Chapter XII

They were both silent as they thought of the immensity of this: the convoy by the dead. Ivan, always something of a mystic, caught fire at once and leaned toward her in deepest interest. “Peter’s spirit has held me up, all the way through,” she told him in a soft monotone that did not in the least conceal her emotion. “It kept me from being afraid, all these days—and has comforted me when the wind blew—and during those long hours that I watched for the _Warrior_ to return. Of course he would be here—we’re just beside his grave. And I think the reason why I was so appalled and depressed at the thought of taking that long, dangerous trip in the dory was that it seemed to me he wouldn’t be there to watch over me. He wouldn’t go away from these shores.”

“It’s not very flattering to me—that the ghost of a dead man could be more assurance to you than I.”

“You’ve been a wonderful help too.” She paused, and her face was stark white in the dusk. “Ivan, do you think we could get a message through to him?”

“I don’t know.” Ivan spoke very softly. “The dead have been called back. What do you want to tell him?”

“I don’t want to tell him anything—I feel that he knows my every thought. But I want him to tell me something. I want to know that he has forgiven me for any failure in duty toward him—and I want his advice, how to go on.”

Ivan was fully receptive to her mood, and he sat a moment with bowed head. “We can try, Dorothy,” he said at last. “We can hold a _séance_—surely every advantage is in our favor. As you say, we’re just beside the man’s grave. Fortune Joe is a medicine man, and Bradford described what he called the spirit rite. He might bring a word through. Who knows?”

“Get all five of us, in a circle——?”

“The bigger the circle the better. Among the mediums of our country it seems to work like wireless—the longer the antennæ the clearer the message can come through. This black magic here is something the same. Shall I summon the three men?”

But they chose to walk together to the guides’ quarters, finding the men smoking in comfort before their low fire. “Joe, isn’t it true you are a medium?” Ivan began addressing the witch-doctor. “That you can get word through to the dead? Mr. Bradford told us you had that reputation——”

“Yes. Me talk with dead,” Joe answered simply.

“Then to-night Mrs. Newhall wants you to try to talk with the man who lies buried here.” He pointed to the cross, wan and ghostly itself in the pale light, on the beach but a short distance below the camp. “He was Mrs. Newhall’s husband, as you know—and she wants to get a message from him. Will you be willing to try a _séance_?”

“Don’t know _séance_. Sometime call—no answer. Maybe get answer to-night.”

“You’ll come too, Pavlof—and Pete. We’re going to make a little circle.”

Neither of these two men took these summons lightly. Pavlof believed thoroughly in ghosts, and a lingering trace of Oriental blood made him particularly subject to mysteries of any kind. To Pete, it was the crowning touch of the whole, fantastic tragic-comic adventure. He would sit in the circle that sought for his own soul in the void. Even as he held their hands, they would seek him in the clouds!

Yet there was a solemn air to the little meeting that was held straightway on the grassy land just above the grave. The medium sat between Dorothy and Ivan; Pete was on the other side of Dorothy and Pavlof next to him. Touching hands lightly, they sat intent.

To Pete, it was a scene never to be forgotten: the white cross just behind him, the tattered clouds racing across the sky, these four faces bent on the incongruous quest. Yet no one waited the developments of the evening with more eagerness than he. What if Fortune Joe turned out to be a real mystic; suppose he did, by his magic, succeed in establishing word through to the hereafter, and that he came back with word that Peter Newhall was not of the hereafter, but was sitting in the circle, alive and well! Pete felt that his situation was jeopardized as never before. Dorothy would only need one hint; while it was true that as yet not one suspicion of the truth had entered her mind, it would all flash home to her in an instant, if ever her thought were turned in that direction.

There was no long, tedious period of waiting, to-night. Almost instantly Pete began to feel, in spite of himself, a queer tingling in his arms that slowly encompassed his entire body. He had been somewhat cold before—chilled by the sharp wind—but now physical sensation seemed to die in him, and he lived as in a dream. The whole circle was breathless and expectant.

Pete had a dim idea that some one was knocking at the door of his secret consciousness, trying to get in. There was a sensation of being drawn out of himself; yet the dream-like quality of the moment would not let him analyze it carefully. Fortune Joe had meanwhile gone into what seemed a half-trance: his head was bowed, his face white as if with unutterable agony. They heard him moan softly, in the utter silence.

“What you want?” he mumbled at last. “Me all tangled—spirit keeps floating up there, keeps coming back here. Who you want Joe to call?”

“My husband!” Dorothy answered quickly. “The man who lies here dead—under this cross!”

There was a brief spell of silence, then the native moaned again. There ensued a second of struggle in which liquid fire seemed to leap through the chain of their hands. Then Joe’s trance seemed to deepen.

His head bowed as he seemed to grow limp. Then he lifted a blanched, drawn face.

“Dead man—he here,” he said slowly. “Man—died in the water—lay under cross. What you want?”

“Ask him if he forgives everything,” the girl whispered. Tears softened her voice. “Ask him if I am to go ahead—and do what Ivan wants me to do.”

The medicine man’s blanched face and subdued struggles seemed to indicate tremendous difficulty in getting the questions through, and hearing their answer. His face worked. “You make fun of me,” he moaned softly. “You laugh at me——”

Dorothy cast one indignant glance about the circle, saw that every face was intent and sober, then pressed tight the native’s hand. “Oh, no! We’re not laughing. Get what message you can for me then——”

She waited in ineffable anxiety for this word from beyond the grave. “The man—he here,” the native muttered, half-intelligibly. “He drown—cut up by rocks. He say—‘change the name.’”

This was something concrete, and the girl trembled in the brooding mystery of the moment. “Is that all—to change my name?”

“‘Change name!’ Me no get no more. Everything else all clouded.”

Yet was it not enough? Dorothy did not doubt but that she had her answer. She had always known that messages from the departed came through with the most incredible difficulty; and she did not marvel that these two words were all the native could transmit. To change the name—and surely that meant nothing more or less than to yield her destiny to Ivan. The man who lay dead was willing that she should, by the fact of marriage, disclaim his own proud name and take the name of another.

They waited a while more for further word from the other side; but the medicine man seemed only confused and faltering. “Can you talk to Paul Sarichef?” she asked. “Maybe you can get in touch with him. I want to know that everything is forgiven—over there. That all debts are paid.”

“You want me—call Paul Sarichef?”

“Yes——”

“Why, Dorothy?” Ivan whispered tensely. “He would have no message for you——”

“I want him to try, just the same,” the girl replied. “Can you call him, Joe——”

The native was already calling; and all of them knew that psychic energy expended in that summons was beyond their wit to grasp. Fortune Joe seemed immersed in a terrific struggle that would seemingly rend the spirit from the body. His muscles hardened to iron, he seemed to writhe, lifting his body half off the ground, as if in physical agony; his hands were icy as if in death. “He come,” the witch-doctor muttered at last. “He no want to—he here soon——”

The muttered words grew unintelligible, then ceased. The circle waited for Paul Sarichef—Newhall’s victim of months before—to speak to them from beyond the grave. Pete, yielding at last to the moment’s magic, felt crushed beneath an unspeakable weight of dread. Yet to get the word back seemed beyond the medicine man’s weird powers, for no further words came to his lips, his trance deepened, and the look of strain left his face.

“Hasn’t he anything to say to us?” Dorothy asked, after a long period of waiting. Word of Sarichef’s forgiveness was an urgent need with her. To Pete, the moment had a quality of actual terror; what message might that grim visitor from beyond the grave have for _him_!

But as he waited, Joe himself emerged into their familiar world. He was white and drawn; and he seemed more like a man drowsy with slumber than one who had pierced the greatest of all mysteries. The chain was broken, and he got up.

“Me no try any more to-night,” he said simply. “Maybe some other time.”

The girl gave him a smile of heartfelt gratitude. “Thank you for what you’ve given me,” she told him earnestly. “You’ve answered my greatest question—I really don’t need to know any more.”

It was true; she felt that the one great problem of her life was solved. “Change the name.” Such had been the message from beyond. There could be but one meaning. There was no need of hesitating longer. Peter himself, from beyond the grave, had urged her to the course over which she had faltered so long.

Ivan, at the door of the tent, read the truth in her radiant face. He reached her hands, then drew her slowly toward him. “Do you know now?” he asked, holding her and peering down into her luminous eyes.

No matter what his beliefs had previously been, she knew that the developments of the _séance_ had moved him deeply, too. He had made the same interpretation of the half-muttered message from beyond as she had made—the only interpretation conceivable to either of them—and he not only believed in it sincerely, but it had moved and thrilled him to the uttermost depths.

“I know now,” she told him tremulously. “Ivan—you can have my promise, now I know that it’s Peter’s wish as well as my own. He wouldn’t advise me wrong.”

“Then I’ve won you at last?”

“Yes. When we come home again.”

He would not urge her, to-night, for anything more. For the time being it was enough that she had definitely engaged herself to him. His plan of immediate marriage, the Russian priest officiating, could be discussed at another hour. He kissed gently, triumphantly, her soft, yielding lips.

From the door of his hut Pete saw their forms in the dusk, the girl’s white blouse and the man’s encircling arms. He guessed the truth: that this was the first kiss of their definite betrothal. Despair swept over him like a great wave of the sea he had once battled, but the madness, the haunting and torturing jealousy, was spared him now. He had conquered that; and he must never let it sweep him into hell again.

Her happiness had been his happiness, all the way through; and such must be his consolation now. He must give them his blessing—not hypocritically, not grudgingly, not with half-felt sentimentality, but with his whole heart and soul; otherwise he must forever burn at the stake of his own misgivings. When at last they sailed away, out of his life and out of this wretched, desolate land where he must live out the rest of his days, it must be with a prayer for their happy voyage, rather than for his own loneliness in the open places where he must make his solitary camps. He must wish them a whole-hearted godspeed.

They would sail soon now. Ivan would go for help within two days more, and when he returned, they would row away together out of his life, about the curve of the world and vanish at last in the haze. To-night was the beginning of the end.

He could not complain. It had all been worth while. He did not even feel resentment for the strange, ironic outcome of the _séance_,—the message out of the void that had made up Dorothy’s mind and which had been attributed to Peter Newhall. Peter Newhall alone, of all people on earth, guessed the possible significance of that cryptic message; and a grim, mirthless smile played at his lips, but there were shadows in his blue eyes.