Читать книгу Flower of the North - James Oliver Curwood - Страница 7

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A dozen steps beyond the door Philip paused in the shadow of a dense spruce, half persuaded to return. From where he stood he could see Gregson bending over the table, already at work on the picture. He confessed that the sketch had startled him. He knew that it had sent the hot blood rushing to his face, and that only through a fortunate circumstance had Gregson ascribed its effect upon him to something that was wide of the truth. Miss Brokaw was a thousand or more miles away. At this moment she was somewhere in the North Atlantic, if their ship had left Halifax. She had never been in the north. More than that, he knew that Gregson had never seen Miss Brokaw, and had heard of her only through himself and the society columns of the newspapers. How could he explain his possession of the sketch?

He drew a step or two nearer to the open door, and stopped again. If he returned to question Gregson it would draw him perilously near to explanations which he did not care to make, to the one secret which he wished to guard from his friend's knowledge. After all, the picture was only a resemblance. It could be nothing but a resemblance, even though it was so striking and unusual that it had thrown him off his guard at first. When he returned later and looked at it again he would no doubt be able to see his error.

He walked on through the spruce shadows and up a narrow trail that led to the bald knob of the ridge, feeling his way with his right hand before him when the denseness of the forest shut out the light of the stars and the moon, until at last he stood out strong and clear under the glow of the skies, with the world sweeping out in black and gray mystery around him. To the north was the Bay, reaching away like a vast black plain. Half a mile distant two or three lights were burning over Fort Churchill, red eyes peering up out of the deep pool of darkness; to the south and west there swept the gray, starlit distances which lay between him and civilization.

He leaned against a great rock, resting his elbows in a carpet of moss, and his eyes turned into the mystery of those distances. The sea of spruce-tops that rose out of the ragged valley at his feet whispered softly in the night wind; from out of their depths trembled the low hoot of an owl; over the vaster desolation beyond hovered a weird and unbroken silence. More than once the spirit of this world had come to him in the night and had roused him from his slumber to sit alone out under the stars, imagining all that it might tell him if he could read the voice of it in the whispering of the trees, if he could but understand it as he longed to understand it, and could find in it the peace which he knew that it all but held for him. The spirit of it had never been nearer to him than to-night. He felt it close to him, so near that it seemed like the warm, vibrant touch of a presence at his side, something which had come to him in a voiceless loneliness as great as his own, watching and listening with him beside the rock. It seemed nearer to him since he had seen and talked with Gregson. It was much nearer to him since a few minutes ago, when he had looked upon what he had first thought to be the face of Eileen Brokaw.

And this was the world—the spirit—that had changed him. He wondered if Gregson had seen the change which he tried so hard to conceal. He wondered if Miss Brokaw would see it when she came, and if her soft, gray eyes would read to the bottom of him as they had fathomed him once before upon a time which seemed years and years ago. Thoughts like these troubled him. Twice that day he had found stealing over him a feeling that was almost physical pain, and yet he knew that this pain was but the gnawing of a great loneliness in his heart. In these moments he had been sorry that he had brought Gregson back into his life. And with Gregson he was bringing back Eileen Brokaw. He was more than sorry for that. The thought of it made him grow warm and uncomfortable, though the night air from off the Bay was filled with the chill tang of the northern icebergs. Again his thoughts brought him face to face with the old pictures, the old life. With them came haunting memories of a Philip Whittemore who had once lived, and who had died; and with these ghosts of the past there surged upon him the loneliness which seemed to crush and stifle him. Like one in a dream he was swept back. Over the black spruce at his feet, far into the gray, misty distances beyond, over forests and mountains and the vast, grim silences his vision reached out until he saw life as it had begun for him, and as he had lived it for a time. It had opened fair. It had given promise. It had filled him with hope and ambition. And then it had changed.

Unconsciously he clenched his hands as he thought of what had followed, of the black days of ruin, of death, of the dissolution of all that he had hoped and dreamed for. He had fought, because he was born a fighter. He had risen again and again, only to find misfortune still at his face. At first he had laughed, and had called it bad luck. But the bad luck had followed him, dogging him with a persistence which developed in him a new perspective of things. He dropped away from his clubs. He began to measure men and women as he had not measured them before, and there grew in him slowly a revulsion for what those measurements revealed. The spirit that was growing in him called out for bigger things, for the wild freedom which he had tasted for a time with Gregson—for a life which was not warped by the gilded amenities of the crowded ballroom to-night, by the frenzied dollar-fight to-morrow. No one could understand that change in him. He could find no spirit in sympathy with him, no chord in another breast that he could reach out and touch and thrill with understanding. Once he had hoped—and tried—

