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Judging from after-developments I suppose it was what the foolish call occult sympathy. Well, where was that girl-child? Jacques Pontiac didn't know. Nobody knew. And I couldn't get rid of Mrs. Malbrouck's face; it haunted me; the broad brow, deep eyes, and high-bred sweetness all beautifully animal. Don't laugh: I find astonishing likenesses between the perfectly human and the perfectly animal.
'You have despised a mother-woman. You will suffer evil and starvation and hunger and poverty, oh! foolish tribes-people. Did you not know how great a girl-child is? "That spring, people from a score of tribes came up to the Fraser for the salmon run. They came great distances from the mountains, the lakes, the far-off dry lands, but not one fish entered the vast rivers of the Pacific Coast.
But it was yet winter, and the rains were slanting and the fogs drifting, when the wife of the Great Tyee stood before him and said: "'Before the salmon-run I shall give to you a great gift. Will you honor me most if it is the gift of a boy-child or a girl-child? The Great Tyee loved the woman. He was stern with his people, hard with his tribe; he ruled his council-fires with a will of stone.
But at the time of this tale they counted for more than he; for they had been constrained to leave behind them what they could not consume, while he, poor man, had left very little besides the aforesaid interest in the investment of his blood, in the form of a pension to his widow, and the small grey cloud in the memory of his girl-child, in the place where he should have been.
Her father and her brothers loved her, but the heart of Be-be, her mother, seemed wrapped round and about that misty-eyed child. "'I love you, the mother would say many times a day, as she caught the girl-child in her arms. 'And I love you, the girl-child would answer, resting for a moment against the warm shoulder.
I was thus employed when all at once the leaves on the opposite side of the brook were parted and a girl-child appeared. For a long moment we eyed each other across the brook, then all at once her pretty lips curved to a smile. "Little maid," says I, furtively thrusting the knife into my belt, "art not afraid of me then?" "Nay!" she answered, smiling yet and shaking her golden head. "And why?"
Then said Achilles, "What ails thee, Patroclus, that thou weepest like a girl-child that runs along by her mother's side, and would be taken up, holding her gown, and looking at her with tearful eyes till she lift her in her arms? Hast thou heard evil news from Phthia? Menoetius yet lives, they say, and Peleus. Or art thou weeping for the Greeks, because they perish for their folly?"
Judging from after-developments I suppose it was what the foolish call occult sympathy. Well, where was that girl-child? Jacques Pontiac didn't know. Nobody knew. And I couldn't get rid of Mrs. Malbrouck's face; it haunted me; the broad brow, deep eyes, and high-bred sweetness all beautifully animal. Don't laugh: I find astonishing likenesses between the perfectly human and the perfectly animal.
The house having collapsed, its members appeared to him only in their true natures, a good-for-nothing young man, tainted with a mortal disease, a foolish mother, a devout spinster threatened with religious mania, and the last descendant of the great old race, one little girl-child not likely to live, and perhaps better dead.
Still, even in your ignorance, you are my people: you and your wishes must be considered. I call together the great medicine-men, the men of witchcraft, the men of magic. They shall decide the laws which will follow the bearing of either boy or girl-child. What say you, oh! mighty men?
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