commandant. That was purgatory to me.”
“Since you reached us,” said Dollard, “I have accepted you without
question and without remorse. I am stupefied. I love you. But, Claire,
to what a death I have brought you!”
“It is a death befitting well the daughter of the stout-hearted
Constable of France. But do not leave me again, Dollard!”
“The Iroquois shall not touch you alive, Claire,” he promised.
“I am ready shriven,” she said, smiling. “Except of one fault. That
will I now confess,--a fault committed against the delicacy of
women,--and I hated the abbess and the bishop because they detected me
in it. I came to New France for love of you, my soldier. Could I help
following you from world to world?”
“O Claire!” trembled Dollard, taking his hat off and standing uncovered
before her.
“But you should not have known this until we were old--until you
had seen me Madame des Ormeaux many years, dignified and very, very
discreet, so that no breath could discredit me save this mine own
confession.”
During four days the Iroquois constantly harassed the fort while
waiting for their reënforcements, enraged more each day at their own
losses and at the handful of French and Indians who stood in the way of
their great raid upon New France. Hungry, thirsty, and giddy from loss
of sleep, the allies in the fort stood at their loop-holes and poured
out destruction. Their supplies were gone, excepting dry hominy, which
they could not swallow without water.
Some of the young Frenchmen made a rush to the river, protected by the
guns of the fort, and brought all the water they could thus carry. They
also dug within the palisade and reached a little clayey moisture which
helped to cool their mouths.
Among the Iroquois were renegade Hurons who had been adopted by the
Five Nations. During these four days of trial the renegades shouted to
their brethren in the fort to come over and surrender to the Iroquois.
Seven or eight hundred more warriors were hurrying from the mouth of
the Richelieu River, and not a blackened coal was to be left where the
fort and the Frenchmen stood.
“Come over,” tempted these Hurons. “The Iroquois will receive you as
brothers. Will you stay there and die for the sake of a few Frenchmen?”
First one, then two more, then three at a time, the famished braves of
Annahotaha slipped over the intrenchment and deserted, in spite of his
rage and exhortations.
On the fifth day, an hour before dawn, a hand of auroral light spread
its fingers across the sky from west to east. Betwixt these finger-rays
were dark spaces having no stars, but through the pulsing medium of
every gigantic finger the constellations glittered. Many signs were
seen in the heavens during the colonial years of New France, but
nothing like the blessed hand stretched over the Long Saut.
That day rapids and forests appeared to rock with the vibration of
savage yells, for soon after daylight the expected force arrived.
La Mouche had sulked some time at the loop-hole where he was stationed
with Annahotaha. Massawippa’s back was towards him during all this
period of distress. She never saw that he was thirsty and that his
cracked lips bled. If she was solicitous for anybody except the
stalwart chief, it was for that white wife of Dollard, who stood always
near Dollard when not doing what could be done for the wounded.
La Mouche had no stomach for dying an unrewarded death. Dogged hatred
of his false position and of his tardy suit had grown large within him.
He therefore left his loop-hole while Annahotaha’s gun was emptied,
leaped on top of the palisade, and stretched his dark face back an
instant to interrogate Massawippa’s quick eye. A motion of her head
might yet bring him back. But did she think that he meant to be killed
like a dog to whom the bone of a good word has never been thrown?
“My father!” shouted the girl, pointing with a finger which pierced La
Mouche’s soul. “Shoot that coward; shoot him down!”
Annahotaha seized the long pistol from his side and discharged it
at his deserting nephew. But La Mouche in the same instant dropped
outside and ran over to the Iroquois.
There remained now only the Frenchmen, Annahotaha, and the four
Algonquins.
Playfully, as a cat reaches out to cuff its mouse, the army of Iroquois
now approached the fort. They gamboled from side to side and uttered
screeches. But the loop-holes were yet all manned by men who would not
die of fatigue and physical privation, and the fire which sprung from
those loop-holes astounded the enemy. Guns of large caliber carried
scraps of iron and lead, and mowed like artillery.
Three days more, says the chronicle, did this fort by the Long Saut
hold out. Who can tell all the story of those days? and who can hear
all the story of such endurance? When acclamation cheers a man’s blood
and a great cloud of witnesses encompasses him, heroic courage is made
easy. But here were a few doomed men in the wilderness, whose fate
and whose action might be misrepresented by a surviving foe--silent
fighters against odds, thinking, “This anguish and sacrifice of
mine are lost on the void, and perhaps taken no account of by any
intelligence, except that myself knows it, and myself demands it of me.”
This is the courage which brings a man’s soul up above his body like a
tall flame out of an altar, and makes us credit the tale of our lineage
tracing thus backward: “Which was the son of Adam, which was the son of
God.”
[Illustration: “Dollard held Claire with his left arm and fought with
his sword.”]
The fort could not be taken by surprise; it could not be taken by
massed sallies. The Iroquois wrangled among themselves. Some were for
raising the siege and going back to their own country. Their best
braves lay in heaps. But others scouted the eternal disgrace of leaving
unpunished so pitiful a foe.
Finally they made themselves great shields of split logs, broad as a
door, and crept forward under cover of these to hew away the palisades.
Mad for revenge, they used their utmost skill and caution.
It was at this time that Dollard, among his reeling and praying
men--men yet able to smile with powder-blackened faces through the
loop-holes--took a large musketoon, filled it with explosives, and
plugged it ready to throw among the enemy. His arms had not remaining
strength to fling it clear of the palisade’s jagged top. It fell back
and exploded in the fort, and amidst the frightful confusion the
Iroquois made their first breach, to find it defended; and yet another
breach, and yet another, overflowing the inclosure with all their
swarms.
Smoke-clouds curled around the bride who had trod that sward and borne
her part in the suffering. Half blinded by the explosion, Dollard held
Claire with his left arm and fought with his sword. As firm and white
as a marble face, the face of the Laval-Montmorency met her foes. The
blood of man-warriors, even of Anne, the great and warlike Constable
of France, throbbed steadfastly in the arm which grasped her husband
and the heart which stood by his until they were swept down by the
same volley of musketry, and lay as one body among the dead. Perhaps
to Claire and Dollard it was but sudden release from thirst, hunger,
exhaustion, and victorious howling. For La Mouche found Massawippa
pointing as if she saw through the earthwork. The half-breed’s eyes
glowed with expansive brightness, as a spark does just before it
expires. Her childish contours were beautiful, and unbroken by pain.
“Father,” said Massawippa with effort,--the chief was dead, having
saved her from the Iroquois with the last stroke of his hand,--“do you
see madame--and the commandant--walking there under--birches?” Her face
smiled as she died, and remained set in its smile.
There are people who steadily live the lives they hate, whose common
speech misrepresents their thought, who walk the world fettered. Is it
better with these than with winged souls?
Fire and smoke of a great burning rose up and blinded the day beside
the Long Saut. It was a mighty funeral pile. The tender grass all
around, licked by flame, gave juices of the earth to that sacrifice.
The wine of young lives, the spices and treasures of courageous hearts,
went freely to it, and for more than two hundred and twenty-five years
love and gratitude have consecrated the spot.
XX.
POSTERITY.
THREE weeks after Dollard’s departure Jacques Goffinet took the boat
and one Huron Indian whom Dollard had sent back with the boat and set
off to Montreal to obey his master’s final order.
No appearances on the river had caused alarm at St. Bernard. While
record has not been made of the route taken by the Iroquois brought
from the Richelieu, it is evident that they passed north of Montreal
island, avoiding settlements.
Montreal was waiting in silence and anxiety for news of the expedition.
The first person whom Jacques encountered was the nuns’ man Jouaneaux,
watching the St. Lawrence with uneasy expectation in his eyes.
When they had exchanged greetings as men do when each thinks only of
the information he can get from the other, Jouaneaux said:
“You come from up river?”
“From St. Bernard island,” replied Jacques. “What news of the
expedition?”
But Jouaneaux had widened his mouth receptively.
“You are then from the commandant Dollard’s seigniory?”
“The commandant is my seignior,” said Jacques.
Jouaneaux laid hold of his sleeve.
“Did Mademoiselle de Granville return to St. Bernard and take the
little half-breed Sister with her?”
“Mademoiselle de Granville, my commandant’s sister, is at St. Bernard;
yes,” replied Jacques, arrested and stupefied by such inquiries.
“Look you here, my good friend,” exclaimed Jouaneaux. “I speak for the
nuns of St. Joseph of the Hôtel-Dieu, where your master put his sister
for protection before he set out. Was not her fire built to suit her?
We are poor, but our hospitality is free, and we love not to have it
flung back in our faces. Still, I say nothing of mademoiselle. She hath
her seigniory to look after, and she was not a novice.”
“My master left my lady at the governor’s house,” asserted Jacques.
“But,” continued Jouaneaux, “this I will say: ill did she requite us
in that she carried off the novice Massawippa, whose father, the Huron
chief, had put her in the Hôtel-Dieu to take vows.”
“I will go to the governor,” threatened Jacques, feeling himself baited.
“And what will it profit thee to go to the governor? The governor is a
just man, and he hath the good of the Hôtel-Dieu at heart.”
“I know nothing about your Hôtel-Dieu,” said Jacques, having
forebodings at his heart.
“But where is our novice?” persisted Jouaneaux, following him.
“I know nothing about your novice.”
At the governor’s house, by scant questions on his part and much speech
on Jouaneaux’s, he learned that Dollard was yet unheard from, that
Claire had been left at the hospital, and for some unspoken reason,
which Jacques silently accepted as good since it was the commandant’s
reason, she had been received as the commandant’s sister; and finally
that she had disappeared with a young novice, the daughter of
Annahotaha, soon after the expedition left, and no one in Montreal knew
anything else about her.
Distressed to muteness by such tidings, Jacques went back to his boat,
still followed by Jouaneaux, and pushed off up the river with the
malediction of St. Joseph invoked upon him.
As his Huron rowed back along Lake St. Louis they saw a canoe drifting,
and cautiously approaching it they found that it held a wounded brave
in the war-dress of the Hurons. He lay panting in his little craft,
feverish and helpless, and they towed him to the island and carried him
up into the seigniory kitchen.
The May sun shone and bees buzzed past the windows; all the landscape
and the pleasant world seemed to contradict the existence of such a
blot on nature as a blood-streaked man.
The family gathered fearfully about La Mouche as he lay upon a
bear-skin brought down from the saloon for him by Joan.
Jacques gave him brandy and Louise bathed his wounds. They used such
surgery as they knew, and La Mouche told them all the story of the Long
Saut except his desertion. None of five deserters who escaped from
the Iroquois, and from the tortures to which the Iroquois put all the
deserters after burning the fort, could tell the truth about their own
action until long after.
Jacques turned away from this renegade and threw both arms around one
of the cemented pillars. Louise fell on her knees beside him, and the
broad hall was filled with wailings. There were consolations which
Louise remembered when her religion and her stolid sense of duty began
reconciling her to the eternal absence of Claire and Dollard. She
stood up and took her apron to wipe her good man’s eyes, saying without
greediness and merely as seizing on a tangible fact:
“Thou hast the island of St. Bernard left thee.”
“But he that is gone,” sobbed Jacques, “he was to me more than the
whole earth.”
The four other Hurons who escaped carried all the details of the
battle, except their own desertion, to Montreal. But the Iroquois were
not so reticent, and in time this remnant of Hurons was brought to
admit that Annahotaha alone of the tribe stood by the Frenchmen to the
last.
As for the Iroquois, they slunk back to their own country utterly
defeated and confounded. They had no further desire to fight such
an enemy. Says the historian,[12] “If seventeen Frenchmen, four
Algonquins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven
hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such
fighting behind walls of stone?” The colony of New France was redeemed
out of their hands. After the struggle at the Long Saut it enjoyed such
a period of rest and peace as the Iroquois had not permitted it for
years.
When La Mouche recovered from his wounds he crept away to his côte down
the river, and with little regret the people on St. Bernard heard of
him no more.
Jacques and Louise remained in possession of St. Bernard, and on that
island their stout-legged children played, or learned contented thrift,
or followed their father in his sowing; their delight being the real
priest who came with his glowing altar to teach them religion, and
their terror the pretended priest in the top apartment of their house.
For Mademoiselle de Granville lived many years, so indulged in her
humors that the story went among neighboring seigniories that she had
an insane brother whom she imprisoned on St. Bernard out of tenderness
towards him, instead of sending him to some asylum in France.[13]
Rather because her memory was a spot of tenderness within themselves
always on the point of bleeding, than because of their ignorant dread
of law’s intermeddling, Jacques and Louise never told about Dollard’s
bride. The marriage had taken place in Quebec. Dollier de Casson,
who celebrated it, made no record of the fact in connection with his
account of Dollard’s exploit. The jealousies and bickerings then
rising high between Quebec and Montreal clouded or misrepresented or
suppressed many a transaction. And honest Dollier de Casson, who no
doubt learned by priestly methods the fate of the bride, may have
seen fit to withhold the luster of her devotion from the name of
Laval, since the bishop pressed no inquiries after his impulsive young
relative. News stretched slowly to and from France then. Her name
dropped out of all records, except the notarial one of her marriage,
and a faint old clew which an obscure scribe has left embodying a
scarcely credited tale told by the Huron deserters. Without monument,
what was once her beautiful body has become grass, flowers, clear air,
beside the hoarse rapids. She died, as many a woman has died, silently
crowning the deed done by a man, and in her finer immortality can
perhaps smile at being forgotten, since it is not by him.
But Dollard has been the darling of his people for more than two and a
quarter centuries.
On every midsummer-day, when the festival of St. John the Baptist is
kept with pageant, music, banners, and long processions; when thousands
choke the streets, and triumphal arch after triumphal arch lifts masses
of flowers to the June sun; when invention has taxed itself to carry
beautiful living pictures before the multitude--then there is always a
tableau to commemorate the heroes of the Long Saut. If young children
or if strangers ask, “Who was Dollard?” any Frenchman is ready to
answer:
“He was a man of courageous heart;[14] he saved Canada from the
Iroquois.”
