Constance Fenimore Woolson
Page 4
On Sunday there was service in the little chapel, an upper room overlooking the inside parade-ground. Here the kindly Episcopal chaplain read the chapters about Balaam and Balak, and always made the same impressive pause after “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.” (Dear old man! he has gone. Would that our last end might indeed be like his!) Not that the chaplain confined his reading to the Book of Numbers; but as those chapters are appointed for the August Sundays, and as it was in August that the summer visitors came to Mackinac, the little chapel is in many minds associated with the patient Balak, his seven altars, and his seven rams.
There was state and discipline in the fort even on Sundays; bugle-playing marshalled the congregation in, bugle-playing marshalled them out. If the sermon was not finished, so much the worse for the sermon, but it made no difference to the bugle; at a given moment it sounded, and out marched all the soldiers, drowning the poor chaplain’s hurrying voice with their tramp down the stairs. The officers attended service in full uniform, sitting erect and dignified in the front seats. We used to smile at the grand air they had, from the stately gray-haired major down to the youngest lieutenant fresh from the Point. But brave hearts were beating under those fine uniforms; and when the great struggle came, one and all died on the field in the front of the battle. Over the grave of the commanding officer is inscribed “Major-General,” over the captain’s is “Brigadier,” and over each young lieutenant is “Colonel.” They gained their promotion in death.
I spent many months at Fort Mackinac with Archie; Archie was my nephew, a young lieutenant. In the short, bright summer came the visitors from below; all the world outside is “below” in island vernacular. In the long winter the little white fort looked out over unbroken ice-fields, and watched for the moving black dot of the dog-train bringing the mails from the mainland. One January day I had been out walking on the snow-crust, breathing the cold, still air, and, returning within the walls to our quarters, I found my little parlor already occupied. Jeannette was there, petite Jeanneton, the fisherman’s daughter. Strange beauty sometimes results from a mixed descent, and this girl had French, English, and Indian blood in her veins, the three races mixing and intermixing among her ancestors, according to the custom of the Northwestern border. A bold profile delicately finished, heavy blue-black hair, light blue eyes looking out unexpectedly from under black lashes and brows; a fair white skin, neither the rose-white of the blonde nor the cream-white of the Oriental brunette; a rounded form with small hands and feet,—showed the mixed beauties of three nationalities. Yes, there could be no doubt but that Jeannette was singularly lovely, albeit ignorant utterly. Her dress was as much of a mélange as her ancestry: a short skirt of military blue, Indian leggins and moccasins, a red jacket and little red cap embroidered with beads. The thick braids of her hair hung down her back, and on the lounge lay a large blanket-mantle lined with fox-skins and ornamented with the plumage of birds. She had come to teach me bead-work; I had already taken several lessons to while away the time, but found myself an awkward scholar.
“Bonjou’, madame,” she said, in her patois of broken English and degenerate French. “Pretty here.”
My little parlor had a square of carpet, a hearth-fire of great logs, Turkey-red curtains, a lounge and arm-chair covered with chintz, several prints on the cracked walls, and a number of books,—the whole well used and worn, worth perhaps twenty dollars in any town below, but ten times twenty in icy Mackinac. I began the bead-work, and Jeannette was laughing at my mistakes, when the door opened, and our surgeon came in, pausing to warm his hands before going up to his room in the attic. A taciturn man was our surgeon, Rodney Prescott, not popular in the merry garrison circle, but a favorite of mine; the Puritan, the New-Englander, the Bostonian, were as plainly written upon his face as the French and Indian were written upon Jeannette.
“Sit down, Doctor,” I said.
He took a seat and watched us carelessly, now and then smiling at Jeannette’s chatter as a giant might smile upon a pygmy. I could see that the child was putting on all her little airs to attract his attention; now the long lashes swept the cheeks, now they were raised suddenly, disclosing the unexpected blue eyes; the little moccasined feet must be warmed on the fender, the braids must be swept back with an impatient movement of the hand and shoulder, and now and then there was a coquettish arch of the red lips, less than a pout, what she herself would have called “une p’tite moue.” Our surgeon watched this pantomime unmoved.
“Is n’t she beautiful?” I said, when, at the expiration of the hour, Jeannette disappeared, wrapped in her mantle.
“No; not to my eyes.”
“Why, what more can you require, Doctor? Look at her rich coloring, her hair—”
“There is no mind in her face, Mrs. Corlyne.”
“But she is still a child.”
“She will always be a child; she will never mature,” answered our surgeon, going up the steep stairs to his room above.
Jeannette came regularly, and one morning, tired of the bead-work, I proposed teaching her to read. She consented, although not without an incentive in the form of shillings; but, however gained, my scholar gave to the long winter a new interest. She learned readily; but as there was no foundation, I was obliged to commence with A, B, C.
“Why not teach her to cook?” suggested the major’s fair young wife, whose life was spent in hopeless labors with Indian servants, who, sooner or later, ran away in the night with spoons and the family apparel.
“Why not teach her to sew?” said Madame Captain, wearily raising her eyes from the pile of small garments before her.
