Castle Nowhere Part 15

'Jeannette,' he said, going toward her, 'I have come to take you away with me. You need not go to school; I have given up that idea,--I accept you as you are. You shall have silk dresses and ribbons, like the ladies of the Mission-House this summer. You shall see all great cities, you shall hear beautiful music. You shall have everything you want,--money, bright shillings, as many as you wish. See! Mrs. Corlyne has come with me to show you that it is true. This morning we had orders to leave Mackinac; in a few days we must go. But--listen, Jeanette; I will marry you. You shall be my wife. Do not look so startled. I mean it; it is really true.'

'Qu'est-ce-que-c'est?' said the girl, bewildered by the rapid, eager words.

'Dr. Prescott wishes to marry you, child,' I explained, somewhat sadly, for never had the disparity between them seemed so great. The presence of the Indian mother, the common room, were like silent protests.

'Marry,' e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Jeannette.

'Yes, love' said the surgeon, ardently. 'It is quite true; Father Piret shall marry us. I will exchange into another regiment, or, if necessary, I will resign. Do you understand what I am saying, Jeannette? See! I give you my hand, in token that it is true.'

But, with a quick bound, the girl was across the room. 'What?' she cried. 'You think I marry you? Have you not heard of Baptiste?

Know, then, that I love one finger of him more than all you, ten times, hundred times.'

'Baptiste?' repeated Rodney.

'Oui, mon cousin, Baptiste, the fisherman. We marry soon-- tenez--la fete de Saint Andre.'

Rodney looked bewildered a moment, then his face cleared; 'Oh! a child engagement? That is one of your customs, I know. But never fear; Father Piret will absolve you from all that. Baptiste shall have a fine new boat; he will let you off for a handful of silver pieces. Do not think of that, Jeannette, but come to me--'

'Je vous abhorre; Je vous deteste,' cried the girl with fury as he approached. 'Baptiste not love me? He love me more than boat and silver dollar,--more than all the world! And I love him; I die for him! Allez-vous-en, traitre!'

Rodney had grown white; he stood before her, motionless, with fixed eyes.

'Jeannette,' I said in French, 'perhaps you do not understand. Dr.

Prescott asks you to marry him; Father Piret shall marry you, and all your friends shall come. Dr. Prescott will take you away from this hard life; he will make you rich; he will support your father and mother in comfort. My child, it is wonderful good fortune. He is an educated gentleman, and loves you truly.'

'What is that to me?' replied Jeannette, proudly. 'Let him go, I care not.' She paused a moment. Then, with flashing eyes, she cried, 'Let him go with his fine new boat and silver dollars! He does not believe me? See, then, how I despise him!' And rushing forward, she struck him on the cheek.

Rodney did not stir, but stood gazing at her while the red mark glowed on his white face.

'You know not what love is,' said Jeannette, with indescribable scorn.

'You! You! Ah, mon Baptiste, ou es-tu? But thou wilt kill him,--kill him for his boats and silver dollars!'

'Child!' I said, startled by her fury.

'I am not a child. Je suis femme, moi!' replied Jeannette, folding her arms with haughty grace. 'Allez!' she said, pointing toward the door. We were dismissed. A queen could not have made a more royal gesture.

Throughout the scene the Indian mother had not stopped her knitting.

In four days we were afloat, and the little white fort was deserted.

It was a dark afternoon, and we sat cl.u.s.tered on the stern of the steamer, watching the flag come slowly down from its staff in token of the departure of the commanding officer. 'Isle of Beauty, fare thee well,' sang the major's fair young wife with the sound of tears in her sweet voice.

'We shall return,' said the officers. But not one of them ever saw the beautiful island again.

Rodney Prescott served a month or two in Florida, 'taciturn and stiff as ever,' Archie wrote. Then he resigned suddenly, and went abroad. He has never returned, and I have lost all trace of him, so that I cannot say, from any knowledge of my own, how long the feeling lived,--the feeling that swept me along in its train down to the beach-cottage that wild night.

Each man who reads this can decide for himself.

Each woman has decided already.

