[LA ROSE WITNESSETH]
[A]Of the Headless Horse and of La Belle Mélanie's Narrow Escape from the Feu Follet
[A] Included with permission of and by arrangements with Houghton Mifflin Company authorized publishers.
One of the privileges Michel esteemed most highly was that of accompanying La Rose occasionally when she went blueberrying over on the barrens—dans les bois, as the phrase still goes in Port l'Évêque, though it is all of sixty years since there were any woods there. The best barrens for blueberrying lay across the harbor. They reached back to the bay four or five miles to southward. Along the edges of several rocky coves, narrow and steep as a sluice, clung a few weatherbeaten fishermen's houses; but there was no other sign of human habitation.
It is what they call a bad country over there. Alder and scrub balsam grow sparsely over the low rocky hills, where little flocks of sheep nibble all day at the thin herbage; and from the marshes that lie, green and mossy, at the foot of every slope, a solitary loon may occasionally be seen rising into the air with a great spread of slow wings. A single thread of a road makes its way somehow across the region, twisting in and out among the small hills, now climbing suddenly to a bare elevation, from which the whole sweep of the sea bursts upon the view, now shelving off along the side of a knoll of rocks, quickly dipping into some close hollow, where the world seems to reach no farther than to the strange sky-line, wheeling sharply against infinite space.
Two miles back from the inner shore, the road forks at the base of a little hill more conspicuously bare than the rest, and close to the naked summit of it, overlooking all the Cape, stands a Calvary. Nobody knows how long it has stood there, or why it was first erected; though tradition has it that long, long ago, a certain man by the name of Toussaint was there set upon by wild beasts and torn to pieces. However that may be, the tall wooden cross, painted black, and bearing on its center, beneath a rude penthouse, a small iron crucifix, has been there longer than any present memory records—an encouragement, as they say, for those who have to cross the bad country after dark.
"That makes courage for you," they say. "It is good to know it is there on the windy nights."
By daylight, however, and especially in the sunshine, the barrens are quite without other terrors than those of loneliness; and upon Michel this remoteness and silence always exercised a kind of spell. He was glad that La Rose was with him, partly because he would have been a little afraid to be there quite by himself, but chiefly because of the imaginative sympathy that at this time existed so strongly between them. La Rose could tell him all about the strange things that had been seen here of winter nights; she herself once, tending a poor old sick woman at Gros Nez, out at the end of the Cape, had heard the hoofs of the white horse that gallops across the barrens claquin-claquant in the darkness.
"It was just there outside the house, pawing the ground. Almost paralyzed for terror, I ran to the window and looked out. It was as tall as the church door,—that animal,—all white, and there was no head to it.