Part 4

Swell, you see," said Jacques Parfaite, as he gave Whiskey Wine, the leading dog, a cut with the whip and twisted his patois to the uses of narrative, "he has been alone there at the old Fort for a long time. I remember when I first see him. It was in the summer. The world smell sweet if you looked this way or that. If you drew in your breath quick from the top of a hill you felt a great man. Ridley, the chief trader, and myself have come to the Fort on our way to the Mackenzie River. In the yard of the Fort the grass have grown tall, and sprung in the cracks under the doors and windows; the Fort have not been use for a long time. Once there was plenty of buffalo near, and the caribou sometimes; but they were all gone--only a few. The Indians never went that way, only when the seasons were the best. The Company have close the Post; it did not pay. Still, it was pleasant after a long tramp to come to even an empty fort. We know dam' well there is food buried in the yard or under the floor, and it would be droll to open the place for a day--Lost Man's Tavern, we called it. Well--"

"Well, what?" said Sir Duke Lawless, who had travelled up to the Barren Grounds for the sake of adventure and game; and, with his old friend, Shon M'Gann, had trusted himself to the excellent care of Jacques Parfaite, the half-breed.

Jacques cocked his head on one side and shook it wisely and mysteriously. "Tres bien, we trailed through the long grass, pried open the shutters and door, and went in. It is cool in the north of an evening, as you know. We build a fire, and soon there is very fine times. Ridley pried up the floor, and we found good things. Holy! but it was a feast. We had a little rum also. As we talk and a great laugh swim round, there come a noise behind us like shuffling feet. We got to our legs quick. Mon Dieu, a strange sight! A man stand looking at us with something in his face that make my fingers cold all at once--a look--well you would think it was carved in stone--it never change. Once I was at Fort Garry; the Church of St. Mary is there. They have a picture in it of the great scoundrel Judas as he went to hang himself. Judas was a fool--what was thirty dollars!--you give me hunder' to take you to the Barren Grounds. Pah!"

The half-breed chuckled, shook his head sagely, swore half-way through his vocabulary at Whiskey Wine, gratefully received a pipe of tobacco from Shon M'Gann, and continued: "He come in on us slow and still, and push out long thin hands, the fingers bent like claws, towards the pot. He was starving. Yes, it was so; but I nearly laugh. It was spring-- a man is a fool to starve in the spring. But he was differen'. There was a cause. The factor give him soup from the pot and a little rum. He was mad for meat, but that would have kill him--yes. He did not look at you like a man.

"When you are starving, you are an animal. But there was something more with this.--He made the flesh creep, he was so thin, and strange, and sulky--eh, is that a word when the face looks dark and never smiles? So. He would not talk. When we ask him where he come from, he points to the north; when we ask him where he is going, he shake his head as he not know. A man is mad not to know where he travel to up here; something comes quick to him unless, and it is not good to die too soon. The trader said, 'Come with us.' He shake his head, No. 'P'r'aps you want to stay here,' said Ridley loud, showing his teeth all in a minute. He nod. Then the trader laugh thick in his throat and give him more soup. After, he try to make the man talk; but he was stubborn like that dirty Whiskey Wine--ah, sacre bleu!"

Whiskey Wine had his usual portion of whip and anathema before Jacques again took up the thread. "It was no use. He would not talk. When the trader get angry once more, he turned to me, and the look in his face make me sorry. I swore--Ridley did not mind that, I was thick friends with him. I say, 'Keep still. It is no good. He has had bad times. He has been lost, and seen mad things. He will never be again like when God make him.' Very well, I spoke true. He was like a sun dog."

"What's that ye say, Parfaite?" said Shon--"a sun dog?"

Sir Duke Lawless, puzzled, listened eagerly for the reply.

The half-breed in delight ran before them, cracking his whip and jingling the bells at his knees. "Ah, that's it! It is a name we have for some. You do not know? It is easy. In the high-up country"--pointing north"-- you see sometimes many suns. But it is not many after all; it is only one; and the rest are the same as your face in looking-glasses--one, two, three, plenty. You see?"

