True and Other Stories Part 10

"You?" cried Reefe, with the first indication of marked feeling that he had betrayed during the interview. "Who are you, then?"

"Oh, I'm a humble citizen named Lance!" said the young man, quietly.

"But I know that motto; it has been in our family for a long time."

The old man seemed to withdraw suddenly into himself. "It is a great charm," he repeated, slowly. "Wonderful! It keeps off harm and trouble.

My father gave it to me."

"Where did he find it?" Lance inquired.

"He found it far, far back," Reefe responded. But his tone was so vague, and his expression grew so introspective, that Lance half imagined that the old face was growing still older--immeasurably more ancient--as he gazed upon it, and that the speaker was removing himself, by some occult spell, into a distant past.

"You spoke of our people," he said, at length. "Did you mean your family?"

"Where we came from. Our people--over there," the herb doctor answered, pointing uncertainly to his right, in a direction, Lance noticed, which signified farther to the North, up the Sound.

"Yes, they always had that charm," Adela now said. "I don't know why.

Who can tell? It all comes from the old story of the Indians and the white folks."

Her father appeared to have lapsed into a semi-trance, or to be dozing; but Adela looked aroused; her interest was kindled, and she was evidently prepared to be communicative.

"Oh, is there a story?" Jessie cried. "Why, I never heard it. Do tell us, Deely!"

Some judicious urging was required before the girl would speak; but, in the end, the inquisitive lovers succeeded in persuading her, and at last she narrated to them the legend of her "people," the substance of which shall here be given, though not precisely in her language.

A great many years ago--as many as there are buds on a tree--an old man dwelt in a wigwam beside the sweet waters, with his only child, a beautiful girl. They had come out of the sea together, no man could remember when; but, while the other people in the wigwams were dark and red, these were almost white. They had been so long in the sea that the foam of the waves, touching their faces, had made them so white. And the old man loved his daughter very much. They spoke a strange language together, but when others talked to them, they replied in the words that all understood.

The old man had no name; but his daughter was called Ewayea, which meant Lullaby or Rest-Song. She, too, loved her father. They lived for each other; and the old man seemed always waiting for something, uneasy and troubled, but Ewayea made him rest and sang him to sleep; and he slept much, and was happy. But when he was resting, Ewayea would go to the top of a little hill near the wigwam and look far away, seeming also to expect that some one would come.

By and by he came. His name was Sharp Arrow; and he came suddenly, as if some hand had bent a bow and sent him there swiftly. He loved Ewayea, but at first she did not love him, because she had not waited for him, and he was a red color; and she told him he must go and stay in the sea and let the foam dash over him, to wash his face and make him white.

Then he went away, but when he came back his face was still red; and the Old-man-without-a-name told him that he could not have his daughter. But Sharp Arrow stayed there, and he flew in and out of the forest, always returning to the maiden with love and with some presents, or bringing food to her father. So at last he struck her heart. It bled for him, and she longed to go with him, to comfort him, and be happy herself. But she said: "Not yet, not yet! The Old-man-without-a-name would die if I left him now. I must sing him to sleep many times before we go."

Her father saw that she loved Sharp Arrow, and he was very jealous. He looked at the young man with enmity, while his face every day grew harder, more angry, and stern, like iron. Often, too, he spoke to Ewayea in the strange language, and pointed to the East, as if he would have her go there. But she only shook her head and sighed; and sometimes she wept.

The summer flew away, and the birds flew away to find it. But those two lovers did not know it had gone, for their hearts were warm, and thoughts of love grew in them, like the leaves of June. The days parted, one from another, and the seasons separated; but for Ewayea and her lover there was no separation. They were man and wife. Their two children played in the shade of the forest, and Ewayea sang lullabies to them. She taught Sharp Arrow charms and spells. She gave him words out of a book. Her children learned the strange language; and she looked at the trees, the water and the sky, and made them talk as they had not talked till then. And Sharp Arrow promised that her spells should never be forgotten among his people if she should die.

But she never died.

The old man slept a long while; then at last he woke. And when he woke his face was wrinkled with anger--it was hard like ice in the sweet waters--and when he looked at Sharp Arrow the look seemed to freeze the young man's face, so that hatred stiffened it into a hardness like that of the old man's. Then, one night in winter, the old man came to the door of his wigwam and stood there like a spirit. He beckoned to Sharp Arrow, with one finger upraised; the moonlight gleamed white on his bitter white face, and behind him there was much white snow. "I am dead," he said to Sharp Arrow, "and you must come with me!"

The look of hate was still in all his features; and as Sharp Arrow rose to obey the command, his own face reflected that hatred. The moonlight fell on him, too--his face grew white in it--and no one could have told which face was most like the other, then. But he went forward, and followed the old man.

Just at that moment Ewayea awoke from her sleep beside the children. She stretched out her arms, tried to catch her husband and hold him, and saw him pa.s.s away out of her reach; saw her father, also, standing beyond, and beckoning.

"Father! father!" she cried, "why do you leave me? Where are you going?"

And to her husband she cried: "Oh my heart, my heart, come back to me!"

But they gave no heed to her. The old man moved away, noiseless, on feet of air--always turning backward that icy, malignant gaze--and the young man followed, staring fixedly, helplessly upon him, with the same dumb and frozen wrath upon his own countenance.

And so, as if they had been spirits, they pa.s.sed noiselessly on and on, disappearing in the pale night and the snow, until all that Ewayea could see in the quarter where they had vanished was the crescent of the sinking moon, like an uplifted, crooked finger, beckoning some one to follow.

