The Quality of Mercy

All the landscape seemed dwarfed since he saw it in that far-off summer. The tops of the interminable solitudes that walled the river in on both sides appeared lower, as if the snow upon them weighed them down, but doubtless they had grown beyond their real height in his memory. They had lost the mystery of the summer aspect when they were dimmed with rain or swathed in mist; all their outlines were in plain sight, and the forests that clothed them from the shore to their summits were not that unbroken gloom which they had seemed. The snow shone through their stems, and the inky river at their feet lay a motionless extent of white. As his carriole slipped lightly over it, Northwick had a fantastic sense of his own minuteness and remoteness. He thought of the photograph of a lunar landscape that he had once seen greatly magnified, and of a fly that happened to traverse the expanse of plaster-like white between the ranges of extinct volcanoes.

At times the cliffs rose from the river too sheer for the snow to lodge on; then their rocky faces shone harsh and stern; and sometimes the springs that gushed from them in summer were frozen in long streams of ice, like the tears bursting from the source of some Titanic grief. These monstrous icicles, blearing the visage of the rock, which he figured as nothing but icicles, affected Northwick with an awe that he nowhere felt except when his driver slowed his carriole in front of the great Capes Trinity and Eternity, and silently pointed at them with his whip. He had no need to name them, the fugitive would have known them in another planet. It was growing late; the lonely day was waning to the lonely night. While they halted, the scream of a catamount broke from the woods skirting the bay between the capes, and repeated itself in the echo that wandered from depth to depth of the frozen wilderness, and seemed to die wailing away at the point where it first tore the silence.

Here and there, at long intervals, they passed a point or a recess where a saw-mill stood, with a few log houses about it, and with signs of human life in the smoke that rose weakly on the thin, dry air from their chimneys, or in the figures that appeared at the doorways as the carriole passed. At the next of these beyond the capes, the driver proposed to stop and pass the night, and Northwick consented. He felt worn out by his day's journey; his nerves were spent as if by a lateral pressure of the lifeless desert he had been travelling through, and by the stress of his thoughts, the intensity of his reveries. His mind ran back against his will, and dwelt with his children. By this time, long before this time, they must be wild with anxiety about him; by this time their shame must have come to poison their grief. He realized it all, and he realized that he could not, must not help them. He must not go back to them if ever he was to live for them again. But at last he asked why he should live, why he should not die. There was laudanum enough in that bottle to kill him.

As he walked up from the carriole at the river's edge to the door of the saw-miller's cabin, he drew the cork of the vial, and poured out the poison; it followed him a few steps, a black dribble of murder on the snow, that the miller's dog smelt at and turned from in offence. That night he could not sleep again; toward morning, when all the house was snoring, he gave way to the sobs that were bursting his heart. He heard the sleepers, men and dogs, start a little in their dreams; then they were still, and he fell into a deep sleep.

They let him sleep late; and he had a dream of himself, which must have been caused by the nascent consciousness of the going and coming around him. People were talking of him, and one said how old he was; and another looked at his long, white beard which flowed down over the blanket as far as his waist. He told them that he wore it so that they should not know him when he got home; and he showed them how he could take it off and put it on at pleasure. He started awake, and found his carriole driver standing over him.

"You got you' sleep hout, no?"

"What time is it?" said Northwick, stupidly, scanning the man to make sure that it was he, and waiting for a full sense of the situation to reach him.

"Nine o'clock," said the man, and he turned away.

Northwick got up, and found the place empty of the men and dogs. A woman, who looked like a half-breed, brought him his breakfast of fried venison and bean-coffee; her little one held by her skirt, and stared at him. He thought of Elbridge's baby that he had seen die. It seemed ages ago. He offered the child a shilling; it shyly turned its face into its mother's dress. The driver said, "'E do'n' know what money is, yet," but the mother seemed to know; she showed her teeth, and took it for the child. Northwick sat a moment thinking what a strange thing it was not to know what money was; it had never occurred to him before; he asked himself a queer question, What was money? The idea of it seemed to go to pieces, as a printed word does when you look steadily at it, and to have no meaning. It affected him as droll, fantastic, like a piece of childish make-believe, when the woman took some more money from him for his meals and lodging. But that was the way the world was worked. You could get anything done for money; it was the question of demand and supply; nothing more. He tried to think where money came in when he went out to see Elbridge's sick boy; when Elbridge left the dead child to drive him to the station. It was something else that came in there; but that thing and money were the same, after all: he had proved his love for his children by making money for them; if he had not loved them so much he would not have tried to get so much money, and he would not have been where he was.

