A few hours later Fleda slowly made her way homeward through the woods on the Manitou side of the Sagalac. Leaving Ingolby’s house, she had seen men from the ranches and farms and mines beyond Lebanon driving or riding into the town, as though to a fair or fete-day. Word of anticipated troubles had sped through the countryside, and the innate curiosity of a race who greatly love a row brought in sensation-lovers. Some were skimming along in one-horse gigs, a small bag of oats dangling beneath like the pendulum of a great clock. Others were in double or triple-seated light wagons—“democrats” they were called. Women had a bit of colour in their hats or at their throats, and the men had on clean white collars and suits of “store-clothes”—a sign of being on pleasure bent. Young men and girls on rough but serviceable mounts cantered past, laughing and joking, and their loud talking grated on the ear of the girl who had seen a Napoleon in the streets of his Moscow.
Presently there crossed her path a gruesomely ugly hearse, with glass sides and cheap imitation ostrich plumes drawn by gorged ravens of horses with egregiously long tails, and driven by an undertaker’s assistant, who, with a natural gaiety of soul, displayed an idiotic solemnity by dragging down the corners of the mouth. She turned away in loathing.
Her mind fled to a scene far away in the land of the Volga when she was a child, where she had seen buried two men, who had fought for their insulted honour till both had died of their wounds. She remembered the white and red sashes and the gay scarfs worn by the women at the burial, the jackets with great silver buttons worn by the men, and the silver-mounted pistols and bright steel knives in the garish belts. She saw again the bodies of the two gladiators, covered with crimson robes, carried shoulder-high on a soft bed of interlaced branches to the graves beneath the trees. There, covered with flowers and sprigs and evergreens, ribbons and favours, the kindly earth hid them, cloaked for their long sleep, while women wept, and men praised the dead, and went back to the open road again cheerily, as the dead would have them do.
If he had died—the man she had just left behind in that torpid sleep which opiates bring—his body would have been carried to his last home in just such a hideous equipage as this hearse. A shiver of revolt went through her frame, and her mind went to him as she had seen him lying between the white sheets of his bed, his hands, as they had lain upon the coverlet, compact of power and grace, knit and muscular and vital—not the hand for a violin but the hand for a sword.
As she had laid her hand upon his hot forehead and over his eyes, he had unconsciously spoken her name. That had told her more of what really was between them than she had ever known. In the presence of the catastrophe that must endanger, if not destroy the work he had done, the career he had made, he thought of her, spoke her name.
What could she do to prevent his ruin? She must do something, else she had no right to think of him. As though her thoughts had summoned him, she came suddenly upon Felix Marchand at a point where her path resolved itself into two, one leading to Manitou, the other to her own home.
There was a malicious glint in the greenish eyes of the dissolute demagogue as he saw her. His hat made a half-circle before it found his head again.
“You pay early visits, mademoiselle,” he said, his teeth showing rat-like.
“And you late ones?” she asked meaningly.
“Not so late that I can’t get up early to see what’s going on,” he rejoined in a sour voice.
“Is it that those who beat you have to get up early?” she asked ironically.
“No one has got up earlier than me lately,” he sneered.
“All the days are not begun,” she remarked calmly.
“You have picked up quite an education since you left the road and the tan,” he said with the look of one who delivers a smashing blow.
“I am not yet educated enough to know how you get other people to commit your crimes for you,” she retorted.
“Who commits my crimes for me?” His voice was sharp and even anxious.
“The man who told you I was once a Gipsy—Jethro Fawe.”
Her instinct had told her this was so. But had Jethro told all? She thought not. It would need some catastrophe which threw him off his balance to make him speak to a Gorgio of the inner things of Romany life; and child—marriage was one of them.
He scoffed. “Once a Gipsy always a Gipsy. Race is race, and you can’t put it off and on like—your stocking.”
He was going to say chemise, but race was race, and vestiges of native French chivalry stayed the gross simile on the lips of the degenerate. Fleda’s eyes, however, took on a dark and brooding look which, more than anything else, showed the Romany in her. With a murky flood of resentment rising in her veins, she strove to fight back the half-savage instincts of a bygone life. She felt as though she could willingly sentence this man to death as her father had done Jethro Fawe that very morning. Another thought, however, was working and fighting in her—that Marchand was better as a friend than an enemy; and that while Ingolby’s fate was in the balance, while yet the Orange funeral had not taken place and the strikes had not yet come, it might be that he could be won over to Ingolby. Her mind was thus involuntarily reproducing Ingolby’s policy, as he had declared it to Jowett and Rockwell. It was to find Felix Marchand’s price, and to buy off his enmity—not by money, for Marchand did not need that, but by those other coins of value which are individual to each man’s desires, passions and needs.
“Once a Frenchman isn’t always a Frenchman,” she replied coolly, disregarding the coarse insolence of his last utterance. “You yourself do not now swear faith to the tricolour or the fleur-de-lis.”
He flushed. She had touched a tender nerve.
“I am a Frenchman always,” he rejoined angrily. “I hate the English. I spit on the English flag.”
“Yes, I’ve heard you are an anarchist,” she rejoined. “A man with no country and with a flag that belongs to no country—quelle affaire et quelle drolerie!”
