The Dark Star

What spectroscope is to horoscope, destiny is to chance. The black star Erlik rushed through interstellar darkness unseen; those born under its violent augury squalled in their cradles, or, thumb in mouth, slumbered the dreamless slumber of the newly born.

One of these, a tiny girl baby, fussed and fidgeted in her mother’s arms, tortured by prickly heat when the hot winds blew through Trebizond.

Overhead vultures circled; a stein-adler, cleaving the blue, looked down where the surf made a thin white line along the coast, then set his lofty course for China.

Thousands of miles to the westward, a little boy of eight gazed out across the ruffled waters of the mill pond at Neeland’s Mills, and wondered whether the ocean might not look that way.

And, wondering, with the salt sea effervescence working in his inland-born body, he fitted a cork to his fishing line and flung the baited hook far out across the ripples. Then he seated himself on the parapet of the stone bridge and waited for monsters of the deep to come.

And again, off Seraglio Point, men were rowing in a boat; and a corded sack lay in the stern, horridly and limply heavy.

There was also a box lying in the boat, oddly bound and clamped with metal which glistened like silver under the Eastern stars when the waves of the Bosporus dashed high, and the flying scud rained down on box and sack and the red-capped rowers.

In Petrograd a little girl of twelve was learning to eat other things than sour milk and cheese; learning to ride otherwise than like a demon on a Cossack saddle; learning deportment, too, and languages, and social graces and the fine arts. And, most thoroughly of all, the little girl was learning how deathless should be her hatred for the Turkish Empire and all its works; and how only less perfect than our Lord in Paradise was the Czar on his throne amid that earthly paradise known as “All the Russias.”

Her little brother was learning these things, too, in the Corps of Officers. Also he was already proficient on the balalaika.

And again, in the mountains of a conquered province, the little daughter of a gamekeeper to nobility was preparing to emigrate with her father to a new home in the Western world, where she would learn to perform miracles with rifle and revolver, and where the beauty of the hermit thrush’s song would startle her into comparing it to the beauty of her own untried voice. But to her father, and to her, the most beautiful thing in all the world was love of Fatherland.

Over these, and millions of others, brooded the spell of the Dark Star. Even the world itself lay under it, vaguely uneasy, sometimes startled to momentary seismic panic. Then, ere mundane self-control restored terrestrial equilibrium, a few mountains exploded, an island or two lay shattered by earthquake, boiling mud and pumice blotted out one city; earth-shock and fire another; a tidal wave a third.

But the world settled down and balanced itself once more on the edge of the perpetual abyss into which it must fall some day; the invisible shadow of the Dark Star swept it at intervals when some far and nameless sun blazed out unseen; days dawned; the sun of the solar system rose furtively each day and hung around the heavens until that dusky huntress, Night, chased him once more beyond the earth’s horizon.

The shadow of the Dark Star was always there, though none saw it in sunshine or in moonlight, or in the silvery lustre of the planets.

A boy, born under it, stood outside the fringe of willow and alder, through which moved two English setters followed and controlled by the boy’s father.

“Mark!” called the father.

Out of the willows like a feathered bomb burst a big grouse, and the green foliage that barred its flight seemed to explode as the strong bird sheered out into the sunshine.

The boy’s gun, slanting upward at thirty degrees, glittered in the sun an instant, then the left barrel spoke; and the grouse, as though struck by lightning in mid-air, stopped with a jerk, then slanted swiftly and struck the ground.

“Dead!” cried the boy, as a setter appeared, leading on straight to the heavy mass of feathers lying on the pasture grass.

“Clean work, Jim,” said his father, strolling out of the willows. “But wasn’t it a bit risky, considering the little girl yonder?”

“Father!” exclaimed the boy, very red. “I never even saw her. I’m ashamed.”

They stood looking across the pasture, where a little girl in a pink gingham dress lingered watching them, evidently lured by her curiosity from the old house at the crossroads just beyond.

Jim Neeland, still red with mortification, took the big cock-grouse from the dog which brought it – a tender-mouthed, beautifully trained Belton, who stood with his feathered offering in his jaws, very serious, very proud, awaiting praise from the Neelands, father and son.

