The Project Gutenberg EBook of Parables Of A Province, by Gilbert Parker This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Parables Of A Province Author: Gilbert Parker Release Date: October 18, 2006 [EBook #6242] Last Updated: August 27, 2016 Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARABLES OF A PROVINCE *** Produced by David Widger
“I am a king,
I have no crown,
I have no throne to sit in—”
“Pull me up, boy,” she said. She wound a leg about the staff, and, taking
hold, he drew her up as if she had been a feather.
“If I had a hundred mouths I would kiss you for that,” she said, still
mocking; “but having only one, I’ll give it to the cat, and weep for
Golgothar.”
“Silly jade,” he said, and turned towards his tent.
As they passed a slippery and dangerous place, where was one strong
solitary tree, she suddenly threw a noose over him, drew it fast and
sprang far out over the precipice into the air. Even as she did so, he
jumped behind the tree, and clasped it, else on the slippery place he
would have gone over with her. The rope came taut, and presently he drew
her up again to safety, and while she laughed at him and mocked him, he
held her tight under his arm, and carried her to his lodge, where he let
her go.
“Why did you do it, devil’s madcap?” he asked.
“Why didn’t you wait for the hundred men so strong?” she laughed.
“Why did you jump behind the tree?
“‘If I had a hundred men, heigho,
I would buy my corn for a penny a gill.
If I had a hundred men or so,
I would dig a grave for the maid of the hill, heigho!’”
He did not answer her, but stirred the soup in the pot and tasted it, and
hung a great piece of meat over the fire. Then he sat down, and only once
did he show anger as she mocked him, and that was when she thrust her hand
into his breast, took out the little stone image, and said:
“If a little stone god had a hundred hearts,
Would a little stone goddess trust in one?”
Then she made as if she would throw it into the fire, but he caught her
hand and crushed it, so that she cried out for pain and anger, and said:
“Brute of iron, go break the posts in the brigands’ prison-house, but
leave a poor girl’s wrist alone. If I had a hundred men—” she added,
mocking wildly again, and then, springing at him, put her two thumbs at
the corners of his eyes, and cried: “Stir a hand, and out they will come—your
eyes for my bones!”
He did not stir till her fury was gone. Then he made her sit down and eat
with him, and afterwards she said softly to him, and without a laugh: “Why
should the people say, ‘Golgothar is our shame, for he has great strength,
and yet he does nothing but throw great stones for sport into the sea’?”
He had the simple mind of a child, and he listened to her patiently, and
at last got up and began preparing for a journey, cleaning all his
weapons, and gathering them together. She understood him, and she said,
with a little laugh like music: “One strong man is better than a hundred—a
little key will open a great door easier than a hundred hammers. What is
the strength of a hundred bullocks without this?” she added, tapping him
on the forehead.
Then they sat down and talked together quietly for a long time; and at
sunset she saw him start away upon great errands.
Before two years had gone, Nooni, the city of their foes, was taken; the
chain wall of the rebels opened to the fish and corn of the poor; the
children wandered in the forest without fear of wild boars; the dyke was
built to save the people in the lowlands; and Golgothar carried to the
castle the King had given him the daughter of the city, freed from Mirnan.
“If Golgothar had a hundred wives—” said a voice to the strong man
as he entered the castle gates. Looking up he saw Sapphire. He stretched
out his hand to her in joy and friendship.
“—I would not be one of them,” she added, with a mocking laugh, as
she dropped from the wall, leaped the moat by the help of her staff, and
danced away laughing. There are those who say, however that tears fell
down her cheeks as she laughed.
“Keeper, O Keeper of the Kimash Hills!
I am as a dog in the North Sea,
I am as a bat in a cave,
As a lizard am I on a prison wall,
As a tent with no pole,
As a bird with one wing;
I am as a seal in the desert,
I am as a wild horse alone.
O Scarlet Hunter of the Kimash Hills!
Thou hast an arm like a shooting star,
Thou hast an eye like the North Sky fires,
Thou hast a pouch for the hungry,
Thou hast a tent for the lost:
Hear me, O Keeper of the Kimash Hills!”
And whether or not this availed him, who can tell? There be many names of
the One Thing, and the human soul hath the same north and south, if there
be any north and south and east and west, save in the words of men. But
something availed; and one day a footworn traveller, entering the Valley
at the southmost corner, laid his cap and bag, moccasins, bow and arrow,
and an iron weapon away in a hollow log, seeing not that there were also
another bag and cap, and a pair of moccasins there. Then, barefooted and
bareheaded, he marched slowly up the Valley, and all its loveliness smote
him as a red iron is buffeted at the forge; and an exquisite agony coursed
through his veins, so that he cried out, hiding his face. And yet he needs
must look and look, all his sight aching with this perfection, never
overpowering him, but keeping him ever in the relish of his torture.
At last he came to the door of the Tent in the late evening, and, intent
not only to buy back the soul he had marketed—for the sake of the
memory of the woman, and believing that none would die for him and that he
must die for himself—he lifted the curtain and entered. Then he gave
a great cry, for there she lay asleep, face downward, her forehead on the
Purple Mat.
