Part 14

Hypolite was a little boy at the time, quiet and brown, with eyes like bronze-purple pansies. It was not his fault that his surname was Gibbs. Even at that age, he preferred to have it ignored. Madame called him “M’sieur Hypolite,” or “le petit sieur.” But then, Madame had served and loved his mother when that mother was Geneviève de Lempriere, before she married Anthony Gibbs, and before Hypolite was born, or Madame herself took boarders. To Hypolite, two white shafts in a cemetery outside Montreal represented that ill-sorted father and mother. But before he had been a week in the village, his French began to return to him.

“It is yours by right,” said Madame, who would hear nothing of the Gibbses. “What wouldst thou for thy dinner, mon ange?”

Madame fed him royally and made a baby of him, and told him stories of the long-ago days, and spoke to him of his mother. In a little while, the Gibbs part seemed to have dropped out of his life. He loved Madame, and Telephore who chopped the wood and André who worked in the garden. But most of all he loved Félice.

Félice was Madame’s help in the kitchen, a girl who belonged to nobody, for whom nobody cared. Perhaps the incipient artist in Hypolite first rejoiced in her; she made an impression on him never effaced. His canvas in last year’s Salon, that canvas full of brown and gold, was a far-off memory of her.

“She was Dian,” I have heard Hypolite say “Dian; not the stately goddess, queen of Nature, but the ever-young Artemis, slender as her own white crescent.”

Hypolite ran about the straggling village and made friends with the children; and climbed the little hill beyond the Calvary, and looked at the great river running to the sea, wishing he might follow it.

“There are many nice things here,” he said, invading the kitchen for cakes, “and nice people. André is nice and Telephore is nice, and so is m’sieur le curé. But Maxime is nicest. I went to-day to see him. He lives in a little cabin all covered with vines, and he has two fields covered with mustard and flowers. He is tall and he has blue eyes. I picked some of his flowers and he came out and talked to me, and told me his name and I told him mine. Then his dog came out, his black big dog he calls Sorrow,—La Tristesse. Why does he call it La Tristesse? It is a nice dog and licked my hands.”

Madame looked up from her cake and crossed herself, with wide eyes. “Hast thou made friends with Sorrow, mon petit?” she asked, gazing at him strangely. “I am grieved. Maxime and La Tristesse are not for thee.”

“It is a very nice dog,” said Hypolite, in the gruff tone that was his sole heritage from the Gibbses. Félice was beating eggs at the table. Her long gray eyes turned lazily towards the child, and then were bent upon her bowl again. Her wrists fascinated Hypolite as she whipped the froth, they were so small and strong and firm, sunburned to a creamy brown. He watched them while he ate the cake, and wondered what her cold eyes had tried to tell him.

“Why am I not to make friends with Maxime’s La Tristesse?” he demanded of old Telephore.

Telephore stared at him as Madame had done, and made the little sign against evil. “La Tristesse?” he said. “La Tristesse? If you make friends with Sorrow, Sorrow will abide with you.”

“But she has not abided with me,” put in Hypolite patiently, “she abides with Maxime.”

Telephore crossed his scarred, knotted hands upon the haft of the axe and leaned his chin upon them. “Not always,” he said in a low voice, “ah! not always. Henri l’Ecossais, he was a strong man last Michaelmas. He stopped to speak with Maxime at his door, and patted on the head that La Tristesse, brute of ill name and ill omen. And she, that La Tristesse, she follows him home, beating with her tail and begging him to look at her, as some dogs will. And he laughs, and gives her bones, and she sleeps a night in his stable. In the morning she goes home, drifting like a black ghost down the road. And Henri, little monsieur, what of Henri? In three days, look you, he is seized with a chill and a weariness, and in a week he is dead,—mon Dieu!—dead! And that is not all. If I had my will, Maxime and La Tristesse should be—eh! sent from here.”

Telephore’s face was as superstitious and cruel as the faces of some of Millett’s peasants, and he muttered to himself as the bright blade of his axe fell upon the wood, and the sweet white chips flew in showers like a tiny snowstorm.

“But that is all foolishness,” said the round-eyed Hypolite, in the lordly tone Saint Jacques de Kilkenny had taught him. “La Tristesse is a nice dog, though she is long and black and cries with her eyes. Once I had a little guinea-pig, un cochon d’Inde, black as Sorrow; but it died of an indigestion.”

“Foolishness, is it?” muttered Telephore. “Then, little monsieur, there are many fools in Saint Jacques. As for the cochon d’Inde, that was different. Gabrielle has a little sucking-pig, and no one is troubled by it, though it visited every house in Saint Jacques. But this Sorrow of Maxime’s—foolishness, is it? Eh, well! Pray the good saints you may not be taught its wisdom.”

Telephore was cross and would not talk any more. André professed to have no opinion at all about La Tristesse. So, as was his way, Hypolite decided to go to headquarters for information.

He crossed one of Maxime’s thriftless fields, and went up the path to the cabin. Once the path led through a garden of flowers, but now garden and fields were all one, overrun with blossoms grown small and hardy and wild, which could not be found elsewhere in Saint Jacques. La Tristesse was lying by the door, in the sun, licking a long red scratch on her side. She put her lank paws on Hypolite’s shoulders and thrust her melancholy nose against his cheek.

“Are you come for more flowers?” asked Maxime, rising from among the wild raspberry canes. “There are pretty flowers in the field beyond the patch of barley. I shall grow oats there next year, they are prettier than the barley, but the flowers are best. My grandfather brought the seeds of some of them from the other side of the world, and a few braved our snows and frosts. Pick all you want, little monsieur.” He laughed at Hypolite, showing his white teeth, and yawned and stretched himself. He was tall and strong, with a fine tanned face and eyes of Breton blue softened by many dreams, and he was shabby to the point of rags.

“Thank you,” said Hypolite politely. “But I did not come for flowers to-day. I came to ask why you call your dog Sorrow? Pardon, m’sieur, if I am too curious.”

Maxime bowed, ready laughter in his eyes. “I am honoured with monsieur’s interest,” said he. “I call her Sorrow because she has the look of it, as any one of these—ganders of Saint Jacques would understand. I found her roaming in the woods, starved, all over of a tremble. I took her home and fed her. That is all there is about her. She would harm no one. Yet, because of her colour and her melancholy she is a witch and a loupgarou and I know not what besides.” He laughed angrily and touched Sorrow’s side gently. “Look you here!” he cried, “this was done last night. It is the mark of a bullet,—of a silver bullet, perhaps, they are such fools.” Hypolite touched the scratch too, with fingers light and tender, and Maxime’s face softened again.

“We have no friends, La Tristesse and I,” he said sadly. “I suppose it is because we do not work or go to church. But those stuffy saints—And why should I work? I have no one to work for, but myself.”

“I’m not very fond of work,” confessed Hypolite. “My uncle says I must go into an engineer’s office when I leave college, but I do not want to. I would rather paint pictures full of pretty colours.”

“And I,” said Maxime, “I also love pretty colours. When I want them, I look at the fields and the skies and the hills, and I am content.” They smiled at each other in perfect understanding.

“And I am a friend to you and La Tristesse if you will have me,” said Hypolite.

“Monsieur honours us,” said Maxime simply, “but Loneliness and Sorrow are an ill pair of friends.”

Hypolite dined with Maxime and La Tristesse, under the vines, with leaves for plates; dined off bread and baked potatoes and little trout from the brook and wild raspberries. “It is poor fare,” said Maxime shyly, “but the air and the sun make it sweet.”

“It is lovely,” answered Hypolite ecstatically. “I should like to have baked potatoes in a little oven and catch little fish for my dinner always. Oh, always.”

“The bread is soft and white,” went on Maxime, “feast-day bread, such as you are used to eating.”

“It is the same as Madame Dulac’s,” said Hypolite with his mouth full.

“It is the same as Madame’s,” repeated Maxime, laughing.

Madame scolded Hypolite for the first time, when she heard where he had been. “It is an ill place,” she cried, “and those who dwell in it have an evil name. That black thing, called a dog, ran and barked at one of Gabrielle’s cows yesterday, and already the cow has sickened. Go not near that La Tristesse, I beg of you, child, nor near her master.”

“La Tristesse is a very nice dog,” repeated Hypolite in the voice of the Gibbses, presenting so stony a front to her shrill vexation that Madame broke into tears and flounced away. When she had gone, Félice slipped over to the child, and, without any change in her small, cold, beautiful face, kissed him. He gasped; feeling as if he had been kissed by a flower, so cool and soft were her lips.

Gabrielle’s cow died, and the whispers against La Tristesse changed to silence, which was a bad sign. Hypolite did not know that there were very few people in Saint Jacques who would have gone to Maxime’s door after dark.

And then the rumours began again, but this time they came from the woods. In the village there was silence and listening. But from the woods there issued a new dread,—a dread of night and loneliness and the sickness that strikes therein. Telephore first put it into words.

“It is said,” he told André in a whisper, “that far to the north there is a deserted village. When that village was full of people, there came to their doors a black dog, long and gaunt and wretched. They took pity on that dog-thing and fed it for three days, and then it went away. But it had left a gift for those people. La Picotte struck them, coming silently as is her wont. They died like flies those people that fed the black dog, and the few that were left ran away.”

André stared, his face growing gray with vague horror. He was slower than Telephore.

“If I were you,” said Telephore with a sort of frightened sneer, “I would change the name of Maxime’s La Tristesse. Maybe she is only biding her time.”

Two or three days afterward, Hypolite went to see Maxime. It was early evening and he moved through a golden world. “I have never forgotten anything of that evening,” he said long afterward. The sky was golden, the air was golden, and everywhere about the fields was the golden glow of mustard. But in front of Maxime’s cabin there was a black little crowd of people, and in the road stood Maxime, facing them fiercely, his hand upon Sorrow’s head. There were boys there, throwing stones, and one or two of the shouting men had old shotguns.

I ran to them, and I think I was screaming with anger. But Telephore was in the crowd, and he caught me in his arms gently, and made me keep still; though I kicked, and bit his hands, and my teeth were as sharp as a squirrel’s. When they saw me, the men who had the guns, lowered them as if ashamed, and the boys stopped throwing stones.

Josef, Gabrielle’s husband, was speaking. “We will not harm you,” he said, “but if you would stay among us, you must shoot that black brute you call your dog, there under your hand.”

“I will not shoot her for any of you cowards of Saint Jacques,” cried Maxime at that. The crowd growled threateningly.

“Then go!” cried Josef, “you and your dog-thing!”

“I shall never forget how Maxime looked, his head thrown back and his eyes like points of blue fire, facing the men who were casting him out of his home. I thought he was going to fight them all. He looked down at Sorrow, cowering beside him and trusting him, and I think he yielded for her sake. He laughed very bitterly.

“I will go,” he said, and they shrank from his eyes. “Sorrow has been my companion and my friend, she has shared my food and my fire, and with Sorrow will I go. She is more faithful to me than any other.”

And then a girl pushed suddenly through the crowd, and stood in front of Maxime. It was Madame’s Félice, and she was laughing aloud. I had never heard her laugh before. “If you go, I will go with you,” she said.

Maxime’s face was suddenly strange and wild at the sight of her. “You—you—you?” he cried. “You—you, O heart of my life, star of my dreams?”

I think he forgot all about the angry crowd on an instant.

“Yes, I,” laughed Félice. “I have seen your heart in your eyes, Maxime, and now you may see my heart in mine. What is the need of words? If you go, I go with you.”

“There is a kind priest at Terminaison,” said Maxime, hot and fierce, his blue eyes on her gray ones that were no longer cold.

Félice laughed still. It seemed as if she could not stop laughing for very happiness, but her beautiful creamy cheeks showed no blush, “As you like,” she answered; “we will go to the curé if it pleases you. But if you go, I go also. I am faithful as La Tristesse.”

“Come then,” said Maxime. And that was all. They forgot the people who were watching them, awed and silent before this strange divine thing shown forth in their midst. Maxime never even looked back at his little cabin, and Félice never looked from his face. They moved away down the road together, hand in hand into the great golden sunset, and Sorrow following them, leaping and frisking. That was absolutely all, and it was over in five minutes. But think of the wonder of it,—a flower of Greece in her golden days, a vision of Italy, a dream of ancient France, there suddenly showing forth for all men to see.

They went unmolested down the lonely road. Once Félice shook her slim arms above her head as if in a very ecstacy of joy. Once Sorrow jumped up to lick her hand.

Yes, they went, and were hidden in the golden mist of sunset, and were gone. Nor did I ever hear of them or see them again,—Maxime, with his blue eyes, his gentle hands, his long lazy body, his rags and tatters; Sorrow, black and faithful as her namesake; Félice, beautiful as the ever-youthful Artemis. Nor can it be said that I saw them go. For I was down on my face, crying so that my tears made little gray runnels in the dust of the road,—crying for the loss of the most beautiful thing I had ever known.

WHITE MAGIC

Lobelia is the new residential suburb on the outskirts of a new town, which is itself on the outskirts of most things. The Big Woods come right down to the streets of Lobelia; bears have been seen on Frontenac Boulevard. Yes, Lobelia is pretty new. But not so new that you’d expect to smell kinnikinnick there.

Yet, one June evening, a savour of that tobacco plant passed along Frontenac Boulevard and down Centre Street and up Magnetwan Avenue. Here and there, an old-timer, relegated to carpet slippers and a back bedroom, sniffed it, and dreamed of prairie and poplar-bluff and the Blackfoot brave outside the H.B.C. Store. Leigh Harvey, busy lifting dandelions from his beautiful lawn, with a dental-looking instrument, dropped it and knelt motionless in the growing dew. He set his big hands on his hip, because they trembled suddenly. To himself, he whispered, “It _couldn’t_ be him—come at last—after all these years.”

He drew a deep breath. The smell was yet in the air. He raised his keen eyes slowly from the dandelions and looked across the hedge that screened his new iron fence.

At the base of the gaudy fence a man was sitting, smoking a little, blackened corncob pipe. He was a mere kernel of a little brown, old man, within the husks of many formless garments. On the grass edge beside him was a pedlar’s basket.

Leigh Harvey, leading citizen of Lobelia, rose silently to his feet. He was shaking. His strong mouth twitched. His eyes were guarded, watchful, but triumphant.

He leaned across his new iron gate with the gold knobs on it, and said, “Hallo, there!”

His voice was rough with emotion held in check—for four years. The old pedlar looked up sideways, cautiously. He twitched the shiny cloth cover off the big basket.

“Boot-laces,” he began, mechanically, “pipes, ver’ cheap pipes, plugs, machine-oil, stickin’-plaster, spools, ver’ nice handkerchiefs.”

He shook a faded rag out of the basket. Harvey leaned over the gate, his new gold watch-chain tinkling against the iron—a stalwart figure in shirt-sleeves. “You come far?” he said, as carelessly as he could.

“Ver’ long way, boss.”

The old man pointed north with his pipe-stem. He dangled the faded handkerchief.

“You travel about much this way?”

“All over, boss.” The old man’s hands began to refold the red handkerchief.

“Stop!” said Harvey, suddenly. “I want to buy that.”

“Ver’ nice handkerchief.”

A silver coin changed hands. The old man shook the ashes from his pipe into his palm, and scattered them to the winds. He began to strap his basket.

“You haven’t,” said Harvey, slowly—“you haven’t got any more—houses and gardens in there?”

The quick glance of the black eyes was wary.

“This,” went on Harvey, indicating the house behind him, the finest in Lobelia—“this here came out of a basket like that.”

The old face creased slowly into a hundred doubtful wrinkles. With a gesture that said, “That may be a good joke, but it’s beyond me,” the pedlar went on covering his basket. Harvey was beset by a fear that the old man would yet slip out of his hold.

“Stop a bit!” he said, desperately. “I want to ask you, did you ever know a feller called Gammett?”

“I forget, boss. I know fellers all over.”

The old man was sending Harvey the swift, impenetrable glances of a wild thing frightened. He was strapping his basket quickly. Harvey, gripping the gate in excitement, spoke commandingly.

“Wait! I’ve got something to tell you. Wait!”

The old pedlar hesitated, then silently acquiesced. He squatted once more at the foot of the fence, relighted his pipe, and prepared to listen. Once more, with the faint blue spiral of kinnikinnick smoke, the lost years came down on Harvey like a wave.

“There was a man,” began Harvey, abruptly, “a man who was down and out, five years ago.”

The pedlar glanced up at him.

“Most fellers bin that,” he suggested.

“Most fellers been that,” agreed Harvey, slowly. “But not many have the bad luck this one did. And one can’t rightly say it was his fault. He’d fought it. My faith, how he’d fought his luck for years! But it just seemed that everything he touched went wrong. Year by year he went down, and down, and a little bit farther down. He tried farmin’, but he hadn’t enough capital to tide over the bad seasons. He tried prospectin’, and his health gave out. At last,” he said, quietly, “this feller got so far down that he was workin’ for a Chinaman—for a Chink that kep’ a little store way up in the hills.”

