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Title: The Lane That Had No Turning, Volume 4.

Author: Gilbert Parker

Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6240]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on October 17, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LANE HAD NO TURNING, PARKER, V4 ***



This eBook was produced by David Widger





THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 4.



TIMES WERE HARD IN PONTIAC
MEDALLION'S WHIM
THE PRISONER
AN UPSET PRICE
A FRAGMENT OF LIVES
THE MAN THAT DIED AT ALMA
THE BARON OF BEAUGARD
THE TUNE McGILVERAY PLAYED




TIMES WERE HARD IN PONTIAC

It was soon after the Rebellion, and there was little food to be had
and less money, and winter was at hand.  Pontiac, ever most loyal to old
France, though obedient to the English, had herself sent few recruits to
be shot down by Colborne; but she had emptied her pockets in sending to
the front the fulness of her barns and the best cattle of her fields.
She gave her all; she was frank in giving, hid nothing; and when her own
trouble came there was no voice calling on her behalf.  And Pontiac would
rather starve than beg.  So, as the winter went on, she starved in
silence, and no one had more than sour milk and bread and a potato now
and then.  The Cure, the Avocat, and the Little Chemist fared no better
than the habitants; for they gave all they had right and left, and
themselves often went hungry to bed.  And the truth is that few outside
Pontiac knew of her suffering; she kept the secret of it close.

It seemed at last, however, to the Cure that he must, after all, write
to the world outside for help.  That was when he saw the faces of the
children get pale and drawn.  There never was a time when there were so
few fish in the river and so little game in the woods.  At last, from the
altar steps one Sunday, the Cure, with a calm, sad voice, told the people
that, for "the dear children's sake," they must sink their pride and ask
help from without.  He would write first to the Bishop of Quebec; "for,"
said he, "Mother Church will help us; she will give us food, and money to
buy seed in the spring; and, please God, we will pay all back in a year
or two!"  He paused a minute, then continued: "Some one must go, to speak
plainly and wisely of our trouble, that there be no mistake--we are not
beggars, we are only borrowers.  Who will go?  I may not myself, for who
would give the Blessed Sacrament, and speak to the sick, or say Mass and
comfort you?"

There was silence in the church for a moment, and many faces meanwhile
turned instinctively to M. Garon the Avocat, and some to the Little
Chemist.

"Who will go?" asked the Cure again.  "It is a bitter journey, but our
pride must not be our shame in the end.  Who will go?"

Every one expected that the Avocat or the Little Chemist would rise; but
while they looked at each other, waiting and sorrowful, and the Avocat's
fingers fluttered to the seat in front of him, to draw himself up, a
voice came from the corner opposite, saying: "M'sieu' le Cure, I will
go."

A strange, painful silence fell on the people for a moment, and then went
round an almost incredulous whisper: "Parpon the dwarf!"

Parpon's deep eyes were fixed on the Cure, his hunched body leaning on
the railing in front of him, his long, strong arms stretched out as if he
were begging for some good thing.  The murmur among the people increased,
but the Cure raised his hand to command silence, and his eyes gazed
steadily at the dwarf.  It might seem that he was noting the huge head,
the shaggy hair, the overhanging brows, the weird face of this distortion
of a thing made in God's own image.  But he was thinking instead of how
the angel and the devil may live side by side in a man, and neither be
entirely driven out--and the angel conquer in great times and seasons.

He beckoned to Parpon to come over, and the dwarf trotted with a sidelong
motion to the chancel steps.  Every face in the congregation was eager,
and some were mystified, even anxious.  They all knew the singular power
of the little man--his knowledge, his deep wit, his judgment, his
occasional fierceness, his infrequent malice; but he was kind to children
and the sick, and the Cure and the Avocat and their little coterie
respected him.  Once everybody had worshipped him: that was when he had
sung in the Mass, the day of the funeral of the wife of Farette the
miller, for whom he worked.  It had been rumoured that in his hut by the
Rock of Red Pigeons, up at Dalgrothe Mountain, a voice of most wonderful
power and sweetness had been heard singing; but this was only rumour.
Yet when the body of the miller's wife lay in the church, he had sung so
that men and women wept and held each other's hands for joy.  He had
never sung since, however; his voice of silver was locked away in the
cabinet of secret purposes which every man has somewhere in his own soul.

"What will you say to the Bishop, Parpon?" asked the Cure.

The congregation stirred in their seats, for they saw that the Cure
intended Parpon to go.

Parpon went up two steps of the chancel quietly and caught the arm of the
Cure, drawing him down to whisper in his ear.

A flush and then a peculiar soft light passed over the Cure's face, and
he raised his hand over Parpon's head in benediction and said: "Go, my
son, and the blessing of God and of His dear Son be with you."

Then suddenly he turned to the altar, and, raising his hands, he tried to
speak, but only said: "O Lord, Thou knowest our pride and our vanity,
hear us, and--"

Soon afterwards, with tearful eyes, he preached from the text:

"And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it
not."

                    .......................

Five days later a little, uncouth man took off his hat in the chief
street of Quebec, and began to sing a song of Picardy to an air which no
man in French Canada had ever heard.  Little farmers on their way to the
market by the Place de Cathedral stopped, listening, though every
moment's delay lessened their chances of getting a stand in the market-
place.  Butchers and milkmen loitered, regardless of waiting customers;
a little company of soldiers caught up the chorus, and, to avoid
involuntary revolt, their sergeant halted them, that they might listen.
Gentlemen strolling by--doctor, lawyer, officer, idler--paused and forgot
the raw climate, for this marvellous voice in the unshapely body warmed
them, and they pushed in among the fast-gathering crowd.  Ladies hurrying
by in their sleighs lost their hearts to the thrilling notes of:

                   "Little grey fisherman,
                    Where is your daughter?
                    Where is your daughter so sweet?
                    Little grey man who comes Over the water,
                    I have knelt down at her feet,
                    Knelt at your Gabrielle's feet---ci ci!"

Presently the wife of the governor stepped out from her sleigh, and,
coming over, quickly took Parpon's cap from his hand and went round among
the crowd with it, gathering money.

"He is hungry, he is poor," she said, with tears in her eyes.  She had
known the song in her childhood, and he who used to sing it to her was in
her sight no more.  In vain the gentlemen would have taken the cap from
her; she gathered the money herself, and others followed, and Parpon sang
on.

A night later a crowd gathered in the great hall of the city, filling it
to the doors, to hear the dwarf sing.  He came on the platform dressed as
he had entered the city, with heavy, home-made coat and trousers, and
moccasins, and a red woollen comforter about his neck--but this comforter
he took off when he began to sing.  Old France and New France, and the
loves and hates and joys and sorrows of all lands, met that night in the
soul of this dwarf with the divine voice, who did not give them his name,
so that they called him, for want of a better title, the Provencal.  And
again two nights afterwards it was the same, and yet again a third night
and a fourth, and the simple folk, and wise folk also, went mad after
Parpon the dwarf.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared from Quebec City, and the next Sunday
morning, while the Cure was saying the last words of the Mass, he entered
the Church of St. Saviour's at Pontiac.  Going up to the chancel steps he
waited.  The murmuring of the people drew the Cure's attention, and then,
seeing Parpon, he came forward.

Parpon drew from his breast a bag, and put it in his hands, and beckoning
down the Cure's head, he whispered.

The Cure turned to the altar and raised the bag towards it in ascription
and thanksgiving, then he turned to Parpon again, but the dwarf was
trotting away down the aisle and from the church.

"Dear children," said the Cure, "we are saved, and we are not shamed."
He held up the bag.  "Parpon has brought us two thousand dollars: we
shall have food to eat, and there shall be more money against seed-time.
The giver of this good gift demands that his name be not known.  Such is
all true charity.  Let us pray."

So hard times passed from Pontiac as the months went on; but none save
the Cure and the Avocat knew who had helped her in her hour of need.






MEDALLION'S WHIM

When the Avocat began to lose his health and spirits, and there crept
through his shrewd gravity and kindliness a petulance and dejection,
Medallion was the only person who had an inspiriting effect upon him.
The Little Chemist had decided that the change in him was due to bad
circulation and failing powers: which was only partially true.

Medallion made a deeper guess.  "Want to know what's the matter with
him?" he said.  "Ha, I'll tell you!  Woman."

"Woman--God bless me!" said the Little Chemist, in a frightened way.

"Woman, little man; I mean the want of a woman," said Medallion.

The Cure, who was present, shrugged his shoulders.  "He has an excellent
cook, and his bed and jackets are well aired; I see them constantly at
the windows."

A laugh gurgled in Medallion's throat.  He loved these innocent folk; but
himself went twice a year to Quebec City and had more expanded views.

"Woman, Padre"--nodding to the priest, and rubbing his chin so that it
rasped like sand-paper--"Woman, my druggist"--throwing a sly look at the
Chemist----"woman, neither as cook nor bottle-washer, is what he needs.
Every man-out of holy orders"--this in deference to his good friend the
Cure--"arrives at the time when his youth must be renewed or he becomes
as dry bones--like an empty house--furniture sold off.  Can only be
renewed one way--Woman. Well, here's our Avocat, and there's his remedy.
He's got the cooking and the clean fresh linen; he must have a wife, the
very best."

"Ah, my friend, you are droll," said the Cure, arching his long fingers
at his lips and blowing gently through them, but not smiling in the
least; rather serious, almost reproving.

"It is such a whim, such a whim!" said the Little Chemist, shaking his
head and looking through his glasses sideways like a wise bird.

"Ha--you shall see!  The man must be saved; our Cure shall have his fees;
our druggist shall provide the finest essences for the feast--no more
pills.  And we shall dine with our Avocat once a week--with asparagus in
season for the Cure, and a little good wine for all.  Ha!"

His Ha! was never a laugh; it was unctuous, abrupt, an ejaculation of
satisfaction, knowledge, solid enjoyment, final solution.

The Cure shook his head doubtfully; he did not see the need; he did not
believe in Medallion's whim; still he knew that the man's judgment was
shrewd in most things, and he would be silent and wait.  But he shrank
from any new phase of life likely to alter the conditions of that old
companionship, which included themselves, the Avocat, and the young
Doctor, who, like the Little Chemist, was married.

The Chemist sharply said: "Well, well, perhaps.  I hope.  There is a
poetry (his English was not perfect, and at times he mixed it with French
in an amusing manner), a little chanson, which runs:

             "'Sorrowful is the little house,
               The little house by the winding stream;
               All the laughter has died away
                    Out of the little house.
               But down there come from the lofty hills
               Footsteps and eyes agleam,
               Bringing the laughter of yesterday
                    Into the little house,
               By the winding stream and the hills.
               Di ron, di ron, di ron, di ron-don!'"

The Little Chemist blushed faintly at the silence that followed his
timid, quaint recital.  The Cure looked calm and kind, and drawn away as
if in thought; but Medallion presently got up, stooped, and laid his long
fingers on the shoulder of the apothecary.

"Exactly, little man," he said; "we've both got the same idea in our
heads.  I've put it hard fact, you've put it soft sentiment; and it's
God's truth either way."

Presently the Cure asked, as if from a great distance, so meditative was
his voice: "Who will be the woman, Medallion?"

"I've got one in my eye--the very right one for our Avocat; not here, not
out of Pontiac, but from St. Jean in the hills--fulfilling your verses,
gentle apothecary.  She must bring what is fresh--he must feel that the
hills have come to him, she that the valley is hers for the first time.
A new world for them both.  Ha!"

"Regardez Ca!  you are a great man," said the Little Chemist.

There was a strange, inscrutable look in the kind priest's eyes.  The
Avocat had confessed to him in his time.

Medallion took up his hat.

"Where are you going?" said the Little Chemist.  "To our Avocat, and
then to St. Jean."

He opened the door and vanished.  The two that were left shook their
heads and wondered.

Chuckling softly to himself, Medallion strode away through the lane of
white-board houses and the smoke of strong tabac from these houses, now
and then pulling suddenly up to avoid stumbling over a child, where
children are numbered by the dozen to every house.  He came at last to a
house unlike the others, in that it was of stone and larger.  He leaned
for a moment over the gate, and looked through a window into a room where
the Avocat sat propped up with cushions in a great chair, staring
gloomily at two candles burning on the table before him.  Medallion
watched him for a long time.  The Avocat never changed his position; he
only stared at the candle, and once or twice his lips moved.  A woman
came in and put a steaming bowl before him, and laid a pipe and matches
beside the bowl.  She was a very little, thin old woman, quick and quiet
and watchful--his housekeeper.  The Avocat took no notice of her.  She
looked at him several times anxiously, and passed backwards and forwards
behind him as a hen moves upon the flank of her brood.  All at once she
stopped.  Her small, white fingers, with their large rheumatic knuckles,
lay flat on her lips as she stood for an instant musing; then she trotted
lightly to a bureau, got pen and paper and ink, reached down a bunch of
keys from the mantel, and came and put them all beside the bowl and the
pipe.  Still the Avocat did not stir, or show that he recognised her.
She went to the door, turned, and looked back, her fingers again at her
lips, then slowly sidled out of the room.  It was long before the Avocat
moved.  His eyes had not wavered from the space between the candles.  At
last, however, he glanced down.  His eye caught the bowl, then the pipe.
He reached out a slow hand for the pipe, and was taking it up, when his
glance fell on the keys and the writing material.  He put the pipe down,
looked up at the door through which the little old woman had gone, gazed
round the room, took up the keys, but soon put them down again with a
sigh, and settled back in his chair.  Now his gaze alternated between
that long lane, sloping into shadow between the candles, and the keys.

Medallion threw a leg over the fence and came in a few steps to the door.
He opened it quietly and entered.  In the dark he felt his way along the
wall to the door of the Avocat's room, opened it, and thrust in his
ungainly, whimsical face.

