The Romance of Dollard

A SHIP FROM FRANCE.

IN April of the year 1660, on a morning when no rain drizzled above the humid rock of Quebec, two young men walked along the single street by the river. The houses of this Lower Town were a row of small buildings with stone gables, their cedar-shingled roofs curving upward at the eaves in Norman fashion. High in north air swelled the mighty natural fortress of rock, feebly crowned by the little fort of St. Louis displaying the lilies of France. Farther away the cathedral set its cross against the sky. And where now a tangle of streets, bisected by the city wall, climb steeply from Lower to Upper Town, then a rough path straggled.

The St. Lawrence, blue with Atlantic tide-water, spread like a sea betwixt its north shore and the high palisades of Fort Levi on the opposite bank. Sailboats and skiffs were ranged in a row at the water’s edge. And where now the steamers of all nations may be seen resting at anchor, on that day one solitary ship from France discharged her cargo and was viewed with lingering interest by every colonist in Quebec. She had arrived the previous day, the first vessel of spring, and bore marks of rough weather during her voyage.

Even merchants’ wives had gathered from their shops in Lower Town, and stood near the river’s edge, watching the ship unload, their hands rolled in their aprons and their square head-covers flaring in the wind.

“How many did she bring over this time?” cried a woman to her neighbor in the teeth of the breeze.

“A hundred and fifty, my husband told me,” the neighbor replied in the same nipped and provincialized French. And she produced one hand from her apron to bridge it over her eyes that she might more unreservedly absorb the ship. “Ah, to think these cables held her to French soil but two months ago! Whenever I hear the Iroquois are about Montreal or Ste. Anne’s, my heart leaps out of my breast towards France.”

“It is better here for us,” returned the other, “who are common people. So another demoiselle was shipped with this load. The king is our father. But look you! even daughters of the nobles are glad to come to New France.”

“And have you heard,” the second exclaimed, “that she is of the house of Laval-Montmorency and cousin of the vicar-apostolic?”

“The cousin of our holy bishop? Then she comes to found some sisterhood for the comfort of Quebec. And that will be a thorn to Montreal.”

“No, she comes to be the bride of the governor-general. We shall soon see her the Vicomtesse d’Argenson, spreading her pretintailles as she goes in to mass. Well would I like a look through her caskets at new court fashions. These Laval-Montmorencys are princes in France. V’là, soldiers!” the woman exclaimed, with that facile play of gesture which seems to expand all Canadian speech, as she indicated the two men from Montreal.

“Yes, every seigniory will be sending out its men to the wife market. If I could not marry without traveling three thousand miles for a husband, and then going to live with him in one of the river côtes, I would be a nun.”

“Still, there must be wives for all these bachelors,” the other woman argued. “And his Majesty bears the expense. The poor seasick girls, they looked so glad to come ashore!”

These chatting voices, blown by the east wind, dropped disjointed words on the passers’ ears, but the passers were themselves busy in talk.

Both were young men, but the younger was evidently his elder’s feudal master. He was muscular and tall, with hazel eyes, and dark hair which clustered. His high features were cut in clear, sharp lines. He had the enthusiast’s front, a face full of action, fire, and vision-seeing. He wore the dress of a French officer and carried his sword by his side.

“I think we have come in good time, Jacques,” he said to his man, who stumped stolidly along at his left hand.

Jacques was a faithful-looking fellow, short and strong, with stiff black hair and somber black eyes. His lower garments looked home-spun, the breeches clasping a huge coarse stocking at the knee, while remnants of military glory clothed his upper person. Jacques was plainly a soldier settler, and if his spear had not become a pruning-hook it was because he had Indians yet to fight. His hereditary lord in France, his late commander and his present seignior under whom he held his grant of land, was walking with him up the rock of Quebec.

This Jacques was not the roaring, noisy type of soldier who usually came in droves to be married when Louis’ ship-load of girls arrived. Besides, the painstaking creature had now a weight upon his soul. He answered:

“Yes, m’sieur. She will hardly be anchored twenty-four hours.”

“In four hours we must turn our backs on Quebec with your new wife aboard, and with the stream against us this time.”

“Yes, m’sieur. But if none of them will have me, or they all turn out unfit?”

His seignior laughed.

“From a hundred and fifty sizes, colors, and dispositions you can surely pick yourself one mate, my man.”

