La Salle’s face owned the sting. Shy natures have always been made to pay a tax on pride. But next to the slanderer we detest the bearer of his slander to our ears.
“It is too much for any man to expect in this world,—a brother who will defend him against his enemies.”
As soon as this regret had burst from the explorer, he rested his look again on Tonty.
“I do defend you,” asserted Abbé Cavelier; “and more than that I impoverish myself for you. But now that you come riding back from France on a high tide of the king’s favor, I may not lay a correcting word on your haughty spirit. Neither yesterday nor to-day could I bring you to any reasonable state of humility. And all New France in full cry against you!”
Extreme impatience darkened La Salle’s face; but without further reply he drew Barbe’s hand and turned back with her toward the Hôtel Dieu. She had watched her uncle the Abbé wrathfully during his attack upon La Salle, but as he dropped his eyes no more to her level she was obliged to carry away her undischarged anger. This she did with a haughty bearing so like La Salle’s that the Abbé grinned at it through his fretfulness.
He grew conscious of alien hair bristling against his neck as a voice mocked in undertone directly below his ear,—
“Yonder struts a great Bashaw that will sometime be laid low!”
The Abbé turned severely upon a person who presumed to tickle a priest’s neck with his coarse mustache and astound a priest’s ear with threats.
He recognized the man known as Jolycœur, who had been pushed against him in the throng. Jolycœur, by having his eyes fixed on the disappearing figure of La Salle, had missed the ear of the person he intended to reach. He recoiled from encountering the Abbé, whose wrath with sudden ebb ran back from a brother upon a brother’s foes.