Читать книгу Shadows on the Rock - Уилла Кэсер - Страница 8

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It was the day after La Bonne Espérance had set sail for France. Auclair and his daughter were on their way to the Hôtel Dieu to attend the Reverend Mother, who had sprained her ankle. Quebec is never lovelier than on an afternoon of late October; ledges of brown and lavender clouds lay above the river and the Île d'Orléans, and the red-gold autumn sunlight poured over the rock like a heavy southern wine. Beyond the Cathedral square the two lingered under the allée of naked trees beside the Jesuits' college. These trees were cut flat to form an arbour, the branches interweaving and interlacing like basket-work, and beneath them ran a promenade paved with flat flagstones along which the dry yellow leaves were blowing, giving off a bitter perfume when one trampled them. Cécile loved that allée, because when she was little the Fathers used to let her play there with her skipping-rope,--few spots in Kebec were level enough to jump rope on. Behind the avenue of trees the long stone walls of the monastery--seven feet thick, those walls--made a shelter from the wind; they held the sun's heat so well that it was possible to grow wall grapes there, and purple clusters were cut in September.

Behind the Jesuits' a narrow, twisted, cobbled street dropped down abruptly to the Hôtel Dieu, on the banks of the little river St. Charles. Auclair and his daughter went through the garden into the refectory, where Mother Juschereau de Saint-Ignace was seated, her sprained foot on a stool, directing the work of her novices. She was a little over forty, a woman of strong frame, tall, upright, with a presence that bespoke force rather than reserve; a handsome face,--the large, open features mobile and alert, perhaps a trifle masculine. She was the first Reverend Mother of the foundation who was Canadian-born, and she had been elected to that office when she was but thirty-four years of age. She was a religious of the practical type, sunny and very outright by nature,--enthusiastic, without being given to visions or ecstasies.

As the visitors entered, the Superior made as if to rise, but Auclair put out a detaining hand.

"I am two days late, Reverend Mother. In your mind you have been chiding me for neglect. But it is a busy time for us when the last ships sail. We have many family letters to write; and I examine my stock and make out my order for the drugs I shall need by the first boats next summer."

"If you had not come today, Monsieur Euclide, you would surely have found me on my feet tomorrow. When the Indians have a sprain, in the woods, they bind their leg tightly with deer thongs and keep on the march with their party. And they recover."

"Dear Mother Juschereau, the idea of such treatment is repugnant to me. We are not barbarians, after all."

"But they are flesh and blood; how is it they recover?"

As he pushed back her snow-white skirt a little and began gently to unwind the bandage from her foot, Auclair explained his reasons for believing that the savages were much less sensitive to pain than Europeans. Cécile fell to admiring the work Mother Juschereau had in hand. Her lap and the table beside her were full of scraps of bright silk and velvet and sheets of coloured paper. While she overlooked the young Sisters at their tasks, her fingers were moving rapidly and cleverly, making artificial flowers. She had great skill at this and delighted in it,--it was her one recreation.

"Yes, my dear," she said, "I am making these for the poor country parishes, where they have so little for the altar. These are wild roses, such as I used to gather when I was a child at Beauport. Oh, the wild flowers we have in the fields and prairies about Beauport!"

When he had applied his ointment and bandaged her foot in fresh linen, the apothecary went off to the hospital medicine room, in charge of Sister Marie Domenica, whom he was instructing in the elements of pharmacy, and Cécile settled herself on the floor at Mother Juschereau's knee. Theirs was an old friendship.

The Reverend Mother (Jeanne Franc Juschereau de la Ferté was her proud name) held rather advanced views on caring for the sick. She did not believe in leaving everything to God, and had availed her hospital of Auclair's skill ever since he first came to Quebec. Quick to detect a trace of the charlatan in anyone, she felt confidence in Auclair because his pretensions were so modest. She addressed him familiarly as "Monsieur Euclide," scolded him for teaching his daughter Latin, and was keenly interested in his study of Canadian plants. Cécile had been coming to the Hôtel Dieu with her father almost every week since she was five years old, and Mother Juschereau always found time to talk to her a little; but today was a very unusual opportunity. The Mother was seldom to be found seated in a chair; when she was not on her knees at her devotions, she was on her feet, hurrying from one duty to another.

"It has been a long while since you told me a story, Reverend Mother," Cécile reminded her.

Mother Juschereau laughed. She had a deep warmhearted laugh, something left over from her country girlhood. "Perhaps I have no more to tell you. You must know them all by this time."

"But there is no end to the stories about Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin. I can never hear them all."

"True enough, when you speak her name, the stories come. Since I have had to sit here with my sprain, I have been recalling some of the things she used to tell me herself, when I was not much older than you."

While her hands flew among the scraps of colour, Mother Juschereau began somewhat formally:

"Before she had left her fair Normandy (avant quelle ait quitté sa belle Normandie), while Sister Catherine was a novice at Bayeux, there lived in the neighbourhood a pécheresse named Marie. She had been a sinner from her early youth and was so proof against all counsel that she continued her disorders even until an advanced age. Driven out by the good people of the town, shunned by men and women alike, she fell lower and lower, and at last hid herself in a solitary cave. There she dragged out her shameful life, destitute and consumed by a loathsome disease. And there she died; without human aid and without the sacraments of the Church. After such a death her body was thrown into a ditch and buried like that of some unclean animal.

"Now, Sister Catherine, though she was so young and had all the duties of her novitiate to perform, always found time to pray for the souls of the departed, for all who died in that vicinity, whether she had known them in the flesh or not. But for this abandoned sinner she did not pray, believing, as did everyone else, that she was for ever lost.

