At the touch of Weyman's lips to her hair Josephine lay very
still, and Philip wondered if she had felt that swift, stolen
caress. Almost he hoped that she had. The silken tress where for
an instant his lips had rested seemed to him now like some
precious communion cup in whose sacredness he had pledged himself.
Yet had he believed that she was conscious of his act he would
have begged her forgiveness. He waited, breathing softly, putting
greater sweep into his paddle to keep Jean well behind them.
Slowly the tremulous unrest of Josephine's shoulders ceased. She
raised her head and looked at him, her lovely face damp with
tears, her eyes shimmering like velvety pools through their mist.
She did not speak. She was woman now--all woman. Her strength, the
bearing which had made him think of her as a queen, the fighting
tension which she had been under, were gone. Until she looked at
him through her tears her presence had been like that of some
wonderful and unreal creature who held the control to his every
act in the cup of her hands. He thought no longer of himself now.
He knew that to him she had relinquished the mysterious fight
under which she had been struggling. In her eyes he read her
surrender. From this hour the fight was his. She told him, without
speaking. And the glory of it all thrilled him with a sacred
happiness so that he wanted to drop his paddle, draw her close
into his arms, and tell her that there was no power in the world
that could harm her now. But instead of this he laughed low and
joyously full into her eyes, and her lips smiled gently back at
him. And so they understood without words.
Behind them, Jean had been coming up swiftly, and now they heard
him break for an instant into the chorus of one of the wild half-
breed songs, and Philip listened to the words of the chant which
is as old in the Northland as the ancient brass cannon and the
crumbling fortress rocks at York Factory:
"O, ze beeg black bear, he go to court,
He go to court a mate;
He court to ze Sout',
He court to ze Nort',
He court to ze shores of ze Indian Lake."
And then, in the moment's silence that followed, Philip threw back
his head, and in a voice almost as wild and untrained as Jean
Croisset's, he shouted back:
"Oh! the fur fleets sing on Temiskaming,
As the ashen paddles bend,
And the crews carouse at Rupert's House,
At the sullen winter's end.
But my days are done where the lean wolves run,
And I ripple no more the path
Where the gray geese race 'cross the red moon's face
From the white wind's Arctic wrath."
The suspense was broken. The two men's voices, rising in their
crude strength, sending forth into the still wilderness both
triumph and defiance, brought the quick flush of living back into
Josephine's face. She guessed why Jean had started his chant--to
give her courage. She KNEW why Philip had responded. And now Jean
swept up beside them, a smile on his thin, dark face.
"The Good Virgin preserve us, M'sieur, but our voices are like
those of two beasts," he cried.
"Great, true, fighting beasts," whispered Josephine under her
breath. "How I would hate almost--"
She had suddenly flushed to the roots of her hair.
"What?" asked Philip.
"To hear men sing like women," she finished.
As swiftly as he had come up Jean and his canoe had sped on ahead
of them.
"You should have heard us sing that up in our snow hut, when for
five months the sun never sent a streak above the horizon," said
Philip. "At the end--in the fourth month--it was more like the
wailing of madmen. MacTavish died then: a young half Scot, of the
Royal Mounted. After that Radisson and I were alone, and sometimes
we used to see how loud we could shout it, and always, when we
came to those two last lines--"
She interrupted him:
"Where the gray geese race 'cross the red moon's face
From the white wind's Arctic wrath."
"Your memory is splendid!" he cried admiringly.
"Yes, always when we came to the end of those lines, the white
foxes would answer us from out on the barrens, and we would wait
for the sneaking yelping of them before we went on. They haunted
us like little demons, those foxes, and never once could we catch
a glimpse of them during the long night. They helped to drive
MacTavish mad. He died begging us to keep them away from him. One
day I was wakened by Radisson crying like a baby, and when I sat
up in my ice bunk he caught me by the shoulders and told me that
he had seen something that looked like the glow of a fire
thousands and thousands of miles away. It was the sun, and it came
just in time."
"And this other man you speak of, Radisson?" she asked.
"He died two hundred miles back," replied Philip quietly. "But
that is unpleasant to speak of. Look ahead. Isn't that ridge of
the forest glorious in the sunlight?"
She did not take her eyes from his face.
"Do you know, I think there is something wonderful about you," she
said, so gently and frankly that the blood rushed to his cheeks.
"Some day I want to learn those words that helped to keep you
alive up there. I want to know all of the story, because I think I
can understand. There was more to it--something after the foxes
yelped back at you?"
