The man stood listening, held as by a spell. The anger passed from his face. In its place came in swift succession relief, surprise, perplexity, shame, humiliation. Before her superb self-abnegation he stood self-condemned, mean, contemptible. He could find no words. This girl who had in those careless days so long ago worshipped him as a god and given herself to him with never a care or question had changed into a woman, his equal in truth of feeling, in sense of right. Here she was asking his solution of a problem that was his before it was hers, and his more than hers. The boy? The little chap standing up straight on sturdy legs, gazing at him with piercing, solemn, appraising eyes—his boy? His heart gave a queer little quiver. Indian or white man? Condemned to be hunted back beyond the horizon of civilisation? Or trained, fitted for a chance for life among men? Never in his life had his thoughts raced through his mind as today in the presence of this girl, this grave, controlled woman by whose very calmness he stood accused and condemned as by a judge upon the bench. For his very life, with those clear, calm eyes reading his soul, he could make no answer. There was no answer in his mind. His first thought had been that the Indian woman should simply disappear from his world and find a home with her own people. But as he listened to her quiet and reasoned appeal in her quaintly picturesque speech, the product of the mission school, and as he looked upon her face, alight with clear-seeing intelligence, aglow with the divine light of motherhood and distinguished with a beauty beyond any he had ever known, the solution which first suggested itself to his mind somehow failed to satisfy. Then, too, the boy, the little boy—his little son—for whom he was responsible before God—yes, and, if it were known to them, before all honourable men, and that meant in his own sight. Was man ever so cornered by fate, nay, by his own doings?
“I will see you tomorrow, Onawata,” he said more gently. “I will come to your camp tomorrow.” He laid his hand upon her shoulder. At his touch and at the change in his voice, the woman was transformed, as if in a single moment the world should pass from the cold beauty of winter to the warm living glory of a midsummer day. Under the brown skin the red blood surged, rich and full, lending warmth and color to the cold beauty of her face. The rigid lines in her slim straight body suddenly seemed to melt into soft curves of winsome grace. The dark steadfast eyes grew soft as with a yearning tenderness. With a little shuddering sigh she sank upon the pine needles, her hands fluttering up toward him.
“Ah, ah, Wa-ka-no-ka” (Hunter with the Golden Hair), she said, with a long sobbing cry. “Do not speak so to me, do not touch me, or I cannot go back. Ah, how can I leave you unless you hate me?”
She swayed forward toward him, flung her arms about his ankles and held him fast, sobs deep drawn shaking her body.
Gaspard was not a hard man. Rather was he strongly, keenly susceptible of appeal to the æsthetic and emotional elements in his artistic nature. The sight of this woman, young—she was not more than twenty-two—beautiful and pitifully, hopelessly, his slave as well as his victim, moved him deeply. He leaned down over her, lifted her to her feet and, with his arms thrown about her, sought to stay her sobbing.
“Don’t, child,” he said. “Don’t cry like that. We will find some way out of the mess, or, by God,” he added with sudden passion, “we’ll make one.”
Still sobbing, she leaned against him. The absence of any suggestion of passion in him revealed to her woman’s instinct that the dream that had drawn her from her far north home was madness. She knew she was nothing to him and could be nothing to him. Her very despair quieted her, and she stood, limp and drooping, her eyes on the ground, her hands folded before her.
“Come, I will take you to your camp, and tomorrow I will talk with you,” said Gaspard, with a gentle kindness in his voice and manner.
The girl roused herself, glanced about to discover her child who was busying himself among the bushes, then turning back to him said with a simple and quiet dignity, “No, you must not come. I do not need you. I must do without you. It is all past. Now you go back to your woman. Tomorrow you will tell me about your boy.” She rolled the child up in his blanket, slung him Indian fashion over her shoulder, picked up her bundle and with never another look at the man and with never a word she took her way.
“Tomorrow,” said Gaspard, “I shall see you. Good-bye.”