Chapter III: Part 3

Claire, with well-opened eyes, pressed backward against her husband, so moldered-looking a creature was this lady gliding on silent feet--not unlike some specter of the Des Ormeaux who had followed their last chevalier under the New World’s glaring skies. She wore a brocaded gown, the remnant of a court costume of some former reign, and her face was covered with a black silk mask. Though masks were then in common use, the eyes which looked through this one were like the eyes of a sleep-walker. She sat down by the embroidery frame as if alone in the room, but instead of a web of needlework she began to fasten in the frame one end of a priest’s stole much in need of mending.

Dollard led his wife to this silent figure.

“My dear Renée,” he said, taking hold of the stole and thereby establishing a nerve of communication, “let me present my beautiful wife.”

The figure looked up, unsurprised but attentive.

“She was Mademoiselle Laval-Montmorency.”

With deference the figure rose off its slim-legged chair and made a deep courtesy, Claire acknowledging it with one equally deep.

“Mademoiselle,” petitioned the bride, “I hope my sudden coming causes you no trouble, though we return to the fort soon.”

The mask gazed at her but said nothing.

“Are you never lonely here upon this island?” pursued Claire.

The mask’s steady gaze made her shiver.

“She does not talk,” Dollard explained. He drew his wife away from the silent woman and suggested, “Let us walk up and down until some supper is served, to get rid of the boat’s cramping.”

Mademoiselle de Granville sat down and continued to arrange her darning.

Whenever they were quite at the room’s end Claire drew a free breath, but always in passing the masked presence she shrunk bodily against Dollard, for the room was narrow. He, with tense nerves and far-looking eyes, failed to notice this. The eccentricities of any man’s female relatives appeal to his blindest side. Custom has used him to them, and his own blood speaks their apology.

The river air blew into the open window. There were no sounds except the footsteps of Dollard and Claire, and a stirring of the household below which was hint of sound only, so thick were the walls and floors.

In due time Jacques came up, bearing the supper. His seignior when at St. Bernard ate in the kitchen. But this was a descent unbefitting a grand bride. While Jacques was preparing the round table, Claire stole another look towards the mask which must now be removed. But by some sudden and noiseless process known to recluse women Mademoiselle de Granville had already taken herself and her embroidery frame out of the room.

X.

THE SEIGNIORY KITCHEN.

ABOUT 1 o’clock of the night Jacques rose from his sleeping-cell, as he was in the habit of doing, to put more wood on the kitchen fire.

The window slits let in some moonlight of a bluish quality, but the larger part of this wide space lay in shadow until Jacques sent over it the ruddiness of a revived fire. Out of uncertainty came the doors of the sleeping-cells, the rafters and dried herbs which hung from them, heavy table and benches and stools, cooking-vessels, guns, bags of stored grain, and the figures of the four Hurons, two at each side of the hearth, stretched out in their blankets with their heels to the fire--and Jacques himself, disordered from sleep and imperfectly thrust into lower garments. He lingered stupidly looking at the magician fire while it rose and crackled and cast long oblique shadows with the cemented posts.

Dollard descended the stairway from his apartment, pressing down his sword-hilt to keep the scabbard from clanking on each step. He was entirely dressed in his uniform. As he approached the fire and Jacques turned towards him, his face looked bloodless, his features standing high, the forehead well reared back.

“I am glad you are awake,” he said to Jacques, half aloud. “Are the others asleep?” indicating those cells occupied by Louise and the Papillon family. There was no questioning the deep slumber which inclosed his Indians.

“Yes, m’sieur.”

“Have you packed the provisions I directed you to pack?”

“Yes, m’sieur. M’sieur, you do not leave at this hour?”

“At once.”

“But, m’sieur, the Lachine is hard enough to run in daytime.”

“There is broad moonlight. Are you sure you understand everything?”

“M’sieur, I hope I do. Have you told madame?”

Dollard wheeled and flung his clinched hands above his head as men do on receiving gunshot wounds.

“O saints! I cannot tell her! I am a wretch, Jacques. She has been happy; I have not caused her a moment’s suffering. Let her sleep till morning. Tell her then merely that I have gone to my fortress; that I would not expose her to the dangers of the route by night. It will soon be over now. Sometime she can forgive this cruelty if a deed goes after it to make her proud. She has proud blood, my boy; she loves honor. Oh, what a raving madman I was to marry her, my beloved! I thought it could do _her_ no harm--that it could not shake _my_ purpose! O my Claire! O my poor New France! Torn this way, I deserve shame with death--no martyr’s crown--no touch of glory to lighten my darkness for ever and ever!”

“M’sieur,” whimpered Jacques, crouching and wiping nose and eyes with his palms, “don’t say that! My little master, my pretty, my dear boy! These women have the trick of tripping a man up when he sets his foot to any enterprise.”

“Hear me,” said Dollard, grasping him on each side of the collar. “She is the last of the Des Ormeaux to you. Serve her faithfully as you serve the queen of heaven. If she wants to go back to France, go with her. Before this I bequeathed you St. Bernard. Now I am leaving you a priceless charge. Your wife shall obey and follow her to the ends of the earth. To-day I altered my will in Montreal and gave her my last coin, gave her my seigniory, I gave her _you_! Do you refuse to obey my last commands? Do you disallow my rights in you?”

Jacques’s puckered face unflinchingly turned upward and met the stare of his master.

“M’sieur, I will follow my lady’s whims and do your commands to the hour of my death.”

Dollard, like a mastiff, shook him.

“Is there any treachery in you, Jacques Goffinet, free follower of the house of Des Ormeaux? If there is, out with it now, or my dead eyes will pry through you hereafter.”

“M’sieur,” answered Jacques, lifting his hand and making the sign of the cross, “I am true man to my core. I do love to pile good stuff together and call land mine, but thou knowest I love a bit of cloth from one of thy old garments better than all the seigniories in New France.”

Dollard let go Jacques’s collar and extended his arms around the stumpy man’s neck.

“My good old Jacques! My good old Jacques!”

“How proud I have always been of thee!” choked Jacques.

“I have told her to depend on you, Jacques. The will I brought home in my breast and placed among her caskets. She will provide for Louise and you, and she will provide for poor Renée, also. Kick the Indians and wake them up. There is not another moment to spare.”

The Indians were roused, and stood up taciturn and ready for action, drawing their blankets around themselves. These Hurons, vagrants from Annahotaha’s tribe, were hangers-on about the fortress at Montreal. Jacques gave them each a careful dram, and lighted at the fire a dipped candle. With this feeble light he penetrated the darkness of the cellar floor, leading the party down its tortuous staircase.

Dollard, who had stood with his hand on the door-latch, was the last to leave the upper room. His questions followed Jacques around the turns of the stairs.

“You are well provisioned, Jacques?”

“Yes, m’sieur.”

“At daybreak you will remember to have Papillon help you bring in an abundant supply of water?”

“Yes, m’sieur.”

“Bar the doors when you see any one approaching and keep watch on all sides every day.”

“Yes, m’sieur.”

Jacques jammed his candle-end into a crack of the rock floor, undid the fastenings, and with a jerk let the moonlight in on their semi-darkness.

They went out to the palisade gate, the Indians dragged the boat carefully to its launching, and Jacques stored in it Dollard’s provisions.

“Good-bye, my man,” said Dollard.

“M’sieur,” said Jacques, “I have always obeyed you. There is but one thing in my heart against you, and I will cleanse myself of that now.”

“Quickly, then.” The young man had one foot in the boat.

“It is the same old hard spot. Thou wouldst rule me out of this expedition. A man that loves thee as I love thee!”

“Jacques, if I had reasons before on Renée’s account, what reasons have I not now?”

“Bless thee, my master Adam Daulac!”

“Bless thee, my Jacques!”

The boat shot off, and Jacques went in and fastened the gate and the door.

XI.

MADEMOISELLE DE GRANVILLE’S BROTHER.

SOON after 1 o’clock Claire awoke and sat upright in her dim room. Her alarm at the absence of Dollard was swallowed instantly by greater alarm at the presence of some one else.

This small chamber, like the saloon, was lighted by one square window, and male housekeeping at St. Bernard, combined with the quality of glass manufactured for colonial use at that date, veiled generous moonlight which would have thrown up sharply every object in the severe place.

Claire’s garments, folded and laid upon a stool, were motionless to her expanding eyes; so were her boxes where Louise had placed them. All the luggage which a young lady of rank then carried with her to the ends of the earth could be lifted upstairs in the arms of a stout maid. Unstirring was the small black velvet cap which Claire had chosen from her belongings to wear during the voyage. It was stuck against the wall like a dim blot of ink. But nothing else visible seemed quite so motionless and unstirring as the figure by the bed. It was Mademoiselle de Granville. Except that her personality was oppressive, she seemed a lifeless lump without breath or sight, until Claire’s tenser pupils adapted to duskiness found eyes in the mask, eyes stiffly gazing.

The bride’s voice sunk in her throat, but she forced it to husky action.

“What do you want?”

Automatically, holding its elbows to its sides, the figure lifted one forearm and pointed to Claire’s garments.

“Do you require me to put them on?”

It continued to point.

“Be so kind as to withdraw, then, and I will put them on.”

It continued to point, without change of attitude or sound of human breath.

The girl crept out of her couch at that corner farthest from the figure, rolled up and pinned her white curls as best she could, and assimilated the garments from the stool, keeping her eye braced repellantly against the automaton pointing at her. She finished by drawing her mantle over her dress, and the velvet cap over her hair.

“Now I am ready, if you are determined I shall go somewhere with you.”

The figure turned itself about and opened the door into the saloon. Claire followed, keeping far behind those silent feet, and thus they walked through that grim room over which touches of beauty had never been thrown by a woman’s keeping.

Claire followed into another chamber and was shut in darkness. It was the rock side of the house, without moonlighted windows. Mademoiselle de Granville had left her, and she stood confused, forgetting which way she should turn to the door-latch of release. The absence of Dollard now rushed back over her, and helped the dark to heap her with terrors. The sanest people have felt sparks of madness flash across the brain. One such flash created for her a trap in the floor to swallow her to the depths of the island.

Directly her surroundings were lighted by a door opening to an inner room. A priest stood there in black cassock, his face smooth and dark, his eyes dark and attentive. He was not tonsured, but with hair clustering high upon his head he looked like Dollard grown to sudden middle age, his fire burnt to ashes, his shoulders bowed by penances, his soul dried as a fern might be dried betwixt the wooden lids of his breviary. Behind him stood an altar, two tall candles burning upon it, and above the altar hung a crucifix. She took note of nothing else in the room.

“Pardon me, father; I am lost in the house. Mademoiselle de Granville brought me here and has left me.”

“Yes.” His voice had depth and volume, and was like Dollard’s voice grown older. “She brought you at my request.”

“At _your_ request, father? Where is Mademoiselle de Granville?”

“In that closet,” he replied, showing a door at the corner of his chapel room. “My poor lifeless sister is at her devotions.”

“I see my way now. With your permission I will go back,” said Claire. This unwholesome priest like a demon presentation of Dollard made her shudder.

“Stop, Mademoiselle Laval.”

“I am Madame des Ormeaux; as you should know, being inmate of this house and evidently my husband’s brother.”

“Mademoiselle de Granville has but one brother,” said the priest.

“The Sieur des Ormeaux is her brother.”

“There is no Sieur des Ormeaux.” He smiled in making the assertion, his lips parting indulgently.

“I mean Dollard, commandant of the fort of Montreal.”

“There is no Dollard, commandant of the fort of Montreal. I am the Abbé de Granville.”

Claire silently observed him, gathering her convictions. The priest leaned towards her, rubbing his hands.

“This misguided soldier, sometimes called Dollard, he is but a bad dream of mine, my poor child. So keen is your beauty that it still pierces the recollection. In my last dream my conscience tells me I worked some harm to you. Return to your family, mademoiselle, and forgive me. I have become myself again, and these holy tokens recall me to my duty and my vows.”

“I know who you are,” said Claire. “You are Mademoiselle de Granville.”

“I am the Abbé de Granville. Look at me.” He took a candle from the altar and held it near his face. So masculine was the countenance that it staggered conviction. The razor had left sleekness there. The tone of flesh was man-like. “I am Dollard,” he said. “I am a priest. There can be, of course, no marriage between us. I sent for you to ask your pardon, and to send you from St. Bernard.”

This gross and stupid cruelty had on Claire merely the effect of steeping her in color. Her face and throat blushed.

“You are Mademoiselle de Granville,” she repeated.

The priest, as if weary of enforcing his explanations, waved his fingers with a gesture of dismissal in Dollard’s own manner.

“I am the Abbé de Granville. But we will discuss the subject no further. I must be at my prayers. A trustworthy witness shall confirm what I have told you.”

He opened the closet door, carrying the candle with him. His tread had body and sound, though his feet were shod in sandals.

Claire moved guardedly after him. He crossed the closet and entered a long passage so narrow that two persons could scarcely walk abreast in it, nor did she covet the privilege of stepping it thus with her conductor.

As she crossed the closet her rapid eye searched it for the chrysalis of Mademoiselle de Granville. The candle was already in the passage beyond, but distinct enough lay that brocaded figure prostrate on the floor beneath a crucifix, but the mask faced Claire.

She moved on behind Abbé de Granville as with masculine tread of foot he strode the length of the passage and opened a door leading out on the stairway.

“Here, Jacques,” he called in his mellow tones, “tell this demoiselle about me; and tell her the truth, or it shall be the worse for you.”

Claire, standing on the upper stairs, could see Jacques with his back to the fire and his mouth opened in consternation at this unpriestly threat. His candle was yet smoking, so lately had it been divorced from its flame.

Abbé de Granville closed the passage door and bolted it.

She went down into the kitchen and Jacques brought her a seat, placed her before the middle hearth, and stationed himself at the corner in an attitude of entire dejection. The other inmates rested in unbroken sleep. The cell occupied by Papillon and his wife resounded with a low guttural duet.

“Where is Sieur des Ormeaux, Jacques?” inquired the lady of St. Bernard.

Writhing betwixt two dilemmas, Dollard’s follower cunningly seized upon the less painful one, and nodded up the stairway.

“He’s been out again, has he?”

“Do you mean the priest?”

“Monsieur the abbé.”

“Jacques, who is he?”

“The Abbé de Granville,” replied Jacques with a shrug, first of one shoulder and then the other, as if the sides of his person took turns in rejecting this statement. “And he sends you to me for the truth, madame. Is not that the craziest part of the play when he knows what I will tell you? There is no limiting a woman, madame, when she takes to whims.”

“Then it really was Mademoiselle de Granville playing priest?”

“Madame, she befools me sometimes until I know not whether to think her man or woman. So secret is this half-sister of my master’s, and so jealous of her pretty abbé, it unsettles a plain soldier. A fine big robust priest he is, and you would take her for a ghost in petticoats. It goes against my conscience, so that I have come nigh to mention it in confession, all this mumming and male-attiring, and even calling for hot shaving-water! Yet she seems an excellent devoted soul when no one crosses her, and for days at a time will be Mademoiselle de Granville, as gentle and timid as a sheep. Besides, women take pleasure in putting on raiment of different kinds, and when you come to look at a priest’s cassock, it is not so far from being a petticoat that I need to raise a scandal against St. Bernard and my commandant’s sister on account of it. M’sieur he minds none of her pranks, and she hath had her humor since I was set to keep guard over her; and if it be a mad humor, it harms no one but herself.”[4]

Claire’s glance rested on the coarse floor where many nailed shoes had left their prints in the grain.

“Such a monomaniac cannot be a pleasant housemate.”

“No, madame; the poor lady is not charming. And she will have the biggest of candles for her altar. But then she must amuse herself. I was, indeed, speechless when I saw her turn you out on the stairway. She does not like a woman about, especially a pretty woman, and doubtless she will dismiss my Louise many times. But, madame, let me entreat you to return to sleep and have no fear. I will even lock the doors of her chambers. She will disturb you no more.”

Claire listened aside to some outer sound, and then exclaimed:

“You did not tell me where the commandant is, Jacques. He has not gone back to his fortress, without me?”

Jacques’s face fell into creases of anguish.

“Madame, he said you were to sleep undisturbed till morning.”