“Sherah! Sherah!” he cried, dropping on his knees beside her and lifting
up her head.
“Ambroise!” she called out faintly, her pale face drawing away from his
breast.
“Sherah, why didst thou come here?” he said. “Thou! thou!”
“To buy back my soul, Ambroise. And this is the last day of the year that
I have spent here. Oh, why, why didst thou come? To-morrow all should have
been well!”
“To buy back thy soul—thou didst no wrong!” But at that moment their
eyes drew close, and changed, and he understood.
“For me—for me!” he whispered.
“Nay, for me!” she replied.
Then they noticed that the Purple Mat on which they knelt was red under
their knees, and a goodly light shone through the Tent, not of the day or
night. And as they looked amazed, the curtain of the Tent drew open, and
one entered, clothed in red from head to foot; and they knew him to be the
Scarlet Hunter, the lover of the lost, the Keeper of the Kimash Hills.
Looking at them steadfastly he said to Sherah: “Thou has prevailed.
To-night, at the setting of the sun, an old man died in Syria who uttered
thy name as in a dream when he passed. The soul of Ambroise hath been
bought back by thee.”
Then he spoke to Ambroise. “Because thy spirit was willing, and for the
woman’s sake thou shalt have peace; but this year which she has spent for
thee shall be taken from thy life, and added to hers. Come, and I will
start ye on the swift trail to your own country, and ye shall come here no
more.”
As they rose, obeying him, they saw that the red of the Mat had gone a
perfect white, and they knew not what to think, for they had acted after
the manner of the heathen; but that night, as they travelled with joy
towards that Inn called Home, down at the Fort, a preacher with rude noise
cried to those who would hear him: “Though your sins be as scarlet they
shall become whiter than snow.”
“None shall stand in the way of the lord,
The lord of the Earth—of the rivers and trees,
Of the cattle and fields and vines!
Hew!
Here shall I build me my cedar home,
A city with gates, a road to the sea
For I am the lord of the Earth!
Hew! Hew!
Hew and hew, and the sap of the tree
Shall be yours, and your bones shall be strong,
Shall be yours, and your heart shall rejoice,
Shall be yours, and the city be yours,
And the key of its gates be the key
Of the home where your little ones dwell.
Hew and be strong! Hew and rejoice!
For man is the lord of the Earth,
And God is the Lord over all!”
And so long as the little city stands will this same wood-cutter’s name
and history stand also. He had camped where it stood now, when nothing was
there save the wild duck in the reeds, the antelopes upon the hills, and
all manner of furred and feathered things; and it all was his. He had seen
the yellow flashes of gold in the stream called Pipi, and he had not
gathered it, for his life was simple, and he was young enough to cherish
in his heart the love of the open world, beyond the desire of cities and
the stir of the market-place. In those days there was not a line in his
face, not an angle in his body—all smoothly rounded and lithe and
alert, like him that was called “the young lion of Dedan.” Day by day he
drank in the wisdom of the hills and the valleys, and he wrote upon the
dried barks of trees the thoughts that came as he lay upon the bearskin in
his tent, or cooled his hands and feet, of a hot summer day, in the moist
sandy earth, and watched the master of the deer lead his cohorts down the
passes of the hills.
But by-and-by mule-trains began to crawl along the ledges of Margath
Mountain, and over Shaknon came adventurers, and after them, wandering men
seeking a new home, women and children coming also. But when these came he
had passed the spring-time of his years, and had grown fixed in the love
of the valley, where his sole visitors had been passing tribes of Indians,
who knew his moods and trespassed not at all on his domain. The
adventurers hungered for the gold in the rivers, and they made it one long
washing-trough, where the disease that afflicted them passed on from man
to man like poison down a sewer. Then the little city grew, and with the
search for gold came other seekings and findings and toilings, and men who
came as one stops at an inn to feed, stayed to make their home, and women
made the valley cheerful, and children were born, and the pride of the
place was as great as that of some village of the crimson East, where
every man has ancestors to Mahomet and beyond.
And he, Felion, who had been lord and master of the valley, worked with
them, but did not seek for riches, and more often drew away into the hills
to find some newer place unspoiled by man. But again and again he
returned; for no fire is like the old fire, and no trail like the old
trail. And at last it seemed as if he had driven his tent-peg in the Long
Valley for ever; for, from among the women who came, he chose one comely
and wise and kind, and for five years the world grew older, and Felion did
not know it. When he danced his little daughter on his knee, he felt that
he had found a new world.
But? a day came when trouble fell upon the little city, for of a sudden
the reef of gold was lost, and the great crushing-mills stood idle, and
the sound of the hammers was stayed. And they came to Felion, because in
his youth he had been of the best of the schoolmen; and he got up from his
misery—only the day before his wife had taken a great and lonely
journey to that Country which welcomes, but never yields again—and
leaving his little child behind, he went down to the mines. And in three
days they found the reef once more; for it had curved like the hook of a
sickle, and the first arc of the yellow circle had dropped down into the
bowels of the earth.
