BACK TO THE CONCESSION.
"And Nature hath remembered, for a trace
Of calm Acadien life yet holds command,
Where, undisturbed, the rustling willows stand,
And the curved grass, telling the breeze's pace."
J. F. H.
Mrs. Rose à Charlitte served her dinner in the middle of the day. The
six o'clock meal she called supper.
With feminine insight she noticed, at supper, on a day a week later,
that her guest was more quiet than usual, and even dull in humor.
Agapit, who was nearly always in high spirits, and always very much
absorbed in himself, came bustling in,--sobered down for one minute to
cross himself, and reverently repeat a _bénédicité_, then launched into
a voluble and enjoyable conversation on the subject of which he never
tired,--his beloved countrymen, the Acadiens.
Rose withdrew to the innermost recesses of her pantry. "Do you know
these little berries?" she asked, coming back, and setting a glass
dish, full of a thick, whitish preserve, before Vesper.
"No," he said, absently, "what are they?"
"They are _poudabre_, or _capillaire_,--waxen berries that grow deep in
the woods. They hide their little selves under leaves, yet the children
find them. They are expensive, and we do not buy many, yet perhaps you
will find them excellent."
"They are delicious," said Vesper, tasting them.
"Give me also some," said Agapit, with pretended jealousy. "It is not
often that we are favored with _poudabre_."
"There are yours beside your plate," said Rose, mischievously; "you
have, if anything, more than Mr. Nimmo."
She very seldom mentioned Vesper's name. It sounded foreign on her lips,
and he usually liked to hear her. This evening he paid no attention to
her, and, with a trace of disappointment in her manner, she went away to
the kitchen.
After Vesper left the table she came back. "Agapit, the young man is
dull."
"I assure thee," said Agapit, in French, and very dictatorially, "he is
as gay as he usually is."
"He is never gay, but this evening he is troubled."
Agapit grew uneasy. "Dost thou think he will again become ill?"
Rose's brilliant face became pale. "I trust not. Ah, that would be
terrible!"
"Possibly he thinks of something. Where is his mother?"
"Above, in her room. Some books came from Boston in a box, and she
reads. Go to him, Agapit; talk not of the dear dead, but of the living.
Seek not to find out in what his dullness consists, and do not say
abrupt things, but gentle. Remember all the kind sayings that thou
knowest about women. Say that they are constant if they truly love. They
do not forget."
Agapit's fingers remained motionless in the bowl of the big pipe that he
was filling with tobacco. "_Ma foi_, but thou art eloquent. What has
come over thee?"
"Nothing, nothing," she said, hurriedly, "I only wonder whether he
thinks of his _fiancée_."
"How dost thou know he has a _fiancée_?"
"I do not know, I guess. Surely, so handsome a young man must belong
already to some woman."
"Ah,--probably. Rose, I am glad that thou hast never been a coquette."
"And why should I be one?" she asked, wonderingly.
"Why, thou hast ways,--sly ways, like most women, and thou art meek and
gentle, else why do men run after thee, thou little bleating lamb?"
Rose made him no answer beyond a shrug of her shoulders.
"But thou wilt not marry. Is it not so?" he continued, with tremulous
eagerness. "It is better for thee to remain single and guard thy child."
She looked up at him wistfully, then, as solemnly as if she were taking
a vow, she murmured, "I do not know all things, but I think I shall
never marry."
Agapit could scarcely contain his delight. He laid a hand on her
shoulder, and exclaimed, "My good little cousin!" Then he lighted his
pipe and smoked in ecstatic silence.
Rose occupied herself with clearing the things from the table, until a
sudden thought struck Agapit. "Leave all that for Célina. Let us take a
drive, you and I and the little one. Thou hast been much in the house
lately."
"But Mr. Nimmo--will it be kind to leave him?"
"He can come if he will, but thou must also ask madame. Go then, while I
harness Toochune."
"I am not ready," said Rose, shrinking back.
"Ready!" laughed Agapit. "I will make thee ready," and he pulled her
shawl and handkerchief from a peg near the kitchen door.
"I had the intention of wearing my hat," faltered Rose.
"Absurdity! keep it for mass, and save thy money. Go ask the young man,
while I am at the stable."
