Part 44 (2/2)

”Yes. It was Owaissa who freed me from captivity. She came down to Bois Blanc and heard the story and sent me away in her own canoe with her favorite servant. Louis Marsac was up at St. Ignace getting a priest while she waited. I cannot think he was at all honest in proposing marriage to me when another had the right. But there was a grand time it was said, and they were very happy.”

Madame stared. ”It was a good thing for you that you did not care for him. I had a distrust for him. He was too handsome. And then he believed nothing and laughed at religion. But the Marsacs are going to be very rich it is said. You did not see them married?”

”Oh, no.” Jeanne laughed with a bitterness she had not meant to put into her voice. ”He was away when Owaissa came to me and heard my plight. And then there was need of haste. I had to go at once, and it would not have been pleasant even if I could have waited.”

”No, no. Men are much given to make love to young girls who have no one to look after them. They think nothing of it.”

”So it was fortunate that it was distasteful to me.”

Jeanne had a girl's pride in wanting this woman to understand that she was in no wise hurt by Marsac's recreancy. Then she added, ”The girl was beautiful as Indian girls go, and it seems a most excellent marriage.

She will be fond of that wild northern country. I could not be content in it.”

Jeanne felt that she was curiously changed, though sometimes she longed pa.s.sionately for the wild little girl who had been ready for every kind of sport and pleasure. But the children with whom she had played were grown now, boys great strapping fellows with manners both coa.r.s.e and shy, going to work at various businesses, and the girls had lovers or husbands,--they married early then. So she seemed left alone. She did not care for their chatter nor their babies of which they seemed so proud.

So she kept her house and nursed Pani back to some semblance of her former self. But often it was a touch of the childhood of old age, and she rambled about those she had known, the De Longueils and Bellestres, and the night Jeanne had been left in her arms.

Jeanne liked the chapel minister and his wife very much. The lady had so many subjects to converse about that never led to curious questions. The minister lent her books and they talked them over afterward. This was the world she liked.

But she had not lost her love for that other world of freedom and exhilaration. After a brief Indian summer with days of such splendor that it seemed as if the great Artist was using his most magnificent colors, winter set in sharp and with a snap that startled every one.

Snow blocked the roads and the sparkling expanse of crust on the top was the delight of the children, who walked and slid and pulled each other in long loads like a chain of dogs. And some of the lighter weight young people skated over it like flying birds. In the early evening all was gayety. Jeanne was not lacking in admirers. Young Loisel often called for her, and Martin Lavosse would easily have verged on the sentimental if Jeanne had not been so gay and unconscious. He was quite sore over the defection of Rose De Ber, who up in one of the new streets was hobn.o.bbing with the gentry and quite looking down on the Beesons.

Then the minister and his wife often joined these outdoor parties. Since he neither played cards, danced, nor drank in after-dinner symposiums, this spirited amus.e.m.e.nt stirred his blood. Pani went to bed early, and Margot would bring in her sewing and see that nothing untoward happened.

Few of the stores were open in the evenings. Short as the day was, all the business could be done in it. Now and then one saw a feeble light in a window where a man stayed to figure on some loss or gain.

Fleets were laid up or ventured only on short journeys. From the northern country came stories of ice and snow that chilled one's marrow.

Yet the great fires, the fur rugs and curtains and soft blankets kept one comfortable within.

There were some puzzling questions for Jeanne. She liked the freedom of conscience at the chapel, and then gentle Father Rameau drew her to the church.

”If I had two souls,” she said one day to the minister, ”I should be quite satisfied. And it seems to me sometimes as if I were two different people,” looking up with a bright half smile. ”In childhood I used to lay some of my wildnesses on to the Indian side. I had a curious fancy for a strain of Indian blood.”

”But you have no Indian ancestry?”

”I think not. I am not so anxious for it now,” laughing gayly. ”But that side of me protests against the servitude Father Gilbert so insists upon. And I hate confession. To turn one's self inside out, to give away the sacred trusts of others--”

”No, that is not necessary,” he declared hastily.

”But when the other lives are tangled up with yours, when you can only tell half truths--”

He smiled then. ”Mademoiselle Jeanne, your short life has not had time to get much entangled with other lives, or with secrets you are aware of.”

”I think it has been curiously entangled,” she replied. ”M'sieu Bellestre, whom I have almost forgotten, M. Loisel--and the old schoolmaster I told you of, who I fancy now was a sad heretic--”

She paused and flushed, while her eyes were slowly downcast. There was Monsieur St. Armand. How could she explain this to a priest? And was not Monsieur a heretic, too? That was her own precious, delightful secret, and she would give it into no one's keeping.

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