| “BE
pretty good to her, Charlie, my boy, or she’ll
balk sure as shooting.”
That was what old Jimmy Robinson
said to his brand new son-in-law, while they waited
for the bride to reappear.
“Oh! you bet, there’s
no danger of much else. I’ll be good to her, help
me Heaven,” replied Charlie McDonald, brightly.
“Yes, of course you will,”
answered the old man, “but don’t you forget,
there’s a good big bit of her mother in her, and,”
closing his left eye significantly, “you don’t
understand these Indians as I do.”
“But I’m just as
fond of them, Mr. Robinson,” Charlie said assertively,
“and I get on with them too, now, don’t
I?”
“Yes, pretty well for
a town boy; but when you have lived forty years among
these people, as I have done; when you have had your
wife as long as I have had mine—for there’s
no getting over it, Christine’s disposition is
as native as her mother’s, every bit—and
perhaps when you’ve owned for eighteen years a
daughter as [Page 116] dutiful, as
loving, as fearless, and, alas! as obstinate as that
little piece you are stealing away from me to-day—I
tell you, youngster, you’ll know more than you
know now. It is kindness for kindness, bullet for bullet,
blood for blood. Remember, what you are, she will be,”
and the old Hudson Bay trader scrutinized Charlie McDonald’s
face like a detective.
It was a happy, fair face, good
to look at, with a certain ripple of dimples somewhere
about the mouth, and eyes that laughed out the very
sunniness of their owner’s soul. There was not
a severe nor yet a weak line anywhere. He was a well-meaning
young fellow, happily dispositioned, and a great favorite
with the tribe at Robinson’s Post, whither he
had gone in the service of the Department of Agriculture,
to assist the local agent through the tedium of a long
census-taking.
As a boy he had had the Indian
relic-hunting craze, as a youth he had studied Indian
archaeology and folk-lore, as a man he consummated his
predilections for Indianology by loving, winning and
marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader,
who himself had married a native woman twenty years
ago. The country was all backwoods, and the Post miles
and miles from even the semblance of civilization, and
the lonely young Englishman’s heart had gone out
to the girl who, apart from speaking a very few [Page
117] words of English, was utterly uncivilized
and uncultured, but had withal that marvellously innate
refinement so universally possessed by the higher tribes
of North American Indians.
Like all her race, observant,
intuitive, having a horror of ridicule, consequently
quick at acquirement and teachable in mental and social
habits, she had developed from absolute pagan indifference
into a sweet, elderly Christian woman, whose broken
English, quiet manner, and still handsome copper-colored
face, were the joy of old Robinson’s declining
years.
He had given their daughter
Christine all the advantages of his own learning—which,
if truthfully told, was not universal; but the girl
had a fair common education, and the native adaptability
to progress.
She belonged to neither and
still to both types of the cultured Indian. The solemn,
silent, almost heavy manner of the one so commingled
with the gesticulating Frenchiness and vivacity of the
other, that one unfamiliar with native Canadian life
would find it difficult to determine her nationality.
She looked very pretty to Charles
McDonald’s loving eyes, as she reappeared in the
doorway, holding her mother’s hand and saying
some happy words of farewell. Personally she looked
much the same as her sisters, all Canada through, who
are the offspring of red and white parentage—[Page
118]olive-complexioned, gray-eyed, black-haired,
with figure slight and delicate, and the wistful, unfathomable
expression in her whole face that turns one so heart-sick
as they glance at the young Indians of to-day—it
is the forerunner too frequently of “the white
man’s disease,” consumption—but McDonald
was pathetically in love, and thought her the most beautiful
woman he had ever seen in his life.
There had not been much of a
wedding ceremony. The priest had cantered through the
service in Latin, pronounced the benediction in English,
and congratulated the “happy couple” in
Indian, as a compliment to the assembled tribe in the
little amateur structure that did service at the post
as a sanctuary.
