THE INTERPRETER OF GOD
One evening in February Samuel Chapdelaine said to his daughter:
"The roads are passable; if you wish it, Maria, we shall go to La
Pipe on Sunday for the mass."
"Very well, father;" but she replied in a voice so dejected, almost
indifferent, that her parents exchanged glances behind her back.
Country folk do not die for love, nor spend the rest of their days
nursing a wound. They are too near to nature, and know too well the
stern laws that rule their lives. Thus it is perhaps, that they are
sparing of high-sounding words; choosing to say "liking" rather than
"loving" ... "ennui" rather than "grief," that so the joys and
sorrows of the heart may bear a fit proportion to those more anxious
concerns of life which have to do with their daily toil, the yield
of their lands, provision for the future.
Maria did not for a moment dream that life for her was over, or that
the world must henceforward be a sad wilderness, because François
Paradis would not return in the spring nor ever again. But her heart
was aching, and while sorrow possessed it the future held no promise
for her.
When Sunday arrived, father and daughter early began to make ready
for the two hours' journey which would bring them to St. Henri de
Taillon, and the church. Before half-past seven Charles Eugene was
harnessed, and Maria, still wearing a heavy winter cloak, had
carefully deposited in her purse the list of her mother's
commissions. A few minutes later the sleigh-bells were tinkling, and
the rest of the family grouped themselves at the little square
window to watch the departure.
For the first hour the horse could not go beyond a walk, sinking
knee-deep in snow; for only the Chapdelaines used this road, laid
out and cleared by themselves, and not enough travelled to become
smooth and hard. But when they reached the beaten highway Charles
Eugene trotted along briskly.
They passed through Honfleur, a hamlet of eight scattered houses,
and then re-entered the woods. After a time they came upon
clearings, then houses appeared dotted along the road; little by
little the dusky ranks of the forest retreated, and soon they were
in the village with other sleighs before and following them, all
going toward the church.
Since the beginning of the year Maria had gone three times to hear
mass at St. Henri de Taillon, which the people of the country
persist in calling La Pipe, as in the gallant days of the first
settlers. For her, besides being an exercise of piety, this was
almost the only distraction possible and her father sought to
furnish it whenever he could do so, believing that the impressive
rites of the church and a meeting with acquaintances in the village
would help to banish her grief.
On this occasion when the mass was ended, instead of paying visits
they went to the _curé's_ house. It was already thronged with members
of the congregation from remote farms, for the Canadian priest not
only has the consciences of his flock in charge, but is their
counsellor in all affairs, and the composer of their disputes; the
solitary individual of different station to whom they can resort for
the solving of their difficulties.
The _curé_ of St. Henri sent none away empty who asked his advice;
some he dealt with in a few swift words amidst a general
conversation where he bore his cheerful part; others at greater
length in the privacy of an adjoining room. When the turn of the
Chapdelaines came he looked at his watch.
"We shall have dinner first. What say you, my good friends? You
must have found an appetite on the road. As for myself, singing mass
makes me hungry beyond anything you could believe."
He laughed heartily, more tickled than anyone at his own joke, and
led his guests into the dining-room. Another priest was there from a
neighbouring parish, and two or three farmers. The meal was one long
discussion about husbandry, with a few amusing stories and bits of
harmless gossip thrown in; now and then one of the farmers, suddenly
remembering where he was, would labour some pious remark which the
priests acknowledged with a nod or an absent-minded "Yes! Yes!"
The dinner over at last, some of the guests departed after lighting
their pipes. The _curé_, catching a glance from Chapdelaine, seemed to
recall something; arising, he motioned to Maria, and went before her
into the next room which served him both for visitors and as his
office.
A small harmonium stood against the wall; on the other side was a
table with agricultural journals, a Civil Code and a few books bound
in black leather; on the walls hung a portrait of Pius X., an
engraving of the Holy Family, the coloured broadside of a Quebec
merchant with sleighs and threshing-machines side by side, and a
number of official notices as to precautions against forest fires
and epidemics amongst cattle.
Turning to Maria, the _curé_ said kindly enough:--"So it appears that
you are distressing yourself beyond what is reasonable and right?"
She looked at him humbly, not far from believing that the priest's
supernatural power had divined her trouble without need of telling.
He inclined his tall figure, and bent toward her his thin peasant
face; for beneath the robe was still the tiller of the soil: the
gaunt and yellow visage, the cautious eyes, the huge bony shoulders.
Even his hands--hands wont to dispense the favours of Heaven--were
those of the husbandman, with swollen veins beneath the dark skin.
But Maria saw in him only the priest, the _curé_ of the parish,
appointed of God to interpret life to her and show her the path of
duty.
"Be seated there," he said, pointing to a chair. She sat down
somewhat like a schoolgirl who is to have a scolding, somewhat like
a woman in a sorcerer's den who awaits in mingled hope and dread the
working of his unearthly spells.
* * * * *
An hour later the sleigh was speeding over the hard snow.
Chapdelaine drowsed, and the reins were slipping from his open
hands. Rousing himself and lifting his head, he sang again in
full-voiced fervour the hymn he was singing as they left the
village:--
... Adorons-le dans le ciel.
Adorons-le sur l'autel ...
Then he fell silent, his chin dropping slowly toward his breast, and
the only sound upon the road was the tinkle of sleigh-bells.
Maria was thinking of the priest's words: "If there was affection
between you it is very proper that you should know regret. But you
were not pledged to one another, because neither you nor he had
spoken to your parents; therefore it is not befitting or right that
you should sorrow thus, nor feel so deep a grief for a young man
who, after all is said, was nothing to you..."
And again: "That masses should be sung, that you should pray for
him, such things are useful and good, you could do no better. Three
high masses with music, and three more when the boys return from the
woods, as your father has asked me, most assuredly these will help
him, and also you may be certain they will delight him more than
your lamentations, since they will shorten by so much his time of
expiation. But to grieve like this, and to go about casting gloom
over the household is not well, nor is it pleasing in the sight of
God."
He did not appear in the guise of a comforter, nor of one who gives
counsel in the secret affairs of the heart, but rather as a man of
the law or a chemist who enunciates his bald formulas, invariable
and unfailing.
"The duty of a girl like you--good-looking, healthy, active withal
and a clever housewife--is in the first place to help her old
parents, and in good time to marry and bring up a Christian family
of her own. You have no call to the religious life? No. Then you
must give up torturing yourself in this fashion, because it is a
sacrilegious thing and unseemly, seeing that the young man was
nothing whatever to you. The good God knows what is best for us; we
should neither rebel nor complain ..."
In all this, but one phrase left Maria a little doubting, it was the
priest's assurance that François Paradis, in the place where now he
was, cared only for masses to repose his soul, and never at all for
the deep and tender regrets lingering behind him. This she could not
constrain herself to believe. Unable to think of him otherwise in
death than in life, she felt it must bring him something of
happiness and consolation that her sorrow was keeping alive their
ineffectual love for a little space beyond death. Yet, since the
priest had said it ...
The road wound its way among the trees rising sombrely from the
snow. Here and there a squirrel, alarmed by the swiftly passing
sleigh and the tinkling bells, sprang upon a trunk and scrambled
upward, clinging to the bark. From the gray sky a biting cold was
falling and the wind stung the cheek, for this was February, with
two long months of winter yet to come.
As Charles Eugene trotted along the beaten road, bearing the
travellers to their lonely house, Maria, in obedience to the words
of the _curé_ at St. Henri, strove to drive away gloom and put
mourning from her; as simple-mindedly as she would have fought the
temptation of a dance, of a doubtful amusement or anything that was
plainly wrong and hence forbidden.
They reached home as night was falling. The coming of evening was
only a slow fading of the light, for, since morning, the heavens had
been overcast, the sun obscured. A sadness rested upon the pallid
earth; the firs and cypresses did not wear the aspect of living
trees and the naked birches seemed to doubt of the springtime. Maria
shivered as she left the sleigh, and hardly noticed Chien, barking
and gambolling a welcome, or the children who called to her from the
door-step. The world seemed strangely empty, for this evening at
least. Love was snatched away, and they forbade remembrance. She
went swiftly into the house without looking about her, conscious of
a new dread and hatred for the bleak land, the forest's eternal
shade, the snow and the cold,--for all those things she had lived her
life amongst, which now had wounded her.