Mother Pêche looked wise and mysterious.
“I knew it,” she reiterated. “Why, dear heart, I knew all along you loved him.”
And at last, strange as it may appear, this seemed to Yvonne de Lamourie, penniless, going into exile with the companionship of misery, an all-sufficient and all-explicative answer.
Chapter XXXI
Young Will and Old Wisdom
Mother Pêche lived to do good deeds, and loved to think she did them from an ill motive. Her witchcraft, devoutly believed in by herself, and by a good half of Grand Pré as well, was never known to curse, but ever to bless; yet its white magic she called black art. There was no one sick, there was no one sorrowful, there was no child in all Grand Pré, but loved her; yet it was her whim to believe herself feared, and in hourly peril of anathema. Even Father Fafard, whom she affected to deride, but in truth vastly reverenced, found it hard to maintain a proper show of austerity toward this incomprehensible old woman.
The boat, soon loaded, went dragging through the flame-lit tide toward the ship. The old dame sat clutching Yvonne’s hand under the warm privacy of the cloak. Here was a weight off her mind. She loved Yvonne de Lamourie and Paul Grande better than any one else in the world; and with all her heart she believed that to hold them apart would mean ruin to others in the end, as well as to themselves. This which had now come about (she had trembled lest Yvonne should not prove quite strong enough at the last) seemed to her the best exit from a bad closure. Anderson she had ever regarded with hostile and unreasoning contempt; and now it suited her whim to tell herself that a part of her present satisfaction lay in the thought of him so ignominiously thwarted. But in very truth she believed that the thwarting was for his good; that he would recover from his hurt in time, and see himself well saved from the lifelong mordancy of a loveless marriage. In a word, what Mother Pêche wanted was the good of those she loved, and as little ill as might be to those she accounted enemies.
Though the boat was packed with intimates of hers, she was absorbed in studying so much of Yvonne’s face as could be seen through the half-drawn hood. “She is, indeed, much better already,” said the old dame to herself. “This was the one medicine.”
Yvonne, for her part, had no eyes but for the ship she was approaching. Eagerly she scanned the bulwarks. Women’s heads, and children’s, she saw in plenty; but no men, save the sailors and a few red-coats.
“Are none of the—are there no men on this ship?” she whispered to Mother Pêche, in a sudden awful doubt.
“But think, chérie,” muttered the old woman, “these men are dangerous. Would they be left on deck like women and children? But no, indeed. They are in the hold, surely; and in irons belike. But they are there—or on the other ship,” she added uneasily in her heart.