Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 42

He had it spread on his knee when Ruth came out of the cabin for the last time, having said farewell to her household G.o.ds.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

"A map." He folded it away hastily.

"And I am not to see it?"

"Some day. Some day, if the owner will sell, you shall have it framed, with our travels marked out upon it. But, just now, it holds a small secret."

She questioned him no further. "Come," she said, "reach your arm in at the window and draw the bolt, and afterwards we will pull the shutter and nail it. Are you going inside for a last look around?"

He laughed. "Why? The knapsacks are here, ready."

"Our home!"

"I take the soul of it with me, taking you."

It was prettily said. Yet perversely she remembered how he had once spoken of Margaret Dance, saying, "Let the dead bury their dead."

The sky, after six angry days--two sullen, four tempestuous--was clear again and promised another stretch of fair weather. This was important, for they counted on having to sleep a night in the open before reaching the M'Lauchlins' camp. Old Strongtharm had told Sir Oliver of a cave at the head of the pa.s.s and directed him how to find it. Should the sky's promise prove false, they would descend back to the hut. Snow was their one serious peril.

They carried but the barest necessaries; for although the worst of the falls lay below and behind them, the upper part of the Gap was arduous enough, and the more difficult for being unknown; also Sir Oliver had old Strongtharm's a.s.surance that the M'Lauchlins would furnish them with all things requisite for voyaging by water.

Sir Oliver climbed in silence. He was flinging a bridge, albeit a short one, across the unknown, and the risk of it weighed on him. For himself this would have counted nothing, but he was learning the lesson common to all male animals whose mates for the first time travel beside them.

As for Ruth, it was wonderful--the course of the path once turned, the small home left out of sight--how securely she breasted the upward path.

Her lover and she were as G.o.ds walking, treading the roof of the world.

Through thickets they climbed, and by stairways beside the singing falls. In a pool below one of these falls they surprised a great loon that had resorted here to live solitary through his moulting-season.

He rose and winged away with a cry like an inhuman laugh; and they recognised a sound which had often been borne down the gorge--once or twice at night, to awake and puzzle them.

They came to the uppermost fall a good hour before sunset, and after a little search Sir Oliver found the cave. They could have pushed on, but decided to sleep here: and they slept soundly, being in truth more weary than their spirits, exhilarated in the high air, allowed them to guess.

They might, as it turned out, by forcing the march, have found the M'Lauchlins' settlement before dusk. For scarcely had they travelled five miles next morning before they came on an outpost of it: a large hut, half dwelling-house, half boat-shed. It stood in a clearing on the left sh.o.r.e, and close by the water's edge was a young man, patching the bottom of an upturned canoe. Two children--a boy and a girl--had dropped their play to watch him. A flat-bottomed boat lay moored to the bank, close by.

The children, catching sight of our travellers, must have uttered some exclamation; for the young man turned quickly, and after a brief look called "Good-morning." There was a ford (he shouted) fifty yards upstream; but no need to wade. Let them wait a minute and he would fetch them.

He laid down his tools, unmoored the flat-bottomed boat, and poled across. On the way back he told them that he was Adam M'Lauchlin, son of David. The little ones were children of his father by a second wife; but he had seven brothers and sisters of his own. . . . Yes, their settlement stood by the other river; at no great distance. "If you'll hark, maybe you can hear the long saws at work. . . ."

He led them to it, the small children bringing up the rear of the procession. The _Z'm--Z'm_ of the saws grew loud in Ruth's ears before crossing the ridge she spied the huts between the trees--a congregation of ten or a dozen standing a little way back from a smooth-flowing river. Between the huts and the river were many saw-pits, with men at work.

At young Adam's hail the men in view desisted, quite as though he had sounded the dinner horn. Heads of others emerged from the pits.

Within a minute there was a small crowd gathered, of burly fellows diffusing the fragrance of pine sawdust, all stamped in their degrees with the M'Lauchlin family likeness, and all eager to know the strangers' business.

Sir Oliver explained that he wanted a boat and two strong guides, to explore the upper waters. He would pay any price, in moderation.

"Ay," said their spokesman. He wore a magnificent iron-grey beard powdered with saw-dust; and he carried a gigantic pair of shoulders, but rheumatism had contracted them to a permanent stoop. "Ay, I'm no fearin' about the pay. You'll be the rich man, the Collector from Boston."

Ruth was startled. She had supposed herself to be travelling deep into the wilderness. She had yet to learn that in the wilderness, where men traffic in little else, they exchange gossip with incredible energy-- talk it, in fact, all the time. In those early colonial days the settlers overleapt and left behind them leagues of primeval forest, to all appearance inviolate. But the solitude was no longer virgin. Where foot of man had once parted the undergrowth the very breath of the wind followed and threaded its way after him, bearing messages to and fro.

