Chapter 15

"All I've got now," she murmured. "Nothing else left--nothing else at all."

She heard the door open behind her, and she turned round. Aunt Kate was entering with a bowl in her hands.

"I heard you moving about, and I've brought you something hot to drink," she said.

"That's real good of you, Aunt Kate," was the cheerful reply. "But it's near supper-time, and I don't need it."

"It's boneset tea--for your cold," answered Aunt Kate, gently, and put it on the high dressing-table made of a wooden box and covered with muslin. "For your cold, Cassy," she repeated.

The little woman stood still a moment gazing at the steaming bowl, lines growing suddenly around her mouth, then she looked at Aunt Kate quizzically. "Is my cold bad--so bad that I need boneset?" she asked, in a queer, constrained voice.

"It's comforting, is boneset tea, even when there's no cold, 'specially when the whiskey's good, and the boneset and camomile has steeped some days."

"Have you been steeping them some days?" Cassy asked, softly, eagerly.

Aunt Kate nodded, then tried to explain.

"It's always good to be prepared, and I didn't know but what the cold you used to have might be come back," she said. "But I'm glad if it ain't--if that cough of yours is only one of the measly little hacks people get in the East, where it's so damp."

Cassy was at the window again, looking out at the dying radiance of the sun. Her voice seemed hollow and strange and rather rough, as she said, in reply:

"It's a real cold, deep down, the same as I had nine years ago, Aunt Kate; and it's come to stay, I guess. That's why I came back West. But I couldn't have gone to Lumley's again, even if they were at the Forks now, for I'm too poor. I'm a back-number now. I had to give up singing and dancing a year ago, after George died. So I don't earn my living any more, and I had to come to George's father, with George's boy."

Aunt Kate had a shrewd mind, and was tactful, too. She did not understand why Cassy, who had earned so much money all these years, should be so poor now, unless it was that she hadn't saved--that she and George hadn't saved. But, looking at the face before her, and the child on the bed, she was convinced that the woman was a good woman; that, singer and dancer as she was, there was no reason why any home should be closed to her, or any heart should shut its doors before her. She guessed a reason for this poverty of Cassy Mavor, but it only made her lay a hand on the little woman's shoulders and look into her eyes.

"Cassy," she said, gently, "you was right to come here. There's trials before you, but for the boy's sake you must bear them. Sophy, George's mother, had to bear them, and Abel was fond of her, too, in his way. He's stored up a lot of things to say, and he'll say them; but you'll keep the boy in your mind, and be patient, won't you, Cassy? You got rights here, and it's comfortable, and there's plenty, and the air will cure your lung as it did before. It did all right before, didn't it?" She handed the bowl of boneset tea. "Take it; it'll do you good, Cassy," she added.

Cassy said nothing in reply. She looked at the bed where her boy lay, she looked at the angular face of the woman, with its brooding motherliness, at the soft, gray hair, and, with a little gasp of feeling, she raised the bowl to her lips and drank freely. Then, putting it down, she said:

"He doesn't mean to have us, Aunt Kate, but I'll try and keep my temper down. Did he ever laugh in his life?"

"He laughs sometimes--kind o' laughs."

"I'll make him laugh real, if I can," Cassy rejoined. "I've made a lot of people laugh in my time."

The old woman leaned suddenly over, and drew the red, ridiculous head to her shoulder with a gasp of affection, and her eyes were full of tears.

"Cassy," she exclaimed, "Cassy, you make me cry!" and then she turned and hurried from the room.

Three hours later the problem was solved in the big sitting-room where Cassy had first been received with her boy. Aunt Kate sat with her feet on a hassock, rocking gently and watching and listening. Black Andy was behind the great stove with his chair tilted back, carving the bowl of a pipe; the old man sat rigid by the table, looking straight before him and smacking his lips now and then as he was wont to do at meeting; while Cassy, with her chin in her hands and elbows on her knees, gazed into the fire and waited for the storm to break.

