Northern Lights, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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She involuntarily drew up the dark red skirt she wore, showing a white
petticoat and a pair of fine stockings on an ankle as shapely as she had
ever seen among all the white women she knew. She drew herself up with
pride, and her body had a grace and ease which the white woman's
convention had not cramped.
Yet, with all her protests, no one would have thought her English. She
might have been Spanish, or Italian, or Roumanian, or Slav, though
nothing of her Indian blood showed in purely Indian characteristics, and
something sparkled in her, gave a radiance to her face and figure which
the storm and struggle in her did not smother. The white women of Portage
la Drome were too blind, too prejudiced, to see all that she really was,
and admiring white men could do little, for Pauline would have nothing to
do with them till the women met her absolutely as an equal; and from the
other halfbreeds, who intermarried with each other and were content to
take a lower place than the pure whites, she held aloof, save when any of
them was ill or in trouble. Then she recognised the claim of race, and
came to their doors with pity and soft impulses to help them. French and
Scotch and English half-breeds, as they were, they understood how she was
making a fight for all who were half-Indian, half-white, and watched her
with a furtive devotion, acknowledging her superior place, and proud of
it.
"I will not stay here," said the Indian mother with sullen stubbornness.
"I will go back beyond the Warais. My life is my own life, and I will do
what I like with it."
The girl started, but became composed again on the instant. "Is your life
all your own, mother?" she asked. "I did not come into the world of my
own will. If I had I would have come all white or all Indian. I am your
daughter, and I am here, good or bad--is your life all your own?"
"You can marry and stay here, when I go. You are twenty. I had my man,
your father, when I was seventeen. You can marry. There are men. You have
money. They will marry you--and forget the rest."
With a cry of rage and misery the girl sprang to her feet and started
forwards, but stopped suddenly at sound of a hasty knocking and a voice
asking admittance. An instant later, a huge, bearded, broad-shouldered
man stepped inside, shaking himself free of the snow, laughing
half-sheepishly as he did so, and laying his fur-cap and gloves with
exaggerated care on the wide window-sill.
"John Alloway," said the Indian woman in a voice of welcome, and with a
brightening eye, for it would seem as though he came in answer to her
words of a few moments before. With a mother's instinct she had divined
at once the reason for the visit, though no warning thought crossed the
mind of the girl, who placed a chair for their visitor with a heartiness
which was real--was not this the white man she had saved from death in
the snow a year ago? Her heart was soft towards the life she had kept in
the world. She smiled at him, all the anger gone from her eyes, and there
was almost a touch of tender anxiety in her voice as she said "What
brought you out in this blizzard? It wasn't safe. It doesn't seem
possible you got here from the Portage."
The huge ranchman and auctioneer laughed cheerily. "Once lost, twice get
there," he exclaimed, with a quizzical toss of the head, thinking he had
said a good thing. "It's a year ago to the very day that I was lost out
back"--he jerked a thumb over his shoulder--"and you picked me up and
brought me in; and what was I to do but come out on the anniversary and
say thank you? I'd fixed up all year to come to you, and I wasn't to be
stopped, 'cause it was like the day we first met, old Coldmaker hitting
the world with his whips of frost, and shaking his ragged blankets of
snow over the wild west."
"Just such a day," said the Indian woman after a pause. Pauline remained
silent, placing a little bottle of cordial before their visitor, with
which he presently regaled himself, raising his glass with an air.
"Many happy returns to us both!" he said, and threw the liquor down his
throat, smacked his lips, and drew his hand down his great moustache and
beard like some vast animal washing its face with its paw. Smiling and
yet not at ease, he looked at the two women and nodded his head
encouragingly, but whether the encouragement was for himself or for them
he could not have told.
His last words, however, had altered the situation. The girl had caught
at a suggestion in them which startled her. This rough white plainsman
was come to make love to her, and to say--what? He was at once awkward
and confident, afraid of her, of her refinement, grace, beauty, and
education, and yet confident in the advantage of his position, a white
man bending to a half-breed girl. He was not conscious of the
condescension and majesty of his demeanour, but it was there, and his
untutored words and ways must make it all too apparent to the girl. The
revelation of the moment made her at once triumphant and humiliated. This
white man had come to make love to her, that was apparent; but that he,
ungrammatical, crude, and rough, should think he had but to put out his
hand, and she in whom every subtle emotion and influence had delicate
response, whose words and ways were as far removed from his as day from
night, would fly to him, brought the flush of indignation to her cheek.
