CHAPTER II.

‘MUSIC HATH CHARMS.’

Ten days go by, empty days of which only Lucius Davoren keeps a record, in a journal which may serve by and by for a history of the ill-fated expedition; which may be found perchance by some luckier sportsmen in years to come, when the ink upon the paper has gone gray and pale, and when the date of each entry has an ancient look, and belongs to a bygone century; nay, when the very fashion of the phrases is obsolete.

Lucius takes note of everything, every cloud in the sky, every red gleam of the aurora, with its ghostly rustling sound, as of phantom trees shaken by the north wind. He finds matter for observation where to the other two there seems only an endless blank, a universe that is emptied of everything except the unvarying pine-trees rising dark against a background of everlasting snow.

Geoffrey Hossack practises hammer-throwing with an iron crowbar, patches the worn-out sleighs, makes little expeditions on his own account, and discovers nothing, except that he has a non-geographical mind, and that, instead of the trapper’s unerring instinct, which enables him to travel always in a straight line, he has an unpleasant tendency to describe a circle; prowls about with his gun, and the scanty supply of ammunition which Davoren allows him; makes traps for silver foxes, and has the mortification of seeing his bait devoured by a wolverine, who bears a life as charmed as that Macbeth was promised; and sometimes, but alas too seldom, kills something—a moose, and once a buffalo. O, then what a hunter’s feast they have in the thick northern darkness! what a wild orgie seems that rare supper! Their souls expand over the fresh meat; they feel mighty as northern gods, Odin and Thor. Hope rekindles in every breast; the moody silence which has well-nigh grown habitual to them in the gloom of these hungry hopeless days, melts into wild torrents of talk. They are moved with a kind of rapture engendered of this roast flesh, and recognise the truth of Barry Cornwall’s dictum, that a poet should be a high feeder.

The grip of the frost-fiend tightens upon them; the brief days flit by ghostlike, only the long nights linger. They sit in their log-hut in a dreary silence, each man seated on the ground, with his knees drawn up to his chin, and his back against the wall. Were they already dead, and this their sepulchre, they could wear no ghastlier aspect.

They are silent from no sullen humour. Discord has never risen among them. What have they to talk about? Swift impending death, the sharp stings of hunger, the bitterness of an empty tobacco-barrel. Their dumbness is the dumbness of stoics who can suffer and make no moan.

They have not yet come to absolute starvation; there is a little pemmican still, enough to sustain their attenuated thread of life for a few more days. When that is gone, they can see before them nothing but death. The remains of their buffalo has been eaten by the wolves, carefully as they hid it under the snow. The region to which they have pushed their way seems empty of human life—a hyperborean chaos ruled by Death. What hardy wanderer, half-breed or Indian, would venture hither at such a season?

They are sitting thus, mute and statue-like, in the brief interval which they call daylight, when something happens which sets every heart beating with a sudden violence—something so unexpected, that they wait breathless, transfixed by surprise. A voice, a human voice, breaks the dead silence; a wild face, with bright fierce eyes peers in at the entrance of the hut, from which a bony hand has dragged aside the tarpaulin that serves for a screen against the keen northern winds, which creep in round the angle of the rough wooden porch.

The face belongs to neither Indian nor half-breed; it is as white as their own. By the faint light that glimmers through the parchment windows they see it scrutinising them interrogatively, with a piercing scrutiny.

‘Explorers?’ asks the stranger, ‘and Englishmen?’

Yes, they tell him, they are English explorers. Absalom Schanck of course counts as an Englishman.

‘Are you sent out by the English government?’

‘No, we came on our own hook,’ replies Geoffrey Hossack, who is the first to recover from the surprise of the man’s appearance, and from a certain half-supernatural awe engendered by his aspect, which has a wild ghastliness, as of a wanderer from the under world. ‘But never mind how we came here; what we want is to get away. Don’t stand there jawing about our business, but come inside, and drop that tarpaulin behind you. Where have you left your party?’

