only one papa!” She put up her arms and tucked them about his neck
and snuggled down with a happy sense of complete understanding of his
protection. At last, so it seemed to her, she had recovered the father
she had never known. Poor, little, caged bird, her release from that
lonely prison was dated in her happy consciousness from his appearance
in the doorway, and all things had been well for her after he
came--sunlight, the trees, the blue sky, and tender care, and the
companionship of human beings. Therefore, the rush of a love her child's
comprehension could not analyze had gone out to him.
Farr returned with significance the look Zelie Dionne's dark eyes gave
him.
“I found the note. It made me go a-meddling. It left a legacy to
somebody--and I accepted--without understanding why I did so.” He
stroked the child's curls.
“I did not understand at first--when Madame Maillet told me,” she
confessed, with a smile. “Old Etienne came at noon to tell her and she
has told it to me. It is very sad--but yet it is comical when I look at
you. But as I look at you I understand better. You have a good heart. I
can see!”
“I am only a strolling stranger--here to-day and there to-morrow,”
protested Farr. “I think the heat must have affected my head. It has
been very warm lately. But when I saw her--” He choked suddenly.
“Oh, it is easy to understand,” said the girl, reassuringly. A mist
of tears came across her big eyes, though her mouth did not lose the
wistful smile. “The poor folks help one another--and they understand.”
“It wouldn't be right to give her to an orphanage,” insisted Farr. “She
has missed too much already. Of course I don't pretend to know what a
little girl needs--but I am willing to be told.”
“I will tell you and I will help.”
“I think old Etienne and I need you in the partnership--as adviser. I
thank you.”
Then came the old Canadian, his wrinkled face tender with solicitous
interest, and he chuckled when he welcomed the new member of the firm.
“Ah, Mam'selle Zelie she shall help us the very much in what we do not
know,” he informed the young man, and continued, while the dark eyes
flashed protest: “I am of the Tadousac country, and she is a good girl,
for I have know her all the years since I trot her on my knee when she
much small as the petite Rosemarie. I can tell you how she dance down
the meadows in the ring-a-rosy play and how she--”
“Phut! Your tongue is as long as your rake and it goes reaching
down into other folks' affairs, old Etienne! What cares this strange
gentleman for what happened in Tadousac? Go use your key instead of your
tongue. Unlock your little door so that Rosemarie may walk on the cool
grass beside the canal.”
The old man grinned and started away.
“We're going out where the birds will sing good night to you,” Farr told
the child and lifted her off his knees. But at the door she stopped and
turned to Zelie Dionne, who had not risen.
“Come, play-mamma!”
“I will wait here till you come back, Rosemarie.”
But the child was coaxingly insistent, holding out her hand.
“I think it is because she has been so lonely all her life,” suggested
Farr. “Now that she has found friends she wants them to be with her
in her little pleasures. May I presume enough to add my invitation to
hers?”
She came and the child walked between them, holding their hands.
“One papa and my play-mamma!” she said, looking up at them in turn.
Mother Maillet came to the kitchen door and waved adieu with her
dish-towel.
“Ah, the family!” she cried. “Yesterday it was not--to-day it is. And
grandpere marching off ahead!”
“Old folks and children--they say embarrassing things,” remarked Farr
when they were on their way.
“One must be silly along with them to be disturbed by such chatter,”
said Zelie Dionne, tartly.
They followed old Etienne through his little door and walked along the
canal bank where the waters were still and glassy, for the big gates
had been closed and power lay motionless and locked in the sullen depths
till morning. The sunset behind the big mills glowed redly through the
myriad windows.
They walked slowly because little Rosemarie found marvels for childish
eyes at every step, and even the cool carpet of the grass provided
unfailing delight as she set slow and cautious footsteps into its
yielding luxuriance. The old man plodded ahead, muttering and frowning
as he peered down at the flotsam in the motionless waters.
The silence between the two who accompanied the child continued a long
time and Farr found it oppressive.
“I have never been in Canada,” he said. “I am sorry you did not care to
have Etienne talk about your home. I would like to know more about that
country.”
“He was talking about me instead of my home in Tadousac. I am not so
important that I am to be talked about.”
“Where is Tadousac?”
