United States or Moldova ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I am going this moment to the Fur Company's quarters to send young Monsieur Crooks after you." At that Jenieve fled along the beach and took to the bushes. As she ran, weeping aloud like a child, she watched the lessening schooner; and it seemed a monstrous thing, out of nature, that her mother was on that little ship, fleeing from her, with a thoughtless face set smiling towards a new world.
Jenieve remembered all her toil for them, and her denial of her own wants that she might give to these half-savage boys, who considered nothing lost that they threw into the lake. She turned around to run to the house. But there stood Jean Bati' McClure's wife, talking through the door, and encouraging her mother to walk with coureurs-de-bois. The girl's heart broke.
Jenieve was so startled that she sprung back, catching herself on her hands. But without the least motion of walking he was far westward, showing like a phosphorescent bar through the trees, and still moving on, until the pallor was lost from sight. Jenieve at once began to cross herself. She had forgotten to do it before.
"When he is tired he will go away." Yet she was not greatly surprised when the visitor ceased knocking and came around the palisades. "Good-evening, Monsieur Crooks," said Jenieve. "Good-evening, mademoiselle," responded Monsieur Crooks, and he leaned against the hut side, cap in hand, where he could look at her. He had never yet been asked to enter the house. Jenieve continued to eat her supper.
The light cloud of smoke, drawn up to the roof-hole, ascended behind her, forming an azure gray curtain against which her figure showed, round-wristed and full-throated. The starlike camp fires on Round Island were before her, and the incessant wash of the water on its pebbles was company to her. Somebody knocked on the front door. "It is that insolent Michel Pensonneau," thought Jenieve.
Jenieve Lalotte came out of the back door of her little house on Mackinac beach. The front door did not open upon either street of the village; and other domiciles were scattered with it along the strand, each little homestead having a front inclosure palisaded with oaken posts. Wooded heights sent a growth of bushes and young trees down to the pebble rim of the lake.
Jenieve, trembling also, took the wooden bowls and spoons from a shelf and ladled out soup for the evening meal. Mama Lalotte was always willing to have the work done without trouble to herself, and she sat on a three-legged stool, like a guest. The supper pot boiled in the centre of the house, hanging on the crane which was fastened to a beam overhead.
Candles were lighted in many houses along the beach, and amongst them Mama Lalotte was probably roaming, for she had left the door open towards the lake, and the boys' voices could be heard with others in the direction of the log wharf. Jenieve took her supper bowl and sat down on the doorstep.
Her flesh and hair and clothes absorbed the scent, and it cooled her nostrils with its strange ether, the breath of sweetbrier, which always before seemed tinctured by the sun. She had a sensation of moving sidewise out of her own person; and then she saw the chief Pontiac standing on the edge of the cliff. Jenieve knew his back, and the feathers in his hair which the wind did not move.
Her grandmother had died, and Jenieve continued to keep house on the beach, having always with her one or more of the half-breed babies, until the plunge of François Iroquois allowed her to bring them all home with their mother. There was but one farm on the island, and Jenieve had all the spinning which the sheep afforded. She was the finest spinner in that region.
Word Of The Day