Shadows on the Rock (12 page)

Ever since Cécile could remember, she had longed to go over to the Île d’Orléans. It was only about four miles down the
river, and from the slopes of Cap Diamant she could watch its fields and pastures come alive in the spring, and the bare
trees change from purple-grey to green. Down the middle of the island ran a wooded ridge, like a backbone, and here and
there along its flanks were cleared spaces, cultivated ground where the islanders raised wheat and rye. Seen from the high
points of Quebec, the island landscape looked as if it had been arranged to please the eye, — full of folds and wrinkles
like a crumpled table-cloth, with little fields twinkling above the dark tree-tops. The climate was said to be more
salubrious than that of Quebec, and the soil richer. All the best vegetables and garden fruits in the market came from the
Île, and the wild strawberries of which Cécile’s father was so fond. Giorgio, the drummer boy, had often told her how well
the farmers lived over there; and about the great eel-fishings in the autumn, when the islanders went out at night with
torches and seined eels by the thousand.

Pierre Charron had a friend on the island, Jean Baptiste Harnois, the smith of Saint–Laurent, and he meant to go over and
pay him a visit this summer, before he went back to Montreal. He had promised to take Cécile along, — every time he came to
the shop, he reminded her that they were to make this excursion. One fine morning in the last week of June he dropped in to
say that the wind was right, and he would start for the island in about an hour, to be gone for three days.

Very well, Auclair told him, Cécile would be ready.

“But three days, father!” she exclaimed; “can you manage for yourself so long? You bought so many things at the market
for me to cook.”

“I can manage. You must go by all means. You may not have such a chance again.”

“Good,” said Pierre. “I will be back in an hour. And she must bring a warm coat; it will be cold out on the water.”

Cécile had never gone on a voyage before, — had never slept a night away from home, except during the Phips bombardment,
when she and her mother had taken refuge at the Ursuline convent, along with the other women and children from the Lower
Town.

“What shall I take with me, Father? I am so distracted I cannot think!”

“The little valise that was your mother’s will hold your things. You will need a night-gown, and a pair of stockings, and
a clean cotton blouse, and some handkerchiefs; I should think that would be all. And I will give you a package of raisins as
a present for Madame Harnois.”

She ran upstairs and began to pack her mother’s bag, finding it hard to assemble her few things in her excitement.

“Are you ready, Cécile?” her father presently called from the foot of the stairs.

“I am not sure, Father — I think so. I wish I had known yesterday.”

“Then you would not have slept all night. Come along, and I will put the raisins in your valise.”

Pierre was waiting, seated on the long table that served as a counter. Her father looked into her bag to see that she had
the proper things, then handed it to him. Cécile put on her cap and coat. Auclair kissed her and wished them bon voyage.
“Take good care of her, Pierre.”

Pierre touched his hand to his black forelock. “As you would yourself, monsieur.” He pushed Cécile out of the door before
him.

“Papa,” she called back, “you will not forget to keep the fire under the soup? It has been on only an hour.”

Pierre’s boat was a light shallop with one sail. He rowed out far enough to catch the breeze and then sat in the stern,
letting the wind and current carry them. He had made a change in his clothes during the hour he was absent from the shop,
Cécile noticed (later in the day she wondered why!), had put on a white linen shirt and knotted a new red silk neckerchief
about his throat. He soon took off his knitted cap, lit his pipe, and lounged at his ease. On one shore stretched the dark
forest, on the other the smiling, sunny fields that ran toward Beaupré. Behind them the Lower Town grew smaller and smaller;
the rock of Kebec lost its detail until they could see only Cap Diamant, and the Château, and the spires of the churches.
The sunlight on the river made a silver glare all about the boat, and from the water itself came a deep rhythmic sound, like
something breathing.

“Think of it, Pierre, in all these years I have never been on the river before!” Such a stretch of lost opportunity as
life seemed just then!

Pierre smiled. “Not so many years, at that! Your father is over-cautious, maybe, but squalls come up suddenly on this
river, and most of these young fellows had as lief drown as not. I’d rather you never went with anyone but me. If you like
it, you can go with me any time.”

“But I’d like to go the other way, — to Montreal, and up those rivers that are full of rapids. I want to go as far as
Michilimackinac.”

“Some time, perhaps. We’ll see how you like roughing it.”

