“And suppose in Montreal some Friday I were to consider a roast capon as a fish? I should be put into the stocks, likely
enough!”
Captain Pondaven smiled and shook his head. “Mademoiselle has the better of you, Charron. A man can make fun of the
angels, if he sets out to. But I was going to tell the little boy here that in our town, when a child is naughty, we still
tell him the she-ape will get him; and the children are as much afraid of that beast as if she were alive.”
The time had come for story-telling; Pondaven and Pierre Charron began to entertain each other with tales of the sea and
forest, as they always did when they got together.
At about ten o’clock Father Hector Saint–Cyr came out from the Château, where he had been to lay before Count Frontenac a
petition from the Christianized Indians of his mission at the Sault. He lingered on the terrace to enjoy the prospect, — he
got to Quebec but seldom. The moon was high in the heavens, shining down upon the rock, with its orchards and gardens and
silvery steeples. The dark forest and the distant mountains were palely visible. This was not the warm white moonlight of
his own Provence, certainly, which made the roads between the mulberry-trees look like rivers of new milk. This was the
moonlight of the north, cold, blue, and melancholy. It threw a shimmer over the land, but never lay in velvet folds on any
wall or tower or wheat-field. Out in the river the five ships from France rode at anchor. Some sailors down in the Place
were singing, and when they finished, their mates on board answered them with another song.
Why, the priest wondered, were these fellows always glad to get back to Kebec? Why did they come at all? Why should this
particular cliff in the wilderness be echoing tonight with French songs, answering to the French tongue? He recalled certain
naked islands in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence; mere ledges of rock standing up a little out of the sea, where the sea birds
came every year to lay their eggs and rear their young in the caves and hollows; where they screamed and flocked together
and made a clamour, while the winds howled around them, and the spray beat over them. This headland was scarcely more than
that; a crag where for some reason human beings built themselves nests in the rock, and held fast.
Down yonder by the waterside, before one of the rustic booths, he could see a little party seated about a table with
lanterns. He could not see who they were, but he felt a friendliness for that company. A little group of Frenchmen, three
thousand miles from home, making the best of things, — having a good dinner. He decided to go down and join them.
The apothecary, in his shirt-sleeves, was standing on a wooden bench, taking down from the shelves of a high cabinet
large sheets of paper, to which dried plants were attached by narrow strips of muslin gummed down with gum Arabic. This was
his herbarium, his collection of medicinal Canadian plants which he meant to take back to France. Cécile, busily knitting,
had been watching him for a long while. When at last he got down and began assorting the piles of paper, she spoke to
him.
“Papa, what will become of Jacques when we go back to France?”
Her father was engaged with a plant of the milkweed kind, which the French colonists called le cotonnier. He did not look
up.
“Ah, my dear, I have the Count’s perplexities and my own, — I cannot arrange a future for your little protégé.”
“But, Father, how can we leave him, with no one to look after him? I shall always be thinking of him, and it will make me
very unhappy.”
“You will soon have your little cousins for companions; Cécile, and André, and Rachel. Cousin André will fill Jacques’s
place in your heart.”
“No, Papa. My heart is not like that.”
She spoke quickly, almost defiantly, in a tone she had never used to her father before. He did not notice it; he was
trying to decide which of two gentians was the better preserved. For a month now he had been distracted and absent-minded.
Cécile went quietly into the salon. She almost hated that little André who was so fortunate, who had a wise and charming
mother to watch over him, a father to provide for him, and a rich aunt to give him presents. Laying aside her knitting, she
put on her cap and went out to walk about the town.
This was the first week of October. The autumn had been warm and sunny, — but rather sad, as always. After the gay
summer, came the departures. First Pierre Charron had gone back to Montreal. Then Captain Pondaven, who had been coming to
the apothecary shop so often that he seemed like a familiar friend, had suddenly set sail for his old town where the grey
sea beat under the castellated walls. Three new ships had come in during September: La Garonne, Le Duc de Bretagne, Le
Soleil d’Afrique. But La Garonne did not bring the Breton sailor Jacques waited for, and his mates reported that he had
shipped on a boat in the West India trade.
None of the ships brought the word Cecile’s father and the Governor were so impatiently expecting. A dark spirit of
discontent and restlessness seemed to be sitting in the little salon behind the shop. All peace and security had departed.
The very furniture looked ill at ease, as if it did not believe in its own usefulness any more. Perhaps the sofa and the
table and the curtains had overheard her father say that he could not take them home with him, but must leave them to be
scattered among the neighbours. Cécile wished that she could be left and scattered, too. She stayed out of doors and away
from the house as much as possible. Her father cared little about his dinner now — sometimes forgot to go to market. So why
should she spend the golden afternoons indoors?
The glorious transmutation of autumn had come on: all the vast Canadian shores were clothed with a splendour never seen
in France; to which all the pageants of all the kings were as a taper to the sun. Even the ragged cliff-side behind her
kitchen door was beautiful; the wild cherry and sumach and the blackberry vines had turned crimson, and the birch and poplar
saplings were yellow. Up by Blinker’s cave there was a mountain ash, loaded with orange berries.
In the Upper Town the grey slate roofs and steeples were framed and encrusted with gold. A slope of roof or a dormer
window looked out from the twisted russet branches of an elm, just as old mirrors were framed in gilt garlands. A sharp
gable rose out of a soft drift of tarnished foliage like a piece of agate set in fine goldsmith’s work. So many kinds of
gold, all gleaming in the soft, hyacinth-coloured haze of autumn: wan, sickly gold of the willows, already dropping; bright
gold of the birches, copper gold of the beeches. Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little
brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even — a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a
kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content. The spirit of peace, that acceptance of fate, which
used to dwell in the pharmacy on Mountain Hill, had left it and come abroad to dwell in the orchards and gardens, in the
little stony streets where the leaves blew about. Day after day Cécile had walked about those streets trying to capture that
lost content and take it home again. She felt almost as if she no longer had a home; often wished she could follow the
squirrels into their holes and hide away with them for the winter.
This afternoon she saw that her father scarcely cared at all for those they would leave behind, — the only friends she
had ever known. She was miserable, too, because she had spoken angrily to him. All the way up the hill her heart grew
heavier, and the neat garden of the Récollets, where she was always welcome, seemed so full of sadness that she could not
stay. She went into the Cathedral, found a dark corner behind the image of Saint Anthony, and knelt to pray. But she could
only hide her face and cry. Once giving way to tears, she wept bitterly for all that she had lost, and all that she must
lose so soon. Her mother had had the courage to leave everything she loved and to come out here with her father; she in turn
ought to show just that same courage about going back, but she could not find it in her heart. “O ma mère, je suis faible!
Je n’ai pas l’esprit fort comme toi!” she whispered under her sobs.
Bishop Laval, who was kneeling in the recess of a chapel, heard a sound of smothered weeping. He rose, turned about, and
regarded her for some moments. Without saying a word he took her hand and led her out through the sacristy door into the
garden of the Priests’ House, where his poplar-trees were all yellow and the ground was covered with fallen leaves. He made
her sit down beside him on a bench and waited until she had dried her tears.
“We are old friends, little daughter,” he said kindly. “Your mother was a woman of exemplary piety. Have you been to your
spiritual director with your troubles?”
“Oh, excuse me, Monseigneur l’Ancien! I am sorry to give way like this. I did not know it was coming on me.”
“Can I help you in any way, my child?”
Cécile thought perhaps he could. At any rate, she felt a longing to confide in him. She had never been intimidated by his
deep-set, burning eyes or his big nose. She always felt a kind of majesty in his grimness and poverty. Seventy-four years of
age and much crippled by his infirmities, going about in a rusty old cassock, he yet commanded one’s admiration in a way
that the new Bishop, with all his personal elegance, did not. One believed in his consecration, in some special authority
won from fasting and penances and prayer; it was in his face, in his shoulders, it was he.
Cécile turned to him and told him in a low voice how she and her father expected to leave Quebec very soon and go back to
France, and how hard it would be for her to part from her friends. “And what troubles me most is the little boy, Jacques
Gaux. You have been so kind as to ask about him sometimes, mon père, and perhaps after we are gone you will not forget him.
I wish someone would bear him in mind and look after him a little.”
“You must pray for him, my child. It is to such as he that our Blessed Mother comes nearest. You must unceasingly
recommend him to her, and I will not forget to do so.”
“I shall always pray for him,” Cécile declared fervently, “but if only there were someone in this world, here in Quebec —
Oh, Monseigneur l’Ancien,” she turned to him pleadingly, “everyone says you are a father to your people, and no one needs a
father so much as poor Jacques! If you would bid Houssart keep an eye on him, and when he sees the little boy dirty and
neglected, to bring him here, where everything is good and clean, and wash his face! It would help him only to sit here with
you — he is like that. Madame Pommier would look after him for me, but she cannot get about, and Jacques will not go to her,
I am afraid. He is shy. When he is very dirty and ragged, he hides away.”
“Compose yourself, my child. We can do something. Suppose I were to send him to the Brothers’ school in Montreal, and
prepare him for the Seminary?”
She shook her head despondently. “He could never learn Latin. He is not a clever child; but he is good. I don’t think he
would be happy in a school.”
“Schools are not meant to make boys happy, Cécile, but to teach them to do without happiness.”
“When he is older, perhaps, Monseigneur, but he is only seven.”
“I was only nine when I was sent to La Flèche, and that is a severe school,” said the Bishop. Perhaps some feeling of
pity for his own hard boyhood, the long hours of study, the iron discipline, the fasts and vigils that kept youth pale, rose
in his heart. He sighed heavily and murmured something under his breath, of which Cécile caught only the words: “. . . domus
. . . Domine.”
She thanked him for his kindness and curtsied to take her leave. He walked with her to the garden door. “I will not
forget what you have confided to my care, and I will seek out this child from time to time and see what can be done for him.
But our Blessed Mother can do more for him than you or I. Never omit to present him to her compassion, my daughter.”
Cécile went away comforted. Merely sitting beside the Bishop had given her an escape from her own thoughts. His nature
was so strong of its kind, and different from that of anyone else she knew. She was hurrying home with fresh courage when
she met Jacques himself, coming up the hill to look for her.
“I went to your house,” he said, “but monsieur your father was occupied, so I came away.”
“That was right. Have you had a bite of anything?”
He shook his head.
“Neither have I. If my father is busy with his plants we should only bother him. Let us get a loaf from Monsieur Pigeon
and take it up by the redoubt, and watch the sun go down.”
By the time they had called at the baker’s and climbed to the top of Cap Diamant, the sun, dropping with incredible
quickness, had already disappeared. They sat down in the blue twilight to eat their bread and await the turbid afterglow
which is peculiar to Quebec in autumn; the slow, rich, prolonged flowing-back of crimson across the sky, after the sun has
sunk behind the dark ridges of the west. Because of the haze in the air the colour seems thick, like a heavy liquid, welling
up wave after wave, a substance that throbs, rather than a light.
That crimson flow, that effulgence at the solemn twilight hour, often made Cécile think about the early times and the
martyrs — coming up, as it did, out of those dark forests that had been the scene of their labours and their fate. The
rainbow, she knew, was set in the heavens to remind us of a promise that all storms shall have an ending. Perhaps this
afterglow, too, was ordained in the heavens for a reminder.
“Jacques,” she said presently, “do you ever think about the martyrs? You ought to, because they were so brave.”
“I don’t like to think about them. It makes me feel bad,” he murmured. He was sitting with his hands on his knees,
looking vaguely into the west.
Cécile squeezed his arm. “Oh, it doesn’t me! It makes me feel happy, as if I could never be afraid of anything again. I
wish you and I could go very far up the river in Pierre Charron’s canoe, and then off into the forests to the Huron country,
and find the very places where the martyrs died. I would rather go out there than — anywhere.” Rather than go home to
France, she was thinking.
But perhaps, after she grew up, she could come back to Canada again, and do all those things she longed to do. Perhaps
some day, after weeks at sea, she would find herself gliding along the shore of the Île d’Orléans and would see before her
Kebec, just as she had left it; the grey roofs and spires smothered in autumn gold, with the Récollet flèche rising slender
and pure against the evening, and the crimson afterglow welling up out of the forest like a glorious memory.