PIERRE'S LITTLE ONE.
This question which Lecorbeau asked, all Beauséjour was asking in an
hour or two. That night an Indian, sent from Le Loutre, who was lying
in exhaustion at Cobequid, arrived at the fort and told the fate of
the expedition.
As already stated, the English authorities in Halifax had been warned
of the movements of the Indians--though they could only guess the part
that Le Loutre had in them. Without delay they had sent small bands
of troops to each of the exposed settlements, but that dispatched
to Kenneticook arrived, as we have seen, too late. When the breathless
soldiers, lighted through the woods by the glare of the burning village,
reached the scene of ruin, of all who had that night lain down to
fearless sleep in Kenneticook there remained alive but one, the little
child whom Pierre had snatched from death.
When the English emerged from the woods and saw the extent of the
disaster, they knew they were too late. Not a house, not a building
of any kind, but was already wrapped in a roaring torrent of flame,
and against the broad illumination could be seen the figures of the
savages, fantastically dancing. The English captain formed his line
with prudent deliberation, and then led the attack at a run.
Never dreaming of so rude an interruption, the raiders were taken
utterly by surprise and made no effective resistance. A number fell
at the first volley, which the English poured in upon them in charging.
Then followed a hand-to-hand fight, fierce but brief, which Le Loutre
didn't see, as he had wisely retired on the instant of the Englishmen's
arrival. He was followed by two of the Acadians, and two or three
of the more prudent of the Micmacs; but the rest of his party, fired
with blind fury by the liquor which they had found among the village
stores, remained to fight with a drunken recklessness and fell to a man
beneath the steel of the avengers.
Left masters of the field, the rescue party gazed with horror on the
ruin they had come too late to avert. With a grim, poetic justice they
cast the bodies of their slain foes into the fires which had already
consumed the victims of their ferocity. While this was going on the
leader of the party, a young lieutenant, stood apart in deepest dejection.
"What's the matter with the general?" inquired a soldier, pointing
with his thumb in the direction of his sorrowing chief.
"I'm afeard as how that little niece of his'n, as you've seed him
a-danderin' many a time in Halifax, was visitin' folks here. If so be
what I've hearn be true, them yellin' butchers has done for her, sure
pop. I tell ye, Bill, she was a little beauty, an' darter of the cap'n
they murdered last September down to Fort Lawrence."
"I ricklecs the child well" replied Bill, shaking his head slowly.
"It _was_ a purty one, an' _no_ mistake! An' Cap'n Howe's darter,
too. I swan!"
In a little while the careless-hearted soldiers were asleep amid the
ashes of Kenneticook village, while the young lieutenant lay awake,
his heart aching for his golden-haired pet, his widowed sister's child.
The next day he gave his men a long rest, for they had done some severe
forced marching. When at length he reached Piziquid he little dreamed
that the child whose death he mourned was at that very moment sailing
down the river bound for Beauséjour and a long sojourn among her
people's enemies.
In the house of Antoine Lecorbeau things went on more pleasantly than
with most of his fellow-Acadians. With the good will of Vergor, the
commandant of Beauséjour, who made enormous profits out of the Acadian's
tireless diligence, Lecorbeau became once more fairly prosperous; and
Le Loutre had grown again friendly. But most of the Acadians found
themselves in a truly pitiable plight. There were not lands enough to
supply them all, and they pined for the farms of Acadie which Le Loutre
had forced them to forsake. Threatened with excommunication and the
scalping knife if they should return to their allegiance, and with
starvation if they obeyed the commands of their heartless superiors
at Quebec, they were girt about on all sides with pain and peril.
Vacillating, unable to think boldly for themselves, they were doubtless
much to blame, but their miseries were infinitely more than they deserved.
The punishments that fell upon them fell upon the wrong shoulders.
The English, who treated them for a long time with the most patient
forbearance, were compelled at length, in self-defense, to adopt an
attitude of rigorous severity; and by the French, in whose cause they
suffered everything, they were regarded as mere tools, to be used
till destroyed. At the door of the corrupt officials of France may be
laid all their miseries.
After the affair at Kenneticook Le Loutre found that Cobequid was no
longer the place for him. He needed the shelter of Beauséjour. There,
by force of his fanatic zeal, his ability, and his power over the
Acadians, he divided the authority of the fort with its corrupt
commandant. He never dreamed of the part Pierre had played that dreadful
night on the Kenneticook. He knew Lecorbeau had somewhere picked up
an English child. But a child was in his eyes quite too trivial
a matter to call for any comment.
As time went on Pierre's little one, as she was generally called--"la
p'tite de Pierre"--picked up the French of her new Acadian home, and
went far to forgetting her English. In the eyes of Lecorbeau and his
wife she came to seem like one of their own and she was a favorite with
the whole family; but to Pierre she clung as if he were her father and
mother in one. As soon as she had learned a little French she was
questioned minutely as to her parents and her home. Her name, Edie Howe,
had at once been associated with that of the lamented captain.
"Edie," good wife Lecorbeau would say to her, "where is your mother?"
At this the child would shake her head sorrowfully for a moment, and
pointing over the hills, would answer:
"Away off there!"--and sometimes she would add, "Poor mamma's sick!"
At last one day she seemed suddenly to remember, and cried as if she
were announcing a great discovery, "Why, mamma's in Halifax."
Mother Lecorbeau was not a little triumphant at having elicited this
definite information.
On the subject of her father the little one had not much to say. When
questioned about him she merely said that she was his little girl, and
that he had gone away somewhere, and some bad people wouldn't let him
come back again. She said her mamma had cried a great deal while telling
her that papa would never come back--and from this it was clear at once
that the father was dead. To get any definite idea from the child as to
the time of his death proved a vain endeavor; she was not very clear
in her ideas of time. But she said he was a tall man and a soldier.
She further declared that he hadn't a lot of hair on his face, like
father Lecorbeau, but was nice and smooth, like her Pierre, only with
a mustache. All this tallied with a description of Captain Howe, so
Lecorbeau concluded that she was Howe's child. As for the people with
whom she had been visiting in the hapless village of Kenneticook, they
were evidently old servants of her father's family.
"I was staying at nurse's," she used to say. "Uncle Willie sent me
there because my mamma was sick." Of this Uncle Willie she talked
so much and so often that Pierre said he was jealous.
While several years rolled by, bringing no great event to the cabin
in the willows at the foot of Beauséjour, a cloud was slowly gathering
over the fortressed hill. The relations between France and England
in Acadie were growing more and more strained. It was plain that a
rupture must soon come. In the cabin, by the light of fire or candle,
after the day's work was done, Pierre and his father, with sometimes
the old sergeant from the fort, used to talk over the condition of
affairs. To Pierre and the sergeant it was obvious that France must win
back Acadie, and that soon; and they paid little heed to Lecorbeau's
sagacious comparisons between the French and English methods of
conducting the government. Lecorbeau, naturally did not feel like
arguing his points with much determination; but across the well-scrubbed
deal table he uttered several predictions which Pierre recalled when
he saw them brought to pass.
"Here's about how it stands," remarked the sergeant one night, shaking
the ashes of his pipe into the hollow of his hand, "there's hundreds
upon hundreds now of your Acadians shifting round loose, waiting for a
chance to get back to their old farms. They don't dare go back while the
English hold possession, for fear of His Reverence yonder"--signifying,
of course, Le Loutre--"so they're all ready to fight just as soon as
France gives the word. They don't care much for France, maybe--not
much more than for the English--but they do just hanker after their
old farms. When the government thinks it the right time, and sends us
some troops from Quebec and Louisburg, all the Acadians out of Acadie
will walk in to take possession, and the Acadians in Acadie will bid
good day to King George and help us kick the English out of Halifax.
It's bound to come, sure as fate; and pretty soon, I'm thinking."
"I believe you're right!" assented Pierre, enthusiastically.
"What would you think, now," said Lecorbeau, suggestively, "if the
English should take it into their slow heads not to wait for all this
to happen? What would you do up there in the fort if some ships were
to sail up to-morrow and land a little English army under Beauséjour?
You've got a priest and a greedy old woman (begging Monsieur Vergor's
pardon) to lead you. How long would Beauséjour hold out? And suppose
Beauséjour was taken, where would the settlements be--Ouestkawk and
Memramcook, and even the fort on the St. John? Wouldn't it rather
knock on the head this rising of the Acadians, this 'walking in and
taking possession' of which you feel so confident?"
"But we won't give the English a chance!" cried the warlike pair,
in almost the same breath. "We'll strike first. You'll see!"
Meanwhile the English were making ready to do just what Lecorbeau said
they might do. At the same time the French at Quebec, at Louisburg,
at Beauséjour, though talking briskly about the great stroke by which
Acadie was to be recaptured, were too busy plundering the treasury
to take any immediate steps. Following the distinguished example of the
notorious intendant, Bigot, almost every official in New France had
his fingers in the public purse. They were in no haste for the fray.
The English, however, seeing what the French _might_ do, naturally
supposed they would try and do it. To prevent this, they were planning
the capture of Beauséjour. Governor Lawrence, in Halifax, and Governor
Shirley, in Boston, were preparing to join forces for the undertaking.
In New England Shirley raised a regiment of two thousand volunteers
who mustered, in April of the year 1755, amid the quaint streets of
Boston. This regiment was divided into two battalions, one of which
was commanded by Colonel John Winslow, and the other by John Scott.
After a month's delay, waiting for muskets, the little army set sail
for Beauséjour. The chief command was in the hands of Colonel Moncton,
who had been sent to Boston by Lawrence to arrange the expedition.
On the night when Lecorbeau, Pierre, and the old sergeant were holding
the conversation of which I have recorded a fragment, the fleet containing
the Massachusetts volunteers were already at Annapolis. A day or two
later they were sailing up the restless tide of Fundy. On the first day
of June they were sighted from the cloud-topped mountain of Chepody,
or "_Chapeau Dieu_." As the sun went down the fleet cast anchor under
the high bluffs of Far Ouestkawk, not three leagues from Beauséjour.
As the next dawn was breaking over the Minudie hills there arrived
at the fort a little party of wearied Acadians, who had hastened up
from Chepody to give warning. Instantly all Beauséjour became a scene
of excitement. There was much to be done in the way of strengthening
the earthworks. Urgent messengers were sent out to implore reinforcements
from Louisburg, while others called together all the Acadians of the
neighborhood, to the number of fourteen hundred fighting men. As Pierre
and his father were taking the rest of the family, with some supplies,
to a little wooded semi-island beside the Tantramar, some miles from
the fort, Lecorbeau said to his son:
"I rather like the idea of that bold stroke of yours and the sergeant's!
When do you think it will be carried out?"
Pierre looked somewhat crestfallen, but he mustered up spirit to reply:
"Just wait till we've beaten off those fellows. Then you'll see what
we'll do."
"Well," said his father, "I'll wait as patiently as possible!"
After placing the mother and children in their refuge, which was already
thronged, our two Acadians, with a tearful farewell, hastened back
to take their part in the defense of Beauséjour.