His mind fought away from his control, as the sledge slipped along over the frozen river again. It was very cold, but the full sun on his head afflicted him like heat. It was the blaze of light that beat up from the snow, too. His head felt imponderable; and yet he could not hold it up. It was always sinking forward; and he woke from naps without being sure that he had been asleep.

He intended to push through that day to Chicoutimi; but his start was so late that it seemed to him as if they would never get to Haha Bay. When they arrived, late in the afternoon, all sense of progress thither faded away; it was as if the starting and stopping were one, or contained in the same impulse. It might be so if he kept on eleven miles further to Chicoutimi, but he would not be able to feel it so at the beginning; the wish could involve its accomplishment only at the end. He said to himself that this was unreasonable; it was a poor rule that would not work both ways.

This ran through his mind in the presence of the old man who bustled out of the door of the cabin where his carriole had stopped. It was larger than most of the other cabins of the place, which Northwick remembered curiously well, some with their logs bare, and some sheathed in birch-bark. He remembered this man, too, when his white moustache, which branched into either ear, was a glistening brown, and the droop of his left eyelid was more like a voluntary wink. But the gayety of his face was the same, and his welcome was so cordial, that a fear of recognition went through Northwick. He knew the man for the talkative Canadian who had taken him and his wife a drive over the hills around the bay, in the morning, when their boat arrived, and afterwards stopped with them at this cabin, and had them in to drink a glass of milk. Northwick's wife liked the man, and said she would like to live in such a house in such a place, and should not be afraid of the winter that he told her was so terrible. It was almost as if her spirit were there; but Northwick said to himself that he must not let the man know that he had ever seen him before. The resolution cost him something, for he felt so broken and weak that he would have liked to claim his kindness as an old acquaintance. He would have liked to ask if he still caught wild animals for showmen, and how his trade prospered; if he had always lived at Haha Bay since they met. But he was the more decided to ignore their former meeting because the man addressed him in English at once, and apparently knew him for an American. Perhaps other defaulters had been there before; perhaps the mines had brought Americans there prospecting.

"Good morning, sir!" cried the Canadian. "I am glad to see you! Let me 'elp you hout, sir. Well, it is a pleasure to speak a little English with some one! The English close hup with the river in the autumn, but it open early this year. I 'ope you are a sign of many Americans. They are the life of our country. Without the Americans we could not live. No, sir. Not a day. Come in, come in. You will find you' room ready for you, sir."

Northwick hung back suspiciously. "Were you expecting me?" he asked.

"No one!" cried the man, with a shrug and opening of the hands. "But hall the travellers they stop with Bird, and where there are honly two rooms, 'eat with one stove between the walls, their room is always ready. Do me the pleasure!" He set the door open, and bowed Northwick in. "Baptiste!" he called to the driver over his shoulder, "take you' 'orse to the stable." He added a long queue of unintelligible French to his English, and the driver responded, "Hall right."

"I am the only person at Haha Bay who speaks English," he said, in the same terms he had used twenty years before, when he presented himself to Northwick and his wife on their steamboat, and asked them if they would like to drive before breakfast. "But you must know me? Bird —Oiseau? You have been here before?"

"No," said Northwick, with one lie for all. The man, with his cheer and gayety, was even terribly familiar; and Northwick could have believed that the room and the furniture in it were absolutely unchanged. There was the little window that he knew opened on the poor vegetable garden, with its spindling corn, and its beans for soup and coffee. There was the chair his wife had sat in to look out on the things; but for the frost on the pane he could doubtless see them growing now.