‘Nowhere,’ answers the stranger, stepping into the hut, and standing in the midst of them, tall and gaunt, clad in garments that are half Esquimaux, half Indian, and in the last stage of dilapidation, torn mooseskin shoes upon his feet, the livid flesh showing between every rent; ‘nowhere. I belong to no party—I’m alone.’

‘Alone!’ they all exclaim, with a bitter pang of disappointment. They had been ready to welcome this wild creature as the forerunner of succour.

‘Yes, I was up some thousand miles northward of this, among icebergs and polar bears and Dog-rib Indians and Esquimaux, with a party of Yankees the summer before last; and served them well, too, for I know some of the Indian lingo, and was able to act as their interpreter. But the expedition was a failure. Unsuccessful men are hard to deal with. In short, we quarrelled, and parted company; they went their way, I went mine. There’s no occasion to enter into details. It was winter when I left them—the stores were exhausted, with the exception of a little ammunition. They had their guns, and may have found reindeer or musk oxen, but I don’t fancy they can have come to much good. They didn’t know the country as well as I do.’

‘You have been alone nearly a year?’ asks Lucius Davoren, interested in this wild-looking stranger. ‘How have you lived during that time?’

‘Anyhow,’ answers the other with a careless shrug of his bony shoulders. ‘Sometimes with the Indians, sometimes with the Esquimaux—they’re civil enough to a solitary Englishman, though they hate the Indians like poison—sometimes by myself. As long as I’ve a charge for my gun I don’t much fear starvation, though I’ve found myself face to face with it a good many times since I parted with my Yankee friends.’

‘Do you know this part of the country?’

‘No; it’s beyond my chart. I shouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t lost my way. But I suppose, now I am here, you’ll give me shelter.’

The three men looked at one another. Hospitality is a noble virtue, and a virtue peculiarly appropriate to the dwellers in remote and savage regions; but hospitality with these men meant a division of their few remaining days of life. And the last of those days might hold the chance of rescue. Who could tell? To share their shrunken stores with this stranger would be a kind of suicide. Yet the dictates of humanity prevailed. The stranger was not pleasant to look upon, nor especially conciliating in manner; but he was a fellow sufferer, and he must he sheltered.

‘Yes,’ says Lucius Davoren, ‘you are welcome to share what we have. It’s not much. A few days’ rations.’

The stranger takes a canvas bag from his neck, and flings it into a corner of the hut.

‘There’s more than a week’s food in that,’ he says; ‘dried reindeer, rather mouldy, but I don’t suppose you’re very particular.’

‘Particular!’ cried Geoffrey Hossack, with a groan. ‘When I think of the dinners I have turned up my nose at, the saddles of mutton I have despised because life seemed always saddle of mutton, I blush for the iniquity of civilised man. I remember a bottle of French plums and a canister of Presburg biscuits that I left in a chiffonier at Balliol. Of course my scout consumed them. O, would I had those toothsome cates to-day!’

‘Balliol!’ says the stranger, looking at him curiously. ‘So you’re a Balliol man, are you?’

There was something strange in the sound of this question from an unkempt savage, with half-bare feet, in ragged mooseskin shoes. The newcomer pushed aside the elf-locks that overhung his forehead, and stared at Geoffrey Hossack as he waited for the answer to his inquiry.

‘Yes,’ replied Geoffrey with his usual coolness, ‘I have had the honour to be gated occasionally by the dons of that college. Are you an Oxford man?’

‘Do I look like it?’ asks the other, with a harsh laugh. ‘I am nothing; I come from nowhere: I have no history, no kith or kin. I fancy I know this kind of life better than you do, and I know how to talk to the natives, which I conclude you don’t. If we can hold on till this infernal season is over, and the trappers come this way, I’ll be your interpreter, your servant, anything you like.’

‘If!’ said Lucius gravely. ‘I don’t think we shall ever see the end of this winter. But you can stay with us, if you please. At the worst, we can die together.’

The stranger gives a shivering sigh, and drops into an angular heap in a corner of the hut.

‘It isn’t a lively prospect,’ he says. ‘Death is a gentleman I mean to keep at arm’s length as long as I can. I’ve had to face him often enough, but I’ve got the best of it so far. Have you used all your tobacco?’

