Auclair met Saint-Vallier’s glittering, superficial glance and plausible tone rather bluntly.

  “I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope.”

  The Bishop flushed — his sanguine cheeks were apt to become more ruddy when he was crossed or annoyed. He rose and gathered the folds of his cloak about him. “It is time your patient dropped the stubborn mask he has worn so long, and began to realize that none of his enterprises will benefit him now but such as have furthered the interests of Christ’s Church in this Province. I have seen him, and I believe he is facing eternity.”

  Auclair expressed himself as much honoured by the Bishop’s visit and accompanied him to the door, holding it open that the light might guide him across the street to the steps of his episcopal Palace. When he returned to the salon, Cécile was bringing in the soup.

  “I began to think Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier would never go, Papa. How people do bother us about everything since the Count is ill! I am glad we can keep them away from him, at least.”

  Her father sat down and took a few spoonfuls of soup. “Why, I find I am quite hungry!” he declared. “And when I came home, I did not think I could eat at all. For some reason, our neighbour’s visit seems to have made me more cheerful.”

  “That is because you were so resolute with him, Father!”

  He smiled at her between the candles.

  “What restless eyes he has, Cécile; they run all over everything, like quicksilver when I spill it. He kept looking in again and again at your glass fruit, there on the mantel. Do you know, I believe he drew some conclusion from that; he has seen it at the Château, of course. These men who are trained at Court all become a little crafty; they learn to put two and two together. I have always believed that is why our patron never got advancement at Versailles: he is too downright.”

  IV

  IT WAS LATE afternoon, and Cécile was alone — as she was nearly always now. The Count had died last night. Today her father had gone to the Château to seal his heart up in a casket, so that it could be carried back to France according to his wish. It was already arranged that Father Joseph, Superior of the Récollets, should take the casket to Montreal, then to Fort Orange, and down the river to New York, where the English boats came and went all winter. On one of those boats he would go to England, cross over to France, and journey to Paris with the Count’s heart, to bury it in the Montmort chapel at Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs.

  Auclair had been gone all the afternoon, and Cécile knew that he would come home exhausted from sorrow, from his night of watching, and from the grim duty which had taken him today to the Count’s death-chamber. Cécile regarded this rite with awe, but not with horror; autopsies, she knew, must be performed upon kings and queens and all great people after death. That was the custom. Her father would have the barber-surgeon to help him, — though they were not very good friends, because they disagreed about bleeding people. The barber complained that the meddlesome apothecary took the bread out of his mouth.

  Many times that afternoon Cécile went out to the doorstep and looked up at the Château. A light snow was falling, and the sky was grey. It was very strange to look up at those windows in the south end, and to know that there was no friend, no protection there. She felt as if a strong roof over their heads had been swept away. She was not sure that they would even have a livelihood without the Count’s patronage. Their sugar and salt and wine, and her father’s Spanish snuff, had always come from the Count’s storehouses. The colonists paid very little for their remedies; if they brought a basket of eggs, or a chicken, or a rabbit, they thought they were treating their medical man very handsomely. But what she most dreaded was her father’s loneliness. He had lived under the Count’s shadow. The Count was the reason for nearly everything he did, — for his being here at all.

  About four o’clock, as the darkness began to close in, Cécile put more wood on the fire in the salon and set some milk to warm before it. There was very little to eat in the house. Her father had not been to market for a week. Running to the door every few minutes, she at last saw him coming down the hill, with his black bag full of deadly poisons. He looked grey and sick as she let him in. Before he threw his black bag into the cupboard, he took out of it a lead box, rudely soldered over. She looked at it solemnly.

  “Yes,” he said, “it is all we have left of him. Father Joseph will set out for France in two days. I am in charge of this box until it starts upon its journey.”

  He placed it in the cabinet where he kept his medical books, then went into the salon and sank down in his chair by the fire. Cécile knelt on the floor beside him, resting her arms upon his knee. He bent and leaned his cheek for a moment on her shingled brown hair.

