Maria Chapdelaine Part 13

Yes, the gleam was gone. Henceforth must she forget that once it had shone upon her path, and grope through the dark with faltering steps.

Chapdelaine and t.i.t'Be were smoking in silence by the stove; the mother knitted stockings; Chien, stretched out with his head between his paws, blinked sleepily in enjoyment of the good warmth.

Telesph.o.r.e had dozed off with the catechism open on his knees, and the little Alma Rose, not yet in bed, was hovering in doubt between the wish to draw attention to her brother's indolence, and a sense of shame at thus betraying him.

Maria looked down again, took her work in hand, and her simple mind pursued a little further its puzzling train of thought. When a girl does not feel, or feels no longer, that deep mysterious impulse toward a man singled out from all the rest of the world, what is left to guide her? For what things should she seek in her marriage?

For a satisfying life, surely; to make a happy home for herself ...

Her parents would like her to marry Eutrope Gagnon--that she felt--because she would live near them, and again because this life upon the land was the only one they knew, and they naturally thought it better than any other. Eutrope was a fine fellow, hard-working and of kindly disposition, and he loved her; but Lorenzo Surprenant also loved her; he, likewise, was steady and a good worker; he was a Canadian at heart, not less than those amongst whom she lived; he went to church ... And he offered as his splendid gift a world dazzling to the eye, all the wonders of the city. He would rescue her from this oppression of frozen earth and gloomy forest.

She could not as yet resolve to say to herself: "I will marry Lorenzo Surprenant," but her heart had made its choice. The cruel north-west wind that heaped the snow above Francois Paradis at the foot of some desolate cypress bore also to her on its wings the frown and the harshness of the country wherein she dwelt, and filled her with hate of the northern winter, the cold, the whitened ground and the loneliness, of that boundless forest unheedful of the destinies of men where every melancholy tree is fit to stand in a home of the dead. Love--all-compelling love--for a brief s.p.a.ce had dwelt within her heart ... Mighty flame, scorching and bright, quenched now, and never to revive. It left her spirit empty and yearning; she was fain to seek forgetfulness and cure in that life afar, among the myriad paler lights of the city.

CHAPTER XIV

INTO THE DEEP SILENCE

There came an evening in April when Madame Chapdelaine would not take her place at the supper table with the others.

"There are pains through my body and I have no appet.i.te," she said, "I must have strained myself to-day lifting a bag of flour when I was making bread. Now something catches me in the back, and I am not hungry."

No one answered her. Those living sheltered lives take quick alarm when the mechanism of one of their number goes wrong, but people who wrestle with the earth for a living feel little surprise if their labours are too much for them now and then, and the body gives way in some fibre.

While father and children supped, Madame Chapdelaine sat very still in her chair beside the stove. She drew her breath hard, and her broad face was working.

"I am going to bed," she said presently. "A good night's sleep, and to-morrow morning I shall be all right again; have no doubt of that.

You will see to the baking, Maria."

And indeed in the morning she was up at her usual hour, but when she had made the batter for the pancakes pain overcame her, and she had to lie down again. She stood for a minute beside the bed, with both hands pressed against her back, and made certain that the daily tasks would be attended to.

"You will give the men their food, Maria, and your father will lend you a hand at milking the cows if you wish it. I am not good for anything this morning."

"It will be all right, mother; it will be all right. Take it quietly; we shall have no trouble."

For two days she kept her bed, with a watchful eye over everything, directing all the household affairs.

"Don't be in the least anxious," her husband urged again and again.

"There is hardly anything to be done in the house beyond the cooking, and Maria is quite fit to look after that--everything else too, by thunder! She is not a little child any longer, and is as capable as yourself. Lie there quietly, without stirring; and be easy in your mind, instead of tossing about all the time under the blankets and making yourself worse...."

On the third day she gave up thinking about the cares of the house and began to bemoan herself.

"Oh my G.o.d!" she wailed. "I have pains all over my body, and my bead is burning. I think that I am going to die."

Her husband tried to cheer her with his Clumsy pleasantries. "You are going to die when the good G.o.d wills it, and according to my way of thinking that will not be for a while yet. What would He be doing with you? Heaven is all cluttered with old women, and down here we have only the one, and she is able to make herself a bit useful, every now and then ..." But he was beginning to feel anxious, and took counsel with his daughter.

"I could put the horse in and go as far as La Pipe," he suggested.

"It may be that they have some medicine for this sickness at the store; or I might talk things over with the cure, and he would tell me what to do."

