The Young Seigneur Part 20

Spoon pressed heavily behind Benoit, and whispered something.

"La Misericoide then," said Benoit, hastily.

Zotique shouted to the Secretary: "Jean Benoit the countryside of La Misericorde!" And to Benoit again:

"There is your committee."

But Jean would have a hand in shoving forward his admired bar-tender: "Give monsieur something near my own."

"Cuiller--the village of La Misericorde," directed Zotique. "Now, both of you, the chief thing you have to do is to report to us if the Bleus commence to work there. Go; go!"

"Salut, Benoit; how goes it; how is the wife? and the father?--the children also? I hope you are well. Comment ca-va-t-il Cuiller?"--asked Chamilly.

Spoon took the proffered hand with his sleepy grin. Benoit responded by an obsequiously graceful shaking and deliberative loquacity:

"Well; well, Monsieur the Seigneur,--We are very well. The wife is well, the father, the children also. And how is Madame the Seigneuresse? and yourself? The crisis approaches, does it not? Eh bien, at that point you will find Jean Benoit strong enough. I have a good heart, Monseigneur.

Once Xiste Brin said to me, 'Monsieur the Director, you have a good heart.' Deign to accept my professions, monseigneur, of a loyalty the most solemn, of a breast for ever faithful."

"I have always accepted your friendship, Benoit, and trusted you,"

smiled generous Haviland. "See here, Zotique, give Benoit a responsible post.--How different must be our feelings at this priceless service of personal affection from those of our opponents, served only for money."

"No money!" blurted Spoon. "Taurieu! An election without money?"

Chamilly, with one quiet glance, turned away to L'Honorable. "Without 'tin,'--St. Christophe, I say!--St. Laurent!"

"Keep quiet--silence, I pray thee," returned Benoit, and drew his companion aside.

"Why did Benoit call himself Director?" Chrysler asked.

Haviland and the Honorable smiled. Chamilly answered:

"It is a weakness of his ever since he was put on the Board of our Agricultural Society. Do not laugh, unless at the common vanity of mankind."

CHAPTER XXV.

THE LOW-COUNTRY SUNRISE.

"Chacun son gout. Moi, j'aime mieux la nature primitive qui n'est pas a la mode du jour mais que l'on ne pourra jamais demoder ... J'aime ce que j'aime, et vous, vous aimez autre chose. Grand bien vous fa.s.se--je vous admire, Monsieur Tout-le-Monde."

--Ben Sulte

"I am going to rise before the sun to-morrow. Would you like to come out fishing?" remarked Haviland, cheerfully, on the way home. Chrysler signified a.s.sent.

At grey dawn, before it was yet quite daybreak, they were on the road.

All the houses in the neighbourhood looked asleep. Heavy dews lay upon the gra.s.s. The scene was chilly, and a little comfortless and suggestive of turning back to bed.

"Where are we going?" the visitor asked, trying to collect his spirits.

"To find Bonhomme Le Brun, who superintends the boating interest.--'Bonhomme'--'Good Man'--is a kind of jocular name we give to every simple old fellow. 'Le Brun' is not quite correct either. His real name--or rather the only one extant among the _noms-de-guerre_ of his predecessors, is Vadeboncoeur--'Go willingly,' which the Notaries I suppose would write 'Vadeboncoeur _dit_ Le Brun.'"

Notwithstanding the early hour they were not alone on the road. A wrinkled woman, bent almost double, was toiling slowly along with heavy sighs, under a sack of firewood.

"See here, madame," Charnilly called out, stepping forward to her, "give me the sack;" which he unloaded from her back and threw over his shoulder.

"You are always so good, monseigneur Chamilly," the old woman groaned in a plaintive, palsied voice, without straightening her doubled frame.

"Is the Bonhomme at the house?" he enquired.

"I think not, sir; he was preparing to go to Isle of Ducks."

