had been a father. He had risked his life. He had saved him from death.
And Marie, as she sat at his side, did not think of him as a young
man--thirty-seven. She talked to him as she might have talked to an
elder brother of Jan's, and with something like the same reverence in
her voice.
It was unfortunate--for her--that Jan had loved Duval, and that he had
never tired of telling her about him. And now, when Blake's caution
warned him to lie no more about the days of plague in Duval's cabin,
she told him--as he had asked her--about herself and Jan; how they had
lived during the last three years, the important things that had
happened to them, and what they were looking forward to. He caught the
low note of happiness that ran through her voice; and with a laugh, a
laugh that sounded real and wholesome, he put out his hand in the
darkness--for the fire had burned itself low--and stroked her hair. She
did not shrink from the caress. He was happy because THEY were happy.
That was her thought! And Blake did not go too far.
She went on, telling Jan's life away, betraying him In her happiness,
crucifying him in her faith. Blake knew that she was telling the truth.
She did not know that Jan had killed Francois Breault, and she believed
that he would surely return--in three days. And the way he had left her
that morning! Yes, she confided even that to this big brother of Jan,
her cheeks flushing hotly in the darkness--how he had hated to go, and
held her a long time in his arms before he tore himself away.
Had he taken his fiddle along with him? Yes--always that. Next to
herself he loved his violin. Oo-oo--no, no--she was not jealous of the
violin! Blake laughed--such a big, healthy, happy laugh, with an odd
tremble in it. He stroked her hair again, and his fingers lay for an
instant against her warm cheek.
And then, quite casually, he played his second big card.
"A man was found dead on the trail yesterday," he said. "Some one
killed him. He had a bullet through his lung. He was the mail-runner,
Francois Breault."
It was then, when he said that Breault had been murdered, that Blake's
hand touched Marie's cheek and fell to her shoulder. It was too dark in
the cabin to see. But under his hand he felt her grow suddenly rigid,
and for a moment or two she seemed to stop breathing. In the gloom
Blake's lips were smiling. He had struck, and he needed no light to see
the effect.
"Francois--Breault!" he heard her breathe at last, as if she was
fighting to keep something from choking her. "Francois
Breault--dead--killed by someone--"
She rose slowly. His eyes followed her, a shadow in the gloom as she
moved toward the stove. He heard her strike a match, and when she
turned toward him again in the light of the oil-lamp, her face was pale
and her eyes were big and staring. He swung himself to the edge of the
cot, his pulse beating with the savage thrill of the inquisitor. Yet he
knew that it was not quite time for him to disclose himself--not quite.
He did not dread the moment when he would rise and tell her that he was
not injured, and that he was not M'sieu Duval, but Corporal Blake of
the Royal Mounted Police. He was eager for that moment. But he
waited--discreetly. When the trap was sprung there would be no escape.
"You are sure--it was Francois Breault?" she said at last.
He nodded.
"Yes, the mail-runner. You knew him?"
She had moved to the table, and her hand was gripping the edge of it.
For a space she did not answer him, but seemed to be looking somewhere
through the cabin walls--a long way off. Ferret-like, he was watching
her, and saw his opportunity. How splendidly fate was playing his way!
He rose to his feet and hobbled painfully to her, a splendid hypocrite,
a magnificent dissembler. He seized her hand and held it in both his
own. It was small and soft, but strangely cold.
"Ma cheri--my dear child--what makes you look like that? What has the
death of Francois Breault to do with you--you and Jan?"
It was the voice of a friend, a brother, low, sympathetic, filled just
enough with anxiety. Only last winter, in just that way, it had won the
confidence and roused the hope of Pierrot's wife, over on the
Athabasca. In the summer that followed they hanged Pierrot. Gently
Blake spoke the words again. Marie's lips trembled. Her great eyes were
looking at him--straight into his soul, it seemed.
"You may tell me, ma cheri," he encouraged, barely above a whisper. "I
am Duval. And Jan--I love Jan."
He drew her back toward the cot, dragging his limb painfully, and
seated her again upon the stool. He sat beside her, still holding her
hand, patting it, encouraging her. The color was coming back into
Marie's cheeks. Her lips were growing full and red again, and suddenly
she gave a trembling little laugh as she looked up into Blake's face.
His presence began to dispel the terror that had possessed her all at
once.
"Tell me, Marie."
He saw the shudder that passed through her slim shoulders.
"They had a fight--here--in this cabin--three days ago," she confessed.
"It must have been--the day--he was killed."
Blake knew the wild thought that was in her heart as she watched him.
The muscles of his jaws tightened. His shoulders grew tense. He looked
over her head as if he, too, saw something beyond the cabin walls. It
was Marie's hand that gripped his now, and her voice, panting almost,
was filled with an agonized protest.
"No, no, no--it was not Jan," she moaned. "It was not Jan who killed
him!"
"Hush!" said Blake.
He looked about him as if there was a chance that someone might hear
the fatal words she had spoken. It was a splendid bit of acting, almost
unconscious, and tremendously effective. The expression in his face
stabbed to her heart like a cold knife. Convulsively her fingers
clutched more tightly at his hands. He might as well have spoken the
words: "It was Jan, then, who killed Francois Breault!"
Instead of that he said:
"You must tell me everything, Marie. How did it happen? Why did they
fight? And why has Jan gone away so soon after the killing? For Jan's
sake, you must tell me--everything."
He waited. It seemed to him that he could hear the fighting struggle in
Marie's breast. Then she began, brokenly, a little at a time, now and
then barely whispering the story. It was a woman's story, and she told
it like a woman, from the beginning. Perhaps at one time the rivalry
between Jan Thoreau and Francois Breault, and their struggle for her
love, had made her heart beat faster and her cheeks flush warm with a
woman's pride of conquest, even though she had loved one and had hated
the other. None of that pride was in her voice now, except when she
spoke of Jan.
"Yes--like that--children together--we grew up," she confided. "It was
down there at Wollaston Post, in the heart of the big forests, and when
I was a baby it was Jan who carried me about on his shoulders. Oui,
even then he played the violin. I loved it. I loved Jan--always. Later,
when I was seventeen, Francois Breault came."
She was trembling.
"Jan has told me a little about those days," lied Blake. "Tell me the
rest, Marie."
"I--I knew I was going to be Jan's wife," she went on, the hands she
had withdrawn from his twisting nervously in her lap. "We both knew.
And yet--he had not spoken--he had not been definite. Oo-oo, do you
understand, M'sieu Duval? It was my fault at the beginning! Francois
Breault loved me. And so--I played with him--only a little, m'sieu!--to
frighten Jan into the thought that he might lose me. I did not know
what I was doing. No--no; I didn't understand.
"Jan and I were married, and on the day Jan saw the missioner--a week
before we were made man and wife--Francois Beault came in from the
trail to see me, and I confessed to him, and asked his forgiveness. We
were alone. And he--Francois Breault--was like a madman."
She was panting. Her hands were clenched. "If Jan hadn't heard my
cries, and come just in time--" she breathed.
Her blazing eyes looked up into Blake's face. He understood, and nodded.
"And it was like that--again--three days ago," she continued. "I hadn't
seen Breault in two years--two years ago down at Wollaston Post. And he
was mad. Yes, he must have been mad when he came three days ago. I
don't know that he came so much for me as it was to kill Jan, He said
it was Jan. Ugh, and it was here--in the cabin--that they fought!"
"And Jan--punished him," said Blake in a low voice.
Again the convulsive shudder swept through Marie's shoulders.
"It was strange--what happened, m'sieu. I was going to shoot. Yes, I
would have shot him when the chance came. But all at once Francois
Breault sprang back to the door, and he cried: 'Jan Thoreau, I am
mad--mad! Great God, what have I done?' Yes, he said that, m'sieu,
those very words--and then he was gone."
"And that same day--a little later--Jan went away from the cabin, and
was gone a long time," whispered Blake. "Was it not so, Marie?"
"Yes; he went to his trap-line, m'sieu."
For the first time Blake made a movement. He took her face boldly
between his two hands, and turned it so that her staring eyes were
looking straight into his own. Every fiber in his body was trembling
with the thrill of his monstrous triumph. "My dear little girl, I must
tell you the truth," he said. "Your husband, Jan, did not go to his
trap-line three days ago. He followed Francois Breault, and killed him.
