François Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, then vicar-apostolic of the province, with the power rather than name of bishop, was a tall noble, priestly through entire length of rusty cassock and height of intellectual temples. He regarded the girl with bloodless patience. He had a large nose, which drooped towards a mouth cut in human granite; his lean, fine hands, wasted by self-abasement and voluntary privations, were smaller than a woman’s. Though not yet forty, he looked old, and his little black skull-cup aged him more. The clear Montmorency eye had in him gained, from asceticism and rigid devotion, a brightness which penetrated.
His young relative’s presence and distress annoyed him. For her soul’s salvation, he would have borne unstinted agony; for any human happiness she craved, he was not prepared to lift a little finger.
“Monseigneur,” the girl began their interview, “I have come to New France.”
“Strangely escorted,” said Laval.
“The reverend father cannot be thinking of Madame Bourdon: Madame Bourdon was the best of duennas on the voyage.”
Laval shook his chin, and for reply rested a glance upon his cousin’s attendant as a type of the company she had kept on shipboard. The attendant was a sedate and pretty young girl, whose black hair looked pinched so tightly in her cap as to draw her eyebrows up, while modesty hung upon her lashes and drew her lids down. The result was an unusual expanse of veined eyelid.
“If you mean Louise Bibelot,” the young lady responded, “she is my foster-sister. Her mother nursed me. Louise bears papers from the curé of her parish to strangers, but she should hardly need such passports to the head of our house.”
“In brief, daughter,” said Laval, passing to the point, “what brings you to this savage country—fit enough to be the arena of young men, or of those who lay self upon the altar of the Church, but most unfit for females tenderly brought up to enjoy the pleasures of the world?”
“Has my bringing-up been so tender, monseigneur? I have passed nearly all my years an orphan in a convent.”
“But what brings you to New France?”