Chapter 6

Keen stars held the sky at immeasurable heights. There was no mist. The chill wind had swept the river clear like a great path. Within reach of Jeannette's hand, but hidden from her, as most of us are hidden from one another, sat one more solitary than herself. He had not her robust body. Disease and anxiety had worn him away while he was hopelessly besieging Quebec. In that last hour before the 13th of September dawned, General Wolfe was groping down river toward one of the most desperate military attempts in the history of the world.

There was no sound but the rustle of the water, the stir of a foot as some standing man shifted his weight, and the light click of metal as guns in unsteady hands touched barrels. A voice, modulating rhythm which Jeannette could not understand, began to speak. General Wolfe was reciting an English poem. The strain upon his soul was more than he could bear, and he relieved it by those low-uttered rhymes. Jeannette did not know one word of English. The meaning which reached her was a dirge, but a noble dirge; the death hymn of a human being who has lived up to his capacities. She felt strangely influenced, as by the neighborhood of some large angel, and at the same time the tragedy of being alive overswept her. For one's duty is never all done; or when we have accomplished it with painstaking care, we are smitten through with finding that the greater things have passed us by.

The tide carried the boats near the great wall of rock. Woods made denser shade on the background of night. The cautious murmur of the speaker was cut short.

"Who goes there?" came the sharp challenge of a French sentry.

The soldiers were silent as dead men.

"France!" answered Colonel Fraser in the same language.

"Of what regiment?"

"The Queen's."

The sentry was satisfied. To the Queen's regiment, stationed at Cap Rouge, belonged the duty of convoying provisions down to Quebec. He did not further peril what he believed to be a French transport by asking for the password.

Jeannette breathed. So low had she sunk that she would have used her language herself to get the Highland colonel past danger.

It was fortunate for his general that he had the accent and readiness of a Frenchman. Again they were challenged. They could see another sentry running parallel with their course.

"Provision boats," this time answered the Highlander. "Don't make a noise. The English will hear us."

That hint was enough, for an English sloop of war lay within sound of their voices.

With the swift tide the boats shot around a headland, and here was a cove in the huge precipice, clothed with sere herbage and bushes and a few trees; steep, with the hint of a once-used path across it, but a little less perpendicular than the rest of the rock. No sentinel was stationed at this place.

The world was just beginning to come out of positive shadow into the indistinctness of dawn. Current and tide were so strong that the boats could not be steered directly to shore, but on the alluvial strip at the base of this cove they beached themselves with such success as they could. Twenty-four men sprung out and ran to the ascent. Their muskets were slung upon their backs. A humid look was coming upon the earth, and blurs were over the fading stars. The climbers separated, each making his own way from point to point of the slippery cliff, and swarms followed them as boat after boat discharged its load. The cove by which he breached the stronghold of this continent, and which was from that day to bear his name, cast its shadow on the gaunt, upturned face of Wolfe. He waited while the troops in whom he put his trust, with knotted muscles and panting breasts, lifted themselves to the top. No orders were spoken. Wolfe had issued instructions the night before, and England expected every man to do his duty.

There was not enough light to show how Canada was taken. Jeannette Descheneaux stepped on the sand, and the single thought which took shape in her mind was that she must scale that ascent if the English scaled it.

The hope of escape to her own people did not animate her labor. She had no hope of any sort. She felt only present necessity, which was to climb where the Highland officer climbed. He was in front of her, and took no notice of her until they reached a slippery wall where there were no bushes. There he turned and caught her by the wrist, drawing her up after him. Their faces came near together in the swimming vapors of dawn. He had the bright look of determination. His eyes shone. He was about to burst into the man's arena of glory. The woman, whom he drew up because she was a woman, and because he regretted having taken her prisoner, had the pallid look of a victim. Her tragic black eyes and brows, and the hairs clinging in untidy threads about her haggard cheeks instead of curling up with the damp as the Highlandman's fleece inclined to do, worked an instant's compassion in him. But his business was not the squiring of angular Frenchwomen. Shots were heard at the top of the rock, a trampling rush, and then exulting shouts. The English had taken Vergor's camp.

The hand was gone from Jeannette's wrist,--the hand which gave her such rapture and such pain by its firm fraternal grip. Colonel Fraser leaped to the plain, and was in the midst of the skirmish. Cannon spoke, like thunder rolling across one's head. A battery guarded by the sentinels they had passed was aroused, and must be silenced. The whole face of the cliff suddenly bloomed with scarlet uniforms. All the men remaining in the boats went up as fire sweeps when carried by the wind. Nothing could restrain them. They smelled gunpowder and heard the noise of victory, and would have stormed heaven at that instant. They surrounded Jeannette without seeing her, every man looking up to the heights of glory, and passed her in fierce and panting emulation.

Jeannette leaned against the rough side of Wolfe's Cove. On the inner surface of her eyelids she could see again the image of the Highlandman stooping to help her, his muscular legs and neck showing like a young god's in the early light. There she lost him, for he forgot her. The passion of women whom nature has made unfeminine, and who are too honest to stoop to arts, is one of the tragedies of the world.

Daylight broke reluctantly, with clouds mustering from the inverted deep of the sky. A few drops of rain sprinkled the British uniforms as battalions were formed. The battery which gave the first intimation of danger to the French general, on the other side of Quebec, had been taken and silenced. Wolfe and his officers hurried up the high plateau and chose their ground. Then the troops advanced, marching by files, Highland bagpipes screaming and droning, the earth reverberating with a measured tread. As they moved toward Quebec they wheeled to form their line of battle, in ranks three deep, and stretched across the plain. The city was scarcely a mile away, but a ridge of ground still hid it from sight.

From her hiding-place in one of the empty houses behind Vergor's tents, Jeannette Descheneaux watched the scarlet backs and the tartans of the Highlanders grow smaller. She could also see the prisoners that were taken standing under guard. As for herself, she felt that she had no longer a visible presence, so easy had it been for her to move among swarms of men and escape in darkness. She never had favored her body with soft usage, but it trembled now in every part from muscular strain. She was probably cold and hungry, but her poignant sensation was that she had no friends. It did not matter to Jeannette that history was being made before her, and one of the great battles of the world was about to be fought. It only mattered that she should discern the Fraser plaid as far as eye could follow it. There is no more piteous thing than for one human being to be overpowered by the god in another.

She sat on the ground in the unfloored hut, watching through broken chinking. There was a back door as well as a front door, hung on wooden hinges, and she had pinned the front door as she came in. The opening of the back door made Jeannette turn her head, though with little interest in the comer. It was a boy, with a streak of blood down his face and neck, and his clothes stained by the weather. He had no hat on, and one of his shoes was missing. He put himself at Jeannette's side without any hesitation, and joined her watch through the broken chinking. A tear and a drop of scarlet raced down his cheek, uniting as they dripped from his chin.

"Have you been wounded?" inquired Jeannette.

"It isn't the wound," he answered, "but that Captain Vergor has let them take the heights. I heard something myself, and tried to wake him. The pig turned over and went to sleep again."

"Let me tie it up," said Jeannette.

"He is shot in the heel and taken prisoner. I wish he had been shot in the heart. He hopped out of bed and ran away when the English fired on his tent. I have been trying to get past their lines to run to General Montcalm; but they are everywhere," declared the boy, his chin shaking and his breast swelling with grief.

Jeannette turned her back on him, and found some linen about her person which she could tear. She made a bandage for his head. It comforted her to take hold of the little fellow and part his clotted hair.

"The skin of my head is torn," he admitted, while suffering the attempted surgery. "If I had been taller, the bullet might have killed me; and I would rather be killed than see the English on this rock, marching to take Quebec. What will my father say? I am ashamed to look him in the face and own I slept in the camp of Vergor last night. The Le Moynes and Repentignys never let enemies get past them before. And I knew that man was not keeping watch; he did not set any sentry."

