God's Country - And the Woman by James Oliver Curwood (most popular novels .TXT) 📕

be filled with the happiness which no grief can destroy. I did not know these things--until last night. I did not know what it meant to love as Jean must love. I do now. And it will be my salvation up in these big forests, just as you have said that it will be yours down in that other world to which you will go."
He had listened to her like one stricken by a sudden grief. He understood her, even before she had finished, and his voice came in a sudden broken cry of protest and of pain.
"Then you mean--that after this--you will still send me away? After last night? It is impossible! You have told me, and it makes no difference, except to make me love you more. Become my wife. We can be married secretly, and no one will ever know. My God, you cannot drive me away now, Josephine! It is not justice. If you love me--it is a crime!"
In the fierceness of his appeal he did not notice how his words were driving the colour from her face. Still she answered him calmly, in her voice a strange tenderness. Strong in her faith in him, she put her hands to his shoulders, and looked into his eyes.
"Have you forgotten?" she asked gently. "Have you forgotten all that you promised, and all that I told you? There has been no change since then--no change that frees me. There can be no change. I love you, Philip. Is that not more than you expected? If one can give one's soul away, I give mine to you. It is yours for all eternity. Is it not enough? Will you throw that away--because--my body--is not free?"
Her voice broke in a dry sob; but she still looked into his eyes, waiting for him to answer--for the soul of him to ring true. And he knew what must be. His hands lay clenched between them. Jean seemed to rise up before him again at the grave-sides, and from his lips he forced the words:
"Then there is something more--than the baby?"
"Yes," she replied, and dropped her hands from his shoulders. "There is that of which I warned you--something which you could not know if you lived a thousand years."
He caught her to him now, so close that his breath swept her face.
"Josephine, if it was the baby alone, you would give yourself to me? You would be my wife?"
"Yes."
Strength leaped back into him, the strength that made her love him. He freed her and stood back from the log, his face ablaze with the old fighting spirit. He laughed, and held out his arms without taking her.
"Then you have not killed my hope!" he cried.
His enthusiasm, the strength and sureness of him as he stood before her, sent the flush back into her own face. She rose, and reached to one of his outstretched hands with her own.
"You must hope for nothing more than I have given you," she said. "A month from to-day you will leave Adare House, and will never return."
"A month!" He breathed the words as if in a dream.
"Yes, a month from to-day. You will go off on a snowshoe journey. You will never return, and they will think that you have died in the deep snows. You have promised me this. And you will not fail me?"
"What I have promised I will do," he replied, and his voice was now as calm as her own. "And for this one month--you are mine!"
"To love as I have given you love, yes."
For a moment he folded her in his arms; and then he drew back her hood so that he might lay a hand on her shining hair, and his eyes were filled with a wonderful illumination as he looked into her upturned face.
"A month is a long time, my Josephine," he whispered. "And after that month there are other months--years and years of them, and through years, if it must be, my hope will live. You cannot destroy it, and some day, somewhere, you will send word to me. Will you promise to do that?"
"If such a thing becomes possible, yes."
"Then I am satisfied," he said. "I am going to fight for you, Josephine. No man ever fought for a woman as I am going to fight for you. I don't know what this strange thing is that separates us. But I can think of nothing terrible enough to frighten me. I am going to fight, mentally and physically, day and night--until you are my own. I cannot lose you now. That will be what God never meant to be. I shall keep all my promises to you. You have given me a month, and much can happen in that time. If at the end of the month I have failed--I will go. But you will not send me away. For I shall win!"
So sure was he, so filled with the conviction of his final triumph, so like a god to her in this moment of his greatest strength, that Josephine drew slowly away from him, her breath coming quickly, her eyes filled with the star-like pride and glory of the Woman who has found a Master. For a moment they stood facing each other in the white stillness of the forest, and in that moment there came to them the low and mourning wail of a dog beyond them. And then the full voice of the pack burst through the wilderness, a music that was wild and savage, and yet through which there ran a strange and plaintive note for Josephine.
"They have caught us in the wind," she said, holding out her hand to him. "Come, Philip. I want you to love my beasts."


CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After a little the trail through the thick spruce grew narrow and dark, and Josephine went ahead of Philip. He followed so close that he could reach out a hand and touch her. She had not replaced her hood. Her face was flushed and her lips parted and red when she turned to him now and then. His heart beat with a tumultuous joy as he followed. A few moments before he had not spoken to her boastfully, or to keep up a falling spirit. He had given voice to what was in his heart, what was there now, telling him that she belonged to him, that she loved him, that there could be nothing in the world that would long stand between them.
The voice of the pack came to them stronger each moment, yet for a space it was unheard by him. His mind--all the senses he possessed--travelled no farther than the lithesome red and gold figure ahead of him. The thick strands of her braid had become partly undone, covering her waist and hips in a shimmering veil of gold. He wanted to touch that rare treasure with his hands. He was filled with the desire to stop her, and hold her close in his arms. And yet he knew that this was a thing which he must not do. For him she had risen above a thing merely physical. The touching of her hair, her lips, her face, were no longer the first passions of love with him. And because Josephine knew these things rose the joyous flush in her face and the wonder-light in her eyes. The still, deep forests had long ago brought her dreams of this man. And these same forests seemed to whisper to Philip that her beauty was a part of her soul, and that it was not to be desecrated in such moments of desire as he was fighting back in himself now.
Suddenly she ran a little ahead of him, and then stopped. A moment later he stood at her side. They were peering into what looked like a great, dimly lighted and carpeted hall. For the space of a hundred feet in diameter the spruce had been thinned out. The trees that remained were lopped of their lower branches, leaving their upper parts crowding in a dense shelter that shut out cold and storm. No snow had filtered through their tops, and on the ground lay cedar and balsam needles two inches deep, a brown and velvety carpet that shone with the deep lustre of a Persian rug.
The place was filled with moving shapes and with gleaming eyes that were half fire in the gloom. Here were leashed the forty fierce and wolfish beasts of the pack. The dogs had ceased their loud clamour, and at sight of Josephine and sound of her voice, as she cried out greeting to them, there ran through the whole space a whining and a clinking of chains, and with that a snapping of jaws that sent a momentary shiver up Philip's back.
Josephine took him by the hand now. With him she ran in among them, calling out their names, laughing with them, caressing the shaggy heads that were thrust against her--until it seemed to Philip that every beast in the pit was straining at the end of his chain to get at them and rend them into pieces. And yet, above this thought, the nervousness that he could not fight it out of himself, rose the wonder of it all.
Philip had seen a husky snap off a man's hand at a single lunge; he knew it was a creature of the whip and the club, with the hatred of men inborn in it from the wolf. What he looked on now filled him with a sort of awe--and a fear for Josephine. He gave a warning cry and half drew his pistol when she dropped on her knees and flung her arms about the shaggy head of a huge beast that could have torn the life from her in an instant. She looked up at him, laughing, the inch-long fangs of Captain, the lead-dog, gleaming in brute happiness close to her soft, flushed face.
"Don't be afraid, Philip!" she cried. "They are my pets--all of them. This is Captain, who leads my sledge team. Isn't he magnificent?"
"Good God!" breathed Philip, looking about him. "I know something of sledge-dogs, Josephine. These are not from mongrel breeds. There are no hounds, no malemutes, none of the soft-footed breeds here. They are WOLF!"
She rose and stood beside him, panting, triumphant, glorious.
"Yes--they've all got the strain of wolf," she said. "That is why I love them, Philip. They are of the forests. AND I HAVE MADE THEM LOVE ME!"
A yellow beast, with small, dangerous eyes, was leaping fiercely at the end of his chain close to them. Philip pointed to him.
"And you would trust yourself THERE?" he exclaimed, catching her by the arm.
"That is Hero," she said. "Once his name was Soldier. Three years ago a man from Thoreau's Place offered me an insult in the woods, and Soldier almost killed him. He would have killed him if I had not dragged him off. From that day I called him Hero. He is a quarter-strain wolf."
She went to the husky, and the yellow giant leaped up against her, so that her arms were about him, with his wolfish muzzle reaching for her face. Under the cedars Philip's face was as white as the snow out in the open. Josephine saw this, and came and put her arm through his fondly.
"You are afraid for me, Philip?" she asked, with a little laugh of pleasure at his anxiety. "You mustn't be, for you must love them--for my sake. I have brought them all up from puppyhood. And they would fight for me--just as you would fight for me, Philip. Once I was lost in a storm. Father turned the dogs loose. And they found me--miles and miles away. When you hear the