“Why not have her up for one of our sociables?” hazarded our most dashing lieutenant, twirling his mustache.
“Frederick!” exclaimed his wife, in a tone of horror: she was aristocratic, but sharp in outlines.
“Why not bring her into the church? Those French half-breeds are little better than heathen,” said the chaplain.
Thus the high authorities disapproved of my educational efforts. I related their comments to Archie, and added, “The surgeon is the only one who has said nothing against it.”
“Prescott? O, he ’s too high and mighty to notice anybody, much less a half-breed girl. I never saw such a stiff, silent fellow; he looks as though he had swallowed all his straightlaced Puritan ancestors. I wish he ’d exchange.”
“Gently, Archie—”
“O, yes, without doubt; certainly, and amen! I know you like him, Aunt Sarah,” said my handsome boy-soldier, laughing.
The lessons went on. We often saw the surgeon during study hours, as the stairway leading to his room opened out of the little parlor. Sometimes he would stop awhile and listen as Jeannette slowly read, “The good boy likes his red top”; “The good girl can sew a seam”; or watched her awkward attempts to write her name, or add a one and a two. It was slow work, but I persevered, if from no other motive than obstinacy. Had not they all prophesied a failure? When wearied with the dull routine, I gave an oral lesson in poetry. If the rhymes were of the chiming, rhythmic kind, Jeannette learned rapidly, catching the verses as one catches a tune, and repeating them with a spirit and dramatic gesture all her own. Her favorite was Macaulay’s “Ivry.” Beautiful she looked, as, standing in the centre of the room, she rolled out the sonorous lines, her French accent giving a charming foreign coloring to the well-known verses:—
“Now by the lips of those ye love, fair gentlemen of France,
Charge for the golden lilies,—upon them with the lance!
A thousand spurs are striking deep, a thousand spears in rest,
A thousand knights are pressing close behind the snow-white crest;
And in they burst, and on they rushed, while, like a guiding star,
Amidst the thickest carnage blazed the helmet of Navarre.”
And ye
t, after all my explanations, she only half understood it; the “knights” were always “nights” in her mind, and the “thickest carnage” was always the “thickest carriage.”
One March day she came at the appointed hour, soon after our noon dinner. The usual clear winter sky was clouded, and a wind blew the snow from the trees where it had lain quietly month after month. “Spring is coming,” said the old sergeant that morning, as he hoisted the storm-flag; “it ’s getting wild-like.”
Jeannette and I went through the lessons, but toward three o’clock a north-wind came sweeping over the Straits and enveloped the island in a whirling snow-storm, partly eddies of white splinters torn from the ice-bound forest, and partly a new fall of round snow pellets careering along on the gale, quite unlike the soft, feathery flakes of early winter. “You cannot go home now, Jeannette,” I said, looking out through the little west window; our cottage stood back on the hill, and from this side window we could see the Straits, going down toward far Waugoschance; the steep fort-hill outside the wall; the long meadow, once an Indian burial-place, below; and beyond on the beach the row of cabins inhabited by the French fishermen, one of them the home of my pupil. The girl seldom went round the point into the village; its one street and a half seemed distasteful to her. She climbed the stone-wall on the ridge behind her cabin, took an Indian trail through the grass in summer, or struck across on the snow-crust in winter, ran up the steep side of the fort-hill like a wild chamois, and came into the garrison enclosure with a careless nod to the admiring sentinel, as she passed under the rear entrance. These French half-breeds, like the gypsies, were not without a pride of their own. They held themselves aloof from the Irish of Shanty-town, the floating sailor population of the summer, and the common soldiers of the garrison. They intermarried among themselves, and held their own revels in their beach-cabins during the winter, with music from their old violins, dancing and songs, French ballads with a chorus after every two lines, quaint chansons handed down from voyageur ancestors. Small respect had they for the little Roman Catholic church beyond the old Agency garden; its German priest they refused to honor; but, when stately old Father Piret came over to the island from his hermitage in the Chenaux, they ran to meet him, young and old, and paid him reverence with affectionate respect. Father Piret was a Parisian, and a gentleman; nothing less would suit these far-away sheep in the wilderness!
Jeannette Leblanc had all the pride of her class; the Irish saloon-keeper with his shining tall hat, the loud-talking mate of the lake schooner, the trim sentinel pacing the fort walls, were nothing to her, and this somewhat incongruous hauteur gave her the air of a little princess.
On this stormy afternoon the captain’s wife was in my parlor preparing to return to her own quarters with some coffee she had borrowed. Hearing my remark she said, “O, the snow won’t hurt the child, Mrs. Corlyne; she must be storm-proof, living down there on the beach! Duncan can take her home.”
Duncan was the orderly, a factotum in the garrison.
“Non,” said Jeannette, tossing her head proudly as the door closed behind the lady, “I wish not of Duncan; I go alone.”
It happened that Archie, my nephew, had gone over to the cottage of the commanding officer to decorate the parlor for the military sociable; I knew he would not return, and the evening stretched out before me in all its long loneliness. “Stay, Jeannette,” I said. “We will have tea together here, and when the wind goes down, old Antoine shall go back with you.” Antoine was a French wood-cutter, whose cabin clung half-way down the fort-hill like a swallow’s nest.
Jeannette’s eyes sparkled; I had never invited her before; in an instant she had turned the day into a high festival. “Braid hair?” she asked, glancing toward the mirror; “faut que je m’ fasse belle.” And the long hair came out of its close braids, enveloping her in its glossy dark waves, while she carefully smoothed out the bits of red ribbon that served as fastenings. At this moment the door opened, and the surgeon, the wind, and a puff of snow came in together. Jeannette looked up, smiling and blushing; the falling hair gave a new softness to her face, and her eyes were as shy as the eyes of a wild fawn.
Only the previous day I had noticed that Rodney Prescott listened with marked attention to the captain’s cousin, a Virginia lady, as she advanced a theory that Jeannette had negro blood in her veins. “Those quadroon girls often have a certain kind of plebeian beauty like this pet of yours, Mrs. Corlyne,” she said, with a slight sniff of her high-bred, pointed nose. In vain I exclaimed, in vain I argued; the garrison ladies were all against me, and, in their presence, not a man dared come to my aid; and the surgeon even added, “I wish I could be sure of it.”
“Sure of the negro blood?” I said, indignantly.
“Yes.”
“But Jeannette does not look in the least like a quadroon.”
“Some of the quadroon girls are very handsome, Mrs. Corlyne,” answered the surgeon, coldly.
“O yes!” said the high-bred Virginia lady. “My brother has a number of them about his place, but we do not teach them to read, I assure you. It spoils them.”
As I looked at Jeannette’s beautiful face, her delicate eagle profile, her fair skin and light blue eyes, I recalled this conversation with vivid indignation. The surgeon, at least, should be convinced of his mistake. Jeannette had never looked more brilliant; probably the man had never really scanned her features,—he was such a cold, unseeing creature; but to-night he should have a fair opportunity, so I invited him to join our storm-bound tea-party. He hesitated.
“Ah, do, Monsieur Rodenai,” said Jeannette, springing forward. “I sing for you, I dance; but, no, you not like that. Bien, I tell your fortune then.” The young girl loved company. A party of three, no matter who the third, was to her infinitely better than two.
The surgeon stayed.
A merry evening we had before the hearth-fire. The wind howled around the block-house and rattled the flag-staff, and the snow pellets sounded on the window-panes, giving that sense of warm comfort within that comes only with the storm. Our servant had been drafted into service for the military sociable, and I was to prepare the evening meal myself.
“Not tea,” said Jeannette, with a wry face; “tea,—c’est médecine!” She had arranged her hair in fanciful braids, and now followed me to the kitchen, enjoying the novelty like a child. “Café?” she said. “O, please, madame! I make it.”
The little shed kitchen was cold and dreary, each plank of its thin walls rattling in the gale with a dismal creak; the wind blew the smoke down the chimney, and finally it ended in our bringing everything into the cosey parlor, and using the hearth fire, where Jeannette made coffee and baked little cakes over the coals.
The meal over, Jeannette sang her songs, sitting on the rug before the fire,—Le Beau Voyageur, Les Neiges de La Cloche, ballads in Canadian patois sung to minor airs brought over from France two hundred years before.
The surgeon sat in the shade of the chimney-piece, his face shaded by his hand, and I could not discover whether he saw anything to admire in my protégée, until, standing in the centre of the room, she gave us “Ivry” in glorious style. Beautiful she looked as she rolled out the lines:—
“And if my standard-bearer fall, as fall full well he may,—
For never saw I promise yet of such a bloody fray,—
Press where ye see my white plume shine amidst the ranks of war,
And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre.”
Rodney sat in the full light now, and I secretly triumphed in his rapt attention.
“Something else, Jeannette,” I said, in the pride of my heart. Instead of repeating anything I had taught her, she began in French:—
“‘Marie, enfin quitte l’ouvrage,
Voici l’étoile du berger.’
—‘Ma mère, un enfant d
u village
Languit captif chez l’étranger;
Pris sur mer, loin de sa patrie,
Il s’est rendu,—mais le dernier.’
File, file, pauvre Marie,
Pour secourir le prisonnier;
File, file, pauvre Marie,
File, file, pour le prisonnier.
“‘Pour lui je filerais moi-même
Mon enfant,—mais—j’ai tant vieilli!’
—‘Envoyez à celui que j’aime
Tout le gain par moi recueilli.
Rose à sa noce en vain me prie;—
Dieu! j’entends le ménétrier!’
File, file, pauvre Marie,
Pour secourir le prisonnier;
File, file, pauvre Marie,
File, file, pour le prisonnier.
“‘Plus près du feu file, ma chère;
La nuit vient refroidir le temps.’
—‘Adrien, m’a-t-on dit, ma mère,
Gémit dans des cachots flottants.
On repousse la main flétrie
Qu’il étend vers un pain grossier.’
File, file, pauvre Marie,
Pour secourir le prisonnier;
File, file, pauvre Marie,
File, file, pour le prisonnier.”*
Jeannette repeated these lines with a pathos so real that I felt a moisture rising in my eyes.