Flower of the North Part 16

"And she is the other at Fort o' G.o.d--Pierre's sister," said Philip.

Jeanne rose from the rock and moved toward the tent, glimmering indistinctly in the night. Her voice came back chokingly.

"No, M'sieur. Pierre's real sister is at Fort o' G.o.d. I am the one whom he found out on the barren."

To the night sounds there was added a heart-broken sob, and Jeanne disappeared in the tent.

XIV

Philip sat where Jeanne had left him. He was powerless to move or to say a word that might have recalled her. Her own grief, quivering in that one piteous sob, overwhelmed him. It held him mute and listening, with the hope that each instant the tent-flap might open and Jeanne reappear. And yet if she came he had no words to say. Unwittingly he had probed deep into one of those wounds that never heal, and he realized that to ask forgiveness would be but another blunder. He almost groaned as he thought of what he had done. In his desire to understand, to know more about Jeanne, he had driven her into a corner.

What he had forced from her he might have learned a little later from Pierre or from the father at Fort o' G.o.d. He thought that Jeanne must despise him now, for he had taken advantage of her helplessness and his own position. He had saved her from her enemies; and in return she had opened her heart, naked and bleeding, to his eyes. What she had told him was not a voluntary confidence; it was a confession wrung from her by the rack of his questionings--the confession that she was a waif-child, that Pierre was not her brother, and that the man at Fort o' G.o.d was not her father. He had gone to the very depths of that which was sacred to herself and those whom she loved.

He rose and stirred the fire, and stray ends of birch leaped into flame, lighting his pale face. He wanted to go to the tent, kneel there where Jeanne could hear him, and tell her that it was all a mistake.

Yet he knew that this could not be, neither the next day nor the next, for to plead extenuation for himself would be to reveal his love. Two or three times he had been on the point of revealing that love. Only now, after what had happened, did it occur to him that to disclose his heart to Jeanne would be the greatest crime he could commit. She was alone with him in the heart of a wilderness, dependent upon him, upon his honor. He shivered when he thought how narrow had been his escape, how short a time he had known her, and how in that brief spell he had given himself up to an almost insane hope. To him Jeanne was not a stranger. She was the embodiment, in flesh and blood, of the spirit which had been his companion for so long. He loved her more than ever now, for Jeanne the lost child of the snows was more the earthly revelation of his beloved spirit than Jeanne the sister of Pierre.

But--what was he to Jeanne?

He left the fire and went to the pile of balsam which he had spread out between two rocks for his bed. He lay down and pulled Pierre's blanket over him, but his fatigue and his desire for sleep seemed to have left him, and it was a long time before slumber finally drove from him the thought of what he had done. After that he did not move. He heard none of the sounds of the night. A little owl, the devil-witch, screamed horribly overhead and awakened Jeanne, who sat up for a few moments in her balsam bed, white-faced and shivering. But Philip slept. Long afterward something warm awakened him, and he opened his eyes, thinking that it was the glow of the fire in his face. It was the sun. He heard a sound which brought him quickly into consciousness of day. It was Jeanne singing softly over beyond the rocks.

He had dreaded the coming of morning, when he would have to face Jeanne. His guilt hung heavily upon him. But the sound of her voice, low and sweet, filled with the carroling happiness of a bird, brought a glad smile to his lips. After all, Jeanne had understood him. She had forgiven him, if she had not forgotten.

For the first time he noticed the height of the sun, and he sat bolt upright. Jeanne saw his head and shoulders pop over the top of the rocks, and she laughed at him from their stone table.

"I've been keeping breakfast for over an hour, M'sieur Philip," she cried. "Hurry down to the creek and wash yourself, or I shall eat all alone!"

Philip rose stupidly and looked at his watch.

"Eight o'clock!" he gasped. "We should have been ten miles on the way by this time!"

Jeanne was still laughing at him. Like sunlight she dispelled his gloom of the night before. A glance around the camp showed him that she must have been awake for at least two hours. The packs were filled and strapped. The silken tent was down and folded. She had gathered wood, built the fire, and cooked breakfast while he slept. And now she stood a dozen paces from him, blushing a little at his amazed stare, waiting for him.

"It's deuced good of you, Miss Jeanne!" he exclaimed. "I don't deserve such kindness from you."

"Oh!" said Jeanne, and that was all. She bent over the fire, and Philip went to the creek.

He was determined now to maintain a more certain hold upon himself. As he doused his face in the cold water his resolutions formed themselves.

For the next few days he would forget everything but the one fact that Jeanne was in his care; he would not hurt her again or compel her confidence.

