Читать книгу Rabble in Arms: A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 13

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St. John’s is a sort of seaport in the middle of nowhere, for vessels can sail to it from Champlain; but beyond it there are falls and quick water, difficult for even canoes to pass. Montreal lies to the west, and Sorel and the broad St. Lawrence to the north, and Albany to the south, so it is well situated for a prosperous trading town. Ordinarily, I have no doubt, it looks pleasant enough, with its broad fortified enclosure containing barracks and a shipyard and various small buildings on the westward bank, and a winding road along the river, with farms and a large house or two fronting on it; and on the eastern side a ridge of high land with more farms and an imposing manor house.

But when we ran our canoes toward the landing on that cold May afternoon, St. John’s looked to have been struck by a plague and an earthquake combined.

There was a half-finished vessel in the shipyard—a brig or schooner—and not a soul near it, so that it had the appearance of a skeleton. The whole place looked dead. Shutters covered the windows of such houses as we could see, and boards were nailed across the fronts of warehouses and barracks, as if they had been gutted by a violent wind and hastily repaired.

The road that paralleled the landing was littered with rubbish. Amid the rubbish, around small fires, sat groups of men so furtive and so dejected in appearance that they might have been beggars out of the filthy slums of London.

Not only were they thin and unshaven, but they were half-clothed, all of them: some with bundles of muddy cloth tied around their feet in place of shoes: some in coats with gaping seams through which the linings hung: some with breeches sadly torn and draggled: some even coatless, and in ragged shirts as dark as the gray clouds that drifted across us from the eastward.

As we stared at them, two men a little better dressed came out from the nearest warehouse and walked quickly to the landing. Their clothes were travesties on uniforms: but uniforms they must have been; for though the men were swordless, they wore the brass gorgets of officers at their throats.

“Where’s the provision boats?” one of them asked us.

“An hour behind,” Nason said.

“How much this time, and what is it you’re carrying?”

Nason shook his head. “We aren’t with ’em.”

“Not with ’em!” the officer shouted. “Then you got to keep away from here! Orders are, no more men received in this section unless provided with rations! That’s what’s been holding Sullivan and Wayne in Albany, damn it, and here you come, contrary to orders! My God! There’s two hundred and eighty smallpox cases—soldiers they call themselves—lying in huts here with nothing to put in their stomachs! I say you can’t come ashore!”

Nason looked down at the swift brown water of the river for a time, while the rest of us stared dumbly at this cheerless town. “We’ll feed ourselves,” he said at length. “We——”

“Feed yourselves!” the officer cried. “What with! What’re you going to eat in place of food? This army’s supposed to be getting six tons of pork a day, and we’re getting less than two!”

“We’ve got to get through to Arnold,” Nason said patiently. “He sent me back to Maine from Quebec on purpose to get these men to do scout duty.”

The officer’s face changed a little. “Scout duty? It’s a pity you couldn’t have been here sooner, to do some scouting on a few of the weasels Arnold’s got under him!”

Nason seemed lost in a contemplative silence; but at length he cleared his throat and spoke softly. “Weasels? Who would that be?”

“That would be Bedel and Butterfield, just to name two of ’em!” the officer said sharply. “You don’t mean to say you haven’t heard what happened at the Cedars!”

“Look here,” Nason said, “I’m going to take these men through to Arnold! Do we come ashore here, or do we have to land back a piece and dodge around you?”

The officer spat violently. “Well, everything’s in a mess, anyway, and I guess you won’t make it much worse. Come ahead.”

We drew our canoes from the water, and overturned them to make shelters for our muskets and packs, while the two officers stood watching us. Nason placed guards over our baggage: then turned to the officers. “What’s this about the Cedars? Was it because of something that happened at Quebec?”

One of them walked away: the other stared moodily at the ground. Then the man in motion must have changed his mind, for he turned and came back to us, his face as red as an Indian blanket. When he spoke, there was both venom and despair in his voice. “A mess! A dirty damned mess!” When he saw all of us silent, watching him, he spoke more calmly.

“Quebec! No, it wasn’t because of Quebec! The Cedars was worse than Quebec, some ways, if anything could be worse! You know where the Cedars is?”

Nason shook his head.

“It’s thirty miles above Montreal, at a bend in the St. Lawrence. Before Arnold came up from Quebec, Colonel Moses Hazen was in charge at Montreal. You know Hazen?”

Again Nason shook his head.

