The Bell of Saint Gregoire
BY
AGNES ROSS WHITE
THE BELL OF SAINT GREGOIRE9
By AGNES ROSS WHITE
Not everywhere does the Virgin reach down to help those who pray to her as she does at St. Gregoire, but not everywhere do people pray with such simple faith, such surety, as do the habitants in this little parish up among the Laurentides.
For there was the never-to-be-forgotten time, when Our Lady came to help Diâne Doré, the year the bell was hung in the old church, more than a hundred years ago.
Diâne was the child of her native hills, beautiful, wild and solemn; so beautiful that the country people, not understanding, called her look strange; wild with a quiet, pagan wildness, and solemn as a seer who beholds the heart of the world. When her parents died, every home in the parish was opened to her, for that is the way of the habitants, but everywhere she was an alien. Only gray-haired Père Dufresne recognized the miracle of her beauty and marveled at it, or listened to her words, even though he wondered at them and was puzzled; and only Père Dufresne loved the child. So it came that she made his house her home; and there she lived her unchildlike life, roaming the hills by day, and telling the curé strange tales as they sat by the firelight after the darkness came, till the priest wondered if another Joan the Maid sat at his knee.
From the solitudes she had brought strange fancies; fantastic forms and faces had she seen in the mist on the river, a throb of divine heart-break had she caught in the moaning before the storm, or a strain of weird, unearthly music in the song of the hermit thrush, “but never Voices,” thought the curé, “she never says she has heard Voices,” and he waited, half expectant.
But Diâne grew as a child grows; and lo, there came a day when the priest looked at her, amazed, that she had grown up so soon. Then his trouble became an insistent thing. She was fifteen; there was no place for her in the village, surely none in the great world outside; there was the veil—and yes, he would speak to Monseigneur about that when next the good Bishop should come to St. Gregoire.
But before the Bishop came, St. Gregoire had been jostled by the world beyond the hills. Men from the outside came into the valley, drawing lines and measuring and placing markers here and there; the iron road was coming through St. Gregoire, perhaps.
From an eyrie on the mountain side Diâne watched the work of the strangers with curiosity. She could understand the work of the beavers and the foxes and the birds, of the wind and the rain, the frost and sunshine, even the work of the unseen things, but these strangers she could not explain.
Then one day, away up at little Lake in the Sky, she came upon one of them. He was young, very young, and never before had Diâne seen eyes the color of the sky, nor hair that shone like sunlight, for the blood of the Indian women of the past was very persistent in St. Gregoire.
To his words in English Diâne shook her head; to his halting French she answered: “I am Diâne Doré, and I live down there,” pointing to the valley.
But Diâne asked no questions; she had found him in the forest on the mountain, as she had found nearly every thing of which she knew; there was nothing unusual in question. And so it was that youth, strong and virile, met youth in its virgin freshness and they walked hand in hand, unconscious and content.
But Père Dufresne was not content. “No, no, my child,” said he, “you must not be with the stranger. It is not well for thee, it is not well.”
“But why not, mon père?” asked Diâne in surprise. “I like to be with him; I tell him many things; he knows so little of all this,” with a sweep of her hand toward the hills, the river and the sky, “and he is glad to know, very glad. Why should I not be with him to tell him?”
Poor Père Dufresne stammered in embarrassment. Surely the Evil One was digging pitfalls and laying snares to entrap him, for never before had his work brought him such a problem as this, never before had one been so dear to him as Diâne, for she had touched the man-father in the priest, and it wrung his heart to say aught to change the child—“ma petite pucelle,” he called her in his thoughts. Why could she not have been like all the rest to him, and why need this stranger have come to St. Gregoire—St. Gregoire so little and almost lost away back of the hills?
“He is English and perhaps a heretic,” he argued, hoping thus to avoid the difficulty.
“I do not know that,” she answered doubtfully. “He signs the cross as I have told him. I will ask him.”
And so Père Dufresne, tender-hearted old man that he was, left the matter, hoping—as so many a wiser man has done—that le bon Dieu in His omnipotence would order the matter to his liking.