"Ha!" he laughed with quick-winking eyes.  "Evening, Garon.  Live the
Code Napoleon!  Pipes for two."  A change came slowly over the Avocat.
His eyes drew away from that vista between the candles, and the strange
distant look faded out of them.

"Great is the Code Napoleon!" he said mechanically.  Then, presently:
"Ah, my friend, Medallion!"

His first words were the answer to a formula which always passed between
them on meeting.  As soon as Garon had said them, Medallion's lanky body
followed his face, and in a moment he had the Avocat's hand in his,
swallowing it, of purpose crushing it, so that Monsieur Garon waked up
smartly and gave his visitor a pensive smile.  Medallion's cheerful
nervous vitality seldom failed to inspire whom he chose to inspire with
Something of his own life and cheerfulness.  In a few moments both the
Avocat and himself were smoking, and the contents of the steaming bowl
were divided between them.  Medallion talked on many things.  The little
old housekeeper came in, chirped a soft good-evening, flashed a small
thankful smile at Medallion, and, after renewing the bowl and lighting
two more tall candles, disappeared.  Medallion began with the parish,
passed to the law, from the law to Napoleon, from Napoleon to France,
and from France to the world, drawing out from the Avocat something of
his old vivacity and fire.  At last Medallion, seeing that the time was
ripe, turned his glass round musingly in his fingers before him and said:

"Benoit, Annette's husband, died to-day, Garon.  You knew him.
He went singing--gone in the head, but singing as he used to do before he
married--or got drunk!  Perhaps his youth came back to him when he was
going to die, just for a minute."

The Avocat's eye gazed at Medallion earnestly now, and Medallion went on:

"As good singing as you want to hear.  You've heard the words of the
song--the river drivers sing it:

             "'What is there like to the cry of the bird
                 That sings in its nest in the lilac tree?
               A voice the sweetest you ever have heard;
                 It is there, it is here, ci ci!
               It is there, it is here, it must roam and roam,
                 And wander from shore to shore,
               Till I go forth and bring it home,
                 And enter and close my door
               Row along, row along home, ci ci!'"

When Medallion had finished saying the first verse he waited, but the
Avocat said nothing; his eyes were now fastened again on that avenue
between the candles leading out into the immortal part of him--his past;
he was busy with a life that had once been spent in the fields of
Fontainebleau and in the shadow of the Pantheon.

Medallion went on:

             "'What is there like to the laughing star,
               Far up from the lilac tree?
               A face that's brighter and finer far;
               It laughs and it shines, ci, ci!
               It laughs and it shines, it must roam and roam,
               And travel from shore to shore,
               Till I go forth and bring it home,
               And house it within my door
               Row along, row along home, ci, ci!'"

When Medallion had finished he raised his glass and said: "Garon, I drink
to home and woman!"

He waited.  The Avocat's eyes drew away from the candles again, and he
came to his feet suddenly, swaying slightly as he did so.  He caught up
a glass and, lifting it, said: "I drink to home and--" a little cold
burst of laughter came from him, he threw his head back with something
like disdain--"and the Code Napoleon!" he added abruptly.

Then he put the glass down without drinking, wheeled back, and dropped
into his chair.  Presently he got up, took his keys, went over, opened
the bureau, and brought back a well-worn note-book which looked like a
diary.  He seemed to have forgotten Medallion's presence, but it was not
so; he had reached the moment of disclosure which comes to every man, no
matter how secretive, when he must tell what is on his mind or die.  He
opened the book with trembling fingers, took a pen and wrote, at first
slowly, while Medallion smoked:

"September 13th.--It is five-and-twenty years ago to-day--Mon Dieu, how
we danced that night on the flags before the Sorbonne!  How gay we were
in the Maison Bleu!  We were gay and happy--Lulie and I--two rooms and a
few francs ahead every week.  That night we danced and poured out the
light wine, because we were to be married to-morrow.  Perhaps there would
be a child, if the priest blessed us, she whispered to me as we watched
the soft-travelling moon in the gardens of the Luxembourg.  Well, we
danced.  There was an artist with us.  I saw him catch Lulie about the
waist, and kiss her on the neck.  She was angry, but I did not think of
that; I was mad with wine.  I quarrelled with her, and said to her a
shameful thing.  Then I rushed away.  We were not married the next day;
I could not find her.  One night, soon after, there was a revolution of
students at Mont Parnasse.  I was hurt.  I remember that she came to me
then and nursed me, but when I got well she was gone.  Then came the
secret word from the Government that I must leave the country or go to
prison.  I came here.  Alas! it is long since we danced before the
Sorbonne, and supped at the Maison Bleu.  I shall never see again the
gardens of the Luxembourg.  Well, that was a mad night five-and-twenty
years ago!"

His pen went faster and faster.  His eyes lighted up, he seemed quite
forgetful of Medallion's presence.  When he finished, a fresh change came
over him.  He gathered his thin fingers in a bunch at his lips, and made
an airy salute to the warm space between the candles.  He drew himself
together with a youthful air, and held his grey head gallantly.  Youth
and age in him seemed almost grotesquely mingled.  Sprightly notes from
the song of a cafe chantant hovered on his thin, dry lips.  Medallion,
amused, yet with a hushed kind of feeling through all his nerves, pushed
the Avocat's tumbler till it touched his fingers.  The thin fingers
twined round it, and once more he came to his feet.  He raised the glass.
"To--" for a minute he got no further--"To the wedding-eve!" he said,
and sipped the hot wine.  Presently he pushed the little well-worn book
over to Medallion.  "I have known you fifteen years--read!" he said.  He
gave Medallion a meaning look out of his now flashing eyes.  Medallion's
bony face responded cordially.  "Of course," he answered, picked up the
book, and read what the Avocat had written.  It was on the last page.
When he had finished reading, he held the book musingly.  His whim had
suddenly taken on a new colour.  The Avocat, who had been walking up and
down the room, with the quick step of a young man, stopped before him,
took the book from him, turned to the first page, and handed it back
silently.  Medallion read:

Quebec, September 13th, 18-.  It is one year since.  I shall learn to
laugh some day.

Medallion looked up at him.  The old man threw back his head, spread out
the last page in the book which he had just written, and said defiantly,
as though expecting contradiction to his self-deception--"I have
learned."

Then he laughed, but the laugh was dry and hollow and painful.  It
suddenly passed from his wrinkled lips, and he sat down again; but now
with an air as of shy ness and shame.  "Let us talk," he said, "of--
of the Code Napoleon."

The next morning Medallion visited St. Jean in the hills.  Five years
before he had sold to a new-comer at St. Jean-Madame Lecyr--the furniture
of a little house, and there had sprung up between them a quiet
friendship, not the less admiring on Medallion's part because Madame
Lecyr was a good friend to the poor and sick.  She never tired, when they
met, of hearing him talk of the Cure, the Little Chemist, and the Avocat;
and in the Avocat she seemed to take the most interest, making countless
inquiries--countless when spread over many conversations--upon his life
during the time Medallion had known him.  He knew also that she came to
Pontiac, occasionally, but only in the evening; and once of a moonlight
night he had seen her standing before the window of the Avocat's house.
Once also he had seen her veiled in the little crowded court-room of
Pontiac when an interesting case was being tried, and noticed how she
watched Monsieur Garon, standing so very still that she seemed lifeless;
and how she stole out as soon as he had done speaking.

Medallion had acute instincts, and was supremely a man of self-counsel.
What he thought he kept to him self until there seemed necessity to
speak.  A few days before the momentous one herebefore described he had
called at Madame Lecyr's house, and, in course of conversation, told her
that the Avocat's health was breaking; that the day before he had got
completely fogged in court over the simplest business, and was quite
unlike his old, shrewd, kindly self.  By this time he was almost prepared
to see her turn pale and her fingers flutter at the knitting-needles she
held.  She made an excuse to leave the room for a moment.  He saw a
little book lying near the chair from which she had risen.  Perhaps it
had dropped from her pocket.  He picked it up.  It was a book of French
songs--Beranger's and others less notable.  On the fly-leaf was written:
"From Victor to Lulie, September 13th, 18-."  Presently she came back to
him quite recovered and calm, inquired how the Avocat was cared for, and
hoped he would have every comfort and care.  Medallion grew on the
instant bold.  He was now certain that Victor was the Avocat, and Lulie
was Madame Lecyr.  He said abruptly to her: "Why not come and cheer him
up--such old friends as you are?"

At that she rose with a little cry, and stared anxiously at him.  He
pointed to the book of songs.  "Don't be angry--I looked," he said.

She breathed quick and hard, and said nothing, but her fingers laced and
interlaced nervously in her lap.  "If you were friends why don't you go
to him?" he said.

She shook her head mournfully.  "We were more than friends, and that is
different."

"You were his wife?" said Medallion gently.

"It was different," she replied, flushing.  "France is not the same as
here.  We were to be married, but on the eve of our wedding-day there was
an end to it all.  Only five years ago I found out he was here."

Then she became silent, and would, or could, speak no more; only, she
said at last before he went: "You will not tell him, or any one?"

She need not have asked Medallion.  He knew many secrets and kept them;
which is not the usual way of good-humoured people.

But now, with the story told by the Avocat himself in his mind, he saw
the end of the long romance.  He came once more to the house of Madame
Lecyr, and being admitted, said to her: "You must come at once with me."

She trembled towards him.  "He is worse--he is dying!"

He smiled.  "Not dying at all.  He needs you; come along.  I'll tell you
as we go."

But she hung back.  Then he told her all he had seen and heard the
evening before.  Without a word further she prepared to go.  On the way
he turned to her and said: "You are Madame Lecyr?"

"I am as he left me," she replied timidly, but with a kind of pride, too.

"Don't mistake me," he said.  "I thought perhaps you had been married
since."

The Avocat sat in his little office, feebly fumbling among his papers,
as Medallion entered on him and called to him cheerily: "We are coming to
see you to-night, Garon--the Cure, our Little Chemist, and the Seigneur;
coming to supper."

The Avocat put out his hand courteously; but he said in a shrinking,
pained voice: "No, no, not to-night, Medallion.  I would wish no visitors
this night--of all."

Medallion stooped over him, and caught him by both arms gently.  "We
shall see," he said.  "It is the anniversary," he whispered.

"Ah, pardon!" said the Avocat, with a reproving pride, and shrank back
as if all his nerves had been laid bare.  But Medallion turned, opened
the door, went out, and let in a woman, who came forward and timidly
raised her veil.

"Victor!" Medallion heard, then "Lulie!" and then he shut the door,
and, with supper in his mind, went into the kitchen to see the
housekeeper, who, in this new joy, had her own tragedy--humming to
himself:

              "But down there come from the lofty hills
               Footsteps and eyes agleam,
               Bringing the laughter of yesterday
               Into the little house."






THE PRISONER

His chief occupation in the daytime was to stand on the bench by the
small barred window and watch the pigeons on the roof and in the eaves of
the house opposite.  For five years he had done this.  In the summer a
great fire seemed to burn beneath the tin of the roof, for a quivering
hot air rose from them, and the pigeons never alighted on them, save in
the early morning or in the evening.  Just over the peak could be seen
the topmost branch of a maple, too slight to bear the weight of the
pigeons, but the eaves were dark and cool, and there his eyes rested when
he tired of the hard blue sky and the glare of the slates.

In winter the roof was covered for weeks and months by a blanket of snow
which looked like a shawl of impacted wool, white and restful, and the
windows of the house were spread with frost.  But the pigeons were always
gay, walking on the ledges or crowding on the shelves of the lead pipes.
He studied them much, but he loved them more.  His prison was less a
prison because of them, and during those long five years he found himself
more in touch with them than with the wardens of the prison or with any
of his fellow-prisoners.  To the former he was respectful, and he gave
them no trouble at all; with the latter he had nothing in common, for
they were criminals, and he--so wild and mad with drink and anger was he
at the time, that he had no remembrance, absolutely none, of how Jean
Gamache lost his life.

He remembered that they had played cards far into the night; that they
had quarrelled, then made their peace; that the others had left; that
they had begun gaming and drinking and quarrelling again--and then
everything was blurred, save for a vague recollection that he had won
all Gamache's money and had pocketed it.  Afterwards came a blank.

He waked to find two officers of the law beside him, and the body of Jean
Gamache, stark and dreadful, a few feet away.

When the officers put their hands upon him he shook them off; when they
did it again he would have fought them to the death, had it not been for
his friend, tall Medallion the auctioneer, who laid a strong hand on his
arm and said, "Steady, Turgeon, steady!" and he had yielded to the firm
friendly pressure.

Medallion had left no stone unturned to clear him at the trial, had
himself played detective unceasingly.  But the hard facts remained, and
on a chain of circumstantial evidence Blaze Turgeon was convicted of
manslaughter and sent to prison for ten years.  Blaze himself had said
that he did not remember, but he could not believe that he had committed
the crime.  Robbery?  He shrugged his shoulders at that, he insisted that
his lawyer should not reply to the foolish and insulting suggestion.  But
the evidence went to show that Gamache had all the winnings when the
other members of the party retired, and this very money had been found in
Blaze's pocket.  There was only Blaze's word that they had played cards
again.  Anger?  Possibly.  Blaze could not recall, though he knew they
had quarrelled.  The judge himself, charging the jury, said that he never
before had seen a prisoner so frank, so outwardly honest, but he warned
them that they must not lose sight of the crime itself, the taking of a
human life, whereby a woman was made a widow and a child fatherless.  The
jury found him guilty.

With few remarks the judge delivered his sentence, and then himself,
shaken and pale, left the court-room hurriedly, for Blaze Turgeon's
father had been his friend from boyhood.

Blaze took his sentence calmly, looking the jury squarely in the eyes,
and when the judge stopped, he bowed to him, and then turned to the jury
and said:

"Gentlemen, you have ruined my life.  You don't know, and I don't know,
who killed the man.  You have guessed, and I take the penalty.  Suppose
I'm innocent--how will you feel when the truth comes out?  You've known
me more or less these twenty years, and you've said, with evidently no
more knowledge than I've got, that I did this horrible thing.  I don't
know but that one of you did it.  But you are safe, and I take my ten
years!"

He turned from them, and, as he did so, he saw a woman looking at him
from a corner of the court-room, with a strange, wild expression.  At the
moment he saw no more than an excited, bewildered face, but afterwards
this face came and went before him, flashing in and out of dark places in
a kind of mockery.

As he went from the court-room another woman made her way to him in spite
of the guards.  It was the Little Chemist's wife, who, years before, had
been his father's housekeeper, who knew him when his eyes first opened on
the world.

"My poor Blaze! my poor Blaze!" she said, clasping his manacled hands.

In prison he refused to see all visitors, even Medallion, the Little
Chemist's wife, and the good Father Fabre.  Letters, too, he refused to
accept and read.  He had no contact, wished no contact with the outer
world, but lived his hard, lonely life by himself, silent, studious--
for now books were a pleasure to him.  He had entered his prison a wild,
excitable, dissipated youth, and he had become a mature brooding man.
Five years had done the work of twenty.

The face of the woman who looked at him so strangely in the court-room
haunted him so that at last it became a part of his real life, lived
largely at the window where he looked out at the pigeons on the roof of
the hospital.

"She was sorry for me," he said many a time to himself.  He was shaken
with misery often, so that he rocked to and fro as he sat on his bed,
and a warder heard him cry out even in the last days of his imprisonment:

"O God, canst Thou do everything but speak!"  And again: "That hour--the
memory of that hour, in exchange for my ruined life!"

One day the gaoler came to him and said: "Monsieur Turgeon, you are free.
The Governor has cut off five years from your sentence."

Then he was told that people were waiting without--Medallion, the Little
Chemist and his wife, and others more important.  But he would not go to
meet them, and he stepped into the open world alone at dawn the next
morning, and looked out upon a still sleeping village.  Suddenly there
stood before him a woman, who had watched by the prison gates all night;
and she put out her hand in entreaty, and said with a breaking voice:
"You are free at last!"

He remembered her--the woman who had looked at him so anxiously and
sorrowfully in the court-room.  "Why did you come to meet me?" he asked.

"I was sorry for you."

"But that is no reason."

"I once committed a crime," she whispered, with shrinking bitterness.

"That's bad," he said.  "Were you punished?"  He looked at her keenly,
almost fiercely, for a curious suspicion shot into his mind.

She shook her head and answered no.

"That's worse!"

"I let some one else take my crime upon him and be punished for it," she
said, an agony in her eyes.  "Why was that?"

"I had a little child," was her reply.

"And the man who was punished instead?"

"He was alone in the world," she said.

A bitter smile crept to his lips, and his face was afire.  He shut his
eyes, and when they opened again discovery was in them.

"I remember you now," he said.  "I remember now.

"I waked and saw you looking at me that night!  Who was the father of your
child?"

"Jean Gamache," she replied.  "He ruined me and left me to starve."

"I am innocent of his death!" he said quietly and gladly.

She nodded.  He was silent for a moment.  "The child still lives?" he
asked.  She nodded again.  "Well, let it be so," he said.  "But you owe
me five years--and a good name."

"I wish to God I could give them back!" she cried, tears streaming down
her cheeks.  "It was for my child; he was so young."

"It can't be helped now," he said sighing, and he turned away from her.

"Won't you forgive me?" she asked bitterly.

"Won't you give me back those five years?"

"If the child did not need me I would give my life," she answered.  "I
owe it to you."

Her haggard, hunted face made him sorry; he, too, had suffered.

"It's all right," he answered gently.  "Take care of your child."

Again he moved away from her, and went down the little hill, with a cloud
gone from his face that had rested there five years.  Once he turned to
look back.  The woman was gone, but over the prison a flock of pigeons
were flying.  He took off his hat to them.

Then he went through the town, looking neither to right nor left, and
came to his own house, where the summer morning was already entering the
open windows, though he had thought to find the place closed and dark.

The Little Chemist's wife met him in the doorway.  She could not speak,
nor could he, but he kissed her as he had done when he went condemned to
prison.  Then he passed on to his own room, and entering, sat down before
the open window, and peacefully drank in the glory of a new world.  But
more than once he choked down a sob rising in his throat.






AN UPSET PRICE

Once Secord was as fine a man to look at as you would care to see: with a
large intelligent eye, a clear, healthy skin, and a full, brown beard.
He walked with a spring, had a gift of conversation, and took life as he
found it, never too seriously, yet never carelessly.  That was before he
left the village of Pontiac in Quebec to offer himself as a surgeon to
the American Army.  When he came back there was a change in him.  He was
still handsome, but something of the spring had gone from his walk, the
quick light of his eyes had given place to a dark, dreamy expression, his
skin became a little dulled, and his talk slower, though not less musical
or pleasant.  Indeed, his conversation had distinctly improved.
Previously there was an undercurrent of self-consciousness; it was all
gone now.  He talked as one knowing his audience.  His office became
again, as it had been before, a rendezvous for the few interesting men
of the place, including the Avocat, the Cure, the Little Chemist, and
Medallion.  They played chess and ecarte for certain hours of certain
evenings in the week at Secord's house.  Medallion was the first to
notice that the wife--whom Secord had married soon after he came back
from the war--occasionally put down her work and looked with a curious
inquiring expression at her husband as he talked.  It struck Medallion
that she was puzzled by some change in Secord.

Secord was a brilliant surgeon and physician.  With the knife or beside a
sick-bed, he was admirable.  His intuitive perception, so necessary in
his work, was very fine: he appeared to get at the core of a patient's
trouble, and to decide upon necessary action with instant and absolute
confidence.  Some delicate operation performed by him was recorded and
praised in the Lancet; and he was offered a responsible post in a medical
college, and, at the same time, the good-will of a valuable practice.  He
declined both, to the lasting astonishment, yet personal joy, of the Cure
and the Avocat; but, as time went on, not so much to the surprise of the
Little Chemist and Medallion.  After three years, the sleepy Little
Chemist waked up suddenly in his chair one day, and said: "Parbleu, God
bless me!" (he loved to mix his native language with English) got up and
went over to Secord's office, adjusted his glasses, looked at Secord
closely, caught his hand with both of his own, shook it with shy
abruptness, came back to his shop, sat down, and said: "God bless my
soul!  Regardez ca!"

Medallion made his discovery sooner.  Watching closely he had seen a
pronounced deliberation infused through all Secord's indolence of manner,
and noticed that often, before doing anything, the big eyes debated
steadfastly, and the long, slender fingers ran down the beard softly.
At times there was a deep meditativeness in the eye, again a dusky fire.
But there was a certain charm through it all--a languid precision,
a slumbering look in the face, a vague undercurrent in the voice,
a fantastical flavour to the thought.  The change had come so gradually
that only Medallion and the wife had a real conception of how great it
was.  Medallion had studied Secord from every stand-point.  At the very
first he wondered if there was a woman in it.  Much thinking on a woman,
whose influence on his life was evil or disturbing, might account
somewhat for the change in Secord.  But, seeing how fond the man was of
his wife, Medallion gave up that idea.  It was not liquor, for Secord
never touched it.  One day, however, when Medallion was selling the
furniture of a house, he put up a feather bed, and, as was his custom--
for he was a whimsical fellow--let his humour have play.  He used many
metaphors as to the virtue of the bed, crowning them with the statement
that you slept in it dreaming as delicious dreams as though you had eaten
poppy, or mandragora, or--He stopped short, said, "By jingo, that's it!"
knocked the bed down instantly, and was an utter failure for the rest of
the day.

The wife was longer in discovering the truth, but a certain morning, as
her husband lay sleeping after an all-night sitting with a patient, she
saw lying beside him--it had dropped from his waistcoat pocket--a little
bottle full of a dark liquid.  She knew that he always carried his
medicine-phials in a pocket-case.  She got the case, and saw that none
was missing.  She noticed that the cork of the phial was well worn.  She
took it out and smelled the liquid.  Then she understood.  She waited and
watched.  She saw him after he waked look watchfully round, quietly take
a wine-glass, and let the liquid come drop by drop into it from the point
of his forefinger.  Henceforth she read with understanding the changes in
his manner, and saw behind the mingled abstraction and fanciful
meditation of his talk.

She had not yet made up her mind what to do.  She saw that he hid it from
her assiduously.  He did so more because he wished not to pain her than
from furtiveness.  By nature he was open and brave, and had always had a
reputation for plainness and sincerity.  She was in no sense his equal in
intelligence or judgment, nor even in instinct.  She was a woman of more
impulse and constitutional good-nature than depth.  It is probable that
he knew that, and refrained from letting her into the knowledge of this
vice, contracted in the war when, seriously ill, he was able to drag
himself about from patient to patient only by the help of opium.  He was
alive to his position and its consequences, and faced it.  He had no
children, and he was glad of this for one reason.  He could do nothing
now without the drug; it was as necessary as light to him.  The little
bottle had been his friend so long, that, with his finger on its smooth-
edged cork, it was as though he held the tap of life.

The Little Chemist and Medallion kept the thing to themselves, but they
understood each other in the matter, and wondered what they could do to
cure him.  The Little Chemist only shrank back, and said, "No, no,
pardon, my friend!" when Medallion suggested that he should speak to
Secord.  But the Little Chemist was greatly concerned--for had not Secord
saved his beloved wife by a clever operation? and was it not her custom
to devote a certain hour every week to the welfare of Secord's soul and
body, before the shrine of the Virgin?  Her husband told her now that
Secord was in trouble, and though he was far from being devout himself,
he had a shy faith in the great sincerity of his wife.  She did her best,
and increased her offerings of flowers to the shrine; also, in her
simplicity, she sent Secord's wife little jars of jam to comfort him.

One evening the little coterie met by arrangement at the doctor's house.
After waiting an hour or two for Secord, who had been called away to a
critical case, the Avocat and the Cure went home, leaving polite old-
fashioned messages for their absent host; but the Little Chemist and
Medallion remained.  For a time Mrs. Secord remained with them, then
retired, begging them to await her husband, who, she knew, would be
grateful if they stayed.  The Little Chemist, with timid courtesy, showed
her out of the room, then came back and sat down.  They were very silent.
The Little Chemist took off his glasses a half-dozen times, wiped them,
and put them back.  Then suddenly turned on Medallion.  "You mean to
speak to-night?"

"Yes, that's it."

"Regardez ca--well, well!"

Medallion never smoked harder than he did then.  The Little Chemist
looked at him nervously again and again, listened towards the door,
fingered with his tumbler, and at last hearing the sound of sleigh-bells,
suddenly came to his feet, and said: "Voila, I will go to my wife."  And
catching up his cap, and forgetting his overcoat, he trotted away home in
a fright.

What Medallion did or said to Secord that night neither ever told.
But it must have been a singular scene, for when the humourist pleads or
prays there is no pathos like it; and certainly Medallion's eyes were red
when he rapped up the Little Chemist at dawn, caught him by the
shoulders, turned him round several times, thumped him on the back, and
called him a bully old boy; and then, seeing the old wife in her quaint
padded night-gown, suddenly hugged her, threw himself into a chair, and
almost shouted for a cup of coffee.

At the same time Mrs. Secord was alternately crying and laughing in her
husband's arms, and he was saying to her: "I'll make a fight for it,
Lesley, a big fight; but you must be patient, for I expect I'll be a
devil sometimes without it.  Why, I've eaten a drachm a day of the stuff,
or drunk its equivalent in the tincture.  No, never mind praying; be a
brick and fight with me that's the game, my girl."

He did make a fight for it, such an one as few men have made and come
out safely.  For those who dwell in the Pit never suffer as do they who
struggle with this appetite.  He was too wise to give it up all at once.
He diminished the dose gradually, but still very perceptibly.  As it was,
it made a marked change in him.  The necessary effort of the will gave a
kind of hard coldness to his face, and he used to walk his garden for
hours at night in conflict with his enemy.  His nerves were uncertain,
but, strange to say, when (it was not often) any serious case of illness
came under his hands, he was somehow able to pull himself together and do
his task gallantly enough.  But he had had no important surgical case
since he began his cure.  In his heart he lived in fear of one; for he
was not quite sure of himself.  In spite of effort to the contrary he
became irritable, and his old pleasant fantasies changed to gloomy and
bizarre imaginings.

The wife never knew what it cost her husband thus, day by day, to take a
foe by the throat and hold him in check.  She did not guess that he knew
if he dropped back even once he could not regain himself: this was his
idiosyncrasy.  He did not find her a great help to him in his trouble.
She was affectionate, but she had not much penetration even where he was
concerned, and she did not grasp how much was at stake.  She thought
indeed that he should be able to give it up all at once.  He was tender
with her, but he wished often that she could understand him without
explanation on his part.  Many a time he took out the little bottle with
a reckless hand, but conquered himself.  He got most help, perhaps, from
the honest, cheerful eye of Medallion and the stumbling timorous
affection of the Little Chemist.  They were perfectly disinterested
friends--his wife at times made him aware that he had done her a wrong,
for he had married her with thus appetite on him.  He did not defend
himself, but he wished she would--even if she had to act it--make him
believe in himself more.  One morning against his will he was irritable
with her, and she said something that burnt like caustic.  He smiled
ironically, and pushed his newspaper over to her, pointing to a
paragraph.  It was the announcement that an old admirer of hers whom she
had passed by for her husband, had come into a fortune.  "Perhaps you've
made a mistake," he said.

She answered nothing, but the look she gave was unfortunate for both.
He muffled his mouth in his long silken beard as if to smother what he
felt impelled to say, then suddenly rose and left the table.

At this time he had reduced his dose of the drug to eight drops twice a
day.  With a grim courage he resolved to make it five all at once.  He
did so, and held to it.  Medallion was much with him in these days.  One
morning in the spring he got up, went out in his garden, drew in the
fresh, sweet air with a great gulp, picked some lovely crab-apple
blossoms, and, with a strange glowing look in his eyes, came in to his
wife, put them into her hands, and kissed her.  It was the anniversary of
their wedding-day.  Then, without a word, he took from his pocket the
little phial that he had carried so long, rolled it for an instant in his
palm, felt its worn, discoloured cork musingly, and threw it out of the
window.

"Now, my dear," he whispered, "we will be happy again."

He held to his determination with a stern anxiety.  He took a month's
vacation, and came back better.  He was not so happy as he hoped to be;
yet he would not whisper to himself the reason why.  He felt that
something had failed him somewhere.

One day a man came riding swiftly up to his door to say that his wife's
father had met with a bad accident in his great mill.  Secord told his
wife.  A peculiar troubled look came into his face as he glanced
carefully over his instruments and through his medicine case.  "God, I
must do it alone!" he said.

The old man's injury was a dangerous one: a skilful operation was
necessary.  As Secord stood beside the sufferer, he felt his nerves
suddenly go--just as they did in the war before he first took the drug.
His wife was in the next room--he could hear her; he wished she would
make no sound at all.  Unless this operation was performed successfully
the sufferer would die--he might die anyhow.  Secord tried to gather
himself up to his task, but he felt it was of no use.  A month later when
he was more recovered physically he would be able to perform the
operation, but the old man was dying now, while he stood helplessly
stroking his big brown beard.  He took up his pocket medicine-case, and
went out where his wife was.

Excited and tearful, she started up to meet him, painfully inquiring.
"Can you save him?" she said.  "Oh, James, what is the matter?  You are
trembling."

"It's just this way, Lesley: my nerve is broken; I can't perform the
operation as I am, and he will die in an hour if I don't."

She caught him by the arm.  "Can you not be strong?  You have a will.
Will you not try to save my father, James?  Is there no way?"

"Yes, there is one way," he said.  He opened the pocket-case and took out
a phial of laudanum.  "This is the way.  I can pull myself together with
it.  It will save his life."  There was a dogged look in his face.

"Well? well?" she said.  "Oh, my dear father, will you not keep him
here?"

A peculiar cold smile hovered about his lips.  "But there is danger to me
in this .  .  .  and remember, he is very old!"

"Oh," she cried, "how can you be so shocking, so cruel!"  She rocked
herself to and fro.  "If it will save him--and you need not take it
again, ever!"

"But, I tell you--"

"Do you not hear him--he is dying!"  She was mad with grief; she hardly
knew what she said.

Without a word he dropped the tincture swiftly in a wine-glass of water,
drank it off, shivered, drew himself up with a start, gave a sigh as if
some huge struggle was over, and went in to where the old man was.  Three
hours after he told his wife that her father was safe.

When, after a hasty kiss, she left him and went into the room of
sickness, and the door closed after her, standing where she had left him
he laughed a hard crackling laugh, and said between his teeth:

"An upset price!"

Then he poured out another portion of the dark tincture--the largest he
had ever taken--and tossed it off.  That night he might have been seen
feeling about the grass in a moon-lit garden.  At last he put something
in his pocket with a quick, harsh chuckle of satisfaction.  It was a
little black bottle with a well-worn cork.






A FRAGMENT OF LIVES

They met at last, Dubarre, and Villiard, the man who had stolen from him
the woman he loved.  Both had wronged the woman, but Villiard most, for
he had let her die because of jealousy.

They were now in a room alone in the forest of St. Sebastian.  Both were
quiet, and both knew that the end of their feud was near.

Going to a cupboard Dubarre brought out four glasses and put them on the
table.  Then from two bottles he poured out what looked like red wine,
two glasses from each bottle.  Putting the bottles back he returned to
the table.

"Do you dare to drink with me?" Dubarre asked, nodding towards the
glasses.  "Two of the glasses have poison in them, two have good red wine
only.  We will move them about and then drink.  Both may die, or only one
of us."

Villiard looked at the other with contracting, questioning eyes.

"You would play that game with me?" he asked, in a mechanical voice.

"It would give me great pleasure."  The voice had a strange, ironical
tone.  "It is a grand sport--as one would take a run at a crevasse and
clear it, or fall.  If we both fall, we are in good company; if you fall,
I have the greater joy of escape; if I fall, you have the same joy."

"I am ready," was the answer.  "But let us eat first."

A great fire burned in the chimney, for the night was cool.  It filled
the room with a gracious heat and with huge, comfortable shadows.  Here
and there on the wall a tin cup flashed back the radiance of the fire,
the barrel of a gun glistened soberly along a rafter, and the long, wiry
hair of an otter-skin in the corner sent out little needles of light.
Upon the fire a pot was simmering, and a good savour came from it.  A
wind went lilting by outside the but in tune with the singing of the
kettle.  The ticking of a huge, old-fashioned repeating-watch on the wall
was in unison with these.

Dubarre rose from the table, threw himself upon the little pile of otter-
skins, and lay watching Villiard and mechanically studying the little
room.

Villiard took the four glasses filled with the wine and laid them on a
shelf against the wall, then began to put the table in order for their
supper, and to take the pot from the fire.

Dubarre noticed that just above where the glasses stood on the shelf a
crucifix was hanging, and that red crystal sparkled in the hands and feet
where the nails should be driven in.  There was a painful humour in the
association.  He smiled, then turned his head away, for old memories
flashed through his brain--he had been an acolyte once; he had served at
the altar.

Suddenly Dubarre rose, took the glasses from the shelf and placed them in
the middle of the table--the death's head for the feast.

As they sat down to eat, the eyes of both men unconsciously wandered to
the crucifix, attracted by the red sparkle of the rubies.  They drank
water with the well-cooked meat of the wapiti, though red wine faced them
on the table.  Each ate heartily; as though a long day were before them
and not the shadow of the Long Night.  There was no speech save that of
the usual courtesies of the table.  The fire, and the wind, and the watch
seemed the only living things besides themselves, perched there between
heaven and earth.

At length the meal was finished, and the two turned in their chairs
towards the fire.  There was no other light in the room, and on the faces
of the two, still and cold, the flame played idly.

"When?" said Dubarre at last.  "Not yet," was the quiet reply.

"I was thinking of my first theft--an apple from my brother's plate,"
said Dubarre, with a dry smile.  "You?"

"I, of my first lie."

"That apple was the sweetest fruit I ever tasted."

"And I took the penalty of the lie, but I had no sorrow."

Again there was silence.

"Now?" asked Villiard, after an hour had passed.  "I am ready."

They came to the table.

"Shall we bind our eyes?" asked Dubarre.  "I do not know the glasses
that hold the poison."

"Nor I the bottle that held it.  I will turn my back, and do you change
about the glasses."

Villiard turned his face towards the timepiece on the wall.  As he did so
it began to strike--a clear, silvery chime: "One! two! three--!"

Before it had finished striking both men were facing the glasses again.

"Take one," said Dubarre.

Villiard took the one nearest himself.  Dubarre took one also.  Without a
word they lifted the glasses and drank.

"Again," said Dubarre.

"You choose," responded Villiard.

Dubarre lifted the one nearest himself, and Villiard picked up the other.
Raising their glasses again, they bowed to each other and drank.

The watch struck twelve, and stopped its silvery chiming.

They both sat down, looking at each other, the light of an enormous
chance in their eyes, the tragedy of a great stake in their clinched
hands; but the deeper, intenser power was in the face of Dubarre, the
explorer.

There was more than power; malice drew down the brows and curled the
sensitive upper lip.  Each man watched the other for knowledge of his own
fate.  The glasses lay straggling along the table, emptied of death and
life.

All at once a horrible pallor spread over the face of Villiard, and his
head jerked forward.  He grasped the table with both hands, twitching and
trembling.  His eyes stared wildly at Dubarre, to whose face the flush of
wine had come, whose look was now maliciously triumphant.

Villiard had drunk both glasses of the poison!

"I win!"  Dubarre stood up.  Then, leaning over the table towards the
dying man, he added: "You let her die-well!  Would you know the truth?
She loved you--always."

Villiard gasped, and his look wandered vaguely along the opposite wall.

Dubarre went on.  "I played the game with you honestly, because--because
it was the greatest man could play.  And I, too, sinned against her.  Now
die!  She loved you--murderer!"

The man's look still wandered distractedly along the wall.  The sweat of
death was on his face; his lips were moving spasmodically.

Suddenly his look became fixed; he found voice.  "Pardon--Jesu!" he
said, and stiffened where he sat.  His eyes were fixed on the jewelled
crucifix.  Dubarre snatched it from the wall, and hastening to him held
it to his lips: but the warm sparkle of the rubies fell on eyes that were
cold as frosted glass.  Dubarre saw that he was dead.

"Because the woman loved him!" he said, gazing curiously at the dead
man.

He turned, went to the door and opened it, for his breath choked him.

All was still on the wooded heights and in the wide valley.

"Because the woman loved him he repented," said Dubarre again with a
half-cynical gentleness as he placed the crucifix on the dead man's
breast.






THE MAN THAT DIED AT ALMA

The man who died at Alma had a Kilkenny brogue that you could not cut
with a knife, but he was called Kilquhanity, a name as Scotch as
McGregor.  Kilquhanity was a retired soldier, on pension, and Pontiac was
a place of peace and poverty.  The only gentry were the Cure, the Avocat,
and the young Seigneur, but of the three the only one with a private
income was the young Seigneur.

What should such a common man as Kilquhanity do with a private income!
It seemed almost suspicious, instead of creditable, to the minds of the
simple folk at Pontiac; for they were French, and poor, and laborious,
and Kilquhanity drew his pension from the headquarters of the English
Government, which they only knew by legends wafted to them over great
tracts of country from the city of Quebec.

When Kilquhanity first came with his wife, it was without introductions
from anywhere--unlike everybody else in Pontiac, whose family history
could be instantly reduced to an exact record by the Cure.  He had a
smattering of French, which he turned off with oily brusqueness; he was
not close-mouthed, he talked freely of events in his past life; and he
told some really wonderful tales of his experiences in the British army.
He was no braggart, however, and his one great story which gave him the
nickname by which he was called at Pontiac, was told far more in a spirit
of laughter at himself than in praise of his own part in the incident.

The first time he told the story was in the house of Medallion the
auctioneer.

"Aw the night it was," said Kilquhanity, after a pause, blowing a cloud
of tobacco smoke into the air, "the night it was, me darlin's!  Bitther
cowld in that Roosian counthry, though but late summer, and nothin' to
ate but a lump of bread, no bigger than a dickybird's skull; nothin' to
drink but wather.  Turrible, turrible, and for clothes to wear--Mother of
Moses! that was a bad day for clothes!  We got betune no barrick quilts
that night.  No stockin' had I insoide me boots, no shirt had I but a
harse's quilt sewed an to me; no heart I had insoide me body; nothin' at
all but duty an' shtandin' to orders, me b'ys!

"Says Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick to me, 'Kilquhanity,' says he, 'there's
betther places than River Alma to live by,' says he.  'Faith, an' by the
Liffey I wish I was this moment'--Liffey's in ould Ireland, Frenchies!
'But, Kilquhanity,' says he, 'faith, an' it's the Liffey we'll never see
again, an' put that in yer pipe an' smoke it!' And thrue for him.

"But that night, aw that night!  Ivery bone in me body was achin', and
shure me heart was achin' too, for the poor b'ys that were fightin' hard
an' gettin' little for it.  Bitther cowld it was, aw, bitther cowld, and
the b'ys droppin' down, droppin', droppin', droppin', wid the Roosian
bullets in thim!

"'Kilquhanity,' says Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick to me, 'it's this
shtandin' still, while we do be droppin', droppin', that girds the soul
av yer.' Aw, the sight it was, the sight it was!  The b'ys of the
rigimint shtandin' shoulder to shoulder, an' the faces av 'm blue wid
powder, an' red wid blood, an' the bits o' b'ys droppin' round me loike
twigs of an' ould tree in a shtorm.  Just a cry an' a bit av a gurgle tru
the teeth, an' divil the wan o' thim would see the Liffey side anny more.
"'The Roosians are chargin'!' shouts Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick.  'The
Roosians are chargin'--here they come!'  Shtandin' besoide me was a bit
of a lump of a b'y, as foine a lad as ever shtood in the boots of me
rigimint--aw! the look of his face was the look o' the dead.  'The
Roosians are comin'--they're chargin'!' says Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick,
and the bit av a b'y, that had nothin' to eat all day, throws down his
gun and turns round to run.  Eighteen years old he was, only eighteen--
just a straight slip of a lad from Malahide.  'Hould on!  Teddie,' says
I, 'hould on!  How'll yer face yer mother if yer turn yer back on the
inimy of yer counthry?'  The b'y looks me in the eyes long enough to wink
three times, picks up his gun, an' shtood loike a rock, he did, till the
Roosians charged us, roared on us, an' I saw me slip of a b'y go down
under the sabre of a damned Cossack.  'Mother!' I heard him say,
'Mother!' an' that's all I heard him say--and the mother waitin' away aff
there by the Liffey soide.  Aw, wurra, wurra, the b'ys go down to battle
and the mothers wait at home!  Some of the b'ys come back, but the most
of thim shtay where the battle laves 'em.  Wurra, wurra, many's the b'y
wint down that day by Alma River, an' niver come back!  "There I was
shtandin', when hell broke loose on the b'ys of me rigimint, and divil
the wan o' me knows if I killed a Roosian that day or not.  But Sergeant-
Major Kilpatrick--a bit of a liar was the Sergeant-Major--says he: 'It
was tin ye killed, Kilquhanity.' He says that to me the noight that I
left the rigimint for ever, and all the b'ys shtandin' round and liftin'
lasses an' saying, 'Kilquhanity!  Kilquhanity!  Kilquhanity!'
as if it was sugar and honey in their mouths.  Aw, the sound of it!
'Kilquhanity,' says he, 'it was tin ye killed;' but aw, b'ys, the
Sergeant-Major was an awful liar.  If he could be doin' annybody anny
good by lyin', shure he would be lyin' all the time.

"But it's little I know how many I killed, for I was killed meself that
day.  A Roosian sabre claved the shoulder and neck of me, an' down I
wint, and over me trampled a squadron of Roosian harses, an' I stopped
thinkin'.  Aw, so aisy, so aisy, I slipped away out av the fight!  The
shriekin' and roarin' kept dwindlin' and dwindlin', and I dropped all
into a foine shlape, so quiet, so aisy.  An' I thought that slip av a lad
from the Liffey soide was houlding me hand, and sayin' 'Mother!  Mother!'
and we both wint ashlape; an' the b'ys of the rigimint when Alma was
over, they said to each other, the b'ys they said: 'Kilquhanity's dead.'
An' the trinches was dug, an' all we foine dead b'ys was laid in long
rows loike candles in the trinches.  An' I was laid in among thim, and
Sergeant-Major Kilpatrick shtandin' there an' looking at me an' sayin':
'Poor b'y--poor b'y!'

"But when they threw another man on tap of me, I waked up out o' that
beautiful shlape, and give him a kick.  'Yer not polite,' says I to
mesilf.  Shure, I couldn't shpake--there was no strength in me.  An' they
threw another man on, an' I kicked again, and the Sergeant-Major he sees
it, an' shouts out.  'Kilquhan ity's leg is kickin'!' says he.  An' they
pulled aff the two poor divils that had been thrown o' tap o' me, and the
Sergeant-Major lifts me head, an' he says 'Yer not killed, Kilquhanity?'
says he.

"Divil a word could I shpake, but I winked at him, and Captain Masham
shtandin' by whips out a flask.

"'Put that betune his teeth,' says he.  Whin I got it there, trust me fur
not lettin' it go.  An' the Sergeant-Major says to me: 'I have hopes of
you, Kilquhanity, when you do be drinkin' loike that.'

"'A foine healthy corpse I am; an' a foine thirsty, healthy corpse I am,'
says I."

A dozen hands stretched out to give Kilquhanity a drink, for even the
best story-teller of Pontiac could not have told his tale so well.

Yet the success achieved by Kilquhanity at such moments was discounted
through long months of mingled suspicion and doubtful tolerance.
Although both he and his wife were Catholics (so they said, and so it
seemed), Kilquhanity never went to Confession or took the Blessed
Sacrament.  The Cure spoke to Kilquhanity's wife about it, and she said
she could do nothing with her husband.  Her tongue once loosed, she spoke
freely, and what she said was little to the credit of Kilquhanity.  Not
that she could urge any horrible things against him; but she railed at
minor faults till the Cure dismissed her with some good advice upon wives
rehearsing their husband's faults, even to the parish priest.

Mrs. Kilquhanity could not get the Cure to listen to her, but she was
more successful elsewhere.  One day she came to get Kilquhanity's
pension, which was sent every three months through M. Garon, the Avocat.
After she had handed over the receipt prepared beforehand by Kilquhanity,
she replied to M. Garon's inquiry concerning her husband in these words:
"Misther Garon, sir, such a man it is--enough to break the heart of anny
woman.  And the timper of him--Misther Garon, the timper of him's that
awful, awful!  No conshideration, and that ugly-hearted, got whin a
soldier b'y!  The things he does--my, my, the things be does!"  She threw
up her hands with an air of distraction.

"Well, and what does he do, Madame?" asked the Avocat simply.

"An' what he says, too--the awful of it!  Ah, the bad sour heart in him!
What's he lyin' in his bed for now--an' the New Year comin' on, whin we
ought to be praisin' God an' enjoyin' each other's company in this
blessed wurruld?  What's he lying betune the quilts now fur, but by token
of the bad heart in him!  It's a wicked could he has, an' how did he come
by it?  I'll tell ye, Misther Garon.  So wild was he, yesterday it was a
week, so black mad wid somethin' I'd said to him and somethin' that
shlipped from me hand at his head, that he turns his back on me, throws
opin the dure, shteps out into the shnow, and shtandin' there alone, he
curses the wide wurruld--oh, dear Misther Garon, he cursed the wide
wurruld, shtandin' there in the snow!  God forgive the black heart of
him, shtandin' out there cursin' the wide wurruld!"

The Avocat looked at the Sergeant's wife musingly, the fingers of his
hands tapping together, but he did not speak: he was becoming wiser all
in a moment as to the ways of women.

"An' now he's in bed, the shtrappin' blasphemer, fur the could he got
shtandin' there in the snow cursin' the wide wurruld.  Ah, Misther Garon,
pity a poor woman that has to live wid the loikes o' that!"

The Avocat still did not speak.  He turned his face away and looked out
of the window, where his eyes could see the little house on the hill,
which to-day had the Union Jack flying in honour of some battle or
victory, dear to Kilquhanity's heart.  It looked peaceful enough, the
little house lying there in the waste of snow, banked up with earth, and
sheltered on the northwest by a little grove of pines.  At last M. Garon
rose, and lifting himself up and down on his toes as if about to deliver
a legal opinion, he coughed slightly, and then said in a dry little
voice:

"Madame, I shall have pleasure in calling on your husband.  You have not
seen the matter in the true light.  Madame, I bid you good-day."

That night the Avocat, true to his promise, called on Sergeant
Kilquhanity.  Kilquhanity was alone in the house.  His wife had gone to
the village for the Little Chemist.  She had been roused at last to the
serious nature of Kilquhanity's illness.

M. Garon knocked.  There was no answer.  He knocked again more loudly,
and still no answer.  He opened the door and entered into a clean, warm
living-room, so hot that the heat came to him in waves, buffeting his
face.  Dining, sitting, and drawing-room, it was also a sort of winter
kitchen; and side by side with relics of Kilquhanity's soldier-life were
clean, bright tins, black saucepans, strings of dried fruit, and well-
cured hams.  Certainly the place had the air of home; it spoke for the
absent termagant.

M. Garon looked round and saw a half-opened door, through which presently
came a voice speaking in a laboured whisper.  The Avocat knocked gently
at the door.  "May I come in, Sergeant?" he asked, and entered.  There
was no light in the room, but the fire in the kitchen stove threw a glow
over the bed where the sick man lay.  The big hands of the soldier moved
restlessly on the quilt.

"Aw, it's the koind av ye!" said Kilquhanity, with difficulty, out of
the half shadows.

The Avocat took one burning hand in both of his, held it for a moment,
and pressed it two or three times.  He did not know what to say.

"We must have a light," said he at last, and taking a candle from the
shelf he lighted it at the stove and came into the bedroom again.  This
time he was startled.  Even in this short illness, Kilquhanity's flesh
had dropped away from him, leaving him but a bundle of bones, on which
the skin quivered with fever.  Every word the sick man tried to speak cut
his chest like a knife, and his eyes half started from his head with the
agony of it.  The Avocat's heart sank within him, for he saw that a life
was hanging in the balance.  Not knowing what to do, he tucked in the
bedclothes gently.

"I do be thinkin'," said the strained, whispering voice--"I do be
thinkin' I could shmoke."

The Avocat looked round the room, saw the pipe on the window, and cutting
some tobacco from a "plug," he tenderly filled the old black corn-cob.
Then he put the stem in Kilquhanity's mouth and held the candle to the
bowl.  Kilquhanity smiled, drew a long breath, and blew out a cloud of
thick smoke.  For a moment he puffed vigorously, then, all at once, the
pleasure of it seemed to die away, and presently the bowl dropped down on
his chin.  M. Garon lifted it away.  Kilquhanity did not speak, but kept
saying something over and over again to himself, looking beyond M. Garon
abstractedly.

At that moment the front door of the house opened, and presently a shrill
voice came through the door: "Shmokin', shmokin', are ye, Kilquhanity?
As soon as me back's turned, it's playin' the fool--" She stopped short,
seeing the Avocat.

"Beggin' yer pardon, Misther Garon," she said, "I thought it was only
Kilquhanity here, an' he wid no more sense than a babby."

Kilquhanity's eyes closed, and he buried one side of his head in the
pillow, that her shrill voice should not pierce his ears.

"The Little Chemist 'll be comin' in a minit, dear Misther Garon," said
the wife presently, and she began to fuss with the bedclothes and to be
nervously and uselessly busy.

"Aw, lave thim alone, darlin'," whispered Kilquhanity, tossing.  Her
officiousness seemed to hurt him more than the pain in his chest.

M. Garon did not wait for the Little Chemist to arrive, but after
pressing the Sergeant's hand he left the house and went straight to the
house of the Cure, and told him in what condition was the black sheep of
his flock.

When M. Garon returned to his own home he found a visitor in his library.
It was a woman, between forty and fifty years of age, who rose slowly to
her feet as the Avocat entered, and, without preliminary, put into his
hands a document.

"That is who I am," she said.  "Mary Muddock that was, Mary Kilquhanity
that is."

The Avocat held in his hands the marriage lines of Matthew Kilquhanity of
the parish of Malahide and Mary Muddock of the parish of St. Giles,
London.  The Avocat was completely taken aback.  He blew nervously
through his pale fingers, raised himself up and down on his toes, and
grew pale through suppressed excitement.  He examined the certificate
carefully, though from the first he had no doubt of its accuracy and
correctness.

"Well?" said the woman, with a hard look in her face and a hard note in
her voice.  "Well?"

The Avocat looked at her musingly for a moment.  All at once there had
been unfolded to him Kilquhanity's story.  In his younger days
Kilquhanity had married this woman with a face of tin and a heart of
leather.  It needed no confession from Kilquhanity's own lips to explain
by what hard paths he had come to the reckless hour when, at Blackpool,
he had left her for ever, as he thought.  In the flush of his criminal
freedom he had married again--with the woman who shared his home on the
little hillside, behind the Parish Church, she believing him a widower.
Mary Muddock, with the stupidity of her class, had never gone to the
right quarters to discover his whereabouts until a year before this day
when she stood in the Avocat's library.  At last, through the War Office,
she had found the whereabouts of her missing Matthew.  She had gathered
her little savings together, and, after due preparation, had sailed away
to Canada to find the soldier boy whom she had never given anything but
bad hours in all the days of his life with her.

"Well," said the woman, "you're a lawyer--have you nothing to say?  You
pay his pension--next time you'll pay it to me.  I'll teach him to leave
me and my kid and go off with an Irish cook!"

The Avocat looked her steadily in the eyes, and then delivered the
strongest blow that was possible from the opposite side of the case.
"Madame," said he, "Madame, I regret to inform you that Matthew
Kilquhanity is dying."

"Dying, is he?" said the woman, with a sudden change of voice and
manner, but her whine did not ring true.  "The poor darlin', and only
that Irish hag to care for him!  Has he made a will?" she added eagerly.

Kilquhanity had made no will, and the little house on the hillside,
and all that he had, belonged to this woman who had spoiled the first
part of his life, and had come now to spoil the last part.

An hour later the Avocat, the Cure, and the two women stood in the chief
room of the little house on the hillside.  The door was shut between the
two rooms, and the Little Chemist was with Kilquhanity.  The Cure's hand
was on the arm of the first wife and the Avocat's upon the arm of the
second.  The two women were glaring eye to eye, having just finished as
fine a torrent of abuse of each other and of Kilquhanity as can be
imagined.  Kilquhanity himself, with the sorrow of death upon him, though
he knew it not, had listened to the brawl, his chickens come home to
roost at last.  The first Mrs. Kilquhanity had sworn, with an oath that
took no account of the Cure's presence, that not a stick nor a stone nor
a rag nor a penny should that Irish slattern have of Matthew
Kilquhanity's!

The Cure and the Avocat had quieted them at last, and the Cure spoke
sternly now to both women.

"In the presence of death," said he, "have done with your sinful clatter.
Stop quarrelling over a dying man.  Let him go in peace--let him go in
peace!  If I hear one word more," he added sternly, "I will turn you both
out of the house into the night.  I will have the man die in peace."

Opening the door of the bedroom, the Cure went in and shut the door,
bolting it quietly behind him.  The Little Chemist sat by the bedside,
and Kilquhanity lay as still as a babe upon the bed.  His eyes were half
closed, for the Little Chemist had given him an opiate to quiet the
terrible pain.

The Cure saw that the end was near.  He touched Kilquhanity's arm: "My
son," said he, "look up.  You have sinned; you must confess your sins,
and repent."

Kilquhanity looked up at him with dazed but half smiling eyes.  "Are they
gone?  Are the women gone?" The Cure nodded his head.  Kilquhanity's
eyes closed and opened again.  "They're gone, thin!  Oh, the foine of it,
the foine of it!" he whispered.  "So quiet, so aisy, so quiet!  Faith,
I'll just be shlaping!  I'll be shlaping now."

His eyes closed, but the Cure touched his arm again.  "My son," said he,
"look up.  Do you thoroughly and earnestly repent you of your sins?"

His eyes opened again.  "Yis, father, oh yis!  There's been a dale o'
noise--there's been a dale o' noise in the wurruld, father," said he.
"Oh, so quiet, so quiet now!  I do be shlaping."

A smile came upon his face.  "Oh, the foine of it!  I do be shlaping-
shlaping."

And he fell into a noiseless Sleep.






THE BARON OF BEAUGARD

"The Manor House at Beaugard, monsieur?  Ah, certainlee, I mind it very
well.  It was the first in Quebec, and there are many tales.  It had a
chapel and a gallows.  Its baron, he had the power of life and death, and
the right of the seigneur--you understand?--which he used only once; and
then what trouble it made for him and the woman, and the barony, and the
parish, and all the country!"

"What is the whole story, Larue?" said Medallion, who had spent months
in the seigneur's company, stalking game, and tales, and legends of the
St. Lawrence.

Larue spoke English very well--his mother was English.

"Mais, I do not know for sure; but the Abbe Frontone, he and I were
snowed up together in that same house which now belongs to the Church,
and in the big fireplace, where we sat on a bench, toasting our knees and
our bacon, he told me the tale as he knew it.  He was a great scholar--
there is none greater.  He had found papers in the wall of the house, and
from the Gover'ment chest he got more.  Then there were the tales handed
down, and the records of the Church--for she knows the true story of
every man that has come to New France from first to last.  So, because I
have a taste for tales, and gave him some, he told me of the Baron of
Beaugard, and that time he took the right of the seigneur, and the end of
it all.

"Of course it was a hundred and fifty years ago, when Bigot was
Intendant-ah, what a rascal was that Bigot, robber and deceiver!  He
never stood by a friend, and never fought fair a foe--so the Abbe said.
Well, Beaugard was no longer young.  He had built the Manor House, he had
put up his gallows, he had his vassals, he had been made a lord.  He had
quarrelled with Bigot, and had conquered, but at great cost; for Bigot
had such power, and the Governor had trouble enough to care for himself
against Bigot, though he was Beaugard's friend.

"Well, there was a good lump of a fellow who had been a soldier, and he
picked out a girl in the Seigneury of Beaugard to make his wife.  It is
said the girl herself was not set for the man, for she was of finer stuff
than the peasants about her, and showed it.  But her father and mother
had a dozen other children, and what was this girl, this Falise, to do?
She said yes to the man, the time was fixed for the marriage, and it came
along.

"So.  At the very hour of the wedding Beaugard came by, for, the church
was in mending, and he had given leave it should be in his own chapel.
Well, he rode by just as the bride was coming out with the man--Garoche.
When Beaugard saw Falise, he gave a whistle, then spoke in his throat,
reined up his horse, and got down.  He fastened his eyes on the girl's.
A strange look passed between them--he had never seen her before, but she
had seen him often, and when he was gone had helped the housekeeper with
his rooms.  She had carried away with her a stray glove of his.  Of
course it sounds droll, and they said of her when all came out that it
was wicked; but evil is according to a man's own heart, and the girl had
hid this glove as she hid whatever was in her soul--hid it even from the
priest.

"Well, the Baron looked and she looked, and he took off his hat, stepped
forward, and kissed her on the cheek.  She turned pale as a ghost, and
her eyes took the colour that her cheeks lost.  When he stepped back he
looked close at the husband.  'What is your name?' he said.  'Garoche,
M'sieu' le Baron,' was the reply.  'Garoche, Garoche,' he said, eyeing
him up and down.  'You have been a soldier?'  'Yes, M'sieu' le Baron.'
'You have served with me?'  'Against you, M'sieu' le Baron .  .  .  when
Bigot came fighting.' 'Better against me than for me,' said the Baron,
speaking to himself, though he had so strong a voice that what he said
could be heard by those near him-that is, those who were tall, for he was
six and a half feet, with legs and shoulders like a bull.

"He stooped and stroked the head of his hound for a moment, and all the
people stood and watched him, wondering what next.  At last he said: 'And
what part played you in that siege, Garoche?' Garoche looked troubled,
but answered: 'It was in the way of duty, M'sieu' le Baron--I with five
others captured the relief-party sent from your cousin the Seigneur of
Vadrome.'  'Oh,' said the Baron, looking sharp, 'you were in that, were
you?  Then you know what happened to the young Marmette?' Garoche
trembled a little, but drew himself up and said: 'M'sieu' le Baron, he
tried to kill the Intendant--there was no other way.' 'What part played
you in that, Garoche?'  Some trembled, for they knew the truth, and they
feared the mad will of the Baron.  'I ordered the firing-party, M'sieu'
le Baron,' he answered.

"The Baron's eyes got fierce and his face hardened, but he stooped and
drew the ears of the hound through his hand softly.  'Marmette was my
cousin's son, and had lived with me,' he said.  'A brave lad, and he had
a nice hatred of vileness--else he had not died.' A strange smile played
on his lips for a moment, then he looked at Falise steadily.  Who can
tell what was working in his mind!  'War is war,' he went on, 'and Bigot
was your master, Garoche; but the man pays for his master's sins this way
or that.  Yet I would not have it different, no, not a jot.'  Then he
turned round to the crowd, raised his hat to the Cure, who stood on the
chapel steps, once more looked steadily at Falise, and said: 'You shall
all come to the Manor House, and have your feastings there, and we will
drink to the home-coming of the fairest woman in my barony.'  With that
he turned round, bowed to Falise, put on his hat, caught the bridle
through his arm, and led his horse to the Manor House.

"This was in the afternoon.  Of course, whether they wished or not,
Garoche and Falise could not refuse, and the people were glad enough, for
they would have a free hand at meat and wine, the Baron being liberal of
table.  And it was as they guessed, for though the time was so short, the
people at Beaugard soon had the tables heavy with food and drink.  It was
just at the time of candle-lighting the Baron came in and gave a toast.
'To the dwellers in Eden to-night,' he said--'Eden against the time of
the Angel and the Sword.'  I do not think that any except the Cure and
the woman understood, and she, maybe, only because a woman feels the
truth about a thing, even when her brain does not.  After they had done
shouting to his toast, he said a good-night to all, and they began to
leave, the Cure among the first to go, with a troubled look in his face.

"As the people left, the Baron said to Garoche and Falise: 'A moment with
me before you go.' The woman started, for she thought of one thing, and
Garoche started, for he thought of another--the siege of Beaugard and the
killing of young Marmette.  But they followed the Baron to his chamber.
Coming in, he shut the door on them.  Then he turned to Garoche.  'You
will accept the roof and bed of Beaugard to-night, my man,' he said, 'and
come to me here at nine tomorrow morning.'  Garoche stared hard for an
instant.  'Stay here!' said Garoche, 'Falise and me stay here in the
Manor, M'sieu' le Baron!'  'Here, even here, Garoche; so good-night to
you,' said the Baron.  Garoche turned towards the girl.  'Then come,
Falise,' he said, and reached out his hand.  'Your room, Garoche, shall
be shown you at once,' the Baron added softly, 'the lady's at her
pleasure.'

"Then a cry burst from Garoche, and he sprang forward, but the Baron
waved him back.  'Stand off,' he said, 'and let the lady choose between
us.'  'She is my wife,' said Garoche.  'I am your Seigneur,' said the
other.  'And there is more than that,' he went on; 'for, damn me, she
is too fine stuff for you, and the Church shall untie what she has tied
to-day!'  At that Falise fainted, and the Baron caught her as she fell.
He laid her on a couch, keeping an eye on Garoche the while.  'Loose her
gown,' he said, 'while I get brandy.' Then he turned to a cupboard,
poured liquor, and came over.  Garoche had her dress open at the neck and
bosom, and was staring at something on her breast.  The Baron saw also,
stooped with a strange sound in his throat, and picked it up.  'My
glove!' he said.  'And on her wedding-day!' He pointed.  'There on the
table is its mate, fished this morning from my hunting-coat--a pair the
Governor gave me.  You see, man, you see her choice!'

"At that he stooped and put some brandy to her lips.  Garoche drew back
sick and numb, and did nothing, only stared.  Falise came to herself
soon, and when she felt her dress open, gave a cry.  Garoche could have
killed her then, when he saw her shudder from him, as if afraid, over
towards the Baron, who held the glove in his hand, and said: 'See,
Garoche, you had better go.  In the next room they will tell you where to
sleep.  To-morrow, as I said, you will meet me here.  We shall have
things to say, you and I.'  Ah, that Baron, he had a queer mind, but in
truth he loved the woman, as you shall see!

"Garoche got up without a word, went to the door and opened it, the look
of the Baron and the woman following him, for there was a devil in his
eye.  In the other room there were men waiting, and he was taken to a
chamber and locked in.  You can guess what that night must have been to
him!"

"What was it to the Baron and Falise?" asked Medallion.

"M'sieu', what do you think?  Beaugard had never had an eye for women;
loving his hounds, fighting, quarrelling, doing wild, strong things.  So,
all at once, he was face to face with a woman who has the look of love in
her face, who was young, and fine of body--so the Abbe said--and was
walking to marriage at her father's will and against her own, carrying
the Baron's glove in her bosom.  What should Beaugard do?  But no, ah no,
m'sieu', not as you think, not quite!  Wild, with the bit in his teeth,
yes; but at heart-well, here was the one woman for him.  He knew it all
in a minute, and he would have her once and for all, and till death
should come their way.  And so he said to her, as he raised her, she
drawing back afraid, her heart hungering for him, yet fear in her eyes,
and her fingers trembling as she softly pushed him from her.  You see,
she did not know quite what was in his heart.  She was the daughter of a
tenant vassal, who had lived in the family of a grand seigneur in her
youth, the friend of his child--that was all, and that was where she got
her manners and her mind.

"She got on her feet and said: 'M'sieu' le Baron, you will let me go--
to my husband.  I cannot stay here.  Oh, you are great, you are noble,
you would not make me sorry, make me to hate myself--and you!  I have
only one thing in the world of any price--you would not steal my
happiness?'  He looked at her steadily in the eyes, and said: 'Will it
make you happy to go to Garoche?'  She raised her hands and wrung them.
'God knows, God knows, I am his wife,' she said helplessly, 'and he loves
me.'  'And God knows, God knows,' said the Baron, 'it is all a question
of whether one shall feed and two go hungry, or two gather and one have
the stubble!  Shall not he stand in the stubble?  What has he done to
merit you?

"What would he do?  You are for the master, not the man; for love, not the
feeding on; for the Manor House and the hunt, not the cottage and the
loom.'

"She broke into tears, her heart thumping in her throat.  'I am for what
the Church did for me this day,' she said.  'O sir, I pray you, forgive
me and let me go.  Do not punish me, but forgive me--and let me go.
I was wicked to wear your glove-wicked, wicked.'  'But no,' was his
reply, 'I shall not forgive you so good a deed, and you shall not go.
And what the Church did for you this day she shall undo--by all the
saints, she shall!  You came sailing into my heart this hour past on a
strong wind, and you shall not slide out on an ebb-tide.  I have you
here, as your Seigneur, but I have you here as a man who will--'

"He sat down by her at that point, and whispered softly in her ear; at
which she gave a cry which had both gladness and pain.  'Surely, even
that,' he said, catching her to his breast.  'And the Baron of Beaugard
never broke his word.'  What should be her reply?  Does not a woman when
she truly loves always believe?  That is the great sign.  She slid to her
knees and dropped her head into the hollow of his arm.  'I do not
understand these things,' she said, 'but I know that the other was death,
and this is life.  And yet I know, too, for my heart says so, that the
end--the end, will be death.'

"'Tut, tut, my flower, my wild-rose!' he said.  'Of course the end of all
is death, but we will go a-Maying first, come October, and let the world
break over us when it must.  We are for Maying now, my rose of all the
world!'  It was as if he meant more than he said, as if he saw what would
come in that October which all New France never forgot, when, as he said,
the world broke over them.

"The next morning the Baron called Garoche to him.  The man was like some
mad buck harried by the hounds, and he gnashed his teeth behind his shut
lips.  The Baron eyed him curiously, yet kindly, too, as well he might,
for when was ever man to hear such a speech as came to Garoche the
morning after his marriage?  'Garoche,' the Baron said, having waved his
men away, 'as you see, the lady made her choice--and for ever.  You and
she have said your last farewell in this world--for the wife of the Baron
of Beaugard can have nothing to say to Garoche the soldier.'  At that
Garoche snarled out, 'The wife of the Baron of Beaugard, that is a lie to
shame all hell.'  The Baron wound the lash of a riding-whip round and
round his fingers quietly and said: 'It is no lie, my man, but the
truth.'  Garoche eyed him savagely, and growled: 'The Church made her my
wife yesterday; and you--you--you--ah, you who had all--you with your
money and place, which could get all easy, you take the one thing I have!
You, the grand seigneur, are only a common robber!  Ah, Jesu--if you
would but fight me!'

"The Baron, very calm, said: 'First, Garoche, the lady was only your wife
by a form which the Church shall set aside--it could never have been a
true marriage.  Second, it is no stealing to take from you what you did
not have.  I took what was mine--remember the glove!  For the rest--to
fight you?  No, my churl, you know that's impossible.  You may shoot me
from behind a tree or a rock, but swording with you--come, come, a pretty
gossip for the Court!  Then, why wish a fight?  Where would you be, as
you stood before me--you!'  The Baron stretched himself up, and smiled
down at Garoche.  'You have your life, man; take it and go--to the
farthest corner of New France, and show not your face here again.  If I
find you ever again in Beaugard I will have you whipped from parish to
parish.  Here is money for you--good gold coins.  Take them, and go.'

"Garoche got still and cold as stone.  He said in a low, harsh voice:
'M'sieu' le Baron, you are a common thief, a wolf, a snake.  Such men as
you come lower than Judas.  As God has an eye to see, you shall pay all
one day.  I do not fear you nor your men nor your gallows.  You are a
jackal, and the woman has a filthy heart--a ditch of shame.'

"The Baron drew up his arm like lightning, and the lash of his whip came
singing across Garoche's pale face.  Where it passed, a red welt rose,
but the man never stirred.  The arm came up again, but a voice' behind
the Baron said: 'Ah no, no, not again!'  There stood Falise.  Both men
looked at her.  'I have heard Garoche,' she said.  'He does not judge me
right.  My heart is no filthy ditch of shame; but it was breaking when I
came from the altar with him yesterday.  Yet I would have been a true
wife to him after all.  A ditch of shame--ah, Garoche--Garoche!  And you
said you loved me, and that nothing could change you!'

"The Baron said to her: 'Why have you come, Falise?  I forbade you.' 'Oh,
my lord,' she answered, 'I feared--for you both!  When men go mad because
of women a devil enters into them.'  The Baron, taking her by the hand,
said: 'Permit me,' and he led her to the door for her to pass out.  She
looked back sadly at Garoche, standing for a minute very still.  Then
Garoche said: 'I command you, come with me; you are my wife.'  She did
not reply, but shook her head at him.  Then he spoke out high and fierce:
'May no child be born to you.  May a curse fall on you.  May your fields
be barren, and your horses and cattle die.  May you never see nor hear
good things.  May the waters leave their courses to drown you, and the
hills their bases to bury you, and no hand lay you in decent graves!'

"The woman put her hands to her ears and gave a little cry, and the Baron
pushed her gently on, and closed the door after her.  Then he turned on
Garoche.  'Have you said all you wish?' he asked.  'For, if not, say on,
and then go; and go so far you cannot see the sky that covers Beaugard.
We are even now--we can cry quits.  But that I have a little injured you,
you should be done for instantly.  But hear me: if I ever see you again,
my gallows shall end you straight.  Your tongue has been gross before the
mistress of this Manor; I will have it torn out if it so much as
syllables her name to me or to the world again.  She is dead to you.  Go,
and go for ever!'

"He put a bag of money on the table, but Garoche turned away from it, and
without a word left the room, and the house, and the parish, and said
nothing to any man of the evil that had come to him.

"But what talk was there, and what dreadful things were said at first-
that Garoche had sold his wife to the Baron; that he had been killed and
his wife taken; that the Baron kept him a prisoner in a cellar under the
Manor House!  And all the time there was Falise with the Baron--very
quiet and sweet and fine to see, and going to Chapel every day, and to
Mass on Sundays--which no one could understand, any more than they could
see why she should be called the Baroness of Beaugard; for had they all
not seen her married to Garoche?  And there were many people who thought
her vile.  Yet truly, at heart, she was not so--not at all.  Then it was
said that there was to be a new marriage; that the Church would let it be
so, doing and undoing, and doing again.  But the weeks and the months
went by, and it was never done.  For, powerful as the Baron was, Bigot
the Intendant was powerful also, and fought the thing with all his might.
The Baron went to Quebec to see the Bishop and the Governor, and though
promises were made, nothing was done.  It must go to the King and then to
the Pope, and from the Pope to the King again, and so on.  And the months
and the years went by as they waited, and with them came no child to the
Manor House of Beaugard.  That was the only sad thing--that and the
waiting, so far as man could see.  For never were man and woman truer to
each other than these, and never was a lady of the Manor kinder to the
poor, or a lord freer of hand to his vassals.  He would bluster
sometimes, and string a peasant up by the heels, but his gallows was
never used; and, what was much in the minds of the people, the Cure did
not refuse the woman the sacrament.

"At last the Baron, fierce because he knew that Bigot was the cause of
the great delay, so that he might not call Falise his wife, seized a
transport on the river, which had been sent to brutally levy upon a poor
gentleman, and when Bigot's men resisted, shot them down.  Then Bigot
sent against Beaugard a company of artillery and some soldiers of the
line.  The guns were placed on a hill looking down on the Manor House
across the little river.  In the evening the cannons arrived, and in the
morning the fight was to begin.  The guns were loaded and everything was
ready.  At the Manor all was making ready also, and the Baron had no
fear.

"But Falise's heart was heavy, she knew not why.  'Eugene,' she said, 'if
anything should happen!'  'Nonsense, my Falise,' he answered; 'what
should happen?'  'If--if you were taken--were killed!' she said.
'Nonsense, my rose,' he said again, 'I shall not be killed.  But if I
were, you should be at peace here.'  'Ah, no, no!' said she.  'Never.
Life to me is only possible with you.  I have had nothing but you--none
of those things which give peace to other women--none.  But I have been
happy-yes, very happy.  And, God forgive me, Eugene, I cannot regret, and
I never have!  But it has been always and always my prayer that, when you
die, I may die with you--at the same moment.  For I cannot live without
you, and, besides, I would like to go to the good God with you to speak
for us both; for oh, I loved you, I loved you, and I love you still, my
husband, my adored!'

"He stooped--he was so big, and she but of middle height--kissed her, and
said: 'See, my Falise, I am of the same mind.  We have been happy in
life, and we could well be happy in death together.'  So they sat long,
long into the night and talked to each other--of the days they had passed
together, of cheerful things, she trying to comfort herself, and he
trying to bring smiles to her lips.  At last they said good-night, and he
lay down in his clothes; and after a few moments she was sleeping like a
child.  But he could not sleep, for he lay thinking of her and of her
life--how she had come from humble things and fitted in with the highest.
At last, at break of day, he arose and went outside.  He looked up at the
hill where Bigot's two guns were.  Men were already stirring there.  One
man was standing beside the gun, and another not far behind.  Of course
the Baron could not know that the man behind the gunner said: 'Yes, you
may open the dance with an early salute;' and he smiled up boldly at the
hill and went into the house, and stole to the bed of his wife to kiss
her before he began the day's fighting.  He looked at her a moment,
standing over her, and then stooped and softly put his lips to hers.

"At that moment the gunner up on the hill used the match, and an awful
thing happened.  With the loud roar the whole hillside of rock and gravel
and sand split down, not ten feet in front of the gun, moved with
horrible swiftness upon the river, filled its bed, turned it from its
course, and, sweeping on, swallowed the Manor House of Beaugard.  There
had been a crack in the hill, the water of the river had sapped its
foundations, and it needed only this shock to send it down.

"And so, as the woman wished: the same hour for herself and the man!  And
when at last their prison was opened by the hands of Bigot's men, they
were found cheek by cheek, bound in the sacred marriage of Death.

"But another had gone the same road, for, at the awful moment, beside the
bursted gun, the dying gunner, Garoche, lifted up his head, saw the loose
travelling hill, and said with his last breath: 'The waters drown them,
and the hills bury them, and--'

"He had his way with them, and after that perhaps the great God had His
way with him perhaps."






THE TUNE McGILVERAY PLAYED

McGilveray has been dead for over a hundred years, but there is a parish
in Quebec where his tawny-haired descendants still live.  They have the
same sort of freckles on their faces as had their ancestor, the
bandmaster of Anstruther's regiment, and some of them have his taste for
music, yet none of them speak his language or with his brogue, and the
name of McGilveray has been gallicised to Magille.

In Pontiac, one of the Magilles, the fiddler of the parish, made the
following verse in English as a tribute of admiration for an heroic deed
of his ancestor, of which the Cure of the parish, the good M. Santonge,
had told him:

              "Piff! poem! ka-zoon, ka-zoon!
               That is the way of the organ tune--
               And the ships are safe that day!
               Piff!  poum!  kazoon, kazoon!
               And the Admiral light his pipe and say:
               'Bully for us, we are not kill!
               Who is to make the organ play
               Make it say zoon-kazoon?
               You with the corunet come this way--
               You are the man, Magillel
               Piff! poum! kazoon, kazoon!'"

Now, this is the story of McGilveray the bandmaster of Anstruther's
regiment:

It was at the time of the taking of Quebec, the summer of 1759.  The
English army had lain at Montmorenci, at the Island of Orleans, and at
Point Levis; the English fleet in the basin opposite the town, since June
of that great year, attacking and retreating, bombarding and besieging,
to no great purpose.  For within the walls of the city, and on the shore
of Beauport, protected by its mud flats--a splendid moat--the French more
than held their own.

In all the hot months of that summer, when parishes were ravaged with
fire and sword, and the heat was an excuse for almost any lapse of
virtue, McGilveray had not been drunk once--not once.  It was almost
unnatural.  Previous to that, McGilveray's career had been chequered.
No man had received so many punishments in the whole army, none had risen
so superior to them as had he, none had ever been shielded from wrath
present and to come as had this bandmaster of Anstruther's regiment.  He
had no rivals for promotion in the regiment--perhaps that was one reason;
he had a good temper and an overwhelming spirit of fun--perhaps that was
another.

He was not remarkable to the vision--scarcely more than five feet four;
with an eye like a gimlet, red hair tied in a queue, a big mouth, and a
chest thrown out like the breast of a partridge--as fine a figure of a
man in miniature as you should see.  When intoxicated, his tongue rapped
out fun and fury like a triphammer.  Alert-minded drunk or sober, drunk,
he was lightning-tongued, and he could play as well drunk as sober, too;
but more than once a sympathetic officer altered the tactics that
McGilveray might not be compelled to march, and so expose his condition.
Standing still he was quite fit for duty.  He never got really drunk "at
the top."  His brain was always clear, no matter how useless were his
legs.

But the wonderful thing was that for six months McGilveray's legs were as
steady as his head was right.  At first the regiment was unbelieving, and
his resolution to drink no more was scoffed at in the non-com mess.  He
stuck to it, however, and then the cause was searched for--and not found.
He had not turned religious, he was not fanatical, he was of sound mind--
what was it?  When the sergeant-major suggested a woman, they howled him
down, for they said McGilveray had not made love to women since the day
of his weaning, and had drunk consistently all the time.

Yet it was a woman.

A fortnight or so after Wolfe's army and Saunders's fleet had sat down
before Quebec, McGilveray, having been told by a sentry at Montmorenci
where Anstruther's regiment was camped, that a French girl on the other
side of the stream had kissed her hand to him and sung across in laughing
insolence:

               "Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre,"

he had forthwith set out to hail this daughter of Gaul, if perchance she
might be seen again.

At more than ordinary peril he crossed the river on a couple of logs,
lashed together, some distance above the spot where the picket had seen
Mademoiselle.  It was a moonlight night, and he might easily have been
picked off by a bullet, if a wary sentry had been alert and malicious.
But the truth was that many of these pickets on both sides were in no
wise unfriendly to each other, and more than once exchanged tobacco and
liquor across the stream.  As it chanced, however, no sentry saw
McGilveray, and presently, safely landed, he made his way down the
stream.  Even at the distance he was from the falls, the rumble of them
came up the long walls of firs and maples with a strange, half-moaning
sound--all else was still.  He came down until he was opposite the spot
where his English picket was posted, and then he halted and surveyed his
ground.

Nothing human in sight, no sound of life, no sign of habitation.  At this
moment, however, his stupidity in thus rushing into danger, the
foolishness of pursuing a woman whom he had never seen, and a French
woman at that, the punishment that would be meted out to him if his
adventure was discovered--all these came to him.

They stunned him for a moment, and then presently, as if in defiance of
his own thoughts, he began to sing softly:

"Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre."

Suddenly, in one confused moment, he was seized, and a hand was clapped
over his mouth.  Three French soldiers had him in their grip-stalwart
fellows they were, of the Regiment of Bearn.  He had no strength to cope
with them, he at once saw the futility of crying out, so he played the
eel, and tried to slip from the grasp of his captors.  But though he gave
the trio an awkward five minutes he was at last entirely overcome, and
was carried away in triumph through the woods.  More than once they
passed a sentry, and more than once campfires round which soldiers slept
or dozed.  Now and again one would raise his head, and with a laugh, or a
"Sapristi!" or a "Sacre bleu!" drop back into comfort again.

After about ten minutes' walk he was brought to a small wooden house, the
door was thrown open, he was tossed inside, and the soldiers entered
after.  The room was empty save for a bench, some shelves, a table, on
which a lantern burned, and a rude crucifix on the wall.  McGilveray sat
down on the bench, and in five minutes his feet were shackled, while a
chain fastened to a staple in the wall held him in secure captivity.

"How you like yourself now?" asked a huge French corporal who had
learned English from an English girl at St. Malo years before.

"If you'd tie a bit o' pink ribbon round me neck, I'd die wid pride,"
said McGilveray, spitting on the ground in defiance at the same time.

The big soldier laughed, and told his comrades what the bandmaster had
said.  One of them grinned, but the other frowned sullenly, and said:

"Avez vous tabac?"

"Havey you to-ba-co?" said the big soldier instantly--interpreting.

"Not for a Johnny Crapaud like you, and put that in your pipe and shmoke
it!" said McGilveray, winking at the big fellow, and spitting on the
ground before the surly one, who made a motion as if he would bayonet
McGilveray where he sat.

"He shall die--the cursed English soldier," said Johnny Crapaud.

"Some other day will do," said McGilveray.  "What does he say?" asked
Johnny Crapaud.

"He says he'll give each of us three pounds of tobacco, if we let him
go," answered the corporal.  McGilveray knew by the corporal's voice that
he was lying, and he also knew that, somehow, he had made a friend.

"Y'are lyin', me darlin', me bloody beauty!" interposed McGilveray.

"If we don't take him to headquarters now he'll send across and get the
tobacco," interpreted the corporal to Johnny Crapaud.

"If he doesn't get the tobacco he'll be hung for a spy," said Johnny
Crapaud, turning on his heel.  "Do we all agree?" said the corporal.

The others nodded their heads, and, as they went out, McGilveray said
after them:

"I'll dance a jig on yer sepulchrees, ye swobs!" he roared, and he spat
on the ground again in defiance.  Johnny Crapaud turned to the corporal.

"I'll kill him very dead," said he, "if that tobacco doesn't come.  You
tell him so," he added, jerking a thumb towards McGilveray.  "You tell
him so."

The corporal stayed when the others went out, and, in broken English,
told McGilveray so.

"I'll play a hornpipe, an' his gory shroud is round him," said
McGilveray.

The corporal grinned from ear to ear.  "You like a chew tabac?" said he,
pulling out a dirty knob of a black plug.

McGilveray had found a man after his own heart.  "Sing a song
a-sixpence," said he, "what sort's that for a gintleman an' a corporal,
too?  Feel in me trousies pocket," said he, "which is fur me frinds for
iver."  McGilveray had now hopes of getting free, but if he had not taken
a fancy to "me baby corporal," as he called the Frenchman, he would have
made escape or release impossible, by insulting him and every one of them
as quick as winking.

After the corporal had emptied one pocket, "Now the other, man-o-wee-
wee!" said McGilveray, and presently the two were drinking what the
flask from the "trousies pocket" contained.  So well did McGilveray work
upon the Frenchman's bonhomie that the corporal promised he should
escape.  He explained how McGilveray should be freed--that at midnight
some one would come and release him, while he, the corporal, was with his
companions, so avoiding suspicion as to his own complicity.  McGilveray
and the corporal were to meet again and exchange courtesies after the
manner of brothers--if the fortunes of war permitted.

McGilveray was left alone.  To while away the time he began to whistle to
himself, and what with whistling, and what with winking and talking to
the lantern on the table, and calling himself painful names, he endured
his captivity well enough.

It was near midnight when the lock turned in the door and presently
stepped inside--a girl.

"Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre," said she, and nodded her head to him
humorously.

By this McGilveray knew that this was the maid that had got him into all
this trouble.  At first he was inclined to say so, but she came nearer,
and one look of her black eyes changed all that.

"You've a way wid you, me darlin'," said McGilveray, not thinking that
she might understand.

"A leetla way of my own," she answered in broken English.

McGilveray started.  "Where did you learn it?" he asked, for he had had
two surprises that night.

"Of my mother--at St. Malo," she replied.  "She was half English--of
Jersey.  You are a naughty boy," she added, with a little gurgle of
laughter in her throat.  "You are not a good soldier to go a-chase of the
French girls 'cross of the river."

"Shure I am not a good soldier thin.  Music's me game.  An' the band of
Anstruther's rigimint's mine."

"You can play tunes on a drum?" she asked, mischievously.

"There's wan I'd play to the voice av you," he said, in his softest
brogue.  "You'll be unloosin' me, darlin'?" he added.

She stooped to undo the shackles on his ankles.  As she did so he leaned
over as if to kiss her.  She threw back her head in disgust.

"You have been drink," she said, and she stopped her work of freeing him.

"What'd wet your eye--no more," he answered.  She stood up.  "I will
not," she said, pointing to the shackles, "if you drink some more--nevare
some more--nevare!"

"Divil a drop thin, darlin', till we fly our flag yander," pointing
towards where he supposed the town to be.

"Not till then?" she asked, with a merry little sneer.  "Ver' well, it
is comme ca!"  She held out her hand.  Then she burst into a soft laugh,
for his hands were tied.  "Let me kiss it," he said, bending forward.

"No, no, no," she said.  "We will shake our hands after," and she
stooped, took off the shackles, and freed his arms.

"Now if you like," she said, and they shook hands as McGilveray stood up
and threw out his chest.  But, try as he would to look important, she was
still an inch taller than he.

A few moments later they were hurrying quietly through the woods, to the
river.  There was no speaking.  There was only the escaping prisoner and
the gay-hearted girl speeding along in the night, the mumbling of the
quiet cascade in their ears, the shifting moon playing hide-and-seek with
the clouds.  They came out on the bank a distance above where McGilveray
had landed, and the girl paused and spoke in a whisper.  "It is more hard
now," she said.  "Here is a boat, and I must paddle--you would go to
splash.  Sit still and be good."

She loosed the boat into the current gently, and, holding it, motioned to
him to enter.

"You're goin' to row me over?" he asked, incredulously.

"'Sh!  get in," she said.

"Shtrike me crazy, no!" said McGilveray.  "Divil a step will I go.  Let
me that sowed the storm take the whirlwind."  He threw out his chest.

"What is it you came here for?" she asked, with meaning.

"Yourself an' the mockin' bird in yer voice," he answered.

"Then that is enough," she said.  "You come for me, I go for you.  Get
in."

A moment afterwards, taking advantage of the obscured moon, they were
carried out on the current diagonally down the stream, and came quickly
to that point on the shore where an English picket was placed.  They had
scarcely touched the shore when the click of a musket was heard, and a
"Qui-va-la?" came from the thicket.

McGilveray gave the pass-word, and presently he was on the bank saluting
the sentry he had left three hours before.

"Malbrouk s'en va t'en guerre!" said the girl again with a gay
insolence, and pushed the boat out into the stream.

"A minnit, a minnit, me darlin'," said McGilveray.

"Keep your promise," came back, softly.

"Ah, come back wan minnit!"

"A flirt!" said the sentry.

"You will pay for that," said the girl to the sentry, with quick anger.

"Do you love me, Irishman?" she added, to McGilveray.

"I do--aw, wurra, wurra, I do!" said McGilveray.  "Then you come and get
me by ze front door of ze city," said she, and a couple of quick strokes
sent her canoe out into the dusky middle of the stream; and she was soon
lost to view.

"Aw, the loike o' that!  Aw, the foine av her-the tip-top lass o' the
wide world!" said he.

"You're a fool, an' there'll be trouble from this," said the sentry.

There was trouble, for two hours later the sentry was found dead; picked
off by a bullet from the other shore when he showed himself in the
moonlight; and from that hour all friendliness between the pickets of the
English and the French ceased on the Montmorenci.

But the one witness to McGilveray's adventure was dead, and that was why
no man knew wherefore it was that McGilveray took an oath to drink no
more till they captured Quebec.

From May to September McGilveray kept to his resolution.  But for all
that time he never saw "the tip-top lass o' the wide world."  A time
came, however, when McGilveray's last state was worse than his first, and
that was the evening before the day Quebec was taken.  A dozen prisoners
had been captured in a sortie from the Isle of Orleans to the mouth of
the St. Charles River.  Among these prisoners was the grinning corporal
who had captured McGilveray and then released him.

Two strange things happened.  The big, grinning corporal escaped from
captivity the same night, and McGilveray, as a non-com said, "Got
shameful drunk."  This is one explanation of the two things.  McGilveray
had assisted the grinning corporal to escape.  The other explanation
belongs to the end of the story.  In any case, McGilveray "got shameful
drunk," and "was going large" through the camp.  The end of it was his
arrest for assisting a prisoner to escape and for being drunk and
disorderly.  The band of Anstruther's regiment boarded H.M.S. Leostaf
without him, to proceed up the river stealthily with the rest of the
fleet to Cap Rouge, from whence the last great effort of the heroic Wolfe
to effect a landing was to be made.  McGilveray, still intoxicated but
intelligent, watched them go in silence.

As General Wolfe was about to enter the boat which was to convey him to
the flag-ship, he saw McGilveray, who was waiting under guard to be taken
to Major Hardy's post at Point Levis.  The General knew him well, and
looked at him half sadly, half sternly.

"I knew you were free with drink, McGilveray," he said, "but I did not
think you were a traitor to your country too."

McGilveray saluted, and did not answer.

"You might have waited till after to-morrow, man," said the General, his
eyes flashing.  "My soldiers should have good music to-morrow."

McGilveray saluted again, but made no answer.

As if with a sudden thought the General waved off the officers and men
near him, and betkcned McGilveray to him.

"I can understand the drink in a bad soldier," he said, "but you helped a
prisoner to escape.  Come, man, we may both be dead to-morrow, and I'd
like to feel that no soldier in my army is wilfully a foe of his
country."

"He did the same for me, whin I was taken prisoner, yer Excillincy, an'
--an', yer Excillincy, 'twas a matter of a woman, too."

The General's face relaxed a little.  "Tell me the whole truth," said he;
and McGilveray told him all.  "Ah, yer Excillincy," he burst out, at
last, "I was no traitor at heart, but a fool I always was!  Yer
Excillincy, court-martial and death's no matter to me; but I'd like to
play wan toon agin, to lead the byes tomorrow.  Wan toon, Gineral, an'
I'll be dacintly shot before the day's over-ah, yer Excillincy, wan toon
more, and to be wid the byes followin' the Gineral!"

The General's face relaxed still more.

"I take you at your word," said he.  He gave orders that McGilveray
should proceed at once aboard the flag-ship, from whence he should join
Anstruther's regiment at Cap Rouge.

The General entered the boat, and McGilveray followed with some non-com.
officers in another.  It was now quite dark, and their motions, or the
motions of the vessels of war, could not be seen from the French
encampment or the citadel.  They neared the flag-ship, and the General,
followed by his officers, climbed up.  Then the men in McGilveray's boat
climbed up also, until only himself and another were left.

At that moment the General, looking down from the side of the ship, said
sharply to an officer beside him: "What's that?"

He pointed to a dark object floating near the ship, from which presently
came a small light with a hissing sound.

"It's a fire-organ, sir," was the reply.

A fire-organ was a raft, carrying long tubes like the pipes of an organ,
and filled with explosives.  They were used by the French to send among
the vessels of the British fleet to disorganise and destroy them.  The
little light which the General saw was the burning fuse.  The raft had
been brought out into the current by French sailors, the fuse had been
lighted, and it was headed to drift towards the British ships.  The fleet
was now in motion, and apart from the havoc which the bursting fire-organ
might make, the light from the explosion would reveal the fact that the
English men-o'-war were now moving towards Cap Rouge.  This knowledge
would enable Montcalm to detect Wolfe's purpose, and he would at once
move his army in that direction.  The west side of the town had meagre
military defenses, the great cliffs being thought impregnable.  But at
this point Wolfe had discovered a narrow path up a steep cliff.

McGilveray had seen the fire-organ at the same moment as the General.
"Get up the side," he said to the remaining soldier in his boat.  The
soldier began climbing, and McGilveray caught the oars and was instantly
away towards the raft.  The General, looking over the ship's side,
understood his daring purpose.  In the shadow, they saw him near it, they
saw him throw a boat-hook and catch it, and then attach a rope; they saw
him sit down, and, taking the oars, laboriously row up-stream toward the
opposite shore, the fuse burning softly, somewhere among the great pipes
of explosives.  McGilveray knew that it might be impossible to reach the
fuse--there was no time to spare, and he had set about to row the
devilish machine out of range of the vessels which were carrying Wolfe's
army to a forlorn hope.

For minutes those on board the man-o'-war watched and listened.
Presently nothing could be seen, not even the small glimmer from the
burning fuse.

Then, all at once, there was a terrible report, and the organ pipes
belched their hellish music upon the sea.  Within the circle of light
that the explosion made, there was no sign of any ship; but, strangely
tall in the red glare, stood McGilveray in his boat.  An instant he stood
so, then he fell, and presently darkness covered the scene.  The furious
music of death and war was over.  There was silence on the ship for a
time as all watched and waited.  Presently an officer said to the
General: "I'm afraid he's gone, sir."

"Send a boat to search," was the reply.  "If he is dead"--the General
took off his hat "we will, please God, bury him within the French citadel
to-morrow."

But McGilveray was alive, and in half-an-hour he was brought aboard the
flag-ship, safe and sober.  The General praised him for his courage, and
told him that the charge against him should be withdrawn.

"You've wiped all out, McGilveray," said Wolfe.  "We see you are no
traitor."

"Only a fool of a bandmaster who wanted wan toon more, yer Excillincy,"
said McGilveray.

"Beware drink, beware women," answered the General.

But advice of that sort is thrown away on such as McGilveray.  The next
evening after Quebec was taken, and McGilveray went in at the head of his
men playing "The Men of Harlech," he met in the streets the woman that
had nearly been the cause of his undoing.  Indignation threw out his
chest.

"It's you, thin," he said, and he tried to look scornfully at her.

"Have you keep your promise?" she said, hardly above her breath.

"What's that to you?" he asked, his eyes firing up.  "I got drunk last
night--afther I set your husband free--afther he tould me you was his
wife.  We're aven now, decaver!  I saved him, and the divil give you joy
of that salvation--and that husband, say I."

"Hoosban'--" she exclaimed, "who was my hoosban'?"

"The big grinning corporal," he answered.

"He is shot this morning," she said, her face darkening, "and, besides,
he was--nevare--my hoosban'."

"He said he was," replied McGilveray, eagerly.

"He was awway a liar," she answered.

"He decaved you too, thin?" asked McGilveray, his face growing red.

She did not answer, but all at once a change came over her, the half-
mocking smile left her lips, tears suddenly ran down her cheeks, and
without a word she turned and hurried into a little alley, and was lost
to view, leaving McGilveray amazed and confounded.

It was days before he found her again, and three things only that they
said are of any moment here.  "We'll lave the past behind us," he said-
"an' the pit below for me, if I'm not a good husband t' ye!"

"You will not drink no more?" she asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Not till the Frenchies take Quebec again," he answered.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

We'll lave the past behind us
The furious music of death and war was over





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