James Oliver Curwood - "Nomads Of The North"

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PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

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NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

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'You think of returning to Nice this afternoon?' she inquired.

De Stancy informed her that such was his intention, and asked
if he could do anything for her there.

Then, he remembered, she had hesitated. 'I have received a
telegram,' she said at length; and so she allowed to escape
her bit by bit the information that her architect, whose name
she seemed reluctant to utter, had travelled from England to
Nice that week, partly to consult her, partly for a holiday
trip; that he had gone on to Monte Carlo, had there lost his
money and got into difficulties, and had appealed to her to
help him out of them by the immediate advance of some ready
cash. It was a sad case, an unexpected case, she murmured,
with her eyes fixed on the window. Indeed she could not
comprehend it.

To De Stancy there appeared nothing so very extraordinary in
Somerset's apparent fiasco, except in so far as that he should
have applied to Paula for relief from his distresses instead
of elsewhere. It was a self-humiliation which a lover would
have avoided at all costs, he thought. Yet after a momentary
reflection on his theory of Somerset's character, it seemed
sufficiently natural that he should lean persistently on
Paula, if only with a view of keeping himself linked to her
memory, without thinking too profoundly of his own dignity.
That the esteem in which she had held Somerset up to that hour
suffered a tremendous blow by his apparent scrape was clearly
visible in her, reticent as she was; and De Stancy, while
pitying Somerset, thanked him in his mind for having
gratuitously given a rival an advantage which that rival's
attentions had never been able to gain of themselves.

After a little further conversation she had said: 'Since you
are to be my messenger, I must tell you that I have decided to
send the hundred pounds asked for, and you will please to
deliver them into no hands but his own.' A curious little
blush crept over her sobered face--perhaps it was a blush of
shame at the conduct of the young man in whom she had of late
been suspiciously interested--as she added, 'He will be on the
Pont-Neuf at four this afternoon and again at eleven tomorrow.
Can you meet him there?'

'Certainly,' De Stancy replied.

She then asked him, rather anxiously, how he could account for
Mr. Somerset knowing that he, Captain De Stancy, was about to
return to Nice?

De Stancy informed her that he left word at the hotel of his
intention to return, which was quite true; moreover, there did
not lurk in his mind at the moment of speaking the faintest
suspicion that Somerset had seen Dare.

She then tied the bag and handed it to him, leaving him with a
serene and impenetrable bearing, which he hoped for his own
sake meant an acquired indifference to Somerset and his
fortunes. Her sending the architect a sum of money which she
could easily spare might be set down to natural generosity
towards a man with whom she was artistically co-operating for
the improvement of her home.

She came back to him again for a moment. 'Could you possibly
get there before four this afternoon?' she asked, and he
informed her that he could just do so by leaving almost at
once, which he was very willing to do, though by so
forestalling his time he would lose the projected morning with
her and the rest at the Palazzo Doria.

'I may tell you that I shall not go to the Palazzo Doria
either, if it is any consolation to you to know it,' was her
reply. 'I shall sit indoors and think of you on your
journey.'

The answer admitted of two translations, and conjectures
thereon filled the gallant soldier's mind during the greater
part of the journey. He arrived at the hotel they had all
stayed at in succession about six hours after Somerset had
left it for a little excursion to San Remo and its
neighbourhood, as a means of passing a few days till Paula
should write again to inquire why he had not come on. De
Stancy saw no one he knew, and in obedience to Paula's
commands he promptly set off on foot for the Pont-Neuf.

Though opposed to the architect as a lover, De Stancy felt for
him as a poor devil in need of money, having had experiences
of that sort himself, and he was really anxious that the
needful supply entrusted to him should reach Somerset's hands.
He was on the bridge five minutes before the hour, and when
the clock struck a hand was laid on his shoulder: turning he
beheld Dare.

Knowing that the youth was loitering somewhere along the
coast, for they had frequently met together on De Stancy's
previous visit, the latter merely said, 'Don't bother me for
the present, Willy, I have an engagement. You can see me at
the hotel this evening.'

'When you have given me the hundred pounds I will fly like a
rocket, captain,' said the young gentleman. 'I keep the
appointment instead of the other man.'

De Stancy looked hard at him. 'How--do you know about this?'
he asked breathlessly.

'I have seen him.'

De Stancy took the young man by the two shoulders and gazed
into his eyes. The scrutiny seemed not altogether to remove
the suspicion which had suddenly started up in his mind. 'My
soul,' he said, dropping his arms, 'can this be true?'

'What?'

'You know.'

Dare shrugged his shoulders; 'Are you going to hand over the
money or no?' he said.

'I am going to make inquiries,' said De Stancy, walking away
with a vehement tread.

'Captain, you are without natural affection,' said Dare,
walking by his side, in a tone which showed his fear that he
had over-estimated that emotion. 'See what I have done for
you. You have been my constant care and anxiety for I can't
tell how long. I have stayed awake at night thinking how I
might best give you a good start in the world by arranging
this judicious marriage, when you have been sleeping as sound
as a top with no cares upon your mind at all, and now I have
got into a scrape--as the most thoughtful of us may sometimes-
-you go to make inquiries.'

'I have promised the lady to whom this money belongs--whose
generosity has been shamefully abused in some way--that I will
deliver it into no hands but those of one man, and he has not
yet appeared. I therefore go to find him.'

Dare laid his hand upon De Stancy's arm. 'Captain, we are
both warm, and punctilious on points of honour; this will come
to a split between us if we don't mind. So, not to bring
matters to a crisis, lend me ten pounds here to enable me to
get home, and I'll disappear.'

In a state bordering on distraction, eager to get the young
man out of his sight before worse revelations should rise up
between them, De Stancy without pausing in his walk gave him
the sum demanded. He soon reached the post-office, where he
inquired if a Mr. Somerset had left any directions for
forwarding letters.

It was just what Somerset had done. De Stancy was told that
Mr. Somerset had commanded that any letters should be sent on
to him at the Hotel Victoria, San Remo.

It was now evident that the scheme of getting money from Paula
was either of Dare's invention, or that Somerset, ashamed of
his first impulse, had abandoned it as speedily as it had been
formed. De Stancy turned and went out. Dare, in keeping with
his promise, had vanished. Captain De Stancy resolved to do
nothing in the case till further events should enlighten him,
beyond sending a line to Miss Power to inform her that
Somerset had not appeared, and that he therefore retained the
money for further instructions.




BOOK THE FIFTH. DE STANCY AND PAULA.


I.

Miss Power was reclining on a red velvet couch in the bedroom
of an old-fashioned red hotel at Strassburg, and her friend
Miss De Stancy was sitting by a window of the same apartment.
They were both rather wearied by a long journey of the
previous day. The hotel overlooked the large open Kleber
Platz, erect in the midst of which the bronze statue of
General Kleber received the rays of a warm sun that was
powerless to brighten him. The whole square, with its people
and vehicles going to and fro as if they had plenty of time,
was visible to Charlotte in her chair; but Paula from her
horizontal position could see nothing below the level of the
many dormered house-tops on the opposite side of the Platz.
After watching this upper storey of the city for some time in
silence, she asked Charlotte to hand her a binocular lying on
the table, through which instrument she quietly regarded the
distant roofs.

'What strange and philosophical creatures storks are,' she
said. 'They give a taciturn, ghostly character to the whole
town.'

The birds were crossing and recrossing the field of the glass
in their flight hither and thither between the Strassburg
chimneys, their sad grey forms sharply outlined against the
sky, and their skinny legs showing beneath like the limbs of
dead martyrs in Crivelli's emaciated imaginings. The
indifference of these birds to all that was going on beneath
them impressed her: to harmonize with their solemn and silent
movements the houses beneath should have been deserted, and
grass growing in the streets.

Behind the long roofs thus visible to Paula over the window-
sill, with their tiers of dormer-windows, rose the cathedral
spire in airy openwork, forming the highest object in the
scene; it suggested something which for a long time she
appeared unwilling to utter; but natural instinct had its way.

'A place like this,' she said, 'where he can study Gothic
architecture, would, I should have thought, be a spot more
congenial to him than Monaco.'

The person referred to was the misrepresented Somerset, whom
the two had been gingerly discussing from time to time,
allowing any casual subject, such as that of the storks, to
interrupt the personal one at every two or three sentences.

'It would be more like him to be here,' replied Miss De
Stancy, trusting her tongue with only the barest generalities
on this matter.

Somerset was again dismissed for the stork topic, but Paula
could not let him alone; and she presently resumed, as if an
irresistible fascination compelled what judgment had
forbidden: 'The strongest-minded persons are sometimes caught
unawares at that place, if they once think they will retrieve
their first losses; and I am not aware that he is particularly
strong-minded.'

For a moment Charlotte looked at her with a mixed expression,
in which there was deprecation that a woman with any feeling
should criticize Somerset so frigidly, and relief that it was
Paula who did so. For, notwithstanding her assumption that
Somerset could never be anything more to her than he was
already, Charlotte's heart would occasionally step down and
trouble her views so expressed.

Whether looking through a glass at distant objects enabled
Paula to bottle up her affection for the absent one, or
whether her friend Charlotte had so little personality in
Paula's regard that she could commune with her as with a lay
figure, it was certain that she evinced remarkable ease in
speaking of Somerset, resuming her words about him in the tone
of one to whom he was at most an ordinary professional
adviser. 'It would be very awkward for the works at the
castle if he has got into a scrape. I suppose the builders
were well posted with instructions before he left: but he
ought certainly to return soon. Why did he leave England at
all just now?'

'Perhaps it was to see you.'

'He should have waited; it would not have been so dreadfully
long to May or June. Charlotte, how can a man who does such a
hare-brained thing as this be deemed trustworthy in an
important work like that of rebuilding Stancy Castle?'

There was such stress in the inquiry that, whatever
factitiousness had gone before, Charlotte perceived Paula to
be at last speaking her mind; and it seemed as if Somerset
must have considerably lost ground in her opinion, or she
would not have criticized him thus.

'My brother will tell us full particulars when he comes:
perhaps it is not at all as we suppose,' said Charlotte. She
strained her eyes across the Platz and added, 'He ought to
have been here before this time.'

While they waited and talked, Paula still observing the
storks, the hotel omnibus came round the corner from the
station. 'I believe he has arrived,' resumed Miss De Stancy;
'I see something that looks like his portmanteau on the top of
the omnibus. . . . Yes; it is his baggage. I'll run down to
him.'

De Stancy had obtained six weeks' additional leave on account
of his health, which had somewhat suffered in India. The
first use he made of his extra time was in hastening back to
meet the travelling ladies here at Strassburg. Mr. Power and
Mrs. Goodman were also at the hotel, and when Charlotte got
downstairs, the former was welcoming De Stancy at the door.

Paula had not seen him since he set out from Genoa for Nice,
commissioned by her to deliver the hundred pounds to Somerset.
His note, stating that he had failed to meet Somerset,
contained no details, and she guessed that he would soon
appear before her now to answer any question about that
peculiar errand.

Her anticipations were justified by the event; she had no
sooner gone into the next sitting-room than Charlotte De
Stancy appeared and asked if her brother might come up. The
closest observer would have been in doubt whether Paula's
ready reply in the affirmative was prompted by personal
consideration for De Stancy, or by a hope to hear more of his
mission to Nice. As soon as she had welcomed him she reverted
at once to the subject.

'Yes, as I told you, he was not at the place of meeting,' De
Stancy replied. And taking from his pocket the bag of ready
money he placed it intact upon the table.

De Stancy did this with a hand that shook somewhat more than a
long railway journey was adequate to account for; and in truth
it was the vision of Dare's position which agitated the
unhappy captain: for had that young man, as De Stancy feared,
been tampering with Somerset's name, his fate now trembled in
the balance; Paula would unquestionably and naturally invoke
the aid of the law against him if she discovered such an
imposition.

'Were you punctual to the time mentioned?' she asked
curiously.

De Stancy replied in the affirmative.

'Did you wait long?' she continued.

'Not very long,' he answered, his instinct to screen the
possibly guilty one confining him to guarded statements, while
still adhering to the literal truth.

'Why was that?'

'Somebody came and told me that he would not appear.'

'Who?'

'A young man who has been acting as his clerk. His name is
Dare. He informed me that Mr. Somerset could not keep the
appointment.'

'Why?'

'He had gone on to San Remo.'

'Has he been travelling with Mr. Somerset?'

'He had been with him. They know each other very well. But
as you commissioned me to deliver the money into no hands but
Mr. Somerset's, I adhered strictly to your instructions.'

'But perhaps my instructions were not wise. Should it in your
opinion have been sent by this young man? Was he commissioned
to ask you for it?'

De Stancy murmured that Dare was not commissioned to ask for
it; that upon the whole he deemed her instructions wise; and
was still of opinion that the best thing had been done.

Although De Stancy was distracted between his desire to
preserve Dare from the consequences of folly, and a
gentlemanly wish to keep as close to the truth as was
compatible with that condition, his answers had not appeared
to Paula to be particularly evasive, the conjuncture being one
in which a handsome heiress's shrewdness was prone to overleap
itself by setting down embarrassment on the part of the man
she questioned to a mere lover's difficulty in steering
between honour and rivalry.

She put but one other question. 'Did it appear as if he, Mr.
Somerset, after telegraphing, had--had--regretted doing so,
and evaded the result by not keeping the appointment?'

'That's just how it appears.' The words, which saved Dare
from ignominy, cost De Stancy a good deal. He was sorry for
Somerset, sorry for himself, and very sorry for Paula. But
Dare was to De Stancy what Somerset could never be: and 'for
his kin that is near unto him shall a man be defiled.'

After that interview Charlotte saw with warring impulses that
Somerset slowly diminished in Paula's estimate; slowly as the
moon wanes, but as certainly. Charlotte's own love was of a
clinging, uncritical sort, and though the shadowy intelligence
of Somerset's doings weighed down her soul with regret, it
seemed to make not the least difference in her affection for
him.

In the afternoon the whole party, including De Stancy, drove
about the streets. Here they looked at the house in which
Goethe had lived, and afterwards entered the cathedral.
Observing in the south transept a crowd of people waiting
patiently, they were reminded that they unwittingly stood in
the presence of the popular clock-work of Schwilgue.

Mr. Power and Mrs. Goodman decided that they would wait with
the rest of the idlers and see the puppets perform at the
striking. Charlotte also waited with them; but as it wanted
eight minutes to the hour, and as Paula had seen the show
before, she moved on into the nave.

Presently she found that De Stancy had followed. He did not
come close till she, seeing him stand silent, said, 'If it
were not for this cathedral, I should not like the city at
all; and I have even seen cathedrals I like better. Luckily
we are going on to Baden to-morrow.'

'Your uncle has just told me. He has asked me to keep you
company.'

'Are you intending to?' said Paula, probing the base-moulding
of a pier with her parasol.

'I have nothing better to do, nor indeed half so good,' said
De Stancy. 'I am abroad for my health, you know, and what's
like the Rhine and its neighbourhood in early summer, before
the crowd comes? It is delightful to wander about there, or
anywhere, like a child, influenced by no fixed motive more
than that of keeping near some friend, or friends, including
the one we most admire in the world.'

'That sounds perilously like love-making.'

''Tis love indeed.'

'Well, love is natural to men, I suppose,' rejoined the young
lady. 'But you must love within bounds; or you will be
enervated, and cease to be useful as a heavy arm of the
service.'

'My dear Miss Power, your didactic and respectable rules won't
do for me. If you expect straws to stop currents, you are
sadly mistaken! But no--let matters be: I am a happy
contented mortal at present, say what you will. . . . You
don't ask why? Perhaps you know. It is because all I care
for in the world is near me, and that I shall never be more
than a hundred yards from her as long as the present
arrangement continues.'

'We are in a cathedral, remember, Captain De Stancy, and
should not keep up a secular conversation.'

'If I had never said worse in a cathedral than what I have
said here, I should be content to meet my eternal judge
without absolution. Your uncle asked me this morning how I
liked you.'

'Well, there was no harm in that.'

'How I like you! Harm, no; but you should have seen how silly
I looked. Fancy the inadequacy of the expression when my
whole sense is absorbed by you.'

'Men allow themselves to be made ridiculous by their own
feelings in an inconceivable way.'

'True, I am a fool; but forgive me,' he rejoined, observing
her gaze, which wandered critically from roof to clerestory,
and then to the pillars, without once lighting on him. 'Don't
mind saying Yes.--You look at this thing and that thing, but
you never look at me, though I stand here and see nothing but
you.'

'There, the clock is striking--and the cock crows. Please go
across to the transept and tell them to come out this way.'

De Stancy went. When he had gone a few steps he turned his
head. She had at last ceased to study the architecture, and
was looking at him. Perhaps his words had struck her, for it
seemed at that moment as if he read in her bright eyes a
genuine interest in him and his fortunes.



II.

