Old Kaskaskia Part 10

"I do not pet her nor feed her pap," declared Angelique, put on the defensive. "Don't be a little beast, Peggy," she added in French.

"I see how it is: you are going to take him. The man who needs a bug in his ear worse than any other man in the Territory will never be handed over to me to get it. But let me tell you, you will have your hands full with Rice Jones. This Welsh-English stock is not soft stuff to manage.

When he makes that line with his lips that looks like a red-hot razor edge, his poor wife will wish to leave this earth and take to the bluffs."

"You appear to think a great deal about Monsieur Reece Zhone and his future wife," said Angelique mischievously.

"I know what you mean," said Peggy defiantly, "and we may as well have it out now as any time. If you throw him at me, I shall quarrel with you. I detest Rice Jones. He makes me crosser than any other person in the world."

"How can you detest a man like that? I am almost afraid of him. He has a wonderful force. It is a great thing at his age to be elected to the National a.s.sembly as the leader of his party in the Territory."

"I am not afraid of him," said Peggy, with a note of pride.

"No,--for I have sometimes thought, Peggy, that Monsieur Reece Zhone and you were made for each other."

Peggy Morrison sneered. Her nervous laughter, however, had a sound of jubilation.

The talk stopped there. They could see fog rising like a smoke from the earth, gradually making distant indistinct objects an obliterated memory, and filling the place where the garden had been.

"We must go in and call for candles," said Angelique.

"No," said Peggy, turning on the broad sill and stretching herself along it, "let me lay my head in your lap and watch that lovely mist come up like a dream. It makes me feel happy. You are a good girl, Angelique."

PART THIRD.

THE RISING.

Father Baby's part in the common fields lay on the Mississippi side of the peninsula, quite three miles from town. The common fields as an entire tract belonged to the community of Kaskaskia; no individual held any purchased or transferable right in them. Each man who wished to could claim his proportion of acres and plant any crop he pleased, year after year. He paid no rent, but neither did he hold any fee in the land.

Early on rainy summer mornings, the friar loved to hoist his capote on the cord, and tramp, bare-legged, out to his two-acre farm, leaving his slave, with a few small coins in the till, to keep shop should any customer forestall his return.

"The fathers of all orders," explained Father Baby, "from their earliest foundations, have counted it a worthy mortification of the flesh to till the ground. And be ready to refresh me without grinning, when I come back muddy from performing the labor to which I might send you, if I were a man who loved sinful ease. Monastic habits are above the understanding of a black rascal like you.".

The truth was, the friar loved to play in wet dirt. Civilized life and the confinement of a shop worked a kind of ferment in his wild spirit, which violent dancing somewhat relieved, but which intimate contact with the earth cooled and settled. Father Baby sometimes stripped off his capote and lay down in the hollow between furrows of corn, like a very lean but peaceful pig. He would not have been seen, on any account, and lifted an apprehensive head in the darkness of the morning if a bird rustled past. This performance he called a mortification of his frame; but when this sly churchman slipped up and put on his capote again, his thin visage bore the same gratified lines which may be seen on the face of a child making mud pies.

It had rained steadily since the political field day which had drawn such crowds to Kaskaskia. The waters of the Okaw had risen, and Father Baby's way to his work had been across fields of puddles, through which he waded before dawn; knowing well that a week's growth of weeds was waiting for him in its rankness.

The rain was not over. It barely yet restrained itself, and threatened without falling; blotting out distance as the light grew. A damp air blew from the northwest. Father Baby found the little avenues between his rows of maize and pea vines choked with the liberal growth which no man plants, and he fell furiously to work. His greatest pleasure was the order and thrift of his little farm, and until these were restored he could not even wallow comfortably. When he had hoed and pulled out stubborn roots until his back ached, he stood erect, letting his hands hang outspread, magnified by their mask of dirt, and rested himself, thinking of the winter dinners he would enjoy when this moist land should take on a silver coating of frost, and a frozen sward resist the tread of his wooden shoe.

"O Lord," said Father Baby, "I confess I am a sinner; we all are. But I am a provident sinner who makes good use of the increase Thou dost send through the earth. I do Thee to wit that Antoine Lamarche's crop is pretty weedy. The lazy dog will have to buy of me, and if I do not skin him well--But hold on. My blessed Master, I had forgot that Antoine has a sick child in his house. I will set his garden in order for him.

Perhaps Thou wilt count it to me for righteousness, and let it offset some of my iniquities."

So when he had finished his own, the friar put his hoe into his neighbor's patch, and worked until the sweat rolled down his thin cheeks. Gusts of rain added their moisture. As much light as the world was to have that day filtered through sheets of vapor. The bluffs bordering the Okaw could not be seen except as a vague bank of forest; and as for the lowlands across the great river, they might as well have had no existence.

It grew upon Father Baby's observation that the Mississippi had never looked so threatening. He stuck to his hoeing until he was nearly exhausted, and Antoine Lamarche's ground showed at least enough improvement to offset all the cheating he had done that week, and then made his way among bushes to the verge of the bank. The strong current always bearing down from the northwest against the peninsula had increased its velocity to a dizzy sweep. It bit out pieces of the sh.o.r.e as large as Father Baby's shop, and far and near these were seen falling in with splashes like the spouting of whales.

