*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 50418 ***

[Illustration: Dollard and His Command Taking the Oath.]




                                  THE
                          ROMANCE OF DOLLARD

                                  BY
                       MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD


                              ILLUSTRATED

[Illustration: LOGO]

                            SEVENTH EDITION
                            NEWLY REVISED.


                            THE CENTURY CO.
                               NEW-YORK




                        COPYRIGHT, 1888, 1889,
                     BY MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD.


                          THE DE VINNE PRESS.




                               CONTENTS.


  I     A SHIP FROM FRANCE                        7

  II    LAVAL                                    13

  III   THE KING’S DEMOISELLE                    23

  IV    THE HUSBAND                              29

  V     JACQUES HAS SCRUPLES                     47

  VI    A RIVER CÔTE                             57

  VII   A HALF-BREED                             69

  VIII  THE HURON                                74

  IX    THE LADY OF ST. BERNARD                  82

  X     THE SEIGNIORY KITCHEN                    93

  XI    MADEMOISELLE DE GRANVILLE’S BROTHER      99

  XII   DOLLARD’S CONFESSION                    109

  XIII  THE CHAPEL OF THE HÔTEL-DIEU            118

  XIV   MASSAWIPPA                              128

  XV    THE WOOING OF JOUANEAUX                 146

  XVI   FIRST USE OF A KNIFE                    156

  XVII  JOUANEAUX’S HOUSE                       161

  XVIII THE WALKING HERMIT                      176

  XIX   THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT             186

  XX    POSTERITY                               199




THE ROMANCE OF DOLLARD.




PREFACE.

BY FRANCIS PARKMAN.


THE exploit which forms the basis of the following story is one of the
most notable feats of arms in American annals, and it is as real as it
is romantic.

The chief personages of the tale--except, always, the heroine--were
actual men and women two and a quarter centuries ago, and Adam
Dollard was no whit less a hero than he is represented by the writer,
though it is true that as regards his position, his past career, and,
above all, his love affairs, romance supplies some information which
history denies us. The brave Huron Annahotaha also is historical. Even
Jouaneaux, the servant of the hospital nuns, was once a living man,
whose curious story is faithfully set forth; and Sisters Brésoles,
Maçé, and Maillet were genuine Sisters of the old Hôtel-Dieu at
Montreal, with traits much like those assigned to them in the story.

The author is a pioneer in what may be called a new departure in
American fiction. Fenimore Cooper, in his fresh and manly way,
sometimes touches Canadian subjects and introduces us to French
soldiers and bush-rangers; but he knew Canada only from the outside,
having no means of making its acquaintance from within, and it is
only from within that its quality as material for romance can be
appreciated. The hard and practical features of English colonization
seem to frown down every excursion of fancy as pitilessly as puritanism
itself did in its day. A feudal society, on the other hand, with
its contrasted lights and shadows, its rivalries and passions, is
the natural theme of romance; and when to lord and vassal is joined
a dominant hierarchy with its patient martyrs and its spiritual
despots, side by side with savage chiefs and warriors jostling the
representatives of the most gorgeous civilization of modern times,--the
whole strange scene set in an environment of primeval forests,--the
spectacle is as striking as it is unique.

The realism of our time has its place and function; but an eternal
analysis of the familiar and commonplace is cloying after a while, and
one turns with relief and refreshment to such fare as that set before
us in Mrs. Catherwood’s animated story.

  FRANCIS PARKMAN.




PREFACE.

BY THE AUTHOR.


THE province of Canada, or New France, under the reign of Louis XIV.,
presented the same panorama of lakes, mountains, rivers, rapids, that
it does to-day; but it was then a background for heroes, and the French
population which has become concentrated in the larger province of
Quebec was then thinly dripped along the river borders. Such figures as
Samuel de Champlain, the Chevalier La Salle, impetuous Louis de Buade,
Count of Frontenac, are seen against that dim past; and the names of
men who lived, fought, and suffered for that province are stamped on
streams, lakes, streets, and towns.

All localities have their romance, their unseen or possible life, which
is hinted to the maker of stories alone. But Canada is teeming with
such suggestions--its picturesque French dwellers in remote valleys are
to-day a hundred or two hundred years behind the rush of the age.

Adam Daulac, Sieur des Ormeaux, stands distinct against the background
of two centuries and a quarter ago. His name and the names of his
companions may yet be seen on the parish register of Villemarie--so
its founders called Montreal. His exploit and its success are matters
of history, as well authenticated as any event of our late civil war.
While the story of Thermopylæ continues to be loved by men, the story
of Dollard cannot die. It is that picture of stalwart heroism which
all nations admire. It is the possible greatness of man--set in this
instance in blue Canadian distances, with the somber and everlasting
Laurentines for its witnesses. The phase is medieval, is clothed in the
garb of religious chivalry; but the spirit is a part of the universal
man.

  MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD.




THE ROMANCE OF DOLLARD.




I.

A SHIP FROM FRANCE.


IN April of the year 1660, on a morning when no rain drizzled above the
humid rock of Quebec, two young men walked along the single street by
the river. The houses of this Lower Town were a row of small buildings
with stone gables, their cedar-shingled roofs curving upward at the
eaves in Norman fashion. High in north air swelled the mighty natural
fortress of rock, feebly crowned by the little fort of St. Louis
displaying the lilies of France. Farther away the cathedral set its
cross against the sky. And where now a tangle of streets, bisected by
the city wall, climb steeply from Lower to Upper Town, then a rough
path straggled.

The St. Lawrence, blue with Atlantic tide-water, spread like a sea
betwixt its north shore and the high palisades of Fort Levi on the
opposite bank. Sailboats and skiffs were ranged in a row at the
water’s edge. And where now the steamers of all nations may be seen
resting at anchor, on that day one solitary ship from France discharged
her cargo and was viewed with lingering interest by every colonist in
Quebec. She had arrived the previous day, the first vessel of spring,
and bore marks of rough weather during her voyage.

Even merchants’ wives had gathered from their shops in Lower Town, and
stood near the river’s edge, watching the ship unload, their hands
rolled in their aprons and their square head-covers flaring in the wind.

“How many did she bring over this time?” cried a woman to her neighbor
in the teeth of the breeze.

“A hundred and fifty, my husband told me,” the neighbor replied in the
same nipped and provincialized French. And she produced one hand from
her apron to bridge it over her eyes that she might more unreservedly
absorb the ship. “Ah, to think these cables held her to French soil but
two months ago! Whenever I hear the Iroquois are about Montreal or Ste.
Anne’s, my heart leaps out of my breast towards France.”

“It is better here for us,” returned the other, “who are common people.
So another demoiselle was shipped with this load. The king is our
father. But look you! even daughters of the nobles are glad to come to
New France.”

“And have you heard,” the second exclaimed, “that she is of the house
of Laval-Montmorency and cousin of the vicar-apostolic?”

“The cousin of our holy bishop? Then she comes to found some sisterhood
for the comfort of Quebec. And that will be a thorn to Montreal.”

“No, she comes to be the bride of the governor-general. We shall soon
see her the Vicomtesse d’Argenson, spreading her pretintailles as she
goes in to mass. Well would I like a look through her caskets at new
court fashions. These Laval-Montmorencys are princes in France. V’là,
soldiers!” the woman exclaimed, with that facile play of gesture which
seems to expand all Canadian speech, as she indicated the two men from
Montreal.

“Yes, every seigniory will be sending out its men to the wife market.
If I could not marry without traveling three thousand miles for a
husband, and then going to live with him in one of the river côtes, I
would be a nun.”

“Still, there must be wives for all these bachelors,” the other woman
argued. “And his Majesty bears the expense. The poor seasick girls,
they looked so glad to come ashore!”

These chatting voices, blown by the east wind, dropped disjointed words
on the passers’ ears, but the passers were themselves busy in talk.

Both were young men, but the younger was evidently his elder’s feudal
master. He was muscular and tall, with hazel eyes, and dark hair which
clustered. His high features were cut in clear, sharp lines. He had the
enthusiast’s front, a face full of action, fire, and vision-seeing. He
wore the dress of a French officer and carried his sword by his side.

“I think we have come in good time, Jacques,” he said to his man, who
stumped stolidly along at his left hand.

Jacques was a faithful-looking fellow, short and strong, with
stiff black hair and somber black eyes. His lower garments looked
home-spun, the breeches clasping a huge coarse stocking at the knee,
while remnants of military glory clothed his upper person. Jacques
was plainly a soldier settler, and if his spear had not become a
pruning-hook it was because he had Indians yet to fight. His hereditary
lord in France, his late commander and his present seignior under whom
he held his grant of land, was walking with him up the rock of Quebec.

This Jacques was not the roaring, noisy type of soldier who usually
came in droves to be married when Louis’ ship-load of girls arrived.
Besides, the painstaking creature had now a weight upon his soul. He
answered:

“Yes, m’sieur. She will hardly be anchored twenty-four hours.”

“In four hours we must turn our backs on Quebec with your new wife
aboard, and with the stream against us this time.”

“Yes, m’sieur. But if none of them will have me, or they all turn out
unfit?”

His seignior laughed.

“From a hundred and fifty sizes, colors, and dispositions you can
surely pick yourself one mate, my man.”

“But the honesty of them,” demurred Jacques, “and their obedience after
you are at the trouble of getting them home; though girls from Rouen
were always good girls. I have not made this long voyage to pick a
Rouen wife, to go back again empty of hand. M’sieur, it is certainly
your affair as much as mine; and if you see me open my mouth to gaze at
a rouged woman who will eat up our provender and bring us no profit,
give me a punch with your scabbard. What I want is a good hearty
peasant girl from Rouen, who can milk, and hoe, and cut hay, and help
grind in the mill, and wait on Mademoiselle de Granville without taking
fright.”

“And one whom I can bless as my joint heir with you, my Jacques,” said
the young commandant, turning a pleasant face over his subaltern.
“Ultimately you will be my heirs, when Renée is done with St. Bernard
and the other islands of the seigniory. Therefore--yes--I want a very
good girl indeed, from Rouen, to perpetuate a line of my father’s
peasantry on Adam Dollard’s estate in New France.”

“Yes, m’sieur,” responded Jacques dejectedly as he plodded upward.

It grieved him that a light leg and a high bright face like Dollard’s
were sworn to certain destruction. His pride in the house of Des
Ormeaux was great, but his love for the last male of its line was
greater. This Adam Daulac, popularly called Dollard, was too mighty a
spirit for him to wrestle with; so all his dissent was silent. When he
recalled the cavalier’s gay beginning in France, he could not join it
to the serious purpose of the same man in New France.

Jacques climbed with his face towards the ground, but Dollard gazed
over the St. Lawrence’s upper flood where misty headlands were touched
with spring grayness. The river, like an elongated sea, wound out of
distances. There had been an early thaw that year, and no drowned
fragments of ice toppled about in the current.

So vast a reach of sight was like the beginning of one of St. John’s
visions.




II.

LAVAL.


THE convent of the Ursulines had received and infolded the lambs sent
out by Louis XIV. to help stock his wilderness. This convent, though
substantially built of stone, was too small for all the purposes of the
importation, and a larger structure, not far from it, had been prepared
as a bazar in which to sort and arrange the ship-load.

The good nuns, while they waited on their crowd of miscellaneous
guests, took no notice of that profane building; and only their
superior, Mother Mary of the Incarnation, accompanied and marshaled
future brides to the marriage market.

Squads began to cross the court soon after matins. The girls were
rested by one night’s sleep upon land, the balsam odor of pines, and
the clear air on Quebec heights. They must begin taking husbands at
once. The spring sowing was near. Time and the chemistry of nature
wait on no woman’s caprices. And in general there was little coyness
among these girls. They had come to New France to settle themselves,
and naturally wished to make a good bargain of it. Some faces wore
the stamp of vice, but these were the exceptions. A stolid herd of
peasantry, varying in shape and complexion but little, were there to
mother posterity in Canada. Some delicate outlines and auburn tresses
offset the monotony of somber black eyes and stout waists. Clucking
all the way across the court her gentle instructions and repressions,
Mother Mary led squad after squad.

There were hilarious girls, girls staring with large interest at the
oddities of this new world while they remarked in provincial French,
and girls folding their hands about their crucifixes and looking down.
The coquettish had arrayed themselves coquettishly, and the sober had
folded their shoulder-collars quite high about their throats.

“But,” dropped Mother Mary into the ear of Madame Bourdon, who stood
at the mouth of the matrimonial pen, receiving and placing each squad,
“these are mixed goods!” To which frolicsome remark from a strict
devotee Madame Bourdon replied with assenting shrug.

The minds of both, however, quite separated the goods on display from
one item of the cargo then standing in the convent parlor before the
real bishop of Canada. This item was a slim young girl, very high-bred
in appearance, richly plain in apparel. She held a long, dull-colored
cloak around her with hands so soft and white of flesh that one’s eye
traced over and over the flexible curve of wrist and finger. Her eyes
were darkly brown, yet they had a tendency towards topaz lights which
gave them moments of absolute yellowness; while her hair had a dazzling
white quality that the powders of a later period could not impart. Bits
of it straying from her high roll of curls suggested a nimbus around
the forehead. Her lower face was full, the lips most delicately round.
Courage and tears stood forth in her face and encountered the bishop.

François Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, then vicar-apostolic of the
province, with the power rather than name of bishop, was a tall
noble, priestly through entire length of rusty cassock and height of
intellectual temples. He regarded the girl with bloodless patience.
He had a large nose, which drooped towards a mouth cut in human
granite; his lean, fine hands, wasted by self-abasement and voluntary
privations, were smaller than a woman’s. Though not yet forty, he
looked old, and his little black skull-cup aged him more. The clear
Montmorency eye had in him gained, from asceticism and rigid devotion,
a brightness which penetrated.

His young relative’s presence and distress annoyed him. For her soul’s
salvation, he would have borne unstinted agony; for any human happiness
she craved, he was not prepared to lift a little finger.

“Monseigneur,” the girl began their interview, “I have come to New
France.”

“Strangely escorted,” said Laval.

“The reverend father cannot be thinking of Madame Bourdon: Madame
Bourdon was the best of duennas on the voyage.”

Laval shook his chin, and for reply rested a glance upon his cousin’s
attendant as a type of the company she had kept on shipboard. The
attendant was a sedate and pretty young girl, whose black hair looked
pinched so tightly in her cap as to draw her eyebrows up, while modesty
hung upon her lashes and drew her lids down. The result was an unusual
expanse of veined eyelid.

“If you mean Louise Bibelot,” the young lady responded, “she is my
foster-sister. Her mother nursed me. Louise bears papers from the curé
of her parish to strangers, but she should hardly need such passports
to the head of our house.”

“In brief, daughter,” said Laval, passing to the point, “what brings
you to this savage country--fit enough to be the arena of young men, or
of those who lay self upon the altar of the Church, but most unfit for
females tenderly brought up to enjoy the pleasures of the world?”

“Has my bringing-up been so tender, monseigneur? I have passed nearly
all my years an orphan in a convent.”

“But what brings you to New France?”

“I came to appeal against your successor in the estates.”

“My successor in the estates has nothing to do with you.”

“He has to marry me, monseigneur.”

“Well, and has he not made a suitable marriage for you?”

Her face burned hotly.

“I do not wish him to make any marriage for me. I refused all the
suitors he selected, and that is what determined him to marry me to the
last one.”

“You are deeply prejudiced against marriage?”

“Yes, monseigneur.”

“Against any marriage?”

“Yes, monseigneur.”

“This must be why you come with the king’s girls to the marriage
market.”

Her face burned in deeper flames.

“The court of Louis,” pursued Laval, “would furnish a better mate for
you than any wild coureur de bois on the St. Lawrence.”

“I have not come to any marriage market,” she stammered.

“You are in the marriage market, Mademoiselle Laval. His Majesty, in
his care for New France, sends out these girls to mate with soldiers
and peasants here. It is good, and will confirm the true faith upon the
soil. What I cannot understand is your presence among them.”

Her face sank upon her breast.

“I did not know what to do.”

“So, being at a loss, you took shipping to the ends of the earth?”

“Other women of good families have come out here.”

“As holy missionaries: as good women should come. Do you intend leading
such a life of self-sacrifice? Is that your purpose?” said Laval,
penetrating her with his glance.

Her angelic beauty, drowned in red shame, could not move him. “Rash”
and “forward” were the terms to be applied to her. She had no defense
except the murmur:

“I thought of devoting myself to a holy life. Everybody was then
willing to help me escape the marriage.”

“Were there, then, no convents in France able to bound your zeal? Did
you feel pushed to make this perilous voyage and to take up the hard
life of saintly women here?”

[Illustration: “You are deeply prejudiced against marriage?”]

“I am myself a Laval-Montmorency,” said mademoiselle, rearing her neck
in her last stronghold. “The Bishop of Petræa[1] may not have inherited
all the heroism of the present generation.”

He smiled slowly; his mouth was not facile at relaxing.

“In your convent they failed to curb the tongue. This step that you
have taken is, I fear, a very rash one, my daughter.”

“Monseigneur, I am a young girl without parents, but with fortune
enough to make suitors troublesome. How can I take none but wise steps?
I want to be let alone to think my thoughts, and that was not permitted
me in France.”

“We will have further talk to-morrow and next week,” concluded the
bishop. “We will see how your resolution holds out. At this hour I go
to the governor’s council. Receive my benediction.”

He abruptly lifted his hands and placed them above her bowed head for
an instant’s articulation of Latin, then left the room. As long as his
elastic, quick tread could be heard, Mademoiselle Laval stood still. It
died away. She turned around and faced her companion with a long breath.

“That is over! Louise, do you think after fifteen years of convent life
I shall cease to have blood in me?”

“Not at all, Mademoiselle Claire,” responded Louise literally. “As long
as we live we have blood.”

“He is terrible.”

“He is such a holy man, mademoiselle; how can he help being terrible?
You know Madame Bourdon told us he ate rotten meat to mortify his
flesh, and his servant has orders never to make his bed or pick the
fleas out of it. I myself have no vocation to be holy, mademoiselle. I
so much like being comfortable and clean.”

Claire sat down upon the only bench which furnished ease to this
convent parlor. Louise was leaning against the stone wall near her.
Such luxuries as came out from France at that date were not for nuns or
missionary priests, though the Church was then laying deep foundations
in vast grants of land which have enriched it.

“I do not love the dirty side of holiness myself,” said Claire. “They
must pick the fleas out of my bed if I endow this convent. And I do not
like trotting, fussy nuns who tell tales of each other and interfere
with one. But, O Louise! how I could adore a saint--a saint who would
lead me in some high act which I could perform!”

“The best thing next to a live saint,” remarked Louise, “is a dead
saint’s bone which will heal maladies. But, mademoiselle,--the Virgin
forgive me!--I would rather see my own mother this day than any saint,
alive or dead.”

“The good Marguerite! How strange it must seem to her that you and I
have been driven this long journey--if the dead know anything about us.”

“She would be glad I was in the ship to wait upon you, mademoiselle.
And I must have done poorly for myself in Rouen. Our curé said great
matches were made out here.”

“Now, tell me, Louise, have you the courage for this?”

“I am here and must do my duty, mademoiselle.”

“But can you marry a strange man this evening or to-morrow morning and
go off with him to his strange home, to bear whatever he may inflict on
you?”

“My mother told me,” imparted Louise, gazing at the floor, where lay
two or three rugs made by the nuns themselves, “that the worst thing
about a man is his relatives. And if he lives by himself in the woods,
these drawbacks will be away.”

“You have no terror of the man himself?”

“Yes, mademoiselle. I can hardly tell at sight whether a man is
inclined to be thrifty or not. It would be cruel to come so far and
then fare worse than at Rouen. But since my mother is not here to make
the marriage, I must do the best I can.”

“Hé, Louise! Never will you see me bending my neck to the yoke!”

“It is not necessary for you to marry, mademoiselle. You are not poor
Louise Bibelot.”

“I meant nothing of the kind. We played together, my child. Why should
you accuse me of a taunt?--me who have so little command of my own
fortune that I cannot lay down a dozen gold pieces to your dower. No!
I have passed the ordeal of meeting the bishop. My spirits rise. I am
glad to dip in this new experience. Do you know that if they send me
back it cannot be for many months? One who comes to this colony may
only return by permission of the king. The bishop himself would be
powerless there. And now I shall hear no more about husbands!”

“Louise Bibelot,” summoned Mother Mary, appearing at the door, “come
now to the hall. Mademoiselle Laval will dispense with thee. The young
men are going about making their selections. Come and get thee a good
honest husband.”




III.

THE KING’S DEMOISELLE.


BETRAYING in her face some disposition to pry into the customs of the
New World, Claire inquired:

“What is this marriage market like, reverend mother?”

“It is too much like an unholy fair,” answered Mother Mary of the
Incarnation, with mild severity. “The gallants stalk about and gaze
when they should be closing contracts. The girls clatter with their
tongues; they seem not to know what a charm lies in silence.”

Mademoiselle Laval stood up and closed her cloak.

“With your permission, reverend mother, I will walk through the fair
with you.”

“Not _you_, mademoiselle!”

“Why not?”

“You are not here to select a husband. The holy cloister is thy
shelter. Common soldiers and peasant farmers are not the sights for
thee to meet.”

“Reverend mother, I must inure myself to the rough aspect of things in
New France, for it is probable I am tossed here to stay. You and Madame
Bourdon gaze upon these evil things, and my poor Louise is exposed to
them.”

“I do not say they are evil. I only say they are not befitting thee.”

“Dear and reverend mother,” urged Claire, with a cajoling lift of the
chin and a cooing of the voice which had been effective with other
abbesses, “when the nausea was so great on shipboard and poor Louise
nursed me so well, I did not think to turn my back on her in her most
trying ordeal.”

“We will say nothing more, mademoiselle,” replied Mother Mary, shaking
her black-bound head. “Without orders from his reverence the vicar, I
should never think of taking thee into the marriage market.” She went
directly away with Louise Bibelot.

As Louise left the door she cast back a keen look of distress at her
mistress. It was merely her protest against the snapping of the last
shred which bound her to France. But Claire received it as the appeal
of dependent to superior; and more, as the appeal of maid to maid.
She unlatched a swinging pane no larger than her hand, hinged like a
diminutive door in glass of the window overlooking the court. The
glass was poor and distorted, and this appeared a loop-hole which
the sisters provided for themselves through the scale-armor Canadian
winters set upon their casement.

“Poor child!” murmured Claire to the back of Louise Bibelot’s square
cap as Louise trotted beside the gliding nun. She did not estimate the
amount of impetus which Louise’s look gave to other impulses that may
have been lurking in her mind. She arose and rebelled with the usual
swiftness of her erratic nature.

Scarcely had nun and bride-elect disappeared within the bazar when
Claire Laval entered behind them. Mother Mary unconsciously escorted
her betwixt rows of suitors and haggling damsels. Louise was to be
placed in the upper hall among select young women.

Benches were provided on which the girls sat, some laughing and
whispering, others block-like as sphinxes, except that they moved their
dark eyes among the offering husbands. Sturdy peasant girls they were,
and all of them in demand, for they could work like oxen. If there was
uniformity of appearance among them, the men presented contrast enough.

Stout coureurs de bois were there, half-renegades, who had made the
woods their home and the Indian their foster-brother; who had shirked
the toils of agriculture and depended on rod and gun: loving lazy
wigwam life and the dense balmy twilight of summer woods which steeped
them in pale green air; loving the winter trapping, the forbidden
beaver-skin, the tracking of moose; loving to surprise the secrets
of the pines, to catch ground-hog or sable at lunch on cast-off
moose-horns; loving to stand above their knees in boiling trout-streams
to lure those angels of the water with well-cast hook as they lay
dreaming in palpitating colors.

Ever thus was the provincial government luring back to domestic life
and agriculture the coureurs de bois themselves. They were paid
bounties and made tenants on seigniories if they would take wives of
the king’s girls and return to colonial civilization. Most of these
young men retained marks of their wild life in Indian trinket, caribou
moccasin, deerskin leggin, or eagle feathers fastened to their hats;
not to speak of those marks of brief Indian marriages left on their
memories.

The habitant, or censitaire, the true cultivator of the soil, was a
very different type. Groups from lower seigniories, from Cap Rouge and
even from Three Rivers, shuffled about selecting partners. They had
none of the audacity of their renegade brethren, and their decoration
was less pronounced, yet they appeared to please the girls from France.

The most successful wooers among these two or three hundred
wife-seekers, however, were soldiers holding grants under their former
officers. They pushed ahead of the slow habitant, and held their
rights above the rights of any bush-ranger. Their minds were made up
at a glance, and their proposals followed with military directness. So
prompt and brief were their measures that couples were formed in a line
for a march to the altar. Thirty at a time were paired and mustered
upon the world by notary and priest.

The notary had his small table, his ink-horn and quills, his books,
papers, and assistant scrivener, in an angle of the lower hall. To
find the priest it was necessary to open a door into a temporary
chapel created in one of those closet-like offshoots which people of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dignified by the name of
rooms. Here fifteen pairs at a time were packed, their breath making a
perceptible cloud in the chill, stone-inclosed air as the long ceremony
proceeded.

Madame Bourdon rustled from upper to lower hall, repeating instructions
to her charges. They were not forced to accept any offer which did not
please them. They might question a suitor. And in some cases their
questioning seemed exhaustive; for though a sacred propriety radiated
throughout the bazar from nun and matron, here and there a young man
sat on a bench beside a damsel, holding her hand and pressing it and
his suit.

The sun penetrated dust and cobweb on narrow high windows, finding
through one a stone fire-place and wasting the light of several logs
which lay piled in stages of roseate coals and sap-sobbing wood-rind.

Madame Bourdon encountered Claire with surprise; but as she followed
Mother Mary, it was evident that the abbess sanctioned her presence, so
nothing was to be said on the subject. In all that buzz and trampling
the abbess could not hear her demoiselle’s silken step, and she was
herself a woman who never turned gazing about, but kept her modest eyes
cast down as she advanced.

The instant that Claire entered this lower hall she recoiled, feeling
degraded in the results of her disobedience. She shaded her face.
But the pride and stubbornness of her blood held her to her ground,
though from mouth to mouth flew a whispered sentence, and she heard it,
comprehending how current tattle was misrepresenting her in New France.

