Hetty Dorval Read Free

a bit, and slipped into church, sitting whereverI chose. People were always friendly; there was always a beckoning finger and a nod that meant “Sit here with us.” Then during the week I went to the public school, and twice a week I went after school to the small Convent-Hospital west of Lytton where there was a nun from Paris; she taught me French, both talking and out of a book. The book was called
Chardenal
and was useful, but the hour’s talk with Sister Marie-Cécile was good French and good discipline. Sister Marie-Cécile hoped, I think, that she might gently win me to Paradise, but I was a wary and stubborn young Protestant. These hours at the Convent were the direct if long-delayed result of the Sorbonne. On Friday afternoon I would saddle Maxey, who ate his head off at Mr. Rossignol’s stable most of the week, and ride back to the ranch, bearing home all the school news, town news, church news, store news, and carrying special orders or presents tied to the horn of my saddle or in a good roll behind me. Maxey was, of course, bridle-wise. It was a lovely ride home, as you can imagine, all along the Lillooet road, reining off into the sage-brush if a car came along in a cloud of dust, and always with accustomed country eyes roving the expanse that unfolded itself at each bend of the river and road, noting whose cattle those were yonder, the promenading hawks, in spring the bluebirds, in summer the ground-hogs changing suddenly from little vertical statues to scurrying dust-coloured vanishing points; in autumn reining in and standing still to watch a flying crying skein of wild geese, sometimes a coyote at close range – quite a pretty little beast. And then at the end of the ride the dogs barking a welcome, and Mother and Father and hugs, Maxey to be stabled and fed, and a great big supper ready.
    On the Friday after Ernestine and I had watched the settling in of Mrs. Dorval – if it
was
Mrs. Dorval or had wedreamed the name? – I told Father and Mother all that I knew and of course they were interested because a newcomer in a place the size of Lytton or in the sparsely settled neighbourhood was real news. I had learned just a little more, because Ernestine’s father had a law office in Lytton and he must have known something about Mrs. Dorval coming, because he was trying to get a lady’s saddle horse and perhaps another saddle horse too; he was trying through Mr. Rossignol who had the livery stable and the truck, and Mr. Rossignol said he might have to go as far as Guichon’s up at Quilchena beyond Merritt before he could get just exactly the kind of horses that Ernestine’s father wanted for Mrs. Dorval. This, in a horse country, made Mrs. Dorval more interesting than ever.
    Following the small snub which the very much occupied woman who was not Mrs. Dorval had given to Ernestine and through Ernestine to me, we affected not to be very much interested in the new household. We did not go up again to the bungalow. There was nothing to take us up there as it was on the way to nowhere, and those children who had been up reported nothing except that there were curtains with flowers on in some of the windows, that Charley Joe and Joe Charley were working in the garden and mending the little fence, and that they seemed to be working hard. We saw the woman who was not Mrs. Dorval once or twice in Mattson’s grocery store, where she gave quite large orders. But Mr. Mattson’s impression was that she ordered all kinds of things from the stores in Vancouver, and it is true that many, many parcels of all sizes arrived by express. Ernestine’s mother extorted from Ernestine’s father the fact that the name of the woman in the grey dress was certainly not Mrs. Dorval. It was Mrs. Broom, which somehow changed her.

THREE
    I t must have been September, and late September at that on account of what I saw that day when I was riding back to Lytton from the ranch. This time I had stayed at home only over Friday night, as