Her vivacity returned, her dark eyes glowed. “Ah, m'sieu', you should go
there. It is in the country of the good habitants where the St. Lawrence
and the Saguenay meet. And now, as the sun is setting, the people are
resting under the wide eaves of the little white houses, looking up
where the hills are all so blue, or off across the wide bay. The white
houses are very small and they crowd along the road, and the farms are
narrow, and there is not much money in the homespun clothes or in the
old clock, but the good world is wide about them and the people are not
sad like those who sit yonder.”
She pointed across the canal to rows of wooden tenement-houses many
stories in height; on narrow porches, nicked one above another, and on
fire-escapes which were slowly cooling after hours on the forge of the
sun, men, women, and children were packed, seeking a breath of fresh
air.
“They stand at loom and spinner and slasher all day,” she said. “They
are too tired to walk afar to the parks. They wait there for good air to
come and it does not come.”
“I don't understand why they flock down here from Canada--why they
stay,” he declared, bluntly.
“Ah, you look at me when you say that!” she cried, arching her brows.
“You hear me talk about the sunset over the meadows and the hills, and
you wonder why I am not there? Well, listen! There are fourteen sons
and daughters of Onesime Dionne--that's my father--for all the habitant
folks marry young, and the priest smiles and blesses the household when
there are many children. And girls are not of much account in the house.
The sons claim and receive their shares of the arpents of land when
those boys are grown and married. The girl may marry--yes! But what if
the right one does not ask? What if the right one has a father who says
to him that he must obey and marry one the father has chosen? All kinds
of things can happen in the habitant country, m'sieu'. So, then, the
girl is less account in the house. And the letters come back from the
girls who have gone down into the mills in the States. The pictures come
back showing the new gown and the smart hat--and so!” She shrugged her
shoulders and tossed her free hand. “One more girl for the big mill!”
He stared at her with some curiosity.
“You ask yourself which one of those things happened to me, do you not?”
“Perhaps,” he confessed.
“I talk little about myself. I talk about the habitant girls. I am
fortunate. I do not breathe the air where the looms clack. I inspect in
the cloth-hall because I have sharp eyes and nimble fingers.”
“But you came here alone--it is strange. I mean, do not the father and
mother and all the family move here, usually?”
She lifted her chin and gazed at him with pride in her mien.
“If you go to Tadousac you shall find that my father owns a large farm
and that one of his grandfathers was a captain with General Montcalm,
and many Dionnes have lived on the land that was given to a brave man. I
came to the States because I wanted to come. My people did not come.”
She clipped the last sentence in a manner that suggested to Farr that
there was no more to be said on that topic. But she went on after a time
in softened tones.
“It is not strange that so many came to the States, sir. The farms of
Beauce, of l'Islet, of the Chaudiere, were so crowded. Years ago, the
old folks used to tell me, the boys began to drive the little white
horses hitched to buckboards across the border in the early summer, and
the boys were strong and willing, and the farmers who laughed at them
and called them Canucks hired them for the hay-fields just the same.
And they slept in the haymows and under the trees and worked hard and
brought back all their money. Then the big mills needed men and women
and children, and the Yankee girls would not work in the mills any
more. You must understand how it was: Ouillette, who had worked in the
hay-field, would hear of the work in the mill, and the Ouillettes would
sell and go to the city. And as soon as they had seen the lights and
the theater and the car which ran with a stick on a wire, and had earned
their first pay and had bought Yankee clothes they wrote home to their
cousins the Pelletiers and the Pelletiers sat nights till late talking
excitedly--and then they sold and came, and so it has gone on and
on--the endless chain, one family pulling on its neighbor, down the long
way from Canada to the States. But it may be all for the best. I am not
wise in such things. But when the sun bakes and the fever comes and the
children die in the tenements, then I wish the fathers and mothers were
back on the little farms and that workers of some other race than the
habitants were chained to the looms in the big mills. That may be a
selfish thought, but my own people are dear to me.”
Farr was not in the mood to argue the economic side of that question
with this girl who had so tersely told the story of two generations
of mill-toilers. With that little waif between them, victim of the
industrial Moloch which must roll on even if its wheels crushed the
innocent here and there, he permitted sentiment to sway him. In fact,
for a day and a night he had surrendered to sentiment and had found a
strange sort of intoxication in the experience. His heart was with the
humble folk and pity was in him--pity which was uncalculating and in
which his cynicism was dissolving.
And when the stars were mirrored in the still canal and the grass was
damp with the dew, they walked back to the house of Mother Maillet and
little Rosemarie murmured her bit of a prayer and was tucked in bed.
“I hope that some day I may go to Tadousac,” said Farr to the girl,
before he passed out of the good woman's house. “I would like to see the
sunset, for you have praised it.”
“Ask for the house of Onesime Dionne, second beyond the big parish
cross. It will be easy to find, and the sunset is very grand from the
porch under the eaves.”
Farr went along with the old man and they walked slowly. Their way took
them down narrow streets between the high tenements.
“Yes, you shall find it very grand at Tadousac--and M'sieu' Dionne is an
honest man,” declared Etienne. “Now and then in the thirty year I have
been visit up there in Tadousac, and I sit those day and whittle for
the children and then little Zelie trot on my knee with the others. So I
know the story of those place. And all the people up there don't care if
I know, because I listen and am glad to know, and sometimes I can give
advice, for I have live long on the States where great matters are
happening. But Farmer Leroux would not listen to me when I advise about
his good son Jean and Zelie Dionne. Farmer Leroux is a good man, but he
is a hard man when his ugly mad get stir. And the children up there do
what the father tell--because that is what the cure preach and it is the
way of the habitants.”
“The old, old story--the Montagues and the Capulets on the banks of the
river of the North.”
“I think I know something what you mean, m'sieu', though I don't know
your friend you speak about. But if he say to his son, 'Ba gar, you
don't marry no girl what I don't like her fadder because we have
hosswhip one anodder t'ree or two time when we have fuss over line
fence--or crowd our wagon when we go to market'--why, then that's your
friend. And it start from there and grow into big thing, so that all
the cure can say it don't make no friend of them. So they wait--Jean and
Zelie! Ah yes, they wait!” He put his finger beside his nose and winked.
“They love. They get marry some nice day. But now!” He flirted his gaunt
fingers. “They say nottings. I maself say nottings. But I see some very
queer look in Jean Leroux's eye when he say to me as I meet him at the
gate of his fadder's farm, 'And how carries Zelie Dionne herself these
days?' And though he look high over the tree and chew the straw and look
very careless, ah, I see the big tear in his eye and hear him choke in
his throat.”
“It's played out and old-fashioned, this letting old folks manage young
folks that way just to satisfy old grudges,” scoffed Farr. “If they are
in love they ought to get married and tell the old folks to go hang!”
Etienne stopped and gazed quizzically at the young man who thus
expounded the law for lovers.
“I think you have in you none of the understanding of the French
habitants who have live the three generation on one farm so that a young
man, no matter if he love a mam'selle so very much that all the bread
he eat taste ashes in his mouth--ah, he cannot say 'I will leave--I
will go!' For then that young man must turn himself to be anodder young
man--and the habitant does not so change.”
“I may be a poor judge,” acknowledged Farr. “I have never yet taken root
in the soil of any one place.”
“And I think, mebbe, the girl you do not understand! Is it to stay in
the home and hear every day about you love the pig of a Leroux, bah? No,
no, m'sieu'! That's too proud, is Zelie Dionne. And so is Zelie Dionne
too proud to take a son from a home that do not want her. So they wait.”
“It's a tough old world, Uncle Etienne,” said Farr. “Why, even I, lord
of my own affairs as I am, don't know where I'm going to sleep to-night.
Do you have a boarding-place?”
“I have my little room on the block up there--my room and my place at
the big table. It is not grand. But there is place for you--and anodder
little room. If you like you shall come and I will speak good for you.”
“All right, Etienne! Take me along and speak good for me.”
It was another such place as Block Ten. It was a crowded and stuffy
warren, and the basement kitchen advertised itself with stale odors in
all the corridors. But Farr was glad to stretch himself upon the narrow
bed. He owned up to himself that he was a very weary bird of passage and
confessed to his own heart, just as frankly, that he was a captive in
the frail grasp of a little girl--and he did not try to understand.
X
POISON FOR THE POOR
It proved to be an amicable and satisfactory partnership between Etienne
Provancher and Walker Farr and dark-eyed Zelie Dionne.
When the days were pleasant the old man kept the little girl with him
out of doors on the canal bank. She did not trouble him by running
about. Her long days of confinement in the attic room had accustomed
her to remain quietly in one place. She sat contentedly in the shade and
watched the bugs in the grass and the birds in the tree above her. In
the cool of the evening she trudged along the canal bank with Farr
and the play-mamma until eyes grew heavy and little feet stumbled with
weariness and it was time for bed. Rainy evenings they studied the
alphabet or he read to her from picture-books in blazing colors, and
after a time she remembered all the stories and made believe read them
to him.
He worked in the trench and looked forward impatiently to Saturday
nights when the clerk came along with the pay-envelopes; there were so
many things in the stores that would delight the heart of a little girl
who had never had any toys except a rag doll and a broken flower-basket.
Then there were pretty dresses to buy. The taste of Zelie Dionne took
charge of that shopping. When he bought the first one--one that was
white and fluffy--and Rosemarie walked out with him she displayed
such feminine pride in fine feathers that he looked forward to future
Saturdays nights and new dresses with anticipatory gusto. If one had
questioned him he could have told weeks ahead just what his plans
of purchases were, for he canvassed all the possibilities with the
play-mamma who knew so well how to get value for a dollar--who knew the
places to buy and whose needle helped to much.
It was a wicked summer for those who were doomed to the mills and
the tenement-houses. The heat puffed and throbbed over the lashing
machinery. The slashers seemed to spit caloric. The spinning-frames
tossed it off their spindles. The looms fairly wove it into the warp.
The thick, sweet, greasy air seemed to distil cotton-oil upon the faces
of the workers. The nights proved to be no better than the days. The
stuffy tenements gulped in the hot air of midday and held it as a person
holds his breath. All the folks came out upon the little platforms that
were ranged, story after story, above each other. They gasped for air
in the narrow spaces between the high buildings. The stars above those
narrow spaces did not sparkle and suggest coolness; they seemed to float
above the hot earth like red cinders.
Every day the undertakers' wagons came “boombling” down the narrow
canyons of streets between the “Blocks,” for the people were dying. The
little white hearse was a more frequent visitor than the rusty black
one; the ranks of the children were paying the greatest toll to death.
“But we shall not worry about our Rosemarie,” old Etienne told Farr.
“Under the shade on the green grass she shall stay where outdoors can
paint her cheeks the very fine color.”
But when the old man called for her at the good woman's house one
morning something else than the sun had painted the little girl's
cheeks--they were flushed with fever. He told the good woman to send
straight for the doctor, and went to his work much disturbed.
Later in the day the yard overseer, passing the rack, saw that the man
was working with furious energy. He was even reaching out his rake to
capture floating stuff before it touched the bars.
“This seems to be your busy day, Pickaroon,” suggested the overseer.
“I make believe this old rack to be a good friend of mine and that the
float stuff be sickness come at him--so I work hard to keep it away.”
The overseer went along about his business, commenting mentally on a
Frenchman's imagination.
When the big mill bells clanged the noon hour Etienne hurried to the
good woman's house. The city physician had been there and had left
medicine--two tumblers of it. He had hurried in and had hurried away and
had been curt and brusk and had not told her what was the trouble, so
the woman reported. But the child had been sleeping.
She was drowsy all that evening while Farr held her in his arms and
Etienne sat near by with Zelie Dionne, ministering solicitously.
“Her cheeks are not so hot,” said the young man many times. He talked
hopefully to reassure himself as well as the others, for he had been
dreadfully frightened when he had come from his work. Fright had
trodden close on the heels of much joy--for the superintendent of
the Consolidated had taken him out of the hot trench that day and had
appointed him boss of twoscore Italian diggers, doubling his pay.
“I have been watching you,” the superintendent told him. “You're built
to boss men. What kind of a bump was it that ever slammed you down like
this?”
The answer the superintendent got was a smile which put further
questions out of his mind.
“No, her cheeks are not so hot,” affirmed Farr when he laid her in her
bed that night. “She will come along all right.”
But at the end of a week languor still weighed on the child. There were
circles under her eyes and her cheeks were wan, and she did not clap
her hands with the old-time glee when he brought her new toys; the
playthings lay beside her on the bed and invited her touch--staring eyes
of dolls, beady eyes of toy dogs--without avail.
“It is the queer way of being sick,” lamented the old man. “The doctor
mebbe not know, because he very gruff and do not say. I think I know
what may cure her--it has been done many time.
“Away up in the Canada country there is the shrine of the good Sainte
Anne de Beaupre. There she stand in the middle of the big church and she
hold her little grandson in her arm--the little boy Jesus. So she feel
very tender toward poor, sick childs. Ah, I have seen her many time--I
have seen childs healed there and made so very smart--all cure. She
loves little childs. _Oui_. All about her feet are short, small crutch
where she has cure childs. The piece of her wrist-bone is there in the
sacristy--it look like a wee scrap of some gray moss under the glass.
And it cure when the good priest say the word for her. I know the way to
the shrine of La Bonne Sainte Anne--I will go with the little Rosemarie
and she shall sing and dance after that.”
For a moment the cynical smile of the skeptic etched itself at the
corners of Farr's mouth--the flash of the nature the young man had
hidden during recent weeks.
He turned to Zelie Dionne and found her regarding him with grave eyes.
“It is as M'sieu' Etienne says,” she assured the young man. “La Bonne
Sainte listens very tenderly when the children come to her. She is good
to all, but her spirit leans over the poor little children and comforts
them.”
“You have been there?”
“Many times, sir. It is not only the sick body that the good Sainte Anne
heals--she comforts anybody who is in much sorrow--she tells the right
way to go. There are many roads to take in this life--and if any one
goes to her with prayer and humble soul she will guide. Ah, it is true,
sir.”
There was earnestness in her features and conviction in her tones and it
was plain that Zelie Dionne was speaking out of the depths of her heart,
and Farr remembered what old Etienne had said about the son of Farmer
Leroux.
“Yes, she will lead to the right way and make all well in the end,”
asserted the girl. “And, most of all, she is kind and gentle to the
little children.”
Between her and the wistful old man Farr divided tolerant and kindly
gaze.
“I believe in more things than I used to,” he said. “I'm willing to
admit in these days that things I do not understand may have truth in
them. The doctor is not making her well. But it is a long way to that
shrine.”
“It is a long way, so! But I am very scare for her as she lie here all
day. I will carry her very tender--on the railway car--on the big boat.
The good Sainte Anne is everywhere, too. She will help.”
“If faith can move mountains it ought to heal easily one poor, little
toddlekins,” muttered Farr.
A new doctor came the next day, a breezy young man, a talkative and
frank young man, the assistant of the over-worked city physician, whose
municipal duties had obliged him to take on helpers.
“I shall ask him, hey--about the shrine?” whispered Etienne to Farr
while the doctor was examining the child.
“Yes; he'll be more patient with you than with me.”
“And do you think that pretty soon she can go on the railway if I
be very careful, good docteur?” asked the old man, wistfully,
apologetically.
“Go where?”
“On the pilgrimage to the shrine of the good Sainte Anne in the Canada
country.”
“Don't you realize what this case is?” demanded the young physician.
“He have not say--he hurry in, he hurry out.”
“You the grandfather?”
“No!”
The doctor turned on Farr.
“Father?”
“No.”
“Then I can talk right out to you two. This is a case of typhoid that
will be fatal in twenty-four hours. There's no use lying about it.”
Old Etienne's mouth and eyes seemed to sink deep into his wrinkles, as
if Time had forced him suddenly to swallow an extra score of years. He
looked at Farr's blank and whitening face, and as quickly looked away.
“Break it to her grandmother,” advised the doctor, nodding toward the
kitchen where the good woman was at work.
“But you don't know what you say,” stammered the old man.
“It so happens that I do, my man. I've been handling too many of these
cases to be fooled. Why, I've got more than fifty cases of typhoid in
this city--just myself.”
“But she has had sun and fresh air--on the canal bank where I tend the
rack.”
“Sun and fresh air can't cure victims of the poison that is being pumped
through the water-mains of this city,” snapped the doctor.
“Water-mains!”
The doctor turned and stared at Farr, for the husky croak of his
exclamation had not sounded human.