CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In a twist of Three Jackpine River, buried in the deep of the forest between the Shamattawa country and Hudson Bay, was the cabin in which lived Jacques Le Beau, the trapper.  There was not another man in all that wilderness who was the equal of Le Beau in wickedness—­unless it was Durant, who hunted foxes a hundred miles north, and who was Jacques’s rival in several things.  A giant in size, with a heavy, sullen face and eyes which seemed but half-hidden greenish loopholes for the pitiless soul within him—­if he had a soul at all—­Le Beau was a “throw-back” of the worst sort.  In their shacks and teepees the Indians whispered softly that all the devils of his forebears had gathered in him.

It was a grim kind of fate that had given to Le Beau a wife.  Had she been a witch, an evil-doer and an evil-thinker like himself, the thing would not have been such an abortion of what should have been.  But she was not that.  Sweet-faced, with something of unusual beauty still in her pale cheeks and starving eyes—­trembling at his approach and a slave in his presence—­she was, like his dogs, the property of The Brute.  And the woman had a baby.  One had already died; and it was the thought that this one might die, as the other had died, that brought at times the new flash of fire into her dark eyes.

“Le bon Dieu—­I pray to the Blessed Angels—­I swear you shall live!” she would cry to it at times, hugging it close to her breast.  And it was at these times that the fire came into her eyes, and her pale cheeks flushed with a smouldering bit of the flame that had once been her beauty.  “Some day—­some day—­”

But she never finished, even to the child, what was in her mind.  Sometimes her dreams were filled with visions.  The world was still young, and she was not old.  She was thinking of that as she stood before the cracked bit of mirror in the cabin, brushing out her hair, that was black and shining and so long that it fell to her hips.  Of her beauty her hair had remained.  It was defiant of The Brute.  And deep back in her eyes, and in her face, there were still the living, hidden traces of her girlhood heritage ready to bloom again if Fate, mending its error at last, would only take away forever the crushing presence of the Master.  She stood a little longer before the bit of glass when she heard the crunching of footsteps in the snow outside.

Swiftly what had been in her face was gone.  Le Beau had been away on his trapline since yesterday, and his return filled her with the old dread.  Twice he had caught her before the mirror and had called her vile names for wasting her time in admiring herself when she might have been scraping the fat from his pelts.  The second time he had sent her reeling back against the wall, and had broken the mirror until the bit she treasured now was not much larger than her two slim hands.  She would not be caught again.  She ran with the glass to the place where she kept it in hiding, and then quickly she wove the heavy strands of her hair into a braid.  The strange, dead look of fear and foreboding closed like a veil over the secrets her eyes had disclosed to herself.  She turned, as she always turned in her woman’s hope and yearning, to greet him when he entered.