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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Pomp of the Lavilettes, Entire, by Parker
+#44 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+Title: The Pomp of the Lavilettes, Complete
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6217]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 27, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POMP OF THE LAVILLETTES, BY PARKER ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTES
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+I believe that 'The Pomp of the Lavilettes' has elements which justify
+consideration.  Its original appearance was, however, not made under
+wholly favourable conditions.  It is the only book of mine which I ever
+sold outright.  This was in 1896.  Mr. Lamson, of Messrs.  Lamson &
+Wolffe, energetic and enterprising young publishers of Boston, came to
+see me at Atlantic City (I was on a visit to the United States at the
+time), and made a gallant offer for the English, American and colonial
+book and serial rights.  I felt that some day I could get the book back
+under my control if I so desired, while the chances of the book making an
+immediate phenomenal sale were not great.  There is something in the
+nature of a story which determines its popularity.  I knew that 'The
+Seats of the Mighty' and 'The Right of Way' would have a great sale, and
+after they were written I said as much to my publishers.  There was the
+element of general appeal in the narratives and the characters.  Without
+detracting from the character-drawing, the characters, or the story in
+'The Pomp of the Lavilettes', I was convinced that the book would not
+make the universal appeal.  Yet I should have written the story, even
+if it had been destined only to have a hundred readers.  It had to be
+written.  I wanted to write what was in me, and that invasion of a little
+secluded French-Canadian society by a ne'er-do-well of the over-sea
+aristocracy had a psychological interest, which I could not resist.
+I thought it ought to be worked out and recorded, and particularly as
+the time chosen--1837--marked a large collision between the British and
+the French interests in French Canada, or rather of French political
+interests and the narrow administrative prejudices and nepotism of the
+British executive in Quebec.
+
+It is a satisfaction to include this book in a definitive edition
+of my works, for I think that, so far as it goes, it is truthfully
+characteristic of French life in Canada, that its pictures are faithful,
+and that the character-drawing represents a closer observation than any
+of the previous works, slight as the volume is.  It holds the same
+relation to 'The Right of Way' that 'The Trail of the Sword' holds to
+'The Seats of the Mighty', that 'A Ladder of Swords' holds to 'The
+Battle of the Strong', that 'Donovan Pasha' holds to 'The Weavers'.
+Instinctively, and, as I believe, naturally, I gave to each ambitious,
+and--so far as conception goes--to each important novel of mine, an avant
+coureur.  'The Trail of the Sword, A Ladder of Swords, Donovan Pasha and
+The Pomp of the Lavilettes', are all very short novels, not exceeding in
+any case sixty thousand words, while the novels dealing in a larger way
+with the same material--the same people and environment, with the same
+mise-en-scene, were each of them at least one hundred and forty thousand
+words in length, or over two and a half times as long.  I do not say that
+this is a system which I devised; but it was, from the first, the method
+I pursued instinctively; on the basis that dealing with a smaller
+subject--with what one might call a genre picture first, I should get
+well into my field, and acquire greater familiarity with my material
+than I should have if I attempted the larger work at once.
+
+This is not to say that the smaller work was immature.  On the contrary,
+I believe that at least these shorter works are quite mature in their
+treatment and in their workmanship and design.  Naturally, however, they
+made less demand on all one's resources, they were narrower in scope and
+less complicated, than the longer works, like 'The Seats of the Mighty',
+which made heavier call upon the capacities of one's art.  The only
+occasion on which I have not preceded a very long novel of life in a new
+field, by a very short one, is in the writing of 'The Judgment House'.
+For this book, however, it might be said, that all the last twenty
+years was a preparation, since the scenes were scenes in which I had
+lived and moved, and in a sense played a part; while the ten South
+African chapters of the book placed in the time of the Natal campaign
+needed no pioneer narrative to increase familiarity with the material,
+the circumstances and the country itself.  I knew it all from study on
+the spot.
+
+From The 'Pomp of the Lavilettes', with which might be associated 'The
+Lane That Had no Turning', to 'The Right of Way', was a natural
+progression; it was the emergence of a big subject which must be treated
+in a large bold way, if it was to succeed.  It succeeded to a degree
+which could not fail to gratify any one who would rather have a wide
+audience than a contracted one, who believes that to be popular is not
+necessarily to be contemptible--as the ancient Pistol put it, "base,
+common and popular."
+
+
+
+
+THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTES
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+You could not call the place a village, nor yet could it be called a
+town.  Viewed from the bluff, on the English side of the river, it was a
+long stretch of small farmhouses--some painted red, with green shutters,
+some painted white, with red shutters--set upon long strips of land,
+green, yellow, and brown, as it chanced to be pasture land, fields of
+grain, or "plough-land."
+
+These long strips of property, fenced off one from the other, so narrow
+and so precise, looked like pieces of ribbon laid upon a wide quilt of
+level country.  Far back from this level land lay the dark, limestone
+hills, which had rambled down from Labrador, and, crossing the River St.
+Lawrence, stretched away into the English province.  The farmhouses and
+the long strips of land were in such regular procession, it might almost
+have seemed to the eye of the whimsical spectator that the houses and the
+ribbon were of a piece, and had been set down there, sentinel after
+sentinel, like so many toy soldiers, along the banks of the great river.
+There was one important break in the long line of precise settlement, and
+that was where the Parish Church, about the middle of the line, had
+gathered round it a score or so of buildings.  But this only added to the
+strength of the line rather than broke its uniformity.  Wide stretches of
+meadow-land reached back from the Parish Church until they were lost in
+the darker verdure of the hills.
+
+On either side of the Parish Church, with its tall, stone tower, were two
+stout-built houses, set among trees and shrubbery.  They were low set,
+broad and square, with heavy-studded, old-fashioned doors.  The roofs
+were steep and high, with dormer windows and a sort of shelf at the
+gables.
+
+They were both on the highest ground in the whole settlement, a little
+higher than the site of the Parish Church.  The one was the residence of
+the old seigneur, Monsieur Duhamel; the other was the Manor Casimbault,
+empty now of all the Casimbaults.  For a year it had lain idle, until the
+only heir of the old family, which was held in high esteem as far back as
+the time of Louis Quinze, returned from his dissipations in Quebec to
+settle in the old place or sell it to the highest bidder.
+
+Behind the Manor Casimbault and the Seigneury, thus flanking the church
+at reverential distance, another large house completed the acute
+triangle, forming the apex of the solid wedge of settlement drawn about
+the church.  This was the great farmhouse of the Lavilettes, one of the
+most noticeable families in the parish.
+
+Of the little buildings bunched beside the church, not the least
+important was the post-office, kept by Papin Baby, who was also keeper
+of the bridge which was almost at the door of the office.  This bridge
+crossed a stream that ran into the large river, forming a harbour.  It
+opened in the middle, permitting boats and vessels to go through.  Baby
+worked it by a lever.  A hundred yards or so above the bridge was the
+parish mill, and between were the Hotel France, the little house of
+Doctor Montmagny, the Regimental Surgeon (as he was called), the cooper
+shop, the blacksmith, the tinsmith and the grocery shops.  Just beyond
+the mill, upon the banks of the river, was the most notorious, if not the
+most celebrated, house in the settlement.  Shangois, the travelling
+notary, lived in it--when he was not travelling.  When he was, he left it
+unlocked, all save one room; and people came and went through the house
+as they pleased, eyeing with curiosity the dusty, tattered books upon the
+shelves, the empty bottles in the corner, the patchwork of cheap prints,
+notices of sales, summonses, accounts, certificates of baptism,
+memoranda, receipted bills--though they were few--tacked or stuck to the
+wall.
+
+No grown-up person of the village meddled with anything, no matter how
+curious; for this consistent, if unspoken, trust displayed by Shangois
+appealed to their better instincts.  Besides, they, like the children,
+had a wholesome fear of the disreputable, shrunken, dishevelled little
+notary, with the bead-like eyes, yellow stockings, hooked nose and
+palsied left hand.  Also the knapsack and black bag he carried under his
+arms contained more secrets than most people wished to tempt or challenge
+forth.  Few cared to anger the little man, whose father and grandfather
+had been notaries here before him.
+
+Like others in the settlement, Shangois was the last of his race.  He
+could put his finger upon the secret history and private lives of nearly
+every person in a dozen parishes, but most of all in Bonaventure--for
+such this long parish was called.  He knew to a hair's breadth the social
+value of every human being in the parish.  He was too cunning and acute
+to be a gossip, but by direct and indirect ways he made every person feel
+that the Cure and the Lord might forgive their pasts, but he could never
+forget them, nor wished to do so.  For Monsieur Duhamel, the old
+seigneur, for the drunken Philippe Casimbault, for the Cure, and for the
+Lavilettes, who owned the great farmhouse at the apex of that wedge of
+village life, he had a profound respect.  The parish generally did not
+share his respect for the Lavilettes.
+
+Once upon a time, beyond the memories of any in the parish, the
+Lavilettes of Bonaventure were a great people.  Disaster came, debt and
+difficulty followed, fire consumed the old house in which their dignity
+had been cherished, and at last they had no longer their seigneurial
+position, but that of ordinary farmers who work and toil in the field
+like any of the fifty-acre farmers on the banks of the St. Lawrence
+River.
+
+Monsieur Louis Lavilette, the present head of the house, had not
+married well.  At the time when the feeling against the English was the
+strongest, and when his own fortunes were precarious, he had married a
+girl somewhat older than himself, who was half English and half French,
+her father having been a Hudson's Bay Company factor on the north coast
+of the river.  In proportion as their fortunes and their popularity
+declined, and their once notable position as an old family became
+scarce a memory even, the pride of the Lavilettes increased.
+
+Madame Lavilette made strong efforts to secure her place; but she was
+not of an old French family, and this was an easy and convenient weapon
+against her.  Besides, she had no taste, and her manners were much
+inferior to those of her husband.  What impression he managed to make by
+virtue of a good deal of natural dignity, she soon unmade by her lack of
+tact.  She had no innate breeding, though she was not vulgar.  She lacked
+sense a little and sensitiveness much.
+
+The Casimbaults and the wife of the old seigneur made no friends of the
+Lavilettes, but the old seigneur kept up a formal habit of calling twice
+a year at the Lavilettes' big farmhouse, which, in spite of all
+misfortune, grew bigger as the years went on.  Probably, in spite of
+everything, Monsieur Lavilette and his family would have succeeded better
+socially had it not been for one or two unpopular lawsuits brought by the
+Lavilettes against two neighbours, small farmers, one of whom was clearly
+in the wrong, and the other as clearly in the right.
+
+When, after years had gone by, and the children of the Lavilettes had
+grown up, young Monsieur Casimbault came from Quebec to sell his property
+(it seemed to the people of Bonaventure like selling his birthright), he
+was greatly surprised to find Monsieur Lavilette ready with ten thousand
+dollars, to purchase the Manor Casimbault.  Before the parish had time to
+take breath Monsieur Casimbault had handed over the deed, pocketed the
+money, and leaving the ancient heritage of his family in the hands of the
+Lavilettes, (who forthwith prepared to enter upon it, house and land),
+had hurried away to Quebec again without any pangs of sentiment.
+
+It was a little before this time that impertinent peasants in the parish
+began to sing:
+
+              "O when you hear my little silver drum,
+                  And when I blow my little gold trompette-a,
+               You must drop your work and come,
+               You must leave your pride at home,
+                  And duck your heads before the Lavilette-a!"
+
+Gatineau the miller, and Baby the keeper of the bridge, gave their
+own reasons for the renewed progress of the Lavilettes.  They met in
+conference at the mill on the eve of the marriage of Sophie Lavilette
+to Magon Farcinelle, farrier, farmer and member of the provincial
+legislature, whose house lay behind the piece of maple wood, a mile
+or so to the right of the Lavilettes' farmhouse.  Farcinelle's engagement
+to Sophie had come as a surprise to all, for, so far as people knew,
+there had been no courting.  Madame Lavilette had encouraged, had even
+tempted, the spontaneous and jovial Farcinelle.  Though he had never made
+a speech in the House of Assembly, and it was hard to tell why he was
+elected, save because everybody liked him, his official position and his
+popularity held an important place in Madame Lavilette's long-developed
+plans, which at last were to place her in a position equal to that of the
+old seigneur, and launch her upon society at the capital.
+
+They had gone more than once to the capital, where their family had been
+well-known fifty years before, but few doors had been opened to them.
+They were farmers--only farmers--and Madame Lavilette made no remarkable
+impression.  Her dress was florid and not in excellent taste, and her
+accent was rather crude.  Sophie had gone to school at the convent in the
+city, but she had no ambition.  She had inherited the stolid simplicity
+of her English grandfather.  When her schooling was finished she let her
+school friends drop, and came back to Bonaventure, rather stately, given
+to reading, and little inclined to bother her head about anybody.
+
+Christine, the younger sister, had gone to Quebec also, but after a week
+of rebellion, bad temper and sharp speaking, had come home again without
+ceremony, and refused to return.  Despite certain likenesses to her
+mother, she had a deep, if unintelligible, admiration for her father,
+and she never tired looking at the picture of her great-grandfather in
+the dress of a chevalier of St. Louis--almost the only thing that had
+been saved from the old Manor House, destroyed so long before her time.
+Perhaps it was the importance she attached to her ancestry which made her
+impatient with their present position, and with people in the parish who
+would not altogether recognise their claims.  It was that which made her
+give a little jerky bow to the miller and the postmaster when she passed
+the mill.
+
+"Come, dusty-belly," said Baby, "what's all this pom-pom of the
+Lavilettes?"
+
+The miller pursed out his lips, contracted his brows, and arranged his
+loose waistcoat carefully on his fat stomach.
+
+"Money," said he, oracularly, as though he had solved the great question
+of the universe.
+
+"La! la!  But other folks have money; and they step about Bonaventure no
+more louder than a cat."
+
+"Blood," added Gatineau, corrugating his brows still more.
+
+"Bosh!"
+
+"Both together--money and blood," rejoined the miller.  Overcome by his
+exertions, he wheezed so tremendously that great billows of excitement
+raised his waistcoat, and a perspiration broke out upon his mealy face,
+making a paste which the sun, through the open doorway, immediately began
+to bake into a crust.
+
+"Pah, the airs they have always had, those Lavilettes!" said Baby.
+"They will not do this because it is not polite, they will not do that
+because they are too proud.  They say that once there was a baron in
+their family.  Who can tell how long ago!  Perhaps when John the Baptist
+was alive.  What is that?  Nothing.  There is no baron now.  All at once
+somebody die a year ago, and leave them ten thousand dollars; and then--
+mais, there is the grand difference!  They have save and save twenty
+years to pay their debts and to buy a seigneury, like that baron who live
+in the time of John the Baptist.  Now it is to stand on a ladder to speak
+to them.  And when all's done, they marry Ma'm'selle Sophie to a farrier,
+to that Magon Farcinelle--bah!"
+
+"Magon was at the Laval College in Quebec; he has ten thousand dollars;
+he is the best judge of horses in the province, and he's a Member of
+Parliament to boot," said the miller, puffing.  "He is a great man
+almost."
+
+"He's no better judge of horses than M'sieu' Nic Lavilette--eh, that's a
+bully bad scamp, my Gatineau!" responded Baby.  "He's the best in the
+family.  He is a grand sport; yes.  It's he that fetched Ma'm'selle
+Sophie to the hitching-post.  Voila, he can wind them all round his
+finger!"
+
+Baby looked round to see if any one was near; then he drew the miller's
+head down by pulling at his collar, and whispered in his ear:
+
+"He's hot foot for the Rebellion; that's one good thing," he said.  "If
+he wipes out the English--"
+
+"Hold your tongue," nervously interrupted Gatineau, for just then two or
+three loiterers of the parish came shambling around the corner of the
+mill.
+
+Baby stopped short, and as they greeted the newcomers their attention was
+drawn to the stage-coach from St. Croix coming over the little hill near
+by.
+
+"Here's M'sieu' Nic now--and who's with him?" said Baby, stepping about
+nervously in his excitement.  "I knew there was something up.  M'sieu'
+Nic's been writing long letters from Montreal."
+
+Baby's look suggested that he knew more than his position as postmaster
+entitled him to know; but the furtive droop at the corner of his eyes
+showed also that his secretiveness was equal to his cowardice.
+
+On the seat, beside the driver of the coach, was Nicolas Lavilette,
+black-haired, brown-eyed, athletic, reckless-looking, with a cast in his
+left eye, which gave him a look of drollery, in keeping with his buoyant,
+daring nature.  Beside him was a figure much more noticeable and unusual.
+
+Lean, dark-featured, with keen-glancing eyes, and a body with a faculty
+for finding corners of ease; waving hair, streaked with grey, black
+moustache, and a hectic flush on the cheeks, lending to the world-wise
+face a wistful look-that, with near six feet of height, was the picture
+of his friend.
+
+"Who is it?" asked the miller, with bulging eyes.  "An English
+nobleman," answered Baby.  "How do you know?" asked Gatineau.
+
+"How do I know you are a fat, cheating miller?" replied the postmaster,
+with cunning care and a touch of malice.  Malice was the only power Baby
+knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+In the matter of power, Baby, the inquisitive postmaster and keeper of
+the bridge, was unlike the new arrival in Bonaventure.  The abilities of
+the Honourable Tom Ferrol lay in a splendid plausibility, a spontaneous
+blarney.  He could no more help being spendthrift of his affections and
+his morals than of his money, and many a time he had wished that his
+money was as inexhaustible as his emotions.
+
+In point of morals, any of the Lavilettes presented a finer average than
+their new guest, who had come to give their feasting distinction, and
+what more time was to show.  Indeed, the Hon. Mr. Ferrol had no morals to
+speak of, and very little honour.  He was the penniless son of an Irish
+peer, who was himself well-nigh penniless; and he and his sister, whose
+path of life at home was not easy after her marriageable years had
+passed, drew from the consols the small sum of money their mother
+had left them, and sailed away for New York.
+
+Six months of life there, with varying fortune in which a well-to-do girl
+in society gave him a promise of marriage, and then Ferrol found himself
+jilted for a baronet, who owned a line of steamships and could give the
+ambitious lady a title.  In his sick heart he had spoken profanely of the
+future Lady of Title, had bade her good-bye with a smile and an agreeable
+piece of wit, and had gone home to his flat and sobbed like a schoolboy;
+for, as much as he could love anybody, he loved this girl.  He and the
+faithful sister vanished from New York and appeared in Quebec, where they
+were made welcome in Government House, at the citadel, and among all who
+cared to know the weight of an inherited title.  For a time, the fact
+that he had little or no money did not temper their hospitality with
+niggardliness or caution.  But their cheery and witty guest began to take
+more wine than was good for him or comfortable for others; his bills at
+the clubs remained unpaid, his landlord harried him, his tailors pursued
+him; and then he borrowed cheerfully and well.
+
+However, there came an end to this, and to the acceptance of his I O U's.
+Following the instincts of his Irish ancestors, he then leagued with a
+professional smuggler, and began to deal in contraband liquors and
+cigars.  But before this occurred, he had sent his sister to a little
+secluded town, where she should be well out of earshot of his doings or
+possible troubles.  He would have shielded her from harm at the cost of
+his life.  His loyalty to her was only limited by the irresponsibility of
+his nature and a certain incapacity to see the difference between radical
+right and radical wrong.  His honour was a matter of tradition, such as
+it was, and in all else he had the inherent invalidity of some of his
+distant forebears.  For a time all went well, then discovery came, and
+only the kind intriguing of as good friends as any man deserved prevented
+his arrest and punishment.  But it all got whispered about; and while
+some ladies saw a touch of romance in his doing professionally and
+wholesale what they themselves did in an amateurish way with laces,
+gloves and so on, men viewed the matter more seriously, and advised
+Ferrol to leave Quebec.
+
+Since that time he had lived by his wits--and pleasing, dangerous wits
+they were--at Montreal and elsewhere.  But fatal ill-luck pursued him.
+Presently a cold settled on his lungs.  In the dead of winter, after
+sending what money he had to his sister, he had lived a week or more in
+a room, with no fire and little food.  As time went on, the cold got no
+better.  After sundry vicissitudes and twists of fortune, he met Nicolas
+Lavilette at a horse race, and a friendship was struck up.  He frankly
+and gladly accepted an invitation to attend the wedding of Sophie
+Lavilette, and to make a visit at the farm, and at the Manor Casimbault
+afterwards.  Nicolas spoke lightly of the Manor Casimbault, yet he had
+pride in it also; for, scamp as he was, and indifferent to anything like
+personal dignity or self-respect, he admired his father and had a
+natural, if good-natured, arrogance akin to Christine's self-will.
+
+It meant to Ferrol freedom from poverty, misery and financial subterfuge
+for a moment; and he could be quiet--for, as he said, "This confounded
+cold takes the iron out of my blood."
+
+Like all people stricken with this disease, he never called it anything
+but a cold.  All those illusions which accompany the malady were his.  He
+would always be better "to-morrow."  He told the two or three friends who
+came from their beds in the early morning to see him safely off from
+Montreal to Bonaventure that he would be all right as soon as he got out
+into the country; that he sat up too late in the town; and that he had
+just got a new prescription which had cured a dozen people "with colds
+and hemorrhages."  His was only a cold--just a cold; that was all.  He
+was a bit weak sometimes, and what he needed was something to pull up
+his strength.  The country would do this-plenty of fresh air, riding,
+walking, and that sort of thing.
+
+He had left Montreal behind in gay spirits, and he continued gay for
+several hours, holding himself' erect in the seat, noting the landscape,
+telling stories; but he stumbled with weakness as they got out of the
+coach for luncheon.  He drank three full portions of whiskey at table,
+and ate nothing.  The silent landlady who waited on them at last brought
+a huge bowl of milk, and set it before him without a word.  A flush
+passed swiftly across his face and faded away, as, with quick
+sensitiveness, he glanced at Nicolas and another passenger, a fat priest.
+They took no notice, and, reassured, he said, with a laugh, that the
+landlady knew exactly what he wanted.  Lifting the dish, he drained it at
+a gasp, though the milk almost choked him, and, to the apprehension of
+his hostess, set the bowl spinning on the table like a top.  Another
+illusion of the disease was his: that he succeeded perfectly in deceiving
+everybody round him with his pathetic make-believe; and, unlike most
+deceivers, he deceived himself as well.  The two actions, inconsistent
+as they were, were reconciled in him, as in all the race of consumptives,
+by some strange chemistry of the mind and spirit.  He was on the broad,
+undiverging highway to death; yet, with every final token about him that
+he was in the enemy's country, surrounded, trapped, soon to be passed
+unceremoniously inside the citadel at the end of the avenue, he kept
+signalling back to old friends that all was well, and he told himself
+that to-morrow the king should have his own again--"To-morrow, and to-
+morrow, and to-morrow!"
+
+He was not very thin in body; his face was full, and at times his eyes
+were singularly and fascinatingly bright.  He had colour--that hectic
+flush which, on his cheek, was almost beautiful.  One would have turned
+twice to see.  The quantities of spirits that he drank (he ate little)
+would have killed a half-dozen healthy men.  To him it was food, taken
+up, absorbed by the fever of his disease, giving him a real, not a
+fictitious strength; and so it would continue to do till some artery
+burst and choked him, or else, by some miracle of air and climate, the
+hole in his lung healed up again; which he, in his elation, believed
+would be "to-morrow."  Perhaps the air, the food, and life of Bonaventure
+were the one medicine he needed!
+
+But, in the moment Nicolas said to him that Bonaventure was just over the
+hill, that they would be able to see it now, he had a sudden feeling of
+depression.  He felt that he would give anything to turn back.  A
+perspiration broke out on his forehead and his cheek.  His eyes had a
+wavering, anxious look.  Some of that old sanity of the once healthy man
+was making a last effort for supremacy, breaking in upon illusive hopes
+and irresponsible deceptions.
+
+It was only for a moment.  Presently, from the top of the hill, they
+looked down upon the long line of little homes lying along the banks of
+the river like peaceful watchmen in a pleasant land, with corn and wine
+and oil at hand.  The tall cross on the spire of the Parish Church was
+itself a message of hope.  He did not define it so; but the impression
+vaguely, perhaps superstitiously, possessed him.  It was this vague
+influence, perhaps (for he was not a Catholic), which made him
+involuntarily lift his hat, as did Nicolas, when they passed a calvary;
+which induced him likewise to make the sacred gesture when they met a
+priest, with an acolyte and swinging censer, hurrying silently on to the
+home of some dying parishioner.  The sensations were different from
+anything he had known.  He had been used to the Catholic religion in
+Ireland; he had seen it in France, Spain, Italy and elsewhere; but here
+was something essentially primitive, archaically touching and convincing.
