Thirty years brought many changes to Bytown. The wild woodland flavour evaporated out of the place almost entirely; and instead of an independent centre of rustic life, it became an annex to great cities. It was exploited as a summer resort, and discovered as a winter resort. Three or four big hotels were planted there, and in their shadow a score of boarding-houses alternately languished and flourished. The summer cottage also appeared and multiplied; and with it came many of the peculiar features which man elaborates in his struggle toward the finest civilization—afternoon teas, and amateur theatricals, and claw-hammer coats, and a casino, and even a few servants in livery.
The very name of Bytown was discarded as being too American and commonplace. An Indian name was discovered, and considered much more romantic and appropriate. You will look in vain for Bytown on the map now. Nor will you find the old saw-mill there any longer, wasting a vast water-power to turn its dripping wheel and cut up a few pine-logs into fragrant boards. There is a big steam-mill a little farther up the river, which rips out thousands of feet of lumber in a day; but there are no more pine-logs, only sticks of spruce which the old lumbermen would have thought hardly worth cutting. And down below the dam there is a pulp-mill, to chew up the little trees and turn them into paper, and a chair factory, and two or three industrial establishments, with quite a little colony of French-Canadians employed in them as workmen.
Hose Ransom sold his place on the hill to one of the hotel companies, and a huge caravansary occupied the site of the house with the white palings. There were no more bleeding-hearts in the garden. There were beds of flaring red geraniums, which looked as if they were painted; and across the circle of smooth lawn in front of the piazza the name of the hotel was printed in alleged ornamental plants letters two feet long, immensely ugly. Hose had been elevated to the office of postmaster, and lived in a Queen Antic cottage on the main street. Little Billy Ransom had grown up into a very interesting young man, with a decided musical genius, and a tenor voice, which being discovered by an enterprising patron of genius, from Boston, Billy was sent away to Paris to learn to sing. Some day you will hear of his debut in grand opera, as Monsieur Guillaume Rancon.
But Fiddlin’ Jack lived on in the little house with the curved roof, beside the river, refusing all the good offers which were made to him for his piece of land.
“NON,” he said; “what for shall I sell dis house? I lak’ her, she lak’ me. All dese walls got full from museek, jus’ lak’ de wood of dis violon. He play bettair dan de new feedle, becos’ I play heem so long. I lak’ to lissen to dat rivaire in de night. She sing from long taim’ ago—jus’ de same song w’en I firs come here. W’at for I go away? W’at I get? W’at you can gif’ me lak’ dat?”
He was still the favourite musician of the county-side, in great request at parties and weddings; but he had extended the sphere of his influence a little. He was not willing to go to church, though there were now several to choose from; but a young minister of liberal views who had come to take charge of the new Episcopal chapel had persuaded Jacques into the Sunday-school, to lead the children’s singing with his violin. He did it so well that the school became the most popular in the village. It was much pleasanter to sing than to listen to long addresses.
Jacques grew old gracefully, but he certainly grew old rapidly. His beard was white; his shoulders were stooping; he suffered a good deal in damp days from rheumatism—fortunately not in his hands, but in his legs. One spring there was a long spell of abominable weather, just between freezing and thawing. He caught a heavy cold and took to his bed. Hose came over to look after him.
For a few days the old fiddler kept up his courage, and would sit up in the bed trying to play; then his strength and his spirit seemed to fail together. He grew silent and indifferent. When Hose came in he would find Jacques with his face turned to the wall, where there was a tiny brass crucifix hanging below the violin, and his lips moving quietly.
“Don’t ye want the fiddle, Jack? I ‘d like ter hear some o’ them old-time tunes ag’in.”
But the artifice failed. Jacques shook his head. His mind seemed to turn back to the time of his first arrival in the village, and beyond it. When he spoke at all, it was of something connected with this early time.
“Dat was bad taim’ when I near keel Bull Corey, hein?”
Hose nodded gravely.
“Dat was beeg storm, dat night when I come to Bytown. You remember dat?”
Yes, Hose remembered it very well. It was a real old-fashioned storm.
“Ah, but befo dose taim’, dere was wuss taim’ dan dat—in Canada. Nobody don’ know ‘bout dat. I lak to tell you, ‘Ose, but I can’t. No, it is not possible to tell dat, nevair!”
