When Gaspard turned from waving his son good-bye he found himself facing
the chief and his daughter.
“Chief, I want to speak to you about—about—that baby there.” He pointed
to the child in the girl’s arms.
The chief motioned the girl away.
“No, Father, it is my child. I will hear what is said.”
“Let her stay,” said Gaspard.
The chief grunted acquiescence. Then Gaspard spoke.
“I want to have the boy educated like a white man. I will pay for all.
But I want him to live in the North Country with his mother. That is the
best place for him just now.”
A gleam shot across the haughty face of the old chief.
“Listen!” he said in his own speech, his voice clear and vibrant with
passion. “You come to my wigwam, wounded, dying. Our people take you in,
bring you back from the land of the Great Spirit. For many moons you
live with me, my son, her brother. When you grow strong again you become
a wolf, you tear my heart; a thief, you rob my cache of the food on
which I live, you take away my treasure, my pride, my honour, my name.
On my knees”—he fell on his knees, his face distorted with passion—“I
make a prayer to the Great Spirit that some day He will show me your
face. That day will wipe out my shame in blood.” He rose from his knees.
His face once more took on its accustomed look of haughty self-command.
“Last night my daughter told me how your woman saved the child from
death. Today you too gave your blood for him. I am content. My knife
remains in its sheath. I have heard your word. It is not good. The boy
is my daughter’s son, he is my son. He will be chief after me. He will
be Indian. He will learn all that his mother has learned, and more. But
he will be Indian. Tomorrow we go to our own land. Never again will we
look upon your face, never again will you come to our land. The day you
come to our land you will die.”
“You will let me pay for the boy’s education and—and all that?” Gaspard
pleaded in a shaking voice.
“No! No thief shall pay money for the son of Wah-na-ta-hi-ta. Go! dog!”
The tall spare form drawn up to its full height, the out-flung command,
the dark eagle-like face, the fiercely blazing eye, the haughty mien,
the ringing trumpet tone, all this, with an acute and damnatory
consciousness of baseness and all too fully deserved rebuke, combined to
produce upon Gaspard’s sensitive, artistic soul a truly appalling and
overwhelming effect. His whole being shrivelled within him like a
growing tree before the blast of a scorching flame. An abasing
degradation swept his soul bare of any and every sense of manhood. For
some moments he stood utterly deprived of speech or movement. An
intolerable agony of humiliation paralysed his mental processes. His
mind was blank. He sought for a word but no word seemed adequate. Nor
could he move from the spot. Fascinated by that superb, terrible, living
embodiment of vengeful judgment, he was held rooted to earth. That final
utterance of blighting contempt, “Go! dog!” inhibited thought or motion.
Suddenly there flamed up against the blank wall of his imagination, as
if in a fiery scroll, the words of ancient doom, “Depart from me, ye
cursed.” He was conscious at once of an agonising desire to be gone and
of an utter powerlessness to lift his feet from their place.
A soft cry and a rush of feet released him. It was Onawata. Swiftly she
came to him, flung her arms round his neck, laid her head against his
breast, and there rested for a few moments. Then, with her one arm still
resting on his shoulder, she faced the old chief and poured forth a
passionate defence of the man against whom he had pronounced his bitter
and contemptuous indictment. The blame for her wrong was hers as much as
his. She had come to him, she had loved him, she loved him still though
he had forgotten her. Today he had saved her child from death, and
yesterday his woman had done the same. Tomorrow she would depart to her
own land, never more would she see his face, but not in humiliation and
shame would he leave her now. He would carry with him her heart, her
love, her life. While she spoke Gaspard felt a warm tide of gratitude
well up within his heart, restoring his manhood, freeing him from the
awful sense of abasing degradation which had overwhelmed him the moment
before. He passed his arm round the girl and drew her toward him. But
even as he did so the Indian girl tore herself free and sprang from him,
her eyes staring in horror over his shoulder. Following her eyes,
Gaspard turned and there beheld his wife, standing beside her pony,
white, silent, bewildered. Slowly she moved toward them.
“Where is Paul?” she asked of her husband. “Is he dead?”
“Dead? Nonsense! He has just gone galloping home with Peg. Who told you
about him? He was knocked out a bit, but he is perfectly all right.” His
words came in a hurried flood, as if he dreaded further questioning.
Standing there, her eyes closed for a moment. “Thank God!” she murmured
to herself. Then, opening her eyes as if waking suddenly from sleep, she
turned them steadily first on the girl, then on the child, then on her
husband and again on the child.
“Hugh, tell me,” her voice calm but terrible as the voice of doom,
“whose is that child? Remember God hears.”
“Mine!” The word leaped forth from the lips of the Indian girl in a
shrill cry. “Mine!” she repeated, springing before the man as if to
shelter him from attack.
“Hugh, in God’s name, tell me truly, whose is that child?”
The man, unnerved by the racking emotions of the last hour and reading
in her eyes that she already knew the truth which she dreaded to hear,
flung up his hands with a despairing cry.
“God help you, Marion! The child is mine!”
For five full seconds, to him they seemed hours, she stood, white-lipped
and staring. Then, turning, she walked with uncertain steps toward her
pony, adjusted the reins, attempted to mount, swayed as if to fall, but
clutched the mane and hung there.
Gaspard and the girl both sprang to her aid.
“Don’t—don’t—don’t touch me, Hugh!” she gasped, thrusting him from her.
“Marion,” he cried, his voice hurried and broken, “let me tell you.”
“No, no! Please go.” She stood a moment or two, shuddering, her hands
over her face as if to shut from her sight a terrible thing, with a
choking cry.
“My God, it has come.” Gaspard turned from his wife, plunged into the
underbrush and was lost to sight.
The Indian woman ran to the other and, clutching her skirt, fell upon
her knees crying, “Call him back, call him back quick. Let me call him
back. You will lose him forever.”
The white woman took her hands from her face, looked down upon the
Indian and said in a voice from which all hope had died, “Why call him
back? He is lost to me now.”
“No, no,” said the other, springing to her feet and seizing the white
woman’s arm. “He is yours, he is yours, only yours. Me! I am nothing to
him. It was my fault, my mistake. I knew nothing. I went to him. But to
him now I am nothing, nothing. Oh, let me call him back quick.” In her
vehemence she shook the white woman violently. But to her violence there
was no reaction. The wife slowly drew away from the grasp of the Indian
woman, climbed somehow on to her pony, and, with the face of one
stricken with her death wound, she set off slowly down the homeward
trail.
For a single moment the Indian woman followed her with scornful eyes.
This supreme, this mad folly in a woman who would turn away from a man
who so obviously and so passionately was hers, she could not understand.
It was the madness of the white race. White women did not know how to
love. She caught up her boy, ran with him to the chief.
“Take him. Keep him till I return,” she said fiercely.
“Where do you go?” said the chief sternly.
“I go to save the man I love,” she breathed.
“But who loves you not.” The chief’s tones were eloquent of scorn.
“What matters that? Not for myself I go, but for him. To bring him
back—to—her.”
“Fool!” said the chief.
“Yes, fool, fool,” she answered passionately. “But he will be
safe—and—happy.” She hurried into her wigwam, snatched a few camp
necessities and, swift as a deer, sped on the white man’s trail.