CHAPTER IX.

LOVE AND POLITICS.

"Calm with the truth of life, deep with the love of loving, New, yet never unknown, my heart takes up the tune. Singing that needs no words, joy that needs no proving, Sinking in one long dream as summer bides with June."

One morning, three weeks later, Rose, on getting up and going out to the sunny yard where she kept her fancy breed of fowls, found them all overcome by some strange disorder. The morning was bright and inspiring, yet they were all sleeping heavily and stupidly under, instead of upon, their usual roosting-place.

She waked up one or two, ran her fingers through their showy plumage, and, after receiving remonstrating glances from reproachful and recognizing eyes, softly laid them down again, and turned her attention to a resplendent red and gold cock, who alone had not succumbed to the mysterious malady, and was staggering to and fro, eyeing her with a doubtful, yet knowing look.

"Come, Fiddéding," she said, gently, "tell me what has happened to these poor hens?"

Fiddéding, instead of enlightening her, swaggered towards the fence, and, after many failures, succeeded in climbing to it and in propping his tail against a post.

Then he flapped his gorgeous wings, and opened his beak to crow, but in the endeavor lost his balance, and with a dismal squawk fell to the ground. Sheepishly resigning himself to his fate, he tried to gain the ranks of the somniferous hens, but, not succeeding, fell down where he was, and hid his head under his wing.

A slight noise caught Rose's attention, and looking up, she found Jovite leaning against the fence, and grinning from ear to ear.

"Do you know what is the matter with the hens?" she asked.

"Yes, madame; if you come to the stable, I will show you what they have been taking."

Rose, with a grave face, visited the stable, and then instructed him to harness her pony to the cart and bring him around to the front of the house.

Half an hour later she was driving towards Weymouth. As it happened to be Saturday, it was market-day, and the general shopping-time for the farmers and the fishermen all along the Bay, and even from back in the woods. Many of them, with wives and daughters in their big wagons, were on their way to sell butter, eggs, and farm produce, and obtain, in exchange, groceries and dry goods, that they would find in larger quantities and in greater varieties in Weymouth than in the smaller villages along the shore.

Upon reaching Weymouth, she stopped on the principal street, that runs across a bridge over the lovely Sissiboo River, and leaving the staid and sober pony to brush the flies from himself without the assistance of her whip, she knocked at the door of her cousin's office.

"Come in," said a voice, and she was speedily confronted by Agapit, who sat at a table facing the door.

He dropped his book and sprang up, when he saw her. "Oh! _ma chère_, I am glad to see you. I was just feeling dull."

She gently received and retained both his hands in hers. "One often does feel dull after a journey. Ah! but I have missed you."

"It has only been two weeks--"

"And you have come back with that same weary look on your face," she said, anxiously. "Agapit, I try to put that look in the back of my mind, but it will not stay."

He lightly kissed her fingers, and drew a chair beside his own for her. "It amuses you to worry."

"My cousin!"

"I apologize,--you are the soul of angelic concern for the minds and bodies of your fellow mortals. And how goes everything in Sleeping Water? I have been quite homesick for the good old place."

Rose, in spite of the distressed expression that still lingered about her face, began to smile, and said, impulsively, "Once or twice I have almost recalled you, but I did not like to interrupt. Yours was a case at the supreme court, was it not, if that is the way to word it?"

"Yes, Rose; but has anything gone wrong? You mentioned nothing in your letters," and, as he spoke, he took off his glasses and began to polish them with his handkerchief.

"Not wrong, exactly, yet--" and she laughed. "It is Bidiane."

The hand with which Agapit was manipulating his glasses trembled slightly, and hurriedly putting them on, he pushed back the papers on the table before him, and gave her an acute and undivided attention. "Some one wants to marry her, I suppose," he said, hastily. "She is quite a flirt."

"No, no, not yet,--Pius Poirier may, by and by, but do not be too severe with her, Agapit. She has no time to think of lovers now. She is--but have you not heard? Surely you must have--every one is laughing about it."

"I have heard nothing. I returned late last night. I came directly here this morning. I intended to go to see you to-morrow."

"I thought you would, but I could not wait. Little Bidiane should be stopped at once, or she will become notorious and get into the papers,--I was afraid it might already be known in Halifax."

"My dear Rose, there are people in Halifax who never heard of Clare, and who do not know that there are even a score of Acadiens left in the country; but what is she doing?" and he masked his impatience under an admirable coolness.

"She says she is making _bombance_," said Rose, and she struggled to repress a second laugh; "but I will begin from the first, as you know nothing. The very day you left, that Mr. Greening, who has been canvassing the county for votes, went to our inn, and Bidiane recognized him as a man who had spoken ill of the Acadiens in her presence in Halifax."

"What had he said?"

"He said that they were 'evil-smelling,'" said Rose, with reluctance.

"Oh, indeed,--he did," and Agapit's lip curled. "I would not have believed it of Greening. He is rather a decent fellow. Sarcastic, you know, but not a fool, by any means. Bidiane, I suppose, cut him."

"No, she did not cut him; he had not been introduced. She asked him to apologize, and he would not. Then she told Mirabelle Marie to request him to leave the house. He did so."

