At this flaming triumph the silence of earth was broken, and ten thousand wolf-dogs, in long-drawn unisoned howls, sobbed their dismay and grief. Frona shivered, and St. Vincent passed his arm about her waist. The woman in her was aware of the touch of man, and of a slight tingling thrill of vague delight; but she made no resistance. And as the wolf-dogs mourned at her feet and the aurora wantoned overhead, she felt herself drawn against him closely.
"Need I tell my story?" he whispered.
She drooped her head in tired content on his shoulder, and together they watched the burning vault wherein the stars dimmed and vanished. Ebbing, flowing, pulsing to some tremendous rhythm, the prism colors hurled themselves in luminous deluge across the firmament. Then the canopy of heaven became a mighty loom, wherein imperial purple and deep sea-green blended, wove, and interwove, with blazing woof and flashing warp, till the most delicate of tulles, fluorescent and bewildering, was daintily and airily shaken in the face of the astonished night.
Without warning the span was sundered by an arrogant arm of black. The arch dissolved in blushing confusion. Chasms of blackness yawned, grew, and rushed together. Broken masses of strayed color and fading fire stole timidly towards the sky-line. Then the dome of night towered imponderable, immense, and the stars came back one by one, and the wolf-dogs mourned anew.
"I can offer you so little, dear," the man said with a slightly perceptible bitterness. "The precarious fortunes of a gypsy wanderer."
And the woman, placing his hand and pressing it against her heart, said, as a great woman had said before her, "A tent and a crust of bread with you, Richard."
CHAPTER XIX
How-ha was only an Indian woman, bred of a long line of fish-eating, meat-rending carnivores, and her ethics were as crude and simple as her blood. But long contact with the whites had given her an insight into their way of looking at things, and though she grunted contemptuously in her secret soul, she none the less understood their way perfectly. Ten years previous she had cooked for Jacob Welse, and served him in one fashion or another ever since; and when on a dreary January morning she opened the front door in response to the deep-tongued knocker, even her stolid presence was shaken as she recognized the visitor. Not that the average man or woman would have so recognized. But How-ha's faculties of observing and remembering details had been developed in a hard school where death dealt his blow to the lax and life saluted the vigilant.
How-ha looked up and down the woman who stood before her. Through the heavy veil she could barely distinguish the flash of the eyes, while the hood of the parka effectually concealed the hair, and the parka proper the particular outlines of the body. But How-ha paused and looked again. There was something familiar in the vague general outline. She quested back to the shrouded head again, and knew the unmistakable poise. Then How-ha's eyes went blear as she traversed the simple windings of her own brain, inspecting the bare shelves taciturnly stored with the impressions of a meagre life. No disorder; no confused mingling of records; no devious and interminable impress of complex emotions, tangled theories, and bewildering abstractions—nothing but simple facts, neatly classified and conveniently collated. Unerringly from the stores of the past she picked and chose and put together in the instant present, till obscurity dropped from the woman before her, and she knew her, word and deed and look and history.
"Much better you go 'way quickety-quick," How-ha informed her.
"Miss Welse. I wish to see her."
The strange woman spoke in firm, even tones which betokened the will behind, but which failed to move How-ha.
"Much better you go," she repeated, stolidly.
"Here, take this to Frona Welse, and—ah! would you!" (thrusting her knee between the door and jamb) "and leave the door open."
How-ha scowled, but took the note; for she could not shake off the grip of the ten years of servitude to the superior race.
May I see you?
LUCILE.
So the note ran. Frona glanced up expectantly at the Indian woman.
"Um kick toes outside," How-ha explained. "Me tell um go 'way quickety-quick? Eh? You t'ink yes? Um no good. Um—"
"No. Take her,"—Frona was thinking quickly,—"no; bring her up here."
"Much better—"
"Go!"
How-ha grunted, and yielded up the obedience she could not withhold; though, as she went down the stairs to the door, in a tenebrous, glimmering way she wondered that the accident of white skin or swart made master or servant as the case might be.
In the one sweep of vision, Lucile took in Frona smiling with extended hand in the foreground, the dainty dressing-table, the simple finery, the thousand girlish evidences; and with the sweet wholesomeness of it pervading her nostrils, her own girlhood rose up and smote her. Then she turned a bleak eye and cold ear on outward things.
"I am glad you came," Frona was saying. "I have so wanted to see you again, and—but do get that heavy parka off, please. How thick it is, and what splendid fur and workmanship!"
"Yes, from Siberia ." A present from St. Vincent , Lucile felt like adding, but said instead, "The Siberians have not yet learned to scamp their work, you know."
She sank down into the low-seated rocker with a native grace which could not escape the beauty-loving eye of the girl, and with proud-poised head and silent tongue listened to Frona as the minutes ticked away, and observed with impersonal amusement Frona's painful toil at making conversation.
"What has she come for?" Frona asked herself, as she talked on furs and weather and indifferent things.
"If you do not say something, Lucile, I shall get nervous, soon," she ventured at last in desperation. "Has anything happened?"
Lucile went over to the mirror and picked up, from among the trinkets beneath, a tiny open-work miniature of Frona. "This is you? How old were you?"
"Sixteen."
"A sylph, but a cold northern one."
"The blood warms late with us," Frona reproved; "but is—"
"None the less warm for that," Lucile laughed. "And how old are you now?"
"Twenty."
"Twenty," Lucile repeated, slowly. "Twenty," and resumed her seat.
"You are twenty. And I am twenty-four."
"So little difference as that!"
"But our blood warms early." Lucile voiced her reproach across the unfathomable gulf which four years could not plumb.
Frona could hardly hide her vexation. Lucile went over and looked at the miniature again and returned.
"What do you think of love?" she asked abruptly, her face softening unheralded into a smile.
"Love?" the girl quavered.
"Yes, love. What do you know about it? What do you think of it?"
A flood of definitions, glowing and rosy, sped to her tongue, but
Frona swept them aside and answered, "Love is immolation."
"Very good—sacrifice. And, now, does it pay?"
"Yes, it pays. Of course it pays. Who can doubt it?"
Lucile's eyes twinkled amusedly.
"Why do you smile?" Frona asked.
"Look at me, Frona." Lucile stood up and her face blazed. "I am twenty-four. Not altogether a fright; not altogether a dunce. I have a heart. I have good red blood and warm. And I have loved. I do not remember the pay. I know only that I have paid."