Chapter 1
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THE LADY OF FORT ST. JOHN
by
MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
Author of "The Romance of Dollard"
Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin and Company The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1891 Copyright, 1891, By Mary Hartwell Catherwood. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
This book I dedicate
TO
TWO ACADIANS OF THE PRESENT DAY;
NATIVES OF NOVA SCOTIA WHO REPRESENT THE LEARNING AND GENTLE ATTAINMENTS OF THE NEW ORDER:
DR. JOHN-GEORGE BOURINOT, C. M. G., ETC. CLERK OF THE CANADIAN HOUSE OF COMMONS, OF OTTAWA; AND
DR. GEORGE STEWART, OF QUEBEC.
PREFACE.
How can we care for shadows and types, when we may go back through history and live again with people who actually lived?
Sitting on the height which is now topped by a Martello tower, at St. John in the maritime province of New Brunswick, I saw--not the opposite city, not the lovely bay; but this tragedy of Marie de la Tour, the tragedy "which recalls" (says the Abbé Casgrain in his "Pèlerinage au pays d'Evangéline") "the romances of Walter Scott, and forces one to own that reality is stranger than fiction."
In "Papers relating to the rival chiefs, D'Aulnay and La Tour," of the Massachusetts Historical Collection, vol. vii., may be found these prefatory remarks:--
"There is a romance of History as well as a History of Romance. To the former class belong many incidents in the early periods of New England and its adjacent colonies. The following papers ... refer to two persons, D'Aulnay and La Tour, ... individuals of respectable intellect and education, of noble families and large fortune. While the first was a zealous and efficient supporter of the Roman Church, the second was less so, from his frequent connection with others of a different faith. The scene of their ... prominent actions, their exhibition of various passions and talents, their conquests and defeats, their career and end, as exerting an influence on their associates as well as themselves, on other communities as well as their own--was laid in Nova Scotia. This phrase then comprised a territory vastly more extensive than it does now as a British Province. It embraced not only its present boundaries, which were long termed Acadia, but also about two thirds of the State of Maine."
It startles the modern reader, in examining documents of the French archives relating to the colonies, to come upon a letter from Louis XIII. to his beloved D'Aulnay de Charnisay, thanking that governor of Acadia for his good service at Fort St. John. Thus was that great race who first trod down the wilderness on this continent continually and cruelly hampered by the man who sat on the throne in France.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
Prelude. At the Head of the Bay of Fundy 1
I. An Acadian Fortress 13
II. Le Rossignol 21
III. Father Isaac Jogues 40
IV. The Widow Antonia 55
V. Jonas Bronck's Hand 64
VI. The Mending 73
VII. A Frontier Graveyard 82
VIII. Van Corlaer 96
IX. The Turret 107
X. An Acadian Poet 121
XI. Marguerite 133
XII. D'Aulnay 143
XIII. The Second Day 155
XIV. The Struggle between Powers 173
XV. A Soldier 191
XVI. The Camp 211
XVII. An Acadian Passover 227
XVIII. The Song of Edelwald 252
Postlude. A Tide-Creek 273
LADY OF FORT ST. JOHN.
PRELUDE.
AT THE HEAD OF THE BAY OF FUNDY.
The Atlantic rushed across a mile or two of misty beach, boring into all its channels in the neck of Acadia. Twilight and fog blurred the landscape, but the eye could trace a long swell of earth rising gradually from the bay, through marshes, to a summit with a small stockade on its southern slope. Sentinels pacing within the stockade felt the weird influence of that bald land. The guarded spot seemed an island in a sea of vapor and spring night was bringing darkness upon it.
The stockade inclosed a single building of rough logs clumsily put together, and chinked with the hard red soil. An unhewn wall divided the house into two rooms, and in one room were gathered less than a dozen men-at-arms. Their officer lay in one of the cupboard-like bunks, with his hands clasped under his head. Some of the men were already asleep; others sat by the hearth, rubbing their weapons or spreading some garment to dry. A door in the partition opened, and the wife of one of the men came from the inner room.
