What had taken Stephen Forrester to the Exhibition would be difficult to say. He had told his friends that snow and ice and anything higher than a first floor made him feel ill, and had then proceeded to lose himself very pleasantly among the fleshpots. Well, he had earned his fleshpots. Yet here he was, at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon, paying his entrance fee like anybody else to the Association Rooms, to see Macrae’s photographs.

“The large photographs of Mount Forrester are in Room C,” said the very efficient young person with the bobbed hair who gave him his change. “Kindly keep to the right.” He thanked her humbly and clicked through the turnstile in the wake of a large woman in musquash and carnations, who would probably have given much to know him. For Forrester was something of a lion that winter.

He went into Room C, after a guilty glance about A and B. But no one was there who knew him. No one said: “That’s Forrester! Yes, the fellow with the limp. You’d never dream he was fond of that sort of thing, would you?” His first thought was: “Mac did some good work!” Then, with an involuntarily catching of the breath, he stopped short before the great photograph that held the end wall alone.

And as he did so he knew with sure foreknowledge that any time in his life he might be brought up with that little thrill, that while he lived, a hundred chance scents or colours or silences would have power to renew for him that air of ineffable space, those sheathed and virgin rocks, those upper snows austere against the burning blue; that the impersonal passion of the climber had been, was, and forever would be the moving force of his soul.

“Mount Forrester from the South-east,” the catalogue had it. Just that! He was the man who had conquered Mount Forrester; and he was the man who knew how utterly the great height had conquered him.

He sat down on one of the leather divans placed at intervals down the centre of the room, staring at the enlarged photograph with half-closed eyes. The heated air grew cold in his throat; inside his irreproachable gloves the scars of his old frost-bites burned and tingled; he tapped one well-shod foot—the lame one—on the floor. There in the extreme left-hand corner of the picture was the bit of ice that had slid and crushed him. That had been on the return journey. They said he’d never walk again. Macrae himself had been all in when he took that picture. Why, they’d put him in the tent in the middle of a snow flurry; the cloud had cleared and the light was right; they’d found Mac up to his ears in snow half a mile away, clutching the camera—raving, but he’d taken the picture.

“Excuse me, boss—you done any climbin’?”

Forrester came to earth with a start, and leaned round the curve of the leather seat-back the better to see and answer the man who had so suddenly spoken to him. But he was slow in answering as the details of the questioner’s face presented themselves to him around the curve of the fat green morocco. For what possible interest could such a one have in climbing mountains? An elderly clerk out of work? Scarcely educated enough, judged Forrester. A night watchman? More likely. Anyway, a sub-under-assistant at whatever he set his hand to do. The stamp of the man born to work under other men was on him, on his respectable garments, on his vague face set in graying bristles; one could guess him treading forever the same smoothed rut, running on the same rail, until pushed off at last into a still deeper obscurity. And he was already growing old. Forrester, clean from his heights, was quick to pity. “One of the Great Unlucky,” he said to himself; and aloud: “Yes, I’ve climbed a good bit. Are you—interested in it?”

The stranger smiled slowly. Then he drew out seven coppers and arranged them along his dingy palm. There was a certain youthfulness, a hovering and unexpected sweetness in his smile that attracted Forrester. “These here,” he said, “are all I got left o’ what Maggie allows me fer baccy this week, after payin’ me admission.” He returned the coins to his pocket and resumed his slow contemplation of the picture.

For a moment Forrester was in doubt. But the shabby-respectable man was oblivious of him, his whole attention absorbed in the picture. And it was Forrester who renewed the conversation on some impulse of sympathy, saying: “Where have you done your climbing?”

“Me? Oh, anywhere north o’ Thunder Valley, for the most part. You got to climb there to get about. Don’t see no sense in doin’ it fer fun.” He turned his eyes again to the photograph, and once more that shy, half-boyish smile transfigured his commonplace face. “But you thinks different when yer young eh, Mister? Where you done your climbin’ if I may arsk?”

Forrester nodded toward the wall. “Thereabouts mostly,” he said pleasantly. “My name’s Forrester—Stephen Forrester, at your service.”

The stranger turned completely around; his face rose over the back of the divan like a queer mild moon. “You—Forrester?” he said with interest. “Well, now! You the feller that climbed that mountain an’ had it named fer him?”

“Yes,” smiled Forrester, conscious of an excusable glow.

“My!” said the unknown softly. “My! If that don’t beat all!” He looked at Forrester carefully, as if making a friendly inventory of him. He rubbed his hands gently together. “Maggie’ll be that amused to hear tell I seen you!” he said shyly.

