A Sister to Evangeline
Page 18
Chapter XVII
Memory is a Child
When I could no longer discern even the shore whence we had started, Iin a measure came to myself. Nicole—sagacious Nicole—had left me to mydream. He had got up the mainsail and jib unaided, and now sat like astatue at the tiller. We were in the open basin, running with a steadywind abeam. There was quite a swell on, and the waves looked sinister,cruel as steel, under the bare white moon. A fading glow still markedthe spot where the De Lamourie house had stood; but save for that therewas no hint of man’s hand in all the wild, empty, hissing, wonderfulopen. Far to the left lay Blomidon, a crouching lion; and straight aheada low, square bluff guarded the mouth of the Piziquid. I saw that wewere nearing it rapidly, for Nicole’s boat had legs. Once in thePiziquid mouth, we should have a hard run up against the ebb; but thewind would then be right aft, and I felt that we could stem the currentand make our landing in time.
“Will this wind carry her against the Piziquid tide?” I asked Nicole. Itwas the first word spoken in perhaps an hour, and my voice soundedstrange to me.
“We’ll catch the first of the flood soon after we get inside, MasterPaul,” said he, in the most matter-of-fact voice in the world.
Content with this, and knowing that for the time there was nothing to dobut wait, I lapsed back into my reverie.
I felt exhausted, not from bodily effort, but from emotion. My nervesand brain felt sleepy; yet nothing was further from my eyes than sleep.Situations and deeds, mental and physical crises, agonies and ecstasiesand dull despair, had so trodden upon one another’s heels that I wasbreathless. I caught at my brain, as it were, to make it keep still longenough to think. Yet I could not think to any purpose. I was aware ofnothing so keenly as the sensation that had intoxicated me as I heldYvonne’s unconsenting body for those few moments in my arms, whileremoving her from the boat. To have touched her at all against her willseemed a sacrilege; but when a sacrilege has seemed a plain necessity Ihave never been the one to balk at it. Now I found myself looking with afoolish affection at the arms which had been guilty of thatsacrilege—and straightway, coming to my wits again, I glanced at Nicoleto see if he had divined the vast dimensions of my folly.
From this I passed to wondering what was truly now my hope or mydespair. During all my talk with Yvonne—from the moment, indeed, whenFather Fafard had told me of her agitation over Anderson’s peril—I hadbeen as one without hope, in darkness utterly. Only a great love—_the_great love, as I had told myself—could inspire this desperate and daringsolicitude. And against the one great love, in such a woman as Yvonne, Iwell knew that nothing earthly could prevail. My own bold resolution hadbeen formed on the theory that her betrothal was but the offspring ofexpediency upon respect. Now, however, either the remembrance of hertouch deluded me or something in her attitude upon the wharf heldsignificance, for assuredly I began to dream that remorse rather thanlove might have been the mainspring of her agitation; remorse, and pity,and something of that strange mother passion which a true woman may feeltoward a man who stirs within her none of the lover passion at all. Ithought, too, of the wild sense of dishonour she must feel, believing mea traitor and herself my dupe. Strange comfort this, of a surety! Yet Igrasped at it. I would prove her no dupe, myself no traitor; and standat last where I had stood before, with perhaps some advantage. And myrival—he, I swore, should owe his life to me; a kind but cruel kind ofrevenge.
At last, my heart beating uncomfortably from the too swift self-chasingof my thoughts, I stood up, shook myself, and looked about me. We hadrounded the bluff, and were standing up the broad Piziquid straightbefore the wind; and the boat was pitching hotly in the short seas wherethe wind thwarted the tide. I glanced at Nicole’s face. It was asplaintively placid as if he dreamed of the days when he leaned at hismother’s knee.
But the expression of his countenance changed; for now, from out theshadowed face of the bluff, came that bell-like, boding cry—
“Woe, woe to Acadie the Fair, for the hour of her desolation is athand!”
Nicole looked awed.
“He knows, that Grûl!” he muttered. “It’s coming quick now, I’ll bebound!”
“Well, so are we, Nicole!” I rejoined cheerfully; “and that’s what mostconcerns me at this moment.”
I peered eagerly ahead, but could not, in that deluding light,discriminate the mouth of the Kenneticook stream from its low adjacentshores. Presently the waves and pitching lessened. The ebb had ceased,and the near shore slipped by more rapidly. The slack of tide lasted buta few minutes. Then the flood set in—noisily and with a great front offoam, as it does in that river of high tides; and the good boat sped onat a pace that augured accomplishment. In what seemed to me but a fewminutes the mouth of the Kenneticook opened, whitely glimmering, beforeus.
