CHAPTER XIX

AFTERWARD

A long shudder, and I had awakened in stifling darkness. Was I dreaming, or were there voices, English voices, talking about me?

"It was too late! He will die!"

"Draw back the curtain! Give him plenty of air!"

In the daze of a misty dream, M. Picot was there with the foils in his hands; and Hortense had cried out as she did that night when the button touched home. A sweet, fresh gust blew across my face with a faint odour of the pungent flames that used to flicker under the crucibles of the dispensary. How came I to be lying in Boston Town? Was M. Radisson a myth? Was the northland a dream?

I tried to rise, but whelming shadows pushed me down; and through the dark shifted phantom faces.

Now it was M. Radisson quelling mutiny, tossed on plunging ice-drift, scouring before the hurricane, leaping through red flame over the fort wall, while wind and sea crooned a chorus like the hum of soldiers singing and marching to battle. "Storm and cold, man and beast, powers of darkness and devil--he must fight them all," sang the gale. "Who?" asked a voice. In the dark was a lone figure clinging to the spars of a wreck. "The victor," shrieked the wind. Then the waves washed over the cast-away, leaving naught but the screaming gale and the pounding seas and the eternal dark.

Or it was M. Picot, fencing in mid-room. Of a sudden, foils turn to swords, M. Picot to a masked man, and Boston to the northland forest. I fall, and when I awaken M. Picot is standing, candle in hand, tincturing my wounds.

Or the dark is filled with a multitude--men and beasts; and the beasts wear a crown of victory and the men are drunk with the blood of the slain.

Or stealthy, crouching, wolfish forms steal through the frost mist, closer and closer till there comes a shout--a groan--a rip as of teeth--then I am up, struggling with Le Borgne, the one-eyed, who pushes me back to a couch in the dark.

Like the faces that hover above battle in soldiers' dreams was a white face framed in curls with lustrous eyes full of lights. Always when the darkness thickened and I began slipping--slipping into the folds of bottomless deeps--always the face came from the gloom, like a star of hope; and the hope drew me back.

"There is nothing--nothing--nothing at all to fear," says the face.

And I laugh at the absurdity of the dream.

"To think of dreaming that Hortense would be here--would be in the northland--Hortense, the little queen, who never would let me tell her----"

"Tell her what?" asks the face.

"Hah! What a question! There is only one thing in all this world to tell her!"

And I laughed again till I thought there must be some elf scrambling among the rafters of that smothery ceiling. It seemed so absurd to be thrilled with love of Hortense with the breath of the wolves yet hot in one's face!

"The wolves got Godefroy," I would reason, "how didn't they get me? How did I get away? What was that smell of fur--"

Then some one was throwing fur robes from the couch. The phantom Hortense kneeled at the pillow.

"There are no wolves--it was only the robe," she says.

"And I suppose you will be telling me there are no Indians up there among the rafters?"

"Give me the candle. Go away, Le Borgne! Leave me alone with him," says the face in the gloom. "Look," says the shadow, "I am Hortense!"

A torch was in her hand and the light fell on her face. I was as certain that she knelt beside me as I was that I lay helpless to rise. But the trouble was, I was equally certain there were wolves skulking through the dark and Indians skipping among the rafters.

"Ghosts haven't hands," says Hortense, touching mine lightly; and the touch brought the memory of those old mocking airs from the spinet.

Was it flood of memory or a sick man's dream? The presence seemed so real that mustering all strength, I turned--turned to see Le Borgne, the one-eyed, sitting on a log-end with a stolid, watchful, unreadable look on his crafty face.

Bluish shafts of light struck athwart the dark. A fire burned against the far wall. The smoke had the pungent bark smell of the flame that used to burn in M. Picot's dispensary. This, then, had brought the dreams of Hortense, now so far away. Skins hung everywhere; but in places the earth showed through. Like a gleam of sunlight through dark came the thought--this was a cave, the cave of the pirates whose voices I had heard from the ground that night in the forest, one pleading to save me, the other sending Le Borgne to trap me.

Leaning on my elbow, I looked from the Indian to a bearskin partition hiding another apartment. Le Borgne had carried the stolen pelts of the massacred tribe to the inland pirates. The pirates had sent him back for me.

And Hortense was a dream. Ah, well, men in their senses might have done worse than dream of a Hortense!

But the voice and the hand were real.

