The Sun of Quebec: A Story of a Great Crisis

by Joseph A. Altsheler

His reading of the books in the slaver's chest told him that folly and crime invariably paid the penalty, if not in one way then in another, and he remembered too some of the ancient Greek plays, over which he had toiled under the stern guidance of Master Alexander McLean. Their burden was the certainty of fate. You could never escape, no matter how you writhed, from what you did, and those old writers must have told the truth, else men would not be reading and studying them two thousand years after they were dead. Only truth could last twenty centuries. Bigot, Cadet, Péan, and the others, stealing from France and Canada and spending the money in debauchery, could not be victorious, despite all the valor of Montcalm and St. Luc and De Levis and their comrades.

He remembered, too, the great contrast between Quebec and New York that had struck him when he arrived at the port at the mouth of the Hudson with the hunter and the Onondaga. The French capital in Canada was all of the state; it was its creature. If the state declined, it declined, there was little strength at the roots, little that sprang from the soil, but in New York, which men already forecast as the metropolis of the New World, there was strength everywhere. It might be a sprawling town. There might be no courtliness to equal the courtliness at the heart of Quebec, but there was vigor, vigor everywhere. The people were eager, restless, curious, always they worked and looked ahead.

He saw all these things very clearly. Silence, loneliness and distance gave a magnificent perspective. Facts that were obscured when he was near at hand, now stood out sharp and true. His thoughts in this period were often those of a man double his age. His iron health too remained. His was most emphatically the sound mind in the sound body, each helping the other, each stimulating the other to greater growth.

It was a fact, however, that the Onondaga belief, peopling the air and all sorts of inanimate objects with spirits, grew upon him; perhaps it is better to say that it was a feeling rather than a belief. According to Tayoga the good spirits fought with the bad, and on his island the good had prevailed. They had told him that a ship was coming, and then they had warned him that it would be a ship of pirates. They had shown him how to drive away the ruffians. His inspiration had not been his own, it had come from them and he thankfully acknowledged it.

He told himself now as he went about his island that he heard the good spirits singing among the leaves and he told it to himself so often that he ended by believing it. It was such a pleasant and consoling belief too. He listened to hear them say that he would leave the island when the time was ripe and his imagination was now so extraordinarily vivid that what he expected to hear he heard. The spirits assured him that when the time came to go he would go. They did not tell him exactly when he would go, but that could not be asked. No one must anticipate a complete unveiling of the future. It was sufficient that intimations came out of it now and then.

It was this feeling, amounting to a conviction, that bore him up on a shield of steel. It soothed the natural impatience of his youth and temperament. Why grieve over not going when he knew that he would go? Yet, a long time passed and there was no sail upon the sea, though the fact failed to shake his faith. Often he climbed his peak of observation and studied the circling horizon through the glasses, only to find nothing, but he was never discouraged. There was never any fall of the spirits. No ship showed, but the ship that was coming might even then be on the way. She had left some port, probably one in England, not dreaming that it was a most important destiny and duty of hers to pick up a lone lad cast away on an island in the Gulf or the Caribbean—at least it was most important to him.

Now came a time of storms that seemed to him to portend a change in the seasons. The island was swept by wind and rain, but he liked to be lashed by both. He even went out in the dinghy in storms, though he kept inside the reefs, and fought with wave and undertow and swell, until, pleasantly exhausted, he retreated to the beach, drawing his little boat after him, where he watched the sea, vainly struggling to reach the one who had defied it. It was after such contests that he felt strongest of the spirit, ready to challenge anything.

He plunged deeper and deeper into his studies, striving to understand everything. The intensity of his application was possible only because he was alone. Forced to probe, to examine and to ponder, his mind acquired new strength. Many things which otherwise would have been obscure to him became plain. Looking back upon his own eventful life since that meeting with St. Luc and Tandakora in the forest, he was better able to read motives and to understand men. The reason why Adrian Van Zoon wished him to vanish must be money, because only money could be powerful enough to make such a man risk a terrible crime. Well, he would have a great score to settle with Van Zoon. He did not yet know just how he would settle it, but he did not doubt that the day of reckoning would come.

A cask of oil and several lanterns were among his treasures from the ship, and, making use of them, he frequently read late at night, often with the rain beating hard on walls and roof. Then it seemed to him that his mind was clearest, and he resolved again and again that when he returned to his own he would make full use of what he learned on the island. It seemed to him sometimes that his being cast away was a piece of luck and not a misfortune.

A clear day came, and, taking his rifle, he strolled toward his peak of observation, passing on the way the herd of wild cattle with the old bull at its head. The big fellow looked at him suspiciously, as if fearing that his friend might be suffering from one of his mad spells again. But Robert's conduct was quite correct. He walked by in a quiet and dignified manner, and, reassured, the bull went back to his task of reducing the visible grass supply.