"I may go as far as the village, Cale. Don't expect me till just before supper."
"All right."
I told but half of the truth. I determined to carry out a part of what I planned on that voyage down the Saguenay. If there were anything to learn from Mère Guillardeau, that would throw light on that "forest episode" connected with my mother, I wanted to know what it was.
I found the old woman alone, at her loom.
"Ah, mademoiselle, you are come to tell me of André, my brother? You are more than welcome. And how goes it with André and my nephew? Did he send me a pair of moccasins for my old feet, such as he sent by the seignior last year?"
She left her work and, still holding my hand, drew me to the little porch, where we sat down on a bench beneath a mass of wild cucumber vines.
I kept her hand in mine—that old hand, which for nearly one hundred years had wrought and toiled, dug, planted, watered, hoed, milked the cow, cut the wood, woven cloth and carpets, harvested her tobacco! That prehensile thing which, in its youth, clasped the hand of her "mate" at the altar, cooked for him, sewed for him, piecing together the skins from the wilds, when he was at home from the trappers' haunts; and, meanwhile, it had found time to rock the cradle for her seven children and sew the shrouds for six of them!
To me it was a marvellous thing—that hand!
I looked at it, while I was trying to find words to tell her of André. It was thin to emaciation, misshapen from hard work—a frail mechanism, but still powerful because of the life-blood coursing within it. The dark blue veins were veritable bas-reliefs.
"Dear Mère Guillardeau, we have had such a lovely summer with André—dear old André, so young in heart."