The Mothers of Honoré | Page 2

wife some outlay--visited her only when he needed funds, and
she silently paid the levy if her toil had provided the means. He also
inclined to offer delicate attentions to Clethera, who spat at him like a
cat, and at sight of him ever afterwards took to the attic, locking the
door.
But while Melinda Crée submitted to the shackles of civilization, she
did not entirely give up the ways of her own people. She kept a conical
tent of poles and birch bark in her back yard, in which she slept during
summer. And she was noted as wise and skilled in herbs, guarding their
secrets so jealously that the knowledge was likely to die with her. Once
she appeared at the bedside of a dying islander, and asked, as the doctor
had withdrawn, to try her own remedies. Permission being given, she
went to the kitchen, took some dried vegetable substance from her
pocket, and made a tea of it. A little was poured down the sick man's
throat. He revived. He drank more, and grew better. Melinda Cree's
decoction cured him, and the chagrined doctor visited her to learn what
wonderful remedy she had used.
"It was nothing but some little bushes," responded the Indian woman.
"If you tell me what they are, I will pay you fifty dollars," he pleaded.
Melinda Crée shook her head. She continued to repeat, as he raised the
bid higher, "It was nothing but some little bushes, doctor; it was

nothing but some little bushes."
Clethera felt the same kind of protecting tenderness for this
self-restrained squaw that Honoré had for his undersized parent, whom
he always called by the baptismal name. Melinda had been the wife of
a great medicine-man, who wore a trailing blanket, and white gulls'
wings bound around and spread behind his head. During his lifetime he
was often seen stretched on his back invoking the sun. A stranger
observing him declared he was using the signs of Freemasonry, and
must know its secrets.
With the readiness of custom, Honoré and Clethera met each other at
the steps in the fence about dusk. She sat down on her side, and he sat
down on his, the broad top of the stile separating them. Honoré was a
stalwart Saxon-looking youth in his early twenties. Wind and weather
had painted his large-featured countenance a rosy tan. By the
employing class Honoré was considered one of the finest and most
promising young quarter-breeds on the island.
The fresh moist odor of the lake, with its incessant wash upon pebbles,
came to them accompanied by piercing sweetness of wild roses. For the
wind had turned to the west, raking fragrant thickets. Dusk was moving
from eastern fastnesses to rock battlements still tinged with sunset. The
fort, dismantled of its garrison, reared a whitewashed crown against the
island's back of evergreens.
Both Honoré and Clethera knew there was a Spanish war. As summer
day followed summer day, the village seethed with it, as other spots
then seethed. A military post, even when dismantled, always brings
home to the community where it is situated the dignity and pomp of
arms. Young men enlisted, and Honoré restlessly followed, with a
friend from the North Shore, to look at the camp. His pulses beat with
the drums. But he was carrying the burden of the family; to leave Jules
and Jules's dependent wife would be deserting infants.
Clethera gave little more thought to fleets sailing tropical seas than to
La Salle's vanished Griffin on Northern waters. It was nothing to her,
for she had never heard of it, that pioneers of her father's blood once

trod that island, and lifted up the cross at St. Ignace, and planted
outposts along the South Shore. Bareheaded, or with a crimson kerchief
bound about her hair, she loved to help her grandmother spread the
white clothes to bleach, or to be seen and respected as a prosperous
laundress carrying her basket through the teeming streets. The island
was her world. Its crowds in summer brought variety enough; and its
virgin winter snows, the dog-sledges, the ice-boats, were month by
month a procession of joys.
Clethera wondered that Honoré persistently went where newspapers
were read and discussed. He stuffed them in his pockets, and pored
over them while waiting in his boat beside the wharf. People would
fight out that war with Spain. What thrilled her was the boom of winter
surf, piling iridescent frozen spume as high as a man's head, and
rimming the island in a corona of shattered rainbows. And she had an
eye for summer lightning infusing itself through sheets of water as if
descending in the downpour, glorifying for one instant every distinct
drop.
The pair sitting with the broad top step betwixt them exchanged the