And so he saved the little city from disaster, and the people blessed him
at the moment; and the years went on.
Then there came a time when the little city was threatened with a woeful
flood, because of a breaking flume; but by a simple and wise device Felion
stayed the danger.
And again the people blessed him; and the years went on.
By-and-by an awful peril came, for two-score children had set a great raft
loose upon the river, and they drifted down towards the rapids in the
sight of the people; and mothers and helpless fathers wrung their hands,
for on the swift tide no boat could reach them, and none could intercept
the raft. But Felion, seeing, ran out upon the girders of a bridge that
was being builded, and there, before them all, as the raft passed under,
he let himself fall, breaking his leg as he dropped among the timbers of
the fore-part of the raft; for the children were all gathered at the back,
where the great oars lay motionless, one dragging in the water behind.
Felion drew himself over to the huge oar, and with the strength of five
men, while the people watched and prayed, he kept the raft straight for
the great slide, else it had gone over the dam and been lost, and all that
were thereon. A mile below, the raft was brought to shore, and again the
people said that Felion had saved the little city from disaster.
And they blessed him for the moment; and the years went on.
Felion’s daughter grew towards womanhood, and her beauty was great, and
she was welcome everywhere in the valley, the people speaking well of her
for her own sake. But at last a time came when of the men of the valley
one called, and Felion’s daughter came quickly to him, and with tears for
her father and smiles for her husband, she left the valley and journeyed
into the east, having sworn to love and cherish him while she lived. And
her father, left solitary, mourned for her, and drew away into a hill
above the valley in a cedar house that he built; and having little else to
love, loved the earth, and sky, and animals, and the children from the
little city when they came his way. But his heart was sore; for by-and-by
no letters came from his daughter, and the little city, having prospered,
concerned it self no more with him. When he came into its streets there
were those who laughed, for he was very tall and rude, and his grey hair
hung loose on his shoulders, and his dress was still a hunter’s. They had
not long remembered the time when a grievous disease, like a plague, fell
upon the place, and people died by scores, as sheep fall in a murrain. And
again they had turned to him, and he, because he knew of a miraculous
medicine got from Indian sachems, whose people had suffered of this
sickness, came into the little city, and by his medicines and fearless
love and kindness stayed the plague.
And thus once more he saved the little city from disaster, and they
blessed him for the moment; and the years went on.
In time they ceased to think of Felion at all, and he was left alone; even
the children came no more to visit him; and he had pleasure only in
hunting and shooting and in felling trees, with which he built a high
stockade and a fine cedar house within it. And all the work of this he did
with his own hands, even to the polishing of the floors and the carved
work of the large fireplaces. Yet he never lived in the house, nor in any
room of it, and the stockade gate was always shut; and when any people
passed that way they stared and shrugged their shoulders, and thought
Felion mad or a fool. But he was wise in his own way, which was not the
way of those who had reason to bless him for ever, and who forgot him,
though he had served them through so many years. Against the little city
he had an exceeding bitterness; and this grew, and had it not been that
his heart was kept young by the love of the earth, and the beasts about
him in the hills, he must needs have cursed the place and died. But the
sight of a bird in the nest with her young, and the smell of a lair, and
the light of the dawn that came out of the east, and the winds that came
up from the sea, and the hope that would not die kept him from being of
those who love not life for life’s sake, be it in ease or in sorrow. He
was of those who find all worth the doing, even all worth the suffering;
and so, though he frowned and his lips drew tight with anger when he
looked down at the little city, he felt that elsewhere in the world there
was that which made it worth the saving.
If his daughter had been with him he would have laughed at that which his
own hands had founded, protected, and saved. But no word came from her,
and laughter was never on his lips—only an occasional smile when,
perhaps, he saw two sparrows fighting, or watched the fish chase each
other in the river, or a toad, too lazy to jump, walk stupidly like a
convict, dragging his long, green legs behind him. And when Felion looked
up towards Shaknon and Margath, a light came in his eyes, for they were
wise and quiet, and watched the world, and something of their grandeur
drew about him like a cloak. As age cut deep lines in his face and gave
angles to his figure, a strange, settled dignity grew upon him, whether he
swung his axe by the balsams or dressed the skins of the animals he had
killed, piling up the pelts in a long shed in the stockade, a goodly
heritage for his daughter, if she ever came back. Every day at sunrise he
walked to the door of his house and looked eastward steadily, and
sometimes there broke from his lips the words: “My daughter-Carille!”
Again, he would sit and brood with his chin in his hand, and smile, as
though remembering pleasant things.
One day at last, in the full tide of summer, a man, haggard and troubled,
came to Felion’s house, and knocked, and, getting no reply, waited; and
whenever he looked down at the little city he wrung his hands, and more
than once he put them up to his face and shuddered, and again looked for
Felion. Just when the dusk was rolling down, Felion came back, and, seeing
the man, would have passed him without a word, but that the man stopped
with an eager, sorrowful gesture and said: “The plague has come upon us
again, and the people, remembering how you healed them long ago, beg you
to come.”
