A Woman of the North

by Arthur Stringer

 

A WOMAN OF THE NORTH.

A Canadian Tale

"Good-bye!" cried little Lizette, standing out in the open door, with her breath turning white in the cold air.

It was not often, in that lonely bush-land, that she saw a woman. She had never seen one with cheeks so clear and crimson—like the last sunlight over the western pine-trees, she said afterwards, and eyes as deep and brown as the little pools in the rock-clefts, where the frogs croak and gurgle in the spring when the last snow is gone. "Good-bye! Adieu!" cried the child once more, waving her little red hand, while the woman turned from the clearing into the white roadway.

"Adieu!" called back Jeanne Bourdeau, as her moccasins crunched on the hard snow of the roadway. Her clear voice echoed and re-echoed across the clearing. Then the child standing in the doorway shivered with the cold. She took a last look, and went in and closed the door. She put another huge piece of wood in the box-stove, though its sides were already a dull red from the mass of glowing coals within it, and then warmed her hands in the cloud of steam that spurted from the kettle. She went quietly over to the side of the little bed where her mother lay, still weak from child-birth. Both mother and child were sleeping, so little Lizette turned to the window, and watched the stranger, who had come into her life for one momentous hour, as she passed down the snow-covered road and disappeared over the hill-crest, towards the pine-lands.

But Jeanne Bourdeau herself was not thinking of little Lizette; for she paused when she came to the little hollow at the eastern edge of the lonely pine-lands, and gazed long and thoughtfully down the road that wound through the forest, already growing dim with the afternoon twilight of a Canadian mid-winter.

The sun was low, and the glow of the white snow made her eyes ache. For a moment she thought it would be better to turn back; for it was a long way to Pierre's log-cabin. She knew it would be a bitterly cold night. Far to the east she could already see the twinkling lights of the village of Silver Rapids; and she knew this lonely little hollow would be the rubicon of her woman's life. In the west, above the dark fringe of the pine-tops, burned a long line of clear, wintry crimson. Higher up in the sky it turned to tawny gold, and then to a tranquil, brooding opal. But its seeming quiet serenity made it none the less austere and pitiless. Far over the hills on the north the quiver of a little, indistinct halo showed where the Northern Lights, later in the night, would come and gleam. Jeanne remembered that Little Crow, the old half-breed, had told her they were the spirits of dead chiefs fighting their enemies. The child Lizette had seen the first glimmer of the Lights from the window, and said they were the angels who come away from Heaven every winter-time to gather handsful of snow to throw down to the wicked spirits who were burning forever and forever and forever in hell. The old Curé had told her so. Jeanne wondered which was true.

It was very quiet and lonely. The only sound was the crunching of her feet on the dry, crisp snow. The early twilight seemed tinged with the strangeness, the mystery, of the silent North. To one who had not learned to know it the silence might have seemed like the silence of death. To the heart of Jeanne it seemed holy. An old, half-remembered line was running through her mind again and again:

"Dark and true and tender is the North."

She walked on, still half-irresolute, taking in the scene before her with no gesture or expression, for she was a daughter of that legendary, mysterious Northland which teaches one to feel but never to express. So the silence touched her wondering heart with a strange, indefinite awe. She could not help fervently crossing herself, and muttering the pater noster which old Father Sebastian had taught her when she was a little child in the village of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, the little town where the pilgrims come to drink of the wondrous waters of the Holy Spring, down where the blue St. Lawrence widens into the bluer lake that nurses the Isle of Orleans.

Perhaps Jeanne was touched by some reminiscent influence of the silent twilight, for as she walked along she began to muse on the memories that clustered about that little prayer. In those old days, she remembered, she often used to repeat it, for that was before she had drifted away from the faith, and long before she had come with Pierre Delorme, her old-time paramour, from Beaupré into this wild country.

Pierre had been a bad man, she knew, and a scoffer at the faith, and a hater of the church; and she had heard bad things said of him. Yet when he was a brown-eyed boy at old Beaupré they had played together on the rafts down by the river. And one's heart often plays one strange tricks. She had loved him all her life; and long ago she had prayed in secret before the shrine of Ste. Anne, and kissed the sacred finger-bone of the mother of the Virgin, so that Pierre's heart might be made pure. She had even climbed, again and again, the Scala Sonata at Beaupré, on her knees, muttering a prayer on every step that she might in time lead him back to the faith. She had never told Pierre. He would have laughed with his merry laugh—and she did not like to hear him scoff.