In good time the engineers finished their work and went on, but the boy remained, for he was not of them. He had come for the fishing, the shooting, for the primitive life he might find; he might go or stay as he chose, and the unreckoning will of youth said, “I have found that which is good in my sight; I shall stop to enjoy.”
Days are to youth what years are to age, and well might Père Dufresne be dismayed at the result of his indecision. Who shall say when boyhood goes and manhood comes? Who shall say, that minute love was not, this minute it is? Certain it was that the boy listened to Diâne’s half-savage, half-religious mysticism, charmed and absorbed. The old druid spirit, that had worshipped under the oak trees of Britain lived again in this son of an ancient soil, and in the reincarnation the boy became a man and loved this woman, unconsciously and naturally as the flower loves the sunlight, or the bird the freedom of the air.
But when she was not with him, when he sat by his campfire with the darkness about him, he remembered that he was from beyond the hills; he saw his lady-mother and the ivy-grown walls of home, a home which would be prison to Diâne, a home in which he knew she could never have a place. Then he saw Diâne, saw the beauty of her eyes, heard the sweetness of her voice, above all felt the purity of her spirit; and it was Diâne of whom he dreamed.
These musings by his campfire kept alive the man of convention, and he knew he must go down to the priest in the valley and claim this woman in the way decreed by man.
Summer passed and the foliage glowed and faded. Indian summer came, like a flower flung back by a band of revelers as they danced madly and merrily away; then the nights became crisp and frosty, and the day arrived when he said to Diâne as they sat watching the passing of the wild geese: “I saw the geese yesterday; I saw them the day before; to-day—to-morrow, perhaps—soon I must follow. I must leave the hills.”
She turned to him quickly with a look and gesture of startled bewilderment. He leaned forward and laid his hand on hers.
“Look at me, Diâne—straight in my eyes as I talk to you. You can come with me. Think of it. Away together to see more beautiful things, away to the southward with the wild geese, till the cold is gone, then to rivers and lakes and mountains again. We shall be together all the days—always; we shall watch the sunrise and sunset together; we shall stand before the priest and he shall send us away man and wife. Do you know why people marry, Diâne? Because they want each other as I want you, to have against all others—because they love. Do you know what I mean? Can you want me like that, Diâne?”
As he bent nearer to her she felt the hand clasping hers tighten, and the blood throbbing in his fingers. For a long time they sat and her gaze did not falter. The companionship of the weeks had changed, and she felt a new knowledge and a new joy, indefinable yet overwhelming. Then slowly she answered him.
“Yes, I want you like that. I know what you mean. But—there is more. I cannot tell what it is; perhaps I know not the words. Can you say it?”
“No, Diâne, sweetheart, only that it is love, and no one can tell what it is. It is like life, we can only live it, dear.”
“Then we will live it together, you and I,” she said.
And she listened to Love’s old tale, not with blushes, not with downcast eyes, but with face and eyes lifted to her lover with a glad new light in them. And he said not that the world was well lost for love—the world was forgotten.
They went hand in hand down the hillside, straight to the priest’s door. The old man wept with remorse, and blamed himself for neglected duty, while Diâne stood in silent distress. At last, falling on her knees by his side, she pressed his fingers to her lips and pleaded.
“Ah, mon père, mon père, you hurt me so. Is it you do not now love your little Diâne? Look at the others in the parish; you have blessed them and let them go away together, and you did not weep. I love you, mon père, but I must go, I must go. Let me go like the rest.”
Sadly Père Dufresne placed his hand on her bowed head and smoothed her heavy, black hair. “It has come, even to my little maid, ma petite pucelle, whom I had thought so far removed from man’s love. My daughter, this love of man brings labor and sorrow, brings pain and tears, and you would go even if it must be that you shall bear pain and sorrow and weep your tears alone?”
He spoke more to himself than to her, but she raised her head and answered quickly as if understanding his meaning, or it may be the new-born woman spoke within her.
