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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The World For Sale, by Gilbert Parker, V3
+#110 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
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+
+Title: The World For Sale, Volume 3.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6283]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 5, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD FOR SALE, PARKER, V3 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD FOR SALE
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+XX.       TWO LIFE PIECES
+XXI.      THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
+XXII.     THE SECRET MAN
+XXIII.    THE RETURN OF BELISARIUS
+XXIV.     AT LONG LAST
+XXV.      MAN PROPOSES
+XXVI.     THE SLEEPER
+XXVII.    THE WORLD FOR SALE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+TWO LIFE PIECES
+
+"It's a fine day."
+
+"Yes, it's beautiful."
+
+Fleda wanted to ask how he knew, but hesitated from feelings of delicacy.
+Ingolby seemed to understand.  A faint reflection of the old whimsical
+smile touched his lips, and his hands swept over the coverlet as though
+smoothing out a wrinkled map.
+
+"The blind man gets new senses," he said dreamily.  "I feel things where
+I used to see them.  How did I know it was a fine day?  Simple enough.
+When the door opened there was only the lightest breath of wind, and the
+air was fresh and crisp, and I could smell the sun.  One sense less, more
+degree of power to the other senses.  The sun warms the air, gives it a
+flavour, and between it and the light frost, which showed that it was dry
+outside, I got the smell of a fine Fall day.  Also, I heard the cry of
+the wild fowl going South, and they wouldn't have made a sound if it
+hadn't been a fine day.  And also, and likewise, and besides, and
+howsomever, I heard Jim singing, and that nigger never sings in bad
+weather.  Jim's a fair-weather raven, and this morning he was singing
+like a 'lav'rock in the glen.'"
+
+Being blind, he could not see that, suddenly, a storm of emotion swept
+over her face.
+
+His cheerfulness, his boylike simplicity, his indomitable spirit, which
+had survived so much, and must still face so much, his almost childlike
+ways, and the naive description of a blind man's perception, waked in her
+an almost intolerable yearning.  It was not the yearning of a maid for a
+man.  It was the uncontrollable woman in her, the mother-thing, belonging
+to the first woman that ever was-protection of the weak, hovering love
+for the suffering, the ministering spirit.
+
+Since Ingolby had been brought to the house in the pines, Madame Bulteel
+and herself, with Jim, had nursed him through the Valley of the Shadow.
+They had nursed him through brain-fever, through agonies which could not
+have been borne with consciousness.  The tempest of the mind and the
+pains of misfortune went on from hour to hour, from day to day, almost
+without ceasing, until at last, a shadow of his former self, but with a
+wonderful light on his face which came from something within, he waited
+patiently for returning strength, propped up with pillows in the bed
+which had been Fleda's own, in the room outside which Jethro Fawe had
+sung his heathen serenade.
+
+It was the room of the house which, catching the morning sun, was best
+suited for an invalid.  So she had given it to him with an eagerness
+behind which was the feeling that somehow it made him more of the inner
+circle of her own life; for apart from every other feeling she had, there
+was in her a deep spirit of comradeship belonging to far-off times when
+her life was that of the open road, the hillside and the vale.  In those
+days no man was a stranger; all belonged.
+
+To meet, and greet, and pass was the hourly event, but the meeting and
+the greeting had in it the familiarity of a common wandering, the
+sympathy of the homeless.  Had Ingolby been less to her than he was,
+there would still have been the comradeship which made her the great
+creature she was fast becoming.  It was odd that, as Ingolby became
+thinner and thinner, and ever more wan, she, in spite of her ceaseless
+nursing, appeared to thrive physically.  She had even slightly increased
+the fulness of her figure.  The velvet of her cheeks had grown richer,
+and her eyes deeper with warm fire.  It was as though she flourished on
+giving: as though a hundred nerves of being and feeling had opened up
+within her and had expanded her life like some fine flower.
+
+Gazing at Ingolby now there was a great hungering desire in her heart.
+She looked at the sightless eyes, and a passionate protest sprang to her
+lips which, in spite of herself, broke forth in a sort of moan.
+
+"What is it?" Ingolby asked, with startled face.
+
+"Nothing," she answered, "nothing.  I pricked my finger badly, that's
+all."
+
+And, indeed, she had done so, but that would not have brought the moan to
+her lips.
+
+"Well, it didn't sound like a pricked finger complaint," he remarked.
+"It was the kind of groan I'd give if I had a bad pain inside."
+
+"Ah, but you're a man!" she remarked lightly, though two tears fell down
+her cheeks.
+
+With an effort she recovered herself.  "It's time for your tonic," she
+added, and she busied herself with giving it to him.  "As soon as you
+have taken it, I'm going for a walk, so you must make up your mind to
+have some sleep."
+
+"Am I to be left alone?" he asked, with an assumed grievance in his
+voice.
+
+"Madame Bulteel will stay with you," she replied.
+
+"Do you need a walk so very badly?" he asked presently.
+
+"I don't suppose I need it, but I want it," she answered.  "My feet and
+the earth are very friendly."
+
+"Where do you walk?" he asked.
+
+"Just anywhere," was her reply.  "Sometimes up the river, sometimes down,
+sometimes miles away in the woods."
+
+"Do you never take a gun with you?"
+
+"Of course," she answered, nodding, as though he could see.  "I get wild
+pigeons and sometimes a wild duck or a prairie-hen."
+
+"That's right," he remarked; "that's right."
+
+"I don't believe in walking just for the sake of walking," she continued.
+"It doesn't do you any good, but if you go for something and get it,
+that's what puts the mind and the body right."
+
+Suddenly his face grew grave.  "Yes, that's it," he remarked.
+
+"To go for something you want, a long way off.  You don't feel the fag
+when you're thinking of the thing at the end; but you've got to have the
+thing at the end, to keep making for it, or there's no good going--none
+at all.  That's life; that's how it is.  It's no good only walking--
+you've got to walk somewhere.  It's no good simply going--you've got to
+go somewhere.  You've got to fight for something.  That's why, when they
+take the something you fight for away--when they break you and cripple
+you, and you can't go anywhere for what you want badly, life isn't worth
+living."
+
+An anxious look came into her face.  This was the first time, since
+recovering consciousness, that he had referred, even indirectly, to all
+that had happened.  She understood him well--ah, terribly well!  It was
+the tragedy of the man stopped in his course because of one mistake,
+though he had done ten thousand wise things.  The power taken from his
+hands, the interrupted life, the dark future, the beginning again, if
+ever his sight came back: it was sickening, heartbreaking.
+
+She saw it all in his face, but as if some inward voice had spoken to
+him, his face cleared, the swift-moving hands clasped in front of him,
+and he said quietly: "But because it's life, there it is.  You have to
+take it as it comes."
+
+He stopped a moment, and in the pause she reached out her hand with a
+sudden passionate gesture, to touch his shoulder, but she restrained
+herself in time.
+
+He seemed to feel what she was doing, and turned his face towards her,
+a slight flush coming to his cheeks.  He smiled, and then he said: "How
+wonderful you are!  You look--"
+
+He checked himself, then added with a quizzical smile:
+
+"You are looking very well to-day, Miss Fleda Druse, very well indeed.
+I like that dark-red dress you're wearing."
+
+An almost frightened look came into her eyes.  It was as though he could
+see, for she was wearing a dark-red dress--"wine-coloured," her father
+called it, "maroon," Madame Bulteel called it.  Could he then see, after
+all?
+
+"How did you know it was dark-red?" she asked, her voice shaking.
+
+"Guessed it!  Guessed it!" he answered almost gleefully.  "Was I right?
+Is it dark-red?"
+
+"Yes, dark-red," she answered.  "Was it really a guess?"
+
+"Ah, but the guessiest kind of a guess," he replied.  "But who can tell?
+I couldn't see it, but is there any reason why the mind shouldn't see
+when the eyes are no longer working?  Come now," he added, "I've a
+feeling that I can tell things with my mind just as if I saw them.  I do
+see.  I'll guess the time now--with my mind's eye."
+
+Concentration came into his face.  "It's three minutes to twelve
+o'clock," he said decisively.
+
+She took up the watch which lay on the table beside the bed.
+
+"Yes, it's just three minutes to twelve," she declared in an awe-struck
+voice.  "That's marvellous--how wonderful you are!"
+
+"That's what I said of you a minute ago," he returned.  Then, with a
+swift change of voice and manner, he added, "How long is it?"
+
+"You mean, since you came here?" she asked, divining what was in his
+mind.
+
+"Exactly.  How long?"
+
+"Six weeks," she answered.  "Six weeks and three days."
+
+"Why don't you add the hour, too," he urged half-plaintively, though he
+smiled.
+
+"Well, it was three o'clock in the morning to the minute," she answered.
+
+"Old Father Time ought to make you his chief of staff," he remarked
+gaily.  "Now, I want to know," he added, with a visible effort of
+determination, "what has happened since three o'clock in the morning,
+six weeks and three days ago.  I want you to tell me what has happened
+to my concerns--to the railways, and also to the towns.  I don't want you
+to hide anything, because, if you do, I'll have Jim in, and Jim, under
+proper control, will tell me the whole truth, and perhaps more than the
+truth.  That's the way with Jim.  When he gets started he can't stop.
+Tell me exactly everything."
+
+Anxiety drove the colour from her cheeks.  She shrank back.
+
+"You must tell me," he urged.  "I'd rather hear it from you than from
+Dr. Rockwell, or Jim, or your father.  Your telling wouldn't hurt as much
+as anybody else's, if there has to be any hurt.  Don't you understand--
+but don't you understand?" he urged.
+
+She nodded to herself in the mirror on the wall opposite.  "I'll try to
+understand," she replied presently; "Tell me, then: have they put someone
+in my place?"
+
+"I understand so," she replied.
+
+He remained silent for a moment, his face very pale.  "Who is running the
+show?" he asked.
+
+She told him.
+
+"Oh, him!" he exclaimed.  "He's dead against my policy.  He'll make a
+mess."
+
+"They say he's doing that," she remarked.
+
+He asked her a series of questions which she tried to answer frankly, and
+he came to know that the trouble between the two towns, which, after the
+Orange funeral and his own disaster had subsided, was up again; that the
+railways were in difficulties; that there had been several failures in
+the town; that one of the banks--the Regent-had closed its doors; that
+Felix Marchand, having recovered from the injury he had received from
+Gabriel Druse on the day of the Orange funeral, had gone East for a month
+and had returned; that the old trouble was reviving in the mills, and
+that Marchand had linked himself with the enemies of the group
+controlling the railways hitherto directed by himself.
+
+For a moment after she had answered his questions, there was strong
+emotion in his face, and then it cleared.
+
+He reached out a hand towards her.  How eagerly she clasped it!  It was
+cold, and hers was so warm and firm and kind.
+
+"True friend o' mine!" he said with feeling.  "How wonderful it is that
+somehow it all doesn't seem to matter so much.  I wonder why?  I wonder--
+Tell me about yourself, about your life," he added abruptly, as though it
+had been a question he had long wished to ask.  In the tone was a quiet
+certainty suggesting that she would not hesitate to answer.
+
+"We have both had big breaks in our lives," he went on.  "I know that.
+I've lost everything, in a way, by the break in my life, and I've an idea
+that you gained everything when the break in yours came.  I didn't
+believe the story Jethro Fawe told me, but still I knew there was some
+truth in it; something that he twisted to suit himself.  I started life
+feeling I could conquer the world like another Alexander or Napoleon.
+I don't know that it was all conceit.  It was the wish to do, to see how
+far this thing on my shoulders"--he touched his head--"and this great
+physical machine"--he touched his breast with a thin hand--"would carry
+me.  I don't believe the main idea was vicious.  It was wanting to work
+a human brain to its last volt of capacity, and to see what it could do.
+I suppose I became selfish as I forged on.  I didn't mean to be, but
+concentration upon the things I had to do prevented me from being the
+thing I ought to be.  I wanted, as they say, to get there.  I had a lot
+of irons in the fire--too many--but they weren't put there deliberately.
+One thing led to another, and one thing, as it were, hung upon another,
+until they all got to be part of the scheme.  Once they got there, I had
+to carry them all on, I couldn't drop any of them; they got to be my
+life.  It didn't matter that it all grew bigger and bigger, and the risks
+got greater and greater.  I thought I could weather it through, and so I
+could have done, if it hadn't been for a mistake and an accident; but the
+mistake was mine.  That's where the thing nips--the mistake was mine.
+I took too big a risk.  You see, I'd got so used to being lucky, it
+seemed as if I couldn't go wrong.  Everything had come my way.  Ever
+since I began in that Montreal railway office, after leaving college,
+I hadn't a single setback.  I pulled things off.  I made money, and I
+plumped it all into my railways and the Regent Bank; and as you said
+a minute ago, the Regent Bank has closed down.  That cuts me clean out
+of the game.  What was the matter with the bank?  The manager?"
+
+His voice was almost monotonous in its quietness.  It was as though he
+told the story of something which had passed beyond chance or change.
+As it unfolded to her understanding, she had seated herself near to his
+bed.  The door of the room was open, and in view outside on the landing
+sat Madame Bulteel reading.  She was not, however, near enough to hear
+the conversation.
+
+Ingolby's voice was low, but it sounded as loud as a waterfall in the
+ears of the girl, who, in a few weeks, had travelled great distances on
+the road called Experience, that other name for life.
+
+"It was the manager?" he repeated.
+
+"Yes, they say so," she answered.  "He speculated with bank money."
+
+"In what?"