“He should have obtained Mademoiselle de Granville’s consent to that. This is not answering a question I have already repeated to you.”

“Madame, he has taken the Indians and gone in his boat. Soldiers must do all sorts of things, especially commandants. He would not expose you to the dangers of the route by night.”

“Listen!” Her expression changed.

Jacques gladly listened.

“I was sure I heard some noise before! You see you are mistaken. He is not yet gone.”

Mellow relief, powerful as sunshine, softened the swarthy pallor of Jacques’s face. He caught his candle from the chimney shelf and jammed its charred wick against a glowing coral knot in the log.

“Madame, that’s m’sieur at the gate. I know his stroke and his call. I’ll bring him up.”

No man can surely say, with all his ancestry at his back and his unproved nature within, what he can or cannot do in certain crises of his life.

“What is it, m’sieur?” exclaimed Jacques as he let Dollard through the gate.

“We went scarce a quarter of a league. I came back because I cannot leave her without telling her; it was a cowardly act!” exclaimed Dollard, darting into the house. “She must go with me to Montreal.”

XII.

DOLLARD’S CONFESSION.

IF Dollard was surprised at finding Claire standing by the fire dressed for her journey, he gave himself no time for uttering it, but directed Jacques to bring down madame’s boxes and to wake Louise.

“One casket will be enough, Jacques,” countermanded madame; “the one which has been opened. If there is such haste, the others can be sent hereafter. As for my poor Louise, I will not have her waked; this is but her second night’s sleep on land. Some one can be found in Montreal to attend me, and I shall see her again soon.”

Jacques shuffled down from his master’s apartment, carrying the luggage on his shoulder and his candle in one hand. Dollard waited for him, to say aside:

“In three weeks come to Montreal and ask for your lady at the governor’s house. Subject yourself to her orders thenceforward.”

“Yes, m’sieur,” grunted Jacques.

Again his candle on the twisted staircase caused great shadows to stalk through the cellar gloom--Claire’s shadow stretching forward a magnified head at its dense future; Dollard’s shadow towering so high as to be bent at right angles and flattened on the joists above. Once more were the bars put up, this time shutting two inmates out of the seigniory house.

Dollard hurried his wife into the boat. One Indian held the boat to the beach, another stored the luggage, and immediately they dropped into their places and took the oars, and the boat was off.

It was a silent night and very little breeze flowed along the surface of the water. The moon seemed lost walking so far down the west sky. She struck a path of gold crosswise of Lake St. Louis, and it grew with the progress of the boat, still traveling downriver and twinkling like a moving pavement of burnished disks.

Going with the current, the Hurons had little need to labor, and the gush of their oars came at longer intervals than during the up-stream voyage.

Dollard had wrapped Claire well. He held the furs around her with one arm. By that ghostly daylight which the moon makes she could follow every line and contour of his face. He examined every visible point on the river’s surface, and turned an acute ear for shore sounds. Before he began to speak, the disturbance of his spirit reached her, and quite drove all mention of Mademoiselle de Granville from her lips.

Having satisfied himself that no other craft haunted the river, Dollard turned his eyes upon Claire’s, and spoke to her ear so that his voice was lost two feet away.

“Claire, the Iroquois are the curse of this province. Let me tell you what they have done. They are a confederation of five Indian nations: their settlements are south of the great Lake Ontario, but they spread themselves all along the St. Lawrence, murder settlers, make forays into Montreal and Quebec; they have almost exterminated the Christian Hurons, and when they offer us truces they do it only to throw us off our guard. The history of this colony is a history of a hand-to-hand struggle against the Iroquois.”

“If they are so strong,” whispered Claire, “how have the settlements lived at all?”

“Partly because their mode of warfare is peculiar, and consists in overrunning, harassing, and burning certain points and then retiring to the woods again, and partly because they needed the French. We are useful to them in furnishing certain supplies for which they trade. But they also trade with the Dutch colony on the Hudson River. Only lately have they made up their minds to sweep over this province and destroy it.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know that at this time two bands of these savages, each hundreds strong, are moving to meet each other somewhere on the Ottawa River. We have heard rumors, and some prisoners have been brought in and made to confess, and the mere fact that no skulking parties haunt us shows that they are massing.”

Dollard drew a deep breath.

“I shall not dread this danger, being with you,” said Claire.

“This is what I must tell you. Claire, there was a man in Montreal who thought the sacking of New France could be prevented if a few determined men would go out and meet these savages on the way, as aggressors, instead of fighting simply on the defensive, as we have done so long. This man found sixteen other young men of his own mind, and they all took a sacred oath to devote themselves to this purpose.”

“Sixteen!” breathed the shuddering girl. “Only sixteen against a thousand Indians?”

“Sixteen are enough if they be fit for the enterprise. One point of rock will break any number of waves. These sixteen men and their leader then obtained the governor’s consent to their enterprise, and they will kneel in the chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu and receive absolution at daybreak this morning.”

“Their leader is Adam Dollard!” Claire’s whispered cry broke out.

“Their leader is Adam Dollard,” he echoed.

She uttered no other sound, but rose up in the boat.

Dollard caught her in his arms, and set her upon his knees. They held each other in an embrace like the rigid lock of death, the smiling, pale night seeming full of crashing and grinding noises, and of chaos like mountains falling.

Length after length the boat shot on, dumb heart-beat after dumb heart-beat, mile after mile. It began to shiver uneasily. Alert to what was before them, and indifferent to their freight of stone in the boat’s end, the Hurons slipped to their knees, each unshipped his oars and took one of the dripping pair for a paddle, fixed his roused eyes on the twisting current, and prepared for the rapids of Lachine. Like an arrow just when the bowstring twangs came the boat at a rock, to be paddled as cleanly aside as if that hissing mass had been a shadow. Right, left, ahead the rapids boiled up; slight shocks ran through the thin-skinned craft as it dodged, shied, leaped, half whirled and half reversed, tumultuously tumbled or shot as if going down a flume. While it lasted the danger seemed endless. But those skilled paddlers played through it with grins of delight folding creases in their leather faces, nor did they settle down dogged and dull Indians again until the boat shot freely out of the rapids upon tame moonlighted ripples once more.

After the Lachine, Dollard lifted his head and said to Claire:

“We start on our expedition as soon as mass is done this morning. It goes without saying that I was pledged to this when I went to Quebec. I cannot go back from it now.”

“There is no thought of your going back from it now,” Claire spoke to him. “But, Dollard, is there hope of any man’s returning alive from this expedition?”

“We are sworn to give no quarter and to take none.”

The Indians, pointing their boat towards Montreal, were now pulling with long easy strokes. A little rocky island rose between voyagers and settling moon.

“O Claire! I loved you so! that is all my excuse. I meant not to bring such anguish upon you.”

“Dollard, I forbid you to regret your marriage. I myself have no regrets.”

“I knew not what I was doing.” His words dropped with effort. She could feel his throat strongly sobbing.

“Don’t fret, my Dollard.” Claire smoothed down those laboring veins with her satin palm. “We are, indeed, young to die. I thought we should live years together. But this marriage gave us nearly a week of paradise. And that is more happiness, I am experienced enough to believe, than many wedded couples have in a lifetime.”

“Claire, the family of the Governor Maisonneuve will receive you and treat you with all courtesy; first for your own sake, and in a small degree for mine. I have set down in my will that you are to have all my rude belongings, and Jacques is sworn your trusty servant.”

“Dollard, hear what I have to say,” she exclaimed, pressing his temples between her hands. “You meant to leave me behind you at St. Bernard. You forget that the blood of man-warriors, the blood of Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France, runs in my veins. Doubt not that I shall go with you on this expedition. Do you think I have no courage because I am afraid of mice and lightning?”

“I knew not that you were afraid of mice and lightning, my Claire.”

“Am I to be the wife of Dollard and have sixteen young men thrust between him and myself, all accounted worthy of martyrdom above me?”

“Daughter of a Montmorency!” burst out Dollard with passion; “better than any man on earth! I do you homage--I prostrate myself--I adore you! Yet must I profane your ears with this: no woman can go with the expedition without bringing discredit on it.”

“Not even your wife?”

“Not even my wife. After absolution in the chapel this morning we are set apart, consecrated to the purpose before us.”

Claire dropped her face and said:

“I comprehend.” He held her upon his breast the brief remainder of their journey, prostrated as she had not been by the shock of his confession.

Mount Royal stood dome-like on Montreal island, a huge shadow glooming out of the north-west upon the little village. After shifting about from a river point of view, those structures composing the town finally settled in their order: the fort, the rough stone seminary of St. Sulpice, the Hôtel-Dieu, the wooden houses standing in a single long row, and eastward the great fortified mill surrounded by a wall. The village itself had neither wall nor palisade.

Surrounding dark fields absorbed light and gave back no glint of dew or sprinkling green blade, for the seed-sowing was not yet finished. Black bears squatting or standing about the fields at length revealed themselves as charred stumps and half trees.

“You have not told me the route your expedition goes,” whispered Claire.

“We go in that direction--up the Ottawa River.” Dollard swept out his arm indicating the west.

“There is one thing. Do not place me in the governor’s charge. How can I be a guest, when I would lie night and day before some shrine? Are there no convents in Montreal? A convent is my allotted shelter.”

“There are only the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu,” he murmured back. “They, also, would receive you into kind protection; but, my Claire, they are poor. Montreal is not Quebec. Our nuns lived at first in one room. Now they have the hospital; but it is a wooden building, exposed by its situation.”

“Let me go to the nuns,” she insisted. “And there is one other thing. Do not tell them who I am. Say nothing about me, that I may have no inquiries to answer concerning our marriage and his lordship the bishop.”

“Our nuns of St. Joseph and the Sulpitians of Montreal bear not too much love for the bishop,” said Dollard. “But every wish you have is my wish. I will say nothing to the nuns, and you may tell them only what you will.”

A strong pallor toning up to yellow had been growing from the east to the detriment of the moon. Now a pencil line of pink lay across the horizon, and the general dewiness of objects became apparent. The mountain turned from shadow into perpendicular earth and half-budded trees. Some people were stirring in Montreal, and a dog ran towards the river barking as the boat touched the wharf.

XIII.

THE CHAPEL OF THE HÔTEL-DIEU.

JOUANEAUX, the retainer of the hospital nuns, though used to rising early to feed their pigs and chickens, this time cast his wary glance into the garden while it was yet night. The garden held now no tall growths of mustard, in which the Iroquois had been known to lurk until daylight for victims, but Jouaneaux felt it necessary that he should scan the inclosure himself before any nun chanced to step into it.

The Sisterhood’s dependent animals were quartered under the same roof with themselves, according to Canadian custom. Jouaneaux scattered provender before the cocks were fairly roused to their matin duty of crowing; and the sleepy swine, lifting the tips of their circular noses, grunted inquiringly at him without scrambling up through the dusk.

Scandal might have attached itself even to these nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu for maintaining so youthful a servitor as Jouaneaux, had not the entire settlement of Montreal known his cause for gratitude towards them and the honest bond which held him devoted to their goodness.