"This," he said, and ahead of them Jean Croisset rested on his
paddle to listen to Philip's voice:
"My seams gape wide, and I'm tossed aside
To rot on a lonely shore,
While the leaves and mould like a shroud enfold,
For the last of my trails are o'er;
But I float in dreams on Northland streams
That never again I'll see,
As I lie on the marge of the old Portage,
With grief for company."
"A canoe!" breathed the girl, looking back over the sunlit lake.
"Yes, a canoe, cast aside, forgotten, as sometimes men and women
are forgotten when down and out."
"Men and women who live in dreams," she added. "And with such
dreams there must always be grief."
There was a moment of the old pain in her face, a little catch in
her breath, and then she turned and looked at the forest ridge to
which he had called her attention.
"We go deep into that forest," she said. "We enter a creek just
beyond where Jean is waiting for us, and Adare House is a hundred
miles to the south and east." She faced him with a quick smile.
"My name is Adare," she explained, "Josephine Adare."
"Is--or was?" he asked.
"Is," she said; then, seeing the correcting challenge in his eyes
she added quickly: "But only to you. To all others I am Madame
Paul Darcambal."
"Paul?"
"Pardon me, I mean Philip."
They were close to shore, and fearing that Jean might become
suspicious of his tardiness, Philip bent to his paddle and was
soon in the half-breed's wake. Where he had thought there was only
the thick forest he saw a narrow opening toward which Jean was
speeding in his canoe. Five minutes later they passed under a
thick mass of overhanging spruce boughs into a narrow stream so
still and black in the deep shadows of the forest that it looked
like oil. There was something a little awesome in the suddenness
and completeness with which they were swallowed up. Over their
heads the spruce and cedar tops met and shut out the sunlight. On
both sides of them the forest was thick and black. The trail of
the stream itself was like a tunnel, silent, dark, mysterious. The
paddles dipped noiselessly, and the two canoes travelled side by
side.
"There are few who know of this break into the forest," said Jean
in a low voice. "Listen, M'sieur!"
From out of the gloom ahead of them there came a faint, oily
splashing.
"Otter," whispered Jean. "The stream is like this for many miles,
and it is full of life that you can never see because of the
darkness."
Something in the stillness and the gloom held them silent. The
canoes slipped along like shadows, and sometimes they bent their
heads to escape the low-hanging boughs. Josephine's face shone
whitely in the dusk. She was alert and listening. When she spoke
it was in a voice strangely subdued.
"I love this stream," she whispered. "It is full of life. On all
sides of us, in the forest, there is life. The Indians do not come
here, because they have a superstitious dread of this eternal
gloom and quiet. They call it the Spirit Stream. Even Jean is a
little oppressed by it. See how closely he keeps to us. I love it,
because I love everything that is wild. Listen! Did you hear
that?"
"Mooswa," spoke Jean out of the gloom close to them.
"Yes, a moose," she said. "Here is where I saw my first moose, so
many years ago that it is time for me to forget," she laughed
softly. "I think I had just passed my fourth birthday."
"You were four on the day we started, ma Josephine," came Jean's
voice as his canoe shot slowly ahead where the stream narrowed;
and then his voice came back more faintly: "that was sixteen years
ago to-day."
A shot breaking the dead stillness of the sunless world about him
could not have sent the blood rushing through Philip's veins more
swiftly than Jean's last words. For a moment he stopped his
paddling and leaned forward so that he could look close into
Josephine's face.
"This is your birthday?"
"Yes. You ate my birthday cake."
She heard the strange, happy catch in his breath as he
straightened back and resumed his work. Mile after mile they wound
their way through the mysterious, subterranean-like stream,
speaking seldom, and listening intently for the breaks in the
deathlike stillness that spoke of life. Now and then they caught
the ghostly flutter of owls in the gloom, like floating spirits;
back in the forest saplings snapped and brush crashed underfoot as
caribou or moose caught the man-scent; they heard once the
panting, sniffing inquiry of a bear close at hand, and Philip
reached forward for his rifle. For an instant Josephine's hand
fluttered to his own, and held it back, and the dark glow of her
eyes said: "Don't kill." Here there were no big-eyed moose-birds,
none of the mellow throat sounds of the brush sparrow, no harsh
janglings of the gaudily coloured jays. In the timber fell the
soft footpads of creatures with claw and fang, marauders and
outlaws of darkness. Light, sunshine, everything that loved the
openness of day were beyond. For more than an hour they had driven
their canoes steadily on, when, as suddenly as they had entered
it, they slipped out from the cavernous gloom into the sunlight
again.
Josephine drew a deep breath as the sunlight flooded her face and
hair.
"I have my own name for that place," she said. "I call it the
Valley of Silent Things. It is a great swamp, and they say that
the moss grows in it so deep that caribou and deer walk over it
without breaking through."