+
+"In your railways," she answered hesitatingly.  "Curious--I dreamed
+that," Ingolby remarked quietly, and leaned down and stroked the dog
+lying at his feet.  It had been with him through all his sickness.
+"It must have been part of my delirium, because, now that I've got my
+senses back, it's as though someone had told me about it.  Speculated in
+my railways, eh?  Chickens come home to roost, don't they?  I suppose I
+ought to be excited over it all," he continued.  "I suppose I ought.  But
+the fact is, you only have just the one long, big moment of excitement
+when great trouble and tragedy come, or else it's all excitement, all the
+time, and then you go mad.  That's the test, I think.  When you're struck
+by Fate, as a hideous war-machine might strike you, and the whole terror
+of loss and ruin bears down on you, you're either swept away in an
+excitement that hasn't any end, or you brace yourself, and become
+master of the shattering thing."
+
+"You are a master," she interposed.  "You are the Master Man," she
+repeated admiringly.
+
+He waved a hand deprecatingly.  "Do you know, when we talked together in
+the woods soon after you ran the Rapids--you remember the day--if you had
+said that to me then, I'd have cocked my head and thought I was a jim-
+dandy, as they say.  A Master Man was what I wanted to be.  But it's a
+pretty barren thing to think, or to feel, that you're a Master Man;
+because, if you are--if you've had a 'scoop' all the way, as Jowett calls
+it, you can be as sure as anything that no one cares a rap farthing what
+happens to you.  There are plenty who pretend they care, but it's only
+because they're sailing with the wind, and with your even keel.  It's
+only the Master Man himself that doesn't know in the least he's that who
+gets anything out of it all."
+
+"Aren't you getting anything out of it?" she asked softly.  "Aren't you
+--Chief?"
+
+At the familiar word--Jowett always called him Chief--a smile slowly
+stole across his face.  "I really believe I am, thanks to you," he said
+nodding.
+
+He was going to say, "Thanks to you, Fleda," but he restrained himself.
+He had no right to be familiar, to give an intimate turn to things.  His
+game was over; his journey of ambition was done.  He saw this girl with
+his mind's eye--how much he longed to see her with the eyes of the body
+--in all her strange beauty; and he knew that even if she cared for him,
+such a sacrifice as linking her life with his was impossible.  Yet her
+very presence there was like a garden of bloom to him: a garden full of
+the odour of life, of vital things, of sweet energy and happy being.
+Somehow, he and she were strangely alike.  He knew it.  From the time
+he held her in his arms at Carillon, he knew it.  The great adventurous
+spirit which was in him belonged also to her.  That was as sure as light
+and darkness.
+
+"No, there's no master man in me, but I think I know what one could be
+like," he remarked at last.  He straightened himself against the pillows.
+The old look of power came to a face hardly strong enough to bear it.
+It was so fine and thin now, and the spirit in him was so prodigious.
+
+"No one cares what happens to the man who always succeeds; no one loves
+him," he continued.  "Do you know, in my trouble I've had more out of
+nigger Jim's affection than I've ever had in my life.  Then there's
+Rockwell, Osterhaut and Jowett, and there's your father.  It was worth
+while living to feel the real thing."  His hands went out as though
+grasping something good and comforting.  "I don't suppose every man needs
+to be struck as hard as I've been to learn what's what, but I've learned
+it.  I give you my word of honour, I've learned it."
+
+Her face flushed and her eyes kindled greatly.  "Jim, Rockwell,
+Osterhaut, Jowett, and my father!" she exclaimed.  "Of course trouble
+wouldn't do anything but make them come closer round you.  Poor people
+live so near to misfortune all the time--I mean poor people like Jim,
+Osterhaut, and Jowett--that changes of fortune are just natural things to
+them.  As for my father, he has had to stretch out his hands so often to
+those in trouble--"
+
+"That he carried me home on his shoulders from the bridge six weeks and
+three days ago, at three o'clock in the morning," interjected Ingolby
+with a quizzical smile.
+
+"Why did you omit Madame Bulteel and myself when you mentioned those who
+showed their--friendship?" she asked, hesitating at the last word.
+"Haven't we done our part?"
+
+"I was talking of men," he answered.  "One knows what women do.  They may
+leave you in the bright days, not in the dark days.  On the majority of
+them you couldn't rely in prosperity, but in misfortune you couldn't do
+anything else.  They are there with you.  They're made that way.  The
+best life can give you in misfortune is a woman.  It's the great
+beginning-of-the-world thing in them.  Men can't stand prosperity, but
+women can stand misfortune.  Why, if Jim and Osterhaut and Jowett and all
+the men of Lebanon and Manitou had deserted me, I shouldn't have been
+surprised; but I'd have had to recast my philosophy if Fleda Druse had
+turned her bonny brown head away."
+
+It was evident he was making an effort to conquer emotions which were
+rising in him; that he was playing on the surface to prevent his deep
+feelings from breaking forth.  "Instead of which," he added jubilantly,
+"here I am, in the nicest room in the world, in a fine bed with springs
+like an antelope's heels."
+
+He laughed, and hunched his back into the mattress.  It was the laugh of
+the mocker, but he was mocking himself.  She did not misunderstand.  It
+was a nice room, as he said.  He had never seen it with his eyes, but if
+he had seen it he would have realized how like herself it was--adorably
+fresh, happily coloured, sumptuous and fine.  It had simple curtains,
+white sheets, and a warm carpet on the floor; and yet with something,
+too, that struck the note of a life outside.  A pennant of many colours
+hung where two soft pink curtains joined, and at the window and over the
+door was an ancient cross in bronze and gold.  It was not the simple
+Christian cross of the modern world, but an ancient one which had become
+a symbol of the Romanys, a sign to mark the highways, the guide of the
+wayfarers.  The pennant had been on the pole of the Ry's tent in far-off
+days in the Roumelian country.  In the girl herself there was that which
+corresponded to the gorgeous pennant and the bronze cross.  It was not in
+dress or in manner, for there was no sign of garishness, of the unusual
+anywhere--in manner she was as well controlled as any woman of fashion,
+in dress singularly reserved--but in the depths of the eyes there was
+some restless, unsettled thing, some flicker of strange banners akin to
+the pennant at the joining of the pink curtains.  There had been
+something of the same look in Ingolby's eyes in the past, only with him
+it was the sense of great adventure, intrepid enterprise, a touch of
+vision and the beckoning thing.  That look was not in his eyes now.
+Nothing was there; no life, no soul; only darkness.  But did that look
+still inhabit the eyes of the soul?
+
+He answered the question himself.  "I'd start again in a different way if
+I could," he said musingly, his face towards the girl.  "It's easy to say
+that, but I would.  It isn't only the things you get, it's how you use
+them.  It isn't only the things you do, it's why you do them.  But I'll
+never have a chance now; I'll never have a chance to try the new way.
+I'm done."
+
+Something almost savage leaped into her eyes--a wild, bitter protest, for
+it was her tragedy, too, if he was not to regain his sight.  The great
+impulse of a nature which had been disciplined into reserve broke forth.
+
+"It isn't so," she said with a tremor in her voice.  All that he--and
+she--was in danger of losing came home to her.  "It isn't so.  You shall
+get well again.  Your sight will come back.  To-morrow; perhaps to-day,
+Hindlip, the great oculist comes from New York.  Mr. Warbeck, the
+Montreal man, holds out hopes.  If the New York man says the same,
+why despair?  Perhaps in another month you will be on your feet again,
+out in the world, fighting, working, mastering, just as you used to do."
+
+A sudden stillness seemed to take possession of him.  His lips parted;
+his head was thrust forwards slightly as though he saw something in the
+distance.  He spoke scarcely above a whisper.
+
+"I didn't know the New York man was coming.  I didn't know there was any
+hope at all," he said with awe in his tones.
+
+"We told you there was," she answered.
+
+"Yes, I know.  But I thought you were all only trying to make it easier
+for me, and I heard Warbeck say to Rockwell, when they thought I was
+asleep, 'It's ten to one against him.'"
+
+"Did you hear that?" she said sorrowfully.  "I'm so sorry; but Mr.
+Warbeck said afterwards--only a week ago--that the chances were even.
+That's the truth.  On my soul and honour it's the truth.  He said the
+chances were even.  It was he suggested Mr. Hindlip, and Hindlip is
+coming now.  He's on the way.  He may be here to-day.  Oh, be sure, be
+sure, be sure, it isn't all over.  You said your life was broken.  It
+isn't.  You said my life had been broken.  It wasn't.  It was only the
+wrench of a great change.  Well, it's only the wrench of a great change
+in your life.  You said I gained everything in the great change of my
+life.  I did; and the great change in your life won't be lost, it will be
+gain, too.  I know it; in my heart I know it."
+
+With sudden impulse she caught his hand in both of hers, and then with
+another impulse, which she could not control, she caught his head to her
+bosom.  For one instant her arms wrapped him round, and she murmured
+something in a language he did not understand--the language of the
+Roumelian country.  It was only one swift instant, and then with shocked
+exclamation she broke away from him, dropped into a chair, and buried her
+face in her hands.
+
+He blindly reached out his hand towards her as if to touch her.  "Mother-
+girl, dear mother-girl--that's what you are," he said huskily.  "What a
+great, kind heart you've got!"
+
+She did not reply, but sat with face hidden in her hands, rocking
+backwards and forwards.  He understood; he tried to help her.  There was
+a great joy in his heart, but he dared not give it utterance.
+
+"Please tell me about your life--about that great change in it," he said
+at last in a low voice.  "Perhaps it would help me.  Anyhow, I'd like to
+know, if you feel you can tell me."
+
+For a moment she was silent.  Then she said to him with an anxious note
+in her voice: "What do you know about my life-about the 'great change,'
+as you call it?"
+
+He reached out over the coverlet, felt for a sock which he had been
+learning to knit and, slowly plying the needles, replied: "I only know
+what Jethro Fawe told me, and he was a promiscuous liar."
+
+"I don't think he lied about me," she answered quietly.  "He told you I
+was a Gipsy; he told you that I was married to him.  That was true.  I
+was a Gipsy.  I was married to him in the Romany way, when I was a child
+of three, and I never saw him again until here, the other day, on the
+Sagalac."
+
+"You were married to him as much as I am," he interjected scornfully.
+"That was a farce.  It was only a promise to pay on the part of your
+father.  There was nothing in that.  Jethro Fawe could not claim on
+that."
+
+"He has tried to do so," she answered, "and if I were still a Gipsy he
+would have the right to do so from his standpoint."
+
+"That sounds silly to me," Ingolby remarked, his fingers moving now more
+quickly with the needles.  "No, it isn't silly," she said, her voice
+almost as softly monotonous as his had been when he told her of his life
+a little while before.  It was as though she was looking into her own
+mind and heart and speaking to herself.  "It isn't silly," she repeated.
+"I don't think you understand.  Just because a race like the Gipsies have
+no country and no home, so they must have things that bind them which
+other people don't need in the same way.  Being the vagrants of the
+earth, so they must have things that hold them tighter than any written
+laws made by King or Parliament.  Unless the Gipsies kept their laws
+sacred they couldn't hold together at all.  They're iron and steel, the
+Gipsy laws.  They can't be stretched, and they can't be twisted.  They
+can only be broken, and then there's no argument about it.  When they are
+broken, there's the penalty, and it has to be met."
+
+Ingolby stopped knitting for a moment.  "You don't mean that a penalty
+could touch you?" he asked incredulously.
+
+"Not for breaking a law," she answered.  "I'm not a Gipsy any more.
+I gave my word about that, and so did my father; and I'll keep it."
+
+"Please tell me about it," he urged.  "Tell me, so that I can understand
+everything."
+
+There was a long pause in which Ingolby inspected carefully with his
+fingers the work which he was doing, but at last Fleda's voice came to
+him, as it seemed out of a great distance, while she began to tell of her
+first memories: of her life by the Danube and the Black Sea, and drew
+for him a picture, so far as she could recall it, of her marriage with
+Jethro, and of the years that followed.  Now and again as she told of
+some sordid things, of the challenge of the law in different countries,
+of the coarse vagabondage of the Gipsy people in this place or in that,
+and some indignity put upon her father, or some humiliating incident, her
+voice became low and pained.  It seemed as if she meant that he should
+see all she had been in that past, which still must be part of the
+present and have its place in the future, however far away all that
+belonged to it would be.  She appeared to search her mind to find that
+which would prejudice him against her.  While speaking with slow scorn
+of the life which she had lived as a Gipsy, yet she tried to make him
+understand, too, that, in the days when she belonged to it, it all seemed
+natural to her, and that its sordidness, its vagabondage did not produce
+repugnance in her mind when she was part of it.  Unwittingly she over-
+coloured the picture, and he knew she did.
+
+In spite of herself, however, some aspects of the old life called forth
+pictures of happy Nature, of busy animal life of wood and glen and stream
+and footpath which was exquisite in its way.  She was in spirit at one
+with the multitudinous world of nature among which so many men and women
+lived, without seeing or knowing.  It was all undesignedly a part of
+herself, and she was one of a population in a universal nation whose
+devout citizen she was.  Sometimes, in response to an interjection from
+Ingolby, deftly made, she told of some incident which revealed as great a
+poetic as dramatic instinct.  As she talked, Ingolby in his imagination
+pictured her as a girl of ten or twelve, in a dark-red dress, brown curls
+falling in profusion on her shoulders, with a clear, honest, beautiful
+eye, and a face that only spoke of a joy of living, in which the small
+things were the small things and the great things were the great: the
+perfect proportion of sane life in a sane world.
