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The World For Sale, a novel by Gilbert Parker |
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Book 3 - Chapter 25. Man Proposes |
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_ BOOK III CHAPTER XXV. MAN PROPOSES Before sunset, as Ingolby had promised, he made his way towards Gabriel Druse's house. A month had gone since he had left its hospitality behind. What had happened between that time and this day of fate for Lebanon and Manitou? It is not a long story, and needs but a brief backward look. This had happened: The New York expert performed the operation upon Ingolby's eyes, announced it successful, declared that his sight would be restored, and then vanished with a thousand dollars in his pocket. For days thereafter the suspense was almost more than Fleda could bear. She grew suddenly thin and a little worn, and her big eyes had that look of yearning which only comes to those whose sorrow is for another. Old Gabriel Druse was emphatic in his encouragement, but his face reflected the trouble in that of his daughter. He knew well that if Ingolby remained blind he would never marry Fleda, though he also knew well that, with her nature, almost fanatical in its convictions, she would sacrifice herself, if sacrifice was the name for it. The New York expert had prophesied and promised, but who could tell! There was the chance of failure, and the vanished eye-surgeon had the thousand dollars in his pocket. Two people, however, were cheerful; they were Ingolby and Jim. Jim went about the place humming a nigger melody to himself, and twice he brought Berry the barber to play to his Chief on the cottonfield fiddle. Nigger Jim, though it was two generations gone which linked him with the wilds of the Gold Coast, was the slave of fanatical imagination, and in Ingolby's own mind there was the persistent superstition that all would be well, because of a dream he had had. He dreamed he heard his dead mother's voice in the room, where he lay. She had called him by name, and had said: "Look at me, Max," and he had replied, "I cannot see," and she had said again, "Look at me, my son!" Then he thought that he had looked at her, had seen her face clearly, and it was as the last time they parted, shining and sweet and good. She had said to him in days long gone, that if she could ever speak to him across the Void, she would; and he had the fullest belief now that she had done so. So it was that this dreadnought of industry and organization, in dock for repairs, cheerfully awaited the hour when he would be launched again upon the tide of work-healthy, healed and whole. At last there came the day when, for an instant, the bandages could be removed. There were present, Rockwell, Fleda, and Jim--Jim, pale but grinning, at the foot of the bed; Fleda, with her back against the door and her hands clenched behind her as though to shut out the invading world. Never had her heart beat as it beat now, but her eyes were steady and bright. There was in them, however, a kind of pleading look. She could not see Ingolby's face; did not want to see it when the bandages were taken off; but at the critical moment she shut her eyes and her back held the door, as though a thousand were trying to force an entrance. The first words after the bandages were removed came from Ingolby. "Well, Jim, you look all right!" he said. Swaying as she went, Fleda half-blindly moved towards a chair near by and sank into it. She scarcely heard Jim's reply. "Looking all right yourself, Chief. You won't see much change in this here old town." Ingolby's hand was in Rockwell's. "It's all right, isn't it?" he asked. "You can see it is," answered Rockwell with a chuckle in his voice, and then suddenly he put the bandages round Ingolby's eyes again. "That's enough for today," he said. A moment later the bandages were secured and Rockwell stood back from the bed. "In another week you'll see as well as ever you did," Rockwell said. "I'm proud of you." "Well, I hope I'll see a little better than ever I did," remarked Ingolby meaningly. "I was pretty short-sighted before." At that instant he heard Fleda's footstep approaching the bed. His senses had grown very acute since the advent of his blindness. He held out his hand into space. "What a nice room this is!" he said as her fingers slid into his. "It's the nicest room I was ever in. It's too nice for me. In a few days I'll hand the lease over again to its owner, and go back to the pigsty Jim keeps in Stormont Street." "Well, there ain't any pigs in that sty now, Chief; but it's all ready," said Jim, indignant and sarcastic. It was a lucky speech. It broke the spell of emotion which was greatly straining everybody's endurance. "That's one in the eye for somebody," remarked Rockwell drily. "What would you like for lunch?" asked Fleda, letting go Ingolby's hand, but laying her fingers on his arm for a moment. What would he like for lunch! Here was a man back from the Shadows, from broken hopes and shattered career, from the helplessness and eternal patience of the blind; here he was on the hard, bright highroad again, with a procession of restored things coming towards him, with life and love within his grasp; and the woman to whom it mattered most of all, who was worth it all, and more than all where he was concerned, said to him in this moment of revelation, "What would you like for lunch?" With an air as casually friendly as her own, he put another