“When that job failed,” Harvey went on, after a silence, “Gammett got him.”

He glanced at the old pedlar’s back, every fold of the rags covering it instinct with listening.

“If you _don’t_ know Gammett,” he went on again, “I’ll have to tell you. Gammett had a store, too—a big store. He made a fortune by helping people. Yes, he was very helpful, was Gammett. If a man was in bad luck, or ill, or’d been on the bust and spent all his money, Gammett was right there, ready for help. He’d supply goods, would Gammett—at his own prices. Many a feller that Gammett helped in the bad years has spent all he made in the good years payin’ off Gammett. Yes, every down-and-outer in the hills got on Gammett’s books sooner or later.

“This feller, this down-and-outer I was telling about, he was on Gammett’s books, and Gammett ground him hard. Gammett got him. And I hope”—Harvey’s big fist gripped and quivered on the gilded iron—“I hope Death and Judgment’s got Gammett!”

After a moment the heat went out of him. He glanced keenly at the pedlar’s back.

“_If_ you’d been at Gammett’s store,” he said, “one autumn day five years ago; _if_ you’d been sitting on a log in front of the store waitin’ to see Gammett on the quiet to sell him some poached mink pelts, then you’d have seen this feller I’m telling about. He was sitting on the log, too. Sitting there with his head in his fists, staring at two little parcels on the ground between his boots. There was a pound of tea in one. There was some rolled-oats in the other. He’d just given Gammett his silver watch for ’em, the last thing he had left, the very last. He hadn’t even hope or courage left. He was down and out.”

The pedlar on the other side of the fence took his pipe out of his mouth with a soft “cloop.” He turned his old head and stared at Harvey steadily, with impenetrable eyes. Harvey met the long look as steadily. By-and-by the old man turned away and resumed his listening.

In a low voice, Harvey said:

“There _was_ another man sitting on that log. He was an old man even then. He looked kind of poor, but not so’s he was worryin’ any about it. He had a brown face, like yours; a long coat, like yours; and a big basket, like your basket.

“After a bit, them two on the log got talking. And the down-and-outer, he told that old man just what I’ve been telling you.

“He told him more. Why, I dunno. It just happens sometimes that when a feller’s beat out, he’ll talk. This feller talked. He said, ‘It ain’t for myself I mind so much; it’s for _her_.’

“‘You married?’ ses the old man. And the down-and-outer, he says, ‘Yes; eight years ago. We haven’t been apart since. But the life’s too rough for her.’”

Harvey glanced back at the house. He went on, after a moment:

“The down-and-outer, he said: ‘You see, she’s not just like other folks. Not just the same. We had two kids, and we lost them. It was too rough for them, too. I wasn’t able to do all I should,’ he said, ‘and they died. Since then she’s not just right. She thinks that if we had a garden they’d come back, the kiddies would. A white garden she wants, a garden full of white flowers, and a white cat. Then, she thinks, they’d come back to play. And the grief of it is,’ says the feller, ‘that she’d need so little to make her happy, and that I can’t get it for her.’ Then he cursed Gammett, and got up and struck off down the trail, home.”

Harvey’s strong voice failed, sank to a whisper. He stood, leaning on the gate, motionless. The old man on the grass outside was as motionless as he. At last, he said, softly, “D’you see anything queer about my garden, friend?”

The pedlar’s answer came slowly.

“All the flowers in it are w’ite flowers.”

“That’s right. All the flowers are white. But wait.

“This feller, he went off down the trail, home. It was late, and it looked like a bad night. He’d gone maybe a half-mile, when someone overhauled him; he saw it was the old pedlar he’d been talkin’ to. The old man, he stops the down-and-outer and puts a little packet in his hand.

“What’s this?’ said the feller. And the pedlar said, ‘To make a garden for the children,’ he said, just like that, and turned away and was gone before the feller could say ‘Thank you.’

“He’s been waitin’,” said Harvey, gently, “to say ‘Thank you,’ ever since.”

Evening was closing to a perfect night. White flowers fell from the locust-trees along the grass, and moths as white and silent haunted the garden of white flowers. A woman came from the house and stood on the white steps as if she were watching something in the garden shadows, and a white cat rubbed against her dress. Harvey’s voice, when it came, was hushed; yet it seemed to break a silence as perfect as a pearl: