CHAPTER XV
IN WHICH THE GRAY FRIAR DONS THE LIVERY OF
SATAN
“IT was a miracle! A voice from heaven whispered in my ear, and, turning back, I left de Tonti, angry, threatening, to take his way alone. To give my Chatémuc the words of absolution at the last, the Virgin Mother led me by the hand. And now in Paradise he wears a martyr’s crown. The saints be praised!”
The earnest eyes of the Franciscan were turned upward in an ecstasy of gratitude and devotion. Seated upon a wooden bench by the gray friar’s side, de Sancerre listened musingly to Membré’s account of the Italian captain’s attempt to entice him back to de la Salle’s camp before he had learned the outcome of Chatémuc’s effort to extinguish a flame from hell.
Noco, well understanding the present temper of the sun-worshipping priesthood, and acting upon a command given to her by the Great Sun himself, had managed, with considerable difficulty, to persuade de Sancerre and Katonah to secrete themselves for a time in her unpretentious but not comfortless hut. Her rescue of Zenobe Membré from his threatening environment at the martyred Mohican’s side had been, she flattered herself, a triumph of adroitness, and she sat in a dark corner of the room at this moment whispering to her gigantic grandson. Cabanacte, warm praise of her own cleverness. She had saved the Franciscan from the immediate vengeance of the sun-worshipping priests by suggesting to the latter that the summary execution of the gray-frocked singer of unorthodox chants might arouse the anger of Coyocop, whose coming, prophecy had told them, was connected, in some occult way, with the predicted advent of the white-faced envoys from the moon. Sated with the cruel entertainment vouchsafed to them by the death-twitchings of the stoical Chatémuc, the white-robed guardians of the sun-temple had permitted the Franciscan to depart with Noco, although the latter well knew that thenceforth every movement which she and her gray-garbed companion made would be noted by the dark eyes of fanatical spies.
The room in which the refugees—for such the antagonism of the dominant sun-priests had made them—had found shelter for the night was a picturesque apartment, fifteen feet in length and breadth, and lighted by flickering gleams from the embers of a fire of walnut-wood. Upon a bed of plaited reeds, resting upon a wooden frame two feet high, lay Katonah, grief-stricken, motionless, making no sound. Heart-broken at her brother’s awful fate, the Indian maiden nursed her sorrow in loneliness and silence. In vain had the good friar attempted to console her for her irreparable loss by painting, in eloquent words, the rewards awaiting a martyr who died for love of Mother Church. Katonah was too recent a convert to the Franciscan’s faith to realize and rejoice in the unseen glories of her brother’s heroic self-sacrifice. She had listened to Membré’s soothing words with a grateful smile upon her strong, symmetrical face, but evident relief had come to her when the gray-frocked enthusiast had retired from her bedside to seat himself beside de Sancerre in the centre of the room.
“Pardieu!” muttered the Frenchman, casting a searching glance at the corner in which Noco and Cabanacte were engaged in earnest, low-voiced converse, “these people show outward signs of enlightenment, but they have a most brutal way of putting a man to death. The savage delight which those white-robed devils seemed to take in basting poor Chatémuc made my sword-point itch. ’Twas well for me Saint Maturin was kind. He checked my folly just in time! But listen, father! The martyrdom of Chatémuc must now suffice. Those imps of hell will have your life, anon, unless you foil their craft by craft. I think I hear their stealthy footsteps menacing these sun-cooked walls and making challenge of our god, the moon.”
The Franciscan put up his hand to enforce silence that he might listen to the furtive footfalls outside the hut. At that moment Noco and her grandson stole toward the centre of the room. The stalwart sun-worshipper, who now looked upon de Sancerre as a supernatural being worthy of the most reverential treatment, towered aloft in the narrow chamber like a keen-eyed, sun-burnt ogre who had lured a number of unlucky dwarfs to his den to have his grim way with them. Stretching his long body at full length before the sputtering fire, Cabanacte turned his admiring gaze toward the troubled face of his fleet-footed conqueror and waited for Noco to put into words the thoughts which fretted him.
“You—all of you—must leave here to-night, señor,” said the old woman in a guttural whisper. “The Brother of the Sun is your friend, but the priests of the temple look with suspicion upon you and the gray chanter. They would not dare to defy openly the King, but they have tracked you to this hiding-place and will work you mischief if they may.”
“But, señora, I fear them not!” exclaimed de Sancerre, drawing his rapier and allowing the fire-flashes to gleam along the steel. “Saving the father’s presence here, one sword against a priesthood is enough. My tongue’s as boastful as a Gascon’s, is it not? But list to this, señora! I leave here only when I’ve had some speech with Coyocop, the spirit of the sun. When that may be I do not know, but Louis de Sancerre, a moonbeam’s eldest son, has sworn an oath—and so, señora, my welcome I must stretch.”
Cabanacte, who had learned a little distorted Spanish from his loquacious grandparent, had caught the drift of the Frenchman’s speech. Putting forth a large, brown hand, shapely in its massiveness, he touched the buckles upon de Sancerre’s shoes and exclaimed, in what sounded like a parody upon Noco’s rendition of an alien tongue:
“Good! Good! The son of moonbeams has a lofty soul! And Cabanacte is his body-guard! No harm shall come to you, despite the oath our priests have sworn!”
The smile upon de Sancerre’s ever-changing face was the visible sign of varied emotions. Pleased at the cordial proffer of Cabanacte’s friendship, the Frenchman was astonished to discover that the giant had picked up a Spanish vocabulary which, in spite of his peculiar pronunciation, was not wholly useless. That the survival of a Spanish patois among these sun-worshippers suggested a pathetic page of unwritten history de Sancerre realized, but his mind at that moment was too disturbed to linger long over an ethnological and linguistic problem. Turning to face the Franciscan friar, he said:
“Père Membré, these pagan priests seek vengeance upon you. They have no reason yet for hating me, a splinter from a moonbeam who makes no open war against their creed. But, for the cause of Mother Church, we must lure them from their grim idolatry. Let Cabanacte use his strength and wits to find a pathway leading to our camp by which you may return. Here I shall stay until our leader, coming North again, shall send me word to quit this place, leaving behind me a friendly race, soil ready for the seeds of living truth.”
It was not excessive self-laudation which had led de Sancerre to believe that he possessed the qualifications essential to success in diplomacy. Whenever he had set out to effect a purpose seemingly worthy of studied effort, he had found no difficulty in checking the satirical tendencies of his flippant tongue. At this moment he was gazing at the Franciscan’s disturbed countenance with eyes which seemed to gleam with the fervor of his zeal for Mother Church. Wishing to convince Père Membré that the ultimate conversion of these pagans from their worship of hell-fire to the true faith depended upon their possession of a hostage who should study their manners and customs and learn the shortest path by which their unregenerated souls might be reached, de Sancerre explained his plan of action to the friar with an unctuous fervor which convinced the latter that he had underestimated the errant courtier’s enthusiasm as a proselyter.
“But the Mohican maiden, monsieur? I owe it to Chatémuc, the martyr, now with the saints in Paradise, to place her in the care of de la Salle. His sword, my crucifix, must guard Katonah for her brother’s sake.”
The walnut embers in the clumsy fireplace had grown black and cold. For some time past no sound had reached the ears of the schemers from the menacing environment outside the hut. The moon had touched its midnight goal, and sought, in passing, to probe the secrets of old Noco’s home.
“Bonnement!” exclaimed de Sancerre. “Go to her at once, good father, and tell her that ’tis best she should return with you to-night. I’ll join you presently. Meanwhile, I must have further speech with Noco and her grandson.”
Presently the moonbeams, which had stolen into the hut through chinks between the timbers and the hardened mud, threw a dim light upon a most impressive tableau. The white face of the Frenchman was bent close to the dusky visage of the athletic sun-worshipper, while Noco, squatting upon the ground, bent toward them her wrinkled, grinning countenance, an effigy of “Gossip,” wrought in bronze. Bending over the reed-made couch upon which Katonah, dumb with misery, lay listening, stood the gray friar, whispering to the phlegmatic and seemingly obedient maiden the Frenchman’s late behest.
Before the moonbeams could take their tale abroad, the scene had changed. From a corner of the hut Noco had brought to the Franciscan and his charge flowing garments of white mulberry bark, in which Katonah and the friar reluctantly enrobed themselves. With a harmless dye, old Noco, whose time-tested frame seemed to defy fatigue, deftly changed the protesting Membré’s white complexion to light mahogany.
“Mother of Mary! I fear me this is sacrilege,” muttered the friar, nervously seeking his breviary beneath the white uniform of a lost sun-worshipper. “Satis, superque! You’ll make my face, old woman, as black as Satan’s heart! The saints forgive me! Were not my life of value to the Church, I’d gladly die before I’d don this ghostly livery of sin.”
Meanwhile de Sancerre had been straining his weary eyes in the effort to scratch a message to de la Salle with his dagger’s-point upon a slip of white bark.
“The Spanish have tampered with a mighty nation,” he wrote. “I remain to learn the truth; to find a way to win them to our king. Camp where you are when you return. I’ll learn of your approach, rejoin you then, and bring you news most worthy your concern. Au revoir, mon capitaine! For France, with sword and crucifix!”
As he scrawled his signature beneath these words, Katonah glided silently to his side, a maiden whose grace was not destroyed by her unwonted garb, a costume enhancing the dark beauty of her proud, melancholy face. Her light hand rested gently upon his arm for a moment.
“The good father tells me that you would have me go,” she murmured in a voice of mingled resignation and regret. De Sancerre, handing her the slip of mulberry bark upon which he had scratched a message to his leader, smiled up into the yearning face of the lonely girl.
“Give this to our captain, Sieur de la Salle,” he said, sharply. “Fail not, Katonah! My life, I think, depends upon this scrawl.”
A smile flashed across the maiden’s mournful face as she pressed the bark to her bosom, heaving with a conflict of emotions to which no words of hers could give relief.
“His hand shall hold it ere the sun is up,” she said, simply. “Farewell!”
De Sancerre, looking up into the girl’s eyes felt, with amazement, the tears creeping into his. He bent his head and imprinted a kiss upon her slender, trembling hand, which felt like ice beneath his lips.
“Courage, ma petite!” he cried, with forced gayety. “You will return anon! And then, the river once again, and home—and friends—and—”
His voice broke, and when he had regained his self-control he saw that Katonah had joined Cabanacte and the friar at the entrance to the hut.