O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 52

"A black dawn," he repeated. Her words unleashed his fancy--her heavy brows and lashes, her satiny raven hair, her slow voice that seemed made of silence, her eyes that changed in expression so rapidly that they dizzied one with a sense of s.p.a.ce. "Black Dawn!" He stared at her long, which in no wise disconcerted her.

"Will you want, then, Antoine and me?" she asked at length.

He woke from his dream with a savage realization that, most surely, he wanted her. "Yes. Of course--you--and Antoine. Wait, _attendez_, don't go yet."

"_Why_ not?" she smiled. "I have what I came for."

Her hand was on the door-latch. The radiance from the opened door of the square, old-fashioned stove shimmered over her fur cap and intensified the broad scarlet stripes of her mackinaw. In black corduroy trousers, full and bagging as a moujik's, she stood at ease, her feet small and dainty even in the heavy caribou-hide boots.

"_Bon soir, monsieur_," she said. "In two days we go with you to camp--me--_and_ Antoine."

"Wait!" he cried, but she had opened the door. He rose with a start, and, ignoring the intense cold, followed her till the stinging breath of the North stabbed him with the recollection of its immutable power.

All about him the night was radiant. Of a sudden the sky was hung with banners--banners that rippled and folded and unfolded, banners of rainbows, long, shaking loops of red and silver, ghosts of lost emeralds and sapphires, oriflammes that fluttered in the heavens, swaying across the world in mysterious majesty. Immensity, Silence, Mystery--The Northern Lights! "Aurora!" he called into the night, "Aurora--Borealis!"

The Cure of Portage Dernier drove up to the log-cabin office and shook himself from his blankets; his _soutane_ was rolled up around his waist and secured with safety-pins; his solid legs were encased in the heaviest of woollen trousers and innumerable long stockings. His appearance was singularly divided--clerical above, under the long wool-lined cape, and "lay" below. Though the thermometer showed a shockingly depressed figure, the stillness and the warmth of the sun, busy at diamond-making in the snow, gave the feeling of spring.

The sky was inconceivably blue. The hard-frozen world was one immaculate glitter, the giant evergreens standing black against its brightness. The sonorous ring of axes on wood, the gnawing of saws, the crunching of runners, the crackling crash of distant trees falling to the woodsmen's onslaughts--Bijou Falls logging-camp was a vital centre of joyous activity.

The Cure grinned and rubbed his mittened hands. "H--Hola!" he called.

At his desk in the north window Crossman heard the hail, and went to the door. At sight of the singular padded figure his face lifted in a grin. "Come in, Father," he exclaimed; "be welcome."

"Ah," said the Priest, his pink face shining with benevolence, "I thank you. Where is my friend, that good Jakapa? I am on my monthly circuit, and I thought to see what happens at the Falls of the Bijou."

He stepped inside the cabin and advanced to the stove with outstretched hands. "I have not the pleasure," he said tentatively.

"My name is Crossman," the other answered. "I am new to the North."

"Ah, so? I am the Cure of Portage Dernier, but, as you see, I must wander after my lambs--very great goats are they, many of them, and the winter brings the logging. So I, too, take to the timber. My team," he waved an introducing hand at the two great cross-bred sled-dogs that unhooked from their traces had followed him in and now sat gravely on their haunches, staring at the fire. "You are an overseer for the company?" suggested the Cure, politely curious--"or perhaps you cruise?"

Crossman shook his head. "No, _mon pere_. I came up here to get well."

"Ah," said the Cure, sympathetically tapping his lung. "In this air of the evergreens and the new wood, in the clean cold--it is the world's sanatorium--you will soon be yourself again."

Crossman smiled painfully. "Perhaps _here_"--he laid a long, slender finger on his broad chest--"but I heal not easily of the great world sickness--the War. It has left its mark! The War, the great malady of the world."

"You are right." Meditatively the Priest threw aside his cape and began unfastening the safety-pins that held up his ca.s.sock. "You say well. It strikes at the _heart_."

Crossman nodded.

"Yet it pa.s.ses, my son, and Nature heals; as long as the hurt be in Nature, Nature will take care. And you have come where Nature and G.o.d work together. In this great living North Country, for sick bodies and sick souls, the good G.o.d has His good sun and His clean winds." He nodded rea.s.surance, and Crossman's dark face cleared of its brooding.

"Sit down, Father." He advanced a chair.

"So," murmured the Cure, continuing his thought as he sank into the embrace of thong and withe. "So you were in the War, and did you take hurt there, my son?"

Crossman nodded. "Trench pneumonia, and then the rat at the lung; but of shock, something also. But I think it was not concussion, as the doctors said, but _soul_-shock. It has left me, Father, like Mohammed's coffin, suspended. I think I have lost my grip on the world--and not found my hold on another."

"Shock of the soul," the Priest ruminated. "Your soul is bruised, my son. We must take care of it." His voice trailed off. There was silence in the little office broken only by the yawn and snuffle of the sled-dogs.

