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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Translation of A Savage, v3, by G. Parker
+#40 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: The Translation of a Savage, Volume 3.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6213]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 27, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE, V3, PARKER ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 3.
+
+
+IX.       THE FAITH OF COMRADES
+X.        "THOU KNOWEST THE SECRETS OF OUR HEARTS"
+XI.       UPON THE HIGHWAY
+XII.      "THE CHASE OF THE YELLOW SWAN"
+XIII.     A LIVING POEM
+XIV.      ON THE EDGE OF A FUTURE
+XV.       THE END OF THE TRAIL
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE FAITH OF COMRADES
+
+When Francis Armour left his wife's room he did not go to his own, but
+quietly descended the stairs, went to the library, and sat down.  The
+loneliest thing in the world is to be tete-a-tete with one's conscience.
+A man may have a bad hour with an enemy, a sad hour with a friend, a
+peaceful hour with himself, but when the little dwarf, conscience,
+perches upon every hillock of remembrance and makes slow signs--those
+strange symbols of the language of the soul--to him, no slave upon the
+tread-mill suffers more.
+
+The butler came in to see if anything was required, but Armour only
+greeted him silently and waved him away.  His brain was painfully alert,
+his memory singularly awake.  It seemed that the incident of this hour
+had so opened up every channel of his intelligence that all his life ran
+past him in fantastic panorama, as by that illumination which comes to
+the drowning man.  He seemed under some strange spell.  Once or twice he
+rose, rubbed his eyes, and looked round the room--the room where as a boy
+he had spent idle hours, where as a student he had been in the hands of
+his tutor, and as a young man had found recreations such as belong to
+ambitious and ardent youth.  Every corner was familiar.  Nothing was
+changed.  The books upon the shelves were as they were placed twenty
+years ago.  And yet he did not seem a part of it.  It did not seem
+natural to him.  He was in an atmosphere of strangeness--that atmosphere
+which surrounds a man, as by a cloud, when some crisis comes upon him and
+his life seems to stand still, whirling upon its narrow base, while the
+world appears at an interminable distance, even as to a deaf man who sees
+yet cannot hear.
+
+There came home to him at that moment with a force indescribable the
+shamelessness of the act he committed four years ago.  He had thought to
+come back to miserable humiliation.  For four years he had refused to do
+his duty as a man towards an innocent woman,--a woman, though in part a
+savage,--now transformed into a gentle, noble creature of delight and
+goodness.  How had he deserved it?  He had sown the storm, it was but
+just that he should reap the whirlwind; he had scattered thistles,
+could he expect to gather grapes?  He knew that the sympathy of all his
+father's house was not with him, but with the woman he had wronged.  He
+was glad it was so.  Looking back now, it seemed so poor and paltry a
+thing that he, a man, should stoop to revenge himself upon those who had
+given him birth, as a kind of insult to the woman who had lightly set him
+aside, and should use for that purpose a helpless, confiding girl.  To
+revenge one's self for wrong to one's self is but a common passion, which
+has little dignity; to avenge some one whom one has loved, man or woman,
+--and, before all, woman,--has some touch of nobility, is redeemed by
+loyalty.  For his act there was not one word of defence to be made, and
+he was not prepared to make it.
+
+The cigars and liquors were beside him, but he did not touch them.  He
+seemed very far away from the ordinary details of his life: he knew he
+had before him hard travel, and he was not confident of the end.  He
+could not tell how long he sat there.  --After, a time the ticking of
+the clock seemed painfully loud to him.  Now and again he heard a cab
+rattling through the Square, and the foolish song of some drunken
+loiterer in the night caused him to start painfully.  Everything jarred
+on him.  Once he got up, went to the window, and looked out.  The moon
+was shining full on the Square.  He wondered if it would be well for him
+to go out and find some quiet to his nerves in walking.  He did so.  Out
+in the Square he looked up to his wife's window.  It was lighted.  Long
+time he walked up and down, his eyes on the window.  It held him like a
+charm.  Once he leaned against the iron railings of the garden and looked
+up, not moving for a time.  Presently he saw the curtain of the window
+raised, and against the dim light of the room was outlined the figure of
+his wife.  He knew it.  She stood for a moment looking out into the
+night.  She could not see him, nor could he see her features at all
+plainly, but he knew that she, like him, was alone with the catastrophe
+which his wickedness had sent upon her.  Soon the curtain was drawn down
+again, and then he went once more to the house and took his old seat
+beside the table.  He fell to brooding, and at last, exhausted, dropped
+to a troubled sleep.  He woke with a start.  Some one was in the room.
+He heard a step behind him.  He came to his feet quickly, a wild light in
+his eyes.  He faced his brother Richard.
+
+Late in the afternoon Marion had telegraphed to Richard that Frank was
+coming.  He had been away visiting some poor and sick people, and when he
+came back to Greyhope it was too late to catch the train.  But the horses
+were harnessed straightway, and he was driven into town, a three-hours'
+drive.  He had left the horses at the stables, and, having a latch-key,
+had come in quietly.  He had seen the light in the study, and guessed who
+was there.  He entered, and saw his brother asleep.  He watched him for a
+moment and studied him.  Then he moved away to take off his hat, and, as
+he did so, stumbled slightly.  Then it was Frank waked, and for the first
+time in five years they looked each other in the eyes.  They both stood
+immovable for a moment, and then Richard caught Frank's hand in both of
+his and said: "God bless you, my boy!  I am glad you are back."
+
+"Dick!  Dick!" was the reply, and Frank's other hand clutched Richard's
+shoulder in his strong emotion.  They stood silent for a moment longer,
+and then Richard recovered himself.  He waved his hand to the chairs.
+The strain of the situation was a little painful for them both.  Men are
+shy with each other where their emotions are in play.
+
+"Why, my boy," he said, waving a hand to the spirits and liqueurs, "full
+bottles and unopened boxes?  Tut, tut!  here's a pretty how-d'ye-do.  Is
+this the way you toast the home quarters?  You're a fine soldier for an
+old mess!"
+
+So saying, he poured out some whiskey, then opened the box of cigars and
+pushed them towards his brother.  He did not care particularly to drink
+or smoke himself, but a man--an Englishman--is a strange creature.  He is
+most natural and at ease when he is engaged in eating and drinking.  He
+relieves every trying situation by some frivolous and selfish occupation,
+as of dismembering a partridge, or mixing a punch.
+
+"Well, Frank," said his brother, "now what have you to say for yourself?
+Why didn't you come long ago?  You have played the adventurer for five
+years, and what have you to show for it?  Have you a fortune?"  Frank
+shook his head, and twisted a shoulder.  "What have you done that is
+worth the doing, then?"
+
+"Nothing that I intended to do, Dick," was the grave reply.
+
+"Yes, I imagined that.  You have seen them, have you?" he added, in a
+softer voice.
+
+Frank blew a great cloud of smoke about his face, and through it he said:
+"Yes, I have seen a damned sight more than I deserved to see."
+
+"Oh, of course; I know that, my boy; but, so far as I can see, in another
+direction you are getting quite what you deserve: your wife and child are
+upstairs--you are here."
+
+He paused, was silent for a moment, then leaned over, caught his
+brother's arm, and said, in a low, strenuous voice: "Frank Armour, you
+laid a hateful little plot for us.  It wasn't manly, but we forgave it
+and did the best we could.  But see here, Frank, take my word for it,
+you have had a lot of luck.  There isn't one woman out of ten thousand
+that would have stood the test as your wife has stood it; injured at the
+start, constant neglect, temptation--" he paused.  "My boy, did you ever
+think of that, of the temptation to a woman neglected by her husband?
+The temptation to men?  Yes, you have had a lot of luck.  There has been
+a special providence for you, my boy; but not for your sake.  God doesn't
+love neglectful husbands, but I think He is pretty sorry for neglected
+wives."
+
+Frank was very still.  His head drooped, the cigar hung unheeded in his
+fingers for a moment, and he said at last: "Dick, old boy, I've thought
+it all over to-night since I came back--everything that you've said.
+I have not a word of defence to make, but, by heaven!  I'm going to win
+my wife's love if I can, and when I do it I'll make up for all my cursed
+foolishness--see if I don't."
+
+"That sounds well, Frank," was the quiet reply.  "I like to hear you talk
+that way.  You would be very foolish if you did not.  What do you think
+of the child?"
+
+"Can you ask me what I think?  He is a splendid little fellow."
+
+"Take care of him, then--take good care of him: you may never have
+another," was the grim rejoinder.  Frank winced.  His brother rose, took
+his arm, and said: "Let us go to our rooms, Frank.  There will be time
+enough to talk later, and I am not so young as I once was."
+
+Truth to say, Richard Armour was not so young as he seemed a few months
+before.  His shoulders were a little stooped, he was greyer about the
+temples.  The little bit of cynicism which had appeared in that remark
+about the care of the child showed also in the lines of his mouth; yet
+his eyes had the same old true, honest look.  But a man cannot be hit in
+mortal places once or twice in his life without its being etched on his
+face or dropped like a pinch of aloe from his tongue.
+
+Still they sat and talked much longer, Frank showing better than when his
+brother came, Richard gone grey and tired.  At last Richard rose and
+motioned towards the window.  "See, Frank," he said, "it is morning."
+Then he went and lifted the blind.  The grey, unpurged air oozed on the
+glass.  The light was breaking over the tops of the houses.  A crossing-
+sweeper early to his task, or holding the key of the street, went
+pottering by, and a policeman glanced up at them as he passed.  Richard
+drew down the curtain again.
+
+"Dick," said Frank suddenly, "you look old.  I wonder if I have changed
+as much?"
+
+Six months before, Frank Armour would have said hat his brother looked
+young.
+
+"Oh, you look young enough, Frank," was the reply.  "But I am a good deal
+older than I was five years ago.  .  .  Come, let us go to bed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THOU KNOWEST THE SECRETS OF OUR HEARTS
+
+And Lali?  How had the night gone for her?  When she rose from the
+child's cot, where her lips had caught the warmth that her husband had
+left on them, she stood for a moment bewildered in the middle of the
+room.  She looked at the door out of which he had gone, her bosom beating
+hard, her heart throbbing so that it hurt her--that she could have cried
+out from mere physical pain.  The wifedom in her was plundering the wild
+stores of her generous soul for the man, for--as Richard had said that
+day, that memorable day!--the father of her child.  But the woman, the
+pure translated woman, who was born anew when this frail life in its pink
+and white glory crept out into the dazzling world, shrank back, as any
+girl might shrink that had not known marriage.  This child had come--from
+what?--She shuddered now--how many times had she done so since she first
+waked to the vulgar sacrilege of her marriage?  She knew now that every
+good mother, when her first child is born, takes it in her arms, and, all
+her agony gone, and the ineffable peace of delivered motherhood come,
+speaks the name of its father, and calls it his child.  But--she
+remembered it now--when her child was born, this little waif, the fruit
+of a man's hot, malicious hour, she wrapped it in her arms, pressed its
+delicate flesh to the silken folds of her bosom, and weeping, whispered
+only: "My child, my little, little child!"
+
+She had never, as many a wife far from her husband has done, talked to
+her child of its father, told it of his beauty and his virtues, arrayed
+it day by day in sweet linen and pretty adornments, as if he were just
+then knocking at her door; she had never imagined what he would say when
+he did come.  What could such a father think of his child, born of a
+woman whose very life he had intended as an insult?  No, she had loved
+it for father and mother also.  She had tried to be good, a good mother,
+living a life unutterably lonely, hard in all that it involved of study,
+new duty, translation, and burial of primitive emotions.  And with all
+the care and tearful watchfulness that had been needed, she had grown so
+proud, so exacting--exacting for her child, proud for herself.
+
+How could she know now that this hasty declaration of affection was
+anything more than the mere man in him?  Years ago she had not been able
+to judge between love and insult--what guarantee had she here?  Did he
+think that she could believe in him?  She was not the woman he had
+married, he was not the man she had married.  He had deceived her basely
+--she had been a common chattel.  She had been miserable enough--could
+she give herself over to his flying emotions again so suddenly?
+
+She paced the room, her face now in her hands, her hands now clasping and
+wringing before her.  Her wifely duty?  She straightened to that.  Duty!
+She was first and before all a good, unpolluted woman.  No, no, it could
+not be.  Love him?  Again she shrank.  Then came flooding on her that
+afternoon when she had flung herself on Richard's breast, and all those
+hundred days of happiness in Richard's company--Richard the considerate,
+the strong, who had stood so by his honour in an hour of peril.
+
+Now as she thought of it a hot wave shivered through all her body, and
+tingled to her hair.  Her face again dropped in her hands, and, as on
+that other day, she knelt beside the cot, and, bursting into tears,
+said through her sobs: "My baby, my own dear baby!  Oh, that we could go
+away--away--and never come back again!"
+
+She did not know how intense her sobs were.  They waked the child from
+its delicate sleep; its blue eyes opened wide and wise all on the
+instant, its round soft arm ran up to its mother's neck, and it said:
+"Don't c'y!  I want to s'eep wif you!  I'se so s'eepy!"
+
+She caught the child to her wet face, smiled at it through her tears,
+went with it to her own bed, put it away in the deep whiteness, kissed
+it, and fondled it away again into the heaven of sleep.  When this was
+done she felt calmer.  How she hungered over it!  This--this could not be
+denied her.  This, at least, was all hers, without clause or reservation,
+an absolute love, and an absolute right.
+
+She disrobed and drew in beside the child, and its little dewy cheek
+touching her breast seemed to ease the ache in her soul.
+
+But sleep would not come.  All the past four years trooped by, with their
+thousand incidents magnified in the sharp, throbbing light of her mind,
+and at last she knew and saw clearly what was before her, what trials,
+what duty, and what honour demanded--her honour.
+
+Richard?  Once for all she gently put him away from her into that
+infinite distance of fine respect which a good woman can feel, who has
+known what she and Richard had known--and set aside.  But he had made for
+her so high a standard, that for one to be measured thereby was a severe
+challenge.
+
+
+Could Frank come even to that measure?  She dared not try to answer the
+question.  She feared, she shrank, she grew sick at heart.  She did not
+reckon with that other thing, that powerful, infinite influence which
+ties a woman, she knows not how or why, to the man who led her to the
+world of motherhood.  Through all the wrongs which she may suffer by him,
+there runs this cable of unhappy attraction, testified to by how many
+sorrowful lives!
+
+But Lali was trying to think it out, not only to feel, and she did not
+count that subterranean force which must play its part in this new
+situation in her drama of life.  Could she love him?  She crept away out
+of the haven where her child was, put on her dressing-gown, went to the
+window, and looked out upon the night, all unconscious that her husband
+was looking at her from the Square below.  Love him?--Love him?--Love
+him?  Could she?  Did he love her?  Her eyes wandered over the Square.
+Nowhere else was there a light, but a chimney-flue was creaking
+somewhere.  It jarred on her so that she shrank.  Then all at once she
+smiled to think how she had changed.  Four years ago she could have slept
+amid the hammers of a foundry.  The noise ceased.  Her eyes passed from
+the cloud of trees in the Square to the sky-all stars, and restful deep
+blue.  That--that was the same.  How she knew it!  Orion and Ashtaroth,
+and Mars and the Pleiades, and the long trail of the Milky Way.  As a
+little child hanging in the trees, or sprawled beside a tepee, she had
+made friends with them all, even as she learned and loved all the signs
+of the earth beneath--the twist of a blade of grass, the portent in the
+cry of a river-hen, the colour of a star, the smell of a wind.  She had
+known Nature then, now she knew men.  And knowing them, and having
+suffered, and sick at heart as she was, standing by this window in the
+dead of night, the cry that shook her softly was not of her new life,
+but of the old, primitive, child-like.
+
+'Pasagathe, omarki kethose kolokani vorgantha pestorondikat Oni.'
+
+"A spear hath pierced me, and the smart of the nettle is in my wound.
+Maker of the soft night, bind my wounds with sleep, lest I cry out and be
+a coward and unworthy."
+
+Again and again, unconsciously, the words passed from her lips
+
+'Vorganthe, pestorondikat Oni.'
+
+At last she let down the blind, came to the bed, and once more gathered
+her child in her arms with an infinite hunger.  This love was hers--rich,
+untrammelled, and so sacred.  No matter what came, and she did not know
+what would come, she had the child.  There was a kind of ecstasy in it,
+and she lay and trembled with the feeling, but at last fell into a
+troubled sleep.
+
+She waked suddenly to hear footsteps passing her door.  She listened.
+One footstep was heavier than the other--heavier and a little stumbling;
+she recognised them, Frank and Richard.  In that moment her heart
+hardened.  Frank Armour must tread a difficult road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+UPON THE HIGHWAY
+
+Frank visited the child in the morning, and was received with a casual
+interest.  Richard Joseph Armour was fastidious, was not to be won at the
+grand gallop.  Besides, he had just had a visit from his uncle, and the
+good taste of that gay time was yet in his mouth.  He did not resent the
+embraces, but he did not respond to them, and he straightened himself
+with relief when the assault was over.  Some one was paying homage to
+him, that was all he knew; but for his own satisfaction and pleasure he
+preferred as yet his old comrades, Edward Lambert, Captain Vidall,
+General Armour, and, above all, Richard.  He only showed real interest
+at the last, when he asked, as it were in compromise, if his father would
+give him a sword.  No one had ever talked to him of his father, and he
+had no instinct for him so far as could be seen.  The sword was,
+therefore, after the manner of a concession.  Frank rashly promised it,
+and was promptly told by Marion that it couldn't be; and she was backed
+by Captain Vidall, who said it had already been tabooed, and Frank wasn't
+to come in and ask for favours or expect them.
+
+The husband and wife met at breakfast.  He was down first.  When his wife
+entered, he came to her, they touched hands, and she presently took a
+seat beside him.  More than once he paused suddenly in his eating, when
+he thought of his inexplicable case.  He was now face to face with a
+reversed situation.  He had once picked up a pebble from the brown dirt
+of a prairie, that he might toss it into the pool of this home life; and
+he had tossed it, and from the sweet bath there had come out a precious
+stone, which he longed to wear, and knew that he could not--not yet.
+He could have coerced a lower being, but for his manhood's sake--he had
+risen to that now, it is curious how the dignity of fatherhood helps to
+make a man--he could not coerce here, and if he did, he knew that the
+product would be disaster.
+
+He listened to her talk with Marion and Captain Vidall.  Her voice
+was musical, balanced, her language breathed; it had manner, and an
+indescribable cadence of intelligence, joined to a deliberation, which
+touched her off with distinction.  When she spoke to him--and she seemed
+to do that as by studied intention and with tact at certain intervals--
+her manner was composed and kind.  She had resolved on her part.  She
+asked him about his journey over, about his plans for the day, and if
+he had decided to ride with her in the Park,--he could have the general's
+mount, she was sure, for the general was not going that day,--and would
+he mind doing a little errand for her afterwards in Regent Street, for
+the child--she feared she herself would not have time?
+
+Just then General Armour entered, and, passing behind her, kissed her on
+the cheek, dropping his hand on Frank's shoulder at the same time with a
+hearty greeting.  Of course, Frank could have his mount, he said.  Mrs.
+Armour did not come down, but she sent word by Richard, who entered last,
+that she would be glad to see Frank for a moment before he left for the
+Park.  As of old, Richard took both Lali's hands in his, patted them, and
+cheerily said:
+
+"Well, well, Lali, we've got the wild man home again safe and sound,
+haven't we--the same old vagabond?  We'll have to turn him into a
+Christian again--'For while the lamp holds out to burn'--"
+
+He did not give her time to reply, but their eyes met honestly, kindly,
+and from the look they both passed into life and time again with a fresh
+courage.  She did not know, nor did he, how near they had been to an
+abyss; and neither ever knew.  One furtive glance at the moment, one
+hesitating pressure of the hand, one movement of the head from each
+other's gaze, and there had been unhappiness for them all.  But they
+were safe.
+
+In the Park, Frank and his wife talked little.  They met many who greeted
+them cordially, and numbers of Frank's old club friends summoned him to
+the sacred fires at his earliest opportunity.  The two talked chiefly of
+the people they met, and Frank thrilled with admiration at his wife's
+gentle judgment of everybody.
+
+"The true thing, absolutely the true thing," he said; and he was
+conscious, too, that her instincts were right and searching, for once or
+twice he saw her face chill a little when they met one or two men whose
+reputations as chevaliers des dames were pronounced.  These men had had
+one or two confusing minutes with Lali in their time.
+
+"How splendidly you ride!" he said, as he came up swiftly to her, after
+having chatted for a moment with Edward Lambert.  "You sit like wax, and
+so entirely easy."
+
+"Thank you," she said.  "I suppose I really like it too well to ride
+badly, and then I began young on horses not so good as Musket here--
+bareback, too!" she added, with a little soft irony.
+
+He thought--she did not, however--that she was referring to that first
+letter he sent home to his people, when he consigned her, like any other
+awkward freight, to their care.  He flushed to his eyes.  It cut him
+deep, but her eyes only had a distant, dreamy look which conveyed nothing
+of the sting in her words.  Like most men, he had a touch of vanity too,
+and he might have resented the words vaguely, had he not remembered his
+talk with his mother an hour before.
+
+She had begged him to have patience, she had made him promise that he
+would not in any circumstance say an ungentle or bitter thing, that he
+would bide the effort of constant devotion, and his love of the child.
+Especially must he try to reach her through love of the child.
+
+By which it will be seen that Mrs. Armour had come to some wisdom by
+reason of her love for Frank's wife and child.
+
+"My son," she had said, "through the child is the surest way, believe me;
+for only a mother can understand what that means, how much and how far it
+goes.  You are a father, but until last night you never had the flush of
+that love in your veins.  You stand yet only at the door of that life
+which has done more to guide, save, instruct, and deepen your wife's life
+than anything else, though your brother Richard--to whom you owe a debt
+that you can never repay--has done much in deed.  Be wise, my dear, as I
+have learned a little to be since first your wife came.  All might easily
+have gone wrong.  It has all gone well; and we, my son, have tried to do
+our duty lovingly, consistently, to dear Lali and the child."
+
+She made him promise that he would wait, that he would not try to hurry
+his wife's affection for him by any spoken or insistent claim.  "For,
+Frank dear," she said, "you are only legally married, not morally, not as
+God can bless--not yet.  But I pray that what will sanctify all may come
+soon, very soon, to the joy of us all.  But again--and I cannot say it
+too prayerfully--do not force one little claim that your marriage gave
+you, but prove yourself to her, who has cause to distrust you so much.
