XXXIII. The White Guard

Next morning Trove was on his way to Quebec--a long, hard journey in the wintertime, those days. Leblanc had moved again,--so they told him in Quebec,--this time to Plattsburg of Clinton County, New York. There, however, Trove was unable to find the Frenchman. A week of patient inquiry, then, leaving promises of reward for information, he came away. He had yet another object of his travels--the prison at Dannemora--and came there of a Sunday morning late in February. Its towers were bathed in sunlight; its shadows lay dark and far upon the snow. Peace and light and silence had fallen out of the sky upon that little city of regret, as if to hush and illumine its tumult of dark passions. He shivered in the gloom of its shadow as he went up a driveway and rang a bell. The warden received him kindly.

"I wish to see Roderick Darrel,---he is my friend,' said Trove, as he gave the warden a letter.

"Come with me," said the official, presently. "He is talking to the men."

They passed through gloomy corridors to the chapel door. Trove halted to compose himself, for now he could hear the voice of Darrel.

"Let me stand here a while--I cannot go in now," he whispered.

The words of the old man were vibrant with colour and dramatic force.

"Night!" he was saying, "the guard passes; the lights are out; ye lie thinking. Hark! a bell! 'Tis in the golden city o' remembrance. Ye hear it calling. Haste away, men, haste away. Ah, look!--flowers by the roadside! an' sunlight, an', just ahead, spires o' the city, an' beneath them--oh! what is there beneath them ye go so many times to see?

"Who is this?

"Here is a man beside ye.

"'Halt!' he says, an cuts ye with a sword.

"Now the bell is tolling--the sky overcast. The spires fall, the flowers wither. Ye turn to look at the man. He is a giant. See the face of him now. It makes ye tremble. He is the White Guard an' he brings ye back. Ah, then, mayhap ye rise in the dark, as I have heard ye, an' shake the iron doors. But ye cannot escape him though ye could fly on the wind. Know ye the White Guard? Dear man! his name is thy name; he is thyself; day an' night he sits in the watch tower o' thy soul; he has all charge o' thee. Make a friend o' him, men, make a friend o' him. Any evening send for me, an' mayhap they'll let me come an' tell thee how."

He paused. Trove could hear the tread of guards in the chapel. They seemed to enter the magnetic field of the speaker and quickly halted.

"Mind the White Guard! Save him ye have none to fear.

"Once, at night, I saw a man smiling in his sleep. 'Twas over there in the hospital. The day long he had been sick with remorse, an' I had given him, betimes, a word o' comfort as well as the medicine. Now when I looked the frown had left his brow. Oh, 'twas a goodly