At that Felion leaned his fishing-rod against the door and answered:
“What people?”
The other then replied: “The people of the little city below, Felion.”
“I do not know your name,” was the reply; “I know naught of you or of your
city.”
“Are you mad?” cried the man. “Do you forget the little city down there?
Have you no heart?”
A strange smile passed over Felion’s face, and he answered: “When one
forgets, why should the other remember?”
He turned and went into the house and shut the door, and though the man
knocked, the door was no opened, and he went back angry and miserable; and
the people could not believe that Felion would no come to help them, as he
had done all his life. A dawn three others came, and they found Felion
looking out towards the east, his lips moving as though he prayed. Yet it
was no prayer, only a call, that was on his lips. They felt a sort of awe
in his presence, for now he seemed as if he had lived more than a century,
so wise and old was the look of his face, so white his hair, so set and
distant his dignity. They begged him to come, and, bringing his medicines,
save the people, for death was galloping through the town, knocking at
many doors.
“One came to heal you,” he answered—“the young man of the schools,
who wrote mystic letters after his name; it swings on a brass by his
door-where is he?”
“He is dead of the plague,” they replied, “and the other also that came
with him, who fled before the sickness, fell dead of it on the roadside,
going to the sea.”
“Why should I go?” he replied, and he turned threateningly to his weapon,
as if in menace of their presence.
“You have no one to leave behind,” they answered eagerly, “and you are
old.”
“Liars,” he rejoined, “let the little city save itself!” and he wheeled
and went into his house, and they saw that they had erred in not
remembering his daughter, whose presence they had once prized. They saw
that they had angered him beyond soothing; and they went back in grief,
for two of them had lost dear relatives by the fell sickness. When they
told what had happened, the people said: “We will send the women; he will
listen to them—he had a daughter.”
That afternoon, when all the hills lay still and dead, and nowhere did
bird or breeze stir, the women came, and they found him seated with his
back turned to the town. He was looking into the deep woods, into the hot
shadows of the trees.
“We have come to bring you to the little city,” they said to him; “the
sick grow in numbers every hour.”
“It is safe in the hills,” he answered, not looking at them. “Why do the
people stay in the valley?”
“Every man has a friend, or a wife, or a child, ill or dying, and every
woman has a husband, or a child, or a friend, or a brother. Cowards have
fled, and many of them have fallen by the way.”
“Last summer I lay sick here many weeks and none came near me—why
should I go to the little city?” he demanded austerely. “Four times I
saved it, and of all that I saved none came to give me water to drink, or
food to eat, and I lay burning with fever, and thirsty and hungry—God
of heaven, how thirsty!”
“We did not know,” they answered humbly; “you came to us so seldom, we had
forgotten; we were fools.”
“I came and went fifty years,” he answered bitterly, “and I have forgotten
how to rid the little city of the plague!”
At that one of the women, mad with anger, made as if to catch him by his
beard, but she forbore, and said: “Liar—the men shall hang you to
your own rooftree!”
His eyes had a wild light, but he waved his hand quietly, and answered:
“Begone, and learn how great a sin is ingratitude.”
He turned away from them gloomily, and would have entered his home, but
one of the women, who was young, plucked his sleeve, and said sorrowfully:
“I loved Carille, your daughter.”
“And forgot her and her father. I am three-score and ten years, and she
has been gone fifteen, and for the first time I see your face,” was his
scornful reply.
She was tempted to say: “I was ever bearing children and nursing them, and
the hills were hard to climb, and my husband would not go;” but she saw
how dark his look was, and she hid her face in her hands and turned away
to follow after the others. She had five little children, and her heart
was anxious for them and her eyes full of tears.
Anger and remorse seized on the little city, and there were those who
would have killed Felion, but others saw that the old man had been sorely
wronged in the past, and these said: “Wait until the morrow and we will
devise something.”
That night a mule-train crept slowly down the mountain side and entered
the little city, for no one who came with them knew of the plague. The
caravan had come from the east across the great plains, and not from the
west, which was the travelled highway to the sea. Among them was a woman
who already was ill of a fever, and knew naught of what passed round her.
She had with her a beautiful child; and one of the women of the place
devised a thing. “This woman,” she said, “does not belong to the little
city, and he can have nothing against her; she is a stranger. Let one of
us take this beautiful lad to him, and he shall ask Felion to come and
save his mother.”
Every one approved the woman’s wisdom, and in the early morning she
herself, with another, took the child and went up the long hillside in the
heavy heat; and when they came near Felion’s house the women stayed
behind, and the child went forward, having been taught what to say to the
old man.