The stream was swelling out into a narrow, finger-like lake that
stretched for a mile or more ahead of them, and she turned to nod
her head at the spruce and cedar shores with their colourings of
red and gold, where birch, and poplar, and ash splashed vividly
against the darker background.
"From now on it is all like that." she said. "Lake after lake,
most of them as narrow as this, clear to the doors of Adare House.
It is a wonderful lake country, and one may easily lose one's
self--hundreds of lakes, I guess, running through the forests like
Venetian canals."
"I would not be surprised if you told me you had been in Venice,"
he replied. "To-day is your birthday--your twentieth. Have you
lived all those years here?"
He repressed his desire to question her, because he knew that she
understood that to be a part of his promise to her. In what he now
asked her he could not believe that he was treading upon
prohibited ground, and in the face of their apparent innocence he
was dismayed at the effect his words had upon her. It seemed to
him that her eyes flinched when he spoke, as if he had struck at
her. There passed over her face the look which he had come to
dread: a swift, tense betrayal of the grief which he knew was
eating at her soul, and which she was fighting so courageously to
hide from him. It had come and gone in a flash, but the pain of it
was left with him. She smiled at him a bit tremulously.
"I understand why you ask that," she said, "and it is no more than
fair that I should tell you. Of course you are wondering a great
deal about me. You have just asked yourself how I could ever hear
of such a place as Venice away up here among the Indians. Why, do
you know"--she leaned forward, as if to whisper a secret, her blue
eyes shilling with a sudden laughter--"I've even read the 'Lives'
of Plutarch, and I'm waiting patiently for the English to bang a
few of those terrible Lucretia Borgias who call themselves
militant suffragettes!"
"I--I--beg your pardon," he stammered helplessly.
She no longer betrayed the hurt of his question, and so sweet was
the laughter of her eyes and lips that he laughed back at her, in
spite of his embarrassment. Then, all at once, she became serious.
"I am terribly unfair to you," she apologized gently; and then,
looking across the water, she added: "Yes, I've lived almost all
of those twenty years up here--among the forests. They sent me to
the Mission school at Fort Churchill, over on Hudson's Bay, for
three years; and after that, until I was seventeen, I had a little
white-haired English governess at Adare House. If she had lived--
" Her hands clenched the sides of the canoe, and she looked
straight away from Philip. She seemed to force the words that came
from her lips then: "When I was eighteen I went to Montreal--and
lived there a year, That is all--that one year--away from--my
forests--"
He almost failed to hear the last words, and he made no effort to
reply. He kept his canoe nearer to Jean's, so that frequently they
were running side by side. In the quick fall of the early northern
night the sun was becoming more and more of a red haze in the sky
as it sank farther toward the western forests. Josephine had
changed her position, so that she now sat facing the bow of the
canoe. She leaned a little forward, her elbows resting in her lap,
her chin tilted in the cup of her hands, looking steadily ahead,
and for a long time no sound but the steady dip, dip, dip of the
two paddles broke the stillness of their progress. Scarcely once
did Philip take his eyes from her. Every turn, every passing of
shadow and light, each breath of wind that set stirring the
shimmering tresses of her hair, made her more beautiful to him.
From red gold to the rich and lustrous brown of the ripened wintel
berries he marked the marvellous changing of her hair with the
setting of the sun. A quick chill was growing in the air now and
after a little he crept forward and slipped a light blanket about
the slender shoulders. Even then Josephine did not speak, but
looked up at him, and smiled her thanks. In his eyes, his touch,
even his subdued breath, were the whispers of his adoration.
Movement roused Jean from his Indian-like silence. As Philip moved
back, he called:
"It is four o'clock, M'sieur. We will have darkness in an hour.
There is a place to camp and tepee poles ready cut on the point
ahead of us."
Fifteen minutes later Philip ran his canoe ashore close to Jean
Croisset's on a beach of white sand. He could not help seeing
that, from the moment she had answered his question out on the
lake, a change had come over Josephine. For a short time that
afternoon she had risen from out of the thing that oppressed her,
and once or twice there had been almost happiness in her smile and
laughter. Now she seemed to have sunk again under its smothering
grip. It was as if the chill and dismal gloom of approaching night
had robbed her cheeks of colour, and had given a tired droop to
her shoulders as she sat silently, and waited for them to make her
tent comfortable. When it was up, and the blankets spread, she
went in and left them alone, and the last glimpse that he had of
her face left with Philip a cameo-like impression of hopelessness
that made him want to call out her name, yet held him speechless.
He looked closely at Jean as they put up their own tent, and for
the first time he saw that the mask had fallen from the half-
breed's face, and that it was filled with that same mysterious
hopelessness and despair. Almost roughly he caught him by the
shoulder.
