The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World
by
Mary Hartwell Catherwood

Part 1 out of 3







Produced by Ted Garvin, Leah Moser and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team







THE CHASE OF SAINT-CASTIN

AND OTHER STORIES OF

THE FRENCH IN THE

NEW WORLD



BY

MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD

[Illustration]

1894




THE CHASE OF SAINT-CASTIN.


The waiting April woods, sensitive in every leafless twig to spring,
stood in silence and dim nightfall around a lodge. Wherever a human
dwelling is set in the wilderness, it becomes, by the very humility of
its proportions, a prominent and aggressive point. But this lodge
of bark and poles was the color of the woods, and nearly escaped
intruding as man's work. A glow lighted the top, revealing the faint
azure of smoke which rose straight upward in the cool, clear air.

Such a habitation usually resounded at nightfall with Indian noises,
especially if the day's hunting had been good. The mossy rocks lying
around, were not more silent than the inmates of this lodge. You could
hear the Penobscot River foaming along its uneasy bed half a mile
eastward. The poles showed freshly cut disks of yellow at the top; and
though the bark coverings were such movables as any Indian household
carried, they were newly fastened to their present support. This was
plainly the night encampment of a traveling party, and two French
hunters and their attendant Abenaquis recognized that, as it barred
their trail to the river. An odor of roasted meat was wafted out like
an invitation to them.

"Excellent, Saint-Castin," pronounced the older Frenchman. "Here
is another of your wilderness surprises. No wonder you prefer an
enchanted land to the rough mountains around Bearn. I shall never go
back to France myself."

"Stop, La Hontan!" The young man restrained his guest from plunging
into the wigwam with a headlong gesture recently learned and practiced
with delight. "I never saw this lodge before."

"Did you not have it set up here for the night?"

"No; it is not mine. Our Abenaquis are going to build one for us
nearer the river."

"I stay here," observed La Hontan. "Supper is ready, and adventures
are in the air."

"But this is not a hunter's lodge. You see that our very dogs
understand they have no business here. Come on."

"Come on, without seeing who is hid herein? No. I begin to think it is
something thou wouldst conceal from me. I go in; and if it be a bear
trap, I cheerfully perish."

The young Frenchman stood resting the end of his gun on sodden leaves.
He felt vexed at La Hontan. But that inquisitive nobleman stooped
to lift the tent flap, and the young man turned toward his waiting
Indians and talked a moment in Abenaqui, when they went on in the
direction of the river, carrying game and camp luggage. They thought,
as he did, that this might be a lodge with which no man ought to
meddle. The daughter of Madockawando, the chief, was known to be
coming from her winter retreat. Every Abenaqui in the tribe stood
in awe of the maid. She did not rule them as a wise woman, but lived
apart from them as a superior spirit.

Baron La Hontan, on all fours, intruded his gay face on the inmates of
the lodge. There were three of them. His palms encountered a carpet
of hemlock twigs, which spread around a central fire to the circular
wall, and was made sweetly odorous by the heat. A thick couch of the
twigs was piled up beyond the fire, and there sat an Abenaqui girl in
her winter dress of furs. She was so white-skinned that she startled
La Hontan as an apparition of Europe. He got but one black-eyed
glance. She drew her blanket over her head. The group had doubtless
heard the conference outside, but ignored it with reticent gravity.
The hunter of the lodge was on his heels by the embers, toasting
collops of meat for the blanketed princess; and an Etchemin woman, the
other inmate, took one from his hand, and paused, while dressing it
with salt, to gaze at the Frenchman.

La Hontan had not found himself distasteful to northwestern Indian
girls. It was the first time an aboriginal face had ever covered
itself from exposure to his eyes. He felt the sudden respect which
nuns command, even in those who scoff at their visible consecration.
The usual announcement made on entering a cabin--"I come to see this
man," or "I come to see that woman,"--he saw was to be omitted in
addressing this strangely civilized Indian girl.

"Mademoiselle," said Baron La Hontan in very French Abenaqui, rising
to one knee, and sweeping the twigs with the brim of his hat as he
pulled it off, "the Baron de Saint-Castin of Pentegoet, the friend of
your chief Madockawando, is at your lodge door, tired and chilled from
a long hunt. Can you not permit him to warm at your fire?"

The Abenaqui girl bowed her covered head. Her woman companion passed
the permission on, and the hunter made it audible by a grunt of
assent. La Hontan backed nimbly out, and seized the waiting man by the
leg. The main portion of the baron was in the darkening April woods,
but his perpendicular soles stood behind the flap within the lodge.

"Enter, my child," he whispered in excitement. "A warm fire,
hot collops, a black eye to be coaxed out of a blanket, and full
permission given to enjoy all. What, man! Out of countenance at
thought of facing a pretty squaw, when you have three keeping house
with you at the fort?"

"Come out, La Hontan," whispered back Saint-Castin, on his part
grasping the elder's arm. "It is Madockawando's daughter."

"The red nun thou hast told me about? The saints be praised! But art
thou sure?"

"How can I be sure? I have never seen her myself. But I judge from her
avoiding your impudent eye. She does not like to be looked at."

"It was my mentioning the name of Saint-Castin of Pentegoet that
made her whip her head under the blanket. I see, if I am to keep my
reputation in the woods, I shall have to withdraw from your company."

"Withdraw your heels from this lodge," replied Saint-Castin
impatiently. "You will embroil me with the tribe."

"Why should it embroil you with the tribe," argued the merry sitter,
"if we warm our heels decently at this ready fire until the Indians
light our own? Any Christian, white or red, would grant us that
privilege."

"If I enter with you, will you come out with me as soon as I make you
a sign?"

"Doubt it not," said La Hontan, and he eclipsed himself directly.

Though Saint-Castin had been more than a year in Acadia, this was the
first time he had ever seen Madockawando's daughter. He knew it was
that elusive being, on her way from her winter retreat to the tribe's
summer fishing station near the coast. Father Petit, the priest of
this woodland parish, spoke of her as one who might in time found a
house of holy women amidst the license of the wilderness.

Saint-Castin wanted to ask her pardon for entering; but he sat without
a sound. Some power went out from that silent shape far stronger than
the hinted beauty of girlish ankle and arm. The glow of brands lighted
the lodge, showing the bark seams on its poles. Pale smoke and the
pulse of heat quivered betwixt him and a presence which, by some swift
contrast, made his face burn at the recollection of his household
at Pentegoet. He had seen many good women in his life, with the
patronizing tolerance which men bestow on unpiquant things that are
harmless; and he did not understand why her hiding should stab him
like a reproach. She hid from all common eyes. But his were not common
eyes. Saint-Castin felt impatient at getting no recognition from a
girl, saint though she might be, whose tribe he had actually adopted.

The blunt-faced Etchemin woman, once a prisoner brought from northern
Acadia, now the companion of Madockawando's daughter, knew her duty to
the strangers, and gave them food as rapidly as the hunter could broil
it. The hunter was a big-legged, small-headed Abenaqui, with knees
over-topping his tuft of hair when he squatted on his heels. He looked
like a man whose emaciated trunk and arms had been taken possession of
by colossal legs and feet. This singular deformity made him the best
hunter in his tribe. He tracked game with a sweep of great beams as
tireless as the tread of a modern steamer. The little sense in his
head was woodcraft. He thought of nothing but taking and dressing
game.

Saint-Castin barely tasted the offered meat; but La Hontan enjoyed it
unabashed, warming himself while he ate, and avoiding any chance of a
hint from his friend that the meal should be cut short.

"My child," he said in lame Abenaqui to the Etchemin woman, while his
sly regard dwelt on the blanket-robed statue opposite, "I wish you the
best of gifts, a good husband."

The Etchemin woman heard him in such silence as one perhaps brings
from making a long religious retreat, and forbore to explain that
she already had the best of gifts, and was the wife of the big-legged
hunter.

"I myself had an aunt who, never married," warned La Hontan. "She
was an excellent woman, but she turned like fruit withered in the
ripening. The fantastic airs of her girlhood clung to her. She was at
a disadvantage among the married, and young people passed her by as
an experiment that had failed. So she was driven to be very religious;
but prayers are cold comfort for the want of a bouncing family."

If the Etchemin woman had absorbed from her mistress a habit of
meditation which shut out the world, Saint-Castin had not. He gave La
Hontan the sign to move before him out of the lodge, and no choice
but to obey it, crowding the reluctant and comfortable man into
undignified attitudes. La Hontan saw that he had taken offense. There
was no accounting for the humors of those disbanded soldiers of the
Carignan-Salieres, though Saint-Castin was usually a gentle fellow.
They spread out their sensitive military honor over every inch of
their new seigniories; and if you chucked the wrong little Indian or
habitant's naked baby under the chin, you might unconsciously stir
up war in the mind of your host. La Hontan was glad he was directly
leaving Acadia. He was fond of Saint-Castin. Few people could approach
that young man without feeling the charm which made the Indians adore
him. But any one who establishes himself in the woods loses touch with
the light manners of civilization; his very vices take on an air of
brutal candor.

Next evening, however, both men were merry by the hall fire at
Pentegoet over their parting cup. La Hontan was returning to Quebec.
A vessel waited the tide at the Penobscot's mouth, a bay which the
Indians call "bad harbor."

The long, low, and irregular building which Saint-Castin had
constructed as his baronial seat was as snug as the governor's castle
at Quebec. It was only one story high, and the small square
windows were set under the eaves, so outsiders could not look in.
Saint-Castin's enemies said he built thus to hide his deeds; but
Father Petit himself could see how excellent a plan it was for
defense. A holding already claimed by the encroaching English needed
loop-holes, not windows. The fort surrounding the house was also well
adapted to its situation. Twelve cannon guarded the bastions. All the
necessary buildings, besides a chapel with a bell, were within the
walls, and a deep well insured a supply of water. A garden and fruit
orchard were laid out opposite the fort, and encompassed by palisades.

