Читать книгу Rose à Charlitte - Marshall Saunders - Страница 6

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"Montrez-moi votre menu et je vous montrerai mon cœur."

A few minutes later, the train had again entered the forest, and Vesper, who had a passion for trees and ranked them with human beings in his affections, allowed the mystery and charm of these foreigners to steal over him. In dignified silence and reserve the tall pines seemed to draw back from the rude contact of the passing train. The more assertive firs and spruces stood still, while the slender hackmatacks, most beautiful of all the trees of the wood, writhed and shook with fright, nervously tossing their tremulous arms and tasselled heads, and breathing long odoriferous sighs that floated after, but did not at all touch the sympathies of the roaring monster from the outer world who so often desecrated their solitude.

Vesper's delicate nostrils dilated as the spicy odors saluted them, and he thought, with tenderness, of the home trees that he loved, the elms of the Common and those of the square where he had been born. How many times he had encircled them with admiring footsteps, noting the individual characteristics of each tree, and giving to each one a separate place in his heart. Just for an instant he regretted that for to-night he could not lie down in their shadow. Then he turned irritably to the salesman, who was stretching and shaking out his legs, and performing other calisthenic exploits as accompaniments of waking.

"Haven't we come to Great Scott yet?" he asked, getting up, and sauntering to Vesper's window.

Vesper consulted his folder. Among the French names he could discover nothing like this, unless it was Grosses Coques, so called, his guide-book told him, because the Acadiens had discovered enormous clams there.

The salesman settled the question by dabbing at the name with his fat forefinger. "Confound these French names, and thank the Lord they're beginning to give them up. This Sleeping Water we're coming to used to be L'Eau Dormante. If I had my way, I'd string up on these pines every fellow that spoke a word of this gibberish. That would cure 'em. Why can't they have one language, as we do?"

"How would you like to talk French?" asked Vesper, quietly.

The little man laughed shrewdly, and not unkindly. "Every man to his liking. I guess it's best not to fight too much."

"I get off here," said Vesper, gathering up his papers.

"Happy you,—you won't have to wait for all of Evangeline's heifers to step off the track between here and Halifax."

Vesper nodded to him, and, swinging himself from the car, went to find the conductor.

There was ample time to get that gentlemanly official's consent to have his wheel and trunk put off at this station, instead of at Grand Pré, and ample time for Vesper to give a long look at the names in the line of cars, which were, successively, Basil the Blacksmith, Benedict the Father, René the Notary, and Gabriel the Lover, before the locomotive snuffed its nostrils and, panting and heaving, started off to trail its romantic appendages through the country of Evangeline.

When the train had disappeared, Vesper looked about him. He was no longer in the heart of the forest. An open country and scattering houses appeared in the distance, and here he could distinctly feel a mischievous breeze from the Bay that playfully ruffled his hair, and tossed back the violets at his feet every time that they bent over to look at their own sweet faces in the black, mirror-like pool of water set in a mossy bed beside them.

He stooped and picked one of the wistful purple blossoms, then stepped up on the platform of the gabled station-house. Inside the kitchen, a woman, sitting with her back to the passing trains, was spinning, and at the same time rocking a cradle, while near the door stood an individual who, to Vesper's secret amusement, might have posed either as a member of the human species, or as one of the class aves.

He had many times seen the fellows of this white-haired, smooth-faced old man, in the Southern States in the shape of cardinal-birds. Those resplendent creatures in the male sex are usually clothed in gay red jackets. This male's plumage was also red, but, unlike the cardinal-birds, it had a trimming of pearl buttons and white lace. The bird's high and conical crest was expressed in the man by a pointed red cap. The bird is nondescript as to the legs,—so also was the man; and the loud and musical note of the Southern songster was reproduced in the fife-like tones of the Acadien, when he presently spoke.

He was an official, and carried in his hand a locked bag containing her Majesty's mail for her Acadien subjects of the Bay. Vesper had seen the mail-carriers along the route, tossing their bags to the passing train, and receiving others in return, but none as gorgeous as this one, and he was wondering why the gentle-faced septuagenarian made himself so peculiar, when he was addressed in a sweet, high voice.

"Sir," said the bird-man, in French,—for was he not Emmanuel Victor De la Rive, lineal descendant of a French marquis who had married a queen's maid of honor, and had subsequently bequeathed his bones and his large family of children to his adored Acadie?—"Sir, is it possible that you are a guest for the inn?"