Barely had I descried it when Nicole put the helm up sharp and ranstraight in shore.
“What are you doing, man?” I cried, in astonishment. “You’ll have usaground!”
But the words were not more than out of my mouth when I understood. Isaw the narrow entrance to a small creek, emptying between high banks.
“Oh!” said I. “I beg your pardon, Nicole; I see you know what you’reabout all right!”
He chuckled behind unsmiling lips.
“_They’ll_ go up the Kenneticook in their canoes,” said he. “We’ll hidethe boat here, where they’ll not find it; and we’ll cut across the ridgeto the Englishman’s. Quicker, too!”
The creek was narrow and winding, but deep for the first two hundredyards of its course; and Nicole, he knew every turn and shallow. Webeached the boat where she could not be seen from the river, tied her toa tree on the bank above so that she might not get away at high tide,and then plunged into the dense young fir woods that clothed the lowerreaches of the Piziquid shore. There was no trail, but it was plain tome that Nicole well knew the way.
“You’ve gone this way before, Nicole?” said I.
“Yes, monsieur, a few times,” he answered.
I considered for a moment, pushing aside the wet, prickly branches as Iwent. Then—
“What is her name, Nicole?” I asked.
“Julie, Master Paul,” said he softly.
“Ah,” said I, “then you had reasons of your own for coming with meto-night?”
“Not so!” he answered, a rebuking sobriety in his voice. “None, save mylove for you and your house, Master Paul. _She_ is in no peril. She isfar from here, safe in Isle St. Jean this month past.”
“I beg your pardon, my friend,” said I, at once. “I know your love. Isaid it but to banter you, for I had not guessed that you had been ledcaptive, Nicole.”
“A man’s way, Master Paul, when a woman wills!” said he cheerfully.
But I had no more thought of it than to be glad it had taught NicoleBrun a short path through the woods to Kenneticook.
What strange tricks do these our tangled makeups play us! I know thatthat night, during that swift half-hour’s run through the woods, mywhole brain, my every purpose, was concentrated upon the rescue ofGeorge Anderson. The price I was prepared to pay was life, no less. Yetall the shaping emotion of it—sharp enough, one would think, to cut itslines forever on a man’s face, to say nothing of his brain—hasbequeathed to me no least etching of remembrance. Of great things all Irecall is that the name “Yvonne” seemed ever just within my lips—so thatonce or twice I thought I had spoken it aloud. But my senses were verywide awake, taking full advantage, perhaps, of the heart’spreoccupation. My eyes, ears, nose, touch, they busied themselves tonote a thousand trifles—and these are what come back to me now. Suchidle, idle things alone remain, out of that race with death.
Things idle as these: I see a dew-wet fir-top catch the moonlight for aninstant and flash to whiteness, an up-thrust lance of silver; I see theshadow of a dead, gnarled branch cast upon a mossy open in startlingsemblance of a crucifix—so clear, I cannot but stoop and touch itreverently as I
pass; I see, at the edge of a grassy glade, a company oftall buttercups, their stems invisible, their petals seeming to floattoward me, a squadron of small, light wings. I hear—I hear the rush ofthe tide die out as we push deeper into the woods; I hear the smoothswish of branches thrust apart; I hear the protesting, unresonant creakof the green underbrush as we tread it down, and the sharp crackle ofdry twigs as we thread the aisles of older forest; I hear, from the faceof a moonlit bluff upon our left, the long, mournful _Whóo-hu-hu—Hóo-oo_of the brown owl. I smell the savour of juniper, of bruised snakeroot,of old, slow-rotting wood; with once a fairy breath of unseen _linnæa_;and once, at the fringed brink of a rivulet, the pungent fragrance ofwild mint. I feel the frequent wet slappings of branches on my face; Ifeel the strong prickles of the fir, the cool, flat frondage of thespruce and hemlock, the unresisting, feathery spines of the younghackmatack trees; I feel, once, a gluey web upon my face, and theabhorrence with which I dash off the fat spider that clings to my chin;I feel the noisome slump of my foot as I tread upon a humped and swollengathering of toad-stools.
All this is what comes back to me—and Nicole’s form, ever silent, everjust ahead, wasting no breath; till at last we came upon a fence, andbeyond the fence wide fields, and beyond the fields a low white housewith wings and outbuildings, at peace in the open moonlight.
“We are in time, Master Paul!” said Nicole quietly.