“Monsieur Waldron!” cried Yvonne faintly.
“You here, Mademoiselle de Lamourie!” he exclaimed, with a surprise that his courtesy could not quite conceal.
“This, monsieur,” she said, in a brave confusion, “is my friend, here for a moment because of my foolish desire to see him. I beg you”—
But he interrupted, reluctantly enough:
“It hurts me, mademoiselle, to have to say that your friend is my prisoner. If I were free to please you, he should go free.”
The case was clearly beyond mending, so I would not condescend to evasion.
“I can do nothing but surrender, monsieur,” said I civilly, “under the conclusive arbitrament of your muskets. Here is my sword.” He took it, and I went on:
“I am Captain Paul Grande, of the French army in Canada.”
178His face changed.
“A spy, then!” he said harshly.
“You insult with impunity,” I began. “An unarmed”—
But Yvonne broke in, her eyes flaming:
“How dare you, sir, insult me? That is not to be done with impunity, I think.”
The man looked puzzled. Then his face cleared somewhat.
“I beg your pardon, mademoiselle,” he said slowly, looking from her face to mine. “I begin to understand a little, I think. There is a very sufficient reason why a French officer might appear in an enemy’s country without his uniform—that country being Grand Pré—and yet be no spy!”
“I give you my word of honour,” said I, “that I am no spy, but merely your prisoner. And if brought to trial I will prove what I say.”
“I beg your pardon also—provisionally,” he replied, with a pleasant air. “I am the last to believe a gentleman a spy, and I am confident you will clear yourself of the unavoidable charge. You are a soldier. You must see it to be unavoidable,” he added.
“I do, monsieur,” said I sorrowfully. “I have lain for months, wounded and delirious, in a hiding-place not far off, nursed by a faithful friend. Having just recovered, I came here for a farewell 179to dear friends; and you have arrived inopportunely, monsieur.”
There was the bitterness of final despair beneath the lightness which I assumed.
“Your action seems to me very pardonable, I assure you,” said he. “But I am not the judge. We must go.” And he motioned his men to me.
But Yvonne came close to my side and laid her hand lightly on my arm.
“It is my wish, Monsieur Waldron,” she said, “that Captain Grande should escort me, with your assistance, and that of your guard also, if you will!”
“Why, certainly, mademoiselle, it shall be as you wish,” he said, with a ghost of a smile, which set her blushing wildly. “I have Captain Grande’s sword and his”—
“And my word,” said I, bowing.
“And his parole,” he continued. “I need in no way constrain him till we reach the—the chapel. I will lead my men a little in the rear, and strive not to interrupt your conversation.”
“I can never thank you enough for your courtesy, monsieur,” said I.
So it came that a strange procession marched up the Gaspereau Ridge, through the bleak twilight. And the hilltop drew swiftly near—and my last few minutes sped—and I was dumb. Still, she was at my side. And perhaps my silence spoke. 180But when we crossed the ridge, and the chapel prison appeared, and Yvonne’s house some way apart, my tongue found speech;—but not argument, only wild entreaties, adorations, words that made her body tremble, though not, alas! her will.
At length she stopped.
“You must go back to them now, Paul. I will go on alone. Good-by, dear!”
“But we are not near the house,” I stammered.
“Monsieur Anderson may come out to meet me. If he sees you now, before I change my conditions, how shall I escape the instant fulfilment of my promise?”
“But I am not safe, surely,” I argued.
“His testimony can at once make you safe,” said she.
My heart dropped, feeling the truth of her words. I could say nothing that I had not already said. Feeling impotent, feeling that utter defeat had been hurled upon me in the very moment of triumph, my brain seemed to stop working.
“What will you do?” was all that came through my dry lips.
She had grown much older in the last hour.
“I will wait, Paul, as I promised you,” she said sadly; “one year—no, two years—before I redeem my pledge and become his wife. That is all I can do—and that I can do. I choose to believe that you would have obeyed me and gone 181away at once, if we had not been interrupted. Therefore I keep my promise to you. It was not your fault that you were not permitted to obey me.”
I was quite at the end of my tether, though my resolution rose again to full stature on learning that I should have time—time to plan anew. She held out her hand. “Good-by, and God keep you, my dear friend!” said she very softly.
I looked around. The squad had halted near by. Some were looking, curse them! But that most decent officer had his back turned, and was intently scanning the weather. I lifted her hand to my lips.
“My—wife!” I muttered, unfalteringly obstinate.
“No!” she said sadly. “Only your friend. Oh, leave me that!”
And she was gone, a Psyche glimmering away through the dark which strove to cling to her.
I stood for a moment, eyes and heart straining after her. Then I turned as the guard came up.
“At your service, monsieur,” said I.
Before the door of the chapel stood a bent old figure hooded in a red shawl. Muttering, and with bowed head, it poked in the dust with a staff. When we were close at hand it straightened alertly; and old Mother Pêche’s startling eyes flashed into mine. I could have kissed the strange hawk face, so glad was I to see it. And I held out my hand, to be clutched eagerly.
“My blessings be upon thee, chéri Master Paul!” she cried.
“Thank you, mother!” said I. “Your love is very dear to me; and for your blessings, I need them all.”
“Come, monsieur,” said Waldron, at the steps.
“A word, a word,” she begged, half of him, half of me, “before thou go in there and these old eyes, perhaps, see thee never again.”
“Grant me one moment, I beg you, monsieur,” said I earnestly to Waldron. “She is a dear old friend and retainer of my family.”
183He nodded, and turned half aside in patient indifference.
“Listen,” she whispered, thrusting her face near mine, and talking rapidly, that the guard, who were but clumsy with our French speech, might not understand. “Hast thou the stone safe?”
“Surely,” said I.
“Then here, take this,” she muttered, laying a silken tress of hair in my hand. In the dusk I could not note its colour; but I needed not light to tell me whose it was. My blood ran hot and cold beneath it. The pulse throbbed furiously in my fingers as they closed upon it. “I clipped it under the new moon, the right moon, with my own hand, for thee, Master Paul.”
“Did she know it was for me?” I asked, in a sort of ecstasy.
“No, no!” answered the old dame impatiently; “but she gave it to me—laughing because I wanted it. I said that I was going far away with these my people,”—sweeping her hand toward the village,—“while she, perhaps, would stay. Strangely she regarded that perhaps, Master Paul. But here it is—and I have put a spell upon it while waiting for thee to come; and it will draw, it will draw her; she cannot let it go very far off, as long as she lives. It is for thee, chéri, I did it.”
Now, how I loved her for it, even while deriding 184the magic, I need not tell. Yet I was angry with her for explaining. That made me seem to take a base advantage in retaining the treasure. Sorrowfully I said:
“I cannot keep it, mother. That were treason to her. I will have naught of her but what her own heart gives me.”
