Alone and with the deadening depression that had come with Jean's
last words, Philip returned to his room. He had made no effort to
follow the half-breed who had shamed him to the quick beside the
grave of his wife. He felt no pleasure, no sense of exultation,
that his suspicions of Croisset's feelings toward Josephine had
been dispelled. Since the hour MacTavish had died up in the
madness of Arctic night, deep and hopeless gloom had not laid its
hand more heavily upon him.
He bolted his door, drew the curtain to the window, and added a
bit of wood to the few embers that still remained alive in the
grate. Then he sat down, with his face to the fire. The dry birch
burst into flame, and for half an hour he sat staring into it with
almost unseeing eyes. He knew that Jean would keep his word--that
even now he was possibly on the fresh trail that led through the
forest. For him there was something about the half-breed now that
was almost omniscient. In him Philip had seen incarnated the
things which made him feel like a dwarf in manhood. In those few
moments close to the graves, Jean had risen above the world. And
Philip believed in him. Yet with his belief, his optimism did not
quite die.
In the same breath Jean had told him that he could never possess
Josephine, and that Josephine loved him. This in itself, Jean's
assurance of her love, was sufficient to arouse a spirit like his
with new hope. At last he went to bed, and in spite of his mental
and physical excitement of the night, he fell asleep.
John Adare did not fail in his promise to rouse Philip early in
the day. When Philip jumped out of bed in response to Adare's
heavy knock at the door, he judged that it was not later than
seven o'clock, and the room was still dark. Adare's voice came
booming through the thick panels in reply to Philip's assurance
that he was getting up.
"This is the third time," he cried. "I've cracked the door trying
to rouse you. And we've got a caribou porterhouse two inches thick
waiting for us."
The giant was walking back and forth in the big living-room when
Philip joined him a few minutes later. He wore an Indian-made
jacket and was smoking a big pipe. That he had been up for some
time was evident from the logs fully ablaze in the fireplace. He
rubbed his hands briskly as Philip entered. Every atom of him
disseminated good cheer.
"You don't know how good it seems to get back home," he exclaimed,
as they shook hands. "I feel like a boy--actually like a boy,
Philip! Didn't sleep two winks after I went to bed, and Miriam
scolded me for keeping her awake. Bless my soul, I wouldn't live
in Montreal if they'd make me a present of the whole Hudson's Bay
Company."
"Nor I," said Philip. "I love the North."
"How long?"
"Four years--without a break."
"One can live a long time in the North in four years," mused the
master of Adare. "But Josephine said she met you in Montreal?"
"True," laughed Philip, catching himself. "That was a break--and I
thank God for it. Outside of that I spent all of the four years
north of the Hight of Land. For eighteen months I lived along the
edges of the Arctic trying to take an impossible census of the
Eskimo for the government."
"I knew something of the sort when I first looked at you," said
Adare. "I can tell an Arctic man, just as I can pick a Herschel
dog or an Athabasca country malemute from a pack of fifty. We have
much to talk about, my boy. We will be great friends. Just now we
are going to that caribou steak."
Out into the hall, through another door, and down a short
corridor, he led Philip. Here a third door was open, and Adare
stood aside while Philip entered.
"This is my private sanctuary," he said proudly. "What do you
think of it?"
Philip looked about him. He was in a room almost as large as the
one from which they had come. In a huge fireplace a pile of logs
were blazing. One end of the room was given up almost entirely to
shelves and weighted down with books. Philip was amazed at their
number. The other end was still partially hidden in glooms but he
could make out that it was fitted up as a laboratory, and on
shelves he caught the white gleam of scores of wild beast skulls.
Comfortably near to the fire was a large table scattered with
books, papers, and piles of manuscript, and behind this was a
small iron safe. Here, Philip thought, was the adytum of no
ordinary man; it was the study of a scholar and a scientist. He
marked the absence of mounted heads from the walls, but in spite
of that the very atmosphere of the room breathed of the forests
and the beast. Here and there he saw the articulated skeletons of
wild animals. From among the books themselves the jaws and ivory
fangs of skulls gleamed out at him. Before he had finished his
wondering survey of the strange room, John Adare stepped to the
table and picked up a skull.
"This is my latest specimen," he said, his voice eager with
enthusiasm. "It is perfect. Jean secured it for me while I was
away. It is the skull of a beaver, and shows in three distinct and
remarkable gradations how nature replaces the soft enamel as it is
worn from the beaver's teeth. You see, I am a hobbyist. For twenty
years I have been studying wild animals. And there--"
He replaced the skull on the table to point to an isolated shelf
filled with books and magazines.
"--there is my most remarkable collection," he added, a gleam of
humour in his eyes. "They are the books and magazine stories of
nature fakirs, the 'works' of naturalists who have never heard the
howl of a wolf or the cry of a loon; the wild dreams of
fictionists, the rot of writers who spend two weeks or a month
each year on some blazed trail and return to the cities to call
themselves students of nature. When I feel in bad humour I read
some of that stuff and laugh."
He leaned over to press a button under the table,
"One of my little electrical arrangements," he explained. "That
will bring our breakfast. To use a popular expression of the
uninformed, I'm as hungry as a bear. As a matter of fact, you
know, a bear is the lightest eater of all brute creation for his
size, strength, and fat supply. That row of naturalists over there
have made him out a pig. The beast's a genius, for it takes a
genius to grow fat on poplar buds!"
Then he laughed good humouredly.
"I suppose you are tired of this already. Josephine has probably
been filling you with a lot of my foolishness. She says I must be
silly or I would have my stuff published in books. But I am
waiting, waiting until I have come down to the last facts. I am
experimenting now with the black and the silver fox. And there are
many other experiments to come, many of them. But you are tired of
this."
"Tired!"
Philip had listened to him without speaking. In this room John
Adare had changed. In him he saw now the living, breathing soul of
the wild. His own face was flushed with a new enthusiasm as he
replied:
"Such things could never tire me. I only ask that I may be your
companion in your researches, and learn something of the wonders
which you must already have discovered. You have studied wild
animals--for twenty years?"
"Twenty and four, day and night; it has been my hobby."
"And you have written about them?"
"A score of volumes, if they were in print."
Philip drew a deep breath.
"The world would give a great deal for what you know," he said.
"It would give a great deal for those books, more than I dare to
estimate, undoubtedly it would be a vast sum in dollars."
Adare laughed softly in his beard.
"And what would I do with dollars?" he asked. "I have sufficient
with which to live this life here. What more could money bring me?
I am the happiest man in the world!"
For a moment a cloud overshadowed his face.
"And yet of late I have had a worry," he added thoughtfully. "It
is because of Miriam, my wife. She is not well. I had hoped that
the doctors in Montreal would help her. But they have failed. They
say she possesses no malady, no sickness that they can discover.
And yet she is not the old Miriam. God knows I hope the tonic of
the snows will bring her back to health this winter!"
"It will," declared Philip. "The signs point to a glorious winter,
crisp and dry--the sledge and dog kind, when you can hear the
crack of a whiplash half a mile away."
"You will hear that frequently enough if you follow Josephine,"
chuckled Adare. "Not a trail in these forests for a hundred miles
she does not know. She trains all of the dogs, and they are
wonderful."
It was on the point of Philip's tongue to ask a reason for the
silence of the fierce pack he had seen the night before, when he
caught himself. At the same moment the Indian woman appeared
through the door with a laden tray. Adare helped her arrange their
breakfast on a small table near the fire.