She laughed. Taken aback in spite of his anger, he stared at her. How good her French accent was! If she would only speak altogether in that beloved language, he could smother much malice. She was beautiful and—well, who could tell? Ingolby was wounded and blind, maybe for ever, and women are always with the top dog—that was his theory. Perhaps her apparent dislike of him was only a mood. Many women that he had conquered had been just like that. They had begun by disliking him—from Lil Sarnia down—and had ended by being his. This girl would never be his in the way that the others had been, but—who could tell?—perhaps he would think enough of her to marry her? Anyway, it was worth while making such a beauty care for him. The other kind of women were easy enough to get, and it would be a piquant thing to have one irreproachable affaire. He had never had one; he was not sure that any girl or woman he had ever known had ever loved him, and he was certain that he had never loved any girl or woman. To be in love would be a new and piquant experience for him. He did not know love, but he knew what passion was. He had ever been the hunter. This trail might be dangerous, too, but he would take his chances. He had seen her dislike of him whenever they had met in the past, and he had never tried to soften her attitude towards him. He had certainly whistled, but she had not come. Well, he would whistle again—a different tune.
“You speak French much?” he asked almost eagerly, the insolence gone from his tone. “Why didn’t I know that?”
“I speak French in Manitou,” she replied, “but nearly all the French speak English there, and so I speak more English than French.”
“Yes, that’s it,” he rejoined almost angrily again. “The English will not learn French, will not speak French. They make us learn English, and—”
“If you don’t like the flag and the country, why don’t you leave it?” she interrupted, hardening, though she had meant to try and win him over to Ingolby’s side.
His eyes blazed. There was something almost real in the man after all.
“The English can kill us, they can grind us to the dust,” he rejoined in French, “but we will not leave the land which has always been ours. We settled it; our fathers gave their lives for it in a thousand places. The Indians killed them, the rivers and the storms, the plague and the fire, the sickness and the cold wiped them out. They were burned alive at the stake, they were flayed; their bones were broken to pieces by stones—but they blazed trails with their blood in the wilderness from New Orleans to Hudson’s Bay. They paid for the land with their lives. Then the English came and took it, and since that time—one hundred and fifty years—we have been slaves.”
“You do not look like a slave,” she answered, “and you have not acted like a slave. If you were to do the things in France that you’ve done here, you wouldn’t be free as you are to-day.”
“What have I done?” he asked darkly.
“You were the cause of what happened at Barbazon’s last night,”—he smiled evilly—“you are egging on the roughs to break up the Orange funeral to-day; and there is all the rest you know so well.”
“What is the rest I know so well?” He looked closely at her, his long, mongrel eyes half-closing with covert scrutiny.
“Whatever it is, it is all bad and it is all yours.”
“Not all,” he retorted coolly. “You forget your Gipsy friend. He did his part last night, and he’s still free.”
They had entered the last little stretch of wood in which her home lay, and she slackened her footsteps slightly. She felt that she had been unwise in challenging him; that she ought to try persistently to win him over. It was repugnant to her, still it must be done even yet. She mastered herself for Ingolby’s sake and changed her tactics.
“As you glory in what you have done, you won’t mind being responsible for all that’s happened,” she replied in a more friendly tone.
She made an impulsive gesture towards him.
“You have shown what power you have—isn’t that enough?” she asked. “You have made the crowd shout, ‘Vive Marchand!’ You can make everything as peaceful as it is now upset. If you don’t do so, there will be much misery. If peace must be got by force, then the force of government will get it in the end. You have the gift of getting hold of the worst men here, and you have done it; but won’t you now master them again in the other way? You have money and brains; why not use them to become a leader of those who will win at last, no matter what the game may be?”
He came close to her. She shrank inwardly, but she did not move. His greenish eyes were wide open in the fulness of eloquence and desire.
“You have a tongue like none I ever heard,” he said impulsively. “You’ve got a mind that thinks, you’ve got dash and can take risks. You took risks that day on the Carillon Rapids. It was only the day before that I’d met you by the old ford of the Sagalac, and made up to you. You choked me off as though I was a wolf or a devil on the loose. The next day when I saw Ingolby hand you out to the crowd from his arms, I got nasty—I have fits like that sometimes, when I’ve had a little too much liquor. I felt it more because you’re the only kind of woman that could ever get a real hold on me. It was you made me get the boys rampaging and set the toughs moving. As you say, I can get hold of a crowd. It’s not hard—with money and drink. You can buy human nature cheap. Every man has his price they say—and every woman too—bien sur! The thing is to find out what is the price, and then how to buy. You can’t buy everyone in the same way, even if you use a different price. You’ve got to find out how they want the price—whether it’s to be handed over the counter, so to speak, or to be kept on the window-sill, or left in a pocket, or dropped in a path, or dug up like a potato, with a funny make-believe that fools nobody, but just plays to the hypocrite in everyone everywhere. I’m saying this to you because you’ve seen more of the world, I bet, than one in a million, even though you’re so young. I don’t see why we can’t come together. I’m to be bought. I don’t say that my price isn’t high. You’ve got your price, too. You wouldn’t fuss yourself about things here in Manitou and Lebanon, if there wasn’t something you wanted to get. Tout ca! Well, isn’t it worth while making the bargain? You’ve got such gift of speech that I’m just as if I’d been drugged, and all round, face, figure, eyes, hair, foot, and girdle, you’re worth giving up a lot for. I’ve seen plenty of your sex, and I’ve heard crowds of them talk, but they never had anything for me beyond the minute. You’ve got the real thing. You’re my fancy. You’ve been thinking and dreaming of Ingolby. He’s done. He’s a back number. There’s nothing he’s done that isn’t on the tumble since last night. The financial gang that he downed are out already against him. They’ll have his economic blood. He made a splash while he was at it, but the alligator’s got him. It’s ‘Exit Ingolby,’ now.”
She made a passionate gesture, and seemed about to speak, but he went on: “No, don’t say anything. I know how you feel. You’ve had your face turned his way, and you can’t look elsewhere all at once. But Time cures quick, if you’re a good healthy human being. Ingolby was the kind likely to draw a girl. He’s a six-footer and over; he spangled a lot, and he smiled pretty—comme le printemps, and was sharp enough to keep clear of women that could hurt him. That was his strongest point after all, for a little, sly sprat of a woman that’s made eyes at you and led you on, till you sent her a note in a hurry some time with some loose hot words in it, and she got what she’d wanted, will make you pay a hundred times for the goods you get. Ingolby was sharp enough to walk shy, until you came his way, and then he lost his underpinning. But last night got him in the vitals—hit him between the eyes; and his stock’s not worth ten cents in the dollar to-day. But though the pumas are out, and he’s done, and’ll never see his way out of the hole he’s in”—he laughed at his grisly joke”—it’s natural to let him down easy. You’ve looked his way; he did you a good turn at the Carillon Rapids, and you’d do one for him if you could. I’m the only one can stop the worst from happening. You want to pay your debt to him. Good. I can help you do it. I can stop the strikes on the railways and in the mills. I can stop the row at the Orange funeral. I can stop the run on his bank and the drop in his stock. I can fight the gang that’s against him—I know how. I’m the man that can bring things to pass.”
He paused with a sly, mean smile of self-approval and conceit, and his tongue licked the corners of his mouth in a way that drunkards have in the early morning when the effect of last night’s drinking has worn off. He spread out his hands with the air of a man who had unpacked his soul, but the chief characteristic of his manner was egregious belief in himself.
At first, in her desire to find a way to meet the needs of Ingolby, Fleda had listened to him with fortitude and even without revolt. But as he began to speak of women, and to refer to herself with a look of gloating which men of his breed cannot hide, her angry pulses beat hard. She did not quite know where he was leading, but she was sure he meant to say something which would vex her beyond bearing. At one moment she meant to cut short his narrative, but he prevented her, and when at last he ended, she was almost choking with agitation. It had been borne in upon her as his monologue proceeded, that she would rather die than accept anything from this man—anything of any kind. To fight him was the only thing. Nothing else could prevail in the end. His was the service of the unpenitent thief.
“And what is it you want to buy from me?” she asked evenly.
He did not notice, and he could not realize that ominous thing in her voice and face. “I want to be friends with you. I want to see you here in the woods, to meet you as you met Ingolby. I want to talk with you, to hear you talk; to learn things from you I never learned before; to—”
She interrupted him with a swift gesture. “And then—after that? What do you want at the end of it all? One cannot spend one’s time talking and wandering in the woods and teaching and learning. After that, what?”
“I have a house in Montreal,” he said evasively. “I don’t want to live there alone.” He laughed. “It’s big enough for two, and at the end it might be us two, if—”
With sharp anger, yet with coolness and dignity, she broke in on his words. “Might be us two!” she exclaimed. “I have never thought of making my home in a sewer. Do you think—but, no, it isn’t any use talking! You don’t know how to deal with man or woman. You are perverted.”
“I did not mean what you mean; I meant that I should want to marry you,” he protested. “You think the worst of me. Someone has poisoned your mind against me.”
“Everyone has poisoned my mind against you,” she returned, “and yourself most of all. I know you will try to injure Mr. Ingolby; and I know that you will try to injure me; but you will not succeed.”
She turned and moved away from him quickly, taking the path towards her own front door. He called something after her, but she did not or would not hear.
As she entered the open space in front of the house, she heard footsteps behind her and turned quickly, not without apprehension. A woman came hurrying towards her. She was pale, agitated, haggard with fatigue.
“May I speak with you?” she asked in French. “Surely,” replied Fleda.
“I want to speak to you about m’sieu’,” replied the sad-faced woman. She made a motion of her head backwards towards the wood. “About M’sieu’ Marchand.”
Fleda’s face hardened; she had had more than enough of “M’sieu’ Marchand.” She was bitterly ashamed that she had, even for a moment, thought of using diplomacy with him. But this woman’s face was so forlorn, apart, and lonely, that the old spirit of the Open Road worked its will. In far-off days she had never seen a human being turned away from a Romany tent, or driven from a Romany camp. She opened the door and stood aside to admit the wayfarer.
A few moments later, the woman, tidied and freshened, sat at the ample breakfast which was characteristic of Romany home-life. The woman’s plate was bountifully supplied by Fleda, and her cup filled more than once by Madame Bulteel, while old Gabriel Druse bulked friendly over all. His face now showed none of the passion and sternness which had been present when he passed the Sentence of the Patrin upon Jethro Fawe; nothing of the gloom filling his eyes as he left Ingolby’s house. The gracious, bountiful look of the patriarch, of the head of the clan, was upon him.
The husband of one wife, the father of one child, yet the Ry of Rys had still the overlooking, protective sense of one who had the care of great numbers of people. His keen eyes foresaw more of the story the woman was to tell presently than either of the women of his household. He had seen many such women as this, and had inflexibly judged between them and those who had wronged them.
“Where have you come from?” he asked, as the meal drew to a close.
“From Wind River and under Elk Mountain,” the woman answered with a look of relief. Her face was of those who no longer can bear the soul’s secrets.
There was silence while the breakfast things were cleared away, and the window was thrown wide to the full morning sun. It broke through the branches of pine and cedar and juniper; it made translucent the leaves of the maples; it shimmered on Fleda’s brown hair as she pulled a rose from the bush at the window, and gave it to the forlorn creature in the grey “linsey-woolsey” dress and the loose blue flannel jacket, whose skin was coarsened by outdoor life, but who had something of real beauty in the intense blue of her eyes. She had been a very comely figure in her best days, for her waist was small, her bosom gently and firmly rounded, and her hands were finer than those of most who live and work much in the open air.
