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Updated: June 17, 2025
I know of only one other who has done that in the last twenty years, and that other is Henry d'Arcambal himself. We three, you, Jeanne, and I, have alone triumphed over those monsters of death. All others have died. It seems like a strange pointing of the hand of God." Philip trembled. "We three!" he exclaimed. "We three," said the old man, "and for that reason you are a part of Fort o' God."
Others know it as D'Arcambal House." "Yes, I have heard of that," said Philip. He waited for Jeanne, and saw that her fingers were nervously twisting a bit of ribbon in her lap. "Of course, that is uninteresting," she continued. "You can almost guess the rest. We have lived here alone. Not one of us has ever felt the desire to leave this little world of ours.
Pierre was unapproachable; Jeanne herself was a mystery, filling him alternately with hope and despair; D'Arcambal had accepted him as a son. He could find no words adequate to his emotion; none that could describe his own happiness, unless it was in a bold avowal of his love for the girl he had saved. And this his good sense told him not to make, at the present moment.
"I must hurry, M'sieur, for it hurts me now to talk. He came first a year ago, and revealed himself to Jeanne. He told her everything. D'Arcambal was rich; Jeanne and I both had money. He threatened we bought him off. We fought to keep the terrible thing from D'Arcambal. Our money sent him away for a time. Then he returned. It was news of him I brought up the river to Jeanne from Churchill.
"They have told me," said D'Arcambal, softly. "You have brought my Jeanne home through death. Accept a father's blessing, and with it this!" He stepped back, and swept his arms about the great room. "Everything everything would have gone with her," he said. "If you had let her die, I should have died. My God, what peril she was in! In saving her you saved me. So you are welcome here, as a son.
Here, separated from all her kind, God, Nature, and a father had made her of their handiwork. The old man pointed Philip to a chair near the large table, and sat down close to him. At his feet was a stool covered with silvery lynx-skin, and D'Arcambal looked at this, his strong, grim face relaxing into a gentle smile of happiness. "There is where Jeanne sits at my feet," he said.
He wore a new rapier at his waist, and his glossy black hair was brushed smoothly back, and fell loose upon his shoulders. It was the courtier, and not Pierre the half-breed, who bowed to Philip. "M'sieur, are you ready?" he asked. "Yes," replied Philip. "Then we will go to M'sieur d'Arcambal, the master of Fort o' God."
For an hour they talked, and Philip went over one by one the events as they had occurred since the fight on the cliff, omitting only such things as he thought that Jeanne and Pierre might wish to keep secret to themselves. At the end of that hour he was certain that D'Arcambal was unaware of the dark cloud that had suddenly come into Jeanne's life.
He made no effort to speak in these moments. Pierre's eyes were dark and luminous as they sought his own. The draught he had taken gave him a passing strength. "I saw Thorpe again this afternoon," he said, more calmly. "D'Arcambal thought I had taken Jeanne to visit a trapper's wife down the Churchill. I saw Thorpe alone. He had been drinking.
Even the master of Fort o' God, to whom he had brought the child, had never seen the woman upon whose cold breast Pierre had found the little Jeanne. With nervous hands he replaced the picture with its face to the wall, and began to pace up and down the room, wondering if D'Arcambal would send for him. He had hope of seeing Jeanne again that night.
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