Heralds of Empire | Page 9

ending to our last lesson,
she must affect an air of injury. 'Twas neither her fault nor mine, I

declare, coaxing back her good-humour; 'twas the fault of the face. I
wanted to see where the white began and the pink ended. Then Rebecca,
with cheeks a-bloom under the hiding of her bonnet, quickens steps to
the meeting-house; but as a matter of course we walk home together,
for behind march the older folk, staidly discoursing of doctrine.
"Rebecca," I say, "you did not take your eyes off the preacher for one
minute."
"How do you know, Ramsay?" retorts Rebecca, turning her face away
with a dimple trembling in her chin, albeit it was the Sabbath.
"That preacher is too handsome to be sound in his doctrine, Rebecca."
Then she grows so mighty prim she must ask which heading of the
sermon pleases me best.
"I liked the last," I declare; and with that, we are at the turnstile.
Hortense became a vision of something lost, a type of what I had
known when great ladies came to our country hall. M. Picot himself
took her on the grand tour of the Continent. How much we had been
hoping to see more of her I did not realize till she came back and we
saw less.
Once I encountered M. Picot and his ward on the wharf. Her curls were
more wayward than of old and her large eyes more lustrous, full of
deep, new lights, dark like the flash of a black diamond. Her form
appeared slender against the long, flowing mantilla shot with gold like
any grand dame's. She wore a white beaver with plumes sweeping
down on her curls. Indeed, little Hortense seemed altogether such a
great lady that I held back, though she was looking straight towards me.
"Give you good-e'en, Ramsay," salutes M. Picot, a small, thin man with
pointed beard, eyebrows of a fierce curlicue, and an expression under
half-shut lids like cat's eyes in the dark. "Give you good-e'en! Can you
guess who this is?"

As if any one could forget Hortense! But I did not say so. Instead, I
begged leave to welcome her back by saluting the tips of her gloved
fingers. She asked me if I minded that drowning of Ben long ago. Then
she wanted to know of Jack.
"I hear you are fur trading, Ramsay?" remarks M. Picot with the
inflection of a question.
I told him somewhat of the trade, and he broke out in almost the same
words as Ben Gillam. 'Twas the life for a gentleman of spirit. Why
didn't I join the beaver trade of Hudson Bay? And did I know of any
secret league between Captain Zachariah Gillam and Mr. Stocking to
trade without commission?
"Ah, Hillary," he sighed, "had we been beaver trading like Radisson
instead of pounding pestles, we might have had little Hortense
restored."
"Restored!" thought I. And M. Picot must have seen my surprise, for he
drew back to his shell like a pricked snail. Observing that the wind was
chill, he bade me an icy good-night.
I had no desire to pry into M. Picot's secrets, but I could not help
knowing that he had unbended to me because he was interested in the
fur trade. From that 'twas but a step to the guess that he had come to
New England to amass wealth to restore Mistress Hortense. Restore her
to what? There I pulled up sharp. 'Twas none of my affair; and yet, in
spite of resolves, it daily became more of my affair. Do what I would,
spending part of every day with Rebecca, that image of lustrous eyes
under the white beaver, the plume nodding above the curls, the slender
figure outlined against the gold-shot mantilla, became a haunting
memory. Countless times I blotted out that mental picture with a sweep
of common sense. "She was a pert miss, with her head full of French
nonsense and a nose held too high in air." Then a memory of the eyes
under the beaver, and fancy was at it again spinning cobwebs in
moonshine.
M. Picot kept more aloof than formerly, and was as heartily hated for it

as the little minds of a little place ever hate those apart.
Occasionally, in the forest far back from the settlement, I caught a
flying glimpse of Lincoln green; and Hortense went through the woods,
hard as her Irish hunter could gallop, followed by the blackamoor,
churning up and down on a blowing nag. Once I had the good luck to
restore a dropped gauntlet before the blackamoor could come. With
eyes alight she threw me a flashing thanks and was off, a sunbeam
through the forest shades; and something was thumping under a velvet
waistcoat faster than the greyhound's