ARRIVING
I
Even when a year had passed I said of my escape from the Tuileries: "It
was a dream. How could it have happened?" For the adventures of my
wandering fell from me like a garment, leaving the one changeless
passion.
Skenedonk and I met on the ship a New England minister, who looked upon
and considered us from day to day. I used to sit in the stern, the miles
stretching me as a rack stretches flesh and tendons. The minister
regarded me as prostrated by the spider bite of that wicked Paris; out
of which he learned I had come, by talking to my Oneida.
The Indian and I were a queer pair that interested him, and when he
discovered that I bore the name of Eleazar Williams his friendship was
sealed to us. Eunice Williams of Deerfield, the grandmother of Thomas
Williams, was a traditional brand never snatched from the burning, in
the minister's town of Longmeadow, where nearly every inhabitant was
descended from or espoused to a Williams. Though he himself was born
Storrs, his wife was born Williams; and I could have lain at his feet
and cried, so open was the heart of this good man to a wanderer
rebounding from a family that disowned the pretender. He was my welcome
back to America. The breath of eastern pines, and the resinous sweetness
of western plains I had not yet seen, but which drew me so that I could
scarcely wait to land, came to me with that man. Before the voyage ended
I had told him my whole history as far as I knew it, except the story of
Madame de Ferrier; and the beginning of it was by no means new to him.
The New England Williamses kept a prayerful eye on that branch
descending through the Iroquois. This transplanted Briton, returning
from his one memorable visit to the England of his forefathers, despised
my Bourbon claims, and even the French contraction of my name.
"What are you going to do now, Eleazar?" he inquired.
Hugging my old dream to myself, feeling my heart leap toward that
western empire which must fascinate a young man as long as there remain
any western lands to possess, I told him I intended to educate our
Iroquois as soon as I could prepare myself to do it, and settle them
where they could grow into a greater nation.
The man of God kindled in the face. He was a dark-eyed, square-browed,
serious man, with black hair falling below his white band. His mouth had
a sweet benign expression, even when he quizzed me about my dauphinhood.
A New England pastor was a flame that burned for the enlightenment of
the nations. From that hour it was settled that I should be his pupil,
and go with him to Longmeadow to finish my education.
When we landed he helped me to sell my Babylonish clothes, except the
white court dress, to which I clung with tenacity displeasing to him,
and garb myself in more befitting raiment. By Skenedonk's hand I sent
some of the remaining gold coins to my mother Marianne and the chief,
when he rejoined the tribe and went to pass the winter at St. Regis. And
by no means did I forget to tell him to bring me letters from De
Chaumont's manor in the spring, if any arrived there for me.
How near to heaven the New England village seemed, with Mount Tom on the
horizon glorious as Mount Zion, the mighty sweep of meadow land, the
Connecticut river flowing in great peace, the broad street of elms like
some gigantic cathedral nave, and in its very midst a shrine--the
meetinghouse, double-decked with fan-topped windows.
Religion and education were the mainsprings of its life. Pastor Storrs
worked in his study nearly nine hours a day, and spent the remaining
hours in what he called visitation of his flock.
This being lifted out of Paris and plunged into Longmeadow was the
pouring of white hot metal into chill moulds. It cast me. With a
seething and a roar of loosened forces, the boy passed to the man.
Nearly every night during all those years of changing, for even
faithfulness has its tides, I put the snuffbox under my pillow, and
Madame de Ferrier's key spoke to my ear. I would say to myself: "The one
I love gave me this key. Did I ever sit beside her on a ledge of stone
overlooking a sunken garden?--so near that I might have touched her!
Does she ever think of the dauphin Louis? Where is she? Does she know
that Lazarre has become Eleazar Williams?"
The pastor's house was fronted with huge white fluted pillars of wood,
upholding a porch roof which shaded the second floor windows. The doors
in that house had a short-waisted effect with little panels above and
long panels below. I had a chamber so clean and small that I called it
in my mind the Monk's Cell, nearly filled with the high posted bed, the
austere table and chairs. The whitewashed walls were bare of pictures,
except a painted portrait of Stephen Williams, pastor of Longmeadow from
1718 to 1783. Daily his laughing eyes watched me as if he found my
pretensions a great joke. He had a long nose, and a high forehead. His
black hair crinkled, and a merry crease drew its half circle from one
cheek around under his chin to the other.
Longmeadow did not receive me without much question and debate. There
were Williamses in every direction; disguised, perhaps, for that
generation, under the names of Cooley, Stebbins, Colter, Ely, Hole, and
so on. A stately Sarah Williams, as Mrs. Storrs, sat at the head of the
pastor's table. Her disapproval was a force, though it never manifested
itself except in withdrawal. If Mrs. Storrs had drawn back from me while
I lived under her roof, I should have felt an outcast indeed. The subtle
refinement of those Longmeadow women was like the hinted sweetness of
arbutus flower. Breeding passed from generation to generation. They had
not mixed their blood with the blood of any outsiders; and their
forbears were English yeomen.
I threw myself into books as I had done during my first months at De
Chaumont's, before I grew to think of Madame de Ferrier. One of those
seven years I spent at Dartmouth. But the greater part of my knowledge I
owe to Pastor Storrs. Greek and Hebrew he gave me to add to the
languages I was beginning to own; and he unlocked all his accumulations
of learning. It was a monk's life that I lived; austere and without
incident, but bracing as the air of the hills. The whole system was
monastic, though abomination alighted on that word in Longmeadow. I took
the discipline into my blood. It will go down to those after me.
There a man had to walk with God whether he wanted to or not.
Living was inexpensive, each item being gaged by careful housekeeping.
It was a sin to gorge the body, and godly conversation was better than
abundance. Yet the pastor's tea-table arises with a halo around it. The
rye and Indian bread, the doughnuts fragrant as flowers, the sparing
tea, the prim mats which saved the cloth, the wire screen covering
sponge cake--how sacred they seem!
The autumn that I came to Longmeadow, Napoleon Bonaparte was beaten on
the sea by the English, but won the battle of Austerlitz, defeating the
Russian coalition and changing the map of Europe.
I felt sometimes a puppet while this man played his great part. It was
no comfort that others of my house were nothing to France. Though I did
not see Louis Philippe again, he wandered in America two or three years,
and went back to privacy.
During my early novitiate at Longmeadow, Aaron Burr's conspiracy went to
pieces, dragging down with it that pleasant gentleman, Harmon
Blennerhassett, startling men like Jackson, who had best befriended him
unawares. But this in nowise affected my own plans of empire. The
solidarity of a nation of Indians on a remote tract could be no menace
to the general government.
Skenedonk came and went, and I made journeys to my people with him. But
there was never any letter waiting at De Chaumont's for me. After some
years indeed, the count having returned to Castorland, to occupy his new
manor at Le Rayville, the mansion I had known was torn down and the
stone converted to other uses. Skenedonk brought me word early that
Mademoiselle de Chaumont had been married to an officer of the Empire,
and would remain in France.
The door between my past and me was sealed. Madame de Ferrier stood on
the other side of it, and no news from her penetrated its dense barrier.
I tried to write letters to her. But nothing that I could write was fit
to send, and I knew not whether she was yet at Mont-Louis. Forever she
was holding the door against me.
Skenedonk, coming and going at his caprice, stayed a month in every
year at Longmeadow, where the townspeople, having had a surfeit of
aboriginal names, called him John. He raised no objection, for that with
half a dozen other Christian titles had been bestowed on him in baptism;
and he entered the godly list of Williamses as John Williams.
The first summer I spent in Longmeadow there was an eclipse of the sun
about the middle of June. I remember lying on open land, my book on its
face beside me, and watching it through my eyelashes; until the weird
and awful twilight of a blotted sun in mid-heaven sent birds and beasts
to shelter as from wrath. When there was but a hairy shining around the
orbed blackness, and stars trembled out and trembled back, as if they
said: "We are here. The old order will return," and the earth held its
breath at threat of eternal darkness, the one I loved seemed to approach
in the long shadows. It was a sign that out of the worst comes the best.
But it was a terror to the unprepared; and Pastor Storrs preached about
it the following Sunday.
The missionary spirit of Longmeadow stirred among the Williamses, and
many of them brought what they called their mites to Pastor Storrs for
my education. If I were made a king no revenue could be half so sweet as
that. The village was richer than many a stonier New England place, but
men were struggling then all over the wide states and territories for
material existence.
The pension no longer came from Europe. It ceased when I returned from
France. Its former payment was considered apocryphal by Longmeadow,
whose very maids--too white, with a pink spot in each cheek--smiled with
reserved amusement at a student who thought it possible he could ever be
a king. I spoke to nobody but Pastor Storrs about my own convictions.
But local newspapers, with their omniscient grip on what is in the air,
bandied the subject back and forth.
We sometimes walked in the burying ground among dead Williamses, while
he argued down my claims, leaving them without a leg to stand on.
Reversing the usual ministerial formula, "If what has been said is true,
then it follows, first, secondly," and so on, he used to say:
"Eleazar, you were brought up among the Indians, conscious only of
bodily existence, and unconscious of your origin; granted. Money was
sent--let us say from Europe--for your support; granted. Several
persons, among them one who testified strongly against his will, told
you that you resembled the Bourbons; granted. You bear on your person
marks like those which were inflicted on the unfortunate dauphin of
France; granted. You were malignantly pursued while abroad; granted. But
what does it all prove? Nothing. It amounts simply to this: you know
nothing about your early years; some foreign person--perhaps an English
Williams--kindly interested himself in your upbringing; you were
probably scalded in the camps; you have some accidental traits of the
Bourbons; a man who heard you had a larger pension than the idiot he was
tending, disliked you. You can prove nothing more."
I never attempted to prove anything more to Pastor Storrs. It would have
been most ungrateful to persuade him I was an alien. At the same time he
prophesied his hopes of me, and many a judicious person blamed him for
treating me as something out of the ordinary, and cockering up pride.
A blunter Williams used to take me by the button on the street.
"Eleazar Williams," he would say, "do you pretend to be the son of the
French king? I tell you what! I will not let the name of Williams be
disgraced by any relationship to any French monarch! You must do one of
two things: you must either renounce Williamsism or renounce
Bourbonism!"
Though there was liberty of conscience to criticise the pastor, he was
autocrat of Longmeadow. One who preceded Pastor Storrs had it told about
him that two of his deacons wanted him to appoint Ruling Elders. He
appointed them; and asked them what they thought the duties were. They
said he knew best.
"Well," said the pastor, "one of the Ruling Elders may come to my house
before meeting, saddle my horse, and hold the stirrup while I get on.
The other may wait at the church door and hold him while I get off, and
after meeting bring him to the steps. This is all of my work that I can
consent to let Ruling Elders do for me."
The Longmeadow love of disputation was fostered by bouts which Ruling
Elders might have made it their business to preserve, if any Ruling
Elders were willing to accept their appointment. The pastor once went to
the next town to enjoy argument with a scientific doctor. When he
mounted his horse to ride home before nightfall the two friends kept up
their debate. The doctor stood by the horse, or walked a few steps as
the horse moved. Presently both men noticed a fire in the east; and it
was sunrise. They had argued all night.
In Longmeadow a man could not help practicing argument. I also practiced
oratory. And all the time I practiced the Iroquois tongue as well as
English and French, and began the translation of books into the language
of the nation I hoped to build. That Indians made unstable material for
the white man to handle I would not believe. Skenedonk was not unstable.
