Part 10

He blanched to his lips, and made a repellent gesture with both hands as if he could put back the woman of his love out of danger as swiftly and unaccountably as she put herself into it. But his only reasonable course was to drag up the canoe when Massawippa beached it.

The half-breed girl leaped out like a fawn and ran up the slope. Annahotaha came striding down to meet her, and as she caught him around the body he lifted his knife as if the impulse which drove the arm of Virginius had been reborn in a savage of the New World. Massawippa showed her white teeth in rapturous smiling. So absolute was her trust in him that she waited thus whatever act his superior wisdom must dictate. That unflinching smile brought out its answer on his countenance. A copper glow seemed to fuse his features into grotesquely passionate tenderness. He turned his back towards his braves and hugged the child to his breast, smoothing her wings of black hair and uttering guttural murmurs which probably expressed that superlative nonsense mothers talk in the privacy of civilized nurseries.

But Claire, pink as a rose from sun and wind, her head covered by a parchment bonnet of birch bark instead of the cap she lost at the island, her satin tatters carefully drawn together with fibers from porcupine quills and loosened from the girdle to flow around her worn moccasins, and radiant as in her loveliest moments, stretched her hands for Dollard’s help.

He lifted her out of the canoe and placed her upon the ground; he knelt before her and kissed both of her hands.

“Good-morning, monsieur!” said Claire, triumphantly. “You left no command against my following the expedition.”

That palpitating presence which we call life seemed to project itself beyond their faces and to meet. Her pinkness and triumph were instantly gone in the whiter heat of spiritual passion. She began to sob, and Dollard stood up strongly holding her in his arms.

“The paving-stone where you knelt--how I kissed it--how I kissed it!”

“I have not a word, Claire; not one word,” said Dollard. “I am blind and dumb and glad.”

“Oh, do be blind to my rags and scratches! I would have crept on my hands and face to you, monsieur, my saint! But now I am not crying.”

“How did you reach us unharmed?”

“We saw no Iroquois. Have you yet seen them?”

“Not yet.”

“But there was the river. Massawippa dragged me through that. Your face looks thin, my Dollard.”

“I have suffered. I did not know heaven was to descend upon me.”

The Frenchmen and Indians, a stone’s-throw away, unable, indeed, to penetrate this singular encounter of the commandant’s, gave it scarcely a moment’s attention, but turned their eager gaze up the rapids. Dollard looked also, as suggestion became certainty.

He hurried Claire to the palisade, calling his men to arm.

Upon the rapids appeared a wonderful sight. Bounding down the broken and tumultuous water came the Iroquois in canoes which seemed unnumbered. They flung themselves ashore and at the fort like a wave, and like a wave they were sent trickling back from the shock of their reception.

Massawippa sat down by Claire in the small inclosure during this first brush with the enemy.

There was no time for either Frenchmen or Indians to look with astonished eyes at these girls, so soon were all united in common peril and bonds of endurance. Men purified by the devotion of such an undertaking could accept the voluntary presence of women as they might accept the unscared alighting of birds in the midst of them.

The Iroquois next tried to parley, in order to take the allies unawares. But all their efforts were met with volleys of ammunition. So they drew off from the palisade and began to cut small trees and build a fort for themselves within the shelter of the woods, this being the Iroquois plan of besieging an enemy.

Dollard had stored all his supplies and tools within his palisade. He now set to work with his men to strengthen the position. They drove stakes inside the inclosure and filled the space between outer and inner pickets with earth and stones as high as their heads, leaving twenty loop-holes. Three men were appointed to each loop-hole.

Before the French had finished intrenching themselves the Iroquois broke up all their canoes, lighted pieces at the fires, and ran to pile them against the palisade, but were again driven back. How many attacks were made Claire did not know, for volley followed volley until the crack of muskets seemed continuous, but the Iroquois attained to a focus of howling when the principal chief of the Senecas, one of the Five Nations, fell among their dead.

Morning and noon passed in this tumult of musketry and human outcry. In the unsullied May weather such gunpowder clouds must have been strange sights to nesting birds and other shy creatures of the woods.

