The Maid of the Whispering Hills Part 40

"Why,--little one," she said gently, unconsciously falling into McElroy's words after a trick she had, "I--I understand. You need not give up the dog,--I know what you would say."

"No!" cried Francette fiercely. "No! Take him! Take him! I will make you take him! I will!"

She was whimpering, and Maren, stooping, laid a hand on the husky's collar.

Without more words she turned and followed her people down to the landing, half-dragging the brute, who hung back and turned his giant head to the little maid, standing with her hands over her face.

He snarled and bit at Maren's wrist, but she picked him up and flung him, half-dragging on the ground, for he was a mighty beast, into the first canoe.

"Push off," she said; and, taking her place in the prow, she raised her face to the cool blue sky, and turned once more to that West whose voice had called from her cradle, but, with some strange perversity of fate, her heart drew back to the squat stockade slowly fading into the distance.

The sweet wind of the Whispering Hills was very faint on her soul.

CHAPTER XXIX BITTER ALOES

Eight months pa.s.sed over the country of the a.s.siniboine, bringing their changes. The short full-tide of the summer seemed to run out with the going of the venturers, and the autumn to come from the north-west in a night.

Great splashes of colour dropped on the land, spilled from the palette of some careless giant,--gold and crimson and purple. Glorious fires burned in the cooling skies and the sweet breath of autumn tingled in the air.

There was comment, and the shaking of heads among the old trappers. The wrong time of year to take the long trail with women,--the wrong time, but, bon Dieu! who was to stop that woman with the sombre eyes? Voila! A woman to thrill the blood in any man who was still warm with life!

"Love awakened in her would be a thing of flame and fury, they had thought, that long past day," thought Pierre Garcon to himself; "he and that friend of his heart, Marc Dupre,--it had been a thing of patient servitude, of transcendent daring, and Marc Dupre; ah! He had been a part of it. But there was much of mystery about it all, and no one knew, nor would any know, all that it had meant."

So the changes came and pa.s.sed, and when Anders McElroy again opened his eyes to reason, the world was white against the pane of the one window of the little room,--the long snows had arrived. Winter was upon the Northland.

It was on a night when the wind without howled like a lost soul shut out from the universe and the sucking of the chimney-throat roared to heaven.

Edmonton Ridgar sat at the hearth gazing into the leaping flames, and Rette de Lancy pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed among the shifting shadows, busy at some kindly task.

Long he lay, this man returned from the Borderland of the Unknown, and stared weakly at the familiar sights that were yet touched with a puzzling strangeness.

It seemed that this was all as it should be, and yet there was something lacking,--a great gap, whose images and happenings were wiped out as a cloth wipes clean a slate,--a s.p.a.ce of darkness, of blankness, whose empty void held prescience of some great sadness. He lay on his side facing the fire, and twice he thought to speak to Ridgar with a question of this strangeness, and each time he was conscious of a vast surprise that the man did not answer.

His lips, so long unused to sane direction, had made no sound in the roar of the night.

And then Ridgar, drawn by that intangible sense of eyes upon him, raised his head; and, as their glances met, that great void flashed suddenly into full panoply of life peopled with a ring of painted faces against the background of a night forest, a leaping fire, and the heroic figure of a tall woman who stood in the dancing light and threw a hatchet at a painted post.

Ridgar's eyes, as he had seen them in the dimness of the outskirts of that ma.s.sed circle, brought back the lost period of time and all that had pa.s.sed therein.

He stared wildly at him, and then around the firelit room.

"Ah!" said Ridgar softly, getting slowly to his feet with a smile at once tender and exaggeratedly calm. "You have awakened, have you; eh, lad? Would you sleep the whole night away as well as the day?"

He came to the bed and took McElroy's hand tenderly in his, while he gave Rette a warning glance.

McElroy tried to rise, but only his head obeyed, lifting itself a bit from the pillow to fall helplessly back.

He looked up at Ridgar with a look that cut that good man's heart, so full was it of wild entreaty and piteous grief.

"Maren?" whispered the weak lips. "Maren,--where--?" And they, too, failed him.

"Safe," said Ridgar gently; "all is well. We are at De Seviere and there is no need to think. Do you drink a sip of Rette's good broth and sleep again."

With a sigh of ineffable relief the sick man obeyed like a child, falling back into the shadows, though this time they were the blessed shades of the Vale of Healing Rest.

Rette in a corner was wiping her eyes and saying, over and over, a prayer of thanksgiving for deliverance from death.

