PRES-DE-VILLE.
Fifteen years have gone by, and a few months. In December 1775, on
the rock of Quebec, Great Britain clung with a last desperate grip
upon Canada, which on that September day in 1760 had passed so
completely into her hands.
All through December the snow had fallen almost incessantly; and
almost incessantly, through the short hours of daylight, the American
riflemen, from their lodgings in the suburbs close under the walls,
had kept up a fire on the British defenders of Quebec. For the
assailants of Great Britain now were her own children; and the man
who led them was a British subject still, and but three years ago had
been a British officer.
Men see their duty by different lights, but Richard Montgomery had
always seen his clearly. He had left the British Army for sufficient
cause; had sought America, and married an American wife. He served
the cause of political freedom now, and meant to serve it so as to
win an imperishable name. The man whom King George had left for ten
years a captain had been promoted by Congress Brigadier-General at a
stroke. It recognised the greatness of which his own soul had always
assured him. "Come what will," he had promised his young wife at
parting, "you shall never be ashamed of me." His men adored him for
his enthusiasm, his high and almost boyish courage, his dash, his
bright self-confidence.
And his campaign had been a triumph. Ticonderoga and Crown Point had
fallen before him. He had swept down the Richelieu, capturing St.
John's, Chambly, Sorel. Montreal had capitulated without a blow.
And so success had swept him on to the cliffs of Quebec--there to
dash itself and fail as a spent wave.
He would not acknowledge this; not though smallpox had broken out
among his troops and they, remembering that their term of service
was all but expired, began to talk of home; not though his guns,
mounted on frozen mounds, had utterly failed to batter a way into the
city. As a subaltern he had idolised Wolfe, and here on the ground
of Wolfe's triumphant stroke he still dreamed of rivalling it.
In Quebec a cautious phlegmatic British General sat and waited,
keeping, as the moonless nights drew on, his officers ready against
surprise. For a week they had slept in their clothes and with their
arms beside them.
From the lower town of Quebec a road, altered since beyond
recognition, ran along the base of Cape Diamond between the cliff and
the river. As it climbed it narrowed to a mere defile, known as
Pres-de-Ville, having the scarped rock on one hand and on the other a
precipice dropping almost to the water's edge. Across this defile
the British had drawn a palisade and built, on the edge of the pass
above, a small three-pounder battery, with a _hangar_ in its rear to
shelter the defenders.
Soon after midnight on the last morning of the year, a man came
battling his way down from the upper town to the Pres-de-Ville
barrier. A blinding snow-storm raged through the darkness, and
although it blew out of the north the cliff caught its eddies and
beat them back swirling about the useless lantern he carried.
The freshly fallen snow encumbering his legs held him steady against
the buffets of the wind; and foot by foot, feeling his way--for he
could only guess how near lay the edge of the precipice--he struggled
toward the stream of light issuing from the _hangar_.
As he reached it the squall cleared suddenly. He threw back his
snow-caked hood and gazed up at the citadel on the cliff. The walls
aloft there stood out brilliant against the black heavens, and he
muttered approvingly; for it was he who, as Officer of the Works, had
suggested to the Governor the plan of hanging out lanterns and
firepots from the salient angles of the bastions; and he flattered
himself that, if the enemy intended an assault up yonder, not a dog
could cross the great ditch undetected.
But it appeared to him that the men in the _hangar_ were not watching
too alertly, or they would never have allowed him to draw so near
unchallenged.
He was lifting a hand to hammer on the rough door giving entrance
from the rear, when it was flung open and a man in provincial uniform
peered out upon the night.
"Is that you, Captain Chabot?" asked the visitor.
The man in the doorway smothered an exclamation. "The wind was
driving the snow in upon us by the shovelful," he explained.
"We are keeping a sharp enough look-out down the road."
"So I perceived," answered John a Cleeve curtly, and stepped past him
into the _hangar_. About fifty men stood packed there in a steam of
breath around the guns--the most of them Canadians and British
militiamen, with a sprinkling of petticoated sailors.
"Who is working these?" asked John a Cleeve, laying his hand on the
nearest three-pounder.
"Captain Barnsfare." A red-faced seaman stepped forward and saluted
awkwardly: Adam Barnsfare, master of the _Tell_ transport.
