LI B R.AFLY OF THE UNIVERSITY or ILLINOIS 823 V.I The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft/ mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN ^/■rj-rd/n, LUCIUS DAVOREN LON^o^r: itOBSON AND SONS, PKlNTlilW, l^VNCRAS liOAD, N.Wr LUCIUS DAVOREN OB PUBLICANS AND SINNERS BY THE AUTHOR OF 'LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET' ETC. ETC. ETC, IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. L LONDON JOHN MAXWELL AND CO. 4 SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET 1873 lAU rights reserved] /^3 ^ Cbis gook is InscribeiJ -^ • TO VISCOUNT MILTOX, M.P. F.R.G.S. ETC. IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE AID DERIVED FROM HIS ADMIRABLE BOOK OF TRAVELS, * THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE OVERLAND,' TO WHICH THE AUTHOR IS INDEBTED FOR THE SCENERY IN THE PROLOGUE. CONTENTS OF VOL. I. prologue:— |n l^e J^ar Wit± CHAP. PAGB I. * Where the Sun is silent' . II. * Music hath Charms' . III. How they lost the Trail . IV. 'All's cheerless, dark, and deadly' V. ' 0, that Way Madness lies' I lO 34 47 57 L Looking Backwards 71 If. Homer Sivewright 95 III. Hard Hit 132 IV. ' World, how apt the Poor are to be proud !' 155 V. * I had a Son, now outlawed from my Blood' 171 VI. ' By Heaven, I love thee better than my- self' 193 vn. * Sorrow HAS need of Friends' . . .213 Till CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE Yiii. Geoffrey inclines to Suspicion . . .227 IX. Something too much for Gratitude X. A Daughter's Love, and a Lover's Hope XI. The Biography of a Scoundrel . XII. Lucius has an Interview with a famous Per- sonage XIII. He fears his Fate too much 245 259 270 293 307 LUCIUS DAYOREN J CHAPTER I. * WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT.' Winter round them : not a winter in city streets, lamplit and glowing, or on a fair English country- side, dotted with cottage-roofs, humble village homes, sending up their incense of blue-gray smoke to the hearth goddess ; not the winter of civilisation, with all means and appliances at hand to loosen the grip of the frost fiend : but winter in its bleakest aspect, amid trackless forests, where the trapper walks alone ; winter in a solitude so drear that the sound of a human voice seems more strange and awful than the prevailing silence ; winter in a pine-forest in British North America, westward of the Rocky Mountains. VOL. I. B 2 LUCIUS DAVOREN. It is December, the bleakest, deariest montb in the long winter ; for spring is still far off. Three men sit crouching over the wood-fire in a roughly-built log-hut in the middle of a forest, which seems to stretch away indefinitely into infinite space. The men have trodden that silent region for many a day, and have found no outlet on either side, only here and there a frozen lake, to whose margin, ere the waters were changed to ice, the forest denizens came down to gorge themselves with the small fish that abound there. They are travellers who have penetrated this dismal region for pleasure ; yet each moved by a different desire. The first, Lucius Davoren, surgeon, has been impelled by that deep- rooted thirst of knowledge which in some minds is a passion. He wants to know what this strange wild territory is like — this unfamiliar land between Fort Garry and Victoria, across the Kocky Mountains — and if there lies not here a fair road for. the Eng- lish emigrant. He has even cherished the hope of some day pushing his way to the northward, up to the ice-bound shores of the polar sea. He looks upon this trapper-expedition as a mere experimental business, an education for grander things, the ex- plorer's preparatory school. So much for Lucius Davoren, surgeon without a 'where the sun is silent. d practice. Mark him as lie sits in his dusky corner by the fire. The hut boasts a couple of windows, but they are only of elk- skin, through which the winter light steals dimly. Mark the strongly-defined profile, the broad forehead, the clear gray eyes. The well- cut mouth and resolute chin are hidden by that bushy untrimmed beard, which stifi'ens with his frozen breath when he ventures outside the hut ; but the broad square forehead, the Saxon type of brow, and clear penetrating eyes, are in themselves all- sufficient indications of the man's character. Here are firmness and patience, or, in one word, the no- blest attribute of the human mind — constancy. On the opposite side of that rude hearth sits Geoffrey Hossack, three years ago an undergraduate at Balliol, great at hammer-throwing and the long jump, doubtful as to divinity exam., and with vague ideas trending towards travel and adventure in the Far West as the easiest solution of that difficulty. Young, handsome, ardent, fickle, strong as a lion, gentle as a sucking dove, Geofi'rey has been the de- light and glory of the band in its sunnier days ; he is the one spot of sunlight in the picture now, when the horizon has darkened to so deep a gloom. The last of the trio is Absalom Schanck, a native of Hamburg,- small and plump, with a perennial 4 LUCIUS DAVOREN. plumpness which has not suffered even from a diet of mouldy pemmican, and rare meals of buffalo or moose flesh, which has survived intervals of semi-starvation, blank dismal days when there was absolutely nothing for these explorers to eat. At such trying periods Absalom is wont to wax plaintive, but it is not of turtle or venison he dreams ; no vision of callipash or callipee, no mocking simula- crum of a lordly Aberdeen salmon or an aldermanic turbot, no mirage picture of sirloin or Christmas turkey, torments his soul ; but his feverish mouth waters for the putrid cabbage and rancid pork of his fatherland; and the sharpest torture which fancy can create for him is the tempting suggestion of a certain boiled sausage which his soul loveth. He has joined the expedition with half-defined ideas upon the subject of a new company of dealers in skins, to be established beyond the precincts of Hudson's Bay ; and not a little influenced by a genuine love of exploration, and a lurking notion that he has in him the stuff that makes a Van Diemen. From first to last it is, and has been, essentially an amateur expedition. No contribution from the government of any nation has aided these wanderers. They have come, as Geoffrey Hossack forcibly ex- ' WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT.' 5 presses the fact, ' on their own hook.' Geoffrey suggests that they should found a city, hy and by, after the manner of classical adventurers : whence should arise in remote future ages some new Empire of the West. * Hossack's Gate would he rather a good name for it,' he says, between two puffs of his meerschaum; ' and our descendants would doubtless be known as the Hossackides, and the Davorenides, and do their very best to annihilate one another, you know, Lucius.' * We Chermans have giv more names to blaizes than you Englishers,' chimes in Mr. Schanck with dignity. ' It is our dalend to disgover.' 