Part 21 (1/2)
It was a wearied woman who finally knocked at the doctor's door and bade him hasten. But his strong man's arm found the return journey comparatively easy paddling. The wind helped him, and Maarda also plied her bow paddle, frequently urging him to hasten.
It was dawn when they entered her home. The sick woman moaned, and the child fretted for food. The doctor bent above his patient, shaking his head ruefully as Maarda built the fire, and attended to the child's needs before she gave thought to changing her drenched garments. All day she attended her charges, cooked, toiled, watched, forgetting her night of storm and sleeplessness in the greater anxieties of ministering to others. The doctor came and went between her home and the village, but always with that solemn headshake, that spoke so much more forcibly than words.
”She shall not die!” declared Maarda. ”The Tenas Klootchman needs her, she shall not die!” But the woman grew feebler daily, her eyes grew brighter, her cheeks burned with deeper scarlet.
”We must fight for it now,” said the doctor. And Maarda and he fought the dread enemy hour after hour, day after day.
Bereft of its mother's care, the Tenas Klootchman turned to Maarda, laughed to her, crowed to her, until her lonely heart embraced the child as a still evening embraces a tempestuous day. Once she had a long, terrible fight with herself. She had begun to feel her owners.h.i.+p in the little thing, had begun to regard it as her right to tend and pet it. Her heart called out for it; and she wanted it for her very own. She began to feel a savage, tigerish joy in thinking--aye, _knowing_ that it really would belong to her and to her alone soon--very soon.
When this sensation first revealed itself to her, the doctor was there--had even told her the woman could not recover. Maarda's gloriously womanly soul was horrified at itself. She left the doctor in charge, and went to the sh.o.r.e, fighting out this outrageous gladness, strangling it--killing it.
She returned, a sanctified being, with every faculty in her body, every sympathy of her heart, every energy of her mind devoted to bringing this woman back from the jaws of death. She greeted the end of it all with a sorrowing, half-breaking heart, for she had learned to love the woman she had envied, and to weep for the little child who lay so helplessly against her unselfish heart.
A beautifully lucid half-hour came to the fever-stricken one just before the Call to the Great Beyond!
”Maarda,” she said, ”you have been a good Tillic.u.m to me, and I can give you nothing for all your care, your kindness--unless--”
Her eyes wandered to her child peacefully sleeping in the delicately-woven basket. Maarda saw the look, her heart leaped with a great joy. Did the woman wish to give the child to her? She dared not ask for it. Suppose Luke ”Alaska” wanted it. His wife loved children, though she had four of her own in their home far inland.
Then the sick woman spoke:
”Your cradle basket and your heart were empty before I came. Will you keep my Tenas Klootchman as your own?--to fill them both again?”
Maarda promised. ”Mine was a Tenas Klootchman, too,” she said.
”Then I will go to her, and be her mother, wherever she is, in the Spirit Islands they tell us of,” said the woman. ”We will be but exchanging our babies, after all.”
When morning dawned, the woman did not awake.
Maarda had finished her story, but the recollections had saddened her eyes, and for a time we both sat on the deck in the violet twilight without exchanging a word.
”Then the little Tenas Klootchman is yours now?” I asked.
A sudden radiance suffused her face, all trace of melancholy vanished. She fairly scintillated happiness.
”Mine!” she said. ”All mine! Luke 'Alaska' and his wife said she was more mine than theirs, that I must keep her as my own. My husband rejoiced to see the cradle basket filled, and to hear me laugh as I used to.”
”How I should like to see the baby!” I began.
”You shall,” she interrupted. Then with a proud, half-roguish expression, she added:
”She is so strong, so well, so heavy; she sleeps a great deal, and wakes laughing and hungry.”
As night fell, an ancient Indian woman came up the companion-way.
In her arms she carried a beautifully-woven basket cradle, within which nestled a round-cheeked, smiling-eyes baby. Across its little forehead hung locks of black, straight hair, and its st.u.r.dy limbs were vainly endeavoring to free themselves from the lacing of the ”blankets.” Maarda took the basket, with an expression on her face that was transfiguring.
”Yes, this is my little Tenas Klootchman,” she said, as she unlaced the bands, then lifted the plump little creature out on to her lap.
Soon afterwards the steamer touched an obscure little harbor, and Maarda, who was to join her husband there, left me, with a happy good-night. As she was going below, she faltered, and turned back to me. ”I think sometimes,” she said, quietly, ”the Great Spirit thought my baby would feel motherless in the far Spirit Islands, so He gave her the woman I nursed for a mother; and He knew I was childless, and He gave me this child for my daughter. Do you think I am right? Do you understand?”