As the old man turned heavily towards the house, and opened the outer door, Fleda met him.
“What did you mean when you said that Ingolby’s eyes would not feed upon me?” she asked in a low tone of fear.
A look of compassion came into the old man’s face. He took her hand.
“Come and I will tell you,” he said.
In Ingolby’s bedroom, on the night of the business at Barbazon’s Tavern, Dr. Rockwell received a shock. His face, naturally colourless, was almost white, and his eyes were moist. He had what the West called nerve. That the crisis through which he had passed was that of a friend’s life did not lessen the poignancy of the experience. He had a singularly reserved manner and a rare economy of words; also, he had the refinement and distinction of one who had, oforetime, moved on the higher ranges of social life. He was always simply and comfortably and in a sense fashionably dressed, yet there was nothing of the dude about him, and his black satin tie gave him an air of old-worldishness which somehow compelled an extra amount of respect. This, in spite of the fact that he had been known as one who had left the East and come into the wilds because of a woman not his wife.
It was not, however, strictly true to say that he had come West because of a woman, for it was on account of three women, who by sudden coincidence or collusion sprang a situation from which the only relief was flight. In that he took refuge, not because he was a coward, but because it was folly to fight a woman, or three women, and because it was the only real solution of an ungovernable situation. At first he had drifted from one town to another, dissolute and reckless, apparently unable to settle down, or to forget the unwholesome three. But one day there was a terrible railway accident on a construction train, and Lebanon and Manitou made a call upon his skill, and held him in bondage to his profession for one whole month. During this time he performed two operations which the surgeons who had been sent out by the Railway Directors at Montreal declared were masterpieces.
When that month was up he was a changed man, and he opened an office in Lebanon. Men trusted him despite his past, and women learned that there was never a moment when his pulses beat unevenly in their presence. Nathan Rockwell had had his lesson and it was not necessary to learn it again. To him, woman, save as a subject of his skill, was a closed book. He regarded them as he regarded himself, with a kindly cynicism. He never forgot that his own trouble could and would have been avoided had it not been for woman’s vanity and consequent cruelty. The unwholesome three had shared his moral lapse with wide-open eyes, and were in no sense victims of his; but, disregarding their responsibility, they had, from sheer jealousy, wrecked his past, and, to their own surprise, had wrecked themselves as well. They were of those who act first and then think—too late.
Thus it was that both men and women called Rockwell a handsome man, but thought of him as having only a crater of exhausted fires in place of a heart. They came to him with their troubles—even the women of Manitou who ought to have gone to the priest.
He moved about Lebanon as one who had authority, and desired not to use it; as one to whom life was like a case in surgery to be treated with scientific, coolness, with humanity, but not with undue sympathy; yet the early morning of the day after Ingolby had had his accident at Barbazon’s Hotel found him the slave of an emotion which shook him from head to foot. He had saved his friend’s life by a most skilful operation, but he had been shocked beyond control when, an hour after the operation was over, and consciousness returned to the patient in the brilliantly lighted room, Ingolby said:
“Why don’t you turn on the light?”
It was thus Rockwell knew that the Master Man, the friend of Lebanon and Manitou, was stone blind. When Ingolby’s voice ceased, a horrified silence filled the room for a moment. Even Jim Beadle, his servant, standing at the foot of the bed, clapped a hand to his mouth to stop a cry, and the nurse turned as white as the apron she wore.
Dumbfounded as Rockwell was, with instant professional presence of mind he said:
“No, Ingolby, you must be kept in darkness a while yet.” Then he whipped out a silk handkerchief from his pocket. “We will have light,” he continued, “but we must bandage you first to keep out the glare and prevent pain. The nerves of the eyes have been injured.”
Hastily and tenderly he bound the handkerchief round the sightless eyes. Having done so, he said to the nurse with unintentional quotation from the Gospel of St. John, and a sad irony: “Let there be light.”
It all gave him time to pull himself together and prepare for the moment when he must tell Ingolby the truth. In one sense the sooner it was told the better, lest Ingolby should suddenly discover it for himself. Surprise and shock must be avoided. So now he talked in his low, soothing voice, telling Ingolby that the operation had put him out of danger, that the pain now felt came chiefly from the nerves of the eye, and that quiet and darkness were necessary. He insisted on Ingolby keeping silent, and he gave a mild opiate which induced several hours’ sleep.
During this time Rockwell prepared himself for the ordeal which must be passed as soon as possible; gave all needed directions, and had a conference with the assistant Chief Constable to whom he confided the truth. He suggested plans for preserving order in excited Lebanon, which was determined to revenge itself on Manitou; and he gave some careful and specific instructions to Jowett the horse-dealer. Also, he had conferred with Gabriel Druse, who had helped bear the injured man to his own home. He had noted with admiration the strange gentleness of the giant Romany as he, alone, carried Ingolby in his arms, and laid him on the bed from which he was to rise with all that he had fought for overthrown, himself the blind victim of a hard fate. He had noticed the old man straighten himself with a spring and stand as though petrified when Ingolby said: “Why don’t you turn on the light?” As he looked round in that instant of ghastly silence he had observed almost mechanically that the old man’s lips were murmuring something. Then the thought of Fleda Druse shot into Rockwell’s mind, and it harassed him during the hours Ingolby slept, and after the giant Gipsy had taken his departure just before the dawn.
“I’m afraid it will mean more there than anywhere else,” he said sadly to himself. “There was evidently something between those two; and she isn’t the kind to take it philosophically. Poor girl! Poor girl! It’s a bitter dose, if there was anything in it,” he added.
He watched beside the sick-bed till the dawn stared in and his patient stirred and waked, then he took Ingolby’s hand, grown a little cooler, in both his own. “How are you feeling, old man?” he asked cheerfully. “You’ve had a good sleep-nearly three and a half hours. Is the pain in the head less?”
“Better, Sawbones, better,” Ingolby replied cheerfully. “They’ve loosened the tie that binds—begad, it did stretch the nerves. I had gripes of colic once, but the pain I had in my head was twenty times worse, till you gave the opiate.”
“That’s the eyes,” said Rockwell. “I had to lift a bit of bone, and the eyes saw it and felt it, and cried out-shrieked, you might say. They’ve got a sensitiveness all their own, have the eyes.”
“It’s odd there aren’t more accidents to them,” answered Ingolby—“just a little ball of iridescent pulp with strings tied to the brain.”
“And what hurts the head may destroy the eyes sometimes,” Rockwell answered cautiously. “We know so little of the delicate union between them, that we can’t be sure we can put the eyes right again when, because of some blow to the head, the ricochet puts the eyes out of commission.”
“That’s what’s the matter with me, then?” asked Ingolby, feeling the bandage on his eyes feverishly, and stirring in his bed with a sense of weariness.
“Yes, the ricochet got them, and has put them out of commission,” replied Rockwell, carefully dwelling upon each word, and giving a note of meaning to his tone.
Ingolby raised himself in bed, but Rockwell gently forced him down again. “Will my eyes have to be kept bandaged long? Shall I have to give up work for any length of time?” Ingolby asked.
“Longer than you’ll like,” was the enigmatical reply. “It’s the devil’s own business,” was the weary answer. “Every minute’s valuable to me now. I ought to be on deck morning, noon, and night. There’s all the trouble between the two towns; there’s the strike on hand; there’s that business of the Orange funeral, and more than all a thousand times, there’s—” he paused.
He was going to say, “There’s that devil Marchand’s designs on my bridge,” but he thought better of it and stopped. It had been his intention to deal with Marchand directly, to get a settlement of their differences without resort to the law, to prevent the criminal act without deepening a feud which might keep the two towns apart for years. Bad as Marchand was, to prevent his crime was far better than punishing him for it afterwards. To have Marchand arrested for conspiracy to commit a crime was a business which would gravely interfere with his freedom of motion in the near future, would create complications which might cripple his own purposes in indirect ways. That was why he had declared to Jowett that even Felix Marchand had his price, and that he would try negotiations first.
But what troubled him now, as he lay with eyes bandaged and a knowledge that to-morrow was the day fixed for the destruction of the bridge, was his own incapacity. It was unlikely that his head or his eyes would be right by to-morrow, or that Rockwell would allow him to get up. He felt in his own mind that the injury he had received was a serious one, and that the lucky horseshoe had done Maxchand’s work for him all too well. This thought shook him. Rockwell could see his chest heave with an excitement gravely injurious to his condition; yet he must be told the worst, or the shock of discovery by himself that he was blind might give him brain fever. Rockwell felt that he must hasten the crisis.
“Rockwell,” Ingolby suddenly asked, “is there any chance of my discarding this and getting out to-morrow?” He touched the handkerchief round his eyes. “It doesn’t matter about the head bandages, but the eyes—can’t I slough the wraps to-morrow? I feel scarcely any pain now.”
