Stories by American Authors Volume VI Part 12

A few days later Marie placed the coveted stone in Father Xavier's hand; but what was his bitter disappointment to find that she had marred the exquisite thing by a rude attempt at a delineation upon it of the vision of the cross. She had carefully chiselled away the milky white layer, excepting on the crests of some very primitive representations of waves, and within the awkwardly plain cross in the centre of the gem. All his hopes of cutting a face upon this lovely jewel were crushed; it was ruined by her unskilful work. Father Xavier was completely master of his own emotions. He took the stone without remark, and hung it, as Marie requested, about the neck of the Madonna. Each day as he said ma.s.s the sight of the mutilated jewel roused within him resentful feelings against poor, well-wishing little Marie. He had been very kind to her since he had first seen the stone in the possession of her father, but now it was worse than before. He avoided her markedly, for the smile which so annoyed him still lighted her face whenever she saw him, and there was in it a reproachful sadness which was even more aggravating than its simple childishness had been.

One day Father Xavier, in turning over his papers, came across an old etching of Venus rising from the sea. The figure, with its outstretched arms, suggested a possibility to him. He made a careful tracing of it, took it to the church, and laid it upon the stone. All of its outlines came within the white cross; there was still hope for the cameo. All that winter Father Xavier toiled upon it, exhausting his utmost skill, but never exhausting his patience. His chief trial was in the extreme hardness of the stone, which rapidly wore out his graving tools. At last it was finished, and Father Xavier confessed to himself, in all humility, that he had not only never executed so delicate a piece of workmanship, but he had never seen its equal. Every curve of the exquisite-hued waves was studied from the swell that sometimes swept grandly in from the lake on the long reef of rocks a few miles above St.

Ignace. The form of the G.o.ddess was modelled from his remembrance of the Greek antique. It was a gem worthy of an emperor. What should he do with it?

As the spring ripened into summer, ambitious thoughts flowered in Pere Francis Xavier's soul. What a grand bishopric this whole western country would make with its unexplored wealth of mines, and furs, and forest!

Why should he be obliged to make reports of the revenue which his own financiering had secured to the mission, to the head at Montreal? Why should not his reverence the Lord Bishop Francis Xavier dwell in an episcopal palace built somewhere on these lakes, with unlimited spiritual and temporal sway over all this country? To effect such a scheme it would be necessary for him to see both the King of France and the Pope. He was not sure that even if he could return to Europe immediately, he had the influence necessary in either quarter, but the cameo was a step in the right direction. Something of the same thought occurred at the same time to the Bishop of Montreal. Father Xavier's reports showed the mission to be in a flourishing condition. The first struggles of the pioneer were over. Father Xavier must not be left in too luxurious a position. The Chevalier La Salle was now fitting out his little band designed to explore the lakes and follow the Mississippi from its source to the Gulf. A most important expedition; it would be well that the Jesuit fathers should share in the honors if it proved successful, and if the little party perished in its hazardous enterprise Pere Francis Xavier could perhaps be spared as easily as any member of his spiritual army.

And so, in the summer of 1679, the Chevalier sailed up the Lac du Dauphin, as Lake Erie was then called, into the Lac d'Orleans, or Huron, carrying letters in which Pere Francis Xavier was ordered to leave his charge for a time in order to render all the a.s.sistance in his power to the explorers. The Bishop of Montreal could never have guessed with what heartfelt joy his command was obeyed. Father Xavier was tired of this peaceful life, tired of "the endless wash of melancholy waves," of the short cool summers, and long white blank of winter; tired of inaction, of the lack of stimulating surroundings, of the gentleness of Father Ignatius and Marie's haunting smile. Here, too, might be the very occasion he craved of making himself famous and deserving of reward as an explorer. It was true that he started as a subordinate, but that was no reason that he should return in the same capacity. Marie had served the n.o.ble guests with pleasant alacrity, pa.s.sing the rainbow-tinted trout caught as well as broiled by her own hand, and the luscious huckleberries in tasteful baskets of her own braiding, and Tontz Main de Fer, the chivalric companion and friend of La Salle, was moved like Geraint, served by Enid, "to stoop and kiss the dainty little thumb that crossed the trencher." The salutation was received with unconscious dignity by little Marie; once only was Pere Francois Xavier annoyed by the absence of a display of childish pleasure in an ever-ready smile.

History tells how trial and privation of every kind waited on this little band of heroic men; how hunger, and cold, and fever dogged their steps; how the Indians proved treacherous and hostile; how, having reached central Illinois, after incredible exertion, they found themselves in the dead of winter unable to proceed further, and surrounded by tribes incited against them by some unknown enemy. A fatality seemed to hang over them; suspicious occurrences indicated that they had a traitor among their number, but he was never discovered. La Salle did not despair or abandon the enterprise; but when six of his most trusted men mutinied and deserted, he lost hope, and became seized with a presentiment that he would never return from his expedition.

Father Xavier was his confidant as well as confessor, but he seems not to have been able to disperse the gloom which settled over the leader's mind. Perhaps he did not endeavor to do so. Hopeless but still true to his trust, La Salle constructed near Peoria a fort which he named Crevecoeur, in token of his despondency and disappointment. Leaving Tontz Main de Fer in command here with the greater part of his men, he set out with five for Frontenac, on the 2d of March, 1680, intending to return with supplies to take command again of his party, and to proceed southward. It was at this point that the most inexplicable event of the entire enterprise occurred. Before the party divided _some one_ attempted to poison the Chevalier La Salle. The poison was a subtle and slow one, similar in its effects to those used by the Borgia family; the secret of its manufacture was thought to be unknown out of Italy.

Fortunately he had taken an under or overdose of it, and the effects manifested themselves only in a long illness. He was too far on his journey from Fort Heartbreak when stricken down to return to it, and was mercifully received and nursed back to health by the friendly Pottawottamies.

While the leader was lying sick in an Indian lodge, the knightly Tontz, ignorant of the fate of his friend, was having his troubles at the little fort of Heartbreak. Pere Francois Xavier had remained with him, and aided him with counsels and personal exertions; he had made himself so indispensable that he was now lieutenant; if anything should happen to Tontz, he would be commander. He was secretary of the expedition, drew careful maps, and made voluminous daily entries in a journal, which was afterward found to be a marvel of painstaking both in the facts and fictions which it contained. Scanty mention was there of La Salle and Tontz Main de Fer, and much of Pere Francois Xavier, but it was clear, explicit, depicting the advantages of an acquisition of this territory to the crown of France in glowing terms, and strongly advising that the man who had most distinguished himself in the difficulties of its discovery should be appointed as governor, or baron, under the royal authority.

While Father Xavier was compiling this remarkable piece of authorship, the Iroquois descended in warlike array upon the somewhat friendly disposed Illinois Indians, in whose midst Fort Crevecoeur had been built. The suspicious Indian mind immediately connected the advent of their enemies with the building of the fort, and regarded the little garrison with distrust. Tontz, at the instance of Father Xavier, presented himself to their chief, and offered to do anything in his power to prove his friendly intentions. The chief accepted his services, and sent him as amba.s.sador to inquire into the cause of the coming of the Iroquois. This mission had nearly been his last, for Tontz was received with stabs, and hardly allowed to give the message of the chief. His ill-treatment at the hands of their enemies did not rea.s.sure the suspicious Illinois, who ordered Tontz to immediately evacuate the fort and return with his forces to the country whence he had come. In his wounded condition such a journey was extremely hazardous, and it must have been with grave doubts as to his surviving it that Father Xavier took temporary command of the returning expedition.

It was in the spring of 1681. Father Xavier had been absent nearly two years. Father Ignatius missed him sadly--all the life and fire seemed have gone out of the mission. Even Marie moved about her work in a listless, languid way, which contrasted markedly with her once lithe and rapid movements. They had not once heard from the explorers, and Father Ignatius shook his head sadly, and feared that he would never see his energetic colleague again. The Black Beaver had slept through the last months of winter, and, as with the general awakening of spring the bears came out of their dens, and the snakes sunned themselves near their holes, he too stretched himself lazily and awoke to a consciousness of what was pa.s.sing around him. In the first place something was amiss with Marie. When she came to the wigwam it was not to chat merrily of the affairs of the mission. She did not braid as many baskets as formerly, and no longer showed him new patterns in sh.e.l.l mosaic on the lids of little boxes. He was a curious old man, and he soon drew her secret from her. Marie loved Pere Francois Xavier, and he had gone.

The Black Beaver went down to the mission one evening and had a long talk with Father Ignatius. He ascertained first that Pere Francois Xavier really meant to return; then, with all the dignity of an old feudal baron, he offered Marie as a bride for his spiritual son. Very gently the good Pere Ignace explained that Romish priests were so nearly in the kingdom of heaven that the question of marrying and giving in marriage was not for them to consider. The Black Beaver went home, told no one of his visit, and for several days indulged in the worst drunken spree of which he was capable. When he came out of it he announced to his wife and Marie that he was going away on his annual trip for stores, but that they need not accompany him.

Marie knelt as usual in the little church on the evening of the day on which her father had gone away. Pere Francois Xavier had replaced the cameo on the Virgin's breast before he went; it was a safer place than the vault of a bank would have been, had such a thing existed in the country. There was no one in the island sacrilegious enough to rob the church. Marie had gazed at the stone each time that she repeated the prayer which he had taught her. She looked up now, and it was gone.

Half way upon their northward route, Tontz's band were struggling wearily on when they were met by a solitary Indian, who, though he carried a long bow, had not an unfriendly aspect. He eyed the little band silently as they pa.s.sed by him in defile, then ran after them, and inquired if the Pere Francois Xavier, of Mission St. Ignace, was not of their number. He was informed that the reverend father had remained a short distance behind to write in his journal, but that he would soon overtake them; and he was warmly pressed to remain with them if he had messages for the priest, and give them to him when he arrived; but the Indian shook his head and pa.s.sed on in the direction in which they told him he would be likely to meet Father Xavier. The party halted and waited hour after hour for the priest, but he did not come. Finally two went back in search, and found him lying upon the sod with upturned face--the place where he had written last in his journal marked by a few drops of his heart's blood, and the long shaft of an arrow protruding from his breast. They drew it out, but the arrow-head had been attached as is the custom in some Indian tribes, by means of a soft wax, which is melted by the warmth of the body, and it remained in the heart. Father Xavier had been dead some hours. They buried him where they found him, and proceeded on their march. Tontz recovered on the way. They reached Michillimackinac in safety, where they were joined two months later by La Salle; and the world knows the result of his second expedition.

Little Marie learned by degrees to smile again, and in after years married another arrow-head maker, as swarthy and as s.h.a.ggy as the Black Beaver. There is no moral to my story except that of poetic justice.

Pere Francois Xavier had sown a plentiful crop of stratagems, and he learned in the lonely forest that "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap."

Meanwhile to all but you, my readers, the Crevecoeur cameo remains as great a mystery as ever.

MISS EUNICE'S GLOVE

By Albert Webster.

I.

For a long time blithe and fragile Miss Eunice, demure, correct in deportment, and yet not wholly without enthusiasm, thought that day the unluckiest in her life on which she first took into her hands that un.o.btrusive yet dramatic book, "Miss Crofutt's Missionary Labors in the English Prisons."

It came to her notice by mere accident, not by favor of proselyting friends; and such was its singular material, that she at once devoured it with avidity. As its t.i.tle suggests, it was the history of the ameliorating endeavors of a woman in criminal society, and it contained, perforce, a large amount of tragic and pathetic incident. But this last was so blended and involved with what Miss Eunice would have skipped as commonplace, that she was led to digest the whole volume--statistics, philosophy, comments, and all. She studied the a.n.a.lysis of the atmosphere of cells, the properties and waste of wheaten flour, the cost of clothing to the general government, the whys and wherefores of crime and evil-doing; and it was not long before there was generated within her bosom a fine and healthy ardor to emulate this practical and courageous pattern.

She was profoundly moved by the tales of missionary labors proper. She was filled with joy to read that Miss Crofutt and her lieutenants sometimes cracked and broke away the formidable husks which enveloped divine kernels in the hearts of some of the wretches, and she frequently wept at the stories of victories gained over monsters whose defences of silence and stolidity had suddenly fallen into ruin above the slow but persistent sapping of constant kindness. Acute tinglings and chilling thrills would pervade her entire body when she read that on Christmas every wretch seemed to become for that day, at least, a gracious man; that the sight of a few penny tapers, or the possession of a handful of sweet stuff, or a spray of holly, or a hot-house bloom, would appear to convert the worst of them into children. Her heart would swell to learn how they acted during the one poor hour of yearly freedom in the prison-yards; that they swelled their chests; that they ran; that they took long strides; that the singers anxiously tried their voices, now grown husky; that the athletes wrestled only to find their limbs stiff and their arts forgotten; that the gentlest of them lifted their faces to the broad sky and spent the sixty minutes in a dreadful gazing at the clouds.

The pretty student gradually became possessed with a rage. She desired to convert some one, to recover some estray, to reform some wretch.

She regretted that she lived in America, and not in England, where the most perfect rascals were to be found; she was sorry that the gloomy, sin-saturated prisons which were the scenes of Miss Crofutt's labors must always be beyond her ken.

There was no crime in the family or the neighborhood against which she might strive; no one whom she knew was even austere; she had never met a brute; all her rascals were newspaper rascals. For aught she knew, this tranquillity and good-will might go on forever, without affording her an opportunity. She must be denied the smallest contact with these frightful faces and figures, these bars and cages, these deformities of the mind and heart, these curiosities of conscience, shyness, skill, and daring; all these dramas of reclamation, all these scenes of fervent grat.i.tude, thankfulness, and intoxicating liberty--all or any of these things must never come to be the lot of her eyes; and she gave herself up to the most poignant regret.

But one day she was astonished to discover that all of these delights lay within half an hour's journey of her home; and moreover, that there was approaching an hour which was annually set apart for the indulgence of the inmates of the prison in question. She did not stop to ask herself, as she might well have done, how it was that she had so completely ignored this particular inst.i.tution, which was one of the largest and best conducted in the country, especially when her desire to visit one was so keen; but she straightway set about preparing for her intended visit in a manner which she fancied Miss Crofutt would have approved, had she been present.

She resolved, in the most radical sense of the word, to be alive. She jotted on some ivory tablets, with a gold pencil, a number of hints to a.s.sist her in her observations. For example: "Phrenological development; size of cells; ounces of solid and liquid; tissue-producing food; were mirrors allowed? if so, what was the effect? jimmy and skeleton-key, character of; canary birds: query, would not their admission into every cell animate in the human prisoners a similar buoyancy? to urge upon the turnkeys the use of the Spanish garrote in place of the present distressing gallows; to find the proportion of Orthodox and Unitarian prisoners to those of other persuasions." But beside these and fifty other similar memoranda, the enthusiast cast about her for something practical to do.

She hit upon the capital idea of flowers. She at once ordered from a gardener of taste two hundred bouquets, or rather nosegays, which she intended for distribution among the prisoners she was about to visit, and she called upon her father for the money.

Then she began to prepare her mind. She wished to define the plan from which she was to make her contemplations. She settled that she would be grave and gentle. She would be exquisitely careful not to hold herself too much aloof, and yet not to step beyond the bounds of that sweet reserve that she conceived must have been at once Miss Crofutt's sword and buckler.

Her object was to awaken in the most abandoned criminals a realization that the world, in its most benignant phase, was still open to them; that society, having obtained a requital for their wickedness, was ready to embrace them again on proof of their repentance.

She determined to select at the outset two or three of the most remarkable monsters, and turn the full head of her persuasions exclusively upon them, instead of sprinkling (as it were) the whole community with her grace. She would arouse at first a very few, and then a few more, and a few more, and so on _ad infinitum_.

It was on a hot July morning that she journeyed on foot over the bridge which led to the prison, and there walked a man behind her carrying the flowers.

Her eyes were cast down, this being the position most significant of her spirit. Her pace was equal, firm, and rapid: she made herself oblivious of the bustle of the streets, and she repented that her vanity had permitted her to wear white and lavender these making a combination in her dress which she had been told became her well. She had no right to embellish herself. Was she going to the races or a match, or a kettle-drum, that she must dandify herself with particular shades of color? She stopped short, blushing. Would Miss Cro----. But there was no help for it now. It was too late to turn back. She proceeded, feeling that the odds were against her.

She approached her destination in such a way that the prison came into view suddenly. She paused, with a feeling of terror. The enormous gray building rose far above a lofty white wall of stone, and a sense of its prodigious strength and awful gloom overwhelmed her. On the top of the wall, holding by an iron railing, there stood a man with a rifle trailing behind him. He was looking down into the yard inside. His att.i.tude of watchfulness, his weapon, the unseen thing that was being thus fiercely guarded, provoked in her such a revulsion that she came to a standstill.

What in the name of mercy had she come here for? She began to tremble.

The man with the flowers came up to her and halted. From the prison there came at this instant the loud clang of a bell, and succeeding this a prolonged and resonant murmur which seemed to increase. Miss Eunice looked hastily around her. There were several people who must have heard the same sounds that reached her ears, but they were not alarmed. In fact, one or two of them seemed to be going to the prison direct. The courage of our philanthropist began to revive. A woman in a brick house opposite suddenly pulled up a window-curtain and fixed an amused and inquisitive look upon her.

This would have sent her into a thrice-heated furnace. "Come, if you please," she commanded the man, and she marched upon the jail.

She entered at first a series of neat offices in a wing of the structure, and then she came to a small door made of black bars of iron.

A man stood on the farther side of this, with a bunch of large keys.

When he saw Miss Eunice he unlocked and opened the door, and she pa.s.sed through.

She found that she had entered a vast, cool, and lofty cage, one hundred feet in diameter; it had an iron floor, and there were several people strolling about here and there. Through several grated apertures the sunlight streamed with strong effect, and a soft breeze swept around the cavernous apartment.

Without the cage, before her and on either hand, were three more wings of the building, and in these were the prisoners' corridors.

At the moment she entered, the men were leaving their cells, and mounting the stone stairs in regular order, on their way to the chapel above. The noisy files went up and down and to the right and to the left, shuffling and sc.r.a.ping and making a great tumult. The men were dressed in blue, and were seen indistinctly through the lofty gratings.

From above and below and all around her there came the metallic snapping of bolts and the rattle of moving bars; and so significant was everything of savage repression and impending violence, that Miss Eunice was compelled to say faintly to herself "I am afraid it will take a little time to get used to all this."

She rested upon one of the seats in the rotunda while the chapel services were being conducted, and she thus had an opportunity to regain a portion of her lost heart. She felt wonderfully dwarfed and belittled, and her plan of recovering souls had, in some way or other, lost much of its feasibility. A glance at her bright flowers revived her a little, as did also a surprising, long-drawn roar from over her head, to the tune of "America." The prisoners were singing.

Miss Eunice was not alone in her intended work, for there were several other ladies, also with supplies of flowers, who with her awaited until the prisoners should descend into the yard and be let loose before presenting them with what they had brought. Their common purpose made them acquainted, and by the aid of chat and sympathy they fortified each other.

Half an hour later the five hundred men descended from the chapel to the yard, rushing out upon its bare broad surface as you have seen a burst of water suddenly irrigate a road-bed. A hoa.r.s.e and tremendous shout at once filled the air, and echoed against the walls like the threat of a volcano. Some of the wretches waltzed and spun around like dervishes, some threw somersaults, some folded their arms gravely and marched up and down, some fraternized, some walked away pondering, some took off their tall caps and sat down in the shade, some looked toward the rotunda with expectation, and there were those who looked toward it with contempt.

There led from the rotunda to the yard a flight of steps. Miss Eunice descended these steps with a quaking heart, and a turnkey shouted to the prisoners over her head that she and others had flowers for them.

No sooner had the words left his lips, than the men rushed up pell-mell.

This was a crucial moment.