An Algonquin Maiden Part 2

"Let me see," mused the young man, "three years ago you were a little inclined to be haughty and cold, occasionally difficult to please, and sometimes exacting. On the whole, 'tis pleasant to reflect that you are an entirely different person now."

He turned towards her with a merry glance, but her face was invisible.

She wore one of those long straw bonnets, no doubt esteemed very pretty and stylish in that day, but marred by what a disciple of Fowler might call a remarkable phrenological development of the anterior portion. This severely intellectual quality in the bonnets of that time naturally stood in the way of the merely sensuous delights of observation. Edward had barely time to be reminded of an unused well, in whose dark, shallow depths his boyish eyes had once discovered a cl.u.s.ter of white water-lilies, languidly opening to the light, when the liquid eyes and lily-like face in the inner vista of this well-like bonnet again confronted him.

"Is that the sort of person I used to be?" she queried, with the incredulity one naturally feels on being presented with a slightly exaggerated outline of one's own failings. "What pleasant memories you must have carried away with you!"

"I did, indeed--myriads of them. Some of the pleasantest were connected with our last dance together. Do you remember it?"

A slight warmth crept up, not into her cheeks, but into her eyes. "I have never forgiven you for that," she said.

"And you don't deserve forgiveness," declared Rose, championing the cause of her friend.

"Ah, well," said the culprit, "perhaps I had better wait till I deserve it before I plead for it."

How strange and far away, almost like part of their childhood, seemed the time of which he spoke. Like a painted picture, suddenly thrust before their view, the scene came back to them. A windy night in late Autumn, illumined without only by the broad shafts of light from the Commodore's mansion, and within by the leaping flames in the big hall fire-place. The young people had improvised a dance in the great hall, and Helene had tantalizingly bestowed most of her favours upon Fred Jarvis, a handsome youngster of twenty, who frequently improved his opportunities of becoming the special object of Edward's boyish enmity. To fall a willing victim to the pangs of jealousy formed, however, no part of this young gentleman's intention. Returning late in the evening, he caught a glimpse of Fred and Helene dancing a stately minuet together, and, lightly securing his horse at the door, he entered the hall, just as Helene was protesting that she was too tired to dance any longer. "Just once with me," he pleaded; and their winged footsteps kept time to the tumultuous throbbing of the music.

The young girl suddenly grew faint. "Give me air," she cried, and at the words Edward's strong arm swept her across the broad veranda, and up on the waiting steed. Mounting behind her, like another young Lochinvar, they dashed wildly off, but just in what direction could not be told, for Helene, in mingled consternation, exhaustion, and alarm, had fainted in earnest, and Edward, in the endeavour to hold her limp, unconscious figure before him, had dropped the reins. The steed, however, with a prudent indisposition for pastures new at that hour of the night, turned into a stubble-field, and brought up at a haystack. How, in the utter darkness, and with the wind blowing a gale, the young man managed to restore his companion to consciousness and bring her back to the house, were mysteries which Rose could never attempt to penetrate with any degree of satisfaction. Helene, of course, was superbly angry, and even this bare mention of the escapade brought fire to her eyes and a loftier poise to the well-set head.

Strongly set about the heart of this young Huguenot were barriers of pride, that could not be overleaped in a day--scarcely in a life-time.

"It is a bargain, then," said Edward, with a mischievous light in his smile, "you will never forgive, and I shall never forget."

"I wish, if it isn't asking too much, that you would allow me to forget. I particularly want to forget everything unpleasant on a morning as beautiful as this," rejoined Helene.

It was indeed an ideal morning. The sky was as soft and warm, as blue and white, as only the skies of early summer can be. Treading the mingled shadow and light, thrown from the interlacing boughs above, they came at last to the blue curves of Kempenfeldt Bay, whose waves lapped lightly on the beach. Here they found the two younger Macleod children, who had come to see the party off. Just as the latter arrived, the youth, Herbert, who had been amusing himself rocking a punt in a creek by the sh.o.r.e, managed to upset the craft and precipitate himself into deep water. The mishap had no more serious result--for the lad was a good swimmer--than to frighten Rose, and deprive her of the antic.i.p.ated pleasure of a visit to "Bellevue" with Helene and her brother Edward. Bidding the former a hurried goodbye, with injunctions to her brother to take care of her friend, Rose disappeared with the children into the woods.

The young man now released a row-boat from its bondage to the sh.o.r.e, helped his companion into it, and pushed it far out upon its native element. A new day in the New World, and a long boat-ride before them--what could they wish for more? Edward, at least, enjoyed the prospect extremely, especially when he could get the bonnet rightly focused. This was a matter somewhat difficult of achievement, as its owner had to his mind a heedless habit of dodging, and his remarks, instead of being didactic and improving in their nature, were necessarily exclamatory and interrogative, in order to gain the attention of his fair _vis-a-vis_. Being a young gentleman of literary tastes he thought of Addison's dissertation upon the fan, and its great adaptability to the purposes of the coquette. To the mind of this impartial critic, a fan was not half so effective and terrible a weapon as the present style of bonnet.

"Bother Addison!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud.

"I beg your pardon," said a voice from the depths of the obnoxious head-gear before him.

"I was thinking of the author of _The Spectator_. You know Johnson says we ought to give our days and nights to the study of Addison.

Don't you think it would be more profitable for us to devote our days and nights to the study of Nature?"