“Yes, you can get rid of the bandages to-morrow—you can get rid of them to-day, if you really wish,” Rockwell answered, closing in on the last defence.
“But I don’t mind being in the dark to-day if it’ll make me fitter for to-morrow and get me right sooner. I’m not a fool. There’s too much carelessness about such things. People often don’t give themselves a chance to get right by being in too big a hurry. So, keep me in darkness to-day, if you want to, old man. For a hustler I’m not in too big a hurry, you see. I’m for holding back to get a bigger jump.”
“You can’t be in a big hurry, even if you want to, Ingolby,” rejoined Rockwell, gripping the wrist of the sick man, and leaning over him.
Ingolby grew suddenly very still. It was as though vague fear had seized him and held him in a vice. “What is it? What do you want to say to me?” he asked in a low, nerveless tone.
“You’ve been hit hard, Chief. The ricochet has done you up for some time. The head will soon get well, but I’m far from sure about your eyes. You’ve got to have a specialist about them. You’re in the dark, and as for making you see, so am I. Your eyes and you are out of commission for some time, anyhow.”
He leaned over hastily, but softly and deftly undid the bandages over the eyes and took them off. “It’s seven in the morning, and the sun’s up, Chief, but it doesn’t do you much good, you see.”
The last two words were the purest accident, but it was a strange, mournful irony, and Rockwell flushed at the thought of it. He saw Ingolby’s face turn grey, and then become white as death itself.
“I see,” came from the bluish-white lips, as the stricken man made call on all the will and vital strength in him.
For a long minute Rockwell held the cold hand in the grasp of one who loves and grieves, but even so the physician and surgeon in him were uppermost, as they should be, in the hour when his friend was standing on the brink of despair, maybe of catastrophe irremediable. He did not say a word yet, however. In such moments the vocal are dumb and the blind see.
Ingolby heaved himself in the bed and threw up his arms, wresting them from Rockwell’s grasp.
“My God—oh, my God-blind!” he cried in agony. Rockwell drew the head with the sightless eyes to his shoulder.
For a moment he laid one hand on the heart, that, suddenly still, now went leaping under his fingers. “Steady,” he said firmly. “Steady. It may be only temporary. Keep your head up to the storm. We’ll have a specialist, and you must not get mired till then. Steady, Chief.”
“Chief! Chief!” murmured Ingolby. “Dear God, what a chief! I risked everything, and I’ve lost everything by my own vanity. Barbazon’s—the horseshoe—among the wolves, just to show I could do things better than any one else—as if I had the patent for setting the world right. And now—now—”
The thought of the bridge, of Marchand’s devilish design, shot into his mind, and once more he was shaken. “The bridge! Blind! Mother!” he called in a voice twisted in an agony which only those can feel to whom life’s purposes are even more than life itself. Then, with a moan, he became unconscious, and his head rolled over against Rockwell’s cheek. The damp of his brow was as the damp of death as Rockwell’s lips touched it.
“Old boy, old boy!” Rockwell said tenderly, “I wish it had been me instead. Life means so much to you—and so little to me. I’ve seen too much, and you’ve only just begun to see.”
Laying him gently down, Rockwell summoned the nurse and Jim Beadle and spoke to them in low tones. “He knows now, and it has hit him hard, but not so hard that he won’t stiffen to it. It might have been worse.”
He gave instructions as to the care that should be taken, and replaced the bandages on the eyes. It was, however, long before Ingolby was restored to consciousness, and when it came, Rockwell put to his lips a cooling drink containing a powerful opiate. Ingolby drank it without protest and in silence. He was like one whose sense of life was automatic and of an inner rather than an outer understanding. But when he lay back on the pillow again, he said slowly:
“I want the Chief Constable to come here to-night at eight o’clock. It will be dark then. He must come. It is important. Will you see to it, Rockwell?”
He thrust out a hand as though to find Rockwell’s, and there was a gratitude and an appeal in the pressure of his fingers which went to Rockwell’s heart.
“All right, Chief. I’ll have him here,” Rockwell answered briskly, but with tears standing in his eyes. Ingolby had, as it were, been stricken out of the active, sentient, companionable world into a world where he was alone, detached, solitary. His being seemed suspended in an atmosphere of misery and helplessness.
