A fine figure of a seventeen-year-old lad he was. At his age many an Acadian youth was beginning to dream of wife and home all his own. Tall and strongly built, his light curls tossed back from a brow whose tell-tale fairness showed through the ruddy bronze left by the suns and storms of Acadia.
This time the exclamations of horror rose louder than before, and above them was heard the piteous remonstrance of the village curé, “Ah, mon fils, submit thyself to the good abbé.”
Gabriel’s fearless glance swept the rows of dull Acadian faces. It seemed to him as if in actual bodily fear the villagers crouched before the enraged priest, who drove, rather than led, his timid, ignorant flock, and the gentle curé, his subordinate. And the whip with which he goaded them was none other than the ferocious band of Micmac Indians, to whom he had been sent by the French government, nominally as missionary, but in reality that he might keep the Acadians, by fair means or foul, in a continual state of rebellion to their easy-going English rulers.
The murmurs died away into awed silence. Then, with a scornful lift of the hand, Le Loutre turned from the boy and faced the trembling villagers. His address at first was in the usual strain, only, if possible, more intolerant and fanatic than at his last visit, and Gabriel soon pushed impatiently out of the crowd, and flung himself down upon the river’s bank. Presently, however, he found himself listening intently. Here were threats more terrible, even, than of old. Gabriel was brave; his father’s blood did not run in his veins for naught; but for once he wondered not that his countrymen cowered beneath the lash of that fierce tongue.
“The people of Acadia are the people of my mother,” he often said, “and I love them. But they are cowards.”
And when he looked forth from the harbor mouth of Chebucto and swept with his eyes the wide Atlantic, there burned in his young bosom a fire that would have amazed his placid kinsmen had they known of it, content, as they were, with the daily round of humble submission to the priests, petty legal quarrels or equally petty gossip with the neighbors, and daily tilling of the soil—a fire that was kindled a hundred years before in one who sailed the seas with Raleigh, and which burned anew in this young scion of an ancient race.
“I want to go, to see, to do!” he would cry, flinging wide his arms.
But now, as he gave unwilling ear to Le Loutre, his boyish heart sank. Could the abbé in truth fulfill these threats of driving the people to French soil, whether they would or no? Could he force them, in the name of God and the king, to forsake their pleasant homes in which the English, whatever might be their crimes against the French, at least allowed the Acadians to live in peace, unpunished too during all these years for their want of loyalty to sworn allegiance? Gabriel’s eyes traveled beyond that dominant figure, and dwelt upon the savage band of “converts” gathered behind the priest. Yes, he could, and would!
Wrapt in his own thoughts, Gabriel noticed neither the dispersion of the people nor the ominous fact that his grandfather, Pierre Grétin, was accompanied on his homeward way by Le Loutre himself. His eyes were upon the flowing river, and the light step of his Cousin Margot failed to arouse him. Her sweet face was close to his, and her small hand on his shoulder ere he stirred.
“Gabriel, I have somewhat to say to thee.”