So he knew that it was God's hand which had etched that warning likeness overnight, which his own conscience had discerned, accusing him. Also, in gazing upon that drawing he heard a voice, which was his own voice, used as a medium for another mind, saying, "Now that thou hast seen what thou art like, go out, that I may be left alone and Spurling." So Granger had agreed with God that day that he would cease from his dreams of human vengeance, and leave Him alone with Spurling. He did not dare to tell God all his thoughts, but he felt certain that, had Spurling's opinions been consulted, he would have preferred to be left alone with John Granger. It was terrible enough to have to dwell between God's footsteps, as all men must who live in Keewatin, when His eyes were averted, and He Himself walked by seemingly unconscious of your presence; but to have to live there when He had noticed your presence, and His face was lifted up, while His gaze was bent upon you, with no hope of escape, a fugitive from human justice, alone in an empty land with your own conscience and Him as your accuser, that was to protract the shamefaced confusion of the Last Judgment through every day of your life. Granger felt that in making that compact he had done his worst by Druce Spurling.

In the middle hours of the night which followed this agreement, which he chose to think of as his compromise with Deity, he was awakened by a thunderous sound, and jumping from his bunk saw that the river had broken up and the ice was going out, as though God, having finished His argument which He had written there, were rubbing out His words. Flinging wide the door, he ran down the mound to the bank, shouting like a boy. As he went he had a panoramic vision of all the other men, both white and red, along the six hundred miles of river which stretched from the great lake to the Hudson Bay, who had been awakened as he had been, and now, or sometime that night, would be doing what he was doing, rushing half-clad beneath the stars down to the river-bank calling on the loneliness to rejoice—the loneliness, which throughout the frozen months had listened so faithfully to all that they had had to say, blasphemous or otherwise, and had made no reply. But this night both silence and loneliness were violated, and cried aloud with rage protestingly; whereat the river only clapped its hands and squeezed its passage, and huddled between its ruined winter-barriers ever northward to the freedom of the Bay.

This was the one night in all the year when revolt was permitted, and the Bastile of Keewatin fell. Fell! Yes, soon the summer would raise it up again in a newer form, only a little less intolerable; and afterwards the winter, that master-builder, would return as a king from his exile. But no one thought of such catastrophe to-night. For the moment it seemed that the reign of tyranny was ended and the millennium had begun—chaos, which men mistake for millennium.

Granger stood above the bank repeating to himself over and over, "The ice is going out! The ice is going out!" as if it were a fact incredible. Every moment the air vibrated with a roar, and the earth was shaken as some new horseman of the ice was overthrown and hurried by in flight, only to halt presently, ranged side by side with some of his fellows, to make yet another stand. Certainly it was a battle which was being fought, and one which must be lost.

As far as sound could travel, from the west and from the north, he could hear the cannonade, and what seemed like the clatter of hoofs, and the clash of thrown-away swords. It was possible to imagine anything when Nature was making a change so titanic. Now the water was the black horse of Revelation, with a sable rider on his back who carried "a balance in his hand,"—and he was in pursuit. And the ice was the pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and Hades followed with him,—and he was in flight. And now, when some great floe jammed in its passage round the Point, and the ice piled up, it became for Granger a magician's silver palace in Aragon, which a dark-mailed knight of Christendom had travelled leagues to demolish. Outside it shone resplendent and crystal in the starlight; but within it was full of uncleanness, and by day it would vanish.

He amused himself with these fancies, and followed them to their furthest length. He could see the faces of the beleaguered, now evil with terror, peering out from the casements, and the stern old enchanter in the turret, over whose ledges flowed down his snow-white beard. He could hear the hoarse-throated clamour of the knight as he led his company about the walls, and rammed in the castle's gateway, shouting, "For Christ! For Christ!" The structure trembled and the turret commenced to wave in the air, as it had been a banner. The sorcerer looked out, his eyes were filled with dismay—he could not withstand that name of 'Christ'; he plunged from the height, spreading abroad his arms, and was lost in the blackness of the underground. The dark host swept over the palace still shouting, "For Christ! For Christ!" In the twinkling of an eye, both the evil one and the avenging host were gone—all was resolved into turbid water and submerged, groaning ice.

So he watched the break-up of the ice, and the travelling of the river which, slipping by at his feet, going forth to wander the world, left him stationary. Perhaps some drops of this Last Chance River would some day be washed up in a wave on the tropic shores of Ceylon, or, having spent a winter in the Arctic, would be carried down in a berg and, having melted, flow on round Cape Horn to the Pacific till they came to Polynesia, where they would be parted by the swimming hands of dusky, slender girls. He grew jealous at the thought, and bending down baled out some of the water in his palms, and threw it on the ground, saying angrily, "You at least shall stay." Then he laughed at his folly and was comforted by thinking, "When my body is dead, it also will journey forth. I must be patient like the river, and wait. In God's good time I also shall wander round the world."

"But shall I know? Shall I be conscious of that?" the spirit of discontent inquired.

Granger shook his head irritably, as if by so doing he could throw off these troublesome imaginations. Since the death of Strangeways, he had not recovered his poise of soul. Ah, and Strangeways! Was Strangeways conscious of his body's release, and the permission which death had given him to wander forth? How odd to think that that body, which had been born of a woman in England and tended by her hands, which had strolled through English lanes and over Oxford meadows, gesticulating and talking, doing good and evil, which even in its life had brought the man who inhabited it so many miles from home, now that the soul had departed from it, should be hurrying away alone to hide itself in Arctic fastnesses! Did Strangeways know that? Was he conscious of this new adventure? Well, if God was so anxious to take care of Spurling, He could be trusted to look after Strangeways—if anything of him survived.

The melting of the ice had chilled the air. The coldness of his yet living body awoke him to a realisation of the petty suffering of that small part of his universe which was explored and known. Taking one last look at the ruin which the one night's thaw had worked, the pinnacles, and beauty, and whiteness which it had destroyed, "Courage!" he said, "for this is life."



CHAPTER X

A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD

The sun was shining down; the spring rains had ceased; within less than a month winter had vanished, and summer had swept through Keewatin with a burst of gladness. The land was riotously green; through the heart of it wandered the river, newly released, a streak of azure, or of gilded splendour where smitten by the sun. Although its waters were running freely, many memories of the frozen quiet still remained in the shape of ice piled up along its banks, sometimes to the height of fifteen feet, and of snow in the more shady hollows of the forest, which glimmered distantly between leaves and branches hinting at secret woodland lakes. Even the most backward among the trees had commenced to unfold their buds. All day long, and through the major portion of the night, the frogs continued to whistle in the marshes and along the river's edges. Flock after flock of duck arrived, flashing their wings against the sky, dropping from under a cloud suddenly, and coming to rest in the water with a shower of spray, where they rode at ease side by side, like painted, anchored merchantmen returned in safety from the earth's end. Now the wild swan, teal, or goose would go by with a whirr of wings, crying hoarsely. To make the world seem yet more wide an occasional gull would heave in sight, drifting without effort in silent flight majestically. In the forest Granger was conscious of a commotion at the cause of which he could only guess. Love was at work in the shadows, or what among the dumb creation passes for love. There was a continual stirring of leaves, the rustle of branches forced aside, the scattering of birds, those spies and betrayers of the four-footed animal, and the grievous low wail of the wolf. Sometimes a fish would leap in the river, flash silvery and dripping in the sunlight, on its bridal journey from the ocean. Was it an act of gallantry, he wondered, which some deep-sea female witnessed from beneath the ripple of the stream, or was it a terrified effort to escape from love. He knew what that best of all passions could mean to the forest animal, and how cruel it might become. Often in the fall of the year he had watched a doe, seen her dash down the river bank, stand quivering, leap in and swim, made fearless of man because she knew that her lover, the stag, was not far behind.

This frenzy of passion set him thinking, and made him long for the return of Peggy Ericsen. He knew that his love for her was not of the highest, was little more than physical, not much nobler than forest love; but what was a man to do, and how guide his conduct when all the world was a-mating? On occasions he had a clearer vision, and realised with a sense of sudden shame to how low a level he had sunk. Then he would strive to throw off this attraction for a half-breed girl by recalling the faces of all the other women whom he had admired and loved. Yet this also was dangerous, for it caused him to remember Mordaunt, thoughts of whom roused up anger within him against Spurling. He had agreed to leave him to God, and could not go back on his word; therefore he must forget Mordaunt and, if his mind must be haunted by womankind, think only of Peggy. Peggy! Well, she was not a bad little sort. Pretty? Yes. But between her and himself there could be no community of mind. He knew that for hundreds of years it had been the custom of traders and white trappers to take to themselves a squaw from a tribe of friendly Indians, sometimes for the sake of commercial advantages, sometimes for defence, sometimes for domestic convenience, rarely for love. But there his education, which would have served him well in an older land, stood in his way, as it had so often done, making him over-delicate.

