"Do not undermine the faith of one in another in this fortress. We must all hold together now. The Swiss may have a tenderness for his wretched wife which thou canst not understand. But he is not therefore faithless to his lord."
Taking the glass and throwing on her wet cloak, Marie again ran up to the wall. But Le Rossignol sat down cross-legged by the fire, wise and brooding.
"If I could see that Swiss hung," she observed, "it would scratch in my soul a long-felt itch."
When calamity threatens, we turn back to our peaceful days with astonishment that they ever seemed monotonous. Marie watched the ships, and thought of the woman days with Antonia before Van Corlaer came; of embroidery, and teaching the Etchemins, and bringing sweet plunder from the woods for the child's grave; of paddling on the twilight river when the tide was up, brimming and bubble-tinted; of her lord's coming home to the autumn-night hearth; of the little wheels and spinning, and Edelwald's songs—of all the common joys of that past life. The clumsy glass lately brought from France to master distances in the New World, wearied her hands before it assured her eyes.
D'Aulnay de Charnisay was actually coming to attack Fort St. John a second time. He warily anchored his vessels out of the fort's range; and hour after hour boats moved back and forth landing men and artillery on the cape at the mouth of the river, a position which gave as little scope as possible to St. John's guns. All that afternoon tents and earthworks were rising, and detail by detail appeared the deliberate and careful preparations of an enemy who was sitting down to a siege.
At dusk camp-fires began to flame on the distant low cape, and voices moved along air made sensitively vibrant by falling damp. There was the suggested hum of a disciplined small army settling itself for the night and for early action.
Madame La Tour came out to the esplanade of the fort, and the Swiss met her, carrying a torch which ineffectual rain-drops irritated to constant hissing. He stood, tall and careworn, holding it up that his lady might see her soldiers. Everything in the fort was ready for the siege. The sentinels were about to be doubled, and sheltered by their positions.
"I have had you called together, my men," she spoke, "to say a word to you before this affair begins."
The torch flared its limited circle of shine, smoke wavering in a half-seen plume at its tip, and showed their erect figures in line, none very distinct, but all keenly suggestive of life. Some were black-bearded and tawny, and others had tints of the sun in flesh and hair. One was grizzled about the temples, and one was a smooth-cheeked youth. The roster of their familiar names seemed to her as precious as a rosary. They watched her, feeling her beauty as keenly as if it were a pain, and answering every lambent motion of her spirit.
All the buildings were hinted through falling mist, and glowing hearths in the barracks showed like forge lights; for the wives of the half dozen married soldiers had come out, one having a child in her arms. They stood behind their lady, troubled, but reliant on her. She had with them the prestige of success; she had led the soldiers once before, and to a successful defense of the fort.