But when Pierre had broken the arm of the young Englishman with one blow of his fork-handle as he was working in the hay fields at the riverside, for calling her a wicked name because Pierre had lived with her before they were married, she went with him from Beaupré, and came across the Maurice into this lonely land where few men ventured, except the lumbermen and the voyageurs, and where no one would know of their old life. The pine-lands were thick with timber, waiting for the woodman's axe, but the summers were short, and the winters long and lonely. But, at last, just before the child was born, Pierre sent to the mission at Silver-Rapids for the minister, and on just such a night as this, two years ago, they were married; for Pierre had said it would be better for the child's sake. As for Pierre himself, he did not care, for was he not always a scoffer?

Then after 'Tite Pierre had come to them, Pierre had done her the great wrong. He had left her and stolen away with Ninon Baby, the woman who was known by every lumber-man who frequented Silver-Rapids, when his winter's work was done and his pockets were heavy with money.

It was the old blood coming out, she had said. So when the two ran away together, just as the snows were coming on, she followed after them; and the child died. Then she cursed him with her own lips, and soon after she met him face to face in the streets of Notre Dame des Anges, and there he told her he was tired of her. That had touched her pride; and she said no more, but turned and left him.

Then she recalled how she went back through the snow to Silver-Rapids, and how the minister at the mission had taken her into his own house to nurse his wife with the terrible cough.

Later, when they told her Ninon Baby had died in the heart of the winter, and Pierre had gone back to live alone in his own home among the pine-lands, she had said nothing. The minister said it was the judgment of God. But Jeanne knew better. It was simply because the woman had been born across the sea in sunny France, where the winter does not creep into one's bones and give one a cough, and then it is all over.

Jeanne remembered how she used to sing, at that time, the boat songs of the Canadian voyageurs and snatches of old French folk songs, to show them she was happy. But she had often broken off in the middle of her verse to look from the window towards the west, where the pine-lands were. Yet she had stayed on through the brief but golden summer and the fragrant, dreamy norland autumn and deep into the long, silent winter, until the wife of the minister had died. Then he came and told her he was going back to his old home in England. And she herself stood long at the window that looked out on the sun going down over the pine-lands, and at last said that she, too, was going back to Pierre.

••••••

The woman was aroused from her reverie by the sound of footsteps echoing along the quiet road, and she looked back over her shoulder. It seemed to her she knew that tall, spare figure that came swinging down the road with its slouching Indian tread. She stopped and looked back once more. Yes: it was Little Crow, as he was ironically called, the half-breed. She stopped and waited for him.

The dark, stolid face betrayed no surprise. "Ah! Jeanne Bourdeau," he said as he came up to her. "Where do you go?"

Jeanne hesitated a moment, and then said: "Back to my husband."

"Good!" half-grunted the half-breed. Little Crow, like most people about Silver-Rapids, had picked up her story. Jeanne had no heart to talk, so the strange pair walked on in silence, until the half-breed stopped and looked towards the north, where a straggling path stretched away from the roadway through the bush.

He pointed to the north. "I must go here," he said. "Pierre is a bad man. But these women, they twist you round their fingers like prairie grass. It is good. You have the red lights of the north in your cheeks. Pierre is no fool!" And saying this the half-breed turned into the deep snow that lay upon the forest path, and plodded away. He seemed a strange figure, moving across the blank, white background. Jeanne stopped and looked after him. She thought of little Lizette, and then of the half-breed, and it seemed strange to her that people should come together for a little while, and then pass away again for ever. The world was so big! And beyond Quebec there was Manitoba, and beyond that the Great West, and then, she had heard, was the sea. If one had only a little home somewhere, that one might not think about this big world!

But night was coming on, the night of a northern Canadian winter, and Jeanne knew what that meant. The thought of a little log-house she knew of between two hills among the pines came into her mind, and caused her to quicken her steps.

The sleigh-tracks grew fainter and fainter, and the crunching of the snow-crust under her feet echoed and re-echoed along the desolate little road between the gloomy trees. At one time it sounded like the crying of children; then again it sounded like wolf-barks to her. Again, she thought it seemed like the crying of her baby on the night that—but she banished the thought.

She trilled a French-Canadian song Pierre used to sing when he wooed her long ago down on the blue St. Lawrence. A reverberating chorus of antiphonal notes came echoing back to her along the tree-lined road, so mellowed and sweetened that she marvelled at the richness of her own voice. The keen, cold air, exhilarating as the wine they used to make down at Beaupré in the early autumns, made her strong heart beat light and quick. So she went on, calling out a few notes of her song at a time, and then waiting for the echo to die out along the road.

Again and again she did this, as she crunched along, and stopped to listen half-childishly to one long, clear echo. Yet, as she listened, another sound came from among the pines. It was a low cry, like the groan of a thing in pain. A tingle of fear ran along her limbs. She was not a coward, yet she was feminine. She was a woman who had been made brave by solitude, and courageous by suffering. She listened again,—still the cry, low, despairing, terrible. It was the second time that night Jeanne crossed herself.

Then she floundered into the loose snow, and pushed through the drifted banks among the pines. She stopped and called. There was no reply; and she pierced still deeper into the dark forest twilight. She was on the point of calling out again, when she suddenly came upon it. And it was Pierre, her husband, pinned down on his back by a fallen pine-tree that lay across his thighs, crushing him down in the snow and frozen earth.

Jeanne understood it all in one moment. As soon as her quick eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she saw his axe lying near him, just beyond his reach. It was the old trick,—a falling tree striking on a smaller one, and swerving. The entrapped man had beaten the snow with his arms, in his frenzied despair, to keep out the cold a little longer. But now he was lying exhausted, quietly moaning. And the winter night was stealing on.

Jeanne's first thought was to take the axe and cut through that part of the tree-trunk which pinned him down. She was a daughter of the wilderness, and had been taught to handle an axe, even before she had learned the use of a needle. Yet she was only a woman. On second thoughts she determined otherwise.

She went over to him and dropped on her knees beside him in the snow. Her wife's heart ached for him.

"Pierre!" she said, bending low over him; "Pierre!"

To the half-conscious Pierre it sounded like the voice of an angel. He slowly opened his eyes.

"Jeanne! Mon Dieu! is it you, Jeanne?" he cried feebly, for the cold had crept into his poor body.

"Yes; it is Jeanne." Then, after a pause; "Pierre, you will die."

Pierre's only reply was a groan.

"Is it well with you, Pierre? Are you all ready to die now?" said the woman bending over him.

"Mother of Christ, I cannot die!" groaned the man, as he tore the crust of the snow until blood oozed from his finger-ends and stained the white ground.

"But you must, Pierre," said Jeanne quietly and solemnly. Then she went on: "You have been a bad husband to me, Pierre, in your time; and you did me a wrong; but that is all over now. And I think I love you more than ever. So, after you are gone, I will go and live in your log-house; and I will put the cross over your grave; and I will pray for you,—and perhaps you will wake up in heaven. And after you die to-night, if the mother of Christ brought one angel to you, and her name was Jeanne, would you still curse her, and say you were tired of her?"

"Ah, Jeanne! I was mad to do it then! Mon Dieu! you see I pay for it; I thought it all out to-night. I have been a bad man; and now I pay for it, and so did she. I was coming to you, Jeanne, on the day of the New Year; I swear I was coming to you, but I waited because I was afraid. But now it is too late—too late. Voila, the pain is going, and I—I will sleep."

"But remember, Pierre! You will promise to be good to me in heaven, after you die? Will you promise me?" aid Jeanne, shaking him to keep him awake.

"Yes—yes—in heaven—after I die," the man repeated wearily.

"Then say this prayer after me, Pierre, for your soul!" And she bent still lower over him and repeated her pater noster. The only reply was the falling of his arm and the sinking of his head back in the snow. He was sleeping the frozen sleep that has taken the pain from many a northern heart.

Jeanne had played her part. When she saw the state he was in she started up in alarm from the snow. She ran across the small clearing out into the roadway towards the little house between the hills, a long half-mile away. She was surprised at her own calm cruelty. It might be already too late to save him. She was panting when she reached the house and broke open the door with a stick of cordwood. Inside everything was drearily cold and dark. But it did not take Jeanne's deft hand long to make a fire in the box-stove. She ransacked the little cupboards and found a huge flask of brandy. Then she gathered together the blankets and buffalo-robes and skins, and spread them out before the fire. From one of the out-houses she took a light hand-sleigh and a keen-toothed cross-cut saw. She knew she would need them both before her work was finished. She flung a couple of robes over the sleigh, and in twenty minutes from the time she had been quietly praying for the soul of the freezing man, there rang out on the clear night air the music of an axe clanging against the pine-trunk that lay across her husband's body. She had forced some brandy down his throat, and had thrust a robe partially under his body, and flung one over him. The thought that she had wasted precious time in her woman's whim made her work with a desperate energy. She took the saw, when she could chop no more, and watched with a strange pleasure how the sharp teeth bit into the green wood.

At last she was through; the last stroke was given, and she sat back in the snow, panting and trembling. The long end of the pine-tree settled scarcely an inch or two, so she knew no bones would be broken or crushed, for all the weight of the tree had not rested on the man's body. The short pieces of bole over Pierre's legs was not difficult to roll away... Jeanne almost laughed when she saw what a sadly hacked-up stump it was; and yet there came a time, years afterwards, when she, and Pierre, and 'Tite Pierre, their second boy, stood by a certain pine-log in the clearing, while Pierre laughingly showed the child what an axe-woman his mother had been in the old days.

But Jeanne had to swallow a scalding draught of brandy before she could lift the rigid Pierre upon the sleigh, and after that she dragged him slowly and wearily across the snow-covered hills to his home. She could scarcely lift him on the bed. She thawed out his frozen feet with snow, and gave him brandy mixed with boiling water from the kettle singing on the stove, and rolled him up in hot blankets, and when everything was done she sat down and waited. Then she went over nearer to him, and sat on the bedside, listening to his heavy breathing. And as she watched, sleep crept over her, the tired head fell wearily forward, and she remembered no more.

When Jeanne awoke the wintry morning sunlight was streaming hazily through the little frosted window panes. The fire in the stove had sunk down to a mass of gray ashes. But in its heart Jeanne still found a bed of coals; and Pierre still slept. She bent over him and felt his brow. As she expected, it was hot and feverish; but his breathing was deep and regular. She knew it would take a few days to bring him round. But she felt that all was well, for she had nursed Father Ignace back to life when they had found him in the snow after the great blizzard of the winter before she left Ste. Anne de Beaupré. And Pierre was to Father Ignace what an iron bar is to a little candle.

Jeanne's arms were stiff, and her shoulders were sore, but there was a happiness lurking about her red lips as she arranged her thick brown hair before the little cracked looking-glass. She set about her household duties with a light heart. She examined the blankets and robes that covered Pierre, and tucked him up again and again, with needless care. She prepared gruels and broths for him, and when she could do nothing more sat and watched his face. All that was woman in her brooded over him tenderly, even maternally. And her heart seemed so light she might have carolled a song, but that she feared to awaken him. She remembered how the wife of the minister at Silver Rapids had called her a strange woman. Jeanne knew her secret was not a deep one, and she blushed half-girlishly as she looked down at the slumbering man.

At last the sleeper moved uneasily and sighed. She went over to him, her heart beating tumultuously. She touched his forehead lightly, and found it cooler. The touch had been as soft as a falling snowflake, but it awakened Pierre.

He opened his eyes and looked up at her with a vague, wondering gaze. One faint cry broke from his lips: "Jeanne!"

"Hush! hush! Pierre," said Jeanne, smiling over him, "you are in heaven now, and the mother of Christ might hear you."

Pierre was silent. At first he could not think; but slowly, deliciously, it all dawned on him. The kettle was singing on the stove, the winter sunlight was streaming through the window. There was a pain in his bruised limbs, and an ache in his poor frost-bitten feet that he knew too well was in no wise celestial. And Jeanne still stood smiling over him with her sorrowful, reproving, tender face and her loving, saintly eyes.

"Remember your promise, Pierre. You swore to love me in heaven, after you died. And the old Pierre died last night out in the cold; and so, Pierre, can we not both be in heaven now, and leave the old sins behind?" And she bent over him and said little love-speeches to him in French, lapsing back into the language of their childhood, just as a happy lover falls into baby-talk.

Pierre did not reply. But the little snow-birds that hopped and twittered on the window-sill that mid-winter morning looked in and saw a strange thing. They saw a man reach up with his arms and draw a smiling woman down on his breast. And if they had listened at the window later in the day, they might have heard the woman singing a quaint old French-Canadian love-song, but they would scarcely know it was the song her lover used to sing when he wooed her in the little village of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, down on the blue St. Lawrence.

Arthur Stringer