Again I felt myself striving to grasp at something—nothing tangible now, but a long series of exhausting, infinitely confused dreams. My brain strove desperately to retain them, but the more it strove the more they slipped back into the darkness of the further side of memory; and, with one mighty effort to hold on to the last of the vanishing train, I opened my eyes, oppressed with a sense of significant things forgotten.
My eyes opened, I say; and they stared widely at a patch of sky, of an untellable blue, sparkling gem-like, and set very far off as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. As I stared, the sense of oppression slipped from me. I sat up; but the patch of sky reeled, and I lay back again, whereupon it recovered its adorable stability. I felt tired, but content. It was good to lie there, and watch that enchanted sky, and rest from thought and dreams.
After a while, however, I turned my head, and 136noted that I was in a deep, low-vaulted, tunnel-shaped cave—or rather bottle-shaped, for it was enlarged about the place where I lay. I noted that I lay on furs, on a low, couch-like ledge; and I noted, too, that there was a wind outside, for at intervals a branch was bowed across the cave-mouth and withdrawn. Then I perceived that a little jar of water and a broken cake of barley meal stood just within reach; and straightway I was aware of a most interested appetite. I sat up again and began to eat and drink. The patch of sky reeled, danced, blurred, darkened,—and again grew clear and steady. I finished the barley bread, finished the little jar of water, and sat communing lucidly with my right mind.
It was manifest that I had been saved that night of my fall over the cliff (by Anderson?—I prayed not); that I had been desperately ill—for the hands and arms upon which I looked down with sarcastic pity were emaciated; that I had been tenderly cared for—for the couch was soft, the cave well kept, and a rude screen stood at one side to shield me when the winds came into the cave-mouth. I raised my hands to my head. It was bandaged; and at one side my hair had been much cut away. But my hair—how long the rest of it was! And then came a stroke of wonder—my once smooth chin was deeply bearded! How long, how long must I 137have rested here, to grow so patriarchal an adornment!
Stung to a fierce restlessness, and with a sinking at my heart, I rose, tottered to the cave-mouth, and looked out.
The world I had last seen was a green world on the threshold of June. The world I looked on now was a world of fading scarlets, the last fires of autumn fast dying from the ragged leafage.
Below, beyond trees and a field, was outspread the wide water of Minas, roughened to a cold and angry indigo under the wind. To the left, purple-dim and haze-wrapped, sat Blomidon. Grand Pré must be around to the left. Then the cave was in the face of the Piziquid bluff. So near to friends, yet hidden in a cave! What had happened the while I lay as dead? I tottered back to the couch, and fell on my back, and thought. My apprehensions were like a mountain of lead upon the pit of my stomach, and I laboured for my breath.
First I thought of Nicole as having saved me—Anderson I knew would have done his best, but was helpless among an unfriendly people, and well occupied to keep his own scalp. Yet Nicole would have taken me to Father Fafard! And surely there were houses in Grand Pré where the son of my father would have been nursed, and not driven to hide in a hole—till his beard grew! And surely, after all that had happened, Yvonne would 138no longer count me a traitor, Monsieur and Madame would make amends for this dreadful misjudgment! And surely—but if so, where were all these friends?
Or what had befallen Grand Pré?
“If evil has befallen them (I did not say Yvonne) I want to die! I will go out, and fight, and die at once!” I cried, springing to my feet.
But I was still very weak, and my passion had yet further weakened me, so that I fell to the floor beside the couch; and in falling I knocked over the little jar and broke it. Even then I was conscious of a regret for the little jar; I realized that I was thirsty; and though I wanted to die, I wanted a drink of water first.
This inconsequent mood soon passed, and I crawled back on to the couch, the conviction well hammered into my brain that I was not yet fit to die with credit. And now, having found me no comfort in reason, and having faced the fact that there was nothing I could do but wait, I began to muse more temperately, and to cast about, as one will when weak, for omens and auguries. They kill time, and I hold them harmless.
But a truce to cant. Who am I that I should dare to say I laugh at or deny them? I may laugh at myself for a credulous fool. And I have no doubt whatever that most omens are sheer rubbish, more vain than a floating feather. But 139again there are things of that kindred that have convinced me, and have blessed me; and I dare not be irreverent to the mock mysteries, lest I be guilty of blaspheming those which are true. We know not—that is the most we know.
I will not agree, then, that I was a subject for laughter if, lying there alone, sick, tormented, loving without hope, fast bound in ignorance of events most vital to my love, I let my mind recall the curious prophesyings of old Mother Pêche. Of Yvonne directly I dared not suffer myself to think, lest my heart should break or stop.
When fate denies occasion to play the hero, it is often well, while waiting, to play the child. I lay quiet, looked at the patch of sky, and occupied myself with Mother Pêche’s soothsayings.
Your heart’s desire is near your death of hope.
At first there was comfort in this, and I took it very seriously, for the sake of the argument. But oh, these oracles, astute from the days of Delphi and Dodona! Already I could perceive that my hope was not quite dead. A thousand chances came hinting about the windows of my thought. Why might not Yvonne be safe, well,—free? The odds were that things had gone ill in my absence, but there was still the chance they might have instead gone well. Here and now, plainly, was not my death of hope, wherefore my heart’s desire could not be near. I turned aside the 140saying in angry contempt, and fell to feeling my ribs, my shrunk chest, my skinny arms, wondering how long before I could well wield sword again.
