Murder Point Part 14

Gradually, as the years went by, the deathly vacancy had gone out of his eyes, but he had remained a man separated from living men. He rarely spoke, but from the first his peculiarities had made no difference to his expertness as a trapper--he was more skilful, white man though he was, than many of the Crees themselves. All the strength which should have been spent upon his soul seemed to have gone to preserving the perfection of his body. For a man of his years, he was surprisingly vigorous and erect--no labour could tire him. This, said the Indians, was the usual sign of bodies which lived on when their souls were dead. He was much feared, and his influence in the district was great; in gaining him as a partisan, Granger had achieved a triumph over Robert Pilgrim, and had improved his status among the native trappers more than could have been possible by any other single act.

Beorn was reverenced as a kind of minor deity; no wish of his, however silently expressed, was ever denied by an Indian. When he had chosen Peggy's mother to be his wife, it had been done merely by the raising of his hand. Straightway the girl's father had driven her panic-stricken forth from his camp, compelling her to go to this strange bridegroom, lest a curse should fall upon his tribe. To her, if absence of cruelty is kindness, he had been uniformly kind. Love is not necessary to an Indian marriage, so she had not been too unhappy.

At Peggy's birth, having first borne him a son, she had died. The little girl had been brought up and cared for by the silent man; the shy tenderness she expressed for him went far to prove that she, at least, had discovered something more vital within him than could be expected to reside in the body of a man whose soul was dead. His sending of her to the school in Winnipeg had shown that he was not so forgetful as he seemed to be of the outside world which he had left.

This last act had come as a great surprise to all who knew him; but they had contrived to retain their old opinion of him by a.s.serting that this was the doing of Pere Antoine.

Only on rare occasions had Beorn let any of his secrets out; when he got drunk he recovered his power of speech, or, as the Indians said, for a little s.p.a.ce his soul returned. This had happened less and less frequently of recent years. It was well remembered by old-timers at G.o.d's Voice how once, in the early morning in Bachelors' Hall, at the end of a night's carousal, when the trappers and traders from the distant outposts had made their yearly pilgrimage to the fort bringing in their twelve months' catch of furs, Beorn, under the influence of rum, had risen uninvited, and, to the consternation of his intoxicated companions, had trolled forth a verse from a fighting mining ballad.

As well might the statue of Lord Nelson climb down from its monument in Trafalgar Square and, with the voice of a living man, commence to address a London crowd. The verse which he sang ran as follows; to the few who were aware, it solved the mystery of an important portion of his hidden early history:

"The Ophir on the Comstock Was rich as bread and honey; The Gould and Curry, farther south, Was raking out the money; The Savage and the others Had machinery all complete, When in came the Groshes And nipped all our feet."

When he had completed the verse, he had slowly gazed round and caught the look of amaze which had dawned in the countenances of his drunken a.s.sociates. He had come to himself and grown sober. Suddenly an expression of intense fear and hatred had shot into his eyes; without saying another word, he had turned his back on the company and gone out into the early morning, floated his canoe, and fled as one who was pursued for his life. That verse had explained many of Beorn's eccentricities to one of those who had heard it, and he had told the rest. Its singing had meant that, sometime in the early sixties, Beorn had taken part in the gold-rush to the Comstock, and had worked and prospected in the Nevada mines.

This was his solitary glaring indiscretion in all the course of his forty years spent in Keewatin. Though he had had many opportunities since then to repeat the event when under the influence of liquor, he had allowed nothing more of any importance to escape his lips. He had never spent much time at G.o.d's Voice, only turning up at the end of his hunt to dispose of his catch of furs, after which he would vanish into the wilderness again. He avoided on every occasion and was restless in the company of men. Very rarely was he encountered on his hunting-trips by any of the Indians or trappers. When once he had set out, he was not seen again until he returned of his own choice. The few times that he had been met, he was far to the northward, about the point where the Last Chance and Forbidden Rivers join, whence they flow on together till they tumble their crowded waters into the freedom of the Hudson Bay. Because it was always in this locality that he had been met, a rumour got abroad that, when his body was not dwelling among living men, it journeyed up the Forbidden River, to reunite with his exiled soul in the habitations of the dead.

