The Maid of the Whispering Hills Part 11

"They are what brought me over seas," he said quietly, "what sent me to De Seviere, what hold me to the tribes that come each year to my doors."

Maren's lips were parted, the fire of her pa.s.sion in her flaming face.

"Then you know why I come to the woods, why I grieve that the spring is pa.s.sing, why I can scarcely hold my soul in patience through this delay!"

With the suddenness of her words her breath had leaped to a heaving tumult, the wide eyes, so calm, so cool, had filled first with fire and then with a mist. That clouded them like tears.

"Oh, M'sieu!" she cried tensely; "know you of that country which lies far to the west and which the Indians call the Land of the Whispering Hills?"

"Aye. It lies circling a great lake, blue as the summer skies, its waters forever rippled by the winds of the west which sing in the gra.s.sy vales and over the rounded knolls that stud the region,--a land of waving trees, of high coolness, or rich valleys thick with rank gra.s.ses and abounding with the pelt animals. It is the country of the Athabasca and from it came last year a band of the Chippewas heavily laden with furs. They told fine tales of its beauty. It is for that land you are bound?"

"For that land, M'sieu," said Maren Le Moyne, and her lips trembled; "for that virgin G.o.ddess of the dreams of years! I have seen its hills, its waving gra.s.s, wind-blown, its leaping streams,--I have breathed the sweet air of its forests and gazed on its beauties since my early childhood, in dreams, always in dreams, M'sieu, until I could bear the strain no longer. And now, when it beckons almost within my reach, when its very breath seems in my nostrils, I must stop for a year's s.p.a.ce!

You know, M'sieu,--you comprehend?"

She leaned forward looking earnestly into McElroy's eyes, and a surge of painful ecstasy shot to the man's heart, so near she seemed in the suddenly created sympathy of the moment, so near and gracious, so strong in her pure pa.s.sion, so infinitely sweet.

"I know," he said, and his voice sounded strange in his ears; "I know every pulse of your heart, Ma'amselle, every longing of your spirit, every pure thought of your mind,--for these many days I have trembled to every vibration that has touched or thrilled you. Oh, Ma'amselle!"

With the surge of that overwhelming thing within him the young man had forgot all things,--that this girl was near a stranger, that he had quaked at his temerity of the gift, forgot all but that she leaned toward him with the mist in her wide eyes, and he strode forward the step between them, his arms reaching out instinctively to enfold her.

With the swiftness of the impulse he swept her into them until the eager face lay on his breast, the smooth black braids pressing his lips with their satiny folds.

For one intoxicating moment he held her, as the primal man takes and holds his woman, tightly against his beating heart as though he would defy the world, lost in a sea of strange new emotions that rolled in golden billows high above his head.

Then from the depths there came a cry that cleared his whirling brain, a very embodiment of startled amaze, of indefinable horror, of mixed intonations.

"M'sieu!"

Maren Le Moyne wrenched herself free and lifted her face to look at him.

It was a warring field.

Upon it lay a great astonishment, a wonder, and a newness. Behind these there came, creeping swiftly with each moment of her startled gaze, an odd excitement that mounted with each panting breath that left his lips, for it was from him that it took its life. Her red mouth dropped apart, showing the gleam of the white teeth between. She looked like a child rudely shaken from its sleep, startled, perhaps vaguely frightened at the strange shapes of familiar things distorted by the vision not yet adjusted.

"M'sieu!" she stammered; "M'sieu!"

And with her voice McElroy felt the arrested blood rush back to his heart again, for it held no anger. Instead it was full of that startled wonder, and it was as gold to him.

"Maren," he said, the emotion choking him; "Maren--" and with that new courage he put both hands on her shoulders and drew her near, looking down into the eyes so near on a level with his own.

Deliberately, slowly, that she might fully catch the meaning of what he was about to do, he drooped his lips until they rested square on the red mouth.

This was the thing he had left the factory for, this was what had drawn him, unconsciously perhaps, to the path along the river's bank, that had made him follow deliberately the light trail of the girl into the woods.

"Maren," he said, so thrilled that his words shook, "from this day forth you are mine. Mine only and against the whole world. I have taken you and you are mine."

He was full of his glory, dominating the dark eyes that had never left his own, and his soul was big within him. He was still very much a boy, this young factor, and the crowning moment of life had him in his grip.

He knew no fear, no thought of her next word or action touched him until she, as deliberately as he had acted, reached up and took both his hands from her shoulders.

"Adieu, M'sieu," said Maren Le Moyne quietly, the excitement of that breathed "M'sieu! M'sieu!" quite lost in the calmness that was her usual characteristic, and turning she walked away down the glen toward the river bank, the little spots of sun dancing on her black head like a leopard's gold as she pa.s.sed in the checkered shade, and not once did she turn her head to see the factor of De Seviere standing where she had left him beside the forest giant.

CHAPTER IX GOLD FIRE

If that time in the tuneful spring was crowded full to the brim of emotions scarce bearable to McElroy, how much more wonderful was it to Maren Le Moyne, for the first time in her life trembling in all her being from the touch of a man's lips?

