Anne: A Novel

The lesson was nearly over when Rast Pronando appeared; he was to enter college – a Western college on one of the lower lakes – early in the spring, and that prospect made the chaplain's lessons seem dull to him. "Very likely they will not teach at all as he does; I shall do much better if I go over the text-books by myself," he said, confidentially, to Anne. "I do not want to appear old-fashioned, you know."

"Is it unpleasant to be old-fashioned? I should think the old fashions would be sure to be the good ones," said the girl. "But I do not want you to go so far beyond me, Rast; we have always been even until now. Will you think me old-fashioned too when you come back?"

"Oh no; you will always be Anne. I can predict you exactly at twenty, and even thirty: there is no doubt about you."

"But shall I be old-fashioned?"

"Well, perhaps; but we don't mind it in women. All the goddesses were old-fashioned, especially Diana. You are Diana."

"Diana, a huntress. She loved Endymion, who was always asleep," said Anne, quoting from her school-girl mythology.

This morning Rast had dropped in to read a little Greek with his old master, and to walk home with Anne. The girl hurried through her Hamlet, and then yielded the place to him. It was a three-legged stool, the only companion the arm-chair had, and it was the seat for the reciting scholar; the one who was studying sat in a niche on the window-seat at a little distance. Anne, retreating to this niche, began to rebraid her hair.

"But she, within – within – singing with enchanting tone, enchanting voice, wove with a – with a golden shuttle the sparkling web," read Rast, looking up and dreamily watching the brown strands taking their place in the long braid. Anne saw his look, and hurried her weaving. The girl had thought all her life that her hair was ugly because it was so heavy, and neither black nor gold in hue; and Rast, following her opinion, had thought so too: she had told him it was, many a time. It was characteristic of her nature that while as a child she had admired her companion's spirited, handsome face and curling golden locks, she had never feared lest he might not return her affection because she happened to be ugly; she drew no comparisons. But she had often discussed the subject of beauty with him. "I should like to be beautiful," she said; "like that girl at the fort last summer."

"Pooh! it doesn't make much difference," answered Rast, magnanimously. "I shall always like you."

"That is because you are so generous, dear."

"Perhaps it is," answered the boy.

This was two years before, when they were fourteen and fifteen years old; at sixteen and seventeen they had advanced but little in their ideas of life and of each other. Still, there was a slight change, for Anne now hurried the braiding; it hurt her a little that Rast should gaze so steadily at the rough, ugly hair.

When the Greek was finished they said good-by to the chaplain, and left the cottage together. As they crossed the inner parade-ground, taking the snow path which led toward the entrance grating, and which was kept shovelled out by the soldiers, the snow walls on each side rising to their chins, Rast suddenly exclaimed: "Oh, Annet, I have thought of something! I am going to take you down the fort hill on a sled. Now you need not object, because I shall do it in any case, although we are grown up, and I am going to college. Probably it will be the last time. I shall borrow Bert Bryden's sled. Come along."

All the boy in him was awake; he seized Anne's wrist, and dragged her through first one cross-path, then another, until at last they reached the commandant's door. From the windows their heads had been visible, turning and crossing above the heaped-up snow. "Rast, and Anne Douglas," said Mrs. Bryden, recognizing the girl's fur cap and the youth's golden hair. She tapped on the window, and signed to them to enter without ceremony. "What is it, Rast? Good-morning, Anne; what a color you have, child!"

"Rast has been making me run," said Anne, smiling, and coming toward the hearth, where the fort ladies were sitting together sewing, and rather lugubriously recalling Christmas times in their old Eastern homes.

"Throw off your cloak," said Mrs. Cromer, "else you will take cold when you go out again."

"We shall only stay a moment," answered Anne.

The cloak was of strong dark blue woollen cloth, closely fitted to the figure, with a small cape; it reached from her throat to her ankles, and was met and completed by fur boots, fur gloves, and a little fur cap. The rough plain costume was becoming to the vigorous girl. "It tones her down," thought the lieutenant's wife; "she really looks quite well."

In the mean while Rast had gone across to the dining-room to find Bert Bryden, the commandant's son, and borrow his sled.

"And you're really going to take Miss Douglas down the hill!" said the boy. "Hurrah! I'll look out of the side window and see. What fun! Such a big girl to go sliding!"