Felion sat just within his doorway, looking out into the sunlight which
fell upon the red and white walls of the little city, flanked by young
orchards, with great, oozy meadows beyond these, where cattle ate,
knee-deep in the lush grass and cool reed-beds. Along the riverside, far
up on the high banks, were the tall couches of dead Indians, set on poles,
their useless weapons laid along the deerskin pall. Down the hurrying
river there passed a raft, bearing a black flag on a pole, and on it were
women and children who were being taken down to the sea from the doomed
city. These were they who had lost fathers and brothers; and now were
going out alone with the shadow of the plague over them, for there was
none to say them nay. The tall oarsmen bent to their task, and Felion felt
his blood beat faster when he saw the huge oars swing high, then drop and
bend in the water, as the raft swung straight in its course and passed on
safe through the narrow slide into the white rapids below, which licked
the long timbers as with white tongues, and tossed spray upon the sad
voyagers. Felion remembered the day when he left his own child behind and
sprang from the bridge to the raft whereon were the children of the little
city, and saved them.
And when he tried to be angry now, the thought of the children as they
watched him, with his broken leg striving against their peril, softened
his heart. He shook his head, for suddenly there came to him the memory of
a time, three-score years before, when he and the foundryman’s daughter
had gone hunting flag-flowers by the little trout stream; of the songs
they sang together at the festivals, she in her sweet Quaker garb and
demure Quaker beauty, he lithe, alert, and full of the joy of life and
loving. As he sat so, thinking, he wondered where she was, and why he
should be thinking of her now, facing the dreary sorrow of this pestilence
and his own anger and vengeance. He nodded softly to the waving trees far
down in the valley, for his thoughts had drifted on to his wife as he
first saw her. She was standing bare-armed among the grape-vines by a wall
of rock, the dew of rich life on her lip and forehead, her grey eyes
swimming with a soft light; and looking at her he had loved her at once,
as he had loved, on the instant, the little child that came to him later;
as he had loved the girl into which the child grew, till she left him and
came back no more. Why had he never gone in search of her?
He got to his feet involuntarily and stepped towards the door, looking
down into the valley. As his eyes rested on the little city his face grew
dark, but his eyes were troubled and presently grew bewildered, for out of
a green covert near there stepped a pretty boy, who came to him with
frank, unabashed face and a half-shy smile.
Felion did not speak at first, but stood looking, and presently the child
said: “I have come to fetch you.”
“To fetch me where, little man?” asked Felion, a light coming into his
face, his heart beating faster.
“To my mother. She is sick.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She’s in the village down there,” answered the boy, pointing.
In spite of himself, Felion smiled in a sour sort of way, for the boy had
called the place a village, and he relished the unconscious irony.
“What is the matter with her?” asked Felion, beckoning the lad inside.
The lad came and stood in the doorway, gazing round curiously, while the
old man sat down and looked at him, moved, he knew not why.
The bright steel of Felion’s axe, standing in the corner, caught the lad’s
eye and held it. Felion saw, and said: “What are you thinking of?”
The lad answered: “Of the axe. When I’m bigger I will cut down trees and
build a house, a bridge, and a city. Aren’t you coming quick to help my
mother? She will die if you don’t come.”
Felion did not answer, and from the trees without two women watched him
anxiously.
“Why should I come?” asked Felion curiously. “Because she’s sick, and
she’s my mother.”
“Why should I do it because she’s your mother?”
“I don’t know,” the lad answered, and his brow knitted in the attempt to
think it out, “but I like you.” He came and stood beside the old man and
looked into his face with a pleasant confidence. “If your mother was sick,
and I could heal her, I would—I know I would—I wouldn’t be
afraid to go down into the village.”
Here were rebuke, love, and impeachment, all in one, and the old man half
started from his seat.
“Did you think I was afraid?” he asked of the boy, as simply as might a
child of a child, so near are children and wise men in their thoughts.
“I knew if you didn’t it’d be because you were angry or were afraid, and
you didn’t look angry.”
“How does one look when one is angry?”
“Like my father.”
“And how does your father look?”
“My father’s dead.”
“Did he die of the plague?” asked Felion, laying his hand on the lad’s
shoulder.
“No,” said the lad quickly, and shut his lips tight.
“Won’t you tell me?” asked Felion, with a strange inquisitiveness.
“No. Mother’ll tell you, but I won’t.” The lad’s eyes filled with tears.
“Poor boy—poor boy!” said Felion, and his hand tightened on the
small shoulder.
“Don’t be sorry for me; be sorry for mother, please,” said the boy, and he
laid a hand on the old man’s knee, and that touch went to a heart long
closed against the little city below; and Felion rose and said: “I will go
with you to your mother.”
Then he went into another room, and the boy came near the axe and ran his
fingers along the bright steel, and fondled the handle, as does a hunter
the tried weapon which has been his through many seasons. When the old man
came back he said to the boy: “Why do you look at the axe?”
“I don’t know,” was the answer; “maybe because my mother used to sing a
song about the wood-cutters.” Without a word, and thinking much, he
stepped out into the path leading to the little city, the lad holding one
hand. Years afterwards men spoke with a sort of awe or reverence of seeing
the beautiful stranger lad leading old Felion into the plague-stricken
place, and how, as they passed, women threw themselves at Felion’s feet,
begging him to save their loved ones. And a drunkard cast his arm round
the old man’s shoulder and sputtered foolish pleadings in his ear; but
Felion only waved them back gently, and said: “By-and-by, by-and-by—God
help us all!”
