The Lady of Fort St. John

XIII.

THE SECOND DAY.

THE exhilaration of fighting quickened every pulse in the fort. By the next dawn the cannon began to speak. D’Aulnay had succeeded in planting batteries on a height eastward, and his guns had immediate effect. The barracks were set on fire and put out several times during the day. All the inmates gathered in the stone hall, and at its fireplace the cook prepared and distributed rations. Great balls ploughed up the esplanade, and the oven was shattered into a storm of stone and mortar, its adjoining mill being left with a gap in the side.

Responsive tremors from its own artillery ran through the fortress walls. The pieces, except, that one in the turret, were all brought into two bastions, those in the southeast bastion being trained on D’Aulnay’s batteries, and the others on his camp. The gunner in the turret also dropped shot with effect among the tents, and attempted to reach the ships. But he was obliged to use nice care, for the iron pellets heaped on the stone floor behind him represented the heavy labor of one soldier, who tramped at intervals up the turret stair carrying ammunition.

The day had dawned rainless but sullen. It was Good Friday. The women huddling in the hall out of their usual haunts noticed Marguerite’s refusal even of the broth the cook offered her. She was restless, like a leopard, and seemed full of electrical currents which found no discharge except in the flicker of her eyes. Leaving the group of settles by the fireplace, where these simple families felt more at home and least intrusive on the grandeur of the hall, she put herself on a distant chair with her face turned from them. This gave the women a chance to backbite her, to note her roused mood, and to accuse her among themselves of wishing evil to the fort, and consequently to their husbands.

“ She hath the closest mouth in Acadia,” murmured one. “ Doth anybody in these walls certainly know that she came from D’Aulnay ? ”

“ The Swiss, her husband, told it.”

“ And if she find means to go back to D’Aulnay, it will appear where she came from,” suggested Zélie.

“ I would he had her now,” said the first woman. “I have that feeling for her that I have for a cat with its hairs on end.”

Madame La Tour came to the hall and sat briefly and alone at her own table to take her dinner and supper. Later in the siege she stood and merely took food from the cook’s hands, talking with and Comforting her women while she ate. The surgeon of the fort was away with La Tour. She laid bandages ready, and felt obliged to dress not only the first but every wound received.

Pierre Doucett was brought from one of the bastions stunned and bleeding, and his wife rose up with her baby in her arms, filling the hall with her cries. The baby and her neighbors’ children were moved to join her. But the eye of her lady was as awful as Pierre’s wound. Her outcry sank to a whimper ; she hushed the children, and swept them off the settle so that Pierre could lie there, and even paid out the roll of bandage with one hand while her lady used it. Marie controlled her own faintness ; for a woman on whom a man’s labors are imposed must bear them.

The four little children stood with fingers in their mouths, looking at these grim tokens of war. All day long they heard the crashing or thumping of balls, and felt the leap and rebound of cannon. The cook, when he came down from a bastion to attend to his kettles, gave them nice bits to eat, and in spite of solemnity they counted it a holiday to be in the hall. Pierre Doucett groaned upon his settle, and Madame La Tour being on the lookout in the turret, Pierre Doucett’s wife again took to wailing over him. The other women comforted her with their ignorant sympathy, and Marguerite sat with her back to it all. But the children adapted themselves to the situation, and trooped across to the foot of the stairway to play war. On that grim pavement door which led down into the keep they shot each other with merry cannonading, and were laid out in turn on the steps.

Le Rossignol passed hours of that day sitting on the broad doorsill of the tower. She loved to watch the fiery rain ; but she was also waiting for a lull in the cannonading that she might release her swan. He was always forbidden the rooms in the tower by her lady ; for he was a pugnacious creature, quick to strike with beak or wings any one who irritated him. Especially did he seem tutored in the dwarf’s dislike of Lady Dorinda. In peaceful times, when she descended to the ground and took a sylvan excursion outside the fort, he ruffled all his feathers and pursued her even from the river. Le Rossignol had a forked branch with which she yoked him as soon as D’Aulnay’s vessels alarmed the fort. She also tied him by one leg under his usual shelter, the pent-house of the mill. He always sulked at restraint, but Le Rossignol maintained discipline. In the destruction of the oven and the reeling of the mill, Shubenacadie leaped upward and fell back flattened upon the ground. The fragments had scarcely settled before his mistress had him in her arms. At the risk of her life she dragged him across to the entrance, and sat desolately crumbling away between her fingers such feathers as were singed upon him, and sleeking his long gasping neck. She swallowed piteously with suspense, but could not bring herself to examine his body. He had his feet; he had his wings ; and finally he sat up of his own accord, and quavered some slight remark about the explosion.

“ What ails thee ?" exclaimed the dwarf indignantly. " Thou great coward ! To lie down and gasp and sicken my heart for the singeing of a few feathers! ”

She boxed the place where a swan’s ear should be, and Shubenacadie bit her. It was a serene and happy moment for both of them. Le Rossignol opened the door and pushed him in. Shubenacadie stood awkwardly with his feet sprawled on the hull pavement, and looked at the scenes to which his mistress introduced him. He noticed Marguerite, and hissed at her.

“ Be still, madman,” admonished the dwarf. “ Thou art an intruder here. The peasants will drive thee up chimney. Low-born people, when they get into good quarters, always try to put their betters out.”