Suddenly the door swung open. In the embrasure stood Aurore in her red mackinaw and corduroy trousers. A pair of snowshoes hung over her back, and her hand gripped a short-handled broad axe. Her great eyes turned from Crossman to the Cure, and across her crimson mouth crept her slow smile. The Cure sprang to his feet at sight of her, his face went white, and the lines from nose to lips seemed to draw in.

"Aurore!" he exclaimed; "Aurore!"

"_Oui, mon pere_," she drawled. "It is Aurore." She struck a provocative pose, her hand on her hip, her head thrown back, while her eyes changed colour as alexandrite in the sun.

The Cure turned on Crossman. "What is this woman to you?"

Her eyes defied him. "Tell him," she jeered. "What _am_ I to you?"

"She is here with Antoine Marceau, the log-brander," Crossman answered unsteadily. "She takes care of our cabin, Jakapa's and mine."

"Is that _all_?" the Priest demanded.

Her eyes challenged him. What, indeed, was she to him?

What _was_ she? From the moment he had followed her into the boreal night, with its streaming lights of mystery and promise, she had held his imagination and his thoughts.

"Is that _all_?" the Priest insisted.

"You insult both this girl and me," Crossman retorted, stung to sudden anger.

"_Dieu merci_!" the Cure made the sign of the cross as he spoke. "As for this woman, send her away. She is _not_ the wife of Antoine Marceau; she is not married--she _will_ not be."

In spite of himself a savage joy burned in Crossman's veins. She was the wife of no man; she was a free being, whatever else she was.

"I do not have to marry," she jeered. "That is for the women that only one man desires--or perhaps two--like some in your parish, _mon pere_."

"She is evil," the Priest continued, paying no attention to her sneering comment. "I know not what she is, nor who. One night, in autumn, in the dark of the hour before morning, she was brought to me by some Indians. They had found her, a baby, wrapped in furs, in an empty canoe, rocking almost under the Grande Falls. But I tell you, and to my sorrow, I _know_, she is evil. She knows not G.o.d, nor G.o.d her. You, whose soul is sick, flee her as you would the devil! Aurore, the Dawn! I named her, because she came so near the morning. Aurore!

Ah, G.o.d! She should be named after the blackest hour of a witch's Sabbath!"

She laughed. It was the first time Crossman had heard her laugh--a deep, slow, far-away sound, more like an eerie echo.

"_He_ has a better name for me," she said, casting Crossman a look whose intimacy made his blood run hot within him. "'The Black Dawn'--_n'est-ce-pas?_ Though I _have_ heard him call me in the night--by another name," with which equivocal statement she swung the axe into the curve of her arm, turned on her heel, and softly closed the door between them.

The Priest turned on him. "My son," his eyes searched Crossman's, "you have not lied to me?"

"No," he answered steadily. "Once I called her the Aurora Borealis--that is all. To me she seems mysterious and changing, and coloured, like the Northern Lights."

"She is mysterious and changing and beautiful, but it is not the lights of the North and of Heaven. She is the _feu follet_, the will-o'-the-wisp that hovers over what is rotten, and dead. Send her away, my son; send her away. Oh, she has left her trail of blood and hatred and malice in my parish, I know. She has bred feuds; she has sent strong men to the devil, and broken the hearts of good women. But _you_ will not believe me. It is to Jakapa I must talk. _Mon Dieu_!

how is it that he let her come! You are a stranger, but he----"

"Jakapa wished for Antoine, and she was with him," explained Crossman uneasily, yet resentful of the Priest's vehemence.

"I can not wait." The Cure rose and began repinning his clerical garments. "Where is Jakapa? Have you a pair of snowshoes to lend me?

You must forgive my agitation, Monsieur, but you do not understand--I--which way?"

"He should be at Mile End, just above the Bijou. Sit still, Father; I will send for him. The wind sets right. I'll call him in." Slipping on his beaver jacket, he stepped outside and struck two blows on the great iron ring, a bent rail, that swung from its gibbet like a Chinese gong. A singing roar, like a metal bellow, sprang into the clear, unresisting air, leaped and echoed, kissed the crags of the Bijou and recoiled again, sending a shiver of sound and vibration through snow-laden trees, on, till the echoes sighed into silence.

Crossman's over-sensitive ear clung to the last burring whisper as it answered, going north, north, to the House of Silence, drawn there by the magnet of Silence, as water seeks the sea. For a moment he had almost forgotten the reason for the smitten clamour, hypnotized by the mystery of sound. Then he turned, to see Aurore, a distant figure of scarlet and black at the edge of the wood road, shuffling northward on her long snowshoes, northward, as if in pursuit of the sound that had gone before. She raised a mittened hand to him in ironic salutation.

She seemed to beckon, north--north--into the Silence. Crossman shook himself. What was this miasma in his heart? He inhaled the vital air and felt the rush of his blood in answer, realizing the splendour of this beautiful, intensely living world of white and green, of sparkle and prismatic brilliance. Its elemental power like the urge of the world's youth.