by Zane Grey
“It is late—too late,” voiced Philip wonderingly.
But as he spoke he followed Jean. The half-breed seemed to have risen out of his world now. There was a wonderful light in his face, a something that seemed to reach back through centuries that were gone—and in this moment Philip thought of Marechal, of Prince Rupert, of le Chevalier Grosselier—of the adventurous and royal blood that had first come over to the New World to form the Great Company, and he knew that of such men as these was Jean Jacques Croisset, the forest man. He understood now the meaning of the soft and faultless speech of this man who had lived always under the stars and the open skies. He was not of to-day, but a harkening back to that long-forgotten yesterday; in his veins ran the blood red and strong of the First Men of the North. Out into the night Philip followed him, bare-headed, with the moonlight streaming down from above; and he stopped only when Jean stopped, close to a little plot where a dozen wooden crosses rose above a dozen snow-covered mounds.
Jean stopped, and his hand fell on Philip’s arm.
“These are Josephine’s,” he said softly, with a sweep of his other hand. “She calls it her Garden of Little Flowers. They are children, M’sieur. Some are babies. When a little one dies—if it is not too far away—she brings it to Le Jardin—her garden, so that it may not sleep alone under the lonely spruce, with the wolves howling over it on winter nights. They must be lonely in the woodsy graves, she says. I have known her to bring an Indian baby a hundred miles, and some of these I have seen die in her arms, while she crooned to them a song of Heaven. And five times as many little ones she has saved, M’sieur. That is why even the winds in the treetops whisper her name, L’Ange! Does it not seem to you that even the moon shines brighter here upon these little mounds and the crosses?”
“Yes,” breathed Philip reverently.
Jean pointed to a larger mound, the one guardian mound of them all, rising a little above the others, its cross lifted watchfully above the other crosses; and he said, as if the spirits themselves were listening to him:
“M’sieur, there is my wife, my Iowaka. She died three years ago, but she is with me always, and even now her beloved voice is singing in my heart, telling me that it is not black and cold where she and the little ones are waiting, but that all is light and beautiful. M’sieur”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“Could I sell my hereafter with her for the price of another woman’s love on earth?”
Philip tried to speak; and strange after a moment he succeeded in saying:
“Jean, an hour ago, I thought I was a man. I see how far short of that I have fallen. Forgive me, and let me be your brother. Such a love as yours is my love for Josephine. And to-morrow—”
“Despair will open up and swallow you to the depths of your soul,” interrupted Jean gently. “Return to your room, M’sieur. Sleep. Fight for the love that will be yours in Heaven, as I live for my Iowaka’s. For that love will be yours, up there. Josephine has loved but one man, and that is you. I have watched and I have seen. But in this world she can never be more to you than she is now, for what she told you to-night is the least of the terrible thing that is eating away her soul on earth. Good-night, M’sieur!”
Straight out into the moonlight Jean walked, head erect, in the face of the forest. And Philip stood looking after him over the little garden of crosses until he had disappeared.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Alone and with the deadening depression that had come with Jean’s last words, Philip returned to his room. He had made no effort to follow the half-breed who had shamed him to the quick beside the grave of his wife. He felt no pleasure, no sense of exultation, that his suspicions of Croisset’s feelings toward Josephine had been dispelled. Since the hour MacTavish had died up in the madness of Arctic night, deep and hopeless gloom had not laid its hand more heavily upon him.
He bolted his door, drew the curtain to the window, and added a bit of wood to the few embers that still remained alive in the grate. Then he sat down, with his face to the fire. The dry birch burst into flame, and for half an hour he sat staring into it with almost unseeing eyes. He knew that Jean would keep his word—that even now he was possibly on the fresh trail that led through the forest. For him there was something about the half-breed now that was almost omniscient. In him Philip had seen incarnated the things which made him feel like a dwarf in manhood. In those few moments close to the graves, Jean had risen above the world. And Philip believed in him. Yet with his belief, his optimism did not quite die.
In the same breath Jean had told him that he could never possess Josephine, and that Josephine loved him. This in itself, Jean’s assurance of her love, was sufficient to arouse a spirit like his with new hope. At last he went to bed, and in spite of his mental and physical excitement of the night, he fell asleep.
John Adare did not fail in his promise to rouse Philip early in the day. When Philip jumped out of bed in response to Adare’s heavy knock at the door, he judged that it was not later than seven o’clock, and the room was still dark. Adare’s voice came booming through the thick panels in reply to Philip’s assurance that he was getting up.
“This is the third time,” he cried. “I’ve cracked the door trying to rouse you. And we’ve got a caribou porterhouse two inches thick waiting for us.”
The giant was walking back and forth in the big living-room when Philip joined him a few minutes later. He wore an Indian-made jacket and was smoking a big pipe. That he had been up for some time was evident from the logs fully ablaze in the fireplace. He rubbed his hands briskly as Philip entered. Every atom of him disseminated good cheer.
