Perhaps it was this grey shadow stealing on the forest mission, the
thought of the day when that beautiful mothering sister would leave
his little friend Lydia alone with a bereft man and four small
children, or perhaps it was a yet more personal note in his life
that brought George Mansion to the realization of what this girl
had grown to be to him.
Indian-wise, his parents had arranged a suitable marriage for him,
selecting a girl of his own tribe, of the correct clan to mate with
his own, so that the line of blood heritage would be intact, and
the sons of the next generation would be of the "Blood Royal,"
qualified by rightful lineage to inherit the title of chief.
This Mohawk girl was attractive, young, and had a partial English
education. Her parents were fairly prosperous, owners of many
acres, and much forest and timber country. The arrangement was
regarded as an ideal one--the young people as perfectly and
diplomatically mated as it was possible to be; but when his parents
approached the young chief with the proposition, he met it with
instant refusal.
"My father, my mother," he begged, "I ask you to forgive me this
one disobedience. I ask you to forgive that I have, amid my fight
and struggle for English education, forgotten a single custom of my
people. I have tried to honor all the ancient rules and usages of
my forefathers, but I forgot this one thing, and I cannot, cannot do
it! My wife I must choose for myself."
"You will marry--whom, then?" asked the old chief.
"I have given no thought to it--yet," he faltered.
"Yes," said his mother, urged by the knowing heart of a woman,
"yes, George, you have thought of it."
"Only this hour," he answered, looking directly into his mother's
eyes. "Only now that I see you want me to give my life to someone
else. But my life belongs to the white girl, Mrs. Evans' sister, if
she will take it. I shall offer it to her to-morrow--to-day."
His mother's face took on the shadow of age. "You would marry a
_white_ girl?" she exclaimed, incredulously.
"Yes," came the reply, briefly, decidedly.
"But your children, your sons and hers--they could never hold the
title, never be chief," she said, rising to her feet.
He winced. "I know it. I had not thought of it before--but I know
it. Still, I would marry her."
"But there would be no more chiefs of the Grand Mansion name,"
cut in his father. "The title would go to your aunt's sons. She
is a Grand Mansion no longer; she, being married, is merely a
Straight-Shot, her husband's name. The Straight-Shots never had
noble blood, never wore a title. Shall our family title go to
a _Straight-Shot_?" and the elder chief mouthed the name
contemptuously.
Again the boy winced. The hurt of it all was sinking in--he hated
the Straight-Shots, he loved his own blood and bone. With lightning
rapidity he weighed it all mentally, then spoke: "Perhaps the white
girl will not marry me," he said slowly, and the thought of it
drove the dark red from his cheeks, drove his finger-nails into his
palms.
"Then, then you will marry Dawendine, our choice?" cried his
mother, hopefully.
"I shall marry no one but the white girl," he answered, with set
lips. "If she will not marry me, I shall never marry, so the
Straight-Shots will have our title, anyway."
The door closed behind him. It was as if it had shut forever
between him and his own.
But even with this threatened calamity looming before her, the old
Indian mother's hurt heart swelled with a certain pride in his
wilful actions.
"What bravery!" she exclaimed. "What courage to hold to his
own choice! What a _man_!"
"Yes," half bemoaned his father, "he is a red man through and
through. He defies his whole nation in his fearlessness, his
lawlessness. Even I bow to his bravery, his self-will, but that
bravery is hurting me here, here!" and the ancient chief laid his
hand above his heart.
There was no reply to be made by the proud though pained mother.
She folded her "broadcloth" about her, filled her small carved pipe
and sat for many hours smoking silently, silently, silently. Now
and again she shook her head mournfully, but her dark eyes would
flash at times with an emotion that contradicted her dejected
attitude. It was an emotion born of self-exaltation, for had she
not mothered a _man_?--albeit that manhood was revealing itself in
scorning the traditions and customs of her ancient race.
