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

/> He took off his things--his coat, his cap, his moccasins, and his thick German socks--and when he again spoke to David and looked at him, his eyes had in them a mysterious light and his words trembled with suppressed emotion.
"You will forgive me, David--you will forgive me a weakness, and make yourself at home--while I go alone for a few minutes into ... that ... room?"
He rose from the chair on which he had seated himself to strip off his moccasins and faced the closed door. He seemed to forget David after he had spoken. He went to it slowly, his breath coming quickly, and when he reached it he drew a heavy key from his pocket. He unlocked the door. It was dark inside, and David could see nothing as the Missioner entered. For many minutes he sat where Father Roland had left him, staring at the door.
"A strange man--a very strange man!" Thoreau had said. Yes, a strange man! What was in that room? Why its unaccountable silence? Once he thought he heard a low cry. For ten minutes he sat, waiting. And then--very faintly at first, almost like a wind soughing through distant tree tops and coming ever nearer, nearer, and more distinct--there came to him from beyond the closed door the gently subdued music of a violin.


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