Shadows on the Rock Read Free Page B

talking a great deal. They already knew in which chamber the Count had slept last night,
the names of his equerries, what he had brought with him for supper in a basket from Fontainebleau, and which wines old
Joseph had got up from the cellar for him. I had scarcely ever heard my family talk so much.
    “Not long after breakfast the Count himself came into our shop. He greeted my father familiarly and began asking about
the people of the Quarter as if he had been away only a few weeks. He inquired for my mother and grandmother, and they came
to pay their respects. I was pulled out from under the counter where I had hidden, and presented to him. I was frightened
because he was wearing his uniform and such big boots. Yes, he was a fine figure of a man forty years ago, but even more
restless and hasty than he is now. I remember he asked me if I wanted to be a soldier, and when I told him that I meant to
be an apothecary like my father, he laughed and gave me a silver piece.”
    Though Auclair so often talked to his daughter of the past, it was not because there was nothing happening in the
present. At that time the town of Quebec had fewer than two thousand inhabitants, but it was always full of jealousies and
quarrels. Ever since Cécile could remember, there had been a feud between Count Frontenac and old Bishop Laval. And now that
the new Bishop, Monseigneur de Saint–Vallier, had just come back from France after a three years’ absence, the Count was
quarrelling with him! Then there was always the old quarrel between the two Bishops themselves, which had broken out with
fresh vigour upon de Saint–Vallier’s return. Everyone in the diocese took sides with one prelate or the other. Since he
landed in September, scarcely a week went by that Monseigneur de Saint–Vallier did not wreck some cherished plan of the old
Bishop.
    Before they went to bed, Auclair and his daughter usually took a walk. The apothecary believed this habit conducive to
sound slumber. Tonight, as they stepped out into the frosty air and looked up, high over their heads, on the edge of the
sheer cliff, the Château stood out against the glittering night sky, the second storey of the south wing brilliantly
lighted.
    “I suppose the Count’s candles will burn till long past midnight,” Cécile remarked.
    “Ah, the Count has many things to trouble him. The King has not been very generous in rewarding his services in the last
campaign. Besides, he is old, and the old do not sleep much.”
    As they climbed Mountain Hill, they passed in front of Monseigneur de Saint–Vallier’s new episcopal Palace, and that,
too, was ablaze with lights. Cécile longed to see inside that building, toward which the King himself had given fifteen
thousand francs. It was said that Monseigneur had brought back with him a great many fine pieces of furniture and tapestry
to furnish it. But he was not fond of children, as the old Bishop was, and his servants were very strict, and there seemed
to be no way in which one could get a peep behind those heavy curtains at the windows.
    Their walk was nearly always the same. On a precipitous rock, scored over with dark, uneven streets, there were not many
ways where one could stroll with a careless foot after nightfall. When the wind was not too biting, they usually took the
path up to the redoubt on Cap Diamant and looked down over the sleeping town and the great pale avenue of river, with black
forest stretching beyond it to the sky. From there the Lower Town was a mere sprinkle of lights along the water’s edge. The
rock-top, blocked off in dark masses that were convents and churches and gardens, was now sunk in sleep. The only lighted
windows to be seen were in the Château, in the Bishop’s Palace, and on the top floor of old Bishop Laval’s Seminary, out
there on its spur overhanging the river. That top floor, the apothecary told his daughter, was the library, and likely
enough some young Canadian-born Seminarians to whom