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Title: The Story of Tonty
Author: Mary Hartwell Catherwood
Release Date: November 2, 2012 [EBook #41273]
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note
The text is given here as printed with the exception of several
punctuation errors, which have been corrected and are noted in the
End Notes. French titles are generally printed without accents, and are
retained as such.
Text in italics is rendered here as '_italic_. The 'oe' ligature is
printed as separate characters.
THE STORY OF TONTY
THE STORY OF TONTY
BY
MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
Illustrated
[Illustration]
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY
1890
COPYRIGHT,
BY A. C. MCCLURG AND CO.
A.D. 1889.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 7
Book I.
A MONTREAL BEAVER FAIR.
I. FRONTENAC 11
II. HAND-OF-IRON 20
III. FATHER HENNEPIN 28
IV. A COUNCIL 39
V. SAINTE JEANNE 48
VI. THE PROPHECY OF JOLYCOEUR 57
Book II.
FORT FRONTENAC.
I. RIVAL MASTERS 71
II. A TRAVELLED FRIAR 81
III. HEAVEN AND EARTH 87
IV. A CANOE FROM THE ILLINOIS 96
V. FATHER HENNEPIN'S CHAPEL 109
VI. LA SALLE AND TONTY 118
VII. AN ADOPTION 128
VIII. TEGAHKOUITA 136
IX. AN ORDEAL 146
X. HEMLOCK 155
Book III.
FORT ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS.
I. IN AN EAGLE'S NEST 167
II. THE FRIEND AND BROTHER 176
III. HALF-SILENCE 188
IV. A FÊTE ON THE ROCK 200
V. THE UNDESPAIRING NORMAN 210
VI. TO-DAY 224
INTRODUCTION.
No man can see all of a mountain at once. He sees its differing sides.
Moreover, it has rainy and bright day aspects, and summer and winter
faces.
[Illustration]
The romancer is covered with the dust of old books, modern books, great
books, and out of them all brings in a condensing hand these pictures of
two men whose lives were as large as this continent.
La Salle is a definite figure in the popular mind. But La Salle's
greater friend is known only to historians and students. To me the
finest fact in the Norman explorer's career is the devotion he
commanded in Henri de Tonty. No stupid dreamer, no ruffian at heart, no
betrayer of friendship, no mere blundering woodsman--as La Salle has
been outlined by his enemies--could have bound to himself a man like
Tonty. The love of this friend and the words this friend has left on
record thus honor La Salle. And we who like courage and steadfastness
and gentle courtesy in men owe much honor which has never been paid to
Henri de Tonty.
Book I.
A MONTREAL BEAVER FAIR.
1678 A. D.
THE STORY OF TONTY.
I.
FRONTENAC.
Along the entire river front of Montreal camp-fires faded as the
amphitheatre of night gradually dissolved around them.
Canoes lay beached in one long row as if a shoal of huge fish had come
to land. The lodges made a new street along Montreal wharf. Oblong
figures of Indian women moved from shadow to shine, and children stole
out to caper beside kettles where they could see their breakfasts
steaming. Here and there light fell upon a tranquil mummy less than a
metre in length, standing propped against a lodge side, and blinking
stoical eyes in its brown flat face as only a bark-encased Indian baby
could blink; or it slept undisturbed by the noise of the awakening camp,
looking a mummy indeed.
The savage of the New World carried his family with him on every
peaceable journey; sometimes to starve for weeks when the winter hunting
proved bad. It was only when he went to war that he denied himself all
squaw service.
The annual beaver fair was usually held in midsummer, but this year the
tribes of the upper lakes had not descended with their furs to Montreal
until September. These precious skins, taken out of the canoes, were
stored within the lodges.
Every male of the camp was already greasing, painting, and feathering
himself for the grand council, which always preceded a beaver fair.
Hurons, Ottawas, Crees, Nipissings, Ojibwas, Pottawatamies, each jealous
for his tribe, completed a process begun the night before, and put on
what might be called his court dress. In some cases this was no dress at
all, except a suit of tattooing, or a fine coat of ochre streaked with
white clay or soot. The juice of berries heightened nature in their
faces. But there were grand barbarians who laid out robes of beaver
skin, ample, and marked inside with strange figures or porcupine quill
embroidery. The heads swarming in this vast and dusky dressing-room were
some of them shaven bare except the scalp lock, some bristling in a
ridge across the top, while others carried the natural coarse growth
tightly braided down one side, with the opposite half flowing loose.
Montreal behind its palisades made a dim background to all this early
illumination,--few domestic candles shining through windows or glancing
about the Hôtel Dieu as the nuns began their morning devotions. Mount
Royal now flickered a high shadow, and now massed inertly against stars;
but the river, breathing forever like some colossal creature, reflected
all the camp-fires in its moving scales.
The guns of the fort had fired a salute to Indian guests on their
arrival the evening before. But at sunrise repeated cannonading, a
prolonged roll of drums, and rounds of musketry announced that the
governor-general's fleet was in sight.
Montreal flocked to the wharf where already the savages were arrayed in
solemn ranks. Marching out of the fortress with martial music, past the
Hôtel Dieu to the landing-place where Frontenac must step from his boat,
came the remnant of the Carignan regiment. Even the Sulpitian
brotherhood, whose rights as seigniors of Montreal island this governor
had at one time slighted, appeared to do him honor. And gentle nuns of
St. Joseph were seen in the general outpour of inhabitants.
This governor-general, with all his faults, had a large and manly way of
meeting colonial dangers, and was always a prop under the fainting heart
of New France.
His boats made that display upon the St. Lawrence which it was his
policy and inclination to make before Indians. Officers in white and
gold, and young nobles of France, powdered, and flashing in the colors
of Louis' magnificent reign, crowded his own vessel,--young men who had
ventured out to Quebec because it was the fashion at court to be skilled
in colonial matters, and now followed Frontenac as far as Montreal to
amuse themselves with the annual beaver fair. The flag of France, set
with its lily-like symbol, waved over their heads its white reply to
its twin signal on the fort.
Frontenac stood at the boat's prow, his rich cloak thrown back, and his
head bared to the morning river breath and the people's shouts. Being
colonial king pleased this soldier, tired of European camps and the full
blaze of royalty, where his poverty put him to the disadvantage of a
singed moth.
He came blandly gliding to the wharf, Louis de Buade, Count of
Frontenac, and Baron of Palluau, and the only governor of New France who
ever handled the arrogant Five Nations of the Iroquois like a strong
father,[1]--a man who would champion the rights of his meanest colonist,
and at the same time quarrel with his lieutenant in power to his last
breath.
Merchants of Quebec followed him with boat-loads of Indian supplies.
Even Acadia had sent men to this voyage, for the Baron de Saint-Castin
appeared in the fleet, with his young Indian Baroness. It is told of
Saint-Castin that he had kept a harem in his sylvan principality of
Pentegoet; but being a man of conscience, he confessed and reformed. It
is also told of him that he never kept a harem or otherwise lapsed into
the barbarisms of the Penobscots, among whom he carried missionaries and
over whom he was a great lord. Type of the Frenchman of his day, he came
to New France a lad in the Carignan regiment, amassed fortunes in the
fur trade, and holding his own important place in the colony, goaded
like a thorn the rival colony of New England along his borders.
But most conspicuous to the eyes of Montreal were two men standing at
Frontenac's right hand, a Norman and an Italian. Both were tall, the
Italian being of deeper colors and more generous materials. His large
features were clothed in warm brown skin. Rings of black hair thick as a
fleece were cut short above his military collar. His fearless, kindly
eyes received impressions from every aspect of the New World. There
dwelt in Henri de Tonty the power to make men love him at
sight,--savages as well as Europeans. He wore the dress of a French
lieutenant of infantry, and looked less than thirty years old, having
entered the service of France in his early youth.
The other man, Robert Cavelier,--called La Salle from an estate he had
once owned in France,--explorer, and seignior of Fort Frontenac and
adjacent grants on the north shore of Lake Ontario, was at that time in
the prime of his power. He was returning from France, with the king's
permission to work out all his gigantic enterprises, with funds for the
purpose, and one of the most promising young military men in Europe as
his lieutenant.
Montreal merchants on the wharf singled out La Salle with jealous eye,
which saw in the drooping point and flaring base of his nose an endless
smile of scorn. He was a man who had only to use his monopolies to
become enormously rich, cutting off the trade of the lakes from
Montreal. That he was above gain, except as he could use it for hewing
his ambitious road into the wilderness, they did not believe. The
merchants of Montreal readily translated the shyness and self-restraint
of his solitary nature into the arrogance of a recently ennobled and
successful man.
La Salle had a spare face, with long oval cheeks, curving well inward
beside the round of his sensitive prominent chin. Gray and olive tones
still further cooled the natural pallor of his skin and made ashen brown
the hair which he wore flowing.
The plainness of an explorer and the elegance of a man exact in all his
habits distinguished La Salle's dress against that background of
brilliant courtiers.
He moved ashore with Frontenac, who saluted benignly both the array of
red allies and the inhabitants of this second town in the province.
The sub-governor stepped out to escort the governor-general to the fort,
bells rang, cannon still boomed, martial music pierced the heart with
its thrill, and the Carignan squad wheeled in behind Frontenac's moving
train.
"Sieur de la Salle! Sieur de la Salle!" a little girl called, breaking
away from the Sisters of St. Joseph, whose convent robes had enclosed
her like palisades, "take me also in the procession!"
This demand granted itself, so nimbly did she escape a nun's ineffectual
grasp and spring between Tonty and La Salle.
Frontenac himself had turned at the shrill outcry. He laughed when he
saw the wilful young creature taking the explorer by the wrist and
falling into step so close to his own person.
A pursuing nun, unwilling to interrupt the governors train, hovered
along its progress, making anxious signs to her charge, until she
received an assuring gesture from La Salle. She then went back
dissatisfied but relieved of responsibility; and the child, with a proud
fling of her person, marched on toward the fort.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Frontenac was the only man the Iroquois would ever allow to
call himself their father. All other governors, English or
French, were simply brothers.
II.
HAND-OF-IRON.
"Mademoiselle the tiger-cat," said La Salle to Tonty, making himself
heard with some effort above the din of martial sound.
The young soldier lifted his hat with his left hand and made the child a
bow, which she regarded with critical eyes.
"I am the niece of Monsieur de la Salle," she explained to Tonty as she
marched; "so he calls me tiger-cat."
"Mademoiselle Barbe Cavelier is the tiger-cat's human name," the
explorer added, laughing. "It is flattering to have this nimble animal
spring affectionately on one from ambush; but I should soon have
inquired after you at the convent, mademoiselle."
"I did not spring affectionately on you," said Barbe; "I wanted to be in
the procession."
"Hast thou then lost all regard for thy uncle La Salle during his year
of absence?"
Barbe's high childish voice distinctly and sincerely stated, "No,
monsieur; I have fought all the girls at the convent on your account.
Jeanne le Ber said nothing against you; but she is a Le Ber. I am glad
you came back in such grandeur. I was determined to be in the grandeur
myself. But it is not a time to give you my cheek for a kiss."
La Salle smiled over her head at Tonty. The Italian noted her marked
resemblance to the explorer. She had the same features in delicate
tints, the darkness of her eyelashes and curls only emphasizing the
type. Already her small nose drooped at the point and flared at the
base. As La Salle and his young kinswoman stepped together, Tonty gauged
them alike,--two self-restraining natures with unmeasured endurance and
individual force like the electric current.
Montreal's square bastioned fort, by the mouth of a small creek flowing
into the St. Lawrence, was soon reached from the wharf. It stood at the
south end of the town.
"My dear child," said La Salle, stating his case to Barbe, "it is
necessary for me to go into the fort with Count Frontenac, and equally
necessary you should go back at once to the Sisters. I will bring you
out of the convent to-morrow to look at the beaver fair. This is
Monsieur de Tonty, my lieutenant; let him take you back to the nuns. I
shall be blamed if I carry you into the fort."
Barbe heard him without raising objections. She looked at Tonty, who
gave her his left hand and drew her out of the train.
It swept past them into the fortress gates,--gallant music, faces
returning her eager gaze with smiles, plumes, powdered curls, and laces,
gold and white uniforms, soldiers with the sun flashing from their
gun-barrels.
Barbe watched the last man in. To express her satisfaction she then
rose to the tip of one foot and hopped three steps. She was lightly and
delicately made, and as full of restless grace as a bird. Her face and
curls bloomed above and strongly contrasted with the raiment her convent
guardians planned for a child dependent, not on their charity, but on
their maternal care.
The September morning enveloped the world in a haze of brightness, like
that perfecting blue breath which we call the bloom upon the grape. A
great landscape with a scarf of melting azure resting around its
horizon, or ravelling to shreds against the mountain's breast, or
pretending to be wood-smoke across the river, drew Tonty's eye from the
disappearing pageant.
That fair land was a fit spot whereon the most luxurious of
civilizations should touch and affiliate with savages of the wilderness.
Up the limpid green river the Lachine Rapids showed their teeth with
audible roar. From that point Mount Royal could be seen rising out of
mists and stretching its hind-quarters westward like some vast mastodon.
But to Tonty only its front appeared, a globe dipped in autumn colors
and wearing plumes of vapor. The sky of this new hemisphere rose in
unmeasured heights which the eye followed in vain; there seemed no
zenith to the swimming blinding azure.
A row of booths for merchants had been built all along the outside of
Montreal's palisades, and traders were thus early setting their goods in
array.
At the north extremity of the town that huge stone windmill built by the
seigniors for defence, cast a long dewy shadow toward the west. Its
loopholes showed like dark specks on the body of masonry.
Sun-sparkles on the river were no more buoyant and changeable than the
child at Tonty's side. Dimples came and went in her cheeks. Her blood
was stirred by the swarming life around her.
"Monsieur," she confided to her uncle's lieutenant, "I am meditating
something very wicked."
"Certainly that is impossible, mademoiselle," said Tonty, accommodating
his step to her reluctant gait.
"I am meditating on not going back to the convent."
"Where would you go, mademoiselle?"
"Everywhere, to see things."
"But my orders are to escort you to the nuns. You would disgrace me as a
soldier."
Barbe lifted her gaze to his face and was diverted from rebellion. Tonty
put out his arm to guard her, but a tall stalking brave was pushed
against her in passing and immediately startled by the thud of her
prompt fist upon his back. The Indian turned, unsheathing his knife.
"Get out of my way, thou ugly big warrior," said Barbe, meeting his eye,
which softened from fierceness to laughter, and holding her fist ready
for further encounter.
[Illustration]
The Indian made some mocking gestures and menaced her playfully with
his thumb. Tonty threw his arm across her shoulder and moved her on
toward the convent. Barbe escaped from this touch, an entirely new
matter filling her mind.
"Monsieur, even old Jonaneaux in our Hôtel Dieu hath not such a heavy
hand as thou hast. Many a time hath he pulled me down off the palisade
when I looked over to see the coureurs de bois go roaring by. But thou
hast a hand like iron!"
Tonty flushed, being not yet hardened to his misfortune.
"It is a hand of iron. I am called Main-de-fer."[2]
Barbe took hold of it in its glove. Of all the people she had ever met
Tonty was the only person whose touch she did not resent.
"The other hand is not like unto it, monsieur?"
He gave her the other also, and she compared their weight. With a
roguish lifting of her nostrils she inquired,--
"Will every bit of you turn to metal like this heavy hand?"
"Alas, no, mademoiselle; there is no hope of that."
Tonty stripped his gauntlet off. With half afraid fingers she examined
the artificial member. It was of copper.
"Where is the old one, monsieur?"
"It was blown off by a grenade at Messina last year."
"Does it hurt?"
"Not now. Except when I think of the service of Monsieur de la Salle,
and of my being thus pieced out as a man."
Barbe measured his height and breadth and warm-toned face with satisfied
eyes. She consoled him.
"There is so much of you, monsieur, you can easily do without a hand."
FOOTNOTES:
[2] "Henri de Tonty, surnommé Main-de-fer." Notes Sur Nouvelle
France.
III.
FATHER HENNEPIN.
"Thou art a comfort to a soldier, mademoiselle," said Tonty, heartily.
"But not to a priest," observed Barbe. "For last birthday when I was
eleven my uncle Abbé stuck out his lip and said I was eleven years bad.
But my uncle La Salle kissed my cheek. There goeth François le Moyne."
Her face became suddenly distorted with grimaces of derision beside
which Tonty could scarcely keep his gravity. A boy of about her own age
ran past, dropping her a sneer for her pains.
"Monsieur, these Le Moynes and Sorels and Bouchers and Varennes and
Joliets and Le Bers, they are all against my uncle La Salle. The girls
talk about it in the convent. But he hath the governor on his side, so
what can they do? I have pinched Jeanne le Ber at school, but she will
never pinch back and it only makes her feel holier. So I pinch her no
more. Do you know Jeanne le Ber?"
"No," said Tonty, "I have not that pleasure."
"Oh, monsieur, it is no pleasure. She says so many prayers. When I have
prayers for penances they make me so tired I have to get up and hop
between them. But Jeanne le Ber would pray all the time if her father
did not pull her off her knees. My father and mother died in France. If
they were alive they would not have to pull me off my knees."
"But a woman should learn to pray, even as a man should learn to fight,"
observed Tonty. "He stands between her and danger, and she should stand
linking him to heaven."
"I can fight for myself," said Barbe. "And everybody ought to say his
own prayers; but it makes one disagreeable to say more than his share. I
wish to grow up an agreeable person."
They had reached the palisade entrance which fronted the river, Barbe's
feet still lagging amid the lively scenes outside. She allowed Tonty to
lead her with his left hand, thus sheltering her next the booths from
streams of passing Indians and traders.
Beside this open gate she would have lingered indefinitely, chattering
to a guardian who felt her hatred of convent restraint, and gazing at
preparations for the council: at prunes and chopped pieces of oxen being
put to boil for an Indian feast; at the governor's chair from the
fortress, where the sub-governor lived, borne by men to the middle of
that space yearly occupied as the council ring. But a watchful Sister
was hovering ready inside the palisade gate, and reaching forth her arm
she drew her charge away from Tonty, giving him brief and scandalized
thanks for his service.
Barbe looked back. It was worth Tonty's while to catch sight of that
regretful face smeared about its warm neck by curls, its lips parted to
repeat and still repeat, "Adieu, monsieur. Adieu, monsieur."
But two men had come between the disappearing child and him, one man,
dressed partly like an officer and partly like a coureur de bois,
throwing both arms around Tonty in the eager Latin manner.
"My cousin Henri de Tonty, welcome to the New World. I waited with my
gouty leg at the fortress for you; but when you came not, like a good
woodsman, I tracked you down."
"My cousin Greysolon du Lhut! Glad am I to find you so speedily. This
cold and heavy hand belies me."
"I heard of this hand. But the other was well lost, my cousin. Take
courage in beholding me; I had nearly lost a leg, and not by good powder
and shot either, but with gout which disgracefully loads up a man with
his own dead members. But the Iroquois virgin, Catharine Tegahkouita,
hath interceded for me."
"Monsieur de Tonty will observe we have saints among the savages in New
France," said the other man.
He was a Récollet friar with sandalled feet, wearing a gray capote of
coarse texture which was girt with the cord of Saint Francis. His
peaked hood hung behind his shoulders leaving his shaven crown to
glisten with rosy enjoyment of the sunlight. A crucifix hung at his
side; but no man ever devoted his life to prayer who was so manifestly
created to enjoy the world. He had a nose of Flemish amplitude depressed
in the centre, fat lips, a terraced chin, and twinkling good-humored
eyes. The gray capote could not conceal a pompous swell of the stomach
and the strut of his sandalled feet.
"My cousin Tonty," said Du Lhut, "this is Father Louis Hennepin from
Fort Frontenac. He hath come down to Montreal[3] to meet Monsieur de la
Salle and engage himself in the new western venture."
"Venture!" exclaimed a keen-visaged man in the garb of a
merchant-colonist who was carrying a bale of goods to one of the
booths,--for no man in Montreal was ashamed to get profit out of the
beaver fair. "Where your Monsieur de la Salle is concerned there will be
venture enough, but no results for any man but La Salle."
He set his bale down as if it were a challenge.
Points of light sprung into Tonty's eyes and the blood in his face
showed its quickening.
"Monsieur," he spoke, "if you are a gentleman you shall answer to me for
slandering Monsieur de la Salle."
"Jacques le Ber is a noble of the colony," declared Du Lhut, with the
derisive freedom this great ranger and leader of coureurs de bois
assumed toward any one; "for hath he not purchased his patent of King
Louis for six thousand livres? But look you, my cousin Tonty, if the
king allowed not us colonial nobles to engage in trade he would lose us
all by starvation; for scarce a miserable censitaire on our lands can
pay us his capon and pint of wheat at the end of the year."
