AGAPIT, THE ACADIEN.
"The music of our life is keyed
To moods that sweep athwart the soul;
The strain will oft in gladness roll,
Or die in sobs and tears at need;
But sad or gay, 'tis ever true
That, e'en as flowers from light take hue,
The key is of our mood the deed."
AMINTA. CORNELIUS O'BRIEN,
_Archbishop of Halifax_.
After Mrs. Rose à Charlitte left Vesper she passed through the kitchen,
and, ascending an open stairway leading to regions above, was soon at
the door of the highest room in the house.
Away up there, sitting at a large table drawn up to the window which
commanded an extensive view of the Bay, sat a sturdy, black-haired young
man. As Mrs. Rose entered the room she glanced about approvingly--for
she was a model housekeeper--at the neatly arranged books and papers on
tables and shelves, and then said, regretfully, and in French, "There is
another of them."
"Of them,--of whom?" said the young man, peevishly, and in the same
language.
"Of the foolish ones who write," continued Mrs. Rose, with gentle
mischief; "who waste much time in scribbling."
"There are people whose brains are continually stewing over
cooking-stoves," said the young man, scornfully; "they are incapable of
rising higher."
"La, la, Agapit," she said, good-naturedly. "Do not be angry with thy
cousin. I came to warn thee lest thou shouldst talk freely to him and
afterward be sorry."
The young man threw his pen on the table, pushed back his chair, and,
springing to his feet, began to pace excitedly up and down the room,
gesticulating eagerly as he talked.
"When fine weather comes," he exclaimed, "strangers flock to the Bay. We
are glad to see them,--all but these abominable idiots. Therefore when
they arrive let the frost come, let us have hail, wind, and snow to
drive them home, that we may enjoy peace."
"But unfortunately in June we have fine weather," said Mrs. Rose.
"I will insult him," said her black-haired cousin, wildly. "I will drive
him from the house," and he stood on tiptoe and glared in her face.
"No, no; thou wilt do nothing of the sort, Agapit."
"I will," he said, distractedly. "I will, I will, I will."
"Agapit," said the young woman, firmly, "if it were not for the
strangers I should have only crusts for my child, not good bread and
butter, therefore calm thyself. Thou must be civil to this stranger."
"I will not," he said, sullenly.
Mrs. Rose à Charlitte's temper gave way. "Pack up thy clothes," she
said, angrily; "there is no living with thee,--thou art so disagreeable.
Take thy old trash, thy papers so old and dusty, and leave my house.
Thou wilt make me starve,--my child will not be educated. Go,--I cast
thee off."
Agapit became calm as he contemplated her wrathful, beautiful face.
"Thou art like all women," he said, composedly, "a little excitable at
times. I am a man, therefore I understand thee," and pushing back his
coat he stuck his thumbs in the armholes and majestically resumed his
walk about the room.
"Come now, cease thy crying," he went on, uneasily, after a time, when
Rose, who had thrown herself into a chair and had covered her face with
her hands, did not look at him. "I shall not leave thee, Rose."
"He is very distinguished," she sobbed, "very polite, and his finger
nails are as white as thy bedspread. He is quite a gentleman; why does
he write for those wicked journals?"
"Thou hast been talking to him, Rose," said her cousin, suspiciously,
stopping short and fixing her with a fiery glance; "with thy usual
innocence thou hast told him all that thou dost know and ever wilt
know."
Rose shuddered, and withdrew her hands from her eyes. "I told him
nothing, not a word."
"Thou didst not tell him of thy wish to educate thy boy, of thy two
hundred dollars in the bank, of thy husband, who teased thy stepmother
till she married thee to him, nor of me, for example?" and his voice
rose excitedly.
His cousin was quite composed now. "I told him nothing," she repeated,
firmly.
"If thou didst do so," he continued, threateningly, "it will all come
out in a newspaper,--'Melting Innocence of an Acadien Landlady. She
Tells a Reporter in Five Minutes the Story of Her Life.'"
"It will not appear," said Mrs. Rose, hastily. "He is a worthy young
man, and handsome, too. There is not on the Bay a handsomer young man. I
will ask him to write nothing, and he will listen to me."