"Was he angry?"

"Yes, and insulting; and you can figure to yourself into what kind of a state our quick-tempered Bidiane became. She talked to Claudine and her aunt, and they agreed to pass Mr. Greening's remark up and down the Bay."

Agapit began to laugh. Something in his cousin's strangely excited manner, in the expression of her face, usually so delicately colored, now so deeply flushed and bewildered over Bidiane's irrepressibility, amused him intensely, but most of all he laughed from sheer gladness of heart, that the question to be dealt with was not one of a lover for their distant and youthful cousin.

Rose was delighted to see him in such good spirits. "But there is more to come, Agapit. The thing grew. At first, Bidiane contented herself with flying about on her wheel and telling all the Acadien girls what a bad man Mr. Greening was to say such a thing, and they must not let their fathers vote for him. Following this, Claudine, who is very excited in her calm way, began to drive Mirabelle Marie about. They stayed at home only long enough to prepare meals, then they went. It is all up and down the Bay,--that wretched epithet of the unfortunate Mr. Greening,--and while the men laugh, the women are furious. They cannot recover from it."

"Well, 'evil-smelling' is not a pretty adjective," said Agapit, with his lips still stretched back from his white teeth. "At Bidiane's age, what a rage I should have been in!"

"But you are in the affair now," said Rose, helplessly, "and you must not be angry."

"I!" he ejaculated, suddenly letting fall a ruler that he had been balancing on his finger.

"Yes,--at first there was no talk of another candidate. It was only, 'Let the slanderous Mr. Greening be driven away;' but, as I said, the affair grew. You know our people are mostly Liberals. Mr. Greening is the new one; you, too, are one. Of course there is old Mr. Gray, who has been elected for some years. One afternoon the blacksmith in Sleeping Water said, jokingly, to Bidiane, 'You are taking away one of our candidates; you must give us another.' He was mending her wheel at the time, and I was present to ask him to send a hoe to Jovite. Bidiane hesitated a little time. She looked down the Bay, she looked up here towards Weymouth, then she shot a quick glance at me from her curious yellow eyes, and said, 'There is my far-removed cousin, Agapit LeNoir. He is a good Acadien; he is also clever. What do you want of an Englishman?' 'By Jove!' said the blacksmith, and he slapped his leather apron,--you know he has been much in the States, Agapit, and he is very wide in his opinions,--'By Jove!' he said, 'we couldn't have a better. I never thought of him. He is so quiet nowadays, though he used to be a firebrand, that one forgets him. I guess he'd go in by acclamation.' Agapit, what is acclamation? I searched in my dictionary, and it said, 'a clapping of hands.'"

Agapit was thunderstruck. He stared at her confusedly for a few seconds, then he exclaimed, "The dear little diablette!"

"Perhaps I should have told you before," said Rose, eagerly, "but I hated to write anything against Bidiane, she is so charming, though so self-willed. But yesterday I began to think that people may suppose you have allowed her to make use of your name. She chatters of you all the time, and I believe that you will be asked to become one of the members for this county. Though the talk has been mostly among the women, they are influencing the men, and last evening Mr. Greening had a quarrel with the Comeaus, and went away."

"I must go see her,--this must be stopped," said Agapit, rising hastily.

Rose got up, too. "But stay a minute,--hear all. The naughty thing that Bidiane has done is about money, but I will not tell you that. You must question her. This only I can say: my hens are all quite drunk this morning."

"Quite drunk!" said Agapit, and he paused with his arms half in a dust coat that he had taken from a hook on the wall. "What do you mean?"

Rose suffocated a laugh in her throat, and said, seriously, "When Jovite got up this morning, he found them quite weak in their legs. They took no breakfast, they wished only to drink. He had to watch to keep them from falling in the river. Afterwards they went to sleep, and he searched the stable, and found some burnt out matches, where some one had been smoking and sleeping in the barn, also two bottles of whiskey hidden in a barrel where one had broken on some oats that the hens had eaten. So you see the affair becomes serious when men prowl about at night, and open hen-house doors, and are in danger of setting fire to stables."

Agapit made a grimace. He had a lively imagination, and had readily supplied all these details. "I suppose you do not wish to take me back to Sleeping Water?"

Rose hesitated, then said, meekly, "Perhaps it would be better for me not to do it, nor for you to say that I have talked to you. Bidiane speaks plainly, and, though I know she likes me, she is most extremely animated just now. Claudine, you know, spoils her. Also, she avoids me lately,--you will not be too severe with her. It is so loving that she should work for you. I think she hopes to break down some of your prejudice that she says still exists against her."

Rose could not see her cousin's face, for he had abruptly turned his back on her, and was staring out the window.

"You will remember, Agapit," she went on, with gentle persistence; "do not be irritable with her; she cannot endure it just at present."

"And why should I be irritable?" he demanded, suddenly wheeling around. "Is she not doing me a great honor?"

Rose fell back a few steps, and clasped her amazed hands. This transfigured face was a revelation to her. "You, too, Agapit!" she managed to utter.

