A backwoods princess

Spring was in full tide at Blackburn’s Post, but Laurentia Blackburn and the four Marys were confined to the Women’s House by rain. There sat the girlish Princess surrounded by her handmaidens in the midst of a rude magnificence which best sets off a beautiful woman. Her feet were hidden in a superb polar bearskin which had come down from the Arctic in trade; and the chair in which she sat was completely covered by the frosted pelt of a grizzly, his huge head hanging down over the back. She was a black-haired Princess with something untamed about her like the creatures whose pelts decorated her chamber. Around her neck hung an astonishing necklace of great pearls strung alternately with water-worn nuggets of gold. Her black dress was worked at the neck and wrists with an Indian design in brightly dyed porcupine quills.

The four Marys were Indian girls, small and comely, with glistening copper faces, and raven hair drawn smoothly back from their brows. They were clad alike in black cotton dresses, with doeskin moccasins upon their feet; and a stranger would have been hard put to it to tell them apart. However, he would presently have perceived that one of them stood in quite a different relation to her mistress from the others. This was Mary-Lou who was of the Beaver tribe, whereas the others were only Slavis. She was the Princess’ foster sister. She could speak English. All four girls looked at their mistress with fear and respect; but only Mary-Lou’s face was capable of softening with love. She was reading aloud from “The Lady of the Lake.”

The others were Mary-Belle; Mary-Rose and Mary-Ann. The first-named crouched in front of the small fire which had been lighted to mitigate the dampness out-of-doors. It was her task to see that it neither went out, nor became hot enough to scorch the Princess’ face. The other two sat on a bearskin engaged in embroidering velvet-soft moccasins with gayly colored silks. None of them could understand a word of what Mary-Lou was reading from the book; and the gentle, droning voice was fatally conducive to sleep. The Princess watched them lazily through the lowered fringe of her black lashes; and, when a head was seen to nod, she exploded like a fire cracker.

“Sit up straight! Your head is going down between your shoulders! Before you are twenty-five you will be the shape of a sack of hay! Your husband if you ever get one at all will look for another wife!”

It especially terrified the girls to be scolded in the English they could not understand. This particular rebuke was addressed to Mary-Belle but all three of the Slavis cringed, and their dark eyes turned helplessly this way and that like a frightened deer’s. Mary-Lou looked apprehensive, too, expecting her turn to come next.

“Well, go on with the book,” said Loseis crossly. The name Laurentia, being unmanageable on the tongue of the Indians, they had given her this one, which means “little wild duck.”

The tremulous voice resumed.

“Oh, shut the book!” Loseis cried immediately afterwards. “It is a foolish book! It tires my ears!”

“Shall I get another book?” faltered Mary-Lou.

“What’s the use? We have read them all. They are no better than this book. All foolish, goody-goody books!”

All four red girls sat scared and silent.

Loseis jumped up as if she had strong springs in her legs. “Can’t you say something, any of you? Are you all struck dumb? You can chatter fast enough among yourselves when I am not there!” She amplified her remarks in the Slavi tongue.

They were struck dumb indeed, then. They looked at each other helplessly, each one mutely begging her neighbor to speak.

“Oh, leave me! leave me! you foolish pudding faces!” cried Loseis, waving her hands. “Or I shall have to beat you!”

They faded into the kitchen with alacrity. Only Mary-Lou looked back.

“Mary-Lou, you stay here,” commanded Loseis. “I’ve got to have somebody to talk to!”

Mary-Lou leaned shyly against the door frame; pleased at being called back, yet terrified, too. Loseis paced up and down the room like a slim black panther, her eyes shooting greenish sparks.

It was a broad, low room with but two tiny windows, glass being such a difficult article to bring in seven hundred miles by pack train. There was a capacious fireplace, cunningly built out of rounded stones from the creek bed. The log walls had been plastered with clay, hardened now almost to the consistency of brick; and overhead was spread a canvas ceiling cloth to keep in the warmth. Walls and ceiling had been washed with a warm terra cotta color, which made a rich background for the beautiful furs. Over the carved bedstead in the corner was flung a robe made of hundreds of raccoons’ tails, the black stripes worked into an elaborate geometrical design. There were other robes made of otters’ skins, of lynx paws, of silver foxes. On the walls hung many beautiful examples of Indian handicraft.

Glancing at the drooping head of the red girl, Loseis cried: “Mary-Lou, you’ve got as much spirit as a lump of pemmican! When you sit by the fire I wonder that you do not melt and run down in grease!”

