A DAUGHTER OF THE FOREST
By Evelyn Raymond
CHAPTER VII
A Woodland Menagerie
SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS
Brought up in the forests of northern Maine, and seeing few persons excepting her uncle and Angelique, the Indian housekeeper, Margot Romeyn knows little of life beyond the deep hemlocks. Naturally observant, she is encouraged in her out-of-door studies by her uncle, at one time a college professor. Through her woodland instincts, she and her uncle are enabled to save the life of Adrian Wadislaw, a youth who, lost and almost overcome with hunger, has been wandering in the neighboring forest. To Margot the new friend is a welcome addition to her small circle of acquaintances, and after his rapid recovery she takes great delight in showing him the many wonders of the forest about her home.
“HOO-AH! Yo-ho! H-e-r-e! This way!”
Adrian followed the voice. It led him aside into the woods on the eastern slope, and it was accompanied by an indescribable babel of noises. Running water, screaming of wild fowl, cooing of pigeons, barking of dogs or some other beasts, cackling, chattering, laughter.
All the sounds of wild life ceased suddenly in the tree-tops as Adrian approached, recognizing and fearing his alien presence. But they were reassured by Margot’s familiar summons, and soon the menagerie he had suspected was gathered about her.
“Whew! it just rains squirrels—and chipmunks—and birds! Hello! that’s a fawn; that’s a fox! as sure as I’m alive, a magnificent red fox! Why isn’t he eating the whole outfit? And—hurrah!”
To the amazement of the watcher, there came from the depths of the woods a sound that always thrills the pulses of any hunter—the cry of a moose-calf, accompanied by a soft crashing of branches, growing gradually louder.
“So they tame even the moose—these wonderful people! What next!” and as Adrian leaned forward the better to watch the advance of this uncommon pet, the next concerning which he had speculated also approached. Slowly up the river bank stalked a pair of blue herons, and for them Margot had her warmest welcome.
“Heigho, Xanthippé, Socrates! What laggards! But here’s your breakfast, or one of them. I suppose you’ve eaten the other long ago. Indeed, you’re always eating, gourmands!”
The red fox eyed the new-comers with a longing eye and crept cautiously to his mistress’ side as she coaxed the herons nearer. But she was always prepared for any outbreak of nature among her forest friends, and drew him also close to her with the caressing touch she might have bestowed upon a beloved house-dog.
“Reynard, you beauty! your head in my lap, sir;” and dropping to a sitting posture, she forced him to obey her. There he lay, winking but alert, which she scattered her store of good things right and left. There were nuts for the squirrels and ’munks, grains and seeds for the winged creatures, and for the herons, as well as Reynard, a few bits of dried meat. But for Browser, the moose-calf, she pulled the tender twigs and foliage with a lavish hand. When she had given some dainty to each of her oddly-assorted pets, she sprang up, closed the box, and waved her arms in dismissal. The more timid of the creatures obeyed her, but some held their ground persistently, hoping for greater favors. To these she paid no further attention, and still keeping hold of Reynard’s neck, started back to her human guest.
The fox, however, declined to accompany her. He distrusted strangers, and, it may be, had designs of his own upon some other forest wilding.
“That’s the worst of it. We tame them and they love us. But they are only conquered, not changed. Isn’t Reynard beautiful? Doesn’t he look noble? as noble as a St. Bernard dog? If you’ll believe me, that fellow is thoroughly acquainted with every one of Angelique’s fowls, and knows he must never, never touch them. Yet he’d eat one, quick as a flash, if he got a chance. He’s a coward, though; and by his cowardice we manage him. Sometimes,” sighed Margot, who had led the way into a little path toward the lake.
“How odd! You seem actually grieved at this state of things.”
“Why shouldn’t I be? I love him, and I have a notion that love will do anything with anybody or anything. I do believe it will, but that I haven’t found just the right way of showing it. Uncle laughs at me, a little, but helps me all he can. Indeed, it is he who has tamed most of our pets. He says it is the very best way to study natural history.”
“H-m-m! He intends your education shall be complete!”
“Of course. But one thing troubles him. He cannot teach me music. And you seem surprised. Aren’t girls, where you come from, educated? Doesn’t everybody prize knowledge?”
“That depends. Our girls are educated, of course. They go to college and all that, but I think you’d down any of them in exams. For my own part, I ran away just because I did not want this famous ‘education’ you value. That is, I didn’t of a certain sort. I wasn’t fair with you awhile ago, you said. I’d like to tell you my story now.”
“I’d like to hear it, of course. But, look yonder! Did you ever see anything like that?”
