The Chase Of Saint Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World by Mary Hartwell Catherwood
M >>
Mary Hartwell Catherwood >> The Chase Of Saint Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 THE CHASE OF SAINT-CASTIN
AND OTHER STORIES OF
THE FRENCH IN THE
NEW WORLD
BY
MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
[Illustration]
1894
THE CHASE OF SAINT-CASTIN.
The waiting April woods, sensitive in every leafless twig to spring,
stood in silence and dim nightfall around a lodge. Wherever a human
dwelling is set in the wilderness, it becomes, by the very humility of
its proportions, a prominent and aggressive point. But this lodge
of bark and poles was the color of the woods, and nearly escaped
intruding as man's work. A glow lighted the top, revealing the faint
azure of smoke which rose straight upward in the cool, clear air.
Such a habitation usually resounded at nightfall with Indian noises,
especially if the day's hunting had been good. The mossy rocks lying
around, were not more silent than the inmates of this lodge. You could
hear the Penobscot River foaming along its uneasy bed half a mile
eastward. The poles showed freshly cut disks of yellow at the top; and
though the bark coverings were such movables as any Indian household
carried, they were newly fastened to their present support. This was
plainly the night encampment of a traveling party, and two French
hunters and their attendant Abenaquis recognized that, as it barred
their trail to the river. An odor of roasted meat was wafted out like
an invitation to them.
"Excellent, Saint-Castin," pronounced the older Frenchman. "Here
is another of your wilderness surprises. No wonder you prefer an
enchanted land to the rough mountains around Bearn. I shall never go
back to France myself."
"Stop, La Hontan!" The young man restrained his guest from plunging
into the wigwam with a headlong gesture recently learned and practiced
with delight. "I never saw this lodge before."
"Did you not have it set up here for the night?"
"No; it is not mine. Our Abenaquis are going to build one for us
nearer the river."
"I stay here," observed La Hontan. "Supper is ready, and adventures
are in the air."
"But this is not a hunter's lodge. You see that our very dogs
understand they have no business here. Come on."
"Come on, without seeing who is hid herein? No. I begin to think it is
something thou wouldst conceal from me. I go in; and if it be a bear
trap, I cheerfully perish."
The young Frenchman stood resting the end of his gun on sodden leaves.
He felt vexed at La Hontan. But that inquisitive nobleman stooped
to lift the tent flap, and the young man turned toward his waiting
Indians and talked a moment in Abenaqui, when they went on in the
direction of the river, carrying game and camp luggage. They thought,
as he did, that this might be a lodge with which no man ought to
meddle. The daughter of Madockawando, the chief, was known to be
coming from her winter retreat. Every Abenaqui in the tribe stood
in awe of the maid. She did not rule them as a wise woman, but lived
apart from them as a superior spirit.
Baron La Hontan, on all fours, intruded his gay face on the inmates of
the lodge. There were three of them. His palms encountered a carpet
of hemlock twigs, which spread around a central fire to the circular
wall, and was made sweetly odorous by the heat. A thick couch of the
twigs was piled up beyond the fire, and there sat an Abenaqui girl in
her winter dress of furs. She was so white-skinned that she startled
La Hontan as an apparition of Europe. He got but one black-eyed
glance. She drew her blanket over her head. The group had doubtless
heard the conference outside, but ignored it with reticent gravity.
The hunter of the lodge was on his heels by the embers, toasting
collops of meat for the blanketed princess; and an Etchemin woman, the
other inmate, took one from his hand, and paused, while dressing it
with salt, to gaze at the Frenchman.
La Hontan had not found himself distasteful to northwestern Indian
girls. It was the first time an aboriginal face had ever covered
itself from exposure to his eyes. He felt the sudden respect which
nuns command, even in those who scoff at their visible consecration.
The usual announcement made on entering a cabin--"I come to see this
man," or "I come to see that woman,"--he saw was to be omitted in
addressing this strangely civilized Indian girl.
"Mademoiselle," said Baron La Hontan in very French Abenaqui, rising
to one knee, and sweeping the twigs with the brim of his hat as he
pulled it off, "the Baron de Saint-Castin of Pentegoet, the friend of
your chief Madockawando, is at your lodge door, tired and chilled from
a long hunt. Can you not permit him to warm at your fire?"
The Abenaqui girl bowed her covered head. Her woman companion passed
the permission on, and the hunter made it audible by a grunt of
assent. La Hontan backed nimbly out, and seized the waiting man by the
leg. The main portion of the baron was in the darkening April woods,
but his perpendicular soles stood behind the flap within the lodge.
"Enter, my child," he whispered in excitement. "A warm fire,
hot collops, a black eye to be coaxed out of a blanket, and full
permission given to enjoy all. What, man! Out of countenance at
thought of facing a pretty squaw, when you have three keeping house
with you at the fort?"
"Come out, La Hontan," whispered back Saint-Castin, on his part
grasping the elder's arm. "It is Madockawando's daughter."
"The red nun thou hast told me about? The saints be praised! But art
thou sure?"
"How can I be sure? I have never seen her myself. But I judge from her
avoiding your impudent eye. She does not like to be looked at."
"It was my mentioning the name of Saint-Castin of Pentegoet that
made her whip her head under the blanket. I see, if I am to keep my
reputation in the woods, I shall have to withdraw from your company."
"Withdraw your heels from this lodge," replied Saint-Castin
impatiently. "You will embroil me with the tribe."
"Why should it embroil you with the tribe," argued the merry sitter,
"if we warm our heels decently at this ready fire until the Indians
light our own? Any Christian, white or red, would grant us that
privilege."
"If I enter with you, will you come out with me as soon as I make you
a sign?"
"Doubt it not," said La Hontan, and he eclipsed himself directly.
Though Saint-Castin had been more than a year in Acadia, this was the
first time he had ever seen Madockawando's daughter. He knew it was
that elusive being, on her way from her winter retreat to the tribe's
summer fishing station near the coast. Father Petit, the priest of
this woodland parish, spoke of her as one who might in time found a
house of holy women amidst the license of the wilderness.
Saint-Castin wanted to ask her pardon for entering; but he sat without
a sound. Some power went out from that silent shape far stronger than
the hinted beauty of girlish ankle and arm. The glow of brands lighted
the lodge, showing the bark seams on its poles. Pale smoke and the
pulse of heat quivered betwixt him and a presence which, by some swift
contrast, made his face burn at the recollection of his household
at Pentegoet. He had seen many good women in his life, with the
patronizing tolerance which men bestow on unpiquant things that are
harmless; and he did not understand why her hiding should stab him
like a reproach. She hid from all common eyes. But his were not common
eyes. Saint-Castin felt impatient at getting no recognition from a
girl, saint though she might be, whose tribe he had actually adopted.
The blunt-faced Etchemin woman, once a prisoner brought from northern
Acadia, now the companion of Madockawando's daughter, knew her duty to
the strangers, and gave them food as rapidly as the hunter could broil
it. The hunter was a big-legged, small-headed Abenaqui, with knees
over-topping his tuft of hair when he squatted on his heels. He looked
like a man whose emaciated trunk and arms had been taken possession of
by colossal legs and feet. This singular deformity made him the best
hunter in his tribe. He tracked game with a sweep of great beams as
tireless as the tread of a modern steamer. The little sense in his
head was woodcraft. He thought of nothing but taking and dressing
game.
Saint-Castin barely tasted the offered meat; but La Hontan enjoyed it
unabashed, warming himself while he ate, and avoiding any chance of a
hint from his friend that the meal should be cut short.
"My child," he said in lame Abenaqui to the Etchemin woman, while his
sly regard dwelt on the blanket-robed statue opposite, "I wish you the
best of gifts, a good husband."
The Etchemin woman heard him in such silence as one perhaps brings
from making a long religious retreat, and forbore to explain that
she already had the best of gifts, and was the wife of the big-legged
hunter.
"I myself had an aunt who, never married," warned La Hontan. "She
was an excellent woman, but she turned like fruit withered in the
ripening. The fantastic airs of her girlhood clung to her. She was at
a disadvantage among the married, and young people passed her by as
an experiment that had failed. So she was driven to be very religious;
but prayers are cold comfort for the want of a bouncing family."
If the Etchemin woman had absorbed from her mistress a habit of
meditation which shut out the world, Saint-Castin had not. He gave La
Hontan the sign to move before him out of the lodge, and no choice
but to obey it, crowding the reluctant and comfortable man into
undignified attitudes. La Hontan saw that he had taken offense. There
was no accounting for the humors of those disbanded soldiers of the
Carignan-Salieres, though Saint-Castin was usually a gentle fellow.
