CHAPTER XXI

HOW THE PIRATES CAME

Inside our Habitation all was the confusion of preparation for leaving the bay. Outside, the Indians held high carnival; for Allemand, the gin-soaked pilot, was busy passing drink through the loopholes to a pandemonium of savages raving outside the stockades. 'Tis not a pretty picture, that memory of white-men besotting the Indian; but I must even set down the facts as they are, bidding you to remember that the white trader who besotted the Indian was the same white trader who befriended all tribes alike when the hunt failed and the famine came. La Chesnaye, the merchant prince, it was, who managed this low trafficking. Indeed, for the rubbing together of more doubloons in his money-bags I think that La Chesnaye's servile nature would have bargained to send souls in job lots blindfold over the gangplank. But, as La Chesnaye said when Pierre Radisson remonstrated against the knavery, the gin was nine parts rain-water.

"The more cheat, you, to lay such unction to your conscience," says M. de Radisson. "Be an honest knave, La Chesnaye!"

Forêt, the marquis, stalked up and down before the gate with two guards at his heels. All day long birch canoes and log dugouts and tubby pirogues and crazy rafts of loose-lashed pine logs drifted to our water-front with bands of squalid Indians bringing their pelts. Skin tepees rose outside our palisades like an army of mushrooms. Naked brats with wisps of hair coarse as a horse's mane crawled over our mounted cannon, or scudded between our feet like pups, or felt our European clothes with impudent wonder. Young girls having hair plastered flat with bear's grease stood peeping shyly from tent flaps. Old squaws with skin withered to a parchment hung over the campfires, cooking. And at the loopholes pressed the braves and the bucks and the chief men exchanging beaver-skins for old iron, or a silver fox for a drink of gin, or ermine enough to make His Majesty's coronation robe for some flashy trinket to trick out a vain squaw. From dawn to dusk ran the patter of moccasined feet, man after man toiling up from river-front to fort gate with bundles of peltries on his back and a carrying strap across his brow.

Unarmed, among the savages, pacifying drunken hostiles at the water-front, bidding Jean and me look after the carriers, in the gateway, helping Sieur de Groseillers to sort the furs--Pierre Radisson was everywhere. In the guard-house were more English prisoners than we had crews of French; and in the mess-room sat Governor Brigdar of the Hudson's Bay Company, who took his captivity mighty ill and grew prodigious pot-valiant over his cups. Here, too, lolled Ben Gillam, the young New Englander, rumbling out a drunken vengeance against those inland pirates, who had deprived him of the season's furs.

Once, I mind, when M. Radisson came suddenly on these two worthies, their fuddled heads were close together above the table.

"Look you," Ben was saying in a big, rasping whisper, "I shot him--I shot him with a brass button. The black arts are powerless agen brass. Devil sink my soul if I didn't shoot him! The red--spattered over the brush----"

M. Radisson raised a hand to silence my coming.

Ben's nose poked across the table, closer to Governor Brigdar's ear.

"But look you, Mister What's-y-er-name," says he.

"Don't you Mister me, you young cub!" interrupts the governor with a pompous show of drunken dignity.

"A fig for Your Excellency," cries the young blackguard. "Who's who when he's drunk? As I was a-telling, look you, though the red spattered the bushes, when I run up he'd vanished into air with a flash o' powder from my musket! 'Twas by the black arts that nigh hanged him in Boston Town----"

At that, Governor Brigdar claps his hand to the table and swears that he cares nothing for black arts if only the furs can be found.

"The furs--aye," husks Ben, "if we can only find the furs! An our men hold together, we're two to one agen the Frenchies----"

"Ha," says M. Radisson. "Give you good-morning, gentlemen, and I hope you find yourselves in health."

The two heads flew apart like the halves of a burst cannon-shell. Thereafter, Radisson kept Ben and Governor Brigdar apart.

Of Godefroy and Jack Battle we could learn naught. Le Borgne would never tell what he and M. Picot had seen that night they rescued me from the hill. Whether Le Borgne and the hostiles of the massacre lied or no, they both told the same story of Jack. While the tribe was still engaged in the scalp-dance, some one had untied Jack's bands. When the braves went to torture their captive, he had escaped. But whither had he gone that he had not come back to us? Like the sea is the northland, full of nameless graves; and after sending scouts far and wide, we gave up all hope of finding the sailor lad.

But in the fort was another whose presence our rough fellows likened to a star flower on the stained ground of some hard-fought battle. After M. Radisson had quieted turbulent spirits by a reading of holy lessons, Mistress Hortense queened it over our table of a Sunday at noon. Waiting upon her at either hand were the blackamoor and the negress. A soldier in red stood guard behind; and every man, officer, and commoner down the long mess-table tuned his manners to the pure grace of her fair face.