Cécile asked what he had in the stone jug she saw in the bow, along with his blanket and buckskin coat.

“That is brandy, for the smith. But it will come back full of good country wine. He makes it from wild grapes. The wild
grapes on the island are the best in Canada; Jacques Cartier named it the Île de Bacchus because he found such fine grapes
growing in the woods. That ought to please you, with all your Latin!”

“Are you like Mother Juschereau, do you think it wrong for a girl to know Latin?”

“Not if she can cook a hare or a partridge as well as Mademoiselle Auclair! She may read all the Latin she pleases. But I
expect you won’t like the food at the Harnois’, à la campagnarde, you know, — they cook everything in grease. As for me, it
doesn’t matter. When you can go to an Indian feast and eat dogs boiled with blueberries, you can eat anything.”

Cécile shuddered. “I don’t see how you can do it, Pierre. I should think it would be easier to starve.”

“Oh, do you, my dear? Try starving once; it’s a long business. I’ve known the time when dog meat cooked in a dirty pot
seemed delicious! But the worst food I ever swallowed was what they call tripe de roche. I went out to Lac la Mort with some
Frenchmen early in the spring once. They were a green lot, and they let most of our provisions get stolen on the way. As
soon as we reached the lake, we were caught in a second winter; a heavy snow, and everything frozen. No game, no fish. We
had to fall back on tripe de roche. It’s a kind of moss that grows on the rocks along the lake, something like a sponge; the
cold doesn’t kill it, when everything else is frozen hard as iron. You gather it and boil it, and it’s not so bad as it goes
down, — tastes like any boiled weed. But afterwards — oh, what a stomach-ache! The men sat round tied up in a knot. We had
about a week of that stuff. We scraped the hair off our bear skins and roasted them, that time. But it’s a truth, monkey, I
wouldn’t like a country where things were too soft. I like a cold winter, and a hot summer. My father used to boast that in
Languedoc you were never out of sight of a field or a vineyard. That would mean people everywhere around you, always
watching you! No hunting, — they put you in jail if you shoot a partridge. Even the fish in the streams belong to somebody.
I’d be in prison in a week there.”

The settlement at Saint–Laurent was Pierre’s destination. After he had passed the point at Saint-Pétronille and turned
into the south channel, a sweet, warm odour blew out from the shore, very like the smell of ripe strawberries. Each time the
boat passed a little cove, this fragrance grew stronger, the air seemed saturated with it. All the early explorers wrote
with much feeling about these balmy odours that blew out from the Canadian shores, — nothing else seemed to stir their
imagination so much. That fragrance is really the aromatic breath of spruce and pine, given out under the hot sun of
noonday, but the early navigators believed it was the smell of luscious unknown fruits, wafted out to sea.

When Pierre had made a landing and tied his boat, they went up the path to the smith’s house, to find the family at
dinner. They were warmly received and seated at the dinner-table. The smith had no son, but four little girls. After dinner
Cécile went off into the fields with them to pick wild strawberries. She had never seen so many wild flowers before. The
daisies were drifted like snow in the tall meadow grass, and all the marshy hollows were thatched over with buttercups, so
clean and shining, their yellow so fresh and unvarying, that it seemed as if they must all have been born that morning at
the same hour. The clumps of blue and purple iris growing in these islands of buttercups made a sight almost too wonderful.
All the afternoon Cécile thought she was in paradise.

The little girls did not bother her much. They were timid with a guest from town and talked very little. Two of them had
been to Quebec, and even to her father’s shop, and they asked her about the stuffed baby alligator, where it came from. They
wanted to know, too, why her father bought so many pigs’ bladders in the market. Did he eat them, or did he fill them with
sausage meat? Cécile explained that he washed and dried them, and when people were sick, he filled the bladders with hot
water and put them on the sore place, to ease the pain.

The little girls wore moccasins, but no stockings, and their brown legs were badly marked by brier scratches and mosquito
bites. When they showed her the pigs and geese and tame rabbits, they kept telling her about peculiarities of animal
behaviour which she thought it better taste to ignore. They called things by very unattractive names, too. Cécile was not at
all sure that she liked these children with pale eyes and hay-coloured hair and furtive ways.

At supper she was glad to see Pierre and the genial blacksmith again, but the kitchen where they ate was very hot and
close, for Madame Harnois shut all the doors and windows to keep out the mosquitos. There were mosquitos at home, on
Mountain Hill, too, but her father drove them away by making a smudge of eucalyptus balls, which were sent to him from
France every year.

The family went to bed early, and after darkness had shut off the country about them, and bedtime was approaching, Cécile
felt uneasy and afraid of something. Pierre had brought his own blanket, and said he would sleep in the hayloft. She wished
she could follow him, and with a sinking heart heard him go whistling across the wagon-yard.

There were only three rooms in this house, the kitchen and two bedrooms. In one of these slept the smith and his wife. In
the other was a wide, low bed made of split poles, and there slept all the four daughters. There, Cécile soon gathered, she
too must sleep! The mother told them to give Cécile the outside place in the bed, for manners. Slowly she undressed and put
on her nightgown. The little Harnois girls took off their frocks and tumbled into bed in their chemises, — they told her
they only wore night-gowns in winter. When they kicked off their moccasins, they did not stop to wash their legs, which were
splashed with the mud of the marsh and bloody from mosquito bites. One candle did not give much light, but Cécile saw that
they must have gone to bed unwashed for many nights in these same sheets. The case on the bolster, too, was rumpled and
dirty. She felt that she could not possibly lie down in that bed. She made one pretext after another to delay the terrible
moment; the children asked whether she said so many prayers every night. At last the mother called that it was time to put
out the candle. She blew it out and crept into the bed, spreading a handkerchief from her valise down on the bolster-cover
where she must put her head.

She lay still and stiff on the very edge of the feather bed, until the children were asleep and she could hear the smith
and his wife snoring in the next room. His snore was only occasional, deep and guttural; but his wife’s was high and nasal,
and constant. Cécile got up very softly and dressed carefully in the dark. There was only one window in the room, and that
was shut tight to keep out mosquitos. She sat down beside it and watched the moon come up, — the same moon that was shining
down on the rock of Kebec. Perhaps her father was taking his walk on Cap Diamant, and was looking up the river at the Île
d’Orléans and thinking of her. She began to cry quietly. She thought a great deal about her mother, too, that night; how her
mother had always made everything at home beautiful, just as here everything about cooking, eating, sleeping, living, seemed
repulsive. The longest voyage on the ocean could scarcely take one to conditions more different. Her mother used to reckon
Madame Pigeon a careless housekeeper; but Madame Pigeon’s easy-going ways had not prepared one for anything like this. She
tried to think about the buttercups in the marsh, as clean as the sun itself, and the long hay-grass with the star-white
daisies.

Cécile sat there until morning, through the endless hours until daylight came, careful never to look back at the rumpled
bed behind her. When Madame Harnois stuck her head in at the door to waken her children, she complimented Cécile upon being
up so early. All the family washed in a wooden basin which stood on a bench in the kitchen, and they all wiped their faces
on the same towel. The mother got breakfast in her night-cap because she had not taken time to arrange her hair. Cécile did
not want much breakfast; the bread had so much lard in it that she could not eat it. She had sagamite and milk.

When they got up from the table, Pierre announced that he was going fishing, and he did not even suggest taking her
along. The little girls were expected to help their mother in the morning, so Cécile got away unobserved into the nearest
wood. She went through it, and climbed toward the ridge in the middle of the island. At last she came out on a waving green
hayfield with a beautiful harp-shaped elm growing in the middle of it. The grass there was much taller than the daisies, so
that they looked like white flowers seen through a driving grey-green rain. Cécile ran across the field to that symmetrical
tree and lay down in the dark, cloud-shaped shadow it threw on the waving grass. The tight feeling in her chest relaxed. She
felt she had escaped for ever from the Harnois and their way of living. She went to sleep and slept a long while. When she
wakened up in the sweet-smelling grass, with the grasshoppers jumping over her white blouse, she felt rested and happy, —
though unreal, indeed, as if she were someone else. She was thinking she need not go back to the smith’s house at all that
day, but could lunch on wild strawberries, when she heard the little girls’ voices calling her, “Cé-cile, Cé — cile!” rather
mournfully, and she remembered that she ought not to cause the family anxiety. She looked for a last time at the elm-tree
and the sunny field, and then started back through the wood. She didn’t want the children to come to that place in their
search for her. She hoped they had never been there!