Flower of the North: A Modern Romance

by James Oliver Curwood

Philip sank into a huge arm-chair, cushioned with velvet, and dropped his cap upon the floor. And this was Fort o' God! He scarcely breathed. He was back two centuries, and he stared, as if each moment he expected some manifestation of life in what he saw. He had dreamed his dream over the dead at Churchill; here it was reality—almost; it lacked but a breath, a movement, a flutter of life in the dead faces that looked down upon him. He gazed up at them again, and laughed a little nervously. Then he fixed his eyes on the opposite wall. One of the pictures was moving. The thought in his brain had given birth to the movement he had imagined. It was a woman's face in the picture, young and beautiful, and it nodded to him, one moment radiant with light, the next caught in shadows that cast over it a gloom. He jumped from his chair and went so that he stood directly under it.

A current of warm air shot up into his face from the floor. It was this air that was causing movement in the picture, and he looked down. What he discovered broke the spell he was under. About him were the relics of age, of a life long dead. Rubens might have sat in that room, and mourned over his handiwork, lost in a wilderness. The stingy Louis might have recognized in the spindle-legged table a bit of his predecessor's extravagance, which he had sold for the good of the exchequer of France; a Gobelin might have reclaimed one of the woven landscapes on the wall, a Grosellier himself have issued from behind the curtained bed. Philip himself, in that environment, was the stranger. It was the current of warm air which brought him back from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Under his feet was a furnace!

Even the master of Fort o' God, stern and forbidding as Philip began to imagine him, might have laughed at the look which came into his face. Grosellier, the cavalier, had he appeared, Philip would have accepted with the same confidence that he had accepted Jeanne and Pierre. But—a furnace! He thrust his hands deep in his pockets, a trick which was always the last convincing evidence of his perplexity, and walked slowly around the room. There were two books on the table. One, bound in faded red vellum, was a Greek Anthology, the other Drummond's Ascent of Man. There were other books on a quaintly carved shelf, under the picture which had been turned to the wall. He ran over the titles. There were a number of French novels, Ely's Socialism, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and a dozen other volumes; there were Balzac and Hugo, and Dante's Divine Comedy. Amid this array, like a black sheep lost among the angels, was a finger-worn and faded little volume bearing the name Camille. Something about this one book, so strangely out of place in its present company, aroused Philip's curiosity. It bore the name, too, which he had found worked in the corner of Jeanne's handkerchief. In a way, the presence of this book gave him a sort of shock, and he took it in his hands, and opened the cover. Under his fingers were pages yellow and frayed with age, and in an ancient type, once black, the title, The Meaning of God. In a large masculine hand some one had written under this title the accompanying words; "A black skin often contains a white soul; a woman's beauty, hell."

Philip replaced the book with a feeling of awe. Something in those words, brutal in their truth—something in the strange whim that had placed a pearl of purity within the faded and worn mask of the condemned, seemed to speak to him of a tragedy that might be a key to the mystery of Fort o' God. From the books he looked up at the picture which had been turned to the wall. The temptation to see what was hidden overcame him, and he turned the frame over. Then he stepped back with a low cry of pleasure.

From out of the proscribed canvas there smiled down upon him a face of bewildering beauty. It was the face of a young woman, a stranger among its companions, because it was of the present. Philip stepped to one side, so that the light from the lamp shone from behind him, and he wondered if the picture had been condemned to hang with its face to the wall because it typified the existent rather than the past. He looked more closely, and drew back step by step, until he was in the proper focus to bring out every expression in the lovely face. In the picture he saw each moment a greater resemblance to Jeanne. The eyes, the hair, the sweetness of the mouth, the smile, brought to him a vision of Jeanne herself. The woman in the picture was older than Jeanne, and his first thought was that it must be a sister, or her mother. It came to him in the next breath that this would be impossible, for Jeanne had been found by Pierre in the deep snows, on her dead mother's breast. And this was a painting of life, of youth, of beauty, and not of death and starvation.

He returned the forbidden picture to the position in which he had found it against the wall, half ashamed of the act and thoughts into which his curiosity had led him. And yet, after all, it was not curiosity. He told himself that as he washed himself and groomed his disheveled clothes.

An hour had passed when he heard a low tap at the door, and Pierre came in. In that time the half-breed had undergone a transformation. He was dressed in an exquisite coat of yellow buckskin, with the same old-fashioned cuffs he had worn when Philip first saw him, trousers of the same material, buckled below the knees, and boot-moccasins with flaring tops. He wore a new rapier at his waist, and his glossy black hair was brushed smoothly back, and fell loose upon his shoulders. It was the courtier, and not Pierre the half-breed, who bowed to Philip.

"M'sieur, are you ready?" he asked.

"Yes," replied Philip.

"Then we will go to M'sieur d'Arcambal, the master of Fort o' God."