The luxury of the house consisted in an abundant use of crude,
unpolished material. Though built grotesquely of stone and wood
intermingled, it had the solid dignity of that rugged coast. A chimney
spacious as a crater let smoke and white ashes upward, and sections of
trees smouldered on Saint-Castin's hearth. An Indian girl, ruddy from
high living, and wearing the brightest stuffs imported from France,
sat on the floor at the hearth corner. This was the usual night scene
at Pentegoet. Candle and firelight shone on her, on oak timbers, and
settles made of unpeeled balsam, on plate and glasses which always
heaped a table with ready food and drink, on moose horns and gun
racks, on stores of books, on festoons of wampum, and usually on a
dozen figures beside Saint-Castin. The other rooms in the house were
mere tributaries to this baronial presence chamber. Madockawando and
the dignitaries of the Abenaqui tribe made it their council hall, the
white sagamore presiding. They were superior to rude western nations.
It was Saint-Castin's plan to make a strong principality here, and to
unite his people in a compact state. He lavished his inherited money
upon them. Whatever they wanted from Saint-Castin they got, as from a
father. On their part, they poured the wealth of the woods upon him.
Not a beaver skin went out of Acadia except through his hands. The
traders of New France grumbled at his profits and monopoly, and the
English of New England claimed his seigniory. He stood on debatable
ground, in dangerous times, trying to mould an independent nation.
The Abenaquis did not know that a king of France had been reared
on Saint-Castin's native mountains, but they believed that a human
divinity had.

Their permanent settlement was about the fort, on land he had paid
for, but held in common with them. They went to their winter's hunting
or their summer's fishing from Pentegoet. It was the seat of power.
The cannon protected fields and a town of lodges which Saint-Castin
meant to convert into a town of stone and hewed wood houses as soon as
the aboriginal nature conformed itself to such stability. Even now
the village had left home and gone into the woods again. The Abenaqui
women were busy there, inserting tubes of bark in pierced maple-trees,
and troughs caught the flow of ascending sap. Kettles boiled over
fires in the bald spaces, incense of the forest's very heart rising
from them and sweetening the air. All day Indian children raced from
one mother's fire to another, or dipped unforbidden cups of hands into
the brimming troughs; and at night they lay down among the dogs, with
their heels to the blaze, watching these lower constellations blink
through the woods until their eyes swam into unconsciousness. It was
good weather for making maple sugar. In the mornings hoar frost
or light snows silvered the world, disappearing as soon as the sun
touched them, when the bark of every tree leaked moisture. This was
festive labor compared with planting the fields, and drew the men,
also.

The morning after La Hontan sailed, Saint-Castin went out and skirted
this wide-spread sugar industry like a spy. The year before, he had
moved heartily from fire to fire, hailed and entertained by every red
manufacturer. The unrest of spring was upon him. He had brought many
conveniences among the Abenaquis, and taught them some civilized arts.
They were his adopted people. But he felt a sudden separateness from
them, like the loneliness of his early boyhood.

Saint-Castin was a good hunter. He had more than once watched a slim
young doe stand gazing curiously at him, and had not startled it by a
breath. Therefore he was able to become a stump behind the tree which
Madockawando's daughter sought with her sap pail. Usually he wore
buckskins, in the free and easy life of Pentegoet. But he had put on
his Carignan-Salieres uniform, filling its boyish outlines with his
full man's figure. He would not on any account have had La Hontan see
him thus gathering the light of the open woods on military finery.
He felt ashamed of returning to it, and could not account for his
own impulses; and when he saw Madockawando's daughter walking
unconsciously toward him as toward a trap, he drew his bright surfaces
entirely behind the column of the tree.

She had taken no part in this festival of labor for several years. She
moved among the women still in solitude, not one of them feeling at
liberty to draw near her except as she encouraged them. The Abenaquis
were not a polygamous tribe, but they enjoyed the freedom of the
woods. Squaws who had made several experimental marriages since
this young celibate began her course naturally felt rebuked by her
standards, and preferred stirring kettles to meeting her. It was not
so long since the princess had been a hoiden among them, abounding
in the life which rushes to extravagant action. Her juvenile whoops
scared the birds. She rode astride of saplings, and played pranks
on solemn old warriors and the medicine-man. Her body grew into
suppleness and beauty. As for her spirit, the women of the tribe knew
very little about it. They saw none of her struggles. In childhood
she was ashamed of the finer nature whose wants found no answer in
her world. It was anguish to look into the faces of her kindred and
friends as into the faces of hounds who live, it is true, but a lower
life, made up of chasing and eating. She wondered why she was created
different from them. A loyalty of race constrained her sometimes to
imitate them; but it was imitation; she could not be a savage. Then
Father Petit came, preceding Saint-Castin, and set up his altar and
built his chapel. The Abenaqui girl was converted as soon as she
looked in at the door and saw the gracious image of Mary lifted up to
be her pattern of womanhood. Those silent and terrible days, when she
lost interest in the bustle of living, and felt an awful homesickness
for some unknown good, passed entirely away. Religion opened an
invisible world. She sprang toward it, lying on the wings of her
spirit and gazing forever above. The minutest observances of the
Church were learned with an exactness which delighted a priest who had
not too many encouragements. Finally, she begged her father to let
her make a winter retreat to some place near the headwaters of the
Penobscot. When the hunters were abroad, it did them no harm to
remember there was a maid in a wilderness cloister praying for the
good of her people; and when they were fortunate, they believed in the
material advantage of her prayers. Nobody thought of searching out her
hidden cell, or of asking the big-legged hunter and his wife to tell
its mysteries. The dealer with invisible spirits commanded respect in
Indian minds before the priest came.

Madockawando's daughter was of a lighter color than most of her tribe,
and finer in her proportions, though they were a well-made people. She
was the highest expression of unadulterated Abenaqui blood. She set
her sap pail down by the trough, and Saint-Castin shifted silently to
watch her while she dipped the juice. Her eyelids were lowered. She
had well-marked brows, and the high cheek-bones were lost in a general
acquiline rosiness. It was a girl's face, modest and sweet, that he
saw; reflecting the society of holier beings than the one behind the
tree. She had no blemish of sunken temples or shrunk features, or the
glaring aspect of a devotee. Saint-Castin was a good Catholic, but he
did not like fanatics. It was as if the choicest tree in the forest
had been flung open, and a perfect woman had stepped out, whom no
other man's eye had seen. Her throat was round, and at the base of it,
in the little hollow where women love to nestle ornaments, hung the
cross of her rosary, which she wore twisted about her neck. The
beads were large and white, and the cross was ivory. Father Petit had
furnished them, blessed for their purpose, to his incipient abbess,
but Saint-Castin noticed how they set off the dark rosiness of her
skin. The collar of her fur dress was pushed back, for the day was
warm, like an autumn day when there is no wind. A luminous smoke which
magnified the light hung between treetops and zenith. The nakedness of
the swelling forest let heaven come strangely close to the ground. It
was like standing on a mountain plateau in a gray dazzle of clouds.

Madockawando's daughter dipped her pail full of the clear water. The
appreciative motion of her eyelashes and the placid lines of her face
told how she enjoyed the limpid plaything. But Saint-Castin understood
well that she had not come out to boil sap entirely for the love of
it. Father Petit believed the time was ripe for her ministry to the
Abenaqui women. He had intimated to the seignior what land might be
convenient for the location of a convent. The community was now to
be drawn around her. Other girls must take vows when she did. Some
half-covered children, who stalked her wherever she went, stood like
terra-cotta images at a distance and waited for her next movement.

The girl had just finished her dipping when she looked up and met the
steady gaze of Saint-Castin. He was in an anguish of dread that she
would run. But her startled eyes held his image while three changes
passed over her,--terror and recognition and disapproval. He stepped
more into view, a white-and-gold apparition, which scattered the
Abenaqui children to their mothers' camp-fires.

"I am Saint-Castin," he said.

"Yes, I have many times seen you, sagamore."

Her voice, shaken a little by her heart, was modulated to such
softness that the liquid gutturals gave him a distinct new pleasure.

"I want to ask your pardon for my friend's rudeness, when you warmed
and fed us in your lodge."

"I did not listen to him." Her fingers sought the cross on her
neck. She seemed to threaten a prayer which might stop her ears to
Saint-Castin.

"He meant no discourtesy. If you knew his good heart, you would like
him."

"I do not like men." She made a calm statement of her peculiar tastes.

"Why?" inquired Saint-Castin.

Madockawando's daughter summoned her reasons from distant vistas of
the woods, with meditative dark eyes. Evidently her dislike of men had
no element of fear or of sentimental avoidance.

"I cannot like them," she apologized, declining to set forth her
reasons. "I wish they would always stay away from me."

"Your father and the priest are men."

"I know it," admitted the girl, with a deep breath like commiseration.
"They cannot help it; and our Etchemin's husband, who keeps the lodge
supplied with meat, he cannot help it, either, any more than he can
his deformity. But there is grace for men," she added. "They may,
by repenting of their sins and living holy lives, finally save their
souls."

Saint-Castin repented of his sins that moment, and tried to look
contrite.

"In some of my books," he said, "I read of an old belief held by
people on the other side of the earth. They thought our souls were
born into the world a great many times, now in this body, and now in
that. I feel as if you and I had been friends in some other state."

The girl's face seemed to flare toward him as flame is blown,
acknowledging the claim he made upon her; but the look passed like an
illusion, and she said seriously, "The sagamore should speak to Father
Petit. This is heresy."

Madockawando's daughter stood up, and took her pail by the handle.

"Let me carry it," said Saint-Castin.

Her lifted palm barred his approach.

"I do not like men, sagamore. I wish them to keep away from me."

"But that is not Christian," he argued.

"It cannot be unchristian: the priest would lay me under penance for
it."

"Father Petit is a lenient soul."

With the simplicity of an angel who would not be longer hindered by
mundane society, she took up her pail, saying, "Good-day, sagamore,"
and swept on across the dead leaves.

Saint-Castin walked after her.

"Go back," commanded Madockawando's daughter, turning.

The officer of the Carignan-Salieres regiment halted, but did not
retreat.

"You must not follow me, sagamore," she remonstrated, as with a child.
"I cannot talk to you."

"You must let me talk to you," said Saint-Castin. "I want you for my
wife."

She looked at him in a way that made his face scorch. He remembered
the year wife, the half-year wife, and the two-months wife at
Pentegoet. These three squaws whom he had allowed to form his
household, and had taught to boil the pot au feu, came to him from
many previous experimental marriages. They were externals of his life,
much as hounds, boats, or guns. He could give them all rich dowers,
and divorce them easily any day to a succeeding line of legal Abenaqui
husbands. The lax code of the wilderness was irresistible to a
Frenchman; but he was near enough in age and in texture of soul
to this noble pagan to see at once, with her eyesight, how he had
degraded the very vices of her people.

"Before the sun goes down," vowed Saint-Castin, "there shall be nobody
in my house but the two Etchemin slave men that your father gave me."

The girl heard of his promised reformation without any kindling of the
spirit.

"I am not for a wife," she answered him, and walked on with the pail.

Again Saint-Castin followed her, and took the sap pail from her hand.
He set it aside on the leaves, and folded his arms. The blood came
and went in his face. He was not used to pleading with women. They
belonged to him easily, like his natural advantages over barbarians
in a new world. The slopes of the Pyrenees bred strong-limbed men,
cautious in policy, striking and bold in figure and countenance. The
English themselves have borne witness to his fascinations. Manhood had
darkened only the surface of his skin, a milk-white cleanness breaking
through it like the outflushing of some inner purity. His eyes and
hair had a golden beauty. It would have been strange if he had not
roused at least a degree of comradeship in the aboriginal woman living
up to her highest aspirations.

"I love you. I have thought of you, of nobody but you, even when I
behaved the worst. You have kept yourself hid from me, while I have
been thinking about you ever since I came to Acadia. You are the woman
I want to marry."

Madockawando's daughter shook her head. She had patience with his
fantastic persistence, but it annoyed her.

"I am not for a wife," she repeated. "I do not like men."

"Is it that you do not like me?"

"No," she answered sincerely, probing her mind for the truth. "You
yourself are different from our Abenaqui men."

"Then why do you make me unhappy?"

"I do not make you unhappy. I do not even think of you."

Again she took to her hurried course, forgetting the pail of sap.
Saint-Castin seized it, and once more followed her.

"I beg that you will kiss me," he pleaded, trembling.

The Abenaqui girl laughed aloud.

"Does the sagamore think he is an object of veneration, that I should
kiss him?"

"But will you not at least touch your lips to my forehead?"

"No. I touch my lips to holy things."

"You do not understand the feeling I have."

"No, I do not understand it. If you talked every day, it would do no
good. My thoughts are different."

Saint-Castin gave her the pail, and looked her in the eyes.

"Perhaps you will some time understand," he said. "I lived many wild
years before I did."

She was so glad to leave him behind that her escape was like a
backward blow, and he did not make enough allowance for the natural
antagonism of a young girl. Her beautiful free motion was something to
watch. She was a convert whose penances were usually worked out afoot,
for Father Petit knew better than to shut her up.

Saint-Castin had never dreamed there were such women. She was like a
nymph out of a tree, without human responsiveness, yet with round arms
and waist and rosy column of neck, made to be helplessly adored. He
remembered the lonesome moods of his early youth. They must have been
a premonition of his fate in falling completely under the spell of an
unloving woman.

Saint-Castin took a roundabout course, and went to Madockawando's
lodge, near the fort. All the members of the family, except the old
chief, were away at the sugar-making. The great Abenaqui's dignity
would not allow him to drag in fuel to the fire, so he squatted
nursing the ashes, and raked out a coal to light tobacco for himself
and Saint-Castin. The white sagamore had never before come in full
uniform to a private talk, and it was necessary to smoke half an hour
before a word could be said.

There was a difference between the chatter of civilized men and the
deliberations of barbarians. With La Hontan, the Baron de Saint-Castin
would have led up to his business by a long prelude on other subjects.
With Madockawando, he waited until the tobacco had mellowed both their
spirits, and then said,--

"Father, I want to marry your daughter in the French way, with priest
and contract, and make her the Baroness de Saint-Castin."

Madockawando, on his part, smoked the matter fairly out. He put an arm
on the sagamore's shoulder, and lamented the extreme devotion of his
daughter. It was a good religion which the black-robed father had
brought among the Abenaquis, but who had ever heard of a woman's
refusing to look at men before that religion came? His own child, when
she was at home with the tribe, lived as separate from the family and
as independently as a war-chief. In his time, the women dressed game
and carried the children and drew sledges. What would happen if his
daughter began to teach them, in a house by themselves, to do nothing
but pray? Madockawando repeated that his son, the sagamore, and
his father, the priest, had a good religion, but they might see for
themselves what the Abenaqui tribe would come to when the women all
set up for medicine squaws. Then there was his daughter's hiding in
winter to make what she called her retreats, and her proposing to take
a new name from some of the priest's okies or saint-spirits, and to be
called "Sister."

"I will never call my own child 'Sister,'" vowed Madockawando. "I
could be a better Christian myself, if Father Petit had not put spells
on her."

The two conspirators against Father Petit's proposed nunnery felt
grave and wicked, but they encouraged one another in iniquity.
Madockawando smiled in bronze wrinkles when Saint-Castin told him
about the proposal in the woods. The proper time for courtship was
evening, as any Frenchman who had lived a year with the tribe ought to
know; but when one considered the task he had undertaken, any time
was suitable; and the chief encouraged him with full consent. A French
marriage contract was no better than an Abenaqui marriage contract in
Madockawando's eyes; but if Saint-Castin could bind up his daughter
for good, he would be glad of it.

The chapel of saplings and bark which first sheltered Father Petit's
altar had been abandoned when Saint-Castin built a substantial one
of stone and timber within the fortress walls, and hung in its little
tower a bell, which the most reluctant Abenaqui must hear at mass
time. But as it is well to cherish the sacred regard which man has for
any spot where he has worshiped, the priest left a picture hanging on
the wall above the bare chancel, and he kept the door repaired on its
wooden hinges. The chapel stood beyond the forest, east of Pentegoet,
and close to those battlements which form the coast line here. The
tide made thunder as it rose among caverns and frothed almost at the
verge of the heights. From this headland Mount Desert could be seen,
leading the host of islands which go out into the Atlantic, ethereal
in fog or lurid in the glare of sunset.

Madockawando's daughter tended the old chapel in summer, for she had
first seen religion through its door. She wound the homely chancel
rail with evergreens, and put leaves and red berries on the walls, and
flowers under the sacred picture; her Etchemin woman always keeping
her company. Father Petit hoped to see this rough shrine become a
religious seminary, and strings of women led there every day to take,
like contagion, from an abbess the instruction they took so slowly
from a priest.

She and the Etchemin found it a dismal place, on their first visit
after the winter retreat. She reproached herself for coming so late;
but day and night an influence now encompassed Madockawando's daughter
which she felt as a restraint on her freedom. A voice singing softly
the love-songs of southern France often waked her from her sleep. The
words she could not interpret, but the tone the whole village could,
and she blushed, crowding paters on aves, until her voice sometimes
became as distinct as Saint-Castin's in resolute opposition. It was so
grotesque that it made her laugh. Yet to a woman the most formidable
quality in a suitor is determination.

When the three girls who had constituted Saint-Castin's household
at the fort passed complacently back to their own homes laden with
riches, Madockawando's daughter was unreasonably angry, and felt their
loss as they were incapable of feeling it for themselves. She was
alien to the customs of her people. The fact pressed upon her that her
people were completely bound to the white sagamore and all his deeds.
Saint-Castin's sins had been open to the tribe, and his repentance was
just as open. Father Petit praised him.

"My son Jean Vincent de l'Abadie, Baron de Saint-Castin, has need of
spiritual aid to sustain him in the paths of virtue," said the priest
impressively, "and he is seeking it."

At every church service the lax sinner was now on his knees in plain
sight of the devotee; but she never looked at him. All the tribe soon
knew what he had at heart, and it was told from camp-fire to camp-fire
how he sat silent every night in the hall at Pentegoet, with his hair
ruffled on his forehead, growing more haggard from day to day.

The Abenaqui girl did not talk with other women about what happened in
the community. Dead saints crowded her mind to the exclusion of living
sinners. All that she heard came by way of her companion, the stolid
Etchemin, and when it was unprofitable talk it was silenced. They
labored together all the chill April afternoon, bringing the chapel
out of its winter desolation. The Etchemin made brooms of hemlock, and
brushed down cobwebs and dust, and laboriously swept the rocky earthen
floor, while the princess, standing upon a scaffold of split log
benches, wiped the sacred picture and set a border of tender moss
around it. It was a gaudy red print representing a pierced heart.
The Indian girl kissed every sanguinary drop which dribbled down the
coarse paper. Fog and salt air had given it a musty odor, and stained
the edges with mildew. She found it no small labor to cover these
stains, and pin the moss securely in place with thorns.

There were no windows in this chapel. A platform of hewed slabs had
supported the altar; and when the princess came down, and the benches
were replaced, she lifted one of these slabs, as she had often done
before, to look into the earthen-floored box which they made. Little
animals did not take refuge in the wind-beaten building. She often
wondered that it stood; though the light materials used by aboriginal
tribes, when anchored to the earth as this house was, toughly resisted
wind and weather.

The Etchemin sat down on the ground, and her mistress on the platform
behind the chancel rail, when everything else was done, to make a
fresh rope of evergreen. The climbing and reaching and lifting had
heated their faces, and the cool salt air flowed in, refreshing
them. Their hands were pricked by the spiny foliage, but they labored
without complaint, in unbroken meditation. A monotonous low singing
of the Etchemin's kept company with the breathing of the sea. This
decking of the chapel acted like music on the Abenaqui girl. She
wanted to be quiet, to enjoy it.

By the time they were ready to shut the door for the night the splash
of a rising tide could be heard. Fog obliterated the islands, and a
bleak gray twilight, like the twilights of winter, began to dim the
woods.

"The sagamore has made a new law," said the Etchemin woman, as they
came in sight of the fort.

Madockawando's daughter looked at the unguarded bastions, and the
chimneys of Pentegoet rising in a stack above the walls.

"What new law has the sagamore made?" she inquired.

"He says he will no more allow a man to put away his first and true
wife, for he is convinced that God does not love inconstancy in men."

"The sagamore should have kept his first wife himself."

"But he says he has not yet had her," answered the Etchemin woman,
glancing aside at the princess. "The sagamore will not see the end of
the sugar-making to-night."

"Because he sits alone every night by his fire," said Madockawando's
daughter; "there is too much talk about the sagamore. It is the end of
the sugar-making that your mind is set on."

"My husband is at the camps," said the Etchemin plaintively. "Besides,
I am very tired."

"Rest yourself, therefore, by tramping far to wait on your husband
and keep his hands filled with warm sugar. I am tired, and I go to my
lodge."

"But there is a feast in the camps, and nobody has thought of putting
a kettle on in the village. I will first get your meat ready."

"No, I intend to observe a fast to-night. Go on to the camps, and
serve my family there."

The Etchemin looked toward the darkening bay, and around them at those
thickening hosts of invisible terrors which are yet dreaded by more
enlightened minds than hers.

"No," responded the princess, "I am not afraid. Go on to the camps
while you have the courage to be abroad alone."

The Etchemin woman set off at a trot, her heavy body shaking, and
distance soon swallowed her. Madockawando's daughter stood still in
the humid dimness before turning aside to her lodge. Perhaps the ruddy
light which showed through the open fortress gate from the hall of
Pentegoet gave her a feeling of security. She knew a man was there;
and there was not a man anywhere else within half a league. It was the
last great night of sugar-making. Not even an Abenaqui woman or child
remained around the fort. Father Petit himself was at the camps to
restrain riot. It would be a hard patrol for him, moving from fire to
fire half the night. The master of Pentegoet rested very carelessly in
his hold. It was hardly a day's sail westward to the English post of
Pemaquid. Saint-Castin had really made ready for his people's spring
sowing and fishing with some anxiety for their undisturbed peace.
Pemaquid aggressed on him, and he seriously thought of fitting out a
ship and burning Pemaquid. In that time, as in this, the strong hand
upheld its own rights at any cost.

The Abenaqui girl stood under the north-west bastion, letting
early night make its impressions on her. Her motionless figure,
in indistinct garments, could not be seen from the river; but she
discerned, rising up the path from the water, one behind the other, a
row of peaked hats. Beside the hats appeared gunstocks. She had never
seen any English, but neither her people nor the French showed such
tops, or came stealthily up from the boat landing under cover of
night. She did not stop to count them. Their business must be with
Saint-Castin. She ran along the wall. The invaders would probably see
her as she tried to close the gate; it had settled on its hinges, and
was too heavy for her. She thought of ringing the chapel bell;
but before any Abenaqui could reach the spot the single man in the
fortress must be overpowered.

Saint-Castin stood on his bachelor hearth, leaning an arm on the
mantel. The light shone on his buckskin fringes, his dejected
shoulders, and his clean-shaven youthful face. A supper stood on the
table near him, where his Etchemin servants had placed it before they
trotted off to the camps. The high windows flickered, and there was
not a sound in the house except the low murmur or crackle of the
glowing backlog, until the door-latch clanked, and the door flew wide
and was slammed shut again. Saint-Castin looked up with a frown, which
changed to stupid astonishment.

Madockawando's daughter seized him by the wrist.

"Is there any way out of the fort except through the gate?"

"None," answered Saint-Castin.

"Is there no way of getting over the wall?"

"The ladder can be used."

"Run, then, to the ladder! Be quick."

"What is the matter?" demanded Saint-Castin.

The Abenaqui girl dragged on him with all her strength as he reached
for the iron door-latch.

"Not that way--they will see you--they are coming from the river! Go
through some other door."

"Who are coming?"

Yielding himself to her will, Saint-Castin hurried with her from room
to room, and out through his kitchen, where the untidy implements of
his Etchemin slaves lay scattered about. They ran past the storehouse,
and he picked up a ladder and set it against the wall.

"I will run back and ring the chapel bell," panted the girl.

"Mount!" said Saint-Castin sternly; and she climbed the ladder,
convinced that he would not leave her behind.

He sat on the wall and dragged the ladder up, and let it down on the
outside. As they both reached the ground, he understood what enemy had
nearly trapped him in his own fortress.

"The doors were all standing wide," said a cautious nasal voice,
speaking English, at the other side of the wall. "Our fox hath barely
sprung from cover. He must be near."

"Is not that the top of a ladder?" inquired another voice.

At this there was a rush for the gate. Madockawando's daughter ran
like the wind, with Saint-Castin's hand locked in hers. She knew, by
night or day, every turn of the slender trail leading to the deserted
chapel. It came to her mind as the best place of refuge. They were cut
off from the camps, because they must cross their pursuers on the way.

The lord of Pentegoet could hear bushes crackling behind him. The
position of the ladder had pointed the direction of the chase. He
laughed in his headlong flight. This was not ignominious running from
foes, but a royal exhilaration. He could run all night, holding the
hand that guided him. Unheeded branches struck him across the face.
He shook his hair back and flew light-footed, the sweep of the
magnificent body beside him keeping step. He could hear the tide boom
against the headland, and the swish of its recoiling waters. The girl
had her way with him. It did not occur to the officer of the Carignan
regiment that he should direct the escape, or in any way oppose the
will manifested for the first time in his favor. She felt for the
door of the, dark little chapel, and drew him in and closed it. His
judgment rejected the place, but without a word he groped at her side
across to the chancel rail. She lifted the loose slab of the platform,
and tried to thrust him into the earthen-floored box.

"Hide yourself first," whispered Saint-Castin.

They could hear feet running on the flinty approach. The chase was so
close that the English might have seen them enter the chapel.

"Get in, get in!" begged the Abenaqui girl. "They will not hurt me."

"Hide!" said Saint-Castin, thrusting her fiercely in. "Would they not
carry off the core of Saint-Castin's heart if they could?"

She flattened herself on the ground under the platform, and gave him
all the space at her side that the contraction of her body left clear,
and he let the slab down carefully over their heads. They existed
almost without breath for many minutes.

The wooden door-hinges creaked, and stumbling shins blundered against
the benches.

"What is this place?" spoke an English voice. "Let some one take his
tinder-box and strike a light."

"Have care," warned another. "We are only half a score in number. Our
errand was to kidnap Saint-Castin from his hold, not to get ourselves
ambushed by the Abenaquis."

"We are too far from the sloop now," said a third. "We shall be cut
off before we get back, if we have not a care."

"But he must be in here."

"There are naught but benches and walls to hide him. This must be
an idolatrous chapel where the filthy savages congregate to worship
images."

"Come out of the abomination, and let us make haste back to the boat.
He may be this moment marshaling all his Indians to surround us."

"Wait. Let a light first be made."

Saint-Castin and his companion heard the clicks of flint and steel;
then an instant's blaze of tinder made cracks visible over their
Heads. It died away, the hurried, wrangling men shuffling about. One
kicked the platform.

"Here is a cover," he said; but darkness again enveloped them all.

"Nothing is to be gained by searching farther," decided the majority.
"Did I not tell you this Saint-Castin will never be caught? The tide
will turn, and we shall get stranded among the rocks of that bay. It
is better to go back without Saint-Castin than to stay and be burnt by
his Abenaquis."

"But here is a loose board in some flooring," insisted the discoverer
of the platform. "I will feel with the butt of my gun if there be
anything thereunder."

The others had found the door, and were filing through it.

"Why not with thy knife, man?" suggested one of them.

"That is well thought of," he answered, and struck a half circle
under the boards. Whether in this flourish he slashed anything he only
learned by the stain on the knife, when the sloop was dropping down
the bay. But the Abenaqui girl knew what he had done, before the
footsteps ceased. She sat beside Saint-Castin on the platform, their
feet resting on the ground within the boards. No groan betrayed him,
but her arms went jealously around his body, and her searching fingers
found the cut in the buckskin. She drew her blanket about him with a
strength of compression that made it a ligature, and tied the corners
in a knot.

"Is it deep, sagamore?"

"Not deep enough," said Saint-Castin. "It will glue me to my buckskins
with a little blood, but it will not let me out of my troubles. I
wonder why I ran such a race from the English? They might have had me,
since they want me, and no one else does."

"I will kiss you now, sagamore," whispered the Abenaqui girl,
trembling and weeping in the chaos of her broken reserve. "I cannot
any longer hold out against being your wife."

She gave him her first kiss in the sacred darkness of the chapel, and
under the picture of the pierced heart. And it has since been recorded
of her that the Baroness de Saint-Castin was, during her entire
lifetime, the best worshiped wife in Acadia.




THE BEAUPORT LOUP-GAROU.


October dusk was bleak on the St. Lawrence, an east wind feeling along
the river's surface and rocking the vessels of Sir William Phips
on tawny rollers. It was the second night that his fleet sat there
inactive. During that day a small ship had approached Beauport
landing; but it stuck fast in the mud and became a mark for gathering
Canadians until the tide rose and floated it off. At this hour all
the habitants about Beauport except one, and even the Huron Indians
of Lorette, were safe inside the fort walls. Cattle were driven and
sheltered inland. Not a child's voice could be heard in the parish of
Beauport, and not a woman's face looked through windows fronting the
road leading up toward Montmorenci. Juchereau de Saint-Denis, the
seignior of Beauport, had taken his tenants with him as soon as the
New England invaders pushed into Quebec Basin. Only one man of the
muster hid himself and stayed behind, and he was too old for military
service. His seignior might lament him, but there was no woman to do
so. Gaspard had not stepped off his farm for years. The priest visited
him there, humoring a bent which seemed as inelastic as a vow. He had
not seen the ceremonial of high mass in the cathedral of Upper Town
since he was a young man.

Gaspard's farm was fifteen feet wide and a mile long. It was one of
several strips lying between the St. Charles River and those heights
east of Beauport which rise to Montmorenci Falls. He had his front on
the greater stream, and his inland boundary among woods skirting the
mountain. He raised his food and the tobacco he smoked, and braided
his summer hats of straw and knitted his winter caps of wool. One suit
of well-fulled woolen clothes would have lasted a habitant a lifetime.
But Gaspard had been unlucky. He lost all his family by smallpox, and
the priest made him burn his clothes, and ruinously fit himself with
new. There was no use in putting savings in the stocking any longer,
however; the children were gone. He could only buy masses for them.
He lived alone, the neighbors taking that loving interest in him which
French Canadians bestow on one another.

More than once Gaspard thought he would leave his farm and go into the
world. When Frontenac returned to take the paralyzed province in hand,
and fight Iroquois, and repair the mistakes of the last governor,
Gaspard put on his best moccasins and the red tasseled sash he wore
only at Christmas. "Gaspard is going to the fort," ran along the whole
row of Beauport houses. His neighbors waited for him. They all carried
their guns and powder for the purpose of firing salutes to Frontenac.
It was a grand day. But when Gaspard stepped out with the rest, his
countenance fell. He could not tell what ailed him. His friends coaxed
and pulled him; they gave him a little brandy. He sat down, and they
were obliged to leave him, or miss the cannonading and fireworks
themselves. From his own river front Gaspard saw the old lion's, ship
come to port, and, in unformed sentences, he reasoned then that a man
need not leave his place to take part in the world.

Frontenac had not been back a month, and here was the New England
colony of Massachusetts swarming against New France. "They may carry
me away from my hearth feet first," thought Gaspard, "but I am not to
be scared away from it."

Every night, before putting the bar across his door, the old habitant
went out to survey the two ends of the earth typified by the road
crossing his strip of farm. These were usually good moments for him.
He did not groan, as at dawn, that there were no children to relieve
him of labor. A noble landscape lifted on either hand from the hollow
of Beauport. The ascending road went on to the little chapel of Ste.
Anne de Beaupre, which for thirty years had been considered a shrine
in New France. The left hand road forded the St. Charles and climbed
the long slope to Quebec rock.

Gaspard loved the sounds which made home so satisfying at autumn dusk.
Faint and far off he thought he could hear the lowing of his cow and
calf. To remember they were exiled gave him the pang of the unusual.
He was just chilled through, and therefore as ready for his own hearth
as a long journey could have made him, when a gray thing loped past in
the flinty dust, showing him sudden awful eyes and tongue of red fire.

Gaspard clapped the house door to behind him and put up the bar. He
was not afraid of Phips and the fleet, of battle or night attack, but
the terror which walked in the darkness of sorcerers' times abjectly
bowed his old legs.

"O good Ste. Anne, pray for us!" he whispered, using an invocation
familiar to his lips. "If loups-garous are abroad, also, what is to
become of this unhappy land?"

There was a rattling knock on his door. It might be made by the
hilt of a sword; or did a loup-garou ever clatter paw against man's
dwelling? Gaspard climbed on his bed.

"Father Gaspard! Father Gaspard! Are you within?"

"Who is there?"

"Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene. Don't you know my voice?"

"My master Sainte-Helene, are you alone?"

"Quite alone, except for my horse tied to your apple-tree. Let me in."

The command was not to be slighted. Gaspard got down and admitted
his visitor. More than once had Sainte-Helene come to this hearth. He
appreciated the large fire, and sat down on a chair with heavy legs
which were joined by bars resting on the floor.

"My hands tingle. The dust on these, flint roads is cold."

"But Monsieur Sainte-Helene never walked with his hands in the dust,"
protested Gaspard. The erect figure, bright with all the military
finery of that period, checked even his superstition by imposing
another kind of awe.

"The New England men expect to make us bite it yet," responded
Sainte-Helene. "Saint-Denis is anxious about you, old man. Why don't
you go to the fort?"

"I will go to-morrow," promised Gaspard, relaxing sheepishly from
terror. "These New Englanders have not yet landed, and one's own bed
is very comfortable in the cool nights."

"I am used to sleeping anywhere."

"Yes, monsieur, for you are young."

"It would make you young again, Gaspard, to see Count Frontenac. I
wish all New France had seen him yesterday when he defied Phips
and sent the envoy back to the fleet. The officer was sweating; our
mischievous fellows had blinded him at the water's edge, and dragged
him, to the damage of his shins, over all the barricades of Mountain
Street. He took breath and courage when they turned him loose before
the governor,--though the sight of Frontenac startled him,--and handed
over the letter of his commandant requiring the surrender of Quebec."

"My faith, Monsieur Sainte-Helene, did the governor blow him out of
the room?"

"The man offered his open watch, demanding an answer within the hour.
The governor said, 'I do not need so much time. Go back at once to
your master and tell him I will answer this insolent message by the
mouths of my cannon.'"

"By all the saints, that was a good word!" swore Gaspard, slapping his
knee with his wool cap. "Neither the Iroquois nor the Bostonnais will
run over us, now that the old governor is back. You heard him say it,
monsieur?"

"I heard him, yes; for all his officers stood by. La Hontan was there,
too, and that pet of La Hontan's, Baron de Saint-Castin's half-breed
son, of Pentegoet."

The martial note in the officer's voice sunk to contempt. Gaspard
was diverted from the governor to recognize, with the speechless
perception of an untrained mind, that jealousy which men established
in the world have of very young men. The male instinct of predominance
is fierce even in saints. Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene, though of the
purest stock in New France, had no prejudice against a half-breed.

"How is Mademoiselle Clementine?" inquired Gaspard, arriving at the
question in natural sequence. "You will see her oftener now than when
you had to ride from the fort."

The veins looked black in his visitor's face. "Ask the little
Saint-Castin. Boys stand under windows and talk to women now. Men have
to be reconnoitering the enemy."

"Monsieur Anselm de Saint-Castin is the son of a good fighter,"
observed Gaspard. "It is said the New England men hate his very name."

"Anselm de Saint-Castin is barely eighteen years old."

"It is the age of Mademoiselle Clementine."

The old habitant drew his three-legged stool to the hearth corner, and
took the liberty of sitting down as the talk was prolonged. He noticed
the leaden color which comes of extreme weariness and depression
dulling Sainte-Helene's usually dark and rosy skin. Gaspard had heard
that this young man was quickest afoot, readiest with his weapon,
most untiring in the dance, and keenest for adventure of all the eight
brothers in his noble family. He had done the French arms credit
in the expedition to Hudson Bay and many another brush with their
enemies. The fire was burning high and clear, lighting rafters and
their curious brown tassels of smoked meat, and making the crucifix
over the bed shine out the whitest spot in a smoke-stained room.

"Father Gaspard," inquired Sainte-Helene suddenly, "did you ever hear
of such a thing as a loup-garou?"

The old habitant felt terror returning with cold feet up his back and
crowding its blackness upon him through the windows. Yet as he rolled
his eyes at the questioner he felt piqued at such ignorance of his
natural claims.

"Was I not born on the island of Orleans, monsieur?"

Everybody knew that the island of Orleans had been from the time of
its discovery the abode of loups-garous, sorcerers, and all those
uncanny cattle that run in the twilights of the world. The western
point of its wooded ridge, which parts the St. Lawrence for twenty-two
miles, from Beauport to Beaupre, lay opposite Gaspard's door.

"Oh, you were born on the island of Orleans?"

"Yes, monsieur," answered Gaspard, with the pride we take in
distinction of any kind.

"But you came to live in Beauport parish."

"Does a goat turn to a pig, monsieur, because you carry it to the
north shore?"

"Perhaps so: everything changes."

Sainte-Helene leaned forward, resting his arms on the arms of the
chair. He wrinkled his eyelids around central points of fire.

"What is a loup-garou?"

"Does monsieur not know? Monsieur Sainte-Helene surely knows that a
loup-garou is a man-wolf."

"A man-wolf," mused the soldier. "But when a person is so afflicted,
is he a man or is he a wolf?"

"It is not an affliction, monsieur; it is sorcery."

"I think you are right. Then the wretched man-wolf is past being
prayed for?"

"If one should repent"--

"I don't repent anything," returned Sainte-Helene; and Gaspard's jaw
relaxed, and he had the feeling of pin-feathers in his hair. "Is he a
man or is he a wolf?" repeated the questioner.

"The loup-garou is a man, but he takes the form of a wolf."

"Not all the time?"

"No, monsieur, not all the time?"

"Of course not."

Gaspard experienced with us all this paradox: that the older we grow,
the more visible becomes the unseen. In childhood the external senses
are sharp; but maturity fuses flesh and spirit. He wished for a
priest, desiring to feel the arm of the Church around him. It was
late October,--a time which might be called the yearly Sabbath of
loups-garous.

"And what must a loup-garou do with himself?" pursued Sainte-Helene.
"I should take to the woods, and sit and lick my chaps, and bless my
hide that I was for the time no longer a man."

"Saints! monsieur, he goes on a chase. He runs with his tongue lolled
out, and his eyes red as blood."

"What color are my eyes, Gaspard?"

The old Frenchman sputtered, "Monsieur, they are very black."

Sainte-Helene drew his hand across them.

"It must be your firelight that is so red. I have been seeing as
through a glass of claret ever since I came in."

Gaspard moved farther into the corner, the stool legs scraping the
floor. Though every hair on his body crawled with superstition, he
could not suspect Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene. Yet the familiar face
altered strangely while he looked at it: the nose sunk with sudden
emaciation, and the jaws lengthened to a gaunt muzzle. There was a
crouching forward of the shoulders, as if the man were about to drop
on his hands and feet. Gaspard had once fallen down unconscious in
haying time; and this recalled to him the breaking up and shimmering
apart of a solid landscape. The deep cleft mouth parted, lifting first
at the corners and showing teeth, then widening to the utterance of a
low howl.

Gaspard tumbled over the stool, and, seizing it by a leg, held it
between himself and Sainte-Helene.

"What is the matter, Gaspard?" exclaimed the officer, clattering his
scabbard against the chair as he rose, his lace and plumes and ribbons
stirring anew. Many a woman in the province had not as fine and
sensitive a face as the one confronting the old habitant.

Gaspard stood back against the wall, holding the stool with its legs
bristling towards Sainte-Helene. He shook from head to foot.

"Have I done anything to frighten you? What is the matter with me,
Gaspard, that people should treat me as they do? It is unbearable! I
take the hardest work, the most dangerous posts; and they are against
me--against me."

The soldier lifted his clenched fists, and turned his back on the old
man. The fire showed every curve of his magnificent stature. Wind,
diving into the chimney, strove against the sides for freedom, and
startled the silence with its hollow rumble.

"I forded the St. Charles when the tide was rising, to take you back
with me to the fort. I see you dread the New Englanders less than you
do me. She told her father she feared you were ill. But every one is
well," said Sainte-Helene, lowering his arms and making for the door.
And it sounded like an accusation against the world.

He was scarcely outside in the wind, though still holding the door,
when Gaspard was ready to put up the bar.

"Good-night, old man."

"Good-night, monsieur, good-night, good-night!" called Gaspard, with
quavering dispatch. He pushed the door, but Sainte-Helene looked
around its edge. Again the officer's face had changed, pinched by the
wind, and his eyes were full of mocking laughter.

"I will say this for a loup-garou, Father Gaspard: a loup-garou may
have a harder time in this world than the other beasts, but he is no
coward; he can make a good death."

Ashes spun out over the floor, and smoke rolled up around the joists,
as Sainte-Helene shut himself into the darkness. Not satisfied with
barring the door, the old habitant pushed his chest against it. To
this he added the chair and stool, and barricaded it further with his
night's supply of firewood.

"Would I go over the ford of the St. Charles with him?" Gaspard
hoarsely whispered as he crossed himself. "If the New England men were
burning my house, I would not go. And how can a loup-garou get over
that water? The St. Charles is blessed; I am certain it is blessed.
Yet he talked about fording it like any Christian."

The old habitant was not clear in his mind what should be done, except
that it was no business of his to meddle with one of Frontenac's great
officers and a noble of New France. But as a measure of safety for
himself he took down his bottle of holy water, hanging on the wall for
emergencies, and sprinkled every part of his dwelling.

Next morning, however, when the misty autumn light was on the hills,
promising a clear day and penetrating sunshine, as soon as he awoke he
felt ashamed of the barricade, and climbed out of bed to remove it.

"The time has at last come when I am obliged to go to the fort,"
thought Gaspard, groaning. "Governor Frontenac will not permit any
sorcery in his presence. The New England men might do me no harm, but
I cannot again face a loup-garou."

He dressed himself accordingly, and, taking his gathered coin from its
hiding-place, wrapped every piece separately in a bit of rag, slid it
into his deep pocket, and sewed the pocket up. Then he cut off enough
bacon to toast on the raked-out coals for his breakfast, and hid
the rest under the floor. There was no fastening on the outside of
Gaspard's house. He was obliged to latch the door, and leave it at the
mercy of the enemy.

Nothing was stirring in the frosted world. He could not yet see
the citadel clearly, or the heights of Levis; but the ascent to
Montmorenci bristled with naked trees, and in the stillness he could
hear the roar of the falls. Gaspard ambled along his belt of ground
to take a last look. It was like a patchwork quilt: a square of wheat
stubble showed here, and a few yards of brown prostrate peavines
showed there; his hayfield was less than a stone's throw long; and
his garden beds, in triangles and sections of all shapes, filled the
interstices of more ambitious crops.

He had nearly reached the limit of the farm, and entered his neck of
woods, when the breathing of a cow trying to nip some comfort from the
frosty sod delighted his ear. The pretty milker was there, with her
calf at her side. Gaspard stroked and patted them. Though the New
Englanders should seize them for beef, he could not regret they were
wending home again. That invisible cord binding him to his own place,
which had wrenched his vitals as it stretched, now drew him back like
fate. He worked several hours to make his truants a concealing corral
of hay and stakes and straw and stumps at a place where a hill spring
threaded across his land, and then returned between his own boundaries
to the house again.

The homesick zest of one who has traveled made his lips and unshaven
chin protrude, as he smelled the good interior. There was the wooden
crane. There was his wife's old wheel. There was the sacred row of
children's snow-shoes, which the priest had spared from burning. One
really had to leave home to find out what home was.

But a great hubbub was beginning in Phips's fleet. Fifes were
screaming, drums were beating, and shouts were lifted and answered by
hearty voices. After their long deliberation, the New Englanders had
agreed upon some plan of attack. Gaspard went down to his landing, and
watched boatload follow boatload, until the river was swarming with
little craft pulling directly for Beauport. He looked uneasily toward
Quebec. The old lion in the citadel hardly waited for Phips to shift
position, but sent the first shot booming out to meet him. The New
England cannon answered, and soon Quebec height and Levis palisades
rumbled prodigious thunder, and the whole day was black with smoke and
streaked with fire.

Gaspard took his gun, and trotted along his farm to the cover of the
trees. He had learned to fight in the Indian fashion; and Le Moyne
de Sainte-Helene fought the same way. Before the boatloads of New
Englanders had all waded through tidal mud, and ranged themselves
by companies on the bank, Sainte-Helene, who had been dispatched by
Frontenac at the first drumbeat on the river, appeared, ready to
check them, from the woods of Beauport. He had, besides three hundred
sharpshooters, the Lorette Hurons and the muster of Beauport militia,
all men with homes to save.

The New Englanders charged them, a solid force, driving the
light-footed bush fighters. But it was like driving the wind, which
turns, and at some unexpected quarter is always ready for you again.

This long-range fighting went on until nightfall, when the English
commander, finding that his tormentors had disappeared as suddenly as
they had appeared in the morning, tried to draw his men together at
the St. Charles ford, where he expected some small vessels would
be sent to help him across. He made a night camp here, without any
provisions.

Gaspard's house was dark, like the deserted Beauport homes all that
night; yet one watching might have seen smoke issuing from his chimney
toward the stars. The weary New England men did not forage through
these places, nor seek shelter in them. It was impossible to know
where Indians and Frenchmen did not lie in ambush. On the other side
of the blankets which muffled Gaspard's windows, however, firelight
shone with its usual ruddiness, showing the seignior of Beauport
prostrate on his old tenant's bed. Juchereau de Saint-Denis was
wounded, and La Hontan, who was with the skirmishers, and Gaspard had
brought him in the dark down to the farmhouse as the nearest hospital.
Baron La Hontan was skillful in surgery; most men had need to be in
those days. He took the keys, and groped into the seigniory house for
the linen chest, and provided lint and bandages, and brought cordials
from the cellar; making his patient as comfortable as a wounded man
who was a veteran in years could be made in the first fever and thirst
of suffering. La Hontan knew the woods, and crept away before dawn to
a hidden bivouac of Hurons and militia; wiry and venturesome in his
age as he had been in his youth. But Saint-Denis lay helpless and
partially delirious in Gaspard's house all Thursday, while the
bombardment of Quebec made the earth tremble, and the New England
ships were being splintered by Frontenac's cannon; while Sainte-Helene
and his brother themselves manned the two batteries of Lower Town,
aiming twenty-four-pound balls directly against the fleet; while they
cut the cross of St. George from the flagstaff of the admiral, and
Frenchmen above them in the citadel rent the sky with joy; while the
fleet, ship by ship, with shattered masts and leaking hulls, drew off
from the fight, some of them leaving cable and anchor, and drifting
almost in pieces; while the land force, discouraged, sick, and hungry,
waited for the promised help which never came.

Thursday night was so cold that the St. Charles was skimmed with ice,
and hoarfrost lay white on the fields. But Saint-Denis was in the fire
of fever, and Gaspard, slipping like a thief, continually brought him
fresh water from the spring.

He lay there on Friday, while the land force, refreshed by half
rations sent from the almost wrecked fleet, made a last stand,
fighting hotly as they were repulsed from New France. It was twilight
on Friday when Sainte-Helene was carried into Gaspard's house and
laid on the floor. Gaspard felt emboldened to take the blankets from
a window and roll them up to place under the soldier's head. Many
Beauport people were even then returning to their homes. The land
force did not reembark until the next night, and the invaders did not
entirely withdraw for four days; but Quebec was already yielding up
its refugees. A disabled foe--though a brave and stubborn one--who had
his ships to repair, if he would not sink in them, was no longer to be
greatly dreaded.

At first the dusk room was packed with Hurons and Montreal men. This
young seignior Sainte-Helene was one of the best leaders of his time.
They were indignant that the enemy's last scattering shots had picked
him off. The surgeon and La Hontan put all his followers out of the
door,--he was scarcely conscious that they stood by him,--and left,
beside his brother Longueuil, only one young man who had helped carry
him in.

Saint-Denis, on the bed, saw him with the swimming eyes of fever.
The seignior of Beauport had hoped to have Sainte-Helene for his
son-in-law. His little Clementine, the child of his old age,--it was
after all a fortunate thing that she was shut for safety in Quebec,
while her father depended for care on Gaspard. Saint-Denis tried to
see Sainte-Helene's face; but the surgeon's helpers constantly balked
him, stooping and rising and reaching for things. And presently a face
he was not expecting to see grew on the air before him.

Clementine's foot had always made a light click, like a sheep's on a
naked floor. But Saint-Denis did not hear her enter. She touched her
cheek to her father's. It was smooth and cold from the October air.
Clementine's hair hung in large pale ringlets; for she was an ashen
maid, gray-toned and subdued; the roughest wind never ruffled her
smoothness. She made her father know that she had come with Beauport
women and men from Quebec, as soon as any were allowed to leave the
fort, to escort her. She leaned against the bed, soft as a fleece,
yielding her head to her father's painful fondling. There was no
heroism in Clementine; but her snug domestic ways made him happy in
his house.

"Sainte-Helene is wounded," observed Saint-Denis.

She cast a glance of fright over her shoulder.

"Did you not see him when you came in?"

"I saw some one; but it is to you that I have been wishing to come
since Wednesday night."

"I shall get well; they tell me it is not so bad with me. But how is
it with Sainte-Helene?"

"I do not know, father."

"Where is young Saint-Castin? Ask him."

"He is helping the surgeon, father."

"Poor child, how she trembles! I would thou hadst stayed in the fort,
for these sights are unfit for women. New France can as ill spare him
as we can, Clementine. Was that his groan?"

She cowered closer to the bed, and answered, "I do not know."

Saint-Denis tried to sit up in bed, but was obliged to resign himself,
with a gasp, to the straw pillows.

Night pressed against the unblinded window. A stir, not made by the
wind, was heard at the door, and Frontenac, and Frontenac's Recollet
confessor, and Sainte-Helene's two brothers from the citadel, came
into the room. The governor of New France was imposing in presence.
Perhaps there was no other officer in the province to whom he would
have galloped in such haste from Quebec. It was a tidal moment in his
affairs, and Frontenac knew the value of such moments better than
most men. But Sainte-Helene did not know the governor was there. The
Recollet father fell on his knees and at once began his office.

Longueuil sat down on Gaspard's stool and covered his face against
the wall. He had been hurt by a spent bullet, and one arm needed
bandaging, but he said nothing about it, though the surgeon was now at
liberty, standing and looking at a patient for whom nothing could be
done. The sterner brothers watched, also, silent, as Normans taught
themselves to be in trouble. The sons of Charles Le Moyne carried his
name and the lilies of France from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the
Gulf of Mexico.

Anselm de Saint-Castin had fought two days alongside the man who lay
dying. The boy had an ardent face, like his father's. He was sorry,
with the skin-deep commiseration of youth for those who fall, whose
falling thins the crowded ranks of competition. But he was not for a
moment unconscious of the girl hiding her head against her father from
the sight of death. The hope of one man forever springing beside the
grave of another must work sadness in God. Yet Sainte-Helene did not
know any young supplanter was there. He did not miss or care for
the fickle vanity of applause; he did not torment himself with the
spectres of the mind, or feel himself shrinking with the littleness of
jealousy; he did not hunger for a love that was not in the world, or
waste a Titan's passion on a human ewe any more. For him, the aching
and bewilderment, exaltations and self-distrusts, animal gladness and
subjection to the elements, were done.

Clementine's father beckoned to the boy, and put her in his care.

"Take her home to the women," Saint-Denis whispered. "She is not used
to war and such sight as these. And bid some of the older ones stay
with her."

Anselm and Clementine went out, their hands just touching as he led
her in wide avoidance of the figure on the floor. Sainte-Helene
did not know the boy and girl left him, for starlight, for silence
together, treading the silvered earth in one cadenced step, as
he awaited that moment when the solitary spirit finds its utmost
loneliness.

Gaspard also went out. When the governor sat in his armchair, and his
seignior lay on the bed, and Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene was stretched
that way on the floor, it could hardly be decent for an old habitant
to stand by, even cap in hand. Yet he could scarcely take his eyes
from the familiar face as it changed in phosphorescent light.
The features lifted themselves with firm nobility, expressing an
archangel's beauty. Sainte-Helene's lips parted, and above the patter
of the reciting Recollet the watchers were startled by one note like
the sigh of a wind-harp.

The Montreal militia, the Lorette Hurons, and Beauport men were still
thronging about, overflowing laterally upon the other farms. They
demanded word of the young seignior, hushing their voices. Some of
them had gone into Gaspard's milk cave and handed out stale milk for
their own and their neighbors' refreshment. A group were sitting on
the crisp ground, with a lantern in their midst, playing some game;
their heads and shoulders moving with an alacrity objectless to
observers, so closely was the light hemmed in.

Gaspard reached his gateway with the certainty of custom. He looked
off at both ends of the world. The starlit stretch of road was almost
as deserted as when Quebec shut in the inhabitants of Beauport. From
the direction of Montmorenci he saw a gray thing come loping down,
showing eyes and tongue of red fire. He screamed an old man's scream,
pointing to it, and the cry of "Loup-garou!" brought all Beauport men
to their feet. The flints clicked. It was a time of alarms. Two shots
were fired together, and an under officer sprung across the fence of a
neighboring farm to take command of the threatened action.

The camp of sturdy New Englanders on the St. Charles was hid by a
swell in the land. At the outcry, those Frenchmen around the lantern
parted company, some recoiling backwards, and others scrambling
to seize their guns. But one caught up the lantern, and ran to the
struggling beast in the road.

Gaspard pushed into the gathering crowd, and craned himself to see the
thing, also. He saw a gaunt dog, searching yet from face to face for
some lost idol, and beating the flinty world with a last thump of
propitiation.

Frontenac opened the door and stood upon the doorstep. His head almost
reached the overhanging straw thatch.

"What is the alarm, my men?"

"Your excellency," the subaltern answered, "it was nothing but a dog.
It came down from Montmorenci, and some of the men shot it."

"Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene," declared Frontenac, lowering his plumed
hat, "has just died for New France."

* * * * *

Gaspard stayed out on his river front until he felt half frozen. The
old habitant had not been so disturbed and uncomfortable since his
family died of smallpox. Phips's vessels lay near the point of Orleans
Island, a few portholes lighting their mass of gloom, while two red
lanterns aloft burned like baleful eyes at the lost coast of Canada.
Nothing else showed on the river. The distant wall of Levis palisades
could be discerned, and Quebec stood a mighty crown, its gems all
sparkling. Behind Gaspard, Beauport was alive. The siege was virtually
over, and he had not set foot off his farm during Phips's invasion of
New France. He did not mind sleeping on the floor, with his heels to
the fire. But there were displacements and changes and sorrows which
he did mind.

"However," muttered the old man, and it was some comfort to the vague
aching in his breast to formulate one fact as solid as the heights
around, "it is certain that there are loups-garous."




THE MILL AT PETIT CAP


August night air, sweet with a half salt breath from the St. Lawrence,
met the miller of San Joachim as he looked out; but he bolted the
single thick door of the mill, and cast across it into a staple a
hook as long as his body and as thick as his arm. At any alarm in the
village he must undo these fastenings, and receive the refugees from
Montgomery; yet he could not sleep without locking the door. So all
that summer he had slept on a bench in the mill basement, to be ready
for the call.

All the parishes on the island of Orleans, and on each side of the
river, quite to Montmorenci Falls, where Wolfe's army was encamped,
had been sacked by that evil man, Captain Alexander Montgomery, whom
the English general himself could hardly restrain. San Joachim du
Petit Cap need not hope to escape. It was really Wolfe's policy to
harry the country which in that despairing summer of 1759 he saw no
chance of conquering.

The mill was grinding with a shuddering noise which covered all
country night sounds. But so accustomed was the miller to this lullaby
that he fell asleep on his chaff cushion directly, without his usual
review of the trouble betwixt La Vigne and himself. He was sensitive
to his neighbors' claims, and the state of the country troubled him,
but he knew he could endure La Vigne's misfortunes better than any
other man's.

Loopholes in the hoary stone walls of the basement were carefully
covered, but a burning dip on the hearth betrayed them within. There
was a deep blackened oven built at right angles to the fireplace in
the south wall. The stairway rose like a giant's ladder to the vast
dimness overhead. No other such fortress-mill was to be found between
Cap Tourmente and the citadel, or indeed anywhere on the St. Lawrence.
It had been built not many years before by the Seminaire priests of
Quebec for the protection and nourishment of their seigniory, that
huge grant of rich land stretching from Beaupre to Cap Tourmente,
bequeathed to the church by the first bishop of Canada.

The miller suddenly dashed up with a shout. He heard his wife scream
above the rattle of the mill, and stumbling over basement litter he
unstopped a loophole and saw the village already mounting in flames.

The mill door's iron-clamped timbers were beaten by a crowd of
entreating hands, and he tore back the fastenings and dragged his
neighbors in. Children, women, men, fell past him on the basement
floor, and he screamed for help to hold the door against Montgomery's
men. The priest was the last one to enter and the first to set a
shoulder with the miller's. A discharge of firearms from without
made lightning in the dim inclosure, and the cure, Father Robineau de
Portneuf, reminded his flock of the guns they had stored in the mill
basement. Loopholes were soon manned, and the enemy were driven back
from the mill door. The roaring torch of each cottage thatch showed
them in the redness of their uniforms,--good marks for enraged
refugees; so they drew a little farther westward still, along the hot
narrow street of San Joachim du Petit Cap.

At an unoccupied loophole Father Robineau watched his chapel burning,
with its meagre enrichments, added year by year. But this was nothing,
when his eye dropped to the two or three figures lying face downward
on the road. He turned himself toward the wailing of a widow and a
mother.

The miller's wife was coming downstairs with a candle, leaving her
children huddled in darkness at the top. Those two dozen or more
people whom she could see lifting dazed looks at her were perhaps
of small account in the province; but they were her friends and
neighbors, and bounded her whole experience of the world, except that
anxiety of having her son Laurent with Montcalm's militia. The dip
light dropped tallow down her petticoat, and even unheeded on one bare
foot.

"My children," exhorted Father Robineau through the wailing of
bereaved women, "have patience." The miller's wife stooped and passed
a hand across a bright head leaning against the stair side.

"Thy mother is safe, Angele?"

"Oh, yes, Madame Sandeau."

"Thy father and the children are safe?"

"Oh, yes," testified the miller, passing towards the fireplace, "La
Vigne and all his are within. I counted them."

"The saints be praised," said his wife.

"Yes, La Vigne got in safely," added the miller, "while that excellent
Jules Martin, our good neighbor, lies scalped out there in the
road."[1]

"He does not know what he is saying, Angele," whispered his wife to
the weeping girl. But the miller snatched the candle from the hearth
as if he meant to fling his indignation with it at La Vigne. His
worthy act, however, was to light the sticks he kept built in the
fireplace for such emergency. A flame arose, gradually revealing
the black earthen floor, the swarm of refugees, and even the
tear-suspending lashes of little children's eyes.

La Vigne appeared, sitting with his hands in his hair. And the
miller's wife saw there was a strange young demoiselle among the women
of the cote, trying to quiet them. She had a calm dark beauty and an
elegance of manner unusual to the provinces, and even Father Robineau
beheld her with surprise.

"Mademoiselle, it is unfortunate that you should be in Petit Cap at
this time," said the priest.

"Father, I count myself fortunate," she answered, "if no worse
calamity has befallen me. My father is safe within here. Can you tell
me anything about my husband, Captain De Mattissart, of the Languedoc
regiment, with General Montcalm?"

"Madame, I never saw your husband."

"He was to meet me with escort at Petit Cap. We landed on a little
point, secretly, with no people at all, and my father would have
returned in his sailboat, but my husband did not meet us. These
English must have cut him off, father."

"These are not times in which a woman should stir abroad," said the
priest.

"Monsieur the cure, there is no such comfortable doctrine for a man
with a daughter," said a figure at the nearest loophole, turning and
revealing himself by face and presence a gentilhomme. "Especially a
daughter married to a soldier. I am Denys of Bonaventure, galloping
hither out of Acadia at her word of command."

The priest made him a gesture of respect and welcome.

"One of the best men in Acadia should be of advantage to us here. But
I regret madame's exposure. You were not by yourselves attempting to
reach Montcalm's camp?"

"How do I know, monsieur the cure? My daughter commanded this
expedition." Denys of Bonaventure shrugged his shoulders and spread
his palms with a smile.

"We were going to knock at the door of the cure of Petit Cap," said
the lady. "There was nothing else for us to do; but the English
appeared."

Successive shots at the loopholes proved that the English had not yet
disappeared. Denys seized his gun again, and turned to the defense,
urging that the children and women be sent out of the way of balls.

Father Robineau, on his part, gave instant command to the miller's
wife, and she climbed the stairs again, heading a long line of
distressed neighbors.

The burrs were in the second story, and here the roaring of the mill
took possession of all the shuddering air. Every massive joist half
growing from dimness overhead was hung with ghostly shreds of cobweb;
and on the grayish whiteness of the floor the children's naked soles
cut out oblongs dotted with toe-marks.