“You said there was something you wished to tell me,” said Fleda, at last.
The woman gazed slowly round at the three, as though with puzzled appeal. There was the look of the Outlander in her face; of one who had been exiled from familiar things and places. In manner she was like a child. Her glance wandered over the faces of the two women, then her eyes met those of the Ry, and stayed there.
“I am old and I have seen many sorrows,” said Gabriel Druse, divining what was in her mind. “I will try to understand.”
“I have known all the bitterness of life,” interposed the low, soft voice of Madame Bulteel.
“All ears are the same here,” Fleda added, looking the woman in the eyes.
“I will tell everything,” was the instant reply. Her fingers twined and untwined in her lap with a nervousness shown by neither face nor body. Her face was almost apathetic in its despair, but her body had an upright courage.
She sighed heavily and began.
“My name is Arabella Stone. I was married from my home over against Wind River by the Jumping Sandhills.
“My father was a lumberman. He was always captain of the gang in the woods, and captain of the river in the summer. My mother was deaf and dumb. It was very lonely at times when my father was away. I loved a boy—a good boy, and he was killed breaking horses. When I was twenty-one years old my mother died. It was not good for me to be alone, my father said, so he must either give up the woods and the river, or he or I must marry. Well, I saw he would not marry, for my mother’s face was one a man could not forget.”
The old man stirred in his seat. “I have seen such,” he said in his deep voice.
“So it was I said to myself I would marry,” she continued, “though I had loved the Boy that died under the hoofs of the black stallion. There weren’t many girls at the Jumping Sandhills, and so there were men, now one, now another, to say things to me which did not touch my heart; but I did not laugh, because I understood that they were lonely. Yet I liked one of them more than all the others.
“So, for my father’s sake, I came nearer to Dennis, and at last it seemed I could bear to look at him any time of the day or night he came to me. He was built like a pine-tree, and had a playful tongue, and also he was a ranchman like the Boy that was gone. It all came about on the day he rode in from the range the wild wicked black stallion which all range-riders had tried for years to capture. It was like a brother of the horse which had killed my Boy, only bigger. When Dennis mastered him and rode him to my door I made up my mind, and when he whispered to me over the dipper of buttermilk I gave him, I said, ‘Yes.’ I was proud of him. He did things that a woman likes, and said the things a woman loves to hear, though they be the same thing said over and over again.”
Madame Bulteel nodded her head as though in a dream, and the Ry of Rys sat with his two great hands on the chair-arm and his chin dropped on his chest. Fleda’s hands were clasped in her lap, and her big eyes never left the woman’s face.
“Before a month was gone I had married him,” the low, tired voice went on. “It was a gay wedding; and my father was very happy, for he thought I had got the desire of a woman’s life—a home of her own. For a time all went well. Dennis was gay and careless and wilful, but he was easy to live with, too, except when he came back from the town where he sold his horses. Then he was different, because of the drink, and he was quarrelsome with me—and cruel, too.
“At last when he came home with the drink upon him, he would sleep on the floor and not beside me. This wore upon my heart. I thought that if I could only put my hand on his shoulder and whisper in his ear, he would get better of his bad feeling; but he was sulky, and he would not bear with me. Though I never loved him as I loved my Boy, still I tried to be a good wife to him, and never turned my eyes to any other man.”
Suddenly she stopped as though the pain of speaking was too great. Madame Bulteel murmured something, but the only word that reached the ears of the others was the Arabic word ‘mafish’. Her pale face was suffused as she said it.
Two or three times the woman essayed to speak again, but could not. At last, however, she overcame her emotion and said: “So it was when M’sieu’ Felix Marchand came up from the Sagalac.”
The old man started and muttered harshly, but Fleda had foreseen the entrance of the dissolute Frenchman into the tale, and gave no sign of surprise.
“M’sieu’ Marchand bought horses,” the sad voice trailed on. “One day he bought the mining-claims Dennis had been holding till he could develop them or sell them for good money. When Dennis went to town again he brought me back a present of a belt with silver clasps; but yet again that night he slept upon the floor alone. So it went on. M. Marchand, he goes on to the mountains and comes back; and he buys more horses, and Dennis takes them to Yargo, and M. Marchand goes with him, but comes back before Dennis does. It was then M’sieu’ begun to talk to me; to say things that soothe a woman when she is hurt. I knew now Dennis did not want me as when he first married me. He was that kind of man—quick to care and quicker to forget. He was weak, he could not fasten where he stood. It pleased him to be gay and friendly with me when he was sober, but there was nothing behind it—nothing, nothing at all. At last I began to cry when I thought of it, for it went on and on, and I was too much alone. I looked at myself in the glass, and I saw I was not old or lean. I sang in the trees beside the brook, and my voice was even a little better than in the days when Dennis first came to my father’s house. I looked to my cooking, and I knew that it was as good as ever. I thought of my clothes, and how I did my hair, and asked myself if I was as fresh to see as when Dennis first came to me. I could see no difference. There was a clear pool not far away under the little hills where the springs came together. I used to bathe in it every morning and dry myself in the sun; and my body was like a child’s. That being so, should my own man turn his head away from me day or night? What had I done to be used so, less than two years after I had married!”
She paused and hung her head, weeping gently. “Shame stings a woman like nothing else,” Madame Bulteel said with a sigh.