“Yes, father, I see the women labor, and the labor is hard and the days are long; I see the children many, and the women grow old with each one; and I saw Delize Paquette crying because there was no one to stand in the church as father to her baby; but, mon père, I see, too, the men and women coming from the long day’s labor together, and they are happy; I see the children bring smiles to their mothers’ tired eyes, and again they are happy; and I see Delize kiss her baby, even as my mother kissed me, and she is happier with that kiss than Madame Bisson who has no child. Bless me and let me go, mon père, for my happiness has gone before and beckons to me, and always I see the man’s love leading it.”
“Enough, my daughter, it shall be as you wish, and may Our Lady have you in her holy keeping.”
And so Diâne was wed, not before the altar, no, not there, for the stranger was not of the faith, but without the church door, just where the gaze of Our Lady, high up in her niche near the roof, seemed to rest with benign love and pity.
Then, hand in hand, as Diâne and her lover had come down the mountain side, so they went down the valley, away from St. Gregoire to where her happiness seemed beckoning her. They paused away down where the valley turns sharp behind the last of the hills; the church could just be seen, a little white speck in the distance.
“Oh, if I might know that day by day the good father will feel that I think of him always. There will be no one now to talk to him by the firelight, no one to tell him the words of the hills.” Diâne’s tone was not one of regretful longing, but rather a great wish that the priest might not feel that she had left him alone.
“If there were something which you might give him, something which would always speak for you,” the stranger had answered, feeling that he had indeed taken the sunshine and the song from the old man’s life. “Can you think of something, Diâne, that will please him much?”
“There is something,” she said, “but I cannot give him that.”
“But tell me; perhaps you may.”
“It is a bell; we have never had one. It takes very much money to buy a bell; the people have flax and grain, but, oh, so little money. Père Dufresne said le bon Dieu might send us one some time if we were not forgetful.”
“A bell it shall be that you shall give him,” the stranger promised, but Diâne only smiled wistfully and turned away.
And so they passed beyond the turn in the valley, and the hills shut them away from St. Gregoire.
Soon the snows of winter fell upon all the hills, and more than ever was St. Gregoire lost to the great world outside. In the long evenings Père Dufresne sat by his fire alone, conjuring up the face of his little maid in the moving shadows, and dreaming, till he almost heard her voice as he used to hear it—“Mais oui, mon père, that is what the bird in the cedars said to me as I came by the swamp at sunset.” It was thus that he thought of her, and always with a great foreboding and self-condemnation. Day after day dragged slowly by until at last the winter was gone, but neither the spring nor the summer brought assurance to the old priest or eased his loneliness. One thing there came to arouse the parish, even as the engineers had with their suggestion of a railroad. In the early summer a letter had come from over the sea saying their bell would be ready in the autumn. From whom it was to come they knew not; le bon Dieu had indeed remembered them.
Then, as the days grew chill again, that which the priest expected and dreaded happened—Diâne came back—Diâne and her baby. Her husband had sailed away to England, to his mother who was dying; as for herself, she could not bear the town alone, she must come back to the old familiar river and her hills to wait for him. That was the simple story she had to tell; to her it was sufficient, but she read anger and grief on the priest’s face.
“This is the happiness you sought, the thing I let you wander out into the world to find, and I knew, I knew.”
As he bowed his head in sorrow, Diâne knelt and pleaded as she had once before.
“Ah, mon père, it is not that you should grieve, for I found my happiness. I am happy now, a little lonely, perhaps, till he shall come for me, but he will come. I tell you he will come,” she repeated in eager defense as she noted the pained look of doubt. “He is gone as I told you, but I chose to stay. Besides, I am not alone; here is my child, father. The days may be long, but he will come. As I came here I heard the people talking of a bell. It is not yet hung, but when it rings for the first time I shall know he will not be far away.”
The prophecy came to her as an inspiration, and her tone of loneliness changed to one of trust and surety.