+
+Now and again, carried away by the history of things remembered, she
+visualized scenes for him with the ardour of an artist and a lover of
+created things.  He realized how powerful a hold the old life still had
+upon her.  She understood it, too, for when at last she told of the great
+event in England which changed her life, and made her a deserter from
+Gipsy life; when she came to the giving of the pledge to a dying woman,
+and how she had kept that pledge, and how her father had kept it,
+sternly, faithfully, in spite of all it involved, she said to him:
+
+"It may seem strange to you, living as I live now in one spot, with
+everything to make life easy, that I should long sometimes for that old
+life.  I hate it in my heart of hearts, yet there's something about it
+that belongs to me, that's behind me, if that tells you anything.  It's
+as though there was some other self in me which reached far, far back
+into centuries, that wills me to do this and wills me to do that.  It
+sounds mad to you of course, but there have been times when I have had a
+wild longing to go back to it all, to what some Gorgio writers call the
+pariah world--the Ishmaelites."
+
+More than once Ingolby's heart throbbed heavily against his breast as he
+felt the passion of her nature, its extraordinary truthfulness, making it
+clear to him by indirect phrases that even Jethro Fawe, whom she
+despised, still had a hateful fascination for her.  It was all at
+variance to her present self, but it summoned her through the long
+avenues of ancestry, predisposition; through the secret communion of
+those who, being dead, yet speak.
+
+"It's a great story told in a great way," he said, when she had finished.
+"It's the most honest thing I ever heard, but it's not the most truthful
+thing I ever heard.  I don't think we can tell the exact truth about
+ourselves.  We try to be honest; we are savagely in earnest about it,
+and so we exaggerate the bad things we do, and we often show distrust of
+the good things we do.  That's not a fair picture.  I believe you've told
+me the truth as you see it and feel it, but I don't think it's the real
+truth.  In my mind I sometimes see an oriel window in the college where I
+spent three years.  I used to work and think for hours in that oriel
+window, and in the fights I've been having lately I've looked back and
+thought I wanted it again; wanted to be there in the peace of it all,
+with the books, and the lectures, and the drone of history, and the
+drudgery of examinations; but if I did go back to it, three days'd sicken
+me, and if you went back to the Gipsy life three days'd sicken you."
+
+"Yes, I know.  Three hours would sicken me.  But what might not happen in
+those three hours!  Can't you understand?"
+
+Suddenly she got to her feet with a passionate exclamation, her
+clenched hands went to her temples in an agony of emotion.  "Can't you
+understand?" she repeated.  "It's the going back at all for three days,
+for three hours, for three minutes that counts.  It might spoil
+everything; it might kill my life."
+
+His face flushed, crimsoned, then became pale; his hands ceased moving;
+the knitting lay still on his knee.  "Maybe, but you aren't going back
+for three minutes, any more than I'm going back to the oriel window for
+three seconds," he said.  "We dreamers have a lot of agony in thinking
+about the things we're never going to do--just as much agony as in
+thinking about the things we've done.  Every one of us dreamers ought to
+be insulated.  We ought to wear emotional lightning-rods to carry off the
+brain-waves into the ground.
+
+"I've never heard such a wonderful story," he added, after an instant,
+with an intense longing to hold out his arms to her, and a still more
+intense will to do no such wrong.  A blind man had no right or title to
+be a slave-owner, for that was what marriage to him would be.  A wife
+would be a victim.  He saw himself, felt himself being gradually
+devitalized, with only the placid brain left, considering only the
+problem of hourly comfort, and trying to neutralize the penalties of
+blindness.  She must not be sacrificed to that, for apart from all else
+she had greatness of a kind in her.  He knew far better than he had said
+of the storm of emotion in her, and he knew that she had not exaggerated
+the temptation which sang in her ears.  Jethro Fawe--the thought of the
+man revolted him; and yet there was something about the fellow,
+a temperamental power, the glamour and garishness of Nature's gifts,
+prostituted though they were, finding expression in a striking
+personality, in a body of athletic grace--a man-beauty.
+
+"Have you seen Jethro Fawe lately?" he asked.  "Not since"--she was
+going to say not since the morning her father had passed the sentence of
+the patrin upon him; but she paused in time.  "Not since everything
+happened to you," she added presently.
+
+"He knows the game is up," Ingolby remarked with forced cheerfulness.
+"He won't be asking for any more."
+
+"It's time for your milk and brandy," she said suddenly, emotion
+subsiding and a look of purpose coming into her face.  She poured out the
+liquid, and gave the glass into his hand.  His fingers touched hers.
+
+"Your hands are cold," she said to him.  "Cold hands, warm heart," he
+chattered.
+
+A curious, wilful, rebellious look came into her eyes.  "I shouldn't
+have thought it in your case," she said, and with sudden resolve turned
+towards the door.  "I'll send Madame Bulteel," she added.  "I'm going for
+a walk."
+
+She had betrayed herself so much, had shown so recklessly what she felt,
+and yet, yet why did he not--she did not know what she wanted him to do.
+It was all a great confusion.  Vaguely she realized what had been working
+in him, but yet the knowledge was dim indeed.  She was a woman.  In her
+heart of hearts she knew that he did care for her, and yet in her heart
+of hearts she denied that he cared.
+
+She was suddenly angry with herself, angry with him, the poor blind man,
+back from the Valley of the Shadow.  She had not reached the door,
+however, when Madame Bulteel entered the room.
+
+"The doctor from New York has come," she said, holding out a note from
+Dr. Rockwell.  "He will be here in a couple of hours."
+
+Fleda turned back towards the bed.
+
+"Good luck!" she said.  "You'll see, it will be all right."
+
+"Certainly I'll see if it's all right," he said cheerfully.  "Am I tidy?
+Have I used Pears' soap?"  He would have his joke at his own funeral if
+possible.
+
+"There are two hours to get you fit to be seen," she rejoined with
+raillery, infected by his cheerfulness in spite of herself.  "Madame
+Bulteel is very brave.  Nothing is too hard for her!"
+
+An instant later she was gone, with her heart telling her to go back to
+him, not to leave him, but yet with a longing stronger still driving her
+to the open world, to which she could breathe her trouble in great gasps,
+as she sped onward through the woods and by the river.  To love a blind
+man was sheer madness, but in her was a superstitious belief that he
+would see again.  It prevailed against the doubts and terrors.  It made
+her resent his own sense of fatality, his own belief that he would be in
+darkness all his days.
+
+In the room where he awaited the verdict of the expert, he kept saying to
+himself:
+
+"She would have made everything else look cheap--if it could have been."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
+
+The last rays of the setting sun touched the gorgeous Autumn woods with
+a loving, bright glow, and the day stole pensively away into a purple bed
+beyond the sight of the eyes.  From a lonely spot by the river, Fleda
+watched the westering gleam until it vanished, her soul alive to the
+melancholy beauty of it all.  Not a human being seemed to be within the
+restricted circle of her vision.  There were only to be seen the deep
+woods, in myriad tints of bronze and red and saffron, and the swift-
+flowing river.  Overhead was the Northern sky, so clear, so thrilling,
+and the stars were beginning to sparkle in the incredibly swift twilight
+which links daytime and nighttime in that Upper Land.  Lonely and
+delicately sad it all looked, but there was no feeling of loneliness
+among those who lived the life of the Sagalac.  Many a man has stood on a
+wide plain of snow, white to the uttermost horizon, or in the yellow-
+brown grass of the Summer prairie, empty of all human life so far as eye
+could see, and yet has felt no solitude.  It is as though the air itself
+is inhabited by a throng of happy comrades whispering in the communion of
+the invisible world.
+
+As a child Fleda had often gazed upon just such scenes, lonely and
+luminous, but she was only conscious then of a vague and pleasant awe,
+a kindly confusion, which, like the din of innumerable bees, lulled
+wonder to sleep.  Even as a child, however, something of what it meant
+had pierced her awe and wonder.  Once as she crossed a broken, bare
+mountain of Roumania she had seen a wild ass perched upon a high summit
+gazing, as it were, over the wide valley, where beneath, among the rocks,
+other wild asses wandered.  There was something so statue-like in this
+immovable wild creature that Fleda had watched it till it was hid from
+her view by a jutting rock.  But the thing which made a lasting
+impression, drawing her nearer to nature-life than all that had chanced
+since she was born, was the fact that on returning, hours after, the wild
+ass was still standing upon the summit of the hill, still gazing across
+the valley.  Or was it gazing across the valley?  Was there some other
+vision commanding its sight?
+
+So a young wife not yet a mother loses herself for hours together in a
+vista of unexplored experience.  Fleda had passed on, out of sight of the
+wild ass on the hills, but for ever after the memory of it remained with
+her and the picture of it sprang to her eye innumerable times.  The
+hypnotized wild thing--hypnotized by its own vague instincts, or by
+something outside itself-became to her as the Sphinx to the Egyptian, the
+everlasting question of existence.
+
+Now, as she watched the day fleeing, and night with swift stealthiness
+coming on, that unforgettable picture of the Roumanian hills came to her
+again.  The instinct of those far-off days which had been little removed
+from the finest animal intelligence had now developed into thought.
+Brain and soul strove to grasp what it all meant, and what the revelation
+was between Nature and herself.  Nature was so vast; she was so
+insignificant; changes in its motionless inorganic life were
+imperceptible save through the telescopes of years; but she, like the
+wind, the water, and the clouds, was variable, inconstant.  Was there any
+real relation between the vast, imperturbable earth, its seas, its
+forests, its mountains and its plains, its life of tree and plant and
+flower and the men and women dotted on its surface?  Did they belong to
+each other, or were mankind only, as it were, vermin infesting the
+desirable world?  Did they belong to each other?  It meant so much if
+they did belong, and she loved to think they did.  Many a time she kissed
+the smooth bole of a maple or whispered to it; or laid her cheek against
+a mossy rock and murmured a greeting in the spirit of a companionship as
+old as the making of the world.
+
+On the evening of this day of her destiny--carrying the story of her own
+fate within its twenty-four hours--she was in a mood of detachment from
+life's routine.  As at a great opera, a sensitive spirit loses itself in
+visions alien to the music and yet born of it, so she, lost in this
+primeval scene before her, saw visions of things to be.
+
+If Ingolby's sight came back!  In her abstraction she saw him with sight
+restored and by her side, and even in that joy her mind felt a hovering
+sense of invasion, no definite, visible thing, but a presence which made
+shadow.  Suddenly oppressed by it, she turned back into the woods from
+the river-bank to make for home.  She had explored nearly every portion
+of this river-country for miles up and down, but on this evening, lost in
+her dreams, she had wandered into less familiar regions.  There was no
+chance of her being lost, so long as she kept near to the river, and
+indeed by instinct and not by thought or calculation she made her way
+about at all times.  Turned homeward, she walked for about a quarter of a
+mile, retreading the path by which she had come.  It was growing darker,
+and, being in unfamiliar surroundings, she hurried on, though she knew
+well what course to take.  Following the bank of the river she would have
+increased her walk greatly, as the stream made a curve at a point above
+Manitou, and then came back again to its original course; so she cut
+across the promontory, taking the most direct line homeward.
+
+Presently, however, she became conscious of other people in the wood
+besides herself.  She saw no one, but she heard breaking twigs, the stir
+of leaves, the flutter of a partridge which told of human presence.  The
+underbrush was considerable, darkness was coming on, and she had a sense
+of being surrounded.  It agitated her, but she pulled herself together,
+stood still and admonished herself.  She called herself a fool; she asked
+herself if she was going to be a coward.  She laughed out loud at her own
+apprehension; but a chill stole into her blood when she heard near by--
+there was no doubt about it now--mockery of her own laughter.  Then
+suddenly, before she could organize her senses, a score of men seemed to
+rise up from the ground around her, to burst out from the bushes, to drop
+from the trees, and to storm upon her.  She had only time to realize that
+they were Romanys, before scarfs were thrown around her head, bound
+around her body, and, unconscious, she was carried away into the deep
+woods.
+
+When she regained consciousness Fleda found herself in a tent, set in a
+kind of prairie amphitheatre valanced by shrubs and trees.  Bright fires
+burned here and there, and dark-featured men squatted upon the ground,
+cared for their horses, or busied themselves near two large caravans, at
+the doors or on the steps of which now and again appeared a woman.
+
+She had waked without moving, had observed the scene without drawing the
+attention of a man--a sentry--who sat beside the tent-door.  The tent was
+empty save for herself.  There was little in it besides the camp-bed
+against the tent wall, upon which she lay, and the cushions supporting
+her head.  She had waked carefully, as it were: as though some inward
+monitor had warned her of impending danger.  She realized that she had
+been kidnapped by Romanys, and that the hand behind the business was that
+of Jethro Fawe.  The adventurous and reckless Fawe family had its many
+adherents in the Romany world, and Jethro was its head, the hereditary
+claimant for its leadership.
+
+Notwithstanding the Ry of Rys' prohibition, there had drawn nearer and
+ever nearer to him, from the Romany world he had abandoned, many of his
+people, never, however, actually coming within his vision till the
+appearance of Jethro Fawe.  Here and there on the prairie, to a point
+just beyond Gabriel Druse's horizon, they had come from all parts of the
+world; and Jethro, reckless and defiant under the Sentence, and knowing
+that the chances against his life were a million to one, had determined
+on one bold stroke which, if it failed, would make his fate no worse,
+and, if it succeeded, would give him his wife and, maybe, headship over
+all the Romany world.  For weeks he had planned, watched and waited,
+filling the woods with his adherents, secretly following Fleda day by
+day, until, at last, the place, the opportunity, seemed perfect; and here
+she lay in a Romany tan once more, with the flickering fires outside in
+the night, and the sentry at her doorway.  This watchman was not Jethro
+Fawe, but she knew well that Jethro was not far off.
