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The Courage of Marge O'Doone, a novel by James Oliver Curwood |
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Chapter 14 |
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_ CHAPTER XIV In the days and weeks that followed, this room beyond the closed door, and what it contained, became to David more and more the great mystery in Father Roland's life. It impressed itself upon him slowly but resolutely as the key to some tremendous event in his life, some vast secret which he was keeping from all other human knowledge, unless, perhaps, Mukoki was a silent sharer. At times David believed this was so, and especially after that day when, carefully and slowly, and in good English, as though the Missioner had trained him in what he was to say, the Cree said to him: "No one ever goes into that room, m'sieu. And no man has ever seen _mon Pere's_ violin." The words were spoken in a low monotone without emphasis or emotion, and David was convinced they were a message from the Missioner, something Father Roland wanted him to know without speaking the words himself. Not again after that first night did he apologize for his visits to the room, nor did he ever explain why the door was always locked, or why he invariably locked it after him when he went in. Each night, when they were at home, he disappeared into the room, opening the door only enough to let his body pass through; sometimes he remained there for only a few minutes, and occasionally for a long time. At least once a day, usually in the evening, he played the violin. It was always the same piece that he played. There was never a variation, and David could not make up his mind that he had ever heard it before. At these times, if Mukoki happened to be in the Chateau, as Father Roland called his place, he would sit like one in a trance, scarcely breathing until the music had ceased. And when the Missioner came from the room his face was always lit up in a kind of halo. There was one exception to all this, David noticed. The door was never unlocked when there was a visitor. No other but himself and Mukoki heard the sound of the violin, and this fact, in time, impressed David with the deep faith and affection of the Little Missioner. One evening Father Roland came from the room with his face aglow with some strange happiness that had come to him in there, and placing his hands on David's shoulders he said, with a yearning and yet hopeless inflection in his voice: "I wish you would stay with me always, David. It has made me younger, and happier, to have a son." In David there was growing--but concealed from Father Roland's eyes for a long time--a strange insistent restlessness. It ran in his blood, like a thing alive, whenever he looked at the face of the Girl. He wanted to go on. And yet life at the Chateau, after the first two weeks, was anything but dull and unexciting. They were in the heart of the great trapping country. Forty miles to the north was a Hudson's Bay post where an ordained minister of the Church of England had a mission. But Father Roland belonged to the forest people alone. They were his "children," scattered in their shacks and tepees over ten thousand square miles of country, with the Chateau as its centre. He was ceaselessly on the move after that first fortnight, and David was always with him. The Indians worshipped him, and the quarter-breeds and half-breeds and occasional French called him "_mon Pere_" in very much the same tone of voice as they said "Our Father" in their prayers. These people of the trap-lines were a revelation to David. They were wild, living in a savage primitiveness, and yet they reverenced a divinity with a conviction that amazed him. And they died. That was the tragedy of it. They died--too easily. He understood, after a while, why a country ten times as large as the state of Ohio had altogether a population of less than twenty-five thousand, a fair-sized town. Their belts were drawn too tight--men, women, and little children--their belts too tight. That was it! Father Roland emphasized it. Too much hunger in the long, terrible months of winter, when to keep body and soul together they trapped the furred creatures for the hordes of luxurious barbarians in the great cities of the earth. Just a steady, gnawing hunger all through the winter--hunger for something besides meat, a hunger that got into the bones, into the eyes, into arms and legs--a hunger that brought sickness, and then death. That winter he saw grown men and women die of measles as easily as flies that had devoured poison. They were over at Metoosin's, sixty miles to the west of the Chateau, when Metoosin returned to his shack with supplies from a Post. Metoosin had taken up lynx and marten and mink that would sell the next year in London and Paris for a thousand dollars, and he had brought back a few small cans of vegetables at fifty cents a can, a little flour at forty cents a pound, a bit of cheap cloth at the price of rare silk, some tobacco and a pittance of tea, and he was happy. A half season's work on the trap-line and his family could have eaten it all in a week--if they had dared to eat as much as they needed. "And still they're always in the debt of the Posts," the Missioner said, the lines settling