Old Kaskaskia
M >> Mary Hartwell Catherwood >> Old KaskaskiaOLD KASKASKIA
BY
MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
AUTHOR OF "THE LADY OF FORT ST. JOHN," "THE ROMANCE OF DOLLARD," ETC.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1893
Copyright, 1893,
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., and
MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
CONTENTS.
PART FIRST: PAGE
The Bonfire of St. John 1
PART SECOND:
A Field Day 55
PART THIRD:
The Rising 106
PART FOURTH:
The Flood 160
OLD KASKASKIA.
PART FIRST.
THE BONFIRE OF ST. JOHN.
Early in the century, on a summer evening, Jean Lozier stood on the
bluff looking at Kaskaskia. He loved it with the homesick longing of one
who is born for towns and condemned to the fields. Moses looking into
the promised land had such visions and ideals as this old lad cherished.
Jean was old in feeling, though not yet out of his teens. The
training-masters of life had got him early, and found under his red
sunburn and knobby joints, his black eyes and bushy eyebrows, the nature
that passionately aspires. The town of Kaskaskia was his sweetheart. It
tantalized him with advantage and growth while he had to turn the clods
of the upland. The long peninsula on which Kaskaskia stood, between the
Okaw and the Mississippi rivers, lay below him in the glory of sunset.
Southward to the point spread lands owned by the parish, and known as
the common pasture. Jean could see the church of the Immaculate
Conception and the tower built for its ancient bell, the convent
northward, and all the pleasant streets bowered in trees. The wharf was
crowded with vessels from New Orleans and Cahokia, and the arched stone
bridge across the Okaw was a thoroughfare of hurrying carriages.
The road at the foot of the bluff, more than a hundred feet below Jean,
showed its white flint belt in distant laps and stretches through
northern foliage. It led to the territorial governor's country-seat of
Elvirade; thence to Fort Chartres and Prairie du Rocher; so on to
Cahokia, where it met the great trails of the far north. The road also
swarmed with carriages and riders on horses, all moving toward Colonel
Pierre Menard's house. Jean could not see his seignior's chimneys for
the trees and the dismantled and deserted earthworks of Fort Gage. The
fort had once protected Kaskaskia, but in these early peaceful times of
the Illinois Territory it no longer maintained a garrison.
The lad guessed what was going on; those happy Kaskaskians, the fine
world, were having a ball at Colonel Menard's. Summer and winter they
danced, they made fetes, they enjoyed life. When the territorial
Assembly met in this capital of the West, he had often frosted himself
late into the winter night, watching the lights and listening to the
music in Kaskaskia. Jean Lozier knew every bit of its history. The
parish priest, Father Olivier, who came to hear him confess because he
could not leave his grandfather, had told it to him. There was a record
book transmitted from priest to priest from the earliest settlement of
Cascasquia of the Illinois. Jean loved the story of young D'Artaguette,
whom the boatmen yet celebrated in song. On moonlight nights, when the
Mississippi showed its broad sheet four miles away across the level
plain, he sometimes fooled himself with thinking he could see the fleet
of young soldiers passing down the river, bearing the French flag;
phantoms proceeding again to their tragedy and the Indian stake.
He admired the seat where his seignior lived in comfort and great
hospitality, but all the crowds pressing to Pierre Menard's house seemed
to him to have less wisdom than the single man who met and passed them
and crossed the bridge into Kaskaskia. The vesper bell rung, breaking
its music in echoes against the sandstone bosom of the bluff. Red
splendors faded from the sky, leaving a pearl-gray bank heaped over the
farther river. Still Jean watched Kaskaskia.
"But the glory remains when the light fades away,"
he sung to himself. He had caught the line from some English boatmen.
"Ye dog, ye dog, where are you, ye dog?" called a voice from the woods
behind him.
"Here, grandfather," answered Jean, starting like a whipped dog. He took
his red cap from under his arm, sighing, and slouched away from the
bluff edge, the coarse homespun which he wore revealing knots and joints
in his work-hardened frame.
"Ye dog, am I to have my supper to-night?"
"Yes, grandfather."
But Jean took one more look at the capital of his love, which he had
never entered, and for which he was unceasingly homesick. The governor's
carriage dashed along the road beneath him, with a military escort from
Fort Chartres. He felt no envy of such state. He would have used the
carriage to cross the bridge.
"If I but lived in Kaskaskia!" whispered Jean.
