For a moment the furious priest was confounded. The color mounted to his dark cheeks and he hesitated. The old man’s aspect was almost threatening, and if fanaticism had left Le Loutre a conscience, it surely spoke then. But the momentary weakness passed.
“And thou wouldst shelter a heretic,” he said sternly, “recusant son of Mother Church that thou art! But she chastens, if in love, yet she chastens. Hope not for further grace. As for the boy, he must be brought back into the fold. This I have ere now told thee, and I repeat it. Me, the chosen instrument of God and the king, he cannot escape. Faithless as thou mayst be, thou canst not keep him from me. This very night he shall be forced back to his duty. As for thyself and the girl——”
He paused, the terrible look in his eyes. But it was enough. Further words were unnecessary. And as the torches danced away like fireflies into the forest shades, Margot, now completely exhausted, flung herself down beside the old man and, with an arm about his neck, wailed: “Gran’-père, my gran’-père, they will find him!”
And the hopeless response came: “Ma fille, they cannot fail to do it. Let us pray.”
Feebly he arose, and hand in hand the helpless pair kneeled before the image of the sorrowing Christ.
CHAPTER III
Concealed in the branches of a wide-spreading oak, Gabriel hoped against hope to remain hidden from the Micmac trailers, now close on his heels. White men his woodcraft would enable him to elude, but Indians hardly. His very breathing seemed as if it must betray him.
Listening thus, every nerve an ear, he heard a slight sound in the deep glade beneath. To the novice it might mean anything or nothing; to his practised understanding it was the crack of a twig beneath a human foot.
Carefully he surveyed his position. The moon, though near its setting, still afforded light sufficient to betray him should its rays fall on face or hands. Then, for the first time, he perceived that, as he lay face downward on a branching limb, the hand with which he sustained himself was palely illuminated; the moon, in her swift course, had penetrated the sheltering foliage. What should he do? To move meant certain discovery. He resolved to lie still, the chances being slightly in favor of absolute stillness. Then he became aware that some one was standing beneath the tree. Now in actual fact he held his breath; for though his sight could not pierce the leaves, every other sense told him that it was an Indian. But his hopes were vain. Another moment and he knew the tree was being climbed.
As the green grasshopper clings, even after detection, blindly to the leaf that it so closely resembles, so Gabriel clung instinctively to his branch, and even when a sinewy hand grasped his ankle, made no sign. The forest-bred boy obeyed the instinct of all woodland creatures; besides, there was one hope left, faint as it was, and were he to move or speak he might lose even that.