deeply on his face. And yet David could not but feel more and more deeply the thrill, the fascination, and, in spite of its hardships, the recompense of this life of which he had become a part. For the first time in his life he clearly perceived the primal measurements of riches, of contentment and of ambition, and these three things that he saw stripped naked for his eyes many other things which he had not understood, or in blindness had failed to see, in the life from which he had come. Metoosin, with that little treasure of food from the Post, did not know that he was poor, or that through many long years he had been slowly starving. He was rich! He was a great trapper! And his Cree wife I-owa, with her long, sleek braid and her great, dark eyes, was tremendously proud of her lord, that he should bring home for her and the children such a wealth of things--a little flour, a few cans of things, a few yards of cloth, and a little bright ribbon. David choked when he ate with them that night. But they were happy! That, after all, was the reward of things, even though people died slowly of something which they could not understand. And there were, in the domain of Father Roland, many Metoosins, and many I-owas, who prayed for nothing more than enough to eat, clothes to cover them, and the unbroken love of their firesides. And David thought of them, as the weeks passed, as the most terribly enslaved of all the slaves of Civilization--slaves of vain civilized women; for they had gone on like this for centuries, and would go on for other generations, giving into the hands of the great Company their life's blood which, in the end, could be accounted for by a yearly dole of food which, under stress, did not quite serve to keep body and soul together. It was after a comprehension of these things that David understood Father Roland's great work. In this kingdom of his, running approximately fifty miles in each direction from the Chateau--except to the northward, where the Post lay--there were two hundred and forty-seven men, women, and children. In a great book the Little Missioner had their names, their ages, the blood that was in them, and where they lived; and by them he was worshipped as no man that ever lived in that vast country of cities and towns below the Height of Land. At every tepee and shack they visited there was some token of love awaiting Father Roland; a rare skin here, a pair of moccasins there, a pair of snow shoes that it had taken an Indian woman's hands weeks to make, choice cuts of meat, but mostly--as they travelled along--the thickly furred skins of animals; and never did they go to a place at which the Missioner did not leave something in return, usually some article of clothing so thick and warm that no Indian was rich enough to buy it for himself at the Post. Twice each winter Father Roland sent down to Thoreau a great sledge load of these contributions of his people, and Thoreau, selling them, sent back a still greater sledge load of supplies that found their way in this manner of exchange into the shacks and tepees of the forest people. "If I were only rich!" said Father Roland one night at the Chateau, when it was storming dismally outside. "But I have nothing, David. I can do only a tenth of what I would like to do. There are only eighty families in this country of mine, and I have figured that a hundred dollars a family, spent down there and not at the Post, would keep them all in comfort through the longest and hardest winter. A hundred dollars, in Winnipeg, would buy as much as an Indian trapper could get at the Post for a thousand dollars' worth of fur, and five hundred dollars is a good catch. It is terrible, but what can I do? I dare not buy their furs and sell them for my people, because the Company would blacklist the whole lot and it would be a great calamity in the end. But if I had money--if I could do it with my own...." David had been thinking of that. In the late January snow two teams went down to Thoreau in place of one. Mukoki had charge of them, and with him went an even half of what David had brought with him--fifteen hundred dollars in gold certificates. "If I live I'm going to make them a Christmas present of twice that amount each year," he said. "I can afford it. I fancy that I shall take a great pleasure in it, and that occasionally I shall return into this country to make a visit." It was the first time that he had spoken as though he would not remain with the Missioner indefinitely. But the conviction that the time was not far away when he would be leaving him had been growing within him steadily. He kept it to himself. He fought against it even. But it grew. And, curiously enough, it was strongest when Father Roland was in the locked room playing softly on the violin. David never mentioned the room. He feigned an indifference to its very existence. And yet in spite of himself the mystery of it became an obsession with him. Something within it seemed to reach out insistently and invite him in, like a spirit chained there by the Missioner himself, crying for freedom. One night they returned to the Chateau through a blizzard from the cabin of a half-breed whose wife was sick, and after their supper the Missioner went into the mystery-room. He played the violin as usual. But after that there was a long silence. When Father Roland came out, and seated himself opposite David at the small table on which their books were scattered, David received a shock. Clinging to the Missioner's shoulder, shimmering like a polished silken thread in the lampglow, was a long, shining hair--a woman's hair. With an effort David choked back the word of amazement in his throat, and began turning over the pages of a book. And then suddenly, the Missioner saw that silken thread. David heard his quick breath. He saw, without raising his eyes, the slow, almost stealthy movement of his companion's fingers as he plucked the hair from his arm and shoulder, and when David looked up the hair was gone, and one of Father Roland's hands was closed tightly, so tightly that the veins stood out on it. He rose from the table, and again went into the room beyond the locked door. David's heart was beating like an unsteady hammer. He could not quite account for the strange effect this incident had upon him. He wanted more than ever to see that room beyond the locked door. February--the Hunger Moon--of this year was a month of great storm in the Northland. This meant sickness, and a great deal of travel for Father Roland. He and David were almost ceaselessly on the move, and its hardships gave the finishing touches to David's education. The wilderness, vast and empty as it was, no longer held a dread for him. He had faced its bitterest storms; he had slept with the deep snow under his blankets; he had followed behind the Missioner through the blackest nights, when it had seemed as though no human soul could find its way; and he had looked on death. Once they ran swiftly to it through a night blizzard; again it came, three in a family, so far to the west that it was out of Father Roland's beaten trails; and again he saw it in the Madonna-like face of a young French girl, who had died clutching a cross to her breast. It was this girl's white face, sweet as a child's and strangely beautiful in death, that stirred David most deeply. She must have been about the age of the girl whose picture he carried next his heart. Soon after this, early in March, he had definitely made up his mind. There was no reason now why he should not _go on_. He was physically fit. Three months had hardened him until he was like a rock. He believed that he had more than regained his weight. He could beat Father Roland with either rifle or pistol, and in one day he had travelled forty miles on snow shoes. That was when they had arrived just in time to save the life of Jean Croisset's little girl, who lived over on the Big Thunder. The crazed father had led them a mad race, but they had kept up with him. And just in time. There had not been an hour to lose. After that Croisset and his half-breed wife would have laid down their lives for Father Roland--and for him. For the forest people had begun to accept him as a part of Father Roland; more and more he could see their growing love for him, their gladness when he came, their sorrow when he left, and it gave him what he thought of as a sort of _filling_ satisfaction, something he had never quite fully experienced before in all his life. He knew that he would come back to them again some day--that, in the course of his life, he would spend a great deal of time among them. He assured Father Roland of this. The Missioner did not question him deeply about his "friends" in the western mountains. But night after night he helped him to mark out a trail on the maps that he had at the Chateau, giving him a great deal of information which David wrote down in a book, and letters to certain good friends of his whom he would find along the way. As the slush snow came, and the time when David would be leaving drew nearer, Father Roland could not entirely conceal his depression, and he spent more time in the room beyond the locked door. Several times when about to enter the room he seemed to hesitate, as if there were something which he wanted to say to David. Twice David thought he was almost on the point of inviting him into the room, and at last he came to believe that the Missioner wanted him to know what was beyond that mysterious door, and yet was afraid to tell him, or ask him in. It was well along in March that the thing happened which he had been expecting. Only it came in a manner that amazed him deeply. Father Roland came from the room early in the evening, after playing his violin. He locked the door, and as he put on his cap he said: "I shall be gone for an hour, David. I am going over to Mukoki's cabin." He did not ask David to accompany him, and as he turned to go the key that he had held in his hand dropped to the floor. It fell with a quite audible sound. The Missioner must have heard it, and would have recovered it had it slipped from his fingers accidentally. But he paid no attention to it. He went out quickly, without glancing back. For several minutes David stared at the key without moving from his chair near the table. It meant but one thing. He was invited to go into that room--_alone_. If he had had a doubt it was dispelled by the fact that Father Roland had left a light burning in there. It was not chance. There was a purpose to it all: the light, the audible dropping of the heavy key, the swift going of the Missioner. David made himself sure of this before he rose from his chair. He waited perhaps five minutes. Then he picked up the key. At the door, as the key clicked in the lock, he hesitated. The thought came to him that if he was making a mistake it would be a terrible mistake. It held his hand for a moment. Then, slowly, he pushed the door inward and followed it until he stood inside. The first thing that he noticed was a big brass lamp, of the old style, brought over from England by the Company a hundred years ago, and he held his breath in anticipation of something tremendous impending. At first he saw nothing that impressed him forcibly. The room was a disappointment in that first glance. He could see nothing of its mystery, nothing of that strangeness, quite indefinable even to himself, which he had expected. And then, as he stood there staring about with wide-open eyes, the truth flashed upon him with a suddenness that drew a quick breath from his lips. He was standing in a _woman's room_! There was no doubt. It looked very much as though a woman had left it only recently. There was a bed, fresh and clean, with a white counterpane. She had left on that bed a--nightgown; yes, and he noticed that it had a frill of lace at the neck. And on the wall were her garments, quite a number of them, and a long coat of a curious style, with a great fur collar. There was a small dresser, oddly antique, and on it were a brush and comb, a big red pin cushion, and odds and ends of a woman's toilet affairs. Close to the bed were a pair of shoes and a pair of slippers, with unusually high heels, and hanging over the edge of the counterpane was a pair of long stockings. The walls of the room were touched up, as if by a woman's hands, with pictures and a few ornaments. Where the garments were hanging David noticed a pair of woman's snow shoes, and a woman's moccasins under a picture of the Madonna. On the mantel there was a tall vase filled with the dried stems of flowers. And then came the most amazing discovery of all. There was a second table between the lamp and the bed, and it was set for two! Yes, for _two_! No, for _three_! For, a little in shadow, David saw a crudely made high-chair--a baby's chair--and on it were a little knife and fork, a baby spoon, and a little tin plate. It was astounding. Perfectly incredible. And David's eyes sought questingly for a door through which a woman might come and go mysteriously and unseen. There was none, and the one window of the room was so high up that a person standing on the ground outside could not look in. And now it began to dawn upon David that all these things he was looking at were old--very old. In the Chateau the Missioner no longer ate on tin plates. The shoes and slippers must have been made a generation ago. The rag carpet under his feet had lost its vivid lines of colouring. Age impressed itself upon him. This was a woman's room, but the woman had not been here recently. And the child had not been here recently. For the first time his eyes turned in a closer inspection of the table on which stood the big brass lamp. Father Roland's violin lay beside it. He made a step or two nearer, so that he could see beyond the lamp, and his heart gave a sudden jump. Shimmering on the faded red cloth of the table, glowing as brightly as though it had been clipped from a woman's head but yesterday, was a long, thick tress of hair! It was dark, richly dark, and his second impression was one of amazement at the length of it. The tress was as long as the table--fully a yard down the woman's back it must have hung. It was tied at the end with a bit of white ribbon. David drew slowly back toward the door, stirred all at once by a great doubt. Had Father Roland meant him to look upon all this? A lump rose suddenly in his throat. He had made a mistake--a great mistake. He felt now like one who had broken into the sanctity of a sacred place. He had committed sacrilege. The Missioner had not dropped the key purposely. It must have been an accident. And he--David--was guilty of a great blunder. He withdrew from the room, and locked the door. He dropped the key where he had found it on the floor, and sat down again with his book. He did not read. He scarcely saw the lines of the printed page. He had not been in his chair more than ten minutes when he heard quick footsteps, followed by a hand at the door, and Father Roland came in. He was visibly excited, and his glance shot at once to the room which David had just left. Then his eyes scanned the floor. The key was gleaming where it had fallen, and with an exclamation of relief the Missioner snatched it up. "I thought I had lost my key," he laughed, a bit nervously; then he added, with a deep breath: "It's snowing to-night. A heavy snow, and there will be good sledging for a few days. God knows I don't want you to leave me, but if it must be--we should take advantage of this snow. It will be the last. Mukoki and I will go with you as far as the Reindeer Lake country, two hundred miles northwest. David--_must_ you go?" It seemed to David that two tiny fists were pounding against his breast, where the picture lay. "Yes, I must go," he said. "I have quite made up my mind to that. I must go." _ |
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