A tiny log house on the river bank she took for her home. The curé found that his old housekeeper needed strong, young arms to lift the burden of her work, and so Diâne settled into a quiet nook, more silent than of old, and if her longing and weary waiting found words, they were whispered to baby ears by the fireside in the little cabin by the river.
And the bell? There was something strange about it. Autumn passed and winter came, but no tidings of the bell. In the spring came a letter from England saying that the ship bringing the bell had foundered in the Gulf and her cargo was lost. Another bell would come by the next autumn perhaps. Poor Diâne! It seemed an answer to her unwitting prophecy.
The snow disappeared and the birds and flowers came with a rush, as they always come to the Northland. When her work was done, Diâne would take her boy in her arms and wander away to the forests on the hillsides. She could seek sympathy nowhere else. The old familiar groves and hollows and peaks made her feel a strange calmness and resignation after stormy nights of despair and dying hope. Up here it seemed that her husband must be dead, or he would have come; down there by the river the torturing thought of desertion and lost love nearly drove her mad. Up here under the trees she told over and over again to her baby what his father had said when she walked here with him; what he would say if he ever came back; and if he did not come back they must know he was dead.
Thus the summer passed and autumn came again. How she dreaded the winter with its long evenings and the snow-bound world, when there would be naught but the whistling wind, the driving snow, the faint murmur of the river under the ice, and her thoughts.
Then one sabbath Père Dufresne told them that the bell would be there in a week. How Diâne’s heart leaped with a vague, new hope! No one knew it was her bell, and that it was so near seemed proof that he was alive and had not forgotten her.
At last it came. All the parish crowded around as it was being lifted from the cart. Diâne looked on from the outer edge of the circle, pale and disturbed, holding her baby so close that he whimpered with pain.
Suddenly an exclamation of anger and disappointment burst from the people. A clumsy handler had let his burden slip and the bell had struck with a jarring ring—its last note. An ugly crack from bottom to top had silenced its voice before it could speak for St. Gregoire.
Diâne sank to her knees with a sob. It was all over; her last faint hope was gone. Now she was certain he must be dead. No one noticed her, for all were listening to the curé who was reading aloud an inscription on the broken bell.
“What? Whose gift? Read it again, father.”
Diâne had paid no heed to the curé’s words, but the deep silence roused her to find them all regarding her with surprised awe.
“My daughter,” said the curé as he came to her side, “the Blessed Virgin has sent her gift in your name; she has looked on her handmaiden with love and favor.”
She arose bewildered and he led her to the bell, but she turned away calm and tearless.
“No, no, father. It means he is dead and will not come. Let me go home.”
Silently they stood aside and watched her go down the hill. In her sorrow Diâne had touched their hearts. The curè’s eyes were dim, and his voice faltered as he blessed them and sent them away.
And now Père Dufresne bethought him that the Bishop might help them, and the bell was sent back to Quebec.
By return messenger came the word that it would be recast, that the parish should have its bell. This Diâne did not know, as the curé thought to calm her grief the sooner if she had no false hope.
After a little she went about her task as before. Her winter evenings were spent now in braiding straw hats. At times, when the straw broke in her weary fingers, she would lay it aside, and kneeling by the rude cradle, would pour out the sorrows of her broken heart in wailing murmurs.
“Ah, why must I suffer so when I know he is dead? My heart aches for one day with him, even for one moment. Why do I start when the wind shakes the door? Why do I listen for footsteps in the whistling of the gale? Why cannot I feel that he is dead when I know he must be? Why do I wake in the night feeling his kiss on my lips? Why does the sound of his voice still fall on my ear, and the light of his eyes meet mine in the twilight? Oh, Mother of Christ, give me peace and strength, or the silence of death for my child and me.”
In the last days of the winter word came again concerning the bell, and a few days later came the bell itself. Great care was taken this time. The people were ready to look upon it as a thing bewitched, and even doubted the wisdom of attempting to hang it; but the curé exorcised their superstition. It was blest, and the day came when it would hang in the steeple before all St. Gregoire.
Diâne had felt only pain when she heard that the bell had come. She cared nothing for ceremonies and she had no curiosity, so through it all she kept steadily at her work, not even glancing toward the church on her way home.
