_BLUFF CASTLE._
"Where are the hands to guide the waiting plow,
To sway the lumbering oxen with a stroke,
Now waiting at the bars for band and yoke?--
An exile curst as with a branded brow.
The kindly walls that cannot shield him now
Are black in embers that have ceased to smoke,
Wrapt tenderly with marsh-fogs as a cloak.
The willows shade no gables where they bow.
The wandering exile from dead Acadie
Sees through the mist of sorrow never done
That mercy has no hand held out to save.
Yet ne'er again the meadows of the sea
Mayhap shall know this heart-sore, weary son,
Denied the kindness of an alien grave."
Winslow's recovery was rapid, under the care and skill of Suzanne. His
left shoulder gave him considerable trouble, and he was compelled to
keep his arm in a sling for several days; yet it was not long after his
mishap when he had strength enough to wander over the island and
ingratiate himself with the folk of Pierre Island.
A deep friendship soon drew Winslow and Pierre together, and the young
man spent much of his time in the company of the older. He felt that he
owed him a debt of gratitude that could never be paid, while Pierre
treated the matter lightly as regards his own connection with the
rescue. He dealt with the escape of his young friend as with an event
that touched a sympathetic and vital chord in his own heart. Pierre
opened his heart to him as a father would who had recovered a lost son.
A deep friendship developed and drew them together in a bond of
fellowship and mutual confidence.
Winslow was now domiciled at "Bluff Castle," where his simple and modest
tastes, his good-nature and his quiet tact, pleased the old Acadian and
the women of his household.
Pierre carried with him into his daily life the rural simplicity of the
peasant, and a certain dignity and kindness which never left him. His
was a calm and quiet old age, far removed from the world, and free from
its weaknesses and sordid influences and its common failings. The
philosophers of old had the nature of this old Acadian, wise in the
experiences peculiar to their environments, and true to those high
principles of living which only men learn who contemplate with correct
judgment the events of their existence and aim at the highest point for
the purpose of their life. Tempered with a long life of labor, reared
and trained within the sight and influence of the mighty changes of
elemental nature, and in constant communication with its forces, and at
last made wise at the shrine of sorrow, Pierre seemed to Winslow the
embodiment of the highest qualities of ripe and noble old age.
Pierre found himself drawn to Winslow as he would have been to his own
son had not an accident cut him off in his young manhood. Because of
this greatest loss and its resulting sorrow, the whole tendency and
purpose of his life had been changed, and in his only daughter, Marie,
he had placed the whole of his affection and hope and purpose of life.
Yet the maiden had become a great fear to him in the element of
uncertainty which necessarily affected his view of her future years. The
father realized his age and the youth of the daughter, and the
difficulties that might at any time surround her if he were removed by
death. He yet mourned his wife, and felt that his life was broken by the
loss of his son, but he faced the future calmly and without fear, save
for the thought of his daughter. In her young womanhood she made the
only concern of his life, and there was as yet no promise for the
future.
Yet in her was his only life. To her would descend all the title and
history of the Gotros, for the first time since the great banishment of
the Acadians in 1755 without a male representative. The name was
virtually extinct and the house broken when he passed away.
"This stone house of the Gotros is known among the Acadians as 'Pierre
Logis,' and has been the home of the Pierres, as the Gotros of the
direct line are known, ever since your ancestor removed our people from
Grand-Pré," said the old man, pointing to his house.
"Tell me, good friend," said Winslow, "how this came to be chosen by
the Gotros as a place of residence, and how they escaped the persecution
that followed your people even after they were driven from their lands
and separated."
"It is a long story, full of cruelty and suffering," answered the old
man, sadly. "We must go back almost to the first settlement of
Grand-Pré. Our name became very numerous, and then gradually through
centuries died out. I am the last of our line,--the last of the name
Pierre Gotro."
The old man remained for some moments in thought, and a shade of sadness
resting on his face darkened the depths of his eyes. His mind seemed to
be dwelling upon the things of the past, and his thoughts shaped
themselves at last in words calm and unimpassioned, as one who deals
with revered things. The strength of his heart and mind, the chastening
experiences of his life, the philosophical cast of his reason and
understanding, gave dignity to his utterances, and impressed Winslow
with the nobility of this son of toil. He began the story of his people
and his family.
"The first Gotro came to Grand-Pré from Port Royal, now called
Annapolis, after that place had been settled for eighty years. It sent
off its people like a hive in summer when, overcrowded, the young bees
are compelled to seek a new home. The great meadows of Grand-Pré were
waiting unpeopled, and in a few years became the largest of the Acadian
centres. The whole section on the south yonder, called Minas," pointing
with his arm across the water to the blue hills in the south, thirty
miles distant, "saw four generations of our sons, who had become a
prosperous and contented people.
"The Gotros in particular were favorable to English rule, as they had
rich and large possessions of land and were anxious to avoid trouble
with the people of other nationality. Yet, with all the other Acadian
people who had taken the oath of allegiance to the English crown, they
refused to the last to take up arms against their own kindred and
nationality, as they were expected to do by the provincial governors who
proposed the measure. This refusal on their part served as a pretext for
removing them in 1755 from the province.
"You know how all the people were called to their church, deceived by
the order which declared that it was the command of the king, and that
they were to hear the wishes of the English king in regard to
themselves. Expecting a settlement of all their difficulties, they were
thus entrapped and forcibly removed from their homes, and all the
houses, barns and mills of Grand-Pré destroyed by fire."
"The history of Pierre Gotro does not relate to those of our race who
were removed. The first Pierre Gotro who made this island his home was
known as 'Peche Gotro,' because of his fondness for fishing, and his
skill in that calling. He was but a young man at the time, not being
married, and was but one of the numerous name in Minas. Pierre owned a
fishing boat, and had been away fishing during the summer. While the
salmon ran he lived near this island. Having injured his boat, he was
belated in his return to Grand Pré. Before the boat was ready to sail he
saw the New England ships sail into the Basin, and from the island he
saw them at anchor or sailing about on the waters at the south of the
basin. Other ships came after, and he learned from Indians and escaping
Acadians what was happening at Grand Pré.
"Pierre Island at that time made a safe retreat. It was almost
inaccessible save by a narrow and dangerous path which animals had
discovered and kept open by constant use. The slope of the island which
has the road leading up here was not connected with the beach, for the
lowest point of it at that time was nearly fifty feet high, and was
built up as it is now after many years of labor when it was finally safe
for an Acadian to return to Nova Scotia.
"Here Pierre made his home. In the cove where you were hurt he kept his
boat, the channel thither being through a long and dangerous space of
boulders.
"It is strange that the Acadians ever attempted to return to a country
where they had received such cruel treatment. It would have seemed more
pleasing to them to go among their own people in other places, where
they would not have been subjected to such severe and unjust treatment,
after they had been separated and broken as a people. Yet they returned.
And thus it was that Pierre came to take possession of this island. He
saw the ships sail out of the Basin. He saw the glare of many fires that
told of the fate of the homes of the Acadians, his own people. He felt
himself as much an outcast as if he had been on a ship destined for a
strange country and an unfriendly people.
"With the building of the stone house Pierre began the long and lonely
life which opens the history of Pierre Island. Months of terrible doubt
as to the fate of his own kindred, and the privation which beset him
turned the young man into an old man before his time. Winter set in and
cut him off from his home, or what had been his home. His supply of
salted fish, with other provisions he had providently gathered,
sustained him. But for eight years he never tasted bread. In six years
the New England settlers had homes on the Acadian lands. Each year
brought more people. The exiled Acadians themselves found their way back
to their own country, but not to the places which had been their homes.
Many of them who had escaped the dangers of the sea, and the disease
that broke out on the ships, died on the long march back to Acadia. They
toiled on through a thousand miles of wilderness. Government persecution
finally ceased, but for many years they were hated by many of the new
settlers, and were glad to escape from them into the woods and to make
homes again in the wilderness. On their fine lands the English settlers
could not at first support themselves, and had to get aid from the
government. The Acadians, in spite of the many disadvantages of their
new life and the changed conditions of their existence, throve without
help, and in the course of a few years had numerous colonies. In this
way the people have learned to do with little, and learned the value of
hard labor, while in their inmost souls was planted the melancholy of a
hunted and oppressed race.
"Pierre in his lonely life learned wisdom and acquired great skill in
the chase and on the water. It was many long years before he learned of
his own family and relatives, and of the cruel fate of the numerous
Gotros. In twenty years but few remained. Their large possessions, which
had included almost all of the present village of Grand-Pré, and a large
and rich family, were reduced to a few heart-broken and hopeless old men
and women.
"At forty years of age Pierre married one of his own people who had
returned to her country after years of wandering and privation. She was
an Acadian woman whom he had known at Grand-Pré. For twenty years he had
lived alone on this island, and had cleared enough land to raise the
necessaries of daily life, and by means of his fishing he added to his
small wealth. He had built the stone house, and had raised up with stone
and earth a road from the beach to the slope by which we come up to
Bluff Castle.
"Four generations of Pierres end with me," said the old man, sadly.
"When I am placed with those whose graves are in sight of the land lost
to them while they lived, and where their ancestors lie without a stone
or mark to show the wayfarer, when I lie down with them the Pierres will
be no more.
"That is the story of Bluff Castle. Each Pierre in turn went to his own
people and chose a wife, and marrying her brought her here. Here the
wives of the Pierres died and were buried. The daughters have never
married till my sister broke the law established in the family after the
deportation. That law required that no female should marry if the Pierre
Gotro should continue and the name be perpetuated.
"We had come to look upon this as an old family tradition, without
meaning, and belonging to an earlier and superstitious time. They had
placed much importance on the perpetuation of the name, and deemed it
not too great a sacrifice if the females of the family remained
unmarried. I did not think it justifiable to make the whole life of my
sister bound to the observance of it. Indeed, her own spirit rebelled
against the acceptance of that old family law after she had been away to
school and had become imbued with the ideas of a later generation.
"Well," continued Pierre, "my sister married. She died of a terrible
disease in a month, and her husband followed not long after. Then came
the fate of the Pierres. My only son was drowned. As if the dreadful
broken vow of the Gotros were not yet expiated, my wife sickened and
passed away, not soon, but after a lingering illness of years, forcing
upon my unbelieving heart the truth of the legend of our family, and the
belief that the end of the Pierres was indeed to come with myself. I
have rejected the belief all my life since the last loss that came to me
through the death of my wife. I reject it to-day as I see myself the
last of the Pierre Gotros of the direct line. I look about me at Pierre
Logis, and at the place of our labor for nearly a hundred and fifty
years. Our pride was placed in a name. Our pride will die as our name
will go out. The effect of so selfish an object and so personal a desire
is manifest in our family now. The once despised and unconsidered female
element of the name takes up the family line, and upon a woman depends
the continuance of the Gotro blood, for the name is soon to be lost."
The old man paused, gazing towards the place where lay the Gotros, the
dark stones standing in mute testimony of the pride of a family, and the
noble man in his great grief and firm submission to the fatal result of
that pride blotted out in the judgment book all that was scored against
the Gotros. He was the noblest of them all, this Gotro, the last of the
Pierres.