“I waited for you till they _dragged_ me away. But I knew you’d come.”
“How did you know that, mother?” whispered Yvonne, delighted to find that this momentous act of hers had seemed to some one just the expected and inevitable thing. “Why, I didn’t know it myself till half an hour ago.”
“I knew it,” she reiterated. “Why, dear heart, I knew all along you loved him.”
And at last, strange as it may appear, this seemed to Yvonne de Lamourie, penniless, going into exile with the companionship of misery, an all-sufficient and all-explicative answer.
Mother Pêche lived to do good deeds, and loved to think she did them from an ill motive. Her witchcraft, devoutly believed in by herself, and by a good half of Grand Pré as well, was never known to curse, but ever to bless; yet its white magic she called black art. There was no one sick, there was no one sorrowful, there was no child in all Grand Pré, but loved her; yet it was her whim to believe herself feared, and in hourly peril of anathema. Even Father Fafard, whom she affected to deride, but in truth vastly reverenced, found it hard to maintain a proper show of austerity toward this incomprehensible old woman.
The boat, soon loaded, went dragging through the flame-lit tide toward the ship. The old dame sat clutching Yvonne’s hand under the warm privacy of the cloak. Here was a weight off her mind. She loved Yvonne de Lamourie and Paul Grande better than any one else in the world; and with all her heart she believed that to hold them apart would mean ruin to others in the end, as well as to themselves. This which had now come about (she had trembled lest Yvonne should not prove quite strong enough at the last) seemed to her the best exit from a bad closure. Anderson she had ever regarded with hostile and unreasoning contempt; and now it suited her whim to tell herself that a part of her present satisfaction lay in the thought of him so ignominiously thwarted. But in very truth she believed that the thwarting was for his good; that he would recover from his hurt in time, and see himself well saved from the lifelong mordancy of a loveless marriage. In a word, what Mother Pêche wanted was the good of those she loved, and as little ill as might be to those she accounted enemies.