Isobel (14 page)

MacVeigh broke in on him as though he had not heard.

"You better get to bed, Pelly," he warned. "That arm needs rest. I'm
going out to see where they bury him."

He put on his cap and heavy coat and went as far as the door, then
turned back. From his kit he took a belt-ax and nails.

The wind was blowing more strongly over the Barren, and MacVeigh could
no longer hear the low lament of the Eskimos. He moved toward their
fires, and found them deserted of men, only the dogs rema g in their
deathlike sleep. And then, far down the edge of the timber, he saw a
flare of light. Five minutes later he stood hidden in a deep shadow, a
few paces from the Eskimos. They had dug the grave early in the
evening, out on the great snow-plain, free of the trees; and as the
fire they had built lighted up their dark, round faces MacVeigh saw
the five little black men who had borne forth Scottie Deane leaning
over the shallow hole in the frozen earth. Scottie was already gone.
The earth and ice and frozen moss were falling in upon him, and not a
sound fell now from the thick lips of his savage mourners. In a few
minutes the crude work was done, and like a thin black shadow the
natives filed back to their camp. Only one remained, sitting
cross-legged at the head of the grave, his long narwhal spear at his
back. It was O-gluck-gluck, the Eskimo chief, guarding the dead man
from the devils who come to steal body and soul during the first few
hours of burial.

Billy went deeper into the forest until he found a thin, straight
sapling, which he cut down with half a dozen strokes of his belt-ax.
From the sapling he stripped the bark, and then he chopped off a third
of its length and nailed it crosswise to what remained. After that he
sharpened the bottom end and returned to the grave, carrying the cross
over his shoulder. Stripped to whiteness, it gleamed in the firelight.
The Eskimo watcher stared at it for a moment, his dull eyes burning
darker in the night, for he knew that after this two gods, and not
one, were to guard the grave. Billy drove the cross deep, and as the
blows of his ax fell upon it the Eskimo slunk back until he was
swallowed in the gloom. When MacVeigh was done he pulled off his cap.
But it was not to pray.

"I'm sorry, old man," he said to what was under the cross. "God knows
I'm sorry. I wish you was alive. I wish you was going back to her—
with the kid— instid o' me. But I'll keep that promise. I swear it.
I'll do— what's right— by her."

From the forest he looked back. The Eskimo chief had returned to his
somber watch. The cross gleamed a ghostly white against the thick
blackness of the Barren. He turned his face away for the last time,
and there filled him the oppression of a leaden hand, a thing that was
both dread and fear. Scottie Deane was dead— dead and in his grave,
and yet he walked with him now at his side. He could feel the
presence, and that presence was like a warning, stirring strange
thoughts within him. He turned back to the cabin and entered softly.
Pelliter was asleep. Little Isobel was breathing the sweet
forgetfulness of childhood. He stooped and kissed her silken curls,
and for a long time he stood with one of those soft curls between his
fingers. In a few years more, he thought, it would be the darker gold
and brown of the woman's hair— of the woman he loved. Slowly a great
peace entered into him. After all, there was more than hope ahead for
him. She— the older Isobel— knew that he loved her as no other man
in the world could love her. He had given proof of that. And now he
was going to her.

After his return from the scene of burial Billy undressed, put out the
light, and went to bed. He fell asleep quickly, and his slumber was
filled with many dreams. They were sweet and joyous at first, and he
lived again his first meeting with the woman; he was once more in the
presence of her beauty, her purity, her faith and confidence in him.
And then more trouble visions came to him. He awoke twice, and each
time he sat up, filled with the shuddering dread that had come to him
at the graveside.

A third time he awakened, and he struck a match to look at his watch.
It was four o'clock. He was still exhausted. His limbs ached from the
tremendous strain of the fifty-mile race across the Barren, but he
could no longer sleep. Something— he did not attempt to ask himself
what it was— was urging him to action. He got up and dressed.