“It was so with me,” continued Dennis’s wife. “Then at last the thought came that there was another woman. And all the time M. Marchand kept coming and going, at first when Dennis was there, and always with some good reason for coming—horses, cattle, shooting, or furs bought of the Indians. When Dennis was not there, he came at first for an hour or two, as if by chance, then for a whole day, because he said he knew I was lonely. One day, I was sitting by the pool—it was in the evening. I was crying because of the thought that followed me of another woman somewhere, who made Dennis turn from me. Then it was M’sieu’ came and put a hand on my shoulder—he came so quietly that I did not hear him till he touched me. He said he knew why I cried, and it saddened his soul.”
“His soul—the jackal!” growled the old man in his beard.
The woman nodded wearily and went on. “For all of ten days I had been alone, except for the cattlemen camping a mile away and an old Indian helper who slept in his tepee within call. Loneliness makes you weak when there’s something tearing at the heart. So I let M’sieu’ Marchand talk to me. At last he told me that there was a woman at Yargo—that Dennis did not go there for business, but to her. Everyone knew it except me, he said. He told me to ask old Throw Hard, the Indian helper, if he had spoken the truth. I was shamed, and angry and crazy, too, I think, so I went to old Throw Hard and asked him. He said he could not tell the truth, and that he would not lie to me. So I knew it was all true.
“How do I know what was in my mind? Is a woman not mad at such a time! There I was, tossed aside for a flyaway, who was for any man that would come her way. Yes, I think I was mad. The pride in me was hurt—as only a woman can understand.” She paused and looked at the two women who listened to her. Fleda’s eyes were on the world beyond the window of the room.
“Surely we understand,” whispered Madame Bulteel.
The woman’s courage returned, and she continued: “I could not go to my father, for he was riding the river scores of miles away. I was terribly alone. It was then that M’sieu’ Marchand, who had bribed the woman to draw Dennis away, begged me to go away with him. He swore I should marry him as soon as I could be free of Dennis. I scarcely knew what I said or thought; but the place I had loved was hateful to me, so I went away with him.”
A sharp, pained exclamation broke from the lips of Madame Bulteel, but presently she reached out and laid a hand upon the woman’s arm. “Of course you went with him,” she said. “You could not stay where you were and face the return of Dennis. There was no child to keep you, and the man that tempted you said he adored you?”
The woman looked gratefully at her. “That was what he said,” she answered. “He said he was tired of wandering, and that he wanted a home-and there was a big house in Montreal.”
She stopped suddenly upon an angry, smothered word from Fleda’s lips. A big house in Montreal! Fleda’s first impulse was to break in upon the woman’s story and tell her father what had happened just now outside their own house; but she waited.
“Yes, there was a big house in Montreal?” said Fleda, her eyes now resting sadly upon the woman.
“He said it should be mine. But that did not count. To be far away from all that had been was more than all else. I was not thinking of the man, or caring for him, I was flying from my shame. I did not see then the shame to which I was going. I was a fool, and I was mad and bad also. When I waked—and it was soon—there was quick understanding between us. The big house in Montreal—that was never meant for me. He was already married.”
The old man stretched heavily to his feet, leaned both hands on the table, and looked at the woman with glowering eyes, while Fleda’s heart seemed to stop beating.
“Married!” growled Gabriel Druse, with a blur of passion in his voice. He knew that Felix Marchand had followed his daughter as though he were a single man.
Fleda saw what was working in his mind. Since her father suspected, he should know all.
“He almost offered me the big house in Montreal this morning,” she said evenly and coldly.
A malediction broke from the old man’s lips.
“He almost thought he wanted me to marry him,” Fleda added scornfully.
“And what did you say?” Druse asked.
“There could only be one thing to say. I told him I had never thought of making my home in a sewer.” A grim smile broke over the old man’s face, and he sat down again.
“Because I saw him with you I wanted to warn you,” the woman continued. “Yesterday, I came to warn him of his danger, and he laughed at me. From Madame Thibadeau I heard he had said he would make you sing his song. When I came to tell you, there he was with you. But when he left you I was sure there was no need to speak. Still I felt I must tell you—perhaps because you are rich and strong, and will stop him from doing more harm.”
“How do you know we are rich?” asked Druse in a rough tone.
“It is what the world says,” was the reply. “Is there harm in that? In any case it was right to tell you all; so that one who had herded with a woman like me should not be friends with you.”
“I have seen worse women than you,” murmured the old man.
“What danger did you come to warn M. Marchand about?” asked Fleda.
“To his life,” answered the woman.
“Do you want to save his life?” asked the old man.
“Ah, is it not always so?” intervened Madame Bulteel in a low, sad voice. “To be wronged like that does not make a woman just.”
“I am just,” answered the woman. “He deserves to die, but I want to save the man that will kill him when they meet.”
“Who will kill him?” asked Fleda. “Dennis—he will kill Marchand if he can.”
The old man leaned forward with puzzled, gloomy interest. “Why? Dennis left you for another. You say he had grown cold. Was that not what he wanted—that you should leave him?”
The woman looked at him with tearful eyes. “If I had known Dennis better, I should have waited. What he did is of the moment only. A man may fall and rise again, but it is not so with a woman. She thinks and thinks upon the scar that shows where she wounded herself; and she never forgets, and so her life becomes nothing—nothing.”
No one saw that Madame Bulteel held herself rigidly, and was so white that even the sunlight was gold beside her look. Yet the strangest, saddest smile played about her lips; and presently, as the eyes of the others fastened on the woman and did not leave her, she regained her usual composure.