Well—amused was not just the word that Forrester had expected! But the other man came sidling along the leather seat, all alight with interest. He put out his hand, so palpably the hand of a failure, and touched Forrester’s sleeve. “Mister,” he begged simply, “tell me all about it, so’s I can tell Maggie!”

The appeal hit Forrester in his softest place. He was touched. Who was Maggie? He visioned her as beautiful and dreaming of her native hills; in a mental flash he saw himself telling a moving story to a dozen well-appointed dinner-tables. He said kindly: “Tell me what you want to know. But first—who’s Maggie? Where is she?”

“My old girl. Mister. She’s washin’ dishes at Henniker’s til I get a job.” He went on with a touch of pride: “She don’t have to work when I’m doin’ anything, boss.”

Again Forrester was moved; he guessed that Maggie washed dishes a lot at Henniker’s and did it cheerily. Maggie’s husband went on with a shy eagerness, jerking his thumb at the wall: “Did you have to cross Somahl’ to the glacier, Mister?” “Yes.” Forrester was conscious of an increasing astonishment, for the glacier was not shown on the photograph, and is not named on any map. “We climbed that long ridge to the east—the photograph does not show much of it—and worked along till we came to the little plateau. And there we made our last camp. We went up next day. We wanted to do it in a day, so as not to spend a night at that altitude.”

“I know.” The face of Maggie’s husband showed keener, harder; he was touched with some quiet amusement that puzzled Forrester. “You went up roped, boss?”

“As far as that big fissure.” Forrester was kindling, as a lyric poet might kindle at the talk of love. “We cast them off then. They were too great a weight. We kept them as dry as we could, but there was a continual poudre and they were frozen as stiff as steel rods, crackling as we moved. It sounded so loud, that crackle.”

“The papers say you was the only one that made the peak, Mister, the only one that made good.”

“It wasn’t the other fellows’ fault,” said Forrester quickly. “They were fine stuff—white men. I tell you they gave up their chances so I should have mine. Yes. They helped me all through, spent their strength for me—so that in the end they’d none left, and I went on alone—on their strength. A man said to me last week: ‘You hired them, didn’t you?’ ‘What difference does that make?’ I said, ‘when they gave me what money couldn’t buy?’ ”

Forrester’s eyes went to the picture; he was abruptly silent. Then: “They gave me that,” he breathed.

After a minute he went on quietly, talking more to himself than to the man beside him:

“I left Mason and Pieters on the last tiny level with the tent over them. Mason was finished. Pieters could have come with me, but daren’t leave Mason, who was in a state of collapse, and blue. Pieters never stopped rubbing him, he told me, for an hour. I went on alone, up a slope of hard old snow, steep, but easy enough—that slope—and in five minutes it was as if I’d been alone for centuries from the beginning of the world! I drew myself up on a ledge and looked down. Mason and Pieters were little black figures beneath. Pieters lifted a hand to me. Then I went on over that hummock—there—and they were gone. It seemed to be all right—all right, I mean, that I should be alone at the end—alone with my mountain.

“The hardest part of the climbing was over. There remained only that great soaring wedge of immortal snow, that heaved above me into the blue. I had only to climb, to keep on working upward as long as my strength held. I knew it would not fail. My arms, outstretched against the face of the steep, and looking as weak as a fly’s legs, were yet long enough and strong enough to clasp the whole of that magnificent summit, and leave their mark upon it, and conquer it. What a thing humanity is! Oh, I’m talking nonsense, if you like, but I was a little mad at the time. If you’ve climbed, you know how it is!”

But Forrester saw at the same moment that his listener didn’t know how it was, for all he was smiling indulgently. “I been mad in my time, boss,” he said almost with a wink. “I ain’t the head for such things now.”

Forrester laughed a little. “It took some head,” he confessed, nodding at the photograph. “After I worked round that curve there, I had nothing under me but a drop—a drop clear to timber-line. I’d loose a handful of snow from somewhere, and it’d go glittering off into the emptiness behind me like frozen smoke, and I’d stick close for a minute to see if any more was coming. Then I’d watch those bits of snow-dust fall and fall and fall—miles and miles they seemed to fall, right to the black furriness that was the forest of the lower slopes. They came near to shaking me. And now and then I seemed to have nothing at all under hands or feet—-to be just afloat in dizzy space. Then I’d look up, and the whole weight of the summit’d rush back at me—hang over me until I seemed to be underneath it and crushed flat. And then I’d kind of come back to myself, and know what I was doing. And I tell you I wouldn’t have swapped places with a millionaire! It’s at times like that a man feels his soul alive in him and knows he can’t fail, whatever seems to happen. They say that morally we only use about one-tenth of our power of living. It takes the divine moment to teach us what we are when we use ten-tenths—what we are!”

