VIII
NOR only Tam Wilson, but Moy Toy himself, Quorinnah, a dozen braves from Tellico, and as many more of Ioco Town joined the escort, the Cherokee headmen having become impressed definitely with the idea that their interest was essentially involved in keeping faith with Laroche.
An early start was made the morn’s morn. The night had not yet revealed the aspect of the day, whether fair or foul; the world was sunk in darkness and swathed in mists. Now and again, glancing upward, one might see a star, augury that the sky was clear, and then the web of vapor annulled the scintillation and portended the gathering of clouds. Torches were here, there, everywhere, flaring through the gloom. The gable of the little home would show for a moment as one sped past, and anon would collapse into the similitude of a burly shadow. The trading-house stood forth with continuous distinctness; the light within streamed through the open doors as the final preparations of departure were in progress. It gave bizarre glimpses of the heavily laden train of horses standing—shadowy equine figures—outside, with now and again one of the packmen moving in the midst, readjusting a burden or examining the strength of the girths. In the chill matutinal air the bells on the animals gave out a keen jangling,—all the clamors of the raucous voices of the packmen crying here and there; the noisy movement of bales and boxes scraping upon the floors or against each other; the thud of pawing hoofs; the swift beat of human footsteps to and fro were punctuated by this continual, metallic vibration, which somehow was jarring to the senses and added a distinct element of confusion. Albeit, with the expectation of immediate departure, the preparations were deemed complete the night before, still, when the actual moment was at hand, it seemed that all was yet to be done—after the perverse manner of a journey’s start. Trifles developed into obstacles; obstacles became immovable; the impracticable asserted its inelastic limitations; and throughout was heard, from time to time, Jock Lesly’s half paternal, half petulant, admonitory upbraiding, “Oh fie!—oh fie!”
Occasionally he quitted the precincts of the trading-house, leaving the solution of its problems to his lieutenants, and plunged into the more dusky and shadowy domain of his own dwelling, where, however, he acquired no placidity, for now and again his favorite adjuration issued thence, invested with a sort of pathetic intonation of futility and associated with the name of Lilias. “Callum,” he would yell from the door in despair, “Lilias winna ride ahint ye on the pillion!” Then his stentorian roar, relaxing to domestic exhortation to the rebel of the interior, seemed in the distance a mere rumble of “Oh fie!” in conscious defeat; he would lift his voice anon as he was beaten back from one line of defense to another, “Callum, Lilias winna ride ahint me on the pillion!”
Callum’s face, half seen in the flare from the door, grew set and hard, as he stood saddling with his own well-descended hands the palfrey destined to bear the weight of the trader’s daughter. His action was significant, whether or not it was observed. He had begun to take the pillion off—since she would accompany neither him nor her father she should not ride behind the saddle of Tam Wilson, if that were her object. The other men looked at one another, laughing slyly, with a certain relish in the paternal discomfiture and the hardiness of the young insurgent, rejoicing in the ultimate victory of “little lassie Lilias,” after the manner of those who are indulgent to the whims and desirous of forwarding the power of a spoiled and imperious child—out of their own household. They discerned nothing more serious in the discussion, but Tam Wilson, busy in the group, was obviously expectant.
A longer interval of argument and remonstrance ensued. Then the great voice, with a hapless quaver in its tones issued forth anew.
“Callum, Callum! Lilias winna ride on the pillion at a’. Lord save us! The lassie vows she maun hae a tall horse all for her nainsel’—oh fie! oh fie!”
He was fairly beaten, for time was against him, and he must needs come out and see to the getting of his convoy together. Again and again in the extremity of his despair he protested that night would find them still hirpling about Ioco Town. But the first long slant of the sun met the pack-train in full march, descending one of those steep defiles among the mountains and the swirls of the Tennessee River, and the wind itself was not more blithe and free and fain to travel. The pack-horses swung in single file along the familiar ways of the old trading-path, now at a brisk trot, now carefully treading a ledge whence a false step would precipitate the creatures into the torrents below, without rein or guidance selecting their footing and balancing their burden with that strong animal intelligence and good will in labor which might seem to entitle them to be considered conscious factors in the commercial enterprise. Their chiming bells, blithely echoing from the crags, now loud, now softly vibrating, as the tones of those in the vanguard or far away in the rear came to the ear, made no dissonance in the free open air in their diversity of quality, and smote upon the dash of waters with the effect of sudden cymbals in the flutings and stringed vibrations of orchestral music. The mist had taken wings. Far and near the airy essences were rising from the mountains. The morning star, luminous, splendid, in her amber cloud, exhaled like a dewdrop in the glance of the sun. The spirit of May was in the air. The alert breeze had a keen, matutinal reviviscence, despite the languors of spring, and upon the mountains was a vague, blue presence, an efflorescence of haze like the bloom on a grape, that made their tint deeper, richer, softer, whether it were the azure of the furthest reaches of vision or the sombre purple of the nearer ranges, or the densely, darkly verdant slopes closing about the immediate vicinage of the series of cup-like coves.
