When I could no longer discern even the shore whence we had started, I in a measure came to myself. Nicole—sagacious Nicole—had left me to my dream. He had got up the mainsail and jib unaided, and now sat like a statue at the tiller. We were in the open basin, running with a steady wind abeam. There was quite a swell on, and the waves looked sinister, cruel as steel, under the bare white moon. A fading glow still marked the spot where the De Lamourie house had stood; but save for that there was no hint of man’s hand in all the wild, empty, hissing, wonderful open. Far to the left lay Blomidon, a crouching lion; and straight ahead a low, square bluff guarded the mouth of the Piziquid. I saw that we were nearing it rapidly, for Nicole’s boat had legs. Once in the Piziquid mouth, we should have a hard run up against the ebb; but the wind would then be right aft, and I felt that we could stem the current and make our landing in time.
118“Will this wind carry her against the Piziquid tide?” I asked Nicole. It was the first word spoken in perhaps an hour, and my voice sounded strange to me.
“We’ll catch the first of the flood soon after we get inside, Master Paul,” said he, in the most matter-of-fact voice in the world.
Content with this, and knowing that for the time there was nothing to do but wait, I lapsed back into my reverie.
I felt exhausted, not from bodily effort, but from emotion. My nerves and brain felt sleepy; yet nothing was further from my eyes than sleep. Situations and deeds, mental and physical crises, agonies and ecstasies and dull despair, had so trodden upon one another’s heels that I was breathless. I caught at my brain, as it were, to make it keep still long enough to think. Yet I could not think to any purpose. I was aware of nothing so keenly as the sensation that had intoxicated me as I held Yvonne’s unconsenting body for those few moments in my arms, while removing her from the boat. To have touched her at all against her will seemed a sacrilege; but when a sacrilege has seemed a plain necessity I have never been the one to balk at it. Now I found myself looking with a foolish affection at the arms which had been guilty of that sacrilege—and straightway, coming to my wits again, I glanced at 119Nicole to see if he had divined the vast dimensions of my folly.
From this I passed to wondering what was truly now my hope or my despair. During all my talk with Yvonne—from the moment, indeed, when Father Fafard had told me of her agitation over Anderson’s peril—I had been as one without hope, in darkness utterly. Only a great love—the great love, as I had told myself—could inspire this desperate and daring solicitude. And against the one great love, in such a woman as Yvonne, I well knew that nothing earthly could prevail. My own bold resolution had been formed on the theory that her betrothal was but the offspring of expediency upon respect. Now, however, either the remembrance of her touch deluded me or something in her attitude upon the wharf held significance, for assuredly I began to dream that remorse rather than love might have been the mainspring of her agitation; remorse, and pity, and something of that strange mother passion which a true woman may feel toward a man who stirs within her none of the lover passion at all. I thought, too, of the wild sense of dishonour she must feel, believing me a traitor and herself my dupe. Strange comfort this, of a surety! Yet I grasped at it. I would prove her no dupe, myself no traitor; and stand at last where I had stood before, with perhaps some advantage. And my rival—he, 120I swore, should owe his life to me; a kind but cruel kind of revenge.
At last, my heart beating uncomfortably from the too swift self-chasing of my thoughts, I stood up, shook myself, and looked about me. We had rounded the bluff, and were standing up the broad Piziquid straight before the wind; and the boat was pitching hotly in the short seas where the wind thwarted the tide. I glanced at Nicole’s face. It was as plaintively placid as if he dreamed of the days when he leaned at his mother’s knee.
But the expression of his countenance changed; for now, from out the shadowed face of the bluff, came that bell-like, boding cry—
“Woe, woe to Acadie the Fair, for the hour of her desolation is at hand!”
Nicole looked awed.
“He knows, that Gr?l!” he muttered. “It’s coming quick now, I’ll be bound!”
“Well, so are we, Nicole!” I rejoined cheerfully; “and that’s what most concerns me at this moment.”
I peered eagerly ahead, but could not, in that deluding light, discriminate the mouth of the Kenneticook stream from its low adjacent shores. Presently the waves and pitching lessened. The ebb had ceased, and the near shore slipped by more rapidly. The slack of tide lasted but a few minutes. Then the flood set in—noisily and 121with a great front of foam, as it does in that river of high tides; and the good boat sped on at a pace that augured accomplishment. In what seemed to me but a few minutes the mouth of the Kenneticook opened, whitely glimmering, before us.
