A month later there was a sale of the household effects, the horses
and general possessions of Medallion the auctioneer, who, though a
Protestant and an Englishman, had, by his wits and goodness of heart,
endeared himself to the parish. Therefore the notables among the
habitants had gathered in his empty house for a last drink of
good-fellowship--Muroc the charcoalman, Duclosse the mealman, Benoit the
ne’er-do-weel, Gingras the one-eyed shoemaker, and a few others. They
had drunk the health of Medallion, they had drunk the health of the
Cure, and now Duclosse the mealman raised his glass. “Here’s to--”
“Wait a minute, porridge-pot,” cried Muroc. “The best man here should
raise the glass first and say the votre sante. ‘Tis M’sieu’ Medallion
should speak and sip now.”
Medallion was half-sitting on the window-sill, abstractedly listening.
He had been thinking that his ships were burned behind him, and that in
middle-age he was starting out to make another camp for himself in the
world, all because of the new Seigneur of Pontiac. Time was when he had
been successful here, but Louis Racine had changed all that. His hand
was against the English, and he had brought a French auctioneer to
Pontiac. Medallion might have divided the parish as to patronage, but he
had other views.
So he was going. Madelinette had urged him to stay, but he had replied
that it was too late. The harm was not to be undone.
As Muroc spoke, every one turned towards Medallion. He came over and
filled a glass at the table, and raised it.
“I drink to Madelinette, daughter of that fine old puffing forgeron
Lajeunesse,” he added, as the big blacksmith now entered the room.
Lajeunesse grinned and ducked his head. “I knew Madelinette, as did you
all, when I could take her on my knee and tell her English stories, and
listen to her sing French chansons--the best in the world. She has gone
on; we stay where we were. But she proves her love to us, by taking her
husband from Pontiac and coming back to us. May she never find a spot so
good to come to and so hard to leave as Pontiac!”
He drank, and they all did the same. Draining his glass, Medallion let
it fall on the stone floor. It broke into a score of pieces.
He came and shook hands with Lajeunesse. “Give her my love,” he said.
“Tell her the highest bidder on earth could not buy one of the kisses
she gave me when she was five and I was twenty.”
Then he shook hands with them all and went into the next room.
“Why did he drop his glass?” asked Gingras the shoemaker.
“That’s the way of the aristocrats when it’s the damnedest toast that
ever was,” said Duclosse the mealman. “Eh, Lajeunesse, that’s so, isn’t
it?”
“What the devil do I know about aristocrats!” said Lajeunesse.
“You’re among the best of the land, now that Madelinette’s married to
the Seigneur. You ought to wear a collar every day.”
“Bah!” answered the blacksmith. “I’m only old Lajeunesse the blacksmith,
though she’s my girl, dear lads. I was Joe Lajeunesse yesterday, and
I’ll be Joe Lajeunesse to-morrow, and I’ll die Joe Lajeunesse the
forgeron--bagosh! So you take me as you find me. M’sieu’ Racine doesn’t
marry me. And Madelinette doesn’t take me to Paris and lead me round the
stage and say, ‘This is M’sieu’ Lajeunesse, my father.’ No. I’m myself,
and a damn good blacksmith and nothing else am I!”
“Tut, tut, old leather-belly,” said Gingras the shoemaker, whose liquor
had mounted high, “you’ll not need to work now. Madelinette’s got double
fortune. She gets thousands for a song, and she’s lady of the Manor
here. What’s too good for you, tell me that, my forgeron?”
“Not working between meals--that’s too good for me, Gingras. I’m here to
earn my bread with the hands I was born with, and to eat what they earn,
and live by it. Let a man live according to his gifts--bagosh! Till I’m
sent for, that’s what I’ll do; and when time’s up I’ll take my hand off
the bellows, and my leather apron can go to you, Gingras, for boots for
a bigger fool than me.”
“There’s only one,” said Benolt, the ne’er-do-weel, who had been to
college as a boy.
“Who’s that?” said Muroc.
“You wouldn’t know his name. He’s trying to find eggs in last year’s
nest,” answered Benolt with a leer.
“He means the Seigneur,” said Muroc. “Look to your son-in-law,
Lajeunesse. He’s kicking up a dust that’ll choke Pontiac yet. It’s as if
there was an imp in him driving him on.”
“We’ve had enough of the devil’s dust here,” said Lajeunesse. “Has he
been talking to you, Muroc?”