But the knot was tied as firmly
and indissolubly as if all Charlie McDonald’s
swell city friends had crushed themselves up against
the chancel to congratulate him, and in his heart he
was deeply thankful to escape the flower-pelting, white
gloves, rice-throwing, and ponderous stupidity of a
breakfast, and indeed all the regulation gimcracks of
the usual marriage celebrations, and it was with a hand
trembling with absolute happiness that he assisted his
little Indian wife into the old muddy buckboard that,
hitched to an underbred-looking pony, was to convey
them over the first stages of their journey. Then came
more adieus, some hand-clasping, [Page 119]
old Jimmy Robinson looking very serious just at the
last, Mrs. Jimmy, stout, stolid, betraying nothing of
visible emotion, and then the pony, rough-shod and shaggy,
trudged on, while mutual hand-waves were kept up until
the old Hudson Bay Post dropped out of sight, and the
buckboard with its lightsome load of hearts, deliriously
happy, jogged on over the uneven trail.
*
*
* *
*
*
She
was “all the rage” that winter at the provincial
capital. The men called her a “deuced fine little
woman.” The ladies said she was “just the
sweetest wildflower.” Whereas she was really but
an ordinary, pale, dark girl who spoke slowly and with
a strong accent, who danced fairly well, sang acceptably,
and never stirred outside the door without her husband.
Charles
was proud of her; he was proud that she had “taken”
so well among his friends, proud that she bore herself
so complacently in the drawing-rooms of the wives of
pompous Government officials, but doubly proud of her
almost abject devotion to him. If ever human being was
worshipped that being was Charlie McDonald; it could
scarcely have been otherwise; for the almost godlike
strength of his passion for that little wife of his
would have mastered and melted a far more invincible
citadel than an already affectionate woman’s heart.
[Page 120]
Favorites socially, McDonald
and his wife went everywhere. In fashionable circles
she was “new”—a potent charm to acquire
popularity, and the little velvet-clad figure was always
the centre of interest among all the women in the room.
She always dressed in velvet. No woman in Canada, has
she but the faintest dash of native blood in her veins,
but loves velvets and silks. As beef to the Englishman,
wine to the Frenchman, fads to the Yankee, so are velvet
and silk to the Indian girl, be she wild as prairie
grass, be she on the borders of civilization, or, having
stepped within its boundary, mounted the steps of culture
even under its superficial heights.
“Such a dolling little
appil blossom,” said the wife of a local M.P.,
who brushed up her etiquette and English once a year
at Ottawa. “Does she always laugh so sweetly,
and gobble you up with those great big gray eyes of
hers, when you are togetheah at home, Mr. McDonald?
If so, I should think youah pooah brothah would feel
himself terribly de trop.”
He laughed lightly. “Yes,
Mrs. Stuart, there are not two of Christie; she is the
same at home and abroad, and as for Joe, he doesn’t
mind us a bit; he’s no end fond of her.”
“I’m very glad he
is. I always fancied he did not care for her, d’you
know.”
If ever a blunt woman existed
it was Mrs. Stuart. She really meant nothing, but her
[Page 121] remark bothered Charlie.
He was fond of his brother, and jealous for Christie’s
popularity. So that night when he and Joe were having
a pipe he said:
“I’ve never asked
you yet what you thought of her, Joe.” A brief
pause, then Joe spoke. “I’m glad she loves
you.”
“Why?”
“Because that girl has
but two possibilities regarding humanity—love
or hate.”
“Humph! Does she love
or hate you?”
“Ask her.”
“You talk bosh. If she
hated you, you’d get out. If she loved you I’d
make you get out.”
Joe McDonald whistled a little,
then laughed.
“Now that we are on the
subject, I might as well ask—honestly, old man,
wouldn’t you and Christie prefer keeping house
alone to having me always around?”
“Nonsense, sheer nonsense.
Why, thunder, man, Christie’s no end fond of you,
and as for me—you surely don’t want assurances
from me?”
“No, but I often think
a young couple—”
“Young couple be blowed!
After a while when they want you and your old surveying
chains, and spindle-legged tripod telescope kickshaws,
farther west, I venture to say the little woman will
cry her eyes out—won’t you, Christie?”
