dream the arrival and flight of Spurling were the nightmare.

No one of all these happenings had ever been--they were unactual: and the chances were that even he himself was no reality.

Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead Soul as he was called, was a fitting tutor to a pupil of this philosophy. Compared with him, his daughter was a whirlwind of words; the lesson of silence, which she taught by her behaviour, she had first learnt from her father on the winter trail--in the presence of his stern taciturnity she appeared a garrulous amateur.

Whence he had originally come, no one had ever persuaded him to tell.

On his first arrival in the district, which was reported to have taken place nearly forty years ago, for the first two years he was said to have conducted himself more or less like a normal man. At that time he must have been near mid-life, for he was now well past seventy to judge by his appearance. Even then, on his first coming, something had happened, which he did not care to talk about, which made him glad of the dreary seclusion of Keewatin. It had been generally supposed that he was badly wanted by Justice, for having shot his man in a border hold-up, or for deeds of violence in some kindred escapade.

At any rate, he had set about his living in Keewatin in earnest, as though he had determined to stay there. Having attached himself to the Hudson Bay Company, he soon proved himself to be an expert trapper, and a man who, for his reckless courage, was to be valued. Promotion seemed certain for him and, despite the fact that he had joined the Company late in life, the likelihood of his attaining a factors.h.i.+p in the end was not improbable. It was then, after he had won the confidence of his employers, that he had taken that journey to the North, through an unexplored country, from which he had come back dazed and dreary-eyed, so that it seemed as though he must have met with some dire calamity in the winter desolation, one from which few men would have escaped alive, which had robbed him of his reason. When they had asked him where he had journeyed, "Far, far," was all he would reply. And when, hoping to satisfy their curiosity by a less direct method, they had questioned him, "What did you see up there?"

"Blackness--it was dark," was the most that he would answer them.

Because of these answers there were some who supposed that, emulating Thomas Simpson, he had penetrated into the Arctic Circle and had gazed upon the frozen quiet of an undiscovered ocean. He had wrested from G.o.d the secret which He was anxious to withhold, they said, and G.o.d in vengeance had condemned him to be always silent. But the Indians explained his condition more readily, speaking in whispers about him around camp-fires among themselves. The last place at which he had been seen by anyone on that journey was at the mouth of the Forbidden River, along whose banks it was commonly believed stretched the villages and homes of manitous, and souls of the departed. The Crees a.s.serted that this was not the first man who, to their knowledge, had wandered up that river and had thus returned. Some few of their boldest hunters had from time to time set out and, roving further afield than their brethren, had likewise trespa.s.sed all unaware within the confines of the spirit-land. So they said that Beorn had been to the Land of Shadows, and that, by reason of his surpa.s.sing strength, he had contrived to escape; but that he had left his soul behind him there, and it was only his body which had come back.

From that day he had been known as _The Man with the Dead Soul_.