Part 11

Yes, there was Lavelotte's widow, the worst of all. She whipped little Jules unmercifully, and if Honoré had not taken his part and stood before him, she might have ended by being Jules's widow. She stripped him of his whole fortune, four hundred dollars, when he finally obtained a separation from her. But instead of curing him, this experience only whetted his zest for another wife.

“And there is Therese.” Honoré did not say, “Last, Therese.” While Jules lived and his wives died, or were traded off or divorced, there would be no last.

“It is four,” declared Clethera; and the count was true. Honoré had taken Jules in hand like a father, after the adventure with Lavelotte's widow. He made his parent work hard at the boat, and in winter walked him to and from mass literally with hand on collar. He encouraged the little man, moreover, with a half interest in their house on the beach, which long-accumulated earnings of the boat paid for. But all this care was thrown away; though after Jules brought Therese home, and saw that Honoré was not appeased by a woman's cooking, he had qualms about the homestead, and secretly carried the deed back to the original owner.

“I want you keep my part of de deed,” he explained. “I not let some more women rob Honoré. My wife, if she get de deed in her han', she might sell de whole t'ing!”

“Why, no, Jules, she couldn't sell your real estate!” the former owner declared. “She would only have a life interest in your share.”

“You say she couldn't sell it?”

“No. She would have nothing but a life interest.”

“She have only life interest? By gar! I t'ink I pay somebody twenty dollar to kill her!”

But lacking both twenty dollars and determination, he lived peaceably with Therese until she died a natural death, on that occasion proudly doing his whole duty as a man and a mourner.

Remembering these affairs, which had not been kept secret from anybody on the island, Clethera spoke out under conviction.

“Honoré, it a scandal' t'ing, to get marry.”

“Me, I t'ink so too,” assented Honoré.

“Jules McCarty have disgrace' his son!”

“Melinda Cree,” retorted Honoré, obliged to defend his own, “she take a little 'usban' honly nineteen.”

“She 'ave no chance like Jules; she is oblige' to wait and take what invite her.”

The voices of children from other quarter-breed cottages, playing along the beach, added cheer to the sweet darkness. Clethera and Honoré sat silently enjoying each other's company, unconscious that their aboriginal forefathers had courted in that manner, sitting under arbors of branches.

“Why do peop' want to get marry?” propounded Clethera.

“I don't know,” said Honoré.

“Me, if some man hask me, I box his ear! I have know you all my life—but don' you never hask me to get marry!”

“I not such a fool,” heartily responded Honoré. “You and me, we have seen de folly. I not form de habit, like Jules.”

“But what we do, Honoré, to keep dat Jules and dat Melinda apart?”

Though they discussed many plans, the sequel showed that nothing effectual could be done. All their traditions and instincts were against making themselves disagreeable or showing discourtesy to their elders. The young man's French and Irish and Chippewa blood, and the young girl's French and Cree blood exhausted all their inherited diplomacy. But as steadily as the waters set like a strong tide through the strait, in spite of wind which combed them to ridging foam, the rapid courtship of age went on.

In carrying laundered clothing through the village street, Melinda Cree was carefully chaperoned by her granddaughter, and Honoré kept Jules under orders in the boat. But of early mornings and late twilights there was no restraining the twittering widower.

“Melinda 'tend to her work and is behave if Jules let her alone,” Clethera reported to Honoré. “But he slip around de garden and talk over de back fence, and he is by de ironing-board de minute my back is turn'! If he belong to me, I could 'mos' whip him!”

“Jules McCarty,” declared Honoré, with some bitterness, “when he fix his min' to marry some more, he is not turn' if he is hexcommunicate'!”

Jules, indeed, became so bold that he crowded across the stile through the very conferences of the pair united to prevent him; and his loud voice could be heard beside Melinda's ironing-board, proclaiming in the manner of a callow young suitor.

“Some peop' like separate us, Melinda, but we not let them.”

