Читать книгу The Road to Frontenac - Merwin Samuel, Webster Henry Kitchell - Страница 3

The sun hung low over the western woods when Menard, at the close of the second day, headed the canoe shoreward. The great river swept by with hardly a surface motion, dimpling and rippling under the last touch of the day breeze. Menard’s eyes rested on Father Claude, as the canoe drew into the shadow of the trees. The priest, stiff from the hours of sitting and kneeling, had taken up a paddle and was handling it deftly. He had rolled his sleeves up to the elbow, showing a thin forearm with wire-like muscles. The two voyageurs, at bow and stern, were proving to be quiet enough fellows. Guerin, the younger, wore a boyish, half-confiding look. His fellow, Perrot, was an older man.

Menard felt, when he thought of Danton, a sense of pride in his own right judgment. The boy was taking hold with a strong, if unguided, hand. Already the feather was gone from his hat, the lace from his throat. Two days in the canoe and a night on the ground had stained and wrinkled his uniform,–a condition of which, with his quick adaptability, he was already beginning to feel proud. He had flushed often, during the first day, under the shrewd glances of the voyageurs, who read the inexperience in his bright clothes and white hands. Menard knew, from the way his shoulders followed the swing of his arms, that the steady paddling was laming him sadly. He would allow Danton five days more; at the week’s end he must be a man, else the experiment had failed.

The canoe scraped bottom under a wild growth of brush and outreaching trees. The forest was stirring with the rustle and call of birds, with the breath of the leaves and the far-away crackle and plunge of larger animals through the undergrowth. A chipmunk, with inquisitive eyes, sat on the root of a knotted oak, but he whisked away when Menard and the canoemen stepped into the shallow water. Overhead, showing little fear of the canoe and of the strangely clad animals within it, scampered a family of red squirrels, now nibbling a nut from the winter’s store, now running and jumping from tree to tree, until only by the shaking of the twigs and the leaf-clusters could one follow their movements.

The maid leaned an elbow on the bale which Danton had placed at her back, and rested her cheek on her hand. They were under the drooping branches of an elm that stood holding to the edge of the bank. Well out over the water sat one of the squirrels, his tail sweeping above his head, nibbling an acorn, and looking with hasty little glances at the canoe. She watched him, and memories came into her eyes. There had been squirrels on her father’s seignory who would take nuts from her hand, burying them slyly under the bushes, and hurrying back for more.

Danton came wading to the side of the canoe to help her to the bank, but she took his hand only to steady herself while rising. Stepping over the bracing-strips between the gunwales, she caught a swaying branch, and swung herself lightly ashore. Back from the water the ground rose into a low hill, covered with oak and elm and ragged hickory trees. Here, for a space, there was little undergrowth, and save under the heaviest of the trees the ground was green with short, coarse grass. Danton took a hatchet from the canoe, and trimmed a fir tree, heaping armfuls of green boughs at the foot of an oak near the top of the slope. Over these he threw a blanket. The maid came slowly up the hill, in response to his call, and with a weary little smile of thanks she sank upon the fragrant couch. She rested against the tree trunk, gazing through the nearer foliage at the rushing river.

For the two days she had been like this,–silent, shy, with sad eyes. And Danton,–who could no more have avoided the company of such a maid than he could have left off eating or breathing or laughing,–Danton, for all his short Paris life (which should, Heaven knows, have given him a front with the maids), could do nothing but hang about, eager for a smile or a word, yet too young to know that he could better serve his case by leaving her with her thoughts, and with the boundless woods and the great lonely spaces of the river. Menard saw the comedy–as indeed, who of the party did not–and was amused. A few moments later he glanced again toward the oak. He was sharpening a knife, and could seem not to be observing. Danton was sitting a few yards from the maid, with the awkward air of a youth who doubts his welcome. She still looked out over the water. Menard saw that her face was white and drooping. He knew that she had not slept; for twice during the preceding night, as he lay in his blanket, he had heard from under the overturned canoe, where she lay, the low sound of her sobbing.

Menard walked slowly down the slope, testing the knife-edge with his thumb, his short pipe between his teeth. He sheathed his knife, lowered his pipe, and called:–

“Guerin.” The two men, who were bringing wood to the fire, looked up. “Where has the Father gone?”

Guerin pointed around the base of the hill. “He went to the woods, M’sieu.”

“With a bundle,” added Perrot.

Menard walked around the hill, and after a little searching found the priest, kneeling, in a clearing, before the portrait of Catharine Outasoren, which he had set against a tree. His brushes and paints were spread on the ground before him. He did not hear Menard approach.

“Oh,” said the captain, “you brought the picture!”

The priest looked up over his shoulder, with a startled manner.

“I myself have stripped down to the lightest necessaries,” said Menard, with a significant glance at the portrait.

The priest lowered his brush, and sat looking at the picture with troubled eyes. “I had no place for it,” he said at last, hesitatingly.

“They didn’t take it at the College, eh?”

Father Claude flushed.

“They were very kind. They felt that perhaps it was not entirely completed, and that–”

“You will leave it at Montreal, then, at the Mission?”

“Yes,–I suppose so. Yes, I shall plan to leave it there.”

Menard leaned against a tree, and pressed the tobacco down in his pipe.

“I have been doing some thinking in the last few minutes, Father. I’ve decided to make my first call on you for assistance.”

“Very well, Captain.”

“It is about the maid. Have you noticed?”

“She seems of a sober mind.”

“Don’t you see why? It is her father’s losses, and this journey. She is taking it very hard. She is afraid, Father, all the time; and she neither sleeps nor eats.”

“It is naturally hard for such a child as she is to take this journey. She has had no experience,–she does not comprehend the easy customs and the hard travelling of the frontier. I think that in time–”

Menard was puffing impatiently.

“Father,” he said, “do you remember when Major Gordeau was killed, and I was detailed to bring his wife and daughter down to Three Rivers? It was much like this. They fretted and could not sleep, and the coarse fare of the road was beneath their appetites. Do you remember? And when it came to taking the rapids, with the same days of hard work that lie before us now, they were too weak, and they sickened, the mother first, then the daughter. When I think of that, Father, of the last week of that journey, and of how I swore never again to take a woman in my care on the river, I–well, there is no use in going over it. If this goes on, we shall not get to Frontenac in time, that is all. And I cannot afford to take such a chance.”

The priest looked grave. The long struggle against the rapids from Montreal to La Gallette had tried the hardihood of more than one strong man.

“It is probable, my son, that the sense of your responsibility makes you a little over-cautious. She is a strong enough child, I should say. Still, perhaps the food is not what she has been accustomed to. I have noticed that she eats little.”

“Perrot is too fond of grease,” Menard said. “I must tell him to use less grease.”

“If she should be taken sick, we could leave her with someone at Montreal.”

“Leave her at Montreal!” exclaimed Menard. “When she breaks down, it will be in the rapids. And then I must either go on alone, or wait with you until she is strong enough to be carried. In any case it means confusion and delay. And I must not be delayed.”

“What have you in mind to do?”

“We must find a way to brighten her spirits. It is homesickness that worries her, and sorrow for her father, and dread of what is before and around her. I’ll warrant she has never been away from her home before. We must get her confidence,–devise ways to cheer her, brighten her.”

“I can reason with her, and–”

“This is not the time for reasoning, Father. What we must do is to make her stop thinking, stop looking backward and forward. And there is Danton; he can help. He is of an age with her, and should succeed where you and I might fail.”

“He has not awaited the suggestion, Captain.”

“Yes, I know. But he must,–well, Father, it has all been said. The maid is on our hands, and must be got to Frontenac. That is all. And there is nothing for it but to rely on Danton to help.”

The priest looked at his brushes, and hesitated. “I am not certain,” he said, “she is very young. And Lieutenant Danton,–I have heard, while at Quebec,–”

Menard laughed.

“He is a boy, Father. These tales may be true enough. Why not? They would fit as well any idle lieutenant in Quebec, who is lucky enough to have an eye, and a pair of shoulders, and a bit of the King’s gold in his purse. This maid is the daughter of a gentleman, Father; she is none of your Lower Town jades. And Danton may be young and foolish,–as may we all have been,–but he is a gentleman born.”