What a hushing of voices and cleansing of wits and disusing of oaths was there after my little lady came to our rough Habitation!

I mind the first Sunday M. Radisson led her out like a queen to the mess-room table. When our voyageurs went upstream for M. Picot's hidden furs, her story had got noised about the fort. Officers, soldiers, and sailors had seated themselves at the long benches on either side the table; but M. Radisson's place was empty and a sort of throne chair had been extemporized at the head of the table. An angry question went from group to group to know if M. Radisson designed such place of honour for the two leaders of our prisoners--under lock in the guard-room. M. de Groseillers only laughed and bade the fellows contain their souls and stomachs in patience. A moment later, the door to the quarters where Hortense lived was thrown open by a red-coated soldier, and out stepped M. Radisson leading Hortense by the tips of her dainty fingers, the ebon faces of the two blackamoors grinning delight behind.

You could have heard a pin fall among our fellows. Then there was a noise of armour clanking to the floor. Every man unconsciously took to throwing his pistol under the table, flinging sword-belt down and hiding daggers below benches. Of a sudden, the surprise went to their heads.

"Gentlemen," began M. Radisson.

But the fellows would have none of his grand speeches. With a cheer that set the rafters ringing, they were on their feet; and to Mistress Hortense's face came a look that does more for the making of men than all New England's laws or my uncle's blasphemy boxes or King Charles's dragoons. You ask what that look was? Go to, with your teasings! A lover is not to be asked his whys! I ask you in return why you like the spire of a cathedral pointing up instead of down; or why the muses lift souls heavenward? Indeed, of all the fine arts granted the human race to lead men's thoughts above the sordid brutalities of living, methinks woman is the finest; for God's own hand fashioned her, and she was the last crowning piece of all His week's doings. The finest arts are the easiest spoiled, as you know very well; and if you demand how Mistress Hortense could escape harm amid all the wickedness of that wilderness, I answer it is a thing that your townsfolk cannot know.

It is of the wilderness.

The wilderness is a foster-mother that teacheth hard, strange paradoxes. The first is _the sin of being weak_; and the second is that _death is the least of life's harms_.

Wrapped in those furs for which he had staked his life like many a gamester of the wilderness, M. Picot lay buried in that sandy stretch outside the cave door. Turning to lead Hortense away before Le Borgne and the blackamoor began filling the grave, I found her stonily silent and tearless.

But it was she who led me.

Scrambling up the hillside like a chamois of the mountains, she flitted lightly through the greening to a small open where campers had built night fires. Her quick glance ran from tree to tree. Some wood-runner had blazed a trail by notching the bark. Pausing, she turned with the frank, fearless look of the wilderness woman. She was no longer the elusive Hortense of secluded life. A change had come--the change of the hothouse plant set out to the bufferings of the four winds of heaven to perish from weakness or gather strength from hardship. Your woman of older lands must hood fair eyes, perforce, lest evil masking under other eyes give wrong intent to candour; but in the wilderness each life stands stripped of pretence, honestly good or evil, bare at what it is; and purity clear as the noonday sun needs no trick of custom to make it plainer.

"Is not this the place?" she asked.

Looking closer, from shrub to open, I recognised the ground of that night attack in the woods.

"Hortense, then it was you that I saw at the fire with the others?"

She nodded assent. She had not uttered one word to explain how she came to that wild land; nor had I asked.

"It was you who pleaded for my life in the cave below my feet?"

"I did not know you had heard! I only sent Le Borgne to bring you back!"

"I hid as he passed."

"But I sent a message to the fort----"

"Not to be bitten by the same dog twice--I thought that meant to keep away?"

"What?" asked Hortense, passing her hand over her eyes. "Was that the message he gave you? Then monsieur had bribed him! I sent for you to come to us. Oh, that is the reason you never came----"

"And that is the reason you have hidden from me all the year and never sent me word?"

"I thought--I thought--" She turned away. "Ben Gillam told monsieur you had left Boston on our account----"

"And you thought I wanted to avoid you----"

"I did not blame you," she said. "Indeed, indeed, I was very weak--monsieur must have bribed Le Borgne--I sent word again and again--but you never answered!"

"How could you misunderstand--O Hortense, after that night in the hunting-room, how could you believe so poorly of me!"

She gave a low laugh. "That's what your good angel used to plead," she said.

"Good angel, indeed!" said I, memory of the vows to that miscreant adventurer fading. "That good angel was a lazy baggage! She should have compelled you to believe!"

"Oh--she did," says Hortense quickly. "The poor thing kept telling me and telling me to trust you till I--"

"Till you what, Hortense?"

She did not answer at once.

"Monsieur and the blackamoor and I had gone to the upper river watching for the expected boats----"

"Hortense, were you the white figure behind the bush that night we were spying on the Prince Rupert!"

