Читать книгу A Gentleman of Courage - James Oliver Curwood - Страница 5

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As long as men remain to tell the story of the Inland Seas the great autumn storm of 1900 will not be forgotten. It has been set down as a matter of history, and a hundred tales could be told of the ships that went down and the men who died in those days when the Five Lakes were like five mighty churns, whipping and tossing their waters in maelstroms of destruction.

It was not cold. A part of the time the sun shone brightly, and back in the woods from the Superior shore birds sang, and flowers still bloomed. To Pierre and his people this was of strange and mysterious portent, for though they had seen many storms at Five Fingers there had never been one like this, with that terrific roar of enraged waters against rock walls and birds preening themselves and chirping in the sunshine of the forest.

On the second day Pierre took Josette and Marie Antoinette down to the tip of the wooded peninsula that lay between the Second and Middle Finger that they might see the lake as they had never seen it before. It was fun for the women. The wind choked them at times, and they had to scream to be heard, and it whipped their long hair loose until they were like panting naiads, clinging to Pierre's hands, their eyes shining and their hearts thrilled with the excitement of the adventure. Pierre, laughing, told Josette she was as lovely as a girl with her shining hair all about her in a windblown tangle and her cheeks as pink and soft as Marie Antoinette's. But he was only half heard, for the seas were roaring among the rocks below them like the steady thunder of countless guns.

When they came out of the last rim of sheltering spruce and looked beyond the black and dripping rampart of rock that held back the raging waters Josette clung to him in sudden fear, and Marie Antoinette gave a cry that cut like a knife above the wind.

Pierre's heart went dead and still as he stared gray-faced out to sea. There was a twist on his lips where laughter suddenly died.

Out from the shore lay an entanglement of reef and rock, jutting up like great heads of sea-monsters in the quiet and calm of summer, a resting-place for gulls, and strangely quiet and beautiful at times when the water rippled between them in wide paths of green silver. Through this network of waiting traps ran the channel in which the tug made her way to and from the Middle Finger. But there was no channel today. It was lost in a fury of thundering flood, lashing itself into ribbons, and among the rocks, half a mile from where Pierre and his women stood, a ship was beating herself to pieces.

In his first moment of horror Pierre knew they had come just in time to see the end. She was a schooner of possibly three hundred tons, and had plunged broadside upon the long, low reef which Josette herself had named the Dragon because of the jagged teeth of rock which rose from it like the spines of a huge fin. Her tall masts were gone. A mass of wreckage tangled her deck, and Pierre fancied that even above the roar of the surf he could hear the crash of her rending timbers as she rose and fell in mighty sledge-hammer blows upon the reef. As he waited, struck dumb with horror, the vessel was raised half out of the sea, and when she fell back her stern split asunder and the foaming water engulfed her until only her bow was held up by the projecting spines of the Dragon.

Marie Antoinette cried out again, and her face was waxlike in its fear and horror, for very clearly in that moment they saw a moving figure in the bow of the ship. In an instant the figure was inundated and gone.

Life leaped back into Pierre.

"If any live they may sweep into this pit of the Middle Finger," he shouted. "We must help them." Then he turned to Marie Antoinette and placed his mouth close to her ear. "Go back," he cried. "Go back and bring help as swiftly as you can!"

Scarcely were the words spoken when Marie Antoinette was gone with the quickness of a bird, her long hair streaming about her like a veil as she ran. Pierre looked at Josette. She was not frightened now. Her face was white and calm and her eyes were pools of steady fire. She was looking on death. She could almost hear the cries of death. Her glance met Pierre's, and her lips moved, but he did not hear her words. It was then, looking again toward what little remained of the schooner, that they saw something sweeping in toward them among the nearer reefs. It came swiftly, now almost submerged, then popping up for an instant, and was swept at last upon a rock where the waters split like a mill race at the very edge of the smoother sea that ran through the mouth of the Middle Finger.

"It is a raft," shouted Pierre, "and someone is on it!"

Josette's cry rose shrill and piercing:

"It is a woman!"

They could see the figure flung upon the rock, with a hand clutching at its slippery sides, and Pierre's breath came in a sudden gasp of despair when he saw it was a woman. Her face was a ghost's face in the surf mist, and her drenched hair streamed upon the rock as the water ebbed away. She seemed to see them as they stood at the cliff edge, and Pierre thought he heard her voice rise faintly above the thunder of the water, crying out for her life.

