tion>
Anna Chapin Ray
By the Good Sainte Anne
A Story of Modern Quebec
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664170248
Table of Contents
Petulantly Nancy Howard cast aside her letter and buried her chin in her cupped palms.
“Oh, the woes of having a learned father!” she sighed. “Here is Joe’s letter, telling me how everything is starting up at home; and here am I, Nancy Howard, buried in this picturesque, polyglot wilderness, just because my sire feels himself moved to take a vacation from medicine in order to study history at first hand! I wish he would let his stupid monograph go to the winds, and take me home in time for the Leighton’s dinner, next week.”
She picked up the scattered sheets of her letter and ran them over once more, holding up her left hand, as she did so, to cut off the dazzling sunshine from the white paper. It was a pretty hand, slim, strong and tapering. Prettier still was her head, erect and crowned with piles of reddish-brown hair. It was not without apparent reason that Nancy Howard had been, for the past year, one of the most popular girls of her social circle at home.
At the third page, her brows wrinkled thoughtfully. Dropping the loose sheets into her lap, she once more fell to musing aloud.
“It does seem to me that Joe is seeing a good deal of Persis Routh. I never thought he liked her especially well. But anyway I am out of all the fun. Space isn’t the only thing that makes distance. Up here, I am at least two hundred years away from home. How long have I been here? Eight, no, nine days.” Suddenly she laughed. “At least, it has been a period of fasting and meditation. I believe I’ll count it as a novena to the Good Sainte Anne. Perhaps she will manufacture a miracle in my behalf, and get up a little excitement for me. Fancy an excitement in this place!”
“B’jour, mam’selle.”
Nancy turned alertly, as the voice broke in upon her musings.
“Bon jour, madame,” she answered, with a painstaking French which laid careful stress upon each silent letter and separated the words into an equal number of distinct sentences. At present, it was her latest linguistic accomplishment, and she aired it with manifest pride.
Pausing midway over the stile, the old woman brushed her face with the apron that hung above her tucked-up skirt.
“Why not you go to the church?” she asked.
Nancy breathed a sigh of relief, as the talk lapsed into her mother tongue. Like most Americans, she preferred that conversational eccentricities should be entirely upon the other side, and she questioned how far she could go upon the strength of her own three words. Nevertheless, she framed her reply on the idioms of her companion.
“Why for should I go?”
The woman set down her pail of water on the top step of the stile. Then she planted herself just below it, with her coarse boots resting on the crisp brown turf.
“We go to church, all the days,” she admonished Nancy sternly.
The girl smiled irrepressibly.
“So I have noticed,” she said, half under her breath. Then she added hastily, “But we do not.”
“Are you Catholique?”
Nancy shook her head.
“Too bad! But surely you can pray in any church.”
This time, Nancy felt a rebuke.
“Yes,” she assented; “but I am not used to going, every day.”
“No. No?” The second no was plainly interrogative. “But the Good Sainte Anne only does those miracle to them that pray without ceasing.”
The girl faced about sharply.
“Madame Gagnier, have you ever seen a miracle?”
The wide flat hat nodded assent.
“A real, true miracle?”
“Yes, so many.”
“Hh! I’d like to see one.”
Two keen old eyes peered up at her from beneath the wide hat.
“Mam’selle does not believe?”
There was reproach in the accent; but the girl answered undauntedly—
“Not one bit. I’ll wait till I have seen one.”
Madame Gagnier shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
“How shall you see, having no eyes at all?”