Part 4
The sacrament of marriage, so easy of attainment in New France at that time, had evidently been dispensed with in the first hut this spiritual father entered. His man carried in his sacred luggage, and the temporary chapel was soon set up in a corner unoccupied. The children hovered near in delight, gazing at tall candles and gilt ornaments, for even in that age of poverty the pomps of the Roman Church were carried into settlers’ cabins throughout New France. Dollier de Casson had for his confessional closet a canopy of black cloth stretched over two supports. The penitent crept under this merciful wing, and the priest, seated on a stool, could examine the soul as a modern photographer examines his camera; except that he used ear instead of eye.
The interior of a peasant censitaire’s dwelling changes little from generation to generation. One may still see the crucifix over the principal bed, joints of cured meat hanging from rafters, and the artillery of the house resting there on hooks. A rough-built loom crowded inmates whom it clothed. And against the wall of the entrance side dangled a vial of holy water as a safeguard against lightning.
Dollier de Casson stood up to admonish his little flock, gathered from all the huts of the côte, into silence before him. The men took off their rough caps and put them under their arms, standing in a disordered group together. Though respectful and obedient, they did not crowd their spiritual father with such wild eagerness as the women, who, on any seat found or carried in, sat hungrily, hushing around their knees the nipped French dialect of their children.
“What is this, Antonio Brunette?” exclaimed Father de Casson after he had cast his eyes among them. “Could you not wait my coming, when you well knew I purposed marrying you this time? You intend to have the wedding and the christening together.”
“Father,” expostulated the swart youth, avoiding the priest to gaze sheepishly at his betrothed’s cowering distress, “Pierre’s daughter is past sixteen, and we would have been married if you had been here. You know the king lays a fine on any father who lets his daughter pass sixteen without binding her in marriage. And Pierre is a very poor man.”
“Therefore, to help Pierre evade his Majesty’s fine, you must break the laws of Heaven, must you, my son? Hearty penance shall ye both do before I minister to you the sacrament of marriage. My children, the evil one prowls constantly along the banks of this river, while your poor confessors can only reach you at intervals of months. Heed my admonitions. Where is Pierre’s wife?”
Down went Pierre’s face between his hands into his cap.
“Dead,” he articulated from its hollow. “Without absolution. And the little baby on her arm, it went with her, baptized by ourselves.”
“God have pity on you, my children,” said Dollier de Casson. “I will say masses over her grave, and it is well with the little unblemished soul. How many children have you, Pierre?”
“Seventeen, father.”
“Twenty-six, he should say, father,” a woman near the priest declared. “For the widow of Jean Ba’ti’ Morin has nine.”
“And why should Pierre count as his own the flock of Jean Ba’ti’ Morin’s widow?”
“Because he is to marry her, father, when Antonio Brunette marries his oldest girl.”
“If I come not oftener,” remarked the priest, “you will all be changed about and newly related to each other so that I shall not know how to name ye. I will read the service for the dead over your first wife, Pierre, before I marry you to your second. It is indeed better to be dwelling in love than in discord. Have you had any disagreements?”
“No, father; but Jean Ba’ti’s oldest boy has taken to the woods and is off among the Indians, leaving his mother to farm alone with only six little lads to help her.”
“Another coureur de bois,” said the priest in displeasure.
“Therefore, father,” opportunely put in Jean Ba’ti’s widow, “I having no man at all, and Pierre having no woman at all, we thought to wed.”
“Think now of your sins,” said Father de Casson, “from oldest to youngest. After penance and absolution and examination in the faith ye shall have mass.”
The solemn performance of these religious duties began and proceeded until dusk obliterated all faces in the dimly lighted cabin. Stump roots were piled up in the fire-place, and Pierre’s daughter, between her prayers, put on the evening meal to cook.
If a child tittered at going under the confessional tent, its mother gave it a rear prod with admonishing hand. In that humble darkness Father de Casson’s ear received the whispers of all these plodding souls, and his tongue checked their evil and nourished their good. The cabin became a chapel full of kneeling figures telling beads.
This portion of his duty finished, Dollier de Casson postponed the catechizing, and made Pierre take a lighted stick of pine and show him that ridge whereunder mother and baby lay. There was always danger of surprise by the Iroquois. The men and women who followed in irregular procession through the vast dimness of northern twilight kept on their guard against moving stumps or any sudden uprising like the rush of quails from some covert. In rapid tones the priest repeated the service for the dead; then called his followers from their knees to return to the house to celebrate the weddings of Pierre and Pierre’s daughter.
After this rite, supper was served in Pierre’s house, the other families dispersing to their own tables--cabbage-soup, fat pork, and coarse bread made from pounded grain; for this côte was too poor to have a mill. These were special luxuries for Father de Casson, for the usual censitaire supper consisted of bread and eels. The missionary priest, accustomed with equal patience to fasting or eating, spread his hands above unsavory steam and blessed the meal. Silently, while he spoke, the door opened and a slim dark girl entered the house.
VII.
A HALF-BREED.
SHE stood erect and silent against the closed door until Dollier de Casson, before he had taken his first mouthful, spoke to her.
“Peace be with you, Massawippa.”
“Peace be also with you, father.”
Her voice was contralto without gutturals.
“You come in good time, my daughter. It is long since I examined you in the faith and absolved you.”
“Think of my soul later, father; I come from the chief.”
“Where is the chief?”
“Étienne Annahotaha sends for you,” she replied grandly. “I am to show you the way.”
Dollier de Casson did not ask why Étienne Annahotaha sent for the priest instead of coming to the priest himself. The Huron chief disdained his wife’s relatives with savage frankness.
“Very good, my daughter. In the morning, then, we will set out.”
“Annahotaha begs that you will come at once, father.”
“Hath he such urgent need of a priest?”
“He leaves his present camp early to-morrow, and he himself will tell you his urgent business.”
The girl’s eyes moved slightingly over this huge French family, holding them unfit to hear many words concerning her father.
“Very good, my daughter. As soon as I have finished my repast I shall be ready.”
Pierre muttered objections. His first wife’s grave was blessed, and his second wife was now comfortably his, but he grudged gospel privileges to that interloper Annahotaha, who had married his sister and made a white squaw of her, poor unsettled woman, paddling her from the island of Orleans to the lower Ottawa and back until she died.
All seats being occupied, Massawippa still stood by the entrance. Her uncle Pierre did point her to a place beside the table, but she shook her head.
Father de Casson was placed by himself at the table end, Pierre’s mob of children and step-children thronging below, the little ones standing wedged together, some with chins barely level with the board. Though scarcely more than fourteen years old, Massawippa looked well grown and tall. No civilized awkwardness of limb, or uncertainty of action when she moved, hampered her. Notwithstanding her cheek-bones were high and her mouth wide, she was full of vigorous young beauty. Her temples were round, and clasped as if by jet-black birdwings in hair which divided its weight betwixt two braids and measured half the length of her body.
Scarcely tolerant was the eye she kept on these French habitants her kinsfolks. She was princess; they were merely inferior white stock from whom her mother had sprung.
In personal appointments she was exquisite compared with the French women of the cabin. Her rich and glowing cheeks, her small dark ears and throat and hands, had reached a state of polish through unusual care. Her raiment appeared to be culled from the best fashions of both races. She wore the soft Indian moccasin, stitched with feather-work, and the woolen French stocking. All beaver skins in New France nominally belonged to the government; but this half-breed girl wore a pliant slim gown, chestnut-colored and silky, of beaver skin, reaching nearly to her ankles. It was girdled around the waist and collared around the top by bands of white wampum glittering like scales. A small light blanket of wool dyed a very dull red was twisted around her and hung over one arm.
A bud of a woman though still a child, full of the gentle dignity of the Hurons, who of all the great tribes along the St. Lawrence had lent themselves most kindly to Christian teaching, and undulled by her French peasant blood, Massawippa was comforting to eyes wearied by oily dark faces.
Dollier de Casson, gentleman and soldier before he became priest, always treated her with the deference she was inclined to exact as due her station.
Most Canadian half-breeds were the children of French fathers who had turned coureurs de bois and of Indian women briefly espoused by them. But the Huron chief had wedded Massawippa’s mother by priest and Latin service. The inmates of Pierre’s house regarded this girl as a misfortune that held them in awe. Her patent of nobility was dirt to them, yet by virtue of it she trod on air above their heads; and she was always so strangely clean and strangely handsome, this high young dame of the woods.
Pierre’s new wife, the corners of her mouth settling, regarded Massawippa with disfavor. The families in that côte knew well at whose door Jean Ba’ti’s widow laid the defection of her son.
One of Pierre’s little boys, creeping sidewise towards Massawippa, leaned against the door and looked up, courting her smile. He was very dirty, his cheeks new sodden with pork-fat being the most acceptable points of his surface. She did not encourage his advances, but met his look sedately.
“Thou know’st not what I know, Massawippa,” said he. “Thou know’st not who’s married.”
She remained silent, pride magnifying the natural indifference of her time of life to such news.
“The father Pierre is married. Dost guess he married our Angèle?” tempted the little boy, whose ideas of the extent of intermarriage surpassed even the generous views of his elders in the côte. “No! Antonio Brunette married our Angèle. Four people are married. It made me laugh. The widow of Jean Ba’ti’ Morin, she wedded Father Pierre, and you must tell La Mouche. Are you also married to La Mouche, Massawippa?”
Her aquiline face blazed with instant wrath, and Pierre’s little boy fell back from her as if scorched. Her hiss followed him.
“I do not myself speak to La Mouche!”
La Mouche’s mother was naturally the most interested witness of this falcon-like stoop of Massawippa’s, and as a mother she experienced deeper sense of injury.
VIII.
THE HURON.
A LIGHT rain was blistering the river and thickening an already dark landscape when Dollier de Casson, followed by his man carrying what might be called his religious tool-chest, crossed the clearing with Massawippa.
The child walked before them, her blanket drawn well up over her head and her moccasins taking no print afterwards visible from any soft earth they trod. The laden and much-enduring servant stumbled across roots, but labored on through sleek and treacherous wet spots with the zeal of a missionary servant.
Dollier de Casson gave him breathing periods by carrying the chapel himself. Thus had these two men helped each other in winter when the earth was banked in white, the river a glittering solid, and one’s breath came to him fluid ice and went from him an eruption of steam, as they toiled to parish or distant fort on snow-shoes. Thus did Jesuit and Sulpitian priests keep their religion alive on the St. Lawrence.
Within the first pine covert three Hurons were waiting, evidently Massawippa’s escort. She now walked beside Dollier de Casson and they stalked ahead, threading a silent way through the darkness.
Spruce and white birch were all the trees that stood out distinctly to the senses, others massing anonymously in the void of night and their spring nakedness. The evergreen with prickling fingers brushed the passers’ faces; while the white birches in flecked shrouds crowded rank on rank like many lofty ghosts diverse of girth, and by their whiteness threw a gleam upon the eyeball.
Following the head Huron, Dollier de Casson’s company trod straight over soft logs where the foot sunk in half-rotten moss, and over that rustling, elastic cushion of dead leaves, histories of uncounted summers which padded the floor of the forests. Through roofing limbs the rain found it less easy to pelt them. They wound about rocks and climbed ascents, until Annahotaha’s camp-fire suddenly blinked beneath them and they could stand overlooking it.
He had pitched his bark tent in a small amphitheater sloping down to a tributary of the St. Lawrence. The camp-fire, hissing as slant lines of the shower struck it, threw light over the little river’s stung surface, on low shrubs and rocks, on the oblong lodge,[3] and the figures of some three dozen Indians squatting blanketed beside it, or walking about throwing long shadows over the brightened area.
Étienne Annahotaha sat just within the shelter of his lodge, and here he received the priest, standing almost as tall as Dollier de Casson, who bent his head to avoid the tent.
This shelter was, indeed, altogether for Massawippa; the chief preferred lying on the ground with his braves; but she was child of a mother long used to roofs, and was, besides, a being whom he would set up and guard as a sacred image. There was no woman in the camp.
When Dollier de Casson and Annahotaha sat silently down together, Massawippa crept up behind her father and rested her cheek against his back. He allowed this mute caress and gazed with stern gravity at the fire.
His soul was in labor, and the priest good-humoredly waited until it should bring forth its care. No religious instruction could be imparted to the camp while Annahotaha held his speech unspoken. Rain hissed softly through listening trees, paused to let damp boughs drip, and renewed itself with a rush. Evident vapor arose from the Indians beside the fire.
“The father’s boat was seen upon the river,” began Annahotaha. “I have sent for the father to tell him the thoughts which come up in my breast and give me no peace. I am a tree of rough bark, but I bear a flower branch. I go to the burning and my branch of flowers will not be cut off from me. I am an old bear, but how shall I make the Iroquois feel my claws if my cub be beside me? The lodge of her mother’s people is not fit to hold her. Continually her mother comes to me in dreams saying, ‘What have you done with the child?’ Shall I hang my branch of flowers in the lodges of my people? Behold the remnant of the Hurons!” He leaped to his feet with energetic passion, and flung his pointed finger at the steaming braves by the fire. They gave an instant’s attention to his voice, and went on toasting themselves as before. “We are trodden underfoot like leaves. The French, our white brothers, promise us protection, and our feeble ones are dragged to the stake and scalped before their eyes. We perish from the earth. Soon not a Huron will make the smoke of his lodge go up beside the great river. But before these Iroquois utterly tread our bones under the turf they shall feel the rage of Annahotaha. The last Hurons shall heap them up in destruction!”
He sat down and rested his savage face on his fists.
Massawippa resumed her attitude of satisfied tenderness; and shade by shade his wrath lifted until the father and not the chief again looked through the red of his mask-like face.
“If Annahotaha is leading a war party against the Iroquois,” began Dollier de Casson--
“Speak not of that. The old bear knows his own track; but no way for the tender feet of his cub.”
--“he will pass through Montreal,” continued the priest. “Now, if Annahotaha wishes to keep his gift of Heaven from contaminations of the world, why should he not lay her on the sacred altar? Place her with the sisters of St. Joseph, those good nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu.”
The chief, expectant and acquiescent, kept yet a wily side-glance on his cassocked guide. Honest Dollier de Casson brought his fist with a gentle spat upon his palm as he proceeded.
“No Indian woman ever hath joined the pious labors of our good nuns. You Hurons clamor without ceasing for protection to white brothers who can scarcely keep their own scalps on their heads, but the burdens and self-denials of our holy religion ye shirk. I speak truth to the chief of the Hurons. You even leave your farms and civilized life on the island of Orleans, and take to the woods.”
“We are dragged scalped from our farms,” interjected Annahotaha’s guttural voice.
“My son, the power of Heaven is over all. We gasp and bleed together; but, see you, we still live. Miracles are continually worked for us. They confound even the dark hearts of the Iroquois.”
Annahotaha smiled, perhaps with some reflection of Quebec distrust in Montreal miracles.
“Hast thou not heard,” insisted Father de Casson with that severe credulity which afflicted the best men of the time, “about Jean Saint-Père--slain by the Iroquois and beheaded, and his head carried off--speaking to them in warnings and upbraidings? Yea, the scalped skull ceased not threatening them with the vengeance of Heaven, in plain, well-spoken Iroquois.” Annahotaha sounded some guttural which the priest could not receive as assent.
“Blessed is a country, my son, when such notable miracles are done in it. For, see you, there was Father le Maître, who had his head likewise cut off by these children of evil, but without making the stain of blood on his handkerchief which received it. And there were his features stamped on the cloth so that any one might behold them. This miracle of Father le Maître hath scarcely ceased to ring in Montreal, for it is a late thing. I counsel the chief of the Hurons to give his child to the Church. The saints will then be around her in life, and in death they will gather her to themselves.”
Annahotaha sat as if turning over in his mind this proposal, which he had secretly foreseen and wished.
“The father has spoken,” he finally pronounced; and silence closed this conference, as silence had preceded it.
Afterwards Dollier de Casson set up his chapel beside a sheltering rock and prepared to shrive the Huron camp, beginning with Massawippa. Her he confessed apart, in the inclosure of the lodge, probing as many of her nature’s youthful and tortuous avenues as the wisdom of man could penetrate. She raised no objection to that plan of life her father and her confessor both proposed for her; but the priest could not afterwards distinctly recall that she accepted it.
When Father de Casson called the congregation of Indians to approach his temporary chapel, one of the restless braves who had sauntered from sputtering fire to dripping tree skulked crouching in the shadow of Massawippa’s tent. He had a reason for avoiding the priest as well as one for seeking her.
When the others were taken up with their devotions he crept to the tent-flap, and firelight shone broadly on his dark side-countenance, separating him in race from the Hurons. He was a Frenchman. But his stiff black hair was close shorn except one bristling tuft, his oily skin had been touched with paint, and he wore the full war-dress of his foster tribe.
“Massawippa,” whispered this proselyte, raising the lodge-flap, “I have something here for you.”
The girl was telling her beads with a soft mutter in the little penances her priest had imposed upon her. He could see but her blurred figure in her dim shrine.
“Massawippa! La Mouche brings you a baked fish,” he whispered in the provincial French.
Her undisturbed voice continued its muttered orisons.
“Massawippa!” repeated the youth, speaking this time in Huron, his tone entreating piteously. “La Mouche brings you a baked fish. It comes but now from the fire.”
Her voice ceased with an indrawing of the breath, and she hissed at La Mouche.
“Return it then to the fire and thyself with it, thou French log!” she uttered in a screaming whisper in Huron, and hissed at him again as her humble lover dropped the lodge-flap.
The candles shone mellowly from the sheltered altar upon kneeling Indians, but La Mouche slunk off into the darkness.
IX.
THE LADY OF ST. BERNARD.
FIVE evenings later a boat was beached on one of the islands above Montreal lying near the south shore of the St. Lawrence. While this island presented rocky points, it had fertile slopes basking in the glow which followed a blue and vaporous April day, and trees in that state of gray greenness which shoots into leaf at the first hot shining.
The principal object on the island was a stone house standing inclosed by strong palisades above the ascent from the beach. It appeared to be built against a mass of perpendicular rock that towered over it on the west side. This was, in fact, the strongest seigniorial mansion west of the Richelieu. There was, in addition, a small stone mill for grinding grain, apart from it on the brink of the river.
Northward, the St. Lawrence spread towards the horizon in that distension of its waters called Lake St. Louis.
Out of the palisade door came a censitaire and his wife, who, having hurried to St. Bernard for protection at an alarm of Indians, staid to guard the seigniory house during Jacques Goffinet’s absence with Dollard.
“This is St. Bernard,” said Dollard, leading Claire up the slope. “Sometimes fog-covered, sometimes wind-swept, green as only islands can be, and stone-girdled as the St. Lawrence islands are. A cluster up-river belongs to the seigniory, but this is your fortress.”
“And yours,” she added.
“It will seem very rude to you.”
“After my life of convent luxury, monsieur?”
“After the old civilization of France. But I believe this can be made quite comfortable.”
“It looks delicious and grim,” said the bride. “Tragic things might happen here if there be a tragic side to life, which I cannot now believe. Yet a few months ago I said there was no happiness!”
Dollard turned his uneasy glance from her to the seigniory house.
“There is scarcely such another private stronghold in the province.”
“Did you build it?”
“Not I. Poor Dollard brought little here but his sword. One of my superior officers abandoned it in my favor, and took a less exposed seigniory near the Richelieu. I wish the inside appointments better befitted you. It was a grand château to me until I now compare it with its châtelaine.”
“Never mind, monsieur. When you demand my fortune from France, you can make your château as grand as you desire. I hope you will get some good of my fortune, for I never have done so. Seriously, monsieur, if no house were here, and there were only that great rock to shelter us, I should feel myself a queen if you brought me to it, so great is my lot.”
“You can say this to poor Adam Dollard, an obscure soldier of the province?”