“I would be his guest no longer than this passing night if my difficulties were solved,” said the Abbé. “For there is even Colin’s sister to torment me. I know not where she is,—whether in Montreal or in the wilderness between Montreal and this fort. If I had taken her back with Colin to France, she would now be safe with my mother. There was another evidence of my poor brother’s madness! He was determined Mademoiselle Cavelier should be sent out to Fort St. Louis. When he sailed on that last great voyage, he sat in one of the ships the king furnished him and in the last lines he wrote his mother refused to tell her his destination! And at the same time he wrote instructions to the nuns of St. Joseph concerning the niece whose guardian he never was. She must be sent to Fort St. Louis at the first safe opportunity! She was to have a grant in this country to replace her fortune which he had used. And this he only told me during his fever at St. Domingo on the voyage.”
Joutel folded and put away his notes. The Abbé’s often repeated complaints seldom stirred a reply from him. Though on this occasion he thought of saying,—
“Monsieur de Tonty may bring news of her from Montreal.”
“You understand, Joutel,” exclaimed the Abbé, approaching the candle, “that it is best,—that it is necessary not to tell Tonty what we know?”
“I have understood what you said, Monsieur the Abbé.”
“You are the only man who gives me anxiety. All the rest are willing to keep silence. Is it not my affair? I wish you would cease writing your scraps. It irritates me to come into this storehouse and find you writing your scraps.” He looked severely at the young man, who leaned against the box making no further promise or reply. Then seizing the candle, the Abbé stepped to a bed made of bales, where, wrapped in skins and blankets, young Colin Cavelier lay uttering the acknowledgement of peaceful sleep. Another boy lay similarly wrapped on the floor beside him.
The priest’s look at these two was brief. He went on to the remaining man in the room, a hairy fellow, lying coiled among hides and pressed quite into a corner. The man appeared unconscious, emitting his breath in short puffs.
Abbé Cavelier gazed upon him with shudders.
The over-taxed candle flame stooped and expired, the scent of its funeral pile rising from a small red point in darkness.