Part 3

"Now you must know that the _feu follet_ is of all objects whatever in the world the most mysterious. No one knows what it is or when it will come. You might walk across the barrens every night of your life and never encounter it; and again it might come upon you all unawares, not more than ten yards from your own threshold. It is more like a ball of fire than any other mortal thing, now large, now small, and always moving. Usually it is seen first hovering over one of the marshes, feeding on the poison vapors that rise from them at night: it floats there, all low, and like a little luminous cloud, so faint as scarcely to be seen by the eye. And sometimes people can travel straight by it, giving no attention, as if they did not know it was there, but keeping the regard altogether ahead of them on the road, and the _feu follet_ will let them pass without harm.

"But that does not happen often, for there are not many who can keep their wits clear enough to manage it. It brings a sort of dizziness, and one's legs grow weak. And then the _feu follet_ draws itself together into a ball of fire and begins to pursue. It glides over the hills and flies across the marshes, sometimes in circles, sometimes bounding from rock to rock, but all the while stealing a little closer and a little closer, no matter how fast you run away. And finally--bff! like that--it's upon you--and that's the end. Death for a certainty. Not all the medicine in the four parishes can help you.

"Indeed, there are only two things in all the world that can save you from the _feu follet_ once it gets after you. One is, if you are in a state of grace, all your sins confessed; which does not happen often to the inhabitants of Pig Cove, for even at this day Père Galland reproaches them for their neglect. And the other is, if you have a needle with you. So little a thing as a needle is enough, incredible as it may seem; for if you stick the needle upright--like that--in an old stump, the _feu follet_ gets all tangled up in the eye of it. Try as it will, it cannot free itself; and meanwhile you run away, and are safe before it reappears. That is why all the inhabitants of the Cape used to carry a needle stuck somewhere in their garments, to use on such an occasion.

"Well, I must tell you about La Belle Mélanie. That is the name she was known by in all parts, for she was beautiful as a lily flower, and no lily was ever more pure and sweet than she. Mélanie lived with her mother, who was aged almost to helplessness, and she cared for her with all the tenderness imaginable. You may believe that she was much sought after by the young fellows of the Cape--yes, and of Port l'Évêque as well, which used to hold its head in the air in those days; but her mother would hear nothing of her marrying.

"'You are only seventeen,' she said, 'ma Mélanie. I will hear nothing of your marrying, no, not for five years at the least. By that time we shall see.'

"And Mélanie tried to be obedient to all her mother's commands, difficult as they often were for a young girl, who naturally desires a little to amuse herself sometimes. For even had her mother forbidden her to speak alone to the young men of the neighborhood, so fearful was she lest her daughter should think of marriage.

"Eh bien, and so that was how things went for quite a while, and every day Mélanie grew more beautiful. And one Saturday afternoon in November she had been in to Port l'Évêque to make her confession, for she was a pious girl. And when she went to meet her companions in order to return to Pig Cove with them, they said they were not going back that night, for there was to be a dance at the courthouse, and they were going to spend the night with some parents by marriage of theirs. Poor Mélanie! she would have been glad to stay, but alas, her poor mother, aged and helpless, was expecting her, and she dared not disappoint the poor soul.

"So finally one of the young men said he would put her across the harbor, if she did not mind traversing the woods alone; and she said, no, why should she mind? It was still plain daylight. And so he put her across. And she said good-night to him and set off along the solitary road to the Cape, little imagining what an adventure was ahead of her.

"For scarcely had she gone so much as a mile when it had grown almost night, so suddenly at that time of the year does the daylight extinguish itself. The sky had grown dark, dark, and there was a look of storm in it. La Belle Mélanie began to grow uneasy of mind. And she thought then of the _feu follet_, and put her hand to her bodice to assure herself of her needle. What then! Alas! it was gone, by some accident, whether or not she had lost it on the road or in the church.

"With that Mélanie began to feel a terror creep over her; and this was not lessened, as you may well believe, when, a few minutes later, she perceived a floating thing like a luminous cloud in a marsh some long distance from the road. The night was now all black; scarcely could she perceive the road ahead, always winding there among the hills.

"She had the idea of running; but alas, her legs were like lead; she could not make them march in front of her. She saw herself already dead. The _feu follet_ was beginning to move, first very slowly and all uncertain, but then drawing itself together into a ball of fire, and leaping as if in play from one hummock of moss to another, just as a cat will leave a poor little mouse half dead on the floor while it amuses itself in another way.

"What the end would have been, who would have the courage to say, if just at this moment, all ready to fall to the ground for terror, poor Mélanie had not bethought herself of her rosary. It was in her pocket. She grasped it. She crossed herself. She saluted the crucifix. And then she commenced to say her prayers; and with that, wonderful to say, her strength came back to her, and she began to run. She had never ran like that before--swift as a horse, not feeling her legs under her, and praying with high voice all the time.

"But for all that, the death fire followed, always faster and faster, now creeping, now flying, now leaping from rock to rock, and always drawing nearer, and nearer, with a strange sound of a hissing not of this world. Mélanie began to feel her forces departing. She was almost exhausted. She would not be able to run much more.

"And suddenly, just ahead, on a bare height, there was the tall Calvaire, and a new hope came to her. If she could only reach it! She summoned all her strength and struggled up. She climbs the ascent. Alas, once more it seems she will fail! There is a fence, as you know, built of white pales, about the cross. She had not the power to climb it. She sinks to the ground. And it was at that last minute, all flat on the ground in fear of death, that an idea came to her, as I will tell you.

"She raises herself to her feet by clinging to the white palings; she faces the _feu follet_, already not more than ten yards away; she holds out the rosary, making the holy sign in the air.

"'I did not make a full confession!' she cries. 'I omitted one thing. My mother had forbidden me to have anything to do with a young man; and one day when I was looking for Fanchette, our cow, who had wandered in the woods, I met André Babinot, and he kissed me.'

"That was what saved her. The _feu follet_ rushed at her with a roar of defeat, and in the same instant it burst apart into a thousand flames and disappeared.

"As for Mélanie, she fell to the ground again, and lay there for a while, quite unconscious. At last the rain came on, and she revived, and set out for home, but not very vigorously. Ah, mon Dieu! if her poor mother was glad to see her alive again! She embraced her most tenderly, and with encouraging voice inquired what had happened, for Mélanie was still as white as milk, and there was a strange smell of fire in her garments, and still she held in her hands the little rosary; and so finally Mélanie told her everything, not even concealing the last confession about André, and with that her mother burst into tears, and said:

"'Mélanie,' she said, 'I have been wrong, me. A young girl will be a young girl despite all the contrary intentions of her mother. To show how grateful to God I am that you are returned to me safe and sound, you shall marry André as soon as you like.'

"So they were married the next year. And there is a lesson to this story, too, which is that one should always tell the truth; because if La Belle Mélanie had told all the truth at the beginning she would not have had all that fright.

"And to show that the story is true, there were found the marks of flames on the white fence of the Calvaire the next day; and as often as they painted it over with whitewash, still the darkness of the scorched wood would show through, as I often saw for myself; but now there is a new fence there...."

LA ROSE WITNESSETH

_Of How Old Siméon's Son Came Home Again_

In the old cemetery above the church some men were at work setting up a rather ornate monument at the head of two long-neglected and overgrown graves. La Rose had noticed what was going on, as she came out from early mass, and had informed herself about it; and since then, she said, all through the day, her thoughts had been traveling back to things that happened many years ago.

"Is it not strange," she observed musingly, sitting about dusk with Michel on the doorsill of the kitchen, while Céleste finished the putting-away of the supper dishes--"is it not strange how things go in this world? So often they turn out sorrowfully, and you cannot understand why that should be so. Think of that poor Léonie Gilet, who was taken so suddenly in the chest last winter and died all in a month, and she one of the purest and sweetest lilies that ever existed, and the next year she was to be married to a good man that loved her better than both his two eyes. Ah, mon Dieu, sometimes I think the sadness comes much more often than the joy down here."