A deep breath, almost a sigh, fell from his lips as he thought of that last night, at the Brokaw ball. He heard again the laughter and chatter of men and women, the soft rustle of skirts—and then the break, the silence, as the low, sweet music of his favorite waltz began, while he stood screened behind a bank of palms looking down into the clear gray eyes of Eileen Brokaw. He saw himself as he had stood then, leaning over her slim white shoulders, intoxicated by her beauty, his face pale with the fear of what he was about to say; and he saw the girl, with her beautiful head thrown a little back, so that her golden hair almost touched his lips, waiting for him to speak. For months he had fought against the fascination of her beauty. Again and again he had almost surrendered to it, only to pull himself back in time. He had seen this girl, as pure-looking as an angel, strike deeply at the hearts of other men; he had heard her laugh and talk lightly of the wounds she had made. Behind the eyes which gazed up at him, dear and sweet as pools of sunlit water, he knew there lay the consuming passion for power, for admiration, for the froth-like pleasures of the life that was swirling about them. Sincerity was but their mask. He knew that the beautiful gray eyes lied to him when he saw in them all that he held glorious in womanhood.

He laughed softly to himself as the picture grew in his mind, and he saw Ransom come blundering in through the palms, mopping his red face and chattering inane things to little Miss Meesen. Ransom was always blundering. This time his blunder saved Philip. The passionate words died on his lips; and when Ransom and Miss Meesen turned about in a giggling flutter, he spoke no words of love, but opened up his heart to this girl whom he would have loved if she had been like her eyes. It was his last hope—that she would understand him, see with him the emptiness of his life, sympathize with him.

And she had laughed at him!

She had risen to her feet; there had come for an instant a flash like that of fire in her eyes; her voice trembled a little when she spoke. There was resentment in the poise of her white shoulders as Ransom's voice came to them in a loud laugh from behind the palms; her red lips showed disdain and anger. She hated Ransom for breaking in; she despised Philip for allowing the interruption to tear away her triumph. Her own betrayal of herself was like tonic to Philip. He laughed joyously when he was alone out in the cool night air. Ransom never knew why Philip hunted him out and shook his fat hand so warmly at parting.

Philip again felt himself in the fever of that night as he turned from the rock and began picking his way down the side of the ridge toward the Bay. He found himself wondering what had become of good-natured, dense-headed Ransom, who had all he could do to spend his father's allowance. From Ransom his thoughts turned to little Harry Dell, Roscoe, big Dan Philips, and three or four others who had sacrificed their hearts at Miss Brokaw's feet. He grimaced as he thought of young Dell, who had worshiped the ground she walked on, and who had gone straight to the devil when she threw him over. He wondered, too, where Roscoe was. He knew that Roscoe would have won out if it had not been for the financial crash which took his brokerage firm off its feet and left him a pauper. He had heard that Roscoe had gone up into British Columbia to recuperate his fortune in Douglas fir. As for big Dan—

Philip stumbled over a rock, and rose with a bruised knee. The shock brought him back to realities, and a few moments later he stood upon the narrow boulder-strewn beach, rubbing his knee and calling himself a fool for allowing the old thoughts to stir him up. Out there, somewhere, Brokaw and his daughter were coming. That Miss Brokaw was with her father was a circumstance which was of no importance to him. At least he told himself so, and set his face toward Churchill.

To-night the stars and the moon seemed to be more than usually brilliant. About him the great masses of rock, the tumbling surf, the edge of the forest, and the Bay itself were illumined as if by the light of a softly radiant day. He looked at his watch and found that it was past midnight. He had been up since dawn, and yet he felt no touch of fatigue, no need of sleep. He took off his cap and walked bareheaded in the mellow light, his moccasined feet falling lightly, his eyes alert to all that this wonderful night world might hold for him. Ahead of him rose a giant mass of rock, worn smooth and slippery by the water dashed against it in the crashing storms of countless centuries, and this he climbed, panting when he reached the top. His eyes turned to where he saw Fort Churchill sleeping along the edge of the Bay.

In that same spot, a great pool of night-glow between two forest-crowned ridges, it had lain for hundreds of years. He passed the ancient landing-place of rocks, built a hundred and fifty years ago for the first ships that came over the strange sea; he stood upon the tumbled foundations of the Fort, that was still older, and saw the starlight glinting on one of the brass cannon that lay where it had fallen amid the debris, untouched and unmoved since the days, ages-gone, when it had last thundered its welcome or its defiance through the solitudes; he walked slowly along the shore where the sea had lashed wearily for many a year, to reach the wilderness dead, and where now, triumphant, the frothing surf bared gun-case coffins and tumbled the bones of men down into its sullen depths. And such men! Men who had lived and died when the world was unborn in a half of its knowledge and science, when red blood was the great capital, strong hearts the winners of life. And there were women, too, women who had come with these men, and died with them, in the opening-up of a new world. It was such men as these, and such women as these, that Philip loved, and he walked with bared head and swiftly beating heart over the unmarked jungle of the dead.