This last in a higher tone, as through [Page
122] clouds of tobacco smoke he caught sight
of his wife passing the doorway.
She entered. “Oh no, I
would not cry; I never do cry, but I would be heart-sore
to lose you, Joe, and apart from that”—a
little wickedly—“you may come in handy for
an exchange some day, as Charlie does always say when
he hoards up duplicate relics.”
“Are Charlie and I duplicates?”
“Well—not exactly”—her
head a little to one side, and eyeing them both merrily,
while she slipped softly on to the arm of her husband’s
chair—“but, in the event of Charlie’s
failing me”—everyone laughed then. The “some
day” that she spoke of was nearer than they thought.
It came about in this wise.
There was a dance at the Lieutenant-Governor’s,
and the world and his wife were there. The nobs were
in great feather that night, particularly the women,
who flaunted about in new gowns and much splendor. Christie
McDonald had a new gown also, but wore it with the utmost
unconcern, and if she heard any of the flattering remarks
made about her she at least appeared to disregard them.
“I never dreamed you could
wear blue so splendidly,” said Captain Logan,
as they sat out a dance together.
“Indeed she can, though,”
interposed Mrs. Stuart, halting in one of her gracious
sweeps [Page 123] down the room with
her husband’s private secretary.
“Don’t shout so,
captain. I can hear every sentence you uttah—of
course Mrs. McDonald can wear blue—she has a morning
gown of cadet blue that she is a picture in.”
“You are both very kind,”
said Christie. “I like blue; it is the color of
all the Hudson’s Bay posts, and the factor’s
residence is always decorated in blue.”
“Is it really? How interesting—do
tell us some more of your old home, Mrs. McDonald; you
so seldom speak of your life at the post, and we fellows
so often wish to hear of it all,” said Logan eagerly.
“Why do you not ask me
of it, then?”
“Well—er, I’m
sure I don’t know; I’m fully interested
in the Ind—in your people—your mother’s
people, I mean, but it always seems so personal, I suppose;
and—a—a—”
“Perhaps you are, like
all other white people, afraid to mention my nationality
to me.”
The captain winced, and Mrs.
Stuart laughed uneasily. Joe McDonald was not far off,
and he was listening, and chuckling, and saying to himself,
“That’s you, Christie, lay ’em out;
it won’t hurt ’em to know how they appear
once in a while.”
“Well, Captain Logan,”
she was saying, “what is it you would like to
hear—of my people, or my parents, or myself?”
[Page 124]
“All, all, my dear,”
cried Mrs. Stuart clamorously. “I’ll speak
for him—tell us of yourself and your mother—your
father is delightful, I am sure—but then he is
only an ordinary Englishman, not half as interesting
as a foreigner, or—or, perhaps I should say, a
native.”
Christie laughed. “Yes,”
she said, “my father often teases my mother now
about how very native she was when he married
her; then, how could she have been otherwise? She did
not know a word of English, and there was not another
English-speaking person besides my father and his two
companions within sixty miles.”
“Two companions, eh? one
a Catholic priest and the other a wine merchant, I suppose,
and with your father in the Hudson Bay, they were good
representatives of the pioneers in the New World,”
remarked Logan, waggishly.
“Oh, no, they were all
Hudson Bay men. There were no rumsellers and no missionaries
in that part of the country then.”
Mrs. Stuart looked puzzled.
“No missionaries?” she repeated
with an odd intonation.
Christie’s insight was
quick. There was a peculiar expression of interrogation
in the eyes of her listeners, and the girl’s blood
leapt angrily up into her temples as she said hurriedly,
“I know what you mean; I know what you are thinking.
You are wondering how my parents were married—”
[Page 125]
“Well—er, my dear,
it seems peculiar—if there was no priest, and
no magistrate, why—a—” Mrs. Stuart
paused awkwardly.
“The marriage was performed
by Indian rites,” said Christie.
“Oh, do tell me about
it; is the ceremony very interesting and quaint—are
your chieftains anything like Buddhist priests?”
It was Logan who spoke.