"Your crew all right, captain?"
"All right, sir."
"The Governor sends me down with word that he believes the enemy
means business to-night. Where's your artilleryman?"
"Sergeant McQuarters, sir? He stepped down, a moment since, to the
barrier, to keep the sentry awake."
John a Cleeve glanced up at the lamp smoking under the beam.
"You have too much light here," he said. "If McQuarters has the guns
well pointed, you need only one lantern for your lintstocks."
He blew out the candle in his own, and reaching up a hand, lowered
the light until it was all but extinct. As he did so his hood fell
back and the lamp-rays illumined his upturned face for two or three
seconds; a tired face, pinched just now with hard living and
wakefulness, but moulded and firmed by discipline. Fifteen years had
bitten their lines deeply about the under-jaw and streaked the
temples with grey. But they had been years of service; and, whatever
he had missed in them, he had found self-reliance.
He stepped out upon the pent of the _hangar_, and, with another glance
up at the night, plunged into the deep snow, and trudged his way down
to the barricade.
"Sergeant McQuarters!"
"Here sir!" The Highlander saluted in the darkness, "Any word from
up yonder, sir?" A faint glow touched the outline of his face as he
lifted it toward the illuminated citadel.
"The Governor looks for an assault to-night. So you know me,
McQuarters?"
"By your voice, sir," answered McQuarters, and added quaintly,
"Ah, but it was different weather in those days!"
"Ay," said John, "we have come around by strange roads; you an
artilleryman, and I--" He broke off, musing. For a moment, standing
there knee-deep in snow, he heard the song of the waters, saw the
forests again, the dripping ledges, the cool, pendant boughs, and
smelt the fragrance of the young spruces. The spell of the woodland
silence held him, and he listened again for the rustle of wild life
in the undergrowth.
"Hist! What was that?"
"Another squall coming, sir. It's on us too, and a rasper!"
But, as the snow-charged gust swept down and blinded them in its
whirl, John leaned towards McQuarters and lifted his voice sharply.
"It was more than that--Hark you!" He gripped McQuarters' arm and
pointed to the barricade, over which for an instant a point of steel
had glimmered. "Back, man!--back to the guns!" he yelled to the
sentry. But the man was already running; and together the three
floundered back to the _hangar_. Behind them blows were already
sounding above the howl of the wind; blows of musket-butts hammering
on the wooden palisade.
"Steady, men," grunted McQuarters as he reached the pent. "Give them
time to break an opening--their files will be nicely huddled by
this."
John a Cleeve glanced around and was satisfied. Captain Chabot had
his men lined up and ready: two ranks of them, the front rank
kneeling.
"Give the word, my lad," said Captain Barnsfare cheerfully, lintstock
in hand.
"Fire then!--and God defend Quebec!"
The last words were lost in an explosion which seemed to lift the
roof off the _hangar_. In the flare of it John saw the faces
of the enemy--their arms outstretched and snatching at the palisade.
Down upon them the grape-shot whistled, tearing through the gale it
outstripped, and close on it followed the Canadians' volleys.
Barnsfare had sprung to the second gun. McQuarters nodded to
him. . . .
For ten minutes the guns swept the pass. The flame of them lit up no
faces now by the shivered palisade, and between the explosions came
no cheering from down the road. The riflemen loaded, fired, and
reloaded; but they aimed into darkness and silence.
Captain Chabot lifted a hand.
The squall had swept by. High in the citadel, drums were beating;
and below, down by the waterside to the eastward, volleys of musketry
crackled sharply. But no sound came up the pass of Pres-de-Ville.
"That will be at the Sault-au-Matelot barrier," said McQuarters,
nodding his head in the direction of the musketry.
"We've raked decks here, anyhow," Captain Barnsfare commented,
peering down the road; and one or two Canadians volunteered to
descend and explore the palisade. For a while Captain Chabot
demurred, fearing that the Americans might have withdrawn around the
angle of the cliff and be holding themselves in ambush there.
"A couple of us could make sure of that," urged John. "They have
left their wounded, at all events, as you may hear by the groans.
With your leave, Captain--"
Captain Chabot yielded the point, and John with a corporal and a
drummer descended the pass.
