The Courage of Marge O'Doone, James Oliver Curwood [smart books to read .txt] 📗

forest. And as he went David noticed the heavy drag of his feet, and the unevenness of his trail in the snow.


CHAPTER XIII
For two or three minutes after Father Roland had disappeared in the forest David and Mukoki stood without moving. Amazed and a little stunned by the change they had seen in the Missioner's ghastly face, and perplexed by the strangeness of his voice and the unsteadiness of his walk as he had gone away from them, they looked expectantly for him to return out of the shadows of the timber. His last words had come to them with metallic hardness, and their effect, in a way, had been rather appalling: "There will be--no prayer." Why? The question was in Mukoki's gleaming, narrow eyes as he faced the dark spruce, and it was on David's lips as he turned at last to look at the Cree. There was to be no prayer for Tavish! David felt himself shuddering, when suddenly, breaking the silence like a sinister cackle, an exultant exclamation burst from the Indian, as though, all at once, understanding had dawned upon him. He pointed to the dead man, his eyes widening.
"Tavish--he great devil," he said. "_Mon Pere_ make no prayer. _Mey-oo!_" and he grinned in triumph, for had he not, during all these months, told his master that Tavish was a devil, and that his cabin was filled with little devils? "Mey-oo," he cried again, louder than before. "A devil!" and with a swift, vengeful movement he sprang to Tavish, caught him by his moccasined feet, and to David's horror flung him fiercely into the shallow grave. "A devil!" he croaked again, and like a madman began throwing in the frozen earth upon the body.
David turned away, sickened by the thud of the body and the fall of the clods on its upturned face--for he had caught a last unpleasant glimpse of the face, and it was staring and grinning up at the stars. A feeling of dread followed him into the cabin. He filled the stove, and sat down to wait for Father Roland. It was a long wait. He heard Mukoki go away. The mice rustled about him again. An hour had passed when he heard a sound at the door, a scraping sound, like the peculiar drag of claws over wood, and a moment later it was followed by a whine that came to him faintly. He opened the door slowly. Baree stood just outside the threshold. He had given him two fish at noon, so he knew that it was not hunger that had brought the dog to the cabin. Some mysterious instinct had told him that David was alone; he wanted to come in; his yearning gleamed in his eyes as he stood there stiff-legged in the moonlight. David held out a hand, on the point of enticing him through the door, when he heard the soft crunching of feet in the snow. A gray shadow, swift as the wind, Baree disappeared. David scarcely knew when he went. He was looking into the face of Father Roland. He backed into the cabin, without speaking, and the Missioner entered. He was smiling. He had, to an extent, recovered himself. He threw off his mittens and rasped his hands over the fire in an effort at cheerfulness. But there was something forced in his manner, something that he was making a terrific fight to keep under. He was like one who had been in great mental stress for many days instead of a single hour. His eyes burned with the smouldering glow of a fever; his shoulders hung loosely as though he had lost the strength to hold them erect; he shivered, David noticed, even as he rubbed his hands and smiled.
"Curious how this has affected me, David," he said apologetically. "It is incredible, this weakness of mine. I have seen death many scores of times, and yet I could not go and look on his face again. Incredible! Yet it is so. I am anxious to get away. Mukoki will soon be coming with the dogs. A devil, Mukoki says. Well, perhaps. A strange man at best. We must forget this night. It has been an unpleasant introduction for you into our North. We must forget it. We must forget Tavish." And then, as if he had omitted a fact of some importance, he added: "I will kneel at his graveside before we go."
"If he had only waited," said David, scarcely knowing what words he was speaking, "if he had waited until to-morrow, only, or the next day...."
"Yes; if he had waited!"
The Missioner's eyes narrowed. David heard the click of his jaws as he dropped his head so that his face was hidden.
"If he had waited," he repeated, after David, "if he had only waited!" And his hands, spread out fan-like ever the stove, closed slowly and rigidly as if gripping at the throat of something.
"I have friends up in that country he came from," David forced himself to say, "and I had hoped he would be able to tell me something about them. He must have known them, or heard of them."
"Undoubtedly," said the Missioner, still looking at the top of the stove, and unclenching his fingers as slowly as he had drawn them together, "but he is dead."
There was a note of finality in his voice, a sudden forcefulness of meaning as he raised his head and looked at David.
"Dead," he repeated, "and buried. We are no longer privileged even to guess at what he might have said. As I told you once before, David, I am not a Catholic, nor a Church-of-England man, nor of any religion that wears a name, and yet I accepted a little of them all into my own creed. A wandering Missioner--and I am such a one--must obliterate to an extent his own deep-souled convictions and accept indulgently all articles of Christian faith; and there is one law, above all others, which he must hold inviolate. He must not pry into the past of the dead, nor speak aloud the secrets of the living. Let us forget Tavish."
His words sounded a knell in David's heart. If he had hoped that Father Roland would, at the very last, tell him something more about Tavish, that hope was now gone. The Missioner spoke in a voice that was almost gentle, and he came to David and put a hand on his shoulder as a father might have done with a son. He had placed himself, in this moment, beyond the reach of any questions that might have been in David's mind. With eyes and touch that spoke a deep affection he had raised a barrier between them as inviolable as that law of his creed which he had just mentioned. And with it had come a better understanding.
David was glad that Mukoki's voice and the commotion of the dogs came to interrupt them. They gathered up hurriedly the few things they had brought into the cabin and carried them to the sledge. David did not enter the cabin again but stood with the dogs in the edge of the timber, while Father Roland made his promised visit to the grave. Mukoki followed him, and as the Missioner stood over the dark mound in the snow, David saw the Cree slip like a shadow into the cabin, where a light was still burning. Then he noticed that Father Roland was kneeling, and a moment later the Indian came out of the cabin quietly, and without looking back joined him near the dogs. They waited.
Over Tavish's grave Father Roland's lips were moving, and out of his mouth strange words came in a low and unemotional voice that was not much above a whisper:
"... and I thank God that you did not tell me before you died, Tavish," he was saying. "I thank God for that. For if you had--I would have killed you!"
As he came back to them David noticed a flickering of light in the cabin, as though the lamp was sputtering and about to go out. They put on their snow shoes, and with Mukoki breaking the trail buried themselves in the moonlit forest.
Half an hour later they halted on the summit of a second ridge. The Cree looked back and pointed with an exultant cry. Where the cabin had been a red flare of flame was rising above the tree tops. David understood what the flickering light in the cabin had meant. Mukoki had spilled Tavish's kerosene and had touched a match to it so that the little devils might follow their master into the black abyss. He almost fancied he could hear the agonized squeaking of Tavish's pets.
* * * * *


