It was a beautiful summer evening. The young mother, having recovered from her illness, decided that her first visit should be to the cabin of her old father, and, of course, the baby went with her. After resting awhile, and receiving the caresses of the hermit, the daughter, with the child in her arms, wandered about the familiar environs to enjoy once more all the pleasures attached to her old home. It was a beautiful summer evening. The forest was charged with perfume; a thousand birds fluttered from branch to branch; the earth was spangled with an endless variety of wild flowers; brilliant insects flashed and buzzed in the slanting beams of the sunset; the whole air gently undulated in a rhythmic wave that disposed the soul to revery and prayer. The young woman felt this influence, without, of course, being able to define it, and yielding to its sway, she wandered farther than she had intended, or than her bodily strength justified, from the hut of her father. It was so delightful to revisit all these scenes which she had learned to love so much, and to see them again under such different circumstances. Even the inanimate world is not the same to the wife as it is to the girl. Marriage for woman seems to alter the form, color, scent and effect of material things, giving them a character of pathos, if not of sadness, which they never wore in the pleasant days when the body owed no service to a master, and the mind was, in very literalness, fancy-free.

With her child in her arms—the flesh-and-blood pledge of her altered life—the young woman strayed away along the avenues of the forest, and out into the open spaces, until she reached the skirt of the high road, fully half a mile from Batoche's hut. The white dusty stretch of the road brought her to a pause, being as it were a dividing line between the expanses of greenery over which she was wandering. Feeling now the fatigue which she had not experienced before, she sat down upon the warm tufted grass to rest, and, like all mothers, became oblivious of self in attention to the wants of her babe. She had been nursing it at her breast about ten minutes, while her eyes were fixed on its rosy limbs, and her mind revelled in the half-sensuous, half-spiritual delights of maternity, when all at once a mighty clatter of hoofs was heard along the road, followed immediately after by loud shouts of men, the flash of red coats and the clang of sabre-sheaths on the flanks of rushing horses. What ensued was never fully known, but the young mother, with disordered dress, hair streaming behind, and babe convulsively pressed against her bosom, fled like a deer through the wood in the direction of the Falls. Behind her went two pursuers, fleet as fate, but indistinct as spectres in the twilight. Unfortunately the poor woman was on the side of the Falls opposite her father's cabin. When she reached the top of the headland, the cataract roared on her right, and the broad St. Lawrence flowed at her feet. There was no outlet of escape. Disgrace and death behind her; death and oblivion before her. There was not a moment to waste. In the highest access of her despair, she heard a voice across the Falls. It was that of her father, who, with hand and word, directed her to go down the steep side of the promontory to the foot of the cascade. He himself immediately disappeared under the overhanging rock and curtain of water, and joined her just as she had attained the desired spot. No time was lost in explanations. Seizing the babe in his right arm, and encircling his left around the waist of his daughter, the valiant old man turned and disappeared again under the Fall. Overhead a yell of baffled rage was heard above the thunder of the torrent, but it was not repeated.

Batoche had not advanced many steps when he noticed that the burden on his left arm was growing heavier and heavier—and, on looking down, he observed with terror that his daughter had swooned. The grand flower of love was broken on its stem. This circumstance added tenfold to the old man's peril. The slightest slip of his foot, the slightest jolt from the perpendicular, the slightest deviation from the protecting line of the granite wall, would hurl him and his precious freight into destruction. If he could only reach the subterranean cavity which opened about midway on his path, he might stop there to rest and all would be well. He dragged along slowly in this hope; his eyes strained till they saw the welcome haven approaching. A few more steps and he would reach it. He did reach it. As he bent down, on his right, to place the babe on a ledge of rock within the cave, he felt a sudden wrench on his left arm, then a sense of looseness, and to his horror he found that the circle made by his arm upon his hip was empty. His daughter had glided like a broken lily into the seething basin, at the point where the waters of the cataract fall sheer like lead, and where they at once battered the life out of her bare white breast.

"Great God of earth and heaven! What is this?" cried the old man, with eyes starting from their sockets.

Then, with a gesture of despair, he took up the child, held it aloft on his arm, and would have jumped into the gulf with it to complete the sacrifice of misery. But his fierce eye turned and caught that of the babe which was mellow with laughing light. There was also a smile upon its lip, and its chubby little hand flourished a wisp of grass plucked from a fissure in the ledge. That look, that smile, were like a flash of Paradise. The old man lowered the child to his breast, folded both arms over it, and rapidly passed out under the Fall. From that moment little Blanche never left him.

Such was the story gathered from Batoche himself, and which is still repeated as one of the traditions of Montmorenci. The hermit always insisted that his daughter's death was caused by two drunken British cavalry men. The version was never proven, but it was impossible to dissuade the old man of its truth. Hence his abiding, ineradicable hatred for the English, which, added to his aversion as a French soldier, rendered him the most bitter of foes during the war of 1775-76. Hence, also, the eccentricity of his character and subsequent mode of life, which have been described in preceding chapters.