CHAPTER V
A Pilgrimage for a Friend
Donald opened his eyes before dawn one morning in his second winter at Whitefish Lake. For a moment he was conscious only of a great lassitude, of a head numb from pain.
A lamp, turned low, was on a stand near his bed. With difficulty he twisted about and looked at it. Beside the stand, huddled in a chair, her head nodding drowsily, sat Nee-tah-wee-gan.
He stared at her in bewilderment. She had never entered his room before, had never been in the dwelling house. As he looked her head snapped up and to his astonishment he read joy, a fierce exultation, in her face.
"You will live!" she whispered jubilantly in Ojibwa.
"Live?" he repeated feebly.
"Yes, live! I was afraid! For days you knew nothing. You did not speak or move."
"I have been ill?"
"Yes, but do not speak. Sleep again. Be quiet."
She became savagely insistent in her solicitude and crossed to the bed to tuck the blankets closer. Donald, wondering, continued to stare at her as she leaned over him.
"You must be quiet!" she commanded, and then with a sudden, frantic wail she added, "You must not die!"
As he marveled at this passionate, despairful cry she laid a weather-roughed hand on his brow. Instantly her eyes glowed with satisfaction.
"The fever is gone," she whispered triumphantly. "You will be better soon."
Donald closed his eyes and as he lay there flashes of memory developed vaguely. He recalled talking with Philip Collinge, complaining of a cold, coming home and going to bed early. He retraced a night of delirium, of thirst and chills, a dawn with a sleepy cook bringing hot tea and soggy bannock.
Later there had been an explosion of energy, shrill, angry voices in the hall, a protesting cook hurled bodily from the room and Nee-tah-wee-gan's cruel, deeply-lined face, grotesque now with solicitude and terror, swaying hazily above him.
This last vision persisted. He knew now that she had nursed him with a savage zeal and amazing sacrifice, that she had remained at his bedside day and night, that she had fought desperately to save a life which in the past she had sought only to make a torment.
Nee-tah-wee-gan had mystified Donald since his childhood. Countless times he saw Ojibwa mothers exhibit affection for their children, indulging them, petting them, crooning over back cradles. Nothing of this sort, no tenderness, no embraces, had come to him. Yet there had always been this fiercely protective spirit. No privation was too great for Nee-tah-wee-gan in starving times. He had never forgotten Pe-tah-bo's return from two days of fruitless search for game in bitter weather, the man's haggard face scarred by frost, his legs barely able to drag his snowshoes.
Donald was sitting beside the fire when the hunter entered. He had just taken the hind leg of a rabbit from the kettle, the last bit of food in the camp, his first that day, and was tearing at it ravenously. Pe-tah-bo sank down beside him, weak and hopeless.
Then his nostrils swelled as the odor of food touched them. His eyes, wide with privation, suddenly narrowed and flared with a savage hunger. He reached out and wrenched the meat from the boy's hands.
Instantly Nee-tah-wee-gan, though weak from hunger, flung herself across the wigwam. She struck Pe-tah-bo across the eyes with a stick of firewood, beat him savagely over the head and tore the rabbit leg from him and returned it to Donald. The next morning she herself went out to hunt and she did not return until she could bring food.
Yet, with one exception, this strange maternal instinct was confined strictly to his physical well-being. Throughout his boyhood she had diligently crammed his mind with the legends of her people. Patiently and endlessly she had recounted the myths and legends which swayed their superstitious minds. The ways of the wilderness, all the lore and all the art of savage existence, these were taught painstakingly.
"You will be a great hunter among your people," was a phrase he heard almost daily.
But after she had nursed him through his illness at Whitefish Lake, spending day and night at his bedside, careless of her own strength and comfort, she resumed, as soon as he had recovered, her taunting and reviling. Apparently she had helped him back to health only that she might hiss her spiteful declaration.
"You are an Indian," was her form of greeting. She seemed to have no object in life except to remind him of his parentage. Her body became bent and flat and thin. Her face was seamed and twisted and horribly expressive of the venom that seethed within her. Only the bitter, savage spirit seemed alive.
It was revealing of the place Philip Collinge filled in his life that Donald should speak to him of this strange hatred that had dogged his footsteps so long. Even Evelyn Layard had never been able to break down the barrier by which he had walled off the sense of ignominy and shame Nee-tah-wee-gan's actions had caused. The Englishman came upon him just as one of the old woman's tirades had left him trembling.
Humiliated, Donald turned away, for he saw his friend had heard, and then he whirled back.
"But you've known it!" he cried. "Everyone has. I understand the north well enough to see how a thing like that gets whispered from one post to another."
"Not as you think, though," Philip said gently. "Everyone likes you too well, old chap. I've heard it talked about and the wonder is always expressed that you let her stay here."
