Part 14 (1/2)
Bill smiled, and, rising, began to clear away the dishes. Hazel resisted an impulse to help. She would not work; she would not lift her finger to any task, she reminded herself. He had put her in her present position, and he could wait on her. So she rested an elbow on the table and watched him. In the midst of his work he stopped suddenly.
”There's oceans of time to do this,” he observed. ”I'm just a wee bit tired, if anybody should ask you. Let's camp in the other room. It's a heap more comfy.”
He put more wood on the kitchen fire, and set a pot of water to heat.
Out in the living-room Hazel drew her chair to one side of the hearth.
Bill sprawled on the bearskin robe with another cigarette in his fingers.
”No,” he began, after a long silence, ”this country doesn't get on one's nerves--not if one is a normal human being. You'll find that.
When I first came up here I thought so, too; it seemed so big and empty and forbidding. But the more I see of it the better it compares with the outer world, where the extremes of luxury and want are always in evidence. It began to seem like home to me when I first looked down into this little basin. I had a partner then. I said to him: 'Here's a dandy, fine place to winter.' So we wintered--in a log shack sixteen foot square that Silk and Satin and n.i.g.g.e.r have for a stable now. When summer came my partner wanted to move on, so I stayed. Stayed and began to build for the next winter. And I've been working at it ever since, making little things like chairs and tables and shelves, and fixing up game heads whenever I got an extra good one. And maybe two or three times a year I'd go out. Get restless, you know. I'm not really a hermit by nature. Lord, the things I've packed in here from the outside! Books--I hired a whole pack train at Ashcroft once to bring in just books; they thought I was crazy, I guess. I've quit this place once or twice, but I always come back. It's got that home feel that I can't find anywhere else. Only it has always lacked one important home qualification,” he finished softly. ”Do you ever build air castles?”
”No,” Hazel answered untruthfully, uneasy at the trend of his talk.
She was learning that Bill Wagstaff, for all his gentleness and patience with her, was a persistent mortal.
”Well, I do,” he continued, unperturbed. ”Lots of 'em. But mostly around one thing--a woman--a dream woman--because I never saw one that seemed to fit in until I ran across you.”
”Mr. Wagstaff,” Hazel pleaded, ”won't you please stop talking like that? It isn't--it isn't--”
”Isn't proper, I suppose,” Bill supplied dryly. ”Now, that's merely an error, and a fundamental error on your part, little person. Our emotion and instincts are perfectly proper when you get down to fundamentals. You've got an artificial standard to judge by, that's all. And I don't suppose you have the least idea how many lives are spoiled one way and another by the operation of those same artificial standards in this little old world. Now, I may seem to you a lawless, unprincipled individual indeed, because I've acted contrary to your idea of the accepted order of things. But here's my side of it: I'm in search of happiness. We all are. I have a few ideals--and very few illusions. I don't quite believe in this thing called love at first sight. That presupposes a volatility of emotion that people of any strength of character arc not likely to indulge in. But--for instance, a man can have a very definite ideal of the kind of woman he would like for a mate, the kind of woman he could be happy with and could make happy. And whenever he finds a woman who corresponds to that ideal he's apt to make a strenuous attempt to get her. That's pretty much how I felt about you.”
”You had no right to kidnap me,” Hazel cried.
”You had no business getting lost and making it possible for me to carry you off,” Bill replied. ”Isn't that logic?”
”I'll never forgive you,” Hazel flashed. ”It was treacherous and unmanly. There are other ways of winning a woman.”
”There wasn't any other way open to me.” Bill grew suddenly moody.
”Not with you in Cariboo Meadows. I'm taboo there. You'd have got a history of me that would have made you cut me dead; you may have had the tale of my misdeeds for all I know. No, it was impossible for me to get acquainted with you in the conventional way. I knew that, and so I didn't make any effort. Why, I'd have been at your elbow when you left the supper table at Jim Briggs' that night if I hadn't known how it would be. I went there out of sheer curiosity to take a look at you--maybe out of a spirit of defiance, too, because I knew that I was certainly not welcome even if they were willing to take my money for a meal. And I came away all up in the air. There was something about you--the tone of your voice, the way your proud little head is set on your shoulders, your make-up in general--that sent me away with a large-sized grouch at myself, at Cariboo Meadows, and at you for coming in my way.”
”Why?” she asked in wonder.
”Because you'd have believed what they told you, and Cariboo Meadows can't tell anything about me that isn't bad,” he said quietly. ”My record there makes me entirely unfit to a.s.sociate with--that would have been your conclusion. And I wanted to be with you, to talk to you, to take you by storm and make you like me as I felt I could care for you.
You can't have grown up, little person, without realizing that you do attract men very strongly. All women do, but some far more than others.”
”Perhaps,” she admitted coldly. ”Men have annoyed me with their unwelcome attentions. But none of them ever dared go the length of carrying me away against my will. You can't explain or excuse that.”
”I'm not attempting excuses,” Bill made answer. ”There are two things I never do--apologize or bully. I dare say that's one reason the Meadows gives me such a black eye. In the first place, the confounded, ignorant fools did me a very great injustice, and I've never taken the trouble to explain to them wherein they were wrong. I came into this country with a partner six years ago--a white man, if ever one lived--about the only real man friend I ever had. He was known to have over three thousand dollars on his person. He took sick and died the second year, at the head of the Peace, in midwinter. I buried him; couldn't take him out. Somehow the yarn got to going in the Meadows that I'd murdered him for his money. The gossip started there because we had an argument about outfitting while we were there, and roasted each other as only real pals can. So they got it into their heads I killed him, and tried to have the provincial police investigate. It made me hot, and so I wouldn't explain to anybody the circ.u.mstances, nor what became of Dave's three thousand, which happened to be five thousand by that time, and which I sent to his mother and sister in New York, as he told me to do when he was dying. When they got to hinting things the next time I hit the Meadows, I started in to clean out the town. I think I whipped about a dozen men that time. And once or twice every season since I've been in the habit of dropping in there and raising the very devil out of sheer resentment. It's a wonder some fellow hasn't killed me, for it's a fact that I've thrashed every man in the blamed place except Jim Briggs--and some of them two or three times. And I make them line up at the bar and drink at my expense, and all that sort of foolishness.
”That may sound to you like real depravity,” he concluded, ”but it's a fact in nature that a man has to blow the steam off his chest about every so often. I have got drunk in Cariboo Meadows, and I have raised all manner of disturbances there, partly out of pure animal spirits, and mostly because I had a grudge against them. Consequently I really have given them reason to look askance at any one--particularly a nice girl from the East--who would have anything to do with me. If they weren't a good deal afraid of me, and always laying for a chance to do me up, they wouldn't let me stay in the town overnight. So you can see what a handicap I was under when it came to making your acquaintance and courting you in the orthodox manner.”
”You've made a great mistake,” she said bitterly, ”if you think you've removed the handicap. I've suffered a great deal at the hands of men in the past six months. I'm beginning to believe that all men are brutes at heart.”
Roaring Bill sat up and clasped his hands over his knees and stared fixedly into the fire.
”No,” he said slowly, ”all men are not brutes--any more than all women are angels. I'll convince you of that.”
”Take me home, then,” she cried forlornly. ”That's the only way you can convince me or make amends.”
”No,” Bill murmured, ”that isn't the way. Wait till you know me better. Besides, I couldn't take you out now if I wanted to without exposing you to greater hards.h.i.+ps than you'll have to endure here. Do you realize that it's fall, and we're in the high lat.i.tudes? This snow may not go off at all. Even if it does it will storm again before a week. You couldn't wallow through snow to your waist in forty-below-zero weather.”