Complete weird tales of.., p.1330
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1330
Steel seated himself on a bench, crossed one knee over the other, and folded his arms to listen.
Raoul, who was now scrubbing his hands in a basin of soap and water, turned his curly head:
“We left the city because we couldn’t live on father’s wages. Now it seems we can’t even live here.”
“As soon as we came here, where we do no harm to anybody,” said the girl, “the State interfered with father. We can’t even live in Hell’s Ashes without getting into trouble.”
“The State stole a whole barrel of partridges that father shot,” explained Raoul, “and Bram Chace was sent to jail.”
“And father had to go away for three months.... We nearly died that winter — the porcupines got in and stole most of the pork; and fishing through the ice was poor, and rabbits scarce.”
“I had sore gums,” said Raoul carelessly. “Raw potatoes cured me; Hank brought us half a sack.”
“Were you two children here all winter alone and without any food except what you could kill?” asked Steel.
The girl nodded and shrugged:
“It was not so very bad — only Raoul ate some roots that poisoned him, and I was afraid he was dying. And if a deer had not come down by our kitchen door one morning I think we both might have died.” She picked up a handful of moss and birch-bark, shoved it into the range and lighted it.
Steel said:
“Did you shoot the deer, Jeanne?”
She came back to the bench beside him:
“Yes, I shot the buck. It was hard work getting the first bit of meat. I had no strength and Raoul was very sick. But the soup was good and I managed to cut up the buck, little by little.”
“The chickadees, meat-birds, and jays had a feast. I could see them from the window,” said Raoul. “But I was afraid the wildcats would drag off our deer before Jeanne could cut it up. And I was too sick to help her. Oh, it was fierce, I can tell you.”
Jeanne sat a moment, silent and absent-eyed, her small, weather-stained hands gathered under her apron. Then, glancing up from her reverie, she encountered Steel’s gaze and smiled faintly. Rising, she took the brimming stewpan and set it on the rusty range, covering it.
The range was about done for; through its bulging sides, cracks showed red streaks of fire; and the thought came to Steel that a conflagration would leave these children naked in the most desolate and wretched wilderness he had ever seen.
Raoul said:
“I guess I’ll take a look at my traps. Jeanne, are you going to fish or look after the deadfalls?”
“I guess I can do both,” replied the girl, picking up the almost furless remains of a coonskin overcoat and struggling into it.
A rusty shotgun stood in a corner: the boy took it, nodded civilly to his guest, and went out. Steel, however, caught him at the doorstep, holding out his own warm Mackinaw.
“Get into this, Raoul,” he insisted; “and wear these one-fingered mitts, too.”
The boy, astonished, suffered himself to be invested with the warm wool garment, looking up at Steel with an expression varying between surprise and doubt.
“Won’t you want it yourself?” he asked at length.
“No. Run along, Raoul. All the deer have not yet yarded. Keep a sharp lookout.”
“I will,” said the boy.
Halfway out of the abattis he turned and came running back.
“I meant to say thank you,” he explained. “You are very kind to me. I noticed that when you first spoke to me. Your — your face is — kind.”
“Don’t mention it, old chap,” returned Steel, flushing; and, on impulse, he threw one arm around the boy’s shoulders.... And that finished him; a blinding light flared in his brain, illuminating the source of impulse. For had his young wife survived childbirth his son should now have been as tall as this ragged boy beside him.
The man’s throat had closed, choking back the convulsive, inarticulate sound of a sorrow forever new; his arm slipped from the boy’s shoulders.
“Good-bye,” said the child. The man only nodded, turned back into the hut.
To and fro he strode, hands clasped tightly behind his back. Jeanne, tugging at a pair of timber-jack’s boots, glanced up at him now and then. After a while he fished out a brier pipe from the pocket of his heavy leather shooting coat and set it between his teeth, still continuing his sturdy, nervous pacing.