Anne was a big girl to go; but Rast was not to be withstood. She would not get on the sled at the door, as he wished, but followed him out through the sally-port, and round to the top of the long steep fort hill, whose snowy slippery road-track was hardly used at all during the winter, save by coasters, and those few in number, for the village boys, French and half-breeds, did not view the snow as an amusement, or toiling up hill as a recreation. The two little boys at the fort, and what Scotch and New England blood there was in the town, held a monopoly of the coasting.

"There they go!" cried Bert, from his perch on the deep window-seat overlooking the frozen Straits and the village below. "Mamma, you must let me take you down now; you are not so big as Miss Douglas."

Mrs. Bryden, a slender little woman, laughed. "Fancy the colonel's horror," she said, "if he should see me sliding down that hill! And yet it looks as if it might be rather stirring," she added, watching the flying sled and its load. The sled, of island manufacture, was large and sledge-like; it carried two comfortably. Anne held on by Rast's shoulders, sitting behind him, while he guided the flying craft. Down they glided, darted, faster and faster, losing all sense of everything after a while save speed. Reaching the village street at last, they flew across it, and out on the icy pier beyond, where Rast by a skillful manœuvre stopped the sled on the very verge. The fort ladies were all at the windows now, watching.

"How dangerous!" said Mrs. Bryden, forgetting her admiration of a moment before with a mother's irrelevant rapidity. "Albert, let me never see or hear of your sliding on that pier; another inch, and they would have gone over, down on the broken ice below!"

"I couldn't do it, mamma, even if I tried," replied Master Albert, regretfully; "I always tumble off the sled at the street, or else run into one of the warehouses. Only Rast Pronando can steer across slanting, and out on that pier."

"I am very glad to hear it," replied Mrs. Bryden; "but your father must also give you his positive commands on the subject. I had no idea that the pier was ever attempted."

"And it is not, mamma, except by Rast," said the boy. "Can't I try it when I am as old as he is?"

"Hear the child!" said Mrs. Cromer, going back to her seat by the fire; "one would suppose he expected to stay here all his life. Do you not know, Bert, that we are only here for a little while – a year or two? Before you are eighteen months older very likely you will find yourself out on the plains. What a life it is!"

The fort ladies all sighed. It was a habit they had. They drew the dreariest pictures of their surroundings and privations in their letters homeward, and really believed them, theoretically. In truth, there were some privations; but would any one of them have exchanged army life for civilian? To the last, thorough army ladies retain their ways; you recognize them even when retired to private and perhaps more prosperous life. Cosmopolitans, they do not sink into the ruts of small-town life; they are never provincial. They take the world easily, having a pleasant, generous taste for its pleasures, and making light of the burdens that fall to their share. All little local rules and ways are nothing to them: neither here nor anywhere are they to remain long. With this habit and manner they keep up a vast amount of general cheeriness – vast indeed, when one considers how small the incomes sometimes are. But if small, they are also sure.

"Rast Pronando is too old for such frolics, I think," said Mrs. Rankin, the lieutenant's wife, beginning another seam in the new dress for her baby.

"He goes to college in the spring; that will quiet him," said Mrs. Bryden.

"What will he do afterward? Is he to live here? At this end of the world – this jumping-off place?"

"I suppose so; he has always lived here. But he belongs, you know, to the old Philadelphia family of the same name, the Peter Pronandos."

"Does he? How strange! How did he come here?"