"Undoubtedly; and especially in this short-summered region, where there are only a few months of the year in which one can pursue one's studies out of doors. My days are spent on the sh.o.r.e, and as for my nights--well, even at night I often go to sleep to the fancy that I am drifting over the water with just such a gentle movement as this."

"I hope," said Edward gravely, "that you have an efficient oarsman.

You couldn't row and sleep at the same time, you know."

He looked up to see if his companion was struck with the force of this observation, but although they were moving towards the east, the bonnet pointed due north. There was also a slight suspicion of the wintry north in the tone with which she replied:

"Oh, there is no labour connected with it; I am merely drifting--drifting to the Isle of Sleep."

"That is a pretty idea, but it is too lonely and listless to suit me.

I should prefer to have a young lady in the boat--and a pair of oars."

"In that case you would have to row," and, with a slightly mocking accent, "you couldn't row and sleep at the same time, you know."

"In that case I should never want to sleep. No, please, Miss DeBerczy, don't look to the north again. Every time your gaze is riveted upon that frozen region my heart sinks within me. I feel as if I were not entertaining you as well as I should."

"Oh, don't let that illusion disturb you. I have never doubted that you were entertaining me as well as you--could."

A brief silence fell upon them, broken only by the regular plash of the oars. In the young man's conversational attacks there had been nothing but a light play of sunny humour, but in this last retort of hers there was something like the glimmer of cold steel. It wounded him, yet he was unwilling either to conceal or reveal the hurt. But Helene DeBerczy had this weakness, common to generous souls, that she could not utter an ungenerous remark without suffering more than her victim. So, scarcely more than a minute elapsed before she said appealingly,

"You are not going to leave me with the last word, are you?"

"Is not that what your s.e.x specially like to have?"

"Perhaps so. I should prefer to have the _best_ word, and--"

"And let a certain well-known gentleman take the hindmost?" supplied the young man smilingly.

"If he only would! What a shocking thing to say, but with me it is always conscience who has the very hindmost word; and my conscience is perfect mistress of the art of saying disagreeable things. At the present moment she is trying to make me believe that I have been unpardonably rude to you."

"She is mistaken then, for even if it were possible for you to be rude, I could not fail to pardon you immediately."

"There! now you have had the best word. It is useless for me to try to say anything better than that. Perhaps the most becoming thing I could do would be to relapse into ignominious silence."

"Silence! Desolation! And with a two-mile pull yet before us! If I have had the best word you have uttered the worst one. What so terrible as silence?"

"It is said to be golden."

"And, like the gold that Robinson Crusoe discovered on his island, it is of no particular use to anyone."

"It is one of the charms of Nature."

"A charm that I have never discovered. What about the ever-present hum of mult.i.tudinous insects, the song of birds, the moan of winds, the laughter of leaping water? It seems to me that Nature is all voice."

"Then, suppose," said the undaunted young lady, lifting her languorous lids, "that we listen to her voice."

There was no answering this; but, as the bonnet now veered towards the sunny south, and the boat rounding the sharp corner of the bay abruptly turned in the same direction, the young man was surprised to find himself looking his companion fully in the face, caught in the sudden sunshine of her smile.

"I was about to remark," he said, emboldened by this token of favour, "that there is nothing I delight in so much as listening to the voice of nature--that is human nature."

The smile deepened into a rippling laugh. "I am in one of my inhuman moods this morning," she said, "but I believe my forte is action rather than speech. Let me take your place, and those oars, please."

He resigned them both, and at once; not because the unusual exertion had made any appreciable inroad upon his strength, but because he foresaw new phases of picturesqueness in the young girl's dainty handling of the oars. Nor was he disappointed. The skirt of her dress was narrow and long, beginning, like an infant's robe, a few inches below the arms, and thence descending in softly curving lines to her feet, with as little hint of rigidity or compression about the tenderly rounded waist as about the full fair throat above it. She stretched out a pair of shoes, incredibly small and unmistakably French, and bent her slender gauntleted hands blithely to their task.

The newborn sweetness of the spring morning was about them. On the heavily wooded sh.o.r.e the great evergreens towered darkly against the sun, but its beams fell with dazzling brightness upon the meadowy undulations of the lake. Above them they heard at times the wild cry of the soaring gull, or the apparently disembodied voice of some unseen bird. Behind them they left the beautiful stretch of Kempenfeldt Bay, gleaming in the sunshine, and now they slowly ascended the waters of Cook's Bay, called after the great circ.u.mnavigator, under whom many of the naval officers who had settled in the region had served, Governor Simcoe's father, after whom the old Lac des Clies--as the French called it--had received its modern name, being a shipmate.

But, now, Helene, whose slender strength had succ.u.mbed to the difficulties of propelling their little craft, resumed her old seat, and her bonnet, like a dark lantern, sometimes allowed a charming light to be reflected upon surrounding objects, and then as suddenly withdrew it. In the blue distance, near the mouth of the Holland River, they caught the first glimpse of "Bellevue"--the home of the DeBerczy's. The long sunlit run had after all been too brief. Edward began to realize that some days might elapse before this pleasure could be repeated. He drew in his oars, and let the boat rock idly on the tide. His companion gave him an inquiring glance. "I wish," said he, "that you would do me a favour."

"Isn't that rather an extraordinary request?"

"Not at all. It is a very natural remark. It has not yet advanced so far as to be a request."

"Oh! well, of course, I can't grant what isn't a request."

"Does that mean that you can grant what is one?"