“Yes, yes,” Menard broke in. “We have only one fact to remember; there must be no delay in carrying out the Governor’s orders. We cannot change our plans because of this maid.”
“We must not let her understand, M’sieu.”
Menard had been standing, with a shoulder against the tree, alternately puffing at his pipe and lowering it, scowling meanwhile at the ground. Now he suddenly raised his head and chuckled.
“It will be many a year since I have played the beau, Father. It may be that I have forgotten the rôle.” He spread out his hands and looked at the twisted fingers. “But I can try, like a soldier. And there are three of us, Father Claude, there are three of us.”
He turned to go back to the camp, but the priest touched him.
“My son,–perhaps, before you return, you would look again at my unworthy portrait. I–about the matter of the canoe–”
“Oh,” said Menard, “you’ve taken it out.”
“Yes; it seemed best, considering the danger that others might feel the same doubts which troubled you.”
“I wouldn’t do that. The canoe was all right, once the direction were decided on.”
“Above all else, the true portrait should convey to the mind of the observer the impression that a single, an unmistakable purpose underlies the work. When one considers–”
“Very true, Father, very true,” said Menard abruptly, looking about at the beginning of the twilight. “And now we had better get back. The supper will be ready.”
Menard strode away toward the camp. Father Claude watched him for a time through the trees, then turned again to the picture. Finally he got together his materials, and carrying them in a fold of his gown, with the picture in his left hand, he followed Menard.
The maid was leaning back against the tree, looking up at the sky, where the first red of the afterglow was spreading. She did not hear Menard; and he paused, a few yards away, to look at the clear whiteness of her skin and the full curve of her throat. Her figure and air, her habits of gesture and step, and carriage of the head, were those of the free-hearted maid of the seignory. They told of an outdoor life, of a good horse, and a light canoe, and the inbred love of trees and sky and running water. Here was none of the stiffness, the more than Parisian manner, of the maidens of Quebec. To stand there and look at her, unconscious as she was, pleased Menard.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, coming nearer, “will you join us at supper?”
The maid looked at him with a slow blush (she was not yet accustomed to the right of these men to enter into the routine of her life). Menard reached to help her, but she rose easily.
“Lieutenant Danton is not here?”
“No, M’sieu, he walked away.”
They sat about a log. Danton had not strayed far, for he joined them shortly, wearing a sulky expression. Menard looked about the group. The maid was silent. Father Claude was beginning at once on the food before him. The twilight was growing deeper, and Guerin dragged a log to the fire, throwing it on the pile with a shower of sparks, and half a hundred shooting tongues of flame. The Captain looked again at Danton, and saw that the boy’s glance shifted uneasily about the group. Altogether it was an unfortunate start for his plan. But it was clear that no other would break the ice, so he drew a long breath, and plunged doggedly into the story of his first fight on the St. Lawrence.
It was a brave story of ambuscade and battle; and it was full of the dark of night and the red flash of muskets and the stealth and treachery of the Iroquois soul. When he reached the tale of the captured Mohawk, who sat against a tree with a ball in his lungs, to the last refusing the sacrament, and dying like a chief with the death song on his lips, Danton was leaning forward, breathless and eager, hanging on his words. The maid’s eyes, too, were moist. Then they talked on, Danton asking boyish questions, and Father Claude starting over and again on a narrative of the wonderful conversion of the Huron drunkard, Heroukiki, who, in his zeal,–and here Menard always swept in with a new story, which left the priest adrift in the eddies of the conversation. At last, when they rose, and the dusk was settling over the trees, the maid was laughing with gentle good fellowship.
While they were eating, the voyageurs had brought the canoe a short way up the bank, resting it, bottom up, on large stones brought from the shore. Underneath was a soft cot of balsam; over the canoe were blankets, hanging on both sides to the ground. Then Mademoiselle said good-night, with a moment’s lingering on the word, and a wistful note in her voice that brought perhaps more sympathy than had the sad eyes of the morning. For after all she was only a girl, and hers was a brave little heart.
The three men lay on the slope with hardly a word, looking at the river, now shining like silver through the trees. This new turn in the life of the party was not as yet to be taken familiarly. Father Claude withdrew early to his meditations. Menard stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head, gazing lazily at the leaves overhead, now hanging motionless from the twigs.
Danton was sitting up, looking about, and running the young reeds through his fingers.
“Danton,” Menard said, after a long silence, “I suppose you know that we have something of a problem on our hands.”
Danton looked over the river.
“What have you thought about Mademoiselle?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Father Claude and I have been talking this evening about her. I have thought that she does not look any too strong for a hard journey of a hundred and more leagues.”
“She has little colour,” said Danton, cautiously.
“It seems to me, Danton, that you can help us.”
“How?”
“What seems to you the cause of the trouble?”
“With Mademoiselle? She takes little impression from the kindness of those about her.”
“Oh, come, Danton. You know better. Even a boy of your age should see deeper than that. You think she slights you; very likely she does. What of that? You are not here to be drawn into a boy-and-girl quarrel with a maid who chances to share our canoe. You are here as my aid, to make the shortest time possible between Quebec and Frontenac. If she were to fall sick, we should be delayed. Therefore she must not fall sick.”
Danton had plucked a weed, and now was pulling it to pieces, bit by bit.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Stop this moping, this hanging about. Take hold of the matter. Devise talks, diversions; fill her idle moments; I care not what you do,–within limits, my boy, within limits.”
“Oh,” said Danton, “then you really want me to?”
“Certainly. I am too old myself.”
Danton rose, and walked a few steps away and back.
“But she will have none of me, Menard. It is, ‘No, with thanks,’ or, worse, a shake of the head. If I offer to help, if I try to talk, if I–oh, it is always the same. I am tired of it.”
Menard smiled in the dark.
“Is that your reply to an order from your superior officer, Danton?”
The boy stood silent for a moment, then he said, “I beg your pardon, Captain.” And with a curious effort at stiffness he wandered off among the trees, and was soon out of Menard’s sight.
Menard walked slowly down