[Illustration: "Monsieur," spoke Tonty, "if you are a gentleman you
shall answer to me for slandering Monsieur de la Salle."--_Page 32._]
"I will answer to you, monsieur," said Jacques le Ber to the soldier,
"that La Salle is the enemy of the colony, and the betrayer of them that
have been his friends."
Father Hennepin and Du Lhut caught Tonty's arms. Du Lhut then dragged
him with expostulations inside the palisade gate, repeating Frontenac's
strict orders that all quarrels should be suppressed during the beaver
fair, and as the young man's furious looks still sought the merchant,
reminding him of the harm he might do La Salle by an open quarrel with
Montreal traders.
"I, who am not bound to La Salle as close as thou art,--I tell you it
will not do," declared Du Lhut.
"Let the man keep his distance, then!"
"Why, you hot-blooded fellow! why do you take these Frenchmen so
seriously?"
"Sieur de la Salle is my friend. I will strike any man who denounces
him."
"Oh, come out toward the mountain. Let us make a little pilgrimage,"
laughed Du Lhut. "We must cool thee, Tonty, we must cool thee; or La
Salle's enemies will lie in one heap the length of Montreal, mowed by
this iron hand!"
As Jacques le Ber carried forward his bale, Father Hennepin walked
beside him dealing forth good-natured remonstrance with fat hands and
out-turned lips.
"My son, God save me from the man who doth nurse a grievance. Your case
is simply this: our governor built a fort at Cataraqui, and it is now
called Fort Frontenac. He put you and associates of yours in charge, and
you had profit of that fort. Afterward, by his recommendation to the
king, Sieur de la Salle was made seignior of Fort Frontenac and lands
thereabout. This hast thou ever since bitterly chewed to the poisoning
of thy immortal soul."
"You churchmen all,--Jesuits, Sulpitians, or Récollets,--are over
zealous to domineer in this colony," spoke Jacques le Ber, through the
effort of carrying his bale.
"My son," said Father Hennepin, swelling his stomach and inflating his
throat, "why should I enter the mendicant order of Saint Francis and
live according to the rules of a pure and severe virtue, if I felt no
zeal for saving souls?"
"I spoke of domineering," repeated the angry merchant.
"And touching Monsieur de la Salle," said Father Hennepin, "I exhort
thee not to love him; for who could love him,--but to rid thyself of
hatred of any one."
"Father Hennepin has not then attached himself to La Salle's new
enterprise?"
"I have a grand plan of discovery of my own," said the friar, deeply,
rolling his shaven head, "an enterprise which would terrify anybody but
me. The Sieur de la Salle merely opens my path. I will confess to thee,
my son, that in youth I often hid myself behind the doors of
taverns,--which were no fit haunts for men of holy life,--to hearken
unto sailors' tales of strange lands. And thus would I willingly do
without eating or drinking, such burning desire I had to explore new
countries."
The Father did not observe that Jacques le Ber had reached his own booth
and was there arranging his goods regardless of explorations in strange
lands, but walked on, talking to the air, his out-thrust lips rounding
every word, until some derisive savage pointed out this solo.
Jacques le Ber made ready to take his place in the governor's council,
thinking wrathfully of his encounter with Tonty. He dwelt, as we all do,
upon the affronts and hindrances of the present, rather than on his
prospect of founding a strong and worthy family in the colony.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] The romancer here differs from the historian, who says Father
Hennepin met La Salle at Quebec.
IV.
A COUNCIL.
The North American savage, with an unerring instinct which republics
might well study, sent his wisest men to the front to represent him.
A great circle of Indians, ranged according to their tribes, sat around
Frontenac when the stone windmill trod its noon shadow underfoot. Te
Deum had been sung in the chapel, and thanks offered for his safe
arrival. The principal men of Montreal, with the governor's white and
gold officers, sat now within the circle behind his chair.
But Frontenac faced every individual of his Indian children, moving
before them, their natural leader, as he made his address of greeting,
admonition, and approval, through Du Lhut as interpreter. The old
courtier loved Indians. They appealed to that same element in him which
the coureurs de bois knew how to reach. The Frenchman has a wild strain
of blood. He takes kindly and easily to the woods. He makes himself an
appropriate and even graceful figure against any wilderness background,
and goes straight to Nature's heart, carrying all the refinements of
civilization with him.
The smoke of the peace pipe went up hour after hour. By strictest rules
of precedence each red orator rose in his turn and spoke his tribe's
reply to Onontio.[4] An Indian never hurried eloquence. The sun might
tip toward Mount Royal, and the steam of his own deferred feast reach
his nose in delicious suggestion. He had to raise the breeze of
prosperity, to clear the sun, to wipe away tears for friends slain
during past misunderstandings with Onontio's other children, and to open
the path of peace between their lodges and the lodges of his tribe.
Ottawa, Huron, Cree, Nipissing, Ojibwa, or Pottawatamie, it was
necessary for him to bury the hatchet in pantomime, to build a great
council-fire whose smoke should rise to heaven in view of all the
nations, and gather the tribes of the lakes in one family council with
the French around this fire forever.
[Illustration: "Each red orator rose in his turn and spoke his tribe's
reply."--_Page 40._]
Children played along the river's brink, and squaws kept fire under the
kettles. A few men guarded the booths along the palisades from
pilferers, though scarce a possible pilferer roamed from the centre of
interest.
Crowds of spectators pressed around the great circle; traders who had
brought packs of skins skilfully intercepted by them at some station
above Montreal; interpreters, hired by merchants to serve them during
the fair; coureurs de bois stretching up their neck sinews until these
knotted with intense and prolonged effort. In this standing wall the
habitant was crowded by converted Iroquois from the Mountain mission,
who, having learned their rights as Christians, yielded no inch of room.
The sun descended out of sight behind Mount Royal, though his presence
lingered with sky and river in abundant crimsons. Still the smoke of the
peace pipe rose above the council ring, and eloquence rolled its periods
on. That misty scarf around the horizon, which high noon drove out of
sight, floated into view again, becoming denser and denser. The pipings
of out-door insects came sharpened through twilight, and all the
camp-fires were deepening their hue, before a solemn uprising of
Frenchmen and Indians proclaimed the council over.
La Salle had sat through it at the governor's right hand, watching those
bronze faces and restless eyes with sympathy as great as Frontenac's.
He, also, was a lord of the wilderness. He could more easily open his
shy nature to such red brethren and eloquently command, denounce, or
persuade them, than stand before dames and speak one word,--which he was
forced to attempt when candles were lighted in the candelabra of the
fort.
There was not such pageantry at Montreal as in the more courtly society
of Quebec. The appearance of the governor with his train of young nobles
drew out those gentler inhabitants who took no part in the bartering of
the beaver fair.
Perrot, the sub-governor, had known his period of bitter disagreement
with Frontenac. Having made peace with a superior he once defied, he was
anxious to pay Frontenac every honor, and the two governors were united
in their policy of amusing and keeping busy so varied an assemblage as
that which thronged the beaver fair. Festivity as grand as colonial
circumstances permitted was therefore held in the governor's apartments.
The guarded fortress gates stood open; torches burned within the walls,
and blanketed savages stalked in and out.
Yet that colonial drawing-room lacked the rude elements which go to
making most pioneer societies. Human intercourse in frontier towns
exposed to danger and hardship, though it may be hearty and innocent, is
rarely graceful.
But here was a small Versailles transplanted to the wilderness.
Fragments of a great court met Indian-wedded nobles and women with
generations of good ancestors behind them. Here were even the fashions
of the times in gowns, and the youths of Louis' salon bowed and paid
compliments to powdered locks. These French colonial nobles were poor;
but with pioneer instinct they decorated themselves with the best
garments their scanty money would buy. Here thronged Dumays, Le Moynes,
Mousniers, Desroches, Fleurys, Baudrys, Migeons, Vigers, Gautiers, all
chattering and animated. Here stood the Baroness de Saint-Castin like a
statue of bronze. Here were those illustrious Le Moynes, father and
sons, whose deeds may be traced in our day from the St. Lawrence to the
Gulf of Mexico. Here Frontenac, with the graciously winning manner which
belonged to his pleasant hours, drew to himself and soothed disaffected
magnates of his colonial kingdom.
All these figures, and the spectacles swarming around the beaver fair,
like combinations in a kaleidoscope to be seen once and seen no more,
gave Tonty such condensed knowledge of the New World as no ordinary days
could offer.
La Salle alone, though fresh from audiences at court and distinguished
by royal favor, stood abashed and annoyed by the part he must play
toward civilized people.
"Look at the Sieur de la Salle," observed Du Lhut to Tonty. "There is a
man who stands and fights off the approach of every other creature."
"There never was a man better formed for friendship," retorted Tonty.
"Touching his reserve, I call that no blemish, though he has said of it
himself, it is a defect he can never be rid of as long as he lives, and
often it spites him against himself."
La Salle turned his shoulder on these associates, uneasily conscious
that his weakness was observed, and put many moving figures between
himself and them. He had the free gait of a woodsman tempered by the air
of a courtier. More than one Montreal girl accusing gold-embroidered
young soldiers of finding the Quebec women charming, turned her eyes to
follow La Salle. Possible lord of the vast and unknown west, in the
flower of his years, he was next to Frontenac the most considerable
figure in the colony.
Severe study in early youth and ambition in early manhood had crowded
the lover out of La Salle. His practical gaze was oppressed by so many
dames. It dwelt upon the floor, until, travelling accidentally to a
corner, it rose and encountered Jacques le Ber's daughter sitting beside
her mother.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] "This name was in Huron and Iroquois the translation of the
name of M. de Montmagny (Mons maguns, great mountain). The
savages continued calling the successors of Governor
Montmagny by the same name, and even to the French king they
applied the title 'Great Ononthio.'" Translated from note on
page 138, tome 1, Garneau's Histoire du Canada.
V.
SAINTE JEANNE.
When La Salle was seignior of Lachine, before the king and Frontenac
helped his ambition to its present foothold, he had been in the habit of
stopping at Jacques le Ber's house when he came to Montreal.
The first day of the beaver fair greatly tasked Madame le Ber. She sat
drowsily beside the eldest child of her large absent flock, and was not
displeased to have her husband's distinguished enemy approach Jeanne.
The wife of Le Ber had been called madame since her husband bought his
patent of nobility; but she held no strict right to the title, even
wives of the lesser nobles being then addressed as demoiselles. In that
simple colonial life Jacques le Ber, or his wife in his absence, served
goods to customers over his own counter. Madame le Ber was an excellent
woman, who said her prayers and approached the sacraments at proper
seasons. She had abundant flesh covered with dark red skin, and she
often pondered why a spirit of a daughter with passionate longings after
heaven had been sent to her. If Sieur de la Salle could draw the
child's mind from extreme devotion, her husband must feel indebted to
him.
La Salle's face relaxed and softened as he sat down beside this
sixteen-year-old maid in her colonial gown. She held her crucifix in her
hands, and waited for him to talk. Jeanne made melody of his silences.
As a child she had never rubbed against him for caresses, but looked
into his eyes with sincere meditation. Having no idea of the explorer's
aim, Jeanne le Ber was yet in harmony with him across their separating
years. She also could stake her life on one supreme idea. La Salle was
formed to subdue the wilderness; she was dimly and ignorantly, but with
her childish might, undertaking that stranger region, the human soul.
She looked younger than other girls of her age; yet La Salle was moved
to say, using the name he had given her,--
"You have changed much since last year, Sainte Jeanne."
"Am I worse, Sieur de la Salle?" she anxiously inquired.
"No. Better. Except I fear you have prayed yourself to a greater
distance from me."
"I name you in my prayers, Sieur de la Salle. Ever since my father
ceased to be your friend I have asked to have your haughty spirit
humbled."
La Salle laughed.
"If you name me at all, Sainte Jeanne, pray rather for the humbling of
my enemies."
"No, Sieur de la Salle. You need your enemies. I could ill do without
mine."
"Who could be an enemy to thee?"
"There are many enemies of my soul. One is my great, my very great
love."
La Salle's face whitened and flushed. He cast a quick glance upon the
dozing matron, the backs of people whose conversation buzzed about his
ears, and returned to Jeanne's childlike white eyelids and
crucifix-folding hands.
"Whom do you love, Sainte Jeanne?"
"I love my father so much, and my mother; and the children are too dear
to me. Sometimes when I rise in the night to pray, and think of living
apart from my dear father, the cold sweat stands on my forehead. Too
many dear people throng between the soul and heaven. Even you, Sieur de
la Salle,--I have to pray against thoughts of you."
[Illustration]
"Do not pray against me, Sainte Jeanne," said the explorer, with a
wistful tremor of the lower lip. "Consider how few there be that love me
well."
Her eyes rested on him with divining gaze. Jeanne le Ber's eyes had the
singular function of sending innumerable points of light swimming
through the iris, as if the soul were in motion and shaking off
sparkles.
"If you lack love and suffer thereby," she instructed him, "it will
profit your soul."
La Salle interlaced his fingers, resting his hands upon his knees, and
gave her a look which was both amused and tender.
"And what other enemies has Sainte Jeanne?"
"Sieur de la Salle, have I not often told you what a sinner I am? It
ridicules me to call me saint."
"Since you have grown to be a young demoiselle I ought to call you
Mademoiselle le Ber."
"Call me Sainte Jeanne rather than that. I do not want to be a young
demoiselle, or in this glittering company. It is my father who insists."
"Nor do I want to be in this glittering company, Sainte Jeanne."
"The worst of all the other enemies, Sieur de la Salle, are vanity and a
dread of enduring pain. I am very fond of dress." The young creature
drew a deep regretful breath.
"But you mortify this fondness?" said La Salle, accompanying with
whimsical sympathy every confession of Jeanne le Ber's.
"Indeed I have to humiliate myself often--often. When this evil desire
takes strong hold, I put on the meanest rag I can find. But my father
and mother will never let me go thus humbled to Mass."
"Therein do I commend your father and mother," said La Salle; "though
the outside we bear toward men is of little account. But tell me how do
you school yourself to pain, Sainte Jeanne? I have not learned to bear
pain well in all my years."
Jeanne again met his face with swarming lights in her eyes. Seeing that
no one observed them she bent her head toward La Salle and parted the
hair over her crown. The straight fine growth was very thick and of a
brown color. It reminded him of midwinter swamp grasses springing out of
a bed of snow. A mat of burrs was pressed to this white scalp. Some of
the hair roots showed red stains.
"These hurt me all the time," said Jeanne. "And it is excellent torture
to comb them out."
She covered the burrs with a swift pressure, tightly closing her mouth
and eyes with the spasm of pain this caused, and once more took and
folded the crucifix within her hands.
The explorer made no remonstrance against such self-torture, though his
practical gaze remained on her youthful brier-crowned head. He heard a
girl in front of him laugh to a courtier who was flattering her.
"Hé, monsieur, I have myself seen Quebec women who dressed with odious
taste."
But Jeanne, wrapped in her own relation, continued with a tone which
slighted mere physical pain,--
"There is a better way to suffer, Sieur de la Salle, and that is from
ill-treatment. Such anguish can be dealt out by the hands we love; but I
have no friend willing to discipline me thus. My father's servant
Jolycoeur is the only person who makes me as wretched as I ought to
be."
"Discipline through Jolycoeur," said La Salle, laughing, "is what my
proud stomach could never endure."
"Perhaps you have not such need, Sieur de la Salle. My father has many
times turned him off, but I plead until he is brought back. He hath this
whole year been a means of grace to me by his great impudence. If I say
to him, 'Jolycoeur, do this or that,' he never fails to reply, 'Do it
yourself, Mademoiselle Jeanne,' and adds profanity to make Heaven blush.
Whenever he can approach near enough, he whispers contemptuous names at
me, so that I cannot keep back the tears. Yet how little I endure, when
Saint Lawrence perished on a gridiron, and all the other holy martyrs
shame me!"
"Your father does not suffer these things to be done to you?"
"No, Sieur de la Salle. My father knows naught of it except my pity. He
did once kick Jolycoeur, who left our house three days, so that I was
in danger of sinking in slothful comfort. But I got him brought back,
and he lay drunk in our garden with his mouth open, so that my soul
shuddered to look at him. It was excellent discipline,"[5] said Jeanne,
with a long breath.
"Jolycoeur will better adorn the woods and risk his worthless neck on
water for my uses, than longer chafe your tender nature," said La Salle.
"He has been in my service before, and craved to-day that I would enlist
him again."
"Had my father turned him off?" asked Jeanne, with consternation.
"He said Jacques le Ber had lifted a hand against him for innocently
neglecting to carry bales of merchandise to a booth."
"I did miss the smell of rum downstairs before we came away," said the
girl, sadly. "And will you take my scourge from me, Sieur de la Salle?"
"I will give him a turn at suffering himself," answered La Salle. "The
fellow shall be whipped on some pretext when I get him within Fort
Frontenac, for every pang he hath laid upon you. He is no stupid. He
knew what he was doing."
"Oh, Sieur de la Salle, Jolycoeur was only the instrument of Heaven.
He is not to blame."
"If I punish him not, it will be on your promise to seek no more
torments, Sainte Jeanne."
"There are no more for me to seek; for who in our house will now be
unkind to me? But, Sieur de la Salle, I feel sure that during my
lifetime I shall be permitted to suffer as much as Heaven could
require."
Man and child, each surrounded by his peculiar world, sat awhile longer
together in silence, and then La Salle joined the governor.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] The asceticism here attributed to Mademoiselle Jeanne le Ber
was really practised by the wife of an early colonial noble.
See Parkman's Old Régime, p. 355.
VI.
THE PROPHECY OF JOLYCOEUR.
By next mid-day the beaver fair was at its height, and humming above the
monotone of the St. Lawrence.
Montreal, founded by religious enthusiasts and having the Sulpitian
priests for its seigniors, was a quiet town when left to itself,--when
the factions of Quebec did not meet its own factions in the street with
clubs; or coureurs de bois roar along the house sides in drunken joy; or
sudden glares on the night landscape with attendant screeching proclaim
an Iroquois raid; or this annual dissipation in beaver skins crowd it
for two days with strangers.
Among colonists who had thronged out to meet the bearers of colonial
riches as soon as the first Indian canoe was beached, were the coureurs
de bois. They still swarmed about, making or renewing acquaintances,
here acting as interpreters and there trading on their own account.
Before some booths Indians pressed in rows, demanding as much as the
English gave for their furs, though the price was set by law. French
merchants poked their fingers into the satin pliancy of skins to search
for flaws. Dealers who had no booths pressed with their interpreters
from tribe to tribe,--small merchants picking the crumbs of profit from
under their brethren's tables. There was greedy demand for the first
quality of skins; for beaver came to market in three grades: "Castor
gras, castor demi-gras, et castor sec."
The booths were hung with finery, upon which squaws stood gazing with a
stoical eye to be envied by civilized woman.
The cassocks of Sulpitians and gray capotes of Récollet
Fathers--favorites of Frontenac who hated Jesuits--penetrated in
constant supervision every recess of the beaver fair. Yet in spite of
this religious care rum was sold, its effects increasing as the day
moved on.
A hazy rosy atmosphere had shorn the sun so that he hung a large red
globe in the sky. The land basked in melting tints. Scarcely any wind
flowed on the river. Ste. Helen's Island and even Mount Royal, the
seminary and stone windmill, the row of wooden houses and palisade tips,
all had their edges blurred by hazy light.
Amusement could hardly be lacking in any gathering of French people not
assembled for ceremonies of religion. In Quebec the governor's court
were inclined to entertain themselves with their own performance of
spectacles. But Montreal had beheld too many spectacles of a tragic
sort, had grasped too much the gun and spade, to have any facility in
mimic play.
Still the beaver fair was enlivened by music and tricksy gambols.
Through all the ever opening and closing avenues a pageant went up and
down, at which no colonist of New France could restrain his shouts of
laughter,--a Dutchman with enormous stomach, long pipe, and short
breeches, walking beside a lank and solemn Bostonnais. The two youths
who had attired themselves for this masking were of Saint-Castin's
train. That one who acted Puritan had drawn austere seams in his face
with charcoal. His plain collar was severely turned down over a black
doublet, which, with the sombre breeches and hose, had perhaps been
stripped from some enemy that troubled Saint-Castin's border. The
Bostonnais sung high shrill airs from a book he carried in one hand,
only looking up to shake his head with cadaverous warning at his roaring
spectators. One arm was linked in the Dutchman's, who took his pipe out
of his mouth to say good-humoredly, "Ya-ya, ya-ya," to every sort of
taunt.
These types of rival colonies were such an exhilaration to the traders
of New France that they pointed out the show to each other and pelted it
with epithets all day.
La Salle came out of the palisade gate of the town, leading by the hand
a frisking little girl. He restrained her from farther progress into the
moving swarm, although she dragged his arm.
"Thou canst here see all there is of it, Barbe. The nuns did well to
oppose your looking on this roaring commerce. You should be housed
within the Hôtel Dieu all this day, had I not spoken a careless word
yesterday. You saw the governor's procession. To-morrow he will start on
his return. And I with my men go to Fort Frontenac."