Forrester was frankly smiling now, frankly talking to himself. Maggie’s husband was listening in respectful bewilderment, yet with something held in reserve; he sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands dangling forward. Forrester wished he wouldn’t; somehow, those hands looked so inept, so apologetic. He went on abruptly:

“I was corkscrewing upwards, if you see what I mean. I calculated to reach the top on the side opposite to where I’d left my two men, for we’d seen that the overhang was less there. But on that side the wind was worse. It was not strong—just a steady swim of cold air fit to freeze the breath inside you.

“I was working up very safely and steadily, finding everything much easier than I had expected, which is often the way. I was cutting steps in solid snow. Nothing could happen to me as long as I kept on cutting steps. I was as safe as a house, for all the next stopping place was two thousand feet under. And I was just thinking so when the thong with which my ice-axe was looped round my wrist caught against a snag that thrust through the snow-crust, and snapped. I shifted my grip on the shaft for greater security; and the next instant the thing was out of my hand and glissading down the slope.

“Well, it was awkward enough, but not fatal. I went on without it, though slower; making detours round hummocks I’d have cut into, and scooping holds with the big knife I had on a lanyard round my neck. I went on so for maybe another hour, not thinking of the top, pinning my mind to every inch of the ascent.

“And then—all in a moment, as it seemed—I looked up. And there was the summit not two hundred feet above me, and easy all the way.

“Well, I hung on with toes and fingers and tried to cheer, but I couldn’t get it out. Change places with a millionaire! I wouldn’t have changed places with the kings of the earth! And then I looked more closely at what lay in front of me. And—the cheer went out of me like the flame out of a candle.

“Immediately over me, and for as far round as I could see the mountain-top was girdled with a band of rock, a sheer face, too sheer to hold the snow. It was all veined with ice, pitted and porous with the weather since the world began—soft stuff, crumbling under frost and sun. Yes, there was just about twenty feet of it. After that a smooth mound of snow to the very crest. And I lay with my chin in a drift at the foot of it, and cried like a baby. For I knew that no power on earth could get me up that little twenty-foot wall of rock without an axe to chip holds with.

“I worked up to it and stood against it. There was a ledge that held me comfortably. I stood on it and drove in the knife as far as I could reach above my head, tossed my line round it and pulled. It came away in a tinkle of tiny ice-chips and rotten rock. I stared below me. I wondered how long it would take me to get down—without having reached the top. I looked to my right, just to make certain of what I was deadly sure of already—that there wasn’t any possible way up for a single climber farther along the ledge. And there, as sure as I’m a living man, were little steps cut roughly in the rock—choked with ice, but recognizable, serviceable.

“When I told our president that,” said Forrester after a silence, “he told me I’d gone light-headed from exposure.”

Forrester gazed at the picture a moment, a smile on his fine vivid face. His eyes looked into a great distance; and the eyes of the man beside him rested on him—kindly, uncomprehendingly, a little wistfully, as if he were trying to follow Forrester into that shining distance.

“I knew.” Forrester was speaking to his own soul. “Oh, I knew,” he repeated, softly. “I met him there. I felt him there—my nameless forerunner! There was a high spirit near me in the very wind. I touched hands with an unknown comrade, a friend who’d climbed higher, leaving his glory to me like a coat for which he’d no more use. How high he must have climbed! To the very stars!

“The steps were very much weathered. They looked very old. They were filled, as I said, with old ice, which I chipped out with the hook of my knife. I went up hand over hand.

“The rest was easy. I won’t trouble you with it. I stood on the summit at last, and left the tiny flag there that I’d carried up. He—my forerunner—seemed to be waiting for me there; I fancied that he gave me a generous smile. I knew he didn’t grudge me anything. It sounds rubbish here, eh? but there I smiled back at him—the man in whose steps I’d climbed to the best thing life’s given me yet; and I drank his health in the last of my brandy. Then I—came down.”

The pleasant, vigorous voice died to silence. Both men, so contrasted, sat silent for a while, looking at the picture, which even in the electric light seemed to glow and recede into some splendid atmosphere of its own.

At last Forrester turned, a little shamefaced; he felt that in talking so to a man who couldn’t possibly understand, he’d gone very near to making a fool of himself and his mountain. There was honest pity in his heart for any man who knew nothing of such austere triumphs as he enjoyed; perhaps there was a shade of contempt, too, as he said hastily: “See here, I’ve made you listen to a lot of stuff, eh? But you must let me pay for this, you know. Just the price of admission—between two men who have something in common.”