Granger had listened to all these reports from time to time, but he had paid small heed to them; he was certain in his own mind that, should he live solitarily in Keewatin for forty years, as Beorn had done, a similar web of legend would be woven about himself. The man's conduct was to him self-explanatory; in his early manhood he had committed some pa.s.sionate wrong, and had fled into the wilderness to escape the penalty, only to find that the executioner was there before him--the Silence, and that the enduring of loneliness was a more cruel punishment than any that an earthly judge could have measured out. The boat was one and the same which carried Beorn, Spurling, and himself.

He promised himself that, by and by, as in the case of Peggy, he would break through Beorn's silence, get to know the man, plunge deep down till he held his heart in his hand.

So he sat outside his store in the June sunlight, oblivious of himself and the pa.s.sage of Time, lifted high above the strife, and impartially, like an ancient deity, reviewed the lives of men.

On the boarded floor of the shack he could hear the moccasined feet of Peggy moving busily to and fro, as she prepared the meal. They had netted some white-fish over night, so their larder was freshly supplied. On the edge of the pier, which ran out from the Point, Beorn sat, mending one of his traps. Along the top of the roof perched a row of whisky-jacks, most impertinent of birds, who, when a man has carried his food almost to his mouth, will flash down, light on his hand, and, before he knows that they have arrived, filch away the morsel. Somewhere across the river a whippoorwill kept on uttering its plaintive cry, as it were Beorn's lost soul come back, pleading insistently for permission to take up its residence in his body once again. And over against the farther bank a brood of yellow ducklings swam in and out among the rushes, hidden behind which their mother watched and waited. The noon came on apace, the shadows shortened, and everything grew silent; over forest and river a restful stillness settled down. If the Last Chance would always look like that it would be almost habitable. Had it been placed in any country where there were men, it would be considered beautiful just now. Ah, well, after he had been married a few years, he would have his children running hither and thither, laughing and chattering, about the Point; then it would be in his own choice to make of his environment what he liked.

Gazing whimsically forward to such a time he could conceive that, were he given the opportunity to return to civilisation, by some curious turn of the wheel of fortune, he might prefer to stay; that such an opportunity might be possible, it would first be necessary that he should have been acquitted from all suspicion concerning the death of Strangeways.

It was easy to be optimistic on such a day; there was a cleanness of youth about the appearance of this newly awakened world which reacted on the watcher's mind.

Peggy had come out from the shack and was seated on the threshold; even she was conscious of a certain elation, for she was humming to herself one of those endless, tuneless, barbaric Indian airs which only take on the pretence of music when they are a.s.sisted by the stamping of many feet, and the clapping of many hands. When Granger turned his head in her direction, she lowered her eyes, and her singing ceased. He had not meant that she should do that; he was merely wondering whether she was really a pretty girl and whether, if he were to take her back with him to England, she would be seen as beautiful by London eyes. London eyes! What had they ever seen that was essentially beautiful and free? They could judge of the latest fas.h.i.+on in hats, and of the proper size of the laced-in waist; but what had they ever seen of the naked, sinuous grace of the human body as G.o.d made it and had meant that it should be seen? Of nakedness and simplicity, and all things genuine, the civilised man had been taught to be ashamed. No, no, to-day, in the suns.h.i.+ne, he felt sure that he would not return to the insincerity, artificiality, and the blinkered-eyes of the town, were he given his choice. He wanted to breathe cleanness, and to see G.o.d's hand at work, and to be _a man_; in London, or any other city, individuality and all these things would be denied. He could be very happy now, he believed; now that he was not lonely any longer, because he had a wife. He wished that he could find a language in which to tell her these things. But he feared to speak; he knew that as yet, just returned from the winter-trail, she would not understand.

While he had been thinking, she had slowly raised her eyes; she was not looking at him, but northeast, down-river, toward the bend.