"I can't drive her away. I'm her son. But has any human the right to do that to another? She bore me but she has never been a mother to me," he ended bitterly. "She's never shown anything except hate."
Philip placed an arm across his friend's shoulder and led him away.
"Just remember that she can't do anything to you unless you let her," he said. "Don't you understand? It's your strength, not your weakness, that drives her to this."
"How can that be?"
"You've left her so little, so very little, and the ways of an Indian woman are so infernally warped by jealousy. I know. Perhaps none knows better."
Donald glanced at him in surprise. He had often wondered at Philip's acceptance of his wife's sway over their boys.
"Don't you see?" the Englishman continued. "A white man may take an Indian woman and she may bear him children, but there is always the racial struggle. The result is that the children are cursed by the folly of the father and again by the mother's unwillingness to give them up to a world she may not enter. Very rarely they are lucky, as you are. They may have the feel of the white blood but it is beaten back by the environment in which the mother keeps them. I wish I might have given my boys what your father gave you."
"But mine stepped out," Donald said bitterly.
"Don't hold that against him. Man's a frail sort of thing, especially up here where there's nothing to hold him, where all the little props are absent."
"You stuck. You didn't run."
"I can't claim the credit for that. Perhaps I was too lazy to run. But we're getting moody. Strip off your shirt and we'll have a go with the gloves."
It was the Englishman's racial diffidence that kept them from going too deeply into some things and it was his wisdom that provided a diversity of interests for the two. He mixed boxing lessons with philosophical discussions, shooting expeditions with the reading of plays, and as Donald grew and expanded Philip began to take the pride in his friend he had once hoped to have in his sons.
The effect of Donald's association with Philip was soon noted at Fort Bruce. Mactavish would have been gratified by the growing success of the Whitefish Lake post alone—by the rehabilitation of the Hudson's Bay fortunes there—but the old Scotchman was something more than a fur trader. His own private library was the largest within a thousand miles and he soon unearthed Donald's new interests.
"Do you know, Merton," he said to Layard, when Donald had been at Whitefish Lake five years, "I wish you would convey my respects to Mrs. Layard and tell her I regard her as being clairvoyant."
"How's that?" Merton laughed.
"She saw something in Donald Norton that has never been in a half-breed before. She saw it and brought it out while you and I chuckled at her sentiment. And I want to tell you something. I once said he came fifty years too late—that the company would think first of his parentage and refuse him the place he deserves. I was wrong. That lad can go to the top, and he's going."
But Philip Collinge recognized Donald's advance better than any other and because he did he was troubled. He knew something was needed to round out the character upon which he had labored so long and at last he hit upon an idea.
"See here," he said one night. "I know you intend to stick to the fur trade, live in the bush all your life, but that's no reason you shouldn't know other things as well. What you want right now is a glimpse of the outside world."
"You mean I ought to ride on a railroad train and a steamship and perhaps in one of those motor carriages they're beginning to talk about?" Donald asked.
"I'm in earnest, old chap. It would be a rounding out, you know. Make your life fuller in every way. There'd be a stimulation in it. You'd be a better fur trader for a month in London."
"You mean I should go to London?" Donald demanded. "Why, I don't know a soul, wouldn't——"
"It's the only city in the world." Philip could not keep down the longing in his voice and strove to cover it with sudden enthusiasm. "Why, you'd have a marvelous time. I'd give you letters to the governor and to Sis. She's Lady Hawarth now and a ripping sort. And I have a brother in the Home Office—something in the undersecretary line. And then my mother! Don, she'd treat you like a son! Stiff and cold and prim as Victoria but when she'd get you off alone she'd melt. She'd love you to death just because you had——"
He broke off suddenly and wheeled toward a window. Donald, understanding the yearning that tore at his friend's heart, raged inwardly that Philip should be tied to a dreary post in the wilderness.
"I'll go," he said suddenly. "This summer. I'll write Mactavish by the winter packet and tell him. I've a leave of absence coming after eight years straight. And I'll see them all, Phil, your father and mother and brother and sister."
He knew what it meant, a vicarious homecoming, a stop-gap for loneliness, and joy, on his return, in the stories he would have to tell.
Donald left the wilderness by way of Winnipeg and that summer Janet Layard returned from six years of English school life, coming in through Hudson Bay and York Factory.
When Donald returned after three months of London, Janet had gone to join her parents at Kenogami. He was sorry to have missed her. The little girl with whom he had romped and read and studied and who had been so strong a champion in the first stumbling days had left a vivid memory, but even his disappointment was forgotten when he saw Duncan Mactavish.
"I've already sent Dale Millington out to Whitefish Lake," the district manager said. "You've put the Keewatin Company on the run there and now I want the same thing done at Fort James."
