Title:      Shadows on the Rock
Author:     Willa Cather
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0200761.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          October 2002
Date most recently updated: October 2002

This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

Title:      Shadows on the Rock
Author:     Willa Cather





CONTENTS

1.  THE APOTHECARY

2.  CÉCILE AND JACQUES

3.  THE LONG WINTER

4.  PIERRE CHARRON

5.  THE SHIPS FROM FRANCE

6.  THE DYING COUNT

    EPILOGUE





Vous me demandez des graines de fleurs de ce pays.  Nous en faisons
venir de France pour notre jardin, n'y en ayant pas ici de fort
rares ni de fort belles.  Tout y est sauvage, les fleurs aussi bien
que les hommes.

Marie de l'Incarnation

(LETTRE À UNE DE SES SOEURS)

Québec, le 12 août, 1653





BOOK ONE

THE APOTHECARY



I


One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair,
the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap
Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.  Empty,
because an hour ago the flash of retreating sails had disappeared
behind the green island that splits the St. Lawrence below Quebec,
and the last of the summer ships from France had started on her
long voyage home.

As long as La Bonne Espérance was still in sight, many of Auclair's
friends and neighbours had kept him company on the hill-top; but
when the last tip of white slid behind the curving shore, they went
back to their shops and their kitchens to face the stern realities
of life.  Now for eight months the French colony on this rock in
the North would be entirely cut off from Europe, from the world.
This was October; not a sail would come up that wide waterway
before next July.  No supplies; not a cask of wine or a sack of
flour, no gunpowder, or leather, or cloth, or iron tools.  Not a
letter, even--no news of what went on at home.  There might be new
wars, floods, conflagrations, epidemics, but the colonists would
never know of them until next summer.  People sometimes said that
if King Louis died, the Minister would send word by the English
ships that came to New York all winter, and the Dutch traders at
Fort Orange would dispatch couriers to Montreal.

The apothecary lingered on the hill-top long after his fellow
townsmen had gone back to their affairs; for him this severance
from the world grew every year harder to bear.  It was a strange
thing, indeed, that a man of his mild and thoughtful disposition,
city-bred and most conventional in his habits, should be found on a
grey rock in the Canadian wilderness.  Cap Diamant, where he stood,
was merely the highest ledge of that fortified cliff which was
"Kebec,"--a triangular headland wedged in by the joining of two
rivers, and girdled about by the greater river as by an encircling
arm.  Directly under his feet was the French stronghold,--scattered
spires and slated roofs flashing in the rich, autumnal sunlight;
the little capital which was just then the subject of so much
discussion in Europe, and the goal of so many fantastic dreams.

Auclair thought this rock-set town like nothing so much as one of
those little artificial mountains which were made in the churches
at home to present a theatric scene of the Nativity; cardboard
mountains, broken up into cliffs and ledges and hollows to
accommodate groups of figures on their way to the manger; angels
and shepherds and horsemen and camels, set on peaks, sheltered in
grottoes, clustered about the base.

Divest your mind of Oriental colour, and you saw here very much
such a mountain rock, cunningly built over with churches, convents,
fortifications, gardens, following the natural irregularities of
the headland on which they stood; some high, some low, some thrust
up on a spur, some nestling in a hollow, some sprawling unevenly
along a declivity.  The Château Saint-Louis, grey stone with steep
dormer roofs, on the very edge of the cliff overlooking the river,
sat level; but just beside it the convent and church of the
Récollet friars ran downhill, as if it were sliding backwards.  To
landward, in a low, well-sheltered spot, lay the Convent of the
Ursulines . . . lower still stood the massive foundation of the
Jesuits, facing the Cathedral.  Immediately behind the Cathedral
the cliff ran up sheer again, shot out into a jutting spur, and
there, high in the blue air, between heaven and earth, rose old
Bishop Laval's Seminary.  Beneath it the rock fell away in a
succession of terraces like a circular staircase; on one of these
was the new Bishop's new Palace, its gardens on the terrace below.

Not one building on the rock was on the same level with any other,--
and two hundred feet below them all was the Lower Town, crowded
along the narrow strip of beach between the river's edge and the
perpendicular face of the cliff.  The Lower Town was so directly
underneath the Upper Town that one could stand on the terrace of
the Château Saint-Louis and throw a stone down into the narrow
streets below.

These heavy grey buildings, monasteries and churches, steep-pitched
and dormered, with spires and slated roofs, were roughly Norman
Gothic in effect.  They were made by people from the north of
France who knew no other way of building.  The settlement looked
like something cut off from one of the ruder towns of Normandy or
Brittany, and brought over.  It was indeed a rude beginning of a
"new France," of a Saint-Malo or Rouen or Dieppe, anchored here in
the ever-changing northern light and weather.  At its feet, curving
about its base, flowed the mighty St. Lawrence, rolling north
toward the purple line of the Laurentian mountains, toward frowning
Cap Tourmente which rose dark against the soft blue of the October
sky.  The Île d'Orléans, out in the middle of the river, was like a
hilly map, with downs and fields and pastures lying in folds above
the naked tree-tops.

On the opposite shore of the river, just across from the proud rock
of Quebec, the black pine forest came down to the water's edge; and
on the west, behind the town, the forest stretched no living man
knew how far.  That was the dead, sealed world of the vegetable
kingdom, an uncharted continent choked with interlocking trees,
living, dead, half-dead, their roots in bogs and swamps, strangling
each other in a slow agony that had lasted for centuries.  The
forest was suffocation, annihilation; there European man was
quickly swallowed up in silence, distance, mould, black mud, and
the stinging swarms of insect life that bred in it.  The only
avenue of escape was along the river.  The river was the one thing
that lived, moved, glittered, changed,--a highway along which men
could travel, taste the sun and open air, feel freedom, join their
fellows, reach the open sea . . . reach the world, even!

After all, the world still existed, Auclair was thinking, as he
stood looking up the way by which La Bonne Espérance had gone out
only an hour ago.  He was not of the proper stuff for a colonist,
and he knew it.  He was a slender, rather frail man of about fifty,
a little stooped, a little grey, with a short beard cut in a point,
and a fair complexion delicately flushed with pink about his cheeks
and ears.  His blue eyes were warm and interested, even in
reflection,--they often had a kindling gleam as if his thoughts
were pictures.  Except for this lively and inquiring spirit in his
glance, everything about him was modest and retiring.  He was
clearly not a man of action, no Indian-fighter or explorer.  The
only remarkable thing about his life was that he had not lived it
to the end exactly where his father and grandfather had lived
theirs,--in a little apothecary shop on the Quai des Célestins, in
Paris.

The apothecary at last turned his back to the river.  He was
glancing up at the sun to reckon the time of day, when he saw a
soldier coming up the grassy slope of Cap Diamant by the irregular
earth path that led to the redoubt.  The soldier touched his hat
and called to him.

"I thought I recognized your figure up here, Monsieur Euclide.  The
Governor requires your presence and has sent a man down to your
shop to fetch you."

Auclair thanked him for his trouble and went down the hill with him
to the Château.  The Governor was his patron, the Count de
Frontenac, in whose service he had come out to Canada.



II


It was late in the afternoon when Auclair left the Château and made
his way through the garden of the Recollet friars, past the new
Bishop's Palace, and down to his own house.  He lived on the steep,
winding street called Mountain Hill, which was the one and only
thoroughfare connecting the Upper Town with the Lower.  The Lower
Town clustered on the strip of beach at the foot of the cliff, the
Upper Town crowned its summit.  Down the face of the cliff there
was but this one path, which had probably been a mere watercourse
when Champlain and his men first climbed up it to plant the French
lilies on the crest of the naked rock.  The watercourse was now a
steep, stony street, with shops on one side and the retaining walls
of the Bishop's Palace on the other.  Auclair lived there for two
reasons: to be close at hand where Count Frontenac could summon him
quickly to the Château, and because, thus situated on the winding
stairway connecting the two halves of Quebec, his services were
equally accessible to the citizens of both.

On entering his door the apothecary found the front shop empty, lit
by a single candle.  In the living-room behind, which was partly
shut off from the shop by a partition made of shelves and cabinets,
a fire burned in the fireplace, and the round dining-table was
already set with a white cloth, silver candlesticks, glasses, and
two clear decanters, one of red wine and one of white.

Behind the living-room there was a small, low-roofed kitchen, built
of stone, though the house itself was built of wood in the earliest
Quebec manner,--double walls, with sawdust and ashes filling in the
space between the two frames, making a protection nearly four feet
thick against the winter cold.  From this stone kitchen at the back
two pleasant emanations greeted the chemist: the rich odour of
roasting fowl, and a child's voice, singing.  When he closed the
heavy wooden door behind him, the voice called:  "Is it you, Papa?"

His daughter ran in from the kitchen,--a little girl of twelve,
beginning to grow tall, wearing a short skirt and a sailor's
jersey, with her brown hair shingled like a boy's.

Auclair stooped to kiss her flushed cheek.  "Pas de clients?" he
asked.

"Mais, oui!  Beaucoup de clients.  But they all wanted very simple
things.  I found them quite easily and made notes of them.  But why
were you gone so long?  Is Monsieur le Comte ill?"

"Not ill, exactly, but there is troublesome news from Montreal."

"Please change your coat now, Papa, and light the candles.  I am so
anxious about the poulet.  Mère Laflamme tried hard to sell me a
cock, but I told her my father always complained of a cock."  The
daughter's eyes were shaped like her father's, but were much
darker, a very dark blue, almost black when she was excited, as she
was now about the roast.  Her mother had died two years ago, and
she made the ménage for her father.

Contrary to the custom of his neighbours, Auclair dined at six
o'clock in winter and seven in summer, after the day's work was
over, as he was used to do in Paris,--though even there almost
everyone dined at midday.  He now dropped the curtains over his two
shop windows, a sign to his neighbours that he was not to be
disturbed unless for serious reasons.  Having put on his indoor
coat, he lit the candles and carried in the heavy soup tureen for
his daughter.

They ate their soup in appreciative silence, both were a little
tired.  While his daughter was bringing in the roast, Auclair
poured a glass of red wine for her and one of white for himself.

"Papa," she said as he began to carve, "what is the earliest
possible time that Aunt Clothilde and Aunt Blanche can get our
letters?"

Auclair deliberated.  Every fall the colonists asked the same
question of one another and reckoned it all anew.  "Well, if La
Bonne Espérance has good luck, she can make La Rochelle in six
weeks.  Of course, it has been done in five.  But let us say six;
then, if the roads are bad, and they are likely to be in December,
we must count on a week to Paris."

"And if she does not have good luck?"

"Ah, then who can say?  But unless she meets with very heavy
storms, she can do it in two months.  With this west wind, which we
can always count on, she will get out of the river and through the
Gulf very speedily, and that is sometimes the most tedious part of
the voyage.  When we came over with the Count, we were a month
coming from Percé to Quebec.  That was because we were sailing
against this same autumn wind which will be carrying La Bonne
Espérance out to sea."

"But surely the aunts will have our letters by New Year's, and then
they will know how glad I was of my béret and my jerseys, and how
we can hardly wait to open the box upstairs.  I can remember my
Aunt Blanche a little, because she was young and pretty, and used
to play with me.  I suppose she is not young now, any more; it is
eight years."

"Not young, exactly, but she will always have high spirits.  And
she is well married, and has three children who are a great joy to
her."

"Three little cousins whom I have never seen, and one of them is
named for me!  Cécile, André, Rachel."  She spoke their names
softly.  These little cousins were almost like playfellows.  Their
mother wrote such long letters about them that Cécile felt she knew
them and all their ways, their individual faults and merits.
Cousin Cécile was seven, very studious, bien sérieuse, already
prepared for confirmation; but she would eat only sweets and highly
spiced food.  André was five, truthful and courageous, but he bit
his nails.  Rachel was a baby, in the midst of teething when they
last heard of her.

Cécile would have preferred to live with Aunt Blanche and her
children when she should go back to France; but by her mother's
wish she was destined for Aunt Clothilde, who had long been a widow
of handsome means and was much interested in the education of young
girls.  The face of this aunt Cécile could never remember, though
she could see her figure clearly,--standing against the light, she
always seemed to be, a massive woman, short and heavy though not
exactly fat,--square, rather, like a great piece of oak furniture;
always in black, widow's black that smelled of dye, with gold rings
on her fingers and a very white handkerchief in her hand.  Cécile
could see her head, too, carried well back on a short neck, like a
general or a statesman sitting for his portrait; but the face was a
blank, just as if the aunt were standing in a doorway with blinding
sunlight behind her.  Cécile was once more trying to recall that
face when her father interrupted her.

"What are we having for dessert tonight, my dear?"

"We have the cream cheese you brought from market yesterday, and
whichever conserve you prefer; the plums, the wild strawberries, or
the gooseberries."

"Oh, the gooseberries, by all means, after chicken."

"But, Papa, you prefer the gooseberries after almost everything!
It is lucky for us we can get all the sugar we want from the Count.
Our neighbours cannot afford to make conserves, with sugar so dear.
And gooseberries take more than anything else."

"There is something very palatable about the flavour of these
gooseberries, a bitter tang that is good for one.  At home the
gooseberries are much larger and finer, but I have come to like
this bitter taste."

"En France nous avons tous les légumes, jusqu'aux dattes," murmured
Cécile.  She had never seen a date, but she had learned that phrase
from a book, when she went to day-school at the Ursulines.