"Yes," she said, "and you pointed your gun at me!"

I was too dumfounded for words. Then a suspicion flashed to my mind. "Who sent Le Borgne for us in the storm, Hortense?"

"Oh," says Hortense, "that was nothing! Monsieur pretended that he thought you were caribou. He wanted to shoot. Oh," she said, "oh, how I have hated him! To think--to think that he would shoot when you helped us in Boston!"

"Hortense, who sent Le Borgne and M. Picot to save me from the wolves?"

"Oh," says Hortense bravely, with a shudder between the words, "that was--that was nothing--I mean--one would do as much for anybody--for--for--for a poor little stoat, or--or--a caribou if the wolves were after it!"

And we laughed with the tears in our eyes. And all the while that vow to the dying adventurer was ringing like a faint death toll to hope. I remember trying to speak a gratitude too deep for words.

"Can--I ever--ever repay you--Hortense?" I was asking.

"Repay!" she said with a little bitter laugh. "Oh! I hate that word repay! I hate all give-and-take and so-much-given-for-so-much-got!" Then turning to me with her face aflame: "I am--I am--oh--why can't you understand?" she asked.

And then--and then--there was a wordless cry--her arms reached out in mute appeal--there was no need of speech.

The forest shone green and gold in the sunlight. The wind rustled past like a springtime presence, a presence that set all the pines swaying and the aspens aquiver with music of flower legend and new birth and the joy of life. There was a long silence; and in that silence the pulsing of the mighty forces that lift mortals to immortality.

Then a voice which only speaks when love speaks through the voice was saying, "Do you remember your dreams?"

"What?" stooping to cull some violets that had looked well against the green of her hunting-suit.

"'Blind gods of chance--blind gods of chance'--you used to say that over and over!"

"Ah, M. Radisson taught me that! God bless the blind gods of chance--Hortense teaches me that; for"--giving her back her own words--"you are here--you are here--you are here with me! God bless the gods of chance!"

"Oh," she cried, "were you not asleep? Monsieur let me watch after you had taken the sleeping drug."

"The stars fight for us in their courses," said I, handing up the violets.

"Ramsay," she asked with a sudden look straight through my eyes, "what did he make you promise when--when--he was dying?"

The question brought me up like a sail hauled short. And when I told her, she uttered strange reproaches.

"Why--why did you promise that?" she asked. "It has always been his mad dream. And when I told him I did not want to be restored, that I wanted to be like Rebecca and Jack and you and the rest, he called me a little fool and bade me understand that he had not poisoned me as he was paid to do because it was to his advantage to keep me alive. Courtiers would not assassinate a stray waif, he said; there was wealth for the court's ward somewhere; and when I was restored, I was to remember who had slaved for me. Indeed, indeed, I think that he would have married me, but that he feared it would bar him from any property as a king's ward----"

"Is that all you know?"

"That is all. Why--why--did you promise?"

"What else was there to do, Hortense? You can't stay in this wilderness."

"Oh, yes," says Hortense wearily, and she let the violets fall. "What--what else was there to do?"

She led the way back to the cave.

"You have not asked me how we came here," she began with visible effort.

"Tell me no more than you wish me to know!"

"Perhaps you remember a New Amsterdam gentleman and a page boy leaving Boston on the Prince Rupert?"

"Perhaps," said I.

"Captain Gillam of the Prince Rupert signalled to his son outside the harbour. Monsieur had been bargaining with Ben all winter. Ben took us to the north with Le Borgne for interpreter----"

"Does Ben know you are here?"

"Not as Hortense! I was dressed as a page. Then Le Borgne told us of this cave and monsieur plotted to lead the Indians against Ben, capture the fort and ship, and sail away with all the furs for himself. Oh, how I have hated him!" she exclaimed with a sudden impetuous stamp.

Leaving her with the slaves, I took Le Borgne with me to the Habitation. Here, I told all to M. Radisson. And his quick mind seized this, too, for advantage.

"Precious pearls," he exclaims, "but 'tis a gift of the gods!"

"Sir?"

"Pardieu, Chouart; listen to this," and he tells his kinsman, Groseillers.

"Why not?" asks Groseillers. "You mean to send her to Mary Kirke?"

Mary Kirke was Pierre Radisson's wife, who would not leave the English to go to him when he had deserted England for France.

"Sir John Kirke is director of the English Company now. He hath been knighted by King Charles. Mary and Sir John will present this little maid at the English court. An she be not a nine days' wonder there, my name is not Pierre Radisson. If she's a court ward, some of the crew must take care of her."

Groseillers smiled. "An the French reward us not well for this winter's work, that little maid may open a door back to England; eh, kinsman?"

'Twas the same gamestering spirit carrying them through all hazard that now led them to prepare for fresh partnership, lest France played false. And as history tells, France played very false indeed.