"It is possible," said Vesper, gravely.

"Alas!" said the old man, turning to the dark-eyed woman, who had left her cradle and spinning-wheel, "is it not always so? When Rose à Charlitte does not send, there are arrivals. When she does, there are not. She will be in despair. Sir, shall I have the honor of taking you over in my road-cart?"

"I have a wheel," said Vesper, pointing to the bicycle, leaning disconsolately against his trunk.

The black-eyed woman immediately put out her hand for his checks.

"Then may I have the honor of showing you the way?" said Monsieur De la Rive, bowing before Vesper as if he were a divinity. "There are sides of the road which it is well to avoid."

"I shall be most happy to avail myself of your offer."

"I will send the trunk over," said the station woman. "There is a constant going that way."

Vesper thanked her, and left the station in the wake of the cardinal-bird, who sat perched on his narrow seat as easily as if it were a branch of a tree, turning his crested head at frequent intervals to look anxiously at the mail-bag which, for reasons best known to himself, he carried slung to a nail in the back of his cart.

At frequent intervals, too, he piped shrill and sweet remarks to Vesper. "Courage; the road will soon improve. It is the ox-teams that cut it up. They load schooners in the Bay. Here at last is a good spot. Monsieur can mount now. Beware of the sharp stones. All the bones of the earth stick up in places. Does monsieur intend to stay long in Sleeping Water? Was it monsieur that Rose à Charlitte expected when she drove through the pouring rain to the station, two days since? What did he say in the letter that he sent yesterday in explanation of his change of plans? Did monsieur come from Halifax, or Boston? Did he know Mrs. de la Rive, laundress, of Cambridge Street? Had he samples of candy or tobacco in that big box of his? How much did he charge a pound for his best peppermints?"

Vesper, fully occupied with keeping his wheel out of the ruts in the road, and in maintaining a safe distance from the cart, which pressed him sore if he went ahead and waited for him if he dallied behind, answered "yes" and "no" at random, until at length he had involved himself in such a maze of contradictions that Monsieur de la Rive felt himself forced to pull up his brown pony and remonstrate.

"But it is impossible, monsieur, that you should have seen Mrs. de la Rive, who has been dying for weeks, dancing at the wedding of the daughter of her step-uncle, the baker, and yet you say 'yes' when I remark that she was not there."

The stop and the remonstrance were so birdlike and so quick, that Vesper, taken aback, fell off his wheel and broke his cyclometer.

He picked himself out of the dust, swearing under his breath, and Monsieur de la Rive, being a gentleman, and seeing that this quiet young stranger was disinclined for conversation, suddenly whipped up his pony and sped madly on ahead, the tails of his red coat streaming out behind him, the tip of his pointed cap fluttering and nodding over his thick white locks of hair.

After the lapse of a few minutes, Vesper had recovered his composure, and was looking calmly about him. The road was better now, and they were nearing the Bay, that lay shimmering and shining like a great sea-serpent coiled between purple hills. He did not know what Grand Pré was like, and was therefore unaware of the extent of the Acadiens' loss in being driven from it; but this was by no means a barren country. On either side of him were fairly prosperous farms, each one with a light painted wooden house, around which clustered usually a group of children, presided over by a mother, who, as the mail-driver dashed by, would appear in the doorway, thrusting forth her matronly face, often partly shrouded by a black handkerchief.

These black handkerchiefs, la cape Normande of old France, were almost universal on the heads of women and girls. He could see them in the fields and up and down the roads. They and the vivacious sound of the French tongue gave the foreign touch to his surroundings, which he found, but for these reminders, might once again have been those of an out-of-the-way district in some New England State.

He noticed, with regret, that the forest had all been swept away. The Acadiens, in their zeal for farming, had wielded their axes so successfully that scarcely a tree had been left between the station and the Bay. Here and there stood a lonely guardian angel, in the shape of a solitary pine, hovering over some Acadien roof-tree, and turning a melancholy face towards its brothers of the forest,—rugged giants primeval, now prostrate and forlorn, and being trailed slowly along towards the waiting schooners in the Bay.