And young George was returning from his father's house to the
Mission with equally mixed emotions. He knew he had dealt an almost
unforgivable blow to those beloved parents whom he had honored and
obeyed from his babyhood. Once he almost turned back. Then a vision
arose of a fair young English girl whose unhappy childhood he had
learned of years ago, a sweet, homeless face of great beauty, lips
that were made for love they had never had, eyes that had already
known more of tears than they should have shed in a lifetime.
Suppose some other youth should win this girl away from him?
Already several of the young men from the town drove over more
frequently than they had cause to. Only the week before he had
found her seated at the little old melodeon playing and singing a
duet with one of these gallants. He locked his teeth together and
strode rapidly through the forest path, with the first full
realization that she was the only woman in all the world for him.
Some inevitable force seemed to be driving him
towards--circumstances seemed to pave the way to--their ultimate
union; even now chance placed her in the path, literally, for as he
threaded his way uphill, across the open, and on to the little log
bridge which crossed the ravine immediately behind the Mission, he
saw her standing at the further side, leaning upon the unpeeled
sapling which formed the bridge guard. She was looking into the
tiny stream beneath. He made no sound as he approached. Generations
of moccasin-shod ancestors had made his own movements swift and
silent. Notwithstanding this, she turned, and, with a bright
girlish smile, she said:
"I knew you were coming, Chief."
"Why? How?" he asked, accepting his new title from her with a
graceful indifference almost beyond his four and twenty years.
"I can hardly say just how--but--" she ended with only a smile. For
a full minute he caught and held her glance. She seemed unable to
look away, but her grave, blue English eyes were neither shy nor
confident. They just seemed to answer his--then,
"Miss Bestman, will you be my wife?" he asked gently. She was
neither surprised nor dismayed, only stood silent, as if she had
forgotten the art of speech. "You knew I should ask this some day,"
he continued, rather rapidly. "This is the day."
"I did not really know--I don't know how I feel--" she began,
faltering.
"I did not know how I felt, either, until an hour ago," he
explained. "When my father and my mother told me they had arranged
my marriage with--"
"With whom?" she almost demanded.
"A girl of my own people," he said, grudgingly. "A girl I honor and
respect, but--"
"But what?" she said weakly, for the mention of his possible
marriage with another had flung her own feelings into her very
face.
"But unless you will be my wife, I shall never marry." He folded
his arms across his chest as he said it--the very action expressed
finality. For a second he stood erect, dark, slender, lithe,
immovable, then with sudden impulse he held out one hand to her and
spoke very quietly. "I love you, Lydia. Will you come to me?"
"Yes," she answered clearly. "I will come."
He caught her hands very tightly, bending his head until his fine
face rested against her hair. She knew then that she had loved him
through all these years, and that come what might, she would love
him through all the years to be.
That night she told her frail and fading sister, whom she found
alone resting among her pillows.
"'Liza dear, you are crying," she half sobbed in alarm, as the great
tears rolled slowly down the wan cheeks. "I have made you unhappy,
and you are ill, too. Oh, how selfish I am! I did not think that
perhaps it might distress you."
"Liddy, Liddy darling, these are the only tears of joy that I have
ever shed!" cried Elizabeth. "Joy, joy, girlie! I have wished this
to come before I left you, wished it for years. I love George
Mansion better than I ever loved brother of mine. Of all the world
I should have chosen him for your husband. Oh! I am happy, happy,
child, and you will be happy with him, too."
And that night Lydia Bestman laid her down to rest, with her heart
knowing the greatest human love that had ever entered into her
life.
Mr. Evans was almost beside himself with joyousness when the young
people rather shyly confessed their engagement to him. He was
deeply attached to his wife's young sister, and George Mansion had
been more to him than many a man's son ever is. Seemingly cold and
undemonstrative, this reserved Scotch missionary had given all his
heart and life to the Indians, and this one boy was the apple of
his eye. Far-sighted and cautious, he saw endless trouble shadowing
the young lovers--opposition to the marriage from both sides of the
house. He could already see Lydia's family smarting under the
seeming disgrace of her marriage to an Indian; he could see George's
family indignant and hurt to the core at his marriage with a white
girl; he could see how impossible it would be for Lydia's people to
ever understand the fierce resentment of the Indian parents that
the family title could never continue under the family name. He
could see how little George's people would ever understand the
"white" prejudice against them. But the good man kept his own
counsel, determining only that when the war did break out, he would
stand shoulder to shoulder with these young lovers and be their
friend and helper when even their own blood and kin should cut them
off.
* * * * *
It was two years before this shy and taciturn man fully realized
what the young chief and the English girl really were to him, for
affliction had laid a heavy hand on his heart. First, his gentle
and angel-natured wife said her long, last good-night to him. Then
an unrelenting scourge of scarlet fever swept three of his children
into graves. Then the eldest, just on the threshold of sweet young
maidenhood, faded like a flower, until she, too, said good-night
and slept beside her mother. Wifeless, childless, the stricken
missionary hugged to his heart these two--George and Lydia--and
they, who had labored weeks and months, night and day, nursing and
tending these loved ones, who had helped fight and grapple with
death five times within two years, only to be driven back heartsore
and conquered by the enemy--these two put away the thought of
marriage for the time. Joy would have been ill-fitting in that
household. Youth was theirs, health was theirs, and duty also was
theirs--duty to this man of God, whose house was their home, whose
hand had brought them together. So the marriage did not take place
at once, but the young chief began making preparations on the estate
he had purchased to build a fitting home for this homeless girl who
was giving her life into his hands. After so many dark days, it was
a relief to get Mr. Evans interested in the plans of the house
George was to build, to select the proper situation, to arrange for
a barn, a carriage house, a stable, for young Mansion had saved
money and acquired property of sufficient value to give his wife a
home that would vie with anything in the large border towns. Like
most Indians, he was recklessly extravagant, and many a time the
thrifty Scotch blood of the missionary would urge more economy,
less expenditure. But the building went on; George determined it
was to be a "Grand Mansion." His very title demanded that he give
his wife an abode worthy of the ancestors who appropriated the name
as their own.
"When you both go from me, even if it is only across the fields to
the new home, I shall be very much alone," Mr. Evans had once said.
Then in an agony of fear that his solitary life would shadow their
happiness, he added quickly, "But I have a very sweet and lovely
niece who writes me she will come to look after this desolated home
if I wish it, and perhaps her brother will come, too, if I want
him. I am afraid I _shall_ want him sorely, George. For though you
will be but five minutes walk from me, your face will not be at my
breakfast table to help me begin each day with a courage it has
always inspired. So I beg that you two will not delay your
marriage; give no thought to me. You are young but once, and youth
has wings of wonderful swiftness. Margaret and Christopher shall
come to me; but although they are my own flesh and blood, they will
never become to me what you two have been, and always will be."
Within their recollection, the lovers had never heard the
missionary make so long a speech. They felt the earnestness of it,
the truth of it, and arranged to be married when the golden days of
August came. Lydia was to go to her married sister, in the eastern
part of Canada, whose husband was a clergyman, and at whose home
she had spent many of her girlhood years. George was to follow. They
were to be quietly married and return by sailing vessel up the
lakes, then take the stage from what is now the city of Toronto,
arrive at the Indian Reserve, and go direct to the handsome home
the young chief had erected for his English bride. So Lydia Bestman
set forth on her long journey from which she was to return as the
wife of the head chief of a powerful tribe of Indians--a man
revered, respected, looked up to by a vast nation, a man of
sterling worth, of considerable wealth as riches were counted in
those days, a man polished in the usages and etiquette of her own
people, who conducted himself with faultless grace, who would have
shone brilliantly in any drawing-room (and who in after years was
the guest of honor at many a great reception by the governors of
the land), a man young, stalwart, handsome, with an aristocratic
lineage that bred him a native gentleman, with a grand old title
that had come down to him through six hundred years of honor in
warfare and high places of his people. That this man should be
despised by her relatives and family connections because of his
warm, red skin and Indian blood, never occurred to Lydia. Her angel
sister had loved the youth, the old Scotch missionary little short
of adored him. Why, then, this shocked amazement of her relatives,
that she should wish to wed the finest gentleman she had ever met,
the man whose love and kindness had made her erstwhile blackened
and cruel world a paradise of sunshine and contentment? She was
but little prepared for the storm of indignation that met her
announcement that she was engaged to marry a Mohawk Indian chief.
