PAGE 4
The Whisperer
by
Left alone, the man by the reedy lake stood watching them until they were out of view. The song came back to him, echoing across the waters:
“‘Oh, come, let us camp on the North Trail together,
With the night-fires lit and the tent-pegs down.'”
The sunset glow, the girl’s presence, had given him a moment’s illusion, had absorbed him for a moment, acting on his deadened nature like a narcotic at once soothing and stimulating. As some wild animal in a forgotten land, coming upon ruins of a vast civilization, towers, temples and palaces, in the golden glow of an Eastern evening, stands abashed and vaguely wondering, having neither reason to understand nor feeling to enjoy, yet is arrested and abashed, so he stood. He had lived the last three years so much alone, had been cut off so completely from his kind–had lived so much alone. Yet to-night, at last, he would not be alone.
Some one was coming to-night, some one whom he had not seen for a long time. Letters had passed, the object of the visit had been defined, and he had spent the intervening days since the last letter had arrived, now agitated, now apathetic and sullen, now struggling with some invisible being that kept whispering in his ear, saying to him: “It was the price of fire and blood and shame. You did it–you–you–you! You are down, and you will never get up. You can only go lower still–fire and blood and shame!”
Criminal as he was, he had never become hardened, he had only become degraded. Crime was not his vocation. He had no gift for it; still, the crime he had committed had never been discovered–the crime that he did with others. There were himself and Dupont and another. Dupont was coming to-night–Dupont, who had profited by the crime, and had not spent his profits, but had built upon them to further profit; for Dupont was avaricious and prudent, and a born criminal. Dupont had never had any compunctions or remorse, had never lost a night’s sleep because of what they two had done, instigated thereto by the other, who had paid them so well for the dark thing.
The other was Henderley, the financier. He was worse perhaps than Dupont, for he was in a different sphere of life, was rich beyond counting, and had been early nurtured in quiet Christian surroundings. The spirit of ambition, rivalry, and the methods of a degenerate and cruel finance had seized him, mastered him; so that, under the cloak of power–as a toreador hides the blade under the red cloth before his enemy the toro–he held a sword of capital which did cruel and vicious things, at last becoming criminal also. Henderley had incited and paid; the others, Dupont and Lygon, had acted and received. Henderley had had no remorse, none at any rate that weighed upon him, for he had got used to ruining rivals and seeing strong men go down, and those who had fought him come to beg or borrow of him in the end. He had seen more than one commit suicide, and those they loved go down and farther down, and he had helped these up a little, but not near enough to put them near his own plane again; and he could not see–it never occurred to him–that he had done any evil to them. Dupont thought upon his crimes now and then, and his heart hardened, for he had no moral feeling; Henderley did not think at all. It was left to the man of the reedy lake to pay the penalty of apprehension, to suffer the effects of crime upon a nature not naturally criminal.
Again and again, how many hundreds of times, had Roger Lygon seen in his sleep–had even seen awake, so did hallucination possess him–the new cattle trail he had fired for scores of miles. The fire had destroyed the grass over millions of acres, two houses had been burned and three people had lost their lives; all to satisfy the savage desire of one man, to destroy the chance of a cattle trade over a great section of country for the railway which was to compete with his own–an act which, in the end, was futile, failed of its purpose. Dupont and Lygon had been paid their price, and had disappeared and been forgotten–they were but pawns in his game–and there was no proof against Henderley. Henderley had forgotten. Lygon wished to forget, but Dupont remembered, and meant now to reap fresh profit by the remembrance.