Flower of the North: A Modern Romance

by James Oliver Curwood

She did not wait for him to reply, but hurried toward her room. For a moment Philip stared after her in amazement. Then he took a step as if to follow her, to call her back. The impulse left him as quickly as it came, and he rejoined Brokaw and the factor.

He looked at his watch. It was seven o'clock. At half-past seven he shook hands with the two men, lighted a fresh cigar, and passed out into the night. It was early for his meeting with Pierre and Jeanne, but he went down to the shore and walked slowly in the direction of the cliff. He was still an hour early when he arrived at the great rock, and sat down, with his face turned to the sea.

It was a white, radiant night, such as he had seen in the tropics. Only here, in the north, his vision reached to greater distances. Churchill lay lifeless in its pool of light; the ship hung like a black silhouette in the distance, with a cloud of jet-black smoke rising straight up from its funnels, and spreading out high up against the sky, a huge, ebon monster that cast its shadow for half a mile over the Bay. The shadow held Philip's eyes. Now it was like a gigantic face, now like a monster beast—now it reached out in the form of a great threatening hand, as though somewhere in the mystery of the north it sought a spirit-victim as potent as itself.

Then the spell of it was broken. From the end of the shadow, which reached almost to the base of the cliff on which Philip sat, there came a sound. It was a clear, metallic sound that left the vibration of steel in the air, and Philip leaned over the edge of the rock. Below him the shadow was broken into a pool of rippling starlight. He heard the faint dip of paddles, and suddenly a canoe shot from the shadow out into the clear light of the moon and stars.

It was a large canoe. In it he could make out four figures. Three of them were paddling; the fourth sat motionless in the bow. They passed under him swiftly, guiding their canoe so that it was soon hidden in the shelter of the cliff. By the faint reflections cast by the disturbed water, Philip saw that the occupants of the canoe had made an effort to conceal themselves by following the course of the dense shadow. Only the chance sound had led him to observe them.

Under ordinary circumstances the passing of a strange canoe at night would have had no significance for him. But at the present time it troubled him. The manner of its approach through the shadow, the strange quiet of its occupants, the stealth with which they had shot the canoe under the cliff, were all unusual. Could the incident have anything to do with Jeanne and Pierre?

He waited until he heard the tiny bell in his watch tinkle the half-hour, and then he set out slowly over the moonlit rocks to the north. Jeanne and Pierre would surely come from that direction. It was impossible to miss them. He walked without sound in his moccasins, keeping close to the edge of the cliff so that he could look out over the Bay. Two or three hundred yards beyond the big rock the sea-wall swung in sharply, disclosing the open water, like a still, silvery sheet, for a mile or more. Philip scanned it for the canoe, but as far as he could see there was not a shadow.

For a quarter of a mile he walked over the rocks, then returned. It was nine o'clock. The moment had arrived for the appearance of Jeanne and Pierre. He resumed his patrol of the cliff, and with each moment his nervousness increased. What if Jeanne failed him? What if she did not come to the rock? The mere thought made his heart sink with a sudden painful throb. Until now the fear that Jeanne might disappoint him, that she might not keep the tryst, had not entered his head. His faith in this girl, whom he had seen but twice, was supreme.

A second and a third time he patrolled the quarter mile of cliff. Again his watch tinkled the half-hour, and he knew that the last minutes of the appointed time had come.

The third and last time he went beyond the quarter-mile limit, searching in the white distances beyond. A low wind was rising from the Bay; it rustled in the spruce and balsam tops of the forest that reached up to the barren whiteness of the rock plateau on which he stood; under him he heard, growing more and more distinct, the moaning wash of the swelling tide. A moment of despair possessed him, and he felt that he had lost.