[Illustration: "The beaver fair was enlivened by music and tricksy
gambols."--_Page 59._]
"And at day dawn naught of the Indians can be found," added Barbe,
"except their ashes and litter and the broken flasks they leave. The
trader's booths will also be empty and dirty."
"Come then, tiger-cat, return to thy cage."
"My uncle La Salle, let me look a moment longer. See that fat man and
his lean brother the people are pointing at! Even the Indians jump and
jeer. I would strike them for such insolence! There, my uncle La Salle,
there is Monsieur Iron-hand talking to the ugly servant of Jeanne le
Ber's father."
La Salle easily found Tonty. He was instructing and giving orders to
several men collected for the explorer's service. Jolycoeur,[6] his
cap set on sidewise, was yet abashed in his impudence by the mastery of
Tonty. He wore a new suit of buckskin, with the coureur de bois' red
sash knotted around his waist.
"My uncle La Salle," inquired Barbe, turning over a disturbance in her
mind, "must I live in the convent until I wed a man?"
"The convent is held a necessary discipline for young maids."
"I will then choose Monsieur Iron-hand directly. He would make a good
husband."
"I think you are right," agreed La Salle.
"Because he would have but one hand to catch me with when I wished to
run away," explained Barbe. "If he had also lost his feet it would be
more convenient."
"The marriage between Monsieur de Tonty and Mademoiselle Barbe Cavelier
may then be arranged?"
She looked at her uncle, answering his smile of amusement. But curving
her neck from side to side, she still examined the Italian soldier.
"I can outrun most people," suggested Barbe; "but Monsieur de Tonty
looks very tall and strong."
"Your intention is to take to the woods as soon as marriage sets you
free?"
"My uncle La Salle, I do have such a desire to be free in the woods!"
"Have you, my child? If the wilderness thus draws you, you will sometime
embrace it. Cavelier blood is wild juice."
"And could I take my fortune with me? If it cumbered I would leave it
behind with Monsieur de Tonty or my brother."
"You will need all your fortune for ventures in the wilderness."
"And the fortunes of all your relatives and of as many as will give you
credit besides," said a priest wearing the Sulpitian dress. He stopped
before them and looked sternly at Barbe.
The Abbé Jean Cavelier had not such robust manhood as his brother. In
him the Cavelier round lower lip and chin protruded, and the eyebrows
hung forward.
La Salle had often felt that he stooped in conciliating Jean, when Jean
held the family purse and doled out loans to an explorer always kept
needy by great plans.
Jean had strongly the instinct of accumulation. He gauged the discovery
and settlement of a continent by its promise of wealth to himself. His
adherence to La Salle was therefore delicately adjusted by La Salle's
varying fortunes; though at all times he gratified himself by handling
with tyranny this younger and distinguished brother. Generous admiration
of another's genius flowering from his stock with the perfect expression
denied him, was scarcely possible in Jean Cavelier.
"The Sisters said I might come hither with my uncle La Salle," replied
Barbe, to his unspoken rebuke.
"Into whose charge were your brother and yourself put when your parents
died?"
"Into the charge of my uncle the Abbé Cavelier."
"Who brought your brother and you to this colony that he might watch
over your nurture?"
"My uncle the Abbé Cavelier."
"It is therefore your uncle the Abbé Cavelier who will decide when to
turn you out among Indians and traders."
"You carry too bitter a tongue, my brother Jean," observed La Salle.
"The child has caught no harm. My own youth was cramped within religious
walls."
"You carry too arrogant a mind now, my brother La Salle. I heard it
noted of you to-day that you last night sat apart and deigned no word
to them that have been of use to you in Montreal."
La Salle's face owned the sting. Shy natures have always been made to
pay a tax on pride. But next to the slanderer we detest the bearer of
his slander to our ears.
"It is too much for any man to expect in this world,--a brother who will
defend him against his enemies."
As soon as this regret had burst from the explorer, he rested his look
again on Tonty.
"I do defend you," asserted Abbé Cavelier; "and more than that I
impoverish myself for you. But now that you come riding back from France
on a high tide of the king's favor, I may not lay a correcting word on
your haughty spirit. Neither yesterday nor to-day could I bring you to
any reasonable state of humility. And all New France in full cry against
you!"
Extreme impatience darkened La Salle's face; but without further reply
he drew Barbe's hand and turned back with her toward the Hôtel Dieu. She
had watched her uncle the Abbé wrathfully during his attack upon La
Salle, but as he dropped his eyes no more to her level she was obliged
to carry away her undischarged anger. This she did with a haughty
bearing so like La Salle's that the Abbé grinned at it through his
fretfulness.
He grew conscious of alien hair bristling against his neck as a voice
mocked in undertone directly below his ear,--
"Yonder struts a great Bashaw that will sometime be laid low!"
The Abbé turned severely upon a person who presumed to tickle a priest's
neck with his coarse mustache and astound a priest's ear with threats.
He recognized the man known as Jolycoeur, who had been pushed against
him in the throng. Jolycoeur, by having his eyes fixed on the
disappearing figure of La Salle, had missed the ear of the person he
intended to reach. He recoiled from encountering the Abbé, whose wrath
with sudden ebb ran back from a brother upon a brother's foes.
"You are the fellow I saw whining yesterday at Sieur de la Salle's
heels. What hath the Sieur de la Salle done to any of you worthless
woods-rangers, except give you labor and wages, when the bread you eat
is a waste of his substance?"
Jolycoeur, not daring to reply to a priest, slunk away in the crowd.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Several historians identify Jolycoeur with the noted
coureur de bois and writer, Nicolas Perrot. But considering
the deed he attempted, the romancer has seen fit to portray
him as a very different person.
Book II.
FORT FRONTENAC.
1683 A. D.
I.
RIVAL MASTERS.
The gate of Fort Frontenac opened to admit several persons headed by a
man who had a closely wrapped girl by his side. Before wooden palisades
and walls of stone enclosed her, she turned her face to look across the
mouth of Cataraqui River and at Lake Ontario rippling full of submerged
moonlight. A magnified moon was rising. Farther than eye could reach it
softened that northern landscape and provoked mystery in the shadows of
the Thousand Islands.
South of the fort were some huts set along the margin of Ontario
according to early French custom, which demanded a canoe highway in
front of every man's door. West of these, half hid by forest, was an
Indian village; and distinct between the two rose the huge white cross
planted by Father Hennepin when he was first sent as missionary to Fort
Frontenac.
An officer appeared beside the sentinel at the gate, and took off his
hat before the muffled shape led first into his fortress. She bent her
head for this civility and held her father's arm in silence. Canoemen
and followers with full knowledge of the place moved on toward barracks
or bakery. But the officer stopped their master, saying,--
"Monsieur le Ber, I have news for you."
[Illustration]
"I have none for you," responded the merchant. "It is ever the same
story,--men lost in the rapids and voyagers drenched to the skin.
However, we had but one man drowned this time, and are only half dead of
fatigue ourselves. Let us have some supper at once. What are your
reports?"
"Monsieur, the Sieur de la Salle arrived here a few hours ago from the
fort on the Illinois."
"The Sieur de la Salle?"
"Yes, monsieur."
"Why did you let him in?" demanded Le Ber, fiercely. "He hath no rights
in this fortress now."
"His men were much exhausted, monsieur."
"He could have camped at the settlement."
"Monsieur, I wish to tell you at once that the last families have left
the settlement."
"The Indians are yet there?"
"Yes, monsieur. But our settlers were afraid our Indians would join the
other Iroquois."
"How many men had La Salle with him?"
"No more than half your party, monsieur. There was Jolycoeur--"
"I tell you La Salle has no rights in this fort," interrupted Le Ber.
"If he meddles with his merchandise stored here which the government has
seized upon, I will arrest him."
"Yes, monsieur. The Father Louis Hennepin has also arrived from the
wilderness after great peril and captivity."
"Tell me that La Salle's man Tonty is here! Tell me that there is a full
muster of all the vagabonds from Michillimackinac! Tell me that Fort St.
Louis of the Illinois hath moved on Fort Frontenac!"
The merchant's voice ascended a pyramid of vexation.
"No, monsieur. Monsieur de Tonty is not here. And the Father Louis
Hennepin[7] only rests a few days before the fatigue of descending the
rapids to Montreal. It was a grief to him to find his mission and the
settlement so decayed after only five years' absence."
"Why do you fret me with the decay of the mission and breaking up of the
settlement? If I were here as commandant of this fort I might then be
blamed for its ruin. Perhaps my associates made a mistake in retaining
an officer who had served under La Salle."
The commandant made no retort, but said,--
"Monsieur, I had almost forgotten to tell you we have another fair
demoiselle within our walls to the honor of Fort Frontenac. The Abbé
Cavelier with men from Lachine, arrived this morning, his young niece
being with him. There are brave women in Montreal."
"That is right,--that is right!" exclaimed the irritable merchant. "Call
all the Cavelier family hither and give up the fortress. I heard the
Abbé had ventured ahead of me."
"Monsieur le Ber, what can they do against the king and the governor?
Both king and governor have dispossessed La Salle. I admitted him as any
wayfarer. The Abbé Cavelier came with a grievance against his brother.
He hath lost money by him the same as others."
"Thou shalt not be kept longer in the night air," said Le Ber, with
sudden tenderness to his daughter. "There is dampness within these walls
to remind us of our drenchings in the rapids."
"We have fire in both upper and lower rooms of the officers' quarters,"
said the commandant.
They walked toward the long dwelling, their shadows stretching and
blending over the ground.
"Where have you lodged these men?" inquired Le Ber.
The officer pointed to the barrack end of the structure made of hewed
timbers. The wider portion intended for commandant's headquarters was
built of stone, with Norman eaves and windows. Near the barracks stood
a guardhouse. The bakery was at the opposite side of the gateway, and
beyond it was the mill. La Salle had founded well this stronghold in the
wilderness. Walls of hewed stone enclosed three sides, nine small cannon
being mounted thereon.[8] Palisades were the defence on the water side.
Fort Frontenac was built with four bastions. In two of these bastions
were vaulted towers which served as magazines for ammunition.[9] A well
was dug within the walls.
"Have you no empty rooms in the officers' quarters?"
The moon threw silhouette palisades on the ground, and made all these
buildings cut blocks of shadow. There was a stir of evening wind in the
forest all around.
"The men are in the barracks. But Sieur de la Salle is in the officers'
house."
"May I ask you, Commandant," demanded Le Ber, "where you propose to
lodge my daughter whom I have brought through the perils of the rapids,
and cannot now return with?"
"Mademoiselle le Ber is most welcome to my own apartment, monsieur, and
I will myself come downstairs."
"One near mine for yourself, monsieur. But with the Abbé and his niece
and the boy and La Salle and Father Hennepin, to say no more, can we
have many empty rooms? Father Hennepin is lodged downstairs, but La
Salle hath his old room overlooking the river."
"How does he appear, Commandant?"
"Worn in his garb and very thin visaged, but unmoved by his misfortunes
as a man of rock. Any one else would be prostrate and hopeless."
"A madman," pronounced Le Ber.
Careless laughter resounded from the barracks. Some water creature made
so distinct a splash and struggle in Cataraqui River that imagination
followed the widening circles spreading from its body until an island
broke their huge circumference.
"See that something be sent us from the bakehouse," said Le Ber to the
commandant, before leading his daughter into the quarters. "My men have
brought provisions from Montreal."
"We can give you a good supper, monsieur. Two young deer were brought
in to-day. As for Monsieur de la Salle," the commandant added, turning
back from the door of the barracks, "you will perhaps not meet him at
all in the officers' quarters. He ate and threw himself down at once to
sleep, and he is in haste to set forward to Quebec."
The bakehouse was illuminated by its oven fire which shone with a dull
crimson through the open door, but failed to find out dusky corners
where bales, barrels, and cook's tools were stored. The oven was built
in the wall, of stone and cement. The cook, a skipping little fellow
smocked in white and wearing a cap, said to himself as he raked out
coals and threw them in the fireplace,--
"What a waste of good material is this, when they glow and breathe with
such ardor to roast some worthy martyr!"
"The beginning of a martyr is a saint," observed a soldier of the
garrison, putting his fur-covered head between door and door-post in the
little space he opened. "We have a saint just landed at Fort Frontenac."
He stepped in and shut the door, to lounge with the cook while the order
he brought was obeyed.
"Some of the best you have, with a tender cut of venison, for Jacques le
Ber and his daughter. And some salt meat for his men in the barracks."
The cook made light skips across the floor and returned with venison.
"Well-timed, my child; for the coals are ready, and so are my cakes for
the oven. Le Ber is soon served. Get upon your knees by the hearth and
watch this cut broil, while I slice the larding for the sore sides of
these fellows that labored through the rapids."
When you are housed in a garrison the cook becomes a potentate; the
soldier went willingly down as assistant.
"Are all the demoiselles of Montreal coming to Fort Frontenac?" inquired
the cook, skipping around a great block on which lay a slab of cured
meat, and nicely poising his knife-tip over it.
"That I cannot tell you," replied the soldier, beginning to perspire
before the coals. "Le Ber's men have been talking in the barracks about
this daughter of his. He brought her almost by force out of his house,
where she has taken to shutting herself in her own room."
"I have heard of this demoiselle," said the cook. "May the saints
incline more women to shut themselves up at home!"
"She is his favorite child. He brought her on this dangerous voyage to
wean her from too much praying."
"Too much praying!" exclaimed the cook.
"He desires to have her look more on the world, lest she should die of
holiness," explained the soldier.
"Turn that venison," shouted the cook. "Was there ever a saint who liked
burnt meat? I could lift this Jacques le Ber on a hot fork for dragging
out a woman who inclined to stay praying in the house. Some men are
stone blind to the blessings of Heaven!"
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Historians return Father Hennepin to France in 1681.
[8] Parkman.
[9] Manuscript relating to early history of Canada.
II.
A TRAVELLED FRIAR.
The lower room of the officers' lodging was filled with the light of a
fire. To the hearth was drawn a half-circle of men, their central figure
being a Récollet friar, so ragged and weather-stained that he seemed
some ecclesiastical scarecrow placed there to excite laughter and tears
in his beholders.
This group arose as Jacques le Ber entered with his daughter, and were
eager to be of service to her.
"There is a fire lighted in the hall upstairs by which mademoiselle can
sit," said the sergeant of the fort.
Le Ber conducted her to the top of a staircase which ascended the side
of the room before he formally greeted any one present. He returned,
unwinding his saturated wool wrappings and pulling off his cap of beaver
skin. He was a swarthy man with anxious and calculating wrinkles between
his eyebrows.
"Do I see Father Hennepin?" exclaimed Le Ber, squaring his mouth, "or is
this a false image of him set before me?"
"You see Father Hennepin," the friar responded with dignity,--"explorer,
missionary among the Sioux, and sufferer in the cause of religion."
"How about that hunger for adventure,--hast thou appeased it?" inquired
Le Ber with freedom of manner he never assumed toward any other priest.
The merchant stood upon the hearth steaming in front of the tattered
Récollet, who from his seat regarded his half-enemy with a rebuking eye
impressive to the other men.
"Jacques le Ber, my son, while your greedy hands have been gathering
money, the poor Franciscan has baptized heathen, discovered and explored
rivers; he has lived the famished life of a captive, and come nigh death
in many ways. I have seen a great waterfall five hundred feet high,
whereunder four carriages might pass abreast without being wet. I have
depended for food on what Heaven sent. Vast fish are to be found in the
waters of that western land, and there also you may see beasts having
manes and hoofs and horns, to frighten a Christian."
"And what profit doth La Salle get out of all this?" inquired Le Ber,
spreading his legs before the fire as he looked down at Father Hennepin.
"What I have accomplished has been done for the spread of the faith, and
not for the glory of Monsieur de la Salle, who has treated me badly."
"Does he ever treat any one well?" exclaimed Le Ber. "Does not every man
in his service want to shoot him?"
"He has an over-haughty spirit, which breaks out into envy of men like
me," admitted the good Fleming, whose weather-seamed face and plump
lips glowed with conscious greatness before the fire. "I have decided to
avoid further encounter with Monsieur de la Salle while we both remain
at Fort Frontenac, for my mind is set on peace, and it is true where
Monsieur de la Salle appears there can be no peace."
Jacques le Ber turned himself to face the chimney.
"Thou hast no doubt accomplished a great work, Father Hennepin," he
said, with the immediate benevolence a man feels toward one who has
reached his point of view. "When I have had supper with my daughter I
will sit down here and beg you to tell me all that befell your
wanderings, and what savages they were who received the faith at your
hands, and how the Sieur de la Salle hath turned even a Récollet Father
against himself."
"Perhaps Father Hennepin will tell about his buffalo hunt," suggested
the sergeant of the fortress, "and how he headed a wounded buffalo from
flight and drove it back to be shot."[10]
Father Hennepin looked down at patches of buffalo hide which covered
holes in his habit. He remembered the trampling of a furious beast's
hoofs and the twitch of its short sharp horn in his folds of flesh as it
lifted him. He remembered his wounds and the soreness of his bones which
lasted for months, yet his lips parted over happy teeth and he roared
with laughter.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[10] In reality this was Father Membré's adventure.
III.
HEAVEN AND EARTH.
Jeanne le Ber sat down upon a high-backed bench before the fire in the
upper room. This apartment was furnished and decorated only by abundant
firelight, which danced on stone walls and hard dark rafters, on rough
floor and high enclosure, of the stairway. At opposite sides of the room
were doors which Jeanne did not know opened into chambers scarcely
larger than the sleepers who might lodge therein.
She sat in strained thought, without unwrapping herself, though shudders
were sent through her by damp raiment. When her father came up with the
sergeant who carried their supper, he took off her cloak, smoothed her
hair, and tenderly reproved her. He set the dishes on the bench between
them, and persuaded Jeanne to eat what he carved for her,--a swarthy
nurse whose solicitude astounded the soldier.
Another man came up and opened the door nearest the chimney, on that
side which overlooked the fortress enclosure. He paused in descending,
loaded with the commandant's possessions, to say that this bedroom was
designed for mademoiselle, and was now ready.
"And thou must get to it as soon as the river's chill is warmed out of
thy bones," said Le Ber. "I will sit and hear the worthy friar
downstairs tell his strange adventures. The sound of your voice can
reach me with no effort whatever. My bedroom will be next yours, or near
by, and no harm can befall you in Fort Frontenac."
Jeanne kissed his cheek before he returned to the lower room, and when
the supper was removed she sat drying herself by the fire.
The eager piety of her early girlhood, which was almost fantastic in its
expression, had yet worked out a nobly spiritual face. She was a
beautiful saint.
For several years Jeanne le Ber had refused the ordinary clothing of
women. Her visible garment was made of a soft fine blanket of white
wool, with long sleeves falling nearly to her feet. It was girded to her
waist by a cord from which hung her rosary. Her neck stood slim and
white above the top of this robe, without ornament except the peaked
monk's hood which hung behind it.
This creature like a flame of living white fire stood up and turned her
back to the ruddier logs, and clasped her hands across the top of her
head. Her eyes wasted scintillations on rafters while she waited for
heavenly peace to calm the strong excitement driving her.
The door of Jeanne's chamber stood open as the soldier had left it. At
the opposite side of the room a similar door opened, and La Salle came
out. He moved a step, toward the hearth, but stopped, and the pallor of
a swoon filled his face.
"Sieur de la Salle," said Jeanne in a whisper. She let her arms slip
down by her sides. The eccentric robe with its background of firelight
cast her up tall and white before his eyes.
In the explorer's most successful moments he had never appeared so
majestic. Though his dress was tarnished by the wilderness, he had it
carefully arranged; for he liked to feel it fitting him with an
exactness which would not annoy his thoughts.
No formal greeting preluded the crash of this encounter between La Salle
and Jeanne le Ber. What had lain repressed by prayer and penance, or had
been trodden down league by league in the wilds, leaped out with
strength made mighty by such repression.
Voices in loud and merry conversation below and occasional laughter came
up the open stairway and made accompaniment to this half-hushed duet.
"Jeanne," stammered La Salle.
"Sieur de la Salle, I was just going to my room."
She moved away from him to the side of the hearth, as he advanced and
sat down upon the bench. Unconscious that she stood while he was
sitting, as if overcome by sudden blindness he reached toward her with a
groping gesture.
"Take hold of my hand, Sainte Jeanne."
"And if I take hold of your hand, Sieur de la Salle," murmured the girl,
bending toward him though she held her arms at her sides, "what profit
will it be to either of us?"
"I beg that you will take hold of my hand."
Her hand, quivering to each finger tip, moved out and met and was
clasped in his. La Salle's head dropped on his breast.
Jeanne turned away her face. Voices and laughter jangled in the room
below. In this silent room pulse answered pulse, and with slow encounter
eyes answered the adoration of eyes. In terror of herself Jeanne uttered
the whispered cry,--
"I am afraid!"
