Various - "Stories by English Authors: England"

St George Stock - "A Little Book of Stoicism"

Upton Sinclair - "Samuel the Seeker"

Bret Harte - "The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales"

The Maid of the Whispering Hills

V >> Vingie E. Roe >> The Maid of the Whispering Hills




McElroy and De Courtenay were loosed of their bonds and given paddles
in the canoes, a change which was welcomed gladly.

At night a guard paced their sleeping-place and the strictest
surveillance was kept over them.

Down the Assiniboine, into Red River, and across Portage la Prairie
went the great flotilla, green shores winding past in an endless
pageant of foliage, all hands falling to at the portages and trailing
silently for many pipes, one behind the other, all laden with
provisions and packs of furs, the canoes upturned and carried on heads
and shoulders.

Of unfailing spirits was Alfred de Courteray.

"'Od's blood, M'sieu," he would laugh, oddly mixing his dialect, "but
this is seeing the wilderness with a vengeance! Though there is no lack
of variety to speed the days, yet I would I were back in my post of
Brisac on the Saskatchewan, with a keg of good-liquor on the table and
my hearty voyaguers shouting their chansons outside, my clerks and
traders making merry within. Eh, M'sieu, is it not a better picture?"

"For you, no doubt. For me, I had rather contemplate a prayer-book and
recall my mother's teaching in these days," answered McElroy simply.

"What it is to have sins upon one's conscience!" sighed the venturer.
"Verily, it must preclude all pleasant thoughts." And he fell to
humming a gay French air.

Presently the foaming river, growing swifter as it neared the great
lake, leaped and plunged into the wide surface of Winnipeg, shooting
its burdens out upon the glassy breast of the lake like a spreading
fan.

Here the blue sky was mirrored faithfully below with its lazy clouds,
the green shores rimmed away to right and left, and the swarming
canoes, with their gleaming paddles, made a picture well worth looking
at.

The Nakonkirhirinons were going back to the Pays d'en Haut by another
way than that by which they had come.

Hugging the western shore, the flotilla strung out into the formation
of a wedge, with the canoe of the dead chief at the apex, and went on,
day after day, in comparative silence.

With the passing of the sleeping green shores, the ceaseless slide of
the quiet waters, a tender peace began to come into McElroy's soul.

With the gliding days he could think of Maren without the poignant pain
which had been unbearable at the beginning, could linger in thought
over each .detail of her wondrous beauty, the clear dark eyes, sane and
earnest and full of the hope of the dreamer, the full red mouth with
its sweetness of curled corners, the black hair banded above the smooth
brow, the rounded figure under the faded garment, the shoulders
swinging with the free walk after the fashion of a man.

Verily, the wilderness held healing as well as hurt.

So followed each other the dawns and the summer noons and the
marvellous twilights, with pageantry of light and colour and soft winds
attuned to the songs of birds, and the two men neared the mystery of
Fate.



CHAPTER XVII THE COMPELLING POWER

Back in De Seviere the gloom of the forest in bleak winter sat heavily
on every cabin.

Women went about with misty eyes and men were oddly silent.

Not one of all his people who did not love the whole-hearted factor
with his ready laugh, his sympathy in all the little life of the post,
his unfailing justice; not one who did not strive to keep away the
haunting visions of leaping flames above fagots, and all the ugly
scenes that imagination, abetted by grim reality, could conjure up.

On that fateful morning when the rising sun saw the slim canoes of the
Nakonkirhirinons trailing around the lower bend, Maren Le Moyne stood
by the little window in the small room to the east of the Baptiste
cabin and covered her face with her hands.

Great breaths lifted her breast, breaths that fluttered her open lips
and could not fill the gasping lungs beneath, that sounded in the
little room like tearless tearing sobs.

"Heavenly Mother!" she gasped between them; "Thou who art
woman...Mary..."

But the prayer hung aborted between the shuddering sighs.... Who shall
say that it is not such a cry, torn from the depths of the spirit by
instinct groping for its god, which reaches swiftest the Eternal
Infinite?

Until the last sound had faded into the morning, until the last little
ripple had widened to the shores and died among the willows, until the
screaming birds, startled from the edges of the river, had settled into
quiet, she stood so, fainting in her Gethsemane. She alone of all the
post had remained away from the great gate where was gathered the
populace at the nearest vantage point.

Silence of the young day hung in the palisade, a silence that cut the
soul with its tragic portent.

