This is not really the story of a child, though it began when Hypolite
caught the measles at dancing-class. And when he was getting better, his
uncle, who kept a business-like eye upon his health and his manners,
sent him to Madame Dulac at Saint Jacques de Kilkenny, to grow strong in
the air of the hills.
Hypolite was a little boy at the time, quiet and brown, with eyes like
bronze-purple pansies. It was not his fault that his surname was Gibbs.
Even at that age, he preferred to have it ignored. Madame called him
“M’sieur Hypolite,” or “le petit sieur.” But then, Madame had served and
loved his mother when that mother was Geneviève de Lempriere, before she
married Anthony Gibbs, and before Hypolite was born, or Madame herself
took boarders. To Hypolite, two white shafts in a cemetery outside
Montreal represented that ill-sorted father and mother. But before he
had been a week in the village, his French began to return to him.
“It is yours by right,” said Madame, who would hear nothing of the
Gibbses. “What wouldst thou for thy dinner, mon ange?”
Madame fed him royally and made a baby of him, and told him stories of
the long-ago days, and spoke to him of his mother. In a little while,
the Gibbs part seemed to have dropped out of his life. He loved Madame,
and Telephore who chopped the wood and André who worked in the garden.
But most of all he loved Félice.
Félice was Madame’s help in the kitchen, a girl who belonged to nobody,
for whom nobody cared. Perhaps the incipient artist in Hypolite first
rejoiced in her; she made an impression on him never effaced. His canvas
in last year’s Salon, that canvas full of brown and gold, was a far-off
memory of her.
“She was Dian,” I have heard Hypolite say “Dian; not the stately
goddess, queen of Nature, but the ever-young Artemis, slender as her own
white crescent.”
Hypolite ran about the straggling village and made friends with the
children; and climbed the little hill beyond the Calvary, and looked at
the great river running to the sea, wishing he might follow it.
“There are many nice things here,” he said, invading the kitchen for
cakes, “and nice people. André is nice and Telephore is nice, and so is
m’sieur le curé. But Maxime is nicest. I went to-day to see him. He
lives in a little cabin all covered with vines, and he has two fields
covered with mustard and flowers. He is tall and he has blue eyes. I
picked some of his flowers and he came out and talked to me, and told me
his name and I told him mine. Then his dog came out, his black big dog
he calls Sorrow,—La Tristesse. Why does he call it La Tristesse? It is
a nice dog and licked my hands.”
Madame looked up from her cake and crossed herself, with wide eyes.
“Hast thou made friends with Sorrow, mon petit?” she asked, gazing at
him strangely. “I am grieved. Maxime and La Tristesse are not for thee.”
“It is a very nice dog,” said Hypolite, in the gruff tone that was his
sole heritage from the Gibbses. Félice was beating eggs at the table.
Her long gray eyes turned lazily towards the child, and then were bent
upon her bowl again. Her wrists fascinated Hypolite as she whipped the
froth, they were so small and strong and firm, sunburned to a creamy
brown. He watched them while he ate the cake, and wondered what her cold
eyes had tried to tell him.
“Why am I not to make friends with Maxime’s La Tristesse?” he demanded
of old Telephore.
Telephore stared at him as Madame had done, and made the little sign
against evil. “La Tristesse?” he said. “La Tristesse? If you make
friends with Sorrow, Sorrow will abide with you.”
“But she has not abided with me,” put in Hypolite patiently, “she abides
with Maxime.”
Telephore crossed his scarred, knotted hands upon the haft of the axe
and leaned his chin upon them. “Not always,” he said in a low voice,
“ah! not always. Henri l’Ecossais, he was a strong man last Michaelmas.
He stopped to speak with Maxime at his door, and patted on the head that
La Tristesse, brute of ill name and ill omen. And she, that La
Tristesse, she follows him home, beating with her tail and begging him
to look at her, as some dogs will. And he laughs, and gives her bones,
and she sleeps a night in his stable. In the morning she goes home,
drifting like a black ghost down the road. And Henri, little monsieur,
what of Henri? In three days, look you, he is seized with a chill and a
weariness, and in a week he is dead,—mon Dieu!—dead! And that is not
all. If I had my will, Maxime and La Tristesse should be—eh! sent from
here.”
Telephore’s face was as superstitious and cruel as the faces of some of
Millett’s peasants, and he muttered to himself as the bright blade of
his axe fell upon the wood, and the sweet white chips flew in showers
like a tiny snowstorm.
“But that is all foolishness,” said the round-eyed Hypolite, in the
lordly tone Saint Jacques de Kilkenny had taught him. “La Tristesse is a
nice dog, though she is long and black and cries with her eyes. Once I
had a little guinea-pig, un cochon d’Inde, black as Sorrow; but it died
of an indigestion.”
“Foolishness, is it?” muttered Telephore. “Then, little monsieur, there
are many fools in Saint Jacques. As for the cochon d’Inde, that was
different. Gabrielle has a little sucking-pig, and no one is troubled by
it, though it visited every house in Saint Jacques. But this Sorrow of
Maxime’s—foolishness, is it? Eh, well! Pray the good saints you may not
be taught its wisdom.”
Telephore was cross and would not talk any more. André professed to have
no opinion at all about La Tristesse. So, as was his way, Hypolite
decided to go to headquarters for information.
He crossed one of Maxime’s thriftless fields, and went up the path to
the cabin. Once the path led through a garden of flowers, but now garden
and fields were all one, overrun with blossoms grown small and hardy and
wild, which could not be found elsewhere in Saint Jacques. La Tristesse
was lying by the door, in the sun, licking a long red scratch on her
side. She put her lank paws on Hypolite’s shoulders and thrust her
melancholy nose against his cheek.
“Are you come for more flowers?” asked Maxime, rising from among the
wild raspberry canes. “There are pretty flowers in the field beyond the
patch of barley. I shall grow oats there next year, they are prettier
than the barley, but the flowers are best. My grandfather brought the
seeds of some of them from the other side of the world, and a few braved
our snows and frosts. Pick all you want, little monsieur.” He laughed at
Hypolite, showing his white teeth, and yawned and stretched himself. He
was tall and strong, with a fine tanned face and eyes of Breton blue
softened by many dreams, and he was shabby to the point of rags.
“Thank you,” said Hypolite politely. “But I did not come for flowers
to-day. I came to ask why you call your dog Sorrow? Pardon, m’sieur, if
I am too curious.”
Maxime bowed, ready laughter in his eyes. “I am honoured with monsieur’s
interest,” said he. “I call her Sorrow because she has the look of it,
as any one of these—ganders of Saint Jacques would understand. I found
her roaming in the woods, starved, all over of a tremble. I took her
home and fed her. That is all there is about her. She would harm no one.
Yet, because of her colour and her melancholy she is a witch and a
loupgarou and I know not what besides.” He laughed angrily and touched
Sorrow’s side gently. “Look you here!” he cried, “this was done last
night. It is the mark of a bullet,—of a silver bullet, perhaps, they
are such fools.” Hypolite touched the scratch too, with fingers light
and tender, and Maxime’s face softened again.
“We have no friends, La Tristesse and I,” he said sadly. “I suppose it
is because we do not work or go to church. But those stuffy saints—And
why should I work? I have no one to work for, but myself.”
“I’m not very fond of work,” confessed Hypolite. “My uncle says I must
go into an engineer’s office when I leave college, but I do not want to.
I would rather paint pictures full of pretty colours.”
“And I,” said Maxime, “I also love pretty colours. When I want them, I
look at the fields and the skies and the hills, and I am content.” They
smiled at each other in perfect understanding.
“And I am a friend to you and La Tristesse if you will have me,” said
Hypolite.
“Monsieur honours us,” said Maxime simply, “but Loneliness and Sorrow
are an ill pair of friends.”
Hypolite dined with Maxime and La Tristesse, under the vines, with
leaves for plates; dined off bread and baked potatoes and little trout
from the brook and wild raspberries. “It is poor fare,” said Maxime
shyly, “but the air and the sun make it sweet.”
“It is lovely,” answered Hypolite ecstatically. “I should like to have
baked potatoes in a little oven and catch little fish for my dinner
always. Oh, always.”
“The bread is soft and white,” went on Maxime, “feast-day bread, such as
you are used to eating.”
“It is the same as Madame Dulac’s,” said Hypolite with his mouth full.
“It is the same as Madame’s,” repeated Maxime, laughing.
Madame scolded Hypolite for the first time, when she heard where he had
been. “It is an ill place,” she cried, “and those who dwell in it have
an evil name. That black thing, called a dog, ran and barked at one of
Gabrielle’s cows yesterday, and already the cow has sickened. Go not
near that La Tristesse, I beg of you, child, nor near her master.”
“La Tristesse is a very nice dog,” repeated Hypolite in the voice of the
Gibbses, presenting so stony a front to her shrill vexation that Madame
broke into tears and flounced away. When she had gone, Félice slipped
over to the child, and, without any change in her small, cold, beautiful
face, kissed him. He gasped; feeling as if he had been kissed by a
flower, so cool and soft were her lips.
Gabrielle’s cow died, and the whispers against La Tristesse changed to
silence, which was a bad sign. Hypolite did not know that there were
very few people in Saint Jacques who would have gone to Maxime’s door
after dark.
And then the rumours began again, but this time they came from the
woods. In the village there was silence and listening. But from the
woods there issued a new dread,—a dread of night and loneliness and the
sickness that strikes therein. Telephore first put it into words.
“It is said,” he told André in a whisper, “that far to the north there
is a deserted village. When that village was full of people, there came
to their doors a black dog, long and gaunt and wretched. They took pity
on that dog-thing and fed it for three days, and then it went away. But
it had left a gift for those people. La Picotte struck them, coming
silently as is her wont. They died like flies those people that fed the
black dog, and the few that were left ran away.”
André stared, his face growing gray with vague horror. He was slower
than Telephore.
“If I were you,” said Telephore with a sort of frightened sneer, “I
would change the name of Maxime’s La Tristesse. Maybe she is only biding
her time.”
Two or three days afterward, Hypolite went to see Maxime. It was early
evening and he moved through a golden world. “I have never forgotten
anything of that evening,” he said long afterward. The sky was golden,
the air was golden, and everywhere about the fields was the golden glow
of mustard. But in front of Maxime’s cabin there was a black little
crowd of people, and in the road stood Maxime, facing them fiercely, his
hand upon Sorrow’s head. There were boys there, throwing stones, and one
or two of the shouting men had old shotguns.
I ran to them, and I think I was screaming with anger. But Telephore was
in the crowd, and he caught me in his arms gently, and made me keep
still; though I kicked, and bit his hands, and my teeth were as sharp as
a squirrel’s. When they saw me, the men who had the guns, lowered them
as if ashamed, and the boys stopped throwing stones.
Josef, Gabrielle’s husband, was speaking. “We will not harm you,” he
said, “but if you would stay among us, you must shoot that black brute
you call your dog, there under your hand.”
“I will not shoot her for any of you cowards of Saint Jacques,” cried
Maxime at that. The crowd growled threateningly.
“Then go!” cried Josef, “you and your dog-thing!”
“I shall never forget how Maxime looked, his head thrown back and his
eyes like points of blue fire, facing the men who were casting him out
of his home. I thought he was going to fight them all. He looked down at
Sorrow, cowering beside him and trusting him, and I think he yielded for
her sake. He laughed very bitterly.
“I will go,” he said, and they shrank from his eyes. “Sorrow has been my
companion and my friend, she has shared my food and my fire, and with
Sorrow will I go. She is more faithful to me than any other.”
And then a girl pushed suddenly through the crowd, and stood in front of
Maxime. It was Madame’s Félice, and she was laughing aloud. I had never
heard her laugh before. “If you go, I will go with you,” she said.
Maxime’s face was suddenly strange and wild at the sight of her.
“You—you—you?” he cried. “You—you, O heart of my life, star of my
dreams?”