She veiled herself with the long sleeve of her robe.
"And of what should you be afraid when we are thus near together?" said
La Salle. "The thing to be afraid of is losing this. Such gladness has
been long coming; for I was a man when you were born, Sainte Jeanne."
"Let go my hand, Sieur de la Salle."
"Do you want me to let it go, Sainte Jeanne?"
"No, Sieur de la Salle."
Dropping her sleeve Jeanne faced heaven through the rafters. Tears
stormed down her face, and her white throat swelled with strong
repressed sobs. Like some angel caught in a snare, she whispered her
up-directed wail,--
"All my enormity must now be confessed! Whenever Sieur de la Salle has
been assailed my soul rose up in arms for him. Oh, my poor father! So
dear has Sieur de la Salle been to me that I hated the hatred of my
father. What shall I do to tear out this awful love? I have fought it
through midnights and solitary days of ceaseless prayer. Oh, Sieur de la
Salle, why art thou such a man? Pray to God and invoke the saints for
me, and help me to go free from this love!"
"Jeanne," said La Salle, "you are so holy I dare touch no more than this
sweet hand. It fills me with life. Ask me not to pray to God that he
will take the life from me. Oh, Jeanne, if you could reach out of your
eternity of devotion and hold me always by the hand, what a man I might
be!"
She dropped her eyes to his face, saying like a soothing mother,--
"Thou greatest and dearest, there is a gulf between us which we cannot
pass. I am vowed to Heaven. Thou art vowed to great enterprises. The
life of the family is not for us. If God showed me my way by thy side I
would go through any wilderness. But Jeanne was made to listen in prayer
and silence and secrecy and anguish for the word of Heaven. The worst
is,"--her stormy sob again shook her from head to foot,--"you will be at
court, and beautiful women will love the great explorer. And one will
shine; she will be set like a star as high as the height of being your
wife. And Jeanne,--oh, Jeanne! here in this rough, new world,--she must
eternally learn to be nothing!"
"My wife!" said La Salle, turning her hand in his clasp, and laying his
cheek in her palm. "You are my wife. There is no court. There is no
world to discover. There is only the sweet, the rose-tender palm of my
wife where I can lay my tired cheek and rest."
Jeanne's fingers moved with involuntary caressing along the lowest curve
of his face.
An ember fell on the hearth beside them, and Father Hennepin emphasized
some point in his relation with a stamp of his foot.
"You left a glove at my father's house, Sieur de la Salle, and I hid it;
I put my face to it. And when I burned it, my own blood seemed to ooze
out of that crisping glove."
La Salle trembled. The dumb and solitary man was dumb and solitary in
his love.
"Now we must part," breathed Jeanne. "Heaven is strangely merciful to
sinners. I never could name you to my confessor or show him this
formless anguish; but now that it has been owned and cast out, my heart
is glad."
La Salle rose up and stood by the hearth. As she drew her hand from his
continued hold he opened his arms. Jeanne stepped backward, her eyes
swarming with motes of light. She turned and reached her chamber door;
but as the saint receded from temptation the woman rose in strength. She
ran to La Salle, and with a tremor and a sob in his arms, met his mouth
with the one kiss of her life. As suddenly she ran from him and left
him.
La Salle had had his sublime moment of standing at the centre of the
universe and seeing all things swing around him, which comes to every
one successful in embodying a vast idea. But from this height he looked
down at that experience.
He stood still after Jeanne's door closed until he felt his own
intrusion. This drove him downstairs and out of the house, regardless of
Jacques le Ber, Father Hennepin, and the officers of the fortress, who
turned to gaze at his transit.
Proud satisfaction, strange in a ruined man, appeared on the explorer's
face. He felt his reverses as cobwebs to be brushed away. He was loved.
The king had been turned against him. His enemies had procured Count
Frontenac's removal, and La Barre the new governor, conspiring to seize
his estate, had ruined his credit. But he was loved. Even on this
homeward journey an officer had passed him with authority to take
possession of his new post on the Illinois River. His discoveries were
doubted and sneered at, as well as half claimed by boasting
subordinates, who knew nothing about his greater views. Yet the only
softener of this man of noble granite was a spirit-like girl, who
regarded the love of her womanhood as sin.
La Salle stood in the midst of enemies. He stood considering merely how
his will should break down the religious walls Jeanne built around
herself, and how Jacques le Ber might be conciliated by shares in the
profits of the West. Behind stretched his shadowed life, full of
misfortune; good was held out to him to be withdrawn at the touch of his
fingers. But this good he determined to have; and thinking of her, La
Salle walked the stiffened frost-crisp ground of the fortress half the
night.
IV.
A CANOE FROM THE ILLINOIS.
When Barbe Cavelier awoke next morning and saw around her the stone
walls of Fort Frontenac instead of a familiar convent enclosure, she sat
up in her bed and laughed aloud. The tiny cell echoed. Never before had
laughter of young girl been heard there. And when she placed her feet
upon the floor perhaps their neat and exact pressure was a surprise to
battered planks used to the smiting tread of men.
Barbe proceeded to dress herself, with those many curvings of neck and
figure, which, in any age, seem necessary to the fit sitting of a young
maid in her garments. Her aquiline face glowed, full of ardent life.
Some raindrops struck the roof-window and ran down its panes like tears.
When Barbe had considered her astounding position as the only woman in
Fort Frontenac, and felt well compacted for farther adventures, she
sprung upon the bunk, and stood with her head near the roof, looking out
into the fortress and its adjacent world. Among moving figures she
could not discern her uncle La Salle, or her uncle the Abbé, or even her
brother. These three must be yet in the officers' house. Dull clouds
were scudding. As Barbe opened the sash and put her head out the morning
air met her with a chill. Fort Frontenac's great walls half hid an
autumn forest, crowding the lake's distant border in measureless expanse
of sad foliage. Eastward, she caught ghostly hints of islands on misty
water. The day was full of depression. Ontario stood up against the sky,
a pale greenish fleece, raked at intervals by long wires of rain.
But such influences had no effect on a healthy warm young creature,
freed unaccountably from her convent, and brought on a perilous,
delightful journey to so strange a part of her world.
She noticed a parley going forward at the gate. Some outsider demanded
entrance, for the sentry disappeared between the towers and returned
for orders. He approached the commandant who stood talking with Jacques
le Ber, the merchant of Montreal. Barbe could see Le Ber's face darken.
With shrugs and negative gestures he decided against the newcomer, and
the sentinel again disappeared to refuse admission. She wondered if a
band of Iroquois waited outside. Among Abbé Cavelier's complaints of La
Salle was Governor la Barre's accusation that La Salle stirred enmity in
the Iroquois by protecting the Illinois tribe they wished to
exterminate.
"Even these Indians on the lake shore," meditated Barbe, "who settled
there out of friendship to my uncle La Salle, may turn against him and
try to harm him as every one does now that his fortunes are low. I would
be a man faithful to my friend, if I were a man at all."
She watched for a sight of the withdrawing party on the lake, and
presently a large canoe holding three men shot out beyond the walls.
One stood erect, gazing back at the fort with evident anxiety. Neither
the smearing medium of damp weather nor increasing distance could rob
Barbe of that man's identity. His large presence, his singular carriage
of the right arm, even his features sinking back to space, stamped him
Henri de Tonty.
"He has come here to see my uncle La Salle, and they have refused to let
him enter," she exclaimed aloud.
Stripping a coverlet from her berth she whipped the outside air with it
until the crackle brought up a challenge from below.
[Illustration]
Fort Frontenac was a seignorial rather than a military post, and its
discipline had been lax since the governor's Associates seized it, yet a
sentinel paced this morning before the officers' quarters. When he saw
the signal withdrawn and a lovely face with dark eyelashes and a topknot
of curls looking down at him, he could do nothing but salute it, and
Barbe shut her window.
Dropping in excitement from the bunk, she ran across the upper room to
knock at La Salle's door.
A boy stood basking in solitude by the chimney.
Her uncle La Salle's apartment seemed filled with one strong indignant
voice, leaking through crevices and betraying its matter to the common
hall.
"You may knock there until you faint of hunger," remarked the lad at the
hearth. "I also want my breakfast, but these precious Associates will
let us starve in the fort they have stolen before they dole us out any
food. I would not mind going into the barracks and messing, but I have
you also to consider."
"It is not anything to eat, Colin--it is pressing need of my uncle La
Salle!"
"The Abbé has pressing need of our uncle La Salle. It was great relief
to catch him here at Frontenac. I have heard every bit of the lecture:
what amounts our uncle the Abbé has ventured in western explorations;
and what a fruitless journey he has made here to rescue for himself some
of the stores of this fortress; and what danger all we Caveliers stand
in of being poisoned on account of my uncle La Salle, so that the Abbé
can scarce trust us out of his sight, even with nuns guarding you."
To Barbe's continued knocking her guardian made the curtest reply. He
opened the door, looked at her sternly, saying, "Go away, mademoiselle,"
and shut it tightly again.
She ran back to her lookout and was able to discern the same canoe
moving off on the lake.
"Colin," demanded Barbe, wrapping herself, "You must run with me."
"Certainly, mademoiselle, and I trust you are making haste toward a
table."
"We must run outside the fortress."
Though the boy felt it a grievance that he should follow instead of lead
to any adventure, he dashed heartily out with her, intending to take his
place when he understood the action. Rain charged full in their faces.
The sentry was inclined to hold them at the fortress gate until he had
orders, and Barbe's impatience darted from her eyes.
"You will get me into trouble," he said. "This gate has been swinging
over-much lately."
"Let us out," persuaded Colin. "The Associates will not care what
becomes of a couple of Caveliers."
"Where are you going?"
"My sister wishes to run to the Iroquois village," responded Colin, "and
beg there for a little sagamite. We get nothing to eat in Fort
Frontenac."
The soldier laughed.
"If you are going to the Iroquois village why don't you say your errand
is to Catharine Tegahkouita? It is no sin to ask an Indian saint's
prayers."
Barbe formed her lips to inquire, "Has Tegahkouita come to Fort
Frontenac?" But this impulse passed into discreet silence, and the man
let them out.
They ran along the palisades southward, Barbe keeping abreast of Colin
though she made skimming dips as the swallow flies, and with a détour
quite to the lake's verge, avoided the foundation of an outwork.
Father Hennepin's cross stood up, a huge white landmark between habitant
settlement on the lake, and Indian village farther west but visible
through the clearing. Ontario seemed to rise higher and top the world,
its green curves breaking at their extremities into white spatter, the
one boat in sight making deep obeisance to heaving water.
"Do you see a canoe riding yonder?" exclaimed Barbe to Colin, as they
ran along wet sand.
"Any one may see a canoe riding yonder. Was it to race with that canoe
we came out, mademoiselle?"
"Wave your arms and make signals to the men in it, Colin. They must be
stopped. I am sure that one is Monsieur de Tonty, and they were turned
away from the fortress gate. They have business with our uncle La Salle,
and see how far they have gone before we could get out ourselves!"
"Why, then, did you follow?" demanded her brother, waving his arms and
flinging his cap in the rain. "They may have business with our uncle La
Salle, but they have no business with a girl. This was quite my affair,
Mademoiselle Cavelier."
A maid whose feet were heavy with the mud of a once ploughed clearing
could say little in praise of such floundering. She paid no attention to
Colin's rebuke, but watched for the canoe to turn landward. Satisfied
that it was heading toward them, Barbe withdrew from the border of the
lake. She would not shelter herself in any deserted hut of the habitant
village. Colin followed her in vexation to Father Hennepin's mission
house, remonstrating as he skipped, and turning to watch the canoe with
rain beating his face.
They found the door open. The floor was covered with sand blown there,
and small stones cast by the hands of irreverent passing Indian boys.
The chapel stood a few yards away, but this whole small settlement was
dominated by its cross.[11]
Barbe and Colin were scarcely under this roof shelter before Tonty
strode up to the door. He took off his hat with the left hand, his dark
face bearing the rain like a hardy flower. Dangers, perpetual immersion
in Nature, and the stimulus of vast undertakings had so matured Tonty
that Barbe felt more awe of his buckskin presence than her memory of the
fine young soldier in Montreal could warrant. She wanted to look at him
and say nothing. Colin, who knew this soldier only by reputation, was
eager to meet and urge him into Father Hennepin's house.
Tonty's reluctant step crunched sand on the boards. He kept his gaze
upon Barbe and inquired,--
"Have I the honor, mademoiselle, to address the niece of Monsieur de la
Salle?"
"The niece and nephew of Monsieur de la Salle," put forth Colin.
"Yes, monsieur. You may remember me as the young tiger-cat who sprung
upon my uncle La Salle when you arrived with him from France."
"I never forgot you, mademoiselle. You so much resemble Monsieur de la
Salle."
"It is on his account we have run out of the fort to stop you. He does
not know you are here. I saw the sentinel close the gate against some
one, and afterward your boat pushed out."
"And did you shake a signal from an upper window in the fort?"
"Monsieur, I could not be sure that you saw it, though I could see your
boat."
"She made it very much her affair," observed Colin, with the merciless
disapproval of a lad. "Monsieur de Tonty, there was no use in her
trampling through sand and rain like a Huron witch going to some herb
gathering. It was my business to do the errand of my uncle La Salle.
When she goes back she will get a lecture and a penance, for all her
sixteen years."
"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "I am distressed if my withdrawal from Fort
Frontenac causes you trouble. I meant to camp here. I was determined to
see Monsieur de la Salle."
"Monsieur," courageously replied Barbe, "you cause me no trouble at all.
I thought you were returning to your fort on the Illinois. I did not
stop to tell my brother, but made him run with me. It is a shame that
the enemies of my uncle La Salle hold you out of Fort Frontenac."
"But very little would you get to eat there," consoled young Cavelier.
"We have had nothing to break our fast on this morning."
"Then let us get ready some breakfast for you," proposed Tonty, as his
men entered with the lading of the canoe. They had stopped at the
doorstep, but Father Hennepin's hewed log house contained two rooms, and
he pointed them to the inner one. There they let down their loads, one
man, a surgeon, remaining, and the other, a canoeman, going out again in
search of fuel.
"Monsieur, it would be better for us to hurry back to the fortress and
call my uncle La Salle."
"Nothing will satisfy you, mademoiselle," denounced Colin. "Out you must
come to stop Monsieur de Tonty. Now back you must go through weather
which is not fitting for any demoiselle to face."
"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "if you return now it will be my duty to
escort you as far as the fortress gate."
Barbe drew her wrappings over her face, as he had seen a wild sensitive
plant fold its leaves and close its cups.
"I will retire to the chapel and wait there until my uncle La Salle
comes," she decided, "and my brother must run to call him."
"You may take to sanctuary as soon as you please," responded Colin, "and
I will attend to my uncle La Salle's business. But the first call I make
shall be upon the cook in this camp."
FOOTNOTES:
[11] "He (La Salle) gave us a piece of ground 15 arpents in front
by 20 deep, the donation being accepted by Monsieur de
Frontenac, syndic of our mission." From Le Clerc.
V.
FATHER HENNEPIN'S CHAPEL.
Tonty held a buffalo robe over Barbe during her quick transit from cabin
to church. Its tanned side was toward the weather, and its woolly side
continued to comfort her after she was under shelter. Tonty bestowed it
around her and closed the door again, leaving her in the dim place.
Father Hennepin's deserted chapel was of hewed logs like his dwelling. A
rude altar remained, but without any ornaments, for the Récollet had
carried these away to his western mission. Some unpainted benches stood
in a row. The roof could be seen through rafters, and drops of rain with
reiterating taps fell along the centre of the floor. A chimney of stones
and cement was built outside the chapel, of such a size that its top
yawned like an open cell for rain, snow, or summer sunshine. Within, it
spread a generous hearth and an expanse of grayish fire-wall little
marked by the blue incense which rises from burning wood.
Barbe looked briefly around the chapel. She laid the buffalo hide before
the altar and knelt upon it.
Tonty returned with a load of fuel and busied himself at the fireplace.
The boom of the lake, and his careful stirring and adjusting in ancient
ashes, made a background to her silence. Yet she heard through her
devotions every movement he made, and the low whoop peculiar to flame
when it leaps to existence and seizes its prey.
A torrent of fire soon poured up the flue. Tonty grasped a brush made of
wood shavings, remnant of Father Hennepin's housekeeping, and whirled
dust and litter in the masculine fashion. When he left the chapel it
glowed with the resurrected welcome it had given many a primitive
congregation of Indians and French settlers, when the lake beat up icy
winter foam.
Beside the fireplace was a window so high that its log sill met Barbe's
chin as she looked out. Jutting roof and outer chimney wall made a snug
spot like a sentry-box without. She dried her feet, holding them one at
a time to the red hot glow, and glanced through this window at the
mission house's sodden logs and crumbled chinking. The excitement of her
sally out of Fort Frontenac died away. She felt distressed because she
had come, and faint for her early convent breakfast.
[Illustration]
She saw Tonty through the window carrying a dish carefully covered. He
approached the broken pane, and Barbe eagerly helped him to unfasten the
sash and swing it out. In doing this, Tonty held her platter braced by
his iron-handed arm.
The fare was passed in to her without apology, and she received it with
sincere gratitude, afterward drawing a bench near the fire and sitting
down in great privacy and comfort.
The moccasins of a frontiersman could make no sound above flap of wind
and pat of water. Tonty paced from window to chapel front, believing
that he kept out of Barbe's sight. But after an interval he was amused
to see, rising over the sill within, a topknot of curls, and eyes filled
with the alert, shy spirit of the deer whose flesh she had just eaten.
For some reason this scrutiny of Barbe's made him regret that he had
lain aside the gold and white uniform of France, and the extreme uses to
which his gauntlets had been put. Entrenched behind logs she
unconsciously poured the fires of her youth upon Tonty.
Not only was one pane in the sash gone, but all were shattered, giving
easy access to his voice as he stood still and explained.
"Frontenac is a lonely post, mademoiselle. It is necessary for you to
have a sentinel."
"Yes, monsieur; you are very good." Barbe accepted the fact with lowered
eyelids. "Has my brother yet gone to call my uncle La Salle?"
"Yes, mademoiselle. As soon as we could give him some breakfast he set
out."
"Colin is a gourmand. All very young people gormandize more or less,"
remarked Barbe, with a sense of emancipation from the class she
condemned.
"I hope you could eat what I brought you?"
"It was quite delicious, monsieur. I ate every bit of it."
The boom of the lake intruded between their voices. Barbe's black
eyelashes flickered sensitively upon her cheeks, and Tonty, feeling that
he looked too steadily at her, dropped his eyes to his folded arms.
"Monsieur de Tonty," inquired Barbe, appealing to experience, "do you
think sixteen years very young?"
"It is the most charming age in the world, mademoiselle."
"Monsieur, I mean young for maturing one's plan of life."
"That depends upon the person," replied Tonty. "At sixteen I was
revolting against the tyranny which choked Italy. And I was an exile
from my country before the age of twenty, mademoiselle."
Barbe gazed straight at Tonty, her gray eyes firing like opals with
enthusiasm.
"And my uncle La Salle at sixteen was already planning his discoveries.
Monsieur, I also have my plans. Many missionaries must be needed among
the Indians."
"You do not propose going as a missionary among the Indians,
mademoiselle?"
Barbe critically examined his smile. She evaded his query.
"Are the Indian women beautiful, Monsieur de Tonty?"
"They do not appear so to me, mademoiselle, though the Illinois are a
straight and well-made race."
"You must find it a grand thing to range that western country."
"But in the midst of our grandeur the Iroquois threaten us even there.
How would mademoiselle like to mediate between these invaders and the
timid Illinois, suspected by one tribe and threatened by the other; to
carry the wampum belt of peace on the open field between two armies, and
for your pains get your scalp-lock around the fingers of a Seneca chief
and his dagger into your side?"
"Oh, monsieur!" whispered Barbe, flushing with the wild pinkness of
roses on the plains, "what amusements you do have in the great west! And
is it a castle on a mountain, that Fort St. Louis of the Illinois?"
"A stockade on a cliff, mademoiselle."
Tonty felt impelled to put himself nearer this delicate head set with
fine small ears and quartered by the angles of the window-frame. When
she meditated, her lashes and brows and aquiline curves and gray tones
flushing to rose were delightful to a wilderness-saturated man. But he
held to his strict position as sentinel.
"Monsieur," said Barbe, "there is something on my mind which I will tell
you. I was thinking of the new world my uncle La Salle discovered, even
before you came to Montreal. Now I think constantly of Fort St. Louis of
the Illinois. Monsieur, I dream of it,--I go in long journeys and never
arrive; I see it through clouds, and wide rivers flow between it and me;
and I am homesick. Yes, monsieur, that is the strangest thing,--I have
cried of homesickness for Fort St. Louis of the Illinois!"
