“The English are heretics, my daughter, but they do not desecrate graves. The body of God’s servant will be as safe here as in his loved Annapolis.”
Then Jean Jacques and M. Girard laid the body in the grave, and as the priest took out his breviary and began to read the first words of the office for the dead, the Micmac slipped away to the hut, thence to remove the scanty remains of Margot’s possessions. The short service over, Margot herself helped M. Girard in the filling of the grave.
But even as they worked the mingled sounds of lamentation and exultation drew nearer, and just as the grave was filled, the imperious figure of Le Loutre, his face alight with religious fervor, stood beside it.
“What doest thou here, brother?” he said sternly.
“What thou seest, M. l’Abbé. I lay in consecrated earth the remains of this our brother in the faith.”
“In consecrated earth,” cried Le Loutre. “What earth is consecrated trod by the feet of heretics? M. Girard, I exhort thee, in the name of the holy mother of God, to remove to uncontaminated soil the body of this servant of the true church.”
He pointed as he spoke to the crowd of hurrying fugitives pressing across the water in boats and on rafts.
M. Girard faced his superior calmly. Well he knew that when, for the sake of his flock as also for the sake of right, he had taken that oath at Halifax, he had incurred the suspicion, nay anger, of his clerical superiors; but in the mild eyes which he raised to the fierce ones of the abbé there was no fear—only the firmness which has led many as gentle a martyr to the stake.
“M. l’Abbé knows,” he said quietly, “that the ground consecrated by a priest of the church becomes holy ground, and that to disturb the dead laid therein is profanation.”
It seemed a long time to the anxious Margot before the silent duel was decided, for some moments elapsed ere either spoke again. Then the hand of Le Loutre slowly fell, and he averted his eyes. Not even his arrogance could forswear the tenets of the church for which he fought so zealously.