The girl wound an old wool comforter around her head and throat, picked up a tangled bundle of tip-ups, lines, sinkers, and hooks, pocketed a rag in which strips of meat from some uneatable animal were rolled, glanced once more at Steel, and then moved toward the door.
“Jeanne,” he said brusquely.
She halted.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“And Raoul?”
“Thirteen.”
Neither spoke for a few moments; then Steel took his fur cap, gloves and rifle from the bench beside him.
“I’ll go with you,” he said briefly.
On the way through the snowy hemlocks down to the frozen channel she replied very simply, almost carelessly, to his steady fire of questions, telling him unconcernedly of her childhood’s poverty and want in the city; of starvation wages, of strikes, of violence, of police, and of hospitals.
But the more dreadful destitution of this fatherless child, here amid these devastated wastes, was now more painfully apparent to the man. And when with her slender, frozen fingers, she began to untangle the stiff fishlines, he stepped up and took from her the whole mess of line, hook, and sinker, drew off his fur gloves with his teeth, pulled them over her unresisting hands, and set about disentangling the snarl himself.
“I am used to doing it,” she expostulated, timidly.
“So am I,” he said. “Where’s your bait, Jeanne?”
She drew from the pocket of her moth-eaten coonskin coat the cloth-covered roll of shredded flesh.
“What is it?” he inquired, sniffing gingerly.
“Fox.”
“Oh. Well, it’s good enough for lake trout.”
He baited and laid out each line beside the holes already excavated, broke the shell of ice over them with his rifle butt, set the tip-ups in place, lowered the baited hooks. The child looked on gravely.
“Is it well done, Jeanne?” he asked gaily.
“Yes.”
“Are you cold?”
“No.... Won’t you take your gloves now?”
“Nonsense,” he said, pulling out and loading his pipe.
When he had lighted it he walked over and passed his arm under hers. She looked up at him out of her clear, grey eyes.
“We’ll walk about on the ice to keep warm,” he explained. So together, arm under arm, they paced the ice along the line of fish holes, up and down, to and fro, till in her face the pink began to glow and her lovely mouth grew red.
“You’re quite certain that you’re warm enough?” he asked.
“Yes. Your gloves keep my wrists so comfortable. Are you sure you don’t need them?”
“Very sure.... Jeanne, would you tell me a little about your mother?”
“Yes,” said the child seriously. “She is dead.”
He waited.
“It was in the city.... A very cold winter. In Mama’s room there was an air shaft, and never any sun. The doctor said that was why she died.”
“I see.”
“Mama was so pretty.... She loved music.... She spoke French and English very well. She had been a salesgirl in a Montreal music shop.... Did you ever see Papa?”
“Yes — once.”
“He is very handsome. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” he said warmly, swallowing the lie and the memory of Jules Vallé as he lay there on the station platform, all splashed with blackish blood — a gaunt, shrunken, emaciated, grotesque thing of horror in his dingy trapper’s dress.
A tip-up signalled them; Steel walked over to it and jerked a white perch out onto the ice. Before he could bait again, the flapping fish had frozen stiff.
“That’s a very good fish to eat,” remarked Jeanne gravely, “and we are very lucky to get him, because there are not many in this creek.”
Hanging closer and more confidently to Steel’s arm as they resumed their pacing, she chattered at hazard of this and that:
“As for fish, I like trout — speckled ones, not the lake trout. But I don’t mind eating ‘lakers’; indeed, I am only too willing when I’m hungry.... And” — her voice became charmingly low and confidential— “please don’t tell Raoul, but I can not eat pickerel, because inside one that I cleaned I found — ugh! — a rat!”
“Horrible!” he admitted. “But a big pickerel will do that — and even snap up a young duck.”
She gave a dainty shudder and clung tighter to his arm.
“Once,” she said, “when Father was away and Raoul had gone trapping, I was fishing — down yonder where the stream flows through the woods, I saw three lynxes come out on the ice and look at me.”
“Were you afraid?” he smiled.
“Not at first. But when I threw a stick at them and they only sat down on the ice and snarled at me — then I was afraid.”
“Rather,” he said. “What did you do, Jeanne?”
“I called as loudly as I could. But Raoul was too far away on the sand-hills to hear me. Then I threw more sticks, but those wildcats sat there flattening their ears at me.... And I began to walk backward toward the house. And what do you suppose?”
“What?” he asked, much interested.
“Why, all they wanted was the frozen pile of fish I had caught. And they came trotting up and began to fight and snarl — I never saw such a sight! Wasn’t it funny?”
They both laughed, she clinging to his arm, grey eyes dancing, enjoying his mirth, he enjoying her youthful delight in her own story.
As for Jeanne, her little heart, which had so suddenly thawed out from the long winter of its hibernation, awoke, exulting like an April bluebird.
What a wonderful comrade was this tall man who had so miraculously appeared in her isolated life to talk to her, walk with her, laugh with her, care for her with great, warm fur gloves because her hands were numb and cracked!
When her laughter died away, and the excitement had died in her eyes, she walked beside him, clasping his arm, as though she were treading in a blissful dream.
Looking around at her, he saw the vague, reminiscent smile still touching her red lips, the happy light lingering still in her pretty eyes.
“What a jolly little comrade you are!” he said.
“Oh!... But you!” she breathed, smiling up at him. “You are more like a boy than a man.”
“I am thirty-two, Jeanne.”
“Really? You seem no older than I. I shall be sixteen on Christmas Day.”
“A birthday!” he exclaimed.
But as she did not seem to think the day of any particular interest, either as Christmas or as her natal day, and as she merely looked at him blankly when he spoke of presents, he said nothing more. But within him his heart was heavy for the childless parents of the earth who would have made a birthday and a Christmas mean something to this adorable child.
And then, abruptly and with a shock, he recollected that French Jules was dead and buried; and that sooner or later he must tell this girl and her brother.
A tip-up signalled; he jerked from the black water another perch, rebaited, came back; and Jeanne naively took possession of his arm again.
“Jeanne,” he said, “Pm hungry. How about you?”
“I always am.”
“What have you to cook?”
“Frozen potatoes,” she replied. “They are not very good. But I’ll try to fry them so you won’t mind. And then we have the stew. Shall we go and look at my deadfalls first?”
“Deadfalls,” he repeated, dismayed. “Do you set deadfalls?”
“Yes; I’ve set a lot of them. Shall we look at them before dinner?”
His position amused him. Here he was, a special warden sworn to a special duty, conniving, aiding, and abetting this ragged, half-starved, and delightful child in breaking the State game laws.
Up through the thicket they walked, broken twigs teaching her the secret mazes and labyrinths to follow; and presently he found himself standing and watching her lift a big, flat stone from the neck of a cock-grouse. The huge bird’s crop was bulging with chestnuts, one of which had lured him to destruction.
She lifted the magnificent game bird triumphantly: Steel took it without blinking and, doubling back its limp, ruffled neck, forced it into his hunting pocket.
And when all the deadfalls had been visited and they had returned to the ice, he strung the fish on a willow wand, wound up the lines, and, taking fish and rifle in one hand, abandoned the other arm to Jeanne, who took possession of it naturally and without the slightest self-consciousness.
In her left hand she swung a fine pair of snowshoe rabbits — victims of her traps. Steel looked at them in grim amusement.
“Jeanne,” he said casually as they approached the hut, “did anybody ever tell you that it is against the law to trap wild game?”
She laughed and squeezed his arm in appreciation of the joke.
“Do you suppose, if a game protector knew it, he’d put me in prison?” she asked, still laughing.
“What would you have to say to a game protector?”
“I? Why, I’d say that Raoul and I had to eat something. Or else how are we to live?”
“That is reason enough,” admitted Steel, gravely.
When they reached the hut he aided her to draw, pluck, and skin the game and prepare the fish.