He broke off. For he was not heard. The shabby man was gazing at the photograph. And as he gazed he chuckled quietly and rubbed his faded knees. “If you’d looked, Mister,” he said, “if you’d looked, maybe you’d have found the bits of an ol’ lantern, up there where you left the flag!”

Perfectly motionless, Forrester waited.

The shabby man turned to him genially. “Such fools as we are when we’re young!” he said. “How it all comes back!” He smiled upon the younger man again with that bright, gentle look which gave him momentarily the aspect of youth; it was like a light reflected from some mountain-peak of the soul. He went on: “Maggie’ll be that interested when she hears some one has set right alongside me, talkin’—excuse me, boss—like man to man, some one that’s been up that there mountain!”

Still Forrester waited, dry-mouthed.

“You see, Mister, me and Maggie, we always counted that there old mountain as ours like, seein’ as I was the only feller’d ever been up it in them days. And a fine fool I was. Many’s the time Maggie’s said to me: ‘I wonder I took you, Si,’ she’s said, ‘seein’ you showed me what kind of a fool you was when you was courtin’.’ Maggie’s a great one for a joke. ‘Or maybe,’ she says, ‘I took you just because you was such a fool that Christmas. There’s no accountin’ for a woman’s taste,’ she says.”

That reflection of a far light rosed his colourless face as he turned again to Forrester; it lighted a pleasant blue star in his homely eyes; he laughed consciously, and glanced down at his patched shoes.

“We wasn’t married then,” he explained confidentially. “It’s a long time ago. Seems queer that there ever was a time when Maggie and me wasn’t married; but there was.” He wrinkled his brow with a ruminative air. “But there wasn’t never at no time, any other girl than Maggie Delane for me.” He looked gently at Forrester. “You should ’a’ seen her then,” he said; “she was the purtiest girl in Cascapedia, my Maggie was.

“There was a lot of fellers after her. She could ’a’ done lots better, but—she stuck to me. Seems like I didn’t have much luck, even then. I dunno why—I was always willin’ to work. It just happened that way, Mister. Times I said to her: ‘You’d best quit me, honey, and take up with a luckier man.’ I said that not knowin’ just what I’d do if she done it. But she—she just put her hands on my shoulders,”—he glanced wonderingly at his shabby coat,—“she put her hands there, an’ she says: ‘Good luck or bad, I’ll never go back on you, Si.’ ” His slow eyes went back to Forrester’s face. “You know how it is with them, with the good ones, boss, when they’re—fond of a feller.”

“No,” said Forrester, after a short silence, and very humbly, “no, I don’t know—yet. Go on, please. Tell me the rest.”

“We was to have been married that Christmas. But I didn’t have no luck. I didn’t have enough saved. It near broke my heart. I hadn’t got so kinder used to waitin’ on things then, and I was just set on goin’ to Cascapedia and claimin’ my girl that Christmas. She was workin’ in a store there, and I was on a lumberin’ job back on the Oucouagan. ’Twasn’t so far asunders, but the hills riz up to heaven in betwixt us. I hadn’t seen her in a long while, Mister. And when the time come on, an’ I’d no luck an’ had been sick, an’ dassent to quit my job, I tramped them hills all one night, boss, tryin’ to find the nerve to write Maggie and say: ‘We can’t be married this Christmas after all, honey; we’ll have to wait for the spring.’ ”

He bent down and picked a thread carefully from his frayed trousers. Raising his head, he stared again at the picture. “I wrote it at last,” he went on in his heavy way, “an’ I sent it to her. I was down an’ out. I—kinder lost me self-respeck, boss, havin’ to write that way to Maggie when she could ’a’ done so much better. . . Yes sir. An’ then her answer came. She wasn’t a very good writer. She just said I wasn’t to worry; she guessed she could get along without me till the spring—always one for a joke, was Maggie!—but I was to think of her on Christmas.”

The shabby man’s voice trailed off into silence. After a moment he said, thoughtfully: “Queer how they—the good ones—can break a feller all up an’ put him on his feet at the same time, aint it, boss?”

“I—don’t know,” said Forrester, softly. “Go on please.”