Claire and Massawippa looked into the supplies of the fort and set out food, but the water was soon exhausted. Dusk came. Starlight came. The first rough day of this continuous battle was over, but not the battle. For the Iroquois gave the allies no rest, harassing them through that and every succeeding night.

It was after 12 o’clock before Dollard could take Claire’s hands and talk with her a few unoccupied minutes. When women intrude upon men’s great labors they risk destroying their own tender ideals, but this daughter of a hundred soldiers had watched her husband all day in raptures of pride. To be near him in the little arena of his sacrifice was worth her heart-chilling vigil, worth her toilsome journey, fully worth the supreme price she must yet pay.

Earth from the breastworks, distributed by thuds of occasional Iroquois bullets, spattered impartially both Claire and Dollard. They had no privacy. Guttural Huron and Algonquin murmurs and the nervous intonation of French voices would have broken into all ordinary conversation. But looking deeply at each other, and unconsciously breathing in the same cadences, they had their moment of talk as if standing on a peak together. There was a lonesome bird in the woods uttering three or four falling notes, which could be heard at intervals when not drowned by any rising din of the Iroquois.

“They sent a canoe down river this afternoon,” said Dollard, “evidently for their reinforcements from below.”

“How long do you think we can hold out?” inquired Claire.

“Until we have broken their force. We must do that.”

“I was on an island at the mouth of the Ottawa when you passed, my commandant. That was purgatory to me.”

“Since you reached us,” said Dollard, “I have accepted you without question and without remorse. I am stupefied. I love you. But, Claire, to what a death I have brought you!”

“It is a death befitting well the daughter of the stout-hearted Constable of France. But do not leave me again, Dollard!”

“The Iroquois shall not touch you alive, Claire,” he promised.

“I am ready shriven,” she said, smiling. “Except of one fault. That will I now confess,--a fault committed against the delicacy of women,--and I hated the abbess and the bishop because they detected me in it. I came to New France for love of you, my soldier. Could I help following you from world to world?”

“O Claire!” trembled Dollard, taking his hat off and standing uncovered before her.

“But you should not have known this until we were old--until you had seen me Madame des Ormeaux many years, dignified and very, very discreet, so that no breath could discredit me save this mine own confession.”

During four days the Iroquois constantly harassed the fort while waiting for their reënforcements, enraged more each day at their own losses and at the handful of French and Indians who stood in the way of their great raid upon New France. Hungry, thirsty, and giddy from loss of sleep, the allies in the fort stood at their loop-holes and poured out destruction. Their supplies were gone, excepting dry hominy, which they could not swallow without water.

Some of the young Frenchmen made a rush to the river, protected by the guns of the fort, and brought all the water they could thus carry. They also dug within the palisade and reached a little clayey moisture which helped to cool their mouths.

Among the Iroquois were renegade Hurons who had been adopted by the Five Nations. During these four days of trial the renegades shouted to their brethren in the fort to come over and surrender to the Iroquois. Seven or eight hundred more warriors were hurrying from the mouth of the Richelieu River, and not a blackened coal was to be left where the fort and the Frenchmen stood.

“Come over,” tempted these Hurons. “The Iroquois will receive you as brothers. Will you stay there and die for the sake of a few Frenchmen?”

First one, then two more, then three at a time, the famished braves of Annahotaha slipped over the intrenchment and deserted, in spite of his rage and exhortations.

On the fifth day, an hour before dawn, a hand of auroral light spread its fingers across the sky from west to east. Betwixt these finger-rays were dark spaces having no stars, but through the pulsing medium of every gigantic finger the constellations glittered. Many signs were seen in the heavens during the colonial years of New France, but nothing like the blessed hand stretched over the Long Saut.

That day rapids and forests appeared to rock with the vibration of savage yells, for soon after daylight the expected force arrived.

La Mouche had sulked some time at the loop-hole where he was stationed with Annahotaha. Massawippa’s back was towards him during all this period of distress. She never saw that he was thirsty and that his cracked lips bled. If she was solicitous for anybody except the stalwart chief, it was for that white wife of Dollard, who stood always near Dollard when not doing what could be done for the wounded.

La Mouche had no stomach for dying an unrewarded death. Dogged hatred of his false position and of his tardy suit had grown large within him. He therefore left his loop-hole while Annahotaha’s gun was emptied, leaped on top of the palisade, and stretched his dark face back an instant to interrogate Massawippa’s quick eye. A motion of her head might yet bring him back. But did she think that he meant to be killed like a dog to whom the bone of a good word has never been thrown?

“My father!” shouted the girl, pointing with a finger which pierced La Mouche’s soul. “Shoot that coward; shoot him down!”

Annahotaha seized the long pistol from his side and discharged it at his deserting nephew. But La Mouche in the same instant dropped outside and ran over to the Iroquois.

There remained now only the Frenchmen, Annahotaha, and the four Algonquins.

Playfully, as a cat reaches out to cuff its mouse, the army of Iroquois now approached the fort. They gamboled from side to side and uttered screeches. But the loop-holes were yet all manned by men who would not die of fatigue and physical privation, and the fire which sprung from those loop-holes astounded the enemy. Guns of large caliber carried scraps of iron and lead, and mowed like artillery.

Three days more, says the chronicle, did this fort by the Long Saut hold out. Who can tell all the story of those days? and who can hear all the story of such endurance? When acclamation cheers a man’s blood and a great cloud of witnesses encompasses him, heroic courage is made easy. But here were a few doomed men in the wilderness, whose fate and whose action might be misrepresented by a surviving foe--silent fighters against odds, thinking, “This anguish and sacrifice of mine are lost on the void, and perhaps taken no account of by any intelligence, except that myself knows it, and myself demands it of me.”

This is the courage which brings a man’s soul up above his body like a tall flame out of an altar, and makes us credit the tale of our lineage tracing thus backward: “Which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.”

The fort could not be taken by surprise; it could not be taken by massed sallies. The Iroquois wrangled among themselves. Some were for raising the siege and going back to their own country. Their best braves lay in heaps. But others scouted the eternal disgrace of leaving unpunished so pitiful a foe.

Finally they made themselves great shields of split logs, broad as a door, and crept forward under cover of these to hew away the palisades. Mad for revenge, they used their utmost skill and caution.

It was at this time that Dollard, among his reeling and praying men--men yet able to smile with powder-blackened faces through the loop-holes--took a large musketoon, filled it with explosives, and plugged it ready to throw among the enemy. His arms had not remaining strength to fling it clear of the palisade’s jagged top. It fell back and exploded in the fort, and amidst the frightful confusion the Iroquois made their first breach, to find it defended; and yet another breach, and yet another, overflowing the inclosure with all their swarms.

Smoke-clouds curled around the bride who had trod that sward and borne her part in the suffering. Half blinded by the explosion, Dollard held Claire with his left arm and fought with his sword. As firm and white as a marble face, the face of the Laval-Montmorency met her foes. The blood of man-warriors, even of Anne, the great and warlike Constable of France, throbbed steadfastly in the arm which grasped her husband and the heart which stood by his until they were swept down by the same volley of musketry, and lay as one body among the dead. Perhaps to Claire and Dollard it was but sudden release from thirst, hunger, exhaustion, and victorious howling. For La Mouche found Massawippa pointing as if she saw through the earthwork. The half-breed’s eyes glowed with expansive brightness, as a spark does just before it expires. Her childish contours were beautiful, and unbroken by pain.

“Father,” said Massawippa with effort,--the chief was dead, having saved her from the Iroquois with the last stroke of his hand,--“do you see madame--and the commandant--walking there under--birches?” Her face smiled as she died, and remained set in its smile.

There are people who steadily live the lives they hate, whose common speech misrepresents their thought, who walk the world fettered. Is it better with these than with winged souls?

Fire and smoke of a great burning rose up and blinded the day beside the Long Saut. It was a mighty funeral pile. The tender grass all around, licked by flame, gave juices of the earth to that sacrifice. The wine of young lives, the spices and treasures of courageous hearts, went freely to it, and for more than two hundred and twenty-five years love and gratitude have consecrated the spot.

XX.

POSTERITY.

THREE weeks after Dollard’s departure Jacques Goffinet took the boat and one Huron Indian whom Dollard had sent back with the boat and set off to Montreal to obey his master’s final order.

No appearances on the river had caused alarm at St. Bernard. While record has not been made of the route taken by the Iroquois brought from the Richelieu, it is evident that they passed north of Montreal island, avoiding settlements.

Montreal was waiting in silence and anxiety for news of the expedition.

The first person whom Jacques encountered was the nuns’ man Jouaneaux, watching the St. Lawrence with uneasy expectation in his eyes.

When they had exchanged greetings as men do when each thinks only of the information he can get from the other, Jouaneaux said:

“You come from up river?”

“From St. Bernard island,” replied Jacques. “What news of the expedition?”

But Jouaneaux had widened his mouth receptively.

“You are then from the commandant Dollard’s seigniory?”

“The commandant is my seignior,” said Jacques.

Jouaneaux laid hold of his sleeve.

“Did Mademoiselle de Granville return to St. Bernard and take the little half-breed Sister with her?”

“Mademoiselle de Granville, my commandant’s sister, is at St. Bernard; yes,” replied Jacques, arrested and stupefied by such inquiries.

“Look you here, my good friend,” exclaimed Jouaneaux. “I speak for the nuns of St. Joseph of the Hôtel-Dieu, where your master put his sister for protection before he set out. Was not her fire built to suit her? We are poor, but our hospitality is free, and we love not to have it flung back in our faces. Still, I say nothing of mademoiselle. She hath her seigniory to look after, and she was not a novice.”

“My master left my lady at the governor’s house,” asserted Jacques.

“But,” continued Jouaneaux, “this I will say: ill did she requite us in that she carried off the novice Massawippa, whose father, the Huron chief, had put her in the Hôtel-Dieu to take vows.”

“I will go to the governor,” threatened Jacques, feeling himself baited.

“And what will it profit thee to go to the governor? The governor is a just man, and he hath the good of the Hôtel-Dieu at heart.”

“I know nothing about your Hôtel-Dieu,” said Jacques, having forebodings at his heart.

“But where is our novice?” persisted Jouaneaux, following him.

“I know nothing about your novice.”

At the governor’s house, by scant questions on his part and much speech on Jouaneaux’s, he learned that Dollard was yet unheard from, that Claire had been left at the hospital, and for some unspoken reason, which Jacques silently accepted as good since it was the commandant’s reason, she had been received as the commandant’s sister; and finally that she had disappeared with a young novice, the daughter of Annahotaha, soon after the expedition left, and no one in Montreal knew anything else about her.

Distressed to muteness by such tidings, Jacques went back to his boat, still followed by Jouaneaux, and pushed off up the river with the malediction of St. Joseph invoked upon him.

As his Huron rowed back along Lake St. Louis they saw a canoe drifting, and cautiously approaching it they found that it held a wounded brave in the war-dress of the Hurons. He lay panting in his little craft, feverish and helpless, and they towed him to the island and carried him up into the seigniory kitchen.

The May sun shone and bees buzzed past the windows; all the landscape and the pleasant world seemed to contradict the existence of such a blot on nature as a blood-streaked man.

The family gathered fearfully about La Mouche as he lay upon a bear-skin brought down from the saloon for him by Joan.

Jacques gave him brandy and Louise bathed his wounds. They used such surgery as they knew, and La Mouche told them all the story of the Long Saut except his desertion. None of five deserters who escaped from the Iroquois, and from the tortures to which the Iroquois put all the deserters after burning the fort, could tell the truth about their own action until long after.

Jacques turned away from this renegade and threw both arms around one of the cemented pillars. Louise fell on her knees beside him, and the broad hall was filled with wailings. There were consolations which Louise remembered when her religion and her stolid sense of duty began reconciling her to the eternal absence of Claire and Dollard. She stood up and took her apron to wipe her good man’s eyes, saying without greediness and merely as seizing on a tangible fact:

“Thou hast the island of St. Bernard left thee.”

“But he that is gone,” sobbed Jacques, “he was to me more than the whole earth.”

The four other Hurons who escaped carried all the details of the battle, except their own desertion, to Montreal. But the Iroquois were not so reticent, and in time this remnant of Hurons was brought to admit that Annahotaha alone of the tribe stood by the Frenchmen to the last.

As for the Iroquois, they slunk back to their own country utterly defeated and confounded. They had no further desire to fight such an enemy. Says the historian,[12] “If seventeen Frenchmen, four Algonquins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such fighting behind walls of stone?” The colony of New France was redeemed out of their hands. After the struggle at the Long Saut it enjoyed such a period of rest and peace as the Iroquois had not permitted it for years.

When La Mouche recovered from his wounds he crept away to his côte down the river, and with little regret the people on St. Bernard heard of him no more.

Jacques and Louise remained in possession of St. Bernard, and on that island their stout-legged children played, or learned contented thrift, or followed their father in his sowing; their delight being the real priest who came with his glowing altar to teach them religion, and their terror the pretended priest in the top apartment of their house. For Mademoiselle de Granville lived many years, so indulged in her humors that the story went among neighboring seigniories that she had an insane brother whom she imprisoned on St. Bernard out of tenderness towards him, instead of sending him to some asylum in France.[13]

Rather because her memory was a spot of tenderness within themselves always on the point of bleeding, than because of their ignorant dread of law’s intermeddling, Jacques and Louise never told about Dollard’s bride. The marriage had taken place in Quebec. Dollier de Casson, who celebrated it, made no record of the fact in connection with his account of Dollard’s exploit. The jealousies and bickerings then rising high between Quebec and Montreal clouded or misrepresented or suppressed many a transaction. And honest Dollier de Casson, who no doubt learned by priestly methods the fate of the bride, may have seen fit to withhold the luster of her devotion from the name of Laval, since the bishop pressed no inquiries after his impulsive young relative. News stretched slowly to and from France then. Her name dropped out of all records, except the notarial one of her marriage, and a faint old clew which an obscure scribe has left embodying a scarcely credited tale told by the Huron deserters. Without monument, what was once her beautiful body has become grass, flowers, clear air, beside the hoarse rapids. She died, as many a woman has died, silently crowning the deed done by a man, and in her finer immortality can perhaps smile at being forgotten, since it is not by him.

But Dollard has been the darling of his people for more than two and a quarter centuries.

On every midsummer-day, when the festival of St. John the Baptist is kept with pageant, music, banners, and long processions; when thousands choke the streets, and triumphal arch after triumphal arch lifts masses of flowers to the June sun; when invention has taxed itself to carry beautiful living pictures before the multitude--then there is always a tableau to commemorate the heroes of the Long Saut. If young children or if strangers ask, “Who was Dollard?” any Frenchman is ready to answer:

“He was a man of courageous heart;[14] he saved Canada from the Iroquois.”

The dullest soul is stirred to passionate acclamation as the chevalier and his sixteen men go by.

And when we tell our stories, shall we tell them only of the commonplace, the gay, the debonair life of this world? Shall the heroes be forgotten?

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Another of Laval’s titles.

[2] Ste. Anne de Beaupré, twenty miles east of Quebec. “The favorite saint appears to be Ste. Anne, whose name appears constantly on the banks of the St. Lawrence.” [J. G. Bourinot.]

[3] On a small scale the typical Iroquois-Huron dwelling. The tribal lodges, made to hold many fires and many families, were fifty or more yards in length by twelve or fifteen in width, framed of sapling poles closely covered with sheets of bark.

[4] The legend of Mademoiselle de Granville dates from the year 1698. It seemed but a slight anachronism to place this singular though unimportant figure in the year 1660.