He turned and ran to a ragged break in the cliff and climbed down swiftly to the narrow shore line at the edge of the Finger, shouting for Josette to remain where she was. But Josette was close behind him when he began tearing off his clothes. She was terribly white. Blood streaked one of her soft cheeks where she had stumbled against a sharp-edged rock coming down. But her eyes were filled with a strange and unchanging fire, and she fell upon her knees among the stones to unlace one of Pierre's boots while he freed himself of the other. She looked up at him. A glory of strength shone in her face even as her heart was breaking in its agony. For she knew that Pierre Gourdon, her husband, was going into the pit of death; and she tried to smile, and Pierre kissed her lips swiftly and sprang into the sea.

She stood up straight and watched him as he fought his way through the shore surf toward the seething maelstrom where the woman lay upon the rock. Josette could see her clearly. She could see the water and white spume leaping up about her, reaching for her, thrusting her up and then dragging her back, and almost she prayed that God would take her and cover her completely with the sea so that Pierre might turn back. For a little her courage left her and she called wildly upon Pierre to return, telling him she was his wife and that the woman on the rock was nothing to him. And then the woman who was fighting for her life seemed to look into the eyes of Josette through the distance that separated them—and Josette held out her arms and cried encouragement to her.

All sound but the roar of water was lost to Pierre. He was swimming now, and a hundred forces dragged at his body, beating him one way and then the other, while with all his strength he fought to keep himself in the right direction. He knew what it meant to be carried beyond the rock into that deadly place which they called the Pit. There he would die. He would be pulled down by the undertows, and a little later, when they were done with him, his body would be thrown up at the foot of the cliff. The thought did not fill him with fear. It gave him strength to know Josette was watching him in this struggle against death, and that she was praying for him—and for the woman on the rock.

Only Josette and the other woman could measure the eternity of time it took him to win the fight. In the last moment a mighty hand seemed to gather him in its palm and sweep him up to the rock, and he found himself clinging to it, facing the woman. She was as white as he had seen Josette. Her eyes were as dark, and there was something in them that was more terrible to look at than fear. Pierre was exhausted. He drew himself up a few inches at a time, trying to smile the encouragement he could not speak. His eyes reached the level of the rock, and he looked over and down—and saw then what it was the woman was holding in the crook of her arm.

It was a little girl, six or seven years old, and forgetting in his amazement the thundering menace of the sea Pierre thought that in all his life he had never seen anything so beautiful as this child. She was not hurt. Her eyes were wide open—great, dark eyes that were velvety pools of terror—and her face, lovely as an angel's, looked at him from a mass of jet-black hair that dripped with water and clung about her neck and shoulders like silken strands of seaweed. It was as if a vision had crept up from the foaming surf to taunt him, a vision of a face he had painted in his dreams and had prayed for and hoped for all through the years of his life, and he dashed the water from his eyes to see more clearly. Then he reached down and drew the child to him and held her fragile, slim little body in his arms. The woman's face changed then. Its fierce resolution died out. She became suddenly limp, and seeing her weakness Pierre caught hold of her so that the surf would not beat her from the rock.

"I will get you ashore," he shouted. "You must not give up! You must hold to the rock!"

He bent his face to the child's.

"And you——"

She lay against his breast. Her eyes were looking up at him steadily, and words choked in Pierre's throat. Those eyes, it seemed to him, were too beautiful for a child's eyes. Her lips were still red. But her face was the color of a white cameo in its frame of wonderful black hair, and the thought came to him again that it was an angel the storm had blown in from the sea.

The woman was drawing herself up beside him. Another wave broke against the rock, smothering them in its surf. Out of it came her voice.

"I am Mona Guyon," she cried, so close that her head touched his shoulder. "This is my baby. Her father—went down—there—beside the rock—a few minutes ago. Take her ashore——"

A roaring flood inundated them. When it was gone Pierre drew in a deep breath.

"You must hold to the rock," he shouted again. "I will come back for you. It will be easy—easy for all of us to get ashore—if you will hold to the rock!"

