"Poor lad!" he repeated; and then, after a long silence, "true lover and true friend."
The intervals between question and answer lengthened insensibly, and at last Beatrice slept. He stole away from her on tiptoe and went out in front of the cabin, where there was only a narrow ledge upon the bluff. He sat down in the doorway, where he could hear the slightest sound, and deliberately set himself to watch out the night.
He was physically exhausted, but his mind was strangely active. For the first time he was in a position to review the events of his stay at Fort Dearborn, from the night of his arrival, when Mad Margaret had appeared at the trading station, to the present hour, when he sat in her pathetic little cabin, with the girl he loved so near him that he could hear her deep breathing as she slept.
"What has it done for me?" he thought—"what has it brought me?" The answer was "Beatrice," which came with a passionate uplifting of soul. With a certain boyish idea of knight-errantry, he had kept his hands and his heart clean, and, in consequence, love brought to him at last an exquisite fineness of joy. In that hour of close self-communion, his deepest satisfaction was this—that in all the years, in spite of frequent temptation, there was nothing of which he need to be ashamed—nothing to remember with a pang of bitterness, when Beatrice lifted her innocent eyes to his.
"Sir Galahad," some of his friends had called him, jeeringly, and, before, it had never failed to bring the colour to his face; but now the words rang through his consciousness like a trumpet-blast of victory. He was spared that inner knowledge of shame and unworthiness which lies, like bitter lees, in the wine of man's love.
"Beatrice! Beatrice!" Like another of her name she had led him through hell, and he saw now a certain sweet slavery in prospect. Wherever his thoughts might wander, she would always be with him, like the golden thread which runs through a dull tapestry, in and out of the design, sometimes hidden for an instant, but never lost.
Aunt Eleanor and Uncle John—they had been like father and mother to him, and he loved the children as though they were his own. The plaintive lisps of the little girl came back to his memory with remorseful tenderness, and he smiled as he wondered, dreamily, what Beatrice might have been at four or five. Swiftly upon the thought came another, which set the blood to singing in his veins, and which he put from him quickly, as one retreats before something too beautiful and too delicate to touch.
Captain Wells and Doctor Norton—they were dead. And Ronald—a lump came into his throat which he could not keep down, for, of all the men in the world, the blue-eyed soldier was best fitted to be his friend. They supplemented one another perfectly, each having what the other lacked, and enough in common to make firm neutral ground whereupon friendship might safely stand. Of his other friends at the Fort he thought idly, since he had not known them so well, but he was genuinely glad that they had survived the horrors of the day.
As night wore on, the battle assumed indistinct and indefinite phases. Here and there some incident stood out vividly; unrelated and detached. He had spoken truly when he told Beatrice that "a mere handful" had been lost. What, indeed, did such things matter in the face of history?
It was but the price of a new country, which courageous souls had been paying for two centuries and more, and which some must continue to pay until——