Shadows on the Rock (10 page)

Father Hector Saint–Cyr was not long in following his messenger. On the day of his arrival in Kebec he stopped at the
apothecary shop, but, Auclair being out, he saw only Cécile, and they arranged that he should come to dinner the following
evening.

He came after hearing vespers at the Cathedral, attended to the door of the pharmacy by a group of Seminarians, who
always followed him about when he was in town. This was his first meeting with Auclair, and there was a cordial moisture in
the priest’s eyes as he embraced his old friend and kissed him on both cheeks.

“How many times on my way from Ville–Marie I have enjoyed this moment in anticipation, Euclide,” he declared. “Only
solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are
everything.”

Father Hector was the son of a noted family of Aix-enProvence; his good breeding and fine presence were by no means lost
upon his Indian parishioners at the Sault. The savages, always scornful of meekness and timidity, believed that a man was
exactly what he looked. They used Father Hector better than any of his predecessors because he was strong and fearless and
handsome. If he was humble before Heaven, he was never so with his converts. He took a high hand with them. If one were
drunk or impertinent, he knocked him down. More than once he had given a drunken Indian a good beating, and the Indian had
come and thanked him afterwards, telling him he did quite right.

Cécile thought it a great honour to entertain a man like Father Hector at their table, and she was much gratified by his
frank enjoyment of everything; of the fish soup with which she had taken such pains, and the wood doves, cooked in a
casserole with mushrooms and served with wild rice. Her father had brought up from the cellar a bottle of fine old Burgundy
which the Count had sent them for New Year’s. She scarcely ate at all herself, for watching their guest.

When Auclair said that this dinner was to make up to Father Hector for the one he missed on Epiphany, he laughed and
protested that on Epiphany he had dined very well.

“Smoked eels and cold lard — what more does a man want in the woods? It was on the day following that we began to feel
the pinch, — and the next day, and the next. Frichette made a great fuss about it, but certainly it was not the first time
either he or I had gone hungry. If one had not been through little experiences of that kind, one would not know how to enjoy
a dinner like this.” He reached out and put his hand lightly on Cécile’s head. “How I wish you could keep her from growing
up, Euclide!”

She blushed with joy at the touch of that large, handsome hand which the Indians feared.

“Yes,” he went on, looking about him, “these are great occasions in a missionary’s life. The next time I am overtaken by
a storm in the woods, the recollection of this evening will be food and warmth to me. I shall see it in memory as plainly as
I see it now; this room, so like at home, this table with everything as it should be; and, most of all, the feeling of being
with one’s own kind. How many times, out there, I shall live over this evening again, with you and Cécile.” Father Hector
tasted his wine, inhaling it with a deep breath. “Very clearly, Euclide, it was arranged in Heaven that I should be a
missionary in a foreign land. I am peculiarly susceptible to the comforts of the fireside and to the charm of children. If I
were a teacher in the college at home, where I have many young nieces and nephews, I should be always planning for them. I
should sink into nepotism, the most disastrous of the failings of the popes.”

Auclair had to remind Cécile when it was time to bring in the dessert. She had quite forgot where they were in the
dinner, so intent was she upon Father Hector’s talk, upon watching his brown face and white forehead, with a sweep of black
hair standing out above it.

“And now, Cécile,” said her father, “shall we tell Father Hector our secret? Next autumn the Count expects to return to
France, and we go with him. We think you have been a missionary long enough; that it is time for you to become a professor
of rhetoric again. We expect you to go back with us, — or very soon afterwards.”

Father Hector smiled, but shook his head. “Ah, no. Thank you, but no. I have taken a vow that will spoil your plans for
me. I shall not return to France.”

Auclair had put his glass to his lips, but set it down untasted. “Not return?” he echoed.

“Not at all, Euclide; never.”

“But when my wife was here, you both used to plan — ”

“Ah, yes. That was my temptation. Now it is vanquished.” He sat for a moment smiling. Then he began resolutely:

“Listen, my friend. No man can give himself heart and soul to one thing while in the back of his mind he cherishes a
desire, a secret hope, for something very different. You, as a student, must know that even in worldly affairs nothing worth
while is accomplished except by that last sacrifice, the giving of oneself altogether and finally. Since I made that final
sacrifice, I have been twice the man I was before.”

Auclair felt disturbed, a little frightened. “You have made a vow, you say? Is it irrevocable?”