Even little Francette Moline, weeping openly, pressed close in the mass
and jerked with unconscious savagery of spirit the short ears of the
husky at her heels,--that Loup whom no man dared to touch save only the
master his fierce spirit must needs acknowledge. It had been DesCaut by
brutality. Now it was the little maid by love.

Strange cat of the woods, Francette could be as riotous in her
tenderness as in her enmity.

In the bastions Dupre and Garcon and Gifford watched the scene with the
grim quiet of men born in the wilderness, while at the portholes
trapper and voyageur and the venturers from Grand Portage handled their
guns and waited.

None knew what might happen, for these Indians were not to be judged by
any standard they knew.

Henri Baptiste held the trembling Marie in his arm, while Mora and Anon
and Ninette clung together in a white-faced group. A little way aside
Micene Bordoux comforted a frightened woman and held a child by the
hand.

Big Bard McLellan stood by a porthole, his eyes always pensive with his
own sadness, gazing with grave sorrow to where McElroy swung down the
slope between his captors.

Thus they watched his going, and he had been spared that sick pain had
he known.

When it was over, Prix Laroux turned back to the deserted factory and
stood hesitating on its step.

This was one of the crises which so commonly confronted the fur
industry in the North-west.

What had he a right to do?

The simple man considered carefully. What right but the right of
humanity to do the best for the many could send a servant into the seat
of power?

And yet who among them all was fitted?

Not the clerks, youths from the Bay, not the traders nor the trappers.

With a daring heart the venturer from Grand Portage went in across the
sill.

To a man the men of De Seviere rallied to him and council was held.

Everywhere in the trading-room, the living-room behind, were evidences
of the factor and Ridgar. It seemed as if the two men had but just
stepped out-were not in hostile hands drifting down the river toward an
unspeakable fate.

In the midst of the grave-faced council another step sounded on the
sill and once again Maren Le Moyne stood looking in at the factory
door, though this time there was no eager interest on her face, only a
drawn tenseness which cut to the heart of her leader like a knife.

"Come in, Maren," he said in aching sympathy.

"Men," she said straightly, "is there none among you who will turn a
hand to save his factor?"

Over every face her eyes travelled slowly, hot and burning.

In every face she read the same thing,--a pitying wonder at the folly
of her words.

"Aye," spoke up Henri Corlier, grizzled and weathered by his years of
loyal service to the Great Company, "not a man among us, Ma'amselle,
but would give his life if it would serve. It would not serve."

"And you?" her gaze shifted feverishly to Laroux; "you, Prix?"

"'Tis useless, Maren. What would you have us do?"

"Do?"

She straightened by the door, and the hand on the lintel gripped until
the nails went white.

"Do? Anything save sit with closed gates in safety while savages burn
your factor at the stake! The Hudson's Bay brigade comes from York this
very month. What easier than to meet it and get help of men and guns?"

"Nay," said Laroux gently; "you do but dream, Maren."

Whereat the girl turned abruptly from the doorway and went down among
the cabins.

Here and there in the doorways groups of women stood together, their
voices hushed and trouble in their eyes.

As Maren passed, seeing nothing to right or left, they looked in pity
upon her.

The heart of this woman was drifting with the canoes,--but with which
man?

"'Tis the gay Nor'wester with his golden curls," whispered Tessa Bibye
sympathetically.

"The Nor'wester? 'Tis little you know, truly, Tessa," said the young
wife of old Corlier. "What maid in her senses would look twice at
yonder be-laced dandy when a man like Anders McElroy stood near?"

"Aye, an' may the Good God have mercy on our factor!" whimpered a
withered old woman, wife of a trapper, making the sign of the cross;
"nor hold back His mercy from the other!"

Night seemed to fall early on Fort de Seviere, waiting sadly for its
healing touch on fevered hearts.

Throughout the long day a waiting hush had lain upon the post, an
expectancy of ill.

Over the dark forest the stars came out on a velvet sky, and a little
wind came out of the south, nightbirds called from the depths, and
peace spread over the Northland like a blanket.

While the twilight lasted with its gorgeous phantasmagoria there were
none of the accustomed sounds of pleasure in the post,--no fiddle
squeaked by the stockade wall, no happy laughter wafted from the
cabins. Even the sleepy children seemed to feel the strangeness and
hushed their peevish crying.

Night and darkness and loneliness held sway, and in one heart the
shadows of the world were gathered.

What was the meaning of this Life whose gift was Pain, where was the
glory of existence?

By the window to the east Maren Le Moyne stood in the darkness, with
her hands upon her breast and her face set after the manner of the
dreamer who follows his visions in simpleness of soul.