“You don’t know how good it seems to get back home,” he exclaimed, as they shook hands. “I feel like a boy—actually like a boy, Philip! Didn’t sleep two winks after I went to bed, and Miriam scolded me for keeping her awake. Bless my soul, I wouldn’t live in Montreal if they’d make me a present of the whole Hudson’s Bay Company.”
“Nor I,” said Philip. “I love the North.”
“How long?”
“Four years—without a break.”
“One can live a long time in the North in four years,” mused the master of Adare. “But Josephine said she met you in Montreal?”
“True,” laughed Philip, catching himself. “That was a break—and I thank God for it. Outside of that I spent all of the four years north of the Hight of Land. For eighteen months I lived along the edges of the Arctic trying to take an impossible census of the Eskimo for the government.”
“I knew something of the sort when I first looked at you,” said Adare. “I can tell an Arctic man, just as I can pick a Herschel dog or an Athabasca country malemute from a pack of fifty. We have much to talk about, my boy. We will be great friends. Just now we are going to that caribou steak.”
Out into the hall, through another door, and down a short corridor, he led Philip. Here a third door was open, and Adare stood aside while Philip entered.
“This is my private sanctuary,” he said proudly. “What do you think of it?”
Philip looked about him. He was in a room almost as large as the one from which they had come. In a huge fireplace a pile of logs were blazing. One end of the room was given up almost entirely to shelves and weighted down with books. Philip was amazed at their number. The other end was still partially hidden in glooms but he could make out that it was fitted up as a laboratory, and on shelves he caught the white gleam of scores of wild beast skulls. Comfortably near to the fire was a large table scattered with books, papers, and piles of manuscript, and behind this was a small iron safe. Here, Philip thought, was the adytum of no ordinary man; it was the study of a scholar and a scientist. He marked the absence of mounted heads from the walls, but in spite of that the very atmosphere of the room breathed of the forests and the beast. Here and there he saw the articulated skeletons of wild animals. From among the books themselves the
jaws and ivory fangs of skulls gleamed out at him. Before he had finished his wondering survey of the strange room, John Adare stepped to the table and picked up a skull.
“This is my latest specimen,” he said, his voice eager with enthusiasm. “It is perfect. Jean secured it for me while I was away. It is the skull of a beaver, and shows in three distinct and remarkable gradations how nature replaces the soft enamel as it is worn from the beaver’s teeth. You see, I am a hobbyist. For twenty years I have been studying wild animals. And there—”
He replaced the skull on the table to point to an isolated shelf filled with books and magazines.
“—there is my most remarkable collection,” he added, a gleam of humour in his eyes. “They are the books and magazine stories of nature fakirs, the ‘works’ of naturalists who have never heard the howl of a wolf or the cry of a loon; the wild dreams of fictionists, the rot of writers who spend two weeks or a month each year on some blazed trail and return to the cities to call themselves students of nature. When I feel in bad humour I read some of that stuff and laugh.”
He leaned over to press a button under the table,
“One of my little electrical arrangements,” he explained. “That will bring our breakfast. To use a popular expression of the uninformed, I’m as hungry as a bear. As a matter of fact, you know, a bear is the lightest eater of all brute creation for his size, strength, and fat supply. That row of naturalists over there have made him out a pig. The beast’s a genius, for it takes a genius to grow fat on poplar buds!”
Then he laughed good humouredly.
“I suppose you are tired of this already. Josephine has probably been filling you with a lot of my foolishness. She says I must be silly or I would have my stuff published in books. But I am waiting, waiting until I have come down to the last facts. I am experimenting now with the black and the silver fox. And there are many other experiments to come, many of them. But you are tired of this.”
“Tired!”
Philip had listened to him without speaking. In this room John Adare had changed. In him he saw now the living, breathing soul of the wild. His own face was flushed with a new enthusiasm as he replied:
“Such things could never tire me. I only ask that I may be your companion in your researches, and learn something of the wonders which you must already have discovered. You have studied wild animals—for twenty years?”
“Twenty and four, day and night; it has been my hobby.”
“And you have written about them?”
“A score of volumes, if they were in print.”
Philip drew a deep breath.
“The world would give a great deal for what you know,” he said. “It would give a great deal for those books, more than I dare to estimate, undoubtedly it would be a vast sum in dollars.”
Adare laughed softly in his beard.
“And what would I do with dollars?” he asked. “I have sufficient with which to live this life here. What more could money bring me? I am the happiest man in the world!”
For a moment a cloud overshadowed his face.
“And yet of late I have had a worry,” he added thoughtfully. “It is because of Miriam, my wife. She is not well. I had hoped that the doctors in Montreal would help her. But they have failed. They say she possesses no malady, no sickness that they can discover. And yet she is not the old Miriam. God knows I hope the tonic of the snows will bring her back to health this winter!”
“It will,” declared Philip. “The signs point to a glorious winter, crisp and dry—the sledge and dog kind, when you can hear the crack of a whiplash half a mile away.”
“You will hear that frequently enough if you follow Josephine,” chuckled Adare. “Not a trail in these forests for a hundred miles she does not know. She trains all of the dogs, and they are wonderful.”
