As Charles Eugene trotted along the beaten road, bearing the travellers to their lonely house, Maria, in obedience to the words of the curé at St. Henri, strove to drive away gloom and put mourning from her; as simple-mindedly as she would have fought the temptation of a dance, of a doubtful amusement or anything that was plainly wrong and hence forbidden.
They reached home as night was falling. The coming of evening was only a slow fading of the light, for, since morning, the heavens had been overcast, the sun obscured. A sadness rested upon the pallid earth; the firs and cypresses did not wear the aspect of living trees and the naked birches seemed to doubt of the springtime. Maria shivered as she left the sleigh, and hardly noticed Chien, barking and gambolling a welcome, or the children who called to her from the doorstep. The world seemed strangely empty, for this evening at least. Love was snatched away, and they forbade remembrance. She went swiftly into the house without looking about her, conscious of a new dread and hatred for the bleak land, the forest’s eternal shade, the snow and the cold—for all those things she had lived her life amongst, which now had wounded her.
XII
Love Bearing Gifts
March came, and one day Tit’Bé brought the news from Honfleur that there would be a large gathering in the evening at Ephrem Surprenant’s to which everyone was invited.
But someone must stay to look after the house, and as Madame Chapdelaine had set her heart on this little diversion after being cooped up for all these months, it was Tit’Bé himself who was left at home. Honfleur, the nearest village to their house, was eight miles away; but what were eight miles over the snow and through the woods compared with the delight of hearing songs and stories, and of talk with people from afar?
A numerous company was assembled under the Surprenant roof: several of the villagers, the three Frenchmen who had bought his nephew Lorenzo’s farm, and also, to the Chapdelaines’ great surprise, Lorenzo himself, back once more from the States upon business that related to the sale and the settling of his father’s affairs. He greeted Maria very warmly, and seated himself beside her.
The men lit their pipes; they chatted about the weather, the condition of the roads, the country news; but the conversation lagged, as though all were looking for it to take some unusual turn. Their glances sought Lorenzo and the three Frenchmen, expecting strange and marvellous tales of distant lands and unfamiliar manners from an assembly so far out of the common. The Frenchmen, only a few months in the country, apparently felt a like curiosity, for they listened, and spoke but little.
Samuel Chapdelaine, who was meeting them for the first time, deemed himself called upon to put them through a catechism in the ingenuous Canadian fashion.
“So you have come here to till the land. How do you like Canada?”
“It is a beautiful country, new and so vast … In the summertime there are many flies, and the winters are trying; but I suppose that one gets used to these things in time.”
The father it was who made reply, his sons only nodding their heads in assent with eyes glued to the floor. Their appearance alone would have served to distinguish them from the other dwellers in the village, but as they spoke the gap widened, and the words that fell from their lips had a foreign ring. There was none of the slowness of the Canadian speech, nor of that indefinable accent found in no corner of France, which is only a peasant blend of the different pronunciations of former emigrants. They used words and turns of phrase one never hears in Quebec, even in the towns, and which to these simple men seemed fastidious and wonderfully refined.
“Before coming to these parts were you farmers in your own country?”
“No.”
“What trade then did you follow?”
The Frenchman hesitated a moment before replying; possibly thinking that what he was about to say would be novel, and hard for them to understand. “I was a tuner myself, a piano-tuner; my two sons here were clerks, Edmond in an office, Pierre in a shop.”
Clerks—that was plain enough for anyone; but their minds were a little hazy as to the father’s business.
However Ephrem Surprenant chimed in with.—“Piano-tuner; that was it, just so!” And his glance at Conrad Neron his neighbour was a trifle superior and challenging, as though intimating.—“You would not believe me, and maybe you don’t know what it means, but now you see …”
“Piano-tuner,” Samuel Chapdelaine echoed in turn, slowly grasping the meaning of the words. “And is that a good trade? Do you earn handsome wages? Not too handsome, eh! … At any rate you are well educated, you and your sons; you can read and write and cipher? And here am I, not able even to read!”
“Nor I!” struck in Ephrem Surprenant, and Conrad Neron and Egide Racicot added: “Nor I!” “Nor I!” in chorus, whereupon the whole of them broke out laughing.
A motion of the Frenchman’s hand told them indulgently that they could very well dispense with these accomplishments; to himself of little enough use at the moment.
“You were not able to make a decent living out of your trades over there. That is so, is it not? And therefore you came here?”
The question was put simply, without thought of offence, for he was amazed that anyone should abandon callings that seemed so easy and so pleasant for this arduous life on the land.
Why indeed had they come? … A few months earlier they would have discovered a thousand reasons and clothed them in words straight from the heart: weariness of the footway and the pavement, of the town’s sullied air; revolt against the prospect of lifelong slavery; some chance stirring word of an irresponsible speaker preaching the gospel of vigour and enterprise, of a free
