I cannot explain to you the connection between the two parts of this
story. They were divided, in their happening, by a couple of hundred
miles of mountain and forest. There were no visible or audible means
of communication between the two scenes. But the events occurred at
the same hour, and the persons who were most concerned in them were
joined by one of those vital ties of human affection which seem to
elude the limitations of time and space. Perhaps that was the
connection. Perhaps love worked the miracle. I do not know. I only
tell you the story.
I
It begins in the peaceful, homely village of Saint Gerome, on the
shore of Lake Saint John, at the edge of the vast northern wilderness.
Here was the home of my guide, Pat Mullarkey, whose name was as Irish
as his nature was French-Canadian, and who was so fond of children
that, having lost his only one, he was willing to give up smoking in
order to save money for the adoption of a baby from the foundling
asylum at Quebec. How his virtue was rewarded, and how his wife,
Angelique, presented him with twins of his own, to his double delight,
has been told in another story. The relation of parentage to a matched
brace of babies is likely to lead to further adventures.
The cradle, of course, being built for two, was a broad affair, and
little Jacques and Jacqueline rolled around in it inextricably mixed,
until Pat had the ingenious idea of putting a board down the middle
for a partition. Then the infants rocked side by side in harmony,
going up and down alternately, without a thought of debating the
eternal question of superiority between the sexes. Their weight was
the same. Their dark eyes and hair were alike. Their voices, whether
they wept or cooed, were indistinguishable. Everybody agreed that a
finer boy and girl had never been seen in Saint Gerome. But nobody
except Pat and Angelique could tell them apart as they swung in the
cradle, gently rising and falling, in unconscious illustration of the
equivalence and balancing of male and female.
Angelique, of course, was particularly proud of the boy. As he grew,
and found his feet, and began to wander about the house and the front
yard, with a gait in which a funny little swagger was often
interrupted by sudden and unpremeditated down-sittings, she was keen
to mark all his manly traits.
"Regard him, m'sieu'," she would say to me when I dropped in at the
cottage on my way home from camp--"regard this little brave. Is it not
a boy of the finest? What arms! What legs! He walks already like a
_voyageur_, and he does not cry when he falls. He is of a marvellous
strength, and of a courage! My faith, you should see him stand up to
the big rooster of the neighbour, Pigot. Come, my little one, my
Jacques, my Jimmee, one day you will be able to put your father on his
back--is it not?"
She laughed, and Pat laughed with her.
"That arrives to all fathers," said he, catching the little Jacqueline
as she swayed past him and swinging her to his knee. "Soon or late the
_bonhomme_ has to give in to his boy; and he is glad of it. But for
me, I think it will not be very soon, and meantime, m'sieu', cast a
good look of the eye upon this girl. Has she not the red cheeks, the
white teeth, the curly hair, brown like her mother's? But she will be
pretty, I tell you! And clever too, I am sure of it! She can bake the
bread, and sew, and keep the house clean; she can read, and sing in
the church, and drive the boys crazy--_hein_, my pretty one--what a
comfort to the old _bonhomme_!"
"He goes fast," laughed Angelique; "he talks already as if she were in
long dresses with her hair done up. Without doubt, m'sieu' amuses
himself to hear such talk about two infants."
But the thing that amused me most was the beginning-to-talk of the
twins themselves. It was natural that the mother and father should
speak to me in their quaint French _patois_; and the practice of many
summers had made me able to get along with it fairly well. But that
these scraps of humanity should begin their adventures in language
with French, and such French, old-fashioned as a Breton song, always
seemed to me surprising and wonderfully smart. I could not get over
the foolish impression that it was extraordinary. There is something
magical about the sound of a baby voice babbling a tongue that is
strange to you; it sets you thinking about the primary difficulties in
the way of human intercourse and wondering just how it was that people
began to talk to each other.
Long before the twins outgrew their French baby talk the famous cradle
was too small to hold their sturdy bodies, and they were promoted to a
trundle-bed on the floor. The cradle was an awkward bit of furniture
in such a little house, and Angelique was for giving it away or
breaking it up for kindling-wood.
"But no!" said Pat. "We have plenty of wood for kindlings in this
country without burning the cradle. Besides, this wood means more to
us than any old tree--it has rocked our hopes. Let us put it in the
corner of the kitchen--what? Come--perhaps we may find a use for it,
who knows?"
"Go along," said Angelique, giving him a friendly box on the ear, "you
old joker! Off with you, _vieux bavasseur_--put the cradle where you
like."
So there it stood, in the corner beside the stove, on the night of my
story. Pat had gone down to Quebec on the first of June (three days
ahead of time) to meet me there and help in packing the goods for a
long trip up the Peribonca River. Angelique was sleeping the sleep of
the innocent and the just in the bedroom, with the twins in their
trundle-bed beside her, and the door into the kitchen half-open.
What it was that waked her she did not know--perhaps a bad dream, for
Pat had given her a bit of trouble that spring, with a sudden
inclination for drinking and carousing, and she was uneasy about his
long absence. A man in the middle years sometimes has a bit of folly,
and a woman worries about him without knowing exactly why. At all
events, Angelique came wide awake in the night with a sense of fear in
her heart, as if she had just heard something terrible about her
husband which she could not remember.
She listened to the breathing of the twins in the darkness. It was
soft and steady as the falling of tiny ripples upon the beach. But
presently she was aware of a louder sound in the kitchen. It was
regular and even, like the ticking of a clock. There was a roll and a
creak in it, as if somebody was sitting in the rocking-chair and
balancing back and forth.
She slipped out of bed and opened the door a little wider. There was a
faint streak of moonlight slanting through the kitchen window, and she
could see the tall back of the chair, with its red-and-white tidy,
vacant and motionless.
In the corner was the cradle, with the children's clothes hanging over
the head of it and their two ragged dolls tucked away within. It was
rocking evenly and slowly, as if moved by some unseen force.
Her eyes followed the ray of the moon. On the rocker of the cradle she
saw a man's foot with the turned-up toe of a _botte sauvage_. It
seemed as if the smoke of a familiar pipe was in the room. She heard
her husband's voice softly humming:
"_Petit rocher de la haute montagne,
Je viens finir ici cette campagne.
Ah, doux echos, entendez mes soupirs;
En languissant je vais bientot mourir!_"
Trembling, she entered the room, with a cry on her lips.
"Ah! Pat, _mon ami_, what is it? How camest thou here?"
As she spoke, the cradle ceased rocking, the moon-ray faded on the
bare floor, the room was silent.
She fell upon her knees, sobbing.
"My God, I have seen his double, his ghost. My man is dead!"