She responded to his toast with a pleasant nod, however, and said:
"But if you will keep coming in such wild storms, there will not be many
anniversaries." Laughing, she poured out another glass of liquor for him.
"Well, now, p'r'aps you're right, and so the only thing to do is not to
keep coming, but to stay--stay right where you are."
The Indian woman could not see her daughter's face, which was turned to
the fire, but she herself smiled at John Alloway, and nodded her head
approvingly. Here was the cure for her own trouble and loneliness.
Pauline and she, who lived in different worlds, and yet were tied to each
other by circumstances they could not control, would each work out her
own destiny after her own nature, since John Alloway had come a-wooing.
She would go back on the Warais, and Pauline would remain at the Portage,
a white woman with her white man. She would go back to the smoky fires in
the huddled lodges; to the venison stew and the snake dance; to the
feasts of the Medicine Men, and the long sleeps in the summer days, and
the winter's tales, and be at rest among her own people; and Pauline
would have revenge of the wife of the prancing Reeve, and perhaps the
people would forget who her mother was.
With these thoughts flying through her sluggish mind, she rose and moved
heavily from the room, with a parting look of encouragement at Alloway,
as though to say, a man that is bold is surest.
With her back to the man, Pauline watched her mother leave the room, saw
the look she gave Alloway. When the door was closed she turned and looked
Alloway in the eyes.
"How old are you?" she asked suddenly.
He stirred in his seat nervously. "Why, fifty, about," he answered with
confusion.
"Then you'll be wise not to go looking for anniversaries in blizzards,
when they're few at the best," she said with a gentle and dangerous
smile.
"Fifty-why, I'm as young as most men of thirty," he responded with an
uncertain laugh. "I'd have come here to-day if it had been snowing
pitchforks and chain-lightning. I made up my mind I would. You saved my
life, that's dead sure; and I'd be down among the moles if it wasn't for
you and that Piegan pony of yours. Piegan ponies are wonders in a
storm-seem to know their way by instinct. You, too--why, I bin on the
plains all my life, and was no better than a baby that day; but you--why,
you had Piegan in you, why, yes--"
He stopped short for a moment, checked by the look in her face, then went
blindly on: "And you've got Blackfoot in you, too; and you just felt your
way through the tornado and over the blind prairie like a bird reaching
for the hills. It was as easy to you as picking out a moverick in a bunch
of steers to me. But I never could make out what you was doing on the
prairie that terrible day. I've thought of it a hundred times. What was
you doing, if it ain't cheek to ask?"
"I was trying to lose a life," she answered quietly, her eyes dwelling on
his face, yet not seeing him; for it all came back on her, the agony
which had driven her out into the tempest to be lost evermore.
He laughed. "Well, now, that's good," he said; "that's what they call
speaking sarcastic. You was out to save, and not to lose, a life; that
was proved to the satisfaction of the court." He paused and chuckled to
himself, thinking he had been witty, and continued: "And I was that
court, and my judgment was that the debt of that life you saved had to be
paid to you within one calendar year, with interest at the usual per cent
for mortgages on good security. That was my judgment, and there's no
appeal from it. I am the great Justinian in this case."
"Did you ever save anybody's life?" she asked, putting the bottle of
cordial away, as he filled his glass for the third time.
"Twice certain, and once dividin' the honours," he answered, pleased at
the question.
"And did you expect to get any pay, with or without interest?" she added.
"Me? I never thought of it again. But yes--by gol, I did! One case was
funny, as funny can be. It was Ricky Wharton over on the Muskwat River. I
saved his life right enough, and he came to me a year after and said, You
saved my life, now what are you going to do with it? I'm stony broke. I
owe a hundred dollars, and I wouldn't be owing it if you hadn't saved my
life. When you saved it I was five hunderd to the good, and I'd have left
that much behind me. Now I'm on the rocks, because you insisted on saving
my life; and you just got to take care of me.' I 'insisted!' Well, that
knocked me silly, and I took him on--blame me, if I didn't keep Ricky a
whole year, till he went north looking for gold. Get pay--why, I paid!
