“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 Jolycœur is the only person who makes me as wretched as I ought to be.”
“Discipline through Jolycœur,” 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, ‘Jolycœur, 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 Jolycœur, 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.
“Jolycœur 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, Jolycœur 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.
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.”
“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. Jolycœur,[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 Jolycœur, who had been pushed against him in the throng. Jolycœur, 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?”
Jolycœur, not daring to reply to a priest, slunk away in the crowd.
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.”
“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 Jolycœur—”
“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!”
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.
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.
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.