  “So it is over, my dear,” he sighed softly. “It has lasted a lifetime, and now it is over. Since I was six years old, the Count has been my protector, and he was my father’s before me. To my mother, and to your mother, he was always courteous and considerate. He belonged to the old order; he cherished those beneath him and rendered his duty to those above him, but flattered nobody, not the King himself. That time has gone by. I do not wish to outlive my time.”

  “But you wish to live on my account, don’t you, Father? I do not belong to the old time. I have got to live on into a new time; and you are all I have in the world.”

  Her father went on sadly: “The Count and the old Bishop were both men of my own period, the kind we looked up to in my youth. Saint-Vallier and Monsieur de Champigny are of a different sort. Had I been able to choose my lot in the world, I would have chosen to be like my patron, for all his disappointments and sorrows; to be a soldier who fought for no gain but renown, merciful to the conquered, charitable to the poor, haughty to the rich and overbearing. Since I could not be such a man and was born in an apothecary shop, it was my good fortune to serve such a man and to be honoured by his confidence.”

  Cécile slipped quietly away to pour the warm milk into a cup, and with it she brought a glass of brandy. Her father drank them. He said he would want no dinner tonight, but that she must prepare something for herself. Without noticing whether she did so or not, he sat in a stupor of weariness, dreaming by the fire. The scene at the Château last night passed again before his eyes.

  The Count had received the Sacrament in perfect consciousness at seven o’clock. Then he sank into a sleep which became a coma, and lay for three hours breathing painfully, with his eyes rolled back and only a streak of white showing between the half-open lids. A little after ten o’clock he suddenly came to himself and looked inquiringly at the group around his bed; there were two nursing Sisters from the Hôtel Dieu, the Intendant and Madame de Champigny, Hector de Callières, Auclair, and Father Joseph, the Récollets’ Superior, who had heard the Count’s confession and administered the last rites of the Church. The Count raised his eyebrows haughtily, as if to demand why his privacy was thus invaded. He looked from one face to another; in those faces he read something. He saw the nuns upon their knees, praying. He seemed to realize his new position in the world and what was now required of him. The challenge left his face, — a dignified calm succeeded it. Father Joseph held the crucifix to his lips. He kissed it. Then, very courteously, he made a gesture with his left hand, indicating that he wished every one to draw back from his bed.

  “This I will do alone,” his steady glance seemed to say.

  All drew back.

  “Merci,” he said distinctly. That was the last word he spoke. While the group of watchers stood four or five feet away from the bed, wondering, they saw that his face had become altogether natural and lost all look of suffering. He breathed softly for a few moments, then breathed no more. One of the nuns held a feather to his lips. Madame de Champigny got a mirror and put it close to his mouth, but there was no cloud on it. Auclair laid his head down on his patron’s chest; there all was still.

  As Auclair was returning home after midnight, under the glitter of the hard bright northern stars, he felt for the first time wholly and entirely cut off from France; a helpless exile in a strange land. Not without reason, he told himself bitterly as he looked up at those stars, had the Latin poets insisted that thrice and four times blessed were those to whom it befell to die in the land of their fathers.

  While Auclair sat by the fire thinking of these things, numb and broken, Cécile was lying on the sofa, wrapped up in the old shawl Madame Auclair had used so much after she became ill. She, too, was thinking of what they had lost. They would indeed have another winter in Quebec; but everything was changed almost as much as if they had gone away. That sense of a strong protector had counted in her life more than she had ever realized. To be sure, they had not called upon the Count’s authority very often; but to know that they could appeal to him at any moment meant security, and gave them a definite place in their little world.

  The hours went by. Her father did not speak or move, not even to fix the fire, which was very low. For once, Cécile herself had no wish to set things right. Let the fire burn out; what of it?

  At last there came a knock at the door, not very loud, but insistent, — urgent, as it were. Auclair got up from his chair.

