The World for Sale Part 8

"Where?" he queried recklessly.

"In Lebanon," she retorted. "In Lebanon--your side."

How different she seemed from a few moments ago when she stood listening like a nymph for the song of the Spirit of the Wood! Now she was gay, buoyant, with a chamois-like alertness and a beaming vigour.

"Now I know what 'blind drunk' means," he replied musingly. "In Manitou when men get drunk, the people get astigmatism and can't see the tangledfooted stagger."

"It means that the pines of Manitou are straighter than the cedars of Lebanon," she remarked.

"And the pines of Manitou have needles," he rejoined, meaning to give her the victory.

"Is my tongue as sharp as that?" she asked, amus.e.m.e.nt in her eyes.

"So sharp I can feel the point when I can't see it," he retorted.

"I'm glad of that," she replied with an affectation of conceit. "Of course if you live in Lebanon you need surgery to make you feel a point."

"I give in--you have me," he remarked.

"You give in to Manitou?" she asked provokingly. "Certainly not--only to you. I said, 'You have me.'"

"Ah, you give in to that which won't hurt you--"

"Wouldn't you hurt me?" he asked in a softening tone.

"You only play with words," she answered with sudden gravity. "Hurt you?

I owe you what I can not pay back. I owe you my life; but as nothing can be given in exchange for a life, I cannot pay you."

"But like may be given for like," he rejoined in a tone suddenly full of meaning.

"Again you are playing with words--and with me," she answered brusquely, and a little light of anger dawned in her eyes. Did he think that he could say a thing of that sort to her--when he pleased? Did he think that because he had done her a great service, he could say casually what belonged only to the sacred moments of existence? She looked at him with rising indignation, but there suddenly came to her the conviction that he had not spoken with affronting gallantry, but that for him the moment had a gravity not to be marred by the place or the circ.u.mstance.

"I beg your pardon if I spoke hastily," he answered presently. "Yet there's many a true word spoken in jest."

There was a moment's silence. She realized that he was drawn to her, and that the attraction was not alone due to his having saved her at Carillon; that he was not taking advantage of the thing which must ever be a bond between them, whatever came of life. When she had seen him at the Hospital Fete, a feeling had rushed over her that he had got nearer to her than any man had ever done. Then--even then, she felt the thing which all lovers, actual, or in the making, feel--that they must do something for the being who to them is more than all else and all others. She was not in love with Ingolby. How could she be in love with this man she had seen but a few times--this Gorgio. Why was it that even as they talked together now, she felt the real, true distance between them--of race, of origin, of history, of life, of circ.u.mstance? The hut in the wood where Gabriel Druse had carried Jethro Fawe was not three hundred yards away.

She sighed, stirred, and a wild look came in her eyes--a look of rebellion or of protest. Presently she recovered herself. She was a creature of sudden moods.

"What is it you want to do with Manitou and Lebanon?" she asked after a pause in which the thoughts of both had travelled far.

"You really wish to know--you don't know?" he asked with sudden intensity.

She regarded him frankly, smiled, then she laughed outright, showing her teeth very white and regular and handsome. The boyish eagerness of his look, the whimsical twist of his mouth, which always showed when he was keenly roused--as though everything that really meant anything was part of a comet-like comedy--had caused her merriment. All the hidden things in his face seemed to open out into a swift shrewdness and dry candour when he was in his mood of "laying all the cards upon the table."

"I don't know," she answered quietly. "I have heard things, but I should like to learn the truth from you. What are your plans?"

Her eyes were burning with inquiry. She was suddenly brought to the gateways of a new world. Plans--what had she or her people to do with plans! What Romany ever constructed anything? What did the building of a city or a country mean to a Romany 'chal' or a Romany 'chi', they who lived from field to field, from common to moor, from barn to city wall. A Romany tent or a Romany camp, with its families, was the whole territory of their enterprise, designs and patriotism. They saw the thousand places where cities could be made, and built their fires on the sites of them, and camped a day, and were gone, leaving them waiting and barren as before. They travelled through the new lands in America from the fringe of the Arctic to Patagonia, but they raised no roof-tree; they tilled no acre, opened no market, set up no tabernacle: they had neither home nor country.

