"I put myself in her way. When she saw me her cheek came like a peach- blossom. 'A very good morning, ma'm'selle,' said I, in English. She smiled and said the same. 'And your master, where is he?' she asked with a fine smile. 'My friend Monsieur Iberville?' I said; 'ah! he will be in Quebec soon.' Then I told her of the abbe, and she took from a chain a little medallion and gave it me in memory of the time we saved. her. And before I could say Thank you, she had gone—Well, that is all —except this."
He drew from his breast a chain of silver, from which hung the gold medallion, and shook his head at it with good-humour. But presently a hard look came on his face, and he was changed from the cheerful woodsman into the chief of bushrangers. Iberville read the look, and presently said:
"Perrot, men have fought for less than gold from a woman's chain and a buckle from her shoe."
"I have fought from Trois Pistoles to Michilimackinac for the toss of a louis-d'or."
"As you say. Well, what think you—"
He paused, rose, walked up and down the room, caught his moustache between his teeth once or twice, and seemed buried in thought. Once or twice he was about to speak, but changed his mind. He was calculating many things: planning, counting chances, marshalling his resources. Presently he glanced round the room. His eyes fell on a map. That was it. It was a mere outline, but enough. Putting his finger on it, he sent it up, up, up, till it settled on the shores of Hudson's Bay. Again he ran the finger from the St. Lawrence up the coast and through Hudson's Straits, but shook his head in negation. Then he stood, looked at the map steadily, and presently, still absorbed, turned to the table. He saw the violin, picked it up, and handed it to De Casson:
"Something with a smack of war," he said. "And a woman for me," added
Perrot.
The abbe shook his head musingly at Perrot, took the violin, and gathered it to his chin. At first he played as if in wait of something that eluded him. But all at once he floated into a powerful melody, as a stream creeps softly through a weir, and after many wanderings broadens suddenly into a great stream. He had found his theme. Its effect was striking. Through Iberville's mind there ran a hundred incidents of his life, one chasing upon the other without sequence—phantasmagoria out of the scene—house of memory:
The light upon the arms of De Tracy's soldiers when they marched up Mountain Street many years before—The frozen figure of a man standing upright in the plains—A procession of canoes winding down past Two Mountains, the wild chant of the Indians joining with the romantic songs of the voyageurs—A girl flashing upon the drawn swords of two lads—King Louis giving his hand to one of these lads to kiss—A lady of the Court for whom he might easily have torn his soul to rags, but for a fair-faced English girl, ever like a delicate medallion in his eye—A fight with the English in the Spaniards' country—His father blessing him as he went forth to France—A dark figure taking a hundred shapes, and yet always meaning the same as when he—Iberville—said over the governor's table in New York, "Foolish boy!"—A vast stretch of lonely forest, in the white coverlet of winter, through which sounded now and then the boom-boom of a bursting tree—A few score men upon a desolate northern track, silent, desperate, courageous; a forlorn hope on the edge of the Arctic circle, with the joy of conquest in their bones, and at their thighs the swords of men.
These are a few of the pictures, but the last of them had not to do with the past: a dream grown into a fact, shaped by the music, become at once an emotion and a purpose.