A dozen bodies lay heaped by the palisade. For the moment he could
not stay to attend to them, but, passing through, followed the road
down to the end of its curve around the cliff. Two corpses lay here
of men who, mortally wounded, had run with the crowd before dropping
to rise no more. The tracks in the snow told plainly enough that the
retreat had been a stampede.
Returning to the palisade he shouted up that the coast was clear, and
fell to work searching the faces of the fallen. The fresh snow, in
which they lay deep, had already frozen about them; and his eye, as
he swung the lantern slowly round, fell on a hand and arm which stood
up stiffly above the white surface.
He stepped forward, flashing his lantern on the dead man's face--and
dropped on his knees beside it.
"Do you know him, sir?" McQuarters' voice was speaking, close by.
"I know him," answered John dully, and groped and found a thin blade
which lay beside the corpse. "He was my cousin, and once my best
friend."
He felt the edge of the sword with his gloved hand, all the while
staring at the arm pointing upwards and fixed in the rigor of death,
frozen in its last gesture as Richard Montgomery had lifted it to
wave forward his men. And as if the last thirty or forty minutes had
never been, he found himself saying to McQuarters:
"We have come around by strange roads, sergeant, and some of us have
parted with much on the way."
He looked up; but his gaze, travelling past McQuarters who stooped
over the corpse, fell on the figure of a woman who had approached and
halted at three paces' distance; a hooded figure in the dress of the
Hospitalieres.
Something in her attitude told him that she had heard. He arose,
holding the lantern high; and stared, shaking, into a face which no
uncomely linen swathings could disguise from him--into eyes which
death only would teach him to forget.
The fatigue-party lifted the corpse. So Richard Montgomery entered
Quebec as he had promised--a General of Brigade.
The drums had ceased to call the alarm from the Citadel; musketry
no longer crackled in the riverside quarter of Sault-au-Matelot.
The assault had been beaten off, and close on four hundred prisoners
were being marched up the hill followed by crowds of excited
Quebecers. But John a Cleeve roamed the streets at random, alone,
unconscious that all the while he gripped the hilt of his cousin's
naked sword.
He was due to carry his report to the Governor. By and by he
remembered this, and ploughed his way up the snowy incline to the
Citadel. The sentry told him that the Governor was at the Seminary;
had gone down half an hour ago, to number and take the names of the
prisoners. John turned back.
Some two hundred prisoners were drawn up in the great hall of the
Seminary, and from the doorway John spied the Governor at the far
end, interrogating them.
"Eh?" Carleton turned, caught sight of him and smiled gaily.
"I fancy, Mr. a Cleeve, your post is going to be a sinecure after
to-night's work. Chabot reports that you were at Pres-de-Ville and
discovered General Montgomery's body."
He turned at the sound of a murmur among the prisoners behind him.
One or two had turned to the wall and were weeping audibly.
Others stared at John and one or two pointed.
John, following their eyes, looked down at the sword in his hand and
stammered an apology.
"Excuse me--I did not know that I carried it. . . . Sirs, believe me,
I intended no offence! Richard Montgomery was my cousin."
From the Seminary he walked back to his quarters, meaning to snatch a
few hours' sleep before daybreak. But having lit his candle, he
found that he could not undress. The narrow room stifled him.
He flung the sword on his bed, and went down to the streets again.
Dawn found him pacing the narrow sidewalk opposite a small log house
in St. Louis Street. Lights shone from the upper storey. In the
room to the right they had laid Montgomery's body, and were arraying
it for burial.
The house door opened, and a lamp in the passage behind it cast a
broadening ray across the snow. A woman stepped out, and, in the act
of closing the door, caught sight of him. He made no doubt that she
would pass up the street; but, after seeming to hesitate, she came
slowly over and stood before him.
"You knew me, then?" she asked.
He bent his head humbly.
"I have seen you many times, and heard of you," she continued.
"I heard what you said, down yonder. . . . Has life been so bitter
for you?"
"Diane!"
He turned towards the house. "He has a noble face," she said, gazing
up at the bright window.
"He was a great man."
"And yet he fought in the end against his country."
"He believed that he did right."
"Should _you_ have believed it right?"
John was silent.
"John!"
He gave a start at the sound of his name and she smiled faintly.
"I have learnt to say it in English, you see."
