a-goin' to be beholden to _you_ fer a lift home, ye're mistaken, that's
all."
After this there was silence for some time, broken only by the rattling
and bumping of the cart, and once by the whir of a woodcock that
volleyed across the road. Young Atkinson chewed the cud of gloomy
bewilderment. At length he roused himself to another effort.
"Liz," said he, plaintively, "y' ain't been like ye used to, sence ye
come back from the States."
"Ain't I?" she remarked, indifferently.
"No, Liz, ye ain't," he repeated, with a sort of pathetic emphasis, as
if eager to persuade himself that she had condescended to rebut his
accusation. "Y' ain't been like ye used to at all. Appears like as if ye
thought us folks in the Settlement wasn't good enough fer ye now."
At this the girl tossed her head crossly.
"It appears like as if ye wanted to be back in the States ag'in," he
continued, in a voice of anxious interrogation.
"My lands," exclaimed the girl, "but ye're green!"
To the young man this seemed such an irrelevant remark that he was
silent for some time, striving to fathom its significance. As his head
sank lower and lower, and he seemed to lose himself completely in
joyless revery, the girl shot occasional glances at him out of the
corners of her eyes. She had spent the preceding winter in a factory in
a crude but stirring little New England town, and had come back to Nova
Scotia ill content with the monotony of life in the backwoods seclusion
of Wyer's Settlement. Before she went away she had been, to use the
vernacular of the Settlement, "keepin' company with Jim-Ed A'ki'son;"
and now, to her, the young man seemed to unite and concentrate in his
person all that she had been wont to persuade herself she had outgrown.
To be sure, she not seldom caught herself dropping back comfortably into
the old conditions. But these symptoms stirred in her heart an uneasy
resentment, akin to that which she felt whenever--as would happen at
times--she could not help recognizing that Jim-Ed and his affairs were
not without a passing interest in her eyes.
Now she began to grow particularly angry at him because, as she thought,
"he hadn't nothing to say fer himself." Sadly to his disadvantage, she
compared his simplicity and honest diffidence with the bold
self-assertion and easy familiarity of the young fellows with whom she
had come in contact during the winter. Their impertinences had offended
her grievously at the time, but, woman-like, she permitted herself to
forget that now, in order to accentuate the deficiencies of the man whom
she was unwilling to think well of.
"My lands!" she reiterated to herself, with accumulated scorn, "but
_ain't_ he green? He--why, he wouldn't know a 'lectric car from a
waterin'-cart. An' _soft_, too, takin' all my sass 'thout givin' me no
lip back, no more 'n if I was his mother!"
But the young man presently broke in upon these unflattering
reflections. With a sigh he said slowly, as if half to himself,--
"Lands, but I used to set a powerful store by ye, Liz!"
He paused; and at that "used to" the girl opened her eyes with angry
apprehension. But he went on,--
"An' I set still more store by ye now, Liz, someways. Seems like I jest
couldn't live without ye. I always did feel as how ye was too good, a
sight too good, fer me, an' you so smart; an' now I feel it more 'n
ever, bein' 's ye've seen so much of the world like. But, Liz, I _don't_
allow as it's right an' proper fer even you to look down the way ye do
on the place ye was born in an' the folks ye was brung up with."
"My!" thought the girl to herself, "he's got some spunk, after all, to
git off such a speech as that, an' to rake me over the coals, too!"
But aloud she retorted, "Who's a-lookin' down on anybody, Jim-Ed
A'ki'son? An', anyways, _you_ ain't the whole of Wyer's Settlement, be
ye?"
The justice of this retort seemed to strike the young man with great
force.
"That's so," he acknowledged, gloomily. "'Course I ain't. An' I s'pose I
hadn't oughter said what I did."
Then he relapsed into silence. For half a mile he slouched on without a
syllable, save an occasional word of command addressed to the team.
Coming to another boggy bit of road, he seated himself dejectedly on the
cart, and apparently would not presume to again press unwelcome
assistance upon his fellow-way-farer. Quite uncertain whether to
interpret this action as excess of humility or as a severe rebuke, the
girl picked her way as best she could, flushed with a sense of injury.
When the mud was passed, the young man absent-mindedly, kept his seat.
Beginning to boil with indignation, the girl speedily lost her confident
superiority, and felt humiliated. She did not know exactly what to do.
She could not continue to walk humbly beside the cart. The situation was
profoundly altered by the mere fact that the young man was riding. She
tried to drop behind; but the team had an infinite capacity for
loitering. At last, with head high in the air, she darted ahead of the
team, and walked as fast as she could. Although she heard no orders
given by their driver, she knew at once that the oxen had quickened
their pace, and that she was not leaving them behind.
Presently she found herself overtaken; whereupon, with swelling heart
and face averted, she dropped again to the rear. She was drawing
perilously near the verge of that feminine cataclysm, tears, when Fate
stepped in to save her from such a mortification.
Fate goes about in many merry disguises. At this juncture she presented
herself under the aspect of two half-tipsy commercial travellers driving
a single horse in a light open trap. They were driving in from the
Settlement, in haste to reach the hotel at Bolton Corners before
nightfall. The youth hawed his team vigorously till the nigh wheels were
on the other side of the ditch, leaving a liberal share of the road for
them to pass in.
But the drummers were not satisfied with this. After a glance at the
bashful face and dejected attitude of the young man on the ox-cart, they
decided that they wanted the whole road. When their horse's head almost
touched the horns of the off ox, they stopped.
"Get out of the way there!" cried the man who held the reins,
insolently.
At any other time Jim-Ed would have resented the town man's tone and
words; just now he was thinking about the way Liz had changed.
"I've gi'n ye the best half o' the road, mister," he said,
deprecatingly, "'n' I can't do no better fer ye than that."
"Yes, you can, too," shouted the driver of the trap; "you can give us
the whole road. It won't hurt your old cart to go out in the stumps, but
_we_ ain't going to drive in the ditch, not by a jugful. Get over, I
tell you, and be quick about it."
To this the youth made no immediate reply; but he began to forget about
the girl, and to feel himself growing hot. As for the girl, she had
stepped to the front, resolved to "show off" and to make very manifest
to the city men her scorn for her companion. Her cheeks and eyes were
flaming, and the drummers were not slow to respond to the challenge
which she flashed at them from under her drooped lids.
"Ah, there, my beauty!" said the driver, his attention for a moment
diverted from the question of right of way. His companion, a smallish
man in striped trousers and fawn-colored overcoat, sprang lightly out of
the trap, with the double purpose of clearing the road and amusing
himself with Liz. The saucy smile with which she met him turned into a
frown, however, as he began brutally kicking the knees of the oxen to
make them stand over.
The patient brutes crowded into the ditch.
"Whoa, there! Gee, Buck! gee, Bright!" ordered the youth, and the team
lurched back into the road. At the same time he stepped over the
cart-beam and came forward on the off side of the team.
"Ye'd better quit that, mister!" he exclaimed, with a threatening note
in his voice.
"Give the lout a slap in the mouth, and make him get out of the way,"
cried the man in the trap.
But the man in the fawn-colored overcoat was busy. Liz was much to his
taste.
"Jump in and take a ride with us, my pretty," said he.
But Liz shrank away, regretting her provocative glances now that she saw
the kind of men she had to do with.
"Come, come," coaxed the man, "don't be shy, my blooming daisy. We'll
drive you right in to the Corners and set up a good time for you." And,
grasping her hand, he slipped an arm about her waist and tried to kiss
her lips. As she tore herself fiercely away, she heard the man in the
trap laugh loud approval. She struck at her insulter with clenched hand;
but she did not touch him, for just then something happened to him. The
long arm of the youth went out like a cannon-ball, and the drummer
sprawled in the ditch. He nimbly picked himself up and darted upon his
assailant, while the man in the trap shouted to him encouragingly,--
"Give it to him pretty, Mike."
But the young countryman caught him by the neck with long, vise-like
fingers, inexorable, and, holding him thus helpless at arm's length,
struck him again heavily in the ribs, and hurled him over the ditch into
a blueberry thicket, where he remained in dazed discretion.
Though of a lamb-like gentleness on ordinary occasions, the young
countryman was renowned throughout the Settlement for the astonishing
strength that lurked in his lean frame. At this moment he was well
aroused, and Liz found herself watching him with a consuming admiration.
He no longer slouched, and his pale eyes, like polished steel, shot a
menacing gleam. He stepped forward and took the horse by the bridle.
"Now," said he to the driver, "I've gi'n ye half the road, an' if ye
can't drive by in that I'm a-going to lead ye by, 'thout no more
nonsense."
"Let go that bridle!" yelled the driver, standing up and lashing at him
with the whip.
One stroke caught the young man down the side of the face, and stung. It
was a rash stroke.
"Hold the horse's head, Liz," he cried; and, leaping forward, he reached
into the trap for his adversary. Heeding not at all the butt end of the
whip which was brought down furiously upon his head, he wrenched the
driver ignominiously from his seat, spun him around, shook him as if his
had been a rag baby, and hurled him violently against a rotten stump on
the other side of the ditch. The stump gave way, and the drummer
splashed into a bog hole.
Nothing cows a man more quickly than a shaking combined with a ducking.
Without a word the drummer hauled himself out of the slop and walked
sullenly forward. His companion joined him; and Liz, leading the horse
and trap carefully past the cart, delivered them up to their owners with
a sarcastic smile on her lips. Then she resumed her place beside the
cart, the young man flicked the oxen gently, and the team once more got
slowly under way.
As the discomfited drummers climbed into their trap, the girl, in the
ardor of her suddenly adopted hero-worship, could not refrain from
turning around again to triumph over them. When the men were fairly
seated, and the reins gathered up for prompt departure, the smaller man
turned suddenly and threw a large stone, with vindictive energy and
deadly aim.
"Look out!" shrieked the girl; and the young countryman turned aside
just in time to escape the full force of the missile. It grazed the side
of his head, however, with such violence as to bring him to his knees,
and the blood spread throbbing out of the long cut like a scarlet veil.
The drummers whipped their horse to a gallop, and disappeared.
The girl first stopped the team, with a true country-side instinct; and
she was at the young man's side, sobbing with anxious fear, just as he
staggered blindly to his feet. Seating him on the cart, she proceeded to
stanch the bleeding with the edge of her gown. Observing this, he
protested, and declared that the cut was nothing. But she would not be
gainsaid, and he yielded, apparently well content under her hands. Then,
tearing a strip from her colored cotton petticoat, she gently bound up
the wound, not artistically, perhaps, but in every way to his
satisfaction.
"If ye hadn't gi'n me warnin', Liz, that there stun'd about fixed me,"
he remarked.
The girl smiled happily, but said nothing.
After a long pause he spoke again.
"Seems to me ye're like what ye used to, Liz," said he, "only nicer, a
sight nicer; an' y' used to be powerful nice. I allow there couldn't
_be_ another girl so nice as you, Liz. An' what ever's made ye quit
lookin' down on me, so sudden like?"
"Jim-Ed," she replied, in a caressing tone, "ef y' _ain't_ got no paper
collar on, ner no glas' di'mon' pin, I allow ye're a _man_. An'
maybe--maybe ye're the _kind_ of man I _like_, Jim-Ed."
To even such genuine modesty as Jim-Ed's this was comprehensible. Shyly
and happily he reached out his hand for hers. They were both seated very
comfortably on the cart-beam, so he did not consider it necessary to
move. Side by side, and hand in hand, they journeyed homeward in a
glorified silence. The oxen appeared to guide themselves very fairly.
The sunset flushed strangely the roadside hillocks. The nighthawks
swooped in the pale zenith with the twang of smitten chords. And from a
thick maple on the edge of a clearing a hermit-thrush fluted slowly over
and over his cloistral ecstasy.
A Tragedy of the Tides.
This is the story of the fate that befell Lieutenant Henry Crewe and
Margaret Neville, his betrothed, who disappeared from the infant city of
Halifax on the afternoon of September 18th, 1749. The facts were
gathered by one Nicholas Pinson from the mouths of Indians more or less
concerned, from members of the Neville family, and from much sagacious
conjecture; and woven, with an infinite deal of irrelevant detail, into
a narrative which has been rigorously condensed in the present
rendering. The industrious Pinson's manuscript, with all its attenuated
old French characters, its obscure abbreviations, and its well-bred
contempt for orthographical accuracy, might perhaps be found even yet in
the Provincial archives at Halifax. At least, if any one be curious to
examine this story in the original, just as M. Pinson wrote it, he may
search the archives of Halifax with a reasonable surety that the
manuscript is as likely to be found there as anywhere else.
There was a faint, opaline haze in the afternoon air, and in the still
waters of the harbor the low hills, with their foliage lightly touched
in bronze and amethyst and amber, were faithfully reproduced. Into a
hollow between two knolls wooded with beech trees, ran a shallow cove,
its clear waters edged with sand of a tender, greenish gray. Close to
the water's edge stood the lovers, and across the silence they could
hear, pulsating dimly, the hammers of them that were building the city.
"Listen," said the man, as he drew the girl closely to him and kissed
her on the forehead; "those are the strokes that are making a home for
_us_."
The girl lifted her lips for a kiss that never reached them. The man was
seized from behind, a dark hand covered his mouth; and Lieutenant Henry
Crewe, his sword unstirred in its scabbard, found himself pinioned hand
and foot, ere he had time to realize that other arms were about him than
those of the woman he loved. With her it fared in like fashion, save
that before they covered her mouth she found time for one long piercing
cry. It was heard by those who were working on the city palisades; but
no man could tell the direction whence it came. Presently a search party
set out for the thick woods lying a little north of west from the city;
but in the mean time the Indians had carried their captives
northeastward to the lakes, and were making all speed on the Fundy coast
by way of the Shubenacadie trail.
Henry Crewe was a tall man, and well sinewed, and for a brief space he
strove so fiercely with his bonds that his fair skin flushed well-nigh
purple, and his lips, under the yellow mustache, curled apart terribly,
like those of a beast at bay. Unable to endure the anguish of his
effort, Margaret averted her eyes, for she knew the hopelessness of it.
Like all the Nevilles of Nova Scotia to this day, the girl was somewhat
spare of form and feature, with dark hair, a clear, dark skin, and eyes
of deep color that might be either gray or green. Her terrible cry had
been far less the utterance of a blind terror than a deliberate signal
to the garrison at the fort, and so complete was her self-control that
when Crewe presently met her gaze his brain grew clearer, he forgot the
derision in the Indians' painted faces, ceased his vain struggles, and
bent all his thought to the task of finding means of deliverance.
The captives were thrown into canoes and paddled swiftly to the head of
the long basin which runs inland for miles from the head of the harbor.
At the beginning of the portage their feet were unbound, and their
mouths set free from the suffocating gags.
"Oh, Margaret! Margaret! To think I should have brought you to this!"
exclaimed Crewe in a harsh voice, the moment his lips were free.
The girl had confidence in her lover's power to find some way of
protecting her, in case no help should come from the city. Her sole
thought now was to show herself brave, and in no way to embarrass his
judgment. Before she could answer, however, the leader of the band
struck Crewe across the mouth with the flat of his hatchet, as a hint
that he should keep silence. Had Crewe been alone, bound as he was, he
would have felled his assailant with a blow of the foot; but for
Margaret's sake he forced himself to endure the indignity tamely, though
his blue eyes flamed with so dangerous a light that the Indian raised
his hatchet again in menace. The girl's heart bled under the stroke and
at sight of the wounded mouth, but she prudently abstained from speech.
Only she spoke one word in a low voice that said all things to her
lover's ear, the one word "Beloved!"
To the chief now spoke one of the band in the Micmac tongue:--
"Why not let the paleface talk to his young squaw? It will be the more
bitter for them at the last!"
"No," said the chief, grinning; "it is as death to the palefaces to keep
silence. But they shall have time to talk at the last."
Throughout the long journey, which was continued till midnight under the
strong light of a moon just at the full, the lovers held no converse
save in the mute language of eye and gesture, and that only during the
rough marches from one lake to another. The greater part of the journey
was by canoe. At night they were lashed to trees some way apart, and
separated by the camp-fire. Crewe dared not address a word to Margaret
lest he should anger his captors into doing him some injury that might
lessen his powers of thought or action, and the girl, seeing that no
immediate gain could be had from speech, dreaded to be smitten on the
mouth in a way that might disfigure her in her lover's eyes. Only at
times, when a wind would blow the smoke and flame aside, she looked
across the camp-fire into the young man's face, and in the look and in
the smile of the steady lips he read not only an unswerving courage, but
also a confidence in his own resourceful protection, which pierced his
heart with anguish. All night he pondered schemes of rescue or escape,
until his brain reeled and his soul grew sick before the unsolvable
problem. He could move neither hand nor foot, and just before dawn he
sank to sleep in his bonds. Then for the waking girl the loneliness
became unspeakable, and her lips grew ashen in the first light of the
dawn.
