“Yes, I’ve heard you are an anarchist,” she rejoined. “A man with no country and with a flag that belongs to no country—quelle affaire et quelle drolerie!”
She laughed. Taken aback in spite of his anger, he stared at her. How good her French accent was! If she would only speak altogether in that beloved language, he could smother much malice. She was beautiful and—well, who could tell? Ingolby was wounded and blind, maybe for ever, and women are always with the top dog—that was his theory. Perhaps her apparent dislike of him was only a mood. Many women that he had conquered had been just like that. They had begun by disliking him—from Lil Sarnia down—and had ended by being his. This girl would never be his in the way that the others had been, but—who could tell?—perhaps he would think enough of her to marry her? Anyway, it was worth while making such a beauty care for him. The other kind of women were easy enough to get, and it would be a piquant thing to have one irreproachable affaire. He had never had one; he was not sure that any girl or woman he had ever known had ever loved him, and he was certain that he had never loved any girl or woman. To be in love would be a new and piquant experience for him. He did not know love, but he knew what passion was. He had ever been the hunter. This trail might be dangerous, too, but he would take his chances. He had seen her dislike of him whenever they had met in the past, and he had never tried to soften her attitude towards him. He had certainly whistled, but she had not come. Well, he would whistle again—a different tune.
“You speak French much?” he asked almost eagerly, the insolence gone from his tone. “Why didn’t I know that?”
“I speak French in Manitou,” she replied, “but nearly all the French speak English there, and so I speak more English than French.”
“Yes, that’s it,” he rejoined almost angrily again. “The English will not learn French, will not speak French. They make us learn English, and—”
“If you don’t like the flag and the country, why don’t you leave it?” she interrupted, hardening, though she had meant to try and win him over to Ingolby’s side.
His eyes blazed. There was something almost real in the man after all.
“The English can kill us, they can grind us to the dust,” he rejoined in French, “but we will not leave the land which has always been ours. We settled it; our fathers gave their lives for it in a thousand places. The Indians killed them, the rivers and the storms, the plague and the fire, the sickness and the cold wiped them out. They were burned alive at the stake, they were flayed; their bones were broken to pieces by stones—but they blazed trails with their blood in the wilderness from New Orleans to Hudson’s Bay. They paid for the land with their lives. Then the English came and took it, and since that time—one hundred and fifty years—we have been slaves.”
“You do not look like a slave,” she answered, “and you have not acted like a slave. If you were to do the things in France that you’ve done here, you wouldn’t be free as you are to-day.”
“What have I done?” he asked darkly.