The stew simmered; she seasoned it and stirred and poked it with a pointed pine stick, moving swiftly and happily about her duties.
Once he heard her singing under her breath the gay refrain of a Canadian song, as she set out the tin dishes and cups on the home-made table.
Raoul came in with a pair of winter weasel pelts.
“I saw a doe,” he said excitedly, “but she went off through the burnt lands and I couldn’t get near her. Your rifle would have fetched her.”
The grim smile came back to Steel’s lips. Here was every form of lawbreaking — a deer not only out of season, but a doe at that!
“Take my rifle after dinner,” he said, shamelessly. “She’ll keep out of buckshot range.”
Jeanne scraped the fried potatoes into each tin plate; lifted the stewpan and picked from it with her pointed stick the bits of flesh and fowl, and distributed them with impartial accuracy.
“Now!” she exclaimed happily, seating herself on Steel’s bench and close to him.
Steel was audience; the children chattered incessantly, each joyous tongue unleashed and wagging like mad after the long months of silence.
Wonderful adventures by flood and field had been Raoul’s portion — a bear with two full-grown cubs had found him weaponless, to his never ending fury and despair; once, setting lines for wild ducks (and Steel shuddered slightly), he had fallen into a hole on the Black Vlaie and had almost drowned in the depthless slit; once he had seen a great pickerel asleep in the shallows, and had tried to shoot it (more shudders from Steel), but when he pulled the huge, stunned fish out of water the creature had come to life, bitten him with its wolfs jaws, and in one mighty and convulsive spasm had floundered back into the channel.
Wonderful and innumerable were the adventures of Raoul; more modest and less picturesque the tales that Jeanne had to tell; and Steel, intent and deeply moved, listened as the midday meal progressed, until Jeanne rose with a happy sigh of satisfaction and prepared to do the dishes.
That night a candle was lighted in Steel’s honour. They possessed only five. When it was half consumed Steel rose, took Raoul’s hand, and, shaking it very gravely, said good-night. Then he walked over to Jeanne; she laid her slender, cold-scarred hand in his; and he bent over it gravely and touched it with his lips.
Long after he had shut the kitchen door and had spread his blanket on the heap of balsam tips — long after the candle had been extinguished and Raoul was asleep in his blanket — the girl lay awake in her bunk, still steeped in the magic of the long day’s memories — a day which already seemed too delightful to be true.
At sunrise Steel opened the kitchen door and walked out. Raoul was chopping kindlings on the doorstep; Jeanne sat on the edge of her bunk, twisting up her splendid hair, a kettle of soapy water on the floor at her feet.
“I’m going,” said Steel quietly.
For a moment she did not seem to comprehend; then her prettily flushed face grew blank and colourless.
“I’ll be gone three days,” he said; “then I am coming back for your birthday — if you want me.”
The girl had risen, looking at him out of great, grey eyes that seemed frightened.
“Will you come back?” she asked.
“Yes, if you want me.”
“I do want you.”
“I’ll come — after three days.”
He went outside and stood talking to Raoul until Jeanne called them to a breakfast of coffee, biscuits, and fried perch. It was the last cupful of flour, but she did not say so.
Steel remained silent; the children’s eyes scarcely left him, but they said very little. And when the quiet meal was ended and he was ready to depart they came to him with a new shyness, offering their hands without a word.
All that day the girl brooded by the range, performing her duties listlessly; the boy made the rounds of his traps and came back at evening empty handed.
Snow fell that night; and the next day it was snowing; and on the next. Then, as usual, the bitter winds came, and the children took to their bunks for warmth, and talked together in the bitter darkness in lieu of supper.
“He said he would come back on the third day,” began Raoul. “This is the third day.”
“He said he’d come back to us after three days. I think he will come tomorrow,” said Jeanne.
“Tomorrow is Christmas.”
“It is my birthday, too. He said he would come back for my birthday.”
“Maybe he has forgotten us,” said the boy.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“He was kind to us.”