“Very well,” replied the priest, looking with regret at the failing light, and beginning to gather his brushes. “I will counsel her, but I fear it will do little good. If the maid is sick at heart, and we attempt to guide her thoughts, we may but drive the trouble deeper in. It is the same with some of the Indian maidens, when they have left the tribe for the Mission. Now and again there comes a time, even with piety to strengthen them,–and this maid has little,–when the yearning seems to grow too strong to be cured. Sometimes they go back. One died. It was at Sault St. Francis in the year of the–”

“Yes, yes,” Menard broke in. “We have only one fact to remember; there must be no delay in carrying out the Governor’s orders. We cannot change our plans because of this maid.”

“We must not let her understand, M’sieu.”

Menard had been standing, with a shoulder against the tree, alternately puffing at his pipe and lowering it, scowling meanwhile at the ground. Now he suddenly raised his head and chuckled.

“It will be many a year since I have played the beau, Father. It may be that I have forgotten the rôle.” He spread out his hands and looked at the twisted fingers. “But I can try, like a soldier. And there are three of us, Father Claude, there are three of us.”

He turned to go back to the camp, but the priest touched him.

“My son,–perhaps, before you return, you would look again at my unworthy portrait. I–about the matter of the canoe–”

“Oh,” said Menard, “you’ve taken it out.”

“Yes; it seemed best, considering the danger that others might feel the same doubts which troubled you.”

“I wouldn’t do that. The canoe was all right, once the direction were decided on.”

“Above all else, the true portrait should convey to the mind of the observer the impression that a single, an unmistakable purpose underlies the work. When one considers–”

“Very true, Father, very true,” said Menard abruptly, looking about at the beginning of the twilight. “And now we had better get back. The supper will be ready.”

Menard strode away toward the camp. Father Claude watched him for a time through the trees, then turned again to the picture. Finally he got together his materials, and carrying them in a fold of his gown, with the picture in his left hand, he followed Menard.

The maid was leaning back against the tree, looking up at the sky, where the first red of the afterglow was spreading. She did not hear Menard; and he paused, a few yards away, to look at the clear whiteness of her skin and the full curve of her throat. Her figure and air, her habits of gesture and step, and carriage of the head, were those of the free-hearted maid of the seignory. They told of an outdoor life, of a good horse, and a light canoe, and the inbred love of trees and sky and running water. Here was none of the stiffness, the more than Parisian manner, of the maidens of Quebec. To stand there and look at her, unconscious as she was, pleased Menard.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, coming nearer, “will you join us at supper?”

The maid looked at him with a slow blush (she was not yet accustomed to the right of these men to enter into the routine of her life). Menard reached to help her, but she rose easily.

“Lieutenant Danton is not here?”

“No, M’sieu, he walked away.”

They sat about a log. Danton had not strayed far, for he joined them shortly, wearing a sulky expression. Menard looked about the group. The maid was silent. Father Claude was beginning at once on the food before him. The twilight was growing deeper, and Guerin dragged a log to the fire, throwing it on the pile with a shower of sparks, and half a hundred shooting tongues of flame. The Captain looked again at Danton, and saw that the boy’s glance shifted uneasily about the group. Altogether it was an unfortunate start for his plan. But it was clear that no other would break the ice, so he drew a long breath, and plunged doggedly into the story of his first fight on the St. Lawrence.

It was a brave story of ambuscade and battle; and it was full of the dark of night and the red flash of muskets and the stealth and treachery of the Iroquois soul. When he reached the tale of the captured Mohawk, who sat against a tree with a ball in his lungs, to the last refusing the sacrament, and dying like a chief with the death song on his lips, Danton was leaning forward, breathless and eager, hanging on his words. The maid’s eyes, too, were moist. Then they talked on, Danton asking boyish questions, and Father Claude starting over and again on a narrative of the wonderful conversion of the Huron drunkard, Heroukiki, who, in his zeal,–and here Menard always swept in with a new story, which left the priest adrift in the eddies of the conversation. At last, when they rose, and the dusk was settling over the trees, the maid was laughing with gentle good fellowship.

