Part 4

He had read them all, and he knew now what it was to wake up famous, but he could not taste it. Now that it had come it meant nothing, and that it was so complete a triumph only made it the harder. In his most optimistic dreams he had never imagined success so satisfying as the reality had proved to be; but in his dreams Helen had always held the chief part, and without her success seemed only to mock him.

He wanted to lay it all before her, to say, "If you are pleased, I am happy. If you are satisfied, then I am content. It was done for you, and I am wholly yours, and all that I do is yours." And, as though in answer to his thoughts, there was an instant knock at the door, and Helen entered the room and stood smiling at him across the table.

Her eyes were lit with excitement, and spoke with many emotions, and her cheeks were brilliant with color. He had never seen her look more beautiful.

"Why, Helen!" he exclaimed, "how good of you to come. Is there anything wrong? Is anything the matter?"

She tried to speak, but faltered, and smiled at him appealingly.

"What is it?" he asked in great concern.

Helen drew in her breath quickly, and at the same moment motioned him away—and he stepped back and stood watching her in much perplexity.

With her eyes fixed on his she raised her hands to her head, and her fingers fumbled with the knot of her veil. She pulled it loose, and then, with a sudden courage, lifted her hat proudly, as though it were a coronet, and placed it between them on his table.

"Philip," she stammered, with the tears in her voice and eyes, "if you will let me—I have come to stay."

The table was no longer between them. He caught her in his arms and kissed her face and her uncovered head again and again. From outside the rain beat drearily and the fog rolled through the street, but inside before the fire the two young people sat close together, asking eager questions or sitting in silence, staring at the flames with wondering, happy eyes.

* * * * *

The Lion and the Unicorn saw them only once again. It was a month later when they stopped in front of the shop in a four-wheeler, with their baggage mixed on top of it, and steamer-labels pasted over every trunk.

"And, oh, Prentiss!" Carroll called from the cab-window. "I came near forgetting. I promised to gild the Lion and the Unicorn if I won out in London. So have it done, please, and send the bill to me. For I've won out all right." And then he shut the door of the cab, and they drove away forever.

"Nice gal, that," growled the Lion. "I always liked her. I am glad they've settled it at last."

The Unicorn sighed, sentimentally, "The other one's worth two of her," he said.

VAILLANTCŒUR

By Henry van Dyke

ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER APPLETON CLARK

I

"That was truly his name, M'sieu'—Raoul Vaillantcœur—a name of the fine sound, is it not? But me—I think sometimes those grand names attach themselves not to the proper men. It is like the time when the guide-post of the four roads, beside Chicoutimi, blows down from the big storm, and Telesphore Gauthier, he sets him up once more. That Telesphore there, he knows not to read, not so much as the fool caribou. It is the mercy of God, now, what road you take, unless you know him already."

Silence for a few moments, broken only by the ripple of water under the bow of the canoe, the _slish_, _slish_ of the dripping paddle at the stern, and the persistent patter of the rain all around us. I knew there was a story on the way. But I must keep still to get it. A single ill-advised question might switch it off the track into a morass of politics or moralizing. Presently the voice behind me began again.

"You like that name, M'sieu', is it not? _Le cœur vaillant_—it pleases you. But my faith! To me it seems that was given by one who knows not to read. It was put upon the wrong man, without doubt. You shall judge for yourself, M'sieu', when you hear what passed between this Vaillantcœur and his friend Prosper Leclère at the building of the church of Abbéville. You remind yourself of that grand stone church of the square tower—yes? Well, I am going to tell you the story of that."

Thus Ferdinand, my brave _voyageur_, in his old-fashioned _patois_ of French Canada, as he pushed the birch-bark down the lonely length of Lac Moïse. How it rained that day! The surface of the lake was beaten flat, and quivered under the storm of silver bullets. Waving sheets of watery gray were driven before the wind; broad curves of dancing drops swept along in front of them where they touched the lake. The dismal clouds had collapsed on the mountains. All around the homeless shores the evergreen trees seemed to hunch their backs and stand closer together in patient misery. Not a bird dared to sing—not even a red-breasted crossbill.

It felt as if we were a thousand miles from everywhere and everybody. Cities, factories, libraries, colleges, laws, palaces, theatres, temples—what had we dreamed of these things? They were far off, in another world. We had slipped back, who knows how many centuries, into a primitive life, and Ferdinand was telling me the naked story of the brave heart, even as it has been told from the beginning.

I cannot tell the story just as he did. There was a charm in his speech too quick for the pen: a flavor of fresh-cut pine logs and clean wood-smoke, that is not to be found in any ink for sale in the shops. Perhaps he left out something that belongs to the tale, and that I may be fool enough to put in. But it shall be as little as possible. The spirit of the tale shall be his. It is Ferdinand's story. If you care for the real thing, here it is. You shall hear the difference between being called Vaillantcœur and having _le cœur vaillant_.

II

There were two young men in Abbéville who were easily the cocks of the woodland walk. Their eminence rested on the fact that they were the strongest men in the parish. Strength is the thing that counts, when people live on the edge of the wilderness. These two were well known all through the country between Lake St. John and Chicoutimi as men of great capacity. Either of them could shoulder a barrel of flour and walk off with it as lightly as a common man would carry a side of bacon. There was not a half-pound of difference between them in ability. But there was a great difference in their looks and in their way of doing things.

Raoul Vaillantcœur was the biggest and the handsomest man in the village; nearly six feet tall, straight as a fir-tree, and black as a bull-moose in December. He had natural force enough and to spare. Whatever he did was done by sheer power of back and arm. He could send a canoe up against the heaviest water, provided he did not get mad and break his paddle—which he usually did. He had more muscle than he knew how to use.

Prosper Leclère did not have so much, but he knew better how to handle it. He never broke his paddle—unless it happened to be a bad one, and then he generally had another all ready in the canoe. He was at least six inches shorter than Vaillantcœur; broad shoulders, long arms, light hair, gray eyes; not a handsome fellow, but pleasant looking and very quiet. What he did was done more than half with his head.

Leclère was the kind of a man that never needs more than one match to light a fire.

But Vaillantcœur—well, if the wood was wet he might use a dozen, and when the blaze was kindled, as like as not, he would throw in the rest of the box.

Now, these two men had been friends and were rivals. At least that was the way that one of them looked at it. And most of the people in the parish seemed to think that was the right view.

It was a strange thing, and not altogether satisfactory to the public mind, to have _two_ strongest men in the village. The question of comparative standing in the community ought to be raised and settled in the usual way. Raoul was perfectly willing, and at times (commonly on Saturday nights) very eager. But Prosper was not.

"No," he said, one March night, when he was boiling maple-sap in the sugar-bush with little Ovide Rossigno (who had a lyric passion for holding the coat while another man was fighting)—"no, for what shall I fight with Raoul? As boys we have played together. Once, in the rapids of _la Belle Rivière_, when I have fallen in the water, I think he has saved my life. He was stronger, then, than me. I am always a friend to him. If I beats him now, am I stronger? No, but weaker. And if he beats me, what is the sense of that? Certainly I shall not like it. What is to gain?"

Down in the store of old Girard, that night, Vaillantcœur was holding forth after a different fashion. He stood among the cracker-boxes and flour-barrels, with a background of shelves laden with bright-colored calicoes, and a line of tin pails hanging overhead, and stated his view of the case with vigor. He even pulled off his coat and rolled up his shirt-sleeve to show the knotty arguments with which he proposed to clinch his opinion.

"That Leclère," said he, "that little Prosper Leclère! He thinks himself one of the strongest—a fine fellow! But I tell you he is _lâche_. If he is clever? Yes. But he is a poltroon. He knows well that I can flatten him out like a _crêpe_ in the frying-pan. But he is afraid. He has not as much courage as the musk-rat. You stamp on the bank. He dives. He swims away. Bah!"

"How about that time he cut loose the jam of logs in the Rapide des Cédres?" said old Girard from his corner.

Vaillantcœur's black eyes sparkled and he twirled his mustache fiercely. "_Sa-prie!_" he cried, "that was nothing! Any man with an axe can cut a log. But to fight—that is another affair. That demands the brave heart. The strong man who will not fight is a coward. Some day I will put him through the mill—you shall see what that small Leclère is made of, _sacrédam!_"

Of course, affairs had not come to this pass all at once. It was a long history, beginning with the time when the two boys had played together, and Raoul was twice as strong as the other, and was very proud of it. Prosper did not care; it was all right so long as they had a good time. But then Prosper began to do things better and better. Raoul did not understand it; he was jealous. Why should he not always be the leader? He had more force. Why should Prosper get ahead? Why should he have better luck at the fishing and the hunting and the farming? It was by some trick. There was no justice in it.

Raoul was not afraid of anything but death; and whatever he wanted, he thought he had a right to have. But he did not know very well how to get it. He would start to chop a log just at the spot where there was a big knot. He was the kind of a man that sets hare-snares on a caribou-trail, and then curses his luck because he catches nothing.

Besides, what ever he did, he was always thinking most about beating somebody else. But Prosper cared most for doing the thing as well as he could. If anyone else could beat him—well, what difference did it make? He would do better the next time.

He looked the log over for a clear place before he began to chop. What he wanted was, not to make the chips fly, but to get the fire started.

You are not to suppose that the one man was a saint and a hero, and the other a fool and a ruffian. No; that sort of thing happens only in books. People in Abbéville were not made on that plan. They were both plain men. But there was a difference between them; and out of that difference grew all the trouble.