It came into Hose’s mind that the case was serious. Jack was going to die. He never went to church, but perhaps the Sunday-school might count for something. He was only a Frenchman, after all, and Frenchmen had their own ways of doing things. He certainly ought to see some kind of a preacher before he went out of the wilderness. There was a Canadian priest in town that week, who had come down to see about getting up a church for the French people who worked in the mills. Perhaps Jack would like to talk with him.
His face lighted up at the proposal. He asked to have the room tidied up, and a clean shirt put on him, and the violin laid open in its case on a table beside the bed, and a few other preparations made for the visit. Then the visitor came, a tall, friendly, quiet-looking man about Jacques’s age, with a smooth face and a long black cassock. The door was shut, and they were left alone together.
“I am comforted that you are come, mon pere,” said the sick man, “for I have the heavy heart. There is a secret that I have kept for many years. Sometimes I had almost forgotten that it must be told at the last; but now it is the time to speak. I have a sin to confess—a sin of the most grievous, of the most unpardonable.”
The listener soothed him with gracious words; spoke of the mercy that waits for all the penitent; urged him to open his heart without delay.
“Well, then, mon pere, it is this that makes me fear to die. Long since, in Canada, before I came to this place, I have killed a man. It was—”
The voice stopped. The little round clock on the window-sill ticked very distinctly and rapidly, as if it were in a hurry.
“I will speak as short as I can. It was in the camp of ‘Poleon Gautier, on the river St. Maurice. The big Baptiste Lacombe, that crazy boy who wants always to fight, he mocks me when I play, he snatches my violin, he goes to break him on the stove. There is a knife in my belt. I spring to Baptiste. I see no more what it is that I do. I cut him in the neck—once, twice. The blood flies out. He falls down. He cries, ‘I die.’ I grab my violin from the floor, quick; then I run to the woods. No one can catch me. A blanket, the axe, some food, I get from a hiding-place down the river. Then I travel, travel, travel through the woods, how many days I know not, till I come here. No one knows me. I give myself the name Tremblay. I make the music for them. With my violin I live. I am happy. I forget. But it all returns to me—now—at the last. I have murdered. Is there a forgiveness for me, mon pere?”
The priest’s face had changed very swiftly at the mention of the camp on the St. Maurice. As the story went on, he grew strangely excited. His lips twitched. His hands trembled. At the end he sank on his knees, close by the bed, and looked into the countenance of the sick man, searching it as a forester searches in the undergrowth for a lost trail. Then his eyes lighted up as he found it.
“My son,” said he, clasping the old fiddler’s hand in his own, “you are Jacques Dellaire. And I—do you know me now?—I am Baptiste Lacombe. See those two scars upon my neck. But it was not death. You have not murdered. You have given the stroke that changed my heart. Your sin is forgiven—AND MINE ALSO—by the mercy of God!”
The round clock ticked louder and louder. A level ray from the setting sun—red gold—came in through the dusty window, and lay across the clasped hands on the bed. A white-throated sparrow, the first of the season, on his way to the woods beyond the St. Lawrence, whistled so clearly and tenderly that it seemed as if he were repeating to these two gray-haired exiles the name of their homeland. “Sweet—sweet—Canada, Canada, Canada!” But there was a sweeter sound than that in the quiet room.
It was the sound of the prayer which begins, in every language spoken by men, with the name of that Unseen One who rules over life’s chances, and pities its discords, and tunes it back again into harmony. Yes, this prayer of the little children who are only learning how to play the first notes of life’s music, turns to the great Master musician who knows it all and who loves to bring a melody out of every instrument that He has made; and it seems to lay the soul in His hands to play upon as He will, while it calls Him, OUR FATHER!
Some day, perhaps, you will go to the busy place where Bytown used to be; and if you do, you must take the street by the river to the white wooden church of St. Jacques. It stands on the very spot where there was once a cabin with a curved roof. There is a gilt cross on the top of the church. The door is usually open, and the interior is quite gay with vases of china and brass, and paper flowers of many colours; but if you go through to the sacristy at the rear, you will see a brown violin hanging on the wall.
Pere Baptiste, if he is there, will take it down and show it to you. He calls it a remarkable instrument—one of the best, of the most sweet.
But he will not let any one play upon it. He says it is a relic.
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