"Oh, thou false one," cried the young man, half in vexation, half in
perplexity. "I wish that thou wert a child,--I would shake thee till thy
teeth chattered!"
Mrs. Rose ran from the room. "He is a pig, an imbecile, and he terrifies
me so that I tell what is not true. What will Father Duvair say to me? I
will rise at six to-morrow, and go to confession."
Vesper went early to bed that night, and slept soundly until early the
next morning, when he opened his eyes to a vision of hazy green fields,
a wide sheet of tremulous water, and a quiet, damp road, bordered by
silent houses. He sprang from his bed, and went to the open window. The
sun was just coming from behind a bank of clouds. He watched the Bay
lighting up under its rays, the green fields brightening, the moisture
evaporating; then hastily throwing on his clothes, he went down-stairs,
unlatched the front door, and hurried across the road into a hay-field,
where the newly cut grass, dripping with moisture, wet his slippered but
stockingless feet.
Down by the rocks he saw a small bathing-house. He slipped off his
clothes, and, clad only in a thin bathing-suit, stood shivering for an
instant at the edge of the water. "It will be frightfully cold," he
muttered. "Dare I--yes, I do," and he plunged boldly into the
deliciously salt waves, and swam to and fro, until he was glowing from
head to foot.
As he was hurrying up to the inn, a few minutes later, he saw, coming
down the road, a small two-wheeled cart, in which was seated Mrs. Rose à
Charlitte. She was driving a white pony, and she sat demure, charming,
with an air of penitence about her, and wearing the mourning garb of
Acadien women,--a plain black dress, a black shawl, and a black silk
handkerchief, drawn hood-wise over her flaxen mop of hair and tied under
her chin.
The young man surveyed her approvingly. She seemed to belong naturally
to the cool, sweet dampness of the morning, and he guessed correctly
that she had been to early mass in the white church whose steeple he
could see in the distance. He was amused with the shy, embarrassed "_Bon
jour_" (good morning) that she gave him as she passed, and murmuring,
"The shadow of _The Evening News_ is still upon her," he went to his
room, and made his toilet for breakfast.
An hour later, a loud bell rang through the house, and Vesper, in making
his way to the dining-room, met a reserved, sulky-faced young man in the
hall, who bowed coolly and stepped aside for him to pass.
"H'm, Agapit LeNoir," reflected Vesper, darting a critical glance at
him. "The Acadien who was to unbosom himself to me. He does not look as
if he would enjoy the process," and he took his seat at the table, where
Mrs. Rose à Charlitte, grown strangely quiet, served his breakfast in an
almost unbroken silence.
Vesper thoughtfully poured some of the thick yellow cream on his
porridge, and enjoyably dallied over it, but when his landlady would
have set before him a dish of smoking hot potatoes and beefsteak, he
said, "I do not care for anything further."
Rose à Charlitte drew back in undisguised concern. "But you have eaten
nothing. Agapit has taken twice as much as this."
"That is the young man I met just now?"
"Yes, he is my cousin; very kind to me. His parents are dead, and he was
brought up by my stepmother. He is so clever, so clever! It is truly
strange what he knows. His uncle, who was a priest, left him many
papers, and all day, when Agapit does not work, he sits and writes or
reads. Some day he will be a learned man--"
Rose paused abruptly. In her regret at the stranger's want of appetite
she was forgetting that she had resolved to have no further conversation
with him, and in sudden confusion she made the excuse that she wished to
see her child, and melted away like a snowflake, in the direction of the
kitchen, where Vesper had just heard Narcisse's sweet voice asking
permission to talk to the Englishman from Boston.
The young American wandered out to the stable. Two Acadiens were there,
asking Agapit for the loan of a set of harness. At Vesper's approach
they continued their conversation in French, although he had distinctly
heard them speaking excellent English before he joined them.
These men were employing an almost new language to him. This was not the
French of _L'Évangéline_, of Doctor Arseneau, nor of Rose à Charlitte.
Nor was it _patois_ such as he had heard in France, and which would have
been unintelligible to him. This must be the true Acadien dialect, and
he listened with pleasure to the softening and sweetening of some
syllables and the sharpening and ruining of others. They were saying
_ung houmme_, for a man. This was not unmusical; neither was
_persounne_, for nobody; but the _ang_ sound so freely interspersing
their sentences was detestable; as was also the reckless introduction of
English phrases, such as "all right," "you bet," "how queer," "too
proud," "funny," "steam-cars," and many others.