Mother Sandeau made her way first to an inclosed corner, and looked
around to invite the attention of her followers. Such violence had
been done to her stolid habits that she seemed to need the sight of
her milk-room to restore her to intelligent action. The group was
left in half darkness while she thrust her candle into the milk-room,
showing its orderly array of flowered bowls amidst moist coolness.
Here was a promise of sustenance to people dependent for the next
mouthful of food. "It will last a few days, even if the cows be driven
off and killed!" said the miller's good wife.

But there was the Acadian lady to be first thought of. Neighbors could
be easily spread out on the great floor, with rolls of bedding. Her
own oasis of homestead stood open, showing a small fireplace hollowed
in one wall, two feet above the floor; table and heavy chairs; and
sleeping rooms beyond. Yet none of these things were good enough to
offer such a stranger.

"Take no thought about me, good friend," said the girl, noticing
Mother Sandeau's anxiously creased face. "I shall presently go back to
my father."

"But, no," exclaimed the miller's wife, "the priest forbids women
below, and there is my son's bridal room upstairs with even a
dressing-table in it. I only held back on account of Angele La Vigne,"
she added to comprehending neighbors, "but Angele will attend to the
lady there."

"Angele will gladly attend to the lady anywhere," spoke out Angele's
mother, with a resentment of her child's position which ruin could not
crush. "It is the same as if marriage was never talked of between your
son Laurent and her."

"Yes, neighbor, yes," said the miller's wife appeasingly. It was not
her fault that a pig had stopped the marriage. She gave her own
candle to Angele, with a motherly look. The girl had a pink and golden
prettiness unusual among habitantes. Though all flush was gone out of
her skin under the stress of the hour, she retained the innocent clear
pallor of an infant. Angele hurried to straighten her disordered dress
before taking the candle, and then led Madame De Mattissart up the
next flight of stairs.

The mill's noise had forced talkers to lift their voices, and it now
half dulled the clamp of habitante shoes below, and the whining of
children longing again for sleep. Huge square wooden hoppers were
shaking down grain, and the two or three square sashes in the
thickness of front wall let in some light from the burning cote.

The building's mighty stone hollows were as cool as the dew-pearled
and river-vapored landscape outside. Occasional shots from below kept
reverberating upward through two more floors overhead.

Laurent's bridal apartment was of new boards built like a deck cabin
at one side of the third story. It was hard for Angele to throw open
the door of this sacred little place which she had expected to
enter as a bride, and the French officer's young wife understood it,
restraining the girl's hand.

"Stop, my child. Let us not go in. I came up here simply to quiet the
others."

"But you were to rest in this chamber, madame."

"Do you think I can rest when I do not know whether I am wife or
widow?"

The young girls looked at each other with piteous eyes.

"This is a terrible time, madame."

"It will, however, pass by, in some fashion."

"But what shall I do for you, madame? Where will you sit? Is there
nothing you require?"

"Yes, I am thirsty. Is there not running water somewhere in this
mill?"

"There is the flume-chamber overhead," said Angele. "I will set the
light here, and go down for a cup, madame."

"Do not. We will go to the flume-chamber together. My hands, my
throat, my eyes burn. Go on, Angele, show me the way."

Laurent's room, therefore, was left in darkness, holding unseen its
best furniture, the family's holiday clothes of huge grained flannel,
and the little yellow spinning-wheel, with its pile of unspun wool
like forgotten snow.

In the fourth story, as below, deep-set swinging windows had small
square panes, well dusted with flour. Nothing broke the monotony of
wall except a row of family snow-shoes. The flume-chamber, inclosed
from floor to ceiling, suggested a grain's sprouting here and there in
its upright humid boards.

As the two girls glanced around this grim space, they were startled by
silence through the building, for the burrs ceased to work. Feet and
voices indeed stirred below, but the sashes no longer rattled. Then a
tramping seemed following them up, and Angele dragged the young lady
behind a stone pillar, and blew out their candle.

"What are you doing?" demanded Madame De Mattissart in displeasure.
"If the door has been forced, should we desert our fathers?"

"It is not that," whispered Angele. And before she could give any
reason for her impulse, the miller's head and light appeared above the
stairs. It was natural enough for Angele La Vigne to avoid Laurent's
father. What puzzled her was to see her own barefooted father creeping
after the miller, his red wool night-cap pulled over dejected brows.

These good men had been unable to meet without quarreling since the
match between Laurent and Angele was broken off, on account of a
pig which Father La Vigne would not add to her dower. Angele had a
blanket, three dishes, six tin plates, and a kneading-trough; at
the pig her father drew the line, and for a pig Laurent's father
contended. But now all the La Vigne pigs were roasted or scattered,
Angele's dower was destroyed, and what had a ruined habitant to say to
the miller of Petit Cap?

Father Robineau had stopped the mill because its noise might cover
attacks. As the milder ungeared his primitive machinery, he had
thought of saving water in the flume-chamber. There were wires and
chains for shutting off its escape.

He now opened a door in the humid wall and put his candle over the
clear, dark water. The flume no longer furnished a supply, and he
stared open-lipped, wondering if the enemy had meddled with his
water-gate in the upland.

The flume, at that time the most ambitious wooden channel on the north
shore, supported on high stilts of timber, dripped all the way from
a hill stream to the fourth story of Petit Cap mill. The miller had
watched it escape burning thatches, yet something had happened at the
dam. Shreds of moss, half floating and half moored, reminded him to
close the reservoir, and he had just moved the chains when La Vigne
startled him by speaking at his ear.

The miller recoiled, but almost in the action his face recovered
itself. He wore a gray wool night-cap, and its tassel hung down over
one lifted eyebrow.

"Pierre Sandeau, my friend," opened La Vigne with a whimper, "I
followed you up here to weep with you."

"You did well," replied the miller bluntly, "for I am a ruined man
with the parish to feed, unless the Seminaire fathers take pity on
me."

"Yes, you have lost more than all of us," said La Vigne.

"I am not the man to measure losses and exult over my neighbors,"
declared the miller; "but how many pigs would you give to your girl's
dower now, Guillaume?"

"None at all, my poor Pierre. At least she is not a widow."

"Nor ever likely to be now, since she has no dower to make her a
wife."

"How could she be a wife without a husband? Taunt me no more about
that pig. I tell you it is worse with you: you have no son."

"What do you mean? I have half a dozen."

"But Laurent is shot."

"Laurent--shot?" whispered the miller, relaxing his flabby face, and
letting the candle sink downward until it spread their shadows on the
floor.

"Yes, my friend," whimpered La Vigne. "I saw him through my window
when the alarm was given. He was doubtless coming to save us all, for
an officer was with him. Jules Martin's thatch was just fired. It was
bright as sunrise against the hill, and the English saw our Laurent
and his officer, no doubt, for they shot them down, and I saw it
through my back window."

The miller sunk to his knees, and set the candle on the floor; La
Vigne approached and mingled night-cap tassels and groans with him.

"Oh, my son! And I quarreled with thee, Guillaume, about a pig, and
made the children unhappy."

"But I was to blame for that, Pierre," wept La Vigne, "and now we have
neither pig nor son!"

"Perhaps Montgomery's men have scalped him;" the miller pulled the
night-cap from his own head and threw it on the floor in helpless
wretchedness.

La Vigne uttered a low bellow in response, and they fell upon each
other's necks and were about to lament together in true Latin fashion,
when the wife of Montcalm's officer called to them.

She stood out from the shadow of the stone column, dead to all
appearances, yet animate, and trying to hold up Angele whose whole
body lapsed downward in half unconsciousness. "Bring water," demanded
Madame De Mattissart.

And seeing who had overheard the dreadful news, La Vigne ran to the
flume-chamber, and the miller scrambled up and reached over him to dip
the first handful. Both stooped within the door, both recoiled, and
both raised a yell which echoed among high rafters in the attic above.
The miller thought Montgomery's entire troop were stealing into the
mill through the flume; for a man's legs protruded from the opening
and wriggled with such vigor that his body instantly followed and he
dropped into the water.

His beholders seized and dragged him out upon the floor; but he
threw off their hands, sprang astride of the door-sill, and stretched
himself to the flume mouth to help another man out of it.

La Vigne ran downstairs shrieking for the priest, as if he had seen
witchcraft. But the miller stood still, with the candle flaring on the
floor behind him, not sure of his son Laurent in militia uniform, but
trembling with some hope.

It was Madame De Mattissart's cry to her husband which confirmed the
miller's senses. She knew the young officer through the drenching
and raggedness of his white and gold uniform; she understood how two
wounded men could creep through any length of flume, from which a
miller's son would know how to turn off the water. She had no need to
ask what their sensations were, sliding down that slimy duct, or how
they entered it without being seen by the enemy. Let villagers talk
over such matters, and shout and exclaim when they came to hear this
strange thing. It was enough that her husband had met her through
every danger, and that he was able to stand and receive her in his
arms.

Laurent's wound was serious. After all his exertions he fainted; but
Angele took his head upon her knee, and the fathers and mothers and
neighbors swarmed around him, and Father Robineau did him doctor's
service. Every priest then on the St. Lawrence knew how to dress
wounds as well as bind up spirits.

Denys of Bonaventure, notwithstanding the excitement overhead, kept
men at the basement loopholes until Montgomery had long withdrawn and
returned to camp.

He then felt that he could indulge himself with a sight of his
son-in-law, and tiptoed up past the colony of women and children whom
the priest had just driven again to their rest on the second floor;
past that sacred chamber on the third floor, and on up to the flume
loft. There Monsieur De Bonaventure paused, with his head just above
the boards, like a pleasant-faced sphinx.

"Accept my salutations, Captain De Mattissart," he said laughing.
"I am told that you and this young militia-man floated down the
mill-stream into this mill, with the French flag waving over your
heads, to the no small discouragement of the English. Quebec will
never be taken, monsieur."

Long ago those who found shelter in the mill dispersed to rebuild
their homes under a new order of things, or wedded like Laurent and
Angele, and lived their lives and died. Yet, witnessing to all these
things, the old mill stands to-day at Petit Cap, huge and cavernous;
with its oasis of home, its milk-room, its square hoppers and
flume-chamber unchanged. Daylight refuses to follow you into the
blackened basement; and the shouts of Montgomery's sacking horde seem
to linger in the mighty hollows overhead.


[Footnote 1: Wolfe forbade such barbarities, but Montgomery did not
always obey. It was practiced on both sides.]




 


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