Last year I met an islander on the cars going eastward. It was the first time he had ever been 'below'; but he saw nothing to admire, that dignified citizen of Mackinac!

'What has become of Jeannette Leblanc?' I asked.

'Jeannette? O, she married that Baptiste, a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow? They live in the same little cabin around the point, and pick up a living most anyhow for their tribe of young ones.'

'Are they happy?'

'Happy?' repeated my islander, with a slow stare. 'Well I suppose they are, after their fashion; I don't know much about them. In my opinion, they are a shiftless set, those French half-breeds round the point.'

THE OLD AGENCY.

'The buildings of the United States Indian Agency on the island of Mackinac were destroyed by fire December 31, at midnight.'--WESTERN NEWSPAPER ITEM.

The old house is gone then! But it shall not depart into oblivion unchronicled. One who has sat under its roof-tree, one who remembers well its rambling rooms and wild garden, will take the pen to write down a page of its story. It is only an episode, one of many; but the others are fading away, or already buried in dead memories under the sod. It was a quaint, picturesque old place, stretching back from the white limestone road that bordered the little port, its overgrown garden surrounded by an ancient stockade ten feet in height, with a ma.s.sive, slow-swinging gate in front, defended by loopholes. This stockade bulged out in some places and leaned in at others; but the veteran posts, each a tree sharpened to a point, did not break their ranks, in spite of decrepitude; and the Indian warriors, could they have returned from their happy hunting-grounds, would have found the brave old fence of the Agency a st.u.r.dy barrier still. But the Indian warriors could not return. The United States agent had long ago moved to Lake Superior, and the deserted residence, having only a mythical owner, left without repairs year after year, and under a cloud of confusion as regarded taxes, t.i.tles, and boundaries, became a kind of flotsam property, used by various persons, but belonging legally to no one. Some tenant, tired of swinging the great gate back and forth, had made a little sally port alongside, but otherwise the place remained unaltered; a broad garden with a central avenue of cherry-trees, on each side dilapidated arbors, overgrown paths, and heart-shaped beds, where the first agents had tried to cultivate flowers, and behind the limestone cliffs crowned with cedars. The house was large on the ground, with wings and various additions built out as if at random; on each side and behind were rough outside chimneys clamped to the wall; in the roof over the central part dormer-windows showed a low second storey; and here and there at intervals were outside doors, in some cases opening out into s.p.a.ce, since the high steps which once led up to them had fallen down, and remained as they fell, heaps of stones on the ground below. Within were suites of rooms, large and small, showing traces of workmanship elaborate for such a remote locality; the ceilings, patched with rough mortar, had been originally decorated with moulding, the doors were ornamented with scroll-work, and the two large apartments on each side of the entrance-hall possessed chimney-pieces and central hooks for chandeliers. Beyond and behind stretched out the wings; coming to what appeared to be the end of the house on west, there unexpectedly began a new series of rooms turning to the north, each with its outside door; looking for a corresponding labyrinth on the eastern side, there was nothing but a blank wall. The blind stairway went up in a kind of dark well, and once up it was a difficult matter to get down without a plunge from top to bottom, since the undefended opening was just where no one would expect to find it. Sometimes an angle was so arbitrarily walled up that you felt sure there must be a secret chamber there and furtively rapped on the wall to catch the hollow echo within. Then again you opened a door, expecting to step into the wilderness of a garden, and found yourself in a set of little rooms running off on a tangent, one after the other, and ending in a windowless closet and an open cistern. But the Agency gloried in its irregularities, and defied criticism. The original idea of its architect--if there was any--had vanished; but his work remained a not unpleasing variety to summer visitors accustomed to city houses, all built with a definite purpose, and one front door.

After some years of wandering in foreign lands, I returned to my own country, and took up the burden of old a.s.sociations whose sadness time had mercifully softened. The summer was over; September had begun, but there came to me a great wish to see Mackinac once more; to look again upon the little white fort where I had lived with Archie, my soldier nephew killed at Shiloh. The steamer took me safely across Lake Erie, up the br.i.m.m.i.n.g Detroit River, through the enchanted region of the St.

Clair flats, and out into broad Lake Huron; there, off Thunder Bay, a gale met us, and for hours we swayed between life and death.