The woman kept looking at Gabriel Druse. “When Dennis found that I had gone, and knew why—for I left word on a sheet of paper—he went mad like me. Trailing to the south, to find M’sieu’ Marchand, he had an accident, and was laid up in a shack for weeks on the Tanguishene River, and they could not move him. But at last a ranchman wrote to me, and the letter found me on the very day I left M’sieu’. When I got that letter begging me to go to the Tanguishene River, to nurse Dennis who loved me still, my heart sank. I said to myself I could not go; and Dennis and I must be apart always to the end of time. But then I thought again. He was ill, and his body was as broken as his mind. Well, since I could do his mind no good, I would try to help his body. I could do that much for him. So I went. But the letter to me had been long on the way, and when I got to the Tanguishene River he was almost well.”
She paused and rocked her body to and fro for a moment as though in pain.
“He wanted me to go back to him then. He said he had never cared for the woman at Yargo, and that what he felt for me now was different from what it had ever been. When he had settled accounts we could go back to the ranch and be at peace. I knew what he meant by settling accounts, and it frightened me. That is why I am here. I came to warn the man, Marchand, for if Dennis kills him, then they will hang Dennis. Do you not see? This is a country of law. I saw that Dennis had the madness in his brain, and so I left him again in the evening of the day I found him, and came here—it is a long way. Yesterday, M’sieu’ Marchand laughed at me when I warned him. He said he could take care of himself. But such men as Dennis stop at nothing; there will be killing, if M’sieu’ stays here.”
“You will go back to Dennis?” asked Fleda gently. “Some other woman will make him happy when he forgets me,” was the cheerless, grey reply.
The old man got up and, coming over, laid a hand upon her shoulder.
“Where did you think of going from here?” he asked.
“Anywhere—I don’t know,” was the reply.
“Is there no work here for her?” he asked, turning to Madame Bulteel.
“Yes, plenty,” was the reply. “And room also?” he asked again.
“Was ever a tent too full, when the lost traveller stumbled into camp in the old days?” rejoined Fleda. The woman trembled to her feet, a glad look in her eyes. “I ought to go, but I am tired and I will gladly stay,” she said and swayed against the table.
Madame Bulteel and Fleda put their arms round her, steadying her.
“This is not the way to act,” said Fleda with a touch of sharp reproof. Had she not her own trouble to face?
The stricken woman drew herself up and looked Fleda in the eyes. “I will find the right way, if I can,” she said with courage.
A half-hour later, as the old man sat alone in the room where he had breakfasted, a rifle-shot rang out in the distance.
“The trouble begins,” he said, as he rose and hastened into the hallway.
Another shot rang out. He caught up his wide felt hat, reached for a great walking-stick in the corner, and left the house hurriedly.
It was a false alarm which had startled Gabriel Druse, but it had significance. The Orange funeral was not to take place until eleven o’clock, and it was only eight o’clock when the Ry left his home. A rifle-shot had, however, been fired across the Sagalac from the Manitou side, and it had been promptly acknowledged from Lebanon. There was a short pause, and then came another from the Lebanon side. It was merely a warning and a challenge. The only man who could have controlled the position was blind and helpless.
As Druse walked rapidly towards the bridge, he met Jowett. Jowett was one of the few men in either town for whom the Ry had regard, and the friendliness had had its origin in Jowett’s knowledge of horseflesh. This was a field in which the Ry was himself a master. He had ever been too high-placed among his own people to trade and barter horses except when, sending a score of Romanys on a hunt for wild ponies on the hills of Eastern Europe, he had afterwards sold the tamed herd to the highest bidders in some Balkan town; but he had an infallible eye for a horse.
It was a curious anomaly also that the one man in Lebanon who would not have been expected to love and pursue horse-flesh was the Reverend Reuben Tripple to whom Ingolby had given his conge, but who loved a horse as he loved himself.
He was indeed a greater expert in horses than in souls. One of the sights of Lebanon had been the appearance in the field of the “Reverend Tripple,” who owned a great, raw-boned bay mare of lank proportions, the winner of a certain great trotting-race which had delighted the mockers.
For two years Jowett had eyed Mr. Tripple’s rawbone with a piratical eye.
Though it had won only a single great race, that, in Jowett’s view, was its master’s fault. As the Arabs say, however, Allah is with the patient; and so it was that on the evening of the day in which Ingolby met disaster, Mr. Tripple informed Jowett that he was willing to sell his rawbone.
He was mounted on the gawky roadster when he met Gabriel Druse making for the bridge. Their greeting was as cordial as hasty. Anxious as was the Ry to learn what was going on in the towns, Jowett’s mount caught his eye. It was but a little time since they had met at Ingolby’s house, and they were both full of the grave events afoot, but here was a horse-deal of consequence, and the bridle-rein was looseflung.
“Yes, I got it,” said Jowett, with a chuckle, interpreting the old man’s look. “I got it for good—a wonder from Wonderville. Damned queer-looking critter, but there, I guess we know what I’ve got. Outside like a crinoline, inside like a pair of ankles of the Lady Jane Plantagenet. Yes, I got it, Mr. Druse, got it dead-on!”
“How?” asked the Ry, feeling the clean fetlocks with affectionate approval.
“He’s off East, so he says,” was the joyous reply; “sudden but sure, and I dunno why. Anyway, he’s got the door-handle offered, and he’s off without his camel.” He stroked the neck of the bay lovingly. “How much?”
Jowett held up his fingers. The old man lifted his eyebrows quizzically. “That-h’m! Does he preach as well as that?” he asked.
Jowett chuckled. “He knows the horse-country better than the New Jerusalem, I guess; and I wasn’t off my feed, nor hadn’t lost my head neither. I wanted that dust-hawk, and he knew it; but I got in on him with the harness and the sulky. The bridle he got from a Mexican that come up here a year ago, and went broke and then went dead; and there being no padre, Tripple did the burying, and he took the bridle as his fee, I s’pose. It had twenty dollars’ worth of silver on it—look at these conchs.”
