“She did not know that you were alive. She believed you resting in the tomb of her family in England, sent there by her own hand.”
“But why should any one keep a parent from her child—a poor, little girl, so helpless as I am, from the sight of her own mother?”
“I could not find her. For years and years I travelled through these forests, searching for her in every savage tribe, for she was not in her right mind, Mary, when she fled from her home; and I would have given my life to have carried her back to her country, and guarded her helplessness again. But she had taken another name—the name which that terrible Queen Esther had cast off, but by which she was still known among the whites. At first I hoped to find my lost wife in this Catharine Montour, but they spoke of her as a half-breed, already grey with age, and it was not till the council-fire at Wyoming that I found your mother bearing the cast-off name of that terrible woman.”
“But you saw her then?”
“Yes, as the dead might come back and find the living forever lost to them. She had heard of the shipwreck in which I was reported to have been cast away, and believed herself free. Mary, she must have been insane still, wildly insane, for against her own wishes, and fired with terrible magnanimity, she became the wife of Gi-en-gwa-tah, the Shawnee chief—the mother of that wild girl who came to us on the island.”
Mary shuddered. “Oh, this is terrible! My mother, my mother!”
“She believed me dead—she believed that you, my child, had perished by her own hand, for in the wild fancy that you were an angel that could help her up to heaven, she seized you in her arms one day and dropped you from the high window of the room in which we had confined her. We took you up, crushed and senseless, maimed, hopelessly maimed for life.”
“And she—did my own mother do this?” said Mary, looking down at her person. “Was I straight like other children before that?”
“Paradise itself had not a more lovely child. She never saw you again till you lay upon her bosom at the spring on Monockonok Island, without knowing that you were her own child. I did not tell her then—how could I say to the wife of that stern chief—to the mother of that wild forest maiden: ‘Behold! here is the husband and child whom you believed dead, rising up in judgment against you for this unnatural marriage?’ It would have driven her mad again. Still, I would have done it, after prayer and reflection—for it was a solemn duty; but when I sought for her at the foot of Campbell’s Ledge she was gone. Mary, I was ill after that, very ill for a long time, and unable to follow her; but we met face to face in that terrible massacre, and I told her all.”
“Then she knows that I am her child; she will be wondering where I am, waiting for me.”