"At this rate," said Father Baby aloud, "I shall have no part left in the common fields by next year."

The river's tremendous rolling roar was also swollen to unusual magnitude. He looked afar over a tawny surface at undermined stumps and trees racing past one another. The June rise, which the melting of snows in those vague regions around its head-waters was called, had been considerable, but nothing to terrify the Kaskaskians. One week's rain and the drainage of the bottom lands could scarcely have raised the river to such a height. "Though Heaven alone can tell," grumbled the friar, "what the Mississippi will do for its own amus.e.m.e.nt. All the able slaves in Kaskaskia should be set to work on the levee before this day is an hour older."

Carrying the hoe on his shoulder like any laborer, and drawing the hood of his garment over his bald crown as the mist of rain increased to a driving sheet, Father Baby tramped along the river edge toward an unfinished defense against the waters. It was a high dike, beginning on a shoulder of the peninsula above the town, but extending barely a mile across a marsh where the river had once continuously raveled the sh.o.r.e even in dry seasons. The friar was glad to discern a number of figures at work carting earth to the most exposed and sunken spots of this dike.

The marsh inside the embankment was now a little lake, and some shouting black boys were paddling about there in a canoe which had probably been made during the leisure enforced by wet weather. It was a rough and clumsy thing, but very strongly put together.

The tavern in Kaskaskia was a common meeting-place. Other guest houses, scattered through the town, fed and lodged the humble in an humble way; but none of them dared to take the name "tavern," or even to imitate its glories. In pleasant weather, its gallery was filled with men bargaining, or hiring the labor of other men. It was the gathering and distributing point of news, the headquarters of the a.s.sembly when that body was in session,--a little hotel de ville, in fact, where munic.i.p.al business was transacted.

The wainscoted dining-room, which had a ceiling traversed by oak beams, had been the scene of many a stately banquet. In front of this was the bar-room, thirty by forty feet in dimensions, with a great stone fireplace built at one end. There was a high carved mantel over this, displaying the solid silver candlesticks of the house, and the silver snuffers on their tray embossed with dragons. The bar was at the end of the room opposite the fireplace, and behind it shone the grandest of negro men in white linen, and behind him, tier on tier, an array of flasks and flat bottles nearly reaching the low ceiling. Poor Kaskaskians who entered there, entered society. They always pulled their cappos off their heads, and said "Good-evening, messieurs," to the company in general. It was often as good as a feast to smell the spicy odors stealing out from the dining-room. It was a gentle community, and the tavern bar-room was by no means a resort of noisy drinkers. If any indecorum threatened, the host was able to quell it. He sat in his own leather chair, at the hearth corner in winter, and on the gallery in summer; a gigantic Frenchman, full of acc.u.mulated happiness.

It was barely dusk when candles were lighted in the sconces around the walls, and on the mantel and bar. The host had his chair by a crackling fire, for continual dampness made the July night raw; and the crane was swung over the blaze with a steaming tea-kettle on one of its hooks.

Several Indians also sat by the stone flags, opposite the host, moving nothing but their small restless eyes; aboriginal America watching transplanted Europe, and detecting the incompatible qualities of French and English blood.

The bar-room had its orchestra of three banjos, making it a hall of music every night in the year. And herein Africa added itself to the civilization of the New World. Three coal-black slaves of the host's sat on a bench sacred to them, and softly tw.a.n.ged their instruments, breaking out at intervals into the wild chants of their people; improvising, and stimulating each other by musical hints and exclamations. It was evident that they esteemed their office; and the male public of Kaskaskia showed them consideration. While the volume of talk was never lessened during their glees, the talkers all listened with at least one ear. There was no loud brawling, and the laughter raised by argument rarely drowned the banjos. Sometimes a Frenchman was inspired to cut a pigeon wing; and Father Baby had tripped it over every inch of this oak floor, when the frenzy for dancing seized him and the tunes were particularly irresistible. The bar-room gave him his only taste of Kaskaskia society, and he took it with zest. Little wizened black-eyed fellows clapped their hands, delighting, while their priest was not by, in the antics of a disreputable churchman; but the bigger and colder race paid little attention to him.

Various as were the home backgrounds of the lives converging at the tavern, there were but two topics before that little public while the cosy fire roared and the banjos rattled. A rumor of coming high water was running down the Mississippi valley like the wind which is driven before a rush of rain; and the non-separation party had suffered some local defeat in the Indiana Territory. The first item of news took greatest hold on those serious Anglo-Americans who had come from the Atlantic coast to found estates in this valley. On the contrary, the peasant tenant gave his mind to politics. It was still an intoxicating privilege for him to have a say in the government.

"Dese Indiana Territory fellers," piped a gra.s.shopper of a Frenchman, springing from his chair in excitement, "dey want our slaves, dey want our Territory,--dey want de hide off our backs."

"Tony Lamarche," drawled a Virginian, "you don't know what you're talking about. You haven't e'er a slave to your name; and you don't own a foot of the Territory. As for your hide, it wouldn't make a drumhead nohow. So what are you dancin' about?"

