Читать книгу Early Candlelight - Maud Hart Lovelace - Страница 11

THE Ojibways called it Oskibugi Sipi, the Young Leaf River, for on its banks the trees bud early. But the Ojibways came from the north country, from that somber land of pines and lakes; they were enemies to the valley; it was not their river. The Dakotas called it Minisota, the Sky-tinted Water, for it has a look like a sky made opaline by clouds; and that was the name to which, years later, it was to return. The Frenchmen called it the St. Pierre. They had come for furs and adventure. They were a wild, singing, lawless crew. Perhaps they thought it might remit them their sins to name a river for a saint. The Americans who arrived with tape and yardstick, with blankets and vermilion for the Indians and treaties to be signed, called it for a time the St. Peters.

It was called the St. Peters when young Jasper Page built his stone house upon the island. He found it a lovely river from the moment when his long birch bark canoe, manned by six voyageurs with high red plumes and gaudy sashes, singing in lusty unison, slipped from the Mississippi into its waters. It flows into the Mississippi, a proud end for any stream.

For days the seven had paddled beneath the shadow of majesty; the Mississippi in these upper reaches runs between grim cliffs. It was pleasant to see the St. Peters in its broad and sunny valley. It advanced in pretty twists and turns, faithfully followed by twin lines of cottonwood and willow, flanked by slopes which drifted gently back to the rolling prairies and the arching sky. This was an early June morning, and the slopes were pale green plush, tufted with tree clumps. Wild roses sprawled over the banks. The river sparkled in the sunshine as it fanned out about that great flat island at its mouth, where Lieutenant Zebulon Pike once made negotiations with the Indians.

It was not that island which caught Jasper Page’s eye. It was another, a round, trim, shapely little land rising far out of reach of the spring freshets, looking like a cupcake.

“Dat island, she lak nice leetle galette,” offered Gamelle the steersman, having the same thought.

“That’s it, Gamelle, exactly. I think,” said Jasper Page, “that I shall build my house there.”

He said it casually, but Gamelle had learned to know him in their month-long trip up the Fox and down the Wisconsin and up the Mississippi.

“Oui, Bourgeois,” he said, and began to visualize upon the island a house like a house of dear memory in Quebec.

The island could not detain them, for they had come but shortly before within sight of the settlement. It was the first sign of civilized habitation since Prairie du Chien, if one except a lone trader’s cabin at the lower end of Lake Pepin. Here, on one bank of the St. Peters, mud roofs appeared among the bark canopies of Sioux summer houses, and on the other, on the bluff which rises boldly where the two rivers meet, gleamed the white towers of Fort Snelling.

The very young nation, pushing its way westward in bulging Conestoga wagons and on heavy-laden flatboats, fighting the Indians, felling trees, building homes and churches and pushing on again, had reached this point and halted. It had paused for a few years to look behind it at a lengthening chain of hamlets, villages and towns which grew ever less rude as they went eastward until they reached those cities on the seaboard, as fine to Yankee eyes as London herself. It had paused, out of breath and full of pride, to look behind and perhaps to look ahead, to dream of the prairies, the painted desert, the Stony Mountains, the Pacific. And where it had paused it had put up this fort, as one puts a slip of paper in a book to keep the place.

With its stone walls enclosing a diamond, its stone turrets crowning each point, its spirited position overlooking the two rivers, the fort was impressive. Jasper ordered the canoe beached and camp made. Then he struck up the wagon road which climbed the chalky cliff, observing the swallows going in and out of their holes with the same preoccupation he had noted in swallows back in Boston.

Jasper Page was received at the fort from that first moment with liking and enthusiasm. Newcomers were always welcome at this outpost of civilization, held by homesick soldiers and a bored command. He was quartered with the commandant and his lady; he was given tea; he was pressed for news of the outside world. It was a full day before he was able to report at the Indian Agency to make application for the license which permitted him to trade in the Indian country and to inquire about the group of traders whom he had come out to superintend.

Especially was he detained by the ladies, more bored, even, than their husbands, who, after all, had unparalleled hunting at their doors. The ladies found him charming in his poised youthfulness and his politely veiled indifference to their arts. For he was unmistakably indifferent. Of course Eva Boles had not yet arrived.

He was not, however, unfriendly. With courtesy he told them all he could recollect of the fashions for women, of the appalling width of the leg-o’-mutton sleeves, of the enormousness of bonnets. His manner with women had the same unassuming, wholly genuine sympathy which marked his manner with men. Both sexes, of all ages and stations, aroused in Jasper Page this immediate interest.

So far as he was concerned, life offered no difficulties. He knew exactly what he wanted of it, and he had not the faintest doubt of his ability to get it. He had not the faintest doubt, either, of the rightness of his standards nor of the certainty of his abiding by them. But even that early he had noted that other people were less certain. Young as he was, he had come to expect to shoulder the woes of others. It was as if he recognized in his own splendid strength an obligation to help those less well armored for life.

He was just twenty-three at the time, although he had been for some years in the fur trade and had shown himself markedly capable. He had no thought to be other than modest; but the success he had had, as well as his unbounded confidence, showed its effect in his bearing. He carried his six feet of lean, hard-muscled body with a dignity which sometimes—but only in the hour of meeting—brought a smile to the lips of observers who were older and more chastened. For he was extremely young in every physical aspect. Quantities of sun-bleached yellow hair waved off his forehead and down his cheeks in the fashionable side whiskers. There was a youthful candor in his clear blue eyes, although they could sharpen, and a youthful brightness in the smile which cut engaging lines in his darkly tanned cheeks.

He was pleasantly democratic. He had no need to be otherwise. Was he not a Page of Boston? He had not followed the tradition of his family, which since before the Revolution had led in the affairs of government. Older brothers had taken that path, and even as a lad he had been drawn by the wilds. But he was a Page, for all that.

And the ladies were quick to discover that he was a young man of culture. He spoke easily in response to their questioning of Mrs. Duff’s new rôles, of Mme Malibran’s triumphs at the opera, while the officers observed approvingly that as soon as the ladies permitted, he turned to them with eager inquiries about the buffalo hunt. His gaze warmed when he mentioned double-barreled guns, his hunting dogs, his lucky shots at grouse and pigeons on the trip.

And shortly—within the year, that is—Jasper Page was all things to all men at the Entry of the St. Peters. To the Indian Agent he was the most satisfactory trader in all the Sioux country, anxious to suppress the traffic in liquor, willing to pay his Indian hunters a fair price. To the agents and clerks he was a just, kindly and energetic employer, able himself to endure all the hardships to which he subjected them. He was fatherly to the French Canadian boatmen as he talked with them in their own tongue, fatherly and yet firm enough to handle that turbulent, fire-eating lot. He turned a sympathetic ear to the problems of the humblest squatter on the reserve. It was not at all surprising that the building of his house was followed with such friendly interest.

He built it, as he had told Gamelle he would, upon the island, and not of logs, as the houses of the settlement were built, but of the native limestone. It had shutters and doorways of painted white wood, and no one would have guessed from its calm New England aspect with what marvels of ingenuity it had been constructed. Its joists and beams and the wooden pegs which held them had been hewn laboriously by hand; so had the timbers for the floors, and the clapboards which covered the roof. Its laths were willows from the river, woven with withes of twigs and grass, and its plaster was clay which the river had also yielded. The St. Peters gave so much that it seemed to Jasper Page to flow round the island with a special possessive music. He was fond of his stone house. So were the hundred Indian men and women, the fifty more of Canadian woodsmen and boatmen who, with much smoking and singing, with feasting at outdoor kettles and rubbing of bruised hands and tired shoulders with bear’s grease, had reared it in a summer.

In one great wing was the company store, with its blankets, traps and sleighbells, its scarlet cloth, blue strouds and gartering, its beads and silk handkerchiefs and ear-bobs. There, also, were sorted and packed for shipment to New York and London, the pelts of musk-rats, fishers, foxes, wolves, beavers, badgers, minks, the skins of deer and the hides of buffalo. Jasper Page’s house was also his trading post, but he did not find it necessary to surround it with a stockade. Indeed a stockade would have been absurd, even had the island not lain beneath the guns of Fort Snelling. He had no warmer friends in all the valley than the Indians.

Walking Wind, the Indians called him. He received the name from a young Sioux who, by reason of taking three Chippewa scalps, was inheriting an ancestral cognomen of special dignity and had the right to give away the one which had been his before. This Sioux had been among Jasper Page’s first Indian friends. He had come one night soon after the trader’s arrival, bringing a young woman of the family, a slender Indian girl who kept her head wrapped in a blanket throughout the interview. He had stated with dignity that a trader always wanted to buy an Indian wife, and that this girl knew well how to cook venison and to make moccasins and to embroider with porcupine quills.

Jasper Page had answered with great tact, thanking him for his kindness, presenting him with tobacco and red cloth. But he took no Indian woman; not by purchase in that ceremony so solemnly momentous to the girl, so quaintly diverting to the white man, nor in midnight excursions to the tepees. What is more astounding, his abstinence was not held against him by his neighbors. He hunted, fished, tramped and played chess with bachelors who were rearing half-breed families. He chaffed them about their domestic affairs and was chaffed in return for his lack of them. And after a time an indulgence on his part would have seriously shaken the community; shocked it, indeed.

Though the house on the island had no Indian mistress, the Indians felt at home there. Its owner had built an outside staircase leading to an attic which was always open to them. From half a dozen to half a hundred slept there on cold nights, each rolled in his blanket. If they overflowed the attic, they were permitted downstairs, even on the parlor floor. And this in spite of the fact that Jasper Page had fine things in his house: carpets, mirrors, sideboards of mahogany, damask curtains in red and green. The children of the settlement, the young DuGays and Angels and Perrets, watched the unloading of the infrequent steamboats with fascinated eyes to see what was coming for M’sieu Page’s house. There were always hunting dogs, or baskets of champagne, or brass andirons, or something. Once there had been a harpsichord.

More than one child felt with Deedee DuGay that no felicity could equal the felicity of seeing the inside of that house. M’sieu Page overswept Deedee’s life like the sky; he permeated it like sunshine. He gave employment to her father and brothers, advice and counsel to her mother; he sent medicines when they were sick, and food when supplies ran low. He was quoted, praised, described on every hand. And such rumors as Deedee heard of that house! M’sieu Page sat down to dinner, she heard, as though he had been in Boston. There was a linen cloth, there were knives and forks of silver, there were thin red goblets and dishes which pictured the battle of New Orleans. Mme. Elmire, his cook, had come up from St. Louis along with the furniture. She could cook buffalo rump so that it tasted like the finest rosbif. Mme. Elmire told great tales in the DuGay cabin, where she made occasional visits and where she was treated with the greatest respect.

Deedee listened and longed to go, but it seemed an impossible dream. Not that Jasper Page was inhospitable; far from it. There were always Canadians sunning themselves at the trading house door. But when they were asked into his parlor for a drink of wine, they went softly. They wiped their moccasins; they would not sit down; and they hardly dared to look about them. There was something about M’sieu Page, in spite of his friendliness, which made one treat him with respect.

Pig’s Eye Parrant had gone there one time when he was drunk, and M’sieu Page was entertaining Mrs. Boles and some others in the garden. Pig’s Eye had not yet been forbidden the Indian country, but he was a good-for-nothing fellow; the scornful nickname derived from his blind eye was already fastened upon him. M’sieu Page had picked him up and carried him to the garden wall and thrown him over into the river. He had not lingered, either, to see how Pig’s Eye recovered himself. Oh, he could do it, M’sieu Page! What was strange about the proceeding was that he had not dismissed Pig’s Eye from his service. When the abashed voyageur presented himself a week later, M’sieu Page greeted him as usual. But Pig’s Eye never came drunk again to the island. On the contrary, he went up and down the St. Peters warning others not to do it.

“M’sieu Page, he handle’ me lak I was enfant. Dat true.”

Deedee longed to go to that house, but she was past twelve and still she had not been there. Jasper Page had been for two years at the Entry of the St. Peters. Major Boles’ wife had arrived, and it was a common sight to see M’sieu Page with Mrs. Boles cantering over the prairie which rippled away from the fort to the westward. Deedee had seen him often, a tall, smiling, handsome figure in buckskins. Once, at the steamboat landing, he had even addressed her.

“Have some sugar plums, little girl,” he had called to her in French.

“Yes, sir,” she called back in English. She came on a run and added when she got her breath, “I am much obliged to you, sir.”

French was the language in common use at the settlement. Jasper Page regarded her closely.

“Aren’t you Canayenne?” he asked, puzzled.

“Well, sir, half of me is.”

She returned his gaze eagerly with eyes of shining brown. She was a tall, thin, brown little girl, with long braids tied in red at the ends and long legs beneath tattered pantalettes. She had very long legs, but she seemed undepressed by them. She stood negligently erect. Something rakish in her pose stirred an amused recognition.

“Bless my soul,” said M’sieu Page, “it’s a little DuGay.”

He turned to Mrs. Boles who stood beside him, looking as dainty as the sprig of flower which rose stiffly from the crown of her big flaring bonnet. Broad ties of watered ribbon met beneath Mrs. Boles’ chin. Bunches of little yellow curls hung at her temples. Her flowered organdie dress swelled into sleeves as big as clouds, returned to a tiny waist, and fell straightly to slim ankles.

“You’ve heard me speak of the divil DuGays?” asked M’sieu Page.

Now Deedee was proud of being a divil DuGay. She knew it meant that her father, old Denis, could fiddle; that her big brothers, Narcisse and Amable and Hypo-lite, could drink more grog without getting tipsy than any other voyageurs on the river; that her little brothers, George and Lafe, jigged for the officers and visiting dignitaries; that her mother cooked stews which the soldiers came and paid two shillings for, and was summoned to the post in great haste and excitement whenever a baby was expected. Deedee was glad to be identified, and smiled at M’sieu Page.

But when Mrs. Boles said, “Really? I must ask her into my Sabbath school,” Deedee’s mood darkened. Not that she objected to the idea of the Sabbath school. She noted its existence with quick interest. It was something in the lady’s pretty eyes which regarded her curiously, as though a divil DuGay were a bear’s claw necklace. Deedee’s smile vanished, and her tongue shot out. She could shoot out her tongue until it looked like a snake’s tongue—regrettable accomplishment.

That had been the previous June, and she had not been invited into the Sabbath school. Neither had she had a chance to visit M’sieu Page’s house. Indeed, the chance seemed farther away than it ever had.