Their conversation for some time left the stable, then it returned along
the line of discussion of a glossy black horse that stood in one of the
stalls.
"_Ce cheval est de bounne harage_" (this horse is well-bred), said one
of the Acadiens, admiringly, and Vesper's thoughts ran back to a word in
the Latin grammar of his boyhood. _Hara_, a pen or stable. _De bonne
race_, a modern Frenchman would be likely to say. Probably these men
were speaking the language brought by their ancestors to Acadie; without
doubt they were. On this Bay would be presented to him the curious
spectacle of the descendants of a number of people lifted bodily out of
France, and preserving in their adopted country the tongue that had been
lost to the motherland. In France the language had drifted. Here the
Acadiens were using the same syllables that had hung on the lips of
kings, courtiers, poets, and wits of three and four hundred years ago.
With keen interest, for he had a passion for the study of languages, he
carefully analyzed each sentence that he heard, until, fearing that his
attitude might seem impertinent to the Acadiens, he strolled away.
His feet naturally turned in the direction of the corner, the most
lively spot in Sleeping Water. In the blacksmith's shop a short, stout
young Acadien with light hair, blue eyes, and a dirty face and arms, was
striking the red-hot tip of a pickax with ringing blows. He nodded
civilly enough to Vesper when he joined the knot of men who stood about
the wide door watching him, but no one else spoke to him.
A farmer was waiting to have a pair of cream white oxen shod, a
stable-keeper, from another part of _la ville française_, was
impatiently chafing and fretting over the amount of time required to
mend his sulky wheel, and conversing with him were two well-dressed
young men, who appeared to be Acadiens from abroad spending their
holidays at home.
Vesper's arrival had the effect of dispersing the little group. The
stable-man moved away to his sulky, as if he preferred the vicinity of
his roan horse, who gazed at him so benevolently, to that of Vesper, who
surveyed him so indifferently. The farmer entered the shop and sat down
on a box in a dark corner, while the Acadien young men, after cold
glances at the newcomer, moved away to the post-office.
After a time Vesper remembered that he must have some Canadian stamps,
and followed them. Outside the shop five or six teams were lined up.
They were on their way to the wharf below, and were loaded with more of
the enormous trees that he had seen the day before. Probably their
sturdy strength, hoarded through long years in Acadien forests, would be
devoted to the support of some warehouse or mansion in his native
Puritan city, whose founders had called so loudly for the destruction of
the French.
Vesper cast a regretful glance in the direction of the trees, and
entered the little shop, whose well-stocked shelves were full of rolls
of cotton and flannel, and boxes of groceries, confectionery, and
stationery. The drivers of the ox-teams were inside, doing their
shopping. They were somewhat rougher in appearance than the inhabitants
of Sleeping Water, and were louder and noisier in their conversation.
Vesper saw a young Acadien whisper a few words to one of them, and the
teamster in return scowled fiercely at him, and muttered something about
"a goddam Yankee."
The young American stared coolly at him, and, going up to the counter,
purchased his stamps from a fat man in shirt-sleeves, who served him
with exquisite and distant courtesy. Then, leaving the shop, he shrugged
his shoulders, and went back the way he had come, murmuring, in amused
curiosity, "I must solve this mystery of _The Evening News_. My friend
Agapit is infecting all who come within the circle of his influence."
He walked on past the inn, staring with interest at the houses bordering
the road. A few were very small, a few very old. He could mark the
transition of a family in some cases from their larval state in a low,
gray, caterpillar-like house of one story to a gay-winged butterfly home
of two or three stories. However, on the whole, the dwellings were
nearly all of the same size,--there were no sharp distinctions between
rich and poor. He saw no peasants, no pampered landlords. These Acadiens
all seemed to be small farmers, and all were on an equality.
The creaking of an approaching team caught his attention. It was drawn
by a pair of magnificent red oxen, groomed as carefully as if they had
been horses, and beside them walked an old man, who was holding an
ejaculatory conversation with them in English; for the Acadiens of the
Bay Saint-Mary always address their oxen and horses as if they belonged
to the English race.
