“No one is so good to women as Charles! He never gets out of patience with me or maman. Let me tell you, you are a lucky girl, 'Mademoiselle' Marguerite, to have such a beau cavalier for your escort. Really, I am jealous of your opportunity; my brother is nearly as fine a man as I am, and I am sure any woman would be proud of my attentions.” Thus she ran on, while I listened, heart-sick at the thought of being in the power of that brother, whom I knew far, far better than she.
But my fortitude was not put to any test, for, on the very evening of M. de Sarennes's return, Lucy fell ill of some violent fever, and by the morning it was clear that our departure was an impossibility.
“Never mind, madame,” said M. de Sarennes, evidently not ill pleased; “I can as well go to my post at Miramichi. I have business there which will detain me about a month; no doubt by that time you will be ready to start.”
“Will you take a letter for Louisbourg?” I asked.
He laughed. “You are like all Paris-bred folk, madame! Miramichi is a good hundred leagues from Louisbourg as the crow flies, and more than twice that as a man can travel. No, no, madame! You must keep your letter until you can deliver it in person.”
He made a pretence of laughing heartily at my discomfiture, and Angélique innocently joined in, thinking the jest to be my ignorance of the country, while my heart was bursting with indignation that he should thus make a mock of my helplessness, for he knew well what it meant to me that Hugh should be ignorant of my whereabouts.
[CHAPTER XVIII]
I AM RESCUED FROM A GREAT DANGER
Lucy's illness proved so serious that all thought of Louisbourg had to be abandoned during the long weeks she lay between life and death. Now it was that I realised the full dreariness of winter. The snow-covered fields and woods had a stillness and emptiness that weighed upon me; my eyes grew weary of the dead whiteness; and that the earth should again be green, and warm, and living, seemed to call for something little short of a miracle. By the water-side it was worse: the drift-ice was piled along the shore in the wildest confusion, magnified and distorted by great banks and fantastic wreaths of snow. Beyond this was the black, open water, bearing the floating ice backward and forward with the changing tides, never at rest, grinding ceaselessly against the frozen barrier between it and the shore, and heralding a coming change of weather with strange, hollow explosions and moanings. The shortness of the days, the desolation of the sweeping storms which imprisoned us, the unbroken isolation, and the disappointment of long delay told heavily on my spirits, which might have failed me had it not been for the constant care demanded by Lucy.
Before she gained strength to be about once more, the feeling of spring was in the air, crows were calling to one another, here and there a rounded hill-top showed a dun, sodden patch under the strengthening sun, and a trickling and gurgling told that, underneath the snow, the waters were gathering to free the rivers and send their burthen of ice sweeping into the St. Lawrence.