“Do no sacrilege, Massawippa.”
“But last summer the walking woman put bread and roasted birds on the altars for an offering. She has put some here to-day. Take this.”
Claire encountered a groping hand full of something which touch received as food. Without further parley she sat up and ate. The very gentle sounds of mastication which even dainty women may make when crisp morsels tempt the hound of starvation that is within them could be heard in the dark. Claire’s less active animal nature was first silenced, and in compunction she spoke.
“If the hermit put these things on the altar for an offering, we are robbing a shrine.”
“She was willing for any pilgrim to carry them away, madame. The coureurs de bois visit these chapels and eat her birds. She is alive, madame! She is not dead! We shall find her at Carillon and get our canoe of her; and the saints be praised for so helping us!”
They finished their meal and stretched themselves upon the platform. Not a delicious scrap which could be eaten was left, but Massawippa piously dropped the bones outside the chancel rail.
“We are in sanctuary,” said Claire, her eyes pressed by the weight of darkness. Venturing with checked voice, the sweeter for such suppression and necessity of utterance, she sung above their heads into the low arching hollow a vesper hymn in monk’s Latin; after which they slept as they had slept in Jouaneaux’s house, and awoke to find the walking woman gazing over the rail at them.
She was so old that her many wrinkles seemed carved in hard wood. Her features were unmistakably Indian; but from the gray blanket loosely draping her, and even from her inner wrappings of soft furs, came the smell of wholesome herbs. She held a long flask in one hand, evidently a bottle lost or thrown away by some passing ranger, and she extended it to Claire, her eyes twinkling pleasantly.