"See here, Jean Croisset," he cried impatiently, "you're a man.
What are you afraid of?"
"God," replied Jean so quietly that Philip dropped his hand from
his shoulder in astonishment. "Nothing else in the world am I
afraid of, M'sieur!"
"Then why--why in the name of that God do you look like this?"
demanded Philip. "You saw her go into the tent. She is
disheartened, hopeless because of something that I can't guess at,
cold and shivering and white because of a FEAR of something. She
is a woman. You are a man. Are YOU afraid?"
"No, not afraid, M'sieur. It is her grief that hurts me, not fear.
If it would help her I would let you take this knife at my side
and cut me into pieces so small that the birds could carry them
away. I know what you mean. You think I am not a fighter. Our Lady
in Heaven, if fighting could only save her!"
"And it cannot?"
"No, M'sieur. Nothing can save her. You can help, but you cannot
save her. I believe that nothing like this terrible thing that has
come to her has happened before since the world began. It is a
mistake that it has come once. The Great God would not let it
happen twice."
He spoke calmly. Philip could find no words with which to reply.
His hand slipped from Jean's arm to his hand, and their fingers
gripped. Thus for a space they stood. Philip broke the silence.
"I love her, Jean," he spoke softly.
"Every one loves her, M'sieur. All our forest people call her
'L'Ange.'"
"And still you say there is no hope?"
"None."
"Not even--if we fight--?"
Jean's fingers tightened about his like cords of steel.
"We may kill, M'sieur, but that will not save hearts crushed like
--See!--like I crush these ash berries under my foot! I tell you
again, nothing like this has ever happened before since the world
began, and nothing like it will ever happen again!"
Steadily Philip looked into Jean's eyes.
"You have seen something of the world, Jean?"
"A good deal, M'sieur. For seven years I went to school at
Montreal, and prepared myself for the holy calling of Missioner.
That was many years ago. I am now simply Jean Jacques Croisset, of
the forests."
"Then you know--you must know, that where there is life there is
hope," argued Philip eagerly, "I have promised not to pry after
her secret, to fight for her only as she tells me to fight. But if
I knew, Jean. If I knew what this trouble is--how and where to
fight! Is this knowledge--impossible?"
"Impossible, M'sieur!"
Slowly Jean withdrew his hand.
"Don't take it that way, man," exclaimed Philip quickly. "I'm not
ferreting for her secret now. Only I've got to know--is it
impossible for her to tell me?"
"As impossible, M'sieur, as it would be for me. And Our Lady
herself could not make me do that if I heard Her voice commanding
me out of Heaven. All that I can do is to wait, and watch, and
guard. And all that you can do, M'sieur, is to play the part she
has asked of you. In doing that, and doing it well, you will keep
the last bit of life in her heart from being trampled out. If you
love her"--he picked up a tepee pole before he finished, and then,
said--"you will do as you have promised!"
There was a finality in the shrug of Jean's shoulders which Philip
did not question. He picked up an axe, and while Jean arranged the
tepee poles began to chop down a dry birch. As the chips flew his
mind flew faster. In his optimism he had half believed that the
cloud of mystery in which Josephine had buried him would, in time,
be voluntarily lifted by her. He had not been able to make himself
believe that any situation could exist where hopelessness was as
complete as she had described. Without arguing with himself he had
taken it for granted that she had been labouring under a
tremendous strain, and that no matter what her trouble was it had
come to look immeasurably darker to her than it really was. But
Jean's attitude, his low and unexcited voice, and the almost
omniscient decisiveness of his words had convinced him that
Josephine had not painted it as blackly as she might. She, at
least, had seemed to see a ray of hope. Jean saw none, and Philip
realized that the half-breed's calm and unheated judgment was more
to be reckoned with than hers. At the same time, he did not feel
dismayed. He was of the sort who have born in them the fighting
instinct, And with this instinct, which is two thirds of life's
battle won, goes the sort of optimism that has opened up raw
worlds to the trails of men. Without the one the other cannot
exist.
As the blows of his axe cut deep into the birch, Philip knew that
so long as there is life and freedom and a sun above it is
impossible for hope to become a thing of char and ash. He did not
use logic. He simply LIVED! He was alive, and he loved Josephine.
The muscles of his arms were like sinews of rawhide. Every fibre
in his body was strung with a splendid strength. His brain was as
clear as the unpolluted air that drifted over the cedar and
spruce. And now to these tremendous forces had come the added
strength of the most wonderful thing in the world: love of a
woman. In spite of all that Josephine and Jean had said, in spite
of all the odds that might be against him, he was confident of
winning whatever fight might be ahead of him.