‘Every shred,’ says Geoffrey Hossack dolefully. ‘I smoked my last pipe and bade farewell to the joys of existence three days ago.’

‘Smoke another, then,’ replies the stranger, taking a leather pouch from his bosom, ‘and renew your acquaintance with pleasure.’

‘Bless you!’ exclaims Geoffrey, clutching the prize. ‘Welcome to our tents! I would welcome Beelzebub if he brought me a pipe of tobacco. But if one fills, all fill—that’s understood. We are brothers in misfortune, and must share alike.’

‘Fill, and be quick about it,’ says the stranger. So the three fill their pipes, light them, and their souls float into Elysium on the wings of the seraph tobacco.

The stranger also fills and lights and smokes silently, but not with a paradisiac air, rather with the gloomy aspect of some fallen spirit, to whose lost soul sensuous joys bring no contentment. His large dark eyes—seeming unnaturally large in his haggard face—wander slowly round the walls of the hut, mark the bunks filled with dried prairie grass, and each provided with a buffalo robe. Indications of luxury these. Actual starvation would have reduced the wanderers to boiling down strips of their buffalo skins into an unsavoury soup. Slowly those great wan eyes travel round the hut. Listlessly, yet marking every detail—the hunting knives and fishing tackle hanging against the wall, Geoffrey’s handsome collection of rifles, which have been the admiration of every Indian who has ever beheld them. The stranger’s gaze lingers upon these, and an envious look glimmers in his eyes. Signs of wealth these. He glances at the three companions, and wonders which is the man who finds the money for the expedition, and owns these guns. There could hardly be three rich fools mad enough to waste life and wealth on such wanderings. He concludes that one is the dupe, the other two adventurers, trading, or hoping to trade, upon his folly. His keen eye lights on Hossack, the man who talked about Balliol. Yes, he has a prosperous stall-fed look. The other, Lucius, has too much intelligence. The little German is too old to spend his substance upon so wild a scheme.

Those observant eyes of the stranger’s have nearly completed their circuit, when they suddenly fix themselves, seem visibly to dilate, and kindle with a fire that gives a new look to his face. He sees an object hanging against the wall, to him as far above all the wonders of modern gunnery as the diamonds of Golconda are above splinters of glass.

He points to it with his bony finger, and utters a strange shrill cry of rapture—the ejaculation of a creature who by long solitude, by hardship and privation, and the wild life of forests and deserts, has lapsed into an almost savage condition.

‘A fiddle!’ he exclaims, after that shrill scream of delight has melted into a low chuckling laugh. ‘It’s more than a year since I’ve seen a fiddle, since I lost mine crossing the McKenzie river. Let me play upon it.’

This in a softer, more human tone than any words he had previously spoken, looking from one to the other of the three men with passionate entreaty.

‘What! you play the fiddle, do you?’ asked Lucius, emptying the ashes from his pipe with a long sigh of regret.

‘It is yours, then?’

‘Yes; you can play upon it, if you like. It’s a genuine Amati. I have kept it like the apple of my eye.’

‘Yes, and it’s been uncommonly useful in frightening away the Indians when they’ve come to torment us for fire-water,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We tried watering the rum, but that didn’t answer. The beggars poured a few drops on the fire, and finding it didn’t blaze up, came back and blackguarded us. I only wish I’d brought a few barrels of turpentine for their benefit. Petroleum would have been still better. _That_ would meet their ideas of excellence in spirituous liquors. They like something that scorches their internal economy. They led us a nice life as long as we had any rum; but the violin was too much for them. They’re uncommonly fond of their own music, and would sometimes oblige us with a song which lasted all night, but they couldn’t stand Davoren’s sonatas. Tune up, stranger. I’m rather tired of De Beriot and Spohr and Haydn myself. Perhaps you could oblige us with a nigger melody.’

The stranger waited for no farther invitation, but strode across the narrow hut, and took the violin case from the shelf where it had been carefully bestowed. He laid it on the rough pine-wood table, opened it, and gazed fondly on the Amati reposing in its bed of pale-blue velvet; the very case, or outer husk, a work of art.

