The Story of Tonty. Mary Hartwell Catherwood
eyelashes and curls only emphasizing the type. Already her small nose drooped at the point and flared at the base. As La Salle and his young kinswoman stepped together, Tonty gauged them alike—two self-restraining natures with unmeasured endurance and individual force like the electric current.
Montreal’s square bastioned fort, by the mouth of a small creek flowing into the St. Lawrence, was soon reached from the wharf. It stood at the south end of the town.
“My dear child,” said La Salle, stating his case to Barbe, “it is necessary for me to go into the fort with Count Frontenac, and equally necessary you should go back at once to the Sisters. I will bring you out of the convent to-morrow to look at the beaver fair. This is Monsieur de Tonty, my lieutenant; let him take you back to the nuns. I shall be blamed if I carry you into the fort.”
Barbe heard him without raising objections. She looked at Tonty, who gave her his left hand and drew her out of the train.
It swept past them into the fortress gates—gallant music, faces returning her eager gaze with smiles, plumes, powdered curls, and laces, gold and white uniforms, soldiers with the sun flashing from their gun-barrels.
Barbe watched the last man in. To express her satisfaction she then rose to the tip of one foot and hopped three steps. She was lightly and delicately made, and as full of restless grace as a bird. Her face and curls bloomed above and strongly contrasted with the raiment her convent guardians planned for a child dependent, not on their charity, but on their maternal care.
The September morning enveloped the world in a haze of brightness, like that perfecting blue breath which we call the bloom upon the grape. A great landscape with a scarf of melting azure resting around its horizon, or ravelling to shreds against the mountain’s breast, or pretending to be wood-smoke across the river, drew Tonty’s eye from the disappearing pageant.
That fair land was a fit spot whereon the most luxurious of civilizations should touch and affiliate with savages of the wilderness. Up the limpid green river the Lachine Rapids showed their teeth with audible roar. From that point Mount Royal could be seen rising out of mists and stretching its hind-quarters westward like some vast mastodon. But to Tonty only its front appeared, a globe dipped in autumn colors and wearing plumes of vapor. The sky of this new hemisphere rose in unmeasured heights which the eye followed in vain; there seemed no zenith to the swimming blinding azure.
A row of booths for merchants had been built all along the outside of Montreal’s palisades, and traders were thus early setting their goods in array.
At the north extremity of the town that huge stone windmill built by the seigniors for defence, cast a long dewy shadow toward the west. Its loopholes showed like dark specks on the body of masonry.
Sun-sparkles on the river were no more buoyant and changeable than the child at Tonty’s side. Dimples came and went in her cheeks. Her blood was stirred by the swarming life around her.
“Monsieur,” she confided to her uncle’s lieutenant, “I am meditating something very wicked.”
“Certainly that is impossible, mademoiselle,” said Tonty, accommodating his step to her reluctant gait.
“I am meditating on not going back to the convent.”
“Where would you go, mademoiselle?”
“Everywhere, to see things.”
“But my orders are to escort you to the nuns. You would disgrace me as a soldier.”
Barbe lifted her gaze to his face and was diverted from rebellion. Tonty put out his arm to guard her, but a tall stalking brave was pushed against her in passing and immediately startled by the thud of her prompt fist upon his back. The Indian turned, unsheathing his knife.
“Get out of my way, thou ugly big warrior,” said Barbe, meeting his eye, which softened from fierceness to laughter, and holding her fist ready for further encounter.
The Indian made some mocking gestures and menaced her playfully with his thumb. Tonty threw his arm across her shoulder and moved her on toward the convent. Barbe escaped from this touch, an entirely new matter filling her mind.
“Monsieur, even old Jonaneaux in our Hôtel Dieu hath not such a heavy hand as thou hast. Many a time hath he pulled me down off the palisade when I looked over to see the coureurs de bois go roaring by. But thou hast a hand like iron!”
Tonty flushed, being not yet hardened to his misfortune.
“It is a hand of iron. I am called Main-de-fer.”[2]
Barbe took hold of it in its glove. Of all the people she had ever met Tonty was the only person whose touch she did not resent.
“The other hand is not like unto it, monsieur?”
He gave her the other also, and she compared their weight. With a roguish lifting of her nostrils she inquired—
“Will every bit of you turn to metal like this heavy hand?”
“Alas, no, mademoiselle; there is no hope of that.”
Tonty stripped his gauntlet off. With half afraid fingers she examined the artificial member. It was of copper.
“Where is the old one, monsieur?”
“It was blown off by a grenade at Messina last year.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not now. Except when I think of the service of Monsieur de la Salle, and of my being thus pieced out as a man.”
Barbe measured his height and breadth and warm-toned face with satisfied eyes. She consoled him.
“There is so much of you, monsieur, you can easily do without a hand.”
III.
FATHER HENNEPIN.
“Thou art a comfort to a soldier, mademoiselle,” said Tonty, heartily.
“But not to a priest,” observed Barbe. “For last birthday when I was eleven my uncle Abbé stuck out his lip and said I was eleven years bad. But my uncle La Salle kissed my cheek. There goeth François le Moyne.” Her face became suddenly distorted with grimaces of derision beside which Tonty could scarcely keep his gravity. A boy of about her own age ran past, dropping her a sneer for her pains.
“Monsieur, these Le Moynes and Sorels and Bouchers and Varennes and Joliets and Le Bers, they are all against my uncle La Salle. The girls talk about it in the convent. But he hath the governor on his side, so what can they do? I have pinched Jeanne le Ber at school, but she will never pinch back and it only makes her feel holier. So I pinch her no more. Do you know Jeanne le Ber?”
“No,” said Tonty, “I have not that pleasure.”
“Oh, monsieur, it is no pleasure. She says so many prayers. When I have prayers for penances they make me so tired I have to get up and hop between them. But Jeanne le Ber would pray all the time if her father did not pull her off her knees. My father and mother died in France. If they were alive they would not have to pull me off my knees.”
“But a woman should learn to pray, even as a man should learn to fight,” observed Tonty. “He stands between her and danger, and she should stand linking him to heaven.”
“I can fight for myself,” said Barbe. “And everybody ought to say his own prayers; but it makes one disagreeable to say more than his share. I wish to grow up an agreeable person.”
They had reached the palisade entrance which fronted the river, Barbe’s feet still lagging amid the lively scenes outside. She allowed Tonty to lead her with