"If I got no land, I got some of dose rights of a citizen, eh?" snorted Antoine, planting himself in front of the Virginian, and bending forward until they almost touched noses.

"I reckon you have, and I reckon you better use them. You git your family over on to the bluff before your house is sucked into the Okaw."

"And go and hoe the weeds out of your maize patch, Antoine," exhorted Father Baby, setting an empty gla.s.s back on the bar. "I cleaned part of them out for you myself, with the rain streaming down my back, thinking only of your breadless children. And what do I find when I come home to my shop but that Antoine Lamarche has been in and carried off six dog-leg twists of tobacco on credit! I say nothing about it. I am a childless old friar; but I have never seen children eat tobacco."

The baited Frenchman turned on Father Baby; but, like a skittish girl, the friar hopped across the room, shook off his wooden shoes, picked up the skirt of his habit, and began to dance. The exhilarating drink, the ruddiness of the fire, the discomfort outside, the smoothness of the oak boards,--these were conditions of happiness for Father Baby. This was perhaps the crowning instant of his experience. He was a b.u.t.terfly man.

He saw his lodger, Dr. Dunlap, appear at the door as haggard as the dead. The friar's first thought was:--

"That fellow has proposed for Mademoiselle Saucier and been rejected. I'm glad I'm a churchman, and not yoked up to draw a family, like these fools, and like he wants to be. This bowing down and worshiping another human being,--crazy if you don't get her, and crazed by her if you do,--I'll have none of it."

Dr. Dunlap raised his arms and shouted to the company in the bar-room.

What he said no one could hear. Hissing and roaring filled the world, submerging the crackling of the fire, the banjo tunes, and human voices.

Men looked at each other, stupefied, holding their pipes from their mouths. Then a wave struck the solid old tavern, hissed across its gallery, and sprawled through the hall upon the bar-room floor. Not a person in the house could understand what had happened to Kaskaskia peninsula; but Jean Lozier stood on the bluff and saw it.

Jean was watching the lights of Kaskaskia while his sick grandfather slept. The moon was nearly full, but on such a night one forgot there was a moon. The bushes dripped on Jean, and the valley below him was a blur pierced by those rows of lights. A great darkness was coming out of the northwest, whistling as it came. He saw the sky and the turbid Mississippi meet and strangely become one. There were waters over the heavens, and waters under the heavens. A wall like a moving dam swept across the world and filled it. The boy found himself sitting on the ground holding to a sapling, drenched and half drowned by the spray which dashed up the bluffs. The darkness and hissing went over him, and he thought he was dying without absolution, at the end of the world. He lay down and gasped and shuddered until the great Thing was gone,--the incredible Thing, in which no one believes except him who has seen it, and which no name can name; that awful spirit of Deluge, which lives in the traditions of every race. Jean had never heard of waterspout or cloudburst or any modern name given to the Force whenever its leash is slipped for a few minutes. He felt himself as trivial a thing in chaos as the ant which clung on his hand and bit him because it was drowning.

The blind downpour being gone, though rain still fell and the wind whistled in his ears, Jean climbed across bent or broken saplings nearer the bluff's edge to look at Kaskaskia. The rows of lights were partially blotted; and lightning, by its swift unrollings, showed him a town standing in a lake. The Mississippi and the Okaw had become one water, spreading as far as the eye could see. Now bells began to clamor from that valley of foam. The bell of the Immaculate Conception, cast in France a hundred years before, which had tolled for D'Artaguette, and made jubilee over weddings and christenings, and almost lived the life of the people, sent out the alarm cry of smitten metal; and a tinkling appeal from the convent supplemented it.

There was no need of the bells to rouse Kaskaskia; they served rather as sounding buoys in a suddenly created waterway. Peggy Morrison had come to stay all night with Angelique Saucier. The two girls were shut in their bedroom, and Angelique's black maid was taking the pins from Peggy's hair, when the stone house received its shock, and shuddered like a ship. Screams were heard from the cabins. Angelique threw the sashes open, and looked into storm and darkness; yet the lightning showed her a driving current of water combed by pickets of the garden fence. It washed over the log steps, down which some of her father's slaves were plunging from their doors, to recoil and scramble and mix their despairing cries with the wakening clamor of bells.

Their master shouted encouragement to them from the back gallery.

Angelique's candles were blown out by the wind when she and Peggy tried to hold them for her father. The terrified maid crouched down in a helpless bunch on the hall floor, and Madame Saucier herself brought the lantern from the attic. The perforated tin beacon, spreading its bits of light like a circular shower of silver on the gallery floor, was held high for the struggling slaves. Heads as grotesque as the waterspouts on old cathedrals craned through the darkness and up to the gallery posts.

The men breasted the deepening water first, and howling little blacks rode on their fathers' shoulders. Captain Saucier pulled the trembling creatures in, standing waist-deep at the foot of the steps. The shrieking women balanced light bundles of dry clothes on their heads, and the cook brought useless kettles and pans, not realizing that all the food of the house was lost in a water-filled cellar.