“She said I was to think of her on Christmas. Somethin’ you said awhile back put me in mind of how I felt then. Think of her! Why, I—I felt as though I could chop the mountains down same as if they was trees to get her! I felt there was nothin’—just nothin’—I couldn’t do, or bear, or get, so as Maggie didn’t quit me. I felt I’d get her them great shiny stars fer buttons to her Sunday dress if she was wantin’ them. Made me feel twelve foot high and drunk, she did, just with three lines o’ bad spellin’ and a joke! I’d five dollars in me pocket, an’ I went an’ looked up a Siwash, one o’ them mountain Injuns that looks like a Chinaman and moves up or down like a goat; I’d done him a kindness a little while back, an’ he was grateful, which is more’n white fellers always is. I said, would he take a letter to my klootch in Cascapedia, for five dollars, she to get it on Christmas? Yes, he said, he would. I gave him the letter an’ the bill, an’ off he went—not that she was rightly my klootch then, o’ course, an’ she’d ’a’ been terrible vexed if she’d known I called her so; but it was near enough fer him.

“We wasn’t so far apart, as I says—not so many miles on the level, only not a yard of it was level; the hills was like a wall between us; but there was one thing we could both see, one thing that was in sight from Cascapedia an’ from the Oucouagan on the other side. An’ that was that mountain there.”

He looked at the picture with lingering surprise. “My!” he said, “You wouldn’t never think I’d been up there, would you? You’d think I was too old and had too much sense. But I was young then; and some way Maggie’d made me clean crazy.”

He flushed and gave Forrester a shy, friendly smile. “Two nights,” he said, laughing a little, “two nights I sat up, fixin’ a lantern to suit me—fixin’ it so’s no draft could get in, puttin’ in extry wicks an’ more oil an’ the dear knows what-all! I’d said to Maggie in my letter I’d sent, ‘You borrer a pair of glasses if it ain’t clear,’ I says, ‘an’ you look at the top o’ the biggest mountain you see in betwixt us,’ I says ‘on Christmas night, an’ you’ll see if I’m thinkin’ of you or not, Maggie Delane.’ That’s what I says.

“When the lantern was fixed, I packed it on me back keerful, an’ I borrerred an ice-ax, an’ a pair o’ creepers, an’ I climbed that there mountain an’ left the lighted lantern on the top.”

Forrester stared at him. Did he know what he was saying, what, in that brief day of glory given him by a girl’s trust, he had done? No, he had no inkling of it; no shadow of a suspicion crossed his simple mind that he had achieved a feat that no man had been able to repeat for thirty years. He was smiling pleasantly, indulgently, at the folly of his youth. And Forrester said, not knowing he spoke aloud: “It’s better it should be like that. It’s more beautiful so.”

“Did you speak, Mister?”

“No—nothing. Please go on.”

But the charm was broken; the reflection of that far light was fading from the ageing face as Forrester had seen the reflected glory of his peak fading from the lowlands. The shabby man’s shyness was increasing; he looked at Forrester uneasily. “I dunno what made me talk so much,” he mumbled apologetically. “Seein’ that picture an’ all, I guess. I aint generally one to talk much.”

“Good heavens, man,” cried Forrester, “don’t you know you’ve just been telling me the most beautiful thing I ever heard?” He checked himself abruptly at the look in his companion’s face. “Tell me how you got up,” he went on more quietly.

But the present had again usurped the splendid past. “I don’t rightly remember now,” said the shabby man uncertainly. “My mind was that full of Maggie, anyways. . . . I crossed the glacier below where you did, an’ then I—I guess, I just went up, boss.”

“Yes,” agreed Forrester, “you just went up. . . And the lantern wasn’t hurt, and Maggie saw the light from Cascapedia?”

“She saw it boss. It burned till the oil give out. ’Twasn’t hurt a mite.”

Forrester looked again at the photograph. He visioned his great peak, a shadow against the winter stars, crowned with a tiniest point of light—a weak star that invaded those awful solitudes, those dominions of wind and cloud, dawn and darkness, to tell a girl in a store that her man hadn’t forgotten her! He roused from his vision to see Maggie’s husband on his feet, to hear him mumbling good-bye.

“. . . . be terribly amused to hear I seen you,” he heard. “Take it as a favour, boss, if you’d not mention it to no one. . . . do a steady man no good. They’d think I was drunk.”

Forrester got up and shook hands, which seemed to abash the man very much.

“It’s better that way too,” he said abruptly, “though you won’t have the least idea what I mean. If I can ever have the honour of doing anything for you or Maggie, let me know.”

The shabby man was gone. An official in blue and silver buttons was staring suspiciously at Forrester. He scowled at the official, and went and stood in front of the great photograph. He stood there so long that the official gave up watching him and moved away. The room was empty. Forrester glanced around; then he took out his fountain pen.