"Good-night, madame," she said.
"Good-night, Zélie," answered a voice within.
"If you have further need of me, you will call me, madame?"
"Assuredly. Get to your rest. To-morrow we may have stormy weather for our voyage home."
The woman closed the door, and the face of the one who had hearkened to her turned again to the fireplace. It was a room repeating the men's barrack in hewed floor, loophole windows, and rough joists.
This frontier outpost on the ridge since called Beausejour was merely a convenient halting-place for one of the lords of Acadia. It stood on a detached spot of his large seigniory, which he had received with other portions of western Acadia in exchange for his grant of Cape Sable.
Though in his early thirties, Charles de la Tour had seen long service in the New World. Seldom has a man from central France met the northern cold and sea air with so white a favor. His clean-shaven skin and the sunny undecided color of his hair were like a child's. Part of his armor had been unbuckled, and lay on the floor near him. He sat in a chair of twisted boughs, made of refuse from trees his men had dragged out of the neighboring forest for the building of the outpost. His wife sat on a pile of furs beside his knee. Her Huguenot cap lay on the shelf above the fire. She wore a black gown slashed in the sleeves with white, and a kerchief of lace pushed from her throat. Her black hair, which Zélie had braided, hung down in two ropes to the floor.
"How soon, monsieur," she asked, "can you return to Fort St. John?"
"With all speed possible, Marie. Soon, if we can work the miracle of moving a peace-loving man like Denys to action."
"Nicholas Denys ought to take part with you."
"Yet he will scarce do it."
"The king-favored governor of Acadia will some time turn and push him as he now pushes you."
"D'Aulnay hath me at sore straits," confessed La Tour, staring at the flame, "since he has cut off from me the help of the Bostonnais."
"They were easily cut off," said Marie. "Monsieur, those Huguenots of the colonies were never loving friends of ours. Their policy hath been to weaken this province by helping the quarrel betwixt D'Aulnay and you. Now that D'Aulnay has strength at court, and has persuaded the king to declare you an outlaw, the Bostonnais think it wise to withdraw their hired soldiers from you. We have not offended the Bostonnais as allies; we have only gone down in the world."
La Tour stirred uneasily.
"I dread that D'Aulnay may profit by this hasty journey I make to northern Acadia, and again attack the fort in my absence."
"He hath once found a woman there who could hold it," said Marie, checking a laugh.
La Tour moved his palm over her cheek. Within his mind the province of Acadia lay spread from Penobscot River to the Island of Sable, and from the southern tip of the peninsula now called Nova Scotia nearly to the mouth of the St. Lawrence. This domain had been parceled in grants: the north to Nicholas Denys; the centre and west to D'Aulnay de Charnisay; and the south, with posts on the western coast, to Charles de la Tour. Being Protestant in faith, La Tour had no influence at the court of Louis XIII. His grant had been confirmed to him from his father. He had held it against treason to France; and his loyal service, at least, was regarded until D'Aulnay de Charnisay became his enemy. Even in that year of grace 1645, before Acadia was diked by home-making Norman peasants or watered by their parting tears, contending forces had begun to trample it. Two feudal barons fought each other on the soil of the New World.
"All things failing me"--La Tour held out his wrists, and looked at them with a sharp smile.
"Let D'Aulnay shake a warrant, monsieur. He must needs have you before he can carry you in chains to France."
She seized La Tour's hands, with a swift impulse of atoning to them for the thought of such indignity, and kissed his wrists. He set his teeth on a trembling lip.
"I should be a worthless, aimless vagrant without you, Marie. You are young, and I give you fatigue and heart-sickening peril instead of jewels and merry company."
"The merriest company for us at present, monsieur, are the men of our honest garrison. If Edelwald, who came so lately, complains not of this New World life, I should endure it merrily enough. And you know I seldom now wear the jewels belonging to our house. Our chief jewel is buried in the ground."
She thought of a short grave wrapped in fogs near Fort St. John; of fair curls and sweet childish limbs, and a mouth shouting to send echoes through the river gorge; of scamperings on the flags of the hall; and of the erect and princely carriage of that diminutive presence the men had called "my little lord."
"But it is better for the boy that he died, Marie," murmured La Tour. "He has no part in these times. He might have survived us to see his inheritance stripped from him."
They were silent until Marie said, "You have a long march before you to-morrow, monsieur."
"Yes; we ought to throw ourselves into these mangers," said La Tour.
One wall was lined with bunks like those in the outer room. In the lower row travelers' preparations were already made for sleeping.
"I am yet of the mind, monsieur," observed Marie, "that you should have made this journey entirely by sea."
"It would cost me too much in time to round Cape Sable twice. Nicholas Denys can furnish ship as well as men, if he be so minded. My lieutenant in arms next to Edelwald," said La Tour, smiling over her, "my equal partner in troubles, and my lady of Fort St. John will stand for my honor and prosperity until I return."
Marie smiled back.
"D'Aulnay has a fair wife, and her husband is rich, and favored by the king, and has got himself made governor of Acadia in your stead. She sits in her own hall at Port Royal: but poor Madame D'Aulnay! She has not thee!"
At this La Tour laughed aloud. The ring of his voice, and the clang of his breastplate which fell over on the floor as he arose, woke an answering sound. It did not come from the outer room, where scarcely a voice stirred among the sleepy soldiery, but from the top row of bunks. Marie turned white at this child wail soothed by a woman's voice.
"What have we here?" exclaimed La Tour.
"Monsieur, it must be a baby!"
"Who has broken into this post with a baby? There may be men concealed overhead."
He grasped his pistols, but no men-at-arms appeared with the haggard woman who crept down from her hiding-place near the joists.
"Are you some spy sent from D'Aulnay?" inquired La Tour.
"Monsieur, how can you so accuse a poor outcast mother!" whispered Marie.
The door in the partition was flung wide, and the young officer appeared with men at his back.
"Have you found an ambush, Sieur Charles?"
"We have here a listener, Edelwald," replied La Tour, "and there may be more in the loft above."
Several men sprang up the bunks and moved some puncheons overhead. A light was raised under the dark roof canopy, but nothing rewarded its search. The much-bedraggled woman was young, with falling strands of silken hair, which she wound up with one hand while holding the baby. Marie took the poor wailer from her with a divine motion and carried it to the hearth.
"Who brought you here?" demanded La Tour of the girl.
She cowered before him, but answered nothing. Her presence seemed to him a sinister menace against even his obscurest holdings in Acadia. The stockade was easily entered, for La Tour was unable to maintain a garrison there. All that open country lay sodden with the breath of the sea. From whatever point she had approached, La Tour could scarcely believe her feet came tracking the moist red clay alone.
"Will you give no account of yourself?"
"You must answer monsieur," encouraged Marie, turning, from her cares with the child. It lay unwound from its misery on Marie's knees, watching the new ministering power with accepting eyes. Feminine and piteous as the girl was, her dense resistance to command could only vex a soldier.
"Put her under guard," he said to his officer.
"And Zélie must look to her comfort," added Marie.
"Whoever she may be," declared La Tour, "she hath heard too much to go free of this place. She must be sent in the ship to Fort St. John, and guarded there."
"What else could be done, indeed?" asked Marie. "The child would die of exposure here."
The prisoner was taken to the other hearth; and the young officer, as he closed the door, half smiled to hear his lady murmur over the wretched little outcast, as she always murmured to ailing creatures,--
"Let mother help you."
I.
AN ACADIAN FORTRESS.
At the mouth of the river St. John an island was lashed with drift, and tide-terraces alongshore recorded how furiously the sea had driven upon the land. There had been a two days' storm on the Bay of Fundy, subsiding to the clearest of cool spring evenings. An amber light lay on the visible world. The forest on the west was yet too bare of leaf buds to shut away sunset.
A month later the headlands would be lined distinctly against a blue and quickening sky by freshened air and light and herbage. Two centuries and a half later, long streaks of electric light would ripple on that surface, and great ships stand at ease there, and ferry-boats rush back and forth. But in this closing dusk it reflected only the gray and yellow vaporous breath of April, and shaggy edges of a wilderness. The high shores sank their shadows farther and farther from the water's edge.
Fort St. John was built upon a gradual ascent of rocks which rose to a small promontory on the south side of the river. There were four bastions guarded with cannon, the northeast bastion swelling above its fellows in a round turret topped with battlements. On this tower the flag of France hung down its staff against the evening sky, for there was scarcely any motion of the air. That coast lay silent like a pictured land, except a hint of falls above in the river. It was ebb tide; the current of the St. John set out toward the sea instead of rushing back on its own channel; and rocks swallowed at flood now broke the surface.
A plume of smoke sprang from one bastion, followed by the rolling thunder of a cannon shot. From a small ship in the bay a gun replied to this salute. She stood, gradually clear of a headland, her sails hanging torn and one mast broken, and sentinel and cannoneer in the bastion saw that she was lowering a boat. They called to people in the fortress, and all voices caught the news:--
"Madame has come at last!"
Life stirred through the entire inclosure with a jar of closing doors and running feet.
Though not a large fortification, St. John was well and compactly built of cemented stone. A row of hewed log-barracks stood against the southern wall, ample for all the troops La Tour had been able to muster in prosperous times. There was a stone vault for ammunition. A well, a mill and great stone oven, and a storehouse for beaver and other skins were between the barracks and the commandant's tower built massively into the northeast bastion. This structure gave La Tour the advantage of a high lookout, though it was much smaller than a castle he had formerly held at La Hève. The interior accommodated itself to such compactness, the lower floor having only one entrance, and windows looking into the area of the fort, while the second floor was lighted through deep loopholes.
A drum began to beat, a tall fellow gave the word of command, and the garrison of Fort St. John drew up in line facing the gate. A sentinel unbarred and set wide both inner and outer leaves, and a cheer burst through the deep-throated gateway, and was thrown back from the opposite shore, from forest and river windings. Madame La Tour, with two women attendants, was seen coming up from the water's edge, while two men pushed off with the boat.
She waved her hand in reply to the shout.
The tall soldier went down to meet her, and paused, bareheaded, to make the salutation of a subaltern to his military superior. She responded with the same grave courtesy. But as he drew nearer she noticed him whitening through the dusk.
"All has gone well, Klussman, at Fort St. John, since your lord left?"
"Madame," he said with a stammer, "the storm made us anxious about you."
"Have you seen D'Aulnay?"
"No, madame."
"You look haggard, Klussman."
"If I look haggard, madame, it must come from seeing two women follow you, when I should see only one."
He threw sharp glances behind her, as he took her hand to lead her up the steep path. Marie's attendant was carrying the baby, and she lifted it for him to look at, the hairs on her upper lip moved by a good-natured smile. Klussman's scowl darkened his mountain-born fairness.
"I would rather, indeed, be bringing more men to the fort instead of more women," said his lady, as they mounted the slope. "But this one might have perished in the stockade where we found her, and your lord not only misliked her, as you seem to do, but he held her in suspicion. In a manner, therefore, she is our prisoner, though never went prisoner so helplessly with her captors."
"Yes, any one might take such a creature," said Klussman.
"Those are no fit words to speak, Klussman."
He was unready with his apology, however, and tramped on without again looking behind. Madame La Tour glanced at her ship, which would have to wait for wind and tide to reach the usual mooring.
"Did you tell me you had news?" she was reminded to ask him.
"Madame, I have some news, but nothing serious."
"If it be nothing serious, I will have a change of garments and my supper before I hear it. We have had a hard voyage."
"Did my lord send any new orders?"
"None, save to keep this poor girl about the fort; and that is easily obeyed, since we can scarce do otherwise with her."
"I meant to ask in the first breath how he fared in the outset of his expedition."
"With a lowering sky overhead, and wet red clay under-foot. But I thanked Heaven, while we were tossing with a broken mast, that he was at least on firm land and moving to his expectations."
They entered the gateway, Madame La Tour's cheeks tingling richly from the effort of climbing. She saluted her garrison, and her garrison saluted her, each with a courteous pride in the other, born of the joint victory they had won over D'Aulnay de Charnisay when he attacked the fort. Not a man broke rank until she entered her hall. There was a tidiness about the inclosure peculiar to places inhabited by women. It added grace even to military appointments.
"You miss the swan, madame," noted Klussman. "Le Rossignol is out again."
"When did she go?"
"The night after my lord and you sailed northward. She goes each time in the night, madame."
"And she is still away?"
"Yes, madame."
"And this is all you know of her?"
"Yes, madame. She went, and has not yet come back."
"But she always comes back safely. Though I fear," said Madame La Tour on the threshold, "the poor maid will some time fall into harm."
He opened the door, and stood aside, saying under his breath, "I would call a creature like that a witch instead of a maid."
"I will send for you, Klussman, when I have refreshed myself."
"Yes, madame."
The other women filed past him, and entered behind his lady.
The Swiss soldier folded his arms, staring hard at that crouching vagrant brought from Beausejour. She had a covering over her face, and she held it close, crowding on the heels in front of her as if she dared not meet his eye.
II.
LE ROSSIGNOL.
A girlish woman was waiting for Marie within the hall, and the two exchanged kisses on the cheek with sedate and tender courtesy.
"Welcome home, madame."
"Home is more welcome to me because I find you in it, Antonia. Has anything unusual happened in the fortress while I have been setting monsieur on his way?"
"This morning, about dawn, I heard a great tramping of soldiers in the hall. One of the women told me prisoners had been brought in."
"Yes. The Swiss said he had news. And how has the Lady Dorinda fared?"
"Well, indeed. She has described to me three times the gorgeous pageant of her marriage."
They had reached the fireplace, and Marie laughed as she warmed her hands before a pile of melting logs.
"Give our sea-tossed bundle and its mother a warm seat, Zélie," she said to her woman.
The unknown girl was placed near the hearth corner, and constrained to take upon her knees an object which she held indifferently. Antonia's eyes rested on her, detecting her half-concealed face, with silent disapproval.
"We found a child on this expedition."
"It hath a stiffened look, like a papoose," observed Antonia. "Is it well in health?"
"No; poor baby. Attend to the child," said Marie sternly to the mother; and she added, "Zélie must go directly with me to my chests before she waits on me, and bring down garments for it to this hearth."
"Let me this time be your maid," said Antonia.
"You may come with me and be my resolution, Antonia; for I have to set about the unlocking of boxes which hold some sacred clothes."
"I never saw you lack courage, madame, since I have known you."
"Therein have I deceived you then," said Marie, throwing her cloak on Zélie's arm, "for I am a most cowardly creature in my affections, Madame Bronck."
They moved toward the stairs. Antonia was as perfect as a slim and blue-eyed stalk of flax. She wore the laced bodice and small cap of New Holland. Her exactly spoken French denoted all the neat appointments of her life. This Dutch gentlewoman had seen much of the world; having traveled from Fort Orange to New Amsterdam, from New Amsterdam to Boston, and from Boston with Madame La Tour to Fort St. John in Acadia. The three figures ascended in a line the narrow stairway which made a diagonal band from lower to upper corner of the remote hall end. Zélie walked last, carrying her lady's cloak. At the top a little light fell on them through a loophole.
"Was Mynheer La Tour in good heart for his march?" inquired Antonia, turning from the waifs brought back to the expedition itself.
"Stout-hearted enough; but the man to whom he goes is scarce to be counted on. We Protestant French are all held alien by Catholics of our blood. Edelwald will move Denys to take arms with us, if any one can. My lord depends much upon Edelwald. This instant," said Marie with a laugh, "I find the worst of all my discomforts these disordered garments."