Turning suddenly, he caught the direction of her gaze. Glancing down to the pier, he discovered that Beorn's eyes were also turned that way. What were they waiting for? What were they antic.i.p.ating? Was it the return of Eyelids that made them so expectant? During the past fourteen days he had often caught them thus waiting and gazing, as though stoically prepared for news of whatever kind. He suspected that they had some secret which they were not willing to share with him--this would account to an extent for Peggy's reticence. But what secrets of importance could they have, dwelling as they did on the Last Chance? Probably Eyelids' delay was only a matter of traps and furs which had been cached. Then, as he watched Peggy, he saw a look partly of fear, partly of bewilderment, spread over her face. She glanced down to her father; he was still gazing in the same direction, towards the bend, and she, seeing him rise to his feet and wave his hand, following his example, also rose up and waved. Granger was on his feet immediately, that so he might see more clearly; turning his eyes down-river, he watched steadfastly in the direction in which the father and daughter gazed. He saw nothing that was not customary; it seemed to him that he must have looked too late.

"What is it, Peggy?" he broke out.

She swung round slowly, giving herself time to make her face expressionless; it was evident that she had forgotten his presence in her excitement.

"Nothing," she said, and turning about, pa.s.sed into the darkness of the house.

Granger did not like it. When there are only three of you, one of whom is your wife, to whom you have been married only a fortnight, it is not pleasant to be the one left out. He had thought at first that they might be on the lookout for York boats, which might soon be expected to pa.s.s by on their way from the House of the Crooked Creek to G.o.d's Voice. But one does not wave his hand to a York boat which is not yet in sight. It seemed certain to him now that Eyelids was in the vicinity, signalling to them secret information, which they were eager to keep from himself. Had they stumbled across the grave of Strangeways, and wondered what it meant? A grave more or less in Keewatin does not usually trouble a living man; nevertheless, he ought to have told them about it and have explained about Spurling. He would tell them his secret presently, and get them to tell him theirs in exchange. In the meanwhile, he would watch the bend.

There was no sound of footsteps in the shack. Turning his head very slowly, so that it could hardly be seen to turn, he could perceive the shadow of Peggy out of the tail of his eye from where he sat; she was standing behind the window, a little way back from the panes so that he might not discover her, and she was also watching. If this system of spying were to go on for long, there would soon be an end to his dreams of freedom and marital peace at Murder Point. Already he was inclined to revise his opinion as to what he would do, were he given the opportunity for escape to a becitied and more populous land. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he would choose to escape. A half-breed girl who was almost pure Indian in her manners--and Peggy seemed that to him now--could never be a fitting companion for an educated white man. He'd been something more than a fool to marry her. The entire business was a farce, from start to finish; and then he remembered that nearly every farce ends in someone's tragedy.

He was interrupted in his bitterness by a shout from up-river. While they had been all engaged in watching the northeast, a swift canoe, carrying two men, had stolen in from the west. It was approaching the pier; before he had time to get down, its occupants had landed and were shaking hands with Beorn effusively, emitting low, hoa.r.s.e cries of "Watchee. Watchee."

As he descended the mound, he scanned their travelling outfit, that he might guess their errand. They carried no cargo, nor was their canoe the broad-built, slate-coloured conveyance of the Hudson Bay Company; it was birch-bark, constructed for speed, and carried in the bow a miniature sail. They must be the bearers of a letter, or of important verbal tidings.

He shook hands with them in silence, nor did he ask them at once to deliver to him their message, well knowing from unhappy experience that to attempt to hurry an Indian is to cause him to delay. Instead, he set about doing them favours, that so they might be the more willing to oblige him. He led the way up to his store and, displaying to them his wares, told them to choose themselves each a present.

There were gaudy shawls, beflowered muslin dress-lengths, rifles, watches, clocks, suits of clothing and city head-gear, probably misfits or the refuse of a bankrupt's stock which Wrath had bought cheap, all of them long since out of date; there were even battered dolls and children's toys lying about mixed up with canned goods and groceries--a miscellaneous array. Arranged along one wall were all the implements of the trapper's trade and the articles of common use, such as kettles, pans, enamel cups and plates, coils of rope, etc.