It was hard on Vaillantcœur, of course, to see Leclère going ahead, getting rich, clearing off the mortgage on his farm, laying up money with the _notaire_ Bergeron, who acted as banker for the parish—it was hard to look on at this, while he himself stood still, or even slipped back a little, got into debt, had to sell a bit of the land that his father left him. There must be some _chicane_ about it.

But this was not the hardest morsel to swallow. The great thing that stuck in his crop was the idea that the little Prosper, whom he could have whipped so easily, and whom he had protected so loftily, when they were boys, now stood just as high as he did as a capable man—perhaps even higher. Why was it that when the Pearce Brothers, down at Chicoutimi, had a good "_jobbe-de-chantier_" up in the woods on _la Belle Rivière_, they made Leclère the boss, instead of Vaillantcœur? Why did the _curé_ Villeneuve choose Prosper, and not Raoul, to steady the strain of the biggest pole when they were setting up the derrick for the building of the new church?

It was rough, rough! The more Raoul thought of it, the rougher it seemed. The fact that it was a man who had once been his _protégé_, and still insisted on being his best friend, did not make it any smoother. Would you have liked it any better on that account? I am not telling you how it ought to have been, I am telling you how it was. This isn't Vaillantcœur's account-book; it's his story. You must strike your balances as you go along.

And all the time, you understand, he felt sure in his heart that he was stronger and braver than Prosper. He was hungry to prove it. He only knew of one way. He grew more and more keen to try it. Two or three things happened to set an edge on his hunger.

The first was the affair at the shanty on _Lac des Caps_. The wood-choppers, like sailors, have a way of putting a new man through a few tricks to initiate him into the camp. Leclère was bossing the job, with a gang of ten men from St. Raymond under him. Vaillantcœur had just driven a team in over the snow with a load of provisions, and was lounging around the camp as if it belonged to him. It was Sunday afternoon, the regular time for fun, but no one dared to take hold of him. He looked too big. He expressed his opinion of the camp.

"No fun in this _chantier_, _hé_? I suppose that little Leclère he makes you others work, and say your prayers, and then, for the rest you can sleep. _Hé!_ Well, I am going to prepare a little fun for you, my boys. Come, Prosper, get your hat, if you are able to climb a tree."

He snatched the hat from the table by the stove and ran out into the snow. In front of the shanty a good-sized spruce, tall, smooth, very straight, was still standing. He went up the trunk like a bear.

But there was a dead balsam that had fallen against the spruce and lodged on the lower branches. It was barely strong enough to bear the weight of a light man. Up this slanting ladder Prosper ran quickly in his moccasined feet, snatched the hat from Raoul's teeth as he swarmed up the trunk, and ran down again. As he neared the ground, the balsam, shaken from its lodgement, cracked and fell. Raoul was left up the tree, perched among the branches, out of breath. Luck had set the scene for the lumberman's favorite trick.

"Chop him down! chop him down!" was the cry; and a trio of axes were twanging against the spruce-tree, while the other men shouted and laughed and pelted the tree with ice to keep the prisoner from climbing down.

Prosper neither shouted nor chopped, but he grinned a little as he watched the tree quiver and shake, and heard the rain of "_sacrés!_" and "_maudits!_" that came out of the swaying top. He grinned—until he saw that a half-dozen more blows would fell the spruce right on the roof of the shanty.

"Are you fools?" he cried, as he picked up an axe; "you know nothing how to chop. You kill a man. You smash the _cabane_. Let go!" He shoved one of the boys away and sent a score of mighty cuts into the side of the spruce that was farthest from the cabin; then two short cuts on the other side; the tree shivered, staggered, cracked, and swept in a great arc toward the deep snow-drift by the brook. As the top swung earth-ward, Raoul jumped clear of the crashing branches and landed safely in the featherbed of snow, buried up to his neck. Nothing was to be seen of him but his head, like some new kind of fire-work—sputtering bad words.

Well, this was the first thing that put an edge on Vaillantcœur's hunger to fight. No man likes to be chopped down by his friend, even if the friend does it for the sake of saving him from being killed by a fall on the shanty-roof. It is easy to forget that part of it. What you remember is the grin.

The second thing that made it worse was the bad chance that both of these men had to fall in love with the same girl. Of course there were other girls in the village besides Marie Antoinette Girard—plenty of them, and good girls, too. But somehow or other, when they _were beside her_, neither Raoul nor Prosper cared to look at any of them, but only at 'Toinette. Her eyes were so much darker and her cheeks so much more red—bright as the berries of the mountain-ash in September. Her hair hung down to her waist on Sunday in two long braids, brown and shiny like a ripe hazel-nut; and her voice when she laughed made the sound of water tumbling over little stones.