Her little flashes of humor at dinner had not brightened things, and she had had an insane desire to turn cartwheels round the room, so implacable and highly strained was the attitude of the master of the house, so unctuous was the grace and the thanksgiving before and after the meal. Abel Baragar had stored up his anger and his righteous antipathy for years, and this was the first chance he had had of visiting his displeasure on the woman who had "ruined" George, and who had now come to get "rights," which he was determined she should not have. He had steeled himself against seeing any good in her whatever. Self-will, self-pride, and self-righteousness were big in him, and so the supper had ended in silence, and with a little attack of coughing on the part of Cassy, which made her angry at herself. Then the boy had been put to bed, and she had come back to await the expected outburst. She could feel it in the air, and while her blood tingled in a desire to fight this tyrant to the bitter end, she thought of her boy and his future, and she calmed the tumult in her veins.

She did not have to wait very long. The querulous voice of the old man broke the silence.

"When be you goin' back East? What time did you fix for goin'?" he asked.

She raised her head and looked at him squarely. "I didn't fix any time for going East again," she replied. "I came out West this time to stay."

"I thought you was on the stage," was the rejoinder.

"I've left the stage. My voice went when I got a bad cold again, and I couldn't stand the draughts of the theatre, and so I couldn't dance, either. I'm finished with the stage. I've come out here for good and all."

"Where did you think of livin' out here?"

"I'd like to have gone to Lumley's, but that's not possible, is it? Anyway, I couldn't afford it now. So I thought I'd stay here, if there was room for me."

"You want to board here?"

"I didn't put it to myself that way. I thought perhaps you'd be glad to have me. I'm handy. I can cook, I can sew, and I'm quite cheerful and kind. Then there's George--little George. I thought you'd like to have your grandson here with you."

"I've lived without him--or his father--for eight years, an' I could bear it awhile yet, mebbe."

There was a half-choking sound from the old woman in the rocking-chair, but she did not speak, though her knitting dropped into her lap.

"But if you knew us better, perhaps you'd like us better," rejoined Cassy, gently. "We're both pretty easy to get on with, and we see the bright side of things. He has a wonderful disposition, has George."

"I ain't goin' to like you any better," said the old man, getting to his feet. "I ain't goin' to give you any rights here. I've thought it out, and my mind's made up. You can't come it over me. You ruined my boy's life and sent him to his grave. He'd have lived to be an old man out here; but you spoiled him. You trapped him into marrying you, with your kicking and your comic songs, and your tricks of the stage, and you parted us--parted him and me forever."

"That was your fault. George wanted to make it up."

"With you!" The old man's voice rose shrilly, the bitterness and passion of years was shooting high in the narrow confines of his mind. The geyser of his prejudice and antipathy was furiously alive. "To come back with you that ruined him and broke up my family, and made my life like bitter aloes! No! And if I wouldn't have him with you, do you think I'll have you without him? By the God of Israel, no!"

Black Andy was now standing up behind the stove intently watching, his face grim and sombre; Aunt Kate sat with both hands gripping the arms of the rocker.

Cassy got slowly to her feet. "I've been as straight a woman as your mother or your wife ever was," she said, "and all the world knows it. I'm poor--and I might have been rich. I was true to myself before I married George, and I was true to George after, and all I earned he shared; and I've got little left. The mining stock I bought with what I saved went smash, and I'm poor as I was when I started to work for myself. I can work awhile yet; but I wanted to see if I could fit in out here and get well again, and have my boy fixed in the house of his grandfather. That's the way I'm placed, and that's how I came. But give a dog a bad name--ah, you shame your dead boy in thinking bad of me! I didn't ruin him. I didn't kill him. He never came to any bad through me. I helped him; he was happy. Why, I--" She stopped suddenly, putting a hand to her mouth. "Go on, say what you want to say, and let's understand once for all," she added, with a sudden sharpness.

Abel Baragar drew himself up. "Well, I say this. I'll give you three thousand dollars, and you can go somewhere else to live. I'll keep the boy here. That's what I've fixed in my mind to do. You can go, and the boy stays. I ain't goin' to live with you that spoiled George's life."

The eyes of the woman dilated, she trembled with a sudden rush of anger, then stood still, staring in front of her without a word. Black Andy stepped from behind the stove.

"You are going to stay here, Cassy," he said, "here where you have rights as good as any, and better than any, if it comes to that." He turned to his father. "You thought a lot of George," he added. "He was the apple of your eye. He had a soft tongue, and most people liked him; but George was foolish--I've known it all these years. George was pretty foolish. He gambled, he bet at races, he speculated--wild. You didn't know it. He took ten thousand dollars of your money, got from the Wonegosh farm he sold for you. He--"

Cassy Mavor started forward with a cry, but Black Andy waved her down.

"No, I'm going to tell it. George lost your ten thousand dollars, dad, gambling, racing, speculating. He told her--Cassy--two days after they was married, and she took the money she earned on the stage and give it to him to pay you back on the quiet through the bank. You never knew, but that's the kind of boy your son George was, and that's the kind of wife he had. George told me all about it when I went East six years ago."

He came over to Cassy and stood beside her. "I'm standing by George's wife," he said, taking her hand, while she shut her eyes in her misery--had she not hid her husband's wrong-doing all these years?--"I'm standing by her. If it hadn't been for that ten thousand dollars she paid back for George, you'd have been swamped, when the Syndicate got after you, and we wouldn't have had Lumley's place, nor this, nor anything. I guess she's got rights here, dad, as good as any."

The old man sank slowly into a chair. "George--George stole from me--stole money from me!" he whispered. His face was white. His pride and vainglory were broken. He was a haggard, shaken figure. His self-righteousness was levelled in the dust.

With sudden impulse Cassy stole over to him and took his hand and held it tight.

"Don't! Don't feel so bad!" she said. "He was weak and wild then. But he was all right afterward. He was happy with me."

"I've owed Cassy this for a good many years, dad," said Black Andy, "and it had to be paid. She's got better stuff in her than any Baragar."

* * * * *

An hour later the old man said to Cassy at the door of her room: "You got to stay here and git well. It's yours, the same as the rest of us--what's here."

Then he went down-stairs and sat with Aunt Kate by the fire.

"I guess she's a good woman," he said, at last. "I didn't use her right."

"You've been lucky with your women-folk," Aunt Kate answered, quietly.

"Yes, I've been lucky," he answered. "I dunno if I deserve it. Mebbe not. Do you think she'll git well?"

"It's a healing air out here," Aunt Kate answered, and listened to the wood of the house snapping in the sharp frost.

MARCILE

That the day was beautiful, that the harvest of the West had been a great one, that the salmon-fishing had been larger than ever before, that gold had been found in the Yukon, made no difference to Jacques Grassette, for he was in the condemned cell of Bindon Jail, living out those days which pass so swiftly between the verdict of the jury and the last slow walk with the Sheriff.

He sat with his back to the stone wall, his hands on his knees, looking straight before him. All that met his physical gaze was another stone wall, but with his mind's eye he was looking beyond it into spaces far away. His mind was seeing a little house with dormer-windows, and a steep roof on which the snow could not lodge in winter-time; with a narrow stoop in front where one could rest of an evening, the day's work done; the stone-and-earth oven near by in the open, where the bread for a family of twenty was baked; the wooden plough tipped against the fence, to wait the "fall" cultivation; the big iron cooler in which the sap from the maple-trees was boiled, in the days when the snow thawed and spring opened the heart of the wood; the flash of the sickle and the scythe hard by; the fields of the little, narrow farm running back from the St. Lawrence like a riband; and, out on the wide stream, the great rafts with their riverine population floating down to Michelin's mill-yards.

For hours he had sat like this, unmoving, his gnarled red hands clamping each leg as though to hold him steady while he gazed; and he saw himself as a little lad, barefooted, doing chores, running after the shaggy, troublesome pony which would let him catch it when no one else could, and, with only a halter on, galloping wildly back to the farm-yard, to be hitched up in the cariole which had once belonged to the old Seigneur. He saw himself as a young man back from "the States," where he had been working in the mills, regarded austerely by little Father Roche, who had given him his first Communion--for, down in Massachusetts he had learned to wear his curly hair plastered down on his forehead, smoke bad cigars, and drink "old Bourbon," to bet and to gamble, and be a figure at horse-races.

