Shadows on the Rock (7 page)

“And I, Father, as long as I live, I will always have a mass said for Bichet on the day he died.”

On All Souls’ Day Cécile went to church all day long; in the morning to the Ursuline chapel, in the afternoon to the
Hôtel Dieu, and last of all down to the Church of Notre Dame de la Victoire to pray for her mother in the very spot where
Madame Auclair had always knelt at mass. All the churches were full of sorrowful people; Cécile met them coming and going,
and greeted them with lowered eyes and subdued voice, as was becoming. But she herself was not sorrowful, though she
supposed she was.

The devotions of the day had begun an hour after midnight. Old Bishop Laval had no thought that anyone should forget the
solemn duties of the time. He was at his post at one o’clock in the morning to ring the Cathedral bell, and from then on
until early mass he rang it every hour. It called out through the intense silence of streets where there were no vehicles to
rumble, but only damp vapours from the river to make sound more intense and startling, to give it overtones and singular
reverberations.

it seemed to say, as if the exacting old priest himself were calling. One had scarcely time to murmur a prayer and turn
over in one’s warm bed, before the bell rang out again.

At twelve years it is impossible to be sad on holy days, even on a day of sorrow; at that age the dark things, death,
bereavement, suffering, have only a dramatic value, — seem but strong and moving colours in the grey stretch of time.

On such solemn days all the stories of the rock came to life for Cécile; the shades of the early martyrs and great
missionaries drew close about her. All the miracles that had happened there, and the dreams that had been dreamed, came out
of the fog; every spire, every ledge and pinnacle, took on the splendour of legend. When one passed by the Jesuits’, those
solid walls seemed sentinelled by a glorious company of martyrs, martyrs who were explorers and heroes as well; at the Hôtel
Dieu, Mother Catherine de Saint–Augustin and her story rose up before one; at the Ursulines’, Marie de l’Incarnation
overshadowed the living.

At Notre Dame de la Victoire one remembered the miraculous preservation for which it had been named, when this little
church, with the banner of the Virgin floating from its steeple, had stood untouched through Sir William Phips’s
bombardment, though every heretic gun was aimed at it. Cécile herself could remember that time very well; the Lower Town had
been abandoned, and she and her mother, with the other women and children, were hidden in the cellars of the Ursuline
convent. Even there they were not out of gun range; a shell had fallen into the court just as Sister Agatha was crossing it,
and had taken off the skirt of her apron, though the Sister herself was not harmed.

To the older people of Kebec, All Souls’ was a day of sad remembrance. Their minds went back to churches and cemeteries
far away. Now the long closed season was upon them, and there would be no letters, no word of any kind from France for
seven, perhaps eight, months. The last letters that came in the autumn always brought disturbing news to one household or
another; word that a mother was failing, that a son had been wounded in the wars, that a sister had gone into a decline.
Friends at home seemed to forget how the Canadians would have these gloomy tidings to brood upon all the long winter and the
long spring, so that many a man and woman dreaded the arrival of those longed-for summer ships.

Fears for the sick and old so far away, sorrow for those who died last year — five years ago — many years ago, — memories
of families once together and now scattered; these things hung over the rock of Kebec on this day of the dead like the dark
fogs from the river. The cheerful faces were those in the convents. The Ursulines and the Hospitalières, indeed, were
scarcely exiles. When they came across the Atlantic, they brought their family with them, their kindred, their closest
friends. In whatever little wooden vessel they had laboured across the sea, they carried all; they brought to Canada the
Holy Family, the saints and martyrs, the glorious company of the Apostles, the heavenly host.

Courageous these Sisters were, accepting good and ill fortune with high spirit, — with humour, even. They never vulgarly
exaggerated hardships and dangers. They had no hours of nostalgia, for they were quite as near the realities of their lives
in Quebec as in Dieppe or Tours. They were still in their accustomed place in the world of the mind (which for each of us is
the only world), and they had the same well-ordered universe about them: this all-important earth, created by God for a
great purpose, the sun which He made to light it by day, the moon which He made to light it by night, — and the stars, made
to beautify the vault of heaven like frescoes, and to be a clock and compass for man. And in this safe, lovingly arranged
and ordered universe (not too vast, though nobly spacious), in this congenial universe, the drama of man went on at Quebec
just as at home, and the Sisters played their accustomed part in it. There was sin, of course, and there was punishment
after death; but there was always hope, even for the most depraved; and for those who died repentant, the Sisters’ prayers
could do much, — no one might say how much.