Immediately after dinner the apothecary went into the front shop to
post his ledger, while his daughter washed the dishes with the hot
water left in an iron kettle on the stove, where the birch-wood
fire was now smouldering coals.  She had scarcely begun when she
heard a soft scratching at the single window of her kitchen.
Through the small panes of glass a face was looking in,--a
terrifying face, but one that she expected.  She nodded and
beckoned with her finger.  A short, heavy man shuffled into the
kitchen.  He seemed loath to enter, yet drawn by some desire
stronger than his reluctance.  Cécile went to the stove and filled
a bowl.

"There is your soup for you, Blinker."

"Merci, Ma'm'selle."  The man spoke out of the side of his mouth,
as he looked out of the side of his face.  He was so terribly
cross-eyed that Cécile had never really looked into his eyes at
all,--this was why he was called Blinker.  He took a half-loaf from
his coat-pocket and began to eat the soup eagerly, trying not to
make a noise.  Eating was difficult for him,--he had once had an
abscess in his lower jaw, it had suppurated, and pieces of the bone
had come out.  His face was badly shrunken on that side, under the
old scars.  He knew it distressed Cécile if he gurgled his soup; so
he struggled between greed and caution, dipping his bread to make
it easy chewing.

This poor mis-shapen fellow worked next door, tended the oven fires
for Nicholas Pigeon, the baker, so that the baker could get his
night's sleep.  His wages were the baker's old clothes, two pairs
of boots a year, a pint of red wine daily, and all the bread he
could eat.  But he got no soup there, Madame Pigeon had too many
children to feed.

When he had finished his bowl and loaf, he rose and without saying
anything took up two large wooden pails.  One was full of refuse
from the day's cooking, the other full of dish-water.  These he
carried down Mountain Hill, through the market square to the edge
of the shore, and there emptied them into the river.  When he came
back, he found a very small glass of brandy waiting for him on the
table.

"Merci, Ma'm'selle, merci beaucoup," he muttered.  He sat down and
sipped it slowly, watching Cécile arrange the kitchen for the
night.  He lingered while the floor was swept, the last dish put in
place on the shelves, the dish-towels hung to dry on a wire above
the stove, following all these operations intently with his crooked
eyes.  When she took up her candle, he must go.  He put down his
glass, got up, and opened the back door, but his feet seemed nailed
to the sill.  He stood blinking with that incredibly stupid air,
blinking out of the side of his face, and Cécile could not be sure
that he saw her or anything else.  He made a fumbling as if to
button his coat, though there were no buttons on it.

"Bon soir, Ma'm'selle," he muttered.

Since this happened every night, Cécile thought nothing of it.  Her
mother had begun to look out for Blinker a little before she became
so ill, and he was one of the cares the daughter had inherited.  He
had come out to the colony four years ago, and like many others who
came he had no trade.  He was strong, but so ill-favoured that
nobody wanted him about.  Neighbour Pigeon found he was faithful
and dependable, and taught him to stoke the wood fire and tend the
oven between midnight and morning.  Madame Auclair felt sorry for
the poor fellow and got into the way of giving him his soup at
night and letting him do the heavy work, such as carrying in wood
and water and taking away the garbage.  She had always called
Blinker by his real name, Jules.  He had a cave up in the rocky
cliff behind the bakery, where he kept his chest,--he slept there
in mild weather.  In winter he slept anywhere about the ovens that
he could find room to lie down, and his clothes and woolly red hair
were usually white with ashes.  Many people were afraid of him,
felt that he must have crooked thoughts behind such crooked eyes.
But the Pigeons and Auclairs had got used to him and saw no harm in
him.  The baker said he could never discover how the fellow made a
living at home, or why he had come out to Canada.  Many
unserviceable men had come, to be sure, but they were usually
adventurers who disliked honest work,--wanted to fight the Iroquois
or traffic in beaver-skins, or live a free life hunting game in the
woods.  This Blinker had never had a gun in his hands.  He had such
a horror of the forest that he would not even go into the near-by
woods to help fell trees for firewood, and his fear of Indians was
one of the bywords of Mountain Hill.  Pigeon used to tell his
customers that if the Count went to chastise the Iroquois beyond
Cataraqui, Blinker would hide in his cave in Quebec.  Blinker
protested he had been warned in a dream that he would be taken
prisoner and tortured by the Indians.



Dinner was the important event of the day in the apothecary's
household.  The luncheon was a mere goûter.  Breakfast was a pot of
chocolate, which he prepared very carefully himself, and a fresh
loaf which Pigeon's oldest boy brought to the door.  But his dinner
Auclair regarded as the thing that kept him a civilized man and a
Frenchman.  It put him in a mellow mood, and he and his daughter
usually spent the long evening very happily without visitors.  She
read aloud to him, the fables of La Fontaine or his favourite
Plutarch, and he corrected her accent so that she would not be
ashamed when she returned home to the guardianship of that
intelligent and exacting Aunt Clothilde.  It was only in the
evening that her father had time to talk to her.  All day he was
compounding remedies, or visiting the sick, or making notes for a
work on the medicinal properties of Canadian plants which he meant
to publish after his return to Paris.  But in the evening he was
free, and while he enjoyed his Spanish snuff their talk would
sometimes lead far away and bring out long stories of the past.
Her father would try to recall to her their old shop on the Quai
des Célestins, where he had grown up and where she herself was
born.  She thought she could remember it a little, though she was
only four years old when they sailed with the Count for the New
World.  It was a narrow wedge, that shop, built in next to the
carriage court of the town house of the Frontenacs.  Auclair's
little chamber, where he slept from his sixth year until his
marriage, was on the third floor, under the roof.  Its one window
looked out upon the carriage court and across it to the front of
the mansion, which had only a blind wall on the street and faced
upon its own court.

When he was a little boy, he used to tell Cécile, nothing ever
changed next door, except that after a rain the cobbles in the yard
were whiter, and the ivy on the walls was greener.  Every morning
he looked out from his window on the same stillness; the shuttered
windows behind their iron grilles, the steps under the porte-
cochère green with moss, pale grass growing up between the stones
in the court, the empty stables at the back, the great wooden
carriage gates that never opened,--though in one of them a small
door was cut, through which the old caretaker came and went.

"Naturally," Auclair would tell his daughter, "having seen the
establishment next door always the same, I supposed it was meant to
be like that, and was there, perhaps, to give a little boy the
pleasure of watching the swallows build nests in the ivy.  The
Count had been at home when I was an infant in arms, and once, I
believe, when I was three, but I could not remember.  Imagine my
astonishment when, one evening about sunset, a dusty coach with
four horses rattled down the Quai and stopped at the carriage
entrance.  Two footmen sprang down from the box, rang the outer
bell, and, as soon as the bar was drawn, began pulling and prying
at the gates, which I had never seen opened in my life.  It seemed
to me that some outrage was being committed and the police should
be called.  At last the gates were dragged inward, and the coach
clattered into the court.  If anything more happened that night I
do not recall it.

"The next morning I was awakened by shouting under my window, and
the sound of shutters being taken down.  I ran across my room and
peeped out.  The windows over there were not only unshuttered, but
open wide.  Three young men were leaning out over the grilles
beating rugs, shaking carpets and wall-hangings into the air.  In a
moment a blacksmith came in his leather apron, with a kit of tools,
and began to repair the hinges of the gates.  Boys were running in
and out, bringing bread, milk, poultry, sacks of grain and hay for
the horses.  When I went down to breakfast, I found my father and
mother and grandparents all very much excited and pleased, talking
a great deal.  They already knew in which chamber the Count had
slept last night, the names of his equerries, what he had brought
with him for supper in a basket from Fontainebleau, and which wines
old Joseph had got up from the cellar for him.  I had scarcely ever
heard my family talk so much.

"Not long after breakfast the Count himself came into our shop.  He
greeted my father familiarly and began asking about the people of
the Quarter as if he had been away only a few weeks.  He inquired
for my mother and grandmother, and they came to pay their respects.
I was pulled out from under the counter where I had hidden, and
presented to him.  I was frightened because he was wearing his
uniform and such big boots.  Yes, he was a fine figure of a man
forty years ago, but even more restless and hasty than he is now.
I remember he asked me if I wanted to be a soldier, and when I told
him that I meant to be an apothecary like my father, he laughed and
gave me a silver piece."

Though Auclair so often talked to his daughter of the past, it was
not because there was nothing happening in the present.  At that
time the town of Quebec had fewer than two thousand inhabitants,
but it was always full of jealousies and quarrels.  Ever since
Cécile could remember, there had been a feud between Count
Frontenac and old Bishop Laval.  And now that the new Bishop,
Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier, had just come back from France after
a three years' absence, the Count was quarrelling with him!  Then
there was always the old quarrel between the two Bishops
themselves, which had broken out with fresh vigour upon de Saint-
Vallier's return.  Everyone in the diocese took sides with one
prelate or the other.  Since he landed in September, scarcely a
week went by that Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier did not wreck some
cherished plan of the old Bishop.



Before they went to bed, Auclair and his daughter usually took a
walk.  The apothecary believed this habit conducive to sound
slumber.  Tonight, as they stepped out into the frosty air and
looked up, high over their heads, on the edge of the sheer cliff,
the Château stood out against the glittering night sky, the second
storey of the south wing brilliantly lighted.

"I suppose the Count's candles will burn till long past midnight,"
Cécile remarked.

"Ah, the Count has many things to trouble him.  The King has not
been very generous in rewarding his services in the last campaign.
Besides, he is old, and the old do not sleep much."

As they climbed Mountain Hill, they passed in front of Monseigneur
de Saint-Vallier's new episcopal Palace, and that, too, was ablaze
with lights.  Cécile longed to see inside that building, toward
which the King himself had given fifteen thousand francs.  It was
said that Monseigneur had brought back with him a great many fine
pieces of furniture and tapestry to furnish it.  But he was not
fond of children, as the old Bishop was, and his servants were very
strict, and there seemed to be no way in which one could get a peep
behind those heavy curtains at the windows.

Their walk was nearly always the same.  On a precipitous rock,
scored over with dark, uneven streets, there were not many ways
where one could stroll with a careless foot after nightfall.  When
the wind was not too biting, they usually took the path up to the
redoubt on Cap Diamant and looked down over the sleeping town and
the great pale avenue of river, with black forest stretching beyond
it to the sky.  From there the Lower Town was a mere sprinkle of
lights along the water's edge.  The rock-top, blocked off in dark
masses that were convents and churches and gardens, was now sunk in
sleep.  The only lighted windows to be seen were in the Château, in
the Bishop's Palace, and on the top floor of old Bishop Laval's
Seminary, out there on its spur overhanging the river.  That top
floor, the apothecary told his daughter, was the library, and
likely enough some young Canadian-born Seminarians to whom Latin
came hard were struggling with the Church Fathers up there.



III


Auclair did a good trade in drugs and herbs and remedies of his own
compounding, but his pay was small, and very little of it was in
money.  Besides, people wasted a great deal of his time in
conversation and thus interfered with his study of Canadian plants.
Like most philosophers, he was not averse to discourse, but here
much of the talk was gossip and very trivial.  The colonists liked
to drop in at his house upon the slightest pretext; the interior
was like home to the French-born.  On a heavy morning, when clouds
of thick grey fog rolled up from the St. Lawrence, it cheered one
to go into a place that was like an apothecary's shop at home; to
glimpse the comfortable sitting-room through the tall cabinets and
chests of drawers that separated without entirely shutting it off
from the shop.

Euclide Auclair had come over with the Count de Frontenac eight
years ago, as his apothecary and physician, and had therefore been
able to bring whatever he liked of his personal possessions.  He
came with a full supply of drugs and specifics, his distilling
apparatus, mortars, balances, retorts, and carboys, all the
paraphernalia of his trade, even the stuffed baby alligator,
brought long ago to Paris by some sailor from the West Indies and
purchased by Auclair's grandfather to ornament the shop on the Quai
des Célestins.

Madame Auclair had brought her household goods, without which she
could not imagine life at all, and the salon behind the shop was
very much like their old salon in Paris.  There was the same well-
worn carpet, made at Lyon, the walnut dining-table, the two large
arm-chairs and high-backed sofa upholstered in copper-red cotton-
velvet, the long window-curtains of a similar velvet lined with
brown.  The same candelabra and china shepherd boy sat on the
mantel, the same colour prints of pastoral scenes hung on the
walls.  Madame had brought out to Canada the fine store of linen
that had been her marriage portion, her feather beds and coverlids
and down pillows.  As long as she lived, she tried to make the new
life as much as possible like the old.  After she began to feel
sure that she would never be well enough to return to France, her
chief care was to train her little daughter so that she would be
able to carry on this life and this order after she was gone.

Madame Auclair had kept upon her feet until within a few weeks of
her death.  When a spasm of coughing came on (she died of her
lungs) and she was forced to lie down on the red sofa there under
the window, she would beckon Cécile to the footstool beside her.
After she got her breath again and was resting, she would softly
explain many things about the ménage.

"Your father has a delicate appetite," she would murmur, "and the
food here is coarse.  If it is not very carefully prepared, he will
not eat and will fall ill.  And he cannot sleep between woollen
coverlids, as many people do here; his skin is sensitive.  The
sheets must be changed every two weeks, but do not try to have them
washed in the winter.  I have brought linen enough to last the
winter through.  Keep folding the soiled ones away in the cold
upstairs, and in April, when the spring rains come and all the
water-barrels are full of soft rain-water, have big Jeanette come
in and do a great washing; give the house up to her, and let her
take several days to do her work.  Beg her to iron the sheets
carefully.  They are the best of linen and will last your lifetime
if they are well treated."

Madame Auclair never spoke of her approaching death, but would say
something like this:

"After a while, when I am too ill to help you, you will perhaps
find it fatiguing to do all these things alone, over and over.  But
in time you will come to love your duties, as I do.  You will see
that your father's whole happiness depends on order and regularity,
and you will come to feel a pride in it.  Without order our lives
would be disgusting, like those of the poor savages.  At home, in
France, we have learned to do all these things in the best way, and
we are conscientious, and that is why we are called the most
civilized people in Europe and other nations envy us."

After such admonition Madame Auclair would look intently into the
child's eyes that grew so dark when her heart was touched, like the
blue of Canadian blueberries, indeed, and would say to herself:
"Oui, elle a beaucoup de loyauté."

During the last winter of her illness she lay much of the time on
her red sofa, that had come so far out to this rock in the
wilderness.  The snow outside, piled up against the window-panes,
made a grey light in the room, and she could hear Cécile moving
softly about in the kitchen, putting more wood into the iron stove,
washing the casseroles.  Then she would think fearfully of how much
she was entrusting to that little shingled head; something so
precious, so intangible; a feeling about life that had come down to
her through so many centuries and that she had brought with her
across the wastes of obliterating, brutal ocean.  The sense of "our
way,"--that was what she longed to leave with her daughter.  She
wanted to believe that when she herself was lying in this rude
Canadian earth, life would go on almost unchanged in this room with
its dear (and, to her, beautiful) objects; that the proprieties
would be observed, all the little shades of feeling which make the
common fine.  The individuality, the character, of M. Auclair's
house, though it appeared to be made up of wood and cloth and glass
and a little silver, was really made of very fine moral qualities
in two women: the mother's unswerving fidelity to certain
traditions, and the daughter's loyalty to her mother's wish.

It was because of these things that had gone before, and the kind
of life lived there, that the townspeople were glad of any excuse
to stop at the apothecary's shop.  Even the strange, bitter,
mysterious Bishop Laval (more accusing and grim than ever, now that
the new Bishop had returned and so disregarded him) used to tramp
heavily into the shop for calomel pills or bandages for his
varicose legs, and peer, not unkindly, back into the living-room.
Once he had asked for a sprig from the box of parsley that was kept
growing there even in winter, and carried it away in his hand,--
though, as everyone knew, he denied himself all the comforts of the
table and ate only the most wretched and unappetizing food.

In a corner, concealed from the shop by tall cabinets, and well
away from the window draughts, stood M. Auclair's four-post bed,
with heavy hangings.  Underneath it was a child's bed, pulled out
at night, where Cécile still slept in cold weather.  Sometimes on a
very bitter night, when the grip of still, intense cold tightened
on the rock as if it would extinguish the last spark of life, the
pharmacist would hear his daughter softly stirring about, moving
something, covering something.  He would thrust his night-cap out
between the curtains and call:

"Qu'est-ce que tu fais, petite?"

An anxious, sleepy voice would reply;

"Papa, j'ai peur pour le persil."

It had never frozen in her mother's time, and it should not freeze
in hers.



IV


The accident of being born next the Count de Frontenac's house in
Paris had determined Euclide Auclair's destiny.  He had grown up a
studious, thoughtful boy, assisting his father in the shop.  Every
afternoon he read Latin with a priest at the Jesuits on the rue
Saint-Antoine.  Count Frontenac's irregular and unexpected returns
to town made the chief variety in his life.

It was usually after some chagrin or disappointment that the Count
came back to the Quai des Célestins.  Between campaigns he lived at
Île Savary, his estate on the Indre, near Blois.  But after some
slight at Court, or some difficulty with his creditors, he would
suddenly arrive at his father's old town house and shut himself up
for days, even weeks, seeing no one but the little people of the
parish of Saint-Paul.  He had few friends of his own station in
Paris,--few anywhere.  He was a man who got on admirably with his
inferiors,--seemed to find among them the only human ties that were
of any comfort to him.  He was poor, which made him boastful and
extravagant, and he had always lived far beyond his means.  At Île
Savary he tried to make as great a show as people who were much
better off than he,--to equal them in hospitality, in dress,
gardens, horses and carriages.  But when he was in Paris, living
among the quiet, faithful people of the quarter, he was a different
man.  With his humble neighbours his manners were irreproachable.
He often dropped in at the pharmacy to see his tenants, the
Auclairs, and would sometimes talk to the old grandfather about his
campaigns in Italy and the Low Countries.

The Count had begun his military life at fifteen, and wherever
there was fighting in Europe, he always managed to be there.  In
each campaign he added to his renown, but never to his fortune.
When his military talents were unemployed, he usually got into
trouble of some sort.  It was after his Italian campaign, when he
was recuperating from his wounds in his father's old house on the
Quai, that he made his unfortunate marriage.  Euclide's father
could remember that affair very well.  Madame de la Grange-
Frontenac and her husband lived together but a short while,--and
now they had been separated for almost a lifetime.  She still lived
in Paris, with a brilliant circle about her,--had an apartment in
the old Arsenal building, not far from the Count's house, and when
she received, he sometimes paid his respects with the rest of the
world, but he never went to see her privately.

When Euclide was twenty-two, Count Frontenac was employed by the
Venetians to defend the island of Crete against the Turks.  From
that command he returned with great honour, but poorer than ever.
For the next three years he was idle.  Then, suddenly, the King
appointed him Governor General of Canada, and he quitted Europe for
ten years.

During that decade Euclide's father and mother died.  He married,
and devoted himself seriously to his profession.  Too seriously for
his own good, indeed.  Although he was so content with familiar
scenes and faces as to be almost afraid of new ones, he was not
afraid of new ideas,--or of old ideas that had gone out of fashion
because surgeons and doctors were too stupid to see their value.
The brilliant reign of Louis XIV was a low period in medicine;
dressmakers and tailors were more considered than physicians.
Euclide had gone deep into the history of medicine in such old
Latin books as were stuffed away in the libraries of Paris.  He
looked back to the time of Ambroise Paré, and still further back to
the thirteenth century, as golden ages in medicine,--and he
considered Fagon, the King's physician, a bigoted and heartless
quack.

When sick people in his own neighbourhood came to Euclide for help,
he kept them away from doctors,--gave them tisanes and herb-teas
and poultices, which at least could do no harm.  He advised them
about their diet; reduced the surfeit of the rich, and prescribed
goat's milk for the poorly nourished.  He was strongly opposed to
indiscriminate blood-letting, particularly to bleeding from the
feet.  This eccentricity made him very unpopular, not only with the
barber-surgeons of the parish, but with their patients, and even
estranged his own friends.  Bleeding from the feet was very much in
vogue just then; it made a sick man feel that the utmost was being
done for him.  At Versailles it was regularly practised on members
of the King's household.  Euclide's opposition to this practice
lost him many of his patrons.  His neighbours used to laugh and say
that whether bleeding from the feet harmed other people or not, it
had certainly been very bad for the son of their reliable old
pharmacien, Alphonse Auclair.

Euclide's business contracted steadily, so that, with all his
wife's good management and his own devotion to his profession, he
scarcely knew where to turn; until one day the Count de Frontenac
walked into the shop and put out his hand as if to rescue a
drowning man.  Auclair had never heard of the Count's difficulties
with the Jesuits in Canada, and knew nothing about his recall by
the King, until he appeared at the shop door that morning, ten
years older, but no richer or better satisfied with the world than
when he went away.

The Count was out of favour at Versailles, his estate on the Indre
had run down during his absence in Canada, and he had not the means
to repair it, so he now spent a good deal of time in the house next
door.  His presence there, and his patronage, eased the strain of
the Auclairs' position.  Moreover, he restored to Euclide the ten
years' rent for the shop, which had been scrupulously paid to the
Count's agent while he was away.

The Count was lonely in his town house.  Many of his old
acquaintances had accomplished their earthly period and been
carried to the Innocents or the churchyard of Saint-Paul while he
was far away in Quebec.  His wife was still entertaining her
friends at her apartment in the old Arsenal, and the Count
occasionally went there on her afternoons at home.  Time hung heavy
on his hands, and he often sent for Euclide to come to him in a
professional capacity,--a flimsy pretext, for, though past sixty,
the Count was in robust health.  Of an evening they would sometimes
sit in the Count's library, talking of New France.  Frontenac's
thoughts were there, and he liked to tell an eager listener about
its great lakes and rivers, the climate, the Indians, the forests
and wild animals.  Often he would dwell upon the explorations and
discoveries of his ill-fated young friend Robert Cavelier de La
Salle, one of the few men for whom, in his long life, he ever felt
a warm affection.

Gradually there grew up in Auclair's mind the picture of a country
vast and free.  He fell into a habit of looking to Canada as a
possible refuge, an escape from the evils one suffered at home, and
of wishing he could go there.

This seemed a safe desire to cherish, since it was impossible of
fulfilment.  Euclide was a natural city-dweller; one of those who
can bear poverty and oppression, so long as they have their old
surroundings, their native sky, the streets and buildings that have
become part of their lives.  But though he was a creature of habit
and derived an actual pleasure from doing things exactly as he had
always done them, his mind was free.  He could not shut his eyes to
the wrongs that went on about him, or keep from brooding upon them.
In his own time he had seen taxes grow more and more ruinous,
poverty and hunger always increasing.  People died of starvation in
the streets of Paris, in his own parish of Saint-Paul, where there
was so much wealth.  All the while the fantastic extravagances of
the Court grew more outrageous.  The wealth of the nation, of the
grain lands and vineyards and forests of France, was sunk in
creating the pleasure palace at Versailles.  The richest peers of
the realm were ruining themselves on magnificent Court dresses and
jewels.  And, with so many new abuses, the old ones never grew
less; torture and cruel punishments increased as the people became
poorer and more desperate.  The horrible mill at the Châtelet
ground on day after day.  Auclair lived too near the prisons of
Paris to be able to forget them.  In his boyhood a harmless old man
who lodged in their own cellar was tortured and put to death at the
Châtelet for a petty theft.

One morning, in the summer when Cécile was four years old, Count
Frontenac made one of his sudden reappearances in Paris and sent
for Euclide.  The King had again appointed him Governor General of
Canada, and he would sail in a few weeks.  He wished to take
Auclair with him as his personal physician.  The Count was then
seventy years old, and he was as eager to be gone as a young man
setting off on his first campaign.

Auclair was terrified.  Indeed, he fell ill of fright, and neither
ate nor slept.  He could not imagine facing any kind of life but
the one he had always lived.  His wife was much the braver of the
two.  She pointed out that their business barely made them a
livelihood, and that after the Count went away it would certainly
decline.  Moreover, the Count was their landlord, and he had now
decided to sell his town property.  Who knew but that the purchaser
might prove a hard master,--or that he might not pull down the
apothecary shop altogether to enlarge the stables?



V


It was the day after La Bonne Espérance had set sail for France.
Auclair and his daughter were on their way to the Hôtel Dieu to
attend the Reverend Mother, who had sprained her ankle.  Quebec is
never lovelier than on an afternoon of late October; ledges of
brown and lavender clouds lay above the river and the Île
d'Orléans, and the red-gold autumn sunlight poured over the rock
like a heavy southern wine.  Beyond the Cathedral square the two
lingered under the allée of naked trees beside the Jesuits'
college.  These trees were cut flat to form an arbour, the branches
interweaving and interlacing like basket-work, and beneath them ran
a promenade paved with flat flagstones along which the dry yellow
leaves were blowing, giving off a bitter perfume when one trampled
them.  Cécile loved that allée, because when she was little the
Fathers used to let her play there with her skipping-rope,--few
spots in Kebec were level enough to jump rope on.  Behind the
avenue of trees the long stone walls of the monastery--seven feet
thick, those walls--made a shelter from the wind; they held the
sun's heat so well that it was possible to grow wall grapes there,
and purple clusters were cut in September.

Behind the Jesuits' a narrow, twisted, cobbled street dropped down
abruptly to the Hôtel Dieu, on the banks of the little river St.
Charles.  Auclair and his daughter went through the garden into the
refectory, where Mother Juschereau de Saint-Ignace was seated, her
sprained foot on a stool, directing the work of her novices.  She
was a little over forty, a woman of strong frame, tall, upright,
with a presence that bespoke force rather than reserve; a handsome
face,--the large, open features mobile and alert, perhaps a trifle
masculine.  She was the first Reverend Mother of the foundation who
was Canadian-born, and she had been elected to that office when she
was but thirty-four years of age.  She was a religious of the
practical type, sunny and very outright by nature,--enthusiastic,
without being given to visions or ecstasies.

As the visitors entered, the Superior made as if to rise, but
Auclair put out a detaining hand.

"I am two days late, Reverend Mother.  In your mind you have been
chiding me for neglect.  But it is a busy time for us when the last
ships sail.  We have many family letters to write; and I examine my
stock and make out my order for the drugs I shall need by the first
boats next summer."

"If you had not come today, Monsieur Euclide, you would surely have
found me on my feet tomorrow.  When the Indians have a sprain, in
the woods, they bind their leg tightly with deer thongs and keep on
the march with their party.  And they recover."

"Dear Mother Juschereau, the idea of such treatment is repugnant to
me.  We are not barbarians, after all."

"But they are flesh and blood; how is it they recover?"

As he pushed back her snow-white skirt a little and began gently to
unwind the bandage from her foot, Auclair explained his reasons for
believing that the savages were much less sensitive to pain than
Europeans.  Cécile fell to admiring the work Mother Juschereau had
in hand.  Her lap and the table beside her were full of scraps of
bright silk and velvet and sheets of coloured paper.  While she
overlooked the young Sisters at their tasks, her fingers were
moving rapidly and cleverly, making artificial flowers.  She had
great skill at this and delighted in it,--it was her one
recreation.

"Yes, my dear," she said, "I am making these for the poor country
parishes, where they have so little for the altar.  These are wild
roses, such as I used to gather when I was a child at Beauport.
Oh, the wild flowers we have in the fields and prairies about
Beauport!"

When he had applied his ointment and bandaged her foot in fresh
linen, the apothecary went off to the hospital medicine room, in
charge of Sister Marie Domenica, whom he was instructing in the
elements of pharmacy, and Cécile settled herself on the floor at
Mother Juschereau's knee.  Theirs was an old friendship.

The Reverend Mother (Jeanne Franc Juschereau de la Ferté was her
proud name) held rather advanced views on caring for the sick.  She
did not believe in leaving everything to God, and had availed her
hospital of Auclair's skill ever since he first came to Quebec.
Quick to detect a trace of the charlatan in anyone, she felt
confidence in Auclair because his pretensions were so modest.  She
addressed him familiarly as "Monsieur Euclide," scolded him for
teaching his daughter Latin, and was keenly interested in his study
of Canadian plants.  Cécile had been coming to the Hôtel Dieu with
her father almost every week since she was five years old, and
Mother Juschereau always found time to talk to her a little; but
today was a very unusual opportunity.  The Mother was seldom to be
found seated in a chair; when she was not on her knees at her
devotions, she was on her feet, hurrying from one duty to another.

"It has been a long while since you told me a story, Reverend
Mother," Cécile reminded her.

Mother Juschereau laughed.  She had a deep warmhearted laugh,
something left over from her country girlhood.  "Perhaps I have no
more to tell you.  You must know them all by this time."

"But there is no end to the stories about Mother Catherine de
Saint-Augustin.  I can never hear them all."

"True enough, when you speak her name, the stories come.  Since I
have had to sit here with my sprain, I have been recalling some of
the things she used to tell me herself, when I was not much older
than you."

While her hands flew among the scraps of colour, Mother Juschereau
began somewhat formally:

"Before she had left her fair Normandy (avant quelle ait quitté sa
belle Normandie), while Sister Catherine was a novice at Bayeux,
there lived in the neighbourhood a pécheresse named Marie.  She had
been a sinner from her early youth and was so proof against all
counsel that she continued her disorders even until an advanced
age.  Driven out by the good people of the town, shunned by men and
women alike, she fell lower and lower, and at last hid herself in a
solitary cave.  There she dragged out her shameful life, destitute
and consumed by a loathsome disease.  And there she died; without
human aid and without the sacraments of the Church.  After such a
death her body was thrown into a ditch and buried like that of some
unclean animal.

"Now, Sister Catherine, though she was so young and had all the
duties of her novitiate to perform, always found time to pray for
the souls of the departed, for all who died in that vicinity,
whether she had known them in the flesh or not.  But for this
abandoned sinner she did not pray, believing, as did everyone else,
that she was for ever lost.

"Twelve years went by, and Sister Catherine had come to Canada and
was doing her great work here.  One day, while she was at prayer in
this house, a soul from purgatory appeared to her, all pale and
suffering, and said:

"'Sister Catherine, what misery is mine!  You commend to God the
souls of all those who die.  I am the only one on whom you have no
compassion.'

"'And who are you?' asked our astonished Mother Catherine.

"'I am that poor Marie, the sinner, who died in the cave.'

"'What,' exclaimed Mother Catherine, 'were you then not lost?'

"'No, I was saved, thanks to the infinite mercy of the Blessed
Virgin.'

"'But how could this be?'

"'When I saw that I was about to die in the cave, and knew that I
was abandoned and cast out by the world, unclean within and
without, I felt the burden of all my sins.  I turned to the Mother
of God and cried to her:  Queen of Heaven, you are the last refuge
of the ruined and the outcast; I am abandoned by all the world; I
have no hope but you; you alone have power to reach where I am
fallen; Mary, Mother of Jesus, have pity upon me!  The tender
Mother of all made it possible for me to repent in that last hour.
I died and I was saved.  The Holy Mother procured for me the favour
of having my punishment abridged, and now only a few masses are
required to deliver me from purgatory.  I beseech you to have them
said for me, and I will never cease my prayers to God and the
Blessed Virgin for you.'

"Mother Catherine at once set about having masses said for that
poor Marie.  Some days later there appeared to her a happy soul,
more brilliant than the sun, which smiled and said:  'I thank you,
my dear Catherine, I go now to paradise to sing the mercies of God
for ever, and I shall not forget to pray for you.'"

Here Mother Juschereau glanced down at the young listener, who had
been following her intently.  "And now, from this we see--" she
went on, but Cécile caught her hand and cried coaxingly,

"N'expliquez pas, chère Mère, je vous en supplie!"

Mother Juschereau laughed and shook her finger.

"You always say that, little naughty!  N'expliquez pas!  But it is
the explanation of these stories that applies them to our needs."

"Yes, dear Mother.  But there comes my father.  Tell me the
explanation some other day."

Mother Juschereau still looked down into her face, frowning and
smiling.  It was the kind of face she liked, because there was no
self-consciousness in it, and no vanity; but she told herself for
the hundredth time:  "No, she has certainly no vocation."  Yet for
an orphan girl, and one so intelligent, there would certainly have
been a career among the Hospitalières.  She would have loved to
train that child for the Soeur Apothicaire of her hospital.  Her
good sense told her it was not to be.  When she talked to Cécile of
the missionaries and martyrs, she knew that her words fell into an
eager mind; admiration and rapture she found in the girl's face,
but it was not the rapture of self-abnegation.  It was something
very different,--almost like the glow of worldly pleasure.  She was
convinced that Cécile read altogether too much with her father, and
had told him so; asking him whether he had perhaps forgotten that
he had a girl to bring up, and not a son whom he was educating for
the priesthood.



While her father and Mother Juschereau were going over an inventory
of hospital supplies, Cécile went into the chapel to say a prayer
for the repose of Mother de Saint-Augustin.  There, in the quiet,
she soon fell to musing upon the story of that remarkable girl who
had braved the terrors of the ocean and the wilderness and come out
to Canada when she was barely sixteen years old, and this Kebec was
but a naked rock rising out of the dark forest.

Catherine de Saint-Augustin had begun her novitiate with the
Hospitalières at Bayeux when she was eleven and a half years of
age, and by the time she was fourteen she was already, in her
heart, vowed to Canada.  The letters and Relations of the Jesuit
missionaries, eagerly read in all the religious houses of France,
had fired her bold imagination, and she begged to be sent to save
the souls of the savages.  Her superiors discouraged her and
forbade her to cherish this desire; Catherine's youth and bodily
frailness were against her.  But while she went about her tasks in
the monastery, this wish, this hope, was always with her.  One day
when she was peeling vegetables in the novices' refectory, she cut
her hand, and, seeing the blood flow, she dipped her finger in it
and wrote upon the table:


     Je mourrai au Canada
     Soeur Saint-Augustin


That table, with its inscription, was still shown at Bayeux as an
historic relic.

Though Catherine's desire seemed so far from fulfilment, she had
not long to wait.  In the winter of 1648, Père Vimont, from the
Jesuit mission in Canada, came knocking at the door of the
monastère at Bayeux, recruiting sisters for the little foundation
of Hospitalières already working in Kebec.  Catherine was told that
she was too young to go, and her father firmly refused to give his
permission.  But in her eagerness the girl wrote petition after
petition to her Bishop and superiors, and at last her request was
brought to the attention of the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria.  The
Queen's intercession won her father's consent.

When, after a voyage of many months, unparalleled for storms and
hardships, Catherine and her companions anchored under the rock of
Kebec and were rowed ashore, she fell upon her knees and kissed the
earth where she first stepped upon it.

Made Superior of the Hôtel Dieu at an early age, she died before
she was forty.  At thirty-seven she had burned her life out in
vigils, mortifications, visions, raptures, all the while carrying
on a steady routine of manual labour and administrative work,
observing the full discipline of her order.  For long before her
death she was sustained by visions in which the spirit of Father
Brébeuf, the martyr, appeared to her, told her of the glories of
heaven, and gave her counsel and advice for all her perplexities in
this world.  It was at the direction of Father Brébeuf,
communicated to her in these visions, that she chose Jeanne Franc
Juschereau de la Ferté to succeed her as Superior, and trained her
to that end.  To many people the choice seemed such a strange one
that Père Brébeuf must certainly have instigated it.  Mother
Catherine de Saint-Augustin was slight, nervous, sickly from
childhood, yet from childhood precocious and prodigious in
everything; always dedicating herself to the impossible and always
achieving it; now getting a Queen of France to speak for her, now
winning the spirit of the hero priest from paradise to direct and
sustain her.  And the woman she chose to succeed her was hardy,
sagacious, practical,--a Canadienne, and the woman for Canada.




BOOK TWO

CÉCILE AND JACQUES



I


On the last Friday of October Auclair went as usual to the market,
held in front of Notre Dame de la Victoire, the only church in the
Lower Town.  All the trade in Quebec went on in the Lower Town, and
the principal merchants lived on the market square.  Their houses
were built solidly around three sides of it, wall against wall, the
shops on the ground floor, the dwelling-quarters upstairs.  On the
fourth side stood the church.  The merchants' houses had formerly
been of wood, but sixteen years ago, just after the Count de
Frontenac was recalled to France, leaving Canada a prey to so many
misfortunes, the Lower Town had been almost entirely wiped out by
fire.  It was rebuilt in stone, to prevent a second disaster.  This
square, which was the centre of commerce, now had a look of
permanence and stability; houses with walls four feet thick, wide
doorways, deep windows, steep, slated roofs and dormers.  La Place,
as it was called, was an uneven rectangle, cobble-paved, sloping
downhill like everything else in Quebec, with gutters to carry off
the rainfall.  In the middle was a grass plot (pitifully small,
indeed), protected by an iron fence and surmounted by a very ugly
statue of King Louis.

On market days the space about this iron fence was considered the
right of the countrywomen, who trudged into Quebec at dawn beside
the dogs that drew their little two-wheeled carts.  Against the
fence they laid out their wares; white bodies of dressed ducks and
chickens, sausages, fresh eggs, cheese, butter, and such vegetables
as were in season.  On the outer edge of the square the men
stationed their carts, on which they displayed quarters of fresh
pork, live chickens, maple sugar, spruce beer, Indian meal, feed
for cows, and long black leaves of native tobacco tied in bunches.
The fish and eel carts, because of their smell and slimy drip, had
a corner of the square to themselves, just at the head of La Place
Street.  The fishmongers threw buckets of cold water over their
wares at intervals, and usually a group of little boys played just
below, building "beaver-dams" in the gutter to catch the overflow.

This was an important market day, and Auclair went down the hill
early.  The black frosts might set in at any time now, and today he
intended to lay in his winter supply of carrots, pumpkins,
potatoes, turnips, beetroot, leeks, garlic, even salads.  On many
of the wagons there were boxes full of earth, with rooted lettuce
plants growing in them.  These the townspeople put away in their
cellars, and by tending them carefully and covering them at night
they kept green salad growing until Christmas or after.  Auclair's
neighbour, Pigeon the baker, had a very warm cellar, and he grew
little carrots and spinach down there long after winter had set in.
The great vaulted cellars of the Jesuits and the Récollet friars
looked like kitchen gardens when the world above ground was frozen
stark.  Careless people got through the winter on smoked eels and
frozen fish, but if one were willing to take enough trouble, one
could live very well, even in Quebec.  It was the long, slow
spring, March, April, early May, that tried the patience.  By that
time the winter stores had run low, people were tired of
makeshifts, and still not a bud, not a salad except under cold-
frames.

The market was full of wood doves this morning.  They were killed
in great numbers hereabouts, were sold cheap, and made very
delicate eating.  Every fall Auclair put down six dozens of them in
melted lard.  He had six stone jars in his cellar for that purpose,
packing a dozen birds to the jar.  In this way he could eat fresh
game all winter, and, preserved thus, the birds kept their flavour.
Frozen venison was all very well, but feathered creatures lost
their taste when kept frozen a long while.

Auclair carried his purchases over to the cart of his butter-maker,
Madame Renaude.  Renaude-le-lièvre, she was called, because she had
a hare-lip, and a bristling black moustache as well.  She was a
big, rough Norman woman, who owned seven cows, was extremely clean
about her dairy, and quite the reverse in her conversation.  In the
town there was keen competition for her wares; but as she was
rheumatic, she was more or less in thralldom to the apothecary, and
seldom failed him.

"Good morning, Madame Renaude.  Have you my lard for me this
morning, as you promised?  I must buy my wood doves today."

"Yes, Monsieur Auclair, and I had to kill my pet pig to get it for
you, too; one that had slept under the same roof with me."

She spoke very loud, and the farmer at the next stall made an
indecent comment.

"Hold your dirty jaw, Joybert.  If I had a bad egg, I'd paste you."
Old Joybert squinted and looked the other way.  "Yes, Monsieur
Auclair, you never saw such lard as he made, as sweet as butter.
He made two firkins.  Surely you won't need so much,--I can sell it
anywhere."

"Yes, indeed, madame, I shall need every bit of it.  Six dozen
birds I have to put down, and I can't do with less."

