The Forge in the Forest by Charles G.D. Roberts

Author:Charles G.D. Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub

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Chapter XIV

My Comrade Shoots Excellently Well

From a medley of dreams, in which I saw Mizpah binding the Black Abbé with cords of her own hair--tight, tighter, till they ate into his flesh, and I trembled at the look of shaking horror in his face; in which then I saw the child chasing butterflies before the door of the Forge in the Forest, and heard Babin's hammer beating musically on his anvil, till the sound became the chiming of the Angelus over the roofs and walls of Quebec, where Mizpah and I walked hand fast together on the topmost bastion,--from such a fleeting and blending confusion as this, I woke to feel a hand laid softly on my face in the dark. I needed no seeing to tell me whose was the hand, so slim, so cool, so softly firm; and I had much ado to keep my lips from reverently kissing it.

"Monsieur, Monsieur," came the whisper, "what is that noise, that voice?"

"Pardon me, comrade, for sleeping so soundly," I murmured, sitting up, and taking her hand in mine with a rough freedom of goodwill, as merely to reassure her. "What is it you hear?"

But before she could reply, I heard it myself, a strange, chanting cry, slow and plangent, from far out upon the water. Presently I caught the words, and knew the voice.

"Woe, woe to Acadie the fair," it came solemnly, "for the day of her desolation draws nigh!"

"It is Grûl," said I, "passing in his canoe, on some strange errand of his."

"Grûl? Who is Grûl?" she questioned, clinging a little to my hand, and then dropping it suddenly.

"A quaint madman of these parts," said I; "and yet I think his madness is in some degree a feigning. He has twice done me inestimable service--once warning us of an immediate peril, and again yesterday, in leading us to the spot where you were held captive. For some reason unknown to me, he has a marvellous kindness for me and mine. But the Black Abbé he hates in deadly fashion--for some ancient and ineffaceable wrong, if the tale tell true."

"And he brought you to us?" she murmured, with a sort of stillness in her voice, which caught me strangely.

"Yes, Grûl did!" said I.

And then there was silence between us, and we heard the mysterious and solemn voice passing, and dying away in the distance. My ears at last being released from the tension of listening, my eyes began to serve me, and through the branches I marked a grayness spreading in the sky.

"We must be stirring, Madame," said I, rising abruptly to my feet. "Let us take our bread down to the brook and eat it there."

But she was already gone, snatching up the sack of bread; and in a few minutes, having righted the canoe and carried it down to a convenient landing-place, I joined her. She was stretched flat beside a little basin of the brook, her cap off, her hair in a tight coil high upon her head, her sleeves pulled up, while she splashed her face and arms in the running coolness.

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