AUTUMN SUNLIGHT
There we watched those troubled eyes,
And her laughing face grow wan;
And the birds sought other skies,
And she knew her year--was gone!
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Valley Princess."
This dog of a life--mongrel of joy and misery that it is!--"The
Silver Poppy."
Cordelia had found, and with bewildered eyes was watching unfold, her
first and only love. About the belated flowering of that tender and
reluctant growth clung a touch of tragic bitter-sweetness; it seemed so
poignantly ineffectual, so like the odorous second blossoming of
orchards at the betraying breath of a St. Martin's summer.
Yet Cordelia's week in the little old French city on the St. Lawrence
was, perhaps, the happiest week in all her life. It was not all pure
happiness; it had its moments of pain--but it was enough. She felt
within her some shy subliminal renewal, as silent yet as implacable as
the insidious first workings of spring.
Through all the gray years that followed, her week of happiness remained
a beautiful memory, colored with the quiet passion of a pathetic
struggle up toward the light of that impossible new world into which
she seemed to glance for one fugitive moment. And that golden week of
happiness had come, too, upon her so unlooked for, so unasked for! It
had crept upon her like a quiet dream through broken and restless sleep.
And even she herself felt, at times, how it had transformed her--seeing,
at the last, how nearly it had liberated from the gloomy walls of pride
and egoism those phantasmal dead selves which clamored for air only in
life's more exalted moments.
A pale wistfulness took possession of her, a quietness and gentleness of
demeanor which was new and strange to her. More than once in their
rambles about the quaint old city Hartley had surprised her looking at
him out of troubled and tearful eyes, with an indefinite, dumb entreaty
on her quivering under-lip. And each time he caught that passing look it
touched him and intangibly drew him closer to her. She felt the
necessity of having him to lean upon, the want of his arm and voice and
presence. And some passionate dread of the solitude she felt ominously
before her drove Cordelia still closer and still more desperately to his
side.
This was not lost on Hartley himself. Those sorrowing eyes seemed to
trumpet to the knight that lay dormant in him; and if he said little at
the time, he nevertheless felt much. With the birth of this tenderer
feeling came a newer and deeper trust in her, a less active quest of
motive and meaning in all her acts. Though he knew, indeed, that she was
still holding back something from him, he made no effort to wring a
reluctant statement from her. He was willing to wait her time. She had
given him much; the little he could and would not claim.
In the meanwhile, with the sense of something slipping between their
fingers, and with a premonition of impending change hanging over both of
them, they made the most of those passing days. Mrs. Spaulding did not
care to take part in their wanderings, and it was only during their
hours at the hotel that the shadow of her presence fell between them.
More than one happy day they spent in visits to the Basilica, to the old
Citadel fortress, to the ancient ruins of the Château Bigot in the
valley of the St. Charles. They idled away a merry forenoon in search of
the Golden Dog, and when that strange figure in gilt was found at last,
on the northern façade of the post-office, Hartley put its still
stranger rhyme into English for her. For many an hour, too, they rambled
about the crooked little streets of the lower town, which Hartley
declared to be wondrously like a second Dieppe or Amiens. And they went
on long walks out upon the Plains of Abraham, and visited the tall shaft
which marks the spot where Wolfe died victorious.
"How sad it seems," said Cordelia, "to die on the day, in the very hour,
that life has grown most worth living!"
She gazed up at the ironical towering marble with musing eyes.
"But isn't it better it should come even in that last moment, than never
at all?" Hartley asked, looking up to where her own eyes rested, and
himself busy, for the moment, with his own thoughts.
"It may be!" said Cordelia, looking from the marble to the man. "It may
be!" she repeated absently.
One day they went by train to the straggling little village of Ste. Anne
de Beaupré, and together visited the Shrine, and drank a cupful of the
miraculous waters from the Holy Spring. A pilgrimage had brought to the
town that day a sadly picturesque army of life's unfortunates, so that
both Cordelia and Hartley drew a breath of relief when the halt and the
maimed had been left behind them and they had escaped from the pitiful
tumult of cassock and crutch and wandered out into the cool quietness of
the open country. There Cordelia, venturing inquisitively into one of
the little whitewashed cottages, was smitten with a sudden vague sense
of homesickness on hearing once more the familiar hum of a
spinning-wheel; while to Hartley the softness of the mingled _patois_ of
Brittany and Normandy, the sedate tranquillity of the clean little
huddling riverside villages, and the crowded yet rambling rows of tiny
cottages with wide eaves that drooped down over mullioned windows like
tired lids over sleepy eyes, brought back from time to time many
thoughts of his older Oxford. Cordelia listened, with wondering eyes and
a strangely heavy heart, to his descriptions of that far-away English
country, trying passionately, yet vainly, to see it as she knew he
beheld it in his own eyes.
"Some day I hope we shall see it," he said, wistfully. "We two,
together!"
Then they were both charmed into silent wonder by the old-world
quaintness of the rambling hillside road, and following it idly, they
wandered on, enchanted into forgetfulness by the beauty of the blended
tints of the autumnal maples and oaks, by the soft verdure of the
terraced foot-hills, broken with little rifts of silver where flashing
streams fell musically down to the blue St. Lawrence, on which, here and
there, they could catch glimpses of low-lying batteaux and drifting
sails.
They had strolled happily on through the tiny village of Rivière des
Chiens, pausing a moment before a towering line of Lombardy poplars that
stood black against the setting sun, when the sound of broken weeping
startled them both from their day-dreams. Hartley, in alarm, ran on
ahead, and under a blighted thorn-tree, crouched amid the roadside
goldenrod, he found a woman with a child clutched to her breast. Her
gaunt body rocked back and forth as she sat there, and she neither
looked up nor ceased her wailing when he bent over and touched her on
the shoulder. He called to her in English, and then in French, but still
she sat amid the dusty goldenrod, clutching the child to her breast.
"Is it dead?" asked Cordelia, in a frightened voice, trying to see into
the muffled face. "Oh, be careful! Do be careful! It may be something
horrible--some horrible disease!"
Hartley had wakened the woman from her stupor, and in broken French,
rich with the idiom of the seventeenth century, she was explaining in
her dead voice that she had tried to make her way on foot to Ste. Anne,
that if she once reached the shrine of the blessed saint she knew her
boy would be saved. Two of them had died, of the black sickness; he was
all she had left! And in a fresh paroxysm of grief she caught the sick
child once more up to her bent body, and swayed back and forth with it
in hopeless despair.
Hartley sent Cordelia hurriedly to the nearest farm-house, for a
conveyance. Impatient at the delay while the _habitant_ harnessed his
stocky little pony to a cart, he helped the woman to her feet, and
taking the child in his own arms, started back for the village, not a
mile distant. There he sent a messenger post-haste to Ste. Anne's, and
an hour later the ponderous little wagon that did service as ambulance
for the convent of the Franciscan Sisters at Beaupré was speeding
homeward with both mother and child, and Hartley and Cordelia were
waiting on the chilly little wind-swept platform for the Quebec train,
intangibly detached from one another and mysteriously depressed in
spirits. It was not until the warmth and lights of the hotel had shut
out the night from them that either cared to talk. Then, of a sudden,
Hartley found the woman at his side shaken with a passionate burst of
seemingly inconsequential weeping.
"Cordelia, what is it?" he cried, in startled wonder.
"Motherhood!" said Cordelia, inadequately, through her tears--"it--it is
such an awful thing!"
And then she fled from him, and he sat up late into the night,
thinking.