The conflict of Honoré and Clethera with Jules and Melinda ended one day in August. There had been no domestic clamor in this silent grapple of forces. The young man used no argument except maxims and morals and a tightening of authority; the young girl permitted neither neighboring maids nor the duties of religion to lure her off guard. It may be said of any French half-breed that he has all the instincts of gentility except an inclination to lying, and that arises from excessive politeness.

Honoré came to the fence at noon and called Clethera. In his excitement he crossed the stile and stood on her premises.

“It no use, Clethera. Jules have tell me this morning he have arrange' de marriage.”

Clethera glanced behind her at the house she called home, and threw herself in Honoré's arms, as she had often done in childish despairs. Neither misunderstood the action, and it relieved them to shed a few tears on each other's necks. This truly Latin outburst being over, they stood apart and wiped their eyes on their sleeves.

“It no use,” exclaimed Clethera, “to set a good examp' to your grandmother!”

“I not wait any longer now,” announced Honoré, giving rein to fierce eagerness. “I go to de war to-day.”

“But de camp is move',” objected Clethera.

“I have pass' de examin', and I know de man to go to when I am ready; he promis' to get me into de war. Jules have de sails up now, ready to take me across to de train.”

“But who will have de boat when you are gone, Honoré?”

“Jules. And he bring Melinda to de house.”

“She not come. She not leave her own house. She take her 'usban' in.”

“Then Jules must rent de house. You not detest poor Jules?”

“I not detest him like de hudder one.”

“Au 'voir, Clethera.”

“Au 'voir, Honoré.”

They shook hands, the young man wringing himself away with the animation of one who goes, the girl standing in the dull anxiety of one who stays. War, so remote that she had heard of it indifferently, rushed suddenly from the tropics over the island.

“Are your clothes all mend' and ready, Honoré?”

But what thought can a young man give to his clothes when about to wrap himself in glory? He is politely tapping at the shed window of the Indian woman, and touching his cap in farewell and gallant capitulation, and with long-limbed sweeping haste, unusual in a quarter-breed, he is gone to the docks, with a bundle under one arm, waving his hand as he passes. All the women and children along the street would turn out to see him go to the war if his intention were known, and even summer idlers about the bazars would look at him with new interest.

Clethera could not imagine the moist and horrid heat of those southern latitudes into which Honoré departed to throw himself. Shifting mists on the lake rim were no vaguer than her conception of her country's mighty undertaking. But she could feel; and the life she had lived to that day was wrenched up by the roots, leaving her as with a bleeding socket.

All afternoon she drenched herself with soapsuds in the ferocity of her washing. By the time Jules returned with the boat, the lake was black as ink under a storm cloud, with glints of steel; a dull bar stretched diagonally across the water. Beyond that a whitening of rain showed against the horizon. Points of cedars on the opposite island pricked a sullen sky.

Clethera's tubs were under the trees. She paid no attention to what befell her, or to her grandmother, who called her out of the rain. It came like a powder of dust, and then a moving, blanched wall, pushing islands of flattened mist before it. Under a steady pour the waters turned dull green, and lightened shade by shade as if diluting an infusion of grass. Waves began to come in regular windrows. Though Clethera told herself savagely she not care for anything in de world, her Indian eye took joy of these sights. The shower-bath from the trees she endured without a shiver.

Jules sat beside Melinda to be comforted. He wept for Honoré, and praised his boy, gasconading with time-worn boasts.

“I got de hang of him, and now I got to part! But de war will end, now Honoré have gone into it. His gran'fodder was such a fighter when de British come to take de island, he turn' de cannon and blow de British off. The gran'fodder of Honoré was a fine man. He always keep de bes' liquors and hy wines on his sideboa'd.”

When Honoré had been gone twenty-four hours, and Jules was still idling like a boy undriven by his task-master, leaving the boat to rock under bare poles at anchor on the rise and fall of the water, Clethera went into their empty house. It contained three rooms, and she laid violent hands on male housekeeping. The service was almost religious, like preparing linen for an altar. It comforted her unacknowledged anguish, which increased rather than diminished, the unrest of which she resented with all her stoic Indian nature.

Nets, sledge-harness, and Honoré's every-day clothes hung on his whitewashed wall. The most touching relic of any man is the hat he has worn. Honoré's cap crowned the post of his bed like a wraith. The room might have been a young hermit's cell in a cave, or a tunnel in the evergreens, it was so simple and bare of human appointments. Clethera stood with the broom in one hand, and tipped forward a piece of broken looking-glass on his shaving-shelf. A new, unforeseen Clethera, whom she had never been obliged to deal with before, gave her a desperate, stony stare out of a haggard face. She was young, her skin had not a line. But it was as if she had changed places with her wrinkled grandmother, to whom the expression of complacent maidenhood now belonged.

As Clethera propped the glass again in place, she heard Jules come in. She resumed her sweeping with resolute strokes on the bare boards, which would explain to his ear the necessity of her presence. He appeared at the door, and it was Honoré!

It was Honoré, shamefaced but laughing, back from the war within twenty-four hours! Clethera heard the broom-handle strike the floor as one hears the far-off fall of a spar on a ship in harbor. She put her palms together, without flying into his arms or even offering to shake hands.

“You come back?” she cried out, her voice sharpened by joy.

“The war is end',” said Honoré. “Peace is declare' yesterday!” He threw his bundle down and looked fondly around the rough walls. “All de peop' laugh at me because I go to war when de war is end'!”

“They laugh because de war is end'! I laugh too?” said Clethera, relaxing to sobs. Tears and cries which had been shut up a day and a night were let loose with French abandon. Honoré opened his arms to comfort her in the old manner, and although she rushed into them, strange embarrassment went with her. The two could not look at each other.

“It is de 'omesick,” she explained. “When you go to war it make me 'omesick.”

“Me, too,” owned Honoré. “I never know what it is before. I not mind de fighting, but I am glad de war is end', account of de 'omesick!”

He pushed the hair from her wet face. The fate of temperament and the deep tides of existence had them in merciless sweep.

“Clethera,” represented Honoré, “the rillation is not mix' bad with Jules and Melinda.”

Clethera let the assertion pass unchallenged.

“And this house, it pretty good house. You like it well as de hudder?”

“It have no loft,” responded Clethera, faintly, “but de chimney not smoke.”

“We not want de 'omesick some more, Clethera—eh? You t'ink de fools is all marry yet?”

Clethera laughed and raised her head from his arm, but not to look at him or box his ear. She looked through the open door at an oblong of little world, where the land was an amethyst strip betwixt lake and horizon. Across that beloved background she saw the future pass: hale, long years with Honoré; the piled up wood of winter fires; her own home; her children—the whole scheme of sweet and humble living.

“You t'ink, after all de folly we have see' in de family, Clethera, you can go de lenk—to get marry?”

“I go dat lenk for you, Honoré—but not for any hudder man.”

THE BLUE MAN

The lake was like a meadow full of running streams. Far off indeed it seemed frozen, with countless wind-paths traversing the ice, so level and motionless was the surface under a gray sky. But summer rioted in verdure over the cliffs to the very beaches. From the high greenery of the island could be heard the tink-tank of a bell where some cow sighed amid the delicious gloom.

East of the Giant's Stairway in a cove are two round rocks with young cedars springing from them. It is easy to scramble to the flat top of the first one and sit in open ambush undetected by passers. The world's majority is unobservant. Children with their nurses, lovers, bicyclists who have left their wheels behind, excursionists—fortunately headed towards this spot in their one available hour—an endless procession, tramp by on the rough, wave-lapped margin, never wearing it smooth.

Amused by the unconsciousness of the reviewed, I found myself unexpectedly classed with the world's majority. For on the east round rock, a few yards from my seat on the west round rock, behold a man had arranged himself, his back against the cedars, without attracting notice. While the gray weather lightened and wine-red streaks on the lake began to alternate with translucent greens, and I was watching mauve plumes spring from a distant steamer before her whistles could be heard, this nimble stranger must have found his own amusement in the blindness of people with eyes.