So the nuns, those who were cloistered and those who came and went about the town, were always cheerful, never
lugubrious. Their voices, even when they spoke to one through the veiled grille, were pleasant and inspiriting to hear. Most
of them spoke good French, some the exquisite French of Tours. They conversed blithely, elegantly. When, on parting from a
stranger, a Sister said pleasantly: “I hope we shall meet in heaven,” that meant nothing doleful, — it meant a happy
appointment, for tomorrow, perhaps!

Inferretque deos Latio. When an adventurer carries his gods with him into a remote and savage country, the colony he
founds will, from the beginning, have graces, traditions, riches of the mind and spirit. Its history will shine with bright
incidents, slight, perhaps, but precious, as in life itself, where the great matters are often as worthless as astronomical
distances, and the trifles dear as the heart’s blood.

A heavy snowfall in December meant that winter had come, — the deepest reality of Canadian life. The snow fell all
through the night of St. Nicholas’ Day, but morning broke brilliant and clear, without a wisp of fog, and when one stepped
out of the door, the sunlight on the glittering terraces of rock was almost too intense to be borne; one closed one’s eyes
and seemed to swim in throbbing red. Before noon there was a little thaw, the snow grew soft on top. But as the day wore on,
a cold wind came up and the surface froze, to the great delight of the children of Quebec. By three o’clock a crowd of them
were coasting down the steep hill named for the Holy Family, among them Cécile and her protégé. Before she and her father
had finished their déjeuner, Jacques had appeared at the shop door, wearing an expectant, hopeful look unusual to him.
Cécile remembered that she had promised to take him coasting on her sled when the first snow came. She unfastened his ragged
jacket and buttoned him into an old fur coat that she had long ago outgrown. Her mother had put it away in one of the chests
upstairs, not because she expected ever to have another child, but because all serviceable things deserve to be taken care
of.

When they reached the coasting-hill, the sun was already well down the western sky (it would set by four o’clock), and
the light on the snow was more orange than golden; the long, steep street and the little houses on either side were a cold
blue, washed over with rose-colour. They went down double, — Jacques sat in front, and Cécile, after she had given the sled
a running start, dropped on the board behind him. Every time they reached the bottom, they trudged back up the hill to the
front of the Cathedral, where the street began.

When the sun had almost sunk behind the black ridges of the western forest, Cécile and Jacques sat down on the Cathedral
steps to eat their goûter. While they sat there, the other children began to go home, and the air grew colder. Now they had
the hill all to themselves, — and this was the most beautiful part of the afternoon. They thought they would like to go down
once more. With a quick push-off their sled shot down through constantly changing colour; deeper and deeper into violet,
blue, purple, until at the bottom it was almost black. As they climbed up again, they watched the last flames of orange
light burn off the high points of the rock. The slender spire of the Récollet chapel, up by the Château, held the gleam
longest of all.

Cécile saw that Jacques was cold. They were not far from Noël Pommier’s door, so she said they would go in and get
warm.

The cobbler had pulled his bench close to the window and was making the most of the last daylight. Cécile begged him not
to get up.

“We have only come in to get warm, Monsieur Pommier.”

“Very good. You know the way. Come here, my boy, let me see whether your shoes keep the snow out.” He reached for
Jacques’s foot, felt the leather, and nodded. Cécile passed into the room behind the shop, called to Madame Pommier in her
kitchen, and asked if they might sit by her fire.

“Certainly, my dear, find a chair. And little Jacques may have my footstool; it is just big enough for him. Noël,” she
called, “come put some wood on the fire, these children are frozen.” She came in bringing two squares of maple sugar — and a
towel for Jacques to wipe his fingers on. He took the sugar and thanked her, but she saw that his eyes were fixed upon a
dark corner of the room where a little copper lamp was burning before some coloured pictures. “That is my chapel, Jacques.
You see, being lame, I do not get to mass very often, so I have a little chapel of my own, and the lamp burns night and day,
like the sanctuary lamp. There is the Holy Mother and Child, and Saint Joseph, and on the other side are Sainte Anne and
Saint Joachim. I am especially devoted to the Holy Family.”

Drawn out by something in her voice, Jacques ventured a question.

“Is that why this is called Holy Family Hill, madame?”

Madame Pommier laughed and stooped to pat his head. “Quite the other way about, my boy! I insisted upon living here
because the hill bore that name. My husband was for settling in the Basse Ville, thinking it would be better for his trade.
But we have not starved here; those for whom the street was named have looked out for us, maybe. When we first came to this
country, I was especially struck by the veneration in which the Holy Family was held in Kebec, and I found it was so all out
through the distant parishes. I never knew its like at home. Monseigneur Laval himself has told me that there is no other
place in the world where the people are so devoted to the Holy Family as here in our own Canada. It is something very
special to us.”

Cécile liked to think they had things of their own in Canada. The martyrdoms of the early Church which she read about in
her Lives of the Saints never seemed to her half so wonderful or so terrible as the martyrdoms of Father Brébeuf, Father
Lalemant, Father Jogues, and their intrepid companions. To be thrown into the Rhone or the Moselle, to be decapitated at
Lyon, — what was that to the tortures the Jesuit missionaries endured at the hands of the Iroquois, in those savage,
interminable forests? And could the devotion of Sainte Geneviève or Sainte Philomène be compared to that of Mother Catherine
de Saint–Augustin or Mother Marie de l’Incarnation?

“My child, I believe you are sleepy,” said Madame Pommier presently, when both her visitors had been silent a long while.
She liked her friends to be entertaining.

Cécile started out of her reverie. “No, madame, but I was thinking of a surprise I have at home, and perhaps I had better
tell you about it now. You remember my Aunt Clothilde? I am sure my mother often talked to you of her. Last summer she sent
me a box on La Licorne: a large wooden box, with a letter telling me not to open it. We must not open it until the day
before Christmas, because it is a crèche; so, you see, we shall have a Holy Family, too. And we have been hoping that on
Christmas Eve, before the midnight mass, Monsieur Noël will bring you to see it. You have not been in our house, you know,
since my mother died.”

“Noel, my son, what do you say to that?”

The cobbler had come in from the shop to light his candle at the fire.

“The invitation is for you too, Monsieur Noël, from my father.”

The cobbler smiled and stood with the stump of candle in his hand before bending down to the blaze.

“That can be managed, and my thanks to monsieur your father. If there is snow, I will push my mother down in her sledge,
and if the ground is naked, I will carry her on my back. She is no great weight.”

“I shall like to see the inside of your house again, Cécile. I miss it. I have not been there since that time when your
mother was ill, and Madame de Champigny sent her carriage to convey me.”

Cécile remembered the time very well. It was after old Madame Pommier was crippled; Madame Auclair had long been too ill
to leave the house. There was then only one closed carriage in Quebec, and that belonged to Madame de Champigny, wife of the
Intendant. In some way she heard that the apothecary’s sick wife longed to see her old friend, and she sent her carrosse to
take Madame Pommier to the Auclairs’. It was a mark of the respect in which the cobbler and his mother were held in the
community.

When Jacques and Cécile ran out into the cold again, from the houses along the tilted street the evening candlelight was
already shining softly. Up at the top of the hill, behind the Cathedral, that second afterglow, which often happens in
Quebec, had come on more glorious than the first. All the western sky, which had been hard and clear when the sun sank, was
now throbbing with fiery vapours, like rapids of clouds; and between, the sky shone with a blue to ravish the heart, — that
limpid, celestial, holy blue that is only seen when the light is golden.

“Are you tired, Jacques?”

“A little, my legs are,” he admitted.

“Get on the sled and I will pull you up. See, there’s the evening star — how near it looks! Jacques, don’t you love
winter?” She put the sled-rope under her arms, gave her weight to it, and began to climb. A feeling came over her that there
would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning
sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from neighbours’ houses. If the Count should go back with
the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city
(yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break for just this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of
being in one’s own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue
air, like a diver coming up from the deep sea.