Chapter XVI An Acadien Festival
“Vive Jésus!
Vive Jésus!
Avec la croix, son cher partage.
Vive Jésus!
Dans les cœurs de tous les élus!
Portons la croix.
Sans choix, sans ennui, sans murmure,
Portons la croix!
Quoique très amère et très dure,
Malgré les sens et la nature,
Portons la croix!”
—Acadien Song.
Charlitte had been in his grave for nearly two years. He slept peacefully in the little green cemetery hard by the white church where a slender, sorrowful woman came twice every week to hear a priest repeat masses for the repose of his soul.
He slept on and gave no sign, and his countrymen came and went above him, reflecting occasionally on their own end, but mostly, after the manner of all men, allowing their thoughts to linger rather on matters pertaining to time than on those of eternity.
One fifteenth of August—the day consecrated by Acadiens all over Canada to the memory of their forefathers—had come and gone, and another had arrived.
This day was one of heavenly peace and calm. The sky was faintly, exquisitely blue, and so placid was the Bay that the occupants of the boats crossing from Digby Neck to some of the churches in Frenchtown were forced to take in their sails, and apply themselves to their oars.
Since early morning the roads of the parish in which Sleeping Water is situated had been black with people, and now at ten o’clock some two thousand Acadiens were assembled about the doors of the old church at Pointe à l’Eglise.
There was no talking, no laughing. In unbroken silence they waited for the sound of the bell, and when it came they flocked into the church, packing it full, and overflowing out to the broad flight of steps, where they knelt in rows and tried to obtain glimpses over each other’s shoulders of the blue and white decorations inside, and of the altar ablaze with lights.
The priests from the college and glebe-house, robed in handsome vestments, filed out from the vestry, and, quietly approaching the silken banners standing against the low gallery, handed them to representatives of different societies connected with the church.
The children of the Guardian Angel received the picture of their patron saint, and, gathering around it, fluttered soberly out to the open air through the narrow lane left among the kneeling worshippers.
The children of the Society of Mary followed them, their white-clad and veiled figures clustering about the pale, pitying Virgin carried by two of their number. A banner waving beside her bore the prayer, “Marie, Priez Pour Nous” (Mary, pray for us), and, as if responding to the petition, her two hands were extended in blessing over them.
After the troop of snowy girls walked the black sisters in big bonnets and drooping shawls, and the brown sisters, assistants to the Eudists, who wore black veils with white flaps against their pale faces. Then came the priests, altar boys, and all the congregation. Until they left the church the organ played an accompaniment to their chanting. On the steps a young deacon put a cornet to his lips, and, taking up the last note of the organ, prolonged it into a vigorous leadership of the singing:
Ave maris Stella,
Dei mater alma,
Atque semper virgo
Felix coeli porta.
As the congregation sang, they crossed the road to the gates of the college grounds, and divided into two parts, the men, with heads uncovered, going one side, and the women on the other.
Above the gate-posts waved two flags, the union jack and the Acadien national flag,—a French tricolor, crossed by a blue stripe, and pierced with a yellow star.
Slowly and solemnly the long array of men and women passed by the glebe-house and the white marble tomb of the good Abbé, whose life was given to the Acadiens of the Bay Saint-Mary. The hymns sung by the priests at the head of the procession floated back to the congregation in the rear, and at the moment when the singing was beginning to die away in the distance and the procession was winding out of sight behind the big college, two strangers suddenly appeared on the scene.
They were a slender, elegant man and a beautiful lad of a clear, healthy pallor of skin. The man, with a look of grave, quiet happiness on his handsome face, stepped from the carriage in which they were driving, fastened his horse to a near fence, and threw a longing glance after the disappearing procession.
“If we hurry, Narcisse,” he said, “we shall be able to overtake them.”
The lad at once placed himself beside him, and together they went on their way towards the gates.
“Do you remember it?” asked the man, softly, as the boy lifted his hat when they passed by the door of the silent, decorated church.
“Yes, perfectly,” he said, with a sweet, delicate intonation of voice. “It seems as if my mother must be kneeling there.”
Vesper’s brow and cheeks immediately became suffused with crimson. “She is probably on ahead. We will find out. If she is not, we shall drive at once to Sleeping Water.”
They hurried on silently. The procession was now moving through another gate, this one opening on the point of land where are the ruins of the first church that the good Abbé built on the Bay.
Beside its crumbling ruins and the prostrate altarstones a new, fresh altar had been put up,—this one for temporary use. It was a veritable bower of green amid which bloomed many flowers, the fragile nurslings of the sisters in the adjacent convent.
Before this altar the priests and deacons knelt for an instant on colored rugs, then, while the people gathered closely around them, an Acadien Abbé from the neighboring province of New Brunswick ascended the steps of the altar, and, standing beside the embowered Virgin mother, special patron and protectress of his race, he delivered a fervent panegyric on the ancestors of the men and women before him.
While he recounted the struggles and trials of the early Acadiens, many of his hearers wept silently, but when this second good Abbé eloquently exhorted them not to linger too long on a sad past, but to gird themselves for a glorious future, to be constant to their race and to their religion, their faces cleared,—they were no longer a prey to mournful recollections.
Vesper, holding his hat in his hand, and closely accompanied by Narcisse, moved slowly nearer and nearer to a man who stood with his face half hidden by his black hat.