Neeland senior “drew” the bird and distributed the sacrifice impartially between both dogs – it being the custom of the country.

Neeland junior broke his gun, replaced the exploded shell, content indeed with his one hundred per cent performance.

“Better run over and speak to the little girl, Jim,” suggested old Dick Neeland, as he motioned the dogs into covert again.

So Jim ran lightly across the stony, clover-set ground to where the little girl roamed along the old snake fence, picking berries sometimes, sometimes watching the sportsmen out of shy, golden-grey eyes.

“Little girl,” he said, “I’m afraid the shot from my gun came rattling rather close to you that time. You’ll have to be careful. I’ve noticed you here before. It won’t do; you’ll have to keep out of range of those bushes, because when we’re inside we can’t see exactly where we’re firing.”

The child said nothing. She looked up at the boy, smiled shyly, then, with much composure, began her retreat, not neglecting any tempting blackberry on the way.

The sun hung low over the hazy Gayfield hills; the beeches and oaks of Mohawk County burned brown and crimson; silver birches supported their delicate canopies of burnt gold; and imperial white pines clothed hill and vale in a stately robe of green.

Jim Neeland forgot the child – or remembered her only to exercise caution in the Brookhollow covert.

The little girl Ruhannah, who had once fidgeted with prickly heat in her mother’s arms outside the walls of Trebizond, did not forget this easily smiling, tall young fellow – a grown man to her – who had come across the pasture lot to warn her.

But it was many a day before they met again, though these two also had been born under the invisible shadow of the Dark Star. But the shadow of Erlik is always passing like swift lightning across the Phantom Planet which has fled the other way since Time was born.

Allahou Ekber, O Tchinguiz Khagan!

A native Mongol missionary said to Ruhannah’s father:

“As the chronicles of the Eighurs have it, long ago there fell metal from the Black Racer of the skies; the first dagger was made of it; and the first image of the Prince of Darkness. These pass from Kurd to Cossack by theft, by gift, by loss; they pass from nation to nation by accident, which is Divine design.

“And where they remain, war is. And lasts until image and dagger are carried to another land where war shall be. But where there is war, only the predestined suffer – those born under Erlik – children of the Dark Star.”

“I thought,” said the Reverend Wilbour Carew, “that my brother had confessed Christ.”

“I am but repeating to you what my father believed; and Temujin before him,” replied the native convert, his remote gaze lost in reflection.

His eyes were quite little and coloured like a lion’s; and sometimes, in deep reverie, the corners of his upper lip twitched.

This happened when Ruhannah lay fretting in her mother’s arms, and the hot wind blew on Trebizond.

Under the Dark Star, too, a boy grew up in Minetta Lane, not less combative than other ragged boys about him, but he was inclined to arrange and superintend fist fights rather than to participate in battle, except with his wits.

His name was Eddie Brandes; his first fortune of three dollars was amassed at craps; he became a hanger-on in ward politics, at race-tracks, stable, club, squared ring, vaudeville, burlesque. Long Acre attracted him – but always the gambling end of the operation.

Which predilection, with its years of ups and downs, landed him one day in Western Canada with an “Unknown” to match against an Athabasca blacksmith, and a training camp as the prospect for the next six weeks.

There lived there, gradually dying, one Albrecht Dumont, lately head gamekeeper to nobility in the mountains of a Lost Province, and wearing the Iron Cross of 1870 on the ruins of a gigantic and bony chest, now as hollow as a Gothic ruin.

And if, like a thousand fellow patriots, he had been ordered to the Western World to watch and report to his Government the trend and tendency of that Western, English-speaking world, only his Government and his daughter knew it – a child of the Dark Star now grown to early womanhood, with a voice like a hermit thrush and the skill of a sorceress with anything that sped a bullet.

Before the Unknown was quite ready to meet the Athabasca blacksmith, Albrecht Dumont, dying faster now, signed his last report to the Government at Berlin, which his daughter Ilse had written for him – something about Canadian canals and stupid Yankees and their greed, indifference, cowardice, and sloth.

Dumont’s mind wandered:

“After the well-born Herr Gott relieves me at my post,” he whispered, “do thou pick up my burden and stand guard, little Ilse.”

“Yes, father.”

“Thy sacred promise?”