A little before daylight they both fell asleep; but soon Maria was awakened by her father who laid his hand upon her shoulder and whispered:—“I am going to harness the horse to go to Mistook for the doctor, and on the way through La Pipe I shall also speak to the curé. It is heartbreaking to hear her moan like this.”
Her eyes open in the ghostly dawn, Maria gave ear to the sounds of his departure: the banging of the stable door against the wall; the horse’s hoofs thudding on the wood of the alley; muffled commands to Charles Eugene: “Hold up, there! Back … Back up! Whoa!” Then the tinkle of the sleigh-bells. In the silence that followed, the sick woman groaned two or three times in her sleep; Maria watched the wan light stealing into the house and thought of her father’s journey, trying to reckon up the distances he must travel.
From their house to Honfleur, eight miles; from Honfleur to La Pipe, six. There her father would speak with the curé, and then pursue his way to Mistook. She corrected herself, and for the ancient Indian name that the people of the country use, gave it the official one bestowed in baptism by the church—St. Coeur de Marie. From La Pipe to St. Coeur de Marie, eight miles … —Eight and six and then eight. Growing confused, she said to herself—“Anyway it is far, and the roads will be heavy.”
Again she felt affrighted at their loneliness, which once hardly gave her a thought. All was well enough when people were in health and merry, and one had no need of help; but with trouble or sickness the woods around seemed to shut them cruelly away from all succour—the woods where horses sink to the chest in snow, where storms smother one in mid-April.
The mother strove to turn in her sleep, waked with a cry of anguish, and the continual moaning began anew. Maria rose and sat by the bed, thinking of the long day just beginning in which she would have neither help nor counsel.
All the dragging hours were burdened with lamentable sound; the groaning from the bed where the sick woman lay never ceased, and haunted the narrow wooden dwelling. Now and then some household noise broke in upon it: the clashing of plates, the clang of the opened stove door, the sound of feet on the planking, Tit’Bé stealing into the house, clumsy and anxious, to ask for news.
“Is she no better?”
Maria answered by a movement of the head. They both stood gazing for a time at the motionless figure under the woollen blankets, giving ear to the sounds of distress; then Tit’Bé departed to his small outdoor duties. When Maria had put the house in order she took up her patient watching, and the sick woman’s agonizing wails seemed to reproach her.
From hour to hour she kept reckoning the times and the distances. “My father should not be far from St. Coeur de Marie … If the doctor is there they will rest the horse for a couple of hours and come back together. But the roads must be very bad; at this time, in the spring, they are sometimes hardly passable.”
And then a little later:—“They should have left; perhaps in going through La Pipe they will stop to speak to the curé; perhaps again he may have started as soon as he heard, without waiting for them. In that case he might be here at any moment.”
But the fall of night brought no one, and it was only about seven o’clock that the sound of sleigh-bells was heard, and her father and the doctor arrived. The latter came into the house alone, put his bag on the table and began to pull off his overcoat, grumbling all the while.
“With the roads in this condition,” said he, “it is no small affair to get about and visit the sick. And as for you folk, you seem to have hidden yourselves as far in the woods as you could. Great Heavens! You might very well all die without a soul coming to help you.”
After warming himself for a little while at the stove he approached the bedside. “Well, good mother, so we have taken the notion to be sick, just like people who have money to spend on such things!”
But after a brief examination he ceased to jest, saying:—“She really is sick, I do believe.”
It was with no affectation that he spoke in the fashion of the peasantry; his grandfather and his father were tillers of the soil, and he had gone straight from the farm to study medicine in Quebec, amongst other young fellows for the most part like himself—grandsons, if not sons of farmers—who had all clung to the plain country manner and the deliberate speech of their fathers. He was tall and heavily built, with a grizzled moustache, and his large face wore the slightly aggrieved expression of one whose native cheerfulness is being continually dashed through listening to the tale of others’ ills for which he is bound to show a decent sympathy.
Chapdelaine came in when he had unharnessed and fed the horse. He and his children sat at a little distance while the doctor was going through his programme.
Every one of them was thinking:—“Presently we shall know what is the matter, and the doctor will give her the right medicines.” But when the examination was ended, instead of turning to the bottles in his bag, he seemed uncertain and began to ask interminable questions. How had it happened, and where, particularly, did she feel pain … Had she ever before suffered from the same trouble … The answers did not seem to enlighten him very much; then he turned to the sick woman herself, only to receive confused statements and complaints.
“If it is just a wrench that she has given herself,” at length he announced, “she will get well without any meddling; there is
