Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/90

84 he was—a little savage." She rose with a repentant cry, and went to snuff the candle. Then she came back to him. "There is so much to tell you, Maurice," she said, "things I stole from you in living them through alone. But every minute you were in my mind. I never bared my breast to feed him without seeing you, standing there before us, grave, protecting us—the mother and the child. I never threw him higher to my shoulder, with that little shrug you spoke of once, without that thought of you. I told him all the things I wanted to tell you: how I ached for you in spite of him, how he never for a minute weaned me from you. All these months I've planned how I would give him to you. Almost always I thought it would be some spring day when you were painting in the woods, and I would walk in on you from the thicket and push him toward you—yes, I knew he'd walk before you saw him—and say, 'Here is your son. She laughed with a sweet irony for herself. "But I couldn't wait, dear, I couldn't wait. I thought of the light burning here—Gaspard's candle—and it beckoned, like a star. I had to come alone. Babies can't be brought out on a night like this, even for you."

He sat drawing breaths that shook him.

"I can't say things, Winifred," he began at last, "any more than I could then. But—" He bent over her and laid his cheek upon her hair.

"I know," she answered, eagerly, "I know it all. Only have faith in me!"

"Faith in you!"

"I mean, believe me when I say the other woman has quite gone, the one that plagued you. You'll say when you think it over, 'How could she change so soon?' But don't you see, dear, it was the miracle! I had to change, to make your son what he must be. He had to be sweet-natured, firm, and sound—a man-child. I threw away the baser part of me and never thought of it again. Ambitions were gone, selfishness, the cruelty of love. I was the mother of your son."

His eyes were wet.

"And I—" he said. "Well, Winifred, we'll see."

"Oh, you will be!" she cried, answering his thought. "You were all ready to be the father of a man-child. You'd been growing for years, straight, strong, just like the trees. I had to be pruned; I had to lose my sap and heal, and grow new leaves to cover up the scars. But I'm getting into shape. That is the miracle." She rose. "I must go back," she said, patting her hair into place with that pretty motion women have. Instantly his artist's-eye supplied a child's hand there, pulling it into tangles. He was aware that he should never see her now outside the miracle. The bloom of that new wonder filled the cabin. It would fill the world. He had risen too, and when he wrapped her cloak about her, she turned, as if she had done it every day through all the weeks, and put her face up to be kissed. That taught him something else. The little charms that marked the past were there, all waiting to be born, like seedlings under snow. She needed her lover; she needed him only less than the mate who would guard the nest for her. He got his cap and jacket, and at once they both looked at the candle.

"We ought not to leave it," she hesitated. "It means too much, that candle."

While they halted, the man asked, irrelevantly, "Will he be asleep?"

"Oh yes! He's in his bed by dusk."

"Will he—I suppose he'll hate me like the dickens!"

"He'll roar at your rough cheek." She put up her hand to touch it. "No man has ever kissed him. Oh, there's Gaspard!"

The door swung in gently, according to Gaspard's decent habit. He liked soft, slow ways of doing things. He brought the cold with him, and after the clarity of it the bayberry wax saluted his nostrils sweetly.

"Ah !" he breathed. Then he snatched off his cap and made a bow. "Madame!"

She gave him her hand, and Gaspard took it as if it were something precious.

"Where have you been?" asked Latham, because there was nothing else to say.

"I have been to the Pine Inlet, m'sieu', where the trees sing so loud. It is like the sea."

"Will you come to dinner to-morrow?" asked Winifred. She was