His faithfulness was a rock.
For some reason, and I think it was the reach of Pastor Storrs, men in
other places began to seek me. The vital currents of life indeed sped
through us on the Hartford and Springfield stage road. It happened that
Skenedonk and I were making my annual journey to St. Regis when the
first steamboat accomplished its trip on the Hudson river. About the
time that the Wisconsin country was included in Illinois Territory, I
decided to write a letter to Madame Tank at Green Bay, and insist on
knowing my story as she believed she knew it. Yet I hesitated; and
finally did not do it. I found afterwards that there was no post-office
at Green Bay. A carrier, sent by the officers of the fort and villagers,
brought mail from Chicago. He had two hundred miles of wilderness to
traverse, and his blankets and provisions as well as the mail to carry;
and he did this at the risk of his life among wild men and beasts.
The form of religion was always a trivial matter to me. I never ceased
to love the sacrifice of the mass, which was an abomination and an
idolatrous practice to Pastor Storrs. The pageantry of the Roman Church
that first mothered and nurtured me touches me to this day. I love the
Protestant prayers of the English Church. And I love the stern and
knotty argument, the sermon with heads and sequences, of the New England
Congregationalist. For this catholicity Catholics have upbraided me,
churchmen rebuked me, and dissenters denied that I had any religion at
all.
When the Episcopal Bishop of New York showed me kindness, and Pastor
Storrs warned me against being proselyted, I could not tell him the
charm in the form of worship practiced by the woman I loved. There was
not a conscious minute when I forgot her. Yet nobody in Longmeadow knew
of her existence. In my most remorseful days, comparing myself with
Pastor Storrs, I was never sorry I had clung to her and begged her not
to let me go alone. For some of our sins are so honestly the expression
of nature that justification breaks through them.
On the western border there was trouble with dissatisfied Indians, and
on the sea there was trouble with the British, so that people began to
talk of war long before it was declared, and to blame President Madison
for his over-caution in affairs. A battle was fought at Tippecanoe in
the Indiana Territory, which silenced the Indians for a while. But every
one knew that the English stood behind them. Militia was mustered, the
army recruited, and embargo laid upon shipping in the ports, and all
things were put forward in April of that year, before war was declared
in June.
I had influence with our tribes. The Government offered me a well paid
commission to act as its secret agent. Pastor Storrs and the Williamses,
who had been nurturing a missionary, were smitten with grief to see him
rise and leap into camps and fields, eager for the open world, the
wilderness smell; the council, where the red man's mind, a trembling
balance, could be turned by vivid language; eager, in fact, to live
where history was being made.
The pastor had clothed me in his mind with ministerial gown and band,
and the martial blood that quickened he counted an Iroquois strain. Yet
so inconsistent is human nature, so given to forms which it calls
creeds, that when I afterwards put on the surplice and read prayers to
my adopted people, he counted it as great a defection as taking to
saddle and spur. We cannot leave the expression of our lives to those
better qualified than we are, however dear they may be. I had to pack my
saddlebags and be gone, loving Longmeadow none the less because I
grieved it, knowing that it would not approve of me more if I stayed and
failed to do my natural part.
The snuffbox and the missal which had belonged to my family in France I
always carried with me. And very little could be transported on the road
we took.
John Williams, who came to Longmeadow in deerskins, and paraded his
burnished red poll among the hatted Williamses, abetted me in turning
from the missionary field to the arena of war, and never left me. It was
Skenedonk who served the United States with brawn and endurance, while I
put such policy and color into my harangues as I could command. We
shared our meals, our camps, our beds of leaves together. The life at
Longmeadow had knit me to good use. I could fast or feast, ride or
march, take the buckskins, or the soldier's uniform.
Of this service I shall write down only what goes to the making of the
story. The Government was pleased to commend it, and it may be found
written in other annals than mine.
Great latitude was permitted us in our orders. We spent a year in the
north. My skin darkened and toughened under exposure until I said to
Skenedonk, "I am turning an Indian;" and he, jealous of my French blood,
denied it.
In July we had to thread trails he knew by the lake toward Sandusky.
There was no horse path wide enough for us to ride abreast. Brush
swished along our legs, and green walls shut our view on each side. The
land dipped towards its basin. Buckeye and gigantic chestnut trees,
maple and oak, passed us from rank to rank of endless forest. Skenedonk
rode ahead, watching for every sign and change, as a pilot now watches
the shifting of the current. So we had done all day, and so we were
doing when fading light warned us to camp.
A voice literally cried out of the wilderness, startling the horses and
ringing among the tree trunks:
"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the
trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold
the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring
flame followeth after them!"
II
"That's Johnny Appleseed," said Skenedonk, turning in his saddle.
"What is Johnny Appleseed?"
"He is a man that God has touched," said Skenedonk, using the aboriginal
phrase that signified a man clouded in mind.
God had hidden him, too. I could see no one. The voice echo still went
off among the trees.
"Where is he?"
"Maybe one side, maybe the other."
"Does he never show himself?"
"Oh, yes," Skenedonk said. "He goes to all the settlements. I have often
seen him when I was hunting on these grounds. He came to our camp. He
loves to sleep outdoors better than in a cabin."
"Why does he shout at us like a prophet?"
"To warn us that Indians are on the warpath."
"He might have thought we were on the warpath ourselves."
"Johnny Appleseed knows Shawanoes and Tecumseh's men."
The trees, lichened on their north sides, massed rank behind rank
without betraying any face in their glooms. The Ohio and Indiana forests
had a nameless quality. They might have been called home-forests, such
invitations issued from them to man seeking a spot of his own. Nor can
I make clear what this invitation was. It produced thoughts different
from those that men were conscious of in the rugged northwest.
"I think myself," said Skenedonk, as we moved farther from the invisible
voice, "that he is under a vow. But nobody told me that."
"Why do you think so?"
"He plants orchards in every fine open spot; or clears the land for
planting where he thinks the soil is right."
"Don't other men plant orchards?"
"No. They have not time, or seed. They plant bread. He does nothing but
plant orchards."
"He must have a great many."
"They are not for himself. The apples are for any one who may pass by
when they are ripe. He wants to give apples to everybody. Animals often
nibble the bark, or break down his young trees. It takes long for them
to grow. But he keeps on planting."
"If other men have no seeds to plant, how does he get them?"
"He makes journeys to the old settlements, where many orchards have
grown, and brings the seeds from ciderpresses. He carries them from
Pennsylvania on his back, in leather bags, a bag for each kind of seed."
"Doesn't he ever sell them?"
"Not often. Johnny Appleseed cares nothing for money. I believe he is
under a vow of poverty. No one laughs at him. The tribes on these
grounds would not hurt a hair of his head, not only because God has
touched him, but because he plants apples. I have eaten his apples
myself."
"Johnny Appleseed!" I repeated, and Skenedonk hastened to tell me:
"He has another name, but I forget it. He is called Johnny Appleseed."
The slim and scarcely perceptible tunnel, among trees, piled with fallen
logs and newly sprung growths, let us into a wide clearing as suddenly
as a stream finds its lake. We could not see even the usual cow tracks.
A cabin shedding light from its hearth surprised us in the midst of
stumps.
The door stood wide. A woman walked back and forth over a puncheon
floor, tending supper. Dogs rushed to meet us, and the playing of
children could be heard. A man, gun in hand, stepped to his door, a
sentinel. He lowered its muzzle, and made us welcome, and helped us put
our horses under shelter with his own.
It was not often we had a woman's handiwork in corn bread and game to
feed ourselves upon, or a bed covered with homespun sheets.
I slept as the children slept, until a voice rang in the clearing:
"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the
trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold
the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring
flame followeth after them!"
Every sleeper in the cabin sat upright or stirred. We said in whispered
chorus:
"Johnny Appleseed!"
A tapping, light and regular, on the window, followed. The man was on
the floor in a breath. I heard the mother groping among the children,
and whispering:
"Don't wake the baby!"
The fire had died upon the hearth, and they lighted no candle. When
Johnny Appleseed gave his warning cry in the clearing, and his cautious
tap on the window, and was instantly gone to other clearings and other
windows, it meant that the Indians were near.
Skenedonk and I, used to the night alarm and boots and saddle in a
hurry, put ourselves in readiness to help the family. I groped for
clothing, and shoved small legs and arms into it. The little creatures,
obedient and silent, made no whimper at being roused out of dreams, but
keenly lent themselves to the march.
We brought the horses, and put the woman and children upon them. The
very dogs understood, and slunk around our legs without giving mouth.
The cabin door was shut after us without noise, closing in what that
family called home; a few pots and pans; patchwork quilts; a
spinning-wheel; some benches; perhaps a child's store of acorn cups and
broken yellow ware in a log corner. In a few hours it might be smoking a
heap of ashes; and the world offered no other place so dear. What we
suffer for is enriched by our suffering until it becomes priceless.
So far on the frontier was this cabin that no community block-house
stood near enough to give its inmates shelter. They were obliged to go
with us to Fort Stephenson.
Skenedonk pioneered the all-night struggle on an obscure trail; and he
went astray sometimes, through blackness of woods that roofed out the
stars. We floundered in swales sponging full of dead leaves, and drew
back, scratching ourselves on low-hung foliage.
By dawn the way became easier and the danger greater. Then we paused and
lifted our rifles if a twig broke near by, or a fox barked, or wind
rushed among leaves as a patter of moccasins might come. Skenedonk and
I, sure of the northern Indians, were making a venture in the west. We
knew nothing of Tecumseh's swift red warriors, except that scarcely a
year had passed since his allies had tomahawked women and children of
the garrison on the sand teach at Chicago.
Without kindling any fire we stopped once that day to eat, and by good
luck and following the river, reached that Lower Sandusky which was
called Fort Stephenson, about nightfall.
The place was merely a high stockade with blockhouses at the angles, and
a gate opening toward the river. Within, besides the garrison of a
hundred and sixty men, were various refugees, driven like our family to
the fort. And there, coming heartily from the commandant's quarters to
receive me, was George Croghan, still a boy in appearance, though
intrusted with this dangerous post. His long face had darkened like
mine. We looked each other over with the quick and critical scrutiny of
men who have not met since boyhood, and laughed as we grasped hands.
"You are as welcome to the inside of this bear-pen," said Major Croghan,
"as you made me to the outside of the one in the wilderness."
"I hope you'll not give me such another tramp after shelter for the
night as I gave you," I said.
"The best in Fort Stephenson is yours. But your rest depends on the
enemy. A runner has just come in from the General warning me Proctor and
Tecumsch are turning their attention this way. I'm ordered to evacuate,
for the post is considered too weak to hold."
"How soon do you march?"
"I don't march at all. I stay here. I'm going to disobey orders."
"If you're going to disobey orders, you have good reason for doing so."
"I have. It was too late to retreat. I'm going to fight. I hear,
Lazarre, you know how to handle Indians in the French way."
"My dear Croghan, you insinuate the American way may be better."
"It is, on the western border. It may not be on the northern."
"Then you would not have advised my attempting the Indians here?"
"I shouldn't have discouraged it. When I got the secret order, I said:
'Bring the French--bring the missionaries--bring anything that will cut
the comb of Tecumseh!'"
