Being relieved of it she turned and tapped with her staff—for her moccasins were silent—slowly around the chapel, mechanically keeping herself in motion. She was so different from fanatics who bind themselves in by walls that in watching her Claire forgot the flask.
Massawippa uncorked it.
“This is a drink she brews, madame. I have heard in my father’s camp that she brews it to keep herself strong and tireless.”
Claire tasted and Massawippa drank the liquid, with unwonted disregard of a common bottle mouth. It was too tepid to be refreshing, but left a wild and spicy tang, delicious as the cleansed sensation of returning health.
“Good mother,” said Claire as she gave the hermit’s flask back, “have you seen white men in canoes on the river?”
The walking woman leaned lower on her staff with keen attention. Massawippa repeated Claire’s words in Huron, and added much inquiry of her own. The walking woman moved back and forth beside the rail, making gestures with her staff and uttering gutturals, until she ended by beckoning to them and leading them out of the chapel.
Massawippa interpreted her as saying that she had seen the white men and the Hurons following them, and had heard a voice in the woods speak out, “Great deeds will now be done.” She would take care of all whom the saints sheltered behind their altar, but she chid Massawippa for prying into mysteries when the girl asked if she had foreseen their coming. They were to go with her to Carillon and get a canoe.
She had breakfast for them down the mountain north of the chapels.
The world is full of resurrections of the body. It was nothing for two young creatures to rise up from their hard bed and plunge heartily into the dew and gladness of morning—the first morning of May.
But the miracle of life is that coming of a person who instantly unlocks all our resources, among which we have groped forlorn and disinherited. Friend or lover, he enriches us with what was before our own, yet what we never should have gathered without the solvent of his touch.