"Do not mock me, mademoiselle! Fifteen years--"
"That is just what I was going to say. Fifteen years is a very long
time--and--and it has not been easy for me, John. I do not think I
can do without you any longer."
So in the street, under the dawn, they kissed for the first time.
EPILOGUE.
I.
HUDSON RIVER.
"Il reviendra-z a Paques,
Ou--a la Trinite!"
On a summer's afternoon of the year 1818, in the deep veranda of a
house terraced high above the Hudson, a small company stood
expectant. Schuylers and Livingstones were there, with others of the
great patroon families; one or two in complete black, and all wearing
some badge of mourning. Some were young, others well advanced in
middle life; but amidst them, and a little apart, reclined a lady to
whose story the oldest had listened in his childhood.
She lay back in an invalid chair, with her face set toward the noble
river sweeping into view around the base of a wooded bluff, and
toward the line of its course beyond, where its hidden waters
furrowed the forests to the northward and divided hill from hill.
Yet to her eyes the landscape was but a blur, and she saw it only in
memory.
For forty-three years she had worn black and a widow's goffered cap.
The hair beneath it was thin now, and her body frail and very far on
its decline to the grave. On the table at her elbow lay a letter
beside a small field-glass, towards which, once and again, she
stretched out a hand.
"It is heavy for you, aunt," said her favourite grand-niece, who
stood at the back of her chair--a beautiful girl in a white frock,
high-waisted and tied with a broad, black sash. "We will tell you
when they come in sight."
"I know, my dear; I know. It was only to make sure."
"But you tried yesterday, and with the glass your sight was as good
as mine, almost."
"Even so short a while makes a difference, now. You cannot
understand that, Janet; you will, some day."
"We will tell you," the girl repeated, "as soon as ever they come in
sight; perhaps before. We may see the smoke first between the trees,
you know."
"Ay," the old lady answered, and added, "There was no such thing in
those days." Her hand went out toward the field-glass again, and
rested, trembling a little, on the edge of the table. "I thought--
yesterday--that the trees had grown a good deal. They have closed
in, and the river is narrower; or perhaps it looks narrower, through
a glass."
The men at the far end of the veranda, who had been talking apart
while they scanned the upper bends of the river, lowered their voices
suddenly. They had heard a throbbing sound to the northward; either
the beat of a drum or the panting stroke of a steamboat's paddles.
All waited, with their eyes on the distant woods. By and by a film
of dark smoke floated up as through a crevice in the massed
tree-tops, lengthened, and spread itself in the sunlight.
The throbbing grew louder--the beat of a drum, slow and funereal,
with the clank of paddle-wheels filling its pauses. And now--hark!--
a band playing the Dead March!
The girl knelt and lifted the glass, ready focused. The failing
woman leaned forward, and with fingers that trembled on the tube,
directed it where the river swept broadly around the headland.
What did she see? At first an ugly steamboat nosing into view and
belching smoke from its long funnel; then a double line of soldiers
crowding the deck, and between their lines what seemed at first to be
a black mound with a scarlet bar across it. But the mound was the
plumed hearse of her husband, and the scarlet bar the striped flag of
the country for which he had died--his adopted country, long since
invited to her seat among the nations.
The men in the veranda had bared their heads. They heard a bell ring
on board the steamboat. Her paddles ceased to rotate, and after a
moment began to churn the river with reversed motion, holding the
boat against its current. The troops on her deck, standing with
reversed arms; the muffled drums; the half-masted flag; all saluted a
hero and the widow of a hero.
So, after forty-three years, Richard Montgomery returned to the wife
he had left with a promise that, come what might, she should be proud
of him.
Proud she was; she, a worn old woman sitting in the shadow of death,
proud of a dry skeleton and a handful of dust under a crape pall.
And they had parted in the hey-day of youth, young and ardent, with
arms passionately loth to untwine.
What did her eyes seek beneath the pall, the plumes, the flag?
Be sure she saw him laid there at his manly length, inert, with
cheeks only a little paler than they had been as he stood looking
down into her eyes a moment before he strode away. In truth, the
searchers, opening his grave in Quebec, had found a few bones, and a
skull from which, as they lifted it, a musket-ball dropped back into
the rotted coffin; these, and a lock of hair, tied with a leathern
thong.