Straight northward, through the white moonlight of that night, Mukoki broke their trail, travelling at times so swiftly that the Missioner commanded him to slacken his pace on David's account. Even David did not think of stopping. He had no desire to stop so long as their way was lighted ahead of them. It seemed to him that the world was becoming brighter and the forest gloom less cheerless as they dropped that evil valley of Tavish's farther and farther behind them. Then the moon began to fade, like a great lamp that had burned itself out of oil, and darkness swept over them like huge wings. It was two o'clock when they camped and built a fire.
So, day after day, they continued into the North. At the end of his tenth day--the sixth after leaving Tavish's--David felt that he was no longer a stranger in the country of the big snows. He did not say as much to Father Roland, for to express such a thought to one who had lived there all his life seemed to him to be little less than a bit of sheer imbecility. Ten days! That was all, and yet they might have been ten months, or as many years for that matter, so completely had they changed him. He was not thinking of himself physically--not a day passed that Father Roland did not point out some fresh triumph for him there. His limbs were nearly as tireless as the Missioner's; he knew that he was growing heavier; and he could at last chop through a tree without winding himself. These things his companions could see. His appetite was voracious. His eyes were keen and his hands steady, so that he was doing splendid practice shooting with both rifle and pistol, and each day when the Missioner insisted on their bout with the gloves he found it more and more difficult to hold himself in. "Not so hard, David," Father Roland frequently cautioned him, and in place of the first joyous grin there was always a look of settled anxiety in Mukoki's face as he watched them. The more David pummelled him, the greater was the Little Missioner's triumph. "I told you what this north country could do for you," was his exultant slogan; "I told you!"
Once David was on the point of telling him that he could see only the tenth part of what it had done for him, but the old shame held his tongue. He did not want to bring up the old story. The fact that it had existed, and had written itself out in human passion, remained with him still as a personal and humiliating degradation. It was like a scar on his own body, a repulsive sore which he wished to keep out of sight, even from the eyes of the man who had been his salvation. The growth of this revulsion within him