“Why, no,” said
the girl in amazement at that gentleman’s ignorance.
“There is no ceremony at all, save a feast. The
two people just agree to live only with and for each
other, and the man takes his wife to his home, just
as you do. There is no ritual to bind them; they need
none; an Indian’s word was his law in those days,
you know.”
Mrs. Stuart stepped backwards.
“Ah!” was all she said. Logan removed his
eye-glass and stared blankly at Christie. “And
did McDonald marry you in this singular fashion?”
he questioned.
“Oh, no, we were married
by Father O’Leary. Why do you ask?”
“Because if he had, I’d
have blown his brains out to-morrow.”
Mrs. Stuart’s partner,
who had hitherto been silent, coughed and began to twirl
his cuff stud nervously, but nobody took any notice
of him. Christie had risen, slowly, ominously—risen,
with the dignity and pride of an empress. [Page
126]
“Captain Logan,”
she said, “what do you dare to say to me? What
do you dare to mean? Do you presume to think it would
not have been lawful for Charlie to marry me according
to my people’s rites? Do you for one instant dare
to question that my parents were not as legally—”
“Don’t, dear, don’t,”
interrupted Mrs. Stuart hurriedly; “it is bad
enough now, goodness knows; don’t make—”
Then she broke off blindly. Christie’s eyes glared
at the mumbling woman, at her uneasy partner, at the
horrified captain. Then they rested on the McDonald
brothers, who stood within earshot, Joe’s face
scarlet, her husband’s white as ashes, with something
in his eyes she had never seen before. It was Joe who
saved the situation. Stepping quickly across towards
his sister-in-law, he offered her his arm, saying, “The
next dance is ours, I think, Christie.”
Then Logan pulled himself together,
and attempted to carry Mrs. Stuart off for the waltz,
but for once in her life that lady had lost her head.
“It is shocking!” she said, “outrageously
shocking! I wonder if they told Mr. McDonald before
he married her!” Then looking hurriedly round,
she too saw the young husband’s face—and
knew that they had not.
“Humph! deuced nice kettle
of fish—and poor old Charlie has always thought
so much of honorable birth.” [Page 127]
Logan thought he spoke in an
undertone, but “poor old Charlie” heard
him. He followed his wife and brother across the room.
“Joe,” he said, “will you see that
a trap is called?” Then to Christie, “Joe
will see that you get home all right.” He wheeled
on his heel then and left the ball-room.
Joe did see.
He tucked a poor, shivering,
pallid little woman into a cab, and wound her bare throat
up in the scarlet velvet cloak that was hanging uselessly
over her arm. She crouched down beside him, saying,
“I am so cold, Joe; I am so cold,” but she
did not seem to know enough to wrap herself up. Joe
felt all through this long drive that nothing this side
of Heaven would be so good as to die, and he was glad
when the poor little voice at his elbow said, “What
is he so angry at, Joe?”
“I don’t know exactly,
dear,” he said gently, “but I think it was
what you said about this Indian marriage.”
“But why should I not
have said it? Is there anything wrong about it?”
she asked pitifully.
“Nothing, that I can see—there
was no other way; but Charlie is very angry, and you
must be brave and forgiving with him, Christie, dear.”
“But I did never see him
like that before, did you?”
“Once.”
“When?” [Page
128]
“Oh, at college, one day,
a boy tore his prayerbook in half, and threw it into
the grate, just to be mean, you know. Our mother had
given it to him at his confirmation.”
“And did he look so?”
“About, but it all blew
over in a day—Charlie’s tempers are short
and brisk. Just don’t take any notice of him;
run off to bed, and he’ll have forgotten it by
the morning.”
They reached home at last. Christie
said good-night quietly, going directly to her room.
Joe went to his room also, filled a pipe and smoked
for an hour. Across the passage he could hear her slippered
feet pacing up and down, up and down the length of her
apartment. There was something panther-like in those
restless footfalls, a meaning velvetyness that made
him shiver, and again he wished he were dead—or
elsewhere.
After a time the hall door opened,
and someone came upstairs, along the passage, and to
the little woman’s room. As he entered, she turned
and faced him.
“Christie,” he said
harshly, “do you know what you have done?”
“Yes,” taking a
step nearer him, her whole soul springing up into her
eyes, “I have angered you, Charlie, and—”
“Angered me? You have
disgraced me; and, moreover, you have disgraced yourself
and both your parents.” [Page 129]
“Disgraced?”
“Yes, disgraced;
you have literally declared to the whole city that your
father and mother were never married, and that you are
the child of—what shall we call it—love?
certainly not legality.”
Across the hallway sat Joe McDonald,
his blood freezing; but it leapt into every vein like
fire at the awful anguish in the little voice that cried
simply, “Oh! Charlie!”
“How could you do it,
how could you do it, Christie, without shame either
for yourself or for me, let alone your parents?”
The voice was like an angry
demon’s—not a trace was there in it of the
yellow-haired, blue-eyed, laughing-lipped boy who had
driven away so gaily to the dance five hours before.
“Shame? Why should I be
ashamed of the rites of my people any more than you
should be ashamed of the customs of yours—of a
marriage more sacred and holy than half of your white
man’s mockeries.”
It was the voice of another
nature in the girl—the love and the pleading were
dead in it.
“Do you mean to tell me,
Charlie—you who have studied my race and their
laws for years—do you mean to tell me that, because
there was no priest and no magistrate, my mother was
not married? Do you mean to say that all my forefathers,
for hundreds of years back, have been [Page
130] illegally born? If so, you blacken my
ancestry beyond—beyond—beyond all reason.”
“No, Christie, I would
not be so brutal as that; but your father and mother
live in more civilized times. Father O’Leary has
been at the post for nearly twenty years. Why was not
your father straight enough to have the ceremony performed
when he did get the chance?”
The girl turned upon him with
the face of a fury. “Do you suppose,” she
almost hissed, “that my mother would be married
according to your white rites after she had
been five years a wife, and I had been born in the meantime?
No, a thousand times I say, no. When
the priest came with his notions of Christianizing,
and talked to them of re-marriage by the Church, my
mother arose and said, “Never—never—I
have never had but this one husband; he has had none
but me for wife, and to have you re-marry us would be
to say as much to the whole world as that we had never
been married before.*
You go away; I do not ask that your people
be re-married; talk not so to me. I am married,
and you or the Church cannot do or undo it.”
“Your father was a fool
not to insist upon the law, and so was the priest.”
“Law? My people
have no priest, and my nation cringes not to
law. Our priest is purity, and our law is honor. Priest?
Was there a [Page 131] priest
at the most holy marriage known to humanity—that
stainless marriage whose offspring is the God you white
men told my pagan mother of?”
“Christie—you are
worse than blasphemous; such a profane remark
shows how little you understand the sanctity of the
Christian faith—”
“I know what I do
understand; it is that you are hating me because I told
some of the beautiful customs of my people to Mrs. Stuart
and those men.”
“Pooh! who cares for them?
It is not them; the trouble is they won’t keep
their mouths shut. Logan’s a cad and will toss
the whole tale about at the club before to-morrow night;
and as for the Stuart woman, I’d like to know
how I’m going to take you to Ottawa for presentation
and the opening, while she is blabbing the whole miserable
scandal in every drawing-room, and I’ll be pointed
out as a romantic fool, and you—as worse; I can’t
understand why your father didn’t tell me before
we were married; I at least might have warned you to
never mention it.” Something of recklessness rang
up through his voice, just as the panther-likeness crept
up from her footsteps and couched herself in hers. She
spoke in tones quiet, soft, deadly.
“Before we were married!
Oh! Charlie, would it have—made—any—differ-
ence?”
“God knows,” he
said, throwing himself into [Page 132]
a chair, his blonde hair rumpled and wet. It was the
only boyish thing about him now.
She walked towards him, then
halted in the centre of the room. “Charlie McDonald,”
she said, and it was as if a stone had spoken, “look
up.” He raised his head, startled by her tone.
