Part 11

"Remain here! a month, yea, a week of this will kill me, Orono. Remain here, and so far away from my country--from the deep glens where the heather blooms so sweetly! I cannot stay, Orono," continued the poor girl, wildly. "I have been taught to love my native land by the voices of my father, who fell in battle, of my mother, who died of sorrow, and of my brave husband, who perished in this hated wilderness!"

"Orono understands," said the Indian, quietly; "he, too, loves the hunting-grounds of the Iroquois; but he will protect the poor pale face and her child."

Seeing her weep bitterly, after a pause, during which he regarded her attentively--

"Orono," said he, "is but a poor Indian warrior and knows not the God of the pale faces; but may he speak."

"Say on."

"Turn to the Great Spirit of the Iroquois, who dwells far away beyond the lakes and the prairies; be resigned to his will. The lightning is not swifter than his wrath; the hunting-grounds are not greater than his goodness. This Great Spirit knows every leaf in the woods--every ripple on the waters; and doubtless he has removed the white chief from evils more terrible than yonder battle by the Horican; for sudden death is good."

"How think you so?"

"I know not; but the pawaws say so."

Here was a subject for one who could reflect; but the heart of Mary seemed to have died within her.

"Oh yes," continued the Indian, patting her white shoulder gently with his strong brown hand, and pointing south; "he is gone to the abode of the Great Spirit, to the happy hunting-grounds, where the souls of all brave warriors go, and where they seem to live again."

"Oh that I were with him."

"Orono has no squaw now; but the Oneida girl who slept on his breast is there."

"Orono," said the widow, touched by his tone, and gathering hope from his protection, "is a good warrior."

"He is a brave one!" replied the Iroquois, proudly.

"It is better to be good than brave; and you _are_ good."

"Orono is grateful to the squaw of the white chief, and has given his promise to protect her; so the strongest and tallest braves of the Iroquois must respect that promise. My brothers say, Let the pale face die----"

"She will not trouble you long," said Mary, weeping over her child, for which she had neither proper nurture nor little garments, nor even the rites of baptism.

"Are we to perish, they cry, that pale faces may gather, and dig, and sow, on the sacred banks of the Horican? Are they sent here to inherit the home of the Indian, the hunting-ground of his fathers, and the great solemn barrows where their bones lie by the Oswego and the Mississippi, as if the Great Spirit loved them better than his children the Iroquois."

From this day fever of mind and body--an illness for which she had neither nurse, physician, nor comforts around her--prostrated the faculties of the poor widow, for such she deemed herself. As each link in the chain of life is broken by death, we are united more closely to those which remain; but to poor Mary all seemed a hopeless blank. The _last link_ was a child, whose feeble life and doubtful future filled her with dismay.

Now that Roderick was gone, her heart seemed to follow him. She clung with fonder affection to the world that was to come, and where she was to meet him; but her babe, could she selfishly forsake it? Her heart was sorely lacerated. Eternity seemed close--terribly _close_ to her; and her husband being there, instituted to her a more endearing tie between this world and that mysterious "bourne from whence no traveller returns." She had no terror of this journey, for he whom she loved with all the strength of her soul had gone before and awaited her there. At times she fancied that he chid her delay; she felt drawn towards that spirit-world by a chord of affection which made her now yearn for it, as before she had wept and yearned for her Highland home.

But her babe--so innocent and so deserted--could she die and leave it among the Iroquois?

How did Roderick die--where? Peacefully or in torture? Was he buried, or lying still unentombed?

These dreadful questions and thoughts were ever before her in the intervals of waking from her fits of delirium, which often lasted for hours; and her snatches of sleep were filled by horrible dreams.

In these intervals a new hope dawned in her heart. Her husband might have escaped and gained Fort Edward or the army of Montcalm, and she might yet reach him with her child if protected by Orono. This idea gave a new and exciting impulse to her already overwrought frame; but it came, alas! too late, for, a few days after the birth of her little one, she too surely felt herself dying--dying there with none to hear her story, or to whom she could bequeath her helpless babe--a thought sufficient alone to kill her. With the last effort of her strength she took from her now matted hair the Celtic marriage brooch (the old palladium of her husband's family) which she had kept there concealed since the day of their departure from Fort William Henry, and fixing it to a fragment of her own dress, which she had wrapped round the infant, pointed to it, that Orono might deem it an amulet or talisman--"a great medicine"--and expired!

* * * *

It was about the time of sunset, and before interring the body in a deep grave which he had scooped at the foot of a gum-tree, and lined with soft furs, Orono sat silent and watching in his wigwam. Near the dead mother her unconscious child slept peacefully. The poor Indian was perhaps praying, and feeling thankful in his heart that he had discharged a debt of gratitude, and would yet do more by conveying the little orphan to the nearest white settlement, and there leaving her to her fate.

The evening was beautiful, like those which preceded the siege and the massacre. A mellow sunset was deepening on the hills that overlook the waters of Lake George, and the setting beams played with a wavering radiance on the green foliage that was tossed like verdant plumage by the evening wind, and on the ripples that ran before it over the bosom of that lovely lake. All was still within the Indian hut where the dead woman lay, with her long black lashes resting on the pallid cheek from which they never more would rise: and with her pure, pale profile, sharply defined against the coarse grass matting that screened her wretched couch. Crouching on one side was the old squaw, appalled by the marble hue of the strange corpse; on the other sat Orono, divested of his plume and all his ornaments in token of grief, with his deep glittering eyes fixed on the rocky bluffs which seemed to start forward from the copse-covered slopes, and were then tinted with a deep purple by the sinking sun.

As the last rays died away from the volcanic peaks, the Indian started up and prepared to inter the remains of poor Mary, when the glittering epaulettes and appointments of a French officer, who was leading his horse by the bridle, appeared at the door of the wigwam.

He was the Baron de Beauchatel, with the gold cross of St. Louis dangling on the lapelle of the gay white uniform of the Grenadiers of Guienne. Having lost his way in the forest, he now sought a guide to the camp of Montcalm; but the dead mother caught his eye at the moment he peered into the obscurity of the hut.

"Mon Dieu! what have we here?" he asked, with surprise.

"The squaw and papoose of a pale chief," replied the apparently unmoved Indian.

"Dead--a lady, too!" exclaimed the French officer, stooping over her with a commiseration that was greatly increased when he discovered that she was young and beautiful. He gently pressed her thin white hand, and lifted her soft black hair. "And this is her child?"

Orono nodded.

"Almost newly born--how calmly it sleeps! The poor infant--alone in this wilderness--Tête Dieu! it is frightful! Tell me all about this, Iroquois, and I will reward you handsomely with a new English clasp-knife, a bottle of eau de vie, a blanket, or whatever else your refined taste teaches you to prize most."

In his own language, by turns soft and guttural, Orono related to the baron all that he knew of the white woman; that she had twice saved his life, and that he, in gratitude, had protected her from the Iroquois; but he had no power over the Great Spirit.

The baron was a humane and gallant French officer of the old days of the monarchy. He had been a gay fellow some few years before, and had been sent to America (according to Parisian gossip) because he had been too favourably noticed by Madame de Pompadour; but he had a good and tender heart; thus, the story of the poor mother, and the helplessness of her orphan, stirred him deeply. By the whole aspect of the dead, and the remains of her attire, he suspected that her rank and position in life had been good--a lady at least. A ring upon the fourth finger of her left hand, bearing the name of her husband in Gaelic, he gently removed; he then cut off some of her fine black hair, and, after making a few memoranda descriptive of her person, he bargained with the Indian that he should give up the child for a few francs. This the Iroquois at once agreed to do, and, with the assistance of the baron, Mary was wrapped in furs and buried under a tree on the sequestered shore of the Horican.

To Beauchatel it seemed strange and repugnant that a Christian woman should be laid there without a prayer or a blessing, on the rough mould that covered her pale attenuated form, her pains and her sorrows; but it was long since _he_ had prayed; yet, with an impulse of piety, he cut on the bark of the tree, which covered the place where she lay, a large cross, and raising his hat retired.

The act was in itself a prayer!

"Can I now do aught for you?" he asked of Orono.

The Indian mournfully shook his head, and then said,

"Give me a new musket, for the time is coming--the time that has been foretold."

"By whom?"

"The sachems, the pawaws, and the old men of the Iroquois."

"And what shall happen, _mon camarade_?"

"The warriors of the Six Nations will break the pipe of peace and dig up the great war-hatchet."

"Against whom?

"All who come from the land of the rising sun."

"Be it so," said the baron, shrugging his shoulders, and looking with some anxiety towards the long shadows, that darkened in the forest vistas; "you shall have your musket; but give me the child, _mon ami_; and now for the camp of Louis de St. Voran!"

* * * *

Let us change the scene.

It is 1778, exactly twenty-one years after the events recorded as having happened at Fort William Henry. We are now in France, in the sunny province of Guienne, and near the gay city of Bordeaux.

A lady, young and beautiful, is seated at one of the lofty open windows of the turreted Chateau de Fontbrune, which crowns the summit of a wooded eminence on the right bank of the Garonne. Her eyes and hair are dark; her complexion soft and brilliant. Her attire, as she is in the country, partakes of the picturesque fashion of the last days of Louis XV. She reclines on a velvet fauteuil, and forcibly reminds us of a languid little beauty in one of Watteau's pictures waiting for some one to make love to her. As a poet of the time has it, her attire

"Was whimsically traversed o'er, Here a knot and there a flower; Like her little heart that dances, Full of maggots--full of fancies; Flowing loosely down her back, Fell with art the graceful sacque; Ornamented well with gimping, Flounces, furbelows, and crimping, While her ruffles, many a row, Guard her elbows, white as snow, Knots below and points above, Emblem of the ties of love."

Her cheek rested on her hand, and heedless of the too familiar splendour of the apartment in which she was seated, she impatiently drew back the blue satin hangings, which were festooned by cords and tassels of silver, and setting her round dimpled chin into the white palm of her pretty little hand, gazed languidly upon the beautiful landscape that spread, as it were, at her feet.

The vine-covered district of the Bordelais, through which wound the Garonne; Bourdeaux, clustering on its left bank in the form, of a crescent, with its old walls and towers of the Middle Ages; its nineteen gates, through which the tide of human life was ebbing and flowing; its long rows of trees casting their lengthening shadows to the eastward; the huge grey ramparts of the venerable Chateau de Trompette; the palace of the Dukes of Guienne; the church of St. Michel and the cathedral of St. André, with its two tall and splendid spires, which pierced the saffron-tinted sky like stone needles; and then the majestic river sweeping past towards the sea, all bathed in the broad light of a glorious June sunset. But Therese had seen all this a thousand times before, and it ceased to interest her now.

In the lap of this noble lady reposed a pretty, but saucy and snubnosed Bologna spaniel, with the long ears and black silky hair of which the white fingers of one hand played involuntarily. Statues, bronzes, buhl tables, vases of flowers, and a hundred beautiful trifles, decorated this little room, which was her boudoir--her own peculiar sanctum sanctorum--and the windows of which overlooked a bastion, whereon were sixteen antique brass cannon; for the Chateau de Fontbrune, in which we have now the honour of finding ourselves, was an old baronial house, which, after being fortified by Louis de Foix, had given shelter to Charles VII., and been beleaguered by the Maréchal de Matignon.

The productions of the popular men of the day strewed the apartment. The poems of Bernis, the comedies of the Abbé Boissy, the music of Lulli, with drawings and pictures without end, lay near, while a vaudeville by Panard was open upon the piano. Mademoiselle had evidently been sorely puzzled in her efforts to get through the long hours of this day of June, 1778.

"Oh, Nanon!" she exclaimed to her attendant, a pretty girl of eighteen, who sat near her on a tabourette, sewing; "I am _so_ ennuyé--for in this dreary old chateau, which I am not permitted to leave, and to which no one comes but prosy old colonels and stupid magistrates, such as M. le Maire, or M. le Maitre du Palais, or still worse, those horrid counsellors of the Court of Admiralty, there is so little to rouse one from sad thoughts and drowsy lethargy."

"Try another chapter of that new romance by M. de Marivaux."

"Ah, _merci!_ he is a most tiresome fellow, Nanon, and odious, too."

"Odious?"

"Yes."

"How, Mademoiselle Therese?"

"I judge from his memoir of himself."

"Explain, mademoiselle."

"He was once in love with a young lady--"

"Once, only--then he is no true romance writer."

"She had black hair, hazel eyes and long lashes, divine little hands and feet--in fact, the counterpart of myself, as the old Abbé de Boissy told me--and was on the point of paying his most solemn and magnificent addresses to her; when, happening to enter her boudoir one day unexpectedly, he found--"

"Not a lover?" exclaimed Nanon, becoming suddenly interested; "not a student or mousquetaire, I hope?"

"_Ma foi!_ no--nothing half so pleasant."

"What, then?"

"Mademoiselle studying smiles and postures before her mirror."

"And this--"

"So shocked the staid and proper M. de Marivaux, that his passion passed away in a moment, and he took to novel writing."

"It was no passion whatever, mademoiselle," replied Nanon, disgusted to find that a lady should lose a lover by the same arts which she practised daily to win one; and now ensued another long pause.

This young lady--so beautiful, so tenderly nurtured, so accomplished, and so splendidly jewelled--was the richest heiress in Bordeaux, a ward of the young King Louis XVI., _fiancée_ of the Comte d'Arcot, a high military noble, who had covered himself with distinction in India, and was now on his way home with a fabulous sum in livres, and, of course, with the liver complaint. But this noble demoiselle, successor of M. le Baron Beauchatel, Seigneur de Fontbrune and of St. Emilion, Seneschal of Bordeaux, and Commandant of the Chateau de Trompette, was the foundling of the Iroquois wigwam, the orphan child of Roderick MacGillivray and of that lonely and despairing mother who found her grave, uncoffined, in the savage solitude on the southern shore of the Horican.

And now to solve this mystery.

Beauchatel had conveyed the infant girl to Fort William Henry, and consigned her to the care of the baroness, a lady of gentle and amiable disposition. In pity for the helplessness of the child, she undertook its care, at first as a mere duty of humanity, but as months passed on, her regard became a strong love for this lonely little waif--a love all the stronger that she was herself without children, and had long ceased to hope that she would ever be a mother; so it seemed as if Heaven had sent this infant to fill up the void in her heart. She named her _Therese_, after herself; for she had been Mademoiselle Therese de St. Veran, a sister of the Marquis de Montcalm, and consequently was a lady of Nismes. Soon after her return to France with Beauchatel she died, and her last request was, that he would continue to protect the orphan which fate had so strangely committed to his care. The good and faithful soldier had learned to love the little girl as if she had been his own, and being without kinsmen or heirs to his title and estates, he obtained from the young King Louis XVI., then in the fourth year of his unhappy reign, as a reward for his services and those of his ancestors, permission to adopt her in legal form. The necessary documents were accordingly drawn up, sealed, signed, and registered; and thus the poor foundling of the Canadian forest, the child of Roderick MacGillivray of the Black Watch, became the heiress of the Chateau de Fontbrune and of the Seigneurie of Saint Emilion.

On returning from America, the baron had served five years under M. Law de Lauriston in the East, upholding the interests of the French India Company against the Nabob of Bengal and the British, under Lord Clive. There he had met and become acquainted with Count d'Arcot, for whom he had conceived a sudden and vehement friendship--so much so, that, after his return to France, he resolved that, _bongré malgré_, his young ward should marry this soldier of fortune; for such he was, having been created Count d'Ascot and Knight of St. Louis for his bravery at the recapture of that city of Hindostan, the capital of the Carnatic.

Poor Therese had been told the sad story of the mother she had never known, and of whom no relics remained but some silky black hair, a ring, and that singular brooch--an ornament so unlike anything she had ever seen, and which was graven with a legend in a language to her so strange and barbarous; and her heart yearned for a further knowledge of whom she was, and whence she came, and for that mother's kiss, of which, though it had been planted a thousand times upon her little lips, she had no memory; and at times she mourned for that father she had never seen. Then it seemed so odd, so strange, so grievous that she could have any other father than the dear, kind old baron, for whom she had a love and reverence so filial and so strong.

But to resume.

"The evening lags, as if the sun would never set," yawned the petulant little beauty. "What shall we do with ourselves--speak, you provoking Nanon?"

"Play," was the pithy reply.

"I have played everything that came last from Paris, and my piano is now frightfully out of tune--the chords are fallen."

"Read."

"I have read MM. Marivaux, Bernis, and Jean Jacques de Rousseau till I am sick of them."

"Draw."

"It makes my head ache, and the Abbé Boissy says it will spoil my eyes, in which he seems to take a poetical interest."

"Sing."

"Nanon, you bore me!"

"Suppose we pray, then!"

"Ma foi!--that would not be very amusing when one is dull and dreary."

"Order out the grey pads and ride."

"M. Beauchatel never allows that, as you know well, Nanon, save when he is with me; and we shall have enough of our horses, I have no doubt, when this odious old count, whom I am to marry, and whom I already hate, and whom I am resolved to tease to death, arrives here."

"I shall retire, mademoiselle."

"You shall not!"

"I fear you find me poor company," urged Nanon, demurely.

"Poor or bad company are better than none----"

"Here in this huge chateau, perhaps; but one would not think so in the midst of a wood."

"Here I am left all day with no thoughts to rouse me but of that horrible old Comte d'Arcot, who is certainly coming from India, and to whom I am to be given like a box of rupees or a bale of sugar."

"It is a long way to India," said Nanon; "away round the end of the world at Cape Finisterre, and perhaps--perhaps----"

"Say on, Nanon."

"He may be drowned by the way."

"Ah! don't say so, Nanon!"

"Storms may arise, as they frequently do, and then ships are wrecked. There was M. la Perouse, who sailed away out into the wide ocean in the days of the late King Louis XV., and has never been heard of since. If stout young sailors drown, surely an old soldier like Comte d'Arcot may."

"I am almost wicked enough to wish it."

"I think I see something that will amuse you, mademoiselle."

"Mon Dieu! I am glad of that--what is it?"

"A party of soldiers."

"Where?--oh, I do so love to see soldiers!"

"'Tis a guard conveying prisoners to the Chateau de Trompette, and now they are about to cross the Garonne by boats."

The lady gazed from the window, and saw a mass of armed soldiers marching quickly down the opposite slope towards the river. As they issued from under the green vine trellis which shaded the roads for miles in every direction, she could distinctly discern the scarlet coats of the prisoners contrasting with the white of the French linesmen who formed the escort, and had their bayonets fixed.

"Red uniforms--they are British prisoners of war!" exclaimed Nanon; "oh, mademoiselle, we have gained a battle somewhere, and beaten the English, as we always do."

"Poor, poor fellows!" sighed Therese; "ah, Nanon, I feel sad when I see them, for M. le Baron says my mother was one of these people: yet it seems so strange that I should ever have had any other than Therese de St. Veran--dear Madame la Baronesse, whom the Blessed Virgin has taken to herself."

"See how they crowd into that little boat! Oh, mon Dieu! the brave reckless fellows--it will never hold them all!"

"And the stream is deep and rapid there."

"See--see, O Dieu! what has happened!" shrieked Nanon.

"Overturned--the boat has overturned."

"No--'tis a man overboard!--he is in the stream, and drowning!"

"Oh, I cannot look upon this!" said Therese, shrinking back and burying her face in her hands, while loud cries of alarm ascended from the river to the windows of the chateau; but Nanon, whose nervous temperament was less delicate than that of her mistress, continued to gaze steadily.

Two men were swimming or splashing in the water. One had fallen overboard; the other had plunged in to succour or save him; but both were swept away by the stream. In short, the former was soon drowned, and the latter rescued with the utmost difficulty. When dragged on shore he was quite insensible; but the officer in command of the escort, having no time to spare, desired four of his men to form a litter with their muskets, and bear him to the Chateau de Fontbrune, as the nearest place where the usual means might be adopted for the restoration of life.