“The king’s demoiselle! V’là! See you? There she goes to choose her
husband--the king’s demoiselle!”




IV.

THE HUSBAND.


CHÂTEAU of St. Louis though the government building of Canada was
called, it had none of the substantial strength of Jesuit and Ursuline
possessions; but was a low, wooden structure, roofed with shingles, and
formed one side of the fort. Galleries, or pillared porches, with which
Latin stock love to surround themselves in any climate, were built at
the front, whence the governor could look down many sheer feet at the
cabins of Lower Town.

Dollard paused before entering the Château of St. Louis to say to
Jacques Goffinet:

“Will you not push your business now while I attend to mine, Jacques?
Yonder is the building you want to enter. Go and examine the cargo, and
I will be there to help you single out your bale.”

“M’sieur, unless these are orders, I will wait here for you. I am not
in a hurry to trot myself before a hundred and fifty women.”

“But hurry you must,” said Dollard, laughing. “I have no time to spare
Quebec, and you know the consequences if we give our Indians a chance
to get as drunk as they can.”

“Dispatch is the word, Sieur des Ormeaux. I’ll attack the first woman
in the hall if you but stand by to give the word of command.”

“Very well, then. But you will remember, not a breath of my sworn
purpose to any of the varlets within here.”

Jacques pulled off his cap, and holding it in air stood in the mute
attitude of taking an oath. Dollard flung his fingers backward,
dismissing the subject.

They entered the Château of St. Louis, where Jacques waited in an
anteroom among noisy valets and men-at-arms. He was put to question by
the governor’s joking, card-playing servants as soon as they understood
that he was from Montreal; but he said little, and sat in lowering
suspense until Dollard came out of the council-chamber.

What Dollard’s brief business was with the governor of Canada has never
been set down. That it held importance either for himself or for the
enterprise he had in hand is evident from his making a perilous journey
in the midst of Indian alarms; but that he made no mention of this
enterprise to the governor is also evident, from the fact that it was
completed before Quebec had even known of it. His garrison at Montreal
and the sub-governor Maisonneuve may have known why he made this
voyage, which he accomplished in the astonishing space of ten days,
both output and return. This century separates Montreal and Quebec by
a single night’s steaming. But voyagers then going up-stream sometimes
hovered two weeks on the way. Dollard had for his oarsmen four stout
Huron Indians, full of river skill, knowing the St. Lawrence like a
brother. He returned through the anteroom, his visionary face unchanged
by high company, and with Jacques at his heels walked briskly across
Quebec Heights.

Spread gloriously before him was St. Lawrence’s lower flood, parted by
the island of Orleans. The rock palisades of Levi looked purple even
under the forenoon sunlight. He could have turned his head over his
left shoulder and caught a glimpse of those slopes of Abraham where the
French were to lose Canada after he had given himself to her welfare.
Not looking over his shoulder, but straight ahead, he encountered
the mightiest priest in New France, stout Dollier de Casson, head of
the order of St. Sulpice in Montreal. His rosy face shone full of
good-will. There shone, also, the record of hardy, desperate mission
work, jovial famine, and high forgetfulness of Dollier de Casson. His
cassock sat on him like a Roman toga, masculine in every line. He took
Dollard’s hand and floated him in a flood-tide of good feeling while
they spoke together an instant.

“You here, commandant? Where are the Iroquois?”

“Not yet at Quebec.”

“But there have been alarms. The people around Ste. Anne’s[2] are said
to be starting to the fort.”

“Jacques,” exclaimed Dollard, “you must hasten this affair of your
marriage. We are here too long.”

“The sun is scarce an hour higher than when we landed,” muttered
Jacques.

“Doesn’t the king ship enough maids to Montreal?” inquired the priest,
smiling at Jacques’s downcast figure. “It is a strain on loyalty when
a bachelor has to travel so far to wive himself, to say nothing of
putting a scandal upon our own town, to the glorifying of Quebec.”

“I came with my seignior,” muttered the censitaire, “and this ship-load
was promised from Rouen.”

“My bride is my sword,” said Dollard. “The poor lad may perhaps find
one as sharp. Anyhow, he must grab his Sabine and be gone.”

“Come, my son,” rallied Father de Casson, dropping a hand on the
subaltern’s shoulder, “marriage is an honorable state, and the risks
of it are surely no worse than we take daily with the Iroquois. Pluck
up heart, pick thee a fine, stout, black-eyed maid, and if the king’s
priest have his hands over-full to make that haste which the commandant
desires, bring her to the cathedral presently, and there will I join
ye. And thus will Montreal Sulpitians steal one church service out of
the hands of Quebec Jesuits!”

“Are you returning directly up river, father?” inquired Dollard over
Jacques’s mumble.

“Yes, my son; but this day only so far as the remote edge of one of our
parishes, lying this side of Three Rivers.”

“Why not go in our company? It will be safer.”

“Much safer,” said Dollier de Casson. “I have only my servant who rows
the boat.”

“I know you are a company of men in yourself, father.”

“Military escort is a luxury we priests esteem when we can get it, my
son. Do you leave at once?”

“As soon as Jacques’s business is over. We shall find you, then, in
Notre Dame?”

“In Notre Dame.”

Dollier de Casson made the sign of benediction, and let them pass.

When Dollard strode into the lower bazar it was boiling in turmoil
around two wrangling men who had laid claim on one maid. The most
placid girls from the remotest benches left their seats to tiptoe and
look over each other’s shoulders at the demure prize, who, though she
kept her eyes upon the floor and tried to withdraw her wrists from both
suitors, laughed slyly.

“It is that Madeleine,” the outer girls who were not quarreled over
whispered to each other with shrugs. But all the men in delight urged
on the fray, uttering partisan cries, “She is thine, brave Picot!”
“Keep to thy rights, my little Jean Debois!” to the distress of Madame
Bourdon. She spread her hands before the combatants, she commanded them
to be at peace and hear her, but they would not have her for their
Solomon.

“I made my proposals, madame,” cried one. “I but stepped to the
notary’s table an instant, when comes this renegade from the woods and
snatches my bride. Madame, he hath no second pair of leather breeches.
Is he a fit man to espouse a wife? The king must needs support his
family. Ah, let me get at thee with my fist, thou hound of Indian
camps!”

“Come on, peasant,” swelled the coureur de bois. “I’ll show thee how to
ruffle at thy master. Mademoiselle has taken me for her husband. She
but engaged thee as a servant.”

The two men sprang at each other, but were restrained by their
delighted companions.

“Holy saints!” gasped Madame Bourdon, “must the governor be sent for to
silence these rioters? My good men, there are a hundred and fifty girls
to choose from.”

“I have chosen this one,” hissed red Picot.

“I have chosen this one,” scowled black Jean Debois.

“Now thou seest,” said Madame Bourdon, presenting her homily to the
spectators, “the evil of levity in girls.”

“Mademoiselle,” urged Picot at the right ear of the culprit, who still
smilingly gazed down her cheeks, “I have the most excellent grant in
New France. There is the mill of the seignior. And our priest comes
much oftener than is the case in up-river côtes.”

“Mademoiselle,” whispered the coureur de bois at her other ear, “thou
hast the prettiest face in the hall. Wilt thou deck that clod-turner’s
hut with it when a man of spirit wooes thee? The choice is simply this:
to yoke thee to an ox, or mate with a trader who can bring wealth out
of the woods when the ground fails.”

“And an Indian wife from every village,” blazed Picot.

“Even there thou couldst never find thee one!” retorted Jean Debois.
They menaced each other again.

“Choose now between these two men,” said Madame Bourdon, sternly. “Must
the garrison of the fort be brought hither to arrest them?”

The girl lifted her eyes as a young soldier hurriedly entered the outer
door, carrying a parcel. He wore several long pistols, and was deeply
scarred across the nose. Pushing through to the object of dispute, he
shook some merchandise out of his bundle and threw it into her hands as
she met him.

“This is my husband,” the bashful maid said to Madame Bourdon; “I
promised him before the others spoke, and he had but gone to the
merchant’s.”

The soldier stared at the beaten suitors; he led his bride to the
notary.

All around the hall laughter rising to a shout drove Picot and Jean
Debois out of the door through which the soldier had come in, the
wood-ranger bearing himself in retreat with even less bravado than the
habitant.

“Was there ever such improvidence as among our settlers!” sighed Madame
Bourdon, feeling her unvented disapproval take other channels as she
gazed after the couple seeking marriage. “They spend their last coin
for finery that they may deck out their wedding, and begin life on the
king’s bounty. But who could expect a jilt and trifler to counsel her
husband to any kind of prudence?”

[Illustration: “Choose now between these two men,” said Madame Bourdon,
sternly.]

Dollard presented his man’s credentials to Madame Bourdon, and she
heard with satisfaction of their haste. It was evident that the best of
the cargo would be demanded by this suitor; so she led them up one of
those pinched and twisted staircases in which early builders on this
continent seemed to take delight. Above this uneasy ascent were the
outer vestibule, where bride traffic went on as briskly as below, and
an inner sanctum, the counterpart of the first flagged hall, to which
the cream of the French importation had risen.

“Here are excellent girls,” said Madame Bourdon, spreading her hands to
include the collection. “They bring the best of papers from the curés
of their own parishes.”

In this hall the cobwebby dimness, the log-fire, and the waiting
figures seemed to repeat what the seekers had glanced through below;
though there was less noise, and the suitors seemed more anxious.

“Here’s your fate, Jacques,” whispered Dollard, indicating the fattest
maid of the inclosure, who sat in peaceful slumber with a purr like a
contented cat.

Jacques, carrying his cap in both hands, craned around Dollard.

“No, m’sieur. She’s a fine creature to look at, but a man must not wed
for his eyes alone. His stomach craves a wife that will not doze by his
fire and let the soup burn.”

“Here, then, my child, behold the other extreme. What activity must be
embodied in that nymph watching us from the corner!”

“Holy saints, m’sieur! There be not eels enough in the St. Lawrence to
fill her ribs and cover her hulk. I have a low-spirited turn, m’sieur,
but not to the length of putting up a death’s-head in my kitchen. A
man’s feelings go against bones.”

“These girls here have been instructed,” said Madame Bourdon at the ear
of the suitor. “These girls are not canaille from the streets of Paris.”

“Do they come from Rouen, madame?” inquired Jacques.

“Some of them came from Rouen. See! Here is a girl from Rouen at this
end of the room.”

“Now, m’sieur,” whispered Dollard’s vassal, squeezing his cap in
agitated hands, “I shall have to make my proposals. I see the girl.
Will you have the goodness to tell me how I must begin?”

“First, hold up your head as if about to salute your military superior.”

“M’sieur, it would never do to call a woman your military superior.”

“Then say to her, ‘Mademoiselle, you are the most beautiful woman in
the world.’”

Again Jacques shook his head.

“Pardon, m’sieur. You have had experience, but you never had to marry
one of them and take the consequences of your fair talk. I wish to be
cautious. Perhaps if I allow her the first shot in this business she
may yield me the last word hereafter.”

So, following Madame Bourdon’s beckoning hand, he made his shamefaced
way towards Louise Bibelot. Mother Mary stood beside the log-fire some
distance away, in the act of administering dignified rebuke to a girl
in a long mantle, who, with her back turned to the hall, heard the
abbess in silence. When the abbess moved away in stately dudgeon, the
girl kept her place as if in reverie, her fair, unusual hand stretched
towards the fire.

“Here, Louise Bibelot,” said the good shepherdess of the king’s flock,
“comes Jacques Goffinet to seek a wife--Jacques Goffinet, recommended
by Monsieur Daulac, the Sieur des Ormeaux, commandant of the fort at
Montreal, and seignior of the islands about St. Bernard.”

Louise made her reverence to Madame Bourdon and the suitor, and
Jacques held his cap in tense fists. He thought regretfully of Turkish
battle-fields which he had escaped. Louise swept him in one black-eyed
look terminating on her folded hands, and he repented ever coming to
New France at all.

The pair were left to court. Around them arose murmur and tinkle of
voices, the tread of passing feet, and the bolder noise of the lower
hall, to which Madame Bourdon hastened back that she might repress a
too-frolic Cupid.

Jacques noted Louise’s trim apparel, her nicely kept hair and excellent
red lips. But she asserted no claim to the first word, and after five
leaden minutes he began to fear she did not want to talk to him at all.
This would be a calamity, and, moreover, a waste of the commandant’s
time. It seemed that Jacques must himself put forth the first word, and
he suffered in the act of creating something to say. But out of this
chaotic darkness a luminous thought streamed across his brain like the
silent flash of the northern aurora.

“Mademoiselle, you like cabbage, is it not so?”

“Yes, monsieur,” responded Louise, without lifting her eyes.

“Cabbage is a very good vegetable.--My seignior is in somewhat of a
hurry. We must be married and start back to Montreal directly. Do you
wish to be married?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“I, in fact, wish it myself. When you go as a soldier you don’t want a
wife. But when you settle down en censive, then, mademoiselle, it is
convenient to have a woman to work and help dig.”

“Have you a house and farm, monsieur?” murmured Louise.

Jacques spread his hands, the cap pendant from one of them.

“I have the island of St. Bernard under my seignior, mademoiselle. It
is a vast estate, almost a league in extent. The house is a mansion of
stone, mademoiselle, strong as a fort, and equal to some castles in
Rouen. You come from Rouen, mademoiselle?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“And there is Mademoiselle de Granville, my lord’s half-sister, but
nobody else to wait upon. For Sieur des Ormeaux, when not at his
fortress, may go on expeditions. We never yet took refuge at Montreal
from the Indians, so strong is St. Bernard. The house is of rock
cemented together and built against a rock. Do you ever drink brandy,
mademoiselle?”

“_I_, monsieur! Never in my life!”

“That must be a good thing in a woman,” commented Jacques, with a nod
of satisfaction.

“Are you at all thriftless or lazy, monsieur?” the demure girl took her
turn to inquire.

“No, mademoiselle; I make my clothes do year after year. And had you
seen the frozen fish and eels, the venison, the cabbage, beets, and
onions I stored in our cellar for winter, you would not ask if I am
lazy.”

Louise smiled her bashful approval upon him, and said in explanation:

“I should not like a thriftless, lazy husband.”

“Mademoiselle, we are cut out of the same caribou-skin, and match like
a pair of moccasins. Shall we go to the notary?”

“If you wish, monsieur.”

“You accept me as your husband?”

“If you please, monsieur.”

“Then let us get married. I forget your name.”

“Louise Bibelot.”

“My name is Jacques Goffinet. When we are married we can get better
acquainted.”

Flushed with success, Jacques turned to display a signal of victory
to his seignior, and was astounded to see Dollard standing by the
fire-place in earnest conversation with a beautiful girl. It was
evident that no further countenance and support could be expected from
Dollard. So Jacques took his bride in tow as a tug may now be seen
guiding some yacht of goodly proportions through a crowded harbor, and
set out to find the notary.

When Dollard fell into an easy posture to enjoy his man’s courtship,
he cast a preliminary glance about the hall, that other amusing things
might not escape him. At once his attitude became tense, his ears
buzzed, and the blood rose like wine to his head. The woman of his
constant thoughts was warming her hand at the fire. He could not be
mistaken; there was nothing else like the glory of her youthful white
hair in either hemisphere; and without an instant’s hesitation he
brought himself before her, bowing, hat in hand, until his plume lay on
the floor.

The demoiselle made a like stately obeisance.

Dumb, then, they stood, just as the peasant couple had done; but in
this case too bounteous speech choked itself. It seemed to both that
their hearts beat aloud. Dollard felt himself vibrate from head to foot
with the action of his blood-valves. The pair looked up and stammered
to cover such noise within, speaking together, and instantly begged
each other’s pardon, then looked down and were silent again.

“How is it possible,” said Dollard, carefully modulating his voice,
“that I see you here, Mademoiselle Laval!”

“The Sieur des Ormeaux takes me for a king’s girl! How is it possible I
see _you_ here, monsieur?”

“I came to keep my man in countenance, while he picked himself a wife.
This instant is a drop from Paradise!”

“Monsieur is easily satisfied if he can call such surroundings a
paradise,” said Claire, smiling at the grim hall.

“Mademoiselle, when did you come from France?”

“Yesterday we arrived, Sieur des Ormeaux.”

“Then you came in the king’s ship?”

“Without a doubt.”

“This is wonderful! I thought you three thousand miles away from me.”

“Did you honor me with a thought at the other extremity of that
distance?” she asked carelessly, pushing towards the fire with the
point of her foot a bit of bark which its own steam had burst off a log.

“Claire!” he said, pressing his hand on his eyes.

“Monsieur, the abbess is near,” the young lady responded in tremor.

“You are not here to be a nun?”

“Why not?”

“But are you?”

“Monsieur, you have penetration. That is said to be my errand.”

“But why do you come to New France?”

“That is what the bishop said. I hope we may choose our convents, we
poor nuns.”

“O Claire! I cannot endure this,” Dollard sobbed in his throat. It was
a hoarse note of masculine anguish, but the girl observed him with
radiant eyes.

“I never was a man fit to touch the tip of your white finger.
Mademoiselle, have you forgotten those messages that I sent you by my
cousin when she was with you at the convent?”

“It was very improper, Sieur des Ormeaux. Yes, indeed, I have forgotten
every one of them.”

“You have not thought of me, and I have lived on thoughts of you. I
hoped to ennoble myself in your eyes--and you are thrown in my way to
turn me mad at the last instant!”

“Forgive my misfortune which throws me in your way, monsieur,” she said
sedately. “I am driven here a fugitive.”

“From what?” Dollard’s hand caught the hilt of his sword.

“From something very unpleasant. In fact, from marriage.”

His face cleared, and he laughed aloud with satisfaction.

“Do you hate marriage?”

“I detest it.”

“You came to live under the bishop’s protection?”

“His penance and discipline, you mean.”

“This is a rude country for you. How often have I presumed to plan your
life and mine together, arranging the minutest points of our perfect
happiness! I have loved you and been yours since the first moment I saw
you. And how I have followed your abbess’s carriage when it contained
you! I was to distinguish myself in military service, and become able
to demand your hand of your guardian. But that takes so long! There was
a rumor that you were to be married. Angel! I could throw myself on the
floor with my cheek against your foot!”

“O Sieur des Ormeaux! do not say that. It is a surprise to find you in
this country, though it is very natural that you should be here. I must
now go back to the convent.”

“Wait. Do not go for a moment. Let me speak to you. Remember how long I
have done without seeing you.”

“Oh, I only came in a moment because I was curious.”

“Then stay a moment because you are merciful.”

“But I must go back to the convent, Sieur des Ormeaux,” she urged, her
throat swelling, her face filling with blood. “Because----”

“Because what?”

“Because I must go back to the convent. It is the best place for me,
monsieur. And you will soon forget.”

The two poor things stood trembling, though Dollard’s face gathered
splendor.

“Claire, you are mine. You know that you are mine! This is love! O
saints!”

He threw himself on his knees before her without a thought of any
spectator, his sword clanking against the flags of the hearth.

“Monsieur----”

“Say ‘My husband!’”

“My husband,” she did whisper; and at that word he rose up and took her
in his arms.




V.

JACQUES HAS SCRUPLES.


ALL other business in the hall was suspended. Perhaps the fire and
success of Dollard’s courtship kindled envy in ruder breasts; but in
Mother Mary’s it kindled that beacon which a vestal keeps ready against
the inroads of the cloister’s despoilers.

Pallid and stately she placed herself before the pair. And during this
conference she made dabs forward with her head, as a poor hen may be
seen to do when the hawk has stolen her chicken.

“We did not understand, monsieur, that the commandant of Montreal
sought a wife.”

“Reverend mother,” said Dollard, shielding the side of Claire’s face
with his hand as he held her head against him, “I never dared seek such
a blessing as this. The saints have given it to me.”

“But mademoiselle is not here to be married, monsieur.”

“I understand that, reverend mother.”

“And do you understand that she is the cousin of the Bishop of New
France?”

“All Mademoiselle Laval’s history is known to me. I have adored her a
lifetime.”

“And was it to meet this young seignior, mademoiselle, that you
insisted on coming into the wife market?”

“Reverend mother,” replied Dollard, himself glowing as he felt Claire’s
face burn under his hand, “blame the saints, not us. We have been flung
together from the ends of the earth. It is a blessed miracle.”

Mother Mary made a dab with her head which meant, “Do not be deceived,
my son.”

Dollard understood a movement Claire made, and gave her his arm to lead
her away.

“And the demoiselle takes this young commandant for her husband?”

“I do, reverend mother,” the demoiselle replied, lifting up a
countenance set in the family cast of stern stubbornness.

“It will be my duty to send an instant message to the bishop.”

“The bishop may still be found at the council. I have just been with
him,” said Dollard. “Let your messenger make haste, reverend mother,
for I leave Quebec directly.”

“Then there is no need of haste. The Sieur des Ormeaux can present his
suit to the bishop next time he comes to Quebec.”

“I shall never come to Quebec again, reverend mother.”

Claire looked above the level of her own eyes to understand this riddle.

Dollard was scarcely twenty-five years old. His crystal love, so strong
that it had him in possession, shone through a face set in lines of
despair.

“Surely you can come again in a week?”

“My darling, it may take nearly that long to reach Montreal. How little
you know of distances in this savage country!”

“Monsieur, I will send for the bishop,” said Mother Mary of the
Incarnation.

As her black robe moved away, the other people in the hall, seeing
nothing further to gaze at, resumed their wooing and bargaining.

“What did you mean when you said you shall never come to Quebec again?”
inquired Claire.

Dollard penetrated her with his look.

“Will you marry me this moment?”

“Monsieur, how can I marry you this moment?”

“By going to the notary, who has a table downstairs, and afterward to
Father de Casson, who, fortunately, is waiting for me in the cathedral
now. I see what will happen if I wait to demand you in marriage of the
bishop. There will be delays and obstacles, if not a flat refusal.”

“The commandant truly takes me for a king’s girl,” she said, her
teeth showing in laughter, though her black eyelashes started into
crescent-like prominence on whitening cheeks.

“Have you I will, however I take you; the whole world shall not prevent
that now. And listen: suppose I had taken vows,--wait!--honorable vows.
It will surely be as well with you after my pledges are fulfilled as
it was before we met here. This hard convent life in New France, you
cannot endure that. You will be the lady of my poor seigniory, and
perhaps I may add some glory to the name. My Claire, do you love me?”

“Sieur des Ormeaux, is not that enough to admit in one day?”

“No, it is not. When was a day ever granted to us before? If we lose
this point of time, the dead wall of separation will rise again, and I
shall be robbed of you forever.”

“But why can you not come back again?”

“Because the bounds are set for me. Yet, if I could come again, would
I prosper any better? Claire, if my suit is even listened to, there
will be messages to the king, and to the Montmorency in France, and
a year’s or two years’ delay. As for me, I shall be dead long before
then. We can go to the notary this moment. We can go to the cathedral
to Father de Casson. We can go forthwith to my boat and start up the
St. Lawrence. O my love!”--Dollard’s voice was searching and deep in
pleading,--“can you not stoop to this haste for me? I shall carry you
into hardship, but carry you like the cross. While we stand here the
abbess sends for the bishop; the bishop comes and says, ‘Go back,
fair cousin, into the convent; and you, Dollard, whoever you may be,
get yourself off to Montreal.’ I could not then urge you against your
kinsman’s authority. But now the word is unspoken. Shall we stand here
and wait until it is spoken?”

“I see no reason why we should, monsieur,” she replied, pink as a
flower.

“Then you will consent to be married at once?”

“There is, I believe, but one staircase,” said Claire. “It would not be
pleasant to meet the bishop or Mother Mary of the Incarnation as we go
down.”

“Let us make haste, therefore,” he deduced from her evasive reply;
and haste they made, so that several pairs were kept waiting by the
notarial table while the commandant was served.

The cathedral of Notre Dame in Quebec stood, and still stands, on
the opposite side of the square. It was a massive pile of masonry,
compared to the cabins of Lower Town, and held its cross far up in
their northern sky. Within were holy dimness and silence, broken only
by the footfalls of occasionally coming and going devotees. Though
not yet rich in altars and shrines, paintings, and glittering crystal
and metal, the young cathedral had its worthy relics, and its humble
offerings of tinsel and ribbon-tied paper flowers. The merchant people
from Lower Town, and peasants from adjacent river côtes and Laval’s
great seigniory, came here to bathe their souls in thoughts of heaven,
and to kneel on the pavement beside governor or high dame.

At this hour of morning only two persons sat in the church as if
waiting for some kind of service.

There were three nuns, indeed, kneeling in a row before the chancel
rail, their three small red noses just appearing beyond their black
veils--noses expressing quiet sanctity. And a confessional was perhaps
occupied.

But the pair who waited were neither nuns nor penitents. They had taken
the usual moisture from the font of holy water, wherein many devout
fingers had deposited considerable sediment. They had bowed towards
the altar and told their prayers from station to station, and were now
anxious to be joined in matrimony lest Dollard should arrive and cut
off all chance of collecting the governor’s bounty by his impatient
haste.

Still, as no priest appeared, Jacques and Louise sat in repose
with their eyes cast down. The feverish activity of this new world
would never touch their veins or quicken the blood of any of their
descendants. How many generations before them had been calmed into this
pastoral peace on sun-soaked lands! Years of dwelling among pines and
mountains and azure lakes, of skimming on snow-shoes over boundless
winter whiteness, of shooting rapids, and of standing on peaks, would
all fail to over-exhilarate blood so kindly bovine and unhurried in its
action.

The penitent came out of the confessional closet and stalked away--an
Algonquin Indian, with some slight smell of rum about him and a
rebuked expression of countenance. A fringe or thread of his blanket
trailed on the pavement as he went. Then Dollier de Casson, who never
omitted confessing any sinner that appealed to him, strode out of the
confessional himself on gigantic soles, though with the soft tread
which nature and training impart to a priest. He saw the waiting
couple, and as serenely as he would have prepared for such an office in
some river cabin, he took his stole out of a large inner pocket of his
cassock and invested himself in it.