She looked out broodingly, and with eyes that did not see anything, across the captain's garden and the hayfield below, dipping gently to the margin of the harbor. Michel was silent. La Rose's fits of melancholy interested him even when he only dimly sensed the burden of them.

"And then," she resumed, after a moment, "sometimes the ending to things is happy. For a while all looks dark, dark, and there is grief, perhaps, and some tears; and then, just at the worst moment--tiens!--there is a change, and the happiness comes again, very likely even greater than it was at first. It is as if this good God up there, he could not bear any longer to see it so heartbreaking, and so he must take things into his own hands and set them right. And so, sometimes, when I find myself feeling sad about things, I like to remember what arrived to that poor Siméon Leblanc, whose son is just having them place a fine tombstone for him up there in the cimetière; for if ever happiness came to any man, it came to him, and that after a long time of griefs. Did you ever hear about this old Siméon Leblanc?"

"Never, tante La Rose," answered the boy, gravely. "But if it has a pleasant ending, I wish you would tell me about it, and I don't mind if it makes me cry a little in the middle."

By this, Céleste, the stout domestic, had finished her kitchen work, and throwing an apron over her stocky head and shoulders, she clumped out into the yard.

"I am running over to Alec Samson's," she explained, "to get a mackerel for breakfast, if he caught any to-day."

The gate clicked after her, and there was a silence. At last La Rose began, a little absently and as if, for the moment at least, unaware of her auditor....

"This Siméon Leblanc, he lived over there on the other side of the harbor, just beyond the place where the road turns off to go to the Cape. My poor stepmother when coming in to Port l'Évêque to sell some eggs or berries--three gallons, say, of blueberries, or perhaps some of those large strawberries from Pig Cove--she would often be running in there for a little rest and a talk with his wife, Célie--who always was glad to see any one, for that matter, the poor soul, for this Siméon was not too gentle, and often he made her unhappy with his harsh talk.

"'Ah, mon amie,' she would say to my stepmother, at the same time wetting her eyes with tears--'Ah, I have such a fear, me, that he will do himself a harm, one day, with the temper he has. He frightens me to death sometimes--especially about that Tommy.'

"Now you must understand that this Tommy was the son they had, and in some ways he resembled to his father, and in some ways to his mother. For it is certain he had a pride of the most incredible, which I daresay made him a little hard to manage; and yet in his heart there was a softness.

"'That Tommy,' said his mother, 'he wants to be loved. That is the way to get him to do anything. There is no use in always punishing him and treating him hardly.'

"But for all that, old Siméon must have his will, and so he does not cease to be scolding the boy. He commands him now to do this thing, now that--here, there. He forbids him to be from home at night. He tells him he is a disgrace of a son to be so little laborious. Oh, it was a horror the way that poor lamb of a Tommy was treated; and finally, one day, when he was seventeen or eighteen, there was a great quarrel, and that Siméon called him by some cruel name, and white as a corpse cries out Tommy:

"'My father, that is not true. You shall not say it!'--and the other, furious as an animal: 'I shall say what I choose!' And he says the same thing again. And Tommy: 'After that, I will not endure to stay here another day. I am tired of being treated so. You will not have another chance.'

"And with that he places a kiss on the forehead of his poor mother, who was letting drop some tears, and walks out of the house without so much as turning his head again; and he marches over to Petit Ingrat, where there was an American fisherman which had put in for some bait, and he says to the captain: 'Will you give me a place?' and the captain says, 'We are just needing another man. Yes, we will give you a place.' So this Tommy, he got aboard, and a little later they put out and went off to the Banks for the fish.

"Well, it was not very long before that Siméon got over his bad wicked rage; and then he was sorry enough for what he had done, especially because there was no longer any son in the house, and that poor Célie must always be grieving herself after him. And you may believe that Siméon got little pity from the neighbors.

"'It is good enough for him,' they would say--'a man like that, who is not decent to his own son.'

"But they were sorry for Célie, most of all when she began to grow thinner and thinner and had a strange look in her eyes that was not entirely of this world. The old man said, 'She will be all right again when that schooner comes back,' and he was always going over to Petit Ingrat to find out if it had returned yet; but you see, of course there would not be any need of bait when the season was finished, and so the schooner did not put in at all; and the autumn came, and went by, and then followed the winter, and still no news, but only waiting and waiting, and a little before Easter that poor Célie went away among the angels. I think her heart was quite broken in two, and it did not seem to her that she needed to stay any longer in this hustling world. And so they buried her in the old cimetière--I saw her grave to-day, next to Siméon's, and this fine new monument is to be for the two of them; but for all these years there has been just a wooden cross there, like the other graves.

"But still no word came of Tommy, and the old Siméon was all alone in the house. Oh, I can remember him well, well, although I was only a young tiny girl then and had not had any sorrow myself. We would see him walking along the Petit Ingrat road, all bent over and trailing one leg a little.

"'Hst!' one of my companions would whisper, 'that is old Siméon, who drove his son from home; and his poor wife is dead with grief. He is going across there to see if a schooner will have come in yet with any news.'

"And that was true. He took this habitude of making a promenade almost every day to Petit Ingrat during that season of the year when the Americans are going down to the fish--là-bas--and if there was a schooner in the harbor, he finds the captain or one of the crew, and he says, 'Is it, m'sieu, for example, that you have seen a boy anywhere named Tommy Leblanc? It is my son--you understand?--a very pretty young boy, with black hair and fine white teeth and a little curly mustache--so--just beginning to sprout.' And he would go on to describe that Tommy, but of course, for one thing they could not understand his French very well, for the Americans, as you know, do not speak that language among themselves; and anyway, you may depend that none of them had ever heard of Tommy Leblanc; and sometimes they would have a little mockery of the old man; and sometimes, on the contrary, they would feel pity, and would say, well, God's name, it was a damage, but they could not tell him anything.

"And then the old man would say, 'Well, if ever you should see him anywhere, will you please tell him that his father is wanting him to come home, if he will be so kind as to do it; because it is very lonesome without him, and the mother is dead.'

"Then after he had said that, he would go back again along the road to the Cape, not speaking to anybody unless they spoke to him first, and trailing one leg after him a little, like one of these horses you see sometimes with a weight tied to a hind foot so that it cannot run away--or at least not very far. That is how I remember old Siméon from the time when I was a little girl--walking there along the road to or from Petit Ingrat. I used to hear people say: 'Ah, my God, how old he is grown all in these few years! He is not the same man--so quiet and so timid'--and others: 'But can one say how it is possible for him to live there all alone like that?'--and someone replied: 'You could not persuade him to live anywhere else, for that is where he has all his memories, both the good and the bad, and what else is left for him now--that, and the crazy idea he has that his Tommy will one day come home again?'

"You see, as the years passed, everybody took the belief that Tommy must be dead, at sea or somewhere, seeing that not one word was heard of him; but of course they guarded themselves well from saying anything like that to poor old Siméon.

"Well, it was about the time when your poor father, Amédée, was a boy of your age, or a little older, that all this sorrow came to an end; and this is the pleasant part of the story. I was living at Madame Paon's then, down near the post-office wharf, and we had the habitude of looking out of the window every day when the packet-boat came in (which was three times a week) to see if anybody would be landing at Port l'Évêque. Well, and one afternoon whom should we see but a fine m'sieu with black beard, carrying a cane, dressed like an American; and next, a lovely lady in clothes of the most fashionable and magnificent; and then, six beautiful young children, all just as handsome as dolls, and holding tightly one another by the hand, with an affection the most charming in the world. Ah, ma foi, if I shall ever forget that sight!

"And Madame Paon to me: 'Rose,--La Rose,--in God's name, who can they be! Perhaps some millionaires from Boston--for look, the trunks that they have!'

"And that was the truth, for the trunks and bags were piled all over the wharf; and opening the window a little, we hear m'sieu giving directions to have them taken to the Couronne d'Or--'and who,' he asks in French, 'is the proprietor there now?'--and they say: 'Gaston Lebal'--and he says: 'What! Gaston Lebal! Is it possible!'

"'He knows Port l'Évêque, it seems,' says Madame Paon, all excitement; and just then the first two trunks go by the windows, and she tells me, 'It is an English name, or an American.' And then, spelling out the letters, for she reads with a marvel of ease, she says, 'W-H-I-T-E is what the trunks say on them; but I can make nothing out of that. I am going outside, me,' she says, 'and perhaps I shall learn something.'

"She descends into the garden, and seems to be working a little at the flowers, and a minute later, here comes the fine m'sieu, and he looks at her for an instant--right in the face, so, and as if asking a question--and then: 'Ah, mon Dieu, it is Suzon Boudrot!' he cries, using the name she was born with. 'Can you not remember me?--That Tommy Leblanc who ran away twenty years ago?'

"Madame Paon gives a scream of joy, and they embrace; and then he presents this Mees W'ite, qui est une belle Américaine, and then he says: 'What is there of news about my dear mother and my father?'--and she: 'Did you not know your poor mother was dead the year after you went!'--and he: 'Ma mère--she is dead?'--and the tears jump out of his eyes, and his voice trembles as if it had a crack in it. 'Well, she is with the blessed angels, then,' says he.

"'But your poor old father,' goes on Madame Paon, 'he is still waiting for you every day. He has waited all these twenty years for you to come back.'

"'He is still in the old place?' asks he.

"'Yes, he would not leave it.'

"'We shall go over there at once,' he says, opening out his two arms--so!--'before ever we set foot in another house. It is my duty as a son.'

"So while André Gilet--the father of that dear Léonie who was taken in the chest--while he is getting the boat ready to cross the harbor, Tommy tells her how he has been up there in Boston all these years--at a place called Shee-cahgo, a big city--and has been making money; and how he changed his name to W'ite, which means the same as Leblanc and is more in the mode; and how he married this lovely Américaine, whose name was Finnegan, and had all these sweet little children; but always, he said, he had desired to make a little visit at home, only it was so far to come; and he was afraid that his father would still be angry at him.

"'Ah,' says Madame Paon, with emotion, 'you will not know your father. He is so different: just as mild as a sheep. Everyone has come to love him.' ...

"Now for the rest of the story, all I know is what that André told us, for he put all this family across to the other side in his boat. So when they reached the shore, M'sieu Tommy, he says: 'You will all wait here until I open the door and beckon: and then you, Maggie, will come up; and then, a little later, we will have the children in, all together.'

"And with that he leaves them, and goes up to the old house, and knocks, and opens the door, and walks in--and who can say the joy and the comfort of the meeting that happened then? And quite a long while passed, André said; and that lovely lady sat there on the side of the boat, all as white as milk, and never saying a word; and those six lambs, whispering softly among themselves--and one of them said, just a little above its breath:

"'It will be nice to have a grandpa all for ourselves, don't you think?'--and was not that a dear sweet little thing for it to say?...

"And finally the door opens again, and see! and his hand makes a sign; and that lady, swift as one of these sea-gulls, leaps ashore. And up the hill; and through the gate; and into the house! And the door shuts again.

"And another wait, while those six look at each other, and say their little things. And at last they are called too, and away they go, all together, just like one of these flocks of curlew that fly over the Cape, making those soft little sounds; and then into the house; and André said he had to wipe two tears out of his eyes to see a thing like that.