He looked again at the picture of the peak. “Not mine,” he said under his breath, and humbly, “not mine!” There was a large ticket attached to the frame, bearing the legend: “Mount Forrester from the South-east.” He crossed out the word “Forrester,” and above the erasure, in neat black letters, he wrote the words: “Maggie Delane.” Then he too, went away.

I like to think of this as a true story, but you who read may please yourselves, siding either with the curé, who says Hyacinthe dreamed it all, and did the carving himself in his sleep, or with Madame. I am sure that Hyacinthe thinks it true, and so does Madame, but then she has the cabinet, with the little birds and the lilies carved at the corners. Monsieur le curé shrugs his patient shoulders; but then he is tainted with the infidelities of cities, good man, having been three times to Montreal, and once, in an electric car, to Sainte Anne. He and Madame still talk it over whenever they meet, though it happened so many years ago, and each leaves the other forever unconvinced. Meanwhile the dust gathers in the infinite fine lines of the little birds’ feathers, and softens the lily stamens where Madame’s duster may not go; and the wood, ageing, takes on a golden gleam as of immemorial sunsets: that pale red wood, heavy with the scent of the ancient East; the wood that Hyacinthe loved.

It was the only wood of that kind which had ever been seen in Terminaison. Pierre L’Oreillard brought it into the workshop one morning; a small heavy bundle wrapped in sacking, and then in burlap, and then in fine soft cloths. He laid it on a pile of shavings, and unwrapped it carefully and a dim sweetness filled the dark shed and hung heavily in the thin winter sunbeams.

Pierre L’Oreillard rubbed the wood respectfully with his knobby fingers. “It is sandal-wood,” he explained to Hyacinthe, pride of knowledge making him expansive; “a most precious wood that grows in warm countries, thou great goblin. Smell it, imbécile. It is sweeter than cedar. It is to make a cabinet for the old Madame at the big house. Thy great hands shall smooth the wood, nigaud, and I,—I, Pierre the cabinet-maker, shall render it beautiful.” Then he went out, locking the door behind him.

When he was gone Hyacinthe laid down his plane, blew on his stiff fingers, and shambled slowly over to the wood. He was a great clumsy boy of fourteen, dark-faced, very slow of speech, dull-eyed and uncared for. He was clumsy because it is impossible to move gracefully when you are growing very big and fast on quite insufficient food. He was dull-eyed because all eyes met his unlovingly; uncared for, because none knew the beauty of his soul. But his heavy young hands could carve simple things, like flowers and birds and beasts, to perfection, as the curé pointed out. Simon has a tobacco-jar, carved with pine-cones and squirrels, and the curé has a pipe whose bowl is the bloom of a moccasin-flower, that I have seen. But it is all very long ago. And facts, in those lonely villages, easily become transfigured, touched upon their gray with a golden gleam.

“Thy hands shall smooth the wood, nigaud, and I shall render it beautiful,” said Pierre L’Oreillard, and went off to drink brandy at the Cinq Châteaux.

Hyacinthe knew that the making of the cabinet would fall to him, as most of the other work did. He also touched the strange sweet wood, and at last laid his cheek against it, while the fragrance caught his breath. “How it is beautiful,” said Hyacinthe, and for a moment his eyes glowed and he was happy. Then the light passed, and with bent head he shuffled back to his bench through a foam of white shavings curling almost to his knees.

“Madame perhaps will want the cabinet next week, for that is Christmas,” said Hyacinthe, and fell to work harder than ever, though it was so cold in the shed that his breath hung like a little silver cloud and the steel stung his hands. There was a tiny window to his right, through which, when it was clear of frost, one looked on Terminaison, and that was cheerful and made one whistle. But to the left, through the chink of the ill-fitting door, there was nothing but the forest and the road dying away in it, and the trees moving heavily under the snow. Yet, from there came all Hyacinthe’s dumb dreams and slow reluctant fancies, which he sometimes found himself able to tell,—in wood, not in words.

Brandy was good at the Cinq Châteaux, and Pierre L’Oreillard gave Hyacinthe plenty of directions, but no further help with the cabinet.

“That is to be finished for Madame on the festival, gros escargot!” said he, cuffing Hyacinthe’s ears furiously, “finished, and with a prettiness about the corners, hearest thou, ourson? I suffer from a delicacy of the constitution and a little feebleness in the legs on these days, so that I cannot handle the tools. I must leave this work to thee, gâcheur. See it is done properly, and stand up and touch a hand to thy cap when I address thee, orvet, great slow-worm.”

“Yes, monsieur,” said Hyacinthe, wearily.