Shubenacadie waddled on, scarcely recovered from the prostration of his fright, and inclined to hold the inmates of the tower accountable for it. Marie had just left Pierre Doucett, and his nurses were so busy with him that the swan was not detected until he scattered the children from the stairs.

“ Now, Mademoiselle Nightingale,” said Zélie, coming heavily across the flags, “ have we not enough strange cattle in this tower that you must bring that creature in, against my lady’s orders? ”

“ He shall not stand out there under D’Aulnay’s guns. Besides, Madame Marie hath need of him,” declared Le Rossignol impudently. “She would have me ride to D’Aulnay’s camp and bring her word how many men have fallen there to-day.”

Zélie shivered through her indignation. “ Do you tell me such a tale, when you were shut in the turret for that very sin ? ”

“ Sin that is sin in peace is virtue in war,” responded Le Rossignol. “ Mount, Shubenacadie.”

“My lady will have his neck wrung,” threatened Zélie.

“ She dare not. The chimney will tumble in. The fort will be taken.”

“ Art thou working against us ? ” demanded the maid wrathfully.

“ Why should I work for you ? You should indeed work for me. Pick me up this swan and carry him to the top of the stairs.”

“ I will not do it! ” cried Zélie, revolting through every atom of her ample bulk. “ Do I want to be lifted over the turret like thistledown ? ”

The dwarf laughed, and caught her swan by the back of his neck. With webbed toes and beating wings he fought every step, but she pulled herself up by the balustrade and dragged him along. His bristling plumage scraped the upper floor until he and his wrath were shut within the dwarf’s chamber.

“ Naught but muscle and bone and fire and flax went to the making of that stunted wight,” mused Zélie, setting her knuckles in her hips. “What a pity that she escapes powder and ball, when poor Pierre Doucett is shot down, — a man with wife and child, and useful to my lady besides ! ”

It was easy for Claude La Tour’s widow to fill her idleness with visions of political alliance, but when D’Aulnay de Charnisay began to batter the walls round her ears, her common sense resumed sway. She could be of no use outside her apartment, so she took her meals there trembling, but in her fashion resolute and courageous. The crash of cannon-shot was forever associated with her first reception in Acadia. Therefore this siege was a torture to her memory as well as a peril to her body. The tower had no more sheltered place, however, than Lady Dorinda’s room. Zélie had orders to wait upon her with strict attention. The cannonading dying away as darkness lifted its wall between the opposed forces, she hoped for such sleep as could be had in a besieged place, and waited Zélie’s knock. War, like a deluge, may drive people who detest one another into endurable contact; and when, without even a warning stroke on the panel, Le Rossignol slipped in as nimbly as a spider, Lady Dorinda felt no such indignation as she would have felt in ordinary times.

“ May I sit by your fire, your highness ? 舠 sweetly asked the dwarf.

Lady Dorinda held out a finger to indicate the chimney-side and to stay further progress. The sallow and corpulent woman gazed at the beak-faced atom.

“ It hath been repeated a thousand times, but I will say again I am no highness.”

Le Rossignol took the rebuke as a bird might have taken it, her bright round eyes reflecting steadily the overblown mortal opposite. She had never called Lady Dorinda anything except “ her highness.” The dullest soldier grinned at the apt sarcastic title. When Marie brought her to account for tins annoyance, she explained that she could not call Lady Dorinda anything else. Was a poor dwarf to be punished because people made light of every word she used ? Yet this innocent creature took a pleasure of her own in laying the term like an occasional lash on the woman who so despised her. Le Rossignol sat with arms around her knees in the hearth corner. Lady Dorinda in her cushioned chair chewed aromatic seeds.

The room, like a flower garden, exhaled all its perfumes at evening. Bottles of essences and pots of pomade and small bags of powders were set out for the luxurious use of its inmate when Zélie prepared her for the night. Le Rossignol enjoyed these scents. The sweet-odored atmosphere which clung about Lady Dorinda was her one attribute approved by the dwarf. Madame Marie never in any way appealed to the nose. Madame Marie’s garments were scentless as outdoor air, and the freshness of outdoor air seemed to belong to them. Le Rossignol liked to have her senses stimulated, and she counted it a lucky thing to sit by that deep fire and smell the heavy fragrance of the room.

A branched silver candlestick held two lighted tapers on the dressing-table. The bed curtains were parted, revealing a huge expanse of resting-place within ; and heavy folds shut the starlit world from the windows. One could here forget that the oven was blown up, and the ground of the fort ploughed with shot and sown with mortar.

“ Is there no fire in the hall ? ” inquired Lady Dorinda.

“ It hath all the common herd from the barracks around it,‡ explained Le Rossignol. “And Pierre Doucett is stretched there, groaning over the loss of half his face.”

“ Where is Madame La Tour ? ”

“ She hath gone out on the walls since the firing stopped. Our gunner in the turret told me that two guns are to be moved back before moonrise into the bastions they were taken from. Madame Marie is afraid D’Aulnay will try to encompass the fort to-night.”

“ And what business took thee into the turret ? ”

“ Your highness ” —

“Ladyship.” corrected Lady Dorinda. — “I like to see D’ Aulnay’s torches,” proceeded the dwarf, without accepting correction. “ His soldiers are burying the dead over there. He needs a stone tower with walls seven feet thick like ours, does D’Aulnay.”

Lady Dorinda put another seed in her mouth, and reflected that Zélie’s attendance was tardier than usual. She inquired, with shadings of disapproval, —

“ Is Madame La Tour’s woman also on the walls ? ”

“ Not Zélie, your highness” —

“ Ladyship,” insisted Lady Dorinda. “That heavy-foot Zélie,” chuckled the dwarf, deaf to correction, — “a fine bit of thistledown would she be to blow around the walls. Zélie is laying beds for the children, and she hath come to words with the cook through trying to steal eggs to roast for them. We have but few wild-fowl eggs in store.”

“Tell her that I require her,” said Lady Dorinda, fretted by the irregularities of life in a siege. “ Madame La Tour will account with her if she neglects her rightful duties.”

Le Rossignol crawled reluctantly up to stand in her dots of moccasins.

“Yes, your highness.”

“ Ladyship.” repeated Claude La Tour’s widow, to whom the sting was forever fresh, reminding her of a once possible regency.

“ But have you heard about the woman that was brought into the fortress before Madame Bronck went away ? ”

“ What of her ? ”

舠The Swiss says she comes from D’Aulnay.”

“It is Zélie that I require,” said Lady Dorinda with discouraging brevity.

Le Rossignol dropped her face, appearing to give round-eyed speculation to the fire.

“ It is believed that D’Aulnay sent by that strange woman a box of poison into the fort to work secret mischief. But,” added the dwarf, looking up in open perplexity, “ that box cannot now be found.”

“ Perhaps you can tell what manner of box it was,” said Lady Dorinda with irony, though a dull red was startled into her cheeks.

“ Madame Marie says it was a tiny box of oak, thick set with nails. She would not alarm the fort, so she had search made for it in Madame Bronck’s name.”

Lady Dorinda, incredulous, but trembling, divined at once that the dwarf had hid that coffer in her chest. Perhaps the dwarf had procured the hand and replaced some valuable of Madame Bronck’s with it. She longed to have the little beast shaken and made to confess. While she was considering what she could do with dignity, Zélie rapped and was admitted, and Le Rossignol escaped into outside darkness.

Hours passed, however, before Shubenacadie’s mistress sought his society. She undressed in her black cell, which had but one loophole looking toward the north, and taking the swan upon her bed tried to reconcile him to blankets. But Shubenacadie protested with both wings against a woolly covering which was not in his experience. The times were disjointed for him. He took no interest in Lady Dorinda and the box of Madame Bronck, and scratched the pallet with his toes and the nail at the end of his bill. But Le Rossignol pushed him down, and pressed her confidences upon this familiar.

“ So her highness threw that box out into the fort. I had to shiver and wait until Zélie left her, but I knew she would choose to rid herself of it through a window, for she would scarce burn it, she hath not adroitness to drop it in the hall, show it to Madame Marie she would not, and keep it longer to poison her court gowns she dare not. She hath found it before this. Her looking-glass was the only place apter than that chest. I would give much to know what her yellow highness thought of that hand. Here, mine own Shubenacadie, I have brought thee this sweet biscuit moistened with water. Eat, and scratch me not.

“ And little did its studding of nails avail the box, for the fall split it in three pieces ; and I hid them under rubbish, for mortar and stones are plentiful down there. Thou shouldst have seen my shade stretch under the moon like a tall hobgoblin. The nearest sentinel on the wall challenges me. ‘ Who is there ?’

‘ Le Rossignol.’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘ Looking for my swan’s yoke.’ Then he laughs, little knowing how I meant to serve his officer. The Hollandais mummy hath been of more use to me than trinkets. I frightened her highness with it, and now it is set to torment the Swiss. Let me tell thee, Shubenacadie, punishment comes even on a swan who would stretch up his neck and stand taller than his mistress. Wert thou not blown up with the oven ? Hide thy head and take warning.”

XIV.

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN POWERS.

The dwarf’s report about Klussman forced Madame La Tour to watch the strange girl; but Marguerite seemed to take no notice of any soldier who came and went in the hall. As for the Swiss, he carried trouble on his self-revealing face, but not treachery. Klussman camped at night on the floor with other soldiers off guard ; screens and the tall settles being placed in a row between this military bivouac and the women and children of the household protected near the stairs. He awoke as often as the guard was changed, and when dawnlight instead of moonlight appeared with the last relief, he sprang up and took the breastplate which had been laid aside for his better rest. Out of its hollow fell Jonas Bronck’s hand, bare and crouching with stiff fingers, on the pavement. The soldiers about to lie down laughed at themselves and Klussman for recoiling from it, and fury succeeded pallor in his blond face.

舠Did you do that ? ” he demanded of the men, but before they could utter denials his suspicion leaped the settles. Spurning Jonas Bronck’s treasured fragment with his boot in a manner which Antonia could never have forgiven, Klussman sent it to the hearth and strode after it. He had not far to look for Marguerite. As his eye traveled recklessly into the women’s camp, he encountered her beside him, sitting on the floor behind a settle and matching the red of a burning tree trunk with the red of her bruised eyelids.

舠Did you put that in my breastplate ?舡 said Klussman, pointing to the hand as it lay palm upwards. Marguerite shuddered and burst out crying. This had been her employment much of the night, but the nervous fit of childish weeping swept away all of Klussman’s self-control.

