Montlivet Part 28

It was tedious traveling, and it seemed a long time before I made my worming way around every inequality in the sh.o.r.e and reached the inlet where we had eaten lunch. Here I lifted the canoe, turned it bottom side up in the meadow, and covered it with a sailcloth. I wanted it to dry, and the air was still dripping moisture. I had expected the fog to lift before this, but it seemed to be growing heavier.

I tried to light my pipe, but the tobacco was damp and would not burn.

Slow drops dribbled from the trees and the meadow was soggy. Where should I go? I could hear nothing, and as for seeing anything I could have pa.s.sed my own camp a rod away. It began to seem a fool's errand.

I thought of returning.

Perhaps it was a boyish feeling that took me to the sycamore. I looked about. The ashes of our little fire still lay in a rounded pile, and at the edge of the pile, printed deep in the yielding surface, was a moccasin print. It was not the woman's moccasin, nor my own boot. One look showed me that.

And then I went over the surrounding ground. I learned nothing, for pebbles and short gra.s.s are as non-committal as a Paris pavement. The print had been made before the mist fell, for the dew was unbrushed. I looked at the encircling forest, and its dripping uniformity gave no clue. I knocked the charred tobacco from my pipe, pulled my hat down on my ears, and plunged straight ahead.

It was a fool's way of going at the matter, but a fool has as good a chance as a philosopher in such a case. I clove my way through the mist as blind and breathless as a swimmer in a breaker. The forest was thickly grown and the trees stood about me as alike as water-reeds.

Whenever I touched one it pelted me with drops, and I was numbed with cold. My feet slipped, for the ground was slimy with wet. But I was not thinking of comfort, nor of speed. I was listening.

For the strange, gray air was trembling with echoes. Every snapped twig, every bird murmur, every brush of a padded foot on leaf mould was multiplied many-fold. The fog was a sounding-board. All the spectral s.p.a.ce around me, above me, below me was quivering and talking. My very breath was peopled with murmurs. I have been in many fogs, but none like this one. If the spirits of the dead should revisit us, they would whisper, I think, as the air whispered around me then.

How long I groped, learning nothing, I do not know, for when the mind forgets the body minutes may be long or short, and no count is taken of them. But at last among the noises that knocked at my ear came a new note. I heard a human voice.

And then, indeed, I pressed all my faculties into service. I put my ear to the wet ground and strained it against tree trunks, trying to weed out the myriad tiny whisperings that a.s.sailed me and grasp that one sound that I wanted and hold it clear. And at last I heard it unmistakably; there were voices, more than one it seemed.

My ears buzzed with my effort to listen. I heard the sound, lost it, then heard it again. It was like a child's game. I heard it, blundered after it, then it disappeared. I turned to go back, and it came behind and mocked me. It was everywhere and nowhere. It came near, then faded into silence. The fog suffocated me; I found myself pressing at it with my hands.

Yet on the whole I made progress. In time the voices grew clearer.

There were several of them, perhaps many. I heard shouting,--orders, presumably,--and once a clink of metal,--an iron kettle it might have been. But the sound was back of me, in front of me, at the sides of me, above me. I could not hold it. It reverberated like the drumming of a woodc.o.c.k that comes to the ear from four quarters at once. And all the time the fog pressed on my eyelids like a hand.

I had left my musket hidden under the canoe, for I could not have used it in the dampness, so I had only my knife for guard. I carried it open, and made an occasional notch upon a tree. Once I came to a notched tree a second time. The old woodland madness was on me, and I was stepping in circles. Yet the sounds were growing clearer. They were approaching, though I could not tell from what quarter. I stood still.

What followed was like a dream; like the dream that I had had the night after the storm when I woke with sweat cold on me. The fog pinioned me like a clammy winding-sheet; I could see nothing; I was too chilled to feel; I was as alone and powerless as a lost canoe in the ocean; but somewhere on earth or in air I heard a company of men pa.s.s me by. The sounds were unmistakable. I heard the swish of wet leaves, the pad of feet, and even the creak of the damp leather of the carrying-straps.

Something cracked, p.r.i.c.king in my ears in a blur of sound, and I knew that the men had brushed a branch with the canoe that they were carrying on their heads. They were near me; at any moment they might come within touch of my hand. But where were they? Whoever they were, whatever they were, the wish to see them became an obsession. I knew no feeling but my tingling to get at them. I pushed to right and left.