And I am not John Duval. I am Corporal Blake of the Mounted Police, and
I have come to get Jan, that he may be hanged by the neck until he is
dead for his crime. I came for that. But I have changed my mind. I have
seen you, and for you I would give even a murderer his life. Do you
understand? For YOU--YOU--YOU--"
And then came the grand finale, just as he had planned it. His words
had stupefied her. She made no movement, no sound--only her great eyes
seemed alive. And suddenly he swept her into his arms with the wild
passion of a beast. How long she lay against his breast, his arms
crushing her, his hot lips on her face, she did not know.
The world had grown suddenly dark. But in that darkness she heard his
voice; and what it was saying roused her at last from the deadliness of
her stupor. She strained against him, and with a wild cry broke from
his arms, and staggered across the cabin floor to the door of her
bedroom. Blake did not pursue her. He let the darkness of that room
shut her in. He had told her--and she understood.
He shrugged his shoulders as he rose to his feet. Quite calmly, in
spite of the wild rush of blood through his body, he went to the cabin
door, opened it, and looked out into the night. It was full of stars,
and quiet.
It was quiet in that inner room, too--so quiet that one might fancy he
could hear the beating of a heart. Marie had flung herself in the
farthest corner, beyond the bed. And there her hand had touched
something. It was cold--the chill of steel. She could almost have
screamed, in the mighty reaction that swept through her like an
electric shock. But her lips were dumb and her hand clutched tighter at
the cold thing.
She drew it toward her inch by inch, and leveled it across the bed. It
was Jan's goose-gun, loaded with buck-shot. There was a single metallic
click as she drew the hammer back. In the doorway, looking at the
stars, Blake did not hear.
Marie waited. She was not reasoning things now, except that in the
outer room there was a serpent that she must kill. She would kill him
as he came between her and the light; then she would follow over Jan's
trail, overtake him somewhere, and they would flee together. Of that
much she thought ahead. But chiefly her mind, her eyes, her brain, her
whole being, were concentrated on the twelve-inch opening between the
bedroom door and the outer room. The serpent would soon appear there.
And then--
She heard the cabin door close, and Blake's footsteps approaching. Her
body did not tremble now. Her forefinger was steady on the trigger. She
held her breath--and waited. Blake came to the deadline and stopped.
She could see one arm and a part of his shoulder. But that was not
enough. Another half step--six inches--four even, and she would fire.
Her heart pounded like a tiny hammer in her breast.
And then the very life in her body seemed to stand still. The cabin
door had opened suddenly, and someone had entered. In that moment she
would have fired, for she knew that it must be Jan who had returned.
But Blake had moved. And now, with her finger on the trigger, she heard
his cry of amazement:
"Sergeant Fitzgerald!"
"Yes. Put up your gun, Corporal. Have you got Jan Thoreau?"
"He--is gone."
"That is lucky for us." It was the stranger's voice, filled with a
great relief. "I have traveled fast to overtake you. Matao, the
half-breed, was stabbed in a quarrel soon after you left; and before he
died he confessed to killing Breault. The evidence is conclusive. Ugh,
but this fire is good! Anybody at home?"
"Yes," said Blake slowly. "Mrs. Thoreau--is--at home."
L'ANGE
She stood in the doorway of a log cabin that was overgrown with
woodvine and mellow with the dull red glow of the climbing bakneesh,
with the warmth of the late summer sun falling upon her bare head.
Cummins' shout had brought her to the door when we were still half a
rifle shot down the river; a second shout, close to shore, brought her
running down toward me. In that first view that I had of her, I called
her beautiful. It was chiefly, I believe, because of her splendid hair.
John Cummins' shout of homecoming had caught her with it undone, and
she greeted us with the dark and lustrous masses of it sweeping about
her shoulders and down to her hips. That is, she greeted Cummins, for
he had been gone for nearly a month. I busied myself with the canoe for
that first half minute or so.
Then it was that I received my introduction and for the first time
touched the hand of Melisse Cummins, the Florence Nightingale of
several thousand square miles of northern wilderness. I saw, then, that
what I had at first taken for our own hothouse variety of beauty was a
different thing entirely, a type that would have disappointed many
because of its strength and firmness. Her hair was a glory, brown and
soft. No woman could have criticized its loveliness. But the flush that
I had seen in her face, flower-like at a short distance, was a tan that
was almost a man's tan. Her eyes were of a deep blue and as clear as
the sky; but in them, too, there was a strength that was not altogether
feminine. There was strength in her face, strength in the poise of her
firm neck, strength in every movement of her limbs and body. When she
spoke, it was in a voice which, like her hair, was adorable. I had
never heard a sweeter voice, and her firm mouth was all at once not
only gentle and womanly, but almost girlishly pretty.
