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A Cry in the Wilderness

by Mary E. Waller · English · Gutenberg #34396 · 623,287 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Cry in the Wilderness

Author: Mary E. Waller

Illustrator: Arthur Ignatius Keller


        
Release date: November 22, 2010 [eBook #34396]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34396

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CRY IN THE WILDERNESS ***




Produced by Al Haines









[Frontispiece: "What a wilderness was this Seigniory of Lamoral! and
yet--I liked it."  Frontispiece.  _See Page 92_.]




A CRY IN

THE WILDERNESS


BY

MARY E. WALLER


Author of "The Wood-carver of 'Lympus," "Flamsted Quarries," "A Year
Out of Life," etc.



WITH FRONTISPIECE IN COLOR BY

ARTHUR I. KELLER




TORONTO

MCCLELLAND & GOODCHILD

LIMITED




_Copyright, 1912,_

BY MARY E. WALLER.


_All rights reserved_



Published, October, 1912



THE COLONIAL PRESS

C. H. SIMONDS & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.




CONTENTS


BOOK ONE

THE JUGGERNAUT


BOOK TWO

THE SEIGNIORY OF LAMORAL


BOOK THREE

FINDING THE TRAIL




BOOK ONE

THE JUGGERNAUT




A Cry in the Wilderness



I

"You Juggernaut!"

That's exactly what I said, and said aloud too.

I was leaning from the window in my attic room in the old district of
New York known as "Chelsea"; both hands were stemmed on the ledge.

"You Juggernaut of a city!" I said again, and found considerable
satisfaction in repeating that word.  I leaned out still farther into
the sickening September heat and defiantly shook my fist, as it were
into the face of the monster commercial metropolis of the New World.

I felt the blood rush into my cheeks--thin and white enough, so my
glass told me.  Then I straightened myself, drew back and into the
room.  The quick sharp clang of the ambulance gong, the clatter of
running hoofs sounded below me in the street.

"And they keep going under--so," I said beneath my breath; and added,
but between my teeth:

"But _I_ won't--I _won't_!"

Turning from the window, I took my seat at the table on which was a
pile of newspapers I kept for reference, and searched through them
until I found an advertisement I remembered to have seen a week before.
I had marked it with a blue pencil.  I cut it out.  Then I put on my
hat and went down into the city that lay swooning in the intense,
sultry heat of mid-September.

The sun, dimmed and blood red in vapor, was setting behind the Jersey
shore.  The heated air quivered above the housetops.  Wherever there
was a stretch of asphalt pavement, innumerable hoof-dents witnessed to
the power of the sun's rays.  The shrivelled foliage in the parks was
gray with dust.

I knew well enough that on the upper avenues for blocks and blocks the
houses were tightly boarded as if hermetically sealed to light and air;
but I was going southward, and below and seaward every door and window
yawned wide.  To the rivers, to the Battery, to the Bridge, the piers,
and the parks, the sluggish, vitiated life of the city's tenement
districts was crawling listless.  The tide was out; and I knew that
beneath the piers--who should know better than I who for six years had
taken half of my recreation on them?--the fetid air lay heavy on the
scum gathered about the slime-covered piles.

The advertisement was a Canadian "want", and in reading it an
overpowering longing came upon me to see something of the spaciousness
of that other country, to breathe its air that blows over the northern
snow-fields.  I had acted on an impulse in deciding to answer it, but
that impulse was only the precipitation of long-unuttered and unfilled
desires.  I was realizing this as I made my way eastward into one of
the former Trinity tenement districts.

I found the flag-paved court upon which the shadows were already
falling.  It was not an easily discoverable spot, and I was a little in
doubt as to entering and inquiring further; I didn't like its look.  I
took out the advertisement; yes, this was the place: "No. 8 V----
Court."

"Don't back down now," I said to myself by way of encouragement and,
entering, rang the bell of an old-fashioned house with low stoop and
faded green blinds close shut in sharp contrast to the gaping ones
adjoining.  The openly neglected aspect of its neighbors was wanting,
as was, in fact, any indication of its character.  Ordinarily I would
have shunned such a locality.

The door was opened by a woman apparently fifty.  Her strong
deeply-lined face I trusted at once.

"What do you want?"  The voice was business-like, neither repellent nor
inviting.

"I 've come in answer to this," I said, holding out the clipping.  The
woman took it.

"You come in a minute, till I get my glasses."

She led the way through a long, unlighted hall into a back room where
the windows were open.

"You set right down there," she said, pushing me gently into a
rocking-chair and pressing a palm-leaf fan into my hand, "for you look
'bout ready to drop."

She spoke the truth; I was.  The sickening breathlessness of the air,
nine hours of indoor work, and little eaten all day for lack of
appetite, suddenly took what strength I had when I started out.

As the woman stood by the window reading the slip in the fading light,
my eyes never left her face.  It seemed to me--and strangely, too, for
I have always felt my independence of others' personal help--that my
life itself was about to depend on her answer.

"Yes, this is the place to apply; but now the first thing I want to
know is how you come to think you 'd fit this place?  You don't look
strong."

"Oh, yes, I am;" I spoke hurriedly, as if a heavy pressure that was
gradually making itself felt on my chest were forcing out the words;
"but I haven't been out of the hospital very long--"

"What hospital?"

"St. Luke's."

"What was the matter with you?"

"Typhoid pneumonia with pleurisy."

"How long was you there?"

"Ten weeks, to the first of July; I've been at work since--but I want
to get away from here where I can breathe; if I don't I shall die."

There was a queer flutter in my voice.  I could hear it.  The woman
noticed it.

"Ain't you well?"

"Oh, yes, I am, and want work--but away from here."

There must have been some passionate energy left in my voice at least,
for the woman lifted her thick eyebrows over the rim of her spectacles.

"H'm--let's talk things over."  She drew up a chair in front of me.  "I
won't light up yet, it's so hot.  I guess we 'll get a tempest 'fore
long."

She sat down, placing her hands on her knees and leaning forward to
look more closely at my face.  I seemed to see her through a fog, and
passed my hand across my eyes to wipe it away.

"There 's no use beating 'round the bush when it comes to business,"
she said bluntly but kindly; "I 've got to ask you some pretty plain
questions; the parties in this case are awful particular."

"Yes."  I answered with effort.  The fog was still before my eyes.

"You see what it says."  She began to read the advertisement slowly:
"'Wanted: A young girl of good parentage, strong, and country raised,
for companion and assistant to an elderly Scotchwoman on a farm in
Canada, Province of Quebec.  Must have had a common school education.
Apply at No. 8 V---- Court, New York City.'  You say you 've been in
St. Luke's?"

"Yes."

"Did you know the one they call Doctor Rugvie there?  He 's the great
surgeon."

"No, I don't know him; but I 've heard so much of him.  He was pointed
out to me once when I was getting better."

"Well, by good rights you ought to be applying for this place to him."

"To him?" I asked in surprise.  I could n't make this fact rhyme in
connection with this woman and Canada.

"Yes, to him; I'm only a go-between he trusts.  He 's in Europe now and
is n't coming home till late this year, so he left this with me," she
indicated the advertisement, "and told me not to put it in till a week
ago.  I ain't had many applications.  Folks in this city don't take to
going off to a farm in Canada, and those I 've had would n't have
suited.  But, anyway, Doctor Rugvie is reference for this place that's
advertised, and I guess he 's good enough for anybody.  I thought I 'd
tell you this to relieve your mind.  'T ain't every girl would come
down here to this hole looking for a place.--  Where was you born?"

"Here in New York, but I have lived most of my life in the country,
northern New England, just this side of the Canada line.  I 've been
here seven years, five in the Public Library; that's my reference."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-six next December--the third."

"I would n't have thought it.  Mother living?"

"No; she died when I was born."

"Any father?"

"I--I don't know whether my father is living or not."

I began to wish I had n't come here to be questioned like this; yet I
knew the woman was asking only what was necessary in the circumstances.
I feared my answers would seal my fate as an applicant.

"What was your father's name?"

"I don't know."  Again I caught the sound of that strange flutter in my
voice.  "I never knew my father."

"Humph!  Then your mother wasn't married, I take it."

The statement would have sounded heartless to me except that the
woman's voice was wholly businesslike, just as if she had asked that
question a hundred times already of other girls.

"Oh, yes--yes, she was."

"Before you was born?"

"Yes."

"What was her husband's name then?"

"Jackson."

"Christian name?"

"George."

"Jackson--Jackson--George Jackson."  The woman repeated the name,
dwelling upon it as if some memory were stirred in the repetition.
"And you say you don't know who your father was?"

"No--".  I could n't help it--that word broke in a half hysterical sob.
I kept saying to myself: "Oh, why did I come--why did I come?"

"Now, look here, my dear," and it seemed as if a flood of tenderness
drowned all those business tones in her voice, "you stop right where
you are.  There ain't no use my putting you into torment this way,
place or no place--Doctor Rugvie wouldn't like it; 't ain't human.  If
you can tell me all you know, and want to, just you take your own
time,"--she laid a hand on my shoulder,--"and if you don't, just set
here a while till the tempest that's coming up is over, and I 'll see
you safe home afterwards.  You ain't fit to be out alone if you are
twenty-six.  You don't look a day over twenty.  There 's nothing to
you."

She leaned nearer, her elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her
palms.  I tried to see her face, but the fog before my eyes was growing
thicker, the room closer; her voice sounded far away.

"See here--will it make it any easier if I tell you I 've got a girl
consider'ble older than you as has never known her father's name
either?  And that there ain't no girl in New York as has a lovinger
mother, nor a woman as has a lovinger daughter for all that?"

I could not answer.

A flash of red lightning filled the darkening room.  It was followed by
a crash of thunder, a rush of wind and a downpour as from a
cloud-burst.  I saw the woman rise and shut both windows; then for me
there was a blank for two or three minutes.

She told me afterwards that when she turned from the window, where she
stood watching the rain falling in sheets, she saw me lying prone
beside her chair.  I know that I heard her talking, but I could not
speak to tell her I could.

"My gracious!" she ejaculated as she bent over me, "if this don't beat
all!  Jane," she called, but it sounded far away, "come here quick.
Here, help me lift this girl on to the cot.  Bring me that camphor
bottle from the shelf; I 'll loosen her clothes.--Rub her hands.--She
fell without my hearing her, there was such an awful crash.--Light the
lamp too...

"There now, she's beginning to come to; guess 't was nothing but the
heat after all, or mebbe she 's faint to her stomach; you never can
tell when this kind 's had any food.  Just run down and make a cup of
cocoa, but light the lamp first--I want to see what she 's like."

I heard all this as through a thick blanket wrapped about my head, but
I could n't open my eyes or speak.  The woman's voice came at first
from a great distance; gradually it grew louder, clearer.

"Now we 'll see," she said.

She must have let the lamplight fall full on my face, for through my
closed and weighted lids I saw red and yellow.  I felt her bend over
me; her breath was on my cheek.  Still I could not speak.

"She 's the living image," I heard her say quite distinctly; "I guess I
've had one turn I shan't get over in a hurry."

I found myself wondering what she meant and trying to lift my eyelids.
She took my hand; I knew she must be looking at the nails.

"She 's coming round all right--the blood 's turning in her nails."
She took both my hands to rub them.

I opened my eyes then, and heard her say: "Eyes different."

Then she lifted my head on her arm and fed me the cocoa spoonful by
spoonful.

"Thank you, I 'm better now," I said; my voice sounded natural to
myself, and I made an effort to sit up.  "I 'm so sorry I 've made you
all this trouble--"

"Don't talk about trouble, child; you lay back against those pillows
and rest you.  I 'll be back in a little while."  She left the room.




II

When she returned, shortly after, I had regained my strength.  She
found me with my hat on and sitting in the rocking-chair.  The woman
drew up her own, and began in a matter-of-fact voice:

"Now we 'll proceed to business.  I 've been thinking like chain
lightning ever since that clap of thunder, and I can tell you the storm
's cleared up more 'n the air.  I ain't the kind to dodge round much
when there 's business on hand.  Straight to the point is the best
every time; so I may as well tell you that this place,"--she held out
the advertisement,--"is made for you and you for the place, even if you
ain't quite so strong as you might be."

I felt the tension in my face lessen.  I was about to speak, but the
woman put out her hand, saying:

"Now, don't say a word--not yet; let me do the talking; you can have
your say afterwards, and I 'll be only too glad to hear it.  But it's
laid on me like the Lord's hand itself to tell you what I 'm going to.
It 'll take long in the telling, but if you go out to this place, you
ought to know something why there is such a place to go to, and to
explain that, I 've got to begin to tell you what I 'm going to.  You
're different from the others, and it's your due to know.  I should
judge life had n't been all roses for you so far, and if you should
have a few later on, there 'll be plenty of thorns--there always is.
So just you stand what I 'm going to tell you.  This was n't in the
bargain when I told Doctor Rugvie I 'd see all the applicants and try
to get the right one,--but I can make it all right with him.  It's a
longer story than I wish 't was, but I 've got to begin at the
beginning.

"And begin with myself, too, for I was country raised.  Father and
mother both died when I was young, and I brought myself up, you might
say.  I come down here when I was nineteen years old, and it wasn't
more 'n a year 'fore I found myself numbered with the outcasts on this
earth--all my own fault too.  I 've always shouldered the blame, for a
woman as has common sense knows better, say what you 've a mind to; but
the knowledge of that only makes green apples sourer, I can tell you.

"I mind the night in December, thirty years ago, when I found myself in
the street, too proud to beg, too good to steal.  There was n't nothing
left--nothing but the river; there 's always enough of that and to
spare.  So I took a bee line for one of the piers, and crouched down by
a mooring-post.  I 'd made up my mind to end it all; it did n't cost me
much neither.  I only remember growing dizzy looking down at the foam
whirling and heaving under me, and kinder letting go a rope I 'd
somehow got hold of...

"The next thing I knew I was hearing a woman say:

"'You leave her to me; she'll be as quiet as a lamb now.'  She put her
arms around me.  'You poor child,' she said, 'you come along with me.'
And I went.

"Well, that woman mothered me.  She took in washing and ironing in two
rooms on Tenth Avenue.  She never left me night or day for a week
running till my baby come.  And all she 'd say to me, when I got sort
of wild and out of my head, was:

"'You ain't going to be the grave of your child, be you?'  And that
always brought me to myself.  I was so afraid of murdering the child
that was coming.  That's what she kept saying:

"'You ain't going to be so mean as not to give that innercent baby a
chance to live!  Just you wait till it comes and you 'll see what life
's for.  'T ain't so bad as you think, and some folks make out; and
that child has a right to this world.  You give it the right, and then
die if you think it's best.'  So she kept at me till my baby come, and
then--why, I got just fierce to live for its sweet little sake.

"'Bout six months after that I got religion--never mind how I got it; I
got it, that's the point, and I 've held on to it ever since.  And when
I 'd got it, the first thing I did was to take my baby in my arms and
go down to that pier, clear out to the mooring-post, and kneel right
down there in the dark and vow a vow to the living God that I 'd give
my life to saving of them of His poor children who 'd missed their
footing, and trying to help 'em on to their feet again.

"And I 've kept it; brought my girl right up to it too.  She 's been my
mainstay through it all these last ten years.  I took in washing and
ironing in the basement of this very house,--my saving angel helped me
to work,--and when it was done, late at night between eleven and
twelve, I 'd go down to the rivers, sometimes one, sometimes t' other,
and watch and wait, ready to do what come in my way.

"At first the police got on to my track thinking something was wrong;
but it took 'bout two words to set 'em right, as it did every other man
that come near me; and soon I went and come and no questions asked.

"One night I 'd been down to one of the North River piers.  It was in
December, and a howling northeaster had set in just before sundown.  It
was sleeting and snowing and blowing a little harder than even I could
stand.  I had just crossed the street from the pier and was thanking
God, as I covered my head closer with my shawl, that, so far as I knew,
no one of His children was tired of living, when something--I did n't
see what for I was bending over against the wind--went by me with a
rush, and I thought I heard a groan.  I turned as quick as a flash, and
see something dark running, swaying, stumbling across the street,
headed for the pier.  That was enough for me.

"I caught up my skirt and give chase.  How the woman, for it was one,
could get over the ground so fast was a mystery, except that she was
running with the wind.  She was on to the pier in no time.  I cried
'Stop!' and 'Watch!'  I don't think she heard me.  Once she nearly
fell, and I thought I had her I was so close to her; but she was up and
off again before I could lay hand on her.  Then I shouted; and the Lord
must have lent me Gabriel's trump, for the woman turned once, and when
she see me she threw out her hands and fairly flew.

"The Sound steamer had n't gone out, the night was so thick and bad,
and the cabin lights alongside shone out bright enough for me to mark
her as she dodged this way and that trying to get to the end of the
pier.

"She knew I was after her, and I was n't going to give up.  But when I
see the make-fast, and all around it the yeasting white on water as
black as ink, and she standing there with her arms up ready to jump, my
knees knocked together.  Somehow I managed to get hold of her
dress--but she did n't move; and all of a sudden, before I could get my
arms around her, she dropped in a heap, groaning: 'My child--my child--'

"I 've always thought 't was then her heart broke.

"A deck-hand on the steamer heard me screech, and together we got her
on the floor of the lower deck.  We did what we could for her, and when
she 'd come to, they got me a hack and I took her home, laid her on my
bed, and sent the hackman for Doctor Rugvie.  He 's been my right-hand
man all these years.  He stayed with her till daylight.  He told me she
'd never come through alive; the heart action was all wrong.

"After he 'd gone, she spoke for the first time and asked for some
paper and a pencil.  I propped her up on the pillows, and all that day
between her pains she was writing, writing and tearing up.  Towards
night she grew worse.  I asked her name then, and if she had any
friends.  She looked at me with a look that made my heart sink; but she
give me no answer.  About six, she handed me a slip of paper--'A
telegram,' she said, and asked me if I would send it right off.  I
could n't leave her, but when the Doctor come about eight, I slipped
out and sent it.  The name on it was the one you say was your mother's
husband's and the message said:

"'I am dying and alone among strangers.  Will you come to me for the
sake of my child,' and she give me the address.

"Come here, my dear," said the woman suddenly to me.  I was staring at
her, not knowing whether I drew breath or not; "come here to me."

I rose mechanically.  The woman drew me down upon her knee and put her
two strong arms about me.  I knew I was in the presence of revelation.

"At midnight her child, a girl, was born--the third of December just
twenty-six years ago.  Doctor Rugvie fought for her life, but he could
n't save her.  At one she died--of a broken heart and no mistake, so
the Doctor said.  She refused to give him her name and he left her in
peace--that's his way.  But before she died she give him an envelope
which she filled with some things she 'd been writing in the afternoon,
and said:

"'Keep them--for my daughter.  I trust you.'

"Oh, my dear, my dear, the sorrow in this God's earth!  I ain't got
used to it yet and never shall.  That dying face was like an angel's.
Doctor Rugvie said he 'd never seen the like before.  She spoke only
once to him in all her agony, then she said: 'The little life that is
coming is worth all this--all--all.'

"The next morning there come a telegram from somewhere in New
England--I forget where--'Will be with you at two.'

"And sure enough, a little after two, a young feller come to the door.
He did n't look more 'n twenty, but it seemed from his face as if those
twenty years had done something to him 't would generally take a man's
lifetime to do, and said he 'd come to claim her who was his wife.
That's just what he said, no more, no less: 'I've come to claim her who
was my wife.  Where is she?'  And he give me the telegram.

"It was 'bout the hardest thing I 've ever had to do, but I had to tell
him just as things was.  I thought for a minute he was going to fall he
shook so; but he laid hold of the door-jamb and, straightening himself,
looked me square in the eye just as composed as Doctor Rugvie himself,
and says:

"'In that case I have come to claim the body of her who was my wife.'

"Those are his very words.  I took him into the back room and left 'em
alone together.  I did n't dare to say a word for his face scairt me.

"When he come out he said he would relieve me of all further
responsibility, which I took pains to inform him included a day-old
baby, thinking that would fetch some explanation from him.  But he did
n't seem to lay any weight on _that_ part of it.  He made all the
arrangements himself, and I took a back seat.  I see I was n't any more
necessary to him than if I had n't been there.  He went out for an hour
and come back with a nurse; and at six that afternoon he drove away in
a hack with her and the baby, an express cart with the body following
on behind.

"I told him the last thing 'fore he went that his wife had given an
envelope with some papers to Doctor Rugvie, and that they were for his
child.  He turned and give me a look that was beyond me.  I never could
fathom that look!  It said more 'n any living human being's look that I
ever see--if only I could have read it!  But he never spoke a word, not
even a word of thanks--not that I was expecting or wanted any after
seeing his face as he stood hanging on to the door-jamb.  I knew then
he did n't really see me nor anything else except the body of his wife
somewhere in that basement.  He did everything as if he 'd been a
machine instead of a human being; and when I see him drive off I did
n't know much more 'n I did when I took the woman in, except that she
was married."

She was silent.  I drew a long breath.

"Is that all you know?"  I felt I could not be left so, suspended as it
were over the abyss of the unknown in my life.

She sighed.  "My dear, this great city is full of just such mysteries
that no human being can fathom.  I, for one, don't try to.  I can only
lend a helping hand, and ask no questions; 't ain't best.  Well, I 've
been talking a blue streak for a half an hour, but I 've had to.  When
you laid there on the cot, you was the living image of that other, only
thinner, smaller like.  You told me you was born in this city
twenty-six years ago come the third of next December; that you did n't
know who your father was, but that your mother was married.  Her
husband's name was the same as the one on the telegram.  I 've put two
and two together, and perhaps I 've made five out of it.  Anyway it's
your right to know.  I 'm sure Doctor Rugvie will back me up in this."