Now a fevered hand snatched at him from a doorway, moanings came from
everywhere, and more than once he almost stumbled over a dead body; others
he saw being carried away to the graveyard for hasty burial. Few were the
mourners that followed, and the faces of those who watched the processions
go by were set and drawn. The sunlight and the green trees seemed an
insult to the dead.
They passed into the house where the sick woman lay, and some met him at
the door with faces of joy and meaning; for now they knew the woman and
would have spoken to him of her; but he waved them off, and put his
fingers upon his lips and went where a fire burned in a kitchen, and
brewed his medicines. And the child entered the room where his mother lay,
and presently he came to the kitchen and said: “She is asleep—my
mother.”
The old man looked down on him a moment steadily, and a look of
bewilderment came into his face. But he turned away again to the simmering
pots. The boy went to the window and, leaning upon the sill, began to hum
softly a sort of chant, while he watched a lizard running hither and
thither in the sun. As he hummed, the old man listened, and presently,
with his medicines in his hands and a half-startled look, he came over to
the lad.
“What are you humming?” he asked.
The lad answered: “A song of the wood-cutters.”
“Sing it again,” said Felion.
The lad began to sing:
“Here shall I build me my cedar house,
A city with gates, a road to the sea—
For I am the lord of the Earth! Hew! Hew!”
The old man stopped him. “What is your name?”
“My name is Felion,” answered the lad; and he put his face close to the
jug that held the steaming tinctures: but the old man caught the little
chin in his huge hand and bent back the head, looking long into the lad’s
eyes. At last he caught little Felion’s hand and hurried into the other
room, where the woman lay in a stupor. The old man came quickly to her and
looked into her face. Seeing, he gave a broken cry and said:
“Carille, my daughter! Carille!”
He drew her to his breast, and as he did so he groaned aloud, for he knew
that inevitable Death was waiting for her at the door. He straightened
himself up, clasped the child to his breast, and said: “I, too, am Felion,
my little son.”
And then he set about to defeat that dark, hovering Figure at the door.
For three long hours he sat beside her, giving her little by little his
potent medicines; and now and again he stopped his mouth with his hand,
lest he should cry out; and his eyes never wavered from her face, not even
to the boy, who lay asleep in the corner.
At last his look relaxed its vigilance, for a dewy look passed over the
woman’s face, and she opened her eyes and saw him, and gave a little cry
of “Father!” and was straightway lost in his arms.
“I have come home to die,” she said.
“No, no, to live!” he answered firmly. “Why did you not send me word all
these long years?”
“My husband was in shame, in prison, and I in sorrow,” she answered sadly.
“I could not.”
“He did evil? He is—” he paused.
“He is dead,” she said. “It is better so.” Her eyes wandered round the
room restlessly, and then fixed upon the sleeping child, and a smile
passed over her face. She pointed to the lad.
The old man nodded. “He brought me here,” he said gently. Then he got to
his feet. “You must sleep now,” he added, and he gave her a cordial. “I
must go forth and save the sick.”
“Is it a plague?” she asked.
He nodded. “They said you would not come to save them,” she continued
reproachfully. “You came to me because I was your Carille, only for that?”
“No, no,” he answered; “I knew not who you were. I came to save a mother
to her child.”
“Thank God!” she said.
With a happy smile she hid her face in the pillow. At last, leaving her
and the child asleep, old Felion went forth into the little city, and the
people flocked to him, and for many days he came and went ceaselessly.
And once more he saved the city, and the people blessed him: and the years
go on.
“When God was making the world,
(Swift is the wind and white is the fire)
The feet of his people danced the stars;
There was laughter and swinging bells,
And clanging iron and breaking breath,
The hammers of heaven making the hills,
The vales on the anvil of God.
(Wild is the fire and low is the wind.)”
His eyes were shining, and his face had a pale radiance from the reflected
light, though he lay in the shadow where he could watch her, while she
could not see him. Now her hand was upon the bellows, and the low, white
fire seethed hungrily up, and set its teeth upon the iron she held; now it
turned the iron about upon the anvil, and the sparks showered about her
very softly and strangely. There was a cheerful gravity in her motions, a
high, fine look in her face.
They two lived alone in the solitudes of Megalon Valley.
It was night now, and the pleasant gloom of the valley was not broken by
any sound save the hum of the stream near by, and the song, and the
ringing anvil. But into the workshop came the moist, fragrant smell of the
acacia and the maple, and a long brown lizard stretched its neck sleepily
across the threshold of the door opening into the valley.
The song went on:
“When God had finished the world
(Bright was the fire and sweet was the wind)
Up from the valleys came song,
To answer the morning stars,
And the hand of man on the anvil rang;
His breath was big in his breast, his life
Beat strong on the walls of the world.
(Glad is the wind and tall is the fire.)”
He put his hands to his eyes, and took them away again, as though to make
sure that the song was not a dream. Wonder grew upon his thin, bearded
face, he ran his fingers through his thick hair in a dazed way. Then he
lay and looked, and a rich warm flush crept over his cheek, and stayed
there.
