CAPE BRETON TALES
[Illustration: THE INNER HARBOR]
CAPE BRETON TALES
BY
HARRY JAMES SMITH
AUTHOR OF
_Amédée's Son, Enchanted Ground, Mrs. Bumpstead Leigh,
Tailor Made Man, etc._
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
OLIVER M. WIARD
[Illustration]
_The_ ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
Copyright 1920
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
ON THE FRENCH SHORE OF CAPE BRETON (1908) 1
LA ROSE WITNESSETH (1908) 17
OF THE BUCHERONS 19
OF LA BELLE MÉLANIE 32
OF SIMÉON'S SON 44
AT A BRETON CALVAIRE (1903) 57
THE PRIVILEGE (1910) 61
THEIR TRUE LOVE (1910) 77
GARLANDS FOR PETTIPAW (1915) 99
FLY, MY HEART (1915) 119
ILLUSTRATIONS
By OLIVER M. WIARD
THE INNER HARBOR _Frontispiece_
ARICHAT 17
A CALVAIRE 56
FOUGÈRE'S COVE 76
A FISHERMAN'S HOUSE 118
_"On the French Shore of Cape Breton" and "The Privilege" were first
published in The Atlantic Monthly, while "La Rose Witnesseth of La Belle
Mélanie" is reprinted from "Amédée's Son" (Chapters VIII and IX) with
the kind permission of the publishers, Houghton Mifflin Company._
_"At a Breton Calvaire" was first published in The Williams Literary
Monthly during undergraduate days, and was rewritten several times
during the next few years. The final form is the one used here, except
for the last stanza, which is a combination of the two versions now
extant._
_The illustrations are from sketches made during Oliver Wiard's visits
in Arichat. It is an especial pleasure to include them, not only
because of their fidelity and beauty, but also because of my brother's
enthusiastic interest and delight in them._
EDITH SMITH.
ON THE FRENCH SHORE OF CAPE BRETON
ON THE FRENCH SHORE OF CAPE BRETON
Summer comes late along the Cape Breton shore; and even while it stays
there is something a little diffident and ticklish about it, as if each
clear warm day might perhaps be the last. Though by early June the
fields are in their first emerald, there are no flowers yet. The little
convent girls who carry the banners at the head of the Corpus Christi
procession at Arichat wear wreaths of artificial lilies of the valley
and marguerites over their white veils, and often enough their teeth
chatter with cold before the completion of the long march--out from the
church portals westward by the populous street, then up through the
steep open fields to the old Calvary on top of the hill, then back to
the church along the grass-grown upper road, far above the roofs, in
full view of the wide bay.
Despite some discomforts, the procession is a very great event; every
house along the route is decked out with bunting or flags or a bright
home-made carpet, hung from a window. Pots of tall geraniums in scarlet
bloom have been set out on the steps; and numbers of little evergreen
trees, or birches newly in leaf, have been brought in from the country
and bound to the fences. Along the roadside are gathered all the
Acadians from the neighboring parishes, devoutly gay, enchanted with
the pious spectacle. The choir, following after the richly canopied
Sacrament and swinging censers, are chanting psalms of benediction and
thanksgiving; banners and flags and veils flutter in the wind; the
harbor, ice-bound so many months, is flecked with dancing white-caps and
purple shadows: surely summer cannot be far off.
"When once the ice has done passing _down there_," they say--"which may
happen any time now--you will see! Perhaps all in a day the change will
come. The fog that creeps in so cold at night--it will all be sucked up;
the sky will be clear as glass down to the very edge of the water. Ah,
the fine season it will be!"
That is the way summer arrives on the Acadian shore: everything bursting
pell-mell into bloom; daisies and buttercups and August flowers rioting
in the fields, lilacs and roses shedding their fragrance in sheltered
gardens; and over all the world a drench of unspeakable sunlight.
You could never forget your first sight of Arichat if you entered its
narrow harbor at this divine moment. Steep, low hills, destitute of
trees, set a singularly definite sky-line just behind; and the town
runs--dawdles, rather--in a thin, wavering band for some miles sheer
on the edge of the water. Eight or ten wharves, some of them fallen
into dilapidation, jut out at intervals from clumps of weatherbeaten
storehouses; and a few small vessels, it may be, are lying up alongside
or anchored idly off shore. Only the occasional sound of a creaking
block or of a wagon rattling by on the hard roadway breaks the silence.
Along the street the houses elbow one another in neighborly groups,
or straggle out in single file, separated by bits of declivitous
white-fenced yard; and to the westward, a little distance up the hill,
sits the square church, far outvying every other edifice in size and
dignity, glistening white, with a tall bronze Virgin on the peak of the
roof--Our Lady of the Assumption, the special patron of the Acadians.
But what impresses you above all is the incredible vividness of color
in this landscape: the dazzling gold-green of the fields, heightened
here and there by luminous patches of foam-white where the daisies are
in full carnival, or subdued to duller tones where, on uncultivated
ground, moss-hummocks and patches of rock break through the investiture
of grass. The sky has so much room here too: the whole world seems to be
adrift in azure; the thin strip of land hangs poised between, claimed
equally by firmament and the waters under it.
In the old days, they tell us, Arichat was a very different place from
now. Famous among the seaports of the Dominion, it saw a continual
coming and going of brigs and ships and barquentines in the South
American fish trade.