When the roar of the surf died away for a moment he told the child what to do. She must put her arms round his neck and ride ashore on his back and draw in deep breaths whenever her face was out of the water. They would swim to the shore very quickly, and then he would come back for mother. He even laughed as he told her how safely and quickly it could be done. And then he kissed her; there on the rock Pierre Gourdon kissed the soft little mouth he had prayed for so many years, and bowed his head a moment, asking God to help him. Then he lay flat on his face and drew her into just the right place on his back, and when her arms were round his neck he tied her hands tightly together under his chin with a strip which he had torn from his shirt. She could not get away after that. They would go ashore together, one way or the other.

Slowly he lowered himself over the slippery lee of the rock, and again he smiled at Mona Guyon. The hour of his Calvary had come, and his heart beat fiercely with the strength of two praying women as he slipped into the sea with his precious burden. The twisting undercurrents reached out like the tentacles of an octopus and tried to drag him into the doom of the Pit. But it was not Pierre Gourdon alone who was fighting for the right to live. The woman on the rock was fighting for him, and the woman ashore—standing to her waist in the boiling surf—no longer had heart or soul or strength of body, for all had gone to him; and about his neck were the arms of a child that gave to him the courage, not only of those who loved and prayed, but of the good God who had called upon him to play his part in this day and hour.

So he fought, and won at last to the place where his beloved Josette reached out and caught him and helped him to the stony shore, where he sank down weakly, with the child in his arms and her face looking up at him from his breast. He had kept her above the water—that had been the never faltering thought in his mind; and now there seemed to be something of awe, of reverence, of unspoken worship in those strangely beautiful eyes of l'Ange, as Pierre called her in his heart, and suddenly her arms tightened round his neck and with a little cry she kissed him.

Then she was in Josette's arms, and Pierre rose to his feet.

A sudden dread swept over him as he looked out at the rock again. It seemed to him the seas were higher, and the woman was not as he had left her. Her face was down, she was limp, a dark blot without life or resistance, and he saw a huge wave drive up and move her like a sodden chip a little nearer to the edge of the Pit. She was not holding on, as he had prayed God she would! A few more waves like that last one, a taller crest, an angrier thrust from the sea—and she would go.

He turned to Josette. She was on her knees among the sharp stones with her arms about the child, and both she and little Mona were looking up at him, waiting, knowing that only Pierre Gourdon was master of himself and of life and death in this hour. He had never seen such eyes as theirs—Josette's in their agony of fear for him, little Mona's so strangely, gloriously beautiful, saying more to him in their childish terror and entreaty than human lips could have spoken.

"I am going back," he said. "It will be easy this time!"

They heard him above the smashing fury of the Pit, and Pierre, catching an unknown note in his own voice, knew that he was lying. As he faced the beat of the sea he made as if he did not hear Josette calling wildly to him that help would surely come in a few minutes, and he must wait. A few minutes and it would be over, for he could see that with each thrust of the frothing surf over the crest of the rock the woman was a little nearer to death.

It was a harder fight this time. At least it seemed so to Pierre, for the old strength was no longer in his limbs, and something seemed to have gone out of his heart. If he could reach the rock, just reach it and cling to it and hold the woman until Marie Antoinette's message brought the men! That was all he prayed for now, all he hoped for. It was inconceivable for his imagination to go beyond those things—the rock, the woman, a jutting tooth of reef to hang to for their lives. He could feel death all about him as he fought and swam. It struck at him, choked him, blinded him, dragged at his breath until it seemed as if he must give up and go riding with it into the maelstroms of the Pit. It laughed and jeered at him and roared in his ears, but through it all he saw the rock, and at last the same strange current caught him with the force of a gargantuan hand and flung him to it.

He tried to climb up, and slipped back. He tried again and again, and then began to make it, an inch at a time. Something was singing in his ears. It was like the droning hum of the saw in the mill. For a moment he rested. He could not see the top of the rock, but he could see the shore, and there were many figures on it now—men running down to where Josette was again standing waist-deep in the water.

With new courage he pulled himself up, and then he gave a cry—a madman's cry of horror, fear and futile warning. The woman had slipped to the very edge of the rock—the edge that lipped the fury of the Pit. She was half over. And she was slipping—slipping. …

He scrambled toward her, flinging himself down the treacherous dip to catch at her long hair. He caught a strand of it, but it pulled away from him—and he thrust himself another foot and buried his fingers in the wet mass of it. In that moment the sea took her. It dragged her down, and Pierre, holding fast to her hair, went with her into the black death of the Pit; and as he went his wide eyes saw once more the blue of the sky and the tops of his beloved forests, and out of his soul came a soundless cry, the faith and gratitude of a man who was not afraid to die, "After all—God has been a long time good to me—Pierre Gourdon!"

