The Hidden Children

She looked at me troubled:

"How would you have me be more womanly?"

"Be less a comrade, more a sweetheart."

"Familiar?"

My heart was beating fast:

"Familiar to my arms. I love you."

"I—do not permit myself to desire your arms. Can I help saying so—if you ask me?"

"When I love you so–"

"No. Why are you, after all, like other men, when I once hoped–"

"Other men love. All men love. How can I be different–"

"You are more finely made. You comprehend higher thoughts. You can command your lesser passions."

"You say that very lightly, who have no need to command yours!"

"How do you know?" she said in a low voice.

"Because you have none to curb—else you could better understand the greater ones."

She sat with head lowered, playing with a blade of grass. After a while she looked up at me, a trifle confused.

"Until I knew you, I entertained but one living passion—to find my mother and hold her in my arms—and have of her all that I had ached for through many empty and loveless years. Since I have known you that desire has never changed. She is my living passion, and my need."

She bent her head again and sat playing with the scented grasses. Then, half to herself, she said:

"I think I am still loyal to her if I have placed you beside her in my heart. For I have not yet invested you with a passion less innocent than that which burns for her."

She lifted her head slowly, propping herself up on one arm, and looked intently at me.

"What do you know about me, that you say I am unwomanly and cold?" Her voice was low, but the words rang a little.

"Do not deceive yourself," she said. "I am fashioned for love as thoroughly as are you—for love sacred or profane. But who am I to dare put on my crown of womanhood? Let me first know myself—let me know what I am, and if I truly have even a right to the very name I wear. Let me see my own mother face to face—hold her first of all in my embrace—give my lips first to her, yield to her my first caresses.... Else," and her face paled, "I do not know what I might become—I do not know, I tell you—having been all my life deprived of intimacy—never having known familiar kindness or its lightest caress—and half dead sometimes of the need of it!"

She straightened up, clenching her hands, then smiled her breathless little smile.

"Think of it, Euan! For twenty years I have wanted her caresses—or such harmless kindness of somebody—almost of anybody! My foster-mother never kissed me, never put her arm about me—or even laid her hand lightly upon my shoulder—as did that girl do to you on the stairs.... I tell you, to see her do it went through me like a Shawanese arrow–"

She forced a mirthless smile, and clasped her fingers across her knee:

"So bitterly have I missed affection all my life," she added calmly. "…And now you come into my life! Why, Euan—and my sentiments were truly pure and blameless when you were there that night with me on the rock under the clustered stars—and I left for you a rose—and my heart with it!—so dear and welcome was your sudden presence that I could have let you fold me in your arms, and so fallen asleep beside you, I was that deathly weary of my solitude and ragged isolation."

She made a listless gesture:

"It is too late for us to yield to demonstration of your affection now, anyway—not until I find myself safe in the arms that bore me first. God knows how deeply it would affect me if you conquered me, or what I would do for very gratitude and happiness under the first close caress.... Stir not anything of that in me, Euan. Let me not even dream of it. It were not well for me—not well for me. For whether I love you as I do, or—otherwise and less purely—it would be all the same—and I should become—something—which I am not—wedded or otherwise—not my free self, but to my lesser self a slave, without ambition, pride—wavering in that fixed resolve which has brought me hither.... And I should live and die your lesser satellite, unhappy to the very end."

After a silence, I said heavily:

"Then you have not renounced your purpose?"

"No."

"You still desire to go to Catharines-town?"

"I must go."

"That was the burden of your conversation with the Sagamore but now?"

"Yes."

"He refused to aid you?"

"He refused."

"Why, then, are you not content to wait here—or at Albany?"

She sat for a long while with head lowered, then, looking up quietly:

"Another pair of moccasins was left outside my door last night."

"What! At Croghan's? Inside our line!" I exclaimed incredulously.

"Aye. But this time the message sewed within them differed from all the others. And on the shred of bark was written: 'Swift moccasins for little feet as swift. The long trail opens. Come!'"

"You think your mother wrote it?" I asked, astounded.

"Yes.... She wrote the others."

"Well?"

"This writing is the same."

"The same hand that wrote the other messages throughout the years?"

"The same."

"Have you told the Sagamore of this?"

"I told him but now—and for the first time."

"You told him everything?"