In the distinct light the convolutions of the train became easily discernible to the eye, as from lower ground one could look back up the winding slopes of the ravine, so narrow at times as to leave a passage but for two or three abreast. Several of the stoutest men, fully armed, rode in the vanguard, and after the pack animals and their drivers came another close squad of horsemen, for owing to the packmen that Callum MacIlvesty had brought with him, the guard of the pack-train was more numerous than it was wont to be. A salient feature of the long, winding troop was the waving feathers of the braves, themselves riding together, for albeit most friendly of aspect, it was deemed meet that they and the young packmen should have as scant opportunity as might be to fall at loggerheads.
“They can’t talk thegither, praise God!” said Jock Lesly, who had had little thought he should ever be in case to be thankful for the impiety of the builders of the Tower of Babel, that had brought about the confusion of tongues. “But they are a’ kittle cattle, and I’se no trust them thegither.”
As he himself rode between the packmen and the Cherokee braves, his own companions were Moy Toy and Quorinnah, who had attached themselves to the chief of the expedition as their only equal in point of rank. He had anticipated this and had directed Callum to ride at the bridle rein of Lilias, whose station was between the squad of extra packmen and the drivers of the pack-train. Tam Wilson had no place assigned to him in the line of march. He was aware, when he took up his position on the other side of her palfrey, that he might seem animated by a sentiment far alien to the spirit of resignation and renunciation that had lately possessed him, but in reality he was influenced by the knowledge of the added protection his proximity afforded her. Nevertheless, with the satisfaction of their safe departure, which he knew his own exertions had secured, the keen edge of exhilaration and expectancy that dangers still unmasked may give, the necessity to support the character he had assumed, the delirious joy that her presence and his knowledge of her preference could but diffuse through mind and heart, all overcame for a time his sense of regret for his idle delay, his disloyalty, his duplicity. He forgot the futile cruelty to Callum MacIlvesty, and the deceit practiced toward her; and the identity of Tam Wilson, which he claimed as his own true character, was never more definite, more consistent than as he fared gayly by her side down the devious ways of the mountain wilderness. The tinkling of the bells and the chiming of the echoes were in his ears. He breathed the fragrance that the herbs of the earth distilled into the rare air; the colors of the landscape glowed so rich, so fine, so fair; and all the heart of a beautiful woman who loved him was in her eyes as she looked at him.
It was plain to Callum MacIlvesty, and Lilias scarcely cared that it was. She had no realization of him save that his words, his face, his very existence irked her, and she would fain be rid of him—being in the nature of an interruption of the free thought of another. He wondered afterward that he could be so patient—to watch her fair face cloud as even casually she turned; to hear the inflection of annoyance in her voice when she spoke to him, and she did not speak unless she needs must answer; to mark her appeal to Tam Wilson for the buckling of her rein anew, and the readjustment of her saddle; for a flower growing beside the way; for a cluster of wild strawberries, which she ate to the manifest danger of life and limb, the reins falling on her horse’s neck as he gingerly picked his way, stumbling now and again down the rugged descent, until Tam Wilson himself gathered up the lines and guided the animal. And when the strawberries were eaten she rode on, laughing like a child, her head bare under the sun, her golden curls hanging down on her shoulder, and her milk-white face burning red, although her riding mask swung by its string to her belt.
Sometimes Laroche was summoned back by the requisition of Moy Toy, Jock Lesly, and Quorinnah, to give opinions or arbitrate on some moot point of the trading privileges as established by the treaty, the Cherokees secretly delighted that it was to a Frenchman, actively employed in the French interest, to whom the unwitting British trader was appealing, by whose decision he professed himself willing to abide, and that these fine-spun theories were to be of consequence no more.
Then—the two young Scotch people left together—Lilias would gravely grasp the reins and ride slowly along, gazing up continually at the massive ranges, for their aspect shifted as the route of the travelers deviated. When one majestic dome, always in view from the little window of the spence, seemed on the very border-land of vision, the turn around a crag about to cut it off forever, she checked her horse and paused to look her last upon it.
“I’ll never see it mair!” she cried, in accents of positive pain. “I’ll ne’er be sae happy again as I hae been, living in the sight. Fare ye weel, sweet friend. May the warld gae cannily wi’ ye!”
The blue dome still towered like a mirage in the distance above the purple of nearer heights and the green of the foothills; then the crag intervened, and suddenly she laid down the reins on the horse’s neck and began to tie on her mask.
“Ye’ll see mountains agen. There’s mountains enough elsewhere, Lilias,” said Callum, in awkward consolation, as he caught up the reins and held the horse to a steady gait.
“Nane like these,” she protested in a husky voice. “There’s mountains enough in Scotland, an’ that’s nae joy to you nor to me.”
And this was very true, as the poor exile realized; his heart might ache vainly for the rugged mountains he remembered and loved, and as for these mountains of this new land she, whom he loved best, loved them well for another man’s sake. He gazed upon them with dreary eyes and an inward protest against them. Happy in their shadow! in magnitude, in multitude they typified woe, unceasing, immeasurable, ineradicable. So these two rode on together in silence, save that she murmured now and again, “Thae sweet mountains!”
He was none the happier when Tam Wilson came spurring up again, and Lilias was suddenly blithe and bonny once more. She was as gay as a child when they reached the first unfordable river, where the singular methods of ferriage of those days came into requisition. Through the shallow waters of the fords the knowing pack animals had cheerfully trudged, scarcely needing and certainly not noticing the halloos and cracking of whips with which the packmen beguiled the passage. Here, however, was a river deep enough to threaten damage to the packs and to require swimming, and the horses lined up on the margin, still with their tinkling bells fitfully jingling, and staidly awaited, more than one with expectant whinnies, the removal of their burdens. A delay ensued, as always, and each section of the guard coming up, kept apart to this time for reasons of policy, halted in a medley on the high and rocky banks which resounded and reëchoed with the various calls in Cherokee and English and braid Scots, with the jangling of bells and stamping of hoofs. Here and there an active and agitated search was in progress for the boat, constructed of buffalo skins and always hidden among the willows or rocks on shore when not in requisition by the traders and packmen and their Indian coadjutors,—the headmen of Ioco, the town where the station was situated, being admitted to the secret of the cache.
“Gone! gone!”—a frenzied exclamation arose. “Stolen! Carried away!”
Perhaps hidden anew! A score of active figures dashed hither and thither, now bursting out of the willows with exclamations of dismay, now plunging down the bank to a new point of search. Some as they sped up and down showed above the rocks heads polled and feathered, others, most genteel, with cocked hats, and again the coonskin cap or Callum’s Highland bonnet was in evidence. Lilias, in the flickering, glinting shade of a low-hanging beech tree, her head bare and golden, her face so fair, looking as some dryad might, captured by this wild and varied rout, waited like one apart, without a pulse of the impatience that swayed the whole cavalcade. She was living in the present. For aught she cared the journey might last forever. The past, it was naught to her; the future was so strangely veiled—and somehow she trembled at the thought. To-day! to-day!
The disaster threatened a long delay; a new boat must be built, new hides procured, all suitably tanned, and the incident itself suggested treachery and fomented suspicion. More than once the eyes of Callum MacIlvesty and Tam Wilson met in secret comment, an interchange of inquiry, a fraternal interdependence, all other considerations forgotten in the realization of a common danger. But Moy Toy’s face was frankly clouded, and Quorinnah was already suggesting ways and means by which, going into camp here, help might be fetched from Ioco Town. Only Jock Lesly gave no outward sign of his inward perturbation as he strode up and down the bank, save that now and again he admonished his cohorts with a shake of the head and a vehement “Oh fie! oh fie!”
And at last and suddenly, quiet descended on all the disordered crew, bating a word or two of rancorous upbraiding and a retort of raucous yet sheepish protest, for the boat was found where first it had been presumed to be. It had been overlooked, so well had it been hidden, and once declared to be missing the place of its usual and most obvious bestowal was not searched again till desperation suggested the retracing of all the various steps that had been taken. And so it was presently launched. A queer craft we of to-day would deem it, and perhaps would prefer something more stanch and less picturesque, seeing how swift and deep and rocky was the river. But the capsizing of such a boat meant only some slight injury of the goods and the swift swimming of the hardy passengers ashore, none the worse for the plunge into the clear waters of the mountain stream. The hides stretched between stout saplings, serving as gunwale and keel and tightly bound at each end, were distended toward the centre by crosspieces of the same fashioning, holding the boat in the conventional canoe shape, and the structure would convey ten horse loads at once. The method of progression was still more singular—no oars nor poles were used in its propulsion. The hardy packmen of the day, being lightly clad in buckskins, were wont boldly to fling themselves into the river and swim across, pushing the pettiaugre before them, their horses all gallantly swimming in the rear. When the first boat’s load had been piled upon the craft, Lilias was conducted down the steep bank and seated in the boat, the only passenger, upon the bales of fine dressed deerskins. Callum MacIlvesty and a number of other young men were instantly in the water, wading first, then swimming, with the liberated horses following after. The girl liked the novelty. She smiled down from her high perch at each strong stroke that sent the curious structure throbbing and quivering on its way, with its silver wake and a little ripple of foam at the prow. The river was crystal clear, smooth, and shining in its centre under the sun, deeply, duskily green beneath the shadow of the trees on the further shore. Beyond, where the stream rounded a sort of peninsula, a great glittering stretch of water seemed to extend indefinitely in a haze that hung about a flat margin and there met the sun in a vaporous shimmer, dazzling yet soft. All the group on the hither shore gazed at the progress of the boat, but only the cultivated imagination of the French officer suggested similitudes of aught that it was not. Against that green and white and misty background the shell-shaped craft and the still and smiling golden-haired figure recalled some legendary sea nymph, some Venus in the gliding shallop; the sleek heads of the attendant train suggested dolphins and sea horses, gleaming in the sunset as they swam swiftly after.