+
+Through the open door of the tent, for some minutes, her eyes studied the
+segment of the circle within her vision, and she realized that here was
+an organized attempt to force her back into the Romany world.  If she
+repudiated the Gorgio life and acknowledged herself a Romany once again,
+she knew her safety would be secured; but in truth she had no fear for
+her life, for no one would dare to defy the Ry of Rys so far as to kill
+his daughter.  But she was in danger of another kind--in deep and
+terrible danger; and she knew it well.  As the thought of it took
+possession of her, her heart seemed almost to burst.  Not fear, but anger
+and emotion possessed her.  All the Romany in her stormed back again from
+the past.  It sent her to her feet with a scarcely smothered cry.  She
+was not quicker, however, than was the figure at the tent door, which,
+with a half-dozen others, sprang up as she appeared.  A hand was raised,
+and, as if by magic, groups of Gipsies, some sitting, some standing, some
+with the Gipsy fiddle, one or two with flutes, began a Romany chant in a
+high, victorious key, and women threw upon the fire powders from which
+flamed up many coloured lights.
+
+In a moment the camp was transformed.  From the woods around came
+swarthy-faced men, with great gold rings in their ears and bright scarfs
+around their necks or waists, some of them handsome, dirty and insolent;
+others ugly, watchful, and quiet in manner and face; others still most
+friendly and kind in face and manner.  All showed instant respect for
+Fleda.  They raised their hands in a gesture of salutation as a Zulu
+chief thrusts up a long arm and shouts "Inkoos!" to one whom he honours.
+Some, however, made the sweeping Oriental gesture of the right hand, palm
+upward, and almost touching the ground--a sign of obedience and infinite
+respect.  It had all been well arranged.  Skilfully managed as it was,
+however, there was something in it deeper than theatrical display or
+dramatic purpose.
+
+It was clear that many of them were deeply moved at being in the presence
+of the daughter of the Ry of Rys, who had for so long exiled himself.
+Racial, family, clan feeling spoke in voice and gesture, in look and
+attitude; but yet there were small groups of younger men whose
+salutations were perfunctory, not to say mocking.  These were they who
+resented deeply Fleda's defection, and truthfully felt that she had
+passed out of their circle for ever; that she despised them, and looked
+down on them from another sphere.  They were all about the age of Jethro
+Fawe, but were of a less civilized type, and had semi-barbarism written
+all over them.  Unlike Jethro they had never known the world of cities.
+They repudiated Fleda, because their ambition could not reach to her.
+They recognized the touch of fashion and of form, of a worldly education,
+of a convention which lifted her away from the tan and the caravan, from
+the everlasting itinerary.  They had not had Jethro's experiences in
+fashionable hotels of Europe, at midnight parties, at gay suppers, at
+garish dances, where Gorgio ladies answered the amorous looks of the
+ambitious Romany with the fiddle at his chin.  Because these young
+Romanys knew they dare not aspire, they were resentful; but Jethro,
+the head of the rival family and the son of the dead claimant to the
+headship, had not such compulsory modesty.  He had ranged far and wide,
+and his expectations were extensive.  He was nowhere to be seen in the
+groups which sang and gestured in the light of the many coloured fires,
+though once or twice Fleda's quickened ear detected his voice, exulting,
+in the chorus of song.
+
+Presently, as she stood watching, listening, and strangely moved in spite
+of herself by the sudden dramatic turn which things had taken, a seat was
+brought to her.  It was a handsome stool, looted perhaps from some
+chateau in the Old World, and over it was thrown a dark-red cloth which
+gave a semblance of dignity to the seat of authority, which it was meant
+to be.
+
+Fleda did not refuse the honour.  She had choked back the indignant words
+which had rushed to her lips as she left the tent where she had been
+lying.  Prudence had bade her await developments.  She could not yet make
+up her mind what to do.  It was clear that a bold and deep purpose lay
+behind it all, and she could not tell how far-reaching it was, nor what
+it represented of rebellion against her father's authority.  That it did
+represent rebellion she had no doubt.  She was well enough aware of the
+claims of Jethro's dead father to the leadership, abandoned for three
+thousand pounds and marriage with herself; and she was also aware that
+while her father's mysterious isolation might possibly have developed a
+reverence for him, yet active pressure and calumny might well have done
+its work.  Also, if the marriage was repudiated, Jethro would be
+justified in resuming the family claim to the leadership.
+
+She seated herself upon the scarlet seat with a gesture of thanks, while
+the salutations and greetings increased; then she awaited events,
+thrilled by the weird and pleasant music, with its touches of Eastern
+fantasy.  In spite of herself she was moved, as Romanys, men and women,
+ran forward in excitement with arms raised towards her as though they
+meant to strike her, then suddenly stopped short, made obeisance, called
+a greeting, and ran backwards to their places.
+
+Presently a group of men began a ceremony or ritual, before which the
+spectators now and again covered their eyes, or bent their heads low,
+or turned their backs, and raised their hands in a sort of ascription.
+As the ceremony neared its end, with its strange genuflections, a woman
+dressed in white was brought forward, her hands bound behind her, her
+hair falling over her shoulders, and after a moment of apparent
+denunciation on the part of the head of the ceremony, she was suddenly
+thrown to the ground, and the pretence of drawing a knife across her
+throat was made.  As Fleda watched it she shuddered, but presently braced
+herself, because she knew that this ritual was meant to show what the end
+must be of those who, like herself, proved traitor to the traditions of
+race.
+
+It was at this point, when fifty knives flashed in the air, with vengeful
+exclamations, that Jethro Fawe appeared in the midst of the crowd.  He
+was dressed in the well-known clothes which he had worn since the day he
+first declared himself at Gabriel Druse's home, and, compared with his
+friends around him, he showed to advantage.  There was command in his
+bearing, and experience of life had given him primitive distinction.
+
+For a moment he stood looking at Fleda in undisguised admiration, for
+she made a remarkable picture.  Animal beauty was hers, too.  There was a
+delicate, athletic charm in her body and bearing; but it added to, rather
+than took away from, the authority of her presence, so differing from
+Jethro.  She had never compared herself with others, and her passionate
+intelligence would have rebelled against the supremacy of the body.  She
+had no physical vanity, but she had some mental vanity, and it placed
+mind so far above matter that her beauty played no part in her
+calculations.  At sight of him, Fleda's blood quickened, but in
+indignation and in no other sense.  As he came towards her, however,
+despising his vanity as she did, she felt how much he was above all those
+by whom he was surrounded.  She realized his talent, and it almost made
+her forget his cunning and his loathsomeness.  As he came near to her he
+made a slight gesture to someone in the crowd, and a chorus of
+salutations rose.
+
+Composed and still she waited for him to come quite close to her, and the
+look in her face was like that of one who was scarcely conscious of what
+was passing around her, whose eyes saw distant things of infinite moment.
+
+A few feet away from her he spoke.
+
+"Daughter of the Ry of Rys, you are among your own people once again,"
+he said.  "From everywhere in the world they have come to show their love
+for you.  You would not have come to them of your own free will, because
+a madness 'got hold of you, and so they came to you.  You cut yourself
+off from them and told yourself you had become a Gorgio.  But that was
+only your madness; and madness can be cured.  We are the Fawes, the
+ancient Fawes, who ruled the Romany people before the Druses came to
+power.  We are of the ancient blood, yet we are faithful to the Druse
+that rules over us.  His word prevails, although his daughter is mad.
+Daughter of the Ry of Rys, you have seen us once again.  We have sung to
+you; we have spoken to you; we have told you what is in our hearts; we
+have shown you how good is the end of those who are faithful, and how
+terrible is the end of the traitor.  Do not forget it.  Speak to us."
+
+Fleda had a fierce desire to spring to her feet and declare to them all
+that the sentence of the patrin had been passed upon Jethro Fawe, but she
+laid a hand upon herself.  She knew they were unaware that the Sentence
+had been passed, else they would not have been with Jethro.  In that case
+none would give him food or shelter or the hand of friendship; none dare
+show him any kindness; and it was the law that any one against whom he
+committed an offence, however small, might take his life.  The Sentence
+had been like a cloud upon her mind ever since her father had passed it;
+she could not endure the thought of it.  She could not bring herself to
+speak of it--to denounce him.  Sooner or later the Sentence would reach
+every Romany everywhere, and Jethro would pass into the darkness of
+oblivion, not in his own time nor in the time of Fate.  The man was
+abhorrent to her, yet his claim was there.  Mad and bad as it was, he
+made his claim of her upon ancient rights, and she was still enough a
+Romany to see his point of view.
+
+Getting to her feet slowly, she ignored Jethro, looked into the face of
+the crowd, and said:
+
+"I am the daughter of the Ry of Rys still, though I am a Romany no
+longer.  I made a pledge to be no more a Romany and I will keep it; yet
+you and all Romany people are dear to me because through long generations
+the Druses have been of you.  You have brought me here against my will.
+Do you think the Ry of Rys will forgive that?  In your words you have
+been kind to me, but yet you have threatened me.  Do you think that a
+Druse has any fear?  Did a Druse ever turn his cheek to be smitten?  You
+know what the Druses are.  I am a Druse still.  I will not talk longer,
+I have nothing to say to you all except that you must take me back to my
+father, and I will see that he forgives you.  Some of you have done this
+out of love; some of you have done it out of hate; yet set me free again
+upon the path to my home, and I shall forget it, and the Ry of Rys will
+forget it."
+
+At that instant there suddenly came forward from the doorway of a tent
+on the outskirts of the crowd a stalwart woman, with a strong face and
+a self-reliant manner.  She was still young, but her slightly pockmarked
+countenance showed the wear and tear of sorrow of some kind.  She had,
+indeed, lost her husband and her father in the Montenegrin wars.
+Hastening forward to Fleda she reached out a hand.
+
+"Come with me," she said; "come and sleep in my tent to-night.  To-morrow
+you shall go back to the Ry of Rys, perhaps.  Come with me."
+
+There was a sudden murmuring in the crowd, which was stilled by a motion
+of Jethro Fawe's hand, and a moment afterwards Fleda gave her hand to the
+woman.
+
+"I will go with you," Fleda said.  Then she turned to Jethro: "I wish to
+speak to you alone, Jethro Fawe," she added.
+
+He laughed triumphantly.  "The wife of Jethro Fawe wishes to speak with
+him," he bombastically cried aloud to the assembled people, and he
+prepared to follow Fleda.
+
+As Fleda entered the woman's tent a black-eyed girl, with tousled hair
+and a bold, sensual face, ran up to Jethro, and in an undertone of evil
+suggestion said to him:
+
+"To-night is yours, Jethro.  You can make tomorrow sure."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE SECRET MAN
+
+"You are wasting your time."
+
+Fleda said the words with a quiet determination, and yet in the tone was
+a slight over-emphasis which was like a call upon reserve forces within
+herself.
+
+"Time is nothing to me," was the complete reply, clothed in a tone of
+soft irony.  "I'm young enough to waste it.  I've plenty of it in my
+knapsack."
+
+"Have you forgotten the Sentence of the Patrin?"  Fleda asked the
+question in a voice which showed a sudden access of determination.
+
+"He will have to wipe it out after to-morrow," replied the other with a
+gleam of sulky meaning and furtive purpose in his eyes.
+
+"If you mean that I will change my mind to-morrow, and be your wife, and
+return to the Gipsy life, it is the thought of a fool.  I asked you to
+come here to speak with me because I was sure I could make you see things
+as they truly are.  I wanted to explain why I did not tell the Romanys
+outside there that the Sentence had been passed on you.  I did not tell
+them because I can't forget that your people and my people have been sib
+for hundreds of years; that you and I were children together; that we
+were sealed to one another when neither of us could have any say about
+it.  If I had remained a Gipsy, who can tell--my mind might have
+become like yours!  I think there must be something rash and bad in me
+somewhere, because I tell you frankly now that a chord in my heart rang
+when you made your wild speeches to me there in the hut in the Wood
+months ago, even when I hated you, knowing you for what you are."
+
+"That was because there was another man," interjected Jethro.
+
+She inclined her head.  "Yes, it was partly because of another man,"
+she replied.  "It is a man who suffers because of you.  When he was alone
+among his foes, a hundred to one, you betrayed him.  That itself would
+have made me despise you to the end of my life, even if the man had been
+nothing at all to me.
+
+"It was a low, cowardly thing to do.  You did it; and if you were my
+brother, I would hate you for it; if you were my father, I should leave
+your house; if you were my husband, I should kill you.  I asked you to
+speak with me now because I thought that if you would go away--far away--
+promising never to cross my father's path, or my path, again, I could get
+him to withdraw the Sentence.  You have kidnapped me.  Where do you think
+you are?  In Mesopotamia?  You can't break the law of this country and
+escape as you would there.  They don't take count of Romany custom here.
+Not only you, but every one of the Fawes here will be punished if the law
+reaches for your throat.  I want you to escape, and I tell you to go now.
+Go back to Europe.  I advise you this for your own sake--because you are
+a Fawe and of the clan."
+
+The blood mounted to Jethro's forehead, and he made an angry gesture.
+"And leave you here for him!  'Mi Duvel!'  I can only die once, and I
+would rather die near you than far away," he exclaimed.