I could understand, now, why Melisse Cummins was the heroine of a
hundred true tales of the wilderness, and I could understand as well
why there was scarcely a cabin or an Indian hut in that ten thousand
square miles of wilderness in which she had not, at one time or
another, been spoken of as "L'ange Meleese." And yet, unlike that other
"angel" of flesh and blood, Florence Nightingale, the story of Melisse
Cummins and her work will live and die with her in that little cabin
two hundred miles straight north of civilization. No, that is wrong.
For the wilderness will remember. It will remember, as it has
remembered Father Duchene and the Missioner of Lac Bain and the heroic
days of the early voyageurs. A hundred "Meleeses" will bear her memory
in name--for all who speak her name call her "Meleese," and not Melisse.
The wilderness itself may never forget, as it has never forgotten
beautiful Jeanne D'Arcambal, who lived and died on the shore of the
great bay more than one hundred and sixty years ago. It will never
forget the great heart this woman has given to her "people" from the
days of girlhood; it will not forget the thousand perils she faced to
seek out the sick, the plague-stricken and the starving; in old age
there will still be those who will remember the first prayers to the
real God that she taught them in childhood; and children still to come,
in cabin, tepee and hut, will live to bless the memory of L'ange
Meleese, who made possible for them a new birthright and who in the
wild places lived to the full measure and glory of the Golden Rule.
To find Meleese Cummins and her home in the wilderness, one must start
at Le Pas as the last outpost of civilization and strike northward
through the long Pelican Lake waterways to Reindeer Lake. Nearly forty
miles up the east shore of the lake, the adventurer will come to the
mouth of the Gray Loon--narrow and silent stream that winds under
overhanging forests--and after that a two-hours' journey in a canoe
will bring one to the Cummins' cabin.
It is set in a clearing, with the thick spruce and balsam and cedar
hemming it in, and a tall ridge capped with golden birch rising behind
it. In that clearing John Cummins raises a little fruit and a few
vegetables during the summer months; but it is chiefly given up to
three or four huge plots of scarlet moose-flowers, a garden of Labrador
tea, and wild flowering plants and vines of half a dozen varieties. And
where the radiant moose-flowers grow thickest, screened from the view
of the cabin by a few cedars and balsams, are the rough wooden slabs
that mark seven graves. Six of them are the graves of children--little
ones who died deep in the wilderness and whose tiny bodies Meleese
Cummins could not leave to the savage and pitiless loneliness of the
forests, but whom she has brought together that they might have company
in what she calls her, "Little Garden of God."
Those little graves tell the story of Meleese--the woman who, all heart
and soul, has buried her own one little babe in that garden of flowers.
One of the slabs marks the grave of an Indian baby, whose little dead
body Meleese Cummins carried to her cabin in her own strong arms from
twenty miles back in the forest, when the temperature was fifty degrees
below zero. Another of them, a baby boy, a French half-breed and his
wife brought down from fifty miles up the Reindeer and begged "L'ange
Meleese" to let it rest with the others, where "it might not be lonely
and would not be frightened by the howl of the wolves." It was a wild
and half Indian mother who said that!
It was almost twenty years ago that the romance began in the lives of
John and Meleese Cummins. Meleese was then ten years old; and she still
remembers as vividly as though they were but memories of yesterday the
fears and wild tales of that one terrible winter when the "Red
Terror"--the smallpox--swept in a pitiless plague of death throughout
the northern wilderness. It was then that there came down from the
north, one bitter cold day, a ragged and half-starved boy, whose mother
and father had died of the plague in a little cabin fifty miles away,
and who from the day he staggered into the home of Henry Janesse,
became Meleese's playmate and chum. This boy was John Cummins.
When Janesse moved to Fort Churchill, where Meleese might learn more in
the way of reading and writing and books than her parents could teach
her, John Cummins went with her. He went with them to Nelson House, and
from there to Split Lake, where Janesse died. From that time, at the
age of eighteen, he became the head and support of the home. When he
was twenty and Meleese eighteen, the two were married by a missioner
from Nelson House. The following autumn the young wife's mother died,
and that winter Meleese began her remarkable work among her "people."