There was scant space for the flattery of illusions, for the deep shadows of the leafy bank opposite were falling upon this misty presentment of myths, the necromancy of the sheen and shimmer, and obliterating it as the little craft was pushed in to the land. Those of the packmen who had crossed were shaking the water from their dripping garments with no more care for a drenching than so many shaggy dogs, and presently were resaddling their horses, while Lilias, quite dry and fresh, stood apart on a little promontory of rock and with a scornful wave of the hand bade Callum in his saturated kilt keep his distance.
It seems incredible that such a man as Laroche should fear a little guying, but perhaps it was only the spectacle of Callum’s discomfiture that reconciled him to the knowledge of the scoffs at him, covert and otherwise, which he knew he should receive from the other young men when with Jock Lesly and the Indian headmen he should cross in the boat on its second trip, his condition as a recent invalid entitling him to share their honors and ease. It was barely possible, however, that Lilias would have found no occasion, even were he also dripping from the short swim, to place an embargo on his near approach. Why it was that this watery quarantine should have roused Callum MacIlvesty’s spirit of revolt, of self-assertion, of pride, it is difficult to say. Perhaps merely the limit of his endurance was reached when he was cried out upon like a too affectionate and dripping water dog.
“I winna sprinkle your kirtle,” he said with some dignity, despite the triviality of the theme. And he withdrew himself—not merely till the hot sun and the reflected heat of sand and rocks should dry off his garments, which, aided by the swift running to and fro on the errands of the pack-train, the brisk wind, and the warmth of his own body, was shortly effected.
The whole train was in motion again incredibly soon, considering the abnormal difficulties which these primitive methods of ferriage would seem to present. The young packmen, by reason of being detailed to the earliest crossing, were kept separated from the braves, the “mad young men,” with whom it was feared some quarrel might arise through their perverse ingenuity, independent of verbal communication. These tribesmen came last of all, after the dignitaries of both factions, and thus when once more on the march the original formation of the little cavalcade was preserved.
Only Callum MacIlvesty had shifted his position. He no longer rode at the right hand of Lilias, but ahead with the squad of packmen, and Tam Wilson succeeded to the position he had occupied; but Lilias appeared hardly to have noticed Callum’s absence, and certainly did not waste a thought upon it. Her radiant spirit seemed to shine through her eyes—she was gay, whimsically, childishly fascinating one moment; soft, serious, deeply emotional the next; now showing her more earnest traits, careful, womanly, unselfish; and again the veriest flutterer of a butterfly. She had never been so protean of mood, so beautiful, so charming. And yet Laroche looked upon her with changed eyes, a newly aroused and upbraiding conscience. The frightful bodily danger in which they had all recently stood from the murderous Cherokees, his triumphant scheming to avert their impending fate, had been as a reprieve to thoughts that now in this leisure again clamored for a hearing. His long, idle lingering amongst them and enforced concealment of his identity had brought this menace upon them. He had not yet annulled all its evils. And now—whither was he tending? Daily he considered the question.
He was a man of education, having had superior facilities and both the talent and the will to avail himself of them. He was not without social culture, and he moved in coteries of refinement. While not of the higher nobility, he was still a man of good birth, of degree, and of some fortune, and this had enabled him to tolerate the more kindly the bourgeois, nay the peasant-like aspect of the Lesly household, since it was but a matter of contemplation, and by no means of assimilation. He had regarded it with all its homely traits and habitudes as impersonally as if it were a scene on a stage.
In addition he was consumed by professional ambition; he had always been accounted an efficient, superior officer; he believed that his military abilities were great. Upon the successful issue of his plans among the Cherokees and other tribes high preferment would await him in the gift of the French government. To hamper by a mésalliance with a simple Scotch girl, the daughter of a bourgeois trader, his future, his pride of diplomatic achievement, his opportunity to render great services to his government—he was appalled by the very thought. He promised himself that he would make no such sacrifice for any woman on earth! Seriously contemplated, he could not raise her to his level, and he would not sink to hers. All must be renounced should he dream of her in any sense but to kiss her hand in gallantry and bless her goodness in gratitude.