+Will you forgive your mother, my dear, for speaking to you?"
+
+He had told her then that what she had asked he had intended as his own
+course, yet what she had said would keep it in his mind always, for he
+was sure it was right.  Mrs. Armour had then embraced him, and they
+parted.  Dealing with Lali had taught them all much of the human heart
+that they had never known before, and the result thereof was wisdom.
+
+They talked casually enough for the rest of the ride, and before they
+parted at the door Frank received his commission for Regent Street, and
+accepted it with delight, as a schoolboy might a gift.  He was absurdly
+grateful for any favours from her, any sign of her companionship.  They
+met at luncheon; then, because Lali had to keep an engagement in Eaton
+Square, they parted again, and Frank and Richard took a walk, after a
+long hour with the child, who still so hungered for his sword that Frank
+disobeyed orders, and dragged Richard off to Oxford Street to get one.
+He was reduced to a beatific attitude of submission, for he knew that he
+had few odds with him now, and that he must live by virtue of new
+virtues.  He was no longer proud of himself in any way, and he knew that
+no one else was, or rather he felt so, and that was just the same.
+
+He talked of the boy, he talked of his wife, he laid plans, he tore them
+down, he built them up again, he asked advice, he did not wait to hear
+it, but rambled on, excited, eager.  Truth is, there had suddenly been
+lifted from his mind the dread and shadow of four years.  Wherever he had
+gone, whatever he had been or done, that dread shadow had followed him,
+and now to know that instead of having to endure a hell he had to win a
+heaven, and to feel as if his brain had been opened and a mass of vapours
+and naughty little mannikins of remorse had been let out, was a trifle
+intoxicating even to a man of his usual vigour and early acquaintance
+with exciting things.
+
+"Dick, Dick!" he said enthusiastically, "you've been royal.  You always
+were better than any chap I ever knew.  You're always doing for others.
+Hang it, Dick, where does your fun come in?  Nobody seems ever to do
+anything for you."
+
+Richard gave his arm a squeeze.  "Never mind about me, boy.  I've had all
+the fun I want, and all I'm likely to get, and so long as you're all
+willing to have me around, I'm satisfied.  There's always a lot to do
+among the people in the village, one way and another, and I've a heap of
+reading on, and what more does a fellow want?"
+
+"You didn't always feel that way, Dick?"
+
+"No.  You see, at different times in life you want different kinds of
+pleasures.  I've had a good many kinds, and the present kind is about as
+satisfactory as any."
+
+"But, Dick, you ought to get married.  You've got coin, you've got sense,
+you're a bit distinguished-looking, and I'll back your heart against a
+thousand bishops.  You've never been in danger of making a fool of
+yourself as I have.  Why didn't you--why don't you--get married?"
+
+Richard patted his brother's shoulder.
+
+"Married, boy?  Married?  I've got too much on my hands.  I've got to
+bring you up yet.  And when that's done I shall have to write a book
+called 'How to bring up a Parent.'  Then I've got to help bring your boy
+up, as I've done these last three years and more.  I've got to think of
+that boy for a long while yet, for I know him better than you do, and I
+shall need some of my coin to carry out my plans."
+
+"God bless you, Dick!  Bring me up as you will, only bring her along too;
+and as for the boy, you're far more his father than I am.  And mother
+says that it's you that's given me the wife I've got now--so what can I
+say?--what can I say?"
+
+It was the middle of the Green Park, and Richard turned and clasped Frank
+by both shoulders.
+
+"Say?  Say that you'll stand by the thing you swore to one mad day in the
+West as well as any man that ever lived--'to have and to hold, to love
+and to cherish from this day forth till death us do part, Amen.'"
+
+Richard's voice was low and full of a strange, searching something.
+
+Frank, wondering at this great affection and fondness of his brother,
+looked him in the eyes warmly, solemnly, and replied: "For richer or for
+poorer, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health--so help me
+God, and her kindness and forgiveness!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+"THE CHASE OF THE YELLOW SWAN"
+
+Frank and Lali did not meet until dinner was announced.  The conversation
+at dinner was mainly upon the return to Greyhope, which was fixed for the
+following morning, and it was deftly kept gay and superficial by Marion
+and Richard and Captain Vidall, until General Armour became reminiscent,
+and held the interest of the table through a dozen little incidents
+of camp and barrack life until the ladies rose.  There had been an
+engagement for late in the evening, but it had been given up because
+of Frank's home-coming, and there was to be a family gathering merely--
+for Captain Vidall was now as much one of the family as Frank or Richard,
+by virtue of his approaching marriage with Marion.  The men left alone,
+General Armour questioned Frank freely about life in the Hudson's Bay
+country, and the conversation ran on idly till it was time to join the
+ladies.
+
+When they reached the drawing-room, Marion was seated at the piano,
+playing a rhapsody of Raff's, and Mrs. Armour and Lali were seated side
+by side.  Frank thrilled at seeing his wife's hand in his mother's.
+Marion nodded over the piano at the men, and presently played a snatch
+of Carmen, then wandered off into the barbaric strength of Tannhauser,
+and as suddenly again into the ballet music of Faust.
+
+"Why so wilful, my girl?" asked her father, who had a keen taste for
+music.  "Why this tangle?  Let us have something definite."
+
+Marion sprang up from the piano.  "I can't.  I'm not definite myself
+to-night."  Then, turning to Lali: "Lali dear, sing something--do!
+Sing my favourite, 'The Chase of the Yellow Swan.'"
+
+This was a song which in the later days at Greyhope, Lali had sung for
+Marion, first in her own language, with the few notes of an Indian chant,
+and afterwards, by the help of the celebrated musician who had taught her
+both music and singing, both of which she had learned but slowly, it was
+translated and set to music.  Lali looked Marion steadily in the eyes for
+a moment and then rose.  It cost her something to do this thing, for
+while she had often talked much and long with Richard about that old
+life, it now seemed as if she were to sing it to one who would not quite
+understand why she should sing it at all, or what was her real attitude
+towards her past--that she looked upon it from the infinite distance of
+affectionate pity, knowledge, and indescribable change, and yet loved the
+inspiring atmosphere and mystery of that lonely North, which once in the
+veins never leaves it--never.  Would he understand that she was feeling,
+not the common detail of the lodge and the camp-fire and the Company's
+post, but the deep spirit of Nature, filtering through the senses in a
+thousand ways--the wild ducks' flight, the sweet smell of the balsam,
+the exquisite gallop of the deer, the powder of the frost, the sun and
+snow and blue plains of water, the thrilling eternity of plain and the
+splendid steps of the hills, which led away by stair and entresol to the
+Kimash Hills, the Hills of the Mighty Men?
+
+She did not know what he would think, and again on second thought she
+determined to make him, by this song, contrast her as she was when he
+married her, and now--how she herself could look upon that past
+unabashed, speak of it without blushing, sing of it with pride, having
+reached a point where she could look down and say: "This was the way by
+which I came."
+
+She rose, and was accompanied to the piano by General Armour, Frank
+admiring her soft, springing steps, her figure so girlish and lissom.
+She paused for a little before she began.  Her eyes showed for a moment
+over the piano, deep, burning, in-looking; then they veiled; her fingers
+touched the keys, wandered over them in a few strange, soft chords,
+paused, wandered again, more firmly and very intimately, and then she
+sang.  Her voice was a good contralto, well balanced, true, of no great
+range, but within its compass melodious, and having some inexpressible
+charm of temperament.  Frank did not need to strain his ears to hear the
+words; every one came clear, searching, delicately valued:
+
+              "In the flash of the singing dawn,
+               At the door of the Great One,
+               The joy of his lodge knelt down,
+               Knelt down, and her hair in the sun
+               Shone like showering dust,
+               And her eyes were as eyes of the fawn.
+               And she cried to her lord,
+               'O my lord, O my life,
+               From the desert I come;
+               From the hills of the Dawn.'
+               And he lifted the curtain and said,
+               'Hast thou seen It, the Yellow Swan?'
+
+              "And she lifted her head, and her eyes
+               Were as lights in the dark,
+               And her hands folded slow on her breast,
+               And her face was as one who has seen
+               The gods and the place where they dwell;
+               And she said: 'Is it meet that I kneel,
+               That I kneel as I speak to my lord?'
+               And he answered her: 'Nay, but to stand,
+               And to sit by my side;
+               But speak, thou hast followed the trail,
+               Hast thou found It, the Yellow Swan?'
+
+              "And she stood as a queen, and her voice
+               Was as one who hath seen the Hills,
+               The Hills of the Mighty Men,
+               And hath heard them cry in the night,
+               Hath heard them call in the dawn,
+               Hath seen It, the Yellow Swan.
+               And she said: 'It is not for my lord;'
+               And she murmured, 'I cannot tell,
+               But my lord must go as I went,
+               And my lord must come as I came,
+               And my lord shall be wise.'
+
+              "And he cried in his wrath,
+               'What is thine, it is mine,
+               And thine eyes are my eyes
+               Thou shalt speak of the Yellow Swan!'
+               But she answered him: 'Nay, though I die.
+               I have lain in the nest of the Swan,
+               I have heard, I have known;
+               When thine eyes too have seen,
+               When thine ears too have heard,
+               Thou shalt do with me then as thou wilt!'
+
+              "And he lifted his hand to strike,
+               And he straightened his spear to slay,
+               But a great light struck on his eyes,
+               And he heard the rushing of wings,
+               And his long spear fell from his hand,
+               And a terrible stillness came.
+               And when the spell passed from his eyes,
+               He stood in his doorway alone,
+               And gone was the queen of his soul,
+               And gone was the Yellow Swan."
+
+Frank Armour listened as in a dream.  The song had the wild swing of
+savage life, the deep sweetness of a monotone, but it had also the fine
+intelligence, the subtle allusiveness of romance.  He could read between
+the lines.  The allegory touched him where his nerves were sensitive.
+Where she had gone he could not go until his eyes had seen and known
+what hers had seen and known; he could not grasp his happiness all in a
+moment; she was no longer at his feet, but equal with him, and wiser than
+he.  She had not meant the song to be allusive when she began, but to
+speak to him through it by singing the heathen song as his own sister
+might sing it.  As the song went on, however, she felt the inherent
+suggestion in it, so that when she had finished it required all her
+strength to get up calmly, come among them again, and listen to their
+praises and thanks.  She had no particular wish to be alone with Frank
+just yet, but the others soon arranged themselves so that the husband
+and wife were left in a cosey corner of the room.
+
+Lali's heart fluttered a little at first, for the day had been trying,
+and she was not as strong as she could wish.  Admirably as she had gone
+through the season, it had worn on her, and her constitution had become
+sensitive and delicate, while yet strong.  The life had almost refined
+her too much.  Always on the watch that she should do exactly as Marion
+or Mrs. Armour, always so sensitive as to what was required of her,
+always preparing for this very time, now that it had come, and her heart
+and mind were strong, her body seemed to weaken.  Once or twice during
+the day she had felt a little faint, but it had passed off, and she had
+scolded herself.  She did not wish a serious talk with her husband
+to-night, but she saw now that it was inevitable.
+
+He said to her as he sat down beside her: "You sing very well indeed.
+The song is full of meaning, and you bring it all out."
+
+"I am glad you like it," she responded conventionally.  "Of course it's
+an unusual song for an English drawing-room."
+
+"As you sing it, it would be beautiful and acceptable anywhere, Lali."