There was a great gap in his memory.
The evening wore on. Once or twice the woman turned towards the room where
the man lay, and listened—she could not see his face from where she
stood. At such times he lay still, though his heart beat quickly, like
that of an expectant child. His lips opened to speak, but still they
remained silent. As yet he was like a returned traveller who does not
quickly recognise old familiar things, and who is struggling with vague
suggestions and forgotten events. As time went on, the woman turned
towards the doorway oftener, and shifted her position so that she faced
it, and the sparks, flying up, lighted her face with a wonderful irregular
brightness.
“Samantha,” he said at last, and his voice sounded so strange to him that
the word quivered timidly towards her.
She paused upon a stroke, and some new note in his voice sent so sudden a
thrill to her heart that she caught her breath with a painful kind of joy.
The hammer dropped upon the anvil, and, in a moment, she stood in the
doorway of his room.
“Francis, Francis,” she responded in a low whisper. He started up from his
couch of skins. “Samantha, my wife!” he cried, in a strong proud voice.
She dropped beside him and caught his head, like a mother, to her
shoulder, and set her warm lips on his forehead and hair with a kind of
hunger; and then he drew her face down and kissed her on the lips. Tears
hung at her eyes, and presently dropped on her cheeks, a sob shook her,
and then she was still, her hands grasping his shoulders.
“Have I been ill?” he asked.
“You have been very ill, Francis.”
“Has it been long?”
Her fingers passed tenderly through his grizzled hair. “Too long, too
long, my husband,” she replied.
“Is it summer now?”
“Yes, Francis, it is summer.”
“Was it in the spring, Samantha?—Yes, I think it was in the spring,”
he added, musing.
“It was in a spring.”
“There was snow still on the mountain-top, the river was running high, and
wild fowl were gathered on the island in the lake—yes, I remember, I
think.”
“And the men were working at the mine,” she whispered, her voice shaking a
little, and her eyes eagerly questioning his face.
“Ah, the mine—it was the mine, Samantha!” he said abruptly, his eyes
flashing up. “I was working at the forge to make a great bolt for the
machinery, and some one forgot and set the engine in motion. I ran out;
but it was too late... and then...”
“And then you tried to save them, Francis, and you were hurt.”
“What month is this, my wife?”
“It is December.”
“And that was in October?”
“Yes, in October.”
“I have been ill since? What happened?”
“Many were killed, Francis, and you and I came away.”
“Where are we now? I do not know the place.”
“This is Megalon Valley. You and I live alone here.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“I did not bring you, Francis; you wished me to come. One day you said to
me: ‘There is a place in Megalon Valley where, long ago, an old man lived,
who had become a stranger among men—a place where the blackbird
stays, and the wolf-dog troops and hides, and the damson grows as thick as
blossoms on the acacia. We will go there.’ And I came with you.”
“I do not remember. What of the mine? Was I a coward and left the mine?
There was no one understood the ways of the wheel, and rod, and steam,
save me.
“The mine is closed, Francis,” she answered gently. “You were no coward,
but—but you had strange fancies.
“When did the mine close?” he said, with a kind of sorrow; “I put hard
work and good years into it.” At that moment, when her face drew close to
his, the vision of her as she stood at the anvil came to him with a new
impression, and he said again in a half-frightened way: “When did it
close, Samantha?”
“The mine was closed—twelve years ago, my own dear husband.”
He got to his feet and clasped her to his breast. A strength came to him
which had eluded him twelve years, and she, womanlike, delighted in that
strength, and, with a great gladness, changed eyes and hands with him;
keeping her soul still her own, brooding and lofty, as is the soul of
every true woman, though, like this one, she labours at a forge, and in a
far, untenanted country is faithful friend, ceaseless apothecary to a
comrade with a disordered mind; living on savage meats, clothing herself
and the other in skins, and, with a divine persistence, keeping a cheerful
heart, certain that the intelligence which was frightened from its home
would come back one day. It should be hers to watch for the great moment,
and give the wanderer loving welcome, lest it should hurry madly away
again into the desert, never to return.
She had her reward, yet she wept. She had carried herself before him with
the bright ways of an unvexed girl these twelve years past; she had earned
the salt of her tears. He was dazed still, but, the doublet of his mind no
longer unbraced, he understood what she had been to him, and how she had
tended him in absolute loneliness, her companions the wild things of the
valley—these and God.
He drew her into the workshop, and put his hand upon the bellows and
churned them, so that the fire roared joyously up, and the place was red
with the light. In this light he turned her to him and looked at her. The
look was as that of one who had come back from the dead—that naked,
profound, unconditional gaze which is as deep and honest as the primeval
sense. His eyes fell upon her rich, firm, stately body; it lingered for a
moment on the brown fulness of her hair; then her look was gathered to
his, and they fell into each other’s arms.
