Days passed, and Pierre Grétin and his granddaughter could obtain no news of Gabriel. Tossed and torn by conflicting emotions, communal as well as personal, the old man’s strength seemed to be ebbing from him. Yet never did he need it more. The village of Port Royal (now Annapolis), nay, all Acadie, was in the confusion of helpless distress. What should they do, these poor ignorant habitans? To whom should they listen? In their hearts they knew that every word of Cornwallis’ proclamation was true, that under English rule they had enjoyed freedom, both secular and religious. On the other hand, Le Loutre swept down upon them continually with the firebrand of his eloquence. “Come to French soil,” he cried, “seek new homes under the old flag! For three years le bon roi will support you. You are French at heart—what have you to do with these English? Refuse, and the consolations of religion will be denied you and your property shall be given over to the savages.”
True, they were French at heart, the most of them, but not all; and their tranquil, sluggish lives had drifted so peacefully on the broad river of the English governor’s indulgence. It was almost worth while to renew the oath of allegiance to these foreigners and sleep quietly once more under their own rooftrees. But would they sleep quietly? Ah, there was the rub! Le Loutre had ever been a man of his word.
Therefore it came to pass that French ships passing to Isle St. Jean, now called Prince Edward Island, and Isle Royale, now Cape Breton, had for two years many hundred Acadians for passengers, some willing, more reluctant, destined to semi-starvation and unutterable misery in the new and desolate country in which their small stock of courage was to be so grievously tried, and in which few of them plucked up spirit sufficient to clear new land for their subsistence, but existed, or ceased to exist, on such meagre supplies as the French government furnished them.
“Gran’-père,” said Margot one evening, as bereft of most of their near neighbors they clung almost alone to their humble home, “mon gran’-père, what think you, has become of our Gabriel?” Her eyes were heavy with weeping, her round cheeks pale.
Grétin, in yet worse case, had scarce strength to take his turn with her behind their yoke of oxen at the plow. He sat on a bench at the door of the hut, both hands leaning heavily on his staff. For a while he answered nothing, but his sunken gaze wandered along the banks of the river, from one desolated home to another. In scarcely more than two or three still burned the sweet fires of home, and those that were forsaken had been plundered by the Indians, fresh traces of whose presence were daily visible. The good village curé, beloved of all, and the influence of whose noble life and teachings represented all that was best in the Catholic church, was gone too. Torn by contending duties he had decided that the forlorn exiles needed his ministrations more than those still remaining in their homes, and had followed them to French soil.
“Le bon Dieu knows, my child!” Grétin answered at last, in the dull tones of hopeless old age.
“Surely M. l’Abbé would not permit that—that——” her voice broke.
“That his fair young life should be destroyed by those savages? No, my child, no—that can I not believe. Moreover, Jean Jacques, Paul Pierre—they were his friends among the Micmacs. And M. l’Abbé—no, he would bend but not break the boy.”
There was a long silence. The evening dews, tears of the soil for the banishment of her children, sparkled on the wide meadows beneath the now rising moon.