"Oh, Madame!" I said, bewildered, and sick as from a stab. It was no comfort that the high lady who scarcely allowed me to kiss her hand before we parted, clung around my neck. She trembled against me. "Have you come back to your mother, Paul?" "Eagle!" I pleaded. "Don't you know me? You surely know Lazarre!" She kissed me, pulling my head down in her arms, the velvet mouth like a baby's, and looked straight into my eyes. "Madame, try to understand! I am Louis! If you forget Lazarre, try to remember Louis!" She heard with attention, and smiled. The pressure of my arms spoke to her. A man's passion addressed itself to a little child. All other barriers which had stood between us were nothing to this. I held her, and she could never be mine. She was not ill in body; the contours of her upturned face were round and softened with much smiling. But mind-sickness robbed me of her in the moment of finding her. "She can't be insane!" I said aloud. "Oh, God, anything but that! She was not a woman that could be so wrecked." Like a fool I questioned, and tried to get some explanation. Eagle smoothed my arm, nested her hand in my neck. "My little boy! He has grown to be a man--while his mother has grown down to be a child! Do you know what I am now, Paul?" I choked a sob in my throat and told her I did not. "I am your Cloud-Mother. I live in a cloud. Do you love me while I am in the cloud?" I told her I loved her with all my strength, in the cloud or out of it. "Will you take care of me as I used to take care of you?" I swore to the Almighty that she should be my future care. "I need you so! I have watched for you in the woods and on the water, Paul! You have been long coming back to me." I heard Madame Ursule mounting the stairs to see if my room was in order. Who could understand the relation in which Eagle and I now stood, and the claim she made upon me? She clung to my arm when I took it away. I led her by the hand. Even this sight caused Madame Ursule a shock at the head of the stairs. "M's'r Williams!" My hostess paused and looked at us. "Did she come to you of her own accord?" "Yes, madame." "I never knew her to notice a stranger before." "Madame, do you know who this is?" "Madeleine Jordan." "It is the Marquise de Ferrier." "The Marquise de Ferrier?" "Yes, madame." "Did you know her?" "I have known her ever since I can remember." "The Marquise de Ferrier! But, M's'r Williams, did she know you?" "She knows me," I asserted. "But not as myself. I am sure she knows me! But she confuses me with the child she lost! I cannot explain to you, madame, how positive I am that she recognizes me; any more than I can explain why she will call me Paul. I think I ought to tell you, so you will see the position in which I am placed, that this lady is the lady I once hoped to marry." "Saints have pity, M's'r Williams!" "I want to ask you some questions." "Bring her down to the fire. Come, dear child," said Madame Ursule, coaxing Eagle. "Nobody is there. The bedrooms can never be so warm as the log fire; and this is a bitter evening." The family room was unlighted by candles, as often happened. For such an illumination in the chimney must have quenched any paler glare. We had a few moments of brief privacy from the swarming life which constantly passed in and out. I placed Eagle by the fire and she sat there obediently, while I talked to Madame Ursule apart. "Was her mind in this state when she came to you?" "She was even a little wilder than she is now. The girls have been a benefit to her." "They were not afraid of her?" "Who could be afraid of the dear child? She is a lady--that's plain. Ah, M's'r Williams, what she must have gone through!" "Yet see how happy she looks!" "She always seemed happy enough. She would come to this house. So when the Jordans went to Canada, Pierre and I both said, 'Let her stay.'" "Who were the Jordans?" "The only family that escaped with their lives from the massacre when she lost her family. Madame Jordan told me the whole story. They had friends among the Winnebagoes who protected them." "Did they give her their name?" "No, the people in La Baye did that. We knew she had another name. But I think it very likely her title was not used in the settlement where they lived. Titles are no help in pioneering." "Did they call her Madeleine?" "She calls herself Madeleine." "How long has she been with your family?" "Nearly a year." "Did the Jordans tell you when this change came over her?" "Yes. It was during the attack when her child was taken from her. She saw other children killed. The Indians were afraid of her. They respect demented people; not a bit of harm was done to her. They let her alone, and the Jordans took care of her." The daughter and adopted daughter of the house came in with a rush of outdoor air, and seeing Eagle first, ran to kiss her on the cheek one after the other. "Madeleine has come down!" said Marie. "I thought we should coax her in here sometime," said