Flower of the North Part 14

"I have told you nothing but the truth," retorted Jeanne, innocently.

She was still busying herself over the pack, but Philip caught the slightest gleam of her laughing teeth.

"You are making fun of me," he remonstrated. "Tell me--where is this Fort o' G.o.d, and what is it?"

"It is far up the Churchill, M'sieur Philip. It is a log chateau, built hundreds and hundreds of years ago, I guess. My father, Pierre, and I, with one other, live there alone among the savages. I have never been so far away from home before."

"I suppose," said Philip, "that the savages up your way converse in Latin, Greek, and German--"

"Latin, FRENCH, and German," corrected Jeanne. "We haven't added a Greek course yet."

"I know of a girl," mused Philip, as though speaking to himself, "who spent five years in a girls' college, and she can talk nothing but light English. Her name is Eileen Brokaw."

Jeanne looked up, but only to point to the coffee.

"It is done," she advised, "unless you like it bitter."

XIII

Philip knew that Jeanne was watching him as he lifted the coffee from the fire and placed the pot on the ground to cool. His mind was in a hopeless tangle--a riot of things he would like to say, throbbing with a hundred questions he would like to ask, one after another. And yet Jeanne seemed bewitchingly unconscious of his uneasiness. Not one of his references to names and events so vital to himself had in any way produced a change in her. Was she, after all, innocent of all knowledge in the things he wished to know? Was it possible that she was entirely ignorant as to the ident.i.ty of the men who had attacked Pierre and herself on the cliff? Was it true that she did not know Eileen Brokaw, that she had never heard of Lord Fitzhugh Lee, and that she had always lived among the wild people of the north? By what miracle performed here in the heart of a savage world could this girl talk to him in German and Latin? Was she making fun of him? He turned to look at her and found her dark, clear eyes upon him. She smiled at him in a tired little way, and he saw nothing but sweetness and truth in her face. In an instant every suspicion was swept away. He felt like a criminal for having doubted her; and for a moment he was on the point of confessing to her what had been in his thoughts. He restrained himself, and went to the river to wash the pot-black from his hands. Jeanne was a mystery to him, a mystery that delighted him and filled him each moment with a deeper love. He saw the life and freedom of the forests in her every movement--in the gesture of her hands, the bird-like poise of her pretty head, the lithe grace of her slender body. She breathed the forests. It glowed in her eyes, in the rich red of her lips, and revealed its beauty and strength in the unconfined wealth of her gold-brown hair. In a dozen ways he could see her primitiveness, her kins.h.i.+p to the wilderness. She had told him the truth. Her eyes smiled truth at him as he came up the bank. No other woman's eyes had ever looked at him like hers; none had he seen so beautiful. And yet in them he saw nothing that she would not have expressed in words--companions.h.i.+p, trust, thankfulness that he was there to care for her. Such eyes as those belonged only to the wilderness, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the flawless beauty of an undefiled nature. He had seen them, but not so beautiful, in Cree women. He thought of Eileen Brokaw's eyes as he looked at Jeanne's. They were very beautiful, but they were DIFFERENT.

Jeanne's could not lie.

On a white napkin Jeanne had spread out cold meat, bread, pickles, and cheese, and Philip brought her the coffee. He noticed that she was resting a little of her weight upon her injured ankle.

"Better?" he asked, indicating the bandaged ankle with a nod of his head.

"Much," replied Jeanne, as tersely. "I'm going to try standing upon it in a few minutes. But not now. I'm starved."

She gave him his coffee and began eating with a relish that made him want to sit back and watch her. Instead, he joined her; and they ate like two hungry children. It was when she turned him out a second cup of coffee that Philip noticed her hand tremble a little.

"If Pierre was here we would be quite happy, M'sieur Philip," she said, uneasily. "I can't understand why he asked you to run away with me to Fort o' G.o.d. If he is not badly hurt, as you have told me, why do we not hide and wait for him? He would overtake us to-morrow."

"There--there was no time to talk over plans," answered Philip, inwardly embarra.s.sed for a moment by the unexpectedness of Jeanne's question. A vision of Pierre, bleeding and unconscious on the cliff, leaped into his mind, and the thought that he had lied to Jeanne and must still make her believe what was half false sickened him. There was, after all, a chance that Pierre would never again come up the Churchill. "Perhaps Pierre thought we would be hotly pursued," he went on, seeing no escape from the demand in the girl's eyes. "In that event it would be best for me to get you to Fort o' G.o.d as quickly as possible. You must remember that Pierre was thinking of you. He can care for himself. It may take him two or three days to get back the strength of--of his arm," he finished, blindly.

"He was wounded in the arm?"

"And on the head," said Philip. "It was only a scalp wound, however--nothing at all, except that it dazed him a little at the time."

Jeanne pointed to the reflection of the fire on the river.

"If we should be pursued?" she suggested.

"There is no danger," a.s.sured Philip, though he had left the flap of his revolver holster unb.u.t.toned. "They will search for us between their camp and Churchill."

"Citius venit periculum c.u.m contemnitur," remonstrated Jeanne, half smiling.

She was pale, but Philip saw that she was making a tremendous effort to appear brave and cheerful.

"Perhaps you are right," laughed Philip, "but I swear that I don't know what you mean. I suppose you picked that lingo up among the Indians."

He caught the faintest gleam of Jeanne's white teeth again as she bent her head.

"I have a tutor at home," she explained, softly. "You shall meet him when we reach Fort o' G.o.d. He is the most wonderful man in the world."

Her words sent a strange chill through Philip. They were filled with an exquisite tenderness, a pride that sent her eyes back to his, glowing.

The questions that he had meant to ask died and faded away. He thought of her words of a few minutes before, when he had asked about Fort o'

G.o.d. She had said, "My father, Pierre, and I, WITH ONE OTHER, live there alone." The OTHER was the tutor, the man who had come from civilization to teach this beautiful girl those things which had amazed him, and this man was THE MOST WONDERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD. He had no excuse for the feelings which were aroused in him. Only he knew, as he rose to his feet, that a part of his old burden seemed suddenly to have returned to his shoulders, and the old loneliness was beating at the door of his heart. He rearranged the pack in silence, and the strength and joy of life were gone from his arms when he helped Jeanne back to her place among the bear-skins. He did not notice that her eyes were watching him curiously, or that her lips trembled once or twice, as if about to speak words which never came. Jeanne, as well as he, seemed to have discovered something which neither dared to reveal in that last five minutes on the sh.o.r.e.

"There is one thing that I must know," said Philip, when they were about to start, "and that is where to find Fort o' G.o.d? Is it on the Churchill?"

"It is on the Little Churchill, M'sieur, near Waskiaowaka Lake."

Darkness concealed the effect of her words upon Philip. For a moment he stared like one struck dumb. He stifled the exclamation that rose to his lips. He felt himself trembling. He knew that if he spoke his voice would betray him.

NEAR WASKIAOWAKA LAKE! And Waskiaowaka was within thirty miles of his own camp on the Blind Indian! If a bomb had burst under his feet he could not have been more amazed than at this information, given to him in Jeanne's quiet voice. Fort o' G.o.d--within thirty miles of the scene where very soon he was to fight the great battle of his life! He dug his paddle into the water and sent the canoe hissing up the river. His blood pounded like that of a racehorse on the home-stretch. Of all the things that had happened, of all he had learned, this was the most significant. Every thought ran like a separate powder-flash to a single idea, to one great, overpowering question. Were Fort o' G.o.d and its people the key to the plot against himself and his company? Was it the rendezvous of those who were striving to work his ruin? Doubt, suspicion, almost belief came to him in those few moments, in spite of himself.

He looked at Jeanne. The gray dawn was breaking, and now light followed swiftly and dissolved the last mist. In the chill of early morning, when with the approach of the sun a cold, uncomfortable sweat rises heavily from the earth and water, Jeanne had drawn one of the bearskins closely about her. Her head was bare. Her hair, glistening with damp, clung in heavy ma.s.ses about her face. There was a bewitching childishness about her, a pathetic appeal to him in the forlorn little picture she made--so helpless, and yet so confident in him. Every energy in him leaped up in defiance of the revolution which for a few moments had stirred within him. And Jeanne, as though she had read the working of his mind, looked straight at him and smiled, with a little purring note in her throat that took the place of a thousand words. It was such a smile, and yet not one of love, which puts the strength of ten men in one man's arms; and Philip laughed back at her, every chord in his body responding in joyous vibration to the delicate note that had come with it. No matter what events might find their birth at Fort o' G.o.d, Jeanne was innocent of all knowledge of plot or wrong-doing.

Once for all Philip convinced himself of this.

The thought that came to him, as he looked at Jeanne, found voice through his lips.

"Do you know," he said, "if I never saw you again I would always have three pictures of you in my memory. I would never forget how you looked when I first saw you on the cliff--or as I see you now, wrapped in your bearskins. Only--I would think of you--as you smiled."

"And the third picture?" questioned Jeanne, little guessing what was in his mind. "Would that be at the fire, when I burned the bad man's neck--or--or when--"

She stopped herself, and pouted her mouth in sudden vexation, while a flush which Philip could easily see rose in her cheeks.

"When I doctored your foot?" he finished, rather unchivalrously, chuckling in his delight at her pretty discomfiture. "No, that wouldn't be the third, Miss Jeanne. The other scene which I shall never forget was that on the stone pier at Churchill, when you met a beautiful girl who was coming off the s.h.i.+p."

The blood leaped to Jeanne's face. Her soft lips tightened. A sudden movement, and the bearskin slipped from her shoulders, leaving her leaning a little forward, her eyes blazing. A dozen words had transformed her from the child he had fancied her to a woman quivering with some powerful emotion, her beautiful head proud and erect, her nostrils dilating with the quickness of her breath.

"That was a mistake," she said. There was no sign of pa.s.sion in her voice. It trembled a little, but that was all. "It was a mistake, M'sieur Philip. I thought that I knew her, and--and I was wrong.

You--you must not remember THAT!"

"I am no better than a wild beast," groaned Philip, hating himself.

"I'm the biggest idiot in the world when it comes to saying the wrong thing, I never miss a chance. I didn't mean to say anything--that would hurt--"

"You haven't," interrupted the girl, quickly, seeing the distress in his face. "You haven't said a thing that's wrong. Only I don't want you to remember THAT picture. I want you to think of me as--as--I burned the bad man's neck."

She was laughing now, though her breast was rising and falling a little excitedly and the deep color was still in her cheeks.

"Will you?" she entreated.

"Until I die," he exclaimed.