While they were eating, the voyageurs had brought the canoe a short way up the bank, resting it, bottom up, on large stones brought from the shore. Underneath was a soft cot of balsam; over the canoe were blankets, hanging on both sides to the ground. Then Mademoiselle said good-night, with a moment’s lingering on the word, and a wistful note in her voice that brought perhaps more sympathy than had the sad eyes of the morning. For after all she was only a girl, and hers was a brave little heart.

The three men lay on the slope with hardly a word, looking at the river, now shining like silver through the trees. This new turn in the life of the party was not as yet to be taken familiarly. Father Claude withdrew early to his meditations. Menard stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head, gazing lazily at the leaves overhead, now hanging motionless from the twigs.

Danton was sitting up, looking about, and running the young reeds through his fingers.

“Danton,” Menard said, after a long silence, “I suppose you know that we have something of a problem on our hands.”

Danton looked over the river.

“What have you thought about Mademoiselle?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Father Claude and I have been talking this evening about her. I have thought that she does not look any too strong for a hard journey of a hundred and more leagues.”

“She has little colour,” said Danton, cautiously.

“It seems to me, Danton, that you can help us.”

“How?”

“What seems to you the cause of the trouble?”

“With Mademoiselle? She takes little impression from the kindness of those about her.”

“Oh, come, Danton. You know better. Even a boy of your age should see deeper than that. You think she slights you; very likely she does. What of that? You are not here to be drawn into a boy-and-girl quarrel with a maid who chances to share our canoe. You are here as my aid, to make the shortest time possible between Quebec and Frontenac. If she were to fall sick, we should be delayed. Therefore she must not fall sick.”

Danton had plucked a weed, and now was pulling it to pieces, bit by bit.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Stop this moping, this hanging about. Take hold of the matter. Devise talks, diversions; fill her idle moments; I care not what you do,–within limits, my boy, within limits.”

“Oh,” said Danton, “then you really want me to?”

“Certainly. I am too old myself.”

Danton rose, and walked a few steps away and back.

“But she will have none of me, Menard. It is, ‘No, with thanks,’ or, worse, a shake of the head. If I offer to help, if I try to talk, if I–oh, it is always the same. I am tired of it.”

Menard smiled in the dark.

“Is that your reply to an order from your superior officer, Danton?”

The boy stood silent for a moment, then he said, “I beg your pardon, Captain.” And with a curious effort at stiffness he wandered off among the trees, and was soon out of Menard’s sight.

Menard walked slowly down to the fire, opened his pack, and spreading out his blanket, rolled himself in it with his feet close to the red embers. For a long time he lay awake. This episode took him back nearly a decade, to a time when he, like Danton, would have lost his poise at a glance from the nearest pair of eyes. That the maid should so interest him was in itself amusing. Had she been older or younger, had she been any but the timid, honest little woman that she was, he would have left her, without a second thought, in the care of the Commandant at Montreal, to be escorted through the rapids by some later party. But he had fixed his mind on getting her to Frontenac, and the question was settled. His last thought that night was of her quiet laughter and her friendly, hesitating “good-night.”

He was awakened in the half light before the sunrise by a step on the twigs. At a little distance through the trees was the maid, walking down toward the water. She slipped easily between the briers, holding her skirt close. From a spring, not a hundred yards up the hillside, a brook came tumbling to the river, picking its way under and over the stones and the fallen trees, and trickling over the bank with a low murmur. The maid stopped by a pool, and kneeling on a flat rock, dipped her hands.

The others were asleep. A rod away lay Danton, a sprawling heap in his blanket. Menard rose, tossed his blanket upon his bundle, and walked slowly down toward the maid.

“Mademoiselle, you rise with the birds.”

She looked around, and laughed gently. He saw that she had frankly accepted the first little change in their relations.

“I like to be with the birds, M’sieu.”

Menard had no small talk. He was thinking of her evident lack of sleep.

“It is the best hour for the river, Mademoiselle.” The colours of the dawn were beginning to creep up beyond the eastern bank, sending a lance of red and gold into a low cloud bank, and a spread of soft crimson close after. “Perhaps you are fond of the fish?”

The maid was kneeling to pick a cluster of yellow flower cups. She looked up and nodded, with a smile.

“We fished at home, M’sieu.”

“We will go,” said Menard, abruptly. “I will bring down the canoe.”

He threw the blankets to one side, and stooping under the long canoe, carried it on his shoulders to the water. A line and hook were in his bundle; the bait was ready at a turn of the grass and weeds.

“We are two adventurers,” he said lightly, as he tossed the line into the canoe, and held out one of the paddles. “You should do your share of the morning’s work, Mademoiselle.”

She laughed again, and took the paddle. They pushed off; the maid kneeling at the bow, Menard in the stern. He guided the canoe against the current. The water lay flat under the still air, reflecting the gloomy trees on the banks, and the deepening colours of the sky. He fell into a lazy, swinging stroke, watching the maid. Her arms and shoulders moved easily, with the grace of one who had tumbled about a canoe from early childhood.

“Ready, Mademoiselle?” He was heading for a deep pool near a line of rushes. The maid, laying down her paddle, reached back for the line, and put on the bait with her own fingers.

Menard held the canoe steady against the current, which was there but a slow movement, while she lowered the hook over the bow. They sat without a word for some minutes. Once he spoke, in a bantering voice, and she motioned to him to be quiet. Her brows were drawn down close together.

It was but a short time before she felt a jerk at the line. Her arms straightened out, and she pressed her lips tightly together. “Quick!” she said. “Go ahead!”

“Can you hold it?” he asked, as he dipped his paddle.

She nodded. “I wish the line were longer. It will be hard to give him any room.” She wound the cord around her wrist. “Will the line hold, M’sieu?”

“I think so. See if you can pull in.”

She leaned back, and pulled steadily, then shook her head. “Not very much. Perhaps, if you can get into the shallow water–”

Menard slowly worked the canoe through an opening in the rushes. There was a thrashing about and plunging not two rods away. Once the fish leaped clear of the water in a curve of clashing silver.

“It’s a salmon,” he said. “A small one.”

The maid held hard, but the colour had gone from her face. The canoe drew nearer to the shore.

“Hold fast,” said Menard. He gave a last sweep of the paddle, and crept forward to the bow. Kneeling behind the maid, he reached over her shoulder, and took the line below her hand.

“Careful, M’sieu; it may break.”

“We must risk it.” He pulled slowly in until the fish was close under the gunwale. “Now can you hold?”

“Yes.” She shook a straying lock of hair from her eyes, and took another turn of the cord around her wrist.

“Steady,” he said. He drew his knife, leaned over the gunwale, and stabbed at the fighting fish until his blade sank in just below the gills, and he could lift it aboard.

The maid laughed nervously, and rested her hands upon the two gunwales. Her breath was gone, and there was a red mark around her wrist where the cord had been. The canoe had drifted into the rushes, and Menard went back to his paddle, and worked out again into the channel.

“And now, Mademoiselle,” he said, “we shall have a breakfast of our own. You need not paddle. I will take her down.”

Her breath was coming back. She laughed, and sat comfortably in the bow, facing Menard, and letting her eyes follow the steady swing and catch of his paddle. When they reached the camp, the voyageurs were astir, but Danton and the priest still slept. The first red glare of the sun was levelled at them over the eastern trees.

Menard made a fire under an arch of flat stones, and trimming a strip of oak wood with his hatchet, he laid the cleaned fish upon it and kept it on the fire until it was brown and crisp. The maid sat by, her eyes alert and her cheeks flushed.

Danton was awake before the fish was cooked, and he stood about with a pretence of not observing them. The maid was fairly aroused. She drew him into the talk, and laughed and bantered with the two men as prettily as they could have wished from a Quebec belle.

All during the morning Danton was silent. At noon, when the halt was made for the midday lunch, he was still puzzling over the apparent understanding between Mademoiselle and the Captain. Before the journey was taken up, he stood for a moment near Menard, on the river bank.

“Captain,” he said, “you asked me last night to–”

“Well?”

“It may be that I have misunderstood you. Of course, if Mademoiselle–if you–” He caught himself.

Menard smiled; then he read the earnestness beneath the boy’s confusion, and sobered.

“Mademoiselle and I went fishing, Danton. Result,–Mademoiselle eats her first meal. If you can do as much you shall have my thanks. And now remember that you are a lieutenant in the King’s service.”