+
+His eyes had a sardonic look, there was a savage edge to his tongue, yet
+his face was flushed with devouring emotion and he was quivering with
+hope.  That which he called love was flooding the field of his feelings,
+and the mad thing--the toxic impulse which is deep in the brain of
+Eastern races bled into his brain now.  He was reckless, rebellious
+against fate, insanely wilful, and what she had said concerning Ingolby
+had roused in him the soul of Cain.
+
+She realized it, and she was apprehensive of some desperate act; yet she
+had no physical fear of him.  Something seemed to tell her that, no
+matter what happened, Ingolby would not wait for her in vain, and that
+he would yet see her enter to him again with the love-light in her eyes.
+
+"But listen to me," Jethro said, with an unnatural shining in his eyes,
+his voice broken in its passion.  "You think you can come it over me with
+your Gorgio talk and the clever things you've learned in the Gorgio
+world.  You try to look down on me.  I'm as well born or as ill born as
+you.  The only difference between us is the way you dress, the way you
+live and use your tongue.  All that belongs to the life of the cities.
+Anyone can learn it.  Anyone well born like you and me, with a little
+practice, can talk like Gorgio dukes and earls.  I've been among them and
+I know.  I've had my friends among them, too.  I've got the hang of it
+all.  It's no good to me, and I don't want it.  It's all part of a set
+piece.  There's no independence in that life; you live by rule.  Diable!
+I know.  I've been in palaces; I've played my fiddle to the women in high
+places who can't blush.  It's no good; it brings nothing in the end.
+It's all hollow.  Look at our people there."  He swept a hand to the tent
+door.
+
+"They're tanned and rough, as all out-door things are rough, but they've
+got their share of happiness, and every day has its pleasures.  Listen to
+them!" he cried with a gesture of exultation.  "Listen to that!"
+
+The colour slowly left Fleda's face.  Outside in the light of the dying
+fires, under the glittering stars, in the shade of the trees, groups of
+Romanys were singing the Romany wedding melody, called "The Song of the
+Sealing."  It was not like the ringing of wedding bells alone, it sealed
+blessing upon the man and the woman.  It was a poem in praise of marriage
+passion; it was a paean proclaiming the accomplishment of life.  Crude,
+primitive, it thrilled with Eastern feeling; a weird charm was showered
+from its notes.
+
+"Listen!" exclaimed Jethro again, a fire burning in his face.  "That's
+for you and me.  To them you are my wife, and I am your man.  'Mi Duvel'
+--it shall be so!  I know women.  For an hour you will hate me; for a day
+you will resent me, and then you will begin to love me.  You will fight
+me, but I will conquer.  I know you--I know you--all you women.  But no,
+it will not be I that will conquer.  It's my love that will do it.  It's
+a den of tigers.  When it breaks loose it will have its way.  Here it is.
+Can't you see it in my face?  Can't you hear it in my voice?  Don't you
+hear my heart beating?  Every throb says, 'Fleda--Fleda--Fleda, come to
+me.'  I have loved you since you were three.  I want you now.  We can be
+happy.  Every night we will make a new home.  The world will be ours; the
+best that is in it will come to us.  We will tap the trees of happiness
+--they're hid from the Gorgio world.  You and I will know where to find
+them.  Every land shall be ours; every gift of paradise within our reach
+--riches, power, children.  Come back to your own people; be a true
+daughter of the Ry of Rys; live with your Romany chal.  You will never be
+at home anywhere else.  It's in your bones; it's in your blood; it's
+deeper than all.  Here, now, come to me--my wife."
+
+He flung the flap of the tent door across the opening, shutting out the
+camp-fires and the people.  "Here--now--come.  Be mine while they sing."
+
+For one swift moment the great passion and eloquence of the man lifted
+her off her feet; for one instant the Romany in her triumphed, and a
+thrill of passion passed through her, storming her senses, like a mist
+shutting out all the rest of the world.  This Romany was right; there was
+in her the wild thing--the everlasting strain of race and years breaking
+down all the defences which civilized life had built up within her.  Just
+for one instant so--and then there flashed before her a face with two
+blind eyes.
+
+Like a stream of ether playing upon warm flesh, making it icy cold, so
+something of the ineradicable good in her swept like a frozen spray upon
+the elements of emotion, and with both hands she made a gesture of
+repulsion.
+
+His eyes with their reddish glow burned nearer and nearer to her.  He
+bulked over her, driving her back against the couch by the tent wall.
+For an instant like that--and then, with clenched hand, she struck him in
+the face.
+
+Swift as had been the change in her, so a change like a cyclone swept
+over him.  The hysterical passion which had possessed him suddenly
+passed, and a dark, sullen determination swept into his eyes and over his
+face.  His lips parted in a savage smile.
+
+"Hell, so that's what you've learned in the Gorgio world, is it?" he
+asked malevolently.  "Then I'll teach you what they do in the Romany
+world; and to-morrow you can put the two together and see what they look
+like."
+
+With a Romany expletive, he flung back the curtain of the tent and passed
+out into the night.
+
+For a long time Fleda sat stunned and overcome by the side of the
+couch, her brain tortured by a thousand thoughts.  She knew there was no
+immediate escape from the encampment.  She could only rely upon the hue
+and cry which would be raised and the certain hunt which would be made
+for her.  But what might not happen before any rescue came?  The ancient
+grudge of the Fawes against the Druses had gained power and activity by
+the self-imposed exile of Gabriel Druse; and Jethro had worked upon it.
+The veiled threats which Jethro had made she did not despise.  He was a
+barbarian.  He would kill what he loved; he would have his way with what
+he loved, whether or not it was the way of law or custom or right.
+Outside, the wedding song still made musical the night.  Women's voices,
+shrill, and with falsetto notes, made the trees ring with it; low, bass
+voices gave it a kind of solemnity.  The view which the encampment took
+of her captivity was clear.  Where was the woman that brought her to the
+tent--whose tent it was?  She seemed kind.  Though her face had a hard
+look, surely she meant to be friendly.  Or did she only mean to betray
+her; to give her a fancied security, and leave her to Jethro--and the
+night?  She looked round for some weapon.  There was nothing available
+save two brass candlesticks.  Though the door of the tent was closed, she
+knew that there were watchers outside; that any break for liberty would
+only mean defeat, and yet she was determined to save herself.
+
+As she tried to take the measure of the situation and plan what she would
+do, the noise of the music suddenly ceased, and she heard a voice, though
+low in tone, give some sort of command.  Then there was a cry, and what
+seemed the chaotic noise of a struggle followed; then a voice a little
+louder speaking, a voice of someone she remembered, though she could not
+place it.  Something vital was happening outside, something punctuated by
+sharp, angry exclamations; afterwards a voice speaking soothingly,
+firmly, prevailed; and then there was silence.  As she listened there was
+a footstep at the door of the tent, a voice called to her softly, and a
+hand drew aside the tent curtain.  The woman who had brought her to this
+place entered.
+
+"You are all safe now," she said, reaching out both hands to Fleda.  "By
+long and by last, but it was a close shave!  He meant to make you his
+wife to-night, whether you would or no.  I'm a Fawe, but I'd have none of
+that.  I was on my way to your father's house when I met someone--someone
+that you know.  He carries your father's voice in his mouth."
+
+She stepped to the tent door and beckoned; and out of the darkness, only
+faintly lightened by the dying fires, there entered one whom Fleda had
+seen not more than fifty times in her life, and never but twice since she
+had ceased to be a Romany.  It was her father's secret agent, Rhodo, the
+Roumelian, now grizzled and gaunt, but with the same vitality which had
+been his in the days when she was a little child.
+
+Here and there in the world went Rhodo, the voice of the Ry of Rys to do
+his bidding, to say his say.  No minister of a Czar was ever more dreaded
+or loved.  His words were ever few, but his deeds had been many.  Now, as
+he looked at Fleda, his old eyes gleamed, and he showed a double row of
+teeth, not one of which was imperfect, though he was seventy years of
+age.
+
+"Would you like to come?" he asked.  "Would you like to come home to the
+Ry?"
+
+With a cry she flung herself upon him.  "Rhodo!  Rhodo!" she exclaimed,
+and now the tears broke forth, and her body shook with sobs.
+
+A few moments later he said to her: "It's fifteen years since you kissed
+me last.  I thought you were ashamed of old Rhodo."
+
+She did not answer, but looked at him with eyes streaming, drawing back
+from him.  Her embrace was astonishing even to herself, for as a child
+Rhodo had been a figure of awe to her, and the feeling had deepened as
+the years had gone on, knowing as she did his work throughout the world
+for the Ry of Rys.  In his face was secrecy, knowledge, and some tragic
+underthing which gave him, apart from his office, a singular loneliness
+of figure and manner.  He was so closely knit in form; there was such
+concentration in face, bearing and gesture, that the isolation of his
+position was greatly deepened.
+
+"No, you never kissed me after you were old enough to like or dislike,"
+he said with mournful and ironical reflection.
+
+There crept into his face a kind of yearning such as one might feel who
+beheld afar off a promised land, and yet was denied its joys.  Rhodo was
+wifeless, childless, and had been so for forty years.  He had had no
+intimates among the Romany people.  His life he lived alone.  That the
+daughter of the Ry of Rys should kiss him was a thing of which he would
+dream when deeds were done and over and the shadows threatened.
+
+"I will kiss you again in another fifteen years," she said half-smiling
+through her tears.  "But tell me--tell me what has happened."
+
+"Jethro Fawe has gone," he answered with a sweeping outward gesture.
+
+"Where has he gone?" she asked, apprehension seizing her.
+
+"A journey into the night," responded the old man with scorn and wrath in
+his tone, and his lips were set.
+
+"Is he going far?" she asked.
+
+"The road you might think long would be short to him," he answered.
+
+Her hands became cold; her heart seemed to stop beating.
+
+"What road is that?" she asked.  She knew, but she must ask.
+
+"Everybody knows it; everybody goes it some time or another," he answered
+darkly.
+
+"What was it you said to all of them outside?"--she made a gesture towards
+the doorway.  "There were angry cries, and I heard Jethro Fawe's voice."
+
+"Yes, he was blaspheming," remarked the old man grimly.
+
+"Tell me what it was you said, and tell me what has happened," she
+persisted.
+
+The old man hesitated a moment, then said grimly: "I told them they must
+go one way and Jethro Fawe another.  I told them the Ry of Rys had said
+no patrins should mark the road Jethro Fawe's feet walked.  I had heard
+of this gathering here, and I was on my way to bid them begone, for in
+following the Ry they have broken his command.  As I came, I met the
+woman of this tent who has been your friend.  She is a good woman; she
+has suffered.  Her people are gone, but she has a heart for others.  I
+met her.  She told me of what that rogue and devil had done and would do.
+He is the head of the Fawes, but the Ry of Rys is the head of all the
+Romanys of the world.  He has spoken the Word against Jethro, and the
+Word shall prevail.  The Word of the Ry when it is given cannot be
+withdrawn.  It is like the rock on which the hill rests."
+
+"They did not go with him?" she asked.
+
+"It is not the custom," he answered sardonically.  "That is a path a
+Romany walks alone."
+
+Her face was white.  "But he has not come to the end of the path--has
+he?" she asked tremulously.  "Who can tell?  This day, or twenty years
+from now, or to-morrow, or next moon, he will come to the end of the
+path.  No one knows, he least of all.  He will not see the end, because
+the road is dark.  I don't think it will be soon," he added, because he
+saw how haggard her face had grown.  "No, I don't think it will be soon.
+He is a Fawe, at the head of all the Fawes; so perhaps there will be time
+for him to think, and no doubt it will not be soon."
+
+"Perhaps it will not be at all.  My father spoke, but he can withdraw his
+word," she urged.
+
+Suddenly the old Gipsy's face hardened.  A look of dark resolve and iron
+force came into it.
+
+"The Ry will not withdraw.  He has spoken, and it must be.  If he spoke
+lightly he is not fit to rule.  Unless the word of the Ry of Rys is good
+against breaking, then the Romanys are no more than scattered leaves at
+the will of the wind.  It is the word of the Ry that holds our folk
+together.  It shall not bless, and it shall not curse in vain."
+
+Pitying the girl's face, however, and realizing that the Gorgio life had
+given her a new view of things; angry with her because it was so, but
+loving her for herself, he added:
+
+"But the night road may be long, though it is lonely, and if it should be
+that the Ry should pass before the end of the road comes to Jethro, then
+is Jethro freed, since the Word is gone which binds his feet for the
+pitfall."
+
+"He must not die," she insisted.
+
+"Then the Ry of Rys must not live," he rejoined sternly.  With a kindly
+gesture, however, he stretched out his hand.  "Come, we shall reach the
+house of the Ry before the morning," he added.  "He is not returned from
+his journey, and so will not be troubled by having missed you.  There
+will be an hour for beauty-sleep before the sun rises," he continued with
+the same wide smile with which he greeted her first.  Then he lifted up
+the curtain and passed out into the night.
+
+Following him, Fleda saw that the Romanys had broken camp, and only a
+small handful remained, among them the woman who had befriended her.
+Fleda went up to her:
+
+"I will never forget you," she said.  "Will you wear this for me?" she
+added, and she took from her throat a brooch which she had worn ever
+since her first days in England, after her great illness there.  The
+woman accepted the brooch.  "Lady love," she said, "you've lost your
+sleep to-night, but that's a loss you can make good.  If there's a
+night's sleep owing you, you can collect the debt some time.  No, a
+night's sleep lost in a tent is nothing, if you're the only one in the
+tent.  But if you're not alone, and you lose a night's sleep, someone
+else may pick it up, and you might never get it again!"
+
+A flush slowly stole over Fleda's face, and a look of horror came into
+her eyes.  She read the parable aright.