He was not the stumpy type of French peasant, but stood tall and lithe, was rosy-faced, and had bright hair like a Saxon’s. A constant smile parted Jouaneaux’s lips and tilted up his nose. He looked always on the point of telling good news. Catastrophe and pain had not erased the up-curves of this expression. So he stood smiling at the pigs while Indian-fighters were gathering from all quarters of Montreal towards the hospital chapel.

“Jouaneaux!” spoke a woman’s well-modulated voice from an inner door.

“Yes, honored Superior,” he responded with alacrity, turning to Sister Judith de Brésoles, head of the Sisterhood of St. Joseph, to whom he accorded always this exaggerated term of respect. She carried a taper in her hand, its slender white flame casting up the beauty of her stern spiritualized features.

Bound at all times to the duty of the moment, whether that duty was to boil herbs for dinner, to ring the tocsin at an Indian alarm, or to receive the wounded and the dying, Sister Brésoles conferred briefly with her servitor.

“Jouaneaux, is the chapel in complete readiness?”

“Yes, honored Superior; everything is ready.”

“The Commandant Dollard has arrived, and he brought his young relative with him to place her in our care.”

“His sister who lives on his seigniory?”

“Certainly. Could it be any other? His sister Mademoiselle Dollard, therefore--”

“Pardon, honored Superior,”--the tip of his nose shifted with expressive twitches, and he had the air of imparting something joyful,--“Mademoiselle de Granville. She is but half-sister to Monsieur Dollard.”

“The minutest relationships of remote families are not hid from you, Jouaneaux,” commented Sister Brésoles. “But I have to mention to you that the parlor fire must be lighted now and every morning for Mademoiselle de Granville, if she choose to sit there.”

“It shall be done, honored Superior.”

“And that is all I had to tell you, I believe,” concluded Sister Judith, turning immediately to the next duty on her list.

Early as it was, the population of Montreal was pressing into the palisade gate of the Hôtel-Dieu. Matrons led their children, who mopped sleep from their eyes with little dark fists and stood on tiptoe to look between moving figures for the Indian-fighters. Some women had pale and tear-sodden cheeks, but most faces showed that rapturous enthusiasm which heroic undertaking rouses in the human breast. Unlike many meetings of a religious character, this one attracted men in majority: the seignior, the gentilhomme, the soldier from the fort, the working-smith or armorer.

When Sister Brésoles received Claire she had given her directly into the hands of a white, gentle little nun, the frame-work of whose countenance was bare and expressive. She took the girl’s hand between her sympathetic and work-worn tiny palms.

They stood in the refectory, the dawn-light just jotting their outlines to each other.

“I am Sister Macé, dear mademoiselle,” said the little nun. “Do you wish me to sit by you in the chapel?”

“I cannot sit in the chapel, Sister.”

“Then let me take you to our parlor. My Sister Brésoles will have a fire lighted there. On these mornings the air from the river comes in chill.”

“No, Sister,” said Claire, her eyes closed. “Thank you. Be not too kind to me. I wish to retain command of myself.”

Sister Macé let a tear slip down each cheek hollow and took one hand away from Claire’s to tweak her dot-like nose and catch the tears on a corner of her veil. The Sisters of St. Joseph were poorly clad, but the very fragrance of cleanness stirred in Sister Macé’s robe. She glanced about for something which might comfort Claire by way of the stomach; for stomach comfort had gained importance to these gently bred nuns after their Canadian winters on frozen bread.

“Sister,” said Claire, “is there any hiding-place about the walls of the chapel where I can thrust myself so that no weakness of mine may be seen, and behold the ceremonies?”

“There is the rood-loft,” replied Sister Macé. “And if you go directly to it before the chapel is opened for the service, nobody would dream you were there.”

“Let us go directly,” said Claire.

Directly they went. Sister Macé paused but to close with care the chapel door behind them. The chapel was dark and they groped across it and up the stairway, Sister Macé talking low and breathlessly on the ascent.

“Ah, mademoiselle, what a blessed and safe retreat is the rood-loft! How many times have my Sister Maillet and I flown to that sacred corner and prostrated ourselves before the Holy Sacrament while the yells of the Iroquois rung in our very ears! We expected every instant to be seized, and to feel the scalps torn from our heads. I have not the fortitude to bear these things as hath my Sister Brésoles,--this way, mademoiselle; give me your hand,--but I can appreciate noble courage; and, mademoiselle, I look with awe upon these young men about to take their vows.”

The sacrament and its appendages had been removed from Sister Macé’s retreat to the altar below. There was a low balustrade at the front of this narrow gallery which would conceal people humble enough to flatten themselves beside it, and here the woman bereft and the woman her sympathizer did lie on the floor and look down from the rood-loft. Before many moments an acolyte came in with his taper and lighted all the candles on the altar. Out of dusk the rough little room, with its few sacred daubs and its waxen images, sprung into mellow beauty.

Claire watched all that passed, sometimes dropping her face to the floor, and sometimes trembling from head to foot, but letting no sound betray her. She saw the settlement of Montreal crowd into the inclosure as soon as the chapel door was opened, and a Sulpitian priest stand forth by the altar. She saw the seventeen men file into space reserved for them before the altar and kneel there four abreast, Dollard at their head kneeling alone.

The chapel was very silent, French vivacity, which shapes itself into animated fervor on religious occasions, being repressed by this spectacle.

Claire knew the sub-governor Maisonneuve by his surroundings and attendants before Sister Macé breathed him into her ear.

“And that man who now comes forward,” the nun added as secretly--“that is Charles Le Moyne, as brave a man as any in the province, and rich and worthy, moreover. His seigniory is opposite Montreal on the south-east shore.”

Charles Le Moyne, addressing himself to the kneeling men, spoke out for his colleagues and brethren of the settlement who could not leave their farms until the spring crops were all planted. He urged the seventeen to wait until he and his friends could join the expedition. He would promise they should not be delayed long.

Claire watched Dollard lift his smiling face and shake his head with decision, against which urging was powerless.

She witnessed the oath which they took neither to give quarter to nor accept quarter from the Iroquois. She witnessed their consecration and the ceremonial of mass. The kneeling men were young, few of them being older than Dollard.[5] They represented the colony, from soldier and gentilhomme down to the lower ranks of handicraftsmen. Whatever their ancestry had been, a baptism of glory descended upon all those faces alike. Their backs were towards the crowded chapel, but the women in the rood-loft could see this unconscious light, and as Claire looked at Dollard she shuddered from head to foot, feeling that her whole silent body was one selfish scream, “He is forgetting me!”

Lighted altar, lifted host, bowed people, and even the knightly splendor of Dollard’s face, all passed from Claire’s knowledge.

“It is now over, dear mademoiselle,” whispered Sister Macé, sighing. “Do you see?--the men are standing up to march out four abreast, headed by the commandant. Ah, how the people will crowd them and shake their hands! Are you not looking, my child? O St. Joseph! patron of little ones, she is in a dead faint. Mademoiselle!” Sister Macé began to rub Claire’s temples and hands and to pant with anxiety, so that the rood-loft must have been betrayed had not the chapel been emptying itself of a crowd running eagerly after other objects.

“Let me be,” spoke Claire, hoarsely. “I am only dying to the world.”

Sister Macé wept again. She patted Claire’s wrist with her small fingers. The girl’s bloodless face and tight-shut eyes were made more pallid by early daylight, for the candles were being put out upon the altar. Sister Macé in her solicitude forgot all about the people pouring through the palisade gate and following their heroes to the river-landing.

“Oh, how strong is the love of brother and sister!” half soliloquized this gentle nun. “These ties so sweeten life; but when the call of Heaven comes, how hard they rend asunder!”

The trampling below hastened itself, ebbed away, entirely ceasing upon the flags of the Hôtel-Dieu and becoming a clatter along the wharf.

“Is the chapel vacant now, Sister?” her charge breathed at her ear.

“The last person has left it, dear mademoiselle.”

“Presently I will go down to lie on that spot where he knelt before the altar.”

“Shall I assist you down, dear mademoiselle?” said Sister Macé with the solicitude of a sparrow trying to lift a wounded robin.

“No, Sister. But of your charity do this for me in my weakness. Go down and stand by the place. I have not known if any foot pressed it, and I will not have it profaned.”

Sister Macé, therefore, who respected all requests, and who herself had lain stretched on that cold stone pavement doing her religious penances, descended the stairs and stood near the altar; while her charge followed, holding by railing or sinking upon step, until she reached the square of stone where Dollard had knelt.

As a mother pounces upon her child in idolatrous abandon, so Claire fell upon that chill spot and encircled it with her arms, sobbing:

“Doubt not that I shall find you again, my Dollard, my Dollard! Once before I prayed mightily to Heaven for a blessing, and I got my blessing.”

While she lay there, cheer after cheer rose from the river-landing, wild enthusiasm bursting out again as soon as the last round had died away. The canoes had put out on their expedition. Those who watched them with the longest watching would finally turn aside to other things. But the woman on the chapel floor lay stretched there for twenty-four hours.

XIV.

MASSAWIPPA.

ALL that pleasant afternoon, while a spring sun warmed seeds in the ground and trees visibly unfurled green pennons, Montrealists stood in groups looking solemnly up-river where the expedition canoes had disappeared, or flinging their hands in excited talk. “They talked too much,” says one of their chroniclers. For the expedition was to be kept secret, particularly from all passing Indians.

There was no wind to cut away tremulous heat simmering at the base of the mountain. Grass could be smelled, with the delicious odor of the earth in which it was quickening. On such a day the soul of man accomplishes its yearly metempsychosis, and finds itself in a body beating with new life.

Jouaneaux carried his happy countenance from group to group along the single street of Montreal, standing with respectful attention when his superiors talked, or chiming in with authority when his equals held parley instead of pushing their business.

Before night a small fleet of Indian canoes came up the river and landed on the wharf of Montreal forty warriors and a very young girl. The chief, leading the girl by the hand, stalked proudly westward along the street, his feathers dancing, his muscular legs and moccasined feet having the flying step of Mercury. His braves trod in line behind him.

“All Hurons,” remarked Jouaneaux to his crony, a lime-burner.

“And should be seeding their island of Orleans at this season,” said the lime-burner, “if Quebec set them any example but to quarrel and take to the woods.”

“That chief can be nobody but Annahotaha,” said Jouaneaux. “Now where dost thou say he stole that brown beauty of a little Sister?”

“He stole her,” responded the lime-burner, “from a full-blooded French girl below Three Rivers, that some Quebec Jesuit mixed up with him in marriage. My cousin lives in the same côte, and little liking hath she for this half-breed who scorns her mother’s people and calls herself a princess.”

“Good hater art thou of Quebec Jesuits,” said Jouaneaux, spreading his approving smile beyond dots of white teeth around large margins of pink gums. “But Quebec Jesuits have done worse work than mixing the blood of this princess. What a little Sister of St. Joseph she would make!” he exclaimed, stretching his neck after the girl and disclosing the healthy depths of his mouth.

“You never look at a woman but to take her measure for the Sisterhood of St. Joseph,” laughed the lime-burner.

“And to what better life could she be measured?” demanded the nuns’ retainer, instantly aggressive, “or what better Sisterhood?”

“There be no better women,” yielded the lime-burner.

* * * * *

All night Sister Brésoles and Sister Macé in turns kneeled beside the prostrate woman in the chapel. She was not disturbed by offers of food or consolation, for they respected her posture and her vigil. The young novices, of whom there were a few, had duties set for them elsewhere. All night a taper burned upon the altar and a nun knelt by it, her shadow wavering long and brown; and the woman’s body, with its arms stretched out on the stones, stirred only at intervals when the hands grasped and wrung each other in renewed prayer.

Before matins Sister Brésoles left her support of this afflicted spirit to devote herself to the revival of the body, by concocting a broth for which she is yet celebrated in Church annals on account of the Divine assistance she received in its preparation. The very odor should rouse Claire from her long fast and cause her to eat and rise, bearing her burdens.

During Sister Brésoles’s absence another figure came in and bowed before the altar.

Conscious of physical disturbance, Claire turned her vacant look towards it, as she had done each time the nuns changed vigils.

This was no serene Sister of St. Joseph, but a dark young girl also flattening herself on the pavement, and writhing about in rages of pain.

“My child, what ails _you_?” whispered Claire, compassion making alive the depths of her eyes.

But the girl, without heeding her, ground a few prayers between convulsive teeth, and then beat her head upon the stones.

By degrees the silence and self-restraint of a woman not greatly her elder, lying in trouble as abject as her own, had its quieting effect on her. Tears, scantily distilled in her, ran the length of her eyelid rims and fell in occasional drops on the floor.

Their cheeks resting on a level, the two unhappy creatures looked at each other across a stone flag.

“Has your father or your brother gone with Dollard?” whispered Claire.

“Madame, my father goes to fight the Iroquois.”

“I thought it.”

“Madame, I have just been making a vow.”

“So have I.”

“I will follow my father wherever he is going, come life or come death, and nobody shall prevent me.”

Claire rose upon her knees.

Sister Brésoles opened the chapel door, carrying in a bowl of soup as she would have carried it to a soldier whose wounds refused to allow his being lifted.

The patient was in evident thanksgiving. Daylight had just begun to glimmer in. Claire’s face shone with the passionate white triumph which religious ascetics of that day looked forward to as the crowning result of their vigils. Flushed with reactionary hope, she rose to her feet as if the pavement had left no stiffness in her muscles, and met the nun.

“St. Joseph and all the Holy Family give you peace, mademoiselle.”

“Peace hath been granted me, Sister. My prayer is answered.”

“Great is the power of the Holy Family. But after your long vigil you will need this strengthening broth which I have made for you.”

“Sister, you are kind. Let me take it to your refectory. I know the place. And may this young girl attend me?”

“I will carry it myself, mademoiselle,” said Sister Judith, “to our rude parlor, if you will follow me up the stairs. The refectory is somewhat chilly, and in the parlor we have a fire kindled. And you may bathe your face and hands before eating your soup.”

Up a stairway Claire groped behind the nun, and came into a barn-like huge room, scant of comforts except an open fire, which Jouaneaux had but finished preparing entirely for her. The cells of the nuns were built along one side of this room, and from the cells they now emerged going devoutly to matins.

“Touching the half-breed girl of whom you spoke,” said Sister Brésoles, lingering to put a basin of water and coarse clean towel within reach of her guest, “she shall come to you as soon as she hath finished her morning devotions. Her father is chief of the Hurons, and hath placed her here as a novice. We have many girls come,” added Sister Brésoles with a light sigh, “but few remain to bear the hardships of life in a frontier convent.”

“Girls are ungrateful creatures,” said Claire, “bent on their own purposes, and greedy of what to them seems happiness. I am myself so. And if I do or say what must offend you, forgive me, Sister.”

She unfastened her necklace and held it up--a slender rope braided of three strings of seed pearls and fastened by a ruby.

“This is a red sapphire, Sister, and has been more than a hundred years in the house of--”

She suppressed “Laval-Montmorency,” and pressed her necklace upon the nun’s refusing palm.

“Why do you offer me this, mademoiselle?”

“Because from this day gems and I part company forever. That is the only hereditary ornament I brought with me into New France. Enrich some shrine with it if you have no need to turn it into money for your convent.”

“Our convent is very poor, mademoiselle,” replied Sister Brésoles, divided between acceptance and refusal. “But we want no rich gifts from those who make their retirement with us. Also, the commandant, your brother, left with us more value than our poor hospitality can return to you.”

“Yet be intreated, Sister,” urged Claire. “I want it to be well placed, but no more about my throat.”

Sister Brésoles, with gentle thanks, therefore,--“It shall still do honor to your house in works of charity, mademoiselle,”--accepted the gift and went directly to matins.

When Claire had washed her face and hands and tightened the loose puffs of her hair, she took her bowl of soup and sat before the fire, eating it with the hearty appetite of a woman risen from despair to resolution.

The odor of a convent, how natural it was to her!--that smell of stale incense intertwined with the scentless breath of excessive cleanliness. Through the poor joints of the house she could hear matin-chanting arise from the chapel. Daylight grew stronger and ruddier, and a light fog from the river showed opal changes.