Next day they went on to Baden. De Stancy was beginning to
cultivate the passion of love even more as an escape from the
gloomy relations of his life than as matrimonial strategy.
Paula's juxtaposition had the attribute of making him forget
everything in his own history. She was a magic alterative;
and the most foolish boyish shape into which he could throw
his feelings for her was in this respect to be aimed at as the
act of highest wisdom.

He supplemented the natural warmth of feeling that she had
wrought in him by every artificial means in his power, to make
the distraction the more complete. He had not known anything
like this self-obscuration for a dozen years, and when he
conjectured that she might really learn to love him he felt
exalted in his own eyes and purified from the dross of his
former life. Such uneasiness of conscience as arose when he
suddenly remembered Dare, and the possibility that Somerset
was getting ousted unfairly, had its weight in depressing him;
but he was inclined to accept his fortune without much
question.

The journey to Baden, though short, was not without incidents
on which he could work out this curious hobby of cultivating
to superlative power an already positive passion. Handing her
in and out of the carriage, accidentally getting brushed by
her clothes, of all such as this he made available fuel.
Paula, though she might have guessed the general nature of
what was going on, seemed unconscious of the refinements he
was trying to throw into it, and sometimes, when in stepping
into or from a railway carriage she unavoidably put her hand
upon his arm, the obvious insignificance she attached to the
action struck him with misgiving.

One of the first things they did at Baden was to stroll into
the Trink-halle, where Paula sipped the water. She was about
to put down the glass, when De Stancy quickly took it from her
hands as though to make use of it himself.

'O, if that is what you mean,' she said mischievously, 'you
should have noticed the exact spot. It was there.' She put
her finger on a particular portion of its edge.

'You ought not to act like that, unless you mean something,
Miss Power,' he replied gravely.

'Tell me more plainly.'

'I mean, you should not do things which excite in me the hope
that you care something for me, unless you really do.'

'I put my finger on the edge and said it was there.'

'Meaning, "It was there my lips touched; let yours do the
same."'

'The latter part I wholly deny,' she answered, with disregard,
after which she went away, and kept between Charlotte and her
aunt for the rest of the afternoon.

Since the receipt of the telegram Paula had been frequently
silent; she frequently stayed in alone, and sometimes she
became quite gloomy--an altogether unprecedented phase for
her. This was the case on the morning after the incident in
the Trink-halle. Not to intrude on her, Charlotte walked
about the landings of the sunny white hotel in which they had
taken up their quarters, went down into the court, and petted
the tortoises that were creeping about there among the flowers
and plants; till at last, on going to her friend, she caught
her reading some old letters of Somerset's.

Paula made no secret of them, and Miss De Stancy could see
that more than half were written on blue paper, with diagrams
amid the writing: they were, in fact, simply those sheets of
his letters which related to the rebuilding. Nevertheless,
Charlotte fancied she had caught Paula in a sentimental mood;
and doubtless could Somerset have walked in at this moment
instead of Charlotte it might have fared well with him, so
insidiously do tender memories reassert themselves in the face
of outward mishaps.

They took a drive down the Lichtenthal road and then into the
forest, De Stancy and Abner Power riding on horseback
alongside. The sun streamed yellow behind their backs as they
wound up the long inclines, lighting the red trunks, and even
the blue-black foliage itself. The summer had already made
impression upon that mass of uniform colour by tipping every
twig with a tiny sprout of virescent yellow; while the minute
sounds which issued from the forest revealed that the
apparently still place was becoming a perfect reservoir of
insect life.

Abner Power was quite sentimental that day. 'In such places
as these,' he said, as he rode alongside Mrs. Goodman,
'nature's powers in the multiplication of one type strike me
as much as the grandeur of the mass.'

Mrs. Goodman agreed with him, and Paula said, 'The foliage
forms the roof of an interminable green crypt, the pillars
being the trunks, and the vault the interlacing boughs.'

'It is a fine place in a thunderstorm,' said De Stancy. 'I am
not an enthusiast, but to see the lightning spring hither and
thither, like lazy-tongs, bristling, and striking, and
vanishing, is rather impressive.'

'It must be indeed,' said Paula.

'And in the winter winds these pines sigh like ten thousand
spirits in trouble.'

'Indeed they must,' said Paula.

'At the same time I know a little fir-plantation about a mile
square not far from Markton,' said De Stancy, 'which is
precisely like this in miniature,--stems, colours, slopes,
winds, and all. If we were to go there any time with a highly
magnifying pair of spectacles it would look as fine as this--
and save a deal of travelling.'