There was a threat in her eyes that, had his rage been
less courageous, his pride less bitterly wounded, would
have cowed him.
“There was no such time
as that before our marriage, for we are not married
now. Stop,” she said, outstretching her palms
against him as he sprang to his feet, “I tell
you we are not married. Why should I recognize the rites
of your nation when you do not acknowledge the rites
of mine? According to your own words, my parents should
have gone through your church ceremony as well as through
an Indian contract; according to my words,
we should go through an Indian contract as
well as through a church marriage. If their union is
illegal, so is ours. If you think my father is living
in dishonor with my mother, my people will think I am
living in dishonor with you. How do I know when another
nation will come and conquer you as you white men conquered
us? And they will have another marriage rite to perform,
and they will tell us another truth, that you are not
my husband, that you are but disgracing and dishonoring
me, that you are keeping me here, not as your wife,
but as your—your—squaw.”
[Page 133]
The terrible word had never
passed her lips before, and the blood stained her face
to her very temples. She snatched off her wedding ring
and tossed it across the room, saying scornfully, “That
thing is as empty to me as the Indian rites to you.”
He caught her by the wrists;
his small white teeth were locked tightly, his blue
eyes blazed into hers.
“Christine, do you dare
to doubt my honor towards you? you, whom I
should have died for; do you dare to think
I have kept you here, not as my wife, but—”
“Oh, God! You are hurting
me; you are breaking my arm,” she gasped.
The door was flung open, and
Joe McDonald’s sinewy hands clinched like vices
on his brother’s shoulders.
“Charlie, you’re
mad, mad as the devil. Let go of her this minute.”
The girl staggered backwards
as the iron fingers loosed her wrists. “Oh! Joe,”
she cried, “I am not his wife, and he says I am
born—nameless.”
“Here,” said Joe,
shoving his brother towards the door. “Go downstairs
till you can collect your senses. If ever a being acted
like an infernal fool, you’re the man.”
The young husband looked from
one to the other, dazed by his wife’s insult,
abandoned to [Page 134] a fit of ridiculously
childish temper. Blind as he was with passion, he remembered
long afterwards seeing them standing there, his brother’s
face darkened with a scowl of anger—his wife,
clad in the mockery of her ball dress, her scarlet velvet
cloak half covering her bare brown neck and arms, her
eyes like flames of fire, her face like a piece of sculptured
graystone.
Without a word he flung himself
furiously from the room, and immediately afterwards
they heard the heavy hall door bang behind him.
“Can I do anything for
you, Christie?” asked her brother-in-law calmly.
“No, thank you—unless—I
think I would like a drink of water, please.”
He brought her up a goblet filled
with wine; her hand did not even tremble as she took
it. As for Joe, a demon arose in his soul as he noticed
she kept her wrists covered.
“Do you think he will
come back?” she said.
“Oh, yes, of course; he’ll
be all right in the morning. Now go to bed like a good
little girl and—and, I say, Christie, you can
call me if you want anything; I’ll be right here,
you know.”
“Thank you, Joe; you are
kind—and good.”
He returned then to his apartment.
His pipe was out, but he picked up a newspaper instead,
threw himself into an armchair, and in a half-hour was
in the land of dreams. [Page 135]
When Charlie came home in the
morning, after a six-mile walk into the country and
back again, his foolish anger was dead and buried. Logan’s
“Poor old Charlie” did not ring so distinctly
in his ears. Mrs. Stuart’s horrified expression
had faded considerably from his recollection. He thought
only of that surprisingly tall, dark girl, whose eyes
looked like coals, whose voice pierced him like a flint-tipped
arrow. Ah, well, they would never quarrel again like
that, he told himself. She loved him so, and would forgive
him after he had talked quietly to her, and told her
what an ass he was. She was simple-minded and awfully
ignorant to pitch those old Indian laws at him in her
fury, but he could not blame her; oh, no, he could not
for one moment blame her. He had been terribly severe
and unreasonable, and the horrid McDonald temper had
got the better of him; and he loved her so. Oh! he loved
her so! She would surely feel that, and forgive him,
and— He went straight to his wife’s room.
