At the bottom of her garden she rested her hands upon a gate in the low stone wall. The mansion behind her was well ordered and prosperous. No drop of milk was spilled in Antonia's domain without her knowledge. She had noted, as she came down the path, how the cabbages were rounding their delicately green spheres. Antonia was a housewife for whom maids labored with zeal. She could manipulate so deftly the comfort-making things of life. Neither sunset nor moonrise quite banished the dreamy blue light on these rolling lands around the head-waters of the Hudson. Across her tranquil commonplace happiness blew suddenly that ocean breath from Fundy Bay; for the dwarf of Fort St. John, leading a white waddling bird, whose feathers even in that uncertain light showed soil, appeared from the screening masonry of the wall.
She stood still and looked at Antonia; and Antonia inside the gate looked at her. That instant was a bubble full of revolving dyes. It brought a thousand pictures to Antonia's sight. Thus silently had that same dwarf with her swan appeared to a camp in the Acadian woods, announcing trouble at Fort St. John.
Again Antonia lived through confusion which was like pillage of the fort. Again she sat in her husband's tent, holding Marie's dying head on her arm while grief worked its swift miracle in a woman formed to such fullness of beauty and strength. Again she saw two graves and a long trench made in the frontier graveyard for Marie and her officer Edelwald and her twenty-three soldiers, all in line with her child. Once more Antonia saw the household turn from that spot weeping aloud; and De Charnisay's ships already sailing away with the spoil of the fort to Penobscot; and his sentinels looking down from the walls of St. John. She saw her husband dividing his own party, and sending all the men he could spare to navigate La Tour's ship and carry the helpless women and children to the head of Fundy Bay. All these things revolved before her, in that bubble of an instant, before her own voice broke it, saying,—
"Is this you, Le Rossignol?"
"Shubenacadie and I," responded the dwarf, lilting up sweetly.
"Where do you come from?" inquired Antonia, feeling the weirdness of her visitor as she had never felt it in the hall at Fort St. John.
"Port Royal. I have come from Port Royal on purpose to speak with you."
"With me?"
"With you, Madame Antonia."
"You must then go directly to the house and eat some supper," said Antonia, speaking her first thought but reserving her second: "Our people will take to the fields when they see the poor little creature by daylight, and as for the swan, it is worse than a drove of Mynheer's Indians."