“Hazen lives across the river, in Iberville,” the officer explained. “You can see his house: the big one over there, on the high land.” He pointed toward the opposite bank, and we saw the house he meant: an imposing place, with what might have been the smaller houses of retainers scattered along the ridge near it, but not too near.

“Oh, yes,” the officer said angrily, “he’s got quite a place: quite a place! Farmers; and nuns to teach the farmers’ children, and everything! He owns a mill here, and a tavern at Chambly, and sells rum that ain’t fit for nothing but poisoning Indians. Quite a feller!”

I was amused at his bitterness; and the officer, doubtless seeing my amusement, hastily added: “Some damned fool made him an American officer; but if you ask me, I think he’s neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring. He changed sides once so he wouldn’t lose his property, and if you ask me, he’s ready to do it again. Anyway, it was Hazen that ordered four hundred of our men up to the Cedars, so’s nobody could come down the river and attack Montreal. He put Colonel Bedel in charge of ’em. Timothy Bedel. Hazen likes him, and if you ask me, that accounts for everything.” He stared at us defiantly, as if expecting contradiction.

“Well, sir,” he went on, “there was some English and Indians up the river, and two weeks ago they did come down. Forty regulars and two-three hundred Indians there were, against Bedel’s four hundred; and Bedel in a fort with two twelve-pounders. Bedel got word they was coming, and just drifted off to Montreal! Ran away, by God!”

“Anybody shot him yet?” Cap Huff asked.

“Listen,” the officer said. “Bedel left a major in command of the Cedars. Butterfield. Major Butterfield. The British and the Indians, they came down the river and the British major sent word to the fort. ‘Kindly surrender,’ he says, ‘as we got business elsewhere, and no time to waste on this annoying place.’ ”

Cap Huff laughed hoarsely.

The officer fixed him with an angry stare.

“You can laugh,” he said, “but that’s what Butterfield did! Yes, sir: that’s what he did! He surrendered! Never fired a gun! Had four hundred men and a fort, and he surrendered to two hundred and fifty! Every last one of the four hundred was took prisoner! The Indians stripped ’em and killed a few. Scalped ’em! Chopped ’em up the way you would a halibut! They say the men were crazy at Butterfield—wanted to kill him.”

Nason made a little clicking noise with his tongue, such as a man makes when he learns of a friend’s misfortune.

“That must have tickled Arnold,” Cap Huff said.

The officer sighed. “God knows! It was only last week this happened. No word’s come through yet. We heard the British warned Arnold not to attack ’em, or they’d turn the prisoners over to the Indians and let every last one of ’em be butchered; but maybe ’tain’t true.”

We stood there silently beside our overturned canoes, above us the heavy gray skies of Canada; behind us, squatted over their miserable fires, the dejected and unkempt soldiers who waited for the scant provisions that must be hurried to a hungry and frightened army. If this was war, I thought to myself—this muck of hunger and distrust and disease and raggedness and cowardice—it was different from all my imaginings: so different that a little would be enough for me.

I looked at Nathaniel, fearing to find in his face some sign of regret for our situation; but he was fingering his pocket and staring across the river to the small farm-houses here and there along the ridge. There was something in his mind, I could see, besides the war: something important enough to veil the darkness of the prospect before us; and what that something was, I was sure I knew.

At length Nason laughed as if he cared nothing for what he had heard; but to me his laugh had a false and hollow sound. “We’ll soon know what happened,” he said. “We’ll soon know! We’ve got to have food to get us to Montreal, and when we’ve got it——”

The officer interrupted him. “You might get it across the river in Iberville, from one of the French farmers, but only if you’ve got hard money. Since the retreat from Quebec, the French won’t touch Congress money. They’ve turned against us, the lousy frog-eaters! That’s why we’re in such a hell of a mess! There ain’t a cent’s worth of hard money in sight anywhere, and none of us can buy anything. When Greaton’s men went up to Montreal from Sorel the other day, to help Arnold, the only thing they could get to eat was thirty loaves of bread the Commissioners bought for ’em out of their own pockets.”

“I’ve got a little hard money,” Nathaniel said suddenly. “I think I can go across the river to those farms, yonder, and pick up enough corn meal to get this detachment to Montreal.”

There was relief in Nason’s voice. “Good! I won’t forget it! Buy what you can and get back here with it as soon as possible. You’d better take Verrieul to do the talking.”