He could find it in his heart to wish himself more ignorant and less refined. That glamour of intellectual gentility, which England sets such store by, had made him unfit for the outdoor brutalities of northern life. In his catastrophe he knew that he was not single, though there was small consolation in that; all through Canada he had encountered younger sons, drawing-room bred young gentlemen, who worked in lumber camps, on railroads, and in mines by day, and spelt out their Horace from ragged texts by brushwood fires, beneath the stars, or in verminous shacks by night. Their power to construe a dead language served to differentiate them from their associates, and, rather foolishly if heroically, to bolster up their pride.

But, to return to Peggy, what a pity it was that she had insisted on the marriage ceremony! Yet, he respected her for that. But, and there was always a but in Granger's reasonings, suppose he should get his chance to return to England one day! And this would certainly happen to him on his mother's death. And suppose, when he had tethered himself to this half-breed wife, he should get word that Mordaunt was still alive! Granger was always at a loss when the moment for decision presented itself; he was too moderate, too far-sighted and philosophic to act immediately. It takes an abrupt, coarse-grained man, or a prophet, to handle a crisis efficiently; your man who is only endowed just beyond the average sees too far—and not far enough. The insolent infringement of personality which he had suffered as man and child from his mother's unwise interference had caused him to become a chronic hesitator. As usual, in this case as in all others, he determined to let matters slide, to give circumstance an unfettered opportunity to evolve its own event. He was content to remain the spectator of his own career, allowing Chance to be the only doer of the deeds which went to make up the record of his life. And what would Chance do next? The Man with the Dead Soul might return at any hour from his winter's hunt, bringing with him his daughter, in which case most surely his book of life would commence to write out its latest chapter of disgrace.

Beorn had cached a canoe at the mouth of the Forbidden River, and therefore would reach the Point up-stream from the northward. Granger found excitement in the thought that any minute, looking out from his window, he might discover the approach of his future wife. The more he allowed his fancy to dwell upon her, the more pleasant her image became for him. After all, there is always something of romance, at first at any rate, in marrying out of your blood heritage. Pizarro must have felt that when he took to himself Inez Huayllas Nusta, the Inca princess. The havoc of affection which was being enacted secretly beneath the shadow of the forest trees urged him on, crying, "Take your pleasure while it is yours, winter will return. Short views of life are best." Having listened to that advice for several days, he allowed himself to be persuaded. It seemed to him, when he remembered how they had parted, that it would be a gallant and reconciling act to set forth to meet her. Moreover, though the mind that was in him stood aside from the project in disdain, the body cried, "Forward! Forward!" in chorus with the song of the wild-wood.

Early one morning he carried down his canoe to the water's edge, loaded it with a week's provisions, padlocked his store and set out. As the prow drove forward down-stream, exultation entered into him. He was playing at saying good-bye to his long exile; miles ahead lay the Hudson Bay, and beyond that England. If his boat were not so frail and his arms were stronger, by pressing on and onward he could escape. These were scarcely the thoughts with which a man should set out to meet his bride. Desires to meet and avoid her alternated even now, when with each fresh thrust of the paddle he approached her nearer presence. Yet, even to his way of thinking, there was something epic in the situation—that this girl of an alien tradition and a savage race, with her copper skin, and blue-black hair, and timid eyes, should be threading her passage up her native river, through the early summer, toward her western lover who was hastening down the self-same primeval highroad to meet her. Oh, he would be very happy with Peggy! Thus imagining himself on through the labyrinth of passionate fancy, he floated down stream, shrouded in the morning mist. He had to go slowly, for he could not see far ahead, and travel by water was still treacherous by reason of belated floes of ice. Over to the eastward the sun winked down on him with a dissipated bloodshot eye, knowingly, with the cruel misanthropic humour of a tired man of the world who, regarding idealism as a jest, had guessed at the purpose of his errand and was eager to declare his own shrewd cleverness.

And if the sun is a cynic, who can blame him? He alone of created things has an intimate knowledge of all live things' love affairs, from when Eve shook back her hair and lifted up her lips, to the last girl kissed in Japan. The canoe drifting out of a scarf of mist brought Granger in sight of the bend, where Strangeways had been drowned. He plunged his paddle deeper in the water, thrusting it forward to stay the progress of the prow, and glanced from side to side, then straight ahead. He had caught the smell of burning. On the northern side of the bend, curling above the trees, he could detect the rise of smoke. Someone had lit a fire and was camping there. But who? Was it Beorn and Peggy? No, they would not camp so near their destination; they would have pushed on to the store for rest. Nor could it be men from the Crooked Creek coming up to God's Voice; the season was as yet too early for them to be expected. Then, was it Spurling?

Paddling out into the middle stream, he stole beneath the farther bank, and, rounding the bend, came in sight of two men, the one seated upright before the fire cooking his bannocks, the other stretched out twenty paces distant at the edge of the underbrush, completely covered with a robe, motionless as if he slept. The man who was awake looked up, shaded his eyes, then rising to his feet came down to the water's edge and waved his hand.

Granger recognised in him his friend Pere Antoine, the gaunt old Jesuit of Keewatin. No one could remember, not even the Indians, at what time he had first come into the district; he seemed to have been there always and was of a great age. Yet, despite his many years, he could travel miracles of journeys in the name of Mary's son. It was said of him that he was always to be seen mounting the sky-line in times of crisis and temptation; that he knew by instinct where men were in spiritual peril, as the caribou scents water; that he had often broken out of the forest unexpectedly in time to prevent murder. There were Indians to be found who would circumstantially assert that they had met with Pere Antoine, five hundred miles distant from the spot where he had last been seen, walking in the wilderness radiantly, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ.

Granger recalled these legends as he gazed toward the camp; he watched the figure of the sleeping man—and he thought of Spurling. Was this Spurling? He tried to make out the man's identity by his figure's outline, but the robes which were piled above him forbade that. Yet within himself he was sure that his guess was correct. What was more likely than that Antoine should have met the fugitive wandering up the Forbidden River, perhaps sick and starving, should have taken his confession and compassionately have brought him back? Probably it was Antoine's purpose that they two should be reconciled. He might even have converted Spurling and have brought back God into his life, so that now he was willing to return to Winnipeg to give himself up, and to take his chance of death.

Having run his canoe aground between the bank-ice, he stepped out and grasped the Jesuit's hand.

"God has arrived before you this time, Pere Antoine," he said, jerking his head in the direction of the sleeping man; "he has already done your work. I have promised Him that I will do no harm to your companion, so you have arrived too late."

"If it was God who arrived," he said, "I am content."

He spoke significantly, hinting at a further knowledge of which he supposed Granger to be possessed.

"If it was not God, then who else?"

"Ah, who else?"

Granger, in common with most white men of the district, had fallen into the Indian superstition that Pere Antoine was omniscient; it came to him as a shock that he might be unaware of how God had written on the ice. Usually in talking with the priest he took short-cuts in his methods of communication, leaving many things understood but unmentioned, as a man is wont to do when conversing with himself.

"There is no doubt that it was God," he said; "He did not want me to murder this man. He wished that I should leave him alone, to be judged in the forest by Himself. Therefore, if you have brought him here with you to make us friends, I will not do that; but I will promise you, as I have promised God, that I will not be his enemy."

Antoine tapped him on the arm gently, looking him full in the face with his grave, penetrating eyes: "And did not God Himself arrive too late?" he asked.

Granger flushed hotly, for he thought that he detected an under-tone of accusation in the way in which those words were uttered. "Tell me, is he dead?" he asked abruptly.

"He is dead."

"Is it . . . is that his body over there?"

"You should know best."

Involuntarily Granger sank his voice, now that he knew that that sleeping man was dead. He pressed closer to the priest and commenced to whisper, now that he knew that no noise of his, however loud, could disturb the rest of this man who would never wake. Sometimes, when in the hurry of his speech his voice had been by accident a little raised, he would cease speaking, lift up his head, and peer furtively from side to side, then over to where the dead man lay, to make certain that he had not stirred,—all this lest someone in that great silence should have heard what he had said. Thus does the presence of the dead accuse living men, as if by our mere retention of life we did them injury. Wheresoever we encounter them, whether in the hired pride of the vulgar city hearse, or in the pitiful disarray of bleached bones and tattered raiment strewn on a mountainside, they make even those of us who are remotest from blame feel guilty men.

"But, Pere Antoine, I did not kill him," Granger was saying. "I was gravely tempted, but God wrote upon the ice and stayed my hand. This man was once my friend, and is now again—now that he is dead. Let me uncover and look upon his face."

But the priest withheld him. "Not yet—not yet," he said. "Let us first talk together awhile, that I may hear what has happened, and get to understand."

So there in the quiet of the early morning, with nothing to break the stillness save the crackling of the fire, and the flowing of the river, and the occasional flight of a bird, Granger told the priest all his story, from his first dream of El Dorado to the thoughts of escape and of Peggy Ericsen which he had had, as drifting down-stream, he had caught the smell of burning and come in sight of the bend. It was a true confession; nothing to his own discredit was left out.

