Harry James Smith

“ There is but little more to tell. The next morning, bright and early, everybody was at the wharf to watch the Gloria hoist her sails, weigh anchor, and tack out into the bay. There were tears in many, many eyes besides those of poor Mrs. Pettipaw. The sea had a dark look, off there, and one thought of the dangers that awaited any man who sailed out on it at this time of the year. ”

“ For that matter, it is not likely to die out, since, on the day of his death, the old reprobate was married to the mother of his seven children—baptized, married, administered, and shuffled off in a day.
It had never occurred to any of us, somehow, that Fortune might be as transitory and impermanent as his patron goddess herself. We had always accepted him as a sort of ageless thing, a living symbol, a peripatetic mortal, coming out of Petit de Grat, and going about, tobacco in cheek, fiddle under arm, as irresponsible as mirth itself among the sons of men. ”

“ It came to her, somehow, that the girl had come thither on a mission similar to her own, she was so silent, and had not the look of those who had waited on the wharf in previous years. And so, one afternoon, when two vessels had rounded the Cape and were entering the harbor, amid a great hubbub of expectancy,—and neither of them was the Soleil,—Zabette surprised a look of woe in the face of the other which she could not resist. She went over to her, with some diffidence, and offered a few words of sympathy.
"You are waiting for some one, too?" she asked her. ”

“ Some people have seen death-fires too, and a headless creature, much like a horse, galloping through the darkness; and over there at Fougère's Cove, the most remote settlement of the Cape, there were knockings at doors through all one winter from hands not human. The Fougères—they were mostly of one tribe there—were driven to desperation; they consulted a priest; they protected themselves with blessed images, with prayers and holy water; and no harm came to them, though poor Marcelle, who was a jeune fille of marriageable age, was prostrated for a year with the fright of it. ”

“ You are a bad, cruel girl; you have no heart. It is a mercy he escaped the traps you set for him—my poor Maxence!"
A thousand taunting words came to Zabette's lips, but she controlled herself, rose to her feet with a show of dignity, and quitted the wharf. She resolved that she would never speak to that Benoît girl again. ”

“ She declared to herself that nothing would induce her to go to l'Étang; and yet, as if under a spell, she made ready for the journey.
"Where are you going, my Zabette?" asked her old mother.
"To l'Étang," she answered. "I hear there is a girl there who makes a special brown dye for wool."
"Well, the walk will do you good, ma fille. You have been indoors too much lately. You are growing right pale and ill-looking."
"Oh, it is nothing, maman. I never feel very brisk, you know, in November. 'Tis such a dreary month."
She took a back road across the barrens to l'Étang. ”

“ It always hurts just as much; it's always just as bewildering, just as terrible, as if you had never seen anything like it before. And when I saw that giant of a Renny Marks just broken over there like some big tree shattered by lightning, it seemed as if I could not bear to face such suffering. ”

“ Can you not put trust in your own mother, who loves you better than her eyes and nose?'—and she smiled at him just like a fat wicked old spider that is waiting for a fly to come and get tangled up in her net.
"But Benoît only remembered then that she was his mother; so he said:
"'I have a fear, me, that I shall not be long for this world, my mother. Last week I saw a little blue fire on the barrens one night, and again one night I heard hoofs going claquin-claquant down there on the beach, much like the horse without head. ”

“ Now just as if they are not doing it at all of their own wish, but something makes them act that way, all of a sudden those four Bucherons are kneeling on the floor, saying their prayers in a strange voice like the prayers you might hear in a tomb; and with that, the chair goes back quietly to its four legs, and the noise ceases on the roof, and those two cupboard doors draw shut without human hands. As for Noémi, she grabs up the money, and out she goes, swift as a bird that is carrying a worm to its children, leaving her parents by marriage still there on their knees, like so many images ”

“ Not the present only, but the future must be thought of.
[Pg 137]
"And if he was forced like that to marry me, he would hate me," pursued the girl, who saw things with the pitiless clear foresight that desperation gives. "He must marry me from his own choice. Oh, if I could only make him choose; but to-night he said NO! and went away, very angry. I'm afraid he will never come back again."
"Yes, he will," said Sabine Bob. There was a grim smile on her lips; and she squared her shoulders as if to give herself courage for some dreaded ordeal. "There is a way." ”

“ We are a very simple people, in this out-of-the-way Cape Breton parish, called mostly to be fishers, like Our Lord's apostles, and recking not a whit of the finer points of doctrine. Nevertheless, it is an hireling shepherd who is faithless only because the flock do not ask to be fed with the appointed manna; and I shall broach the sermon again, once I have set down the thing that is so heavy on my heart.
For all I can think of just now is that Renny and Suse, out there on Halibut Head, four miles away, are alone; alone for the first time in well-nigh thirty years. ”

“ She would not encourage any of them, however.
"If I marry," she said to herself, "it is giving Maxence over to that l'Étang girl. She will crow about it. She will say, 'At last he is mine altogether. She has surrendered.' No, I could not stand that."
So that winter passed, and the next summer, and other winters and summers. Zabette did not marry; and after a time she began hearing herself spoken of as an old maid. The young men flocked to other houses, not hers. At the end of twelve years both her father and mother were dead, and she was alone in the world, thirty, and unprovided for. ”