"Yes," said Sir Duke, "reflections of the real sun." Parfaite tapped him on the arm. "So: you have the thing. Well, this man is not himself--he have left himself where he seen his bad times. It makes your flesh creep sometimes when you see the sun dogs in the sky--this man did the same. You shall see him tonight."

Sir Duke looked at the little half-breed, and wondered that the product of so crude a civilisation should be so little crude in his imagination. "What happened?" he asked.

"Nothing happened. But the man could not sleep. He sit before the fire, his eyes moving here and there, and sometimes he shiver. Well, I watch him. In the morning we leave him there, and he has been there ever since--the only man at the Fort. The Indians do not go; they fear him; but there is no harm in him. He is old now. In an hour we'll be there."

The sun was hanging, with one shoulder up like a great red peering dwarf, on the far side of a long hillock of stunted pines, when the three arrived at the Fort. The yard was still as Parfaite had described it-- full of rank grass, through which one path trailed to the open door. On the stockade walls grass grew, as though where men will not live like men Nature labours to smother. The shutters of the window were not open; light only entered through narrow openings in them, made for the needs of possible attacks by Indians in the far past. One would have sworn that anyone dwelling there was more like the dead than the living. Yet it had, too, something of the peace of the lonely graveyard. There was no one in the Fort; but there were signs of life--skins piled here and there, a few utensils, a bench, a hammock for food swung from the rafters, a low fire burning in the chimney, and a rude spear stretched on the wall.

"Sure, the place gives you shivers!" said Shon. "Open go these windows. Put wood on the fire, Parfaite; cook the meat that we've brought, and no other, me boy; and whin we're filled wid a meal and the love o' God, bring in your Lost Man, or Sun Dog, or whativer's he by name or nature."

While Parfaite and Shon busied themselves, Lawless wandered out with his gun, and, drawn on by the clear joyous air of the evening, walked along a path made by the same feet that had travelled the yard of the Fort. He followed it almost unconsciously at first, thinking of the strange histories that the far north hoards in its fastnesses, wondering what singular fate had driven the host of this secluded tavern--farthest from the pleasant south country, nearest to the Pole--to stand, as it were, a sentinel at the raw outposts of the world. He looked down at the trail where he was walking with a kind of awe, which even his cheerful common sense could not dismiss.

He came to the top of a ridge on which were a handful of meagre trees. Leaning on his gun, he looked straight away into the farthest distance. On the left was a blurred edge of pines, with tops like ungainly tendrils feeling for the sky. On the right was a long bare stretch of hills veiled in the thin smoke of the evening, and between, straight before him, was a wide lane of unknown country, billowing away to where it froze into the vast archipelago that closes with the summit of the world. He experienced now that weird charm which has drawn so many into Arctic wilds and gathered the eyes of millions longingly. Wife, child, London, civilisation, were forgotten for the moment. He was under a spell which, once felt, lingers in your veins always.

At length his look drew away from the glimmering distance, and he suddenly became conscious of human presence. Here, almost at his feet, was a man, also looking out along that slumbering waste. He was dressed in skins, his arms were folded across his breast, his chin bent low, and he gazed up and out from deep eyes shadowed by strong brows. Lawless saw the shoulders of the watcher heave and shake once or twice, and then a voice with a deep aching trouble in it spoke; but at first he could catch no words. Presently, however, he heard distinctly, for the man raised his hands high above his head, and the words fell painfully: "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Then a low harsh laugh came from him, and he was silent again. Lawless did not move. At last the man turned round, and, seeing him standing motionless, his gun in his hands, he gave a hoarse cry. Then he stood still. "If you have come to kill, do not wait," he said; "I am ready."

At the sound of Lawless's reassuring voice he recovered, and began, in stumbling words, to excuse himself. His face was as Jacques Parfaite had described it: trouble of some terrible kind was furrowed in it, and, though his body was stalwart, he looked as if he had lived a century. His eyes dwelt on Sir Duke Lawless for a moment, and then, coming nearer, he said, "You are an Englishman?"

Lawless held out his hand in greeting, yet he was not sorry when the other replied: "The hand of no man in greeting. Are you alone?"

When he had been told, he turned towards the Fort, and silently they made their way to it. At the door he turned and said to Lawless, "My name--to you--is Detmold."

The greeting between Jacques and his sombre host was notable for its extreme brevity; with Shon McGann for its hesitation--Shon's impressionable Irish nature was awed by the look of the man, though he had seen some strange things in the north. Darkness was on them by this time, and the host lighted bowls of fat with wicks of deer's tendons, and by the light of these and the fire they ate their supper. Parfaite beguiled the evening with tales of the north, always interesting to Lawless; to which Shon added many a shrewd word of humour--for he had recovered quickly from his first timidity in the presence of the stranger.

As time went on Jacques saw that their host's eyes were frequently fixed on Sir Duke in a half-eager, musing way, and he got Shon away to bed and left the two together.

"You are a singular man. Why do you live here?" said Lawless. Then he went straight to the heart of the thing. "What trouble have you had, of what crime are you guilty?"

The man rose to his feet, shaking, and walked to and fro in the room for a time, more than once trying to speak, but failing. He beckoned to Lawless, and opened the door. Lawless took his hat and followed him along the trail they had travelled before supper until they came to the ridge where they had met. The man faced the north, the moon glistening coldly on his grey hair. He spoke with incredible weight and slowness:

"I tell you--for you are one who understands men, and you come from a life that I once knew well. I know of your people. I was of good family--"

"I know the name," said Sir Duke quietly, at the same time fumbling in his memory for flying bits of gossip and history which he could not instantly find.

"There were two brothers of us. I was the younger. A ship was going to the Arctic Sea." He pointed into the north. "We were both young and ambitious. He was in the army, I the navy. We went with the expedition. At first it was all beautiful and grand, and it seemed noble to search for those others who had gone into that land and never come back. But our ship got locked in the ice, and then came great trouble. A year went by and we did not get free; then another year began. . . . Four of us set out for the south. Two died. My brother and I were left--"

Lawless exclaimed. He now remembered how general sympathy went out to a well-known county family when it was announced that two of its members were lost in the Arctic regions.

Detmold continued: "I was the stronger. He grew weaker and weaker. It was awful to live those days: the endless snow and cold, the long nights when you could only hear the whirring of meteors, the bright sun which did not warm you, nor even when many suns, the reflections of itself, followed it--the mocking sun dogs, no more the sun than I am what my mother brought into the world. . . . We walked like dumb men, for the dreadful cold fills the heart with bitterness. I think I grew to hate him because he could not travel faster, that days were lost, and death crept on so pitilessly. Sometimes I had a mad wish to kill him. May you never know suffering that begets such things! I laughed as I sat beside him, and saw him sink to sleep and die. . . . I think I could have saved him. When he was gone I--what do men do sometimes when starvation is on them, and they have a hunger of hell to live? I did that shameless thing--and he was my brother! . . . I lived, and was saved."

Lawless shrank away from the man, but words of horror got no farther than his throat. And he was glad afterwards that it was so; for when he looked again at this woful relic of humanity before him he felt a strange pity.

"God's hand is on me to punish," said the man. "It will never be lifted. Death were easy: I bear the infamy of living."

Lawless reached out and caught him gently by the shoulders. "Poor fellow! poor Detmold!" he said. For an instant the sorrowful face lighted, the square chin trembled, and the hands thrust out towards Lawless, but suddenly dropped.

"Go," he said humbly, "and leave me here. We must not meet again. . . I have had one moment of respite. . . . Go."

Without a word, Lawless turned and made his way to the Fort. In the morning the three comrades started on their journey again; but no one sped them on their way or watched them as they went.

THE PILOT OF BELLE AMOUR

He lived in a hut on a jutting crag of the Cliff of the King. You could get to it by a hard climb up a precipitous pathway, or by a ladder of ropes which swung from his cottage door down the cliff-side to the sands. The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour. The cliff was huge, sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness. If you travelled back from its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador, you would add step upon step of barrenness and austerity.

Only at seasons did the bay share the gloom of the cliff. When out of its shadow it was, in summer, very bright and playful, sometimes boisterous, often idle, coquetting with the sands. There was a great difference between the cliff and the bay: the cliff was only as it appeared, but the bay was a shameless hypocrite. For under one shoulder it hid a range of reefs, and, at a spot where the shadows of the cliff never reached it, and the sun played with a grim kind of joy, a long needle of rock ran up at an angle under the water, waiting to pierce irresistibly the adventurous ship that, in some mad moment, should creep to its shores.

The man was more like the cliff than the bay: stern, powerful, brooding. His only companions were the Indians, who in summer-time came and went, getting stores of him, which he in turn got from a post of the Hudson's Bay Company, seventy miles up the coast. At one time the Company, impressed by the number of skins brought to them by the pilot, and the stores he bought of them, had thought of establishing a post at Belle Amour; but they saw that his dealings with them were fair and that he had small gain, and they decided to use him as an unofficial agent, and reap what profit was to be had as things stood. Kenyon, the Company's agent, who had the Post, was keen to know why Gaspard the pilot lived at Belle Amour. No white man sojourned near him, and he saw no one save now and then a priest who travelled silently among the Indians, or some fisherman, hunter, or woodsman, who, for pleasure or from pure adventure, ran into the bay and tasted the hospitality tucked away on a ledge of the Cliff of the King.

To Kenyon, Gaspard was unresponsive, however adroit the catechism. Father Corraine also, who sometimes stepped across the dark threshold of Gaspard's hut, would have, for the man's soul's sake, dug out the heart of his secret; but Gaspard, open with food, fire, blanket, and tireless attendance, closed like the doors of a dungeon when the priest would have read him. At the name of good Ste. Anne he would make the sacred gesture, and would take a blessing when the priest passed from his hut to go again into the wilds; but when pressed to disclose his mind and history, he would always say: "M'sieu', I have nothing to confess." After a number of years the priest ceased to ask him, and he remained with the secret of his life, inscrutable and silent.

Being vigilant, one would have seen, however, that he lived in some land of memory or anticipation, beyond his life of daily toil and usual dealing. The hut seemed to have been built at a point where east and west and south the great gulf could be seen and watched. It seemed almost ludicrous that a man should call himself a pilot on a coast and at a bay where a pilot was scarce needed once a year. But he was known as Gaspard the pilot, and on those rare occasions when a vessel did anchor in the bay, he performed his duties with such a certainty as to leave unguessed how many deathtraps crouched near that shore. At such times, however, Gaspard seemed to look twenty years younger. A light would come into his face, a stalwart kind of pride sit on him, though beneath there lurked a strange, sardonic look in his deep eyes--such a grim furtiveness as though he should say: "If I but twist my finger we are all for the fishes." But he kept his secret and waited. He never seemed to tire of looking down the gulf, as though expecting some ship. If one appeared and passed on, he merely nodded his head, hung up his glass, returned to his work, or, sitting by the door, talked to himself in low, strange tones. If one came near, making as if it would enter the bay, a hungry joy possessed him. If a storm was on, the joy was the greater. No pilot ever ventured to a ship on such rough seas as Gaspard ventured for small profit or glory.

Behind it all lay his secret. There came one day a man who discovered it.

It was Pierre, the half-breed adventurer. There was no point in all the wild northland which Pierre had not touched. He loved it as he loved the game of life. He never said so of it, but he never said so of the game of life, and he played it with a deep subterranean joy. He had had his way with the musk-ox in the Arctic Circle; with the white bear at the foot of Alaskan Hills; with the seal in Baffin's Bay; with the puma on the slope of the Pacific; and now at last he had come upon the trail of Labrador. Its sternness, its moodiness pleased him. He smiled at it the comprehending smile of the man who has fingered the nerves and the heart of men and things. As a traveller, wandering through a prison, looks upon its grim cells and dungeons with the eye of unembarrassed freedom, finding no direful significance in the clank of its iron, so Pierre travelled down with a handful of Indians through the hard fastnesses of that country, and, at last, alone, came upon the bay of Belle Amour.

There was in him some antique touch of refinement and temperament which, in all his evil days and deeds and moments of shy nobility, could find its way into the souls of men with whom the world had had an awkward hour. He was a man of little speech, but he had that rare persuasive penetration which unlocked the doors of trouble, despair, and tragedy. Men who would never have confessed to a priest confessed to him. In his every fibre was the granite of the Indian nature, which looked upon punishment with stoic satisfaction.

In the heart of Labrador he had heard of Gaspard, and had travelled to that point in the compass where he could find him. One day when the sun was fighting hard to make a pathway of light in front of Gaspard's hut, Pierre rounded a corner of the cliff and fronted Gaspard as he sat there, his eyes idling gloomily with the sea. They said little to each other-- in new lands hospitality has not need of speech. When Gaspard and Pierre looked each other in the eyes they knew that one word between them was as a hundred with other men. The heart knows its confessor, and the confessor knows the shadowed eye that broods upon some ghostly secret; and when these are face to face there comes a merciless concision of understanding.

"From where away?" said Gaspard, as he handed some tobacco to Pierre.

"From Hudson's Bay, down the Red Wolf Plains, along the hills, across the coast country, here."

"Why?" Gaspard eyed Pierre's small kit with curiosity; then flung up a piercing, furtive look. Pierre shrugged his shoulders.

"Adventure, adventure," he answered. "The land"--he pointed north, west, and east--"is all mine. I am the citizen of every village and every camp of the great north."

The old man turned his head towards a spot up the shore of Belle Amour, before he turned to Pierre again, with a strange look, and said: "Where do you go?"

Pierre followed his gaze to that point in the shore, felt the undercurrent of vague meaning in his voice, guessed what was his cue, and said: "Somewhere, sometime; but now only Belle Amour. I have had a long travel. I have found an open door. I will stay--if you please--hein? If you please?"

Gaspard brooded. "It is lonely," he replied. "This day it is all bright; the sun shines and the little gay waves crinkle to the shore. But, mon Dieu! sometimes it is all black and ugly with storm. The waves come grinding, booming in along the gridiron rocks"--he smiled a grim smile--"break through the teeth of the reefs, and split with a roar of hell upon the cliff. And all the time, and all the time,"--his voice got low with a kind of devilish joy,--"there is a finger--Jesu! you should see that finger of the devil stretch up from the bowels of the earth, waiting, waiting for something to come out of the storm. And then--and then you can hear a wild laugh come out of the land, come up from the sea, come down from the sky--all waiting, waiting for something! No, no, you would not stay here."

Pierre looked again to that point in the shore towards which Gaspard's eyes had been cast. The sun was shining hard just then, and the stern, sharp rocks, tumbling awkwardly back into the waste behind, had an insolent harshness. Day perched garishly there. Yet now and then the staring light was broken by sudden and deep shadows--great fissures in the rocks and lanes between. These gave Pierre a suggestion, though why, he could not say. He knew that when men live lives of patient, gloomy vigilance, they generally have something to watch and guard. Why should Gaspard remain here year after year? His occupation was nominally a pilot in a bay rarely touched by vessels, and then only for shelter. A pilot need not take his daily life with such brooding seriousness. In body he was like flexible metal, all cord and muscle. He gave the impression of bigness, though he was small in stature. Yet, as Pierre studied him, he saw something that made him guess the man had had about him one day a woman, perhaps a child; no man could carry that look unless. If a woman has looked at you from day to day, something of her, some reflection of her face, passes to yours and stays there; and if a child has held your hand long, or hung about your knees, it gives you a kind of gentle wariness as you step about your home.