JOUANEAUX, the retainer of the hospital nuns, though used to rising early to feed their pigs and chickens, this time cast his wary glance into the garden while it was yet night. The garden held now no tall growths of mustard, in which the Iroquois had been known to lurk until daylight for victims, but Jouaneaux felt it necessary that he should scan the inclosure himself before any nun chanced to step into it.

The Sisterhood’s dependent animals were quartered under the same roof with themselves, according to Canadian custom. Jouaneaux scattered provender before the cocks were fairly roused to their matin duty of crowing; and the sleepy swine, lifting the tips of their circular noses, grunted inquiringly at him without scrambling up through the dusk.

Scandal might have attached itself even to these nuns of the HÔtel-Dieu for maintaining so youthful a servitor as Jouaneaux, had not the entire settlement of Montreal known his cause for gratitude towards them and the honest bond which held him devoted to their goodness.

He was not the stumpy type of French peasant, but stood tall and lithe, was rosy-faced, and had bright hair like a Saxon’s. A constant smile parted Jouaneaux’s lips and tilted up his nose. He looked always on the point of telling good news. Catastrophe and pain had not erased the up-curves of this expression. So he stood smiling at the pigs while Indian-fighters were gathering from all quarters of Montreal towards the hospital chapel.

“Jouaneaux!” spoke a woman’s well-modulated voice from an inner door.

“Yes, honored Superior,” he responded with alacrity, turning to Sister Judith de BrÉsoles, head of the Sisterhood of St. Joseph, to whom he accorded always this exaggerated term of respect. She carried a taper in her hand, its slender white flame casting up the beauty of her stern spiritualized features.

Bound at all times to the duty of the moment, whether that duty was to boil herbs for dinner, to ring the tocsin at an Indian alarm, or to receive the wounded and the dying, Sister BrÉsoles conferred briefly with her servitor.

“Jouaneaux, is the chapel in complete readiness?”

“Yes, honored Superior; everything is ready.”

“The Commandant Dollard has arrived, and he brought his young relative with him to place her in our care.”

“His sister who lives on his seigniory?”

“Certainly. Could it be any other? His sister Mademoiselle Dollard, therefore—”

“Pardon, honored Superior,”—the tip of his nose shifted with expressive twitches, and he had the air of imparting something joyful,—“Mademoiselle de Granville. She is but half-sister to Monsieur Dollard.”

“The minutest relationships of remote families are not hid from you, Jouaneaux,” commented Sister BrÉsoles. “But I have to mention to you that the parlor fire must be lighted now and every morning for Mademoiselle de Granville, if she choose to sit there.”

“It shall be done, honored Superior.”

“And that is all I had to tell you, I believe,” concluded Sister Judith, turning immediately to the next duty on her list.

Early as it was, the population of Montreal was pressing into the palisade gate of the HÔtel-Dieu. Matrons led their children, who mopped sleep from their eyes with little dark fists and stood on tiptoe to look between moving figures for the Indian-fighters. Some women had pale and tear-sodden cheeks, but most faces showed that rapturous enthusiasm which heroic undertaking rouses in the human breast. Unlike many meetings of a religious character, this one attracted men in majority: the seignior, the gentilhomme, the soldier from the fort, the working-smith or armorer.

When Sister BrÉsoles received Claire she had given her directly into the hands of a white, gentle little nun, the frame-work of whose countenance was bare and expressive. She took the girl’s hand between her sympathetic and work-worn tiny palms.

They stood in the refectory, the dawn-light just jotting their outlines to each other.

“I am Sister MacÉ, dear mademoiselle,” said the little nun. “Do you wish me to sit by you in the chapel?”

“I cannot sit in the chapel, Sister.”

“Then let me take you to our parlor. My Sister BrÉsoles will have a fire lighted there. On these mornings the air from the river comes in chill.”

“No, Sister,” said Claire, her eyes closed. “Thank you. Be not too kind to me. I wish to retain command of myself.”

Sister MacÉ let a tear slip down each cheek hollow and took one hand away from Claire’s to tweak her dot-like nose and catch the tears on a corner of her veil. The Sisters of St. Joseph were poorly clad, but the very fragrance of cleanness stirred in Sister MacÉ’s robe. She glanced about for something which might comfort Claire by way of the stomach; for stomach comfort had gained importance to these gently bred nuns after their Canadian winters on frozen bread.

“Sister,” said Claire, “is there any hiding-place about the walls of the chapel where I can thrust myself so that no weakness of mine may be seen, and behold the ceremonies?”

“There is the rood-loft,” replied Sister MacÉ. “And if you go directly to it before the chapel is opened for the service, nobody would dream you were there.”

“Let us go directly,” said Claire.

Directly they went. Sister MacÉ paused but to close with care the chapel door behind them. The chapel was dark and they groped across it and up the stairway, Sister MacÉ talking low and breathlessly on the ascent.

“Ah, mademoiselle, what a blessed and safe retreat is the rood-loft! How many times have my Sister Maillet and I flown to that sacred corner and prostrated ourselves before the Holy Sacrament while the yells of the Iroquois rung in our very ears! We expected every instant to be seized, and to feel the scalps torn from our heads. I have not the fortitude to bear these things as hath my Sister BrÉsoles,—this way, mademoiselle; give me your hand,—but I can appreciate noble courage; and, mademoiselle, I look with awe upon these young men about to take their vows.”

The sacrament and its appendages had been removed from Sister MacÉ’s retreat to the altar below. There was a low balustrade at the front of this narrow gallery which would conceal people humble enough to flatten themselves beside it, and here the woman bereft and the woman her sympathizer did lie on the floor and look down from the rood-loft. Before many moments an acolyte came in with his taper and lighted all the candles on the altar. Out of dusk the rough little room, with its few sacred daubs and its waxen images, sprung into mellow beauty.

Claire watched all that passed, sometimes dropping her face to the floor, and sometimes trembling from head to foot, but letting no sound betray her. She saw the settlement of Montreal crowd into the inclosure as soon as the chapel door was opened, and a Sulpitian priest stand forth by the altar. She saw the seventeen men file into space reserved for them before the altar and kneel there four abreast, Dollard at their head kneeling alone.

The chapel was very silent, French vivacity, which shapes itself into animated fervor on religious occasions, being repressed by this spectacle.

Claire knew the sub-governor Maisonneuve by his surroundings and attendants before Sister MacÉ breathed him into her ear.

“And that man who now comes forward,” the nun added as secretly—“that is Charles Le Moyne, as brave a man as any in the province, and rich and worthy, moreover. His seigniory is opposite Montreal on the south-east shore.”

Charles Le Moyne, addressing himself to the kneeling men, spoke out for his colleagues and brethren of the settlement who could not leave their farms until the spring crops were all planted. He urged the seventeen to wait until he and his friends could join the expedition. He would promise they should not be delayed long.

Claire watched Dollard lift his smiling face and shake his head with decision, against which urging was powerless.

She witnessed the oath which they took neither to give quarter to nor accept quarter from the Iroquois. She witnessed their consecration and the ceremonial of mass. The kneeling men were young, few of them being older than Dollard.[5] They represented the colony, from soldier and gentilhomme down to the lower ranks of handicraftsmen. Whatever their ancestry had been, a baptism of glory descended upon all those faces alike. Their backs were towards the crowded chapel, but the women in the rood-loft could see this unconscious light, and as Claire looked at Dollard she shuddered from head to foot, feeling that her whole silent body was one selfish scream, “He is forgetting me!”

Lighted altar, lifted host, bowed people, and even the knightly splendor of Dollard’s face, all passed from Claire’s knowledge.

“It is now over, dear mademoiselle,” whispered Sister MacÉ, sighing. “Do you see?—the men are standing up to march out four abreast, headed by the commandant. Ah, how the people will crowd them and shake their hands! Are you not looking, my child? O St. Joseph! patron of little ones, she is in a dead faint. Mademoiselle!” Sister MacÉ began to rub Claire’s temples and hands and to pant with anxiety, so that the rood-loft must have been betrayed had not the chapel been emptying itself of a crowd running eagerly after other objects.

“Let me be,” spoke Claire, hoarsely. “I am only dying to the world.”

Sister MacÉ wept again. She patted Claire’s wrist with her small fingers. The girl’s bloodless face and tight-shut eyes were made more pallid by early daylight, for the candles were being put out upon the altar. Sister MacÉ in her solicitude forgot all about the people pouring through the palisade gate and following their heroes to the river-landing.

“Oh, how strong is the love of brother and sister!” half soliloquized this gentle nun. “These ties so sweeten life; but when the call of Heaven comes, how hard they rend asunder!”

The trampling below hastened itself, ebbed away, entirely ceasing upon the flags of the HÔtel-Dieu and becoming a clatter along the wharf.

“Is the chapel vacant now, Sister?” her charge breathed at her ear.

“The last person has left it, dear mademoiselle.”

“Presently I will go down to lie on that spot where he knelt before the altar.”

“Shall I assist you down, dear mademoiselle?” said Sister MacÉ with the solicitude of a sparrow trying to lift a wounded robin.

“No, Sister. But of your charity do this for me in my weakness. Go down and stand by the place. I have not known if any foot pressed it, and I will not have it profaned.”

Sister MacÉ, therefore, who respected all requests, and who herself had lain stretched on that cold stone pavement doing her religious penances, descended the stairs and stood near the altar; while her charge followed, holding by railing or sinking upon step, until she reached the square of stone where Dollard had knelt.

As a mother pounces upon her child in idolatrous abandon, so Claire fell upon that chill spot and encircled it with her arms, sobbing:

“Doubt not that I shall find you again, my Dollard, my Dollard! Once before I prayed mightily to Heaven for a blessing, and I got my blessing.”

While she lay there, cheer after cheer rose from the river-landing, wild enthusiasm bursting out again as soon as the last round had died away. The canoes had put out on their expedition. Those who watched them with the longest watching would finally turn aside to other things. But the woman on the chapel floor lay stretched there for twenty-four hours.