+
+"Thank you again," she answered, closing and unclosing her fan, her eyes
+wandering to where Mrs. Armour was.  She wished she could escape, for she
+did not feel like talking, and yet though the man was her husband she
+could not say that she was too tired to talk; she must be polite.  Then,
+with a little dainty malice: "It is more interesting, though, in the
+vernacular--and costume!"
+
+"Not unless you sang it so," he answered gallantly, and with a kind of
+earnestness.
+
+"You have not forgotten the way of London men," she rejoined.
+
+"Perhaps that is well, for I do not know the way of women," he said, with
+a faint bitterness.  "Yet, I don't speak unadvisedly in this,"--here he
+meant to be a little bold and bring the talk to the past,--"for I heard
+you sing that song once before."
+
+She turned on him half puzzled, a little nervous.  "Where did you hear me
+sing it?"
+
+He had made up his mind, wisely enough, to speak with much openness and
+some tact also, if possible.  "It was on the Glow Worm River at the Clip
+Claw Hills.  I came into your father's camp one evening in the autumn,
+hungry and tired and knocked about.  I was given the next tent to yours.
+It was night, and just before I turned in I heard your voice singing.  I
+couldn't understand much of the language, but I had the sense of it, and
+I know it when I hear it again."
+
+"Yes, I remember singing it that night," she said.  "Next day was the
+Feast of the Yellow Swan."
+
+Her eyes presently became dreamy, and her face took on a distant, rapt
+look.  She sat looking straight before her for a moment.
+
+He did not speak, for he interpreted the look aright, and he was going to
+be patient, to wait.
+
+"Tell me of my father," she said.  "You have been kind to him?"
+
+He winced a little.  "When I left Fort Charles he was very well," he
+said, "and he asked me to tell you to come some day.  He also has sent
+you a half-dozen silver-fox skins, a sash, and moccasins made by his own
+hands.  The things are not yet unpacked."
+
+Moccasins?--She remembered when last she had moccasins on her feet--the
+day she rode the horse at the quick-set hedge, and nearly lost her life.
+How very distant that all was, and yet how near too!  Suddenly she
+remembered also why she took that mad ride, and her heart hardened a
+little.
+
+"You have been kind to my father since I left?" she asked.
+
+He met her eyes steadily.  "No, not always; not more than I have been
+kind to you.  But at the last, yes."  Suddenly his voice became intensely
+direct and honest.  "Lali," he continued, "there is much that I want to
+say to you."  She waved her hand in a wearied fashion.  "I want to tell
+you that I would do the hardest penance if I could wipe out these last
+four years."
+
+"Penance?" she said dreamily--"penance?  What guarantee of happiness
+would that be?  One would not wish another to do penance if--"
+
+She paused.
+
+"I understand," he said--"if one cared--if one loved.  Yes, I understand.
+But that does not alter the force or meaning of the wish.  I swear to you
+that I repent with all my heart--the first wrong to you, the long
+absence--the neglect--everything."
+
+She turned slowly to him.  "Everything-Everything?" she repeated after
+him.  "Do you understand what that means?  Do you know a woman's heart?
+No.  Do you know what a shameful neglect is at the most pitiful time in
+your life?  No.  How can a man know!  He has a thousand things--the woman
+has nothing, nothing at all except the refuge of home, that for which she
+gave up everything!"
+
+Presently she broke off, and something sprang up and caught her in the
+throat.  Years of indignation were at work in her.  "I have had a home,"
+she said, in a low, thrilling voice--"a good home; but what did that cost
+you?  Not one honest sentiment of pity, kindness, or solicitude.  You
+clothed me, fed me, abandoned me, as--how can one say it?  Do I not know,
+if coming back you had found me as you expected to find me, what the
+result would have been?  Do I not know?  You would have endured me if I
+did not thrust myself upon you, for you have after all a sense of legal
+duty, a kind of stubborn honour.  But you would have made my life such
+that some day one or both of us would have died suddenly.  For"--she
+looked him with a hot clearness in the eyes--"for there is just so much
+that a woman can bear.  I wish this talk had not come now, but, since
+it has come, it is better to speak plainly.  You see, you misunderstand.
+A heathen has a heart as another--has a life to be spoiled or made happy
+as another.  Had there been one honest passion in your treatment of me--
+in your marrying me--there would be something on which to base mutual
+respect, which is more or less necessary when one is expected to love.
+But--but I will not speak more of it, for it chokes me, the insult to me,
+not as I was, but as I am.  Then it would probably have driven me mad,
+if I had known; now it eats into my life like rust."
+
+He made a motion as if to take her hands, but lifting them away quietly
+she said: "You forget that there are others present, as well as the fact
+that we can talk better without demonstration."
+
+He was about to speak, but she stopped him.  "No, wait," she said;
+"for I want to say a little more.  I was only an Indian girl, but you
+must remember that I had also in my veins good white blood, Scotch blood.
+Perhaps it was that which drew me to you then--for Lali the Indian girl
+loved you.  Life had been to me pleasant enough--without care, without
+misery, open, strong and free; our people were not as those others which
+had learned the white man's vices.  We loved the hunt, the camp-fires,
+the sacred feasts, the legends of the Mighty Men; and the earth was a
+good friend, whom we knew as the child knows its mother."
+
+She paused.  Something seemed to arrest her attention.  Frank followed
+her eyes.  She was watching Captain Vidall and Marion.  He guessed what
+she was thinking--how different her own wooing had been from theirs, how
+concerning her courtship she had not one sweet memory--the thing that
+keeps alive more love and loyalty in this world than anything else.
+Presently General Armour joined them, and Frank's opportunity was over
+for the present.
+
+Captain Vidall and Marion were engaged in a very earnest conversation,
+though it might not appear so to observers.
+
+"Come, now, Marion," he said protestingly, "don't be impossible.  Please
+give the day a name.  Don't you think we've waited about long enough?"
+
+"There was a man in the Bible who served seven years."
+
+"I've served over three in India since I met you at the well, and that
+counts double.  Why so particular to a day?  It's a bit Jewish.  Anyhow,
+that seven years was rough on Rachel."
+
+"How, Hume?  Because she got passee?"
+
+"Well, that counted; but do you suppose that Jew was going to put in
+those seven years without interest?  Don't you believe it.  Rachel paid
+capital and interest back, or Jacob was no Jew.  Tell me, Marion, when
+shall it be?"
+
+"Hume, for a man who has trifled away years in India, you are strangely
+impatient."
+
+"Mrs. Lambert says that I have the sweetest disposition."
+
+"My dear sir!"
+
+"Don't look at me like that at this distance, or I shall have to wear
+goggles, as the man did who went courting the Sun."
+
+"How supremely ridiculous you are!  And I thought you such a sensible,
+serious man."
+
+"Mrs. Lambert put that in your head.  We used to meet at the annual
+dinners of the Bible Society."
+
+"Why do you tell me such stuff?"
+
+"It's a fact.  Her father and my aunt were in that swim, and we were
+sympathisers."
+
+"Mercenary people!"
+
+"It worked very well in her case; not so well in mine.  But we conceived
+a profound respect for each other then.  But tell me, Marion, when is it
+to be?  Why put off the inevitable?"
+
+"It isn't inevitable--and I'm only twenty-three."
+
+                    "Only twenty-three,
+                    And as good fish in the sea"
+
+he responded, laughing.  "Yes, but you've set the precedent for a
+courtship of four years and a bit, and what man could face it?"
+
+"You did."
+
+"Yes, but I wasn't advertised of the fact beforehand.  Suppose I had seen
+the notice at the start: 'This mortgage cannot be raised inside of four
+years--and a bit!'  There's a limit to human endurance."
+
+"Why shouldn't I hold to the number, but alter the years to days?"
+
+"You wouldn't dare.  A woman must live up to her reputation."
+
+"Indeed?  What an ambition!"
+
+"And a man to his manners."
+
+"An unknown quantity."
+
+"And a lover to his promises."
+
+"A book of jokes."  Marion had developed a taste for satire.
+
+"Which reminds me of Lady Halwood and Mrs. Lambert.  Lady Halwood was
+more impertinent than usual the other day at the Sinclairs' show, and had
+a little fling at Mrs. Lambert.  The talk turned on gowns.  Lady Halwood
+was much interested at once.  She has a weakness that way.  'Why,' said
+she, 'I like these fashions this year, but I'm not sure that they suit
+me.  They're the same as when the Queen came to the throne.'  'Well,'
+said Mrs. Lambert sweetly, 'if they suited you then--' There was an
+audible titter, and Mrs. Lambert had an enemy for life."
+
+"I don't see the point of your story in this connection."
+
+"No?  Well, it was merely to suggest that if you had to live up to this
+scheme of four-years' probation, other people besides lovers would make
+up books of jokes, and--"
+
+"That's like a man--to threaten."
+
+"Yes, I threaten--on my knees."
+
+"Hume, how long do you think Frank will have to wait?"
+
+They were sitting where they had a good view of the husband and wife, and
+Vidall, after a moment, said: "I don't know.  She has waited four years,
+too; now it looks as if, like Jacob, she was going to gather in her
+shekels of interest compounded."
+
+"It isn't going to be a bit pleasant to watch."
+
+"But you won't be here to see."
+
+Marion ignored the suggestion.  "She seems to have hardened since he came
+yesterday.  I hardly know her; and yet she looks awfully worn to-night,
+don't you think?"
+
+"Yes, as if she had to keep a hand on herself.  But it'll come out all
+right in the end, you'll see."
+
+"Yes, of course; but she might be sensible and fall in love with Frank at
+once.  That's what she did when--"
+
+"When she didn't know man."
+
+"Yes, but where would you all be if we women acted on what we know of
+you?"
+
+"On our knees chiefly, as I am.  Remember this, Marion, that half a
+sinner is better than no man."
+
+"You mean that no man is better than half a saint?"
+
+"How you must admire me!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"As you are about to name the day, I assume that I'm a whole saint in
+your eyes."
+
+"St. Augustine!"
+
+"Who was he?"
+
+"A man that reformed."
+
+"Before or after marriage?"
+
+"Before, I suppose."
+
+"I don't think he died happy."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I've a faint recollection that he was boiled."
+
+"Don't be horrid.  What has that to do with it?"
+
+"Nothing, perhaps.  But he probably broke out again after marriage, and
+sank at last into that caldron.  That's what it means by being-steeped in
+crime."
+
+"How utterly nonsensical you are!"
+
+"I feel light-headed.  You've been at sea, on a yacht becalmed, haven't
+you?  when along comes a groundswell, and as you rock in the sun there
+comes trouble, and your head goes round like a top?  Now, that's my case.
+I've been becalmed four years, and while I pray for a little wind to take
+me--home, you rock me in the trough of uncertainty.  Suspense is very
+gall and wormwood.  You know what the jailer said to the criminal who was
+hanging on a reprieve: 'Rope deferred maketh the heart sick.'  Marion,
+give me the hour, or give me the rope."
+
+"The rope enough to hang yourself?"
+
+She suddenly reached up and pulled a hair from her head.  She laid it in
+his hand-a long brown silken thread.  "Hume," she said airily yet gently,
+"there is the rope.  Can you love me for a month of Sundays?"
+
+"Yes, for ever and a day!"
+
+"I will cancel the day, and take your bond for the rest.  I will be
+generous.  I will marry you in two months-and a day."
+
+"My dearest girl!"--he drew her hand into both of his--"I can't have you
+more generous than myself, I'll throw off the month."  But his eyes were
+shining very seriously, though his mouth smiled.
+
+"Two months and a day," she repeated.
+
+"We must all bundle off to Greyhope to-morrow," came General Armour's
+voice across the room.  "Down comes the baby, cradle and all."
+
+Lali rose.  "I am very tired," she said; "I think I will say good-night."
+
+"I'll go and see the boy with you," Frank said, rising also.
+
+Lali turned towards Marion.  Marion's face was flushed, and had a sweet,
+happy confusion.  With a low, trembling good-night to Captain Vidall, a
+hurried kiss on her mother's cheek, and a tip-toed caress on her father's
+head, she ran and linked her arm in Lali's, and together they proceeded
+to the child's room.  Richard was there when they arrived, mending a
+broken toy.  Two hours later, the brothers parted at Frank's door.
+
+"Reaping the whirlwind, Dick?" Frank said, dropping his hand on his
+brother's arm.
+
+Richard pointed to the child's room.
+
+"Nonsense!  Do you want all the world at once?  You are reaping the
+forgiveness of your sins."  Somehow Richard's voice was a little stern.
+
+"I was thinking of my devilry, Dick.  That's the whirlwind--here!"  His
+hand dropped on his breast.
+
+"That's where it ought to be.  Good-night."
+
+"Good-night."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A LIVING POEM
+
+Part of Frank's most trying interview, next to the meeting with his wife,
+was that with Mackenzie, who had been his special commissioner in the
+movement of his masquerade.  Mackenzie also had learned a great deal
+since she had brought Lali--home.  She, like others, had come to care
+truly for the sweet barbarian, and served her with a grim kind of
+reverence.  Just in proportion as this had increased, her respect for
+Frank had decreased.  No man can keep a front of dignity in the face of
+an unbecoming action.  However, Mackenzie had her moment, and when it was
+over, the new life began at no general disadvantage to Frank.  To all
+save the immediate family Frank and Lali were a companionable husband and
+wife.  She rode with him, occasionally walked with him, now and again
+sang to him, and they appeared in the streets of St. Albans and at the
+Abbey together, and oftener still in the village church near, where the
+Armours of many generations were proclaimed of much account in the solid
+virtues of tomb and tablet.
+
+The day had gone by when Lali attracted any especial notice among the
+villagers, and she enjoyed the quiet beauty and earnestness of the
+service.  But she received a shock one Sunday.  She had been nervous all
+the week, she could not tell why, and others remarked how her face had
+taken on a new sensitiveness, a delicate anxiety, and that her strength
+was not what it had been.  As, for instance, after riding she required to
+rest, a thing before unknown, and she often lay down for an hour before
+dinner.  Then, too, at table once she grew suddenly pale and swayed
+against Edward Lambert, who was sitting next to her.  She would not,
+however, leave the table, but sat the dinner out, to Frank's
+apprehension.  He was devoted, but it was clear to Marion and her mother
+at least that his attentions were trying to her.  They seemed to put her
+under an obligation which to meet was a trial.  There is nothing more
+wearing to a woman than affectionate attentions from a man who has claims
+upon her, but whom she does not love.  These same attentions from one who
+has no claims give her a thrill of pleasure.  It is useless to ask for
+justice in such a matter.  These things are governed by no law; and
+rightly so, else the world would be in good time a loveless multitude,
+held together only by the hungering ties of parent and child.
+
+But this Sunday wherein Lali received a shock.  She did not know that the
+banns for Marion's and Captain Vidall's marriage were to be announced,
+and at the time her thoughts were far away.  She was recalled to herself
+by the clergyman's voice pronouncing their names, and saying: "If any of
+you do know cause or just impediment why these two people should not be
+joined together in the bonds of holy matrimony, ye are to declare it."
+All at once there came back to her her own marriage when the Protestant
+missionary, in his nasal monotone, mumbled these very words, not as if he
+expected that any human being would, or could, offer objection.
+
+She almost sprang from her seat now.  Her nerves all at once came to such
+a tension that she could have cried out.  Why had there been no one there
+at her marriage to say: "I forbid it"?  How shameful it had all been!
+And the first kiss her husband had given her had the flavour of brandy!
+If she could but turn back the hands upon the clock of Time!  Under the
+influence of the music and the excited condition of her nerves, the event
+became magnified, distorted; it burned into her brain.  It was not made
+less poignant by the sermon from the text: "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin."
+When the words were first announced in the original, it sounded like her
+own language, save that it was softer, and her heart throbbed fast.  Then
+came the interpretation: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found
+wanting."
+
+Then suddenly swept over her a new feeling, one she had never felt
+before.  Up to this point a determination to justify her child, to
+reverse the verdict of the world, to turn her husband's sin upon himself,
+had made her defiant, even bitter; in all things eager to live up to her
+new life, to the standard that Richard had by manner and suggestion,
+rather than by words, laid down for her.  But now there came in upon her
+a flood of despair.  At best she was only of this race through one-third
+of her parentage, and education and refinement and all things could do no
+more than make her possible.  There must always be in the record: "She
+was of a strange people.  She was born in a wigwam."  She did not know
+that failing health was really the cause of this lapse of self-
+confidence, this growing self-depreciation, this languor for which she
+could not account.  She found that she could not toss the child and
+frolic with it as she had done; she was conscious that within a month
+there had stolen upon her the desire to be much alone, to avoid noises
+and bustle--it irritated her.  She found herself thinking more and more
+of her father, her father to whom she had never written one line since
+she had left the North.  She had had good reasons for not writing--
+writing could do no good whatever, particularly to a man who could not
+read, and who would not have understood her new life if he had read.  Yet
+now she seemed not to know why she had not written, and to blame herself
+for neglect and forgetfulness.  It weighed on her.  Why had she ever been
+taken from the place of tamarack-trees and the sweeping prairie grass?
+No, no, she was not, after all, fit for this life.  She had been
+mistaken, and Richard had been mistaken--Richard, who was so wise.  The
+London season?  Ah!  that was because people had found a novelty, and
+herself of better manners than had been expected.
+
+The house was now full of preparations for the wedding.  It stared her in
+the face every day, almost every hour.  Dressmakers, milliners, tailors,
+and all those other necessary people.  Did the others think what all this
+meant to her?  It was impossible that they should.  When Marion came back
+from town at night and told of her trials among the dressmakers, when she
+asked the general opinion and sometimes individual judgment, she could
+not know that it was at the expense of Lali's nerves.
+
+Lali, when she married, had changed her moccasins, combed her hair, and
+put on a fine red belt, and that was all.  She was not envious now, not
+at all.  But somehow it all was a deadly kind of evidence against herself
+and her marriage.  Her reproach was public, the world knew it, and no
+woman can forgive a public shame, even was it brought about by a man she
+loved, or loves.  Her chiefest property in life is her self-esteem and
+her name before the world.  Rob her of these, and her heaven has fallen,
+and if a man has shifted the foundations of her peace, there is no
+forgiveness for him till her Paradise has been reconquered.  So busy were
+all the others that they did not see how her strength was failing.  There
+were three weeks between the day the banns were announced and the day of
+the wedding, which was to be in the village church, not in town; for, as
+Marion said, she had seen too many marriages for one day's triumph and
+criticism; she wanted hers where there would be neither triumph nor
+criticism, but among people who had known her from her childhood up.
+A happy romance had raised Marion's point of view.
+
+Meanwhile Frank was winning the confidence of his own child, who,
+however, ranked Richard higher always, and became to a degree his
+father's tyrant.  But Frank's nature was undergoing a change.  His point
+of view also had enlarged.  The suffering, bitterness, and humiliation of
+his life in the North had done him good.  He was being disciplined to
+take his position as a husband and father, but he sometimes grew heavy-
+hearted when he saw how his attentions oppressed his wife, and had it not
+been for Richard he might probably have brought on disaster, for the
+position was trying to all concerned.  A few days before the wedding
+Edward Lambert and his wife arrived, and he, Captain Vidall, and Frank
+Armour took rides and walks together, or set the world right in the
+billiard-room.  Richard seldom joined them, though their efforts to
+induce him to do so were many.  He had his pensioners, his books, his
+pipe, and "the boy," and he had returned in all respects, in so far as
+could be seen, to his old life, save for the new and larger interest of
+his nephew.
+
+One evening the three men with General Armour were all gathered in the
+billiard-room.  Conversation had been general and without particular
+force, as it always is when merely civic or political matters are under
+view.  But some one gave a social twist to the talk, and presently they
+were launched upon that sea where every man provides his own chart, or he
+is a very worm and no man.  Each man had been differently trained, each
+viewed life from a different stand-point, and yet each had been brought
+up in the same social atmosphere, in the same social sets, had imbibed
+the same traditions, been moved generally by the same public
+considerations.
+
+"But there's little to be said for a man who doesn't, outwardly at least,
+live up to the social necessity," said Lambert.
+
+"And keep the Ten Commandments in the vulgar tongue," rejoined Vidall.
+
+"I've lived seventy-odd years, and I've knocked about a good deal in my
+time," said the general, "but I've never found that you could make a
+breach of social necessity, as you call it, without paying for it one way
+or another.  The trouble with us when we're young is that we want to get
+more out of life than there really is in it.  There is not much in it,
+after all.  You can stand just so much fighting, just so much work, just
+so much emotion--and you can stand less emotion than anything else.  I'm
+sure more men and women break up from a hydrostatic pressure of emotion
+than from anything else.  Upon my soul, that's so."
+
+"You are right, General," said Lambert.  "The steady way is the best way.
+The world is a passable place, if a fellow has a decent income by
+inheritance, or can earn a big one, but to be really contented to earn
+money it must be a big one, otherwise he is far better pleased to take
+the small inherited income.  It has a lot of dignity, which the other
+can only bring when it is large."
+
+"That's only true in this country; it's not true in America," said Frank,
+"for there the man who doesn't earn money is looked upon as a muff, and
+is treated as such.  A small inherited income is thought to be a trifle
+enervating.  But there is a country of emotions, if you like.  The
+American heart is worn upon the American sleeve, and the American mind is
+the most active thing in this world.  That's why they grow old so young."
+
+"I met a woman a year or so ago at dinner," said Vidall, "who looked
+forty.  She looked it, and she acted it.  She was younger than any woman
+present, but she seemed older.  There was a kind of hopeless languor
+about her which struck me as pathetic.  Yet she had been beautiful, and
+might even have been so when I saw her, if it hadn't been for that look.
+It was the look of a person who had no interest in things.  And the
+person who has no interest in things is the person who once had a great
+deal of interest in things, who had too passionate an interest.  The
+revulsion is always terrible.  Too much romance is deadly.  It is as
+false a stimulant as opium or alcohol, and leaves a corresponding mark.
+Well, I heard her history.  She was married at fifteen--ran away to be
+married; and in spite of the fact that a railway accident nearly took her
+husband from her on the night of her marriage--one would have thought
+that would make a strong bond--she was soon alive to the attentions that
+are given a pretty and--considerate woman.  At a ball at Naples, her
+husband, having in vain tried to induce her to go home, picked her up
+under his arm and carried her out of the ballroom.  Then came a couple of
+years of opium-eating, fierce social excitement, divorce, new marriage,
+and so on, until her husband agreeably decided to live in Nice, while she
+lived somewhere else.  Four days after I had met her at the dinner I saw
+her again.  I could scarcely believe my eyes.  The woman had changed
+completely.  She was young again-twenty-five, in face and carriage, in
+the eye and hand, in step and voice."