'I wish you'd disgover something to eat, then, my friend Absalom,' replies the Oxonian irreverently; ' that mouthful of pemmican Lucius doled out to us just now has only served as a whet for my appetite. Like the half-dozen Ostend oysters they give one as the overture to a French dinner.' *Ah, they are goot the oysders of Osdend,' says Mr. Schanck with a sigh, ' and zo are ze muzzles of Blankenberk. I dreamt ze ozer night I vas in hea- fen eading muzzles sdewed in vin cle madere.' ' Don't,' cries Geoffrey emphatically; ' if we begin to talk about eating, we shall go mad, or eat each b LUCIUS DAVOREN. other. How nice you would be, Sclianck, stuffed with chestnuts, and roasted, like a Norfolk turkey dressed French fashion ! It's rather a pity that one's friends are reported to be indigestible ; but I believe that's merely a fable, designed as a deterring in- fluence. The Maories cannibalised from the begin- ning of time •; fed in and in, as well as bred in and in. One nice old man, a chieftain of Eakiraki, kept a register of his own consumption of prisoners, by means of a row of stones, which, when reckoned up after the old gentleman's demise, amounted to eight hundred and seventy-two : and yet these Maories were a healthy race enough when civilisation looked them up.' Lucius Davoren takes no heed of this frivolous talk. He is lying on the floor of the log-hut, with a large chart spread under him, studying it intensely, and sticking pins here and there as he pores over it. He has ideas of his own, fixed and definite, which neither of his companions shares in the smallest de- gree. Hossack has come to these wild regions with an Englishman's unalloyed love of adventure, as well as for a quiet escape from the trusting relatives who would have urged him to go up for Divinity. Schanck has been beguiled hither by the fond expectation of finding himself in a paradise of tame polar bears and * WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT.' 7 silver foxes, who would lie down at his feet, and mutely beseech him to convert them into carriage- rugs. They are waiting for the return of their guide, an Indian, who has gone to hunt for the lost trail, and to make his way back to a far distant fort in quest of provisions. If he should find the journey impossible, or fall dead upon the way, their last hope must perish with the failure of his mission, their one only chance of succour must die with his death. Very shrunken are the stores which Lucius Da- voren guards with jealous care. He doles out each man's meagre portion day by day with a Spartan severity, and a measurement so just that even hunger cannot dispute his administration ; the tobacco, that sweet solacer of weary hours, begins to shrink in the barrel, and Geoffrey Hossack's lips linger lovingly over the final puffs of his short black-muzzled meer- schaum, with a doleful looking forward to the broad abyss of empty hours which must be bridged over before he refills the bowl. Unless the guide returns with supplies there is hardly any hope that these '- reckless adventurers will ever reach the broad blu^ waters of the Pacific, and accomplish the end of that adventurous scheme which brought them to these barren regions. Unless help comes to them in this 8 LUCIUS DAVOREN. way, or in some fortuitous fashion, tliey are cloonaed to perish. They have, considered this fact among themselves many times, sitting huddled together under the low roof of their log-hut, by the feeble glimmer of their lantern. Of the three wanderers Absalom Schanck is the only experienced traveller. He is a naturalised Englishman, and a captain in the merchant navy; having traded prosperously for some years as the owner of a ship — a sea-carrier in a small w^ay — he had sold his vessel, and built himself a water-side villa at Battersea, half Hamburgian, half nautical in design ; a cross between a house in Hamburg and half-a-dozen ships' cabins packed neatly together; everything planned with as strict an economy of space as if the dainty little habitation were destined to put to sea as soon as she was finished. As many shelves and drawers and hatches in the kitchen as in a steward's cabin ; stairs winding up the heart of the house, like a companion-ladder; a flat roof, from which Mr. Schanck can see the sunset beyond the westward-lying swamps of Fulham, and which he fondly calls the admiral's poop. But even this comfortable habitation has palled upon the mind of the professional rover. Dull are those suburban flats to the eye that for twenty years ' WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT.' 9 has ranged over the vast and various ocean. Absa- lom has found the consolation of pipe and case-bottle inadequate ; and with speculative ideas of the vaguest nature, has joined Geoffrey Hossack's expedition to the Far West. CHAPTER II. ' MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' Ten days go by, empty days of which only Lucius Davoren keeps a record, in a journal which may serve by and by for a history of the ill-fated ex- pedition; which may be found perchance by some luckier sportsmen in years to come, when the ink upon the paper has gone gray and pale, and when the date of each entry has an ancient look, and be- longs to a bygone century; nay, when the very fashion of the phrases is obsolete. Lucius takes note of everything, every cloud in the sky, every red gleam of the aurora, with its ghostly rustling sound, as of phantom trees shaken by the north wind. He finds matter for observation where to the other two there seems only an endless blank, a universe that is emptied of everything ex- cept the unvarying pine-trees rising dark against a background of everlasting snow. * MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 11 Geoffrey Hossack practises hammer-throwing with an iron crowbar, patches the worn-out sleighs, makes little expeditions on his own account, and dis- covers nothing, except that he has a non-geographical mind, and that, instead of the trapper's unerring in- stinct, which enables him to travel always in a straight line, he has an unpleasant tendency to describe a cir- cle; prowls about with his gun, and the scanty supply of ammunition which Davoren allows him ; makes traps for silver foxes, and has the mortification of seeing his bait devoured by a wolverine, who bears a life as charmed as that Macbeth was promised ; and sometimes, but alas too seldom, kills something — a moose, and once a buffalo. 0, then what a hunter's feast they have in the thick northern darkness ! what a wild orgie seems that rare supper ! Their souls expand over the fresh meat ; they feel mighty as northern gods, Odin and Thor. Hope rekindles in every breast ; the moody silence which has well- nigh grown habitual to them in the gloom of these hungry hopeless days, melts into wild torrents of talk. They are moved with a kind of rapture engen- dered of this roast flesh, and recognise the truth of Barry Cornwall's dictum, that a poet should be a high feeder. The grip of the frost-fiend tightens upon them ; 12 LUCIUS DAVOREN. the brief clays flit by ghostlike, only the long nights linger. They sit in their log-hut in a dreary silence, each man seated on the ground, with his knees drawn up to his chin, and his back against the wall. Were they already dead, and this their sepulchre, they could wear no ghastlier aspect. They are silent from no sullen humour. Discord has never risen among them. What have they to talk about ? Swift impending death, the sharp stings of hunger, the bitterness of an empty tobacco-barrel. Their dumbness is the dumbness of stoics who can sufi'er and make no moan. They have not yet come to absolute starvation ; there is a little pemmican still, enough to sustain their attenuated thread of life for a few more daySc When that is gone, they can see before them no- thing but death. The remains of their buffalo has been eaten by the wolves, carefully as they hid it under the snow. The region to which they have pushed their way seems empty of human life — a hyperborean chaos ruled by Death. What hardy wanderer, half-breed or Indian, would venture hither at such a season ? They are sitting thus, mute and statue-like, in the brief interval which they call daylight, when something happens which sets every heart beating ' MUSIC HATH CHAEMS.' 