Mr. Stanton did know. There was a look of white, suppressed rage on his face. Strange to say his thoughts had gone in the same direction as Joe’s. He was at that moment reflecting for the thousandth time on the bitterness of the unnatural struggle that he had carried on with an unnatural parent for so many years.
“You not feelum bad,” said Joe consolingly, as he observed his emotion. “Me watchum like dog, always.”
Armour instantly recovered himself and turned his despairing eyes from the photograph. “That is all, Joe. You may go now.”
The Micmac buttoned his coat over the sacred scarlet vest. “You never loseum, Mr. Stanton. Me watchum. Mr. Val get out of trap—sore paw heal—he snarl, but not much hurt. Ging,” and with this invariable parting salutation, he glided from the room.
With a face as devoid of expression as one of the blocks of wood that he was cutting, Joe laid the foundation of a substantial bonfire on a gravel walk close to the frozen shore of the Arm. A number of garden seats he placed near by, and a few small tables. Then walking along the path, he surveyed the jagged cakes of ice shouldering each other up the bank, and selecting the clearest place, chopped a cutting to lay a plank walk to the smooth ice. This done, he examined the sky where a pale and sickly moon was reluctantly climbing above the trees, a hazy cloud hanging on her skirt.
“No wind—crows much chatter this sundown—big snow ‘fore morning,” muttered Joe; then he sauntered to the cottage to see that the fires were burning brightly and watched the house-servants who were bringing down china and eatables in covered baskets, and large kettles for heating tea, coffee, and soup.
An hour later the snapping, crackling bonfire sent up a cheerful blaze that brightly illumined the frozen declivity, the walls of the little cottage against the evergreens, and the sheet of bluish-white ice spreading itself out under the pale rays of the moon. Groups of guests came hurrying down in detachments from the house, laughing and exclaiming at the pleasures of an impromptu skating party, and Joe, standing a little aside, watched them. To his Indian mind, the obsequious manner in which the gentlemen of a party always served and ministered in every possible way to their “squaws,” was the most remarkable thing in the social intercourse of white people.
“Makeum no good,” he soliloquized, surveying a little lady’s delicate foot extended for a skate that Valentine was putting on with an empressement as great as if kneeling at her feet were the most supreme happiness that could be bestowed upon him.
Though talking and laughing with the little lady, Valentine kept one eye on the path to the house, and Joe knew that he was watching for Vivienne, who had not yet appeared. Presently she came lightly over the gravel, Judy hanging on her arm.
Valentine had just finished his task and springing up was about to offer his services to Vivienne, when Joe strolled out from the trees.