In their little cabin on the Gray Loon, one will hear John Cummins say
but little about himself; but there is a glow in his eyes and a flush
in his cheeks as he tells of that first day he came home from a
three-days journey over a long trap line to find his home cold and
fireless, and a note written by Meleese telling him that she had gone
with a twelve-year-old boy who had brought her word through twenty
miles of forest that his mother was dying. That first "case" was more
terrible for John Cummins than for his wife, for it turned out to be
smallpox, and for six weeks Meleese would allow him to come no nearer
than the edge of the clearing' in which the pest-ridden cabin stood.
First the mother, and then the boy, she nursed back to life, locking
the door against the two husbands, who built themselves a shack in the
edge of the forest. Half a dozen times Meleese Cummins has gone through
ordeals like that unscathed. Once it was to nurse a young Indian mother
through the dread disease, and again she went into a French trapper's
cabin where husband, wife and daughter were all sick with the malady.
At these times, when the "call" came to Meleese from a far cabin or
tepee, John Cummins would give up the duties of his trap line to
accompany her, and would pitch his tent or make him a shack close by,
where he could watch over her, hunt food for the afflicted people and
keep up the stack of needed firewood and water.
But there were times when the "calls" came during the husband's
absence, and, if they were urgent, Meleese went alone, trusting to her
own splendid strength and courage. A half-breed woman came to her one
day, in the dead of winter, from twenty miles across the lake. Her
husband had frozen one of his feet, and the "frost malady" would kill
him, she said, unless he had help. Scarcely knowing what she could do
in such a case, Meleese left a note for her husband, and on snowshoes
the two heroic women set off across the wind-swept and unsheltered
lake, with the thermometer fifty degrees below zero. It was a terrible
venture, but the two won out. When Meleese saw the frozen man, she knew
that there was but one thing to do, and with all the courage of her
splendid heart she amputated his foot. The torture of that terrible
hour no one will ever know. But when John Cummins returned to his home
and, wild with fear, followed across the lake, he scarcely recognized
the Meleese who flung herself sobbing into his arms when he found her.
For two weeks after that Meleese herself was sick. Thus, through the
course of years, it came about that it was, indeed, a stranger in the
land who had not heard her name. During the summer months Meleese's
work, in place of duty, was a pleasure. With her husband she made canoe
journeys for fifty miles about her home, hearing with her the teachings
of cleanliness, of health and of God. She was the first to hold to her
own loving breast many little children who came into their wild and
desolate inheritance of life. She was the first to teach a hundred
childish lips to say "Now I lay me down to sleep," and more than one
woman she made to see the clear and starry way to brighter life.
Far up on Reindeer Lake, close to the shore, there is a towering
"lob-stick tree"--which is a tall spruce or cedar lopped of all its
branches to the very crest, which is trimmed in the form of a plume. A
tree thus shriven and trimmed is the Cree cenotaph to one held in
almost spiritual reverence, and the tree far up on Reindeer Lake is one
of the half dozen or more "lob-sticks" dedicated to Meleese. Six weeks
Meleese and John Cummins spent in an Indian camp at this point, and
when at last the two bade their primitive friends good-bye and left for
home, the little Indian children and the women followed their canoe
along the edge of a stream and flung handfuls of flowers after them.
Of what Meleese Cummins and her husband know of the great outside
world, or of what they do not know, it is wisest to leave unsaid.
Details have often marred a picture. They are children of the
wilderness, born of that wilderness, bred of it, and life of it--a
beating and palpitating part of a world which few can understand. I
doubt if one or the other has ever heard of a William Shakespeare or a
Tennyson, for it has not been in my mind or desire to ask; but they do
know the human heart as it beats and throbs in a land that is
desolation and loneliness, where poetry runs not in lines and meters,
but in the bloom of the wild flower, the rush of the rapid, the thunder
of the waterfall and the murmuring of the wind in the spruce tops;
where drama exists not in the epic lines of literature, but in the hunt
cry of the wolf, the death dirges of the storms that wail down from the
Barrens, and in the strange cries that rise up out of the silent
forests, where for a half of each year life is that endless strife that
leaves behind only those whom we term the survival of the fittest.
THE CASE OF BEAUVAIS
Madness? Perhaps. And yet if it was madness. . . .