“He brought an order from Monsieur de la Salle,” retorted Tonty. “On that order I would give him the last skin in the storehouse. What I will strip him of is the wretch he carries in his forgiving bosom!”
“And you will put a scandal upon this young girl your bride, who has this sorrow also to bear. Are you determined to denounce her uncle and her brother before this fortress as unworthy to be the kinsmen of La Salle? She has now no consolation left except in you. Will you burn the wound of her sorrow with the brand of shame?”
Tonty leaned against the tree, pallor succeeding the pulsing of blood in his face. He looked at Du Lhut with piteous black eyes, like a stag brought down in full career.
“The Abbé Cavelier,” Bellefontaine was whispering to one of the immigrants, “carried from this fortress above four thousand livres worth of furs, besides other goods!”
“And left mademoiselle married without fortune,” muttered back the other. “He did well for himself by concealing the death of Sieur de la Salle.”
Men and women looked mournfully at each other as Tonty walked across the fort and shut himself in his house. They wondered at hearing no crying within it such as a woman might utter upon the first shock of her grief. With La Salle’s own instinct Barbe locked herself within her room. It was not known to the people of Fort St. Louis, it was not known even to Tonty, how she lay on the floor with her teeth set and faced this fact.
Tonty sat in his door overlooking the cliff all day.
Clouds sailed over the Rock. The lingering robins quarrelled with crows. That glittering pinnacled cliff across the ravine shone like white castle turrets. Smoke went up from the lodges on the plains as it had done during the six months La Salle’s bones were bleaching on Trinity River; but now a whisper like the whisper of wind in September corn-leaves was rushing from lodge to lodge. Tonty heard tribe after tribe take up the lament for the dead.
Not only was it a lament for La Salle; but it was also for their own homes. He and Tonty had brought them back from exile, had banded them for strength and helped them ward off the Iroquois. His unstinted success meant their greatest prosperity. The undespairing Norman’s death foreshadowed theirs, with all that silence and desolation which must fall on the Rock of St. Louis before another civilization possessed it.
Night came, and the leaves sifted down in its light breeze as if only half inclined to their descent. The children had been quieted all day. To them the revelry of the night before seemed a far remote occasion, so instantly are joy and trouble set asunder.