It was after nine o'clock before they were upon the river. They paddled without a rest until twelve. After lunch Philip confiscated Jeanne's paddle and made her sit facing him in the canoe.

The afternoon pa.s.sed like a dream to Philip, He did not refer again to Fort o' G.o.d or the people there; he did not speak again of Eileen Brokaw, of Lord Fitzhugh, or of Pierre. He talked of himself and of those things which had once been his life. He told of his mother and his father, who had died, and of the little sister, whom he had worshiped, but who had gone with the others. He bared his loneliness to her as he would have told them to the sister, had she lived; and Jeanne's soft blue eyes were filled with tenderness and sympathy. And then he talked of Gregson's world. Within himself he called it no longer his own.

It was Jeanne who questioned now. She asked about cities and great people, about books and WOMEN. Her knowledge amazed Philip. She might have visited the Louvre. One would have guessed that she had walked in the streets of Paris, Berlin, and London. She spoke of Johnson, of d.i.c.kens, and of Balzac as though they had died but yesterday. She was like one who had been everywhere and yet saw everything through a veil that bewildered her. In her simplicity she unfolded herself to Philip, leaf by leaf, petal by petal, like the morning apios that surrenders its mysteries to the sun. She knew the world which he had come from, its people, its cities, its greatness; and yet her knowledge was like that of the blind. She knew, but she had never seen; and in her wistfulness to see as HE could see there was a sweetness and a pathos which made every fiber in his body sing with a quiet and thrilling joy.

He knew, now, that the man who was at Fort o' G.o.d must, indeed, be the most wonderful man in the world. For out of a child of the snows, of the forest, of a savage desolation, he had made Jeanne. And Jeanne was glorious!

The afternoon pa.s.sed, and they made thirty miles before they camped for the night. They traveled the next day, and the one that followed. On the afternoon of the fourth they were approaching Big Thunder Rapids, close to the influx of the Little Churchill, sixty miles from Fort o'

G.o.d.

These days, too, pa.s.sed for Philip with joyous swiftness; swiftly because they were too short for him. His life, now, was Jeanne. Each day she became a more vital part of him. She crept into his soul until there was no longer left room for any other thought than of her. And yet his happiness was tampered by a thing which, if not grief, depressed and saddened him at times. Two days more and they would be at Fort o' G.o.d, and there Jeanne would be no longer his own, as she was now. Even the wilderness has its conventionality, and at Fort o' G.o.d their comradeship would end. A day of rest, two at the most, and he would leave for the camp on Blind Indian Lake. As the time drew nearer when they would be but friends and no longer comrades, Philip could not always hide the signs of gloom which weighed upon him. He revealed nothing in words; but now and then Jeanne had caught him when the fears at his heart betrayed themselves in his face. Jeanne became happier as their journey approached its end. She was alive every moment, joyous, expectant, looking ahead to Fort o' G.o.d; and this in itself was a bitterness to Philip, though he knew that he was a fool for allowing it to be so. He reasoned, with dull, masculine wit, that if Jeanne cared for him at all she would not be so anxious for their comradeship to end. But these moods, when they came, pa.s.sed quickly. And on this afternoon of the fourth day they pa.s.sed away entirely, for in an instant there came a solution to it all. They had known each other but four days, yet that brief time had encompa.s.sed what might not have been in as many years. Life, smooth, uneventful, develops friendship slowly; an hour of the unusual may lay bare a soul. Philip thought of Eileen Brokaw, whose heart was still a closed mystery to him; who was a stranger, in spite of the years he had known her. In four days he had known Jeanne a lifetime; in those four days Jeanne had learned more of him than Eileen Brokaw could ever know. So he arrived at the resolution which made him, too, look eagerly ahead to the end of the journey. At Fort o' G.o.d he would tell Jeanne of his love.

Jeanne was looking at him when the determination came. She saw the gloom pa.s.s, a flush mount into his face; and when he saw her eyes upon him he laughed, without knowing why.

"If it is so funny," she said, "please tell me."

It was a temptation, but he resisted it.

"It is a secret," he said, "which I shall keep until we reach Fort o'

G.o.d."

Jeanne turned her face up-stream to listen. A dozen times she had done this during the last half-hour, and Philip had listened with her. At first they had heard a distant murmur, rising as they advanced, like an autumn wind that grows stronger each moment in the tree-tops. The murmur was steady now, without the variations of a wind. It was the distant roaring of the rocks and rushing floods of Big Thunder Rapids.

It grew steadily from a murmur to a moan, from a moan to rumbling thunder. The current became so swift that Philip was compelled to use all his strength to force the canoe ahead. A few moments later he turned into sh.o.r.e.

