Читать книгу Early Candlelight - Maud Hart Lovelace - Страница 12

Book 1-Chapter 2

II

AT the meeting of the rivers were two worlds. In one of them the army made the best of a bad situation. It danced quadrilles and drank tea and went on buffalo hunts with its valued neighbor, Jasper Page. In the other the squatters, a tatterdemalion set, ran their sheep and dug in their gardens and gave thanks to the good God that they had a bit of this pleasant land for their own.

The squatters had come from far places to build their cabins at the Entry. Some had been lured from comfortable old-world homes by that Scotch Earl of Selkirk, who had done no more harm than well-intentioned people often do. He had offered free lands on the distant Red River. The settlers had arrived with high hearts, to find empty wastes that in winter were buried under snow, and in summer were scorched by sun and harried by locusts. Among them were excellent men like Abraham Perret, who had made clocks in Switzerland and suffered much hardship in a wild land where men told the time by the sun. He and his wife and little daughters with several other families had made their hazardous way down to the fort. There was much rejoicing when they heard their own tongue spoken among their fellow squatters. These were French Canadians, former voyageurs, many with sons who were still upon the river.

In those days, throughout that country, the voyageur was a figure of romance. His dress told you as much at your first sight of him. By the nodding feather he loved to wear, by the dagger in his sash, you knew him to be of no workaday world.

Nor was he. Not his a common dull routine in field or town. His the perilous task of serving to bind the civilized headquarters of the great fur companies with the trading posts, set down hundreds of leagues away in unmapped country. To these posts, in heat and cold, the voyageur bore supplies, and from them he returned with precious furs. He had no trail to follow; he asked none. He was a maker of trails on water or on land. With a ration of tallow and hulled corn, he went where white men had never gone before. He paddled and portaged from ocean to ocean and thought it worth only a ballad.

He was a fellow, the ancien voyageur! Winter storms might drive him to shelter beneath a snowdrift, but they could not turn him back. Not even the mosquitoes of summer, more terrible than any storm, could turn him back. As for the savages, he learned their tongue and ate their dogs and made love to their women—as faithless to the women as he was faithful to the distant employers he served.

For many years Denis DuGay had been a voyageur. But he had stayed the year round at the Entry since a riverman of a rival company had emptied a gun in his leg when he was bargaining for furs in an Indian tepee. He had three voyageur sons upon the St. Peters, however, and seven more growing up about him. The seven, with Deedee, were his children by Mme. DuGay. Denis had been the father of Narcisse and Amable and Hypolite—they were half-grown youngsters and already wild as hawks—when he married Tessie Marsh.

Tess, arriving at the St. Peters, had thought that she was the wife of Jimmie Marsh and had found herself his widow. He had come with that detachment of the Fifth United States Infantry which under Colonel Leavenworth broke the first ground for the fort. They toiled up the Mississippi in keel boats and bateaux, but the rigors of the trip were as nothing to the rigors of that first winter in the wilderness. They threw up inadequate log shelters on the right bank of the St. Peters, at that place which the Indians called M’dota, the Meeting of the Waters. Their provisions were moldy flour and pork, pork which had suffered from the enterprise of a St. Louis contractor who drew off the brine to make the barrels lighter, and later substituted river water. Scurvy attacked them. The Indians brought in roots of spikenard, and the handful of officers’ wives in the party nursed the sick faithfully. But forty soldiers died, young Jimmie Marsh among them. He went on sentry duty in boisterous health, and they found him dead. So it happened that when Tess arrived she found her husband only in the mound which marked his grave.

Tess was not permitted to prolong her mourning. Jimmie Marsh had been a favorite with his comrades, but it was something to see a red-cheeked girl out in the Indian country. She, however, would have nothing of the military. The uniform, it is well known, causes hearts to tremble, but what is the uniform to the outfit of a voyageur—the bright blue capote, confined at the waist by a knitted scarlet sash, the small scarlet stocking cap set at a slant, the pipe in the lips? To the chagrin of the Fifth Infantry, Tess took Denis DuGay.

Denis was not so young as he had been. His tall figure stooped a little, but he had his fiddle, and those eyes of shining brown that were to be Deedee’s, and the happy heart which made him such a favorite at the garrison. And all these counted. But what counted most with Tess was a guarantee she found in the three young sons, of somewhat obscure maternity, who followed him wherever he went like a triplicate shadow. It was a guarantee of care, of loyalty, of gentleness.

What a man, thought Tess, thus to shepherd his casual progeny while his mates neither knew nor cared where their blood ran! And what children, these, to be living on the river! What little lads, to be cursing and carousing! So she stood up with Denis before Major Lawrence Taliaferro, the honest Indian Agent, and took the boys in hand with kindly vigor.

Tess was not only a woman of red cheeks, of charm and courage and unsentimental tenderness. She had been to school. She could read and write. She believed in well scrubbed hands and a well scrubbed kitchen floor. Of course she had no floors to scrub at the Entry, but she made the boys pound pebbles into the hard dirt, which served.

The DuGays had lived in a number of cabins. Denis had housed them first on the river bottom, and their home had been swept away in a spring torrent; then at M’dota, where they had been washed out again. Now they were lodged on the crest of the hill near the limestone walls of the fort, their window, when not blinded by sacking, looking down on the crooked St. Peters. Wherever they lived, their cabin was unique. Like the others, it was made of Cottonwood logs with a bark roof and mud chinkins, but it had a different air. The kettles were scoured with sand. The split-log furniture was tidy. If the cupboard was not entirely empty, the stew had flavor; Tess DuGay knew the value of an onion. She covered the wooden bunk, built into a corner for herself and Denis, with a three-point blanket. She put the wild flowers which the children brought in into a jug. Everyone liked the DuGay cabin, even the Indians, who never failed to pay a call when they came for a palaver with their white father at the Agency.

Tess was no longer young, but she had kept her red cheeks, and on Sundays she wore a white cap trimmed with cherry-colored ribbons which Narcisse had bought for her at the sutler’s store. She moved as quickly as a girl, although she grew heavier yearly. The family spoke an anomalous mixture of English, French and Sioux, but Tessie’s commonest means of communication was a chuckle. She chuckled when Denis strewed shavings of red cedar in his endless manufacture of fiddles. She chuckled when the boys overturned benches and tables in rough and tumble fights. She chuckled when Deedee ran in with dirty Indian babies held tenderly for her mother to admire. She chuckled—but she had the finger of authority. The DuGays were full of mischief—divil-ment, an Irish officer had called it, giving them their nickname—but not of honest wickedness. Unless, perhaps, it were Narcisse.

Narcisse said, “Tess, she brek de heart eef we too moch gret beeg devils.” He said it earnestly to his small half brothers and sister. But Narcisse drank too much whiskey; and more than once he had been in trouble with the military. And yet—there was something about Narcisse. Tess had, she could not deny it, a special feeling for him. And not Tess alone; everybody—the soldiers, the squatters, the Indians. For a mission which required tactful handling of the Indians, M’sieu Page always chose Narcisse. The Sioux would give Narcisse their very eagle feathers, M’sieu Page had said one time to Tess. Narcisse showed, it is true, a tint of the bois brûlé, but that was not the reason. Amable and Hypolite showed that, too.

How Deedee loved Narcisse! He and Amable and Hypolite seemed no less her brothers than the younger seven, and her supreme devotion was rendered to him and to Andy, the baby. Narcisse was like the baby, although he was tall and bronzed; he was so helpless. His curly black hair was always tousled by elated or despairing fingers. His black eyes either sparkled with fun or were clouded with misery. His smile flashed in his bearded face, only to go out like a candle.

There was no one quite like Narcisse, who on one return loaded her with wampum and beaded trinkets, and on the next would hardly fling her a word, but brooded over his pipe for days. The other DuGays were always happy. The little cabin shone with the sunshine of their dispositions. Narcisse was the only cloud. Yet when Narcisse was happy he was the happiest of all. How he could sing, about the three fairy ducks or the little bird which spoke both French and Latin! How he could laugh, with his head thrown back and his black beard pointed at the ceiling! How he could swing Tess off the floor, and did it, too, on those nights when some soldiers came in for a stew and Denis tuned up the fiddle!

Narcisse was too happy. Couldn’t he see it himself, wondered Deedee, watching him? It was going up so high which made him fall so far. When he was happy she watched him smilingly, but with a small pain at her heart, and when he was unhappy her eyes took on an anxious watchful look.

Amable had a round moon face and loved to eat, to sleep, to chatter. Hypolite had a long nose and twinkling eyes and a dangerous reputation as a fighter. All three had the long rakish body of their father, which Deedee also possessed. There was a story told of the brothers. It was said that once they had walked over fifty miles on snowshoes, and then, arriving to find a ball in progress at some half-breed shanty at the Entry, had danced all the rest of the night.

The younger boys were more like Tess, stocky and red-cheeked. Their mother had tried to insure their greatness by naming them for the great, and it was Deedee’s duty and privilege to box the ears, scrub the hands, sugar the bread and kiss the bumps of George Washington (Georgie), Lafayette (Lafe), Napoleon Bonaparte (Nappie), Jasper Page (Jappie), Daniel Boone (Dannie), Zachary Taylor (Zach)—Old Rough and Ready and his four delightful daughters had recently commanded at the fort. And down at the end of the string was Andy (for Andrew Jackson, who was president at the time), a one-year-old of soft alluring bulges and tender pendent cheeks.

Andy was the baby, and Deedee always took care of the baby. She took care of succeeding babies as they arrived at yearly intervals, and tended each one with undiminishing delight. Deedee loved babies. She loved all of her brothers, and herded the younger ones about with great good humor and beat them at running, at climbing, at swimming, just to keep them in hand. But especially she loved the one who at the moment was the youngest. Her long thin arms knew the very gentlest way to cradle a baby. Her bright eyes grew soft as patches of brown velvet when babies looked up at them with their unblinking stares. Her merry mouth turned tender as she hummed the little tuneless song which so infallibly put them to sleep.

“Delia has a way with babies,” said Tess DuGay. She was proud of her only daughter.

And in other ways besides taking care of babies, Dee-dee was a help. She was more help, her mother sometimes said, than the seven boys laid end to end. Deedee thought that boys laid end to end would be even less help than they were on their lively toes, but she never brought up the matter. Deedee, like her mother, was inclined to be silent in a houseful of chatterers. When she spoke it was slowly. She moved slowly, too. She had a negligent, smiling way of going into action.

But she went into action. Consider the morning upon which she went to the island and into M’sieu Page’s house.