Late on the following day the band drew up their canoes on the banks of
the Shubenacadie, where its waters began to redden with the tide, and
struck through the woods by a dark trail. The next day the captives were
tortured by the sight of a white steeple in the distance, belonging to
an Acadian settlement. Crewe judged this to be the village of
Beaubassin. The surmise was confirmed when, a few hours later, after a
wide detour to avoid the settlement, the flag of France was seen waving
over the foliage that clothed a long line of heights. By this time the
band was traversing a vast expanse of salt marshes, and after crossing a
little tidal stream near its head, they turned sharply southwestward
toward the sea. Presently the raw red earthworks of Beauséjour rose into
view some seven or eight miles distant across the marshes. There, among
his bitter enemies, Crewe knew he might find sure succor, if only the
gallant Frenchmen could be made aware of what was passing so near them.
He saw Margaret's eyes fixed with terrible appeal upon the hostile
works, wherein for her and for her lover lay safety; and agonized to
feel his utter helplessness, he raised a long and ringing shout which,
as it seemed to him, must reach the very souls of those behind the
ramparts. Margaret's heart leaped with hope, which flickered out as she
saw the Indians laugh grimly at the foolish effort. To be within sight
of help, and yet so infinitely helpless! For the first time the girl
yielded to complete despair, and her head sank upon her breast. In the
Journal of the Sieur Carré, at this time a lieutenant at Beauséjour,
occurs this entry, under date of September 20, 1749:--
"Noted this morning a small party of natives moving down the shores of
the river Tintamarre. Too far off to distinguish whether it was a war
party or not, but this their order of march seemed to suggest."
After skirting for perhaps an hour a red and all but empty channel,
which Crewe recognized by hearsay as the bed of the Tantramar (or
_Tintamarre_, "water of hubbub"), the savages suddenly led their
captives down the steep, gleaming abyss of mud to the edge of the
shallow current, which now, at low tide, clattered shrilly seaward over
clods of blue clay and small stones rolled down from the uplands.
Margaret awoke from her despair enough to shudder disdainfully, as her
feet sank more than ankle deep in the clinging ooze, and to wonder why
the Indians should halt in such a place. She met her lover's glance, and
saw that he was singularly disturbed.
The place was like a hideous gaping pit. A double winding of the channel
closed it in above and below. Some forty or fifty feet over their heads,
against a pure sky of loveliest blue, waved a shaggy fringe of salt
grasses, yellowing in the autumn air. This harsh and meagre herbage
encircled the rim of the chasm, and seemed to make the outer world of
men infinitely remote. The sun, an hour or two past noon, glared down
whitely into the gulf, and glistened, in a myriad of steely reflections,
from the polished but irregular steeps of slime. There was something so
strange and monstrous in the scene that Margaret's dull misery was
quickened to a nameless horror. Suddenly a voice, which she hardly
recognized as that of her lover, said slowly and steadily:--
"Margaret, this is the end of our journey; we have come to the end."
Looking up she met Crewe's eyes fastened upon her with a gaze which
seemed to sustain her and fill her nerves with strength. With the end of
his uncertainty his will became clear, and his resolution perfect as
tempered steel. An Indian had brought two stakes and thrown them on the
mud at the leader's feet. Margaret looked at the rough-trimmed saplings,
at the tide-mark far up the dreadful slope, then again into her lover's
face. She understood; but she gave no sign, save that her skin blanched
to a more deathly pallor, and she exclaimed in a voice of poignant
regret: "Have we kept silence all these long hours only for this? And I
had so much to say to you!"
"There will be time," he said gently, and his voice was a caress. "The
flood tide has not yet begun, and it will take some hours. And it was
well, dear, that we could not speak; for so you had hope till the last
to support you, while I had none, having heard the Indians say we were
to die, though they said not in my hearing when or how. Had you known
you might not have had this high courage of yours, that now gives _me_
strength to endure the utmost. Dear, your heroic fortitude has been
everything to me."
A faint flush of pride rose into the girl's face, and she stretched out
her pinioned arms to him, and cried: "You shall not be deceived in me. I
will be worthy of you, and will not shame our race before these beasts."