“ At such moments we act from something deeper, more elemental, than will. The best or the worst in us leaps out—or perhaps neither one nor the other but merely that thing in us that is most essentially ourselves.
Sabine stared at the poor girl whose terrifying, wonderful secret had just been revealed to her, and she felt through all her being a sense of shattering and disintegration; and suddenly she was there, beside Tina, on the arm of her chair ”

“ Zabette sighed wearily. "And all these years I have been saying the same thing. And yet I could never forget the shell box and your letter from St. Pierre Miquelon. Come, don't you see how much easier it will be—how much more natural—if we put our treasures together: all we have of Maxence, and call him ours?"
Suzanne was beginning to yield, but doubtfully. "If it would be proper," she said.
"Not if he were living, of course," replied the other, with assurance. "The laws of the church forbid that. But in the course of a lifetime a husband may have more than one wife. ”

“ But it is on a Sunday morning, when, in response to the quavering summons of the chapel bell, the whole countryside gives up its population, that you get the clearest notion of what religion means in the life of the Acadians. From the doorway of our house, which was close to the road at the upper end of the harbor, we could see the whole church-going procession from the outlying districts. The passing would be almost unbroken from eight o'clock on for more than an hour and a half: a varied, vivacious, friendly human stream. ”

“ La Rose had no age. She was both very young and very old. For all she had never traveled more than ten miles from the little Cape Breton town of Port l'Évêque, you had the feeling that she had seen a good deal of the world, and it is certain that her life had not been easy; yet she would laugh as quickly and abundantly as a young girl just home from the convent.
These two were the best of comrades. La Rose had been the boy's nurse when he was little, and as he had [Pg 20] no mother she had kept a feeling of special affection and responsibility for him. ”

“ We had wanted Captain Joe to go away; we had actually forced him to go away; yet no sooner was he gone than we prayed he might be brought safe home again. Yes, for when all is said and done, a town that has a hero must love him and cherish him and wish him well. Because we have ours, Three Rivers will always be a better place to live in and to bring up children in: a more inspiring place. ”

“ Then she said:
"Mary Willee, you are a bad girl and I can never forgive you; but if Tina Lejeune thinks she is going to marry Thomas Ned, she will find out that she is mistaken. That is a thing that will not happen."
Mary recoiled, terrified, at the pitiless, menacing smile on the other woman's face; but before she could say anything Sabine Bob had stalked out of the house into the darkness.
She climbed the hill to the back road, stumbling often, blinded more by her own fierce emotions than by the winter night; she fought her way westward against the bitter wind that was rising ”

“ Two miles back from the inner shore, the road forks at the base of a little hill more conspicuously bare than the rest, and close to the naked summit of it, overlooking all the Cape, stands a Calvary. Nobody knows how long it has stood there, or why it was first erected; though tradition has it that long, long ago, a certain man by the name of Toussaint was there set upon by wild beasts and torn to pieces. ”

“ I remember once meeting a little funeral train [Pg 8] crossing the barrens. They were bearing the body of a young girl, Anna Béjean, to its last rest, five miles away by the road, in the yard of the parish church amongst the wooden crosses. The long box of pine lay on the bottom of a country wagon, and a wreath of artificial flowers and another of home-dyed immortelles were fastened to the cover. A young fisherman, sunburned and muscular, was leading the horse along the rough road, and behind followed three or four carts, carrying persons in black, all of middle age or beyond, and silent. ”

“ One of the privileges Michel esteemed most highly was that of accompanying La Rose occasionally when she went blueberrying over on the barrens—dans les bois, as the phrase still goes in Port l'Évêque, though it is all of sixty years since there were any woods there. The best barrens for blueberrying lay across the harbor. They reached back to the bay four or five miles to southward. Along the edges of several rocky coves, narrow and steep as a sluice, clung a few weatherbeaten fishermen's houses; but there was no other sign of human habitation.
It is what they call a bad country over there. ”

“ And now that he had been away four months, pogey-fishing, she would sometimes console herself by getting out the five picture-postcards he had sent her and muse upon the scenes of affection depicted there and pick out, word by word, the brief messages he had written. With Mary Willee's assistance she had memorized them; and they were words of sempiternal devotion; and there were little round love-knows-what's in plenty; and on one card he called her his little wife; and that was the one she prized the most. Wife! Sabine Bob! ”

“ It was when my poor stepmother was a girl. She lived at Pig Cove then, and that is only two miles from Gros Nez. And one of those Bucherons was once wanting to marry her; but do you think she would have anything to do with a man like that?
"'No,' she said. 'I will have nothing to do with you. I would sooner not ever be married, me, than to have you for my man.'
"And the reason she spoke that way was because of the cruelty they had shown toward that poor widow of a Noémi, which everybody on the Cape knew about, and it was a great scandal. ”

“ I would not fancy ox eyes in a man."
[Pg 89]
Suzanne freed herself and stood facing her with a flash of hatred in her mild face which Zabette could not understand.
"And his name!" she demanded, harshly. "His name, then!"
Zabette smiled a little proudly. "That is my secret," she replied. "But, Suzanne, what is the matter?"
"It is not your secret," laughed the other, bitterly. "It is not your secret. It is my secret."
"What do you mean?" cried Zabette, with a sudden feeling of terror at the girl's drawn face.
"His name is Maxence!" Suzanne's laugh was like bones rattling in a coffin. ”

“ Flocks of sheep scamper untended over the barrens all day, and groups of horses, turned out to shift for themselves while the fishing season keeps their owners occupied, look for a moment, nose in the air, at the passer, kick up their heels, and race off. ”