Rose meekly put on the shawl and the handkerchief, and went to the front
of the house.
Vesper stood in the doorway, his hands clasped behind his back. She
could only see his curly head, a bit of his cheek, and the tip of his
mustache. At the sound of her light step he turned around, and his face
brightened.
"Look at the sunset," he said, kindly, when she stood in embarrassment
before him. "It is remarkable."
It was indeed remarkable. A blood-red sun was shouldering his way in and
out of a wide dull mass of gray cloud that was unrelieved by a single
fleck of color.
Rose looked at the sky, and Vesper looked at her, and thought of a
grieving Madonna. She had been so gay and cheerful lately. What had
happened to call that expression of divine tenderness and sympathy to
her face? He had never seen her so ethereal and so spiritually
beautiful, not even when she was bending over his sick-bed. What a rest
and a pleasure to weary eyes she was, in her black artistic garments,
and how pure was the oval of her face, how becoming the touch of
brownness on the fair skin. The silk handkerchief knotted under her chin
and pulled hood-wise over the shock of flaxen hair combed up from the
forehead, which two or three little curls caressed daintily, gave the
finishing touch of quaintness and out-of-the-worldness to her
appearance.
"You are feeling slightly blue this evening, are you not?" he asked.
"Blue,--that means one's thoughts are black?" said Rose, bringing her
glance back to him.
"Yes."
"Then I am a very little blue," she said, frankly. "This inn is like the
world to me. When those about me are sad, I, too, am sad. Sometimes I
grieve when strangers go,--for days in advance I have a weight at heart.
When they leave, I shut myself in my room. For others I do not care."
"And are you melancholy this evening because you are thinking that my
mother and I must soon leave?"
Her eyes filled with tears. "No; I did not think of that, but I do now."
"Then what was wrong with you?"
"Nothing, since you are again cheerful," she said, in tones so doleful
that Vesper burst into one of his rare laughs, and Rose, laughing with
him, brushed the tears from her face.
"There was something running in my mind that made me feel gloomy," he
said, after a short silence. "It has been haunting me all day."
Her eager glance was a prayer to him to share the cause of his
unhappiness with her, and he recited, in a low, penetrating voice, the
lines:
"Mon Dieu, pour fuir la mort n'est-il aucun moyen?
Quoi? Dans un jour peut-être immobile et glacé....
Aujourd'hui avenir, le monde, la pensée
Et puis, demain, ... plus rien."
Rose had never heard anything like this, and she was troubled, and
turned her blue eyes to the sky, where a trailing white cloud was
soaring above the dark cloud-bank below. "It is like a soul going up to
our Lord," she murmured, reverently.
Vesper would not shock her further with his heterodoxy. "Forget what I
said," he went on, lightly, "and let me beg you never to put anything on
your head but that handkerchief. You Acadien women wear it with such an
air."
"But it is because we know how to tie it. Look,--this is how the Italian
women in Boston carry those colored ones," and, pulling the piece of
silk from her head, she arranged it in severe lines about her face.
"A decided difference," Vesper was saying, when Agapit came around the
corner of the house, driving Toochune, who was attached to a shining
dog-cart.
"Are you going with us?" he called out.
"I have not yet been asked."
"Thou naughty Rose," exclaimed Agapit; but she had already hurried
up-stairs to invite Mrs. Nimmo to accompany them. "Madame, your mother,
prefers to read," she said, when she came back, "therefore Narcisse will
come."
"Mount beside me," said Agapit to Vesper; "Rose and Narcisse will sit in
the background."
"No," said Vesper, and he calmly assisted Rose to the front seat, then
extended a hand to swing Narcisse up beside her. The child, however,
clung to him, and Vesper was obliged to take him in the back seat, where
he sat nodding his head and looking like a big perfumed flower in his
drooping hat and picturesque pink trousers.
"You smile," said Agapit, who had suddenly twisted his head around.
"I always do," said Vesper, "for the space of five minutes after getting
into this cart."
"But why?"
"Well--an amusing contrast presents itself to my mind."
"And the contrast, what is it?"
"I am driving with a modern Evangeline, who is not the owner of the
rough cart that I would have fancied her in, a few weeks ago, but of a
trap that would be an ornament to Commonwealth Avenue."
"Am I the modern Evangeline?" said Agapit, in his breakneck fashion.
"To my mind she was embodied in the person of your cousin," and Vesper
bowed in a sidewise fashion towards his landlady.
Rose crimsoned with pleasure. "But do you think I am like
Evangeline,--she was so dark, so beautiful?"
"You are passable, Rose, passable," interjected Agapit, "but you lack
the passion, the fortitude of the heroine of Mr. Nimmo's immortal
countryman, whom all Acadiens venerate. Alas! only the poets and
story-tellers have been true to Acadie. It is the historians who lie."
"Why do you think your cousin is lacking in passion and fortitude?"
asked Vesper, who had either lost his gloomy thoughts, or had completely
subdued them, and had become unusually vivacious.
"She has never loved,--she cannot. Rose, did you love your husband as I
did _la belle Marguerite_?"
"My husband was older,--he was as a father," stammered Rose. "Certainly
I did not tear my hair, I did not beat my foot on the ground when he
died, as you did when _la belle_ married the miller."
"Have you ever loved any man?" pursued Agapit, unmercifully.
"Oh, shut up, Agapit," muttered Vesper; "don't bully a woman."
Agapit turned to stare at him,--not angrily, but rather as if he had
discovered something new and peculiar in the shape of young manhood.
"Hear what she always says when young men, and often old men, drive up
and say, 'Rose à Charlitte, will you marry me?' She says, 'Love,--it is
all nonsense. You make all that.' Is it not so, Rose?"
"Yes," she replied, almost inaudibly; "I have said it."
"You make all that," repeated Agapit, triumphantly. "They can rave and
cry,--they can say, 'My heart is breaking;' and she responds,
'Love,--there is no such thing. You make all that.' And yet you call her
an Evangeline, a martyr of love who laid her life on its holy altar."
Rose was goaded into a response, and turned a flushed and puzzled face
to her cousin. "Agapit, I will explain that lately I do not care to say
'You make all that.' I comprehend--possibly because the blacksmith talks
so much to me of his wish towards my sister--that one does not make
love. It is something that grows slowly, in the breast, like a flower.
Therefore, do not say that I am of ice or stone."
"But you do not care to marry,--you just come from telling me so."
"Yes; I am not for marriage," she said, modestly, "yet do not say that I
understand not. It is a beautiful thing to love."
"It is," said Agapit, "yet do not think of it, since thou dost not care
for a husband. Let thy thoughts run on thy cooking. Thou wert born for
that. I think that thou must have arrived in this world with a little
stew-pan in thy hand, a tasting fork hanging at thy girdle. Do not wish
to be an Evangeline or to read books. Figure to yourself, Mr.
Nimmo,"--and he turned his head to the back seat,--"that last night she
came to my room, she begged me for an English book,--she who says often
to Narcisse, 'I will shake thee, my little one, if thou usest English
words.' She says now that she wishes to learn,--she finds herself
forgetful of many things that she learned in the convent. I said, 'Go to
bed, thou silly fool. Thy eyes are burning and have black rings around
them the color of thy stove,' and she whimpered like a baby."
"Your cousin is an egotist, Mrs. Rose," said Vesper, over his shoulder.
"I will lend you some books."
"Agapit is as a brother," she replied, simply.
"I have been a good brother to thee," he said, "and I will never forget
thee; not even when I go out into the world. Some day I will send for
thee to live with me and my wife."
"Perhaps thy wife will not let me," she said, demurely.
"Then she may leave me; I detest women who will not obey."
For some time the cousins chattered on and endeavored to snatch a
glimpse, in "time's long and dark prospective glass," of Agapit's future
wife, while Vesper listened to them with as much indulgence as if they
had been two children. He was just endeavoring to fathom the rationale
of their curious interchange of _thou_ and _you_, when Agapit said, "If
it is agreeable to you, we will drive back in the woods to the
Concession. We have a cousin who is ill there,--see, here we pass the
station," and he pointed his whip at the gabled roof near them.
The wheels of the dog-cart rolled smoothly over the iron rails, and they
entered upon a road bordered by sturdy evergreens that emitted a
deliciously resinous odor and occasioned Mrs. Rose to murmur,
reverently, "It is like mass; for from trees like these the altar boys
get the gum for incense."
