The Story of Tonty Part 10

"Monsieur, it would be better for us to hurry back to the fortress and call my uncle La Salle."

"Nothing will satisfy you, mademoiselle," denounced Colin. "Out you must come to stop Monsieur de Tonty. Now back you must go through weather which is not fitting for any demoiselle to face."

"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "if you return now it will be my duty to escort you as far as the fortress gate."

Barbe drew her wrappings over her face, as he had seen a wild sensitive plant fold its leaves and close its cups.

"I will retire to the chapel and wait there until my uncle La Salle comes," she decided, "and my brother must run to call him."

"You may take to sanctuary as soon as you please," responded Colin, "and I will attend to my uncle La Salle's business. But the first call I make shall be upon the cook in this camp."

FOOTNOTES:

[11] "He (La Salle) gave us a piece of ground 15 arpents in front by 20 deep, the donation being accepted by Monsieur de Frontenac, syndic of our mission." From Le Clerc.

V.

FATHER HENNEPIN'S CHAPEL.

Tonty held a buffalo robe over Barbe during her quick transit from cabin to church. Its tanned side was toward the weather, and its woolly side continued to comfort her after she was under shelter. Tonty bestowed it around her and closed the door again, leaving her in the dim place.

Father Hennepin's deserted chapel was of hewed logs like his dwelling. A rude altar remained, but without any ornaments, for the Recollet had carried these away to his western mission. Some unpainted benches stood in a row. The roof could be seen through rafters, and drops of rain with reiterating taps fell along the centre of the floor. A chimney of stones and cement was built outside the chapel, of such a size that its top yawned like an open cell for rain, snow, or summer sunshine. Within, it spread a generous hearth and an expanse of grayish fire-wall little marked by the blue incense which rises from burning wood.

Barbe looked briefly around the chapel. She laid the buffalo hide before the altar and knelt upon it.

Tonty returned with a load of fuel and busied himself at the fireplace.

The boom of the lake, and his careful stirring and adjusting in ancient ashes, made a background to her silence. Yet she heard through her devotions every movement he made, and the low whoop peculiar to flame when it leaps to existence and seizes its prey.

A torrent of fire soon poured up the flue. Tonty grasped a brush made of wood shavings, remnant of Father Hennepin's housekeeping, and whirled dust and litter in the masculine fashion. When he left the chapel it glowed with the resurrected welcome it had given many a primitive congregation of Indians and French settlers, when the lake beat up icy winter foam.

Beside the fireplace was a window so high that its log sill met Barbe's chin as she looked out. Jutting roof and outer chimney wall made a snug spot like a sentry-box without. She dried her feet, holding them one at a time to the red hot glow, and glanced through this window at the mission house's sodden logs and crumbled c.h.i.n.king. The excitement of her sally out of Fort Frontenac died away. She felt distressed because she had come, and faint for her early convent breakfast.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

She saw Tonty through the window carrying a dish carefully covered. He approached the broken pane, and Barbe eagerly helped him to unfasten the sash and swing it out. In doing this, Tonty held her platter braced by his iron-handed arm.

The fare was pa.s.sed in to her without apology, and she received it with sincere grat.i.tude, afterward drawing a bench near the fire and sitting down in great privacy and comfort.

The moccasins of a frontiersman could make no sound above flap of wind and pat of water. Tonty paced from window to chapel front, believing that he kept out of Barbe's sight. But after an interval he was amused to see, rising over the sill within, a topknot of curls, and eyes filled with the alert, shy spirit of the deer whose flesh she had just eaten.

For some reason this scrutiny of Barbe's made him regret that he had lain aside the gold and white uniform of France, and the extreme uses to which his gauntlets had been put. Entrenched behind logs she unconsciously poured the fires of her youth upon Tonty.

Not only was one pane in the sash gone, but all were shattered, giving easy access to his voice as he stood still and explained.

"Frontenac is a lonely post, mademoiselle. It is necessary for you to have a sentinel."

"Yes, monsieur; you are very good." Barbe accepted the fact with lowered eyelids. "Has my brother yet gone to call my uncle La Salle?"

"Yes, mademoiselle. As soon as we could give him some breakfast he set out."

"Colin is a gourmand. All very young people gormandize more or less,"

remarked Barbe, with a sense of emanc.i.p.ation from the cla.s.s she condemned.

"I hope you could eat what I brought you?"

"It was quite delicious, monsieur. I ate every bit of it."

The boom of the lake intruded between their voices. Barbe's black eyelashes flickered sensitively upon her cheeks, and Tonty, feeling that he looked too steadily at her, dropped his eyes to his folded arms.

"Monsieur de Tonty," inquired Barbe, appealing to experience, "do you think sixteen years very young?"

"It is the most charming age in the world, mademoiselle."

"Monsieur, I mean young for maturing one's plan of life."

"That depends upon the person," replied Tonty. "At sixteen I was revolting against the tyranny which choked Italy. And I was an exile from my country before the age of twenty, mademoiselle."

Barbe gazed straight at Tonty, her gray eyes firing like opals with enthusiasm.

"And my uncle La Salle at sixteen was already planning his discoveries.

Monsieur, I also have my plans. Many missionaries must be needed among the Indians."

"You do not propose going as a missionary among the Indians, mademoiselle?"

Barbe critically examined his smile. She evaded his query.

"Are the Indian women beautiful, Monsieur de Tonty?"

"They do not appear so to me, mademoiselle, though the Illinois are a straight and well-made race."

"You must find it a grand thing to range that western country."

"But in the midst of our grandeur the Iroquois threaten us even there.

How would mademoiselle like to mediate between these invaders and the timid Illinois, suspected by one tribe and threatened by the other; to carry the wampum belt of peace on the open field between two armies, and for your pains get your scalp-lock around the fingers of a Seneca chief and his dagger into your side?"

"Oh, monsieur!" whispered Barbe, flushing with the wild pinkness of roses on the plains, "what amus.e.m.e.nts you do have in the great west! And is it a castle on a mountain, that Fort St. Louis of the Illinois?"

"A stockade on a cliff, mademoiselle."

Tonty felt impelled to put himself nearer this delicate head set with fine small ears and quartered by the angles of the window-frame. When she meditated, her lashes and brows and aquiline curves and gray tones flushing to rose were delightful to a wilderness-saturated man. But he held to his strict position as sentinel.

"Monsieur," said Barbe, "there is something on my mind which I will tell you. I was thinking of the new world my uncle La Salle discovered, even before you came to Montreal. Now I think constantly of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. Monsieur, I dream of it,--I go in long journeys and never arrive; I see it through clouds, and wide rivers flow between it and me; and I am homesick. Yes, monsieur, that is the strangest thing,--I have cried of homesickness for Fort St. Louis of the Illinois!"