In this far from reassuring occupation I came upon the little leather pouch which Mother Pêche had hung about my neck. With eagerness I drew out the mystic stone and held it up before my face. The eye waned and dilated in the dim light, as if a living spirit lurked behind it.
“Le Veilleur,” I said to myself. “The Watcher. Little strange is it if simple souls ascribe to you sorcery and power.”
Then I remembered the snatch of doggerel which the old dame had muttered over it as she gave it to me. While this you wear what most you fear will never come to pass.
Curious it seemed to me that it should have stuck in my mind, though so little heeded at the time. What most you fear. What was it most I feared? Surely, that Yvonne should go to another. Then that, at least, should not befall while I lived, if there were force in witchcraft; for I would wear the “Watcher” till I died.
But here again my delusive little satisfaction had but a breath long to live. For indeed what most I feared was something, alas! quite different. What most I feared was calamity, evil, anguish, for Yvonne. Then, clearly, if her happiness 141required her to be the wife of George Anderson, I could not hinder it. Could not? Nay, “would not!” I cried aloud; and thereupon, no longer able to drug myself with auguries, and no longer able to be dumb under the misery of my own soul, I sprang upright, strained my arms above my head, and prayed a selfish prayer:
“God, give her joy, but through me, through me!” Then I flung myself down again, and set my teeth, and turned my face to the wall. Thus I lay as one dead; and so it fell that when the door of the cave was darkened, and steps came to my bed, I did not look up.
The steps came close to me, moved away, and were still. A sick man’s curiosity soon works, and here, surely, were incalculable matters for me to find out. I turned over suddenly.
It was a fantastic figure that faced me, sitting on a billet of wood not far from the door. Withered herbs were in the high, peaked cap. The black-and-yellow mantle was drawn forward to cover the folded arms. The steely eyes were at my inmost thought.
There is no doubt I was still a sick man. I was unspeakably disappointed. Looking back upon it now, I verily believe that I expected to see Yvonne, as in a fairy tale.
“Why did you come in,” I asked peevishly, twisting under those eyes, “without proclaiming—
“Woe, woe to Acadie the Fair, for the hour of her desolation cometh?”
“It has come,” said he quietly.
143I sat up as if a spring had moved me. My eyes alone questioned.
“Beauséjour has fallen. France is driven back on Louisbourg. The men of Acadie are in chains. The women await what fate they know not. Their homes await the flame.”
Here was no madman speaking.
“And—Yvonne?” I whispered.
“They all are safe, under shelter of the governor—and of Anderson,” he added icily.
I had no more words for a moment. Then I asked—“And the Black Abbé?”
His sane calm disappeared. His face worked; his hands came out from under his cloak, darting like serpents; his eyes veered like pale flame. As suddenly he was calm again.
“He is at Louisbourg,” said he, “at Isle St. Jean—here—there—anywhere; free, busy, still heaping and heating the fires which shall burn his soul alive.”
I like a man who is in earnest; but I could think of nothing appropriate to say. After a pause I changed the subject.
“I am thirsty,” said I, “and hungry too, I think, though I have eaten all the barley bread. And I’m sorry, but I’ve broken the jar.”
From a niche in the wall he at once brought me more barley cake, with butter, and fresh milk, and some dried beef. The wholesome, homely taste 144of them comes back to me now. Having eaten, I felt that nothing could be quite so good as sleep; and with grateful mutterings, half spoken, I slept.
When I woke it was the cold light of early morning that came in at the cave-mouth; and I was alone. I felt so much better that I got up at once; but ere I could reach the door a dizziness came over me, and I staggered back to my place, feeling that my hour was not yet. As I lay fretting my heart with a thousand hot conjectures, my host came in. He looked at me, but said not a word; nor could I get his tongue loosened all through our light breakfast. At last, to my obstinate repetition of the inquiry: “When shall I be strong enough to go down into Grand Pré?” he suddenly awoke and answered:
“A little way to-morrow, perhaps; and the next day, further; and within the week, if you are fortunate, you should be strong enough for anything. You will need to be, if you are going down into Grand Pré!” he added grimly.
Upon this direct telling I think I became in all ways my sane self—weak, indeed, but no longer whimsical. I felt that Gr?l’s promise was much better than I could have hoped. I knew there would be need of all my strength. I was a man again, no more a sick child. And I would wait.
Gr?l busied himself a few minutes about the 145cave, in a practical, every-day fashion that consorted most oddly with his guise and fame. I could not but think of a mad king playing scullion. But there was none of the changing light of madness in his eyes.
Soon he seated himself at the cave-mouth, and said, pointing to a roughly shaped ledge with a wolfskin upon it:
“Come hither, now, and take this good air. It will medicine your thin veins.”
Obeying gladly, I was soon stretched on the wolfskin at the very brink, as it seemed, of the open world. But it was cold. Perceiving this, he arose without a word, fetched another skin, and tucked it about me. His tenderness of touch was like a woman’s.