"I thought we would be more congenial here than alone in the
dining-room, Philip," he explained. "Unless I am mistaken the
ladies won't be up until dinner time. Did you ever see a steak
done to a finer turn than this? Marie, you are a treasure." He
motioned Philip to a seat, and began serving. "Nothing in the
world is better than a caribou porterhouse cut well back," he went
on. "Don't fry or roast it, but broil it. An inch and a half is
the proper thickness, just enough to hold the heart of it ripe
with juice. See it ooze from that cut! Can you beat it?"
"Not with anything I have had along the Arctic," confessed Philip.
"A steak from the cheek of a cow walrus is about the best thing
you find up in the 'Big Icebox'--that is, at first. Later, when
the aurora borealis has got into your marrow, you gorge on seal
blubber and narwhal fat and call it good. As for me, I'd prefer
pickles to anything else in the world, so with your permission
I'll help myself. Just now I'd eat pickles with ice cream."
It was a pleasant meal. Philip could not remember when he had
known a more agreeable host. Not until they had finished, and
Adare had produced cigars of a curious length and slimness, did
the older man ask the question for which Philip had been carefully
preparing himself.
"Now I want to hear about you," he said. "Josephine told me very
little--said that she wanted me to get my impressions first hand.
We'll smoke and talk. These cigars are clear Havanas. I have the
tobacco imported by the bale and we make the cigars ourselves.
Reduces the cost to a minimum, and we always have a supply. Go on,
Philip, I'm listening."
Philip remembered Josephine's words telling him to narrate the
events of his own life to her father--except that he was to leave
open, as it were, the interval in which he was supposed to have
known her in Montreal. It was not difficult for him to slip over
this. He described his first coming into the North, and Adare's
eyes glowed sympathetically when Philip quoted Hill's words down
at Prince Albert and Jasper's up at Fond du Lac. He listened with
tense interest to his experiences along the Arctic, his
descriptions of the death of MacTavish and the passing of Pierre
Radisson. But what struck deepest with him was Philip's physical
and mental fight for new life, and the splendid way in which the
wilderness had responded.
"And you couldn't go back now," he said, a tone of triumph in his
voice. "When the forests once claim you--they hold."
"Not alone the forests, Mon Pere."
"Ah, Mignonne. No, there is neither man nor beast in the world
that would leave her. Even the dogs are chained out in the deep
spruce that they may not tear down her doors in the night to come
near her. The whole world loves my Josephine. The Indians make the
Big Medicine for her in a hundred tepees when they learn she is
ill. They have trimmed five hundred lob-stick trees in her memory.
Mon Dieu, in the Company's books there are written down more than
thirty babes and children grown who bear her name of Josephine!
She is different than her mother. Miriam has been always like a
flower--a timid wood violet, loving this big world, yet playing no
part in it away from my side. Sometimes Josephine frightens me.
She will travel a hundred miles by sledge to nurse a sick child,
and only last winter she buried herself in a shack filled with
smallpox and brought six souls out of it alive! For two weeks she
was buried in that hell. That is Mignonne, whom Indian, breed, and
white man call L'Ange. Miriam they call La Fleurette. We are two
fortunate men, my son!"
A dozen questions burned on Philip's lips, but he held them back,
fearing that some accidental slip of the tongue might betray him.
He was convinced that Josephine's father knew absolutely nothing
of the trouble that was wrecking the happiness of Adare House, and
he was equally positive that all, even Miriam herself, were
fighting to keep the secret from him.
That Josephine's motherhood was not the sole cause of the
mysterious and tragic undercurrent that he had been made to feel
he was more than suspicious. A few hours would tell him if he was
right, for he would ask Josephine to become his wife. And he
already knew what John Adare did not know.
Miriam was not sick with a physical illness. The doctors whom
Adare had not believed were right. And he wondered, as he sat
facing her husband, if it was fear for his life that was breaking
her down. Were they shielding him from some great and ever-
menacing peril--a danger with which, for some inconceivable
reason, they dared not acquaint him?