Mary-Lou’s head went lower still, and her eyes filled.

Seeing this, Loseis became angrier still. “There you go! Of course you’re good! That’s what makes me mad! Because I’m not good at all! I’ve got the temper of a fiend! Well, do you suppose I enjoy losing it? . . . I know I ought to say I’m sorry now, but it sticks in my throat!”

“I not want that,” murmured Mary-Lou. “I am lovin’ you anyway.”

“Well . . . I love you, too,” grumbled Loseis, shamefaced as a boy. “But I wish you weren’t so humble. It’s bad for me. This is Blackburn’s Post on Blackburn’s River; all this is Blackburn’s country, and I’m Blackburn’s daughter. There is nobody to stand up to me. I am too young to be the mistress. I don’t know anything. . . . That white man laughed at me as one laughs at a child!”

Loseis had stopped her pacing. Her head hung down. “I ought to have a white woman to tell me things,” she said wistfully. “In all my life I have seen but one woman of my own kind. That was the governess my father brought in for me. I used to mock her. But now I wish I had her back. She had nice manners. . . . He laughed at me. . . .”

She strayed to the second little crooked window, which was at the end of the room furthest from the fireplace. It overlooked a natural meadow below, where the tepees of the Slavis were built upon both sides of a creek which emptied into the main stream just beyond. In front of the Post the main river described a great convex bend, so that Loseis could look both up-stream and down. This bend was formed by a bold promontory of a hill which forced the river to go around its base. The point of this hill had been sliced off by the water, leaving a precipitous yellow cut-bank facing the Post. On the summit, startlingly conspicuous against a group of dark pine trees, was a fence of white palings enclosing a tiny plot with a cross rising out of it. By day and by night too, that grave dominated the Post.

“Ah! if only my mother had lived!” sighed Loseis.

“Let me read the book again,” suggested Mary-Lou, to divert her mind.

Loseis shook her head impatiently. She came away from the window. “I am not in the humor for it. I guess it is too fine for me. . . .” She resumed her uneven pacing. “Mary-Lou,” she suddenly cried in a voice full of pain, “when a man and a woman love I am sure they do not think such elegant thoughts as are in that book. Ah! the heart burns a hole in your breast! It is impossible to think at all!”

The red girl’s eyes followed her, full of compassion.

Observing that look, Loseis said sharply: “You must not think I am in love with that white man, Conacher. Oh, no! I was just imagining. I am far from loving him. I hate him!”

“You are not hating Conacher,” murmured Mary-Lou sadly. “Why say that to me?”

Loseis stamped her foot. “I tell you I hate him!” she cried. “That is enough for you! . . . What right had he to treat me like a child? I am Blackburn’s daughter. My father is the master of this country. And who is this white man? A poor man in a canoe with only two servants! Nobody ever heard of him before. My father was angry at his coming, and I was angry. We do not want white men coming here to spoil the fur trade!”

Mary-Lou’s silence suggested that she was far from being convinced.

“A poor man with no outfit at all!” Loseis repeated louder. “Yet he held his head as if he was as good as my father! He must be a fool. He talked to me as if I was anybody at all, and his eyes laughed when I became angry . . . !” In the midst of her tirade Loseis suddenly broke down. “Oh, I wish I could forget him!” she cried, with the angry tears springing to her eyes.

This sign of weakness gave Mary-Lou the courage to glide to her mistress, and wreathe her arms about her. “I think Conacher was a good man,” she whispered. “His eyes were true.”

These words were very sweet to Loseis; but she would not openly confess it. However, she gave Mary-Lou a little squeeze, before withdrawing herself from her arms. “No,” she said; “I shall stand by my father. My father is the finest man living. Conacher is gone. I shall never see him again. I shall quickly forget him.

“It was only because he took me by surprise,” she went on with an eagerness in which there was something pathetically childlike. “When he came paddling down our river with the two Beaver Indians I was like one struck on the head. It was like a white man falling from the skies. No white man ever came down our river before; and he so young and strong and full of laughter! He wore no hat; and the sunlight was snared in his yellow hair. I never saw hair like that. . . .”

“He like you, too, ver’ moch,” ventured Mary-Lou. “I was there when he landed. I saw it burn up like fire in his blue eyes.”

“Yes, I saw that, too,” murmured Loseis, averting her face. “But why did he change right away?”

“Because you treat him like poor, dirty Slavi,” said Mary-Lou. “No white man take that.”