Chapter 5

"Yes, mynheer. Yes, mynheer."

IX.

THE TURRET.

While Antonia continued her conference on the stone steps leading to the wall, the dwarf was mounting a flight which led to the turret. Klussman walked ahead, carrying her instrument and her ration for the day. There was not a loophole to throw glimmers upon the blackness. The ascent wound about as if carved through the heart of rock, and the tall Swiss stooped to its slope. Such a mountain of unseen terraces made Le Rossignol pant. She lifted herself from step to step, growing dizzy with the turns and holding to the wall.

"Wait for me," she called up the gloom, and shook her fist at the unseen soldier because he gave her no reply. Klussman stepped out on the turret floor and set down his load. Stretching himself from the cramp of the stairway, he stood looking over bay and forest and coast. The battlemented wall was quite as high as his shoulder. One small cannon, brought up with enormous labor, was here trained through an embrasure to command the mouth of the river.

Le Rossignol emerged into the unroofed light and the sea air like a potentate, dragging a warm furred robe. She had fastened great hoops of gold in her ears, and they gave her peaked face a barbaric look. It was her policy to go in state to punishment. The little sovereign stalked with long steps and threw out her arm in command.

"Monsieur the Swiss, stoop over and give me thy back until I mount the battlement."

Klussman, full of his own bitter and confused thinking, looked blankly down at her heated countenance.

"Give me thy back!" sang the dwarf in the melodious scream which anger never made harsh in her.

"Faith, yes, and my entire carcass," muttered the Swiss. "I care not what becomes of me now."

"Madame Marie sent you to escort me to this turret. You have the honor because you are an officer. Now do your duty as lieutenant of this fortress, and make me a comfortable prisoner."

Klussman set his hands upon his sides and smiled down upon his prisoner.

"What is your will?"

"Twice have I told you to stoop and give me your back, that I may mount from the cannon to the battlements. Am I to be shut up here without an outlook?"

"May I be hanged if I do that," exclaimed Klussman. "Make a footstool of myself for a spoiled puppet like thee?"

Le Rossignol ran towards him and kicked his boots with the heel of her moccasin. The Swiss, remonstrating and laughing, moved back before her.

"Have some care--thou wilt break a deer-hoof on my stout leather. And why mount the battlements? A fall from this turret edge would spread thee out like a raindrop. Though the fewer women there are in the world the better," added Klussman bitterly.

"Presume not to call me a woman!"

"Why, what art thou?"

"I am the nightingale."

"By thy red head thou art the woodpecker. Here is my back, clatterbill. Why should I not crawl the ground to be walked over? I have been worse used than that."

He grinned fiercely as he bent down with his hands upon his knees. Le Rossignol mounted the cannon, and with a couple of light bounds, making him a perch midway, reached an embrasure and sat arranging her robes.

"Now you may hand me my clavier," she said, "and then you shall have my thanks and my pardon."

The Swiss handed her the instrument. His contempt was ruder than he knew. Le Rossignol pulled her gull-skin cap well down upon her ears, for though the day was now bright overhead, a raw wind came across the bay. She leaned over and looked down into the fortress to call her swan. The cook was drawing water from the well, and that soft sad note lifted his eyes to the turret. Le Rossignol squinted at him, and the man went into the barracks and told his wife that he felt shooting pains in his limbs that instant.

"Come hither, gentle Swiss," said the dwarf striking the plectrum into her mandolin strings, "and I will reward thee for thy back and all thy courtly services."

Klussman stepped to the wall and looked with her into the fort.

"Take that sweet sight for my thanks," said Le Rossignol, pointing to Marguerite below. The miserable girl had come out of the barracks and was sitting in the sun beside the oven. She rested her head against it and met the sky light with half-shut eyes, lovely in silken hair and pallid flesh through all her sullenness and dejection. As Klussman saw her he uttered an oath under his breath, which the dwarf's hand on the mandolin echoed with a bang. He turned his back on the sight and betook himself to the stairway, the dwarf's laughter following him. She felt high in the world and played with a good spirit. The sentinel below heard her, but he took care to keep a steady and level eye. When the swan rose past him, spreading its wings almost against his face, he prudently trod the wall without turning his head.

"Hé, Shubenacadie," said the human morsel to her familiar as the wide wings composed themselves beside her. "We had scarce said good-morning when I must be haled before my lady for that box of the Hollandaise." The swan was a huge white creature of his kind, with fiery eyes. There was satin texture delightful to the touch in the firm and glistening plumage of his swelling breast. Le Rossignol smoothed it.

"They have few trinkets in that barbarous Fort Orange in the west. I detest that Hollandaise more since she carries about such a casket. Let us be cozy. Kiss me, Shubenacadie."

The swan's attachment and obedience to her were struggling against some swan-like instinct which made him rear a lofty head and twist it riverward.

"Kiss me, I say! Shall I have to beat thee over the head with my clavier to teach thee manners?"

Shubenacadie darted his snake neck downward and touched bills with her. She patted his coral nostrils.

"Not yet. Before you take to the water we must have some talk. I am shut up here to stay this whole day. And for what? Not because of the casket, for they know not what I have done with it. But because thou and I sometimes go out without the password. Stick out thy toes and let me polish them."

Shubenacadie resisted this mandate, and his autocrat promptly dragged one foot from under him, causing him to topple on the parapet. He hissed at her. Le Rossignol looked up at the threatening flat head and hissed back.

"You are as bad as that Swiss," she laughed. "I will put a yoke on you. I will tie you to the settle in the hall. Why have all man creatures such tempers? Thank heaven I was not born to hose and doublet. Never did I see a mild man in my life except Edelwald. As for this Swiss, I am done with him. He hath a wife, Shubenacadie. She sits down there by the oven now; a miserable thing turned off by D'Aulnay de Charnisay. Have I told thee the Swiss had a soul above a common soldier and I picked him out to pay court to me? Beat me for it. Pull the red hair he condemned. I would have had him sighing for me that I might pity him. The populace is beneath us, but we must amuse ourselves. Beat me, I demand. Punish me well for abasing my eyes to that Swiss."

Shubenacadie understood the challenge and the tone. He was used to rendering such service when his mistress repented of her sins. Yet he gave his tail feathers a slight flirt and quavered some guttural to sustain his part in the conversation, and to beg that he might be excused from holding the sword this time. As she continued to prod him, however, he struck her with his beak. Le Rossignol was human in never finding herself able to bear the punishment she courted. She flew at the swan, he spread his wings for ardent warfare, and they both dropped to the stone floor in a whirlwind of mandolin, arms, and feathers. The dwarf kept her hold on him until he cowered and lay with his neck along the pavement.

"Thou art a Turk, a rascal, a horned beast!" panted Le Rossignol. Shubenacadie quavered plaintively, and all her wrath was gone. She spread out one of his wings and smoothed the plumes. She nursed his head in her lap and sung to him. Two of his feathers, plucked out in the contest, she put in her bosom. He flirted his tail and gathered himself again to his feet, and she broke her loaf and fed him and poured water into her palm for his bill.

Le Rossignol esteemed the military dignity given to her imprisonment, and she was a hardy midget who could bear untold exposure when wandering at her own will. She therefore received with disgust her lady's summons to come down long before the day was spent, the messenger being only Zélie.

"Ah--h, mademoiselle," warned the maid, stumping ponderously out of the stone stairway, "are you about to mount that swan again?"

"Who has ever seen me mount him?"

"I would be sworn there are a dozen men in the fort that have."

"But you never have."

"No. I have been absent with my lady."

"Well, you shall see me now."

The dwarf flung herself on Shubenacadie's back, and thrust her feet down under his wings. He began to rise, and expanded, stretching his neck forward, and Zélie uttered a yell of terror. The weird little woman leaped off and turned her laughing beak toward the terrified maid. Her ear-hoops swung as she rolled her mocking head.

"Oh, if it frightens you I will not ride to-day," she said. Shubenacadie sailed across the battlements, and though they could no longer see him they knew he had taken to the river.

"If I tell my lady this," shivered Zélie, "she will never let you out of the turret. And she but this moment sent me to call you down out of the chill east wind."