Before they had made up their minds night had fallen, and t.i.t'Be, who had been at Eutrope Gagnon's helping him to saw his firewood, came back bringing Eutrope along with him.

"Eutrope has a remedy," said he. They all gathered round Eutrope, who took a little tin box from his pocket and opened it deliberately.

"This is what I have," he announced rather dubiously. "They are little pills. When my brother was bad with his kidneys three years ago he saw an advertis.e.m.e.nt in a paper about these pills, and it said they were the proper thing, so he sent the money for a box, and he declares it is a good medicine. Of course his trouble did not leave him at once, but he says that this did him good. It comes from the States ..."

Without word said they looked at the little gray pills rolling about on the bottom of the box ... A remedy compounded by some man in a distant land famed for his wisdom ... And they felt the awe of the savage for his broth of herbs simmered on a night of the full moon beneath the medicineman's incantations.

Maria asked doubtfully: "Is it certain that her trouble has only to do with the kidneys?"

"I thought it was just that, from what t.i.t'Be told me."

A motion of Chapdelaine's hand eked out his words.--"She strained herself lifting a bag of flour, as she says; and now she has pains everywhere. How can we tell ..."

"The newspaper that spoke of this medicine," Eutrope Gagnon went on, "put it that whenever a person falls sick and is in pain it is always the kidneys; and for trouble in the kidneys these pills here are first-rate. That is what the paper said, and my brother as well."

"Even if they are not for this very sickness," said t.i.t'Be deferentially, "they are a remedy all the same."

"She suffers, that is one thing certain; we cannot let her go on like this."

They drew near the bed where the sick woman was moaning and breathing heavily, attempting from time to time to make slight movements which were followed by sharper outcries.

"Eutrope has brought you a cure, Laura."

"I have no faith in your cures," she groaned out. But yet she was ready to look at the little gray pills ever running round in the tin box as if they were alive.

"My brother took some of these three years ago when he had the kidney trouble so badly that he was hardly able to work at all, and he says that they cured him. It is a fine remedy, Madame Chapdelaine, there is not a question of it!" His former doubts had vanished in speech and he felt wholly confident. "This is going to cure you, Madame Chapdelaine, as surely as the good G.o.d is above us.

It is a medicine of the very first cla.s.s; my brother had it sent expressly from the States. You may be sure that you would never find a medicine like this in the store at La Pipe."

"It cannot make her worse?" Maria asked, some doubt lingering. "It is not a poison, or anything of that sort?"

With one voice, in an indignant tone, the three men protested: "Do harm? Tiny pills no bigger than that!"

"My brother took nearly a box of them, and according to his account it was only good they did him."

When Eutrope departed he left the box of pills; the sick woman had not yet agreed to try them, but her objections grew weaker with their urging. In the middle of the night she took a couple, and two more in the morning, and as the hours pa.s.sed they all waited in confidence of the virtue of the medicine to declare itself. But toward midday they had to bow to the facts: she was no easier and did not cease her moaning. By evening the box was empty, and at the falling of the night her groans were filling the household with anguished distress, all the keener as they had no medicine now in which to place their trust.

Maria was up several times in the night, aroused by her mother's more piercing cries; she always found her lying motionless on her side, and this position seemed to increase the suffering and the stiffness, so that her groans were pitiful to hear.

"What ails you, mother? Are you not feeling any better?"

"Ah G.o.d, how I suffer! How I do suffer! I cannot stir myself, not the least bit, and even so the pain is as bad as ever. Give me some cold water, Maria; I have the most terrible thirst."

Several times Maria gave her mother water, but at last she became afraid. "Maybe it is not good for you to drink so much. Try to bear the thirst for a little."

"But I cannot bear it, I tell you-the thirst and the pain all through my body, and my head that b.u.ms like fire ... My G.o.d! It is certain that I am to die."

A little before daylight they both fen asleep; but soon Maria was awakened by her father who laid his hand upon her shoulder and whispered:--"I am going to harness the horse to go to Mistook for the doctor, and on the way through La Pipe I shall also speak to the cure. It is heart-breaking to hear her moan Eke this."

Her eyes open in the ghostly dawn, Maria gave ear to the sounds of his departure: the banging of the stable door against the wall; the horse's hoofs thudding on the wood of the alley; m.u.f.fled commands to Charles Eugene: "Hold up, there! Back ... Back up! Whoa!" Then the tinkle of the sleigh-bells. In the silence that followed, the sick woman groaned two or three times in her sleep; Maria watched the wan light stealing into the house and thought of her father's journey, trying to reckon up the distances he must travel.