PAGE 17
My Mother
by
“At last, at last!” half sobbed the weary girl. “Oh, George, I am so happy! You are going to get well, and they have come to us at last.”
“Yes, dear,” he replied. Then with a half humorous yet wholly pathetic smile flitting across his wan face, he added, “And my mother has a little gift for you.” He nodded then towards the quaint old figure at the further side of the bed. His mother arose, and, drawing from her bosom a tiny, russet-colored object, laid it in Lydia’s hand. It was a little moccasin, just three and a quarter inches in length. “Its mate is lost,” added the sick man, “but I wore it as a baby. My mother says it is yours, and should have been yours all these years.”
For a second the two women faced each other, then Lydia sat down abruptly on the bedside, her arms slipped about the older woman’s shoulders, and her face dropped quickly, heavily–at last on a mother’s breast.
George Mansion sighed in absolute happiness, then closed his eyes and slept the great, strong, vitalizing sleep of reviving forces.
PART IV.
How closely the years chased one another after this! But many a happy day within each year found Lydia and her husband’s mother sitting together, hour upon hour, needle in hand, sewing and harmonizing–the best friends in all the world. It mattered not that “mother” could not speak one word of English, or that Lydia never mastered but a half dozen words of Mohawk. These two were friends in the sweetest sense of the word, and their lives swept forward in a unison of sympathy that was dear to the heart of the man who held them as the two most precious beings in all the world.
And with the years came new duties, new responsibilities, new little babies to love and care for until a family, usually called “A King’s Desire,” gathered at their hearthside–four children, the eldest a boy, the second a girl, then another boy, then another girl. These children were reared on the strictest lines of both Indian and English principles. They were taught the legends, the traditions, the culture and the etiquette of both races to which they belonged; but above all, their mother instilled into them from the very cradle that they were of their father’s people, not of hers. Her marriage had made her an Indian by the laws which govern Canada, as well as by the sympathies and yearnings and affections of her own heart. When she married George Mansion she had repeated to him the centuries-old vow of allegiance, “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” She determined that should she ever be mother to his children, those children should be reared as Indians in spirit and patriotism, and in loyalty to their father’s race as well as by heritage of blood. The laws of Canada held these children as Indians. They were wards of the Government; they were born on Indian lands, on Indian Reservations. They could own and hold Indian lands, and their mother, English though she was, made it her life service to inspire, foster and elaborate within these children the pride of the race, the value of that copper-tinted skin which they all displayed. When people spoke of blood and lineage and nationality, these children would say, “We are Indians,” with the air with which a young Spanish don might say, “I am a Castilian.” She wanted them to grow up nationalists, and they did, every mother’s son and daughter of them. Things could never have been otherwise, for George Mansion and his wife had so much in common that their offspring could scarcely evince other than inherited parental traits. Their tastes and distastes were so synonymous; they hated hypocrisy, vulgarity, slovenliness, imitations.
After forty years spent on a Canadian Indian Reserve, Lydia Mansion still wore real lace, real tortoise shell combs, real furs. If she could not have procured these she would have worn plain linen collars, no combs, and a woven woolen scarf about her throat; but the imitation fabrics, as well as the “imitation people,” had no more part in her life than they had in her husband’s, who abhorred all such pinchbeck. Their loves were identical. They loved nature–the trees, best of all, and the river, and the birds. They loved the Anglican Church, they loved the British flag, they loved Queen Victoria, they loved beautiful, dead Elizabeth Evans, they loved strange, reticent Mr. Evans. They loved music, pictures and dainty china, with which George Mansion filled his beautiful home. They loved books and animals, but, most of all, these two loved the Indian people, loved their legends, their habits, their customs–loved the people themselves. Small wonder, then, that their children should be born with pride of race and heritage, and should face the world with that peculiar, unconquerable courage that only a fighting ancestry can give.