Her sister, with whom she never had anything in common, who was
years older, and had been married in England when Lydia was but
three years of age, implored, entreated, sneered, ridiculed and
stormed. Lydia sat motionless through it all, and then the outraged
sister struck a vital spot with: "I don't know what Elizabeth has
been thinking of all these years, to let you associate with Indians
on an equality. _She_ is to blame for this."
Then and only then, did Lydia blaze forth. "Don't you _dare_ speak
of 'Liza like that!" flung the girl. "She was the only human being
in our whole family, the only one who ever took me in her arms, who
ever called me 'dear,' who ever kissed me as if she meant it. I
tell you, she loved George Mansion better than she loved her cold,
chilly English brothers. She loved _me_, and her house was my home,
which yours never was. Yes, she loved me, angel girl that she was,
and she died in a halo of happiness because I was happy and
because I was to marry the noblest, kingliest gentleman I ever
met." The girl ceased, breathless.
"Yes," sneered her sister, "yes, marry an _Indian_!"
"Yes," defied Lydia, "an _Indian_, who can give me not only a
better home than this threadbare parsonage of yours"--here she
swept scornful eyes about the meagre little, shabby room--"yes, a
home that any Bestman would be proud to own; but better than that,"
she continued ragingly, "he has given me love--_love_, that you in
your chilly, inhuman home sneer at, but that I have cried out for;
love that my dead mother prayed should come to me, from the moment
she left me a baby, alone, in England, until the hour when this one
splendid man took me into his heart."
"Poor mother!" sighed the sister. "I am grateful she is spared
_this_."
"Don't think that she doesn't know it!" cried Lydia. "If 'Liza
approved, mother does, and she is glad of her child's happiness."
"Her child--yes, her child," taunted the sister. "Child! child!
Yes, and what of the _child_ you will probably mother?"
The crimson swept painfully down the young girl's face, but she
braved it out.
"Yes," she stammered, "a child, perhaps a _son_, a son of mine,
who, poor boy, can never inherit his father's title."
"And why not, pray?" remarked her sister.
"Because the female line of lineage will be broken," explained the
girl. "He _should_ marry someone else, so that the family title
could follow the family name. His father and mother have
practically cast him off because of me. _Don't_ you see? Can't you
understand that I am only an untitled commoner to his people? I am
only a white girl."
"_Only_ a white girl!" repeated the sister, sarcastically. "Do you
mean to tell me that you believe these wretched Indians don't want
him to marry you? _You_, a _Bestman_, and an English girl?
Nonsense, Lydia! You are talking utter nonsense." But the sister's
voice weakened, nevertheless.
"But it's true," asserted the girl. "You don't understand the
Indian nation as 'Liza did; it's perfectly true--a son of mine can
claim no family title; the honor of it must leave the name of
Mansion forever. Oh, his parents have completely shut him out of
their lives because I am only a white girl!" and the sweet young
voice trembled woefully.
"I decline to discuss this disgraceful matter with you any
further," said the sister coldly. "Perhaps my good husband can
bring you to your senses," and the lady left the room in a fever of
indignation.