During this pause Dollard came hastily into the cathedral with a
muffled lady on his arm. He took her at once to Father de Casson, and
beckoned Jacques to follow them to the altar.

Jacques followed with Louise, his face waxing in anxiety, until a
heavy heart brought down his knees with a bump behind Dollard and that
unknown dame.

“How is this, my son?” inquired Father de Casson of Dollard as he
rested his eyes on the commandant’s bride.

“Father, let the service go on at once, and I will make all due
explanation when there is more time. The civil marriage is completed.”

Father de Casson took his book to administer the sacrament of marriage
to these two pairs, when Jacques, walking on his knees, brought himself
behind Dollard’s ear.

“Father,” he whispered to the priest, the hisses of his suppressed
voice scattering through the place, “I have on my mind what must first
be said to my master.”

“When did ye all confess last?” inquired Dollier de Casson.

“Father,” urged Dollard, “believe me, we are all prepared for the
sacrament of marriage.”

“But, m’sieur,” anxiously hissed Jacques at his ear, “I did not know
you were going to take a wife too.”

“Suppose you didn’t know,” exclaimed Dollard, turning towards him in
impatience; “what is it to you?”

“You will have to change your will, m’sieur.”

“Certainly I will have to change my will; but you shall not be injured.”

“That’s not it, m’sieur,” persisted Jacques. “Whatever is right to you
will be right to me. But here’s this girl. I’ve nearly promised her the
seigniory, and what will she say when she’s cut out of it?”

“Get back to your place and let the service go on,” said Dollard, half
rising in menace.

“But I ought to take her out and explain this to her first,” insisted
Jacques. “Then if she chooses to go into the marriage she can blame no
one but herself.”

“Will you get back to your place and cease your interruption,”
whispered Dollard, with fierceness, “or must I take you by the neck and
toss you out of the cathedral?”

“No, m’sieur, I’ll not interrupt it. I’ll marry her. But what she will
do with me afterwards is the load upon my mind.”

So, rubbing his knees on the pavement, Jacques returned like a crab
to his immovable bride, and dejectedly bore his part in the service.
Yet before this ordeal of marriage was over, the pastoral peace had
returned to his countenance, and solemn relief appeared in his eyes. As
Louise Bibelot became transmuted into Louise Goffinet, he said within
himself:

“Now, if she be well contented with the commandant’s change of mind,
all will go right. But if she turns rebellious at these new orders,
threatening to desert, and wanting the entire earth with the seigniory
thrown in, there’ll be only one thing for me to do. I’ll whip her!”




VI.

A RIVER CÔTE.


THE four Huron Indians, cut off abruptly from the luxury of a Lower
Town drinking-shop, sat in sulky readiness with their grasp upon the
oars. Dollard was at the stern of the boat beside Claire, whom he had
wrapped in bear-skins, because at high noon the April air was chill
upon the river.

Dollier de Casson had likewise taken to his canoe with his servant and
pack of sacred utensils, and this small craft rested against the larger
one to resist the current’s dragging. Dollard’s rope yet held to the
shore. His impatient eyes watched Quebec Heights for the appearance of
Jacques and Louise.

Water lapping the two boats brought them together with faint jars and
grindings of the edges. Dollier de Casson, sitting thus facing the
contraband bride, beheld her with increasing interest.

Jacques and Louise, carrying the bride’s caskets and impedimenta
of their own, finally appeared on Quebec’s slopes, descending with
deliberation to the landing.

They had no breath to spend in chat, but Jacques realized with
voiceless approval that Louise carried manfully her portion of the
freight.

He rolled his keg into the boat, slipped the boxes aboard, and helped
Louise to a bench in front of himself; then, untying the rope, he
sprung in.

The Hurons bent to their oars and the boat shot out into the river,
Dollier de Casson’s canoe-man following. Above water murmur and
rhythmic splash of oars Dollard then called his vassal to account,
addressing him over the Indians’ swaying shoulders.

“What have you been doing this hour by the sun, Jacques Goffinet?”

“Hour, m’sieur? I have trotted myself into a sweat since we left the
cathedral, and thrown away all my bounty the king pays a bachelor on
his marriage, except this keg of salt meat and eleven crowns in money.
That because of your hot haste, m’sieur. I lose an ox, a cow, a pair of
fine hogs, and such chickens as never crowed on St. Bernard, and yet I
have been an hour, have I?--May the saints never let ruin and poverty
tread on my heels so fast another hour while I live!”

Claire held out to Dollard, from her furs, a square watch having a
mirror set in its back, saying:

“You see, we waited scarcely twenty-five minutes.”

Dollard laughed, but called again to his vassal:

“A cow, an ox, a load of swine, and a flock of chickens! And having
freighted the boat with these, where did you intend to carry the lady
of St. Bernard, your seignior, your wife, yourself, and the rowers, my
excellent Jacques? Were we to be turned out as guests to the bishop?”

“Saints forbid, m’sieur,” Jacques called back sincerely. “The bishop
and the abbess stood by while my wife brought madame’s caskets from
the convent, and they smiled so ’twould make a man’s teeth chatter. I
am not skilled in the looks of holy folks, but I said to my wife as
we came away, ‘These Quebec Jesuits, they begrudge the light of day
to Montreal.’ So it would be cold cheer you got of bishop or abbess,
m’sieur.”

Dollard and the fur-wrapped bride looked up at Quebec promontory which
they were rounding, heights of sheer rock stretching up and holding the
citadel in mid-heaven. The Indians steadily flung the boat up-stream.

Claire turned over in her mind that mute contempt which Mother Mary
evidently felt for what she would call a girl’s fickleness. Her
ungracious leave-taking of the upright and duty-loving abbess was a
pain to her. As to the bishop, she could not regret that his first
benediction had been final. Resentment still heated her against both
those strict devotees. She was yet young enough to expect perfect
happiness, for the children of man live much before they learn to
absorb the few flawless joys which owe their perfection to briefness.

One such moment Claire had when her soldier leaned over her in silence.

“We are going farther from France. Are you homesick, dear?”

“No; I am simply in a rage at the bishop of New France and the abbess
of the Ursulines.”

“There they go behind the rock of Quebec, entirely separated from us.
Have you regrets that you bore such a wedding for my sake?”

“Sieur des Ormeaux, I have but a single fault to find with you.”

“What is that?” Dollard anxiously inquired.

“The edge of your hat is too narrow.”

“Why, it is the usual head-cover of a French officer of my rank; but I
will throw it into the river.”

“O, monsieur! that would be worse than ever. If you despise me for
seizing on you as I did----”

“O Claire!”

“What will you think when I own my depravity now? The abbess might
well smile. She doubtless knows I will say this to you. Are those
yellow-feathered men watching us?”

“Not at all. They watch the St. Lawrence.”

“Louise’s back is turned. But your servant?”

“Can he do anything but stare at Louise?”

“I forgot the priest.”

“His boat is many lengths behind.”

“Sieur des Ormeaux, this is a lovely voyage. But do you remember
climbing the convent wall and dropping into the garden once where your
cousin and I sat with our needlework?”

“Once? Say many times. I spent much of my life on that convent wall.
You saw me once.”

“You fell on one knee, monsieur, and seized my work and kissed it. That
silk mess; I often looked at it afterward. Men have very queer tastes,
have they not? It is a shocking thing when a girl has just flown the
convent and her own family, but, O Sieur des Ormeaux! I want to kiss
you!”

A sail-boat, perhaps venturing down from Three Rivers, cut past them
in the distance. Other craft disappeared. No stealthy canoe shot from
cover of rock or headland. As Claire half closed her eyes and leaned
against the rest provided for her, she thought she saw a heron rise
from shallows at the water’s edge, trailing its legs in flight.
Catbirds and blue jays could be seen like darting specks, describing
lineless curves against the sky or shore.

Sometimes Dollier de Casson’s boat lagged, or again it shot close
behind Dollard’s. The first stop was made on a flat rocky island where
there was a spring of clear water. Louise and Jacques spread out as
a bridal repast such provisions as Dollard had hurriedly bought in
Quebec, with dried eels and cured fish from the St. Bernard cellar.
The pause was a brief one. And no tale of this island was dropped in
Claire’s ear, or of another island nearer the St. Lawrence’s mouth: how
two hundred Micmac Indians camped there for the night, beaching their
canoes and hiding their wives and children in a recess of the rocks;
how the Iroquois surprised and blotted them all out. That dreaded
war-cry, “Kohe--Kohe!” might well be living in the air along the river
yet.

Before reëntering the boat Claire went to the spring for a last cup of
water, taking Louise with her.

“And what did the bishop say?” she seized this chance to inquire.

“Mademoiselle--madame, he did nothing but look, as my husband said. We
were all four surprised, the bishop, the abbess, my husband, and I.”

“Did the abbess accept my purse I bade you leave for the convent?”

“Madame, I left it lying on the floor where she dropped it. She has
no doubt picked it up and counted the coins out to charity by this.
The whole marriage seems a miracle, with my mother helping the blessed
saints.”

“Were you, then, pleased, my child?”

“Mademoiselle, I was stupid with delight. For you will now be my
mistress and have me to wait on you the rest of our lives. Had _you_ no
terrors at coming away with a strange man, mademoiselle?”

“Strange man, tongue of pertness! when the Sieur des Ormeaux has been
my lover these many years.”

“Was he, indeed, one of those troublesome wooers who drove you out of
France? You said this morning you would never be yoked in marriage, and
long before the sun goes down you are a bride! Ah, madame, the air of
this country must be favorable to women!”

Again the boats pushed up-river, following the afternoon westward.

They had passed Cap Rouge, a cluster of cabins, the seignior’s
substantial stone hut forming one side of the fort-like palisades. The
strip farms extended in long ribbons back from the shore. Their black
stubble of stumps, mowed by ax and fire, crouched like the pitiful
impotence of man at the flanks of unmeasured forest.

Before nightfall the voyagers came near a low beach where sand and
gravel insensibly changed to flat clearing, and a côte of three or four
families huddled together.

Wild red-legged children came shouting to the water’s edge before
Dollier de Casson’s canoe was beached, and some women equally sylvan
gathered shyly among the stumps to welcome him.

As the priest stepped from his boat he waved a hand in farewell to the
other voyagers, and Dollard stood up, lifting his hat.

The sacrament of marriage, so easy of attainment in New France at that
time, had evidently been dispensed with in the first hut this spiritual
father entered. His man carried in his sacred luggage, and the
temporary chapel was soon set up in a corner unoccupied. The children
hovered near in delight, gazing at tall candles and gilt ornaments, for
even in that age of poverty the pomps of the Roman Church were carried
into settlers’ cabins throughout New France. Dollier de Casson had for
his confessional closet a canopy of black cloth stretched over two
supports. The penitent crept under this merciful wing, and the priest,
seated on a stool, could examine the soul as a modern photographer
examines his camera; except that he used ear instead of eye.

The interior of a peasant censitaire’s dwelling changes little from
generation to generation. One may still see the crucifix over the
principal bed, joints of cured meat hanging from rafters, and the
artillery of the house resting there on hooks. A rough-built loom
crowded inmates whom it clothed. And against the wall of the entrance
side dangled a vial of holy water as a safeguard against lightning.

Dollier de Casson stood up to admonish his little flock, gathered
from all the huts of the côte, into silence before him. The men took
off their rough caps and put them under their arms, standing in a
disordered group together. Though respectful and obedient, they did not
crowd their spiritual father with such wild eagerness as the women,
who, on any seat found or carried in, sat hungrily, hushing around
their knees the nipped French dialect of their children.

“What is this, Antonio Brunette?” exclaimed Father de Casson after he
had cast his eyes among them. “Could you not wait my coming, when you
well knew I purposed marrying you this time? You intend to have the
wedding and the christening together.”

“Father,” expostulated the swart youth, avoiding the priest to gaze
sheepishly at his betrothed’s cowering distress, “Pierre’s daughter
is past sixteen, and we would have been married if you had been here.
You know the king lays a fine on any father who lets his daughter pass
sixteen without binding her in marriage. And Pierre is a very poor
man.”

“Therefore, to help Pierre evade his Majesty’s fine, you must break
the laws of Heaven, must you, my son? Hearty penance shall ye both do
before I minister to you the sacrament of marriage. My children, the
evil one prowls constantly along the banks of this river, while your
poor confessors can only reach you at intervals of months. Heed my
admonitions. Where is Pierre’s wife?”

Down went Pierre’s face between his hands into his cap.

“Dead,” he articulated from its hollow. “Without absolution. And the
little baby on her arm, it went with her, baptized by ourselves.”

“God have pity on you, my children,” said Dollier de Casson. “I will
say masses over her grave, and it is well with the little unblemished
soul. How many children have you, Pierre?”

“Seventeen, father.”

“Twenty-six, he should say, father,” a woman near the priest declared.
“For the widow of Jean Ba’ti’ Morin has nine.”

“And why should Pierre count as his own the flock of Jean Ba’ti’
Morin’s widow?”

“Because he is to marry her, father, when Antonio Brunette marries his
oldest girl.”

“If I come not oftener,” remarked the priest, “you will all be changed
about and newly related to each other so that I shall not know how to
name ye. I will read the service for the dead over your first wife,
Pierre, before I marry you to your second. It is indeed better to be
dwelling in love than in discord. Have you had any disagreements?”

“No, father; but Jean Ba’ti’s oldest boy has taken to the woods and is
off among the Indians, leaving his mother to farm alone with only six
little lads to help her.”

“Another coureur de bois,” said the priest in displeasure.

“Therefore, father,” opportunely put in Jean Ba’ti’s widow, “I having
no man at all, and Pierre having no woman at all, we thought to wed.”

“Think now of your sins,” said Father de Casson, “from oldest to
youngest. After penance and absolution and examination in the faith ye
shall have mass.”

The solemn performance of these religious duties began and proceeded
until dusk obliterated all faces in the dimly lighted cabin. Stump
roots were piled up in the fire-place, and Pierre’s daughter, between
her prayers, put on the evening meal to cook.

If a child tittered at going under the confessional tent, its mother
gave it a rear prod with admonishing hand. In that humble darkness
Father de Casson’s ear received the whispers of all these plodding
souls, and his tongue checked their evil and nourished their good. The
cabin became a chapel full of kneeling figures telling beads.

This portion of his duty finished, Dollier de Casson postponed the
catechizing, and made Pierre take a lighted stick of pine and show him
that ridge whereunder mother and baby lay. There was always danger of
surprise by the Iroquois. The men and women who followed in irregular
procession through the vast dimness of northern twilight kept on their
guard against moving stumps or any sudden uprising like the rush of
quails from some covert. In rapid tones the priest repeated the service
for the dead; then called his followers from their knees to return to
the house to celebrate the weddings of Pierre and Pierre’s daughter.

After this rite, supper was served in Pierre’s house, the other
families dispersing to their own tables--cabbage-soup, fat pork, and
coarse bread made from pounded grain; for this côte was too poor to
have a mill. These were special luxuries for Father de Casson, for the
usual censitaire supper consisted of bread and eels. The missionary
priest, accustomed with equal patience to fasting or eating, spread his
hands above unsavory steam and blessed the meal. Silently, while he
spoke, the door opened and a slim dark girl entered the house.




VII.

A HALF-BREED.


SHE stood erect and silent against the closed door until Dollier de
Casson, before he had taken his first mouthful, spoke to her.

“Peace be with you, Massawippa.”

“Peace be also with you, father.”

Her voice was contralto without gutturals.

“You come in good time, my daughter. It is long since I examined you in
the faith and absolved you.”

“Think of my soul later, father; I come from the chief.”

“Where is the chief?”

“Étienne Annahotaha sends for you,” she replied grandly. “I am to show
you the way.”

Dollier de Casson did not ask why Étienne Annahotaha sent for the
priest instead of coming to the priest himself. The Huron chief
disdained his wife’s relatives with savage frankness.

“Very good, my daughter. In the morning, then, we will set out.”

“Annahotaha begs that you will come at once, father.”

“Hath he such urgent need of a priest?”

“He leaves his present camp early to-morrow, and he himself will tell
you his urgent business.”

The girl’s eyes moved slightingly over this huge French family, holding
them unfit to hear many words concerning her father.

“Very good, my daughter. As soon as I have finished my repast I shall
be ready.”

Pierre muttered objections. His first wife’s grave was blessed, and his
second wife was now comfortably his, but he grudged gospel privileges
to that interloper Annahotaha, who had married his sister and made a
white squaw of her, poor unsettled woman, paddling her from the island
of Orleans to the lower Ottawa and back until she died.

All seats being occupied, Massawippa still stood by the entrance. Her
uncle Pierre did point her to a place beside the table, but she shook
her head.

Father de Casson was placed by himself at the table end, Pierre’s mob
of children and step-children thronging below, the little ones standing
wedged together, some with chins barely level with the board. Though
scarcely more than fourteen years old, Massawippa looked well grown and
tall. No civilized awkwardness of limb, or uncertainty of action when
she moved, hampered her. Notwithstanding her cheek-bones were high and
her mouth wide, she was full of vigorous young beauty. Her temples were
round, and clasped as if by jet-black birdwings in hair which divided
its weight betwixt two braids and measured half the length of her body.

[Illustration: “Peace be with you, Massawippa.”]

Scarcely tolerant was the eye she kept on these French habitants her
kinsfolks. She was princess; they were merely inferior white stock from
whom her mother had sprung.

In personal appointments she was exquisite compared with the French
women of the cabin. Her rich and glowing cheeks, her small dark ears
and throat and hands, had reached a state of polish through unusual
care. Her raiment appeared to be culled from the best fashions of both
races. She wore the soft Indian moccasin, stitched with feather-work,
and the woolen French stocking. All beaver skins in New France
nominally belonged to the government; but this half-breed girl wore a
pliant slim gown, chestnut-colored and silky, of beaver skin, reaching
nearly to her ankles. It was girdled around the waist and collared
around the top by bands of white wampum glittering like scales. A small
light blanket of wool dyed a very dull red was twisted around her and
hung over one arm.

A bud of a woman though still a child, full of the gentle dignity of
the Hurons, who of all the great tribes along the St. Lawrence had
lent themselves most kindly to Christian teaching, and undulled by her
French peasant blood, Massawippa was comforting to eyes wearied by oily
dark faces.

Dollier de Casson, gentleman and soldier before he became priest,
always treated her with the deference she was inclined to exact as due
her station.

Most Canadian half-breeds were the children of French fathers who
had turned coureurs de bois and of Indian women briefly espoused by
them. But the Huron chief had wedded Massawippa’s mother by priest and
Latin service. The inmates of Pierre’s house regarded this girl as a
misfortune that held them in awe. Her patent of nobility was dirt to
them, yet by virtue of it she trod on air above their heads; and she
was always so strangely clean and strangely handsome, this high young
dame of the woods.

Pierre’s new wife, the corners of her mouth settling, regarded
Massawippa with disfavor. The families in that côte knew well at whose
door Jean Ba’ti’s widow laid the defection of her son.

One of Pierre’s little boys, creeping sidewise towards Massawippa,
leaned against the door and looked up, courting her smile. He was very
dirty, his cheeks new sodden with pork-fat being the most acceptable
points of his surface. She did not encourage his advances, but met his
look sedately.

“Thou know’st not what I know, Massawippa,” said he. “Thou know’st not
who’s married.”

She remained silent, pride magnifying the natural indifference of her
time of life to such news.

“The father Pierre is married. Dost guess he married our Angèle?”
tempted the little boy, whose ideas of the extent of intermarriage
surpassed even the generous views of his elders in the côte. “No!
Antonio Brunette married our Angèle. Four people are married. It made
me laugh. The widow of Jean Ba’ti’ Morin, she wedded Father Pierre, and
you must tell La Mouche. Are you also married to La Mouche, Massawippa?”

Her aquiline face blazed with instant wrath, and Pierre’s little boy
fell back from her as if scorched. Her hiss followed him.

“I do not myself speak to La Mouche!”

La Mouche’s mother was naturally the most interested witness of this
falcon-like stoop of Massawippa’s, and as a mother she experienced
deeper sense of injury.




VIII.

THE HURON.


A LIGHT rain was blistering the river and thickening an already dark
landscape when Dollier de Casson, followed by his man carrying what
might be called his religious tool-chest, crossed the clearing with
Massawippa.

The child walked before them, her blanket drawn well up over her head
and her moccasins taking no print afterwards visible from any soft
earth they trod. The laden and much-enduring servant stumbled across
roots, but labored on through sleek and treacherous wet spots with the
zeal of a missionary servant.

Dollier de Casson gave him breathing periods by carrying the chapel
himself. Thus had these two men helped each other in winter when the
earth was banked in white, the river a glittering solid, and one’s
breath came to him fluid ice and went from him an eruption of steam,
as they toiled to parish or distant fort on snow-shoes. Thus did Jesuit
and Sulpitian priests keep their religion alive on the St. Lawrence.

Within the first pine covert three Hurons were waiting, evidently
Massawippa’s escort. She now walked beside Dollier de Casson and they
stalked ahead, threading a silent way through the darkness.

Spruce and white birch were all the trees that stood out distinctly to
the senses, others massing anonymously in the void of night and their
spring nakedness. The evergreen with prickling fingers brushed the
passers’ faces; while the white birches in flecked shrouds crowded rank
on rank like many lofty ghosts diverse of girth, and by their whiteness
threw a gleam upon the eyeball.

Following the head Huron, Dollier de Casson’s company trod straight
over soft logs where the foot sunk in half-rotten moss, and over that
rustling, elastic cushion of dead leaves, histories of uncounted
summers which padded the floor of the forests. Through roofing limbs
the rain found it less easy to pelt them. They wound about rocks and
climbed ascents, until Annahotaha’s camp-fire suddenly blinked beneath
them and they could stand overlooking it.

He had pitched his bark tent in a small amphitheater sloping down to a
tributary of the St. Lawrence. The camp-fire, hissing as slant lines
of the shower struck it, threw light over the little river’s stung
surface, on low shrubs and rocks, on the oblong lodge,[3] and the
figures of some three dozen Indians squatting blanketed beside it, or
walking about throwing long shadows over the brightened area.

Étienne Annahotaha sat just within the shelter of his lodge, and here
he received the priest, standing almost as tall as Dollier de Casson,
who bent his head to avoid the tent.

This shelter was, indeed, altogether for Massawippa; the chief
preferred lying on the ground with his braves; but she was child of a
mother long used to roofs, and was, besides, a being whom he would set
up and guard as a sacred image. There was no woman in the camp.

When Dollier de Casson and Annahotaha sat silently down together,
Massawippa crept up behind her father and rested her cheek against his
back. He allowed this mute caress and gazed with stern gravity at the
fire.

His soul was in labor, and the priest good-humoredly waited until it
should bring forth its care. No religious instruction could be imparted
to the camp while Annahotaha held his speech unspoken. Rain hissed
softly through listening trees, paused to let damp boughs drip, and
renewed itself with a rush. Evident vapor arose from the Indians beside
the fire.

“The father’s boat was seen upon the river,” began Annahotaha. “I have
sent for the father to tell him the thoughts which come up in my breast
and give me no peace. I am a tree of rough bark, but I bear a flower
branch. I go to the burning and my branch of flowers will not be cut
off from me. I am an old bear, but how shall I make the Iroquois feel
my claws if my cub be beside me? The lodge of her mother’s people is
not fit to hold her. Continually her mother comes to me in dreams
saying, ‘What have you done with the child?’ Shall I hang my branch of
flowers in the lodges of my people? Behold the remnant of the Hurons!”
He leaped to his feet with energetic passion, and flung his pointed
finger at the steaming braves by the fire. They gave an instant’s
attention to his voice, and went on toasting themselves as before. “We
are trodden underfoot like leaves. The French, our white brothers,
promise us protection, and our feeble ones are dragged to the stake
and scalped before their eyes. We perish from the earth. Soon not a
Huron will make the smoke of his lodge go up beside the great river.
But before these Iroquois utterly tread our bones under the turf they
shall feel the rage of Annahotaha. The last Hurons shall heap them up
in destruction!”

He sat down and rested his savage face on his fists.

Massawippa resumed her attitude of satisfied tenderness; and shade by
shade his wrath lifted until the father and not the chief again looked
through the red of his mask-like face.

“If Annahotaha is leading a war party against the Iroquois,” began
Dollier de Casson--

“Speak not of that. The old bear knows his own track; but no way for
the tender feet of his cub.”

--“he will pass through Montreal,” continued the priest. “Now, if
Annahotaha wishes to keep his gift of Heaven from contaminations of the
world, why should he not lay her on the sacred altar? Place her with
the sisters of St. Joseph, those good nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu.”

The chief, expectant and acquiescent, kept yet a wily side-glance on
his cassocked guide. Honest Dollier de Casson brought his fist with a
gentle spat upon his palm as he proceeded.

“No Indian woman ever hath joined the pious labors of our good nuns.
You Hurons clamor without ceasing for protection to white brothers who
can scarcely keep their own scalps on their heads, but the burdens and
self-denials of our holy religion ye shirk. I speak truth to the chief
of the Hurons. You even leave your farms and civilized life on the
island of Orleans, and take to the woods.”

“We are dragged scalped from our farms,” interjected Annahotaha’s
guttural voice.

“My son, the power of Heaven is over all. We gasp and bleed together;
but, see you, we still live. Miracles are continually worked for us.
They confound even the dark hearts of the Iroquois.”

Annahotaha smiled, perhaps with some reflection of Quebec distrust in
Montreal miracles.

“Hast thou not heard,” insisted Father de Casson with that severe
credulity which afflicted the best men of the time, “about Jean
Saint-Père--slain by the Iroquois and beheaded, and his head carried
off--speaking to them in warnings and upbraidings? Yea, the scalped
skull ceased not threatening them with the vengeance of Heaven, in
plain, well-spoken Iroquois.” Annahotaha sounded some guttural which
the priest could not receive as assent.

“Blessed is a country, my son, when such notable miracles are done in
it. For, see you, there was Father le Maître, who had his head likewise
cut off by these children of evil, but without making the stain of
blood on his handkerchief which received it. And there were his
features stamped on the cloth so that any one might behold them. This
miracle of Father le Maître hath scarcely ceased to ring in Montreal,
for it is a late thing. I counsel the chief of the Hurons to give his
child to the Church. The saints will then be around her in life, and in
death they will gather her to themselves.”