And I held out the precious lock to her again, yet all the time grasped it tightly enough, no doubt.
“Why, chéri,” she laughed cunningly, “where is the treason? You don’t believe an old wife’s foolish charms!”
“True, mother,” I acquiesced at once, relieved beyond measure, “true, there can be no witchcraft in it but that which ever resides in every hair of that dear head. Not her, alas! but me, me it ensnares. God bless you, mother, for this wonderful gift.”
“Be of good cheer, Master Paul,” she said, hobbling briskly off. “I will bring thee some word often to the wicket.”
“I am ready now for the inside of these walls, monsieur,” said I, turning to Waldron, with a warm elation at my heart. The hair I had coiled and slipped into the little deerskin pouch wherein the eye of Manitou slumbered.
A moment more and I had stepped inside the prison. The closing and locking of the door 185seemed to me unnecessarily loud, blatantly conspicuous.
At once I heard greetings, my name spoken on all sides, heartily, respectfully, familiarly, as might be, for I had both friends and followers—many, alas!—in that dolorous company. To them, worn with the sameness of day upon monotonous day, my coming was an event. But for a little I chose to heed no one. There was time, I thought, ahead of us, more than we should know what to do with. As I could not possibly speak to all at once, I spoke to none. I leaned against a wooden pillar, looked at the windows, then the altar-place, of the sacred building which hived for me so many humming memories of childhood—memories rich with sweetness, sharp with sting. The place looked battered, begrimed, desecrated,—yet a haunting of my mother’s gentle eyes still hallowed it. To see them the better I covered my own eyes with my hand.
“It must be something of a sorer stroke than merely to be clapped in prison, to make my captain so downcast,” I heard a cheerful voice declare close at my elbow.
“Why, and that it is, you may be sure, my brave ferryman!” said I, looking up with a smile and grasping the long, gaunt fingers of yellow Ba’tiste Chouan. “I have my own reasons for not wanting to be in Grand Pré chapel this day, 186for all that it is especially the place where I can see most of my friends.”
Straightway, my mood changing, I moved swiftly hither and thither, calling them by name. There was the whole clan of the Le Marchands, black, fearless, melancholy for their flax-fields; the three Le Boutilliers; the brave young slip, Jacques Violet, whom I had liked as a boy; a Landry or two; the lad Petit Joliet; several of the restless Labillois; long Philibert Trou, the moose-hunter; and, to my regretful astonishment, that wily fox, La Mouche.
“You here, too!” I cried, shaking him by the arm. “If they have caught you, who has escaped!”
“I came in on business, my captain,” said he grimly.
“A woman back of it, monsieur,” grunted Philibert, indifferent to La Mouche’s withering eye-stroke.
Naturally, I did not smile. I met his brooding, deep eyes with a look which told him much. I might, indeed, have even spoken a word of comprehension; but just then I caught sight of my cousin Marc coming from the sacristy. I hastened to greet him with hand and heart.
There was so much to talk of between us two that others, understanding, left us to ourselves. He told me of his little Puritan’s grief, far away in Quebec, of her long suspense, and of how, at last, 187he had got word to her. “She is a woman among ten thousand, Paul,” said he. “These New Englanders are the people to breed up a wife for a French gentleman.”
I assented most heartily, for I had ever liked and admired that white-skinned Prudence of his. Of my own affairs I told him some things fully, some things not at all; of my accident, my illness, my sojourning with Gr?l, everything; but of my coming to the Gaspereau ford and my capture, nothing then.
“There is too much hanging upon it, Marc,” said I. “It touches me too deeply. I cannot talk of it at all while we are like to be interrupted. Let us wait for quiet—when the rest are asleep.”
“It is cold here at night,” said Marc, “but the women have been allowed to bring us a few quilts and blankets. You wills hare mine—the gift of the good curé. Then we can talk.”
The early autumnal dark had been feebly lighted this while by a few candles; but candles were getting scarce in the stricken cottages of Grand Pré, and in Grand Pré chapel prison they were a hoarded luxury. The words “lights out” came early; and Marc and I laid ourselves in a corner of the sacristy by general consent reserved to him.
A cold glimmer of stars came in by the narrow window, and I thought of them looking down on 188Yvonne, awake, not sleeping, I well knew. Were the astrologers right, I wondered. Good men and great had believed in the jurisdiction of the stars. I remembered a very learned astrologer in Paris, during the year I spent there, and futilely I wished I had consulted him. But at the time I had been so occupied with the present as to make small question of the future.
Soon the sound of many breathings told that the prisoners were forgetting for a little their bars and walls. In a whisper, slowly, I told Marc of my coming to Grand Pré in the spring—of Yvonne’s bond to the Englishman—of the conversation at the hammock—of the fire, the scene at the boat, the saving of Anderson—and of all that had just been said and done at the ford of the Gaspereau.
He heard me through, in such silence that my heart sank, fearing he, too, was against me; and I passionately craved his support. I knew the lack of it would no jot alter my purpose; but I loved him, and hungered for the warmth of the comrade heart.
When he spoke, however, my fears straight fell dead.
“Only let us get safe out of this coil, Paul, and we will let my Prudence take the obstinate maid in hand,” said he, with an air that proclaimed all confidence in the result. “You must remember, dear old boy, the inevitable fetish which our 189French maids are wont to make out of obedience to parents—a fair and worshipful virtue, indeed, that obedience, but not one to exact the sacrifice of a woman’s life—and of what is yet more sacred to her. Prudence will make her understand some things that you could not.”
I felt for his hand and gripped it.
“You think I will win her?” I whispered. “And you will stand by me?”
“For the latter question, how can you ask it?” he answered, with a hint of reproach in his voice. “I fear I should stand by you in the wrong, Paul, let alone when, as now, I count you much in the right. I have but to think of Prudence in like case, you see. For the former question—why, see, you have time and her own heart on your side. She may be obstinate in that blindness of hers; and you may make blunders with your ancient facility, cousin mine. But I call to mind that trick you ever had of holding on—the trick of the English bulldog which you used so to admire. It is a strange streak, that, in a star-worshipping, sonnet-writing, wonder-wise freak like you, and makes me often doubt whether your verses, much as I like them, can be poetry, after all. But it is a useful characteristic to have about you, and, to my mind, it means you’ll win.”
“If the English don’t hang me for a spy,” said I.
190“Stuff!” grunted my cousin. “The maid will look to that.”
Such was my confidence in my cousin Marc’s discernment that I went to sleep somewhat comforted.
