CHAPTER XXVIII
CHILDREN OF OPPORTUNITY
It was but little after dawn the next morning when I met Madame de
Montlivet in the waiting-room of the commandant.
It was a crisp, clear morning, blue of water and sky. I stood at the window and looked at the water-way that led to the east, and waited for my wife. I had several speeches prepared for her, but when she came I said none of them. I took her hand and led her to the window.
"Look at the path of the sun, madame. It was just such a morning when you came to me first."
Her hand lingered a moment in mine. "I came to the most gallant gentleman that I have ever known."
With all the kindness of her words there was something in them that spoke of parting. "Then will you stay with him?" I cried. "Mary, I know no gallant gentleman. To me he seems much a fool and a dreamer. But such as he is he is loyally yours. Will you stay with him? Or will you start for Montreal this morning with your cousin?"
"This morning?"
"Yes, as soon as the canoes can be made ready. I did not know this till after midnight. I wish I might have warned you."
"This is warning enough. I was sure that this was what you had to tell me when you asked for me so early. There is but one thing for me to do. I must go with my cousin."
I heard the words, but I felt incredulous, stupid. I was prepared to meet this decision after argument, not to have it fall on me in this leaden way. I dropped her hand and walked to and fro. It was useless to ask if she had thought out her decision carefully. Her tone disposed of that. I went back and stood before her.
"The question is yours to decide. Yet I should be a strange man if I let you go without being sure I understood your motives. If you go because you wish to be free from me,—that is all that need be said. But if I have failed to woo you as a man should—— You sealed my lips. Will you let me open them now?"
Perhaps my hand went out to her. At all events she drew away, and I thought her look frightened, as if something urged her to me that she must resist.
"No, no, you must not woo me, you must not. I beg you, monsieur."
I looked at her panic and shook my head.
"Why do you fear to love me, to yield to me? You are my wife."
"I told you. I told you the day—the last day that we were together in the woods. It would be a tragedy if we loved, monsieur."
"But you are my wife."
She looked at me. The light from the window fell full in her great eyes, and they were the eyes of the boy who had looked up at me in that very room; the boy who had captured me, against my reason, by his spirit and will, I felt the same challenge now.
"I am your wife, yes," she was saying slowly. "That is, the priest said some words over us that we both denied in our hearts. I cannot look at marriage in that way, monsieur. No priest, no ritual can make a marriage if the right thing is not there. The fact that you gave me your name to shield me does not give me a claim on you in my mind. Wait. Let me say more. You have great plans, great opportunity. You will make a great leader, monsieur."
Her words sounded mockery. "Thank you, madame." I knew my tone was bitter.
She looked at me reproachfully. "Monsieur, you are unkind. I meant what I said. I heard you in the council yesterday. I asked to go in that I might hear you. I know something of what you have done this summer. I know how you fended away massacre the other night. This is a crucial time, and you are the only man who can handle the situation; the only man who has influence to lead the united tribes. Your opportunity is wonderful. You are making history. You may be changing the map of nations, you—alone here—working with a few Indians. Believe me, I see it all. It is wonderful, monsieur."
"But what has this to do with you and me?"
"Just this, monsieur. I cannot forget my blood. I am an Englishwoman. I come of a family that has chosen exile rather than yield a point of honor that involved the crown. I have been bred to that idea of country, nurtured on it. Could I stay with you and see you work against my people? If I were a different sort of woman; if I were the gentle girl that you should marry,—one who knew no life but flattery and courts, like the lady of the miniature,—why, then it might be possible for me to think of you only in relation to myself, and to forget all that you stood for. But I am—what I am. I have known tragedy and suffering. I cannot blind myself with dreams as a girl might, and I understand fully the significance of what you are doing. We should have a divided hearth, monsieur."
She had made her long speech with breaks, but I had not interrupted her. And now that she had finished I did not speak till she looked at me in wonder.
"I am thinking. I see that it comes to this, madame. I must renounce either my work or my wife."
She suddenly stretched out her hand. "Oh, I would not have you renounce your work, monsieur!"
A chair stood in front of her, and I brushed it away and let it clatter on the floor.
"Mary! Mary, you love me!"
"No, no!" she cried. "No, monsieur, it need not mean I love you,—it need not." She fled from me and placed a table between us. "Surely a woman can understand a man's power, and glory in it—yes, glory in it, monsieur—without loving the man!"
"But if you did love me,—if you did love me, what then?"
"Oh, monsieur, the misery of it for us if we loved! I have seen it from the beginning, though at times I forgot. For there is nothing for us but to part."
"Many women have forgotten country for their husbands. The world has called them wise."
She put out her hand. "Not in my family, monsieur."
And then the face of Lord Starling came before me. "You have changed from the woman of the wilderness. You changed when you put on this gown. You were different even three days ago. Some influence has worked on you here."
She understood me. "Yes, my cousin has talked to me. Yet I think that I am not echoing him, monsieur. If I have hardened in the last few days, it is because I have come to see the inevitableness of what I am saying now. I have grasped the terrible significance of what is happening. May I ask you some questions?"
"Yes, Mary."
"Oh, you must not—— The Seneca messengers, you will let them go back and rejoin their camp?"
"We can do nothing else."
"And you will follow them, and attack them at La Baye?"
"So we plan."
"But the Senecas trust you."
"Not for a moment. They think we fear their power over the Hurons,—as we do,—so they are reckless. They are undoubtedly carrying peace belts from our Hurons to the Iroquois and the English. We must intercept them."
She tried to ward my words, and all that they stood for, away. "You see! You see!" she cried, "we must part. We must part while we can. Monsieur, say no more. I beg you, monsieur." And she dropped in a chair by the table and laid her head in her arms.
