Shadows on the Rock Read Free Page A

been warned in a dream that he would be taken
prisoner and tortured by the Indians.
    Dinner was the important event of the day in the apothecary’s household. The luncheon was a mere goûter. Breakfast was a
pot of chocolate, which he prepared very carefully himself, and a fresh loaf which Pigeon’s oldest boy brought to the door.
But his dinner Auclair regarded as the thing that kept him a civilized man and a Frenchman. It put him in a mellow mood, and
he and his daughter usually spent the long evening very happily without visitors. She read aloud to him, the fables of La
Fontaine or his favourite Plutarch, and he corrected her accent so that she would not be ashamed when she returned home to
the guardianship of that intelligent and exacting Aunt Clothilde. It was only in the evening that her father had time to
talk to her. All day he was compounding remedies, or visiting the sick, or making notes for a work on the medicinal
properties of Canadian plants which he meant to publish after his return to Paris. But in the evening he was free, and while
he enjoyed his Spanish snuff their talk would sometimes lead far away and bring out long stories of the past. Her father
would try to recall to her their old shop on the Quai des Célestins, where he had grown up and where she herself was born.
She thought she could remember it a little, though she was only four years old when they sailed with the Count for the New
World. It was a narrow wedge, that shop, built in next to the carriage court of the town house of the Frontenacs. Auclair’s
little chamber, where he slept from his sixth year until his marriage, was on the third floor, under the roof. Its one
window looked out upon the carriage court and across it to the front of the mansion, which had only a blind wall on the
street and faced upon its own court.
    When he was a little boy, he used to tell Cécile, nothing ever changed next door, except that after a rain the cobbles in
the yard were whiter, and the ivy on the walls was greener. Every morning he looked out from his window on the same
stillness; the shuttered windows behind their iron grilles, the steps under the porte-cochère green with moss, pale grass
growing up between the stones in the court, the empty stables at the back, the great wooden carriage gates that never
opened, — though in one of them a small door was cut, through which the old caretaker came and went.
    “Naturally,” Auclair would tell his daughter, “having seen the establishment next door always the same, I supposed it was
meant to be like that, and was there, perhaps, to give a little boy the pleasure of watching the swallows build nests in the
ivy. The Count had been at home when I was an infant in arms, and once, I believe, when I was three, but I could not
remember. Imagine my astonishment when, one evening about sunset, a dusty coach with four horses rattled down the Quai and
stopped at the carriage entrance. Two footmen sprang down from the box, rang the outer bell, and, as soon as the bar was
drawn, began pulling and prying at the gates, which I had never seen opened in my life. It seemed to me that some outrage
was being committed and the police should be called. At last the gates were dragged inward, and the coach clattered into the
court. If anything more happened that night I do not recall it.
    “The next morning I was awakened by shouting under my window, and the sound of shutters being taken down. I ran across my
room and peeped out. The windows over there were not only unshuttered, but open wide. Three young men were leaning out over
the grilles beating rugs, shaking carpets and wall-hangings into the air. In a moment a blacksmith came in his leather
apron, with a kit of tools, and began to repair the hinges of the gates. Boys were running in and out, bringing bread, milk,
poultry, sacks of grain and hay for the horses. When I went down to breakfast, I found my father and mother and grandparents
all very much excited and pleased,