He trifled with the big beautiful buttons on the head-stall. “The sulky’s as good as new, and so’s the harness almost; and there’s the nose-bag and the blankets, and a saddle and a monkey-wrench and two bottles of horse-liniment, and odds and ends. I only paid that”—and he held up his fingers again as though it was a sacred rite—“for the lot. Not bad, I want to say. Isn’t he good for all day, this one?”
The old man nodded, then turned towards the bridge. “The gun-shots—what?” he asked, setting forward at a walk which taxed the rawbone’s stride.
“An invite—come to the wedding; that’s all. Only it’s a funeral this time, and, if something good doesn’t happen, there’ll be more than one funeral on the Sagalac to-morrow. I’ve had my try, but I dunno how it’ll come out. He’s not a man of much dictionary is the Monseenoor.”
“The Monseigneur Lourde? What does he say?”
“He says what we all say, that he is sorry. ‘But why have the Orange funeral while things are as they are?’ he says, and he asks for the red flag not to be shook in the face of the bull.”
“That is not the talk of a fool, as most priests are,” growled the other.
“Sure. But it wants a real wind-warbler to make them see it in Lebanon. They’ve got the needle. They’ll pray to-day with the taste of blood in their mouths. It’s gone too far. Only a miracle can keep things right. The Mayor has wired for the mounted police—our own battalion of militia wouldn’t serve, and there’d be no use ordering them out—but the Riders can’t get here in time. The train’s due the very time the funeral’s to start, but that train’s always late, though they say the ingine-driver is an Orangeman! And the funeral will start at the time fixed, or I don’t know the boys that belong to the lodge. So it’s up to We, Us & Co. to see the thing through, or go bust. It don’t suit me. It wouldn’t have been like this, if it hadn’t been for what happened to the Chief last night. There’s no holding the boys in. One thing’s sure, the Gipsy that give Ingolby away has got to lie low if he hasn’t got away, or there’ll be one less of his tribe to eat the juicy hedgehog. Yes, sir-ee!”
To the last words of Jowett the Ry seemed to pay no attention, though his lips shut tight and a menacing look came into his eyes. They were now upon the bridge, and could see what was forward on both sides of the Sagalac. There was unusual bustle and activity in the streets and on the river-bank of both towns. It was noticeable also that though the mills were running in Manitou, there were fewer chimneys smoking, and far more men in the streets than usual. Tied up to the Manitou shore were a half-dozen cribs or rafts of timber which should be floating eastward down the Sagalac.
“If the Monseenoor can’t, or don’t, step in, we’re bound for a shindy over a corpse,” continued Jowett after a moment.
“Can the Monseigneur cast a spell over them all?” remarked the Ry ironically, for he had little faith in priests, though he had for this particular one great respect.
“He’s a big man, that preelate,” answered Jowett quickly and forcibly. “He kept the Crees quiet when they was going to rise. If they’d got up, there’d have been hundreds of settlers massacreed. He risked his life to do that—went right into the camp in face of levelled rifles, and sat down and begun to talk. A minute afterwards all the chiefs was squatting, too. Then the tussle begun between a man with a soul and a heathen gang that eat dog, kill their old folks, their cripples and their deformed children, and run sticks of wood through their bleeding chests, just to show that they’re heathens. But he won out, this Jesueete friend o’ man. That’s why I’m putting my horses and my land and my pants and my shirt and the buff that’s underneath on the little preelate.”
Gabriel Druse’s face did not indicate the same confidence. “It is not an age of miracles; the priest is not enough,” he said sceptically.
By twos, by threes, by tens, men from Manitou came sauntering across the bridge into Lebanon, until a goodly number were scattered at different points through the town. They seemed to distribute themselves by a preconceived plan, and they were all habitants. There were no Russians, Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, or Germans among them. They were low-browed, sturdy men, dressed in red or blue serge shirts, some with sashes around their waists, some with ear-rings in their ears, some in knee-boots, and some with the heavy spiked boots of the river-driver. None appeared to carry any weapon that would shoot, yet in their belts was the sheath-knife, the invariable equipment of their class. It would have seemed more suspicious if they had not carried them. The railwaymen, miners, carters, mill-hands, however, appeared to carry nothing save their strong arms and hairy hands, and some were as hairy as animals. These backwoodsmen also could, without weapons, turn a town into a general hospital. In battle they fought not only with hands but also with teeth and hoofs like wild stallions. Teeth tore off an ear or sliced away a nose, hands smote like hammers or gouged out eyes, and their nailed boots were weapons of as savage a kind as could be invented. They could spring and strike an opponent with one foot in the chest or in the face, and spoil the face for many a day, or for ever. It was a gift of the backwoods and the lumber-camps, practised in hours of stark monotony when the devils which haunt places of isolation devoid of family life, where men herd together like dogs in a kennel, break loose. There the man that dips his fingers “friendly-like” in the dish of his neighbour one minute wants the eye of that neighbour the next not so much in innate or momentary hatred, as in innate savagery and the primeval sense of combat, the war which was in the blood of the first man.
The unarmed appearance of these men did not deceive the pioneer folk of Lebanon. To them the time had come when the reactionary forces of Manitou must receive a check. Even those who thought the funeral fanatical and provocative were ready to defend it.
The person who liked the whole business least was Rockwell. He was subject to the same weariness of the flesh and fatigue of the spirit as all men; yet it was expected of him that at any hour he should be at the disposal of suffering humanity—of criminal or idiotic humanity—patient, devoted, calm, nervestrung, complete. He was the one person in the community who was the universal necessity, and yet for whom the community had no mercy in its troubles or out of them. There were three doctors in Lebanon, but none was an institution, none had prestige save Rockwell, and he often wished that he had less prestige, since he cared nothing for popularity.
He had made his preparations for possible “accidents” in no happy mood. Fresh from the bedside of Ingolby, having had no sleep, and with many sick people on his list, he inwardly damned the foolishness of both towns. He even sharply rebuked the Mayor, who urged surgical preparations upon him, for not sending sooner to the Government for a force which could preserve order or prevent the procession.
It was while he was doing so that Jowett appeared with Gabriel Druse to interview the Mayor.
“It’s like this,” said Jowett. “In another hour the funeral will start. There’s a lot of Manitou huskies in Lebanon now, and their feet is loaded, if their guns ain’t. They’re comin’ by driblets, and by-and-bye, when they’ve all distributed themselves, there’ll be a marching column of them from Manitou. It’s all arranged to make trouble and break the law. It’s the first real organized set-to we’ve had between the towns, and it’ll be nasty. If the preelate doesn’t dope them, there’ll be pertikler hell to pay.”
He then gave the story of his visit to Monseigneur Lourde, and the details of what was going forward in Manitou so far as he had learned. Also the ubiquitous Osterhaut had not been idle, and his bulletin had just been handed to Jowett.
“There’s one thing ought to be done and has got to be done,” Jowett added, “if the Monseenoor don’t pull if off. The leaders have to be arrested, and it had better be done by one that, in a way, don’t belong to either Lebanon or Manitou.”
The Mayor shook his head. “I don’t see how I can authorize Marchand’s arrest—not till he breaks the law, in any case.”
“It’s against the law to conspire to break the law,” replied Jowett. “You’ve been making a lot of special constables. Make Mr. Gabriel Druse here a special constable, then if the law’s broke, he can have a right to take a hand in.”
The giant Ry had stood apart, watchful and ruminant, but he now stepped forward, as the Mayor turned to him and stretched out a hand.
“I am for peace,” the old man said. “To keep the peace the law must be strong.”
In spite of the gravity of the situation the Mayor smiled. “You wouldn’t need much disguise to stand for the law, Mr. Druse,” he remarked. “When the law is seven feet high, it stands well up.”
The Ry did not smile. “Make me the head of the constables, and I will keep the peace,” he said. There was a sudden silence. The proposal had come so quietly, and it was so startling, that even the calm Rockwell was taken aback. But his eye and the eye of the Mayor met, and the look in both their faces was the same.
“That’s bold play,” the Mayor said, “but I guess it goes. Yesterday it couldn’t be done. To-day it can. The Chief Constable’s down with smallpox. Got it from an Injun prisoner days ago. He’s been bad for three days, but hung on. Now he’s down, and there’s no Chief. I was going to act myself, but the trouble was, if anything happened to me, there’d be no head of anything. It’s better to have two strings to your bow. It’s a go-it’s a straight go, Mr. Druse. Seven foot of Chief Constable ought to have its weight with the roughnecks.”
A look of hopefulness came into his face. This sage, huge, commanding figure would have a good moral effect on the rude elements of disorder.
“I’ll have you read the Riot Act instead of doing it myself,” added the Mayor. “It’ll be a good introduction for you, and as you live in Manitou, it’ll be a knock-out blow to the toughs. Sometimes one man is as good as a hundred. Come on to the Courthouse with me,” he continued cheerfully. “We’ll fix the whole thing. All the special constables are waiting there with the regular police. An extra foot on a captain’s shoulders is as good as a battery of guns.”
“You’re sure it’s according to Hoyle?” asked Jowett quizzically.
He was so delighted that he felt he must “make the Mayor show off self,” as he put it afterwards. He did not miscalculate; the Mayor rose to his challenge.
“I’m boss of this show,” he said, “and I can go it alone if necessary when the town’s in danger and the law’s being hustled. I’ve had a meeting of the Council and I’ve got the sailing-orders I want. I’m boss of the place, and Mr. Druse is my—” he stopped, because there was a look in the eyes of the Ry which demanded consideration—“And Mr. Druse is lawboss,” he added.
The old ineradicable look of command shone in the eyes of Gabriel Druse. Leadership was written all over him. Power spoke in every motion. The square, unbowed shoulders, the heavily lined face, with the patriarchal beard, the gnarled hands, the rough-hewn limbs, the eye of bright, brooding force proclaimed authority.
Indeed in that moment there came into the face of the old Nomad the look it had not worn for many a day. The self-exiled ruler had paid a heavy price for his daughter’s vow, though he had never acknowledged it to himself. His self-ordained impotency, in a camp that was never moved, within walls which never rose with the sunset and fell with the morning; where his feet trod the same roadway day after day; where no man asked for justice or sought his counsel or fell back on his protection; where he drank from the same spring and tethered his horse in the same paddock from morn to morn: all these things had eaten at his heart and bowed his spirit in spite of himself.
He was not now of the Romany world, and he was not of the Gorgio world; but here at last was the old thing come back to him in a new way, and his bones rejoiced. He would entitle his daughter to her place among the Gorgios. Perhaps also it would be given him, in the name of the law, to deal with a man he hated.
“We’ve got Mister Marchand now,” said Jowett softly to the old chieftain.
The Ry’s eyes lighted and his jaw set. He did not speak, but his hands clenched, opened and clenched again. Jowett saw and grinned.
“The Mayor and the law-boss’ll win out, I guess,” he said to himself.