I could say nothing. I stood helpless and dizzy. I had asked her to forget her country. Yet not once had she asked me to forget mine. If I gave up my plans I could go to her now and draw her to my breast. I gripped the table, and I did not see clearly. To save her life I had jeopardized my plans; to follow her here I had jeopardized them again. But now that I knew her to be safe—— No, I could not turn back; I must walk the path I had laid for myself.
"What will you do with yourself, with your life?" I asked with stiff lips.
She did not raise her head. "We are both children of opportunity.
What is left either of us but ambition, monsieur?"
"You will help your cousin in his plans?"
"If he will work for the state."
"But you will not marry him?"
"Monsieur, I bear your name! That—that troubles me sorely. To bear your name yet work against France! Yet what can I do?"
I touched her hair. "Carry my name and do what you will. I shall understand. As to what the world thinks,—we are past caring for that, madame."
And then for a time we sat silent. I thought, with stupid iteration, of how like a jest this had sounded when the woman said it to me in the forest: a matter for coquetry, a furnishing of foils for the game. If I had realized then—— But no, what could I have done?
One thing my thought cried incessantly,—women were not made for patriotism. Yet even as accompaniment to the thought, a long line of women who had given up life and family for country passed before my memory. Could I say that this woman beside me had not equal spirit?
It seemed long that we sat there, though I think that it was not. I laid my hand on hers, and she turned her palm that she might clasp my fingers.
"You have never failed me, never, never," she whispered. "You are not failing me now." And then I heard Starling's voice at the door calling my name.
I opened to him mechanically, and accepted his pleasant phrases with a face like wood, though my manner was apt enough, I think. I had no feeling as regarded him; all my thought was with the woman by the table.
He went to her with his news, but she interrupted him. "I know." Her face was as expressionless as my own. "I am going with you," she said to him. "When do we leave?"
"In a few minutes." He looked from one to the other of us, and if he could not probe the situation it was perhaps no wonder. We had forgotten him, and we sat like dead people. For once his tremendous, compelling presence was ignored, yet my tongue replied to him courteously, and I could not but admit the perfection of his attitude. He deplored the necessity that took his cousin from me; he, and all of his people, labored under great indebtedness to me. He was dignified, direct of thought and speech. The man whom I had seen by the dead ashes of the camp fire; the man who had held my wife's miniature, and taunted me with what it meant,—that man was gone. This was an elder brother, a grave elder brother, chastened by suffering.
The woman closed the scene. "I am prepared to go with you," she told him. "I shall wait here till the canoes are ready. Will you leave me with my husband?"
She had never before said "husband" in my hearing. As soon as the door clicked behind Starling I went to her. I knelt and laid my cheek on her hand.
"You are going to stay with me, Mary. You are my wife. You cannot escape that. It is fundamental. Patriotism is a man-made feeling. You are going to stay with me. I am going now to tell Cadillac."
But I could feel her tremble. "If you say more, I must leave you. You cannot alter my mind. What has come must come. Can we not sit together in silence till I go?"
And so I sat beside her. "You are a strange woman," I said at length.
She looked at me as if to plead her own cause. "Strange events have made me. I cannot marvel if you are bitter, for I have brought you unhappiness. Yet it was in this room that I asked you to remember that I went with you against my will."
"I remember."
"And will you remember what—what I have seen? Is it strange that I understand; that I know we must part?"
I shook my head. "It is your cousin's mind impressed on yours that tells you that we must part,—that and your unfathomable spirit,—the spirit that carried you in man's dress through those weeks as a captive. It is that same spirit that will bring you back to me some day."
"Monsieur!"
"That will bring you back."
"Monsieur, no. I cannot change myself."
"Would I have you change? Mary, Mary! I took you as a boy with me to the wilderness because you had an unbreakable will and a fanatic's courage. Yet this is not the end. It is not the end."
She did not answer, and again she laid her head on the table. We had but a few minutes left now. I saw her look up at me twice before I heard her whisper, "Monsieur, you said that I loved you. But you never said that you"——
"Would it change your decision if I said it now?"
"No, no! It could not."
I slipped to my knees and laid my lips on her clasped hands. "You are part of me. You go with me whether you will or no. You are in the red sunsets that we saw together, and in the white dawns when we ate our meal and meat side by side. You are fettered to me. I cannot rid myself of your presence for a moment. I shall tell you more of this when you come to me again."
She bent to me with the color driven from her lips. "Don't! Don't! We will learn to forget. We are both rulers of our wills. We will learn to forget. Wait—— Are they calling me?"
We listened. Cadillac was at the door. We both rose.
"In a moment," I called to him. Then I turned. "Whatever happens, keep to the eastward. Don't let your Indians turn. Refuse, and make Starling refuse, to listen to any change of plan."
She was trembling. She seemed not to hear me, and I said the words again. "You must promise. You are not to go to the west."
And then she put out her hands to me. "Yes, yes, I understand. I promise. I shall not go west. But, monsieur, do not—do not go with me to the shore. Let me go alone. Let us part here."
I could have envied her the power to tremble. I felt like stone. I had but one arm, but I drew her to me till I felt her heart on mine. "This is not the end. This is not the end. But till you come to me again"—— And I would have laid my lips on hers.
But she was out of my grasp. "We—we—— It was a compact. If we—— If we did that, we could not part. Good-by, monsieur. I beg you not to go with me. God be with you. God be with you, monsieur."
I followed to the door and held to its casing as I looked after her. She had met Cadillac, and was walking with him. She, whom I had always seen erect, was leaning on his arm.