Flower of the North - James Oliver Curwood (desktop ebook reader .txt) 📗

old man. Beard and hair were white. He was as tall as Philip; his shoulders were broader; his chest massive; and as he stood under the light of one of the hanging lamps, his face shining with a pale glow, one hand upon his breast, the other extended, it seemed to Philip that all of the greatness and past glory of Fort o' God, whatever they may have been, were personified in the man he beheld. He was dressed in soft buckskin, like Pierre. His hair and beard grew in wild disorder, and from under shaggy eyebrows there burned a pair of deep-set eyes of the color of blue steel. He was a man to inspire awe; old, and yet young; white-haired, gray-faced, and yet a giant. One might have expected from between his bearded lips a voice as thrilling as his appearance; a rumbling voice, deep-chested, sonorous--and it would have caused no surprise. It was the voice that surprised Philip more than the man. It was low, and trembling with an agitation which even strength and pride could not control.
"Philip Whittemore, I am Henry d'Arcambal. May God bless you for what you have done!"
A hand of iron gripped his own. And then, before Philip had found words to say, the master of Fort o' God suddenly placed his arms about his shoulders and embraced him. Their shoulders touched. Their faces were close. The two men who loved Jeanne d'Arcambal above all else on earth gazed for a silent moment into each other's eyes.
"They have told me," said D'Arcambal, softly. "You have brought my Jeanne home through death. Accept a father's blessing, and with it--this!"
He stepped back, and swept his arms about the great room.
"Everything--everything--would have gone with her," he said. "If you had let her die, I should have died. My God, what peril she was in! In saving her you saved me. So you are welcome here, as a son. For the first time since my Jeanne was a babe Fort o' God offers itself to a man who is a stranger and its hospitality is yours so long as its walls hang together. And as they have done this for upward of two hundred years, M'sieur Philip, we may conclude that our friendship is to be without end."
He clasped Philip's hands again, and two tears coursed down his gray cheeks. It was difficult for Philip to restrain the joy his words produced, which, coming from the lips of Jeanne's father, lifted him suddenly into a paradise of hope. For many reasons he had come to expect a none too warm reception at Fort o' God; he had looked ahead to the place with a grim sort of fear, scarcely definable; and here Jeanne's father was opening his arms to him. Pierre was unapproachable; Jeanne herself was a mystery, filling him alternately with hope and despair; D'Arcambal had accepted him as a son. He could find no words adequate to his emotion; none that could describe his own happiness, unless it was in a bold avowal of his love for the girl he had saved. And this his good sense told him not to make, at the present moment.
"Any man would have done as much for your daughter," he said at last, "and I am happy that I was the fortunate one to render her assistance."
"You are wrong," said D'Arcambal, taking him by the arm. "You are one out of a thousand. It takes a MAN to go through the Big Thunder and come out at the other end alive. I know of only one other who has done that in the last twenty years, and that other is Henry d'Arcambal himself. We three, you, Jeanne, and I, have alone triumphed over those monsters of death. All others have died. It seems like a strange pointing of the hand of God."
Philip trembled.
"We three!" he exclaimed.
"We three," said the old man, "and for that reason you are a part of Fort o' God."
He led Philip deeper into the great room, and Philip saw that almost all the space along the walls of the huge room was occupied by shelves upon shelves of books, masses of papers, piles of magazines shoulder-high, scores of maps and paintings. The massive table was covered with books; there were piles on smaller tables; chairs, and the floor itself, covered with the skins of a score of wild beasts, were littered with them. At the far end of the room he saw deeper and darker shelves, where gleamed faintly in the lamplight row upon row of vials and bottles and strange instruments of steel and glass. A scientist in the wilderness--a student exiled in a desolation! These were the thoughts that leaped into his mind, and he knew that in this room Jeanne had been created; that here, between these centuries-old walls, amid an environment of strange silence, of whispering age, her visions of the world had come. Here, separated from all her kind, God, Nature, and a father had made her of their handiwork.
The old man pointed Philip to a chair near the large table, and sat down close to him. At his feet was a stool covered with silvery lynx-skin, and D'Arcambal looked at this, his strong, grim face relaxing into a gentle smile of happiness.
"There is where Jeanne sits--at my feet," he said. "It has been her place for many years. When she is not there I am lost. Life ceases. This room has been our world. To-night you are in Fort o' God; to-morrow you will see D'Arcambal House. You have heard of that, perhaps, but never of Fort o' God. That belongs to Jeanne and me, to Pierre--and you. Fort o' God is the heart, the soul, the life's blood of D'Arcambal House. It is this room and two or three others. D'Arcambal House is our barrier. When strangers come, they see D'Arcambal House; plain rooms, of rough wood; quarters such as you have seen at posts and stations; the mask which gives no hint of what is hidden within. It is there that we live to the world; it is here that we live to ourselves. Jeanne has my permission to tell you whatever she wishes, a little later. But I am curious, and being an old man must be humored first. I am still trembling. You must tell me what happened to Jeanne."