Margot was proud of the surprises she was able to offer this stranger in her woods, and pointed outward over the lake. They had just come to an open place on the shore and the water spread before them, sparkling in the sunlight. Something was crossing the smooth surface, heading straight for their island, and of a nature to make Adrian cry out:
“Oh! for a gun!”
VIII
KING MADOC
“IF you had one you should not use it! Are you a dreadful hunter?”
Margot had turned upon her guest with a defiant fear. As near as she had ever come to hating anything she hated the men, of whom she had heard, who used this wonderful northland as a murder ground. That was what she named it in her uncompromising judgment of those who killed for the sake of killing, for the lust of blood that was in them.
“Yes; I reckon I am a ‘dreadful’ hunter, for I am a mighty poor shot. But I’d like a try at that fellow. What horns! what a head! and how can that fellow in the canoe keep so close to him, yet not finish him?”
Adrian was so excited he could not stand still. His eyes gleamed, his hands clenched, and his whole appearance was changed; greatly for the worse, the girl thought, regarding him with disgust.
“Finish him? That’s King Madoc, Pierre’s trained moose. You’d be finished yourself, I fear, if you harmed that splendid creature. Pierre’s a lazy fellow, mostly, but he spent a long time teaching Madoc; and with his temper—I’m thankful you lost your gun.”
“Do you never shoot things up here? I saw you giving the fox and herons what looked like meat. You had a stew for supper, and fish for breakfast. I don’t mean to be impertinent, but the sight of that big game—whew!”
“Yes; we do kill things, or have them killed, when it is necessary for food. Never in sport. Man is almost the only animal who does that. It’s all terrible, seems to me. Everything preys upon something else, weaker than itself. Sometimes when I think of it, my dinner chokes me. It’s so easy to take life, and only God can create it. But uncle says it is also God’s law to take what is provided, and that there is no mistake, even if it seems such to me.”
But there Margot perceived that Adrian was not listening. Instead, he was watching, with the intensest interest, the closer approach of the canoe, in which sat idle Pierre, holding the reins of a harness attached to his aquatic steed. The moose swam easily, with powerful strokes, and Pierre was singing a gay melody, richer in his unique possession than any king.
“Indeed, it’s not one other has a king for a bow man,” he often asserted.
When he touched the shore and the great animal stood shaking his wet hide, Adrian’s astonishment found vent in a whirlwind of questions that Pierre answered at his leisure and after his kind. But he walked first toward Margot and offered her a great bunch of trailing arbutus flowers, saying:
“I saw these just as I pushed off and went back after them. What’s the matter here, that the flag is up? It was the biggest storm I ever saw. Yes; a deal of beasties are killed back on the mainland. Any dead over here?”
“No, I’m glad to say, none that we know of. But Snowfoot’s shed is down and uncle is going to build a new one. I hope you’ve come to work.”
Pierre laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh! yes.”
But his interest in work was far less than in the stranger whom he now answered, and whose presence on Peace Island was a mystery to him. Heretofore, the only visitors there had been laborers or traders, but this young fellow, so near his own age, and despite his worn clothing, was of another sort. He recognized this, at once, as Margot had done, and his curiosity made him ask:
“Where’d you come from? Hurricane blow you out the sky?”
“About the same. I was lost in the woods and Margot found me and saved my life. What’ll you take for that moose?”
“There isn’t money enough in the State of Maine to buy him!”
“Nonsense! Well, if there was I haven’t it. But you could get a good price for it anywhere.”
Pierre looked Adrian over. From his appearance the lad was not likely to be possessed of much cash, but the moose-trainer was eager for capital, and never missed an opportunity of seeking it.
“I want to go into the show business. What do you say? would you furnish the tents and fixings, and share the profits? I’m no scholar, but maybe you’d know enough to get out the hand bills and so on. What do you say?”
“I—say—What you mean, Pierre Ricord, keepin’ the master waitin’ your foolishness and him half sick? What kept you twice as long as you ought? Hurry up, now, and put that moose in the cow yard and get to work.”
The interruption was caused by Angelique, and it was curious to see the fear with which she inspired the great fellow, her son. He forgot the stranger, the show business, and all his own immediate interests, and with the docility of a little child obeyed. Unhitching his odd steed, he turned the canoe bottom upwards on the beach and hastily led the animal toward that part of the island clearing where Snowfoot stood in a little fenced-in lot behind her ruined shed.
Adrian went with him, and asked:
“Won’t those two animals fight?”
“Won’t get a chance. When one goes in the other goes out. Here, bossy, you can take the range of the island. Get out!”
She was more willing to go than Madoc to enter the cramped place, but the transfer was made, and Adrian lingered by the osier paling, to observe at close range this subjugated monarch of the forest.
