Voban looked for a moment as if he might do some wild thing. His spirit,
his devilry, pleased Doltaire, and he laughed. “Who would have thought
our Voban had such wit? The trade of barber is double-edged. Razors
should be in fashion at Versailles.”
Then he sat down, while Voban made a pretty show of touching off my
person. A few minutes passed so, in which the pealing of bells, the
shouting of the people, the beating of drums, and the calling of bugles
came to us clearly.
A half hour afterwards, on our way to the Intendant’s palace, we
heard the Benedictus chanted in the Church of the Recollets as we
passed--hundreds kneeling outside, and responding to the chant sung
within:
“That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hands of all
that hate us.”
At the corner of a building which we passed, a little away from
the crowd, I saw a solitary cloaked figure. The words of the chant,
following us, I could hear distinctly:
“That we, being delivered out of the hands of our enemies, might serve
Him without fear.”
And then, from the shadowed corner came in a high, melancholy voice the
words:
“To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
Looking closer, I saw it was Mathilde.
Doltaire smiled as I turned and begged a moment’s time to speak to her.
“To pray with the lost angel and sup with the Intendant, all in
one night--a liberal taste, monsieur; but who shall stay the good
Samaritan!”
They stood a little distance away, and I went over to her and said,
“Mademoiselle--Mathilde, do you not know me?”
Her abstracted eye fired up, as there ran to her brain some little
sprite out of the House of Memory and told her who I was.
“There were two lovers in the world,” she said: “the Mother of God
forgot them, and the devil came. I am the Scarlet Woman,” she went on;
“I made this red robe from the curtains of Hell--”
Poor soul! My own trouble seemed then as a speck among the stars to
hers. I took her hand and held it, saying again, “Do you not know me?
Think, Mathilde!”
I was not sure that she had ever seen me, to know me, but I thought
it possible; for, as a hostage, I had been much noticed in Quebec, and
Voban had, no doubt, pointed me out to her. Light leapt from her black
eye, and then she said, putting her finger on her lips, “Tell all the
lovers to hide. I have seen a hundred Francois Bigots.”
I looked at her, saying nothing--I knew not what to say. Presently her
eye steadied to mine, and her intellect rallied. “You are a prisoner,
too,” she said; “but they will not kill you: they will keep you till
the ring of fire grows in your head, and then you will make your scarlet
robe, and go out, but you will never find It--never. God hid first, and
then It hides.... It hides, that which you lost--It hides, and you can
not find It again. You go hunting, hunting, but you can not find It.”
My heart was pinched with pain. I understood her. She did not know her
lover now at all. If Alixe and her mother at the Manor could but care
for her, I thought. But alas! what could I do? It were useless to ask
her to go to the Manor; she would not understand.
Perhaps there come to the disordered mind flashes of insight,
illuminations and divinations, greater than are given to the sane, for
she suddenly said in a whisper, touching me with a nervous finger, “I
will go and tell her where to hide. They shall not find her. I know
the woodpath to the Manor. Hush! she shall own all I have--except the
scarlet robe. She showed me where the May-apples grew. Go,”--she pushed
me gently away--“go to your prison, and pray to God. But you can not
kill Francois Bigot, he is a devil.” Then she thrust into my hands a
little wooden cross, which she took from many others at her girdle. “If
you wear that, the ring of fire will not grow,” she said. “I will go
by the woodpath, and give her one, too. She shall live with me: I will
spread the cedar branches and stir the fire. She shall be safe. Hush!
Go, go softly, for their wicked eyes are everywhere, the were-wolves!”
She put her fingers on my lips for an instant, and then, turning, stole
softly away towards the St. Charles River.
Doltaire’s mockery brought me back to myself.
“So much for the beads of the addled; now for the bowls of sinful man,”
said he.