Old Man Savarin and Other Stories

E >> Edward William Thomson >> Old Man Savarin and Other Stories

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Peter did not speak; he could not.

"I was going round to your place to-morrow," resumed John, cheerfully,
"to see if I couldn't hire you again. There's a job of hewing for you
in the Conlonge shanty,--a man gone off sick. But I can't give more 'n
twenty-two, or say twenty-three, seeing you're an old neighbor. What
do you say?"

Peter still said nothing; he was choking.

"You had better have a bit of something more than bacon and flour,
Peter," he went on, "and I'll give you a hand to carry the truck
home. I guess your wife won't mind seeing me with you; then she'll
know that you've taken a job with me again, you see. Come along and
give me a hand to hitch the mare up. I'll drive you down."

"Ah--ah--Boss--Boss!" spoke Peter then, with terrible gasps between.
"Boss--O my God, Mr. Pontiac--I can't never look you in the face
again!"

"Peter McGrath--old neighbor,"--and John Pontiac laid his hand on the
shaking shoulder,--"I guess I know all about it; I guess I do.
Sometimes a man is driven he don't know how. Now we will say no more
about it. I'll load up, and you come right along with me. And mind,
I'll do the talking to your wife."

* * * * *

Mary Ann McGrath was in a terrible frame of mind. What had become of
Peter?

She had gone out to look down the road, and had been recalled by
Number Eleven's crying. Number Ten then chimed in; Nine, too, awoke,
and determined to resume his privileges as an infant. One after
another they got up and huddled around her--craving, craving--all but
the three eldest, who had been well practised in the stoical
philosophy by the gradual decrease of their rations. But these bounced
up suddenly at the sound of a grand jangle of bells.

Could it be? Mr. Pontiac they had no doubt about; but was that real
bacon that he laid on the kitchen table? Then a side of beef, a can of
tea; next a bag of flour, and again an actual keg of sirup. Why, this
was almost incredible! And, last, he came in with an immense round
loaf of bread! The children gathered about it; old John almost
sickened with sorrow for them, and hurrying out his jacknife, passed
big hunks around.

"Well, now, Mrs. McGrath," he said during these operations, "I don't
hardly take it kindly of you and Peter not to have come up to an old
neighbor's house before this for a bit of a loan. It's well I met
Peter to-night. Maybe he'd never have told me your troubles--not but
what I blame myself for not suspecting how it was a bit sooner. I just
made him take a little loan for the present. No, no; don't be talking
like that! Charity! tut! tut! it's just an advance of wages. I've got
a job for Peter; he'll be on pay to-morrow again."

At that Mary Ann burst out crying again. "Oh, God bless you, Mr.
Pontiac! it's a kind man you are! May the saints be about your bed!"

With that she ran out to Peter, who still stood by the sleigh; she put
the baby in his arms, and clinging to her husband's shoulder, cried
more and more.

And what did obstinate Peter McGrath do? Why, he cried, too, with
gasps and groans that seemed almost to kill him.

"Go in," he said; "go in, Mary Ann--go in--and kiss--the feet of him.
Yes--and the boards--he stands on. You don't know what he's done--for
me. It's broke I am--the bad heart of me--broke entirely--with the
goodness of him. May the heavens be his bed!"

"Now, Mrs. McGrath," cried old John, "never you mind Peter; he's a bit
light-headed to-night. Come away in and get a bite for him. I'd like a
dish of tea myself before I go home." Didn't that touch on her Irish
hospitality bring her in quickly!

"Mind you this, Peter," said the old man, going out then, "don't you
be troubling your wife with any little secrets about to-night; that's
between you and me. That's all I ask of you."

Thus it comes about that to this day, when Peter McGrath's fifteen
children have helped him to become a very prosperous farmer, his wife
does not quite understand the depth of worship with which he speaks of
old John Pontiac.

Mrs. Pontiac never knew the story of the night.

"Never mind who it was, Jane," John said, turning out the light, on
returning to bed, "except this,--it was a neighbor in sore trouble."

"Stealing--and you helped him! Well, John, such a man as you are!"

"Jane, I don't ever rightly know what kind of a man I might be,
suppose hunger was cruel on me, and on you, and all of us! Let us
bless God that he's saved us from the terriblest temptations, and
thank him most especially when he inclines our hearts--inclines our
hearts--that's all."

GREAT GODFREY'S LAMENT.

"Hark to Angus! Man, his heart will be sore the night! In five years I
have not heard him playing 'Great Godfrey's Lament,'" said old
Alexander McTavish, as with him I was sitting of a June evening, at
sundown, under a wide apple-tree of his orchard-lawn.

When the sweet song-sparrows of the Ottawa valley had ceased their
plaintive strains, Angus McNeil began on his violin. This night,
instead of "Tullochgorum" or "Roy's Wife" or "The March of the
McNeils," or any merry strathspey, he crept into an unusual movement,
and from a distance came the notes of an exceeding strange strain
blent with the meditative murmur of the Rataplan Rapids.

I am not well enough acquainted with musical terms to tell the method
of that composition in which the wail of a Highland coronach seemed
mingled with such mournful crooning as I had heard often from Indian
voyageurs north of Lake Superior. Perhaps that fancy sprang from my
knowledge that Angus McNeil's father had been a younger son of the
chief of the McNeil clan, and his mother a daughter of the greatest
man of the Cree nation.

"Ay, but Angus is wae," sighed old McTavish. "What will he be seeing
the now? It was the night before his wife died that he played yon
last. Come, we will go up the road. He does be liking to see the
people gather to listen."

We walked, maybe three hundred yards, and stood leaning against the
ruined picket-fence that surrounds the great stone house built by
Hector McNeil, the father of Angus, when he retired from his position
as one of the "Big Bourgeois" of the famous Northwest Fur Trading
Company.

The huge square structure of four stories and a basement is divided,
above the ground floor, into eight suites, some of four, and some of
five rooms. In these suites the fur-trader, whose ideas were all
patriarchal, had designed that he and his Indian wife, with his seven
sons and their future families, should live to the end of his days and
theirs. That was a dream at the time when his boys were all under nine
years old, and Godfrey little more than a baby in arms.

The ground-floor is divided by a hall twenty-five feet wide into two
long chambers, one intended to serve as a dining-hall for the
multitude of descendants that Hector expected to see round his old
age, the other as a withdrawing-room for himself and his wife, or for
festive occasions. In this mansion Angus McNeil now dwelt alone.

He sat out that evening on a balcony at the rear of the hall, whence
he could overlook the McTavish place and the hamlet that extends a
quarter of a mile further down the Ottawa's north shore. His right
side was toward the large group of French-Canadian people who had
gathered to hear him play. Though he was sitting, I could make out
that his was a gigantic figure.

"Ay--it will be just exactly 'Great Godfrey's Lament,'" McTavish
whispered. "Weel do I mind him playing yon many's the night after
Godfrey was laid in the mools. Then he played it no more till before
his ain wife died. What is he seeing now? Man, it's weel kenned he has
the second sight at times. Maybe he sees the pit digging for himself.
He's the last of them."

"Who was Great Godfrey?" I asked, rather loudly.

Angus McNeil instantly cut short the "Lament," rose from his chair,
and faced us.

"Aleck McTavish, who have you with you?" he called imperiously.

"My young cousin from the city, Mr. McNeil," said McTavish, with
deference.

"Bring him in. I wish to spoke with you, Aleck McTavish. The young man
that is not acquaint with the name of Great Godfrey McNeil can come
with you. I will be at the great door."

"It's strange-like," said McTavish, as we went to the upper gate. "He
has not asked me inside for near five years. I'm feared his wits is
disordered, by his way of speaking. Mind what you say. Great Godfrey
was most like a god to Angus."

When Angus McNeil met us at the front door I saw he was verily a
giant. Indeed, he was a wee bit more than six and a half feet tall
when he stood up straight. Now he was stooped a little, not with age,
but with consumption,--the disease most fatal to men of mixed white
and Indian blood. His face was dark brown, his features of the Indian
cast, but his black hair had not the Indian lankness. It curled
tightly round his grand head.

Without a word he beckoned us on into the vast withdrawing room.
Without a word he seated himself beside a large oaken centre-table,
and motioned us to sit opposite.

Before he broke silence, I saw that the windows of that great chamber
were hung with faded red damask; that the heads of many a bull moose,
buck, bear, and wolf grinned among guns and swords and claymores from
its walls; that charred logs, fully fifteen feet long, remained in the
fireplace from the last winter's burning; that there were three dim
portraits in oil over the mantel; that the room contained much frayed
furniture, once sumptuous of red velvet; and that many skins of wild
beasts lay strewn over a hard-wood floor whose edges still retained
their polish and faintly gleamed in rays from the red west.

That light was enough to show that two of the oil paintings must be
those of Hector McNeil and his Indian wife. Between these hung one of
a singularly handsome youth with yellow hair.

"Here my father lay dead," cried Angus McNeil, suddenly striking the
table. He stared at us silently for many seconds, then again struck
the table with the side of his clenched fist. "He lay here dead on
this table--yes! It was Godfrey that straked him out all alone on this
table. You mind Great Godfrey, Aleck McTavish."

"Well I do, Mr. McNeil; and your mother yonder,--a grand lady she
was." McTavish spoke with curious humility, seeming wishful, I
thought, to comfort McNeil's sorrow by exciting his pride.

"Ay--they'll tell hereafter that she was just exactly a squaw," cried
the big man, angrily. "But grand she was, and a great lady, and a
proud. Oh, man, man! but they were proud, my father and my Indian
mother. And Godfrey was the pride of the hearts of them both. No
wonder; but it was sore on the rest of us after they took him apart
from our ways."

Aleck McTavish spoke not a word, and big Angus, after a long pause,
went on as if almost unconscious of our presence:--

"White was Godfrey, and rosy of the cheek like my father; and the blue
eyes of him would match the sky when you'll be seeing it up through a
blazing maple on a clear day of October. Tall, and straight and grand
was Godfrey, my brother. What was the thing Godfrey could not do? The
songs of him hushed the singing-birds on the tree, and the fiddle he
would play to take the soul out of your body. There was no white one
among us till he was born.

"The rest of us all were just Indians--ay, Indians, Aleck McTavish.
Brown we were, and the desire of us was all for the woods and the
river. Godfrey had white sense like my father, and often we saw the
same look in his eyes. My God, but we feared our father!"

Angus paused to cough. After the fit he sat silent for some minutes.
The voice of the great rapid seemed to fill the room. When he spoke
again, he stared past our seat with fixed, dilated eyes, as if tranced
by a vision.

"Godfrey, Godfrey--you hear! Godfrey, the six of us would go over the
falls and not think twice of it, if it would please you, when you were
little. Oich, the joy we had in the white skin of you, and the fine
ways, till my father and mother saw we were just making an Indian of
you, like ourselves! So they took you away; ay, and many's the day the
six of us went to the woods and the river, missing you sore. It's then
you began to look on us with that look that we could not see was
different from the look we feared in the blue eyes of our father. Oh,
but we feared him, Godfrey! And the time went by, and we feared and we
hated you that seemed lifted up above your Indian brothers!"

"Oich, the masters they got to teach him!" said Angus, addressing
himself again to my cousin. "In the Latin and the Greek they trained
him. History books he read, and stories in song. Ay, and the manners
of Godfrey! Well might the whole pride of my father and mother be on
their one white son. A grand young gentleman was Godfrey,--Great
Godfrey we called him, when he was eighteen.

"The fine, rich people that would come up in bateaux from Montreal to
visit my father had the smile and the kind word for Godfrey; but they
looked upon us with the eyes of the white man for the Indian. And that
look we were more and more sure was growing harder in Godfrey's eyes.
So we looked back at him with the eyes of the wolf that stares at the
bull moose, and is fierce to pull him down, but dares not try, for the
moose is too great and lordly.

"Mind you, Aleck McTavish, for all we hated Godfrey when we thought he
would be looking at us like strange Indians--for all that, yet we were
proud of him that he was our own brother. Well, we minded how he was
all like one with us when he was little; and in the calm looks of
him, and the white skin, and the yellow hair, and the grandeur of him,
we had pride, do you understand? Ay, and in the strength of him we
were glad. Would we not sit still and pleased when it was the talk how
he could run quicker than the best, and jump higher than his head--ay,
would we! Man, there was none could compare in strength with Great
Godfrey, the youngest of us all!

"He and my father and mother more and more lived by themselves in this
room. Yonder room across the hall was left to us six Indians. No
manners, no learning had we; we were no fit company for Godfrey. My
mother was like she was wilder with love of Godfrey the more he grew
and the grander, and never a word for days and weeks together did she
give to us. It was Godfrey this, and Godfrey that, and all her thought
was Godfrey!

"Most of all we hated him when she was lying dead here on this table.
We six in the other room could hear Godfrey and my father groan and
sigh. We would step softly to the door and listen to them kissing her
that was dead,--them white, and she Indian like ourselves,--and us not
daring to go in for the fear of the eyes of our father. So the
soreness was in our hearts so cruel hard that we would not go in till
the last, for all their asking. My God, my God, Aleck McTavish, if you
saw her! she seemed smiling like at Godfrey, and she looked like him
then, for all she was brown as November oak-leaves, and he white that
day as the froth on the rapid.

"That put us farther from Godfrey than before. And farther yet we were
from him after, when he and my father would be walking up and down, up
and down, arm in arm, up and down the lawn in the evenings. They would
be talking about books, and the great McNeils in Scotland. The six of
us knew we were McNeils, for all we were Indians, and we would listen
to the talk of the great pride and the great deeds of the McNeils
that was our own kin. We would be drinking the whiskey if we had it,
and saying: 'Godfrey to be the only McNeil! Godfrey to take all the
pride of the name of us!' Oh, man, man! but we hated Godfrey sore."

Big Angus paused long, and I seemed to see clearly the two
fair-haired, tall men walking arm in arm on the lawn in the twilight,
as if unconscious or careless of being watched and overheard by six
sore-hearted kinsmen.

"You'll mind when my father was thrown from his horse and carried into
this room, Aleck McTavish? Ay, well you do. But you nor no other
living man but me knows what came about the night that he died.

"Godfrey was alone with him. The six of us were in yon room. Drink we
had, but cautious we were with it, for there was a deed to be done
that would need all our senses. We sat in a row on the floor--we were
Indians--it was our wigwam--we sat on the floor to be against the
ways of them two. Godfrey was in here across the hall from us; alone
he was with our white father. He would be chief over us by the will,
no doubt,--and if Godfrey lived through that night it would be
strange.

"We were cautious with the whiskey, I told you before. Not a sound
could we hear of Godfrey or of my father. Only the rapid, calling and
calling,--I mind it well that night. Ay, and well I mind the striking
of the great clock,--tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,--I listened and I
dreamed on it till I doubted but it was the beating of my father's
heart.

"Ten o'clock was gone by, and eleven was near. How many of us sat
sleeping I know not; but I woke up with a start, and there was Great
Godfrey, with a candle in his hand, looking down strange at us, and us
looking up strange at him.

"'He is dead,' Godfrey said.

"We said nothing.

"'Father died two hours ago,' Godfrey said.

"We said nothing.

"'Our father is white,--he is very white,' Godfrey said, and he
trembled. 'Our mother was brown when she was dead.'

"Godfrey's voice was wild.

"'Come, brothers, and see how white is our father,' Godfrey said.

"No one of us moved.

"'Won't you come? In God's name, come,' said Godfrey. 'Oich--but it is
very strange! I have looked in his face so long that now I do not know
him for my father. He is like no kin to me, lying there. I am alone,
alone.'

"Godfrey wailed in a manner. It made me ashamed to hear his voice like
that--him that looked like my father that was always silent as a
sword--him that was the true McNeil.

"'You look at me, and your eyes are the eyes of my mother,' says
Godfrey, staring wilder. 'What are you doing here, all so still?
Drinking the whiskey? I am the same as you. I am your brother. I will
sit with you, and if you drink the whiskey, I will drink the whiskey,
too.'

"Aleck McTavish! with that he sat down on the floor in the dirt and
litter beside Donald, that was oldest of us all.

"'Give me the bottle,' he said. 'I am as much Indian as you, brothers.
What you do I will do, as I did when I was little, long ago.'

"To see him sit down in his best,--all his learning and his grand
manners as if forgotten,--man, it was like as if our father himself
was turned Indian, and was low in the dirt!

"What was in the heart of Donald I don't know, but he lifted the
bottle and smashed it down on the floor.

"'God in heaven! what's to become of the McNeils! You that was the
credit of the family, Godfrey!' says Donald with a groan.

"At that Great Godfrey jumped to his feet like he was come awake.

"'You're fitter to be the head of the McNeils than I am, Donald,'
says he; and with that the tears broke out of his eyes, and he cast
himself into Donald's arms. Well, with that we all began to cry as if
our hearts would break. I threw myself down on the floor at Godfrey's
feet, and put my arms round his knees the same as I'd lift him up when
he was little. There I cried, and we all cried around him, and after a
bit I said:--

"'Brothers, this was what was in the mind of Godfrey. He was all alone
in yonder. We are his brothers, and his heart warmed to us, and he
said to himself, it was better to be like us than to be alone, and he
thought if he came and sat down and drank the whiskey with us, he
would be our brother again, and not be any more alone.'

"'Ay, Angus, Angus, but how did you know that?' says Godfrey, crying;
and he put his arms round my neck, and lifted me up till we were
breast to breast. With that we all put our arms some way round one
another and Godfrey, and there we stood sighing and swaying and
sobbing a long time, and no man saying a word.

"'Oh, man, Godfrey dear, but our father is gone, and who can talk with
you now about the Latin, and the history books, and the great
McNeils--and our mother that's gone?' says Donald; and the thought of
it was such pity that our hearts seemed like to break.

"But Godfrey said: 'We will talk together like brothers. If it shames
you for me to be like you, then I will teach you all they taught me,
and we will all be like our white father.'

"So we all agreed to have it so, if he would tell us what to do. After
that we came in here with Godfrey, and we stood looking at my father's
white face. Godfrey all alone had straked him out on this table, with
the silver-pieces on the eyes that we had feared. But the silver we
did not fear. Maybe you will not understand it, Aleck McTavish, but
our father never seemed such close kin to us as when we would look at
him dead, and at Godfrey, that was the picture of him, living and
kind.

"After that you know what happened yourself."

"Well I do, Mr. McNeil. It was Great Godfrey that was the father to
you all," said my cousin.

"Just that, Aleck McTavish. All that he had was ours to use as we
would,--his land, money, horses, this room, his learning. Some of us
could learn one thing and some of us could learn another, and some
could learn nothing, not even how to behave. What I could learn was
the playing of the fiddle. Many's the hour Godfrey would play with me
while the rest were all happy around.

"In great content we lived like brothers, and proud to see Godfrey as
white and fine, and grand as the best gentleman that ever came up to
visit him out of Montreal. Ay, in great content we lived all together
till the consumption came on Donald, and he was gone. Then it came
and came back, and came back again, till Hector was gone, and Ranald
was gone, and in ten years' time only Godfrey and I were left. Then
both of us married, as you know. But our children died as fast as they
were born, almost,--for the curse seemed on us. Then his wife died,
and Godfrey sighed and sighed ever after that.

"One night I was sleeping with the door of my room open, so I could
hear if Godfrey needed my help. The cough was on him then. Out of a
dream of him looking at my father's white face I woke and went to his
bed. He was not there at all.

"My heart went cold with fear, for I heard the rapid very clear, like
the nights they all died. Then I heard the music begin down stairs,
here in this chamber where they were all laid out dead,--right here on
this table where I will soon lie like the rest. I leave it to you to
see it done, Aleck McTavish, for you are a Highlandman by blood. It
was that I wanted to say to you when I called you in. I have seen
myself in my coffin three nights. Nay, say nothing; you will see.

"Hearing the music that night, down I came softly. Here sat Godfrey,
and the kindest look was on his face that ever I saw. He had his
fiddle in his hand, and he played about all our lives.

"He played about how we all came down from the North in the big canoe
with my father and mother, when we were little children and him a
baby. He played of the rapids we passed over, and of the rustling of
the poplar-trees and the purr of the pines. He played till the river
you hear now was in the fiddle, with the sound of our paddles, and the
fish jumping for flies. He played about the long winters when we were
young, so that the snow of those winters seemed falling again. The
ringing of our skates on the ice I could hear in the fiddle. He played
through all our lives when we were young and going in the woods yonder
together--and then it was the sore lament began!

"It was like as if he played how they kept him away from his brothers,
and him at his books thinking of them in the woods, and him hearing
the partridges' drumming, and the squirrels' chatter, and all the
little birds singing and singing. Oich, man, but there's no words for
the sadness of it!"

Old Angus ceased to speak as he took his violin from the table and
struck into the middle of "Great Godfrey's Lament." As he played, his
wide eyes looked past us, and the tears streamed down his brown
cheeks. When the woful strain ended, he said, staring past us: "Ay,
Godfrey, you were always our brother."

Then he put his face down in his big brown hands, and we left him
without another word.

THE RED-HEADED WINDEGO.

Big Baptiste Seguin, on snow-shoes nearly six feet long, strode
mightily out of the forest, and gazed across the treeless valley
ahead.

"Hooraw! No choppin' for two mile!" he shouted.

"Hooraw! Bully! Hi-yi!" yelled the axemen, Pierre, "Jawnny," and
"Frawce," two hundred yards behind. Their cries were taken up by the
two chain-bearers still farther back.

"Is it a lake, Baptiste?" cried Tom Dunscombe, the young surveyor, as
he hurried forward through balsams that edged the woods and concealed
the open space from those among the trees.

"No, seh; only a beaver meddy."

"Clean?"

"Clean! Yesseh! Clean 's your face. Hain't no tree for two mile if de
line is go right."

"Good! We shall make seven miles to-day," said Tom, as he came forward
with immense strides, carrying a compass and Jacob's-staff. Behind him
the axemen slashed along, striking white slivers from the pink and
scaly columns of red pines that shot up a hundred and twenty feet
without a branch. If any underbrush grew there, it was beneath the
eight-feet-deep February snow, so that one could see far away down a
multitude of vaulted, converging aisles.

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