The dullest soul is stirred to passionate acclamation as the chevalier
and his sixteen men go by.
And when we tell our stories, shall we tell them only of the
commonplace, the gay, the debonair life of this world? Shall the heroes
be forgotten?
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Another of Laval’s titles.
[2] Ste. Anne de Beaupré, twenty miles east of Quebec. “The favorite
saint appears to be Ste. Anne, whose name appears constantly on the
banks of the St. Lawrence.” [J. G. Bourinot.]
[3] On a small scale the typical Iroquois-Huron dwelling. The tribal
lodges, made to hold many fires and many families, were fifty or more
yards in length by twelve or fifteen in width, framed of sapling poles
closely covered with sheets of bark.
[4] The legend of Mademoiselle de Granville dates from the year 1698.
It seemed but a slight anachronism to place this singular though
unimportant figure in the year 1660.
[5] The following list may be found in the parish register of
Villemarie, June 3, 1660:
1. Adam Dollard (Sieur des Ormeaux), commandant, age de 25 ans.
2. Jacques Brassier, âgé de 25 ans.
3. Jean Tavernier, dit la Hochehère, armurier, âgé de 28 ans.
4. Nicolas Tellemont, serrurier, âgé de 25 ans.
5. Laurent Hebert, dit la Rivière, 27 ans.
6. Alonié de Lestres, chaufournier, 31 ans.
7. Nicolas Josselin, 25 ans.
8. Robert Jurée, 24 ans.
9. Jacques Boisseau, dit Cognac, 23 ans.
10. Louis Martin, 21 ans.
11. Christophe Augier, dit Desjardins, 26 ans.
12. Étienne Robin, dit Desforges, 27 ans.
13. Jean Valets, 27 ans.
14. René Doussin (Sieur de Sainte-Cécile), soldat de garnison, 30 ans.
15. Jean Lecomte, 20 ans.
16. Simon Grenet, 25 ans.
17. François Crusson, dit Pilote, 24 ans.
Also cited in “Histoire de la Colonie Française,” II., 414, 416:
“À ces dix-sept héros chrétiens, on doit joindre le brave Annahotaha,
chef des Hurons, comme aussi Metiwemeg, capitaine Algonquin, avec
les trois autres braves de sa nation, qui tous demeurent fidèles et
mourirent au champ d’honneur; enfin les trois Français qui périrent
au début de l’expédition, Nicolas du Val, serviteur au fort, Mathurin
Soulard, charpentier du fort, et Blaise Juillet, dit Argnon, habitant.”
Of the ambush in which these last-mentioned three men were slain, and
the subsequent volunteering of others in their places, this romance
does not treat.
[6] “They stopped by the way at Three Rivers, where they found a band
of Christian Algonquins under a chief named Mituvemeg. Annahotaha
challenged him to a trial of courage, and it was agreed that they
should meet at Montreal.... Thither, accordingly, they repaired, the
Algonquin with three followers, the Huron with thirty-nine.”--_Francis
Parkman._
[7] Ste. Anne de Bellevue, an old village at the junction of the
Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, “always a rendezvous of the voyageurs and
coureurs de bois up the Ottawa.”
“The waters of the Ottawa are about three inches higher than the waters
of Lake St. Louis (in the St. Lawrence), and are therefore precipitated
through the two channels running around Île Perot with considerable
force, forming a succession of short rapids.”--_From Report of Public
Works, 1866._
[8] While Jouaneaux’s house had historic existence, its elaboration, of
course, had not.
[9] “Furent arrêtés huit jours au bout de l’île de Montreal, dans
un endroit très-rapide qu’ils avaient à traverser”, says the French
chronicler. But for romancer’s purposes, the liberty is taken of
shortening the time.
[10] “The large mountain was named Le Calvaire by the piety of the
first settlers. At its summit were seven chapels,--memorials of the
mystic seven of St. John’s vision,--the scene of many a pilgrimage.
Gallant cavalier and high-born lady from their fastness at Villemarie
toiled side by side up the same weary height.”--_Picturesque Canada._
[11] Pronounced “So.” The Abbé Faillon with exactness locates the
engagement at the foot of the Long Saut rapids, “à huit ou dix lieues
au-dessus de l’île de Montreal, et au-dessous du saut dit de la
Chaudière.”
[12] Francis Parkman.
[13] Le Moine.
[14] “Dollard, un homme de cœur,” says Abbé Faillon.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
--Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of Dollard, by Mary Hartwell Catherwood