"Tell Madame Marie," urged the dwarf insolently.

"And do you ride that way over bush and brier, through mirk and daylight?"

"I was at Penobscot this week," answered Le Rossignol.

Zélie gazed with a bristling of even the hairs upon her lip.

"It goeth past belief," she observed, setting her hands upon her sides. "And the swan, what else can he do besides carry thee like a dragon?"

"He sings to me," boldly asserted Le Rossignol. "And many a good bit of advice have I taken from his bill."

"It would be well if he turned his mind more to thinking and less to roving," respectfully hinted Zélie. "I will go before you downstairs and leave the key in the turret door," she suggested.

"Take up these things and go when you please, and mind that I do not hear my clavier striking the wall."

"Have you not felt the wind in this open donjon?"

"The wind and I take no note of each other," answered the dwarf, lifting her chilled nose skyward. "But the cold water and bread have worked me most discomfort in this imprisonment. Go down and tell the cook for me that he is to make a hot bowl of the broth I like."

"He will do it," said Zélie.

"Yes, he will do it," said the dwarf, "and the sooner he does it the better."

"Will you eat it in the hall?"

"I will eat it wherever Madame Marie is."

"But that you cannot do. There is great business going forward and she is shut with Madame Bronck in our other lady's room."

"I like it when you presume to know better than I do what is going forward in this fort!" exclaimed the dwarf jealously, a flush mounting her slender cheeks.

"I should best know what has happened since you left the hall," contended Zélie.

"Do you think so, poor heavy-foot? You can only hearken to what is whispered past your ear; but I can sit here on the battlements and read all the secrets below me."

"Can you, Mademoiselle Nightingale? For instance, where is Madame Bronck's box?"

The maid drew a deep breath at her own daring.

"It is not about Madame Bronck's box that they confer. It is about the marriage of the Hollandaise," answered Le Rossignol with a bold guess. "I could have told you that when you entered the turret."

Zélie experienced a chill through her flesh which was not caused by the damp breath of Fundy Bay.

"How doth she find out things done behind her back--this clever little witch? And perhaps you will name the bridegroom, mademoiselle?"

"Who could that be except the big Hollandais who hath come out of the west after her? Could she marry a priest or a common soldier?"

"That is true," admitted Zélie, feeling her superstition allayed.

"There must be as few women as trinkets in that wilderness Fort of Orange from which he came," added the dwarf.

"Why?" inquired Zélie, wrinkling her nose and squinting in the sunlight.

But Le Rossignol took no further trouble than to give her a look of contempt, and lifted the furred garment to descend the stairs.

X.

AN ACADIAN POET.

"The woman who dispenses with any dignity which should attend her marriage, doth cheapen herself to her husband," said Lady Dorinda to Antonia Bronck, leaning back in the easiest chair of the fortress. It was large and stiff, but filled with cushions. Lady Dorinda's chamber was the most comfortable one in Fort St. John. It was over the front of the great hall, and was intended for a drawing-room, being spacious, well warmed by a fireplace and lighted by windows looking into the fort. A stately curtained bed, a toilet table with swinging mirror, bearing many of the ornaments and beauty-helpers of an elderly belle, and countless accumulations which spoke her former state in the world, made this an English bower in a French fort.

Her dull yellow hair was coifed in the fashion of the early Stuarts. She held a hand-screen betwixt her face and the fire, but the flush which touched its usual sallowness was not caused by heat. A wedding was a diversion of her exile which Lady Dorinda had never hoped for. There had been some mating in the fort below among soldiers and peasant women, to which she did not lower her thoughts. The noise of resulting merrymakings sufficiently sought out and annoyed her ear. But the wedding of the guest to a man of consequence in the Dutch colony was something to which she might unbend herself.

Antonia had been brought against her will to consult with this faded authority by Marie, who sat by, supporting her through the ordeal. There was never any familiar chat between the lady of the fort and the widow of Claude La Tour. Neither forgot their first meeting behind cannon, and the tragedy of a divided house. Lady Dorinda lived in Acadia because she could not well live elsewhere. And she secretly nursed a hope that in her day the province would fall into English hands, her knight be vindicated, and his son obliged to submit to a power he had defied to the extremity of warring with a father.

If the two women had no love for each other they at least stinted no ceremony. Marie presented the smallest surface of herself to her mother-in-law. It is true they had been of the same household only a few months; but months and years are the same betwixt us and the people who solve not for us this riddle of ourselves. Antonia thought little of Lady Dorinda's opinions, but her saying about the dignity of marriage rites had the force of unexpected truth. Arendt Van Corlaer had used up his patience in courtship. He was now bent on wedding Antonia and setting out to Montreal without the loss of another day. His route was planned up St. John River and across-country to the St. Lawrence.

"I would therefore give all possible state to this occasion," added Lady Dorinda. "Did you not tell me this Sir Van Corlaer is an officer?"

"He is the real patroon of Fort Orange, my lady."

"He should then have military honors paid him on his marriage," observed Lady Dorinda, to whom patroon suggested the barbarous but splendid vision of a western pasha. "Salutes should be fired and drums sounded. In thus recommending I hope I have not overstepped my authority, Madame La Tour?"

"Certainly not, your ladyship," murmured Marie.

"The marriage ceremony hath length and solemnity, but I would have it longer, and more solemn. A woman in giving herself away should greatly impress a man with the charge he hath undertaken. There be not many bridegrooms like Sir Claude de la Tour, who fasted an entire day before his marriage with me. The ceremonial of that marriage hath scarce been forgotten at court to this hour."

Lady Dorinda folded her hands and closed her eyes to sigh. Her voice had rolled the last words in her throat. At such moments she looked very superior. Her double chins and dull light eyes held great reserves of self-respect. A small box of aromatic seeds lay in her lap, and as her hands encountered it she was reminded to put a seed in her mouth and find pensive comfort in chewing it.

"Edelwald should be here to give the proper grace to this event," added Lady Dorinda.

"I thought of him," said Marie. "Edelwald has so much the nature of a troubadour."

"The studies which adorn a man were well thought of when I was at court," said Lady Dorinda. "Edelwald is really thrown away upon this wilderness."

Antonia was too intent on Van Corlaer and his fell determination to turn her mind upon Edelwald. She had, indeed, seen very little of La Tour's second in command, for he had been away with La Tour on expeditions much of the time she had spent in Acadia. Edelwald was the only man of the fortress called by his baptismal name, yet it was spoken with respect and deference like a title. He was of the family of De Born. In an age when religion made political ties stronger than the ties of nature, the La Tours and De Borns had fought side by side through Huguenot wars. When a later generation of La Tours were struggling for foothold in the New World, it was not strange that a son of the De Borns, full of songcraft and spirit inherited from some troubadour soldier of the twelfth century, should turn his face to the same land. From his mother Edelwald took Norman and Saxon strains of blood. He had left France the previous year and made his voyage in the same ship with Madame La Tour and her mother-in-law, and he was now La Tour's trusted officer.

Edelwald could take up any stringed instrument, strike melody out of it and sing songs he had himself made. But such pastimes were brief in Acadia. There was other business on the frontier; sailing, hunting, fighting, persuading or defying men, exploring unyielded depths of wilderness. The joyous science had long fallen out of practice. But while the grim and bloody records of our early colonies were being made, here was an unrecorded poet in Acadia. La Tour held this gift of Edelwald's in light esteem. He was a man so full of action and of schemes for establishing power that he touched only the martial side of the young man's nature, though in that contact was strong comradeship. Every inmate of the fortress liked Edelwald. He mediated between commandant and men, and jealousies and bickerings disappeared before him.

"It would be better," murmured Antonia, breaking the stately silence by Lady Dorinda's fire, "if Mynheer Van Corlaer journeyed on to Montreal and returned here before any marriage takes place."

"Think of the labor you will thereby put upon him," exclaimed Marie. "I speak for Monsieur Corlaer and not for myself," she added; "for by that delay I should happily keep you until summer. Besides, the priest we have here with us himself admits that the town of Montreal is little to look upon. Ville-Marie though it be named by the papists, what is it but a cluster of huts in the wilderness?"

"I was six months preparing to be wedded to Mynheer Bronck," remembered Antonia.

"And will Monsieur Corlaer return here from Montreal?"

"No, madame. He will carry me with him."

"I like him better for it," said Marie smiling, "though it pleases me ill enough."

This was Antonia's last weak revolt against the determination of her stalwart suitor. She gained a three days' delay from him by submitting to the other conditions of his journey. It amused Marie to note the varying phases of Antonia's surrender. She was already resigned to the loss of Jonas Bronck's hand, and in no slavish terror of the consequences.

"And it is true I am provided with all I need," she mused on, in the line of removing objections from Van Corlaer's way.

"I have often promised to show you the gown I wore at my marriage," said Lady Dorinda, roused from her rumination on the aromatic seed, and leaving her chair to pay this gracious compliment to the Dutch widow. "It hath faded, and been discolored by the sea air, but you will not find a prettier fashion of lace in anything made since."

She had no maid, for the women of the garrison had all been found too rude for her service. When she first came to Acadia with Claude La Tour, an English gentlewoman gladly waited on her. But now only Zélie gave her constrained and half-hearted attention, rating her as "my other lady," and plainly deploring her presence. Lady Dorinda had one large box bound with iron, hidden in a nook beyond her bed. She took the key from its usual secret place and busied herself opening the box. Marie and Antonia heard her speak a word of surprise, but the curtained bed hid her from them. The raised lid of her box let out sweet scents of England, but that breath of old times, though she always dreaded its sweep across her resignation, had not made her cry out.

She found a strange small coffer on the top of her own treasures. Its key stood in its lock, and Lady Dorinda at once turned that key, as a duty to herself. Antonia's loss of some precious casket had been proclaimed to her, but she recollected that in her second thought, when she had already laid aside the napkin and discovered Jonas Bronck's hand. Lady Dorinda snapped the lid down and closed her own chest. She rose from her place and stretched both arms toward the couch at the foot of her bed. Having reached the couch she sank down, her head meeting a cushion with nice calculation.

"I am about to faint," said Lady Dorinda, and having parted with her breath in one puff, she sincerely lost consciousness and lay in extreme calm, her clay-colored eyelids shut on a clay-colored face. Marie was used to these quiet lapses of her mother-in-law, for Lady Dorinda had not been a good sailor on their voyage; but Antonia was alarmed. They bathed her face with a few inches of towel dipped in scented water, and rubbed her hands and fanned her. She caught life in again with a gasp, and opened her eyes to their young faces.

"Your ladyship attempted too much in opening that box," said Marie. "It is not good to go back through old sorrows."

"Madame La Tour may be right," gasped Claude's widow.

"I could not now look at that gown, Lady Dorinda," protested Antonia. When her ladyship was able to sit again by the fire, she asked both of them to leave her; and being alone, she quieted her anxiety about her treasures in the chest by a forced search. Nothing had been disturbed. The coals burned down red while Lady Dorinda tried to understand this happening. She dismissed all thought of the casket's belonging to Antonia Bronck;--a mild and stiff-mannered young provincial who had nothing to do with ghastly tokens of war. That hand was a political hint, mysteriously sent to Lady Dorinda and embodying some important message.

D'Aulnay de Charnisay may have sent it as a pledge that he intended to do justice to the elder La Tour while chastising the younger. There was a strange girl in the fort, accused of coming from D'Aulnay. Lady Dorinda could feel no enmity towards D'Aulnay. Her mind swarmed with foolish thoughts, harmless because ineffectual. She felt her importance grow, and was sure that the seed of a deep political intrigue lay hidden in her chest.

XI.

MARGUERITE.

The days which elapsed before Antonia Bronck's marriage were lived joyfully by a people who lost care in any festival. Van Corlaer brought the sleek-faced young dominie from camp and exhibited him in all his potency as the means of a Protestant marriage service. He could not speak a word of French, but only Dutch was required of him. All religious rites were celebrated in the hall, there being no chapel in Fort St. John, and this marriage was to be witnessed by the garrison.