“Blind! I am blind!” That was the phrase which kept beating with the pulses in Ingolby’s veins, that throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed like engines in a creaking ship which the storm was shaking and pounding in the vast seas between the worlds. Here was the one incomprehensible, stupefying fact: nothing else mattered. Every plan he had ever had, every design which he had made his own by an originality that even his foes acknowledged, were passing before his brain in swift procession, shining, magnified, and magnificent, and in that sudden clear-seeing of his soul he beheld their full value, their exact concrete force and ultimate effect. Yet he knew himself detached from them, inactive, incapable, because he could not see with the eyes of the body. The great essential thing to him was that one thing he had lost. A man might be a cripple and still direct the great concerns of life and the business of life. He might be shorn of limb and scarred of body, but with eye sight still direct the courses of great schemes, in whatever sphere of life his purposes were at work. He might be deaf to every sound and forever dumb, but seeing enabled him still to carry forward every enterprise. In darkness, however, those things were naught, because judgment must depend on the eyes and senses of others. The report might be true or false, the deputy might deceive, and his blind chief might never know the truth unless some other spectator of his schemes should report it; and the truth could not surely be checked, save by some one, perhaps, whose life was joined to his, by one that truly loved him, whose fate was his.
His brain was afire. By one that truly loved him! Who was there that loved him? Who was there at one with him in all his deep designs, in all he had done and meant to do? Neither brother, nor sister, nor friend, nor any other. None of his blood was there who could share with him the constructive work he had set out to do. There was no friend whose fate was part of his own. There was the Boss Doctor: but Rockwell was tied to his own responsibilities, and he could not give up, of course, would not give up his life to the schemes of another. There were a dozen men whom he had helped to forge ahead by his own schemes, but their destinies were not linked with his. Only one whose life was linked with his could be trusted to be his eyes, to be the true reporter of all he did, had done, or planned to do. Only one who loved him.
But even one who loved him could not carry through his incompleted work against the assaults of his enemies, who were powerful, watchful, astute, and merciless; who had a greed which set money higher than all else in the world. They were of the new order of things in the New World. The business of life was to them not a system of barter and exchange, a giving something of value to get something of value, with a margin of profit for each, and a sense of human equity behind; it was a cockpit where one man sought to get what another man had—and get it almost anyhow.
It was the work of the faro-bank man, whose sleight of hand deceived the man that carried the gun.
All the old humanity and good-fellowship of the trader, the man who exchanged, as it was in the olden days of the world and continued in greater or less degree till the present generation—all that was gone. It was held in contempt. It had prevailed when men were open robbers and filibusters and warriors, giving their lives, if need be, to get what they wanted, making force their god. It had triumphed over the violence and robbery of the open road until the dying years of one century and the young years of a new century. Then the day of the trickster came—and men laughed at the idea of fair exchange and strove to give an illusive value for a thing of real value—the remorseless sleight of hand which the law could not reach. The desire to get profit by honest toiling was dying down to ashes.
Against such men had Ingolby worked—the tricksters, the manipulators. At the basis of his schemes was organization and the economy which concentrated and conserved energy begets, together with its profit. He had been the enemy of waste, the apostle of frugality and thrift; and it was that which had enabled him, in his short career, to win the confidence of the big men behind him in Montreal, to make good every step of the way. He had worked for profit out of legitimate product and industry and enterprise, out of the elimination of waste. It was his theory (and his practice) that no bit of old iron, no bolt or screw, no scrap of paper should be thrown away; that the cinders of the engines could and should be utilized for that which they would make; and that was why there was a paper-mill and foundry on the Sagalac at Manitou. That was why and how, so far, he had beaten the tricksters.
But while his schemes flashed before his mind, as the opiate suspended him in the middle heaven between sleep and waking, the tricksters and manipulators came hurrying after him like marauders that waited for the moment when they could rush the camp in the watches of the night. His disordered imagination saw the ruin and wreck of his work, the seizure of what was his own—the place of control on his railways, the place of the Master Man who cared infinitely more to see his designs accomplished than for the profit they would bring to himself. Yesterday he had been just at the top of the hill. The key in his fingers was turning in the lock which would make safe the securities of his life and career, when it snapped, and the world grew dark as the black curtain fell and shut out the lighted room from the wayfarer in the gloom. Then, it was, came the opaque blackness which could be felt, and his voice calling in despair: “Blind! I am blind!”
He did not know that he had taken an opiate, that his friend had mercifully atrophied his rebellious nerves. These visions he was seeing were terribly true, but they somehow gave him no physical torture. It was as though one saw an operation performed upon one’s body with the nerves stilled and deadened by ether. Yet he was cruelly conscious of the disaster which had come to him. For a time at least. Then his mind seemed less acute, the visions came, then without seeing them go, they went. And others came in broken patches, shreds, and dreams, phantasmagoria of the brain, and at last all were mingled and confused; but as they passed they seemed to burn his sight. How he longed for a cool bandage over his eyes, for a soft linen which would shut out the cumuli of broken hopes and designs, life’s goals obliterated! He had had enough of the black procession of futile things.
His longing was not denied, for even as he roused himself from the oblivion coming on him, as though by a last effort to remember his dire misfortune, maybe his everlasting tragedy, something soothing and soft like linen dipped in dew was laid upon his forehead. A cool, delicious hand covered his eyes caressingly; a voice from spheres so far away that worlds were the echoing points of the sound, came whispering to him like a stir of wings in a singing grove. With a last effort to remain in the waking world, he raised his head so very little, but fell gently back again with one sighing word on his lips:
“Fleda!”
It was no illusion. Fleda had come from her own night of trouble to his motherless, wifeless home, and would not be denied admittance by the nurse. It was Jim Beadle who admitted her.
“He’d be mad if he knew we wouldn’t let her come,” Jim had said to the nurse.
It was Fleda who had warned Ingolby of the dangers that surrounded him—the physical as well as business dangers. She came now to serve the blind victim of that Fate which she had seen hovering over him.
The renegade daughter of the Romanys, as Jethro Fawe had called her, was, for the first time, in the house of her master Gorgio.
For once in its career, Lebanon was absolutely united. The blow that had brought down the Master Man had also struck the town between the eyes, and there was no one—friend or foe of Ingolby—who did not regard it as an insult and a challenge. It was now known that the roughs of Manitou, led by the big river-driver, were about to start on a raid upon Lebanon and upon Ingolby at the very moment the horseshoe did its work. All night there were groups of men waiting outside Ingolby’s house. They were of all classes-carters, railway workers, bartenders, lawyers, engineers, bankers, accountants, merchants, ranchmen, carpenters, insurance agents, manufacturers, millers, horse-dealers, and so on.
Some prayed for Ingolby’s life, others swore viciously; and those who swore had no contempt for those who prayed, while those who prayed were tolerant of those who swore. It was a union of incongruous elements. Men who had nothing in common were one in the spirit of faction; and all were determined that the Orangeman, whose funeral was fixed for this memorable Saturday, should be carried safely to his grave. Civic pride had almost become civic fanaticism in Lebanon. One of the men beaten by Ingolby in the recent struggle for control of the railways said to the others shivering in the grey dawn: “They were bound to get him in the back. They’re dagos, the lot of ‘em. Skunks are skunks, even when you skin ‘em.”
When, just before dawn, old Gabriel Druse issued from the house into which he had carried Ingolby the night before, they questioned him eagerly. He had been a figure apart from both Lebanon and Manitou, and they did not regard him as a dago, particularly as it was more than whispered that Ingolby “had a lien” on his daughter. In the grey light, with his long grizzled beard and iron-grey, shaggy hair, Druse looked like a mystic figure of the days when the gods moved among men like mortals. His great height, vast proportions, and silent ways gave him a place apart, and added to the superstitious feeling by which he was surrounded.
“How is he?” they asked whisperingly, as they crowded round him.
“The danger is over,” was the slow, heavy reply. “He will live, but he has bad days to face.”
“What was the danger?” they asked. “Fever—maybe brain fever,” he replied. “We’ll see him through,” someone said.
“Well, he cannot see himself through,” rejoined the old man solemnly. The enigmatical words made them feel there was something behind.
“Why can’t he see himself through?” asked Osterhaut the universal, who had just arrived from the City Hall.
“He can’t see himself through because he is blind,” was the heavy answer.
There was a moment of shock, of hushed surprise, and then a voice burst forth: “Blind—they’ve blinded him, boys! The dagos have killed his sight. He’s blind, boys!”
A profane and angry muttering ran through the crowd, who were thirsty, hungry, and weary with watching.
Osterhaut held up the horseshoe which had brought Ingolby down. “Here it is, the thing that done it. It’s tied with a blue ribbon-for luck,” he added ironically. “It’s got his blood on it. I’m keeping it till Manitou’s paid the price of it. Then I’ll give it to Lebanon for keeps.”
“That’s the thing that did it, but where’s the man behind the thing?” snarled a voice.
Again there was a moment’s silence, and then Billy Kyle, the veteran stage-driver, said: “He’s in the jug, but a gaol has doors, and doors’ll open with or without keys. I’m for opening the door, boys.”
“What for?” asked a man who knew the answer, but who wanted the thing said.
“I spent four years in Arizona, same as Jowett,” Billy Kyle answered, “and I got in the way of thinking as they do there, and acting just as quick as you think. I drove stage down in the Verde Valley. Sometimes there wasn’t time to bring a prisoner all the way to a judge and jury, and people was busy, and hadn’t time to wait for the wagon; so they done what was right, and there was always a tree that would carry that kind o’ fruit for the sake of humanity. It’s the best way, boys.”
“This isn’t Arizona or any other lyncher’s country,” said Halliday, the lawyer, making his way to the front. “It isn’t the law, and in this country it’s the law that counts. It’s the Gover’ment’s right to attend to that drunken dago that threw the horseshoe, and we’ve got to let the Gover’ment do it. No lynching on my plate, thank you. If Ingolby could speak to us, you can bet your boots it’s what he’d say.”
“What’s your opinion, boss?” asked Billy Kyle of Gabriel Druse, who had stood listening, his chin on his breast, his sombre eyes fixed on them abstractedly.
At Kyle’s question his eyes lighted up with a fire that was struck from a flint in other spheres, and he answered: “It is for the ruler to take life, not the subject. If it is a man that rules, it is for him; if it is the law that rules, it is for the law. Here, it is the law. Then it is not for the subject, and it is not for you.”
“If he was your son?” asked Billy Kyle.
“If he was my son, I should be the ruler, not the law,” was the grim, enigmatic reply, and the old man stalked away from them towards the bridge.
“I’d bet he’d settle the dago’s hash that done to his son what the Manitou dagos done to Ingolby—and settle it quick,” remarked Lick Farrelly, the tinsmith.
“I bet he’s been a ruler or something somewhere,” remarked Billy Kyle.
“I bet I’m going home to breakfast,” interposed Halliday, the lawyer. “There’s a straight day’s work before us, gentlemen,” he added, “and we can’t do anything here. Orangemen, let’s hoof it.”
Twenty Orangemen stepped out from the crowd. Halliday was a past master of their lodge, and they all meant what he meant. They marched away in procession—to breakfast and to a meeting of the lodge. Others straggled after, but a few waited for the appearance of the doctor. When the sun came up and Rockwell, pale and downcast, issued forth, they gathered round him, and walked with him through the town, questioning, listening and threatening.
A few still remained behind at Ingolby’s house. They were of the devoted slaves of Ingolby who would follow him to the gates of Hades and back again, or not back if need be.
The nigger barber, Berry, was one; another was the Jack-of-all-trades, Osterhaut, a kind of municipal odd-man, with the well-known red hair, the face that constantly needed shaving, the blue serge shirt with a scarf for a collar, the suit of canvas in the summer and of Irish frieze in the winter; the pair of hands which were always in his own pocket, never in any one else’s; the grey eye, doglike in its mildness, and the long nose which gave him the name of Snorty. Of the same devoted class also was Jowett who, on a higher plane, was as wise and discerning a scout as any leader ever had.
While old Berry and Osterhaut and all the others were waiting at Ingolby’s house, Jowett was scouting among the Manitou roughs for the Chief Constable of Lebanon, to find out what was forward. What he had found was not reassuring, because Manitou, conscious of being in the wrong, realized that Lebanon would try to make her understand her wrong-doing; and that was intolerable. It was clear to Jowett that, in spite of all, there would be trouble at the Orange funeral, and that the threatened strike would take place at the same time in spite of Ingolby’s catastrophe. Already in the early morning revengeful spirits from Lebanon had invaded the outer portions of Manitou and had taken satisfaction out of an equal number of “Dogans,” as they called the Roman Catholic labourers, one of whom was carried to the hospital with an elbow out of joint and a badly injured back.
With as much information as he needed, Jowett made his way back to Lebanon, when, at the approach to the bridge, he met Fleda hurrying with bent head and pale, distressed face in his own direction. Of all Western men none had a better appreciation of the sex that takes its toll of every traveller after his kind than Aaron Jowett. He had been a real buck in his day among those of his own class, and though the storm of his romances had become but a faint stirring of leaves which had tinges of days that are sear, he still had an eye unmatched for female beauty. The sun which makes that northern land a paradise in summer caught the gold-brown hair of Gabriel Druse’s daughter, and made it glint and shine. It coquetted with the umber of her eyes and they grew luminous as a jewel; it struck lightly across the pale russet of her cheek and made it like an apple that one’s lips touch lovingly, when one calls it “too good to eat.” It made an atmosphere of half-silver and half-gold with a touch of sunrise crimson for her to walk in, translating her form into melting lines of grace.
Jowett knew that Druse’s daughter was on her way to the man who had looked once, looked twice, looked thrice into her eyes and had seen there his own image; and that she had done the same; and that the man, it might be, would never look into their dark depths again. He might speak once, he might speak twice, he might speak thrice, but would it ever be the same as the look that needed no words?
When he crossed Fleda Druse’s pathway she stopped short. She knew that Jowett was Ingolby’s true friend. She had seen him often, and he was intimately associated with that day when she had run the Carillon Rapids and had lain (for how long she never dared to think) in Ingolby’s arms in the sight of all the world. First among those who crowded round her at Carillon that day were Jowett and Osterhaut, who had tried to warn her.
“You are going to him?” she said now with confidence in her eyes, and by the intimacy of the phrase (as though she could speak of Ingolby only as him) their own understanding was complete.
“To see how he is and then to do other things,” Jowett answered.
There was silence for a moment in which they moved slowly forward, and then she said: “You were at Barbazon’s last night?”
“When that Gipsy son of a dog gave him away!” he assented. “I never heard anything like the speech Ingolby made. He had them in the throat. The Gipsy would have had nothing out of it, if it hadn’t been for the horseshoe. But in spite of the giveaway, Ingolby was getting them where they were soft-fairly drugging them with good news. You never heard such dope. My, he was smooth! The golden, velvet truth it was, too. That’s the only kind he has in stock; and they were sort of stupefied and locoed as they chewed his word-plant. Cicero must have been a saucy singer of the dictionary, and Paul the Apostle had a dope of his own you couldn’t buy, but the gay gamut that Ingolby run gives them all the cold good-bye.”
She held herself very still as he spoke. There was, however, a strange, lonely look in her eyes. The man lying asleep in the darkness of body and mind yonder was not really her lover, for he had said no word direct of love to her, and she knew him so little, how could she love him? Yet there was something between them which had its authority over their lives, overcoming even that maiden modesty which was in contrast to the bold, physical thing she had done in running the Carillon Rapids those centuries ago when she was young and glad-wistfully glad. So much had come since that day, she had travelled so far on the highway of Fate, that she looked back from peak to peak of happening to an almost invisible horizon. So much had occurred and she felt so old this morning; and yet there was in her heart the undefined feeling that she must keep her radiant Spring of life for the blind Gorgio if he needed it-if he needed it. Would he need it, robbed of sight and with his life-work murdered?
She shuddered as she thought of what it meant to him. If a man is to work, he must have eyes to see. Yet what had she to do with it, after all? She had no right to go to him even as she was going. Yet had she not the right of common humanity? This Gorgio was her friend. Did not the world know that he had saved her life?
As they came to the Lebanon end of the bridge, Fleda turned to Jowett and, commenting on his description of the scene at Barbazon, said: “He is a great man, but he trusts too much and risks too much. That was no place for him.”
“Big men like him think they can do anything,” Jowett replied, a little ironically, subtly trying to force a confession of her preference for Ingolby.
He succeeded. Her eye lighted with indignation. She herself might challenge him, but she would not allow another to do so.
“It is not the truth,” she rejoined sharply. “He does not measure himself against the world so. He is like—like a child,” she added.
“It seems to me all big men are like that,” Jowett rejoined; “and he’s the biggest man the West has seen. He knows about every man’s business as though it was his own. I can get a margin off most any man in the West on a horse-trade, but I’d look shy about doing a trade with him. You can’t dope a horse so he won’t know. He’s on to it, sees it-sees it like as if it was in glass. Sees anything and everything, and—” He stopped short. The Master Gorgio could no longer see, and his henchman flushed like a girl at his “break”; though, as a horse-dealer, he had in his time listened without shame to wilder, angrier reproaches than most men living.
She glanced at him, saw his confusion, forgave and understood him.
“It was not the horseshoe, it was not the Gipsy,” she returned. “They did not set it going. It would not have happened but for one man.”
“Yes, it’s Marchand, right enough,” answered Jowett, “but we’ll get him yet. We’ll get him with the branding-iron hot.”
“That will not put things right if—” she paused, then with a great effort she added: “Does the doctor think he will get it back and that—”
She stopped suddenly in an agitation he did not care to see and he turned away his head.
