"Never, tante La Rose," answered the boy, gravely. "But if it has a pleasant ending, I wish you would tell me about it, and I don't mind if it makes me cry a little in the middle."
By this, Céleste, the stout domestic, had finished her kitchen work, and throwing an apron over her stocky head and shoulders, she clumped out into the yard.
"I am running over to Alec Samson's," she explained, "to get a mackerel for breakfast, if he caught any to-day."
The gate clicked after her, and there was a silence. At last La Rose began, a little absently and as if, for the moment at least, unaware of her auditor....
"This Siméon Leblanc, he lived over there on the other side of the harbor, just beyond the place where the road turns off to go to the Cape. My poor stepmother when coming in to Port l'Évêque to sell some eggs or berries—three gallons, say, of blueberries, or perhaps some of those large strawberries from Pig Cove—she would often be running in there for a little rest and a talk with his wife, Célie—who always was glad to see any one, for that matter, the poor soul, for this Siméon was not too gentle, and often he made her unhappy with his harsh talk.
"'Ah, mon amie,' she would say to my stepmother, at the same time wetting her eyes with tears—'Ah, I have such a fear, me, that he will do himself a harm, one day, with the temper he has. He frightens me to death sometimes—especially about that Tommy.'
"Now you must understand that this Tommy was the son they had, and in some ways he resembled to his father, and in some ways to his mother. For it is certain he had a pride of the most incredible, which I daresay made him a little hard to manage; and yet in his heart there was a softness.
"'That Tommy,' said his mother, 'he wants to be loved. That is the way to get him to do anything. There is no use in always punishing him and treating him hardly.'
"But for all that, old Siméon must have his will, and so he does not cease to be scolding the boy. He commands him now to do this thing, now that—here, there. He forbids him to be from home at night. He tells him he is a disgrace of a son to be so little laborious. Oh, it was a horror the way that poor lamb of a Tommy was treated; and finally, one day, when he was seventeen or eighteen, there was a great quarrel, and that Siméon called him by some cruel name, and white as a corpse cries out Tommy:
"'My father, that is not true. You shall not say it!'—and the other, furious as an animal: 'I shall say what I choose!' And he says the same thing again. And Tommy: 'After that, I will not endure to stay here another day. I am tired of being treated so. You will not have another chance.'