+
+"Will  you  let me kiss you?" she said to the woman, and now it was the
+woman's turn to flush.
+
+"You are the daughter of the Ry of Rys," she said almost shyly, yet
+proudly.
+
+"I'm a girl with a debt to pay and can never pay it," Fleda answered,
+putting her arms impulsively around the woman's neck and kissing her.
+Then she took the brooch from the woman's hand, and pinned it at her
+throat.
+
+"Think of Fleda of the Druses sometimes," she said, and she laid a hand
+upon the woman's breast.  "Lady love--lady love," said the blunt woman
+with the pockmarked face, "you've had the worst fright to-night that
+you'll ever have."  She caught Fleda's hand and peered into it.  "Yes,
+it's happiness for you now, and on and on," she added exultingly, and
+with the fortune-teller's air.  "You've passed the danger place, and
+there'll be wealth and a man who's been in danger, too; and there's
+children, beautiful children--I see them."
+
+In confusion, Fleda snatched her hand away.  "Good-bye, you fool-woman,"
+she said impatiently, yet gently, too.  "You talk such sense and such
+nonsense.  Good-bye," she added brusquely, but yet she smiled at the
+woman as she turned away.
+
+A moment later she was on her way back to Manitou, but she did not get to
+her father's house before the break of day; and in the doorway she met
+Madame Bulteel, whose pale, drawn face proclaimed a sleepless night.
+
+"Tell me what has happened?  Tell me what has happened?" she asked in
+distress.
+
+Fleda took both her hands.  "Before I answer, tell me what has happened
+here," she said breathlessly.  "What news?"
+
+Madame Bulteel's face lighted.  "Good news," she exclaimed eagerly.
+
+"He will see--he will see again?" Fleda asked in great agitation.
+
+"The Montreal doctor said that the chances were even," answered Madame
+Bulteel.  "This man from the States says it is a sure thing."
+
+With a murmur Fleda sank into a chair, and a faintness came over her.
+
+"That's not like a Romany," remarked old Rhodo.  "No, it's certainly not
+like a Romany," remarked Madame Bulteel meaningly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE RETURN OF BELISARIUS
+
+Grey days in the prairie country do not come very often, but they are
+very depressing when they arrive.  The landscape is not of the luscious
+kind; it has no close correspondence with a picture by Corot or
+Constable; sunlight is needed to give it the touch of the habitable and
+the homelike.  It was, therefore, unfortunate for the spirits of the
+Lebanon people that the meeting summoned by local agitators to discuss
+with asperity affairs on both sides of the Sagalac should, while starting
+with fitful sunlight in the early morning, have developed to a bleak
+greyness by three o'clock in the afternoon, the time set for the meeting.
+
+Another strike was imminent in the factories at Manitou and in the
+railway-shops at Lebanon, due to the stupidity of the policy of Ingolby's
+successor as to the railways and other financial and manufacturing
+interests.  If he had planned a campaign of maladroitness he could not
+have more happily fulfilled his object.  It was not a good time for
+reducing wages, or for quarrelling with the Town Councils of Manitou and
+Lebanon concerning assessments and other matters.  November and May
+always found Manitou, as though to say, "upset."  In the former month,
+men were pouring through the place on their way to the shanties for their
+Winter's work, and generally celebrating their coming internment by
+"irrigation"; in the latter month, they were returning from their
+Winter's imprisonment, thirsty for excitement, and with memories of
+Winter quarrels inciting them to "have it out of someone."
+
+And it was in October, when the shantyman was passing through on his way
+to the woods--a natural revolutionary, loving trouble as a coyote loves
+his hole--that labour discontent was practically whipped into action, and
+the Councils of the two towns were stung into bitterness against the new
+provocative railway policy.  Things looked dark enough.  The trouble
+between the two towns and the change of control and policy of the
+railways, due to Ingolby's downfall, had greatly shaken land and building
+values in Lebanon, and a black eye, as it were, had been given to the
+whole district for the moment.
+
+So serious had the situation been regarded that the Mayor of Lebanon,
+with Halliday the lawyer and another notable citizen, all friends of
+Ingolby, had "gone East"--as a journey to Montreal, Toronto, or Quebec
+was generally called--to confer with and make appeal to the directorate
+of the great railways.  They went with some elation and hope, for they
+had arguments of an unexpected kind in their possession, carefully hidden
+from the rest of the population.  They had returned only the day before
+the meeting which was to be held in the square in front of the Town Hall,
+to find that a platform had been built at the very steps of the Town Hall
+with the assent of the Chief Constable, now recovered from illness and
+returned to duty.  To the Deputy Mayor and the Council, the Chief
+Constable, on the advice of Gabriel Druse, had said that it was far
+better to have the meeting in front of the Town Hall where he could,
+on the instant, summon special constables from within if necessary, while
+the influence of a well-built platform and the orderly arrangement of a
+regular meeting were better than a mob oration from the tops of ash-
+barrels.
+
+The signs were ominous.  In a day of sunshine the rebellious and
+discontented spirit does not thrive; on a wet day it is apt to take
+shelter; on a bleak, grey day men are prone to huddle together in their
+anger with consequent stimulation of their passions.
+
+It was a grey enough day at Lebanon, and dark-faced visitors from Manitou
+felt the need of Winter clothing as they shiveringly crossed the Sagalac
+by Ingolby's bridge.  The air was raw and searching; Nature was sulky.
+In the sharp wind the trees shook themselves angrily free of leaves.  The
+taverns were greatly frequented, which was not good for Manitou and
+Lebanon.  Up to the time of the meeting, however, the expected strike had
+not occurred.  This was mainly due to the fact that Felix Marchand, the
+evil genius of Manitou, had not been seen in the town or in the district
+for over a week.  It was not generally known that he was absent because a
+man by the name of Dennis, whose wife he had wronged, was dogging him
+with no good intent.  Marchand had treated the woman's warning with
+contempt, but at sight of her injured husband he had himself withdrawn
+from the scene of his dark enterprises.  His malign influence was
+therefore not at work at the moment.
+
+The tactics of the Lebanon Town Council had been careful and wise.  So
+that the meeting should not be composed only of the roughest elements,
+they privately urged all responsible citizens to attend, and if possible
+capture the meeting for law and order and legitimate agitation.  That was
+why Osterhaut, the town-crier, went about with a large dinner-bell
+announcing the hour of the meeting and admonishing all "good folks" to
+attend.  No one had ever seen Osterhaut quite so cheerful--and he had a
+bonny cheerfulness on occasion--as on this grisly October day when Nature
+was very sour and the spirit of the winds was in a "scratchy" mood.  But
+Osterhaut was not more cheerful than Jowett who, in a very undignified
+way, described the state of his feelings, on receiving a certain
+confidence from Halliday, the lawyer, and Gabriel Druse, by turning a
+cart-wheel in the Mayor's office; which certainly was an unusual thing
+in a man of fifty years of age.
+
+It was a people's meeting.  No local official was on the platform.
+Under the influence of alien elements who, though their co-operation was
+directed against the common enemy, were intensely irritating, the meeting
+became disorderly.  One or two wise men, however, were able to secure
+order long enough to have the resolution passed for forming a Local
+Interests Committee whose duty it would be to see that the people were
+not sacrificed to a "soulless plutocracy."  While the names of those who
+were to form the Committee were being selected, in a storm of disorder
+arising from the Manitou section of the crowd, the sky overhead grew
+suddenly brighter and the sun came out, bringing an instant change.  It
+was as though a hand, which had hypnotized them into anger, restored them
+to good-humour once again.
+
+At this moment, to the astonishment of all, there appeared at the back
+of the platform between Jowett and Halliday the lawyer, the man with a
+tragic history who had been as one buried for weeks past, who had
+vanished from their calculations.  It was their old champion, Ingolby.
+Slowly a hush came over the vast assembly as, apparently guided by his
+friends on the platform, he was given a seat on the right of the
+Chairman's table.
+
+A strange sensation, partly pleasure, partly resentment, passed through
+the crowd.  Why did Ingolby come to remind them of better days gone--of
+his own rashness, of what they had lost through that rashness?  Why had
+he come?  They could not say and do all that they wanted with him
+present.  It was like having a row in the presence of a corpse.  He had
+been a hero to all in Lebanon, but he was not in the picture now.  His
+day was done.  It was no place for him.  Yet it was a pleasant omen that
+the sun broke clear and shining over the platform as Ingolby took his
+seat.  Presently in the silence he half-turned his head, murmured
+something to the Chairman, and then got to his feet, stretching out a
+hand towards the crowd.
+
+For one moment there was silence, a little awestricken, a little painful,
+and then as from one man a great cheer went up.  For a moment they had
+thought him inconsiderate to come among them in this crisis, for he was
+no longer of their scheme of things, and must be counted out, a beaten,
+battered, blind bankrupt.  Yet the sight of him on his feet was too much
+for them.  Blind he might be, but there was the personality which had
+conquered them in the past brave, adroit, reckless, renowned.  None of
+them, or very few of them, had seen him since that night at Barbazon's
+Tavern, yet in spite of his tragedy there seemed little change in him.
+There was the same quirk at the corner of the mouth, the same humour in
+the strong face, not so ruddy now; and strangely enough the eyes were
+neither guarded by spectacles, nor were they shrunken, glazed, or
+diseased, so far as could be seen.
+
+Stretching out a hand, Ingolby gave a crisp laugh and said: "So there's
+been trouble since I've been gone, has there?"  The corner of his mouth
+quirked, his eyelids drooped in the old quizzical way, and the crowd
+laughed in spite of themselves.  What a spirit he had to take it all that
+way!
+
+"Got a little deeper in the mire, have you, boys?" he added.  "They tell
+me the town's a frost just now, but it seems nice and warm here in the
+sun.  Yes, boys, it's nice and warm here among you all--the same good old
+crowd that's made the two towns what they are.  The same good old crowd,"
+he repeated, "--and up to the same old games!"
+
+At this point he could scarcely proceed for laughter.  "Like true
+pioneers," he went on, "not satisfied with what you've got, but wanting
+such a lot more--if I might say so in the language of the dictionary, a
+deuce of a lot more."
+
+Almost every sentence had been punctuated by cheers.  His personality
+dominated them as aforetime with some new accent to it; his voice was
+like that of one given up from the dead, yet come back from the wars
+alive and loving.  They never knew what a figure he was until now when
+they saw and heard him again, and realized that he was one of the few
+whom the world calls leaders, because they have in them that immeasurable
+sympathy which is understanding of men and matters.  Yet in the old days
+there never had been the something that was in his voice now, and in his
+face there was a great friendliness, a sense of companionship, a Jonathan
+and David something.  He was like a comrade talking to a thousand other
+comrades.  There was a new thing in him and they felt it stir them.  They
+thought he had been made softer by his blindness; and they were not
+wrong.  Even the Manitou section were stilled into sympathy with him.
+Many of them had heard his speech in Barbazon's Tavern just before the
+horseshoe struck him down, and they heard him now, much simpler in manner
+and with that something in his voice and face.  Yet it made them shrink
+a little, too, to see his blind eyes looking out straight before him.
+It was uncanny.  Their idea was that the eyes were as before, but seeing
+nothing-blank to the world.
+
+Presently his hand shot out again.  "The same old crowd!" he said.
+"Just the same--after the same old thing, wanting what we all want: these
+two places, Manitou and Lebanon, to be boosted till they rule the West
+and dominate the North.  It's good to see you all here again"--he spoke
+very slowly--"to see you all here together looking for trouble--looking
+for trouble.  There you are, Jim Barager; there you are, Bill Riley;
+there you are, Mr. William John Thomas McLeary."  The last named was the
+butt of every tavern and every street corner.  "There you are, Berry--old
+brown Berry, my barber."
+
+At first the crowd did not quite understand, did not realize that he was
+actually pointing to the people whom he named, but presently, as Berry
+the barber threw up his hands with a falsetto cry of understanding, there
+was a simultaneous, wild rush forward to the platform.
+
+"He sees, boys--he sees!" they shouted.
+
+Ingolby's hand shot up above them with a gesture of command.
+
+"Yes, boys, I see--I see you all.  I'm cured.  My sight's come back, and
+what's more"--he snatched from his pocket a folded sheet of paper and
+held it aloft "what's more, I've got my commission to do the old job
+again; to boss the railways, to help the two towns.  The Mayor brought it
+back from Montreal yesterday; and together, boys, together, we'll make
+Manitou and Lebanon the fulcrum of the West, the swivel by which to swing
+prosperity round our centre."
+
+The platform swayed with the wild enthusiasm of the crowd storming it to
+shake hands with him, when suddenly a bell rang out across the river,
+wildly, clamorously.  A bell only rang like that for a fire.  Those on
+the platform could see a horseman galloping across the bridge.
+
+A moment later someone shouted, "It's the Catholic church at Manitou on
+fire!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+AT LONG LAST
+
+Originally the Catholic church at Manitou had stood quite by itself,
+well back from the river, but as the town grew its dignified isolation
+was invaded and houses kept creeping nearer and nearer to it.  So that
+when it caught fire there was general danger, because the town possessed
+only a hand fire-engine.  Since the first settlement of the place there
+had been but few fires, and these had had pretty much their own way.
+When one broke out the plan was to form a long line of men, who passed
+buckets of water between the nearest pump, well, or river, and the
+burning building.  It had been useful in incipient fires, but it was
+child's play in a serious outburst.  The mournful fact that Manitou had
+never equipped itself with a first-class fire-engine or a fire-brigade
+was now to play a great part in the future career of the two towns.
