"Aurore"

By ETHEL WATTS MUMFORD
From Pictorial Review

"Your name!--Votre nom?" Crossman added, for in the North Country not many of the habitants are bilingual.

She looked at him and smiled slowly, her teeth white against cardinal-flower lips.

"Ma name? Aurore," she answered in a voice as mystically slow as her smile, while the mystery of her eyes changed and deepened.

Crossman watched her, fascinated. She was like no woman he had ever seen, radiating a personality individual and strange. "Aurore," he repeated. "You're not the dawn, you know; not a bit like it." He did not expect her to own to any knowledge of the legend of her name, but she nodded her head understandingly.

"It was the Curé name' me so," she explained. "But the Curé and me," she shrugged, "never could--how you say?--see--hear--one the other--so, I would not be a blonde just for spite to him--I am a very black dawn, n'est-ce pas?"

"A black dawn," he repeated. Her words unleashed his fancy--her heavy brows and lashes, her satiny raven hair, her slow voice that seemed made of silence, her eyes that changed in expression so rapidly that they dizzied one with a sense of space. "Black Dawn!" He stared at her long, which in no wise disconcerted her.

"Will you want, then, Antoine and me?" she asked at length.

He woke from his dream with a savage realization that, most surely, he wanted her. "Yes. Of course--you--and Antoine. Wait, attendez, don't go yet."

"Why not?" she smiled. "I have what I came for."

Her hand was on the door-latch. The radiance from the opened door of the square, old-fashioned stove shimmered over her fur cap and intensified the broad scarlet stripes of her mackinaw. In black corduroy trousers, full and bagging as a moujik's, she stood at ease, her feet small and dainty even in the heavy caribou-hide boots.

"Bon soir, monsieur," she said. "In two days we go with you to camp--me--and Antoine."

"Wait!" he cried, but she had opened the door. He rose with a start, and, ignoring the intense cold, followed her till the stinging breath of the North stabbed him with the recollection of its immutable power. All about him the night was radiant. Of a sudden the sky was hung with banners--banners that rippled and folded and unfolded, banners of rainbows, long, shaking loops of red and silver, ghosts of lost emeralds and sapphires, oriflammes that fluttered in the heavens, swaying across the world in mysterious majesty. Immensity, Silence, Mystery--The Northern Lights! "Aurora!" he called into the night, "Aurora--Borealis!"

The Curé of Portage Dernier drove up to the log-cabin office and shook himself from his blankets; his soutane was rolled up around his waist and secured with safety-pins; his solid legs were encased in the heaviest of woollen trousers and innumerable long stockings. His appearance was singularly divided--clerical above, under the long wool-lined cape, and "lay" below. Though the thermometer showed a shockingly depressed figure, the stillness and the warmth of the sun, busy at diamond-making in the snow, gave the feeling of spring.

The sky was inconceivably blue. The hard-frozen world was one immaculate glitter, the giant evergreens standing black against its brightness. The sonorous ring of axes on wood, the gnawing of saws, the crunching of runners, the crackling crash of distant trees falling to the woodsmen's onslaughts--Bijou Falls logging-camp was a vital centre of joyous activity.

The Curé grinned and rubbed his mittened hands. "H--Hola!" he called.

At his desk in the north window Crossman heard the hail, and went to the door. At sight of the singular padded figure his face lifted in a grin. "Come in, Father," he exclaimed; "be welcome."

"Ah," said the Priest, his pink face shining with benevolence, "I thank you. Where is my friend, that good Jakapa? I am on my monthly circuit, and I thought to see what happens at the Falls of the Bijou." He stepped inside the cabin and advanced to the stove with outstretched hands. "I have not the pleasure," he said tentatively.

"My name is Crossman," the other answered. "I am new to the North."

"Ah, so? I am the Curé of Portage Dernier, but, as you see, I must wander after my lambs--very great goats are they, many of them, and the winter brings the logging. So I, too, take to the timber. My team," he waved an introducing hand at the two great cross-bred sled-dogs that unhooked from their traces had followed him in and now sat gravely on their haunches, staring at the fire. "You are an overseer for the company?" suggested the Curé, politely curious--"or perhaps you cruise?"

Crossman shook his head. "No, mon père. I came up here to get well."

"Ah," said the Curé, sympathetically tapping his lung. "In this air of the evergreens and the new wood, in the clean cold--it is the world's sanatorium--you will soon be yourself again."

Crossman smiled painfully. "Perhaps here"--he laid a long, slender finger on his broad chest--"but I heal not easily of the great world sickness--the War. It has left its mark! The War, the great malady of the world."

"You are right." Meditatively the Priest threw aside his cape and began unfastening the safety-pins that held up his cassock. "You say well. It strikes at the heart."

Crossman nodded.

"Yet it passes, my son, and Nature heals; as long as the hurt be in Nature, Nature will take care. And you have come where Nature and God work together. In this great living North Country, for sick bodies and sick souls, the good God has His good sun and His clean winds." He nodded reassurance, and Crossman's dark face cleared of its brooding.

"Sit down, Father." He advanced a chair.

"So," murmured the Curé, continuing his thought as he sank into the embrace of thong and withe. "So you were in the War, and did you take hurt there, my son?"

Crossman nodded. "Trench pneumonia, and then the rat at the lung; but of shock, something also. But I think it was not concussion, as the doctors said, but soul-shock. It has left me, Father, like Mohammed's coffin, suspended. I think I have lost my grip on the world--and not found my hold on another."

"Shock of the soul," the Priest ruminated. "Your soul is bruised, my son. We must take care of it." His voice trailed off. There was silence in the little office broken only by the yawn and snuffle of the sled-dogs.

Suddenly the door swung open. In the embrasure stood Aurore in her red mackinaw and corduroy trousers. A pair of snowshoes hung over her back, and her hand gripped a short-handled broad axe. Her great eyes turned from Crossman to the Curé, and across her crimson mouth crept her slow smile. The Curé sprang to his feet at sight of her, his face went white, and the lines from nose to lips seemed to draw in.

"Aurore!" he exclaimed; "Aurore!"

"Oui, mon père," she drawled. "It is Aurore." She struck a provocative pose, her hand on her hip, her head thrown back, while her eyes changed colour as alexandrite in the sun.

The Curé turned on Crossman. "What is this woman to you?"

Her eyes defied him. "Tell him," she jeered. "What am I to you?"

"She is here with Antoine Marceau, the log-brander," Crossman answered unsteadily. "She takes care of our cabin, Jakapa's and mine."

"Is that all?" the Priest demanded.

Her eyes challenged him. What, indeed, was she to him? What was she? From the moment he had followed her into the boreal night, with its streaming lights of mystery and promise, she had held his imagination and his thoughts.

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