  “Whoever it is, send him away. I can see no one tonight.” He went into the kitchen and shut the door behind him.

  Cécile was a little startled, — death made everything strange. She took a candle into the shop, set it down on the counter, and opened the door. Outside there, against the snow, was the outline of a man with a gun strapped on his back. She had thrown her arms around him before she could really see him, — the set of his shoulders told her who it was.

  “Oh, Pierre, Pierre Charron!” She began to cry abandonedly, but from joy. Never in all her life had she felt anything so strong and so true, so real and so sure, as that quick embrace that smelled of tobacco and the pine-woods and the fresh snow.

  “Petite tête de garçon!” he muttered running his hand over her head, which lay on his shoulder. “There, don’t try to tell me. I know all about it. I started for Kebec as soon as I heard the Count was sinking. Today, on the river, I passed the messengers going to Montreal; they called the word to me. And your father?”

  “I don’t know what to do, Pierre. It is worse with him than when my mother died. There seems to be no hope for us.”

  “I understand,” he stroked her soothingly. “I knew this would be a blow to him. I said to myself in Ville-Marie: ‘I must be there when it happens.’ I came as quickly as I could. Never did I paddle so fast. The breeze was against me, there was no chance of a sail. I had only a half-man to help me — Antoine Frichette, you remember? That poor fellow for whom your father made the belly-band. He did his best, but since his hurt he has no wind. I’m here at last, to be of any use I can. Command me.” He had loosed the big kerchief from his neck, and now he gently wiped her cheeks dry with it. Turning her face about to the candlelight, he regarded it intently.

  “I wish you would go to him, Pierre. He is in the kitchen.”

  He kissed her softly on the forehead, unslung his gun, and went out into the kitchen. He, too, closed the door behind him. In the few moments while she was left alone in the shop, Cécile opened the outer door again and looked up toward the Château. The falling snow and the darkness hid it from sight; but she had once more that feeling of security, as if the strong roof were over them again; over her and the shop and the salon and all her mother’s things. For the first time she realized that her father loved Pierre for the same reason he had loved the Count; both had the qualities he did not have himself, but which he most admired in other men.

  When they came in from the kitchen, Charron had his arm over Auclair’s shoulder.

  “Cécile” he called, “je n’ai pas de chance. Evidently I am too late for supper, and I have not had a morsel since I broke camp before daybreak.”

  “Supper? But we have had no supper here tonight. We had no appetite. I will make some for you, at once. There is not much in the house, I am afraid; my father has not been to market. Smoked eels, perhaps?”

  Charron made a grimace. “Detestable! Even I can do better than that. I shot a deer for our supper in the forest last night, and I brought a haunch along with me, — outside, in my bag. What else have you?”

  “Not much.” Cécile felt deeply mortified to confess this, though it was not her fault. “We have some wild rice left from last year, and there are some carrots. We always have preserves, and of course there is soup.”

  “Excellent; all that sounds very attractive to me at the moment. You attend to everything else, but by your leave I will cook the venison in my own way. It’s enough for us all, and there will be good pickings left for Blinker.”

  When Charron went out to get his game-bag, Auclair whispered to his daughter: “Are we really so destitute, my child? Do the best you can for him. I will open a box of the conserves from France.”

  He now seemed very anxious about his dinner, and she could not forbear a reproachful glance at the head of the house, who had been so neglectful of his duties.

  “And you, Monsieur Euclide,” said Pierre, when he came back with the haunch in his hand, “you ought to produce something rather special from your cellar for us.”

  “It shall be the best I have,” declared his host.

  The supper lasted until late. After the dessert the apothecary opened a bottle of heavy gold-coloured wine from the South.

  “This,” he said, “is a wine the Count liked after supper. His family was from the South, and his father always kept on hand wines that were brought up from Bordeaux and the Rhone vineyards. The Count inherited that taste.” He sighed heavily.