The most of these fallen giants were loaded on rough carts drawn by pairs of sleek and well-kept oxen who were yoked by the horns. The carts were covered with mud from the bad roads of the forest, and muddy also were the boots of the stalwart Acadien drivers, who walked beside the oxen, whip in hand, and turned frankly curious faces towards the stranger who flashed by their slow-moving teams on his shining wheel.

The road was now better, and Vesper quickly attained to the top of the last hill between the station and the Bay.

Ah! now the fields did not appear bare, the houses naked, the whole country wind-swept and cold, for the wide, regal, magnificent Bay lay spread out before him. It was no longer a thread of light, a sea-serpent shining in the distance, but a great, broad, beautiful basin, on whose placid bosom all the Acadien, New England, and Nova Scotian fleets might float with never a jostle between any of their ships.

A fire of admiration kindled in his calm eyes, and he allowed himself to glide rapidly down the hill towards this brilliant blue sweep of water, along whose nearer shores stretched, as far as his gaze could reach, the curious dotted line of the French village.

The country had become flat, as flat as Holland, and the fields rolled down into the water in the softest, most exquisite shades of green, according to the different kinds of grass or grain flourishing along the shores. The houses were placed among the fields, some close together, some far apart, all, however, but a stone's throw from the water's edge, as if the Acadiens, fearful of another expulsion, held themselves always in readiness to step into the procession of boats and schooners moored almost in their dooryards.

At the point where Vesper found himself threatened with precipitation into the Bay, they struck the village line. Here, at the corner, was the general shop and post-office of Sleeping Water. The cardinal-bird fluttered his mail-bag in among the loafers at the door, saw the shopkeeper catch it, then, swelling out his vermilion breast with importance, he nimbly took the corner with one wheel in the air and pulled up before the largest, whitest house on the street, and flourished a flaming wing in the direction of a swinging sign,—"The Sleeping Water Inn."

Vesper, biting his lip to restrain a smile, rounded the corner after him, and leisurely stepped from his wheel in front of the house.

"Ring, sir, and enter," piped the bird, then, wishing him bonne chance (good luck), he flew away.

Vesper pulled the bell, and, as no one answered his summons, he sauntered through the open door into the hall.

So this was an Acadien house,—and he had expected a log hut. He could command a view from where he stood of a staircase, a smoking-room, and a parlor,—all clean, cool, and comfortably furnished, and having easy chairs, muslin curtains, books, and pictures.

He smiled to himself, murmured "I wonder where the dining-room is? These flies will probably know," and followed a prosperous-looking swarm sailing through the hall to a distant doorway.

A table, covered by a snowy cloth and set ready for a meal, stood before him. He walked around it, rapped on a door, behind which he heard a murmur of voices, and was immediately favored with a sight of an Acadien kitchen.

This one happened to be large, lofty, and of a grateful irregularity in shape. The ceiling was as white as snow, and a delicate blue and cream paper adorned the walls. The floor was of hard wood and partly covered with brightly colored mats, made by the skilful fingers of Acadien women. There were several windows and doors, and two pantries, but no fireplace. An enormous Boston cooking range took its place. Every cover on it glistened with blacking, every bit of nickel plating was polished to the last degree, and, as if to show that this model stove could not possibly be malevolent enough to throw out impurities in the way of soot and ashes, there stood beside it a tall clothes-horse full of white ironed clothes hung up to air.

But the most remarkable thing in this exquisitely clean kitchen was the mistress of the inn,—tall, willowy Mrs. Rose à Charlitte, who stood confronting the newcomer with a dish-cover in one hand and a clean napkin in the other, her pretty oval face flushed from some sacrifice she had been offering up on her huge Moloch of a stove.

"ROSE À CHARLITTE STOOD CONFRONTING THE NEWCOMER."

"Can you give me some lunch?" asked Vesper, and he wondered whether he should find a descendant of the Fiery Frenchman in this placid beauty, whose limpid blue eyes, girlish, innocent gaze, and thick braid of hair, with the little confusion of curls on the forehead, reminded him rather of a Gretchen or a Marguerite of the stage.

"But yes," said Mrs. Rose à Charlitte, in uncertain yet pretty English, and her gentle and demure glance scrutinized him with some shrewdness and accurate guessing as to his attainments and station in life.

"Can you give it to me soon?" he asked.

"I can give it soon," she replied, and as she spoke she made an almost imperceptible motion of her head in the direction of the neat maid-servant behind her, who at once flew out to the garden for fresh vegetables, while, with her foot, which was almost as slender as her hand, Mrs. Rose à Charlitte pulled out a damper in the stove that at once caused a still more urgent draft to animate the glowing wood inside.

"Can you let me have a room?" pursued Vesper.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Rose, and she turned to the third occupant of the kitchen, a pale child with a flowerlike face and large, serious eyes, who sat with folded hands in a little chair. "Narcisse," she said, in French, "wilt thou go and show the judge's room?"

The child, without taking his fascinated gaze from Vesper, responded, in a sweet, drawling voice, "Ou-a-a-y, ma ma-r-re" (yes, my mother). Then, rising, he trotted slowly through the dining-room and up the staircase to a hall above, where he gravely threw open the door of a good-sized chamber, whose chief ornament was a huge white bed.

"Why do you call this the judge's room?" asked Vesper, in French.

The child answered him in unintelligible childish speech, that made the young man observe him intently. "I believe you look like me, you black lily," he said, at last.

There was, indeed, a resemblance between their two heads. Both had pale, inscrutable faces, dark eyes, and curls like midnight clustering over their white foreheads. Both were serious, grave, and reserved in expression. The child stared up at Vesper, then, seizing one of his hands, he patted it gently with his tiny fingers. They were friends.

"THEY WERE FRIENDS."

Vesper allowed the child to hold his hand until he plunged his head into a basin of cold water. Then, with water dripping from his face, he paused to examine a towel before he would press it against his sensitive skin. It was fine and perfectly clean, and, with a satisfied air, he murmured: "So far, Doctor Arseneau has not led me astray."

The child waited patiently until the stranger had smoothed down his black curls, then, stretching out a hand, he mutely invited him to descend to the parlor.

Upon arriving there, he modestly withdrew to a corner, after pointing out a collection of photographs on the table. Vesper made a pretence of examining them until the entrance of his landlady with the announcement that his lunch was served.

She shyly set before him a plate of soup, and a dish which she called a little ragoût, "not as good as the ragoûts of Boston, and yet eatable."

"How do you know that I am from Boston?" asked Vesper.

"I do not know," she murmured, with a quick blush. "Monsieur is from Halifax, I thought. He seems English. I speak of Boston because it was there that I learned to cook."

Vesper said nothing, but his silence seemed to invite a further explanation, and she went on, modestly: "When I received news that my husband had died of yellow fever in the West Indies, neighbors said, 'What will you do?' My stepmother said, 'Come home;' but I answered, 'No; a child that has left its father's roof does not return. I will keep hotel. My house is of size. I will go to Boston and learn to cook better than I know.' So I went, and stayed one week."

"That was a short time to learn cooking," observed Vesper, politely.

"I did not study. I bought cuisine books. I went to grand hotels and regarded the tables and tasted the dishes. If I now had more money, I would do similar," and she anxiously surveyed her modest table and the aristocratic young man seated at it; "but not many people come, and the money lacks. However, our Lord knows that I wish to educate my child. Strangers will come when he is older.

"And," she went on, after a time, with mingled reluctance and honesty, "I must not hide from you that I have already in the bank two hundred dollars. It is not much; not so much as the Gautreaus, who have six hundred, and Agapit, who has four, yet it is a starting."

Vesper slightly wrinkled his forehead, and Mrs. Rose, fearful that her cooking displeased him, for he had scarcely tasted the ragoût and had put aside a roast chicken, hastened to exclaim, "That pudding is but overheated, and I did wrong to place it before you. Despise it if you care, and it will please the hens."

"It is a very good pudding," said Vesper, composedly, and he proceeded to finish it.

"Here is a custard which is quite fresh," said his landlady, feverishly, "and bananas, and oranges, and some coffee."

"Thank you. No cream—may I ask why you call that room you put me in the judge's room?"

"Because we have court near by, every year. The judge who comes exists in that room. It is a most stirabout time, for many witnesses and lawyers come. Perhaps monsieur passed the court-house and saw a lady looking through the bars?"

"No, I did not. Who is the lady?"

"A naughty one, who sold liquor. She had no license, she could not pay her fine, therefore she must look through those iron bars," and Mrs. Rose à Charlitte shuddered.

Vesper looked interested, and presently she went on: "But Clothilde Dubois has some mercies,—one rocking-chair, her own feather bed, some dainties to eat, and many friends to visit and talk through the bars."

