A Canadian Heroine. Mrs. Harry Coghill
drew up, therefore, at the end of the lane, and Lucia sprang out. Mr. Percy, however, insisted on going with her. He dismounted and led his horse beside her.
"I am sure you will be wet," she said; "you forget that I am a Canadian girl, and quite used to running about by myself."
"That may be very well," he answered, "when you have no one at your disposal for an escort, but at present the case is different."
She blushed a little and smiled. "In England would people be shocked at my going wherever I please alone?"
"I don't know; I believe I am forgetting England and everything about it. Do you know that I ought to be there now?"
"Ought? that is a very serious word. But you are not going yet?"
"Not just yet. Miss Costello, your mother is an Englishwoman, why don't you persuade her to bring you to England."
"My mother will never go to England." Lucia repeated the words slowly like a lesson learned by rote; and as she did so, an old question rose again in her mind—why not?
"Yet you long to go—you have told me so."
"Yes, oh! I do long to go. It seems to me like Fairyland."
It was Mr. Percy's turn to smile now. "Not much like Fairyland," he answered; "not half so much like it as your own Canada."
"Well, perhaps I shall see it some day, but then alone. Without mamma, I should not care half so much."
"Are you still so much a child? 'Without mamma' would be no great deprivation to most young ladies."
"I cannot understand that. But then we have always been together; we could hardly live apart."
"Not even if you had—Doctor Morton for instance, to take care of you?"
Lucia laughed heartily at the idea, and Mr. Percy laughed too, though his sentence had begun seriously enough. They were now at the gate, he bade her good-bye, and springing on his horse, went away at a pace which was meant to carry off a considerable amount of irritation against himself. "I had nearly made a pretty fool of myself," he soliloquised. "It is quite time I went away from here. But what a sweet little piece of innocence she is, and so lovely! I do not believe anything more perfect ever was created. Pshaw! who would have thought of my turning sentimental?"
As Lucia turned from the gate, Margery put her head round the corner of the house, and beckoned.
"Your ma's lying down, Miss Lucia—at least I guess so—and she doesn't expect you yet, and I've something to tell you."
Lucia went into the kitchen and sat down. She was feeling tired after the heat of the day, and the excitement of her alarm, and expected only to hear some tale of household matters. But to her surprise Margery began, "There've been a squaw here to-day, and, you know, they don't come much about Cacouna, thank goodness, nasty brown things—but this one, she came with her mats and rubbish, in a canoe, to be sure. Your ma, she was out, and I caught sight of something coming up the bank towards the house, so I went out on the verandah to see. As soon as she saw me, she held up her mats and says, 'Buy, buy, buy,' making believe she knew no more English than that, but I told her we wanted none of her goods, and then she said, 'Missis at home?' I told her no, and she said 'Where?' as impudent as possible. I told her that was none of her business, and she'd better go; but instead of that, she took hold of my gown, and she said "Lucia" as plain as possible. I do declare, Miss Lucia, I did not know what to make of her, for how she should come to know your name was queer anyhow; but I just said, Mrs. Costello is not in, nor Miss Lucia neither, so you'd better be off; and she nodded her head a lot of times, and seemed as if she were considering whether to go or not. I asked her what she wanted, but she would not tell me, and after awhile she went off again in her canoe as fast as if she was going express."
Lucia was thoroughly startled by this story. Mr. Strafford's letter came to her mind, and connected itself with the singular look and manner of the squaw, at the farm. This could not certainly be the mysterious "C." of the letter, for Mr. Strafford said "he is in the neighbourhood," but it might be Mary Wanita, who had apparently given the first friendly warning, and might possibly have come to Cacouna for the purpose of giving a second, and more urgent one.
"Where was mamma?" she asked.
"Gone in to see Mr. Leigh," Margery answered; "he is quite sick to-day, and Mr. Maurice came to ask your mamma to go and sit with him awhile."
"Did you tell her about this squaw?"
"Well, no, Miss Lucia, I had a kind of guess it was better not. You see she is not very strong, and I thought you could tell her when you came if you thought it was any use."
"Thank you, Margery, you were quite right."
Lucia went in slowly, thinking the matter over. It did not, however, appear to her advisable to conceal from her mother the squaw's visit—it might have greater significance than she, knowing so little, could imagine—but she wished extremely that she possessed some gauge by which to measure beforehand the degree of agitation her news was likely to produce. She had none, however, and could devise no better plan than that of telling Mrs. Costello, quite simply, what she had just heard from Margery.
As she opened the door of the parlour, Mrs. Costello half rose from the sofa, where she was lying.
"Is it you, darling," she asked, "so soon?"
"There is a storm coming on," Lucia answered; "we hurried home to escape it."
"And you have had a pleasant day?"
"Very pleasant. You have been out, too?"
"Yes; poor Mr. Leigh is quite an invalid, and complains that he never sees you now."
"I will go to-morrow," Lucia said hastily, and then, glad to escape from the subject, asked if her mother had seen an Indian woman about?
Mrs. Costello answered no, but Lucia felt her start, and went on to repeat, in as unconcerned a tone as possible, Margery's story; but when she said that her own name had been mentioned, her mother stopped her.
"Was the woman a stranger? Have you ever seen her?"
"She was a stranger to Margery certainly. I think I saw her to-day."
"Where? Tell me all you know of her."
Lucia described the squaw's appearance at the farm.
"It must be Mary," Mrs. Costello said half to herself. "What shall I do? How escape?"
She rose from the sofa and walked with hurried steps up and down the room. Lucia watched her in miserable perplexity till she suddenly stopped.
"Is that all?" she asked. "Did she go away?"
Lucia finished her account, and when she had done so, Mrs. Costello came back to the sofa and sat down. She put her arm round her daughter, and drawing her close to her, she said, "You are a good child, Lucia, for you ask no questions, though you may well think your mother ought to trust you. Be patient only a little longer, till I have thought all over. Perhaps we shall be obliged to go away. I cannot tell."
"Away from Cacouna, mamma?"
"Away from Cacouna and from Canada. Away from all you love—can you bear it?"
"Yes—with you;" but the first pang of parting came with those words.
CHAPTER VI.
"Away from all you love!" The words haunted Lucia after she lay down in her little white bed that night. There, in the midst of every object familiar to her through all her life, surrounded by the perfect atmosphere of home, she repeated, with wondering trouble, the threat that had come to her. When at last she slept, these words, and the pale face of her mother bending over her as she closed her eyes, mixed themselves with her dreams. At last, she fancied that a violent storm had come on in the very noon of a brilliant