Le Loup-Garou.
The fear of it is killing me, Baptiste, for it is on my mind all the time. Think of it: for seven long years he has neither been to confession nor partaken of the blessed sacrament, and he is drinking and growing wickeder every day. This is the last night of the seventh year, and the curse may fall upon him now at any moment. She buried her wrinkled, fear-stricken face in her thin trembling hands, and wept as though her heart was breaking. "O Marie, blessed Virgin!" she whispered, "save our son, our Pierre; let not the fate of the loup-garou fall upon him." A thin stream of light shone through an ancient crack in the old-fashioned box-stove, and fell caressingly across the bowed head, making its silvery hair look pathetically thin. The bent shoulders of the sorrowing mother shook convulsively.
Baptiste gazed with a troubled look at the bar of light on his wife's head, and his heart went out to her as only a husband's can to a wife who for half a century has borne with him the joys and trials of the passing years. As he looked at the thin white hair, memory drifted back to the time when it was as black as a raven's wing, and fell in great glossy folds far below her waist. A tender smile stole into his face as he remembered how, on account of the waywardness of the beautiful hair and its rebellion against imprisonment, he had more than once heard her chide it; yes, and at times when more than usually arrogant, threaten to use the shears upon it. He observed, too, how round her shoulders had grown, and noted many other signs of old age which the glow from the stove made so cruelly apparent. It had taken sixty years of life just to streak her hair with grey; but the past seven years had remorselessly thinned and whitened it, and now not even one black hair was to be seen. All these things and many more he thought of as he gazed upon his sorrowing wife.
Distressfully the old man put his hand to his forehead, and then thought reverted to himself, and he recalled the days when his head was subject to his will and did not, with painful persistency, nod and tremble the long day through. The infirmity of age was strong upon him; seventy years is a long time to have lived and toiled as French-Canadian farmers toil in eastern Canada. He thought, too, how much he had aged the last seven years, and of the one who had caused those years to be fraught with so much suffering to them both. He realized, indeed, that sorrow ages more quickly than years!
"Pierre, Pierre, my son!" he muttered brokenly, "better that you had never been born, than after reaching manhood's estate to have forgotten all our teachings and become a drunkard and an outcast from the Church." A stifled sob from his wife again changed his rambling thoughts, and painfully rising he walked over to her side. Gently he laid his hand on the hair that he so dearly loved, although so much changed, and bending tenderly down said, bravely, trying to check the tremor in his voice, "There, wife, don't fret." And then he drew her head to his shoulder in a way he used to do when they were both in the noonday of life. She remembered, and her grief grew less. "The Virgin is good, wife, and we have prayed so much to Her about him. Surely She will hear us, and not let what you fear fall upon our Pierre. Father Benoit has been praying to Her all these years, and we are told that the Virgin sooner or later answers the prayers of the priests of our Church. Then special prayers will be offered for our son to-night by the priest, for he knows how you feared for him because this was the last night of the seventh year."
A shudder ran through her frame as the anxious mother started to her feet and said fearfully:
"Yes, in another hour a new day will dawn, and then seven years will have passed since our son went to confession, and then the curse may fall at any time."
Dropping his voice almost to a whisper, and looking with superstitious dread out of the window into the moonlight, which made the newly fallen snow glisten on the road with almost supernatural whiteness, and trying to speak in a tone of conviction, her husband said:
"Perhaps the priest may be right, wife, and this about loup-garou may not be true. He told us that he did not believe in it, and that the Church had uttered no such curse against those who for seven years did not confess; although if they died in that sinful state there was no hope of salvation for them. As for the devil, you remember the priest said that he had not the power to change a man into a wolf or an animal of any kind, and—"