To the outward world there was no sign of the tumult within her as she came and went about the business of the new cabin by the stockade wall, but in her virgin heart there stirred strange new things that filled her calm eyes with wonder.

In the seclusion of the little room to the east she spread out on the patchwork quilt the Indian garment and looked at it with a new meaning.

Never before in her life had she thought of a man's eyes as she thought of McElroy's, thrilling to the very tips of her fingers at memory of the blue fire in them, and never before had she been conscious of anything as she was conscious of the flesh on her shoulders where his hands had rested, her lips sealed under the warm caress of his. Verily, there was nowhere another such man as this one who knew the longing of the wild as did she, whose heart responded to the same call of the great wilderness.

Night and day she thought of him, and the memory of that day in the forest glade haunted her like a golden melody newly heard.

Yet something within her held her back from his sight, kept her eyes from that part of the small settlement where stood the factory with its wide doorway. She could not bear to look upon him yet in the newness of this awakening.

And McElroy, deep in the work of the trading, was eaten by a thousand qualms and torments. All those doubts that beset lovers tore at his heart and made of his days a nightmare.

With the cooling of his exalted intoxication what time the touch of the girl's young body had fired him with all confidence, came a thousand condemnations for his blundering haste, his stupid boasting of conquest.

To what depths of scorn might he not now be fallen in the mind of such a girl as Maren Le Moyne with her calm judgment; how far might he not be from the object of his longing!

And the fact that he could catch no sight of her, no matter how often he stepped near the door nor how diligently he sought for a glimpse of the shining braids and plain garment among the women at the well, but added fuel to the fire that scorched him.

But the times were getting very busy at Fort de Seviere. Before the a.s.siniboines were ready to depart back up the waterways down which they had come, their canoes laden with the wealth of the coming season, other flotillas were on the little waves of the river, other chiefs made their entrance up the main way of the post, and the goods of the Hudson's Bay Company went out in a stream as the priceless pelts came in.

"Lad," said Edmonton Ridgar with that easy probing of the well-known friend, "there is something eating at your mind these days. The trade goes differently from that of last year. It is not so all-absorbing. I fear me that the Nor'westers, with their plundering and their tales of deportation, have entered a wedge of worry."

"'Tis not of the Nor'westers I give a thought, Ridgar," he smiled, accepting the veiled raillery, "for you well know that we of the Company are above them, though it was but yesterday that an Indian brought word of a trapper at Isle a La Crosse being maltreated in the woods by a couple of their sneaking cutthroats and two packs of beaver taken from him for which they laughingly offered him in payment a bundle of mangy skins cast out from the summer's pickings. 'Twas Peter Brins and I'll wager that those two are marked for a long reckoning when the tables turn. And by the same Indian I hear that the young blade from Montreal with his light-haired brigade who stumbled upon us a while back, has reached his post on the Saskatchewan and has taken hold with a high hand, doing his utmost to intercept our Indians and turn the tide of the Company's furs into the trading-rooms of the Nor'westers. I think it will be a bootless process, for we hold our people with the hand of surety."

"Aye, but what of the Nakonkirhirinons, making their initial trip by way of Rapid River and Deer Lake, coming through the country of the Saskatchewan and held by no bond of loyalty? I see trouble ahead if this young De Courtenay gets wind of their coming, for they will be rich in peltry and they are a warlike tribe."

"But they are to celebrate the Peace Dance in the lodges of the a.s.siniboines. Surely they will come straight to their friends before trusting their trade to any."

Edmonton Ridgar shook his head.

"Hey fear nothing, these Nakonkirhirinons, and would as soon enter trade with one as another, having come for trade, if the values were above those at York and Churchill. I hope they swing eastward to Winipigoos and thus miss that young hot-brain on the Saskatchewan."

"By the way, Ridgar, Pierre Garcon says that Bois DesCaut is at Seven Isles on the Qui Appelle with Henderson. Since telling that wanton lie to the Nor'wester he has not had enough to show his face here. A bad lot Bois, and one to be watched for tricks."

"Aye, a bad lot, but salted with a prudence that savours of cowardice.

His tricks are all turncoats that slip danger like an old garment."

But for all Ridgar's hope, at that very moment the great tribe from the far north country, even twelve leagues beyond the Oujuragatchousibi, was swinging down through the wilderness bound for the lodges of the a.s.siniboines, burdened with a wealth of peltry to make a trader's eyes stand out and clad in all the glory of the visiting tribes, and it was heading straight for the country of the Saskatchewan.

Towering head-dresses swept above their moving columns, pomp and ceremony showed in the panoply of carved spear-heads, feathered shafts, and slung bows of the white ash which decked them on their peaceful mission, while underneath fringed garments of buckskin, stained and beaded with porcupine quills, were bands and stripes of war-paint. They were ready for anything that might happen in this unknown country into which they journeyed at the word of their friends the a.s.siniboines, given at the buffalo hunt the fall before, above the Great Slave Lake.