Saving life has its responsibilities, little gal."
"You can't save life without running some risk yourself, not as a rule,
can you?" she said, shrinking from his familiarity.
"Not as a rule," he replied. "You took on a bit of risk with me, you and
your Piegan pony."
"Oh, I was young," she responded, leaning over the table, and drawing
faces on a piece of paper before her. "I could take more risks, I was
only nineteen!"
"I don't catch on," he rejoined. "If it's sixteen or--"
"Or fifty," she interposed.
"What difference does it make? If you're done for, it's the same at
nineteen as fifty, and vicey-versey."
"No, it's not the same," she answered. "You leave so much more that you
want to keep, when you go at fifty."
"Well, I dunno. I never thought of that."
"There's all that has belonged to you. You've been married, and have
children, haven't you?"
He started, frowned, then straightened himself. "I got one girl--she's
east with her grandmother," he said jerkily.
"That's what I said; there's more to leave behind at fifty," she replied,
a red spot on each cheek. She was not looking at him, but at the face of
a man on the paper before her--a young man with abundant hair, a strong
chin, and big, eloquent eyes; and all around his face she had drawn the
face of a girl many times, and beneath the faces of both she was writing
Manette and Julien.
The water was getting too deep for John Alloway.
He floundered towards the shore. "I'm no good at words," he said--"no
good at argyment; but I've got a gift for stories--round the fire of a
night, with a pipe and a tin basin of tea; so I'm not going to try and
match you. You've had a good education down at Winnipeg. Took every
prize, they say, and led the school, though there was plenty of fuss
because they let you do it, and let you stay there, being half-Indian.
You never heard what was going on outside, I s'pose. It didn't matter,
for you won out. Blamed foolishness, trying to draw the line between red
and white that way. Of course, it's the women always, always the women,
striking out for all-white or nothing. Down there at Portage they've
treated you mean, mean as dirt. The Reeve's wife--well, we'll fix that up
all right. I guess John Alloway ain't to be bluffed. He knows too much
and they all know he knows enough. When John Alloway, 32 Main Street,
with a ranch on the Katanay, says, 'We're coming--Mr. and Mrs. John
Alloway is coming,' they'll get out their cards visite, I guess."
Pauline's head bent lower, and she seemed laboriously etching lines into
the faces before her--Manette and Julien, Julien and Manette; and there
came into her eyes the youth and light and gaiety of the days when Julien
came of an afternoon and the riverside rang with laughter; the dearest,
lightest days she had ever spent.
The man of fifty went on, seeing nothing but a girl over whom he was
presently going to throw the lasso of his affection, and take her home
with him, yielding and glad, a white man, and his half-breed girl--but
such a half-breed!
"I seen enough of the way some of them women treated you," he continued,
"and I sez to myself, Her turn next. There's a way out, I sez, and John
Alloway pays his debts. When the anniversary comes round I'll put things
right, I sez to myself. She saved my life, and she shall have the rest of
it, if she'll take it, and will give a receipt in full, and open a new
account in the name of John and Pauline Alloway. Catch it? See--Pauline?"
Slowly she got to her feet. There was a look in her eyes such as had been
in her mother's a little while before, but a hundred times intensified: a
look that belonged to the flood and flow of generations of Indian life,
yet controlled in her by the order and understanding of centuries of
white men's lives, the pervasive, dominating power of race.
For an instant she kept her eyes towards the window. The storm had
suddenly ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the
distant wastes of snow.
"You want to pay a debt you think you owe," she said, in a strange,
lustreless voice, turning to him at last. "Well, you have paid it. You
have given me a book to read which I will keep always. And I give you a
receipt in full for your debt."
"I don't know about any book," he answered dazedly. "I want to marry you
right away."
"I am sorry, but it is not necessary," she replied suggestively. Her face
was very pale now.
"But I want to. It ain't a debt. That was only a way of putting it. I
want to make you my wife. I got some position, and I can make the West
sit up, and look at you and be glad."
Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words
were slow and measured. "There is no reason why I should marry you--not
one. You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar. If
my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all as a
matter of course. But my father was a white man, and I am a white man's
daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me the best
thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you. Had I been pure
white you would not have been so sure, you would have asked, not offered.
I am not obliged to you. You ought to go to no woman as you came to me.
See, the storm has stopped. You will be quite safe going back now. The
snow will be deep, perhaps, but it is not far."
She went to the window, got his cap and gloves, and handed them to him.
He took them, dumbfounded and overcome.
"Say, I ain't done it right, mebbe, but I meant well, and I'd be good to
you and proud of you, and I'd love you better than anything I ever saw,"
he said shamefacedly, but eagerly and honestly too.
"Ah, you should have said those last words first," she answered.
"I say them now."
"They come too late; but they would have been too late in any case," she
added. "Still, I am glad you said them."
She opened the door for him.
"I made a mistake," he urged humbly. "I understand better now. I never
had any schoolin'."
"Oh, it isn't that," she answered gently. "Goodbye."
Suddenly he turned. "You're right--it couldn't ever be," he said.
"You're--you're great. And I owe you my life still."
He stepped out into the biting air.
For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her gaze
fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild gesture of
misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a passionate
outburst of weeping. Sobs shook her from head to foot, and her hands,
clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.
Presently the door opened and her mother looked in eagerly. At what she
saw her face darkened and hardened for an instant, but then the girl's
utter abandonment of grief and agony convinced and conquered her. Some
glimmer of the true understanding of the problem which Pauline
represented got into her heart, and drove the sullen selfishness from her
face and eyes and mind. She came over heavily and, sinking upon her
knees, swept an arm around the girl's shoulder. She realised what had
happened, and probably this was the first time in her life that she had
ever come by instinct to a revelation of her daughter's mind, or of the
faithful meaning of incidents of their lives.
"You said no to John Alloway," she murmured. Defiance and protest spoke
in the swift gesture of the girl's hands. "You think because he was white
that I'd drop into his arms! No--no--no!"
"You did right, little one."
The sobs suddenly stopped, and the girl seemed to listen with all her
body. There was something in her Indian mother's voice she had never
heard before--at least, not since she was a little child, and swung in a
deer-skin hammock in a tamarac tree by Renton's Lodge, where the chiefs
met, and the West paused to rest on its onward march. Something of the
accents of the voice that crooned to her then was in the woman's tones
now.
"He offered it like a lump of sugar to a bird--I know. He didn't know
that you have great blood--yes, but it is true. My man's grandfather, he
was of the blood of the kings of England. My man had the proof. And for a
thousand years my people have been chiefs. There is no blood in all the
West like yours. My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to me,
because my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an
Indian woman from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now. But
some great Medicine has been poured into my heart. As I stood at the door
and saw you lying there, I called to the Sun. 'O great Spirit,' I said,
'help me to understand; for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh of my
flesh, and Evil has come between us!' And the Sun Spirit poured the
Medicine into my spirit, and there is no cloud between us now. It has
passed away, and I see. Little white one, the white life is the only
life, and I will live it with you till a white man comes and gives you a
white man's home. But not John Alloway--shall the crow nest with the
oriole?"
As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice, full of the cadences of a
heart revealing itself, the girl's breath at first seemed to stop, so
still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her,
she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed her
face. When the slow voice ceased, and the room became still, she lay
quiet for a moment, letting the new thing find secure lodgment in her
thought; then, suddenly, she raised herself and threw her arms round her
mother in a passion of affection.
"Lalika! O mother Lalika!" she said tenderly, and kissed her again and
again. Not since she was a little girl, long before they left the Warais,
had she called her mother by her Indian name, which her father had
humorously taught her to do in those far-off happy days by the beautiful,
singing river and the exquisite woods, when, with a bow and arrow, she
had ranged a young Diana who slew only with love.
"Lalika, mother Lalika, it is like the old, old times," she added softly.
"Ah, it does not matter now, for you understand!"
"I do not understand altogether," murmured the Indian woman gently. "I am
not white, and there is a different way of thinking; but I will hold your
hand, and we will live the white life together."
Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and, afterwards, the silver
moon steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and
braced the heart like wine. Then, at last, before it was nine o'clock,
after her custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter
brooding peacefully by the fire.
For a long time Pauline sat with hands clasped in her lap, her gaze on
the tossing flames, in her heart and mind a new feeling of strength and
purpose. The way before her was not clear, she saw no further than this
day, and all that it had brought; yet she was as one that has crossed a
direful flood and finds herself on a strange shore in an unknown country,
with the twilight about her, yet with so much of danger passed that there
was only the thought of the moment's safety round her, the camp-fire to
be lit, and the bed to be made under the friendly trees and stars.
For a half-hour she sat so, and then, suddenly, she raised her head
listening, leaning towards the window, through which the moonlight
streamed. She heard her name called without, distinct and
strange--"Pauline! Pauline!"
Starting up, she ran to the door and opened it. All was silent and
cruelly cold. Nothing but the wide plain of snow and the steely air. But
as she stood intently listening, the red glow from the fire behind her,
again came the cry--"Pauline!" not far away. Her heart beat hard, and she
raised her head and called--why was it she should call out in a language
not her own? "Qu'appelle? Qu'appelle?"
And once again on the still night air came the trembling
appeal--"Pauline!"
"Qu'appelle? Qu'appelle?" she cried, then, with a gasping murmur of
understanding and recognition she ran forwards in the frozen night
towards the sound of the voice. The same intuitive sense which had made
her call out in French, without thought or reason, had revealed to her
who it was that called; or was it that even in the one word uttered there
was the note of a voice always remembered since those days with Manette
at Winnipeg?
Not far away from the house, on the way to Portage la Drome, but a little
distance from the road, was a crevasse, and towards this she sped, for
once before an accident had happened there. Again the voice called as she
sped--"Pauline!" and she cried out that she was coming. Presently she
stood above the declivity, and peered over. Almost immediately below her,
a few feet down, was a man lying in the snow. He had strayed from the
obliterated road, and had fallen down the crevasse, twisting his foot
cruelly. Unable to walk he had crawled several hundred yards in the snow,
but his strength had given out, and then he had called to the house, on
whose dark windows flickered the flames of the fire, the name of the girl
he had come so far to see. With a cry of joy and pain at once she
recognised him now. It was as her heart had said--it was Julien,
Manette's brother. In a moment she was beside him, her arm around his
shoulder.
"Pauline!" he said feebly, and fainted in her arms. An instant later she
was speeding to the house, and, rousing her mother and two of the
stablemen, she snatched a flask of brandy from a cupboard and hastened
back.
An hour later Julien Labrosse lay in the great sitting-room beside the
fire, his foot and ankle bandaged, and at ease, his face alight with all
that had brought him there. And once again the Indian mother with a sure
instinct knew why he had come, and saw that now her girl would have a
white woman's home, and, for her man, one of the race like her father's
race, white and conquering.
"I'm sorry to give trouble," Julien said, laughing--he had a trick of
laughing lightly; "but I'll be able to get back to the Portage
to-morrow."
To this the Indian mother said, however: "To please yourself is a great
thing, but to please others is better; and so you will stay here till you
can walk back to the Portage, M'sieu' Julien."
"Well, I've never been so comfortable," he said--"never so--happy. If you
don't mind the trouble!" The Indian woman nodded pleasantly, and found an
excuse to leave the room. But before she went she contrived to place near
his elbow one of the scraps of paper on which Pauline had drawn his face,
with that of Manette. It brought a light of hope and happiness into his
eyes, and he thrust the paper under the fur robes of the couch.
"What are you doing with your life?" Pauline asked him, as his eyes
sought hers a few moments later.
"Oh, I have a big piece of work before me," he answered eagerly, "a great
chance--to build a bridge over the St. Lawrence, and I'm only thirty!
I've got my start. Then, I've made over the old Seigneury my father left
me, and I'm going to live in it. It will be a fine place, when I've done
with it--comfortable and big, with old oak timbers and walls, and deep
fireplaces, and carvings done in the time of Louis Quinze, and dark red
velvet curtains for the drawingroom, and skins and furs. Yes, I must have
skins and furs like these here." He smoothed the skins with his hand.