  “Euclide,” said Charron, “tomorrow it may be you or I; that is the way to look at death. Not all the wine in the Château, not all the wines in the great cellars of France, could warm the Count’s blood now. Let us cheer our hearts a little while we can. Good wine was put into the grapes by our Lord, for friends to enjoy together.”

  When it was almost midnight, the visitor said he was too tired to go hunt a lodging, and would gladly avail himself of the invitation, often extended, but never before accepted, of spending the night here and sleeping on the sofa in the salon.

  Cécile, in her upstairs bedroom, turned to slumber with the weight of doubt and loneliness melted away. Her last thoughts before she sank into forgetfulness were of a friend, devoted and fearless, here in the house with them, as if he were one of themselves. He had not a throne behind him, like the Count (it had been very far behind, indeed!), not the authority of a parchment and seal. But he had authority, and a power which came from knowledge of the country and its people; from knowledge, and from a kind of passion. His daring and his pride seemed to her even more splendid than Count Frontenac’s.

  EPILOGUE

  ON THE SEVENTEENTH day of August 1713, fifteen years after the death of Count Frontenac, the streets of Quebec and the headland overlooking the St. Lawrence were thronged with people. By the waterside the Governor-General and Monsieur Vaudreuil, the Intendant, with all the clergy, regular and secular, the magistrates, and the officers from the garrison, stood waiting to receive a long-expected guest. Down the river lay a ship from France, La Manon, unable to come in against the wind. A small boat had been sent out to bring in one of her passengers. As the little boat drew near the shore, all the cannon on the fortifications, and the guns on the vessels anchored in the roadstead, thundered a salute of welcome to Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier, at last returning to his people after an absence of thirteen years.

  When the prelate put foot upon the shore of Quebec, the church-bells began to ring, and continued to ring while the Governor-General, the Intendant, and the Archidiacre made addresses of welcome. The Intendant’s carriage stood ready to convey the Bishop, but he preferred, characteristically, to ascend on foot to the Cathedral in the Upper Town, surrounded by the clergy and preceded by drums and hautbois.

  Euclide Auclair, the old apothecary, standing before his door on Mountain Hill to watch the procession, was shocked at the change in Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier. When he sailed for France thirteen years ago, he was a very young man of forty-seven; now he came back a very old man of sixty. Every physical trait by which Auclair remembered the handsome and arrogant churchman had disappeared. He would never have recognized, in this heavy, stooped, lame old man going up the hill, the slender and rather dramatic figure he had so often seen mounting the steps of the episcopal Palace across the way. The narrow, restless shoulders were fat and bent; the Bishop carried his head like a man broken to the yoke.

  Auclair watched the procession until the turn of the way shut Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier from sight, then went back to his shop and sat down, overcome. The thirteen years which for him had passed quietly, happily, had been bitter ones for the wandering Bishop. Nine years ago Saint-Vallier was on his way back to Canada after one of his long absences, when his ship, La Seine, was captured by the English, taken into London, and sold at auction. The Bishop himself was declared a prisoner of state, and was sequestered in a small English town near Farnham until the French King should ransom him.

  Politics intervened: King Louis had lately seized and imprisoned the Baron of Méan, Dean of the Cathedral of Liege. The German Emperor was much offended at this, and besought Queen Anne not to release the Bishop of Quebec under any other terms than as an exchange for the Baron of Méan. For five years Saint-Vallier remained a prisoner of state in England, until King Louis at last set the Baron of Méan at liberty and recalled the Bishop of Quebec to France. But this did not mean that he was free to return to Canada. During his captivity his enemies in Quebec and Montreal had been busy, had repeatedly written the Minister, Pontchartrain, that the affairs of the colony went better with the Bishop away; that the King would be assisting his Canadian subjects by keeping Saint-Vallier in France. This the King did. He kept him, indeed, almost as long as the Queen of England had done.