In the short time he had known him, a strange feeling for John
Adare had found a place in Philip's heart. It was more than
friendship, more than the feeling which his supposed relationship
might have roused. This big-hearted, tender, rumbling voiced giant
of a man he had grown to love. And he found himself struggling
blindly now to keep from him what the others were trying to
conceal, for he knew that John Adare's heart would crumble down
like a pile of dust if he knew the truth. He was thinking of the
baby, and it seemed as if his thoughts flashed like fire to the
other.
Adare was laughing softly in his beard.
"You should have seen the kid last night, Philip. When they woke
'im he stared at me for a time as though I was an ogre, then he
grinned, kicked me, and grabbed my whiskers, I've just one fault
to find. I wish he was a dozen instead of me. The little rascal! I
wonder if he is awake?"
He half rose, as if about to investigate, then reseated himself.
"Guess I'd better not take a chance of waking him," he reflected.
"If Jean should catch me rousing Josephine or the baby he'd
throttle me."
"Jean is--a sort of guardian," ventured Philip.
"More than that. Sometimes I think he is a spirit," said Adare
impressively. "I have known him for twenty years. Since the day
Josephine was born he has been her watch-dog. He came in the heart
of a great storm, years and years ago, nearly dead from cold and
hunger. He never went away, and he has talked but little about
himself. See--"
Adare went to a shelf and returned with a bundle of manuscript.
"Jean gave me the idea for this," he went on.
There are two hundred and eighty pages here. I call it 'The
Aristocracy of the North.' It is true--and it is wonderful!
"You have seen a spring or New Year's gathering of the forest
people at a Company's post--the crowd of Indians, half-breeds, and
whites who follow the trap-lines? And would you guess that in that
average foregathering of the wilderness people there is better
blood than you could find in a crowded ballroom of New York's
millionaires? It is true. I have given fish to hungry half-breeds
in whose veins flows the blood of royalty. I have eaten with
Indian women whose lineage reaches back to names that were mighty
before the first Astors and the first Vanderbilts were born. The
descendant of a king has hunted me caribou meat at two cents a
pound. In a smoke-blackened tepee, over beyond the Gray Loon
waterway, there lives a girl with hair and eyes as black as a
raven's wing who could go to Paris to-morrow and say: 'I am the
descendant of a queen,' and prove it. And so it is all over the
Northland.
"I have hunted down many curious facts, and I have them here in my
manuscript. The world cannot sneer at me, for records have been
kept almost since the day away back in the seventeenth century
when Prince Rupert landed with his first shipload of gentlemen
adventurers. They intermarried with our splendid Crees--those
first wanderers from the best families of Europe. They formed the
English-Cree half-breed. Prince Rupert himself had five children
that can be traced to him. Le Chevalier Grosselier had nine. And
so it went on for a hundred years, the best blood in England
giving birth to a new race among the Crees, and the best of France
sowing new generations among the Chippewyans on their way up from
Quebec.
"And for another hundred years and more the English-Cree half-
breed and the French-Chippewyan half-breed have been meeting and
intermarrying, forming the 'blood,' until in all this Northland
scarce a man or a woman cannot call back to names that have long
become dust in history.
"From the blood of some mighty king of France--of some splendid
queen--has come Jean Croisset. I have always felt that, and yet I
can trace him no farther than a hundred years back, to the
quarter-strain wife of the white factor at Monsoon. Jean has lost
interest in himself now--since his wife died three years ago. Has
Josephine told you of her?"
"Very little," said Philip.
The flush of enthusiasm faded from Adare's eyes. It was replaced
by a look that was grief deep and sincere.
"Iowaka's death was the first great blow that came to Adare
House," he said gently. "For nine years they were man and wife
lovers. God's pity they had no children. She was French--with a
velvety touch of the Cree, lovable as the wild flowers from which
she took her name. Since she went Jean has lived in a dream. He
says that she is constantly with him, and that often he hears her
voice. I am glad of that. It is wonderful to possess that kind of
a love, Philip!--the love that lives like a fresh flower after
death and darkness. And we have it--you and I."