The blue velvet evening dress lay on the chair into
which he had thrown himself when he doomed his life’s
happiness by those two words, “God knows.”
A bunch of dead daffodils and her slippers were on the
floor, everything—but Christie.
He went to his brother’s
bedroom door.
“Joe,” he called,
rapping nervously thereon; “Joe, wake up; where’s
Christie, d’you know?” [Page 136]
“Good Lord, no,”
gasped that youth, springing out of his armchair and
opening the door. As he did so a note fell from off
the handle. Charlie’s face blanched to his very
hair while Joe read aloud, his voice weakening at every
word:—
“DEAR OLD JOE,—I
went into your room at daylight to get that picture
of the Post on your bookshelves. I hope you do not mind,
but I kissed your hair while you slept; it was so curly,
and yellow, and soft, just like his. Good-bye, Joe.
“CHRISTIE.”
And
when Joe looked
into his brother’s face and saw the anguish settle
in those laughing blue eyes, the despair that drove
the dimples away from that almost girlish mouth; when
he realized that this boy was but four-and-twenty years
old, and that all his future was perhaps darkened and
shadowed for ever, a great, deep sorrow arose in his
heart, and he forgot all things, all but the agony that
rang up through the voice of the fair, handsome lad
as he staggered forward, crying, “Oh! Joe—what
shall I do—what shall I do!”
* *
*
* *
*
It
was months and months before he found her, but during
all that time he had never known a hopeless moment;
discouraged he often was, [Page 137]
but despondent, never. The sunniness of his ever-boyish
heart radiated with a warmth that would have flooded
a much deeper gloom than that which settled within his
eager young life. Suffer? ah! yes, he suffered, not
with locked teeth and stony stoicism, but with the masterful
self-command, the reserve, the conquered bitterness
of the still-water sort of nature, that is supposed
to run to such depths. He tried to be bright, and his
sweet old boyish self. He would laugh sometimes in a
pitiful, pathetic fashion. He took to petting dogs,
looking into their large, solemn eyes with his wistful,
questioning blue ones; he would kiss them, as women
sometimes do, and call them “dear old fellow,”
in tones that had tears; and once in the course of his
travels, while at a little way-station, he discovered
a huge St. Bernard imprisoned by some mischance in an
empty freight car; the animal was nearly dead from starvation,
and it seemed to salve his own sick heart to rescue
back the dog’s life. Nobody claimed the big starving
creature, the train hands knew nothing of its owner,
and gladly handed it over to its deliverer. “Hudson,”
he called it, and afterwards when Joe McDonald would
relate the story of his brother’s life he invariably
terminated it with, “And I really believe that
big lumbering brute saved him.” From what, he
was never known to say. [Page 138]
But all things end, and he heard
of her at last. She had never returned to the Post,
as he at first thought she would, but had gone to the
little town of B——, in Ontario, where she
was making her living at embroidery and plain sewing.
The September sun had set redly
when at last he reached the outskirts of the town, opened
up the wicket gate, and walked up the weedy, unkept
path leading to the cottage where she lodged.
Even through the twilight, he
could see her there, leaning on the rail of the verandah—oddly
enough she had about her shoulders the scarlet velvet
cloak she wore when he had flung himself so madly from
the room that night.
The moment the lad saw her his
heart swelled with a sudden heat, burning moisture leapt
into his eyes, and clogged his long, boyish lashes.
He bounded up the steps—“Christie,”
he said, and the word scorched his lips like audible
flame.
She turned to him, and for a
second stood magnetized by his passionately wistful
face; her peculiar grayish eyes seemed to drink the
very life of his unquenchable love, though the tears
that suddenly sprang into his seemed to absorb every
pulse of his body through those hungry, pleading eyes
of his that had, oh! so often been blinded by her kisses
when once her whole world lay in their blue depths.
