I.
It was close upon high tide, and the creek that wound in through the diked marshes was rapidly filling to the brim with the swirling, cold, yellow-gray waters of Minas. The sun, but half risen, yet lingered on the wooded crest of the Gaspereau hills; while above hung a dappled sky of pink and pale amber and dove-color. A yellow light streamed sharply down across the frost-whitened meadows, the smouldering ruins of Grand Pré village, and out upon the glittering expanse of Minas Basin. The beams tinged brightly the cordage and half-furled sails of two ships that rode at anchor in the Basin, near the shore. With a pitilessly revealing whiteness the rays descended on the mournful encampment at the creek's mouth, where a throng of Acadian peasants were getting ready to embark for exile.
"Late grew the year, and stormy was the sea."
Already had five ships sailed away with their sorrowful freight, disappearing around the towering front of Blomidon, from the straining eyes of friends and kinsfolk left behind. Another ship would sail out with the next ebb, and all was sad confusion and unwilling haste till the embarkation should be accomplished. The ship's boats were loaded down with rude household stuff, and boxes full of homespun linens and woollens.
Children were crying with the cold, and a few women were weeping silently; but the partings which had succeeded each other at intervals throughout the last few weeks had dulled the edge of anguish, and most of the Acadians wore an air of heavy resignation. The New England soldiers on guard gave what help they could, but sullenly; for they were weary of the misery that they had so long been forced to watch.
The people were huddled on a little patch of marsh within a curve of the dike. Beyond the dike there spread a stretch of reddish brown salt-flats, covered with water only at the highest spring-tides, and now meagrely sprinkled with sharp-edged blades and tufts of the gray salt-grasses. The flats were soft between the bunches of the grass, and a broad track was trampled into mire by the passing down of many feet from the dike's edge to the boats.
In a work like this there are always a thousand unlooked-for delays, and before half the embarkation was effected the tide had reached the full, and paused and turned to ebb. As the strip of shining red mud began to widen between the grasses and the water's edge, the bustle and confusion increased. Sometimes a woman who had already stepped into the boat, thinking that her people had preceded her, would spring over the side into the shallow water, and rush, sobbing with anxious fear, back to the encampment. Sometimes a child would lose sight of its father or mother in the press, and lift its shrill voice in a wail of desolation which found piteous echo in every Acadian heart.
Lower and lower fell the tide. The current was now thick and red with the mud which it was dragging from the flats to re-deposit on some crescent shoal at the mouth of the Canard or Piziquid. Over the dike and down toward the waiting boats came an old man, bent with years, supported by his son and his son's wife a middle-aged couple. The decrepit figure in its quaint Acadian garb was one to be remembered. Old Remi Corveau was a man of means among the Acadian peasants. His feet were incased in high-top moccasins of vividly embroidered moose-hide, and his legs in gaiters, or mitasses, of dark blue woollen homespun, laced with strips of red cloth. His coat was a long and heavy garment of homespun blanket, dyed to a yellowish brown with many decoctions of a plant which the country-folk now know as "yaller-weed." A cap of coarse sealskin covered his head, and was tied beneath his chin with a woollen scarf of dull red. The old man clutched his stick in his mittened right hand, muttering to himself, and seemed but half aware of what was going on. When he came to the edge of the wet, red clay, however, he straightened himself and looked about him. He gazed at the boats and at the anchored ships beyond. A light of sudden intelligence flashed into his feeble eyes. He turned half round and looked back upon the ruined village, while his son and daughter paused respectfully.
"Hurry along there now," exclaimed one of the guards, impatiently; and the Acadian couple, understanding the tone and gesture, pulled at their father's arms to lead him into the boat. The old man's eyes flamed wildly, and crying, "J'ne veux pas! j'ne veux pas!" he broke from them and struggled back toward the dike. Instantly his son overtook him, picked him up in his arms, and carried him, now sobbing feebly, down to the boat, where he laid him on a pile of blankets. As the laden craft moved slowly toward the ship the old man's complainings ceased. When they went to hoist him over the ship's side they discovered that he was dead.
And now the very last boatload was well-nigh ready to start. The parish priest, who was staying behind to sail with the next and final ship, was bidding his sad farewells. A young woman drew near the boat, but hardly seemed to see the priest's kind face of greeting, so anxiously was she fumbling in the depths of a small bag which she carried on her arm.
The bag was of yellow caribou-skin, worked by Indian fingers in many-colored designs of dyed porcupine quills.
"What's the matter, Marie, my child?" inquired the priest, gently. "Hast thou lost something more, besides thy country and thy father's house?"
As he spoke the girl, whose name was Marie Beaugrand, looked up with a sigh of relief, and turned to him affectionately.
"I have found it, Father! V'la!" she exclaimed, holding up a gigantic amethyst of marvellous brilliancy. "Pierrot gave it to me to keep for him, you know," she added timidly, "because of the bad luck that goes with it when a man has it!"
This was no time to chide the girl for her belief in the superstition which he knew was connected with the wondrous jewel. The priest merely smiled and said: "Well, well, guard it carefully, my little one; and may the Holy Saints enable it to mend the fortunes of thee and thy Pierrot! Farewell; and God have thee ever in his keeping, my dear child!"
Hardly were the words well past his lips when the girl gave a scream of dismay, and sprang forward down the slippery red incline. She had dropped the amethyst, by some incomprehensible mischance. The priest beheld the purple gleam as it flashed from between the girl's fingers. Her high cap of coarse undyed French linen fell away from her black locks as she stooped to grope passionately in the ooze which had swallowed up her treasure. In a moment the comely picture of her dark blue sleeves, gray petticoat, and trim red stockings was sadly disfigured by the mud. The girl's despair was piercing; but the impatient guards, who knew not what she had lost, were on the point of taking her forcibly to the boat, when Colonel Winslow, who stood near by, checked them peremptorily.