Muroc nodded. “Treason, or thereabouts. Once, with him that’s dead in
the graveyard yonder, it was France we were to save and bring back the
Napoleons--I have my sword yet. Now it’s save Quebec. It’s stand alone
and have our own flag, and shout, and fight, maybe, to be free of
England. Independence--that’s it! One by one the English have had to go
from Pontiac. Now it’s M’sieu’ Medallion.”
“There’s Shandon the Irishman gone too. M’sieu’ sold him up and shipped
him off,” said Gingras the shoemaker.
“Tiens! the Seigneur gave him fifty dollars when he left, to help him
along. He smacks and then kisses, does M’sieu’ Racine.”
“We’ve to pay tribute to the Seigneur every year, as they did in the
days of Vaudreuil and Louis the Saint,” said Duclosse. “I’ve got my
notice--a bag of meal under the big tree at the Manor door.”
“I’ve to bring a pullet and a bag of charcoal,” said Muroc. “‘Tis the
rights of the Seigneur as of old.”
“Tiens! it is my mind,” said Benoit, “that a man that nature twists in
back, or leg, or body anywhere, gets a twist in’s brain too. There’s
Parpon the dwarf--God knows, Parpon is a nut to crack!”
“But Parpon isn’t married to the greatest singer in the world, though
she’s only the daughter of old leather-belly there,” said Gingras.
“Something doesn’t come of nothing, snub-nose,” said Lajeunesse. “Mark
you, I was born a man of fame, walking bloody paths to glory; but, by
the grace of Heaven and my baptism, I became a forgeron. Let others ride
to glory, I’ll shoe their horses for the gallop.”
“You’ll be in Parliament yet, Lajeunesse,” said Duclosse the mealman,
who had been dozing on a pile of untired cart-wheels.
“I’ll be hanged first, comrade.”
“One in the family at a time,” said Muroc. “There’s the Seigneur. He’s
going into Parliament.”
“He’s a magistrate--that’s enough,” said Duclosse. “He’s started the
court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago.
He’ll want a gibbet and a gallows next.”
“I should think he’d stay at home and not take more on his shoulders!”
said the one-eyed shoemaker. Without a word, Lajeunesse threw a dish of
water in Gingras’s face. This reference to the Seigneur’s deformity was
unpalatable.
Gingras had not recovered from his discomfiture when all were startled
by the distant blare of a bugle. They rushed to the door, and were
met by Parpon the dwarf, who announced that a regiment of soldiers was
marching on the village.
“‘Tis what I expected after that meeting, and the Governor’s visit,
and the lily-flag of France on the Manor, and the body-guard and the
carbines,” said Muroc nervously.
“We’re all in trouble again-sure,” said Benoit, and drained his glass to
the last drop. “Some of us will go to gaol.”
The coming of the militia had been wholly unexpected by the people of
Pontiac, but the cause was not far to seek. Ever since the Governor’s
visit there had been sinister rumours abroad concerning Louis Racine,
which the Cure and the Avocat and others had taken pains to contradict.
It was known that the Seigneur had been requested to disband his
so-called company of soldiers with their ancient livery and their modern
arms, and to give them up. He had disbanded the corps, but he had not
given up the arms, and, for reasons unknown, the Government had not
pressed the point, so far as the world knew. But it had decided to
hold a district drill in this far-off portion of the Province; and this
summer morning two thousand men marched ‘upon the town and through
it, horse, foot, and commissariat, and Pontiac was roused out of the
last-century romance the Seigneur had sought to continue, to face the
actual presence of modern force and the machinery of war. Twice before
had British soldiers marched into the town, the last time but a few
years agone, when blood had been shed on the stones in front of the
parish church. But here were large numbers of well-armed men from the
Eastern parishes, English and French, with four hundred regulars to
leaven the mass. Lajeunesse knew only too well what this demonstration
meant.
Before the last soldier had passed through the street, he was on his way
to the Seigneury.
He found Madelinette alone in the great dining-room, mending a rent in
the British flag, which she was preparing for a flag-staff. When she
saw him, she dropped the flag, as if startled, came quickly to him, took
both his hands in hers, and kissed his cheek.
“Wonder of wonders!” she said.
“It’s these soldiers,” he replied shortly. “What of them?” she asked
brightly.
“Do you mean to say you don’t know what their coming here means?” he
asked.
“They must drill somewhere, and they are honouring Pontiac,” she replied
gaily, but her face flushed as she bent over the flag again.
He came and stood in front of her. “I don’t know what’s in your mind;
I don’t know what you mean to do; but I do know that M’sieu’ Racine is
making trouble here, and out of it you’ll come more hurt than anybody.”
“What has Louis done?”
“What has he done! He’s been stirring up feeling against the British.
What has he done!--Look at the silly customs he’s got out of old
coffins, to make us believe they’re alive. Why did he ever try to marry
you? Why did you ever marry him? You are the great singer of the world.
He’s a mad hunchback habitant seigneur!”
She stamped her foot indignantly, but presently she ruled herself to
composure, and said quietly: “He is my husband. He is a brave man, with
foolish dreams.” Then with a sudden burst of tender feeling, she said:
“Oh, father, father, can’t you see, I loved him--that is why I married
him. You ask me what I am going to do? I am going to give the rest of my
life to him. I am going to stay with him, and be to him all that he may
never have in this world, never--never. I am going to be to him what my
mother was to you, a slave to the end--a slave who loved you, and who
gave you a daughter who will do the same for her husband--”
“No matter what he does or is--eh?”
“No matter what he is.”
Lajeunesse gasped. “You will give up singing! Not sing again before
kings and courts, and not earn ten thousand dollars a month--more than
I’ve earned in twenty years? You don’t mean that, Madelinette.”
He was hoarse with feeling, and he held out his hand pleadingly. To
him it seemed that his daughter was mad; that she was throwing her life
away.
“I mean that, father,” she answered quietly. “There are things worth
more than money.”
“You don’t mean to say that you can love him as he is. It isn’t natural.
But no, it isn’t.”
“What would you have said, if any one had asked you if you loved my
mother that last year of her life, when she was a cripple, and we
wheeled her about in a chair you made for her?”
“Don’t say any more,” he said slowly, and took up his hat, and kept
turning it round in his hand. “But you’ll prevent him getting into
trouble with the Gover’ment?” he urged at last.
“I have done what I could,” she answered. Then with a little gasp: “They
came to arrest him a fortnight ago, but I said they should not enter the
house. Havel and I prevented them--refused to let them enter. The men
did not know what to do, and so they went back. And now this--!” she
pointed to where the soldiers were pitching their tents in the valley
below. “Since then Louis has done nothing to give trouble. He only
writes and dreams. If he would but dream and no more--!” she added, half
under her breath.
“We’ve dreamt too much in Pontiac already,” said Lajeunesse, shaking his
head.
Madelinette reached up her hand and laid it on his shaggy black hair.
“You are a good little father, big smithy-man,” she said lovingly. “You
make me think of the strong men in the Niebelungen legends. It must be a
big horse that will take you to Walhalla with the heroes,” she added.
“Such notions--there in your head,” he laughed. “Try to frighten me with
your big names-hein?” There was a new look in the face of father and of
daughter. No mist or cloud was between them. The things they had long
wished to say were uttered at last. A new faith was established between
them. Since her return they had laughed and talked as of old when they
had met, though her own heart was aching, and he was bitter against the
Seigneur. She had kept him and the whole parish in good humour by
her unconventional ways, as though people were not beginning to make
pilgrimages to Pontiac to see her--people who stared at the name over
the blacksmith’s door, and eyed her curiously, or lay in wait about
the Seigneury, that they might get a glimpse of Madame and her deformed
husband. Out in the world where she was now so important, the newspapers
told strange romantic tales of the great singer, wove wild and wonderful
legends of her life. To her it did not matter. If she knew, she did
not heed. If she heeded it--even in her heart--she showed nothing of it
before the world. She knew that soon there would be wilder tales still
when it was announced that she was bidding farewell to the great working
world, and would live on in retirement. She had made up her mind quite
how the announcement should read, and, once it was given out, nothing
would induce her to change her mind. Her life was now the life of the
Seigneur.
A struggle in her heart went on, but she fought it down. The lure of a
great temptation from that far-off outside world was before her, but
she had resolved her heart against it. In his rough but tender way her
father now understood, and that was a comfort to her. He felt what he
could not reason upon or put into adequate words. But the confidence
made him happy, and his eyes said so to her now.
“See, big smithy-man,” she said gaily, “soon will be the fete of St.
Jean Baptiste, and we shall all be happy then. Louis has promised me to
make a speech that will not be against the English, but only words which
will tell how dear the old land is to us.”
“Ten to one against it!” said Lajeunesse anxiously. Then he brightened
as he saw a shadow cross her face. “But you can make him do anything--as
you always made me,” he added, shaking his tousled head and taking with
a droll eagerness the glass of wine she offered him.