With the inborn thriftlessness of the Indian, at the articles of essential worth they only glanced, after which they turned aside from them. Not until an hour had pa.s.sed did one of the men make up his mind to take a top-hat for his present, broad-brimmed and dusty, from off which most of the silk was worn--a relic, perhaps, of the outside respectability with which one of the Winnipeg partners had been wont to clothe himself years since, when he went to church and still had hopes that one day he might live to see himself an honest man. But the second visitor could find nothing that met with his approval; now that his companion was owner of the top-hat, he felt that of all things, sacks of flour, rifles, sails, knives, that was the one and only present which he would have chosen. Granger was losing patience, though he did not dare to show it. There were so many tidings which that letter, if letter it was, might contain--news concerning Spurling, Strangeways, his mother, Mordaunt. To cut his suspense short by a few minutes he was willing to pay almost any price. Still the Indian procrastinated and seemed to be more and more inclined to become obstinate and offended. Transgressing the usual rule of a trading-store, he had seated himself on a pile of nets and was striking a match to light his pipe.

Granger gazed round his stock in desperation, endeavouring to discover something, whatever its value, which would be acceptable.

A sudden inspiration came to him. Reaching up to a shelf, he took down an oblong box, about nine inches in length, adjusted several parts of it on the inside, wound it up with a key which was in the back, and set it on the counter. A whirring, coughing noise was heard, as though a creature hidden inside was clearing its throat to prevent itself from choking; after a few seconds of this, a voice, so thin and whispering that it seemed impossible that it should ever have come from a person who owned a chest, commenced to sing with an atrocious perversion of the vowels,

"Sife in the h'arms of Jesus, Sife on 'is gentle breast, There by 'is love o'ershadowed Sweetly my soul shall rest."

He cut it short at the end of one verse, for he could endure no more of that--the tears were in his eyes. Ugly as the dialect was in itself and often as it had revolted him in former days, there was something hauntingly pathetic about it when combined with religion, and sung in Keewatin by that weakling voice; the London voice, shut up in the mildewed box, was an exile like himself. When he was a child, he had heard his mother sing those words, and that was at a time when he believed in the faith which they expressed. For him there was now no overshadowing G.o.d--only a careless, and perhaps unconscious, tyrant.

But he had accomplished his purpose, for the Indian was won over and beaming with pleasure. Gramo-phones had not been long introduced into the district as articles of trade; as yet only the chiefs and most successful trappers could purchase them. To own one was equivalent to keeping a butler in civilisation. Seeing the greed in the man's eyes, he told him that he could have it so soon as he had declared his business and delivered his message.

This promise caused the oracle to work. Diving his hand beneath his s.h.i.+rt, the Indian drew forth a pouch which was slung about his neck, and, opening it, produced from it a letter. Then s.n.a.t.c.hing up his play-thing, he and his companion, proud in his top-hat, went outside to build their fire, and to make their camp, leaving the trader to himself.

Granger rose up and made fast the door behind them, so that he might be undisturbed. Now that he held within his hand the solution to the problem of their visit, he was willing to postpone the fuller knowledge lest it should make him sad. Sitting himself down on the edge of the counter he drew forth his pipe and filled it slowly; and when that was done, still more slowly commenced searching for a match, found it at last and kindled the tobacco. He looked at the address; it was in Wrath's handwriting, but the envelope bore no stamp--it had evidently been sent up by him in haste over the entire six hundred and eighty miles by private carrier. That meant that the news was important, for such means of transit were expensive. Breaking the seal, he found a letter enclosed, which had been addressed to him in care of Wrath; it also was unstamped, but it bore in the left-hand corner the name of his mother's firm of London solicitors. About it was folded a note from Wrath himself, which read:

DEAR GRANGER,

The enclosed letter arrived here by yesterday's mail.

It was accompanied by a letter to myself from some London lawyers, urging me to deliver it into your hands in the quickest possible time, regardless of expense.

Carrying out my instructions, I am sending it up to you by private messengers; heaven knows how long it would take to get to you, were I to send it any other way. Of course I shall dock the cost of its transit from your salary, which means that if you don't have a good year's trade, I sha'n't have much to pay you.

Yours, CHARLES E. WRATH.

His mother's lawyers! That meant that his mother had relented, and was anxious to have him home again. His heart leapt at the thought--and then he remembered that there were Peggy and the death of Strangeways as obstacles to his return.

He undid the wrapping of the lawyer's letter and, as he read, the blood went from his face. It was to tell him, in formal language, that his mother was dead, and that, if he would fulfil certain conditions, he was to become heir to the property which she had left. The estate was valued at fifteen thousand pounds. The conditions were, that he was to return to England within four months from the writing of this letter, and take up his permanent residence there. If for any reason he should be unwilling or unable to agree to these terms, the money was to be divided among certain charities which his mother had named in her will. That was all. So the chance for which he had waited had come at last, and he was unable to take it--and his mother was dead!

He sat very still and motionless. The flies drummed against the panes--they also were captives. Outside, across the river, the whippoorwill continued to cry, demanding entrance into Beorn's body because it was his soul. Peggy came to the door, tried to open it, rattled the latch and announced that the meal was ready: he took no notice of her, and presently she went away. For hours he sat like a man of stone, making no pretence at thinking; of one fact only was he aware, that with both hands, for the want of a little patience, he had thrown away all his chances of return. He was lost--lost--lost.

As the hours dragged by the flies grew tired of trying to escape, and the whippoorwill of calling; the whole world fell silent. He wished that the darkness might come, so that he might hide himself; but in June time, on the Last Chance River, it is never utterly night. When the sun has sunk from the sky the sunset lingers, gradually working round toward the dawn; through the summer months, as if to make amends for the long dark winter days, it always leaves a little torch of promise burning somewhere along the horizon. The perpetual brightness of the world outside seemed to jeer him; it was as careless in its way as the winter had been of the solitariness of his soul.

But at last the shadows lengthened in the store, and through the dusty, cobwebbed window he could see that the sky had grown indigo and grey. So his mother was dead, and he would never look on her again.

They had not understood one another, and now, with whatever longing he might desire it, he could never explain. He had abandoned her for the sake of his father's quest, that he might seek out El Dorado--and this was the wage of his sacrifice, thirty, perhaps forty long years of life at Murder Point, shared in the company of a squaw, a hurried burial one day, and an unnoticed grave.

He could not accept the conditions set forth in the lawyer's letter and return to London in the two months which remained--there were the Mounted Police to prevent him, and there was Peggy. He had chosen his own path in life, and he must follow it without complaint to the bitter end. He tried to think himself back into the opinion of the morning, when he had fancied that he preferred the Last Chance River to any other place. He could not think that now; he knew that it was no more than a consoling lie. Then he ceased to think and grew drowsy.

He was aroused by the faint and far-away sound of singing. The dusk had gathered and it must be nearing midnight. He was stiff from sitting so long in a cramped position; he rose to his feet and rubbed his eyes. The window was ruddy with the s.h.i.+fting light of the Indians'

camp-fire; occasionally, when the flame shot up, its brightness stole across the ceiling and illumined the walls of the store. He listened; the tune that was sung seemed to him familiar and puzzled him, for he was not fully awake. Drifting through the stillness of the northern twilight, at an hour when even the beasts of the forests held their breath because of G.o.d's nearness and His solemnity, there reached his ears the vulgar strutting tones of a music-hall singer's voice:

"As I walked through Leicester Square With my most magnificent air, You should hear the girls declare 'Why, he's a millionaire;'

And they turn around and sigh, And they wink the other eye, 'He's the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.'"

The coa.r.s.e suggestiveness of the words, the cheap pa.s.sions which they implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came vividly home to him.

He did not stop to reason, or to trace his repugnance to its source--to his native hostility to the impurity and strengthlessness of mult.i.tudes of creatures who arrogantly boast that they are civilised--he was too angry for that. He was only conscious that a vain and impertinent echo of the town had, by his instrumentality, found its way into and vilified the secret refuge of G.o.d's austerity.

Tearing back the bolts from the storehouse door and lifting the latch, he rushed out into the cool half-light.

Half-way between himself and the pier he saw the Indians' camp-fire, with four figures squatting round, two of which were Peggy's and Beorn's. Running down the descent, he burst into their midst, seized the offending gramophone and crushed it down with his heel into the flames. His foot was scorched, but he did not care for that. When his work was accomplished, turning savagely upon his spectators he said, "I'll teach you to offend G.o.d's silence," and strode away, leaving them staring after him through the shadows, terrified and amazed.

Suddenly he returned; there was a gentler look upon his face. Going up to where Peggy sat, he took her by the hand, and, without a word, led her out of the circle of firelight towards the shack.