Another change had been the coming to Sleeping Water of a family from up the Bay. They kept the inn now, and they were protégés of the Englishman, and relatives of a young girl that he and his mother had taken away—away across the ocean to France some four years before—because she was a badly brought up child, who did not love her native tongue nor her father's people.
It had been a wonderful thing that had happened to these Watercrows in the coming of the Englishman to the Bay. His mission had been to search for the heirs of Etex LeNoir, who had been murdered by his great-grandfather at the time of the terrible expulsion, and he had found a direct one in the person of this naughty little Bidiane.
She had been a great trouble to him at first, it was said, but, under his wise government, she had soon sobered down; and she had also brought him luck, as much luck as a pot of gold, for, directly after he had discovered her he—who had not been a rich young man, but one largely dependent on his mother—had fallen heir to a large fortune, left to him by a distant relative. This relative had been a great-aunt, who had heard of his romantic and dutiful journey to Acadie, and, being touched by it, and feeling assured that he was a worthy young man, she had immediately made a will, leaving him all that she possessed, and had then died.
He had sought to atone for the sins of his forefathers, and had reaped a rich reward.
A good deal of the Englishman's money had been bestowed on these Watercrows. With kindly tolerance, he had indulged a whim of theirs to go to Boston when they were obliged to leave their heavily mortgaged farm. It was said that they had expected to make vast sums of money there. The Englishman knew that they could not do so, but that they might cease the repinings and see for themselves what a great city really was for poor people, he had allowed them to make a short stay in one.
The result had been that they were horrified; yes, absolutely horrified,—this family transported from the wide, beautiful Bay,—at the narrowness of the streets in the large city of Boston, at the rush of people, the race for work, the general crowding and pushing, the oppression of the poor, the tiny rooms in which they were obliged to live, and the foul air which fairly suffocated them.
They had begged the Englishman to let them come back to the Bay, even if they lived only in a shanty. They could not endure that terrible city.
He generously had given them the Sleeping Water Inn that he had bought when Rose à Charlitte had left it, and there they had tried to keep a hotel, with but indifferent success, until Claudine, the widow of Isidore Kessy, had come to assist them.
The Acadiens in Sleeping Water, with their keen social instincts, and sympathetically curious habit of looking over, and under, and into, and across every subject of interest to them, were never tired of discussing Vesper Nimmo and his affairs. He had still with him the little Narcisse who had run from the Bay five years before, and, although the Englishman himself never wrote to Rose à Charlitte, there came every week to the Bay a letter addressed to her in the handwriting of the young Bidiane LeNoir, who, according to the instructions of the Englishman, gave Rose a full and minute account of every occurrence in her child's life. In this way she was kept from feeling lonely.
These letters were said to be delectable, yes, quite delectable. Célina said so, and she ought to know.