"He was born here: Dr. Gaston told me his history. It seems that the boy's father was a wild younger son of the second Peter, grandson, of course, of the original Peter, from whom the family derive all their greatness —and money. This Peter the third, only his name was not Peter, but John (the eldest sons were the Peters), wandered away from home, and came up here, where his father's name was well known among the directors of the Fur Company. John Pronando, who must have been of very different fibre from the rest of the family, liked the wild life of the border, and even went off on one or two long expeditions to the Red River of the North and the Upper Missouri after furs with the hunters of the Company. His father then offered him a position here which would carry with it authority, but he curtly refused, saying that he had no taste for a desk and pen like Peter. Peter was his brother, who had begun dutifully at an early age his life-long task of taking care of the large accumulation of land which makes the family so rich. Peter was the good boy always. Father Peter was naturally angry with John, and inclined even then to cross his name off the family list of heirs; this, however, was not really done until the prodigal crowned his long course of misdeeds by marrying the pretty daughter of a Scotchman, who held one of the smaller clerkships in the Company's warehouses here – only a grade above the hunters themselves. This was the end. Almost anything else might have been forgiven save a marriage of that kind. If John Pronando had selected the daughter of a flat-boat man on the Ohio River, or of a Pennsylvania mountain wagoner, they might have accepted her – at a distance – and made the best of her. But a person from the rank and file of their own Fur Company – it was as though a colonel should marry the daughter of a common soldier in his own regiment: yes, worse, for nothing can equal the Pronando pride. From that day John Pronando was simply forgotten – so they said. His mother was dead, so it may have been true. A small sum was settled upon him, and a will was carefully drawn up forever excluding him and the heirs he might have from any share in the estate. John did not appear to mind this, but lived on merrily enough for some years afterward, until his sweet little wife died; then he seemed to lose his strength suddenly, and soon followed her, leaving this one boy, Erastus, named after the maternal grandfather, with his usual careless disregard of what would be for his advantage. The boy has been brought up by our good chaplain, although he lives with a family down in the village; the doctor has husbanded what money there was carefully, and there is enough to send him through college, and to start him in life in some way. A good education he considered the best investment of all."

"In a fresh-water college?" said Mrs. Cromer, raising her eyebrows.

"Why not, for a fresh-water boy? He will always live in the West."

"He is so handsome," said Mrs. Rankin, "that he might go Eastward, captivate his relatives, and win his way back into the family again."

"He does not know anything about his family," said the colonel's wife.

"Then some one ought to tell him."

"Why? Simply for the money? No: let him lead his own life out here, and make his own way," said Mrs. Bryden, warmly.

"What a radical you are, Jane!"

"No, not a radical; but I have seen two or three of the younger Pronandos, of the fourth generation, I mean, and whenever I think of their dead eyes, and lifeless, weary manner, I feel like doing what I can to keep Rast away from them."

"But the boy must live his life, Jane. These very Pronandos whom you describe will probably be sober and staid at fifty: the Pronandos always are. And Rast, after all, is one of them."

"But not like them. He would go to ruin, he has so much more imagination than they have."

"And less stability?"

"Well, no; less epicureanism, perhaps. It is the solid good things of life that bring the Pronandos back, after they have indulged in youthful wildness: they have no taste for husks."

Then the colonel came in, and, soon after, the sewing circle broke up, Mrs. Cromer and Mrs. Rankin returning to their quarters in the other cottages through the walled snow-paths. The little fort was perched on the brow of the cliff, overlooking the village and harbor; the windows of the stone cottages which formed the officers' quarters commanded an uninterrupted view of blue water in summer, and white ice fields in winter, as far as the eye could reach. It could hardly have withstood a bombardment; its walls and block-houses, erected as a defense against the Indians, required constant propping and new foundation-work to keep them within the requirements of safety, not to speak of military dignity. But the soldiers had nothing else to do, and, on the whole, the fort looked well, especially from the water, crowning the green height with buttressed majesty. During eight months of the year the officers played chess and checkers, and the men played fox-and-geese. The remaining four months, which comprised all there was of spring, summer, and autumn, were filled full of out-door work and enjoyment; summer visitors came, and the United States uniform took its conquering place, as usual, among the dancers, at the picnics, and on the fast-sailing fishing-boats which did duty as yachts, skimming over the clear water in whose depths fish could be seen swimming forty feet below. These same fish were caught and eaten – the large lake trout, and the delicate white-fish, aristocrat of the freshwater seas; three-quarters of the population were fishermen, and the whole town drew its food from the deep. The business had broadened, too, as the Prairie States became more thickly settled, namely, the salting and packing for sale of these fresh-water fish. Barrels stood on the piers, and brisk agents, with pencils behind their ears, stirred the slow-moving villagers into activity, as the man with a pole stirs up the bears. Fur-bearing animals had had their day; it was now the turn of the creatures of the deep.

"Let us stop at the church-house a moment and see Miss Lois," said Rast, as, dragging the empty sled behind him, he walked by Anne's side through the village street toward the Agency.

"I am afraid I have not time, Rast."