“Look you here, now!” exclaimed the Frenchman. “I am good enough for you, if I would marry you. For while your fathers were ranging the woods, mine were decent tillers of the soil, keeping their skins white and minding the priest. Where could you get a finer husband than I would make you? But I shall never marry. The Queen of France would be no temptation to me. There you sit, enough to turn the head of our blessed St. Joseph, for you turned my head the moment I looked upon you; but I don’t want you.”
“I will bid you good-night,” said Massawippa, drawing her blanket.
“At the proper time, little Sister; when I speak my mind freer of its load. I must live a bachelor, it is true; but if I were a free man I would have you to-morrow, though you scratched me with your wild hands.”
“I am not for your bolts and bars,” returned Massawippa, scornfully.
“If we were settled in the house I made upon my land,” said Jouaneaux, tempting himself with the impossible while he leaned back smiling, “little need you complain of bolts and bars. My case is this: I had a grant of land on the western shore of this island of Montreal.”
“Not where the Ottawa comes in?” questioned Massawippa, impaling him with interest.
“That was the exact spot.” Jouaneaux widened his mouth pinkly as he became retrospective. “And never wouldst thou guess what turned me from that freeholding to a holy life. I may say that I lead a holy life, for are not vows laid upon me as strait as on the Sulpitian fathers? And straiter; I am under writings to the nuns to serve them to the day of my death, and they be under writings to me to maintain my sickness and old age. It is likely my skeleton barn still stands where I set it up to hold my produce. Down I falls from the ridge of it headlong to the ground, and here in the Hôtel-Dieu I lay for many a month like a rag, the Sisters tending me. It was then I said to myself, ‘Jouaneaux, these be angels of pity and patience, yet they soil their hands feeding pigs and bearing up such as thou.’ Though I am equal to most of my betters, little Sister, I always held it well to be humble-minded. The result is, I give up my land, I bind myself to serve the saints in this Hôtel-Dieu, and therefore I cannot marry.”
Jouaneaux collapsed upon himself with a groaning sigh.
“Then your house and your barn were left to ruin?” questioned Massawippa, passing without sympathy his nuptial restrictions.