the laws of Heaven, must you, my son? Hearty penance shall ye both do
before I minister to you the sacrament of marriage. My children, the
evil one prowls constantly along the banks of this river, while your
poor confessors can only reach you at intervals of months. Heed my
admonitions. Where is Pierre’s wife?”
Down went Pierre’s face between his hands into his cap.
“Dead,” he articulated from its hollow. “Without absolution. And the
little baby on her arm, it went with her, baptized by ourselves.”
“God have pity on you, my children,” said Dollier de Casson. “I will
say masses over her grave, and it is well with the little unblemished
soul. How many children have you, Pierre?”
“Seventeen, father.”
“Twenty-six, he should say, father,” a woman near the priest declared.
“For the widow of Jean Ba’ti’ Morin has nine.”
“And why should Pierre count as his own the flock of Jean Ba’ti’
Morin’s widow?”
“Because he is to marry her, father, when Antonio Brunette marries his
oldest girl.”
“If I come not oftener,” remarked the priest, “you will all be changed
about and newly related to each other so that I shall not know how to
name ye. I will read the service for the dead over your first wife,
Pierre, before I marry you to your second. It is indeed better to be
dwelling in love than in discord. Have you had any disagreements?”
“No, father; but Jean Ba’ti’s oldest boy has taken to the woods and is
off among the Indians, leaving his mother to farm alone with only six
little lads to help her.”
“Another coureur de bois,” said the priest in displeasure.
“Therefore, father,” opportunely put in Jean Ba’ti’s widow, “I having
no man at all, and Pierre having no woman at all, we thought to wed.”
“Think now of your sins,” said Father de Casson, “from oldest to
youngest. After penance and absolution and examination in the faith ye
shall have mass.”
The solemn performance of these religious duties began and proceeded
until dusk obliterated all faces in the dimly lighted cabin. Stump
roots were piled up in the fire-place, and Pierre’s daughter, between
her prayers, put on the evening meal to cook.
If a child tittered at going under the confessional tent, its mother
gave it a rear prod with admonishing hand. In that humble darkness
Father de Casson’s ear received the whispers of all these plodding
souls, and his tongue checked their evil and nourished their good. The
cabin became a chapel full of kneeling figures telling beads.
This portion of his duty finished, Dollier de Casson postponed the
catechizing, and made Pierre take a lighted stick of pine and show him
that ridge whereunder mother and baby lay. There was always danger of
surprise by the Iroquois. The men and women who followed in irregular
procession through the vast dimness of northern twilight kept on their
guard against moving stumps or any sudden uprising like the rush of
quails from some covert. In rapid tones the priest repeated the service
for the dead; then called his followers from their knees to return to
the house to celebrate the weddings of Pierre and Pierre’s daughter.
After this rite, supper was served in Pierre’s house, the other
families dispersing to their own tables--cabbage-soup, fat pork, and
coarse bread made from pounded grain; for this côte was too poor to
have a mill. These were special luxuries for Father de Casson, for the
usual censitaire supper consisted of bread and eels. The missionary
priest, accustomed with equal patience to fasting or eating, spread his
hands above unsavory steam and blessed the meal. Silently, while he
spoke, the door opened and a slim dark girl entered the house.
VII.
A HALF-BREED.
SHE stood erect and silent against the closed door until Dollier de
Casson, before he had taken his first mouthful, spoke to her.
“Peace be with you, Massawippa.”
“Peace be also with you, father.”
Her voice was contralto without gutturals.
“You come in good time, my daughter. It is long since I examined you in
the faith and absolved you.”
“Think of my soul later, father; I come from the chief.”
“Where is the chief?”
“Étienne Annahotaha sends for you,” she replied grandly. “I am to show
you the way.”
Dollier de Casson did not ask why Étienne Annahotaha sent for the
priest instead of coming to the priest himself. The Huron chief
disdained his wife’s relatives with savage frankness.
“Very good, my daughter. In the morning, then, we will set out.”
“Annahotaha begs that you will come at once, father.”
“Hath he such urgent need of a priest?”
“He leaves his present camp early to-morrow, and he himself will tell
you his urgent business.”
The girl’s eyes moved slightingly over this huge French family, holding
them unfit to hear many words concerning her father.
“Very good, my daughter. As soon as I have finished my repast I shall
be ready.”
Pierre muttered objections. His first wife’s grave was blessed, and his
second wife was now comfortably his, but he grudged gospel privileges
to that interloper Annahotaha, who had married his sister and made a
white squaw of her, poor unsettled woman, paddling her from the island
of Orleans to the lower Ottawa and back until she died.
All seats being occupied, Massawippa still stood by the entrance. Her
uncle Pierre did point her to a place beside the table, but she shook
her head.
Father de Casson was placed by himself at the table end, Pierre’s mob
of children and step-children thronging below, the little ones standing
wedged together, some with chins barely level with the board. Though
scarcely more than fourteen years old, Massawippa looked well grown and
tall. No civilized awkwardness of limb, or uncertainty of action when
she moved, hampered her. Notwithstanding her cheek-bones were high and
her mouth wide, she was full of vigorous young beauty. Her temples were
round, and clasped as if by jet-black birdwings in hair which divided
its weight betwixt two braids and measured half the length of her body.
[Illustration: “Peace be with you, Massawippa.”]
Scarcely tolerant was the eye she kept on these French habitants her
kinsfolks. She was princess; they were merely inferior white stock from
whom her mother had sprung.
In personal appointments she was exquisite compared with the French
women of the cabin. Her rich and glowing cheeks, her small dark ears
and throat and hands, had reached a state of polish through unusual
care. Her raiment appeared to be culled from the best fashions of both
races. She wore the soft Indian moccasin, stitched with feather-work,
and the woolen French stocking. All beaver skins in New France
nominally belonged to the government; but this half-breed girl wore a
pliant slim gown, chestnut-colored and silky, of beaver skin, reaching
nearly to her ankles. It was girdled around the waist and collared
around the top by bands of white wampum glittering like scales. A small
light blanket of wool dyed a very dull red was twisted around her and
hung over one arm.
A bud of a woman though still a child, full of the gentle dignity of
the Hurons, who of all the great tribes along the St. Lawrence had
lent themselves most kindly to Christian teaching, and undulled by her
French peasant blood, Massawippa was comforting to eyes wearied by oily
dark faces.
Dollier de Casson, gentleman and soldier before he became priest,
always treated her with the deference she was inclined to exact as due
her station.
Most Canadian half-breeds were the children of French fathers who
had turned coureurs de bois and of Indian women briefly espoused by
them. But the Huron chief had wedded Massawippa’s mother by priest and
Latin service. The inmates of Pierre’s house regarded this girl as a
misfortune that held them in awe. Her patent of nobility was dirt to
them, yet by virtue of it she trod on air above their heads; and she
was always so strangely clean and strangely handsome, this high young
dame of the woods.
Pierre’s new wife, the corners of her mouth settling, regarded
Massawippa with disfavor. The families in that côte knew well at whose
door Jean Ba’ti’s widow laid the defection of her son.
One of Pierre’s little boys, creeping sidewise towards Massawippa,
leaned against the door and looked up, courting her smile. He was very
dirty, his cheeks new sodden with pork-fat being the most acceptable
points of his surface. She did not encourage his advances, but met his
look sedately.
“Thou know’st not what I know, Massawippa,” said he. “Thou know’st not
who’s married.”
She remained silent, pride magnifying the natural indifference of her
time of life to such news.
“The father Pierre is married. Dost guess he married our Angèle?”
tempted the little boy, whose ideas of the extent of intermarriage
surpassed even the generous views of his elders in the côte. “No!
Antonio Brunette married our Angèle. Four people are married. It made
me laugh. The widow of Jean Ba’ti’ Morin, she wedded Father Pierre, and
you must tell La Mouche. Are you also married to La Mouche, Massawippa?”
Her aquiline face blazed with instant wrath, and Pierre’s little boy
fell back from her as if scorched. Her hiss followed him.
“I do not myself speak to La Mouche!”
La Mouche’s mother was naturally the most interested witness of this
falcon-like stoop of Massawippa’s, and as a mother she experienced
deeper sense of injury.
VIII.
THE HURON.
A LIGHT rain was blistering the river and thickening an already dark
landscape when Dollier de Casson, followed by his man carrying what
might be called his religious tool-chest, crossed the clearing with
Massawippa.
The child walked before them, her blanket drawn well up over her head
and her moccasins taking no print afterwards visible from any soft
earth they trod. The laden and much-enduring servant stumbled across
roots, but labored on through sleek and treacherous wet spots with the
zeal of a missionary servant.
Dollier de Casson gave him breathing periods by carrying the chapel
himself. Thus had these two men helped each other in winter when the
earth was banked in white, the river a glittering solid, and one’s
breath came to him fluid ice and went from him an eruption of steam,
as they toiled to parish or distant fort on snow-shoes. Thus did Jesuit
and Sulpitian priests keep their religion alive on the St. Lawrence.
Within the first pine covert three Hurons were waiting, evidently
Massawippa’s escort. She now walked beside Dollier de Casson and they
stalked ahead, threading a silent way through the darkness.
Spruce and white birch were all the trees that stood out distinctly to
the senses, others massing anonymously in the void of night and their
spring nakedness. The evergreen with prickling fingers brushed the
passers’ faces; while the white birches in flecked shrouds crowded rank
on rank like many lofty ghosts diverse of girth, and by their whiteness
threw a gleam upon the eyeball.
Following the head Huron, Dollier de Casson’s company trod straight
over soft logs where the foot sunk in half-rotten moss, and over that
rustling, elastic cushion of dead leaves, histories of uncounted
summers which padded the floor of the forests. Through roofing limbs
the rain found it less easy to pelt them. They wound about rocks and
climbed ascents, until Annahotaha’s camp-fire suddenly blinked beneath
them and they could stand overlooking it.
He had pitched his bark tent in a small amphitheater sloping down to a
tributary of the St. Lawrence. The camp-fire, hissing as slant lines
of the shower struck it, threw light over the little river’s stung
surface, on low shrubs and rocks, on the oblong lodge,[3] and the
figures of some three dozen Indians squatting blanketed beside it, or
walking about throwing long shadows over the brightened area.
Étienne Annahotaha sat just within the shelter of his lodge, and here
he received the priest, standing almost as tall as Dollier de Casson,
who bent his head to avoid the tent.
This shelter was, indeed, altogether for Massawippa; the chief
preferred lying on the ground with his braves; but she was child of a
mother long used to roofs, and was, besides, a being whom he would set
up and guard as a sacred image. There was no woman in the camp.
When Dollier de Casson and Annahotaha sat silently down together,
Massawippa crept up behind her father and rested her cheek against his
back. He allowed this mute caress and gazed with stern gravity at the
fire.
His soul was in labor, and the priest good-humoredly waited until it
should bring forth its care. No religious instruction could be imparted
to the camp while Annahotaha held his speech unspoken. Rain hissed
softly through listening trees, paused to let damp boughs drip, and
renewed itself with a rush. Evident vapor arose from the Indians beside
the fire.
“The father’s boat was seen upon the river,” began Annahotaha. “I have
sent for the father to tell him the thoughts which come up in my breast
and give me no peace. I am a tree of rough bark, but I bear a flower
branch. I go to the burning and my branch of flowers will not be cut
off from me. I am an old bear, but how shall I make the Iroquois feel
my claws if my cub be beside me? The lodge of her mother’s people is
not fit to hold her. Continually her mother comes to me in dreams
saying, ‘What have you done with the child?’ Shall I hang my branch of
flowers in the lodges of my people? Behold the remnant of the Hurons!”
He leaped to his feet with energetic passion, and flung his pointed
finger at the steaming braves by the fire. They gave an instant’s
attention to his voice, and went on toasting themselves as before. “We
are trodden underfoot like leaves. The French, our white brothers,
promise us protection, and our feeble ones are dragged to the stake
and scalped before their eyes. We perish from the earth. Soon not a
Huron will make the smoke of his lodge go up beside the great river.
But before these Iroquois utterly tread our bones under the turf they
shall feel the rage of Annahotaha. The last Hurons shall heap them up
in destruction!”
He sat down and rested his savage face on his fists.
Massawippa resumed her attitude of satisfied tenderness; and shade by
shade his wrath lifted until the father and not the chief again looked
through the red of his mask-like face.
“If Annahotaha is leading a war party against the Iroquois,” began
Dollier de Casson--
“Speak not of that. The old bear knows his own track; but no way for
the tender feet of his cub.”
--“he will pass through Montreal,” continued the priest. “Now, if
Annahotaha wishes to keep his gift of Heaven from contaminations of the
world, why should he not lay her on the sacred altar? Place her with
the sisters of St. Joseph, those good nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu.”
The chief, expectant and acquiescent, kept yet a wily side-glance on
his cassocked guide. Honest Dollier de Casson brought his fist with a
gentle spat upon his palm as he proceeded.
“No Indian woman ever hath joined the pious labors of our good nuns.
You Hurons clamor without ceasing for protection to white brothers who
can scarcely keep their own scalps on their heads, but the burdens and
self-denials of our holy religion ye shirk. I speak truth to the chief
of the Hurons. You even leave your farms and civilized life on the
island of Orleans, and take to the woods.”
“We are dragged scalped from our farms,” interjected Annahotaha’s
guttural voice.
“My son, the power of Heaven is over all. We gasp and bleed together;
but, see you, we still live. Miracles are continually worked for us.
They confound even the dark hearts of the Iroquois.”
Annahotaha smiled, perhaps with some reflection of Quebec distrust in
Montreal miracles.
“Hast thou not heard,” insisted Father de Casson with that severe
credulity which afflicted the best men of the time, “about Jean
Saint-Père--slain by the Iroquois and beheaded, and his head carried
off--speaking to them in warnings and upbraidings? Yea, the scalped
skull ceased not threatening them with the vengeance of Heaven, in
plain, well-spoken Iroquois.” Annahotaha sounded some guttural which
the priest could not receive as assent.
“Blessed is a country, my son, when such notable miracles are done in
it. For, see you, there was Father le Maître, who had his head likewise
cut off by these children of evil, but without making the stain of
blood on his handkerchief which received it. And there were his
features stamped on the cloth so that any one might behold them. This
miracle of Father le Maître hath scarcely ceased to ring in Montreal,
for it is a late thing. I counsel the chief of the Hurons to give his
child to the Church. The saints will then be around her in life, and in
death they will gather her to themselves.”
Annahotaha sat as if turning over in his mind this proposal, which he
had secretly foreseen and wished.
“The father has spoken,” he finally pronounced; and silence closed this
conference, as silence had preceded it.
Afterwards Dollier de Casson set up his chapel beside a sheltering rock
and prepared to shrive the Huron camp, beginning with Massawippa. Her
he confessed apart, in the inclosure of the lodge, probing as many of
her nature’s youthful and tortuous avenues as the wisdom of man could
penetrate. She raised no objection to that plan of life her father
and her confessor both proposed for her; but the priest could not
afterwards distinctly recall that she accepted it.
When Father de Casson called the congregation of Indians to approach
his temporary chapel, one of the restless braves who had sauntered from
sputtering fire to dripping tree skulked crouching in the shadow of
Massawippa’s tent. He had a reason for avoiding the priest as well as
one for seeking her.
When the others were taken up with their devotions he crept to the
tent-flap, and firelight shone broadly on his dark side-countenance,
separating him in race from the Hurons. He was a Frenchman. But his
stiff black hair was close shorn except one bristling tuft, his oily
skin had been touched with paint, and he wore the full war-dress of his
foster tribe.
“Massawippa,” whispered this proselyte, raising the lodge-flap, “I have
something here for you.”
The girl was telling her beads with a soft mutter in the little
penances her priest had imposed upon her. He could see but her blurred
figure in her dim shrine.
“Massawippa! La Mouche brings you a baked fish,” he whispered in the
provincial French.
Her undisturbed voice continued its muttered orisons.
“Massawippa!” repeated the youth, speaking this time in Huron, his tone
entreating piteously. “La Mouche brings you a baked fish. It comes but
now from the fire.”
Her voice ceased with an indrawing of the breath, and she hissed at La
Mouche.
“Return it then to the fire and thyself with it, thou French log!” she
uttered in a screaming whisper in Huron, and hissed at him again as her
humble lover dropped the lodge-flap.
The candles shone mellowly from the sheltered altar upon kneeling
Indians, but La Mouche slunk off into the darkness.
IX.
THE LADY OF ST. BERNARD.
FIVE evenings later a boat was beached on one of the islands above
Montreal lying near the south shore of the St. Lawrence. While this
island presented rocky points, it had fertile slopes basking in the
glow which followed a blue and vaporous April day, and trees in that
state of gray greenness which shoots into leaf at the first hot shining.
The principal object on the island was a stone house standing inclosed
by strong palisades above the ascent from the beach. It appeared to be
built against a mass of perpendicular rock that towered over it on the
west side. This was, in fact, the strongest seigniorial mansion west of
the Richelieu. There was, in addition, a small stone mill for grinding
grain, apart from it on the brink of the river.
Northward, the St. Lawrence spread towards the horizon in that
distension of its waters called Lake St. Louis.
Out of the palisade door came a censitaire and his wife, who, having
hurried to St. Bernard for protection at an alarm of Indians, staid
to guard the seigniory house during Jacques Goffinet’s absence with
Dollard.
“This is St. Bernard,” said Dollard, leading Claire up the slope.
“Sometimes fog-covered, sometimes wind-swept, green as only islands
can be, and stone-girdled as the St. Lawrence islands are. A cluster
up-river belongs to the seigniory, but this is your fortress.”
“And yours,” she added.
“It will seem very rude to you.”
“After my life of convent luxury, monsieur?”
“After the old civilization of France. But I believe this can be made
quite comfortable.”
“It looks delicious and grim,” said the bride. “Tragic things might
happen here if there be a tragic side to life, which I cannot now
believe. Yet a few months ago I said there was no happiness!”
Dollard turned his uneasy glance from her to the seigniory house.
“There is scarcely such another private stronghold in the province.”
“Did you build it?”
“Not I. Poor Dollard brought little here but his sword. One of my
superior officers abandoned it in my favor, and took a less exposed
seigniory near the Richelieu. I wish the inside appointments better
befitted you. It was a grand château to me until I now compare it with
its châtelaine.”
“Never mind, monsieur. When you demand my fortune from France, you can
make your château as grand as you desire. I hope you will get some good
of my fortune, for I never have done so. Seriously, monsieur, if no
house were here, and there were only that great rock to shelter us, I
should feel myself a queen if you brought me to it, so great is my lot.”
“You can say this to poor Adam Dollard, an obscure soldier of the
province?”
“In these few days,” replied the girl, laughing, and she threw the
light of her topaz eyes half towards him, “the way they call your name
in this new country has become to me like a title.”
“You shall have more than a title,” burst out Dollard. “Heaven helping
me, you shall yet have a name that will not die!”
They passed through the gate of the palisade, Jacques and Louise
following with the loads of the expedition. To insure its safety the
boat was afterwards dragged within the palisade.
The censitaire in charge, with his wife at his shoulder, stood grinning
at Jacques’s approach.
“Thou got’st thyself a wife, hé, my pretty Jacques?”
“That did I, bonhomme Papillon. And a good wife, and a stout wife,
and a handsome. Thou ’lt want to go to Quebec market thyself when the
Indians carry off Joan.”
“Let me see him go to the Quebec market!” cried Joan, shaking her
knuckled fist under his ear.
“It would trouble thee little to lose sight of him, Joan. But his
coming back with such freight--it is _that_ would fire thee hotter than
Iroquois torches. Alas, my children,” Jacques said, letting down his
load inside the gate, “I bring much, but I leave much behind. If I am
to hold this seigniory while my commandant is away, and feed ye both
and my new wife, to say naught of Mademoiselle de Granville and our
great lady, I need the cattle and swine and fowls which our king gave
me for dower and my seignior made me throw over my shoulder.”
“But I thought,” said Louise, in dismay, “that thou had’st such stores
of vegetables and other provisions here.”
“Have no fear, my spouse. Thou shalt see how this garrison is
provisioned. But what prudent man can drop without a sigh the moiety
of his wife’s fortune? Here are Papillon and Joan, who hold the next
island under our seignior. And here, timid Joan, is thy soldierly
new neighbor Louise Goffinet, who squealed not in the dangers of the
river.”
“Wert thou afraid?” Joan asked Louise, kindly.
“I was until I saw Madame des Ormeaux was not. And the Indians have a
wonderful skill.”
“Did the commandant also marry her at the wife market?” pressed Joan,
walking by Louise’s side behind the men. “She is surely the fairest
woman in New France. I could have crawled before her when she gave me a
smile.”
“My mother nursed her,” said Louise, with pride.
“Did she so! And is our lady some great dame from the king’s court, who
heard of the commandant at Montreal?”