Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/461

 454 drooping lashes, her soft crimson lips and pearly teeth, her wavy masses of black silken tresses, her tall, rounded figure, moulded with a grace not to be surpassed, all seemed more characteristic of some soft southern clime, where cloudless skies and benign seasons foster and ripen beauty’s choicest flowers, than of the rude, northern wilderness, in which she had her birth. Owing probably to her white blood, and the superior degree of intelligence she possessed, Louis treated his French wife with more consideration and kindness than Indian women usually receive from their masters. He extended the same indulgence to their daughter, and the beauty nature had bestowed on this fair forest flower was not marred by toil or hardship. Her slight form was not bent with coarse labours; her smooth brow was not contracted with servile drudgery; no fierce suns or burning heats scorched and shrivelled her delicate skin; no keen wind or pelting sleet roughened or pinched it. Her primitive wants were never unsupplied, her simple wishes rarely ungratified; light of heart, graceful and gay, the vivid, tinted, airy birds that in summer come wandering from summer regions to brighten our woods, and at the coming of winter hasten back to the sweet south from whence they came, were types of her beauty and her fate. She sometimes went to Quebec with her mother, or some of the squaws of the tribe, to sell Indian baskets, or other trifling articles of their workmanship; and one day, as she stood in the market-place, she attracted the attention of a handsome young man, on whom many a colonial belle had wasted her smiles. This was the young Count de Lavillon, who had escaped from one of the convulsions of the French revolutions, just in time to save his life, which he highly valued, and a large sum of money, which was nearly equally precious to him, as on it depended all those enjoyments that he most prized. He had talents and accomplishments, was brave and honourable, but was ignorant of any higher good or nobler aim in life than the gratification of his own selfish pleasures. Fascinated by the Indian girl’s beauty, he contrived to make her acquaintance, and ere long he succeeded in making her love him as some nymph of the plains, when Greece was young, may have loved the God who had descended from Olympus for her sake. He loved her, too, as much as it was in his nature to love any one, and found a greater charm in the simple, child-like heart of this young savage, so full of spontaneous and untaught goodness and beauty, than he had ever done in the studied, artificial graces and accomplishments, and all the self-conscious attractions of the women he had known in his own land. Poor Marie was as ignorant of all conventional worlds as the birds that in winter come wandering from the snow-fields of the north, and also as innocent of evil, as harmless and artless; her heart had pure, warm, faithful feelings, her fancy was bright and sparkling; her temper sweet and docile, though lively and spirited; above all, her love for him was unbounded; her trust and faith in him infinite. He promised to love her for ever, and she believed him; and on one of those cloudless summer nights, when the moon and stars hang glowing in the sky over a flowery and perfumed earth, she left her sylvan home for ever. Perhaps it was well for her that she did not live long to try her lover’s constancy, for after custom had taken the charm of novelty from her innocent loveliness, her playful gaiety, her tenderness and naiveté, he might have found their power to please fail. Rendered wayward and fastidious by self-indulgence, weariness and disgust would have succeeded passion, and he would have sought pleasure in other objects, and she would have learned, like many before her, how slight and easily broken are the chains which bind a light and faithful heart. But she was spared those sufferings, which her sensitive nature would have felt so acutely; she died soon after giving birth to a little girl. And she died happy, for his arms were round her when she breathed her last, and her last thought was that he loved her still.

Her father and mother had felt her desertion very bitterly, the latter never reflecting that it was only a fit retribution for the ingratitude she had herself shown to her own parents; and though the rich presents Marie continually sent to their wigwam partly reconciled her mother to her loss, they failed to propitiate her more haughty and disinterested father. When she died, his grief for her death settled into hatred of her lover, but for whom she might have remained gay and happy in her native woods, and less from any natural desire to possess his daughter’s child than a wish to be revenged on one he regarded as her murderer, he contrived to carry off the infant, and gave her moodily into his wife’s charge, who received the gift as indifferently as it was bestowed. Had she shown more decided indications of her dark blood her chance of winning some affection from him might have been greater, but her beauty was altogether that of the Celtic race. From her heroic and imaginative French forefathers came her broad, thoughtful brow, and from them the light and inspiration of her beautiful eyes. And perhaps the fair traits of that sunny land, which in early youth the wife of Louis had called her own, touched some lingering chords of her early affections, for ere long she began to love the little Coralie more than she had ever loved her own daughter.

But she died almost before her little charge was able to feel or respond to her affection, and the child was then thrown altogether on the protection of her stern and unloving grandfather. Probably old Louis had always intended to restore Coral to her father before his death, but he would have carried the secret of her birth with him to his grave, if chance had not thrown O’Brien in his way just before he died. On hearing Coral’s story O’Brien readily promised to let the Count de Lavillon know that she was alive, and where she was to be found, the old hunter assuring him that he might be certain of receiving the most magnificent reward for his tidings from the generosity of the Count. But the schoolmaster’s ambition was of a more aspiring kind than old Louis had any idea of. Though he had hitherto regarded the little Indian girl with supreme indifference, he now resolved that before her father heard of her existence, she should be his wife, and the Count,