13 with a sudden violence — something so unexpected, that they wait breathless, transfixed by surprise. A voice, a human voice, breaks the dead silence; a wild face, with bright fierce eyes peers in at the entrance of the hut, from which a bony hand has dragged aside the tarpaulin that serves for a screen against the keen northern ^nnds, which creep in round the angle of the rough wooden porch. The face belongs to neither Indian nor half- breed; it is as white as their own. By the faint light that glimmers through the parchment windows they see it scrutinising them interrogatively, with a piercing scrutiny. ' Explorers ?' asks the stranger, ' and English- men?' Yes, they tell him, they are English explorers. Absalom Schanck of course counts as an Englishman. ' Are you sent out by the English government ?' * No, we came on our own hook,' replies Geofi'rey Hossack, who is the first to recover from the sur- prise of the man's appearance, and from a certain half - supernatural awe engendered by his aspect, which has a wild ghastliness, as of a wanderer from the under world. ' But never mind how we came here ; what we want is to get away. Don't stand there jawing about our business, but come 14 LUCIUS DAVOREN. inside, and drop that tarpaulin behind you. Where have you left your party ?' ' Nowhere,' answers the stranger, stepping into the hut, and standing in the midst of them, tall and gaunt, clad in garments that are half Esqui- maux, half Indian, and in the last stage of dilapi- dation, torn moosekin shoes upon his feet, the livid flesh showing between every rent ; ' nowhere. I be- long to no party — I'm alone.' * Alone!' they all exclaim, with a bitter pang of disappointment. They had been ready to wel- come this wild creature as the forerunner of suc- cour. ' Yes, I was up some thousand miles north- ward of this, among icebergs and polar bears and Dog-rib Indians and Esquimaux, with a party of Yankees the summer before last ; and served them well, too, for I know some of the Indian lingo, and was able to act as their interpreter. But the ex- pedition was a failure. Unsuccessful men are hard to deal with. In short, we quarrelled, and parted company ; they went their way, I went mine. There's no occasion to enter into details. It was winter when I left them — the stores were exhausted, with the ex- ception of a little ammunition. They had their guns, and may have found reindeer or musk oxen, but I 'music hath chabms.' 15 don't fancy they can have come to much good. They didn't know the country as well as I do.' ' You have been alone nearly a year?' asks Lucius Davoren, interested in this wild -looking stranger. ' How have you lived during that time ?' 'Anyhow,' answers the other with a careless shrug of his bony shoulders. ' Sometimes with the Indians, sometimes with the Esquimaux — they're civil enough to a solitary Englishman, though they hate the Indians like poison— sometimes by myself. As long as I've a charge for my gun I don't much fear starvation, though I've found myself face to face with it a good many times since I parted with my Yankee friends.' ' Do you know this part of the country ?' ' No ; it's beyond my chart. I shouldn't be here now if I hadn't lost my way. But I suppose, now I am here, you'll give me shelter.' The three men looked at one another. Hospi- tality is a noble virtue, and a virtue peculiarly ap- propriate to the dwellers in remote and savage regions ; but hospitality with these men meant a division of their few remaining days of life. And the last of those days might hold the chance of rescue. Who could tell '? To share their shrunken stores with this stranger would be a kind of suicide. 16 LUCIUS DAVOREN. Yet the dictates of humanity prevailed. The stranger was not pleasant to look upon, nor especially con- ciliating in manner; but he was a fellow sufferer, and he must be sheltered. ' Yes,' says Lucius Davoren, ' you are welcome to share what we have. It's not much. A few days' rations.' The stranger takes a canvas bag from his neck, and flings it into a corner of the hut. ' There's more than a week's food in that,' he says ; * dried reindeer, rather mouldy, but I don't suppose you're very particular.' * Particular !' cried Geoffrey Hossack, with a groan. ' When I think of the dinners I have turned up my nose at, the saddles of mutton I have despised because life seemed always saddle of mutton, I blush for the iniquity of civilised man. I remember a bottle of French plums and a canister of Presburg biscuits that I left in a cheffonier at Balliol. Of course my scout consumed them. 0, would I had those toothsome cates to-day !' * Balliol!' says the stranger, looking at him cu- riously. ' So you're a Balliol man, are you ?' There was something strange in the sound of this question from an unkempt savage, with half- bare feet, in ragged mooseskin shoes. The new- ' MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 17 comer pushed aside the elf-locks that overhung his forehead, and stared at Geoffrey Hossack as he waited for the answer to his inquiry. 'Yes/ replied Geoffrey with his usual coolness, ' I have had the honour to be gated occasionally by the dons of that college. Are you an Oxford man '?' ' Do I look like it ?" asks the other, with a harsh laugh. ' I am nothing ; I come from nowhere : I have no history, no kith or kin. I fancy I know this kind of life better than you do, and I know how to talk to the natives, which I conclude you don't. If we can hold on till this infernal season is over, and the trappers come this way, 1*11 be your interpreter, your servant, anything you like.' 'If!' said Lucius gravely. 'I don't think we shall ever see the end of this winter. But you can stay with us, if you please. At the worst, we can die together.' The stranger gives a shivering sigh, and drops into an angular heap in a corner of the hut. ' It isn't a lively prospect,' he says. ' Death is a gentleman I mean to keep at arm's length as long as I can. I've had to face him often enough, -but I've got the best of it so far. Have you used all your tobacco ?' ' Every shred,' says Geoffrey Hossack dolefully. VOL. I. c 18 LUCIUS DAVOREN. ' I smoked my last pipe and bade farewell to the joys of existence three days ago.' ' Smoke another, then,' replies the stranger, taking a leather pouch from his bosom, ' and renew your acquaintance with pleasure.' * Bless you !' exclaims Geoffrey, clutching the prize. ' Welcome to our tents ! I would welcome Beelzebub if he brought me a pipe of tobacco. But if one fills, all fill — that's understood. We are bro- thers in misfortune, and must share alike.' * Fill, and be quick about it,' says the stranger. So the three fill their pipes, light them, and their souls float into Elysium on the wings of the seraph tobacco. The stranger also fills and lights and smokes silently, but not with a paradisiac air, rather with the gloomy aspect of some fallen spirit, to whose lost soul sensuous joys bring no contentment. His large dark eyes — seeming unnaturally large in his haggard face — wander slowly round the walls of the hut, mark the bunks filled with dried prairie grass, and each provided with a buffalo robe. Indications of luxury these. Actual starvation would have re- duced the wanderers to boiling down strips of their bufi'alo skins into an unsavoury soup. Slowly those great wan eyes travel round the hut. Listlessly, yet ' MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 19 marking every detail — tlie hunting knives and fish- ing tackle hanging against the wall, Geofi'rey's hand- some collection of rifles, which have been the ad- miration of every Indian who has ever beheld them. The stranger's gaze lingers upon these, and an envious look glimmers in his eyes. Signs of wealth these. He glances at the three companions, and wonders which is the man who finds the money for the expedition, and owns these guns. There could hardly be three rich fools mad enough to waste life and wealth on such wanderings. He con- cludes that one is the dupe, the other two adven- turers, trading, or hoping to trade, upon his folly. His keen eye lights on Hossack, the man who talked about Balliol. Yes, he has a prosperous stall-fed look. The other, Lucius, has too much intelligence. The little German is too old to spend his substance upon so wild a scheme. Those observant eyes of the stranger's have nearly completed their circuit, when they suddenly fix themselves, seem visibly to dilate, and kindle with a fire that gives a new look to his face. He sees an object hanging against the wall, to him as far above all the wonders of modern gunnery as the diamonds of Golconda are above splinters of glass. He points to it with his bony finger, and utters 20 LUCIUS DAVOREN. a strange shrill cry of rapture — the ejaculation of a creature who by long solitude, by hardship and pri- vation, and the wild life of forests and deserts, has lapsed into an almost savage condition. 'A fiddle!' he exclaims, after that shrill scream of delight has melted into a low chuckling laugh. ' It's more than a year since I've seen a fiddle, since I lost mine crossing the McKenzie river. Let me play upon it.' This in a softer, more human tone than any words he had previously spoken, looking from one to the other of the three men with passionate en- treaty. ' What ! you play the fiddle, do you ?' asked Lu- cius, emptying the ashes from his pipe with a long sigh of regret. * It is yours, then ?' ' Yes ; you can play upon it, if you like. It's a genuine Amati. I have kept it like the apple of my eye.' ' Yes, and it's been uncommonly useful in fright- ening away the Indians when they've come to tor- ment us for fire-water,' said Geoffrey. * We tried watering the rum, but that didn't answer. The beggars poured a few drops on the fire, and finding it didn't blaze up, came back and blackguarded us. * MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 21 I only wish I'd brought a few barrels of turpentine for their benefit. Petroleum would have been still better. That would meet their ideas of excellence in spirituous liquors. They like something that scorches their internal economy. They led us a nice life as long as we had an}' rum ; but the violin was too much for them. They're uncommonly fond of their own music, and ^vould sometimes oblige us with a song which lasted all night, but they couldn't stand Davoren's sonatas. Tune up, stranger. I'm .rather tired of De Beriot and Spohr and Haydn my- self. Perhaps you could oblige us with a nigger melody.' The stranger waited for no farther invitation, but strode across the narrow hut, and took the violin case from the shelf where it had been carefully be- stowed. He laid it on the rough pinewood table, opened it, and gazed fondly on the Amati reposing in its bed of pale-blue velvet : the very case, or outer husk, a work of art. Lucius watched him as the young mother watches her first baby in the ruthless hands of a stranger. Would he clutch the fiddle by its neck, drag it roughly from its case, at the hazard of dislocation ? The surgeon was too much an Englishman to show his alarm, but sat stolid and in a^'onv. No : the un- 22 LUCIUS DAVOREN. kempt stranger's bony claws spread themselves out gently, and embraced the polished table of the fiddle. He lifted it as the young mother lifts her darling from his dainty cradle ; he put it to his shoulder and lowered his chin upon it, as if in a loving caress. His long fingers stretched themselves about the neck; he drew the bow slowly across the strings. 0, what rapture even in those experimental notes ! Geoffrey flung a fresh pine-log upon the fire, as if in honour of the coming performance. Absalom sat and dozed, dreaming he was in his cuddy at Batter- sea, supping upon his beloved sausage. Lucius watched the stranger, with a gaze full of curiosity. He was passionately fond of music, and his violin had been his chief solace in hours of darkest appre- hension. Strange to find in this other wanderer mute evidence of the same passion. The man's hand as it hugged the fiddle, the man's face as it bent over the strings, were the index of a passion as deep as, or deeper than, his own. He waited eagerly for the man to play. Presently there arose in that low hut a long-drawn wailing sound ; a minor chord, that seemed like a passionate sob of complaint wrung from a heart newly broken ; and with this for his sole prelude the stranger began his theme. What he played, Lucius strove in ' MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 23 vain to discover. His memory could recall no such music: Wilder, stranger, more passionate, more solemn, more awful than the strain which Orpheus played in the under world, was that music : more demoniac than that diabolical sonata which Tartini pretended to have composed in a dream. It seemed extemporaneous, for it obeyed none of the laws of harmony, yet even in its discords was scarcely in- harmonious. There was melody, too, through all — a plaintive under -current of melody, which never utterly lost itself, even when the player allowed his fancy its wildest flights. The passionate rapture of his haggard, weather-beaten face was reflected in the passionate rapture of his music ; but it was not the rapture of joy ; rather the sharp agony of those con- vulsions of the soul which touch the border-line of madness ; like the passion of a worshipper at one of those Dionysian festivals in which religious fervour might end in self-slaughter ; or like the ' possession' of some Indian devil -dancer, leaping and wounding himself under the influence of his demon god. The three men sat and listened, curiously affected by that strange sonata. Even Absalom Schanck, to whom music was about as familiar a language as the Cuneiform character, felt that this was something out of the common way ; that it was grander, if not 24 LUCIUS DAVOREN. more beautiful, than those graceful compositions of De Beriot or Eode wherewith Lucius Davoren had been wont to amuse his friends in their desolate solitude. Upon Lucius the music had a curious effect. At first and for some time he listened with no feeling but the connoisseur's unmixed delight. Of envy his mind was incapable, though music is perhaps the most jealous of the arts, and though he felt this man was infinitely his superior — could bring tones out of the heart of that Amati which no power of his could draw from his beloved instrument. But as the man played on, new emotions showed themselves upon Lucius Davoren's countenance — wonder, perplexity ; then a sudden lighting up of passion. His brows contracted ; he watched the stranger with gleaming eyes, breathlessly, waiting for the end of the composition. With the final chord he started up from his seat and confronted the man. ' Were you ever in Hampshire ?' he asked, sharply and shortly. The stranger started ever so slightly at this abrupt interrogatory, but showed no farther sign of discom- posure, and laid the fiddle in its case as tenderly as he had taken it thence ten minutes before. ' MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 25 ' Hampshire, Massachusetts ?' he inquired. ' Yes, many a time.' ' Hampshire in England. Were you in that county in the year '59 ?' asked Lucius breathlessly, watching the stranger as he spoke. ' I was never in England in my life.' ' Ah,' said Lucius with a long-drawn sigh, which might indicate either disappointment or relief, ' then you're not the man I was half inclined to take you for. Yet that,' dropping into soliloquy, ^ was a foolish fancy. There may be more than one man in the world who plays like a devil.' 