But the adjoining room was the real workroom of the Sieur. Here were his books, he brought a few more every time he came from France; shelves of curiosities, a wide stone fireplace, with sundry pipes of Indian make on the ledges. A great table occupied the centre of the room and all about it were strewn papers,—maps in every state,—plans for the city, plans of fortifications, diagrams of the unsuccessful settlements, and the new project of Mont Réal. Notes on agriculture and the propagation of fruits, for none better than the Sieur understood that the colony must in some way provide its own food, that it could not depend upon sustenance from the mother country. For his ambition desired to make New France the envy of the nations who had tried colonizing. He ordered crops of wheat and rye and barley sown, and often worked in his own field when the moon shone with such glory that it inspired him. And though he had all the ardor of an explorer, he meant to turn the profits of trade to this end, but to further it settlements were necessary, and he bent much of his energy to the duller and more trying task of building colonies. Though the route to the Indies fired his ambition he was in real earnest to bring this vast multitude of heathens within the pale of the Church, and to do that he must be friendly with them as far as they could be trusted, but there were times when he almost lost faith.
CHAPTER III
SUMMER TIME
The child sat in a dream on a rude, squarely-built settle with a coarse blanket on it of Indian make and some skins thrown over the back, for often at sundown the air grew cool and as yet women were not spinning or weaving as in old France. A few luxuries had been brought thither, but the mother government had a feeling that the colonists ought mostly to provide for themselves, and was often indifferent to the necessary demands.
Mère Dubray went out to the kitchen and began to prepare supper. There was a great stone chimney with a bench at each side, and for a fireplace two flat stones that would be filled in with chunks of wood. When the blaze had burned them to coals the cooking began. Corn bread baked on both sides, sometimes rye or wheaten cakes, a kettle boiled, though the home-brewed beer was the common drink in summer, except among those who used the stronger potions. The teas were mostly fragrant herbs, thought to be good for the stomach and to keep the blood pure.
Mère Dubray dressed half a dozen birds in a trice. It was true that in the summer they could live on the luxuries of the land in some respects. Fish and game of all kinds were abundant, and as there were but few ways of keeping against winter it was as well to feast while one could. They dried and smoked eels and some other fish, and salted them, but they had learned that too much of this diet induced scurvy.
The birds were hung on an improvised spit, with a pan below to catch the drippings with which they were basted. Between whiles the worthy woman unexpectedly bolted out to the garden with a switch in her hand and laid it about the two Indian boys, who did not bear it with the stoicism of their race, as they learned the greater the noise the shorter their punishment.
The little girl did not heed the screams or the shrill scolding, or even the singing of the birds that grew deliciously tender toward nightfall. She often watched the waving branches as the wind blew among them until it seemed as if they must be alive, bending over caressing each other and murmuring in low tones. If she could only know what they said. Of course they must be alive; she heard them cry piteously in winter when they were stripped of their covering. Why did God do it? Why did He send winter when summer was so much better, when people were merry and happy and could hunt and fish and wander in the woods and fight Indians? She had not had much of an idea of God hitherto only as a secret charm connected with Mère Dubray's beads, but now it was some great power living beyond the sky, just as the Indians believed. You could only go there by growing cold and stiff and being put in the ground. She shrank from that thought.
Something new had come in her life now. There was a vague, confused idea of gods and goddesses, that she had gathered from the Latin verses that she no more understood than the language. And this must be one that descended upon her this afternoon. The soft, sweet voice still lingered in her ears, entrancing her. The graceful figure that was like some delicate swaying branch, the attire the like of which she had never even dreamed of. How could she indeed, when the finest things she had seen were the soldiers' trappings?