When he came to an end the mist had lifted, and the sun rode high in the heavens disentangled of cloud. All the time that he had been speaking the priest had sat motionless, with his head bent forward listening, his knees drawn up and his arms about them. Now that the tale was over, he slowly turned his head; and then it was for the first time that Granger knew what the Indians meant when they said that they had met with Pere Antoine in the wilderness, walking radiantly, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. There was such a brightness about him that he could not bear his gaze, but trembling with a kind of fearful joy fell forward on his face, covering his eyes with his hands. And still the priest said nothing, not trusting himself to speak, perhaps, so great was his compassion.

But it was not long before Granger was conscious of a hand, hard and horny and ungentle, as far as outward circumstance could make it so, which rested on his head. At last he spoke. "I think I understand," he said, and then, after a pause, "but you will never help yourself or the world by merely being sad. No man ever has."

When Granger answered nothing nor lifted up his head, he spoke again. "Does that seem a strange judgment to pass on you here in Keewatin? Does it sound too much like the speech of a city man? Nevertheless, it is because of your flight from sadness that you have met with all your dangers. All your life you have spent in striving to escape from things which are sad. Why did you dream of El Dorado when you were in London? Because, as you yourself have told me, exquisiteness of dress did not reassure you of another's happiness; you were always remembering that a decent coat may sometimes cover cancer. You are one of those who suffer more because of the sores of Lazarus than Lazarus himself. That is well and Christlike, if you suffer gladly—which you do not. So you left London and travelled half across the world to Yukon, only to find a greater wretchedness; for your misery growing vicious pursued you, and goaded you on to crime. Once more to escape you left Yukon and came to Winnipeg, and came up here, and still you are sad. Will I tell you why? Always, always you have depended on yourself for escape and rest. That is useless, for your sadness does not belong to any city, or any land; it is within yourself. Wherever you have travelled you have carried it with you. You must look for help from outside yourself."

Again he paused, but Granger did not stir. Then he repeated, speaking yet more gently, "I am an old man and have lived in Keewatin the length of most men's lives, yet I have not always lived up here. I was not always happy, and I say to you, you must look for help from outside yourself."

Then Granger answered him, keeping his head still bowed.

"Where, where must I look for help?"

"Lift up your head."

He obeyed, and the first sight he saw was the face of Pere Antoine bent above him. Again he was struck with its likeness to the traditional face of Christ—but the face was that of a Jesus who had grown grey in suffering and had been often crucified, who was very ancient and had not yet attained his death. Then he thought he knew what le Pere had meant by saying that he must look for help from outside himself. He turned his eyes away and gazed into the sunshine, and on the greenness of the awakened country. Somehow it all looked very happy and changed from what it had been before they two had met. He vaguely wondered whether already he might not be now experiencing that help. But, as had always happened to him after tasting of a momentary joy, in turning his head he found a new grief awaiting him, for there, twenty paces distant, stretched out at the edge of the underbrush, covered with a robe, he caught sight of that recumbent figure, lying motionless as if it slept. He shuddered, and seizing the priest by the arm, speaking hoarsely with suppressed excitement, exclaimed, "Where did he come from? But where did you find him?"

"I found him stretched out on the bank-ice, awaiting me as I paddled up-stream toward the bend."

"Then he was coming back. God must have met him down there on the Forbidden River and have spoken with him face to face; he could not endure His voice, so he fled. Oh, to come back at such a season, when the river was in flood, he must have been terribly afraid. He must have clambered his way up-stream, all those hundred miles, running by the bank. Pere Antoine, you know many things, what kind of words were those, do you suppose, that God spoke to Spurling?"

"The kind of words which God always speaks to men; He told him the truth about himself."

"The truth about himself? There are few who could endure to hear that."

"Yes, He would accuse him with a question, I think."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because that is the way in which God usually speaks to men. He asked Adam a question, and Adam hid himself; he asked Cain a question, and Cain became a vagabond in the earth."

They sat in silence awhile, and then Granger said, "And if God were to speak to me, what question would He ask?"

"I think he would say, 'John Granger, by how much are you better than Spurling, whom you condemn?'"

"You are right; yes, I think He would say that. Even I have asked myself that question before to-day."

"You did not ask yourself; it was God's voice."

"And I could give no answer to what He said. Pere Antoine, before we met, I had often wondered what I would say to Spurling should we meet again. I had planned all manner of kindly phrases to make him again my friend; but I had thought of him as coming to me prosperous, with the approval of the world. When he came to me in poverty, asking help, in peril of his life for a sin which had been almost mine, I turned him away. He had chosen me out from among all men between Winnipeg and the Klondike, as the only one to whom he could safely go for help; and I turned him away. I see it clearly now; God sent to me this man whom I had wished to murder, when he had performed my crime, that, by endangering my life for his, I might cleanse myself. When all men had failed him, he and God expected that I, at least, would understand. But for Mordaunt, I might have had to flee as he fled, changed by the raising of a gun and hasty pulling of a trigger into a Judas to all that is best; I might have had to support within me his utter solitariness and agony of mind, and have been compelled to see myself as debased throughout and forever by a single, momentary act. How he must have suffered! I shall fear to die now; till now I have been afraid only of life."

"Why will you fear to die?"

"Because I shall meet with Spurling, and then I shall hear God's question and His accusing voice."

The priest laid a hand upon his shoulder gently. "Ah, my child, but you forget," he said; "in the country where Spurling has gone he will have learnt how to understand."

That thought was new to Granger, that of the two faults his own was the greater and that forgiveness belonged to Spurling. He sat motionless for a long time arguing it out; he wanted to be exactly just to both Spurling and himself. The fire died down and Pere Antoine threw on more brushwood; the sun grew tall in the heavens and a rain cloud gathered in the west; the floe-ice caught in its passage round the bend, gasped and whined and, tearing itself free again, vanished down river out of sight. The arithmetic of the problem stood thus: Spurling's sin had been the result of a sudden violence, his own of a conscious and premeditated uncharitableness. Which sin was morally the worse, to shoot a fellow creature in a fit of passionate desperation, or to turn your back upon a bygone benefactor who comes to you in distress, comes to you when his heart is breaking, because he can trust himself with no one else? "My sin is the greater," Granger told himself, "I am more wrongful than wronged against"; his thoughts going back to what le Pere had said, he added, "I am Cain, and yet I judged Spurling as if I had been God Himself."

He was roused from his meditation by a dull thudding sound which had commenced behind his back; turning his head, he saw that Pere Antoine was already digging a grave. Rising without a word, he began to lend a hand. They had not gone far when they found that the ground was hard as granite, that it had not yet thawed out; then they commenced to look for stones to pile upon the body so that, since the grave would be shallow, they might raise a mound above it to prevent the wolves from getting the body out.

By the time they had completed their preparations the rain was falling in large and heavy drops, and the storm was blowing in great gusts through the forest, causing the young leaves to shudder and whisper together, and to turn their backs to the wind. The priest and the trader stood upright from their work and gazed at one another. Already the narrow hole, which they had scooped out, was filling with water; there was no time to lose; yet neither seemed inclined to hurry. At last Pere Antoine said, "So you are sure that you did not do it?"

"I cannot be sure of that."

"Ah, but you did not do it in the way I mean? You did not kill him with the strength of your hands?"

They went together to the edge of the underbrush where the dead man's body lay, and carried it, without disturbing the coverings, to the side of the grave; there they set it down.

"I cannot bear that he should lie in that dampness," Granger broke out; "I remember when we were in London, how he used to hate the wet. Coldness he could put up with or the hottest sunshine, but he could not endure the damp. He said it made him feel as though the world was crying, like a dreary woman because her youngest child was dead. We can't drop him into that puddle and leave him there."

He commenced to strip off his clothes, and to fold them along the floor of the grave. When he had apparently made all ready, he stooped down again and smoothed out a ruck, lest its discomfort should irk the dead.

"Now," he said, "let me see his face for the last time, for he was my friend."

Le Pere bent down, and drew the coverings back to the waist, while Granger leant over him in his eagerness. The body, having lain upon the ice, had been well preserved, no feature had been disturbed; but it was not the body of a man who was newly dead, nor was it the face of Spurling. So absorbed had Granger been by thoughts of the comrade whom he had treated harshly, and by the mysterious meaning of the writing which he had seen upon the ice, that the likelier solution of the problem of this man's identity had not entered into his head, that the body might be that of Strangeways, thrown up by the back-rush of the current around the bend.

"Strangeways," he muttered, "it is Strangeways." And with those words his charity towards Spurling began to ebb.

Pere Antoine, when he heard it, realising that these were the remains of an officer of justice, for whom, when he did not return, search would be made, and not of an escaped murderer with a price upon his head, at news of whose death Authority would be glad, went down on his hands and knees and began to examine the clothing of the dead for proofs of his identity, which could be sent in to headquarters for the establishing of his death. He foresaw that there was need for care; when the matter came to be investigated, it would be discovered that Granger had been Spurling's partner in the Klondike; questions would certainly be asked of Robert Pilgrim, as Hudson Bay factor and head man of the district, concerning Granger's conduct in Keewatin, and no good word could be looked for from that quarter. That which would tell most heavily against him would be this fact, that two men, separated by a few hours, were known to have passed God's Voice en route for the independent store of Garnier, Parwin, and Wrath, the first a hunted criminal, the second an officer of justice—the criminal had escaped and the officer was dead. Presumably both pursued and pursuer had arrived at Murder Point, for the body of Strangeways, the follower, had been found a mile down-river below the Point. Then where was Spurling? And how had he managed to escape, if he had not been helped? Who could have helped him save Granger? And why was Strangeways dead?

These were some of the many questions which avenging justice would be sure to ask, and, however skilfully they might be answered, the priest knew well that it would be difficult to prevent suspicion from attaching to a hated independent trader, especially when it became known that he had once been the fugitive's friend. Why, he himself had suspected Granger at first!

His present purpose was, if possible, to gather such proofs from the dead man's clothing as would exclude the doubt of foul play, and establish as a fact Granger's assertion that the corporal had arrived at his death by the accident of drowning.

In the meanwhile, he was not meeting with much success in his search, for the right arm of the dead man was pressed so rigidly across his breast that it could not be moved without breaking; the hand was concealed and the fingers tangled in the folds of his dress, as if even in the last moments of life he had been conscious that he kept a secret hidden there. Only with violence could it be forced aside, and to this the priest was averse; he commenced to cut away the clothing, above downwards from the neck, below upwards from the belt. The cloth ripped easily, having become rotten with the wet, but the trimmings of fur were tough and obstinate to separate. When he had slit the capote and under-garments above and below the arm in two big flaps, he rolled them back, laying bare the breast, where he discovered a silver chain which went about the neck, the pendant to which, wrapped in the portion of the dress that had covered it, was clutched in the icy hand. He now cut away the stuff from around the hand, and, with a severity which seemed both profane and cruel, bent back the fingers one by one, compelling them to release their hold, so that the bones were heard to crack.

"What are you doing?" cried Granger, angrily, being roused by the sound from an unsatisfactory examination of the mixed feelings which had arisen within him on discovering that Spurling, whom he had just been regretting, was not dead. "Why must we torture him? Why can't we leave him alone, and lay him decently in his grave?"

"Perhaps in order that we may prevent you from being hanged."

"From being hanged! You mistake me for Spurling, Pere Antoine; your memory must be failing. What have I done to deserve such courtesy at the hands of Fate? Why should men want to hang me?"

"For the murder of Strangeways."

Granger stood back, and drew himself erect, as if by asserting his physical cleanness and manhood he could refute the accusation. He lifted up his head and gazed with a fixed stare on the landscape, seeing nothing. Yes, it was true, they could make that accusation; there was sufficient evidence for suspecting him and, with the aid of a few lies and inaccurate statements on the part of his enemies—Robert Pilgrim, for instance, and Indians whom he had offended—sufficient evidence might be got together to bring him to the gallows. A fitting ending that for the son of the ambitious mother who had stinted herself and planned for his success, and a most appropriate sequel to the example of reckless bravery set by the last two generations of his father's house!

Dimly, slowly, as he stood there in the northern icy drizzle, with his eyes on the muddy river hurrying toward its freedom between jagged banks, he came very wretchedly to realise that there was only one way in which he could save himself, a way, albeit, which both his loyalty and honour forbade, by becoming ardent in the pursuit and effecting the capture of Spurling, that so he might prove his innocence. An emotion of shame and self-disgust throbbed through him that it should have been possible for him, even for a moment, to entertain such a coward's thought as that. He shook himself free from temptation and looked about. What was Pere Antoine doing? What had he meant by saying that he was perhaps preventing him from being hanged? Did he still believe him to be guilty, as he had evidently done at first?

Pere Antoine was intent upon his undertaking; when asked, he only shook his head, saying, "If I believed you guilty, why should I endeavour to find the signs which will prove you innocent? Would I do that, do you think, if I believed you to be a guilty man?"

Granger was softened by those words; they meant a great deal to him at such a time, spoken as they were curtly by one who was so eager to rehabilitate his character before all the world that he had no moments to waste in argument. They were far more convincing to him of the true opinion which le Pere held of him than an hour consumed in apology, which would have been an hour spent in idleness. He came and knelt down by the side of the priest, and gazed on the results of his work. He saw the cold white face of Strangeways with the eyes set wide, staring upwards at the clouds. Their gaze did not seem to concentrate as in life, but like that of a well-painted portrait, while the eyes themselves remained fixed, wandered everywhere. Yet, when he settled his attention upon them, they seemed to look at him alone as if, since the lips were silent, they were trying to speak those words which the body had come to utter; if he turned his head away for a moment and then looked back, they seemed themselves to have changed their direction and to be staring again incuriously out on space, having abandoned hope of delivering their message. And he saw the naked throat and neck, and the marks where the teeth of the yellow-faced husky had clashed and met; last of all he saw the silver chain and the pendant attached, which Pere Antoine had at that moment succeeded in freeing from the cold clenched hand.

"What have you there?" he asked.

"I don't know yet. Lift up the head, so that we can slip the chain over and find out."

Granger did as he was bidden; but, as he stooped to his task, he was horribly conscious that the dead man's eyes were intently fixed upon him, as if they knew and lived on, though every other part of the motionless body was dead and ignorant.

"Well, here it is. It's a locket."

Granger started up from the ground trembling. "Pere Antoine, do you think we ought to look at it?" he said.

"Why not?"

"Look at the eyes of that dead man."

"They seem to me to be saying 'yes.'"

Granger looked again, went near, bent down and looked carefully; then he turned his head. "You are right," he said; "I also think they are saying 'yes.'"

The priest put the locket in his hand. "It is for you to open it," he said.

It was of gold and studded with turquoise, a woman's trinket and old-fashioned, the chasing being worn flat in places; the silver chain was common and strong, and had evidently not at first belonged to it, being of modern manufacture—probably a comparatively recent purchase. Granger looked it over critically, but could get no hint of its contents from the outside. On the front was engraved a monogram J. M., and on the back a coat-of-arms. The lines of the monogram were distinct and sharp to the touch, they must have been cut many years after the locket itself was made, but the coat-of-arms seemed contemporary with the rest of the chasing. He tried to open it, but the dampness had caused it to stick, so that he broke his nails upon the fastening. He took out his knife and attempted to lever its edges apart with the blade. At last, growing impatient, he set it on its hinges upon a rock and commenced to hammer it with a stone. At the third blow the fastening gave, and the sides fell apart. He could see that it contained a miniature, and, on the other side, a lock of hair; but the glasses which shut them in were mist-covered. He rubbed them clean on the lining of his coat and looked again.

The portrait was that of a young girl, fresh and innocent, about eighteen years of age; her hair, worn loose, all blown about, fell upon her neck and shoulders in long curls; her eyes were blue and intensely bright; her face was animated, with a certain dash of generous spirit and healthy defiance in it, which were chiefly denoted by the full firm lips and arching brows—and the face was the face of Mordaunt. For the first time, he saw the woman whom he had loved, in her rightful woman's guise. He had often longed that he might do that; it had made him feel that he shared so small a portion of her life that he should know her only by her man's name and remember her only in her Yukon placer-miner's dress. He would have stooped to kiss her lips at that time, had it not been for the presence of the dead, who had also loved her and from whom he had stolen his treasure. Would his body be able to rest in the grave when thus robbed of the symbol of the passion which had caused its blood to pulsate most fiercely in its life?

Then he fell to thinking other thoughts—of how strangely this knowledge had come to him, from all across the world, by the hand of a rejected lover who was dead. Had this been the secret which the corporal had waited to tell him, thrown up on the ice, lying silent and deserted throughout that month at the bend; had he been waiting only to say, "I hold the knowledge which you most desire in my clenched right hand. Here is her woman's likeness. I require it no longer, now that I am dead?" No, surely he had not delayed for that. Then suddenly he realised that this must mean that the woman herself was dead. He remembered distinctly those last words which Strangeways had spoken, even as though he were now repeating them again aloud, "I tell you if the ice were as rotten as your soul or Spurling's, I would still follow him, though I had to follow him to Hell." And his last utterance had been a reiteration of that promise, "He killed the woman I loved, and he shall pay the price though I follow him to Hell."

This was the fulfilment of that promise; though he himself was dead, he had delayed his body near Murder Point that, with his pale and silent lips and the portrait which hung about his neck, he might urge his rival on in their common cause of vengeance. "I will pray God every day of my life that Spurling may be damned throughout the ages—eternally and pitilessly damned," he had said, and now that the days of his life were over his body had tarried behind to continue that errand, so far as was possible, into the days of his death. When they had parted that night, a month ago outside the shack, he had told a lie; he had denied that the woman was Mordaunt who had been murdered, and had tried to prove his words by asserting that the body which was found in the creek near Forty-Mile had worn a woman's dress. Now he had come back to silently refute his own statement, and to declare the truth which would stir up anger and give him an inheritor of his revenge.

Here, then, was a new reason why he should become ardent in the pursuit and effect the capture of Spurling, that by so doing he would be behaving honourably by a man who was dead. He saw in it at present, with his cynic's eye for self-scorn and self-depreciation, only an added excuse and more subtle temptation for the saving of himself. "No, I cannot do it," he said. And yet, somewhere at the back of his brain, the monotonous and oracular voice of a wise self-knowledge kept answering, "But you will do it, when you have had leisure to be lonely, and have tortured yourself with memories of her."

It seemed to Granger as though Strangeways himself were the speaker of those words; but when he turned round hotly, prepared for argument, he found that the eyes had become glazed and vacant, and that at last the body was truly dead. It had no need to live longer—it had delivered its message.



CHAPTER XI

THE LOVE OF WOMAN

It was past noon before they had completed Strangeways' burial at the bend. When they had finished, the skies had cleared themselves of storm and cloud, and the sun shone out again. The air was full of earth-fragrance, and the landscape was cool and fresh. Nothing of disorder remained, no sign that a man was dead, save only a mound of piled-up stones and sod, surmounted by a little cross of branches bound together with twisted grass.

Pere Antoine had searched the body with scant results, for he had found no more than the warrant for Spurling's detection and arrest, and the fragments of two torn and well-nigh obliterated letters, at which latter he had only glanced up to the present. Nor had he seen the contents of the locket as yet, for when he had asked Granger what was its secret, he had received as answer, "Oh, nothing, only a young girl's face." So he had been foiled in his endeavour to gather materials for the establishing of Granger's innocence, should that be assailed, and had discovered nothing which might be of use in his defence. All he could contribute was his own personal evidence that the appearance of the body, as he had seen it, bore out Granger's account in every detail as to the manner in which Strangeways' catastrophe had occurred, and that his deportment, when he had charged him with murder, had proved conclusively to himself that there was no ground for such an accusation.

When they had returned to the store and had had supper together, Granger sat for a long while with the locket open before him, gazing intently on the portrait. Suddenly he looked up. "Have you seen Beorn?" he asked. "Do you know whether he is on his way back?"

"I have not seen him."

"Antoine, you must stay here with me until he returns."

"Why?"

"I was on my way to meet Peggy when you met and stopped me; I want you to marry us."

"But why now and at once?"

"Because if we're not married she won't live with me,—and I must do something to break down my loneliness by getting a new interest into my life. If I don't, I shall be always thinking of what has happened, and shall go mad,—in which case it will be the worse for Spurling. I don't want to kill him—at least, not until he has had his chance to explain himself. I'm sure now that it was Mordaunt whom he murdered, but I'm still uncertain as to whether he knew that she was a woman, at the time when he killed her—he may not know even yet. If he did it mistaking her for a man, I might be able to forgive him; anyhow, I can say so now, while you are with me. What I should do and think if I were left here miserably alone, I dare not tell. Yet, if what Strangeways said to me is true, that her body was found at Forty-Mile in a woman's dress, which would mean that Spurling killed her, well-knowing that she was a girl, why then I would go in search of him, and tell him what I thought about him, and shoot him carefully, and be glad when he was dead."

"But you have promised God to leave him alone with Himself."

"And shall I be the first man who has gone back on his prayers and promises? There's nothing to be gained by talking about it; fate must work itself out. But if you want to understand what Strangeways felt, and what I am still feeling, then look at that."

He handed him the locket. Pere Antoine took it and bent above it. At last he said, "Why, she's only a girl . . . and he killed her!"

"Yes, and he killed her when her back was turned. Now do you understand?"

"May God help you!" was all that Antoine said. Granger went over to where he sat and, from above his shoulder, gazed down upon the portrait. The face had in it so little that was tragic that it seemed impossible to realise that its owner should have encountered such a death. When the smile upon the painted lips seemed so fresh and imperishable, it seemed incredible that the lips themselves should be now silent and underground.

"I wonder where she lived and what sort of a girlhood she had," Granger said.

"I have here two letters which I found upon Strangeways; perhaps they may tell us something about her."

Pere Antoine produced the letters from an oilskin pouch. They were in a pointed feminine hand, and the ink was faded. Granger lit the lamp, for the twilight without was deepening into darkness; spreading out the crumpled sheets on his knees before him, he read their contents aloud. Across the top, left-hand corner of the uppermost page was scrawled in a rude, boyish writing, "The first letter she ever wrote me"; the letter itself had been evidently penned by a young girl's hand. It bore the address of a school in London, and ran as follows:—

DEAR ERIC.

I am very miserable hear and sometimes wonder why I was ever brought into the world. Your Papa was very kind to me once, but why has he scent me away from you? You did not want me to be scent, and so I can tell you all about myself. I am very home-sick hear. I say home-sick, though I have no home; I have always been a stranger in your Papa's house. I suppose I am reely home-sick for you. I think it is because you and I are seperated that I am sorry. The girls hear are not always kind; they say that I look as though I had been crying, and then of course I do cry when they say that. But if my eyes are red, I don't care. I want you badly and I'm writting to tell you that. Don't forget to feed my rabbits.

Your loving little friend, J. M.

The second was marked in the same way, but in a manlier hand, "Her last letter to me."

DEAREST ERIC.

I am so sorry that I am the cause of all this trouble, and that I cannot love you in the way that you and your father so much desire. I would do anything to make you happy save that—play the coward, and say that I love you as a woman should whom you were going to marry, when I do not. I have always been used to think of you as a brother, which is natural, seeing that from our earliest childhood we have grown up together. I thought that you would be content with that; no other kind of affection for you has ever entered into my heart or head.

Your father was very angry with me last night after you went out. He said that I, by my conduct, had led you on to expect; believe me, I never meant to do that. It never occurred to me that there was any need to be careful in your presence. The truth is, I have always been an interloper in your home; you will remember how, long years since, when first I went to boarding-school, I told you that . . . (four lines were here undecipherable, being faded and rubbed out). When I look back, I see that in all my life you have been my only friend—which makes me the more unhappy that this has happened. Mind, I don't mean to accuse your family of unkindness; I only say that I, perhaps naturally, was never one of them. If I thought that you would be willing, knowing how I feel toward you, to make me your wife, for the sake of your peace I might consent even to that. But you are not such a man. (Three lines were here obliterated.) Let there be no bitterness between us by reason of harsh words which others have spoken; what has happened must make a difference, but I want to remain still your friend. This recent occurrence seems to make it necessary that one of us should go away—there will never be any quiet in your father's house while we both live there. Don't be alarmed or surprised if you get word shortly that I have vanished.

Yours as ever, J. M.

To this letter was added a note in Strangeways' hand at the bottom of the page, "She was not to blame; it was I who left."

"We have not learnt very much about her from those two letters, have we?" said Pere Antoine. "They are ordinary, and leave many questions, which we wanted to ask, unanswered."

"Yes, they do little more than confirm Strangeways' own statements, and yet. . . ."

"Well?"

"They tell us that her true initials were J. M., the same as those of her assumed name, and the same as those of the monogram on the locket; and they tell us of her great loneliness."

"But I can't see how a knowledge of that one fact—her great loneliness—will help us; it does not reconstruct for us the details of her life so that we can imagine her to ourselves, nor does it contribute anything towards your defence."

"Bother my defence. I don't much care if I am hanged; that would at least be a final solution, so far as I am concerned, to this problem of living. What troubles me at present is, how is this woman feeling about my marriage with a half-breed girl? Now these letters help me; they make me certain that whatever I may be compelled to do at any future time by reason of my isolation, she will not be hard upon me, but will understand. This marriage with Peggy, for instance, looks like a betrayal of her. And though she is dead, I should hate to grieve her in the other world."

Granger paused, and then he added fiercely, "And I'm glad of that last letter for another reason, because it states so clearly that she never loved the other man."

"That can make no difference now."

"But it can," said Granger, rising to his feet, and speaking in a strained whisper, with clenched hands, "I tell you it can. If I thought that she had ever really cared for him, I would shoot myself here and now, that I might be beside her to get between him and her. The thought that he was there with her all alone in the vastness, free to do and to say just whatever he pleased, and that I was shut out, would drive me crazy. Do you think that, if I supposed that he had got his arms around her over there, I could ever rest—if I thought that she would allow him? One little pull of a trigger, the report of a revolver, which I probably shouldn't hear and in any case shouldn't care about, and the journey would be accomplished and I could be bending over her. It sounds very tempting. But I'm prepared to live out my life like a man, now that I know that she understands. If she hadn't known what loneliness meant, she might misjudge my motives in taking up with Peggy, and might, out of revenge, instead of waiting for me, herself take up with Strangeways before my arrival there."

Pere Antoine watched him gravely for some seconds after he had finished speaking; then he said, "I don't think that Heaven is quite like that; but none of us can be certain, perhaps your views are as correct as those of anyone else. When I was a young man, before I came to Keewatin, I should have been angry with any man who had said to me a thing like that—but we come to hold strange opinions in this land where all things, judged by our former standards of sanity, even God Himself, seem mad. At that time I longed to be dogmatic and definite in all my beliefs on religion, and this life, and the after-world—that was why I became a Jesuit, that I might exchange despair for certainty. Now, priest though I am, like you I see one gigantic interrogation mark written over sky and earth—and because of it I am grateful. I have learnt that the whole attraction of religion for the human mind, and the entire majesty of God depend on His mystery and silence, and the things which He does not care to tell. If all our questions were answered, we might lose our God-sense. If we knew everything, we should cease to be curious and to strive. Of one thing only are we certain, that Jesus lived and died, and that though we live in the uttermost parts of the earth, it is our duty to be like Him."

"And Spurling—if Spurling dwells near us in the uttermost parts of the earth?"

"He also is God's child."

"It is easy for you to talk, Pere Antoine; you are an old man, and, being a priest, have never loved a woman yourself."

The stern, grey features of the Jesuit relaxed; he hesitated, then he said, "My child, don't be too sure of that. Perhaps I may be attempting to live this life well only in order that I may make sure of meeting and being worthy of one such woman in the after-world. If that were so, it would be great shame to me, for I ought to be striving to live this life well solely for the love of Christ."

He fell silent, sitting with his head bent forward, his gnarled hands folded on his knees before him. A far-away look had come into his eyes, a fixed expression of calmness, as though they slept with the lids parted. Granger watched the hands, mutilated and ruined, with three fingers missing from the right, and two from the left; and yet, despite their brokenness, he thought how beautiful they were. There was scarcely a part of the priest's body that had not been at some time shattered with service. It had never occurred to Granger that Pere Antoine, like most other men in the district, had a past which did not belong to Keewatin—memories of a happier time to which he might sometimes look back with the painfulness of regret. Antoine had been there so long that there was no man who remembered the day when first he arrived. He seemed as natural to the landscape as the Last Chance River itself. And now suddenly, in an electric moment of sympathy, his past had revealed itself.

Granger watched and waited, hoping that presently he would explain. It occurred to him as a discovery that he had no knowledge of the priest's real name or of his family. At his nationality he could only guess, supposing him to be a Frenchman or a French-Canadian. How incurious he had been! And, in this case, lack of curiosity had meant lack of kindness; he blamed himself. He, like all Keewatin, was ready in time of crisis to draw upon the old man's strength, but beyond that he had never shown him real friendship—he had never been conscious of any desire to hear about the man himself. And now he had learned that this man also had a tragedy, and, like himself, had loved a woman who was now long since dead. He wanted to ask him questions, that so he might make up for omitted kindnesses; but he was restrained when he looked upon the grey dreamy countenance, for it was evident that le Pere was wandering in the idealised meadows of a bygone pleasantness—a country which was known only to himself. So Granger returned his eyes to the portrait which he had taken from the dead man's hand, and, gazing upon it, tried his best to fill in the blanks in his little knowledge of the woman he had loved.

He constructed for himself a picture of an ivied manor-house, terraced and with an old-world garden lying round about it, where her childhood had been spent and where she had grown to girlhood. He told himself that there must have been a river somewhere near, and he imagined her as stretched upon its banks in the summer shadows. And he thought of the schoolhouse in London, and the little heart-weary child who had penned that letter there. He re-read it, and then once again re-read it, suffering the same agony of longing for things irrecoverable which this small creature had suffered years ago, who was now beyond all knowledge of pain. What a mystery it was that across that expanse of space and years her letter should have drifted down to him, from London to Keewatin, carried over the last few yards of its journey in the breast of a man who was already dead. It made him feel less of an exile that a miracle like that could happen—it was almost as though she herself had appealed to him from the hidden world. It made him ask himself that question, which so many had asked before him, "And are we really ever dead?"

Pere Antoine stirred, rose up and walked over to the window, where he stood in the shadow, outside the circle of the lamp's rays, with his back turned toward the younger man. There was something which he wanted to say, but which he found difficult to express. Granger guessed that, and so he said, "Antoine, you are thinking of her to-night. She must have lived very long ago. Was she anything like the portrait of this young girl?"

There was silence. Then, still gazing away from him, his long lean figure blocking out the moonlight, the priest returned, "All white women seem alike to one who has lived long in Keewatin. Yet that face did seem very like to hers; but it is many years ago now, and I may not remember her well. She died; and she was everything that was of worth to me in this world. I begin to fear that she is all that I count of highest value in the next."

"But why fear? I should not fear that."

"Because, being a missionary, with me it should be otherwise. I became a Jesuit through distrust of myself. I knew, when she had been taken from me, that because of my despair, if I did not bind myself strongly to that which was highest, I should sink to that which was worst. And I knew that if I sank to that which was worst, she would be lost to me throughout all eternity. So, in order that God might give her to me again in a future world, I strove to bribe Him; I asked that I might be sent to this hardest of all fields of missionary labour, hoping that thus I might acquire merit. Since then a new doubt has come to haunt me, has been with me half a century; the fear lest the life which I have led may count for nothing, may be regarded as only sinfulness, because I have done God's work for her sake rather than for the sake of His Christ, and that therefore as a punishment to me she may still be withheld. Ah, I have fought against her memory, trying to cling only to God! That has been useless. So I have gone on doing my best for my fellow-men, hoping that He may overlook the motive, and judging only by the work, may give me my reward in the end,—may allow me to be with her."

"Antoine, I am a sinful man and one who is little qualified to judge of God's purposes, but I think that He will grant you your request. But if you, with all your goodness, are banished from her whom you loved most on earth, how can I hope for success?"

Then the Jesuit turned round and faced him. "It was because I feared for your success that I mentioned my own trouble," he said. "You are planning to do a thing which is right in marrying this half-breed girl—you owe it to her and to God, inasmuch as you have lived with her. But you will be doing her a greater wrong than if you were to leave her unmarried, if, when you have made her your wife, you think only of the dead white woman. When the turmoil of living is over, you want to meet and be worthy of the woman who wrote those letters, you tell me; your best chance of success in that desire is in trying to forget her in this world, by giving all your affection to the woman who is your wife, and trusting to God's goodness to give you the rewards which He knows that you covet after death. Don't make my mistake—it means torture in this life, and, perhaps, disappointment in the next. Be true to the choice which you have made, and leave the rest to God's mercy. I have not been strong enough to do all that I advise, for, though I love Christ, I am shamed into owning, old man though I am, that I more often do His work in the hope of re-meeting with a woman who is dead than out of loyalty to Christ Himself."

"Pere Antoine, you do not judge kindly of your own actions as Christ would judge of them; you Catholics, in making Christ God, forget that He also was a lonely man. I think it is not as a God, but as a peasant that He will judge us, having knowledge of what we have suffered—if He judges us at all. It is more likely that He will just be sorry for us, that we ever thought that He would judge us."

"Whether I judge kindly or not, will you try to take my advice? I have told you a secret to-night which never, since I came to Keewatin, have I told to any man. And I have told you that I may save you. Believe me, if you cannot love your daily companions for their own sake in this world, whoever and wherever they are, you will fail to find love for your own sake in the next—and to love well, whatever you love you must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end."

Granger moved restlessly, but remained silent; then he sat still and thought. Pere Antoine also said nothing, for he knew that the man before him was reasoning his way toward a decision upon which all his happiness must depend.

But to Granger the problem appeared quite otherwise; it seemed to him that he was being asked to abandon another pleasantness for the sake of Peggy, a half-breed girl, for whom he had been prepared already to sacrifice his career. To be sure, his career was not of much value at present, and didn't seem a large thing to sacrifice; but then, when it comes to giving anything away, even the most thorough-paced pessimist is capable of turning optimist about its worth.

Since he had become certain of Mordaunt's death, he had vaguely planned out for himself a course of spiritual debauchery, though he would not have applied to it such a word. He had expected to marry Peggy Ericsen, and to live with the memory of the woman for whom he had really cared. His wife was to have been the servant of his comfort and desires, and the dead woman the companion of his mind and daily round. So he hoped, by keeping Mordaunt near him in his thoughts, to qualify himself for attaining her after death, and to atone for his apostasy in marrying a different woman while yet on earth. Throughout all his reasoning ran a streak of madness, of which he himself was totally unaware. And now, when he had completed arrangements to his own satisfaction, here came this Jesuit telling him that such a course of action savoured of adultery, and would probably end in the eternal separation of Mordaunt from himself.

Presently he heard a sound of moving. He looked up. Antoine was standing before him, on the outer edge of the light which was thrown by the lamp, appearing huge and prophetic against the background of dwarfed shadows which crawled over wall and ceiling, crowding behind him. His awe for the office of the man returned to him, blotting out the equality which the past few hours of confession had brought about. Once more he recalled how it was said that le Pere had been seen walking in the wilderness, wearing the countenance of Jesus Christ. He looked like that now. Granger, made conscious of his own premeditated wrong-doing, shrank back before him. Yet the words which Pere Antoine uttered were very simple: "I am an old man, and I knew what I was saying," was all he said.

Granger rose to his feet. "I'm going out," he said. "I'll return in a little while and give you my decision."

He passed out from the close stale air of the shack into the starlight; he could be nearer God there. A low, leisurely wind was journeying over the forest, crooning softly to itself as it went. Dominant over all other sounds, as was ever the case at Murder Point, the wash of the ongoing river was to be heard—even in winter, when every other live thing had ceased to stir, it was not silent. But now, in the early summer of the northern year, it laughed uproariously and clapped its hands against the banks in its passage, as if the water were calling to the land, "Good-bye, old fellow; you won't see me again for many a century. It was the end of the ice age when last we parted." To Granger the shouting of the river was for all the world like that of a troop-ship departing for a distant country. "Farewell, farewell," it cried. The sound of its going made him weary with a sense of world-wideness; if he was left behind to-day, when once he had joined himself to a daughter of that country, he would be forever left behind. But he had come outside not to reargue his way over the old ground, but to decide. To do that he must be alone, quite solitary; and there, just outside the shack, he was all too conscious of Pere Antoine's eyes.

Slowly he commenced to descend the Point toward the river-bank. As he went, a new desire sprang up within him—to speak with Strangeways; if possible to make a compact and extort some approving sign from that dead man. Stepping into the canoe, he pushed off lightly and set out for the bend. The nearer he drew, the sterner his face became; he was thinking of what he should say, and one has to be careful in what he says in speaking with a man who is dead. Soon he came in sight of the flimsy little cross which they had raised, and saw the stones which they had piled above the body, shining white and grey in the moonlight; then with a twist of the paddle his canoe shot in toward the bank and the prow grated on the ice. Granger stepped out and beached his craft above the water's edge. With slow deliberate steps he went forward till he stood above the grave. There, with his hands clasped behind him and his head bowed, he waited for a few minutes listening, half expecting that something would happen. When nothing stirred, he went upon his knees, as if he prayed, placing his lips so near to the grave that sometimes they touched the stones and mould; and so he began to speak to the man imprisoned beneath the ground.

"Strangeways," he said, "you know everything about me now, and you ought to understand. I want to act fairly by you. I didn't do that in your lifetime; if I had, you might not now be dead. I ought to have warned you about the ice at first, and I ought to have told you the truth about Spurling; then you might have believed me. But I did try my best to save you in the end. Pere Antoine says that I may get hanged for your death; but I don't mind that so very much, if I can only act fairly by you now."

He paused to hear whether there was any sound of movement underground; when he heard none, he knew that the dead man was listening and waiting eagerly for what would come next. Crouching still nearer, so that he might narrow the space between them, "Strangeways, are you listening?" he said. "We both loved her, and neither of us won her in this world; but because you are dead, you are nearer to her now than I am. I want you to promise me to do nothing till I have come."

And still when he halted, waiting for his answer, nothing stirred. Presently he spoke again. "I have a reason for asking which, if you remember anything of what you suffered in this life, you should understand. To save myself from madness, I must have a companion, and so I am going to marry a woman of this country. In order that I may live well with her, and even in order to marry her, I must pledge my word to forget Mordaunt while I am in this world. Now do you understand? I cannot pledge my word until you have promised me that you will do nothing until I am also dead." He fell forward over the grave and lay there silent. His brain had become numb; he could fashion no more words—perhaps in the interval which elapsed he slept. Then it seemed to him that the chambers within his brain were lighted up, so that pressing his face against the crannies and between the stones he could look right down, and see distinctly the narrow bed of the grave whereon the body of Strangeways rested. The eyes of the body were open and the lips were working, trying to say something. By watching the lips he discovered that they kept on repeating, over and over, one word; then he read that that word was revenge. "I cannot, I cannot," he whispered. "I have promised God that I will not; and, moreover, to take revenge on Spurling would be to remember her."

Was it that he moved as he slept, or did the thing which he thought he saw actually occur! Some stones slipped from off the mound and, to his eyes looking down into the grave, it seemed that Strangeways' hand began to grope frantically after the locket which had been about his neck, and that, finding it missing, his face became angry and he strove to rise, causing the stones to fall and the ground to tremble.

Granger jumped up, and stood there shaking with his hands clenched and his head thrown back, prepared.

"Will you answer me?" he cried in despair. "Don't you know how I suffer? If you consent to what I have asked of you, give me a sign? If nothing happens, I shall know that you are cruel and do not care."

When he had waited in vain some seconds, he lost his nerve and his courage. Kneeling beside the grave he commenced to weep, smoothing the stones with his hands coaxingly like a child, and whispering, "Give me a sign. Give me a sign. Give me a sign."

Suddenly he paused in his pleading. The rustling of water against a travelling prow, and sound of paddles thrust in, forced back, and withdrawn, struck upon his ears. He threw himself full length along the ground; he did not want to be discovered there. Stealing up-stream from the northward, creeping close in to the opposite bank to avoid the current, came a canoe, sitting deep in the water, heavily laden with furs; the stern-paddle was held by a tall and thickly bearded man, and in the prow, even at that distance and in that shadowy light, it was possible to make out that the second figure was that of a girl. Granger recognised them immediately, and knew that the Man with the Dead Soul and his daughter had returned. He also noticed that Eyelids was not there. They did not see him, but quickly vanished round the bend.

When all was silent and lonely again, Granger arose. "It is a sign," he said. Standing above the grave, before departing he spoke once more with the man who lay buried there. "Strangeways, you may rest quiet now," he said. "Though I cannot revenge her as you have desired, we can both, in our separate ways, be true to her."

He delayed a moment to have what he had said confirmed; but this time no token either of dissent or approval was vouchsafed.



CHAPTER XII

HE REVIEWS HIS MARRIAGE, AND IS PUT TO THE TEST

It was the first week in June; for a fortnight John Granger had been a married man. He was now removed a sufficiently just distance from his bachelor-hood to be able to estimate the value of the change which this new step had wrought in his career.

Its true worth to him had been that it had converted him from a Londoner in Keewatin into a man of the Northland. This might mean, though it need not, that he had retrograded to a lower type; at all events it meant that he was robbed of his excuse for considering himself an exile, bearing himself rebelliously toward his environment, and being unhappy. By joining himself to Peggy by the rites of the Roman Church, he had made an irrevocable choice, had slammed the door of opportunity and return to civilisation in his own face, and had adopted as his country a land where no one has any use for money or for time, and where nothing could ever again be of very much importance. He had not realised all that a fortnight ago when, at the bidding of the Jesuit, he had made this girl his wife; but since he had lived in her company he had come to realise. Mercifully there is no situation, however bad, which may not develop the peculiar virtue whereby it can be endured. He had learnt his virtue by observing Peggy, an Indian virtue at that—stolidity. In a great lonely territory, where men say good-bye to one another for twelve months at a stretch, and sometimes forever, they arrive at a philosophy of life which consists in waiting very patiently and unambitiously for the next thing which the good God may send. To attain this sort of quietness a man must be quite hopeless, for so long as he hopes he is liable to disappointment. Also he must live each day as though it were his first, for to remember things past is to court regret. He must permit himself to know none of the extremes of emotion, either of joy or of sadness; to this end he must consider himself as a non-partisan in life, a careless spectator before whose eyes the groping shadows pass. The traffic of words is a labour, and a more frequent cause of misunderstanding than of interpretation—therefore it is wiser, if peace be desired, to keep always silent. Where a gesture will do the work of a word, let a gesture suffice.

All this Granger had learnt during the fortnight which he had lived with his wife; in watching her, he had studied to forego his former turbulence of mind as a thing most foolish, and had determined to sink down into the dull acceptance of a destiny against which it was profitless to contend—a kind of resigned contentment. If he was to be hanged to-morrow for Strangeways' death, that was no reason why he should disturb himself to-day; if that was to happen, it would come to pass in any case,—nothing that he might do or say could prevent it. The momentary pain of dying is usually much less intense than the hours of cowardly suffering which men bring upon themselves by prevising the anguish of their last departure, so he told himself. So to-day he sat outside his store in the sunshine and smoked his pipe, the freest and silentest man in all Keewatin, and, he would have had himself believe, the most stably contented.

That night, when he had left Pere Antoine and had gone to consult the dead man at the bend, had been the turning-point in his frenzy. It seemed to him, as he looked back, to have happened long ago when he was little more than a child, at a time before his enlightenment, when he had supposed very foolishly that he was of importance to God and to his fellow-men. Now he had come to know that he was of no importance even to himself. He blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it vanish in the air; in other days he would have smiled, but it was not worth the effort now. The relation of that whiff of tobacco-smoke to the unplumbed space, throughout which it would be dispersed, was about the same as that of his present existence to the rest of the world.

When, having said good-bye to Strangeways, he had followed the Man with the Dead Soul back to the store, he had made up his mind to the inevitable, and had been prepared to greet Peggy with a certain display of joy. Before ever he could put his thought into action, his intention had been repelled. As he had drawn nearer to the crazy wooden pier which ran out from Murder Point, he had seen the shadowy shapes of the trapper and his daughter, bending down, unloading their canoe, moving slowly hither and thither through the night. As he had come up, he had hailed them. To his call Beorn had made no reply, had only turned his head and nodded, while Peggy, stooping over a pile of furs, had thrown him the customary salutation of the Cree Indian to the white man, used both on arrival and departure, "Watchee"—which is a corruption of "What cheer." No other words of greeting had passed between them, and he, when he had landed, had set to work at once to help them with their unlading. When that was finished and the furs had been carried up to the store, they had raised their tent, kindled their fire, brewed their black tea, cooked their bacon, and gone to rest. Granger had so far intruded on their reserve as to ask them to spend the night in his store, but his invitation had been ungraciously refused with a shake of the head.

Next day Pere Antoine had married them, after which he had departed, promising, however, to return before the summer was out. Granger had said nothing more to him either concerning Spurling or the death of Strangeways, except to insist that the warrant for the arrest, together with the letters and locket which had been found, should be left with himself; nevertheless, he had been well aware that these things were largely responsible for the hurry of the priest's departure. At first he had not been surprised at the silence of Peggy, for he had grown accustomed to the shy modesty of women who are Indian-bred. The women of Keewatin accept it as their fate that they are born to be subservient to men—to be their burden-bearers. But at the end of a few days, when her demeanour had shown no sign of change, he had become a little curious. In the early part of the year the white blood that was in her had been more manifest, and because of it she had been proud. When she had insisted that he should marry her, if he would live with her, the reason she had given him for her demand had been because her blood was white. Since then she had journeyed into the winter-wilderness with the menfolk of her family, like any other Indian or half-breed girl, and in the primeval solitariness of the land the red blood of her mother had asserted itself; the hand of her native deity had been laid upon her mouth, staying her flow of words, the shyness of the forest-gods had entered into her eyes, and the Lord God of Women had stooped her shoulders, causing her to carry her head less bravely, binding the hereditary burden of the red woman upon her back. She had unlearned in those few months all the conceits of self-respect which she had been taught in the school at Winnipeg, and had reverted to the ancient type from which she was sprung,—the river Indian. Granger, as he watched her, guessed all this, for had not he himself been parted from his old traditions?—and he had not known Keewatin till he was a grown man. Well, these people had lived there longer than he had! They should know what was best suited to their circumstance, he told himself; and so, without questioning or combatting their social methods, he resigned himself to accept their modes of life.

It was a strange wedding that he had had—very different from the kind he had planned for himself in the heat of his passion, when he was a younger man. And this was a strange woman whom he must call his wife—one who worked for him tirelessly with her head and hands, but who appeared to crave for none of his affection, and with whom he could have not a moment's conversation; the exchange of a few monosyllables and signs in the course of a day seemed to be the most that he might expect. Yet, because of her meekness and faithfulness, and her ready willingness to serve, he was conscious of a growing protective quality of love for her. If he could prevent himself from adopting her reticence, he promised himself that he would gather her whole heart into his own by and by.

He did not as yet realise that the mere fact that he could feel thus towards her, when no speech had passed between them, was an indication that she was communicating herself in a more vigorous and sincerer language than that of words. This difference between them, that he expected her to use her lips to explain her personality, and that she, far from imagining that she was silent, believed herself to be in her deeds most eloquent, was one of the few traits remaining to him of the street-born man.

As an example of their reservedness was the fact that, though Eyelids, Peggy's brother, had set out on the winter hunt and had not returned, no explanation of his delay had been forthcoming, nor had Granger summoned up the energy to inquire for himself. On their first arrival he had felt distinctly curious as to his whereabouts. Had he come across traces of Spurling and gone in pursuit of him? Had he heard from some stray Indian that Spurling was an outlaw, with a price upon his head? Had Beorn, having found that his cache at the Forbidden River had been broken into, dispatched his son to follow up the thief and exact revenge? Or was Spurling dead, and had Eyelids killed him, for which reason he was afraid to come back?

For the first few days after his marriage these questions and answers had been continually running through his head; but since he had learnt the lesson that nothing was of much importance, he had almost ceased to care. Why should he trouble to inquire? If he did, he might get no reply; and if he was answered, the probability was that his only gain would be something fresh to worry about. The unreturning of Eyelids was one small detail of the total unreality, the dream which he had once taken so seriously, which in former times he had called life; and of that dream the arrival and flight of Spurling were the nightmare. No one of all these happenings had ever been—they were unactual: and the chances were that even he himself was no reality.

Beorn Ericsen, the Man with the Dead Soul as he was called, was a fitting tutor to a pupil of this philosophy. Compared with him, his daughter was a whirlwind of words; the lesson of silence, which she taught by her behaviour, she had first learnt from her father on the winter trail—in the presence of his stern taciturnity she appeared a garrulous amateur.

Whence he had originally come, no one had ever persuaded him to tell. On his first arrival in the district, which was reported to have taken place nearly forty years ago, for the first two years he was said to have conducted himself more or less like a normal man. At that time he must have been near mid-life, for he was now well past seventy to judge by his appearance. Even then, on his first coming, something had happened, which he did not care to talk about, which made him glad of the dreary seclusion of Keewatin. It had been generally supposed that he was badly wanted by Justice, for having shot his man in a border hold-up, or for deeds of violence in some kindred escapade.

At any rate, he had set about his living in Keewatin in earnest, as though he had determined to stay there. Having attached himself to the Hudson Bay Company, he soon proved himself to be an expert trapper, and a man who, for his reckless courage, was to be valued. Promotion seemed certain for him and, despite the fact that he had joined the Company late in life, the likelihood of his attaining a factorship in the end was not improbable. It was then, after he had won the confidence of his employers, that he had taken that journey to the North, through an unexplored country, from which he had come back dazed and dreary-eyed, so that it seemed as though he must have met with some dire calamity in the winter desolation, one from which few men would have escaped alive, which had robbed him of his reason. When they had asked him where he had journeyed, "Far, far," was all he would reply. And when, hoping to satisfy their curiosity by a less direct method, they had questioned him, "What did you see up there?" "Blackness—it was dark," was the most that he would answer them.

Because of these answers there were some who supposed that, emulating Thomas Simpson, he had penetrated into the Arctic Circle and had gazed upon the frozen quiet of an undiscovered ocean. He had wrested from God the secret which He was anxious to withhold, they said, and God in vengeance had condemned him to be always silent. But the Indians explained his condition more readily, speaking in whispers about him around camp-fires among themselves. The last place at which he had been seen by anyone on that journey was at the mouth of the Forbidden River, along whose banks it was commonly believed stretched the villages and homes of manitous, and souls of the departed. The Crees asserted that this was not the first man who, to their knowledge, had wandered up that river and had thus returned. Some few of their boldest hunters had from time to time set out and, roving further afield than their brethren, had likewise trespassed all unaware within the confines of the spirit-land. So they said that Beorn had been to the Land of Shadows, and that, by reason of his surpassing strength, he had contrived to escape; but that he had left his soul behind him there, and it was only his body which had come back.

From that day he had been known as The Man with the Dead Soul. Gradually, as the years went by, the deathly vacancy had gone out of his eyes, but he had remained a man separated from living men. He rarely spoke, but from the first his peculiarities had made no difference to his expertness as a trapper—he was more skilful, white man though he was, than many of the Crees themselves. All the strength which should have been spent upon his soul seemed to have gone to preserving the perfection of his body. For a man of his years, he was surprisingly vigorous and erect—no labour could tire him. This, said the Indians, was the usual sign of bodies which lived on when their souls were dead. He was much feared, and his influence in the district was great; in gaining him as a partisan, Granger had achieved a triumph over Robert Pilgrim, and had improved his status among the native trappers more than could have been possible by any other single act.

Beorn was reverenced as a kind of minor deity; no wish of his, however silently expressed, was ever denied by an Indian. When he had chosen Peggy's mother to be his wife, it had been done merely by the raising of his hand. Straightway the girl's father had driven her panic-stricken forth from his camp, compelling her to go to this strange bridegroom, lest a curse should fall upon his tribe. To her, if absence of cruelty is kindness, he had been uniformly kind. Love is not necessary to an Indian marriage, so she had not been too unhappy. At Peggy's birth, having first borne him a son, she had died. The little girl had been brought up and cared for by the silent man; the shy tenderness she expressed for him went far to prove that she, at least, had discovered something more vital within him than could be expected to reside in the body of a man whose soul was dead. His sending of her to the school in Winnipeg had shown that he was not so forgetful as he seemed to be of the outside world which he had left. This last act had come as a great surprise to all who knew him; but they had contrived to retain their old opinion of him by asserting that this was the doing of Pere Antoine.

Only on rare occasions had Beorn let any of his secrets out; when he got drunk he recovered his power of speech, or, as the Indians said, for a little space his soul returned. This had happened less and less frequently of recent years. It was well remembered by old-timers at God's Voice how once, in the early morning in Bachelors' Hall, at the end of a night's carousal, when the trappers and traders from the distant outposts had made their yearly pilgrimage to the fort bringing in their twelve months' catch of furs, Beorn, under the influence of rum, had risen uninvited, and, to the consternation of his intoxicated companions, had trolled forth a verse from a fighting mining ballad. As well might the statue of Lord Nelson climb down from its monument in Trafalgar Square and, with the voice of a living man, commence to address a London crowd. The verse which he sang ran as follows; to the few who were aware, it solved the mystery of an important portion of his hidden early history: