Part 30 (1/2)
When he had been told, he turned towards the Fort, and silently they made their way to it. At the door he turned and said to Lawless, ”My name--to you--is Detmold.”
The greeting between Jacques and his sombre host was notable for its extreme brevity; with Shon McGann for its hesitation--Shon's impressionable Irish nature was awed by the look of the man, though he had seen some strange things in the north. Darkness was on them by this time, and the host lighted bowls of fat with wicks of deer's tendons, and by the light of these and the fire they ate their supper. Parfaite beguiled the evening with tales of the north, always interesting to Lawless; to which Shon added many a shrewd word of humour--for he had recovered quickly from his first timidity in the presence of the stranger.
As time went on Jacques saw that their host's eyes were frequently fixed on Sir Duke in a half-eager, musing way, and he got Shon away to bed and left the two together.
”You are a singular man. Why do you live here?” said Lawless. Then he went straight to the heart of the thing. ”What trouble have you had, of what crime are you guilty?”
The man rose to his feet, shaking, and walked to and fro in the room for a time, more than once trying to speak, but failing. He beckoned to Lawless, and opened the door. Lawless took his hat and followed him along the trail they had travelled before supper until they came to the ridge where they had met. The man faced the north, the moon glistening coldly on his grey hair. He spoke with incredible weight and slowness:
”I tell you--for you are one who understands men, and you come from a life that I once knew well. I know of your people. I was of good family--”
”I know the name,” said Sir Duke quietly, at the same time fumbling in his memory for flying bits of gossip and history which he could not instantly find.
”There were two brothers of us. I was the younger. A s.h.i.+p was going to the Arctic Sea.” He pointed into the north. ”We were both young and ambitious. He was in the army, I the navy. We went with the expedition.
At first it was all beautiful and grand, and it seemed n.o.ble to search for those others who had gone into that land and never come back. But our s.h.i.+p got locked in the ice, and then came great trouble. A year went by and we did not get free; then another year began.... Four of us set out for the south. Two died. My brother and I were left--”
Lawless exclaimed. He now remembered how general sympathy went out to a well-known county family when it was announced that two of its members were lost in the Arctic regions.
Detmold continued: ”I was the stronger. He grew weaker and weaker. It was awful to live those days: the endless snow and cold, the long nights when you could only hear the whirring of meteors, the bright sun which did not warm you, nor even when many suns, the reflections of itself, followed it--the mocking sun dogs, no more the sun than I am what my mother brought into the world.... We walked like dumb men, for the dreadful cold fills the heart with bitterness. I think I grew to hate him because he could not travel faster, that days were lost, and death crept on so pitilessly. Sometimes I had a mad wish to kill him. May you never know suffering that begets such things! I laughed as I sat beside him, and saw him sink to sleep and die.... I think I could have saved him. When he was gone I--what do men do sometimes when starvation is on them, and they have a hunger of h.e.l.l to live? I did that shameless thing--and he was my brother!... I lived, and was saved.”
Lawless shrank away from the man, but words of horror got no farther than his throat. And he was glad afterwards that it was so; for when he looked again at this woful relic of humanity before him he felt a strange pity.
”G.o.d's hand is on me to punish,” said the man. ”It will never be lifted.
Death were easy: I bear the infamy of living.”
Lawless reached out and caught him gently by the shoulders. ”Poor fellow! poor Detmold!” he said. For an instant the sorrowful face lighted, the square chin trembled, and the hands thrust out towards Lawless, but suddenly dropped.
”Go,” he said humbly, ”and leave me here. We must not meet again... I have had one moment of respite.... Go.”
Without a word, Lawless turned and made his way to the Fort. In the morning the three comrades started on their journey again; but no one sped them on their way or watched them as they went.
THE PILOT OF BELLE AMOUR
He lived in a hut on a jutting crag of the Cliff of the King. You could get to it by a hard climb up a precipitous pathway, or by a ladder of ropes which swung from his cottage door down the cliff-side to the sands. The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour. The cliff was huge, sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness. If you travelled back from its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador, you would add step upon step of barrenness and austerity.
Only at seasons did the bay share the gloom of the cliff. When out of its shadow it was, in summer, very bright and playful, sometimes boisterous, often idle, coquetting with the sands. There was a great difference between the cliff and the bay: the cliff was only as it appeared, but the bay was a shameless hypocrite. For under one shoulder it hid a range of reefs, and, at a spot where the shadows of the cliff never reached it, and the sun played with a grim kind of joy, a long needle of rock ran up at an angle under the water, waiting to pierce irresistibly the adventurous s.h.i.+p that, in some mad moment, should creep to its sh.o.r.es.
The man was more like the cliff than the bay: stern, powerful, brooding.
His only companions were the Indians, who in summer-time came and went, getting stores of him, which he in turn got from a post of the Hudson's Bay Company, seventy miles up the coast. At one time the Company, impressed by the number of skins brought to them by the pilot, and the stores he bought of them, had thought of establis.h.i.+ng a post at Belle Amour; but they saw that his dealings with them were fair and that he had small gain, and they decided to use him as an unofficial agent, and reap what profit was to be had as things stood. Kenyon, the Company's agent, who had the Post, was keen to know why Gaspard the pilot lived at Belle Amour. No white man sojourned near him, and he saw no one save now and then a priest who travelled silently among the Indians, or some fisherman, hunter, or woodsman, who, for pleasure or from pure adventure, ran into the bay and tasted the hospitality tucked away on a ledge of the Cliff of the King.
To Kenyon, Gaspard was unresponsive, however adroit the catechism.
Father Corraine also, who sometimes stepped across the dark threshold of Gaspard's hut, would have, for the man's soul's sake, dug out the heart of his secret; but Gaspard, open with food, fire, blanket, and tireless attendance, closed like the doors of a dungeon when the priest would have read him. At the name of good Ste. Anne he would make the sacred gesture, and would take a blessing when the priest pa.s.sed from his hut to go again into the wilds; but when pressed to disclose his mind and history, he would always say: ”M'sieu', I have nothing to confess.”
After a number of years the priest ceased to ask him, and he remained with the secret of his life, inscrutable and silent.
Being vigilant, one would have seen, however, that he lived in some land of memory or antic.i.p.ation, beyond his life of daily toil and usual dealing. The hut seemed to have been built at a point where east and west and south the great gulf could be seen and watched. It seemed almost ludicrous that a man should call himself a pilot on a coast and at a bay where a pilot was scarce needed once a year. But he was known as Gaspard the pilot, and on those rare occasions when a vessel did anchor in the bay, he performed his duties with such a certainty as to leave unguessed how many deathtraps crouched near that sh.o.r.e. At such times, however, Gaspard seemed to look twenty years younger. A light would come into his face, a stalwart kind of pride sit on him, though beneath there lurked a strange, sardonic look in his deep eyes--such a grim furtiveness as though he should say: ”If I but twist my finger we are all for the fishes.” But he kept his secret and waited. He never seemed to tire of looking down the gulf, as though expecting some s.h.i.+p.
If one appeared and pa.s.sed on, he merely nodded his head, hung up his gla.s.s, returned to his work, or, sitting by the door, talked to himself in low, strange tones. If one came near, making as if it would enter the bay, a hungry joy possessed him. If a storm was on, the joy was the greater. No pilot ever ventured to a s.h.i.+p on such rough seas as Gaspard ventured for small profit or glory.