"Is it painful?" she inquired, wiping the bloody cut, which still welled forth along its channel.

The boy lifted his brimming eyes, and answered her from his deeper hurt:--

"I don't know what to do. I think my father would make for General Montcalm's camp if he were alone and could not attack the enemy's rear; for something ought to be done as quickly as possible."

Jeannette bandaged his head, the rain spattering through the broken log house upon them both.

"Who brought you here?" inquired Jacques. "There was nobody in these houses last night, for I searched them myself."

"I hid here before daybreak," she answered briefly.

"But if you knew the English were coming, why did you not give the alarm?"

"I was their prisoner."

"And where will you go now?"

She looked towards the Plains of Abraham and said nothing. The open chink showed Wolfe's six battalions of scarlet lines moving forward or pausing, and the ridge above them thronging with white uniforms.

"If you will trust yourself to me, mamoiselle," proposed Jacques, who considered that it was not the part of a soldier or a gentleman to leave any woman alone in this hut to take the chances of battle, and particularly a woman who had bound up his head, "I will do my best to help you inside the French lines."

The singular woman did not reply to him, but continued looking through the chink. Skirmishers were out. Puffs of smoke from cornfields and knolls showed where Canadians and Indians hid, creeping to the flank of the enemy.

Jacques stooped down himself, and struck his hands together at these sights.

"Monsieur de Montcalm is awake, mademoiselle! And see our sharpshooters picking them off! We can easily run inside the French lines now. These English will soon be tumbled back the way they came up."

In another hour the group of houses was a roaring furnace. A detachment of English light infantry, wheeled to drive out the bushfighters, had lost and retaken it many times, and neither party gave up the ready fortress until it was set on fire. Crumbling red logs hissed in the thin rain, and smoke spread from them across the sodden ground where Wolfe moved. The sick man had become an invincible spirit. He flew along the ranks, waving his sword, the sleeve falling away from his thin arm. The great soldier had thrown himself on this venture without a chance of retreat, but every risk had been thought of and met. He had a battalion guarding the landing. He had a force far in the rear to watch the motions of the French at Cap Rouge. By the arrangement of his front he had taken precautions against being outflanked. And he knew his army was with him to a man. But Montcalm rode up to meet him hampered by insubordinate confusion.

Jeannette Descheneaux, carried along, with the boy, by Canadians and Indians from the English rear to the Côte Ste. Geneviève, lay dazed in the withered grass during the greater part of the action which decided her people's hold on the New World. The ground resounded like a drum with measured treading. The blaze and crash of musketry and cannon blinded and deafened her; but when she lifted her head from the shock of the first charge, the most instantaneous and shameful panic that ever seized a French army had already begun. The skirmishers in the bushes could not understand it. Smoke parted, and she saw the white-and-gold French general trying to drive his men back. But they evaded the horses of officers.

Jacques rose, with the Canadians and Indians, to his knees. He had a musket. Jeannette rose, also, as the Highlanders came sweeping on in pursuit. She had scarcely been a woman to the bushfighters. They were too eager in their aim to glance aside at a rawboned camp follower in a wet shawl. Neither did the Highlanders distinguish from other Canadian heads the one with a woman's braids and a faint shadowing of hair at the corners of the mouth. They came on without suspecting an ambush, and she heard their strange cries--"Cath-Shairm!" and "Caisteal Duna!"--when the shock of a volley stopped the streaming tartans. She saw the play of surprise and fury in those mountaineer faces. They threw down their muskets, and turned on the ambushed Canadians, short sword in hand.

Never did knight receive the blow of the accolade as that crouching woman took a Highland knife in her breast. For one breath she grasped the back of it with both hands, and her rapt eyes met the horrified eyes of Colonel Fraser. He withdrew the weapon, standing defenseless, and a ball struck him, cutting the blood across his arm, and again he was lost in the fury of battle, while Jeannette felt herself dragged down the slope.

She resisted. She heard a boy's voice pleading with her, but she got up and tried to go back to the spot from which she had been dragged. The Canadians and Indians were holding their ground. She heard their muskets, but they were far behind her, and the great rout caught her and whirled her. Officers on their horses were borne struggling along in it. She fell down and was trampled on, but something helped her up.

The flood of men poured along the front of the ramparts and down to the bridge of boats on the St. Charles, or into the city walls through the St. Louis and St. John gates.

To Jeannette the world was far away. Yet she found it once more close at hand, as she stood with her back against the lofty inner wall. The mad crowd had passed, and gone shouting down the narrow streets. But the St. Louis gate was still choked with fugitives when Montcalm appeared, reeling on his horse, supported by a soldier on each side. His white uniform was stained on the breast, and blood dripped from the saddle. Jeannette heard the piercing cry of a little girl: "Oh heavens! Oh heavens! The marquis is killed!" And she heard the fainting general gasp, "It is nothing, it is nothing. Don't be troubled for me, my children."

She knew how he felt as he was led by. The indistinctness of the opposite wall, which widened from the gate, was astonishing. And she was troubled by the same little boy whose head she had tied up in the log house. Jeannette looked obliquely down at him as she braced herself with chill fingers, and discerned that he was claimed by a weeping little girl to whom he yet paid no attention.

"Let me help you, mademoiselle," he urged, troubling her.

"Go away," said Jeannette.

"But, mademoiselle, you have been badly hurt."

"Go away," said Jeannette, and her limbs began to settle. She thought of smiling at the children, but her features were already cast. The English child held her on one side, and the French child on the other, as she collapsed in a sitting posture. Tender nuns, going from friend to foe, would find this stoical face against the wall. It was no strange sight then. Canada was taken.

Men with bloody faces were already running with barricades for the gates. Wailing for Montcalm could be heard.

The boy put his arm abound the girl and turned her eyes away. They ran together up towards the citadel: England and France with their hands locked; young Canada weeping, but having a future.

THE WINDIGO.

The cry of those rapids in Ste. Marie's River called the Sault could be heard at all hours through the settlement on the rising shore and into the forest beyond. Three quarters of a mile of frothing billows, like some colossal instrument, never ceased playing music down an inclined channel until the trance of winter locked it up. At August dusk, when all that shaggy world was sinking to darkness, the gushing monotone became very distinct.

Louizon Cadotte and his father's young seignior, Jacques de Repentigny, stepped from a birch canoe on the bank near the fort, two Chippewa Indians following with their game. Hunting furnished no small addition to the food supply of the settlement, for the English conquest had brought about scarcity at this as well as other Western posts. Peace was declared in Europe; but soldiers on the frontier, waiting orders to march out at any time, were not abundantly supplied with stores, and they let season after season go by, reluctant to put in harvests which might be reaped by their successors.

Jacques was barely nineteen, and Louizon was considerably older. But the Repentignys had gone back to France after the fall of Quebec; and five years of European life had matured the young seignior as decades of border experience would never mature his half-breed tenant. Yet Louizon was a fine dark-skinned fellow, well made for one of short stature. He trod close by his tall superior with visible fondness; enjoying this spectacle of a man the like of whom he had not seen on the frontier.

Jacques looked back, as he walked, at the long zigzag shadows on the river. Forest fire in the distance showed a leaning column, black at base, pearl-colored in the primrose air, like smoke from some gigantic altar. He had seen islands in the lake under which the sky seemed to slip, throwing them above the horizon in mirage, and trees standing like detached bushes on a world rim of water. The Ste. Marie River was a beautiful light green in color, and sunset and twilight played upon it all the miracles of change.

"I wish my father had never left this country," said young Repentigny, feeling that spell cast by the wilderness. "Here is his place. He should have withdrawn to the Sault, and accommodated himself to the English, instead of returning to France. The service in other parts of the world does not suit him. Plenty of good men have held to Canada and their honor also."

"Yes, yes," assented Louizon. "The English cannot be got rid of. For my part, I shall be glad when this post changes hands. I am sick of our officers."

He scowled with open resentment. The seigniory house faced the parade ground, and they could see against its large low mass, lounging on the gallery, one each side of a window, the white uniforms of two French soldiers. The window sashes, screened by small curtains across the middle, were swung into the room; and Louizon's wife leaned on her elbows across the sill, the rosy atmosphere of his own fire projecting to view every ring of her bewitching hair, and even her long eyelashes as she turned her gaze from side to side.

It was so dark, and the object of their regard was so bright, that these buzzing bees of Frenchmen did not see her husband until he ran up the steps facing them. Both of them greeted him heartily. He felt it a peculiar indignity that his wife's danglers forever passed their good-will on to him; and he left them in the common hall, with his father and the young seignior, and the two or three Indians who congregated there every evening to ask for presents or to smoke.

Louizon's wife met him in the middle of the broad low apartment where he had been so proud to introduce her as a bride, and turned her cheek to be kissed. She was not fond of having her lips touched. Her hazel-colored hair was perfumed. She was so supple and exquisite, so dimpled and aggravating, that the Chippewa in him longed to take her by the scalp-lock of her light head; but the Frenchman bestowed the salute. Louizon had married the prettiest woman in the settlement. Life overflowed in her, so that her presence spread animation. Both men and women paid homage to her. Her very mother-in-law was her slave. And this was the stranger spectacle because Madame Cadotte the senior, though born a Chippewa, did not easily make herself subservient to anybody.

The time had been when Louizon was proud of any notice this siren conferred on him. But so exacting and tyrannical is the nature of man that when he got her he wanted to keep her entirely to himself. From his Chippewa mother, who, though treated with deference, had never dared to disobey his father, he inherited a fond and jealous nature; and his beautiful wife chafed it. Young Repentigny saw that she was like a Parisian. But Louizon felt that she was a spirit too fine and tantalizing for him to grasp, and she had him in her power.

He hung his powderhorn behind the door, and stepped upon a stool to put his gun on its rack above the fireplace. The fire showed his round figure, short but well muscled, and the boyish petulance of his shaven lip. The sun shone hot upon the Sault of an August noon, but morning and night were cool, and a blaze was usually kept in the chimney.

"You found plenty of game?" said his wife; and it was one of this woman's wickedest charms that she could be so interested in her companion of the moment.

"Yes," he answered, scowling more, and thinking of the brace on the gallery whom he had not shot, but wished to.

She laughed at him.

"Archange Cadotte," said Louizon, turning around on the stool before he descended; and she spread out her skirts, taking two dancing steps to indicate that she heard him. "How long am I to be mortified by your conduct to Monsieur de Repentigny?"

"Oh--Monsieur de Repentigny. It is now that boy from France, at whom I have never looked."

"The man I would have you look at, madame, you scarcely notice."

"Why should I notice him? He pays little attention to me."

"Ah, he is not one of your danglers, madame. He would not look at another man's wife. He has had trouble himself."

"So will you have if you scorch the backs of your legs," observed Archange.

Louizon stood obstinately on the stool and ignored the heat. He was in the act of stepping down, but he checked it as she spoke.

"Monsieur de Repentigny came back to this country to marry a young English lady of Quebec. He thinks of her, not of you."

"I am sure he is welcome," murmured Archange. "But it seems the young English lady prefers to stay in Quebec."

"She never looked at any other man, madame. She is dead."

"No wonder. I should be dead, too, if I had looked at one stupid man all my life."

Louizon's eyes sparkled. "Madame, I will have you know that the seignior of Sault Ste. Marie is entitled to your homage."

"Monsieur, I will have you know that I do not pay homage to any man."

"You, Archange Cadotte? You are in love with a new man every day."

"Not in the least, monsieur. I only desire to have a new man in love with me every day."