The man on horseback, who met and passed the ball-goers, rode through
Kaskaskia's twinkling streets in the pleasant glow of twilight. Trade
had not reached its day's end. The crack of long whips could be heard,
flourished over oxen yoked by the horns, or three or four ponies hitched
tandem, all driven without reins, and drawing huge bales of merchandise.
Few of the houses were more than one story high, but they had a
sumptuous spread, each in its own square of lawn, orchard, and garden.
They were built of stone, or of timbers filled in with stone and mortar.
The rider turned several corners, and stopped in front of a small house
which displayed the wares of a penny-trader in its window.
From the open one of the two front doors a black boy came directly out
to take the bridle; and behind him skipped a wiry shaven person, whose
sleek crown was partly covered by a Madras handkerchief, the common
headgear of humble Kaskaskians. His feet clogged their lightness with a
pair of the wooden shoes manufactured for slaves. A sleeved blanket,
made with a hood which lay back on his shoulders, almost covered him,
and was girdled at the waist by a knotted cord.
"Here I am again, Father Baby," hailed the rider, alighting.
"Welcome home, doctor. What news from Fort Chartres?"
"No news. My friend the surgeon is doing well. He need not have sent for
me; but your carving doctor is a great coward when it comes to
physicking himself."
They entered the shop, while the slave led the horse away; and no
customers demanding the trading friar's attention, he followed his
lodger to an inner room, having first lighted candles in his wooden
sconces. Their yellow lustre showed the tidiness of the shop, and the
penny merchandise arranged on shelves with that exactness which has been
thought peculiar to unmarried women. Father Baby was a scandal to the
established confessor of the parish, and the joke of the ungodly. Some
said he had been a dancing-master before he entered the cloister, and it
was no wonder he turned out a renegade and took to trading. Others
declared that he had no right to the gray capote, and his tonsure was a
natural loss of hair; in fact, that he never had been a friar at all.
But in Kaskaskia nobody took him seriously, and Father Olivier was not
severe upon him. Custom made his harlequin antics a matter of course;
though Indians still paused opposite his shop and grinned at sight of a
long-gown peddling. His religious practices were regular and severe, and
he laid penance on himself for all the cheating he was able to
accomplish.
"I rode down from Elvirade with Governor Edwards," said the doctor. "He
and all Kaskaskia appear to be going to Colonel Menard's to-night."
"Yes, I stood and counted the carriages: the Bonds, the Morrisons, the
Vigos, the Sauciers, the Edgars, the Joneses"--
"Has anything happened these three days past?" inquired the doctor,
breaking off this list of notable Kaskaskians.
"Oh, many things have happened. But first here is your billet."
The young man broke the wafer of his invitation and unfolded the paper.
"It is a dancing-party," he remarked. His nose took an aquiline curve
peculiar to him. The open sheet, as he held it, showed the name of "Dr.
Dunlap" written on the outside. He leaned against a high black mantel.
"You will want hot shaving-water and your best ruffled shirt," urged the
friar.
"I never dance," said the other indifferently.
"And you do well not to," declared Father Baby, with some contemptuous
impatience. "A man who shakes like a load of hay should never dance. If
I had carried your weight, I could have been a holier man."
Dr. Dunlap laughed, and struck his boot with his riding-whip.
"Don't deceive yourself, worthy father. The making of an abbot was not
in you. You old rascal, I am scarcely in the house, and there you stand
all of a tremble for your jig."
Father Baby's death's-head face wrinkled itself with expectant smiles.
He shook off his wooden shoes and whirled upon one toe.
The doctor went into another room, his own apartment in the friar's
small house. His office fronted this, and gave him a door to the street.
Its bottles and jars and iron mortar and the vitreous slab on which he
rolled pills were all lost in twilight now. There were many other
doctors' offices in Kaskaskia, but this was the best equipped one, and
was the lair of a man who had not only been trained in Europe, but had
sailed around the entire world. Dr. Dunlap's books, some of them in
board covers, made a show on his shelves. He had an articulated
skeleton, and ignorant Kaskaskians would declare that they had seen it
whirl past his windows many a night to the music of his violin.
"What did you say had happened since I went away?" he inquired,
sauntering back and tuning his fiddle as he came.
"There's plenty of news," responded Father Baby. "Antoine Lamarche's
cow fell into the Mississippi."
Dr. Dunlap uttered a note of contempt.
"It would go wandering off where the land crumbles daily with that
current setting down from the northwest against us; and Antoine was far
from sneering in your cold-blooded English manner when he got the news."
"He tore his hair and screamed in your warm-blooded French manner?"
"That he did."
The doctor stood in the bar of candle-light which one of the shop
sconces extended across the room, and lifted the violin to his neck. He
was so large that all his gestures had a ponderous quality. His dress
was disarranged by riding, and his blond skin was pricked through by the
untidy growth of a three-days' beard, yet he looked very handsome.
Dr. Dunlap stood in the light, but Father Baby chose the dark for those
ecstatic antics into which the fiddle threw him. He leaped high from
the floor at the first note, and came down into a jig of the most
perfect execution. The pat of his bare soles was exquisitely true. He
raised the gown above his ankles, and would have seemed to float but for
his response in sound. Yet through his most rapturous action he never
ceased to be conscious of the shop. A step on the sill would break the
violin's charm in the centre of a measure.
But this time no step broke it, and the doctor kept his puppet friar
going until his own arm began to weary. The tune ended, and Father Baby
paused, deprived of the ether in which he had been floating.
Dr. Dunlap sat down, nursing the instrument on his crossed knees while
he altered its pitch.
"Are you not going to Colonel Menard's at all?" inquired the friar.
"It would be a great waste of good dancing not to," said the doctor
lazily. "But you haven't told me who else has lost a cow or had an
increase of goats while I was away."
"The death of even a beast excites pity in me."
"Yes, you are a holy man. You would rather skin a live Indian than a
dead sheep."
The doctor tried his violin, and was lifting it again to position when
Father Baby remarked:--
"They doubtless told you on the road that a party has come through from
Post Vincennes."
"Now who would doubtless tell me that?"
"The governor's suite, since they must have known it. The party was in
almost as soon as you left. Perhaps," suggested the friar, taking a
crafty revenge for much insolence, "nobody would mention it to you on
account of Monsieur Zhone's sister."
The violin bow sunk on the strings with a squeak.
"What sister?"
"The only sister of Monsieur Reece Zhone, Mademoiselle Zhone, from
Wales. She came to Kaskaskia with the party from Post Vincennes."
On Dr. Dunlap's face the unshorn beard developed like thorns on a mask
of wax. The spirit of manly beauty no longer infused it.
"Why didn't you tell me this at first?" he asked roughly.
"Is the name of Zhone so pleasant to you?" hinted the shrugging friar.
"But take an old churchman's advice now, my son, and make up your
quarrel with the lawyer. There will be occasion. That pretty young thing
has crossed the sea to die. I heard her cough."
The doctor's voice was husky as he attempted to inquire,--
"Did you hear what she was called?"
"Mademoiselle Mareea Zhone."
The young man sagged forward over his violin. Father Baby began to
realize that his revel was over, and reluctantly stuck his toes again
into his wooden shoes.
"Will you have something to eat and drink before you start?"
"I don't want anything to eat, and I am not going to Colonel Menard's
to-night."
"But, my son," reasoned the staring friar, "are you going to quit your
victuals and all good company because one more Zhone has come to town,
and that one such a small, helpless creature? Mademoiselle Saucier will
be at Menard's."
Dr. Dunlap wiped his forehead. He, and not the cool friar, appeared to
have been the dancer. A chorus of slaves singing on some neighboring
gallery could be heard in the pause of the violin. Beetles, lured by the
shop candles, began to explore the room where the two men were, bumping
themselves against the walls and buzzing their complaints.
"A man is nothing but a young beast until he is past twenty-five years
old," said Dr. Dunlap.
Father Baby added his own opinion to this general remark.--
"Very often he is nothing but an old beast when you catch him past
seventy. But it all depends on what kind of a man he is."
"Friar, do you believe in marriage?"
"How could I believe in marriage?"
"But do you believe in it for other people?"
"The Church has always held it to be a sacred institution."
Dr. Dunlap muttered a combination of explosive words which he had
probably picked up from sailors, making the churchman cross himself. He
spoke out, with a reckless laugh:--
"I married as soon as I came of age, and here I am, ruined for my prime
by that act."
"What!" exclaimed Father Baby, setting his hands on his hips, "you a man
of family, and playing bachelor among the women of Kaskaskia?"
"Oh, I have no wife now. She finally died, thank Heaven. If she had only
died a year sooner! But nothing matters now."