'You are not particularly complimentary,' returned the stranger, touching the violin strings lightly with the tips of his skeleton fingers, repeating the dismal burden of his melody in those pizzacato notes. ' You don't consider it a compliment. Eely upon it, if Lucifer played the fiddle at all, he'd play well. The spirit who said, *'E^il, be thou my good," would hardly do anything by halves. Do you remember w^hat Corelli said to Strengk when he first heard him play? "I have been called Arcangelo, but by hea- vens, sir, you must be Arcidiavolo." I would give a great deal to have your power over that instrument. Was that your own composition you played just now?' ' I believe so, or a reminiscence ; but if the latter, 26 LUCIUS DAVOREN. I can't tell you its source. I left off playing by book a long time ago ; but I have a reserve fund of acquired music — chiefly German — and I have no doubt I draw upon it occasionally.' ' Yes,' repeated Lucius thoughtfully, ' I should like to play as you do, only — ' ' Only what ?' asked the stranger. ' I should be inclined to fancy there was something uncomfortable — uncanny, as the Scotch say — lurking in the deep waters of my mind, if my fancies took the shape yours did just now.' *As for me,' exclaimed Geoffrey, with agreeable candour, ' without wishing either to flatter or upbraid, I can only say that I feel as if I had been listening to a distinguished member of the royal orchestra in Pandemonium — the Paganini of Orcus.' The stranger laughed — a somewhat harsh and grating cachinnation. ' You don't like minors ?' he said. * I was a minor myself for a long time, and I only object to the species on the score of impecuniosity,' replied Geoffrey. ' 0, 1 beg your pardon ; you mean the key. If that composition of yours was minor, I certainly lean to the major. Could you not oblige us with a Christy-minstrel melody to take the taste out of our mouths ?' ^ MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 27 The stranger deigned no answer to that request, but sat down on the rough log which served Lucius for a seat, and made a kind of settle by the ample fireplace. With lean arms folded and gaze bent upon the fire, he lapsed into thoughtful silence. The blaze of the pine - logs, now showing yivid tinges of green or blue as the resin bubbled from their tough hide, lit up the faces, and gave something of grotesque to each. Seen by this medium, the stranger's face was hardly a pleasant object for contemplation, and was yet singular enough to arrest the gaze of him who looked upon it. Heaven knows if, with all the aids of civilisation, soap and water, close-cut hair, and carefully-trimmed moustache, the man might not have been ranked handsome. Seen in this dusky hovel, by the change- ful light of the pine-logs, that face was grotesque and grim as a study by Gustave Dore ; the lines as sharply accentuated, the lights and shadows as vividly con- trasted. The stranger's eyes were of darkest hue ; as nearly black as the human eye, or any other eye, ever is : that intensest brown which, when in shadow, looks black, and when the light shines upon it seems to emit a tawny fire, like the ray which flashes from a fine cat's -eye. His forehead was curiously low, the 28 LUCIUS DAYOREN. hair growing in a peak between the temples. His nose was long, and a pronounced aquiline. His cheek-bones were rendered prominent by famine. The rest of his face was almost hidden by the thick ragged beard of densest black, through which his white teeth flashed with a hungry look when he talked or smiled. His smile was not a pleasant one. ^If one could imagine his Satanic majesty tak- ing another promenade, like that walk made famous by Porson, and penetrating to these hyperborean shores — and why not, when contrast is ever pleas- ing? — I should expect to behold him precisely in yonder guise,' mused Geoffrey, as he contemplated their uninvited guest from the opposite side of the hearth. ' But the age has grown matter-of-fact ; we no longer believe in the pleasing illusions of our childhood — hobgoblins. Jack and the Beanstalk, and old Nick. Gunpowder and the printing press, as somebody observes, have driven away Kobin Good- fellow and the fairies.' Lucius sat meditative, staring into the fire. That wild minor theme had moved him profoundly, yet it was not so much of the music that he thought as of the man. Five years ago he had heard the descrip- tion of music — which seemed to him to correspond * :\IUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 29 exactly with this — of an amateur whose phiying had the same unearthly, or even diabolical excellence. Certainly that man had been a pianist. And then it was too wild a fancy to conceive for a moment that he had encountered that man, whom he had hunted for all over England, and even out of England, here in this primeval forest. Destiny in her maddest sport could hardly have devised such a hazard. Xo, the thought was absurd ; no doubt an evidence of a brain enfeebled by anxiety and famine. Yet the fancy disturbed him not the less. * Unless Geoff stalks another buffalo before long, I shall go off my head,' he said to himself. He brooded upon the stranger's assertion that he was a Southern American, and had never crossed the Atlantic ; an assertion at variance with the fact of his accent, which was purely English. Yet Lucius had known American citizens whose English was as pure, and he could scarcely condemn the man as a liar on such ground as this. ' The description of that man's appearance might fit this man,' he thought ; ' due allowance being made for the circumstances under which we see him. Tall and dark, with a thin lissom figure, a hooked nose, a hawk's eye ; that was the description they gave me at Wykhamston ; I had it from three 30 LUCIUS DAVOREN. separate people. There is no palpable discrepancy, and yet — ball, I am a fool to think of it ! Haven't I had trouble of mind enough upon this score, and would it do any good to her — in her grave, perhaps — if I had my wish : if God gave me the means of keep- ing the promise I made five years ago, when I was little more than a boy?' Lucius' s thoughts rambled on while the stranger sat beside him, with brooding eyes fixed, like his, upon the flare of the pine-logs. 'By the way,' said Lucius presently, rousing himself from that long reverie, 'when my friend yonder spoke of Balliol, you pricked up your ears as if the name were familiar to you. That's odd, since you have never been in England.' ' I suppose there is nothing especially odd in my having had an English acquaintance in my prosperous days, when even Englishmen were not ashamed to know me. One may be familiar with the name of a college without having seen the college itself. I had a friend who was a student at Balliol.' 'I wonder whether he was the man who wrote ^^ Aratus sum T' upon one of the tables in the ex- aminers' room after they ploughed him,' speculated Geoffrey idly. 'I'll tell you what it is, Mr. Stranger,' said * MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 31 Lucius presently, struggling with the sense of irri- tation caused by that wild fancy which the stranger's playing had inspired, 'it's all very well for us to give you a corner in our hut. As good or evil for- tune brought you this way, we could hardly be so unchristian as to refuse you our shelter ; God knows it's poor enough, and death is near enough inside as well as outside these wooden walls ; but even Christi- anity doesn't oblige us to harbour a man without a name. That traveller who fell among thieves told the Samaritan his name, rely upon it, as soon as he was able to say anything. No honest man withholds his name from the men he breaks bread with. Even the Indians tell us their names ; so be good enough to give us yours.' ' I renounced my own name when I turned my back upon civilisation,' answered the stranger dog- gedly ; ' I brought no card-case to this side of the Rocky Mountains. If you give me your hospitality,' with a monosyllabic laugh and a scornful glance round the hut, ' solely on condition that I acquaint you with my antecedents, I renounce your hospitality. I can go back to the forest and liberty. As you say, death could not be much farther off out yonder in the snow. If you only want my name for the pur- poses of social intercourse, you can call me what the 32 LUCIUS DAYOREN. Indians call me, a sobriquet of their own invention, *' Matchi Mohkamarn." ' ^ That means the Evil Knife, I believe,' said Lucius ; ' hardly the fittest name to inspire confi- dence in the minds of a man's acquaintance. But I suppose it must do, since you withhold your real name.' 