"Yes, I, too," he said, bravely, while a dull, heavy crimson mantled his cheeks. "I, too, as well as the Poirier boy, and half a dozen others; and why not?"

"You love her, Agapit?"

"Does it seem like hatred?"

"Yes--that is, no--but certainly you have treated her strangely, but I am glad, glad. I don't know when anything has so rejoiced me,--it takes me back through long years," and, sitting down, she covered her face with her nervous hands.

"I did not intend to tell you," said her cousin, hurriedly, and he laid a consoling finger on the back of her drooping head. "I wish now I had kept it from you."

"Ah, but I am selfish," she cried, immediately lifting her tearful face to him. "Forgive me,--I wish to know everything that concerns you. Is it this that has made you unhappy lately?"

With some reluctance he acknowledged that it was.

"But now you will be happy, my dear cousin. You must tell her at once. Although she is young, she will understand. It will make her more steady. It is the best thing that could happen to her."

Agapit surveyed her in quiet, intense affection. "Softly, my dear girl. You and I are too absorbed in each other. There is the omnipotent Mr. Nimmo to consult."

"He will not oppose. Oh, he will be pleased, enraptured,--I know that he will. I have never thought of it before, because of late years you have seemed not to give your thoughts to marriage, but now it comes to me that, in sending her here, one object might have been that she would please you; that you would please her. I am sure of it now. He is sorry for the past, he wishes to atone, yet he is still proud, and cannot say, 'Forgive me.' This young girl is the peace-offering."

Agapit smiled uneasily. "Pardon me for the thought, but you dispose somewhat summarily of the young girl."

Rose threw out her hands to him. "Your happiness is perhaps too much to me, yet I would also make her happy in giving her to you. She is so restless, so wayward,--she does not know her own mind yet."

"She seems to be leading a pretty consistent course at present."

Rose's face was like an exquisitely tinted sky at sunrise. "Ah! this is wonderful, it overcomes me; and to think that I should not have suspected it! You adore this little Bidiane. She is everything to you, more than I am,--more than I am."

"I love you for that spice of jealousy," said Agapit, with animation. "Go home now, dear girl, and I will follow; or do you stay here, and I will start first."

"Yes, yes, go; I will remain a time. I will be glad to think this over."

"You will not cry," he said, anxiously, pausing with his hand on the door-knob.

"I will try not to do so."

"Probably I will have to give her up," he said, doggedly. "She is a creature of whims, and I must not speak to her yet; but I do not wish you to suffer."

Rose was deeply moved. This was no boyish passion, but the unspeakably bitter, weary longing of a man. "If I could not suffer with others I would be dead," she said, simply. "My dear cousin, I will pray for success in this, your touching love-affair."

"Some day I will tell you all about it," he said, abruptly. "I will describe the strange influence that she has always had over me,--an influence that made me tremble before her even when she was a tiny girl, and that overpowered me when she lately returned to us. However, this is not the occasion to talk; my acknowledgment of all this has been quite unpremeditated. Another day it will be more easy--"

"Ah, Agapit, how thou art changed," she said, gliding easily into French; "how I admire thee for thy reserve. That gives thee more power than thou hadst when young. Thou wilt win Bidiane,--do not despair."

"In the meantime there are other, younger men," he responded, in the same language. "I seem old, I know that I do to her."

"Old, and thou art not yet thirty! I assure thee, Agapit, she respects thee for thy age. She laughs at thee, perhaps, to thy face, but she praises thee behind thy back."

"She is not beautiful," said Agapit, irrelevantly, "yet every one likes her."

"And dost thou not find her beautiful? It seems to me that, when I love, the dear one cannot be ugly."

"Understand me, Rose," said her cousin, earnestly; "once when I loved a woman she instantly became an angel, but one gets over that. Bidiane is even plain-looking to me. It is her soul, her spirit, that charms me,--that little restless, loving heart. If I could only put my hand on it, and say, 'Thou art mine,' I should be the happiest man in the world. She charms me because she changes. She is never the same; a man would never weary of her."

Rose's face became as pale as death. "Agapit, would a man weary of me?"

He did not reply to her. Choked by some emotion, he had again turned to the door.

"I thank the blessed Virgin that I have been spared that sorrow," she murmured, closing her eyes, and allowing her flaxen lashes to softly brush her cheeks. "Once I could only grieve,--now I say perhaps it was well for me not to marry. If I had lost the love of a husband,--a true husband,--it would have killed me very quickly, and it would also have made him say that all women are stupid."

"Rose, thou art incomparable," said Agapit, half laughing, half frowning, and flinging himself back to the table. "No man would tire of thee. Cease thy foolishness, and promise me not to cry when I am gone."

She opened her eyes, looked as startled as if she had been asleep, but submissively gave the required promise.

"Think of something cheerful," he went on.

She saw that he was really distressed, and, disengaging her thoughts from herself by a quiet, intense effort, she roguishly murmured, "I will let my mind run to the conversation that you will have with this fair one--no, this plain one--when you announce your love."

Agapit blushed furiously, and hurried from the room, while Rose, as an earnest of her obedience to him, showed him, at the window, until he was out of sight, a countenance alight with gentle mischief and entire contentment of mind.