And then he came to other things, the first low log buildings of Churchill, to the silence of sleeping life. New buildings loomed up—working quarters of men who were grubbing for dollars, the new wharves, the skeletons of elevators, sullen, windowless warehouses, the office-buildings of men who were already fighting and quarreling and gripping at one another's throats in the struggle for supremacy, for the biggest and ripest plums in this new land of opportunity. The dollar-fight had begun, and the things that already marked its presence loomed monstrous and grotesque to Philip, as if jeering at the forgotten efforts of those whom the sea was washing away. And suddenly it struck Philip that the sea, working ceaselessly, digging away at its dead, was not the enemy of the nameless creatures in the gun-case coffins, but that it was a friend, stanch through centuries, rescuing them now from the desecration that was to come; and for a moment he was resistless to the spirit that moved him about and made him face that sea with something that was almost a prayer in his heart.

As he turned he saw that a light had appeared in one of the low log buildings which contained the two offices of the Keewatin Mines and Lands Company. The light, and the bulky shadow of old Pearce, which appeared for a moment on one of the drawn curtains, aroused Philip to other thoughts. Since his arrival at Churchill he had made the acquaintance of Pearce, and it struck him now that just such a man as this might be Lord Fitzhugh Lee. The Keewatin Mines and Lands Company had no mines and few lands, and yet Pearce had told him that they were doing a hustling business down south, selling stock on mineral claims that couldn't be worked for years. After all, was he any better than Pearce?

The old bitterness rose in him. He was no better than Pearce, no better than this Lord Fitzhugh himself, and it was fate—fate and people, that had made him so. He walked swiftly now, following close along the shore in the hard stretch kept bare by the tides, until he came to the red coals of half a dozen Indian fires on the edge of the forest beyond the company's buildings. A dog scented him and howled. He heard a guttural voice break in a word of command from one of the tepees, and there was silence again.

He turned to the right, burying himself deeper and deeper into the great silence of the north, his quick steps keeping pace with the thoughts that were passing through his brain. Fate, bad luck, circumstance—they had been against him. He had told himself this a hundred times, had laughed at them with the confidence of one who knew that some day he would rise above these things in triumph. And yet what were these elements of fortune, as he had called them, but people? A feeling of personal resentment began to oppress him. People had downed him, and not circumstance and bad luck. Men and women had made a failure of him, and not fate. For the first time it occurred to him that the very men and women whom Brokaw and his associates had duped, whom Pearce was duping, would play the game in the same way if they had the opportunity. What if he had played on the winning side, if he had enlisted his fighting energies with men like Brokaw and Pearce, fought for money and power in place of this other thing, which seemed to count so little? Other men would have given much to have been in his favor with Eileen Brokaw. He might have been in the front of this other fight, the winning fight, the possessor of fortune, a beautiful woman—

He stopped suddenly. It seemed to him that he had heard a voice. He had climbed from out of the shadow of the forest until he stood now on a gray cliff of rock that reached out into the Bay, like the point of a great knife guarding Churchill. A block of sandstone rose in his path, and he passed quietly around it. In another instant he had flattened himself against it.

A dozen feet away, full in the moonlight, three figures sat on the edge of the cliff, as motionless as though hewn out of rock. Instinctively Philip's hand slipped to his revolver holster, but he drew it back when he saw that one of the three figures was that of a woman. Beside her crouched a huge wolf-dog; on the other side of the dog sat a man. The man was resting in the attitude of an Indian, with his elbows on his knees, his chin in the palms of his hands, gazing steadily and silently out over the Bay toward Churchill.

It was his companion that held Philip motionless against the face of the rock. She, too, was leaning forward, gazing in that same steady, silent way toward Churchill. She was bareheaded. Her hair fell loose over her shoulders and streamed down her back until it piled itself upon the rock, shining dark and lustrous in the light of the moon. Philip knew that she was not an Indian.

Suddenly the girl sat erect, and then sprang to her feet, partly facing him, the breeze rippling her hair about her face and shoulders, her eyes turned to the vast gray depths of the world beyond the forests. For an instant she turned so that the light of the moon fell full upon her, and in that moment Philip thought that her eyes had searched him out in the shadow of the rock and were looking straight into his own. Never had he seen such a beautiful face among the forest people. He had dreamed of such faces beside camp-fires, in the deep loneliness of long nights in the forests, when he had awakened to bring before him visions of what Eileen Brokaw might have been to him if he had found her one of these people. He drew himself closer to the rock. The girl turned again to the edge of the cliff, her slender form silhouetted against the starlit sky. She leaned over the dog, and he heard her voice, soft and caressing, but he could not understand her words. The man lifted his head, and he recognized the swarthy, clear-cut features of a French half-breed. He moved away as quietly as he had come.

The girl's voice stopped him.

"And that is Churchill, Pierre—the Churchill you have told me of, where the ships come in?"

"Yes, that is Churchill, Jeanne."

For a moment there was silence. Then, clear and low, with a wild, sobbing note in her voice that thrilled Philip, the girl cried: