CHAPTER XXV.
THE LOW-COUNTRY SUNRISE.
"Chacun son goût. Moi, j'aime mieux la nature primitive qui n'est pas à la mode du jour mais que l'on ne pourra jamais démoder … J'aime ce que j'aime, et vous, vous aimez autre chose. Grand bien vous fasse—je vous admire, Monsieur Tout-le-Monde."
—Ben Sulte
"I am going to rise before the sun to-morrow. Would you like to come out fishing?" remarked Haviland, cheerfully, on the way home. Chrysler signified assent.
At grey dawn, before it was yet quite daybreak, they were on the road. All the houses in the neighbourhood looked asleep. Heavy dews lay upon the grass. The scene was chilly, and a little comfortless and suggestive of turning back to bed.
"Where are we going?" the visitor asked, trying to collect his spirits.
"To find Bonhomme Le Brun, who superintends the boating interest.—'Bonhomme'—'Good Man'—is a kind of jocular name we give to every simple old fellow. 'Le Brun' is not quite correct either. His real name—or rather the only one extant among the noms-de-guerre of his predecessors, is Vadeboncoeur—'Go willingly,' which the Notaries I suppose would write 'Vadeboncoeur dit Le Brun.'"
Notwithstanding the early hour they were not alone on the road. A wrinkled woman, bent almost double, was toiling slowly along with heavy sighs, under a sack of firewood.
"See here, madame," Charnilly called out, stepping forward to her, "give me the sack;" which he unloaded from her back and threw over his shoulder.
"You are always so good, monseigneur Chamilly," the old woman groaned in a plaintive, palsied voice, without straightening her doubled frame.
"Is the Bonhomme at the house?" he enquired.
"I think not, sir; he was preparing to go to Isle of Ducks."
"Just where I thought," exclaimed Haviland in English. "This Le Brun is of the oddest class—a secular hermit on the solitudes of the river—a species of mystery to the others. Sometimes he is seen paddling among the islands far down; sometimes seining a little, by methods invented by himself; sometimes carrying home an old gun and more or less loaded with ducks; sometimes his torch is seen far out in the dark, night-fishing; but few meet him face to face besides myself. When a boy I used to think he lived on the water because his legs were crooked, though more probably his legs are crooked because he avoids the land. He keeps my sail-boat for me and I let him use the old windmill we shall come to by those trees."
The windmill and the cot of Le Brun stood in a birch-grown hollow, not far off, where a stream cascaded into the St. Lawrence, and had worn down the precipitous bank of earth. It was a wild picture. The gable of the cot was stained Indian red down to the eaves, and a stone chimney was embedded irregularly in its log side. The windmill, towering its conical roof and rusty weather-vane a little distance off, and stretching out its gray skeleton arms as if to creak more freely in the sweep of gales from the river, was one of those rembrandtesque relics which prove so picturesquely that Time is an artist inimitable by man. A clay oven near the cot completed this group of erections, around and behind which the silver birches and young elms grew up and closed.
No, Messieurs, Le Brun was not at home; he had gone to Isle of Ducks; and all the blessings of the saints upon Monseigneur for his kindness to a poor old woman.—"Ah, Seigneur!"
Chamilly took his skiff from the boathouse himself, and was soon pulling swiftly from the shore, while as they got out upon it the vastness and power of the stream became apparent.
From its broad surface the mists began to rise gracefully in long drifts, moved by the early winds and partly obscuring the distant shores, whose fringe of little shut up houses still suggested slumber. The dews had freshened the pines of Dormilliere, and the old Church stood majestically forward among them, throwing back its head and keeping sleepless watch towards the opposite side. Gradually receding, too, the Manoir showed less and less gable among its mass of foliage.
If the Church is one great institution of that country, the St. Lawrence is no less another,—displaying thirty miles unbroken blue on a clear day in the direction of the distant hill of Montreal, and on the other hand, towards Lake St. Peter, a vista oceanlike and unhorizoned. In certain regions numerous flat islands, covered by long grasses and rushes intersected by labyrinthine passages, hide the boatman from the sight of the world and form innumerable nooks of quiet which have a class of scenery and inhabitants altogether their own. As the chaloupe glides around some unsuspected corner, the crane rises heavily at the splash of a paddle, wild duck fly off low and swiftly, the plover circle away in bright handsome flocks, the gorgeous kingfisher leaves his little tree. In the water different spots have their special finny denizens. In one place a broad deep arm of the river—which throws off a dozen such arms, each as large as London's Thames, without the main stream appearing a whit less broad—shelters among its weeds exhaustless tribes of perch and pickerel; in another place a swifter and profounder current conceals the great sturgeon and lion-like maskinongé; while among certain shallower, less active corners, the bottom is clothed with muddy cat fish.
They approached a region of this kind, skimmed along by spirited athletic strokes, and had arrived at the head of the low-lying archipelago just described, where they came upon a motionless figure sitting fishing in a punt, some distance along a broad passage to the left.
Short blue blouse, little cap and flat-bottomed boat, the appearance of the figure at that hour made one with the drifting mists and rural strangeness of the landscape, and Chrysler knew it was Le Brun, and remarked so to Haviland.
"Without doubt, Bonhomme is part of nature and unmistakable—Hola
Bonhomme!"
"Mo-o-o-o-nseigneur," he sung in reply, without looking up or taking further notice of them.
Haviland gave a few more vigorous strokes.
"How does it bite, Bonhomme?"
"A little badly, monseigneur; all perch here; one pickerel. Shall we enter the little channels?"
"I do not wish to enter the little channels: I remain here."
They were soon fishing beside him, Chamilly at one end of the skiff intent upon his sport. The old man's flat punt was littered with perch. How early he must have risen! He was small of figure, weathered of face, simple and impassive of manner.
"Good day," Chrysler opened; "the weather is wettish."
"It is morningy, Monsieur."—
"My son knows you, Monsieur," he said again humbly, after a pause.
As Chrysler could not recall his son, as such, he waited before replying.
"He saw you at Benoit's."
Still Chrysler paused.
"On Sunday."
"A—ha, now I remember. That fine young man is your son?"
"That fine young man, sir," he assented with perfect faith.
After adjusting a line for Chrysler, he continued.
"Do you not think, monsieur, that my son is fine enough for Josephte
Benoit?"
"Assuredly. Does he like her?"
"They are devoted to each other."
"If she accepts him then, why not? You do not doubt your son?"
"Never, Monsieur! what is different is Jean. He thinks my Francois too poor for his Josephte, and he is for ever planning to discourage their love. Grand Dieu, he is proud! Yet his father and I were good friends when we were both boys. He wants Mlle. Josephte to take the American."
"Reassure yourself; that will never be. No, Bonhomme, trust to me; that shall never he," exclaimed Chamilly.
"How did you come to know these parties, sir," he put in English. But without awaiting an answer he continued: "Benoit is crazy to marry his daughter to that rowdy. Benoit was always rather off on the surface, but he has usually been shrewder at bottom. Cuiller infatuates him. He hasn't a single antecedent, but has been treating Benoit so much to liquor and boasting, that the foolish man follows him like a dog."
"My son has been to Montreal,—he has done business," said the Bonhomme with pride—"he is a good young man—and he had plenty of money before he lost it on the journey."
"How did he lose his money?"
"Some one stole it. He was coming down to marry Josephte. If he had had his money Jean would have let her take him.—But he can earn more."
"There was a mysterious robbery of François' money on the steam boat a couple of weeks ago," said Chamilly in English again, "I shall have to lend him some to set him up in business here, but mustn't do it till after my election."