Annahotaha sat as if turning over in his mind this proposal, which he
had secretly foreseen and wished.

“The father has spoken,” he finally pronounced; and silence closed this
conference, as silence had preceded it.

Afterwards Dollier de Casson set up his chapel beside a sheltering rock
and prepared to shrive the Huron camp, beginning with Massawippa. Her
he confessed apart, in the inclosure of the lodge, probing as many of
her nature’s youthful and tortuous avenues as the wisdom of man could
penetrate. She raised no objection to that plan of life her father
and her confessor both proposed for her; but the priest could not
afterwards distinctly recall that she accepted it.

When Father de Casson called the congregation of Indians to approach
his temporary chapel, one of the restless braves who had sauntered from
sputtering fire to dripping tree skulked crouching in the shadow of
Massawippa’s tent. He had a reason for avoiding the priest as well as
one for seeking her.

When the others were taken up with their devotions he crept to the
tent-flap, and firelight shone broadly on his dark side-countenance,
separating him in race from the Hurons. He was a Frenchman. But his
stiff black hair was close shorn except one bristling tuft, his oily
skin had been touched with paint, and he wore the full war-dress of his
foster tribe.

“Massawippa,” whispered this proselyte, raising the lodge-flap, “I have
something here for you.”

The girl was telling her beads with a soft mutter in the little
penances her priest had imposed upon her. He could see but her blurred
figure in her dim shrine.

“Massawippa! La Mouche brings you a baked fish,” he whispered in the
provincial French.

Her undisturbed voice continued its muttered orisons.

“Massawippa!” repeated the youth, speaking this time in Huron, his tone
entreating piteously. “La Mouche brings you a baked fish. It comes but
now from the fire.”

Her voice ceased with an indrawing of the breath, and she hissed at La
Mouche.

“Return it then to the fire and thyself with it, thou French log!” she
uttered in a screaming whisper in Huron, and hissed at him again as her
humble lover dropped the lodge-flap.

The candles shone mellowly from the sheltered altar upon kneeling
Indians, but La Mouche slunk off into the darkness.




IX.

THE LADY OF ST. BERNARD.


FIVE evenings later a boat was beached on one of the islands above
Montreal lying near the south shore of the St. Lawrence. While this
island presented rocky points, it had fertile slopes basking in the
glow which followed a blue and vaporous April day, and trees in that
state of gray greenness which shoots into leaf at the first hot shining.

The principal object on the island was a stone house standing inclosed
by strong palisades above the ascent from the beach. It appeared to be
built against a mass of perpendicular rock that towered over it on the
west side. This was, in fact, the strongest seigniorial mansion west of
the Richelieu. There was, in addition, a small stone mill for grinding
grain, apart from it on the brink of the river.

Northward, the St. Lawrence spread towards the horizon in that
distension of its waters called Lake St. Louis.

Out of the palisade door came a censitaire and his wife, who, having
hurried to St. Bernard for protection at an alarm of Indians, staid
to guard the seigniory house during Jacques Goffinet’s absence with
Dollard.

“This is St. Bernard,” said Dollard, leading Claire up the slope.
“Sometimes fog-covered, sometimes wind-swept, green as only islands
can be, and stone-girdled as the St. Lawrence islands are. A cluster
up-river belongs to the seigniory, but this is your fortress.”

“And yours,” she added.

“It will seem very rude to you.”

“After my life of convent luxury, monsieur?”

“After the old civilization of France. But I believe this can be made
quite comfortable.”

“It looks delicious and grim,” said the bride. “Tragic things might
happen here if there be a tragic side to life, which I cannot now
believe. Yet a few months ago I said there was no happiness!”

Dollard turned his uneasy glance from her to the seigniory house.

“There is scarcely such another private stronghold in the province.”

“Did you build it?”

“Not I. Poor Dollard brought little here but his sword. One of my
superior officers abandoned it in my favor, and took a less exposed
seigniory near the Richelieu. I wish the inside appointments better
befitted you. It was a grand château to me until I now compare it with
its châtelaine.”

“Never mind, monsieur. When you demand my fortune from France, you can
make your château as grand as you desire. I hope you will get some good
of my fortune, for I never have done so. Seriously, monsieur, if no
house were here, and there were only that great rock to shelter us, I
should feel myself a queen if you brought me to it, so great is my lot.”

“You can say this to poor Adam Dollard, an obscure soldier of the
province?”

“In these few days,” replied the girl, laughing, and she threw the
light of her topaz eyes half towards him, “the way they call your name
in this new country has become to me like a title.”

“You shall have more than a title,” burst out Dollard. “Heaven helping
me, you shall yet have a name that will not die!”

They passed through the gate of the palisade, Jacques and Louise
following with the loads of the expedition. To insure its safety the
boat was afterwards dragged within the palisade.

The censitaire in charge, with his wife at his shoulder, stood grinning
at Jacques’s approach.

“Thou got’st thyself a wife, hé, my pretty Jacques?”

“That did I, bonhomme Papillon. And a good wife, and a stout wife,
and a handsome. Thou ’lt want to go to Quebec market thyself when the
Indians carry off Joan.”

“Let me see him go to the Quebec market!” cried Joan, shaking her
knuckled fist under his ear.

“It would trouble thee little to lose sight of him, Joan. But his
coming back with such freight--it is _that_ would fire thee hotter than
Iroquois torches. Alas, my children,” Jacques said, letting down his
load inside the gate, “I bring much, but I leave much behind. If I am
to hold this seigniory while my commandant is away, and feed ye both
and my new wife, to say naught of Mademoiselle de Granville and our
great lady, I need the cattle and swine and fowls which our king gave
me for dower and my seignior made me throw over my shoulder.”

“But I thought,” said Louise, in dismay, “that thou had’st such stores
of vegetables and other provisions here.”

“Have no fear, my spouse. Thou shalt see how this garrison is
provisioned. But what prudent man can drop without a sigh the moiety
of his wife’s fortune? Here are Papillon and Joan, who hold the next
island under our seignior. And here, timid Joan, is thy soldierly
new neighbor Louise Goffinet, who squealed not in the dangers of the
river.”

“Wert thou afraid?” Joan asked Louise, kindly.

“I was until I saw Madame des Ormeaux was not. And the Indians have a
wonderful skill.”

“Did the commandant also marry her at the wife market?” pressed Joan,
walking by Louise’s side behind the men. “She is surely the fairest
woman in New France. I could have crawled before her when she gave me a
smile.”

“My mother nursed her,” said Louise, with pride.

“Did she so! And is our lady some great dame from the king’s court, who
heard of the commandant at Montreal?”

“Thou hast woman wit. It is exactly as thou sayest,” bragged Jacques,
turning towards the mummied face of Papillon’s simple wife. “She is
cousin to our holy bishop himself; and even that great man she left
grinning and biting his nails, for he and the abbess they would make a
nun of her. Thou dost not know the mightiness of her family. My Louise
can charm thee with all that. But this lady was a princess in France,
and voyaged here by the king’s ship, being vilely sickened and tossed
about; and all for my commandant. Is not the Sieur des Ormeaux known in
France?” Jacques snapped his fingers high in air.

The lowest floor of the seigniory house was the rock on which it was
based. Here and within the stockade were such domestic animals as
belonged to the island. A sheep rubbed against Louise, passing out as
she passed in.

She looked around the darkened strong walls, unpierced by even a
loop-hole, at the stores of provender for dumb and human inmates.
Jacques had underestimated his wealth in collected food. His magazine
seemed still overflowing when it was spring and seed-time, and the
dearth of winter nearly past.

A stone staircase twisted itself in giving ascent to the next floor.
Here were sleeping-cells for the seignior’s servants, and a huge
kitchen having pillars of cemented rock across its center, and a
fire-place like a cave. Lancelike windows gave it light, and in the
walls were loop-holes which had been stopped with stone to keep out the
Canadian winter.

A broader stairway of tough and well-dried wood in one corner led up
to the seignior’s apartment above, which was divided into several
rooms. The largest one, the saloon of the mansion, had also its cavern
fire-place where pieces of wood were smoldering. A brass candelabrum
stood on the mantel. Rugs of fawn skin beautifully spotted, and of
bear skin relieved the dark unpolished floor. The walls of all the
rooms were finished with a coarse plaster glittering with river sand.
Some slender-legged chairs, a high-backed cushioned bench, a couch
covered by moth-eaten tapestry, and a round black table furnished this
drawing-room. Some cast-off pieces of armor hung over the mantel, and
an embroidery frame stood at one side of the hearth.

There was but one window, and it swung outward on hinges, the sash
being fitted with small square panes.

When Claire appeared from the private chamber where she had been taken
to refresh herself with Louise to attend on her, Dollard came down the
room, took her by the hands, and led her to this window. He pushed the
sash open quite out of their way, and thus set the landscape in a deep
frame of stone wall.

The two young lovers still met each other with shyness and reserve.
From the hour of his impetuous marriage Dollard had watched his wife
with passionate solicitude. But that day when his boat approached
Montreal he had it brought to the dock and went ashore by himself,
spending what Claire considered the best hours of the afternoon at the
fort and on the streets, coming back flushed and repressed.

She felt the energetic pulses still beating in his face as he touched
her forehead.

“You see now the way we came,” said Dollard, indicating the St.
Lawrence sweeping towards the east.

“A lovely way it was,” said Claire. The river’s breath came to them
fresh and clean, leaving a touch of dampness on the skin. Already the
wooded south shore was clothing itself in purple, but northward the
expanse of water still held to what it had received from sunset. “That
was very different from the voyage on shipboard.”

“Are you not tired?”

“I was tired only once--at Montreal,” hinted Claire, gazing at the
extremity of the island.

“Again I beg you to pardon that. I had been nearly ten days away from
my command and there were serious matters to attend to. Put it out of
your mind and let us be very happy this evening.”

“And every following evening. That goes without saying.”

“I must report at my fortress at daybreak to-morrow.”

“You should have left my caskets at Montreal, monsieur,” exclaimed
Claire. “I could do without them here one night.”

“You want to turn your back on poor St. Bernard immediately?”

“Monsieur, you do not mean to separate yourself from me?” she inquired
lightly, keeping control of her trembling voice.

“I brought you here to take possession of my land,” said Dollard.

“I have taken possession. The keys of the house of course I do not
want. They shall in all courtesy be left with the resident châtelaine,
your sister. Monsieur, where is your sister?”

Dollard glanced over his shoulder at the embroidery frame.

“She has been here or is coming. I have hardly prepared you for poor
Renée. She lives in delusions of her own, and pays little regard to the
courtesies of the outside world. My excellent Jacques waits on her as
on a child.”

“Doubtless I thought too little about her,” Claire said, visibly
shrinking. “She may object to me.”

“She will not even see you unless I put you before her eyes.”

“What ails your sister, monsieur? Is she a religious devotee?”

“Not strictly that. She is a nurser of delusions. I cannot remember
when she was otherwise, though we have lived little together, for poor
Renée is but my half-sister. Her father was a De Granville. You will
not feel afraid of her when you have seen her; she is not unkind. She
has her own chambers at the rock side of the house and lives there
weeks together. I see her embroidery frame is set out, and that means
we may expect her presence.”

While he was speaking, Mademoiselle de Granville had opened a door at
the end of the room.

Claire, with well-opened eyes, pressed backward against her husband, so
moldered-looking a creature was this lady gliding on silent feet--not
unlike some specter of the Des Ormeaux who had followed their last
chevalier under the New World’s glaring skies. She wore a brocaded
gown, the remnant of a court costume of some former reign, and her face
was covered with a black silk mask. Though masks were then in common
use, the eyes which looked through this one were like the eyes of a
sleep-walker. She sat down by the embroidery frame as if alone in the
room, but instead of a web of needlework she began to fasten in the
frame one end of a priest’s stole much in need of mending.

Dollard led his wife to this silent figure.

“My dear Renée,” he said, taking hold of the stole and thereby
establishing a nerve of communication, “let me present my beautiful
wife.”

The figure looked up, unsurprised but attentive.

“She was Mademoiselle Laval-Montmorency.”

With deference the figure rose off its slim-legged chair and made a
deep courtesy, Claire acknowledging it with one equally deep.

“Mademoiselle,” petitioned the bride, “I hope my sudden coming causes
you no trouble, though we return to the fort soon.”

The mask gazed at her but said nothing.

“Are you never lonely here upon this island?” pursued Claire.

The mask’s steady gaze made her shiver.

“She does not talk,” Dollard explained. He drew his wife away from the
silent woman and suggested, “Let us walk up and down until some supper
is served, to get rid of the boat’s cramping.”

Mademoiselle de Granville sat down and continued to arrange her darning.

Whenever they were quite at the room’s end Claire drew a free breath,
but always in passing the masked presence she shrunk bodily against
Dollard, for the room was narrow. He, with tense nerves and far-looking
eyes, failed to notice this. The eccentricities of any man’s female
relatives appeal to his blindest side. Custom has used him to them, and
his own blood speaks their apology.

The river air blew into the open window. There were no sounds except
the footsteps of Dollard and Claire, and a stirring of the household
below which was hint of sound only, so thick were the walls and floors.

In due time Jacques came up, bearing the supper. His seignior when at
St. Bernard ate in the kitchen. But this was a descent unbefitting a
grand bride. While Jacques was preparing the round table, Claire stole
another look towards the mask which must now be removed. But by some
sudden and noiseless process known to recluse women Mademoiselle de
Granville had already taken herself and her embroidery frame out of the
room.




X.

THE SEIGNIORY KITCHEN.


ABOUT 1 o’clock of the night Jacques rose from his sleeping-cell, as he
was in the habit of doing, to put more wood on the kitchen fire.

The window slits let in some moonlight of a bluish quality, but the
larger part of this wide space lay in shadow until Jacques sent over
it the ruddiness of a revived fire. Out of uncertainty came the doors
of the sleeping-cells, the rafters and dried herbs which hung from
them, heavy table and benches and stools, cooking-vessels, guns, bags
of stored grain, and the figures of the four Hurons, two at each side
of the hearth, stretched out in their blankets with their heels to the
fire--and Jacques himself, disordered from sleep and imperfectly thrust
into lower garments. He lingered stupidly looking at the magician fire
while it rose and crackled and cast long oblique shadows with the
cemented posts.

Dollard descended the stairway from his apartment, pressing down his
sword-hilt to keep the scabbard from clanking on each step. He was
entirely dressed in his uniform. As he approached the fire and Jacques
turned towards him, his face looked bloodless, his features standing
high, the forehead well reared back.

“I am glad you are awake,” he said to Jacques, half aloud. “Are the
others asleep?” indicating those cells occupied by Louise and the
Papillon family. There was no questioning the deep slumber which
inclosed his Indians.

“Yes, m’sieur.”

“Have you packed the provisions I directed you to pack?”

“Yes, m’sieur. M’sieur, you do not leave at this hour?”

“At once.”

“But, m’sieur, the Lachine is hard enough to run in daytime.”

“There is broad moonlight. Are you sure you understand everything?”

“M’sieur, I hope I do. Have you told madame?”

Dollard wheeled and flung his clinched hands above his head as men do
on receiving gunshot wounds.

“O saints! I cannot tell her! I am a wretch, Jacques. She has been
happy; I have not caused her a moment’s suffering. Let her sleep till
morning. Tell her then merely that I have gone to my fortress; that I
would not expose her to the dangers of the route by night. It will soon
be over now. Sometime she can forgive this cruelty if a deed goes after
it to make her proud. She has proud blood, my boy; she loves honor. Oh,
what a raving madman I was to marry her, my beloved! I thought it could
do _her_ no harm--that it could not shake _my_ purpose! O my Claire!
O my poor New France! Torn this way, I deserve shame with death--no
martyr’s crown--no touch of glory to lighten my darkness for ever and
ever!”

“M’sieur,” whimpered Jacques, crouching and wiping nose and eyes with
his palms, “don’t say that! My little master, my pretty, my dear boy!
These women have the trick of tripping a man up when he sets his foot
to any enterprise.”

“Hear me,” said Dollard, grasping him on each side of the collar. “She
is the last of the Des Ormeaux to you. Serve her faithfully as you
serve the queen of heaven. If she wants to go back to France, go with
her. Before this I bequeathed you St. Bernard. Now I am leaving you a
priceless charge. Your wife shall obey and follow her to the ends of
the earth. To-day I altered my will in Montreal and gave her my last
coin, gave her my seigniory, I gave her _you_! Do you refuse to obey my
last commands? Do you disallow my rights in you?”

Jacques’s puckered face unflinchingly turned upward and met the stare
of his master.

“M’sieur, I will follow my lady’s whims and do your commands to the
hour of my death.”

Dollard, like a mastiff, shook him.

“Is there any treachery in you, Jacques Goffinet, free follower of the
house of Des Ormeaux? If there is, out with it now, or my dead eyes
will pry through you hereafter.”

“M’sieur,” answered Jacques, lifting his hand and making the sign of
the cross, “I am true man to my core. I do love to pile good stuff
together and call land mine, but thou knowest I love a bit of cloth
from one of thy old garments better than all the seigniories in New
France.”

Dollard let go Jacques’s collar and extended his arms around the stumpy
man’s neck.

“My good old Jacques! My good old Jacques!”

“How proud I have always been of thee!” choked Jacques.

“I have told her to depend on you, Jacques. The will I brought home in
my breast and placed among her caskets. She will provide for Louise and
you, and she will provide for poor Renée, also. Kick the Indians and
wake them up. There is not another moment to spare.”

The Indians were roused, and stood up taciturn and ready for action,
drawing their blankets around themselves. These Hurons, vagrants from
Annahotaha’s tribe, were hangers-on about the fortress at Montreal.
Jacques gave them each a careful dram, and lighted at the fire a dipped
candle. With this feeble light he penetrated the darkness of the cellar
floor, leading the party down its tortuous staircase.

Dollard, who had stood with his hand on the door-latch, was the last to
leave the upper room. His questions followed Jacques around the turns
of the stairs.

“You are well provisioned, Jacques?”

“Yes, m’sieur.”

“At daybreak you will remember to have Papillon help you bring in an
abundant supply of water?”

“Yes, m’sieur.”

“Bar the doors when you see any one approaching and keep watch on all
sides every day.”

“Yes, m’sieur.”

Jacques jammed his candle-end into a crack of the rock floor, undid the
fastenings, and with a jerk let the moonlight in on their semi-darkness.

They went out to the palisade gate, the Indians dragged the boat
carefully to its launching, and Jacques stored in it Dollard’s
provisions.

“Good-bye, my man,” said Dollard.

“M’sieur,” said Jacques, “I have always obeyed you. There is but one
thing in my heart against you, and I will cleanse myself of that now.”

“Quickly, then.” The young man had one foot in the boat.

“It is the same old hard spot. Thou wouldst rule me out of this
expedition. A man that loves thee as I love thee!”

“Jacques, if I had reasons before on Renée’s account, what reasons have
I not now?”

“Bless thee, my master Adam Daulac!”

“Bless thee, my Jacques!”

The boat shot off, and Jacques went in and fastened the gate and the
door.




XI.

MADEMOISELLE DE GRANVILLE’S BROTHER.


SOON after 1 o’clock Claire awoke and sat upright in her dim room. Her
alarm at the absence of Dollard was swallowed instantly by greater
alarm at the presence of some one else.

This small chamber, like the saloon, was lighted by one square window,
and male housekeeping at St. Bernard, combined with the quality of
glass manufactured for colonial use at that date, veiled generous
moonlight which would have thrown up sharply every object in the severe
place.

Claire’s garments, folded and laid upon a stool, were motionless to her
expanding eyes; so were her boxes where Louise had placed them. All
the luggage which a young lady of rank then carried with her to the
ends of the earth could be lifted upstairs in the arms of a stout maid.
Unstirring was the small black velvet cap which Claire had chosen from
her belongings to wear during the voyage. It was stuck against the
wall like a dim blot of ink. But nothing else visible seemed quite so
motionless and unstirring as the figure by the bed. It was Mademoiselle
de Granville. Except that her personality was oppressive, she seemed
a lifeless lump without breath or sight, until Claire’s tenser pupils
adapted to duskiness found eyes in the mask, eyes stiffly gazing.

The bride’s voice sunk in her throat, but she forced it to husky action.

“What do you want?”

Automatically, holding its elbows to its sides, the figure lifted one
forearm and pointed to Claire’s garments.

“Do you require me to put them on?”

It continued to point.

“Be so kind as to withdraw, then, and I will put them on.”

It continued to point, without change of attitude or sound of human
breath.

The girl crept out of her couch at that corner farthest from the
figure, rolled up and pinned her white curls as best she could, and
assimilated the garments from the stool, keeping her eye braced
repellantly against the automaton pointing at her. She finished by
drawing her mantle over her dress, and the velvet cap over her hair.

“Now I am ready, if you are determined I shall go somewhere with you.”

The figure turned itself about and opened the door into the saloon.
Claire followed, keeping far behind those silent feet, and thus they
walked through that grim room over which touches of beauty had never
been thrown by a woman’s keeping.

Claire followed into another chamber and was shut in darkness. It was
the rock side of the house, without moonlighted windows. Mademoiselle
de Granville had left her, and she stood confused, forgetting which way
she should turn to the door-latch of release. The absence of Dollard
now rushed back over her, and helped the dark to heap her with terrors.
The sanest people have felt sparks of madness flash across the brain.
One such flash created for her a trap in the floor to swallow her to
the depths of the island.

Directly her surroundings were lighted by a door opening to an inner
room. A priest stood there in black cassock, his face smooth and
dark, his eyes dark and attentive. He was not tonsured, but with hair
clustering high upon his head he looked like Dollard grown to sudden
middle age, his fire burnt to ashes, his shoulders bowed by penances,
his soul dried as a fern might be dried betwixt the wooden lids of his
breviary. Behind him stood an altar, two tall candles burning upon it,
and above the altar hung a crucifix. She took note of nothing else in
the room.

“Pardon me, father; I am lost in the house. Mademoiselle de Granville
brought me here and has left me.”

“Yes.” His voice had depth and volume, and was like Dollard’s voice
grown older. “She brought you at my request.”

“At _your_ request, father? Where is Mademoiselle de Granville?”

“In that closet,” he replied, showing a door at the corner of his
chapel room. “My poor lifeless sister is at her devotions.”

“I see my way now. With your permission I will go back,” said Claire.
This unwholesome priest like a demon presentation of Dollard made her
shudder.

“Stop, Mademoiselle Laval.”

“I am Madame des Ormeaux; as you should know, being inmate of this
house and evidently my husband’s brother.”

“Mademoiselle de Granville has but one brother,” said the priest.

“The Sieur des Ormeaux is her brother.”

“There is no Sieur des Ormeaux.” He smiled in making the assertion, his
lips parting indulgently.

“I mean Dollard, commandant of the fort of Montreal.”

“There is no Dollard, commandant of the fort of Montreal. I am the Abbé
de Granville.”

Claire silently observed him, gathering her convictions. The priest
leaned towards her, rubbing his hands.

“This misguided soldier, sometimes called Dollard, he is but a bad
dream of mine, my poor child. So keen is your beauty that it still
pierces the recollection. In my last dream my conscience tells me I
worked some harm to you. Return to your family, mademoiselle, and
forgive me. I have become myself again, and these holy tokens recall me
to my duty and my vows.”

“I know who you are,” said Claire. “You are Mademoiselle de Granville.”

“I am the Abbé de Granville. Look at me.” He took a candle from the
altar and held it near his face. So masculine was the countenance that
it staggered conviction. The razor had left sleekness there. The tone
of flesh was man-like. “I am Dollard,” he said. “I am a priest. There
can be, of course, no marriage between us. I sent for you to ask your
pardon, and to send you from St. Bernard.”

This gross and stupid cruelty had on Claire merely the effect of
steeping her in color. Her face and throat blushed.

“You are Mademoiselle de Granville,” she repeated.

The priest, as if weary of enforcing his explanations, waved his
fingers with a gesture of dismissal in Dollard’s own manner.

“I am the Abbé de Granville. But we will discuss the subject no
further. I must be at my prayers. A trustworthy witness shall confirm
what I have told you.”

He opened the closet door, carrying the candle with him. His tread had
body and sound, though his feet were shod in sandals.

Claire moved guardedly after him. He crossed the closet and entered a
long passage so narrow that two persons could scarcely walk abreast
in it, nor did she covet the privilege of stepping it thus with her
conductor.

As she crossed the closet her rapid eye searched it for the chrysalis
of Mademoiselle de Granville. The candle was already in the passage
beyond, but distinct enough lay that brocaded figure prostrate on the
floor beneath a crucifix, but the mask faced Claire.

She moved on behind Abbé de Granville as with masculine tread of foot
he strode the length of the passage and opened a door leading out on
the stairway.

“Here, Jacques,” he called in his mellow tones, “tell this demoiselle
about me; and tell her the truth, or it shall be the worse for you.”

Claire, standing on the upper stairs, could see Jacques with his back
to the fire and his mouth opened in consternation at this unpriestly
threat. His candle was yet smoking, so lately had it been divorced from
its flame.

[Illustration: “I know who you are.”]

Abbé de Granville closed the passage door and bolted it.

She went down into the kitchen and Jacques brought her a seat, placed
her before the middle hearth, and stationed himself at the corner in
an attitude of entire dejection. The other inmates rested in unbroken
sleep. The cell occupied by Papillon and his wife resounded with a low
guttural duet.

“Where is Sieur des Ormeaux, Jacques?” inquired the lady of St. Bernard.

Writhing betwixt two dilemmas, Dollard’s follower cunningly seized upon
the less painful one, and nodded up the stairway.

“He’s been out again, has he?”

“Do you mean the priest?”

“Monsieur the abbé.”

“Jacques, who is he?”

“The Abbé de Granville,” replied Jacques with a shrug, first of one
shoulder and then the other, as if the sides of his person took turns
in rejecting this statement. “And he sends you to me for the truth,
madame. Is not that the craziest part of the play when he knows what I
will tell you? There is no limiting a woman, madame, when she takes to
whims.”