"Le Borgne," I ask, "was any one here?"

Le Borgne's cheeks corrugate in wrinkles of bronze that leer an evil laugh, and he pretends not to understand.

"Le Borgne, was any one here with you?"

Le Borgne shifts his spread feet, mutters a guttural grunt, and puffs out his torch; but the shafted flame reveals his shadow. I can still hear him beside me in the dark.

"Le Borgne is the great white chief's friend," I say; "and the white-man is the great white chief's friend. Where are we, Le Borgne?"

Le Borgne grunts out a low huff-huff of a laugh.

"Here; white-man is here," says Le Borgne; and he shuffles away to the bearskin partition hiding another apartment.

Ah well as I said, one might do worse than dream of Hortense. But in spite of all your philosophers say about there being no world but the world we spin in our brains, I could not woo my lady back to it. Like the wind that bloweth where it listeth was my love. Try as I might to call up that pretty deceit of a Hortense about me in spirit, my perverse lady came not to the call.

Then, thoughts would race back to the mutiny on the stormy sea, to the roar of the breakers crashing over decks, to M. Radisson leaping up from dripping wreckage, muttering between his teeth--"Blind god o' chance, they may crush, but they shall not conquer; they may kill, but I snap my fingers in their faces to the death!"

Then, uncalled, through the darkness comes her face.

"God is love," says she.

If I lie there like a log, never moving, she seems to stay; but if I feel out through the darkness for the grip of a living hand, for the substance of a reality on which souls anchor, like the shadow of a dream she is gone.

I mind once in the misty region between delirium and consciousness, when the face slipped from me like a fading light, I called out eagerly that love was a phantom; for her God of love had left me to the blind gods that crush, to the storm and the dark and the ravening wolves.

Like a light flaming from dark, the face shone through the gloom.

"Love, a phantom," laughs the mocking voice of the imperious Hortense I knew long ago; and the thrill of her laugh proves love the realest phantom life can know.

Then the child Hortense becomes of a sudden the grown woman, grave and sweet, with eyes in the dark like stars, and strange, broken thoughts I had not dared to hope shining unspoken on her face.

"Life, a phantom-substance, the shadow--love, the all," the dream-face seems to be saying. "Events are God's thoughts--storms and darkness and prey are his puppets, the blind gods, his slaves-God is love; for you are here! . . . You are here! . . . You are here with me!"

When I feel through the dark this time is the grip of a living hand.

Then we lock arms and sweep through space, the northern lights curtaining overhead, the stars for torches, and the blazing comets heralding a way.

"The very stars in their courses fight for us," says Hortense.

And I, with an earthy intellect groping behind the winged love of the woman, think that she refers to some of M. Picot's mystic astrologies.

"No--no," says the dream-face, with the love that divines without speech, "do you not understand? The stars fight for us--because--because----"

"Because God is love," catching the gleam of the thought; and the stars that fight in their courses for mortals sweep to a noonday splendour.

And all the while I was but a crazy dreamer lying captive, wounded and weak in a pirate cave. Oh, yes, I know very well what my fine gentlemen dabblers in the new sciences will say--the fellow was daft and delirious--he had lost grip on reality and his fevered wits mixed a mumble-jumble of ancient symbolism with his own adventures. But before you reduce all this great universe to the dimensions of a chemist's crucible, I pray you to think twice whether the mind that fashioned the crucible be not greater than the crucible; whether the Master-mind that shaped the laws of the universe be not greater than the universe; whether when man's mind loses grip--as you call it--of the little, nagging, insistent realities it may not leap free like the jagged lightnings from peak to peak of a consciousness that overtowers life's commoner levels! Spite of our boastings, each knows neither more nor less than life hath taught him. For me, I know what the dream-voice spoke proved true: life, the shadow of a great reality; love, the all; the blind gods of storm and dark and prey, the puppets of the God of gods, working his will; and the God of gods a God of love, realest when love is near.

Once, I mind, the dark seemed alive with wolfish shades, sniffing, prowling, circling, creeping nearer like that monster wolf of fable set on by the powers of evil to hunt Man to his doom. A nightmare of fear bound me down. The death-frosts settled and tightened and closed--but suddenly, Hortense took cold hands in her palms, calling and calling and calling me back to life and hope and her. Then I waked.

Though I peopled the mist with many shadows, Le Borgne alone stood there.