The tall spare form drawn up to its full height, the out-flung command, the dark eagle-like face, the fiercely blazing eye, the haughty mien, the ringing trumpet tone, all this, with an acute and damnatory consciousness of baseness and all too fully deserved rebuke, combined to produce upon Gaspard’s sensitive, artistic soul a truly appalling and overwhelming effect. His whole being shrivelled within him like a growing tree before the blast of a scorching flame. An abasing degradation swept his soul bare of any and every sense of manhood. For some moments he stood utterly deprived of speech or movement. An intolerable agony of humiliation paralysed his mental processes. His mind was blank. He sought for a word but no word seemed adequate. Nor could he move from the spot. Fascinated by that superb, terrible, living embodiment of vengeful judgment, he was held rooted to earth. That final utterance of blighting contempt, “Go! dog!” inhibited thought or motion. Suddenly there flamed up against the blank wall of his imagination, as if in a fiery scroll, the words of ancient doom, “Depart from me, ye cursed.” He was conscious at once of an agonising desire to be gone and of an utter powerlessness to lift his feet from their place.
A soft cry and a rush of feet released him. It was Onawata. Swiftly she came to him, flung her arms round his neck, laid her head against his breast, and there rested for a few moments. Then, with her one arm still resting on his shoulder, she faced the old chief and poured forth a passionate defence of the man against whom he had pronounced his bitter and contemptuous indictment. The blame for her wrong was hers as much as his. She had come to him, she had loved him, she loved him still though he had forgotten her. Today he had saved her child from death, and yesterday his woman had done the same. Tomorrow she would depart to her own land, never more would she see his face, but not in humiliation and shame would he leave her now. He would carry with him her heart, her love, her life. While she spoke Gaspard felt a warm tide of gratitude well up within his heart, restoring his manhood, freeing him from the awful sense of abasing degradation which had overwhelmed him the moment before. He passed his arm round the girl and drew her toward him. But even as he did so the Indian girl tore herself free and sprang from him, her eyes staring in horror over his shoulder. Following her eyes, Gaspard turned and there beheld his wife, standing beside her pony, white, silent, bewildered. Slowly she moved toward them.
“Where is Paul?” she asked of her husband. “Is he dead?”
“Dead? Nonsense! He has just gone galloping home with Peg. Who told you about him? He was knocked out a bit, but he is perfectly all right.” His words came in a hurried flood, as if he dreaded further questioning.
Standing there, her eyes closed for a moment. “Thank God!” she murmured to herself. Then, opening her eyes as if waking suddenly from sleep, she turned them steadily first on the girl, then on the child, then on her husband and again on the child.
“Hugh, tell me,” her voice calm but terrible as the voice of doom, “whose is that child? Remember God hears.”
“Mine!” The word leaped forth from the lips of the Indian girl in a shrill cry. “Mine!” she repeated, springing before the man as if to shelter him from attack.
“Hugh, in God’s name, tell me truly, whose is that child?”
The man, unnerved by the racking emotions of the last hour and reading in her eyes that she already knew the truth which she dreaded to hear, flung up his hands with a despairing cry.
“God help you, Marion! The child is mine!”