Once again a great call was sounding from the wilderness, as that which
lured her to the Whispering Hills had sounded since she could remember,
once more the Long Trail beckoned, and once more she answered, simply
and without fear.

She waited for the depth of night.

Long she stood at the little window, facing the east like some
worshipper, even until the wheeling stars spelled the mid hour.

To Marie she gave one thought,--child-like Marie with her dependence
and her loving heart. But Marie, to whom she had been all things, was
safe in the care of Henri. There remained only the dream of the
Whispering Hills and the illusive figure of a man,--an old man, sturdy
of form and with blue eyes set in swarthy darkness.

Poignant was the pain that assailed her at that memory. Would she ever
reach that shadowy country, ever fulfil the quest that was hers from
the beginning? Did she not wrong that ghostly figure which seemed to
gaze with reproach across the years? Her own blood called, and she
turned aside to follow the way of a stranger, an alien whose kiss had
brought her all sorrow.

And yet she was helpless as the water flowing to the sea. The primal
quest must wait. Her being turned to this younger man as the needle to
the pole, even though his words were false, his kiss a betrayal.

When the mid hour hung in silence over the wilderness a figure came out
of the darkness and stood at the gate beside that watcher, Cif Bordoux,
who paced its length with noiseless tread.

A strange figure it was, clad in garments that shone misty white in the
shadow, whose fringes .fluttered in the warm wind and whose glowing
plastron glittered in the starlight.

"Cif Bordoux," said the figure, "I would go without."

Wondering and startled, Bordoux would have refused if he dared; but
this was the leader of the Long Trail and her word had been his law for
many moons, nor had he ever questioned her wisdom.

Therefore he drew the bolts and opened the gate the width of a man's
body, and Maren Le Moyne slipped outside the palisade into the night.

A rifle hung in her arm and a pouch of bullets dangled at her knee.

Swiftly and silently she pushed a canoe into the water at the landing,
stepped in, and with one deep dip of a paddle sent the frail craft out
to midstream. She did not turn her head for a farewell glance toward
the post, but set her face toward the way that led to the Pays d'en
Haut and the man who journeyed thither.

Deep and even her paddle took the sweet waters and the current shot her
forward like a racer. The dark shores flowed by in a long black ribbon
of soft shadow, their leaning grasses and foliage playing with the
ripples in endless dip and lift. No fear was in her, scarce any thought
of what she did, only an obeying of the call which simplified all
things.

McElroy was in danger, and she followed him.

That was all she knew, save the mighty sorrow of his falseness which
never left her day or night.

He had taught her love in that one passionate embrace in the forest,
and it was for all time.

What mattered it that he had turned from her for another? That was the
sorry tangle of the threads of Fate,--she had naught to do with it.

Love was born in her and it set a new law unto her being, the law of
service.

Every fibre in her revolted at thought of his death. If it was to be
done beneath the pitying Heaven, he should be saved. He must be helped
to escape. The other was insupportable. Nothing mattered in all the
world save that. Therefore she set herself, alone and fearless, to
follow the tribe of the Nakonkirhirinons to the far North if need be,
to hang on their flank like a wolverine, to take every chance the good
God might send. Chief of these was her hope of the Hudson's Bay brigade
which should be coming into the wilderness at this time of year.
Somewhere she must meet them and demand their help.

There was no rebellion in her, no hope of gain in what she did. Love
was of her own soul alone, since that evening by the factory when she
had seen the factor bend his head and kiss the little Francette.

No more did she think of his words in the forest, no more did she dream
of the wondrous glory of that first kiss.

Far apart and impersonal was McElroy now,--only she loved him with that
vast idolatry which seeks naught but the good of its idol.

Even if he loved Francette he must be saved for that happiness.

Therefore she knelt in a cockleshell alone on a rushing river and sped
through, a wilderness into appalling danger.

Such was the compelling power of that love which had come tardily to
her.



CHAPTER XVIII "I AM A STONE TO YOUR FOOT, MA'AMSELLE"

At dawn Maren shot her craft into a little cove, opal and pearl in the
pageantry of breaking light, and drawing it high on shore, went
gathering little sticks for a micmac fire.

The bullet pouch held small allowance of food. She would eat and sleep
for a few hours.

Deep and ghostly with white mist-wraiths was the forest, shouldering
close to the living water, pierced with pine, shadowy with trembling
maple, waist-high with ferns. She looked about with the old love of the
wild stirring dumbly under the greater feeling that weighted her soul
with iron and wondered vaguely what had come over the woods and the
waters that their familiar faces were changed.

