"Pauline—allow me to call you by this name for perhaps the last time—Pauline, promise me one thing. Take care of your health. I fear that, after I am gone, you will replace me on that sick-bed, worn out by wearing weeks of watching."
Two livid spots burned on Pauline's cheek, and there was a glassiness in her eye. She leaned on the frame of the door for support, but mustered strength enough to answer that she felt no illness and hoped that all would turn out for the best. It was poor comfort; Cary had, however, to be satisfied with it, and drove away with a very heavy heart.
He had not been two hours in the American camp, when he met Batoche. It goes without saying that the meeting was of the heartiest, and, between them, a visit to Pointe-aux-Trembles was planned for that same evening. Zulma having heard of the negotiations for the exchange of prisoners, the coming of Cary was not unexpected, and there was great rejoicing that evening at the Sarpy Mansion, as over one who had been lost and was found, who had died and had risen from the dead.
[X.]
[ON THE BRINK.]
Another month had passed. With the middle of April the balmy spring-time was at hand. The snow had disappeared from mountain and plain; the rivers flowed clear and abundant in their channels; the trees were faintly burgeoning, and the heavens palpitated with an atmosphere of genial warmth. The cattle, confined for so many months in the darkness of stalls, lay basking in the sunshine, or trooped to the southern slopes where the young grass was springing. The sheep skipped on the hill sides. The doors and windows of the farm-houses were thrown wide open for a vital freshening. The children played on the stoop. White steam rose from the cracks and fissure of the heated granaries. The barn-yard was vocal with awakening sounds. The dove-cots buzzed with wooings; the eaves grew populous with swallows, and the thatched roofs of the pens and stables were covered with poultry grubbing for the earliest worm.
It was the resurrection of nature, nowhere felt with such keen exhilarance as in arctic latitudes. From the far off mountains, the clouds of murky vapour that lifted and rolled away, leaving the purple summits towering up to receive the first kiss of the rosy dawn and the last embrace of the golden sunset, were emblems of the winter's gloom replaced by that spring-tide brightness which aroused new hopes and a revived interest in the souls of men. The crocus of the glen, the anemone of the prairie, the cress of the sheltered waters, the hum of the first insect, the twitter from the mossy nest, the murmur of forest streams, were all so many types of human rejuvenescence and animation.
There was besides a moral feature to the splendour of the season. The dreary Lenten time was over, with its vigils and fasts, its self-abasement and penitence. The dread Holy Week had gone, with its plaints and laments, its confession of sins and cries for mercy, its darkened windows and stripped altars, its quenched tapers and hushed bells, its fourteen stations of that Via Crucis which rehearses the ineffable history of the Man of Sorrows and the Lady of Pain. The glorious Easter morning was there. Bright vestments gleamed, a thousand lights flamed from the sanctuary, perfumed incense circled heavenward, bearing the thanksgiving of opening hearts. From hillside to valley echoed the music of bells in every turret and steeple, even the bells of the churches and convents in the old beleaguered town that had so often sounded the alarm of battle during the night, taking on a new voice to celebrate the "great day which the Lord hath made." And even as the heavy stone was suddenly flung aside from the sepulchre under the shadow of Golgotha, giving freedom to the Master of the world; so the pall of winter was torn from the face of nature, and from the hearts of men was removed the burden which, during four long months, had made their torpor somewhat akin to that of the great beasts of the wilderness.
It was Easter Monday, a calmer day, but perhaps more enjoyable from the palpable assurance it afforded that the promises of its predecessor were really being fulfilled. The weather was magnificent, and the whole country resounded with the voices of men and women preparing for their work. Zulma Sarpy and Cary Singleton walked alone on the bank of the St. Lawrence, directly in front of the mansion. They moved along slowly, frequently stopping to admire the scenery spread out before them, or to engage in earnest conversation. Cary had entirely recovered from his illness, appearing stouter and stronger than ever before. He was clothed in his uniform, a proof that he had resumed active military duty. Zulma was seemingly in her usual health, and as she stood with her grey felt Montespan hat and azure plume, and brilliant cashmere shawl tightly drawn across her shoulders, her beauty shone in its queenliest aspects. No fitter companion for a soldier could well be pictured. Cary evidently felt this, as his frequent glances of admiration testified, and there were moments when to the observer he would have appeared as making the most ardent declarations of love.