Rose A Charlitte Part 61

"And you spent it, dearest child?"

"Yes, it just melted away. You know how money goes. But I shall pay it back some day."

"How will you get the money?"

"I don't know," she said, with a sigh. "I shall try to earn it."

"You may earn it now, in the quarter of a minute," he said, fatuously.

"And you call yourself an honest man--you talk against bribery and corruption, you doubt poor lonely orphans when they are going to confess little peccadilloes, and fancy in your wicked heart that they have committed some awful sin!" said Bidiane, in low, withering tones.

"I think you had better go home, sir."

They had arrived in front of the inn, and, although Agapit knew that she ought to go at once and put off her wet shoes, he still lingered, and said, delightedly, in low, cautious tones, "But, Bidiane, you have surely a little affection for me--and one short kiss--very short--certainly it would not be so wicked."

"If you do not love a man, it is a crime to embrace him," she said, with cold severity.

"Then I look forward to more gracious times," he replied. "Good night, little one, in twenty minutes I must be in Belliveau's Cove."

Bidiane, strangely subdued in appearance, stood watching him as, with eyes riveted on her, he extended a grasping hand towards Turenne's hanging bridle. When he caught it he leaped into the saddle, and Bidiane, supposing herself to be rid of him, mischievously blew him a kiss from the tips of her fingers.

In a trice he had thrown himself from Turenne's back and had caught her as she started to run swiftly to the house.

"Do not squeal, dear slippery eel," he said, laughingly, "thou hast called me back, and I shall kiss thee. Now go," and he released her, as she struggled in his embrace, laughing for the first time since her capture by the river. "Once I have held you in my arms--now you will come again," and shaking his head and with many a backward glance, he set off through the rain and the darkness towards his waiting friends and supporters, a few miles farther on.

An hour later, Claudine left the vivacious, unwearied revellers below, and went up-stairs to see whether Bidiane had returned home. She found her in bed, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling.

"Claudine," she said, turning her brown eyes on her friend and admirer, "how did you feel when Isidore asked you to marry him?"

"How did I feel--_misericorde_, how can I tell? For one thing, I wished that he would give up the drink."

"But how did you feel towards him?" asked Bidiane, curiously. "Was it like being lost in a big river, and swimming about for ages, and having noises in your head, and some one else was swimming about trying to find you, and you couldn't touch his hand for a long time, and then he dragged you out to the sh.o.r.e, which was the sh.o.r.e of matrimony?"

Claudine, who found nothing in the world more delectable than Bidiane's fancies, giggled with delight. Then she asked her where she had spent the evening.

Bidiane related her adventure, whereupon Claudine said, dryly, "I guess the other person in your river must be Agapit LeNoir."

"Would you marry him if he asked you?" said Bidiane.

"Mercy, how do I know--has he said anything of me?"

"No, no," replied Bidiane, hastily. "He wants to marry me."

"That's what I thought," said Claudine, soberly. "I can't tell you what love is. You can't talk it. I guess he'll teach you if you give him a chance. He's a good man, Bidiane. You'd better take him--it's an opening for you, too. He'll get on out in the world."

Bidiane laid her head back on her pillow, and slipped again into a hazy, dreamy condition of mind, in which the ever recurring subject of meditation was the one of the proper experience and manifestation of love between men and the women they adore.

"I don't love him, yet what makes me so cross when he looks at another woman, even my beloved Rose?" she murmured; and with this puzzling question bravely to the fore she fell asleep.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHARLITTE COMES BACK.

"From dawn to gloaming, and from dark to dawn, Dreams the unvoiced, declining Michaelmas.

O'er all the orchards where a summer was The noon is full of peace, and loiters on.

The branches stir not as the light airs run All day; their stretching shadows slowly pa.s.s Through the curled surface of the faded gra.s.s, Telling the hours of the cloudless sun."

J. F. H.

The last golden days of summer had come, and the Acadien farmers were rejoicing in a bountiful harvest. Day by day huge wagons, heaped high with grain, were driven to the threshing-mills, and day by day the stores of vegetables and fruit laid in for the winter were increased in barn and store-house.

Everything had done well this year, even the flower gardens, and some of the more pious of the women attributed their abundance of blossoms to the blessing of the seeds by the parish priests.

Agapit LeNoir, who now naturally took a broader and wider interest in the affairs of his countrymen, sat on Rose a Charlitte's lawn, discussing matters in general. Soon he would have to go to Halifax for his first session of the local legislature. Since his election he had come a little out of the shyness and reserve that had settled upon him in his early manhood. He was now usually acknowledged to be a rising young man, and one sure to become a credit to his nation and his province. He would be a member of the Dominion Parliament some day, the old people said, and in his more mature age he might even become a Senator. He had obtained just what he had needed,--a start in life.

Everything was open to him now. With his racial zeal and love for his countrymen, he could become a representative man,--an Acadien of the Acadiens.

Then, too, he would marry an accomplished wife, who would be of great a.s.sistance to him, for it was a well-known fact that he was engaged to his lively distant relative, Bidiane LeNoir, the young girl who had been educated abroad by the Englishman from Boston.

Just now he was talking to this same relative, who, instead of sitting down quietly beside him, was pursuing an erratic course of wanderings about the trees on the lawn. She professed to be looking for a robin's deserted nest, but she was managing at the same time to give careful attention to what her lover was saying, as he sat with eyes fixed now upon her, now upon the Bay, and waved at intervals the long pipe that he was smoking.

"Yes," he said, continuing his subject, "that is one of the first things I shall lay before the House--the lack of proper schoolhouse accommodation on the Bay."

"You are very much interested in the schoolhouses," said Bidiane, sarcastically. "You have talked of them quite ten minutes."

His face lighted up swiftly. "Let us return, then, to our old, old subject,--will you not reconsider your cruel decision not to marry me, and go with me to Halifax this autumn?"

"No," said Bidiane, decidedly, yet with an evident liking for the topic of conversation presented to her. "I have told you again and again that I will not. I am surprised at your asking. Who would comfort our darling Rose?"

"Possibly, I say, only possibly, she is not as dependent upon us as you imagine."

"Dependent! of course she is dependent. Am I not with her nearly all the time. See, there she comes,--the beauty! She grows more charming every day. She is like those lovely Flemish women, who are so tall, and graceful, and simple, and elegant, and whose heads are like burnished gold. I wish you could see them, Agapit. Mr. Nimmo says they have preserved intact the admirable _navete_ of the women of the Middle Ages. Their husbands are often brutal, yet they never rebel."

"Is _navete_ justifiable under those circ.u.mstances, _mignonne_?"

"Hush,--she will hear you. Now what does that boy want, I wonder. Just see him scampering up the road."

He wished to see her, and was soon stumbling through a verbal message.

Bidiane kindly but firmly followed him in it, and, stopping him whenever he used a corrupted French word, made him subst.i.tute another for it.

"No, Raoul, not _j'etions_ but _j'etais_" (I was). "_Pet.i.t mieux_" (a little better), "not _p't.i.t mieux_. _La rue_ not _la street_. _Ces jeunes demoiselles_" (those young ladies), "not _ces jeunes ladies_."

"They are so careless, these Acadiens of ours," she said, turning to Agapit, with a despairing gesture. "This boy knows good French, yet he speaks the impure. Why do his people say _becker_ for _baiser_" (kiss) "and _gueule_ for _bouche_" (mouth) "and _echine_ for _dos_" (back)? "It is so vulgar!"

"Patience," muttered Agapit, "what does he wish?"

"His sister Lucie wants you and me to go up to Grosses Coques this evening to supper. Some of the D'Entremonts are coming from Pubnico.