“You will come back to
me, Christie, my wife? My wife, you will let me love
you again?” [Page 139]
She gave a singular little gasp,
and shook her head. “Don’t, oh! don’t,”
he cried piteously. “You will come to me, dear?
it is all such a bitter mistake—I did not understand.
Oh! Christie, I did not understand, and you’ll
forgive me, and love me again, won’t you—won’t
you?”
“No,” said the girl
with quick, indrawn breath.
He dashed the back of his hand
across his wet eyelids. His lips were growing numb,
and he bungled over the monosyllable “Why?”
“I do not like you,”
she answered quietly.
“God! Oh! God, what is
there left?”
She did not appear to hear the
heart-break in his voice; she stood like one wrapped
in sombre thought; no blaze, no tear, nothing in her
eyes; no hardness, no tenderness about her mouth. The
wind was blowing her cloak aside, and the only visible
human life in her whole body was once when he spoke
the muscles of her brown arm seemed to contract.
“But, darling, you are
mine—mine—we are husband and wife!
Oh, heaven, you must love me, you must come
to me again.”
“You cannot make
me come,” said the icy voice, “neither church,
nor law, nor even”—and the voice softened—“nor
even love can make a slave of a red girl.”
“Heaven forbid it,”
he faltered. “No, Christie, I will never claim
you without your love. What reunion would that be? But
oh, Christie, [Page 140] you are lying
to me, you are lying to yourself, you are lying to heaven.”
She did not move. If only he
could touch her he felt as sure of her yielding as he
felt sure there was a hereafter. The memory of times
when he had but to lay his hand on her hair to call
a most passionate response from her filled his heart
with a torture that choked all words before they reached
his lips; at the thought of those days he forgot she
was unapproachable, forgot how forbidding were her eyes,
how stony her lips. Flinging himself forward, his knee
on the chair at her side, his face pressed hardly in
the folds of the cloak on her shoulder, he clasped his
arms about her with a boyish petulance, saying, “Christie,
Christie, my little girl-wife, I love you, I love you,
and you are killing me.”
She quivered from head to foot
as his fair, wavy hair brushed her neck, his despairing
face sank lower until his cheek, hot as fire, rested
on the cool, olive flesh of her arm. A warm moisture
oozed up through her skin, and as he felt its glow he
looked up. Her teeth, white and cold, were locked over
her under lip, and her eyes were as gray stones.
Not murderers alone know the
agony of a death sentence.
“Is it all useless? all
useless, dear?” he said, with lips starving for
hers. [Page 141]
“All useless,” she
repeated. “I have no love for you now. You forfeited
me and my heart months ago, when you said those
two words.”
His arms fell away from her
wearily, he arose mechanically, he placed his little
gray checked cap on the back of his yellow curls, the
old-time laughter was dead in the blue eyes that now
looked scared and haunted, the boyishness and the dimples
crept away for ever from the lips that quivered like
a child’s; he turned from her, but she had looked
once into his face as the Law Giver must have looked
at the land of Canaan outspread at his feet. She watched
him go down the long path and through the picket gate,
she watched the big yellowish dog that had waited for
him lumber up on to its feet—stretch—then
follow him. She was conscious of but two things, the
vengeful lie in her soul, and a little space on her
arm that his wet lashes had brushed.
*
*
* *
*
*
It
was hours afterwards when he reached his room. He had
said nothing, done nothing—what use were words
or deed? Old Jimmy Robinson was right; she had “balked”
sure enough.
What a bare, hotelish room it
was! He tossed off his coat and sat for ten minutes
looking blankly at the sputtering gas jet. Then his
whole life, desolate as a desert, loomed up before him
with appalling distinctness. Throwing himself [Page
142] on the floor beside the bed, with clasped
hands and arms outstretched on the white counterpane,
he sobbed. “Oh! God, dear God, I thought you loved
me; I thought you’d let me have her again, but
you must be tired of me, tired of loving me too. I’ve
nothing left now, nothing! it doesn’t seem that
I even have you to-night.”
He lifted his face then, for
his dog, big and clumsy and yellow, was licking at his
sleeve. [Page 143]
*
Fact. [back]
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