"But, monsieur, what do you do with the grease after you take your
doves out?"

"Why, some of it we use in cooking, and the rest I think my
daughter gives to our neighbours."

"To that Blinker, eh?  That's a waste!  If you were to bring it
back to me, I could easily sell it over again and we could both of
us make something.  The hunters who come up from Three Rivers in
winter carry nothing but cold grease to fill their bellies.  You
forget you are not in France, monsieur.  Here grease is meat, not
something to throw to criminals."

"I will consider the matter, madame.  Now that I am sure of my
lard, I must go and select my birds.  Good morning, and thank you."

After he had finished his marketing, Auclair put his basket down on
the church steps and went inside to say a prayer.  Notre Dame de la
Victoire was a plain, solid little church, built of very hard rough
stone.  It had already stood through one bombardment from the
waterside, and was dear to the people for that reason.  The windows
were narrow and set high, like the windows in a fortress, making an
agreeable dusk inside.  Occasionally, as someone entered to pray, a
flash of sunlight and a buzz of talk came in from the Place, cut
off when the door closed again.

While the apothecary was meditating in the hush and dusk of the
church, he noticed a little boy, kneeling devoutly at one after
another of the Stations of the Cross.  He was at once interested,
for he knew this child very well; a chunky, rather clumsy little
boy of six, unkept and uncared for, dressed in a pair of old
sailor's breeches, cut off in the leg for him and making a great
bulk of loose cloth about his thighs.  His ragged jacket was as
much too tight as the trousers were too loose, and this gave him
the figure of a salt-shaker.  He did not look at Auclair or the
several others who came and went, being entirely absorbed in his
devotions.  His lips moved inaudibly, he knelt and rose slowly,
clumsily, very carefully, his cap under his arm.  Though all his
movements were so deliberate, his attention did not wander,--seemed
intently, heavily fixed.  Auclair carefully remained in the shadow,
making no sign of recognition.  He respected the child's
seriousness.

This boy was the son of 'Toinette Gaux, a young woman who was quite
irreclaimable.  Antoinette was Canadian-born; her mother had been
one of the "King's Girls," as they were called.  Thirty years ago
King Louis had sent several hundred young Frenchwomen out to Canada
to marry the bachelors of the disbanded regiment of Carignan-
Salières.  Many of these girls were orphans or poor girls of good
character; but some were bad enough, and 'Toinette's mother proved
one of the worst.  She had one daughter, this 'Toinette,--as pretty
and as worthless a girl as ever made eyes at the sailors in any
seaport town in France.  It once happened that 'Toinette fell in
love, and then she made great promises of reform.  One of the hands
on La Gironde had come down with a fever in Quebec and was lying
sick in the Hôtel Dieu when his ship sailed for France.  After he
was discharged from the hospital, he found himself homeless in a
frontier town in winter, too weak to work.  'Toinette took him in,
drove her old sweethearts away, and married him.  But soon after
this boy, Jacques, was born, she returned to her old ways, and her
husband disappeared.  It was thought that his shipmates had hidden
him on board La Gironde and taken him home.

'Toinette and another woman now kept a sailors' lodging-house in
the Lower Town, up beyond the King's warehouses.  They were
commonly called La Grenouille and L'Escargot, because, every
summer, when the ships from France began to come in, they stuck in
their window two placards:  "FROGS," "SNAILS," to attract the
hungry sailors, whether they had those delicacies on hand or not.
'Toinette, called La Grenouille, was still good to look at; yellow
hair, red cheeks, lively blue eyes, an impudent red mouth over
small pointed teeth, like a squirrel's.  Her partner, the poor
snail, was a vacant creature, scarcely more than half-witted,--and
the hard work, of course, was put off on her.

This unfortunate child, Jacques, in spite of his bad surroundings,
was a very decent little fellow.  He told the truth, he tried to be
clean, he was devoted to Cécile and her father.  When he came to
their house to play, they endeavoured to give him some sort of
bringing-up, though it was difficult, because his mother was
fiercely jealous.

It was two years ago, soon after her mother's death, that Cécile
had first noticed Jacques playing about the market place, and begun
to bring him home with her, wash his face, and give him a piece of
good bread to eat.  Auclair thought it natural for a little girl to
adopt a friendless child, to want something to care for after
having helped to care for her mother so long.  But he did not
greatly like the idea of anything at all coming from La
Grenouille's house to his, and he was determined to deprive Cécile
of her playfellow if he saw any signs of his bad blood.  Observing
the little boy closely, he had come to feel a real affection for
him.

Once, not long ago, when the children were having their goûter in
the salon, and the apothecary was writing at his desk, he overheard
Jacques telling Cécile where he would kick any boy who broke down
his beaver-dam, and he used a nasty word.

"Oh, Jacques!" Cécile exclaimed, "that is some horrible word you
have heard the sailors say!"

Auclair, glancing through the partition, saw the child's pale face
stiffen and his round eyes stare; he said nothing at all, but he
looked frightened.  The apothecary guessed at once that it was not
from a sailor but from La Grenouille herself he had got that
expression.

Cécile went on scolding him.  "Now I am going to do what the
Sisters at the convent do when a child says anything naughty.  Come
into the kitchen, and I will wash your mouth out with soap.  It is
the only way to make your mouth clean."

All this time Jacques said nothing.  He went obediently into the
kitchen with Cécile, and when he came back he was wiping his eyes
with the back of his hand.

"Is it gone?" he asked solemnly.

This morning, as Auclair watched Jacques at his devotions, it
occurred to him that the boatmen who brought the merchants up from
Montreal to see the Count were doubtless staying with La
Grenouille.  Likely enough something rowdy had gone on there last
night, and the little boy felt a need of expiation.  The apothecary
went out of the church softly and took up his basket.  All the way
up the hill he wondered why La Grenouille should have a boy like
that.

When he reached home, he called Cécile, who was busy in the room
upstairs, where she slept until cold weather.  As he gave her his
basket, he asked her whether she had seen Jacques lately.

"No, I haven't happened to.  Why, is anything the matter?"

"Oh, nothing that I know of.  But I saw him in church just now,
saying his prayers at the Stations of the Cross, and I felt sorry
for him.  Perhaps he is getting old enough to realize."

"Was he clean, Papa?"

The apothecary shook his head.

"Far from clean.  I never saw him so badly off.  His toes were
sticking out of his shoes, and when he knelt I could see that he
had no stockings on."

"Oh, dear, and I have never finished the pair I began for him!
Papa, if you were to let me off from reading to you for a few
evenings, I could soon get them done."

"But his shoes, daughter!  It would be a mere waste to give the
child new stockings.  And shoes are very dear."

Cécile sat down for a moment and thought, while her father put on
his shop apron.  "Papa," she said suddenly, "would you allow me to
speak to the Count?  He is kind to children, and I believe he would
get Jacques some shoes."



II


That afternoon Cécile ran up the hill with a light heart.  She was
always glad of a reason for going to the Château,--often slipped
into the courtyard merely to see who was on guard duty.  Her little
friend Giorgio, the drummer boy, was at his post on the steps
before the great door, and the moment he saw Cécile he snatched his
drumsticks from his trousers pocket and executed a rapid flourish
in the air above his drum, making no noise.  Cécile laughed, and
the boy grinned.  This was an old joke, but they still found it
amusing.  Giorgio was stationed there to announce the arrival of
the commanding officer, and of all distinguished persons, by a
flourish on his drum.  The drum-call echoed amazingly in the empty
court, could be heard even in the apothecary shop down the hill, so
that one always knew when the Count had visitors.

Cécile told the soldier on duty that she would like to see Picard,
the Count's valet, and while she waited for him, she went up the
steps to talk with Giorgio and to ask him if his cold were better,
and when he had last heard from his mother.

The boy's real name was Georges Million; his family lived over on
the Île d'Orléans, and his father was a farmer, Canadian-born.  But
the old grandfather, who was of course the head of the house, had
come from Haute-Savoie as a drummer in the Carignan-Salières
regiment.  He played the Alpine horn as well, and still performed
on the flute at country weddings.  This grandson, Georges, took
after him,--was musical and wanted nothing in the world but a
soldier's life.  When he was fifteen, he came into Quebec and
begged the Governor to let him enter the native militia.  He was
very small for his age, but he was a good-looking boy, and the
Count took him on as a drummer until he should grow tall enough to
enlist.  He put him into a blue coat, high boots, and a three-
cornered hat, and stationed him at the door to welcome visitors.
For some reason the Count always called him Giorgio, and that had
become his name in Quebec.

Giorgio's life was monotonous; his duties were to keep clean and
trim, and to stand perfectly idle in a draughty courtyard for hours
at a time.  There were very few distinguished persons in Quebec,
and not all of those were on calling terms with Count Frontenac.
The Intendant, de Champigny, came to the Château when it was
necessary, but his relations with the Count were formal rather than
cordial.  Sometimes, indeed, he brought Madame de Champigny with
him, and when they rolled up in their carrosse, Giorgio had a great
opportunity.  Old Bishop Laval, who would properly have been
announced by the drum, had not crossed the threshold of the Château
for years.  The new Bishop had called but twice since his return
from France.  Dollier de Casson, Superior of the Sulpician Seminary
at Montreal, was a person to be greeted by the drum, and so was
Jacques Le Ber, the rich merchant.  Sometimes Daniel du Lhut, the
explorer in command of Fort Frontenac, came to Quebec, and, very
rarely, Henri de Tonti,--that one-armed hero who had an iron hook
in place of a hand.  For all Indian chiefs and messengers, too,
Giorgio could beat his drum long and loud.  This form of welcome
was very gratifying to the savages.  But often the days passed one
after another when the drummer had no one to salute but the
officers of the fort, and life was very dull for him.

When a friendly soldier was on guard, Cécile would often run in to
give the drummer boy some cardamon seeds or raisins from her
father's shop, and to gossip with him for a while.  This afternoon
their talk was cut short by the arrival of the Count's valet,
through whom one approached his master.  Picard had been with the
Count since the Turkish wars, and Cécile had known him ever since
she could remember.  He took her by the hand and led her into the
Château and upstairs to the Count's private apartment in the south
wing.

The apartment was of but two rooms, a dressing-cabinet and a long
room with windows on two sides, which was both chamber and study.
The Governor was seated at a writing-table in the south end, a
considerable distance from his fireplace and his large curtained
bed.  He was nearly eighty years old, but he had changed very
little since Cécile could remember him, except that his teeth had
grown yellow.  He still walked, rode, struck, as vigorously as
ever, and only two years ago he had gone hundreds of miles into the
wilderness on one of the hardest Indian campaigns of his life.
When Picard spoke to him, he laid down his pen, beckoned Cécile
with a long forefinger, put his arm about her familiarly, and drew
her close to his side, inquiring about her health and her father's.
As he talked to her, his eyes took on a look of uneasy, mocking
playfulness, with a slightly sarcastic curl of the lips.  Cécile
was not afraid of him.  He had always been one of the important
figures in her life; when she was little she used to like to sit on
his knee, because he wore such white linen, and satin waistcoats
with jewelled buttons.  He took great care of his person when he
was at home.  Nothing annoyed him so much as his agent's neglecting
to send him his supply of lavender-water by the first boat in the
spring.  It vexed him more than a sharp letter from the Minister,
or even from the King.

After replying to his courtesies Cécile began at once:

"Monsieur le Comte, you know little Jacques Gaux, the son of La
Grenouille?"

The old soldier nodded and sniffed, drooping the lid slightly over
one eye,--an expression of his regard for a large class of women.
She understood.

"But he is a good little boy, Monsieur le Comte, and he cannot help
it about his mother.  You know she neglects him, and just now he is
very badly off for shoes.  I am knitting him some stockings, but
the shoes we cannot manage."

"And if I were to give you an order on the cobbler?  That is soon
done.  It is very nice of you to knit stockings for him.  Do you
knit your own?"

"Of course, monsieur!  And my father's."

The old Count looked at her from out his deep eye-sockets, and felt
for the hard spots on her palm.  "You are content down there,
keeping house for your father?  Not much time for play, I take it?"

"Oh, everything we do, my father and I, is a kind of play."

He gave a dry chuckle.  "Well said!  Everything we do is.  It gets
rather tiresome,--but not at your age, perhaps.  I am very well
pleased with you, Cécile, because you do so well for your father.
We have too many idle girls in Kebec, and I cannot say that Kebec
is exceptional.  I have been about the world a great deal, and I
have found only one country where the women like to work,--in
Holland.  They have made an ugly country very pretty."  He slipped
a piece of money into her hand.  "That is for your charities.  Get
the frog's son what he needs, and Picard will give Noël Pommier an
order for his shoes.  And is there nothing you would like for
yourself?  I have never forgot what a brave sailor you were on the
voyage over.  You cried only once, and that was when we were coming
into the Gulf, and a bird of prey swooped down and carried off a
little bird that perched on one of our yard-arms.  I wish I had
some sweetmeats; you do not often pay me a visit."

"Perhaps you would let me look at your glass fruit," Cécile
suggested.

The Count got up and led her to the mantelpiece.  Between the tall
silver candlesticks stood a crystal bowl full of glowing fruits of
coloured glass: purple figs, yellow-green grapes with gold vine-
leaves, apricots, nectarines, and a dark citron stuck up endwise
among the grapes.  The fruits were hollow, and the light played in
them, throwing coloured reflections into the mirror and upon the
wall above.

"That was a present from a Turkish prisoner whose life I spared
when I was holding the island of Crete," the Count told her.  "It
was made by the Saracens.  They blow it into those shapes while the
glass is melted.  Every piece is hollow; that is why they look
alive.  Here in Canada it reminds one of the South.  You admire
it?"

"More than anything I have ever seen," said Cécile fervently.

He laughed.  "I like it myself, or I should not have taken so much
trouble to bring it over.  I think I must leave it to you in my
will."

"Oh, thank you, monsieur, but it is quite enough to look at it; one
would never forget it.  It is much lovelier than real fruit."  She
curtsied and thanked him again and went out softly to where Picard
was waiting for her in the hall.  She wished that she could some
time go there when the Count was away, and look as long as she
pleased at the glass fruit and at the tapestries on the walls of
the long room.  They were from his estate at Île Savary and
represented garden scenes.  One could study them for hours without
seeing all the flowers and figures.



III


The next morning Auclair sent Cécile up to the Ursuline convent
with some borax de Venise which the Mother Superior required, and a
bottle of asafoetida for one of the Sisters who was ailing.  At this
time of year Cécile always felt a little homesick for the Sisters
and her old life at the Ursuline school.  She had left it so early,
because of her mother's illness, and she never passed the garden
walls without looking wistfully at the tree-tops which rose above
them.  From her walks on Cap Diamant she could look down into the
rectangular courts and see, through the leafless boughs, the rows
of dormer windows in the white roofs, each opening into a Sister's
bare little room.  One teacher she loved better than any of the
others: Sister Anne de Sainte-Rose, who taught history and the
French language.  She was a niece of the Bishop of Tours, had been
happily married, and had led a brilliant life in the great world.
Only after the death of her young husband and infant son had she
become a religious.  She had charm and wit and the remains of great
beauty--everything that would appeal to a little girl brought up on
a rude frontier.  Cécile still saw her when she went to the convent
on errands, and she was always invited to the little miracle plays
which Sister Anne had the pensionnaires give at Christmas-time, for
the good of their French and their deportment.  But her little
visits with her teacher were very short,--stolen pleasures.  The
nuns were always busy, and if you once dropped out of the school
life, you could not share it any more.

This morning she did not see Sister Anne at all; and after
delivering her packages to Sister Agatha, the porteress, she turned
away to enjoy the weather.  It was on days like this that she loved
her town best.  The autumn fog was rolling in from the river so
thick that she seemed to be walking through drifts of brown cloud.
Only a few roofs and spires stood out in the fog, detached and
isolated: the flèche of the Récollet chapel, the slate roof of the
Château, the long, grey outline of Bishop Laval's Seminary,
floating in the sky.  Everything else was blotted out by rolling
vapours that were constantly changing in density and colour; now
brown, now amethyst, now reddish lavender, with sometimes a glow of
orange overhead where the sun was struggling behind the thick
weather.

It was like walking in a dream.  One could not see the people one
passed, or the river, or one's own house.  Not even the winter
snows gave one such a feeling of being cut off from everything and
living in a world of twilight and miracles.  After loitering on her
way, she set off for the Lower Town to look for Jacques.

Cécile never on any account went to his mother's house to find him.
Sometimes, in searching for him, she went behind the King's
warehouses, as far as the stone paving extended.  Beyond the paving
the strip of beach directly underneath Cap Diamant grew so narrow
that there was room for barely a dozen houses to sit in a straight
line against the foot of the cliff, and they were the slum of
Quebec.  Respectability stopped with the cobble-stones.

This morning she did not have to go so far; she found Jacques in a
group of little boys who had kindled a fire of sticks at the foot
of Notre Dame street, behind the church.  Before she came up to the
children, a light sprinkle began to fall.  In a few seconds all the
brownish-lilac masses of vapour melted away, leaving a lead-
coloured sky, and the rain came down in streams, like water poured
from a great height.  Cécile caught Jacques by the arm and ran with
him into the church, which had often been a refuge to them in
winter.  Not that the church was ever heated, but in there one was
out of the wind, and perhaps the bright colours made one feel the
cold less.  This morning the church was empty, except for an old
man and three women at their prayers.  There were a few benches on
either side of the nave, for old people who could not stand during
mass, and the children slipped into one of these, sitting close
together to keep warm.

"It's been a long time since we were in here together," Cécile
whispered.

He nodded.

"But you come in to say your prayers, don't you, every day?"

"I think so," he answered vaguely.

"That is right.  I like this church better than any other.  Even in
the chapel of the Ursulines I don't feel so much at home, though I
used to be there every day when I was going to school.  This is our
own church, isn't it, Jacques?"

He glanced up at her and smiled faintly.  This child never looked
very well.  He was not thin,--rather chunky, on the contrary,--but
there was no colour in his cheeks, or even in his lips.  That,
Cécile knew, was because he wasn't properly nourished.

"You might tell me about some nice saint," said Jacques presently.
She began to whisper the story of Saint Anthony of Padua, who stood
quite near them, ruddy and handsome, with a sheaf of lilies on one
arm and the Holy Child on the other.

It chanced that this one church* in the Lower Town, near Jacques's
little world, where he and Cécile had so often made rendezvous, was
peculiarly the church of childhood.  It had been renamed Notre Dame
de la Victoire five years ago, after the Count had driven off Sir
William Phips's besieging fleet, in recognition of the protection
which Our Lady had afforded Quebec in that hour of danger.  But
originally it was called the Church of the Infant Jesus, and the
furnishings and decorations which had been sent over from France
were appropriate for a church of that name.


* The charm of this old church was greatly spoiled by unfortunate
alterations in the lighting, made in the autumn of 1929.


Two paintings hung in the Lady Chapel, both of Sainte Geneviève as
a little girl.  In one she sat under a tree in a meadow, with a
flock of sheep all about her, and a distaff in her hand, while two
angels watched her from a distance.  In the other she was reading
an illuminated scroll,--but here, too, she was in a field and
surrounded by her flock.

The high altar was especially interesting to children, though it
was not nearly so costly or so beautiful as the altar in the
Ursulines' chapel with its delicate gold-work.  It was very simple
indeed,--but definite.  It was a representation of a feudal castle,
all stone walls and towers.  The outer wall was low and thick, with
many battlements; the second was higher, with fewer battlements;
the third seemed to be the wall of the palace itself, with towers
and many windows.  Within the arched gateway (hung with little
velvet curtains that were green or red or white according to the
day) the Host was kept.  Cécile had always taken it for granted
that the Kingdom of Heaven looked exactly like this from the
outside and was surrounded by just such walls; that this altar was
a reproduction of it, made in France by people who knew; just as
the statues of the saints and of the Holy Family were portraits.
She had taught Jacques to believe the same thing, and it was very
comforting to them both to know just what Heaven looked like,--
strong and unassailable, wherever it was set among the stars.

Out of this walled castle rose three tall stone towers, with holy
figures on them.  On one stood a grave Sainte Anne, regally clad
like a great lady of this world, with a jewelled coronet upon her
head.  On her arm sat a little dark-skinned Virgin, her black hair
cut straight across the back like a scholar's, her hands joined in
prayer.  Sainte Anne was noble in bearing, but not young; her
delicately featured face was rather worn by life, and sad.  She
seemed to know beforehand all the sorrows of her own family, and of
the world it was to succour.

On the central tower, which was the tallest and rose almost to the
roof of the church, the Blessed Mother and Child stood high up
among the shadows.  Today, with the leaden sky and floods of rain,
it was too dark up there to see her clearly; but the children
thought they saw her, because they knew her face so well.  She was
by far the loveliest of all the Virgins in Kebec, a charming figure
of young motherhood,--oh, very young, and radiantly happy, with a
stately crown, and a long, blue cloak that parted in front over a
scarlet robe.  The little Jesus on her arm was not a baby,--he
looked as if he would walk if she put him down, and walk very well.
He was so intelligent and gay, a child in a bright and joyful mood,
both arms outstretched in a gesture of welcome, as if he were
giving a fête for his little friends and were in the act of
receiving them.  He was a little Lord indeed, in his gaiety and
graciousness and savoir-faire.

The rain fell on the roof and drove against the windows.  Outside,
the ledges of bare rock and all the sloping streets were running
water; everything was slippery and shiny with wet.  The children
sat contentedly in their corner, feeling the goodness of shelter.
Jacques remarked that it would be nice if there were more candles.
The tapers on the votive candle-stand were burning low, and nobody
was coming in now because of the downpour.  It was pleasanter, they
agreed, when there were enough candles burning before Sainte Anne
to show the gold flowers on her cloak.

"Why don't you light a candle, Cécile?" Jacques asked.  "You do,
sometimes."

"Yes, but this morning I haven't any money with me."

Jacques sighed.  "It would be nice," he repeated.

"I wonder, Jacques, if it would be wrong for me to take a candle,
and then bring the ten sous down later, when the rain stops."

Jacques brightened.  He thought that a very good idea.

"But it's irregular, Jacques.  Perhaps it would not be right."

"You wouldn't forget, would you?"

"Oh, no!  But I might be struck by lightning or something on the
way home.  And then, I expect, I'd die in sin."

"But I would tell your father, and he would give me the ten sous to
put in the box.  I wouldn't forget."

She saw he wanted very much to light a candle.  "Well, perhaps.
I'll try it this once, and I'll light one for you, too.  Only be
sure you don't forget, if anything happens to me."

They went softly up to the feet of Sainte Anne, where the candles
were burning down in the metal basin.  Each of them took a fresh
taper from the box underneath, lit it, and fitted its hollow base
upon one of the little metal horns.  After saying a prayer they
returned to their bench to enjoy the sight of the two new bright
spots in the brownish gloom.  Sure enough, when the fresh tapers
were burning well, the gold flowers on Sainte Anne's cloak began to
show; not entire, but wherever there was a fold in the mantle, the
gold seemed to flow like a glistening liquid.  Her figure emerged
from the dusk in a rich, oily, yellow light.

After a long silence Jacques spoke.

"Cécile, all the saints in this church like children, don't they?"

"Oh, yes!  And Our Lord loves children.  Because He was a child
Himself, you know."

Jacques had something else in mind.  In a moment he brought it out.
"Sometimes sailors are fond of children, too."

"Yes," she agreed with some hesitation.

He sensed a reservation in her voice.

"And they're awful brave," he went on feelingly.  "If it wasn't for
the sailors, we wouldn't have any ships from France, or anything."

"That's true," Cécile assented.

Jacques relapsed into silence.  He was thinking of a jolly Breton
sailor who had played with him in the summer, and carved him a
marvellous beaver out of wood and painted its teeth white.  He had
sailed away on La Garonne three weeks ago, nearly breaking
Jacques's heart.  With that curious tact of childhood, which fails
less often than the deepest diplomacy, Jacques almost never
referred to his mother or her house or the people who came there,
when he was with Cécile and her father.  When he went to see them,
he left his little past behind him, as it were.

At last the fall of water on the roof grew fainter, and the light
clearer.  Cécile said she must be going home now.  "Come along with
me, Jacques.  Never mind about your clothes," seeing that he hung
back, "that will be all right.  Perhaps my father will give you a
bath while I am getting our déjeuner, and we will all have our
chocolate together."

As they quitted their bench, someone entered the church; a very
heavy, tall old man with wide, stooping shoulders and a head
hanging forward.  When he took off his shovel hat at the door, a
black skull-cap still remained over his scanty locks.  He carried a
cane and seemed to move his legs with some difficulty under his
long, black gown.  It was old Bishop Laval himself, who had been
storm-bound for an hour and more at the house of one of the
merchants on the square.  Cécile hurried up to him before he should
have time to kneel.

"Excuse me, Monseigneur l'Ancien," she said respectfully, "but if
it is quite convenient would you be so kind as to lend me twenty
sous?"

The old man looked down at her, frowning.  His eyes were large and
full, but set deep back under his forehead.  He had such a very
large, drooping nose, and such a grim, bitter mouth, that he might
well have frightened a child who didn't know him.  With
considerable difficulty he got a little black purse out from under
his gown.  There was not much in it.

"You see," Cécile explained, "the little boy and I wished to offer
candles, and I had no money with me.  I was going up to my father's
shop to get some, but I would rather not leave the church owing for
the candles."

The old man nodded and looked slightly amused.  He put two pieces
in her hand, and she went to the front of the church to slip them
in the box, leaving Jacques, who had got back against the wall as
far as he could go, to bear the scrutiny of the Bishop's
smouldering eyes.  When she came back, she found them regarding
each other in silence, but very intently; the old man staring down
from his height, the little boy, his finger in his mouth, looking
up at the Bishop shyly, but in a way that struck her as very
personal.  Cécile took him by the hand and led him to the door.
Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw the Bishop sink heavily to
his knees with something between a sigh and a groan.

Everything was glittering when they stepped out into the square; no
sun yet, but a bright rain-grey light, silver and cut steel and
pearl on the grey roofs and walls.  Long veils of smoky fog were
caught in the pine forests across the river.  And how fresh the air
smelled!

"Jacques," Cécile asked wonderingly, "do you know Monseigneur
Laval?  Did he ever talk to you?"

"I think once he did."

"What about?"

"I don't remember."

They went hand in hand up the hill.



He both did and did not remember; it came back to him in flashes,
unrelated pictures, like a dream.  Perhaps it was a dream.  He
could never have told Cécile about it, since it was hard for him to
talk even about things he knew very well.  But whenever he chanced
to see old Bishop Laval, he felt that once, long ago, something
pleasant had happened between them.

It had happened two years ago, when he was only four, before he
knew the Auclairs at all.  It was in January.  A light, sticky snow
had fallen irresolutely, at intervals, all day.  Toward evening the
weather changed; the sun emerged, just sinking over the great pine
forest to the west, hung there, an angry ball, and all the snow-
covered rock blazed in orange fire.  The sun became a half-circle,
then a mere red eyebrow, then dropped behind the forest, leaving
the air clear blue, and much colder, with a pale lemon moon riding
high overhead.  There was no wind, it was a night of still
moonlight, and within an hour after sunset the wet snow had frozen
fast over roofs and spires and trees.  Everything on the rock was
sheathed in glittering white ice.  It was a sight to stir the
dullest blood.  Some trappers from Three Rivers were in town.  They
had supper with La Grenouille, and afterwards persuaded her to go
for a ride in their dog-sledges up the frozen St. Lawrence.
Jacques was in bed asleep.  'Toinette threw an extra blanket over
him and put an armful of wood in the stove, then went off with the
young men, taking L'Escargot with her.  She meant to be out only an
hour or two; but they had plenty of brandy along to keep them warm,
and so they made a night of it.  Dog-sledging by moonlight on that
broad marble highway, with no wind, was fine sport.

After she had been gone a couple of hours, Jacques wakened up very
cold and called for his mother.  Presently he got up and went to
look for her.  He went to L'Escargot's bed, and that, too, was
empty.  The moonlight shone in brightly, but the fire had gone out,
and all about him things creaked with the cold.  He found his shoes
and an old shawl and went out into the snow to look for his mother.
The poor neighbour houses were silent.  He went behind the King's
storehouse and up Notre Dame street to the market square.  The
worthy merchants were long ago in bed, and all the houses were dark
except one, where the mother of the family was very sick.  The
statue of King Louis, with a cloak and helmet of snow, looked
terrifying in the moonlight.  Jacques already knew better than to
knock at that solid, comfortable house where he saw a lighted
window; he knew his mother wasn't well thought of by these rich
people.  Not knowing where to turn, he took the only forward way
there was, up Mountain Hill.

Luckily, one other person was abroad that night.  Old Bishop Laval,
who never spared himself, had been down to the square to sit with
the sick woman.  He came toiling up the hill in his fur cloak and
his tall fur cap, which was almost as imposing as his episcopal
mitre, a cane in one hand, a lantern in the other.  His valet
followed behind.  They were passing the new Bishop's Palace, now
cold and empty, as Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier was in France.
Just as they wound under the retaining wall of the terrace, they
heard a child crying.  The Bishop stopped and flashed his lantern
this way and that.  On the flight of stone steps that led up
through the wall to the episcopal residence, he saw a little boy,
almost a baby, sitting in the snow, crouching back against the
masonry.

"Where does he belong?" asked the Bishop of his donné.

"Ah, that I cannot tell, Monseigneur," replied Houssart.

"Pick him up and bring him along," said the Bishop.

"Unbutton your coat and hold him against your body."  The lantern
moved on.

The old Bishop lived in the Priests' House, built as a part of his
Seminary.  His private rooms were poor and small.  All his silver
plate and velvet and linen he had given away little by little, to
needy parishes, to needy persons.  He had given away the revenues
of his abbeys in France, and had transferred his vast grants of
Canadian land to the Seminary.  He lived in naked poverty.

When they reached home, he commanded Houssart to build a fire in
the fireplace at once (had he been alone he would have undressed
and gone to bed in the cold) and to heat water, that he might give
the child a warm bath.

"Is there any milk?" he asked.

Houssart hesitated.  "A little, for your chocolate in the morning,
Monseigneur."

"Get it and put it to warm on the hearth.  Pour a little cognac in
it, and bring any bread there is in the house."

One strange thing Jacques could remember afterwards.  He was
sitting on the edge of a narrow bed, wrapped in a blanket, in the
light of a blazing fire.  He had just been washed in warm water;
the basin was still on the floor.  Beside it knelt a very large old
man with big eyes and a great drooping nose and a little black cap
on his head, and he was rubbing Jacques's feet and legs very softly
with a towel.  They were all alone then, just the two of them, and
the fire was bright enough to see clearly.  What he remembered
particularly was that this old man, after he had dried him like
this, bent down and took his foot in his hand and kissed it; first
the one foot, then the other.  That much Jacques remembered.

When the servant returned, they gave the child warm milk with a
little bread in it, and put him into the Bishop's bed, though
Houssart begged to take him to his own.

"No, we will not move him.  He is falling asleep already.  I do not
know if that flush means a fever or not."

"Monseigneur," Houssart whispered, "now that I have seen him in the
light, I recognize this child.  He is the son of that 'Toinette
Gaux, the woman they call La Grenouille."

"Ah!" the old man nodded thoughtfully.  "That, too, may have a
meaning.  Throw more wood on the fire and go.  I shall rest here in
my arm-chair with my fur coat over my knees until it is time to
ring the bell."  The Bishop got up at four o'clock every morning,
dressed without a fire, went with his lantern into the church, and
rang the bell for early mass for the working people.  Many good
people who did not want to go to mass at all, when they heard that
hoarse, frosty bell clanging out under the black sky where there
was not yet even a hint of daybreak, groaned and went to the
church.  Because they thought of the old Bishop at the end of the
bell-rope, and because his will was stronger than theirs.  He was a
stubborn, high-handed, tyrannical, quarrelsome old man, but no one
could deny that he shepherded his sheep.

When his donné had gone and he was left with the sleeping child,
the Bishop settled his swollen legs upon a stool, covered them with
his cloak, and sank into meditation.  This was not an accident, he
felt.  Why had he found, on the steps of that costly episcopal
residence built in scorn of him and his devotion to poverty, a male
child, half-clad and crying in the merciless cold?  Why had this
reminder of his Infant Saviour been just there, under that house
which he never passed without bitterness, which was like a thorn in
his flesh?  Had he been too much absorbed in his struggles with
governors and intendants, in the heavy labour of founding and
fixing his church upon this rock, in training a native priesthood
and safeguarding their future?

Monseigneur de Laval had not always been a man of means and
measures.  Long ago, in Bernières's Hermitage at Caen, his life had
been wholly given up to meditation and prayer.  Not until he was
sent out to Canada to convert a frontier mission into an enduring
part of the Church had he become a man of action.  His life, as he
reviewed it, fell into two even periods.  The first thirty-six
years had been given to purely personal religion, to bringing his
mind and will into subjection to his spiritual guides.  The last
thirty-six years had been spent in bringing the minds and wills of
other people into subjection to his own,--since he had but one
will, and that was the supremacy of the Church in Canada.  Might
this occurrence tonight be a sign that it was time to return to
that rapt and mystical devotion of his earlier life?

In the morning, after he returned from offering early mass in the
church, before it was yet light, the Bishop sent his man about over
the hill, to this house and that, wherever there were young
children, begging of one shoes, of another a little frock,--
whatever the mother could spare from the backs of her own brood.

'Toinette Gaux had returned home meanwhile, and was frightened at
missing her son.  But she was ashamed to go out and look for him.
Some neighbour would bring him back, she thought,--and, insolent as
she was, she dreaded the moment.  She got her deserts, certainly,
when two long, black shadows fell upon the glistening snow before
her door; the Bishop in his tall fur cap, prodding the icy crust
with his cane, and behind him Houssart, carrying the little boy.

The Bishop came in without knocking, and motioned his man to put
the child down and withdraw.  He stood for some moments confronting
the woman in silence.  'Toinette was no fool; she felt all his
awfulness; the long line of noble blood and authority behind him,
the power of the Church and the power of the man.  She wished the
earth would swallow her.  Not a shred of her impudence was left
her.  Her tongue went dry.  His silence was so dreadful that it was
a relief when he began to thunder and tell her that even the beasts
of the forest protected their young (Les ourses et les louves
protègent leurs petits).  He meant to watch over this boy, he said;
if she neglected him, he would take the child and put him with the
Sisters of the Congregation, not here, but in Montreal, to place
him as far as possible from a worthless mother.

'Toinette knew that he would do it, too.  When she was a little
girl, she used to hear talk about just such a high-handed
proceeding of the Bishop's.  A rich man in Quebec had brought a
girl over from France to work as a bonne in his family.  The Bishop
thought she did not come to mass often enough and was not receiving
proper religious training.  So one day when he met her on the
street, he took her by the hand and led her to the Ursuline convent
and put her with the cloistered Sisters.  There she stayed until
the Governor gave her master a warrant to search the rock for his
maid and take her wherever he found her.  But 'Toinette knew that a
woman of her sort, without money or good repute, had little chance
of getting her boy back if once the Bishop took him away.

She kept Jacques in the house all the rest of the winter, and never
went out herself except L'Escargot was there to watch him.  It was
not until the summer ships came, bringing new lovers and new
distractions, that Jacques was allowed to go into the streets to
play.



IV


Cécile was taking Jacques to Noël Pommier to be measured for his
shoes.  The cobbler lived half-way down Holy Family Hill, the steep
street that plunged from the Cathedral down toward the St.
Lawrence.  There were other shoemakers in Quebec, but all persons
of quality went to Pommier, unless they had had a short answer from
him at some time.  He would not hurry a piece of work for anybody,--
not for the Count or the Intendant or the Bishop.  If anyone tried
to hurry him, he became surly and was likely to say something that
a self-important person could not allow himself to overlook.  It
was rumoured that he had spoken unbecomingly to the valet of
Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier, and had told him it would be better
if his master had all his shoes made in Paris, where he spent so
much of his time.  Certainly the new Bishop had ceased to patronize
him, which was a grief to Pommier's pious mother.

When the children entered the cobbler's door, they found him seated
at his bench with a shoe between his knees, sewing the sole to the
upper.  Seeing that it was M. Auclair's daughter, he rose and put
down his work.  He was a thick-set man with stooped shoulders; his
head was grown over with coarse black hair cut short like bristles,
his fleshy face was dark red, and seamed with hard creases.  The
purple veins that spread like little roots about his nostrils
suggested an occasional indulgence in brandy.  When Pommier stood
up, with his blackened hands hanging beside his leather apron, and
his corded, hairy arms bare to the elbow, he looked like a black
bear standing upright.  His eyes, too, were small like a bear's,
and somewhat bloodshot.

"Bonjour, Mademoiselle Cécile, what can I do for you?"

"If you please, Monsieur Pommier, I have brought little Jacques
Gaux to be measured for his shoes.  Has the Count's valet spoken to
you about it?"

Pommier nodded.  "Sit down there, little man, and let me see."  He
put Jacques down on a straw-topped stool (an old one his father had
brought from Rouen, along with his bench and tools), took off the
wretched foot-gear he had on, and began to study his feet and to
make measurements.

While this was going on in deep silence, a door at the back of the
house opened, and Pommier's mother, a thin, lively old woman with a
crutch, came tapping lightly across the living-room and into the
shop.  She embraced Cécile with delight, and spoke very kindly to
Jacques when he was presented to her.

"I have never seen this little fellow before, since I don't get
about much, but I like to know all the children in Quebec.  You
will be very content with fine new shoes, my boy?"

"Oui, madame," Jacques murmured.

"And you have quite neglected me of late, Cécile.  I know you are
busy enough down there, but I have been looking for you every day
since the ships sailed.  My son saw your father at the market
yesterday and observed that he was laying in good supplies for
you."  Madame Pommier seated herself on one of the wooden chairs
without backs and rested her crutch across her knees.  She always
came into the shop when there were clients, and she liked to know
what her son was doing every minute of the day.

When Cécile was little, Madame Pommier used to come to see her
mother very often.  She was one of the first friends Madame Auclair
made in Quebec, and had given her a great deal of help in her
struggle to keep house in a place where there were none of the
conveniences to which she was accustomed.  The Pommiers themselves
were old residents, had lived here ever since this Noël was a young
lad, and his father had been the Count's shoemaker during his first
governorship, twenty-odd years ago.  Just about the time that
Madame Auclair's health began to fail, Madame Pommier had fallen on
the icy hill in front of her own door and broken her hip.  The good
chirurgien Gervaise Beaudoin attended her, but though the bone
knit, it came together badly and left one leg much shorter than the
other.  M. Auclair had made a crutch for her, and as she was slight
and very active, she was soon able to get about in her own house
and attend to her duties.  Many a time Cécile had found her by her
stove, the crutch under her left arm, handling her pots and
casseroles as deftly as if she were not propped up by a wooden
stick.  Sometimes in winter she even got to mass.  Her son had set
an arm-chair upon runners, and in this he pushed her up the hill
over the snow to the Cathedral.

After the cobbler had made his measurements and noted them down, he
took up his work again and began driving his awl through the
leather, drawing the big needle with waxed thread through after it.
Tools of any sort had a fascination for Cécile; she loved to watch
a shoemaker or a carpenter at work.  Jacques, who had never seen
anything of the kind before, followed Pommier's black fingers with
astonishment.  They both sat quietly, and the old lady joined them
in admiringly watching her clever son.  Suddenly she bethought
herself of something, and pointed with her crutch to a little
cabinet of shelves covered by a curtain.  There ladies' shoes, sent
in for repair or made to order, were kept, as being rather too
personal to expose on the open shelves with the men's boots.

"Tirez, tirez," whispered Madame Pommier.  Cécile got up and drew
back the curtain, and at once knew what the old lady wished her to
see: a beautiful pair of red satin slippers, embroidered in gold
and purple, with leather soles and red leather heels.

"Oh, madame, how lovely!  To whom do they belong?"