"But if you had known it then!" they say. "The wharves were as thick all
the length of the harbor as the teeth of a comb; and in winter, when the
vessels were laid up--eh, mon Dieu! you would have called it a forest,
for all the masts and spars you saw there. No indeed, it was not dreamed
of in those days that Arichat would ever come to this!"
So passes the world's glory! An air of tender, almost jealous
reminiscence hangs about the town; and in its gentle decline into
obscurity it has kept a sort of dignity, a self-possession, a certain
look of wisdom and experience, which in a sense make it proof against
all arrows of outrageous Fortune.
Back from the other shore of the harbor, jutting out for some miles
into Chedabucto Bay, lies the Cape. You get a view of it if you climb
to the crest of the hill--a broad reach of barrens, fretted all day
by the sea. Out there it is what the Acadians call a bad country.
About the sluice-like coves that have been eaten into its rocky shore
are scrambling groups of fishermen's houses; but aside from these
and the lighthouse on the spit of rocks to southward, the region is
uninhabited--a waste of rock and swamp-alder and scrub-balsam, across
which a single thread of a road takes its circuitous way, dipping over
steep low hills, turning out for gnarls of rock and patches of gleaming
marsh, losing itself amid dense thickets of alder, then emerging upon
some bare hilltop, where the whole measureless sweep of sea and sky
fills the vision.
When the dusk begins to fall of an autumn afternoon--between dog and
wolf, as the saying goes--you could almost believe in the strange
noises--the rumblings, clankings, shrill voices--that are to be heard
above the dull roar of the sea by belated passers on the barrens. Some
people have seen death-fires too, and a headless creature, much like a
horse, galloping through the darkness; and over there at Fougère's Cove,
the most remote settlement of the Cape, there were knockings at doors
through all one winter from hands not human. The Fougères--they were
mostly of one tribe there--were driven to desperation; they consulted a
priest; they protected themselves with blessed images, with prayers and
holy water; and no harm came to them, though poor Marcelle, who was a
_jeune fille_ of marriageable age, was prostrated for a year with the
fright of it.
This barren territory, where nothing grows above the height of a man's
shoulder, still goes by the name of "the woods"--_les bois_--among the
Acadians. "Once the forest was magnificent here," they tell you--"trees
as tall as the church tower; but the great fire swept it all away; and
never has there been a good growth since. For one thing, you see, we
must get our firewood from it somehow."
This fact accounts for a curious look in the ubiquitous stubby
evergreens: their lower branches spread flat and wide close on the
ground,--that is where the snow in winter protects them,--and above
reaches a thin, spire-like stem, trimmed close, except for new growth at
the top, of all its branches. It gives suggestion of a harsh, misshapen,
all but defeated existence; the adverse forces are so tyrannical out
here on the Cape, the material of life so sparse.
I remember once meeting a little funeral train crossing the barrens.
They were bearing the body of a young girl, Anna Béjean, to its last
rest, five miles away by the road, in the yard of the parish church
amongst the wooden crosses. The long box of pine lay on the bottom of
a country wagon, and a wreath of artificial flowers and another of
home-dyed immortelles were fastened to the cover. A young fisherman,
sunburned and muscular, was leading the horse along the rough road, and
behind followed three or four carts, carrying persons in black, all of
middle age or beyond, and silent.
Yet in the full tide of summer the barrens have a beauty in which
this characteristic melancholy is only a persistent undertone. Then
the marshes flush rose-pink with lovely multitudes of calopogons that
cluster like poising butterflies amongst the dark grasses; here too
the canary-yellow bladderwort flecks the black pools, and the red,
leathery pitcher-plant springs in sturdy clumps from the moss-hummocks.
And the wealth of color over all the country!--gray rock touched into
life with sky-reflections; rusty green of alder thickets, glistening
silver-green of balsam and juniper; and to the sky-line, wherever it
can keep its hold, the thin, variegated carpet of close-cropped grass,
where creeping berries of many kinds grow in profusion. Flocks of sheep
scamper untended over the barrens all day, and groups of horses, turned
out to shift for themselves while the fishing season keeps their owners
occupied, look for a moment, nose in the air, at the passer, kick up
their heels, and race off.
As you turn back again toward Arichat you catch a glimpse of its
glistening white church, miles distant in reality, but looking curiously
near, across a landscape where none of the familiar standards of
measure exist. You lose it on the next decline; then it flashes in
sight again, and the blue, sun-burnished expanse of water between. It
occurs to you that the whole life of the country finds its focus
there: christenings and first communions, marriages and burials--how
wonderfully the church holds them all in her keeping; how she sends
out her comfort and her exhortation, her reproach and her eternal hope
across even this bad country, where the circumstances of human life are
so ungracious.
But it is on a Sunday morning, when, in response to the quavering
summons of the chapel bell, the whole countryside gives up its
population, that you get the clearest notion of what religion means
in the life of the Acadians. From the doorway of our house, which was
close to the road at the upper end of the harbor, we could see the whole
church-going procession from the outlying districts. The passing would
be almost unbroken from eight o'clock on for more than an hour and a
half: a varied, vivacious, friendly human stream. They came in hundreds
from the scattered villages and hamlets of the parish--from Petit de
Grat and Little Anse and Pig Cove and Gros Nez and Point Rouge and Cap
au Guet, eight or nine miles often enough.
First, those who went afoot and must allow plenty of time on account
of age: bent old fishermen, whose yellowed and shiny coats had been
made for more robust shoulders; old women, invariably in short black
capes, and black bonnets tied tight under the chin, and in their hands
a rosary and perhaps a thumb-worn missal. Then troops of children, much
_endimanché_,--one would like to say "Sundayfied,"--trotting along
noisily, stopping to examine every object of interest by the way,
extracting all the excitement possible out of the weekly pilgrimage.
A little later the procession became more general: young and old and
middle-aged together. In Sunday boots that creaked loudly passed numbers
of men and boys, sometimes five or six abreast, reaching from side
to side of the street, sometimes singly attendant upon a conscious
young person of the other sex. The wagons are beginning to appear now,
scattering the pedestrians right and left as they rattle by, bearing
whole families packed in little space; and away across the harbor, you
see a small fleet of brown sails putting off from the Cape for the
nearer shore.
Outside the church, in the open space before the steps, is gathered a
constantly growing multitude, a dense, restless swarm of humanity, full
of gossip and prognostic, until suddenly the bell stops its clangor
overhead; then there is a surging up the steps and through the wide
doors of the sanctuary; and outside all is quiet once more.
The Acadians do not appear greatly to relish the more solemn things of
religion. They like better a religion demurely gay, pervaded by light
and color.
"Elle est très chic, notre petite église, n'est-ce pas?" was a comment
made by a pious soul of my acquaintance, eager to uphold the honor of
her parish.
Proper, mild-featured saints and smiling Virgins in painted robes and
gilt haloes abound in the Acadian churches; on the altars are lavish
decorations of artificial flowers--silver lilies, paper roses, red
and purple immortelles; and the ceilings and pillars and wall-spaces
are often done in blue and pink, with gold stars; such a style, one
imagines, as might appeal to our modern St. Valentine. The piety
that expresses itself in this inoffensive gayety of embellishment is
more akin to that which moves universal humanity to don its finery
o' Sundays,--to the greater glory of God,--than to the sombre,
death-remembering zeal of some other communities. A kind religion
this, one not without its coquetries, gracious, tactful, irresistible,
interweaving itself throughout the very texture of the common life.
Last summer, out at Petit de Grat, three miles from Arichat, where
the people have just built a little church of their own, they held a
"Grand Picnic and Ball" for the raising of funds with which to erect
a glebe house. The priest authorized the affair, but stipulated that
sunset should end each day's festivities, so that all decencies might be
respected. This parish picnic started on a Monday and continued daily
for the rest of the week--that is to say, until all that there was to
sell was sold, and until all the youth of the vicinity had danced their
legs to exhaustion.
An unoccupied shop was given over to the sale of cakes, tartines,
doughnuts, imported fruits, syrup drinks (unauthorized beverages being
obtainable elsewhere), to the vending of chances on wheels of fortune,
target-shooting, dice-throwing, hooked rugs, shawls, couvertures,
knitted hoods, and the like; and above all the hubbub and excitement
twanged the ceaseless, inevitable voice of a graphophone, reviving
long-forgotten rag-time.
Outside, most conspicuous on the treeless slope of hill, was a
"pavilion" of boards, bunting-decked, on which, from morn till eve,
rained the incessant clump-clump of happy feet. For music there was a
succession of performers and of instruments: a mouth-organ, a fiddle, a
concertina, each lending its particular quality of gayety to the dance;
the mouth-organ, shrill, extravagant, whimsical, failing in richness;
the concertina, rich, noisy, impetuous, failing in fine shades; the
fiddle, wheedling, provocative, but a little thin. And besides--the
fiddle is not what it used to be in the hands of old Fortune.
Fortune died a year ago, and he was never appreciated till death
snatched him from us: the skinniest, most ramshackle of mankind, tall,
loose-jointed, shuffling in gait; at all other times than those that
called his art into play, a shiftless, hang-dog sort of personage, who
would always be begging a coat of you, or asking the gift of ten cents
to buy him some tobacco. But at a dance he was a despot unchallenged.
Only to hear him jig off the Irish Washerwoman was to acknowledge
his preëminence. His bleary eyes and tobacco-stained lips took on a
radiance, his body rocked to and fro, vibrated to the devil-may-care
rhythm of the thing, while his left foot emphatically rapped out the
measure.
Until another genius shall be raised up amongst us, Fortune's name will
be held in cherished memory. For that matter, it is not likely to die
out, since, on the day of his death, the old reprobate was married to
the mother of his seven children--baptized, married, administered, and
shuffled off in a day.
It had never occurred to any of us, somehow, that Fortune might be as
transitory and impermanent as his patron goddess herself. We had always
accepted him as a sort of ageless thing, a living symbol, a peripatetic
mortal, coming out of Petit de Grat, and going about, tobacco in cheek,
fiddle under arm, as irresponsible as mirth itself among the sons of
men. God rest him! Another landmark gone.
And old Maximen Forêt, too, from whom one used to take weather-wisdom
every day--his bench out there in the sun is empty. Maximen's shop was
just across the street from our house--a long, darkish, tunnel-like
place under a steep roof. Tinware of all descriptions hung in dully
shining array from the ceiling; barrels and a rusty stove and two broad
low counters occupied most of the floor space, and the atmosphere was
charged with a curious sharp odor in which you could distinguish oil and
tobacco and molasses. The floor was all dented full of little holes,
like a honeycomb, where Maximen had walked over it with his iron-pointed
crutch; for he was something of a cripple. But you rarely had any
occasion to enter the smelly little shop, for no one ever bought much of
anything there nowadays.
Instead, you sat down on the sunny bench beside the old man--Acadian of
the Acadians--and listened to his tireless, genial babble--now French,
now English, as the humor struck him.
"It go mak' a leetle weat'er, m'sieu," he would say. "I t'ink you better
not go fur in the p'tit caneau t'is day. Dere is squall--là-bas--see,
dark--may be t'unner. Dat is not so unlike, dis mont'. Oh, w'at a hell
time for de hays!"
For everybody who passed he had a greeting, even for those who had
hastened his business troubles through never paying their accounts. To
the last he never lost his faith in their good intentions.
"Dose poor devil fishermen," he would say, "however dey mak' leeve, God
know. You t'ink I mak' 'em go wid notting? It ain't lak dat wit' me here
yet, m'sieu. Dey pay some day, when le bon Dieu, he send dem some feesh;
dat's sure sure."
If it happened that anybody stopped on business, old Maximen would
hobble to the door and tug violently at a bell-rope.
"Cr-r-r-line! Cr-r-r-line!" he would call.
"Tout d' suite!" answered a shrill voice from some remoter portion of
the edifice; and a moment later an old woman with straggling white
hair, toothless gums, and penetrating, humorous eyes, deepset under a
forehead of infinite wrinkles, would come shuffling up the pebble walk
from the basement.
"Me voila!" she would ejaculate, panting. "Me ol' man, he always know
how to git me in a leetle minute, hé?"
On Sundays Caroline and Maximen would drive to chapel in a queer, heavy,
antiquated road-cart that had been built especially for his use, hung
almost as low between the axles as a chariot.
"We go mak' our respec' to the bon Dieu," he would laugh, as he took
the reins in hand and waited for Célestine, the chunky little mare, to
start--which she did when the mood took her.
The small shop is closed and beginning to fall to pieces. Maximen has
been making his respects amid other surroundings for some four or five
years, and Caroline, at the end of a twelvemonth of lonely waiting,
followed after.
"It seem lak I need t'e ol' man to look out for," she used to say. "All
t'e day I listen to hear t'at bell again. 'Tout d' suite! I used to
call, no matter what I do--maybe over the stove or pounding my bread;
and den, 'Me voila, mon homme!' I would be at t'e shop, ready to help."
I suppose that wherever a man looks in the world, if he but have the
eyes to see, he finds as much of gayety and pathos, of failure and
courage, as in any particular section of it; yet so much at least is
true: that in a little community like this, so removed from the larger,
more spectacular conflicts of life, so face to face, all the year, with
the inveterate and domineering forces of nature, one seems to discover a
more poignant relief in all the homely, familiar, universal episodes of
the human comedy.
[Illustration: ARICHAT]
LA ROSE WITNESSETH
OF THE BUCHERONS
OF LA BELLE MÉLANIE
OF SIMÉON'S SON
LA ROSE WITNESSETH
_Of How the Bucherons Were Punished for Their Hard Hearts_
It was a boy of ten who listened to La Rose, and while he listened, the
sun stood still in the sky, there was an enchantment on all the world.
Whatever La Rose said you had to believe, somehow. Oh, I assure you, no
one could be more exacting than she in the matter of proofs. For persons
who would give an ear to any absurd story tattled abroad she had nothing
but contempt.
"Before you believe a thing," said La Rose, sagely, "you must know
whether it is true or not. That is the most important part of a story."
She would give a decisive nod to her small head and shut her lips
together almost defiantly. Yet always, somewhere in the corner of her
alert gray eye, there seemed to be lurking the ghost of a twinkle. La
Rose had no age. She was both very young and very old. For all she had
never traveled more than ten miles from the little Cape Breton town of
Port l'Évêque, you had the feeling that she had seen a good deal of
the world, and it is certain that her life had not been easy; yet she
would laugh as quickly and abundantly as a young girl just home from the
convent.
These two were the best of comrades. La Rose had been the boy's nurse
when he was little, and as he had no mother she had kept a feeling
of special affection and responsibility for him. Thus it happened
that whenever she was making some little expedition out across the
harbor--say for blueberries on the barrens, or white moorberries, or
ginseng--she would get permission from the captain for Michel to go with
her; and this was the happiest privilege in the boy's life. Most of all
because of the stories La Rose would tell him.
La Rose had a story to tell about every spot they visited, about every
person they passed. She had been brought up, herself, out here on the
Cape; and not an inch of its territory but was familiar to her.
"Now that is where those Bucherons lived," she observed one day, as they
were walking homeward from Pig Cove by the Calvaire road. "They are all
gone now, and the house is almost fallen to pieces; but once things were
lively enough there--mon Dieu, oui!--quite lively enough for comfort."
She gave a sagacious nod to her head, with the look of one who could say
more, and would, if you urged her a little.
"Was it at the Bucherons' that all the chairs stood on one leg?" asked
Michel, thrilling mysteriously.
"Oui, c'est ça," answered La Rose, in a voice of the most sepulchral,
"right there in that house, the chairs stood on one leg and went
rap--rap--against the floor. And more than once a table with dishes
and other things on it fell over, and there were strange sounds in
the cupboard. Oh, it is certain those Bucherons were tormented; but
for that matter they had brought it on themselves because of their
greediness and their hard hearts. It came for a punishment; and when
they repented themselves, it went away."
"I haven't ever heard all the story about the Bucherons," said
Michel--"or at least, not since I was big. I am almost sure I would like
it."
"Well, I daresay," agreed La Rose. "It is an interesting story in some
ways; and the best of it is, it is not one of those stories that are
only to make you laugh, and then you go right away and forget them. And
another thing: this story about the Bucherons really happened. It was
when my poor stepmother was a girl. She lived at Pig Cove then, and that
is only two miles from Gros Nez. And one of those Bucherons was once
wanting to marry her; but do you think she would have anything to do
with a man like that?
"'No,' she said. 'I will have nothing to do with you. I would sooner not
ever be married, me, than to have you for my man.'
"And the reason she spoke that way was because of the cruelty they had
shown toward that poor widow of a Noémi, which everybody on the Cape
knew about, and it was a great scandal. And if you want me to tell you
about it, that is what I am going to do now."
La Rose seated herself on a flat rock by the road, and Michel found
another for himself close by. Below them lay a deep rocky cove, with
shores as steep as a sluice, and close above its inner margin stood the
shell of a small house. The chimney had fallen in, the windows were all
gone--only vacant holes now, through which you saw the daylight from the
other side, and the roof had begun to sag.
"Yes," said La Rose, "it will soon be gone to pieces entirely, and then
there will be nothing to remind anyone of those Bucherons and what
torments they had. You see there were four of them, an old woman and two
sons, and one of the sons was married, but there were not any children;
and all those four must have had stones instead of hearts. They were
only thinking how they could get the better of other people, and so
become rich.
"And before that there had been three sons at home; but one of
them--Benoît his name was--had married a certain Noémi Boudrot; and she
was as sweet and beautiful as a lily, and he too was different from the
others; and so they had not lived here, but had got a little house at
Pig Cove, where they were very happy; and the good God sent them two
children, of a beauty and gentleness indescribable; and they called them
Évangéline and little Benoît, but you do not need to remember that,
because it is not a part of the story.
"So things went on that way for quite a while; and all the time those
four Bucherons were growing more and more hard-hearted, like four
serpents in a pile together.
"Well, one day in October that Benoît Bucheron who lived in Pig Cove
was going alone in a small cart to Port l'Évêque to buy some provisions
for winter--flour, I suppose, and meal, and perhaps some clothes and
some tobacco; and instead of going direct by the Gros Nez road, he
came around this way by the Calvaire so as to stop in and speak to his
relatives; and to see them welcoming him, you would never have suspected
their stone hearts. But Benoît was solemn for all that, as if troubled
by some idea. Then that sly old mother, she said:
"'Dear Benoît,' she said, 'what troubles you? Can you not put trust in
your own mother, who loves you better than her eyes and nose?'--and she
smiled at him just like a fat wicked old spider that is waiting for a
fly to come and get tangled up in her net.
"But Benoît only remembered then that she was his mother; so he said:
"'I have a fear, me, that I shall not be long for this world, my mother.
Last week I saw a little blue fire on the barrens one night, and again
one night I heard hoofs going _claquin-claquant_ down there on the
beach, much like the horse without head. And that is why I am getting my
provisions so early, and making everything ready for the winter. See,'
he said, 'here is the thirteen dollars I have saved this year. I am
going to buy things with it in Port l'Évêque.'
"Now you may depend that when he showed them all that money, their
eyes stuck out like the eyes of crabs; but of course they did not say
anything only some words of the most comforting. And finally he said,
getting ready to go:
"'If anything should happen,' he said, 'will you promise me to be good
to that poor Noémi and those two poor little innocent lambs?'--and
those serpents said, certainly, they would do all that was possible;
and with that Benoît gets into his cart, and starts down the hill; and
suddenly the horse takes a fright of something and runs away, and the
cart tips over, and Benoît is thrown out; and when his brothers get to
him he is quite quite dead--and that shows what it means to see one of
those little blue fires at night in the woods.
"Well, you can believe that Noémi was not very happy when they brought
back that poor Benoît to Pig Cove. Her eyes were like two brooks, and
for a long time she could not say anything, and then finally, summoning
a little voice of courage:
"'I am glad of one thing,' she said, 'which is that he had saved all
that money, for without it I would never know how to live through the
winter.'
"And one of those brothers said, with an innocent voice of a dove, 'what
money then?'--and she said, 'He had it with him.' And so they look for
it; but no, there is not any.
"'You must have deceived yourself,' said that brother. 'I am sure he
would have spoken of it if he had had any money with him; but he said
never a word of such a thing.'
"Now was not that a wicked lie for him to tell? It is hard to understand
how abominable can be some of those men! But you may be sure they will
be punished for it in the end; and that is what happened to those four
serpents, the Bucherons.
"For listen. The old mother had taken the money and had put it inside a
sort of covered bowl, like a sugar bowl, but there was no sugar in it;
and then she had set this bowl away on a shelf in the cupboard where
they kept the dishes and such things; and the Bucherons thought it
would be safe until the time when they had something to spend it for in
Port l'Évêque; and they were telling themselves how no one would ever
know what they had done; and they were glad that the promise they had
made to Benoît had not been heard by anyone but themselves. And so that
poor Noémi was left all alone without man or money; but sometimes the
neighbors would give her a little food; but for all that those two lambs
were often hungry, and their mother too, when it came bedtime.
"But do you think the Bucherons cared--those four hearts of stone? They
would not even give her so much as a crust of dry, mouldy bread; and
Noémi was too proud to go and beg; and beside something seemed to tell
her that there had been a wickedness somewhere, and that the Bucherons
perhaps knew more than they had told her about that money. So she waited
to see if anything would happen.
"Now one night in December, when all those four were in the house alone,
the beginning of their punishment arrived, and surely nothing more
strange was ever heard of in this world.
"'Ah, mon Dieu!' cries out the married woman all of a sudden--'mon Dieu,
what is that!'
"They all looked where she was looking, and what do you think they saw?
There was a chair standing with three legs in the air, and only the
little point of one on the floor.
"The old woman pushed a scream and jumped to her feet and went over to
it, and with much force set it back on the floor, the way a chair is
meant to stand; but immediately when she let go of it, there it was
again, as before, all on one leg.
"And then, there cries out the younger woman again, with a voice shrill
as a frightened horse that throws up its head and then runs away--'Oh,
mère Bucheron, mère Bucheron,' cries she, 'the chair you were just
sitting in is three legs in air too!'
"And so it was! With that all the family got up in terror; but no sooner
had they done that than at once all the chairs behaved just like the
first, which made five chairs. These chairs did not seem to move at all,
but stood there on one leg just as if they were always like that. Those
Bucherons were almost dead with fright, and all four of them fled out of
the house as fast as ever their legs could carry them--you would have
said sheep chased by a mad dog--and never stopped for breath till they
reached Gros Nez.
"And pell-mell into old Pierre Leblanc's house all together, and shaking
like ague. Hardly able to talk, they tell what has happened; and he will
not believe them but says, well, he will go back with them and see. So
he does, and they re-enter the house together, and look! the chairs are
all just as usual.
"'You have been making some crazy dreams,' says Pierre, rather angry,
'or else,' he says, 'you have something bad in your hearts.' And with
that he goes home again; and there is nothing more to be told about that
night, though I daresay none of those wicked persons slept very well.
"But that was only the beginning of what happened to them during that
winter. Sometimes it would be these knockings about the roof, as of
someone with a great hammer; and again it was as if they had seen a face
at the window--just an instant, all white, in the dark--and then it
would be gone. And often, often, the chairs would be standing as before
on one leg. The table likewise, which once let fall a great crowd of
dishes, and not a few were broken. But worst of all were these strange
sounds that made themselves heard in the cupboard, like the hand of
a corpse going rap--rap, rap--rap--rap, rap,--against the lid of its
coffin. You may well believe it was a dreadful fright for those four
infamous ones; but still they would do nothing, because of their desire
to keep all that money and buy things with it.
"Everybody on the Cape soon knew about what was happening at the
Bucherons', but some pretended it was to laugh at, saying that such
things did not happen nowadays; and others said the Bucherons must
have gone crazy, and had better be left alone--and their arms and legs
would sometimes keep jerking a little when they talked to anyone, as
my stepmother told me a thousand times; and they had a way of looking
behind them--so!--as if they were afraid of being pursued. So however
that might be, nobody would go and see them.
"Well, things went on like that for quite a while, and finally, one day
in February, through all the snow that it made on the ground then, that
poor Noémi marched on her feet from Pig Cove to her mother-in-law's,
having left her two infants at a neighbor's; for she had resolved
herself to ask for some help, seeing that she had had nothing but a
little bite since three days. And when they saw her coming they were
taken with a fright, and at first they were not going to let her in; but
that old snake of a mother, she said:
"'If we refuse to let her in, my children, she will go and suspect
something.'
"So they let her in, and when she was in, they let her make all her
story, or as much as she had breath for, and then:
"'I am sorry,' said this old snake of a mother, 'that we cannot possibly
do anything for you. Alas, my dear little daughter, it is barely even
if we can manage to hold soul and body together ourselves, with the
terrible winter it makes these days.'
"And just as she said that, what do you think happened? A chair got on
one leg and went rap--rap, rap--against the floor.
"That Noémi would often be telling about it afterwards to my stepmother,
and she said never of her life had she seen anything so terrifying. But
she did not scream or do anything like that, because something, she
said, inside her seemed to bid her keep quiet just then. And she used
to tell how that old Bucheron woman's face turned exactly the color of
an oyster on a white plate, and a trembling took her, and finally she
said, scarcely able to make the sound of the words:
"'Though perhaps--I might find--a crust of bread somewhere that--that we
could spare.'
"That was how she spoke, and at the same instant, _rap_ went the chair,
still on its one leg; and there was a sound of a hammering on the roof.
"'Or perhaps--a little loaf of bread and some potatoes,' said that old
Bucheron, while the other Bucherons sat there without one word, in
their chairs, as if paralyzed, except that their hands kept up a little
shaking motion all the time, like this scour-grass you get in the marsh,
which trembles always even if there is not any wind. 'Or perhaps a loaf
of bread and some potatoes'--that is what she was saying, when listen,
there is a knock as of the hand of corpse just inside the cupboard; and
suddenly the two doors fly open--you would have said _pushed_ from the
inside!
"Noémi crosses herself, but does not say anything, for she knows it is a
time to keep still.
"'And perhaps,' says the old woman then, in a voice of the most piteous,
as if someone were giving her a pinch, 'and perhaps, if only I had it,
a dollar or two to help buy some medicine and a pair of shoes for that
Évangéline.... But no, I do not think we have so much as that anywhere
in the house.'
"Now was not that like the old serpent, to be telling a lie even at the
last; and surely if God had struck her dead by a ball of lightning at
that moment it would have been none too good for her. But no, he was
going to give her a chance to repent and not to have to go to Hell for a
punishment. So what do you think He made happen then?
"Hardly had those abominable words jumped out of her when with a great
crash, down off the top shelf comes that sugar bowl (if it was a sugar
bowl), and as it hits the floor, it breaks into a thousand pieces; and
there, in a little pile, are those thirteen dollars, just as on the day
when that poor Benoît had been carrying them with him to Port l'Évêque.
"Now just as if they are not doing it at all of their own wish, but
something makes them act that way, all of a sudden those four Bucherons
are kneeling on the floor, saying their prayers in a strange voice like
the prayers you might hear in a tomb; and with that, the chair goes back
quietly to its four legs, and the noise ceases on the roof, and those
two cupboard doors draw shut without human hands. As for Noémi, she
grabs up the money, and out she goes, swift as a bird that is carrying
a worm to its children, leaving her parents by marriage still there on
their knees, like so many images; but as she opens the door she says:
"'May the good God have pity on all the four of you!'--which was a
Christian thing to say, seeing how much she had suffered at their hands.
"Well, there is not much more to tell. Noémi got through the rest of
that winter without any more trouble; and the next year she married a
fisherman from Little Anse, and went away from the Cape. As for the
Bucherons, they were not like the same people any more. You would not
have known them--so pious they were and charitable, though always,
perhaps, a little strange in their ways. But when the old woman died,
two years later, or three, all the people of Pig Cove and Gros Nez
followed the corpse in to Port l'Évêque; and her grave is there in the
cemetery.
"The rest of the family are gone now too, as you see; and soon, I
suppose, there will not be many left, even out here on the Cape, who
know all about what happened to the Bucherons, because of their hard
hearts; which is a pity, seeing that the story has such a good lesson to
it...."
LA ROSE WITNESSETH
[A]_Of the Headless Horse and of La Belle Mélanie's Narrow Escape from
the Feu Follet_
[A] Included with permission of and by arrangements with Houghton
Mifflin Company authorized publishers.
One of the privileges Michel esteemed most highly was that of
accompanying La Rose occasionally when she went blueberrying over on the
barrens--_dans les bois_, as the phrase still goes in Port l'Évêque,
though it is all of sixty years since there were any woods there. The
best barrens for blueberrying lay across the harbor. They reached back
to the bay four or five miles to southward. Along the edges of several
rocky coves, narrow and steep as a sluice, clung a few weatherbeaten
fishermen's houses; but there was no other sign of human habitation.
It is what they call a bad country over there. Alder and scrub balsam
grow sparsely over the low rocky hills, where little flocks of sheep
nibble all day at the thin herbage; and from the marshes that lie, green
and mossy, at the foot of every slope, a solitary loon may occasionally
be seen rising into the air with a great spread of slow wings. A single
thread of a road makes its way somehow across the region, twisting
in and out among the small hills, now climbing suddenly to a bare
elevation, from which the whole sweep of the sea bursts upon the view,
now shelving off along the side of a knoll of rocks, quickly dipping
into some close hollow, where the world seems to reach no farther than
to the strange sky-line, wheeling sharply against infinite space.
Two miles back from the inner shore, the road forks at the base of a
little hill more conspicuously bare than the rest, and close to the
naked summit of it, overlooking all the Cape, stands a Calvary. Nobody
knows how long it has stood there, or why it was first erected; though
tradition has it that long, long ago, a certain man by the name of
Toussaint was there set upon by wild beasts and torn to pieces. However
that may be, the tall wooden cross, painted black, and bearing on its
center, beneath a rude penthouse, a small iron crucifix, has been there
longer than any present memory records--an encouragement, as they say,
for those who have to cross the bad country after dark.
"That makes courage for you," they say. "It is good to know it is there
on the windy nights."
By daylight, however, and especially in the sunshine, the barrens are
quite without other terrors than those of loneliness; and upon Michel
this remoteness and silence always exercised a kind of spell. He was
glad that La Rose was with him, partly because he would have been a
little afraid to be there quite by himself, but chiefly because of the
imaginative sympathy that at this time existed so strongly between them.
La Rose could tell him all about the strange things that had been seen
here of winter nights; she herself once, tending a poor old sick woman
at Gros Nez, out at the end of the Cape, had heard the hoofs of the
white horse that gallops across the barrens _claquin-claquant_ in the
darkness.
"It was just there outside the house, pawing the ground. Almost
paralyzed for terror, I ran to the window and looked out. It was as tall
as the church door,--that animal,--all white, and there was no head to
it.
"'Oh, mère Babinot,' I whispered, scarcely able to make the sound of the
words. 'It is as tall as the church door and all white.'
"She sits up in bed and stares at me like a corpse. 'La Rose,' she
says,--just like that, shrill as a whistle of wind,--'La Rose, do you
see a head to it?'
"'No, not any!'
"'Oh, mon Dieu, mon Dieu! Then it's sure! It is the very one, the horse
without head!'
"And the next day she took only a little spoonful of tea, and in two
weeks she was dead, poor mère Babinot; and that's as true as that I made
my communion last Easter. Oh, it's often seen hereabouts, that horse.
It's a sign that something will happen, and never has it failed yet."
They made their way, La Rose and Michel, slowly over the low hills,
picking the blueberries that grew thickly in clumps of green close to
the ground. La Rose always wore a faded yellow-black dress, the skirt
caught up, to save it, over a red petticoat; and on her small brown head
she carried the old Acadian _mouchoir_, black, brought up to a peak in
front, and knotted at the side.
She picked rapidly, with her alert, spry movements, her head always
cocked a little to one side, almost humorously, as she peered about
among the bushes for the best spots. And wherever he was, Michel heard
her chattering softly to herself, in an inconsequential undertone, now
humming a scrap of some pious song, now commenting on the quality of the
berry crop--never had she seen so few and so small as these last years.
Surely there must be something to account for it. Perhaps the birds had
learned the habitude of devouring them--now addressing some strayed
sheep that had ventured with timid bleats within range: "Te voilà, petit
méchant! Little rogue! What are you looking about for? Did the others go
off and leave you? Eh bien, that's how it happens, mon petit. They'll
leave you. The world's like that. Eh, là, là!"
He liked to go to the other side of the hill, out of sight of her,
where he could imagine that he was lost _dans les bois_. Then he would
listen for her continual soft garrulity; and if he could not hear it
he would wait quietly for a minute in the silence, feeling a strange
exhilaration, which was almost pain, in the presence of the great sombre
spaces, the immense emptiness of the overhanging sky, until he could
endure it no longer.
"La Rose!" he would call. "Êtes-vous toujours là?"
"Mais oui, mon enfant. What do you want?"
"Nothing. It is only that I was thinking."
"The strange child that you are!" she would exclaim. "You are not like
the others."
"La Rose," he would ask, "was it by here that La Belle Mélanie passed on
the night she saw the death fire?"
"Yes, by this very spot. She was on her way to Pig Cove, over beyond
the Calvary to the east. It is a desolate little rat-hole, Pig Cove,
nowadays; but then it was different--as many as two dozen houses. My
stepmother lived in one of them. Now there are scarcely six, and falling
to pieces at that. La Belle Mélanie, she was a Boudrot, sister of the
Pierre Boudrot whose son, Théobald, was brother-in-law of stepmother.
That was many years ago. They are all dead now, or gone away from
here--to Boston, I daresay."
"Will you tell me about that again,--the _feu follet_ and Mélanie?"
It was the story Michel liked the best, most of all when he could sit
beside La Rose, on a moss-hummock of some rough hill on the barrens.
Perhaps there would be cloud shadows flitting like dream presences
across the shining face of the moor. In the distance, over the backs of
the hills that crouched so thickly about them, he saw the stretch of the
ocean, a motionless floor of azure and purple, flecked, it might be, by
a leaning sail far away; and now and then a gull or two would fly close
over their heads, wheeling and screaming for a few seconds, and then
off again through the blue.
"S'il vous plaît, tante La Rose, see how many berries I have picked
already!"
The little woman was not difficult of persuasion.
"It was in November," she began. "There had not been any snow yet; but
the nights were cold and terribly dark under a sky of clouds. That
autumn, as my stepmother often told me, many people had seen the horse
without head as it galloped _claquin-claquant_ across the barrens. At
Gros Nez it was so bad that no one dared go out after dark, unless it
was to run with all one's force to the neighbors--but not across the
woods to save their souls. Especially because of the _feu follet_.
"Now you must know that the _feu follet_ is of all objects whatever in
the world the most mysterious. No one knows what it is or when it will
come. You might walk across the barrens every night of your life and
never encounter it; and again it might come upon you all unawares, not
more than ten yards from your own threshold. It is more like a ball
of fire than any other mortal thing, now large, now small, and always
moving. Usually it is seen first hovering over one of the marshes,
feeding on the poison vapors that rise from them at night: it floats
there, all low, and like a little luminous cloud, so faint as scarcely
to be seen by the eye. And sometimes people can travel straight by it,
giving no attention, as if they did not know it was there, but keeping
the regard altogether ahead of them on the road, and the _feu follet_
will let them pass without harm.
"But that does not happen often, for there are not many who can keep
their wits clear enough to manage it. It brings a sort of dizziness, and
one's legs grow weak. And then the _feu follet_ draws itself together
into a ball of fire and begins to pursue. It glides over the hills and
flies across the marshes, sometimes in circles, sometimes bounding
from rock to rock, but all the while stealing a little closer and a
little closer, no matter how fast you run away. And finally--bff! like
that--it's upon you--and that's the end. Death for a certainty. Not all
the medicine in the four parishes can help you.