The Ships of her Exile
The days dragged till December was setting his hoar face toward death,
and still delayed the last ships. The jailers grew sour-visaged. From
Yvonne came no more word, only the tidings that she was not well, and
that her people were troubled for her. Father Fafard’s cheery wrinkles
at mouth and eyes deepened from cheer to care; but still his lips locked
over the name of Yvonne.
My hope sank ever lower and lower. That old wound in my head, cured by
Grûl’s searching simples, began to harass me afresh—whether from cold,
the chapel being but barn-like, or from the circumstance that my heart,
ceaselessly gnawing upon itself, gnawed also upon every tissue and
nerve. I came strangely close to the ranger La Mouche in those bad days;
for though I knew not, nor cared nor dared to ask, his story, I saw in
his eyes a something which he, too, doubtless saw in mine. So it came
that we sat much together, in a black silence. It was not that I loved
less than of old my true comrade Marc, but the fact that he possessed
where he loved, and could with blissful confidence look forward, set him
some way apart from me. Upon La Mouche, with the deep hurt sullen in his
eyes, I could look and mutter to myself:
“Old, wily fox, is your foot, once so free, caught in the snare of a
woman?”
So tortuous a thing in its workings is this red clot of a human heart
that I got a kind of perverted solace out of such thoughts as these.
At last the tired watchers at our south windows announced two ship in
the basin. They came up on the flood, and dropped anchor off the
Gaspereau mouth.
“This ends it,” I heard Marc say coolly. “All that’s left of Grand Pré
can go in those two ships.”
To me the words came as a knell for the burial of my last hope.
The embarkation had now to be pushed with a speed which wrought infinite
confusion, for the weather had turned bitter, and it was not possible
for women and children to long endure the cold of their dismantled
homes. The big wagons, watched by us from our windows, went creaking and
rattling down the frozen roads. Wailing women, frightened and wondering
children, beds, chests, many-colored quilts, bright red and green
chairs,—to us it looked as if all these were tumbled into a narrowing
vortex and swept with a piteous indiscriminacy into one ship or the
other. The orderly method with which the previous embarkings had been
managed was now all thrown to the winds by the fierce necessity for
haste. We in the chapel were not left long to watch the scene from the
windows. While yet the main street of Grand Pré was dolorous with the
tears of the women and children, the doors of our prison opened and
names were called. I heeded them not; but the sound of my own name
pierced my gloom; and I went out. In the tingling air I awoke a little,
to gaze up the hill at the large house where Yvonne had lodged since the
parsonage had been taken for a guard-house. No message came to me from
those north windows. Then I turned, to find Marc at my side.
“Courage, cousin mine,” he whispered. “We are not beaten yet. Better
outside than in there. This much means freedom—and, once free, we’ll
act.”
“No, Marc, I’m not beaten,” I muttered. “But—it _looks_ as if I were.”
“Chut, man!” said he crisply. “You couldn’t do a better thing to bring
her to her senses than you are doing now.”
It was but a few steps down to the lane, and there we found ourselves in
a jumble of heaped carts and blue-skirted, weeping women. My head was
paining me sorely—a numb ache that seemed to rise in the core of my
brain. But I remember noting with a far-off commiseration the blubbered
faces of the women, and their poor little solicitudes for this or that
bit of household gear which, from time to time, would fall crashing to
the ground from the hastily laden carts. I found spirit to wonder that
the tears which had exhausted themselves over the farewell to fatherland
and hearthside should break out afresh over the cracking of a gilded
glass or the shattering of a blue and silver jug. The women’s
lamentations in a little hardened me, so that my ears ignored them; but
the wide-eyed terrors of the children, their questions unanswered, their
whimpering at the cold that blued their hands, all this pierced me.
Tears for the children’s sorrow gathered in my heart, till it was nigh
to bursting; and this curbed passion of pity, I think, kept my sick body
from collapse. It in some way threw me back from my own misery on to my
old unroutable resolution.
“I _will_ win!” I said in my heart, as we came down upon the wharf at
the Gaspereau mouth. “Though there seems to be no more hope, there is
life; and while there is life, I hold on.”
When we reached the wharf the ebb was well advanced. The boats could not
get near the wharf. Women had to wade ankle-deep in freezing slime to
reach them. The slime was churned with the struggle of many feet. The
stuff from the carts was at times dropped in the ooze, to be recovered
or not as might chance. The soldiers toiled faithfully, and their
leggings to the knee were a sorry sight. They were patient, these
red-coats, with the women, who often seemed to lose their heads so that
they knew not which boat they wanted to go in. To the children every
red-coat seemed tender as a mother. For any one, indeed, they would do
anything, except endure delay. Haste, haste, haste was all—and therefore
there was calamitous confusion. While I stood on the wharf awaiting the
order to embark, I saw a stout girl in a dark-red stomacher and grey
petticoat throw herself screaming into the water where it was about
waist deep, and scramble desperately to another boat near by. No effort
was made to restrain her. Dripping with tide and slime she climbed over
the gunwale; and belike found what she sought, for her cries ceased.
Again I noted—Marc called my attention to it—a small child being passed
from one boat to the other, as the two, bound for different ships, were
about diverging. The mother had stumbled blindly into one boat while the
child had been tossed into the other. In the effort to remedy this
oversight the child was dropped into the water between the boats. The
screams of the mother were like a knife in our ears. Two sailors went
overboard at once, but there was some delay ere the little one was
recovered. Then we saw its limp body passed in over the boatside;
whether alive or dead we could not judge; but the screams ceased and our
ear-drums blessed the respite.
With the next boat came our turn; and I found myself wading down the
slope of icy ooze. I heard Marc, just behind me, mutter a careless
imprecation upon the needless defiling of his boots. He was ever
imperturbable, my cousin,—a hot heart, but in steel harness.
We loaded the roomy long-boat till the gunwale was almost awash. The big
oars creaked and thumped in the rowlocks. We moved laboriously out to
the ships, which swung on straining cable in the tide. As we came under
her black-wall side, with the turbid red-grey current hissing past it,
men on deck caught us with grapnels, and we swung, splashing, under the
stern. Then, the tide being very troublesome, we were drawn again
alongside.
Marc was at my elbow. “Look!” he cried, pointing to the ridge behind the
village. I saw a wide-roofed cottage on the crest break into flame.
There was a wind up there, though little as yet down here in the valley;
and the flames streamed out to westward, the black smoke rolling low and
ragged above them.
“So goes all Grand Pré in a little!” muttered Marc.
“It is P’tit Joliet’s house!” said I.
“Yes,” said a steady young voice behind me; and I turned to see Petit
Joliet himself, watching with undaunted eyes the burning of his home.
“Yes, and it was a fine house. It would have hurt my father sorely, were
he alive now, to see it go up in smoke like that.”
“Well, you have a brave heart,” said I, liking him well as I saw his
firmness.
“Oh,” said he, “the only thing that is troubling me is this—shall I find
my mother on this ship? They are making mistakes now, these English, in
their haste to be done with us. I’m worried.”
“If she is not on board,” said my kind Marc, “we’ll try and keep a watch
on the boats; and if we see her bound for the wrong ship we’ll let the
guard know. They _want_ to keep families together, if they can.”
This was Marc, ever careful of others. But his good purpose was like to
have been frustrated soon as formed; for scarce were our feet well on
deck when our hands were clapped in irons, and we were marched off
straight to the hold.
“Sorry, sir. Can’t help it. So many of you, you know,” said the red-coat
apologetically, as I stretched out my wrists to him.
But glancing about the crowded deck I descried my good friend,
Lieutenant Waldron, busily unravelling the snarl of things. In answer to
my hail he came at once, warm, friendly, and trying not to see my irons.
“One last little service, sir!” I cried. “Little to us, it may be great
to others. You see we are ironed, Captain de Mer and I. We will give our
word to neither attempt escape nor in any way interfere with this sorry
work. Let us two wait here on deck till the ship sails. We know all
these villagers; and we want to help you avoid the severance of
families.”
“It is little to grant for you, my friend,” said he, in a feeling voice.
“You cannot know how my heart is aching. I will speak to the captain of
the ship, and you shall stay on deck till the ship sails.”
Marc thanked him courteously, but I with no more than a look, for words
did not at that time seem compliant to say what I desired them to say.
They are false and treacherous spirits, these words we make so free with
and trust so rashly with affairs of life and death. How often do they
take an honest meaning from the heart and twist it to the semblance of a
lie as it leaves the lips! How often do they take a flame from the
inmost soul, and make it ice before it reaches the soul toward which it
thrilled forth! It has been my calling to work with words in peace, as
with swords in time of war; and I know them. I do not trust them. The
swords are the safer.