With her arms full of dead sticks she came back to the canoe,--and face
to face with Marc Dupre. His canoe lay at the cove's edge and his eyes
were anguished in a white face.

"Ma'amselle," he said simply, "I came."

No word was ready on the maid's lips. She stood and looked at him, with
the little sticks in her arms, and suddenly she saw what was in his
eyes, what made his lips ashen under the weathered tan.

It was the same thing that had changed for her the face of the waters
and the wood. She had learned in that moment to read a man better than
she had read aught in her life beside the sign of leaf and wind.

"Oh, M'sieu!" she cried out sharply; "God forbid!"

The youth came forward and took the sticks from her, dropping them on
the ground and holding both her hands in a trembling clasp.

"Forbid?" he said and his voice quivered; "Ma'amselle, I love you.
Though my heart is full of dread, I am at your feet. By the voice of my
own soul I hear the cry of yours. We are both past help, it seems,
Ma'amselle,-yet am I that stone to your foot which we pledged yonder by
the stockade wall. You will let me go the long trail with you? You will
give me to be your stay in this? You will let me do all a man can do to
help you take the factor from the Nakonkirhirinons?"

The infinite sadness in Dupre's voice was as a wind across a harp of
gold, and it struck to Maren's heart with unbearable pain.

Her eyes, looking straight into his, filled slowly with tears, and his
white face danced grotesquely before her vision.

"M'sieu," she said quite simply, "I would to God it had been given me
to love you. We have ever seen eye to eye save in that wherein we
should have. And I know of nothing dearer than this love you have given
me. If you would risk your life and more, M'sieu, I shall count your
going one of the gifts of God."

"I cannot ask you to return, Ma'amselle,--too well do I know you,--nor
to consider all you must risk for, this,--life and death and the
certain slander of the settlement,--though by all the standards of
manhood I should do so. The heart in me is faithful echo of your own.
This trail must be travelled,--therefore we travel it together. And,
oh, Ma'amselle! Think not of my love as that of a man! Rather do I
adore the ground beneath your foot, worship at the shrine of your pure
and gentle spirit! See!"

With all the prodigal fire of his wild French blood, the youth dropped
on his knee and, catching the fringe on the buckskin garment, pressed
it to his lips.

For once Maren, unused to tears, could speak no word.

She only drew him up, her grip like a man's upon his wrists, and turned
to the making of the fire.

Dupre drew up his canoe and took a snared wild hen from the bow.

* * * * * * * * *

"I think, Ma'amselle," said the youth when Maren awaked some hours
later from a heavy sleep, during which Dupre had killed the little
smoke of the fire and kept silent watch from the shore, "that we had
best leave your canoe here and take mine. It is much the better craft."

"So I see. Mine was but the first I could put my hands upon in the
darkness."

"'Tis that of old Corlier, and sadly lacking in repair. If you will
steer, Ma'amselle?"

Thus set forth as forlorn a hope as ever lost itself in that vast
region of hard living and daily tragedy, with the strength of the man
set behind the woman's wisdom in as delicate a compliment as ever
breathed itself in silken halls, and the blind courage of the dreamer
urged it on. .

At the forks of Red River they passed the signs of a landing.

Here had the Indians summarily sent ashore all of the Nor'westers who
had been with De Courtenay and who had followed in the uncertainty of
fear, not daring to desert lest they be overtaken and massacred.

All, that is, save Bois DesCaut and the lean, hawk-faced Runners of the
Burnt Woods.

Thanking their gods, the North-west servants had lost no time in taking
advantage of the fact that they were not wanted, leaving their Montreal
master to whatever fate might befall him.

Dupre went ashore and examined the reach of land, the trampled grass, a
broken bush or two.

"Ten men, I think," he said, returning, "and all in tremendous haste.
The Nor'westers escaping, I have no doubt. Would our captives were
among them."

"No such fortune, M'sieu," said Maren calmly, "Heard you not the cry
before the gate in that unhallowed scramble what time they took the
factor and the venturer? 'Twas 'a skin for a skin.' There are many
guards."

The summer day dreamed by in drowsy beauty, like a woman or a rose
full-blown, and Maren, who would at another time have seen each
smallest detail of its perfection through the eye of love, saw only the
rushing water ahead and counted time and distance.

Dupre, kneeling in the bow, his lithe brown arms bare to the shoulder,
where the muscles lifted and fell like waves, was silent. Sadness sat
upon him like a garment, yet lightened by a holy joy.