It is hard, when you do all the work, to be cuffed into the bargain, and fourteen is not very old. He went to work on the cabinet with slow, exquisite skill, but on the eve of Noel, he was still at work, and the cabinet unfinished. It meant a thrashing from Pierre if the morrow came and found it still unfinished, and Pierre’s thrashings were cruel. But it was growing into a thing of perfection under his slow hands, and Hyacinthe would not hurry over it.

“Then work on it all night, and show it to me all completed in the morning, or thy bones shall mourn thine idleness,” said Pierre with a flicker of his little eyes. And he shut Hyacinthe into the workshop with a smoky lamp, his tools and the sandal-wood cabinet.

It was nothing unusual. The boy had often been left before to finish a piece of work overnight while Pierre went off to his brandies. But this was Christmas Eve, and he was very tired. The cold crept into the shed until the scent of the sandal-wood could not make him dream himself warm, and the roof cracked sullenly in the frost. There came upon Hyacinthe one of those awful, hopeless despairs that children know. It seemed to be a living presence that caught up his soul and crushed it in black hands. “In all the world, nothing!” said he, staring at the dull flame; “no place, no heart, no love! O kind God, is there a place, a love for me in another world?”

I cannot endure to think of Hyacinthe, poor lad, shut up despairing in the work-shop with his loneliness, his cold, and his hunger, on the eve of Christmas. He was but an overgrown, unhappy child, and for unhappy children no aid, at this season, seems too divine for faith. So Madame says, and she is very old and very wise. Hyacinthe even looked at the chisel in his hand, and thought that by a touch of that he might lose it all, all, and be at peace, somewhere not far from God; only it was forbidden. Then came the tears, and great sobs that sickened and deafened him, so that he scarcely heard the gentle rattling of the latch.

At least, I suppose it came then, but it may have been later. The story is all so vague here, so confused with fancies that have spoiled the first simplicity. I think that Hyacinthe must have gone to the door, opening it upon the still woods and the frosty stars, and the lad who stood outside in the snow must have said; “I see you are working late, comrade. May I come in?” or something like it.

Hyacinthe brushed his ragged sleeve across his eyes, and opened the door wider with a little nod to the other to enter. Those little lonely villages strung along the great river see strange wayfarers adrift inland from the sea. Hyacinthe said to himself that surely here was such a one.

Afterwards he told the curé that for a moment he had been bewildered. Dully blinking into the stranger’s eyes, he lost for a flash the first impression of youth and received one of some incredible age or sadness. But this also passed and he knew that the wanderer’s eyes were only quiet, very quiet, like the little pools in the wood where the wild does went to drink. As he turned within the door, smiling at Hyacinthe and shaking some snow from his fur cap, he did not seem more than sixteen or so.

“It is very cold outside,” he said. “There is a big oak tree on the edge of the fields that has split in the frost and frightened all the little squirrels asleep there. Next year it will make an even better home for them. And see what I found close by!” He opened his fingers, and showed Hyacinthe a little sparrow lying unruffled in the palm.

“Pauvrette!” said the dull Hyacinthe.

“Pauvrette! Is it then dead?” He touched it with a gentle forefinger.

“No,” answered the strange boy, “it is not dead. We’ll put it here among the shavings, not far from the lamp, and it will be well by morning.”

He smiled at Hyacinthe again, and the shambling lad felt dimly as if the scent of the sandal-wood had deepened, and the lamp flame burned clearer. But the stranger’s eyes were only quiet, quiet.

“Have you come far?” asked Hyacinthe. “It is a bad season for travelling, and the wolves are out in the woods.”

“A long way,” said the other; “a long, long way. I heard a child cry. . .”

“There is no child here,” answered Hyacinthe, shaking his head. “Monsieur L’Oreillard is not fond of children, he says they cost too much money. But if you have come far, you must be cold and hungry, and I have no food nor fire. At the Cinq Châteaux you will find both!”

The stranger looked at him again with those quiet eyes, and Hyacinthe fancied his face was familiar. “I will stay here,” he said. “You are very late at work and you are unhappy.”

“Why, as to that,” answered Hyacinthe, rubbing again at his cheeks and ashamed of his tears, “most of us are sad at one time or another, the good God knows. Stay here and welcome if it pleases you, and you may take a share of my bed, though it is no more than a pile of balsam boughs and an old blanket, in the loft. But I must work at this cabinet, for the drawer must be finished and the handles put on and these corners carved, all by the holy morning; or my wages will be paid with a stick.”

“You have a hard master,” put in the other boy, “if he would pay you with blows upon the feast of Noel.”

