This is the story that the old sailor from Tadousac told me when the
waves were leaping, snapping, and frothing at us from the St.
Lawrence, and over the moan of the wind and the anger of the waters
rose the wail of the Braillard de la Magdeleine.
"You hear him? Every storm he calls so loud. I think of my own baby
when I hear him, always the same, always so sorrowful. Poor baby!
"Yes, it is a baby. Across there you might see, but the storm darkens
everything, yonder toward Gaspe, where the little mother
lived--_pauvre mêre_. She was only a child, innocent and good and
happy, when he came--the great lord, the _Grand Seigneur_, from
France--came with the Commandant to Quebec and then to Tadousac.
"She loved him, loved him and forgot--forgot her father and
mother--forgot the good name they gave her--forgot the innocence that
made her beautiful--forgot the pure Mother and the good God, for him
and his love. She went to Quebec with him, but the Curé had not
blessed them in the church.
"Then the baby came. That is the baby who cries out there in the
storm. The _Grand Seigneur_ killed the little baby, killed it to save
her from disgrace, killed it without baptism, and it cries and wails
out there, _pauvre enfant_.
"The mother? She is here, too, in the storm. She has been here for
more than two hundred years listening to her baby cry. Poor mother.
The baby calls her and she wanders through the storm to find him. But
she never sees, only hears him cry for her--and God. Till the great
Day of Judgment will the baby cry, and she--_pauvre mêre_--will pay
the price of her sin, pay it out of her empty mother heart and hungry
mother arms, that will not be filled. You hear the soft wind from the
shore battle with the great wind from the Gulf? Perhaps it is she,
_pauvre mêre_--perhaps.
"The _Grand Seigneur_? He never comes, for he died unrepentant and
unpardoned. The lost do not return to Earth and Hope. He never comes.
Only the mother comes--the mother who weeps and seeks, and hears the
baby cry."