He was not quite a stranger. I had seen him the day before; and he was a man to be remembered on account of a peculiar blueness of the skin, in which, perhaps, some drug or chemical had left an unearthly haze over the natural flush of blood. It might have appeared the effect of sky lights and cliff shadows, if I had not seen the same blue face distinctly in Madame Clementine's house. He was standing in the middle of a room at the foot of the stairway as we passed his open door.

So unusual a personality was not out of place in a transplanted Parisian tenement. Madame Clementine was a Parisian; and her house, set around three sides of a quadrangle in which flowers overflowed their beds, was a bit of artisan Paris. The ground-floor consisted of various levels joined by steps and wide-jambed doors. The chambers, to which a box staircase led, wanted nothing except canopies over the beds.

“Alors I give de convenable beds,” said Madame Clementine, in mixed French and English, as she poked her mattresses. “Des bons lits! T'ree dollar one chambre, four dollar one chambre—” she suddenly spread her hands to include both—“seven dollar de tout ensemble!”

It was delightful to go with any friend who might be forced by crowded hotels to seek rooms in Madame Clementine's alley. The active, tiny Frenchwoman, who wore a black mob-cap everywhere except to mass, had reached present prosperity through past tribulation. Many years before she had followed a runaway husband across the sea. As she stepped upon the dock almost destitute the first person her eyes rested on was her husband standing well forward in the crowd, with a ham under his arm which he was carrying home to his family. He saw Clementine and dropped the ham to run. The same hour he took his new wife and disappeared from the island. The doubly deserted French-speaking woman found employment and friends; and by her thrift was now in the way of piling up what she considered a fortune.

The man on the rock near me was no doubt one of Madame Clementine's permanent lodgers. Tourists ranting over the island in a single day had not his repose. He met my discovering start with a dim smile and a bend of his head, which was bare. His features were large, and his mouth corners had the sweet, strong expression of a noble patience. What first impressed me seemed to be his blueness, and the blurredness of his eyes struggling to sight as Bartimeus' eyes might have struggled the instant before the Lord touched them.

Only Asiatics realize the power of odors. The sense of smell is lightly appreciated in the Western world. A fragrance might be compounded which would have absolute power over a human being. We get wafts of scent to which something in us irresistibly answers. A satisfying sweetness, fleeting as last year's wild flowers, filled the whole cove. I thought of dead Indian pipes, standing erect in pathetic dignity, the delicate scales on their stems unfurled, refusing to crumble and pass away; the ghosts of Indians.

The blue man parted his large lips and moved them several instants; then his voice followed, like the tardy note of a distant steamer that addresses the eye with its plume of steam before the whistle is heard. I felt a creepy thrill down my shoulders—that sound should break so slowly across the few yards separating us! “Are you also waiting, madame?”

I felt compelled to answer him as I would have answered no other person. “Yes; but for one who never comes.”

If he had spoken in the pure French of the Touraine country, which is said to be the best in France, free from Parisianisms, it would not have surprised me. But he spoke English, with the halting though clear enunciation of a Nova Scotian.

“You—you must have patience. I have—have seen you only seven summers on the island.”

“You have seen me these seven years past? But I never met you before!”

His mouth labored voicelessly before he declared, “I have been here thirty-five years.”

How could that be possible!—and never a hint drifting through the hotels of any blue man! Yet the intimate life of old inhabitants is not paraded before the overrunning army of a season. I felt vaguely flattered that this exclusive resident had hitherto noticed me and condescended at last to reveal himself.

The blue man had been here thirty-five years! He knew the childish joy of bruising the flesh of orange-colored toadstools and wading amid long pine-cones which strew the ground like fairy corn-cobs. The white birches were dear to him, and he trembled with eagerness at the first pipe sign, or at the discovery of blue gentians where the eastern forest stoops to the strand. And he knew the echo, shaking like gigantic organ music from one side of the world to the other.

In solitary trysts with wilderness depths and caves which transient sight-seers know nothing about I had often pleased myself thinking the Mishi-ne-macki-naw-go were somewhere around me. If twigs crackled or a sudden awe fell causelessly, I laughed—“That family of Indian ghosts is near. I wish they would show themselves!” For if they ever show themselves, they bring you the gift of prophecy. The Chippewas left tobacco and gunpowder about for them. My offering was to cover with moss the picnic papers, tins, and broken bottles, with which man who is vile defiles every prospect. Discovering such a queer islander as the blue man was almost equal to seeing the Mishi-ne-macki-naw-go.

Voices approached; and I watched his eyes come into his face as he leaned forward! From a blurr of lids they turned to beautiful clear balls shot through with yearning. Around the jut of rock appeared a bicycle girl, a golf girl, and a youth in knickers having his stockings laid in correct folds below the knee. They passed without noticing us. To see his looks dim and his eagerness relax was too painful. I watched the water ridging against the horizon like goldstone and changing swiftly to the blackest of greens. Distance folded into distance so that the remote drew near. He was certainly waiting for somebody, but it could not be that he had waited thirty-five years: thirty-five winters, whitening the ice-bound island; thirty-five summers, bringing all paradise except what he waited for.

Just as I glanced at the blue man again his lips began to move, and the peculiar tingle ran down my back, though I felt ashamed of it in his sweet presence.

“Madame, it will—it will comfort me if you permit me to talk to you.”

“I shall be very glad, sir, to hear whatever you have to tell.”

“I have—have waited here thirty-five years, and in all that time I have not spoken to any one!”

He said this quite candidly, closing his lips before his voice ceased to sound. The cedar sapling against which his head rested was not more real than the sincerity of that blue man's face. Some hermit soul, who had proved me by watching me seven years, was opening himself, and I felt the tears come in my eyes.

“Have you never heard of me, madame?”

“You forget, sir, that I do not even know your name.”

“My name is probably forgotten on the island now. I stopped here between steamers during your American Civil War. A passing boat put in to leave a young girl who had cholera. I saw her hair floating out of the litter.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed; “that is an island story.” The blue man was actually presenting credentials when he spoke of the cholera story. “She was taken care of on the island until she recovered; and she was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Southern family trying to get home from her convent in France, but unable to run the blockade. The nun who brought her died on shipboard before she landed at Montreal, and she hoped to get through the lines by venturing down the lakes. Yes, indeed! Madame Clementine has told me that story.”

He listened, turning his head attentively and keeping his eyes half closed, and again worked his lips.

“Yes, yes. You know where she was taken care of?”

“It was at Madame Clementine's.”

“I myself took her there.”

“And have you been there ever since?”

He passed over the trivial question, and when his voice arrived it gushed without a stammer.

“I had a month of happiness. I have had thirty-five years of waiting. When this island binds you to any one you remain bound. Since that month with her I can do nothing but wait until she comes. I lost her, I don't know how. We were in this cove together. She sat on this rock and waited while I went up the cliff to gather ferns for her. When I returned she was gone. I searched the island for her. It kept on smiling as if there never had been such a person! Something happened which I do not understand, for she did not want to leave me. She disappeared as if the earth had swallowed her!”

I felt a rill of cold down my back like the jetting of the spring that spouted from its ferny tunnel farther eastward. Had he been thirty-five years on the island without ever hearing the Old Mission story about bones found in the cliff above us? Those who reached them by venturing down a pit as deep as a well, uncovered by winter storms, declared they were the remains of a woman's skeleton. I never saw the people who found them. It was an oft-repeated Mission story which had come down to me. An Indian girl was missed from the Mission school and never traced. It was believed she met her fate in this rock crevasse. The bones were blue, tinged by a clay in which they had lain. I tried to remember what became of the Southern girl who was put ashore, her hair flying from a litter. Distinct as her tradition remained, it ended abruptly. Even Madame Clementine forgot when and how she left the island after she ceased to be an object of solicitude, for many comers and goers trample the memory as well as the island.