At first, when the work and his surroundings were strange to him, Harold did many useless things and ran many unnecessary risks. But his knowledge grew with experience. Privations he had in plenty; and all the fibre of his body and the strength of his resolution and endurance were now and again taxed to their utmost. But with a man of his nature and race the breaking strain is high; and endurance and resolution are qualities which develop with practice.
Gradually his mind came back to normal level; he had won seemingly through the pain that shadowed him. Without anguish5 he could now think, remember, look forward. Then it was that the kindly6 wisdom of the American came back to him, and came to stay. He began to examine himself as to his own part of the unhappy transaction; and stray moments of wonderment came as to whether the fault may not, at the very base, have his own. He began to realise that it is insufficient7 in this strenuous world to watch and wait; to suppress one’s self; to put aside, in the wish to benefit others, all the hopes, ambitions, cravings which make for personal gain.
Thus it was that Harold’s thoughts, ever circling round Stephen, came back with increasing insistence8 to his duty towards her. He often thought, and with a bitter feeling against himself that it came too late, of the dying trust of her father:
‘Guard her and cherish her, as if you were indeed my son and she your sister . . . If it should be that you and Stephen should find that there is another affection between you remember I sanction it. But give her time! I trust that to you! She is young, and the world is all before her. Let her choose . . . And be loyal to her, if it is another! It may be a hard task; but I trust you, Harold!’
Here he would groan9, as all the anguish of the past would rush back upon him; and keenest of all would be the fear, suspicion, thought which grew towards belief, that he may have betrayed that trust. . . .
At first the side of this memory personal to his own happiness was faintly emphasised; the important side was of the duty to Stephen. But as time went on the other thought became a sort of corollary; a timid, halting, blushing thought which followed sheepishly, borne down by trembling hope. No matter what adventure came to him, the thought of neglected duty returned ever afresh. Once, when he lay sick for weeks in an Indian wigwam, the idea so grew with each day of the monotony, that when he was able to crawl out by himself into the sunshine he had almost made up his mind to start back for home.
Luck is a strange thing. It seems in some mysterious way to be the divine machinery10 for adjusting averages. Whatever may be the measure of happiness or unhappiness, good or evil, allotted11 to anyone, luck is the cause or means of counter-balancing so that the main result reaches the standard set.
From the time of Harold’s illness Dame12 Fortune seemed to change her attitude to him. The fierce frown, nay13! the malignant14 scowl15, to which he had become accustomed, changed to a smile. Hitherto everything seemed to have gone wrong with him; but now all at once all seemed to go right. He grew strong and hardy16 again. Indeed, he seemed by contrast to his late helplessness to be so strong and hard that it looked as if that very illness had done him good instead of harm. Game was plentiful17, and he never seemed to want. Everywhere he went there were traces of gold, as though by some instinct he was tracking it to its home. He did not value gold for its own sake; but he did for the ardour of the search. Harold was essentially18 a man, and as a man an adventurer. To such a man of such a race adventure is the very salt of existence.
The adventurer’s instinct took with it the adventurer’s judgment19; Harold was not content with small results. Amidst the vast primeval forces there were, he felt, vast results of their prehistoric20 working; and he determined21 to find some of them. In such a quest, purpose is much. It was hardly any wonder, then, that in time Harold found himself alone in the midst of one of the great treasure-places of the world. Only labour was needed to take from the earth riches beyond the dreams of avarice22. But that labour was no easy problem; great and difficult distance had to be overcome; secrecy23 must be observed, for even a whisper of the existence of such a place would bring a horde24 of desperadoes. But all these difficulties were at least sources of interest, if not in themselves pleasures. The new Harold, seemingly freshly created by a year of danger and strenuous toil25, of self-examining and humiliation26, of the realisation of duty, and—though he knew it not as yet—of the dawning of hope, found delight in the thought of dangers and difficulties to be overcome. Having taken his bearings exactly so as to be safe in finding the place again, he took his specimens27 with him and set out to find the shortest and best route to the nearest port.
At length he came to the port and set quietly about finding men. This he did very carefully and very systematically28. Finally, with the full complement29, and with ample supply of stores, he started on his expedition to the new goldfields.
It is not purposed to set out here the extraordinary growth of Robinson City, for thus the mining camp soon became. Its history has long ago been told for all the world. In the early days, when everything had to be organised and protected, Harold worked like a giant, and with a system and energy which from the first established him as a master. But when the second year of his exile was coming to a close, and Robinson City was teeming30 with life and commerce, when banks and police and soldiers made life and property comparatively safe, he began to be restless again. This was not the life to which he had set himself. He had gone into the wilderness to be away from cities and from men; and here a city had sprung up around him and men claimed him as their chief. Moreover, with the restless feeling there began to come back to him the old thoughts and the old pain.
But he felt strong enough by this time to look forward in life as well as backward. With him now to think was to act; so much at least he had gained from his position of dominance in an upspringing city. He quietly consolidated31 such outlying interests as he had, placed the management of his great estate in the hands of a man he had learned to trust, and giving out that he was going to San Francisco to arrange some business, left Robinson City. He had already accumulated such a fortune that the world was before him in any way he might choose to take.
Knowing that at San Francisco, to which he had booked, he would have to run the gauntlet of certain of his friends and business connections, he made haste to leave the ship quietly at Portland, the first point she touched on her southern journey. Thence he got on the Canadian Pacific Line and took his way to Montreal.
What most arrested his attention, and in a very disconcerting way, were the glimpses of English life one sees reproduced so faithfully here and there in Canada. The whole of the past rushed back on him so overpoweringly that he was for the moment unnerved. The acute feeling of course soon became mitigated32; but it was the beginning of a re-realisation of what had been, and which grew stronger with each mile as the train swept back eastward33.
At first he tried to fight it; tried with all the resources of his strong nature. His mind was made up, he assured himself over and over again. The past was past, and what had been was no more to him than to any of the other passengers of the train. Destiny had long ago fulfilled itself. Stephen no doubt had by now found some one worthy34 of her and had married. In no dream, sleeping or waking, could he ever admit that she had married Leonard; that was the only gleam of comfort in what had grown to be remorse35 for his neglected duty.
And so it was that Harold An Wolf slowly drifted, though he knew it not, into something of the same intellectual position which had dominated him when he had started on his journeying and the sunset fell nightly on his despairing face. The life in the wilderness, and then in the dominance and masterdom of enterprise, had hardened and strengthened him into more self-reliant manhood, giving him greater forbearance and a more practical view of things.
When he took ship in the Dominion36, a large cargo-boat with some passengers running to London, he had a vague purpose of visiting in secret Norcester, whence he could manage to find out how matters were at Normanstand. He would then, he felt, be in a better position to regulate his further movements. He knew that he had already a sufficient disguise in his great beard. He had nothing to fear from the tracing of him on his journey from Alaska or the interest of his fellow-passengers. He had all along been so fortunate as to be able to keep his identity concealed37. The name John Robinson told nothing in itself, and the width of a whole great continent lay between him and the place of his fame. He was able to take his part freely amongst both the passengers and the officers. Even amongst the crew he soon came to be known; the men liked his geniality38, and instinctively39 respected his enormous strength and his manifest force of character. Men who work and who know danger soon learn to recognise the forces which overcome both. And as sufficient time had not elapsed to impair40 his hardihood or lower his vast strength he was facile princeps. And so the crew acknowledged him; to them he was a born Captain whom to obey would be a natural duty.
After some days the weather changed. The great ship, which usually rested even-keeled on two waves, and whose bilge keels under normal conditions rendered rolling impossible, began to pitch and roll like a leviathan at play. The decks, swept by gigantic seas, were injured wherever was anything to injure. Bulwarks41 were torn away as though they had been compact of paper. More than once the double doors at the head of the companion stairs had been driven in. The bull’s eye glasses of some of the ports were beaten from their brazen42 sockets43. Nearly all the boats had been wrecked44, broken or torn from their cranes as the great ship rolled heavily in the trough, or giant waves had struck her till she quivered like a frightened horse.
At that season she sailed on the far northern course. Driven still farther north by the gales45, she came within a short way of south of Greenland. Then avoiding Moville, which should have been her place of call, she ran down the east of Britain, the wild weather still prevailing46.
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1
strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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fraught
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| adj.充满…的，伴有(危险等)的；忧虑的 | |
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strife
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| n.争吵，冲突，倾轧，竞争 | |
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anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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7
insufficient
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| adj.(for，of)不足的，不够的 | |
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insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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groan
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| vi./n.呻吟，抱怨；(发出)呻吟般的声音 | |
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machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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allotted
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| 分配，拨给，摊派( allot的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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12
dame
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| n.女士 | |
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nay
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| adv.不；n.反对票，投反对票者 | |
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malignant
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| adj.恶性的，致命的；恶意的，恶毒的 | |
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scowl
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| vi.(at)生气地皱眉，沉下脸，怒视；n.怒容 | |
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16
hardy
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| adj.勇敢的，果断的，吃苦的；耐寒的 | |
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plentiful
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| adj.富裕的，丰富的 | |
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18
essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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prehistoric
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| adj.（有记载的）历史以前的，史前的，古老的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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avarice
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| n.贪婪；贪心 | |
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secrecy
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| n.秘密，保密，隐蔽 | |
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horde
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| n.群众，一大群 | |
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toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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specimens
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| n.样品( specimen的名词复数 )；范例；（化验的）抽样；某种类型的人 | |
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systematically
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| adv.有系统地 | |
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complement
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| n.补足物，船上的定员；补语；vt.补充，补足 | |
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30
teeming
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| adj.丰富的v.充满( teem的现在分词 )；到处都是；（指水、雨等）暴降；倾注 | |
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31
consolidated
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| a.联合的 | |
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32
mitigated
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| v.减轻，缓和( mitigate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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eastward
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| adv.向东；adj.向东的；n.东方，东部 | |
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34
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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remorse
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| n.痛恨，悔恨，自责 | |
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dominion
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| n.统治，管辖，支配权；领土，版图 | |
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concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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geniality
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| n.和蔼，诚恳；愉快 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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impair
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| v.损害，损伤；削弱，减少 | |
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41
bulwarks
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| n.堡垒( bulwark的名词复数 )；保障；支柱；舷墙 | |
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42
brazen
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| adj.厚脸皮的，无耻的，坚硬的 | |
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43
sockets
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| n.套接字，使应用程序能够读写与收发通讯协定(protocol)与资料的程序( Socket的名词复数 )；孔( socket的名词复数 )；（电器上的）插口；托座；凹穴 | |
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44
wrecked
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| adj.失事的，遇难的 | |
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45
gales
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| 龙猫 | |
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46
prevailing
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| adj.盛行的；占优势的；主要的 | |
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