I knocked against trees. The sounds were here, then there. I could not reach them. They taunted me as lost spirits tantalize a soul in purgatory. Whichever way I turned they were just out of my grasp. I clenched my hands and swore that I would not be beaten.

But my pitiful little oath was all bl.u.s.ter and impotent defiance. I was as helpless as a squirming puppy held by the neck. I ran like a madman, but I ran the wrong way. The invisible crew pa.s.sed me, and their voices faded. I heard them melt, melt into nothing. A sound, an impression,--that had been all. Not even a gray shadow on the fog to show that I had not been dreaming. I looked at my skinned knuckles and disordered clothes, and a strange feeling shook me. A certain rashness of temperament had all my life made me contemptuous of fear. But this was different. I tried to laugh at myself, but could not.

It was a simple matter to retrace my route, for I had left a trail like a behemoth's. And one thought I chewed all the way back to the meadow.

If I could have done it over again I should have called, and so have drawn whatever thing it was toward me. That would have been dangerous, and I might have paid the forfeit of a head that was not my own to part with, but at least I should have seen what thing it was that pa.s.sed me in the fog. There began to be something that was not wholly sound and sane in the depth of my feeling that I ought, at whatever cost, to have confronted that noise and forced it to declare itself.

When I came to the meadow it was wet and spectral. The fog had lifted somewhat and now the air was curiously luminous. It appeared transparent, as if the vision could pierce far-stretching reaches, but when I tried to peer ahead I found my glance baffled a few feet away.

It was as if the world ended suddenly, exhaled in grayness, just beyond the reach of my hand. It made objects remote and unreal and singularly s.h.i.+ning. I looked toward the sycamore, and my heart beat fast for a moment, for I thought that a pool of fresh blood lay in the gra.s.s where the woman and I had sat the day before. But I looked again and saw that it was only the bunch of red lilies that she had plucked and worn and thrown away. I had told her that their red was the color of war, and she had let them drop to the ground. I went to them and picked them up, and they left heavy, scarlet stains upon my fingers.

When I went to the canoe I found it still damp, but I uncovered it and went to work to do what I could with the frayed seams. An unreasoning haste had possession of me, and I worked fumblingly and badly, like a man with fear behind him. Yet I was not afraid. I was consumed by the feeling that I must get back to camp and to the woman without delay.

Kneeling to my work with my back to the forest, strange noises came behind and begged attention. But I would not look up. I had had enough of visions and whisperings and a haunted wood. I wanted my canoe and my paddle and a chance to shoot straight and to get home.

For already I thought of the camp as home, and of this meadow as a place where I had been held for a long time. It was a strange morning.

And so it was that even when I heard the thud, thud of a man's step behind me I did not turn. A man's step is unlike an animal's, and I had no doubt in my heart that a man was coming. But let him come to me. My immediate and pressing concern was to repair my canoe that I might get to camp, and I would squander neither movement nor eyesight till that was done. A few moments before it had seemed a vital matter to find what creatures they were that whispered and rustled past me in the grayness. Now my anxiety was transferred.

The echoing fog played witchcraft with the step as it had done with the other noises. The sound came, came, came,--a steady, moderate note; no haste, no dallying, no indecision. Quiet, purposeful, controlled, it sounded; that pace, pace, that came through the twig-carpeted timber.

The Greek Fates were pictured as moving with just that even relentlessness of stride. Yet in life, so far as I have seen it, tragedies commonly pounce upon us, like a wolfish cat upon her prey, and we find ourselves stunned and mangled before we gather dignity to meet the blow. I thought of this, in an incoherent, muddy way, as the step came nearer. And I worked with hurrying hands at the canoe.

Then came a voice. No whispering, no rustling, nothing vague and formless and haunting, but a low, commanding call:--

"Bonjour, mon ami."

I did not start. If I turned slowly it was because I knew what was waiting me, and was adjusting several possibilities to meet it. It was a man's voice that called, yet its every inflection was familiar, familiar as the beating of my heart. For madame, my wife, had called to me more or less often in the twin of that voice with its slurring deliberateness and its insolent disregard of the pitfall accents of a foreign tongue. And now I turned to meet her cousin, the man whom she had promised to marry; the man who had deserted her to the knives of savages; the man whom she despised and yet feared, and who now called to me in a voice that was hers and yet was not; that haunted and repelled, all in one. I did not think out any of this by rule and line. I only knew that I dreaded meeting this man who was stepping, stepping into my life through the fog, and that I turned to meet him with my heart like ice but my brain on fire.

