Memory is a Child
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.
“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 Nicole
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, I 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 Grûl!” 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 with 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 shore. 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 prepared 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 thread 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 _linnæa_;
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.