+Osterhaut put the thing in a nutshell as he slithered up the main street
+of Lebanon on his way to the manning of the two fire-engines at the
+Lebanon fire-brigade station.
+
+"This thing is going to link up Lebanon and Manitou like a trace-chain,"
+he declared with a chuckle.  "Everything's come at the right minute.
+Here's Ingolby back on the locomotive, running the good old train of
+Progress, and here's Ingolby's fire-brigade, which cost Lebanon twenty
+thousand dollars and himself five thousand, going to put out the fires
+of hate consuming two loving hamulets.  Out with Ingolby's fire-brigade!
+This is the day the doctor ordered!  Hooray!"
+
+Osterhaut had a gift of being able to do two things at one time.  Nothing
+prevented him from talking, and though it had probably never been tested,
+it is quite certain he could have talked under water.  His words had been
+addressed to Jowett, who drew to him on all great occasions like the
+drafts of a regiment to the main body.  Jowett was often very critical of
+Osterhaut's acts, words and views, but on this occasion they were of one
+mind.
+
+"I guess it's Ingolby's day all right," answered Jowett.  "When you say
+'Hooray!' Osterhaut, I agree, but you've got better breath'n I have.  I
+can't talk like I used to, but I'm going to ride that fire-engine to save
+the old Monseenoor's church--or bust."
+
+Both Jowett and Osterhaut belonged to the Lebanon fire-brigade, which
+was composed of only a few permanent professionals, helped by capable
+amateurs.  The two cronies had their way, and a few moments later,
+wearing brass helmets, they were away with the engine and the hose,
+leaving the less rapid members of the brigade to follow with the ladders.
+
+"What did the Chief do?" asked Osterhaut.  "Did you see what happened to
+him?"
+
+Jowett snorted.  "What do you think Mr. Max Ingolby, Esquire, would do?
+He commandeered my sulky and that rawbone I bought from the Reverend
+Tripple, and away he went like greased lightning over the bridge.  I
+don't know why I drove that trotter to-day, nor why I went on that sulky,
+for I couldn't hear good where I was, on the outskirts of the meeting;
+but I done it like as if the Lord had told me.  The Chief spotted me soon
+as the fire-bell rung.  In a second he bundled me off, straddled the
+sulky, and was away 'fore you could say snakes."
+
+"I don't believe he's strong enough for all this.  He ain't got back to
+where he was before the war," remarked Osterhaut sagely.
+
+"War--that business at Barbazon's!  You call that war!  It wasn't war,"
+declared Jowett spasmodically, grasping the rail of the fire-engine as
+the wheel struck a stone and nearly shot them from their seats.  "It
+wasn't war.  It was terrible low-down treachery.  That Gipsy gent, Fawe,
+pulled the lever, but Marchand built the scaffold."
+
+"Heard anything more about Marchand--where he is?" asked Osterhaut, as
+the hoofs of the horses clattered on the bridge.
+
+"Yes, I've heard--there's news," responded Jowett.  "He's been lying
+drunk at Gautry's caboose ever since yesterday morning at five o'clock,
+when he got off the West-bound train.  Nice sort of guy he is.  What's
+the good of being rich, if you can't be decent Some men are born low.
+They always find their level, no matter what's done for them, and
+Marchand's level is the ditch."
+
+"Gautry's tavern--that joint!" exclaimed Osterhaut with repulsion.
+
+"Well, that ranchman, Dennis What's-his-name, is looking for him, and
+Felix can't go home or to the usual places.  I dunno why he comes back at
+all till this Dennis feller gits out."
+
+"Doesn't make any bones about it, does he?  Dennis Doane's the name,
+ain't it?  Marchand spoiled his wife-run away with her up along the Wind
+River, eh?" asked Osterhaut.
+
+Jowett nodded: "Yes, that's it, and Mr. Dennis Doane ain't careful;
+that's the trouble.  He's looking for Marchand, and blabbing what he
+means to do when he finds him.  That ain't good for Dennis.  If he kills
+Marchand, it's murder, and even if the lawyers plead unwritten law, and
+he ain't hung, and his wife ain't a widow, you can't have much married
+life in gaol.  It don't do you any good to be punished for punishing
+someone else.  Jonas George Almighty--look!  Look, Osterhaut!"
+
+Jowett's hand was pointing towards the Catholic church, from a window
+of which smoke was rolling.  "There's going to be something to do there.
+It ain't a false alarm, Snorty."
+
+"Well, this engine'll do anything you ask it," rejoined Osterhaut.  "When
+did you have a fire last, Billy?" he shouted to the driver of the
+engine, as the horses' feet caught the dusty road of Manitou.
+
+"Six months," was the reply, "but she's working smooth as music.  She's
+as good as anything 'twixt here and the Atlantic."
+
+"It ain't time for Winter fires.  I wonder what set it going," said
+Jowett, shaking his head ominously.  "Something wrong with the furnace,
+I s'pose," returned Osterhaut.  "Probably trying the first heatup of the
+Fall."
+
+Osterhaut was right.  No one had set the church on fire.  The sexton had
+lighted the furnace for the first time to test it for the Winter's
+working, but had not stayed to see the result.  There was a defect in the
+furnace, the place had caught fire, and some of the wooden flooring had
+been burnt before the aged Monseigneur Lourde discovered it.  It was he
+who had given the alarm and had rescued the silver altar-vessels from the
+sacristy.
+
+Manitou offered brute force, physical energy, native athletics, muscle
+and brawn; but it was of no avail.  Five hundred men, with five hundred
+buckets of water would have had no effect upon the fire at St. Michael's
+Church at Manitou; willing hands and loving Christian hearts would have
+been helpless to save the building without the scientific aid of the
+Lebanon fire-brigade.  Ingolby, on founding the brigade, had equipped it
+to the point where it could deal with any ordinary fire.  The work it had
+to do at St. Michael's was critical.  If the church could not be saved,
+then the wooden houses by which it was surrounded would be swept away,
+and the whole town would be ablaze; for though it was Autumn, everything
+was dry, and the wind was sufficient to fan and spread the flames.
+
+Lebanon took command of the whole situation, and for the first time in
+the history of the two towns men worked together under one control like
+brothers.  The red-shirted river-driver from Manitou and the lawyer's
+clerk from Lebanon; the Presbyterian minister and a Christian brother of
+the Catholic school; a Salvation Army captain and a black-headed Catholic
+shantyman; the President of the Order of Good Templars and a switchman
+member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament slaved together on
+the hand-engine, to supplement the work of the two splendid engines of
+the Lebanon fire-brigade; or else they climbed the roofs of houses, side
+by side, to throw on the burning shingles the buckets of water handed up
+to them.
+
+For some time it seemed as though the church could not be saved.  The
+fire had made good headway with the flooring, and had also made progress
+in the chancel and the altar.  Skill and organization, combined with good
+luck, conquered, however.  Though a portion of the roof was destroyed and
+the chancel gutted, the church was not beyond repair, and a few thousand
+dollars would put it right.  There was danger, however, among the smaller
+houses surrounding the church, and there men from both towns worked with
+great gallantry.  By one of those accidents which make fatality, a small
+wooden house some distance away, with a roof as dry as wool, caught fire
+from a flying cinder.  As everybody had fled from their own homes and
+shops to the church, this fire was not noticed until it had made headway.
+Then it was that the cries of Madame Thibadeau, who was confined to her
+bed in the house opposite, were heard, and the crowd poured down towards
+the burning building.  It was Gautry's "caboose."  Gautry himself had
+been among the crowd at the church.
+
+As Gautry came reeling and plunging down the street, someone shouted,
+"Is there anyone in the house, Gautry?"
+
+Gautry was speechless with drink.  He threw his hands up in the air with
+a gesture of maudlin despair, and shouted something which no one
+understood.  The crowd gathered like magic in the wide street before the
+house--the one wide street in Manitou--from the roof and upper windows of
+which flames were bursting.  Far up the street was heard the noisy
+approach of the fire-engine, which now would be able to do little more
+than save adjoining buildings.  Gautry, reeling, mumbling and whining,
+gestured and wept.
+
+A man shook him roughly by the shoulder.  "Brace up, get steady, you
+damned old geezer!  Is there any body in the house?  Do you hear?  Is
+there anybody in the house?" he roared.
+
+Madame Thibadeau, who had dragged herself from her bed, was now at the
+window of the house opposite.  Seeing Fleda Druse passing beneath, she
+called to her.
+
+"Ma'mselle, Felix Marchand is in Gautry's house--drunk!" she cried.
+"He'll burn to death--but yes, burn to death."
+
+In agitation Fleda hastened to where the stranger stood shaking old
+Gautry.
+
+"There's a man asleep inside the house," she said to the stranger, and
+then all at once she realized who he was.  It was Dennis Doane, whose
+wife was staying in Gabriel Druse's home: it was the husband of
+Marchand's victim.
+
+"A man in there, is there?" exclaimed Dennis.  "Well, he's got to be
+saved."  He made a rush for the door.  Men called to him to come back,
+that the roof would fall in.  In the smoking doorway he looked back.
+"What floor?" he shouted.
+
+From the window opposite, her fat old face lighted by the blazing roof,
+Madame Thibadeau called out, "Second floor!  It's the second floor!"
+
+In an instant Dennis was lost in the smoke and flame.
+
+One, two, three minutes passed.  A fire-engine arrived; in a moment the
+hose was paid out to the river near by, and as a fireman seized the
+nozzle to train the water upon the building the roof fell in with a
+crash.  At that instant Dennis stumbled out of the house, blind with
+smoke, his clothes aflame, carrying a man in his arms.  A score of hands
+caught them, coats smothered Dennis's burning clothes, and the man he had
+rescued was carried across the street and laid upon the pavement.
+
+"Great glory, it's Marchand!  It's Felix Marchand!" someone shouted.
+
+"Is he dead?" asked another.
+
+"Dead drunk," was the comment of Osterhaut, who had helped to carry him
+across the street.
+
+At that moment Ingolby appeared on the scene.  "What's all this?" he
+asked.  Then he recognized Marchand.  "He's been playing with fire
+again," he added sarcastically, and there was a look of contempt on his
+face.
+
+As he said it, Dennis broke through the crowd and made for Marchand.
+Stooping over, he looked into Marchand's face.
+
+"Hell and damnation--you!" he growled.  "I risked my life to save you!"
+
+With a sudden access of rage his hand suddenly went to his hip-pocket,
+but another hand was quicker.  It was that of Fleda Druse.
+
+"No--no," she said, her fingers on his wrist.  "You have had your
+revenge.  For the rest of his life he will have to bear his punishment
+--that you have saved him.  Leave him alone.  It was to be.  It is fate."
+
+Dennis Doane was not a man of great thinking capacity.  If he got a
+matter into his head it stayed there till it was dislodged, and
+dislodging was a real business with him.
+
+"If you want her to live with you again, you had better let this be as it
+is," whispered Fleda, for the crowd were surging round and cheering the
+new hero.  "Just escaped the roof falling in," said one.
+
+"Got the strength of two, for a drunk man weighs twice as heavy as a
+sober one!" exclaimed another admiringly.
+
+"Marchand's game is up on the Sagalac," declared a third decisively.
+
+The excitement was so great, however, that only a very few of them knew
+what they were saying, and fewer still knew that Dennis Doane had risked
+his life to save the man he had been stalking for weeks past.  Marchand
+had been lying on his face in the smoke-filled room when Dennis broke
+into it, and he had been carried down the stairs without his face being
+seen at all.
+
+To Dennis it was as though he had been made a fool of by Fate or
+Providence, or whatever controlled the destinies of men; as though the
+dangerous episode had been arranged to trap him into this situation.
+
+Ingolby drew near and laid a hand upon Dennis's arm.  Fleda's hand was on
+the other arm.
+
+"You can't kill a man and save him too," said Ingolby quietly, and
+holding the abashed blue eyes of Dennis.  "There were two ways to punish
+him; taking away his life at great cost, or giving it him at great cost.
+If you'd taken away his life, the cost would probably have been your own
+life; in giving him his life you only risked your own; you had a chance
+to save it.  You're a bit scorched-hair, eyebrows, moustache, clothes
+too, but he'll have brimstone inside him.  Come along.  Your wife would
+rather have it this way; and so will you, to-morrow.  Come along."
+
+Dennis suddenly swung round with a gesture of fury.  "He spoiled her-
+treated her like dirt!" he cried huskily.
+
+With savage purpose he made a movement towards where Marchand had lain;
+but Marchand was gone.  With foresight Ingolby had quickly and quietly
+accomplished that while Dennis's back was turned.
+
+"You'd be treating her like a brute if you went to prison for killing
+Marchand," urged Ingolby.  "Give her a chance.  She's fretting her heart
+out."
+
+"She wants to go back to Elk Mountain with you," pleaded Fleda gently.
+"She couldn't do that if the law took hold of you."
+
+"Ain't there to be any punishment for men like him?" demanded Dennis,
+stubbornly yet helplessly.  "Why didn't I let him burn!  I'd have been
+willing to burn myself to have seen him sizzling.  Ain't men like that to
+be punished at all?"
+
+"When he knows who has saved him, he'll sizzle inside for the rest of his
+life," remarked Ingolby.  "Don't think he hasn't got a heart.  He's done
+wrong and gone wrong; he has belonged to the sewer, but he isn't all bad,
+and maybe this is the turning-point.  Drink'll make a man do anything."
+
+"His kind are never sorry for what they do," commented Dennis bitterly.
+"They're sorry for what comes from what they do, but not for the doing of
+it.  I can't think the thing out.  It makes me sick.  I was hunting for
+him to kill him; I was watching this town like a lynx, and I've been and
+gone and saved his body from Hell on earth."