Fate was kinder now, and at last the bell was in place, but the first ringing was to be for mass on the sabbath; and so it waited.
The winter had been a terrible one. Snow storm followed snow storm till the drifts piled higher than ever before. People along the river prayed for a gentle spring, with only south wind and sunshine. Heavy rains meant disaster, perhaps destruction to their all.
Before the sabbath dawned, that which they dreaded came; it rained, a steady downpour for many hours, then a deluge. The ice on the river had had no time to melt, and the floods from the slopes above poured over it without breaking it up. Helplessly the people watched the torrent swell and spread. Nearly every one had moved what he could to higher land, each one striving for himself. Night came on, dark and dreadful. There was no sleep even on the hillsides. The sound of the waters had been deep and threatening, but suddenly in the darkness they burst forth in a roaring crash. Something had happened in the lake above. Thank God, every one had had time to escape danger. Now thoughts turned to fellow creatures and their safety. Yes, all seemed to be safe. But where was Diâne and the child? In the curé’s house, of course. No? God in heaven! Was she down there by the river?
“Men to the rescue!” shouted the curé.
In a moment he had hurried to the bell rope, and for the first time the Bell of St. Gregoire rang out clear and strong, even before the roar of the storm and the battle of the waters.
At dusk Diâne had looked at the river almost touching her threshold; but the high land lay back of her; she would not be cut off without warning. She dressed the child warmly before he went to sleep, placed their outer garments in readiness, piled the logs on the hearth and sat down to wait.
Suddenly the house shook and the water poured in at every opening. She sprang to the bed, and in an instant they were ready. But, oh, the awful darkness! The house seemed to be moving from its place. The water was rising quickly. She stood dazed. What should she do? The loft! Quickly she mounted the ladder and broke open the window. She leaned far out—nothing could be seen. She could feel the house moving away on the flood. What was that? The bell! She smiled and laid her face close to the child. Softly she whispered:
“Ah, baby, baby! Mother was right after all. Listen to the bell. I said that when it should ring for the first time he would not be far away, and in a moment we shall be with him. Don’t be afraid, dearie. He will be waiting for us, and, at last, after all this long, long time, we shall be together all the days, as he used to tell me, and we shall have you besides. Perhaps he can see us now coming nearer.”
She laughed a happy little laugh, the first since she had come back to St. Gregoire. The child was quiet, soothed by the gentle crooning as she murmured on.
“Diâne! Diâne! Shout! Call to me! I am here,” came faintly to her ears over the waters out of the darkness.
“Listen, listen, my little one. He is calling to us. Blessed Virgin, I thank thee.” Then loud and clear: “Here! Here am I, your Diâne.”
Again came the cry, louder and nearer.
“Call again, Diâne! Be brave!”
Again she called. “We are nearer, nearer,” she whispered. “Soon it will be light, the great, beautiful Dawn!”
Something else was whirling along the way with them—it loomed near her window. Again the cry, almost within reach.
“Courage a little longer, Diâne. Now! Hold closely to me!”
Our Lady had indeed looked with favor on her handmaiden, for who, think you, had brought the stranger over sea and land, through storm and peril, by snowshoe and sled track, even into the darkness, to answer to the call of the bell in Diâne’s great need? Who had made him listen to the song of his heart, even though the music of home had been loud in his ears, and brought him dreams such as he had dreamed by his campfire that summer, until he could hear Diâne’s voice—and his baby’s?
Israel Gagnon knows, and Victor Brassard knows and Grandmère Touchette knows and the little habitant girl at her flax wheel knows. For as the vesper tones ebb and flow around the hills and along the valley I hear her murmur Diâne’s name and a little prayer to Our Lady, for our little maid, too, has a lover; and as I listen to the bell, now “so beeg it feel all de worl’, beeger den all de mountain’,” and now “so small an’ sof’ I can jus’ feel it inside me,” I, too, know who brought the stranger back to his wife and child.
Pictorial