"It may be!" said Cordelia, looking from the marble to the man. "It may be!" she repeated absently.
One day they went by train to the straggling little village of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, and together visited the Shrine, and drank a cupful of the miraculous waters from the Holy Spring. A pilgrimage had brought to the town that day a sadly picturesque army of life's unfortunates, so that both Cordelia and Hartley drew a breath of relief when the halt and the maimed had been left behind them and they had escaped from the pitiful tumult of cassock and crutch and wandered out into the cool quietness of the open country. There Cordelia, venturing inquisitively into one of the little whitewashed cottages, was smitten with a sudden vague sense of homesickness on hearing once more the familiar hum of a spinning-wheel; while to Hartley the softness of the mingled patois of Brittany and Normandy, the sedate tranquillity of the clean little huddling riverside villages, and the crowded yet rambling rows of tiny cottages with wide eaves that drooped down over mullioned windows like tired lids over sleepy eyes, brought back from time to time many thoughts of his older Oxford. Cordelia listened, with wondering eyes and a strangely heavy heart, to his descriptions of that far-away English country, trying passionately, yet vainly, to see it as she knew he beheld it in his own eyes.
"Some day I hope we shall see it," he said, wistfully. "We two, together!"
Then they were both charmed into silent wonder by the old-world quaintness of the rambling hillside road, and following it idly, they wandered on, enchanted into forgetfulness by the beauty of the blended tints of the autumnal maples and oaks, by the soft verdure of the terraced foot-hills, broken with little rifts of silver where flashing streams fell musically down to the blue St. Lawrence, on which, here and there, they could catch glimpses of low-lying batteaux and drifting sails.
They had strolled happily on through the tiny village of Rivière des Chiens, pausing a moment before a towering line of Lombardy poplars that stood black against the setting sun, when the sound of broken weeping startled them both from their day-dreams. Hartley, in alarm, ran on ahead, and under a blighted thorn-tree, crouched amid the roadside goldenrod, he found a woman with a child clutched to her breast. Her gaunt body rocked back and forth as she sat there, and she neither looked up nor ceased her wailing when he bent over and touched her on the shoulder. He called to her in English, and then in French, but still she sat amid the dusty goldenrod, clutching the child to her breast.
"Is it dead?" asked Cordelia, in a frightened voice, trying to see into the muffled face. "Oh, be careful! Do be careful! It may be something horrible—some horrible disease!"
Hartley had wakened the woman from her stupor, and in broken French, rich with the idiom of the seventeenth century, she was explaining in her dead voice that she had tried to make her way on foot to Ste. Anne, that if she once reached the shrine of the blessed saint she knew her boy would be saved. Two of them had died, of the black sickness; he was all she had left! And in a fresh paroxysm of grief she caught the sick child once more up to her bent body, and swayed back and forth with it in hopeless despair.
Hartley sent Cordelia hurriedly to the nearest farm-house, for a conveyance. Impatient at the delay while the habitant harnessed his stocky little pony to a cart, he helped the woman to her feet, and taking the child in his own arms, started back for the village, not a mile distant. There he sent a messenger post-haste to Ste. Anne's, and an hour later the ponderous little wagon that did service as ambulance for the convent of the Franciscan Sisters at Beaupré was speeding homeward with both mother and child, and Hartley and Cordelia were waiting on the chilly little wind-swept platform for the Quebec train, intangibly detached from one another and mysteriously depressed in spirits. It was not until the warmth and lights of the hotel had shut out the night from them that either cared to talk. Then, of a sudden, Hartley found the woman at his side shaken with a passionate burst of seemingly inconsequential weeping.
"Cordelia, what is it?" he cried, in startled wonder.
"Motherhood!" said Cordelia, inadequately, through her tears—"it—it is such an awful thing!"