'I am sure jou are welcome to our pasteboards,' said Geoffrey, yawning ; ' I have a few yonder in my dressing-bag — rather a superfluous encumbrance by the way, since here one neither dresses nor shaves. But I have occasionally propitiated ravening Indians with the gift of a silver-topped scent-bottle or poma- tum-pot, so the bag has been useful. Dear, dear, how nice it would be to find oneself back in a world in which there are dressing-bags and dressing-bells, and dinner-bells afterwards ! And yet one fancied it so slow, the world of civilisation. Lucius, is it not time for our evening pemmican ? Think of the ma- caroons and rout-cakes we have trampled under our heels in the bear-fights that used to wind up our wine-parties; to think of the anchovy toasts and various devils we have eaten — half from sheer glut- tony, half because it was good form — when we were gorged like Strasburg geese awaiting their eutha- nasia. Think how we have rioted, and wasted and ' MUSIC HATH CHARMS.' 33 wallowed in what are called the pleasures of the table ; and behold us now, hungering for a lump of rancid fat or a tallow-candle, to supply our exhausted systems with heat-giving parti :les I' VOL. I. CHAPTEK III. HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL. The slow days pass, but the guide does not re- turn. Geoffrey's sporting explorations have resulted only in a rare bird, hardly a mouthful for one of the four starving men, though they divide the appetising morsel with rigid justice, Lucius dissecting it with his clasp-knife almost as carefully as if it were a -subject. ' To think that I should live to dine on a section ■of wood-partridge without any bread-sauce!' exclaimed Oeoffrey dolefully. * Do you know, when I put the •small beast in my bag I was sorely tempted to eat him, feathers and all ! Indeed, I think we make a mistake in plucking our game. The feathers would at least be filling. It is the sense of a vacuum from which one suffers most severely ; after all it can't matter much what a man puts inside him, so long as he fills the cavity. Do you remember that experi- mental Frenchman who suggested that a hungry HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL. 35 peasantry should eat grass ? The suggestion was hardly popular, and the moh stuffed the poor wretch's mouth with a handful of his favourite pahulum, when they hung him to a convenient lamp-post in '93. But I really think the notion was sensible. If there were a rood of pasture uncovered by the perpetual snow I should imitate Nebuchadnezzar, and go to grass !' Yain lamentations ! Vainer still those long argu- ments by the pine-log fire, in which, with map and compass, they travel over again the journey which has been so disastrous — try back, and find where it was they lost time — how they let slip a day here, half a week there, until the expedition, which should have ended with last September, occupied a period they had never dreamed of, and left them in the bleak bitter winter : their trail lost, alone in a track- less forest, the snow rising higher around them day by day, until even the steep bank upon which they have built their log-hut stands but a few feet above the universal level. From first to last the journey has been attended by misfortune as well as mistake. They had set forth on this perilous enterprise fondly hoping they could combine pleasure for themselves, with profit to their fellow-creatures, and by this wild adventure 36 LUCIUS DAVOREN. open up a track for future emigrants — a high road in the days to come from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific — a path by which adventurers from the old world should travel across the Rocky Mountains to the gold-fields of the new world. They had started with high hopes — or Lucius had at least cherished this dream above all thought of personal enjoyment — ^hopes of being reckoned among the golden band of adventurers whose daring has enlarged man's do- minion over that wide world God gave him for his heritage — hopes of seeing their names recorded on that grand muster-roll which begins with Hercules, and ends with Livingstone. They had started from Fort Edmonton with three horses, two guides, and a fair outfit ; but they had left that point too late in the year, as the guardians of the fort warned them. They were entreated to postpone their attempt till the following summer, but they had already spent one winter in camp between Carlton and Edmonton, and the two young men were resolutely set against farther delay. Absalom Schanck, much more phleg- matic, would have willingly wintered at the fort, where there was good entertainment, and where he could have smoked his pipe and looked out of window at the pine-tops and the snow from one week's end to another, resigned to circumstances, and patiently HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL. 37 awaiting remittances from England. But to Lucius Davoren and Geoffrey Hossack the idea of such loss of time was unendurable. They had both seen as much as they cared to see of the trapper's life during the past winter. Both were eager to push on to fresh woods and pastures new, Geoffrey moved by the predatory instincts of the sportsman, Lucius fevered by the less selfish and more ambitious desire to discover that grand highway which he had dreamed of, between the two great oceans. The star wh^ch guided his pilgrimage was the lodestar of the dis- coverer. No idle fancy, no caprice of the moment, could have tempted him aside from the settled pur- pose of his journey. But a mountain-sheep — the bighorn — or a wild goat, seen high up on some crag against the clear cold sky, was magnet enough to draw Geoffrey twenty miles out of his course. Of the two guides, one deserted before they had crossed the range, making off quietly with one of their horses — the best, by the way — and leaving them, after a long day and night of wonderment, to the melancholy conviction that they had been cheated. They retraced their way for one day's journey, sent their other guide, an Indian, back some distance in search of the deserter, but with no result. This cost them between three and four davs. The man had 88 LUCIUS DAVOREN. doubtless gone quietly back to Edmonton. To fol- low him farther would be altogether to abandon their expedition for this year. The days they had already lost were precious as rubies. * En avant /' exclaimed Geoffrey. * Excelsior !' cried Lucius. The German was quiescent. 'I zink you leat me to my deaths,' he said ; * but man must die one time. Gismet, as the Durks say. They are wise beobles, ze Durks.' The Indian promised to remain faithful, ay, even to death; of which fatal issue these savages think somewhat lightly; life for them mostly signifying hardship and privation, brightened only by rare liba- tions of rum. He was promoted from a secondary position to the front rank, and was now their sole guide. With their cavalcade thus shrunken they pushed bravely on, crossed the mountains by the Yellow Head Pass, looked down from anion g snow- clad pinnacles upon the Athabasca river, rushing madly between its steep banks, and reached Jasper House, a station of the Hudson's Bay Company, which they found void of all human life, a mere shell or empty simulacrum; in the distance a cheering object to look upon, promising welcome and shelter ; and giving neither. HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL. 39 For Hossack, that mighty mountain range, those snow-clad peaks, towering skyward, had an irresisti- ble attraction. He had done a good deal of Alpine climbing in his long vacations, had scaled peaks which few have ever succeeded in surmounting, and had made his name a household word among the Swiss guides, but such a range as this was new to him. Here there was a larger splendour, an infinite beauty. The world which he had looked down upon from Mont Blanc — lakes, valleys, and villages dwarfed by the distance — was a mere tea-board land- scape, a toy -shop panorama, compared with this. He drew in his breath and gazed in a dumb rapture, ' Or like stout Cortez, -svlien, with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific' Here, again, they lost considerable time ; for even Davoren's stronger mind was beguiled by the glory of that splendid scene. He consented to a week's halt on the margin of the Athabasca, climbed the mountain-steeps with his friend, chased the big- horn with footstep light and daring as the chamois- hunter's ; and found himself sometimes, after the keen pleasures of the* hunt, with his moccasins in rags, and his naked feet cut and bleeding, a fact of which he had been supremely unconscious so long as the chase lasted. Sometimes, after descending to 40 LUCIUS DAVOREN. the lower earth, laden with their quarry, the hunters looked upward and saw the precipices they had trod- den, the narrow cornice of rock along which they had run in pursuit of their prey — saw, and shud- dered. Had they heen really within a hair's- breadth of death ? These were the brightest days of their journey. Their stores were yet ample, and seemed inexhausti- ble. They feasted on fresh meat nightly ; yet, with a laudable prudence, smoked and dried some portion of their prey. In the indulgence of their sporting propensities they squandered a good deal of ammu- nition. They smoked half-a-dozen pipes of tobacco daily. In a word, they enjoyed the present, with a culpable shortsightedness as to the future. This delay turned the balance against them. While they loitered, s^utumn stole on with footstep almost impalpable, in that region of evergreen. The first sharp frost of early October awakened Lucius to a sense of their folly. He gave the word for the march forward, refusing to listen to Geoffrey's entreaty for one day more — one more wild hunt among those mighty crags between earth and sky. The sea-captain and Kekek-ooarsis, their Indian guide, had been meritoriously employed during this delay in constructing a raft for the passage of the HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL. 41 Athabasca, at this point a wide lake whose peaceful waters spread theraselves amid an amphitheatre of mountains. While they were getting ready for the passage of the river they were surprised by a party of half- breeds — friendly, but starving. Anxious as they were to husband their resources, humanity com- pelled them to furnish these hapless wanderers with a meal. In return for this hospitality, the natives gave them some good advice, urging them on no account to trust themselves to the cui^ent of the river — a mode of transit which seemed easy and tempting — as it abounded in dangerous rapids. They afforded farther information as to the trail on ahead, and these sons of the old and new world parted, well pleased with one another. Soon after this began their, time of trial and hard- ship. They had to cross the river many times in their journey — sometimes on rafts, sometimes ford- ing the stream — and often in imminent peril of an abrupt ending of their troubles by drowning. They crossed pleasant oases of green prairie, verdant valleys all abloom y\ ith wild flowers, gentian and tiger lilies, cineraria, blue borage — the last-lingering traces of summer's footfall in the sheltered nooks. Some- times they came upon patches where the forest-trees 42 LUCIUS DAVOREN. were blackened by fire, or bad fallen among tbe ashes of the underwood. Sometimes they had to cut their way through the wood, and made slow and painful progress. Sometimes they lost the trail, and only regained it after a day's wasted labour. One of their horses died — the other was reduced to a mere skele- ton — so rare had now become the glimpses of pasture. They looked at this spectral equine with sad pro- phetic eyes, not knowing how long it might be be- fore they would be reduced to the painful necessity of cooking and eating him ; and with a doleful fore- boding that, when famine brought them to that strait, the faithful steed would be found to consist solely of bone and hide. So they tramped on laboriously and with a dogged patience till they lost the trail once more; and this time even the Indian's sagacity proved ut- terly at fault, and all their efforts to regain it were vain. They found themselves in a trackless ring of forest, to them as darksome a circle as the lowest deep in Dante's Inferno, and here beheld the first snow-storm fall white upon the black pine -tops. Here, in one of their vain wanderings in search of the lost track, they came upon a dead Indian, seated stark and ghastly at the foot of a giant pine, draped in his blanket, and bent as if still stooping over the HOW THEY LOST THE TEIIL. 43 ashes of the fire wherewith he had tried to keep the ebbing life warm in his wasted clay. This gruesome stranger was headless. Famine had wasted him to the very bone ; his skin was mere parchment, stretched tightly oyer the gaunt skeleton ; the whitening bones of his horse bestrewed the ground by his side. How he came in that awful condition, what had befallen the missing head, they knew not. Even conjecture was here at fault. But the spectacle struck them T\ith indescribable horror. So too might they be found; the skeleton horse crouched dead at their feet, beside the ^shes of the last fire at which their dim eyes had gazed in the final agonies of starva- tion. This incident made them desperate. * We are wasting our strength in a useless hunt for the lost track,' said Lucius decisively. ' We have neither the instinct nor the experience of the In- dian. Let us make a log-hut here, and wait for the worst quietly, while Ivekek-ooarsis searches for the path, or tries to work his way back to the fort to fetch help and food. He will make his way three times as fast when he is unencumbered by us and our incapacity. We may be able to ward ofi" starva- tion meanwhile with the aid of Geoff's guns. At the worst, we only face death. And since a man can but die once, it is after all only a question of 44 LUCIUS DAVOBEN. whether we get full or short measure of the wine of life. * And come he slow or come lie fast, It is but Death who comes at last.' ' Brezisely,' said the Hamburgher. ' It is clrue. A man can but die one time — Gismet. Yet ze wine of life is petter zan ze vater of death, in most beoble's obinion.' Kekek-ooarsis had been absent nearly five weeks at the time of the stranger's appearance, and the length of his absence had variously affected the three men who waited with a gloomy resignation for his return, or the coming of that other stranger. Death. At times, when Geoffrey's gun had not been useless, when they had eaten, and were inclined to take a somewhat cheerful view of their situation, they told each other that he had most likely recovered the lost track at a considerable distance from their hut, and had pushed on to the fort, to procure fresh horses and supplies. They calculated the time such a journey to and fro must take him, allowed a wide margin for accidental delays, and argued that it was not yet too late for the possibility of his return. * I hope he hasn't cut and run like that other beggar,' said Geoffrey. ' It was rather a risky thing HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL. 45 to trust liim with our money to bu}^ the horses anl provender. Yet it was our only resource.' *I believe in his honesty,' replied Davoren. 