The women of the Chapdelaine household had no part in the work of the fields. The father and his three tall sons, all strong and skilled in farm labour, could have managed everything by themselves; if they continued to employ Legare and to pay him wages it was because he had entered their service eleven years before, when the children were young, and they kept him now, partly through habit, partly because they were loth to lose the help of so tremendous a worker. During the haymaking then, Maria and her mother had only their usual tasks: housework, cooking, washing and mending, the milking of three cows and the care of the hens, and once a week the baking which often lasted well into the night.
On the eve of a baking Telesphore was sent to hunt up the bread-pans which habitually found their way into all corners of the house and shed-being in daily use to measure oats for the horse or Indian corn for the fowls, not to mention twenty other casual purposes they were continually serving. By the time all were routed out and scrubbed the dough was rising, and the women hastened to finish other work that their evening watch might be shortened.
Telesphore made a blazing fire below the Oven with branches of gummy cypress that smelled of resin, then fed it with tamarack logs, giving a steady and continuous heat. When the oven was hot enough, Maria slipped in the pans of dough; after which nothing remained but to tend the fire and change the position of the pans as the baking required.
Too small an oven had been built five years before, and ever since then the family did not escape a weekly discussion about the new oven it was imperative to construct, which unquestionably should have been put in hand without delay; but on each trip to the village, by one piece of bad luck and another, someone forgot the necessary cement; and so it happened that the oven had to be filled two or even three times to make weekly provision for the nine mouths of the household.
Maria invariably took charge of the first baking; invariably too, when the oven was ready for the second batch of bread and the evening well advanced, her mother would say considerately:—“You can go to bed, Maria, I will look after the second baking.” And Maria would reply never a word, knowing full well that the mother would presently stretch herself on the bed for a little nap and not awake till morning. She then would revive the smudge that smouldered every evening in the damaged tin pail, install the second batch of bread, and seat herself upon the doorstep, her chin resting in her hands, upheld through the long hours of the night by her inexhaustible patience.
Twenty paces from the house the clay oven with its sheltering roof of boards loomed dark, but the door of the fireplace fitted badly and one red gleam escaped through the chink; the dusky border of the forest stole a little closer in the night. Maria sat very still, delighting in the quiet and the coolness, while a thousand vague dreams circled about her like a flock of wheeling birds.
There was a time when this night-watch passed in drowsiness, as she resignedly awaited the moment when the finished task would bring her sleep; but since the coming of François Paradis the long weekly vigil was very sweet to her, for she could think of him and of herself with nothing to distract her dear imaginings. Simple they were, these thoughts of hers, and never did they travel far afield. In the springtime he will come back; this return of his, the joy of seeing him again, the words he will say when they find themselves once more alone, the first touch of hands and lips. Not easy was it for Maria to make a picture for herself of how these things were to come about.
Yet she essayed. First she repeated his full name two or three times, formally, as others spoke it: François Paradis, from St. Michel de Mistassini … François Paradis … Then suddenly, with sweet intimacy—François!
The evocation fails not. He stands before her tall and strong, bold of eye, his face bronzed with sun and snow-glare. He is by her side, rejoicing at the sight of her, rejoicing that he has kept his faith, has lived the whole year discreetly, without drinking or swearing. There are no blueberries yet to gather—it is only springtime—yet some good reason they find for rambling off to the woods; he walks beside her without word or joining of hands, through the massed laurel flaming into blossom, and naught beyond does either need to flush the cheek, to quicken the beating of the heart.
Now they are seated upon a fallen tree, and thus he speaks: “Were you lonely without me, Maria?” Most surely it is the first question he will put to her; but she is able to carry the dream no further for the sudden pain stabbing her heart. Ah! dear God! how long will she have been lonely for him before that moment comes! A summer to be lived through, an autumn, and all the endless winter! She sighs, but the steadfast patience of the race sustains her, and her thoughts turn upon herself and what the future may be holding.
When she was at St. Prime, one of her cousins who was about to be wedded spoke often to her of marriage. A young man from the village and another from Normandin had both courted her; for long months spending the Sunday evenings together at the house.
“I was fond of them both,”—thus she declared to Maria. “And I really think I liked Zotique best; but he went off to the drive on the St. Maurice, and he wasn’t to be back till summer; then Romeo asked me and I said, ‘Yes.’ I like him very well, too.”
Maria made no answer,