Yet what was he doing? Separating forever two young people whose kindness had been so largely instrumental in saving his life. Lapsed in the luxury of a sweet, delicate, almost abstract emotion, flattered by the consciousness of her love, he had supplanted her true suitor by this ghastly simulacrum of a lover, and was wrecking the happiness of both. He was sentimental enough, in the abstract, to care much for a sentimental woe. He was conscientious enough to appraise the unjustified intermeddling of the course he had pursued, and sensitive enough to shrink from bearing the consciousness of it all his days. With the policy of the confessional of the faith in which he had been trained, that restitution must accompany repentance and peace only follow penance, he was canvassing how to undo in days all that he had wrought in months. It should not be, he declared arbitrarily. He cared honestly, kindly, too much for her, loved her too truly, for herself, as a friend! And toward Callum himself he was not indifferent. Yet how could he bring them together again? Difficulties hedged him about. He feared the English in his character of French emissary. Now, daily, he was approaching the Englishman’s country. He adventured, indeed, much for the sake of her and hers. Knowing his prejudice, he would not trust Jock Lesly with his secret. But the girl loved him. He would trust Lilias! She would doubtless expect him to follow her to Charlestown. She would watch and wait for him. She would pine. But should he disclose his nationality, his employ, it must appear that their parting was final; in all probability, so divided by distance and prejudice, they would never meet again. It would be a poignant pang to them both, and Lilias he could never forget! If thus unhampered she could find her happiness in Callum MacIlvesty—he sighed—but he would not grudge it. At all events he owed her this: she must not waste her sweet young life in devotion to an illusion.
In reaching this resolution he was far too acute, too accustomed to introspection, not to perceive that he had postponed the shattering of the romance that had delighted him until its enchantment had at the most but a few days’ lease. He took some credit, however, that he had determined to submit to the ordeal and the jeopardy it involved before these were passed, that he might have space for an earnest effort to bring the young people to their former understanding. Besides, he argued, he might easily, in the interests of his own safety, hold his peace. Surely it was not a part of his duty, in going about the country, to warn susceptible maidens against losing their hearts to him.
Notwithstanding the stress of this absorption, he conducted a dual train of thought, listened to her talk, answered in character, followed the manifold changing theme, commented on the varying aspects of the country,—all the region being new to him,—found even space for a keen notice of her flattered consciousness that it was for her sake that he made this long and laborious detour in his journey to delay their parting—if ever they should part again; and only once did he answer at random, and only once did he fall into silence, to be merrily rallied and asked when and where did he see that wolf.
One day the camp was pitched about sunset, the blue twilight yet in abeyance. This, too, was the first halt since breakfast, dinner having been eaten on the march. A substantial meal, therefore, was this supper al fresco. Kettles were swung gypsy fashion; venison was broiled on the coals; some wild ducks, brought down by a volley in the course of the march, were split and toasted on a long stick at the general camp, but brandered at the fire of the “gentlefolks” as the contingent of Moy Toy and Jock Lesly was called,—it boasting a branding iron. The “gentles” also rejoiced in a case bottle of brandy, while the lower grades were content with rum, and only Lilias and the Frenchman drank a “dish of chocolate.” By a watercourse, necessarily, the halt was made and in the neighborhood of one of those exquisite springs for which the region is noted.
It seemed illimitably deep as Laroche and Lilias stood amidst the sweet-scented ferns on its rocky verge and then sat down on one of the fractured fragments fallen from the great crag beetling from the mountain slope above their heads.
Lured by the fascination that this sort of fountain in the wilderness seems to exert on all travelers, each of the cavalcade had come to gaze upon the crystalline depths which were like topaz in the lucent tints imparted by the golden gravel beneath. The hewing of the circular basin was almost as symmetrical as if wrought by hand. The down-dropping branches of the sycamore and beech nearly veiled the crags closing about them, and the far-away mountains across a stretch of valleys and lesser ranges were purple and sombre under the light of the sinking and vermilion sun. Only these two lingered here, quite silent at first, and Laroche wondered if he could speak at all. He glanced about doubtfully.
“Lilias,” he said slowly, “I have something to say to you.”
The shadow of a homing bird sped across the sunlit valley. Down the current of the river was visible a red reflection that was not a cast of the western sun, but was caught from a camp-fire on the bluff. At these he looked, not at her, lest the sight of her face disarm his resolution; yet somehow he was aware of the sudden flutter of her heart and the quickening of her pulses, and he knew that for all his art and all his tact he had begun amiss. He hastened to nullify the impression she might have taken, nay, nay, must have taken from his words.
“It is a secret,” he said hurriedly. “You must promise that you will tell no one—not even your father.”
He wondered, his eyes still fixed on those furthest western mountains, if her heart had ceased to beat, so still she suddenly was; then he realized rather than saw the slow motion of surprise, of protest, as her head turned toward him on its long and slender white neck.
“Not even your father,” he reiterated, for he must needs go on.
So sudden had been the revulsion of feeling, so complete, so paralyzing, that she could not trust her voice. And this was well, for he perceived that even in these few steps he had stumbled into a second pitfall. Exclude the paternal idol, know a secret forbidden to that paragon of wisdom and crown of creation, Jock Lesly! In another moment he would have a downright refusal of the trust. He must quickly involve her in the safety, the confidence of another, and even filial fealty would not warrant her in breaking faith with him.
“No,” he qualified hastily, “don’t promise. I will throw myself on your honor—in the fullest assurance of safety. Lilias, I am not what I seem; I am an emissary of the French government, an officer of the army!”
She recoiled violently, suddenly shaken, shocked; and albeit ghastly pale she fixed a challenging stare upon him.
“A spy?” she demanded in a husky voice, impressive with its deliberate tone and weighty yet incredulous rebuke.
Laroche hastily collected his faculties. This untoward trend of his disclosures must needs be checked in sheer consideration of the safety of his neck.
“Ah, Lilias, bien aimée,” he cried, in half petulant, half affectionate protest. “How can you misunderstand? Remember how I came to you—was it of my own intention, my own volition?”
The recollection of those weeks of illness, of helplessness, when he lay under their roof unconscious, brought thither by her father, was supplemented by the thought of the simple domestic routine in which he had grown a factor and had made the dear sense of home in these savage wilds so doubly dear, his eager care for their safety, his suspicions of the Indians, his precautions for the defense of the trading-station, his oft ridiculed anxieties and prognostications of savage treachery that had at last proved stern truth,—only foiled by his foresight and ingenuity and sagacity. As these reflections flitted through her mind, his eyes read the changing expressions of her face like an open book. He spoke as if in response.
“Remember,” he said with emotion, “for believe me I can never forget, dear heart”—
Suddenly, seeing the roseate color at the word beginning to return, to deepen, to glow in her cheek with a subtle, conscious emotion, he was admonished of that far more significant secret of his mission which must be disclosed, and that quickly, for the sake of both.
“No, not a spy,” he declared deliberately, seeking to quell the wild plunging of his own heart, as though one should find a gentle palfrey suddenly metamorphosed into a mighty charger. “My mission was primarily to survey and report the character of the obstructions to navigation of the Cherokee River—far away, a hundred miles or more; but I feared to say as much to your father, because of the international jealousies, that yet need hamper no friendship between him and me. May we not think kindly of each other as man to man, even though the nations are at war?”
He turned questioning eyes upon her—and she, her face so sweetly flushed, her eyes so gently luminous, looking all her love for him, all her soft faith in his love for her, silently acceded, for she could not trust her voice in the consciousness of what she looked to hear, what his words next promised.
Oh, how could he speak? Yet how could he dally and delay and torture both himself and her? The look in her face nearly routed his resolve. With an effort he went on almost at random, blurting out his revelation by piecemeal.
“My mission was primarily merely diplomatic—but I foresaw the opportunity here and, representing it to the government, I volunteered for the service; my authority was accordingly extended, and I will command an army of Indians when it is put into the field in the French interest.”
He had plucked off a frond of the fern that grew by the margin and was tearing it to bits and throwing them from him in the pause. They could hear the water of the spring softly gurgle. The voices of the camp beyond sounded distant and a-dream, like half heeded calls to drowsy ears; the reflection of the camp-fires in the river had mustered a deeper glow, as if recruited from the crimson clouds so lately parading through the sky. Now the sky was vacant, a clear, pure, faintly tinted blue, and in its midst a star gleamed with an incomparable whiteness above the darkly bronze green of the mountains. And yet the night had not come. The world was full of this gentle, limpid clarity of light. He could have seen every line of her face as she sat upon the rock had he dared glance toward her.
If the girl had been an image, craftily wrought of stone, she could have shown no more semblance of life than that silent, motionless figure.
She doubtless heard. She could but understand.
The reserve of her attitude overwhelmed the alert expectation of the Frenchman, whose mental posture had been, by long and agitated anticipation, braced for expostulation, for reproaches, for tears, nay even appeals,—for she loved him as he loved her, and he knew it. This absolute nullity as the result of a revelation so momentous to them both reacted on his nerves. Oddly enough he experienced the tumult of feeling in which he had thought to see her whelmed. He even called out to her in his agitation, as heretofore he had prefigured her appeal to him. He had utterly lost his artificial poise—he had become once more the natural man.
“Lilias! Lilias!” he cried with a poignant accent. “It is true, lassie, to my sorrow—to my sorrow! I am a French soldier, but no enemy of you or of yours, and, God help me, I love you!”
She lifted her head suddenly and looked at him with stern eyes, which, even despite the dusk, he could by no means misunderstand.
“Do you mean,” she said, “that you volunteered to spirit up these fiends of Indians to fall upon the frontier and massacre women and children?”
He drew back, affronted and wounded.
“Nay, Lilias, war is war, and never play. If women and children suffer, ’tis the fortune of war, and the responsibility is on the men who have the care of them. And do not the English march savages against the French? And have not Frenchmen also wives and children, and even hearts and souls?”
“If it were your bounden duty,” she stipulated.
“It is, being my country’s opportunity,” he argued.
“If it had been that ye could na turn back—that your help had been pledged—your honor engaged—your own and your hame to defend! But to seek the foul employ—to lead into the field these merciless fiends against the peaceful hunter and the patient husbandman, the wife and the daughter, the grandame and the babe! And for what price, Judas? Is it gold—or is it place?”
He could kiss her hand, even if it dealt a blow.
“Nay, Lilias,” he said, wincing at every thrust. “It is justifiable by all the rules of war; no honorable soldier need evade the duty. But I will not have you think of me thus. I mean”—taking the plunge of irrevocable revolt, to his own amazement—“I will renounce it; I will resign. I will return to civil life. I will be a planter—a—what you will, and you shall be my wife.”
“Your wife!” she exclaimed, and her voice, although steady, rang uncertain of intonation. “Your wife!”
She seemed, to his alert receptiveness, to dwell lingeringly, fondly, on the words. But after a moment she went on unfalteringly,—
“Oh, man! you’d break faith with king and country to win favor with a woman!”
He was staggered for an instant.
“It would be no loss to the government. They would only send another officer to fill my place.”
He hesitated in a sudden jealous speculation as to who might succeed to the result of his careful work and the rewards of his hard-earned opportunity. Then he resumed with eager urgency, “But you think my orders are revolting and the service unholy. You account my engagements with the French government inconsistent with my honor”—
“It is na what I think, but what are they to you—naething?—naething?”
“Nothing in comparison with my love for you; nothing in comparison with my gratitude for your love for me. For, Lilias, you love me; surely you love me!”
She had risen, and still standing, she suddenly put both hands before her eyes.
“Oh, puir Tam Wilson!” she cried, and burst into a tumult of tears.
The irrelevance stunned him as he stood staring at her.
“But you are na Tam Wilson!” She turned upon him in a sort of fury, throwing out one hand at arm’s length with a gesture of repudiation. “Oh, you are na Tam Wilson! Oh, the leal heart he had! He wad na gie ower his trust and renounce his pledges and quit his country’s wark for ony lassie alive! He could na be balked by fear, an’ he could na be bought by favor. And if God prospered him he thankit Him for his mercies! And if God denied him he thankit Him for his chastening! And when in the gude time his wife suld come to him, ’t would be as a helpmeet, as ’t was ordained,—to go hand in hand in an honorable path, to work together, building up, not throwing down, keeping faith, not breaking it,—open as the day, hiding naething and with naething to hide. And she would be dear, but his honor would be dearer! He wad na win a woman’s heart wi’ vain protestations an’ false names, and wi’ terrible secret military orders to haud him back,—and then tell her that his engagements were naught to him for her sake! For she might tell him, as I tell you, an oath’s an oath, and ill to break! And I will hae naught to do wi’ a man wha wad break it for the blink o’ a lassie’s eye! He wad na do that—oh, puir Tam Wilson!”
He stood aghast, arraigned, conscience-stricken. But she had leaned against the crag, her soft cheek pressed on the stern gray rock, relinquishing her reproaches and bewailing her bereavement.
“Oh, puir, puir Tam Wilson!” she cried again and again. “To think he never lived! He isna you! He is naebody—naething! Puir Tam Wilson—to think he never lived!”
She would not hear remonstrances. She would not look at Laroche. He was fain presently to leave her in the closing dusk, lest the others might join them when neither could well explain her emotion. As he slipped away in the elusive gathering gray shadows, he still heard her sobs from their midst, bewailing the tenuous estate of puir Tam Wilson, quite as elusive as they.
He did not see her again till the next morning. She was pallid as the result of a sleepless night. Her eyelids, although swollen from persistent weeping, were still heavy with unshed tears. Her face was stern, hard, even sullen. She seemed averse to speech and answered her father’s expressions of alarm because of her grief-stricken manner and Callum’s eager solicitous inquiries as to her well-being with a curt explanation, “I hae had dreams.”
Laroche, who had had time for reflection, appreciated an undercurrent of a more subtle sincerity in the response than was obvious from the surface. Dreams indeed—mere dreams! Puir Tam Wilson!
He was glad of the relief which this apt reply afforded him, for he had suffered some mundane and most personal anxieties, in view of her youth and inexperience in diplomatic matters, as to her capability to guard his disclosure. Indeed he was doubtful of her disposition to shield him since her emotion had been so strongly elicited and the unexpected resultant repulsion for him had so completely offset her prepossession hitherto in his favor, on which he had relied for protection. His liberty, and even his life, were in her hands, and he could hardly contain his regret that he had confided aught to her.
There is no repentance so sharp as that which arises from a mistake made in a presumable excess of conscientiousness. He told himself now that acting in the discharge of his political and official duty he might well have left events to take their own course. If he had parted with her, revealing naught of the true identity of puir Tam Wilson, she could hardly have pined more for the man himself than for the figment of her fancy. Callum had scarcely a more definite rival in the substance than in the shadow. If the two young people could not come to an understanding with the memory of the man between them, they could hardly now have a unity of interest separated by the myth.
But the dreams that she had had, of which he was acutely conscious of being a visionary part, and her fractious, imperious temper served to account for much childish petulance in her conduct toward all who approached her. She waved away the horse on which she had hitherto ridden, when the animal was brought forward, ready saddled for her use. She would not speak, nor would she mount.
“Oh fie! oh fie!” exclaimed Jock Lesly, as in duty bound. Then in dulcet solicitude, “Winna ma poppet ride her pillion? Hey, Duncan, Dougal,—Miss Lilias’s pillion!”
And then it became evident that on this pillion she would in no wise ride behind Callum, who was only too officious to proffer his services; nor Tam Wilson, whose proposition, despite a secret reluctance, was made with all needful show of alacrity. Therefore the pillion was strapped behind Jock Lesly’s saddle, and when mounted there Lilias leaned her head against his broad shoulder and wept silently from time to time and desisted to clasp both arms as tightly as possible around his broad girth with a childish but joyless hug, feeling, nevertheless, that here was the only stanch heart in all the world, the only one whose love was of any value. Then she would fall to weeping again, and pause to take pleasure in wiping her eyes on the gray and flaxen wisps of his plaited hair, hanging down on his shoulders within her reach. So often was his hair devoted to the sad duty of drying her tears that the locks came unplaited and escaped from the leather thong that tied them, so that she needs must plait them over again. This she did, using both hands and sustaining her weight on the pillion by holding to the hair of the suffering scalp of her father, who, much tormented lest she fall, punctuated the performance with adjurations—“Oh fie! oh fie!”
Presently he would feel her head, once more lying against his shoulder, shaken by the tumult of her sobs, and in a bewildered effort at consolation he would admonish her, “Whist—whist, hinny! Dreams are naething! but maist like sour sowens for supper. Dreams are naething!”
“Naething!” she would respond ambiguously. “Naething! Oh, that I suld say so! Dreams are naething at a’!”
She did not speak to Laroche again except upon the day of his departure, which he had expedited as far as he might without incurring comment. She was riding her own horse again, and when she pressed the animal up abreast with him in the cavalcade, he felt his heart glow within him. He had loved her, truly and purely, and with a sort of tender lenient admiration, and he warmed to the thought of bearing away with him some word of friendship that would make the remembrance of her less like a flagellation than a grief both sad and sweet and to be tenderly cherished. For she could not be aware that he had revealed his military and national status without intending to confess his love merely to stem the tide of her own.
There was a touch of pride in the poise of her head. Yet it was always carried high, in truth. Her eyes flashed. They were always at their brightest when they looked out thus, gleaming like sapphires upon the variant blue of the distant mountain ranges. The day was fair, the wind went by with a rush, and her smile was as bland as the sun on the expanse of vernal foliage in the valley beneath the verge of the path as they rode adown the rugged ravines.
“They tell me you are gaun to quit us the day,” she said suavely.
“Aye, and sorry am I,” he replied with polite alacrity.
She made a gesture as of flouting a triviality.
“Why suld mortals be glad or sorry?” she said. “Their fate is a’ fixed, whether they will or no. And they go to meet it—ane might a’most say—without mair knowledge o’ its nearness than kyloes hae o’ the shambles.”
She paused for a moment. Then quickly resumed as if she neither expected nor desired response.
“But mony folks try to speer out the future, and tak muckle heed o’ signs an’ sic-like, especial o’ ill luck. Ye hae heard us speak o’ thae strange warnin’s that appear in the likeness o’ a man’s nainsel’—but I misdoubts these are only auld wives’ clavers; I misdoubts. I want to tell you this,”—she turned upon him a casual but radiant smile,—“if e’er you hap to see a man comin’ till you that looks like yoursel’, ye needna be frighted, for it winna be Tam Wilson. Tak my word for it—it winna be Tam Wilson!”
She reined in her horse and fell back among the others, while he rode on feeling his heart thrust through with the stabs of her deliberate cruelty; and these were all the farewell words that passed between them.