Part 25

"I am sorry, but it is not necessary," she replied, suggestively. Her face was very pale now.

"But I want to. It ain't a debt. That was only a way of putting it. I want to make you my wife. I got some position, and I can make the West sit up and look at you and be glad."

Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words were slow and measured. "There is no reason why I should marry you--not one. You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar. If my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all as a matter of course. But my father was a white man, and I am a white man's daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me the best thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you. Had I been pure white you would not have been so sure; you would have asked, not offered. I am not obliged to you. You ought to go to no woman as you came to me. See, the storm has stopped. You will be quite safe going back now. The snow will be deep, perhaps, but it is not far."

She went to the window, got his cap and gloves, and handed them to him. He took them, dumbfounded and overcome.

"Say, I ain't done it right, mebbe, but I meant well, and I'd be good to you and proud of you, and I'd love you better than anything I ever saw," he said, shamefacedly, but eagerly and honestly, too.

"Ah, you should have said those last words first," she answered.

"I say them now."

"They come too late; but they would have been too late in any case," she added. "Still, I am glad you said them."

She opened the door for him.

"I made a mistake," he urged, humbly. "I understand better now. I never had any schoolin'."

"Oh, it isn't that," she answered, gently. "Good-bye."

Suddenly he turned. "You're right--it couldn't ever be," he said. "You're--you're great. And I owe you my life still!"

He stepped out into the biting air.

For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her gaze fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild gesture of misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a passionate outburst of weeping. Sobs shook her from head to foot, and her hands, clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.

Presently the door opened and her mother looked in eagerly. At what she saw her face darkened and hardened for an instant, but then the girl's utter abandonment of grief and agony convinced and conquered her. Some glimmer of the true understanding of the problem which Pauline represented got into her heart and drove the sullen selfishness from her face and eyes and mind. She came over heavily and, sinking upon her knees, swept an arm around the girl's shoulder. She realized what had happened, and probably this was the first time in her life that she had ever come by instinct to a revelation of her daughter's mind or of the faithful meaning of incidents of their lives.

"You said no to John Alloway," she murmured.

Defiance and protest spoke in the swift gesture of the girl's hands. "You think because he was white that I'd drop into his arms! No--no--no!"

"You did right, little one."

The sobs suddenly stopped, and the girl seemed to listen with all her body. There was something in her Indian mother's voice she had never heard before--at least, not since she was a little child and swung in a deerskin hammock in a tamarac-tree by Renton's Lodge, where the chiefs met and the West paused to rest on its onward march. Something of the accents of the voice that crooned to her then was in the woman's tones now.

"He offered it like a lump of sugar to a bird--I know. He didn't know that you have great blood--yes, but it is true. My man's grandfather, he was of the blood of the kings of England. My man had the proof. And for a thousand years my people have been chiefs. There is no blood in all the West like yours. My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to me, because my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an Indian woman from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now. But some great Medicine has been poured into my heart. As I stood at the door and saw you lying there, I called to the Sun. 'O great Spirit,' I said, 'help me to understand, for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and Evil has come between us!' And the Sun Spirit poured the Medicine into my spirit, and there is no cloud between us now. It has passed away, and I see. Little white one, the white life is the only life, and I will live it with you till a white man comes and gives you a white man's home. But not John Alloway. Shall the crow nest with the oriole?"

As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice full of the cadences of a heart revealing itself, the girl's breath at first seemed to stop, so still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her, she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed her face. When the slow voice ceased, and the room became still, she lay quiet for a moment, letting the new thing find secure lodgment in her thought; then, suddenly, she raised herself and threw her arms round her mother in a passion of affection.

"Lalika! O mother Lalika!" she said, tenderly, and kissed her again and again. Not since she was a little girl, long before they left the Warais, had she called her mother by her Indian name, which her father had humorously taught her to do in those far-off happy days by the beautiful, singing river and the exquisite woods, when, with a bow and arrow, she had ranged, a young Diana who slew only with love.

"Lalika, mother Lalika, it is like the old, old times," she added, softly. "Ah, it does not matter now, for you understand!"

"I do not understand altogether," murmured the Indian woman, gently. "I am not white, and there is a different way of thinking; but I will hold your hand, and we will live the white life together."

Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and afterwards the silver moon steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and braced the heart like wine. Then, at last, before it was nine o'clock, after her custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter brooding peacefully by the fire.

For a long time Pauline sat with hands clasped in her lap, her gaze on the tossing flames, in her heart and mind a new feeling of strength and purpose. The way before her was not clear, she saw no further than this day, and all that it had brought; yet she was as one that has crossed a direful flood and finds herself on a strange shore in an unknown country, with the twilight about her, yet with so much of danger passed that there was only the thought of the moment's safety round her, the camp-fire to be lit, and the bed to be made under the friendly trees and stars.

For a half-hour she sat so, and then, suddenly, she raised her head listening, leaning toward the window, through which the moonlight streamed. She heard her name called without, distinct and strange--"Pauline! Pauline!"

Starting up, she ran to the door and opened it. All was silent and cruelly cold. Nothing but the wide plain of snow and the steely air. But as she stood intently listening, the red glow from the fire behind her, again came the cry--"Pauline!"--not far away. Her heart beat hard, and she raised her head and called--why was it she should call out in a language not her own?--"Qu'appelle? Qu'appelle?"