But her "good husband," the city clergyman, declined the task of
"bringing Lydia to her senses." He merely sent for her to go to his
study, and, as she stood timidly in the doorway, he set his small
steely eyes on her and said:
"You will leave this house at once, to-night. _To-night_, do you
hear? I'll have no Indian come _here_ after my wife's sister. I
hope you quite understand me?"
"Quite, sir," replied the girl, and with a stiff bow she turned and
went back to her room.
In the haste of packing up her poor and scanty wardrobe, she heard
her sister's voice saying to the clergyman: "Oh! how _could_ you
send her away? You know she has no home, she has nowhere to go. How
_could_ you do it?" All Lydia caught of his reply was: "Not another
night, not another meal, in this house while _I_ am its master."
Presently her sister came upstairs carrying a plate of pudding.
Her eyes were red with tears, and her hands trembled. "Do eat
this, my dear; some tea is coming presently," she said.
But Lydia only shook her head, strapped her little box, and,
putting on her bonnet, she commanded her voice sufficiently to say:
"I am going now. I'll send for this box later."
"Where are you going to?" her sister's voice trembled.
"I--don't know," said the girl. "But wherever I do go, it will be
a kindlier place than this. Good-bye, sister." She kissed the
distressed wife softly on each cheek, then paused at the bedroom
door to say, "The man I am to marry loves me, honors me too much to
treat me as a mere possession. I know that _he_ will never tell me
he is 'master.' George Mansion may have savage blood in his veins,
but he has grasped the meaning of the word 'Christianity' far more
fully than your husband has."
Her sister could not reply, but stood with streaming eyes and
watched the girl slip down the back stairs and out of a side door.
For a moment Lydia Bestman stood on the pavement and glanced up and
down the street. The city was what was known as a garrison town in
the days when the British regular troops were quartered in Canada.
Far down the street two gay young officers were walking, their
brilliant uniforms making a pleasant splash of color in the
sunlight. They seemed to suggest to the girl's mind a more than
welcome thought. She knew the major's wife well, a gracious,
whole-souled English lady whose kindness had oftentimes brightened
her otherwise colorless life. Instinctively the girl turned to the
quarters of the married officers. She found the major's wife at
home, and, burying her drawn little face in the good lady's lap,
she poured forth her entire story.
"My dear," blazed out the usually placid lady, "if I were only the
major for a few moments, instead of his wife, I should--I
should--well, I should just _swear_! There, now I've said it, and
I'd _do_ it, too. Why, I never heard of such an outrage! My dear,
kiss me, and tell me--when, how, do you expect your young chief to
come for you?"
"Next week," said the girl, from the depths of those sheltering
arms.
"Then here you stay, right here with me. The major and I shall go
to the church with you, see you safely married, bring you and your
Hiawatha home for a cosy little breakfast, put you aboard the boat
for Toronto, and give you both our blessing and our love." And
the major's wife nodded her head with such emphasis that her
quaint English curls bobbed about, setting Lydia off into a fit of
laughter. "That's right, my dear. You just begin to laugh now, and
keep it up for all the days to come. I'll warrant you've had little
of laughter in your young life," she said knowingly. "From what
I've known of your father, he never ordered laughter as a daily
ingredient in his children's food. Then that sweet Elizabeth
leaving you alone, so terribly alone, must have chased the sunshine
far from your little world. But after this," she added brightly,
"it's just going to be love and laughter. And now, my dear, we must
get back the rosy English color in your cheeks, or your young
Hiawatha won't know his little white sweetheart. Run away to my
spare room, girlie. The orderly will get a man to fetch your box.
Then you can change your frock. Leave yesterday behind you forever.
Have a little rest; you look as if you had not slept for a week.
Then join the major and me at dinner, and we'll toast you and your
redskin lover in true garrison style."
And Lydia, with the glorious recuperation of youth, ran joyously
upstairs, smiling and singing like a lark, transformed with the
first unadulterated happiness she had ever felt or known.