Wild gooseberry and raspberry bushes lined the roadside, and under their
fruit-laden branches grew many wild flowers. A man who stopped Agapit to
address a few remarks to him gathered a handful of berries and a few
sprays of wild roses and tossed them in Narcisse's lap.
The child uttered a polite, "_Merci, monsieur_" (thank you, sir), then
silently spread the flowers and berries on the lap rug and allowed tears
from his beautiful eyes to drop on them.
Vesper took some of the berries in his hand, and carefully explained to
the sorrowing Narcisse that the sensitive shrubs did not shiver when
their clothes were stripped from them and their hats pulled off. They
were rather shaking their sides in laughter that they could give
pleasure to so good and gentle a boy. And the flowers that bowed so
meekly when one wished to behead them, were trembling with delight to
think that they should be carried, for even a short time, by one who
loved them so well.
Narcisse at last was comforted, and, drying his tears, he soberly ate
the berries, and presented the roses to his mother in a brilliant
nosegay, keeping only one that he lovingly fastened in his neck, where
it could brush against his cheek.
Soon they were among the clearings in the forest. Back of every farm
stood grim trees in serried rows, like soldiers about to close in on the
gaps made in their ranks by the diligent hands of the Acadien farmers.
The trees looked inexorable, but the farmers were more so. Here in the
backwoods so quiet and still, so favorable for farming, the forest must
go as it had gone near the shore.
About every farmhouse, men and women were engaged in driving in cows,
tying up horses, shutting up poultry, feeding pigs, and performing the
hundred and one duties that fall to the lot of a farmer's family.
Everywhere were children. Each farmer seemed to have a quiver full of
these quiet, well-behaved little creatures, who gazed shyly and
curiously at the dog-cart as it went driving by.
When they came to a brawling, noisy river, having on its banks a
saw-mill deserted for the night, Agapit exclaimed, "We are at last
arrived!"
Close to the mill was a low, old-fashioned house, situated in the midst
of an extensive apple orchard in which the fruit was already taking on
size and color.
"They picked four hundred barrels from it last year," said Agapit, "our
cousins, the Kessys, who live here. They are rich, but very simple," and
springing out, he tied Toochune's head to the gatepost. "Now let us
enter," he said, and he ushered Vesper into a small, dull room where an
old woman of gigantic stature sat smoking by an open fireplace.
Another tall woman, with soft black eyes, and wearing on her breast a
medal of the congregation of St. Anne, took Rose away to the sick-room,
while Agapit led Vesper and Narcisse to the fireplace. "Cousin
grandmother, will you not tell this gentleman of the commencement of the
Bay?"
The old woman, who was nearly sightless, took her pipe from her mouth,
and turned her white head. "Does he speak French?"
"Yes, yes," said Agapit, joyfully.
A light came into her face,--a light that Vesper noticed always came
into the faces of Acadiens, no matter how fluent their English, if he
addressed them in their mother tongue.
"I was born _en haut de la Baie_" (up the Bay), she began, softly.
"Further than Sleeping Water,--towards Digby," said Agapit, in an
undertone.
"Near Bleury," she continued, "where there were only eight families. In
the morning my mother would look out at the neighbors' chimneys; where
she saw smoke she would send me, saying, 'Go, child, and borrow fire.'
Ah! those were hard days. We had no roads. We walked over the beach
fifteen miles to Pointe à l'Eglise to hear mass sung by the good Abbé.
"There were plenty of fish, plenty of moose, but not so many boats in
those days. The hardships were great, so great that the weak died. Now
when my daughter sits and plays on the organ, I think of it. David
Kessy, my father, was very big. Once our wagon, loaded with twenty
bushels of potatoes, stuck in the mud. He put his shoulder against it
and lifted it. Nowadays we would rig a jack, but my father was strong,
so strong that he took insults, though he trembled, for he knew a blow
from his hand would kill a man."
The Acadienne paused, and fell into a gentle reverie, from which Agapit,
who was stepping nimbly in and out of the room with jelly and other
delicacies that he had brought for the invalid, soon roused her.
"Tell him about the derangement, cousin grandmother," he vociferated in
her ear, "and the march from Annapolis."