With infinite tact Ridgar kept him quiet, promising the tale of what had happened, and, when the flow of returning life could no longer be stemmed, he set himself the task of telling what he knew of those swift days.

It was again night, though a week of nights had pa.s.sed since that on which the factor had awakened to consciousness, and Ridgar had dismissed Rette.

There was only the roar of the wind without, the whistle of the fire, and the two men alone in the room as they had been many a winter's night.

"Now,--where shall I begin?" said the chief trader, gazing into the fire. "At what point?"

"Maren," said McElroy eagerly, from the bed; "begin with her."

Ridgar shook his head.

"Nay, it goes farther back. Let it begin with the leaving of De Seviere and the coldness of my bearing to you.... Did you never think, lad, that it was but a blind, covering the determination to help you at the first opportunity? Thought you the friendship of years so poor a thing as to be turned in a day? Day by day my heart ached for some word with you, or even a glance that would make all straight; but those painted devils watched my every move, my every look, the very intaking of my breath, as the coyote watches the gopher-hole when the badger is below. Only for sake of the dead chief at my feet was I given such seemingly free leave among them,--for myself, I had been shipped as were poor De Courtenay's Nor'westers at Wenusk Creek. And now is the time when I must go farther back and tell you of the good chief who was my father, indeed, at heart."

Ridgar paused a moment, and his eyes took on a look of distant things

"Have you not wondered how it was, lad, that a man should live long as I have lived in the wilderness, alone, without ties other than those which bind him to the Great Company, without love of woman, without the joy of children?... I have not always lived so. Time was when I had my own wickiup, when I lay by my own night-fire and played with the braids of a woman's hair,--long black braids, bound with crimson silk and heavy with ornaments, for whose buying I paid my year's catch, when I looked into eyes black as the woods at night and dumb with the great love she could not speak.... She lived it one day ... nay, died it--when I had some words with a young man of the tribe, who drew a spear before I knew what he meant and hurled it at me. She...leaped between. G.o.d!"

He ceased again, and McElroy could hear his breathing, see the whitened knuckles of his hands grasping the poker from the hearth where he had absently stirred the leaping fire.

"It went quite through her,--a foot beyond her swelling breast, full for my only child, unborn.... She was Negansahima's daughter.... We mourned together, the old chief and I, and our hearts were bound close as the tree and its bark. In a far high hill of the Pays d'en Haut we put her to sleep with that last look of love on her dark face...and we made a pact to lie beside her when our time should come, he who out-lived the other to see the rites of the Death Feast. He has joined her. I saw his rites. So for this end, reaching far back, I did not return when you came back to De Seviere, going on with that rabble who dared not harm me who am to share the Sleep of Chiefs some day....

"So!

"Now for the rest. I know no more of Maren Le Moyne than that first tragic sight of her, hauled into the light by the brute DesCaut. I only know that she stood before those savages as fearless as a lioness and threw again and again, her black head up and sane, her young body under her own command in every taut cord and muscle, and that again and again and yet again the flying hatchet landed in its own cleft,--a wonderful performance!--putting off with coolness and skill the death they would see her decide, choosing neither man of you."

"But," cried McElroy, "it was De Courtenay she came to see,--to save,--to die with,--she loved him, man!"

"Aye,--maybe. But I know only that that young trapper, Marc Dupre, gave his life as gallantly as might be to cover our retreat while we, the Nor'wester and I, slipping among the sleepers, carried you to the river; that they woke, those devils, before we had cleared the little gorge, and that M'sieu de Courtenay, brave man and gay cavalier, gave your knees to this woman who helped me get you to the canoe, himself taking the only gun and meeting what fate was his in the narrow seam among the rocks. She had with her men of Mr. Mowbray's brigade, that she had got somewhere on Winnipeg, and we put you in their waiting canoe. She was dragged in among the thwarts,--while I--slipped back among the shadows, circled the camp, and was at my death-watch inside the big tepee when peering eyes looked in. I saw no more of the dashing Nor'wester, save a flash of long gold curls at a headman's belt. What fate was meted out to him was swift and therefore merciful. Peace be to him!

"No more I know, my friend, save that, when I returned to De Seviere, I found you ill with some fever of the brain."

"But, Ridgar, for love of Heaven, what of Maren?"

"She had brought you here, and Rette says the women hung off from her and laughed in corners, whispering and talking, and that her face was worn and greatly changed, as if with some deep sorrow."

McElroy turned his head upon the pillow and weak tears smarted under his lids.

"Me! It was I she saved when it was I who slew her lover! G.o.d forgive me, for I cannot forgive myself!"