It was on the point of Philip’s tongue to ask a reason for the silence of the fierce pack he had seen the night before, when he caught himself. At the same moment the Indian woman appeared through the door with a laden tray. Adare helped her arrange their breakfast on a small table near the fire.
“I thought we would be more congenial here than alone in the dining-room, Philip,” he explained. “Unless I am mistaken the ladies won’t be up until dinner time. Did you ever see a steak done to a finer turn than this? Marie, you are a treasure.” He motioned Philip to a seat, and began serving. “Nothing in the world is better than a caribou porterhouse cut well back,” he went on. “Don’t fry or roast it, but broil it. An inch and a half is the proper thickness, just enough to hold the heart of it ripe with juice. See it ooze from that cut! Can you beat it?”
“Not with anything I have had along the Arctic,” confessed Philip. “A steak from the cheek of a cow walrus is about the best thing you find up in the ‘Big Icebox’—that is, at first. Later, when the aurora borealis has got into your marrow, you gorge on seal blubber and narwhal fat and call it good. As for me, I’d prefer pickles to anything else in the world, so with your permission I’ll help myself. Just now I’d eat pickles with ice cream.”
It was a pleasant meal. Philip could not remember when he had known a more agreeable host. Not until they had finished, and Adare had produced cigars of a curious length and slimness, did the older man ask the question for which Philip had been carefully preparing himself.
“Now I want to hear about you,” he said. “Josephine told me very little—said that she wanted me to get my impressions first hand. We’ll smoke and talk. These cigars are clear Havanas. I have the tobacco imported by the bale and we make the cigars ourselves. Reduces the cost to a minimum, and we always have a supply. Go on, Philip, I’m listening.”
Philip remembered Josephine’s words telling him to narrate the events of his own life to her father—except that he was to leave open, as it were, the interval in which he was supposed to have known her in Montreal. It was not difficult for him to slip over this. He described his first coming into the North, and Adare’s eyes glowed sympathetically when Philip quoted Hill’s words down at Prince Albert and Jasper’s up at Fond du Lac. He listened with tense interest to his experiences along the Arctic, his descriptions of the death of MacTavish and the passing of Pierre Radisson. But what struck deepest with him was Philip’s physical and mental fight for new life, and the splendid way in which the wilderness had responded.
“And you couldn’t go back now,” he said, a tone of triumph in his voice. “When the forests once claim you—they hold.”
“Not alone the forests, Mon Pere.”
“Ah, Mignonne. No, there is neither man nor beast in the world that would leave her. Even the dogs are chained out in the deep spruce that they may not tear down her doors in the night to come near her. The whole world loves my Josephine. The Indians make the Big Medicine for her in a hundred tepees when they learn she is ill. They have trimmed five hundred lob-stick trees in her memory. Mon Dieu, in the Company’s books there are written down more than thirty babes and children grown who bear her name of Josephine! She is different than her mother. Miriam has been always like a flower—a timid wood violet, loving this big world, yet playing no part in it away from my side. Sometimes Josephine frightens me. She will travel a hundred miles by sledge to nurse a sick child, and only last winter she buried herself in a shack filled with smallpox and brought six souls out of it alive! For two weeks she was buried in that hell. That is Mignonne, whom Indian, breed, and white man call L’Ange. Miriam they call La Fleurette. We are two fortunate men, my son!”
A dozen questions burned on Philip’s lips, but he held them back, fearing that some accidental slip of the tongue might betray him. He was convinced that Josephine’s father knew absolutely nothing of the trouble that was wrecking the happiness of Adare House, and he was equally positive that all, even Miriam herself, were fighting to keep the secret from him.
That Josephine�
��s motherhood was not the sole cause of the mysterious and tragic undercurrent that he had been made to feel he was more than suspicious. A few hours would tell him if he was right, for he would ask Josephine to become his wife. And he already knew what John Adare did not know.
Miriam was not sick with a physical illness. The doctors whom Adare had not believed were right. And he wondered, as he sat facing her husband, if it was fear for his life that was breaking her down. Were they shielding him from some great and ever-menacing peril—a danger with which, for some inconceivable reason, they dared not acquaint him?
In the short time he had known him, a strange feeling for John Adare had found a place in Philip’s heart. It was more than friendship, more than the feeling which his supposed relationship might have roused. This big-hearted, tender, rumbling voiced giant of a man he had grown to love. And he found himself struggling blindly now to keep from him what the others were trying to conceal, for he knew that John Adare’s heart would crumble down like a pile of dust if he knew the truth. He was thinking of the baby, and it seemed as if his thoughts flashed like fire to the other.
Adare was laughing softly in his beard.
“You should have seen the kid last night, Philip. When they woke ’im he stared at me for a time as though I was an ogre, then he grinned, kicked me, and grabbed my whiskers, I’ve just one fault to find. I wish he was a dozen instead of me. The little rascal! I wonder if he is awake?”
He half rose, as if about to investigate, then reseated himself.
“Guess I’d better not take a chance of waking him,” he reflected. “If Jean should catch me rousing Josephine or the baby he’d throttle me.”
“Jean is—a sort of guardian,” ventured Philip.