Ewayea hoped that they would come back. At first she wanted to go after them, but when she tried to move she could not: her limbs were as weak and cold as snow, and invisible arms were thrown around her, holding her back. There was nothing for her to do but to wait. When the spring came again she was always waiting and watching. She stayed every day in the same place, looking out and expecting her father and her lover to return; but still they came not. At last she ceased to speak: she sat there motionless and voiceless on the ground, ever longing for them, but afraid to stir, for fear that they would come back and not find her. The years pa.s.sed, and her children grew up and departed, carrying with them the spells and charms they had learned. Yes; they went away and forgot their mother, who sat there so patiently. But she never once called to them, and only waited--waited--waited. They say she is still waiting in that spot. Summer after summer has blossomed above her, and the new leaves have started and rustled with surprise as they caught sight of her, and have whispered one another all day long about the strangeness of her silent presence. The slow autumns, one after another, have wreathed her brow with weird, unnatural flame; and the snows of many, many winters have crept around her feet and drifted higher until they almost buried her. But she cares nothing for all these changes; does not even turn her head one way or the other, but simply gazes straight forward, expectantly, just as she used to when she went to the top of the little hill looking eastward. In summer, again, come the b.u.t.terflies and softly touch her cheek with sympathetic wings, as they hover around; the humming-birds flash and tremble near her lips, as if expecting to find honey there; and other birds look curiously with their bright eyes into hers that make no answer, while the squirrels that chatter on the boughs near by, and nibble nuts, seem to wonder that she does not ask to share their food. Still, she gives heed to nothing. She crouches low, and her weary head has drooped; and the leaves and dust have fallen thick upon her from the underbrush that has sprung up so rankly about her; so that sometimes you might think she was not a woman at all, but only a mound of earth. Yet she is not dead. No! The rains and winds, of course, have worn away the expression from her face, until it looks dull and sad and lifeless; but, for all that, she is not dead. Her arms and knees must have grown very tired in the long vigil she has been keeping, and one would suppose they would have crumbled into earth before now.

But, you see, the wild vines have reached out from the surrounding trees to support her; and they have encircled her lovingly, lending their strength, that she may not fail of her purpose.

No; she is not dead. If you could only discover the exact place, you would find her still alive. But we do not know where it is.

All four remained silent for a few moments, after Adela had finished her legend. Lance had listened with profound attention; and the shadowy, fantastic outlines of the narrative were so extraordinary, that he was at first too much astonished and perplexed to know what to think or say about it. Clearly enough, that which the girl had told might be interpreted as a sequel to the history of Gertrude Wylde, after his ancestor, Guy Wharton, had lost trace of her. It was impossible to say just what the tradition, now so vague and impossible, had originally come from. But the blending of the white and Indian races at which it hinted, the looking eastward, and the idea of endless waiting and expectancy that ran all through it--did not these things point plainly toward the old romance with which his family was connected?

He did not believe that his imagination alone was responsible for these suggestions, because Adela could not possibly know what he knew--her story was an inheritance so carefully guarded, that even Jessie had not heard it until now--and yet here were these salient details that fitted on so naturally to his own tradition, and supplemented it. Then, too, there was the old, transmitted rhyme. Ah, that was the clew! It clinched all the parts of his guess-work together.

"Was Ewayea one of your people, then?" he asked, at length.

Adela looked at him with surprise, as if he were asking about something which had already been explained.

"Why, I thought I said so," she answered. "We _came_ from her."

Old Reefe, roused perhaps by Lance's voice, opened his eyes, and, hearing his daughter's statement, nodded a silent corroboration.

"And that charm," Lance continued--"the one that you put on the belt--came from her, too? Did she teach it to her children?"

"Yes; that came from her, too," said Adela.

Lance turned toward Jessie in a bewildered way, gazing at her as if he expected her to say or do something which would dispel the phantasm that was growing so like a reality. But Jessie only reflected his amazement in the glance which she gave him in return.

"Isn't this very remarkable?" he said.

"Very," said Jessie. "It's a perfect puzzle. I don't see what to make of it. But, Adela," she went on, addressing the girl, "why have you never told me this before?"

Adela responded only with a reticent smile, and her luminous gray eyes roved from Jessie to Lance and back again without betraying what she thought.

"We don't tell it," muttered her father. "It was our story--only for us."

"But you _have_ told it now," Jessie argued. "You've told Mr. Lance, and he is a stranger." Here Jessie blushed, and corrected herself: "Any way, he _was_ a stranger to you."

The old man raised his hand to point at Lance; and--by an odd coincidence--his forefinger, separated from the others, was curved with a beckoning emphasis, as if he were himself the Old-man-without-a-name of the legend. "_He_ is one of us," he declared.

"I'm not so sure of that!" Lance exclaimed, feeling that the mystery was going almost too far. "I don't see it at all."

"You knew the charm," old Reefe retorted; and his eyes twinkled obscurely, as he fixed them upon his visitor.

"That doesn't prove that I'm one of you," said Lance, rising, for the situation vexed him; he was becoming indignant. "It only shows that my people in England knew the rhyme long before yours were heard of."

Jessie rose as well. "I don't see what your father is thinking of," she observed, frigidly, to Adela. "Mr. Lance belongs to a very old family."

Something like a sarcastic chuckle seemed to escape from Reefe's bearded lips; but he remained quite impa.s.sive. It was impossible to tell whether or not he had made any sound.