The birth of their boy drew them still more closely together, and, content with the world of happiness which they could center in their home, they came unrepiningly out to the New World. During the summer, business of importance took the Governor to Montreal, whither his wife and child accompanied him. While there, they received intelligence of the arrival of an old friend and relative of de Laguy at Quebec, and, as the Governor could not leave for some time, Adèle determined to return at once in order to welcome him at the gubernatorial castle.
The parting between the young husband and his wife was very painful, but it would be only of brief duration, and the Governor saw his treasures depart under the charge of a numerous escort without fear for her safety or anxiety beyond the pain of separation. The Governor’s wife made the journey in boats, and, as the weather was delightful, the trip was exceedingly pleasant.
Adèle did her best to shake off the oppression which parting from her husband had caused, with the unselfishness which made one of the most beautiful traits of her character, and endeavored to make every return for the efforts which the officers, who commanded her escort, employed to render her journey pleasant. So she drifted on toward her own sumptuous home, counting the days in her loving heart as blanks in her life till they brought back her husband.
While this journey was taking place, Mahaska and her band of warriors were threading the forest till they reached the vicinity of the St. Lawrence. It had been a dreary journey to Gi-en-gwa-tah; Mahaska had paid very little attention to his presence, but she never missed an opportunity to make his slight impatience apparent to the band, and to irritate, him by a thousand feminine efforts of malice. Still, he would not speak harshly to her; in spite of all, he loved her with the fervor of a noble heart that has set all its hopes on one object. He suffered cruelly and he changed greatly during those long days, but he bore up bravely under the heart-martyrdom which she inflicted on him. But he watched her; doubt and jealousy grew every day stronger in his mind. If once fully convinced that she was deceiving his people, all his love would not prevent his exposing her plots; his keen sense of honor and right would not have allowed him to remain silent.
So they journeyed on, but nothing arose to throw light upon the trouble in his mind or to make the reason of this hasty journey more apparent. He could neither eat nor sleep; all his faculties seemed absorbed in that eager suspense as if some great crisis were at hand and he was waiting for its approach.
Besides her other reasons for this expedition, Mahaska had one which was unknown to any human being—a project which she might not be able to carry out at that time, but which was swayed by the passion in her nature next in magnitude to her thirst for powder and revenge—her love of wealth.
It was a plan which would be very difficult to carry out, and in which she could not trust even the most faithful of her band, resulting from a secret confided to her by her grandmother, Ahmo, just before her death, a few months previously. It was Ahmo to whose baleful influence the child of Count Frontenac owed much of the unnatural ferocity of her nature. It was Ahmo who had instilled into Mahaska’s mind the idea that Frontenac had poisoned her mother—she it was who had inspired the girl with the idea of a queenly supremacy over the tribes of the Six Nations, by whom her mother’s father, the great chief and prophet Nemono, had been held in the greatest reverence. After Mahaska’s rejection by the gay young cavalier—de Laguy—to whom she made a remarkable proposition of marriage, but who rejected her strange suit and soon wed Adèle, Mahaska’s foster-sister and companion—the half-breed’s passions were in a fit mood to bend to the will of Ahmo’s cunning and treacherous nature, and the girl passed off among the Indians to become their queen and prophet. Old Ahmo’s implacable soul only stayed long enough in its worn out body to see her grandchild the wife of one of the Seneca braves and the acknowledged princess of the tribe.
It was just after Mahaska’s arrival among the Senecas, that she was one day sitting in her lodge, reflecting upon the savage life which now she had chosen, when the draperies were flung back and Ahmo entered the apartment. Her form was bent; her steps tottering and feeble, and it was evident that she was rapidly passing away beyond the restlessness of this life.
She had been for several days confined to her bed; Mahaska, hence, looked in astonishment at her entrance.
“Ahmo could not rest; she longed to see her grandchild once again.”