The days dragged till December was setting his hoar face toward death, and still delayed the last ships. The jailers grew sour-visaged. From Yvonne came no more word, only the tidings that she was not well, and that her people were troubled for her. Father Fafard’s cheery wrinkles at mouth and eyes deepened from cheer to care; but still his lips locked over the name of Yvonne.
My hope sank ever lower and lower. That old wound in my head, cured by Grûl’s searching simples, began to harass me afresh—whether from cold, the chapel being but barn-like, or from the circumstance that my heart, ceaselessly gnawing upon itself, gnawed also upon every tissue and nerve. I came strangely close to the ranger La Mouche in those bad days; for though I knew not, nor cared nor dared to ask, his story, I saw in his eyes a something which he, too, doubtless saw in mine. So it came that we sat much together, in a black silence. It was not that I loved less than of old my true comrade Marc, but the fact that he possessed where he loved, and could with blissful confidence look forward, set him some way apart from me. Upon La Mouche, with the deep hurt sullen in his eyes, I could look and mutter to myself:
“Old, wily fox, is your foot, once so free, caught in the snare of a woman?”
So tortuous a thing in its workings is this red clot of a human heart that I got a kind of perverted solace out of such thoughts as these.
At last the tired watchers at our south windows announced two ship in the basin. They came up on the flood, and dropped anchor off the Gaspereau mouth.
“This ends it,” I heard Marc say coolly. “All that’s left of Grand Pré can go in those two ships.”
To me the words came as a knell for the burial of my last hope.
The embarkation had now to be pushed with a speed which wrought infinite confusion, for the weather had turned bitter, and it was not possible for women and children to long endure the cold of their dismantled homes. The big wagons, watched by us from our windows, went creaking and rattling down the frozen roads. Wailing women, frightened and wondering children, beds, chests, many-colored quilts, bright red and green chairs,—to us it looked as if all these were tumbled into a narrowing vortex and swept with a piteous indiscriminacy into one ship or the other. The orderly method with which the previous embarkings had been managed was now all thrown to the winds by the fierce necessity for haste. We in the chapel were not left long to watch the scene from the windows. While yet the main street of Grand Pré was dolorous with the tears of the women and children, the doors of our prison opened and names were called. I heeded them not; but the sound of my own name pierced my gloom; and I went out. In the tingling air I awoke a little, to gaze up the hill at the large house where Yvonne had lodged since the parsonage had been taken for a guard-house. No message came to me from those north windows. Then I turned, to find Marc at my side.
“Courage, cousin mine,” he whispered. “We are not beaten yet. Better outside than in there. This much means freedom—and, once free, we’ll act.”
“No, Marc, I’m not beaten,” I muttered. “But—it looks as if I were.”