"I'm no speirin'," said the oldster cautiously. "But though our lads have never been so far, there's talk of a braw house buildin'."

Here, somewhat hastily, Sir Oliver took him aside, and they spent twenty minutes or so in converse together. Ruth waited.

He came back and selected young Adam, with a cousin of his--a taciturn youth, by name Jesse, son of Andrew--to be their boatman. Five or six of the young men were evidently eager to be chosen; but none disputed his choice. Rome, which reaches everywhere, reigned in the forest here; its old law of family unquestioned and absolute. The two youths swung off to pack and provision the canoe. An hour later they reported that all was ready; and by three in the afternoon the voyagers were on their way up-stream.

The voyage lasted four days and was seldom laborious; for the river ran in long loops through the table-land, and with an easy current.

But here and there shallow runs of rock made stairways for it from one level to another, and each of these miniature rapids compelled a portage; so that towards the end of the second day the young men had each a red shoulder spot chafed by the canoe's weight.

They camped by night close beside the murmuring water, ate their supper beside a fire of boughs, slept on piled leaves beneath a tent of canvas stretched over a long ridge-pole. The two young men had a separate and similar tent.

For two days the forest hemmed them in so closely that although frost had half-stripped the deciduous trees, the eye found few vistas save along the river ahead. On either hand was drawn a continuous curtain of mossed stems and boughs overlapping and interlacing their delicate twigs. Scarcely a bird sang within the curtain; scarcely a woodland sound broke in upon the monotonous plash of the paddles. Alder, birch, maple, pine, spruce, and hemlock--the woods were a lifeless tapestry.

Ahead curved and stretched the waterway, rippled now and again by a musk-rat crossing, swimming with its nose and no more above water.

A little before noon on the third day they emerged from this forest upon a wide track of burnt land; and certain hills of which the blue summits had for some hours been visible above the tree-tops on their right, now took shape from the base up, behind thin clumps of birch, poplar, and spruce--all of them (but the spruce especially) ragged and stunted in growth. For the rest this burnt land resembled a neglected pasture, being carpeted for the most part with moss and blueberry. A mysterious blight lay over all, and appeared to extend to the foot of the hills.

All through the afternoon the chine of these hills closed the landscape; purpled at times by pa.s.sing clouds, at times lit up by sun-rays that defined every bush and seam on the slopes. All through the afternoon the folded gullies between the slopes unwound themselves interminably, little by little, as the voyagers traced up the river, paddling almost due southward, along its loops and meanders.

But by nightfall they had turned the last spur of the range, and the next morning opened to them a vastly different landscape: an undulating country, wooded like a park, with hills indeed, but scattered ones to the south and west, and behind the hills the faint purple dome of a far-distant mountain, so faintly seen that at first Ruth mistook it for a cloud.

She could not tell afterwards--though she often asked herself the question--at what point the landscape struck her as being strangely familiar. Yet she was sure that the recognition came to her suddenly.

Sir Oliver since the morning's start had been indisposed to talk.

From time to time he drew out his map and consulted it. The M'Lauchlin lads, on the other hand, seemed to be restless. During the halt for the midday meal they drew aside together and Ruth heard them conversing in eager whispers.

Possibly this stirred some expectation in her, which pa.s.sed into surmise, into certainty. Late in the afternoon she drew in the paddle she had been plying, laid it across the canoe, and called softly,--

"Oliver!"

He turned. She was pointing to a hill now full in view ahead of them.

"That cliff . . . you remember--the eagles?"

He laughed as though the question amused him.

"It is very like. Yes, certainly, it is very like. But wait until we open the clump of trees yonder. . . ."

They opened it, and her heart gave a leap. A moment before she had been sure this was the very hill. His laugh had confirmed it. . . .

She remembered how, at the foot of it, just such a river as this looped itself through the plain. . . . But, lo! in the opening gap, inch by inch, a long building displayed itself: a mansion, gleaming white, with a pillared front and pillared terraces, rising--terrace on terrace--from the woodland, into which a cascade of water, spouting half-way down the slope, plunged and was lost.

She sat dumb. His eyes were upon her; and he laughed quietly.

"It is yours--as you commanded. See!"

He flung out a hand to the left. She beheld a clearing--an avenue, that ran like a broad ribbon to the summit of a flat-topped rise.

"You demanded sight of the ocean," he was saying, and his voice seemed to lose itself in the beat of the churning paddles. "We cannot see it from here; but from the house--_your_ house--you shall look on it every day. Did you not bid me remove a mountain?"