Odd servers of Love, these two, who knew only its pain without its
pleasure, yet who were standing on the threshold of its Holy of Holies.

Of nights they sat together at the tiny fire of a few laid sticks and
talked at intervals in a strange companionship.

Never again did they speak of love, nor even so much as skirt its
fringes, though the young trapper read with wistful eyes its working in
the woman's face. Out of her eyes had gone a certain light to be
replaced by another, as if a star had passed near a smouldering world
and gone on, changed by the contact, its radiance darkened by a deeper
glow.

The firm cheeks, dusky as sunset, had lost something of their contour.

Like comrades, too, they shared the work and the watches, the girl
standing guard with rifle and ball while Dupre snatched heavy sleep,
herself dropping down like the veriest old wolf of the North on mossy
bank or green grass for the rest they sternly shortened.

"'Tis near the time of the Hudson's Bay brigade, is it not, M'sieu?"
she would ask sometimes. "Think you we shall meet them surely if we
skirt the eastern shore of Winnipeg?"

And Dupre would always answer, "Assuredly. By the third week in July
they will be at the upper bend where the river comes down from York.
The Nakonkirhirinons will hold to the west, going up Nelson River and
west through the chain of little lakes that lie to the south of
Winnipeg, thence gaining Deer River and that Reindeer Lake which sends
them forth into their unknown region beyond the Oujuragatchousibi. We,
then, will make straight for the eastern shore, skirting upward to the
interception of the ways, and we will surely meet the brigade."

"And they will surely lend help, think you, to a factor of the Company
in such grave plight?"

"Surely, Ma'amselle."

So the hours of day and darkness slipped by with dip of paddle and with
portage, with snatched rest and fare of the wild.

In a plentiful forest and on an abundant stream Dupre was at no loss
for food. Trout, sparkling and fresh from the icy water, roasted on
forked sticks stuck in the ground beside a bed of coals, made fare for
an epicure, and the young trapper, watching Maren as she knelt to tend
them, shielding her face with her hand, thought wistfully of a cabin
where the fire leaped on the hearth and where this woman passed back
and forth at the tasks of home.

"'Tis too great a thing to ask of le bon Dieu," he said in his heart;
"'tis not permitted even that one dream of such joy,--'twould be heaven
robbed of its glory."

So he fished and hunted for her, as the primal man has hunted and
fished for his woman since time began, tended her fires and guarded her
sleep, and the wistful sadness within him grew with the passing days.

Down that northbound river the lone canoe with its two people hurried
after the great flotilla, silent and determined, like a starved wolf on
the flanks of a caribou herd.

Out on the breast of the great blue lake it, too, was shot by the
rushing waters, lone little cockleshell, to head its prow to the
eastward, where the green shore curved away, to take its infinitesimal
chance of victory against all odds.

When the sun came out of the eastern forest, a golden ball in a cloud
of fire, it saw the light craft already cutting the cool waters of
Winnipeg. When it sank into the western woods the bobbing dot was still
shooting forward.

Child of the wilderness by birth was Dupre, child of the wilderness by
dream and desire was Maren, and its simple courage was inborn in both.

The Indians were a day and night ahead, hurrying by dawn and dusk to
the north, that the body of the dead chief, cured like a mummy by the
smoke curling from the big tepee at every stop, might have burial, the
earth-bound spirit begin its journey to the shadowy hunting-grounds.

When McElroy took his last look backward at the blue lake from the
northern end, Maren and Dupre were making their last camp before the
Big Bend on the eastern shore.

"How soon, think you, M'sieu?" she asked that night, standing beside
the little fire; "how soon will they come,--the H. B. C.'s from York?"

"To-morrow, most like, or in a few days at most."

This evening luck had deserted his fishing, so the trapper took a rifle
and went into the woods after a fool-hen. Thoughts kept him company;
thoughts of love and its strangeness, of the odd decrees of Fate and
the helplessness of man. How all the world had changed with its coming,
this love which hail been born in an hour what time he had listened to
a woman's voice beside the stockade wall, and how the very soul within
him had changed also.

Where had been lightness and the recklessness of youth there was now a
wistful tenderness so vast that it covered his life as the pearly mist
covered the world at dawn.

Where he had taken all of joy that post and settlement, friend and foe
could give, lived for naught but his sparkling pleasures, he was now
possessed of a great yearning to give to this woman, this goddess of
the black braids; to give, only to give to her; to give of his
strength, of his overwhelming love; aye, of even his heart's blood
itself as he had told her in the beginning.

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