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They pitied my Cloud-Mother and me with the condescending pity of the very young, and unguardedly talked where they could be heard. "Oh, she'll come to her senses some time, and he'll marry her of course," was the conclusion they invariably reached; for the thing must turn out well to meet their approval. How could they foresee what was to happen to people whose lives held such contrasts?
"The Pawnees dye with vegetable colors. But they cannot make the pale gray she loves." Eagle watched me with maternal care. If a hair dropped on my collar she brushed it away, and smoothed and settled my cravat. The touch of my Cloud-Mother, familiar and tender, like the touch of a wife, charged through me with torture, because she was herself so unconscious of it.
I thought of my Cloud-Mother walking enclosed from the world upon a height of changeless youth. She could not feel another shock. She was past both ambition and poverty. If she had ever felt the sweet anguish of love Oh! she must have understood when she kissed me and said: "I will come to you sometime!" the anguish the hoping, waiting, expecting, receiving nothing, all were gone by.
"The horse paths are heavy," I answered, "and I have been as far as the Indian lands." I had been as far as that remote time when Eagle was not a Cloud-Mother. To cross the river and see her smiling in meaningless happiness seemed more than I could do. Yet she might notice my absence. We had been housed together ever since she had discovered me.
She had not the expression of insane people, the shifty eyes, the cunning and perverseness, the animal and torpid presence. If I called her Madame de Ferrier instead of my Cloud-Mother, a strained and puzzled look replaced her usual satisfaction. I did not often use the name, nor did I try to make her repeat my own.
I left the room and was flinging myself from the house to walk in the chill wind; but she caught me. "I will be good!" pleaded my Cloud-Mother, her face in my breast. Her son who had grown up big, while she grew down little, went back to the family room with her. My Cloud-Mother sat beside me at table, and insisted on cutting up my food for me.
Whether she slept under a bush, or not at all, or took to the house after Pierre Grignon and I left it, she was resting quietly on the settle before the fireplace, without a stain of mud upon her. I could see nothing but the foot of her dress. Had any change passed over her face? Or had the undisturbed smile of my Cloud-Mother followed me on the road? Perhaps the cloud had thickened.
Christmas and New Year's days were great festivals, when the settlement ate and drank at Pierre Grignon's expense, and made him glad as if he fathered the whole post. Madame Grignon spun and looked to the house. And a thousand changes passed over the landscape. But in all that time no one could see any change in my Cloud-Mother. She sewed like a child. She laughed, and danced gavottes.
Before I had been in the house a week she made a little pair of trousers a span long, and gave them to me. Marie and Katarina turned their faces to laugh. My Cloud-Mother held the garment up for their inspection, and was not at all sensitive to the giggles it provoked. "I made over an old pair of his father's," she said.
Heredity, ambition, lust, noble aspirations, weak self-indulgence, power, failure, success, have their turns with him. But the woman he desires above all others, whose breast is his true home, makes him, mars him. Had she cast herself on the settle exhausted and ill after exposure? Should I find her muttering and helpless? Worse than all, had the night made her forget that she was a Cloud-Mother?
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