+
+"Who was the man?" suggested Frank Armour.  "A man about her own age,
+or a little more, but who was an infant beside her in knowledge of the
+world."  "She was in love with the fellow?  It was a grande passion?"
+asked Lambert.
+
+"In love with him?  No, not at all.  It was a momentary revival of an
+old-possibility."
+
+"You mean that such women never really love?"
+
+"Perhaps once, Frank, but only after a fashion.  The rest was mere
+imitation of their first impulses."
+
+"And this woman?"
+
+"Well, the end came sooner than I expected.  I tell you I was shocked at
+the look in her face when I saw it again.  That light had flickered out;
+the sensitive alertness of hand, eye, voice, and carriage had died away;
+lines had settled in the face, and the face itself had gone cold, with
+that hard, cold passiveness which comes from exhausted emotions and a
+closed heart.  The jewels she wore might have been put upon a statue with
+equal effect."
+
+"It seems to me that we might pitch into men in these things and not make
+women the dreadful examples," said a voice from the corner.  It was the
+voice of Richard, who had but just entered.
+
+"My dear Dick," said his father, "men don't make such frightful examples,
+because these things mean less to men than they do to women.  Romance is
+an incident to a man; he can even come through an affaire with no ideals
+gone, with his mental fineness unimpaired; but it is different with a
+woman.  She has more emotion than mind, else there were no cradles in the
+land.  Her standards are set by the rules of the heart, and when she has
+broken these rules she has lost her standard too.  But to come back, it
+is true, I think, as I said, that man or woman must not expect too much
+out of life, but be satisfied with what they can get within the normal
+courses of society and convention and home, and the end thereof is peace
+--yes, upon my soul, it's peace."
+
+There was something very fine in the blunt, honest words of the old man,
+whose name had ever been sweet with honour.
+
+"And the chief thing is that a man live up to his own standard," said
+Lambert.  "Isn't that so, Dick?--you're the wise man."
+
+"Every man should have laws of his own, I should think; commandments of
+his own, for every man has a different set of circumstances wherein to
+work--or worry."
+
+"The wisest man I ever knew," said Frank, dropping his cigar, "was a
+little French-Canadian trapper up in the Saskatchewan country.  A priest
+asked him one day what was the best thing in life, and he answered: 'For
+a young man's mind to be old, and an old man's heart to be young.'  The
+priest asked him how that could be.  And he said: 'Good food, a good
+woman to teach him when he is young, and a child to teach him when he is
+old.' Then the priest said: 'What about the Church and the love of God?'
+The little man thought a little, and then said: 'Well, it is the same--
+the love of man and woman came first in the world, then the child, then
+God in the garden.'  Afterwards he made a little speech of good-bye to
+us, for we were going to the south while he remained in a fork of the Far
+Off River.  It was like some ancient blessing: that we should always have
+a safe tent and no sorrow as we travelled; that we should always have a
+cache for our food, and food for our cache; that we should never find a
+tree that would not give sap, nor a field that would not grow grain; that
+our bees should not freeze in winter, and that the honey should be thick,
+and the comb break like snow in the teeth; that we keep hearts like the
+morning, and that we come slow to the Four Corners where man says Good-
+night."
+
+Each of the other men present wondered at that instant if Frank Armour
+would, or could, have said this with the same feelings two months before.
+He seemed almost transformed.
+
+"It reminds me," said the general, "of an inscription from an Egyptian
+monument which an officer of the First put into English verse for me
+years ago:
+
+         "Fair be the garden where their loves shall dwell,
+          Safe be the highway where their feet may go,
+          Rich be the fields wherein their hands may toil,
+          The fountains many where their good wines flow.
+          Full be their harvest-bins with corn and oil,
+          To sorrow may their humour be a foil;
+          Quick be their hearts all wise delights to know,
+          Tardy their footsteps to the gate Farewell."
+
+There was a moment's silence after he had finished, and then there was
+noise without, a sound of pattering feet; the door flew open, and in ran
+a little figure in white--young Richard in his bed-gown, who had broken
+away from his nurse, and had made his way to the billiard-room, where he
+knew his uncle had gone.
+
+The child's face was flashing with mischief and adventure.  He ran in
+among the group, and stretched out his hands with a little fighting air.
+His uncle Richard made a step towards him, but he ran back; his father
+made as if to take him in his arms, but he evaded him.  Presently the
+door opened, the nurse entered, the child sprang from among the group,
+and ran with a laughing defiance to the farthest end of the room, and,
+leaning his chin on the billiard-table, flashed a look of defiant humour
+at his pursuer.  Presently the door opened again, and the figure of the
+mother appeared.  All at once the child's face altered; he stood
+perfectly still, and waited for his mother to come to him.  Lali had not
+spoken, and she did not speak until, lifting the child, she came the
+length of the billiard-table and faced them.
+
+"I beg your pardon," she said, "for intruding; but Richard has led
+us a dance, and I suppose the mother may go where her child goes."
+
+"The mother and the child are always welcome wherever they go," said
+General Armour quietly.
+
+All the men had risen to their feet, and they made a kind of semicircle
+before her.  The white-robed child had clasped its arms about her neck,
+and nestled its face against hers, as if, with perfect satisfaction, it
+had got to the end of its adventure; but the look of humour was still in
+the eyes as they ran from Richard to his father and back again.
+
+Frank Armour stepped forwards and took the child's hand, as it rested on
+the mother's shoulder.  Lali's face underwent a slight change as her
+husband's fingers touched her neck.
+
+"I must go," she said.  "I hope I have not broken up a serious
+conversation--or were you not so serious after all?" she said, glancing
+archly at General Armour.  "We were talking of women," said Lambert.
+
+"The subject is wide," replied Lali, "and the speakers many.  One would
+think some wisdom might be got in such a case."
+
+"Believe me, we were not trying to understand the subject," said Captain
+Vidall; "the most that a mere man can do is to appreciate it."
+
+"There are some things that are hidden from the struggling mind of man,
+and are revealed unto babes and the mothers of babes," said General
+Armour gravely, as, reaching out his hands, he took the child from the
+mother's arms, kissed it full upon the lips, and added: "Men do not
+understand women, because men's minds have not been trained in the same
+school.  When once a man has mastered the very alphabet of motherhood,
+then he shall have mastered the mind of woman; but I, at least, refuse to
+say that I do not understand, from the stand-point of modern cynicism."
+
+"Ah, General, General!" said Lambert, "we have lost the chivalric way of
+saying things, which belongs to your generation."
+
+By this time the wife had reached the door.  She turned and held out her
+arms for the child.  General Armour came and placed the boy where he had
+found it, and, with eyes suddenly filling, laid both his hands upon
+Lali's and they clasped the child, and said: "It is worth while to have
+lived so long and to have seen so much."  Her eyes met his in a wistful,
+anxious expression, shifted to those of her husband, dropped to the
+cheeks of the child, and with the whispered word, which no one, not even
+the general, heard, she passed from the room, the nurse following her.
+
+Perhaps some of the most striking contrasts are achieved in the least
+melodramatic way.  The sudden incursion of the child and its mother into
+the group, the effect of their presence, and their soft departure,
+leaving behind them, as it were, a trail of light, changed the whole
+atmosphere of the room, as though some new life had been breathed into
+it, charged each mind with new sensations, and gave each figure new
+attitude.  Not a man present but had had his full swing with the world,
+none worse than most men, none better than most, save that each had
+latent in him a good sense of honour concerning all civic and domestic
+virtues.  They were not men of sentimentality; they were not accustomed
+to exposing their hearts upon their sleeve, but each, as the door closed,
+recognised that something for one instant had come in among them, had
+made their past conversation to appear meagre, crude, and lacking in both
+height and depth.  Somehow, they seemed to feel, although no words
+expressed the thought, that for an instant they were in the presence of a
+wisdom greater than any wisdom of a man's smoking-room.
+
+"It is wonderful, wonderful," said the general slowly, and no man asked
+him why he said it, or what was wonderful.  But Richard, sitting apart,
+watched Frank's face acutely, himself wondering when the hour would come
+that the wife would forgive her husband, and this situation so fraught
+with danger would be relieved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+ON THE EDGE OF A FUTURE
+
+At last the day of the wedding came, a beautiful September day, which may
+be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else.  Lali had been
+strangely quiet all the day before, and she had also seemed strangely
+delicate.  Perhaps, or perhaps not, she felt the crisis was approaching.
+It is probable that when the mind has been strained for a long time, and
+the heart and body suffered much, one sees a calamity vaguely, and cannot
+define it; appreciates it, and does not know it.  She came to Marion's
+room about a half-hour before they were to start for the church.  Marion
+was already dressed and ready, save for the few final touches, which,
+though they have been given a dozen times, must still again be given
+just before the bride starts for the church.  Such is the anxious mind
+of women on these occasions.  The two stood and looked at each other a
+moment, each wondering what were the thoughts of the other.  Lali was
+struck by that high, proud look over which lay a glamour of infinite
+satisfaction, of sweetness, which comes to every good woman's face when
+she goes to the altar in a marriage which is not contingent on the rise
+or fall in stocks, or a satisfactory settlement.  Marion, looking, saw,
+as if it had been revealed to her all at once, the intense and miraculous
+change which had come over the young wife, even within the past two
+months.  Indeed, she had changed as much within that time as within all
+the previous four years--that is, she had been brought to a certain point
+in her education and experience, where without a newer and deeper
+influence she could go no further.  That newer and deeper influence had
+come, and the result thereof was a woman standing upon the verge of the
+real tragedy to her life, which was not in having married the man, but
+in facing that marriage with her new intelligence and a transformed soul.
+Men can face that sort of thing with a kind of philosophy, not because
+men are better or wiser, but because it really means less to them.  They
+have resources of life, they can bury themselves in their ambitions good
+or bad, but a woman can only bury herself in her affections, unless her
+heart has been closed; and in that case she herself has lost much of what
+made her adorable.  And while she may go on with the closed heart and
+become a saint, even saintship is hardly sufficient to compensate any man
+or woman for a half-lived life.  The only thing worth doing in this world
+is to live life according to one's convictions--and one's heart.  He or
+she who sells that fine independence for a mess of pottage, no matter if
+the mess be spiced, sells, as the Master said, the immortal part of him.
+
+And so Lali, just here on the edge of Marion's future, looking into that
+mirror, was catching the reflection of her own life.  When two women come
+so near that, like the lovers in the Tempest, they have changed eyes, in
+so far as to read each other's hearts, even indifferently, which is much
+where two women are concerned, there is only one resource, and that is to
+fall into each other's arms, and to weep if it be convenient, or to hold
+their tears for a more fitting occasion; and most people will admit that
+tears need not add to a bride's beauty.
+
+Marion might, therefore, be pardoned if she had her tears in her throat
+and not in her eyes, and Lali, if they arose for a moment no higher than
+her heart.  But they did fall into each other's arms despite veils and
+orange blossoms, and somehow Marion had the feeling for Lali that she had
+on that first day at Greyhope, four years ago, when standing on the
+bridge, the girl looked down into the water, tears dropping on her hands,
+and Marion said to her: "Poor girl!  poor girl!"  The situations were the
+same, because Lali had come to a new phase of her life, and what that
+phase would be who could tell-happiness or despair?