Seeing the priest gird up his cassock and step forward to help the sobbing girl in her search; Colonel Winslow questioned of the interpreter as to what the damsel had lost to cause such lament.
"A toy, a mere gaud, your Excellency," said the shrewd interpreter, giving Winslow a title which he would not have employed had there been any one present of higher rank than the New England Colonel. "A mere gaud of a purple stone; but they do say it would be worth a thousand pounds if one had it in London. These poor folk call it the 'Witch Stone,' because, they say, it brings bad luck to the man that has it. The more learned sort smile at such a superstition, and call the stone 'The Star' by reason of its surpassing beauty,—Pierrot Desbarat's star, they call it now, since that youth picked it up last spring on Blomidon, where it had once before been found and strangely lost again. They say the youth gave the jewel to his betrothed yonder to keep for him, if so she might ward off the evil fortune."
The New England colonel's high-arched eyebrows went up into his forehead at this tale. His round and ruddy face softened with sympathy for the poor girl's despair. Winslow was convinced of the wisdom and justice of the orders which he was carrying out so firmly; but he wished the task of removing the Acadians had been confided to any other hands than his. "This affair is more grievous to me," he wrote to a friend about this time, "than any service I was ever employed in."
Presently, remarking that the girl's efforts were fruitless, and the tide ebbing rapidly, Winslow ordered several of his soldiers down into the mud to assist her search. Veiling their reluctance the men obeyed, and the ooze was explored to the very water's edge. At length, realizing that the departure could not safely be longer delayed, Winslow ordered the quest to cease.
As the girl turned back to the boat the colonel caught sight of the despair upon her face; and reddening in the folds of his double chin he slipped some gold pieces into the muddy hand of the priest.
"Be good enough, sir, to give the damsel these," he said, stiffly. "Tell her I will have the search continued. If the stone is found she shall have it. If any one steals it I will hang him."
As the priest, leaning over the boat-side, slipped the pieces into the buckskin bag, Colonel Winslow turned away, and rather roughly ordered the bespattered soldiers back to camp to clean themselves.
After the priest had bid farewell to the still weeping Marie and the little company about her, he stood waiting to receive the other boat which was now returning from the ship. He saw that something unexpected had taken place. His old parishioner was lying back in the stern, covered with a blanket, while his son and daughter lamented over him with the unrestraint of children. On the following day, under the stern guard of the Puritan soldiers, there was a funeral in the little cemetery on the hillside, and the frozen sods were heaped upon the last Acadian grave of Grand Pré village. Remi Corveau had chosen death rather than exile.
And what was the jewel whose loss had caused such grief to Marie Beaugrand? For generations the great amethyst had sparkled in the front of Blomidon, visible at intervals in certain lights and from certain standpoints, and again unseen for months or years together. The Indians called it "The Eye of Gluskâp," and believed that to meddle with it at all would bring down swiftly the vengeance of the demigod. Fixed high on the steepest face of the cliff, the gem had long defied the search of the most daring climbers. It lurked, probably, under some over-hanging brow of ancient rock, as in a fit and inviolable setting. At length, some years before the date of the events I have been describing, a French sailor, fired by the far-off gleaming of the gem, had succeeded in locating the spot of splendor. Alone, with a coil of rope, he made his way to the top of the ancient cape. A few days later his bruised and lifeless body was found among the rocks below the height, and taken for burial to the little hillside cemetery by the Gaspereau. The fellow had evidently succeeded in finding the amethyst and dislodging it from its matrix, for when next the elfin light gleamed forth it was seen to come from a point far down the cliff, not more than a hundred feet above the tide.
Here it had been found by Pierrot Desbarats, who, laughing to scorn the superstitious fears of his fellow-villagers, had brought it home in triumph. It was his purpose to go, at some convenient season, to Halifax, and there sell the matchless crystal, of whose value the priest had been able to give him some idea. But that very spring ill luck had crossed the threshold of Pierrot's cabin, a threshold over which he was even then preparing to lead Marie Beaugrand as his bride. Two of his oxen died mysteriously, his best cow slipped her calf, his horse got a strain in the loins, and his apple blossoms were nipped by a frost which passed by his neighbors' trees. Thereupon, heeding the words of an old Micmac squaw, who had said that the spell of the stone had no power upon a woman, Pierrot had placed his treasure in Marie's keeping till such time as it could be transformed into English gold—and from that day the shadow of ill-fate had seemed to pass from him, until the edict of banishment came upon Grand Pré like a bolt out of a cloudless heaven.
From the ship, on whose deck he awaited her coming, Pierrot saw the apparently causeless accident which had befallen the gem, and watched with dry lips and burning eyes the vain endeavors of the search. His hands trembled and his heart was bitter against the girl for a few moments; but as the boat drew near, and he caught the misery and fathomless self-reproach on her averted face, his anger melted away in pity. He took Marie's hand as she came over the bulwarks, and whispered to her: "Don't cry about it, 'Tite Chérie, it would have brought us bad luck anywhere we went. Let's thank the Holy Saints it's gone."
As the ship forged slowly across the Basin and came beneath the shadow of the frown of Blomidon, Pierrot pointed out first the perilous ledge to which he had climbed for the vanished "star," and then the tide-washed hollow under the cliff, where they had picked up the body of the luckless sailor from St. Malo. "Who knows, Marie," continued Pierrot, "if thou hadst not lost that evil stone thou might'st one day have seen me in such a case as that sailor came unto!" And then, not because she was at all convinced by such reasoning, but because her lover's voice was kind, the girl looked up into Pierrot's face and made shift to dry her tears.