clear fresh stream. Beyond that were green pastures, and in the distance a farm so picturesque as to seem unreal. The lettering on the side of the barn still advised us to chew Mail Pouch.
“You’re quite right, it is lovely,” he said, putting down a robe he had brought from the car. We sat on this, and Hepzibah was quite delighted to be let out of her basket. She had no difficulty in remembering Mr. Forrest, and divided her attention between the two of us as we talked.
“You have a distinct advantage over me,” I said, chewing on a blade of grass I had plucked from the ground. “You now know virtually everything there is to know about me, my home, my life, and I know nothing about you.”
“Have you never been to upstate New York?”
“No. I’ve done very little travelling. To and from hospitals, that’s about all.”
“It’s quite a lovely area. Our home is called La Deuxième. If you were a history buff, you’d have run across the name in a book or two.”
“La Deuxième. The second?”
“The second house, in our case.”
I propped myself up on an elbow. An orange and black butterfly hovered nearby as if preparing to listen too. “It sounds intriguing,” I said. “Do go on, tell me about this history. Is it romantic?”
“Very,” he said. He seemed happy to speak of his home, and perhaps a little embarrassed by his own pride. I thought as he talked that this story was very old to him; he had heard it first when he was far too young to understand, and a hundred times since then, and when he held a child of his own on his knee, this was the story he would tell him.
“Before the second house,” he said, “There was a first house—a convent. A band of French nuns built it before this country was a country. They had set out from the coast thinking they would find a place in the West where they were most needed. Heaven knows how they survived their journey through what was then truly a wilderness. They had no guide with them, not a single man to assist them.”
“But somehow they came to a small settlement. The settlers living there were French; they had decided to make their homes in this vast fertile valley bordered with rich forests. There were numerous French settlements in the state. It was still a tossup, you recall, whether the country would end up French or English.”
“The sisters felt at home among this band of countrymen, and they felt that they had come to the place where they were needed. Of course it was a long way from what we consider the West, but they had no comprehension of the size of the country, and by their reckoning they had come a very long way, and they decided this was where they would stay.
He paused briefly before going on. “So, while the settlers built their homes the sisters built their convent. Don’t ask how they did it. That’s been a mystery all these years. Perhaps they had more help from the townsmen than tradition records. At any rate, for its time and location it was a handsome building. Parts of it still stand. Some of it was wood, and some of it stone, and it was complete with arches and naves and everything one would expect from a prosperous French convent in the old country.
“And the sisters did prosper, as well as the village. It grew quite rapidly. The largest family among the settlers was a silversmithing family, and this became the chief trade for the settlement. These people wrote to relatives and friends at home, who in turn made the difficult journey to the settlement. The convent served as a school for the town, and as a hospital, in addition to being a home for the sisters. And in a short time it just wasn’t big enough. Only a few years after the sisters first arrived, they were faced with the necessity of building a second house.
“After some discussion with the townsfolk, it was decided that the first building would become a community building; initially it had been outside the town, but the town had now crept around it. This time the townsmen took charge of the construction, and in a short while the new building was nearly finished. The old building was still referred to as the couvent, and the new one simply as La Deuxième.
“But it was never finished, at least not for the sisters. Tragedy struck. The plague suddenly entered the village. For all the progress, conditions were still primitive. The location was remote. There were neither doctors nor medicine in the village to cope with anything of this sort, and none less than a week’s travel away at the very least. The disease spread like wildfire. Entire families were wiped out. The sisters did all they could, but that was all too little. Their convent was filled completely with the dead and the dying; there were not even enough able-bodied men to keep up with the task of burying the dead. A doctor arrived, summoned by a pair of brave sisters who had risked the wilderness alone to bring him. But he had far underestimated the seriousness of the situation; the medicine he brought was literally a drop in the bucket.
“The rest of the story is quite horrible. You must remember that nearly all these people were simple peasants, volatile and as superstitious as everybody else of that time. By now it was known that the disease arrived with a Nun who had just come from the old country. And because the Sisters took many of the ailing into their convent, it was literally a breeding ground for the plague. Resentment against the place began to grow. People began to say that the sisters were being punished for some wickedness, and the townspeople were suffering as well. One of the villagers in particular, half mad with grief because he had lost his wife and three children, harangued the townspeople, turning them against the sisters. Nearly two hundred people, all but a handful of the town’s population, had died within a matter of weeks. Finally, the remaining villagers drew up a sort of petition, asking the sisters to leave in order to lift the curse that had descended upon the village. The sisters refused.
“A short time afterward a handful of men—either with or without the blessings of the rest of the village—set fire to the convent. It was during the night. The timbers were blazing fiercely before the sisters even woke from their slumber. Probably the sisters were meant to escape, but the fire seems to have burned faster than anyone expected. It is not known if any of them escaped alive; if they did so, they fled and never returned. The ruins were filled with the ashes of the sick and the Nuns alike.”
He paused for a long moment. “How horrible,” I said. I shuddered as I envisioned the flames reaching to the sky. I could almost hear the cries of the terrified sisters as they found themselves trapped in the inferno.
Jeffrey too seemed completely absorbed in his story. For a time he stared thoughtfully before him as though weighing the crime that had been committed.
“Afterward,” he went on, but less somberly, “the people were ashamed of what they had done. They met and concluded that there were too few of them left, and the town too haunted with tragedy, to make a home there. They gathered together the few who were unafflicted by the disease, and moved west. As they left, they fired the village, burning it completely to the ground. Only La Deuxième, unfinished, was left standing. No one had the heart to set the torch to it.
“A few years later one of my ancestors, in reward for some service to the British throne, was given a vast land grant in this country, including the area of La Deuxième, which was by then under English domination. My family found the unfinished house, and because it was quite a handsome structure, finished it. It’s been our family home ever since.”
“What a strange story,” I said when he had finished. “Those poor creatures, to die so horribly, for no fault of their own.”
“Yes, it’s said they haunt the ruins of the convent, and even wander the halls of La Deuxième. Tradition is filled with tales of their visits.”
“Are you afraid?” I asked