Then he saw himself, his money all gone, but the luck still with him, at Mass on the Sunday before going to the backwoods lumber-camp for the winter, as boss of a hundred men. He had a way with him, and he had brains, had Jacques Grassette, and he could manage men, as Michelin the lumber-king himself had found in a great river-row and strike, when bloodshed seemed certain. Even now the ghost of a smile played at his lips as he recalled the surprise of the old _habitants_ and of Father Roche when he was chosen for this responsible post; for to run a great lumber-camp well, hundreds of miles from civilisation, where there is no visible law, no restraints of ordinary organized life, and where men, for seven months together, never saw a woman or a child, and ate pork and beans, and drank white whiskey, was a task of administration as difficult as managing a small republic new-created out of violent elements of society. But Michelin was right, and the old Seigneur, Sir Henri Robitaille, who was a judge of men, knew he was right, as did also Hennepin the school-master, whose despair Jacques had been, for he never worked at his lessons as a boy, and yet he absorbed Latin and mathematics by some sure but unexplainable process. "Ah, if you would but work, Jacques, you _vaurien_, I would make a great man of you," Hennepin had said to him more than once; but this had made no impression on Jacques. It was more to the point that the ground-hogs and black squirrels and pigeons were plentiful in Casanac Woods.

And so he thought as he stood at the door of the Church of St. Francis on that day before going "out back" to the lumber-camp. He had reached the summit of greatness--to command men. That was more than wealth or learning, and as he spoke to the old Seigneur going in to Mass, he still thought so, for the Seigneur's big house and the servants and the great gardens had no charm for him. The horses--that was another thing; but there would be plenty of horses in the lumber-camp; and, on the whole, he felt himself rather superior to the old Seigneur, who now was Lieutenant-Governor of the province in which lay Bindon Jail.

At the door of the Church of St. Francis he had stretched himself up with good-natured pride, for he was by nature gregarious and friendly, but with a temper quick and strong, and even savage when roused; though Michelin the lumber-king did not know that when he engaged him as boss, having seen him only at the one critical time when his superior brain and will saw its chance to command and had no personal interest in the strife. He had been a miracle of coolness then, and his six-foot-two of pride and muscle was taking natural tribute at the door of the Church of St. Francis, where he waited till nearly every one had entered, and Father Roche's voice could be heard in the Mass.

Then had happened the real event of his life: a black-eyed, rose-cheeked girl went by with her mother, hurrying in to Mass. As she passed him their eyes met, and his blood leaped in his veins. He had never seen her before, and, in a sense, he had never seen any woman before. He had danced with many a one, and kissed a few in the old days among the flax-beaters, at the harvesting, in the gayeties of a wedding, and also down in Massachusetts. That, however, was a different thing, which he forgot an hour after; but this was the beginning of the world for him; for he knew now, of a sudden, what life was, what home meant, why "old folks" slaved for their children, and mothers wept when girls married or sons went away from home to bigger things; why in there, in at Mass, so many were praying for all the people and thinking only of one. All in a moment it came--and stayed; and he spoke to her, to Marcile, that very night, and he spoke also to her father, Valloir the farrier, the next morning by lamplight, before he started for the woods. He would not be gainsaid, nor take no for an answer, nor accept, as a reason for refusal, that she was only sixteen, and that he did not know her, for she had been away with a childless aunt since she was three. That she had fourteen brothers and sisters who had to be fed and cared for did not seem to weigh with the farrier. That was an affair of _le bon Dieu_, and enough would be provided for them all as heretofore--one could make little difference; and though Jacques was a very good match, considering his prospects and his favor with the lumber-king, Valloir had a kind of fear of him, and could not easily promise his beloved Marcile, the flower of his flock, to a man of whom the priest so strongly disapproved. But it was a new sort of Jacques Grassette who, that morning, spoke to him with the simplicity and eagerness of a child; and the suddenly conceived gift of a pony stallion, which every man in the parish envied Jacques, won Valloir over; and Jacques went "away back" with the first timid kiss of Marcile Valloir burning on his cheek. "Well, bagosh, you are a wonder!" said Jacques' father, when he told him the news, and saw Jacques jump into the cariole and drive away.

Here in prison, this, too, Jacques saw--this scene; and then the wedding in the spring, and the tour through the parishes for days together, lads and lasses journeying with them; and afterward the new home with a bigger stoop than any other in the village, with some old, gnarled crab-apple-trees and lilac bushes, and four years of happiness, and a little child that died; and all the time Jacques rising in the esteem of Michelin the lumber-king, and sent on inspections, and to organize camps; for weeks, sometimes for months, away from the house behind the lilac bushes--and then the end of it all, sudden and crushing and unredeemable.

Jacques came back one night and found the house empty. Marcile had gone to try her luck with another man.

That was the end of the upward career of Jacques Grassette. He went out upon a savage hunt which brought him no quarry, for the man and the woman had disappeared as completely as though they had been swallowed by the sea. And here, at last, he was waiting for the day when he must settle a bill for a human life taken in passion and rage.

His big frame seemed out of place in the small cell, and the watcher sitting near him, to whom he had not addressed a word nor replied to a question since the watching began, seemed an insignificant factor in the scene. Never had a prisoner been more self-contained, or rejected more completely all those ministrations of humanity which relieve the horrible isolation of the condemned cell. Grassette's isolation was complete. He lived in a dream, did what little there was to do in a dark abstraction, and sat hour after hour, as he was sitting now, piercing, with a brain at once benumbed to all outer things and afire with inward things, those realms of memory which are infinite in a life of forty years.

"_Sacre!_" he muttered at last, and a shiver seemed to pass through him from head to foot; then an ugly and evil oath fell from his lips, which made his watcher shrink back appalled, for he also was a Catholic, and had been chosen of purpose, in the hope that he might have an influence on this revolted soul. It had, however, been of no use, and Grassette had refused the advances and ministrations of the little good priest, Father Laflamme, who had come from the coast of purpose to give him the offices of the Church. Silent, obdurate, sullen, he had looked the priest straight in the face, and had said, in broken English, "_Non_, I pay my bill. _Nom de diable!_ I will say my own Mass, light my own candle, go my own way. I have too much."

Now, as he sat glooming, after his outbreak of oaths, there came a rattling noise at the door, the grinding of a key in the lock, the shooting of bolts, and a face appeared at the little wicket in the door. Then the door opened, and the Sheriff stepped inside, accompanied by a white-haired, stately old man. At sight of this second figure--the Sheriff had come often before, and would come for one more doleful walk with him--Grassette started. His face, which had never whitened in all the dismal and terrorizing doings of the capture and the trial and sentence, though it had flushed with rage more than once, now turned a little pale, for it seemed as if this old man had stepped out of the visions which had just passed before his eyes.

"His Honor, the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Henri Robitaille, has come to speak with you.... Stand up!" the Sheriff added, sharply, as Grassette kept his seat.

Grassette's face flushed with anger, for the prison had not broken his spirit; then he got up slowly. "I not stand up for you," he growled at the Sheriff; "I stand up for him." He jerked his head toward Sir Henri Robitaille. This grand Seigneur, with Michelin had believed in him in those far-off days which he had just been seeing over again, and all his boyhood and young manhood was rushing back on him. But now it was the Governor who turned pale, seeing who the criminal was.

"Jacques Grassette!" he cried, in consternation and emotion, for under another name the murderer had been tried and sentenced, nor had his identity been established--the case was so clear, the defence had been perfunctory, and Quebec was very far away!

"M'sieu'!" was the respectful response, and Grassette's fingers twitched.

"It was my sister's son you killed, Grassette," said the Governor, in a low, strained voice.

"_Nom de Dieu_!" said Grassette, hoarsely.