No one knew which of the two lovers she liked best. At school it was certainly Raoul, because he was bigger and bolder. When she came back from her year in the convent at Roberval it was certainly Prosper, because he could talk better and had read more books. He had a volume of _chansons_ full of love and romance, and knew most of them by heart. But this did not last forever. 'Toinette's manners had been polished at the convent, but her ideas were still those of her own people. She never thought that knowledge of books could take the place of strength, in the real battle of life. She was a brave girl, and she felt sure in her heart that the man of the most courage must be the best man after all.

For awhile she appeared to persuade herself that it was Prosper, beyond a doubt, and always took his part when the other girls laughed at him. But this was not altogether a good sign. When a girl really loves, she does not talk, she acts. The current of opinion and gossip in the village was too strong for her. By the time of the affair of the "chopping-down" at _Lac des Caps_, her heart was swinging to and fro like a pendulum. One week she would walk home from mass with Raoul. The next week she would loiter in the front yard on a Saturday evening and talk over the gate with Prosper, until her father called her into the shop to wait on customers.

It was in one of these talks that the pendulum seemed to make its last swing and settle down to its resting-place. Prosper was telling her of the good crop of sugar that he had just made from his maple grove.

"The profit will be large—more than forty piastres—and with that I shall buy at Chicoutimi a new _quatre-roue_, of the finest, a veritable wedding-carriage—if you—if I—'Toinette? Shall we ride together?"

"_Baptême!_ Who told you he said that?"

"I heard him, myself."

"Where?"

"In the store, two nights ago. But it was not for the first time. He said it when we came from the church together, it will be four weeks to-morrow."

"What did you say to him?"

"I told him perhaps he was mistaken. The next wedding might be after the little Prosper had measured the road with the back of the longest man in Abbéville."

The laugh had gone out of her voice now. She was speaking eagerly, and her bosom rose and fell with quick breaths. But Prosper's right arm had dropped from her shoulder, and his hand gripped the fence as he straightened up.

"'Toinette!" he cried, "that was bravely said. And I could do it. Yes, I know I could do it. But, _mon Dieu_, what shall I say? Three years now, he has pushed me, everyone has pushed me, to fight. And you—but I cannot. I am not capable of that."

The girl's hand lay in his as cold and still as a stone. She was silent for a moment, and then asked, coldly, "Why not, Monsieur Leclère?"

"Why not? Because of the old friendship. Because he pulled me out of the river long ago. Because I am still his friend. Because now he hates me too much. Because it would be a black fight. Because shame and evil would come of it, whoever won. That is what I am afraid of, 'Toinette!"

Her hand slipped suddenly away from his. She stepped back from the gate.

"_Tiens!_ You have fear, Monsieur Leclère! Truly? I had not thought of that. It is strange. For so strong a man it is a little stupid. Good-night. I hear my father calling me. Perhaps some one in the store who wants to be served. You must tell me again what you are going to do with the new _quatre-roue_. Good-night!"

She was laughing again. But it was a different laughter. Prosper, at the gate, did not think it sounded like the running of a brook over the stones. No, it was more the noise of the dry branches that knock together in the wind. He did not hear the sigh that came as she shut the door of the house, nor see how slowly she walked through the passage into the store.

III

There seemed to be a great many rainy Saturdays that spring; and in the early summer the trade in Girard's store was so brisk that it appeared to need all the force of the establishment to attend to it. The gate of the front yard had no more strain put upon its hinges. It fell into a stiff propriety of opening and shutting at the touch of people who understood that a gate was made merely to pass through, not to lean upon.

That summer Vaillantcœur had a new hat—_chapeau de castor_—black and shiny—and a new red-silk cravat. They looked fine on Corpus Christi day, when he and 'Toinette walked in the procession as _fiancées_.

You would have thought he would have been content with that. Proud, he certainly was. He stepped like the _curé's_ big rooster with the top-knot—almost as far up in the air as he did along the ground; and he held his chin high, as if he liked to look at things over his nose.

But he was not satisfied all the way through. He thought more of beating Prosper than of getting 'Toinette. _And he was not quite sure that he had beaten him yet._ Perhaps the girl still liked Prosper a little. Perhaps she still thought of his romances, and his _chansons_, and his fine, smooth words, and missed them. Perhaps she was too silent and dull sometimes, when she walked with Raoul; and sometimes she laughed too loud when he talked, more at him than with him. Perhaps those St. Raymond fellows still remembered the way his head stuck out of that cursed snow-drift, and joked about it, and said how clever and quick the little Prosper was. Perhaps—ah, _dame!_ a thousand times perhaps! And only one way to settle them, the old way, the sure way, and all the better now because 'Toinette must be on his side. She must understand for sure that the best man in the parish had chosen her.