"My son," observed Father Baby severely, "Satan has you in his net. You
utter profane words, you rail against institutions sanctioned by the
Church, and you have desired the death of a human being. Repent and do
penance"--
"You have a customer, friar," sneered the young man, lifting his head to
glance aside at a figure entering the shop. "Vigo's idiot slave boy is
waiting to be cheated."
"By my cappo!" whispered Father Baby, a cunning look netting wrinkles
over his lean face, "you remind me of the bad shilling I have laid by me
to pass on that nigger. O Lamb of mercy,"--he turned and hastily plumped
on his knees before a sacred picture on the wall,--"I will, in expiation
for passing that shilling, say twelve paters and twelve aves at the foot
of the altar of thy Virgin Mother, or I will abstain from food a whole
day in thy honor."
Having offered this compromise, Father Baby sprung with a cheerful
eagerness to deal with Vigo's slave boy.
The doctor sat still, his ears closed to the chatter in the shop. His
bitter thoughts centred on the new arrival in Kaskaskia, on her brother,
on all her family.
She herself, unconscious that he inhabited the same hemisphere with her,
was standing up for the reel in Pierre Menard's house. The last carriage
had driven to the tall flight of entrance steps, discharged its load,
and parted with its horses to the huge stone stable under the house. The
mingling languages of an English and French society sounded all around
her. The girl felt bewildered, as if she had crossed ocean and forest to
find, instead of savage wilderness, an enchanted English county full of
French country estates. Names and dignitaries crowded her memory.
A great clear glass, gilt-framed and divided into three panels, stood
over the drawing-room mantel. It reflected crowds of animated faces, as
the dance began, crossing and recrossing or running the reel in a vista
of rooms, the fan-lights around the hall door and its open leaves
disclosing the broad gallery and the dusky world of trees outside; it
reflected cluster on cluster of wax-lights. To this day the great glass
stands there, and, spotless as a clear conscience, waits upon the
future. It has held the image of Lafayette and many an historic
companion of his.
On the other side of the hall, in the dining-room, stood a carved
mahogany sideboard holding decanters and glasses. In this quiet retreat
elderly people amused themselves at card-tables. Apart from them, but
benignantly ready to chat with everybody, sat the parish priest; for
every gathering of his flock was to him a call for social ministration.
A delicious odor of supper escaped across a stone causeway from the
kitchen, and all the Menard negroes, in their best clothes, were
collected on the causeway to serve it. Through open doors they watched
the flying figures, and the rocking of many a dusky heel kept time to
the music.
The first dance ended in some slight confusion. A little cry went
through the rooms: "Rice Jones's sister has fainted!" "Mademoiselle
Zhone has fainted!" But a few minutes later she was sitting on a
gallery chair, leaning against her brother and trying to laugh through
her coughing, and around her stood all girlish Kaskaskia, and the
matrons also, as well as the black maid Colonel Menard had sent with
hartshorn.
Father Olivier brought her a glass of wine; Mrs. Edwards fanned her; the
stars shone through the pecan-trees, and all the loveliness of this new
hemisphere and home and the kindness of the people made her close her
eyes to keep the tears from running out. The separation of the sick from
all healthy mankind had never so hurt her. Something was expected of
her, and she was not equal to it. She felt death's mark branding in, and
her family spoke of her recovery! What folly it was to come into this
gay little world where she had no rights at all! Maria Jones wondered
why she had not died at sea. To be floating in that infinity of blue
water would be better than this. She pictured herself in the weighted
sack,--for we never separate ourselves from our bodies,--and tender
forgiveness covering all her mistakes as the multitude of waters covered
her.
"I will not dance again," laughed Maria. Her brother Rice could feel her
little figure tremble against him. "It is ridiculous to try."
"We must have you at Elvirade," said the governor's wife soothingly. "I
will not let the young people excite you to too much dancing there."
"Oh, Mrs. Edwards!" exclaimed Peggy Morrison. "I never do dance quite as
much anywhere else, or have quite as good a time, as I do at Elvirade."
"Hear these children slander me when I try to set an example of sobriety
in the Territory!"
"You shall not want a champion, Mrs. Edwards," said Rice Jones. "When I
want to be in grave good company, I always make a pilgrimage to
Elvirade."
"One ought to be grave good company enough for himself," retorted
Peggy, looking at Rice Jones with jealous aggressiveness. She was a
lean, sandy girl, at whom he seldom glanced, and her acrid girlhood
fought him. Rice Jones was called the handsomest man in Kaskaskia, but
his personal beauty was nothing to the ambitious force of his presence.
