The inn he had chosen was one which he remembered, from former visits to
Quebec, as having seemed a resort of old world folk of humble fortunes.
He got a room, and went to it long enough to count the money he had with
him, and find it safe. Then he took one of the notes from the others,
and went to a broker's to get it changed.
The amount seemed to give the broker pause; but he concerned himself
only with the genuineness of the greenback, and after a keen glance at
Northwick's unimpeachable face, he paid over the thousand dollars in
Canadian bills. "We used to make your countrymen give us something
over," he said with a smile in recognition of Northwick's nationality.
"Yes; that's all changed, now," returned Northwick. "Do I look so very
American?" he asked.
"Oh, I don't know that," said the broker, with an airy English
inflection. "I suppose it's your hard hat, as much as anything. We all
wear fur caps in such weather."
"Ah, that's a good idea," said Northwick. He spoke easily, but with a
nether torment of longing to look at the newspaper lying open on the
counter. He could see that it was the morning paper; there might be
something about him in it. The thought turned him faint; but he knew
that if the paper happened to have anything about him in it, any rumor
of his offence, any conjecture of his flight, he could not bear it. He
could bear to keep himself deaf and blind to the self he had put behind
him, but he could not bear anything less. The papers seemed to thrust
themselves upon him; newsboys followed him up in the street with them;
he saw them in all the shops, where he went for the fur cap and fur
overcoat he bought, for the underclothing and changes of garments that
he had to provide; for the belt he got to put his money in. This great
sum, which he dared not bank, must be carried about with him; it must
not leave him night or day; it must be buckled into the chamois belt and
worn round his waist, sleeping and waking. The belt was really for gold,
but the forty-two thousand-dollar notes, which were not a great bulk,
would easily go into it.
He returned to his hotel and changed them to it, and put the belt on.
Then he felt easier, and he looked up the landlord to ask about the
route he wished to take. He found, as he expected, that it was one very
commonly travelled by lumber merchants going down into the woods to look
after their logging camps. Some took a sleigh from Quebec; but the
landlord said it was just as well to go by train to St. Anne, and save
that much sleighing; you would get enough of it then. Northwick thought
so too, and after the early dinner they gave him he took the cars for
St. Anne.
He was not tired; he was curiously buoyant and strong. He thought he
might get a nap on the way; but he remained vividly awake; and even that
night he did not sleep much. He felt again that pulling of his mind, as
if it were something separate from him, and were struggling to get
beyond the control of his will. The hotel in the little native village
was very good in its way; he had an excellent supper and an easy bed;
but he slept brokenly, and he was awake long before the early breakfast
which he had ordered for his start next day. The landlord wished to
persuade him that there was no need of such great haste; it was only
eighteen miles to St. Joachim, where he was to make his first stop, and
the road was so good that he would get there in a few hours. He had
better stop and visit the church, and see the sick people's offerings,
which they left there every year, in gratitude to the saint for healing
them of their maladies. The landlord said it was a pity he could not
come some time at the season of the pilgrimage; his countrymen often
came then. Northwick perceived that in spite of his fur cap and
overcoat, and his great Canadian boots, he was easily recognizable for
an American to this man, though he could not definitely decide whether
his landlord was French or Irish, and could not tell whether it was in
earnest or in irony that he invited him to try St. Anne for any trouble
he happened to be suffering from. But he winced at the suggestion, while
his heart leaped at the fantastic thought of hanging that money-belt at
her altar, and so easing himself of all his pains. He grotesquely
imagined the American defaulters in Canada making a pilgrimage to St.
Anne, and devoting emblems of their moral disease to her: forged notes,
bewitched accounts, false statements. At the same time, with that part
of him which seemed obedient, he asked the landlord if he knew of the
gold discoveries on the Chicoutimi River, and tried to account for
himself as an American speculator going to look into the matter in his
own way and at his own time.
In spite of his uncertainty about the landlord in some ways, Northwick
found him a kindly young fellow. He treated Northwick with a young
fellow's comfortable deference for an elderly man, and helped him forget
the hurts to his respectability which rankled so when he remembered
them. He explained the difference between the two routes from Malbaie
on, and advised him to take the longer, which lay through a more settled
district, where he would be safer in case of any mischance. But if he
liked to take the shorter, he told him there were good _campes_, or
log-house stations, every ten or fifteen miles, where he would find
excellent meals and beds, and be well cared for by people who kept them
in the winter for travellers. Ladies sometimes made the journey on that
route, which the government had lately opened, and the mails were
carried that way; he could take passage with the mail-carriers.
This fact determined Northwick. He shrank from trusting himself in
government keeping, though he knew he would be safe in it. He said he
would go by Tadoussac; and the landlord found a carriole driver, with a
tough little Canadian horse, who agreed to go the whole way to
Chicoutimi with him.
After an early lunch the man came, with the low-bodied sledge, set on
runners of solid wood, and deeply bedded with bearskins for the lap and
back. The day was still and sunny, like the day before, and the air
which drove keenly against his face, with the rush of the carriole,
sparkled with particles of frost that sometimes filled it like a light
shower of snow. The drive was so short that he reached St. Joachim at
noon, and he decided to push on part of the way to Baie St. Paul after
dinner. His host at St. Joachim approved of that. "You goin' have snow
to-night and big drift to-morrow," he said, and he gave his driver the
name of an habitant whom they could stop the night with. The driver was
silent, and he looked sinister; Northwick thought how easily the man
might murder him on that lonely road and make off with the money in his
belt; how probably he would do it if he dreamed such wealth was within
his grasp. But the man did not notice him after their journey began,
except once to turn round and say, "Look out you' nose. You' goin'
freeze him." For the rest he talked to his horse, which was lazy, and
which he kept urging forward with "Marche donc! Marche donc!" finally
shortened to "'Ch' donc! 'Ch' donc!" and repeated and repeated at
regular intervals like the tolling of a bell. It made Northwick think of
a bell-buoy off a ledge of rocks, which he had spent a summer near. He
wished to ask the man to stop, but he reflected that the waves would not
let him stop; he had to keep tolling.
Northwick started. He must be going out of his mind, or else he was
drowsing. Perhaps he was freezing, and this was the beginning of the
death drowse. But he felt himself warm under his furs, where he touched
himself, and he knew he had merely been dreaming. He let himself go
again, and arrived at his own door in Hatboro'. He saw the electric
lights through the long piazza windows, and he was going to warn
Elbridge again about that colt's shoes. Then he heard a sharp fox-like
barking, and found that his carriole had stopped at the cabin of the
habitant who was to keep him over night. The open doorway was filled
with children; the wild-looking dogs leaping at his horse's nose were in
a frenzy of curiosity and suspicion.
Northwick rose from his nap refreshed physically, but with a desolate
and sinking heart. The vision of his home had taken all his strength
away with it; but from his surface consciousness he returned the
greeting of the man with a pipe in his mouth and what looked like a blue
stocking on his head, who welcomed him. It was a poor place within, but
it had a comfort and kindliness of its own, and it was well warmed from
the great oblong stove of cast-iron set in the partition of the two
rooms. The meal that the housewife got him was good and savory, but he
had no relish for it, and he went early to bed. He did not understand
much French, and he could not talk with the people, but he heard them
speak of him as an old man, with a sort of surprise and pity at his
being there. He felt this surprise and pity, too; it seemed such a wild
and wicked thing that he should be driven away from his home and
children at his age. He tried to realize what had done it.
The habitant had given Northwick his best bed, in his large room; he
went with his wife into the other, and they took two or three of the
younger children; the rest all scattered up into the loft; each bade the
guest a well-mannered good-night. Before Northwick slept he heard his
host get up and open the outer door. Some Indians came in and lay down
before the fire with the carriole driver.