They spread out their sensitive military honor over every inch of
their new seigniories; and if you chucked the wrong little Indian or
habitant's naked baby under the chin, you might unconsciously stir
up war in the mind of your host. La Hontan was glad he was directly
leaving Acadia. He was fond of Saint-Castin. Few people could approach
that young man without feeling the charm which made the Indians adore
him. But any one who establishes himself in the woods loses touch with
the light manners of civilization; his very vices take on an air of
brutal candor.
Next evening, however, both men were merry by the hall fire at
Pentegoet over their parting cup. La Hontan was returning to Quebec.
A vessel waited the tide at the Penobscot's mouth, a bay which the
Indians call "bad harbor."
The long, low, and irregular building which Saint-Castin had
constructed as his baronial seat was as snug as the governor's castle
at Quebec. It was only one story high, and the small square
windows were set under the eaves, so outsiders could not look in.
Saint-Castin's enemies said he built thus to hide his deeds; but
Father Petit himself could see how excellent a plan it was for
defense. A holding already claimed by the encroaching English needed
loop-holes, not windows. The fort surrounding the house was also well
adapted to its situation. Twelve cannon guarded the bastions. All the
necessary buildings, besides a chapel with a bell, were within the
walls, and a deep well insured a supply of water. A garden and fruit
orchard were laid out opposite the fort, and encompassed by palisades.
The luxury of the house consisted in an abundant use of crude,
unpolished material. Though built grotesquely of stone and wood
intermingled, it had the solid dignity of that rugged coast. A chimney
spacious as a crater let smoke and white ashes upward, and sections of
trees smouldered on Saint-Castin's hearth. An Indian girl, ruddy from
high living, and wearing the brightest stuffs imported from France,
sat on the floor at the hearth corner. This was the usual night scene
at Pentegoet. Candle and firelight shone on her, on oak timbers, and
settles made of unpeeled balsam, on plate and glasses which always
heaped a table with ready food and drink, on moose horns and gun
racks, on stores of books, on festoons of wampum, and usually on a
dozen figures beside Saint-Castin. The other rooms in the house were
mere tributaries to this baronial presence chamber. Madockawando and
the dignitaries of the Abenaqui tribe made it their council hall, the
white sagamore presiding. They were superior to rude western nations.
It was Saint-Castin's plan to make a strong principality here, and to
unite his people in a compact state. He lavished his inherited money
upon them. Whatever they wanted from Saint-Castin they got, as from a
father. On their part, they poured the wealth of the woods upon him.
Not a beaver skin went out of Acadia except through his hands. The
traders of New France grumbled at his profits and monopoly, and the
English of New England claimed his seigniory. He stood on debatable
ground, in dangerous times, trying to mould an independent nation.
The Abenaquis did not know that a king of France had been reared
on Saint-Castin's native mountains, but they believed that a human
divinity had.
Their permanent settlement was about the fort, on land he had paid
for, but held in common with them. They went to their winter's hunting
or their summer's fishing from Pentegoet. It was the seat of power.
The cannon protected fields and a town of lodges which Saint-Castin
meant to convert into a town of stone and hewed wood houses as soon as
the aboriginal nature conformed itself to such stability. Even now
the village had left home and gone into the woods again. The Abenaqui
women were busy there, inserting tubes of bark in pierced maple-trees,
and troughs caught the flow of ascending sap. Kettles boiled over
fires in the bald spaces, incense of the forest's very heart rising
from them and sweetening the air. All day Indian children raced from
one mother's fire to another, or dipped unforbidden cups of hands into
the brimming troughs; and at night they lay down among the dogs, with
their heels to the blaze, watching these lower constellations blink
through the woods until their eyes swam into unconsciousness. It was
good weather for making maple sugar. In the mornings hoar frost
or light snows silvered the world, disappearing as soon as the sun
touched them, when the bark of every tree leaked moisture. This was
festive labor compared with planting the fields, and drew the men,
also.
The morning after La Hontan sailed, Saint-Castin went out and skirted
this wide-spread sugar industry like a spy. The year before, he had
moved heartily from fire to fire, hailed and entertained by every red
manufacturer. The unrest of spring was upon him. He had brought many
conveniences among the Abenaquis, and taught them some civilized arts.
They were his adopted people. But he felt a sudden separateness from
them, like the loneliness of his early boyhood.
Saint-Castin was a good hunter. He had more than once watched a slim
young doe stand gazing curiously at him, and had not startled it by a
breath. Therefore he was able to become a stump behind the tree which
Madockawando's daughter sought with her sap pail. Usually he wore
buckskins, in the free and easy life of Pentegoet. But he had put on
his Carignan-Salieres uniform, filling its boyish outlines with his
full man's figure. He would not on any account have had La Hontan see
him thus gathering the light of the open woods on military finery.
He felt ashamed of returning to it, and could not account for his
own impulses; and when he saw Madockawando's daughter walking
unconsciously toward him as toward a trap, he drew his bright surfaces
entirely behind the column of the tree.
She had taken no part in this festival of labor for several years. She
moved among the women still in solitude, not one of them feeling at
liberty to draw near her except as she encouraged them. The Abenaquis
were not a polygamous tribe, but they enjoyed the freedom of the
woods. Squaws who had made several experimental marriages since
this young celibate began her course naturally felt rebuked by her
standards, and preferred stirring kettles to meeting her. It was not
so long since the princess had been a hoiden among them, abounding
in the life which rushes to extravagant action. Her juvenile whoops
scared the birds. She rode astride of saplings, and played pranks
on solemn old warriors and the medicine-man. Her body grew into
suppleness and beauty. As for her spirit, the women of the tribe knew
very little about it. They saw none of her struggles. In childhood
she was ashamed of the finer nature whose wants found no answer in
her world. It was anguish to look into the faces of her kindred and
friends as into the faces of hounds who live, it is true, but a lower
life, made up of chasing and eating. She wondered why she was created
different from them. A loyalty of race constrained her sometimes to
imitate them; but it was imitation; she could not be a savage. Then
Father Petit came, preceding Saint-Castin, and set up his altar and
built his chapel. The Abenaqui girl was converted as soon as she
looked in at the door and saw the gracious image of Mary lifted up to
be her pattern of womanhood. Those silent and terrible days, when she
lost interest in the bustle of living, and felt an awful homesickness
for some unknown good, passed entirely away. Religion opened an
invisible world. She sprang toward it, lying on the wings of her
spirit and gazing forever above. The minutest observances of the
Church were learned with an exactness which delighted a priest who had
not too many encouragements. Finally, she begged her father to let
her make a winter retreat to some place near the headwaters of the
Penobscot. When the hunters were abroad, it did them no harm to
remember there was a maid in a wilderness cloister praying for the
good of her people; and when they were fortunate, they believed in the
material advantage of her prayers. Nobody thought of searching out her
hidden cell, or of asking the big-legged hunter and his wife to tell
its mysteries. The dealer with invisible spirits commanded respect in
Indian minds before the priest came.
Madockawando's daughter was of a lighter color than most of her tribe,
and finer in her proportions, though they were a well-made people. She
was the highest expression of unadulterated Abenaqui blood. She set
her sap pail down by the trough, and Saint-Castin shifted silently to
watch her while she dipped the juice. Her eyelids were lowered. She
had well-marked brows, and the high cheek-bones were lost in a general
acquiline rosiness. It was a girl's face, modest and sweet, that he
saw; reflecting the society of holier beings than the one behind the
tree. She had no blemish of sunken temples or shrunk features, or the
glaring aspect of a devotee. Saint-Castin was a good Catholic, but he
did not like fanatics. It was as if the choicest tree in the forest
had been flung open, and a perfect woman had stepped out, whom no
other man's eye had seen. Her throat was round, and at the base of it,
in the little hollow where women love to nestle ornaments, hung the
cross of her rosary, which she wore twisted about her neck. The
beads were large and white, and the cross was ivory. Father Petit had
furnished them, blessed for their purpose, to his incipient abbess,
but Saint-Castin noticed how they set off the dark rosiness of her
skin. The collar of her fur dress was pushed back, for the day was
warm, like an autumn day when there is no wind. A luminous smoke which
magnified the light hung between treetops and zenith. The nakedness of
the swelling forest let heaven come strangely close to the ground. It
was like standing on a mountain plateau in a gray dazzle of clouds.
Madockawando's daughter dipped her pail full of the clear water. The
appreciative motion of her eyelashes and the placid lines of her face
told how she enjoyed the limpid plaything. But Saint-Castin understood
well that she had not come out to boil sap entirely for the love of
it. Father Petit believed the time was ripe for her ministry to the
Abenaqui women. He had intimated to the seignior what land might be
convenient for the location of a convent. The community was now to
be drawn around her. Other girls must take vows when she did. Some
half-covered children, who stalked her wherever she went, stood like
terra-cotta images at a distance and waited for her next movement.
The girl had just finished her dipping when she looked up and met the
steady gaze of Saint-Castin. He was in an anguish of dread that she
would run. But her startled eyes held his image while three changes
passed over her,--terror and recognition and disapproval. He stepped
more into view, a white-and-gold apparition, which scattered the
Abenaqui children to their mothers' camp-fires.
"I am Saint-Castin," he said.
"Yes, I have many times seen you, sagamore."
Her voice, shaken a little by her heart, was modulated to such
softness that the liquid gutturals gave him a distinct new pleasure.
"I want to ask your pardon for my friend's rudeness, when you warmed
and fed us in your lodge."
"I did not listen to him." Her fingers sought the cross on her
neck. She seemed to threaten a prayer which might stop her ears to
Saint-Castin.
"He meant no discourtesy. If you knew his good heart, you would like
him."
"I do not like men." She made a calm statement of her peculiar tastes.
"Why?" inquired Saint-Castin.
Madockawando's daughter summoned her reasons from distant vistas of
the woods, with meditative dark eyes. Evidently her dislike of men had
no element of fear or of sentimental avoidance.
"I cannot like them," she apologized, declining to set forth her
reasons. "I wish they would always stay away from me."
"Your father and the priest are men."
"I know it," admitted the girl, with a deep breath like commiseration.
"They cannot help it; and our Etchemin's husband, who keeps the lodge
supplied with meat, he cannot help it, either, any more than he can
his deformity. But there is grace for men," she added. "They may,
by repenting of their sins and living holy lives, finally save their
souls."
Saint-Castin repented of his sins that moment, and tried to look
contrite.
"In some of my books," he said, "I read of an old belief held by
people on the other side of the earth. They thought our souls were
born into the world a great many times, now in this body, and now in
that. I feel as if you and I had been friends in some other state."
The girl's face seemed to flare toward him as flame is blown,
acknowledging the claim he made upon her; but the look passed like an
illusion, and she said seriously, "The sagamore should speak to Father
Petit. This is heresy."
Madockawando's daughter stood up, and took her pail by the handle.
"Let me carry it," said Saint-Castin.
Her lifted palm barred his approach.
"I do not like men, sagamore. I wish them to keep away from me."
"But that is not Christian," he argued.
"It cannot be unchristian: the priest would lay me under penance for
it."
"Father Petit is a lenient soul."
With the simplicity of an angel who would not be longer hindered by
mundane society, she took up her pail, saying, "Good-day, sagamore,"
and swept on across the dead leaves.
Saint-Castin walked after her.
"Go back," commanded Madockawando's daughter, turning.
The officer of the Carignan-Salieres regiment halted, but did not
retreat.
"You must not follow me, sagamore," she remonstrated, as with a child.
"I cannot talk to you."
"You must let me talk to you," said Saint-Castin. "I want you for my
wife."
She looked at him in a way that made his face scorch. He remembered
the year wife, the half-year wife, and the two-months wife at
Pentegoet. These three squaws whom he had allowed to form his
household, and had taught to boil the pot au feu, came to him from
many previous experimental marriages. They were externals of his life,
much as hounds, boats, or guns. He could give them all rich dowers,
and divorce them easily any day to a succeeding line of legal Abenaqui
husbands. The lax code of the wilderness was irresistible to a
Frenchman; but he was near enough in age and in texture of soul
to this noble pagan to see at once, with her eyesight, how he had
degraded the very vices of her people.
"Before the sun goes down," vowed Saint-Castin, "there shall be nobody
in my house but the two Etchemin slave men that your father gave me."
The girl heard of his promised reformation without any kindling of the
spirit.
"I am not for a wife," she answered him, and walked on with the pail.
Again Saint-Castin followed her, and took the sap pail from her hand.
He set it aside on the leaves, and folded his arms. The blood came
and went in his face. He was not used to pleading with women. They
belonged to him easily, like his natural advantages over barbarians
in a new world. The slopes of the Pyrenees bred strong-limbed men,
cautious in policy, striking and bold in figure and countenance. The
English themselves have borne witness to his fascinations. Manhood had
darkened only the surface of his skin, a milk-white cleanness breaking
through it like the outflushing of some inner purity. His eyes and
hair had a golden beauty. It would have been strange if he had not
roused at least a degree of comradeship in the aboriginal woman living
up to her highest aspirations.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10