"I will not," he said, sullenly.
Mrs. Rose a 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 gra.s.s, 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 a 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 ma.s.s in the white church whose steeple he could see in the distance. He was amused with the shy, embarra.s.sed "_Bon jour_" (good morning) that she gave him as she pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.s.
"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 a 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 a 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 appet.i.te 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"evangeline_, of Doctor a.r.s.eneau, nor of Rose a 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 n.o.body; 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 pa.s.sion for the study of languages, he carefully a.n.a.lyzed each sentence that he heard, until, fearing that his att.i.tude 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 francaise_, 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 st.u.r.dy strength, h.o.a.rded 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 G.o.ddam 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 a Charlitte is _tres-smart, tres-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?"