"Fort James?" Donald made no attempt to hide his surprise and pleasure. It was the largest and best post in the district and it seemed only yesterday that he had stood in the same office and listened to the hard decision that he must return to Wabinosh for another year.
"Yes, Fort James," Mactavish repeated. "You're young and there's a big job there but I hope I'm not such an old fogy I can't recognize a man by his record."
As Donald looked down into the kindly old eyes which made such a pretense of glaring from under the shaggy brows he suddenly realized how much this man had done for him. Grudging in his praise, stern in his demands, and yet gentle and just in his decisions, he seemed for the moment to personify the spirit of the great company, a spirit which had reached out to that dirty, unkempt child of the wigwams.
Whitefish Lake was off the direct route to Fort James but Donald went out of his way to spend a few days there. He not only wanted to pack his books but nothing could have induced him to miss seeing Philip and delivering in person the messages he bore.
All the Englishman's repression and control were necessary when they met. There was the first warm greeting, a silent handclasp, broken phrases, and then Donald plunged into an account of his stay in London.
Never had he had a task so bitter sweet. He saw his friend grasp longingly for the smallest crumbs of the story and felt him wince at each fresh detail. Yet Donald drove himself to what he knew was torture. He gave his glowing impressions of Philip's father and mother and brother and sister. He told of their kindness to him, of all the things they had done to make his visit enjoyable. He described the places he had seen, laying special stress on those he knew to have been his friend's favorite haunts, painting London in all the charm in which he had seen it.
Then he returned to the family, taking up each member. He made them live there in that lonely trading post—the courtly father whose ease and worldliness of bearing failed to hide completely the real man beneath, the proud, formal mother whose Victorian manner had sustained her until that morning in the garden, the clear-eyed, startlingly straight-speaking sister, the brother who could shed completely the stiff, ceremonious official manner and become so delightful and understanding.
"And the questions, Phil!" Donald exclaimed. "All four asked them. And so differently. There really weren't enough facts to go around. There wasn't a thing about your life here they didn't want to know, that they didn't ask about again and again.
"They knew a lot, too. They must have learned your letters by heart. They wanted this explained, and that, without end. But most of all it was you, how you were and not what you did, how you felt and not how you lived. Your mother—of course I wasn't surprised after you'd warned me. But your father! I never saw such a change come over a man as when he——"
"Good God! Stop!" Collinge cried as he hurled himself from his chair and plunged across the room.
The agony of that cry halted Donald but though he saw his friend's shoulders shaking, heard the muffled, sobbing groans, he watched and listened eagerly.
"Phil," he began at last, his own voice trembling, "don't you see——"
"See! I saw from the beginning. I understood what you were doing. But I can't! I can't!"
"You're a fool!" Donald cried passionately. "They want you. Every one of them. It's killing your mother."
"Stop it!" Philip commanded. "I can't, I tell you."
"Others run. No one expects them to stick. You can't do your boys any good. They're going to be exactly what they are, what Ellen has made them—just two half-breeds hanging around a trading post."
"Don!"
The younger man ignored the desolation of that cry.
"But your family expects you. They think you will come. They've made all the plans. They've forgotten everything. Your father blames himself for it all and it's killing him, Phil."
The Englishman turned back from the window. Anguish had twisted his face but his eyes were steady.
"I'm tied, Donald," he said firmly. "I've tied myself. So far as Ellen is concerned, I wouldn't hesitate. It means nothing to her. I couldn't harm her by going. But the boys! They've been doomed from the beginning, I know, but I alone am responsible and I've got to stick. I've got to see them through as best I can. Some day, in some way, I may be able to help them a little. When that time comes I want be on hand."
"Rot! What could you do for them?"
"Perhaps not much; probably nothing. But I'd be there. Just that would help them—knowing their father was ready to back them up."
"They wouldn't care what you——" Donald began, and then all the fight went out of him.
In that moment, in the agony of Philip's sacrifice, Donald was brought face to face with the reason for a vague discontent, an obscure longing, which had possessed him from the beginning.
It was not that he had failed to make his fasting dream come true. He had climbed high since he had left Pe-tah-bo's wigwam and he could climb still higher. He knew the Layards, Philip and Mactavish were loyal, that the great company itself approved and trusted him. The men in the service, fine, big-hearted fellows, had accepted him. All, he believed, would stick through anything—had long ago forgotten the smear of red.
Yet despite the place he had won with these people, despite his success and his growing confidence in himself and his future, there was the misty yearning for something else, a constant sense of incompleteness.
Now he suddenly knew it for what it was, understood the longing which tormented him, the thing of which he believed the cowardice of one man had robbed him. He knew that no matter where he went or what he might achieve, he would never feel the touch of a father's hand on his shoulder, never have the joy of realizing that the man who was responsible for his being stood beside him.