For long they sat in the solemn silence of their joy, and so awed were
they by the thing which had come to them that they felt no surprise when a
wolf-dog crawled over the lizard on the threshold, and stole along the
wall with shining, bloody eyes to an inner room, and stayed there munching
meat to surfeit and drowsiness, and at last crept out and lay beside the
forge in a thick sleep. These two had lived so much with the untamed
things of nature, the bellows and the fire had been so long there, and the
clang of the anvil was so familiar, that there was a kinship among them,
man and beast, with the woman as ruler.
“Tell me, Samantha,” he said at last, “what has happened during these
twelve years, all from the first. Keep nothing back. I am strong now.” He
looked around the workshop, then, suddenly, at her, with a strange pain,
and they both turned their heads away for an instant, for the same thought
was on them. Then, presently, she spoke, and answered his shy, sorrowful
thought before all else. “The child is gone,” she softly said.
He sat still, but a sob was in his throat. He looked at her with a kind of
fear. He wondered if his madness had cost the life of the child. She
understood. “Did I ever see the child?” he asked.
“Oh yes, I sometimes thought that through the babe you would be yourself
again. When you were near her you never ceased to look at her and fondle
her, as I thought very timidly; and you would start sometimes and gaze at
me with the old wise look hovering at your eyes. But the look did not
stay. The child was fond of you, but she faded and pined, and one day as
you nursed her you came to me and said: ‘See, beloved, the little one will
not wake. She pulled at my beard and said, “Daddy,” and fell asleep.’ And
I took her from your arms.... There is a chestnut tree near the door of
our cottage at the mine. One night you and I buried her there; but you do
not remember her, do you?”
“My child, my child!” he said, looking out into the night; and he lifted
up his arms and looked at them. “I held her here, and still I never held
her; I fondled her, and yet I never fondled her; I buried her, yet—to
me—she never was born.”
“You have been far away, Francis; you have come back home. I waited, and
prayed, and worked with you, and was patient.... It is very strange,” she
continued. “In all these twelve years you cannot remember our past, though
you remembered about this place—the one thing, as if God had made it
so—and now you cannot remember those twelve years.”
“Tell me now of the twelve years,” he urged.
“It was the same from day to day. When we came from the mountain, we
brought with us the implements of the forge upon a horse. Now and again as
we travelled we cut our way through the heavy woods. You were changed for
the better then; a dreadful trouble seemed to have gone from your face.
There was a strong kind of peace in the valley, and there were so many
birds and animals, and the smell of the trees was so fine, that we were
not lonely, neither you nor I.”
She paused, thinking, her eyes looking out to where the Evening Star was
sailing slowly out of the wooded horizon, his look on her. In the pause
the wolf-dog raised its big, sleepy eyes at them, then plunged its head
into its paws, its wildness undisturbed by their presence.
Presently the wife continued: “At last we reached here, and here we have
lived, where no human being, save one, has ever been. We put up the forge,
and in a little hill not far away we found coal for it. The days went on.
It was always summer, though there came at times a sharp frost, and
covered the ground with a coverlet of white. But the birds were always
with us, and the beasts were our friends. I learned to love even the
shrill cry of the reed hens, and the soft tap-tap of the wood-pecker is
the sweetest music to my ear after the song of the anvil. How often have
you and I stood here at the anvil, the fire heating the iron, and our
hammers falling constantly! Oh, Francis, I knew that only here with God
and His dumb creatures, and His wonderful healing world, all sun, and
wind, and flowers, and blossoming trees, working as you used to work, as
the first of men worked, would the sane wandering soul return to you. The
thought was in you, too, for you led me here, and have been patient also
in the awful exile of your mind.”
“I have been as a child, and not as a man,” he said gravely. “Shall I ever
again be a man, as I once was, Samantha?”
“You cannot see yourself,” she said. “A week ago you fell ill, and since
then you have been pale and worn; but your body has been, and is, that of
a great strong man. In the morning I will take you to a spring in the
hills, and you shall see yourself, beloved.”
He stood up, stretched himself, went to the door, and looked out into the
valley flooded with moonlight. He drew in a great draught of air, and
said: “The world—the great, wonderful world, where men live, and
love work, and do strong things!”—he paused, and turned with a
trouble in his face. “My wife,” he said, “you have lived with a dead man
twelve years, and I have lost twelve years in the world. I had a great
thought once—an invention—but now—” he hung his head
bitterly. She came to him, and her hands slid up along his breast to his
shoulders, and rested there; and she said, with a glad smile: “Francis,
you have lost nothing. The thing—the invention—was all but
finished when you fell ill a week ago. We have worked at it for these
twelve years; through it, I think, you have been brought back to me. Come,
there is a little work yet to, do upon it;” and she drew him to where a
machine of iron lay in the corner. With a great cry he fell upon his knees
beside it, and fondled it.
Then, presently, he rose, and caught his wife to his breast.
Together, a moment later, they stood beside the anvil. The wolf-dog fled
out into the night from the shower of sparks, as, in the red light, the
two sang to the clanging of the hammers:
“When God was making the world
(Swift is the wind and white is the fire)”
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: Counsel of the overwise to go jolting through the soul Love knows not distance; it hath no continent When a child is born the mother also is born again
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