"To Monseigneur l'Ancien.  They are his house slippers.  My son is
to put new soles on them,--see, they are almost worn through.
Houssart says he paces his chamber in the night when he is at his
devotions, so that he will not be overcome by sleep."

"But these are so small, can he possibly wear them?  And his walk
is so heavy, too."

"Ah, that is because of his legs, which are bad.  But he has a very
slender foot, very distinguished.  That is the Montmorency in him;
he is of noble blood, you know."

Here Pommier himself reached up to a row of wooden lasts over his
head and handed one of them to Cécile.

"That is his foot, mademoiselle."

Cécile took the smoothly shaped wood in her hands and examined it
curiously.  On the sole Noël had scratched with his awl:  "Mgr.
Lav'."

"And next it," said Madame Pommier, "you will find the Governor's.
He, too, has a fine foot, very high in the arch, but large, as is
needful for a soldier.  And there to the left is the Intendant's,
and Madame de Champigny's."

"Oh, Monsieur Pommier, you have the feet of all the great people
here!  Did you make them all yourself?"

"Ah, no!  Some are from my father's time.  Yes, you may look at
them if it amuses you."

Cécile took them down one after another.  To be sure, they all
looked a good deal alike to her, but she could guess the original
of each form from the awl scratches on the sole.  On one she
spelled the letters "R. CAV."  She was trying to think whose that
might be, when Pommier startled her a little by saying in a very
peculiar tone of voice:

"That foot will not come back."

She could not tell whether he was angry or sorry,--there was
something so harsh in his tone.

"But why, Monsieur Noël, why not?"

"It went too far," he replied with the same bitter shortness.

She stared at the letters.  The old lady beckoned her and traced
over the inscription with her finger.  "That is my husband's
marking; he always made capitals.  It means Robert Cavelier de La
Salle."

Cécile drew a deep breath.  "Monsieur Noël believes he is really
dead, then?"

Noël looked up from his black threads.  "Everyone knows he is dead,
mademoiselle.  The people who say he will come back are fools.  He
was murdered, a thousand miles from here.  Tonti brought the word.
Robert de La Salle has come into this shop many a time when I was a
lad.  He was a true man, mademoiselle, and nobody was true to him,
except Monsieur le Comte; not his own brother, nor his nephew, nor
his King.  It is always like that when there is a great one in a
family.  But I shall always keep his last.  That foot went farther
than any other in New France."  He dropped his eyes and began
driving his awl again.

Cécile knew it would be useless to question him,--such an outburst
was most unusual from Pommier.  But when she got home, she brought
the matter up to her father and asked him whether it was true that
the Abbé Cavelier had turned against his brother.

"I don't know, my dear.  Nobody knows what happened down there.
The Count blames him, but then, the Count always hated the Abbé."



V


It was the afternoon of All Saints' Day, and Jacques had come up
the hill through a driving sleet storm to put on his new shoes for
the first time.  When he had carefully laced them, he stood up in
them and, looking from one to the other of his friends, smiled a
glad, surprised, soft smile.  He was certainly not a handsome
child, but he had one beauty,--his baby teeth.  When his pale lips
parted, his teeth showed like two rows of pearls, really; even,
regular, all the same size, lustrous like those pearls that have
just a faint shimmer of lilac.  The hard crusts, which were his
fare for the most part, kept them polished like veritable jewels.
Cécile only hoped that when his second teeth came in, they would
not be narrow and pointed, of the squirrel kind, like his mother's.

When M. Auclair asked Jacques if the shoes were comfortable, he
looked up wonderingly and said:  "Mais, oui, monsieur," as if they
could not possibly be otherwise.

The apothecary went back into his shop, where he was boiling pine
tops (bourgeons des pins) to make a cough-syrup.  Cécile told
Jacques she had found in her Lives of the Saints the picture of a
little boy who looked very much like him.

"I shall always keep it for a picture of you, Jacques.  Look, it is
little Saint Edmond.  He was an English saint, and he became
Archbishop of Cantorbéry.  But he died in France, at the monastery
of Pontigny.  Sit here beside me, and I will read you what it says
about him.


"Edmond était tout enfant un modèle de vertu, grâce aux tendres
soins de sa pieuse mère.  On ne le voyait qu'à l'école et à
l'église, partageant ses journées entre la prière et l'étude, et se
privant des plaisirs les plus innocents pour s'entretenir avec
Jésus et sa divine Mère à laquelle il voua un culte tout spécial.
Un jour qu'il fuyait ses compagnons de jeu, pour se recueillir
intimement, l'Enfant Jésus lui apparaît, rayonnant de beauté et le
regarde avec amour en lui disant:  'Je te salue, mon bien-aimé.'
Edmond tout éblouî n'ose répondre et le divin Sauveur reprend:
'Vous ne me connaissez donc pas?--Non, avoue l'enfant, je n'ai pas
cet honneur et je crois que vous ne devez pas me connaître non
plus, mais me prenez pour un autre.--Comment, continue le petit
Jésus, vous ne me reconnaissez pas, moi qui suis toujours à vos
côtés et vous accompagne partout.  Regardez-moi; je suis Jésus,
gravez toujours ce nom en votre coeur et imprimez-le sur votre front
et je vous préserverai de mort subite ainsi que tous ceux qui
feront de même.'"


The little woodcut in Cécile's old book showed the boy saint very
like Jacques indeed; a clumsy little fellow, abashed at the
apparition, standing awkwardly with his finger in his mouth; his
chin had no tip, because the old block from which he was printed
was worn away.  Beside him stood the Heavenly Child, all surrounded
by rays, just Edmond's height, friendly like a playfellow, and
treading on the earth, not floating in the air as visions are wont
to do.  Jacques bent over the book, his thumb on the page to keep
it flat, and asked Cécile to read it over again, so that he could
remember.  When she finished, he drew a long, happy sigh.

"I wish the little Jesus would appear to me like that, standing on
the ground.  Then I would not be frightened," he murmured.

"I don't believe He ever does, in Canada, Jacques.  Though perhaps
He appears to the recluse in Montreal, she is so very holy.  I know
angels come to her.  But I expect He is often near you and keeps
you from harm, as He said to Saint Edmond; moi qui suis toujours à
vos côtés et vous accompagne partout.  Now you can look at the
other pictures while I make our chocolate.  Since this is All
Saints' Day, we ought to think a great deal about the saints."

Left in the corner of the red sofa, Jacques held the book, but he
did not turn the pages.  He sat looking at the logs burning in the
fireplace and making gleams on the china shepherd boy, the object
of his especial admiration.  He heard the sleet pecking on the
window-panes and thought how nice it was to have a place like this
to come to.  When the chocolate began to give off its rich odour,
his nostrils quivered like a puppy's.  Cécile carried her father's
cup to him in the shop, and then she and Jacques sat down at one
corner of the table, where she had spread a napkin over the cloth.

Much as Jacques loved chocolate (in so far as he knew, this was the
only house in the world in which that comforting drink was made),
there was something he cared more about, something that gave him a
kind of solemn satisfaction,--Cécile's cup.  She had a silver cup
with a handle; on the front was engraved a little wreath of roses,
and inside that wreath was the name, "Cécile" cut in the silver.
Her Aunt Clothilde had given it to her when she was but a tiny
baby, so it had been hers all her life.  That was what seemed so
wonderful to Jacques.  His clothes had always belonged to somebody
else before they were made over for him; he slept wherever there
was room for him, sometimes with his mother, sometimes on a bench.
He had never had anything of his own except his toy beaver,--and
now he would have his shoes, made just for him.  But to have a
little cup, with your name on it . . . even if you died, it would
still be there, with your name.

More than the shop with all the white jars and mysterious
implements, more than the carpet and curtains and the red sofa,
that cup fixed Cécile as born to security and privileges.  He
regarded it with respectful, wistful admiration.  Before the milk
or chocolate was poured, he liked to hold it and trace with his
finger-tips the letters that made it so peculiarly and almost
sacredly hers.  Since his attention was evidently fixed upon her
cup, more than once Cécile had suggested that he drink his
chocolate from it, and she would use another.  But he shook his
head, unable to explain.  That was not at all what her cup meant to
him.  Indeed, Cécile could not know what it meant to him; she was
too fortunate.

They had scarcely finished the last drop and the last crumb, when
the shop door opened and they heard a woman's voice.  Without a
word Jacques slipped to the floor and began to take off his new
shoes.  Cécile sat still.

In the front shop Auclair was confronted by a vehement young woman,
slightly out of breath, her head and shoulders tightly wrapped in a
shawl, her cheeks reddened by the wind, and her fair hair curling
about her forehead and glistening with water drops.  The apothecary
rose and said politely:

"Good day, 'Toinette, what will you have?"

She tossed her head.  "None of your poisons, thank you!  I believe
my son is here?"

"I think so.  He is in very good hands when he is here."

'Toinette struck an attitude, her hand on her hip.  "Je suis mère,
vous savez!  The care of my son is my affair."

"Very true."

"What is this I hear about your getting shoes for him?  I am his
mother.  I will get him shoes when I think it necessary.  I am
poor, it is true; but I want none of your money that is the price
of poisons."

"Bien.  I will take care that you get none of it.  But I did not
pay for the shoes.  They were bought with the Governor's money."

'Toinette looked interested.  Sharp points showed in her eyes, like
the points of her teeth.  "The Governor?  Ah, that is different.
The Governor is our protector, he owes us something.  And the King
owes something to the children of those poor creatures, like my
mother, whom he sent out here under false pretences."

Auclair held up a warning finger.  He was sorry for her, because he
saw how ill at ease she was under her impertinence.  "Do not
quarrel with the Government, my girl.  That can do you no good, and
it might get you into trouble."

'Toinette loosened her shawl and then wound it tight.  She wished
she had been more civil; perhaps they would have offered her some
chocolate.  She called shrilly for Jacques.  He came at once,
without saying a word, his new shoes in his hands, his old ones on
his feet.  His mother caught him by the shoulder with a jerk,--she
could not cuff him in the apothecary's presence.  "Au revoir,
monsieur," she snapped, as Auclair opened the door for her.  She
went down the hill with her defiant stride, her head high, and
Jacques walked after her as fast as he could, wearing an expression
of intense gravity, blinking against the sleet, and carrying his
new shoes, soles up, out in front of him in a most unnatural way,
as if he were carrying a basin full of water and trying not to
spill it.

Auclair thrust his head out and watched them round the turn, then
closed the door.  He looked in upon his daughter and remarked:

"She has shown her teeth; now she will not make any more trouble
for a while.  She will let him wear his shoes.  She was pleased and
was afraid of showing it."

"He pulled off his new stockings and stuffed them inside his shirt,
Papa!"

Auclair laughed.  "How often I have seen children and dogs, and
even brave men, take on quick sly ways to protect themselves from
an ill-tempered woman!  I doubt whether she is very rough with him
at home.  When she is among people who look down on her, she takes
it out on him."



That night after dinner they did not go for their usual walk, since
the weather was so bleak, but sat by the fire listening to the
rattle of the sleet on the windows.

"Papa," said Cécile, "shall you have a mass said for poor Bichet
this year, as always?"

"Yes, on the tenth of November, the day on which he was hanged."

This mass Auclair had said at the Récollets' chapel where Count
Frontenac heard mass every morning.

"Please tell me about Bichet again, and it will be fresh in my mind
when I go to the mass."

"It will not keep you awake, as it did the first time I told you?
We must not grieve about these things that happened long ago,--and
this happened when the Count was in Canada the first time, while
your grandfather and grandmother were both living.

"Poor old Bichet had lodged in our cellar since I was a boy.  He
was a knife-grinder and used to go out every day with his wheel on
his back, and he picked up a few sous at his trade.  But he could
never have kept himself in shoes, having to walk so much, if your
grandfather had not given him his old ones.  He paid us nothing for
his lodging, of course.  He had his bed on the floor in a dry
corner of our cellar, where the sirops and elixirs were kept.  In
very cold weather your grandmother would put a couple of bricks
among the coals when she was getting supper, and old Bichet would
take these hot bricks down and put them in his bed.  And she often
saved a cup of hot soup and a piece of bread for the old man and
let him eat them in the warm kitchen, for he was very neat and
cleanly.  When I had any spending-money, or when I was given a fee
for carrying medicines to some house in the neighbourhood, I always
saved a little for the old knife-grinder.  He was reserved and
uncomplaining and never inflicted his troubles upon us, though he
must have had many.  On Saturdays, when your grandmother cooked a
joint and had a big fire, she used to heat a kettle of water for
him, and he carried it down to his corner and washed himself.  He
was a Christian and went to mass.  He was a kind man, gentle to
creatures below him,--for there were those even worse off.

"Now, on the rue du Figuier stood a house that had long been
closed, for the family had gone to live at Fontainebleau, and the
empty coach-house was used as a store-room for old pieces of
furniture.  The caretaker was a careless fellow who went out to
drink with his cronies and left the place unguarded.  In the coach-
house were two brass kettles which had lain there for many years,
doing nobody any good.  Bichet must have seen them often, as he
went in and out to sharpen the caretaker's carving-knife.

"One night, when this fellow was carousing, Bichet carried off
those two pots.  He took them to an ironmonger and sold them.
Nobody would ever have missed them; but Bichet had an enemy.  Near
us there lived a degenerate, half-witted boy of a cruel
disposition.  He tortured street cats, and even sparrows when he
could catch them.  Old Bichet had more than once caught him at his
tricks and reproved him and set his victims at liberty.  That boy
was cunning, and he used to spy on Bichet.  He saw hi