"The missionaries and the French like being classed with--anything," I
said.
"We're Americans here," Croghan laughed. "The dauphin may have to fight
in the ditch with the rest of us."
"The dauphin is an American too, and used to scars, as you know. Can you
give me any news from Green Bay in the Wisconsin country?"
"I was ordered to Green Bay last year to see if anything could be done
with old Fort Edward Augustus."
"Does my Holland court-lady live there?"
"Not now," he answered soberly. "She's dead."
"That's bad," I said, thinking of lost opportunities.
"Is pretty Annabel de Chaumont ever coming back from France?"
"Not now, she's married."
"That's worse," he sighed. "I was very silly about her when I was a
boy."
We had our supper in his quarters, and he busied himself until late in
the night with preparations for defense. The whole place was full of
cheer and plenty of game, and swarmed like a little fair with moving
figures. A camp-fire was built at dark in the center of the parade
ground, heaped logs sending their glow as far as the dark pickets. Heads
of families drew towards it while the women were putting their children
to bed; and soldiers off duty lounged there, the front of the body in
light, the back in darkness.
Cool forest night air flowed over the stockade, swaying smoke this way
and that. As the fire was stirred, and smoke turned to flame, it showed
more and more distinctly what dimness had screened.
A man rose up on the other side of it, clothed in a coffee sack, in
which holes were cut for his head and arms. His hat was a tin kettle
with the handle sticking out behind like a stiff queue.
Indifferent to his grotesqueness, he took it off and put it on the
ground beside him, standing ready to command attention.
He was a small, dark, wiry man, barefooted and barelegged, whose black
eyes sparkled, and whose scanty hair and beard hung down over shoulders
and breast. Some pokes of leather, much scratched, hung bulging from the
rope which girded his coffee sack. From one of these he took a few
unbound leaves, the fragment of a book, spread them open, and began to
read in a chanting, prophetic key, something about the love of the Lord
and the mysteries of angels. His listeners kept their eyes on him,
giving an indulgent ear to spiritual messages that made less demand on
them than the violent earthly ones to which they were accustomed.
"It's Johnny Appleseed," a man at my side told me, as if the name
explained anything he might do.
[Illustration: "It's Johnny Appleseed," a man at my side told me]
When Johnny Appleseed finished reading the leaves he put them back in
his bag, and took his kettle to the well for water. He then brought some
meal from the cook-house and made mush in his hat.
The others, turning their minds from future mysteries, began to talk
about present danger, when he stood up from his labor to inquire:
"Is there plenty in the fort for the children to eat?"
"Plenty, Johnny, plenty," several voices assured him.
"I can go without supper if the children haven't enough."
"Eat your supper, Johnny. Major Croghan will give you more if you want
it," said a soldier.
"And we'll give you jerked Britisher, if you'll wait for it," said
another.
"Johnny never eats meat," one of the refugees put in. "He thinks it's
sinful to kill critters. All the things in the woods likes him. Once he
got into a holler log to sleep, and some squirrels warned him to move
out, they settled there first; and he done it. I don't allow he'd pick a
flea off his own hide for fear he'd break its legs so it couldn't hop
around and make a living."
The wilderness prophet sat down quietly to his meal without appearing to
notice what was said about him; and when he had eaten, carried his hat
into the cook-house, where dogs could not get at his remaining
porridge.
"Now he'll save that for his breakfast," remarked another refugee.
"There's nothing he hates like waste."
"Talking about squirrels," exclaimed the man at my side, "I believe he
has a pasture for old, broke-down horses somewhere east in the hills.
All the bates he can find he swaps young trees for, and they go off with
him leading them, but he never comes into the settlements on horseback."
"Does he always go barefoot?" I asked.
"Sometimes he makes bark sandals. If you give him a pair of shoes he'll
give them away to the first person that can wear them and needs them.
Hunters wrap dried leaves around their leggins to keep the rattlesnakes
out, but Johnny never protects himself at all."
"No wonder," spoke a soldier. "Any snake'd be discouraged at them
shanks. A seven-year rattler'd break his fang on 'em."
Johnny came out of the cook-house with an iron poker, and heated it in
the coals. All the men around the fire waited, understanding what he was
about to do, but my own breath drew with a hiss through my teeth as he
laid the red hot iron first on one long cut and then another in his
travel-worn feet. Having cauterized himself effectually, and returned
the poker, he took his place in perfect serenity, without any show of
pain, prepared to accommodate himself to the company.
Some boys, awake with the bigness of the occasion, sat down near Johnny
Appleseed, and gave him their frank attention. Each boy had his hair cut
straight around below the ears, where his mother had measured it with an
inverted bowl, and freshly trimmed him for life in the fort, and perhaps
for the discomfiture of savages, if he came under the scalping knife.
Open-mouthed or stern-jawed, according to temperament, the young
pioneers listened to stories about Tecumseh, and surmises on the enemy's
march, and the likelihood of a night attack.
"Tippecanoe was fought at four o'clock in the morning," said a soldier.
"I was there," spoke out Johnny Appleseed.
No other man could say as much. All looked at him as he stood on his
cauterized feet, stretching his arms, lean and sun-cured, upward in the
firelight.
"Angels were there. In rain and darkness I heard them speak and say, 'He
hath cast the lot for them, and His hand hath divided it unto them by
line; they shall possess it forever; from generation to generation shall
they dwell therein. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad
for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose!'"
"Say, Johnny, what does an angel look like?" piped up one of the boys,
quite in fellowship.
Johnny Appleseed turned his rapt vision aside and answered:
"'White robes were given unto every one of them.' There had I laid me
down in peace to sleep, and the Lord made me to dwell in safety. The
camp-fires burned red in the sheltered place, and they who were to
possess the land watched by the campfires. I looked down from my high
place, from my shelter of leaves and my log that the Lord gave me for a
bed, and saw the red camp-fires blink in the darkness.
"Then was I aware that the heathen crept betwixt me and the camp,
surrounding it as a cloud that lies upon the ground. The rain fell upon
us all, and there was not so much sound as the rustling of grasshoppers
in tall grass. I said they will surprise the camp and slay the sleepers,
not knowing that they who were to possess the land watched every man
with his weapon. But when I would have sounded the trumpet of warning, I
heard a rifle shot, and all the Indians rose up screeching and rushed at
the red fires.
"Then a sorcerer leaped upon my high place, rattling many deer hoofs,
and calling aloud that his brethren might hear his voice. Light he
promised them for themselves, and darkness for the camp, and he sang his
war song, shouting and rattling the deer hoofs. Also the Indians rattled
deer hoofs, and it was like a giant breathing his last, being shot with
many musket flashes.
"I saw steam through the darkness, for the fires were drenched and
trampled by the men of the camp, and no longer shone as candles so that
the Indians might see by them to shoot. The sorcerer danced and
shouted, the deer hoofs rattled, and on this side and that men fought
knee to knee and breast to breast. I saw through the wet dawn, and they
who had crept around the camp as a cloud arose as grasshoppers and fled
to the swamp.
"Then did the sorcerer sit upon his heels, and I beheld he had but one
eye, and he covered it from the light.
"But the men in the camp shouted with a mighty shouting. And after their
shouting I heard again the voices of angels saying: 'He hath cast the
lot for them, and His hand hath divided it unto them by line; they shall
possess it forever; from generation to generation shall they dwell
therein. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them,
and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose!'"
The speaker sat down, and one of the men remarked:
"So that's the way the battle of Tippecanoe looked to Johnny Appleseed."
But the smallest boy thoughtfully inquired:
"Say, Johnny, haven't the Indians any angels?"
"You'll wish they was with the angels if they ever get you by the hair,"
laughed one of the men.
Soldiers began moving their single cannon, a six-pounder, from one
blockhouse to another. All the men jumped up to help, as at the raising
of a home, and put themselves in the way so ardently that they had to be
ordered back.
When everybody but ourselves had left the starlit open place, Johnny
Appleseed lay down and stretched his heels to the blaze. A soldier added
another log, and kicked into the flame those fallen away. Though it was
the end of July, Lake Erie cooled the inland forests.
Sentinels were posted in the blockhouses. Quiet settled on the camp; and
I sat turning many things in my mind besides the impending battle.
Napoleon Bonaparte had made a disastrous campaign in Russia. If I were
yet in France; if the Marquis du Plessy had lived; if I had not gone to
Mittau; if the self I might have been, that always haunts us, stood
ready to take advantage of the turn--
Yet the thing which cannot be understood by men reared under old
governments had befallen me. I must have drawn the wilderness into my
blood. Its possibilities held me. If I had stayed in France at twenty, I
should have been a Frenchman. The following years made me an American.
The passion that binds you to a land is no more to be explained than the
fact that many women are beautiful, while only one is vitally
interesting.
The wilderness mystic was sitting up looking at me.
"I see two people in you," he said.
"Only two?"
"Two separate men."
"What are their names?"
"Their names I cannot see."
"Well, suppose we call them Louis and Lazarre."
His eyes sparkled.
"You are a white man," he pronounced. "By that I mean you are not
stained with many vile sins."
"I hadn't an equal chance with other men. I lost nine years."
"Mebby," hazarded Johnny Appleseed cautiously, "you are the one
appointed to open and read what is sealed."
"If you mean to interpret what you read, I'm afraid I am not the one.
Where did you get those leaves?"
"From a book that I divided up to distribute among the people."
"Doesn't that destroy the sense?"
"No. I carry the pages in their order from cabin to cabin."
He came around the fire with the lightness of an Indian, and gave me his
own fragment to examine. It proved to be from the writings of one
Emanuel Swedenborg.
With a smile which seemed to lessen the size of his face and concentrate
its expression to a shining point, Johnny Appleseed slid his leather
bags along the rope girdle, and searched them, one after the other. I
thought he wanted me to notice his apple seeds, and inquired how many
kinds he carried. So he showed them in handfuls, brown and glistening,
or gummed with the sweet blood of cider. These produced pippins; these
produced russets; these produced luscious harvest apples, that fell in
August bursting with juicy ripeness. Then he showed me another bagful
which were not apple seeds at all, but neutral colored specks moving
with fluid swiftness as he poured them from palm to palm.
"Do you know what this is?"
I told him I didn't.
"It's dogfennel seed."
I laughed, and asked him what kind of apples it bore.
Johnny Appleseed smiled at me again.
"It's a flower. I'm spreading it over the whole of Ohio and Indiana!
It'll come up like the stars for abundance, and fill the land with
rankness, and fever and ague will flee away!"
"But how about the rankness?"
"Fever and ague will flee away," he repeated, continuing his search
through the bags.
He next brought out a parcel, wrapped up carefully in doeskin to protect
it from the appleseeds; and turned foolish in the face, as bits of
ribbon and calico fell out upon his knees.
"This isn't the one," he said, bundling it up and thrusting it back
again. "The little girls, they like to dress their doll-babies, so I
carry patches for the little girls. Here's what I was looking for."
It was another doeskin parcel, bound lengthwise and crosswise by thongs.
These Johnny Appleseed reverently loosened, bringing forth a small book
with wooden covers fastened by a padlock.
III
"Where did you get this?" I heard myself asking, a strange voice
sounding far down the throat.
"From an Indian," the mystic told me quietly. "He said it was bad
medicine to him. He never had any luck in hunting after it fell to his
share, so he was glad to give it to me."
"Where did he get it?"
"His tribe took it from some prisoners they killed."
I was running blindly around in a circle to find relief from the news he
dealt me, when the absurdity of such news overtook me. I stood and
laughed.
"Who were the prisoners?"
"I don't know," answered Johnny Appleseed.
"How do you know the Indians killed them?"
"The one that gave me this book told me so."
"There are plenty of padlocked books in the world," I said jauntily. "At
least there must be more than one. How long ago did it happen?"
"Not very long ago, I think; for the book was clean."
"Give it to me," I said, as if I cursed him.
"It's a sacred book," he answered, hesitating.
"Maybe it's sacred. Let me see."
"There may be holy mysteries in it, to be read only of him who has the
key."
"I have a key!"
I took it out of the snuffbox. Johnny Appleseed fixed his rapt eyes on
the little object in my fingers.
"Mebby you are the one appointed to open and read what is sealed!"
"No, I'm not! How could my key fit a padlocked book that belonged to
prisoners killed by the Indians?"
He held it out to me and I took hold of the padlock. It was a small
steel padlock, and the hole looked dangerously the size of my key.
"I can't do it!" I said.
"Let me try," said Johnny Appleseed.
"No! You might break my key in a strange padlock! Hold it still, Johnny.
Please don't shake it."
"I'm not shaking it," Johnny Appleseed answered tenderly.
"There's only one way of proving that my key doesn't fit," I said, and
thrust it in. The ward turned easily, and the padlock came away in my
hand. I dropped it and opened the book. Within the lid a name was
written which I had copied a thousand times--"Eagle Madeleine Marie de
Ferrier."
Still I did not believe it. Nature protects us in our uttermost losses
by a density through which conviction is slow to penetrate. In some
mysterious way the padlocked book had fallen into strange hands, and
had been carried to America.
"If Eagle were in America, I should know it. For De Chaumont would know
it, and Skenedonk would find it out."
I stooped for the padlock, hooked it in place, and locked the book
again.
"Is the message to you alone?" inquired Johnny Appleseed.
"Did you ever care for a woman?" I asked him.
Restless misery came into his eyes, and I noticed for the first time
that he was not an old man; he could not have been above thirty-five. He
made no answer; shifting from one bare foot to the other, his body
settling and losing its Indian lightness.
"A woman gave me the key to this book. Her name is written inside the
lid. I was to read it if it ever fell into my hands, after a number of
years. Somebody has stolen it, and carried it among the Indians. But
it's mine. Every shilling in my wallet, the clothes off my back you're
welcome to--"
"I don't want your money or your clothes."
"But let me give you something in exchange for it."
"What do I need? I always have as much as I want. This is a serviceable
coat, as good as any man need wish for; and the ravens feed me. And if I
needed anything, could I take it for carrying a message? I carry good
tidings of great joy among the people all the time. This is yours. Put
it in your pocket."
I hid the padlocked book in the breast of my coat, and seized his wrist
and his hand.
"Be of good courage, white double-man," said Johnny Appleseed. "The Lord
lift up the light of His countenance upon you, the Lord make His face to
shine upon you and give you peace!"
He returned to his side of the fire and stretched himself under the
stars, and I went to Croghan's quarters and lay down with my clothes on
in the bunk assigned to me.
The book which I would have rent open at twenty, I now carried unsealed.
The suspense of it was so sweet, and drew my thoughts from the other
suspense which could not be endured. It was not likely that any person
about Mont-Louis had stolen the book, and wandered so far. Small as the
volume was, the boards indented my breast and made me increasingly
conscious of its presence. I waked in the night and held it.
Next morning Johnny Appleseed was gone from the fort, unafraid of war,
bent only on carrying the apple of civilization into the wilderness.
Nobody spoke about his absence, for shells began to fall around us. The
British and Indians were in sight; and General Proctor sent a flag of
truce demanding surrender.
Major Croghan's ensign approached the messenger with a flag in reply.
The women gathered their children as chickens under shelter. All in the
fort were cheerful, and the men joked with the gush of humor which
danger starts in Americans. I saw then the ready laugh that faced in
its season what was called Indian summer, because the Indian took then
advantage of the last pleasant weather to make raids. Such pioneers
could speak lightly even of powwowing time--the first pleasant February
days, when savages held councils before descending on the settlements.
Major Croghan and I watched the parley from one of the blockhouses that
bastioned the place. Before it ended a Shawanoe sprang out of a ravine
and snatched the ensign's sword. He gave it back reluctantly, and the
British flag bearer hurried the American within the gates.
General Proctor regretted that so fine a young man as Major Croghan
should fall into the hands of savages, who were not to be restrained.
"When this fort is taken," said Croghan on hearing the message, "there
will be nobody left in it to kill."
British gunboats drawn up on the Sandusky river, and a howitzer on the
shore, opened fire, and cannonaded all day with the poor execution of
long range artillery. The northwestern angle of the fort was their
target. Croghan foresaw that the enemy's intention was to make a breach
and enter there. When night came again, his one six-pounder was moved
with much labor from that angle into the southwest blockhouse, as
noiselessly as possible. He masked the embrasure and had the piece
loaded with a double charge of slugs and grape shot and half a charge of
powder. Perhaps the British thought him unprovided with any heavy
artillery.
They were busy themselves, bringing three of the ineffectual
six-pounders and the howitzer, under darkness, within two hundred and
fifty yards of the fort; giving a background of woods to their battery.
About dawn we saw what they had been doing. They concentrated on the
northwest angle; and still Croghan replied only with muskets, waiting
for them to storm.
So it went on all day, the gun-proof blockhouse enduring its
bombardment, and smoke thickening until it filled the stockade as water
fills a well, and settled like fog between us and the enemy. An attack
was made on the southern angle where the cannon was masked.
"This is nothing but a feint," Croghan said to the younger officers.
While that corner replied with musketry, he kept a sharp lookout for the
safety of the northwest blockhouse.
One soldier was brought down the ladder and carried through the murky
pall to the surgeon, who could do nothing for him. Another turned from a
loophole with blood upon him, laughing at his mishap. For the
grotesqueness and inconvenience of a wound are sometimes more swiftly
felt than its pain. He came back presently with his shoulder bandaged
and resumed his place at the loophole.
The exhilaration of that powder atmosphere and its heat made soldiers
throw off their coats, as if the expanding human body was not to be
confined in wrappings.
In such twilight of war the twilight of Nature overtook us. Another
feint was made to draw attention from a heavy force of assailants
creeping within twenty paces, under cover of smoke, to surprise the
northwest blockhouse.
Musketry was directed against them: they hesitated. The commander led a
charge, and himself sprang first into the ditch. We saw the fine fellows
leaping to carry the blockhouse, every man determined to be first in
making a breach. They filled the ditch.
This was the instant for which Croghan had waited. He opened the
porthole and unmasked his exactly trained cannon. It enfiladed the
assailants, sweeping them at a distance of thirty feet; slugs and
grapeshot hissed, spreading fan rays of death! By the flash of the
re-loaded six-pounder, we saw the trench filled with dead and wounded.
The besiegers turned.
Croghan's sweating gunners swabbed and loaded and fired, roaring like
lions.
The Indians, of whom there were nearly a thousand, were not in the
charge, and when retreat began they went in panic. We could hear calls
and yells, the clatter of arms, and a thumping of the earth; the strain
of men tugging cannon ropes; the swift withdrawal of a routed force.
Two thousand more Indians approaching under Tecumseh, were turned back
by refugees.
Croghan remarked, as we listened to the uproar, "Fort Stephenson can
hardly be called untenable against heavy artillery."
Then arose cries in the ditch, which penetrated to women's ears. Neither
side was able to help the wounded there. But before the rout was
complete, Croghan had water let down in buckets to relieve their thirst,
and ordered a trench cut under the pickets of the stockade. Through this
the poor wretches who were able to crawl came in and surrendered
themselves and had their wounds dressed.
By three o'clock in the morning not a British uniform glimmered red
through the dawn. The noise of retreat ended. Pistols and muskets
strewed the ground. Even a sailboat was abandoned on the river, holding
military stores and the clothing of officers.
"They thought General Harrison was coming," laughed Croghan, as he sat
down to an early breakfast, having relieved all the living in the trench
and detailed men to bury the dead. "We have lost one man, and have
another under the surgeon's hands. Now I'm ready to appear before a
court-martial for disobeying orders."
"You mean you're ready for your immortal page in history."
"Paragraph," said Croghan; "and the dislike of poor little boys and
girls who will stick their fists in their eyes when they have to learn
it at school."
Intense manhood ennobled his long, animated face. The President
afterwards made him a lieutenant-colonel, and women and his superior
officers praised him; but he was never more gallant than when he said:
"My uncle, George Rogers Clark, would have undertaken to hold this fort;
and by heavens, we were bound to try it!"
The other young officers sat at mess with him, hilarious over the
outcome, picturing General Proctor's state of mind when he learned the
age of his conqueror.
None of them cared a rap that Daniel Webster was opposing the war in the
House of Representatives at Washington, and declaring that on land it
was a failure.
A subaltern came to the mess room door, touching his cap and asking to
speak with Major Croghan.
"The men working outside at the trenches saw a boy come up from the
ravine, sir, and fall every few steps, so they've brought him in."
"Does he carry a dispatch?"
"No, sir. He isn't more than nine or ten years old. I think he was a
prisoner."
"Is he a white boy?"
"Yes, sir, but he's dressed like an Indian."
"I think it unlikely the British would allow the Shawanoes to burden
their march with any prisoners."
"Somebody had him, and I'm afraid he's been shot either during the
action or in the retreat. He was hid in the ravine."
"Bring him here," said Croghan.
A boy with blue eyes set wide apart, hair clinging brightly and moistly
to his pallid forehead, and mouth corners turning up in a courageous
smile, entered and stood erect before the officer. He was a well made
little fellow. His tiny buckskin hunting shirt was draped with a sash in
the Indian fashion, showing the curve of his naked hip. Down this a
narrow line of blood was moving. Children of refugees, full of pity,
looked through the open door behind him.
"Go to him, Shipp," said Croghan, as the boy staggered. But he waved the
ensign back.
"Who are you, my man?" asked the Major.
"I believe," he answered, "I am the Marquis de Ferrier."
IV
He pitched forward, and I was quicker than Ensign Shipp. I set him on my
knees, and the surgeon poured a little watered brandy clown his throat.
"Paul!" I said to him.
"Stand back," ordered the surgeon, as women followed their children,
crowding the room.
"Do you know him, Lazarre?" asked Croghan.
"It's Madame de Ferrier's child."
"Not the baby I used to see at De Chaumont's? What's he doing at Fort
Stephenson?"
The women made up my bunk for Paul, and I laid him in it. Each wanted to
take him to her care. The surgeon sent them to the cook-house to brew
messes for him, and stripped the child, finding a bullet wound in his
side. Probing brought nothing out, and I did not ask a single question.
The child should live. There could be no thought of anything else. While
the surgeon dressed and bandaged that small hole like a sucked-in mouth,
I saw the boy sitting on saddle-bags behind me, his arms clipping my
waist, while we threaded bowers of horse paths. I had not known how I
wanted a boy to sit behind me! No wonder pioneer men were so confident
and full of jokes: they had children behind them!
He was burning with fever. His eyes swam in it as he looked at me. He
could not eat when food was brought to him, but begged for water, and
the surgeon allowed him what the women considered reckless quantities.
Over stockades came the August rustle of the forest. Morning bird voices
succeeded to the cannon's reverberations.
The surgeon turned everybody out but me, and looked in by times from his
hospital of British wounded. I wiped the boy's forehead and gave him his
medicine, fanning him all day long. He lay in stupor, and the surgeon
said he was going comfortably, and would suffer little. Once in awhile
he turned up the corners of his mouth and smiled at me, as if the opiate
gave him blessed sensations. I asked the surgeon what I should do in the
night if he came out of it and wanted to talk.
"Let him talk," said the doctor briefly.
Unlike the night before, this was a night of silence. Everybody slept,
but the sentinels, and the men whose wounds kept them awake; and I was
both a sentinel, and a man whose wounds kept him awake.
Paul's little hands were scratched; and there was a stone bruise on the
heel he pushed from cover of the blankets. His small body, compact of so
much manliness, was fine and sweet. Though he bore no resemblance to his
mother, it seemed to me that she lay there for me to tend; and the
change was no more an astounding miracle than the change of baby to
boy.
I had him all that night for my own, putting every other thought out of
mind and absorbing his presence. His forehead and his face lost their
burning heat with the coolness of dawn, which blew our shaded candle,
flowing from miles of fragrant oaks.
He awoke and looked all around the cabin. I tried to put his opiate into
his mouth; but something restrained me. I held his hand to my cheek.
"I like you," he spoke out. "Don't you think my mother is pretty?"
I said I thought his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world.
He curled up his mouth corners and gave me a blue-eyed smile.
"My father is not pretty. But he is a gentleman of France."
"Where are they, Paul?"
He turned a look upon me without answering.
"Paul," I said brutally, "tell me where your father and mother are."
He was so far gone that my voice recalled him. He simply knew me as a
voice and a presence that he liked.
"With poor old Ernestine," he answered.
"And where is poor old Ernestine?"
He began to shake as if struck with a chill. I drew the blanket closer.
"Paul, you must tell me!"
He shook his head. His mouth worked, and his little breast went into
convulsions.
He shrieked and threw himself toward me. "My pretty little mother!"
I held him still in a tight grip. "My darling--don't start your wound!"
I could have beaten myself, but the surgeon afterwards told me the child
was dying when he came into the fort. About dawn, when men's lives sink
to their lowest ebb with night, his sank away, I smoothed his head and
kissed and quieted him. Once he looked into space with blurred eyes, and
curled up his mouth corners when I am sure he no longer saw me.
Thus swiftly ended Paul's unaccountable appearance at the fort. It was
like the falling of a slain bird out of the sky at my feet. The women
were tender with his little body. They cried over him as they washed him
for burial. The children went outside the stockade and brought green
boughs and August wild flowers, bearing the early autumn colors of gold
and scarlet. With these they bedded the child in his plank coffin,
unafraid of his waxen sleep.
Before Croghan went to report to his General, he asked me where we
should bury the little fellow.
"In the fort, by the southern blockhouse," I answered. "Let Fort
Stephenson be his monument. It will stand here forever. The woods around
it will be trampled by prowling savages, and later on by prowling white
men. Within, nothing will obliterate the place. Give a little fellow a
bed here, who died between two countries, and will never be a citizen of
either."
"I don't want to make a graveyard of the fort," said Croghan. But he
looked at Paul, bent low over him, and allowed him to be buried near the
southwest angle.
There the child's bones rest to this day. The town of Fremont in the
commonwealth of Ohio has grown up around them. Young children who climb
the grassy bastion, may walk above his head, never guessing that a
little gentleman of France, who died like a soldier of his wound, lies
deeply cradled there.
Before throwing myself down in the dead heaviness which results from
continual loss of sleep, I questioned the wounded British soldiers about
Paul. None of them had seen him. Straggling bands of Indians continually
joined their force. Captives were always a possibility in the savage
camp. Paul might have been taken hundreds of miles away.
But I had the padlocked book, which might tell the whole story. With
desperate haste that could hardly wait to open the lids, I took it out,
wondering at the patience which long self-restraint had bred in me. I
was very tired, and stretched my arms across the pillow where Paul's
head had lain, to rest one instant. But I must have slept. My hand woke
first, and feeling itself empty, grasped at the book. It was gone, and
so was the sun.
I got a light and searched, thrusting my arm between the bunk and the
log wall. It was not on the floor, or in my breast pocket, or in my
saddle-bags.
The robbery was unendurable. And I knew the Indian who had done it. He
was the quietest, most stubborn Oneida that ever followed an adopted
white man. Why he had taken the book I could not understand. But I was
entirely certain that he had taken it out of my hand while I slept. He
would not break the padlock and read it, but like a judicious father he
would take care of a possibly unwholesome volume himself.
I went out and found the bald-headed and well-beloved wretch. He was
sitting with his knees to his chin by the evening log fire.
"Skenedonk," I said, "I want my book."
"Children and books make a woman of you," he responded. "You had enough
books at Longmeadow."
"I want it at once," I repeated.
"It's sorcery," he answered.
"It's a letter from Madame de Ferrier, and may tell where she is."
His fawn eyes were startled, but he continued to hug his knees.
"Skenedonk, I can't quarrel with you. You were my friend before I could
remember. When you know I am so bound to you, how can you deal me a
deadly hurt?"
"White woman sorcery is the worst sorcery. You thought I never saw it.
But I did see it. You went after her to Paris. You did not think of
being the king. So you had to come back with nothing. That's what woman
sorcery does. Now you have power with the tribes. The President sees
you are a big man! And she sends a book to you to bewitch you! I knew
she sent the book as soon as I saw it."
"Do you think she sent Paul?"
He made no answer.
"Madame de Ferrier does not know I have the book."
"You haven't it," said Skenedonk.
"But you have."
"If she wrote and sent a letter she expected it would be received."
"When I said a letter I meant what is called a journal: the writing down
of what happens daily. Johnny Appleseed got the book from an Indian.
That is how it was sent to me."
"If you read it you will want to drop everything else and go to find
her."
This was the truth, for I was not under military law.
"Where is the book?"
"Down my back," said Skenedonk.
I felt the loose buckskin.
"It isn't there."
"In my front," said Skenedonk.
I ran my hand over his chest, finding nothing but bone and brawn.
"There it is," he said, pointing to a curled wisp of board at the edge
of the fire. "I burnt it."
"Then you've finished me."
I turned and left him sitting like an image by the fire.
V
Before I left Fort Stephenson, I wrote a letter to Count de Chaumont,
telling him about Paul's death and asking for news of the De Ferriers.
The answer I begged him to send to Sandusky, which the British now
despaired of taking. But although Skenedonk made a long journey for it
twice during the half year, I got no answer.
The dangerous work of the next few months became like a long debauch.
Awake, we were dodging betwixt hostile tribes, or dealing with those
inclined to peace. Asleep, I was too exhausted to dream. It was a
struggle of the white force of civilization with the red sense of
justice. I wrestled with Algonquin dialects as I had wrestled with
Greek. Ottawas and Chippewas, long friendly to the French, came more
readily than other tribes to agreement with Americans.
Wherever I went I pushed the quest that was uppermost in my mind, but
without finding any trace of Madame de Ferrier.
From the measure constantly taken betwixt other men of my time and
myself, this positive knowledge resulted.
In spite of the fact that many treated me as a prince, I found myself an
average man. I had no military genius. In argument, persuasive,
graceful--even eloquent--were the adjectives applied to me; not sweeping
and powerful. I should have made a jog-trot king, no better than my
uncle of Provence; no worse than my uncle of Artois, who would rather
saw wood than reign a constitutional monarch, and whom the French people
afterward turned out to saw wood. My reign might have been neat; it
would never have been gaudily splendid. As an average man, I could well
hold my own in the world.
Perry on the lakes, General Jackson in the southwest, Harrison in the
west, and Lawrence on the ocean were pushing the war towards its close;
though as late as spring the national capital was burned by the British,
and a gentleman whom they gaily called "Old Jimmy Madison," temporarily
driven out. But the battle on the little river Thames, in October,
settled matters in the Northwest.
The next April, after Leipsic, Napoleon Bonaparte was banished to the
island of Elba; and Louis XVIII passed from his latest refuge at
Hartwell House in England, to London; where the Prince Regent honored
him and the whole capital cheered him; and thence to Paris where he was
proclaimed king of France. We heard of it in due course, as ships
brought news. I was serving with the American forces.
The world is fluid to a boy. He can do and dare anything. But it hardens
around a man and becomes a wall through which he must cut. I felt the
wall close around me.
In September I was wounded at the battle of Plattsburg on Lake
Champlain. Three men, besides the General and the doctor, and my Oneida,
showed a differing interest in me, while I lay with a gap under my left
arm, in a hospital tent.
First came Count de Chaumont, his face plowed with lines; no longer the
trim gentleman, youthfully easy, and in his full maturity, that he had
been when I first saw him at close range.
He sat down on a camp seat by my cot, and I asked him before he could
speak--
"Where is Madame de Ferrier?"
"She's dead," he answered.
"I don't believe it."
"You're young. I'm going back to France for a while. France will not be
what it was under the Empire. I'm tired of most things, however, and my
holdings here make me independent of changes there."
"What reason have you to think that she is dead?"
"Do you know the Indiana Territory well?"
"The northern part only."
"It happened in what was called the Pigeon Roost settlement at the fork
of the White River. The Kickapoos and Winnebagoes did it. There were
about two dozen people in the settlement."
"I asked how you know these things."
"I have some of the best Indian runners that ever trod moccasins, and
when I set them to scouting, they generally find what I want;--so I know
a great many things."
"But Paul--"
"It's an old custom to adopt children into the tribes. You know your
father, Chief Williams, is descended from a white girl who was a
prisoner. There were about two dozen people in the settlement, men,
women and children. The majority of the children were dashed against
trees. It has been consolation to me to think she did not survive in the
hands of savages."
The hidden causes which work out results never worked out a result more
improbable. I lay silent, and De Chaumont said,
"Do you remember the night you disappeared from the Tuileries?"
"I remember it."
"You remember we determined not to let the Marquis de Ferrier see
Napoleon. When you went down the corridor with Eagle I thought you were
luring him. But she told us afterward you were threatened with arrest,
and she helped you out of the Tuileries by a private stairway."
"Did it make any stir in the palace?"
"No. I saw one man hurrying past us. But nobody heard of the arrest
except Eagle."
"How did she get out?"
"Out of what?"
"The queen's closet."
"She was in the garden. She said she went down the private stairway to
avoid the gendarme. She must have done it cleverly, for she came in on
the arm of Junot and the matter was not noticed. There stood my
emergency facing me again. You had deserted. What made you imagine you
were threatened with arrest?"
"Because a gendarme in court dress laid his hand on my shoulder and told
me I was to come with him."
"Well, you may have drawn the secret police upon you. You had been
cutting a pretty figure. It was probably wise to drop between walls and
get out of France. Do you know why you were arrested?"
"I think the groundless charge would have been an attack upon Napoleon."
"You never attacked the emperor!"
"No. But I had every reason to believe such a charge would be sworn
against me if I ever came to trial."
"Perhaps that silly dauphin story leaked out in Paris. The emperor does
hate a Bourbon. But I thought you had tricked me. And the old marquis
never took his eyes off the main issue. He gave Eagle his arm, and was
ready to go in and thank the emperor."
"You had to tell him?"
"I had to tell him."
"What did he say?"
"Not a word. All the blood seemed to be drawn out of his veins, and his
face fell in. Then it burned red hot, and instead of good friend and
benefactor, I saw myself a convict. His big staring blue eyes came out
of a film like an owl's, and shot me through. I believe he saw
everything I ever did in my life, and my intentions about Eagle most
plainly of all. He bowed and wished me good-night, and took her out of
the Tuileries."
"But you saw him again?"
"He never let me see him again, or her either. I am certain he forbade
her to communicate with us. They did not go back to Mont-Louis. They
left their hotel in Paris. I wrote imploring him to hold the estates. My
messages were returned. I don't know how he got money enough to
emigrate. But emigrate they did; avoiding Castorland, where the
Saint-Michels, who brought her up, lived in comfort, and might have
comforted her, and where I could have made her life easy. He probably
dragged her through depths of poverty, before they joined a company
bound for the Indiana Territory, where the Pigeon Roost settlement was
planted. I have seen old Saint-Michel work at clearing, and can imagine
the Marquis de Ferrier sweating weakly while he chopped trees. It is a
satisfaction to know they had Ernestine with them. De Ferrier might have
plowed with Eagle," said the count hotly. "He never hesitated to make
use of her."
While I had been living a monk's studious, well-provided life, was she
toiling in the fields? I groaned aloud.
De Chaumont dropped his head on his breast.
"It hurts me more than I care to let anybody but you know, Lazarre. If I
hadn't received that letter I should have avoided you. I wish you had
saved Paul. I would adopt him."
"I think not, my dear count."
"Nonsense, boy! I wouldn't let you have him."
"You have a child."
"Her husband has her. But let us not pitch and toss words. No use
quarreling over a dead boy. What right have you to Eagle's child?"
"Not your right of faithful useful friendship. Only my own right."
"What's that?"
"Nothing that she ever admitted."
"I was afraid of you," said De Chaumont, "when you flowered out with old
Du Plessy, like an heir lost in emigration and found again. You were a
startling fellow, dropping on the Faubourg; and anything was possible
under the Empire. You know I never believed the dauphin nonsense, but a
few who remembered, said you looked like the king. You were the king to
her; above mating with the best of the old nobility. She wouldn't have
married you."
"Did she ever give you reason to think she would marry you?"
"She never gave me reason to think she would marry anybody. But what's
the use of groaning? There's distraction abroad. I took the trails to
see you, when I heard you were with the troops on Champlain. I shall be
long in France. What can I do for you, my boy?"
"Nothing, count. You have already done much."
"She had a foolish interest in you. The dauphin!--Too good to sit at
table with us, you raw savage!--Had to be waited on by old Jean! And she
would have had me serve you, myself!"
He laughed, and so did I. We held hands, clinging in fellowship.
"I might not have refused your service; like Marquis de Ferrier."
The count's face darkened.
"I'll not abuse him. He's dead."
"Are you sure he's dead this time, count?"
"A Kickapoo is carrying his scalp. Trust my runners. They have traced
him so much for me they know the hair on his stubborn head. I must go
where I can have amusement, Lazarre. This country is a young man's
country. I'm getting old. Adieu. You're one of the young men."
Some changes of light and darkness passed over me, and the great anguish
of my wound increased until there was no rest. However, the next man who
visited me stood forth at the side of the stretcher as Bellenger. I
thought I dreamed him, being light-headed with fever. He was
unaccountably weazened, robbed of juices, and powdering to dust on the
surface. His mustache had grown again, and he carried it over his ears
in the ridiculous manner affected when I saw him in the fog.
"Where's your potter's wheel?" I inquired.
"In the woods by Lake George, sire."
"Do you still find clay that suits you?"
"Yes, sire."
"Have you made that vase yet?"
"No, sire. I succeed in nothing."
"You succeed in tracking me."
He swam before my eyes, and I pointed to the surgeon's camp-chair.
"Not in your presence, sire."
"Have you lost your real dauphin?" I inquired.
"I have the honor of standing before the real dauphin."
"So you swore at Mittau!"
"I perjured myself."
"Well, what are you doing now?"
"Sire, I am a man in failing health. Before the end I have come to tell
you the truth."
"Do you think you can do it?"
"Sire"--said Bellenger.
"Your king is Louis XVIII," I reminded him.
"He is not my king."
"Taken your pension away, has he?"
"I no longer receive anything from that court."
"And your dauphin?"
"He was left in Europe."
"Look here, Bellenger! Why did you treat me so? Dauphin or no dauphin,
what harm was I doing you?"
"I thought a strong party was behind you. And I knew there had been
double dealing with me. You represented some invisible power tricking
me. I was beside myself, and faced it out in Mittau. I have been used
shamefully, and thrown aside when I am failing. Hiding out in the hills
ruined my health."
"Let us get to facts, if you have facts. Do you know anything about me,
Bellenger?"
"Yes, sire."
"Who am I?"
"Louis XVII of France."
"What proof can you give me?"
"First, sire, permit a man who has been made a wretched tool, to implore
forgiveness of his rightful sovereign, and a little help to reach a
warmer climate before the rigors of a northern winter begin."
"Bellenger, you are entrancing," I said. "Why did I ever take you
seriously? Ste. Pélagie was a grim joke, and tipping in the river merely
your playfulness. You had better take yourself off now, and keep on
walking until you come to a warmer climate."
He wrung his hands with a gesture that touched my natural softness to my
enemy.
"Talk, then. Talk, man. What have you to say?"
"This, first, sire. That was a splendid dash you made into France!"
"And what a splendid dash I made out of it again, with a gendarme at my
coat tails, and you behind the gendarme!"
"But it was the wrong time. If you were there now;--the French people
are so changeable--"
"I shall never be there again. His Majesty the eighteenth Louis is
welcome. What the blood stirs in me to know is, have I a right to the
throne?"
"Sire, the truth as I know it, I will tell you. You were the boy taken
from the Temple prison."
"Who did it?"
"Agents of the royalist party whose names would mean nothing to you if I
gave them."
"I was placed in your hands?"
"You were placed in my hands to be taken to America."
"I was with you in London, where two royalists who knew me, recognized
me?"
"The two De Ferriers."
"Did a woman named Madame Tank see me?"
Bellenger was startled.
"You were noticed on the ship by a court-lady of Holland; a very clever
courtier. I had trouble in evading her. She suspected too much, and
asked too many questions; and would have you to play with her baby on
the deck, though at that time you noticed nothing."
"But where does the idiot come into my story?"
"Sire, you have been unfortunate, but I have been a victim. When we
landed in New York I went directly and made myself known to the man who
was to act as purveyor of your majesty's pension. He astonished me by
declaring that the dauphin was already there, and had claimed the
pension for that year. The country and the language were unknown to me.
The agent spoke French, it is true, but we hardly understood each other.
I supposed I had nothing to do but present my credentials. Here was
another idiot--I crave your majesty's pardon--"
"Quite right--at the time, Bellenger."
--"drawing the annuity intended for the dauphin. I inquired into his
rights. The agent showed me papers like my own. I asked who presented
them. He knew no more of the man than he did of me. I demanded to face
the man. No such person could be found. I demanded to see the idiot. He
was shut in a room and fed by a hired keeper. I sat down and thought
much. Clearly it was not the agent's affair. He followed instructions.
Good! I would follow instructions also. Months would have been required
to ask and receive explanations from the court of Monsieur. He had
assumed the title of Louis XVIII, for the good of the royalist cause, as
if there were no prince. I thought I saw what was expected of me."
"And what did you see, you unspeakable scoundrel?"
"I saw that there was a dauphin too many, hopelessly idiotic. But if he
was the one to be guarded, I would guard him."
"Who was that idiot?"
"Some unknown pauper. No doubt of that."
"And what did you do with me?"
"A chief of the Iroquois Indians can tell you that."
"This is a clumsy story, Bellenger. Try again."
"Sire--"
"If you knew so little of the country, how did you find an Iroquois
chief?"
"I met him in the woods when he was hunting. I offered to give you to
him, pretending you had the annuity from Europe. Sire, I do not know why
trickery was practiced on me, or who practiced it: why such pains were
taken to mix the clues which led to the dauphin. But afterwards the same
agent had orders to give you two-thirds and me only one-third of the
yearly sum. I thought the court was in straits;--when both Russia and
Spain supported it! I was nothing but a court painter. But when you went
to France, I blocked your way with all the ingenuity I could bring."
"I would like to ask you, Bellenger, what a man is called who attempts
the life of his king?"
"Sire, the tricks of royalists pitted us against each other."
"That's enough, Bellenger. I don't believe a word you say, excepting
that part of your story agreeing with Madame de Ferrier's. Put your hand
under my pillow and find my wallet. Now help yourself, and never let me
see you again."
He helped himself to everything except a few shillings, weeping because
his necessities were so great. But I told him I was used to being
robbed, and he had done me all the harm he could; so his turn to pluck
me naturally followed.
Then I softened, as I always do towards the claimant of the other part,
and added that we were on the same footing; I had been a pensioner
myself.
"Sire, I thank you," said Bellenger, having shaken the wallet and poked
his fingers into the lining where an unheard-of gold piece could have
lodged.
"It tickles my vanity to be called sire."
"You are a true prince," said Bellenger. "My life would be well spent if
I could see you restored to your own."
"So I infer, from the valuable days you have spent trying to bring that
result about."
"Your majesty is sure of finding support in France."
"The last king liked to tinker with clocks. Perhaps I like to tinker
with Indians."
"Sire, it is due to your birth--"
"Never mind my birth," I said. "I'm busy with my life."
He bowed himself out of my presence without turning. This tribute to
royalty should have touched me. He took a handsome adieu, and did not
afterward seek further reward for his service. I heard in the course of
years that he died in New Orleans, confessing much regarding myself to
people who cared nothing about it, and thought him crazy. They doubtless
had reason, so erratic was the wanderer whom I had first consciously
seen through Lake George fog. His behavior was no more incredible than
the behavior of other Frenchmen who put a hand to the earlier years of
their prince's life.
The third to appear at my tent door was Chief Williams, himself. The
surgeon told him outside the tent that it was a dangerous wound. He had
little hope for me, and I had indifferent hope myself, lying in torpor
and finding it an effort to speak. But after several days of effort I
did speak.
The chief sat beside me, concerned and silent.
"Father," I said.
The chief harkened near to my lips.
"Tell me," I begged, after resting, "who brought me to you."
His dark sullen face became tender. "It was a Frenchman," he answered.
"I was hunting and met him on the lake with two boys. He offered to give
you to me. We had just lost a son."
When I had rested again, I asked:
"Do you know anything else about me?"
"No."
The subject was closed between us. And all subjects were closed betwixt
the world and me, for my face turned the other way. The great void of
which we know nothing, but which our faith teaches us to bridge, opened
for me.
VI
But the chief's and Skenedonk's nursing and Indian remedies brought me
face earthward again, reviving the surgeon's hope.
When blood and life mounted, and my torn side sewed up its gap in a
healthy scar, adding another to my collection, autumn was upon us. From
the hunting lodges on Lake George, and the Williamses of Longmeadow, I
went to the scorched capital of Washington. In the end the Government
helped me with my Indian plan, though when Skenedonk and I pushed out
toward Illinois Territory we had only my pay and a grant of land. Peace
was not formally made until December, but the war ended that summer.
Man's success in the world is proportioned to the number of forces he
can draw around himself to work with him. I have been able to draw some
forces; though in matters where most people protect themselves, I have a
quality of asinine patience which the French would not have tolerated.
The Oneidas were ready to follow wherever I led them. And so were many
families of the Iroquois federation. But the Mohawk tribe held back.
However, I felt confident of material for an Indian state when the
foundation should be laid.
We started lightly equipped upon the horse paths. The long journey by
water and shore brought us in October to the head of Green Bay. We had
seen Lake Michigan, of a light transparent blueness, with fire ripples
chasing from the sunset. And we had rested at noon in plum groves on the
vast prairies, oases of fertile deserts, where pink and white fruit
drops, so ripe that the sun preserves it in its juice. The freshness of
the new world continually flowed around us. We shot deer. Wolves sneaked
upon our trail. We slept with our heels to the campfire, and our heads
on our saddles. Sometimes we built a hunter's shed, open at front and
sloping to ground at back. To find out how the wind blew, we stuck a
finger in our mouths and held it up. The side which became cold first
was the side of the wind.
Physical life riots in the joy of its revival. I was so glad to be alive
after touching death that I could think of Madame de Ferrier without
pain, and say more confidently--"She is not dead," because resurrection
was working in myself.
Green Bay or La Baye, as the fur hunters called it, was a little post
almost like a New England village among its elms: one street and a few
outlying houses beside the Fox River. The open world had been our
tavern; or any sod or log hut cast up like a burrow of human prairie
dogs or moles. We did not expect to find a tavern in Green Bay. Yet such
a place was pointed out to us near the Fur Company's block warehouse. It
had no sign post, and the only visible stable was a pen of logs. Though
negro slaves were owned in the Illinois Territory, we saw none when a
red-headed man rushed forth shouting:
"Sam, you lazy nigger, come here and take the gentleman's horses! Where
is that Sam? Light down, sir, with your Indian, and I will lead your
beasts to the hostler myself."
In the same way our host provided a supper and bed with armies of
invisible servants. Skenedonk climbed a ladder to the loft with our
saddlebags.
"Where is that chambermaid?" cried the tavern keeper.
"Yes, where is she?" said a man who lounged on a bench by the entrance.
"I've heard of her so often I would like to see her myself."
The landlord, deaf to raillery, bustled about and spread our table in
his public room.
"Corn bread, hominy, side meat, ven'zin," he shouted in the kitchen.
"Stir yourself, you black rascal, and dish up the gentleman's supper."
Skenedonk walked boldly to the kitchen door and saw our landlord stewing
and broiling, performing the offices of cook as he had performed those
of stableman. He kept on scolding and harrying the people who should
have been at his command:--"Step around lively, Sam. Tell the gentleman
the black bottle is in the fireplace cupboard if he wants to sharpen his
appetite. Where is that little nigger that picks up chips? Bring me some
more wood from the wood-pile! I'll teach you to go to sleep behind the
door!"
Our host served us himself, running with sleeves turned back to admonish
an imaginary cook. His tap-room was the fireplace cupboard, and it was
visited while we ate our supper, by men in elkskin trousers, and caps
and hooded capotes of blue cloth. These Canadians mixed their own drink,
and made a cross-mark on the inside of the cupboard door, using a system
of bookkeeping evidently agreed upon between themselves and the
landlord. He shouted for the lazy barkeeper, who answered nothing out of
nothingness.
Nightfall was very clear and fair in this Northwestern territory. A man
felt nearer to the sunset. The region took hold upon me: particularly
when one who was neither a warehouseman nor a Canadian fur hunter,
hurried in and took me by the hand.
"I am Pierre Grignon," he said.
Indeed, if he had held his fiddle, and tuned it upon an arm not quite so
stout, I should have known without being told that he was the man who
had played in the Saint-Michel cabin while Annabel de Chaumont climbed
the chimney.
We sat and talked until the light faded. The landlord brought a candle,
and yelled up the loft, where Skenedonk had already stretched himself in
his blanket, as he loved to do:
"Chambermaid, light up!"
"You drive your slaves too hard, landlord," said Pierre Grignon.
"You'd think I hadn't any, Mr. Grignon; for they're never in the way
when they're wanted."
"One industrious man you certainly have."
"Yes, Sam is a good fellow; but I'll have to go out and wake him up and
make him rub the horses down."
"Never mind," said Pierre Grignon. "I'm going to take these travelers
home with me."
"Now I know how a tavern ought to be kept," said the landlord. "But
what's the use of my keeping one if Pierre Grignon carries off all the
guests?"
"He is my old friend," I told the landlord.
"He's old friend to everybody that comes to Green Bay. I'll never get so
much as a sign painted to hang in front of the Palace Tavern."
I gave him twice his charges and he said:
"What a loss it was to enterprise in the Bay when Pierre Grignon came
here and built for the whole United States!"
The Grignon house, whether built for the whole United States or not, was
the largest in Green Bay. Its lawn sloped down to the Fox River. It was
a huge square of oak timbers, with a detached kitchen, sheltered by
giant elms. To this day it stands defying time with its darkening frame
like some massive rock, the fan windows in the gables keeping guard
north and south.
A hall divided the house through the center, and here Madame Grignon
welcomed me as if I were a long-expected guest, for this was her custom;
and as soon as she clearly remembered me, led me into a drawing-room
where a stately old lady sat making lace.
This was the grandmother of the house. Such a house would have been
incomplete without a grandmother at the hearth.
The furniture of this hall or family room had been brought from
Montreal; spindle chairs and a pier table of mahogany; a Turkey carpet,
laid smoothly on the polished floor to be spurned aside by young dancers
there; some impossible sea pictures, with patron saints in the clouds
over mariners; an immense stuffed sofa, with an arm dividing it across
the center;--the very place for those head-to-head conversations with
young men which the girls of the house called "twosing." It was, in
fact, the favorite "twosing" spot of Green Bay.
Stools there were for children, and armchairs for old people were not
lacking. The small yellow spinning wheel of Madame Ursule, as I found
afterwards Madame Grignon was commonly called, stood ready to revolve
its golden disk wherever she sat.
The servants were Pawnee Indians, moving about their duties almost with
stealth.
The little Grignon daughter who had stood lost in wonder at the dancing
of Annabel de Chaumont, was now a turner of heads herself, all flaxen
white, and contrasting with the darkness of Katarina Tank. Katarina was
taken home to the Grignon's after her mother's death. Both girls had
been educated in Montreal.
The seigniorial state in which Pierre Grignon lived became at once
evident. I found it was the custom during Advent for all the villagers
to meet in his house and sing hymns. On Christmas day his tables were
loaded for everybody who came. If any one died, he was brought to Pierre
Grignon's for prayer, and after his burial, the mourners went back to
Pierre Grignon's for supper. Pierre Grignon and his wife were god-father
and god-mother to most of the children born at La Baye. If a child was
left without father and mother, Pierre Grignon's house became its asylum
until a home could be found for it. The few American officers stationed
at the old stockade, nearly every evening met the beauties of Green Bay
at Pierre Grignon's, and if he did not fiddle for them he led Madame in
the dancing. The grandmother herself sometimes took her stick and
stepped through a measure to please the young people. Laughter and the
joy of life filled the house every waking hour of the twenty-four.
Funerals were never horrible there. Instead, they seemed the mystic
beginning of better things.
"Poor Madame Tank! She would have been so much more comfortable in her
death if she had relieved her mind," Madame Ursule said, the first
evening, as we sat in a pause of the dancing. "She used to speak of you
often, for seeing you made a great impression upon her, and she never
let us forget you. I am sure she knew more about you than she ever told
me. 'I have an important disclosure to make,' she says. 'Come around me,
I want all of you to hear it!' Then she fell back and died without
telling it."
A touch of mystery was not lacking to the house. Several times I saw the
tail of a gray gown disappear through an open door. Some woman half
entered and drew back.
"It's Madeleine Jordan," an inmate told me each time. "She avoids
strangers."
I asked if Madeleine Jordan was a relative.
"Oh, no," Madame Ursule replied; "but the family who brought her here,
went back to Canada, and of course they left her with us."
Of course Madeleine Jordan, or anybody else who lacked a roof, would be
left with the Grignons; but in that house a hermit seemed out of place,
and I said so to Madame Ursule.
"Poor child!" she responded. "I think she likes the bustle and noise.
She is not a hermit. What difference can it make to her whether people
are around her or not?"
The subject of Madeleine Jordan was no doubt beyond a man's handling. I
had other matters to think about, and directly plunged into them. First
the Menominees and Winnebagoes must be assembled in council. They held
all the desirable land.
"We don't like your Indian scheme in Green Bay," said Pierre Grignon.
"But if the tribes here are willing to sell their lands, other settlers
can't prevent it."
He went with me to meet the savages on the opposite side of the Fox near
the stockade. There the talking and eating lasted two days. At the end
of that time I had a footing for our Iroquois in the Wisconsin portion
of the Illinois Territory; and the savages who granted it danced a war
dance in our honor. Every brave shook over his head the scalps he had
taken. I saw one cap of soft long brown hair.
"Eh!" said Pierre Grignon, sitting beside me. "Their dirty trophies make
you ghastly! Do your eastern tribes never dance war dances?"
After the land was secured its boundaries had to be set. Then my own
grant demanded attention; and last, I was anxious to put my castle on it
before snow flew. Many of those late autumn nights Skenedonk and I spent
camping. The outdoor life was a joy to me. Our land lay up the Fox River
and away from the bay. But more than one stormy evening, when we came
back to the bay for supplies, I plunged into the rolling water and swam
breasting the waves. It is good to be hardy, and sane, and to take part
in the visible world, whether you are great and have your heart's desire
or not.
When we had laid the foundation of the Indian settlement, I built my
house with the help of skilled men. It was a spacious one of hewn logs,
chinked with cat-and-clay plaster, showing its white ribs on the hill
above the Fox. In time I meant to cover the ribs with perennial vines.
There was a spring near the porches. The woods banked me on the rear,
and an elm spread its colossal umbrella over the roof. Fertile fields
stretched at my left, and on my right a deep ravine lined with white
birches, carried a stream to the Fox.
From my stronghold to the river was a long descent. The broadening and
narrowing channel could be seen for miles. A bushy island, beloved of
wild ducks, parted the water, lying as Moses hid in osiers, amidst tall
growths of wild oats. Lily pads stretched their pavements in the oats.
Beyond were rolling banks, and beyond those, wooded hills rising terrace
over terrace to the dawn. Many a sunrise was to come to me over those
hills. Oaks and pines and sumach gathered to my doorway.
In my mind I saw the garden we afterward created; with many fruit trees,
beds, and winding walks, trellised seats, squares of flaming tulips,
phlox, hollyhocks, roses. It should reach down into the ravine, where
humid ferns and rocks met plants that love darkling ground. Yet it
should not be too dark. I would lop boughs rather than have a growing
thing spindle as if rooted in Ste. Pélagie!--and no man who loves trees
can do that without feeling the knife at his heart. What is long
developing is precious like the immortal part of us.
The stoicism that comes of endurance has something of death in it. I
prepared a home without thought of putting any wife therein. I had grown
used to being alone, with the exception of Skenedonk's taciturn company.
The house was for castle and resting place after labor. I took
satisfaction in the rude furniture we made for it. In after years it
became filled with rich gifts from the other side of the world, and
books that have gladdened my heart. Yet in its virginhood, before pain
or joy or achievement had entered there, before spade struck the ground
which was to send up food, my holding on the earth's surface made me
feel prince of a principality.
The men hewed a slab settle, and stationed it before the hearth, a thing
of beauty in its rough and lichen-tinted barks, though you may not
believe it. My floors I would have smooth and neatly joined, of hard
woods which give forth a shining for wear and polish. Stools I had,
easily made, and one large round of a tree for my table, like an Eastern
tabouret.
Before the river closed and winter shut in, Skenedonk and I went back to
Green Bay. I did not know how to form my household, and had it in mind
to consult Madame Ursule. Pawnees could be had: and many French
landholders in the territory owned black slaves. Pierre Grignon himself
kept one little negro like a monkey among the stately Indians.
Dealing with acres, and with people wild as flocks, would have been
worth while if nothing had resulted except our welcome back to Pierre
Grignon's open house. The grandmother hobbled on her stick across the
floor to give me her hand. Madame Ursule reproached me with delaying,
and Pierre said it was high time to seek winter quarters. The girls
recounted harvest reels and even weddings, with dances following, which
I had lost while away from the center of festivity.
The little negro carried my saddlebags to the guest room. Skenedonk was
to sleep on the floor. Abundant preparations for the evening meal were
going forward in the kitchen. As I mounted the stairway at Madame
Ursule's direction, I heard a tinkle of china, her very best, which
adorned racks and dressers. It was being set forth on the mahogany
board.
The upper floor of Pierre Grignon's house was divided by a hall similar
to the one below. I ran upstairs and halted.
Standing with her back to the fading light which came through one fan
window at the hall end, was a woman's figure in a gray dress. I gripped
the rail.
My first thought was: "How shall I tell her about Paul?" My next was:
"What is the matter with her?"
She rippled from head to foot in the shiver of rapture peculiar to her,
and stretched her arms to me crying:
"Paul! Paul!"
VII
"Oh, Madame!" I said, bewildered, and sick as from a stab. It was no
comfort that the high lady who scarcely allowed me to kiss her hand
before we parted, clung around my neck. She trembled against me.
"Have you come back to your mother, Paul?"
"Eagle!" I pleaded. "Don't you know me? You surely know Lazarre!"
She kissed me, pulling my head down in her arms, the velvet mouth like a
baby's, and looked straight into my eyes.
"Madame, try to understand! I am Louis! If you forget Lazarre, try to
remember Louis!"
She heard with attention, and smiled. The pressure of my arms spoke to
her. A man's passion addressed itself to a little child. All other
barriers which had stood between us were nothing to this. I held her,
and she could never be mine. She was not ill in body; the contours of
her upturned face were round and softened with much smiling. But
mind-sickness robbed me of her in the moment of finding her.
"She can't be insane!" I said aloud. "Oh, God, anything but that! She
was not a woman that could be so wrecked."
Like a fool I questioned, and tried to get some explanation.
Eagle smoothed my arm, nested her hand in my neck.
"My little boy! He has grown to be a man--while his mother has grown
down to be a child! Do you know what I am now, Paul?"
I choked a sob in my throat and told her I did not.
"I am your Cloud-Mother. I live in a cloud. Do you love me while I am in
the cloud?"
I told her I loved her with all my strength, in the cloud or out of it.
"Will you take care of me as I used to take care of you?"
I swore to the Almighty that she should be my future care.
"I need you so! I have watched for you in the woods and on the water,
Paul! You have been long coming back to me."
I heard Madame Ursule mounting the stairs to see if my room was in
order.
Who could understand the relation in which Eagle and I now stood, and
the claim she made upon me? She clung to my arm when I took it away. I
led her by the hand. Even this sight caused Madame Ursule a shock at the
head of the stairs.
"M's'r Williams!"
My hostess paused and looked at us.
"Did she come to you of her own accord?"
"Yes, madame."
"I never knew her to notice a stranger before."
"Madame, do you know who this is?"
"Madeleine Jordan."
"It is the Marquise de Ferrier."
"The Marquise de Ferrier?"
"Yes, madame."
"Did you know her?"
"I have known her ever since I can remember."
"The Marquise de Ferrier! But, M's'r Williams, did she know you?"
"She knows me," I asserted. "But not as myself. I am sure she knows me!
But she confuses me with the child she lost! I cannot explain to you,
madame, how positive I am that she recognizes me; any more than I can
explain why she will call me Paul. I think I ought to tell you, so you
will see the position in which I am placed, that this lady is the lady I
once hoped to marry."
"Saints have pity, M's'r Williams!"
"I want to ask you some questions."
"Bring her down to the fire. Come, dear child," said Madame Ursule,
coaxing Eagle. "Nobody is there. The bedrooms can never be so warm as
the log fire; and this is a bitter evening."
The family room was unlighted by candles, as often happened. For such an
illumination in the chimney must have quenched any paler glare. We had a
few moments of brief privacy from the swarming life which constantly
passed in and out.
I placed Eagle by the fire and she sat there obediently, while I talked
to Madame Ursule apart.
"Was her mind in this state when she came to you?"
"She was even a little wilder than she is now. The girls have been a
benefit to her."
"They were not afraid of her?"
"Who could be afraid of the dear child? She is a lady--that's plain. Ah,
M's'r Williams, what she must have gone through!"
"Yet see how happy she looks!"
"She always seemed happy enough. She would come to this house. So when
the Jordans went to Canada, Pierre and I both said, 'Let her stay.'"
"Who were the Jordans?"
"The only family that escaped with their lives from the massacre when
she lost her family. Madame Jordan told me the whole story. They had
friends among the Winnebagoes who protected them."
"Did they give her their name?"
"No, the people in La Baye did that. We knew she had another name. But I
think it very likely her title was not used in the settlement where they
lived. Titles are no help in pioneering."
"Did they call her Madeleine?"
"She calls herself Madeleine."
"How long has she been with your family?"
"Nearly a year."
"Did the Jordans tell you when this change came over her?"
"Yes. It was during the attack when her child was taken from her. She
saw other children killed. The Indians were afraid of her. They respect
demented people; not a bit of harm was done to her. They let her alone,
and the Jordans took care of her."
The daughter and adopted daughter of the house came in with a rush of
outdoor air, and seeing Eagle first, ran to kiss her on the cheek one
after the other.
"Madeleine has come down!" said Marie.
"I thought we should coax her in here sometime," said Katarina.
Between them, standing slim and tall, their equal in height, she was yet
like a little sister. Though their faces were unlined, hers held a
divine youth.
To see her stricken with mind-sickness, and the two girls who had done
neither good nor evil, existing like plants in sunshine, healthy and
sound, seemed an iniquitous contrast.
If ever woman was made for living and dying in one ancestral home, she
was that woman. Yet she stood on the border of civilization, without a
foothold to call her own. If ever woman was made for one knightly love
which would set her in high places, she was that woman. Yet here she
stood, her very name lost, no man so humble as to do her reverence.
"Paul has come," Eagle told Katarina and Marie. Holding their hands, she
walked between them toward me, and bade them notice my height. "I am
his Cloud-Mother," she said. "How droll it is that parents grow down
little, while their children grow up big!"
Madame Ursule shook her head pitifully. But the girls really saw the
droll side and laughed with my Cloud-Mother.
Separated from me by an impassable barrier, she touched me more deeply
than when I sued her most. The undulating ripple which was her peculiar
expression of joy was more than I could bear. I left the room and was
flinging myself from the house to walk in the chill wind; but she caught
me.
"I will be good!" pleaded my Cloud-Mother, her face in my breast.
Her son who had grown up big, while she grew down little, went back to
the family room with her.
My Cloud-Mother sat beside me at table, and insisted on cutting up my
food for me. While I tried to eat, she asked Marie and Katarina and
Pierre Grignon and Madame Ursule to notice how well I behaved. The
tender hearted host wiped his eyes.
I understood why she had kept such hold upon me through years of
separateness. A nameless personal charm, which must be a gift of the
spirit, survived all wreck and change. It drew me, and must draw me
forever, whether she knew me again or not. One meets and wakes you to
vivid life in an immortal hour. Thousands could not do it through
eternity.
The river piled hillocks of water in a strong north wind, and no officer
crossed from the stockade. Neither did any neighbor leave his own fire.
It seldom happened that the Grignons were left with inmates alone. Eagle
sat by me and watched the blaze streaming up the chimney.
If she was not a unit in the family group and had no part there, they
were most kind to her.
"Take care!" the grandmother cried with swift forethought when Marie and
Katarina marshaled in a hopping object from the kitchen. "It might
frighten Madeleine."
Pierre Grignon stopped in the middle of a bear hunt. Eagle was not
frightened. She clapped her hands.
"This is a pouched turkey!" Marie announced, leaning against the wall,
while Katarina chased the fowl. It was the little negro, his arms and
feet thrust into the legs of a pair of Pierre Grignon's trousers, and
the capacious open top fastened upon his back. Doubled over, he waddled
and hopped as well as he could. A feather duster was stuck in for a
tail, and his woolly head gave him the uncanny look of a black harpy. To
see him was to shed tears of laughter. The pouched turkey enjoyed being
a pouched turkey. He strutted and gobbled, and ran at the girls; tried
to pick up corn from the floor with his thick lips, tumbling down and
rolling over in the effort; for a pouched turkey has no wings with which
to balance himself. So much hilarity in the family room drew the Pawnee
servants. I saw their small dark eyes in a mere line of open door,
gazing solemnly.
When the turkey was relieved from his pouching and sent to bed, Pierre
Grignon took his violin. The girls answered with jigs that ended a reel,
when couples left the general figure to jig it off.
When Eagle had watched them awhile she started up, spread her skirts in
a sweeping courtesy, and began to dance a gavotte. The fiddler changed
his tune, and the girls rested and watched her. Alternately swift and
languid, with the changes of the movement, she saluted backward to the
floor, or spun on the tips of rapid feet. I had seen her dance many
times, but never with such abandon of joy.
Our singular relationship was established in the house, where
hospitality made room and apology for all human weakness.
Nobody of that region, except the infirm, stayed indoors to shiver by a
fire. Eagle and the girls in their warm capotes breasted with me the
coldest winter days. She was as happy as they were; her cheeks tingled
as pink as theirs. Sometimes I thought her eyes must answer me with her
old self-command; their bright grayness was so natural.
I believed if her delusions were humored, they would unwind from her
like the cloud which she felt them to be. The family had long fallen
into the habit of treating her as a child, playing some imaginary
character. She seemed less demented than walking in a dream, her
faculties asleep. It was somnambulism rather than madness. She had not
the expression of insane people, the shifty eyes, the cunning and
perverseness, the animal and torpid presence.
If I called her Madame de Ferrier instead of my Cloud-Mother, a strained
and puzzled look replaced her usual satisfaction. I did not often use
the name, nor did I try to make her repeat my own. It was my daily
effort to fall in with her happiness, for if she saw any anxiety she was
quick to plead: