God's Country-And the Woman Part 2

"Delicious!" he cried instantly. "Think of it--nothing but bannock, bannock, bannock for two years, and only six ounces of that a day for the last six months! Do you care if I eat the whole of it--the cake, I mean?"

Seriously she began cutting the remainder of the cake into quarters.

"It would be one of the biggest compliments you could pay me," she said. "But won't you have some boiled tongue with it, a little canned lobster, a pickle--"

"Pickles!" he interrupted. "Just cake and pickles--please! I've dreamed of pickles up there. I've had 'em come to me at night as big as mountains, and one night I dreamed of chasing a pickle with legs for hours, and when at last I caught up with the thing it had turned into an iceberg. Please let me have just pickles and cake!"

Behind the lightness of his words she saw the truth--the craving of famine. Ashamed, he tried to hide it from her. He refused the third huge piece of cake, but she reached over and placed it in his hand. She insisted that he eat the last piece, and the last pickle in the bottle she had opened.

When he finished, she said:

"Now--I know."

"What?"

"That you have spoken the truth, that you have come from a long time in the North, and that I need not fear--what I did fear."

"And that fear? Tell me--"

She answered calmly, and in her eyes and the lines of her face came a look of despair which she had almost hidden from him until now.

"I was thinking during those thirty minutes you away," she said. "And I realized what folly it was in me to tell you as much as I have. Back there, for just one insane moment, I thought that you might help me in a situation which is as terrible as any you may have faced in your months of Arctic night. But it is impossible. All that I can ask of you now--all that I can demand of you to prove that you are the man you said you were--is that you leave me, and never whisper a word into another ear of our meeting. Will you promise that?"

"To promise that--would be lying," he said slowly, and his hand unclenched and lay listlessly on his knee. "If there is a reason--some good reason why I should leave you--then I will go."

"Then--you demand a reason?"

"To demand a reason would be--"

He hesitated, and she added:

"Unchivalrous."

"Yes--more than that," he replied softly. He bowed his head, and for a moment she saw the tinge of gray in his blond hair, the droop of his clean, strong shoulders, the SOMETHING of hopelessness in his gesture.

A new light flashed into her own face. She raised a hand, as if to reach out to him, and dropped it as he looked up.

"Will you let me help you?" he asked.

She was not looking at him, but beyond him. In her face he saw again the strange light of hope that had illumined it at the pool.

"If I could believe," she whispered, still looking beyond him. "If I could trust you, as I have read that the maidens of old trusted their knights. But--it seems impossible. In those days, centuries and centuries ago, I guess, womanhood was next to--G.o.d. Men fought for it, and died for it, to keep it pure and holy. If you had come to me then you would have levelled your lance and fought for me without asking a question, without demanding a reward, without reasoning whether I was right or wrong--and all because I was a woman. Now it is different. You are a part of civilization, and if you should do all that I might ask of you it would be because you have a price in view. I know. I have looked into you. I understand. That price would be--ME!"

She looked at him now, her breast throbbing, almost a sob in her quivering voice, defying him to deny the truth of her words.

"You have struck home," he said, and his voice sounded strange to himself. "And I am not sorry. I am glad that you have seen--and understand. It seems almost indecent for me to tell you this, when I have known you for such a short time. But I have known you for years--in my hopes and dreams. For you I would go to the end of the world. And I can do what other men have done, centuries ago. They called them knights. You may call me a MAN!"

At his words she rose from where she had been sitting. She faced the radiant walls of the forests that rolled billow upon billow in the distance, and the sun lighted up her crown of hair in a glory. One hand still clung to her breast. She was breathing even more quickly, and the flush had deepened in her cheek until it was like the tender stain of the crushed bakneesh. Philip rose and stood beside her. His shoulders were back. He looked where she looked, and as he gazed upon the red and gold billows of forest that melted away against the distant sky he felt a new and glorious fire throbbing in his veins. From the forests their eyes turned--and met. He held out his hand. And slowly her own hand fluttered at her breast, and was given to him.

"I am quite sure that I understand you now," he said, and his voice was the low, steady, fighting voice of the man new-born. "I will be your knight, as you have read of the knights of old. I will urge no reward that is not freely given. Now--will you let me help you?"

For a moment she allowed him to hold her hand. Then she gently withdrew it and stepped back from him.

"You must first understand before you offer yourself," she said. "I cannot tell you what my trouble is. You will never know. And when it is over, when you have helped me across the abyss, then will come the greatest trial of all for you. I believe--when I tell you that last thing which you must do--that you will regard me as a monster, and draw back. But it is necessary. If you fight for me, it must be in the dark.

You will not know why you are doing the things I ask you to do. You may guess, but you would not guess the truth if you lived a thousand years.

Your one reward will be the knowledge that you have fought for a woman, and that you have saved her. Now, do you still want to help me?'

"I can't understand," he gasped. "But--yes--I would still accept the inevitable. I have promised you that I will do as you have dreamed that knights of old have done. To leave you now would be"--he turned his head with a gesture of hopelessness--"an empty world forever. I have told you now. But you could not understand and believe unless I did. I love you."

He spoke as quietly and with as little pa.s.sion in his voice as if he were speaking the words from a book. But their very quietness made them convincing. She started, and the colour left her face. Then it returned, flooding her cheeks with a feverish glow.

"In that is the danger," she said quickly. "But you have spoken the words as I would have had you speak them. It is this danger that must be buried--deep--deep. And you will bury it. You will urge no questions that I do not wish to answer. You will fight for me, blindly, knowing only that what I ask you to do is not sinful nor wrong. And in the end--"

She hesitated. Her face had grown as tense as his own.

"And in the end," she whispered, "your greatest reward can be only the knowledge that in living this knighthood for me you have won what I can never give to any man. The world can hold only one such man for a woman. For your faith must be immeasurable, your love as pure as the withered violets out there among the rocks if you live up to the tests ahead of you. You will think me mad when I have finished. But I am sane. Off there, in the s...o...b..rd Lake country, is my home. I am alone.

No other white man or woman is with me. As my knight, the one hope of salvation that I cling to now, you will return with me to that place--as my husband. To all but ourselves we shall be man and wife. I will bear your name--or the one by which you must be known. And at the very end of all, in that hour of triumph when you know that you have borne me safely over that abyss at the brink of which I am hovering now, you will go off into the forest, and--"

She approached him, and laid a hand on his arm. "You will not come back," she finished, so gently that he scarcely heard her words. "You will die--for me--for all who have known you."

"Good G.o.d!" he breathed, and he stared over her head to where the red and gold billows of the forests seemed to melt away into the skies.

CHAPTER FOUR

Thus they stood for many seconds. Never for an instant did her eyes leave his face, and Philip looked straight over her head into that distant radiance of the forest mountains. It was she whose emotions revealed themselves now. The blood came and went in her cheeks. The soft lace at her throat rose and fell swiftly. In her eyes and face there was a thing which she had not dared to reveal to him before--a prayerful, pleading anxiety that was almost ready to break into tears.

At last she had come to see and believe in the strength and wonder of this man who had come to her from out of the North, and now he stared over her head with that strange white look, as if the things she had said had raised a mountain between them. She could feel the throb of his arm on which her hand rested. All at once her calm had deserted her. She had never known a man like this, had never expected to know one; and in her face there shone the gentle loveliness of a woman whose soul and not her voice was pleading a great cause. It was pleading for her self. And then he looked down.

"You want to go--now," she whispered. "I knew that you would."

"Yes, I want to go," he replied, and his two hands took hers, and held them close to his breast, so that she felt the excited throbbing of his heart. "I want to go--wherever you go. Perhaps in those years of centuries ago there lived women like you to fight and die for. I no longer wonder at men fighting for them as they have sung their stories in books. I have nothing down in that world which you have called civilization--nothing except the husks of murdered hopes, ambitions, and things that were once joys. Here I have you to love, to fight for.

For you cannot tell me that I must not love you, even though I swear to live up to your laws of chivalry. Unless I loved you as I do there would not be those laws."

"Then you will do all this for me--even to the end--when you must sacrifice all of that for which you have struggled, and which you have saved?"

"Yes."

"If that is so, then I trust you with my life and my honour. It is all in your keeping--all."

Her voice broke in a sob. She s.n.a.t.c.hed her hands from him, and with that sob still quivering on her lips she turned and ran swiftly to the little tent. She did not look back as she disappeared into it, and Philip turned like one in a dream and went to the summit of the bare rock ridge, from which he could look over the quiet surface of the lake and a hundred square miles of the unpeopled world which had now become so strangely his own. An hour--a little more than that--had changed the course of his life as completely as the master-strokes of a painter might have changed the tones of a canvas epic. It did not take reason or thought to impinge this fact upon him. It was a knowledge that engulfed him overwhelmingly. So short a time ago that even now he could not quite comprehend it all, he was alone out on the lake, thinking of the story of the First Woman that Jasper had told him down at Fond du Lac. Since then he had pa.s.sed through a lifetime. What had happened might well have covered the s.p.a.ce of months--or of years. He had met a woman, and like the warm suns.h.i.+ne she had become instantly a part of his soul, flooding him with those emotions which make life beautiful.

That he had told her of this love as calmly as if she had known of it slumbering within his breast for years seemed to him to be neither unreal nor remarkable.

He turned his face back to the tent, but there was no movement there.

He knew that there--alone--the girl was recovering from the tremendous strain under which she had been fighting. He sat down, facing the lake.

For the first time his mental faculties began to adjust themselves and his blood to flow less heatedly through his veins. For the first time, too, the magnitude of his promise--of what he had undertaken--began to impress itself upon him. He had thought that in asking him to fight for her she had spoken with the physical definition of that word in mind.