“He desires it above all things to be taken to the house of your family there in New Rochelle. He refers again and again to the goodness of Madame Mercier, to his own tyrannical spirit, and repeats his longing to be allowed to die there. I think my husband will have no difficulty in persuading the authorities to allow it when they see his condition. He is our enemy and a prisoner, but a helpless one.”
Alaine sat thinking deeply. “I think I am almost forgetting to be a Christian,” she said. “I am so weak, so wretched, so grief-worn, but if it can ease a departing soul to grant his request, and he can be safely taken, I shall not deny my consent. But do not let me see him yet.”
“That is the good child. I expected nothing less of you,” Madam told her. “So then I think we shall trust him to Adriaen, whose heart is so warm at thought of his marriage to Trynje that the whole world he loves. Smiling and staring, he sits there by François just for the sake of comradeship. They can go on ahead to Fort Orange, and we will follow. From there it will not be much of a voyage down the river to New Amsterdam.” The goede vrouw had arranged it all to her satisfaction, and sat smiling over the plan.
“He is better. Better is François Dupont,” Trynje told Alaine. “Scarce believe it would I, but he lies there and smiles and chatters at Adriaen, who smiles at him, and sits and smokes and blinks and blushes, though not a word he understands of what is said.” Trynje laughed. “But good care he will have, and I shall let him go all the way to New Amsterdam.” She spoke with a pretty air of proprietorship. Her little heart had adjusted itself very readily and there was not any one now like Adriaen. “And my mother will go,” Trynje added, “and my father. They will take the time to buy my wedding finery, though it is little I need, for long ago my chests were filled.”
One morning, therefore, Alaine bade good-by to the fort and the blockhouse, to little Trynje and the flock of flaxen-haired children. Mynheer van der Deen and his goede vrouw accompanied this party; the first had gone on. Adriaen and his man Isaac took charge of François. The young Dutchman’s face was wreathed in smiles. He gloated over his charge as a mother over her baby. Trynje had given him this to do. Very well, it became a pleasure, and he would do it as faithfully as he could.
François gave a little weak laugh as he was deposited in the canoe on a pile of skins. “My faith! but I never expected to travel again, and here I am still following mademoiselle about. She has not a word for me, and no wonder.” A shadow passed over his face, for the pains spent upon him by Johanna van der Deen were not without result, and in the weeks of suffering, in the long nights when she had watched by his side, he had spoken to her as to a mother. He had lost much of his arrogance, and acknowledged that he was a mere straw driven by the wind, a leaf in a storm.
“You have dared to undertake to change the decrees of the Almighty, little insignificant human creature that you are,” Madam van der Deen had said to him. “You have thought your will stronger than that of God. Wrapped in your own selfish desires you have forgotten that the cry of the helpless is more powerful than the clash of a destroying sword in the hands of man.”
“You have me here, and I cannot get away,” François had returned. “Say on, mother. I will listen, for I cannot help myself. You are as good a preacher as the old renegade priest.” He had learned of Father Bisset’s change of belief and of his plan of escape, and he had laughed. His respect for the wily Jacques Bisset increased as his anger against the priest died away. “At least, then, we are quits,” he had said. “I fooled him and he fooled me, so that is done with. Now I am here, shattered and done for. Lendert Verplanck takes his way out of the world by another road. There is then left the man Pierre Boutillier, and he is no doubt as good as dead. All that the work of one girl.”
“The work of wicked men,” Madam van der Deen had replied, “of Louis XIV. and François Dupont.”
At that François had laughed. “Thanks for coupling my name with his majesty’s. He would feel flattered.”