October dusk was bleak on the St. Lawrence, an east wind feeling along
the river's surface and rocking the vessels of Sir William Phips
on tawny rollers. It was the second night that his fleet sat there
inactive. During that day a small ship had approached Beauport
landing; but it stuck fast in the mud and became a mark for gathering
Canadians until the tide rose and floated it off. At this hour all
the habitants about Beauport except one, and even the Huron Indians
of Lorette, were safe inside the fort walls. Cattle were driven and
sheltered inland. Not a child's voice could be heard in the parish of
Beauport, and not a woman's face looked through windows fronting the
road leading up toward Montmorenci. Juchereau de Saint-Denis, the
seignior of Beauport, had taken his tenants with him as soon as the
New England invaders pushed into Quebec Basin. Only one man of the
muster hid himself and stayed behind, and he was too old for military
service. His seignior might lament him, but there was no woman to do
so. Gaspard had not stepped off his farm for years. The priest visited
him there, humoring a bent which seemed as inelastic as a vow. He had
not seen the ceremonial of high mass in the cathedral of Upper Town
since he was a young man.
Gaspard's farm was fifteen feet wide and a mile long. It was one of
several strips lying between the St. Charles River and those heights
east of Beauport which rise to Montmorenci Falls. He had his front on
the greater stream, and his inland boundary among woods skirting the
mountain. He raised his food and the tobacco he smoked, and braided
his summer hats of straw and knitted his winter caps of wool. One suit
of well-fulled woolen clothes would have lasted a habitant a lifetime.
But Gaspard had been unlucky. He lost all his family by smallpox, and
the priest made him burn his clothes, and ruinously fit himself with
new. There was no use in putting savings in the stocking any longer,
however; the children were gone. He could only buy masses for them.
He lived alone, the neighbors taking that loving interest in him which
French Canadians bestow on one another.
More than once Gaspard thought he would leave his farm and go into the
world. When Frontenac returned to take the paralyzed province in hand,
and fight Iroquois, and repair the mistakes of the last governor,
Gaspard put on his best moccasins and the red tasseled sash he wore
only at Christmas. "Gaspard is going to the fort," ran along the whole
row of Beauport houses. His neighbors waited for him. They all carried
their guns and powder for the purpose of firing salutes to Frontenac.
It was a grand day. But when Gaspard stepped out with the rest, his
countenance fell. He could not tell what ailed him. His friends coaxed
and pulled him; they gave him a little brandy. He sat down, and they
were obliged to leave him, or miss the cannonading and fireworks
themselves. From his own river front Gaspard saw the old lion's, ship
come to port, and, in unformed sentences, he reasoned then that a man
need not leave his place to take part in the world.
Frontenac had not been back a month, and here was the New England
colony of Massachusetts swarming against New France. "They may carry
me away from my hearth feet first," thought Gaspard, "but I am not to
be scared away from it."
Every night, before putting the bar across his door, the old habitant
went out to survey the two ends of the earth typified by the road
crossing his strip of farm. These were usually good moments for him.
He did not groan, as at dawn, that there were no children to relieve
him of labor. A noble landscape lifted on either hand from the hollow
of Beauport. The ascending road went on to the little chapel of Ste.
Anne de Beaupré, which for thirty years had been considered a shrine
in New France. The left hand road forded the St. Charles and climbed
the long slope to Quebec rock.
Gaspard loved the sounds which made home so satisfying at autumn dusk.
Faint and far off he thought he could hear the lowing of his cow and
calf. To remember they were exiled gave him the pang of the unusual.
He was just chilled through, and therefore as ready for his own hearth
as a long journey could have made him, when a gray thing loped past in
the flinty dust, showing him sudden awful eyes and tongue of red fire.
Gaspard clapped the house door to behind him and put up the bar. He
was not afraid of Phips and the fleet, of battle or night attack, but
the terror which walked in the darkness of sorcerers' times abjectly
bowed his old legs.
"O good Ste. Anne, pray for us!" he whispered, using an invocation
familiar to his lips. "If loups-garous are abroad, also, what is to
become of this unhappy land?"
There was a rattling knock on his door. It might be made by the
hilt of a sword; or did a loup-garou ever clatter paw against man's
dwelling? Gaspard climbed on his bed.
"Father Gaspard! Father Gaspard! Are you within?"
"Who is there?"
"Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène. Don't you know my voice?"
"My master Sainte-Hélène, are you alone?"
"Quite alone, except for my horse tied to your apple-tree. Let me in."
The command was not to be slighted. Gaspard got down and admitted
his visitor. More than once had Sainte-Hélène come to this hearth. He
appreciated the large fire, and sat down on a chair with heavy legs
which were joined by bars resting on the floor.
"My hands tingle. The dust on these, flint roads is cold."
"But Monsieur Sainte-Hélène never walked with his hands in the dust,"
protested Gaspard. The erect figure, bright with all the military
finery of that period, checked even his superstition by imposing
another kind of awe.
"The New England men expect to make us bite it yet," responded
Sainte-Hélène. "Saint-Denis is anxious about you, old man. Why don't
you go to the fort?"
"I will go to-morrow," promised Gaspard, relaxing sheepishly from
terror. "These New Englanders have not yet landed, and one's own bed
is very comfortable in the cool nights."
"I am used to sleeping anywhere."
"Yes, monsieur, for you are young."
"It would make you young again, Gaspard, to see Count Frontenac. I
wish all New France had seen him yesterday when he defied Phips
and sent the envoy back to the fleet. The officer was sweating; our
mischievous fellows had blinded him at the water's edge, and dragged
him, to the damage of his shins, over all the barricades of Mountain
Street. He took breath and courage when they turned him loose before
the governor,--though the sight of Frontenac startled him,--and handed
over the letter of his commandant requiring the surrender of Quebec."
"My faith, Monsieur Sainte-Hélène, did the governor blow him out of
the room?"
"The man offered his open watch, demanding an answer within the hour.
The governor said, 'I do not need so much time. Go back at once to
your master and tell him I will answer this insolent message by the
mouths of my cannon.'"
"By all the saints, that was a good word!" swore Gaspard, slapping his
knee with his wool cap. "Neither the Iroquois nor the Bostonnais will
run over us, now that the old governor is back. You heard him say it,
monsieur?"
"I heard him, yes; for all his officers stood by. La Hontan was there,
too, and that pet of La Hontan's, Baron de Saint-Castin's half-breed
son, of Pentegoet."
The martial note in the officer's voice sunk to contempt. Gaspard
was diverted from the governor to recognize, with the speechless
perception of an untrained mind, that jealousy which men established
in the world have of very young men. The male instinct of predominance
is fierce even in saints. Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène, though of the
purest stock in New France, had no prejudice against a half-breed.
"How is Mademoiselle Clementine?" inquired Gaspard, arriving at the
question in natural sequence. "You will see her oftener now than when
you had to ride from the fort."
The veins looked black in his visitor's face. "Ask the little
Saint-Castin. Boys stand under windows and talk to women now. Men have
to be reconnoitering the enemy."
"Monsieur Anselm de Saint-Castin is the son of a good fighter,"
observed Gaspard. "It is said the New England men hate his very name."
"Anselm de Saint-Castin is barely eighteen years old."
"It is the age of Mademoiselle Clementine."
The old habitant drew his three-legged stool to the hearth corner, and
took the liberty of sitting down as the talk was prolonged. He noticed
the leaden color which comes of extreme weariness and depression
dulling Sainte-Hélène's usually dark and rosy skin. Gaspard had heard
that this young man was quickest afoot, readiest with his weapon,
most untiring in the dance, and keenest for adventure of all the eight
brothers in his noble family. He had done the French arms credit
in the expedition to Hudson Bay and many another brush with their
enemies. The fire was burning high and clear, lighting rafters and
their curious brown tassels of smoked meat, and making the crucifix
over the bed shine out the whitest spot in a smoke-stained room.
"Father Gaspard," inquired Sainte-Hélène suddenly, "did you ever hear
of such a thing as a loup-garou?"
The old habitant felt terror returning with cold feet up his back and
crowding its blackness upon him through the windows. Yet as he rolled
his eyes at the questioner he felt piqued at such ignorance of his
natural claims.
"Was I not born on the island of Orleans, monsieur?"
Everybody knew that the island of Orleans had been from the time of
its discovery the abode of loups-garous, sorcerers, and all those
uncanny cattle that run in the twilights of the world. The western
point of its wooded ridge, which parts the St. Lawrence for twenty-two
miles, from Beauport to Beaupré, lay opposite Gaspard's door.
"Oh, you were born on the island of Orleans?"
"Yes, monsieur," answered Gaspard, with the pride we take in
distinction of any kind.
"But you came to live in Beauport parish."
"Does a goat turn to a pig, monsieur, because you carry it to the
north shore?"
"Perhaps so: everything changes."
Sainte-Hélène leaned forward, resting his arms on the arms of the
chair. He wrinkled his eyelids around central points of fire.
"What is a loup-garou?"
"Does monsieur not know? Monsieur Sainte-Hélène surely knows that a
loup-garou is a man-wolf."
"A man-wolf," mused the soldier. "But when a person is so afflicted,
is he a man or is he a wolf?"
"It is not an affliction, monsieur; it is sorcery."
"I think you are right. Then the wretched man-wolf is past being
prayed for?"
"If one should repent"--
"I don't repent anything," returned Sainte-Hélène; and Gaspard's jaw
relaxed, and he had the feeling of pin-feathers in his hair. "Is he a
man or is he a wolf?" repeated the questioner.
"The loup-garou is a man, but he takes the form of a wolf."
"Not all the time?"
"No, monsieur, not all the time?"
"Of course not."
Gaspard experienced with us all this paradox: that the older we grow,
the more visible becomes the unseen. In childhood the external senses
are sharp; but maturity fuses flesh and spirit. He wished for a
priest, desiring to feel the arm of the Church around him. It was
late October,--a time which might be called the yearly Sabbath of
loups-garous.
"And what must a loup-garou do with himself?" pursued Sainte-Hélène.
"I should take to the woods, and sit and lick my chaps, and bless my
hide that I was for the time no longer a man."
"Saints! monsieur, he goes on a chase. He runs with his tongue lolled
out, and his eyes red as blood."
"What color are my eyes, Gaspard?"