Part 22 (1/2)

”Come seek the lunch-tables,” said Agapit, presently bursting out on them, and mopping his perspiring face with his handkerchief. ”Most ambrosial dainties are known to the cooks of this parish.”

CHAPTER XIV.

WITH THE OLD ONES.

”The fresh salt breezes mingle with the smell Of clover fields and ripened hay beside; And Nature, musing, happy and serene, Hath here for willing man her sweetest spell.”

J. F. H.

After lunch, the Sleeping Water party separated. The Pitres found some old friends from up the Bay. Agapit wandered away with some young men, and Vesper, lazily declining to saunter with them, stood leaning against a tree behind a bench on which his mother and Rose were seated.

The latter received and exchanged numerous greetings with her acquaintances who pa.s.sed by, sometimes detaining them for an introduction to Mrs. Nimmo, who was making a supreme effort to be gracious and agreeable to the woman that the fates had apparently destined to be her daughter-in-law.

Vesper looked on, well pleased. ”Why do you not introduce me?” he said, mischievously, while his mother's attention was occupied with two Acadien girls.

Rose gave him a troubled glance. She took no pleasure in his presence now,--his mother had spoiled all that, and, although naturally simple and unaffected, she was now tortured by self-consciousness.

”I think that you do not care,” she said, in a low voice.

Vesper did not pursue the subject. ”Have all Acadien women gentle manners?” he asked, with a glance at the pair of shy, retiring ones talking to his mother.

A far-away look came into Rose's eyes, and she replied, with more composure: ”The Abbe Casgrain says--he who wrote 'A Pilgrimage to the Land of Evangeline'--that over all Acadiens hangs a quietness and melancholy that come from the troubles of long ago; but Agapit does not find it so.”

”What does Agapit say?”

”He finds,” and Rose drew her slight figure up proudly, ”that we are born to good manners. It was the best blood of France that settled Acadie. Did our forefathers come here poor? No, they brought much money.

They built fine houses of stone, not wood; Grand Pre was a very fine village. They also built chateaux. Then, after scatteration, we became poor; but can we not keep our good manners?”

Vesper was much diverted by the glance with which his mother, having bowed farewell to her new acquaintances, suddenly favored Rose. There was pride in it,--pride in the beauty and distinction of the woman beside her who was scarcely more than a girl; yet there was also in her glance a jealousy and aversion that could not yet be overcome. Time alone could effect this; and smothering a sigh, Vesper lifted his head towards Narcisse, who had crawled from his shoulder to a most uncomfortable seat on the lower limb of a pine-tree, where, however, he professed to be most comfortable, and sat with his head against the rough bark as delightedly as if it were the softest of cus.h.i.+ons.

”I am quite right,” said Narcisse, in English, which language he was learning with astonis.h.i.+ng rapidity, and Vesper again turned his attention to the picturesque, constantly changing groups of people. He liked best the brown and wrinkled old faces belonging to farmers and their wives who were enjoying a well-earned holiday. The young men in gray suits, he heard Rose telling his mother, were sailors from up the Bay, whose schooners had arrived just in time for them to throw themselves on their wheels and come to the picnic. The smooth-faced girls in blue, with pink handkerchiefs on their heads, were from a settlement back in the woods. The dark-eyed maidens in sailor hats, who looked like a troop of young Evangelines, were the six demoiselles Aucoin, the daughters of a lawyer in Meteghan, and the tall lady in blue was an Acadienne from New York, who brought her family every summer to her old home on the Bay.

”And that tall priest in the distance,” said Rose, ”is the father in whose parish we are. Once he was a colonel in the army of France.”

”There is something military in his figure,” murmured Mrs. Nimmo.

”He was born among the Acadiens in France. They did not need him to ministrate, so when he became a priest he journeyed here,” continued Rose, hurriedly, for the piercing eyes of the kindly-faced ecclesiastic had sought out Vesper and his mother, and he was approaching them with an uplifted hat.

Rose got up and said, in a fluttering voice, ”May I present you, Father La Croix, to Mrs. Nimmo, and also her son?”

The priest bowed gracefully, and begged to a.s.sure madame and her son that their fame had already preceded them, and that he was deeply grateful to them for honoring his picnic with their presence.

”I suppose there are not many English people here to-day,” said Mrs.

Nimmo, smiling amiably, while Vesper contented himself with a silent bow.

Father La Croix gazed about the crowd, now greatly augmented. ”As far as I can see, madame, you and your son are the only English that we have the pleasure of entertaining. You are now in the heart of the French district of Clare.”

”And yet I hear a good deal of English spoken.”