But to me awaking in the raw of the morning, a prisoner, the comfort seemed less sure. All through the weary, soul-sapping weeks that followed, it paled and shrank, till nothing was left of it but a hopeless sort of obstinacy, so rooted in the central fibre-knots of my being that to the very teeth of fate my pulses still kept beating out the vow, “I will win! I will win!”
For cheer, all my cousin’s sober and well-considered confidence could not keep that in my heart. Of Yvonne, I could get not one word directly. I saw her hand in the fact that nothing more was heard of the charge of “spy” against me. Yet this benefit had a bitterness in it, for I knew she must have done it through Anderson. Intolerably did that knowledge grate.
Mother Pêche came daily to the wicket, but could never boast a message for my ear—and in this reticence of Yvonne’s I saw a hardness of resolve which made my heart sink. Father Fafard, 192too, came daily with food for me, and with many a little loving kindness; but of Yvonne he would not speak. Marc, one day, encountered him on the subject, but prevailed not at all, in so much that they two parted in some heat.
At last from Mother Pêche came word that my dear maid was ill, obscurely ailing, pale-lipped, and with no more of the fathomless light in her great eyes. The reassurance that this gave me on the score of her love was beyond measure overbalanced by the new fear that it bred and nourished. Would not the strain become too great for her—so great that either her promise to wait would break down, or else her health? Here was a dilemma, and upon one or the other of the horns of it I writhed hourly. It cost little to feed me, those weeks in the Grand Pré chapel prison.
Meanwhile, it is but just to our English jailers—they were men of New England chiefly, from Boston, Plymouth, Salem, and that vicinage—to record it of them that they were kind and little loved their employment. They held the doom of banishment to be just, but they deplored the inescapable harshness of it. As I came to learn, it was for New England’s sake chiefly, and at her instance, that old England had ordained the great expulsion. Boston would not trust the Acadians, and vowed she could no longer endure a wasp’s nest at her door. Thus it was that the 193decree had at last gone forth; and even I could not quite deny the justice of it. I knew that patient forbearance had long been tried in vain; and I bethought me, too, of the great Louis’ once plan, to banish and utterly purge away all the English of New England and New York.
Of affairs and public policy in the world outside our walls I learned from Lieutenant Waldron, who came in often among us and made me his debtor by many kindly courtesies. He had an interest in me from the first—in the beginning, as I felt, an interest merely of curiosity, for he doubtless wondered that Mademoiselle de Lamourie should stoop to be entangled with two lovers. But soon he conceived a friendship for me, which I heartily reciprocated. I have ever loved the English as a brave and worthy enemy; and this young officer from Plymouth town presented to my admiration a fair epitome of the qualities I most liked in his race. In appearance he was not unlike Anderson, but of slimmer build, with the air of the fighter added, and a something besides which I felt, but could not name. This something Anderson lacked—and the lack was subtly conspicuous in a character which even my jealous rivalry was forced to call worthy of love.
The reservation in my own mind I found to lie in Waldron’s also, and with even more consequence attached to it. Anderson having chanced 194to be one day the subject of our conversation, I let slip hint of the way it galled me to feel myself in his debt for exemption from the charge of spying.
“I can easily understand,” said he, “that you feel it intolerable. I am surprised, more and more daily, at Mademoiselle de Lamourie’s acceptance of his suit. Oh, you French,—may I say it, monsieur?—what a merchandise you make of your young girls!”
“You put it unpleasantly, sir,” said I; “but too truly for me to resent it. You surprise me, however, in what you imply of Anderson. I liked him heartily at first sight. I know him to be brave, though he does not carry arms. He is capable and clear-sighted, kind and frank; and surely he has beauty to delight a woman’s eyes. I am in despair when I think of him.”
“He is all you say,” acknowledged Waldron, with a shrewd twinkle in his sharp blue eyes; “nevertheless there is something he is not, which damns him for me. I don’t quite like him, and that’s a fact. At the same time I know he’s a fine fellow, and I ought to like him. I don’t mind telling you, for your discomfort, that he has done all that man could do to get you out of this place. He has been to Halifax about it, and dared to make himself very disagreeable to the governor when he was refused. It is not his fault you are not out and off by this time.”
195“Thank God, he failed!” said I, with fervour.
“So should I say in your case, monsieur,” he replied, with a kind of dry goodwill.
To this obliging officer—in more kindly after-years, I am proud to say, destined to become my close friend—I owed some flattering messages from Madame de Lamourie. I knew she liked me—had ever liked me, save during those days of my ignominious eclipse when I seemed to all Grand Pré an accomplice of the Black Abbé and Vaurin. I had a suspicion that she would not be deeply displeased should I, by any hook or crook, accomplish the discomfiture of Anderson. But I well knew her friendliness to me would not go so far as open championship. She would obey her husband, for peace’ sake; and take her satisfaction in a little more delicate malice. I pictured her as making the handsome English Quaker subtly miserable by times.
From Giles de Lamourie, however, I received no greeting. I took it that he regarded me as a menace not only to his own authority, but to his daughter’s peace. A prudent marriage,—a regular, well-ordered, decently arranged for marriage,—in such he fancied happiness for Yvonne. But I concerned me not at all for opposition of his. I thought that Yvonne, if ever she should choose, could bring him to her feet.
At last there came a break in the monotony of 196the days—a break which, for all its bitterness, was welcomed. Word came that another ship was tardily ready for its freight of exiles. The weary faces of the guard brightened, for here was evidence that something was being done. Within the chapel rose a hum of expectation, and all speculated on their chances. For if exile was to be, “Let it come quickly” was the cry of all.
But no—not of all. I feared it, with a physical fear till then unknown to me. To me it meant a new and appalling barrier. Here but two wooden walls and a stone’s throw of wintry space fenced me from her bodily presence. But after exile, how many seas, and vicissitudes, and uncomprehending alien faces!
But I was not to go this time; nor yet my cousin Marc, who, having at last received from Quebec authentic word of the health and safety of his Puritan, was looking out upon events with his old enviable calm.
On the day when a stir in the cottages betokened that embarkation was to begin, the south windows of the chapel were in demand. They afforded a clear view of the village and a partial view of the landing-place. Benches were piled before them, and we took turns by the half hour in looking out, those at the post of observation passing messages back to the eager rows behind. It was plain at once that the cottages at the west end of the 197village were to be cleared in a block. On a sudden there was a sharp outcry from the three Le Boutilliers, as they saw their homely house-gear being carried from their doorways and heaped upon a lumbering hay-wagon. They were of a nervous stock, and forthwith began a great lamentation, thinking that their wives and families were to be sent away without them. When the little procession started down the street toward the landing—the old grandmother and the two littlest children perched on the wagon-load, the wives and other children walking beside in attitudes that proclaimed their tears—the good fellows became so excited as to trouble our company.
“Chut, men!” cried Marc, in a tone of sharp command. “Are you become women all at once? There will be no separation of families this time, when there is but one ship and no room for mistakes. The guards yonder will be calling for you presently, never fear.”
This quieted them; for my cousin had a convincing way with him, and they accounted his wisdom something beyond natural.
Then there came by two more wagons, and another sorrowful procession, appearing from the direction of the Habitants; and the word “Le Marchands” went muttering through the prison. Le Marchand settlement was moving to the ship—and even now a cloud of black smoke, with red 198tongues visible on the morning air, showed us what would befall the houses of Grand Pré when the folk of Grand Pré should be gone.
The Le Marchand men made no sign, save to glower under their brows and grip the window sashes with tense fingers. They were of different stuff from the Le Boutilliers, these black Le Marchands. They set their teeth hard, and waited.
So it went on through the morning, one man after another seeing his family led away to the ship—his family and some scant portion of his goods; and thus we came to know what men among us were like to be called forth on this voyage.
Presently the big door was thrown open, and all faces flashed about to the new interest. Outside stood a double red line of English soldiers. An officer—the round-faced Colonel Winslow himself—stepped in, a scroll of paper curling in his hand. In a precise and something pompous voice he read aloud the names of those to go. The Le Marchands were first on the roll; then the Le Boutilliers, Ba’tiste Chouan, Jean and Tamin Masson, and a long list that promised to thin our crowded benches by one-third. But I was left among the unsummoned; and my cousin Marc, and long Philibert Trou, and the wily fox La Mouche; and I saw Marc’s lips compress with 199a significant satisfaction when he saw these two remaining. Vaguely I thought—“He has a plan!” But thereafter, in my gloom, I thought no more of it.
So these chosen ones marched off between their guards; and that afternoon the ship went out on the ebb tide with a wind that carried her, white-sailed, around the dark point of Blomidon. Grand Pré chapel prison settled apathetically back to a deeper calm.
The days dragged till December was setting his hoar face toward death, and still delayed the last ships. The jailers grew sour-visaged. From Yvonne came no more word, only the tidings that she was not well, and that her people were troubled for her. Father Fafard’s cheery wrinkles at mouth and eyes deepened from cheer to care; but still his lips locked over the name of Yvonne.
My hope sank ever lower and lower. That old wound in my head, cured by Gr?l’s searching simples, began to harass me afresh—whether from cold, the chapel being but barn-like, or from the circumstance that my heart, ceaselessly gnawing upon itself, gnawed also upon every tissue and nerve. I came strangely close to the ranger La Mouche in those bad days; for though I knew not, nor cared nor dared to ask, his story, I saw in his eyes a something which he, too, doubtless saw in mine. So it came that we sat much 201together, in a black silence. It was not that I loved less than of old my true comrade Marc, but the fact that he possessed where he loved, and could with blissful confidence look forward, set him some way apart from me. Upon La Mouche, with the deep hurt sullen in his eyes, I could look and mutter to myself:
“Old, wily fox, is your foot, once so free, caught in the snare of a woman?”
So tortuous a thing in its workings is this red clot of a human heart that I got a kind of perverted solace out of such thoughts as these.
At last the tired watchers at our south windows announced two ship in the basin. They came up on the flood, and dropped anchor off the Gaspereau mouth.
“This ends it,” I heard Marc say coolly. “All that’s left of Grand Pré can go in those two ships.”
To me the words came as a knell for the burial of my last hope.
The embarkation had now to be pushed with a speed which wrought infinite confusion, for the weather had turned bitter, and it was not possible for women and children to long endure the cold of their dismantled homes. The big wagons, watched by us from our windows, went creaking and rattling down the frozen roads. Wailing women, frightened and wondering children, beds, chests, many-colored quilts, bright red and green chairs,—to 202us it looked as if all these were tumbled into a narrowing vortex and swept with a piteous indiscriminacy into one ship or the other. The orderly method with which the previous embarkings had been managed was now all thrown to the winds by the fierce necessity for haste. We in the chapel were not left long to watch the scene from the windows. While yet the main street of Grand Pré was dolorous with the tears of the women and children, the doors of our prison opened and names were called. I heeded them not; but the sound of my own name pierced my gloom; and I went out. In the tingling air I awoke a little, to gaze up the hill at the large house where Yvonne had lodged since the parsonage had been taken for a guard-house. No message came to me from those north windows. Then I turned, to find Marc at my side.
“Courage, cousin mine,” he whispered. “We are not beaten yet. Better outside than in there. This much means freedom—and, once free, we’ll act.”
“No, Marc, I’m not beaten,” I muttered. “But—it looks as if I were.”
“Chut, man!” said he crisply. “You couldn’t do a better thing to bring her to her senses than you are doing now.”
It was but a few steps down to the lane, and there we found ourselves in a jumble of heaped carts and blue-skirted, weeping women. My head was 203paining me sorely—a numb ache that seemed to rise in the core of my brain. But I remember noting with a far-off commiseration the blubbered faces of the women, and their poor little solicitudes for this or that bit of household gear which, from time to time, would fall crashing to the ground from the hastily laden carts. I found spirit to wonder that the tears which had exhausted themselves over the farewell to fatherland and hearthside should break out afresh over the cracking of a gilded glass or the shattering of a blue and silver jug. The women’s lamentations in a little hardened me, so that my ears ignored them; but the wide-eyed terrors of the children, their questions unanswered, their whimpering at the cold that blued their hands, all this pierced me. Tears for the children’s sorrow gathered in my heart, till it was nigh to bursting; and this curbed passion of pity, I think, kept my sick body from collapse. It in some way threw me back from my own misery on to my old unroutable resolution.
“I will win!” I said in my heart, as we came down upon the wharf at the Gaspereau mouth. “Though there seems to be no more hope, there is life; and while there is life, I hold on.”
When we reached the wharf the ebb was well advanced. The boats could not get near the wharf. Women had to wade ankle-deep in freezing slime to reach them. The slime was churned with 204the struggle of many feet. The stuff from the carts was at times dropped in the ooze, to be recovered or not as might chance. The soldiers toiled faithfully, and their leggings to the knee were a sorry sight. They were patient, these red-coats, with the women, who often seemed to lose their heads so that they knew not which boat they wanted to go in. To the children every red-coat seemed tender as a mother. For any one, indeed, they would do anything, except endure delay. Haste, haste, haste was all—and therefore there was calamitous confusion. While I stood on the wharf awaiting the order to embark, I saw a stout girl in a dark-red stomacher and grey petticoat throw herself screaming into the water where it was about waist deep, and scramble desperately to another boat near by. No effort was made to restrain her. Dripping with tide and slime she climbed over the gunwale; and belike found what she sought, for her cries ceased. Again I noted—Marc called my attention to it—a small child being passed from one boat to the other, as the two, bound for different ships, were about diverging. The mother had stumbled blindly into one boat while the child had been tossed into the other. In the effort to remedy this oversight the child was dropped into the water between the boats. The screams of the mother were like a knife in our ears. Two sailors went overboard at 205once, but there was some delay ere the little one was recovered. Then we saw its limp body passed in over the boatside; whether alive or dead we could not judge; but the screams ceased and our ear-drums blessed the respite.
With the next boat came our turn; and I found myself wading down the slope of icy ooze. I heard Marc, just behind me, mutter a careless imprecation upon the needless defiling of his boots. He was ever imperturbable, my cousin,—a hot heart, but in steel harness.
We loaded the roomy long-boat till the gunwale was almost awash. The big oars creaked and thumped in the rowlocks. We moved laboriously out to the ships, which swung on straining cable in the tide. As we came under her black-wall side, with the turbid red-grey current hissing past it, men on deck caught us with grapnels, and we swung, splashing, under the stern. Then, the tide being very troublesome, we were drawn again alongside.
Marc was at my elbow. “Look!” he cried, pointing to the ridge behind the village. I saw a wide-roofed cottage on the crest break into flame. There was a wind up there, though little as yet down here in the valley; and the flames streamed out to westward, the black smoke rolling low and ragged above them.
“So goes all Grand Pré in a little!” muttered Marc.
206“It is P’tit Joliet’s house!” said I.
“Yes,” said a steady young voice behind me; and I turned to see Petit Joliet himself, watching with undaunted eyes the burning of his home. “Yes, and it was a fine house. It would have hurt my father sorely, were he alive now, to see it go up in smoke like that.”
“Well, you have a brave heart,” said I, liking him well as I saw his firmness.
“Oh,” said he, “the only thing that is troubling me is this—shall I find my mother on this ship? They are making mistakes now, these English, in their haste to be done with us. I’m worried.”
“If she is not on board,” said my kind Marc, “we’ll try and keep a watch on the boats; and if we see her bound for the wrong ship we’ll let the guard know. They want to keep families together, if they can.”
This was Marc, ever careful of others. But his good purpose was like to have been frustrated soon as formed; for scarce were our feet well on deck when our hands were clapped in irons, and we were marched off straight to the hold.
“Sorry, sir. Can’t help it. So many of you, you know,” said the red-coat apologetically, as I stretched out my wrists to him.
But glancing about the crowded deck I descried my good friend, Lieutenant Waldron, busily unravelling the snarl of things. In answer to my 207hail he came at once, warm, friendly, and trying not to see my irons.
“One last little service, sir!” I cried. “Little to us, it may be great to others. You see we are ironed, Captain de Mer and I. We will give our word to neither attempt escape nor in any way interfere with this sorry work. Let us two wait here on deck till the ship sails. We know all these villagers; and we want to help you avoid the severance of families.”
“It is little to grant for you, my friend,” said he, in a feeling voice. “You cannot know how my heart is aching. I will speak to the captain of the ship, and you shall stay on deck till the ship sails.”
Marc thanked him courteously, but I with no more than a look, for words did not at that time seem compliant to say what I desired them to say. They are false and treacherous spirits, these words we make so free with and trust so rashly with affairs of life and death. How often do they take an honest meaning from the heart and twist it to the semblance of a lie as it leaves the lips! How often do they take a flame from the inmost soul, and make it ice before it reaches the soul toward which it thrilled forth! It has been my calling to work with words in peace, as with swords in time of war; and I know them. I do not trust them. The swords are the safer.
Returning from a brief word with the ship-captain,—a very broad-bearded, broad-chested man, in a very rough blue coat,—Lieutenant Waldron passed us hastily, and signified that it was all right. With this sanction we pushed along the crowded deck in order to gain a post of vantage at the bow. The vessel, whose hold was now to be our new and narrow cage, was one of those ordinarily engaged in the West Indian trade. Our noses told us this. To the savours of fish and tar which clung in her timbers she added a foreign tang of molasses, rum, and coffee. As we stumbled up the cluttered deck, lacking the balance of free hands, these shippy smells were crossed in curious, pathetic fashion by the homely odours of the blankets, clothes, pillows, and other household stuff that lay about waiting for storage. Here a woman sat stolidly upon her own pile, with a mortgage on the future so long as she kept her bedding in possession; and there a youngster, 209already homesick, for his wide-hearthed cabin, sobbed heavily, with his face buried in an old coat of his father’s.
For hours, in the bitter cold, we held our post in the bow of the ship and watched the boats go back and forth. Of the old mother of Petit Joliet we saw nothing. We judged perforce that she had been moved early and carried to the other ship, which swung at anchor a little up the channel. We were able—I say we, though Marc did all, I being, as it were, drowned in my own dejection—we were able to be of service in divers instances. When, for example, young Violet was brought aboard with another boat-load from the chapel prison, we made haste to tell the guards that we had seen his mother and sisters taken to the other ship. As a consequence, when the boat went back to the wharf it carried young Violet; so he and his were not divided in their exile.
By the very next boat there came to us a black-browed, white-lipped woman, from whose dry eyes the tears seemed all drained out. She carried a babe-at-breast, while two thin little ones clung to her homespun skirt. As soon as she reached the deck she stared around in wild expectation, as if she thought to find her husband waiting to receive her. Not seeing him, she straightway fainted in a heap. It chanced I knew the woman’s face. She was the wife of one Caspar Besnard, of Pereau, 210whom I had seen taken, early in the day, to the other ship. He was conspicuous by reason of having red hair, a marvel in Acadie; and therefore my memory had retained him, though he concerned me not. Now, however, he did concern me much. A few words to the officer of the guard, and the poor woman, with her children, was transferred to where she doubtless found her husband.
Such cases justified, in our jailers’ eyes, the favour that had been shown us. Meanwhile our ship had filled up. We had seen Long Philibert and La Mouche brought aboard, but had not spoken with them. “Time for that later,” Marc had said. I had watched for Petit Joliet’s mother; and I had watched eagerly for old Mother Pêche; but in vain. While yet the boats were plying, heavy laden, between the shore and the other ship, we found ourselves ready for departure. Our boats were swung aboard; and the English Yeo, heave ho! arose as the sailors shoved on the capstan. Lieutenant Waldron, after an all but wordless farewell, went ashore in the gig with two soldiers. The rest of the red-coats stayed aboard. They had been re?nforced by a fresh squad who were marched down late to the landing. These, plainly, were to be our guard during the voyage; and I saw with a sort of vague resentment that a tall, foppish exquisite of an officer, known to me by sight, was to command this guard. 211He was one Lieutenant Shafto, whom we had seen two or three times at the chapel prison; and I think all disliked him for a certain elaborate loftiness in his air. It came to my mind dimly that I should well rejoice to cross swords with him, and I hinted as much to Marc.