"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, his voice vibrating, "there is a stranger
thing. It is this,--that a man with a wretched hand of iron should
suddenly find within himself a heart of fire!"
When this confession had burst from him he turned his back without
apology, and Barbe's forehead sunk upon the window-sill.
Within the chapel, drops from the cracked roof still fell in succession,
like invisible fingers playing scales along the boards. Outside was the
roar of the landlocked sea, and the higher music of falling rain. Barbe
let her furtive eyes creep up the sill and find Tonty's large back on
which she looked with abashed but gratified smiles.
"Mademoiselle," he begged without turning, "forgive what I have said."
"Certainly, monsieur," she responded. "What was it that you said?"
"Nothing, mademoiselle, nothing."
"Then, monsieur, I forgive you for saying nothing."
Tonty, in his larger perplexity at having made such a confession without
La Salle's leave, missed her sting.
Nothing more was said through the window. Barbe moved back, and the
stalwart soldier kept his stern posture; until La Salle, whose approach
had been hidden by chimney and mission house, burst abruptly into view.
As he came up, both he and Tonty opened their arms. Strong breast to
strong breast, cheek touching cheek, spare olive-hued man and dark
rich-blooded man hugged each other.
Barbe's convent lessons of embroidery and pious lore had included no
heathen tales of gods or heroes. Yet to her this sight was like a vision
of two great cloudy figures stalking across the world and meeting with
an embrace.
VI.
LA SALLE AND TONTY.
When one of the men had been called from the mission house to stand
guard, they came directly into the chapel, preferring to talk there in
the presence of Barbe.
La Salle kissed her hand and her cheek, and she sat down before the
fire, spreading the buffalo skin under her feet.
As embers sunk and the talk of the two men went on, she crept as low as
this shaggy carpet, resting arms and head upon the bench. The dying fire
made exquisite color in this dismal chapel.
"The governor's man, when he arrived to seize Fort St. Louis, gave you
my letter of instructions, Tonty?"
"Yes, Monsieur de la Salle."
"Then, my lad, why have you abandoned the post and followed me? You
should have stayed to be my representative. They have Frontenac.
Crévecoeur was ruined for us. If they get St. Louis of the Illinois
entirely into their hands they will claim the whole of Louisiana, these
precious Associates."
Tonty, laying his sound arm across his commandant's shoulder, exclaimed,
"Monsieur, I have followed you five hundred leagues to drag that rascal
Jolycoeur back with me. He told at Fort St. Louis that this should be
your last journey."
La Salle laughed.
"Let me tie Jolycoeur and fling him into my canoe, and I turn back at
once. I can hold your claims on the Illinois against any number of
governor's agents. Take the surgeon Liotot in Jolycoeur's place.
Liotot came with me, anxious to return to France."
"Jolycoeur is no worse than the others, my Tonty, and he has had many
opportunities. How often has my life been threatened!"
"He intends mischief, monsieur. If I had heard it before you set out,
this journey need not have been made."
"Tonty," declared the explorer, "I think sometimes I carry my own
destruction within myself. I will not chop nice phrases for these hounds
who continually ruin my undertakings by their faithlessness. If a man
must keep patting the populace, he can do little else. But I am glad you
overtook me here. My Tonty, if I had a hundred men like you I could
spread out the unknown wilderness and possess it as that child possesses
that hide of buffalo."
Though their undertakings were united, and the Italian had staked his
fortune in the Norman's ventures, La Salle always assumed, and Tonty
from the first granted him, entire mastery of the West. Both looked with
occupied eyes at Barbe, who felt her life enlarged by witnessing this
conference.
"Monsieur, what aspect have affairs taken since you reached Fort
Frontenac?"
"Worse, Tonty, than I dreaded when I left the Illinois. You know how
this new governor stripped Fort Frontenac of men and made its
unprotected state an excuse for seizing it, saying I had not obeyed the
king's order to maintain a garrison. And you know how he and the
merchants of Montreal have possessed themselves of my seigniory here.
They have sold and are still busy selling my goods from this post,
putting the money into their pockets. I spent nearly thirty-five
thousand francs improving this grant of Frontenac. But worse than that,
Tonty, they have ruined my credit both here and in France. Even my
brother will no more lift a finger for me. The king is turned against
me. The fortunes of my family--even the fortune of that child--are
sucked down in my ruin."
Barbe noted her own bankruptcy with the unconcern of youth. Monsieur de
Tonty's face, when you looked up at it from a rug beside the hearth,
showed well its full rounded chin, square jaws, and high temples, the
richness of its Italian coloring against the blackness of its Italian
hair.
"They call me a dreamer and a madman, these fellows now in power, and
have persuaded the king that my discoveries are of no account."
"Monsieur," exclaimed Tonty, "do you remember the mouth of the great
river?"[12]
Face glowed opposite face as they felt the log walls roll away from
environing their vision. It was no longer the wash of the Ontario they
heard, but the voice of the Mexican gulf. The yellow flood of
Mississippi poured out between marsh borders. Again discharges of
musketry seemed to shake the morasses beside a naked water world, the
Te Deum to arise, and the explorer to be heard proclaiming,--
"In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible, and victorious
Prince, Louis the Great, by the grace of God king of France and of
Navarre, Fourteenth of that name, I, this ninth day of April, one
thousand and six hundred and eighty-two, in virtue of the commission of
his Majesty, which I hold in my hand and which may be seen by all whom
it may concern, have taken and do now take, in the name of his Majesty
and of his successors to the crown, possession of this country of
Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the
nations, people, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals,
fisheries, streams, and rivers within the extent of the said Louisiana,
from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio,
as also along the river Colbert or Mississippi, and the rivers which
discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of
the Nadouessioux, as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of
Mexico."[13]
"Monsieur," exclaimed Tonty, "the plunderers of your fortune cannot take
away that discovery or blot out the world you then opened. And what is
Europe compared to this vast country? At the height of his magnificence
Louis cannot picture to himself the grandeur of this western empire.
France is but the palm of his hand beside it. It stretches from endless
snow to endless heat; its breadth no man may guess. Nearly all the
native tribes affiliate readily with the French. We have to dispute us
only the English who hold a little strip by the ocean, the Dutch with
smaller holding inland, and a few Spaniards along the Gulf."
"And all may be driven out before the arms of France," exclaimed La
Salle. "These crawling merchants and La Barre,--soldier, he calls
himself!--see nothing of this. Every man for his own purse among them.
But thou seest it, Tonty. I see it. And we are no knights on a crusade.
Nor are we unpractised courtiers shredding our finery away on the briers
of the wilderness. This western enterprise is based on geographical
facts. No mind can follow all the development of that rich land. It is
an empire," declared La Salle, striding between hearth and
chancel-rail, unconscious that he lifted his voice to the rafters of a
sanctuary, "which Louis might drop France itself to grasp!"
"The king will be convinced of this, Monsieur de la Salle, when you
again have his ear. When you have showed him what streams of commerce
must flow out through a post stationed at the mouth of the Mississippi.
France will then have a cord drawn half around this country."
"Tonty, if you could be commandant of every fort I build, navigator of
every ship I set afloat, if you could live in every man who labors for
me, if you could stand forever between those Iroquois wolves and the
tribes we try to band for mutual protection, and at the same time, if
you could always be at my side to ward off gun, knife, and poison,--you
would make me the most successful man on earth."
"I have travelled five hundred leagues to ward poison away from you,
monsieur. And you laugh at me."
[Illustration: "Tonty, if you could be commandant of every fort I
build," etc.--_Page 124._]
"For your pains, I will dismiss Jolycoeur to-day, and take Liotot with
me."
"And will you come here as soon as you dismiss him and let my men
prepare your food?"
"Willingly. Fort Frontenac, with my rights in it denied, is no halting
place for me. To-morrow I set out again to France, and you to the fort
on the Illinois. But, Tonty--"
La Salle's face relaxed into tenderness as he laid his hands upon his
friend's shoulders. The Italian's ardent temperament was the only agent
which ever fused and made facile of tongue and easy of confidence that
man of cold reserve known as La Salle. The Italian guessed what he had
to say. They both glanced at Barbe and flushed. But the nebulous thought
surrounding the name of Jeanne le Ber was never condensed to spoken
word.
Tonty's sentinel opened the chapel door and broke up this council. He
said an Indian stood there with him demanding to be admitted.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Relation of Henri de Tonty (cited in Margry, I). "Comme cette
rivière se divise en trois chenaux, M. de la Salle fut
descouvrér celuy de la droite, je fus à celuy du mileu et le
Sieur d'Autray à celuy de la gauche."
[13] Abridged from Francis Parkman's version of La Salle's
proclamation. The Procès Verbal is a long document.
VII.
AN ADOPTION.
"What does he want?" inquired Tonty.
"He is determined to speak with you, Monsieur de Tonty, from what I can
gather out of his words."
"Let him wait in the mission house, then," said Tonty, "until Monsieur
de la Salle has ended his business."
"I have ended," said La Salle. "It is time I ordered my men and baggage
and canoes out of Fort Frontenac."
"Monsieur, remain, and let an order from you be taken to the gate."
"Some of those sulky fellows need my hand over them, Tonty. Besides,
there are matters which must be definitely settled before I leave the
fort. I have need to go myself, besides the obligation to deliver this
runaway girl, on whom her uncle La Salle is always bringing penances."
Barbe sprung up and put herself in the attitude of accompanying him.
"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "the rain is still falling. If Monsieur de
la Salle can carry this hide over you, it will be some protection."
He took up the buffalo skin, and shook it to loosen any dust which
might be clinging to the shag.
"Monsieur, you are very good," she answered. "But it is not necessary
for me."
"Mademoiselle cares very little about a wetting," said La Salle. "She
was born to be a princess of the backwoods. Call in your Indian before
we go, Tonty. He may have some news for us."
Tonty spoke to the sentinel, whose fingers visibly held the door, and he
let pass a tall Iroquois brave carrying such a bundle of rich furs as
one of that race above the condition of squaw rarely deigned to lift.
His errand was evidently peaceable. He paused and stood like a prince.
Neither La Salle nor Tonty remembered his face, though both felt sure he
came from the mission village of friendly Iroquois near Fort Frontenac.
"What does my brother want?" inquired La Salle, with sympathy he never
showed to his French subordinates.
"He waits to speak to his white brother with the iron hand," answered
the Iroquois.
"Have you brought us bad news?" again inquired La Salle.
"Good news."
"What is it?"
"It is only to my brother with the iron hand."
"Can you not speak in the presence of Monsieur de la Salle?" demanded
Tonty.
With exquisite reserve the Indian stood silent, waiting the conditions
he needed for the delivery of his message.
"It is nothing which concerns me," said La Salle to Tonty. He prepared
to stalk into the weather with Barbe.
Tonty spoke a few words to the waiting savage, who heard without
returning any sign, and then followed Barbe, stretching the buffalo hide
above her head. When La Salle observed this he failed to ridicule his
lieutenant, but took one side of the shaggy canopy in his own hold. It
was impossible for the girl to go dry-shod, but Tonty directed her way
over the best and firmest ground. They made a solemn procession, for not
a word was spoken. When they came to the fortress gate, Tonty again
bestowed the robe around her as he had done when she entered the chapel,
and stood bareheaded while Barbe--whispering "Adieu, monsieur"--passed
out of his sight.
"I have thought of this, Tonty," said La Salle as he entered; "when she
is a few years older she shall come to the fort on the Illinois, if I
again reap success."
"Monsieur de la Salle, I am bound to tell you it will be dangerous for
me ever to see mademoiselle again."
"Monsieur de Tonty," responded the explorer with his close smile, "I am
bound to tell you I think it will be the safest imaginable arrangement
for her."
The gate closed behind him, and Tonty carried back an exhilarated face
to the waiting Iroquois.
He entered Father Hennepin's chapel again, and the Indian followed him
to the hearth.
They stood there, ready for conference, the small black savage eye
examining Tonty's face with open approval.
"Now let me have your message," said the Italian. "Have I ever seen you
before? What is your name?"
"Sanomp," answered the Iroquois. "My white brother with the iron hand
has not seen me before."
[Illustration]
He spread open on the bench Barbe had occupied a present of fine furs
and dried meat.
"Why does my brother bring me these things?" inquired Tonty, realizing
as he looked at the gift how much of this barbarian's wealth was
bestowed in such an offering.
"Listen," said Sanomp.[14] He had a face of benevolent gravity,--the
unhurried, sincere face of man living close to Nature. "It is a chief of
the Seneca tribe who speaks to my white brother."
"I have met a chief of the Seneca tribe before," remarked Tonty,
smiling. "It was in the country of the Illinois, and he wrapped my
scalp-lock around his fingers."
Sanomp smiled, too, without haste, and continued his story.
"I left my people to live near the fort of my French brothers because it
was told me the man with a hand of iron was here. When I came here the
man with a hand of iron was gone. So I waited for him. Our lives are
consumed in waiting for the best things. Five years have I stood by the
mouth of Cataraqui. And this morning the man with a hand of iron passed
before my face."
He spoke a mixture of French and Iroquois which enabled Tonty to catch
his entire meaning.
"But this hand could not betray me from the lake, to eyes that had never
seen me before," objected the Italian.
Advancing one foot and folding his arms in the attitude of a narrator,
the Indian said,--
"Listen. At that time of life when a young Iroquois retires from his
tribe to hide in the woods and fast until his okie[15] is revealed to
him, four days and four nights the boy Sanomp lay on the ground, rain
and dew, moonlight and sunlight passing over him. The boy Sanomp looked
up, for an eagle dropped before his eyes. He then knew that the eagle
was his okie, and that he was to be a warrior, not a hunter or
medicine-man. But the eagle dropped before the feet of a soldier the
image of my white brother, and the soldier held up a hand of yellow
metal. The boy heard a voice coming from the vision that said to him,
'Warrior, this is thy friend and brother. Be to him a friend and
brother. After thou hast seven times followed the war path go and wait
by the mouth of Cataraqui until he comes.' So when I had seven times
followed the war path I came, and my brother being passed by, I waited."
Tonty's square brown Italian face was no more sincere than the redder
aquiline visage fronting him and telling its vision.
"My brother Sanomp comes in a good time," he remarked.
The Iroquois next took out his peace pipe and pouch of tobacco. While he
filled the bowl and stooped for an ember, Tonty stripped the copper hand
of its glove. He held it up before Sanomp as he received the calumet in
the other. An aboriginal grunt of strong satisfaction echoed in the
chapel.
"Hand of yellow metal," said Sanomp.
Tonty gravely smoked the pipe and handed it back to Sanomp. Sanomp
smoked it, shook the ashes out and put it away.
Thus was the ceremony of adoption finished. Without more talk, the red
friend and brother turned from his white friend and brother and went
back to his own world.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Sanomp was suggested to the romancer by La Salle's faithful
Shawanoe follower, Nika, and an Indian friend and brother in
"Pontiac."
[15] Guardian Manitou. See Introduction to "Jesuits in North America."
VIII.
TEGAHKOUITA.
Barbe ran breathless up the stairway, glad to catch sight of her uncle
the Abbé so occupied at the lower hearth that he took no heed of her
return.
She had counted herself the only woman in Fort Frontenac, yet she found
a covered figure standing in front of the chamber door next her own.
Though Barbe had never seen Catharine Tegahkouita[16] she knew this must
be the Iroquois virgin who lived a hermit life of devotion in a cabin at
Lachine, revered by French and Indians alike. How this saint had reached
Fort Frontenac or in whose behalf she was exerting herself Barbe could
not conjecture. Tegahkouita had interceded for many afflicted people and
her prayers were much sought after.
The Indian girl kept her face entirely covered. No man knew that it was
comely or even what its features were like. The chronicler tells us when
she was a young orphan beside her uncle's lodge-fire her eyes were too
weak to bear the light of the sun, and in this darkness began the
devotion which distinguished her life. What was first a necessity,
became finally her choice, and she shut herself from the world.
To Barbe, Tegahkouita was an object of religious awe tempered by that
criticism in which all young creatures secretly indulge. She sat on the
bench as if in meditation, but her eyes crept up and down that straight
and motionless and blanket-eclipsed presence. She knew that Tegahkouita
was good; was it not told of the Indian girl that she rolled three days
in a bed of thorns, and that she often walked barefooted in ice and
snow, to discipline her body? She was not afraid of Tegahkouita. But she
wished somebody else would come into the room who could break the
saint's death-like silence. Sainthood was a very safe condition, but
Barbe found it impossible to admire the outward appearance of a living
saint.
La Salle had stopped at the barracks to order out his men, and Colin who
had taken to that part of the fort for amusement, watched their transfer
with much interest.
Wind was conquering rain. It blew keenly from the southwest, and sung at
the corners of Frontenac, whirling dead leaves like fugitive birds into
the area of the fort. La Salle's men turned out of their quarters with
reluctance to exchange safety and comfort for exposure and a leaky camp.
The explorer stood and saw them pass before him bearing their various
burdens, excepting one man who slouched by the door of the bakehouse as
if he had stationed himself there to see that they passed in order out
of the gate.
"Come here, you Jolycoeur," called La Salle, lifting his finger.
Jolycoeur, savagely hairy, approached with that look of sulky menace
La Salle never appeared to see in his servants.
"Where is your load of goods?" inquired the explorer.
[Illustration: "'Come here, you Jolycoeur,' called La Salle."--_Page
138._]
Jolycoeur lifted a quick look, and dropping it again, replied, "Sieur
de la Salle, I was waiting for the cook to hand me out the dishes you
ordered against you came back."
La Salle examined him through half-shut eyes. It was this man's constant
duty to prepare his food. Tonty and his brother Jean had so occupied his
morning that he had found no time for eating. A man inured to hardships
can fast with very little thought about the matter, but he decided if
Jolycoeur had not yet handled this meal he might hazard some last
service from a man who had missed so many opportunities.
"Did you cook my breakfast?" he inquired.
"Sieur de la Salle, I dared not put my nose in the bakehouse. This cook
is the worst man in Fort Frontenac."
The cook appearing with full hands in his door, La Salle said to
Jolycoeur, "Carry those platters into the lodge," and he watched the
minutest action of the man's elbows, walking behind him into the lower
apartment of the dwelling. A table stood there on which Jolycoeur
began to arrange the dishes with surly carelessness.
The explorer forgot him the moment they entered, for two people occupied
this room in close talk. Challenging whatever ill Jacques le Ber and the
Abbé Cavelier had prepared, La Salle advanced beyond the table with the
chill and defiant bearing natural to him.
"Monsieur le Ber and I have been discussing this alliance you are so
anxious to make with his family," spoke the Abbé.
The explorer met Le Ber's face full of that triumphant contempt which
men strangely feel for other men who have fallen and become
stepping-stones of fortune to themselves. He turned away without answer,
and began to eat indifferently from the dishes Jolycoeur had left
ready, standing beside the table while he ate.
"If Jacques le Ber were as anxious for the marriage as yourself,--but I
told you this morning, my brother La Salle, what madness it must seem to
all sane men,--it could not be arranged. His daughter hath refused to
see you."
"My thanks are due to my brother the Abbé for his nice management of all
my affairs," sneered La Salle. "I comprehend there is nothing which he
will not endeavor to mar for me. It surely is madness which induces a
man against all experience to confide in his brother."
Jean Cavelier replied with a shrug and a spread of the hands which said,
"In such coin of gratitude am I always paid."
"Sieur de la Salle," volunteered Le Ber, rising and coming forward with
natural candor, "it is not so long ago that your proposal would have
made me proud, and the Abbé hath not ill managed it now. Monsieur, I
wish my girl to marry. I have been ready for any marriage she would
accept. She has indeed shown more liking for you than for any other man
in New France. Monsieur, I would far rather have her married than bound
to the life she leads. But if you were in a position to marry, Jeanne
refuses your hand."
"Has she said this to you?" inquired La Salle.
"I have not seen her to-day," replied Le Ber. "She has the Iroquois
virgin Tegahkouita with her. I brought Tegahkouita here because she was
besought for some healing in our Iroquois lodges near the fort."
Jacques le Ber stopped. But La Salle calmly heard him thus claim
everything pertaining to Fort Frontenac.
"We must do what we can to hold these unstable Indians," continued Le
Ber. "Monsieur, before I could carry your proposal to Jeanne, she sends
me Tegahkouita, as if they had some holy contrivance for reading
people's minds. Your brother will confirm to you the words Tegahkouita
brought."
"Mademoiselle le Ber will pray for you always, my brother La Salle. But
she refuses even to see you."
"It is easy enough for Jeanne to put you in her prayers," remarked the
discontented father, "she hath room enough there for all New France."
The man who had more than once sprung into the midst of hostile savages
and carried their admiration by a word, now stood silent and musing. But
his face expressed nothing except determination.
"You shall see her yourself," Jacques le Ber exclaimed, with the
shrewdness of a man holding present advantage, yet gauging fully his
antagonist's force. "You and I were once friends, Sieur de la Salle. I
might obtain a worse match for my girl."