He sank into the chair, and said to himself that he should die there, and it would be as well, it would be easy. He felt very old and weak; and he did not try to take off the wraps which he had worn in the sledge. He wished that he might fall so into his grave, and be done with it.

V

Bird walked up and down the room, talking; he seemed overjoyed with the chance, and as if he could not forego it for a moment. "Well, sir, I wish that I could say as much! But I have been here forty years, hoff and on. I am born at Quebec" – in his tremulous inattention, Northwick was aware that the man had said the same thing to him all those years before, with the same sidelong glance for the effect of the fact upon him – "and I came here when I was twenty. Now I am sixty. Hall the Americans know me. I used to go into the bush with them for bear. Lots of bear in the bush when I first came; now they get pretty scarce. I have the best moose-dog. But I don't care much for the hunting now; I am too hold. That's a fact. I am sixty; and forty winters I 'ave pass at Haha Bay. You know why it is call Haha Bay? It is the hecho. Well, I don't hear much ha-ha nowadays round this bay. But it is pretty here in the summer; yes, very pretty. Prettier than Chicoutimi; and more gold in the 'ills."

He let his bold, gay eye rest confidently on Northwick, as if to say he knew what had brought him there, and he might as well own the fact at once; and Northwick tried to get his mind to grapple with his real motive. But his mind kept pulling away from him, like that unruly horse, and he could not manage it. He knew, in that self which seemed apart from his mind, that it would be a very good thing to let the man suppose he was there to look into the question of the mines; but there was something else that seemed to go with that intention; something like a wish to get away from the past so remotely and so completely that no rumor of it should reach him till he was willing to let it; to be absent from all who had known him so long that no one of them would know him if he saw him. He was there not only to start a pulp-mill, but to grow a beard that should effectually disguise him. He recalled how he had looked with that long beard in his dream; he put his hand to his chin and felt the eight days' stubble there, and he wondered how much time it would take to grow such a beard.

Bird went on talking. "I know that Chicoutimi Company. I told Markham about the gold when he was here for bear. He is smart; but he don't know heverything. You think he can make it pay with that invention? I doubt, me. There is one place in those 'ills," and Bird came closer to Northwick, and dropped his voice, "where you don't 'ave to begin with the tailings. I know the place. But what's the good? All the same, you want capital."

He went to the shelf in the wall above the stove, and took a pipe, which he filled with tobacco, and then he drew some coals out on the stove hearth. But before he dropped one of them on his pipe with his horny thumb and finger, he asked politely, "You hobject to the smoking?"

Northwick said he did not, and Bird said, "It is one of three things you can do here in the winter; smoke the pipe, cut the wood, court the ladies." Northwick remembered his saying that before, too, and how it had made his wife laugh. "I used to do all three. Now I smoke the pipe. Well, while you are young, it is all right, and it is fun in the woods. But I was always 'omesick for Quebec, more or less. You know what it is to be 'omesick."

The word pierced Northwick through the vagary which clothed his consciousness like a sort of fog, and made his heart bleed with self-pity.

"Well, I been 'omesick forty years, and I don't know what for, any more. I been back to Quebec; it is not the same. You know 'ow they pull down those city gate? What they want to do that for? The gate did not keep the stranger hout; it let them in! And there were too many people dead! Now I think I am 'omesick just to get away from here. If I had some capital – ten, fifteen thousand dollars – I would hopen that mine, and take out my hundred, two hundred thousand dollar, and then, Good-by, Haha Bay! I would make it hecho like it never hecho before. I don't want nothing to work up the tailings of my mine, me! There is gold enough there to pay, and I can hire those habitans cheap, like dirt. What is their time worth? The bush is cut away: they got nothing to do. It is the time of a setting 'en, as you Americans say, their time."

Bird smoked away for a little while in silence, and then he seemed aware, for the first time, that Northwick had not taken off his wraps, and he said, hospitably, "I 'ope you will spend the night with me here?"

Northwick said, "Thank you, I don't know. Is it far to Chicoutimi?" He knew, but he asked, hoping the man would exaggerate the distance, and then he would not have to go.

"It is eleven mile, but the road is bad. Drifted."

