The Chapel Prison
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.”
He 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 the 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 seemed 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, for 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, he 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 Grûl, 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 Yvonne, 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 French 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.
“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.