From where they landed, a worn trail led up to one of the precipitous walls of rock and shut in the Big Thunder Rapids. Everything about them was rock. The trail was over rock, worn smooth by the countless feet of centuries--clawed feet, naked feet, moccasined feet, the feet of white men. It was the Great Portage, for animal as well as man. Philip went up with the pack, and Jeanne followed behind him. The thunder increased. It roared in their ears until they could no longer hear their own voices. Directly above the rapids the trail was narrow, scarcely eight feet in width, shut in on the land side by a mountain wall, on the other by the precipice. Philip looked behind, and saw Jeanne hugging close to the wall. Her face was white, her eyes shone with terror and awe. He spoke to her, but she saw only the movement of his lips. Then he put down his pack and went close to the edge of the precipice.

Sixty feet below him was the Big Thunder, a chaos of lashing foam, of slippery, black-capped rocks bobbing and grimacing amid the rushing torrents like monsters playing at hide-and-seek. Now one rose high, as though thrust up out of chaos by giant hands; then it sank back, and milk-white foam swirled softly over the place where it had been. There seemed to be life in the chaos--a grim, terrible life whose voice was a thunder that never died. For a few moments Philip stood fascinated by the scene below him. Then he felt a touch upon his arm. It was Jeanne.

She stood beside him quivering, dead-white, Almost daring to take the final step. Philip caught her hands firmly in his own, and Jeanne looked over. Then she darted back and hovered, shuddering, near the wall.

The portage was a short one, scarce two hundred yards in length, and at the upper end was a small green meadow in which river voyagers camped.

It still lacked two hours of dusk when Philip carried over the last of the luggage.

"We will not camp here," he said to Jeanne pointing to the remains of numerous fires and remembering Pierre's exhortation. "It is too public, as you might say. Besides, that noise makes me deaf."

Jeanne shuddered.

"Let us hurry," she said. "I'm--I'm afraid of THAT!"

Philip carried the canoe down to the river, and Jeanne followed with the bearskins. The current was soft and sluggish, with tiny maelstroms gurgling up here and there, like air-bubbles in boiling syrup. He only half launched the canoe, and Jeanne remained while he went for another load. The dip, kept green by the water of a spring, was a pistol-shot from the river. Philip looked back from the crest and saw Jeanne leaning over the canoe. Then he descended into the meadow, whistling.

He had reached the packs when to his ears there seemed to come a sound that rose faintly above the roar of the water in the chasm. He straightened himself and listened.

"Philip! Philip!"

The cry came twice--his own name, piercing, agonizing, rising above the thunder of the floods. He heard no more, but raced up the slope of the dip. From the crest he stared down to where Jeanne had been. She was gone. The canoe was gone. A terrible fear swept upon him, and for an instant he turned faint. Jeanne's cry came to him again.

"Philip! Philip!"

Like a madman he dashed up the rocky trail to the chasm, calling to Jeanne, shrieking to her, telling her that he was coming. He reached the edge of the precipice and looked down. Below him was the canoe and Jeanne. She was fighting futilely against the resistless flood; he saw her paddle wrenched suddenly from her hands, and as it went swirling beyond her reach she cried out his name again. Philip shouted, and the girl's white face was turned up to him. Fifty yards ahead of her were the first of the rocks. In another minute, even less, Jeanne would be dashed to pieces before his eyes. Thoughts, swifter than light, flashed through his mind. He could do nothing for her, for it seemed impossible that any living creature could exist amid the maelstroms and rocks ahead. And yet she was calling to him. She was reaching up her arms to him. She had faith in him, even in the face of death.

"Philip! Philip!"

There was no M'SIEUR to that cry now, only a moaning, sobbing prayer filled with his name.

"I'm coming, Jeanne!" he shouted. "I'm coming! Hold fast to the canoe!"

He ran ahead, stripping off his coat. A little below the first rocks a stunted banskian grew out of an earthy fissure in the cliff, with its lower branches dipping within a dozen feet of the stream. He climbed out on this with the quickness of a squirrel, and hung to a limb with both hands, ready to drop alongside the canoe. There was one chance, and only one, of saving Jeanne. It was a chance out of a thousand--ten thousand. If he could drop at the right moment, seize the stern of the canoe, and make a rudder of himself, he could keep the craft from turning broadside and might possibly guide it between the rocks below.

This one hope was destroyed as quickly as it was born. The canoe crashed against the first rock. A smother of foam rose about it and he saw Jeanne suddenly engulfed and lost. Then she reappeared, almost under him, and he launched himself downward, clutching at her dress with his hands. By a supreme effort he caught her around the waist with his left arm, so that his right was free.