"Is there much drinking among the Acadiens on this Bay?" asked Vesper.

"They do not drink at all," she said, stoutly.

"Really,—then you never see a drunken man?"

"I never see a drunken man," rejoined his pretty hostess.

"Then I suppose there are no fights."

"There are no fights among Acadiens. They are good people. They go to mass and vespers on Sunday. They listen to their good priests. In the evening one amuses oneself, and on Monday we rise early to work. There are no dances, no fights."

Vesper's meditative glance wandered through the window to a square of grass outside, where some little girls in pink cotton dresses were playing croquet. He was drinking his coffee and watching their graceful behavior, when his attention was recalled to the room by hearing Mrs. Rose à Charlitte say to her child, "There, Narcisse, is a morsel for thy trees."

The little boy had come from the corner where he had sat like a patient mouse, and, with some excitement, was heaping a plate with the food that Vesper had rejected.

"Not so fast, little one," said his mother, with an apologetic glance at the stranger. "Take these plates to the pantry, it will be better."

"Ah, but they will have a good dinner to-day," said the child. "I will give most to the French willows, my mother. In the morning it will all be gone."

"But, my treasure, it is the dogs that get it, not the trees."

"No, my mother," he drawled, "you do not know. In the night the long branches stretch out their arms; they sweep it up," and he clasped his tiny hands in ecstasy.

Vesper's curiosity was aroused, although he had not understood half that the child had said. "Does he like trees?" he asked.

Rose à Charlitte made a puzzled gesture. "Sir, to him the trees, the flowers, the grass, are quite alive. He will not play croquet with those dear little girls lest his shoes hurt the grass. If I would allow, he would take all the food from the house and lay under the trees and the flowers. He often cries at night, for he says the hollyhocks and sunflowers are hungry, because they are tall and lean. He suffers terribly to see the big spruces and pines cut down and dragged to the shore. The doctor says he should go away for awhile, but it is a puzzle, for I cannot endure to have him leave me."

Vesper gave more attention than he yet had done to the perusal of the child's sensitive yet strangely composed face. Then he glanced at the mother. Did she understand him?

She did. In her deep blue eyes he could readily perceive the quick flash of maternal love and sympathy whenever her boy spoke to her. She was young, too, extremely young, to have the care of rearing a child. She must have been married in her cradle, and with that thought in mind he said, "Do Acadien women marry at an early age?"

"Not more so than the English," said Mrs. Rose, with a shrug of her graceful, sloping shoulders, "though I was but young,—but seventeen. But my husband wished it so. He had built this house. He had been long ready for marriage," and she glanced at the wall behind Vesper.

The young man turned around. Just behind him hung the enlarged photograph of a man of middle age,—a man who must have been many years older than his young wife, and whose death had, evidently, not left a permanent blank in her affections.

In a naïve, innocent way she imparted a few more particulars to Vesper with regard to her late husband, and, as he rose from the table, she followed him to the parlor and said, gently, "Perhaps monsieur will register."

Vesper sat down before the visitors' book on the table, and, taking up a pen, wrote, "Vesper L. Nimmo, The Evening News, Boston."

After he had pressed the blotting-paper on his words, and pushed the book from him, his landlady stretched out her hand in childlike curiosity. "Vesper," she said,—"that name is beautiful; it is in a hymn to the blessed virgin; but Evening News,—surely it means not a journal?"

Vesper assured her that it did.

The young French widow's face fell. She gazed at him with a sudden and inexplicable change of expression, in which there was something of regret, something of reproach. "Il faut que je m'en aille" (I must go away), she murmured, reverting to her native language, and she swiftly withdrew.

Vesper lifted his level eyebrows and languidly strolled out to the veranda. "The Acadienne evidently entertains some prejudice against newspaper men. If my dear father were here he would immediately proceed, in his inimitable way, to clear it from her mind. As for me, I am not sufficiently interested," and he listlessly stretched himself out on a veranda settle.

"Monsieur," said a little voice, in deliberate French, "will you tell me a story about a tree?"

Vesper understood Narcisse this time, and, taking him on his knee, he pointed to the wooded hills across the Bay and related a wonderful tale of a city beyond the sun where the trees were not obliged to stand still in the earth from morning till night, but could walk about and visit men and women, who were their brothers and sisters, and sometimes the young trees would stoop down and play with the children.