Claire watched Dollard lift his smiling face and shake his head with decision, against which urging was powerless.
She witnessed the oath which they took neither to give quarter to nor accept quarter from the Iroquois. She witnessed their consecration and the ceremonial of mass. The kneeling men were young, few of them being older than Dollard.[5] They represented the colony, from soldier and gentilhomme down to the lower ranks of handicraftsmen. Whatever their ancestry had been, a baptism of glory descended upon all those faces alike. Their backs were towards the crowded chapel, but the women in the rood-loft could see this unconscious light, and as Claire looked at Dollard she shuddered from head to foot, feeling that her whole silent body was one selfish scream, “He is forgetting me!”
Lighted altar, lifted host, bowed people, and even the knightly splendor of Dollard’s face, all passed from Claire’s knowledge.
“It is now over, dear mademoiselle,” whispered Sister Macé, sighing. “Do you see?—the men are standing up to march out four abreast, headed by the commandant. Ah, how the people will crowd them and shake their hands! Are you not looking, my child? O St. Joseph! patron of little ones, she is in a dead faint. Mademoiselle!” Sister Macé began to rub Claire’s temples and hands and to pant with anxiety, so that the rood-loft must have been betrayed had not the chapel been emptying itself of a crowd running eagerly after other objects.
“Let me be,” spoke Claire, hoarsely. “I am only dying to the world.”
Sister Macé wept again. She patted Claire’s wrist with her small fingers. The girl’s bloodless face and tight-shut eyes were made more pallid by early daylight, for the candles were being put out upon the altar. Sister Macé in her solicitude forgot all about the people pouring through the palisade gate and following their heroes to the river-landing.
“Oh, how strong is the love of brother and sister!” half soliloquized this gentle nun. “These ties so sweeten life; but when the call of Heaven comes, how hard they rend asunder!”
The trampling below hastened itself, ebbed away, entirely ceasing upon the flags of the Hôtel-Dieu and becoming a clatter along the wharf.
“Is the chapel vacant now, Sister?” her charge breathed at her ear.
“The last person has left it, dear mademoiselle.”