"I wonder whether this worthy man in homespun has been informed that I
am a kind of leper," reflected Vesper, as he uttered a somewhat guarded
"_Bon jour_."
"_Bon jour_," said the old man, delightedly, and he halted and
admonished his companions to do the same.
"_Il fait beau_" (it is a fine day), pursued Vesper, cautiously.
"_Oui, mais je crais qu'il va mouiller_" (yes, but I think it is going
to rain), said the Acadien, with gentle affability; then he went on,
apologetically, and in English, "I do not speak the good French."
"It is the best of French," said Vesper, "for it is old."
"And you," continued the old man, not to be outdone in courtesy, "you
speak like the sisters of St. Joseph who once called at my house. Their
words were like round pebbles dropping from their mouths."
Vesper smoothed his mustache, and glanced kindly at his aged companion,
who proceeded to ask him whether he was staying at the inn. "Ah, it is a
good inn," he went on, "and Rose à Charlitte is _très-smart,
très-smart_. Perhaps you do not understand my English," he added, when
Vesper did not reply to him.
"On the contrary, I find that you speak admirably."
"You are kind," said the old man, shaking his head, "but my English
langwidge is spiled since my daughter went to Bostons, for I talk to no
one. She married an Irish boy; he is a nusser."
"An usher,--in a theatre?"
"No, sir, in a cross-spittal. He nusses sick people, and gets two
dollars a day."
"Oh, indeed."
"Do you come from Bostons?" asked the old man.
"Yes, I do."
"And do you know my daughter?"
"What is her name?"
The Acadien reflected for some time, then said it was MacCraw, whereupon
Vesper assured him that he had never had the pleasure of meeting her.
"Is your trade an easy one?" asked the old man, wistfully.
"No; very hard."
"You are then a farmer."
"No; I wish I were. My trade is taking care of my health."
The Acadien examined him from head to foot. "Your face is beautifuller
than a woman's, but you are poorly built."
Vesper drew up his straight and slender figure. He was not surprised
that it did not come up to the Acadien's standard of manly beauty.
"Let us shake hands lest we never meet again," said the old man, so
gently, so kindly, and with so much benevolence, that Vesper responded,
warmly, "I hope to see you some other time."
"Perhaps you will call. We are but poor, yet if it would please you--"
"I shall be most happy. Where do you live?"
"Near the low down brook, way off there. Demand Antoine à Joe Rimbaut,"
and, smiling and nodding farewell, the old man moved on.
"A good heart," said Vesper, looking after him.
"Caw, caw," said a solemn voice at his elbow.
He turned around. One of the blackest of crows sat on a garden fence
that surrounded a neat pink cottage. The cottage was itself smothered in
lilacs, whose fragrant blossoms were in their prime, although the Boston
lilacs had long since faded and died.
"Do not be afraid, sir," said a woman in the inevitable handkerchief,
who jumped up from a flower bed that she was weeding, "he is quite
tame."
"_Un corbeau apprivoisé_" (a tame crow), said Vesper, lifting his cap.
"_Un corbeau privé_, we say," she replied, shyly. "You speak the good
French, like the priests out of France."
She was not a very young woman, nor was she very pretty, but she was
delightfully modest and retiring in her manner, and Vesper, leaning
against the fence, assured her that he feared the Acadiens were lacking
in a proper appreciation of their ability to speak their own language.
After a time he looked over the fields behind her cottage, and asked the
name of a church crowning a hill in the distance.
"It is the Saulnierville church," she replied, "but you must not walk so
far. You will stay to dinner?"
While Vesper was politely declining her invitation, a Frenchman with a
long, pointed nose, and bright, sharp eyes, came around the corner of
the house.
"He is my husband," said the woman. "Edouard, this gentleman speaks the
good French."
The Acadien warmly seconded the invitation of his wife that Vesper
should stay to dinner, but he escaped from them with smiling thanks and
a promise to come another day.
"They never saw me before, and they asked me to stay to dinner. That is
true hospitality,--they have not been infected. I will make my way back
to the inn, and interview that sulky beggar."