"I will wait till to-morrow," said Northwick, and he began to unswathe and unbutton, but so feebly that Bird noticed.

"Allow me!" he said, putting down his pipe, and coming to his aid. He was very gentle and light-handed, like a woman; but Northwick felt one touch on the pouch of his belt, and refused further help.

He let his host carry his two bags into the next room for him; the bag that he had brought with the few things from home, when he pretended that he was coming away for a day or two, and the bag that he had got in Quebec to hold the things he had to buy there. When Bird set them down beside his bed he could not bear to see the bag from home, and he pushed it under out of sight. Then he tumbled himself on the bed, and pulled the bearskin robe that he found on it up over him, and fell into a thin sleep, that was not so different from his dim waking that he was sure it had been sleep when Bird came back with a lamp.

"Been 'aving a little nap?" he asked, looking gayly down on Northwick's bewildered face. "Well, that is all right! We have supper, now, pretty soon. You hungry? Well, in a 'alf-hour."

He went out again, and Northwick, after some efforts, made out to rise. His skull felt sore, and his arms as if they had been beaten with hard blows. But after he had bathed his face and hands in the warm water Bird had brought with the lamp, he found himself better, though he was still wrapped in that cloudy uncertainty of himself and of his sleeping or waking. He saw some pictures about on the coarse, white walls: the Seven Stations of the Cross, in colored prints; a lithograph of Indians burning a Jesuit priest. Over the bed's head hung a chromo of Our Lady, with seven swords piercing her heart; beside the bed was a Parian crucifix, with the figure of Christ writhing on it.

These things made Northwick feel very far and strange. His simple and unimaginative nature could in nowise relate itself to this alien faith, this alien language. He heard soft voices of women in the next room, the first that he had heard since he last heard his daughters'. A girl's voice singing was severed by a door that closed and then opened to let it be heard a few notes more, and again closed.

But he found Bird still alone in the next room when he returned to it. "Well, now, we go to supper as soon as Father Étienne comes. He is our curate – our minister – here. And he eats with me when he heat anywhere. I tell 'im 'e hought to have my appetite, if he wants to keep up his spiritual strength. The body is the foundation of the soul, no? Well, you let that foundation tumble hin, and then where you got you' soul, heigh? But Father Étienne speaks very good English. Heducate at Rome. I am the only other educated man at Haha Bay. You don't 'appen to have some papers in you' bag? French? English? It is the same!"

"Papers? No!" said Northwick, with horror and suspicion. "What is in the papers?"

"That is what I like to find hout," said Bird, spreading his hands with a shrug.

The outer door opened, and a young man in a priest's long robe came in. Bird introduced his guest, and Northwick shook hands with the priest, who had a smooth, regular face, with beautiful, innocent eyes, like a girl's. He might have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine; he had the spare figure of a man under thirty who leads an active life; his features were refined by study and the thought of others. When he smiled the innocence of his face was more than girlish, it was childlike. Points of light danced in his large, soft, dark eyes; an effect of trusting, alluring kindness came from his whole radiant visage.

Northwick felt its charm with a kind of fear. He shrank away from the priest, and at the table he left the talk to him and his host. They supped in a room opening into a sort of wing; beyond it was a small kitchen, from which an elderly woman brought the dishes, and where that girl whom he heard singing kept trilling away as if she were excited, like a canary, by the sound of the frying meat.

Bird said, by way of introduction, that the woman was his niece; but he did not waste time on her. He began to talk up his conjecture as to Northwick's business with the priest, as if it were an ascertained fact. Northwick fancied his advantage in leaving him to it. They discussed the question of gold in the hills, which the young father treated as an old story of faded interest, and Bird entered into with the fervor of fresh excitement. The priest spoke of the poor return from the mines at Chaudière, but Bird claimed that it was different here. Northwick did not say anything: he listened and watched them, as if they were a pair of confidence-men trying to work him. The priest seemed to be anxious to get the question off the personal ground into the region of the abstract, and Northwick believed that this was part of his game, a ruse to throw him from his guard, and commit him to something. He made up his mind to get away as early as he could in the morning; he did not think it was a safe place.