+
+"Well, perhaps you've saved his soul from Hell below," said Fleda.  "Ah,
+come!  Your face and hands are burned, your hair is scorched--your
+clothes need mending.  Arabella is waiting for you.  Come home with
+me to Arabella."
+
+With sudden resolve Dennis squared his shoulders.  "All right," he said.
+"This thing's too much for me.  I can't get the hang of it.  I've lost my
+head."
+
+"No, I won't come, I can't come now," said Ingolby, in response to an
+inquiring look from Fleda.
+
+"Not now, but before sundown, please."
+
+As Fleda and Dennis disappeared, Ingolby looked back towards the fire.
+"How good it is to see again even a sight like that," he said.  "Nothing
+that the eyes see is so horrible as the pictures that come to the mind
+when the eyes don't see.  As Dennis said, I can't get the hang of it, but
+I'll try--I'll try."
+
+The burning of Gautry's tavern had been conquered, though not before it
+was a shell; and the houses on either side had been saved.  Lebanon had
+shown itself masterful in organization, but it had also shown that that
+which makes enemies is not so deep or great a thing as that which makes
+friends.  Jealous, envious, narrow and bitter Manitou had been, but she
+now saw Lebanon in a new light.  It was a strange truth that if Lebanon
+had saved the whole town of Manitou, it would not have been the same to
+the people as the saving of the church.  Beneath everything in Manitou--
+beneath its dirt and its drunkenness, its irresponsibility and the signs
+of primeval savagery which were part of its life, there was the tradition
+of religion, the almost fanatical worship of that which was their master,
+first and last, in spite of all--the Church.  Not one of its citizens but
+would have turned with horror from the man who cursed his baptism; not
+one but would want the last sacrament when his time came.  Lebanon had
+saved the Catholic church, the temple of their faith, and in an hour was
+accomplished what years had not wrought.
+
+The fire at the church was out.  A few houses had been destroyed, and
+hundreds of others had been saved.  The fire-brigade of Lebanon, with its
+two engines, had performed prodigies of valour.  The work done, the men
+marched back, but with Osterhaut sitting on one fire-engine and Jowett on
+the other, through crowds of cheering, roaring workmen, rivermen,
+shantymen, and black-eyed habitants.  When Ingolby walked past Barbazon's
+Tavern arm in arm with Monseigneur Lourde, to the tiny house where the
+good priest lived, the old man's face beaming with gratitude, and with a
+piety which was his very life, the jubilant crowd followed them to the
+very door.  There the sainted pioneer expressed the feeling of the moment
+when he raised his hands in benediction over them and said:
+
+"Peace be unto you and the blessings of peace; and the Lord make his face
+to shine upon you and give you peace now and for ever more."
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE SLEEPER
+
+The Ry of Rys sat in his huge armchair, his broad-brimmed hat on his knee
+in front of him.  One hand rested on the chair-arm, the other clasped the
+hat as though he would put it on, but his head was fallen forward on his
+breast.
+
+It was a picture of profound repose, but it was the repose of death.
+It was evident that the Ry had prepared to leave the house, had felt a
+sudden weakness, and had taken to his chair to recover himself.  As was
+evident from the normal way in which his fingers held his hat, and his
+hand rested on the chair-arm, death had come as gently as a beam of
+light.  With his stick lying on the table beside him, and his hat on his
+knee, he was like one who rested a moment before renewing a journey.
+There could not have been a pang in his passing.  He had gone as most men
+wish to go--in the midst of the business of life, doing the usual things,
+and so passing into the sphere of Eternity as one would go from this room
+to that.  Only a few days before had he yielded up his temporary position
+as chief constable, and had spent almost every hour since in conference
+with Rhodo.  What he had planned would never be known to his daughter
+now.  It was Rhodo himself who had found his master with head bowed
+before the Master of all men.
+
+Before Fleda entered the room she knew what awaited her; a merciful
+intuition had blunted the shock to her senses.  Yet when she saw the Ry
+on his throne of death a moan broke from her lips like that of one who
+sees for the last time someone indelibly dear, and turns to face strange
+paths with uncertain feet.  She did not go to the giant figure seated in
+the chair.  In what she did there was no panic or hysteria of lacerated
+heart and shocked sense; she only sank to her knees in the room a few
+feet away from him, and looked at him.
+
+"Father!  Oh, Ry!  Oh, my Ry!" she whispered in agony and admiration,
+too, and kept on whispering.
+
+Fleda had whispered to him in such awe, not only because he was her
+father, but because he was so much a man among men, a giant, with a
+great, lumbering mind, slow to conceive, but moving in a large,
+impressive way when once conception came.  To her he had been more than
+father; he had been a patriarch, a leader, a viking, capable of the fury
+of a Scythian lord, but with the tenderness of a peasant father to his
+first child.
+
+"My Ry!  My father!  Oh, my Ry of Rys!" she kept murmuring to herself.
+
+On either side of her, but a few feet behind, stood Rhodo and Ingolby.
+
+Presently in a low, firm voice Rhodo spoke.
+
+"The Ry of Rys is dead, but his daughter must stand upon her feet, and in
+his place speak for him.  Is it not well with him?  He sleeps.  Sleep is
+better than pain.  Let his daughter speak."
+
+Slowly Fleda arose.  Not so much what Rhodo had said as the meaning in
+his voice, aroused her to a situation which she must face.  Rhodo had
+said that she must speak for her father.  What did it mean?
+
+"What is it you wish to say to me, Rhodo?" she asked.
+
+"What I have to say is for your ears only," was the low reply.
+
+"I will go," said Ingolby.  "But is it a time for talk?"  He made a
+motion towards the dead man.  "There are things to be said which can only
+be said now, and things to be done which can only be done according to
+what is said now," grimly remarked Rhodo.
+
+"I wish you to remain," said Fleda to Ingolby with resolution in her
+bearing as she placed herself beside the chair where the dead man sat.
+"What is it you want to say to me?" she asked Rhodo again.
+
+"Must a Romany bare his soul before a stranger?" replied Rhodo.  "Must a
+man who has been the voice of the Ry of Rys for the long years have no
+words face to face with the Ry's daughter now that he is gone?  Must the
+secret of the dead be spoken before the robber of the dead--"
+
+It was plain that some great passion was working in the man, that it was
+wise and right to humour him, and Ingolby intervened.
+
+"I will not remain," he said to Fleda.  To Rhodo he added: "I am not a
+robber of the dead.  That's high-faluting talk.  What I have of his was
+given to me by him.  She was for me if I could win her.  He said so.
+This is a free country.  I will wait outside," he added to Fleda.
+
+She made a gesture as though she would detain him, but she realized that
+the hour of her fate was at hand, and that the old life and the new were
+face to face, Rhodo standing for one and she for the other.  When they
+were alone, Rhodo's eyes softened, and he came near to her.  "You asked
+me what I wished to tell you," he said.  "See then, I want to tell you
+that it is for you to take the place of the dead Ry.  Everywhere in the
+world where the Romanys wander they will rejoice to hear that a Druse
+rules us still.  The word of the Ry of Rys was law; what he wished to be
+done was done; what he wished to be undone was undone.  Because of you he
+hid himself from his people; because of you I was for ever wandering,
+keeping the peace by lies for love of the Ry and for love of you."
+
+His voice shook.  "Since your mother died--and she was kin of mine--you
+were to me the soul of the Romany people everywhere.  As a barren woman
+loves a child, so I loved you.  I loved you for the sake of your mother.
+I gave her to the Ry, who was the better man, that she might be great and
+well placed.  So it is I would have you be ruler over us, and I would
+serve you as I served your father until I, also, fall asleep."
+
+"It is too late," Fleda answered, and there was great emotion in her
+voice now.  "I am no longer a Romany.  I am my father's daughter, but
+I have not been a Romany since I was ill in England.  I will not go back;
+I shall go with the man I love, to be his wife, here, in the Gorgio
+world.  You believed my father when he spoke; well, believe me--I speak
+the truth.  It was my father's will that I should be what I am, and do
+what I am now doing.  Nothing can alter me."
+
+"If it be that Jethro Fawe is still alive he is free from the Sentence of
+the Patrin, and he will become the Ry of Rys," said the old man with
+sudden passion.
+
+"It may be so.  I hope it is so.  He is of the blood, and I pray that
+Jethro has escaped the sentence which my father passed," answered Fleda.
+"By the River Starzke it was ordained that he should succeed my father,
+marrying me.  Let him succeed."
+
+The old man raised both hands, and made a gesture as though he would
+drive her from his sight.
+
+"My life has been wasted," he said.  "I wish I were also in death beside
+him."  He gazed at the dead man with the affection of a clansman for his
+chief.
+
+Fleda came up close to him.  "Rhodo!  Rhodo!" she said gently and sadly.
+"Think of him and all he was, and not of me.  Suppose I had died in
+England--think of it in that way.  Let me be dead to you and to all
+Romanys, and then you will think no evil."
+
+The old man drew himself up.  "Let no more be said," he replied.  "Let it
+end here.  The Ry of Rys is dead.  His body and all things that are his
+belong now to his people.  Say farewell to him," he added, with
+authority.
+
+"You will take him away?" Fleda asked.
+
+Rhodo inclined his head.  "When the doctors have testified, we will take
+him with us.  Say your farewells," he added, with gesture of command.
+
+A cry of protest rose from Fleda's soul, and yet she knew it was what the
+Ry would have wished, that he should be buried by his own people where
+they would.
+
+Slowly she drew near to the dead man, and leaned over and kissed his
+shaggy head.  She did not seek to look into the sightless eyes; the
+illusion of sleep was so great that she wished to keep this picture of
+him while she lived; but she touched the cold hand which held the hat
+upon the knee and the other that lay upon the chair-arm.  Then, with a
+mist before her eyes, she passed from the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+THE WORLD FOR SALE
+
+As though by magic, like the pictures of a dream, out of the horizon,
+in caravans, by train, on horseback, the Romany people gathered to the
+obsequies of their chief and king.  For months, hundreds of them had not
+been very far away.  Unobtrusive, silent, they had waited, watched, till
+the Ry of Rys should come back home again.  Home to them was the open
+road where Romanys trailed or camped the world over.
+
+A clot of blood in the heart had been the verdict of the doctors; and
+Lebanon and Manitou had watched the Ry of Rys carried by his own people
+to the open prairie near to Tekewani's reservation.  There, in the hours
+between the midnight and the dawn, all Gabriel Druse's personal
+belongings--the clothes, the chair in which he sat, the table at which he
+ate, the bed in which he slept, were brought forth and made into a pyre,
+as was the Romany way.  Nothing personal of his chattels remained behind.
+The walking-stick which lay beside him in the moment of his death was the
+last thing placed upon the pyre.  Then came the match, and the flames
+made ashes of all those things which once he called his own.  Standing
+apart, Tekewani and his braves watched the ceremonial of fire with a
+sympathy born of primitive custom.  It was all in tune with the
+traditions of their race.
+
+As dawn broke, and its rosy light valanced the horizon, a great
+procession moved away from the River Sagalac towards the East, to which
+all wandering and Oriental peoples turn their eyes.  With it, all that
+was mortal of Gabriel Druse went to its hidden burial.  Only to the
+Romany people would his last resting-place be known; it would be as
+obscure as the grave of him who was laid:
+
+     "By Nebo's lonely mountain, On this side Jordan's wave."
+
+Many people from Manitou and Lebanon watched the long procession pass,
+and two remained until the last wagon had disappeared over the crest of
+the prairie.  Behind them were the tents of the Indian reservation;
+before them was the alert morn and the rising sun; and ever moving on to
+the rest his body had earned was the great chief lovingly attended by his
+own Romany folk; while his daughter, forbidden to share in the ceremonial
+of race, remained with the stranger.
+
+With a face as pale and cold as the western sky, the desolation of this
+last parting and a tragic renunciation giving her a deathly beauty, Fleda
+stood beside the man who must hereafter be, to her, father, people, and
+all else.  Shuddering with the pain of this hour, yet resolved to begin
+the new life here and now, as the old life faded before her eyes, she
+turned to him, and, with the passing of the last Romany over the crest of
+the hill, she said bravely:
+
+"I want to help you do the big things.  They will be yours.  The world is
+all for you yet."
+
+Ingolby shook his head.  He had had his Moscow.
+
+His was the true measure of things now; his lesson had been learned;
+values were got by new standards; he knew in a real sense the things that
+mattered.
+
+"I have you--the world for sale!" he said, with the air of one
+discarding a useless thing.
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY OF ROMANY WORDS
+
+Bosh----fiddle, noise, music.
+Bor----an exclamation (literally, a hedge).
+
+Chal----lad, fellow.
+Chi----child, daughter, girl.
+
+Dadia----an exclamation.
+Dordi----an exclamation.
+
+Hotchewitchi----hedgehog.
+
+Kek----no, none.
+Koppa----blanket.
+
+Mi Duvel----My God.
+
+Patrin----small heaps of grass, or leaves, or twigs, or string, laid at
+        cross-roads to indicate the route that must be followed.
+Pral----brother or friend.
+
+Rinkne rakli----pretty girl.
+Ry----King or ruler.
+
+Tan----tent, camp.
+
+Vellgouris----fair.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Agony in thinking about the things we're never going to do
+I don't believe in walking just for the sake of walking
+It's no good simply going--you've got to go somewhere
+Most honest thing I ever heard, but it's not the most truthful
+Women may leave you in the bright days
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD FOR SALE, V3 ***
+
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