Philip murmured softly that it was so. He felt that it was
dangerous to tread upon the ground which Adare was following. In
these moments, when this great bent-shouldered giant's heart lay
like an open book before him, he was not sure of himself. The
other's unbounded faith, his happiness, the idyllic fulness of his
world as he found it, were things which added to the heaviness and
fear at Philip's heart instead of filling him with similar
emotions. Of these things he was not a part. A voice kept
whispering to him with maddening insistence that he was a fraud.
One by one John Adare was unlocking for him hallowed pictures in
which Jean had told him he could never share possession. His
desire to see Josephine again was almost feverish, and filled him
with a restlessness which he knew he must hide from Adare. So when
Adare's eyes rested upon him in a moment's silence, he said:
"Last night Jean and I were standing beside her grave. It seemed
then as though he would have been happier if he had lain near her
--under the cross."
"You are wrong," said Adare quickly. "Death is beautiful when
there is a perfect love. If my Miriam should die it would mean
that she had simply gone from my SIGHT. In return for that loss
her hand would reach down to me from Heaven, as Iowaka reaches
down to Jean. I love life. My heart would break if she should go.
But it would be replaced by something almost like another soul.
For it must be wonderful to be over-watched by an angel."
He rose and went to the window, and with a queer thickening in his
throat Philip stared at his broad back. He thought he saw a
moment's quiver of his shoulders. Then Adare's voice changed.
"Winter brings close to our doors the one unpleasant feature of
this country," he said, turning to light a second cigar. "Thirty-
five miles to the north and west of us there is what the Indians
call 'Muchemunito Nek'--the Devil's Nest. It's a Free Trader's
house. A man down in Montreal by the name of Lang owns a string of
them, and his agent over at the Devil's Nest is a scoundrel of the
first water. His name is Thoreau. There are a score of half-breeds
and whites in his crowd, and not a one of them with an honest hair
in his head. It's the one criminal rendezvous I know of in all
this North country. Bad Indians who have lost credit at the
Hudson's Bay Company's posts go to Thoreau's. Whites and half-
breeds who have broken the laws are harboured there. A dozen
trappers are murdered each winter for their furs, and the
assassins are among Thoreau's men. One of these days there is
going to be a big clean-up. Meanwhile, they are unpleasant
company. There is a deep swamp between our house and Thoreau's, so
that during the open water seasons it means we are a hundred miles
away from them by canoe. When winter comes we are only thirty-five
miles, as the sledge-dogs run. I don't like it. You can snow-shoe
the distance in a few hours."
"I know of such a place far to the west," replied Philip. "Both
the Hudson's Bay Company and Reveillon Freres have threatened to
put it out of business, but it still remains. Perhaps that is
owned by Lang, too."
He had joined Adare at the window. The next moment both men were
staring at the same object in a mutual surprise. Into the white
snow space between the house and the forest there had walked
swiftly the slim, red-clad figure of Josephine, her face turned to
the forest, her hair falling in a long braid down her back.
The master of Adare chuckled exultantly.
"There goes our little Red Riding Hood!" he rumbled. "She beat us
after all, Philip. She is going after the dogs!"
Philip's heart was beating wildly. A better opportunity for seeing
Josephine alone could not have come to him. He feared that his
voice might betray him as he laid a hand on Adare's arm.
"If you will excuse me I will join her," he said. "I know it
doesn't seem just right to tear off in this way, but--you see--"
Adare interrupted him with one of his booming laughs.
"Go, my lad. I understand. If it was Miriam instead of Mignonne
running away like that, John Adare wouldn't be waiting this long."
Philip turned and left the room, every pulse in his body throbbing
with an excitement roused by the knowledge that the hour had come
when Josephine would give herself to him forever, or doom him to
that hopelessness for which Jean Croisset had told him to prepare
himself.