hand on the fingers lying on his arm, patted them, and said gaily, "Anything I can see. As a drover once said to me, 'I can clean as fur as I can reach.'" In just such a temper also they had parted when he went back to his "pigsty" with Jim. To Gabriel Druse he had said all that one man might say to another without excess of feeling; to Madame Bulteel he had given a gold pencil which he had always worn; to Fleda he gave nothing, said little, but the few words he did say told the story, if not the whole story. "It's a nice room," he said, and she had flushed at his words, "and I've had the best time of my life in it. I'd like to buy it, but I know it's not for sale. Love and money couldn't buy it--isn't that so?" Then had--come days in his own home, still with bandaged eyes, but with the bandages removed for increasing hours every day; yet no one at all in the town knowing the truth except the Mayor, Halliday the lawyer, and one or two others who kept the faith until Ingolby gave them the word to speak. Then had come the Mayor's visit to Montreal, the great meeting, the fire at Manitou, and now Ingolby on the way to his tryst with Fleda. They had met twice only since he had left Gabriel Druse's house, and on the last occasion they had looked each other full in the eyes, and Ingolby had said to her in the moment they had had alone: "I'm going to get back, but I can't do it without you." To this her reply had been, "I hope it's not so bad as that," and she had looked provokingly in his eyes. Now she knew beyond peradventure that he cared for her, and she was almost provoked at herself that when he was in such danger of losing his sight for ever she had caught his head to her breast in the passion of the moment. Many a time when he had been asleep, with gentle fingers she had caressed his hands, his head, his face; but that did not count, because he did not know. He did, however, know of that moment when her passionate heart broke over him in tenderness; and she tried to make him think, by things said since, that it was only pity for his sufferings which made her do it. Ingolby thought of all these things, but in a spirit of understanding, as he went to his tryst with her at sunset on the day when Lebanon and Manitou were reconciled. ......................... He met her walking among the trees, very near the place where they had had their first long talk, months before, when Jethro Fawe was a prisoner in the Hut in the Woods. Then it was warm, singing Summer; now, beneath the feet the red and brown leaves rustled, the trees were stretching up gaunt arms to the Winter, the woods were no longer vocal, and the singing birds had fled, though here and there a black squirrel, not yet gone to Winter quarters, was busy and increasing his stores. A hedgehog scuttled across his path. He smiled as he remembered telling Fleda that once, when he was a little boy, he had eaten hedgehog, and she had asked him if he remembered the Gipsy name for hedgehog--hotchewitchi was the word. Now, as the shapeless creature made for its hole, it was significant of the history of his life during the past Summer. How long it seemed since that day when love first peeped forth from their hearts like a young face at the lattice of a sunlit window. Fleda had warned him of trouble, and that trouble had come! In his mind she was a woman like none he had ever known; she could think greatly, act largely, give tremendously. As he stood waiting, the wonderful, ample life of her seemed to come like a wave towards him. In his philosophy, intellect alone had never been the governing influence. Intellect must find its play through the senses, be vitalized by the elements of physical life, or it could not prevail. There was not one sensual strain in him, but with a sensuous mind he loved the vital thing. He was sure that presently Gabriel Druse would disappear, leaving her behind with him. That was what he meant to ask her to-day--to be and stay with him always. He knew that the Romanys were gathering in the prairie. They had been heard of here and there, and some of them had been seen along the Sagalac, though he knew nothing of that dramatic incident in the woods when Fleda was kidnapped and Jethro Fawe vanished from the scene. As Fleda came towards him, under the same trees which had shielded her from the sun months ago--now nearly naked and bare--something in her look and bearing sharply caught his interest. He asked himself what it was. So often a face familiar over half a lifetime perhaps, suddenly at some new angle, or because, by chance, one has looked at it searchingly, shows a new expression, a new contour never before observed, giving fresh significance to the character. There was that in Ingolby's mind, a depth of desire, a resolve to stake two lives against the chances of Fate, which made him look at Fleda now with a revealing intensity. What was the new thing in her carriage which captured his eye? Presently it flashed upon him--memories of Mexico and the Southern United States; native women with jars of water upon their heads; the erect, well-balanced form; the sure, sinuous movement; the step measured, yet free; the dignity come of carrying the head as though it were a pillar of an Athenian temple, one of the beautiful Caryatides yonder by the AEgean Sea. It smote him as a sudden breath of warm air strikes a face in the night coolness of the veldt. His pulses quickened, he flushed with the soft shock of it. There she was, refined, civilized, gowned