“No, I remember!” I interrupted doggedly. “I forget nothing. You do not love him. You are mine.”
“Oh!” she gasped, lifting both hands sharply to her face and dropping them at once. “I shall never trust you again.”
And in a moment she had flashed past me, with a sob, and disappeared into the house.
Chapter IX
In Sleep a King, but Waking, no such Matter
De Lamourie himself showed me to my room, a low chamber under the eaves, very plainly furnished. In the houses of the few Acadian gentry there was little of the luxury to be found in the seigneurial mansions of the St. Lawrence. In the De Lamourie house, for example, there were but two serving-maids, with one man to work the little farm.
If De Lamourie had noted any excitement on Yvonne’s part, or any abstraction on mine, he said nothing of it. With simple kindness he set down the candle on my dressing-table and wished me good sleep. But at the door he turned.
“Are you well assured that the abbé will not attempt to carry out his threat?” he asked, with a tinge of anxiety in his voice.
“I am confident of it,” I answered boldly. “That worthy ecclesiastic will not try issues with me, when I hold the king’s commission.”
Just why I should have been so overweeningly secure is not clear to me now that I look back upon it. That I should have expected the terrible La Garne to bow so pliantly to my command appears to me now the most fatuous of vain follies. In truth I was thinking only of Yvonne. But De Lamourie seemed to take my assurance as final, and went away in blither mood.
My room was lighted by a narrow, high-peaked dormer window, through which I could look out across the moonlit orchards, the level dyke lands, the wide and winding mouth of the Gaspereau, and the far-glimmering breast of Minas. Upon these my eyes rested long—but the eyes of my soul saw quite another loveliness than that of the moon-flooded landscape. They brooded upon Yvonne’s face—the troubled, changing, pleading look in her eyes—her sharp and strange emotion at the last. Over and over it all I went, reliving each moment, each word, each look, each breath. Then, being deeply wearied by my long day’s tramp, but with no hint of sleep coming to my eyes, I threw myself down upon the bed to deliciously think it all over yet again. I had grown sure that Yvonne loved me. Yet once more, in a still ecstasy of reverence and love, I fell at her feet and kissed them. Then I thought about the stone which Mother Pêche had given me, and its mystic virtues, which I would explain to Yvonne on the morrow in the apple-orchard. Then I found myself fancying that it was Yvonne who had given me the talisman, bidding me guard it well if I would ever hope to win her from my English rival. And then—the sunlight lay in a white streak across my bed-foot, the morning sky was blue over the dyke lands, and the robins were joyous in the apple-blooms under my window. What a marvellous air blew in upon my face, sweet with all freshness and cleanness and wholesome strength! I sprang up, deriding myself. I had slept all night in my clothes.