Katarina. Between them, standing slim and tall, their equal in height, she was yet like a little sister. Though their faces were unlined, hers held a divine youth. To see her stricken with mind-sickness, and the two girls who had done neither good nor evil, existing like plants in sunshine, healthy and sound, seemed an iniquitous contrast. If ever woman was made for living and dying in one ancestral home, she was that woman. Yet she stood on the border of civilization, without a foothold to call her own. If ever woman was made for one knightly love which would set her in high places, she was that woman. Yet here she stood, her very name lost, no man so humble as to do her reverence. "Paul has come," Eagle told Katarina and Marie. Holding their hands, she walked between them toward me, and bade them notice my height. "I am his Cloud-Mother," she said. "How droll it is that parents grow down little, while their children grow up big!" Madame Ursule shook her head pitifully. But the girls really saw the droll side and laughed with my Cloud-Mother. Separated from me by an impassable barrier, she touched me more deeply than when I sued her most. The undulating ripple which was her peculiar expression of joy was more than I could bear. 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. While I tried to eat, she asked Marie and Katarina and Pierre Grignon and Madame Ursule to notice how well I behaved. The tender hearted host wiped his eyes. I understood why she had kept such hold upon me through years of separateness. A nameless personal charm, which must be a gift of the spirit, survived all wreck and change. It drew me, and must draw me forever, whether she knew me again or not. One meets and wakes you to vivid life in an immortal hour. Thousands could not do it through eternity. The river piled hillocks of water in a strong north wind, and no officer crossed from the stockade. Neither did any neighbor leave his own fire. It seldom happened that the Grignons were left with inmates alone. Eagle sat by me and watched the blaze streaming up the chimney. If she was not a unit in the family group and had no part there, they were most kind to her. "Take care!" the grandmother cried with swift forethought when Marie and Katarina marshaled in a hopping object from the kitchen. "It might frighten Madeleine." Pierre Grignon stopped in the middle of a bear hunt. Eagle was not frightened. She clapped her hands. "This is a pouched turkey!" Marie announced, leaning against the wall, while Katarina chased the fowl. It was the little negro, his arms and feet thrust into the legs of a pair of Pierre Grignon's trousers, and the capacious open top fastened upon his back. Doubled over, he waddled and hopped as well as he could. A feather duster was stuck in for a tail, and his woolly head gave him the uncanny look of a black harpy. To see him was to shed tears of laughter. The pouched turkey enjoyed being a pouched turkey. He strutted and gobbled, and ran at the girls; tried to pick up corn from the floor with his thick lips, tumbling down and rolling over in the effort; for a pouched turkey has no wings with which to balance himself. So much hilarity in the family room drew the Pawnee servants. I saw their small dark eyes in a mere line of open door, gazing solemnly. When the turkey was relieved from his pouching and sent to bed, Pierre Grignon took his violin. The girls answered with jigs that ended a reel, when couples left the general figure to jig it off. When Eagle had watched them awhile she started up, spread her skirts in a sweeping courtesy, and began to dance a gavotte. The fiddler changed his tune, and the girls rested and watched her. Alternately swift and languid, with the changes of the movement, she saluted backward to the floor, or spun on the tips of rapid feet. I had seen her dance many times, but never with such abandon of joy. Our singular relationship was established in the house, where hospitality made room and apology for all human weakness. Nobody of that region, except the infirm, stayed indoors to shiver by a fire. Eagle and the girls in their warm capotes breasted with me the coldest winter days. She was as happy as they were; her cheeks tingled as pink as theirs. Sometimes I thought her eyes must answer me with her old self-command; their bright grayness was so natural. I believed if her delusions were humored, they would unwind from her like the cloud which she felt them to be. The family had long fallen into the habit of treating her as a child, playing some imaginary character. She seemed less demented than walking in a dream, her faculties asleep. It was somnambulism rather than madness. 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. It was my daily effort to fall in with her happiness, for if she saw any anxiety she was quick to plead: "Don't you like me any more, Paul? Are you tired of me, because I am a Cloud-Mother?" "No," I would answer. "Lazarre will never be tired of you." "Do you think I am growing smaller? Will you love me if I shrink to a baby?" "I will love you." "I used to love you when you were so tiny, Paul, before you knew how to love me back. If I forget how"--she clutched the lapels of my coat--"will you leave me then?" "Eagle, say this: 'Lazarre cannot leave me.'" "Lazarre cannot leave me." I heard her repeating this at her sewing. She boasted to Marie Grignon--"Lazarre cannot leave me!--Paul taught me that." My Cloud-Mother asked me to tell her the stories she used to tell me. She had forgotten them. "I am the child now," she would say. "Tell me the stories." I repeated mythical tribe legends, gathered from Skenedonk on our long rides, making them as eloquent as I could. She listened, holding her breath, or sighing with contentment. If any one in the household smiled when she led me about by the hand, there was a tear behind the smile. She kept herself in perfection, bestowing unceasing care upon her dress, which was always gray. "I have to wear gray; I am in a cloud," she had said to the family. "We have used fine gray stuff brought from Holland, and wools that Mother Ursule got from Montreal," Katarina told me. "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. 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. The discarded breeches used by the pouched turkey had been devoted to her whim. Every stitch was neatly set. I praised her beautiful needlework, and she said she would make me a coat. Skenedonk was not often in the house. He took to the winter hunting and snow-shoeing with vigor. Whenever he came indoors I used to see him watching Madame de Ferrier with saturnine wistfulness. She paid no attention to him. He would stand gazing at her while she sewed; being privileged as an educated Indian and my attendant, to enter the family room where the Pawnees came only to serve. They had the ample kitchen and its log fire to themselves. I wondered what was working in Skenedonk's mind, and if he repented calling one so buffeted, a sorceress. Kindly ridicule excited by the incongruous things she did, passed over without touching her. She was enveloped in a cloud, a thick case guarding overtaxed mind and body, and shutting them in its pellucid chrysalis. The Almighty arms were resting her on a mountain of vision. She had forgot how to weep. She was remembering how to laugh. The more I thought about it the less endurable it became to have her dependent upon the Grignons. My business affairs with Pierre Grignon made it possible to transfer her obligations to my account. The hospitable man and his wife objected, but when they saw how I took it to heart, gave me my way. I told them I wished her to be regarded as my wife, for I should never have another; and while it might remain impossible for her to marry me, on my part I was bound to her. "You are young, M's'r Williams," said Madame Ursule. "You have a long life before you. A man wants comfort in his house. And if he makes wealth, he needs a hand that knows how to distribute and how to save. She could never go to your home as she is." "I know it, madame." "You will change your mind about a wife." "Madame, I have not changed my mind since I first wanted her. It is not a mind that changes." "Well, that's unusual. Young men are often fickle. You never made proposals for her?" "I did, madame, after her husband died." "But she was still a wife--the wife of an old man--in the Pigeon Roost settlement." "Her father married her to a cousin nearly as old as himself, when she was a child. Her husband was reported dead while he was in hiding. She herself thought, and so did her friends, that he was dead." "I see. Eh! these girls married to old men! Madame Jordan told me Madeleine's husband was very fretful. He kept himself like silk, and scarcely let the wind blow upon him for fear of injuring his health. When other men were out toiling at the clearings, he sat in his house to avoid getting chills and fever in the sun. It was well for her that she had a faithful servant. Madeleine and the servant kept the family with their garden and corn field. They never tasted wild meat unless the other settlers brought them venison. Madame Jordan said they always returned a present of herbs and vegetables from their garden. It grew for them better than any other garden in the settlement. Once the old man did go out with a hunting party, and got lost. The men searched for him three days, and found him curled up in a hollow tree, waiting to be brought in. They carried him home on a litter and he popped his head into the door and said: 'Here I am, child! You can't kill me!'" "What did Madame de Ferrier say?" "Nothing. She made a child of him, as if he were her son. He was in his second childhood, no doubt. And Madame Jordan said she appeared to hold herself accountable for the losses and crosses that made him so fretful. The children of the emigration were brought up to hardship, and accepted everything as their elders could not do." "I thought the Marquis de Ferrier a courteous gentleman." "Did you ever see him?" "Twice only." "He used to tell his wife he intended to live a hundred years. And I suppose he would have done it, if he had not been tomahawked and scalped. 'You'll never get De Chaumont,' he used to say to her. 'I'll see that he never gets you!' I remember the name very well, because it was the name of that pretty creature who danced for us in the cabin on Lake George." "De Chaumont was her father," I said. "He would have married Madame de Ferrier, and restored her estate, if she had accepted him, and the marquis had not come back." "Saints have pity!" said Madame Ursule. "And the poor old man must make everybody and himself so uncomfortable!" "But how could he help living?" "True enough. God's times are not ours. But see what he has made of her!" 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. Even mother cares no longer touched her. Paul was grown. She could not be made anything that was base. Unseen forces had worked with her and would work with her still. "You told me," I said to Madame Ursule, "the Indians were afraid of her when they burned the settlement. Was the change so sudden?" "Madame Jordan's story was like this: It happened in broad daylight. Two men went into the woods hunting bee trees. The Indians caught and killed them within two miles of the clearing--some of those very Winnebagoes you treated with for your land. It was a sunshiny day in September. You could hear the poultry crowing, and the children playing in the dooryards. Madeleine's little Paul was never far away from her. The Indians rushed in with yells and finished the settlement in a few minutes. Madame Jordan and her family were protected, but she saw children dashed against trees, and her neighbors struck down and scalped before she could plead for them. And little good pleading would have done. An Indian seized Paul. His father and the old servant lay dead across the doorstep. His mother would not let him go. The Indian dragged her on her knees and struck her on the head. Madame Jordan ran out at the risk of being scalped herself, and got the poor girl into her cabin. The Indian came back for Madeleine's scalp. Madeleine did not see him. She never seemed to notice anybody again. She stood up quivering the whole length of her body, and laughed in his face. It was dreadful to hear her above the cries of the children. The Indian went away like a scared hound. And none of the others would touch her." After I heard this story I was thankful every day that Eagle could not remember; that natural happiness had its way with her elastic body. Madame Ursule told me the family learned to give her liberty. She rowed alone upon the river, and went where she pleased. The men in La Baye would step aside for her. Strangers disturbed her by bringing the consciousness of something unusual. Once I surprised Marie and Katarina sitting close to the fire at twilight, talking about lovers. Eagle was near them on a stool. "That girl," exclaimed Katarina, speaking of the absent with strong disapproval, "is one of the kind that will let another girl take her sweetheart and then sit around and look injured! Now if she could get him from me she might have him! But she'd have to get him first!" Eagle listened in the attitude of a young sister, giving me to understand by a look that wisdom flowed, and she was learning. We rose one morning to find the world buried in snow. The river was frozen and its channel padded thick. As for the bay, stretches of snow fields, with dark pools and broken gray ridges met ice at the end of the world. It was so cold that paper stuck to the fingers like feathers, and the nails tingled with frost. The white earth creaked under foot, and when a sled went by the snow cried out in shrill long resistance, a spirit complaining of being trampled. Explosions came from the river, and elm limbs and timbers of the house startled us. White fur clothed the inner key holes. Tree trunks were black as ink against a background of snow. The oaks alone kept their dried foliage, which rattled like many skeletons, instead of rustling in its faded redness, because there was no life in it. But the colder it grew the higher Grignon's log fires mounted. And when channels were cut in the snow both along the ridge above Green Bay, and across country in every direction, French trains moved out with jangling bells, and maids and men uttered voice sounds which spread as by miracle on the diffusing air from horizon to horizon. You could hear the officers speaking across the river; and dogs were like to shake the sky down with their barking. Echoes from the smallest noises were born in that magnified, glaring world. The whole festive winter spun past. Marie and Katarina brought young men to the peaks of hope in the "twosing" seat, and plunged them down to despair, quite in the American fashion. 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. She trod the snow, or muffled in robes, with Madame Ursule and the girls, flew over it in a French train; a sliding box with two or three horses hitched tandem. Every evening I sat by her side at the fire, while she made little coats and trousers for me. But remembrance never came into her eyes. The cloud stood round about her as it did when I first tried to penetrate it. My own dim days were often in mind. I tried to recall sensations. But I had lived a purely physical life. Her blunders of judgment and delusion of bodily shrinking were no part of my experience. The thinking self in me had been paralyzed. While the thinking self in her was alive, in a cloud. Both of us were memoryless, excepting her recollection of Paul. After March sent the ice out of river and bay, spring came with a rush as it comes in the north. Perhaps many days it was silently rising from tree roots. In February we used to say:--"This air is like spring." But after such bold speech the arctic region descended upon us again, and we were snowed in to the ears. Yet when the end of March unlocked us, it seemed we must wait for the month of Mary to give us soft air and blue water. Then suddenly it was spring, and every living soul knew it. Life revived with passion. Longings which you had forgotten came and took you by the throat, saying, "You shall no longer be satisfied with negative peace. Rouse, and live!" Then flitting, exquisite, purple flaws struck across milk-opal water in the bay. Fishing boats lifted themselves in mirage, sailing lightly above the water; and islands sat high, with a cushion of air under them. The girls manifested increasing interest in what they called the Pigeon Roost settlement affair. Madame Ursule had no doubt told them what I said. 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? "Father Pierre says he's nearly twenty-eight; I call him an old bachelor," declared Katarina; "and she was a married woman. They are really very old to be in love." "You don't know what you'll do when you are old," said Marie. "Ah, I dread it," groaned Katarina. "So do I." "But there is grandmother. She doesn't mind it. And beaux never trouble her now." "No," sighed the other. "Beaux never trouble her now." Those spring days I was wild with restlessness. Life revived to dare things. We heard afterwards that about that time the meteor rushed once more across France. Napoleon landed at a Mediterranean port, gathering force as he marched, swept Louis XVIII away like a cobweb in his path, and moved on to Waterloo. The greatest Frenchman that ever lived fell ultimately as low as St. Helena, and the Bourbons sat again upon the throne. But the changes of which I knew nothing affected me in the Illinois Territory. Sometimes I waked at night and sat up in bed, hot with indignation at the injustice done me, which I could never prove, which I did not care to combat, yet which unreasonably waked the fighting spirit in me. Our natures toss and change, expand or contract, influenced by invisible powers we know not why. One April night I sat up in the veiled light made by a clouded moon. Rain points multiplied themselves on the window glass; I heard their sting. The impulse to go out and ride the wind, or pick the river up and empty it all at once into the bay, or tear Eagle out of the cloud, or go to France and proclaim myself with myself for follower; and other feats of like nature, being particularly strong in me, I struck the pillow beside me with my fist. Something bounced from it on the floor with a clack like wood. I stretched downward from one of Madame Ursule's thick feather beds, and picked up what brought me to my feet. Without letting go of it I lighted my candle. It was the padlocked book which Skenedonk said he had burned. And there the scoundrel lay at the other side of the room, wrapped in his blanket from head to foot, mummied by sleep. I wanted to take him by the scalp lock and drag him around on the floor. He had carried it with him, or secreted it somewhere, month after month. I could imagine how the state of the writer worked on his Indian mind. He repented, and was not able to face me, but felt obliged to restore what he had withheld. So waiting until I slept, he brought forth the padlocked book and laid it on the pillow beside my head; thus beseeching pardon, and intimating that the subject was closed between us. I got my key, and then a fit of shivering seized me. I put the candle stand beside the pillow and lay wrapped in bedding, clenching the small chilly padlock and sharp-cornered boards. Remembering the change which had come upon the life recorded in it, I hesitated. Remembering how it had eluded me before, I opened it. The few entries were made without date. The first pages were torn out, crumpled, and smoothed and pasted to place again. Rose petals and violets and some bright poppy leaves, crushed inside its lids, slid down upon the bedcover.