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.