"Edie," good wife Lecorbeau would say to her, "where is your mother?"
At this the child would shake her head sorrowfully for a moment, and pointing over the hills, would answer:
"Away off there!"--and sometimes she would add, "Poor mamma's sick!"
At last one day she seemed suddenly to remember, and cried as if she were announcing a great discovery, "Why, mamma's in Halifax."
Mother Lecorbeau was not a little triumphant at having elicited this definite information.
On the subject of her father the little one had not much to say. When questioned about him she merely said that she was his little girl, and that he had gone away somewhere, and some bad people wouldn't let him come back again. She said her mamma had cried a great deal while telling her that papa would never come back--and from this it was clear at once that the father was dead. To get any definite idea from the child as to the time of his death proved a vain endeavor; she was not very clear in her ideas of time. But she said he was a tall man and a soldier. She further declared that he hadn't a lot of hair on his face, like father Lecorbeau, but was nice and smooth, like her Pierre, only with a mustache. All this tallied with a description of Captain Howe, so Lecorbeau concluded that she was Howe's child. As for the people with whom she had been visiting in the hapless village of Kenneticook, they were evidently old servants of her father's family.
"I was staying at nurse's," she used to say. "Uncle Willie sent me there because my mamma was sick." Of this Uncle Willie she talked so much and so often that Pierre said he was jealous.
While several years rolled by, bringing no great event to the cabin in the willows at the foot of Beauséjour, a cloud was slowly gathering over the fortressed hill. The relations between France and England in Acadie were growing more and more strained. It was plain that a rupture must soon come. In the cabin, by the light of fire or candle, after the day's work was done, Pierre and his father, with sometimes the old sergeant from the fort, used to talk over the condition of affairs. To Pierre and the sergeant it was obvious that France must win back Acadie, and that soon; and they paid little heed to Lecorbeau's sagacious comparisons between the French and English methods of conducting the government. Lecorbeau, naturally did not feel like arguing his points with much determination; but across the well-scrubbed deal table he uttered several predictions which Pierre recalled when he saw them brought to pass.
"Here's about how it stands," remarked the sergeant one night, shaking the ashes of his pipe into the hollow of his hand, "there's hundreds upon hundreds now of your Acadians shifting round loose, waiting for a chance to get back to their old farms. They don't dare go back while the English hold possession, for fear of His Reverence yonder"--signifying, of course, Le Loutre--"so they're all ready to fight just as soon as France gives the word. They don't care much for France, maybe--not much more than for the English--but they do just hanker after their old farms. When the government thinks it the right time, and sends us some troops from Quebec and Louisburg, all the Acadians out of Acadie will walk in to take possession, and the Acadians in Acadie will bid good day to King George and help us kick the English out of Halifax. It's bound to come, sure as fate; and pretty soon, I'm thinking."
"I believe you're right!" assented Pierre, enthusiastically.