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Flower of the North, a novel by James Oliver Curwood |
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Chapter 16 |
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_ Chapter XVI There was a low tremble in Jeanne's voice. The canoe swung broadside to the slow current, and Philip looked in astonishment at the change in Pierre. The tired half-breed had uncovered his head, and knelt with his face turned to that last crimson glow in the sky, like one in prayer. But his eyes were open, there was a smile on his lips, and he was breathing quickly. Pride and joy came where there had been the lines of grief and exhaustion. His shoulders were thrown back, his head erect, and the fire of the distant rock reflected itself in his eyes. From him Philip turned, so that he could look into Jeanne's face. The girl, too, had changed. Again these two were the Pierre and Jeanne whom he had seen that first night on the moonlit cliff. Pierre seemed no longer the half-breed, but the prince of the rapier and broad cuffs; and Jeanne, smiling proudly at Philip, made him an exquisite little courtesy from her cramped seat in the bow, and said: "M'sieur Philip, welcome to Fort o' God!" "Thank you," he said, and stared toward the sun-capped rock. He could see nothing but the rock, the black forests, and the desolate barren stretching between. Fort o' God, unless it was the rock itself, was still a mystery hidden in the gathering gloom. The canoe began moving slowly onward, and Jeanne turned so that her eyes searched the stream ahead. A thick wall of stunted forest shut out the barren from their view; the stream grew narrower, and on the opposite side a barren ridge, threatening them with torn and upheaved masses of rock, flung the heavy shadows of evening down upon them. No one spoke. Philip could hear Pierre breathing behind him: something in the intense quiet--in the awesome effect which their approach to Fort o' God had upon these two--sent strange little thrills shooting through his body. He listened, and heard nothing, not even the howl of a dog. The stillness was oppressive, and the darkness thickened about them. For half an hour they continued, and then Pierre headed the canoe into a narrow creek, thrusting it through a thick growth of wild rice and reeds, Balsam and cedar and swamp hazel shut them in. Overhead the tall cedars interlaced, and hid the pale light of the sky. Philip could just make out Jeanne ahead of him. And then, suddenly, there came a wonderful change. They shot out of the darkness, as if from a tunnel, but so quietly that one a dozen feet away could not have heard the ripple of Pierre's paddle. Almost in their faces rose a huge black bulk, and in that blackness three or four yellow lights gleamed like mellow stars. The canoe touched noiselessly upon sand. Pierre sprang out, still without sound. Jeanne followed, with a whispered word. Philip was last. Pierre pulled the canoe up, and Jeanne came to Philip. She held out her two hands. Her face shone white in the gloom, and there was a look in her beautiful eyes, as she stood for a moment almost touching him, that set his heart jumping. She let her hands lie in his while she spoke. "We have not even alarmed the dogs, M'sieur Philip," she whispered. "Is not that splendid? I am going to surprise father, and you will go with Pierre. I will see you a little later, and--" She rose on tiptoe, and her face was dangerously close to his own. "And you are very, very welcome to Fort o' God, M'sieur." She slipped away into the darkness, and Pierre stood beside Philip. His white teeth were gleaming strangely, and he said in a soft voice: "M'sieur, that is the first time that I have ever heard those words spoken at Fort o' God. We welcome no man here who has your blood and your civilization in his veins. You are greater than a king!" With a sudden exclamation Philip turned upon Pierre. "And that is the reason for Jeanne's surprise?" he said. "She wishes to pave a way for me. I begin to understand!" "It is true that you might not have received that welcome which you are certain to receive now from the master of Fort o' God," replied Pierre, frankly. "So we will go in quietly, and make no disturbance, while your way is being paved, as you call it." He walked ahead, with Philip following so closely that he could have touched him. He made out more distinctly now the lines of the huge black edifice from which the lights shone. It was a massive structure of logs, two stories high, a half of it almost completely hidden in the impenetrable shadow of a great wall of rock. Philip's eyes traveled up this wall, and he was convinced that he stood under the rock upon whose towering crest he had seen the last reflection of the evening sun. About him there were no signs of life or of other habitation. Pierre moved swiftly. They passed under a small lighted window that was a foot above Philip's head, and turned around the corner of the building. Here all was blackness. Pierre went straight to a door, and uttered at low word of satisfaction when he found that it was not barred. He opened it, and reached out a guiding hand to Philip's arm. Philip entered, and the door closed softly behind him. He felt the flow of warm air in his face, and his moccasined feet trod upon something soft and velvety. Faintly, as though coming from a great distance, he heard a voice singing. It was a woman's voice, but he knew that it was not Jeanne's. In spite of himself his heart was beating excitedly. The mystery of Fort o' God was about him, warm and subtle, like a strange spirit, sending through him the thrill of anticipation, a hundred fancies, little fears. Pierre advanced, still guiding him; then he stopped, and chuckled softly in the darkness. The distant voice had stopped singing, and there came in place of it the loud barking of a dog, an unintelligible sound of a voice, and then quiet. Jeanne had sprung her surprise. Pierre led the way to another room. "This is to be your room, M'sieur," he explained. "Make yourself comfortable. I have no doubt that the master of Fort o' God will wish to see you very soon." He struck a match as he spoke, and lighted a lamp. A moment more and he was gone. Philip looked about him. He was in a room fully twenty feet square, furnished in a manner that drew from him an audible gasp of astonishment. At one end of the room was a massive mahogany bed, screened by heavy curtains which were looped back by silken cords. Near the bed was an old-fashioned mahogany dresser, with a diamond-shaped mirror, and in front of it a straight-backed chair adorned with the grotesque carving of an ancient and long-dead fashion. About him, everywhere, were the evidences of luxury and of age. The big lamp, which gave a brilliant light, was of hammered brass; the base of its square pedestal was partly hidden in the rumples of a heavy damask spread which covered the table on which it rested. The table itself was old, spindle-legged, glowing with the mellow luster endowed by many passing generations--a relic of the days when the originator of its fashion became the favorite of a capricious and beautiful queen. Soft rugs were upon the floor; from the walls, papered and hung with odd bits of tapestry, strange faces looked down upon Philip from out of heavy gilded frames; faces grim, pale, shadowed; men with plaited ruffles and curls; women with powdered hair, who gazed down upon him haughtily, as if they wondered at his intrusion. One picture was turned with its face to the wall. Philip sank into a huge arm-chair, cushioned with velvet, and dropped his cap upon the floor. And this was Fort o' God! He scarcely breathed. He was back two centuries, and he stared, as if each moment he expected some manifestation of life in what he saw. He had dreamed his dream over the dead at Churchill; here it was reality--almost; it lacked but a breath, a movement, a flutter of life in the dead faces that looked down upon him. He gazed up at them again, and laughed a little nervously. Then he fixed his eyes on the opposite wall. One of the pictures was moving. The thought in his brain had given birth to the movement he had imagined. It was a woman's face in the picture, young and beautiful, and it nodded to him, one moment radiant with light, the next caught in shadows that cast over it a gloom. He jumped from his chair and went so that he stood directly under it. A current of warm air shot up into his face from the floor. It was this air that was causing movement in the picture, and he looked down. What he discovered broke the spell he was under. About him were the relics of age, of a life long dead. Rubens might have sat in that room, and mourned over his handiwork, lost in a wilderness. The stingy Louis might have recognized in the spindle- legged table a bit of his predecessor's extravagance, which he had sold for the good of the exchequer of France; a Gobelin might have reclaimed one of the woven landscapes on the wall, a Grosellier himself have issued from behind the curtained bed. Philip himself, in that environment, was the stranger. It was the current of warm air which brought him back from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Under his feet was a furnace! Even the master of Fort o' God, stern and forbidding as Philip began to imagine him, might have laughed at the look which came into his face. Grosellier, the cavalier, had he appeared, Philip would have accepted with the same confidence that he had accepted Jeanne and Pierre. But--a furnace! He thrust his hands deep in his pockets, a trick which was always the last convincing evidence of his perplexity, and walked slowly around the room. There were two books on the table. One, bound in faded red vellum, was a Greek Anthology, the other Drummond's Ascent of Man. There were other books on a quaintly carved shelf, under the picture which had been turned to the wall. He ran over the titles. There were a number of French novels, Ely's Socialism, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and a dozen other volumes; there were Balzac and Hugo, and Dante's Divine Comedy. Amid this array, like a black sheep lost among the angels, was a finger-worn and faded little volume bearing the name Camille. Something about this one book, so strangely out of place in its present company, aroused Philip's curiosity. It bore the name, too, which he had found worked in the corner of Jeanne's handkerchief. In a way, the presence of this book gave him a sort of shock, and he took it in his hands, and opened the cover. Under his fingers were pages yellow and frayed with age, and in an ancient type, once black, the title, The Meaning of God. In a large masculine hand some one had written under this title the accompanying words; "A black skin often contains a white soul; a woman's beauty, hell." Philip replaced the book with a feeling of awe. Something in those words, brutal in their truth--something in the strange whim that had placed a pearl of purity within the faded and worn mask of the condemned, seemed to speak to him of a tragedy that might be a key to the mystery of Fort o' God. From the books he looked up at the picture which had been turned to the wall. The temptation to see what was hidden overcame him, and he turned the frame over. Then he stepped back with a low cry of pleasure. From out of the proscribed canvas there smiled down upon him a face of bewildering beauty. It was the face of a young woman, a stranger among its companions, because it was of the present. Philip stepped to one side, so that the light from the lamp shone from behind him, and he wondered if the picture had been condemned to hang with its face to the wall because it typified the existent rather than the past. He looked more closely, and drew back step by step, until he was in the proper focus to bring out every expression in the lovely face. In the picture he saw each moment a greater resemblance to Jeanne. The eyes, the hair, the sweetness of the mouth, the smile, brought to him a vision of Jeanne herself. The woman in the picture was older than Jeanne, and his first thought was that it must be a sister, or her mother. It came to him in the next breath that this would be impossible, for Jeanne had been found by Pierre in the deep snows, on her dead mother's breast. And this was a painting of life, of youth, of beauty, and not of death and starvation. He returned the forbidden picture to the position in which he had found it against the wall, half ashamed of the act and thoughts into which his curiosity had led him. And yet, after all, it was not curiosity. He told himself that as he washed himself and groomed his disheveled clothes. An hour had passed when he heard a low tap at the door, and Pierre came in. In that time the half-breed had undergone a transformation. He was dressed in an exquisite coat of yellow buckskin, with the same old-fashioned cuffs he had worn when Philip first saw him, trousers of the same material, buckled below the knees, and boot-moccasins with flaring tops. He wore a new rapier at his waist, and his glossy black hair was brushed smoothly back, and fell loose upon his shoulders. It was the courtier, and not Pierre the half-breed, who bowed to Philip. "M'sieur, are you ready?" he asked. "Yes," replied Philip. "Then we will go to M'sieur d'Arcambal, the master of Fort o' God." They passed out into the hall, which was faintly illumined now, so that Philip caught glimpses of deep shadows and massive doors as he followed behind Pierre. They turned into a second hall, at the end of which was an open door through which came a flood of light. At this door Pierre stopped, and with a bow allowed his companion to pass in ahead of him. The next moment Philip stood in a room twice as large as the one he had left. It was brilliantly lighted by three or four lamps; he had only an instant's vision of numberless shelves loaded with books, of walls covered with pictures, of a ponderous table in front of him, and then he heard a voice. A man stepped out from beside the door, and he stood face to face with the master of Fort o' God. _ |
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