At my cousin Marc’s rashness in going to the chapel he glanced with some severity, grieving for the sorrow of the young wife at Quebec. But for the English he had many good words—they were pitiful, he said, in the act of carrying out cruel orders. And they neither robbed nor terrorized. Not they, said he, but a wicked priest and the intriguers of a rotten government at Quebec, were the scourge of Acadie.
When the sun got low over the Gaspereau Ridge he called to mind some duties too long forgotten, and bade me farewell with a loving wistfulness. I think, however, it was the imminent coming of Yvonne that drove him away. He feared lest he should meet her, and in seeming to know of my purpose seem to sanction it. I could not help believing in my heart that in this matter, perhaps for the first time in his priesthood, the kind curé’s conscience was a little tremulous in its admonitions.
I watched him out of sight; and then, posting myself in a coign of vantage behind a great willow that overhung the stream, I waited with a thumping heart, and with a misgiving that all other organs within my frame had slumped away to nothing but a meagre and contemptible jelly.
Chapter XXIV
“If You Love Me, Leave Me”
Till the flames of amber and copper along the Gaspereau Ridge had temperately diminished to a lucidity of pale violet, I waited and watched. Then all at once the commotion in my bosom came to an icy stop.
A light, white form descended from the ridge to the ford. I needed not the black lace shawl about the head and shoulders to tell me it was she, before a feature or a line could be distinguished. The blood at every tingling finger-tip thrilled the announcement of her coming.
I grasped desperately at all I had planned to say—now slipping from me. I felt that she was intrenched in a fixed resolve; and I felt that not my life alone,—ready to become a very small matter,—but hers, her true life, depended upon my breaking that resolve. Yet how was I to conquer her, I who at sight of her was at her feet? I knew—with that inner knowledge by which I know God is—that she, the whitest of women, intended unwittingly a sin against her body in wedding a man unloved—that she, in my eyes the wisest, most clear-visioned of women, contemplated a folly beyond words. But how could I so far escape my reverence for her as to convict her of this folly and this sin?
But now all my thoughts, words, pleas, sprayed into air. She came—and I stepped into her path, whispering:
“Yvonne!”
She was almost within reach of my hand, had I stretched it out,—but I dared not touch her. She gave the faintest cry. Taken at so sudden a disadvantage, she had not time to mask herself, and her great eyes told for one heart-beat what I knew her lips would have denied. Her fingers locked and unlocked where they caught the black mantilla across her bosom. She stood for an instant motionless; then glanced back up the hill with a desperate fear.