Part 14 (1/2)
”Well, then,” continued Jean, ”I will tell you how the news came to me.
It was at St. Gedeon, one Sunday last March. The snow was good and hard, and I drove in, ten miles on the lake, from our house opposite Grosse Ile. After ma.s.s, a man, evidently of the city, comes to me in the stable while I feed the horse, and salutes me.
”'Is this Jean Lamotte?'
”'At your service, m'sieu'.'
”'Son of Francois Louis Lamotte?'
”'Of no other. But he is dead, G.o.d give him repose.'
”'I been looking for you all through Charlevoix and Chicoutimi.'
”'Here you find me then, and good-day to you,' says I, a little short, for I was beginning to be shy of him.
”'Chut, chut,' says he, very friendly. 'I suppose you have time to talk a bit. How would you like to be a marquis and have a castle in France with a hundred thousand dollars?'
”For a moment I think I will lick him; then I laugh. 'Very well indeed,'
says I, 'and also a handful of stars for buckshot, and the new moon for a canoe.'
”'But no,' answers the man. 'I am earnest, Monsieur Lamotte. I want to talk a long talk with you. Do you permit that I accompany you to your residence?'
”Residence! You know that little farm-house of logs where my mother lives,--you saw it last summer. But of course it is a pretty good house.
It is clean. It is warm. So I bring the man home in the sleigh. All that evening he tells the story. How our name Lamotte is really De la Motte de la Luciere. How there belongs to that name an estate and a t.i.tle in France, now thirty years with no one to claim it. How he, being an AVOCAT, has remarked the likeness of the names. How he has tracked the family through Montmorency and Quebec, in all the parish books. How he finds my great-grandfather's great-grandfather, Etienne de La Motte who came to Canada two hundred years ago, a younger son of the Marquis de la Luciere. How he has the papers, many of them, with red seals on them. I saw them. 'Of course,' says he, 'there are others of the family here to share the property. It must be divided. But it is large--enormous--millions of francs. And the largest share is yours, and the t.i.tle, and a castle--a castle larger than Price's saw-mill at Chicoutimi; with carpets, and electric lights, and coloured pictures on the wall, like the hotel at Roberval.'
”When my mother heard about that she was pleased. But me--when I heard that I was a marquis, I knew it was true.”
Jean's blue eyes were wide open now, and sparkling brightly. He had put down the pan of potatoes. He was holding his head up and talking eagerly.
Alden turned away his face to light his pipe, and hide a smile. ”Did he get--any money--out of you?”--came slowly between the puffs of smoke.
”Money!” answered Jean, ”of course there must be money to carry on an affair of this kind. There was seventy dollars that I had cleaned up on the lumber-job last winter, and the mother had forty dollars from the cow she sold in the fall. A hundred and ten dollars,--we gave him that.
He has gone to France to make the claim for us. Next spring he comes back, and I give him a hundred dollars more; when I get my property five thousand dollars more. It is little enough. A marquis must not be mean.”
Alden swore softly in English, under his breath. A rustic comedy, a joke on human nature, always pleased him; but beneath his cynical varnish he had a very honest heart, and he hated cruelty and injustice. He knew what a little money meant in the backwoods; what hard and bitter toil it cost to rake it together; what sacrifices and privations must follow its loss. If the smooth prospector of unclaimed estates in France had arrived at the camp on the Grande Decharge at that moment, Alden would have introduced him to the most unhappy hour of his life.
But with Jean Lamotte it was by no means so easy to deal. Alden perceived at once that ridicule would be worse than useless. The man was far too much in earnest. A jest about a marquis with holes in his hat!
Yes, Jean would laugh at that very merrily; for he was a true VOYAGEUR.
But a jest about the reality of the marquis! That struck him as almost profane. It was a fixed idea with him. Argument could not shake it.
He had seen the papers. He knew it was true. All the strength of his vigorous and healthy manhood seemed to have gone into it suddenly, as if this was the news for which he had been waiting, unconsciously, since he was born.
It was not in the least morbid, visionary, abstract. It was concrete, actual, and so far as Alden could see, wholesome. It did not make Jean despise his present life. On the contrary, it appeared to lend a zest to it, as an interesting episode in the career of a n.o.bleman. He was not restless; he was not discontented. His whole nature was at once elated and calmed. He was not at all feverish to get away from his familiar existence, from the woods and the waters he knew so well, from the large liberty of the unpeopled forest, the joyous rush of the great river, the splendid breadth of the open sky. Unconsciously these things had gone into his blood. Dimly he felt the premonitions of homesickness for them all. But he was lifted up to remember that the blood into which these things had entered was blue blood, and that though he lived in the wilderness he really belonged to la haute cla.s.se. A breath of romance, a spirit of chivalry from the days when the high-spirited courtiers of Louis XIV sought their fortune in the New World, seemed to pa.s.s into him. He spoke of it all with a kind of proud simplicity.
”It appears curious to m'sieu', no doubt, but it has been so in Canada from the beginning. There were many n.o.bles here in the old time.
Frontenac,--he was a duke or a prince. Denonville,--he was a grand seigneur. La Salle, Vaudreuil,--these are all n.o.ble, counts or barons. I know not the difference, but the cure has told me the names. And the old Jacques Cartier, the father of all, when he went home to France, I have heard that the King made him a lord and gave him a castle. Why not? He was a capable man, a brave man; he could sail a big s.h.i.+p, he could run the rapids of the great river in his canoe. He could hunt the bear, the lynx, the carcajou. I suppose all these men,--marquises and counts and barons,--I suppose they all lived hard, and slept on the ground, and used the axe and the paddle when they came to the woods. It is not the fine coat that makes the n.o.ble. It is the good blood, the adventure, the brave heart.”
”Magnificent!” thought Alden. ”It is the real thing, a bit of the seventeenth century lost in the forest for two hundred years. It is like finding an old rapier beside an Indian trail. I suppose the fellow may be the descendant of some gay young lieutenant of the regiment Carignan-Salieres, who came out with De Tracy, or Courcelles. An amour with the daughter of a habitant,--a name taken at random,--who can unravel the skein? But here's the old thread of chivalry running through all the tangles, tarnished but unbroken.”
This was what he said to himself. What he said to Jean was, ”Well, Jean, you and I have been together in the woods for two summers now, and marquis or no marquis, I hope this is not going to make any difference between us.”