Maria Chapdelaine Part 14

From their house to Honfleur, eight miles; from Honfleur to La Pipe, six. There her father would speak with the cure, 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 clas.h.i.+ng of plates, the clang of the opened stove door, the sound of feet on the planking, t.i.t'Be 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 t.i.t'Be 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 pa.s.sable."

And then a little later:--"They should have left; perhaps in going through La Pipe they will stop to speak to the cure; 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 nothing for her to do but to stay quietly in bed. But if there is some injury within, to the kidneys or another organ, it may be a grave affair." He was conscious that his state of doubt was disappointing to the Chapdelaines, and was anxious to restore his medical reputation.

"Internal lesions are serious things, and often one cannot detect them. The wisest man in the world could tell you no more than I. We shall have to wait ... But perhaps it is not that we have to deal with." After some further investigation he shook his head. "Of course I can give something that will keep her from suffering like this."

The leather bag now disclosed its wonderworking phials; fifteen drops of a yellowish drug were diluted with two fingers of water, and the sick woman, lifted up in bed, managed to swallow this with sharp cries of pain. Then there was apparently nothing more to be done; the men fit their pipes, and the doctor, with his feet against the stove, held forth as to his professional labours and the cures he had wrought.

"Illnesses like these," said he, "where one cannot discover precisely what is the matter, are more baffling to a doctor than the gravest disorders--like pneumonia now, or even typhoid fever which carry off three-quarters of the people hereabouts who do not die of old age. Well, typhoid and pneumonia, I cure these every month in the year. You know Viateur Tremblay, the postmaster at St. Henri ..."

He seemed a little hurt that Madame Chapdelaine should be the victim of an obscure malady, hard to diagnose, and had not been taken down with one of the two complaints he was accustomed to treat with such success, and he gave an account by chapter and verse of the manner in which he had cured the postmaster of St. Henri. From that they pa.s.sed on to the country news--news carried by word of mouth from house to house around Lake St. John, and greeted a thousandfold more eagerly than tidings of wars and famines, since the gossipers always manage to connect it with friend or relative in a country where all ties of kins.h.i.+p, near or far, are borne scrupulously in mind.

Madame Chapdelaine ceased moaning and seemed to be asleep. The doctor, considering that he had done all that was expected of him, for the evening at least, knocked the ashes out of his pipe and rose to go.

"I shall sleep at Honfleur," said he, "I suppose your horse is fit to take me so far? There is no need for you to come, I know the road. I shall stay with Ephrem, Surprenant, and come back in the morning."

Chapdelaine was a little slow to make reply, recalling the stiff day's work his old beast had already accomplished, but at the end he went out to harness Charles Eugene once more. In a few minutes the doctor was on the road, leaving the family to themselves as usual.

A great stillness reigned in the house. The comfortable thought was with them all:--"Anyway the medicine he has given her is a good one; she groans no longer." But scarce an hour had gone by before the sick woman ceased to feel the effect of the too feeble drug, became conscious again, tried to turn herself in bed and screamed out with pain. They were all up at once and crowding about her in their concern; she opened her eyes, and after groaning in an agonized way began to weep unrestrainedly.

"O Samuel, I am dying, there can be no doubt of it."

"No! No! You must not think that."

"Yes, I know that I am dying. I feel it. The doctor is only an old fool, and he cannot tell what to do. He is not even able to say what the trouble is, and the medicine he gave me is useless; it has done me no good. I tell you I am dying."

The failing words were hindered with her groaning, and tears coursed down the heavy cheeks. Husband and children looked at her, struck to the very earth with grief. The footstep of death was sounding in the house. They knew themselves cut off from all the world, helpless, remote, without even a horse to bring them succour. The cruel treachery of it all held them speechless and transfixed, with streaming eyes.

In their midst appeared Eutrope Gagnon.

"And I who was thinking to find her almost well. This doctor, now ..."

Chapdelaine broke out, quite beside himself:--"This doctor is not a bit of use, and I shall tell him so plainly, myself. He came here, he gave her a drop of some miserable stuff worth nothing at all in the bottom of a cup, and he is off to sleep in the village as if his pay was earned! Not a thing has he done but tire out my horse, but he shall not have a copper from me, not a single copper..."

Eutrope's face was very grave, and he shook his head as he declared:--"Neither have I any faith in doctors. Now if we had only thought of fetching a bone-setter--such a man as t.i.t'Sebe of St. Felicien ..." Every face was turned to him and the tears ceased flowing.

"t.i.t'Sebe!" exclaimed Maria. "And you think he could help in a case like this?" Both Eutrope and Chapdelaine hastened to avow their trust in him.

"There is no doubt whatever that t.i.t'Sebe can make people well. He was never through the schools, but he knows how to cure. You heard of Nazaire Gaudreau who fell from the top of a barn and broke his back. The doctors came to see him, and the best they could do was to give the Latin name for his hurt and say that he was going to die.

Then they went and fetched t.i.t'Sebe, and t.i.t'Sebe cured him." Every one of them knew the healer's repute and hope sprang up again in their hearts.

"t.i.t'Sebe is a first-rate man, and a man who knows how to make sick people well. Moreover he is not greedy for money. You go and you fetch him, you pay him for his time, and he cures you. It was he who put little Romeo Boilly on his legs again after being run over by a wagon loaded with planks."

The sick woman had relapsed into stupor, and was moaning feebly with her eyes closed.

"I will go and get him if you like," suggested Eutrope.

"But what will you do for a horse?" asked Maria. "The doctor has Charles Eugene at Honfleur."

Chapdelaine clenched his fist in wrath and swore through his teeth:--"The old rascal!"

Eutrope thought a moment before speaking. "It makes no difference. I will go just the same. If I walk to Honfleur, I shall easily find someone there who will lend me a horse and sleigh--Racicot, or perhaps old Neron."

"It is thirty-five miles from here to St. Felicien and the roads are heavy."

"I will go just the same."

He, departed forthwith, thinking as he went at a jog-trot over the snow of the grateful look that Maria had given him. The family made ready for the night, computing meanwhile these new distances ...

Seventy miles there and back ... Roads deep in snow. The lamp was left burning, and till morning the voice from the bed was never hushed. Sometimes it was sharp with pain; sometimes it weakly strove for breath. Two hours after daylight the doctor and the cure of St.

Henri appeared together.

"It was impossible for me to come sooner," the cure explained, "but I am here at last, and I picked up the doctor in the village." They sat at the bedside and talked in low tones. The doctor made a fresh examination, but it was the cure who told the result of it. "There is little one can say. She does not seem any worse, but this is not an ordinary sickness. It is best that I should confess her and give her absolution; then we shall both go away and be back again the day after to-morrow."

He returned to the bed, and the others went over and sat by the window. For some, minutes the two voices were beard in question and response; the one feeble and broken by suffering; the other confident, grave, scarcely lowered for the solemn interrogation.

After some inaudible words a hand was raised in a gesture which instantly bowed the heads of all those in the house. The priest rose.

Before departing the doctor gave Maria a little bottle with instructions. "Only if she should suffer greatly, so that she cries out, and never more than fifteen drops at a time. And do not let her have any cold water to drink."