"I will see her," said La Salle, more in the manner of affirming his own
wish than of accepting a concession.
He mounted the stairs, with Le Ber behind him, the Abbé Cavelier
following Le Ber.
As the father expected, Tegahkouita stood as a bar in front of Jeanne's
chamber door. Slightly spreading her blanketed arms this Indian girl of
peculiar gifts said slowly and melodiously in a voice tuned by much
low-spoken prayer, "Mademoiselle Jeanne le Ber says, 'Tell Sieur de la
Salle I will pray for him always, but I must never see his face
again.'"
FOOTNOTES:
[16] The romancer differs from the historian--Charlevoix, tome 2--who
records that Catharine Tegahkouita died in 1678.
IX.
AN ORDEAL.
"When I have seen Mademoiselle le Ber," La Salle replied to the blanket
of Tegahkouita, "I shall understand from herself what her wishes are in
this matter."
"Sieur de la Salle cannot see her," spoke Tegahkouita. "She hath no word
but this, and she will not see Sieur de la Salle again."
"I say he shall see her!" exclaimed the Montreal merchant, with asperity
created by so many influences working upon his daughter. "He may look
upon her this minute!"
Jeanne le Ber's presence in Fort Frontenac scarcely surprised Barbe, so
great was her amazement at the attitude of her uncle La Salle. That he
should be suing to Le Ber's daughter seemed as impossible as any
rejection of his suit. She felt toward the saint she had pinched at
convent that jealous resentment peculiar to women who desire to have the
men of their families married, yet are never satisfied with the choice
those men make. Even Barbe, however, considered it a sacrilegious act
when Le Ber shook his daughter's door and demanded admittance.
Jeanne's complete silence, like a challenge, drew out his imperative
force. He broke through every fastening and threw the door wide open.
The small, bare room, scarcely wider than its entrance, afforded no
hiding-places. There was little to catch the eye, from rude berth to
hooks in the ruder wall, from which the commandant's clothing had so
lately been removed.
Jeanne, the focus of this small cell, had flown to its extremity. As the
door burst from its fastenings, everybody in the outer room could see
her standing against the wall with noble instinct, facing the breakers
of her privacy, but without looking at them. Her eyes rested on her
beads, which she told with rapid lips and fingers. A dormer window
spread its background of light around her head.
The recoil of inaction which followed Le Ber's violence was not felt by
Tegahkouita. With the swift silence of an Indian and the intuition of a
devotee, she at once put herself in the sleeping cell, and kneeled
holding up a crucifix before Jeanne. As this symbol of religion was
lifted, Jeanne fell upon her knees.
Le Ber had not intended to enter, but indignation drove him on after
Tegahkouita. He stood aside and did not approach his child,--a jealous,
remorseful, anxious, irritated man.
La Salle could see Jeanne, though with giddy and indistinct vision. Her
wool gown lay around her in carven folds, as she knelt like a victim
ready for the headsman's axe.
One of the proudest and most reticent men who ever trod the soil of the
New World was thus reduced to woo before his enemy and his kindred; to
argue against those unseen forces represented by the Indian girl, and to
fight death in his own body with every pleading respiration. For
blindness was growing over his eyes. His lungs were tightened. When his
back was turned in the room below, Jolycoeur had mixed a dish for him.
La Salle's hardihood was the marvel of his followers. A body and will of
electric strength carried him thousands of miles through ways called
impassable. Defeat could not defeat him. But this struggle with Jeanne
le Ber was harder than any struggle with an estranged king, harder than
again bringing up fortune from the depths of ruin, harder than tearing
his breath of life from the reluctant air. He reared himself against the
chimney-side, pressing with palms and stretched fingers for support, yet
maintaining a roused erectness.
"Jeanne!" he spoke; and eyes less blind than his could detect a sinking
of her figure at the sound, "I have this to say."
With a plunging gait which terrified Barbe by its unnaturalness, La
Salle attempted to place himself nearer the silent object he was to
move. As he passed through the doorway he caught at the sides, and then
stretched out and braced one palm against the wall. Thus propped he
proceeded, articulating thickly but with careful exactness.
"Jeanne, when I have again brought success out of failure, I shall
demand you in marriage. Your father permits it."
Her trembling lips prayed on, and she gave no token of having heard him,
except the tremor which shook even the folds of her gown.
Too proud to confess his peril and make its appeal to her, and
suppressing before so many witnesses her tender name of Sainte, he
labored on as La Salle the explorer with the statement of his case.
"Perhaps I cannot see you again for some years. I do not ask words--of
acceptance now. It is enough--if you look at me."
La Salle leaned forward. His eyeballs appeared to swell and protrude as
he strained sight for the slightest lifting of the veil before that
self-restraining spirit.
Barbe's wailing suddenly broke all bounds in the outer room. "My uncle
the Abbé! Look at my uncle La Salle! He cannot breathe--he is going to
die! Somebody has poisoned or stabbed my uncle La Salle!"
Jean Cavelier with lower outcry ran to help the explorer. But even a
brother and a priest has his limitations. La Salle pushed him off.
When Barbe saw this, she threw herself to the floor and hid her face
upon the bench. Her kinsman and the hero of her childhood was held over
the abyss of death in the hand of Jeanne le Ber, while those who loved
him must set their teeth in silence.
But neither this childish judge, nor the father watching for any slight
motion of eyelids which might direct all his future hopes and plans,
knew what sickening moisture started from every pore of Jeanne le Ber.
Still she lifted her fainting eyes only as high as the crucifix
Tegahkouita held before her. Compared to her duty as she saw it, she
must count as nothing the life of the man she loved.
The Indian girl's weak sight had no plummet for the face of this greater
devotee. Passionately white, its lips praying fast, it stared at the
crucifix. Cold drops ran down from the dew which beaded temples and
upper lip. Sieur de la Salle--Sieur de la Salle was dying, and asking
her for a look! The lifting of her eyelids, the least wavering of her
sight, would sweep away the vows she had made to Heaven, and loosen her
soul for its swift rush to his breast. To be the wife of La Salle! Her
mutter became almost audible as she slid the beads between her fingers.
God would keep her from this deadly sin.
The gigantic will of La Salle, become almost material and visible, fell
upon her with a cry which must have broken any other endurance.
"Jeanne! look at me now--you _shall_ look at me now!"
Hoarse shouts of battle never tingled through blood as did the voice of
this isolated man.
Jeanne's lips twitched on; she twisted her hands in tense knots against
her neck, and her eyes maintained the level of the cross.
Silence--that fragment of eternity--then filled up the room, submerging
strained ears. There were remote sounds, like the scream of wind cut by
the angles of Fort Frontenac; but no sound which pierced the silence
between La Salle and Jeanne le Ber.
He turned around and cast himself through the doorway with a lofty tread
as if he were trying to mount skyward. The Abbé Cavelier extended both
arms and kept him from stumbling over the settle which Barbe was
baptizing with her anguish. She looked up with the distorted visage of
one who weeps terribly, and saw the groping explorer led to the
staircase. His feet plunged in the descent.
To this noise was added a distinct thud from Jeanne le Ber's room as her
head struck the floor. She lay relaxed and prostrate, and her father
lifted her up. Before rising to his feet with her he passed his hand
piteously across her bruised forehead.
[Illustration: "She twisted her hands in tense knots against her
neck."--_Page 152._]
X.
HEMLOCK.
[Illustration]
Jolycoeur, lounging with his shoulders against the barrack wall, gave
furtive attention to La Salle as the explorer appeared within the fort.
Even his eye was deceived by his master's bearing in giving him the
signal to approach.
The wind was helpful to La Salle, but he only half met daylight and saw
Jolycoeur taking strange shapes.
"Go to Father Hennepin's old mission house," he slowly commanded, "and
send Monsieur de Tonty directly to me."
The man, not daring to disobey until he could take refuge in Fort
Frontenac with the gates closed behind the explorer, went on this
errand.
"What ails Sieur de la Salle?" inquired the cook, coming out of his
bakehouse to get this news of a sentinel.
They both watched the Abbé Cavelier making vain efforts to get hold of
his misdirected brother.
"Gone mad with pride," suggested the sentinel. "The less he prospers
the loftier I have always heard he bears himself. Would the governor of
New France climb the wind with a tread like that?"
Outside the gate La Salle's limbs failed. The laboring Abbé then dragged
him along, and it seemed an immense détour he was obliged to make to
pass the extended foundation.
"Now you will believe my words which I spoke this morning concerning the
peril we all stand in," panted this sorely taxed brother. "The Cavelier
family is destroyed. My brother La Salle--Robert--my child! Shall I give
you absolution?"
"Not yet," gasped La Salle.
"If you had ever taken my advice, this miserable end had not come upon
you."
"I am not ended," gasped La Salle.
"Oh, my brother," lamented Jean Cavelier, tucking up his cassock as he
bent to the strain, "I have but one consolation in my wretchedness. This
is better for you than the marriage you would have made. What business
have you to ally yourself with Le Ber? What business have you with
marriage at all? For my part, I would object to any marriage you had in
view, but Le Ber's daughter was the worst marriage for you in New
France."
"Tonty!" gasped La Salle. With the swiftness of an Indian, Tonty was
flying across the clearing. The explorer's unwary messenger Jolycoeur
he had left behind him bound with hide thongs and lying in Father
Hennepin's inner room.
"Yes, yonder comes your Monsieur de Tonty who so easily gave up your
post on the Illinois," panted the Abbé Cavelier. "Like all your
worthless followers he hath no attachment to your person."
"There is more love in his iron hand," La Salle's paralyzing mouth flung
out, "than in any other living heart!"
Needing no explanation from the Abbé, the commandant from Fort St. Louis
took strong hold of La Salle and hurried him to the mission house. They
faced the wind, and Tonty's cap blew off, his rings of black hair
flaring to a fierce uprightness.
The surgeon ran out of the dwelling and met and helped them in, and thus
tardily resistance to the poison was begun, but it had found its
hardiest victim since the day of Socrates.
Tonty's iron hand brought out of Jolycoeur immediate confession of the
poison he had used.
In an age when most cunning and deadly drugs were freely handled, and
men who would not shed blood thought it no sin to take enemies neatly
off the scene by the magic of a dish, Jolycoeur was not without
knowledge of a plant called hemlock, growing ready to the hand of a good
poisoner in the New World.
Noon stood in the sky, half shredding vapors, and lighting cool sparkles
upon the lake. Afternoon dragged its mute and heavy hours westward.
Men left the mission house and entered it again, carrying wood or water.
The sun set in the lake, parting clouds before his sinking visage and
stretching his rays like long arms of fire to smite the heaving water.
[Illustration: "His rings of black hair flaring to a fierce
uprightness."--_Page 158._]
Twilight rose out of the earth and crept skyward, blotting all visible
shore. Fort Frontenac stood an indistinct mass beside the Cataraqui, as
beside another lake. Stars seemed to run and meet and dive in long
ripples. The wash of water up the sand subsided in force as the wind
sunk, leaving air space for that ceaseless tune breathed by a great
forest.
Overhead, from a port of cloud, the moon's sail pushed out suddenly,
less round than it had been the night before, and owning by such
depression that she had begun tacking toward her third quarter. Fort and
settlements again found their proportions, and Father Hennepin's cross
stood clear and fair, throwing its shadow across the mission house.
Within the silent mission house warmth and redness were diffused from
logs piled in the chimney.
The Abbé Cavelier's cassock rose and fell with that sleep which follows
great anxiety and exhaustion. He reclined against the lowest step of a
broken ladder-way which once ascended from corner to loft. The men,
except one who stood guard outside in the shadow of the house, were
asleep in the next room.
La Salle rested before the hearth on some of the skins Tonty had
received from his Indian friend and brother. Whenever the explorer
opened his eyes he saw Tonty sitting awake on the floor beside him.
"Sleep," urged La Salle.
"I shall not sleep again," said Tonty, "until I see you safely on your
way toward France."
"This has been worse than the dose of verdigris I once got."
"Jolycoeur says he used hemlock," responded Tonty. "He accused
everybody in New France of setting him on to the deed, but I silenced
that."
"I had not yet dismissed him, Tonty. The scoundrel hath claims on me for
two years' wages."
"He should have got his wages of me," exclaimed Tonty, "if this proved
your death. He should have as many bullets as his body could hold."
"Tonty, untie the fellow and turn him out and discharge his wages for me
with some of the skins you have put under me." La Salle rose on his
elbow and then sat up. His face was very haggard, but the practical
clear eye dominated it. "These fellows cannot balk me. I have lost all
that makes life, except my friend. But I shall come back and take the
great west yet! A man with a purpose cannot be killed, Tonty. He goes
on. He must go on."
Book III.
FORT ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS.
1687 A. D.
I.
IN AN EAGLE'S NEST.
[Illustration]
"Fort Lewis is in the country of the Illinois and seated on a steep Rock
about two hundred Foot high, the River running at the Bottom of it. It
is only fortified with Stakes and Palisades, and some Houses advancing
to the Edge of the Rock. It has a very spacious Esplanade, or Place of
Arms. The Place is naturally strong, and might be made so by Art, with
little expence. Several of the Natives live in it, in their Huts. I
cannot give an Account of the Latitude it stands in, for want of proper
Instruments to take an Observation, but Nothing can be pleasanter; and
it may be truly affirmed that the Country of the Illinois enjoys all
that can make it accomplished, not only as to Ornament, but also for its
plentiful Production of all Things requisite for the Support of human
Life.
"The Plain, which is watered by the River, is beautified by two small
Hills about half a League distant from the Fort, and those Hills are
cover'd with groves of Oaks, Walnut-Trees, and other Sorts I have named
elsewhere. The Fields are full of Grass, growing up very high. On the
Sides of the Hills is found a gravelly Sort of Stone, very fit to make
Lime for Building. There are also many Clay Pits, fit for making of
Earthen Ware, Bricks, and Tiles, and along the River there are Coal
Pits, the Coal whereof has been try'd and found very good."[17]
The young man lifted his pen from the paper and stood up beside a box in
the storehouse which had served him as table, at the demand of a
priestly voice.
"Joutel, what are you writing there?"
"Monsieur the Abbé, I was merely setting down a few words about this
Fort St. Louis of the Illinois in which we are sheltered. But my candle
is so nearly burned out I will put the leaves aside."
"You were writing nothing else?" insisted La Salle's brother, setting
his shoulders against the storehouse door.
"Not a word, monsieur."
The Abbé's ragged cassock scarcely showed such wear as his face, which
the years that had handled him could by no means have cut into such deep
grooves or moulded into such ghastly hillocks of features.
"I cannot sleep to-night, Joutel," said the Abbé Cavelier.
"I thought you were made very comfortable in the house," remarked
Joutel.
"What can make me comfortable now?"
They stood still, saying nothing, while a candle waved its feeble plume
with uncertainty over its marsh of tallow, making their huge shadows
stagger over log-wall or floor or across piled merchandise. One side of
the room was filled with stacked buffalo hides, on which Joutel,
nightly, took the complete rest he had earned by long tramping in
southern woods.
He rested his knuckles on the box and looked down. A Norman follower of
the Caveliers, he had done La Salle good service, but between the Abbé
and him lay a reason for silence.
"Tonty may reach the Rock at any time,"[18] complained the Abbé to the
floor, though his voice must reach Joutel's ears. "There is nothing I
dread more than meeting Tonty."
"We can leave the Rock before Monsieur de Tonty arrives," said Joutel,
repeating a suggestion he had made many times.
"Certainly, without the goods my brother would have him deliver to me,
without a canoe or any provision whatever for our journey!"
"They say here that Monsieur de Tonty led only two hundred Indians and
fifty Frenchmen to aid the new governor in his war against the
Iroquois," observed Joutel. "He may not come back at all."
[Illustration: "Joutel, what are you writing there?"--_Page 169._]
"I have thought of that," the Abbé mused. "If Tonty be dead we are
indeed wasting our time here, when we ought to be well on our way to
Quebec, to say naught of the voyage to France. But this fellow in charge
of the Rock refuses to honor my demands without more authority."
"He received us most kindly, and we have been his guests a month," said
Joutel.
"I would be his guest no longer than this passing night if my
difficulties were solved," said the Abbé. "For there is even Colin's
sister to torment me. I know not where she is,--whether in Montreal or
in the wilderness between Montreal and this fort. If I had taken her
back with Colin to France, she would now be safe with my mother. There
was another evidence of my poor brother's madness! He was determined
Mademoiselle Cavelier should be sent out to Fort St. Louis. When he
sailed on that last great voyage, he sat in one of the ships the king
furnished him and in the last lines he wrote his mother refused to tell
her his destination! And at the same time he wrote instructions to the
nuns of St. Joseph concerning the niece whose guardian he never was. She
must be sent to Fort St. Louis at the first safe opportunity! She was to
have a grant in this country to replace her fortune which he had used.
And this he only told me during his fever at St. Domingo on the voyage."
Joutel folded and put away his notes. The Abbé's often repeated
complaints seldom stirred a reply from him. Though on this occasion he
thought of saying,--
"Monsieur de Tonty may bring news of her from Montreal."
"You understand, Joutel," exclaimed the Abbé, approaching the candle,
"that it is best,--that it is necessary not to tell Tonty what we know?"
"I have understood what you said, Monsieur the Abbé."
"You are the only man who gives me anxiety. All the rest are willing to
keep silence. Is it not my affair? I wish you would cease writing your
scraps. It irritates me to come into this storehouse and find you
writing your scraps." He looked severely at the young man, who leaned
against the box making no further promise or reply. Then seizing the
candle, the Abbé stepped to a bed made of bales, where, wrapped in skins
and blankets, young Colin Cavelier lay uttering the acknowledgement of
peaceful sleep. Another boy lay similarly wrapped on the floor beside
him.
The priest's look at these two was brief. He went on to the remaining
man in the room, a hairy fellow, lying coiled among hides and pressed
quite into a corner. The man appeared unconscious, emitting his breath
in short puffs.
Abbé Cavelier gazed upon him with shudders.
The over-taxed candle flame stooped and expired, the scent of its
funeral pile rising from a small red point in darkness.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Joutel. English Translation "from the edition just published at
Paris, 1714 A. D."
[18] "Le Rocher," this natural fortress was commonly called by the
French. See Charlevoix.
II.
THE FRIEND AND BROTHER
While Abbé Cavelier stood in the storehouse, Tonty, a few miles away,
was setting his camp around a spring of sulphur water well known to the
hunters of St. Louis. The spring boiled its white sand from unmeasured
depths at the root of an oak, and spread a pool which slipped over its
barrier in a thin stream to the Illinois.
Though so near his fortress, Tonty and Greysolon du Lhut, fresh from
their victorious campaign with the governor of New France against the
Iroquois, thought it not best to expose their long array of canoes in
darkness on the river. They had with them[19] women and
children,--fragments of families, going under their escort to join the
colony at Fort St. Louis.
Du Lhut's army of Indians from the upper lakes had returned directly to
their own villages to celebrate the victory; but that unwearied rover
himself, with a few followers, had dragged his gouty limbs across
portages to the Illinois, to sojourn longer with Tonty.
Their camp was some distance from the river, up an alluvial slope of
the north shore. Opposite, a line of cliffs, against which the Illinois
washes for miles, caught the eye through darkness by its sandy glint;
and not far away, on the north side of the river, that long ridge known
as Buffalo Rock made a mass of gloom.
Dependent and unarmed colonists were placed in the centre of the camp.
Tonty himself, with his usual care on this journey, had helped to pitch
a tent of blankets and freshly cut poles for Mademoiselle Barbe Cavelier
and the officer's wife, who clung to her in the character of guardian.
The other immigrants understood and took pleasure in this small
temporary home, built nightly for a girl whose proud silence among them
they forgave as the caprice of beauty. The wife of the officer
Bellefontaine, on her part, rewarded Tonty by attaching her ceaseless
presence to Barbe. She was a timid woman, very small-eyed and silent,
who took refuge in Barbe's larger shadow, and found it convenient for an
under-sized duenna whose husband was so far in the wilds.
Mademoiselle Cavelier was going to Fort St. Louis at the first
opportunity since her uncle La Salle's request, made three years before.
At this time it was not known whether La Salle had succeeded or failed
in his last enterprise. He had again convinced the king. His seigniories
and forts were restored to him, and governor's agents and associates
driven out of his possessions. He had sailed from France with a fleet of
ships, carrying a large colony to plant at the Mississippi's mouth. His
brother the Abbé Cavelier, two nephews, priests, artisans, young men,
and families were in his company, which altogether numbered over four
hundred people.
Fogs or storms, or dogged navigators disagreeing with and disobeying
him, had robbed him of his destination; for news came back to France, by
a returning ship, of loss and disaster and a colony dropped like
castaways on some inlet of the Gulf.