“Who knows?” said my unruffled cousin; “we may live to see him look less complacent.” His smile had a meaning which I could not fathom. I could see no ground for his sanguine satisfaction; and I dared not question where some enemy might overhear. I thought no more of it, therefore, but relapsed into my apathy. As we slipped down the tide I saw, in a boat-load just approaching the other ship, a figure with a red shawl wrapped round head and shoulders. This gave me a pang, as I had hoped to have Mother Pêche with me, to talk to me of Yvonne and help me to build up the refuge of a credulous hope. But since even that was denied me—well, it was nothing, after all, and I was a child! I turned my eyes upon the house, far up the ridge, where the Lamouries had lodging. It was one of four, standing well aloof from the rest of the village; and I knew they all were occupied by those prudent ones of the neighbourhood who had been wise in time and now stood safe in English favour. The doom of Grand Pré, I knew, would turn aside from them.
212But on the emptied and desolated village it was even now descending. Marc and I, unnoticed in our place, were free to watch. So dire was even yet the confusion on our deck, so busy seamen and soldiers alike, that we were quite forgotten for a time. The early winter dark was gathering upon Blomidon and the farther hills; but there was to be no dark that night by the mouth of Gaspereau.
The house of Petit Joliet, upon the hill, burned long alone. It was perhaps a signal to the troops at Piziquid, twenty miles away, telling them that the work at Grand Pré was done. Not till late in the afternoon was the torch set to the village itself. Then smoke arose suddenly on the westernmost outskirts, toward the Habitants dyke. The wind being from the southeast, the fire spread but slowly against it. As the smoke drove low the flames started into more conspicuous brilliance, licking lithely over and under the rolling cloud that strove to smother them. These empty houses burned for the most part with a clear, light flame; but the barns, stored with hay and straw, vomited angry red, streaked with black. Up the bleak hillside ran the terrified cattle, with wildly tossing horns. At times, even on shipboard, we caught their bellowings. They had been turned loose, of course, before the fires were started, but had remained huddled in the familiar barnyards until this horrible and inexplicable cataclysm drove 213them forth. Far up the slope we saw them turn and stand at gaze.
In an hour we observed that the wharf was empty, and the other ship hoisting sail. Then the fires sprang up in every part of the village at once. They ran along the main street below the chapel; but they came not very near the chapel itself, for all the buildings in its immediate neighbourhood had been long ago removed, and it stood in a safe isolation, towering in white solemnity over the red tumult of ruin.
“The chapel will be a camp to-night, instead of a prison,” said Marc at my ear, his grave eyes fixed and wide. “It will be the last thing to go—it and the Colony of Compromise yonder up the hill.”
“But who shall blame them for the compromise?” I protested, unwilling to hear censure that touched the father of Yvonne.
Marc shrugged his shoulders at this. He never was a lover of vain argument.
“I wonder where the Black Abbé is at this moment!” was what he said, with no apparent relevancy.
“Not yet in his own place, I fear!” said I.
“The implication is a pious one,” said Marc. “Yonder is the work of him, and of no other. He should be roasting now in the hottest of it.”
I really, at this moment, cared little, and was at 214loss for reply. But a bullying roar of a voice just behind us saved me the necessity of answering.
“Here, you two! What are ye doin’ here on deck? Git, now! Git, quick!”
The speaker was a big, loose-jointed man, ill-favoured and palpably ill-humoured. I was pleased to note that the middle two of his obtrusive front teeth were wanting, and that his nose was so misshapen as to suggest some past calamitous experience. As I learned afterwards, this was our ship’s first mate. I was too dull of mood—too sick, in fact—to be instantly wroth at his insolence. I looked curiously at him; but Marc answered in a quiet voice:
“Merely waiting here, sir, on parole and by direction, till the proper authorities are ready to take us below!” And he thrust out his manacled hands to show how we were conditioned.
“Well, here’s proper authority, ye’ll find out. Git, er I’ll jog ye!” And he made a motion to take me by the collar.
I stepped aside and faced him. I looked him in the eyes with a sudden rage so deadly that he must have felt it, for he hesitated. I cared nothing then what befell me, and would have smashed him with my iron-locked wrist had he touched me, or else so tripped him and fallen with him that we should have gone overboard together. But he was a brute of some perception, and his hesitancy 215most likely saved us both. It gave Marc time to shout—“Guards! Guards! Here! Prisoner escaping!”
Instantly along the red-lit deck came soldiers running—three of them. The mate had grabbed a belaying-pin, but stood fingering it, uncertain of his status in relation to the soldiers.
“Corporal,” said Marc ceremoniously to one of them, discerning his rank by the stripes on his sleeve, “pardon the false alarm. There was no prisoner escaping. We were here on parole, by the favour of Lieutenant Waldron—as you yourself know, indeed, for we helped you this afternoon in getting scattered families together. But this man—we don’t know who he is—was brutal, and threatening violence in spite of our defenceless state. Please take us in charge!”
“Certainly, Captain de Mer,” said the man promptly. “I was just about coming for you!”
Then he turned to the mate with an air of triumphant aversion, in which lurked, perhaps, a consciousness of conflicting and ill-defined authorities.
“No belaying-pins for the prisoners!” he growled. “Keep them for yer poor swabs o’ sailor lads.”
As we marched down the deck under guard the sails overhead were all aglow, the masts and spars gleamed ruddily. The menacing radiance 216was by this time filling the whole heaven, and the small, quick-running surges flashed under it with a sinister sheen. As we reached the open hatch I turned for a last look at Grand Pré.
The whole valley was now as it were one seething lake of smoke and flame, the high, half-shrouded spire of the chapel rising impregnable on the further brink. The conflagration was fiercest now along the eastern half of the main street, toward the water side. Even at this distance we heard the great-lunged roar of it. High over the chaos, like a vaulted roof upheld by the Gaspereau Ridge, arched an almost stationary covering of smoke-cloud, impenetrable, and red as blood along its under side. The smoke of the burning was carried off toward the Habitants and Canard—where there was nothing left to burn. Between the red stillness above and the red turbulence below, apart and safe on their high slope, gleamed the cottages of the Colony of Compromise. With what eyes, I wondered, does my beloved look out upon this horror? Do they strain sadly after the departing ships—or does the Englishman stand by and comfort her?
As I got clumsily down the ladder the last thing I saw—and the picture bit its lines in strange fashion on my memory—was the other ship, a league behind us, black-winged against the flame.
Then the hatch closed down. By the glimmer of a swinging lanthorn we groped our way to a 217space where we two could lie down side by side. Marc wanted to talk, but I could not. There was a throbbing in my head, a great numbness on my heart. In my ears the voice of the Minas waves assailing the ship’s timbers seemed to whisper of the end of things. Grand Pré was gone. I was being carried, sick and in chains, to some far-off land of strangers. My beloved was cared for by another.
“No!” said I in my heart (I thought at first I had spoken it aloud, but Marc did not stir), “when my foot touches land my face shall turn back to seek her face again, though it be from the ends of earth. It is vain, but I will not give her up. I am not dead yet—though hope is!”
As I thought the words there came humming through my brain that foolish saying of Mother Pêche’s. Again I saw her on that spring evening bending over my palm and murmuring—“Your heart’s desire is near your death of hope!”
“Here is my death of hope, mother,” said I to myself. “But where is my heart’s desire?”
And with that I laughed harshly—aloud.
It was an ill sound in that place of bitterness, and heads were raised to look at me. Marc asked, with a trace of apprehension in his voice:
“What’s the matter, Paul? Anything to laugh at?”
“Myself!” I muttered.
“The humour of the subject is not obvious,” said he curtly.
I did not sleep that night—not one eye-wink—in the hold of the New England ship. Neither could I think, nor even greatly suffer. Rather I lay as it were numbly weltering in my despair. What if I had known all that was going on meanwhile in that other ship, a league behind us, sailing under the lurid sky!
The events which I am now about to set down were not, as will be seen, matter of my own experience. I tell what I have inferred and what has been told me—but told me from such lips and in such fashion that I may indeed be said to have lived it all myself. It is more real to me than if my own eyes had followed it. It is sometimes true that we may see with the eyes of others—of one other—more vividly than with our own.
In the biggest house of that “Colony of Compromise” on the hill—the house nearest the chapel prison—a girl stood at a south window watching the flames in the village below. The 219flames, at least, she seemed to be watching. What she saw was the last little column of prisoners marching away from the chapel; and her teeth were set hard upon her under lip.
She was not thinking; she was simply clarifying a confused resolve.
White and thin, and with deep purple hollows under her great eyes, she was nevertheless not less beautiful than when, a few months before, joyous mirth had flashed from her every look and gesture, as colored lights from a fire-opal. She still wore on her small feet moccasins of Indian work; but now, in winter, they were of heavy, soft, white caribou-skin, laced high upon the ankles, and ornamented with quaint pattern of red and green porcupine quills. Her skirt and bodice were of creamy woollen cloth; and over her shoulders, crossed upon her breast and caught in her girdle, was spread a scarf of dark-yellow silk. The little black lace shawl was flung back from her head, and her hands, twisted tightly in the ends of it, were for a wonder quite still—tensely still, with an air of final decision. Close beside her, flung upon the back of a high wooden settee, lay a long, heavy, hooded cloak of grey homespun, such as the peasant women of Acadie were wont to wear in winter as an over-garment.
A door behind her opened, but Yvonne did not turn her head. George Anderson came in. He 220came to the window, and tried to look into her eyes. His face was grave with anxiety, but touched, too, with a curious mixture of impatience and relief. He spoke at once, in a voice both tender and tolerant.
“There go the last of them, poor chaps!” he said. “Captain Grande went some hours ago—quite early. I pray, dear, that now he is gone—to exile indeed, but in safety—you will recover your peace of mind, and throw off this morbid mood, and be just a little bit kinder to—some people!” And he tried, with an awkward timidity, to take her hand.
She turned upon him a sombre, compassionate gaze, but far-off, almost as if she saw him in a dream.
“Don’t touch me—just now,” she said gently, removing her hand. “I must go out into the pastures for air, I think. All this stifles me! No, alone, alone!” she added more quickly, in answer to an entreaty in his eyes. “But, oh, I am sorry, so sorry beyond words, that I cannot seem kind to—some people! Good-by.”
She left the room, and closed the door behind her. The door shut smartly. It sounded like a proclamation of her resolve. So—that was settled! In an instant her whole demeanour changed. A fire came back into her eyes, and she stepped with her old, soft-swaying lightness. In the room 221which she now entered sat her father and mother. The withered little reminiscence of Versailles watched at a window-side, her black eyes bright with interest, her thin lips slightly curved with an acerb and cynical compassion. But Giles de Lamourie sat with his back to the window, his face heavy and grey.
“This is too awful!” he said, as Yvonne came up to him, and, bending over, kissed him on the forehead and the lips.
“It is like a nightmare!” she answered. “But, would you believe it, papa, the very shock is doing me good? The suspense—that kills! But I feel more like myself than I have for weeks. I must go out, breathe, and walk hard in the open.”
De Lamourie’s face lightened.
“Thou art better, little one,” said he. “But why go alone at such a time? Where’s George?”
But Yvonne was already at her mother’s side, kissing her, and did not answer her father’s question; which, indeed, needed no answer, as he had himself seen Anderson go into the inner room and not return.
“But where will you go, child?” queried her mother. “There are no longer any left of your sick and your poor and your husbandless to visit.”
“But I will be my own sick, little mamma,” she cried nervously, “and my own poor—and my own husbandless. I will visit myself. Don’t 222be troubled for me, dearies!” she added, in a tender voice. “I am so much better already.”
The next moment she was gone. The door shut loudly after her.
“Wilful!” said her mother.
“Yes, more like she used to be. Much better!” exclaimed Giles de Lamourie, rising and looking out at the fires in a moment of brief absent-mindedness. “Yes, much better, George,” he added, as Anderson appeared from the inner room.
But the Englishman’s face was full of discomfort. “I wish she would not go running out alone this way,” said he.
“Curious that she should prefer to be alone, George,” said Madame de Lamourie, with deliberate malice. She was beginning to dislike this man who so palpably could not give her daughter happiness.
Yvonne, meanwhile, was speeding across the open fields, in the teeth of the wind. The ground was hard as iron, but there was little snow—only a dry, powdery covering deep enough to keep the stubble from hurting her feet. She ran straight for the tiny cabin of Mother Pêche, trusting to find her not yet gone. None of the houses at the eastern end of the village were as yet on fire. That of Mother Pêche stood a little apart, in a bushy 223pasture-lot. Yvonne found the low door swinging wide, the house deserted; but there were red embers still on the hearth, whereby she knew the old woman had not been long away.
The empty house seemed to whisper of fear and grief from every corner. She turned away and ran toward the landing, her heart chilled with a sudden apprehension that she might be too late. Before she was clear of the bushes, however, she stopped with a cry. A man who seemed to have risen out of the ground stood right in her path. He was of a sturdy figure, somewhat short, and clad in dull-coloured homespun of peasant fashion. At sight of her beauty and her alarm his woollen cap was snatched from his head and his cunning face took on the utmost deference.
“Have no fear of me, mademoiselle,—Mademoiselle de Lamourie, if I may hazard a guess from your beauty,” said he smoothly. “It is I who am in peril, lest you should reveal me to my enemies.”
“Who are you, monsieur?” she asked, recovering her self-possession and fretting to be gone.
“A spy,” he whispered, “in the pay of the King of France, who must know, to avenge them later, the wrongs of his people here in Acadie. I have thrown myself on your mercy, that I might ask you if the families who have found favour with the English will remain here after this work is done, or be taken elsewhere. I pray you inform me.”
224“Believe me, I do not know their plans, monsieur,” answered Yvonne. “And I beg you to let me pass, for my haste is desperate.”
“Let me escort you to the edge of the bush, then, mademoiselle,” said he courteously, stepping from the path. “And not to delay you, I will question you as we go, if you will permit. Is the Englishman, Monsieur George Anderson, still here?”
“He is, monsieur. But now leave me, I entreat you.”
She was wild with fear lest the stranger’s presence should frustrate her design.
The man smiled.
“I dare go no farther with you than the field edge, mademoiselle,” said he regretfully. “To be caught would mean”—and he put his hand to his throat with ghastly suggestion.
Relieved from this anxiety, Yvonne paused when she reached the open.
“I must ask you a question in turn, monsieur,” said she. “Have you chanced to learn on which of the two ships Captain de Mer and Captain Grande were placed?”
“I have been so fortunate,” replied the stranger, and the triumph in his thought found no expression in his deferential tone or deep-set eyes. Here was the point he had been studying to approach. Here was a chance to worst a foe and win favour from the still powerful, though far-distant, Black Abbé.
225He paused, and Yvonne had scarce breath to cry “Which?”
“They are in the ship this way,” he said calmly. “The one still at anchor.”
“Thank you, monsieur!” she cried, with a passion in the simple words; and was straightway off across the red-lit snow, her cloak streaming out behind her.
“The beauty!” said the man to himself, lurking in the bushes to follow her with his eyes. “Pity to lie to her. But she’s leaving—and that stabs Anderson; and she’s going on the wrong ship—and that stabs Grande. Both at a stroke. Not bad for a day like this.”
And with a look of hearty satisfaction on his face Le F?ret[1] (for Vaurin’s worthy lieutenant it was) withdrew to safer covert.
1. None of Vaurin’s villains were taken by the English at the time of the great capture, for none dared come within a league of an English proclamation lest it should turn into a rope to throttle them.—P. G.
Le F?ret smiled to himself; but Yvonne almost laughed aloud as she ran, deaf to the growing roar at the farther end of the village and heedless of the flaring crimson that made the air like blood. The wharf, when she reached it, was in a final spasm of confusion, and shouted orders, and sobbings. Now, she grew cautious. Drawing her cloak close about her face, she pushed through the crowd toward the boat.
Just then a firm hand was laid upon her arm, 226and a very low voice said in her ear,—with less surprise, to be sure, than on a former occasion by Gaspereau lower ford,—
“You here, Mademoiselle de Lamourie?”
Her heart stood still; and she turned upon him a look of such imploring, desperate dismay that Lieutenant Waldron without another word drew her to one side. Then she found voice.
“Oh, if you have any mercy, any pity, do not betray me,” she whispered.
“But what does this mean? It is my duty to ask,” he persisted, still puzzled.
“I am trying to save my life, my soul, everything, before it’s too late!” she said.
“Oh,” said he, comprehending suddenly. “Well, I think you had better not tell me anything more. I think it is not my duty to say anything about this meeting. You may be doing right. I wish you good fortune and good-by, mademoiselle!”—and, to her wonder, he was off among the crowd.
Still trembling from the encounter, she hastened to the boat.
She found it already half laden; and in the stern, to her delight, she saw Mother Pêche’s red mantle. She was on the point of calling to her, but checked herself just in time. The boat was twenty paces from the wharf-edge; and those twenty paces were deep ooze, intolerable beyond 227measure to white moccasins. Absorbed in her one purpose, which was to get on board the ship without delay, she had not looked to one side or the other, but had regarded women, children, soldiers, boatmen, as so many bushes to be pushed through. Now, however, letting her hood part a little from her face, she glanced hither and thither with her quick imperiousness, and then from her feet to that breadth of slime, as if demanding an instant bridge. The next thing she knew she was lifted by a pair of stout arms and carried swiftly through the mud to the boatside.
After a moment’s hot flush of indignation at the liberty, she realized that this was by far the best possible solution of the problem, as there was no bridge forthcoming. She looked up gratefully, and saw that her cavalier was a big red-coat, with a boyish, jolly face. As he gently set her down in the boat she gave him a radiant look which brought the very blood to his ears.
“Thank you very much indeed!” she said, in an undertone. “I don’t know how I should have managed but for your kindness. But really it is very wrong of you to take such trouble about me; for I see these other poor things have had to wade through the mud, and their skirts are terrible.”
The big red-coat stood gazing at her in open-mouthed adoration, speechless; but a comrade, busy in the boat stowing baggage, answered for him.
228“That’s all right, miss,” said he. “Don’t you worry about Eph. He’s been carryin’ children all day long, an’ some few women because they was sick. He’s arned the right to carry one woman jest fer her beauty.”
In some confusion Yvonne turned away, very fearful of being recognized. She hurriedly squeezed herself down in the stern by Mother Pêche. The old dame’s hand sought hers, furtively, under the cloak.
“I went to look for you, mother,” she whispered into the red shawl.
“I knew you’d come, poor heart, dear heart!” muttered the old woman, with a swift peering of her strange eyes into the shadow of the girl’s hood.
“I waited for you till they dragged me away. But I knew you’d come.”
“How did you know that, mother?” whispered Yvonne, delighted to find that this momentous act of hers had seemed to some one just the expected and inevitable thing. “Why, I didn’t know it myself till half an hour ago.”
Mother Pêche looked wise and mysterious.
“I knew it,” she reiterated. “Why, dear heart, I knew all along you loved him.”
And at last, strange as it may appear, this seemed to Yvonne de Lamourie, penniless, going into exile with the companionship of misery, an all-sufficient and all-explicative answer.