Flower of the North: A Modern Romance

by James Oliver Curwood

He clasped Philip's hands again, and two tears coursed down his gray cheeks. It was difficult for Philip to restrain the joy his words produced, which, coming from the lips of Jeanne's father, lifted him suddenly into a paradise of hope. For many reasons he had come to expect a none too warm reception at Fort o' God; he had looked ahead to the place with a grim sort of fear, scarcely definable; and here Jeanne's father was opening his arms to him. Pierre was unapproachable; Jeanne herself was a mystery, filling him alternately with hope and despair; D'Arcambal had accepted him as a son. He could find no words adequate to his emotion; none that could describe his own happiness, unless it was in a bold avowal of his love for the girl he had saved. And this his good sense told him not to make, at the present moment.

"Any man would have done as much for your daughter," he said at last, "and I am happy that I was the fortunate one to render her assistance."

"You are wrong," said D'Arcambal, taking him by the arm. "You are one out of a thousand. It takes a MAN to go through the Big Thunder and come out at the other end alive. I know of only one other who has done that in the last twenty years, and that other is Henry d'Arcambal himself. We three, you, Jeanne, and I, have alone triumphed over those monsters of death. All others have died. It seems like a strange pointing of the hand of God."

Philip trembled.

"We three!" he exclaimed.

"We three," said the old man, "and for that reason you are a part of Fort o' God."

He led Philip deeper into the great room, and Philip saw that almost all the space along the walls of the huge room was occupied by shelves upon shelves of books, masses of papers, piles of magazines shoulder-high, scores of maps and paintings. The massive table was covered with books; there were piles on smaller tables; chairs, and the floor itself, covered with the skins of a score of wild beasts, were littered with them. At the far end of the room he saw deeper and darker shelves, where gleamed faintly in the lamplight row upon row of vials and bottles and strange instruments of steel and glass. A scientist in the wilderness—a student exiled in a desolation! These were the thoughts that leaped into his mind, and he knew that in this room Jeanne had been created; that here, between these centuries-old walls, amid an environment of strange silence, of whispering age, her visions of the world had come. Here, separated from all her kind, God, Nature, and a father had made her of their handiwork.

The old man pointed Philip to a chair near the large table, and sat down close to him. At his feet was a stool covered with silvery lynx-skin, and D'Arcambal looked at this, his strong, grim face relaxing into a gentle smile of happiness.

"There is where Jeanne sits—at my feet," he said. "It has been her place for many years. When she is not there I am lost. Life ceases. This room has been our world. To-night you are in Fort o' God; to-morrow you will see D'Arcambal House. You have heard of that, perhaps, but never of Fort o' God. That belongs to Jeanne and me, to Pierre—and you. Fort o' God is the heart, the soul, the life's blood of D'Arcambal House. It is this room and two or three others. D'Arcambal House is our barrier. When strangers come, they see D'Arcambal House; plain rooms, of rough wood; quarters such as you have seen at posts and stations; the mask which gives no hint of what is hidden within. It is there that we live to the world; it is here that we live to ourselves. Jeanne has my permission to tell you whatever she wishes, a little later. But I am curious, and being an old man must be humored first. I am still trembling. You must tell me what happened to Jeanne."

For an hour they talked, and Philip went over one by one the events as they had occurred since the fight on the cliff, omitting only such things as he thought that Jeanne and Pierre might wish to keep secret to themselves. At the end of that hour he was certain that D'Arcambal was unaware of the dark cloud that had suddenly come into Jeanne's life. The old man's brow was knitted with deep lines, and his powerful jaws were set hard, as Philip told of the ambush, of the wounding of Pierre, and the flight of his assailants with his daughter. It was to get money, the old man thought. The half-breed had suggested that, and Jeanne herself had given it as her opinion. Why else should they have been attacked at Churchill? Such things had occurred before, he told Philip. The little daughter of the factor at Nelson House had been stolen, and held for ransom. With a hundred questions he wrung from Philip every detail of the second fight and of the struggle for life in the rapids. He betrayed no physical excitement, even in those moments of Philip's description when Jeanne hung between life and death; but in his eyes there was the glow of red-hot fires. At last there came to interrupt them the low, musical tinkling of a bell under the table.