“Oh! for a palette and brush!” he exclaimed, while Pierre walked away.
“What would you do with them?”
Margot had followed the lads and was beside Adrian, though he had not heard her footsteps. Now he wheeled about, eager, enthusiastic.
“Paint—as I have never painted before!”
“Oh!—are you an—artist?”
“I want to be one. That’s why I’m here.”
“What! What do you mean?”
“I told you I was a runaway. I didn’t say why, before. It’s truth. My people, my—father—forced me to college. I hated it. He was forcing me to business. I liked art. All my friends were artists. When I should have been at the books I was in their studios. They were a gay crowd, spent money like water when they had it; merrily starved and pinched when they hadn’t. A few were worse than spendthrifts, and with my usual want of sense I made that particular set my intimates. I never had any money, though, after it was suspected what my tastes were, except a little that my mother gave.”
Margot was listening breathlessly and watching intently. At the mention of his mother a shadow crossed Adrian’s face, softening and bettering it, and as they rose to go home she saw that his whole mood had changed.
IX.
AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION
IT was weeks afterward when they were again surrounded by the many wonderful inhabitants of the forest that Adrian mentioned his own parents. Their talk drifted from vexing subjects to merry anecdotes of his childhood, in the home where he had been the petted, only brother of a half-dozen elder sisters. But while they laughed and Margot listened, her fingers were busy weaving a great garland of wild laurel, and when it was finished she rose and said:
“It’s getting late. There’ll be just time to take this to the grave. Will you go with me?”
“Yes.”
But this was another of the puzzling things he found at Peace Island. In its very loveliest nook was the last resting-place of Cecily Romeyn, and the sacred spot was always beautiful with flowers, or, in the winter, with brilliant berries. Both the master and the girl spoke of their dead as if she were still present with them; or, at least, lived as if she were only removed from sight but not from their lives.
When Margot had laid the fresh wreath upon the mound, she carefully removed the faded flowers of the day before, and a thought of his own mother stirred Adrian’s heart.
“I wish I could send a bunch of such blossoms to the mater!”
“How can you live without her, since she is still alive?”
His face hardened again.
“You forget. I told you that she, too, turned against me at the last. It was a case of husband or son, and she made her choice.”
“Oh! no. She was unhappy. One may do strange things then, I suppose. But I tell you one thing: if I had either father or mother, anywhere in this world; no matter if either was bad—had done everything that is sinful!—nothing should ever, ever make me leave them. Nothing. I would bear anything, do anything, suffer anything—but I would be true to them. I could not forget that I was their child, and if I had done wrong to them my whole life would be too short to make atonement.”
She spoke strongly, as she felt. So early orphaned, she had come to think of her parents as the most wonderful blessing in the power of God to leave one. She loved her Uncle Hugh like a second father, but her tenderest dreams were over the pictured faces of her dead.
“Where is your father buried?”
It was the simplest, most natural question.
“I—don’t—know.”
They stared at one another. It was proof of her childlike acceptance of her life that she had never asked—had never thought to do so, even. She had been told that he had passed out of sight before they came to Peace Island and the forest, and had asked no further concerning him. Of his character and habits she had heard much. Her uncle was never weary in extolling his virtues; but of his death he had said only what has been written.
“But—I must know right away!”
In her eagerness she ran, and Adrian followed as swiftly. He was sorry for his thoughtless inquiry, but regret came too late. He tried to call Margot back, but she would not wait.
“I must know—I must know right away. Why have I never thought before?”
Hugh Dutton was resting after a day of study and mental labor, and his head leaned easily upon his cushioned chair. Yet as his dear child entered his room he held out his arms to draw her to his knee.
“In a minute, uncle. But Adrian has asked me something and it is the strangest thing that I cannot answer him. Where is my father buried?”
If she had dealt him a mortal blow he could not have turned more white. With a groan that pierced her very heart, he stared at Margot with wide, unseeing eyes; then sprang to his feet and fixed upon poor Adrian a look that scorched.
“You! you!” he gasped, and, sinking back, covered his face with his hands.
X
PERPLEXITIES
WHAT had he done?
Ignorant why his simple question should have such strange results, that piercing look made Adrian feel the veriest culprit, and he hastened to leave the room and the cabin. Hurrying to the beach, he appropriated Margot’s little canvas canoe and pushed out upon the lake. From her and Pierre he had learned to handle the light craft with considerable skill, and he now worked off his excitement by swift paddling, so that there was soon a wide distance between him and the island.
Then he paused and looked around him, upon as fair a scene as could be found in any land. Unbroken forests bounded this hidden Lake Profundus, out of whose placid waters rose that mountain-crowned, verdure-clad Island of Peace, with its picturesque home and its cultured owner, who had brought into this best of the wilderness the best of civilization.
“What is this mystery? How am I concerned in it? For I am, and mystery there is. It is like that mist over the island, which I can see and feel but cannot touch. Pshaw! I’m getting sentimental, when I ought to be turning detective. Yet I couldn’t do that—pry into the private affairs of a man who’s treated me so generously. What shall I do? How can I go back there? But where else can I go?”
At the thought that he might never return to the roof he had quitted, a curious homesickness seized him.
“Who’ll hunt what game they need? Who’ll catch their fish? Who’ll keep the garden growing? Where can I study the forest and its furry people, at first hand, as in the Hollow? And I was doing well—not as I hope to do, but getting on. Margot was a merciless critic, but even she admitted that my last picture had the look, the spirit of the woods. That’s what I want to do, what Mr. Dutton, also, approved: to bring glimpses of these solitudes back to the cities and the thousands who can never see them in any other way. Well—let it go. I can’t stay and be a torment to anybody, and sometime in some other place, maybe—Ah!”
What he had mistaken for the laughter of a loon was Pierre’s halloo. He was coming back, then, from the mainland where he had been absent these past days. Adrian was thankful. There was nothing mysterious or perplexing about Pierre, whose rule of life was extremely simple:
“Pierre, first, second, and forever. After Pierre, if there was anything left, then—anybody, the nearest at hand,” would have expressed the situation; but his honest, unblushing selfishness was sometimes a relief.
“One always knows just where to find Pierre,” Margot had said.
So Adrian’s answering halloo was prompt, and, turning about, he watched the birch leaving the shadow of the forest and heading for himself. It was soon alongside and Ricord’s excited voice was shouting his good news:
“Run him up to seven hundred and fifty!”
“But I thought there wasn’t money enough anywhere to buy him?”
Pierre cocked his dark head on one side and winked.
“Madoc sick and Madoc well are different.”
“Oh, you wretch! Would you sell a sick moose and cheat the buyer?”
“Would I lose such a pile of money for foolishness? I guess not.”
“But suppose, after you parted with him, he got well?”
Again the woodlander grinned and winked.
“Could you drive the King?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s all right. I buy him back, what you call trade. One do that many times, good enough. If—”
Pierre was silent for some moments, during which Adrian had steadily paddled backward to the island, keeping time with the other boat, and without thinking what he was doing. But when he did remember, he turned to Pierre and asked:
“Will you take me across the lake again?”
“What for?”
“No matter. I’ll just leave Margot’s canoe and you do it. There’s time enough.”
“What’ll you give me?”
“Pshaw! What can I give you? Nothing.”
“That’s all right. My mother, she wants the salt,” and he kicked the sack of that valuable article lying at his feet. “There, she’s on the bank now, and it’s not she will let me out of her sight again, this long time.”
“You’d go fast enough for money.”
“Maybe not. When one has Angelique Ricord for mére—U-m-m!”
But it was less for Pierre than for Adrian that Angelique was waiting, and her expression was kinder than common.
“Carry that salt to my kitchen cupboard, son, and get to bed. No; you’ve no call to tarry. What the master’s word is for his guest is nothin’ to you.”
Pierre’s curiosity was roused. Why had Adrian wanted to leave the island at nightfall, since there was neither hunting nor fishing to be done? Sport for sport’s sake—that was forbidden. And what could be the message he was not to hear? He meant to learn, and lingered, busying himself uselessly in beaching the canoes afresh, after he had once carefully turned them bottom side upwards: in brushing out imaginary dirt, readjusting his own clothing—a task he did not often bother with—and in general making himself a nuisance to his impatient parent.
But, so long as he remained, she kept silence, till, unable to hold back her rising anger, she stole up behind him, unperceived, and administered a sounding box upon his sizable ears.
“Would you? To the cupboard, miserable!” and Adrian could not repress a smile at the meekness with which the great woodlander submitted to the little woman’s authority.
“Xanthippé and Socrates!” he murmured, and Pierre heard him. So, grimacing at him from under the heavy sack, he called back “Fifty dollar. Tell her fifty—dollar.”
“What did he mean by fifty dollar?” demanded Angelique.
“I suppose something about that show business of his. It is his ambition, you know, and I must admit I believe he’d be a success at it.”
“Pouf! There is more better business than the showin’ one, of takin’ God’s beasties in the towns and lettin’ the fool people stare. The money comes that way is not good money.”
“Oh, yes. It’s all right, fair Angelique. But what is the word for me?”
“It is: that you come with me, at once, to the master. He will speak with you before he sleeps. Yes. And, Adrian, lad!”