When Pelliter awoke two hours later MacVeigh's pack and sledge were
ready for the trip south. While they ate their breakfast the two men
finished their plans. When the hour of parting came Billy left his
comrade alone with little Isobel and went out to hitch up the dogs.
When he returned there was a fresh redness in Pelliter's eyes, and he
puffed out thick clouds of smoke from his pipe to hide his face.
MacVeigh thought of that parting often in the days that followed.
Pelliter stood last in the door, and in his face was a look which
MacVeigh wished that he had not seen. In his own heart was the dread
and the fear, the thing which he could not name.

For hours he could not shake off the gloom that oppressed him. He
strode at the head of old Kazan, the leader, striking a course due
south by compass. When he fell back for the third time to look at
little Isobel he found the child buried deep in her blankets sound
asleep. She did not awake until he stopped to make tea at noon. It was
four o'clock when he halted again to make camp in the shelter of a
clump of tall spruce. Isobel had slept most of the day. She was wide
awake now, laughing at him as he dug her out of her nest.

"Give me a kiss," he demanded.

Isobel complied, putting her two little hands to his face.

"You're a— a little peach," he cried. "There ain't been a whimper out
of you all day. And now we're going to have a fire— a big fire."

He set about his work, whistling for the first time since morning. He
set up his silk Service tent, cut spruce and balsam boughs until he
had them a foot deep inside, and then dragged in wood for half an
hour. By that time it was dark and the big fire was softening the snow
for thirty feet around. He had taken off Isobel's thick, swaddling
coat, and the child's pretty face shone pink in the fireglow. The
light danced red and gold in her tangled curls, and as they ate
supper, both on the same blanket, Billy saw opposite him more and more
of what he knew he would find in the woman. When they had finished he
produced a small pocket comb and drew Isobel close up to him. One by
one he smoothed the tangles out of her curls, his heart beating
joyously as the silken touch of them ran through his fingers. Once he
had felt that same soft touch of the woman's hair against his face. It
had been an accidental caress, but he had treasured it in his memory.
It seemed real again now, and the thrill of it made him place little
Isobel alone again on the blanket, while he rose to his feet. He threw
fresh fuel on the fire, and then he found that the warmth had softened
the snow until it clung to his feet. The discovery gave him an
inspiration. A warmth that was not of the fire leaped into his face,
and he gathered up the softened snow, raking it into piles with a
snow-shoe; and before Isobel's astonished and delighted eyes there
grew into shape a snow-man almost as big as himself. He gave it arms
and a head, and eyes of charred wood, and when it was done he placed
his own cap on the crown of it and his pipe in its mouth. Little
Isobel screamed with delight, and together, hand in hand, they danced
around and around it, just as he and the other girls and boys had
danced years and years ago. And when they stopped there were tears of
laughter and joy in the child's eyes and a filmy mist of another sort
in Billy's.

It was the snow-man that brought back to him years and years of lost
hopes. They flooded in upon him until it seemed as though the old life
was the life of yesterday and waiting for him now just beyond the edge
of the black forest. Long after Isobel was asleep in the tent he sat
and looked at the snow-man; and more and more his heart sang with a
new joy, until it seemed as though he must rise and cry out in the
eagerness and hope that filled him. In the snow-man, slowly melting
before the fire, there was a heart and a soul and voice. It was
calling to him, urging him as nothing in the world had ever urged him
before. He would go back to the old home down in God's country, to the
old playmates who were men and women now. They would welcome him— and
they would welcome the woman. For he would take her. For the first
time he made himself believe that she would go. And there, hand in
hand, they would follow his boyhood footprints over the meadows and
through the hills, and he would gather flowers for her in place of the
mother that was gone, and he would tell her all the old stories of the
days that were passed.

It was the snow-man!

Until late that night Billy sat beside his campfire with the snow-man.
Strange and new thoughts had come to him, and among these was the
wondering one asking himself why he had never built a snow-man before.
When he went to bed he dreamed of the snow-man and of little Isobel;
and the little girl's laughter and happiness when she saw the curious
form the dissolving snow-man had taken in the heat of the fire when
she awoke the following morning filled him again with those boyish
visions of happiness that he had seen just ahead of him. At other
times he would have told himself that he was no longer reasonable.
After they had breakfasted and started on the day's journey he laughed
and talked with baby Isobel, and a dozen times in the forenoon he
picked her up in his arms and carried her behind the dogs.