“He won’t need Verrieul,” I said. “I’ll go with him. I’ve got some hard money, too, and I can speak a little French: enough to get food.”

That was how Nathaniel and I happened to cross the brown waters of the Richelieu together, and set off up the slope toward the small farms on the high land. We may have looked fraternal enough, being similar in height and appearance; but there was little brotherly love in the way Nathaniel pressed his lips tight together and stared straight ahead. When we were out of sight of the canoes, he spoke with what might have been indifference. “There’s no need of our staying together. We’ll probably get more if we go separately.”

“Now, look here,” I told him, “we haven’t any time to waste. I know what’s in your mind. When you got into the chaise in London, that woman with the French name gave you a letter to carry with you to Canada. Do you think I didn’t take note of that, Nathaniel, or that I’ve forgotten it?”

Nathaniel’s colour heightened. “Well, what of it?”

“This,” I said. “I think your mind’s on that letter now, more than on your duty. To be frank about it, Nathaniel, I’m afraid that if I don’t come with you, you might go out of your way to deliver that letter. As matters stand, I am with you, and our business is to get through to Montreal the straightest and quickest we can.”

Even as I spoke, it came to me, with something of surprise, that my brooding over Marie de Sabrevois and the fear of how she might affect my brother had made me reluctant to speak her name openly; and when Nathaniel, a moment later, also showed an unwillingness to speak her name, I knew there was more than a little in what I suspected of his feeling for her.

“I know our business as well as you do,” he said. “I admit I’ve got a letter to deliver. It’s one she wrote that little ward of hers she spoke of. It’s a matter for you not to interfere in, I take it.”

I looked at him shrewdly. “Why is it you’ve fingered that letter in your pocket so much? Why is it that for days you’ve heard little that was said to you? Why is it you’ve been all along more bent on getting to St. John’s than on getting to Quebec?”

“What’s wrong in such a note?” he asked testily. “A note of affection from a kind woman to a young girl! ’Tisn’t a wickedness, is it?”

“We’re wasting time,” I told him again. “This country’s British, even if we are in it. My mind’s made up: if anybody wants to know where you’ve been in this town, and who you’ve seen, I propose to be able to tell him.”

Nathaniel faced me. “What is it you’re hinting at?”

“I’m hinting at nothing. You saw, in Arundel, how much trouble can spring from next to nothing nowadays. Well, I want no more trouble of that sort. If you want to present your letter, hurry up about it, because I’m going with you.”

Nathaniel’s glance filled me with discomfort; for it seemed to me to hold contempt as well as anger. But at last, seeing that his displeasure had no effect on my stubbornness, he fumbled in his pocket and drew out a crumpled envelope addressed:

Ellen Phipps,

Château de St. Auge,

Iberville contre St. Jean.

Along the ridge opposite the St. John’s fort there were, in addition to Hazen’s house, a number of small farm-houses, but only one that might be called a château—and if it was indeed a château, then Hazen’s big house, not far distant, was a royal palace. It was an affair of rough boards plentifully daubed with whitewash, capped with a roof of hand-split shingles. Its eaves curved upward as if warped by the heat and the moisture of this flat country.

With one accord we turned our steps towards it, whereupon another suspicion that had crept into my mind in London was confirmed; for cut in the wood above the entrance was a cross. In addition, there was another taller cross planted before the house: a cross with an amazing collection of objects attached to its upper portions—bottles, hammers, roosters, gun-rammers and a score of other things. When I thumped on the door, it was opened by a spectacled nun who looked at us with a face as blank as a shuttered window.

“Hold up the letter for her to see,” I told Nathaniel, “but don’t let her have it.”

He held it up, and I said “Est-elle ici?”

The nun adjusted her spectacles and stared at the envelope: then, with a movement so quick that Nathaniel almost fell backward, she snatched at it. Nathaniel put it behind him, and raised his eyebrows appealingly, whereupon the nun sourly said “Entrez!”

She left us in a room that had high-coloured pictures of saints on the walls, and was furnished with four stiff chairs covered with horsehair. We were uncomfortable, for more reasons than the chairs accounted for, and waited in silence, not looking at each other, until, at length, another older woman, with an even more expressionless face, came silently into the room, and with her a girl no older than my sister Jane.

The woman, I thought, affected a nunnish air without being a nun; for her gray gown clung to her figure, but was fastened at the waist with a common leather strap, very ostentatious, as if she advertised her sanctity. The girl with her seemed, in a way, half a nun herself; for her dress was severe and simple, made from a rough gray material, better fitted, I thought, for potato-sacking than for wearing. At her throat and wrists were bands of black, which gave her garb the look of a uniform, and not a gay uniform either.

In spite of the dullness of her garments, she had the cheeriest look of any girl I had ever seen. Her hair was dark brown—so dark as to seem almost black; and it curled in tight little curls around her forehead and ears and the nape of her neck, a cap of crinkly, glistening, chestnut-coloured fleece. I was filled with curiosity, the moment I saw her, to know whether the ringlets were soft, or whether they would be harsh to the touch; and I think my curiosity was not unusual; for when the lady had looked at us almost sleepily, she said, “Sit down, Ellen”; and as she did so she passed her hand gently over the girl’s tight mass of brown curls. Ellen sat down at once, prim and obedient, and looked up at us out of brown eyes so bright that they seemed to glitter as the brown brass of my sextant sometimes glitters when I look across it at the sun. Yet there was nothing hard about those eyes. Although they glittered, they seemed both warm and soft, like the finest Lisbon sherry.

The lady regarded us. “You have a letter for Ellen?” she asked. “I am Madame St. Auge. I will take it, please.”

Nathaniel gave her the envelope. When she had glanced carelessly at the name on it, she turned it over and looked thoughtfully at the seal; then fingered the square of paper dreamily, while Ellen’s round brown eyes stared at it as if she expected it to burst into speech.

“Yes,” Madame St. Auge said. “The writing is that of a dear friend. From where do you bring this letter?”

“From London,” Nathaniel said. He coughed. “We were in London until the end of March. She—I met her——” He coughed again, seeming to have trouble with his throat.

Madame St. Auge’s eyes darted from his face to mine, and fell again to the letter.

“Yes,” she said, “yes.” She broke the seal and gave the contents one swift glance. She smoothed the letter on her knee, then, and made a cooing sound. I could see there were only a few lines on the page, written large, so that much of the paper was wasted. “A sweet note,” she murmured to Ellen. “Like herself; sweet, my dear!” Then she read it aloud.

“My darling Ellen; I send you my love by a kind gentleman who may see you before I do. I shall come to you as soon as I return. Pray assure the good Madame St. Auge that all goes well here, but that I long to see you once more, never again to leave you. To M. Montgolfier I send my respects, and to you eight thousand kisses. The gentleman who brings this to you will, I am sure, assist you in any possible way, if the opportunity should arise.”

Nathaniel looked at me reproachfully, and I could not meet his eye. I was ashamed of the curious broodings that had been mine concerning him, and Mademoiselle de Sabrevois and the letter; and I wanted to tell him that I was sorry, and to ask his pardon; but I suppose that I have always had a stiffness, both in mind and manner, that makes such matters awkward for me.

At all events, I sat saying nothing; and then, abruptly, I began to think again about this letter. The surface of it was simple, kind and sweet; but there were three words in it that all at once repeated themselves to me, and gave me odd thoughts. “Eight thousand kisses.”

Then, too, why was this harmless letter so brief? The woman who wrote it professed a deep affection for her ward, and had few opportunities to communicate with her. I thought so much love might have been more copious in expression: more ample of news.

And those eight thousand kisses? Lovers and mothers and tender women writing to children send a thousand kisses, or ten thousand kisses; they do not send two thousand or six thousand or eight thousand, though I could admit the possibility that here and there five thousand might be sent. Eight thousand was a number I misliked.

However, seeing that Nathaniel was fumbling for words, I thought it wise to say a few myself. I said them somewhat at random, but not altogether. During our voyage, my musings had sometimes occupied themselves a little with the quiet figure that had been our companion for a time; and just at this moment I recalled rather sharply that we had first encountered that figure in Marie de Sabrevois’s company. An impulse decided me to mention him.

“Well,” I said to Madame St. Auge, “it was a pleasure to meet the lady, and her uncle, also. It was due to Mr. Leonard that we were able to leave England when we did. I hoped he might arrive here before us, even.”

“Leonard?” she asked. “Leonard?” then she smiled. “Ah, Lanaudiere!” The word was no sooner out of her mouth than her face seemed to stiffen. “Your English names!” she protested. “They’re difficult for us! I do not know that name you spoke! I do not know that gentleman! We have no knowledge of him.”

