Old Kaskaskia Part 18

"Must I first bail out the church?"

"I draw the line there, monsieur the colonel. You are a prevailing man.

You will doubtless wind me around your thumb as you do the Indians. But when I am married, I will be married in church, and sign the register in the old way. What, monsieur, do you think the water will never go down?"

"It will go down, yes, and the common fields will be the better for it.

But it is hard a man should have to watch a rivergauge to find out the date of his own wedding."

"Yet one would rather do that than never have a wedding at all."

"I kiss your hand on that, mademoiselle."

"What are those little rings around the base of the trees, monsieur the colonel?"

"They are marks which show that the water is already falling. It must be two inches lower than last night on the Church of the Immaculate Conception. I am one sixth of a foot on my way toward matrimony."

A tent like a white blossom showed through the woods; then many more.

The bluffs all about Pierre Menard's house were dotted with them. Boats could be seen coming back from the town, full of people. Two or three sails were tacking northward on that smooth and glistening fresh-water sea. Music came across it, meeting the rising sun; the nuns sang their matin service as they were rowed.

Angelique closed her eyes over tears. It seemed to her like floating into the next world,--in music, in soft shadow, in keen rapture,--seeing the light on the hills beyond while her beloved held her by the hand.

All day boats pa.s.sed back and forth between the tented bluffs and the roofs of Kaskaskia, carrying the goods of a temporarily houseless people. At dusk, some jaded men came back--among them Captain Saucier and Colonel Menard--from searching overflow and uplands for Dr. Dunlap.

At dusk, also, the fireflies again scattered over the lake, without waiting for a belated moon. Jean Lozier stood at the top of the bluff, on his old mount of vision, and watched these boats finis.h.i.+ng the work of the day. They carried the only lights now to be seen in Kaskaskia.

He was not excited by the swarming life just below him. His idea of Kaskaskia was not a buzzing encampment around a glittering seigniory house, with the governor's presence giving it grandeur, and Rice Jones and his sister, waiting their temporary burial on the uplands, giving it awe. Old Kaskaskia had been over yonder, the place of his desires, his love. The glamour and beauty and story were on the smothered valley, and for him they could never be anywhere else.

Father Olivier came out on the bluff, and Jean at once pulled his cap off, and looked at the ground instead of at the pale green and wild-rose tints at the farther side of the world. They heard the soft wash of the flood. The priest bared his head to the evening air.

"My son, I am sorry your grandfather died last night, while I was unable to reach him."

"Yes, father."

"You have been a good son. Your conscience acquits you. And now the time has come when you are free to go anywhere you please."

Jean looked over the flood.

"But there's no place to go to now, father. I was waiting for Kaskaskia, and Kaskaskia is gone."

"Not gone, my son. The water will soon recede. The people will return to their homes. Kaskaskia will be the capital of the new State yet."

"Yes, father," said Jean dejectedly. He waited until the priest sauntered away. It was not for him to contradict a priest. But watching humid darkness grow over the place where Kaskaskia had been, he told himself in repeated whispers,--

"It'll never be the same again. Old Kaskaskia is gone. Just when I am ready to go there, there is no Kaskaskia to go to."

Jean sat down, and propped his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, as tender a spirit as ever brooded over ruin. He thought he could bear the bereavement better if battle and fire had swept it away; but to see it lying drowned before him made his heart a clod.

Singly and in bunches the lantern-bearing boats came home to their shelter in the pecan-trees, leaving the engulfed plain to starlight. No lamp was seen, no music tinkled there; in the water streets the evening wind made tiny tracks, and then it also deserted the town, leaving the liquid sheet drawn and fitted smoothly to place. Nothing but water, north, west, and south; a vast plain reflecting stars, and here and there showing spots like burnished s.h.i.+elds. The grotesque halves of buildings in its foreground became as insignificant as flecks of shadow.

The sky was a clear blue dome, the vaporous folds of the Milky Way seeming to drift across it in indistinct light.

Now, above the flowing whisper of the inland sea, Jean Lozier could hear other sounds. Thunder began in the north, and rolled with its cloud toward the point where Okaw and Mississippi met; s.h.a.ggy lowered heads and flying tails and a thousand hoofs swept past him; and after them fleet naked men, who made themselves one with the horses they rode. The buffalo herds were flying before their hunters. He heard bowstrings tw.a.n.g, and saw great creatures stagger and fall headlong, and lie panting in the long gra.s.s.

Then pale blue wood smoke unfolded itself upward, and the lodges were spread, and there was Cascasquia of the Illinois. Black gowns came down the northern trail, and a cross was set up.

The lodges pa.s.sed into wide dormered homesteads, and bowers of foliage promised the fruits of Europe among old forest trees. Jean heard the drum, and saw white uniforms moving back and forth, and gun barrels glistening, and the lilies of France floating over expeditions which put out to the south. This was Kaskaskia. The traffic of the West gathered to it. Men and women crossed the wilderness to find the charm of life there; the waterways and a north trail as firm as a Roman road bringing them easily in. Neyon de Villiers lifted the hat from his fine gray head and saluted society there; and the sulky figure of Pontiac stalked abroad. Fort Gage, and the scarlet uniform of Great Britain, and a new flag bearing thirteen stripes swam past Jean's eyes. The old French days were gone, but the new American days, blending the gathered races into one, were better still. Kaskaskia was a seat of government, a Western republic, rich and merry and generous and eloquent, with the great river and the world at her feet. The hum of traffic came up to Jean. He saw the beautiful children of gently nurtured mothers; he saw the men who moulded public opinion; he saw brawny white-clothed slaves; he saw the crowded wharf, the bridge with long rays of motes stretching across it from the low-lying sun.

Now it disappeared. The weird, lonesome flood spread where that city of his desires had been.

"Kaskaskia is gone. 'But the glory remains when the light fades away.'"