“These hurt me all the time,” said Jeanne. “And it is excellent torture to comb them out.”
She covered the burrs with a swift pressure, tightly closing her mouth and eyes with the spasm of pain this caused, and once more took and folded the crucifix within her hands.
The explorer made no remonstrance against such self-torture, though his practical gaze remained on her youthful brier-crowned head. He heard a girl in front of him laugh to a courtier who was flattering her.
“Hé, monsieur, I have myself seen Quebec women who dressed with odious taste.”
But Jeanne, wrapped in her own relation, continued with a tone which slighted mere physical pain,—
“There is a better way to suffer, Sieur de la Salle, and that is from ill-treatment. Such anguish can be dealt out by the hands we love; but I have no friend willing to discipline me thus. My father’s servant Jolycœur is the only person who makes me as wretched as I ought to be.”
“Discipline through Jolycœur,” said La Salle, laughing, “is what my proud stomach could never endure.”
“Perhaps you have not such need, Sieur de la Salle. My father has many times turned him off, but I plead until he is brought back. He hath this whole year been a means of grace to me by his great impudence. If I say to him, ‘Jolycœur, do this or that,’ he never fails to reply, ‘Do it yourself, Mademoiselle Jeanne,’ and adds profanity to make Heaven blush. Whenever he can approach near enough, he whispers contemptuous names at me, so that I cannot keep back the tears. Yet how little I endure, when Saint Lawrence perished on a gridiron, and all the other holy martyrs shame me!”
“Your father does not suffer these things to be done to you?”
“No, Sieur de la Salle. My father knows naught of it except my pity. He did once kick Jolycœur, who left our house three days, so that I was in danger of sinking in slothful comfort. But I got him brought back, and he lay drunk in our garden with his mouth open, so that my soul shuddered to look at him. It was excellent discipline,”[5] said Jeanne, with a long breath.