"Very well!" the priest cried, at one point. "Suppose you had the capital you wish. And suppose you had taken out all the gold you say is there, and you were rich. What would you do?"

"What I do?" Bird struck the table with his fist. "Leave Haha Bay to-morrow morning!"

"And where would you go?"

"Go? To Quebec, to London, to Paris, to Rome, to the devil! Keep going!"

The young father laughed a laugh as innocent as his looks, and turned with a sudden appeal to Northwick. "Tell me a little about the rich men in your land of millionnaires! How do they find their happiness? In what? What is the secret of joy that they have bought with their money?"

"I don't know what you mean," said Northwick, with a recoil deeper into himself after the first flush of alarm at being addressed.

"Where do they live?"

Northwick hesitated, and the priest laid his hand on Bird's shoulder, as if to restrain a burst of information from him.

"I suppose most of them live in New York."

"All the time?"

"No. They generally have a house at the seaside, at Newport or Bar Harbor, for the summer, and one at Lenox or Tuxedo for the fall; and they go to Florida for the winter, or Nice. Then they have their yachts."

"The land is not large enough for their restlessness; they roam the sea. My son," said the young priest to the old hunter, "you can have all the advantage of riches at the expense of a gypsies' van!" He laughed again in friendly delight at Bird's supposed discomfiture; and touched him lightly, delicately, as before. "It is the same in Europe; I have seen it there, too." Bird was going to speak, but the priest stayed him a moment. "But how did your rich people get their millions? Not like those rich people in Europe, by inheritance?"

"Very few," said Northwick, sensible of a remnant of the pride he used to feel in the fact, hidden about somewhere in his consciousness. "They made it."

"How? Excuse me!"

"By manufacturing, by speculating in railroad stocks, by mining, by the rise in land-values."

"What causes the land to rise in value?"

"The demand for it. The necessity."

"Oh! The need of others. And when a man gains in stocks, some other man loses. No? Do the manufacturers pay the operatives all they earn? Are the miners very well paid and comfortable? I have read that they are miserable. Is it so?"

Northwick was aware that there were good and valid answers to all these questions which the priest seemed to be asking rather for the confusion of Bird than as an expression of his own opinions; but in his dazed intelligence he could not find the answers.

Bird roared out, "Haw! Do not regard him! He is a man of the other world – an angel – a mere imbecile – about business!" The priest threw himself back in his chair and laughed tolerantly, showing his beautiful teeth. "All those rich men they give work to the poor. If I had a few thousand dollars to hopen up that place in the 'ill, I would furnish work to every man in Haha Bay – to hundreds. Are the miners more miserable than those habitans, eh?"

"The good God seems to think so," returned the priest, seriously. "At least, he has put the gold in the rocks so that you cannot get it out. What would you give the devil to help you?" he asked, with a smile.

"When I want to make a bargain with the devil, I don't come to you, Père Étienne; I go to a notary. You ever hear, sir," said Bird, turning to Northwick, "about that notary at Montreal – "

"I think I will go to bed," said Northwick, abruptly. "I am not feeling very well – I am very tired, that is." He had suddenly lost account of what and where he was. It seemed to him that he was both there and at Hatboro'; that there were really two Northwicks, and that there was a third self somewhere in space, conscious of them both.

It was this third Northwick whom Bird and the priest would have helped to bed if he had suffered them, but who repulsed their offers. He made shift to undress himself, while he heard them talking in French with lowered voices in the next room. Their debate seemed at an end. After a little while he heard the door shut, as if the priest had gone away. Afterwards he appeared to have come back.

VI

The talk went on all night in Northwick's head between those two Frenchmen, who pretended to be of contrary opinions, but were really leagued to get the better of him, and lure him on to put his money into that mine. In the morning his fever was gone; but he was weak, and he could not command his mind, could not make it stay by him long enough to decide whether any harm would come from remaining over a day before he pushed on to Chicoutimi. He tried to put in order or sequence the reasons he had for coming so deep into the winter and the wilderness; but when he passed from one to the next, the former escaped him.