The parted hair fitted his broad, high head like a glove. His straight
nose extended its tip below the nostrils and shadowed the long upper
lip. He had a long chin, beautifully shaped and shaven clean as marble,
a mouth like a scarlet line, and a very round, smooth throat, shown by
his flaring collar. His complexion kept a cool whiteness which no
exposure tanned, and this made striking the blackness of his eyes and
hair.
"Please will you all go back into the drawing-room?" begged Maria. "My
brother will bring me a shawl, and then I shall need nothing else."
"But may I sit by you, mademoiselle?"
It was Angelique Saucier leaning down to make this request, but Peggy
Morrison laughed.
"I warn you against Angelique, Miss Jones. She is the man-slayer of
Kaskaskia. They all catch her like measles. If she stays out here, they
will sit in a row along the gallery edge, and there will be no more
dancing."
"Do not observe what Peggy says, mademoiselle. We are relations, and so
we take liberties."
"But no one must give up dancing," urged Maria.
They arranged for her in spite of protest, however. Rice muffled her in
a shawl, Mademoiselle Saucier sat down at her right side and Peggy
Morrison at her left, and the next dance began.
Maria Jones had repressed and nestling habits. She curled herself into a
very small compass in the easy gallery chair, and looked off into the
humid mysteries of the June night. Colonel Menard's substantial slave
cabins of logs and stone were in sight, and up the bluff near the house
was a sort of donjon of stone, having only one door letting into its
base.
"That's where Colonel Menard puts his bad Indians," said Peggy Morrison,
following Maria's glance.
"It is simply a little fortress for times of danger," said Mademoiselle
Saucier, laughing. "It is also the colonel's bureau for valuable papers,
and the dairy is underneath."
"Well, you French understand one another's housekeeping better than we
English do; and may be the colonel has been explaining these things to
you."
"But are there any savage men about here now?"
"Oh, plenty of them," declared Peggy. "We have some Pottawatomies and
Kickapoos and Kaskaskias always with us,--like the poor. Nobody is
afraid of them, though. Colonel Menard has them all under his thumb, and
if nobody else could manage them he could. My father says they will
give their furs to him for nothing rather than sell them to other
people. You must see that Colonel Menard is very fascinating, but I
don't think he charms Angelique as he does the Indians."
Mademoiselle Saucier's smile excused anything Peggy might say. Maria
thought this French girl the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. The
waist of her clinging white gown ended under the curve of her girlish
breasts, and face, neck, and arms blossomed out with the polish of
flower-petals. Around her throat she wore gold beads suspending a cross.
Her dark hair, which had an elusive bluish mist, like grapes, was pinned
high with a gold comb. Her oval face was full of a mature sympathy
unusual in girls. Maria had thought at first she would rather be alone
on the gallery, but this reposeful and tender French girl at once became
a necessity to her.
"Peggy," said Angelique, "I hear Jules Vigo inquiring for you in the
hall."
"Then I shall take to the roof," responded Peggy.
"Have some regard for Jules."
"You may have, but I shan't. I will not dance with a kangaroo."
"Do you not promise dances ahead?" inquired Maria.
"No, our mothers do not permit that," answered Angelique. "It is
sometimes best to sit still and look on."
"That means, Miss Jones," explained Peggy, "that she has set a fashion
to give the rest of the girls a chance. I wouldn't be so mealy-mouthed
about cutting them out. But Angelique has been ruined by waiting so much
on her tante-gra'mere. When you bear an old woman's temper from dawn
till dusk, you soon forget you're a girl in your teens."
"Don't abuse the little tante-gra'mere."
"She gets praise enough at our house. Mother says she's a discipline
that keeps Angelique from growing vain. Thank Heaven, we don't need such
discipline in our family."
"It is my father's grand-aunt," explained Angelique to Maria, "and when
you see her, mademoiselle, you will be surprised to find how well she
bears her hundred years, though she has not been out of her bed since I
can remember. Mademoiselle, I hope I never shall be very old."
Maria gave Angelique the piercing stare which unconsciously belongs to
large black eyes set in a hectic, nervous face.
"Would you die now?"
"I feel always," said the French girl, "that we stand facing the mystery
every minute, and sometimes I should like to know it."
"Now hear that," said Peggy. "I'm no Catholic, but I will say for the
mother superior that she never put that in your head at the convent. It
is wicked to say you want to die."
"But I did not say it. The mystery of being without any body,--that is
what I want to know. It is good to meditate on death."