'If he deserts us, Death will be the tempter who lures him away. These Indians have nobler qualities than you are inclined to credit them with. Do you re- member that starving creature who came to our hut by the Saskatchewan one day while we were out hunting, and sat by our hearth, famishing amidst plenty, for twelve mortal hours, and did not touch a morsel till we returned and offered him food "? I'll forfeit my reputation as a judge of character, if Kekek-ooarsis tries to cheat us. That other fellow was a half-breed.' * The Greeks weren't half-breeds,' said Geoffrey, whose reading had of late years been chiefly confined to the Greek historians and the more popular of the French novelists, 'yet they were the most treacher- ous ruffians going. I don't pin my faith on your chivalrous Indian. However, there's no use in con- templating the gloomiest side of the question. Let's take a more lively view of it, and say that he's frozen to death in the pass, with our money intact in his bosom, exactly where you sewed it into his shirt.' Thus they speculated; the German venturing no opinion, but smoking the only obtainable suh- 46 LUCIUS DAVOKEN stitute for tobacco in stolid silence. Indeed, when hard pressed by his companions, he admitted that he had never had any opinion. * Vat is ze goot ov obinions?' he demanded. 'Man is no petter vor zem, and it is zo much vasted lapour of prain. I do not know how to tink. Zomedimes I have ask my froints vat it is like, tinking. Zey gannot tell me. Zey tink zey tink, put zey to not tink.' CHAPTER IV. 'all's cheerless, dark, and deadly.' The stranger, having had their exact circumstances laid before him, took the gloomiest view of the posi- tion. The first deep fall of snow had occurred a week after the guide's departure. If he had not ere that time regained a track, with landmarks fa- miliar to his eye, all hope of his haying been able to reach the fort was as foolish as it was vain. ' For myself,' said the stranger, ' I give him up.' This man, who was henceforth known among them as Matchi, a contraction of the sobriquet be- stowed on him by the Indians, fell into his place in that small circle easily enough. They neither liked him nor trusted him. But he had plenty to say for himself, and had a certain originality of thought and language that went some little way towards dispell- ing the deep gloom that surrounded them. In their wretched position, any one who could bring an ele- ment of novelty into their life was welcome. The desperation of his character suited their desperate 48 LUCIUS DAVOREN. circumstances. In a civilised country they would have shut their doors in his face. But here, with Death peering in at their threshold, this wild spirit helped them to sustain the horrors of suspense, the dreary foreboding of a fatal end. But there was one charm in his presence which all felt, even the phlegmatic German. With Lucius Davoren's violin in his hand, he could beguile them into brief forgetfulness of that grisly spectre watch- ing at the door. That passionate music opened the gates of dreamland. Matchi's repertoire seemed in- exhaustible : but everything he played, even melodies the world knows by heart, bore the stamp of his own genius. Whatever subject of Corelli, or Yiotti, or Mozart, or Haydn, formed the groundwork of his theme, the improvisatore sported with the air at pleasure, and interwove his own wild fancies with the original fabric. Much that he played was ob- viously his own composition, improvised as the bow moved over the strings ; wild strains which inter- preted the gloom of their surroundings ; dismal threnodies in which one heard the soughing of the wind among the snow-laden pine-branches ; the howl- ing of wolves at sunrise. He proved no drone in that little hive, but toiled at such labour as there was to be done with a savage ' all's cheerless, dark, and deadly.' 49 energy which seemed in accord with his half- savage _ nature. He felled the pine-trunks with his axe, and brought new stores of fuel to the hut. He fetched water from a distant lake, where there was but one corner which the ice had not locked against him. He slept little, and those haggard eyes of his had a strange brightness and vivacity as he sat by the hearth and stared into the fire which his toil had helped to furnish. Though he talked much at times, but always by fits and starts, it was curious to note how rarely he spoke directly of himself or his past life. Even when Lucius questioned him about his musical education, in what school he had learned, who had been his master, he contrived to evade the question. ' There are some men who have not the knack of learning from other people, but who must be their own teachers,' he said. ' I am one of those. Shut me up in a prison for ten years, with my fiddle for my only companion, and when I come out I shall have discovered a new continent in the world of music' ' You play other instruments,' hazarded Lucius ; ' the cello ?' ' I play most stringed instruments,' the other answered carelessly. VOL. I. E 50 LUCIUS DAVOREN. * The piano ?' 'Yes, I play the piano. A man has fingers ; what is there strange in his using them ?' ' Nothing ; only one wonders that you should he content to hide so many accomplishments in the backwoods.' Matchi shrugged his lean shoulders. * There are a thousand various reasons why a man should grow tired of his own particular world/ he said. ' To say nothing of the possibility that a man's own particular world may grow tired of him/ re- turned Lucius. Instead of himself and his own affairs — that subject which exalts the most ungifted speaker into eloquence — the stranger spoke of men and manners, the things he had seen from the outside as a mere spectator; the books he had read, and they were legion. Never was a brain stocked with a more heterogeneous collection of ideas. Queer books, out- of-the-way books, had evidently formed his favourite study. Geoffrey heard, and was amused. Lucius heard, and wondered, and rendered to this man that unwilling respect which we give to intellect unallied with the virtues. Thus three days and nights went by, somewhat ' all's cheerless, dark, and deadly.' 51 less slowly than the days had gone of late. On the morning of the fourth the stranger grew impatient — paced the narrow bounds of his hut like an impri- soned jaguar. ' Death lies yonder, I doubt not,' he said, point- ing to the forest, ' while here there is the possibility — a mere possibility — that we may outlive our troubles ; that some luckier band of emigrants may come this way to succour us before we expire. But I tell you frankly, my friends, that I can't stand this sort of life three days longer — to sit down and wait for death, arms folded, without so much as a pipe of tobacco to lull the fever in one's brain. That needs a Eoman courage which I possess not. I shall not trouble your hospitality much longer.' ' What will you do ?' asked Geoffrey. *Push ahead. I have my chart here,' touching" his forehead. ' I shall push on towards the Pacific with no better guide than the stars. I can but perish ; better to be frozen to death on the march — like a team of sleigh-dogs I saw^ once by the Sas- katchewan, standing stark and stiff in the snow, as their drivers had left them — than to sit and doze by the fire here till Death comes in his slowest and most hideous shape — death by famine.' *You had better stay with us and share our v