“Then it really was Mademoiselle de Granville playing priest?”

“Madame, she befools me sometimes until I know not whether to think
her man or woman. So secret is this half-sister of my master’s, and so
jealous of her pretty abbé, it unsettles a plain soldier. A fine big
robust priest he is, and you would take her for a ghost in petticoats.
It goes against my conscience, so that I have come nigh to mention it
in confession, all this mumming and male-attiring, and even calling for
hot shaving-water! Yet she seems an excellent devoted soul when no one
crosses her, and for days at a time will be Mademoiselle de Granville,
as gentle and timid as a sheep. Besides, women take pleasure in putting
on raiment of different kinds, and when you come to look at a priest’s
cassock, it is not so far from being a petticoat that I need to raise
a scandal against St. Bernard and my commandant’s sister on account of
it. M’sieur he minds none of her pranks, and she hath had her humor
since I was set to keep guard over her; and if it be a mad humor, it
harms no one but herself.”[4]

Claire’s glance rested on the coarse floor where many nailed shoes had
left their prints in the grain.

“Such a monomaniac cannot be a pleasant housemate.”

“No, madame; the poor lady is not charming. And she will have the
biggest of candles for her altar. But then she must amuse herself. I
was, indeed, speechless when I saw her turn you out on the stairway.
She does not like a woman about, especially a pretty woman, and
doubtless she will dismiss my Louise many times. But, madame, let me
entreat you to return to sleep and have no fear. I will even lock the
doors of her chambers. She will disturb you no more.”

Claire listened aside to some outer sound, and then exclaimed:

“You did not tell me where the commandant is, Jacques. He has not gone
back to his fortress, without me?”

Jacques’s face fell into creases of anguish.

“Madame, he said you were to sleep undisturbed till morning.”

“He should have obtained Mademoiselle de Granville’s consent to that.
This is not answering a question I have already repeated to you.”

“Madame, he has taken the Indians and gone in his boat. Soldiers must
do all sorts of things, especially commandants. He would not expose you
to the dangers of the route by night.”

“Listen!” Her expression changed.

Jacques gladly listened.

“I was sure I heard some noise before! You see you are mistaken. He is
not yet gone.”

Mellow relief, powerful as sunshine, softened the swarthy pallor of
Jacques’s face. He caught his candle from the chimney shelf and jammed
its charred wick against a glowing coral knot in the log.

“Madame, that’s m’sieur at the gate. I know his stroke and his call.
I’ll bring him up.”

No man can surely say, with all his ancestry at his back and his
unproved nature within, what he can or cannot do in certain crises of
his life.

“What is it, m’sieur?” exclaimed Jacques as he let Dollard through the
gate.

“We went scarce a quarter of a league. I came back because I cannot
leave her without telling her; it was a cowardly act!” exclaimed
Dollard, darting into the house. “She must go with me to Montreal.”




XII.

DOLLARD’S CONFESSION.


IF Dollard was surprised at finding Claire standing by the fire dressed
for her journey, he gave himself no time for uttering it, but directed
Jacques to bring down madame’s boxes and to wake Louise.

“One casket will be enough, Jacques,” countermanded madame; “the one
which has been opened. If there is such haste, the others can be sent
hereafter. As for my poor Louise, I will not have her waked; this is
but her second night’s sleep on land. Some one can be found in Montreal
to attend me, and I shall see her again soon.”

Jacques shuffled down from his master’s apartment, carrying the luggage
on his shoulder and his candle in one hand. Dollard waited for him, to
say aside:

“In three weeks come to Montreal and ask for your lady at the
governor’s house. Subject yourself to her orders thenceforward.”

“Yes, m’sieur,” grunted Jacques.

Again his candle on the twisted staircase caused great shadows to
stalk through the cellar gloom--Claire’s shadow stretching forward a
magnified head at its dense future; Dollard’s shadow towering so high
as to be bent at right angles and flattened on the joists above. Once
more were the bars put up, this time shutting two inmates out of the
seigniory house.

Dollard hurried his wife into the boat. One Indian held the boat to the
beach, another stored the luggage, and immediately they dropped into
their places and took the oars, and the boat was off.

It was a silent night and very little breeze flowed along the surface
of the water. The moon seemed lost walking so far down the west sky.
She struck a path of gold crosswise of Lake St. Louis, and it grew with
the progress of the boat, still traveling downriver and twinkling like
a moving pavement of burnished disks.

Going with the current, the Hurons had little need to labor, and the
gush of their oars came at longer intervals than during the up-stream
voyage.

Dollard had wrapped Claire well. He held the furs around her with one
arm. By that ghostly daylight which the moon makes she could follow
every line and contour of his face. He examined every visible point on
the river’s surface, and turned an acute ear for shore sounds. Before
he began to speak, the disturbance of his spirit reached her, and quite
drove all mention of Mademoiselle de Granville from her lips.

Having satisfied himself that no other craft haunted the river, Dollard
turned his eyes upon Claire’s, and spoke to her ear so that his voice
was lost two feet away.

“Claire, the Iroquois are the curse of this province. Let me tell you
what they have done. They are a confederation of five Indian nations:
their settlements are south of the great Lake Ontario, but they spread
themselves all along the St. Lawrence, murder settlers, make forays
into Montreal and Quebec; they have almost exterminated the Christian
Hurons, and when they offer us truces they do it only to throw us off
our guard. The history of this colony is a history of a hand-to-hand
struggle against the Iroquois.”

“If they are so strong,” whispered Claire, “how have the settlements
lived at all?”

“Partly because their mode of warfare is peculiar, and consists in
overrunning, harassing, and burning certain points and then retiring
to the woods again, and partly because they needed the French. We are
useful to them in furnishing certain supplies for which they trade. But
they also trade with the Dutch colony on the Hudson River. Only lately
have they made up their minds to sweep over this province and destroy
it.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know that at this time two bands of these savages, each hundreds
strong, are moving to meet each other somewhere on the Ottawa River. We
have heard rumors, and some prisoners have been brought in and made to
confess, and the mere fact that no skulking parties haunt us shows that
they are massing.”

Dollard drew a deep breath.

“I shall not dread this danger, being with you,” said Claire.

“This is what I must tell you. Claire, there was a man in Montreal
who thought the sacking of New France could be prevented if a few
determined men would go out and meet these savages on the way, as
aggressors, instead of fighting simply on the defensive, as we have
done so long. This man found sixteen other young men of his own mind,
and they all took a sacred oath to devote themselves to this purpose.”

“Sixteen!” breathed the shuddering girl. “Only sixteen against a
thousand Indians?”

“Sixteen are enough if they be fit for the enterprise. One point of
rock will break any number of waves. These sixteen men and their leader
then obtained the governor’s consent to their enterprise, and they
will kneel in the chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu and receive absolution at
daybreak this morning.”

“Their leader is Adam Dollard!” Claire’s whispered cry broke out.

“Their leader is Adam Dollard,” he echoed.

She uttered no other sound, but rose up in the boat.

Dollard caught her in his arms, and set her upon his knees. They held
each other in an embrace like the rigid lock of death, the smiling,
pale night seeming full of crashing and grinding noises, and of chaos
like mountains falling.

Length after length the boat shot on, dumb heart-beat after dumb
heart-beat, mile after mile. It began to shiver uneasily. Alert to
what was before them, and indifferent to their freight of stone in the
boat’s end, the Hurons slipped to their knees, each unshipped his oars
and took one of the dripping pair for a paddle, fixed his roused eyes
on the twisting current, and prepared for the rapids of Lachine. Like
an arrow just when the bowstring twangs came the boat at a rock, to be
paddled as cleanly aside as if that hissing mass had been a shadow.
Right, left, ahead the rapids boiled up; slight shocks ran through the
thin-skinned craft as it dodged, shied, leaped, half whirled and half
reversed, tumultuously tumbled or shot as if going down a flume. While
it lasted the danger seemed endless. But those skilled paddlers played
through it with grins of delight folding creases in their leather
faces, nor did they settle down dogged and dull Indians again until
the boat shot freely out of the rapids upon tame moonlighted ripples
once more.

After the Lachine, Dollard lifted his head and said to Claire:

“We start on our expedition as soon as mass is done this morning. It
goes without saying that I was pledged to this when I went to Quebec. I
cannot go back from it now.”

“There is no thought of your going back from it now,” Claire spoke to
him. “But, Dollard, is there hope of any man’s returning alive from
this expedition?”

“We are sworn to give no quarter and to take none.”

The Indians, pointing their boat towards Montreal, were now pulling
with long easy strokes. A little rocky island rose between voyagers and
settling moon.

“O Claire! I loved you so! that is all my excuse. I meant not to bring
such anguish upon you.”

“Dollard, I forbid you to regret your marriage. I myself have no
regrets.”

“I knew not what I was doing.” His words dropped with effort. She could
feel his throat strongly sobbing.

“Don’t fret, my Dollard.” Claire smoothed down those laboring veins
with her satin palm. “We are, indeed, young to die. I thought we
should live years together. But this marriage gave us nearly a week
of paradise. And that is more happiness, I am experienced enough to
believe, than many wedded couples have in a lifetime.”

“Claire, the family of the Governor Maisonneuve will receive you and
treat you with all courtesy; first for your own sake, and in a small
degree for mine. I have set down in my will that you are to have all my
rude belongings, and Jacques is sworn your trusty servant.”

“Dollard, hear what I have to say,” she exclaimed, pressing his
temples between her hands. “You meant to leave me behind you at St.
Bernard. You forget that the blood of man-warriors, the blood of Anne
de Montmorency, Constable of France, runs in my veins. Doubt not that
I shall go with you on this expedition. Do you think I have no courage
because I am afraid of mice and lightning?”

“I knew not that you were afraid of mice and lightning, my Claire.”

“Am I to be the wife of Dollard and have sixteen young men thrust
between him and myself, all accounted worthy of martyrdom above me?”

“Daughter of a Montmorency!” burst out Dollard with passion; “better
than any man on earth! I do you homage--I prostrate myself--I adore
you! Yet must I profane your ears with this: no woman can go with the
expedition without bringing discredit on it.”

“Not even your wife?”

“Not even my wife. After absolution in the chapel this morning we are
set apart, consecrated to the purpose before us.”

Claire dropped her face and said:

“I comprehend.” He held her upon his breast the brief remainder of
their journey, prostrated as she had not been by the shock of his
confession.

Mount Royal stood dome-like on Montreal island, a huge shadow glooming
out of the north-west upon the little village. After shifting about
from a river point of view, those structures composing the town finally
settled in their order: the fort, the rough stone seminary of St.
Sulpice, the Hôtel-Dieu, the wooden houses standing in a single long
row, and eastward the great fortified mill surrounded by a wall. The
village itself had neither wall nor palisade.

Surrounding dark fields absorbed light and gave back no glint of dew
or sprinkling green blade, for the seed-sowing was not yet finished.
Black bears squatting or standing about the fields at length revealed
themselves as charred stumps and half trees.

“You have not told me the route your expedition goes,” whispered Claire.

“We go in that direction--up the Ottawa River.” Dollard swept out his
arm indicating the west.

“There is one thing. Do not place me in the governor’s charge. How can
I be a guest, when I would lie night and day before some shrine? Are
there no convents in Montreal? A convent is my allotted shelter.”

“There are only the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu,” he murmured back. “They,
also, would receive you into kind protection; but, my Claire, they are
poor. Montreal is not Quebec. Our nuns lived at first in one room. Now
they have the hospital; but it is a wooden building, exposed by its
situation.”

“Let me go to the nuns,” she insisted. “And there is one other thing.
Do not tell them who I am. Say nothing about me, that I may have no
inquiries to answer concerning our marriage and his lordship the
bishop.”

“Our nuns of St. Joseph and the Sulpitians of Montreal bear not too
much love for the bishop,” said Dollard. “But every wish you have is my
wish. I will say nothing to the nuns, and you may tell them only what
you will.”

A strong pallor toning up to yellow had been growing from the east
to the detriment of the moon. Now a pencil line of pink lay across
the horizon, and the general dewiness of objects became apparent. The
mountain turned from shadow into perpendicular earth and half-budded
trees. Some people were stirring in Montreal, and a dog ran towards the
river barking as the boat touched the wharf.




XIII.

THE CHAPEL OF THE HÔTEL-DIEU.


JOUANEAUX, the retainer of the hospital nuns, though used to rising
early to feed their pigs and chickens, this time cast his wary glance
into the garden while it was yet night. The garden held now no tall
growths of mustard, in which the Iroquois had been known to lurk until
daylight for victims, but Jouaneaux felt it necessary that he should
scan the inclosure himself before any nun chanced to step into it.

The Sisterhood’s dependent animals were quartered under the same roof
with themselves, according to Canadian custom. Jouaneaux scattered
provender before the cocks were fairly roused to their matin duty of
crowing; and the sleepy swine, lifting the tips of their circular
noses, grunted inquiringly at him without scrambling up through the
dusk.

Scandal might have attached itself even to these nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu
for maintaining so youthful a servitor as Jouaneaux, had not the entire
settlement of Montreal known his cause for gratitude towards them and
the honest bond which held him devoted to their goodness.

He was not the stumpy type of French peasant, but stood tall and lithe,
was rosy-faced, and had bright hair like a Saxon’s. A constant smile
parted Jouaneaux’s lips and tilted up his nose. He looked always on the
point of telling good news. Catastrophe and pain had not erased the
up-curves of this expression. So he stood smiling at the pigs while
Indian-fighters were gathering from all quarters of Montreal towards
the hospital chapel.

“Jouaneaux!” spoke a woman’s well-modulated voice from an inner door.

“Yes, honored Superior,” he responded with alacrity, turning to Sister
Judith de Brésoles, head of the Sisterhood of St. Joseph, to whom he
accorded always this exaggerated term of respect. She carried a taper
in her hand, its slender white flame casting up the beauty of her stern
spiritualized features.

Bound at all times to the duty of the moment, whether that duty was to
boil herbs for dinner, to ring the tocsin at an Indian alarm, or to
receive the wounded and the dying, Sister Brésoles conferred briefly
with her servitor.

“Jouaneaux, is the chapel in complete readiness?”

“Yes, honored Superior; everything is ready.”

“The Commandant Dollard has arrived, and he brought his young relative
with him to place her in our care.”

“His sister who lives on his seigniory?”

“Certainly. Could it be any other? His sister Mademoiselle Dollard,
therefore--”

“Pardon, honored Superior,”--the tip of his nose shifted with
expressive twitches, and he had the air of imparting something
joyful,--“Mademoiselle de Granville. She is but half-sister to Monsieur
Dollard.”

“The minutest relationships of remote families are not hid from you,
Jouaneaux,” commented Sister Brésoles. “But I have to mention to
you that the parlor fire must be lighted now and every morning for
Mademoiselle de Granville, if she choose to sit there.”

“It shall be done, honored Superior.”

“And that is all I had to tell you, I believe,” concluded Sister
Judith, turning immediately to the next duty on her list.

Early as it was, the population of Montreal was pressing into the
palisade gate of the Hôtel-Dieu. Matrons led their children, who mopped
sleep from their eyes with little dark fists and stood on tiptoe to
look between moving figures for the Indian-fighters. Some women had
pale and tear-sodden cheeks, but most faces showed that rapturous
enthusiasm which heroic undertaking rouses in the human breast. Unlike
many meetings of a religious character, this one attracted men in
majority: the seignior, the gentilhomme, the soldier from the fort, the
working-smith or armorer.

When Sister Brésoles received Claire she had given her directly into
the hands of a white, gentle little nun, the frame-work of whose
countenance was bare and expressive. She took the girl’s hand between
her sympathetic and work-worn tiny palms.

They stood in the refectory, the dawn-light just jotting their outlines
to each other.

“I am Sister Macé, dear mademoiselle,” said the little nun. “Do you
wish me to sit by you in the chapel?”

“I cannot sit in the chapel, Sister.”

“Then let me take you to our parlor. My Sister Brésoles will have a
fire lighted there. On these mornings the air from the river comes in
chill.”

“No, Sister,” said Claire, her eyes closed. “Thank you. Be not too kind
to me. I wish to retain command of myself.”

Sister Macé let a tear slip down each cheek hollow and took one hand
away from Claire’s to tweak her dot-like nose and catch the tears on a
corner of her veil. The Sisters of St. Joseph were poorly clad, but the
very fragrance of cleanness stirred in Sister Macé’s robe. She glanced
about for something which might comfort Claire by way of the stomach;
for stomach comfort had gained importance to these gently bred nuns
after their Canadian winters on frozen bread.

“Sister,” said Claire, “is there any hiding-place about the walls of
the chapel where I can thrust myself so that no weakness of mine may be
seen, and behold the ceremonies?”

“There is the rood-loft,” replied Sister Macé. “And if you go directly
to it before the chapel is opened for the service, nobody would dream
you were there.”

“Let us go directly,” said Claire.

Directly they went. Sister Macé paused but to close with care the
chapel door behind them. The chapel was dark and they groped across it
and up the stairway, Sister Macé talking low and breathlessly on the
ascent.

“Ah, mademoiselle, what a blessed and safe retreat is the rood-loft!
How many times have my Sister Maillet and I flown to that sacred corner
and prostrated ourselves before the Holy Sacrament while the yells of
the Iroquois rung in our very ears! We expected every instant to be
seized, and to feel the scalps torn from our heads. I have not the
fortitude to bear these things as hath my Sister Brésoles,--this way,
mademoiselle; give me your hand,--but I can appreciate noble courage;
and, mademoiselle, I look with awe upon these young men about to take
their vows.”

The sacrament and its appendages had been removed from Sister Macé’s
retreat to the altar below. There was a low balustrade at the front
of this narrow gallery which would conceal people humble enough to
flatten themselves beside it, and here the woman bereft and the woman
her sympathizer did lie on the floor and look down from the rood-loft.
Before many moments an acolyte came in with his taper and lighted all
the candles on the altar. Out of dusk the rough little room, with its
few sacred daubs and its waxen images, sprung into mellow beauty.

Claire watched all that passed, sometimes dropping her face to the
floor, and sometimes trembling from head to foot, but letting no sound
betray her. She saw the settlement of Montreal crowd into the inclosure
as soon as the chapel door was opened, and a Sulpitian priest stand
forth by the altar. She saw the seventeen men file into space reserved
for them before the altar and kneel there four abreast, Dollard at
their head kneeling alone.

The chapel was very silent, French vivacity, which shapes itself
into animated fervor on religious occasions, being repressed by this
spectacle.

Claire knew the sub-governor Maisonneuve by his surroundings and
attendants before Sister Macé breathed him into her ear.

“And that man who now comes forward,” the nun added as secretly--“that
is Charles Le Moyne, as brave a man as any in the province, and
rich and worthy, moreover. His seigniory is opposite Montreal on the
south-east shore.”

Charles Le Moyne, addressing himself to the kneeling men, spoke out for
his colleagues and brethren of the settlement who could not leave their
farms until the spring crops were all planted. He urged the seventeen
to wait until he and his friends could join the expedition. He would
promise they should not be delayed long.

Claire watched Dollard lift his smiling face and shake his head with
decision, against which urging was powerless.

She witnessed the oath which they took neither to give quarter to nor
accept quarter from the Iroquois. She witnessed their consecration and
the ceremonial of mass. The kneeling men were young, few of them being
older than Dollard.[5] They represented the colony, from soldier and
gentilhomme down to the lower ranks of handicraftsmen. Whatever their
ancestry had been, a baptism of glory descended upon all those faces
alike. Their backs were towards the crowded chapel, but the women in
the rood-loft could see this unconscious light, and as Claire looked at
Dollard she shuddered from head to foot, feeling that her whole silent
body was one selfish scream, “He is forgetting me!”

Lighted altar, lifted host, bowed people, and even the knightly
splendor of Dollard’s face, all passed from Claire’s knowledge.

“It is now over, dear mademoiselle,” whispered Sister Macé, sighing.
“Do you see?--the men are standing up to march out four abreast, headed
by the commandant. Ah, how the people will crowd them and shake their
hands! Are you not looking, my child? O St. Joseph! patron of little
ones, she is in a dead faint. Mademoiselle!” Sister Macé began to
rub Claire’s temples and hands and to pant with anxiety, so that the
rood-loft must have been betrayed had not the chapel been emptying
itself of a crowd running eagerly after other objects.

“Let me be,” spoke Claire, hoarsely. “I am only dying to the world.”

Sister Macé wept again. She patted Claire’s wrist with her small
fingers. The girl’s bloodless face and tight-shut eyes were made more
pallid by early daylight, for the candles were being put out upon
the altar. Sister Macé in her solicitude forgot all about the people
pouring through the palisade gate and following their heroes to the
river-landing.

“Oh, how strong is the love of brother and sister!” half soliloquized
this gentle nun. “These ties so sweeten life; but when the call of
Heaven comes, how hard they rend asunder!”

The trampling below hastened itself, ebbed away, entirely ceasing upon
the flags of the Hôtel-Dieu and becoming a clatter along the wharf.

“Is the chapel vacant now, Sister?” her charge breathed at her ear.

“The last person has left it, dear mademoiselle.”

“Presently I will go down to lie on that spot where he knelt before the
altar.”

“Shall I assist you down, dear mademoiselle?” said Sister Macé with the
solicitude of a sparrow trying to lift a wounded robin.

“No, Sister. But of your charity do this for me in my weakness. Go down
and stand by the place. I have not known if any foot pressed it, and I
will not have it profaned.”

Sister Macé, therefore, who respected all requests, and who herself
had lain stretched on that cold stone pavement doing her religious
penances, descended the stairs and stood near the altar; while her
charge followed, holding by railing or sinking upon step, until she
reached the square of stone where Dollard had knelt.

As a mother pounces upon her child in idolatrous abandon, so Claire
fell upon that chill spot and encircled it with her arms, sobbing:

“Doubt not that I shall find you again, my Dollard, my Dollard! Once
before I prayed mightily to Heaven for a blessing, and I got my
blessing.”

While she lay there, cheer after cheer rose from the river-landing,
wild enthusiasm bursting out again as soon as the last round had died
away. The canoes had put out on their expedition. Those who watched
them with the longest watching would finally turn aside to other
things. But the woman on the chapel floor lay stretched there for
twenty-four hours.




XIV.

MASSAWIPPA.


ALL that pleasant afternoon, while a spring sun warmed seeds in the
ground and trees visibly unfurled green pennons, Montrealists stood
in groups looking solemnly up-river where the expedition canoes had
disappeared, or flinging their hands in excited talk. “They talked too
much,” says one of their chroniclers. For the expedition was to be kept
secret, particularly from all passing Indians.

There was no wind to cut away tremulous heat simmering at the base
of the mountain. Grass could be smelled, with the delicious odor of
the earth in which it was quickening. On such a day the soul of man
accomplishes its yearly metempsychosis, and finds itself in a body
beating with new life.

Jouaneaux carried his happy countenance from group to group along the
single street of Montreal, standing with respectful attention when his
superiors talked, or chiming in with authority when his equals held
parley instead of pushing their business.

Before night a small fleet of Indian canoes came up the river and
landed on the wharf of Montreal forty warriors and a very young girl.
The chief, leading the girl by the hand, stalked proudly westward along
the street, his feathers dancing, his muscular legs and moccasined feet
having the flying step of Mercury. His braves trod in line behind him.

“All Hurons,” remarked Jouaneaux to his crony, a lime-burner.

“And should be seeding their island of Orleans at this season,” said
the lime-burner, “if Quebec set them any example but to quarrel and
take to the woods.”

“That chief can be nobody but Annahotaha,” said Jouaneaux. “Now where
dost thou say he stole that brown beauty of a little Sister?”

“He stole her,” responded the lime-burner, “from a full-blooded French
girl below Three Rivers, that some Quebec Jesuit mixed up with him in
marriage. My cousin lives in the same côte, and little liking hath she
for this half-breed who scorns her mother’s people and calls herself a
princess.”

“Good hater art thou of Quebec Jesuits,” said Jouaneaux, spreading his
approving smile beyond dots of white teeth around large margins of
pink gums. “But Quebec Jesuits have done worse work than mixing the
blood of this princess. What a little Sister of St. Joseph she would
make!” he exclaimed, stretching his neck after the girl and disclosing
the healthy depths of his mouth.

“You never look at a woman but to take her measure for the Sisterhood
of St. Joseph,” laughed the lime-burner.

“And to what better life could she be measured?” demanded the nuns’
retainer, instantly aggressive, “or what better Sisterhood?”

“There be no better women,” yielded the lime-burner.

       *       *       *       *       *

All night Sister Brésoles and Sister Macé in turns kneeled beside the
prostrate woman in the chapel. She was not disturbed by offers of food
or consolation, for they respected her posture and her vigil. The young
novices, of whom there were a few, had duties set for them elsewhere.
All night a taper burned upon the altar and a nun knelt by it, her
shadow wavering long and brown; and the woman’s body, with its arms
stretched out on the stones, stirred only at intervals when the hands
grasped and wrung each other in renewed prayer.

Before matins Sister Brésoles left her support of this afflicted spirit
to devote herself to the revival of the body, by concocting a broth
for which she is yet celebrated in Church annals on account of the
Divine assistance she received in its preparation. The very odor should
rouse Claire from her long fast and cause her to eat and rise, bearing
her burdens.

During Sister Brésoles’s absence another figure came in and bowed
before the altar.

Conscious of physical disturbance, Claire turned her vacant look
towards it, as she had done each time the nuns changed vigils.

This was no serene Sister of St. Joseph, but a dark young girl also
flattening herself on the pavement, and writhing about in rages of pain.

“My child, what ails _you_?” whispered Claire, compassion making alive
the depths of her eyes.

But the girl, without heeding her, ground a few prayers between
convulsive teeth, and then beat her head upon the stones.

By degrees the silence and self-restraint of a woman not greatly her
elder, lying in trouble as abject as her own, had its quieting effect
on her. Tears, scantily distilled in her, ran the length of her eyelid
rims and fell in occasional drops on the floor.

Their cheeks resting on a level, the two unhappy creatures looked at
each other across a stone flag.

“Has your father or your brother gone with Dollard?” whispered Claire.

“Madame, my father goes to fight the Iroquois.”

“I thought it.”

“Madame, I have just been making a vow.”

“So have I.”

“I will follow my father wherever he is going, come life or come death,
and nobody shall prevent me.”

Claire rose upon her knees.

Sister Brésoles opened the chapel door, carrying in a bowl of soup as
she would have carried it to a soldier whose wounds refused to allow
his being lifted.

The patient was in evident thanksgiving. Daylight had just begun to
glimmer in. Claire’s face shone with the passionate white triumph which
religious ascetics of that day looked forward to as the crowning result
of their vigils. Flushed with reactionary hope, she rose to her feet as
if the pavement had left no stiffness in her muscles, and met the nun.

“St. Joseph and all the Holy Family give you peace, mademoiselle.”

“Peace hath been granted me, Sister. My prayer is answered.”

“Great is the power of the Holy Family. But after your long vigil you
will need this strengthening broth which I have made for you.”

“Sister, you are kind. Let me take it to your refectory. I know the
place. And may this young girl attend me?”

“I will carry it myself, mademoiselle,” said Sister Judith, “to our
rude parlor, if you will follow me up the stairs. The refectory is
somewhat chilly, and in the parlor we have a fire kindled. And you may
bathe your face and hands before eating your soup.”

Up a stairway Claire groped behind the nun, and came into a barn-like
huge room, scant of comforts except an open fire, which Jouaneaux had
but finished preparing entirely for her. The cells of the nuns were
built along one side of this room, and from the cells they now emerged
going devoutly to matins.

“Touching the half-breed girl of whom you spoke,” said Sister Brésoles,
lingering to put a basin of water and coarse clean towel within reach
of her guest, “she shall come to you as soon as she hath finished her
morning devotions. Her father is chief of the Hurons, and hath placed
her here as a novice. We have many girls come,” added Sister Brésoles
with a light sigh, “but few remain to bear the hardships of life in a
frontier convent.”

“Girls are ungrateful creatures,” said Claire, “bent on their own
purposes, and greedy of what to them seems happiness. I am myself so.
And if I do or say what must offend you, forgive me, Sister.”

She unfastened her necklace and held it up--a slender rope braided of
three strings of seed pearls and fastened by a ruby.

“This is a red sapphire, Sister, and has been more than a hundred years
in the house of--”

She suppressed “Laval-Montmorency,” and pressed her necklace upon the
nun’s refusing palm.

“Why do you offer me this, mademoiselle?”

“Because from this day gems and I part company forever. That is the
only hereditary ornament I brought with me into New France. Enrich
some shrine with it if you have no need to turn it into money for your
convent.”

“Our convent is very poor, mademoiselle,” replied Sister Brésoles,
divided between acceptance and refusal. “But we want no rich gifts from
those who make their retirement with us. Also, the commandant, your
brother, left with us more value than our poor hospitality can return
to you.”

“Yet be intreated, Sister,” urged Claire. “I want it to be well placed,
but no more about my throat.”

Sister Brésoles, with gentle thanks, therefore,--“It shall still do
honor to your house in works of charity, mademoiselle,”--accepted the
gift and went directly to matins.

When Claire had washed her face and hands and tightened the loose puffs
of her hair, she took her bowl of soup and sat before the fire, eating
it with the hearty appetite of a woman risen from despair to resolution.

The odor of a convent, how natural it was to her!--that smell of
stale incense intertwined with the scentless breath of excessive
cleanliness. Through the poor joints of the house she could hear
matin-chanting arise from the chapel. Daylight grew stronger and
ruddier, and a light fog from the river showed opal changes.

On moccasined feet, and so deft of hand that Claire heard her neither
open nor close the door, the half-breed girl came to the hearth.
A brown and a white favor in woman beauty were then set in strong
contrast. Both girls were slenderly shaped, virginal and immature lines
still predominating. Claire was transparently clear of skin, her hair
was silken white like dandelion down, and the brown color of her eyes,
not deeply tinged with pigment, showed like shadow on water; while
the half-breed burned in rich pomegranate dyes, set in black and fawn
tints. They looked an instant at each other in different mood from
their first gaze across the flagstone.

“Your father is an Indian chief, the Sister tells me,” said Claire.

“My father is Étienne Annahotaha, chief of the Hurons.”

“And what is your name?”

“Massawippa.”

“Massawippa, the Virgin sent you into the chapel to answer my prayer.”

The half-breed, standing in young dignity, threw a dark-eyed
side-glance at this perfect lily of French civilization. She was not
yet prepared to be used as an answer to the prayers of any French woman.

“Did you know that an expedition started yesterday to the Ottawa
River?” inquired Claire.

Massawippa shook her head.

“But your father, also--he is going to fight the Iroquois?”

“I know not where they are, but I shall find out,” said Massawippa.

“I know,” said Claire. “The Iroquois are coming down the Ottawa.”

“From their winter trapping,” the girl assented with a nod.

“Your father, therefore, will follow Dollard’s expedition.”

“My father has but forty-three men,” Massawippa said gloomily.

“Child,” said Claire, “Dollard has only sixteen!”

“And, madame, the Iroquois are like leaves for number. But I did not
mean our Hurons are forty-three strong. Mituvemeg,[6] the Algonquin,
meets my father here.”

“Do you know this country? Have you lived much in the woods?”

“Yes, madame.”

“Have you ever been up the Ottawa River?”

“Yes, madame. The very last summer my father took me up the Ottawa
beyond Two Mountains Lake.”

“Two Mountains Lake?”

“Yes, madame; a widening of the river, just as Lake St. Louis is a
widening of the St. Lawrence.”

“Could we go up this river in a boat, you and I?”

Massawippa looked steadily at Claire, searching her for cowardice or
treachery. The Laval-Montmorency smiled back.

“Twenty-four hours, Massawippa, I lay on the chapel pavement, praying
the Virgin to send me guide or open some way for me to follow the
French expedition up that Ottawa River. You threw yourself beside
me and answered my prayer by your own vow. We are bound to the same
destination.”

The half-breed girl looked with actual solicitude at the tender white
beauty of her fellow-plotter.

“Madame, it will be very hard for you. You and I could not, in a boat,
pass the rapids of Ste. Anne at the head of this island; they test the
skill of our best Huron paddlers.”

“Can we then go by land?”

“We shall have to cross one arm of the Ottawa to the mainland. Montreal
is on an island, madame. Two or three leagues of travel would bring us
to that shore near the mouth of the Ottawa.”

Sister Macé, unobtrusive as dawn, opened the door and stole softly in
from matins, breaking up the conference. She called Massawippa to learn
how pallets must be aired and cells made tidy. The half-breed girl saw
all this care with contempt, having for years cast out of mind her bed
of leaves and blankets as soon as she arose from it.

Claire went with unpromising novice and easy teacher to breakfast in
the refectory, and afterwards by herself to confession--a confession
with its mental reservation as to her plans; but the rite was one
which her religion imposed upon her under the circumstances. She had
been even less candid towards the nuns in allowing them to receive and
address her as Dollard’s sister. The prostration of grief and reaction
of intense resolve benumbed her, indeed, to externals. But in that day
of pious deception, when the churchmen themselves were full of evasive
methods, a daughter of conventual training may have been less sensitive
to false appearances than women of Claire’s high nature bred in a later
age. She saw no more of Massawippa until nightfall, but lay in the cell
assigned to her, resting with shut eyes, and allowing no thought to
wander to the men paddling towards that lonely river.

All day the season grew; shower chased sun and sun dried shower, and
in the afternoon Jouaneaux told Sister Brésoles that he had weeded the
garden of a growth which would surprise her.

At dusk, however, he brought the usual small log up to the parlor, and
with it news which exceeded his tale of weeding.

Sister Brésoles was folding her tired hands in meditation there, and
Massawippa, sullen and lofty from her first day’s probation, curled on
the floor in a corner full of shadows.

“Honored Superior,” said Jouaneaux after placing his log, “who, say’st
thou, did boldly walk up to the governor to-day?”

“Perhaps yourself, Jouaneaux. You were ever bold enough.”

“I was there, honored Superior, about a little matter of garden seeds,
and I stood by and hearkened, as it behooved the garrison of a convent
to do; for there comes me in this chief of the Hurons, Annahotaha,
swelling like--”

Jouaneaux suppressed “cockerel about to crow.” His wandering glance
caught Massawippa sitting in her blanket. The Sisters of St. Joseph
were at that time too poor to furnish any distinguishing garments to
their novices; and so insecure were these recruits from the world that
any uniform would have been thrown away upon them. With the facility of
Frenchmen, Jouaneaux substituted,

--“like a mighty warrior, as he is known to be. And he asks the
governor, does Annahotaha, for a letter to Dollard; and before he
leaves the presence he gets his letter.”

Sister Brésoles raised a finger, being mindful of two pairs of
listening ears, and two souls just sinking to the peace of resignation.

“Honored Superior,” exclaimed Jouaneaux, in haste to set bulwarks
around his statement, “you may ask Father Dollier de Casson if this be
not so, for he had just landed from the river parishes, and was with
the governor. V’là,” said Jouaneaux, spreading an explanatory hand,
“if Annahotaha and his braves join Dollard without any parchment of
authority, what share will Dollard allow them in the enterprise? Being
a shrewd chief and a man of affairs, Annahotaha knew he must bear
commission.”

“Come down to the refectory and take thy supper and discharge thy news
there,” Sister Brésoles exclaimed, starting up and swiftly leaving the
room.

Jouaneaux obeyed her, keeping his punctilious foot far behind the soft
rush of her garments.

He dared not wink at the nun, even under cover of dusk and to add zest
to his further recital; but he winked at the wall separating him from
Massawippa and said slyly on the stairs:

“Afterwards, however, honored Superior, I heard the governor tell
Father de Casson that he wrote it down to Dollard to accept or refuse
Annahotaha, as he saw fit.”

As soon as the door was closed Claire came running out of her cell and
met Massawippa at the hearth, silently clapping her hands in swift
rapture as a humming-bird beats its wings.

“Now thou see’st how the Virgin answers prayer, Massawippa!”

The half-breed, sedately eager, said:

“We must cross the arm of the Ottawa and follow their course up that
river. Madame, I have troubled my mind much about a boat. For if we got
over the Ottawa arm and followed the right-hand shore, have you thought
how possible it is that they may fix their camp on the opposite side?”

“Can we not take a boat with us from Montreal?”

“And carry it two or three leagues across the country? For I cannot
paddle up the Ste. Anne[7] current. But if we could get one here it
would draw suspicion on us and we might be followed. I see but one way.
We must depend upon that walking woman above Carillon; and if she be
dead, and they camp on the other side, we must raft across the Ottawa.
But if we must first make a raft to cross at the mouth, how much time
will be lost!”

“Massawippa, we have vowed to follow this expedition, and with such
good hap as Heaven sends us we shall follow it. May we not start
to-morrow?”

“Madame, before we start there are things to prepare. We must eat on
the way.”

“What food shall we carry?”

“Bread and smoked eels would keep us alive. I can perhaps buy these
with my wampum girdle,” suggested Massawippa, who held the noble young
dame beside her to be as dowerless as a Huron princess, and thought it
no shame so to be.

“Why need you do that?” inquired Claire. “I have two or three gold
louis left of the few I brought from France.”

“Gold, madame! Gold is so scarce in this land we might attract too much
attention by paying for our supplies with it.”

“I have nothing else, so we must hazard it. And what must we take
beside food and raiment?”

“Madame, we cannot carry any garments.”

“But, Massawippa, I cannot go to Dollard all travel-stained and ragged!”

“If we find him, madame, he will not think of your dress. Is he wedded
to you?”

Claire’s head sunk down in replying.

“He is wedded to glory. Men care more for glory than they care for us,
Massawippa.”

“Madame,” said the younger, her mouth settling to wistfulness, “the
more they care for glory the more we love them. My father is great. If
he was a common Indian little could I honor him, whatever penance the
priest laid upon me.”

“Yes, Dollard is my husband. He is my Dollard,” said Claire.

“The nuns call you mademoiselle.”

“I have not told them.”

“They might see!” asserted Massawippa, slightingly. “Do women lie in
deadly anguish before the altar for brothers?” she demanded, speaking
as decidedly from her inexperience as any young person of a later
century, “or for detestable young men who wish to be accepted as
lovers?”

“Assuredly not,” said Claire, smiling.

“But fathers, they are a different matter. And in your case, madame,
husbands. We shall need other things besides bread and eels. For
example, two knives.”

“To cut our bread with?” inquired Claire.

“No; to cut our enemies with!” Massawippa replied, with preoccupied eye
which noted little the shudder of the European.

“O Massawippa! they may be engaged with the Iroquois even now. Dollard
has been gone two days.”

“Have no fear of that, madame. There will be no fighting until
Annahotaha reaches the expedition,” assumed the chief’s daughter with a
high air most laughable to her superior. And after keen meditation she
added: “We might start to-morrow daybreak if we but had our supplies
ready.”

“Massawippa,” exclaimed Claire, “how do you barter with merchants? Can
we not send for them and buy our provisions at once?”

“Madame, send for the merchants? You make me laugh! Very cautiously
will I have to slip from this place to that; and perhaps I cannot then
buy all we need, especially with gold louis. They may, however, think
coureurs de bois have come to town. And now at dusk is a better time
than in broad daylight.”

Claire went in haste to her casket, which stood in the nuns’ parlor,
and selected from it things which she might not have the chance of
removing later. These she put in her cell, and came back to Massawippa
with her hand freighted.

“How much, madame?” the half-breed inquired as pieces were turned with
a clink upon her own palm.

“All. Three louis.”

“Take one back, then. Two will be too many, though one might not be
enough. Madame, that Frenchman who feeds the nuns’ pigs and tends
this fire, he will let me out; and what I buy I will hide outside the
Hôtel-Dieu.”




XV.

THE WOOING OF JOUANEAUX.


IN consequence of Massawippa’s plan the Frenchman who fed the nuns’
pigs guarded in dolor his palisade gate at about 10 o’clock of the
evening.

The hospital had these bristling high pickets set all about its
premises as a defense against sudden attacks, and its faithful
retainer felt that he was courting its destruction in keeping its
bolts undone so late. There was, besides, the anticipative terror of
a nun’s stepping forth to demand of his hands the new novice. Cold
dew of suspense stood on his face; and he could only hope that Sister
Maillet, who usually had charge of the last novice, believed her to be
folded safely in her cell by Sister Brésoles, and that Sister Brésoles
believed her to be thus folded by Sister Maillet. When at last the cat
footsteps of Massawippa passed through the palisade gate she requited
his sufferings with scarce a nod of thanks, though she hesitated with
some show of interest to see him fasten both gate and convent door.
Indignation possessed him while he shot the bolts, and freed itself
through jerks of the head.

But instead of going to her cell, Massawippa entered the chapel; and
Jouaneaux, feeling himself still responsible for her, followed and
closed the door behind him.

A solitary light burned on the altar. The girl knelt a long time in her
devotions.

Jouaneaux knelt also, near the door, and after a pater and an ave it
may be supposed that he begged St. Joseph to intercede for a poor
sinner who felt beset and impelled to meddle with novices.

Having finished her prayers, Massawippa began to ascend the stairway to
the rood-loft.

“Where are you going?” whispered Jouaneaux, following her in wrath.

She turned around and held to the rail of the stair, while he stood at
the foot, she guarding her voice also in reply.

“I am going up here to sleep, lest I wake the Sisters. The floor is no
harder than their pallets, and the night is not cold.”

“And in the morning my honored Superior calls me to account for you.”

“No one has missed me. I shall be up early.”

“How do you know you are not missed? Some one may this moment open that
chapel door.”

“Go away and quit hissing at me then,” suggested Massawippa,
contracting her brows.

Jouaneaux, drawn by a power irresistible, fell into the error of vain
natures, and set himself to lecture the creator of his infatuation.

“I want to talk to you. I want to give you some good advice. Sit down
on that step,” he demanded.

Massawippa settled down, and rested her chin on her dark soft knuckles.
Sparks of amusement burned in the deeps of her eyes. Accustomed to
having men of inferior rank around her, she was satisfied that he kept
his distance and sat three steps below her, literally beneath her feet.
Her beaver gown cased her in rich creases.

Seeing her thus plastic, Jouaneaux’s severity ran off his cheeks in a
smile. He forgot her abuse of the privilege he had stolen for her. His
genial nose tilted up, and as overture to his good advice, showing all
his gums, he whispered:

“What a pretty little Sister of St. Joseph you will make!”

Massawippa stirred, and with her dull-red blanket arranged a rest for
her head against the balustrade.

“What do you think of me?” he inquired.

After reticent pause of a length to embarrass a modest questioner,
Massawippa admitted:

“You are not so black and oily as La Mouche.”

“Who is La Mouche?”

“He is my father’s adopted nephew.”

“Does he want to wed you?”

“He dare not name such a thing to me!”

“That is excellent,” commended Jouaneaux. “You have the true spirit of
a novice. You must never think of marriage with any man.” He gloated
upon her, his entire chest sighing.

The scandal of the situation, should any nun open the chapel door, was
a danger which made this interview the most delightful sin of his life.
But the two Sisters most given to vigils had watched all the previous
night, and he counted upon nature’s revenge to leave him unmolested.

The taper burned upon the altar, and there were the sacred images
keeping guard, chastening both speakers always to a reverent murmur
of the voice which rose no louder, and which to a devout ear at the
door might have suggested, in that period of miracles, some gentle
colloquy between the waxen St. Joseph and his waxen spouse. Massawippa,
childishly innocent, and Jouaneaux, nearly as innocent himself, would
scarcely be such objects of veneration, though their converse might
prove equally harmless.

“Is this the good advice you wished to give me?” inquired Massawippa.

“It is the beginning of it,” replied Jouaneaux.

“I do not intend to wed. There is no man fit to wed me,” said the
half-breed girl in high sincerity, leveling her gaze above his bright
poll.

“Look you here, now!” exclaimed the Frenchman. “I am good enough for
you, if I would marry you. For while your fathers were ranging the
woods, mine were decent tillers of the soil, keeping their skins white
and minding the priest. Where could you get a finer husband than I
would make you? But I shall never marry. The Queen of France would be
no temptation to me. There you sit, enough to turn the head of our
blessed St. Joseph, for you turned my head the moment I looked upon
you; but I don’t want you.”

“I will bid you good-night,” said Massawippa, drawing her blanket.

“At the proper time, little Sister; when I speak my mind freer of its
load. I must live a bachelor, it is true; but if I were a free man I
would have you to-morrow, though you scratched me with your wild hands.”

“I am not for your bolts and bars,” returned Massawippa, scornfully.

“If we were settled in the house I made upon my land,” said Jouaneaux,
tempting himself with the impossible while he leaned back smiling,
“little need you complain of bolts and bars. My case is this: I had a
grant of land on the western shore of this island of Montreal.”

“Not where the Ottawa comes in?” questioned Massawippa, impaling him
with interest.

“That was the exact spot.” Jouaneaux widened his mouth pinkly as he
became retrospective. “And never wouldst thou guess what turned me from
that freeholding to a holy life. I may say that I lead a holy life,
for are not vows laid upon me as strait as on the Sulpitian fathers?
And straiter; I am under writings to the nuns to serve them to the day
of my death, and they be under writings to me to maintain my sickness
and old age. It is likely my skeleton barn still stands where I set it
up to hold my produce. Down I falls from the ridge of it headlong to
the ground, and here in the Hôtel-Dieu I lay for many a month like a
rag, the Sisters tending me. It was then I said to myself, ‘Jouaneaux,
these be angels of pity and patience, yet they soil their hands feeding
pigs and bearing up such as thou.’ Though I am equal to most of my
betters, little Sister, I always held it well to be humble-minded. The
result is, I give up my land, I bind myself to serve the saints in this
Hôtel-Dieu, and therefore I cannot marry.”

Jouaneaux collapsed upon himself with a groaning sigh.

“Then your house and your barn were left to ruin?” questioned
Massawippa, passing without sympathy his nuptial restrictions.

“My house!” said Jouaneaux, looking up with reviving spirit. “Little
Sister, you would walk over the roof of my house and not perceive it.”

“In midwinter?”

“No, now, when young grass springs. I could endure to risk my store
of crops where the Iroquois might set torch to them, but this pretty
fellow, this outer man of me, I took no risks with him. I chooses me a
stump, a nice hollow stump.”

“And squeezed into it like a bear?”

“Jouaneaux is a fox, little Sister. Call your clumsy La Mouche the
bear. No: I burrows me out a house beneath the stump; a good house,
a sizable hole. Over there is my fire-place, and the stump furnishes
me a chimney. Any Iroquois seeing my stump smoking would merely say
to himself, ‘It is afire.’ Let a canoe spring out on the river or a
cry ring in the forest--down went Jouaneaux into his house, and, as
you may say, pulled the earth over his head. I also kept my canoe
dragged within there, for there was no telling what might happen to it
elsewhere.”

Massawippa regarded him with animation. “You had also a boat?”

“Indeed, yes!” the nuns’ man affirmed, kindled higher by such interest.
“A good birch craft it was, and large enough for two people.” Another
groaning sigh paid tribute to this lost instrument of happiness.

“But your house may be all crumbled in now.”

“Not that house, little Sister. Look you! it had ceiling and walls of
timbers well fastened together and covered with cement. Was not that a
snug house? It will endure like rock, and some day I must go and see it
once more.”

“Perhaps you could not find it now.”

Jouaneaux laughed.

“My house! I could walk straight to it, little Sister, and lay my hand
on the chimney. That chimney stump, it standeth near the river, the
central one in a row of five. Many other rows of five there be in the
field, but none, to my eye, exactly like this.”

Massawippa rose suddenly and dived like a swallow up the stairway. So
much keener was her ear than Jouaneaux’s that she was out of sight
before he realized the probability of an interruption.

A hand was on the chapel latch, and he turned himself on the step as
Sister Judith Brésoles entered, her night taper in her hand. When she
discovered him, instead of screaming, she stood and fixed a stern gaze
on him, her mouth compressed and her brows holding an upright wrinkle
betwixt them. Her servitor stood up in his most pious and depressed
attitude.

“Jouaneaux, what are you doing here?”

“Honored Superior, I have been sitting half an hour or so meditating
before the sacred images.”

“Where is the novice Massawippa?”

“That is what troubles my conscience, honored Superior.” Beneath his
childlike distress Jouaneaux was silently blessing St. Joseph that it
was not Sister Macé with her tendency to resort to the rood-loft. “Here
is the case I stand in: the little Sister you call Massawippa, she came
begging me for a breath of air by the river before I fastened the bolts
to-night.”

“You turned that child upon the street!” exclaimed Sister Brésoles. “I
cannot find her in any cell or anywhere about the Hôtel-Dieu. You have
exceeded your authority, Jouaneaux. It is a frightful thing you have
done!”

“Honored Superior, she will be back in the morning. Those half-Indians
are not like French girls; they have the bird in them. This one will
hop over all evil hap.”

“I would ring the tocsin,” said Sister Brésoles, “if alarming the town
would recall her. Without doubt, though,” she sighed, “the girl has
returned to her father.”

“Honored Superior, if she comes not back to matins as clean and fresh
as a brier-rose, turn me out of the Hôtel-Dieu.”

“Get you to bed, Jouaneaux, and, let me tell you, you must meddle no
more with novices. These young creatures are ever a weight on one’s
heart.”

“Especially this one,” lamented Jouaneaux, as, leaving the chapel
behind Sister Brésoles, he rolled his eyes in one last gaze at the
rood-loft.




XVI.

FIRST USE OF A KNIFE.


THE capeline, or small black velvet cap, which Claire had worn on her
journeys about New France sheltered her head from the highest and
softest of April morning skies. Though so early and humid that mists
were still curling and changing form around the mountain and in all the
distances, it promised to be a fine day.

Massawippa led the way across the clearing, leaning a little to one
side as a sail-boat does when it flies on the wind, her moccasined
feet just touching the little billows of ploughed ground; and Claire
followed eagerly, though she carried her draperies clutched in her
hands. The rising sun would shine on their backs, but before the sun
rose they were where he must grope for them among great trees.

One short pause had been made at the outset while Massawippa brought,
from some recess known to herself among rocks or stumps in the
direction of the mountain, a hempen sack filled with her supplies. She
carried this, and a package of what Claire had made up as necessaries
from her box in the Hôtel-Dieu, as if two such loads were wings placed
under the arms of a half-Huron maid to help her feet skim ploughed
ground.

When they had left the clearing and were well behind a massed shelter
of forest trunks, Claire was moist and pink with haste and exertion,
and here Massawippa paused.

They were, after all, but young girls starting on an excursion with the
morning sky for a companion, and they laughed together as they sat down
upon a low rock.

“When I closed the door of the parlor,” said Claire with very pink
lips, “I thought I heard some one stirring in the cells. But we have
not been followed, and I trust not seen.”

“They were rousing for matins,” said the half-Huron. “No, they think I
ran away last night; and you, madame, they do not expect to matins. We
are taking one risk which I dread, but it must be taken.”

“You mean leaving the palisade and entrance doors unfastened? My heart
smote me for those good nuns. Is the risk very great? We have seen no
danger abroad.”

“Not that. No, madame. Their man, that stupid, who ranks himself with
Sulpitian fathers, he is always astir early among his bolts and his
pigs. It is his suspicion I dread. For he knows I slept in the chapel
last night, and he told me of his house, and in that house we must
sleep to-night. Perhaps he dare not tell the Sisters, and in that
case he dare not follow to search his house for us. We have also his
stupidity to count on. Young men are not wise.”

Present discomfort, which puts coming risks farther into the future in
most minds, made Claire thrust out her pointed satin feet and look at
them dubiously.

“What would Dollard think of these, Massawippa? I have one other pair
of heeled shoes in that packet, but they will scarcely hold out for
such journeying.”

“Madame, that is why I stopped here,” said Massawippa, opening her
sack. “It was necessary for us to kneel in the chapel and ask the Holy
Family’s aid before we set out; but we have no time to spend here. Let
me get you ready.”

“Am I not ready?” inquired Claire, giving her companion a rosy laugh.

“No, madame; your feet must be moccasined and your dress cut off.”