“Well, Angelique?”
“This is the truth. Remember—when the heart is sore tried the tongue is often sharp. There is death—that is a sorrow—God sends it. There are sorrows God does not send, but the evil one. Death is but joy to them. What the master says, answer; and luck light upon your lips.”
The lad had never seen the old housekeeper so impressive nor so gentle. At the moment it seemed as if she almost liked him, though, despite the faithfulness with which she had obeyed her master’s wishes and served him, he had never before suspected it.
“Thank you, Angelique. I am troubled, too, and I will take care that I neither say nor resent anything harsh. More than that, I will go away. I have stayed too long already, though I had hoped I was making myself useful. Is he in his own study?”
“Yes, and the little maid is with him. No—there she comes, but she is not laughin’, no. Oh! the broken glass. Scat! Meroude. Why leap upon one to scare the breath out, that way? Pst! ’Tis here that tame creatures grow wild and wild ones tame. Scat! I say.”
Margot was coming through the rooms, holding Reynard by the collar she made him wear whenever he was in the neighborhood of the hen-house, and Tom limped listlessly along upon her other side. There was trouble and perplexity in the girl’s face, and Angelique made a great pretense of being angry with the cat, to hide that in her own.
But Margot noticed neither her nor Adrian, and sitting down upon the threshold dropped her chin in her hands and fixed her eyes upon the darkening lake.
“Why, mistress! The beast here at the cabin, and it nightfall! My poor fowls!”
“He’s leashed, you see, Angelique. And I’ll lock the poultry up, if you like,” observed Adrian. Anything to delay a little an interview from which he shrank with something very like that cowardice of which the girl had once accused him.
The housekeeper’s ready temper flamed, and she laid an ungentle touch upon the stranger’s shoulder.
“Go, boy. When Master Hugh commands, ’tis not for such as we to disobey.”
“All right. I’m going; and I’ll remember.”
At the inner doorway he turned and looked back. Margot was still sitting, thoughtful and motionless, the firelight from the great hearth making a Rembrandt-like silhouette of her slight figure against the outer darkness and touching her wonderful hair with a flood of silver. Reynard and the eagle, the wild foresters her love had tamed, stood guard on either side. It was a picture that appealed to Adrian’s artistic sense and he lingered a little, regarding its effects, even considering what pigments would best convey them.
HER PETS STOOD GUARD ON EITHER SIDE
“Adrian!”
“Yes, Angelique—yes.”
When the door shut behind him, Angelique touched her darling’s shining head, and the toil-stiffened fingers had for it almost a mother’s tenderness.
“Sweetheart, the bed-time.”
“I know—I’m going, Angelique; my uncle sent me from him to-night. It was the first time in all my life that I remember.”
“Maybe, little stupid, because you’ve never waited for that, before, but were quick enough to see whenever you were not wanted.”
“He—there’s something wrong, and Adrian is the cause of it. I—Angelique, you tell me—uncle did not hear, or reply, any way—where is my father buried?”
Angelique was prepared and had her answer ready.
“’Tis not for the servant to reveal what her master hides. No—all will come to you in good time. Tarry the master’s will. But, that silly Pierre! What think you? Is it fifty dollar would be the price of they tame blue herons? Hey?”
“No; nor fifty times fifty. Pierre knows that. Love is more than money.”
“Sometimes, to some folks. Well, what would you? That son will be havin’ even me, his old mother, in his show—why not? As a cur’osity—the only livin’ human bein’ can make that ingrate mind. Yes—to bed, ma p’tite.”
Margot rose and housed her pets. This threat of Pierre’s, that he would eventually carry off the foresters and exhibit their helplessness to staring crowds, always roused her fiercest indignation; and this result was just what Angelique wanted, at present, and she murmured her satisfaction.
“Good! That bee will buzz in her ear till she sleeps, and so sound she’ll hear no dip of the paddle, by and by. Here, Pierre, my son, you’re wanted.”
“What for, now? Do leave me be. I’m going to bed. I’m just wore out, trot-trottin’ from Pontius to Pilate, luggin’ salt, and—” he finished by yawning most prodigiously.
“Firs’-rate sign, that gapin’. Yes—sign you’re healthy and able to do all’s needed. There’s no rest for you this night. Come—here—take this basket to the beach. If your canoe needs pitchin’, pitch it. There’s the lantern. If one goes into the show business he learns right now to work and travel o’ nights. Yes—start—I’ll follow and explain.”
[TO BE CONTINUED]
“Believe not each accusing tongue,
As most weak people do;
But still believe that story wrong
Which ought not to be true.”
—R. B. Sheridan.