Chapter 17. Isobel Faces The Abyss

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_ CHAPTER XVII. ISOBEL FACES THE ABYSS

It was not the face of MacVeigh-- the old MacVeigh-- that Rookie McTabb, the ex-constable, looked into a few moments later. Days of sickness could have laid no heavier hand upon him than had those few minutes in the darkened room of the cabin. His face was white and drawn. There were tense lines at the corners of his mouth and something strange and disquieting in his eyes. McTabb did not see the change until he came out into what remained of the day with little Isobel in his arms. Then he stared.

"That blow got you bad," he said. "You look sick. Mebbe I'd better stay with you here to-night."

"No, you hadn't," replied Billy, trying to throw off what he knew the other saw. "Take the kid over to the cabin. A night's sleep and I'll be as lively as a cat. I'm going to vaccinate her before you go."

He went into the tent and dug out from his pack the small rubber pouch in which he carried a few medicines and a roll of medicated cotton. In a small bottle there were three vaccine points. He returned with these and the cotton.

"Watch her close," he said, as he rolled back the child's sleeve. "I'm going to give you an extra point, and if this doesn't work by the seventh or eighth day you must do the job over again."

With the point of his knife he began to work gently on baby Isobel's tender pink skin. He had expected that she would cry. But she was not frightened, and her big blue eyes followed his movements wonderingly. At last it began to hurt, and her lips quivered. But she made no sound, and as tears welled into her eyes Billy dropped his knife and caught her up close to his breast.

"God bless your dear little heart," he cried, smothering his face in her silken curls. "You've been hurt so much, an' you've froze, an' you've starved, an' you ain't never said a word about it since that day up at Fullerton! Little sweetheart--"

McTabb heard him whispering things, and little Isobel's arms crept tightly about his neck. After a little Billy held her out to him again, and a part of what Rookie had seen in his face was gone.

"It won't hurt any more," he said, as he rubbed the vaccine point over the red spot on her arm. "You don't want to be sick, do you? And that 'll keep you from being sick. There--"

He wound a strip of the cotton about her arm, tied it, and gave part of what remained to McTabb. Then he took her in his arms again and kissed her warm face and her soft curls, and after that bundled her in furs and put her on the sledge. Rookie was straightening out the dogs when, like a thief, he clipped off one of the curls with his knife. Isobel laughed gleefully when she saw the curl between his fingers. Before McTabb had turned it was in his pocket.

"I won't see her again-- soon," MacVeigh said; and he tried to keep a thickness out of his voice. "That is, I-- I won't see her to-- to handle her. I'll come over now and then an' look at her from the edge of the woods. You bring 'er out, Rookie, an' don't you dare to let her know I'm out there. She wouldn't know what it meant if I didn't come to her."

He watched them as they disappeared into the gloom of night, and when they had gone a groan of anguish broke from his lips. For he knew that little Isobel was going from him forever. He would see her again-- from the edge of the forest; but he would never hold her in his arms, nor feel again her tender arms about his neck or the soft smother of her hair against his face. Long before the dread menace of the plague was lifted from the cabin and from himself he would be gone. For that was what Isobel, the mother, had demanded, and he would keep his promise to her. She would never know what happened in these days of her delirium. She would not have to face him afterward. He knew already how he would go. When help came he would slip away quietly some night, and the big wilderness would swallow him up. His plans seemed to come without thought on his own part. He would go to Fort Churchill and testify against Bucky Smith. And then he would quit the Service. His term of enlistment expired in a month, and he would not re-enlist. "It was the Law that killed him-- and you are the Law. It kills-- kills-- kills-- and it never gives back when it makes a mistake." Under the dark sky those words seemed never to end in his ears, and each moment they added to his hatred of the thing of which he had been a part for years. He seemed to hear Isobel's accusing voice in the low soughing of the night wind in the spruce tops; and in the stillness of the world that hung heavy and close about him the words chased each other through his brain until they seemed to leave behind them a path of fire.

"It kills-- kills-- kills-- and it never gives back when it makes a mistake."

His lips were set tensely as he faced the cabin. He remembered now more than one instance where the Law had killed and had never given back. That was a part of the game of man-hunting. But he had never thought of it in Isobel's way until she had painted for him in those few half-mad, accusing words a picture of himself. The fact that he had fought for Scottie Deane and had given him his freedom did not exonerate himself in his own eyes now. It was because of himself and Pelliter chiefly that Deane and Isobel had been forced to seek refuge among the Eskimos. From Fullerton they had watched and hunted for him as they would have hunted for an animal. He saw himself as Isobel must see him now-- the murderer of her husband. He was glad, as he returned to the cabin, that he had happened to come in the second or third day of her fever. He dreaded her sanity now more than her delirium,

He lighted a tin lamp in the cabin and listened for a moment at the inner door. Isobel was quiet. For the first time he made a more careful note of the cabin. Couchée and his wife had left plenty of food. He had noticed a frozen haunch of venison hanging outside the cabin, and he went out and chopped off several pieces of the meat. He did not feel hungry enough to prepare food for himself, but put the meat in a pot and placed it on the stove, that he might have broth for Isobel.

He began to find signs of her presence in the room as he moved about. Hanging on a wooden peg in the log wall he saw a scarf which he knew belonged to her. Under the scarf there was a pair of her shoes, and then he noticed that the crude cabin table was covered with a litter of stuff which he had not observed before. There were needles and thread, some cloth, a pair of gloves, and a red bow of ribbon which Isobel had worn at her throat. What held his eyes were two bundles of old letters tied with blue ribbon, and a third pile, undone and scattered. In the light of the lamp he saw that all of the writing on the envelopes was in the same hand. The top envelope on the first pile was addressed to "Mrs. Isobel Deane, Prince Albert, Saskatchewan"; the first envelope of the other bundle to "Miss Isobel Rowland, Montreal, Canada." Billy's heart choked him as he gathered the loose letters in his hands and placed them, with the others, on a little shelf above the table. He knew that they were letters from Deane, and that in her fever and loneliness Isobel had been reading them when he brought to her news of her husband's death.

He was about to remove the other articles from the table where a folded newspaper clipping was uncovered by the removal of the cloth. It was a half page from a Montreal daily, and out of it there looked straight up at him the face of Isobel Deane. It was a younger, more girlish-looking face, but to him it was not half so beautiful as the face of the Isobel who had come to him from out of the Barren. His fingers trembled and his breath came more quickly as he held the paper in the light and read the few lines under the picture:

ISOBEL ROWLAND, ONE OF THE LAST OF MONTREAL'S DAUGHTERS
OF THE NORTH, WHO HAS SACRIFICED A FORTUNE FOR LOVE OF A
YOUNG ENGINEER

In spite of the feeling of shame that crept over him at thus allowing himself to be drawn into a past sacred to Isobel and the man who had died, Billy's eyes sought the date-line. The paper was eight years old. And then he read what followed. In those few minutes, as the cold, black type revealed to him the story of Isobel and Deane, he forgot that he was in the cabin, and that he could almost hear the breathing of the woman whose sweet romance had ended now in tragedy. He was with Deane that day, years ago, when he had first looked into Isobel's eyes in the little old cemetery of nameless and savage dead at Ste. Anne de Beaupré; he heard the tolling of the ancient bell in the church that had stood on the hillside for more than two hundred and fifty years; and he could hear Deane's voice as he told Isobel the story of that bell and how, in the days of old, it had often called the settlers in to fight against the Indians. And then, as he read on, he could feel the sudden thrill in Deane's blood when Isobel had told him who she was, and that Pierre Radisson, one of the great lords of the north, had been her great-grandfather; that he had brought offerings to the little old church, and that he had fought there and died close by, and that his body was somewhere among the nameless and unmarked dead. It was a beautiful story, and MacVeigh saw more of it between the lines than could ever have been printed. Once he had gone to Ste. Anne de Beaupré to see the pilgrims and the miracles there, and there flashed before him the sunlit slope overlooking the broad St. Lawrence, where Isobel and Deane had afterward met, and where she had told him how large a part the little old cracked bell, the ancient church, and the plot of nameless dead had played in her life ever since she could remember. His blood grew hot as he read of what followed the beginning of love at the pilgrims' shrine. Isobel had no father or mother, the paper said. Her uncle and guardian was an iron master of the old blood-- the blood that had been a part of the wilderness and the great company since the day the first "gentlemen adventurers" came over with Prince Rupert. He lived alone with Isobel in a big white house on the top of a hill, shut in by stone walls and iron pickets, and looked out upon the world with the cold hauteur of a feudal lord. He was young David Deane's enemy from the moment he first heard about him, largely because he was nothing more than a struggling mining engineer, but chiefly because he was an American and had come from across the border. The stone walls and iron pickets were made a barrier to him. The heavy gates never opened for him. Then had come the break. Isobel, loyal in her love, had gone to Deane. The story ended there.

For a few moments Billy stood with the paper in his hand, the type a blur before his eyes. He could almost see Isobel's old home in Montreal. It was on the steep, shaded road leading up to Mount Royal, where he had once watched a string of horses "tacking" with their two-wheeled carts of coal in their arduous journey to Sir George Allen's basement at the end of it. He remembered how that street had held a curious sort of fascination for him, with its massive stone walls, its old French homes, and that old atmosphere still clinging to it of the Montreal of a hundred years ago. Twelve years before he had gone there first and carved his name on the wooden stairway leading to the top of the mountain. Isobel had been there then. Perhaps it was she he had heard singing behind one of the walls.

He put the paper with the letters, making a note of the uncle's name. If anything happened it would be his duty to send word to him-- perhaps. And then, deliberately, he tore into little pieces the slip of paper on which he had written the name. Geoffrey Renaud had cast off his niece. And if she died why should he-- Billy MacVeigh-- tell him anything about little Isobel? Since Isobel's terrible castigation of himself and the Law duty had begun to hold a diferent meaning for him.

Several times during the next hour Billy listened at the door. Then he made some tea and toast and took the broth from the stove. He went into the room, leaving these on the hearth of the stove so that they would not grow cold. He heard Isobel move, and as he went to her side she gave a little breathless cry.

"David-- David-- is it you?" she moaned. "Oh, David, I'm so glad you have come!"

Billy stood over her. In the darkness his face was ashen gray, for like a flash of fire in the lightless room the truth rushed upon him. Shock and fever had done their work. And in her delirium Isobel believed that he was Deane, her husband. In the gloom he saw that she was reaching up her arms to him.

"David!" she whispered; and in her voice there were a love and gladness that thrilled and terrified him to the quick of his soul. _

Read next: Chapter 18. The Fulfilment Of A Promise

Read previous: Chapter 16. The Law-- Murderer Of Men

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