The season for pleasure travelling was over; my fellow-pa.s.sengers, with one exception, were of that cla.s.s of Americans who dressed in cheap imitations of fine clothes, are forever travelling, travelling,--taking the steamers not from preference, but because they are less costly than an all-rail route. The thin, listless men, in ill-fitting black clothes and shining tall hats, sat on the deck in tilted chairs hour after hour silent and dreary; the thin listless women, clad in raiment of many colors, remained on the fixed sofas in the cabin hour after hour, silent and weary. At meals they ate indiscriminately everything within range, but continued the same, a weary, dreary, silent band. The one exception was an old man, tall and majestic, with silvery hair and bright, dark eyes, dressed in the garb of a Roman Catholic priest, albeit slightly tinged with frontier innovations. He came on board at Detroit, and as soon as we were under way he exchanged his hat for a cloth cap embroidered with Indian bead-work; and when the cold air, precursor of the gale, struck us on Huron, he wrapped himself in a large capote made of skins, with the fur inward.

In times of danger formality drops from us. During those long hours, when the next moment might have brough death, this old man and I were together; and when at last the cold dawn came, and the disabled steamer slowly ploughed through the angry water around the point, and showed us Mackinac in the distance, we discovered that the island was a mutual friend, and that we knew each other, at least by name; for the silver-haired priest was Father Piret, the hermit of the Chenaux.

In the old days, when I was living at the little white fort, I had known Father Piret by reputation, and he had heard of me from the French half-breeds around the point. We landed. The summer hotels were closed, and I was directed to the old Agency, where occasionally a boarder was received by the family then in possession. The air was chilly, and a fine rain was falling, the afterpiece of the equinoctial; the wet storm-flag hung heavily down over the fort on the height, and the waves came in sullenly. All was in sad accordance with my feelings as I thought of the past and its dead, while the slow tears of age moistened my eyes. But the next morning Mackinac awoke, robed in autumn splendor; the sunshine poured down, the straits sparkled back, the forest glowed in scarlet, the larches waved their wild, green hands, the fair-weather flag floated over the little fort, and all was as joyous as though no one had ever died; and indeed it is in glorious days like these that we best realise immortality.

I wandered abroad through the gay forest to the Arch, the Lovers'

Leap, and old Fort Holmes, whose British walls had been battered down, for pastime, so that only a caved-in British cellar remained to mark the spot. Returning to the Agency, I learned that Father Piret had called to see me.

'I am sorry that I missed him,' I said; 'he is a remarkable old man.'

The circle at the dinner-table glanced up with one accord. The little minister with the surprised eyes looked at me more surprised than ever; his large wife groaned audibly. The Baptist colporteur peppered his potatoes until they and the plate were black; the Presbyterian doctor, who was the champion of the Protestant party on the island, wished to know if I was acquainted with the latest devices of the Scarlet Woman in relation to the county school-fund.

'But my friends,' I replied, 'Father Piret and I both belong to the past. We discuss not religion, but Mackinac; not the school-fund, but the old a.s.sociations of the island, which is dear to both of us.'

The four looked at me with distrust; they saw nothing dear about the island, unless it was the price of fresh meat; and as to old a.s.sociations, they held themselves above such nonsense. So, one and all, they, took beef and enjoyed a season of well-regulated conversation, leaving me to silence and my broiled white-fish; as it was Friday, no doubt they thought the latter a rag of popery.

Very good rags.

But my hostess, a gentle little woman, stole away from these bulwarks of Protestantism in the late afternoon, and sought me in my room, or rather series of rooms, since there were five opening one out of the other, the last three unfurnished, and all the doorless doorways staring at me like so many fixed eyes, until, oppressed by their silent watchfulness, I hung a shawl over the first opening and shut out the whole gazing suite.

'You must not think, Mrs. Corlyne, that we islanders do not appreciate Father Piret,' said the little woman, who belonged to one of the old island families, descendants of a chief factor of the fur trade.

'There has been some feeling lately against the Catholics--'

'Roman Catholics, my dear,' I said with Anglican particularity.