Barely had I descried it when Nicole put the helm up sharp and ran straight in shore.
“What are you doing, man?” I cried, in astonishment. “You’ll have us aground!”
But the words were not more than out of my mouth when I understood. I saw the narrow entrance to a small creek, emptying between high banks.
“Oh!” said I. “I beg your pardon, Nicole; I see you know what you’re about all right!”
He chuckled behind unsmiling lips.
“They’ll go up the Kenneticook in their canoes,” said he. “We’ll hide the boat here, where they’ll not find it; and we’ll cut across the ridge to the Englishman’s. Quicker, too!”
The creek was narrow and winding, but deep for the first two hundred yards of its course; and Nicole, he knew every turn and shallow. We beached the boat where she could not be seen from the river, tied her to a tree on the bank above so that she might not get away at high tide, and then plunged into the dense young fir woods that clothed the lower reaches of the Piziquid 122shore. There was no trail, but it was plain to me that Nicole well knew the way.
“You’ve gone this way before, Nicole?” said I.
“Yes, monsieur, a few times,” he answered.
I considered for a moment, pushing aside the wet, prickly branches as I went. Then—
“What is her name, Nicole?” I asked.
“Julie, Master Paul,” said he softly.
“Ah,” said I, “then you had reasons of your own for coming with me to-night?”
“Not so!” he answered, a rebuking sobriety in his voice. “None, save my love for you and your house, Master Paul. She is in no peril. She is far from here, safe in Isle St. Jean this month past.”
“I beg your pardon, my friend,” said I, at once. “I know your love. I said it but to banter you, for I had not guessed that you had been led captive, Nicole.”
“A man’s way, Master Paul, when a woman wills!” said he cheerfully.
But I had no more thought of it than to be glad it had taught Nicole Brun a short path through the woods to Kenneticook.
What strange tricks do these our tangled makeups play us! I know that that night, during that swift half-hour’s run through the woods, my whole brain, my every purpose, was concentrated upon the rescue of George Anderson. The price I was 123prepared to pay was life, no less. Yet all the shaping emotion of it—sharp enough, one would think, to cut its lines forever on a man’s face, to say nothing of his brain—has bequeathed to me no least etching of remembrance. Of great things all I recall is that the name “Yvonne” seemed ever just within my lips—so that once or twice I thought I had spoken it aloud. But my senses were very wide awake, taking full advantage, perhaps, of the heart’s preoccupation. My eyes, ears, nose, touch, they busied themselves to note a thousand trifles—and these are what come back to me now. Such idle, idle things alone remain, out of that race with death.
Things idle as these: I see a dew-wet fir-top catch the moonlight for an instant and flash to whiteness, an up-thrust lance of silver; I see the shadow of a dead, gnarled branch cast upon a mossy open in startling semblance of a crucifix—so clear, I cannot but stoop and touch it reverently as I pass; I see, at the edge of a grassy glade, a company of tall buttercups, their stems invisible, their petals seeming to float toward me, a squadron of small, light wings. I hear—I hear the rush of the tide die out as we push deeper into the woods; I hear the smooth swish of branches thrust apart; I hear the protesting, unresonant creak of the green underbrush as we tread it down, and the sharp crackle of dry twigs as we 124thread the aisles of older forest; I hear, from the face of a moonlit bluff upon our left, the long, mournful Whóo-hu-hu—Hóo-oo of the brown owl. I smell the savour of juniper, of bruised snakeroot, of old, slow-rotting wood; with once a fairy breath of unseen linn?a; and once, at the fringed brink of a rivulet, the pungent fragrance of wild mint. I feel the frequent wet slappings of branches on my face; I feel the strong prickles of the fir, the cool, flat frondage of the spruce and hemlock, the unresisting, feathery spines of the young hackmatack trees; I feel, once, a gluey web upon my face, and the abhorrence with which I dash off the fat spider that clings to my chin; I feel the noisome slump of my foot as I tread upon a humped and swollen gathering of toad-stools.
All this is what comes back to me—and Nicole’s form, ever silent, ever just ahead, wasting no breath; till at last we came upon a fence, and beyond the fence wide fields, and beyond the fields a low white house with wings and outbuildings, at peace in the open moonlight.
“We are in time, Master Paul!” said Nicole quietly.