The younger girl took from the sack a pair of new moccasins and knelt
on one knee before Claire--not as a menial would kneel, but as a
commanding junior who has undertaken maternal duty. She flung aside
the civilized foot-beautifiers of Louis’ reign and substituted Indian
shoes, lacing them securely with fine thongs.

“These are the best I had, madame, and I carried them out of the
Hôtel-Dieu under my blanket and hid them with our provisions last
night.”

“What a sensible, kind child you are, Massawippa! But while you were
doing this for me I took no thought of any special comfort for you.”

“They will bear the journey.”

Massawippa rose and took from her store two sheathed knives with
cross-hilts--not of the finest workmanship, but of good temper: their
pointed blades glittered as she displayed them. She showed her pupil
how to place one, sheathed, at a ready angle within her bodice, and
then took up the other like a naked sword.

“Now stand on the rock, madame, and let me cut your dress short.”

“Oh, no!” pleaded Claire for her draperies. “You do not understand,
Massawippa. This is simply the dress which women of my rank wear in
France, and because I am going into the woods must I be shorn to my
knees like a man?”

Retreating a step she stretched before her the skirt of dark glacé
satin with its Grecian border of embroidery at the foot, and in doing
so let fall from her arm the overskirt, which trailed its similar
border upon the ground behind her.

“Madame,” argued Massawippa, suspending the knife, “we have a road of
danger before us. That shining stuff hanging behind you will catch on
bushes, and weary you, and will soon be ragged though you nurse it on
your arm all the way.”

“Cut that off, therefore,” said Claire, turning. “I am not so childish
as to love the pall we hang over our gowns and elbows. But the skirt is
not too long if it be lifted by a girdle below the waist. Cut me out a
rope of satin, Massawippa.”

The hiss of a thick and rich fabric yielding to the knife could be
heard behind her back. Massawippa presently lifted the plenteous fleece
thus shorn, and pared away the border while the elder girl held it.
Together they tied the border about Claire’s middle for a support, and
over this pulled the top of her skirt in a pouting ruff.

It was now sunrise. Having thus finished equipping themselves they
took up each a load, Claire bearing her packet on the arm her surplus
drapery had burdened, and when Massawippa had thrust both cast-off
shoes and satin under a side of the rock they hurried on.




XVII.

JOUANEAUX’S HOUSE.


THE sun had almost described his arc before Claire and Massawippa
reached the extremity of the island. Massawippa could have walked
two leagues in half the day, but wisely did she forecast that the
young Frenchwoman would be like a liberated canary, obliged to grow
into uncaged use of herself by little flights and pauses. Besides,
Jouaneaux’s house would give them safe asylum until they crossed the
river.

“That must be his barn,” said Massawippa, pointing to a pile of hewed
timbers, too far up the bank and too recently handled by man to be
drift. They lay in angular positions, scarce an upright log marking
the site of the little structure Jouaneaux had tried to erect for his
granary.

Two slim figures casting long shadows eastward on the clearing, the
girls stood trying to discern in those tumultuous waters where the
Ottawa came in or where the St. Lawrence’s own current wrestled around
islands. The north shore looked far off, thick clothed with forests.
Massawippa held her blanket out to canopy her eyes, anxiously examining
the trackless way by which they must cross.

“But the first thing is to find Jouaneaux’s house,” she said, turning
to Claire.

“I was thinking of that,” Claire answered, “and counting the stumps in
rows of five. All this land is covered with stumps, Massawippa.”

“He said the row of five nearest the water.”

“Did he tell you how to enter?”

“That I had no time to learn. But, madame, if a man went in and out of
this underground house, surely you and I can do the same. Here be five
stumps--the row nearest the river.”

They went to the central stump. It had a nest of decayed yellow wood
within, crumbled down by the tooth of the air, but probing could not
make it hollow.

“Perhaps he deceived you about his house,” said Claire.

Massawippa met her apprehension with dark seriousness.

“It would be the worst about the boat,” she replied. “I counted on that
boat all day, so that I have not thought what to do without it.”

[Illustration: “Massawippa held her blanket out to canopy her eyes.”]

They moved along the bank, passing irregular groups of stumps, until
one standing by itself, much smoke-stained, as if it had leaked through
all its fibers, drew their notice. It was deeply charred and hollow.
Claire took up a pebble and dropped it into the stump. It rattled down
some unseen hopper and clinked smartly on a surface below. This was
Jouaneaux’s chimney.

“He himself forgot where it was!” sneered Massawippa.

“Or some one has occupied the house since,” suggested Claire, “and
taken the other stumps away.”

This was matter for apprehension.

“But stumps are not easily moved, madame. They crumble away or are
burned into their roots. Let us find the door.”

Massawippa dropped on her knees, and it happened that the first spot
of turf she struck with a stone reverberated. Claire stooped also, and
like two large children playing at mud pies they scraped the loam with
sticks and found a rusty iron handle. The door rose by the tugging of
four determined arms and left a square dark hole in the ground.[8]

“Wait,” said Claire, as Massawippa thrust her head within it. “Poison
vapors sometimes lie in such vaults. And let us see if anything is down
there.”

Massawippa took flint and steel from her sack, and Claire gingerly held
the bit of scorched linen which these were to ignite. The tinder being
set on fire, Massawippa lighted a candle and carefully put out her bit
of linen. They fastened a rope to the candle and let it down into the
cell.

The flame burned up steadily, revealing pavement and walls of gray
cement, a tiny hearth and flue of river stones, a flight of slab steps
descending from the door, and a small birch canoe, in which Jouaneaux
had probably slept.

Massawippa went down and set the candle securely on the hearth. Claire
waited until Massawippa had returned and filled both cups at the river.
Then they descended into Jouaneaux’s house and carefully shut the door.

“Oh!” Claire exclaimed as this lid cut off the sunlit world above her
head, “do you suppose we can easily open it again from within?”

“Yes, madame; as easily as the Iroquois could raise it from without.
Jouaneaux was skillful for a Frenchman. But he relied on secrecy, for
there are no fastenings to his door. A fox he called himself.”

“It would be charming,” said Claire, “if we could carry this pit with
us on our way.”

Drift-bark and small sticks, half charred, were piled against the
chimney-back. To these Massawippa set a light, blowing and cheering
it until it rose to cheer her and helped the candle illuminate their
retreat.

“Sit on the bottom of this boat, madame,” said Massawippa, folding her
blanket and placing it there. “Let us eat now, instead of nibbling bits
of bread.”

Claire took up one of the cups and drank reluctantly of river water,
saying, “I am so thirsty! While you are taking out the loaves and the
meat, show me all you have in the sack, Massawippa.”

Massawippa therefore sat on the floor with the sack’s mouth spread in
her lap, and Claire leaned forward from her seat on the boat.

“There were the cups and the candle and one rope and the tinder that we
have taken out,” said Massawippa. She did not explain that she despised
the promiscuous use of pewter cups, and would not use one in common
with the Queen of France.

Out of the bag, jostled by every step of the day’s journey, came
unsorted a loaf of bread, some cured eels, a second rope,--“I brought
ropes for rafts,” observed Massawippa,--a lump of salt, a piece of loaf
sugar,--“For you, madame,”--more bread, more eels, another length of
rope,--“I dared not buy all we needed at one place or at two places,”
explained Massawippa,--the tinder-box, a hatchet, and, last, half a
louis in coin, which Massawippa now returned to Claire.

“Be my purse-bearer still,” said Claire, pushing it back. “If there be
things we need to buy in the wilderness, you will know how to select
them.”

“We will keep it for the walking woman above Carillon,” said the
half-breed girl, sagely; and she put it in the careful bank of her
tinder-box, bestowing this in the safest part of her dress.

They ate a hearty supper of eels and bread, and breaking the sugar
in bits nibbled it afterwards, talking and looking at the coals on
Jouaneaux’s hearth.

Massawippa put their candle out. Their low voices echoed from the sides
of the underground house and made a booming in their heads, but all
sound of the river’s wash so near them, or of the organ murmur of the
forest trees, was shut away.

They cast stealthy occasional looks up at the trapdoor, but neither
said to the other that she dreaded to see a painted face peering there,
or even apprehended the nuns’ man.

While night and day were yet blended they turned the canoe over, and
propped it in a secure position with the help of the paddle. Claire
brought her cloak out of her packet, and this they made their cushion
in the canoe.

The half-breed took the European’s head upon her childish shoulder,
wrapping the older dependent well with her own blanket. Of all her
experiences Claire thought this the strangest--that she should be
resting like a sister on the breast of a little Indian maid in an
underground chamber of the wilderness.

“If it were not for you, madame,” spoke Massawippa, “I would put
this canoe to soak in the water to-night. We must lose time to do it
to-morrow. It has lain so long out of water it will scarcely be safe
for us to venture across in.”

“Massawippa, I thought we could take this boat and go directly up the
Ottawa in it.”

“Madame, you know nothing about the current. And at Carillon, above
Two Mountains Lake, there is a place so swift that I could not paddle
against it. We should have to carry around hard places. And there is
the danger of meeting the Iroquois or being overtaken by some.”

“For Dollard said there were hundreds coming up from the south,”
whispered Claire. “We must, indeed, hide ourselves from all canoes
passing on the river. I took no thought of that.”

“It will be best to go direct to the walking woman and get a boat of
her. We have only to keep the river in sight to find the expedition. If
they camp on the other shore, either below or above Carillon, we will
have to go to Carillon for a boat. The Chaudière rapids will be hard
for them to pass, madame.”

“Who is this walking woman you speak of, Massawippa?”

“I do not know, madame. The Hurons say she is an Indian woman, and some
French have claimed her for a saint of the Holy Church. She makes good
birch canoes, which are prized by those who can get them. She is under
a vow never to sit or lie down, and they say she goes constantly from
Mount Calvary to Carillon, for at Carillon she lives or walks about
working at her boats. On Mount Calvary are seven holy chapels built of
stone, and the walking woman tends these chapels, but she is too humble
to live near them. And even the Iroquois dare not touch her.”

“Did you ever see her?”

“I saw her walking along the side of the mountain, bent over upon a
stick like a very old woman. How tired she must be! for last summer it
was told along the Ottawa that she had been years upon her feet.”

“Were you afraid of her?”

“No, madame. I am not afraid of any holy person who lives in the woods.”

“But did you ever see her face, Massawippa? What did she cover herself
with?” inquired Claire, uncomfortably thinking of the recluse on St.
Bernard.

“Far up the mountain I saw her face like a dot. She was covered, head
and all, in a blanket the color of gray rock. And that is all I know
about her, madame.”

“Yet you count on getting a boat from her?”

“If she be a holy woman, madame, and sees us in trouble, will she not
help us?”

The rosiness of glowing embers tinted the walls of Jouaneaux’s house,
and perfectly the smoke sought its flue.

Lying quite still in weariness, and holding each other for warmth and
comfort, the two young creatures felt such thoughts rise and rush to
speech as semi-darkness fosters when we are on the edge of great perils.

“Madame,” said Massawippa, “do you understand how it will seem to be
dead?”

“I was just thinking of it, Massawippa, and that we shall soon know.
There is no imagining such a change; yet it may be no stranger than
stripping off a glove of kid-skin and leaving the naked hand, which is,
after all, the natural hand. Do you think it possible that anything has
happened to the expedition yet? They are three days out from Montreal.”

“They cannot be far up the Ottawa, madame. No, I think they have not
met the Iroquois.”

After such sleep as makes the whole night but a pause between two
sentences, they opened their eyes to behold a hint of daylight
glimmering down their stump chimney, and Claire exclaimed:

“Child, did you bear the weight of my head all night?”

“I don’t know, madame,” replied Massawippa, laughing. “This canoe
floated us wondrously in sleep. If it but carry us on the Ottawa as
well, we shall pass over without trouble.”

They drew it up the steps of Jouaneaux’s house before eating their
breakfast, and carried it between them to the river. Massawippa
fastened one of her ropes to it and knotted the other end around a
tree. She crept down to the water’s edge pushing the canoe, filled it
with small rocks, and sunk it. They left their craft thus until late
afternoon, while they staid cautiously underground, feeding the little
fire with slab chips from Jouaneaux’s barn, and exchanging low-voiced
chat.

Such close contact in a common peril and endeavor was not without its
effect on both of them. Claire from superior had changed to pupil,
and seemed developing hardihood without losing her soft refinements.
Massawippa, mature for her years, and exactly nice, as became a
princess, in all her personal habits, had from the moment of meeting
this European dropped her taciturn Indian speech. She unconsciously
imitated while she protected a creature so much finer than herself.

Venturing forth when shadows were stretching from the west across that
angry mass of waters, they emptied their canoe from its wetting and
wiped it out with the hempen sack. But Massawippa still shook her head
at it.

“Madame, I am afraid this canoe will not carry us well. Can you swim?”

“No, Massawippa; I never learned to do anything useful,” replied Claire.

“We might make a raft of those barn timbers. But, madame, the canoe
would take us swiftly, and the raft is clumsy in such swirls and
cross-waters as these. You must take one of the cups in your hand and
dip out the water while I paddle. Shall we wait until to-morrow?”

“Oh, no!” urged Claire. “We have lost one day for it. If the canoe will
carry us at all, Massawippa, I believe it will carry us now.”

They accordingly put their supplies back into the bag, but Massawippa
cautiously wound all the ropes around her waist and secured them like a
girdle. She brought the paddle from Jouaneaux’s house, and perhaps with
regret closed for the last time its trapdoor above it.

Woods, rocks, islands, and water were steeped in a wonderful amber
light. The two girls sat down close by the river edge and ate a supper
before embarking. Then Massawippa launched the canoe and carefully
placed herself and Claire over the keel.

“Unfasten your cloak and let it fall from your shoulders, madame. You
see my blanket lies on the sack. We must have nothing to drag us under
in case of mischance.”

So, dipping with skillful rapidity, she ventured out across the current.

They fared well until far on in their undertaking. Immediately the
little craft oozed as if its entire skin had grown leaky; but Claire
bailed with desperate swiftness; the paddle dipped from side to side,
flashing in the sun, which now lay level with the rivers.

Massawippa felt the canoe settling, turned it towards the nearest
island, and tore the water with her speed.

“Madame!” she cried, her cry merging into one with Claire’s “O
Massawippa, we are going down!”

They were close to the island’s ribbed side when a bubbling and roaring
confusion overtook Claire’s ears, and she was drenched, strangled, and
still gulping in her death until all sensation passed away.

Life returned through hearing; her head was filled with humming noises,
she was giving back the water which had been forced upon her, and lying
across a rock supported by Massawippa. In the midst of her chill misery
she noted that shadow was settling on the river, and all the cheerful
ruddiness of western light was gone.

“Madame, are you able to get up the rocks now?” anxiously spoke
Massawippa. “We must hide on this island to-night.”

“How did we reach it?” Claire gasped.

“I swam, and dragged you.”

“Then here had been the end of my expedition but for you, Massawippa.”

“There was the end of our supplies. All gone, madame, except the ropes
I put around my waist, and they would have drowned me with their weight
if the island had not been almost under our feet. It is well we ate
and filled ourselves, for the saints alone know where we shall get
breakfast.”

Claire turned her face on the rock.

“My packet of linen and clean comforts, Massawippa!” she regretted.

“The cloak and the blanket were of more account, madame. The
Frenchman’s boat played us a fine trick. But we are here. And we have
still our knives and tinder.”

Before the long northern twilight had double-dyed itself into
night, they crept up the island’s rocky side, explored its small
circumference, and found near the western edge a dry hollow, the socket
of an uprooted tree. Into this Massawippa piled all the loose leaves
she could find, and cut some branches full of tender foliage from the
trees to shelter them. Had her tinder been dry, she dared not make a
light to be seen from the river.

Drenched and heavy through all their garments, they nestled closely
down together and shivered in the chill breath of night. An emaciated
moon lent them enough cadaverous light to make them apprehensive
of noises on the rushing water. Sometimes they dozed, sometimes
they whispered to each other, sometimes they startled each other by
involuntary shivers. But measured by patient breath, by moments of
endurance succeeding one another in what then seemed endless duration,
this second night of their journey passed away, and nothing upon the
island or upon the two rivers terrified them.

Just at the pearl-blue time of dawn canoes grew on the southward sweep
of the St. Lawrence.

Claire touched Massawippa, and Massawippa nodded. They dared scarcely
breathe, but watched along the level of the sward, careful not to rear
a feature above the dull leaves.

Nearer and nearer came the canoes. A splash of unskillful paddling grew
distinct; familiar outlines projected familiar faces.

“Oh, it is Dollard!” Claire’s whisper was a strangled scream. “There
are the men of the French expedition! There is my--”

“Hush!” whispered Massawippa. “Madame, do you want them to see us, and
turn and send us back to Montreal?”

“O my Dollard!” Claire clasped her own hand over her mouth while she
sobbed. “Drowned and wretched and homesick for you, must I see you pass
me by, never turning a glance this way?”

“Hush, madame,” begged Massawippa, adding her hand to Claire’s. “Sound
goes like a bird over water.”

“This is our one chance to reach him,” struggled Claire. “Oh, the
woods, and the rivers, and the Iroquois--they are all coming between us
again!”

“It is no chance at all, madame. I know what my father would do.”

“O my Dollard!” groaned Claire in the dead leaves. “Oh, do not let him
go by! Must he flit and flit from me--must I follow him so through
space forever when we are dead?”

Almost like dream-men, wreathed slowly about by mists, their
alternating paddles making no sound which could be caught by the woman
on the island living so keenly in her ears, the expedition passed into
the mouth of the Ottawa. When they could be seen no more, Claire lay in
dejection like death.




XVIII.

THE WALKING HERMIT.


“THEY have been these five[9] days getting past Ste. Anne,” remarked
Massawippa. “I could not have paddled against that current with the
best of canoes. My father will soon follow; we dare scarcely stir until
my father passes. He would see us if we did more than breathe; the
Huron knows all things around him. And if he finds us, he will put us
back into safety, after all our trouble.”

Claire was weeping on her damp arms, and lay quite as still as the
younger woman could wish, while daylight, sunlight, and winged life
grew around them.

Hour after hour passed. Annahotaha’s canoes did not appear. Still the
half-Huron stoic watched southward, lying with her cheek on the leaves,
clasping her eyelids almost shut to protect her patient sight from the
glare on the water.

“Madame, are you hungry?”

“In my heart I am,” said Claire.

“That is because we were so drenched. My father will soon pass; and
when we have food and dry skins our courage will come up again. There
is only one way to reach the north shore. If my father would go by, I
could cut limbs for the raft.”

Claire gave listless attention.

“We must cut branches as large as we can with our knives, the hatchet
being gone, and we shall be drenched again; but the river’s arm shall
not hold us back.”

When the sun stood overhead without having brought Annahotaha, Claire
could endure her stiff discomfort no longer.

“Lie still, madame,” begged Massawippa.

“My child,” returned Claire, fretfully, “I do not care if the Iroquois
see me and scalp me.”

“And me also?”

“No, not you.”

“Have a little more patience, madame, for I do see specks like wild
ducks riding yonder. They may be the Huron canoes.”

The little more patience, wrung like a last tax from exhaustion, was
measured out, and not vainly.

The specks like wild ducks rode nearer, shaping themselves into Huron
canoes.

In rigid calm the half-breed girl watched them approach, fly past with
regular and beautiful motion of the paddles, and make their entrance
into the Ottawa. Her eyes shone across the leaves, but Annahotaha,
sweeping all the horizon with a sight formed and trained to keenest
use, caught no sign of ambush or human life on the islands.

When the fleet was far off, his young daughter rose up and unsheathed
her knife to cut raftwood.

“My father is a great man,” was the only weakness she allowed herself,
and in this her gratified pride was restricted to a mere statement of
fact.

The raft, made of many large branches bound securely together, occupied
them some time. On this frail and uneasy flooring the half-breed placed
her companion. Claire was instructed to hold to it though the water
should rise around her waist.

The space betwixt island and north shore was a very dangerous passage
for them. Massawippa swam and propelled the raft with the current,
fighting for it midway, while Claire clung in desperation and begged
the brown face turned up to her from the water to let her go and to
swim out alone.

When they finally stood on the north bank, streams of water running
down their persons, Massawippa’s black hair shining as it clung to her
cheeks, and their raft escaping from their reach, they felt that a
great gulf of experience divided them from the island and Jouaneaux’s
house.

“This time we lose our ropes,” said the half-breed girl. “My hands were
too numb. And now we have nothing left but our knives and tinder.”

To Claire the rest of the day was a heavy dream. Giddy from fasting
and exposure, with swimming eyes she saw the landscape. Sometimes
Massawippa walked with an arm around her waist, sometimes held low
boughs out of her way, introducing her to the deeper depths of Canadian
forest. They did not talk, but reserved their strength for plodding;
and thus they edged along the curves and windings of the Ottawa. Claire
took no thought of Massawippa’s destination for the night; they were
making progress if they followed beside the track of the expedition.

Before dark she noticed that the land ascended, and afterwards they
left the river below, for a glooming pile of mountain was to be
climbed. Perhaps no wearier feet ever toiled up that steep during all
the following years, though the mountain was piously named Calvary and
its top held sacred as a shrine, to be visited by many a pilgrim.[10]

Sometimes the two girls hugged this rugged ascent, lying against
it, and paused for breath. The rush and purr of the river went on
below, and all the wilderness night sounds were magnified by their
negations--the night silences.

At the summit of the mountain, starlight made indistinctly visible a
number of low stone structures, each having a rough cross above its
door. These were the seven chapels Massawippa had told about. Whether
they stood in regular design or were dotted about on the plateau,
Claire scarcely used her heavy eyes to discern. She was comforted by
Massawippa’s whisper that they must sleep in the first chapel, and by
the sound of heavy hinges grating, as if the door yielded unwillingly
an entrance to such benighted pilgrims.

The tomb-like inclosure was quite as chill as the mountain air outside.
They stood on uneven stone flooring, and listened for any breathing
beside their own.

“Let me feel all around the walls and about the altar, madame,”
whispered Massawippa.

“Let me continue with you, then,” whispered back Claire. “Have you been
in this place before?”

“I have been in all the chapels, madame.”

Claire held to Massawippa’s beaver gown and stepped grotesquely in
her tracks as the half-breed moved forward with stretched, exploring
fingers. When this blind progress brought them to the diminutive altar,
they failed not to kneel before it and whisper some tired orisons.

After one round of the chapel they groped back to the altar, assured
that no foe lurked with them.

The chancel rail felt like the smooth rind of a tree. Within the rail
Massawippa said a wooden platform was built, on which it could be no
sin against Heaven for such forlorn beings to sleep.

Their clothes were now nearly dry; but footsore and weak with hunger,
Claire sunk upon this refuge, disregarding dust which had settled there
in silence and dimness all the days of the past winter. Exhaustion made
her first posture the right one. Scarcely breathing, she would have
sunk at once to stupor, but Massawippa hissed joyful whispers through
the dark.

“Madame!”

“What is it?”

“Madame, I have been feeling the top of the altar.”

“Do no sacrilege, Massawippa.”

“But last summer the walking woman put bread and roasted birds on the
altars for an offering. She has put some here to-day. Take this.”

Claire encountered a groping hand full of something which touch
received as food. Without further parley she sat up and ate. The very
gentle sounds of mastication which even dainty women may make when
crisp morsels tempt the hound of starvation that is within them could
be heard in the dark. Claire’s less active animal nature was first
silenced, and in compunction she spoke.

“If the hermit put these things on the altar for an offering, we are
robbing a shrine.”

“She was willing for any pilgrim to carry them away, madame. The
coureurs de bois visit these chapels and eat her birds. She is alive,
madame! She is not dead! We shall find her at Carillon and get our
canoe of her; and the saints be praised for so helping us!”

They finished their meal and stretched themselves upon the platform.
Not a delicious scrap which could be eaten was left, but Massawippa
piously dropped the bones outside the chancel rail.

“We are in sanctuary,” said Claire, her eyes pressed by the weight
of darkness. Venturing with checked voice, the sweeter for such
suppression and necessity of utterance, she sung above their heads into
the low arching hollow a vesper hymn in monk’s Latin; after which they
slept as they had slept in Jouaneaux’s house, and awoke to find the
walking woman gazing over the rail at them.

She was so old that her many wrinkles seemed carved in hard wood. Her
features were unmistakably Indian; but from the gray blanket loosely
draping her, and even from her inner wrappings of soft furs, came the
smell of wholesome herbs. She held a long flask in one hand, evidently
a bottle lost or thrown away by some passing ranger, and she extended
it to Claire, her eyes twinkling pleasantly.

Being relieved of it she turned and tapped with her staff--for her
moccasins were silent--slowly around the chapel, mechanically keeping
herself in motion. She was so different from fanatics who bind
themselves in by walls that in watching her Claire forgot the flask.

Massawippa uncorked it.

“This is a drink she brews, madame. I have heard in my father’s camp
that she brews it to keep herself strong and tireless.”

Claire tasted and Massawippa drank the liquid, with unwonted disregard
of a common bottle mouth. It was too tepid to be refreshing, but left a
wild and spicy tang, delicious as the cleansed sensation of returning
health.

“Good mother,” said Claire as she gave the hermit’s flask back, “have
you seen white men in canoes on the river?”

The walking woman leaned lower on her staff with keen attention.
Massawippa repeated Claire’s words in Huron, and added much inquiry of
her own. The walking woman moved back and forth beside the rail, making
gestures with her staff and uttering gutturals, until she ended by
beckoning to them and leading them out of the chapel.

Massawippa interpreted her as saying that she had seen the white men
and the Hurons following them, and had heard a voice in the woods speak
out, “Great deeds will now be done.” She would take care of all whom
the saints sheltered behind their altar, but she chid Massawippa for
prying into mysteries when the girl asked if she had foreseen their
coming. They were to go with her to Carillon and get a canoe.

She had breakfast for them down the mountain north of the chapels.

The world is full of resurrections of the body. It was nothing for two
young creatures to rise up from their hard bed and plunge heartily into
the dew and gladness of morning--the first morning of May.

But the miracle of life is that coming of a person who instantly
unlocks all our resources, among which we have groped forlorn and
disinherited. Friend or lover, he enriches us with what was before our
own, yet what we never should have gathered without the solvent of his
touch.

In some degree the walking woman came like such a prophet to Claire. As
she brushed down the mountain-side with Massawippa, followed by woman
and clinking staff, all things seemed easy to do. The healing of the
woods flowed over her anxiety, and like an urchin she pried under moss
and within logs for an instant’s peep at life swarming there. Never
before had she felt turned loose to Nature, with the bounds of her past
fallen away, and the freedom which at first abashed her now became like
the lifting of wings. Sweet smells of wood mold and damp greenery came
from this ancient forest like the long-preserved essence of primeval
gladness. It did not have its summer density of leafage, but the rocks
were always there, heaving their placid backs from the soil in the
majesty of everlasting quiet.

The walking woman lifted her stick and struck upon their rocky
path, which answered with a hollow booming, as if drums were beaten
underground. She gave Claire a wrinkled smile.

“The rocks do the same far to the eastward,” said Massawippa. “It is
the earth’s heart which answers--we walk so close to it here. And,
madame, I never saw any snakes in this fair land.”




XIX.

THE HEROES OF THE LONG SAUT.[11]


IT was morning by the Long Saut, that length of boiling rapids which
had barred the French expedition’s farther progress up the Ottawa. The
seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins, and forty Hurons were encamped
together in an open space on the west bank of the river. Their kettles
were slung for breakfast, the fires blinking pinkly in luminous morning
air; their morning hymn had not long ceased to echo from the forest
around the clearing. Three times the previous day these men had prayed
their prayers together in three languages.

Their position at the foot of the rapids was well taken. The Iroquois
must pass them. In the clearing stood a dilapidated fort, a mere
stockade of sapling trunks, built the autumn before by an Algonquin war
party; but Dollard’s party counted upon it as their pivot for action,
though with strange disregard of their own defense they had not yet
strengthened it by earthworks.

Dollard stood near the brink of the river watching the rapids. His
scouts had already encountered some canoes full of Iroquois coming down
the Ottawa, and in a skirmish two of the enemy escaped. The main body,
hastened by these refugees, must soon reach the Long Saut, unless they
were determined utterly to reject and avoid the encounter, which it was
scarcely in the nature of Iroquois to do.

No canoes yet appeared on the rapids, but against the river’s southward
sweep rode a new little craft holding two women. Having crossed the
current below and hugged the western shore, this canoe shot out before
Dollard’s eyes as suddenly as an electric lancet unsheathed by clouds.

He blanched to his lips, and made a repellent gesture with both hands
as if he could put back the woman of his love out of danger as swiftly
and unaccountably as she put herself into it. But his only reasonable
course was to drag up the canoe when Massawippa beached it.

The half-breed girl leaped out like a fawn and ran up the slope.
Annahotaha came striding down to meet her, and as she caught him
around the body he lifted his knife as if the impulse which drove
the arm of Virginius had been reborn in a savage of the New World.
Massawippa showed her white teeth in rapturous smiling. So absolute was
her trust in him that she waited thus whatever act his superior wisdom
must dictate. That unflinching smile brought out its answer on his
countenance. A copper glow seemed to fuse his features into grotesquely
passionate tenderness. He turned his back towards his braves and hugged
the child to his breast, smoothing her wings of black hair and uttering
guttural murmurs which probably expressed that superlative nonsense
mothers talk in the privacy of civilized nurseries.

But Claire, pink as a rose from sun and wind, her head covered by a
parchment bonnet of birch bark instead of the cap she lost at the
island, her satin tatters carefully drawn together with fibers from
porcupine quills and loosened from the girdle to flow around her worn
moccasins, and radiant as in her loveliest moments, stretched her hands
for Dollard’s help.

He lifted her out of the canoe and placed her upon the ground; he knelt
before her and kissed both of her hands.

“Good-morning, monsieur!” said Claire, triumphantly. “You left no
command against my following the expedition.”

That palpitating presence which we call life seemed to project itself
beyond their faces and to meet. Her pinkness and triumph were instantly
gone in the whiter heat of spiritual passion. She began to sob, and
Dollard stood up strongly holding her in his arms.

“The paving-stone where you knelt--how I kissed it--how I kissed it!”

“I have not a word, Claire; not one word,” said Dollard. “I am blind
and dumb and glad.”

“Oh, do be blind to my rags and scratches! I would have crept on my
hands and face to you, monsieur, my saint! But now I am not crying.”

“How did you reach us unharmed?”

“We saw no Iroquois. Have you yet seen them?”

“Not yet.”

“But there was the river. Massawippa dragged me through that. Your face
looks thin, my Dollard.”

“I have suffered. I did not know heaven was to descend upon me.”

The Frenchmen and Indians, a stone’s-throw away, unable, indeed, to
penetrate this singular encounter of the commandant’s, gave it scarcely
a moment’s attention, but turned their eager gaze up the rapids.
Dollard looked also, as suggestion became certainty.

He hurried Claire to the palisade, calling his men to arm.

Upon the rapids appeared a wonderful sight. Bounding down the broken
and tumultuous water came the Iroquois in canoes which seemed
unnumbered. They flung themselves ashore and at the fort like a wave,
and like a wave they were sent trickling back from the shock of their
reception.

Massawippa sat down by Claire in the small inclosure during this first
brush with the enemy.

There was no time for either Frenchmen or Indians to look with
astonished eyes at these girls, so soon were all united in common
peril and bonds of endurance. Men purified by the devotion of such an
undertaking could accept the voluntary presence of women as they might
accept the unscared alighting of birds in the midst of them.

The Iroquois next tried to parley, in order to take the allies
unawares. But all their efforts were met with volleys of ammunition. So
they drew off from the palisade and began to cut small trees and build
a fort for themselves within the shelter of the woods, this being the
Iroquois plan of besieging an enemy.

Dollard had stored all his supplies and tools within his palisade. He
now set to work with his men to strengthen the position. They drove
stakes inside the inclosure and filled the space between outer and
inner pickets with earth and stones as high as their heads, leaving
twenty loop-holes. Three men were appointed to each loop-hole.

Before the French had finished intrenching themselves the Iroquois
broke up all their canoes, lighted pieces at the fires, and ran to
pile them against the palisade, but were again driven back. How many
attacks were made Claire did not know, for volley followed volley until
the crack of muskets seemed continuous, but the Iroquois attained to a
focus of howling when the principal chief of the Senecas, one of the
Five Nations, fell among their dead.

Morning and noon passed in this tumult of musketry and human outcry. In
the unsullied May weather such gunpowder clouds must have been strange
sights to nesting birds and other shy creatures of the woods.

Claire and Massawippa looked into the supplies of the fort and set out
food, but the water was soon exhausted. Dusk came. Starlight came. The
first rough day of this continuous battle was over, but not the battle.
For the Iroquois gave the allies no rest, harassing them through that
and every succeeding night.

It was after 12 o’clock before Dollard could take Claire’s hands and
talk with her a few unoccupied minutes. When women intrude upon men’s
great labors they risk destroying their own tender ideals, but this
daughter of a hundred soldiers had watched her husband all day in
raptures of pride. To be near him in the little arena of his sacrifice
was worth her heart-chilling vigil, worth her toilsome journey, fully
worth the supreme price she must yet pay.

Earth from the breastworks, distributed by thuds of occasional
Iroquois bullets, spattered impartially both Claire and Dollard. They
had no privacy. Guttural Huron and Algonquin murmurs and the nervous
intonation of French voices would have broken into all ordinary
conversation. But looking deeply at each other, and unconsciously
breathing in the same cadences, they had their moment of talk as if
standing on a peak together. There was a lonesome bird in the woods
uttering three or four falling notes, which could be heard at intervals
when not drowned by any rising din of the Iroquois.

“They sent a canoe down river this afternoon,” said Dollard, “evidently
for their reinforcements from below.”

“How long do you think we can hold out?” inquired Claire.

“Until we have broken their force. We must do that.”

“I was on an island at the mouth of the Ottawa when you passed, my
commandant. That was purgatory to me.”

“Since you reached us,” said Dollard, “I have accepted you without
question and without remorse. I am stupefied. I love you. But, Claire,
to what a death I have brought you!”

“It is a death befitting well the daughter of the stout-hearted
Constable of France. But do not leave me again, Dollard!”

“The Iroquois shall not touch you alive, Claire,” he promised.

“I am ready shriven,” she said, smiling. “Except of one fault. That
will I now confess,--a fault committed against the delicacy of
women,--and I hated the abbess and the bishop because they detected me
in it. I came to New France for love of you, my soldier. Could I help
following you from world to world?”

“O Claire!” trembled Dollard, taking his hat off and standing uncovered
before her.

“But you should not have known this until we were old--until you
had seen me Madame des Ormeaux many years, dignified and very, very
discreet, so that no breath could discredit me save this mine own
confession.”

During four days the Iroquois constantly harassed the fort while
waiting for their reënforcements, enraged more each day at their own
losses and at the handful of French and Indians who stood in the way of
their great raid upon New France. Hungry, thirsty, and giddy from loss
of sleep, the allies in the fort stood at their loop-holes and poured
out destruction. Their supplies were gone, excepting dry hominy, which
they could not swallow without water.

Some of the young Frenchmen made a rush to the river, protected by the
guns of the fort, and brought all the water they could thus carry. They
also dug within the palisade and reached a little clayey moisture which
helped to cool their mouths.

Among the Iroquois were renegade Hurons who had been adopted by the
Five Nations. During these four days of trial the renegades shouted to
their brethren in the fort to come over and surrender to the Iroquois.
Seven or eight hundred more warriors were hurrying from the mouth of
the Richelieu River, and not a blackened coal was to be left where the
fort and the Frenchmen stood.

“Come over,” tempted these Hurons. “The Iroquois will receive you as
brothers. Will you stay there and die for the sake of a few Frenchmen?”

First one, then two more, then three at a time, the famished braves of
Annahotaha slipped over the intrenchment and deserted, in spite of his
rage and exhortations.

On the fifth day, an hour before dawn, a hand of auroral light spread
its fingers across the sky from west to east. Betwixt these finger-rays
were dark spaces having no stars, but through the pulsing medium of
every gigantic finger the constellations glittered. Many signs were
seen in the heavens during the colonial years of New France, but
nothing like the blessed hand stretched over the Long Saut.

That day rapids and forests appeared to rock with the vibration of
savage yells, for soon after daylight the expected force arrived.

La Mouche had sulked some time at the loop-hole where he was stationed
with Annahotaha. Massawippa’s back was towards him during all this
period of distress. She never saw that he was thirsty and that his
cracked lips bled. If she was solicitous for anybody except the
stalwart chief, it was for that white wife of Dollard, who stood always
near Dollard when not doing what could be done for the wounded.

La Mouche had no stomach for dying an unrewarded death. Dogged hatred
of his false position and of his tardy suit had grown large within him.
He therefore left his loop-hole while Annahotaha’s gun was emptied,
leaped on top of the palisade, and stretched his dark face back an
instant to interrogate Massawippa’s quick eye. A motion of her head
might yet bring him back. But did she think that he meant to be killed
like a dog to whom the bone of a good word has never been thrown?

“My father!” shouted the girl, pointing with a finger which pierced La
Mouche’s soul. “Shoot that coward; shoot him down!”

Annahotaha seized the long pistol from his side and discharged it
at his deserting nephew. But La Mouche in the same instant dropped
outside and ran over to the Iroquois.

There remained now only the Frenchmen, Annahotaha, and the four
Algonquins.

Playfully, as a cat reaches out to cuff its mouse, the army of Iroquois
now approached the fort. They gamboled from side to side and uttered
screeches. But the loop-holes were yet all manned by men who would not
die of fatigue and physical privation, and the fire which sprung from
those loop-holes astounded the enemy. Guns of large caliber carried
scraps of iron and lead, and mowed like artillery.

Three days more, says the chronicle, did this fort by the Long Saut
hold out. Who can tell all the story of those days? and who can hear
all the story of such endurance? When acclamation cheers a man’s blood
and a great cloud of witnesses encompasses him, heroic courage is made
easy. But here were a few doomed men in the wilderness, whose fate
and whose action might be misrepresented by a surviving foe--silent
fighters against odds, thinking, “This anguish and sacrifice of
mine are lost on the void, and perhaps taken no account of by any
intelligence, except that myself knows it, and myself demands it of me.”

This is the courage which brings a man’s soul up above his body like a
tall flame out of an altar, and makes us credit the tale of our lineage
tracing thus backward: “Which was the son of Adam, which was the son of
God.”

[Illustration: “Dollard held Claire with his left arm and fought with
his sword.”]

The fort could not be taken by surprise; it could not be taken by
massed sallies. The Iroquois wrangled among themselves. Some were for
raising the siege and going back to their own country. Their best
braves lay in heaps. But others scouted the eternal disgrace of leaving
unpunished so pitiful a foe.

Finally they made themselves great shields of split logs, broad as a
door, and crept forward under cover of these to hew away the palisades.
Mad for revenge, they used their utmost skill and caution.

It was at this time that Dollard, among his reeling and praying
men--men yet able to smile with powder-blackened faces through the
loop-holes--took a large musketoon, filled it with explosives, and
plugged it ready to throw among the enemy. His arms had not remaining
strength to fling it clear of the palisade’s jagged top. It fell back
and exploded in the fort, and amidst the frightful confusion the
Iroquois made their first breach, to find it defended; and yet another
breach, and yet another, overflowing the inclosure with all their
swarms.

Smoke-clouds curled around the bride who had trod that sward and borne
her part in the suffering. Half blinded by the explosion, Dollard held
Claire with his left arm and fought with his sword. As firm and white
as a marble face, the face of the Laval-Montmorency met her foes. The
blood of man-warriors, even of Anne, the great and warlike Constable
of France, throbbed steadfastly in the arm which grasped her husband
and the heart which stood by his until they were swept down by the
same volley of musketry, and lay as one body among the dead. Perhaps
to Claire and Dollard it was but sudden release from thirst, hunger,
exhaustion, and victorious howling. For La Mouche found Massawippa
pointing as if she saw through the earthwork. The half-breed’s eyes
glowed with expansive brightness, as a spark does just before it
expires. Her childish contours were beautiful, and unbroken by pain.

“Father,” said Massawippa with effort,--the chief was dead, having
saved her from the Iroquois with the last stroke of his hand,--“do you
see madame--and the commandant--walking there under--birches?” Her face
smiled as she died, and remained set in its smile.

There are people who steadily live the lives they hate, whose common
speech misrepresents their thought, who walk the world fettered. Is it
better with these than with winged souls?

Fire and smoke of a great burning rose up and blinded the day beside
the Long Saut. It was a mighty funeral pile. The tender grass all
around, licked by flame, gave juices of the earth to that sacrifice.
The wine of young lives, the spices and treasures of courageous hearts,
went freely to it, and for more than two hundred and twenty-five years
love and gratitude have consecrated the spot.




XX.

POSTERITY.


THREE weeks after Dollard’s departure Jacques Goffinet took the boat
and one Huron Indian whom Dollard had sent back with the boat and set
off to Montreal to obey his master’s final order.

No appearances on the river had caused alarm at St. Bernard. While
record has not been made of the route taken by the Iroquois brought
from the Richelieu, it is evident that they passed north of Montreal
island, avoiding settlements.

Montreal was waiting in silence and anxiety for news of the expedition.

The first person whom Jacques encountered was the nuns’ man Jouaneaux,
watching the St. Lawrence with uneasy expectation in his eyes.

When they had exchanged greetings as men do when each thinks only of
the information he can get from the other, Jouaneaux said:

“You come from up river?”

“From St. Bernard island,” replied Jacques. “What news of the
expedition?”

But Jouaneaux had widened his mouth receptively.

“You are then from the commandant Dollard’s seigniory?”

“The commandant is my seignior,” said Jacques.

Jouaneaux laid hold of his sleeve.

“Did Mademoiselle de Granville return to St. Bernard and take the
little half-breed Sister with her?”

“Mademoiselle de Granville, my commandant’s sister, is at St. Bernard;
yes,” replied Jacques, arrested and stupefied by such inquiries.

“Look you here, my good friend,” exclaimed Jouaneaux. “I speak for the
nuns of St. Joseph of the Hôtel-Dieu, where your master put his sister
for protection before he set out. Was not her fire built to suit her?
We are poor, but our hospitality is free, and we love not to have it
flung back in our faces. Still, I say nothing of mademoiselle. She hath
her seigniory to look after, and she was not a novice.”

“My master left my lady at the governor’s house,” asserted Jacques.

“But,” continued Jouaneaux, “this I will say: ill did she requite us
in that she carried off the novice Massawippa, whose father, the Huron
chief, had put her in the Hôtel-Dieu to take vows.”

“I will go to the governor,” threatened Jacques, feeling himself baited.

“And what will it profit thee to go to the governor? The governor is a
just man, and he hath the good of the Hôtel-Dieu at heart.”

“I know nothing about your Hôtel-Dieu,” said Jacques, having
forebodings at his heart.

“But where is our novice?” persisted Jouaneaux, following him.

“I know nothing about your novice.”

At the governor’s house, by scant questions on his part and much speech
on Jouaneaux’s, he learned that Dollard was yet unheard from, that
Claire had been left at the hospital, and for some unspoken reason,
which Jacques silently accepted as good since it was the commandant’s
reason, she had been received as the commandant’s sister; and finally
that she had disappeared with a young novice, the daughter of
Annahotaha, soon after the expedition left, and no one in Montreal knew
anything else about her.

Distressed to muteness by such tidings, Jacques went back to his boat,
still followed by Jouaneaux, and pushed off up the river with the
malediction of St. Joseph invoked upon him.

As his Huron rowed back along Lake St. Louis they saw a canoe drifting,
and cautiously approaching it they found that it held a wounded brave
in the war-dress of the Hurons. He lay panting in his little craft,
feverish and helpless, and they towed him to the island and carried him
up into the seigniory kitchen.

The May sun shone and bees buzzed past the windows; all the landscape
and the pleasant world seemed to contradict the existence of such a
blot on nature as a blood-streaked man.

The family gathered fearfully about La Mouche as he lay upon a
bear-skin brought down from the saloon for him by Joan.

Jacques gave him brandy and Louise bathed his wounds. They used such
surgery as they knew, and La Mouche told them all the story of the Long
Saut except his desertion. None of five deserters who escaped from
the Iroquois, and from the tortures to which the Iroquois put all the
deserters after burning the fort, could tell the truth about their own
action until long after.

Jacques turned away from this renegade and threw both arms around one
of the cemented pillars. Louise fell on her knees beside him, and the
broad hall was filled with wailings. There were consolations which
Louise remembered when her religion and her stolid sense of duty began
reconciling her to the eternal absence of Claire and Dollard. She
stood up and took her apron to wipe her good man’s eyes, saying without
greediness and merely as seizing on a tangible fact:

“Thou hast the island of St. Bernard left thee.”

“But he that is gone,” sobbed Jacques, “he was to me more than the
whole earth.”

The four other Hurons who escaped carried all the details of the
battle, except their own desertion, to Montreal. But the Iroquois were
not so reticent, and in time this remnant of Hurons was brought to
admit that Annahotaha alone of the tribe stood by the Frenchmen to the
last.

As for the Iroquois, they slunk back to their own country utterly
defeated and confounded. They had no further desire to fight such
an enemy. Says the historian,[12] “If seventeen Frenchmen, four
Algonquins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven
hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such
fighting behind walls of stone?” The colony of New France was redeemed
out of their hands. After the struggle at the Long Saut it enjoyed such
a period of rest and peace as the Iroquois had not permitted it for
years.

When La Mouche recovered from his wounds he crept away to his côte down
the river, and with little regret the people on St. Bernard heard of
him no more.

Jacques and Louise remained in possession of St. Bernard, and on that
island their stout-legged children played, or learned contented thrift,
or followed their father in his sowing; their delight being the real
priest who came with his glowing altar to teach them religion, and
their terror the pretended priest in the top apartment of their house.
For Mademoiselle de Granville lived many years, so indulged in her
humors that the story went among neighboring seigniories that she had
an insane brother whom she imprisoned on St. Bernard out of tenderness
towards him, instead of sending him to some asylum in France.[13]

Rather because her memory was a spot of tenderness within themselves
always on the point of bleeding, than because of their ignorant dread
of law’s intermeddling, Jacques and Louise never told about Dollard’s
bride. The marriage had taken place in Quebec. Dollier de Casson,
who celebrated it, made no record of the fact in connection with his
account of Dollard’s exploit. The jealousies and bickerings then
rising high between Quebec and Montreal clouded or misrepresented or
suppressed many a transaction. And honest Dollier de Casson, who no
doubt learned by priestly methods the fate of the bride, may have
seen fit to withhold the luster of her devotion from the name of
Laval, since the bishop pressed no inquiries after his impulsive young
relative. News stretched slowly to and from France then. Her name
dropped out of all records, except the notarial one of her marriage,
and a faint old clew which an obscure scribe has left embodying a
scarcely credited tale told by the Huron deserters. Without monument,
what was once her beautiful body has become grass, flowers, clear air,
beside the hoarse rapids. She died, as many a woman has died, silently
crowning the deed done by a man, and in her finer immortality can
perhaps smile at being forgotten, since it is not by him.

But Dollard has been the darling of his people for more than two and a
quarter centuries.

On every midsummer-day, when the festival of St. John the Baptist is
kept with pageant, music, banners, and long processions; when thousands
choke the streets, and triumphal arch after triumphal arch lifts masses
of flowers to the June sun; when invention has taxed itself to carry
beautiful living pictures before the multitude--then there is always a
tableau to commemorate the heroes of the Long Saut. If young children
or if strangers ask, “Who was Dollard?” any Frenchman is ready to
answer:

“He was a man of courageous heart;[14] he saved Canada from the
Iroquois.”

The dullest soul is stirred to passionate acclamation as the chevalier
and his sixteen men go by.

And when we tell our stories, shall we tell them only of the
commonplace, the gay, the debonair life of this world? Shall the heroes
be forgotten?

                               THE END.




                              FOOTNOTES:

[1] Another of Laval’s titles.

[2] Ste. Anne de Beaupré, twenty miles east of Quebec. “The favorite
saint appears to be Ste. Anne, whose name appears constantly on the
banks of the St. Lawrence.” [J. G. Bourinot.]

[3] On a small scale the typical Iroquois-Huron dwelling. The tribal
lodges, made to hold many fires and many families, were fifty or more
yards in length by twelve or fifteen in width, framed of sapling poles
closely covered with sheets of bark.

[4] The legend of Mademoiselle de Granville dates from the year 1698.
It seemed but a slight anachronism to place this singular though
unimportant figure in the year 1660.

[5] The following list may be found in the parish register of
Villemarie, June 3, 1660:

  1. Adam Dollard (Sieur des Ormeaux), commandant, age de 25 ans.
  2. Jacques Brassier, âgé de 25 ans.
  3. Jean Tavernier, dit la Hochehère, armurier, âgé de 28 ans.
  4. Nicolas Tellemont, serrurier, âgé de 25 ans.
  5. Laurent Hebert, dit la Rivière, 27 ans.
  6. Alonié de Lestres, chaufournier, 31 ans.
  7. Nicolas Josselin, 25 ans.
  8. Robert Jurée, 24 ans.
  9. Jacques Boisseau, dit Cognac, 23 ans.
  10. Louis Martin, 21 ans.
  11. Christophe Augier, dit Desjardins, 26 ans.
  12. Étienne Robin, dit Desforges, 27 ans.
  13. Jean Valets, 27 ans.
  14. René Doussin (Sieur de Sainte-Cécile), soldat de garnison, 30 ans.
  15. Jean Lecomte, 20 ans.
  16. Simon Grenet, 25 ans.
  17. François Crusson, dit Pilote, 24 ans.

Also cited in “Histoire de la Colonie Française,” II., 414, 416:

“À ces dix-sept héros chrétiens, on doit joindre le brave Annahotaha,
chef des Hurons, comme aussi Metiwemeg, capitaine Algonquin, avec
les trois autres braves de sa nation, qui tous demeurent fidèles et
mourirent au champ d’honneur; enfin les trois Français qui périrent
au début de l’expédition, Nicolas du Val, serviteur au fort, Mathurin
Soulard, charpentier du fort, et Blaise Juillet, dit Argnon, habitant.”

Of the ambush in which these last-mentioned three men were slain, and
the subsequent volunteering of others in their places, this romance
does not treat.

[6] “They stopped by the way at Three Rivers, where they found a band
of Christian Algonquins under a chief named Mituvemeg. Annahotaha
challenged him to a trial of courage, and it was agreed that they
should meet at Montreal.... Thither, accordingly, they repaired, the
Algonquin with three followers, the Huron with thirty-nine.”--_Francis
Parkman._

[7] Ste. Anne de Bellevue, an old village at the junction of the
Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, “always a rendezvous of the voyageurs and
coureurs de bois up the Ottawa.”

“The waters of the Ottawa are about three inches higher than the waters
of Lake St. Louis (in the St. Lawrence), and are therefore precipitated
through the two channels running around Île Perot with considerable
force, forming a succession of short rapids.”--_From Report of Public
Works, 1866._

[8] While Jouaneaux’s house had historic existence, its elaboration, of
course, had not.

[9] “Furent arrêtés huit jours au bout de l’île de Montreal, dans
un endroit très-rapide qu’ils avaient à traverser”, says the French
chronicler. But for romancer’s purposes, the liberty is taken of
shortening the time.

[10] “The large mountain was named Le Calvaire by the piety of the
first settlers. At its summit were seven chapels,--memorials of the
mystic seven of St. John’s vision,--the scene of many a pilgrimage.
Gallant cavalier and high-born lady from their fastness at Villemarie
toiled side by side up the same weary height.”--_Picturesque Canada._

[11] Pronounced “So.” The Abbé Faillon with exactness locates the
engagement at the foot of the Long Saut rapids, “à huit ou dix lieues
au-dessus de l’île de Montreal, et au-dessous du saut dit de la
Chaudière.”

[12] Francis Parkman.

[13] Le Moine.

[14] “Dollard, un homme de cœur,” says Abbé Faillon.




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

--Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of Dollard, by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

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