For an hour they talked, and Philip went over one by one the events as they had occurred since the fight on the cliff, omitting only such things as he thought that Jeanne and Pierre might wish to keep secret to themselves. At the end of that hour he was certain that D'Arcambal was unaware of the dark cloud that had suddenly come into Jeanne's life. The old man's brow was knitted with deep lines, and his powerful jaws were set hard, as Philip told of the ambush, of the wounding of Pierre, and the flight of his assailants with his daughter. It was to get money, the old man thought. The half-breed had suggested that, and Jeanne herself had given it as her opinion. Why else should they have been attacked at Churchill? Such things had occurred before, he told Philip. The little daughter of the factor at Nelson House had been stolen, and held for ransom. With a hundred questions he wrung from Philip every detail of the second fight and of the struggle for life in the rapids. He betrayed no physical excitement, even in those moments of Philip's description when Jeanne hung between life and death; but in his eyes there was the glow of red-hot fires. At last there came to interrupt them the low, musical tinkling of a bell under the table.
D'Arcambal's face lighted up suddenly.
"Ah, I had forgotten," he exclaimed. "Pardon me, Philip. Dinner has been awaiting us this last half-hour; and besides--"
He reached out and touched a tiny button, which Philip had not observed before.
"I am selfish."
He had hardly ceased speaking when footsteps sounded in the hall, and in spite of every resolution he had made to guard himself against any betrayal of the emotions burning in his breast, Philip sprang to his feet. Jeanne had come in under the glow of the lamps and stood now a dozen feet from him, a vision so exquisitely lovely that he saw nothing of those who entered behind her, nor heard D'Arcambal's low, happy laugh at his side. It seemed to him for a moment as if there had suddenly appeared before him the face of the picture that was turned against the wall, only more beautiful now, radiant with the glow of living flesh and blood. But there was something even more startling than this resemblance. In this moment Jeanne was the fulfilment of his dream; she had come to him from out of another world. She was dressed in an old- fashioned gown of pure white, a fabric so delicate that it seemed to float about her slender form, responsive to every breath she drew. Her white shoulders revealed themselves above masses of filmy lace that fell upon her bosom; her slender arms, girlish rather than womanly in their beauty, were bare. Her hair was bound up in shining coils about her head, with a single flower nestling amid a little cluster of curls that fell upon her neck. After his first movement, Philip recovered himself by a strong effort. He bowed low to conceal the flush in his face. Jeanne swept him a little courtesy, and then ran past him, with the eagerness of any modern child, into the outstretched arms of her father.
Laughter and joy rumbled in the beard of the master of Fort o' God as he looked over Jeanne's head at Philip.
"And this is what you have saved for me," he said.
Then he looked beyond, and for the first time Philip realized there were others in the room. One was Pierre; the other a pretty, dark-faced girl, with hair that glistened like a raven's wing in the lamp-glow.
Jeanne left her father's arms and gave her hand to Philip.
"M'sieur Philip, this is my sister, Mademoiselle Couchee," she cried.
Pierre's sister gave Philip her hand, and behind them D'Arcambal laughed softly in his beard again, and said:
"To-morrow, in D'Arcambal House, you may call her Otille, Philip. But to-night we are in Fort o' God. Oh, Jeanne, Jeanne, what a witch you are!"
"An angel!" breathed Philip, but no one heard him.
"And this witch," added the old man, "you are to take in to supper, M'sieur Philip. To night I suppose that I must call you m'sieur, but to-morrow, when I have on my leather leggings and my skin cap, I will call you Phil, or Tom, Dick, or Harry, just as I please. This is the first time, sir, that my Jeanne has ever gone in to dinner on another arm than mine or Pierre's. And so I may be a little jealous. Proceed."
As Jeanne's hand rested in his arm, and they went into the hall, Philip could not restrain himself from whispering:
"I am glad--of that."
"And the dress, M'sieur Philip!" exclaimed D'Arcambal behind them, in the voice of a happy boy. "It is an honor to escort that, to say nothing of the silly girl that's in it. That dress, sir, belonged to a beautiful lady who was called Camille, and who died over a century ago."
"Father, please do be good!" protested Jeanne. "Remember!"
"Ah, so I will," said her father. "I had forgotten that you were to tell M'sieur Philip these things."
They entered another room illuminated by a single huge lamp suspended above a table spread with silver and fine linen. The room was as great a surprise as the other two had been. It contained no chairs. What Philip mentally designated as