I had ado to keep my tongue from exclaiming when I turned. I do not know why I expected the man to be small, except that I myself am overly large, and that I was looking for him to be my ant.i.thesis in every way.

But the figure that loomed toward me out of the luminous mist dwarfed my own stature. Never had my eyes seen so powerful a man. Long and swinging as an elk, he had the immense, humped shoulders of a buffalo and the length of arm of a baboon. His head would have sat well on some rough bronze coin of an early day. Semitic in type he looked, with his eagle-beaked nose and prominent cheek bones, but the blue of his eyes was English. They were intelligent eyes.

He looked at me a moment, and I stood silent for his initiative. I remembered that I was dressed roughly, was torn and rumpled by my contest with the forest, and that I must appear an out-at-elbows _coureur de bois_. He would not know me for the man he was seeking. I waited for him to ask my name, and selected one to give him that was my own and yet was not M. de Montlivet. Since names cannot be sold nor squandered, my father had bequeathed me a plethora of them.

But I credited the Englishman with too little acuteness. He stepped forward. "This is Monsieur de Montlivet?"

I could do no less than bow, but I kept my hand by my side. "And you, monsieur?"

He smiled as at one indulging a childish skirmish of wits; but controlled as his face was, I could see the relief that overspread it at my admission. "My name is Starling. I have a packet for you, monsieur," and he handed me Cadillac's letter.

I hated the farce of the whole affair, and when I ran my eye over Cadillac's message, which I could forecast word for word, I felt like a play-acting fool. But I read it and put it in my pocket.

"You have had a long trip, Lord Starling," I said, with some show of courtesy. "It is new to see a man of your nation in this land!"

He waved me and my words into limbo.

"Where is the Englishman,--the prisoner?"

A folded blanket lay beside the canoe, and I shook it out and spread it on the dew-drenched gra.s.s. "Will you sit, Lord Starling? Forgive me if I smoke. It is unusual grace to meet a man of my own station, and I would enjoy it in my own way. Will you do the same? I see you have your pipe."

He swung his great arm like a war club. "Where is the prisoner?"

I sat on the red blanket and filled my pipe. "I know of no prisoner."

I thought he would have broken into oaths, but instead he shrugged his shoulders. He walked to the other side of the blanket, and I saw that he limped painfully. Then he sat down opposite me, his great turtle neck standing up between his humping shoulders. With all his size and ugliness he was curiously well finished,--a personality. He was a man to sway men and women. I felt it as I felt his likeness to his cousin, a likeness that I could not put my finger on but that I knew was there.

Small wonder that she dreaded him. He was a replica in heavy lines of the sterner traits in her own nature. He had something of her curiously winning quality, too. Did she feel that? She had promised to marry him. I lit my pipe and smoked, and waited for him to declare himself.

He did it with his glance hard on me. "You are playing for time. Is that worthy your very evident intelligence, monsieur, since you can protract the game only the matter of a few hours at most? I have Cadillac's warrant for the prisoner."

I smoked. I felt no haste for speech. What I had to say would make a brutal, tearing wound, and I hugged my sense of power and gloated over it like an Iroquois. A woman was between us, and I knew no mercy.

My silence appeared to amuse him. He studied me and looked unhurried and reflective. He stretched out a long, yellow arm in simulation of contented weariness. "I wonder why you wish to keep the prisoner with you longer," he marveled.

And then I laughed. I looked him full in the face and laughed again.

"But I have no prisoner. Unless, indeed, matrimony be a sort of bondage. I travel with my wife, with Madame de Montlivet, nee Starling, monsieur."

I knew that I had cut him in a vital part, but he held himself well.

An oath burst from him, but it did not move his great, immobile face into betraying lines. Yet when he tried to speak his voice trailed off in an unmeaning rattle. He tried twice, and his hands were sweat-beaded. Then he heaved his great bulk upward and stood over me, his baboon arms reaching for my throat.

"The marriage was honest? Speak."

I could respect that feeling. "Father Nouvel married us," I replied.

"We found him at the Pottawatamie Islands. I marvel that you did not hear news of us from there, monsieur."

He sank back on the blanket. "I did not go there. I sprained my ankle." He talked still with that curious rattling in his voice. "I lost time and the d.a.m.ned Indians left me. When did you discover"----