The evening meal was eaten and sentinels were posted. Even petulant
children had ceased to fret within the various enclosures. Indians and
Frenchmen lay asleep under their canoes which they had carried from the
river, and by propping with stones or stakes at one side, converted into
low-roofed shelters.
Barbe's tent was beside the spring near the camp-fire. She could, by
parting overlapped blanket edges, look out of her cloth house into those
living depths of bubbling white sand, so like the thoughts of young
maids. Two or three fallen leaves, curled into quaint craft, slid across
the pool's surface, hung at its barrier, and one after the other slipped
over and disappeared along the thread of water. A hollow of light was
scooped above the camp-fire, outside of which darkness stood an
impenetrable rind, for the sky had all day been thickened by clouds.
The Demoiselle Bellefontaine, tucked neatly as a mole under her ridge,
rested from her fears in sleep; and Barbe made ready to lie down also,
sweeping once more the visible world with a lingering eye. She saw an
Indian creeping on hands and knees toward Tonty's lodge. He entered
darkness the moment she saw him. The girl arose trembling and put on her
clothes. She had caught no impression of his tribe; but if he were a
warrior of the camp, his crawling so secretly must threaten harm to
Tonty. She did not distinctly know what she ought to do, except warn
Monsieur de Tonty.
[Illustration]
But on a sudden the iron-handed commandant ran past her tent, shouting
to his men. There was a sound like the rushing of bees through the air,
and horrible faces smeared with paint, tattooed bodies, and hands
brandishing weapons closed in from darkness; the men of the camp rose up
with answering yells, and the flash and roar of muskets surrounded Barbe
as if she were standing in some nightmare world of lightning and
thunder. She heard the screams of children and frightened mothers. She
saw Tonty in meteor rushes rallying men, and striking down, with nothing
but his iron hand, a foe who had come to quarters too close for
fire-arms. Indian after Indian fell under that sledge, and a cry of
terror in Iroquois French, which she could understand, rose through the
whoop of invasion,--
"The Great-Medicine-Hand! The Great-Medicine-Hand!"
Brands were caught from the fire and thrown like bolts, sparks hissing
as they flew. Her tent was overturned and she fell under it with the
Demoiselle Bellefontaine, who uttered muffled squeals.
When Barbe dragged her companion out of the midst of poles, all the
hurricane of action had passed by. Its rush could be heard down the
slope, then the splashing of bodies and tumultuous paddling in the
river. Guns yet flashed. She heard Frenchmen and Illinois running with
their canoes down to the water to give chase. Farther and farther away
sounded the retreat, and though women and children continued to make
outcry, Barbe could hear no groans.
The brands of the fire were still scattered, but hands were busy
collecting and bringing them back,--processions of gigantic glow-worms
meeting by dumb appointment in a nest of hot ashes and trodden logs. All
faces were drowned in the dark until these re-united embers fitfully
brought them out. A crowd of frightened immigrants drew around the
blaze, calling each other by name, and demanding to know who was
scalped.
Barbe saw nothing better to do than to stand beside her wrecked tent,
and the Demoiselle Bellefontaine burrowed closely to her, uttering
distressed noises.
The pursuers presently returned and quieted the camp. Tonty had not lost
a man, though a few were wounded. The attacking party carried off with
them every trace of their repulse.
Overturned lodges were now set straight, and as soon as Bellefontaine's
wife found hers inhabitable she hid herself within it. But Barbe waited
to ask the busy commandant,--
"Monsieur de Tonty, have you any wound?"
"No, mademoiselle," he answered, pausing to breathe himself, and seize
upon an interview so unusual. "I hope you have not been greatly
disturbed. The Iroquois are now entirely driven off, and they will not
venture to attack us again."
With excited voice Barbe assured him she had remained tranquil through
the battle.
"We do not call this a battle," laughed Tonty. "These were a party of
Senecas, who rallied after defeat and have followed us to our own
country. They tried to take the camp by surprise, and nearly did it; but
Sanomp crept between sentinels and waked me."
"Who is Sanomp, monsieur?"
"Do you remember the Iroquois Indian who came to Father Hennepin's
chapel at Fort Frontenac?"
"Yes, monsieur; was he among these Senecas?"
"The Senecas are his tribe of the Iroquois, mademoiselle. He was among
them; but he has left his people for my sake. These Indians have visions
and obey them. He said the time had come for him to follow me."
"Sanomp was then the Indian I saw creeping toward your tent. Did he
fight against his own people?"
"No, mademoiselle. While Du Lhut and I flew to rouse the camp, he sat
doggedly down where he found me. This was a last chance for the Senecas.
We are so near Fort St. Louis, and almost within shouting distance of
our Miamis on Buffalo Rock. Such security makes sentinels careless.
Sanomp crept ahead of the others and whispered in my ear, taking his
chance of being brained before I understood him. He has proved himself
my friend and brother, mademoiselle, to do this for me, and moreover to
bear the shame of sitting crouched like a squaw through a fray."
"Everybody loves and fears Monsieur de Tonty,"[20] observed Barbe, with
sedate accent.
Tonty breathed deeply.
"Am I an object of fear to you, mademoiselle? Doubtless I have grown
like a buffalo," he ruminated. "Perhaps you feel a natural aversion
toward a man bearing a hand of iron."
"On the contrary, it seemed a great convenience among the Indians,"
murmured Barbe, and Tonty laughed and stood silent.
The camp was again settling to rest, and fewer swarming figures peopled
the darkness. Winding and aspiring through new fuel the camp-fire once
more began to lift its impalpable pavilion, and groups sat around it
beneath that canopy of tremulous light, with rapid talk and gesture
repeating to each other their impressions of the Senecas' attack.
"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, lifting his left hand to his bare head, for
he had rushed hatless into action, "good-night. The guards are
doubled. You are more secure than when you lay down before."
"Good-night, monsieur," replied Barbe, and he opened her tent for her,
when she turned back.
"Monsieur de Tonty," she whispered swiftly, "I have had no chance during
this long journey,--for with you alone would I speak of it,--to demand
if you believe that saying against yourself which they are wickedly
charging to my uncle La Salle?"
"Mademoiselle, how could I believe that Monsieur de la Salle said in
France he wished to be rid of me? One laughs at a rumor like that."
"The tales lately told about his madness are more than I can bear."
"Mademoiselle, Monsieur de la Salle's enemies always called his great
enterprises madness."
"Can you imagine where he now is, Monsieur de Tonty?"
"Oh, heavens!" Tonty groaned. "Often have I said to myself,--Has
Monsieur de la Salle been two years in America, and I have not joined
him, or even spoken with him? It is not my fault! As soon as I believed
he had reached the Gulf of Mexico I descended the Mississippi. I
searched all those countries, every cape and every shore. I demanded of
all the natives where he was, and not one could tell me a word. Judge of
my pain and my dolor."[21]
They stood in such silence as could result from two people's ceasing to
murmur in the midst of high-pitched voices.
"Monsieur de Tonty," resumed Barbe, "do you remember Jeanne le Ber?"
"Mademoiselle, I never saw her."
"She refused my uncle La Salle at Fort Frontenac, and I detested her for
it. In the new church at Montreal she has had a cell made behind the
altar. There she prays day and night. She wears only a blanket, but the
nun who feeds her says her face is like an angel's. Monsieur, Jeanne le
Ber fell with her head bumping the floor,--and I understood her. She had
a spirit fit to match with my uncle La Salle's. She thought she was
right. I forgave her then, for I know, monsieur, she loved my uncle La
Salle."
When Barbe had spoken such daring words she stepped inside her tent and
dropped its curtain.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] "On his return he brought back with him the families of a number
of French immigrants, soldiers, and traders. This arrival of the
wives, sisters, children, and sweethearts of some of the
colonists, after years of separation, was the occasion of great
rejoicing."--John Moses' History of Illinois.
[20] "He was loved and feared by all," says St. Cosme.
[21] Tonty's words in "Dernieres Decouvertes dans L'Amerique
Septentrional."
III.
HALF-SILENCE.
The October of the Mississippi valley--full of mild nights and mellow
days and the shine of ripened corn--next morning floated all the region
around Fort St. Louis in silver vapor. The two small cannon on the Rock
began to roar salutes as soon as Tonty's line of canoes appeared moving
down the river.
To Barbe this was an enchanted land. She sat by the Demoiselle
Bellefontaine and watched its populous beauty unfold. Blue lodge-smoke
arose everywhere. Tonty pointed out the Shawnee settlement eastward, and
the great town of the Illinois northwest of the Rock,--a city of high
lodges shaped like the top of a modern emigrant wagon. He told where
Piankishaws and Weas might be distinguished, how many Shawanoes were
settled beyond the ravine back of the Rock, and how many thousand
people, altogether, were collected in this principality of Monsieur de
la Salle.
A castellated cliff with turrets of glittering sandstone towered above
the boats, but beyond that,--round, bold, and isolated, its rugged
breasts decked with green, its base washed by the river,--the Rock[22]
of St. Louis waited whatever might be coming in its eternal leisure.
Frenchmen and Indians leaped upon earthworks at its top and waved a
welcome side by side, the flag of France flying above their heads.
At Barbe's right hand lay an alluvial valley bordered by a ridge of
hills a mile away. Along this ancient river-bed Indian women left off
gathering maize from standing stalks, and ran joyfully crying out to
receive their victorious warriors. Inmates poured from the settlement of
French cabins opposite and around the Rock. With cannon booming
overhead, Tonty passed its base followed by the people who were to
ascend with him, and landed west of it, on a sandy strip where the
voyager could lay his hand on that rugged fern-tufted foundation. Barbe
and the Demoiselle Bellefontaine followed him along a path cut through
thickets, around moss-softened irregular heights of sandstone, girdled
in below and bulging out above, so that no man could obtain foothold to
scale them. Gnarled tree-roots, like folds of snakes caught between
closing strata, hung, writhed in and out. The path, under pine needles
and fallen leaves, was cushioned with sand white as powdered snow.
Behind the Rock, stretching toward a ravine, were expanses of this lily
sand which looked fresh from the hands of the Maker, as if even a
raindrop had never indented its whiteness.
Three or four foot-holes were cut in the southeast flank of rock wall.
An Indian ran down from above and flung a rope over to Tonty. He mounted
these rocky stirrups first, helped by the rope, and knelt to reach back
for Barbe and the Demoiselle Bellefontaine. The next ascent was up
water-terraced rock to an angle as high as their waists. Here two more
stirrups were cut in the rock. Ferns brushed their faces, and shrubs
stooped over them. The heights were studded thick with gigantic trees
half-stripped of leaves. Rust-colored lichens and lichens hoary like
blanched old men, spread their great seals on stone and soil.
Wide water-terraced steps, looking as if cut for a temple, ascended at
last to the gate. Through this Tonty led his charge upon a dimpled
sward, for care had been taken to keep turf alive in Fort St. Louis.
Recognition and joy were the first sensations of many immigrants
entering, as the people they loved received them. But Barbe felt only
delicious freedom in such a crag castle. There was a sound of the sea in
pine trees all around. The top of the Rock was nearly an acre in extent.
It was fortified by earthworks, except the cliff above the river, which
was set with palisades and the principal dwellings of the fort. There
were besides, a storehouse, a block-house, and several Indian lodges.
But the whole space--so shaded yet so sunny, reared high in air yet
sheltered as a nest--was itself such a temple of security that any
buildings within it seemed an impertinence. The centre, bearing its
flagstaff, was left open.
Two priests, a Récollet and a Sulpitian, met Tonty and the girl he led
in, the Sulpitian receiving her in his arms and bestowing a kiss on her
forehead.
"Oh, my uncle Abbé!" Barbe gasped with surprise. "Is Colin with you? Is
my uncle La Salle here?"
But Tonty, swifter than the Abbé's reply, laid hold of the Récollet
Father and drew him beside Abbé Cavelier, demanding without greeting or
pause for courteous compliment,--
"Is Monsieur de la Salle safe and well? You both come from Monsieur de
la Salle!"
"He was well when we parted from him," replied the Abbé Cavelier,
looking at a bunch of maiden-hair fern which Barbe had caught from a
ledge and tucked in the bosom of her gown. "We left him on the north
branch of the Trinity River, Monsieur de Tonty."
The Récollet said nothing, but kept his eyes fixed on his folded hands.
Tonty, too eager to mark well both bearers of such news, demanded again
impartially,--
"And he was well?"
"He left us in excellent health, monsieur."
"How glad I am to find you in Fort St. Louis!" exclaimed Tonty. "This is
the first direct message I have had from Monsieur de la Salle since he
sailed from France. How many men are in your party? Have you been made
comfortable?"
"Only six, monsieur. We have been made quite comfortable by your officer
Bellefontaine."
[Illustration: "And he was well?"--_Page 192._]
"Monsieur the Abbé, where did Monsieur de la Salle land his colony?"
"On a western coast of the Gulf, monsieur. It was most unfortunate. Ever
since he has been searching for the Mississippi."
"While I searched for him. Oh, Fathers!" Tonty's voice deepened and his
swarthy joyful face set its contrast opposite two downcast churchmen,
"nothing in Fort St. Louis is good enough for messengers from Monsieur
de la Salle. What can I do for you? Did he send me no orders?"
"He did commit a paper to my hand, naming skins and merchandise that he
would have delivered to me, as well as a canoe and provisions for our
journey to New France."
"Come, let me see this paper," demanded Tonty. "Whatever Monsieur de la
Salle orders shall be done at once; but the season is now so advanced
you will not push on to New France until spring."
"That is the very reason, Monsieur de Tonty, why we should push on at
once. We have waited a month for your return. I leave Fort St. Louis
with my party to-morrow, if you will so forward my wishes."
"Monsieur the Abbé, it is impossible! You have yet told me nothing of
all it is necessary for me to know touching Monsieur de la Salle."
"To-morrow," repeated the Abbé Cavelier, "I must set out at dawn, if you
can honor my brother's paper."
Tonty, with a gesture of his left hand, led the way to his quarters
across the esplanade. As Barbe walked behind the Récollet Father, she
wondered why he had given no answer to any of Tonty's questions.
Her brother advanced to meet her, and she ran and gave him her hands and
her cheek to kiss. They had been apart four years, and looked at each
other with scrutinizing gaze. He overtopped her by a head. Barbe
expected to find him tall and rudely masculine, but there was change in
him for which she was not prepared.
"My sister has grown charming," pronounced Colin. "Not as large as the
Caveliers usually are, but like a bird exquisite in make and graceful
motion."
"Oh, Colin, what is the matter?" demanded Barbe, with direct dart. "I
see concealment in your face!"
"What do you see concealed? Perhaps you will tell me that." He became
mottled with those red and white spots which are the blood's protest
against the will.
"The Récollet Father did not answer a word to Monsieur de Tonty's
questions, Colin; and the voice of my uncle the Abbé sounded unnatural.
Is there wicked power in those countries you have visited to make you
all come back like men half asleep from some drug?"
"Yes, there is!" exclaimed the boy; "I hate that wilderness. When we are
once in France I will never venture into such wilds again. They dull me
until my tongue seems dead."
"And, Colin, you did leave my uncle La Salle quite well?"
"It was he who left us. He was in excellent health the last time we saw
him." The boy spoke these words with precision, and Barbe sighed her
relief.
"For myself," she said, "I love this wild world. I shall stay here until
my uncle La Salle arrives."
"Our uncle the Abbé will decide that," replied Colin. "It is unfortunate
that you left Montreal. Your only hope of staying here rests on the hard
journey before us, and the risks we run of meeting winter on the way. I
wish you had been sent to France. I wish we were all in France now."
Colin's face relaxed wistfully.
Two crows were scolding in the trees below them. Barbe felt ready to
weep; as if the tender spirit of autumn had stolen through her, as mists
steal along the hills. She sat down on the grassy earthwork, and Colin
picked some pine needles from a branch and stood silent beside her,
chewing them.
But those vague moods which haunt girlhood held always short dominion
over Barbe. She was in close kinship with the world around, and the life
of the fort began to occupy her.
The Rock was like a small fair with its additional inhabitants, who were
still running about in a confusion of joyful noises. Children, delighted
to be freed from canoes at so bright a time of day, raced across the
centre, or hid behind wigwam or tree, calling to each other. An Indian
stalked across to the front of the Rock, and Barbe watched him reach out
through an opening in the low log palisade. A platform was there built
on the trunks of two leaning cedars. The Indian unwound a windlass and
let down a bucket to the river below. She heard its distant splash and
some of its resounding drips on the way up. Living in Fort St. Louis was
certainly like living on a cloud.
"I will go into the officers' house," suggested Colin, "and see how the
Abbé's demands are met by Monsieur de Tonty. We shall then know if we
are to set out for Quebec to-morrow."
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Parkman states its actual height to be only a hundred and
twenty-five feet.
IV.
A FÊTE ON THE ROCK.[23]
Barbe did not object or assent. Youth shoves off any evil day by
ignoring it, and Colin left her in lazy enjoyment of the populous place.
The Demoiselle Bellefontaine approached to ask if she desired to come to
the apartment the commandant reserved for her; but Barbe replied that
she wished to sit there and amuse herself awhile longer with the novelty
of Fort St. Louis.
A child she had noticed on the journey brought her, as great treasure, a
handful of flints and crumble-dust from the sandstone. They sorted the
stuff on her knee,--fat-faced dark French child and young girl fine
enough to be the sylvan spirit of the Rock.
Mademoiselle Cavelier's wardrobe was by no means equal to that gorgeous
period in which she lived, being planned by her uncle the Abbé and
executed by the frugal and exact hands of a self-denying sisterhood. But
who can hide a girl's supple slimness in a gown plain as a nun's, or
take the blossom-burnish off her face with colonial caps? Dark curls
showed around her temples. Barbe's aquiline face had received scarcely a
mark since Tonty saw it at Fort Frontenac. The gentle monotonous
restraint of convent life had calmed her wild impulses, and she was in
that trance of expecting great things to come, which is the beautiful
birthright of youth.
While she was sorting arrow-head chips, her uncle came out of Tonty's
quarters and cast his eye about the open space in search of her. At his
approach Barbe's playmate slipped away, and the Abbé placed himself in
front of her with his hands behind him.
Barbe gave him a scanty look, feeling sure he came to announce the next
day's journey. This man, having many excellences, yet roused constant
antagonism in his brother and the niece most like that brother. When he
protruded his lower lip and looked determined, Barbe thought if the sin
could be set aside a plunge in the river would be better than this
journey.
"I have a proposal for you, my child," said the Abbé. "It comes from
Monsieur de Tonty. He tells me my brother La Salle encouraged him to
hope for this alliance, and I must declare I see no other object my
brother La Salle had in view when he sent you to Fort St. Louis.
Monsieur de Tonty understands the state of your fortune. On his part, he
holds this seigniory jointly with my brother, and the traffic he is able
to control brings no mean revenue. It is true he lacks a hand. But it
hath been well replaced by the artificer, and he comes of an Italian
family of rank."
Barbe's head was turned so entirely away that the mere back of a scarlet
ear was left to the Abbé. One hand clutched her lap and the other pulled
grass with destructive fingers.
"Having stated Monsieur de Tonty's case I will now state mine,"
proceeded her uncle. "I leave this fort before to-morrow dawn. I must
take you with me or leave you here a bride. The journey is perilous for
a small party and we may not reach France until next year. And an
alliance like this will hardly be found in France for a girl of
uncertain fortune. Therefore I have betrothed you to Monsieur de Tonty,
and you will be married this evening at vespers."
[Illustration]
"You have stated Monsieur de Tonty's case, and you have stated yours,"
said Barbe. "I will now state mine. I will not be married to any man at
a day's notice."
"May I ask what it is you demand, mademoiselle?" inquired the Abbé, with
irony, "if you propose to re-arrange any marriage your relatives make
for you."
"I demand a week between the betrothal and the marriage."
"A week, mademoiselle!" her uncle laughed. "We who set out must give
winter a week's start of us for such a whim! You will be married
to-night or you will return with me to France. I will now send Monsieur
de Tonty to you to be received as your future husband."
"I will scratch him!" exclaimed Barbe, with a flash of perverseness, at
which her uncle's cassocked shoulders shook until he disappeared within
doors.
She left the earthwork and went to the entrance side of the fort. There
she stood, whispering with a frown,--"Oh, if you please, monsieur, keep
your distance! Do not come here as any future husband of mine!"
She had, however, much time in which to prepare her mind before Tonty
appeared.
All eyes on the Rock followed him. He shone through the trees, a
splendid figure in the gold and white uniform of France, laid aside for
years but resumed on this great occasion.
When he came up to Barbe he stopped and folded his arms, saying
whimsically,--
"Mademoiselle, I have not the experience to know how one should approach
his betrothed. I never was married before."
"It is my case, also, monsieur," replied Barbe.
"How do you like Fort St. Louis?" proceeded Tonty.
"I am enchanted with it."
"You delight me when you say that. During the last four years I have not
made an improvement about the land or in any way strengthened this
position without thinking, Mademoiselle Cavelier may sometime approve of
this. We are finding a new way of heating our houses with underground
flues made of stone and mortar."
"That must be agreeable, monsieur."
"We often have hunting parties from the Rock. This country is full of
game."
"It is pleasant to amuse one's self, monsieur."
Tonty had many a time seen the silent courtship of the Illinois. He
thought now of those motionless figures sitting side by side under a
shelter of rushes or bark from morning till night without exchanging a
word.
"Mademoiselle, I hope this marriage is agreeable to you?"
"Monsieur de Tonty," exclaimed Barbe, "I have simply been flung at your
head to suit the convenience of my relatives."
"Was that distasteful to you?" he wistfully inquired.
"I am not fit for a bride. No preparation has been made for me."
"I thought of making some preparation myself," confessed Tonty. "I got a
web of brocaded silk from France several years ago."
"To be clothed like a princess by one's bridegroom," said Barbe,
wringing her gown skirt and twisting folds of it in her fingers. "That
might be submitted to. But I could not wear the web of brocade around me
like a blanket."
"There are fifty needlewomen on the Rock who can make it in a day,
mademoiselle."
"And in short, monsieur, to be betrothed in the morning and married the
same day is what no girl will submit to!"
Tonty, in the prime of his manhood and his might as a lover was too
imposing a figure for her to face; she missed seeing his swarthy pallor
as he answered,--
"I understand from all this, mademoiselle, that you care nothing for me.
I have felt betrothed to you ever since I declared myself to Monsieur de
la Salle at Fort Frontenac. How your pretty dreaming of the Rock of St.
Louis and your homesick cry for this place did pierce me! I said, 'She
shall be my wife, and I will bring home everything that can be obtained
for her. That small face shall be heart's treasure to me. Its eyes will
watch for me over the Rock.' On our journey here, many a night I took my
blanket and lay beside your tent, thanking the saints for the sweet
privilege of bringing home my bride. Mademoiselle," said Tonty,
trembling, "I will kill any other man who dares approach you. Yet,
mademoiselle, I could not annoy you by the least grief! Oh, teach a
frontiersman what to say to please a woman!"
"Monsieur de Tonty," panted Barbe. "You please me too well, indeed! It
was necessary to come to an understanding. You should not make me
say,--for I am ashamed to tell,--how long I have adored you!"
As Tonty's quick Italian blood mounted from extreme anguish to extreme
rapture, he laughed with a sob.
Fifty needlewomen on the Rock made in a day a gown of the web of
brocaded silk. The fortress was full of preparation for evening
festivity. Hunters went out and brought in game, and Indians carried up
fish, new corn, and honey from wild bee trees. All the tables which the
dwellings afforded were ranged in two rows at opposite sides of the
place of arms, and decorated with festoons of ferns and cedar, and such
late flowers as exploring children could find.
Some urchins ascended the Rock with an offering of thick-lobed prickly
cactus which grew plentifully in the sand. The Demoiselle Bellefontaine
labored from place to place, helping her husband to make this the most
celebrated fête ever attempted in Fort St. Louis.
As twilight settled--and it slowly settled--on the summit, roast
venison, buffalo steaks, and the odor of innumerable dishes scented the
air. Many candles pinned to the branches of trees like vast candelabra,
glittered through the dusk. Crows sat on the rocks below and gabbled of
the corn they had that day stolen from lazy Indian women.
There was no need of chapel or bell in a temple fortress. All the
inhabitants of the Rock stood as witnesses. Colin brought Barbe from the
dwelling with the greater part of the web of brocaded silk dragged in
grandeur behind her. Tonty kissed her hand and led her before the
priests. When the ceremony ended a salute was fired.
The Illinois town could hear singing on the Rock and see that stronghold
glittering as if it had been carried by torches. Music of violin and
horn, laughter, dancing, and gay voices in repartee sounded on there
through half the hours of the night.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] "The joyous French held balls, gay suppers, and wine parties on
the Rock."--Old History of Illinois.
V.
THE UNDESPAIRING NORMAN.
The morning star yet shone and the river valley was drenched with half
frosty dew, and filled with silver mist when the Abbé Cavelier and his
party descended to their canoes and set off up the river. They had made
their farewells the night before, but Tonty and Greysolon du Lhut
appeared, Tonty accompanying them down the descent. He came up with a
bound before the boat was off, thundered at Bellefontaine's door, and
pulled that sleepy officer into the open air, calling at his ear,--
"What fellow is this in the Abbé's party who kept out of my sight until
he carried his load but now to the canoe?"
"You must mean Teissier, Monsieur de Tonty. He has lain ailing in the
storehouse."
"Look,--yonder he goes."
Tonty made Bellefontaine lean over the eastern earthwork, but even the
boat was blurred upon the river.
"That was Jolycoeur," declared Tonty, "whom Monsieur de la Salle
promised me he would never take into his service again. That fellow
tried to poison Monsieur de la Salle at Fort Frontenac."
"Monsieur de Tonty," remonstrated the subordinate, "I know him well. He
was here a month. He told me he was enlisted at St. Domingo, while
Monsieur de la Salle lay in a fever, to replace men who deserted. He is
a pilot and his name is Teissier."
"Whatever his real name may be we had him here on the Rock before you
came, and he was called Jolycoeur."
"At any rate," said Du Lhut, "his being of Abbé Cavelier's company
argues that he hath done La Salle no late harm."
Tonty thought about the matter while light grew in the sky, but
dismissed it when the priest of Fort St. Louis summoned his great family
to matins. On such pleasant mornings they were chanted in the open air.
The sun rose, drawing filaments from the mass of vapor like a spinner,
and every shred disappeared while the eye watched it. Preparations went
forward for breakfast, while children's and birds' voices already
chirped above and below the steep ascent.
One urchin brought Tonty a paper, saying it was Monsieur Joutel's, the
young man who slept in the storehouse and was that morning gone from the
fort.
"Did he tell you to give it to me?" inquired Tonty.
"Monsieur," complained the lad, "he pinned it in the cap of my large
brother and left order it was to be given to you after two days. But my
large brother hath this morning pinned it in my cap, and it may work me
harm. Besides, I desire to amuse myself by the river, and if I lost
Monsieur Joutel's paper I should get whipped."
"I commend you," laughed Tonty, as he took the packet. "You must have no
secrets from your commandant."
The child leaped, relieved, toward the gate, and this heavy
communication shook between the iron and the natural hand. Tonty spread
it open on his right gauntlet.
He read a few moments with darkening countenance. Then the busy people
on the Rock were startled by a cry of awful anguish. Tonty rushed to the
centre of the esplanade, flinging the paper from him, and shouted, "Du
Lhut--men of Fort St. Louis! Monsieur de la Salle has been murdered in
that southern wilderness! We have had one of the assassins hiding here
in our storehouse! Get out the boats!"
[Illustration]
Men and women paused in their various business, and children, like
frightened sheep, gathered closely around their mothers. The clamorous
cry which disaster wrings from excitable Latins burst out in every part
of the fortress. Du Lhut grasped the paper and read it while he limped
after Tonty.
With up-spread arms the Italian raved across the open space, this
far-reaching calamity widening like an eternally expanding circle around
him. His rage at the assassins of La Salle--among whom he had himself
placed a man whom he thought fit to be trusted--and his sorrow broke
bounds in such sobs as men utter.
"Oh, that I might brain them with this hand! Oh, wretched people on
these plains! What hope remains to us? What will become of all these
families, whose resource he was, whose sole consolation! It is despair
for us! Thou wert one of the greatest men of this age,--so useful to
France by thy great discoveries, so strong in thy virtues, so respected,
so cherished by people even the most barbarous. That such a man should
be massacred by wretches, and the earth did not engulf them or the
lightning strike them dead!"[24]
Tonty's blood boiled in his face.
"Why do you all stand here like rocks instead of getting out the boats?
Get out the boats! They stripped my master; they left his naked body to
wolves and crows on Trinity River. Get ready the canoes. I will hunt
those assassins, down to the last man, through every forest on this
continent!"
"You did not finish this relation,"[25] shouted Du Lhut at his ear. "Can
you get revenge on dead men? The men who actually put their hands in the
blood of La Salle are all dead. Those who killed not each other the
Indians killed."
Tonty turned with a furious push at Du Lhut which sent him staggering
backward.
"Is Jolycoeur dead? I will run down this forgiving priest of a brother
of Monsieur de la Salle's, and the assassin he harbored here under his
protection he shall give up to justice!"
"Thou mad-blooded loyal-hearted Italian!" exclaimed Du Lhut, dragging
him out of the throng and holding him against a tree, "dost thou think
nobody can feel this wrong except thee? I would go with thee anywhere if
it could be revenged. But hearken to me, Henri de Tonty; if you go after
the Abbé it will appear that you wish to strip him of the goods he bore
away."
"He brought an order from Monsieur de la Salle," retorted Tonty. "On
that order I would give him the last skin in the storehouse. What I will
strip him of is the wretch he carries in his forgiving bosom!"
"And you will put a scandal upon this young girl your bride, who has
this sorrow also to bear. Are you determined to denounce her uncle and
her brother before this fortress as unworthy to be the kinsmen of La
Salle? She has now no consolation left except in you. Will you burn the
wound of her sorrow with the brand of shame?"
Tonty leaned against the tree, pallor succeeding the pulsing of blood in
his face. He looked at Du Lhut with piteous black eyes, like a stag
brought down in full career.
"The Abbé Cavelier," Bellefontaine was whispering to one of the
immigrants, "carried from this fortress above four thousand livres worth
of furs, besides other goods!"
"And left mademoiselle married without fortune," muttered back the
other. "He did well for himself by concealing the death of Sieur de la
Salle."
Men and women looked mournfully at each other as Tonty walked across the
fort and shut himself in his house. They wondered at hearing no crying
within it such as a woman might utter upon the first shock of her grief.
With La Salle's own instinct Barbe locked herself within her room. It
was not known to the people of Fort St. Louis, it was not known even to
Tonty, how she lay on the floor with her teeth set and faced this fact.
Tonty sat in his door overlooking the cliff all day.
Clouds sailed over the Rock. The lingering robins quarrelled with crows.
That glittering pinnacled cliff across the ravine shone like white
castle turrets. Smoke went up from the lodges on the plains as it had
done during the six months La Salle's bones were bleaching on Trinity
River; but now a whisper like the whisper of wind in September
corn-leaves was rushing from lodge to lodge. Tonty heard tribe after
tribe take up the lament for the dead.
Not only was it a lament for La Salle; but it was also for their own
homes. He and Tonty had brought them back from exile, had banded them
for strength and helped them ward off the Iroquois. His unstinted
success meant their greatest prosperity. The undespairing Norman's death
foreshadowed theirs, with all that silence and desolation which must
fall on the Rock of St. Louis before another civilization possessed it.
Night came, and the leaves sifted down in its light breeze as if only
half inclined to their descent. The children had been quieted all day.
To them the revelry of the night before seemed a far remote occasion, so
instantly are joy and trouble set asunder.
The rich valley of the Illinois grew dimmer and dimmer under the
starlight. Tonty could no longer see the river's brown surface, but he
could distinguish the little trail of foam down its centre churned by
rapids above. Twisted pines, which had tangled their roots in
everlasting rock, hung below him, children of the air. Some man of the
garrison approached the windlass and let down the bucket with creak and
rattle. He waited with the ear of custom for its clanking cry as it
plunged, its gurgle and struggle in the water, and the many splashes
with which it ascended.
His face showed as a pale spot in the dusk when he rose from the
doorstep and came into the room to light a candle. Barbe must be brought
out from her silent ordeal and comforted and fed.
Tonty set his lighted candle on a table and considered how he should
approach her door. The furniture of the room had been hastily carried in
that morning from its uses in the fête. The apartment was a rude
frontier drawing-room, having furs, deer antlers, and shining canoe
paddles for its ornaments.
While Tonty hesitated, the door on the fortress side opened, and La
Salle stepped into the room.
[Illustration]
Tonty's voice died in his throat. The joy and terror of this sight held
him without power to move.
It was La Salle; a mere shred of his former person, girt like some
skeleton apostle with a buffalo hide which left his arm bones naked as
well as his journey roughened feet. Beard had started through his pallid
skin, and this and his wild hair the wilderness had dressed with dead
leaves. A piece of buffalo leather banded his forehead like a coarse
crown, yet blood had escaped its pressure, for a dried track showed
darkly down the side of his neck. Tonty gave no thought to the manitou
of a waterfall from whose shrine La Salle had probably stripped that
Indian offering of a buffalo robe. It did not seem to him incredible
that Robert Cavelier should survive what other men called a death wound,
and naked, bleeding, and starving, should make his way for six months
through jungles of forest, to his friend.
Hoarse and strong from the depths of his breast Tonty brought out the
cry,--
"O my master, my master!"
"Tonty," spoke La Salle, standing still, with the rapture of achievement
in his eyes, "I have found the lost river!"
He moved across the room and went out of the cliff door. His gaunt limbs
and shaggy robe were seen one instant against the palisades, as if his
eye were passing that starlit valley in review, the picture in miniature
of the great west. He was gone while Tonty looked at him.
The whisper of water at the base of the rock, and of the sea's sweet
song in pines, took the place of the voice which had spoken.
A lad began to carol within the fortress, but hushed himself with sudden
remembrance. That brooding body of darkness, which so overlies us all
that its daily removal by sunlight is a continued miracle, pressed
around this silent room resisted only by one feeble candle. And Tonty
stood motionless in the room, blanched and exalted by what he had seen.
Barbe's opening her chamber door startled him and set in motion the
arrested machinery of life.
"What has been here, monsieur?" she asked under her breath.
Tonty, without replying, moved to receive her, crushing under his foot a
beech-nut which one of the children of the fortress had dropped upon the
floor. Barbe's arms girded his great chest.
"Oh, monsieur," she said with a sob, "I thought I heard a voice in this
room, and I know I would myself break through death to come back to
you!"
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Translated from Tonty's lament over La Salle in "Dernieres
Decouvertes dans L'Amerique Septentrional."
[25] Joutel's Journal gives a long and exact account of La Salle's
assassination and the fate of all who were concerned in it.
The murder, by the conspirators, of his nephew Moranget, his
servant Saget, and his Indian hunter Nika--which preceded and
led to his death--is not mentioned in this romance.
To this day it is not certainly known what became of La Salle's
body. Father Anastase Douay, the Récollect priest who
witnessed his death, told Joutel at the time that the
conspirators stripped it and threw it in the bushes. But
afterward he declared La Salle lived an hour, and he himself
confessed the dying man, buried him when dead, and planted a
cross on his grave. So excellent a historian as Garneau gives
credit to this story.
In reality the Abbé Cavelier and his party treated Tonty with
greater cruelty than the romancer describes. They lived over
winter on his hospitality, departed loaded with his favors,
and told him not a word of the tragedy.
Joutel's account of it, much condensed from the old English
translation, reads thus:--
"The conspirators hearing the shot (fired by La Salle
to attract their attention) concluded it was Monsieur
de la Sale who was come to seek them. They made ready
their arms and Duhaut passed the river with
Larcheveque. The first of them spying Monsieur de la
Sale at a Distance, as he was coming towards them,
advanced and hid himself among the high weeds, to wait
his passing by, so that Monsieur de la Sale suspected
nothing, and having not so much as charged his Piece
again, saw the aforesaid Larcheveque at a good distance
from him, and immediately asked for his nephew
Moranget, to which Larcheveque answered, That he was
along the river. At the same time the Traitor Duhaut
fired his Piece and shot Monsieur de la Sale thro' the
head, so that he dropped down dead on the Spot, without
speaking one word.
"Father Anastase, who was then by his side, stood stock
still in a Fright, expecting the same fate,... but the
murderer Duhaut put him out of that Dread, bidding him
not to fear, for no hurt was intended him; that it was
Dispair that had prevailed with them to do what he
saw....
"The shot which had killed Monsieur de la Sale was a
signal ... for the assassins to draw near. They all
repaired to the place where the wretched corpse lay,
which they barbarously stripped to the shirt, and vented
their malice in opprobrious language. The surgeon Liotot
said several times in scorn and derision, There thou
liest, Great Bassa, there thou liest. In conclusion they
dragged it naked among the bushes and left it exposed to
the ravenous wild Beasts.
"When they came to our camp ... Monsieur Cavelier the
priest could not forbear telling them that if they would
do the same by him he would forgive them his" (La
Salle's) "murder.... They answered they had Nothing to
say to him.
... "We were all obliged to stifle our Resentment that
it might not appear, for our Lives depended upon it....
We dissembled so well that they were not suspicious of
us, and that Temptation we were under of making them
away in revenge for those they had murdered, would have
easily prevailed and been put in execution, had not
Monsieur
Cavelier, the Priest, always positively opposed it,
alleging that we ought to leave vengeance to God."
The Récollet priest, who had seen La Salle's death, answered
no questions at Fort St. Louis. Teissier, one of the
conspirators, had obtained the Abbé's pardon. The others
could truly say La Salle was well when they last saw him.
VI.
TO-DAY.
It is recorded that the Abbé Cavelier and his party arrived safely in
France, and that he then concealed the death of La Salle for awhile that
he might get possession of property which would have been seized by La
Salle's creditors. He died "rich and very old" says the historian,[26]
though he was unsuccessful in a petition which he made with his nephew
to the king, to have all the explorer's seigniorial propriety in America
put in his possession. Like Father Hennepin--who returned to France and
wrote his entertaining book to prove himself a greater man than La
Salle--the Abbé Cavelier was skilful in turning loss to profit.
It is also recorded that Henri de Tonty, at his own expense, made a long
search with men, canoes, and provisions, for La Salle's Texan
colony--left by the king to perish at the hands of Indians; that he was
deserted by every follower except his Indian and one Frenchman, and
nearly died in swamps and canebrakes before he again reached the fort on
the Illinois.
* * * * *
To-day you may climb the Rock of St. Louis,--called now Starved Rock
from the last stand which the Illinois made as a tribe on that fortress,
a hundred years ago, when the Iroquois surrounded and starved them,--and
you may look over the valley from which Tonty heard the death lament
arise.
A later civilization has cleared it of Indian lodges and set it with
villages and homesteads. A low ridge of the old earthwork yet remains on
the east verge. Behind the Rock, slopes of milk-white sand still stretch
toward a shallow ravine. Beyond that stands a farmhouse full of the
relics of French days. The iron-handed commandant of the Rock has left
some hint of his strong spirit thereabouts, for even the farmer's boy
will speak his name with the respect boys have for heroic men.
Crosses, beads, old iron implements, and countless remains of La Salle's
time, turn up everywhere in the valley soil.
Ferns spring, lush and vivid, from the lichened lips of that great
sandstone body. The stunted cedars lean over its edge still singing the
music of the sea. Sunshine and shade and nearness to the sky are yet
there. You see depressions in the soil like grass-healed wounds, made by
the tearing out of huge trees; but local tradition tells you these are
the remains of pits dug down to the rock by Frenchmen searching for
Tonty's money. At the same time, local tradition is positive that Tonty
came back, poor, to the Rock to die, in 1718.
Death had stripped him of every tie. He had helped to build that city
near the Mississippi's mouth which was La Salle's object, and had also
helped found Mobile. The great west owes more to him than to any other
man who labored to open it to the world. Yet historians say the date of
his death is unknown, and tradition around the Rock says he crept up the
stony path an old and broken man, helped by his Indian and a priest,
died gazing from its summit, and was buried at its west side. The
tribes, while they held the land, continued to cover his grave with wild
roses. But men may tread over him now, for he lies lost in the earth as
La Salle was lost in the wilderness of the south.
No justice ever was done to this man who gave to his friends with both
hand of flesh and hand of iron, caring nothing for recompense; and whom
historians, priests, tradition, savages, and his own deeds unite in
praising. But as long as the friendship of man for man is beautiful, as
long as the multitude with one impulse lift above themselves those men
who best express the race, Henri de Tonty's memory must stand like the
Rock of St. Louis.[27]
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Parkman.
[27] "In 1690 the proprietorship of Fort St. Louis was granted to
Tonty jointly with La Forest.... In 1702 the governor of
Canada, claiming that the charter of the fort had been
violated, decided to discontinue it. Although thus officially
abandoned it seems to have been occupied as a trading post
until 1718. Deprived of his command and property, Tonty
engaged with Le Moyne d'Iberville in various successful
expeditions."--John Moses' History of Illinois.
THE END.
Transcriber's Note
The following errors are noted. The page numbers in this table refer to
those of the original. The French 'Récollet' is spelled twice as
'Récollect'. The instance appearing in a footnote is left as is, but
that in the text itself was changed to match all other occurrences.
56 | He is no stupid | _sic._
| |
73 | No more than half your party, monsieur[.] | Added period.
| |
190 | flank of rock wall | _sic._
| |
197 | The Récolle[c]t Father did not answer | Removed 'c' for
| | consistency.
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