“Doctor doesn’t know,” he answered. “There’s got to be an expert. It’ll take time before he gets here, but—” he could not help but say it, seeing how great her distress was—“but it’s going to come back. I’ve seen cases—I saw one down on the Border”—how easily he lied!—“just like his. It was blasting that done it—the shock. But the sight come back all right, and quick too—like as I’ve seen a paralizite get up all at once and walk as though he’d never been locoed. Why, God Almighty don’t let men like Ingolby be done like that by reptiles same’s Marchand.”
“You believe in God Almighty?” she said half-wonderingly, yet with gratitude in her tone. “You understand about God?”
“I’ve seen too many things not to try and deal fair with Him and not try to cheat Him,” he answered. “I see things lots of times that wasn’t ever born on the prairie or in any house. I’ve seen—I’ve seen enough,” he said abruptly, and stopped.
“What have you seen?” she asked eagerly. “Was it good or bad?”
“Both,” he answered quickly. “I was stalked once—stalked I was by night and often in the open day, by some sickly, loathsome thing, that even made me fight it with my hands—a thing I couldn’t see. I used to fire buckshot at it, enough to kill an army, till I near went mad. I was really and truly getting loony. Then I took to prayin’ to the best woman I ever knowed. I never had a mother, but she looked after me—my sister, Sara, it was. She brought me up, and then died and left me without anything to hang on to. I didn’t know all I’d lost till she was gone. But I guess she knew what I thought of her; for she come back—after I’d prayed till I couldn’t see. She come back into my room one night when the cursed ‘haunt’ was prowling round me, and as plain as I see you, I saw her. ‘Be at peace,’ she said, and I spoke to her, and said, ‘Sara-why, Sara’ and she smiled, and went away into nothing—like a bit o’ cloud in the sun.”
He stopped, and was looking straight before him as though he saw a vision.
“It went?” she asked breathlessly.
“It went like that—” He made a swift, outward gesture. “It went and it never came back; and she didn’t either—not ever. My idee is,” he added, “that there’s evil things that mebbe are the ghost-shapes of living men that want to do us harm; though, mebbe, too, they’re the ghost-shapes of men that’s dead, but that can’t get on Over There. So they try to get back to us here; and they can make life Hell while they’re stalking us.”
“I am sure you are right,” she said.
She was thinking of the loathsome thing which haunted her room last night. Was it the embodied second self of Jethro Fawe, doing the evil that Jethro Fawe, the visible corporeal man, wished to do? She shuddered, then bent her head and fixed her mind on Ingolby, whose house was not far away. She felt strangely, miserably alone this morning. She was in that fluttering state which follows a girl’s discovery that she is a woman, and the feeling dawns that she must complete herself by joining her own life with the life of another.
She showed no agitation, but her repression gave an almost statuesque character to her face and figure. The adventurous nature of her early life had given her a power to meet shock and danger with coolness, and though the news of Ingolby’s tragedy had seemed to freeze the vital forces in her, and all the world became blank for a moment, she had controlled herself and had set forth to go to him, come what might.
As she entered the street where Ingolby lived, she suddenly realized the difficulty before her. She might go to him, but by only one right could she stay and nurse him, and that right she did not possess. He would, she knew, understand her, no matter how the world babbled. Why should the world babble? What woman could have designs upon a blind man? Was not humanity alone sufficient warrant for staying by his side? Yet would he wish it? Suddenly her heart sank; but again she remembered their last parting, and once more she was sure he would be glad to have her with him.
It flashed upon her how different it would have been, if he and she had been Romanys, and this thing had happened over there in the far lands she knew so well. Who would have hinted at shame, if she had taken him to her father’s tan or gone to his tan and tended him as a man might tend a man? Humanity would have been the only convention; there would have been no sex, no false modesty, no babble, no reproach. If it had been a man as old as the oldest or as young as Jethro Fawe it would have made no difference.
As young as Jethro Fawe! Why was it that now she could never think of the lost and abandoned Romany life without thinking also of Jethro Fawe? Why should she hate him, despise him, revolt against him, and yet feel that, as it were by invisible cords, he drew her back to that which she had forsworn, to the Past which dragged at her feet? The Romany was not dead in her; her real struggle was yet to come; and in a vague but prophetic way she realized it. She was not yet one with the settled western world.
As they came close to Ingolby’s house she heard marching footsteps, and in the near distance she saw fourscore or more men tramping in military order. “Who are they?” she asked of Jowett.
“Men that are going to see law and order kept in Lebanon,” he answered.