“Irrevocable. And what do you suppose gave me the strength to make that decision? Why, merely a good example!” At this
point Father Hector glanced at Cécile and saw that she had almost ceased to breathe in her excitement; that her eyes, in the
candlelight, were no longer blue, but black. Again he put out his hand and touched her head. “See, she understands me! From
the beginning women understand devotion, it is a natural grace with them; they have only to learn where to direct it. Men
have to learn everything.

“There was among the early missionaries, among the martyrs, one whom I have selected for my especial reverence. I mean
Noël Chabanel, Euclide. He was not so great a figure as Brébeuf or Jogues or Lalemant, but I feel a peculiar sympathy for
him. He perished, you remember, in the great Iroquois raid of ‘49. But his martyrdom was his life, not his death.

“He was a little different from all the others, — equal to them in desire, but not in fitness. He was only thirty years
of age when he came, and was from Toulouse, that gracious city.

“Chabanel had been a professor of rhetoric like me, and like me he was fond of the decencies, the elegancies of life.
From the beginning his life in Canada was one long humiliation and disappointment. Strange to say, he was utterly unable to
learn the Huron language, though he was a master of Greek and Hebrew and spoke both Italian and Spanish. After five years of
devoted study he was still unable to converse or to preach in any Indian tongue. He was sent out to the mission of Saint
Jean in the Tobacco nation, as helper to Father Charles Gamier. Father Gamier, though not at all Chabanel’s equal in
scholarship, had learned the Huron language so thoroughly that the Indians said there was nothing more to teach him, — he
spoke like one of themselves.

“His humiliating inability to learn the language was only one of poor Chabanel’s mortifications. He had no love for his
converts. Everything about the savages and their mode of life was utterly repulsive and horrible to him; their filth, their
indecency, their cruelty. The very smell of their bodies revolted him to nausea. He could never feel toward them that
long-suffering love which has been the consolation of our missionaries. He never became hardened to any of the privations of
his life, not even to the vermin and mosquitos that preyed upon his body, nor to the smoke and smells in the savage wigwams.
In his struggle to learn the language he went and lived with the Indians, sleeping in their bark shelters, crowded with dogs
and dirty savages. Often Father Chabanel would lie out in the snow until he was in danger of a death self-inflicted, and
only then creep inside the wigwam. The food was so hateful to him that one might say he lived upon fasting. The flesh of
dogs he could never eat without becoming ill, and even corn-meal boiled in dirty water and dirty kettles brought on
vomiting; so that he used to beg the women to give him a little uncooked meal in his hand, and upon that he subsisted.

“The Huron converts were more brutal to him than to Father Gamier. They were contemptuous of his backwardness in their
language, and they must have divined his excessive sensibility, for they took every occasion to outrage it. In the wigwam
they tirelessly perpetrated indecencies to wound him. Once when a hunting party returned after a long famine, they invited
him to a feast of flesh. After he had swallowed the portion in his bowl, they pulled a human hand out of the kettle to show
him that he had eaten of an Iroquois prisoner. He became ill at once, and they followed him into the forest to make merry
over his retchings.

“But through all these physical sufferings, which remained as sharp as on the first day, the greatest of his sufferings
was an almost continual sense of the withdrawal of God. All missionaries have that anguish at times, but with Chabanel it
was continual. For long months, for a whole winter, he would exist in the forest, every human sense outraged, and with no
assurance of the nearness of God. In those seasons of despair he was constantly beset by temptation in the form of
homesickness. He longed to leave the mission to priests who were better suited to its hardships, to return to France and
teach the young, and to find again that peace of soul, that cleanliness and order, which made him the master of his mind and
its powers. Everything that he had lost was awaiting him in France, and the Director of Missions in Quebec had suggested his
return.

“On Corpus Christi Day, in the fifth year of his labours in Canada and the thirty-fifth of his age, he cut short this
struggle and overcame his temptation. At the mission of Saint Matthias, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament exposed, he
made a vow of perpetual stability (perpetuam stabilitatem) in the Huron missions. This vow he recorded in writing, and he
sent copies of it to his brethren in Kebec.

“Having made up his mind to die in the wilderness, he had not long to wait. Two years later he perished when the mission
of Saint Jean was destroyed by the Iroquois, — though whether he died of cold in his flight through the forest, or was
murdered by a faithless convert for the sake of the poor belongings he carried on his back, was not surely known. No man
ever gave up more for Christ than Noël Chabanel; many gave all, but few had so much to give.

“It was perhaps in memory of his sufferings that I, in my turn, made a vow of perpetual stability. For those of us who
are unsteadfast by nature, who have other lawful loves than our devotion to our converts, it is perhaps the safest way. My
sacrifice is poor compared with his. I was able to learn the Indian languages; I have a house where I can, at least, pray in
solitude; I can keep clean, and am seldom hungry, except by accident in the journeys I have to make. But Noël Chabanel — ah,
when your faith is cold, think of him! How can there be men in France this day who doubt the existence of God, when for the
love of Him weak human beings have been able to endure so much?”

Cécile looked up at him in bewilderment. “Are there such men, Father?” she whispered.

“There are, my child, — but it is the better for you if you have never heard of them.”

Presently it was time that Father Hector should get back to Monseigneur de Saint–Vallier’s Palace, where he was lodged
during his stay in Quebec.

“And your books, Father Hector? Will you not take them back to the Sault with you? If I leave Canada before you visit
Quebec again, what shall I do with them?” Auclair opened a cabinet and pointed to a row of volumes bound in vellum. Father
Hector’s eyes brightened as he looked at them, but he shook his head.

“No, I shall not take them this time. If you go away, give them to Monseigneur l’Ancien to keep for me. If they could be
eaten, or worn on the back, he would give them to the poor, certainly. But Greek and Latin texts will be safe with him. I
will not say good-bye, for I shall come tomorrow to lay in a supply of medicines for my mission.”

After Auclair had disappeared behind his bed-curtains that night, he lay awake a long while, regretting that a man with
Father Hector’s gifts should decide to live and die in the wilderness, and wondering whether there had not been a good deal
of misplaced heroism in the Canadian missions, — a waste of rare qualities which did nobody any good.

“Ah, well,” he sighed at last, “perhaps that is the box of precious ointment which was acceptable to the Saviour, and I
am like the disciples who thought it might have been used better in another way.”

This solution allowed him to go to sleep.

About the middle of March, soon after Father Hector’s visit, the weather went sick, as it were. The air suddenly grew
warm and springlike, and for three days there was a continuous downpour of rain. The deep snow drank it up like a thirsty
sponge, but never melted. Not a patch of ground showed through, even on the hill-sides. But the snow darkened; everything
grew grey like faintly smoked glass. The ice in the river broke up before Quebec, and olive-green water carried grey islands
of ice and snow slowly northward. The great pine forests, across the river and on the western sky-line, were no longer
bronze, but black. The only colours in the world were black and white and grey, — bewildering variations of clouded white
and grey. The Laurentian mountains, to the north, sometimes showed a little blue in their valleys, when the fogs thinned
enough to let them be seen. After the interval of rain everything froze hard again and stayed frozen, — but no fresh snow
fell. The white winter was gone. Only the smirched ruins of winter remained, mournful and bleak and impoverished, frozen
into enduring solidity.

Behind the Auclairs’ little back yard and the baker’s, the cliff ran up to the Château in a perpendicular wall, and the
face of it was overgrown with wild cherry bushes and knotty little Canadian willows. It was up there that one looked, from
the back door, for the first sign of spring. But all through April those stumps and twigs were so forbidding, so black and
ugly, that Cécile often wondered whether anything short of a miracle of the old-fashioned kind could ever make the sap rise
in them again.

A great many people in the town were sick at this time, and Cécile herself caught a cold and was feverish. Her father
wrapped her in blankets and made her sit with her feet in a hot mustard bath while she drank a great quantity of sassafras
tea. Then he put her to bed and entertained her with an account of the cures his father and grandfather had effected with
sassafras. It was one of the medicinal plants of the New World in which he had great faith. It had been first brought to
Europe by Sir Walter Raleigh, he said, and had been for a time a very popular remedy in France. Even when it went out of
fashion, the pharmacy on the Quai des Célestins had remained loyal to it, and continued to use sassafras after it became
expensive because of infrequent supply. His father got it from London, where it still came in occasional shipments from the
Virginia colony.

Cécile was kept in bed for three days, — in her father’s big bed, with the curtains drawn back, while her father himself
attended to all the household duties. He was an accomplished cook, and continual practice in making medicines kept his hand
expert in handling glass and earthenware and in regulating heat. He debated the advisability of sending for Jeanette, the
laundress, or of asking Madame Pigeon to come in and help him. “Mais non, nous sommes plus tranquilles comme ça,” he
decided. That was the important thing — tranquillity. In the evenings he read aloud to his daughter; and even when he was in
the shop, she could hear everything his clients had to say, so she was not dull. If her father was disengaged for a moment,
he came in to chat with her. They talked about Father Hector, and of how soon they could hope for green salads in the
market, and of whether it could be true that Pierre Charron was home from the Great Lakes already, since there was a rumour
that he had been seen in Montreal.

It was a pleasant and a novel experience to lie warm in bed while her father was getting dinner in the kitchen, and to
feel no responsibility at all; to listen to the drip of the rain, to watch the grey daylight fade away in the salon, and the
firelight grow redder and redder on the old chairs and the sofa, on the gilt picture-frames and the brass candlesticks. But
her mind roamed about the town and was dreamily conscious of its activities and of the lives of her friends; of the dripping
grey roofs and spires, the lighted windows along the crooked streets, the great grey river choked with ice and frozen snow,
the never-ending, merciless forest beyond. All these things seemed to her like layers and layers of shelter, with this one
flickering, shadowy room at the core.

They dined on the little table beside the bed (as they so often breakfasted even when she was well), and after dinner her
father closed the door so that she would not be disturbed by the noise he made in washing the dishes, or even by Blinker’s
visit. It was while he was thus alone in the kitchen that he had, one evening, a strange interview with Blinker.

When Blinker had finished his tasks, he asked timidly if monsieur would please give him a little of that medicine again,
to make him sleep.

Auclair looked at him doubtfully.

“How long is it you have not been sleeping?”

“Oh, a long time! Please, monsieur, give me something.”

“Sit down, Jules. What is the matter? You are strong and healthy. You do not overeat. I cannot understand why you have
this trouble. Perhaps you have something on your mind.”

“Perhaps.”

“That will often keep one awake. I am not a man to meddle, but if you told me what worries you, I should know better what
to do for you.”

Blinker’s head drooped. He looked very miserable.

“Monsieur, I am an unfortunate man. If I told you, you might put me out.”

“You have told your confessor?”

“It was not a sin. Not what they call a sin. It was a misfortune.”

“Well, we will never put you out, Jules, be sure of that.”

Blinker, with his hands knotted on his knees, seemed to be trying to bring something up out of himself. “Monsieur,” he
said at last, “I am unfortunate. I was brought up to a horrible trade. I was a torturer in the King’s prison at Rouen.”

Auclair started, but he caught himself quickly.

“Well, Jules,” he said quietly, “that, too, is the King’s service.”

“Sale service, monsieur,” the poor wretch exclaimed bitterly, “sale métier! It was my father who did those things, — he
was under the chief, he had to do it. I was afraid of him, for he was a hard man. I had no chance to learn another trade.
Nobody wanted the prison folks about. In the street people would curse us. My father gave me brandy when he made me help
him, all I could hold. He said it was right to punish the wicked, but I could never get used to it. Then something dreadful
happened.” Blinker was shivering all over.

Auclair poured him a glass of spirits and put some more wood into the stove. “You had better get it out, my boy. That
will help you,” he told him.

Hard as it was for Blinker to talk, he managed to tell his story. In Rouen there was a rough sort of woman who lived down
near the river and did washing. She was honest, but quarrelsome; her neighbours didn’t like her. She had a little son who
was a bad boy, and she often thrashed him. When he grew older, he struck back, and they used to fight, to the great
annoyance of the neighbours. One summer this boy disappeared. A search was made for him. His mother was examined, and
contradicted herself. The neighbours remembered hearing angry shouts and a smashing of bottles one night; they began to say
she had done away with him. Someone made an accusation. The laundress was taken before the examiners again, but was sullen
and refused to talk. She was put to the torture. After half an hour she broke down and confessed that she had killed her
son, had put his body into a sack with stones and dragged it to the river. A few weeks later she was hanged.

Not long afterwards Blinker began to have trouble with his lower jaw, some decomposition of the bone; pieces of bone came
out through his cheek. For weeks he never lay down, but walked the floor all night. Sometimes when he was full of brandy, he
could doze in a chair for half an hour.

But he had another misery, harder to bear than his jaw. This was the first time he had ever suffered great pain, and
ghosts began to haunt him. The faces of people he had put to torture rose before him, faces he had long forgotten. When
everybody else was asleep, he could think of nothing but those faces. He told himself it was the law of the land and must be
right; someone had to do it. But they never gave him any peace.

The suppuration in his jaw stopped at last. The scars on his face had begun to heal, when that murdered boy came back, —
walked insolently in the streets of Rouen. The truth came out. After his quarrel with his mother he had hidden himself away
on a boat tied up to the wharf, had got to Le Havre undiscovered, and there shipped as mousse on a bark bound for the West
Indies. He made the voyage and came home.

Blinker began to walk the floor at night again, just as when his jaw was at its worst. How many of the others had been
innocent? He could never get the big washerwoman’s screams out of his ears. He would have made away with himself then, but
he was afraid of being punished after death. If he dropped asleep from exhaustion, he would dream of her. He had only one
hope; that miserable boy’s adventure had put a thought into his head. If he could get away to a new country, where nobody
knew him for the executioner’s son, perhaps he would leave all that behind and forget it. That was why he had come to Kebec.
But sometimes, he never knew when or why, these things would rise up out of the past . . . faces . . . voices . . . even
words, things they had said.

“They are inside me, monsieur, I carry them with me.” Blinker closed his eyes and slowly dropped his head forward on his
hands.

“Your sickness was a good chance for you, my poor fellow. Suffering teaches us compassion. There are some in Kebec, in
high places, who have not learned that yet. If Monseigneur de Saint–Vallier had ever known chagrin and disappointment, he
would not cross the old Bishop as he does. I will give you something to make you sleep tomorrow, but afterwards you will not
need anything. When God sent you that affliction in your face, he showed his mercy to you. And, by the way, who is your
confessor?”

“Father Sébastien, at the Récollets’. But I have wanted to tell you, monsieur, ever since All Souls’ Eve. I came back
late with my buckets, and the door there was a little open, — you were telling Ma’m’selle about the old man who stole the
brass pots. I wanted to make away with myself — but you said something. You said the law was wrong, not us poor creatures.
Monsieur, I never hurt an animal to amuse myself, as some do. I was brought up to that trade.” Blinker stopped and wiped the
sweat out of his eyes with his sleeve.

The poor fellow had begun to give off a foul odour, as creatures do under fear or anguish. Auclair watched with amazement
the twisted face he saw every day above an armful of wood, — grown as familiar to him as an ugly piece of furniture, — now
become altogether strange; it brought to his mind terrible weather-worn stone faces on the churches at home, — figures of
the tormented in scenes of the Last Judgment. He hastened to measure out a dose of laudanum. After Blinker had gone out of
the kitchen door, he made the sign of the cross over his own heart before he blew out the candle and went in to his
daughter.

Cécile was flushed and excited; she had been crying, he saw.

“Oh father, why were you so long with Blinker, and what was he telling you? He sounded so miserable!”

Her father put her head back on the pillow and smoothed her hair. “He was telling me all his old troubles, my dear, and
when you are well again, I will tell them to you. We must be very kind to him. Your mother was right when she said there was
no harm in him. Tomorrow I will go to Father Sébastien, and between us we will cure his distress.”

“Then it was not a crime? You know some people say he was in the galleys in France.”

“No, he was never in the galleys. He was one of the unfortunate of this world. You remember, when Queen Dido offers Æneas
hospitality, she says: Having known misery, I have learned to pity the miserable. Our poor wood-carrier is like Queen
Dido.”

The next morning Cécile’s recovery began. As soon as she had drunk her chocolate, her father brought a pair of woollen
stockings and told her to put them on. When she looked up at him wonderingly, he said:

“I have something to show you.”

He wrapped her in a blanket, took her up in his arms, and carried her into the kitchen, where the back door stood
open.

“Look out yonder,” he said, “and presently you will see something.”

She looked out at the dreary cliff-side with its black, frozen bushes and dirty snow, and long, grey icicles hanging from
the jagged rocks. She wondered if there could be yellow buds on the willows, perhaps; but they were still naked, like stiff
black briars.

Suddenly there was a movement up there, a flicker of something swift and slender in the grey light, against the grey,
granulated snow, — then a twitter, a scolding anxious protest. Now she knew why her father had smiled so confidently when he
lifted her out of bed.

“Oh, Papa, it is our swallow! Then the spring is coming! Nothing can keep it back now.” She put her head down on his
shoulder and cried a little. He pretended not to notice it, but stood holding her fast, patting her back, so muffled in
folds of blanket.

“She is hunting her old nest, up among the crags. I cannot see whether it is still there. But if it has been blown away,
she can easily build herself another. She can get mud, because there is a thaw every day now about noon, and the dead leaves
are sticking up wherever the snow melts.”

“Is she the only one? Is she all alone?”

“She is the only one here this morning, but her friends will be close behind. Listen, how she scolds!”

“Father,” said Cécile suddenly, “where has she been, our swallow? Where, do you think?”

“Oh, far away in the South! Somewhere down there where Robert de La Salle was murdered. By the Gulf of Mexico,
perhaps.”

“And in France where do the swallows go in winter?”

“Very far. Across the Mediterranean to Algérie, where the oranges grow.”

“Has our swallow been where there are oranges? Do they grow by the Gulf of Mexico? Oh, Papa, I wish I could see an
orange, on its little tree!”