“How can I thank you?” I began. “It is to you, I now perceive, that I owe my life. How much besides I know not!”
He waved my thanks aside something impatiently.
“Yes, I saved you,” said he. “It suited me to do so. I foresaw you would some day repay me. And I like you, boy. I trust you; though in some ways you are a vain fool.”
I laughed. I had such confidence in him I began to think he would bring all my desires to pass.
“And I have been wont to imagine you a madman,” 146said I. “But I seem to have been mistaken.”
“Were I mad utterly as I seem,” said he, in a voice which thrilled me to the bone, “it would not be strange. I am mad but on one subject; and on that I believe that God will adjudge me sanest.”
He was silent for a long time, that white fire playing in his eyes; and I dared not break upon his reverie. At last I ventured, for my tongue ached with questions unasked:
“How did you find me when I fell over the cliff?” I queried. “And where was the Englishman?”
My mouth once opened, two questions instead of one jumped out.
“It was noon,” said Gr?l, “and I found your Englishman sitting by you waiting for the sky to fall. Had the Micmacs come instead of me, your two scalps would have risen nimbly together. He is a good man and brave; but he lacks wits. A woman could trust him to do anything but keep her from yawning!”
I grinned with the merest silly delight—a mean delight. But Gr?l went on:
“He is worth a dozen cleverer men; but he fatigued me. I sent him away. I told him just how to go to reach the Piziquid settlement, whom to ask for, and what help to bring for his sick comrade. Then, knowing what was about to befall, and having 147in mind a service which you will do me at a later day, and divining that you would rather be sick in a madman’s cave than in an English jail, I brought you here. I was reputed a wizard in the old days in France, for having brought men back from the very gape of the grave; and I knew you would be long sick.”
I looked at him, and I think my grateful love needed no words.
“And what became of the Englishman?” I asked presently.
“He appeared at last in Grand Pré,” answered Gr?l, “and told the truth of you, and dwelt awhile within the shadow of the chapel, to be near the guests of Father Fafard; and he got a strong guard placed in the village close at hand, that those who loved the English and feared the abbé might sleep in peace. I hear he presses for the redemption of Mademoiselle’s pledge; but she, to the much vexation of Monsieur and Madame, is something dilatory in her obedience. Of course she will obey in the end. Even Father Fafard exhorts her to that, for obedience sums all virtues in a maid. But she has an absurd idea that the Englishman should present alive to her the man who saved his life, before claiming reward at hands of hers. I might have enabled him to do this; but you were not in a mind to be consulted.”
“You are the wisest man I ever knew,” said I, 148conscious of an absurd inclination to fling myself at his feet and do penance for past supercilious underratings.
He seemed to accept the tribute as not undue, and again took up his monologue.
“Had you died, as seemed for some weeks likely for all my skill, I should have smoothed the way for the stupid Englishman; but finding that you would live, I thought to bind you to me by keeping your way open. In a few days you will be well, and must tread your own path, to triumph or disaster as your own star shall decree. In either case, I know you will stand by me when my need comes!”
“You know the merest truth,” said I.
Now, while I was arranging in my mind a fresh and voluminous series of interrogations, my singular host arose abruptly and went off without a word, leaving me to rebuild a new image of him out of the shattered fragments of the old.
I saw that he was not mad, but possessed. One intolerably dominant purpose of revenge making all else little in his eyes, he was mad but in relation to a world of complex impulses; in relation to his great aim, sane, and ultimately effective, I could not doubt. But the mad grotesquerie of the part he had assumed had come to cling to him as another self, no longer to be quite sloughed off at will. To play his part well he had resolved to be it; and he was it, with reservation. Just now, Acadie fallen and his enemy for the time in eclipse, I concluded that he found his occupation gone. Therefore, after solitary and tongue-tied years, his speech flowed freely to me, as a stream broken 150loose. That he had a purpose with me, I divined, would excuse him in his own sight for descending to the long unwonted relief of direct and simple utterance. I expected to find out from him many things of grave import during the few days of inaction that yet lay ahead of me. Then I would be able to act—without, perhaps, the follies of the past. Meanwhile this tender, icy, extravagant, colossal, all but omniscient character had bound me to him with the irrefragable bonds of mystery, gratitude, and trust. I was Yvonne’s first, but next I felt myself fast in leash to the posturing madman Gr?l.
Returning soon to my couch, I dozed and mused away the morning. At noon came no sign of my host, so I went to the niche in the wall, found food, and made my meal alone, feeling myself hourly growing in strength. Toward sunset Gr?l strode in, wafted, as my convalescent nostrils averred, upon a most savoury smell. It proved to be a still steaming collop of roast venison, and after that feast I know the blood ran redder and swifter in my pulses.
“O best physician!” said I, leaning back. “And now, I beg you, assuage a little the itching of my ears.”
He sat, his mantle and wizard wand flung by, upon a billet of wood against the wall, and looked not all unlike familiar mortals of the finest. Leaning 151his chin in his long, clutching hands, as if to make gesture impossible, he leaped straight into the story:
“That fighting fire in your Anderson, when he killed the savage with his hands, died out. He is still the Quaker farmer. He went to Grand Pré, and cleared your name, and told how you had saved him for Mademoiselle de Lamourie. With some inconsequence, Mademoiselle was thereupon austere with him because he had not in turn saved you for her. He went to Halifax and did deeds with the council—for he secured further and greater grants of land for himself and further and greater grants of land for Giles de Lamourie, with compensations for the burnings which English rule should have prevented, and with, last of all, an English guard for Grand Pré, in order that scalps of English inclination might be secure upon their owners’ heads. All this was wise, and indeed plain sense—better than fighting. And he remains at Grand Pré, and waits upon Mademoiselle de Lamourie, patient on crumbs.
“In June things happened, while you slept here. The English came in ships, sailing up Chignecto water and startling the slow fools at Beauséjour. The English landed on their own side of the Missiguash. The black ruins of Beaubassin cried out to them for vengeance on La Garne.” (The name, upon his lips, snarled like a wolf.)
152“Vergor, the public thief, called in the men of the villages to help his garrison. Beauséjour was a nest of beavers mending the walls—but not till the torrent was already tearing through. The invaders, wading the deep mud, forced the Missiguash, and drove back the white-coat regiments. They seized the long ridge behind the fort, and set up their batteries. Fort guns and field guns bowled at each other across the meadows.
“Meanwhile the English governor at Halifax sent for the heads of the villages, the householders of Piziquid, Grand Pré, Annapolis. He said the time was come, the final time, and they must swear fealty to King George of England. He bade them choose between that oath, with peace, or a fate he did not name. A few, wise like Giles de Lamourie, took oath. The rest feared La Garne, trusted France, and accounted England an old woman. They refused, and went home.
“The siege went on, and many balls were wasted. The English were all on one side of the fort, so those of the garrison who got tired of being besieged walked out the other side and went home. These were the philosophers. Vergor lived in his bomb-proof casemate, and was at ease. But one morning while he sat at breakfast with other officers a shell came through the roof and killed certain of them.
“That ended it. If the bomb-proof was not 153bomb-proof, Vergor might get hurt. He capitulated. His officers broke their swords, but in vain. La Garne spat upon him.”
Here he stopped, his eyes veered, and his face twisted. In a strange voice he went on:
“In La Garne yet flickers one spark of good—his courage. Till that is eaten out by his sins he lives, not being fully ripe for the final hell.”
He stopped again, moistening his lips with his tongue.
I put my hand to my head.
“Give me a drink of water, I pray you!” said I to divert him, fearing lest that swift and succinct narrative had come to an end.
He gave it to me, and in a moment began again.
“So Beauséjour fell,” said he. “La Garne left early, for him the English wanted to hang. The rest marched out with honours of war. The English found them an inconvenience as prisoners, and sent them to Louisbourg. And Beauséjour is now Fort Cumberland.”
“So fades the glory of France from Acadie—forever!” I murmured, weighed down with prescience.
“Just as it was fading,” continued Gr?l, with a hint of the cynic in his voice, “your cousin, Marc de Mer, came from Quebec with despatches. The garrison was marching out. He, being already out, judged it unnecessary to go in. He 154took boat down Chignecto water, and up through Minas to Grand Pré. Here he busied himself with your uncle’s affairs, laying aside his uniform and passing unmolested as a villager.
“For a little there was stillness. Then the great doom fell.
“To every settlement went English battalions. What I saw at Grand Pré is what others saw at Annapolis, Piziquid, Baie Verte. An English colonel, one Winslow, smooth and round and rosy of countenance, angry and anxious, little in love with his enterprise, summoned the men of Grand Pré to meet him in the chapel and hear the last orders of the king. There had been “last orders” before, and they had exploded harmlessly enough. The men of Grand Pré went—and your cousin Marc, having a restless curiosity, went with them. Thereupon the doors were shut. They were as rats in a trap, a ring of fire about them.
“They learned the king’s decree clearly enough. They were to be put on ships,—they, their families, such household gear as there might be place for,—and carried very far from their native fields, and scattered among strangers of an alien speech and faith.
“Well, the mountains had fallen upon them. Who could move? They lay in the chapel, and their hearts sweat blood. Daily their weeping women, 155their wide-eyed children, came bringing food. But the ships were not ready. The agony has dragged all summer. At last two small ship-loads are gone; the crowd is less in the chapel; some houses stand empty in the village, waiting to burn. The year grows old; the task is nearly done.”
There was a dark silence.
“Has my cousin Marc gone yet?” I asked heavily.
“He waits and wastes in the chapel.”
“And my almost-father, Father Fafard?”
“No,” said Gr?l, “his trouble is but for others. He has ever counselled men to keep their oaths. He has opposed a face of steel to Quebec intrigue. The English reverence him. He blesses those who are taken away. He comforts those who wait.”
Of Yvonne I had no excuse for asking more. What more I would know I must go and learn. To go and learn I must get strong. To get strong I must sleep. I turned my face to the wall.
On the following day, being alone all day, I walked out, shaking at first, but with a step growing rapidly assured. Not far from the cave I passed a clear pool, and saw my face amid the branches leaning over it. A pretty cavalier, I thought, to go a-wooing. A little further on I came to a secluded cabin, where a young woman bent over the wash-tub in the sunny doorway. I went up and saluted her courteously. The alarm died from her face, and compassion melted there instead.
“I have been long wounded, in the woods,” I said. “Give me, I pray you, the charity of a cup of milk, and lend me your scissors and a glass.”
At this the compassion ran away in laughter, and she cried merrily:
“Sit here on the stoop, monsieur, till I get them for you.”
“Plainly,” thought I, “you have not husband or brother in the chapel at Grand Pré!”
157On her return she answered as it were straight to my thought.
“My man’s in the woods!” she said, with pride. “And he’s all safe. They didn’t catch him.”
“You may well thank God for that, madame!” said I gravely, drinking the milk with relish and setting myself assiduously to my toilet. My hair of course I could do little with,—I was no barber’s apprentice. The long, straight, lustreless black locks hung down over my collar, framing lugubriously a face to scare hunger from a feast. But there was enough of it to be persuaded into covering the patches and scars.
My beard, however, proved interesting. With infinite pains I trimmed it to a courtly point, and decided it would pass muster. It was not unlike my uncle’s—and the Sieur de Briart was ever, in my eyes, an example of all that was to be admired. The success of my efforts was attested by the woman’s growing respect. She now recognized me for a gentleman, and brought me a dish of curds, and bustled with civilities till I went.
I arrived back at the cave in such good fettle that I felt another day would see me ripe for any venture. But I was tired, and slept so soundly that I knew not when my host came in.
In the morning he was there, getting ready a savory breakfast. When I proposed my enterprise for the day, he said, very wisely:
158“If you think you’re fit to-day, perhaps you may almost be so to-morrow. Wait. Don’t bungle a great matter by a little haste!”
So I curbed my chafing eagerness, and waited. He rested at home all day, and we talked much. What was said, however, was for the most part not pertinent to this record. Only one short reach of the conversation lives in my memory—but that is etched with fire.
It came in this way. One question had led to another, till at last I asked:
“Why do you so hate La Garne?” and was abashed at my boldness in asking.
He sprang up and left the cave; and left me cursing my stupidity. It was an hour ere he came back, but he was calm, and seated himself as if nothing had happened.
“I had thought,” said he, in an even voice, “that if I were to speak of that the walls of this cave would cry out upon me for vengeance delayed. But I have considered, and a little I will tell you. You must know; for the hour will come when you will help me in my vengeance, and you might weaken, for you do not comprehend the mad sweetness of hate. You are born for a great happiness or a great sorrow, and either destiny may make one blunt to hate.
“I was a poor gentleman of Blois, part fop, part fantastical scholar, a dabbler in magic, and a lover 159of women. My nature pulled two ways. I was alone in the world, save for a little sister, beautiful, just come to womanhood, whom I loved as daughter and sister both. She thought me the wonderful among men. It chanced that at last I knew another love. A woman, the wife of a witless pantaloon of the neighbourhood, ensnared all my wits, till I saw life only in her eyes. Her husband came upon us in her garden—and for his reproaches I beat him cruelly. But he, though not a man, was not all fool. For loving his wife he could not punish me—I being stronger and more popular than he; but he knew that for theft the law would hang a man. He hid a treasure of jewels, and with a nice cunning fixed the crime upon me. It was clear as daylight, so that almost myself believed myself guilty. In a foul, reeking cell in the city wall I awaited judgment and the penalty.
“A confession makes the work of the judges easier, and as I would not confess I was to be tortured—when the Court was ready; all in good time.
“At Blois was a young blade renowned no less for his conquests of women than for his ill-favoured face. His ugliness prevailed where the beauty of other men found virtue an impregnable wall against it. He courted my sister. She repulsed him. It got about and shamed him. Then (I this while in prison, and she helpless) he laid 160a public wager with his fellows that he would have her innocence.
“He told her I was to be tortured. After a time he told her he could save me from that extremity. This thought worked for a time upon her lonely anguish. Then he swore he would save me—but at a price.
“At last the price was paid. He won his wager. On the day that I was tortured she killed herself before the judges. He, astonished, fled to Italy, hid in a monastery, and dedicated himself to the missions of the New World.
“The judges were, after all, men. They said the evidence against me was insufficient. They set me free, as an avenger.
“I have not been in haste. The man has grown more evil year by year; so I have waited. I will not send him to his account till the score is full. The deepest hell must be ready, and gape for him. Meanwhile, his soul has dwelt all these years alone with fear. He is a brave man, but he knows I wait—he knows not for what; and he sweats and is afraid!”
He told the story simply, quietly; but there was madness in his voice. The unspeakable thing choked me. I got up.
“It is enough!” said I. “I will not fail you when you need me.”
But I went out into the air for a little.
On the following day, being Tuesday, November 16, 1855, and my twenty-seventh birthday, I went down to Grand Pré. I am thus precise about the date, for I felt as I set forth that the issues of life and death hung upon my going. Right here, it seemed to me, was a very knife-edge of a day, which should sever and allot to me for all the future my part of joy or ruin. Surely, thought I,—to justify my expectation of colossal events,—I have not lain these long months dead, that action, once more started, should dribble like a spent stream.
Therefore I went, like a careful strategist, equipped with all the knowledge Gr?l could give. I had planned how to reach Father Fafard, and through him how to reach Yvonne. And as the day was to be a great one, I thought well it should be a long one. I set out upon the palest promise of daybreak.
My strength, under one compelling purpose, had 162come back; and it seemed to me that I saw events and their chances with radiating clearness. So up-strung were my nerves that the long tramp seemed over in a few minutes, and I found myself, almost with surprise, at the lower ford of the Gaspereau, just under the hill which backs Grand Pré. Here was the thick wood wherein I planned to lie perdu, in the event of dangerous passers. In a little while there came in view a woman, heavy-eyed and dishevelled, carrying a basket of new-baked barley bread, very sweet to smell. It was clear she was one with an interest in the prisoners at the chapel. In such a case I could have no fear of stumbling upon a traitor. I stepped out to her.
“Would that he, too,” said I significantly, “had gone to the woods in time!”
Her eyes ran over with the ready and waiting tears; but she jerked her apron jealously over the loaves, and looked at me with a touch of resentment, as if to say, “Why had you such foresight, and not he?”
“He went to hear the reading, and they took him,” she moaned. “And who will keep the little ones from starving in the winter coming on?”
“It is where I, too, would be now—in the chapel prison yonder,” said I gently. “But I lay in the woods, wounded, too sick to go to the reading, so I escaped.”
The resentment faded out. She saw that I was 163not one of those who shamed her husband’s credulity. I might have been caught too, had I been given the same chance.
“For the little ones, I pray you accept this silver, and count it a loan to your husband in his prison,” said I, slipping two broad Spanish pieces into her hand.
She looked grateful and astonished, but had no words ready.
“And do, I beg of you, a kindness to one in bitter need of it,” I went on. “You know Father Fafard?”
Her face lightened with love.
“He grieves for me, thinking me dead,” said I. “Tell him, I beg of you, that one who loves him waits to see him in the wood by the lower ford.”
Her face clouded with suspicion.
“How shall I know—how shall he know—you are honest?” she asked.
I was troubled.
“You must judge by your woman’s wit,” said I. “And he will come. He fears no one. But no, tell him Paul Grande waits at the lower ford.”
“The traitor!” she blazed out; and, recoiling, hurled the money in my face. It stung strangely.
“You are wrong,” said I, in a low voice. “But as you will. Tell him, if you will, that Paul Grande, the traitor, waits for him at the lower ford. But if you do not tell him, be sure he will not soon 164forgive you. And for the money, he shall keep it for your children—and you will be sorry to have unjustly accused me.”
She laughed with bitter mockery, and turned away.
“But I will tell him; that can do no harm,” she said. “I’ll tell him the traitor who loves him waits at the ford.”
I withdrew into the wood, beyond all reason pained at the injustice.
The unpleasant peasant woman was as good as her word, however; for in little more than the space of an hour I saw Father Fafard approaching. Plainly he had come hot upon the instant.
“My dear, dear boy! Where have you been, and what suffered?” he cried, catching me hard by the two arms, and looking into my eyes.
“It was Gr?l saved me,” said I.
Beyond earshot, deep in the wood, where no wind hindered the noon sun from warming a little open glade, I told my story briefly.
“Paul,” said he, when I had finished, “my heart has now the first happiness it has known through all these dreadful months. But you must slip out of this doomed country without an hour’s delay. Quebec, of course! And then, when an end is made here, I will join you. Have you money for the journey?”
I laughed softly.
165“My plans are not quite formed. I must see Yvonne. Will you fetch her to me?”
He rose in anger—a little forced, I thought.
“No!” said he.
“Then, I beseech you, give her a message from me, that I may see her for a little this very day.”
“Paul,” he cried passionately, “it is a sin to talk of it. She has pledged her troth. She is at peace. I will not have her disturbed.”
“Does she love him?” I asked.
“I—I suppose so. Or she will, doubtless,” he stammered.
“Oh, doubtless!” said I. “And meanwhile, does she show readiness to carry out her promise? Does she listen kindly to her impatient lover—her anxious father?”
“The Englishman has displeased her, for a time,” said he, “but that will pass. She knows the duty of obedience; she respects the plighted word. There can be but one ending; though you may succeed in making her very unhappy—for a time.”
“I will make her very happy,” I said quietly, “so long as time endures for her and me.”
He flashed round upon me with sharp scorn.
“What can you do for her? You, hiding for your life, the ruined upholder of a lost cause! Here she is safe, protected, wealth and security before her. And with you?”
166“Life, I think!” said I, rising too, and stretching out my arms. “But listen, father,” I went on more lightly. “I am not so helpless. I have some little rentes in Montreal, you know. And moreover, I am not planning to carry her off to-night. By no means anything so finely irregular. I am not ready. Only, see her I will before I go. If you will not help me, I will stay about this place, about your house indeed, till I meet her. That is all. If you dote upon my going, you know the way to speed me.”
His kind, round face puckered anxiously. But he hit upon a compromise.
“I will have no hand in it,” said he. “But if you are resolved to stay, you may as well find her without loss of time. The house we occupy is crowded, and she affects a solitary mood. She walks over the hill and down this way, of an evening, to visit some unhappy ones along by the river. You may see her, perhaps, to-night.”
I grasped his hand and kissed it, but he drew it away, vexed at himself.
“We will talk of other things now,” I said softly. “But do not be angry if I say I love you, father.”
He smiled with an air of reproach; and thereafter talk we did through hours, save for a little time when he was absent fetching me a meal. All that Gr?l had told me of the ruin of the French cause he told me in another colour, and more 167besides of the doom of the Acadians—but upon Yvonne’s name we touched no more by so much as the lightest breath.
At my cousin Marc’s rashness in going to the chapel he glanced with some severity, grieving for the sorrow of the young wife at Quebec. But for the English he had many good words—they were pitiful, he said, in the act of carrying out cruel orders. And they neither robbed nor terrorized. Not they, said he, but a wicked priest and the intriguers of a rotten government at Quebec, were the scourge of Acadie.
When the sun got low over the Gaspereau Ridge he called to mind some duties too long forgotten, and bade me farewell with a loving wistfulness. I think, however, it was the imminent coming of Yvonne that drove him away. He feared lest he should meet her, and in seeming to know of my purpose seem to sanction it. I could not help believing in my heart that in this matter, perhaps for the first time in his priesthood, the kind curé’s conscience was a little tremulous in its admonitions.
I watched him out of sight; and then, posting myself in a coign of vantage behind a great willow that overhung the stream, I waited with a thumping heart, and with a misgiving that all other organs within my frame had slumped away to nothing but a meagre and contemptible jelly.
Till the flames of amber and copper along the Gaspereau Ridge had temperately diminished to a lucidity of pale violet, I waited and watched. Then all at once the commotion in my bosom came to an icy stop.
A light, white form descended from the ridge to the ford. I needed not the black lace shawl about the head and shoulders to tell me it was she, before a feature or a line could be distinguished. The blood at every tingling finger-tip thrilled the announcement of her coming.
I grasped desperately at all I had planned to say—now slipping from me. I felt that she was intrenched in a fixed resolve; and I felt that not my life alone,—ready to become a very small matter,—but hers, her true life, depended upon my breaking that resolve. Yet how was I to conquer her, I who at sight of her was at her feet? I knew—with that inner knowledge by which I know God is—that she, the whitest of women, intended unwittingly 169a sin against her body in wedding a man unloved—that she, in my eyes the wisest, most clear-visioned of women, contemplated a folly beyond words. But how could I so far escape my reverence for her as to convict her of this folly and this sin?
But now all my thoughts, words, pleas, sprayed into air. She came—and I stepped into her path, whispering:
“Yvonne!”
She was almost within reach of my hand, had I stretched it out,—but I dared not touch her. She gave the faintest cry. Taken at so sudden a disadvantage, she had not time to mask herself, and her great eyes told for one heart-beat what I knew her lips would have denied. Her fingers locked and unlocked where they caught the black mantilla across her bosom. She stood for an instant motionless; then glanced back up the hill with a desperate fear.
“They will see you!” she half sobbed. “You will be caught and thrown into prison. Oh, hide yourself, hide at once!”
“Not without you,” I interrupted.
“Then with me!” she cried pantingly, and led the way, almost running, back of the willow, down a thread of a path, to a hidden place behind a bend of the stream. Glancing back at the last moment, I saw a squad of soldiers coming over the hill.
170As soon as she felt that I was safely out of sight and earshot, she turned and faced me with a sudden swift anger.
“Why have you done this? Why have you forced me to this?” she cried.
“Because I love you,” said I slowly. “Because”—
She drew herself up.
“You do not know,” said she, “what I have promised to Monsieur Anderson. I have promised to redeem my word to him when he can show you to me safe and well.”
I laughed with sheer joy.
“He shall wait long then,” said I. “Sooner than he should claim the guerdon I will fall upon my sword, though my will is, rather, to live for you, beloved.”
“Had the soldiers seen you and taken you,” said she, in her eagerness forgetting her disguise, “he would have been able to claim me to-morrow. They may yet take you. Oh, go, go at once!”
“They shall not take me. Now that I know you love me, Yvonne,—for you have betrayed it,—my life is, next to yours, the most precious thing to me in the world. I go at once to Quebec to settle my affairs and prepare a home for you. Then I will come,—it will be but in a month or two, when this trouble is overpast,—and I will take you away.”
171Her face, all her form, drooped with a sort of weariness, as if her will had been too long taxed.
“You will find me the wife of George Anderson,” she said faintly.
It was as if I had been struck upon the temples. My mouth opened, and shut again without words. First rage, then amazement, then despair, ran through me in hot surges.
“But—your promise—not till he could show me to you,” I managed to stammer.
“I gave it in good faith,” she said simply. “I can no longer hold him off by it, for I have seen you safe and well.”
“I am not safe, as you may soon see,” said I fiercely, “and not long shall I be well, as you will learn.” Then, perceiving that this was a sorry kind of threat, and little manly, I made haste to amend it.
“No, no,” I cried, “forget that! But stick to the letter of your promises, I beseech you. Why push to go back of that? Unless,” I added, with bitterness, “you want the excuse!”
She shuddered, and forgot to resent the brutality.
“Go!” she pleaded. “Save yourself—for my sake—Paul!” And her voice broke.
“That you may wed with the clearer conscience!” I went on, merciless in my pain.
She crouched down, a drear and pitiful figure, on the slope of sod, and wept silently, her hands 172over her eyes. I looked at her helplessly. I wanted to throw myself at her feet. Then the right thing seemed that I should gather her up into my arms—but I dared not touch her. At last I said, doubtfully:
“But—you love me!”
No answer.
“You do love me, Yvonne?”
She lifted her face, and with a childish bravery dashed off the tears, first with one hand, then the other. She looked me straight in the eyes.
“I do not,” said she, daring the lie. “But you—you disturb me!”
This astonishing remark did not shake my confidence, but it threw me out of my argument. I shifted ground.
“You do not love him!” I exclaimed, lamely enough.
“I respect him!” said she, cool now, and controlling the situation. I felt that I had lost my one moment of advantage—the moment when I should have taken her into my arms. Not timidity, but reverence, had balked me. My heart turned, as it were, in my breast, with a hot, dumb fury—at myself.
“The respect that cannot breed love for a lover will soon breed contempt,” said I, holding myself hard to mere reasoning.
173She ignored this idle answer. She arose and came close up to me.
“Paul,” she said, scarcely above a whisper, “will you save yourself for my sake? If I say—if I say that I do love you a little—that if it could have been different—been you—I should have been—oh, glad, glad!—then will you go, for my sake?”
“No, no indeed!” shouted the heart within me at this confession. But with hope came cunning. I temporized.
“And if I go, for your sake,” I asked, “when do you propose to become the wife of the Englishman?”
“Not for a long time, I will promise you,” said she earnestly. “Not for a year—no, not for two years, if you like. Oh,”—with a catch in her voice,—“not till I can feel differently about you, Paul!” And she hung her head at the admission.
“Dear,” I said, “most dear and wonderful, can you not even now see how monstrous it would be if I should seem, for a moment, to relinquish you to another? Soul and body must tell you you are mine, as I am yours. But your eyes are shut. You are a maid, and you do not realize what it is that I would save you from. It is your very whiteness blinds you, so that you do not see the intolerableness of what they would thrust upon 174you. For you it would be a sin. You do not see it—but you would see it, awaking to the truth when it was too late. From the horror of that awakening I must save you. I must”—
But she did not see; though her brain must have comprehended, her body did not; and therefore there could be no real comprehension of a matter so vital. She brushed aside my passionate argument, and came close up to me.
“Paul, dear,” she said, “I think I know the beauty of sacrifice. I am sure I know what is right. You cannot shake me. I know what must be in the end. But if you will go and save yourself, I promise that the end shall be far off—so that he may grow angry, and perhaps even set me free, as I have almost asked him to do. But now this is good-by, dear. You shall go. You will not disobey me. But you may say good-by to me. And as once you kissed my feet (they have been proud ever since), so—though it is a sin, I know—you may kiss my lips, just once,—and go.”
How little she knew what she was doing! Even as she spoke she was in my arms. The next moment she was trembling violently, and then she strove to tear herself away. But I was inexorable, and folded her close for yet an instant longer, till she was still. I raised my head and pushed her a little away, holding her by both arms that I might see her face.
175“Oh,” she gasped, “you are cruel! I did not mean that you should kiss me so—so hard.”
“My—wife!” I whispered irrelevantly.
“Let me go, sir,” she said, with her old imperious air, trying to remove herself from my grasp upon her arms. But I did not think it necessary to obey her. Then her face saddened in a way that made me afraid.
“You have done wrong, Paul,” she said heavily. “I meant you should just touch me and go. You took unmanly advantage. Alas! I fear I have a bad heart. I cannot be so angry as I ought. But I am resolved. You know, now, that I love you; that no other can ever have my love. But that knowledge is the end of all between us, even of the friendship which might, one day, have comforted me. Go, I command you, if you would not have me an unhappy woman forever!”
She wrenched herself free. Then, seeing me, as she thought, hesitate for an answer, she added firmly:
“I love you! But I love honour more, and obedience to the right, and my plighted word. Go!”
“I will not go, my beloved, till you swear to tell the Englishman to-morrow that you love me and intend to be my wife.”
“Listen,” she said. “If you do not go at once, I promise you that I will be George Anderson’s wife to-morrow.”
176I stared at her dumbly. Was it conceivable that she should mean such madness? Her eyes were fathomlessly sorrowful, her mouth was set. How was I to decide?
But fortune elected to save me the decision. A sharp voice came from the bank above—
“I arrest you, in the king’s name!”
We glanced up. There stood a squad of red-coats, a spruce young officer at their head.