+
+His spirits came back with a rush; he had a splendid feeling of
+exaltation.  He was not religious, never could be, but he felt religious;
+he was ill, but he felt that he was on the open highway to health; he was
+dishonest, but he felt an honest man; he was the son of a peer, but he
+felt himself brother to the fat miller by the roadway, to Baby, the
+postmaster and keeper of the bridge, to the Regimental Surgeon, who stood
+in his doorway, pulling at his moustache and blowing clouds of tobacco
+smoke into the air.
+
+Shangois, the notary, met his eye as they dashed on.  A new sensation--
+not a change in the elation he felt, but an instant's interruption--
+came to him.  He asked who Shangois was, and Nicolas told him.
+
+"A notary, eh?" he remarked gaily.  "Well, why does he disguise himself?
+He looks like a ragpicker, and has the eye of Solomon and the devil in
+one.  He ought to be in some Star Chamber--Palmerston could make use of
+him."
+
+"Oh, he's kept busy enough with secrets here!" was Nicolas's laughing
+reply.
+
+"It's only a difference of size in the secrets anyhow," was Ferrol's
+response in the same vein; and in a few moments they had passed the
+Seigneury, and were drawn up before the great farmhouse.
+
+Its appearance was rather comfortable and commodious than impressive, but
+it had the air of home and undepreciating use.  There was one beautiful
+clump of hollyhocks and sunflowers in the front garden; a corner of the
+main building was covered with morning-glories; a fence to the left was
+overgrown with grape-vines, making it look like a hedge; a huge pear tree
+occupied a spot opposite to the pretty copse of sunflowers and
+hollyhocks; and the rest of the garden was green, save just round a
+little "summer-house," in the corner, with its back to the road, near
+which Sophie had set a palisade of the golden-rod flower.  Just beside
+the front door was a bush of purple lilac; and over the door, in copper,
+was the coat-of-arms of the Lavilettes, placed there, at Madame's
+insistence, in spite of the dying wish of Lavilette's father, a feeble,
+babbling old gentleman in knee-breeches, stock, and swallow-tailed coat,
+who, broken down by misfortune, age and loneliness, had gathered himself
+together for one last effort for becomingness against his daughter-in-
+law's false tastes--and had died the day after.  He was spared the
+indignity of the coat-of-arms on the tombstone only by the fierce
+opposition of Louis Lavilette, who upon this point had his first quarrel
+with his wife.
+
+Ferrol saw no particular details in his first view of the house.
+The picture was satisfying to a tired man--comfort, quiet, the bread
+of idleness to eat, and welcome, admiring faces round him.  Monsieur
+Lavilette stood in the doorway, and behind him, at a carefully disposed
+distance, was Madame, rather more emphatically dressed than necessary.
+As he shook hands genially with Madame he saw Sophie and Christine in the
+doorway of the parlour.  His spirits took another leap.  His
+inexhaustible emotions were out upon cheerful parade at once.
+
+The Lavilettes immediately became pensioners of his affections.  The
+first hour of his coming he himself did not know which sister his ample
+heart was spending itself on most--Sophie, with her English face, and
+slow, docile, well-bred manner, or Christine, dark, petite, impertinent,
+gay-hearted, wilful, unsparing of her tongue for others--or for herself.
+Though Christine's lips and cheeks glowed, and her eyes had wonderful
+warm lights, incredulity was constantly signalled from both eyes and
+lips.  She was a fine, daring little animal, with as great a talent for
+untruth as truth, though, to this point in her life, truth had been more
+with her.  Her temptations had been few.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Mr. Ferrol seemed honestly to like the old farmhouse, with its low
+ceilings, thick walls, big beams and wide chimneys, and he showed himself
+perfectly at home.  He begged to be allowed to sit for an hour in the
+kitchen, beside the great fireplace.  He enjoyed this part of his first
+appearance greatly.  It was like nothing he had tasted since he used, as
+a boy, to visit the huntsman's home on his father's estate, and gossip
+and smoke in that Galway chimney-corner.  It was only when he had to face
+the too impressive adoration of Madame Lavilette that his comfort got a
+twist.
+
+He made easy headway into the affections of his hostess; for, besides all
+other predilections, she had an adoring awe of the nobility.  It rather
+surprised her that Ferrol seemed almost unaware of his title.  He was
+quite without self-consciousness, although there was that little touch
+of irresponsibility in him which betrayed a readiness to sell his dignity
+for a small compensation.  With a certain genial capacity for universal
+blarney, he was at first as impressive with Sophie as he was attentive to
+Christine.  It was quite natural that presently Madame Lavilette should
+see possibilities beyond all her past imaginations.  It would surely
+advance her ambitions to have him here for Sophie's wedding; but even as
+she thought that, she had twinges of disappointment, because she had
+promised Farcinelle to have the wedding as simple and bourgeois as
+possible.
+
+Farcinelle did not share the social ambitions of the Lavilettes.
+He liked his political popularity, and he was only concerned for that.
+He had that touch of shrewdness to save him from fatuity where the
+Lavilettes were concerned.  He was determined to associate with the
+ceremony all the primitive customs of the country.  He had come of a race
+of simple farmers, and he was consistent enough to attempt to live up to
+the traditions of his people.  He was entirely too good-natured to take
+exception to Ferrol's easy-going admiration of Sophie.
+
+Ferrol spoke excellent French, and soon found points of pleasant contact
+with Monsieur Lavilette, who, despite the fact that he had coarsened as
+the years went on, had still upon him the touch of family tradition,
+which may become either offensive pride or defensive self-respect.  With
+the Cure, Ferrol was not quite so successful.  The ascetic, prudent
+priest, with that instinctive, long-sighted accuracy which belongs to the
+narrow-minded, scented difficulty.  He disliked the English exceedingly;
+and all Irishmen were English men to him.  He resisted Ferrol's blarney.
+His thin lips tightened, his narrow forehead seemed to grow narrower, and
+his very cassock appeared to contract austerely on his figure as he
+talked to the refugee of misfortune.
+
+When the most pardonable of gossips, the Regimental Surgeon, asked him on
+his way home what he thought of Ferrol, he shrugged his shoulders,
+tightened his lips again, and said:
+
+"A polite, designing heretic."
+
+The Regimental Surgeon, though a Frenchman, had once belonged to a
+British battery of artillery stationed at Quebec, and there he had
+acquired an admiration for the English, which betrayed itself in his
+curious attempts to imitate Anglo-Saxon bluffness and blunt spontaneity.
+When the Cure had gone, he flung back his shoulders, with a laugh, as he
+had seen the major-general do at the officers' mess at the citadel, and
+said in English:
+
+"Heretics are damn' funny.  I will go and call.  I have also some Irish
+whiskey.  He will like that; and pipes--pipes, plenty of them!"
+
+The pipe he was smoking at the moment had been given to him by the major-
+general, and he polished the silver ferrule, with its honourable
+inscription, every morning of his life.
+
+On the morning of the second day after Ferrol came, he was carried off to
+the Manor Casimbault to see the painful alterations which were being made
+there under the direction of Madame Lavilette.  Sophie, who had a good
+deal of natural taste, had in the old days fought against her mother's
+incongruous ideas, and once, when the rehabilitation of the Manor
+Casimbault came up, she had made a protest; but it was unavailing, and it
+was her last effort.  The Manor Casimbault was destined to be an example
+of ancient dignity and modern bad taste.  Alterations were going on as
+Madame Lavilette, Ferrol and Christine entered.
+
+For some time Ferrol watched the proceedings with a casual eye, but
+presently he begged his hostess that she would leave the tall, old oak
+clock where it was in the big hall, and that the new, platter-faced
+office clock, intended for its substitute, be hung up in the kitchen.
+He eyed the well-scraped over-mantel askance and saw, with scarcely
+concealed astonishment, a fine, old, carved wooden seat carried out of
+doors to make room for an American rocking-chair.  He turned his head
+away almost in anger when he saw that the beautiful brown wainscoting was
+being painted an ultra-marine blue.  His partly disguised astonishment
+and dissent were not lost upon the crude but clever Christine.  A new
+sense was opened up in her, and she felt somehow that the ultra-marine
+blue was not right, that the over-mantel had been spoiled, that the new
+walnut table was too noticeable, and that the American rocking-chair
+looked very common.  Also she felt that the plush, with which her mother
+and the dressmaker at St. Croix had decorated her bodice, was not the
+thing.  Presently this made her angry.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" she asked a little maliciously, pointing to the
+rocking-chair in the salon.
+
+"I prefer standing--with you," he answered, eyeing the chair with a sly
+twinkle.
+
+"No, that isn't it," she rejoined sharply.  "You don't like the chair."
+Then suddenly breaking into English--"Ah!  I know, I know.  You can't
+fool me.  I see de leetla look in your eye; and you not like the paint,
+and you'd pitch that painter, Alcide, out into the snow if it is your
+house."
+
+"I wouldn't, really," he answered--he coughed a little--"Alcide is doing
+his work very well.  Couldn't you give me a coat of blue paint, too?"
+
+The piquant, intelligent, fiery peasant face interested him.  It had
+warmth, natural life and passion.
+
+She flushed and stamped her foot, while he laughed heartily; and she was
+about to say something dangerous, when the laugh suddenly stopped and he
+began coughing.  The paroxysm increased until he strained and caught at
+his breast with his hand.  It seemed as if his chest and throat must
+burst.
+
+She instantly changed.  The flush of anger passed from her face, and
+something else came into it.  She caught his hand.
+
+"Oh!  what can I do, what can I do to help you?" she asked pitifully.
+"I did not know you were so ill.  Tell me, what can I do?"
+
+He made a gentle, protesting motion of his free arm--he could not speak
+yet--while she held and clasped his other hand.
+
+"It's the worst I ever had," he said, after a moment "the very worst!"
+
+He sat down, and again he had a fit of coughing, and the sweat started
+out violently upon his forehead and cheek.  When his head at last lay
+back against the chair, the paroxysm over, a little spot of blood showed
+and spread upon his white lips.  With a pained, shuddering little gasp
+she caught her handkerchief from her bosom, and, running one hand round
+his shoulder, quickly and gently caught away the spot of blood, and
+crumpled the handkerchief in her hand to hide it from him.
+
+"Oh! poor fellow, poor fellow!" she said.  "Oh! poor fellow!"
+
+Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked at him with that look which
+is not the love of a woman for a man, or of a lover for a lover, but that
+latent spirit of care and motherhood which is in every woman who is more
+woman than man.  For there are women who are more men than women.
+
+For himself, a new fact struck home in him.  For the first time since
+his illness he felt that he was doomed.  That little spot of blood in
+the crumpled handkerchief which had flashed past his eye was the fatal
+message he had sought to elude for months past.  A hopeless and ironical
+misery shot through him.  But he had humour too, and, with the taste of
+the warm red drop in his mouth still, his tongue touched his lips
+swiftly, and one hand grasping the arm of the chair, and the fingers of
+the other dropping on the back of her hand lightly, he said in a quaint,
+ironical tone:
+
+"'Dead for a ducat!'"
+
+When he saw the look of horror in her face, his eyes lifted almost gaily
+to hers, as he continued:
+
+"A little brandy, if you can get it, mademoiselle."
+
+"Yes, yes.  I'll get some for you--some whiskey!" she said, with
+frightened, terribly eager eyes.
+
+"Alcide always has some.  Don't stir.  Sit just where you are."  She ran
+out of the room swiftly--a light-footed, warm-spirited, dramatic little
+thing, set off so garishly in the bodice with the plush trimming; but she
+had a big heart, and the man knew it.  It was the big-heartedness which
+was the touch of the man in her that made her companionable to him.
+
+He said to himself when she left him:
+
+"What cursed luck!"  And after a pause, he added: "Good-hearted little
+body, how sorry she looked!"  Then he settled back in his chair, his eyes
+fixed upon her as she entered the room, eager, pale and solicitous.  A
+half-hour later they two were on their way to the farmhouse, the work of
+despoiling going on in the Manor behind them.  Ferrol walked with an
+easy, half-languid step, even a gay sort of courage in his bearing.  The
+liquor he had drunk brought the colour to his lips.  They were now hot
+and red, and his eyes had a singular feverish brilliancy, in keeping with
+the hectic flush on his cheek.  He had dismissed the subject of his
+illness almost immediately, and Christine's adaptable nature had
+instantly responded to his mood.
+
+He asked her questions about the country-side, of their neighbours, of
+the way they lived, all in an easy, unintrusive way, winning her
+confidence and provoking her candour.
+
+Two or three times, however, her face suddenly flushed with the memory
+of the scene in the Manor, and her first real awakening to her social
+insufficiency; for she of all the family had been least careful to see
+herself as others might see her.  She was vain; she was somewhat of a
+barbarian; she loved nobody and nobody's opinion as she loved herself and
+her own opinion.  Though, if any people really cared for her, and she for
+them, they were the Regimental Surgeon and Shangois the notary.
+
+Once, as they walked on, she turned and looked back at the Manor House,
+but only for an instant.  He caught the glance, and said:
+
+"You'll like to live there, won't you?"
+
+"I don't know," she answered almost sharply.  "But if the Casimbaults
+liked it, I don't see why we shouldn't."
+
+There was a challenge in her voice, defiance in the little toss of her
+head.  He liked her spirit in spite of the vanity.  Her vanity did not
+concern him greatly; for, after all, what was he doing here?  Merely
+filling in dark days, living a sober-coloured game out.  He had one
+solitary hundred dollars--no more; and half of that he had borrowed, and
+half of it he got from selling his shooting-traps and his hunting-watch.
+He might worry along on that till the end of the game; but he had no
+money to send his sister in that secluded village two hundred miles away.
+She had never known how really poor he was; and she had lived in her
+simple way without want and without any unusual anxiety, save for his
+health.  More than once he had practically starved himself to send money
+to her.  Perhaps also he would have starved others for the same purpose.
+
+"I'll warrant the Casimbaults never enjoyed the Manor as much as I've
+done that big kitchen in your house," he said, "and I can't see why you
+want to leave it.  Don't you feel sorry you are going to leave the old
+place?  Hadn't you got your own little spots there, and made friends with
+them?  I feel as if I should like to sit down by the side of your big,
+warm chimney-corner, till the wind came along that blows out the candle."
+
+"What do you mean by 'blowing out the candle'?" she asked.
+
+"Well," he answered, "it means, shut up shop, drop the curtain, or
+anything you like.  It means X Y Z and the grand finale!"
+
+"Oh!" she said, with a little start, as the thing dawned upon her.
+"Don't speak like that; you're not going to die."
+
+"Give me your handkerchief," he answered.  "Give it to me, and I'll tell
+you--how soon."
+
+She jammed her hand down in her pocket.  "No, I won't," she answered.
+"I won't!"
+
+She never did, and he liked her none the less for that.  Somehow, up to
+this time, he had always thought that he would get well, and to-morrow he
+would probably think so again; but just for the moment he felt the real
+truth.
+
+Presently she said (they spoke in French):
+
+"Why is it you like our old kitchen so much?  It isn't nearly as nice as
+the parlour."
+
+"Well, it's a place to live in, anyhow; and I fancy you all feel more at
+home there than anywhere else."
+
+"I feel just as much at home in the parlour as there," she retorted.
+
+"Oh, no, I think not.  The room one lives in the most is the room for any
+one's money."
+
+She looked at him in a puzzled way.  Too many sensations were being born
+in her all at once; but she did recognise that he was not trying to
+subtract anything from the pomp of the Lavilettes.
+
+He belonged to a world that she did not know--and yet he was so perfectly
+at home with her, so idly easygoing.
+
+"Did you ever live in a castle?" she asked eagerly.  "Yes," he said,
+with a dry little laugh.  Then, after a moment, with the half-abstracted
+manner of a man who is recalling a long-forgotten scene, he added: "I
+lived in the North Tower, looking out on Farcalladen Moor.  When I wasn't
+riding to the hounds myself I could see them crossing to or from the
+meet.  The River Stavely ran between; and just under the window of the
+North Tower is the prettiest copse you ever saw.  That was from one side
+of the tower.  From the other side you looked into the court-yard.  As a
+boy, I liked the court-yard just as well as the moor; for the pigeons,
+the sparrows, the horses and the dogs were all there.  As a man, I liked
+the moor better.  Well, I had jolly good times in Castle Stavely--once
+upon a time."  "Yet, you like our kitchen!" she again urged, in a maze
+of wonderment.
+
+"I like everything here," he answered; "everything--everything, you
+understand!" he said, looking meaningly into her eyes.
+
+"Then you'll like the wedding--Sophie's wedding," she answered, in a
+little confusion.
+
+A half-hour later, he said much the same sort of thing to Sophie, with
+the same look in his eyes, and only the general purpose, in either case,
+of being on easy terms with them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The day of the wedding there was a gay procession through the parish of
+the friends and constituents of Magon Farcinelle.  When they came to his
+home he joined them, and marched at the head of the procession as had
+done many a forefather of his, with ribbons on his hat and others at his
+button-hole.  After stopping for exchange of courtesies at several houses
+in the parish, the procession came to the homestead of the Lavilettes,
+and the crowd were now enough excited to forget the pride which had
+repelled and offended them for many years.
+
+Monsieur Lavilette made a polite speech, sending round cider and "white
+wine" (as native whiskey was called) when he had finished.  Later,
+Nicolas furnished some good brandy, and Farcinelle sent more.  A good
+number of people had come out of curiosity to see what manner of man the
+Englishman was, well prepared to resent his overbearing snobbishness--
+they were inclined to believe every Englishman snobbish.  But Ferrol was
+so entirely affable, and he drank so freely with everyone that came to
+say "A votre sante, M'sieu' le Baron," and kept such a steady head in
+spite of all those quantities of white wine, brandy and cider, that they
+were almost ready to carry him on their shoulders; though, with their
+racial prejudice, they would probably have repented of that indiscretion
+on the morrow.
+
+Presently, dancing began in a paddock just across the road from
+the house; and when Madame Lavilette saw that Mr. Ferrol gave such
+undisguised countenance to the primitive rejoicings, she encouraged the
+revellers and enlarged her hospitality, sending down hampers of eatables.
+She preened with pleasure when she saw Ferrol walking up and down in very
+confidential conversation with Christine.  If she had been really
+observant she would have seen that Ferrol's tendency was towards an
+appearance of confidential friendliness with almost everybody.  Great
+ideas had entered Madame's head, but they were vaguely defining
+themselves in Christine's mind also.  Where might not this friendship
+with Ferrol lead her?
+
+Something occurred in the midst of the dancing which gave a new turn to
+affairs.  In one of the pauses a song came monotonously lilting down the
+street; yet it was not a song, it was only a sort of humming or chanting.
+Immediately there was a clapping of hands, a flutter of female voices,
+and delighted exclamations of children.
+
+"Oh, it's a dancing bear, it's a dancing bear!" they cried.
+
+"Is it Pito?" asked one.
+
+"Is it Adrienne?" cried another.
+
+"But no; I'll bet it's Victor!" exclaimed a third.  As the man and the
+bear came nearer, they saw it was neither of these.  The man's voice was
+not unpleasant; it had a rolling, crooning sort of sound, a little weird,
+as though he had lived where men see few of their kind and have much to
+do with animals.
+
+He was bearded, but young; his hair grew low on his forehead, and,
+although it was summer time, a fur cap was set far back, like a fez, upon
+his black curly hair.  His forehead was corrugated, like that of a man of
+sixty who had lived a hard life; his eyes were small, black and piercing.
+He wore a thick, short coat, a red sash about his waist, a blue flannel
+shirt, and a loose red scarf, like a handkerchief, at his throat.  His
+feet were bare, and his trousers were rolled half way up to his knee.  In
+one hand he carried a short pole with a steel pike in it, in the other a
+rope fastened to a ring in the bear's nose.
+
+The bear, a huge brown animal, upright on his hind legs, was dancing
+sideways along the road, keeping time to the lazy notes of his leader's
+voice.
+
+In front of the Hotel France they halted, and the bear danced round and
+round in a ring, his eyes rolling savagely, his head shaking from side to
+side in a bad-tempered way.
+
+Suddenly some one cried out: "It's Vanne Castine!  It's Vanne!"
+
+People crowded nearer: there was a flurry of exclamations, and then
+Christine took a few steps forward where she could see the man's face,
+and as swiftly drew back into the crowd, pale and distraite.
+
+The man watched her until she drew away behind a group, which was
+composed of Ferrol, her brother and her sister Sophie.  He dropped no
+note of his song, and the bear kept jigging on.  Children and elders
+threw coppers, which he picked up, with a little nod of his head, a
+malicious sort of smile on his lips.  He kept a vigilant eye on the bear,
+however, and his pole was pointed constantly towards it.  After about
+five minutes of this entertainment he moved along up the road.  He spoke
+no word to anybody though there were some cries of greeting, but passed
+on, still singing the monotonous song, followed by a crowd of children.
+Presently he turned a corner, and was lost to sight.  For a moment longer
+the lullaby floated across the garden and the green fields, then the
+cornet and the concertina began again, and Ferrol turned towards
+Christine.
+
+He had seen her paleness and her look of consternation, had observed the
+sulky, penetrating look of the bear-leader's eye, and he knew that he was
+stumbling upon a story.  Her eye met his, then swiftly turned away.  When
+her look came to his face again it was filled with defiant laughter, and
+a hot brilliancy showed where the paleness had been.
+
+"Will you dance with me?" Ferrol asked.
+
+"Dance with you here?" she responded incredulously.
+
+"Yes, just here," he said, with a dry little laugh, as he ran his arm
+round her waist and drew her out upon the green.
+
+"And who is Vanne Castine?" he asked as they swung away in time with the
+music.
+
+The rest stopped dancing when they saw these two appear in the ring-
+through curiosity or through courtesy.
+
+She did not answer immediately.  They danced a little longer, then he
+said:
+
+"An old friend, eh?"
+
+After a moment, with a masked defiance still, and a hard laugh, she
+answered in English, though his question had been in French:
+
+"De frien' of an ol frien'."
+
+"You seem to be strangers now," he suggested.  She did not answer at all,
+but suddenly stopped dancing, saying: "I'm tired."
+
+The dance went on without them.  Sophie and Farcinelle presently withdrew
+also.  In five minutes the crowd had scattered, and the Lavilettes and
+Mr. Ferrol returned to the house.
+
+Meanwhile, as they passed up the street, the droning, vibrating voice of
+the bear-leader came floating along the air and through the voices of the
+crowd like the thread of motive in the movement of an opera.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+That night, while gaiety and feasting went on at the Lavilettes', there
+was another sort of feasting under way at the house of Shangois, the
+notary.
+
+On one side of a tiny fire in the chimney, over which hung a little black
+kettle, sat Shangois and Vanne Castine.  Castine was blowing clouds of
+smoke from his pipe, and Shangois was pouring some tea leaves into a
+little tin pot, humming to himself snatches of an old song as he did so:
+
+              "What shall we do when the King comes home?
+                  What shall we do when he rides along
+               With his slaves of Greece and his serfs of Rome?
+                  What shall we sing for a song--
+                                   When the King comes home?
+
+              "What shall we do when the King comes home?
+                  What shall we do when he speaks so fair?
+               Shall we give him the house with the silver dome
+                  And the maid with the crimson hair
+                                   When the King comes home?"
+
+A long, heavy sigh filled the room, but it was not the breath of Vanne
+Castine.  The sound came from the corner where the huge brown bear
+huddled in savage ease.  When it stirred, as if in response to Shangois's
+song, the chains rattled.  He was fastened by two chains to a staple
+driven into the foundation timbers of the house.  Castine's bear might
+easily be allowed too much liberty!
+
+Once he had killed a man in the open street of the City of Quebec,
+and once also he had nearly killed Castine.  They had had a fight and
+struggle, out of which the man came with a lacerated chest; but since
+that time he had become the master of the bear.  It feared him; yet, as
+he travelled with it, he scarcely ever took his eyes off it, and he never
+trusted it.  That was why, although Michael was always near him, sleeping
+or waking, he kept him chained at night.
+
+As Shangois sang, Castine's brow knotted and twitched and his hand
+clinched on his pipe with a sudden ferocity.
+
+"Name of a black cat, what do you sing that song for, notary?" he broke
+out peevishly.  "Nose of a little god, are you making fun of me?"
+
+Shangois handed him some tea.  "There's no one to laugh--why should I
+make fun of you?" he asked, jeeringly, in English, for his English was
+almost as good as his French, save in the turn of certain idioms.
+"Come, my little punchinello, tell me, now, why have you come back?"
+
+Castine laughed bitterly.
+
+"Ha, ha, why do I come back?  I'll tell you."  He sucked at his pipe.
+"Bon'venture is a good place to come to-yes.  I have been to Quebec,
+to St. John, to Fort Garry, to Detroit, up in Maine and down to New York.
+I have ride a horse in a circus, I have drive a horse and sleigh in a
+shanty, I have play in a brass band, I have drink whiskey every night for
+a month--enough whiskey.  I have drink water every night for a year--it
+is not enough.  I have learn how to speak English; I have lose all my
+money when I go to play a game of cards.  I go back to de circus; de
+circus smash; I have no pay.  I take dat damn bear Michael as my share--
+yes.  I walk trough de State of New York, all trough de State of Maine to
+Quebec, all de leetla village, all de big city--yes.  I learn dat damn
+funny song to sing to Michael.  Ha, why do I come to Bon'venture?  What
+is there to Bon'venture?  Ha!  you ask that?  I know and you know,
+M'sieu' Shangois.  There is nosing like Bon'venture in all de worl'.
+
+"What is it you would have?  Do you want nice warm house in winter,
+plenty pork, molass', patat, leetla drop whiskey 'hind de door in de
+morning?  Ha!  you come to Bon'venture.  Where else you fin' it?  You
+want people say: 'How you do, Vanne Castine--how you are?  Adieu, Vanne
+Castine; to see you again ver' happy, Vanne Castine.'  Ha, that is what
+you get in Bon'venture.  Who say 'God bless you' in New York!  They say
+'Damn you!'--yes, I know.
+
+"Where have you a church so warm, so ver' nice, and everybody say him
+mass and God-have-mercy?  Where you fin' it like that leetla place on de
+hill in Bon'venture?  Yes.  There is anoser place in Bon'venture, ver'
+nice place--yes, ha!  On de side of de hill.  You have small-pox, scarlet
+fev', difthere; you get smash your head, you get break your leg, you fall
+down, you go to die.  Ha, who is there in all de worl' like M'sieu'
+Vallier, the Cure?  Who will say to you like him: 'Vanne Castine, you
+have break all de commandments: you have swear, you have steal, you have
+kill, you have drink.  Ver' well, now, you will be sorry for dat, and say
+your prayer.  Perhaps, after hunder fifty tousen' years of purgator', you
+will be forgive and go to Heaven.  But first, when you die, we will put
+you way down in de leetla warm house in de ground, on de side of de hill,
+in de Parish of Bon'venture, because it is de only place for a gipsy like
+Vanne Castine.'
+
+"You ask me-ah!  I see you look at me, M'sieu' le Notaire, you look at me
+like a leetla dev'.  You t'ink I come for somet'ing else"--his black eyes
+flashed under his brow, he shook his head, and his hands clinched--"You
+ask me why I come back?  I come back because there is one thing I care
+for mos' in all de worl'.  You t'ink I am happy to go about with a damn
+brown bear and dance trough de village?  Moi?--no, no, no!  What a Jack
+I look when I sing--ah, that fool's song all down de street!  I come back
+for one thing only, M'sieu' Shangois.
+
+"You know that night--ah, four, five years ago?  You remember, M'sieu'
+Shangois?  Ah! she was so beautiful, so sweet; her hair it fall down
+about her face, her eyes all black, her cheeks like the snow, her lips,
+her lips!--You rememb' her father curse me, tell me to go.  Why?  Because
+I have kill a man!  Eh bien, what if I kill a man!  He would have kill
+me: I do it to save myself.  I say I am not guilty; but her father say I
+am a sc'undrel, and turn me out de house.
+
+"De girl, Christine, she love me.  Yes, she love Vanne Castine.  She say
+to me, 'I will go with you.  Go anywhere, and I will go!'
+
+"It is night and it is all dark.  I wait at de place, an' she come.  We
+start to walk to Montreal.  Ah! dat night, it is like fire in my heart.
+Well, a great storm come down, and we have to come back.  We come to your
+house here, light a fire, and sit just in de spot where I am, one hour,
+two hour, three hour.  Saprie, how I love her!  She is in me like fire,
+like de wind and de sea.  Well, I am happy like no other man.  I sit here
+and look at her, and t'ink of to-morrow-for ever.  She look at me; oh, de
+love of God, she look at me!  So I kneel down on de floor here beside her
+and say, 'Who shall take you from me, Christine, my leetla Christine?'
+
+"She look at me and say: 'Who shall take you from me, my big Vanne?'
+
+"All at once the door open, and--"
+
+"And a little black notary take her from you," said Shangois, dryly, and
+with a touch of malice also.  "You, yes, you lawyer dev', you take her
+from me!  You say to her it is wicked.  You tell her how her father will
+weep and her mother's heart will break.  You tell her how she will be
+ashame', and a curse will fall on her.  Then she begin to cry, for she is
+afraid.  Ah, where is de wrong?  I love her; I would go to marry her--but
+no, what is that to you!  She turn on me and say, 'I will go back to my
+father.'  And she go back.  After that I try to see her; but she will not
+see me.  Then I go away, and I am gone five years; yes."
+
+Shangois came over, and with his thin beautiful hand (for despite the
+ill-kept finger nails, it was the one fine feature of his body-long,
+shapely, artistic) tapped Castine's knee.
+
+"I did right to save Christine.  She hates you now.  If she had gone with
+you that night, do you suppose she would have been happy as your wife?
+No, she is not for Vanne Castine."
+
+Suddenly Shangois's manner changed; he laid his hand upon the other's
+shoulder.
+
+"My poor, wicked, good-for-nothing Vanne Castine, Christine Lavilette was
+not made for you.  You are a poor vaurien, always a poor vaurien.  I knew
+your father and your two grandfathers.  They were all vauriens; all as
+handsome as you can think, and all died, not in their beds.  Your
+grandfather killed a man, your father drank and killed a man.  Your
+grandfather drove his wife to her grave, your father broke your mother's
+heart.  Why should you break the heart of any girl in the world?  Leave
+her alone.  Is it love to a woman when you break all the commandments,
+and shame her and bring her down to where you are--a bad vaurien?  When
+a man loves a woman with the true love, he will try to do good for her
+sake.  Go back to that crazy New York--it is the place for you.
+Ma'm'selle Christine is not for you."
+
+"Who is she for, m'sieu' le dev'?"
+
+"Perhaps for the English Irishman," answered Shangois, in a low
+suggestive tone, as he dropped a little brandy in his tea with light
+fingers.
+
+"Ah, sacre!  we shall see.  There is vaurien in her too," was the half-
+triumphant reply.
+
+"There is more woman," retorted Shangois; "much more."
+
+"We'll see about that, m'sieu'!" exclaimed Castine, as he turned towards
+the bear, which was clawing at his chain.
+
+An hour later, a scene quite as important occurred at Lavilette's great
+farmhouse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+It was about ten o'clock.  Lights were burning in every window.  At a
+table in the dining-room sat Monsieur and Madame Lavilette, the father of
+Magon Farcinelle, and Shangois, the notary.  The marriage contract was
+before them.  They had reached a point of difficulty.  Farcinelle was
+stipulating for five acres of river-land as another item in Sophie's dot.
+
+The corners tightened around Madame's mouth.  Lavilette scratched his
+head, so that the hair stood up like flying tassels of corn.  The land
+in question lay next a portion of Farcinelle's own farm, with a river
+frontage.  On it was a little house and shed, and no better garden-stuff
+grew in the parish than on this same five acres.
+
+"But I do not own the land," said Lavilette.  "You've got a mortgage on
+it," answered Farcinelle.  "Foreclose it."
+
+"Suppose I did foreclose; you couldn't put the land in the marriage
+contract until it was mine."
+
+The notary shrugged his shoulder ironically, and dropped his chin in his
+hand as he furtively eyed the two men.  Farcinelle was ready for the
+emergency.  He turned to Shangois.
+
+"I've got everything ready for the foreclosure," said he.  "Couldn't it
+be done to-night, Shangois?"
+
+"Hardly to-night.  You might foreclose, but the property couldn't be
+Monsieur Lavilette's until it is duly sold under the mortgage."
+
+"Here, I'll tell you what can be done," said Farcinelle.  "You can put
+the mortgage in the contract as her dot, and, name of a little man!  I'll
+foreclose it, I can tell you.  Come, now, Lavilette, is it a bargain?"
+Shangois sat back in his chair, the fingers of both hands drumming on the
+table before him, his head twisted a little to one side.  His little
+reflective eyes sparkled with malicious interest, and his little voice
+said, as though he were speaking to himself:
+
+"Excuse, but the land belongs to the young Vanne Castine--eh?"
+
+"That's it," exclaimed Farcinelle.
+
+"Well, why not give the poor vaurien a chance to take up the mortgage?"
+
+"Why, he hasn't paid the interest in five years!" said Lavilette.
+
+"But--ah--you have had the use of the land, I think, monsieur.  That
+should meet the interest."  Lavilette scowled a little; Farcinelle
+grunted and laughed.
+
+"How can I give him a chance to pay the mortgage?" said Lavilette.  "He
+never had a penny.  Besides, he hasn't been seen for five years."
+
+A faint smile passed over Shangois's face.  "Yesterday," he said, "he had
+not been seen for five years, but to-day he is in Bonaventure."
+
+"The devil!" said Lavilette, dropping a fist on the table, and staring
+at the notary; for he was not present in the afternoon when Castine
+passed by.
+
+"What difference does that make?" snarled Farcinelle.  "I'll bet he's
+got nothing more than what he went away with, and that wasn't a sou
+markee!"
+
+A provoking smile flickered at the corners of Shangois's mouth, and he
+said, with a dry inflection, as he dipped and redipped his quill pen in
+the inkhorn:
+
+"He has a bear, my friends, which dances very well."  Farcinelle
+guffawed.  "St. Mary!" said he, slapping his leg, "we'll have the bear
+at the wedding, and I'll have that farm of Vanne Castine's.  What does he
+want of a farm?  He's got a bear.  Come, is it a bargain?  Am I to have
+the mortgage?  If you don't stick it in, I'll not let my boy marry your
+girl, Lavilette.  There, now, that's my last word."
+
+"'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, nor his wife, nor his maid,
+nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his,"' said the notary,
+abstractedly, drawing the picture of a fat Jew on the paper before him.
+
+The irony was lost upon his hearers.  Madame Lavilette had been thinking,
+however, and she saw further than her husband.
+
+"It amounts to the same thing," she said.  "You see it doesn't go away
+from Sophie; so let him have it, Louis."
+
+"All right," responded monsieur at last, "Sophie gets the acres and the
+house in her dot."
+
+"You won't give young Vanne Castine a chance?" asked the notary.  "The
+mortgage is for four hundred dollars and the place is worth seven
+hundred!"
+
+No one replied.  "Very well, my Israelites," added Shangois, bending over
+the contract.
+
+An hour later, Nicolas Lavilette was in the big storeroom of the
+farmhouse, which was reached by a covered passage from the hall between
+the kitchen and the dining-room.  In his off-hand way he was getting out
+some flour, dried fruit and preserves for the cook, who stood near as he
+loaded up her arms.  He laughingly thrust a string of green peppers under
+her chin, and added a couple of sprigs of summer-savoury, then suddenly
+turned round, with a start, for a peculiar low whistle came to him
+through the half-open window.  It was followed by heavy stertorous
+breathing.
+
+He turned back again to the cook, gaily took her by the shoulders, and
+pushed her to the door.  Closing it behind her, he shot the bolt and ran
+back to the window.  As he did so, a hand appeared on the windowsill,
+and a face followed the hand.
+
+"Ha!  Nicolas Lavilette, is that you?  So, you know my leetla whistle
+again!"
+
+Nicolas's brow darkened.  In old days he and this same Vanne Castine had
+been in many a scrape together, and Vanne, the elder, had always borne
+the responsibility of their adventures.  Nicolas had had enough of those
+old days; other ambitions and habits governed him now.  He was not
+exactly the man to go back on a friend, but Castine no longer had any
+particular claims to friendship.  The last time he had heard Vanne's
+whistle was a night five years before, when they both joined a gang of
+river-drivers, and made a raid on some sham American speculators and
+surveyors and labourers, who were exploiting an oil-well on the property
+of the old seigneur.  The two had come out of the melee with bruised
+heads, and Vanne with a bullet in his calf.  But soon afterwards came
+Christine's elopement with Vanne, of which no one knew save her father,
+Nicolas, Shangois and Vanne himself.  That ended their compact, and,
+after a bitter quarrel, they had parted and had never met nor seen each
+other till this very afternoon.
+
+"Yes, I know your whistle all right," answered Nicolas, with a twist of
+the shoulder.
+
+"Aren't you going to shake hands?" asked Castine, with a sort of sneer
+on his face.
+
+Nicolas thrust his hands down in his pockets.  "I'm not so glad to see
+you as all that," he answered, with a contemptuous laugh.
+
+The black eyes of the bear-leader were alive with anger.
+
+"You're a damn' fool, Nic Lavilette.  You think because I lead a bear--
+eh?  Pshaw! you shall see.  I am nothing, eh?  I am to walk on!  Nic
+Lavilette, once he steal the Cure's pig and--"
+
+"See you there, Castine, I've had enough of that," was the half-angry,
+half-amused interruption.  "What are you after here?"
+
+"What was I after five years ago?" was the meaning reply.
+
+Lavilette's face suddenly flushed with fury.  He gripped the window with
+both hands, and made as if he would leap out; but beside Castine's face
+there appeared another, with glaring eyes, red tongue, white vicious
+teeth, and two huge claws which dropped on the ledge of the window in
+much the same way as did Lavilette's.
+
+There was a moment's silence as the man and the beast looked at each
+other, and then Castine began laughing in a low, sneering sort of way.
+
+"I'll shoot the beast, and I'll break your neck if ever I see you on this
+farm again," said Lavilette, with wild anger.
+
+"Break my neck--that's all right; but shoot this leetla Michael!  When
+you do that you will not have to wait for a British bullet to kill you.
+I will do it with a knife--just where you can hear it sing under your
+ear!"
+
+"British bullet!" said Lavilette, excitedly; "what about a British
+bullet--eh--what?"
+
+"Only that the Rebellion's coming quick now," answered Castine, his
+manner changing, and a look of cunning crossing his face.  "You've given
+your name to the great Papineau, and I am here, as you see."
+
+"You--you--what have you got to do with the Revolution?  with Papineau?"
+
+"Pah! do you think a Lavilette is the only patriot!  Papineau is my
+friend, and--"
+
+"Your friend--"
+
+"My friend.  I am carrying his message all through the parishes.
+Bon'venture is the last--almost.  The great General Papineau sends you
+a word, Nic Lavilette--here."
+
+He drew from his pocket a letter and handed it over.  Lavilette tore it
+open.  It was a captain's commission for M. Nicolas Lavilette, with a
+call for money and a company of men and horses.
+
+"Maybe there's a leetla noose hanging from the tail of that, but then--
+it is the glory--eh?  Captain Lavilette--eh?" There was covert malice in
+Castine's voice.  "If the English whip us, they won't shoot us like grand
+seigneurs, they will hang us like dogs."
+
+Lavilette scarcely noticed the sneer.  He was seeing visions of a
+captain's sword and epaulettes, and planning to get men, money and horses
+together--for this matter had been brooding for nearly a year, and he had
+been the active leader in Bonaventure.
+
+"We've been near a hundred years, we Frenchmen, eating dirt in the
+country we owned from the start; and I'd rather die fighting to get back
+the old citadel than live with the English heel on my nose," said
+Lavilette, with a play-acting attempt at oratory.
+
+"Yes, an' dey call us Johnny Pea-soups," said Castine, with a furtive
+grin.  "An' perhaps that British Colborne will hang us to our barn doors
+--eh?"
+
+There was silence for a moment, in which Lavilette read the letter over
+again with gloating eyes.  Presently Castine started and looked round.
+
+"What's that?" he said in a whisper.  "I heard nothing."
+
+"I heard the feet of a man--yes."
+
+They both stood moveless, listening.  There was no sound; but, at the
+same time, the Hon. Mr. Ferrol had the secret of the Rebellion in his
+hands.
+
+A moment later Castine and his bear were out in the road.  Lavilette
+leaned out of the window and mused.  Castine's words of a few moments
+before came to him:
+
+"That British Colborne will hang us to our barn doors--eh?"
+
+He shuddered, and struck a light.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Mr. Ferrol slept in the large guest-chamber of the house.  Above it was
+Christine's bedroom.  Thick as were the timbers and boards of the floor,
+Christine could hear one sound, painfully monotonous and frequent, coming
+from his room the whole night--the hacking, rending cough which she had
+heard so often since he came.  The fear of Vanne Castine, the memories of
+the wild, half animal-like love she had had for him in the old days, the
+excitement of the new events which had come into her life; these kept her
+awake, and she tossed and turned in feverish unrest.  All that had
+happened since Ferrol had arrived, every word that he had spoken, every
+motion that he had made, every look of his face, she recalled vividly.
+All that he was, which was different from the people she had known, she
+magnified, so that to her he had a distant, overwhelming sort of
+grandeur.  She beat the bedclothes in her restlessness.  Suddenly she sat
+up straight in bed.
+
+"Oh, if I hadn't been a Lavilette!  If I'd only been born and brought up
+with the sort of people he comes from, I'd not have been ashamed of
+myself or him of me."
+
+The plush bodice she had worn that day danced before her eyes.  She knew
+how horribly ugly it was.  Her fingers ran over the patchwork quilt on
+her bed; and although she could not see it, she loathed it, because she
+knew it was a painful mess of colours.  With a little touch of dramatic
+extravagance, she leaned over and down, and drew her fingers
+contemptuously along the rag-carpet on the floor.  Then she cried a
+little hysterically:
+
+"He never saw anything like that before.  How he must laugh as he sits
+there in that room!"
+
+As if in reply, the hacking cough came faintly through the time-worn
+floor.
+
+"That cough's going to kill him, to kill him," she said.
+
+Then, with a little start and with a sort of cry, which she stopped by
+putting both hands over her mouth, she said to herself, brokenly:
+
+"Why shouldn't he--why shouldn't he love me!  I could take care of him;
+I could nurse him; I could wait on him; I could be better to him than any
+one else in the world.  And it wouldn't make any difference to him at all
+in the end.  He's going to die before long--I know it.  Well, what does
+it matter what becomes of me afterwards?  I should have had him; I should
+have loved him; he should have been mine for a little while anyway.  I'd
+be good to him; oh, I'd be good to him!  Who else is there?  He'll get
+worse and worse; and what will any of the fine ladies do for him then,
+I'd like to know.  Why aren't they here?  Why isn't he with them?  He's
+poor--Nic says so--and they're rich.  Why don't they help him?  I would.
+I'd give him my last penny and the last drop of blood in my heart.  What
+do they know about love?"
+
+Her little teeth clinched, she shook her brown hair back in a sort of
+fury.
+
+"What do they know about love?  What would they do for it?  I'd have my
+fingers chopped off one by one for it.  I'd break every one of the ten
+commandments for it.  I'd lose my soul for it.
+
+"I've got twenty times as much heart as any one of them, I don't care who
+they are.  I'd lie for him; I'd steal for him; I'd kill for him.  I'd
+watch everything that he says, and I'd say it as he says it.  I'd be
+angry when he was angry, miserable when he was miserable, happy when he
+was happy.  Vanne Castine--what was he!  What was it that made me care
+for him then?  And now--now he travels with a bear, and they toss coppers
+to him; a beggar, a tramp--a dirty, lazy tramp!  He hates me, I know--or
+else he loves me, and that's worse.  And I'm afraid of him; I know I'm
+afraid of him.  Oh, how will it all end?  I know there's going to be
+trouble.  I could see it in Vanne's face.  But I don't care, I don't
+care, if Mr. Ferrol--"
+
+The cough came droning through the floor.
+
+"If he'd only--ah!  I'd do anything for him, anything; anybody would.
+I saw Sophie look at him as she never looked at Magon.  If she did--
+if she dared to care for him--"
+
+All at once she shivered as if with shame and fright, drew the bedclothes
+about her head, and burst into a fit of weeping.  When it passed, she lay
+still and nerveless between the coarse sheets, and sank into a deep sleep
+just as the dawn crept through the cracks of the blind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The weeks went by.  Sophie had become the wife of the member for the
+country, and had instantly settled down to a quiet life.  This was
+disconcerting to Madame Lavilette, who had hoped that out of Farcinelle's
+official position she might reap some praise and pence of ambition.
+Meanwhile, Ferrol became more and more a cherished and important figure
+in the Manor Casimbault, where the Lavilettes had made their home soon
+after the wedding.  The old farmhouse had also secretly become a
+rendezvous for the mysterious Nicolas Lavilette and his rebel comrades.
+This was known to Mr. Ferrol.  One evening he stopped Nic as he was
+leaving the house, and said:
+
+"See, Nic, my boy, what's up?  I know a thing or so--what's the use of
+playing peek-a-boo?"
+
+"What do you know, Ferrol?"
+
+"What's between you and Vanne Castine, for instance.  Come, now, own up
+and tell me all about it.  I'm British; but I'm Nic Lavilette's friend
+anyhow."
+
+He insinuated into his tone that little touch of brogue which he used
+when particularly persuasive.  Nic put out his hand with a burst of good-
+natured frankness.
+
+"Meet me in the store-room of the old farmhouse at nine o'clock, and I'll
+tell you.  Here's a key."  Handing over the key, he grasped Ferrol's hand
+with an effusive confidence, and hurried out.  Nic Lavilette was now
+an important person in his own sight and in the sight of others in
+Bonaventure.  In him the pomp of his family took an individual form.
+
+Earlier than the appointed time, Ferrol turned the key and stepped inside
+the big despoiled hallway of the old farmhouse.  His footsteps sounded
+hollow in the empty rooms.  Already dust had gathered, and an air of
+desertion and decay filled the place in spite of the solid timbers and
+sound floors and window-sills.  He took out his watch; it was ten minutes
+to nine.  Passing through the little hallway to the store-room, he opened
+the door.  It was dark inside.  Striking a match, he saw a candle on the
+window-sill, and, going to it, he lighted it with a flint and steel lying
+near.  The window was shut tight.  From curiosity only he tried to open
+the shutter, but it was immovable.  Looking round, he saw another candle
+on the window-sill opposite.  He lighted it also, and mechanically tried
+to force the shutters of the window, but they were tight also.
+
+Going to the door, which opened into the farmyard, he found it securely
+fastened.  Although he turned the lock, the door would not open.
+
+Presently his attention was drawn by the glitter of something upon one of
+the crosspieces of timber halfway up the wall.  Going over, he examined
+it, and found it to be a broken bayonet--left there by a careless rebel.
+Placing the steel again upon the ledge, he began walking up and down
+thoughtfully.
+
+Presently he was seized with a fit of coughing.  The paroxysm lasted a
+minute or more, and he placed his arm upon the window-sill, leaning his
+head upon it.  Presently, as the paroxysm lessened, he thought he heard
+the click of a lock.  He raised his head, but his eyes were misty, and,
+seeing nothing, he leaned his head on his arm again.
+
+Suddenly he felt something near him.  He swung round swiftly, and saw
+Vanne Castine's bear not fifteen-feet away from him!  It raised itself on
+its hind legs, its red eyes rolling, and started towards him.  He picked
+up the candle from the window-sill, threw it in the animal's face, and
+dashed towards the door.
+
+It was locked.  He swung round.  The huge beast, with a loud snarl, was
+coming down upon him.
+
+Here he was, shut within four solid walls, with a wild beast hungry for
+his life.  All his instincts were alive.  He had little hope of saving
+himself, but he was determined to do what lay in his power.
+
+His first impulse was to blow out the other candle.  That would leave him
+in the dark, and it struck him that his advantage would be greater if
+there were no light.  He came straight towards the bear, then suddenly
+made a swift movement to the left, trusting to his greater quickness of
+movement.  The beast was nearly as quick as he, and as he dashed along
+the wall towards the candle, he could hear its breath just behind him.
+
+As he passed the window, he caught the candle in his hands, and was about
+to throw it on the floor or in the bear's face, when he remembered that,
+in the dark, the bear's sense of smell would be as effective as eyesight,
+while he himself would be no better off.
+
+He ran suddenly to the centre of the room, the candle still in his hand,
+and turned to meet his foe.  It came savagely at him.  He dodged, ran
+past it, turned, doubled on it, and dodged again.  A half-dozen times
+this was repeated, the candle still flaring.  It could not last long.
+The bear was enraged.  Its movements became swifter, its vicious teeth
+and lips were covered with froth, which dripped to the floor, and
+sometimes spattered Ferrol's clothes as he ran past.  No matador ever
+played with the horns of a mad bull as Ferrol played his deadly game with
+Michael, the dancing bear.  His breath was becoming shorter and shorter;
+he had a stifling sensation, a terrible tightness across his chest.  He
+did not cough, however, but once or twice he tasted warm drops of his
+heart's blood in his mouth.  Once he drew the back of his hand across his
+lips mechanically, and a red stain showed upon it.
+
+In his boyhood and early manhood he had been a good sportsman; had been
+quick of eye, swift of foot, and fearless.  But what could fearlessness
+avail him in this strait?  With the best of rifles he would have felt
+himself at a disadvantage.  He was certain his time had come; and with
+that conviction upon him, the terror of the thing and the horrible
+physical shrinking almost passed away from him.  The disease, eating away
+his life, had diminished that revolt against death which is in the
+healthy flesh of every man.  He was levying upon the vital forces
+remaining in him, which, distributed naturally, might cover a year or so,
+to give him here and now a few moments of unnatural strength for the
+completion of a hopeless struggle.
+
+It was also as if two brains in him were working: one busy with all the
+chances and details of his wild contest, the other with the events of his
+life.
+
+Pictures flashed before him.  Some having to do with the earliest days of
+his childhood; some with fighting on the Danube, before he left the army,
+impoverished and ashamed; some with idle hours in the North Tower in
+Stavely Castle; and one with the day he and his sister left the old
+castle, never to return, and looked back upon it from the top of
+Farcalladen Moor, waving a "God bless you" to it.  The thought of his
+sister filled him with a desire, a pitiful desire to live.
+
+Just then another picture flashed before his eyes.  It was he himself,
+riding the mad stallion, Bolingbroke, the first year he followed the
+hounds: how the brute tried to smash his leg against a stone wall; how it
+reared until it almost toppled over and backwards; how it jibbed at a
+gate, and nearly dashed its own brains out against a tree; and how, after
+an hour's hard fighting, he made it take the stiffest fence and water-
+course in the county.
+
+This thought gave him courage now.  He suddenly remembered the broken
+bayonet upon the ledge against the wall.  If he could reach it there
+might be a chance--chance to strike one blow for life.  As his eye
+glanced towards the wall he saw the steel flash in the light of the
+candle.
+
+The bear was between him and it.  He made a feint towards the left, then
+as quickly to the right.  But doing so, he slipped and fell.  The candle
+dropped to the floor and went out.  With a lightning-like instinct of
+self-preservation he swung over upon his face just as the bear, in its
+wild rush, passed over his head.  He remembered afterwards the odour of
+the hot, rank body, and the sprawling huge feet and claws.  Scrambling to
+his feet swiftly, he ran to the wall.  Fortune was with him.  His hand
+almost instantly clutched the broken bayonet.  He whipped out his
+handkerchief, tore the scarf from his neck, and wound them around his
+hand, that the broken bayonet should not tear the flesh as he fought for
+his life; then, seizing it, he stood waiting for the bear to come on.
+His body was bent forwards, his eyes straining into the dark, his hot
+face dripping, dripping sweat, his breath coming hard and laboured from
+his throat.
+
+For a minute there was absolute silence, save for the breathing of the
+man and the savage panting of the beast.  Presently he felt exactly where
+the bear was, and listened intently.  He knew that it was now but a
+question of minutes, perhaps seconds.  Suddenly it occurred to him that
+if he could but climb upon the ledge where the bayonet had been, there
+might be safety.  Yet again, in getting up, the bear might seize him, and
+there would be an end to all immediately.  It was worth trying, however.
+
+Two things happened at that moment to prevent the trial: the sound of
+knocking on a door somewhere, and the roaring rush of the bear upon him.
+He sprang to one side, striking at the beast as he did so.  The bayonet
+went in and out again.  There came voices from the outside; evidently
+somebody was trying to get in.
+
+The bear roared again and came on.  It was all a blind man's game.  But
+his scent, like the animal's, was keen.  He had taken off his coat, and
+he now swung it out before him in a half-circle, and as it struck the
+bear it covered his own position.  He swung aside once more and drove his
+arm into the dark.  The bayonet struck the nose of the beast.
+
+Now there was a knocking and a hammering at the window, and the wrenching
+of the shutters.  He gathered himself together for the next assault.
+Suddenly he felt that every particle of strength had gone out of him.  He
+pulled himself up with a last effort.  His legs would not support him; he
+shivered and swayed.  God, would they never get that window open!
+
+His senses were abnormally acute.  Another sound attracted him: the
+opening of the door, and a voice--Vanne Castine's--calling to the bear.
+
+His heart seemed to give a leap, then slowly to roll over with a thud,
+and he fell to the floor as the bear lunged forwards upon him.
+
+A minute afterwards Vanne Castine was goading the savage beast through
+the door and out to the hallway into the yard as Nic swung through the
+open window into the room.
+
+Castine's lantern stood in the middle of the floor, and between it and
+the window lay Ferrol, the broken bayonet still clutched in his right
+hand.  Lavilette dropped on his knees beside him and felt his heart.  It
+was beating, but the shirt and the waistcoat were dripping with blood
+where the bear had set its claws and teeth in the shoulder of its victim.
+
+An hour later Nic Lavilette stood outside the door of Ferrol's bedroom in
+the Manor Casimbault, talking to the Regimental Surgeon, as Christine,
+pale and wildeyed, came running towards them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+"Is he dead? is he dead?" she asked distractedly.  "I've just come from
+the village.  Why didn't you send for me?  Tell me, is he dead?  Oh, tell
+me at once!"
+
+She caught the Regimental Surgeon's arm.  He looked down at her, over his
+glasses, benignly, for she had always been a favourite of his, and
+answered:
+
+"Alive, alive, my dear.  Bad rip in the shoulder--worn out--weak--
+shattered--but good for a while yet--yes, yes--certainement!"
+
+With a wayward impulse, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him
+on the cheek.  The embrace disarranged his glasses and flushed his face
+like a schoolgirl's, but his eyes were full of embarrassed delight.
+
+"There, there," he said, "we'll take care of him--!"  Then suddenly he
+paused, for the real significance of her action dawned upon him.
+
+"Dear me," he said in disturbed meditation; "dear me!"
+
+She suddenly opened the bedroom door and went in, followed by Nic.  The
+Regimental Surgeon dropped his mouth and cheeks in his hand reflectively,
+his eyes showing quaintly and quizzically above the glasses and his
+fingers.
+
+"Well, well!  Well, well!" he said, as if he had encountered a
+difficulty.  "It--it will never be possible.  He would not marry her,"
+he added, and then, turning, went abstractedly down the stairs.
+
+Ferrol was in a deep sleep when Christine and her brother entered the
+chamber.  Her face turned still more pale when she saw him, flushed, and
+became pale again.  There were leaden hollows round his eyes, and his
+hair was matted with perspiration.  Yet he was handsome--and helpless.
+Her eyes filled with tears.  She turned her head away from her brother
+and went softly to the window, but not before she had touched the pale
+hand that lay nerveless upon the coverlet.
+
+"It's not feverish," she said to Nic, as if in necessary explanation of
+the act.
+
+She stood at the window for a moment, looking out, then said:
+
+"Come here, Nic, and tell me all about it."
+
+He told her all he knew: how he had come to the old house by appointment
+with Ferrol; had tried to get into the store-room; had found the doors
+bolted; had heard the noise of a wild animal inside; had run out, tried a
+window, at last wrenched it open and found Ferrol in a dead faint.  He
+went to the table and brought back the broken bayonet.
+
+"That's all he had to fight with," he said.  "Fire of a little hell, but
+he had grit--after all!"
+
+"That's all he had to fight with!" she repeated, as she untwisted the
+handkerchief from the hilt end.  "Why did you say he had true grit--
+'after all'?  What do you mean by that 'after all'?"
+
+"Well, you don't expect much from a man with only one lung--eh?"
+
+"Courage isn't in the lungs," she answered.  Then she added: "Go and
+fetch me a bottle of brandy--I'm going to bathe his hands and feet in
+brandy and hot water as soon as he's awake."
+
+"Better let mother do that, hadn't you?" he asked rather hesitatingly,
+as he moved towards the door.
+
+Her eyes snapped fire.  "Nic--mon Dieu, hear the nice Nic!" she said.
+"The dear Nic, who went in swimming with--"
+
+She said no more, for he had no desire to listen to an account of his
+misdeeds, which were not a few,--and Christine had a galling tongue.
+
+When the door was shut she went to the bed, sat down on a chair beside
+it, and looked at Ferrol earnestly and sadly.
+
+"My dear! my dear, dear, dear!" she said in a whisper, "you look so
+handsome and so kind as you lie there--like no man I ever saw in my life.
+Who'd have fought as you fought--and nearly dead!  Who'd have had brains
+enough to know just what to do!  My darling, that never said 'my darling'
+to me, nor heard me call you so.  Suppose you haven't a dollar, not a
+cent, in the world, and suppose you'll never earn a dollar or a cent in
+the world, what difference does that make to me?  I could earn it; and
+I'd give more for a touch of your finger than a thousand dollars; and
+more for a month with you than for a lifetime with the richest man in the
+world.  You never looked cross at me, or at any one, and you never say an
+unkind thing, and you never find fault when you suffer so.  You never
+hurt any one, I know.  You never hurt Vanne Castine--"
+
+Her fingers twitched in her lap, and then clasped very tight, as she went
+on:
+
+"You never hurt him, and yet he's tried to kill you in the most awful
+way.  Perhaps you'll die now--perhaps you'll die to-night--but no, no,
+you shall not!" she cried in sudden fright and eagerness, as she got up
+and leaned over him.  "You shall not die; you shall live--for a while--
+oh! yes, for a while yet," she added, with a pitiful yearning in her
+voice; "just for a little while--till you love me, and tell me so!  Oh,
+how could that devil try to kill you!"
+
+She suddenly drew herself up.
+
+"I'll kill him and his bear too--now, now, while you lie there sleeping.
+And when you wake I'll tell you what I've done, and you'll--you'll love
+me then, and tell me so, perhaps.  Yes, yes, I'll--"
+
+She said no more, for her brother entered with the brandy.
+
+"Put it there," she said, pointing to the table.  "You watch him till I
+come.  I'll be back in an hour; and then, when he wakes, we'll bathe him
+in the hot water and brandy."
+
+"Who told you about hot water and brandy?" he asked her, curiously.
+
+She did not answer him, but passed through the door and down the hall
+till she came to Nic's bedroom; she went in, took a pair of pistols from
+the wall, examined them, found they were fully loaded, and hurried from
+the room.
+
+About a half-hour later she appeared before the house which once had
+belonged to Vanne Castine.  The mortgage had been foreclosed, and the
+place had passed into the hands of Sophie and Magon Farcinelle;
+but Castine had taken up his abode in the house a few days before,
+and defied anyone to put him out.
+
+A light was burning in the kitchen of the house.  There were no curtains
+to the window, but an old coat had been hung up to serve the purpose, and
+light shone between a sleeve of it and the window-sill.  Putting her face
+close to the window, the girl could see the bear in the corner, clawing
+at its chain and tossing its head from side to side, still panting and
+angry from the fight.
+
+Now and again, also, it licked the bayonet-wound between its shoulders,
+and rubbed its lacerated nose on its paw.  Castine was mixing some tar
+and oil in a pan by the fire, to apply to the still bleeding wounds of
+his Michael.  He had an ugly grin on his face.
+
+He was dressed just as in the first day he appeared in the village, even
+to the fur cap; and presently, as he turned round, he began to sing the
+monotonous measure to which the bear had danced.  It had at once a
+soothing effect upon the beast.
+
+After he had gone from the store-room, leaving Ferrol dead, as he
+thought, it was this song alone which had saved himself from peril; for
+the beast was wild from pain, fury and the taste of blood.  As soon as
+they had cleared the farmyard, he had begun this song, and the bear,
+cowed at first by the thrusts of its master's pike, quieted to the well-
+known ditty.
+
+He approached the bear now, and, stooping, put some of the tar and oil
+upon its nose.  It sniffed and rubbed off the salve, but he put more on;
+then he rubbed it into the wound of the breast.  Once the animal made a
+fierce snap at his shoulder, but he deftly avoided it, gave it a thrust
+with a sharp-pointed stick, and began the song again.  Presently he rose
+and came towards the fire.
+
+As he did so he heard the door open.  Turning round quickly, he saw
+Christine standing just inside.  She had a shawl thrown round her, and
+one hand was thrust in the pocket of her dress.  She looked from him to
+the bear, then back again to him.
+
+He did not realise why she had come.  For a moment, in his excited state,
+he almost thought she had come because she loved him.  He had seen her
+twice since his return; but each time she would say nothing to him
+further than that she wished not to meet or to speak to him at all.  He
+had pleaded with her, had grown angry, and she had left him.  Who could
+tell--perhaps she had come to him now as she had come to him in the old
+days.  He dropped the pan of tar and oil.  "Chris!" he said, and started
+forward to her.
+
+At that moment the bear, as if it knew the girl's mission, sprang
+forward, with a growl.  Its huge mouth was open, and all its fierce lust
+for killing showed again in its wild lunges.  Castine turned, with an
+oath, and thrust the steel-set pike into its leg.  It cowered at the
+voice and the punishment for an instant, but came on again.
+
+Castine saw the girl raise a pistol and fire at the beast.  He was so
+dumfounded that at first he did not move.  Then he saw her raise another
+pistol.  The wounded bear lunged heavily on its chain--once--twice--in a
+devilish rage, and as Christine prepared to fire, snapped the staple
+loose and sprang forward.
+
+At the same moment Castine threw himself in front of the girl, and caught
+the onward rush.  Calling the beast by its name, he grappled with it.
+They were man and servant no longer, but two animals fighting for their
+lives.  Castine drew out his knife, as the bear, raised on its hind legs,
+crushed him in its immense arms, and still calling, half crazily,
+"Michael!  Michael!  down, Michael!" he plunged the knife twice in the
+beast's side.
+
+The bear's teeth fastened in his shoulder; the horrible pressure of its
+arms was turning his face black; he felt death coming, when another
+pistol shot rang out close to his own head, and his breath suddenly came
+back.  He staggered to the wall, and then came to the floor in a heap as
+the bear lurched downwards and fell over on its side, dead.
+
+Christine had come to kill the beast and, perhaps, the man.  The man had
+saved her life, and now she had saved his; and together they had killed
+the bear which had maltreated Tom Ferrol.
+
+Castine's eyes were fixed on the dead beast.  Everything was gone from
+him now--even the way to his meagre livelihood; and the cause of it all,
+as he in his blind, unnatural way thought, was this girl before him--this
+girl and her people.  Her back was towards the door.  Anger and passion
+were both at work in him at once.
+
+"Chris," he said, "Chris, let's call it even-eh?  Let's make it up.
+Chris, ma cherie, don't you remember when we used to meet, and was fond
+of each other?  Let's make it up and leave here--now--to-night-eh?
+
+"I'm not so poor, after all.  I'll be paid by Papineau, the leader of the
+Rebellion--" He made a couple of unsteady steps towards her, for he was
+weak yet.  "What's the good--you're bound to come to me in the end!
+You've got the same kind of feelings in you; you've--"
+
+She had stood still at first, dazed by his words; but she grew angry
+quickly, and was about to speak as she felt, when he went on:
+
+"Stay here now with me.  Don't go back.  Don't you remember Shangois's
+house?  Don't you remember that night--that night when--ah!  Chris, stay
+here--"
+
+Her face was flaming.  "I'd rather stay in a room full of wild beasts
+like that"--she pointed to the bear" than be with you one minute--you
+murderer!" she said, with choking anger.
+
+He started towards her, saying:
+
+"By the blood of Joseph!  but you'll stay just the same; and--"
+
+He got no further, for she threw the pistol in his face with all her
+might.  It struck between his eyes with a thud, and he staggered back,
+blind, bleeding and faint, as she threw open the door and sped away in
+the darkness.
+
+Reaching the Manor safely, she ran up to her room, arranged her hair,
+washed her hands, and came again to Ferrol's bedroom.  Knocking softly
+she was admitted by Nic.  There was an unnatural brightness in her eyes.
+"Where've you been?" he asked, for he noticed this.  "What've you been
+doing?"
+
+"I've killed the bear that tried to kill him," she answered.
+
+She spoke louder than she meant.  Her voice awakened Ferrol.
+
+"Eh, what?" he said, "killed the bear, mademoiselle,--my dear friend,"
+he added, "killed the bear!"  He coughed a little, and a twinge of pain
+crossed over his face.
+
+She nodded, and her face was alight with pleasure.  She lifted up his
+head and gave him a little drink of brandy.  His fingers closed on hers
+that held the glass.  His touch thrilled her.
+
+"That's good, that's easier," he remarked.
+
+"We're going to bathe you in brandy and hot water, now--Nic and I," she
+said.
+
+"Bathe me!  Bathe me!" he said, in amused consternation.
+
+"Hands and feet," Nic explained.
+
+A few minutes later as she lifted up his head, her face was very near
+him; her breath was in his face.  Her eyes half closed, her fingers
+trembled.  He suddenly drew her to him and kissed her.  She looked round
+swiftly, but her brother had not noticed.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Illusive hopes and irresponsible deceptions
+She lacked sense a little and sensitiveness much
+To be popular is not necessarily to be contemptible
+Who say 'God bless you' in New York!  They say 'Damn you!'
+
+
+
+
+
+
+POMP OF THE LAVILETTES
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 2.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Ferrols's recovery from his injuries was swifter than might have been
+expected.  As soon as he was able to move about Christine was his
+constant attendant.  She had made herself his nurse, and no one had
+seriously interfered, though the Cure had not at all vaguely offered a
+protest to Madame Lavilette.  But Madame Lavilette was now in the humour
+to defy or evade the Cure, whichever seemed the more convenient or more
+necessary.  To be linked by marriage with the nobility would indeed be
+the justification of all her long-baffled hopes.  Meanwhile, the parish
+gossiped, though little of that gossip was heard at the Manor Casimbault.
+By and by the Cure ceased to visit the Manor, but the Regimental Surgeon
+came often, and sometimes stayed late.  He, perhaps, could have given
+Madame Lavilette the best advice and warning; but, in truth, he enjoyed
+what he considered a piquant position.  Once, drawing at his pipe, as
+little like an Englishman as possible, he tried to say with an English
+accent, "Amusing and awkward situation!" but he said, "Damn funny and
+chic!" instead.  He had no idea that any particular harm would be done--
+either by love or marriage; and neither seemed certain.
+
+One day as Ferrol, entirely convalescent, was sitting in an arbour of the
+Manor garden, half asleep, he was awakened by voices near him.
+
+He did not recognise one of the voices; the other was Nic Lavilette's.
+
+The strange voice was saying: "I have collected five thousand dollars--
+all that can be got in the two counties.  It is at the Seigneury.  Here
+is an order on the Seigneur Duhamel.  Go there in two days and get the
+money.  You will carry it to headquarters.  These are General Papineau's
+orders.  You will understand that your men--"
+
+Ferrol heard no more, for the two rebels passed on, their voices becoming
+indistinct.  He sat for a few moments moveless, for an idea had occurred
+to him even as Papineau's agent spoke.
+
+If that money were only his!
+
+Five thousand dollars--how that would ease the situation!  The money
+belonged to whom?  To a lot of rebels: to be used for making war against
+the British Government.  After the money left the hands of the men who
+gave it--Lavilette and the rest--it wasn't theirs.  It belonged to a
+cause.  Well, he was the enemy of that cause.  All was fair in love and
+war!
+
+There were two ways of doing it.  He could waylay Nicolas as he came from
+the house of the old seigneur, could call to him to throw up his hands in
+good highwayman fashion, and, well disguised, could get away with the
+money without being discovered.  Or again, he could follow Nic from the
+Seigneury to the Manor, discover where he kept the money, and devise a
+plan to steal it.
+
+For some time he had given up smoking; but now, as a sort of celebration
+of his plan, he opened his cigar case, and finding two cigars left, took
+one out and lighted it.
+
+"By Jove," he said to himself, "thieving is a nice come-down, I must say!
+But a man has to live, and I'm sick of charity--sick of it.  I've had
+enough."
+
+He puffed his cigar briskly, and enjoyed the forbidden and deadly luxury
+to the full.
+
+Presently he got up, took his stick, came down-stairs, and passed out
+into the garden.  The shoulder which had been lacerated by the bear
+drooped forward some what, and seemed smaller than the other.  Although
+he held himself as erect as possible, you still could have laid your hand
+in the hollow of his left breast, and it would have done no more than
+give it a natural fulness.  Perhaps it was a sort of vanity, perhaps a
+kind of courage, which made him resolutely straighten himself, in spite
+of the deadly weight dragging his shoulder down.  He might be melancholy
+in secret, but in public he was gay and hopeful, and talked of everything
+except himself.  On that interesting topic he would permit no discussion.
+Yet there often came jugs and jars from friendly people, who never spoke
+to him of his disease--they were polite and sensitive, these humble folk
+--but sent him their home-made medicines, with assurances scrawled on
+paper that "it would cure Mr. Ferrol's cold, oh, absolutely."
+
+Before the Lavilettes he smiled, and received the gifts in a debonair
+way, sometimes making whimsical remarks.  At the same time the jugs and
+jars of cordial (whose contents varied from whiskey, molasses and
+boneset, to rum, licorice, gentian and sarsaparilla roots) he carried to
+his room; and he religiously tried them all by turn.  Each seemed to do
+him good for a few days, then to fail of effect; and he straightway tried
+another, with renewed hope on every occasion, and subsequent
+disappointment.  He also secretly consulted the Regimental Surgeon, who
+was too kindhearted to tell him the truth; and he tried his hand at
+various remedies of his own, which did no more than to loosen the cough
+which was breaking down his strength.
+
+As now, he often walked down the street swinging his cane, not as though
+he needed it for walking, but merely for occupation and companionship.
+He did not delude the villagers by these sorrowful deceptions, but they
+made believe he did.  There were a few people who did not like him; but
+they were of that cantankerous minority who put thorns in the bed of the
+elect.
+
+To-day, occupied with his thoughts, he walked down the main road, then
+presently diverged on a side road which led past Magon Farcinelle's house
+to an old disused mill, owned by Magon's father.  He paused when he came
+opposite Magon's house, and glanced up at the open door.  He was tired,
+and the coolness of the place looked inviting.  He passed through the
+gate, and went lightly up the path.  He could see straight through the
+house into the harvest-fields at the back.  Presently a figure crossed
+the lane of light, and made a cheerful living foreground to the blue sky
+beyond the farther door.  The light and ardour of the scene gave him a
+thrill of pleasure, and hurried his footsteps.  The air was palpitating
+with sleepy comfort round him, and he felt a new vitality pass into him:
+his imagination was feeding his enfeebled body; his active brain was
+giving him a fresh counterfeit of health.  The hectic flush on his pale
+face deepened.  He came to the wooden steps of the piazza, or stoop, and
+then paused a moment, as if for breath; but, suddenly conscious of what
+he was doing, he ran briskly up the steps, knocked with his cane upon the
+door jamb, and, without waiting, stepped inside.
+
+Between him and the outer door, against the ardent blue background, stood
+Sophie Farcinelle--the English faced Sophie--a little heavy, a little
+slow, but with the large, long profile which is the type of English
+beauty--docile, healthy, cow-like.  Her face, within her sunbonnet,
+caught the reflected light, and the pink calico of her dress threw a glow
+over her cheeks and forehead, and gave a good gleam to her eyes.  She had
+in her hands a dish of strawberries.  It was a charming picture in the
+eyes of a man to whom the feelings of robustness and health were mostly a
+reminiscence.  Yet, while the first impression was on him, he contrasted
+Sophie with the impetuous, fiery-hearted Christine, with her dramatic
+Gallic face and blood, to the latter's advantage, in spite of the more
+harmonious setting of this picture.
+
+Sophie was in place in this old farmhouse, with its dormer windows, with
+the weaver's loom in the large kitchen, the meat-block by the fireplace,
+and the big bread-tray by the stove, where the yeast was as industrious
+as the reapers beyond in the fields.  She was in keeping with the chromo
+of the Madonna and the Child upon the wall, with the sprig of holy palm
+at the shrine in the corner, with the old King Louis blunderbuss above
+the chimney.
+
+Sophie tried to take off her sunbonnet with one hand, but the knot
+tightened, and it tipped back on her head, giving her a piquant air.  She
+flushed.
+
+"Oh, m'sieu'!" she said in English, "it's kind of you to call.  I am
+quite glad--yes."
+
+Then she turned round to put the strawberries upon a table, but he was
+beside her in an instant and took the dish out of her hands.  Placing it
+on the table, he took a couple of strawberries in his fingers.
+
+"May I?" he asked in French.
+
+She nodded as she whipped off the sunbonnet, and replied in her own
+language:
+
+"Certainly, as many as you want."
+
+He bit into one, but got no further with it.  Her back was turned to him,
+and he threw the berry out of the window.  She felt rather than saw what
+he had done.  She saw that he was fagged.  She instantly thought of a
+cordial she had in the house, the gift of a nun from the Ursuline
+Convent in Quebec; a precious little bottle which she had kept for the
+anniversary of her wedding day.  If she had been told in the morning that
+she would open that bottle now, and for a stranger, she probably would
+have resented the idea with scorn.
+
+His disguised weariness still exciting her sympathy, she offered him a
+chair.
+
+"You will sit down, m'sieu'?" she asked.  "It is very warm."
+
+She did not say: "You look very tired."  She instinctively felt that it
+would suggest the delicate state of his health.
+
+The chair was inviting enough, with its chintz cover and wicker seat, but
+he would never admit fatigue.  He threw his leg half jauntily over the
+end of the table and said:
+
+"No--no, thanks; I'd rather not sit."
+
+His forehead was dripping with perspiration.  He took out his
+handkerchief and dried it.  His eyes were a little heavy, but his
+complexion was a delicate and unnatural pink and white-like a piece of
+fine porcelain.  It was a face without care, without vice, without fear,
+and without morals.  For the absence of vice with the absence of morals
+are not incongruous in a human face.  Sophie went into another room for a
+moment, and brought back a quaint cut-glass bottle of cordial.
+
+"It is very good," she said, as she took the cork out; "better than peach
+brandy or things like that."
+
+He watched her pour it out into a wine-glass, and as soon as he saw the
+colour and the flow of it he was certain of its quality.
+
+"That looks like good stuff," he said, as she handed him a glass brimming
+over; "but you must have one with me.  I can't drink alone, you know."
+
+"Oh, m'sieu', if you please, no," she answered half timidly, flattered by
+the glance of his eye--a look of flattery which was part of his stock-in-
+trade.  It had got him into trouble all his life.
+
+"Ah, madame, but I plead yes!" he answered, with a little encouraging
+nod towards her.  "Come, let me pour it for you."
+
+He took the odd little bottle and poured her glass as full as his own.
+
+"If Magon were only here--he'd like some, I know," she said, vaguely
+struggling with a sense of impropriety, though why, she did not know;
+for, on the surface, this was only dutiful hospitality to a distinguished
+guest.  The impropriety probably lay in the sensations roused by this
+visit and this visitor.  "I intended--"
+
+"Oh, we must try to get along without monsieur," he said, with a little
+cough; "he's a busy gentleman."  The rather rude and flippant sentiment
+seemed hardly in keeping with the fatal token of his disease.
+
+"Of course, he's far away out there in the field, mowing," she said, as
+if in apology for something or other.  "Yes, he's ever so far away," was
+his reply, as he turned half lazily to the open doorway.
+
+Neither spoke for a moment.  The eyes of both were on the distant
+harvest-fields.  Vaguely, not decisively, the hazy, indolent air of
+summer was broken by the lazy droning of the locusts and grasshoppers.
+A driver was calling to his oxen down the dusty road, the warning bark
+of a dog came across the fields from the gap in the fence which he was
+tending, and the blades of tho scythes made three-quarter circles of
+light as the mowers travelled down the wheat-fields.
+
+When their eyes met again, the glasses of cordial were at their lips.
+He held her look by the intentional warmth and meaning of his own,
+drinking very slowly to the last drop; and then, like a bon viveur, drew
+a breath of air through his open mouth, and nodded his satisfaction.
+
+"By Jove, but it is good stuff!" he said.  "Here's to the nun that made
+it," he added, making a motion to drink from the empty glass.
+
+Sophie had not drunk all her cordial.  At least one third of it was still
+in the glass.  She turned her head away, a little dismayed by his toast.
+
+"Come, that's not fair," he said.  "That elixir shouldn't be wasted.
+Voila, every drop of it now!" he added, with an insinuating smile and
+gesture.
+
+"Oh, m'sieu'!" she said in protest, but drank it off.  He still held the
+empty glass in his hand, twisting it round musingly.
+
+"A little more, m'sieu'?" she asked, "just a little?"  Perhaps she was
+surprised that he did not hesitate.  He instantly held out his glass.
+
+"It was made by a saint; the result should be health and piety--I need
+both," he added, with a little note of irony in his voice.
+
+"So, once again, my giver of good gifts--to you!"  He raised his glass
+again, toasting her, but paused.  "No, this won't do; you must join me,"
+he added.
+
+"Oh, no, m'sieu', no!  It is not possible.  I feel it now in my head and
+in all of me.  Oh, I feel so warm all, through, and my heart it beats so
+very fast!  Oh, no, m'sieu', no more!"
+
+Her cheeks were glowing, and her eyes had become softer and more
+brilliant under the influence of the potent liqueur.
+
+"Well, well, I'll let you off this time; but next time--next time,
+remember."
+
+He raised the glass once more, and let the cordial drain down lazily.
+
+He had said, "next time"--she noticed that.  He seemed very fond of this
+strong liqueur.  She placed the bottle on the table, her own glass beside
+it.
+
+"For a minute, a little minute," she said suddenly, and went quickly into
+the other room.
+
+He coolly picked up the bottle of liqueur, poured his glass full once
+more, and began drinking it off in little sips.  Presently he stood up,
+and throwing back his shoulder, with a little ostentation of health, he
+went over to the chintz-covered chair, and sat down in it.  His mood was
+contented and brisk.  He held up the glass of liqueur against the
+sunlight.
+
+"Better than any Benedictine I ever tasted," he said.  "A dozen bottles
+of that would cure this beastly cold of mine.  By Jove! it would.  It's
+as good as the Gardivani I got that blessed day when we chaps of the
+Ninetieth breakfasted with the King of Savoy."  He laughed to himself at
+the reminiscence.  "What a day that was, what a stunning day that was!"
+
+He was still smiling, his white teeth showing humorously, when Sophie
+again entered the room.  He had forgotten her, forgotten all about her.
+As she came in he made a quick, courteous movement to rise--too quick;
+for a sharp pain shot through his breast, and he grew pale about the
+lips.  But he made essay to stand up lightly, nevertheless.
+
+She saw his paleness, came quickly to him, and put out her hand to gently
+force him back into his seat, but as instantly decided not to notice his
+indisposition, and turned towards the table instead.  Taking the bottle
+of cordial, she brought it over, and not looking at him, said:
+
+"Just one more little glass, m'sieu'?"  She had in her other hand a plate
+of seed-cakes.  "But yes, you must sit down and eat a cake," she added
+adroitly.  "They are very nice, and I made them myself.  We are very fond
+of them; and once, when the bishop stayed at our house, he liked them
+too."
+
+Before he sat down he drank off the whole of the cordial in the glass.
+
+She took a chair near him, and breaking a seed-cake began eating it.  His
+tongue was loosened now, and he told her what he was smiling at when she
+came into the room.  She was amused, and there was a little awe to her
+interest also.  To think--she was sitting here, talking easily to a man
+who had eaten at kings' tables--with the king!  Yet she was at ease too--
+since she had drunk the cordial.  It had acted on her like some philtre.
+He begged that she would go on with her work; and she got the dish of
+strawberries, and began stemming them while he talked.
+
+It was much easier talking or listening to him while she was so occupied.
+She had never enjoyed anything so much in her life.  She was not clever,
+like Christine, but she had admiration of ability, and was obedient to
+the charm of temperament.  Whenever Ferrol had met her he had lavished
+little attentions on her, had said things to her that carried weight far
+beyond their intention.  She had been pleased at the time, but they had
+had no permanent effect.
+
+Now everything he said had a different influence: she felt for the first
+time that it was not easy to look into his eyes, and as if she never
+could again without betraying--she knew not what.
+
+So they sat there, he talking, she listening and questioning now and
+then.  She had placed the bottle of liqueur and the seed-cakes at his
+elbow on the windowsill; and as if mechanically, he poured out a
+glassful, and after a little time, still another, and at last, apparently
+unconsciously, poured her out one also, and handed it to her.  She shook
+her head; he still held the glass poised; her eyes met his; she made a
+feeble sort of protest, then took the glass and drank off the liqueur in
+little sips.
+
+"Gad, that puts fat on the bones, and gives the gay heart!" he said.
+"Doesn't it, though?"
+
+She laughed quietly.  Her nature was warm, and she had the animal-like
+fondness for physical ease and content.
+
+"It's as if there wasn't another stroke of work to do in the world," she
+answered, and sat contentedly back in her chair, the strawberries in her
+lap.  Her fingers, stained with red, lay beside the bowl.  All the
+strings of conscious duty were loose, and some of them were flying.  The
+bumble-bee that flew in at the door and boomed about the room contributed
+to the day-dream.
+
+She never quite knew how it happened that a moment later he was bending
+over the back of her chair, with her face upturned to his, and his lips--
+With that touch thrilling her, she sprang to her feet, and turned away
+from him towards the table.  Her face was glowing like a peony, and a
+troubled light came into her eyes.  He came over to her, after a moment,
+and spoke over her shoulders as he just touched her waist with his
+fingers.
+
+"A la bonne heure--Sophie!"
+
+"Oh, it isn't--it isn't right," she said, her body slightly inclining
+from him.
+
+"One minute out of a whole life--What does it matter!  Ce ne fait rien!
+Good-bye-Sophie."
+
+Now she inclined towards him.  He was about to put his arms round her,
+when he heard the distant sound of a horse's hoofs.  He let her go, and
+turned towards the front door.  Through it he saw Christine driving up
+the road.  She would pass the house.
+
+"Good-bye-Sophie," he said again over her shoulder, softly; and, picking
+up his hat and stick, he left the house.
+
+Her eyes followed him dreamily as he went up the road.  She sat down in
+a chair, the trance of the passionate moment still on her, and began to
+brood.  She vaguely heard the rattle of a buggy--Christine's--as it
+passed the house, and her thoughts drifted into a new-discovered
+hemisphere where life was all a somnolent sort of joy and bodily love.
+
+She was roused at last by a song which came floating across the fields.
+The air she knew, and the voice she knew.  The chanson was, "Le Voleur de
+grand Chemin!"  The voice was her husband's.
+
+She knew the words, too; and even before she could hear them, they were
+fitting into the air:
+
+              "Qui va la!  There's some one in the orchard,
+                  There's a robber in the apple-trees;
+               Qui va la!  He is creeping through the doorway.
+                  Ah, allez-vous-en! Va-t'-en!"
+
+She hurriedly put away the cordial and the seed-cakes.  She picked up the
+bottle.  It was empty.  Ferrol had drunk near half a pint of the liqueur!
+She must get another bottle of it somehow.  It would never do for Magon
+to know that the precious anniversary cordial was all gone--in this way.
+
+She hurried towards the other room.  The voice of the farrier-farmer was
+more distinct now.  She could hear clearly the words of the song.  She
+looked out.  The square-shouldered, blue-shirted Magon was skirting the
+turnip field, making a short cut home.  His straw hat was pushed back on
+his head, his scythe was over his shoulder.  He had cut the last swathe
+in the field--now for Sophie.  He was not handsome, and she had known
+that always; but he seemed rough and coarse to-day.  She did not notice
+how well he fitted in with everything about him; and he was so healthy
+that even three glasses of that cordial would have sent him reeling to
+bed.
+
+As she passed into the dining-room, the words of the song followed her:
+
+              "Qui va la!  If you please, I own the mansion,
+                  And this is my grandfather's gun!
+               Qui va la!  Now you're a dead man, robber
+                  Ah, allez-vous-en!  Va-t'-en!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+"I saw you coming," Ferrol said, as Christine stopped the buggy.
+
+"You have been to see Magon and Sophie?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, for a minute," he answered.  "Where are you going?"
+
+"Just for a drive," she replied.  "Come, won't you?"  He got in, and she
+drove on.
+
+"Where were you going?" she asked.
+
+"Why, to the old mill," was his reply.  "I wanted a little walk, then a
+rest."
+
+Ten minutes later they were looking from a window of the mill, out upon
+the great wheel which had done all the work the past generations had
+given it to do, and was now dropping into decay as it had long dropped
+into disuse.  Moss had gathered on the great paddles; many of them were
+broken, and the debris had been carried away by the freshets of spring
+and the floods of autumn.
+
+They were silent for a time.  Presently she looked up at him.
+
+"You're much better to-day, "she said; "better than you've been since--
+since that night!"
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," he answered; "right as can be."  He suddenly turned
+on her, put his hand upon her arm, and said:
+
+"Come, now, tell me what there was between you and Vanne Castine--once
+upon a time.
+
+"He was in love with me five years ago," she said.
+
+"And five years ago you were in love with him, eh?"  "How dare you say
+that to me!" she answered.  "I never was.  I always hated him."
+
+She told her lie with unscrupulous directness.  He did not believe her;
+but what did that matter!  It was no reason why he should put her at a
+disadvantage, and, strangely enough, he did not feel any contempt for her
+because she told the lie, nor because she had once cared for Castine.
+Probably in those days she had never known anybody who was very much
+superior to Castine.  She was in love with himself now; that was enough,
+or nearly enough, and there was no particular reason why he should demand
+more from her than she demanded from him.  She was lying to him now
+because--well, because she loved him.  Like the majority of men, when
+women who love them have lied to them so, they have seen in it a
+compliment as strong as the act was weak.  It was more to him now that
+this girl should love him than that she should be upright, or moral, or
+truthful.  Such is the egotism and vanity of such men.
+
+"Well, he owes me several years of life.  I put in a bad hour that
+night."
+
+He knew that "several years of life" was a misstatement; but, then, they
+were both sinners.
+
+Her eyes flashed, she stamped her foot, and her fingers clinched.
+
+"I wish I'd killed him when I killed his bear!" she said.
+
+Then excitedly she described the scene exactly as it occurred.  He
+admired the dramatic force of it.  He thrilled at the direct simplicity
+of the tale.  He saw Vanne Castine in the forearms of the huge beast,
+with his eyes bulging from his head, his face becoming black, and he saw
+blind justice in that death grip; Christine's pistol at the bear's head,
+and the shoulder in the teeth of the beast, and then!
+
+"By the Lord Harry," he said, as she stood panting, with her hands fixed
+in the last little dramatic gesture, "what a little spitfire and brick
+you are!"
+
+All at once he caught her away from the open window and drew her to him.
+Whether what he said that moment, and what he did then, would have been
+said and done if it were not for the liqueur he had drunk at Sophie's
+house would be hard to tell; but the sum of it was that she was his and
+he was hers.  She was to be his until the end of all, no matter what the
+end might be.  She looked up at him, her face glowing, her bosom beating
+--beating, every pulse in her tingling.
+
+"You mean that you love me, and that--that you want-to marry me?" she
+said; and then, with a fervent impulse, she threw her arms round his neck
+and kissed him again and again.
+
+The directness of her question dumfounded him for the moment; but what
+she suggested (though it might be selfish in him to agree to it) would be
+the best thing that could happen to him.  So he lied to her, and said:
+
+"Yes, that's what I meant.  But, then, to tell you the sober truth, I'm
+as poor as a church mouse."
+
+He paused.  She looked up at him with a sudden fear in her face.
+
+"You're not married?" she asked, "you're not married?" then, breaking
+off suddenly: "I don't care if you are, I don't!  I love you--love you!
+Nobody would look after you as I would.  I don't; no, I don't care."
+
+She drew up closer and closer to him.
+
+"No, I don't mean that I was married," he said.  "I meant--what you know
+--that my life isn't worth, perhaps, a ten-days' purchase."
+
+Her face became pale again.
+
+"You can have my life," she said; "have it just as long as you live, and
+I'll make you live a year--yes, I'll make you live ten years.  Love can
+do anything; it can do everything.  We'll be married to-morrow."
+
+"That's rather difficult," he answered.  "You see, you're a Catholic,
+and I'm a Protestant, and they wouldn't marry us here, I'm afraid; at
+least not at once, perhaps not at all.  You see, I--I've only one lung."
+
+He had never spoken so frankly of his illness before.  "Well, we can go
+over the border into the English province--into Upper Canada," she
+answered.  "Don't you see?  It's only a few miles' drive to a village.
+I can go over one day, get the licence; then, a couple of days after, we
+can go over together and be married.  And then, then--"
+
+He smiled.  "Well, then it won't make much difference, will it?  We'll
+have to fit in one way or another, eh?"
+
+"We could be married afterwards by the Cure, if everybody made a fuss.
+The bishop would give us a dispensation.  It's a great sin to marry a
+heretic, but--"
+
+"But love--eh, ma cigale!"  Then he took her eagerly, tenderly into his
+arms; and probably he had then the best moment in his life.
+
+Sophie Farcinelle saw them driving back together.  She was sitting at
+early supper with Magon, when, raising her head at the sound of wheels,
+she saw Christine laughing and Ferrol leaning affectionately towards her.
+Ferrol had forgotten herself and the incident of the afternoon.  It meant
+nothing to him.  With her, however, it was vital: it marked a change in
+her life.  Her face flushed, her hands trembled, and she arose hurriedly
+and went to get something from the kitchen, that Magon might not see her
+face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Twenty men had suddenly disappeared from Bonaventure on the day that
+Ferrol visited Sophie Farcinelle, and it was only the next morning that
+the cause of their disappearance was generally known.
+
+There had been many rumours abroad that a detachment of men from the
+parish were to join Papineau.  The Rebellion was to be publicly declared
+on a certain date near at hand, but nothing definite was known; and
+because the Cure condemned any revolt against British rule, in spite of
+the evils the province suffered from bad government, every recruit who
+joined Nic Lavilette's standard was sworn to secrecy.  Louis Lavilette
+and his wife knew nothing of their son's complicity in the rumoured
+revolt--one's own people are generally the last to learn of one's
+misdeeds.  Madame would have been sorely frightened and chagrined if
+she had known the truth, for she was partly English.  Besides, if the
+Rebellion did not succeed, disgrace must come, and then good-bye to the
+progress of the Lavilettes, and goodbye, maybe, to her son!
+
+In spite of disappointments and rebuffs in many quarters, she still kept
+faith with her ambitions, and, fortunately for herself, she did not see
+the abject failure of many of her schemes.  Some of the gentry from the
+neighbouring parishes had called, chiefly, she was aware, because of Mr.
+Ferrol.  She was building the superstructure of her social ambitions on
+that foundation for the present.  She told Louis sometimes, with tears
+of joy in her eyes, that a special Providence had sent Mr. Ferrol to
+them, and she did not know how to be grateful enough.  He suggested a
+gift to the church in token of gratitude, but her thanksgiving did not
+take that form.
+
+Nic was entirely French at heart, and ignored his mother's nationality.
+He resented the English blood in his veins, and atoned for it by
+increased loyalty to his French origin.  This was probably not so much
+a principle as a fancy.  He had a kind of importance also in the parish,
+and in his own eyes, because he made as much in three months by buying
+and selling horses as most people did in a year.  The respect of
+Bonaventure for his ability was considerable; and though it had no marked
+admiration for his character, it appreciated his drolleries, and was
+attracted by his high spirits.  He had always been erratic, so that when
+he disappeared for days at a time no one thought anything of it, and when
+he came home to the Manor at unearthly hours it created no peculiar
+notice.
+
+He had chosen very good men for his recruits; for, though they talked
+much among themselves, they drew a cordon of silence round their little
+society of revolution.  They vanished in the night, and Nic with them;
+but he returned the next afternoon when the fire of excitement was at its
+height.  As he rode through the streets, people stopped him and poured
+out questions; but he only shrugged his shoulders, and gave no
+information, and neither denied nor affirmed anything.
+
+Acting under orders, he had marched his company to make conjunction with
+other companies at a point in the mountains twenty miles away, but had
+himself returned to get the five thousand dollars gathered by Papineau's
+agent.  Now that the Rebellion was known, Nicolas intended to try and win
+his father and his father's money and horses over to the cause.
+
+Because Ferrol was an Englishman he made no confidant of him, and because
+he was a dying man he saw in him no menace to the cause.  Besides, was
+not Ferrol practically dependent upon their hospitality?  If he had
+guessed that his friend knew accurately of his movements since the night
+he had seen Vanne Castine hand him his commission from Papineau, he would
+have felt less secure: for, after all, love--or prejudice--of country is
+a principle in the minds of most men deeper than any other.  When all
+other morals go, this latent tendency to stand by the blood of his clan
+is the last moral in man that bears the test without treason.  If he had
+known that Ferrol had written to the Commandant at Quebec, telling him of
+the imminence of the Rebellion, and the secret recruiting and drilling
+going on in the parishes, his popular comrade might have paid a high
+price for his disclosure.
+
+That morning at sunrise, Christine, saying she was going upon a visit to
+the next parish, started away upon her mission to the English province.
+Ferrol had urged her to let him go, but she had refused.  He had not yet
+fully recovered from his adventure with the bear, she said.  Then he said
+they might go together; but she insisted that she must make the way
+clear, and have everything ready.  They might go and find the minister
+away, and then--voila, what a chance for cancan!  So she went alone.
+
+From his window he watched her depart; and as she drove away in the fresh
+morning he fell to thinking what it might seem like if he had to look
+forward to ten, twenty, or forty years with just such a woman as his
+wife.  Now she was at her best (he did not deceive himself), but in
+ten years or less the effects of her early life would show in many ways.
+She had once loved Vanne Castine!  and now vanity and cowardice, or
+unscrupulousness, made her lie about it.  He would have her at her best
+--a young, vigorous radiant nature--for his short life, and then, good-
+bye, my lover, good-bye!  Selfish?  Of course.  But she would rather--
+she had said it--have him for the time he had to live than not at all.
+Position?  What was his position?  Cast off by his family, forgotten by
+his old friends, in debt, penniless--let position be hanged!  Self-
+preservation was the first law.  What was the difference between this
+girl and himself?  Morals?  She was better than himself, anyhow.  She had
+genuine passions, and her sins would be in behalf of those genuine
+passions.  He had kicked over the moral traces many a time from absolute
+selfishness.  She had clean blood in her veins, she was good-looking,
+she had a quick wit, she was an excellent horse-woman--what then?  If she
+wasn't so "well bred," that was a matter of training and opportunity
+which had never quite been hers.  What was he himself?  A loafer, "a
+deuced unfortunate loafer," but still a loafer.  He had no trade and no
+profession.  Confound it!  how much better off, and how much better in
+reality, were these people who had trades and occupations.  In the vigour
+and lithe activity of that girl's body was the force of generations of
+honest workers.  He argued and thought--as every intelligent man in his
+position would have done--until he had come into the old life again, and
+into the presence of the old advantages and temptations!
+
+Christine pulled up for a moment on a little hill, and waved her whip.
+He shook his handkerchief from the window.  That was their prearranged
+signal.  He shook it until she had driven away beyond the hill and was
+lost to sight, and still stood there at the window looking out.
+
+Presently Madame Lavilette appeared in the garden below, and he was sure,
+from the way she glanced up at the window, and from her position in the
+shrubbery, that she had seen the signal.  Madame did not look displeased.
+On the contrary, though an alliance with Christine now seemed unlikely,
+because of the state of Ferrol's health and his religion and nationality,
+it pleased her to think that it might have been.
+
+When she had passed into the house, Ferrol sat down on the broad window-
+sill, and looked out the way Christine had gone.  He was thinking of the
+humiliation of his position, and how it would be more humiliating when he
+married Christine, should the Lavilettes turn against them--which was
+quite possible.  And from outside: the whole parish--a few excepted--
+sympathised with the Rebellion, and once the current of hatred of the
+English set in, he would be swept down by it.  There were only three
+English people in the place.  Then, if it became known that he had given
+information to the authorities, his life would be less uncertain than it
+was just now.  Yet, confound the dirty lot of little rebels, it served
+them right!  He couldn't sit by and see a revolt against British rule
+without raising a hand.  Warn Nic?  To what good?  The result would be
+just the same.  But if harm came to this intended brother-in-law-well,
+why borrow trouble?  He was not the Lord in Heaven, that he could have
+everything as he wanted it!  It was a toss-up, and he would see the sport
+out.  "Have to cough your way through, my boy!" he said, as he swayed
+back and forth, the hard cough hacking in his throat.
+
+As he had said yesterday, there was only one thing to do: he must have
+that five thousand dollars which was to be handed over by the old
+seigneur.  This time he did not attempt to find excuses; he called the
+thing by its proper name.
+
+"Well, it's stealing, or it's highway robbery, no matter how one looks at
+it," he said to himself.  "I wonder what's the matter with me.  I must
+have got started wrong somehow.  Money to spend, playing at soldiering,
+made to believe I'd have a pot of money and an estate, and then told one
+fine day that a son and heir, with health in form and feature, was come,
+and Esau must go.  No profession, except soldiering, debt staring me in
+the face, and a nasty mess of it all round.  I wonder why it is that I
+didn't pull myself together, be honest to a hair, and fight my way
+through?  I suppose I hadn't it in me.  I wasn't the right metal at the
+start.  There's always been a black sheep in our family, a gentleman or
+a lady, born without morals, and I happen to be the gentleman this
+generation.  I always knew what was right, and liked it, and I always did
+what was wrong, and liked it--nearly always.  But I suppose I was fated.
+I was bound to get into a hole, and I'm in it now, with one lung, and a
+wife in prospect to support.  I suppose if I were to write down all the
+decent things I've thought in my life, and put them beside the indecent
+things I've done, nobody would believe the same man was responsible for
+them.  I'm one of the men who ought to be put above temptation; be well
+bridled, well fed, and the mere cost of comfortable living provided, and
+then I'd do big things.  But that isn't the way of the world; and so I
+feel that a morning like this, and the love of a girl like that" (he
+nodded towards the horizon into which Christine had gone) "ought to make
+a man sing a Te Deum.  And yet this evening, or to-morrow evening, or the
+next, I'll steal five thousand dollars, if it can be done, and risk my
+neck in doing it--to say nothing of family honour, and what not."
+
+He got up from the window, went to his trunk, opened it, and, taking out
+a pistol, examined it carefully, cocking and uncorking it, and after
+loading it, and again trying the trigger, put it back again.  There came
+a tap at the door, and to his call a servant entered with a glass of milk
+and whiskey, with which he always began the day.
+
+The taste of the liquid brought back the afternoon of the day before, and
+he suddenly stopped drinking, threw back his head, and laughed softly.
+
+"By Jingo, but that liqueur was stunning--and so was-Sophie .  .  .
+Sophie!  That sounds compromisingly familiar this morning, and very
+improper also!  But Sophie is a very nice person, and I ought to be well
+ashamed of myself.  I needed the bit and curb both yesterday.  It'll
+never do at all.  If I'm going to marry Christine, we must have no family
+complications.  'Must have'!" he exclaimed.  "But what if Sophie
+already?--good Lord!"
+
+It was a strange sport altogether, in which some people were bound to get
+a bad fall, himself probably among the rest.  He intended to rob the
+brother, he had set the government going against the brother's
+revolutionary cause, he was going to marry one sister, and the other
+--the less thought and said about that matter the better.
+
+The afternoon brought Nic, who seemed perplexed and excited, but was most
+friendly.  It seemed to Ferrol as if Nic wished to disclose something;
+but he gave him no opportunity.  What he knew he knew, and he could make
+use of; but he wanted no further confidences.  Ever since the night of
+the fight with the bear there had been nothing said on matters concerning
+the Rebellion.  If Nicolas disclosed any secret now, it must surely be
+about the money, and that must not be if he could prevent it.  But he
+watched his friend, nevertheless.
+
+Night came, and Christine did not return; eight o'clock, nine o'clock.
+Lavilette and his wife were a little anxious; but Ferrol and Nicolas made
+excuses for her, and, in the wild talk and gossip about the Rebellion,
+attention was easily shifted from her.  Besides, Christine was well used
+to taking care of herself.
+
+Lavilette flatly refused to give Nic a penny for "the cause," and stormed
+at his connection with it; but at last became pacified, and agreed it was
+best that Madame Lavilette should know nothing about Nic's complicity
+just yet.  At half past nine o'clock Nic left the house and took the road
+towards the Seigneury.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+About half-way between the Seigneury and the main street of the village
+there was a huge tree, whose limbs stretched across the road and made a
+sort of archway.  In the daytime, during the summer, foot travellers,
+carts and carriages, with their drivers, loitered in its shade as they
+passed, grateful for the rest it gave; but at night, even when it was
+moonlight, the wide branches threw a dark and heavy shadow, and the
+passage beneath them was gloomy travel.  Many a foot traveller hesitated
+to pass into that umbrageous circle, and skirted the fence beyond the
+branches on the further side of the road instead.
+
+When Nicolas Lavilette, returning from the Seigneury with the precious
+bag of gold for Papineau, came hurriedly along the road towards the
+village, he half halted, with sudden premonition of danger, a dozen feet
+or so from the great tree.  But like most young people, who are inclined
+to trust nothing but their own strong arms and what their eyes can see,
+he withstood the temptation to skirt the fence; and with a little half-
+scornful laugh at himself, yet a little timidity also (or he would not
+have laughed at all), he hurried under the branches.  He had not gone
+three steps when the light of a dark lantern flashed suddenly in his
+face, and a pistol touched his forehead.  All he could see was a figure
+clothed entirely in black, even to hands and face, with only holes for
+eyes, nose and mouth.
+
+He stood perfectly still; the shock was so sudden.  There was something
+determined and deadly in the pose of the figure before him, in the touch
+of the weapon, in the clearness of the light.  His eyes dropped, and
+fixed involuntarily upon the lantern.
+
+He had a revolver with him; but it was useless to attempt to defend
+himself with it.  Not a word had been spoken.  Presently, with the
+fingers that held the lantern, his assailant made a motion of Hands up!
+There was no reason why he should risk his life without a chance of
+winning, so he put up his hands.  At another motion he drew out the bag
+of gold with his left hand, and, obeying the direction of another
+gesture, dropped it on the ground.  There was a pause, then another
+gesture, which he pretended not to understand.
+
+"Your pistol!" said the voice in a whisper through the mask.
+
+He felt the cold steel at his forehead press a little closer; he also
+felt how steady it was.  He was no fool.  He had been in trouble before
+in his lifetime; he drew out the pistol, and passed it, handle first, to
+three fingers stretched out from the dark lantern.
+
+The figure moved to where the money and the pistol were, and said, in a
+whisper still:
+
+"Go!"
+
+He had one moment of wild eagerness to try his luck in a sudden assault,
+but that passed as suddenly as it came; and with the pistol still
+covering him, he moved out into the open road, with a helpless anger on
+him.
+
+A crescent moon was struggling through floes of fleecy clouds, the stars
+were shining, and so the road was not entirely dark.  He went about
+thirty steps, then turned and looked back.  The figure was still standing
+there, with the pistol and the light.  He walked on another twenty or
+thirty steps, and once again looked back.  The light and the pistol were
+still there.  Again he walked on.  But now he heard the rumble of buggy
+wheels behind.  Once more he looked back: the figure and the light had
+gone.  The buggy wheels sounded nearer.  With a sudden feeling of
+courage, he turned round and ran back swiftly.  The light suddenly
+flashed again.
+
+"It's no use," he said to himself, and turned and walked slowly along the
+road.
+
+The sound of the buggy wheels came still nearer.  Presently it was
+obscured by passing under the huge branches of the tree.  Then the horse,
+buggy and driver appeared at the other side, and in a few moments had
+overtaken him.  He looked up sharply, scrutinisingly.  Suddenly he burst
+out:
+
+"Holy mother, Chris, is that you!  Where've you been?  Are you all
+right?"
+
+She had whipped up her horse at first sight of him, thinking he might be
+some drunken rough.
+
+"Mais, mon dieu, Nic, is that you?  I thought at first you were a
+highwayman!"
+
+"No, you've passed the highwayman!  Come, let me get in."
+
+Five minutes afterwards she knew exactly what had happened to him.
+
+"Who could it be?" she asked.
+
+"I thought at first it was that beast Vanne Castine!" he answered; "he's
+the only one that knew about the money, besides the agent and the old
+seigneur.  He brought word from Papineau.  But it was too tall for him,
+and he wouldn't have been so quiet about it.  Just like a ghost.  It
+makes my flesh creep now!"
+
+It did not seem such a terrible thing to her at the moment, for she had
+in her pocket the licence to marry the Honourable Tom Ferrol upon the
+morrow, and she thought, with joy, of seeing him just as soon as she set
+foot in the doorway of the Manor Casimbault.
+
+It was something of a shock to her that she did not see him for quite a
+half hour after she arrived home, and that was half past ten o'clock.
+But women forget neglect quickly in the delight of a lover's presence;
+so her disappointment passed.  Yet she could not help speaking of it.
+
+"Why weren't you at the door to meet me when I came back to-night with
+that-that in my pocket?" she asked him, his arm round her.
+
+"I've got a kicking lung, you know," he said, with a half ironical, half
+self-pitying smile.
+
+"Oh, forgive me, forgive me, Tom, my love!" she said as she buried her
+face on his breast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Before he left for the front next morning to join his company and march
+to Papineau's headquarters, Nic came to Ferrol, told him, with rage and
+disappointment, the story of the highway robbery, and also that he hoped
+Ferrol would not worry about the Rebellion, and would remain at the Manor
+Casimbault in any case.
+
+"Anyhow," said he, "my mother's half English; so you're not alone.  We're
+going to make a big fight for it.  We've stood it as long as we can.  But
+we're friends in this, aren't we, Ferrol?"
+
+There was a pause, in which Ferrol sipped his whiskey and milk, and
+continued dressing.  He set the glass down, and looked towards the open
+window, through which came the smell of the ripe orchard and the
+fragrance of the pines.  He turned to.  Lavilette at last and said, as he
+fastened his collar:
+
+"Yes, you and I are friends, Nic; but I'm a Britisher, and my people have
+been Britishers since Edward the Third's time; and for this same Quebec
+two of my great-grand-uncles fought and lost their lives.  If I were
+sound of wind and limb I'd fight, like them, to keep what they helped to
+get.  You're in for a rare good beating, and, see, my friend--while I
+wouldn't do you any harm personally, I'd crawl on my knees from here to
+the citadel at Quebec to get a pot-shot at your rag-tag-and-bobtail
+'patriots.'  You can count me a first-class enemy to your 'cause,' though
+I'm not a first-class fighting man.  And now, Nic, give me a lift with my
+coat.  This shoulder jibs a bit since the bear-baiting."
+
+Lavilette was naturally prejudiced in Ferrol's favour; and this
+deliberate and straightforward patriotism more pleased than offended him.
+His own patriotism was not a deep or lasting thing: vanity and a restless
+spirit were its fountains of inspiration.  He knew that Ferrol was
+penniless--or he was so yesterday--and this quiet defiance of events in
+the very camp of the enemy could not but appeal to his ebullient, Gallic
+chivalry.  Ferrol did not say these things because he had five thousand
+dollars behind him, for he would have said them if he were starving and
+dying--perhaps out of an inherent stubbornness, perhaps because this
+hereditary virtue in him would have been as hard to resist as his sins.
+
+"That's all right, Ferrol," answered Lavilette.  "I hope you'll stay here
+at the Manor, no matter what comes.  You're welcome.  Will you?"
+
+"Yes, I'll stay, and glad to.  I can't very well do anything else.  I'm
+bankrupt.  Haven't got a penny--of my own," he added, with daring irony.
+"Besides, it's comfortable here, and I feel like one of the family; and,
+anyhow, Life is short and Time is a pacer!"  His wearing cough emphasised
+the statement.
+
+"It won't be easy for you in Bonaventure," said Nicolas, walking
+restlessly up and down.  "They're nearly all for the cause, all except
+the Cure.  But he can't do much now, and he'll keep out of the mess.
+By the time he has a chance to preach against it, next Sunday, every man
+that wants to 'll be at the front, and fighting.  But you'll be all
+right, I think.  They like you here."
+
+"I've a couple of good friends to see me through," was the quiet reply.
+
+"Who are they?"
+
+Ferrol went to his trunk, took out a pair of pistols, and balanced them
+lightly in his hands.  "Good to confuse twenty men," he said.  "A brace
+of 'em are bound to drop, and they don't know which one."
+
+He raised a pistol lazily, and looked out along its barrel through the
+open, sunshiny window.  Something in the pose of the body, in the curve
+of the arm, struck Nicolas strangely.  He moved almost in front of
+Ferrol.  There came back to him mechanically the remembrance of a piece
+of silver on the butt of one of the highwayman's pistols!
+
+The same piece of silver was on the butt of Ferrol's pistol.  It
+startled him; but he almost laughed to him self at the absurdity of the
+suggestion.  Ferrol was the last man in the world to play a game like
+that, and with him.
+
+Still he could not resist a temptation.  He stepped in front of the
+pistol, almost touching it with his forehead, looking at Ferrol as he had
+looked at the highwayman last night.
+
+"Look out, it's loaded!" said Ferrol, lowering the weapon coolly, and
+not showing by sign or muscle that he understood Lavilette's meaning.
+"I should think you'd had enough of pistols for one twenty-four hours."
+
+"Do you know, Ferrol, you looked just then so like the robber last night
+that, for one moment, I half thought!--And the pistol, too, looks just
+the same--that silver piece on the butt!"
+
+"Oh, yes, this piece for the name of the owner!" said Ferrol, in a
+laughing brogue, and he coughed a little.  "Well, maybe some one did use
+this pistol last night.  It wouldn't be hard to open my trunk.  Let's
+see; whom shall we suspect?"
+
+Lavilette was entirely reassured, if indeed he needed reassurance.
+Ferrol coughed still more, and was obliged to sit down on the side
+of the bed and rest himself against the foot-board.
+
+"There's a new jug of medicine or cordial come this morning from
+Shangois, the notary," said Lavilette.  "I just happened to think of it.
+What he does counts.  He knows a lot."
+
+Ferrol's eyes showed interest at once.
+
+"I'll try it.  I'll try it.  The stuff Gatineau the miller sent doesn't
+do any good now."
+
+"Shangois is here--he's downstairs--if you want to see him."
+
+Ferrol nodded.  He was tired of talking.
+
+"I'm going," said Lavilette, holding out his hand.  "I'll join my company
+to-day, and the scrimmage 'll begin as soon as we reach Papineau.  We've
+got four hundred men."
+
+Ferrol tried to say something, but he was struggling with the cough in
+his throat.  He held out his hand, and Nicolas took it.  At last he was
+able to say:
+
+"Good luck to you, Nic, and to the devil with the Rebellion!  You're in
+for a bad drubbing."
+
+Nicolas had a sudden feeling of anger.  This superior air of Ferrol's was
+assumed by most Englishmen in the country, and it galled him.
+
+"We'll not ask quarter of Englishmen; no-sacre!" he said in a rage.
+
+"Well, Nic, I'm not so sure of that.  Better do that than break your
+pretty neck on a taut rope," was the lazy reply.
+
+With an oath, Lavilette went out, banging the door after him.  Ferrol
+shrugged his shoulder with a stoic ennui, and put away the pistols in the
+trunk.  He was thinking how reckless he had been to take them out; and
+yet he was amused, too, at the risk he had run.  A strange indifference
+possessed him this morning--indifference to everything.  He was suffering
+reaction from the previous day's excitement.  He had got the five
+thousand dollars, and now all interest in it seemed to have departed.
+
+Suddenly he said to himself, as he ran a brush around his coat-collar:
+
+"'Pon my soul, I forgot; this is my wedding day!--the great day in a
+man's life, the immense event, after which comes steady happiness or the
+devil to pay."
+
+He stepped to the window and looked out.  It was only six o'clock as yet.
+He could see the harvesters going to their labours in the fields of wheat
+and oats, the carters already bringing in little loads of hay.  He could
+hear their marche-'t'-en!  to the horses.  Over by a little house on the
+river bank stood an old woman sharpening a sickle.  He could see the
+flash of the steel as the stone and metal gently clashed.
+
+Presently a song came up to him, through the garden below, from the
+house.  The notes seemed to keep time to the hand of the sickle-
+sharpener.  He had heard it before, but only in snatches.  Now it seemed
+to pierce his senses and to flood his nerves with feeling.
+
+The air was sensuous, insinuating, ardent.  The words were full of summer
+and of that dramatic indolence of passion which saved the incident at
+Magon Farcinelle's from being as vulgar as it was treacherous.  The voice
+was Christine's, on her wedding day.
+
+              "Oh, hark how the wind goes, the wind goes
+               (And dark goes the stream by the mill!)
+               Oh, see where the storm blows, the storm blows
+               (There's a rider comes over the hill!)
+
+              "He went with the sunshine one morning
+               (Oh, loud was the bugle and drum!)
+               My soldier, he gave me no warning
+               (Oh, would that my lover might come!)
+
+              "My kisses, my kisses are waiting
+               (Oh, the rider comes over the hill!)
+               In summer the birds should be mating
+               (Oh, the harvest goes down to the mill!)
+
+              "Oh, the rider, the rider he stayeth
+               (Oh, joy that my lover hath come!)
+               We will journey together he sayeth
+               (No more with the bugle and drum!)"
+
+He caught sight of Christine for a moment as she passed through the
+garden towards the stable.  Her gown was of white stuff, with little
+spots of red in it, and a narrow red ribbon was shot through the collar.
+Her hat was a pretty white straw, with red artificial flowers upon it.
+She wore at her throat a medallion brooch: one of the two heirlooms of
+the Lavilette family.  It had belonged to the great-grandmother of
+Monsieur Louis Lavilette, and was the one security that this ambitious
+family did not spring up, like a mushroom, in one night.  It had always
+touched Christine's imagination as a child.  Some native instinct in, her
+made her prize it beyond everything else.  She used to make up wonderful
+stories about it, and tell them to Sophie, who merely wondered, and was
+not sure but that Christine was wicked; for were not these little
+romances little lies?  Sophie's imagination was limited.  As the years
+went on Christine finally got possession of the medallion, and held it
+against all opposition.  Somehow, with it on this morning, she felt
+diminish the social distance between herself and Ferrol.
+
+Ferrol himself thought nothing of social distance.  Men, as a rule, get
+rather above that sort of thing.  The woman: that was all that was in his
+mind.  She was good to look at: warm, lovable, fascinating in her little
+daring wickednesses; a fiery little animal, full of splendid impulses,
+gifted with a perilous temperament: and she loved him.  He had a kind of
+exultation at the very fierceness of her love for him, of what she had
+done to prove her love: her fury at Vanne Castine, the slaughter of the
+bear, and the intention to kill Vanne himself; and he knew that she would
+do more than that, if a great test came.  Men feel surer of women than
+women feel of men.
+
+He sat down on the broad window-ledge, still sipping his whiskey and
+milk, as he looked at her.  She was very good to see.  Presently she had
+to cross a little plot of grass.  The dew was still on it.  She gathered
+up her skirts and tip-toed quickly across it.  The action was attractive
+enough, for she had a lithe smoothness of motion.  Suddenly he uttered an
+exclamation of surprise.
+
+"White stockings--humph!" he said.
+
+Somehow those white stockings suggested the ironical comment of the world
+upon his proposed mesalliance; then he laughed good-humouredly.
+
+"Taste is all a matter of habit, anyhow," said he to himself.  "My own
+sister wouldn't have had any better taste if she hadn't been taught.  And
+what am I?
+
+"What am I?  I drink more whiskey in a day than any three men in the
+country.  I don't do a stroke of work; I've got debts all over the world;
+I've mulcted all my friends; I've made fools of two or three women in my
+time; I've broken every commandment except--well, I guess I've broken
+every one, if it comes to that, in spirit, anyhow.  I'm a thief, a fire-
+eating highwayman, begad, and here I am, with a perforated lung, going to
+marry a young girl like that, without one penny in the world except what
+I stole!  What beasts men are!  The worst woman may be worse than the
+worst man, but all men are worse than most women.  But she wants to marry
+me.  She knows exactly what I am in health and prospects; so why
+shouldn't I?"
+
+He drew himself up, thinking honestly.  He believed that he would live if
+he married Christine; that his "cold" would get better; that the hole in
+his lung would heal.  It was only a matter of climate; he was sure of it.
+Christine had a few hundred dollars--she had told him so.  Suppose he
+took three hundred dollars of the five thousand dollars: that would leave
+four thousand seven hundred dollars for his sister.  He could go away
+south with Christine, and could live on five or six hundred dollars a
+year; then he'd be fit for something.  He could go to work.  He could
+join the Militia, if necessary.  Anyhow, he could get something to do
+when he got well.
+
+He drank some more whiskey and milk.  "Self-preservation, that's the
+thing; that's the first law," he said.  "And more: if the only girl I
+ever loved, ever really loved--loved from the crown of her head to the
+sole of her feet--were here to-day, and Christine stood beside her,
+little plebeian with a big heart, by Heaven, I'd choose Christine.
+I can trust her, though she is a little liar.  She loves, and she'll
+stick; and she's true where she loves.  Yes; if all the women in the
+world stood beside Christine this morning, I'd look them all over, from
+duchess to danseuse, and I'd say, 'Christine Lavilette, I'm a scoundrel.
+I haven't a penny in the world.  I'm a thief; a thief who believes in
+you.  You know what love is; you know what fidelity is.  No matter what I
+did, you would stand by me to the end.  To the last day of my life, I'll
+give you my heart and my hand; and as you are faithful to me, so I will
+be faithful to you, so help me God!'
+
+"I don't believe I ever could have run straight in life.  I couldn't have
+been more than four years old when I stole the peaches from my mother's
+dressing-table; and I lied just as coolly then as I could now.  I made
+love to a girl when I was ten years old."  He laughed to himself at the
+remembrance.  "Her father had a foundry.  She used to wear a red dress,
+I remember, and her hair was brown.  She sang like a little lark.  I was
+half mad about her; and yet I knew that I didn't really love her.  Still,
+I told her that I did.  I suppose it was the cursed falseness of my whole
+nature.  I know that whenever I have said most, and felt most, something
+in me kept saying all the time: 'You're lying, you're lying, you're
+lying!'  Was I born a liar?
+
+I wonder if the first words I ever spoke were a lie?  I wonder, when I
+kissed my mother first, and knew that I was kissing her, if the same
+little devil that sits up in my head now, said then: 'You're lying,
+you're lying, you're lying.'  It has said so enough times since.  I loved
+to be with my mother; yet I never felt, even when she died--and God knows
+I felt bad enough then!
+
+I never felt that my love was all real.  It had some infernal note of
+falseness somewhere, some miserable, hollow place where the sound of my
+own voice, when I tried to speak the truth, mocked me!  I wonder if the
+smiles I gave, before I was able to speak at all, were only blarney?
+I wonder, were they only from the wish to stand well with everybody,
+if I could?  It must have been that; and how much I meant, and how much
+I did not mean, God alone knows!
+
+"What a sympathy I have always had for criminals!  I have always wanted,
+or, anyhow, one side of me has always wanted, to do right, and the other
+side has always done wrong.  I have sympathised with the just, but I have
+always felt that I'd like to help the criminal to escape his punishment.
+If I had been more real with that girl in New York, I wonder whether she
+wouldn't have stuck to me?  When I was with her I could always convince
+her; but, I remember, she told me once that, when I was away from her,
+she somehow felt that I didn't really love her.  That's always been the
+way.  When I was with people, they liked me; when I was away from them,
+I couldn't depend upon them.  No; upon my soul, of all the friends I've
+ever had, there's not one that I know of that I could go to now--except
+my sister, poor girl!--and feel sure that no matter what I did, they'd
+stick to me to the end.  I suppose the fault is mine.  If I'd been worth
+the standing by, I'd have been the better stood by.  But this girl, this
+little French provincial, with a heart of fire and gold, with a touch of
+sin in her, and a thumping artery of truth, she would walk with me to the
+gallows, and give her life to save my life--yes, a hundred times.  Well,
+then, I'll start over again; for I've found the real thing.  I'll be true
+to her just as long as she's true to me.  I'll never lie to her; and I'll
+do something else--something else.  I'll tell her--"
+
+He reached out, picked a wild rose from the vine upon the wall, and
+fastened it in his button-hole, with a defiant sort of smile, as there
+came a tap to his door.  "Come in," he said.
+
+The door opened, and in stepped Shangois, the notary.  He carried a jug
+under his arm, which, with a nod, he set down at the foot of the bed.
+
+"M'sieu'," said he, "it is a thing that cured the bishop; and once, when
+a prince of France was at Quebec, and had a bad cold, it cured him.  The
+whiskey in it I made myself--very good white wine."  Ferrol looked at the
+little man curiously.  He had only spoken with him once or twice, but he
+had heard the numberless legends about him, and the Cure had told him
+many of his sayings, a little weird and sometimes maliciously true to the
+facts of life.
+
+Ferrol thanked the little man, and motioned to a chair.  There was,
+however, a huge chest against the wall near the window, and Shangois sat
+down on this, with his legs hunched up to his chin, looking at Ferrol
+with steady, inquisitive eyes.  Ferrol laughed outright.  A grotesque
+thought occurred to him.  This little black notary was exactly like the
+weird imp which, he had always imagined, sat high up in his brain,
+dropping down little ironies and devilries--his personified conscience;
+or, perhaps, the truth left out of him at birth and given this form, to
+be with him, yet not of him.
+
+Shangois did not stir, nor show by even the wink of an eyelid that he
+recognised the laughter, or thought that he was being laughed at.
+
+Presently Ferrol sat down and looked at Shangois without speaking, as
+Shangois looked at him.  He smiled more than once, however, as the
+thought recurred to him.
+
+"Well?" he said at last.
+
+"What if she finds out about the five thousand dollars--eh, m'sieu'?"
+
+Ferrol was completely dumfounded.  The brief question covered so much
+ground--showed a knowledge of the whole case.  Like Conscience itself,
+the little black notary had gone straight to the point, struck home.
+He was keen enough, however, had sufficient self-command, not to betray
+himself, but remained unmoved outwardly, and spoke calmly.
+
+"Is that your business--to go round the parish asking conundrums?" he
+said coolly.  "I can't guess the answer to that one, can you?"
+
+Shangois hated cowards, and liked clever people--people who could answer
+him after his own fashion.  Nearly everybody was afraid of his tongue and
+of him.  He knew too much; which was a crime.
+
+"I can find out," he replied, showing his teeth a little.
+
+"Then you're not quite sure yourself, little devilkin?"
+
+"The girl is a riddle.  I am not the great reader of riddles."
+
+"I didn't call you that.  You're only a common little imp."
+
+Shangois showed his teeth in a malicious smile.
+
+"Why did you set me the riddle, then?" Ferrol continued, his eyes fixed
+with apparent carelessness on the other's face.
+
+"I thought she might have told you the answer."
+
+"I never asked her the puzzle.  Have you?"
+
+By instinct, and from the notary's reputation, Ferrol knew that he was in
+the presence of an honest man at least, and he waited most anxiously for
+an answer, for his fate might hang on it.
+
+"M'sieu', I have not seen her since yesterday morning."
+
+"Well, what would you do if you found out about the five thousand
+dollars?"
+
+"I would see what happened to it; and afterwards I would see that a girl
+of Bonaventure did not marry a Protestant, and a thief."
+
+Ferrol rose from his chair, coughing a little.  Walking over to Shangois,
+he caught him by both ears and shook the shaggy head back and forth.
+
+"You little scrap of hell," he said in a rage, "if you ever come within
+fifty feet of me again I'll send you where you came from!"
+
+Though Shangois's eyes bulged from his head, he answered:
+
+"I was only ten feet away from you last night under the elm!"
+
+Suddenly Ferrol's hand slipped down to Shangois's throat.  Ferrol's
+fingers tightened, pressed inwards.
+
+"Now, see, I know what you mean.  Some one has robbed Nicolas Lavilette
+of five thousand dollars.  You dare to charge me with it, curse you.  Let
+me see if there's any more lies on your tongue!"
+
+With the violence of the pressure Shangois's tongue was forced out of his
+mouth.
+
+Suddenly a paroxysm of coughing seized Ferrol, and he let go and
+staggered back against the window ledge.  Shangois was transformed--an
+animal.  No human being had ever seen him as he was at this moment.  The
+fingers of his one hand opened and shut convulsively, his arms worked up
+and down, his face twitched, his teeth showed like a beast's as he glared
+at Ferrol.  He looked as though he were about to spring upon the now
+helpless man.  But up from the garden below there came the sound of a
+voice--Christine's--singing.
+
+His face quieted, and his body came to its natural pose again, though his
+eyes retained an active malice.  He turned to go.
+
+"Remember what I tell you," said Ferrol: "if you publish that lie, you'll
+not live to hear it go about.  I mean what I say."  Blood showed upon his
+lips, and a tiny little stream flowed down the corner of his mouth.
+Whenever he felt that warm fluid on his tongue he was certain of his
+doom, and the horror of slowly dying oppressed him, angered him.  It
+begot in him a desire to end it all.  He had a hatred of suicide; but
+there were other ways.  "I'll have your life, or you'll have mine.  I'm
+not to be played with," he added.
+
+The sentences were broken by coughing, and his handkerchief was wet and
+red.
+
+"It is no concern of the world," answered Shangois, stretching up his
+throat, for he still felt the pressure of Ferrol's fingers--"only of the
+girl and her brother.  The girl--I saved her once before from your friend
+Vanne Castine, and I will save her from you--but, yes!  It is nothing to
+the world, to Bonaventure, that you are a robber; it is everything to
+her.  You are all robbers--you English--cochons!"
+
+He opened the door and went out.  Ferrol was about to follow him, but he
+had a sudden fit of weakness, and he caught up a pillow, and, throwing it
+on the chest where Shangois had sat, stretched himself upon it.  He lay
+still for quite a long time, and presently fell into a doze.  In those
+days no event made a lasting impression on him.  When it was over it
+ended, so far as concerned any disturbing remembrances of it.  He was
+awakened (he could not have slept for more than fifteen minutes) by a
+tapping at his door, and his name spoken softly.  He went to the door and
+opened it.  It was Christine.  He thought she seemed pale, also that she
+seemed nervous; but her eyes were full of light and fire, and there was
+no mistaking the look in her face: it was all for him.  He set down her
+agitation to the adventure they were about to make together.  He stepped
+back, as if inviting her to enter, but she shook her head.
+
+"No, not this morning.  I will meet you at the old mill in half an hour.
+The parish is all mad about the Rebellion, and no one will notice or talk
+of anything else.  I have the best pair of horses in the stable; and we
+can drive it in two hours, easy."
+
+She took a paper from her pocket.
+
+"This is--the--license," she added, and she blushed.  Then, with a sudden
+impulse, she stepped inside the room, threw her arms about his neck and
+kissed him, and he clasped her to his breast.
+
+"My darling Tom!" she said, and then hastened away, with tears in her
+eyes.
+
+He saw the tears.  "I wonder what they were for?" he said musingly, as
+he opened up the official blue paper.  "For joy?"  He laughed a little
+uneasily as he said it.  His eyes ran through the document.
+
+"The Honourable Tom Ferrol, of Stavely Castle, County Galway, Ireland,
+bachelor, and Christine Marie Lavilette, of the Township of Bonaventure,
+in the Province of Lower Canada, spinster, Are hereby granted," etc.,
+etc., etc., "according to the laws of the Province of Upper Canada,"
+etc., etc., etc.
+
+He put it in his pocket.
+
+"For better or for worse, then," he said, and descended the stairs.
+
+Presently, as he went through the village, he noticed signs of hostility
+to himself.  Cries of Vive la Canada!  Vive la France!  a bas l'Anglais!
+came to him out of the murmuring and excitement.  But the Regimental
+Surgeon took off his cap to him, very conspicuously advancing to meet
+him, and they exchanged a few words.
+
+"By the way, monsieur," the Regimental Surgeon added, as he took his
+leave, "I knew of this some days ago, and, being a justice of the peace,
+it was my duty to inform the authorities--yes of course!  One must do
+one's duty in any case," he said, in imitation of English bluffness, and
+took his leave.
+
+Ten minutes later Christine and Ferrol were on their way to the English
+province to be married.
+
+That afternoon at three o'clock, as they left the little English-speaking
+village man and wife, they heard something which startled them both.  It
+was a bear-trainer, singing to his bear the same weird song, without
+words, which Vanne Castine sang to Michael.  Over in another street they
+could see the bear on his hind feet, dancing, but they could not see the
+man.
+
+Christine glanced at Ferrol anxiously, for she was nervous and excited,
+though her face had also a look of exultant happiness.
+
+"No, it's not Castine!" he said, as if in reply to her look.
+
+In a vague way, however, she felt it to be ominous.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+The village had no thought or care for anything except the Rebellion and
+news of it; and for several days Ferrol and Christine lived their new
+life unobserved by the people of the village, even by the household of
+Manor Casimbault.
+
+It almost seemed that Ferrol's prophecy regarding himself was coming
+true, for his cheek took on a heightened colour, his step a greater
+elasticity, and he flung his shoulders out with a little of the old
+military swagger: cheerful, forgetful of all the world, and buoyant in
+what he thought to be his new-found health and permanent happiness.
+
+Vague reports came to the village concerning the Rebellion.  There were
+not a dozen people in the village who espoused the British cause; and
+these few were silent.  For the moment the Lavilettes were popular.
+Nicolas had made for them a sort of grand coup.  He had for the moment
+redeemed the snobbishness of two generations.
+
+After his secret marriage, Ferrol was not seen in the village for some
+days, and his presence and nationality were almost forgotten by the
+people: they only thought of what was actively before their eyes.  On the
+fifth day after his marriage, which was Saturday, he walked down to the
+village, attracted by shouting and unusual excitement.  When he saw the
+cause of the demonstration he had a sudden flush of anger.  A flag-staff
+had been erected in the centre of the village, and upon it had been run
+up the French tricolour.  He stood and looked at the shouting crowd a
+moment, then swung round and went to the office of the Regimental
+Surgeon, who met him at the door.  When he came out again he carried a
+little bundle under his left arm.  He made straight for the crowd, which
+was scattered in groups, and pushed or threaded his way to the flag-
+staff.  He was at least a head taller than any man there, and though he
+was not so upright as he had been, the lines of his figure were still
+those of a commanding personality.  A sort of platform had been erected
+around the flag-staff and on it a drunken little habitant was talking
+treason.  Without a word, Ferrol stepped upon the platform, and,
+loosening the rope, dropped the tricolour half-way down the staff before
+his action was quite comprehended by the crowd.  Presently a hoarse shout
+proclaimed the anger and consternation of the habitants.
+
+"Leave that flag alone," shouted a dozen voices.  "Leave it where it is!"
+others repeated with oaths.
+
+He dropped it the full length of the staff, whipped it off the string,
+and put his foot upon it.  Then he unrolled the bundle which he had
+carried under his arm.  It was the British flag.  He slipped it upon the
+string, and was about to haul it up, when the drunken orator on the
+platform caught him by the arm with fiery courage.
+
+"Here, you leave that alone: that's not our flag, and if you string it
+up, we'll string you up, bagosh!" he roared.
+
+Ferrol's heavy walking-stick was in his right hand.  "Let go my arm-
+quick!" he said quietly.
+
+He was no coward, and these people were, and he knew it.  The habitant
+drew back.
+
+"Get off the platform," he said with quiet menace.
+
+He turned quickly to the crowd, for some had sprung towards the platform
+to pull him off.  Raising his voice, he said:
+
+"Stand back, and hear what I've got to say.  You're a hundred to one.
+You can probably kill me; but before you do that I shall kill three or
+four of you.  I've had to do with rioters before.  You little handful of
+people here--little more than half a million--imagine that you can defeat
+thirty-five millions, with an army of half a million, a hundred battle-
+ships, ten thousand cannon and a million rifles.  Come now, don't be
+fools.  The Governor alone up there in Montreal has enough men to drive
+you all into the hills of Maine in a week.  You think you've got the
+start of Colborne?  Why, he has known every movement of Papineau and your
+rebels for the last two months.  You can bluster and riot to-day, but
+look out for to-morrow.  I am the only Englishman here among you.  Kill
+me; but watch what your end will be!  For every hair of my head there
+will be one less habitant in this province.  You haul down the British
+flag, and string up your tricolour in this British village while there is
+one Britisher to say, 'Put up that flag again!'--You fools!"
+
+He suddenly gave the rope a pull, and the flag ran up half-way; but as
+he did so a stone was thrown.  It flew past his head, grazing his temple.
+A sharp point lacerated the flesh, and the blood flowed down his cheek.
+He ran the flag up to its full height, swiftly knotted the cord and put
+his back against the pole.  Grasping his stick he prepared himself for an
+attack.
+
+"Mind what I say," he cried; "the first man that comes will get what
+for!"
+
+There was a commotion in the crowd; consternation and dismay behind
+Ferrol, and excitement and anger in front of him.  Three men were pushing
+their way through to him.  Two of them were armed.  They reached the
+platform and mounted it.  It was the Regimental Surgeon and two British
+soldiers.  The Regimental Surgeon held a paper in his hand.
+
+"I have here," he said to the crowd, "a proclamation by Sir John
+Colborne.  The rebels have been defeated at three points, and half of
+the men from Bonaventure who joined Papineau have been killed.  The
+ringleader, Nicolas Lavilette, when found, will be put on trial for his
+life.  Now, disperse to your homes, or every man of you will be arrested
+and tried by court-martial."
+
+The crowd melted away like snow, and they hurried not the less because
+the stone which some one had thrown at Ferrol had struck a lad in the
+head, and brought him senseless and bleeding to the ground.
+
+Ferrol picked up the tricolour and handed it to the Regimental Surgeon.
+
+"I could have done it alone, I believe," he said; "and, upon my soul, I'm
+sorry for the poor devils.  Suppose we were Englishmen in France, eh?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+The fight was over.  The childish struggle against misrule had come to a
+childish end.  The little toy loyalists had been broken all to pieces.  A
+few thousand Frenchmen, with a vague patriotism, had shied some harmless
+stones at the British flag-staff on the citadel: that was all.  Obeying
+the instincts of blood, religion, race, and language, they had made a
+haphazard, sidelong charge upon their ancient conquerors, had spluttered
+and kicked a little, and had then turned tail upon disaster and defeat.
+An incoherent little army had been shattered into fugitive factors, and
+every one of these hurried and scurried for a hole of safety into which
+he could hide.  Some were mounted, but most were on foot.
+
+Officers fared little better than men.  It was "Save who can": they were
+all on a dead level of misfortune.  Hundreds reached no cover, but were
+overtaken and driven back to British headquarters.  In their terror,
+twenty brave rebels of two hours ago were to be captured by a single
+British officer of infantry speaking bad French.
+
+Two of these hopeless fugitives were still fortunate enough to get a
+start of the hounds of retaliation and revenge.  They were both mounted,
+and had far to go to reach their destination.  Home was the one word in
+the mind of each; and they both came from Bonaventure.
+
+The one was a tall, athletic young man, who had borne a captain's
+commission in Papineau's patriot army.  He rode a sorel horse--a great,
+wiry raw-bone, with a lunge like a moose, and legs that struck the ground
+with the precision of a piston-rod.  As soon as his nose was turned
+towards Bonaventure he smelt the wind of home in his nostrils; his
+hatchet head jerked till he got the bit straight between his teeth; then,
+gripping it as a fretful dog clamps the bone which his master pretends to
+wrest from him, he leaned down to his work, and the mud, the new-fallen
+snow and the slush flew like dirty sparks, and covered man and horse.
+
+Above, an uncertain, watery moon flew in and out among the shifting
+clouds; and now and then a shot came through the mist and the half dusk,
+telling of some poor fugitive fighting, overtaken, or killed.
+
+The horse neither turned head nor slackened gait.  He was like a living
+machine, obeying neither call nor spur, but travelling with an unchanging
+speed along the level road, and up and down hill, mile after mile.
+
+In the rider's heart were a hundred things; among them fear, that
+miserable depression which comes with the first defeats of life, the
+falling of the mercury from passionate activity to that frozen numbness
+which betrays the exhausted nerve and despairing mind.  The horse could
+not go fast enough; the panic of flight was on him.  He was conscious of
+it, despised himself for it; but he could not help it.  Yet, if he were
+overtaken, he would fight; yes, fight to the end, whatever it might be.
+Nicolas Lavilette had begun to unwind the coil of fortune and ambition
+which his mother had long been engaged in winding.
+
+A mile or two behind was another horse and another rider.  The animal was
+clean of limb, straight and shapely of body, with a leg like a lady's,
+and heart and wind to travel till she dropped.  This mare the little
+black notary, Shangois, had cheerfully stolen from beside the tent of the
+English general.  The bridle-rein hung upon the wrist of the notary's
+palsied left hand, and in his right hand he carried the long sabre of an
+artillery officer, which he had picked up on the battlefield.  He rode
+like a monkey clinging to the back of a hound, his shoulder hunched, his
+body bent forward even with the mare's neck, his knees gripping the
+saddle with a frightened tenacity, his small, black eyes peering into the
+darkness before him, and his ears alert to the sound of pursuers.
+
+Twenty men of the British artillery were also off on a chase that pleased
+them well.  The hunt was up.  It was not only the joy of killing, but the
+joy of gain, that spurred them on; for they would have that little black
+thief who stole the general's brown mare, or they would know the reason
+why.
+
+As the night wore on, Lavilette could hear hoof-beats behind him; those
+of the mare growing clearer and clearer, and those of the artillerymen
+remaining about the same, monotonously steady.  He looked back, and saw
+the mare lightly leaning to her work, and a little man hanging to her
+back.  He did not know who it was; and if he had known he would have
+wondered.  Shangois had ridden to camp to fetch him back to Bonaventure
+for two purposes: to secure the five thousand dollars from Ferrol, and to
+save Nic's sister from marrying a highwayman.  These reasons he would
+have given to Nic Lavilette, but other ulterior and malicious ideas were
+in his mind.  He had no fear, no real fear.  His body shrank, but that
+was because he had been little used to rough riding and to peril.  But he
+loved this game too, though there was a troop of foes behind him; and as
+long as they rode behind him he would ride on.
+
+He foresaw a moment when he would stop, slide to the ground, and with his
+sabre kill one man--or more.  Yes, he would kill one man.  He had a
+devilish feeling of delight in thinking how he would do it, and how red
+the sabre would look when he had done it.  He wished he had a hundred
+hands and a hundred sabres in those hands.  More than once he had been in
+danger of his life, and yet he had had no fear.
+
+He had in him the power of hatred; and he hated Ferrol as he had never
+hated anything in his life.  He hated him as much as, in a furtive sort
+of way, he loved the rebellious, primitive and violent Christine.
+
+As he rode on a hundred fancies passed through his brain, and they all
+had to do with killing or torturing.  As a boy dreams of magnificent
+deeds of prowess, so he dreamed of deeds of violence and cruelty.  In his
+life he had been secret, not vicious; he had enjoyed the power which
+comes from holding the secrets of others, and that had given him pleasure
+enough.  But now, as if the true passion, the vital principle, asserted
+itself at the very last, so with the shadow of death behind him, his real
+nature was dominant.  He was entirely sane, entirely natural, only
+malicious.
+
+The night wore on, and lifted higher into the sky, and the grey dawn
+crept slowly up: first a glimmer, then a neutral glow, then a sort of
+darkness again, and presently the candid beginning of day.
+
+As they neared the Parish of Bonaventure, Lavilette looked back again,
+and saw the little black notary a few hundred yards behind.  He
+recognised him this time, waved a hand, and then called to his own fagged
+horse.  Shangois's mare was not fagged; her heart and body were like
+steel.
+
+Not a quarter of a mile behind them both were three of the twenty
+artillerymen.  Lavilette came to the bridge shouting for Baby, the
+keeper.  Baby recognised him, and ran to the lever even as the sorel
+galloped up.  For the first time in the ride, Nic stuck spurs harshly
+into the sorel's side.  With a grunt of pain the horse sprang madly on.
+A half-dozen leaps more and they were across, even as the bridge began to
+turn; for Baby had not recognised the little black notary, and supposed
+him to be one of Nic's pursuers; the others he saw further back in the
+road.  It was only when Shangois was a third of the way across, that he
+knew the mare's rider.  There was no time to turn the bridge back, and
+there was no time for Shangois to stop the headlong pace of the mare.
+She gave a wild whinny of fright, and jumped cornerwise, clear out across
+the chasm, towards the moving bridge.  Her front feet struck the timbers,
+and then, without a cry, mare and rider dropped headlong down to the
+river beneath, swollen by the autumn rains.
+
+Baby looked down and saw the mare's head thrust above the water, once,
+twice; then there was a flash of a sabre--and nothing more.
+
+Shangois, with his dreams of malice and fighting, and the secrets of a
+half-dozen parishes strapped to his back, had dropped out of Bonaventure,
+as a stone crumbles from a bank into a stream, and many waters pass over
+it, and no one inquires whither it has gone, and no one mourns for it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+ON Sunday morning Ferrol lay resting on a sofa in a little room off the
+saloon.  He had suffered somewhat from the bruise on his head, and while
+the Lavilettes, including Christine, were at mass, he remained behind,
+alone in the house, save for two servants in the kitchen.  From where he
+lay he could look down into the village.  He was thinking of the tangle
+into which things had got.  Feeling was bitter against him, and against
+the Lavilettes also, now that the patriots were defeated.  It had gone
+about that he had warned the Governor.  The habitants, in their blind
+way, blamed him for the consequences of their own misdoing.  They blamed
+Nicolas Lavilette.  They blamed the Lavilettes for their friend ship with
+Ferrol.  They talked and blustered, yet they did not interfere with the
+two soldiers who kept guard at the home of the Regimental Surgeon.  It
+was expected that the Cure would speak of the Rebellion from the altar
+this morning.  It was also rumoured that he would have something to say
+about the Lavilettes; and Christine had insisted upon going.  He laughed
+to think of her fury when he suggested that the Cure would probably have
+something unpleasant to say about himself.  She would go and see to that
+herself, she said.  He was amused, and yet he was not in high spirits,
+for he had coughed a great deal since the incident of the day before, and
+his strength was much weakened.
+
+Presently he heard a footstep in the room, and turned over so that he
+might see.  It was Sophie Farcinelle.
+
+Before he had time to speak or to sit up, she had dropped a hand on his
+shoulder.  Her face was aflame.
+
+"You have been badly hurt, and I'm very sorry," she said.  "Why haven't
+you been to see me?  I looked for you.  I looked every day, and you
+didn't come, and--and I thought you had forgotten.  Have you?  Have you,
+Mr. Ferrol?"
+
+He had raised himself on his elbow, and his face was near hers.  It was
+not in him to resist the appealing of a pretty woman, and he had scarcely
+grasped the fact that he was a married man, his clandestine meetings with
+his wife having had, to this point, rather an air of adventure and
+irresponsibility.  It is hard to say what he might have done or left
+undone; but, as Sophie's face was within an inch of his own, the door of
+the room suddenly opened, and Christine appeared.  The indignation that
+had sent her back from mass to Ferrol was turned into another indignation
+now.
+
+Sophie, frightened, turned round and met her infuriated look.  She did
+not move, however.
+
+"Leave this room at once.  What do you want here?" Christine said,
+between gasps of anger.
+
+"The room is as much mine as yours," answered Sophie, sullenly.
+
+"The man isn't," retorted Christine, with a vicious snap of her teeth.
+
+"Come, come," said Ferrol, in a soothing tone, rising from the sofa and
+advancing.
+
+"What's he to you?" said Sophie, scornfully.
+
+"My husband: that's all!" answered Christine.  "And now, if you please,
+will you go to yours?  You'll find him at mass.  He'll have plenty of
+praying to do if he prays for you both--voila!"
+
+
+"Your husband!" said Sophie, in a husky voice, dumfounded and miserable.
+"Is that so?" she added to Ferrol.  "Is she-your wife?"
+
+"That's the case," he answered, "and, of course," he added in a
+mollifying tone, "being my sister as well as Christine's, there's no
+reason why you shouldn't be alone with me in the room a few moments.
+Is there now?" he added to Christine.
+
+The acting was clever enough, but not quite convincing, and Christine was
+too excited to respond to his blarney.
+
+"He can't be your real husband," said Sophie, hardly above a whisper.
+"The Cure didn't marry you, did he?"  She looked at Ferrol doubtfully.
+
+"Well, no," he said; "we were married over in Upper Canada."
+
+"By a Protestant?" asked Sophie.
+
+Christine interrrupted.  "What's that to you?  I hope I'll never see your
+face again while I live.  I want to be alone with my husband, and your
+husband wants to be alone with his wife: won't you oblige us and him--
+Hein?"
+
+Sophie gave Ferrol a look which haunted him while he lived.  One idle
+afternoon he had sowed the seeds of a little storm in the heart of a
+woman, and a whirlwind was driving through her life to parch and make
+desolate the green fields of her youth and womanhood.  He had loitered
+and dallied without motive; but the idle and unmeaning sinner is the most
+dangerous to others and to himself, and he realised it at that moment,
+so far as it was in him to realise anything of the kind.
+
+Sophie's figure as it left the room had that drooping, beaten look which
+only comes to the stricken and the incurably humiliated.
+
+"What have you said to her?" asked Christine of Ferrol, "what have you
+done to her?"
+
+"I didn't do a thing, upon my soul.  I didn't say a thing.  She'd only
+just come in."
+
+"What did she say to you?"
+
+"As near as I can remember, she said: 'You have been hurt, and I'm very
+sorry.  Why haven't you been to see me?  I looked for you; but you didn't
+come, and I thought you had forgotten me.'"
+
+"What did she mean by that?  How dared she!"
+
+"See here, Christine," he said, laying his hand on her quivering
+shoulder, "I didn't say much to her.  I was over there one afternoon, the
+afternoon I asked you to marry me.  I drank a lot of liqueur; she looked
+very pretty, and before she had a chance to say yes or no about it I
+kissed her.  Now that's a fact.  I've never spent five minutes with her
+alone since; I haven't even seen her since, until this morning.  Now
+that's the honest truth.  I know it was scampish; but I never pretended
+to be good.  It is nothing for you to make a fuss about, because,
+whatever I am--and it isn't much one way or another--I am all yours,
+straight as a die, Christine.  I suppose, if we lived together fifty
+years, I'd probably kiss fifty women--once a year isn't a high average;
+but those kisses wouldn't mean anything; and you, you, my girl"--he bent
+his head down to her "why, you mean everything to me, and I wouldn't give
+one kiss of yours for a hundred thousand of any other woman's in the
+world!  What you've done for me, and what you'd do for me--"
+
+There was a strange pathos in his voice, an uncommon thing, because his
+usual eloquence was, as a rule, more pleasing than touching.  A quick
+change of feeling passed over her, and her eyes filled with tears.  He
+ran his arm round her shoulder.
+
+"Ah, come, come!" he said, with a touch of insinuating brogue, and
+kissed her.  "Come, it's all right.  I didn't mean anything, and she
+didn't mean anything; and let's start fresh again."
+
+She looked up at him with quick intelligence.  "That's just what we'll
+have to do," she said.  "The Cure this morning at mass scolded the people
+about the Rebellion, and said that Nic and you had brought all this
+trouble upon Bonaventure; and everybody looked at our pew and snickered.
+Oh, how I hate them all!  Then I jumped up--"
+
+"Well?" asked Ferrol, "and what then?"
+
+"I told them that my brother wasn't a coward, and that you were my
+husband."
+
+"And then--then what happened?"
+
+"Oh, then there was a great fuss in the church, and the Cure said ugly
+things, and I left and came home quick.  And now--"
+
+"Well, and now?" Ferrol interrupted.
+
+"Well, now we'll have to do something."
+
+"You mean, to go away?" he asked, with a little shrug of his shoulder.
+She nodded her head.
+
+He was depressed: he had had a hemorrhage that morning, and the road
+seemed to close in on him on all sides.
+
+"How are we to live?" he asked, with a pitiful sort of smile.
+
+She looked up at him steadily for a moment, without speaking.  He did not
+understand the look in her eyes, until she said:
+
+"You have that five thousand dollars!"
+
+He drew back a step from her, and met her unwavering look a little
+fearfully.  She knew that--she--!  "When did you find it out?" he asked.
+
+"The morning we were married," she replied.
+
+"And you--you, Christine, you married me, a thief!"  She nodded again.
+
+"What difference could it make?" she asked.  "I wouldn't have been happy
+if I hadn't married you.  And I loved you!"
+
+"Look here, Christine," he said, "that five thousand dollars is not for
+you or for me.  You will be safe enough if anything should happen to me;
+your people would look after you, and you have some money in your own
+right.  But I've a sister, and she's lame.  She never had to do a stroke
+of work in her life, and she can't do it now.  I have shared with her
+anything I have had since times went wrong with us and our family.  I
+needed money badly enough, but I didn't care very much whether I got it
+for myself or not--only for her.  I wanted that five thousand dollars for
+her, and to her it shall go; not one penny to you, or to me, or to any
+other human being.  The Rebellion is over: that money wouldn't have
+altered things one way or another.  It's mine, and if anything happens to
+me--"
+
+He suddenly stooped down and caught her hands, looking her in the eyes
+steadily.
+
+"Christine," he said, "I want you never to ask me to spend a penny of
+that money; and I want you to promise me, by the name of the Virgin Mary,
+that you'll see my sister gets it, and that you'll never let her or any
+one else know where it came from.  Come, Christine, will you do it for
+me?  I know it's very little indeed I give you, and you're giving me
+everything; but some people are born to be debtors in this world, and
+some to be creditors, and some give all and get little, because--"
+
+She interrupted him.
+
+"Because they love as I love you," she said, throwing her arms round his
+neck.  "Show me where the money is, and I'll do all you say, if--"
+
+"Yes, if anything happens to me," he said, and dropped his hand
+caressingly upon her head.  He loved her in that moment.
+
+She raised her eyes to his.  He stooped and kissed her.  She was still in
+his arms as the door opened and Monsieur and Madame Lavilette entered,
+pale and angry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+That night the British soldiers camped in the village.  All over the
+country the rebels had been scattered and beaten, and Bonaventure had
+been humbled and injured.  After the blind injustice of the fearful and
+the beaten, Nicolas Lavilette and his family were blamed for the miseries
+which had come upon the place.  They had emerged from their isolation to
+tempt popular favour, had contrived many designs and ambitions, and in
+the midst of their largest hopes were humiliated, and were followed by
+resentment.  The position was intolerable.  In happy circumstances,
+Christine's marriage with Ferrol might have been a completion of their
+glory, but in reality it was the last blow to their progress.
+
+In the dusk, Ferrol and Christine sat in his room: she, defiant,
+indignant, courageous; he hiding his real feelings, and knowing that all
+she now planned and arranged would come to naught.  Three times that day
+he had had violent paroxysms of coughing; and at last had thrown himself
+on his bed, exhausted, helplessly wishing that something would end it
+all.  Illusion had passed for ever.  He no longer had a cold, but a
+mortal trouble that was killing him inch by inch.  He remembered how a
+brother officer of his, dying of an incurable disease, and abhorring
+suicide, had gone into a cafe and slapped an unoffending bully and
+duellist in the face, inviting a combat.  The end was sure, easy and
+honourable.  For himself--he looked at Christine.  Not all her abounding
+vitality, her warm, healthy body, or her overwhelming love, could give
+him one extra day of life, not one day.  What a fool he had been to think
+that she could do so!  And she must sit and watch him--she, with her
+primitive fierceness of love, must watch him sinking, fading helplessly
+out of life, sight and being.
+
+A bottle of whiskey was beside him.  During the two hours just gone he
+had drunk a whole pint of it.  He poured out another half-glass, filled
+it up with milk, and drank it off slowly.  At that moment a knock came
+to the door.  Christine opened it, and admitted one of the fugitives of
+Nicolas's company of rebels.  He saw Ferrol, and came straight to him.
+
+"A letter for M'sieu' the Honourable," said he "from M'sieu' le Capitaine
+Lavilette."
+
+Ferrol opened the paper.  It contained only a few lines.  Nicolas was
+hiding in the store-room of the vacant farmhouse, and Ferrol must assist
+him to escape to the State of New York.
+
+He had stolen into the village from the north, and, afraid to trust any
+one except this faithful member of his company, had taken refuge in a
+place where, if the worst came to the worst, he could defend himself,
+for a time at least.  Twenty rifles of the rebels had been stored in the
+farmhouse, and they were all loaded!  Ferrol, of course, could go where
+he liked, being a Britisher, and nobody would notice him.  Would he not
+try to get him away?
+
+While Christine questioned the fugitive, Ferrol thought the matter over.
+One thing he knew: the solution of the great problem had come; and the
+means to the solution ran through his head like lightning.  He rose to
+his feet, drank off a few mouthfuls of undiluted whiskey, filled a flask
+and put it in his pocket.  Then he found his pistols, and put on his
+greatcoat, muffler and cap, before he spoke a word.
+
+Christine stood watching him intently.
+
+"What are you going to do, Tom?" she said quietly.  "I am going to save
+your brother, if I can," was his reply, as he handed her Nic's letter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Half an hour later, as Ferrol was passing from Louis Lavilette's stables
+into the road leading to the Seigneury he met Sophie Farcinelle, face to
+face.  In a vague sort of way he was conscious that a look of despair and
+misery had suddenly wasted the bloom upon her cheek, and given to the
+large, cow-like eyes an expression of child-like hopelessness.  An apathy
+had settled upon his nerves.  He saw things as in a dream.  His brain
+worked swiftly, but everything that passed before his eyes was, as it
+were, in a kaleidoscope, vivid and glowing, but yet intangible.  His
+brain told him that here before him was a woman into whose life he had
+brought its first ordeal and humiliation.  But his heart only felt a
+reflective sort of pity: it was not a personal or immediate realisation,
+that is, not at first.
+
+He was scarcely conscious that he stood and looked at her for quite two
+minutes, without motion or speech on the part of either; but the dumb,
+desolate look in her eyes--a look of appeal, astonishment, horror and
+shame combined, presently clarified his senses, and he slowly grew to
+look at her as at his punishment, the punishment of his life.  Before
+--always before--Sophie had been vague and indistinct: seen to-day,
+forgotten tomorrow; and previous to meeting her scores had affected his
+senses, affected them not at all deeply.
+
+She was like a date in history to a boy who remembers that it meant
+something, but what, is not quite sure.  But the meaning and definiteness
+were his own.  Out of the irresponsibility of his nature, out of the
+moral ineptitude to which he had been born, moral knowledge came to him
+at last.  Love had not done it; neither the love of Christine, as strong
+as death, nor the love of his sister, the deepest thing he ever knew--but
+the look of a woman wronged.  He had inflicted on her the deepest wrong
+that may be done a woman.  A woman can forgive passion and ruin, and
+worse, if the man loves her, and she can forgive herself, remembering
+that to her who loved much, much was forgiven.  But out of wilful
+idleness, the mere flattery of the senses, a vampire feeding upon the
+spirits and souls of others, for nothing save emotion for emotion's sake
+--that was shameless, it was the last humiliation of a woman.  As it
+were, to lose joy, and glow, and fervour of young, sincere and healthy
+life, to whip up the dying vitality and morbid brain of a consumptive!
+
+All in a flash he saw it, realised it, and hated himself for it.  He knew
+that as long as he lived, an hour or ten years, he never could redeem
+himself; never could forgive himself, and never buy back the life that he
+had injured.  Many a time in his life he had kissed and ridden away, and
+had been unannoyed by conscience.  But in proportion as conscience had
+neglected him before, it ground him now between the stones, and he saw
+himself as he was.  Come of a gentleman's family, he knew he was no
+gentleman.  Having learned the forms and courtesies of life, having
+infused his whole career with a spirit of gay bonhomie, he knew that in
+truth he was a swaggerer; that bad taste, infamous bad taste, had marked
+almost everything that he had done in his life.  He had passed as one of
+the nobility, but he knew that all true men, all he had ever met, must
+have read him through and through.  He had understood this before to a
+certain point, had read himself to a certain mark of gauge, but he had
+never been honestly and truly a man until this moment.  His soul was
+naked before his eyes.  It had been naked before, but he had laughed.
+Born without real remorse, he felt it at last.  The true thing started
+within him.  God, the avenger, the revealer and the healer, had held up
+this woman as a glass to him that he might see himself.
+
+He saw her as she had been, a docile, soft-eyed girl, untouched by
+anything that defames or shames, and all in a moment the man that had
+never been in him until now, from the time he laughed first into his
+mother's eyes as a babe, spoke out as simply as a child would have
+spoken, and told the truth.  There were no ameliorating phrases to soften
+it to her ears; there was no tact, there was no blarney, there was no
+suave suggestion now, no cheap gaiety, no cynicism of the social vampire
+--only the direct statement of a self-reproachful, dying man.
+
+"I didn't fully know what I was doing," he said to her.  "If I had
+understood then as I do now, I would never have come near you.  It was
+the worst wickedness I ever did."
+
+The new note in his voice, the new fashion of his words, the new look of
+his eyes, startled her, confused her.  She could scarcely believe he was
+the same man.  The dumb desolation lifted a little, and a look of under
+standing seemed to pierce her tragic apathy.  As if a current of thought
+had been suddenly sent through her, she drew herself up with a little
+shiver, and looked at him as if she were about to speak; but instead of
+doing so, a strange, unhappy smile passed across her lips.
+
+He saw that all the goodness of her nature was trying to arouse itself
+and assure him of forgiveness.  It did not deceive him in the least.
+
+"I won't be so mean now as to say I was weak," he added.  "I was not
+weak; I was bad.  I always felt I was born a liar and a thief.  I've lied
+to myself all my life; and I've lied to other people because I never was
+a true man."
+
+"A thief!" she said at last, scarcely above a whisper, and looking at him
+with a flash of horror in her eyes.  "A thief!"
+
+It was no use; he could not allow her to think he meant a thief in the
+vulgar, common sense, though that was what he was: just a common
+criminal.
+
+"I have stolen the kind thoughts and love of people to whom I gave
+nothing in return," he said steadily.  "There is nothing good in me.
+I used to think I was good-natured; but I was not, or I wouldn't have
+brought misery to a girl like you."
+
+His truth broke down the barriers of her anger and despair.  Something
+welled up in her heart: it may have been love, it may have been inherent
+womanliness.
+
+"Why did you marry Christine?" she asked.
+
+All at once he saw that she never could quite understand.  Her stand-
+point would still, in the end, be the stand-point of a woman.  He saw
+that she would have forgiven him, even had he not loved her, if he had
+not married Christine.  For the first time he knew something, the real
+something, of a woman's heart.  He had never known it before, because he
+had been so false himself.  He might have been evil and had a conscience
+too; then he would have been wise.  But he had been evil, and had had no
+conscience or moral mentor from the beginning; so he had never known
+anything real in his life.  He thought he had known Christine, but now he
+saw her in a new light, through the eyes of her sister from whose heart
+he had gathered a harvest of passion and affection, and had burnt the
+stubble and seared the soil forever.  Sophie could never justify herself
+in the eyes of her husband, or in her own eyes, because this man did not
+love her.  Even as he stood before her there, declaring himself to her as
+wilfully wicked in all that he had said and done, she still longed
+passionately for the thing that was denied her: not her lost truth back,
+but the love that would have compensated for her suffering, and in some
+poor sense have justified her in years to come.  She did not put it into
+words, but the thought was bluntly in her mind.  She looked at him, and
+her eyes filled with tears, which dropped down her cheek to the ground.
+
+He was about to answer her question, when, all at once, her honest eyes
+looked into his mournfully, and she said with an incredible pathos and
+simplicity:
+
+"I don't know how I am going to live on with Magon.  I suppose I'll have
+to keep pretending till I die!"
+
+The bell in the church was ringing for vespers.  It sounded peaceful and
+quiet, as though no war, or rebellion, or misery and shame, were anywhere
+within the radius of its travel.
+
+Just where they stood there was a tall calvary.  Behind it was some
+shrubbery.  Ferrol was going to answer her, when he saw, coming along the
+road, the Cure in his robes, bearing the host.  In front of him trotted
+an acolyte, swinging the censer.
+
+Ferrol quickly drew Sophie aside behind the bushes, where they should not
+be seen; for he was no longer reckless.  He wished to be careful for the
+woman's sake.
+
+The Curb did not turn his head to the right or left, but came along
+chanting something slowly.  The smell of the incense floated past them.
+When the priest and the lad reached the calvary they turned towards it,
+bowed, crossed themselves, and the lad rang a little silver bell.  Then
+the two passed on, the lad still ringing.  When they were out of sight
+the sound of the bell came softly, softly up the road, while the bell in
+the church tower still called to prayer.
+
+The words the priest chanted seemed to ring through the air after he had
+gone.
+
+              "God have mercy upon the passing soul!
+               God have mercy upon the passing soul!
+               Hear the prayer of the sinner, O Lord;
+               Listen to the voice of those that mourn;
+               Have mercy upon the sinner, O Lord!"
+
+When Ferrol turned to Sophie again, both her hands were clasping the
+calvary, and she had dropped her head upon them.
+
+"I must go," he said.  She did not move.
+
+Again he spoke to her; but she did not lift her head.  Presently,
+however, as he stood watching her, she moved away from the calvary, and,
+with her back still turned to him, stepped out into the road and hurried
+on towards her home, never once turning her head.
+
+He stood looking after her for a moment, then turned and, sitting on a
+log behind the shrubbery, he tore a few pieces of paper out of a note-
+book and began writing.  He wrote swiftly for about twenty minutes or
+more, then, arising, he moved on towards the village, where crowds had
+gathered--excited, fearful, tumultuous; for the British soldiers had just
+entered the place.
+
+Ferrol seemed almost oblivious of the threatening crowd, which once or
+twice jostled him more than was accidental.  He came into the post-
+office, got an envelope, put his letter inside it, stamped it, addressed
+it to Christine, and dropped it into the letter-box.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+An hour later he stood among a few companies of British soldiers in front
+of the massive stone store-house of the Lavilettes' abandoned farmhouse,
+with its thick shuttered windows and its solid oak doors.  It was too
+late to attempt the fugitive's escape, save by strategy.  Over half an
+hour Nic had kept them at bay.  He had made loopholes in the shutters and
+the door, and from these he fired upon his assailants.  Already he had
+wounded five and killed two.
+
+Men had been sent for timber to batter down the door and windows.
+Meanwhile, the troops stood at a respectful distance, out of the range of
+Nic's firing, awaiting developments.
+
+Ferrol consulted with the officers, advising a truce and parley, offering
+himself as mediator to induce Nic to surrender.  To this the officers
+assented, but warned him that his life might pay the price of his
+temerity.  He laughed at this.  He had been talking, with his head and
+throat well muffled, and the collar of his greatcoat drawn about his
+ears.  Once or twice he coughed, a hacking, wrenching cough, which struck
+the ears of more than one of the officers painfully; for they had known
+him in his best and gayest days at Quebec.
+
+It was arranged that he should advance, holding out a flag of truce.
+Before he went he drew aside one of the younger lieutenants, in whose
+home at Quebec his sister had always been a welcome visitor, and told him
+briefly the story of his marriage, of his wife and of Nicolas.  He sent
+Christine a message, that she should not forget to carry his last token
+to his sister!  Then turning, he muffled up his face against the crisp,
+harsh air (there was design in this also), and, waving a white
+handkerchief, advanced to the door of the store-room.
+
+The soldiers waited anxiously, fearing that Nic would fire, in spite of
+all; but presently a spot of white appeared at one of the loopholes; then
+the door was slowly opened.  Ferrol entered, and it was closed again.
+
+Nicolas Lavilette grasped his hand.
+
+"I knew you wouldn't go back on me," said he.  "I knew you were my
+friend.  What the devil do they want out there?"
+
+"I am more than your friend: I'm your brother," answered Ferrol,
+meaningly.  Then, quickly taking off his greatcoat, cap, muffler and
+boots: "Quick, on with these!" he said.  "There's no time to lose!"
+
+"What's all this?" asked Nic.
+
+"Never mind; do exactly as I say, and there's a chance for you."
+
+Nic put on the overcoat.  Ferrol placed the cap on his head, and muffled
+him up exactly as he himself had been, then made him put on his own top-
+boots.
+
+"Now, see," he said, "everything depends upon how you do this thing.
+You are about my height.  Pass yourself off for me.  Walk loose and long
+as I do, and cough like me as you go."
+
+There was no difficulty in showing him what the cough was like: he
+involuntarily offered an illustration as he spoke.
+
+"As soon as I shut the door and you start forward, I'll fire on them.
+That'll divert their attention from you.  They'll take you for me, and
+think I've failed in persuading you to give yourself up.  Go straight on-
+don't hurry--coughing all the time; and if you can make the dark, just
+beyond the soldiers, by the garden bench, you'll find two men.  They'll
+help you.  Make for the big tree on the Seigneury road--you know: where
+you were robbed.  There you'll find the fastest horse from your father's
+stables.  Then ride, my boy, ride for your life to the State of New
+York!"
+
+"And you--you?" asked Nicolas.  Ferrol laughed.
+
+"You needn't worry about me, Nic.  I'll get out of this all right; as
+right as rain!  Are you ready?  Steady now, steady.  Let me hear you
+cough."  Nic coughed.
+
+"No, that isn't it.  Listen and watch."  Ferrol coughed.  "Here," he
+said, taking something from his pocket, "open your mouth."  He threw some
+pepper down the other's throat.  "Now try it."
+
+Nic coughed almost convulsively.
+
+"Yes, that's it, that's it!  Just keep that up.  Come along now.  Quick-
+not a moment to lose!  Steady!  You're all right, my boy; you've got
+nerve, and that's the thing.  Good-bye, Nic, good luck to you!"
+
+They grasped hands: the door opened swiftly, and Nic stepped outside.  In
+an instant Ferrol was at the loophole.  Raising a rifle, he fired, then
+again and again.  Through the loophole he could see a half-dozen men lift
+a log to advance on the door as Nic passed a couple of officers, coughing
+hard, and making spasmodic motions with his hand, as though exhausted and
+unable to speak.
+
+He fired again, and a soldier fell.  The lust of fighting was on him now.
+It was not a question of country or of race, but only a man crowding the
+power of old instincts into the last moments of his life.  The vigour and
+valour of a reconquered youth seemed to inspire him; he felt as he did
+when a mere boy fighting on the Danube.  His blood rioted in his veins;
+his eyes flashed.  He lifted the flask of whiskey and gulped down great
+mouthfuls of it, and fired again and again, laughing madly.
+
+"Let them come on, let them come on," he cried.  "By God, I'll settle
+them!"  The frenzy of war possessed him.  He heard the timber crash
+against the door--once, twice, thrice, and then give away.  He swung
+round and saw men's faces glowing in the light of the fire, and then
+another face shot in before the others--that of Vanne Castine.
+
+With a cry of fury he ran forward into the doorway.  Castine saw him at
+the same moment.  With a similar instinct each sprang for the other's
+throat, Castine with a knife in his hand.
+
+A cry of astonishment went up from the officers and the men without.
+They had expected to see Nic; but Nic was on his way to the horse beneath
+the great elm tree, and from the elm tree to the State of New York--and
+safety.
+
+The men and the officers fell back as Castine and Ferrol clinched in a
+death struggle.  Ferrol knew that his end had come.  He had expected it,
+hoped for it.  But, before the end, he wanted to kill this man, if he
+could.  He caught Castine's head in his hands, and, with a last effort,
+twisted it back with a sudden jerk.
+
+All at once, with the effort, blood spurted from his mouth into the
+other's face.  He shivered, tottered and fell back, as Castine struck
+blindly into space.  For a moment Ferrol swayed back and forth, stretched
+out his hands convulsively and gasped, trying to speak, the blood welling
+from his lips.  His eyes were wild, anxious and yearning, his face deadly
+pale and covered with a cold sweat.  Presently he collapsed, like a
+loosened bundle, upon the steps.
+
+Castine, blinded with blood, turned round, and the light of the fire upon
+his open mouth made him appear to grin painfully--an involuntary grimace
+of terror.
+
+At that instant a rifle shot rang out from the shrubbery, and Castine
+sprang from the ground and fell at Ferrol's feet.  Then, with a
+contortive shudder, he rolled over and over the steps, and lay face
+downward upon the ground-dead.
+
+A girl ran forward from the trees, with a cry, pushing her way through to
+Ferrol's body.  Lifting up his head, she called to him in an agony of
+entreaty.  But he made no answer.
+
+"That's the woman who fired the shot!" said a subaltern officer
+excitedly.  "I saw her!"
+
+"Shut up, you fool--it was his wife!" exclaimed the young captain to
+whom Ferrol had given his last message for Christine.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+After which comes steady happiness or the devil to pay (wedding)
+All men are worse than most women
+I always did what was wrong, and liked it--nearly always
+Men feel surer of women than women feel of men
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "POMP OF THE LAVILETTES":
+
+After which comes steady happiness or the devil to pay (wedding)
+All men are worse than most women
+I always did what was wrong, and liked it--nearly always
+Illusive hopes and irresponsible deceptions
+Men feel surer of women than women feel of men
+She lacked sense a little and sensitiveness much
+To be popular is not necessarily to be contemptible
+Who say 'God bless you', in New York! they say 'Damn you!'
+
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POMP OF THE LAVILETTES, BY PARKER ***
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+*********** This file should be named gp44w10.txt or gp44w10.zip ***********
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