“But the honesty of them,” demurred Jacques, “and their obedience after you are at the trouble of getting them home; though girls from Rouen were always good girls. I have not made this long voyage to pick a Rouen wife, to go back again empty of hand. M’sieur, it is certainly your affair as much as mine; and if you see me open my mouth to gaze at a rouged woman who will eat up our provender and bring us no profit, give me a punch with your scabbard. What I want is a good hearty peasant girl from Rouen, who can milk, and hoe, and cut hay, and help grind in the mill, and wait on Mademoiselle de Granville without taking fright.”

“And one whom I can bless as my joint heir with you, my Jacques,” said the young commandant, turning a pleasant face over his subaltern. “Ultimately you will be my heirs, when Renée is done with St. Bernard and the other islands of the seigniory. Therefore--yes--I want a very good girl indeed, from Rouen, to perpetuate a line of my father’s peasantry on Adam Dollard’s estate in New France.”

“Yes, m’sieur,” responded Jacques dejectedly as he plodded upward.

It grieved him that a light leg and a high bright face like Dollard’s were sworn to certain destruction. His pride in the house of Des Ormeaux was great, but his love for the last male of its line was greater. This Adam Daulac, popularly called Dollard, was too mighty a spirit for him to wrestle with; so all his dissent was silent. When he recalled the cavalier’s gay beginning in France, he could not join it to the serious purpose of the same man in New France.

Jacques climbed with his face towards the ground, but Dollard gazed over the St. Lawrence’s upper flood where misty headlands were touched with spring grayness. The river, like an elongated sea, wound out of distances. There had been an early thaw that year, and no drowned fragments of ice toppled about in the current.

So vast a reach of sight was like the beginning of one of St. John’s visions.

II.

LAVAL.

THE convent of the Ursulines had received and infolded the lambs sent out by Louis XIV. to help stock his wilderness. This convent, though substantially built of stone, was too small for all the purposes of the importation, and a larger structure, not far from it, had been prepared as a bazar in which to sort and arrange the ship-load.

The good nuns, while they waited on their crowd of miscellaneous guests, took no notice of that profane building; and only their superior, Mother Mary of the Incarnation, accompanied and marshaled future brides to the marriage market.

Squads began to cross the court soon after matins. The girls were rested by one night’s sleep upon land, the balsam odor of pines, and the clear air on Quebec heights. They must begin taking husbands at once. The spring sowing was near. Time and the chemistry of nature wait on no woman’s caprices. And in general there was little coyness among these girls. They had come to New France to settle themselves, and naturally wished to make a good bargain of it. Some faces wore the stamp of vice, but these were the exceptions. A stolid herd of peasantry, varying in shape and complexion but little, were there to mother posterity in Canada. Some delicate outlines and auburn tresses offset the monotony of somber black eyes and stout waists. Clucking all the way across the court her gentle instructions and repressions, Mother Mary led squad after squad.

There were hilarious girls, girls staring with large interest at the oddities of this new world while they remarked in provincial French, and girls folding their hands about their crucifixes and looking down. The coquettish had arrayed themselves coquettishly, and the sober had folded their shoulder-collars quite high about their throats.

“But,” dropped Mother Mary into the ear of Madame Bourdon, who stood at the mouth of the matrimonial pen, receiving and placing each squad, “these are mixed goods!” To which frolicsome remark from a strict devotee Madame Bourdon replied with assenting shrug.

The minds of both, however, quite separated the goods on display from one item of the cargo then standing in the convent parlor before the real bishop of Canada. This item was a slim young girl, very high-bred in appearance, richly plain in apparel. She held a long, dull-colored cloak around her with hands so soft and white of flesh that one’s eye traced over and over the flexible curve of wrist and finger. Her eyes were darkly brown, yet they had a tendency towards topaz lights which gave them moments of absolute yellowness; while her hair had a dazzling white quality that the powders of a later period could not impart. Bits of it straying from her high roll of curls suggested a nimbus around the forehead. Her lower face was full, the lips most delicately round. Courage and tears stood forth in her face and encountered the bishop.

François Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, then vicar-apostolic of the province, with the power rather than name of bishop, was a tall noble, priestly through entire length of rusty cassock and height of intellectual temples. He regarded the girl with bloodless patience. He had a large nose, which drooped towards a mouth cut in human granite; his lean, fine hands, wasted by self-abasement and voluntary privations, were smaller than a woman’s. Though not yet forty, he looked old, and his little black skull-cup aged him more. The clear Montmorency eye had in him gained, from asceticism and rigid devotion, a brightness which penetrated.

His young relative’s presence and distress annoyed him. For her soul’s salvation, he would have borne unstinted agony; for any human happiness she craved, he was not prepared to lift a little finger.

“Monseigneur,” the girl began their interview, “I have come to New France.”

“Strangely escorted,” said Laval.