Sabine Bob interrupted. "The number of the day comes first. Always! I
brought you the calendar with the day marked on it."
"I wrote it here," said Mary Willee. "You need not be so anxious. I have
done letters before this."
"Oh, but everything is so important!" ejaculated Sabine, with tragedy in
her voice. "Now begin again."
"'My dearling Thomas. It is bad times here. So much fogg all ways. i was
houghing potatoes since 2 days and they looks fine and i am nitting yous
some socks for when yous come back. i hope you is getting lots of them
poggiz.'"
Mary Willee hesitated. "I ain't just sure how to spell that word," she
confessed.
"Pogeys?"
"Yes."
"You ought to be. What for did they send you to the convent all those
four years?"
"It was only three. And the nuns never taught us no such things as
about pogey-fishing. But no matter. Thomas Ned will know what you mean,
because that's what he's gone fishing after."
And she continued: "'I miss yous awful some days. when you comes back in
octobre we's git married sure.'"
She looked up. "That's all you told me so far."
Sabine's face was drawn into furrows of intense thought. "How many more
lines is there to fill?"
"Seven."
"Well, then, tell him I was looking at the little house what his auntie
Sophie John left him and thinking how nice it would be when there was
some front steps and the shimney was fix' and there were curtains to the
windows in front and some geraniums and I t'ink I will raise some hens
because they are such good company running in and out all day when he
will be away pogey-fishing but perhaps when we're married he won't have
to go off any more because his healt' is put to danger by it and how
would it do, say, if he got a little horse and truck with the hundred
and fifty dollars I got saved up and did work by the day for people
ashore and then"--she paused for breath.
"Is that too much to write?" she remarked with sudden anxiety.
"It is," replied Mary Willee, firmly. "You can say two things, and then
good-by."
Two things! Sabine Bob stared at the little yellow circle of light
on the smoky ceiling over the lamp; then out of the window into the
darkness. Two things more; and there were so many thousand things to
say! Her mind was a blank.
"I am waiting," Mary reminded her, poising her pen pitilessly.
"Tell him," gasped out Sabine, "tell him--I t'ink I raise some hens."
Letter by letter the pregnant sentence was inscribed, while Sabine
stared at the pen with paralyzed attention, as if her doom were being
written in the Book of Judgment; and now the time had come for the
second thing! Tears of helplessness stood in her eyes.
"Ask him," she blurted out, "would the hundred and fifty dollars what I
got buy a nice little horse and truck."
Mary Willee paused. She seemed embarrassed.
"Write it," commanded the other.
Mary Willee looked almost frightened. "Must you say that about the
money?" she asked, weakly.
"Write the words I told you," insisted Sabine. "This is my letter, not
yours."
Reluctantly the younger woman set down the sentence; then added the
requisite and necessary "Good-by, from Sabine."
"Is there room for a few kisses?" asked the fiancée.
"One row."
Sabine seized the pen greedily and holding it between clenched fingers
added a line of significant little lop-sided symbols. Then while her
secretary prepared the letter for mailing, she wiped her forehead
with a large blue handkerchief which she refolded and returned to the
skirt-pocket that contained her rosary and her purse. She put on her
little old yellow-black hat again and made ready to go.
"Now to the post-office," she said. "How glad Thomas Ned will be when he
gets it!"
"I am sure he will," said Mary; and if there was any doubt in her tone,
it was not perceived by her friend, who suddenly flung her arms about
her in a gush of happy emotion.
"Dieu, que c'est beau, l'amour!" she exclaimed.
The sentiment was not a new one in the world; but it was still a new
one, and very wonderful, to Sabine Bob: Sabine Bob who had never been
pretty, even in youthful days, who had never had any nice clothes or
gone to parties, but had just scrubbed and washed and swept, saved what
she could, gone to church on Sundays, bought a new pair of shoes every
other year.
Not that she had ever thought of pitying herself. She was too practical
for that; and besides, there had always been plenty to be happy about.
The music in church, for instance, which thrilled and dissolved and
comforted her; and the pictures there, which she loved to gaze at,
especially the one of Our Lady above the altar.
And then there were children! No one need be very unhappy, it seemed
to Sabine Bob, in a world where there were children. She never went
out without first putting a few little hard, colored candies in her
pocket to dispense along the street, over gates and on front steps.
The tinier the children were the more she loved them. Every spring in
Petit Espoir there was a fresh crop of the very tiniest of all; and
towards these--little pink bundles of softness and helplessness--she
felt something of the adoration which those old Wise Men felt who had
followed the star. If she had had spices and frankincense, Sabine Bob
would have offered it, on her knees. But in lieu of that, she brought
little knitted sacques and blankets and hoods.
Such had been Sabine Bob's past; and that a day was to come in her
life when a handsome young man should say sweet, loving things to
her, present her with perfumery, bottle on bottle, ask her to be his
wife, bless you, she would have been the first to scout the ridiculous
idea--till six months ago! Thomas Ned was a small man, about forty,
squarely built, with pink cheeks, long lashes, luxuriant moustache; a
pretty man; a man who cut quite a figure amongst the girls and (many
declared) could have had his pick of them. Why, why, had he chosen
Sabine Bob? When she considered the question thoughtfully, she found
answers enough, for she was not a girl who underestimated her own worth.
"Thomas is sensible," she explained to Mary Willee. "He knows better
than to take up with one of those weak, sickly young things that have
nothing but a pretty face and stylish clothes to recommend them. I can
work; I can save; I can make his life easy. He knows he will be well
looked out for."
If Mary Willee could have revised this explanation, she refrained from
doing so. It would have taken courage to do so at that moment, for
Sabine Bob was so happy! It was almost comical for any one to be so
happy as that! Sabine realized it and laughed at herself and was happier
still. Morning, noon, and night, during those first mad, marvelous days
after she had promised to become Madame Thomas Ned, she was singing a
bit of gay nonsense she had known from childhood:
_Vive la Canadienne,
Vole, vole, vole, mon coeur!_
"Fly, fly, oh fly, my heart," trolled Sabine Bob; and every evening,
until the time came when he must depart for the pogey-fishing, in May,
he had come and sat with her in the kitchen; he would smoke; she would
knit away at a pair of mittens for him (oh, such small hands as that
Thomas had!), and about ten o'clock she would fetch a glass of blueberry
wine and some currant cookies. How nice it was to be doing such things
for some one--of one's own!
She hovered over him like a ministering spirit, beaming and tender. This
was what she had starved for all her life without knowing it: to serve
some one of her own! Not for wages now; for love! She flung herself on
the altar of Thomas and burned there with a clear ecstatic flame.
And now that he had been away four months, pogey-fishing, she would
sometimes console herself by getting out the five picture-postcards he
had sent her and muse upon the scenes of affection depicted there and
pick out, word by word, the brief messages he had written. With Mary
Willee's assistance she had memorized them; and they were words of
sempiternal devotion; and there were little round love-knows-what's in
plenty; and on one card he called her his little wife; and that was the
one she prized the most. Wife! Sabine Bob!
That no card arrived in answer to her August letter did not surprise
her, for the pogeymen often did not put into port for weeks at a time;
and anyhow the day was not far away, now, when the season would be over
and those who had gone up from Petit Espoir would come down again.
So the weeks slipped by. October came. The pogey-fishermen returned.
She waited for Thomas Ned in the kitchen that first evening, palpitating
with expectancy; and he did not come. During the sleepless night that
followed she conjured up excuses for him. He had had one of his attacks
of rheumatism. His mother had been ill and had required his presence
at home. The next evening he would come, oh certainly, and explain
everything. Attired in her best, she sat and waited a second evening;
then a third. There was no sign of him.
From Mary Willie she learned that Thomas had arrived with the others;
that he appeared in perfect health, never handsomer; also that his
mother was well.
"Oh, it cannot be that anything has happened," cried Sabine, with
choking tears. "Surely it will all be explained soon!" But there was a
tightening about her heart, a black premonition of ill to come.
She continued to wait. She was on the watch for him day and night. At
least he would pass on the street, and she could waylay him! Every time
she heard footsteps or voices she flew to the kitchen door. When her
work was done, she would hurry out to the barn, where there was a little
window commanding a good view of the harbor-front; and there she would
sit, muffled in a shawl, for hours, hunger gnawing at her heart, her
eyes dry and staring, until her teeth began to chatter with cold and
nervousness.
He never passed. Some one met him taking the back road into the village.
He was purposely avoiding her.
When Sabine Bob realized that she was deserted by the man she loved,
thrown aside without a word, she suffered unspeakably; but her native
good sense saved her from making any exhibition of her grief. She
knew better than to make a fool of herself. If there was one thing
she dreaded worse than death it was being laughed at. She was a
self-respecting girl; she had her pride. And no one witnessed the
spasms, the cyclones, which sometimes seized her in the seclusion of
her little attic bedroom. These were not the picturesque, grandiose
sufferings of high tragedy; there was small resemblance between Sabine
Bob and Carthaginian Dido; Sabine's agonies were stark and cruel and
ugly, unsoftened by poetry. But she kept them to herself.
She did her work as before. But she did not sing; and perhaps she nicked
more dishes than usual, for her hands trembled a good deal. But she kept
her lips tight shut. And she never went out on the street if she could
help it.
So a month passed. Two months. And then one evening Mary Willee came
running in breathless with news for her: news that made her skin prickle
and her blood, after one dizzy, faint moment, drum hotly in her temples.
Thomas Ned was paying attentions to Tina Lejeune, that blonde young girl
from the Ponds. He had taken her to a dance. He had bought a scarf for
her and a bottle of perfumery. He had taken her to drive. They had been
seen walking together several times in the dark on the upper street.
"Does he say he is going to marry her?" asked Sabine Bob, with dry lips.
"I do not know that. _She_ says so. She says they are to be married
soon."
"Does she know about--about me?"
"Yes, but she says--" Mary Willee stopped short in embarrassment.
"Says what! Tell me! Tell me at once!" commanded Sabine, fiercely. "What
does she say!"
"She says Thomas thought you had a lot of money. He was deceived, he
said."
Sabine broke out in a passion of indignation. "I never deceived him:
never, never! I never once said anything about money. He never asked me
anything. It's a lie. I tell you, it's a lie!"
Mary quailed visibly, unable to disguise a tell-tale look of guilt.
"What is the matter with you, Mary Willee!" cried Sabine. "You are
hiding something. You know something you have not told me!"
Mary replied, in a very frightened voice: "Once he asked me if you had
any money. I did not think he was really in earnest, so I told him you
had saved a thousand dollars. Oh, I didn't mean any harm. I only said it
to be agreeable. And later I was afraid to tell the truth, for it was
only two or three days later he asked you to marry him, and you were so
happy."
Mary Willee hid her face in her hands and waited for the storm to break
upon her; but it did not break. The room was very quiet. At last she
heard Sabine moving about, and she looked up again. Sabine was putting
on her hat and coat.
"Sabine! Sabine!" she gasped. "What are you doing!"
Sabine Bob turned quietly and stood for a moment gazing at her without a
word. Then she said:
"Mary Willee, you are a bad girl and I can never forgive you; but if
Tina Lejeune thinks she is going to marry Thomas Ned, she will find out
that she is mistaken. That is a thing that will not happen."
Mary recoiled, terrified, at the pitiless, menacing smile on the other
woman's face; but before she could say anything Sabine Bob had stalked
out of the house into the darkness.
She climbed the hill to the back road, stumbling often, blinded more by
her own fierce emotions than by the winter night; she fought her way
westward against the bitter wind that was rising; then turned off by the
Old French Road, as it was called, toward the Ponds.
It was ten o'clock at night; stars, but no moon. She saw a shadow
approaching in the darkness from the opposite direction: it was a man,
short and squarely-built. With a sickening weakness she sank down
against the wattle fence at the side of the road. He passed her, so
close that she could have reached out and touched him. But he had not
seen. She got up and hurried on.
By and by she saw ahead of her the little black bulk of a house from the
tiny window of which issued a yellow glow. The house stood directly on
the road. She went quietly to the window and looked in. A young girl
was sitting by a bare table, her head supported by the palms of her
hands. Sabine knew the weak white face and hated it. She made her way to
the door and knocked. There was a smothered, startled exclamation; then
the rustle of some one moving.
"Who is it?" inquired a timid voice.
"Let me in and I will tell you," responded the woman outside, in a voice
the more menacing because of its control.
"My mother is not at home to-night. She is over at the widow Babinot's.
If you go over there you will find her."
"It is you I wish to see. Open the door!"
There was no answer. Sabine turned the knob and entered. At the sight of
her the blonde girl gave a cry of dismay and retreated behind the table,
trembling.
"What do you want?" she gasped.
"We have an account to settle together, you and me," said Sabine, with
something like a laugh.
"Account?" said the other, bracing herself, but scarcely able to
articulate. "What account? I have not done you any harm. Before God I
have not done you any harm."
Sabine laughed mockingly. "So you think there is no harm in taking away
from me the man I was going to marry?"
"I did not take him away," said Tina, faintly.
"You did! You did take him away!" cried Sabine, fiercely. "He was mine;
it was last March he promised to marry me; any one can tell you that. I
have witnesses. I have letters. Everything I tell you can be proved. He
belongs to me just as much as if we had been before a priest already;
and if you think you can take him away from me, you will find out you
are wrong!"
For a few seconds the paralyzed girl before her could not utter a word;
then she stammered out:
"He told me you had deceived him about money."
Sabine gave an inarticulate cry of rage, like a wild beast at bay. "It's
a lie! A lie! I never deceived him. It's he who deceived me; but let me
tell you this: when a woman like me promises to marry a man, she keeps
her word. Do you understand? She keeps her word! I am going to marry
Thomas Ned. He cannot escape me. I will go to the priest. I will go to
the lawyer. There are plenty of ways."
The blonde girl sank trembling into a chair.
"He cannot marry you," she gasped. "He cannot. He cannot."
"No?" cried Sabine, with ringing mockery. "And why not?"
Tina's lips moved inaudibly. She moistened them with her tongue and made
a second attempt.
"Because--" she breathed.
"Yes? Yes?"
"Because--he must marry me." She buried her head in her hands and sobbed.
Sabine Bob strode to the cringing girl, seized her by the shoulders,
forcing her up roughly against the back of the chair, and broke out with
a ruthless laugh:
"Must! Must! You don't say so! And why, tell me, must he marry you?"
The white girl raised her eyes for one instant to the other's face; and
there was a look in them of mute pleading and confession, a look that
was like a death-cry for pity. The look shot through Sabine's turgid
consciousness like a white-hot dagger. She staggered back as if mortally
stricken, supporting herself against a tall cupboard, staring at the
girl, whose head had now sunk to the table again and whose body was
shaking with spasmodic sobs. It was one of the moments when destinies
are written.
At such moments we act from something deeper, more elemental, than will.
The best or the worst in us leaps out--or perhaps neither one nor the
other but merely that thing in us that is most essentially ourselves.
Sabine stared at the poor girl whose terrifying, wonderful secret had
just been revealed to her, and she felt through all her being a sense of
shattering and disintegration; and suddenly she was there, beside Tina,
on the arm of her chair; and she brought the girl's head over against
her bosom and held her very tight in her eager old arms, patting her
shoulders and stroking her soft hair, while the tears rained down her
cheeks and she murmured, soothingly:
"Pauvre petite!" and again and again, "Pauvre petite! Ma pauvre petite!"
Tina abandoned herself utterly to the other's impassioned tenderness;
and for a long time the two sat there, tightly clasped, silent,
understanding.
Sabine Bob had no word of blame for the unhappy girl. Vaguely she knew
that she ought to blame her; very vaguely she remembered that girls
like this were bad girls; but that did not seem to make any difference.
Instead of indignation she felt something very like humility and
reverence.
"Yes, he must marry you," she said at last, very simply and gently.
"Oh, if he only would!" sobbed Tina.
"What!" cried Sabine, in amazement.
"He says such cruel things to me," confessed the girl. "He knows, oh, he
does know I never loved any man but himself; never, never any other man,
nor ever will!"
Sabine's eyes opened upon new vistas of man's perfidiousness. And yet,
in spite of everything, how one could love them! She felt an immense
compassion toward this poor girl who had loved not wisely but so
all-givingly.
"I will go to him," she said, resolutely. "I will tell him he must marry
you; and I will say that if he does not, I will tell every person in
Petit Espoir what a wicked thing he has done."
Tina leaped to her feet in terror. "Oh, no, no!" she pleaded. "No one
must know."
Sabine understood. Not the present only, but the future must be thought
of.
"And if he was forced like that to marry me, he would hate me," pursued
the girl, who saw things with the pitiless clear foresight that
desperation gives. "He must marry me from his own choice. Oh, if I could
only make him choose; but to-night he said NO! and went away, very
angry. I'm afraid he will never come back again."
"Yes, he will," said Sabine Bob. There was a grim smile on her lips; and
she squared her shoulders as if to give herself courage for some dreaded
ordeal. "There is a way."
But to the startled, eager question in the other's eyes, she vouchsafed
no answer. She came to her and put her hands firmly on her shoulders.
"Tina, will you promise not to believe anything you hear them say about
me? Will you promise to keep on loving me just the same?"
The girl clung to her. "Oh, yes, yes," she promised. "Always!" and then,
in a shy whisper, she added: "And some day--I will not be the only one
to love you."
Sabine Bob gave her a quick, almost violent kiss, and went out, not
stopping for even a word of good-night. And the next day she put her
plan into execution. There was a perfectly relentless logic about Sabine
Bob. She saw a thing to do; and she went and did it.
As soon as her dinner dishes were washed and put away, she donned
her old brown coat and the little yellow-black hat that had served
her winter and summer from time immemorial, and proceeded to make
a dozen calls on her friends, up and down the street. Wherever she
went she talked, volubly, feverishly. She railed; she threatened; she
vociferated; and the object of her vociferations was Thomas Ned. He had
promised to marry her; and he had deserted her; and she would have the
law on him! Marry her he must, now, whether he would or no.
"See that word?" she demanded, displaying her sheaf of compromising
post-cards. "That word is _wife_; and the man who calls me wife must
stick to it. I am not a woman to be made a fool of!"
So she stormed away, from house to house. Her friends tried to pacify
her; but the more they tried, the more venom she put into her threats.
And soon the news spread through the whole town. Nothing else was talked
of.
"She's crazy," people said. "But she can make trouble for him, if she
wants to, no doubt about it."
Sabine laughed grimly to herself. She was going to succeed. The scheme
would work. She knew the kind of man Thomas Ned was: full of shifts. He
had proved that already. He would never face a thing squarely. He would
look for a way out.
She was right. It was only ten days later, at high mass, that the
success of her strategy was tangibly proved. At the usual point in
the service for such announcements, just before the sermon, Father
Beauclerc, standing in the pulpit, called the banns for Thomas Boudrot,
of Petit Espoir, North, and Tina Mélanie Brigitte Lejeune, of the Ponds.
The announcement caused a sensation. An audible murmur of amazement, not
to say consternation, went up from all quarters of the edifice, floor
and galleries; even the altar boys exchanged whispers with one another;
and there was a great stretching of necks in the direction of Sabine
Bob, who sat there in her uncushioned pew, very straight and very red,
with set lips, while her rough old fingers played nervously with the
rosary in her lap.
This was her victory! She had never felt the ugliness of her fifty years
so cruelly before. A bony, ridiculous old maid, making a fool of herself
in public! That was the sum of it! And all her life she had been so
careful, so jealously careful, not to do anything that might cause her
to be laughed at!
She could hear some of the whispers that were being exchanged in
neighboring pews. "Poor old thing!" people were saying. "But how could
she expect anybody would want to marry her at her age!"
A trembling like ague seized her, and she felt suddenly very cold and
very very weak. She shut her eyes, for things were beginning to flicker
and whirl; and when she opened them again, they were caught and held by
the picture above the high altar.
It was the Mother. The Mother and the Little One. He lay in her arms and
smiled.
The tears gushed up in Sabine Bob's eyes, and a smile of wonderful
tenderness and peace broke over the harsh lines of her face and
transfigured it, just for one instant. It was a victory; it _was_ a
victory; though nobody knew it but herself; just herself, and one
other, and--perhaps--
Sabine still gazed at the picture, poor old Sabine Bob in her brown
coat and faded little yellow-black hat: and the Eternal Mother returned
the gaze of the Eternal Mother, smiling; and it didn't matter very much
after that--how could it?--what people might think or say in Petit
Espoir.
Once more, that afternoon, as she slashed the suds over the dishes,
Sabine Bob was singing. You could hear her way down there on the street,
so buoyant and so merry was her voice:
_Long live the Canadian maid;
Fly, fly, oh fly, my heart!_
[Illustration]