Lucius watched him as the young mother watches her first baby in the ruthless hands of a stranger. Would he clutch the fiddle by its neck, drag it roughly from its case, at the hazard of dislocation? The surgeon was too much an Englishman to show his alarm, but sat stolid and in agony. No; the unkempt stranger’s bony claws spread themselves out gently, and embraced the polished table of the fiddle. He lifted it as the young mother lifts her darling from his dainty cradle; he put it to his shoulder and lowered his chin upon it, as if in a loving caress. His long fingers stretched themselves about the neck; he drew the bow slowly across the strings. O, what rapture even in those experimental notes!

Geoffrey flung a fresh pine-log upon the fire, as if in honour of the coming performance. Absalom sat and dozed, dreaming he was in his cuddy at Battersea, supping upon his beloved sausage. Lucius watched the stranger, with a gaze full of curiosity. He was passionately fond of music, and his violin had been his chief solace in hours of darkest apprehension. Strange to find in this other wanderer mute evidence of the same passion. The man’s hand as it hugged the fiddle, the man’s face as it bent over the strings, were the index of a passion as deep as, or deeper than, his own. He waited eagerly for the man to play.

Presently there arose in that low hut a long-drawn wailing sound; a minor chord, that seemed like a passionate sob of complaint wrung from a heart newly broken; and with this for his sole prelude the stranger began his theme. What he played, Lucius strove in vain to discover. His memory could recall no such music: Wilder, stranger, more passionate, more solemn, more awful than the strain which Orpheus played in the under world, was that music: more demoniac than that diabolical sonata which Tartini pretended to have composed in a dream. It seemed extemporaneous, for it obeyed none of the laws of harmony, yet even in its discords was scarcely inharmonious. There was melody, too, through all—a plaintive under-current of melody, which never utterly lost itself, even when the player allowed his fancy its wildest flights. The passionate rapture of his haggard, weather-beaten face was reflected in the passionate rapture of his music; but it was not the rapture of joy; rather the sharp agony of those convulsions of the soul which touch the border-line of madness; like the passion of a worshipper at one of those Dionysian festivals in which religious fervour might end in self-slaughter; or like the ‘possession’ of some Indian devil-dancer, leaping and wounding himself under the influence of his demon god.

The three men sat and listened, curiously affected by that strange sonata. Even Absalom Schanck, to whom music was about as familiar a language as the Cuneiform character, felt that this was something out of the common way; that it was grander, if not more beautiful, than those graceful compositions of De Beriot or Rode wherewith Lucius Davoren had been wont to amuse his friends in their desolate solitude.

Upon Lucius the music had a curious effect. At first and for some time he listened with no feeling but the connoisseur’s unmixed delight. Of envy his mind was incapable, though music is perhaps the most jealous of the arts, and though he felt this man was infinitely his superior—could bring tones out of the heart of that Amati which no power of his could draw from his beloved instrument.

But as the man played on, new emotions showed themselves upon Lucius Davoren’s countenance—wonder, perplexity; then a sudden lighting up of passion. His brows contracted; he watched the stranger with gleaming eyes, breathlessly, waiting for the end of the composition. With the final chord he started up from his seat and confronted the man.

‘Were you ever in Hampshire?’ he asked, sharply and shortly.

The stranger started ever so slightly at this abrupt interrogatory, but showed no farther sign of discomposure, and laid the fiddle in its case as tenderly as he had taken it thence ten minutes before.

‘Hampshire, Massachusetts?’ he inquired. ‘Yes, many a time.’

‘Hampshire in England. Were you in that county in the year ’59?’ asked Lucius breathlessly, watching the stranger as he spoke.

‘I was never in England in my life.’

‘Ah,’ said Lucius with a long-drawn sigh, which might indicate either disappointment or relief, ‘then you’re not the man I was half inclined to take you for. Yet that,’ dropping into soliloquy, ‘was a foolish fancy. There may be more than one man in the world who plays like a devil.’

‘You are not particularly complimentary,’ returned the stranger, touching the violin strings lightly with the tips of his skeleton fingers, repeating the dismal burden of his melody in those pizzacato notes.

‘You don’t consider it a compliment. Rely upon it, if Lucifer played the fiddle at all, he’d play well. The spirit who said, “Evil, be thou my good,” would hardly do anything by halves. Do you remember what Corelli said to Strengk when he first heard him play? “I have been called Arcangelo, but by heavens, sir, you must be Arcidiavolo.” I would give a great deal to have your power over that instrument. Was that your own composition you played just now?’

‘I believe so, or a reminiscence; but if the latter, I can’t tell you its source. I left off playing by book a long time ago; but I have a reserve fund of acquired music—chiefly German—and I have no doubt I draw upon it occasionally.’

‘Yes,’ repeated Lucius thoughtfully, ‘I should like to play as you do, only—’

‘Only what?’ asked the stranger.

‘I should be inclined to fancy there was something uncomfortable—uncanny, as the Scotch say—lurking in the deep waters of my mind, if my fancies took the shape yours did just now.’

‘As for me,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, with agreeable candour, ‘without wishing either to flatter or upbraid, I can only say that I feel as if I had been listening to a distinguished member of the royal orchestra in Pandemonium—the Paganini of Orcus.’

The stranger laughed—a somewhat harsh and grating cachinnation.

‘You don’t like minors?’ he said.

‘I was a minor myself for a long time, and I only object to the species on the score of impecuniosity,’ replied Geoffrey. ‘O, I beg your pardon; you mean the key. If that composition of yours was minor, I certainly lean to the major. Could you not oblige us with a Christy-minstrel melody to take the taste out of our mouths?’

The stranger deigned no answer to that request, but sat down on the rough log which served Lucius for a seat, and made a kind of settle by the ample fireplace. With lean arms folded and gaze bent upon the fire, he lapsed into thoughtful silence. The blaze of the pine-logs, now showing vivid tinges of green or blue as the resin bubbled from their tough hide, lit up the faces, and gave something of grotesque to each. Seen by this medium, the stranger’s face was hardly a pleasant object for contemplation, and was yet singular enough to arrest the gaze of him who looked upon it.

Heaven knows if, with all the aids of civilisation, soap and water, close-cut hair, and carefully-trimmed moustache, the man might not have been ranked handsome. Seen in this dusky hovel, by the changeful light of the pine-logs, that face was grotesque and grim as a study by Gustave Doré; the lines as sharply accentuated, the lights and shadows as vividly contrasted.

The stranger’s eyes were of darkest hue; as nearly black as the human eye, or any other eye, ever is: that intensest brown which, when in shadow, looks black, and when the light shines upon it seems to emit a tawny fire, like the ray which flashes from a fine cat’s-eye. His forehead was curiously low, the hair growing in a peak between the temples. His nose was long, and a pronounced aquiline. His cheek-bones were rendered prominent by famine. The rest of his face was almost hidden by the thick ragged beard of densest black, through which his white teeth flashed with a hungry look when he talked or smiled. His smile was not a pleasant one.

‘If one could imagine his Satanic majesty taking another promenade, like that walk made famous by Porson, and penetrating to these hyperborean shores—and why not, when contrast is ever pleasing?—I should expect to behold him precisely in yonder guise,’ mused Geoffrey, as he contemplated their uninvited guest from the opposite side of the hearth. ‘But the age has grown matter-of-fact; we no longer believe in the pleasing illusions of our childhood—hobgoblins, Jack and the Beanstalk, and old Nick. Gunpowder and the printing press, as somebody observes, have driven away Robin Goodfellow and the fairies.’

Lucius sat meditative, staring into the fire. That wild minor theme had moved him profoundly, yet it was not so much of the music that he thought as of the man. Five years ago he had heard the description of music—which seemed to him to correspond exactly with this—of an amateur whose playing had the same unearthly, or even diabolical excellence. Certainly that man had been a pianist. And then it was too wild a fancy to conceive for a moment that he had encountered that man, whom he had hunted for all over England, and even out of England, here in this primeval forest. Destiny in her maddest sport could hardly have devised such a hazard. No, the thought was absurd; no doubt an evidence of a brain enfeebled by anxiety and famine. Yet the fancy disturbed him not the less.