They did not bring him ashore to her. Even after forty years his
return must be for a moment only; his country still claimed him.
The letter beside her was from Governor Clinton, written in
courtliest words, telling her of the grave in New York prepared for
him beneath the cenotaph set up by Congress many years before.
Again a bell rang sharply, the paddles ceased backing and ploughed
forward again. To the sound of muffled drums he passed down the
river, and out of her sight for ever.
II.
THE PHANTOM GUARD.
Just a hundred years have passed since the assault on Pres-de-Ville.
It is the last day of 1875, and in the Citadel above the cliff the
Commandant and his lady are holding a ball. Outside the warm rooms
winter binds Quebec. The St. Lawrence is frozen over, and the
copings and escarpments of the old fortress sparkle white under a
flying moon.
The Commandant's lady had decreed fancy dress for her dancers, and
further, that their costumes shall be those of 1775. The Commandant
himself wears the antique uniform of the Royal Artillery, and some of
his guests salute him in the very coats, and carry the very swords,
their ancestors wore this night a hundred years ago. They pass up
the grand staircase hung with standards--golden leopards of England,
golden irises of France, the Dominion ensign, the Stars and Stripes--
and come face to face with a trophy, on the design of which Captain
Larne of the B Battery has spent some pious hours. Here, above
stacks of muskets piled over drums and trumpets, is draped the red
and black "rebel" pennant so that its folds fall over the escutcheon
of the United States; and against this hangs a sword, heavily craped,
with the letters R.I.P. beneath it.
It is the same thin blade of steel which dropped on the snow, its
hilt warm from Richard Montgomery's hand, as he turned to wave
forward his men. His enemies salute it to-night.
They pass into the upper ballroom. They are met to dance a new year
in, and the garrison band is playing a waltz of Strauss's--"Die guten
alten Zeiten." So dance follows dance, and the hours fly by to
midnight--outside, the moon in chase past the clouds and over fields
and wastes of snow--inside, the feet of dancers warming to their work
under the clustered lights.
But on the stroke of midnight a waltz ceases suddenly. From the
lower ballroom the high, clear note of a trumpet rings out, silencing
the music of the bandsmen. A panel has flown open there and a
trumpeter steps forth blowing a call which, as it dies away, is
answered by a skirl of pipes and tapping of drums from a remote
corner of the barracks. The guests fall back as the sound swells on
the night, drawing nearer. Pipes are shrieking now; the rattle of
drums shakes the windows. Two folding doors fall wide, and through
them stalks a ghostly guard headed by the ghost of Sergeant Hugh
McQuarters, in kilt and tartan and cross-belt yet spotted with the
blood of a brave Highlander who died in 1775, defending Quebec.
The guard looks neither to right nor to left; it passes on through
hall and passage and ballroom, halts beneath Montgomery's sword,
salutes it in silence, and vanishes.
Some of the ladies are the least bit scared. But the men are
pronouncing it a brilliant _coup de theatre_, and presently crowd
about the trophy, discussing Montgomery and what manner of man he
was.
Down in St. Louis Street the windows have been illuminated in the old
house in which his body lay. Up in the Citadel the boom of guns
salutes his memory.
So the world commemorates its heroes, the brave hearts and high minds
that never doubted but pressed straight to their happy or unhappy
goals. But some of us hear the guns saluting those who doubted and
were lost, or seemed to achieve little; whose high hopes perished by
the way; whom fate bound or frustrated; whom conscience or divided
counsel drove athwart into paths belying their promise; whom,
wrapping both in one rest, earth covers at length indifferently with
its heroes.
So let these guns, a hundred years late, salute the meeting of two
lovers who, before they met and were reconciled, suffered much.
The flying moon crosses the fields over which they passed forth
together, and a hundred winters have smoothed their tracks on the
snow. There is a tradition that they sought Boisveyrac; that
children were born to them there; and that they lived and died as
ordinary people do. But a thriving town hides the site of the
Seigniory, and their graves are not to be found.
And north of Lake Michigan there long lingered another tradition--but
it has died now--of an Englishman and his wife who came at rare
intervals and would live among the Ojibways for a while, accepted by
them and accepting their customs; that none could predict the time of
their coming or of their departure; but that the man had, in his
time, been a famous killer of bears.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Fort Amity, by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch