Shadows on the Rock (2 page)

“Naturally,” Auclair would tell his daughter, “having seen the establishment next door always the same, I supposed it was
meant to be like that, and was there, perhaps, to give a little boy the pleasure of watching the swallows build nests in the
ivy. The Count had been at home when I was an infant in arms, and once, I believe, when I was three, but I could not
remember. Imagine my astonishment when, one evening about sunset, a dusty coach with four horses rattled down the Quai and
stopped at the carriage entrance. Two footmen sprang down from the box, rang the outer bell, and, as soon as the bar was
drawn, began pulling and prying at the gates, which I had never seen opened in my life. It seemed to me that some outrage
was being committed and the police should be called. At last the gates were dragged inward, and the coach clattered into the
court. If anything more happened that night I do not recall it.

“The next morning I was awakened by shouting under my window, and the sound of shutters being taken down. I ran across my
room and peeped out. The windows over there were not only unshuttered, but open wide. Three young men were leaning out over
the grilles beating rugs, shaking carpets and wall-hangings into the air. In a moment a blacksmith came in his leather
apron, with a kit of tools, and began to repair the hinges of the gates. Boys were running in and out, bringing bread, milk,
poultry, sacks of grain and hay for the horses. When I went down to breakfast, I found my father and mother and grandparents
all very much excited and pleased, talking a great deal. They already knew in which chamber the Count had slept last night,
the names of his equerries, what he had brought with him for supper in a basket from Fontainebleau, and which wines old
Joseph had got up from the cellar for him. I had scarcely ever heard my family talk so much.

“Not long after breakfast the Count himself came into our shop. He greeted my father familiarly and began asking about
the people of the Quarter as if he had been away only a few weeks. He inquired for my mother and grandmother, and they came
to pay their respects. I was pulled out from under the counter where I had hidden, and presented to him. I was frightened
because he was wearing his uniform and such big boots. Yes, he was a fine figure of a man forty years ago, but even more
restless and hasty than he is now. I remember he asked me if I wanted to be a soldier, and when I told him that I meant to
be an apothecary like my father, he laughed and gave me a silver piece.”

Though Auclair so often talked to his daughter of the past, it was not because there was nothing happening in the
present. At that time the town of Quebec had fewer than two thousand inhabitants, but it was always full of jealousies and
quarrels. Ever since Cécile could remember, there had been a feud between Count Frontenac and old Bishop Laval. And now that
the new Bishop, Monseigneur de Saint–Vallier, had just come back from France after a three years’ absence, the Count was
quarrelling with him! Then there was always the old quarrel between the two Bishops themselves, which had broken out with
fresh vigour upon de Saint–Vallier’s return. Everyone in the diocese took sides with one prelate or the other. Since he
landed in September, scarcely a week went by that Monseigneur de Saint–Vallier did not wreck some cherished plan of the old
Bishop.

Before they went to bed, Auclair and his daughter usually took a walk. The apothecary believed this habit conducive to
sound slumber. Tonight, as they stepped out into the frosty air and looked up, high over their heads, on the edge of the
sheer cliff, the Château stood out against the glittering night sky, the second storey of the south wing brilliantly
lighted.

“I suppose the Count’s candles will burn till long past midnight,” Cécile remarked.

“Ah, the Count has many things to trouble him. The King has not been very generous in rewarding his services in the last
campaign. Besides, he is old, and the old do not sleep much.”

As they climbed Mountain Hill, they passed in front of Monseigneur de Saint–Vallier’s new episcopal Palace, and that,
too, was ablaze with lights. Cécile longed to see inside that building, toward which the King himself had given fifteen
thousand francs. It was said that Monseigneur had brought back with him a great many fine pieces of furniture and tapestry
to furnish it. But he was not fond of children, as the old Bishop was, and his servants were very strict, and there seemed
to be no way in which one could get a peep behind those heavy curtains at the windows.

Their walk was nearly always the same. On a precipitous rock, scored over with dark, uneven streets, there were not many
ways where one could stroll with a careless foot after nightfall. When the wind was not too biting, they usually took the
path up to the redoubt on Cap Diamant and looked down over the sleeping town and the great pale avenue of river, with black
forest stretching beyond it to the sky. From there the Lower Town was a mere sprinkle of lights along the water’s edge. The
rock-top, blocked off in dark masses that were convents and churches and gardens, was now sunk in sleep. The only lighted
windows to be seen were in the Château, in the Bishop’s Palace, and on the top floor of old Bishop Laval’s Seminary, out
there on its spur overhanging the river. That top floor, the apothecary told his daughter, was the library, and likely
enough some young Canadian-born Seminarians to whom Latin came hard were struggling with the Church Fathers up there.

Auclair did a good trade in drugs and herbs and remedies of his own compounding, but his pay was small, and very little
of it was in money. Besides, people wasted a great deal of his time in conversation and thus interfered with his study of
Canadian plants. Like most philosophers, he was not averse to discourse, but here much of the talk was gossip and very
trivial. The colonists liked to drop in at his house upon the slightest pretext; the interior was like home to the
French-born. On a heavy morning, when clouds of thick grey fog rolled up from the St. Lawrence, it cheered one to go into a
place that was like an apothecary’s shop at home; to glimpse the comfortable sitting-room through the tall cabinets and
chests of drawers that separated without entirely shutting it off from the shop.

Euclide Auclair had come over with the Count de Frontenac eight years ago, as his apothecary and physician, and had
therefore been able to bring whatever he liked of his personal possessions. He came with a full supply of drugs and
specifics, his distilling apparatus, mortars, balances, retorts, and carboys, all the paraphernalia of his trade, even the
stuffed baby alligator, brought long ago to Paris by some sailor from the West Indies and purchased by Auclair’s grandfather
to ornament the shop on the Quai des Célestins.

Madame Auclair had brought her household goods, without which she could not imagine life at all, and the salon behind the
shop was very much like their old salon in Paris. There was the same well-worn carpet, made at Lyon, the walnut
dining-table, the two large arm-chairs and high-backed sofa upholstered in copper-red cotton-velvet, the long
window-curtains of a similar velvet lined with brown. The same candelabra and china shepherd boy sat on the mantel, the same
colour prints of pastoral scenes hung on the walls. Madame had brought out to Canada the fine store of linen that had been
her marriage portion, her feather beds and coverlids and down pillows. As long as she lived, she tried to make the new life
as much as possible like the old. After she began to feel sure that she would never be well enough to return to France, her
chief care was to train her little daughter so that she would be able to carry on this life and this order after she was
gone.

Madame Auclair had kept upon her feet until within a few weeks of her death. When a spasm of coughing came on (she died
of her lungs) and she was forced to lie down on the red sofa there under the window, she would beckon Cécile to the
footstool beside her. After she got her breath again and was resting, she would softly explain many things about the
ménage.

“Your father has a delicate appetite,” she would murmur, “and the food here is coarse. If it is not very carefully
prepared, he will not eat and will fall ill. And he cannot sleep between woollen coverlids, as many people do here; his skin
is sensitive. The sheets must be changed every two weeks, but do not try to have them washed in the winter. I have brought
linen enough to last the winter through. Keep folding the soiled ones away in the cold upstairs, and in April, when the
spring rains come and all the water-barrels are full of soft rain-water, have big Jeanette come in and do a great washing;
give the house up to her, and let her take several days to do her work. Beg her to iron the sheets carefully. They are the
best of linen and will last your lifetime if they are well treated.”

Madame Auclair never spoke of her approaching death, but would say something like this:

“After a while, when I am too ill to help you, you will perhaps find it fatiguing to do all these things alone, over and
over. But in time you will come to love your duties, as I do. You will see that your father’s whole happiness depends on
order and regularity, and you will come to feel a pride in it. Without order our lives would be disgusting, like those of
the poor savages. At home, in France, we have learned to do all these things in the best way, and we are conscientious, and
that is why we are called the most civilized people in Europe and other nations envy us.”

After such admonition Madame Auclair would look intently into the child’s eyes that grew so dark when her heart was
touched, like the blue of Canadian blueberries, indeed, and would say to herself: “Oui, elle a beaucoup de loyauté.”

During the last winter of her illness she lay much of the time on her red sofa, that had come so far out to this rock in
the wilderness. The snow outside, piled up against the window-panes, made a grey light in the room, and she could hear
Cécile moving softly about in the kitchen, putting more wood into the iron stove, washing the casseroles. Then she would
think fearfully of how much she was entrusting to that little shingled head; something so precious, so intangible; a feeling
about life that had come down to her through so many centuries and that she had brought with her across the wastes of
obliterating, brutal ocean. The sense of “our way,” — that was what she longed to leave with her daughter. She wanted to
believe that when she herself was lying in this rude Canadian earth, life would go on almost unchanged in this room with its
dear (and, to her, beautiful) objects; that the proprieties would be observed, all the little shades of feeling which make
the common fine. The individuality, the character, of M. Auclair’s house, though it appeared to be made up of wood and cloth
and glass and a little silver, was really made of very fine moral qualities in two women: the mother’s unswerving fidelity
to certain traditions, and the daughter’s loyalty to her mother’s wish.

It was because of these things that had gone before, and the kind of life lived there, that the townspeople were glad of
any excuse to stop at the apothecary’s shop. Even the strange, bitter, mysterious Bishop Laval (more accusing and grim than
ever, now that the new Bishop had returned and so disregarded him) used to tramp heavily into the shop for calomel pills or
bandages for his varicose legs, and peer, not unkindly, back into the living-room. Once he had asked for a sprig from the
box of parsley that was kept growing there even in winter, and carried it away in his hand, — though, as everyone knew, he
denied himself all the comforts of the table and ate only the most wretched and unappetizing food.

In a corner, concealed from the shop by tall cabinets, and well away from the window draughts, stood M. Auclair’s
four-post bed, with heavy hangings. Underneath it was a child’s bed, pulled out at night, where Cécile still slept in cold
weather. Sometimes on a very bitter night, when the grip of still, intense cold tightened on the rock as if it would
extinguish the last spark of life, the pharmacist would hear his daughter softly stirring about, moving something, covering
something. He would thrust his night-cap out between the curtains and call:

“Qu’est-ce que tu fais, petite?”

An anxious, sleepy voice would reply;

“Papa, j’ai peur pour le persil.”

It had never frozen in her mother’s time, and it should not freeze in hers.

The accident of being born next the Count de Frontenac’s house in Paris had determined Euclide Auclair’s destiny. He had
grown up a studious, thoughtful boy, assisting his father in the shop. Every afternoon he read Latin with a priest at the
Jesuits on the rue Saint–Antoine. Count Frontenac’s irregular and unexpected returns to town made the chief variety in his
life.

It was usually after some chagrin or disappointment that the Count came back to the Quai des Célestins. Between campaigns
he lived at Île Savary, his estate on the Indre, near Blois. But after some slight at Court, or some difficulty with his
creditors, he would suddenly arrive at his father’s old town house and shut himself up for days, even weeks, seeing no one
but the little people of the parish of Saint–Paul. He had few friends of his own station in Paris, — few anywhere. He was a
man who got on admirably with his inferiors, — seemed to find among them the only human ties that were of any comfort to
him. He was poor, which made him boastful and extravagant, and he had always lived far beyond his means. At Île Savary he
tried to make as great a show as people who were much better off than he, — to equal them in hospitality, in dress, gardens,
horses and carriages. But when he was in Paris, living among the quiet, faithful people of the quarter, he was a different
man. With his humble neighbours his manners were irreproachable. He often dropped in at the pharmacy to see his tenants, the
Auclairs, and would sometimes talk to the old grandfather about his campaigns in Italy and the Low Countries.

The Count had begun his military life at fifteen, and wherever there was fighting in Europe, he always managed to be
there. In each campaign he added to his renown, but never to his fortune. When his military talents were unemployed, he
usually got into trouble of some sort. It was after his Italian campaign, when he was recuperating from his wounds in his
father’s old house on the Quai, that he made his unfortunate marriage. Euclide’s father could remember that affair very
well. Madame de la Grange–Frontenac and her husband lived together but a short while, — and now they had been separated for
almost a lifetime. She still lived in Paris, with a brilliant circle about her, — had an apartment in the old Arsenal
building, not far from the Count’s house, and when she received, he sometimes paid his respects with the rest of the world,
but he never went to see her privately.

When Euclide was twenty-two, Count Frontenac was employed by the Venetians to defend the island of Crete against the
Turks. From that command he returned with great honour, but poorer than ever. For the next three years he was idle. Then,
suddenly, the King appointed him Governor General of Canada, and he quitted Europe for ten years.

During that decade Euclide’s father and mother died. He married, and devoted himself seriously to his profession. Too
seriously for his own good, indeed. Although he was so content with familiar scenes and faces as to be almost afraid of new
ones, he was not afraid of new ideas, — or of old ideas that had gone out of fashion because surgeons and doctors were too
stupid to see their value. The brilliant reign of Louis XIV was a low period in medicine; dressmakers and tailors were more
considered than physicians. Euclide had gone deep into the history of medicine in such old Latin books as were stuffed away
in the libraries of Paris. He looked back to the time of Ambroise Paré, and still further back to the thirteenth century, as
golden ages in medicine, — and he considered Fagon, the King’s physician, a bigoted and heartless quack.

When sick people in his own neighbourhood came to Euclide for help, he kept them away from doctors, — gave them tisanes
and herb-teas and poultices, which at least could do no harm. He advised them about their diet; reduced the surfeit of the
rich, and prescribed goat’s milk for the poorly nourished. He was strongly opposed to indiscriminate blood-letting,
particularly to bleeding from the feet. This eccentricity made him very unpopular, not only with the barber-surgeons of the
parish, but with their patients, and even estranged his own friends. Bleeding from the feet was very much in vogue just
then; it made a sick man feel that the utmost was being done for him. At Versailles it was regularly practised on members of
the King’s household. Euclide’s opposition to this practice lost him many of his patrons. His neighbours used to laugh and
say that whether bleeding from the feet harmed other people or not, it had certainly been very bad for the son of their
reliable old pharmacien, Alphonse Auclair.

Euclide’s business contracted steadily, so that, with all his wife’s good management and his own devotion to his
profession, he scarcely knew where to turn; until one day the Count de Frontenac walked into the shop and put out his hand
as if to rescue a drowning man. Auclair had never heard of the Count’s difficulties with the Jesuits in Canada, and knew
nothing about his recall by the King, until he appeared at the shop door that morning, ten years older, but no richer or
better satisfied with the world than when he went away.

The Count was out of favour at Versailles, his estate on the Indre had run down during his absence in Canada, and he had
not the means to repair it, so he now spent a good deal of time in the house next door. His presence there, and his
patronage, eased the strain of the Auclairs’ position. Moreover, he restored to Euclide the ten years’ rent for the shop,
which had been scrupulously paid to the Count’s agent while he was away.

The Count was lonely in his town house. Many of his old acquaintances had accomplished their earthly period and been
carried to the Innocents or the churchyard of Saint–Paul while he was far away in Quebec. His wife was still entertaining
her friends at her apartment in the old Arsenal, and the Count occasionally went there on her afternoons at home. Time hung
heavy on his hands, and he often sent for Euclide to come to him in a professional capacity, — a flimsy pretext, for, though
past sixty, the Count was in robust health. Of an evening they would sometimes sit in the Count’s library, talking of New
France. Frontenac’s thoughts were there, and he liked to tell an eager listener about its great lakes and rivers, the
climate, the Indians, the forests and wild animals. Often he would dwell upon the explorations and discoveries of his
ill-fated young friend Robert Cavelier de La Salle, one of the few men for whom, in his long life, he ever felt a warm
affection.

Gradually there grew up in Auclair’s mind the picture of a country vast and free. He fell into a habit of looking to
Canada as a possible refuge, an escape from the evils one suffered at home, and of wishing he could go there.

This seemed a safe desire to cherish, since it was impossible of fulfilment. Euclide was a natural city-dweller; one of
those who can bear poverty and oppression, so long as they have their old surroundings, their native sky, the streets and
buildings that have become part of their lives. But though he was a creature of habit and derived an actual pleasure from
doing things exactly as he had always done them, his mind was free. He could not shut his eyes to the wrongs that went on
about him, or keep from brooding upon them. In his own time he had seen taxes grow more and more ruinous, poverty and hunger
always increasing. People died of starvation in the streets of Paris, in his own parish of Saint–Paul, where there was so
much wealth. All the while the fantastic extravagances of the Court grew more outrageous. The wealth of the nation, of the
grain lands and vineyards and forests of France, was sunk in creating the pleasure palace at Versailles. The richest peers
of the realm were ruining themselves on magnificent Court dresses and jewels. And, with so many new abuses, the old ones
never grew less; torture and cruel punishments increased as the people became poorer and more desperate. The horrible mill
at the Châtelet ground on day after day. Auclair lived too near the prisons of Paris to be able to forget them. In his
boyhood a harmless old man who lodged in their own cellar was tortured and put to death at the Châtelet for a petty
theft.

One morning, in the summer when Cécile was four years old, Count Frontenac made one of his sudden reappearances in Paris
and sent for Euclide. The King had again appointed him Governor General of Canada, and he would sail in a few weeks. He
wished to take Auclair with him as his personal physician. The Count was then seventy years old, and he was as eager to be
gone as a young man setting off on his first campaign.

Auclair was terrified. Indeed, he fell ill of fright, and neither ate nor slept. He could not imagine facing any kind of
life but the one he had always lived. His wife was much the braver of the two. She pointed out that their business barely
made them a livelihood, and that after the Count went away it would certainly decline. Moreover, the Count was their
landlord, and he had now decided to sell his town property. Who knew but that the purchaser might prove a hard master, — or
that he might not pull down the apothecary shop altogether to enlarge the stables?