For a moment I made no answer.  Then I spoke:

"Are you sure there is no more?  You can't recall anything that Doctor
Rugvie said about that paper in the envelope?"

"Well, yes, I can; a little more.  After all, it's what will help you
most--and yet I ain't sure--"

"Tell me, do--do."  My hands clasped each other nervously.

"Why, it's just this: Doctor Rugvie was called away out of the city on
a case as soon as he 'd got through here, and meantime the young feller
had come and gone.  When the Doctor come back I told him what had been
going on while he was away, and I give him the envelope.  He told me he
found her marriage certificate in it--but not to the man whose name was
on the telegram.  I never could make head nor tail of it."

"Married--my mother married--" I repeated.  I drew away from the
woman's restraining arms and slipping to my knees beside her, buried my
face in her lap and began to sob.  I could not help it.  I was broken
for the time both physically and mentally by the force of my unpent
emotion.

The woman laid her hand protectingly, tenderly on my quivering
shoulders, and waited.  She must have seen spring freshets before, many
a one during the past thirty years, and have known both their benefit
and injury to the human soul.  Gradually I regained my control.

"Oh, you don't know what this means to me!" I exclaimed, lifting my
face swollen with weeping to the kindly one that looked down into mine.
"You don't know what this means to me--it has lifted so much, so
much--has let in so much light just at a time when I needed it so--when
everything looked so black.  Sometime I will tell you; but now I want
to know when, where, how I can get hold of that marriage certificate.
It belongs to me--to me."

I rose with an energy that surprised the woman and, stooping, took her
face between my hands and kissed her.  I smiled down into that face.
She sat speechless.  I smiled again.  She passed her hand over her eyes
as if trying to clear her mind of confusing ideas.  I spoke again to
her:

"The tempest is over; why should n't we look for a bright to-morrow?"
I could hear the vibrant note of a new hope in my voice.  The woman
heard it too.  She continued to stare at me.  I drew up my chair to
hers and, laying my hand on her knee, said persuasively:

"Now, let's talk; and let me ask some questions."

"To be sure; to be sure," the woman replied.  I know she was wondering
what would be the next move on the part of her applicant.

"Don't you want to know my name?" I said.  "That's rather an important
matter when you take a new position; and you said the place was mine,
didn't you?"

The woman smiled indulgently.  "To be sure it's yours; and what is your
name?" she asked, frankly curious at last.

"Marcia Farrell, but I took my great-grandmother's maiden name.  There
are none of the family left; I 'm the last."

"What was you christened?"

"I never was christened.  And what is your name?"

"Delia Beaseley."

"And your daughter's?"

"Jane."

"And when does Doctor Rugvie return?"

"The last of November.  You want that certificate?"

"I must have it; it is mine by right."  I spoke with decision.

"Well, you 'll get it just as soon as the Doctor can find it; like
enough it's locked up in some Safe Deposit with his papers; you mustn't
forget it's been nearly twenty-six years since he's had it.--I can't
for the life of me think of that name."

"Never mind that now; tell me about the place.  Where is it?  Who are
the people?  Or is there only one--it said 'an elderly Scotchwoman'.
Do you know her?"

"No, my dear, I don't know any one of them, and Doctor Rugvie does n't
mean I should; that's where he trusts me.  I can tell you where the
place is: Lamoral, Province of Quebec; more 'n that I don't know."

"But," I spoke half in protest, "does n't Doctor Rugvie think that any
one taking the position ought to know beforehand where she is going and
whom she 's going to live with?"

"He might tell you if he was here himself, and then again he mightn't.
You see it's this way: he trusts me to use my common sense in accepting
an applicant, and he expects the applicant to trust his name for
reference to go to the end of the world if he sends her there, without
asking questions."

"Oh, the old tyrant!"  I laughed a little.  "What does he pay?" was my
next question.

"Doctor Rugvie!  You think _he_ pays?  Good gracious, child, you _are_
on the wrong track."

"Then put me on the right one, please."  I laid my hand on the hard
roughened one.

"I s'pose I might as well; I don't believe the Doctor would mind."

"Of course he would n't."  I spoke with a fine, assumed assurance.
Delia Beaseley smiled.

"You know I told you that young feller who come here went away without
saying so much as 'Thank you'?"

I merely nodded in reply.  That question suddenly quenched all the new
hope of a new life in me.

"Along the first of the New Year, that was twenty-five years ago, I got
a draft by mail from a national bank in this city; the draft was on
that bank; it was for five hundred dollars.  And ever since, in
December, I have had a check for one hundred in the same way.  I always
get Doctor Rugvie to cash them for me, and he says no questions are
answered; after the first year he did n't ask any.  The Doctor 's in
the same boat.  He 's got a draft on that same bank for five hundred
dollars every year for the last twenty-five years.  He says it's
conscience money; and he feels just as I do, that it comes either from
the man who claimed to be the woman's husband, or from that other she
was married to according to the certificate.--I can't think of that
name!

"He don't care much, I guess, seeing the use he 's going to put the
money to.  He 's hired a farm for a term of years, up in the Province
of Quebec, somewhere near the St. Lawrence, with some good buildings on
it; and when he knows of somebody that needs just such a home to pick
up in he is going to send 'em up there.  And the conscience money is
going to help out.  This is the place where you 're to help the
Scotchwoman, as I understand it.  Now that's all I can tell you, except
the wages is twenty-five dollars a month besides room and keep.  I
s'pose you 'll go for that?"

"Go!  I can't wait to get away; I 'd like to go to-morrow, but I must
stay two or three weeks longer in the library.  But, I don't
understand--how am I to accept the place without notification?  And you
don't know even the name of the Scotch-woman?"

"I 'll tend to that.  My girl writes all the letters for me, and the
letters to this place go in the care of the 'Seigniory of Lamoral',
whatever that may mean.  They get there all right.  You come round here
within a week, and I 'm pretty sure that the directions will be here
with the passage money."

I felt my face flush from my chin to the roots of my hair; and I knew,
moreover, that Delia Beaseley was reading that sign with keen
accustomed eyes; she knew there was sore need for just that help.




III

Do you who are reading these life-lines know what it is to be alone in
a world none too mindful of anyone, even if he be somebody?  Never to
experience after the day's work the rest and joy of home-coming to
one's own?

Do you know what it is to acknowledge no tie of blood that binds one
life to another and makes for a common interest in joy or sorrow?  To
ask yourself: Do I belong here?  To wonder, perhaps, why, in fact, you
are here?  To feel your isolation in a crowded thoroughfare, your
remoteness in the midst of an alien family life?  To feel, in truth, a
stranger on this earth?

If you have known this, if you have experienced this, or, even if, at
times, you have been only dimly conscious of this for another, then you
will understand these my life-lines, and it may be they will interpret
something of yourself to yourself.


Delia Beaseley walked with me as far as the Bowery.  There I insisted
on her leaving me.  I assured her I was used to the streets of New York
in the evening.  However, she waited with me for the car.

When I said good night to the woman, who twenty-six years ago saved
another woman, "one who had missed her footing",--those words seem to
ring constantly in my ears,--in order that I, Marcia Farrell, that
stranger's child, might become the living fact I am, I began to realize
that during the last hour I had been acting a part, and acting it well;
that, without sacrificing the truth at any stage of the evening's
developments, I had been able to obtain all this information, which
pointed to a crisis in my life, yet had given but little return in
kind.  I felt justified in withholding it.

Now, as soon as I had left her and entered the car, there was a
reaction from the intensity of my emotion.  I felt a strange elation of
spirit, a rising courage to face the new conditions in that other
country, and a consequent physical recuperation.  The lassitude that
had burdened me since my long illness seemed to have left me.  My mind
was alert.  I felt I had been able to take advantage of a promising
circumstance and, in so doing, the mental inertia from which I had been
suffering for three months was overcome.

Without being able to find any special reason for it, my life began to
assume importance in my thoughts.  I suppose this is the normal
condition of youth; only, I never felt that I had had much youth.  With
the thought of this new future, unknown, untried as it was, opening
before me, I experienced an unaccountable security, an unwonted
serenity of existence.  All these thoughts and feelings crowded upon me
as I rode up through the noisy Bowery.

All my life hitherto had been undefined to me on the side of expansion;
only its limitations impressed me as being ever present, sharply
outlined, hedging me in with memories that gave no scope for
anticipation.  Sometimes it seemed to me as if I had always been old;
the seven years in New York, my daily encounter with metropolitan life
and its problem of "keep" had intensified this feeling.

When I came down to the city to look for work I was nearly twenty.  I
had left what to me was a makeshift for a home--and I regretted
nothing.  I had done my whole duty there in caring for my grandfather,
imbecile for years, and my aunt, the last of my family, until they
died.  Then I was free.

After paying all the debts, I found I had just thirty dollars of my
own.  With these I started for the city.  On my arrival this amount was
diminished by nine.

At twenty I was facing life for the first time alone, unfriended, in
new conditions; poor, too, but that I had always been.  I knew that
money must be had somehow, must be forthcoming in a few days at most.
But at that time my spirit was indomitable, my courage high.  I was my
own mistress; and my only feeling, as I sat in the Grand Central
Station on that morning of my arrival, reading through the various
columns of "wants" in the early newspapers, was that I had escaped, at
last, from all associations that were hateful to me.

I was thinking of all this as the car passed with frequent haltings
along the noisy Bowery, and of that first experience of this city: its
need-driven herds of human beings, the thoroughfares crowded with
traffic, its nightmare crossings, the clank and deafening roar of the
overhead railroad, when, suddenly, mingled with the steam rising from
the pavements, that were cooling rapidly after the recent shower, I
smelt the acrid heaviness of fresh printer's ink.  That smell
visualized for me the column of leaded "Wants," the dismal
waiting-room, the uncompromising daylight that spared no wrinkle, no
paint, no moth-spot on the indifferent faces about me.  That was nearly
seven years ago--and now--

I found I was at Union Square, and got out; walked a block to Broadway
and waited on the corner for an uptown car.  During that minute of
waiting, a woman spoke to me:

"If I take a car here can I get up to West Sixty-first street?"

"Yes."  My answer was short and sharp.  I had heard the kind of
question put in that oily voice too many times to pay any further heed
to it.  I stepped out into the street to take the car.

"If you 're going up that way I might as well go 'long too.  I like
comp'ny," said the woman, keeping abreast of me and nudging me with an
elbow.

The car was nearly full, and the crowd waiting for it made a running
assault upon the few vacancies.  Just before it stopped I saw some one
leave the seat behind the motor-man; I made a rush to secure the place.
As I sat down the woman mounted the step.

"You don't get rid of me so easy, duckie," she said with a leer.

I turned squarely to her, looking beneath the wide brim of the tawdry
bedraggled hat to find her eyes; her gin-laden breath was hot on my
cheek.

"You go your way and I 'll go mine," I said in a low hard voice.

With a curse the woman swung off the step just as the two signal bells
rang.

I took off my hat.  The night was cooling rapidly after the tempest.
The motion of the car created a movement of air against my face.  It
was grateful to me.  I drew a long breath of relief; these evening
rides in the open cars were one of my few recreations.

As the car sped along the broad thoroughfare, now so long familiar to
me, so wonderful and alluring to my country eyes in those early years,
so drearily artificial and depressing in the later ones, I found myself
dwelling again on that first experience in this city; I recalled the
first time I was accosted by a woman pander.  It was when I was reading
the wants that morning of my arrival.  I looked up to find her taking a
seat beside me--a woman who tried by every dives' art of which she was
possessed to entice me to go with her on leaving the station.  Oh, she
was awful, that woman!  I never knew there were such till then.

The searchlight of memory struck full upon my thought at that time: And
they said my mother was like this!

That thought, horrible as it was to me, was my safeguard then and has
been ever since.  Such as they said my mother was, I would never be.
Nor am I aware that any moral factor was the lever in this decision.
Rather it was my pride that had been scourged for many years by a
girl's half knowledge of her mother's career, my sensitiveness that was
ever ready at the least outside touch to make me close in upon myself,
the horror of thinking it might be possible that my name could be used
as I had heard my mother's, that had panoplied my nature and warped it
until that nature had narrowed to its armor.  I was proud, sensitive,
cold, or thought I was--and I was glad of it.

It had come to a point, at last, now when I was nearly twenty-six, that
in what I termed my strength, lay my weakness.  But of this I was, as
yet, unaware.

I shut my eyes as the car sped onwards that I might not see the swift
succession of glaring lights--the many flashing, changing,
nerve-tormenting electric signs and advertisements, the brilliant
globes, stars, and whirligigs of all kinds.  How they tired me now!
And the summer theatre throngs streaming in under the entrance arches
picked out in glowing red and white, the saloons flashing a well-known
signal to customers--I knew it all and was glad to close my eyes to it
all.  Now and then I caught a strain of music from the orchestra of
some roof-garden.

At Seventy-second Street I changed for Amsterdam Avenue.  I wanted to
get away to the heights.  The air was becoming fresher and I needed
more of it.  Another twenty minutes and the car stopped near the brow
of the hill.  I left it and walked a cross block till I came to
Morningside Heights, the small, irregular, but beautiful promenade
behind St. Luke's.

I leaned on the massive stone coping that crowns the wall of the
escarpment; below me the hill sloped sharply to the flats of the
Harlem.  I looked off over the city.

East, and north-east in the direction of the Sound, great cloud masses,
the wrack of the tempest, were piled high towards the zenith; but
beneath them there was a clear zone near the city's level.  A moon
nearly two thirds to the full, was heralding its appearance above them
by lighted rifts, bright-rimmed haloes, and the marvellous play of
direct shaft light that struck downwards behind the clouds into the
clear space above the city and shot white radiance upon its roofs.  The
sky, also, while yet the moon was invisible, was radiant, but with
starlight.

Against this background, I watched the glow-worm lights of the elevated
trains winding along the high invisible trestle-work.  Beneath me lay
Morningside Park, the foliage and its shadows blackened in masses
beneath the glaring white of the arc-lights; and beyond, in seemingly
interminable perspective, the long converging lines of parallel street
lights led my gaze across the city to some large, unknown, uncertain
flarings somewhere near the East River shore.

And from all this wide-stretching housing-place of a vast population,
there rose into my ears a continuous, dull, peculiar sound, as of the
magnified stertorous breathing of a hived and stifled humanity.

I had come here many times in the last four years, at all seasons, at
all times.  I drew strength and inspiration from this view in all its
aspects, until my almost fatal illness in the late spring.  After that
there came upon me a powerful longing for change.  I wanted to get away
from this city, its sights and sounds; to escape from the conditions
that were sapping my life.  And the way was, at last, opened.  How I
exulted in this thought!

There were others on the promenade, and I was withdrawn from thought of
myself by hearing voices, a man's and a woman's, below me on the
winding walk that leads down the slope past the poplars to the level of
the Harlem streets.  The woman's was pleading, strident from
excitement; it broke at last in a dry hard sob.  The man's was hateful;
the tones and accents like a vicious snarl.

I turned away sickened, indignant.

"It's always so in this city!" I said to myself while I walked rapidly
towards the hospital.  "If I get a chance for a breath of fresh air, or
if I take a walk in the park, or have an outlook that, for a moment, is
free from all suggestions of crime and horror--then beware!  For then I
have to shut my ears not to hear the fatal sounds of human brutishness;
or I hear a shot in the park, and a life goes out in some
thick-foliaged path; or I have to turn away my eyes from a sight in the
gutter that offends three of my senses--and so my day is ruined.  It's
merciless, merciless--and I loathe it!" I cried within myself as I
passed the hospital.

I lifted my eyes to the massive purity of noble St. Luke's, the windows
rising tier upon tier above me.  A light showed here and there.  At the
sight my mood softened.

"Oh, I know it is merciful too--it is merciful," I murmured; then I
stopped short and turned back to the entrance.  I entered the main
vestibule, mounted the marble steps that lead to the chapel, opened the
noiseless heavily-padded doors, and sat down near the entrance.

The air was close and hot after the outer freshness; the lights few.
The stained-glass window behind the altar was a meaningless confused
mass of leaded opacity.  I knew that the daylight was needed to ensoul
it, to give to the dead unmeaning material its spiritual symbolism.
And because I knew this, I realized, as I sat there, what a long
distance in a certain direction I had travelled since that morning in
the Grand Central Station, seven years ago.

But the air was very close.  I felt depressed, disappointed, that the
time and the place yielded me nothing.  I was faint, too; I had taken
nothing but the cocoa since noon.  Without realizing it, another
reaction from that strange elation of spirit was setting in.  I knew I
ought to be in the attic room in Chelsea rather than where I was.  It
was already nine, and an hour's ride before me on the surface car.

I went out to Amsterdam Avenue.  No car was in sight.  I walked on down
the hill, knowing that one would soon overtake me.

A man and woman were just behind me talking--at least, the woman was.
I recognized her voice as one of those I had heard on the winding path
by the poplars.  A moment after, they passed me in a noticeably
peculiar fashion: the man sauntering by on my right, the woman hurrying
past on my left.  At the same moment I heard the car coming down the
hill.  I turned at once, but only to see the man, who had passed me,
running swiftly along the pavement and up the hill to meet it; the
woman was running after him.

I saw that the car was over full.  The platform and steps were black
with human beings clinging to the guard rails like swarming bees
alight.  I saw the man struggle madly to catch the guards and gain a
footing on the lower step, the woman still running beside him and
holding him by the coat.  Then I was aware of a sudden sweeping
movement of the man's free arm, the roar of the car as it sped down the
incline, and of the woman lying, hatless from the force of the man's
blow, on the pavement beside the track.  He had freed himself so!

Before I could reach her the woman was up and off again, running
hatless after the quickly receding car.  Only one cry, no scream,
escaped her.

I shivered.  There was nothing to be done with such as these, no rescue
possible.  A sudden thought half paralyzed me; I stood motionless: Had
my own mother ever been cast off like this?  Had such treatment been
the cause of her seeking the river?  Had I, Marcia Farrell, been
fathered by such a brute?

For the second time in my life, I felt my hardness of heart towards the
mother I had never known soften with pity; a sob rose in my throat.  I
shook my shoulders as if freeing them from some nightmare clutch, and
hurried to the next corner to meet the car that was following the other
closely.




IV

I unlocked my attic room in the fourth storey of the old Chelsea house
and lighted the lamp.  In contrast to what both ear and eye had been
witness during the evening: Delia Beaseley's account of my mother's
rescue and death, and that scene of life's brutality on Columbia
Heights, the sight of the small plain interior gave me, for the first
time in all the seven years, a home-sense, a feeling of welcome and
refuge.

I looked at the cretonne-covered cot, the packing boxes curtained with
the same, the white painted hanging box-shelves, the one chair--a flour
barrel, cut to the required form, well padded and upholstered; all
these were the work of my hands in free hours.  And I was about to
exchange the known for the unknown!  This thought added to my
depression.

I put out the lamp and sat down by the one window.  The night air was
refreshingly cool.  The many lights on the river gleamed clear; the
roar in the streets was subdued.  Gradually, my antagonism to the
physical features of the metropolis, to its heedless crowds, its
overpowering mechanism, its thoroughfares teeming with human beings who
passed me daily, knowing little of their own existence and nothing of
mine, its racial divergencies, grew less intense; in fact, the whole
life of this city, in its aspect of mere Juggernaut, was being
unconsciously modified for me as I realized I was about to go forth
into a strange country.

I was recalling those ten weeks of mortal weakness and suffering at St.
Luke's, the kindness of nurses and physicians.  No matter if I had paid
my way; theirs was a ready helpfulness, a steady administration of the
tonic of human kindness that never could be bought and paid for in the
Republic's money.  I thought of Delia Beaseley and her noble work among
those "who had missed their footing".  I relived in imagination that
rescue of my own mother, with all of the horror and all of the merciful
pity it entailed.  I found myself wondering if Doctor Rugvie would be
able to lay his hand on those papers immediately after his arrival.  I
dwelt upon the many kindly advances from my co-workers in the Library;
few of these women I had met, for I felt strangely old, apart from
them, and the struggle to live and at the same time accomplish my
purpose had been so hard.  My landlady, too, came in for a share of my
softening mood; exacting, but scrupulously honest, she had lodged under
this same roof a generation of theological students, yet her best dress
remained a rusty alpaca.  I thought of the various types of students
for the ministry--

I smiled at that thought, a smile that proved the latent youth in me
was sufficiently appreciative, at least of that phase of life.

I left the window and, after closing the lower half of the inside
shutters, partly undressed and relighted the lamp.  Then I took two
paper-covered blank books from my trunk.  I sat down in my one easy
chair of home manufacture and, resting my feet on the cot, began to
read.

These two books were my journal, my confidante, my most intimate
companion for seven years.  I had written in them intermittently only,
and, as I turned a page here and there, my eye dwelt longest, not on
the few high lights, as it were, in my uneventful life of work and
struggle, but on the many shadows they deepened and emphasized.


Nov. 4, 1902.  My first day in New York.  I took a hack from the
station to this house in the old "Chelsea district" they call it.  My
first hack-ride; it was pretty grand for me, but I was afraid to try
the street cars after a horrid woman had tried her best to get me to go
with her after I left the station--oh, it was awful!  I never knew
there could be such women before--not that kind.  I shall look for work
to-morrow.

Nov. 5.  I have to pay a dollar and a half for this room in the attic.
There isn't any heat, and there is no gas in it.  I have to furnish it
myself.  My landlady is a queer little old woman, Mrs. Turtelot, who
has kept lodgers here for thirty years.  She has her house filled with
the students from the Theological Seminary near by.  It's lucky I have
this place to come to.  I wondered to-day how girls ever get on in this
city, without having someone to go to they know is all right.  She
seems like a Frenchwoman, perhaps a French Canadian.  I think she must
be, for her mother used to work at Seth White's tavern up home; it was
through his neighbors I got her address.  She says the students have to
furnish their own bed clothes and towels.  I 'm glad I brought mine
with me.  It's awfully cold here to-night, but Mrs. Turtelot has given
me a lamp, till I can get one, and that warms up some.  Anyway, I feel
safe here from that other kind.  I 'll soon earn enough to fix up a
little.

Nov. 6.  I 've been tramping about all day answering advertisements.
Mrs. Turtelot told me not to go into any strange place, like up stairs,
and not to go over a door sill.  I have n't found that so easy.

I 've been afraid all day of getting lost, but she told me to-night to
ask every time for West Twenty-third Street and follow it to the river;
then I could always find my way here.

I slept in her room on the sofa the first night; she says I can sleep
with her for a few nights till I can get a cot.  A student is leaving
here in a few days and he will sell his second hand.  But I don't want
to sleep with her, and I asked her as a favor to let me have two
pillows.  She didn't have any extra ones, but let me have hers; so I
have a good bed on the floor.  Could n't find work.

Nov. 8.  Mrs. T. told me to-day that it is a bad time of year to find
work.  It is late in the season and help is being turned off, and,
besides, it is going to be a hard winter, so everybody says.  What do
the turned-off ones do, then, for a living?--  No job yet!  But I won't
go out to service in a private family unless I have to.  I 've had
enough of that in the past.

Nov. 9.  Since I came here I have answered fifty-two advertisements.  I
get the same answer every time: "You have n't been trained and you have
n't had any experience."  How am I to get training and experience if I
don't have the chance?  That's what I want to know.

Nov. 10.  I 've bought the cot and the mattress.  I paid four dollars
for them.  There is a small stove hole in the chimney on one side of my
room; when I get to earning, I 'm going to have a little stove here and
do my own cooking.  Thank fortune, I can cook as well as chop wood if I
have to!  So far I 've heated my things on Mrs. T.'s stove.  She lives,
that is, cooks, eats, sleeps, and washes in her back basement; the
front one she rents to a barber.  He makes his living from the students
round here and the professors at the Seminary.  She says the students
cook most of their meals in their rooms on their gas stoves.  I wish I
had one.

Nov. 13.  A bad lot of a date!  No work yet, and I 've tramped all day
in the slush and snow.  I dried my things down in Mrs. T.'s room.  I
did n't dare to spend any more in car fares, for I must have a stove.

I know to a cent just what I 've spent since I came, but I 'm going to
put it down so I can see the figures; it will make me more cautious
about spending.  The car fare is more than I meant it should be, but,
to save it, I walked the first three days from Eighty-sixth Street and
Fourth Avenue--a bakery that advertised for a woman to sell the early
morning bread in the shop; three hours of work only, at twenty cents an
hour--down as far as the Washington Market where they wanted a girl to
sell flowers in a sidewalk booth, for two weeks before Christmas.  I
found then that the soles of my boots were beginning to wear and that
it saves something to ride.

  Car fare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  $ .75
  Bread  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    .25
  Cheese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    .10
  1 tin pail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    .15
  6 eggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    .20
  1 can baked beans  . . . . . . . . . . .    .17
  2 pints soup . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    .26
  Oil  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    .13
  Tin lamp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    .50
  Cot and mattress . . . . . . . . . . . .   4.00
  Room rent, two weeks in advance  . . . .   3.00
  Total  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  $9.51


And I have ten dollars and ninety-three cents left.  I can hold the
fort another two weeks on this.

Nov. 15.  No work yet.  I 'm going to keep a stiff upper lip and find
work, or starve in doing it.  This city _sha'n't_ beat _me_, not if I
can use my two arms and hands and legs, two eyes, one tongue and a
brain!  No!

Nov. 17.  I scrubbed down the three flights of stairs for Mrs. T.
to-day.  She has the rheumatism in her wrists, and I was glad to do it
for her to help pay for her loan of the pillows and for letting me heat
my things on her stove.  I must buy my own to-morrow.  I feel ashamed
to ask favors of her any longer, for I have put off the buying of it
till I could get work.

Friday.  Now I have just four dollars left; for I bought it to-day and
set it up myself.  A little second hand one with one hole on top--and
no coals to put in it!  I don't dare use the last four dollars, for the
rent is due soon and I have to pay in advance.  I suppose it's all
right to secure herself, but it's hard on me.

Nov. 30.  I believe I 'm hungry, and I don't remember to have been
hungry before in all my life, without having enough ready to fill my
stomach.  But I don't dare to spend another cent till I get work.  It
must come, _it must_--

I 've lived three days on a half a pound of walnuts, half a pound of
cheese and a loaf of bread--and walked my feet sore looking for a
place.  I know I could have had two places, but I dared not engage to
the women.  That woman in the Grand Central Station haunts me; these
two women had a look of her!  One wanted me in private manicure rooms
to learn the trade; she said I had the right kind of fingers after the
rough had worn off.  The other wanted me to show rooms to rent in a
queer looking house.  Mrs. T. told me to keep away from it and all like
it.

Dec. 1.  I 'm not only hungry, I 'm cold too.  I bought two pails of
coals, and paid high for them so Mrs. T. says.  They say there is going
to be a coal famine from the great strike.  It makes me mad that it
should all pile up on me in this way!  Why can't I have work?  Why,
when I am willing, can't I find a place?

An awful feeling comes over me sometimes, when I am turned down at a
place I 've applied for: I want to throttle the first well-dressed man
or woman I meet and say, "Give me work or I 'll make it the worse for
you!"  Then I turn all dizzy and sick after that feeling, and hate
myself for the thought; it's so unjust.

Dec. 10.  I asked Mrs. T. if I might n't pay by the week and at the end
of each week.  I think she knew what the trouble was.  She hesitated
for a minute, and that was enough for me.

"Oh, I _can_ pay you," I said, "only it's a little more convenient."

"Then I 'd like you to," she said in her queer dry voice.

I hated her at that moment.  I went up stairs to my bare room and took
off the knit woollen petticoat I made for myself at home, just before
coming down; I took that and a set of gold beads, that were my
grandmother's, and went out with them to a pawnbroker's just around the
corner on the avenue.  I got eight dollars for the two of them, and
made the time in which to redeem them one month.  Then I went back to
the house and paid her.  She looked surprised, but her skinny hand
closed upon the money as if she, too, had no more for the morrow.  I
don't know that she has.  The students come and go.

Dec. 14.  I stood on Twentieth Street near Broadway to-day, watching
the teamsters unload the heavy drays at the back of a department store.
I found myself envying them--they had work.

Dec. 15.  I am not up to date with my clothes, and I have no money to
make myself so.  I find it is for this reason I am "turned down" at so
many places where I apply.  I read it in men's eyes, in the women's
hard stare.

Dec. 17.  A man offered to clothe me for a position in a shop, if I
would--

I know I looked at him; I think I saw him, or perhaps the beast that
was in him.  Then I saw queer lights before me, red and yellow--if I
had been a man I would have taken him by the throat.  When, at last, I
could see again, the man was gone.  Good riddance!  There is such a
thing as day nightmare.

Dec. 19.  I am beginning to understand how it is done; how the fifteen
dollar waists, the diamond rings, the theatre, and the suppers after,
can be had without work.

Dec. 20.  The strike is on.  I should have to do without coals, strike
or no strike, for I have nothing to buy them with.  Mrs. Turtelot
offered to let me heat my food on her stove--my food!  I 've lived on
one loaf of bread and a can of baked beans for seven days--and to-day I
've been down to the Washington Market just to smell the evergreens
that, for all I have no home, give me a homesick longing for the
country.  But I will not go back; I 'll starve here first.

Afterwards I walked up to Twenty-third Street, and lost myself there in
the holiday crowds.  What throngs!--jostled, pushed, beset by vendors,
loaded with bundles, yet so good natured!  No one looked hungry.  I
stood on the kerb to watch the men selling toys and birds; to listen to
the strange cries, the shrilling of the wooden canaries and the trill
of the real ones; to peep into the rabbit hutch, and the basket of
kittens; to stroke an armful of sleeping puppies; to smell the
fragrance of roses and violets and carnations; to smile a little at the
slow-moving turtles, the leaping frogs, the Jack-in-the-box, the
mechanical toys of all kinds that performed on the sidewalk, each the
centre of a small crowd.  Then, at twilight, the flare from the
chestnut vendor's stand, the little electric lights of the Punch and
Judy sidewalk show, the electric torches that the children were
carrying, the brilliant whirligigs for advertisements, gave to the
whole scene a strange unreal appearance.  Men, women, children,
Christmas trees, dogs, birds, electric cars, rabbits, kittens, a goat,
cabs, automobiles, express carts, surged into the flare and glare,
first of one light then of another, till what was shadow and what was
substance I failed to make out.

Dec. 21.  At last, oh, at last, there is work for me,--for me, too,
among all these millions!  But it makes me sick to know there must be
some who are trying and never find.

I have taken a place in a small writing-paper factory.  It's down near
Barclay Street, in the loft of a crazy old building, three wooden
flights from the street.  The loft is lighted at both ends by windows
and in the top by skylights.  It is heated by a large cylinder stove in
the centre, and a small glue box-pot at one end.  The air is close, but
I don't care much, for it is so warm.  I get four dollars a week.

I can manage to live, at least, on this.  I can think about nothing
else to-night.

Jan. 15, 1903.  The coal strike is on.  It is cold in the loft, for we
have to be saving of fuel.  It takes all I can save to buy three
pailfuls of coal a week for my little stove.  I kindle my fire at
night, heat water, cook my cereal, or bean soup, and am comfortable
till morning; the room is decently warm to dress in.  I am off to work
at seven.  Fuel and rent and some necessary underclothes leave little
for food.  I cannot redeem my petticoat, and gold beads which my
grandmother had from her mother, Marcia Farrell.

July 6.  Hot, hotter, hottest in the old fire-trap of a loft.  The sun
beats down through the skylights till we get sick.  Two of the girls
fainted this afternoon.

Aug. 4.  I discovered the Public Library to-day!  It means so much to
me that I simply can't write a word about it.

Nov. 4.  Just a year ago to-day since I came here.  I am able to draw a
free breath for the first time, to look about me and plan a little for
my future.  I 've made up my mind to study for the examinations for a
place in the Public Library.  My district school was no bad training,
after all, for this work.  It taught me one lesson: to put my mind on
what was given me to do--and I have not forgotten it.

The extra time for study at night will take more fuel and oil, but I
can make that up by living a few more days every week on bean soup.  I
've made living on four dollars a week an art this last year.  An art?
Yes, rather than a science; and, like an art, it accomplishes
surprisingly satisfactory results--results that science, with all its
proven facts, from which it deduces laws of hygiene, fails to produce.

I honestly believe that I 'm better fed than half the theological
students.  They scrimp and save--for a theatre ticket!  They're a queer
lot!  I 've asked half a dozen to tell me what they 're aiming at, and
not one of the six could give me a sensible answer.  If they had said
right out--"It's an easy way to get a small living," I would have
respect for them.  We all have to earn our living in one way or another.

March, 1904.  Desk assistant in a branch of the Library--at last!

October, 1906.  When I came down here I made a vow to put everything
behind me; forget what I had left in New England, the memories of those
hard-worked years, and start afresh; cut loose from all the old
associations.  I have succeeded fairly well.  This new life of books is
a wonderful one.  I like my work as desk assistant in the Library, and
I get nine dollars a week.  This is wealth for me; I am saving.  I have
so much besides: the river and the ferries for a change; one trip up
the Hudson--a thing to live on for years until I get another.  Sometime
I mean to travel--sometime!  Meanwhile, I go on saving in every
possible way.

Jan. 8, 1907.  What luck for me!  I don't have to buy a book.  The
whole Library is mine for the asking.  How I have read these last three
years!  As if I could never read enough; read while I 've been standing
and eating; read before getting up and long after I have been in bed.
It has been a hunger and thirst for this kind of food--and there has
been enough of _this_!  Enough!

Feb. 1908.  I am studying French now daily, and beginning Latin by
myself, for I want to take the higher examinations for the cataloguing
department.  That will mean more pay and the prospect of a vacation
sometime.

March 16, 1908.  How I gloat like a miser over my savings-bank book!
Just one hundred and seventy-five dollars to my credit.  I have visions
of--oh, so much in ten years!

May, 1908.  I was at the Metropolitan this morning.  I feel rich when I
realize that all this treasure-house is open to me--is mine for the
entering.  I am taking the whole museum, room by room.  A year's work
on Sundays.

August, 1908.  I have not seen fit to change my method of expenditure
since I entered the Library; I have continued to spend as I spent when
I had four dollars a week, with the exception that I allow,
necessarily, a little more for clothing.

For housing:--

  Room, $1.50 a week.
  Fuel and oil in winter, $ 0.75
  Oil in summer,             .26


Now for my art:--

I have allowed for my food exactly one dollar a week and allow the same
now.  I go down to the Washington Market early in the morning.  I revel
in the sight of the fresh vegetables, of the flowers and fruits.  The
market-people know me now, and many a gift-flower I have brought back
with me to my room, and several times a pot of herbs or spring bulbs;
now and then a few sprays of parsley or thyme.  These I look upon as my
commission!  Without leaving the market, I buy a loaf of bread for ten
cents; a knuckle of veal, or a beef bone, a pound and a half of
sausages, or a pound of salt pork, for fifteen cents; I vary my
purchases from time to time that I may have variety.  Ten cents for
vegetables--I vary these, also, as much as possible; these, with a
pound of rice, nine cents, a half a pound of butter, eighteen cents,
and a quart of beans for another ten cents, give me satisfying
combinations.  When eggs are cheap I vary this diet with them, lettuce
and bacon.  I buy things that are cheapest in their season.  In summer,
I drop out all meat and substitute milk.  I allow myself one pound of
sugar a week; no tea, no coffee; the city water is the only thing of
which I can have enough free.  With what is left of my hundred
cents,--for in my art it is the cents with which I reckon, not
dollars,--I buy fruit in its season, a bit of cheese, sometimes even a
Philadelphia squab!  At times, they are cheaper than meat in the
Market.  In the season I can get one for ten cents.

I have an extra treat when I buy that last, for the old man at the
poultry stall, who draws the chickens and various fowl, is a model from
the old Italian masters.  An Italian himself, he speaks little English,
wears a skull cap and, to my delight, looks like one of Fra Angelico's
saints.  I learn all this from the Metropolitan Museum, and apply it in
the Washington Market!

At times I haunt the fish stalls, select good sea food for a change,
and am rewarded by the play of color on the zinc counters--the mottled
green of live lobsters, the scarlet of boiled ones, the silver and rose
of pompano, the pomegranate of salmon.  I have stood by the half hour
to watch the slow-moving turtles, the scuttling crabs in the tanks.  I
have good friends throughout the Market--men and women.  They confide
in me at times, like the cod-and-hake man, dealer in dried fish, who
told me he had "a girl once down on Cape Cod".  He seemed relieved by
this confession.  He was serving me at the time, and his two hundred or
more pounds, his red face and his cordiality were delightful.  My
butter-egg-and-cheese man also confides to me that he is a commuter;
has purchased a home on the instalment plan; has three children, and
his wife runs a private laundry.

What remains of the four dollars after the weekly bills are paid, I lay
aside for clothes.  I make my own shirt waists.  It took me eleven
months to earn a good skirt of brown Panama cloth; but it has lasted me
four years.

I think I live well, _considering_; but, in living thus, there is no
denying I cross the bridge of mere sustenance every day, and am obliged
to burn my bridge behind me!  I don't like it--but am thankful for
work.  I 'm not beneath adding to my reserve fund five cents at a time.

Dec. 18, 1908.  They 're nice boys, the theological students--but
queer, some of them.  I 've watched different sets of them come and go
during these six years.  Two or three have attempted to make a little
love to me; a few have adopted me--so they said--for their sister.  I
'm forgotten with their graduation and their flitting!  One or two are
really friends; they 're younger than I, of course, and I can patronize
and quiz them.

Johnny is my favorite.  There is little theological nonsense about him,
and there is an inquisitive disposition to see New York and make the
most of his time here.  He 's from the north part of the state; likes
books, likes people, likes a good time, whenever he can get it, on his
limited income to which he adds by helping the basement barber two days
in the week, canvassing for books in the summer, and on Saturdays
waiting on the patrons of a book stall in a corridor of one of the big
hotels.

Taken altogether, Johnny is a man who has not as yet found his calling,
although he is anchored for the present, through affection for his
father, to "Chelsea" and a career that, at times, irks him.  We 've had
many a good talk about this matter.  I tell him he 's not dragging
anchor, but weighing it.

I like to see New York through Johnny's eyes--Adirondack eyes, keen,
honest, and blue; they take in all the metropolitan sights, from the
Hippodrome, to the Bowery vaudevilles and the Cathedral of St. John.

It's fun to "do" the city with him, with no expense except car fares.

Jan. 1909.  Johnny and I stood outside the Metropolitan Opera House
this evening, to see the hodge-podge of carriages and automobiles
arrive with their contents: the women who toil not, neither do they
spin anything except financial webs for men's undoing.  It was a queer
sight!  Hundreds of women passed me.  As I looked at them, I saw the
same long, pointed, manicured nails, the same jewelled fingers, the
incurving fronts, the distorted busts, the lined and rouged faces--like
those I loathed so when I first came to this city.  I asked myself,
"What's the difference between the two kinds?  Is it money alone that
makes it?"

"But are there two kinds?" I was asking myself again, when Johnny, who
has an eye for good clothes on man and woman, called my attention to a
woman's opera cloak.  It was worth a man's ransom.  From a deep yoke of
Russian sable depended the long cape of pale green satin covered with
graduated flounces, from eight to fourteen inches deep, of Venetian
point.  And taking in all this, I saw--

Well, I don't know that I dare to set down in words, even for my own
enlightenment, what I saw in that Vision.  But, suddenly, all the rich
robings, opera cloaks, clinging gowns of silk, velvet and chiffon, the
diamond tiaras, the jewelled necklaces, the French lingerie even--all
dropped from every one in that procession; and there, on a New York
sidewalk, in the harsh glare of electric lights, amidst the hiss and
cranking of their automobiles, the clank of silver-mounted harness and
the champing of bits, the shouts and calls and myriad city noises, I
saw them for what they really are:--women, like unto all other women;
women made originally for the mates of men, for mothers, for
burden-bearers, with prehensile hands to grasp, then lead and uplift,
and so aid in the work of the world.

And what more I saw in the Vision I may scarcely write down; for,
therein, I was shown for these same women both unfathomable depths and
scarce attainable heights, both degradation and transfiguration, the
human bestial and the humanly divine--the Vampire, the Angel.

And I was shown in that Vision the Calvaries of maternity common to
all, whether the conception be immaculate, so-called if within the law,
or maculate, so-called if without the law.  I saw, also, the
Gethsemanes of motherhood common to all.  I saw, moreover, the three
Dolorous Ways which their feet--and the feet of all women, because
women--are treading, have ever trod, must ever tread, that the seed
which shall propagate the Race may be trodden deep for germination.

Moreover, I saw in that Vision the women treading the seed in the Ways.
One of the Ways was stony, and those therein walked with bleeding feet
for their labor was in vain; the land was sterile.  And the second was
deeply rutted with sand, and those therein labored heavily with sweat
and toil; the fruition was but for a day.  And the third Way was heavy
with deeply-furrowed fertile soil, and those that trod it toiled long
and late that the seed might not fail of abundant harvest.

Furthermore, I saw that every woman was treading one of these three
Ways; and silk, and chiffon, or velvet gown, opera cloaks of sable and
satin, diamond tiaras and jewelled necklaces could avail them naught.
Trammelled by these or by rags--it matters not which--they must tread
the Ways.

I pressed my hand over my eyes to clear them of this Vision; for, at
last, I understood.  I knew that I, too, being a woman, must tread one
of the three Dolorous Ways even as my mother had trodden one before me.
But which?

I could bear it no longer.  "Come away, Johnny," I said abruptly.

April, 1909.  I am beginning to be so tired of the confusion of the
streets.  The work at the Library has become irksome.  I am tired of
reading, too, and feel as if my last prop had been taken from under me,
when I have no longer the desire to read.

I handle the books, place them, record dates, handle books again, place
them, record dates, handle books again--the very smell of the booky
atmosphere is sickening to me.

I suppose I need rest.  But how can I rest when I have my daily living
to earn?  I won't touch those hundred and seventy-five dollars if I
never have a vacation.  I should lose all my courage if I had to spend
a dollar of that money, except for the final end--nine years hence.
Even the thought of stopping work makes me feel weary.

      *      *      *      *      *

July 1.  So the money is gone!  I have been trying to face this fact
the last hour.  The long sickness of ten weeks has taken it all, for I
was too proud to go to the hospital without paying my way.  I let no
one know how matters stood with me.  I have come out of St. Luke's
feeling so weak, so indifferent to life, to everything I thought made
my own small life worth living.--And it is so hot here!  So breathless!
A great longing has come upon me to get away somewhere.  Since I have
been so sick things look different to me.  The energy of life seems to
have gone out of me, and I want to creep away into some place far, far
away from this city, where I can live a more normal life.

But how can I make the break?  Where can I go?  How begin all over
again in this awful struggle to get work, and succeed in anything?  My
courage has failed me.


I closed the books.  I was wondering if I should destroy them and in
this fashion burn all my bridges behind me.

"No," I spoke aloud; "I 'll save them, but I will never keep another
journal."

I opened to a blank page, took pen and ink and wrote on it:

September 18th, 1909.  I have decided to accept a place at service (at
last!) on a farm in Canada, Province of Quebec, Seigniory of Lamoral
(?).  Wages twenty-five dollars a month, besides room and board.

And underneath:

12 midnight.  My last word in this book.  Within the past six hours I
have experienced something of what I call "heaven and hell".  I have
travelled a long road since I came to this city on November 4, 1902.




V

A few evenings afterwards Delia Beaseley came up to see me.  She
brought the passage money and a note of instruction.  It was directly
to the point: I was to take a sleeping car on the Montreal express;
then the day local boat down the St. Lawrence to Richelieu-en-Bas.  At
the landing I was to enquire for Mrs. Macleod, and someone would be
there to meet me.  A time-table was enclosed.  The note was signed
"Janet Macleod ".

"This must be the 'elderly Scotchwoman,' Delia," I said after reading
the note twice.

"I'm thinking it's her--but then you never can tell."

"How did she send the passage money?"

"By post office order.  It would n't have hurt her to send a bit of a
welcome word, to my thinking."  She spoke rather grimly.

"I 'm not going for the welcome, you know; it's work and a change I
want--and right thankful I am to get the chance."

"Well you may be, my dear, in these times," she said, softening at once.

"I shall write you, Delia, all about everything; you know you want to
hear all about things."

"Would I own to being a woman if I did n't?"  She laughed her hearty
laugh; then, with a little hesitancy: "And, my dear, I 'd think kindly
of you for writing me, and I 'd like to know that all is going well
with you, but you know there's Doctor Rugvie to reckon with, and he
won't hold to much correspondence, I 'm thinking, between me
and--what's the name of that place?  I can't pronounce it--"

"Richelieu-en-Bas."

"Rich--I can't get the twist of it round my English tongue; say it
again, and may be I 'll catch it."

I repeated it twice for her, but her results were not equal to her
efforts.  We both laughed.

"Never mind, Delia; and don't tell me Doctor Rugvie is going to say to
whom I shall write or to whom I shan't--especially if it's my friend,
Delia Beaseley."

"Well, I can't say, my dear; but I 'll speak to him about it when he
gets home--"

"Now, no nonsense from a sensible woman, Delia Beaseley; I should think
I was going into a land of mysteries to hear you talk."

She laughed again.  "I don't say as it's a mystery, but I can't help
thinking he wants to keep the matter quiet like, you see."

"But I don't see--and I don't intend to," I said obstinately.

Delia changed the subject.  "It's well you 've got your passage money.
It's quite dear travelling that way."

"Never was in a Pullman in my life, Delia, but you may believe I shall
enjoy it."

She beamed on me.  "That's right, my dear, take all the pleasure you
can, and, of course, if Doctor Rugvie did n't mind--well, I must own up
to it that I 'd like to hear from you, and what you make of it up
there."

"So you shall, Delia; no secrets between you and me; there can't be; we
've known each other too long--ever since I was born into the world."

She looked a little mystified at my statement, but accepted it
evidently with appreciation.

"Jane or me 'll be down to the station to see you off," she said as she
bade me good night.

During the next two weeks and at odd times, I did a good bit of
reference work on my own account in looking up the histories of the
Canadian "Seigniories"; but at the end of that time I was ready to set
out for that other country only a little wiser for my research.

A week later, Delia Beaseley was at the Grand Central to see me start
on my journey northwards.

"I feel as if I were setting out on a real series of adventures,
Delia!" I exclaimed when I met her.  I took both her hands in mine.
"If only I were a man I should take stick and knapsack and find my way
on foot.  I 'd camp on the shore of the Tappan Zee, wander through the
Catskills, and stop over night at the old Dutch farmhouses, follow the
shores of Lake Champlain and cross the border high of heart, even if
footweary!"

Delia smiled indulgently upon me.

"Such fancies will help you out a good bit, my dear; it's well you have
a word or two of French to get along with.  I used to hear it when I
was a girl in Cape Breton."

I caught the shadow of a memory settle in her eyes.  We were at the
gate.  The train was made up.

"I must say goodby here, my dear; they won't let me in to the train."

I took both her hands again.  "Goodby, Delia Beaseley," I began; then
something choked me.  I so wanted to thank her for all her goodness to
me.  "I wish I knew what to say--how to thank--"

"There, there, my dear, I 'm the one to be thankful.  I 've been
reaping a harvest just from one little seed I sowed near twenty-six
years ago--and I never thought to see so much as a blade of grass!
That's all.  I 'm wonderful grateful it's been given me to see such a
harvest."

"Oh, Delia, if I only amounted to something, so that you could be proud
of your little harvest--"

"Now, don't, my dear, don't; don't say nothing more, but just go
straight forward with God's blessing, which is the same as mine this
time, and--don't forget me if ever you need a friend."

My eyes filled with unaccustomed tears.  A curious thought: New York,
the Juggernaut, the fetich of millions, just when I was ridding myself
of the horror of its awful presence, was about to bind me to it through
this new-old friend!

I caught her rough toil-worn hand in both mine and pressed my lips to
it; then I dropped it, and walked rapidly down the platform to the
train.  Not once did I look behind me.


For a little while after entering the luxurious sleeping car, I felt
awkward, uncomfortable; I had never been in one before.  But when I was
settled in my ample, high-backed section, and the train began to move
slowly out of the station and through the tunnel, I felt more at ease.
After that, with every mile that the train, moving more and more
swiftly, put between me and the city's sights and sounds, I felt a
rising of spirits, an ease of mind and body I had never before
experienced.

Within an hour all depression had vanished; hopes and anticipations for
the new environment filled the foreground of my thoughts.  Without
adequate reason, I believed that the change I was making was for my
good; that with new faces about me, with new and closer interests
which, alone as I was in the world, I must substitute for a home, I was
about to escape from all former associations and the memories they
fostered.

Only one thought troubled me, that was the connection by Delia Beaseley
of Doctor Rugvie's name with that of George Jackson--my mother's
husband.  I had hoped never to hear that name again.

For an hour I peered at the dark Hudson, the shadowed hills; the night
fell, blotting out the landscape wholly and shutting me into the warm
brilliantly lighted car with a sense of cosy security.

I looked at the few people I could see over the high sections.  Three
women were opposite to me, two of them young.  I found myself
calculating the cost of their dresses and accessories, their furs and
hats.  I reckoned the amount to be something like my wages on the farm
for six years.  How easily and unconsciously they wore their good
clothes!  One of the two younger held my attention.  She was fair,
slender, long-throated, and carried herself with noticeable erectness.
I caught bits of their conversation carried on in low pleasing voices:

"It will be such a surprise to them."

"... the C. P. steamer--"

"Oh, fancy!  They must have known--"

"... you know I am glad to be at home this winter..."

"Where is it? ..."

"Somewhere in Richelieu-en-Bas--"

I was all ears.  Richelieu-en-Bas was my destination.  Their voices
were so low I could catch but little more.

"Just fancy!  But you would never know from him--"

"When is Mr. Ewart coming over?"

"Bess!"  The fair one held up a warning finger; "your voice carries
so."  She rose and reached for her furs from the hook.  "Let's go into
the forward car and see the Ellwicks."

The others rose too; shook themselves out a little; patted hair rolls,
changed a hairpin, took down their furs and left the car--tall graceful
women, all of them.

Since my illness I had squeezed out from my earnings enough for the
passage money, fourteen dollars, and eight besides.  I did n't want to
begin by being indebted to any one in the Seigniory of Lamoral for that
amount; and I did n't want it deducted from my first wages.  I pleased
myself with the fancy that, soon after my arrival, I should give the
money into some one's hands with an appropriate word or two, to the
effect that I had chosen to pay my own travelling expenses.  That
sounded better than passage money which was reminiscent of the steerage.

They should understand that if I were at service, I had a little
moneyed independence of my own--the pitiful eight dollars with which to
go out into the new country.  Immigrants have come in with less than
this--nor been deported.  Well, I ran no risk of being deported from
Canada.

I asked the porter to make my berth early.  About nine I lay down,
tired and worn out with the excitement of the past three weeks.  I drew
the curtains close to shut out the night, and lay there passively
content, listening to the steadily accented _clankity-clank-clank_ of
the Montreal night express.

I liked the sound; it soothed me.  This swift on-rush into the night
towards Canada, the even motion, began to rest the long over-strained
nerves.  During these hours, at least, I was care free.  I slept.

For the first time for months that sleep was long, unbroken, dreamless.
I awoke refreshed, strengthened.  Drawing the window curtains aside, I
looked out upon a world newly bathed in the early morning lights.

At the sight, my enthusiasm, which I thought quenched forever in the
overwhelming flood of adverse circumstance, was rekindled; my
imagination stimulated.  Dawn was breaking clear and golden behind the
mountains across Lake Champlain.  Green those mountains are in the
October sunlight, green and yellow and frost-wrought crimson; but now
they loomed dark against the horizon's deepening gold.  A few small
dawn clouds of pure rose and one, gigantic, high-piled, of smoke gray,
hung motionless above the mist-veiled waters of the lake.

I watched the coming of this day with charmed eyes.  The sun rose
clear, undimmed over the shadowed mountains.  The lake mists felt its
beams; dispersed suddenly in silver flocculence; and the path across
the blue waters was free for the morning glory that was advancing apace.




BOOK TWO

THE SEIGNIORY OF LAMORAL



I

"Richelieu--Richelieu-en-Bas."

The captain of the local freight and passenger boat, that had taken six
hours to make its trip down the St. Lawrence from Montreal, pointed
encouragingly to the low north bank of the river.  I looked eagerly in
that direction.

"Richelieu-en-Haut is back there," with a sweep of his hand northwards,
"six miles back on the railroad."

The little steamer was running, at that moment, within twenty feet of
the low bank which, I saw at once, had been converted into a meandering
village street, built up only on one side.  A double row of trees
shaded both houses and highway.  We were within confidential speaking
distance of the few people I saw in the street, and apparently on
intimate terms with the front rooms of the tiny houses.  We sailed past
the market-place square, past the long low inn with double verandas,
past the post office, and drew to the landing-place which the steamer
saluted.

This salute was the signal for the appearance of what appeared to me
the entire population of the place.  There were people under the
lindens, people at the doors and open windows, people in boats rowing
towards us; one man was poling a scow in which were a cow and two
horses.  There were men with handcarts, boys with baskets, old women
and young girls, all talking, gesticulating freely.

The handcarts were drawn up to the landing-place; the steamer was made
fast to an apology for a mooring-post; the gangway heaved up.  Several
sheep on the lower deck were run down it by a forced method of
locomotion, their keepers hoisting their hind legs, and steering them
wheelbarrow fashion into the street where some children attempted to
ride them.  All about me I heard the chatter of Canadian French, not a
word of which I understood.

A ponderous antiquated private coach, into which were harnessed two
fine shaggy-fetlocked horses,--I learned afterwards these were
Percherons, with sires from Normandy,--stood in the street directly
opposite the boat; a small boy was holding their heads.  I wondered if
that were my "Seigniory coach"!

My trunk was literally shovelled out down the gangway, and I followed.
I stood on the landing-place and looked about me.  I was, in truth, in
that other country for, oh, the air!  It was like nothing I had ever
known!  So strong, so free, so soft, as if it were blowing straight
from the great Northland, over unending virgin plains, through primeval
unending forests, that the dwellers on this great water highway might
enjoy something of its primal purity and strength.

I was filling my lungs full of it and thinking of my instructions to
ask for Mrs. Janet Macleod, when a tall man, loosely jointed but
powerfully built, made his way to me through the crowd.

"I take it you 're the gal Mis' Macleod 's lookin' fer?"

It was simply the statement of a foregone conclusion, but the drawling
nasal intonation, the accent and manner of speech, told me that it was
native to my northern New England, where I have lived two-thirds of my
life; it was the speech of my own people.  I laughed; I could not have
helped it.  It was such a come-down from my high ideas of "Seigniory
retainers" of foreign birth, with which romance I had been entertaining
myself ever since I had fed my fancy on what the New York Public
Library yielded me.

"Yes, I 'm the one, Marcia Farrell.  Is this our coach?"

The man gave me a keen glance from under his bushy eyebrows; indeed, he
looked sharply at me a second time.  If he thought I was quizzing him
he was much mistaken.

"Yes, that's our'n,"--I noticed he placed an emphasis on the
possessive,--"and we 'd better be gettin' along 'fore dark; the
steamer's late.  You and the coach ain't just what you 'd call a
perfect fit--nor I could n't say as you was a misfit," he added, as he
opened the door for me to get in.  "Guess Mis' Macleod was expectin'
somebody with a little more heft to 'em; you don't look over tough?"
The statement was put in the form of a question.  "But your trunk 'll
fill up some."

He hoisted it endwise with one hand on to the front seat; took his
place beside it; gathered up the reins, and said to the boy:

"Let 'em go, Pete.  You get up behind."

But the horses did not go.  They snorted, threw up their heads,
flourished their long tails, one of them showed his heels, and both
cavorted to the wild delight of the assembled crowd.

Some emphatic words from the coachman, and judicious application of the
whiplash, soon showed the young thoroughbreds what was wanted of them,
and they trotted slowly, heavily, but steadily, down the road beside
the river, Pete, who was behind on a curious tail extension, shouting
to the small boys as he passed them.

After the horses had settled down to real work, my driver turned to me.

"Did you come through last night clear from New York?"

"Yes, and I 'm glad to get here; this air is wonderful."

"Thet 's what they all say when they strike Canady fer the fust time.
I take it it's your fust time?"

"Yes, I 'm a stranger here."

"Speakin' 'bout air--I can't see much difference 'twixt good air most
anywheres.  Take it, now, up in New England, up north where I was
raised, you can't get better nowheres.  Thet comes drorrin' through the
mountains and acrosst the Lake, an' it can't be beat."

I made no reply for I feared he would ask me if I knew "New England up
north".

He turned to look at me, evidently surprised at my short silence.  He
saw that I was being jolted about on the broad back seat, owing to the
uneven road.

"Sho!  If I did n't have the trunk, I 'd put you here on the front seat
'longside of me to kinder steady you."

"How far is it to the Seigniory of Lamoral, Mr.--?" I ventured to ask,
hoping for a flood of information about the Seigniory and its occupants.

"Call me Cale," he said shortly; "thet 's short fer Caleb, an' what all
the Canucks know me by.  Mis' Macleod, she ain't but jest come to it;
she balked consider'ble at fust, but it rolls off'n her tongue now
without any Scotch burr, I can tell you!  You was askin' 'bout the
Seigniory of Lamoral--I dunno jest what to say.  The way we 're
proceedin' now it's 'bout an hour from here, but with some hosses it
might take a half, an' by boat you can make it as long as you 're a
mind ter."

"It's a large place?"

"Thet depends on whether you 're talkin' 'bout the old manor or the
Seigniory; one I can show you in ten minutes, t' other in about three
days."  He turned and looked at me again with his small keen gray eyes.

"Where was _you_ raised?"  He spoke carelessly enough; but I knew my
own.  He was simulating indifference, and I put him off the track at
once.

"I was born in New York City."

"Great place--New York."

He chirrupped to the colts, and we drove for the next fifteen minutes
without further conversation.

The boat, owing to heavy freight, was an hour late in leaving Montreal,
and two hours longer than its usual time, in discharging it at a dozen
hamlets and villages along the St. Lawrence.  In consequence, it was
sunset when we left the landing-place, and the twilight was deepening
to-night, as we turned away from the river road and drove a short
distance inland.  Once Caleb drew rein to light a lantern, and summon
Pete from the back of the coach to sit beside him and hold it.

It grew rapidly dark.  Leaning from the open upper half of the coach
door, I could just see between the trees along the roadside, a sheet of
water.

"Hola!" Cale shouted suddenly with the full power of his lungs.
"Hola--hola!"

It was echoed by Pete's shrill prolonged "Ho--la-a-a-a-a!"

"Ho-la!  Ho!" came the answer from somewhere across the water.  Cale
turned and looked over his shoulder.

"Thet 's the ferry.  We ferry over a piece here; it's the back water of
a crick thet makes in from the river 'long here, fer 'bout two mile."
He turned into a narrow lane, dark under the trees, and drove to the
water's edge.

By the flare of the lantern I could see a broad raft, rigged with a
windlass, slowly moving towards us over the darkening waters.  Another
lantern of steady gleam lighted the face of the ferryman.  It took but
a few minutes to reach the bank; the horses went on to the boards with
many a snort and much stamping of impatient hoofs.  Pete took his place
at their heads.

"_Marche!_"

We moved slowly away towards the other bank.  There was no moon; the
night air was crisp with coming frost; an owl hooted somewhere in the
woods.

We were soon on the road again, as ever beneath trees.  It seemed to me
as if we were turning to the river again.  I asked Cale about it.

"You 've hit it 'bout right, in the dark too.  We foller back a quarter
of a mile, an' then we 're there."

That quarter of a mile seemed long to me.

"Here we are," said Cale, at last.

I looked out.  I could see the long low outlines of a house showing
dimly white through the trees, for there were trees everywhere.  A
flaring light, as from a wood fire, illumined one window.

We drew up at a broad flight of low steps.  A door into a lighted
passageway was opened.  I saw there were at least four people in it;
one, a woman in a white cap, came out on the upper step.

"Have you brought Miss Farrell, Cale?" she said.

"Yes, Mis' Macleod, fetched her right along; but the boat was good
three hours late.--Pete, open the door; I 'll hold the hosses."

I went up the steps, not knowing what to say, for the mere inflection
of her voice, the gentle address, the prefix "Miss" to my name, told me
intuitively that I was with gentle people, and my service with them was
to be other than I fancied.




II

"I hope you will soon feel at home in the old manor."  With these words
I was made welcome.  Mrs. Macleod led the way into the house.

"Jamie," she said to a young man, or youth, I could not tell which,
"this is Miss Farrell.  My son," she added, turning to me.

"Call me Marcia," I said to her.  She smiled as if pleased.

"You will be feeling very tired after your long journey--and I 'm
thinking jolly hungry after coming up in the old boat; that was
mother's doings."

"Now, Jamie--!" she spoke in smiling protest.

O Jamie, Jamie Macleod!  Your thin bright eager face was in itself a
welcome to the old manor of Lamoral.

"I 'm not tired, but I confess to having a good appetite; this Canada
air would make an angel long for manna," I said laughing.

"Wouldn't it though--oh, it's great!" he responded joyfully.
"Angelique, here, will help you out in that direction--she's our cook;
Angelique, come here."  He gave his command in French.

The short thickset French Canadian of the black-eyed-Susan type, came
forward, with outstretched hand, from the back of the passageway; there
was good friendship in her hearty grip.

"And Marie will take charge of you till supper time," said Mrs.
Macleod, smiling; "Jamie is apt to run the house at times because he
can speak with the servants in their own tongue."

"Now, mother!"  It was Jamie's turn to protest.

Mrs. Macleod spoke to the little maid, who was beaming on me, in
halting French.

"Do you speak French?" she asked me.

"No, I can read it, that 's all."

"Oh, well, with that you can soon understand and speak it; my Scotch
tongue is too old to be learning new tricks; fortunately I understand
it a little.  Marie will take you to your room."

Marie looked on me with an encouraging smile, and led the way up stairs
through a wide passageway, down three steps into another long corridor,
and opened a door at the end.  She lighted two candles and, after some
pantomime concerning water, left me, closing the door behind her.

And this was my room.  I looked around; it took immediate possession of
me in spirit--a new experience for me and a wholly pleasing one.

There were two windows in one end; the walls were sloping.  I concluded
it must be in the gable end of some addition to the main building.  The
walls were whitewashed; the floor was neatly laid with a woven rag
carpet of peculiar design and delicate coloring; the cottage bedroom
set was painted dark green.  There was a plain deal writing table with
writing pad and inkstand, and a dressing table on which stood two white
china candlesticks.  Counterpane, chair cushions, and window hangings
were of beautiful old chintz still gay with faded paroquets and vines,
trees, trellises, roses and numerous humming-birds, on a background of
faded crocus yellow.

There was a knock at the door.  On my using one of the few words in
French at my command, "Entrez," Marie burst in with delighted
exclamations and a flood of unintelligible French.  But I gathered she
was explaining to me Pierre who followed her, cap in one hand, and in
the other, the handle of my trunk which he was dragging behind him.
This was evidently Pierre, father, in distinction from Pierre, son.

"Big Pete and little Pete," I translated for their benefit; whereupon
Marie clapped her hands and Peter the Great came forward man fashion to
shake hands before he placed my trunk.  As the two spoke together I
heard the name "Cale".

"What a household!" I said to myself after they had gone, and while I
was doing over my hair.  "I wonder if there are any other members?  And
what is my place in it going to be?"

It kept me guessing until I had made myself ready for supper.

Soon there was another knock.  Marie's voice was heard; her tongue
loosed in voluble expression of her evident desire to conduct me down
stairs to the dining-room.

"Here are more of us!" was Jamie Macleod's exclamation, as I entered
the long low room.  Four fine dogs--he told me afterwards they were
Gordon setters--rose slowly from the rug before the fireplace.  "But
they 're Scotch and need no introduction.  Come here, comrades!"

The four leaped towards me; snuffed at me with evident curiosity;
licked my hands and were about to spring on me, but a word from their
master sent them back to the rug.

He showed me my place at the long narrow table; drew out the chair for
his mother and, when she was seated, spoke to the dogs who, with
perfect decorum, sedately settled themselves on their haunches in twos,
one on each side of Mrs. Macleod at the head of the table, one on each
side of her son at her right.  They looked for all the world like the
Barye bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum!  After all, I could not get
rid of all the associations, nor did this one bring with it anything
but pleasure, that the great city had yielded me this much of
instruction.

I was looking at the dogs and about to speak, when I noticed that Mrs.
Macleod had bent her head and folded her hands.  I caught Jamie looking
at me out of the corner of his eye.  For the first time in my life I
heard "grace" said at a table.  I felt myself grow red; I was
embarrassed.  Jamie saw my confusion and began to chat in his own
bright way.

"I asked mother if she had written definitely what we 'd asked you up
here for into the wilds of Canada."

"Now, Jamie!  You will be giving Miss--Marcia," she corrected herself,
"to understand I asked her here under false pretence.  To tell the
truth, I did n't quite see how to explain myself at such a distance."
She spoke with perfect sincerity.  "Moreover, Doctor Rugvie told me
that Mrs. Beaseley was absolutely trustworthy, and I relied on her--but
you don't know Doctor Rugvie?"

"Of him, yes; I saw him once in the hospital."

"So you 've been in the hospital too?"

It was Jamie who put that question, and something of the eager light in
his face faded as he asked it.

"Yes, last spring; I was there ten weeks."

"Then you know," he said quite simply, and looked at me with inquiring
eyes.

Why or how I was enabled to read the significance of that simple
statement, I cannot say; I know only in part.  But I do know that my
eyes must have answered his, for I saw in them a reflection of my own
thought: We both, then, have known what it is, to draw near to the
threshold of that door that opens only outward.

"You don't indeed look strong; I noticed that the first thing," said
Mrs. Macleod.

"Oh, but I am," I assured her; "you will see when you have work for me.
I can cook, and sew--and chop wood, and even saw a little, if
necessary."

Mrs. Macleod looked at me in absolute amazement, and Jamie burst into a
hearty laugh.  It was good to hear, and, without in the slightest
knowing why, I laughed too--at what I did not know, nor much care.  It
was good to laugh like that!

"And to think, mother, that you told me to come down heavy on the
'strong and country raised'!  Oh, this is rich!  I wrote that
advertisement, Miss Far--"

"Please call me Marcia."

"May I?"  He was again eager and boyish.

"Why not?" I said.  He went on with his unfinished sentence.

"--And I pride myself that I rose to the occasion of mother's command
to make it 'brief but explicit'."

"Poor girl, you 've had little chance to hear anything explicit from me
as yet."  Mrs. Macleod smiled, rather sadly I thought.  "But you shall
know before you go to bed.  I could n't be so thoughtless as to keep
you in suspense over night."

"Oh, I can wait," I said; "but what I want to know, Mr. Macleod--"

"Please call me Jamie," he said, imitating my voice and intonation.

"May I?" I replied, mimicking his own.  Then we both fell to laughing
like two children, and it seemed to me that I felt what it is to be
young, for the first time in my life.  The four dogs wagged their
tails, threshing the floor with them like flails and keeping time to
our hilarity; Mrs. Macleod smiled, almost happily, and Marie came in to
see what it was all about.

"What do you want to know?" he said at last, mopping the tears from his
eyes with his napkin.

"Why you advertised your mother as 'an elderly Scotchwoman'?"

"Because that sounded safe."

Again we laughed, it seemed at almost nothing.  The dogs whined as if
wanting to join in what fun there was; the fire snapped merrily on the
hearth, and the large coal-oil lamp, at the farther end of the long
table, sent forth a cheerful light from under its white porcelain
shade, and showed me the old room in all its simple beauty.

Overhead, the great beams and the ceiling were a rich mahogany color
with age.  The sides were panelled to the ceiling with the same wood.
Between the two doors opening into the passageway, was a huge but
beautifully proportioned marble chimney-piece that reached to the beams
of the ceiling.  The marble was of the highest polish, white, pale
yellow, and brown in tone.  Above the mantel, it formed the frame of a
large canvas that showed a time-darkened landscape with mounted
hunters.  The whole piece was exquisitely carved with the wild grape
vine--its leaves and fruit.

On each side were old iron sconces.  Above the two doors were the
antlers of stags.  The room was lighted by four windows; these were
hung with some faded chintz, identical in pattern and color with that
in my bedroom; they were drawn.  I wondered, as I looked at this beauty
of simplicity, what the other rooms in the house would show.  I noticed
there was no sideboard, no dresser; only the table, and heavy chairs
with wooden seats, furnished the room.

The food was wholesome and abundant.  I found myself wondering that I
could eat each mouthful without counting the cost.

"I 'll stay here with the dogs and smoke," Jamie said, as we left the
table.

We crossed the passageway, which I noticed was laid with flagging and
unheated, to the room opposite the dining-room.

Here again, there were the wood ceilings and panelled walls, the latter
painted white.  The great chimney-piece was like its fellow in the
dining-room; only the carvings were different: intricate scrollwork and
fine groovings.  There was a canvas, also, in the marble frame, but it
was in a good state of preservation; it showed a walled city on a
height and a river far below.  I wondered if it could be Quebec.

The room was larger than the other, but much cosier in every way.
There were a few modern easy chairs, an ample old sofa--swans carved on
the back and arms--a large library table of black oak with bevelled
edges, also beautifully carved; and around the walls of the room, in
every available space, were plain low bookshelves of pine stained to
match the table.  On the floor were the same woven rugs of rag carpet,
unique of design and beautiful in coloring--dark brown, pale yellow,
and white, with large squares marked off in narrow lines of rose.  The
furniture, except for the sofa which was upholstered in faded yellow
wool damask, was covered with flowery chintz like that in the
dining-room, and at the windows were the same faded yellow hangings.  A
large black bear skin rug lay before the hearth.  There were no
ornaments or pictures anywhere.  On the mantel were two pots of
flourishing English ivy.  A stand of geraniums stood before one of the
four windows.

There were sconces on each side of the chimney-piece, but of gilt
bronze.  Each was seven-branched, and it was evident that Marie had
just lighted all fourteen candles.

Mrs. Macleod drew her chair to the hearth, and I took one near her.




III

"It is a good time to speak of some matters between ourselves; Jamie
will not be coming in for an hour at least."  She turned and looked at
me steadily.

"I don't know how much or how little you know of this place, and
perhaps it will be best to begin at the beginning.  Mrs. Beaseley wrote
me you were born in the city of New York."

"Yes; twenty-six years ago next December."

"So Mrs. Beaseley wrote, or rather her daughter did for her.  She said
you were an orphan."

"Yes."  I answered so.  How could I answer otherwise knowing what I
did?  But I felt the blood mount to my temples when I stated this half
truth.

"You say you do not know Doctor Rugvie?"

"No; only of him."

"I wish you did."  (How could she know that my wish to see him and know
him must be far stronger than hers!)

"He will be coming out here later on in the winter--are you cold?" she
asked quickly, for I had shivered to cover an involuntary start.

"No, not at all; but I think it must be growing colder outside."

"It is.  Cale said we might have heavy frost or snow before morning.
You will find the changes in temperature very sudden and trying here in
spring and autumn.  About Doctor Rugvie; he is a good man, and a great
one in his profession.  We made his acquaintance many years ago in
Scotland, in my own home, Crieff.  He had lodgings with us for ten
weeks, and since then he has made us proud to be counted among his
friends."

She rose, stirred the fire and took a maple stick from a large
wood-basket.

"Let me," I said, taking it from her.

"You really don't look strong enough."

"Oh, but I am; you 'll see."

"By the way, don't let my son do anything like this.  He is often
careless and over confident, and he must not strain himself--he is
under strict orders."  She was silent for a moment then went on:

"My son is not strong, as you must see."  She looked at me appealingly,
as if hoping I might dispute her statement; but I could say nothing.

"A year ago," she spoke slowly, as if with difficulty, "he was in the
Edinboro' Hospital for five months; he inherits his father's
constitution, and the hemorrhages were very severe.  Doctor Rugvie came
over to see him, and advised his coming out here to Canada to live as
far as possible in the pine forests.  He has been away all summer.  He
is to go away again next year with one of the old guides.

"I want you to remain with me as companion and assistant here in the
house; the service is large and, as you will soon find," she added with
a smile, "extremely personal.  They are interested in us and our
doings, and we are expected to reciprocate that interest.  It will be a
comfort to Jamie to know you are with me, and that I am not alone in
this French environment."  She interrupted herself to say:

"Did Mrs. Beaseley tell you anything about this place?  You can speak
with perfect freedom to me.  We have no mysteries here."  She smiled as
if she read my thoughts.

"She told me she knew nothing of the place, except that Doctor Rugvie
had hired a farm in Canada with some good buildings on it, and that he
intended to use it for those who might need to be built up in health."

"She has stated it exactly.  My son and I are the first
beneficiaries--only, this is not the farm."

"Not the farm!" I exclaimed.  She looked amused at my surprise.  "What
is it then?  Do tell me."

"There is very little to tell.  A friend of Doctor Rugvie's, an
Englishman who was with him for a week in Scotland while he was with
us, is owner of the Seigniory of Lamoral; it is his, I think, by
inheritance, although I am not positive; and this is the old manor
house.  The estate is very large, but has been neglected; I have
understood it is to be cultivated; some of it is to be reforested and
the present forest conserved.  He will be his own manager and will make
his home here a great part of the year.  Mean while, he has installed
us here in his absence, through Doctor Rugvie, of course, and given
over the charge of house and servants to Jamie and me."

"And what is the owner's title?"

"He has none that I know of.  The real 'Seignior' and 'Seignioress'
live in Richelieu-en-Bas in the new manor house--I say 'new', but that
must be seventy-five years old.  This is only a part of the original
seigniory."

"I don't understand these seigniories, and I tried to read up about
them before I came here."

"It is very perplexing--these seigniorial rights and rents and
transferences.  I don't make any pretence of understanding them."

"Are the farm buildings occupied now?"

"No; Doctor Rugvie wants to attend to those himself.  It is his
recreation to make plans for this farm, and he will be here himself to
see that they are begun and carried out right.  He tells me he has
always loved Canada."

"And what am I to do for you?  I want to begin to feel of a little
use," I said half impatiently.

"You are doing for me now, my dear."  (How easily Delia Beaseley's name
for me came from the "elderly Scotchwoman's" lips!)  "Your presence
cheers Jamie; the young need the young, and belong to the young--"

"But," I protested, "I am not young; I am twenty-six."

"And Jamie is twenty-three.  But when you laughed together to-night,
you both might have been sixteen.  It did me good to hear you; this old
house needs just that--and I can't laugh easily now," she added.  I
heard a note of hopelessness in her voice.

How lovely she was as she sat by the fire in the soft radiance of
candle light!  "Elderly"!--She could not be a day over fifty-seven or
eight.  The fine white cap rested on heavy, smoothly parted hair; the
figure was round to plumpness; the dress, not modernized, became her;
her voice was still young if a little weary, and her brown eyes bright,
the lids unwrinkled.

"Do you know Delia Beaseley well?  Doctor Rugvie says she is a fine
woman."

"She is noble," I said emphatically; "I feel that I know her well,
although I have seen her only a few times."

"Is she a widow?"

The door opened before I could gather my wits to answer.  I felt
intuitively that I could not say to this Scotchwoman, that Delia
Beaseley was neither widow nor wife.  I welcomed the sudden inrush of
all four dogs and Jamie behind them, with the smell of a fresh pipe
about him.

"I positively must have my second short pipe here with you.  I kept
away in deference to the new member of the family."  He flourished his
pipe towards me.  "I always smoke here, don't I, mother?"

"In that case, I will stay in my room after supper unless you continue
to smoke your first, second, and third--"

"Only two; Doctor Rugvie won't allow me a third--"

"Doctor Rugvie is a tyrant, and I 've said the same thing before," I
declared firmly.

"Now, look here, Marcia," he said solemnly, "we will call a halt right
now and here."  He settled his long length in the deep easy chair on
the other side of the hearth, refilled and relighted his pipe.  "Doctor
Rugvie is my friend, my very special friend; whoever enters this house,
enters it on the footing of friendship with all those who are my
friends--"

"Hear, hear!  Another tyrant," I said, turning to his mother who was
enjoying our chaff.

"--Whose name is legion," he went on, ignoring my interruption.  "I'll
begin to enumerate them for your benefit.  There are the four dogs,
Gordon setters of the best breed--and Gordon's setters in fact."  He
made some pun at which his mother smiled, but it was lost on me.  "They
're not mine, they 're my friend's, and that amounts to the same thing
when he 's away."

"And who is this friend of dogs and of man?"

"He?  Guy Mannering, hear her!  Why there's only one 'he' for this
place and that's--"

"Doctor Rugvie?"

"Doctor Rugvie!" he repeated, looking at me in unfeigned amazement;
then to his mother:

"Have n't you told her yet, mother?"

"I doubt if I mentioned his name--I had so many other things to say and
think of."  She spoke half apologetically.

"The man who owns this house, Miss Farrell,"--he was speaking so
earnestly and emphatically that he forgot our agreement,--"the man who
owns these dogs, the lord of this manor, such as it is, and everything
belonging to it, lord of a forest it will do your eyes and lungs and
soul good to journey through, the man who is master in the best sense
of Pete and little Pete, of Angelique and Marie, of old Mere
Guillardeau, of a dozen farmers here on the old Seigniory of Lamoral,
my friend, Doctor Rugvie's friend and friend of all Richelieu-en-Bas,
is Mr. Ewart, Gordon Ewart--and you missed my pun! the first I've made
to-day!--and I hope he will be yours!"

"Well, I 'll compromise.  If he will just tolerate me here for your
sakes, I 'll be his friend whether he is mine or not--for I want to
stay."

I meant what I said; and I think both mother and son realized, that
under the jesting words there was a deep current of feeling.  Mrs.
Macleod leaned over and laid her hand on mine.

"You shall stay, Marcia; it will not depend on Mr. Ewart, your
remaining with us.  When the farm is ready, Doctor Rugvie will place us
there, and then I shall need your help all the time."

Again, as at the station with Delia Beaseley's blessing ringing in my
ears, I felt the unaccustomed tears springing in my eyes.  Jamie leaned
forward and knocked the ashes from his pipe; he continued to stare into
the fire.

"And who are the others?" I asked unsteadily; my lips trembled in spite
of myself.

"The others?  Oh--," he seemed to come back to us from afar, "there is
Andre--"

"And who is Andre?"

"Just Andre--none such in the wide world; my guide's old father, old
Mere Guillardeau's brother, old French voyageur and coureur de bois; it
will take another evening to tell you of Andre.--  Mother," he spoke
abruptly, "it's time for porridge and Cale."

"Yes, I will speak to Marie."  She rose and left the room by a door at
the farther end.

"Remark those fourteen candles, will you?" said Jamie, between puffs.

"I have noticed them; I call that a downright extravagance."

"I pay for it," he said sententiously; then, with a slight flash of
resentment; "you need n't think I sponge on Ewart to the extent of
fourteen candles a night."

I laughed a little under my breath.  I knew a little friction would do
him no harm.

"And when those fourteen candles burn to within two inches of the
socket, as at present, it is my invariable custom, being a Scotsman, to
call for the porridge--and for Cale, because he is of our tongue, and
needs to discourse with his own, at least once, before going to bed.  I
say a Scotsman without his nine o'clock porridge is a cad."

"Any more remarks are in order," I said to tease him.

"You really must know Cale--"

"I thought I made his acquaintance this afternoon."

He laughed again his hearty laugh.  "I forgot; he drove you out.  We
did n't send Pete because we thought you might not understand his
lingo.  But you must n't fancy you know Cale because you 've seen him
once--oh, no!  You 'll have to see him daily and sometimes hourly; in
fact, you will see so much of him that, sometimes, you will wish it a
little less; for you are to understand that Cale is omnipresent, very
nearly omnipotent here with us, and indispensable to _me_.  You will
accept him on my recommendation and afterwards make a friend of him for
your own sake."

"Who is he?"

"Cale?--He 's just Cale too.  His name is Caleb Marstin; 'hails', as he
says, from northern New England.  I have noticed he does n't care to
name the locality, and I respect his reticence; it's none of my
business.  He says he has n't lived there for more than a quarter of a
century and has no relations.  He can tell you more about forests,
lumber and forestry, in one hour than a whole Agricultural College.  He
has been for years lumbering in northern Minnesota and across the
Canadian border.  He 's here to help reforest and conserve the old
forest to the estate; he 's--in a word, he 's my right hand man."

"Is Mr. Ewart lord of Cale too?"

At my question, Jamie's long body doubled up with mirth.

"Have n't seen each other yet and don't know each other.  Gordon Ewart
is n't apt to acknowledge any one as his master, especially in the
matter of forestry, and Cale never does; result, fun for us when they
do know each other."

"How did you happen to get him here?"

"Oh, a girl I know, who visits in Richelieu-en-Bas, said her father,
who is a big lumber merchant on the States' border, knew of good men
for the place.  Ewart had told me that this was my first business, to
get a man for the place; so I wrote to him, and he replied that Cale
was coming east in the spring and he had given him my name.  That's
how."

Mrs. Macleod came in, followed by Marie with steaming porridge, bowls
and spoons on a tray; Cale was behind her.  Jamie looked up with a
smile.

"Cale, this is Miss Farrell, the new member of our Canadian settlement.
I take it you have spoken with her before."

There was no outstretched hand for me; nor did I extend mine to him.
We were of one people, Cale and I: northern New Englanders, and rarely
demonstrative to strangers.  We are apt to wait for an advance in
friendship and then retreat before it when it is made, for the simple
reason that we fear to show how much we want it!  But I smiled up at
him as he took his stand by the mantel, leaning an elbow on it.

"Yes, Cale and I have made each other's acquaintance."  I noticed that
when I looked up at him and smiled, he gave an involuntary start.  I
wondered if Jamie saw it.

"Yes, we had some conversation, such as 'twas, on the way.  'T ain't
every young gal would ride out inter what you might call the
unbeknownst of a seigniory in Canady with an old feller like me."

A slow smile wrinkled his gaunt whiskered cheeks, and creased a little
more deeply the crowsfeet around the small keen grey eyes that, I
noticed, fixed themselves on me and were hardly withdrawn during the
five minutes he stood by the mantel gulping his porridge.

After finishing it, he bade us an abrupt good night and left.

"What's struck Cale, mother?" Jamie asked as soon as he had left the
room; "this is the first time I 've ever known his loquacity to be at a
low ebb.  It could n't be Marcia, could it?"

"I don't think Marcia's presence had anything to do with it; he is n't
apt to be minding the presence of any one.  I think he has something on
his mind."

"Then he 'd better get it off; I don't like it," said Jamie brusquely;
"here they come--"

In came Angelique and Marie, Pierre the Great, and Pierre the Small, to
bid us good night; it was their custom; and after the many
"bonne-nuits" and "dormez-biens", they trooped out.  We took our
lighted candlesticks from the library table where Marie had placed
them; Jamie snuffed out the fourteen low-burning lights in the sconces,
drew ashes over the embers, put a large screen before the fire, and we
went to our rooms.

Mine greeted me with an extra degree of warmth.  Marie had made more
fire; the air was frosty.  I drew apart the curtains and looked out.
There was only the blackness of night beyond the panes.  I drew them to
again; unlocked my trunk to take out merely what was necessary for the
night, undressed and went to bed.

I must have lain there hours with wide open eyes; there was no sleep in
me.  Hour after hour I listened for a sound from somewhere; there was
absolute silence within the manor and without.  I had opened my window
for air, and, as I lay there wide awake, gradually, without reason, in
that intense silence, the various nightly street sounds of the great
city, five hundred miles to the southward, began to sound in my ears;
at first far away, then nearer and nearer until I heard distinctly the
roar of the elevated, the multiplied "honk-honk" of the automobiles,
the rolling of cabs, the grating clamor of the surface cars, the clang
of the ambulance, the terrific clatter of the horses' hoofs as they
sped three abreast to the fire, the hoarse whistle of tug and ferry;
and, above all, the voices of those crying in that wilderness.

Again I felt that awful burden, that blackness of oppression, which was
with me for weeks in the hospital--the result of the intensified life
of the huge metropolis and the giant machinery that sustains it--and,
feeling it, I knew myself to be a stranger even in the white walled
room in the old manor house of Lamoral.

It must have been long, long after midnight when I fell asleep.




IV

There was a soft white light on walls and ceiling when I awoke.  I
recognized it at once: the reflection from snow.  I drew aside both
curtains and looked out.

"Oh, how beautiful!" I exclaimed, drawing long deep breaths of the fine
dry air.

It was the so-called "feather-snow" that had fallen during the night.
It powdered the massive drooping hemlock boughs, the spraying
underbrush, the stiff-branched spruce and cedars that crowded the tall
pines, overstretching the steep gable above my windows.

Just below me, about twenty feet from the house, was the creek, a
backwater of the St. Lawrence, lying clear, unruffled, dark, and
mirroring the snow-frosted cedars, hemlocks, and spraying underbrush.
Across its narrow width the woods came down to the water, glowing
crimson, flaunting orange, shimmering yellow beneath the light snow
fall.  Straight through these woods, and directly opposite my windows,
a broad lane had been cut, a long wide clearing that led my eyes
northward, over some open country, to the soft blue line of the
mountains.  I took them to be the Laurentides.

From a distance, in the direction of the village, came the sudden
muffled clash of bells; then peal followed peal.  The sun was fully an
hour high.  As I listened, I heard the soft _drip_, _drip_, that
sounded the vanishing of the "feather-snow".

I stood long at the window, for I knew this glory was transient and
before another snowfall every crimson and yellow leaf would have fallen.

While dressing, I took myself to task for the mood of the night before.
Such thoughts could not serve me in my service to others.  I was a
beneficiary--Mrs. Macleod's word--as well as Jamie and his mother, and
I determined to make the most of my benefits which, in the morning
sunshine, seemed many and great.  Had I not health, a sheltering room,
abundant food and good wages?

I could not help wondering whose was the money with which I was to be
paid.  Had it anything to do with Doctor Rugvie's "conscience fund"?
Did Mrs. Macleod and Jamie bear the expense?  Or was it Mr. Ewart's?

"Ewart--Ewart," I said to myself; "why it's the very same I heard in
the train."

Then and there I made my decision: I would write to Delia Beaseley
that, as Mrs. Macleod said Doctor Rugvie would be here sometime later
on in the winter, I would wait until I should have seen him before
asking him for my papers.

"I shall ask her never to mention my name to him in connection with
what happened twenty-six years ago; I prefer to tell it myself," was my
thought; "it is an affair of my own life, and it belongs to me, and to
no other, to act as pioneer into this part of my experience--"

Marie's rap and entrance with hot water, her voluble surprise at
finding me up and dressed, and our efforts to understand each other,
diverted my thoughts.  I made out that the family breakfasted an hour
later, and that it was Marie's duty to make a fire for me every
morning.  I felt almost like apologizing to her for allowing her to do
it for me, who am able-bodied and not accustomed to be waited on.

I took rain-coat and rubbers, and followed her down stairs.  She
unbolted the great front door and let me out into the early morning
sunshine.  I stood on the upper step to look around me, to take in
every detail of my surroundings, only guessed at the night before.

Maples and birch mingled with evergreens, crowding close to the house,
filled the foreground on each side.  In front, an unkempt driveway
curved across a large neglected lawn, set with lindens and pines, and
lost itself in woods at the left.  Between the tree trunks on the lawn,
at a distance of perhaps five hundred feet, I saw the broad gleaming
waters of the St. Lawrence broken by two long islands.  Behind the
farther one I saw the smoke of some large steamer.

I looked up at the house.  It was a storey and a half, long, low,
white.  The three large windows on each side of the entrance were
provided with ponderous wooden shutters banded with iron.  There were
four dormers in the gently sloping roof and two large central chimneys,
besides two or three smaller ones in various parts of the roof.  Such
was the old manor of Lamoral.

A path partly overgrown with bushes led around the house; following it,
I found that the main building was the least part of the whole
structure.  Two additions, varying in length and height, provided as
many sharp gables, and gave it the inconsequent charm of the unexpected.

Beyond, in a tangle of cedars and hemlocks, were some low square
out-buildings with black hip-roofs.  Still following the path, that
turned to the left away from the outbuildings, I found myself in the
woods that from all sides encroached upon the house.  It was a joy to
be in them at that early hour.  The air was filled with sunshine and
crisp with the breath of vanishing snow.  The sky was deep blue as seen
between the interlocking branches, wet and darkened, of the crowding
trees.

Before me I saw what looked to be another out-building, also white, and
evidently the goal for this path through the woods.  It proved to be a
small chapel, half in ruins; the door was time-stained and barred with
iron; the window glass was gone; only the delicate wooden traceries of
the frame were intact.  I mounted a pile of building stone beneath one
of the windows, and by dint of standing on tiptoe I could look over the
window ledge to the farther end of the chapel.  To my amazement I saw
that it had been, in part, a mortuary chapel.  Several slabs were lying
about as if they had been pried off, and the deep stone-lined graves
were empty.  The place fairly gave me the creeps; it was so unexpected
to find this reminder in the hour of the day's resurrection.

What a wilderness was this Seigniory of Lamoral!  And yet--I liked it.
I liked its wildness, the untrammelled growth of its trees, underbrush
and vines; the dignified simplicity of its old manor that matched the
simple sincerity of its present inmates.  I felt somehow akin to all of
it, and I could say with truth, that I should be glad to remain a part
of it.  But I recalled what Mrs. Macleod said about our removal to the
farm, and that remembrance forbade my indulging in any thoughts of
permanency.

"Stranger I am in it, and stranger I must remain to it, and at no
distant time 'move on,' I suppose."  This was my thought.

A noise of soft runnings-to-and-fro in the underbrush startled me.  I
jumped down from the pile of stones and started for the house, but not
before the dogs found me and announced the fact with continued and
energetic yelpings.  Jamie greeted me from the doorway.

"Good morning!  You 've stolen a march on me; I wanted to show you the
chapel in the woods.  You will find this old place as good as a two
volume novel."

"What a wilderness it is!"

"That's what Cale is here for.  He is only waiting for Ewart to come to
bring order out of this chaos.  I hope you noticed that cut through the
woods across the creek?"

"Yes, it's lovely; those are the Laurentians I see, are n't they?"

"You 're right.  The cut is Cale's doing.  He said the first thing
necessary was to let in light and air, and provide drainage.  But he
won't do much more till Ewart comes--he does n't want to."

"When is Mr. Ewart coming?"

"We expect him sometime the last of November.  He was in England when
we last heard from him--here's Marie; breakfast is ready."  He opened
the door to the dining-room and Mrs. Macleod greeted me from the head
of the table.

I loved the dining-room; the side windows looked into a thicket of
spruce and hemlock, and from the front ones I could see under the
great-branched lindens to the St. Lawrence.

After breakfast Mrs. Macleod showed me what she called the "offices",
also the large winter kitchen at the end of the central passageway, and
the method by which both are heated: a range of curious make is set
into the wall in such a way that the iron back forms a portion of the
wall of the passageway.

"We came out here early in the spring and found this arrangement
perfect for heating the passageway.  Angelique has moved in this
morning from the summer kitchen; she says the first snowfall is her
warning.  I have yet to experience a Canadian winter."

She showed me all over the house.  It was simple in arrangement and
lacked many things to make it comfortable.  Above, in the main house,
there were four large bedrooms with dormer windows and wide shallow
fireplaces.  The walls were whitewashed and sloping as in my room.  The
furniture was sparse but old and substantial.  There were no bed
furnishings or hangings of any kind.  All the rooms were laid with rag
carpets of beautiful coloring and unique design.

"Jamie and I have rooms in the long corridor where yours is," said Mrs.
Macleod; "it's much cosier there; we actually have curtains to our
beds, which seems a bit like home."

I was looking out of one of the dormer windows as she spoke, and saw
little Pete on the white Percheron, galloping clumsily up the driveway.
He saw me and waved a yellow envelope.  I knew that little yellow flag
to be a telegram.  A sudden heart-throb warned me that it might bring
some word that would shorten my stay in this old manor, and banish all
three to Doctor Rugvie's farm.

A few minutes afterwards, we heard Jamie's voice calling from the lower
passageway:

"Mother, where are you?--Oh, you 're there, Marcia!" he said, as I
leaned over the stair rail.  "Here 's a telegram from Ewart, and news
by letter--no end of it.  Come on down."

"Come away," said Mrs. Macleod quickly.  I saw her cheeks flush with
excitement.  On entering the living-room we found Jamie in high
feather.  He flourished the telegram joyously.

"Oh, I say, mother, it's great!  Ewart telegraphs he will be here by
the fifteenth of November and that Doctor Rugvie will come with him.
And here 's a letter from him, written two weeks ago, and he says that
by now all the cases of books should be in Montreal, plus two French
coach horses at the Royal Stables.  He says Cale is to go up for them.
He tells me to open the cases, and gives you free hand to furbish up in
any way you see fit, to make things comfortable for the winter."

"My dear boy, what an avalanche of responsibility!  I don't know that I
feel competent to carry out his wishes."  She looked so hopelessly
helpless that her son laughed outright.

"And when and where do I come in?" I asked merrily; "am I to continue
to be the cipher I 've been since my arrival?"

"You forgot Marcia, now did n't you, mother?"

"I think I did, dear.  Do you really think you can attempt all this?"
she asked rather anxiously.

"Do it!  Of course I can--every bit, if only you will let me."

"Hurrah for the States!" Jamie cried triumphantly; "Marcia, you're a
trump," he added emphatically.

Mrs. Macleod turned to me, saying half in apology:

"I really have no initiative, my dear; and when so many demands are
made upon me unexpectedly, I simply can do nothing--just turn on a
pivot, Jamie says; and the very fact that I am a beneficiary here would
be an obstacle in carrying out these plans.  It is so different in my
own home in Crieff."

I heard the note of homesickness in her voice, and it dawned upon me
that there are others in the world who may feel themselves strangers in
it.  My heart went out to her for her loneliness in this far away land
of French Canada.

"Well, so am I a beneficiary; so is Cale and the whole household; and
if only you will let me, I 'll make Mr. Ewart himself feel he is a
beneficiary in his own house," I retorted gayly.  "And as for Doctor
Rugvie, we 'll see whether his farm will have such attractions for him
after he has been our guest."

Mrs. Macleod laid her hand on my shoulder and smiled, saying with a
sigh of relief:

"If you will only take the generalship, Marcia, you will find in me a
good aide-de-camp."

Jamie said nothing, but he gave me a look that was with me all that day
and many following.  It spurred me to do my best.




V

How I enjoyed the next three weeks!  Jamie said the household activity
had been "switched off" until the arrival of the letter and telegram
from Mr. Ewart; these, he declared, made the connection and started a
current.  Its energy made itself pleasurably felt in every member of
the household.  Cale was twice in Montreal, on a personally conducted
tour, for the coach horses.  Big Pete was putting on double windows all
over the house, stuffing the cracks with moss, piling cords of winter
wood, hauling grain and, during the long evenings, enjoying himself by
cutting up the Canadian grown tobacco, mixing it with a little
molasses, and storing it for his winter solace.  Angelique was making
the kitchen to shine, and Marie was helping Mrs. Macleod.

For the first week Jamie and I lived, in part, on the road between
Lamoral and Richelieu-en-Bas.  With little Pete for driver, an old
cart-horse and a long low-bodied wagon carried us, sometimes twice a
day, to the village.  We spent hours in the one "goods" shop of the
place.  It was a long, low, dark room stocked to the ceiling on both
walls and on shelves down the middle, with all varieties of cotton,
woolen and silk goods, some of modern manufacture but more of past
decades.  In the dim background, a broad flight of stairs, bisecting on
a landing, led to the gallery where were piled higgledy-piggledy every
Canadian want in the way of furnishings, from old-fashioned bellows and
all wool blankets, to Englishware toilet sets that must have found
storage there for a generation, and no customer till Jamie and I
appeared to claim them.  There, too, I unearthed a bolt of English
chintz.

In a tiny front room of a tiny house on the marketplace, I found an old
dealer in skins.  He and his wife made some up for me into small
foot-rugs for the bedrooms.  Acting on Angelique's suggestion, I
visited old Mere Guillardeau's daughter.  I found her in her cabin at
her rag carpet loom, and bought two rolls which she was just about to
leave with the "goods" merchant to sell on commission.  I wanted them
to make the long passageways more comfortable.

I revelled in each day's work which was as good as play to me.  I
gloried in being able to spend the money for what was needed to make
the house comfortable, without the burden of having to earn it; just as
I rejoiced in the abundant wholesome food that now nourished me,
without impoverishing my pocket.  There were times when I found myself
almost grateful for the discipline and denial of those years in the
city; for, against that background, my present life seemed one of
care-free luxury.  I began to feel young; and it was a pleasure to know
I was needed and helpful.

The shortening November days, the strengthening cold, that closed the
creek and was beginning to bind the river, the gray unlifting skies, I
welcomed as a foil to the cosy evenings in the dining-room where Mrs.
Macleod and I sewed and stitched, and planned for the various rooms,
Jamie smoked and jeered or encouraged, and the four dogs watched every
movement on our part, with an ear cocked for little Pete who was
cracking butternuts in the kitchen.

The life in the manor was so peaceful, so sheltered, so normal.  Every
member of the household was busy with work during the day, and the
night brought with it well-earned rest, and a sense of comfort and
security in the flame-lighted rooms.

Often after going up to my bedroom, which Marie kept acceptably warm
for me, I used to sit before the open grate stove for an hour before
going to bed, just to enjoy the white-walled peace around me, the night
silence without, the restful quiet of the old manor within.  At such
times I found myself dreading the "foreign invasion", as I termed in
jest the coming of the owner of Lamoral and Doctor Rugvie.  To the
first I gave little thought; the second was rarely absent from my
consciousness.  "How will it all end?" I asked myself time and time
again while counting off the days before his arrival.  What should I
find out?  What would the knowledge lead to?

"Who am I?  Who--who?" I said to myself over and over again during
those three weeks of preparation.  And at night, creeping into my
bed--than which there could be none better, for it was in three layers:
spring, feather bed and hair mattress--and drawing up the blankets and
comforter preparatory for the sharp frost of the early morning, I cried
out in revolt:

"I don't care a rap who I may prove to be!  If only this peaceful sense
of security will last, I want to remain Marcia Farrell to the end."

But I knew it could not last.  I hinted as much to Jamie Macleod only
three days before the fifteenth of November.  We were making our last
trip to the village for some extra supplies for Angelique.  We were
alone, and I was driving.

"Jamie," I said suddenly, after the old and trustworthy cart-horse,
newly and sharply shod for the ice, had taken us safely over the frozen
creek, "I wish this might last, don't you?"

He looked at me a little doubtfully.

"You mean the kind of life we 're living now?  Yes,"--he
hesitated,--"for some reasons I do; but there are others, and for those
it is better that the change should come."

"What others?"  I was at times boldly inquisitive of Jamie; I took
liberties with his youth.

"You would n't understand them if I told you.  Wait till the others
come and you 'll see, in part, why."

"Do you know," I continued, my words following my thought, "that you
've never told me a thing about Doctor Rugvie and Mr. Ewart?"

"Not told you anything?  Why, I thought I 'd said enough that first
evening for you to know as much of them as you can without seeing them."

"No, you have n't; you 've been like a clam so far as telling me
anything about their looks, or age, or--or anything--"

"Oh, own up, now; you mean you want to know if they 're married or
single?"  He was beginning to tease.

"Of course I do.  This old manor has had a good many surprises for me
already in these three weeks, you, for one--"

He threw back his head, laughing heartily.

"--And the 'elderly Scotchwoman', and Cale for a third; and if you
would give me a hint as to the matrimonial standing of the two from
over-seas, I should feel fortified against any future petticoat
invasion of their wives, or children, or sweethearts."

Jamie laughed uproariously.

"Oh, Guy Mannering, hear her!  I thought you said you saw Doctor Rugvie
in the hospital."

"So I did; but it was only a glimpse, and a long way off, as he was
passing through another ward."

He turned to me quickly.  "It's Doctor Rugvie you want to know about
then?  Why about him, rather than Ewart?"

"Because,--('Be cautious,' I warned myself),--I happen to have known of
him."

"Well, fire away, and I 'll answer to the best of my knowledge.  I
believe a woman lives, moves and has her being in details," he said a
little scornfully.

"Have you just found that out?" I retorted.  "Well, you have n't cut
all your wisdom teeth yet.  And now, as you seem to think it's Doctor
Rugvie I 'm most interested in, we 'll begin with your Mr. Ewart."  I
changed my tactics, for I feared I had shown too much eagerness for
information about Doctor Rugvie.

"My Mr. Ewart!"  He smiled to himself in a way that exasperated me.

"Yes, your Mr. Ewart.  How old is he?  For all you 've told me he might
be a grandfather."

"Ewart--a grandfather!"  Again he laughed, provokingly as I thought.  I
kept silence.

"Honestly, Marcia, I don't know Ewart's age, and"--he was suddenly
serious--"for all I know, he may be a grandfather."

"For all you know!  What do you mean by that?"

"I mean I never seriously gave Gordon Ewart's age a thought.  When I am
with him he seems, somehow, as young as I--younger in one way, for he
has such splendid health.  But I suppose he really is old enough to be
my father--forty-five or six, possibly; I don't know."

"Is he married?"

Jamie brought his hand down upon his knee with such a whack that the
old cart-horse gave a queer hop-skip-and-jump.  We both laughed at his
antic.

"There you have me, Marcia.  I 'm floored in your first round of
questions.  I don't know exactly--"

"Exactly!  It seems to me that, marriage being an exact science, if a
man is married why he is--and no ifs and buts."

"That's so."  Jamie spoke seriously and nodded wisely.  "I never heard
it put in just those words, 'exact science', but come to think of it,
you 're right."

"Well, is he?"

"Is he what?"

"Married.  Are we to expect later on a Mrs. Ewart at Lamoral?"

"Great Scott, no!" said Jamie emphatically.  "Look here, Marcia, I hate
to tell tales that possibly, and probably, have no foundation--"

"Who wants you to tell tales?" I said indignantly.  "I won't hear you
now whatever you say.  You think a woman has no honor in such things."

"Oh, well, you 'll have to hear it sometime, I suppose, in the
village--"

"I won't--and I won't hear you either," I said, and closed my ears with
my fingers; but in vain, for he fairly shouted at me:

"I say, I don't know whether he 's married or not--"

"And I say I don't care--"

"Well, you heard that anyway," he shouted again diabolically; "here 's
another: they say--"

"Keep still; the whole village can hear you--"

"We 're not within a mile of the village; take your fingers out of your
ears if you don't want me to shout."

"Not till you stop shouting."  He lowered his voice then, and I
unstopped my ears.

"I say, Marcia, I believe it's all a rotten lot of damned gossip--"

"Why, Jamie Macleod!  I never heard you use so strong an expression."

"I don't care; it's my way of letting off steam.  Mother is n't round."

We both laughed and grew good-humored again.

"I never thought a Scotsman, who takes porridge regularly at nine
o'clock every evening, could swear--"

"Oh, did n't you!  Where are _your_ wisdom teeth?  Live and learn,
Marcia."

"Quits, Jamie."  He chuckled.

"Honestly, Marcia, I could n't answer you in any other way.  Ewart has
never opened his lips to me about his intimate personal life; he has no
need to--for, of course, there is a great difference in our ages even
if he is such a companion.  And then, you know, I only saw him that one
week in Crieff when he was with us, and I was a little chap--it was
just after father left us--and he was no end good to me.  And the
second time was this year in June when he stayed a week here and then
took me up to Andre.  He was with us a month in camp; that is where I
came to know him so well.  He 's an Oxford man, and that's what I was
aiming at when--when my health funked.  He seems to understand how hard
it is to me to give it all up.  I don't object to telling you it was
Doctor Rugvie who was going to put me through."

"Oh, Jamie!"  It was all I could say, for I had known during our few
weeks of an intimacy, which circumstances warranted, that some great
disappointment had been his--wholly apart from his being handicapped by
his inheritance.

"About Ewart," he went on; "you know a village is a village, and a dish
of gossip is meat and drink for all alike.  It's only a rumor anyway,
but it crops out at odd times and in the queerest places that he was
married and divorced, and that he has a son living whom he is educating
in Europe.  I don't believe one bally word of it, and I don't want you
to."

"Well, I won't to please you."

"Now, if you want to know about Doctor Rugvie, I can tell you.  He
lives, you might say, in the open.  Ewart strikes me as the kind that
takes to covert more.  Doctor Rugvie is older too."

"He must be fifty if he 's a day."

"He 's fifty-four--and he is a widower, a straight out and out one."

"I know that."

"Oh, you do!  Who told you?"

"Delia Beaseley."

"Is she a widow?" Jamie asked slyly.

"Now, no nonsense, Jamie Macleod."  I spoke severely.

"Nonsense!  I was only putting two and two together logically; you said
the Doctor trusted her--"

"And well he may.  No, she is n't a widow," I said shortly.

"That settles it; you need n't be so touchy about it."

"Has he any children?" I asked, ignoring the admonition.

"No; that's his other great sorrow.  He lost both his son and daughter.
Do you know, I can't help thinking he 's doing all this for them?"

"You mean the farm arrangement?"

"Yes, and us--he 's been such a friend to mother and me.  Oh, he 's
great!"  He was lost suddenly in one of his silences.  I had already
learned never to permit myself the liberty of breaking them.

We drove into the village, and, while Jamie was with the grocer,
"stoking ", as he put it for the coming week, I was wondering what to
make of Delia Beaseley's theory about the "conscience money" and its
connection with the farm.  Was it to aid in carrying out the Doctor's
plans for helpfulness?  From what Jamie Macleod had told me, I came to
the conclusion that neither he nor his mother knew anything of _that_
financial source.  How strange it seemed to know of this tangled skein
of circumstance, the right thread of which I could not grasp!

While thinking of this, I became aware of the noise of a cheap
graphophone carrying a melody with its raucous voice; the sounds came
from a cabaret just below the steamboat landing-place.  I listened
closely to catch the words; the melody, even in this cheap
reproduction, was a beautiful one.

"_O Canada, pays de mon amour_--"

I caught those words distinctly, and was amusing myself with this
expression of patriotism when Jamie came out of the shop.

"What's up?" he asked, noticing my listening attitude.

"Hark!"  He listened intently.

"Oh, that!" he said with a smile of recognition as he stepped into the
wagon; "you should hear Ewart sing it.  I 've heard him in camp and
seen old Andre fairly weep at hearing it.  I see you are discovering
Richelieu-en-Bas; but you should make acquaintance with the apple-boat."

"What's that?"

"It's a month too late now for it; it moors just below the cabaret by
the lowest level of the bank.  It's a fine old sloop, and the hull is
filled with the reddest, roundest, biggest apples that you 've ever
seen.  I come down here once a day regularly while she is here, just to
get the fragrance into my nostrils, to walk the narrow plank to her
deck, and touch--and taste to my satisfaction.  We put in ten barrels
at the manor."

I could see that picture in my mind's eye: the old apple-boat, the
heaped up apples, the hull glowing with their color, the green river
bank, the blue waters of the St. Lawrence, the islands for a
background--and the October air spicy with the fragrance of Pomona's
blessed gift!

We put the old cart-horse through his best paces in order to be at home
before sunset.  We had all the books to arrange in the next two days
for we had left them until the last.  Pete was opening the boxes when
we came away.




VI

After supper we went over the house to see the various furnishings by
firelight.  Pete had built roaring fires in each bedroom to take off
the chill, and was to keep them going till the rooms should be occupied
on the night of the fifteenth; this was necessary against the
increasing cold.

I confess I had worked to some purpose, and Mrs. Macleod and every
member of the household seconded me with might and main.  Now, in a
body, the eight of us trooped from room to room, to enjoy the sight of
the labor of our hands.  Angelique was stolidly content.  Marie was
volubly enthusiastic.  Cale, his hands in his pockets, took in all with
keen appreciative eyes, and expressed his satisfaction in a few words:

"'T ain't every man can get a welcome home like this."

"You 're right, Cale," said Jamie, "and there are n't so many men it's
worth doing all this for."

We stood together, admiring,--and I was happy.  I had spent but
eighty-seven dollars, "_pieces_", and the rooms did look so inviting!
The windows and beds were hung with the English chintz, which was old
fashioned, a mixture of red and white with a touch of gray.  I had sent
to Montreal for fine lamb's wool coverlets for every bed.  The village
furnished plain deal tables for writing.  Jamie stained them dark oak,
and I put on desk pads and writing utensils.  Two easy chairs cushioned
with the chintz were in each room.  The old English-ware toilet sets of
white and gold looked really stately on the old-fashioned stands.  Mrs.
Macleod sewed, with Marie's help, until she had provided every window
with an inner set of white dimity curtains, every washstand, every
bureau and table with a cover.  She made sheets by the dozen which
Angelique and Marie laundered.  Pete had polished the fine old brass
andirons, that furnished each fireplace, till they shone.  My bedroom
foot-rugs were pronounced a success, and graced the rag carpets beside
each bed; they were of coarse gray and white fur.  Marie had found in
the garret some long-unused white china candlesticks of curious design,
like those in my room; a pair stood on each bureau.

We were standing about in the Doctor's room, admiring.  The firelight
played on the white walls, deepened the red in the hangings to crimson,
shone in the ball-topped andirons, and lighted the pleased satisfied
faces about me.  A sudden thought struck a chill to my heart:

"What a contrast between this room and that poor basement in V----
Court where, twenty-six years ago, the man who is going to enjoy this
comfort fought for my mother's life, and succeeded in giving me mine!"

I left the room abruptly.  Jamie called after me:

"Where are you going, Marcia?"

"Down stairs to begin with the books."

"Hold on till I come; you can't handle them alone.  Cale, put the
screens before the fires.  Come on down, mother."

The passageway was stacked high with books along the walls.  Cale had
brought them in, and these were not the half.  I was looking at them
when the others came down.

"You took them out, Cale, how many do you think there are?"

"I cal'lated 'bout three hundred in a box.  We 've opened five, and
there 's two we ain't opened."

Jamie started to gather up an armful, but Cale took them from him.  His
tenderness and care of him were wonderful to see.

"No yer don't!  If there 's to be any fetchin' and carryin', I 'm the
one ter do it."

"And I 'm the one to place and classify.  I want to prove that I did
n't work five years in the New York Library for nothing."  I stayed
with Cale while he was gathering up the books.

"I cal'late you was paid a good price fer handlin' other folks'
brains."  Cale spoke tentatively, and I humored him; I like to give
news of myself piece-meal.

"Of course, I did, Cale; I had nine dollars a week."

"Hm--pretty small wages fer a treadmill like thet!"  He spoke almost
scornfully.

"Oh, that was better than I had in the beginning.  What would you say
to four dollars a week, Cale?"

"With room and keep?"

"Not a bit of it; board and room and clothes had to come out of that."

"Hm--".  He looked at me keenly, but made no reply.  "You tend ter
putting 'em on the shelves, an' I 'll take 'em all in.  'T ain't fit
work fer women, all such liftin'; books has heft, if what's in 'em is
pretty light weight sometimes."

"What would you say about the owner of all these books, Cale?  Let's
guess what he 's like," I said, laughing, as I lingered to hear what he
would say.  But he was non-committal.

"I could n't guess fer I ain't seen the insides.  I 'm glad he 's
coming, though; I want ter get down to some real work 'fore long.  Wal,
we 'll see what he 's like in two days now.  Pete an' I have got to
drive over ter Richelieu-en-Haut--durn me, if I can see why they don't
call it Upper Richelieu!--an' meet the Quebec express."

"They won't get here till long after dark, then."

"No.--Here, jest put a couple more on each arm, will you?"

I accommodated him, and we went into the living-room.  Jamie looked
rather glum.  Sometimes, I know, he feels as if he had no place in all
this preparation.

"Now, Jamie, let me plan--" I began, but he interrupted me:

"Maitresse femme," he muttered; then he smiled on me, but I paid no
heed.

"You sit at the library table; Cale will bring in the books and pile
them round it; you will sort them according to subject, and I will put
them on the shelves."

"Go ahead, I 'm ready."

To help us, we pressed Angelique and Marie into service.  In a little
while we had five hundred books piled about the table.  These were as
many as Mrs. Macleod and I could handle for the evening, so we
dismissed the others.

It was pleasant work, filling the empty shelves; moreover, I was in my
element.  It was good to see books about again; I owed so much to them.

"This is what the room needed," I said, placing the last of the
historical works on a lower shelf.

"Yes; what a difference it makes, doesn't it?  Oh, I say, mother, here
's one of your late favorites!"

"What is it?"

"Memoirs of Doctor Barnardo."

"I must read them again."

"Who was Doctor Barnardo?" I asked; I was curious.

"If you don't know of him and his London work, then you have a treat
before you in this book."  Mrs. Macleod spoke with unusual enthusiasm.

"And he was Ewart's friend too.  I might have known I should find this
among his books.  It always seems to me as if it were 'books and the
man'.  Show me what books are a man's familiars, and I 'll tell you his
characteristics."

"No, really, can you do that?" I asked, surprised at this dictum from
such youthful lips.

"Yes, in a general way I can.  Look at this for instance."  He held out
a volume.  "The man who has this book for an inner possession, and also
on his shelves, is a thinker, broad-minded, scholarly, human to an
intense degree--"

"What is it?" I said, impatient to see.

"Something you don't know, I 'll wager; it is n't a woman's book."

"Now, Jamie Macleod, read your characteristics of men, if you can, by
the books they read and love, but, please, please, keep within your
masculine 'sphere of influence', and don't presume to say what is or
what is n't a woman's book.  I know a good deal more about those than
you do--what is the book anyway?"  I confess his overbearing ways about
women provoke me at times.  But he paid no heed to my little temper.

"It's dear old Murray's 'Rise of the Greek Epic'--it comes next to the
Bible.  It's an English book; you would n't be apt to read it."

"Oh, would n't I?" I exclaimed, and determined another forty-eight
hours should not pass without my having made myself familiar with the
rise of the Greek epic, and the fall of it, for that matter.  I
swallowed my indignation, for the truth was I had not heard of it.

"And here 's another--American, this time, and right up to date.  I 'll
wager you never heard of this either.  Would n't I know just by the
title it would be Ewart's!"

"How would you know?"

"Oh, because any man of his calibre would have it."

And I was no wiser than before.  I was beginning to realize that there
was a whole world of experience of which I knew nothing; that, in my
struggle to exist in the conditions of the city so far away, I had
grown self-centered and, in consequence, narrow, not open to the world
of others.  Jamie Macleod, with his twenty-three years, was opening my
inward eye.  I can't say that what I saw of myself was pleasing.

"What is the book?" I asked, after a moment's silence in which Mrs.
Macleod was busy with the "Memoirs", and Jamie was looking over titles.

"'The Anthracite Coal Industry'."

"Well, give it to me; I 'll classify it with 'Economics and Sociology'.
There will be more of this kind, I 'm sure.  Let's go on with the work
or we shan't be through before midnight.  Look up the 'Lives' and
'Letters', and 'Autobiographies' next.  I want to put them on the upper
shelf--"

"I know;" he nodded approvingly; "so they will be at your elbow when,
of a winter's evening, you want to reach out your hand, without much
trouble, and find a companion.  Well, give me a little time to look
them over."

I watched him for a few minutes, as he took up book after book,
examined the title, sometimes turned the leaves rapidly, and again
opened to some particular page and lost himself for a moment.  Jamie
was showing me another side than that to which I had grown accustomed
in our daily intercourse.  I sat down while I was waiting, for I was
tired.  Mrs. Macleod was reading.

"Are you ready now?" I asked, after waiting a quarter of an hour, and
still no sound from behind the pile of books across the table.

"M-hm, in a minute."

His mother looked up, and we both saw that he was absorbed in
something.  Mrs. Macleod smiled indulgently.

"That's always his way with a book--lost to everything around him.  He
would n't hear a word we said if we were to talk here for an hour."

"I 'll make him hear."  I spoke positively, and again Mrs. Macleod
smiled.

"Jamie--I would like a few books, the 'Lives' and 'Letters'."

For answer he burst into a roar that roused the dogs under the table.
He slapped his hand on his knee, threw his leg over the arm of the easy
chair, and settled into an attitude that indicated, there would be no
more work gotten out of him for the rest of the evening.  Suddenly he
shouted again.

"Here 's a man for you!" he said joyfully.

"Who?" I demanded, but might have spared myself the question.  There
was another interval of silence, followed by an uproarious outburst:

"Oh, I do love Stevenson's 'damns'!  They 're great!  Hear this--"

He read a portion of a letter which included a choicely selected
expletive.

"Jamie!"  It was a decided protest on his mother's part; but I laughed
aloud, for I, too, knew what he meant.  I, too, loved the varied and
picturesque "damns" of those letters that had been so much to me in the
past few years.  As I looked at Jamie, another Scotsman, with the thin
bright eager face, I knew at once that, without realizing it, I had
connected his appearance with that of Robert Louis Stevenson, his
countryman.  And how like the two spirits were!

"I wonder," I said to myself, "I wonder if this same Jamie Macleod also
has the inner impulse to write!"  And, having said that in thought, I
looked at Jamie Macleod through different glasses.

We let him mercifully alone; but I went on with my work, reading
titles, classifying, placing, finding genuine pleasure in speculating
on the "calibre" of the owner.

At nine, Marie entered with the porridge; Cale followed her.

"Here endeth the first chapter," I said to Cale.  "We 'll try to get
all the books on the shelves to-morrow; then we can have one day of
rest before they come."

"You kinder speak as if two extra men in the fam'ly would make some
difference," said Cale, smiling down at me from his place by the mantel.

"It will make a difference I shall not like, Cale.  There 'll be no
more cosy evening-ends with porridge, after the lord of the manor
comes."

"What's that you say?"  Jamie was roused at last.  I thought I could do
it.

"Nothing in particular; only Cale and I were saying how different it
would be when Mr. Ewart comes."

"You bet it will!" said Jamie emphatically.  "You won't know this
house,"--he took up his porridge,--"and Ewart won't know it either
since you 've had your hand on it, Marcia."  This I perceived to be a
sop.

"Thet's so," said Cale, with emphasis.  "I never see what a difference
all thet calico an' fixin's has made; an' my room looks as warm with
them red blankets and foot-rugs!  It beats me how a woman can take an
old house like this, an' make it look as if it had been lived in
always.  I thank _you_," he said, looking hard at me, "fer all the
comfort you 've worked inter my room."

"You have n't thanked me the way I want to be thanked, Cale," I said,
smiling up at him.

"I done the best I could," he replied with such a crestfallen air that
we laughed.

"The only way you can thank me is to call me 'Marcia'.  I 've wanted to
ask you to, ever since our first drive together up from the steamboat
landing."

"Sho!--Have you?"

He looked at me intently for a minute; then he spoke slowly and we all
knew with deep feeling: "You 're name 's all right; but you've made
such a lot of happiness in this house since you come, I 'd like ter
have my own name fer you--"

"What's that?" I said.

"I 'd like ter call you 'Happy', if you don't mind."

I know I turned white, but I controlled myself.  Was it possible he
knew!  It could not be.  I dared not assume that he knew and refuse
him.  I made an effort to answer in my usual voice:

"Of course I don't, Cale--only, I hardly deserve it; all I 've done is
just in 'the day's work', you know."

"Not all," he said, putting down his emptied bowl and turning to the
door; "no wages thet I ever heard of will buy good-will an' the
happiness you 've put inter all this work."

"Oh, Cale, I don't deserve this--"  But he was gone without the usual
good night to any of us.

"You do too," said Jamie shortly, and, reaching for his pipe, went off
into the dining-room.

Mrs. Macleod laid her hand on my shoulder.  "They mean it, Marcia; good
night, my dear."

For the first time she leaned over and kissed me.  I ran up to my room
without any good night on my part.  I needed to be alone after what
Cale had said.  Did he know?  _Could_ he know?  Or was it merely chance
that he chose that name?  Over and over again I asked myself these
questions--and could find no answer.

Late at night I made ready for bed.  I drew the curtains and looked
out.  The window ledge was piled two inches high with snow; against the
panes I saw the soft white swirl and heard the hushed, intermittent
brushing of the drifting storm.




VII

The snow fell lightly but steadily all night and the next day.  Just
after sunset the leaden skies cleared, and the starred firmamental blue
of a Canadian winter night replaced them.  Before six, Cale and Peter
were off on their nine mile drive to Richelieu-en-Haut to meet the
Quebec express.  They drove in a low comfortable double "pung", lined
with fur rugs and piled with robes; a skeleton truck trailed behind for
luggage.  The yoke of bells jangled cheerfully in the dry crisping air,
for the Percherons were lively--the French coach horses were not ready
for the northern snows--and freely tossed their heads as they played a
little before plunging into the light drifts.

After supper I went to my room, making the excuse that I had a bit of
work to finish.  All my thoughts centered on Doctor Rugvie whose coming
was so momentous to me.  While I sewed, I made a dozen plans for
approaching him on the subject of the papers, and rejected each in turn
as not serving my purpose.  Finally, my work being finished, I sat
quiet, with a tensity of quietness that showed itself in my listening
attitude and tightly clasped hands.  It was nearly time for the sound
of the returning bells.  At last,--it was nearly nine,--I heard them
close to the house and, hearing them, I knew intuitively that my life,
hitherto so detached from others, was about to be linked through
strange circumstance--the Doctor's coming--to some unknown personality
in the past.  I knew this; how I knew, I cannot say.

I heard Jamie calling to me from the lower passageway.  I opened my
door but did not cross the threshold.  I stood listening.

Suddenly the dogs went mad with joy.  I heard Jamie's voice in joyous
greeting.  I heard men's voices, Cale's loudest in giving some order to
Peter; then Mrs. Macleod's.  The confusion grew apace when Angelique
and Marie joined their French welcome to the English one.  Listening
so, I felt shut out from it all; felt myself a stranger again in the
environment to which I had so soon wonted myself.  Then I heard Jamie's
voice calling:

"Marcia, Marcia Farrell, where are you?"

He was at the foot of the stairs looking up at me as I came down, and
scarcely waited for me to reach the last step before saying:

"Ewart, this is Miss Farrell; Marcia--my friend, the 'lord of the
manor'."  He spoke with such teasing emphasis that I could have boxed
his ears.

I think the "lord of the manor" intended to shake hands with me; at
least, his hand was promptly extended; but before I could take it, it
dropped at his side, for Jamie was claiming me for the second
introduction:

"Allow me to present to you the result of the advertisement, Doctor!"

"What?"  The pleasant voice held a note of surprised interrogation.  My
hand was taken in a firm professional clasp, and I looked up into the
face of the great surgeon who had troubled himself with me so far as to
give me the chance to exist.  For the life of me, I could not find the
right word of welcome in these circumstances, and the only result of
the instantaneous mental effort to find it was, that those words of
Delia Beaseley's, which I heard as I was regaining consciousness in
V---- Court: "She's the living image", flashed into my consciousness
with the illuminating suddenness of a re-appearing electric signboard.
And, seeing them, rather than hearing them, I looked up into the fine
homely face and smiled my welcome.  It was the only one I had at my
command just then.

Something indefinable, intangible, perhaps best expressed as the
visible diffused wave-current of consciousness' wireless telegraphy,
showed in his face.  Puzzled, concentrated thought was evident from the
sudden contraction of the forehead.  Nor did the look "clear up"; it
remained as he greeted me--and I knew he had not the key to interpret
the message, sent thus to him across an interval of twenty-six years.

"Well, Mrs. Macleod, it's surely a success," he said, releasing my hand.

"Success?  Oh, no end!"  Jamie interrupted him in his joyous
excitement.  "You 'll see!"

"Come, Boy, give your mother a chance," said the Doctor, laughing.

"We have practical witness that Marcia is all that Jamie claims she
is."  Mrs. Macleod spoke enthusiastically for her, and to cover my
embarrassment I suggested that the Doctor should go at once to his room.

"Oh, she 's canny!  She wants you to see the improvements," Jamie
cried, as he rushed upstairs two steps at a time after Mr. Ewart who,
attended by the dogs, was investigating the region of the bedrooms.  I
think he doubted their comfort.  The Doctor followed, and soon I heard
his voice praising everything, with Jamie's lending a running
accompaniment of jesting comment.  It occurred to me then, that I had
not heard the "lord of the manor" utter a word.  Cale and Peter came in
with the trunks, chests, gun-cases, with bags of ice-hockey sticks,
kits, snow-shoes and skis--indeed, all the sporting paraphernalia for a
Canadian winter.

Within ten minutes, my clean passageway, laid with the brand-new rag
carpet, was piled high with these masculine belongings, and the snow
from eight masculine boots was melting and wetting the pretty strip
into dismal sogginess!  I began to understand why the passageways in
the manor were laid with flagging, and I determined I would have the
lower carpet taken up in the morning, that Jamie might not laugh at me.

As Cale set down the last chest, he must have taken note of my despair,
for he spoke encouragingly:

"Makes a lot of difference in a house havin' so many men folks round."

"I should think so, Cale, look at that carpet!"

"Sho!  It don't look more 'n fit for mop-rags, an' they in the house
scurce ten minutes.  Guess 't 'll have ter come up ter-morrer, an' I
'll see that 't is up."

"And it will stay up; but it did look so neat and cosy--and now see
that!"  I included in a glance the entire mass of luggage and sporting
outfit.

"Good deal of truck for one man, but I guess he can handle it all;
seems a likely enough sort of feller.  I had to introduce myself, you
might say, for he an' Pete was talkin' so fast in French that I could
n't get in a word edgewise at furst.  You 'd have thought the old manor
barns was afire, and they was trying to get the hosses out.  I managed
to have my say, though, 'fore we struck the river road."

"I have n't had a good look at him--Jamie did n't give me the chance."

"Wal, I can't say as I have neither.  He 's pretty quiet, but I noticed
he hit the nail on the head every time he did speak.  The one they call
Doctor Rugvie is some different; he was like a schoolboy let loose when
he got into the pung.  Guess Mr. Ewart won't wait long 'fore he 'll
have a sleigh, as is a sleigh, to match the French coach hosses, from
what I heard.  The Doctor had his little joke about a pung for a manor
house.  I 've got to go over again ter-morrer to get the rest of the
truck."

"Oh, Cale, more!"

He nodded, and, with a significant upward motion of his thumb, made his
exit at the kitchen end.  I slipped into the dining-room to see that
all was in readiness for the extra supper.  I actually did not know
what to do with myself, what was my place, or where I belonged in the
household, now that the owner of Lamoral and his friend were here.  I
looked about: the flames from the pine cones were leaping in the
fireplace, the curtains were drawn close, the room was filled with a
resinous forest fragrance, for I had placed large branches of white
pine in some antiquated milk jugs of glazed red clay, which I found in
one of the unused dairy rooms, and set them on each end of the mantel.

When I heard Jamie and the Doctor on the stairs, I left by way of the
kitchen and, passing through that and the bare offices between it and
the living-room, slipped into the latter to inspect it.  Here also the
fire was blazing, the wax candles in the sconces were lighted.  The
yellow sofa was drawn in front of the fireplace, but good eight feet
from it.  At either end were the easy chairs, and at the right of the
chimney, nearest the door into the kitchen offices, was a low ample tea
table covered with a white linen cloth, set with plain white china, a
nickel-plated tea-kettle and lamp.  Behind the sofa, along the length
of its straight long back, stood the library table furnished with
writing pad and inkstand, a wooden bookrack filled with Jamie's
favorites and mine, and a bowl of red geranium blossoms.  I was
satisfied with my work.

Around the room, even between the windows, the more than two thousand
books in their cases formed a rich dado of finely blended colors--the
deep royal blue and dark reds in morocco, the yellow-white imitation of
parchment,--parchment itself in several instances,--the light faun and
reddish brown of half calf; even shagreen was there, and the limp
bronze-gilt leather of Chinese bindings.  Jamie told me that many of
the editions were rare.

It seemed to me in my ignorance, that there could be no more beautiful
room than this simple, book-lined, wood-panelled parlor in the old
manor of Lamoral.  I felt an ownership in it, for I had helped in part
to create the intimate atmosphere that I knew must be like
home,--something I had dreamed of, but never expected to make real.
The owner, whose voice I heard for the first time talking to the dogs
as he came down stairs, presented himself to me at that moment as an
outsider, an intruder.  I waited until I heard him close the
dining-room door; then I went up stairs again to my own room.




VIII

I did not light the candles.  The firelight showed through the mica in
the stove grate.  I sat down by the window and looked out.  A full moon
shone high and clear above the dark irregular outline of the massed
treetops in the woods across the creek, now covered with ice and
blanketed with white.  The great hemlock branches, crowding close to
the house, were drooping, snow-laden.  The moonlight, reflected in
them, flashed diamond dust from the upper branches; beneath the lower
ones it cast violet shadows on the snow.

"What next?" I was thinking, and might have spared myself the trouble
of that thought, for just then Mrs. Macleod knocked at the door and
came in.

"In the dark?  Marcia, my dear, we need you down stairs."

"Of course I 'll come, Mrs. Macleod, if you wish me to, but I don't
quite see how, as your companion and assistant, I am needed now down
stairs.  I shall feel as if I were not earning my salt, just playing
lady."

Now, can any one tell me why the spirit of revolt at the change in my
position in this house, through the coming of the owner and his friend,
should have materialized in just this ungracious speech?  I was ashamed
of myself the moment I had given it utterance.  Such a mean sentiment!
Not worthy of a woman of twenty-six.  I was thankful she could not see
my face.

She hesitated before replying.  When she spoke I heard a note of
displeasure in her voice.

"I need you now, perhaps, more than before.  With these guests in the
house, there is more responsibility than during the last three weeks."

"If only they _were_ guests!"  The perverse spirit was still at work
within me.  "But we are the guests now, and I don't quite see what my
work is to be; my position seems to be an anomalous one."

"It may seem so to you," she replied quietly.  I knew by the tone of
her voice she was exercising great self control, and that had the
candles been lighted I should have seen her cheeks flush a deep pink;
"but evidently it is perfectly clear to Doctor Rugvie.  The position is
his creation.  I think you can trust him.--  Are you coming?"

The rebuke was well deserved, and, in accepting it, my respect for her
was doubled.

"Just let me get my work," I said, fumbling in my basket for some petty
crochet.  She said nothing, and in silence we went down stairs
together, she little realizing that, in referring to Doctor Rugvie as
the one to whom I was indebted for being here, she twisted some fibre
in my mental make-up and caused it to vibrate painfully.  Had I but
known it, I had been keyed to this moment ever since hearing Delia
Beaseley's account of my mother's death--keyed too long and at too high
a pitch.  Something had to give way; hence my mood of apparent revolt,
because I could not live in unchanged circumstances in this manor of
Lamoral.

As we entered the living-room the three pipes were in full blast.

"Permitted?" said the Doctor, waving his towards us as he rose.  Mr.
Ewart, also, rose and came towards us.  In the manner of his action I
saw that, already, he had taken his rightful place as host.  He held
out his hand in greeting, and I took it.

"Sit here, Miss Farrell, by me," he motioned to the corner of the sofa
next his easy chair, "and tell me how you have managed to accomplish a
home--in three weeks.  Mrs. Macleod and Jamie have been giving you all
the credit for this transformation.  How did you do it?"

He put me at ease at once, for what he said sounded both cordial and
sincere.  The tone of voice challenged me instantly to be as sincere
with him.

"Perhaps it's because I never have had the chance to make what you call
a 'home' before, and besides," I looked up from my sofa corner and
dared to say the truth, "it was such a pleasure to spend some money
that I did n't have to earn by hard work; this was play for me.  But,
truly, Mrs. Macleod and Jamie are not fair to themselves; they not only
helped, but inspired me."

"Oh, woman, woman!" said the Doctor, laughing; "shopping is the
characteristic symptom of the sex!"

"Talk about inspiration," said Jamie; "Marcia put mother and me through
our best paces.  I can tell you we conjugated: I must hustle, Thou must
hustle, He must hustle, We must hustle, You must hustle, They must
hustle, for three weeks," he said emphatically.

"You seem to have thriven on it," said the Doctor.

"Your work was in the New York Library, Miss Farrell?"  It was Mr.
Ewart who spoke.

"Yes, in a branch; I was there for five years."

"Who told you that, Gordon?" Jamie demanded.

"Who?--Who but Cale?"

Mrs. Macleod laughed outright at that, and Jamie and I joined her; we
could not help it.  The mere inflection of Mr. Ewart's voice, told us
he had succumbed on the way over to our omniscient One.  I saw that,
quiet as he was, he had a keen sense of humor.

"Yes," he continued, "Cale made my acquaintance on the platform, and
half way on the road he took occasion to give me some information
concerning my household."

"Oh, I know that too," I said, "for Cale confided to me immediately on
his arrival that, to use his own expression, he could n't get in a
'word edgewise', on account of the rapidity with which you and Peter
were carrying on a conversation in French.  I think he is jealous of
every tongue but his own."

"We had better compare notes, Miss Farrell.  I concluded that Cale was
a firm friend of yours from his remarks."

"What did he say?  Do tell me."

"I will--if you 'll agree to tell me his comments on my talk with
Pierre.  I believe Pierre's words fell over themselves, he had so much
to tell me."

"Hear--hear!"  This from Jamie.

"I agree; tell me, please."

"I think it was just before we entered the river road--"

"I know it was, for he told me so," I said, enjoying the fun.

"Oh, he did!  Well, perhaps you will be so good as to tell me, if he
told you what he told me you told him?"

"You would n't ask that if you knew Cale," said Jamie, shaking his head
dubiously.

"No, he did n't," I said.  "Cale is a genuine Yankee.  What did he say?"

"You hear that, Ewart?  What did I tell you?"

"Oh, you've been telling, too, have you, Jamie Macleod?  He gave me to
understand that it was he who brought you from the steamboat to the
house; that you were born in New York; that you had been in the Public
Library of that city; that in consequence what you did n't know about
books was, in his estimation, not worth knowing; that you were just as
handy with hammer and tacks as you were with books, and that you had
been 'fixin' up' the old manor till it shone.  I gathered further, that
he expected me to be properly appreciative of the benefits conferred
upon me in this matter.  As, up to that time, I had heard nothing of
your arrival in Richelieu-en-Bas, and as my friend here, Doctor Rugvie,
was likewise in the dark in regard to your personality, you may imagine
our curiosity; in fact, he wanted to rouse it, and took the best way to
do it."

"He can do that," said Mrs. Macleod, smiling at this description of
Cale's powers; "but he rarely satisfies us in regard to himself.  Of
course, Jamie and I respect his reticence, but I should like to know if
he has been married.  He is such a character!  I should like to know
more of his life."

"I must take a good look at him to-morrow," said the Doctor, filling
his pipe.

"I should n't know him if I met him on the road," said Mr. Ewart; "for
his cap was drawn over his forehead, and his beard and side whiskers
were a mask.  Won't he come in with us for a few minutes, Jamie?--  By
the way, you say that he is always with you at porridge, a custom I
hope you will not depart from, now I am here, Mrs. Macleod."

"I shall want some too," said the Doctor, whimsically; "it will be like
those never-to-be-forgotten days in Crieff fifteen years ago."

Mrs. Macleod said nothing; but she turned to him with such an indulgent
smile, that I knew she would give the great man anything in reason or
unreason for what he had been, and was, to her son and to herself.

Jamie jumped up impulsively.

"Tell me what he said, Marcia, about Gordon's talk with Pierre, and
then I 'll go and have him in--without the porridge, though, for it's
too late to-night."

"He said that if the old manor barns had been 'afire', and Mr. Ewart
and Pierre had been trying to get the horses out, they could n't have
talked faster."

"That's one on you, Ewart," said Jamie, gleefully.  Mr. Ewart laughed.
"I hope to make a friend of Cale; I like him."

Jamie left the room, and the talk drifted to other things.

"Have you seen Mere Guillardeau lately?" Mr. Ewart asked of Mrs.
Macleod.

"Not since the last of October; but Marcia has seen her recently."

He looked at me inquiringly.

"I bought the rag carpet strips of her daughter."

"Is the old woman well?"

"Yes, she is wonderful for her age."

"Ninety-nine next year," said Mr. Ewart.  "What a century she has
lived!"

"Andre pere must be ninety, then," said Doctor Rugvie.  "How well I
remember him!  He is Mere Guillardeau's brother, as perhaps you know,"
he said turning to me.  "Jamie must have told you of Andre."

"Yes, of Andre father and Andre son; you know them both?"

It was the first time I had spoken directly with the Doctor, although
he was the one in the room upon whom all my thoughts centered.

"For many years; I saw him first in Tadoussac, just after the Columbian
Exposition in Chicago.  Afterwards, for six consecutive summers I was
in camp with him and his son on the Upper Saguenay.  There 's none like
him.  By the way, Miss Farrell, has Jamie ever told you how the old
guide Andre went to the World's Fair at Chicago?"

"No."

"We 'll get him to tell you--and us; I can never hear it too many
times.  It's unique, and it takes Jamie to tell it well.  Andre told me
years ago, and last summer he told Jamie and Mr. Ewart.  Jamie wrote me
about it."

"I shall never forget that night," said Mr. Ewart.

He laid his pipe on the mantel and stood back to the fireplace, his
hands clasped behind him.  He was not so tall as Jamie or Doctor
Rugvie; not so thin as the former, nor stout like the latter.  He had
kept his body in good training for, as he stood there, despite the few
gray hairs on the temples, he looked like a man of thirty, rather than
one who might be father to Jamie.

Jamie came in at this moment, looking thoroughly cross as well as
crestfallen.

"He won't come," he announced bluntly, taking his seat and leaning
forward to the fire, his long arms resting on his knees, his hands
clasped and hanging between them.  He glared at the andirons.

"What's the matter, Jamie?" I asked; I knew something had gone wrong.

"He says he does n't belong here, and all that rot.  Confound it all!
When you come up against Cale's crotchets you might as well go hang
yourself for all you can move him."

I looked at Mr. Ewart.  I saw the gray eyes flash suddenly.

"We must change all that, Jamie.  Just give him leeway till I 've
looked about a bit and struck root into my--home."  I noticed the
slight hesitation before the word "home".  "By the way, it's early yet."

"Early!"  Jamie was rousing himself from his private sulk.  "You might
like to know that generally we have porridge at nine and are in bed by
half-past."

"We 'll change all that too, Mrs. Macleod--with the Doctor's
permission, of course," he said, sitting down beside her.  "We 're not
going to lose the pleasure of these long winter evenings.  After
porridge, we 'll have grand bouts of chess, Jamie, and a little
music--I see that Miss Farrell has not included a piano in her
furnishings--"

"Not for eighty-seven dollars," I said, hoping he would appreciate the
financial fact; but he only looked a little mystified, and went on:

"--And hours with the books, and some snowshoeing on fine moonlight
nights; you 'll see that the winter is none too long in Canada--_O pays
de mon amour_!" he said smiling.  Clasping his hands behind his head,
he looked steadily at the leaping flames.

The tone in which he said all this would have heartened a confirmed
pessimist; upon Jamie Macleod it acted like new wine.  His face grew
radiant, and the look he gave his friend held something of worship in
it.

Doctor Rugvie groaned audibly as he laid aside his pipe.

"What is it, _mon vieux_?" said Mr. Ewart.

"You make me envious," he said, rising and putting on another log; "but
if I can be with you only one week, I 'm going to make the most of it.
No turning in before eleven-thirty while I 'm here."

"I 'll make it one with you any time you say, John."  Underneath the
banter we heard the undercurrent of deep affection.  "You 'll be up
here two or three times during the winter, and next summer you 've
promised to camp with Jamie and the Andres, father and son, and me, for
two months on the Upper Saguenay.  Speaking of Andre, pere, Jamie, have
you redeemed the promise you gave me last summer?"

Jamie twisted his long length in his chair before answering.  "Yes, in
a way."

"What does 'in a way' mean?  What promise?" asked the Doctor eagerly.
Mr. Ewart answered for him.

"It was about Andre--old Andre's story of his voyage to the Columbian
Exposition in 'ninety-three.  Have you written it up?"

"In a way I have, yes."

"Well, Jamie Macleod," I exclaimed, half impatiently, "for lack of
originality, commend me to you to-night!"

I was afraid I should not hear the story.  I exulted in the thought
that my intuition concerning a second R. L. Stevenson in Jamie Macleod,
was to prove correct.  Jamie looked over at me and smiled provokingly.

"Come on, Boy, out with it!" said the Doctor encouragingly.  "I 'm
willing to be bored with your literary style for the sake of hearing
dear old Andre's story rehashed by a young aspirant for honors."

"Have you seen anything of this?"  Mr. Ewart turned to Mrs. Macleod.

"I 've neither seen nor heard anything of this kind," she replied with
an amazed look at her son.  Jamie smiled again, this time quizzically.

"What's this you 've been keeping from your mother, Boy?"

"Oh, Jamie, do read it to us!" I begged.

Jamie laughed aloud then, much to the two men's delight, as I could
see, and said--tease that he is:

"I 've been waiting for Marcia to ask me; she is n't apt to ask favors
of any one; but I say,--" he looked half shamefacedly at his
friends,--"it's rough on me to read anything of mine before such
critics as you and Gordon, Doctor Rugvie."

"Do you good," growled the Doctor; "get you used to publicity.  If we
have a genius in the family, it's best he should sprout his pin
feathers in our presence before he becomes a full-fledged Pegasus.  We
could n't hold you down then, you know."

"You 've had a lot of faith in me, Doctor--you and Ewart; after all,
Oxford mightn't have done what that has for me.  I 'll read it--but I
shall feel like a fool, I know."

"It won't hurt you to feel that way once in a while at twenty-three;
it's educative," said the Doctor dryly.

In the general laughter that followed, Jamie left the room.  He was
gone but a minute.  When he came in, I saw he was nervous.  He cleared
his throat once or twice, after taking his seat at the left of the
fireplace, and glanced anxiously at the candles; but they were fresh at
nine, and good for two hours longer.  Doctor Rugvie looked at his watch.

"Half-past ten; I 'll keep time, Jamie."

"What do you call it, Jamie?" Mr. Ewart asked, to ease the evident
embarrassment in which the young Scotsman found himself.

"'Andre's Odyssey'."

"Good!  I like that," said the Doctor; "that's just what it was.
Nothing like a good title to work up to."

"Of course, I embellished a little here and there, but I stuck to the
facts and in many places to Andre's words; and I tried to make the
whole in Andre's spirit."

"Intentions all right, Boy--let us judge of the result," said the
Doctor.  He settled comfortably in his chair, leaned his head on the
back and gazed steadily at the wooden ceiling; but I think he managed
to keep an eye on Jamie.

And, oh, that bright eager face, the firelight enhancing its
brightness!  The hand that trembled despite his effort at control, the
slight flush on the high cheek bones from which the summer's tan had
not yet house-worn!  The expressive unsteady voice that gradually
steadied itself as, in the interest of reading, self-consciousness was
forgotten!

I bent low over my crochet; I did not want to look again at him, for I
was glad, so glad for him, for his mother, for his two friends, who had
had such faith in him, for myself that I could count him as a friend.
This was, indeed, the beginning of fulfilment.




IX

For five and twenty years no man had seen in Tadoussac old Andre's face
nor heard his voice upon the river's lower course.  Both long and late
within their icy caves the winters dwelt.  The spring-tides, messaging
the wild emancipated water's glee, rushed down to meet the short-lived
summer joy, and autumn after autumn fled with torch of flaming leaf,
reversed, death-heralding, far up the Saguenay's dark winding
gorge--yet Andre came no more in all that time.

And now, behold them both, in Tadoussac! old Andre and his dog, Pierre,
le brave, or was it Pierre's son?--lean-ribbed, thin-haunched and
tragic-eyed, with fell of wolf, Pierre!  How well they all remembered
him, le brave!  The frosts were in his bones, oh, long ere this; so
Pierre's offspring, then?--as large as life!  And Andre, too, old guide
and voyageur!

Of notches six times ten had Andre cut within the shaft of one great
pine that sings above that wonderful caprice of pool, and quiet river
reach, and torrent wild, men long have called the Upper Saguenay.  That
very day when his boy's heart beat wild to suffocation, as upon the
bank he landed his first salmon--nom de Dieu, no sunset glow e'er
equalled in his eyes that palpitant and silver-scaled mass of vibrant
rose!--the sap from that first notch had oozed; and now they said in
Tadoussac that Andre never knew his age!

Oh, fools!  What matter of a few years more or less?  He counted all
his years by his heart's youth, as here he was in Tadoussac to prove.

"And whither away?"--"To see Mere Guillardeau?"--"To visit once again
in Richelieu-en-Bas?"--"Or else Trois Rivieres where long ago the
maskinonge leaped for him?"  "To see the Seigniory of Lamoral where
lived his grandpere's seignior, lived and died?"--"A pilgrimage?
Sainte Anne de Beaupre, then?"--"Or Indian Lorette just by Quebec?"
The questions multiplied.  "Come, tell us all."  And Andre told them
all.

"'Tis true," he said, "that there upon the Upper Saguenay strange tales
are rife.  From o'er the distant sea the English came to camp within
the wilds, and I was guide.  I listened to their tales whene'er the
camp-fire crackled and the snow, the feather-snow that melted from the
pines, fell hissing on the glowing arch of logs."

How Andre loved that sound!  How dear to him was that one time in all
the year's full round, when freeze the nights, the sap grows chill and
numb; when warms the rising sun at early dawn and that sweet ichor
runs!  It kept him young; within him stirred his youthful forest hopes
and joys with that first mounting life.  And loud he laughed, nor gave
the secret of his youth, his woodsman's lasting joys.

He told them how with mien impassive he had listened well, reflected
long on what the English said, till May clouds, mirrored in the
darkling pools, foreshadowed substance for those haunting dreams of
glories human eyes had never seen; for far away upon the Lake there
stood a city marvellous, the English said,--and they to Andre never yet
had lied,--and who beheld it saw with naked eye the glories of the New
Jerusalem.

And Andre, marking how the little runs were earlier loosened from their
icy chains, how soft beneath the black and sodden leaves the water
trickled free with here and there a bubble rising, proving spring had
come--old Andre, listening so, the echo caught of that far song of
storm-tossed Michigan as its wild waters, mingling with the rest,
pursued their steady seaward course and swept with undertones enticing
past the gorge of Saguenay and sang in Andre's ear:

  "Viens, viens, tu trouveras
  La bas, la bas,
  Le royaume cher et merveilleux
  Du bon Dieu."


What wonder that his simple woodsman's heart was moved to quick
response!  That ere one moon had waxed and waned his dugout was
prepared for its long journey inland, west by south, along the waterway
of two great Lands!  He showed it now in Tadoussac with pride: this
fruit of two Canadian winters' toil.  Its ample hull was shiny black
with age.  Its prow sharp-nosed and long to cleave, pike-like, the
rapids' wave, capricious, treacherous.  Its stern was truncated like
tail of duck, the waters never closed but on it pressed, and sped it on
the river's lower course.

For twenty years he watched the sturdy growth of one great tree that
towered above its mates; and when the noble bole, both straight and
strong, was grown to such proportions that he deemed it fit to brave
the rapids, such its curve, he laid the monarch low, and hewed, and
shaped, and burned, and thickly overlaid with pitch, and launched it on
the Lower Saguenay--a fine, well-balanced craft, his floating camp; and
this was thirty years or more agone.

His destination now made known, upon the river bank a crowd eyed him
agape.  With pride he showed to wondering Tadoussac how he had made
provision for his voyage.

Along one side was lashed a sapling pine with seamless sail,
three-cornered and close furled; 'twas fashioned from the stout flap of
a tent.  Along the other stretched two pockets strong of moose skin,
hair side out to shed the rain.  The topmost one he filled with ample
store of salmon smoked on his own spit of ash, and good supply of that
brown wrinkled leaf whose qualmy fragrance, issuing from the bowl of
his loved pipe, had ever proved in camp and wild the solace of his
lonely life.

Within the other pocket he had placed his comrade-breadwinner, his
trusted gun.  Its shining barrel glistened cunningly from out the soft
black depths, and knowingly, for many a winged voyager of the air would
it bring low to beat the lucent wave to crimson froth before the voyage
were done.  Both oars and paddles of well-seasoned ash he laid within
the dugout's ample hulk.

Then he was ready to set out, and seek that shining wonder-city by the
Lake--a "New Jerusalem", the English said, and they to Andre never yet
had lied.  His old-time friends were gathered at the pier to bid him on
his quest "God Speed".  They cast the painter loose.

"Adieu--adieu," a hand clasp here and there, and then again: "Adieu!"

Pierre, with forepaws stemmed against the prow, bayed musical farewell.
Old Andre turned and murmuring, "Adieu," broke forth exultantly in
joyous song:

  "Je chercherai
  La bas, la bas
  La ville de Dieu, la merveilleuse;
  Si je la trouve, quand je serai
  De mon retour,
  Elle chante toujours, mon ame joyeuse,--
  Les gloires de Dieu, les gloires de Dieu."


So aged Andre, guide and voyageur, his parchment face alight with
inward joy, fared forth to seek that City in the West.


For you who love the sunlight on the wave, who hail with joy the
sunrise ever new; for you to whom the starlight brings a thought of
that high peace that guides the wanderer; for you who watch the coming
of the day with eyes that see the miracle of life; for you who share in
all the fair delights of sunlight, moonlight, starlight, twilight,
dawn, and feel their charm in every mood and tense of nature's
perfecting--for you alone I sing this voyage over inland seas.


By sunlight, moonlight, starlight, Andre fared along the river called
"the Queen's Highway"; and soon there frowned upon him, dark, superb,
the crested towering headland of Tourmente that signals to the Plains
of Abraham.  And ever westwards, west by south, he fared until he saw
the shipping of Quebec like some huge cobweb out

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