Here, at least, was something—not much, but a sign, perhaps: an indication. I fixed the name firmly in my mind: Lanaudiere. It was possible that a Lanaudiere might somehow be connected with Marie de Sabrevois, and in no praiseworthy manner. At all events, Madame St. Auge had made a slip. That was clear from the volubility of her protests. She was frightened, too, at having made it; but I knew I could gain nothing by letting her see I had noticed her mistake.

“Too bad,” I said, “too bad! If you should ever meet Mr. Leonard, please to tell him we inquired for him. And now about that letter: as she says, of course, we’d be happy to assist this young lady in any possible way; but we’re in the army and not our own masters.”

“Ah, yes,” she said slowly. “You are a part of that poor army. Yes, yes! I understand! It is something we know little about, this terrible war. We hear sad tales: sad tales! These poor Americans! Without food and without medicines! I hope they can return safely to their homes and those who love them.”

Nathaniel found his voice at last. “She said in her letter,” he interrupted, “that she’d come here when she returned. Do you know when that’ll be?”

Madame St. Auge shook her head.

Nathaniel’s face was scarlet. I could see he was sorely tried at the need of speaking before me; but there was no way around it. “I’d like to leave a message for her,” he said. “Could I write a message for her?”

I’d already risen. “There’s no time, Nathaniel!” I protested. “We’re supposed to be getting food. We can’t be all day finding a sack of meal!”

He turned on me with a sort of desperation. “There’s nothing to keep you here! I’m not a child, to be told what to do and what not to do! You can get corn meal without me, can’t you?”

“You need corn meal?” Madame St. Auge asked.

“Enough to get seventeen men to Montreal,” I told her. “We ate our last this morning. I could pay you in hard money.”

“Yes, yes!” she said. “Of course I will spare one sack. It is high, now: fourteen dollars. But for you I will spare it. First I will get paper for your brother, and then the sack shall be brought.”

“Fourteen dollars hard money for one sack of corn!” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” she said sadly. “It is the war!”

She bustled from the room, leaving Ellen looking up at the two of us out of her great brown eyes—and pretty sights we must have been: Nathaniel, so absent that he stared through her as if she were a shadow; and I frowned horribly because of the outrageous price of the corn meal.

Madame St. Auge bustled back with the paper and ink for Nathaniel: then ran from the room again. Nathaniel drew the chair vacated by Madame St. Auge into the farthest corner of the small room. Kneeling before it, he used the seat as a desk, ignoring us but, I was sure, hating us for being near him.

As for Ellen, she said nothing, but continued to stare at me out of eyes that seemed to have a golden fire burning deep within. It was foolish, I thought, to cause her embarrassment because we were disturbed; so I put the corn out of my mind and sat on the floor near her chair. “I have a sister,” I told her. “She’s your age, but her hair is black and straight.”

“How nice!” she said. “If I had straight hair, then it wouldn’t tangle, and there’d be no need to cut it off, like this.” She bent her head and shook it, so that her curls danced. They seemed to have a look of softness, but there was no way of being sure. “I have a brother, too,” she added. “An Indian.”

I looked at her hard, but she seemed serious. I was at a loss how to reply.

“His name is Joseph,” she went on. “Two months ago he came to visit me. He brought me a young fawn, a basket of cranberries, and a lump of maple sugar bigger than my head. Madame St. Auge would not allow me to speak with him until he had washed his face. It was painted black around the eyes and mouth, and red elsewhere. It was different from the way he used to paint himself, but not better, I think.”

Nathaniel flashed an impatient look over his shoulder at her, at which she opened her eyes wide at me, and made a slight mouth, as if she regretted having disturbed him.

“He’s not really your brother,” I protested. “How could you have an Indian for a brother!”

“Yes, he is really my brother. His name is Phipps, like mine. Joseph Phipps. What is strange about my brother becoming an Indian, any more than for a Frenchman to become a Canadian?”

She looked at me inquiringly, so I admitted there was something in what she said. She nodded violently, and her curls bobbed. “We were captured at the same time, Joseph and I, and my mother too—all of us, at the siege of Fort William Henry, where my father was killed. He was an officer of the English army. My mother was sold to a French gentleman in Quebec. He was a kind gentleman, so he gave the Indians a little more than they asked, and I was thrown in for good measure. I was small, three years old, only; and so not worth much. Joseph was never sold. He remained in St. Francis and became an Indian. He has done very well at it. When he came to see me, he had forty brooches in his shirt, and ten bracelets on each arm: also a robe of black squirrel skins.”

