The Plains of Abraham by Curwood James Oliver

Author:Curwood, James Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
Published: 1928-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X

Hidden against the scarlet-topped sumac Jeems stood for many minutes gazing upon the scene of ruin in the valley, too heavily scarred by his own tragedy to be conscious of great shock again. The thing was an enormity which stunned him, but it did not lock his reason and his power to act as the other had. Here his hopes were set at an end, and his mind, seizing upon facts as the death shroud in the valley told them to him, cut away with the keenness of a knife the mental umbra which had obscured his visions. The last of his world which might have remained was destroyed, and with it, Toinette.

Below the thin veil of smoke through which he surveyed the bottom land there was no sign of life, and no movement except the turning of the wheel at the top of the mill. The wide pasture which extended to the river was empty. Cattle and horses and sheep were gone. This emptiness lay over the earth as far as he could see. Death had gone its way as swiftly as it had come, and no enemy remained to exult over what had happened.

As he had stood at the edge of the Big Forest seeking for a figure that might have been his mother's, he now quested for one that might be Toinette's. But the same hope was not in his breast, nor the same fear. Certainty had taken their place. Toinette was dead, despoiled of her beauty and her life as his mother had been. A fury triumphed over him that was as possessive in its effect as the colour which blazed about him in the crimson bush. It had been growing in him since the moment he knelt at his father's side; it had strained at the bounds of his grief when he found his mother; it had filled him with madness, still unformed in his brain, when he covered their faces in the early dawn. Now he knew why he gripped the English hatchet so tightly. He wanted to kill. It was a terrible and totally unexcitable feeling in him. It did not give him the desire to cry out defiance or to hurl himself headlong at something. The passion which consumed him, searing his veins while it left his flesh calm, was a thing whose object of vengeance was not an individual or a group of individuals. He did not analyze the philosophy or the absurdity of this fact, but his eyes turned from the smoke-filled valley of the Richelieu to the south where Champlain lay gleaming in the sun miles away, and the hand which held the hatchet trembled in its new-born yearning for the life blood of a people whom he hated from this day and hour.

He was vaguely conscious of the whine of the mill wheel as he went down into the valley. He did not feel fear or the necessity for concealing his movement, for death would not trouble itself to return to a desolation so complete.

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