“He is hard enough,” said Hyacinthe; “but once he gave me a dinner of sausages and white wine, and once, in the summer, melons. If my eyes will stay open, I will finish this by morning, but indeed I am sleepy. Stay with me an hour or so, comrade, and talk to me of your wanderings, so that the time may pass more quickly.”

“I will tell you of the country where I was a child,” answered the stranger.

And while Hyacinthe worked, he told—of sunshine and dust; of the shadows of vine-leaves on the flat white walls of a house; of rosy doves on the flat roof; of the flowers that come in the spring, crimson and blue, and the white cyclamen in the shadow of the rocks; of the olive, the myrtle and almond; until Hyacinthe’s slow fingers ceased working, and his sleepy eyes blinked wonderingly.

“See what you have done, comrade,” he said at last; “you have told of such pretty things that I have done no work for an hour. And now the cabinet will never be finished, and I shall be beaten.”

“Let me help you,” smiled the other; “I also was bred a carpenter.”

At first Hyacinthe would not, fearing to trust the sweet wood out of his own hands, but at length he allowed the stranger to fit in one of the little drawers, and so deftly was the work done, that Hyacinthe pounded his fists on the bench in admiration. “You have a pretty knack” he cried; “it seemed as if you did but hold the drawer in your hands a moment, and hey! ho! it jumped into its place!”

“Let me fit in the other little drawers, while you go and rest a while,” said the wanderer. So Hyacinthe curled up among the shavings, and the stranger fell to work upon the little cabinet of sandal-wood.

Here begins what the curé will have it is a dream within a dream. Sweetest of dreams was ever dreamed, if that is so. Sometimes I am forced to think with him, but again I see as clearly as with old Madame’s eyes, that have not seen the earthly light for twenty years, and with her and Hyacinthe, I say “Credo.”

Hyacinthe said that he lay among the shavings in the sweetness of the sandal-wood, and was very tired. He thought of the country where the stranger had been a boy; of the flowers on the hills; of the laughing leaves of aspen, and poplar; of the golden flowering anise and the golden sun upon the dusty roads, until he was warm. All the time through these pictures, as through a painted veil, he was aware of that other boy with the quiet eyes, at work upon the cabinet, smoothing, fitting, polishing. “He does better work than I,” thought Hyacinthe, but he was not jealous. And again he thought, “It is growing towards morning. In a little while I will get up and help him.” But he did not, for the dream of warmth and the smell of the sandal-wood held him in a sweet drowse. Also he said that he thought the stranger was singing as he worked, for there seemed to be a sense of some music in the shed, though he could not tell whether it came from the other boy’s lips, or from the shabby old tools as he used them, or from the stars. “The stars are much paler,” thought Hyacinthe, “and soon it will be morning, and the corners are not carved yet. I must get up and help this kind one in a little moment. Only I am so tired, and the music and the sweetness seem to wrap me and fold me close, so that I may not move.”

He lay without moving, and behind the forest there shone a pale glow of some indescribable colour that was neither green nor blue, while in Terminaison the church bells began to ring. “Day will soon be here!” thought Hyacinthe, immovable in that deep dream of his, “and with day will come Monsieur L’Oreillard and his stick. I must get up and help, for even yet the corners are not carved.”

But he did not get up. Instead, he saw the stranger look at him again, smiling as if he loved him, and lay his brown finger lightly upon the four empty corners of the cabinet. And Hyacinthe saw the little squares of reddish wood ripple and heave and break, as little clouds when the wind goes through the sky. And out of them thrust forth little birds, and after them the lilies, for a moment living, but even while Hyacinthe looked, growing hard and reddish-brown and settling back into the sweet wood. Then the stranger smiled again, and laid all the tools neatly in order, and, opening the door quietly, went away into the woods.

Hyacinthe lay still among the shavings for a long time, and then he crept slowly to the door. The sun, not yet risen, sent his first beams upon the delicate mist of frost afloat beneath the trees, and so all the world was aflame with splendid gold. Far away down the road a dim figure seemed to move amid the glory, but the glow and the splendour were such that Hyacinthe was blinded. His breath came sharply as the glow beat in great waves on the wretched shed; on the foam of shavings; on the cabinet with the little birds and the lilies carved at the corners.

He was too pure of heart to feel afraid. But, “Blessed be the Lord,” whispered Hyacinthe, clasping his slow hands, “for He hath visited and redeemed His people, But who will believe?”

Then the sun of Christ’s day rose gloriously, and the little sparrow came from his nest among the shavings and shook his wings to the light.

Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.

Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.