Fleda was the heir of all this, the product of generations of such vagabondage. Had the last few years given her the civic sense, the home sense? From the influence of the Englishwoman, who had made her forsake the Romany life, had there come habits of mind in tune with the women of the Sagalac, who were helping to build so much more than their homes?

Since the incident of the Carillon Rapids she had changed, but what the change meant was yet in her unopened Book of Revelations. Yet something stirred in her which she had never felt before. She had come of a race of wayfarers, but the spirit of the builders touched her now.

"What are my plans?" Ingolby drew along breath of satisfaction. "Well, just here where we are will be seen a great thing. There's the Yukon and all its gold; there's the Peace River country and all its unploughed wheat-fields; there's the whole valley of the Sagalac, which alone can maintain twenty millions of people; there's the East and the British people overseas who must have bread; there's China and j.a.pan going to give up rice, and eat the wheaten loaf; there's the U. S. A. with its hundred millions of people--it'll be that in a few years--and its exhausted wheat-fields; and here, right here, is the bread-basket for all the hungry peoples; and Manitou and Lebanon are the centre of it.

They will be the distributing centre. I want to see the base laid right.

I'm not going to stay here till it all happens, but I want to plan it all so that it will happen, then I'll go on and do a bigger thing somewhere else. These two towns have got to come together; they must play one big game. I want to lay the wires for it. That's why I've got capitalists to start paper-works, engineering works, a foundry, and a sash-door-and-blind factory--just the beginning. That's why I've put two factories on one side of the river and two on the other."

"Was it really you who started those factories?" she asked incredulously.

"Of course! It was part of my plans. I wasn't foolish enough to build and run them myself. I looked for the right people that had the money and the brains, and I let them sweat--let them sweat it out. I'm not a manufacturer; I'm an inventor and a builder. I built the bridge over the river; and--"

She nodded. "Yes, the bridge is good; but they say you are a schemer,"

she added suggestively.

"Certainly. But if I have schemes which'll do good, I ought to be supported. I don't mind what they call me, so long as they don't call me too late for dinner."

They both laughed. It was seldom he talked like this, and never had he talked to such a listener before. "The merging of the three railways was a good scheme, and I was the schemer," he continued. "It might mean monopoly, but it won't work out that way. It will simply concentrate energy and: save elbow-grease. It will set free capital and capacity for other things."

"They say there will be fewer men at work, not only in the offices but on the whole railway system, and they don't like that in Manitou--ah, no, they don't!" she urged.

"They're right in a sense," he answered. "But the men will be employed at other things, which won't represent waste and capital overlapping.

Overlapping capital hits everybody in the end. But who says all that?

Who raises the cry of 'wolf' in Manitou?"

"A good many people say it now," she answered, "but I think Felix Marchand said it first. He is against you, and he is dangerous."

He shrugged a shoulder. "Oh, if any fool said it, it would be the same!"

he answered. "That's a fire easily lighted; though it sometimes burns long and hard." He frowned, and a fighting look came into his face.

"Then you know all that is working against you in Manitou--working harder than ever before?"

"I think I do, but I probably don't know all. Have you any special news about it?"

"Felix Marchand is spending money among the men. They are going on strike on your railways and in the mills."

"What mills--in Manitou?" he asked abruptly. "In both towns."

He laughed harshly. "That's a tall order," he said sharply. "Both towns--I don't think so, not yet."

"A sympathetic strike is what he calls it," she rejoined.

"Yes, a row over some imagined grievance on the railway, and all the men in all the factories to strike--that's the new game of the modern labour agitator! Marchand has been travelling in France," he added disdainfully, "but he has brought his goods to the wrong shop. What do the priests--what does Monseigneur Lourde say to it all?"

"I am not a Catholic," she replied gravely. "I've heard, though, that Monseigneur is trying to stop the trouble. But--" She paused.

"Yes--but?" he asked. "What were you going to say?"

"But there are many roughs in Manitou, and Felix Marchand makes friends with them. I don't think the priests will be able to help much in the end, and if it is to be Manitou against Lebanon, you can't expect a great deal."

"I never expect more than I get--generally less," he answered grimly; and he moved the gun about on his knees restlessly, fingering the lock and the trigger softly.