"We're going home," he kept telling her over and over again. "We're
going home— down to mama— mama— mama!" He emphasized that; and each
time Isobel's pretty mouth formed the word mama after him his heart
leaped exultantly. By the end of that day it had become the sweetest
word in the world to him. He tried mother, but his little comrade
looked at him blankly, and he did not like it himself. "Mama, mama,
mama," he said a hundred times that night beside their campfire, and
before he tucked her away in her warm blankets he said something to
her about "Now I lay me down to sleep." Isobel was too tired and
sleepy to comprehend much of that. Even after she was deep in slumber
and Billy sat alone smoking his pipe he whispered that sweetest word
in the world to himself, and took out the tress of shining hair and
gazed at it joyously in the glow of the fire. By the end of the next
day little Isobel could say almost the whole of the prayer his own
mother had taught him years and years and years ago, so far back that
his vision of her was not that of a woman, but of an elusive and
wonderful angel; and the fourth day at noon she lisped the whole of it
without a word of assistance from him.

On the morning of the fifth day Billy struck the Gray Beaver, and
little Isobel grew serious at the change in him. He no longer amused
her, but urged the dogs along, never for an instant relaxing his
vigilant quest for a sign of smoke, a trail, a blazed tree. At his
heart there began to burn a suspense that was almost suffocating. In
these last hours before he was to see Isobel there came the inevitable
reaction within him. Gloom oppressed him where a little while before
joyous anticipation had given him hope. The one terrible thought drove
out all others now— he was bringing her news of death, her husband's
death. And to Isobel he knew that Deane had meant all that the world
held of joy or hope— Deane and the baby.

It was like a shock when he came suddenly upon the cabin, in the edge
of a small clearing. For a moment he hesitated. Then he took Isobel in
his arms and went to the door. It was slightly ajar, and after
knocking upon it with his fist he thrust it open and entered.

There was no one in the room in which he found himself, but there was
a stove and a fire. At the end of the room was a second door, and it
opened slowly. In another moment Isobel stood there. He had never seen
her as he saw her now, with the light from a window falling upon her.
She was dressed in a loose gown, and her long hair fell in disheveled
profusion over her shoulders and bosom. MacVeigh would have cried out
her name— he had told himself a hundred times what he would first say
to her— but what he saw in her face startled him and held him silent
while their eyes met. Her cheeks were flushed. Her lips burned an
unnatural red. Her eyes were glowing with strange fires. She looked at
him first, and her hands clutched at her bosom, crumpling the masses
of her lustrous hair. Not until she had looked into his eyes did she
recognize what he carried in his arms. When he held the child out to
her she sprang forward with the strangest cry he had ever heard.

"My baby!" she almost shrieked. "My baby— my baby—"

She staggered back and sank into a chair near a table, with little
Isobel clasped to her breast. For a time Billy heard only those words
in her dry, sobbing voice as she crushed her burning face down against
her child's. He knew that she was sick, that it was fever which had
sent the hot flush into her cheeks. He gulped hard, and went near to
her. Trembling, he put out a hand and touched her. She looked up. A
bit of that old, glorious light leaped into her eyes, the light which
he had seen when in gratitude she had given him her lips to kiss.

"You?" she whispered. "You— brought her—"

She caught his hand, and the soft smother of her loose hair fell over
it. He could feel the quick rise and fall of her bosom.

"Yes," he said.

There was a demand in her face, her eyes, her parted lips. He went on,
her hand clasping his tighter, until he could feel the swift beating
of her heart. He had never thought that he could tell the story in as
few words as he told it now, with more and more of the glorious light
creeping into Isobel's eyes. She stopped breathing when he told her of
the fight in the cabin and the death of the man who had stolen little
Isobel. A hundred words more brought him to the edge of the forest. He
stopped there. But she still questioned him in silence. She drew him
down nearer, until he could feel her breath. There was something
terrible in the demand of her eyes. He tried to find words to say, but
something rose up in his throat and choked him. She saw his effort.