+
+The usual person might think that Lali was placing herself and her wifely
+affection at a rather high price, but then it is about the only thing
+that a woman can place high, even though she be one-third a white woman
+and two-thirds an Indian.  Here was a beautiful woman, who had run the
+gamut of a London season, who had played a pretty social part, admirably
+trained therefor by one of the best and most cultured families of
+England.  Besides, why should any woman sell her affections even to her
+husband, bargain away her love, the one thing that sanctifies "what God
+hath joined let no man put asunder"?  Lali was primitive, she was unlike
+so many in a trivial world, but she was right.  She might suffer, she
+might die, but, after all, there are many things worse than that.  Man is
+born in a day, and he dies in a day, and the thing is easily over; but to
+have a sick heart for three-fourths of one's lifetime is simply to have
+death renewed every morning; and life at that price is not worth living.
+In this sensitive age we are desperately anxious to save life, as if it
+was the really great thing in the world; but in the good, strong times of
+the earth--and in these times, indeed, when necessity knows its hour--men
+held their lives as lightly as a bird upon the housetop which any chance
+stone might drop.
+
+It is possible that at this moment the two women understood each other
+better than they had ever done, and respected each other more.  Lali,
+recovering herself, spoke a few soft words of congratulation, and then
+appeared to busy herself in putting little touches to Marion's dress,
+that soft persuasion of fingers which does so much to coax mere cloth
+into a sort of living harmony with the body.
+
+They had no more words of confidence, but in the porch of the church,
+Marion, as she passed Lali, caught the slender fingers in her own and
+pressed them tenderly.  Marion was giving comfort, and yet if she had
+been asked why she could not have told.  She did not try to define it
+further than to say to herself that she herself was having almost too
+much happiness.  The village was en fete, and peasants lined the street
+leading to the church, ready with their hearty God-bless-you's.  Lali sat
+between her husband and Mrs. Armour, apparently impassive until there
+came the question: "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?"
+and General Armour's voice came clear and strong: "I do."  Then a soft
+little cry broke from her, and she shivered slightly.  Mrs. Armour did
+not notice, but Frank and Mrs. Lambert heard and saw, and both were
+afterwards watchful and solicitous.  Frank caught Mrs. Lambert's eye,
+and it said, to a little motion of the head: "Do not appear to notice."
+
+Lali was as if in a dream.  She never took her eyes from the group at
+the altar until the end, and the two, now man and wife, turned to go into
+the vestry.  Then she appeared to sink away into herself for a moment,
+before she fell into conversation with the others, as they moved towards
+the vestry.
+
+"It was beautiful, wasn't it?" ventured Edward Lambert.
+
+"The most beautiful wedding I ever saw," she answered, with a little
+shadow of meaning; and Lambert guessed that it was the only one she had
+seen since she came to England.
+
+"How well Vidall looked," said Frank, "and as proud as a sultan.  Did you
+hear what he said, as Marion came up the aisle?"
+
+"No," responded Lambert.
+
+"He said, 'By Jove, isn't she fine!'  He didn't seem conscious that other
+people were present."
+
+"Well, if a man hasn't some inspirations on his wedding-day when is he to
+have them?" said Mrs. Lambert.  "For my part, I think that the woman
+always does that sort of thing better than a man.  It is her really great
+occasion, and she masters it--the comedy is all hers."  They were just
+then entering the vestry.
+
+"Or the tragedy, as the case may be," said Lali quietly, smiling at
+Marion.  She had, as it were, recovered herself, and her words had come
+with that airy, impersonal tone which permits nothing of what is said in
+it to be taken seriously.  Something said by the others had recalled her
+to herself, and she was now returned very suddenly to the old position of
+alertness and social finesse.  Something icy seemed to pass over her, and
+she immediately lost all self-consciousness, and began to speak to her
+husband with less reserve than she had shown since he had come.  But he
+was not deceived.  He saw that at that very instant she was further away
+from him than she had ever been.  He sighed, in spite of himself,
+as Lali, with well-turned words, said some loving greetings to Marion,
+and then talked a moment with Captain Vidall.
+
+"Who can understand a woman?" said Lambert to his wife meaningly.
+
+"Whoever will," she answered.  "How do you mean?"
+
+"Whoever will wait like the saint upon the pillar, will suffer like the
+traveller in the desert; serve like a slave, and demand like a king; have
+patience greater than Job; love ceaseless as a fountain in the hills; who
+sees in the darkness and is not afraid of light; who distrusts not,
+neither believes, but stands ready to be taught; who is prepared for a
+kiss this hour and a reproach the next; who turneth neither to right nor
+left at her words, but hath an unswerving eye--these shall understand a
+woman."
+
+"I never knew you so philosophical.  Where did you get this deliverance
+on the subject?"
+
+"May not even a woman have a moment of inspiration?"
+
+"I should expect that of my wife."
+
+"And I should expect that of my husband.  It is trite to say that men are
+vain; I shall remark that they sit so much in their own light that they
+are surprised if another being crosses their disc."
+
+"You always were clever, my dear, and you always were twice too good for
+me."
+
+"Well, every woman--worth the knowing--is a missionary."
+
+"Where does Lali come in?"
+
+"Can you ask?  To justify the claims of womanhood in spite of race--and
+all."
+
+"To bring one man to a sense of the duty of sex to sex, eh?"
+
+"Truly.  And is she not doing it well?  See her now."  They were now just
+leaving the church, and Lali had taken General Armour's arm, while
+Richard led his mother to the carriage.
+
+Lali was moving with a little touch of grandeur in her manner and a more
+than ordinary deliberation.  She had had a moment of great weakness, and
+then there had come the reaction--carried almost too far by the force of
+the will.  She was indeed straining herself too far.  Four years of
+tension were culminating.
+
+"See her now, Edward," repeated Mrs. Lambert.  "Yes, but if I'm not
+mistaken, my dear, she is doing so well that she's going to pieces.
+She's overstrung to-day.  If it were you, you'd be in hysterics."
+
+"I believe you are right," was the grave reply.  "There will be an end
+to this comedy one way or another very soon."
+
+A moment afterwards they were in a carriage rolling away to Greyhope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE END OF THE TRAIL
+
+When Marion was about leaving with her husband for the railway station,
+she sought out Lali, and found her standing half hidden by the curtains
+of a window, looking out at little Richard, who was parading his pony up
+and down before the house.  An unutterable sweetness looked out of
+Marion's eyes.  She had found, as it seemed to her, and as so many have
+believed until their lives' end, the secret of existence.  Lali saw the
+glistening joy, and responded to it, just as it was in her being to
+respond to every change of nature--that sensitiveness was in her as
+deep as being.
+
+"You are very happy, dear?" she said to Marion.  "You cannot think how
+happy, Lali.  And I want to say that I feel sure that you will yet be as
+happy, even happier than I.  Oh, it will come--it will come.  And you
+have the boy now-so fine, so good."
+
+Lali looked out to where little Richard disported himself; her eyes
+shone, and she turned with a responsive but still sad smile to Marion.
+"Marion," she said gently, "the other should have come before he came."
+"Frank loves you, Lali."
+
+"Who knows?  And then, oh, I cannot tell!  How can one force one's heart?
+No, no!  One has to wait, and wait, even if the heart grows harder, and
+one gets hopeless."
+
+Marion kissed her on the cheek and smiled.  "Some day soon the heart will
+open up, and then such a flood will pour out!  See, Lali.  I am going
+now, and our lives won't run together so much again ever, perhaps.  But I
+want to tell you now that your coming to us has done me a world of good--
+helped me to be a wiser girl; and I ought to be a better woman for it.
+Good-bye."
+
+They were calling to her, and with a hurried embrace the two parted, and
+in a few moments the bride and bridegroom were on their way to the new
+life.  As the carriage disappeared in a turn of the limes, Lali vanished
+also to her room.  She was not seen at dinner.  Mackenzie came to say
+that she was not very well, and that she would keep to her room.  Frank
+sent several times during the evening to inquire after her, and was told
+that she was resting comfortably.  He did not try to see her, and in this
+was wise.  He had now fallen into a habit of delicate consideration,
+which brought its own reward.  He had given up hope of winning her heart
+or confidence by storm, and had followed his finer and better instincts--
+had come to the point where he made no claims, and even in his own mind
+stood upon no rights.  His mother brought him word from Lali before he
+retired, to say that she was sorry she could not see him, but giving him
+a message and a commission into town the following morning for their son.
+Her tact had grown is her strength had declined.  There is something in
+failing health--ill-health without disease--which sharpens and refines
+the faculties, and makes the temper exquisitely sensitive--that is, with
+people of a certain good sort.  The aplomb and spirited manner in which
+Lali had borne herself at the wedding and after, was the last flicker of
+her old strength, and of the second phase in her married life.  The end
+of the first phase came with the ride at the quick-set hedge, this with
+a less intent but as active a temper.
+
+The next morning she did not appear at breakfast, but sent a message to
+Frank to say that she was better, and adding another commission for town.
+All day, save for an hour on the balcony, she kept to her room, and lay
+down for the greater part of the afternoon.  In the evening, when Frank
+returned, his mother sent for him, and frankly told him that she thought
+it would be better for him to go away for a few weeks or so; that Lali
+was in a languid, nervous state, and she thought that by the time he got
+back--if he would go--she would be better, and that better things would
+come for him.
+
+Frank was no longer the vain, selfish fellow who had married Lali--
+something of the best in him was at work.  He understood, and suggested
+a couple of weeks with Richard at their little place in Scotland.  Also,
+he saw his wife for a little while that evening.  She had been lying
+down, but she disposed herself in a deep chair before he entered.  He was
+a little shocked to see, as it were all at once, how delicate she looked.
+He came and sat down near her, and after a few moments of friendly talk,
+in which he spoke solicitously of her health, he told her that he thought
+of going up to Scotland with Richard for a few weeks, if she saw no
+objection.
+
+She did not quite understand why he was going.  She thought that perhaps
+he felt the strain of the situation, and that a little absence would be
+good for both.  This pleased her.  She did not shrink, as she had so
+often done since his return, when he laid his hand on hers for an
+instant, as he asked her if she were willing that he should go.
+Sometimes in the past few weeks she had almost hated him.  Now she was
+a little sorry for him, but she said that of course he must go; that no
+doubt it was good that he should go, and so on, in gentle, allusive
+phrases.  The next evening she came down to dinner, and was more like
+herself as she was before Frank came back, but she ate little, and before
+the men came into the drawing-room she had excused herself, and retired;
+at which Mrs. Lambert shook her head apprehensively at herself, and made
+up her mind to stay at Greyhope longer than she intended.
+
+Which was good for all concerned; for, two nights after Frank and Richard
+had gone, Mackenzie hurried down to the drawing-room with the news that
+Lali had been found in a faint on her chamber floor.  That was the
+beginning of weeks of anxiety, in which Mrs. Lambert was to Mrs. Armour
+what Marion would have been, and more; and both to Lali all that mother
+and sister could be.
+
+Their patient was unlike any other that they had known.  Feverish,
+she had no fever; with a gentle, hacking cough, she had no lung trouble;
+nervous, she still was oblivious to very much that went on around her;
+hungering often for her child, she would not let him remain long with her
+when he came.  Her sleep was broken, and she sometimes talked to herself,
+whether consciously or unconsciously they did not know.  The doctor had
+no remedies but tonics--he did not understand the case; but he gently
+ventured the opinion that it was mostly a matter of race, that she was
+pining because civilisation had been infused into her veins--the old
+insufficient theory.