I had a thought that this girl was laughing at me: yet her eyes held nothing save a sort of kindness, as though she talked for the purpose of keeping me amused.

“Where is your mother?” I asked.

She picked up a fold of her gray dress and pleated it carefully. “She died. That was how it happened I was placed in a convent in Montreal by my dear aunt. She placed me in the same convent which she had attended, as a young lady. The nuns were sweet to me: very kind: like mothers, almost.”

I cleared my throat. “So you enjoyed being in the convent?”

“Oh, yes!” she said. “It was pleasant. Of course, it’s an opportunity, being allowed to come with Madame St. Auge to work among these poor habitants of Iberville. I’m grateful that my dear aunt learned about it and so made it possible for me to come here. But I miss the good sisters in Montreal. It was my only home, the convent. It’s possible to be homesick for even a convent, if you have no other home.”

She stared at me and I stared back at her. I felt a quick stirring in my chest, as though a vein had somehow opened and closed again.

Now where, I wondered, would Marie de Sabrevois have learned that Hazen, a landowner in this far-off place, had decided to employ nuns to teach the children of the farmers on his estate.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your father was an Englishman, and your mother, too, I gather. Yet your aunt is American.”

Ellen smiled. “She would not be pleased to hear you say that! She is the sister of the gentleman—the French officer—who bought me from the Indians. He died, also, last year; and when he died, my dear aunt took me from the convent and sent me here to Madame St. Auge.”

“So she’s French,” I said, “and her brother died last year. Did her father die last year, too?”

Ellen shook her head. “Only her brother, whom she loved greatly.”

I felt a little glow within me. Here was something else! Certainly when we had met Marie de Sabrevois in the rotunda of Ranelagh, she had told us she was American. So, too, had the reticent Mr. Leonard. I distinctly remembered hearing him call her “a countrywoman of yours.” And she had spoken, too, of the death of her father. I tried to recall whether she had told us when he died. It seemed to me she had either said or implied he had died within the year. I was sure she had said he was a fur merchant, and that she was in England to settle his affairs. That lady, I was positive, would have let no grass grow under her feet when it came to settling an estate in which she had an interest. I looked hard at Ellen Phipps and wondered how much she had in common with this aunt of hers—this aunt who was so free with misstatements. If I was any hand at reading character, she had little in common with her, but I had heard that one could never tell about a woman.

“Why did your aunt take you from the convent to send you here?” I asked her suddenly.

She raised her eyes and started to speak. Then the golden light in them seemed to dim and waver like a candleflame blown by the wind, and she was silent.

I knew what had happened. My words had sent a wave of homesickness over her—truly a pathetic homesickness, considering that its origin was a barren convent smelling, no doubt, of plaster and candles and dyed cloth! I knew, too, that she was no more like Marie de Sabrevois than a yacht is like a prison hulk.

I was filled with a deep compassion for this lonely girl, and with anger at those with whom her lot was cast—a half-savage brother so senseless as to stick his shirt full of brooches; an aunt willing to push a motherless child about, from pillar to post; and a goat-faced duenna who welcomed the opportunity to charge hungry men fourteen hard dollars for a sack of corn meal.

Nathaniel, I saw, had finished his letter and was folding it; so I got to my feet, wondering what I could say to this girl with the brown curls. Seemingly she expected me to say nothing; for she was looking down at her coarse gray dress and carefully flattening the crease she had so recently made.

Outside there was a scuffling, which proved to be Madame St. Auge and the spectacled nun dragging a full meal sack between them. I counted out the fourteen dollars, and then shouldered the sack. My hat, I found, was still on the floor; but the girl Ellen brought it to me and put it on my head.

“Be careful your hat doesn’t drop in the mud,” she said. “I hope you’ll have a pleasant journey to Montreal.”

Because of the bulky burden on my left shoulder, I could see nothing of her; but I had the feeling that she nodded cheerfully; and certainly a faint fragrance came to me from her brown curls.

I would have liked to say something kind to her; but I could think of nothing; and I well knew I was a grotesque spectacle, with my hat askew and a flour sack weighing me down—too grotesque for her to care whether I spoke or not. Therefore I felt only relief when Nathaniel pushed me before him through the doorway, and we stood beneath the dull Canadian sky once more.