like other women, with all the manners and details of civilization and social life about her; yet, in spite of it all, she did not belong; there was about her still something remote and alien. It had not to do with appearance alone, though her eyes were so vivid, and her expression so swift and varying; it was to be found in the whole presence--something mountain-like and daring, something Eastern and reserved and secret, something remote--brooding like a Sphinx, and prophetic like a Sibyl. But suppose that in days to come the thing that did not belong, which was of the East, of the tan, of the River Starzke; suppose that it should-- With a great effort he drove apprehension and the instant's confused wonder far away, and when, come close to him, she smiled, showing the perfect white teeth, and her eyes softened to a dreamy regard of him, all he had ever felt for her in the past months seemed concentrated into this one moment. Yet he did not look like a languishing lover; rather like one inflamed with a great idea or stirred to a great resolve. For quite a minute they stood gazing as though they would read the whole truth in each other's eyes. She was all eager, yet timorous; he was resolved; yet now, when the great moment had come, as it were, like a stammerer fearing the sound of his own voice. There was so much to say that he could not speak. She broke the spell. "I am here. Can't you see me?" she asked in a quizzical, playful tone, her lips trembling a little, but with a smile in her eyes which she vainly tried to veil. She had said the one thing which above all others could have lifted the situation to its real significance. A few weeks ago the eyes now looking into hers and telling a great story were sealed with night, and the mind behind was fretted by the thought of a perpetual darkness. All the tragedy of the past rushed into his mind now, and gave all that was between them, or was to be between them, its real meaning. A beautiful woman is dear to man simply as woman, and not as the woman; virtue has slain its thousands, but physical charm has slain its tens of thousands! Whatever Ingolby's defects, however, infinitely more than the girl's beauty, more than the palpitating life in her, than red lips and bright eye, than warm breast and clasping hand, was something beneath all which would last, or should last, when the hand was palsied and the eye was dim. "I am here. Can't you see me?" All that he had regained in life in her little upper room rushed upon him, and with outstretched arms and in a voice choked with feeling, he said: "See you! Dear God--To see you and all the world once more! It is being born again to me. I haven't learned to talk in my new world yet; but I know three words of the language. I love you. Come--I'll be good to you." She drew back from him, and her look said that she would read him to the uttermost word in his life's book, would see the heart of this wonderful thing; and then with a hungry cry, she flung her arms around his neck and pressed her wet eyes against his flushed cheek. A half-hour later, as they wandered back to the house he suddenly stopped, put his hands on her shoulders, looked earnestly in her eyes, and said: "God's good to me. I hope I'll remember that." "You won't be so blind as to forget," she answered, and she wound her fingers in his with a feeling which was more than the simple love of woman for man. "I've got much more to remember than you have," she added. Suddenly she put both hands upon his breast. "You don't understand; you can't understand, but I tell you that I shall have to fight hard if I am to be all you want me to be. I have got a past to forget; you have a past you want to remember--that's the difference. I must tell you the truth: it's in my veins, that old life, in spite of all. Listen. I ought to have told you, and I meant to tell you before this happened, but when I saw you there, and you held out your arms to me, I forgot everything. Yet still I must tell you now, though perhaps you will hate me when you know. The old life--I hate it, but it calls me, and I have an impulse to go back to it even though I hate it. Listen. I'll tell you what happened the other day. It's terrible, but it's true. I was walking in the woods--" Thereupon she told him of her being seized and carried to the Gipsy camp, and of all that happened there to the last detail. She even had the courage to tell of all she felt there; but when she had finished, with a half-frightened look in her eyes, her face pale, and her hands clasped before her, he did not speak for a minute. Suddenly, however, he seemed to tower over her, his two big hands were raised as though they would strike, and then the palms spread out and enclosed her cheeks lovingly, and his eyes fastened upon hers. "I know," he said gently. "I always understood--everything; but you'll never have the same fight again, because I'll be with you. You understand, Fleda--I'll be with you." With an exclamation of gratitude she nestled into his arms. Before the thrill of his embrace had passed from their pulses, they heard the breaking of twigs under a quick footstep, and Rhodo stood before them. "Come," he said to Fleda. His voice was as solemn and strange as his manner. "Come!" he repeated peremptorily. Fleda sprang to his side. "Is it my father? What has happened?" she cried. The old man waved her aside, and pointed toward the house. _ |
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