HE son, Jean, was very tired and discouraged; the daughter-in-law, Marie, was tired and thoughtful; the little children, of whom there were four played many games restlessly and fretfully. In the corner, between the big sheet-iron wood-stove and the two walls sat Daddy Jeadreau, tired—not with a day's toil like the young people, but tired because he was old and had done a man's work during a lifetime in the wilderness. The fatigue of sixty years was on his shoulders, and he was patient, observant, silent.
Old Jeadreau's chair was a great rocker which had drifted up on the North Shore, and on the wooden seat was a thick mattress which had moose hide for cover, and was stuffed full of feathers, duck, goose, partridge, and other bird-down till it was as thick and springy as a newly laid balsam bough bed.
In that old chair sat the old man dreaming, and his dreams were memories of toils he had undergone and the jeopardies he had braved; he looked back on his youth and saw its trials in perspective, and so he knew the trials that these young people were undergoing, and he smiled in his heart because they, too, were brave, and they did, not know it.
They were fronting just such difficulties as he had faced; they had the impatience of youth, its inexperience, its questionings of the unkind assaults made upon their comfort, and the inexplicable failures of the most ardent efforts
The old man could remember his own youth, and its precious strength and the joy undying of loving a confident wife, working out destinies together—their own destinies, and setting their young children firmly on the way into prosperity of the soul, if not greatly in material riches. His wife was dead; all the children were grown up, except two or three who were dead; but Jean survived, and old Jeadreau was proud of him, for he was big and strong and impatient, like his father—tearing with ambition, but like his mother, loving little children and loving his father and loving his own wife, whose tongue was sometimes impatient, but what wife ever lived who would not grow impatient with the stolid thick-headedness of men?
"Jean!" she exclaimed. "Don't you see that heater is going out? And why couldn't you put in some dry maple before that cooking fire got so low that the potpie stopped cooking?"
Just so she talked to Jean and to the children, and old Jeadreau leaned back in his comfort, with his eyes quite closed, listening as to an echo of his own youthful days when he did not understand Mammee, the way he would understand her now, if, with his experience, she could be alive with him and he be young again.
Ah—those blessed little children which, if they do not die and become angels, grow up into strong boys and fine young men, so like their fathers, not inheriting much knowledge or instinct about girls and women, but so willing to learn! And how wise the girls are, even little ones—and Marie? She was so lovely, and old Jeadreau dreamed wistfully, remembering the little girl—his only daughter, who was dead, but who might have grown up like Marie!
"You children, stop that noise! Go outdoors! It's a pretty day! Go out, I tell you!"
The thoughtless little tribe ran out, waiting near the door because the potpie was sweet-savored, and it was almost done, and it was a rabbit one, with two great white rabbits, which Daddy had brought in from the line.
Jean watched his wife anxiously, for he had only the day before returned from his line of traps down toward Oiseau Bay. Luck had not been very good. For two weeks' tramping he had caught one twelve-dollar-fisher, two five-dollar-mink, and some fifty-cent ermines, and something had lugged away four dollars' worth of traps, which he. did not dare tell about.
It seemed pitiful, twenty dollars net, for two weeks' work in the best trapping time! Would all the winter be like that? And if next trip was not good, how about the Christmas presents?
Jean had much to think about, and his wife, praying for just one silver fox, not a big one—but a three-hundred- dollar fox, or a five-hundred-dollar, or even a hundred-dollar one! If only God would grant them one week without that steady, that constant pressure upon shoulders and soul and hope itself!
"Maybe we catch a black fox next trip!" Jean exclaimed with that strange fatuity of mankind.