It was Agapit, and at Vesper’s touch he started slightly, then, for he would not speak on this solemn occasion, he extended a hand that was grasped in the firm and enduring clasp of a friendship that would not again be broken.
Vesper would never forget that, amid all the bustle and confusion succeeding Charlitte’s death, Agapit had found time to send him a cable message,—“Charlitte is dead.”
After communicating with Agapit, Vesper drew the boy nearer to him, and fell back a little. He was inexpressibly moved. A few years ago he would have called this “perverted Christianity—Mariolatry.” Now, now—“O God!” he muttered, “my pure saint, she has genuine piety,” and under wet lashes he stole a glance at one form, preëminently beautiful among the group of straight and slim young Acadien women beyond him. She was there,—his heart’s delight, his treasure. She was his. The holy, rapt expression would give place to one more earthly, more self-conscious. He would not surrender her to heaven just yet,—but still, would it not be heaven on earth to be united to her?
She did not know that he was near. In complete oblivion of her surroundings she followed the singing of the Tantum Ergo. When the benediction was over, she lifted her bowed head, her eyes turned once towards the cemetery. She was thinking of Charlitte.
The sensitive Narcisse trembled. The excess of melancholy and sentimental feeling about him penetrated to his soul, and Vesper withdrew with him to the edge of the crowd. Then before the procession re-formed to march back to the church, they took up their station by the college gates.
All the Acadiens saw him there as they approached,—all but Rose.
She only raised her eyes from her prayer-book to fix them on the sky. She alone of the women seemed to be so wholly absorbed in a religious fervor that she did not know where she was going nor what she was doing.
Some of the Acadiens looked doubtfully at Vesper. Since the death of her husband, whose treachery towards her had in some way been discovered, she had been regarded more than ever as a saint,—as one set apart for prayer and meditation almost as much as if she had been consecrated to them. Would she give up her saintly life for marriage with the Englishman?
Would she do it? Surely this holy hour was the wrong time to ask her, and they waited breathlessly until they reached the gates where the procession was to break up. There she discovered Vesper. In the face of all the congregation he had stepped up and was holding out his hand to her.
She did not hesitate an instant. She did not even seem to be surprised. An expression of joyful surrender sprang to her face; in silent, solemn ecstasy she took her lover’s hand, and, throwing her arm around the neck of her recovered child, she started with them on the long road down the Bay.
All this happened a few years ago, but the story is yet going on. If you come from Boston to-day, and take your wheel or carriage at Yarmouth,—for the strong winds blow one up and not down the Bay,—you will, after passing through Salmon River, Chéticamp, Meteghan, Saulnierville, and other places, come to the swinging sign of the Sleeping Water Inn.
There, if you stop, you will be taken good care of by Claudine and Mirabelle Marie,—who is really a vastly improved woman.
Perhaps among all the two hundred thousand Acadiens scattered throughout the Maritime Provinces of Canada there is not a more interesting inn than that of Sleeping Water. They will give you good meals and keep your room tidy, and they will also show you—if you are really interested in the Acadien French—a pretty cottage in the form of a horseshoe that was moved bodily away from the wicked Sleeping Water River and placed in a flat green field by the shore. To it, you will be informed, comes every year a family from Boston, consisting of an Englishman and his wife, his mother and two children. They will describe the family to you, or perhaps, if it is summer-time, you may see the Englishman himself, riding a tall bay horse and looking affectionately at a beautiful lad who accompanies him on a glossy black steed rejoicing in the name of Toochune.
The Englishman is a man of wealth and many schemes. He has organized a company for the planting and cultivation of trees along the shore of the charming, but certainly wind-swept Bay. He also is busy now surveying the coast for the carrying out of his long-cherished plan of an electric railway running along the shore.
He will yet have it, the Acadiens say, but in the meantime he amuses himself by viewing the land and interviewing the people, and when he is weary he rides home to the cottage where his pale, fragile mother is looking eagerly for her adopted, idolized grandchild Narcisse, and where his wife sits by the window and waits for him.
As she waits she often smiles and gazes down at her lap where lies a tiny creature,—a little girl whose eyes and mouth are her own, but whose hair is the hair of Vesper.
Perhaps you will go to Sleeping Water by the train. If so, do not look out for the red coat which always used to be the distinguishing mark of this place, and do not mention Emmanuel’s name to the woman who keeps the station, nor to her husband, for they were very fond of him, and if you speak of the red-jacketed mail-man they will turn aside to hide their tears.
Nannichette and her husband have come out of the woods and live by the shore. Mirabelle Marie has persuaded the former to go to mass with her. The Indian in secret delight says nothing, but occasionally he utters a happy grunt.
Bidiane and her husband live in Weymouth. Their ménage is small and unambitious as yet, in order that they may do great things in the future, Bidiane says. She is absolutely charming when she ties a handkerchief on her head and sweeps out her rooms; and sometimes she cooks.
Often at such times she scampers across a yard that separates her from her husband’s office, and, after looking in his window to make sure that he is alone, she flies in, startles and half suffocates him by throwing her arms around his neck and stuffing in his mouth or his pocket some new and delectable dainty known only to herself and the cook-book.
She is very happy, and turns with delight from her winter visits to Halifax, where, however, she manages to enjoy herself hugely, to her summer on the Bay, when she can enjoy the most congenial society in the world to her and to her husband,—that of Vesper Nimmo and his wife Rose.
The End