“No; no;” she repeated. “You think I do everything that is horrible.” And she sobbed upon her hands.

Klussman stooped down and tossed the hand like an escaped coal behind the log. As he stooped he said, —

“ I don’t think that. Don’t cry. If you cry I will shoot myself.”

Marguerite looked up and saw his helplessness in his face. He had sought her before, but only with reproaches. Now his resentment was broken. Twice had the dwarf’s mischief thrown Marguerite on his compassion and thereby diminished his resistance to her. Jonas Bronck’s hand, in its red-hot seclusion behind the log, writhed and smoked, discharging its grosser parts up the chimney’s shaft. Unseen, it lay a wirelike outline of bone ; unseen, it became a hand of fairy ashes, trembling in every filmy atom; finally an ember fell upon it, and where a hand had been some bits of lime lay in a white glow.

Klussman went out and mounted one of the bastions where the gunners were already preparing for work. The weather had changed in the night, and the sky seemed immeasurably lifted while yet filled with the uncertainties of dawn. Fundy Bay revealed more and more of its clean blue-emerald level, and far eastward the glassy water shaded up to a flushing of pink. Smoke rose from the mess fires in D’Aulnay’s camp. The first light puff of burnt powder sprung from his batteries, and the artillery duel again begun.

“ If we had but enough soldiery to make a sally,” said Madame La Tour to her officer, as she came for an instant to the bastion, “ we might take his batteries. Oh, for monsieur to appear on the bay with a stout shipload of men! ”

“It is time he came,” said the Swiss.

“ Yes, we shall see him or have news of him soon.”

In the tumult of Klussman’s mind Jonas Bronck’s hand never again came uppermost. He cared nothing and thought nothing about that weird fragment in the midst of living disaster. It had merely been the occasion of his surrendering to Marguerite. He determined that when La Tour returned and the siege was raised, if he survived he would take his wife and go to some new colony. Live without her he could not. Yet neither could he reëspouse her in Fort St. John, where he had himself openly denounced her.

Spring that day leaped forward to a semblance of June. The sun poured warmth, the very air renewed life. But to Klussman it was the brilliancy of passing delirium. He did not feel when gun-metal touched his hands. The sound of the incoming tide, which could be heard betwixt artillery boomings, and the hint of birds which the sky gave, were mute against his thoughts.

Though D’Aulnay’s loss was visibly heavy, it proved also an ill day for the fort. The southeast bastion was raked by a fire which disabled the guns and killed three men. Five others were wounded at various posts. The long spring twilight sunk through an orange horizon rim and filled up the measure which makes night before firing reluctantly stopped. Marie had ground opened near the powder magazine to make a temporary grave for her three dead. They had no families. She held a taper in her hand and read a service over them. One bastion and so many men being disabled, a sentinel was posted in the turret after the gunners descended. The Swiss took this duty, and felt his way up the pitch-black stairs. He had not seen Marguerite in the hall when he hurriedly took food, but she was safe in the tower. No woman ventured out in the storm of shot. The barracks were charred and battered.

As Klussman reached the turret door he exclaimed against some human touch, but caught his breath and surrendered himself to Marguerite’s arms, holding her soft body and smoothing her silkstranded hair.

“ I heard you say you would come up here,” murmured Marguerite. “ And the door was unlocked.”

“ Where have you been since morning?”

“ Behind a screen in the great hall. The women are cruel.”

Klussman hated the women. He kissed his wife with the first kiss since their separation, and all the toils of war failed to unman him like that kiss.

“ But there was that child ! ” he groaned.

“ That was not my child.” said Marguerite.

“ The baby brought here with you ! ”

“ It was not mine.”

“ Whose was it ? ”

“It was a drunken soldier’s. His wife died. They made me take care of it,” said Marguerite resentfully.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” exclaimed Klussman. “ You made me lie to my lady ! ”

Marguerite had no answer. He understood her reticence, and the degradation which could not be excused.

“ Who made you take care of it ? ”

“ He did.”

“ D’Aulnay ? ” Klussman uttered through his teeth.

“ Yes ; I don’t like him.”

“ I like him ! ” said the savage Swiss.

“ He is cruel,” complained Marguerite, “ and selfish.”

The Swiss pressed his face to her soft cheek.

“ I never was selfish and cruel to thee,” he said weakly.

“No, you never were.”

“Then why,” burst out the husband afresh, “ did you leave me to follow that beast of prey ? ”

Marguerite brought a sob from her breast which was like a sword through Klussman. He smoothed and smoothed her hair.

“ But what did I ever do to thee, Marguerite ? ”

“I always liked you best,” she said. 舠But he was a great lord. The women in barracks are so hateful, and a common soldier is naught.”

“ You would be the lady of a seignior,” hissed Klussman.

“ Thou knowest I was fit for that,” retorted Marguerite with spirit.

“ I know thou wert. It is marrying me that has been thy ruin.舡 He groaned with his head hanging.

“We are not ruined yet,” she said, “ if you care for me.”

“That hat was a stranger child?” he repeated.

“All the train knew it to be a motherless child. He had no right to thrust it on me.”

“ I demand no testimony of D’Aulnay’s followers, said Klussman roughly.

He let har go from his arms, and stepped to the battlements. His gaze moved over the square of the fortress, and eastward to that blur of whiteness which hinted the enemy’s tents, the hint being verified by a light or two.

“ I have a word to tell you,” said Marguerite, leaning beside her husband.

“ I have this to tell thee,” said the Swiss. “ We must leave Acadia.” His arm again fondled her and he comforted his sore spirit with an instant’s thought of home and peace somewhere.

“ Yes. We can go to Penobscot,” she said.

“ Penobscot ? ” he repeated with suspicion.

“ The king will give you a grant of Penobscot.”

“ The king will give it to — me ? ”

“ Yes. And it is a great seigniory.”

“ How do you know the king will do that ? ”

“ He told me to tell you ; he promised it.”

“The king? You never saw the king.”

“ No.”

“ D’Aulnay?”

“ Yes.”

“ I would I had him by the throat! ” burst out Klussman. Marguerite leaned her cheek on the stone and sighed. The bay seemed full of salty spice. It was a night in which the human soul must beat against casements to break free and roam the blessed dark. All of spring was in the air. Overhead stood the north star, with slow constellations wheeling in review before him.

“ So D’Aulnay sent you to spy on my lord, as my lord believed ? ”

“ You shall not call me a spy. I came to my husband. I hate him,” she added in a resentful burst. “ He made me walk the marshes, miles and miles alone, carrying that child.”

“ Why the child ? ”

“ Because the people from St. John would be sure to pity it.”

“ And what word did he send you to tell me ? ” demanded Klussman. “ Give me that word.”

Marguerite waited, her face downcast.

“ It was kind of him to think of me,” said the Swiss ; “ and to send you with the message ! ”

She felt mocked, and drooped against the wall. And in the midst of his scorn he took her face in his hands with a softness he could not master.

“ Give me the word,” he repeated. Marguerite drew his neck down and whispered, but before she finished whispering Klussman flung her against the cannon with an oath.

“ I thought it would be, betray my lord’s fortress to D’Aulnay de Charnisay! Go downstairs, Marguerite Klussman. When I have less matter in hand I will flog thee ! Hast thou no wit at all ? To come from a man who broke faith with thee and offer his faith to me ! Bribe me with Penobscot to betray St. John to him ! ”

Marguerite sat on the floor. She whispered, gasping, —

“Tell not the whole fortress.”

Klussman ceased to talk, but his heels rung on the stone as he paced the turret. He felt himself grow old as silence became massive betwixt his wife and him. The moon rose, piercing the cannon embrasure, and showed Marguerite weeping against the wall. the mass of silence drove him resistless before her will. That soft and childlike shape did not propose treason to him. He understood that she thought only of herself and him. It was her method of bringing profit out of the times. He heard his relief stumble at the foot of the turret stairs and went down the winding darkness to send the soldier back.

“ I am not sleepy,” said Klussman. “ I slept last night. Go and rest till daybreak.” And the man willingly went. Marguerite had not moved a fold of her gown when her husband again came into the lighted tower. The Swiss lifted her up and made her stand beside him while he stanched her tears.

“ You hurt me when you threw me against the cannon,” she said.

“ I was rough. But I am too foolish fond to hold anger. It has worn me out to be hard on thee. I am not the man I was.”

Marguerite clung around him. He dumbly felt his misfortune in being thralled by a nature of greater moral crudity than his own. But she was his portion in the world.

“ You flung me against the cannon because I wanted you made a seignior.”

“ It was because D’Aulnay wanted me made a traitor.”

“ What is there to do, indeed ? ” murmured Marguerite. “ He said if you would take the sentinels off the wall on the entrance side of the fort at daybreak any morning, he would be ready to scale that wall.”

“ But how will he know I have taken the sentinels off? ”

“ You must hold up a ladder in your hands.”

“ The tower is between that side of the fort and D’Aulnay’s camp. No one would see me standing with a ladder in my hands.”

“ When you set the ladder against the outside wall it is all you have to do, except to take me with you as you climb down. It is their affair to see the signal.”

“ So D’Aulnay plans an ambush between us and the river ? And suppose I did all that and the enemy failed to see the signal ? I should go down there to be hanged, or my lady would have me thrown into the keep here, and perhaps shot. I ought to be shot.”

“They will see the signal,” insisted Marguerite. “ I know all that is to be done. He made me say it over until I tired of it. You must mount the wall where the gate is, that side of the fort toward the river, the camp being on another side.”

Klussman again smoothed her hair and argued with her as with a child.

“ I cannot betray my lady. You see how madame trusts me.”

She grieved against his hard breastplate with insistence which pierced even that.

“ I am indeed not fit to be thought on beside the lady !”

“ I would do anything for thee but betray my lady.”

“ And when you have held her fort for her will she advance you by so much as a handful of land ?“

“ I was made lieutenant since the last siege.”

“ But now you may be a seignior with a holding of your own,” repeated Marguerite. So they talked the night away. She showed him on one hand a future of honor and plenty which he ought not to withhold from her ; and on the other a wandering forth to endless hardships. D’Aulnay had worked them harm; but this was in her mind an argument that he should now work them good. Being a selfish lord, powerful and cruel, he could demand this service as the condition of making her husband master of Penobscot; and the service itself she regarded as a small one compared to her lone tramping of the marshes to La Tour’s stockade. D’Aulnay was certain to take Fort St. John some time. He had the king and all France behind him ; the La Tours had nobody. Marguerite was a woman who could see no harm in advancing her husband by the downfall of his mere employers. Her husband must be advanced. She saw herself lady of Penobscot.

The Easter dawn began to grow over the world. Klussman remembered what day it was, and lifted her up to look over the battlements at light breaking from the east. Marguerite turned her head from point to point of the dewy world once more rising out of chaos. She showed her husband a new trench and a line of breastworks between the fort and the river. These had been made in the night, and might have been detected by him if he had guarded his post. The jutting of rocks probably hid them from sentinels below.

“ D’Aulnay is coming nearer,” said the Swiss, looking with haggard indifferent eyes at these preparations, and an occasional head venturing above the fresh ridge. Marguerite threw her arms around her husband’s neck, and hung on him with kisses.

“Come on, then,” he said, speaking with the desperate conviction of a man who has lost himself. “ I have to do it. You will see me hang for this, but I ’ll do it for you.”

XV.

A SOLDIER.

Marie felt herself called through the deepest depths of sleep, and sat up in the robe of fur which she had wrapped around her for her night bivouac. There was some alarm at her door. The enemy might be on the walls. She tingled with the intense return of life and was opening the door without conscious motion. Nobody stood outside in the hall except the dwarf, whose aureole of foxy hair surrounded features pinched by anxiety.

“Madame Marie—Madame Marie! The Swiss has gone to give up the fort to D’Aulnay.”

“ Has gone ? ”

“ He came down from the turret with his wife, who persuaded him. I listened all night on the stairs. D’Aulnay is ready to mount the wall when he gives the signal. I had to hide me until the woman and the Swiss passed below. They are now going to the wall to give the signal.”

Through Marie passed that worst shock of all human experience. To see your trusted ally transmuted into your secret most deadly foe sickens the heart as death surely cannot sicken it. Like many a pierced wretch who has collapsed suddenly into the dust while the stab yet held the knife, she whispered feebly, —

“ He could not do that! ”

The stern blackness of her eyes seemed to annihilate all the rest of her face. Was rock itself stable underfoot? Why should one care to prolong life, when life only proved how cruel and worthless are the people for whom we labor ?

“ Madame Marie, he is now doing it. He was to hold up a ladder on the wall.”

“ Which wall ? ”

“ This one — where the gate is.”

Marie looked through the glass in her door which opened toward the battlements, rubbed aside moisture, and looked again. While one breath could be drawn Klussman was standing in the dawn-light with a ladder raised overhead. She caught up a pair of long pistols which had lain beside her all night.

“ Rouse the men below — quick ! ” she said to Le Rossignol, and ran up the steps to the wall. No sentinels were there. The Swiss had already dropped down the ladder outside and was out of sight, and she heard the running, climbing feet of D’Aulnay’s men coming to take the advantage afforded them. Sentinels in the other two bastions turned with surprise at her cry. They had seen Klussman relieving the guard, but his subtle action escaped their watch-worn eyes. They only noticed that he had the strange woman with him.

D’Aulnay’s men were at the foot of the wall planting ladders. They were swarming up. Marie met them with the sentinels joining her and the soldiers rushing from below. Mho discharge of firearms, the clash of opposing metals, the thuds of falling bodies, cries, breathless struggling, clubbed weapons sweeping the battlements — filled one vast minute. Ladders were thrown back to the stones and D’Aulnay’s repulsed men were obliged to take once more to their trench, carrying the stunned and wounded. A cannon was trained on their breastworks, and St. John belched thunder and fire down the path of retreat. The Swiss’s treason had been useless to the enemy. The people of the fort saw him hurried more like a prisoner than an ally towards D’Aulnay’s camp, his wife beside him.

“ Oh, Klussman,” thought the lady of St. John as she turned to station guards at every exposed point and to continue that day’s fight, “ you knew in another way what it is to be betrayed. How could you put this anguish upon me ? ”

The furious and powder-grimed men, her faithful soldiers, hooted at the Swiss from their bastions, not knowing what a heart he carried with him. He turned once and made them a gesture of defiance, more pathetic than any wail for pardon, but they saw only the treason of the man, and shot at him with a good will. Through smoke and ball-ploughed earth D’Aulnay’s soldiers ran into camp and his batteries answered. Artillery echoes were scattered far through the woods, into the very depths of which that untarnished Easter weather seemed to stoop, coaxing growths from the swelling ground.

Advancing and pausing with equal caution, a man came out of the northern forest toward St. John River. No part of his person was covered with armor. And instead of the rich and formal dress then worn by the Huguenots even in the wilderness, he wore a complete suit of hunter’s buckskin which gave his supple muscles a freedom beautiful to see. His young face was freshly shaved, showing the clean fine texture of the skin. For having nearly finished his journey from the head of Fundy Bay, he had that morning prepared himself to appear what he was in Fort St. John — a man of good birth and nurture. His portables were rolled tightly in a blanket and strapped to his shoulders. A huntingknife and two long pistols armed him. His head was covered with a cap of beaver skin, and he wore moccasins. Not an ounce of unnecessary weight hampered him.

The booming of cannon had met him so far off on that day’s march that he understood well the state of siege in which St. John would be found, and long before there was any glimpse of D’Aulnay’s tents and earthworks the problem of getting into the fort occupied his mind. For D’Aulnay’s guards might be extended in every direction. But the first task in hand was to cross the river. One or two old canoes could be seen on the other side ; cast - off property of the Etchemin Indians who had broken camp. Being on the wrong bank these were as useless to him as dream canoes. But had a ferryman stood in waiting, it was perilous to cross in open day, within possible sight of the enemy. So the soldier moved carefully down to a shelter of rocks below the falls, opposite that place where Van Corlaer had watched the tide sweep up and drown the rapids. From this post he got a view of La Tour’s small ship, yet anchored and safe at its usual moorings. No human life was visible about it.

舠 The ship would afford me good quarters,” said the soldier to himself, “ had I naught to do but rest. But I must get into the fort this night, and how is it to be done ? ”

All the thunders of war and all the effort and danger to be undertaken, could not put his late companions out of his mind. He lay with hands clasped under his head and looked back at the trees visibly leafing in the warm Easter air. They were much to this man in all their differences and habits, their whisperings and silences. They had marched with him through countless lone long reaches, passing him from one to another with friendly recommendation. It hurt him to notice a broken or deformed one among them, but one full and nobly equipped from root to crown was Nature’s most triumphant shout. There is a glory of the sun and a glory of the moon, but to one who loves them there is another glory of the trees.

“ In autumn,” thought the soldier, “ I have seen light desert the skies and take to the trees and finally spread itself beneath them, a material glow, flake on flake. But in the spring, before their secret is spoken, when they throb, and restrain the force driving through them, then have I most comfort with them, for they live as I live.”

Shadows grew on the river, and ripples were arrested and turned back to flow up stream. There was but one way for him to cross the river, and that was to swim. And the best time to swim was when the tide brimmed over the current and trembled at its turn, a broad and limpid expanse of water, cold, dangerous, repellent to the chilled plunging body ; but safer and more easily paddled through than when the current, angular as a skeleton, sought the bay at its lowest ebb.

Fortunately tide and twilight favored the young soldier together. He stripped himself and bound his weapons and clothes in one tight packet on his head. At first it was easy to tread water ; the salt brine upheld him. But in the middle of the river it was wise to sink close to the surface and carry as small a ripple as possible; for D’Aulnay’s guards might be posted nearer than he knew. The water, deceptive at its outer edges in iridescent reflection of warm clouds, was cold as glacier drippings in midstream. He swam with desperate calmness, guarding himself by every stroke against cramp. The bundle oppressed him. He would have cast it off, but dared not change by a thought of variation the routine of his struggle. Hardy and experienced woodsman though he was, he staggered out on the other side and lay a space in the sand, too exhausted to move.

The tide began to recede, leaving stranded seaweed in green or brown streaks, the color of which could be determined only by the dullness or vividness of its shine through the dusk. As soon as he was able, the soldier sat up, shook out his blanket and rolled himself in it. The first large stars were trembling out. He lay and smelled gunpowder mingling with the saltness of the bay and the evening incense of the earth.

There was a moose’s lip in his wallet, the last spoil of his wilderness march, taken from game shot the night before and cooked at his morning fire. He ate it, still lying in the sand. Lights began to appear in the direction of D’Aulnay’s camp, but the fort held itself dark and close. He thought of the grassy meadow rivulet which was always empty at low tide, and that it might afford him some shelter in his nearer approach to the fort. He dressed and put on his weapons, but left everything else except the blanket lying where he had landed. In this venture little could be carried except the man and his life. The frontier graveyard outlined itself dimly against the expanse of landscape. The newturned clay therein gave him a start. He crept over the border of stones, went close, and leaned down to measure the length of the fresh grave with his outstretched hands. A sigh of relief which was as strong as a sob burst from the soldier.

“It is only that child we found at the stockade.”he murmured, and stepped on among the older mounds and leaped the opposite boundary to descend that dip of land which the tide invaded. Water yet shone there on the grass. Too impatient to wait until the tide ran low, he found the log and moved carefully forward, through increasing dusk, on hands and knees within closer range of the fort. Remembering that his buckskin might make an inviting spot on the slope he wrapped his dark blanket around him. The chorus of insect life and of water creatures, which had scarcely been tuned for the season, began to raise experimental notes. And now a splash like the leap of a fish came from the river. The moon would be late ; he thought of that with satisfaction. There was a little mist blown aloft over the stars, yet the night did not promise to be cloudy.

The whole environment of Fort St. John was so familiar to the young soldier that he found no unusual stone in his way. That side toward the garden might be the side least exposed to D’Aulnay’s forces at night. If he could reach the southwest bastion unseen, he could ask for a ladder. There was every likelihood of his being shot before the sentinels recognized him, yet he might be more fortunate. Balancing these chances, he moved toward that angle of shadow which the fortress lifted against the southern sky. Long rays of light within the walls were thrown up and moved on darkness like the pulsing motions of the aurora.

“ Who goes there ? ” said a voice.

The soldier lay flat against the earth. He had imagined the browsing sound of cattle near him. But a standing figure now condensed itself from the general dusk, some distance up the slope betwixt him and the bastion. The challenger was entirely apart from the fort. As he flattened himself in breathless waiting for a shot which might follow, a clatter began at his very ears, some animal bounded over him with a glancing cut of its hoof, and galloped toward the trench below St. John’s gate. He heard another exclamation, — this rapid traveler had probably startled another sentinel. The man who had challenged him laughed softly in the darkness. All the Sable Island ponies must be loose upon the slope. D’Aulnay’s men had taken possession of the stable and cattle, and the wild and frightened ponies were scattered. As his ear lay so near the ground, the soldier heard other little hoofs startled to action, and a snort or two from suspicious nostrils. He moved away from the sentinel without further challenge. It was evident that D’Aulnay had encompassed the fort with guards.

The young soldier crept slowly down the rocky hillock, avoided another sentinel, and, after long caution and selfrestraint and polishing the earth with his buckskin, crawled into the empty trench. The Sable Island ponies continually helped him. They were so nervous and so agile that the sentinels ceased to watch moving shadows.

The soldier looked up at St. John and its tower, knowing that he must enter in some manner before the moon rose. He dreaded the red brightness of moondawn, when guards whom he could discern against the stony ascent might detect his forehead above the breastwork. Behind him stretched an alluvial flat to the river’s sands. The tide was running swiftly out, and in the starlight its swirls and long muscular sweeps could be followed by a practiced eye.

As the soldier glanced warily in every direction, two lights left D’Aulnay’s camp and approached him, jerking and flaring in the hands of men who were evidently walking over irregular ground. They might be coming directly to take possession of the trench. But why should they proclaim their intention with torches to the batteries of Fort St. John? He looked around for some refuge from the advancing circle of smoky shine, and moved backwards along the bottom of the trench. The light stretched over and bridged him, leaving him in a stream of deep shadow, protected by the breastwork from sentinels above. He could therefore lift a cautious eye at the back of the trench and scan the group now moving betwixt him and the river. There were seven persons, only one of whom strode the stones with reckless feet. This man’s hands were tied behind his back, and a rope was noosed around his neck and held at the other end by a soldier.

“ It is Klussman, our Swiss! ” flashed through the soldier in the trench, with a mighty throb of rage and shame and anxiety for the lady in the fort. If Klussman had been taken prisoner, the guns of St. John would surely speak in his behalf when he was about to be hanged before its very gate. Such a parade of the act must be discovered on the walls. It was plain that Klussman had deserted to D’Auluay and was now enjoying D’Aulnay’s gratitude.

舠The tree that doth best front the gates,‡ said one of the men, pointing with his torch to an elm in the alluvial soil; “ my lord said the tree that doth best front the gates.”

“ That hath no fit limbs,” objected another.

“ He said the tree that doth best front the gates,舡 insisted the first man. 舠Besides this one, what shrub hereabouts is tall enough for our use ? ”

They moved down towards the elm. A stool carried by one man showed its long legs grotesquely behind his back. There were six persons besides the prisoner, all soldiers except one, who wore the coarse, long, cord-girdled gown of a Capuchin. His hood was drawn over his face, and the torches imperfectly showed that he was of the barefooted order and wore only sandals. He held up a crucifix and walked close beside Klussman. But the Swiss gazed all around the dark world which he was so soon to leave, and up at the fortress he had attempted to betray, and never once at the murmuring friar.

The soldier in the trench heard a breathing near him and saw that a number of the ponies, drawn by the light, had left their fitful grazing and were venturing step by step beyond the end of the trench. Some association of this scene with soldiers who used to feed them at night, after a hard day of drawing home the winter logs, may have stirred behind their shaggy foreheads. He took his hunting-knife with sudden and desperate intention, threw off his moccasins, cut his leggins short at the middle of the leg, and silently divided his blanket into strips.

Preparations were going forward under the elm. One of the soldiers climbed the tree and crept out upon an arched limb, catching the rope end thrown up to him. Both torches were given to one man that all the others might set themselves to the task. Klussman stood upon the stool, which they had brought for the purpose from the cook’s galley in one of their ships. His blond face, across which all his thoughts used to parade, was cast up by the torches like a stiffened mask, hopeless yet fearless in its expression.

“ Come, Father Vincent,” said the man who had made the knot, sliding down the tree. “ This is a Huguenot fellow, and good words are lost on him. I wonder that my lord let him have a friar to comfort him.”

“ Retire, Father Vincent,” said the men around the stool, with more roughness than they would have shown to a favorite confessor of D’Aulnay’s. The Capuchin turned and walked toward the trench.

The soldier in the trench could not hear what they said, but he had time for no further thought of Klussman. He had been watching the ponies with the conviction that his own life hung on what he might drive them to do. They alternately snuffed at Klussman’s presence and put their noses down to feel for springing grass. Before they could start and wheel from the friar, the soldier had thrown his hunting knife. It struck the hind leg of the nearest pony, and a scampering and snorting hurricane swept down past the elm. Klussman’s stool and the torch-bearer were rolled together. Both lights were stamped out by the panic-struck men, who thought a sally had been made from the fort. Father Vincent saw the knife thrown, and turned back, but the man in the trench seized him with steel muscles and dragged him into its hollow. If the good father uttered cry against such violence there was also noise under the elm, and the wounded pony yet galloped and snorted toward the river. The young soldier fastened his mouth shut with a piece of blanket, stripped off his capote and sandals, and tied him so that he could not move. Having done all most securely and put the capote and sandals upon himself, the soldier whispered at the friar’s ear an apology which must have amused them both,—

“ Pardon my roughness, good father. Perhaps you will lend me your clothes ? ”

Mary Hartwell Catherwood.