"Twelve years went by, and Sister Catherine had come to Canada and was doing her great work here. One day, while she was at prayer in this house, a soul from purgatory appeared to her, all pale and suffering, and said:

"'Sister Catherine, what misery is mine! You commend to God the souls of all those who die. I am the only one on whom you have no compassion.'

"'And who are you?' asked our astonished Mother Catherine.

"'I am that poor Marie, the sinner, who died in the cave.'

"'What,' exclaimed Mother Catherine, 'were you then not lost?'

"'No, I was saved, thanks to the infinite mercy of the Blessed Virgin.'

"'But how could this be?'

"'When I saw that I was about to die in the cave, and knew that I was abandoned and cast out by the world, unclean within and without, I felt the burden of all my sins. I turned to the Mother of God and cried to her: Queen of Heaven, you are the last refuge of the ruined and the outcast; I am abandoned by all the world; I have no hope but you; you alone have power to reach where I am fallen; Mary, Mother of Jesus, have pity upon me! The tender Mother of all made it possible for me to repent in that last hour. I died and I was saved. The Holy Mother procured for me the favour of having my punishment abridged, and now only a few masses are required to deliver me from purgatory. I beseech you to have them said for me, and I will never cease my prayers to God and the Blessed Virgin for you.'

"Mother Catherine at once set about having masses said for that poor Marie. Some days later there appeared to her a happy soul, more brilliant than the sun, which smiled and said: 'I thank you, my dear Catherine, I go now to paradise to sing the mercies of God for ever, and I shall not forget to pray for you.'"

Here Mother Juschereau glanced down at the young listener, who had been following her intently. "And now, from this we see--" she went on, but Cécile caught her hand and cried coaxingly,

"N'expliquez pas, chère Mère, je vous en supplie!"

Mother Juschereau laughed and shook her finger.

"You always say that, little naughty! N'expliquez pas! But it is the explanation of these stories that applies them to our needs."

"Yes, dear Mother. But there comes my father. Tell me the explanation some other day."

Mother Juschereau still looked down into her face, frowning and smiling. It was the kind of face she liked, because there was no self-consciousness in it, and no vanity; but she told herself for the hundredth time: "No, she has certainly no vocation." Yet for an orphan girl, and one so intelligent, there would certainly have been a career among the Hospitalières. She would have loved to train that child for the Sœur Apothicaire of her hospital. Her good sense told her it was not to be. When she talked to Cécile of the missionaries and martyrs, she knew that her words fell into an eager mind; admiration and rapture she found in the girl's face, but it was not the rapture of self-abnegation. It was something very different,--almost like the glow of worldly pleasure. She was convinced that Cécile read altogether too much with her father, and had told him so; asking him whether he had perhaps forgotten that he had a girl to bring up, and not a son whom he was educating for the priesthood.

While her father and Mother Juschereau were going over an inventory of hospital supplies, Cécile went into the chapel to say a prayer for the repose of Mother de Saint-Augustin. There, in the quiet, she soon fell to musing upon the story of that remarkable girl who had braved the terrors of the ocean and the wilderness and come out to Canada when she was barely sixteen years old, and this Kebec was but a naked rock rising out of the dark forest.

Catherine de Saint-Augustin had begun her novitiate with the Hospitalières at Bayeux when she was eleven and a half years of age, and by the time she was fourteen she was already, in her heart, vowed to Canada. The letters and Relations of the Jesuit missionaries, eagerly read in all the religious houses of France, had fired her bold imagination, and she begged to be sent to save the souls of the savages. Her superiors discouraged her and forbade her to cherish this desire; Catherine's youth and bodily frailness were against her. But while she went about her tasks in the monastery, this wish, this hope, was always with her. One day when she was peeling vegetables in the novices' refectory, she cut her hand, and, seeing the blood flow, she dipped her finger in it and wrote upon the table:

Je mourrai au Canada Sœur Saint-Augustin

That table, with its inscription, was still shown at Bayeux as an historic relic.

Though Catherine's desire seemed so far from fulfilment, she had not long to wait. In the winter of 1648, Père Vimont, from the Jesuit mission in Canada, came knocking at the door of the monastère at Bayeux, recruiting sisters for the little foundation of Hospitalières already working in Kebec. Catherine was told that she was too young to go, and her father firmly refused to give his permission. But in her eagerness the girl wrote petition after petition to her Bishop and superiors, and at last her request was brought to the attention of the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria. The Queen's intercession won her father's consent.

When, after a voyage of many months, unparalleled for storms and hardships, Catherine and her companions anchored under the rock of Kebec and were rowed ashore, she fell upon her knees and kissed the earth where she first stepped upon it.

Made Superior of the Hôtel Dieu at an early age, she died before she was forty. At thirty-seven she had burned her life out in vigils, mortifications, visions, raptures, all the while carrying on a steady routine of manual labour and administrative work, observing the full discipline of her order. For long before her death she was sustained by visions in which the spirit of Father Brébeuf, the martyr, appeared to her, told her of the glories of heaven, and gave her counsel and advice for all her perplexities in this world. It was at the direction of Father Brébeuf, communicated to her in these visions, that she chose Jeanne Franc Juschereau de la Ferté to succeed her as Superior, and trained her to that end. To many people the choice seemed such a strange one that Père Brébeuf must certainly have instigated it. Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin was slight, nervous, sickly from childhood, yet from childhood precocious and prodigious in everything; always dedicating herself to the impossible and always achieving it; now getting a Queen of France to speak for her, now winning the spirit of the hero priest from paradise to direct and sustain her. And the woman she chose to succeed her was hardy, sagacious, practical,--a Canadienne, and the woman for Canada.