He began to count backwards and downwards. I counted after him:
"Twenty-seven." By the last notch there was a deep gash.
"What is this?"
"Twenty-seven years ago she was here, she whom you are like. I have
waited twenty-seven years."
"Tell me about it; I am ready to hear."
"Come here." He beckoned to me from a group of trees, tamaracks, on
the other side of the path. He went behind one. I followed him.
"Read," he said. And I read with difficulty, although the lettering
was cut deep, one word "Heureuse", and a date "1883. 9. 10."
"'Heureuse'," I repeated. "Happy--happy; oh, I know how happy!"
He looked at me significantly for a moment, and I knew that his "fixed
idea" had possession of him. He regarded me, Marcia Farrell, as the
child of that "forest love" of nearly twenty-seven years ago.
"You say true; they were happy." Without preliminaries he told me the
story he had related to Mr. Ewart and Jamie last year.
"Has Mr. Ewart or Jamie ever seen this tree, Andre?"
"No. I have told them both of my tree and the notches--but never of
this other. You are the first to see it since her blue eyes watched
him cut those letters. I have shown it to neither my young comrade nor
to the seignior."
"And you say I am so like her?"
"As like as if you were her own child?"
He put up his hand suddenly to "feel the wind". There was a sudden
strange movement among the tree tops.
"Come, come quickly, mademoiselle; we must get back. The wind is
shifting to the southwest. It is blowing hot. I know the sign. The
seignior will not want you to be out even with old Andre with this wind
on the lake."
I looked at the pool; it was black. The singing waters of the torrent
showed unearthly white against the intensified green. The sky became
suddenly overcast with swiftly moving clouds. In a moment the wind was
all about us; the sound of its going through the forest filled the air
with a confused roar. The great trees were already swaying, as we ran
down the trail to the lake--and found Mr. Ewart just drawing his canoe
and ours high up and away from the already uneasy water. He was
breathing quickly.
"There 's a storm coming, Andre--we saw it from the other side of the
lake; coming hard, too, from the southwest. The lake will not be safe
till it is over. We will stay here in the open even if we get wet. It
is not safe in the woods; the trees are already breaking. I hear the
crash of the branches."
"And the seignior did not trust mademoiselle with me?" Evidently he
was disgruntled. "True, I am no longer in my first youth" (I saw Mr.
Ewart suppress a smile), "but years give caution, seignior--and I have
many more than you."
Mr. Ewart laughed pleasantly. The sound of it dissipated Andre's
anger--the quick resentment of old age.
"True, mon vieux camarade, you have the years; but I stand between you
and mademoiselle when it comes to a matter of years. I must care for
you both."
"I am content that it should be so, _moi_." He squatted by the canoes
which he lashed to a small boulder.
No rain fell, but the wind was terrific in its force. We were obliged
to lie flat on the sand. The air was filled with confused torrents of
sound, so deafening that we could not make ourselves heard one to the
other. It was over in ten minutes. The sky cleared, the sun shone;
the lake waters subsided; the sounds died away, and very suddenly. In
the minute's calm that followed it seemed as if, in all that land,
there were no stirring of a leaf, a twig, or fin of fish, or wing of
fowl. There was again a sudden change of wind, and we knew the very
moment when the upper air currents, cool and crisp with a touch of
Arctic frost, swept down upon the earth and brought refreshment. In
another quarter of an hour there was no trace of the storm on the lake;
but behind us, on each side of the trail, we saw great trees uprooted.
"I can leave you and Andre now, and with a clear conscience, to your
fishing," he said, as he ran down his canoe.
I felt positively grateful to him for not insisting on taking me back
with him; it would have hurt old Andre's pride as well as feelings.
"We 'll bring home fish enough for supper," I said with fine amateur
assurance.
"I warn you 'We are seven' plus the two Montagnais; they stay to-night."
"If I don't make good, Andre will." And Andre smiled in what I thought
a particularly significant way.
We watched the swift course of his canoe over the lake. Just as he was
about to round a small promontory, that would hide him from our sight,
he stood up, and swung the dripping paddle high above his head. I
waved my hand in answering greeting.
Andre turned to me with a smile. "The seignior has a look of that
other--but he is not the same."
What an obsession it was with this man of ninety! I watched him
preparing lines and bait. The canoe had passed from sight.
"Andre," I said, speaking on the impulse of the moment, "I want to go
back to camp."
"As you please, mademoiselle. I can fish on that side as well as
this." Upon that he put up his pipe,--I verily believe it was still
alive and his pockets must have been lined with asbestos,--and we
embarked on our little voyage.
I used my paddle mechanically, for I was thinking: "Is it for one
moment probable I have any connection with that girl? Is that past, I
am trying so hard to eliminate from my life, to present itself here as
a quantity with which I must reckon--here in my life in this
wilderness? Is there no avoiding it? Andre is so sure. Jamie knows
he is sure; Mr. Ewart knows this too. They can say nothing to me about
it--it is a matter of such delicacy; and they do not know who I am;
even my journal does not tell that, and I knew this when I gave it into
his hands.
"But the Doctor--he knows. He knows from Cale and Delia Beaseley. He
knows who I am; in all probability knows this very day, from those
papers in his possession, my father's name; but he knows nothing of
this new complication that Andre has brought about by his insistence
that I am like some woman who camped here many years ago--
"Twenty-seven years! That must have been just before I was born--and
the date--and that word 'heureuse' with a queer capital H--oh--"
Perhaps it was a groan that escaped my lips, for, like a searchlight,
the logic of events illumined each factor in that tragedy in which my
mother--