“It must be something of a sorer stroke than merely to be clapped in prison, to make my captain so downcast,” I heard a cheerful voice declare close at my elbow.
“Why, and that it is, you may be sure, my brave ferryman!” said I, looking up with a smile and grasping the long, gaunt fingers of yellow Ba’tiste Chouan. “I have my own reasons for not wanting to be in Grand Pré chapel this day, for all that it is especially the place where I can see most of my friends.”
Straightway, my mood changing, I moved swiftly hither and thither, calling them by name. There was the whole clan of the Le Marchands, black, fearless, melancholy for their flax-fields; the three Le Boutilliers; the brave young slip, Jacques Violet, whom I had liked as a boy; a Landry or two; the lad Petit Joliet; several of the restless Labillois; long Philibert Trou, the moose-hunter; and, to my regretful astonishment, that wily fox, La Mouche.
“You here, too!” I cried, shaking him by the arm. “If they have caught you, who has escaped!”
“I came in on business, my captain,” said he grimly.
“A woman back of it, monsieur,” grunted Philibert, indifferent to La Mouche’s withering eye-stroke.
Naturally, I did not smile. I met his brooding, deep eyes with a look which told him much. I might, indeed, have even spoken a word of comprehension; but just then I caught sight of my cousin Marc coming from the sacristy. I hastened to greet him with hand and heart.
There was so much to talk of between us two that others, understanding, left us to ourselves. He told me of his little Puritan’s grief, far away in Quebec, of her long suspense, and of how, at last, he had got word to her. “She is a woman among ten thousand, Paul,” said he. “These New Englanders are the people to breed up a wife for a French gentleman.”
I assented most heartily, for I had ever liked and admired that white-skinned Prudence of his. Of my own affairs I told him some things fully, some things not at all; of my accident, my illness, my sojourning with Grûl, everything; but of my coming to the Gaspereau ford and my capture, nothing then.
“There is too much hanging upon it, Marc,” said I. “It touches me too deeply. I cannot talk of it at all while we are like to be interrupted. Let us wait for quiet—when the rest are asleep.”