He not only felt confident, but cheerful. He did not try to make
Jean understand what it meant to be in camp with the company of a
woman for the first time in two years. Long after the tents were
up and the birch-fire was crackling cheerfully in the darkness
Josephine still remained in her tent. But the mere fact that she
was there lifted Philip's soul to the skies.
And Josephine, with a blanket drawn about her shoulders, lay in
the thick gloom of her tent and listened to him. His far-reaching,
exuberant whistling seemed to warm her. She heard him laughing and
talking with Jean, whose voice never came to her; farther back,
where he was cutting down another birch, she heard him shout out
the words of a song between blows; and once, sotto voce, and close
to her tent, she quite distinctly heard him say "Damn!" She knew
that he had stumbled with an armful of wood, and for the first
time in that darkness and her misery she smiled. That one word
alone Philip had not intended that she should hear. But when it
was out he picked himself up and laughed.
He did not meddle with Jean's cook-fire, but he built a second
fire where the cheer of it would light up Josephine's tent, and
piled dry logs on it until the flame of it lighted up the gloom
about them for a hundred feet. And then, with a pan in one hand
and a stick in the other, he came close and beat a din that could
have been heard a quarter of a mile away.
Josephine came out full in the flood-light of the fire, and he saw
that she had been crying. Even now there was a tremble of her lips
as she smiled her gratitude. He dropped his pan and stick, and
went to her. It seemed as if this last hour in the darkness of
camp had brought her nearer to him, and he gently took her hands
in his own and held them for a moment close to him. They were cold
and trembling, and one of them that had rested under her cheek was
damp with tears.
"You mustn't do this any more," he whispered.
"I'll try not to," she promised. "Please let me stand a little in
the warmth of the fire. I'm cold."
He led her close to the flaming birch logs and the heat soon
brought a warm flush into her cheeks. Then they went to where Jean
had spread out their supper on the ground. When she had seated
herself on the pile of blankets they had arranged for her,
Josephine looked across at Philip, squatted Indian-fashion
opposite her, and smiled apologetically.
"I'm afraid your opinion of me isn't getting better," she said.
"I'm not much of a--a--sport--to let you men get supper by
yourselves, am I? You see--I'm taking advantage of my birthday."
"Oui, ma belle princesse," laughed Jean softly, a tender look
coming into his thin, dark face. "And do you remember that other
birthday, years and years ago, when you took advantage of Jean
Croisset while he was sleeping? Non, you do not remember?"
"Yes, I remember."
"She was six, M'sieur," explained Jean, "and while I slept,
dreaming of one gr-r-rand paradise, she cut off my moustaches.
They were splendid, those moustaches, but they would never grow
right after that, and so I have gone shaven."
In spite of her efforts to appear cheerful, Philip could see that
Josephine was glad when the meal was over, and that she was
forcing herself to sip at a second cup of tea on their account. He
accompanied her back to the tent after she had bade Jean good-
night, and as they stood for a moment before the open flap there
filled the girl's face a look that was partly of self-reproach and
partly of wistful entreaty for his understanding and forgiveness.
"You have been good to me," she said. "No one can ever know how
good you have been to me, what it has meant to me, and I thank
you."
She bowed her head, and again he restrained the impulse to gather
her close up in his arms. When she looked up he was holding
something toward her in the palm of his hand. It was a little
Bible, worn and frayed at the edges, pathetic in its raggedness.
"A long time ago, my mother gave me this Bible," he said. "She
told me that as long as I carried it, and believed in it, no harm
could come to me, and I guess she was right. It was her first
Bible, and mine. It's grown old and ragged with me, and the water
and snow have faded it. I've come to sort of believe that mother
is always near this Book. I'd like you to have it, Josephine. It's
the only thing I've got to offer you on your birthday."
While he was speaking he had taken one of her hands and thrust his
precious gift into it. Slowly Josephine raised the little Bible to
her breast. She did not speak, but for a moment Philip saw in her
eyes the look for which he would have sacrificed the world; a look
that told him more than all the volumes of the earth could have
told of a woman's trust and faith.
He bent his head lower and whispered:
"To-night, my Josephine--just this night--may I wish you all the
hope and happiness that God and my Mother can bring you, and kiss
you--once--"
In that moment's silence he heard the throbbing of her heart. She
seemed to have ceased breathing, and then, slowly, looking
straight into his eyes, she lifted her lips to him, and as one who
meets a soul of a thing too sanctified to touch with hands, he
kissed her. Scarcely had the warm sweetness of her lips thrilled
his own than she had turned from him, and was gone.