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" said General Armour, when his wife told him.
+"The girl bloomed till Frank came back.  God bless my soul! she's falling
+in love, and doesn't know what it is."
+
+He was only partly right, perhaps, but he was nearer the truth than the
+dealer in quinine and a cheap philosophy of life.  "She'll come around
+all right, you'll see.  Decline--decline be hanged!  The girl shall live,
+--damn it, she shall!" he blurted out, as his wife's eyes filled with
+tears.
+
+Mrs. Lambert was much of the same mind as the general, but went further.
+She said to Mrs. Armour that in all her life she had never seen so sweet
+a character, so sensitive a mind--a mind whose sorrow was imagination.
+And therein the little lady showed herself a person of wisdom.  For none
+of them had yet reckoned with that one great element in Lali's character
+--that thing which is the birthright of all who own the North for a
+mother, the awe of imagination, the awe and the pain, which in its finest
+expression comes near, very near, to the supernatural.  Lali's mind was
+all pictures; she never thought of things in words, she saw them; and
+everything in her life arrayed itself in a scene before her, made vivid
+by her sensitive soul, so much more sensitive now with health failing,
+the spirit wearing out the body.  There was her malady--the sick heart
+and mind.
+
+A new sickness wore upon her.  It had not touched her from the day she
+left the North until she sang "The Chase of the Yellow Swan" that first
+evening after Frank's return.  Ever since then her father was much in her
+mind--the memory of her childhood, and its sweet, inspiring friendship
+with Nature.  All the roughness and coarseness of the life was refined
+in her memory by the exquisite atmosphere of the North, the good sweet
+earth, the strong bracing wind, the camaraderie of trees and streams and
+grass and animals.  And in it all stood her father, whom she had left
+alone, in that interminable interval between the old life and the new.
+
+Had she done right?  She had cut him off, as if he had never been--her
+people, her country also; and for what?  For this--for this sinking
+sense, this failing body, this wear and tear of mind and heart, this
+constant study to be possible where she had once been declared by the
+world to be impossible.
+
+One night she lay sleeping after a rather feverish day, when it was
+thought best to keep the child from her.  Suddenly she waked, and sat up.
+Looking straight before her, she said:
+
+"I will arise, and will go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father,
+I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be
+called Thy son."
+
+She said nothing more than this, and presently lay back, with eyes wide
+open, gazing before her.  Like this she lay all night long, a strange,
+aching look in her face.  There had come upon her the sudden impulse to
+leave it all, and go back to her father.  But the child--that gave her
+pause.  Towards morning she fell asleep, and slept far on into the day,
+a thing that had not occurred for a long time.
+
+At noon a letter arrived for her.  It came into General Armour's hands,
+and he, seeing that it bore the stamp of the Hudson's Bay Company, with
+the legend, From Fort St. Charles, concluded that it was news of Lali's
+father.  Then came the question whether the letter should be given to
+her.  The general was for doing so, and he prevailed.  If it were bad
+news, he said, it might raise her out of her present apathy and by
+changing the play of her emotions do her good in the end.
+
+The letter was given to her in the afternoon.  She took it apathetically,
+but presently, seeing where it was from, she opened it hurriedly with a
+little cry which was very like a moan too.  There were two letters inside
+one from the factor at Fort Charles in English, and one from her father
+in the Indian language.  She read her father's letter first, the other
+fluttered to her feet from her lap.  General Armour, looking down, saw a
+sentence in it which, he felt, warranted him in picking it up, reading
+it, and retaining it, his face settling into painful lines as he did so.
+Days afterwards, Lali read her father's letter to Mrs. Armour.  It ran:
+
+
+                              My daughter,
+
+                  Lali, the sweet noise of the Spring:
+
+     Thy father speaks.
+
+     I have seen more than half a hundred moons come like the sickle and
+     go like the eye of a running buck, swelling with fire, but I hear
+     not thy voice at my tent door since the first one came and went.
+
+     Thou art gone.
+
+     Thy face was like the sun on running water; thy hand hung on thy
+     wrists like the ear of a young deer; thy foot was as soft on the
+     grass as the rain on a child's cheek; thy words were like snow in
+     summer, which melts in richness on the hot earth.  Thy bow and arrow
+     hang lonely upon the wall, and thy empty cup is beside the pot.
+
+     Thou art gone.
+
+     Thou hast become great with a great race, and that is well.  Our
+     race is not great, and shall not be, until the hour when the Mighty
+     Men of the Kimash Hills arise from their sleep and possess the land
+     again.
+
+     Thou art gone.
+
+     But thou hast seen many worlds, and thou hast learned great things,
+     and thou and I shall meet no more; for how shall the wise kneel at
+     the feet of the foolish, as thou didst kneel once at thy father's
+     feet?
+
+     Thou art gone.
+
+     High on the Clip Claw Hills the trees are green, in the Plain of the
+     Rolling Stars the wings of the wild fowl are many, and fine is the
+     mist upon Goldfly Lake; and the heart of Eye-of-the-Moon is strong.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     The trail is open to the White Valley, and the Scarlet Hunter hath
+     saved me, when my feet strayed in the plains and my eyes were
+     blinded.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     I have friends on the Far Off River who show me the yards where the
+     musk-ox gather; I have found the gardens of the young sable, and my
+     tents are full of store.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     In the morning my spirit is light, and I have harvest where I would
+     gather, and the stubble is for my foes.  In the evening my limbs are
+     heavy, and I am at rest in my blanket.  The hunt is mine and sleep
+     is mine, and my soul is cheerful when I remember thee.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     I have built for thee a place where thy spirit comes.  I hear thee
+     when thou callest to me, and I kneel outside the door, for thou art
+     wise, and thou speakest to me; but thee as thou art in a far land I
+     shall see no more.  This is my word to thee, that thou mayst know
+     that I am not alone.  Thou shalt not come again, as thou once went;
+     it is not meet.  But by these other ways I will speak to thee.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     Farewell.  I have spoken.
+
+Lali finished reading, and then slowly folded up the letter.  The writing
+was that of the wife of the factor at Fort Charles--she knew it.  She
+sat for a minute looking straight before her.  She read her father's
+allegory.  Barbarian in so much as her father was, he had beaten this
+thing out with the hammer of wisdom.  He missed her, but she must not
+come back; she had outgrown the old life--he knew it and she was with
+him in spirit, in his memory; she understood his picturesque phrases,
+borrowed from the large, affluent world about him.  Something of the
+righteousness and magnanimity of this letter passed into her, giving her
+for an instant a sort of peace.  She had needed it--needed it to justify
+herself, and she had been justified.  To return was impossible--she had
+known that all along, though she had not admitted it; the struggle had
+been but a kind of remorse, after all.  That her father should come to
+her was also impossible--it was neither for her happiness nor his.  She
+had been two different persons in her life, and the first was only a
+memory to the second.  The father had solved the problem for her.  He too
+was now a memory that she could think on with pleasure, as associated
+with the girl she once was.  He had been well provided for by her
+husband, and General Armour put his hand on hers gently and said:
+
+"Lali, without your permission I have read this other letter."
+
+She did not appear curious.  She was thinking still of her father's
+letter to her.  She nodded abstractedly.  "Lali," he continued, "this
+says that your father wished that letter to be written to you just as he
+said it at the Fort, on the day of the Feast of the Yellow Swan.  He
+stood up--the factor writes so here--and said that he had been thinking
+much for years, and that the time had come when he must speak to his
+daughter over the seas--"
+
+General Armour paused.  Lali inclined her head, smiled wistfully, and
+held up the letter for him to see.  The general continued:
+
+"So he spoke as has been written to you, and then they had the Feast of
+the Yellow Swan, and that night--"  He paused again, but presently, his
+voice a little husky, he went on: "That night he set out on a long
+journey,"--he lifted the letter and looked at it, then met the serious
+eyes of his daughter-in-law," on a long journey to the Hills of the
+Mighty Men; and, my dear, he never came back; for, as he said, there was
+peace in the White Valley, and he would rest till the world should come
+to its Spring again, and the noise of its coming should be in his ears.
+Those, Lali, are his very words."
+
+His hand closed on hers, he reached out and took the other hand, from
+which the paper fluttered, and clasped both tight in his own firm grasp.
+
+"My daughter," he said, "you have another father."  With a low cry, like
+that of a fawn struck in the throat, she slid forward on her knees beside
+him, and buried her face on his arm.  She understood.  Her father was
+dead.  Mrs. Armour came forward, and, kneeling also, drew the dark head
+to her bosom.  Then that flood came which sweeps away the rust that
+gathers in the eyes and breaks through the closed dikes of the heart.
+
+Hours after, when she had fallen into a deep sleep, General Armour and
+his wife met outside her bedroom door.
+
+"I shall not leave her," Mrs. Armour said.  "Send for Frank.  His time
+has almost come."
+
+But it would not have come so soon had not something else occurred.  The
+day that he came back from Scotland he entered his wife's room, prepared
+for a change in her, yet he did not find so much to make him happy as he
+had hoped.  She received him with a gentleness which touched him, she let
+her hand rest in his, she seemed glad to have him with her.  All bars had
+been cast down between them, but he knew that she had not given him all,
+and she knew it also.  But she hoped he did not know, and she dreaded the
+hour when he would speak out of his now full heart.  He did not yet urge
+his affection on her, he was simply devoted, and watchful, and tender,
+and delightedly hopeful.
+
+But one night she came tapping at his door.  When he opened it, she said:
+"Oh come, come!  Richard is ill!  I have sent for the doctor."
+
+Henceforth she was her old self again, with a transformed spirit, her
+motherhood spending itself in a thousand ways.  She who was weak bodily
+became now much stronger; the light of new vigour came to her eyes; she
+and her husband, in the common peril, worked together, thinking little
+of themselves, and all of the child.  The last stage of the journey to
+happiness was being passed, and if it was not obvious to themselves,
+the others, Marion and Captain Vidall included, saw it.
+
+One anxious day, after the family doctor had left the sick child's room,
+Marion, turning to the father and mother, said: "Greyhope will be itself
+again.  I will go and tell Richard that the danger is over."
+
+As she turned to do so, Richard entered the room.  "I have seen the
+doctor," he began, "and the little chap is going to pull along like a
+house afire."
+
+Tapping Frank affectionately on the arm, he was about to continue, but
+he saw what stopped him.  He saw the last move in Frank Armour's tragic-
+comedy.  He and Marion left the room as quickly as was possible to him,
+for, as he said himself, he was "slow at a quick march"; and a moment
+afterwards the wife heard without demur her husband's tale of love for
+her.
+
+Yet, as if to remind him of the wrong he had done, Heaven never granted
+Frank Armour another child.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Every man should have laws of his own
+Flood came which sweeps away the rust that gathers in the eyes
+How can one force one's heart?  No, no!  One has to wait
+Man or woman must not expect too much out of life
+May be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else
+Men are shy with each other where their emotions are in play
+Prepared for a kiss this hour and a reproach the next
+Romance is an incident to a man
+Simply to have death renewed every morning
+To sorrow may their humour be a foil
+We want to get more out of life than there really is in it
+Who can understand a woman?
+Worth while to have lived so long and to have seen so much
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE, V3, PARKER ***
+
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