Even then, in that roaring baptism of death, his mind was on the woman. It would not do to let her body beat itself among the rocks alone, and in some way—as they were twisted and torn by the rending currents—he got his arms about her. He made no effort to fight, except to hold her. To fight against the forces which had him in their power was impossible. He was like a chip in a boiling pot, twisted and turned, now thrust downward and then up, but never far enough to snatch a breath of air. He felt the blows of the rocks. Then he began going down, until it seemed in the last moment that he was falling swiftly through illimitable space. Consciousness of the woman's presence was gone, but he still held her in his arms.

Only the strong hands of Joe Gourdon and Simon McQuarrie held Josette from joining her husband in the heart of the Pit. She struggled against them, crying out her right to go to him, until they brought her to the narrow rim of beach under the cliff and her eyes fell on little Mona. The wind had blown the child's wet hair back from her face, and a bitter cry came to Josette's lips and resentment burned in her for an instant like a fire. Pierre was gone because of her, because of this beautiful, star-eyed child and the woman! They had taken him from her. And here was the child, living, staring at her with those eyes which had made Pierre call her l'Ange—staring at her—while Pierre—and the other woman—dead and beaten among the rocks. … And then. …

"My mother!"

It was the child's voice, two words crying out to her, faint and yearning and filled with agony above the lash of the sea, and with an answering cry Josette fell down sobbing upon her knees and opened her arms and held the little stranger tightly against her breast. For a space after that she was blind to what happened about her. Dominique stood between her and the sea, even as he saw the grim joke which the fiends of the Pit were playing upon them this day. For these fiends were seldom known to give up their playthings, whether logs or sticks or living things. Once he had known them to keep the body of a dog for days, and at another time a strong-limbed buck had died there, and it was a week before they had tired of him and had thrown him ashore. But this day there was a change. Joe Gourdon and Jeremie Poulin and Poleon Dufresne had leaped waist-deep into the surf and were bringing out the bodies of Pierre and the woman!

It was Marie Antoinette who knelt beside them first, and unclasped Pierre's arms from about the woman. And then Josette saw them. She staggered to her feet and ran past Dominique, and the first she looked upon was the white, dead face of the mother. Very tenderly then she took Pierre's head in her arms, and bent her own over it until both their faces were shrouded in her long hair.

"He isn't dead," she whispered. No one heard her, for she was saying it only to herself, and then to Pierre. "He isn't dead. He isn't dead." She repeated the words, swaying her body gently with Pierre, and the others drew back, and Marie Antoinette hid little Mona's face against her while Simon McQuarrie and Telesphore Clamart bore the dead woman between them round the end of the cliff. And Josette kept repeating, "He isn't dead, he isn't dead," and she kissed Pierre's lips, and pressed her cheek against his cheek, and the women and men of Five Fingers stood back and waited, none daring to be first to break in upon these sacred moments which belonged to Josette and her dead.

At last Marie Antoinette came up softly and knelt beside Josette and put a loving hand about her shoulder. Josette's eyes turned to look at her and they were soft and glowing and so strange they frightened Marie Antoinette. "He isn't dead," she was still saying, and she bowed her face down again to Pierre's.

Choking the sob in her throat, Marie Antoinette put her hand to Josette's face—and a great shock ran through her. She had touched Pierre's cheek. She felt with her other hand, and drew back Josette's hair, her heart suddenly throbbing like an Indian drum. Then she saw it was not the madness of grief that kept Josette repeating those words, but the intuition of a soul which had felt the nearness of its mate, for Pierre's eyes slowly opened and the first vision which came to him out of a roaring sea of dreams was the face of his wife.

From the group of tensely waiting people Mona had come, sobbing in a strange, quiet way for her mother, and as Marie Antoinette drew a little back Josette caught the child close to her, along with Pierre, and as Pierre reached his arms up weakly to them both the thought came to him again, "God has been a long time good to me—Pierre Gourdon!"