Samuel Merwin - The Road to Frontenac

The sun hung low over the western woods when Menard, at the close of the second day, headed the canoe shoreward. The great river swept by with hardly a surface motion, dimpling and rippling under the last touch of the day breeze. Menard’s eyes rested on Father Claude, as the canoe drew into the shadow of the trees. The priest, stiff from the hours of sitting and kneeling, had taken up a paddle and was handling it deftly. He had rolled his sleeves up to the elbow, showing a thin forearm with wire-like muscles. The two voyageurs , at bow and stern, were proving to be quiet enough fellows. Guerin, the younger, wore a boyish, half-confiding look. His fellow, Perrot, was an older man.

Menard felt, when he thought of Danton, a sense of pride in his own right judgment. The boy was taking hold with a strong, if unguided, hand. Already the feather was gone from his hat, the lace from his throat. Two days in the canoe and a night on the ground had stained and wrinkled his uniform,–a condition of which, with his quick adaptability, he was already beginning to feel proud. He had flushed often, during the first day, under the shrewd glances of the voyageurs , who read the inexperience in his bright clothes and white hands. Menard knew, from the way his shoulders followed the swing of his arms, that the steady paddling was laming him sadly. He would allow Danton five days more; at the week’s end he must be a man, else the experiment had failed.

The canoe scraped bottom under a wild growth of brush and outreaching trees. The forest was stirring with the rustle and call of birds, with the breath of the leaves and the far-away crackle and plunge of larger animals through the undergrowth. A chipmunk, with inquisitive eyes, sat on the root of a knotted oak, but he whisked away when Menard and the canoemen stepped into the shallow water. Overhead, showing little fear of the canoe and of the strangely clad animals within it, scampered a family of red squirrels, now nibbling a nut from the winter’s store, now running and jumping from tree to tree, until only by the shaking of the twigs and the leaf-clusters could one follow their movements.

The maid leaned an elbow on the bale which Danton had placed at her back, and rested her cheek on her hand. They were under the drooping branches of an elm that stood holding to the edge of the bank. Well out over the water sat one of the squirrels, his tail sweeping above his head, nibbling an acorn, and looking with hasty little glances at the canoe. She watched him, and memories came into her eyes. There had been squirrels on her father’s seignory who would take nuts from her hand, burying them slyly under the bushes, and hurrying back for more.

Danton came wading to the side of the canoe to help her to the bank, but she took his hand only to steady herself while rising. Stepping over the bracing-strips between the gunwales, she caught a swaying branch, and swung herself lightly ashore. Back from the water the ground rose into a low hill, covered with oak and elm and ragged hickory trees. Here, for a space, there was little undergrowth, and save under the heaviest of the trees the ground was green with short, coarse grass. Danton took a hatchet from the canoe, and trimmed a fir tree, heaping armfuls of green boughs at the foot of an oak near the top of the slope. Over these he threw a blanket. The maid came slowly up the hill, in response to his call, and with a weary little smile of thanks she sank upon the fragrant couch. She rested against the tree trunk, gazing through the nearer foliage at the rushing river.

For the two days she had been like this,–silent, shy, with sad eyes. And Danton,–who could no more have avoided the company of such a maid than he could have left off eating or breathing or laughing,–Danton, for all his short Paris life (which should, Heaven knows, have given him a front with the maids), could do nothing but hang about, eager for a smile or a word, yet too young to know that he could better serve his case by leaving her with her thoughts, and with the boundless woods and the great lonely spaces of the river. Menard saw the comedy–as indeed, who of the party did not–and was amused. A few moments later he glanced again toward the oak. He was sharpening a knife, and could seem not to be observing. Danton was sitting a few yards from the maid, with the awkward air of a youth who doubts his welcome. She still looked out over the water. Menard saw that her face was white and drooping. He knew that she had not slept; for twice during the preceding night, as he lay in his blanket, he had heard from under the overturned canoe, where she lay, the low sound of her sobbing.

Menard walked slowly down the slope, testing the knife-edge with his thumb, his short pipe between his teeth. He sheathed his knife, lowered his pipe, and called:–

“Guerin.” The two men, who were bringing wood to the fire, looked up. “Where has the Father gone?”

Guerin pointed around the base of the hill. “He went to the woods, M’sieu.”

“With a bundle,” added Perrot.

Menard walked around the hill, and after a little searching found the priest, kneeling, in a clearing, before the portrait of Catharine Outasoren, which he had set against a tree. His brushes and paints were spread on the ground before him. He did not hear Menard approach.

“Oh,” said the captain, “you brought the picture!”

The priest looked up over his shoulder, with a startled manner.

“I myself have stripped down to the lightest necessaries,” said Menard, with a significant glance at the portrait.

The priest lowered his brush, and sat looking at the picture with troubled eyes. “I had no place for it,” he said at last, hesitatingly.

“They didn’t take it at the College, eh?”

Father Claude flushed.

“They were very kind. They felt that perhaps it was not entirely completed, and that–”

“You will leave it at Montreal, then, at the Mission?”

“Yes,–I suppose so. Yes, I shall plan to leave it there.”

Menard leaned against a tree, and pressed the tobacco down in his pipe.

“I have been doing some thinking in the last few minutes, Father. I’ve decided to make my first call on you for assistance.”

“Very well, Captain.”

“It is about the maid. Have you noticed?”

“She seems of a sober mind.”

“Don’t you see why? It is her father’s losses, and this journey. She is taking it very hard. She is afraid, Father, all the time; and she neither sleeps nor eats.”

“It is naturally hard for such a child as she is to take this journey. She has had no experience,–she does not comprehend the easy customs and the hard travelling of the frontier. I think that in time–”

Menard was puffing impatiently.

“Father,” he said, “do you remember when Major Gordeau was killed, and I was detailed to bring his wife and daughter down to Three Rivers? It was much like this. They fretted and could not sleep, and the coarse fare of the road was beneath their appetites. Do you remember? And when it came to taking the rapids, with the same days of hard work that lie before us now, they were too weak, and they sickened, the mother first, then the daughter. When I think of that, Father, of the last week of that journey, and of how I swore never again to take a woman in my care on the river, I–well, there is no use in going over it. If this goes on, we shall not get to Frontenac in time, that is all. And I cannot afford to take such a chance.”

The priest looked grave. The long struggle against the rapids from Montreal to La Gallette had tried the hardihood of more than one strong man.

“It is probable, my son, that the sense of your responsibility makes you a little over-cautious. She is a strong enough child, I should say. Still, perhaps the food is not what she has been accustomed to. I have noticed that she eats little.”