Amy in Acadia Part 19

"Come," she cried, "which two of you will drive with me? You slipped off this afternoon without my realizing that you were going away, and now I want company."

"I would rather stroll along," replied Amy, "but I am sure that Martine and Priscilla would enjoy the drive. Martine is turning antiquarian, and if your driver can take you to some old grave or Indian mound, she will be delighted to use her shovel."

"I don't know what I can promise in the way of graves and mounds, but if Martine comes with me I can offer her a lovely view."

"If you please, Mrs. Redmond," said Priscilla, "I would rather walk back home than drive."

Although Amy tried to make her change her mind, Priscilla was firm, and the discussion ended by Amy's getting into the carriage with Martine and Mrs. Redmond.

As she walked along the main street, where the houses were still rather far apart, Priscilla noticed a little graveyard in a corner of a garden.

As the gate was open, she felt at liberty to walk inside. The stones at which she glanced were of marble, and the inscriptions were well cut.

The names on two or three of them were French, and the men who bore them had evidently been officers in the English army. This interested her, and when she saw a girl of about her own age standing at the door of a cottage near by, she felt emboldened to speak to her.

"They were not really French," said the girl, in answer to her question, "but of Huguenot family, who fought for the King in the Revolution. I've heard my mother say that one of them was a cousin of her grandmother's, and they all came here together at the close of the war."

Priscilla was delighted. Here, perhaps, was a person who would tell her something about the Loyalists of the Revolution.

"Were your people Loyalists?" she asked.

"Why, of course," was the reply, as if anything else were unsupposable.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" responded Priscilla. "I've been waiting to hear more about the Loyalists."

"You are an American?" questioned the girl. "Americans are not apt to care about Loyalists; they seem to think only about the Acadians; but my ancestors were all Loyalists, and if you will just come into the house my mother would love to talk to you."

So Priscilla followed her new acquaintance indoors. Outside, the house looked small, but within she found many rooms opening one into another, none of them very large, and all of them with low ceilings.

"My mother's great-grandfather built this house when he first came from New York. He was an officer in the Loyal American Regiment. There is his commission; we framed it to hang on the wall."

"By His Excellency Sir Henry Clinton, K. B., General and Commander-in-Chief of all His Majesty's Forces within the Colonies lying on the Atlantic Ocean, from Nova Scotia to West Florida inclusive, etc., etc., etc.

"By Virtue of the Power and Authority in Me vested, I DO hereby const.i.tute and appoint You to be Captain of a Company in the Loyal American Regiment commanded by Colonel Beverly Robinson."

Priscilla read the whole commission in which the duties of the newly made captain were defined, to the very end where the signature of Sir Henry Clinton still stood out clearly.

While the new acquaintance went to call her mother, Priscilla looked around the pleasant sitting-room. There was a high, old-fas.h.i.+oned bookcase filled with books, many of them in dingy calf bindings. The young girl returned while she was looking at them, expressing her regret that her mother was not at home.

"My grandfather brought many of these books from New York," she said; "he was a nephew of the rector of Trinity Church, and was himself a graduate of King's College, New York."

"I don't see how they had the courage to give up everything and come down here so far away. Even if they did not like the new government, I should think they would rather have stayed where most of their friends and relatives were."

"Oh, it wasn't always a matter of choice," rejoined Eunice, for this, Priscilla discovered, was her new friend's name; "some had to come, because they had been too active in the King's cause and the other side would not forgive them. Even after the Peace many were in danger of imprisonment; and then a great many had had all their property confiscated, and thought it would be easier to start over again down here than to live in poverty among their old friends and neighbors."

Priscilla looked in amazement at Eunice. She expressed herself so much more carefully than most girls of her age.

"Martine would call her quaint," thought Priscilla, looking at her, "and if she knows as much about other things as she does about history, she must be a wonder."

"I wish my mother were here," said Eunice, politely. "She gets quite worked up when she talks about the Loyalists."

"I should think she would," responded Priscilla. "They certainly had a hard time."

"She thinks that we have been cut off from things that really are our own, and now, when we have so little money that I can't even afford to go away to college, she feels more and more indignant at the injustice of it all."

Priscilla did not know exactly what to say. In her mind there was a struggle between her feeling of patriotism and her sense of justice. As Eunice had put it, it did not seem fair that the Loyalists should have lost everything, simply because they had had the courage to hold out for the King. But a phrase came into her mind that she had often heard, and for the moment it seemed the only sentiment that she could express.

"After all," she said gently, "I suppose it was the 'fortune of war'

that your people suffered so much."

"Oh, yes," responded Eunice, "that is what I often say to my mother; and then I tell her too, that in one hundred and twenty-five years the family probably would have lost all the property they had before the Revolution."

Finding that the subject was getting a little beyond her, Priscilla ventured a more general remark.

"There must be many interesting historical incidents connected with Annapolis; I mean, incidents that are not French," she concluded hastily. "I am just a little tired, myself, of the Acadians."

"I don't know of many very entertaining things," responded Eunice, "but I remember one story that might amuse you. During the Revolution, the people of Annapolis were awfully afraid of attacks from Privateers. You see, after the Acadians were driven out a large colony from New England came down here. They received grants of land from the government, and were very prosperous when the war began. Many were on the side of the Yankees, but in the end England was able to hold Nova Scotia. However, the small privateering vessels were constantly coming into Nova Scotia ports, and even Annapolis wasn't perfectly safe. One night two rebel schooners came up to the mouth of the river; they had about eighty men, and landed them safely, because the sentry at the fort was asleep. They entered the houses and stirred people up immensely; they seemed more bent on making mischief than in doing any real violence. There were not many citizens here in the town then, but one of them, looking from the window when he heard a noise in the street, saw two of the rebels disputing over something they had stolen; when they saw him at the window, they dashed into his house, and a minute or two afterwards another Annapolis man, only half dressed, rushed excitedly into the room to tell his friend that the Yankees were plundering the town; this was unnecessary information, because, as I have said, two rebels were already in the house. He discovered them with their bayonets pointed at him just as he had finished telling his story, and he was so surprised that he fell backward over a cradle, with his feet in the air. His comical appearance made the rebels laugh so, that he afterwards said that this saved his life, for before they had recovered he had jumped to his feet and run away. But later he and all the other able-bodied citizens were shut up in the fort, while the men from the schooners went through the houses and carried away everything movable. They allowed the ladies to keep their shoes, though they first removed the silver buckles. The schooners disappeared in the morning, when the report was spread around that the militia of the county were gathering and coming to Annapolis. That, I believe, was the only attack on Annapolis during the Revolution. It happened two or three years before the arrival of the refugees, and the accounts of it that have been handed down always represented it as a very comical affair."

"Did you say 'Yankees'?" asked Priscilla. "Did you mean--"

"Oh, I meant schooners from New England; I've heard they were from Cape Cod," replied Eunice.

"It was pretty small business," said Priscilla, almost apologetically.

"I don't believe that the men on the schooners were either soldiers or sailors. I am sure that Was.h.i.+ngton wouldn't have approved if he had known."

"You don't think that all on your side were good, do you," asked Eunice, "and that all on ours were bad?"

Priscilla hardly knew what to reply. She was getting again into deep water, for she saw that although the war was long over, Eunice was still a strong partisan. So, as a kind of peace-offering, she asked Eunice if she would not walk back home with her.

"I should like to have you meet my friends whom I am travelling with,"

she said. "We are going to stay in Annapolis a week or more. Mrs.

Redmond is making some beautiful sketches, and her daughter Amy is just dear; she is older than Martine and I, but she never makes us feel the difference in our ages, and she knows more than almost anybody I ever saw."

"I should love to walk back with you," said Eunice, "though I cannot stay very long. What is Martine like?" she asked abruptly.

"Oh, Martine,--well, Martine is different. She always sees the funny side of things, and she doesn't care what anything costs if she happens to want it. She's perfectly devoted to the French, and I'm so terribly tired of her Acadians that I want to find out what the English did in Annapolis."

"I will be glad to do what I can to help you," responded Eunice, "only you mustn't be too touchy about things; for you see we're still all English down here."

As Priscilla walked back to the boarding-house she congratulated herself on her new friend; for although she had known Eunice so short a time, she already regarded her as much more than an ordinary acquaintance.

"I can always tell," she said to herself, "whether any one is going to wear well. Mother says that that is the only test for real friends, and I can see that Eunice and I are likely to be more than acquaintances. I feel as if I had known her a long time. Now it wasn't so with Martine, and even though we have been together so much this summer, some way I don't feel perfectly comfortable with her. I'd like to be fair, but still--"

Yes, Priscilla meant to be fair, but still--what was the trouble? It is to be feared that she had not yet learned the real meaning of tolerance.

Martine's point of view was often so unlike hers that Priscilla did not make enough effort to put herself in her friend's place. While believing herself just, she certainly permitted herself to be bia.s.sed little in her judgments. Nor did she realize that Martine herself often spoke in an exaggerated tone, chiefly for the purpose of seeing to what extent she could impose on Priscilla; for Martine, discovering Priscilla's att.i.tude toward her, liked to say things to surprise her,--"Puritan Prissie," as she called her at these times.

It would not be quite true, perhaps, to say that Priscilla distrusted Martine's interest in Yvonne, although she had a strong conviction that it was merely impulse that had led her to promise so much.

"For the day that we spent at Meteghan, Yvonne was like a new plaything to her. Had Martine been with Yvonne a week, it would have been the same; she would have lavished things on her, and would have been ready to promise her anything. But 'out of sight, out of mind;' I believe that that is always the way with her. I am not even sure that she is as fond of Mrs. Redmond and Amy as she seems to be."

Poor Priscilla! she was really borrowing trouble needlessly, and yet in more senses than one it was real trouble to her, because she was never sure just how she ought to respond to the more flippant remarks made by Martine. They were often so witty that she could not help laughing, even when she felt the greatest need of preserving her own dignity.