‘Unless Geoff stalks another buffalo before long, I shall go off my head,’ he said to himself.

He brooded upon the stranger’s assertion that he was a Southern American, and had never crossed the Atlantic; an assertion at variance with the fact of his accent, which was purely English. Yet Lucius had known American citizens whose English was as pure, and he could scarcely condemn the man as a liar on such ground as this.

‘The description of that man’s appearance might fit this man,’ he thought; ‘due allowance being made for the circumstances under which we see him. Tall and dark, with a thin lissom figure, a hooked nose, a hawk’s eye; that was the description they gave me at Wykhamston; I had it from three separate people. There is no palpable discrepancy, and yet—bah, I am a fool to think of it! Haven’t I had trouble of mind enough upon this score, and would it do any good to her—in her grave, perhaps—if I had my wish: if God gave me the means of keeping the promise I made five years ago, when I was little more than a boy?’

Lucius’s thoughts rambled on while the stranger sat beside him, with brooding eyes fixed, like his, upon the flare of the pine-logs.

‘By the way,’ said Lucius presently, rousing himself from that long reverie, ‘when my friend yonder spoke of Balliol, you pricked up your ears as if the name were familiar to you. That’s odd, since you have never been in England.’

‘I suppose there is nothing especially odd in my having had an English acquaintance in my prosperous days, when even Englishmen were not ashamed to know me. One may be familiar with the name of a college without having seen the college itself. I had a friend who was a student at Balliol.’

‘I wonder whether he was the man who wrote “_Aratus sum!_” upon one of the tables in the examiners’ room after they ploughed him,’ speculated Geoffrey idly.

‘I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Stranger,’ said Lucius presently, struggling with the sense of irritation caused by that wild fancy which the stranger’s playing had inspired, ‘it’s all very well for us to give you a corner in our hut. As good or evil fortune brought you this way, we could hardly be so unchristian as to refuse you our shelter; God knows it’s poor enough, and death is near enough inside as well as outside these wooden walls; but even Christianity doesn’t oblige us to harbour a man without a name. That traveller who fell among thieves told the Samaritan his name, rely upon it, as soon as he was able to say anything. No honest man withholds his name from the men he breaks bread with. Even the Indians tell us their names; so be good enough to give us yours.’

‘I renounced my own name when I turned my back upon civilisation,’ answered the stranger doggedly; ‘I brought no card-case to this side of the Rocky Mountains. If you give me your hospitality,’ with a monosyllabic laugh and a scornful glance round the hut, ‘solely on condition that I acquaint you with my antecedents, I renounce your hospitality. I can go back to the forest and liberty. As you say, death could not be much farther off out yonder in the snow. If you only want my name for the purposes of social intercourse, you can call me what the Indians call me, a sobriquet of their own invention, “Matchi Mohkamarn.”’

‘That means the Evil Knife, I believe,’ said Lucius; ‘hardly the fittest name to inspire confidence in the minds of a man’s acquaintance. But I suppose it must do, since you withhold your real name.’

‘I am sure you are welcome to our pasteboards,’ said Geoffrey, yawning; ‘I have a few yonder in my dressing-bag—rather a superfluous encumbrance by the way, since here one neither dresses nor shaves. But I have occasionally propitiated ravening Indians with the gift of a silver-topped scent-bottle or pomatum-pot, so the bag _has_ been useful. Dear, dear, how nice it would be to find oneself back in a world in which there are dressing-bags and dressing-bells, and dinner-bells afterwards! And yet one fancied it so slow, the world of civilisation. Lucius, is it not time for our evening pemmican? Think of the macaroons and rout-cakes we have trampled under our heels in the bear-fights that used to wind up our wine-parties; to think of the anchovy toasts and various devils we have eaten—half from sheer gluttony, half because it was good form—when we were gorged like Strasburg geese awaiting their euthanasia. Think how we have rioted, and wasted and wallowed in what are called the pleasures of the table; and behold us now, hungering for a lump of rancid fat or a tallow-candle, to supply our exhausted systems with heat-giving particles!’