"Just where I thought," exclaimed Haviland in English. "This Le Brun is of the oddest cla.s.s--a secular hermit on the solitudes of the river--a species of mystery to the others. Sometimes he is seen paddling among the islands far down; sometimes seining a little, by methods invented by himself; sometimes carrying home an old gun and more or less loaded with ducks; sometimes his torch is seen far out in the dark, night-fishing; but few meet him face to face besides myself. When a boy I used to think he lived on the water because his legs were crooked, though more probably his legs are crooked because he avoids the land. He keeps my sail-boat for me and I let him use the old windmill we shall come to by those trees."

The windmill and the cot of Le Brun stood in a birch-grown hollow, not far off, where a stream cascaded into the St. Lawrence, and had worn down the precipitous bank of earth. It was a wild picture. The gable of the cot was stained Indian red down to the eaves, and a stone chimney was embedded irregularly in its log side. The windmill, towering its conical roof and rusty weather-vane a little distance off, and stretching out its gray skeleton arms as if to creak more freely in the sweep of gales from the river, was one of those rembrandtesque relics which prove so picturesquely that Time is an artist inimitable by man. A clay oven near the cot completed this group of erections, around and behind which the silver birches and young elms grew up and closed.

No, Messieurs, Le Brun was not at home; he had gone to Isle of Ducks; and all the blessings of the saints upon Monseigneur for his kindness to a poor old woman.--"Ah, Seigneur!"

Chamilly took his skiff from the boathouse himself, and was soon pulling swiftly from the sh.o.r.e, while as they got out upon it the vastness and power of the stream became apparent.

From its broad surface the mists began to rise gracefully in long drifts, moved by the early winds and partly obscuring the distant sh.o.r.es, whose fringe of little shut up houses still suggested slumber.

The dews had freshened the pines of Dormilliere, and the old Church stood majestically forward among them, throwing back its head and keeping sleepless watch towards the opposite side. Gradually receding, too, the Manoir showed less and less gable among its ma.s.s of foliage.

If the Church is one great inst.i.tution of that country, the St. Lawrence is no less another,--displaying thirty miles unbroken blue on a clear day in the direction of the distant hill of Montreal, and on the other hand, towards Lake St. Peter, a vista oceanlike and unhorizoned. In certain regions numerous flat islands, covered by long gra.s.ses and rushes intersected by labyrinthine pa.s.sages, hide the boatman from the sight of the world and form innumerable nooks of quiet which have a cla.s.s of scenery and inhabitants altogether their own. As the chaloupe glides around some unsuspected corner, the crane rises heavily at the splash of a paddle, wild duck fly off low and swiftly, the plover circle away in bright handsome flocks, the gorgeous kingfisher leaves his little tree. In the water different spots have their special finny denizens. In one place a broad deep arm of the river--which throws off a dozen such arms, each as large as London's Thames, without the main stream appearing a whit less broad--shelters among its weeds exhaustless tribes of perch and pickerel; in another place a swifter and profounder current conceals the great sturgeon and lion-like maskinonge; while among certain shallower, less active corners, the bottom is clothed with muddy cat fish.

They approached a region of this kind, skimmed along by spirited athletic strokes, and had arrived at the head of the low-lying archipelago just described, where they came upon a motionless figure sitting fishing in a punt, some distance along a broad pa.s.sage to the left.

Short blue blouse, little cap and flat-bottomed boat, the appearance of the figure at that hour made one with the drifting mists and rural strangeness of the landscape, and Chrysler knew it was Le Brun, and remarked so to Haviland.

"Without doubt, Bonhomme is part of nature and unmistakable--Hola Bonhomme!"

"Mo-o-o-o-nseigneur," he sung in reply, without looking up or taking further notice of them.

Haviland gave a few more vigorous strokes.

"How does it bite, Bonhomme?"

"A little badly, monseigneur; all perch here; one pickerel. Shall we enter the little channels?"

"I do not wish to enter the little channels: I remain here."

They were soon fishing beside him, Chamilly at one end of the skiff intent upon his sport. The old man's flat punt was littered with perch.

How early he must have risen! He was small of figure, weathered of face, simple and impa.s.sive of manner.

"Good day," Chrysler opened; "the weather is wettish."

"It is morningy, Monsieur."--