Marshall Saunders - The House of Armour

In the southeastern extremity of Canada, jutting out into the blue waters of the Atlantic, holding on to the great mainland of North America only by one narrow arm or isthmus, is the green and fertile little peninsula called Acadie, land of abundance, by the French and Indians, and Nova Scotia, New Scotland, by the baronet Sir William Alexander, when in 1621 it was ceded to him by his most worshipful majesty, King James the First of England.

Projected, pushed out from the mainland as it is, the province is pre-eminently a child of the sea. Her wealth comes from it; her traffic is over it; it keeps her warm in winter; it cools her in summer. Old Father Atlantic, savage, boisterous old parent that he is, dashing so often the dead bodies of her children against her rockbound coasts, is yet her chief guardian and protector, and the one who loves her most.

He is on all her sides, lapping her grassy shores, breaking against her frowning cliffs, and running away up into the land, wide, blue tongues of water, where foreign ships can ride at anchor and give to lovely Nova Scotia their fairest merchandise.

Among all the harbors, among all the bays—and they are long and numerous—can none be found to eclipse the chief and prince of them all, glorious old Chebucto, which hundreds of years ago Indians paddled over and called the greatest of waters. It lies almost midway between the two ends of the peninsula and sends up between smiling shores a long, wide, crystal expanse of water, that is curved like a slightly bent arm and is six whole miles in length. Clear and shining it comes in from the sea, washing around its guardian forts, and with a strong, full tide floating the most ponderous leviathans of the deep right up to the wharves of the capital town of the province, built along its shores.

At all times white-winged ships sail over its waters. Farther north the bays skim over and harbors freeze. Here the waters are always blue and open, and tired ships, bruised and buffeted by the angry winter winds of the Northern Atlantic, can always steal in and find a safe and pleasant anchorage. The shores are gently sloping, the hills are wooded, only the softest breezes blow here. Boreas and all his gang must lurk outside the harbor mouth.

It is with one of these ships that we have to do. Steadily day by day plowing the ocean track that leads from England to the little maritime province, a large passenger steamer had come. Soon she would sight the harbor lights, would make her way to the desired haven.

The evening was cold and still; the time was early December. A brilliant moon in a sky of lovely steely blue was in mid-heaven, staring down at the lighted, busy town, the silent country, the glistening line of the harbor, and the crystal sea beyond.

The hull of the steamer sat on the waters a large, black mass. Its decks were white and as bright as day in the moonlight. The captain stood on the bridge, occasionally speaking, but mostly by signs and gestures making known his wishes. A few sailors were hurrying about the decks and officers were directing preparations made for entering port.

The most of the passengers had gone forward and stood in a group at the bow of the ship, eagerly straining their eyes to catch the first glimpse of the town they were approaching. A few lingered behind. Among them were two people, a man of a straight, military figure, and a young girl with a dark, brilliant face.

The man observed attentively his youthful companion, making, man of the world that he was, amused comments on her badly suppressed girlish enthusiasm at being again within sight of her native land.

It was absolutely necessary for her to talk and it charmed him to listen to her sweet, half-foreign voice. At first she had seemed to him to be thoroughly French. Then he had found grafted on her extreme Frenchiness manners and ways so entirely English that she made at the same time an interesting and an amusing combination to him.

They were still well out at sea when she looked over her shoulder and made her first salutation.

“There is Thrum Cap,” she exclaimed, “wicked old Thrum Cap, thrusting his bald, sandy head out of the water, pretending to look at the moonbeams. What a tale the old villain could tell!” and she shook her glove so impatiently at him that her companion was moved to ask what power the barren sand dune had to call forth such a display of emotion.

“There are treacherous ledges beneath his shimmering waves,” said the girl. “Shall I tell you the tale of the English frigate ‘La Tribune,’ that was wrecked there in 1797?”

“If you will be so kind,” he said gravely, giving her no hint that he was already acquainted with the story of the disaster.

At the conclusion of her recital he gave her an inscrutable look, which she did not perceive.

“You seem—ah—to know a vast deal about your native land,” he said meditatively. “How has all this knowledge been acquired, since you left here at such an early age?”

“By reading, always reading,” said the girl restlessly.

“And you are fond of your country,” he said.

“Passionately. What else have I to love? Father, mother—both are gone.”

“Your friends, acquaintances–”

“Ah, there are too many. Life has been change to me, always change. Imagine me in early youth a young and tender plant. I throw out my tendrils and attach myself to this object—it is snatched away from me; to that one—it too is snatched away; and finally my tendrils are all gone. Suppose the most charming object to come within my reach, I have no tendril to grasp it. Nothing remains but my country.”

“That will all change some day,” said the man sententiously.

“In what manner?” she asked.

“You will meet some man in whom everything will become merged—friends, country, everything.”

“You mean that I shall fall in love?”

“I do.”

“Possibly,” she said with a gay laugh. “Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“Because, as I have told you, I make few attachments; and if I did I never stay long enough in one place for one to mature. This winter I fancied that I was settled in Paris, but you see I am summoned here.”

“Leaving sorrowing admirers behind you,” said her companion imperturbably.

“According to me—yes.”

“You would not overstate,” he said hastily; “you are not like most girls.”

“Did you never see any one like me?” she asked vivaciously.

“No,” he said quietly; “you are an anomaly. A Frenchwoman educated among English people and speaking your own language with a foreign accent—half of you goes in one direction, half in another.”

“Ah, you understand me, Captain Macartney,” said the girl with an eager gesture. “You will know what I mean when I say that at times I seem to feel in my veins the gay French blood running beside the sober English.”

“Yes, I understand you,” he said with a smile, and he fixed his gaze admiringly on her dark eyes that were wandering restlessly from shore to shore of the entrance to the beautiful harbor.

“Away down there is the place of wrecks,” she said, waving her hand toward the western coast. “Some of my countrymen named it Saint Cendre, and the careless Nova Scotians corrupted it into Sambro. Do you hear that, Captain Macartney?”

The man’s glance had suddenly dropped to the sea and he was staring at it as if he were trying to wrest some secret from it. Now he roused himself. “Yes, Miss Delavigne, I hear.”

“The old name of the harbor was Chebucto,” the girl went on; “Chebook-took—chief haven. The Indian and French names should still remain; it was unfair in Englishmen to drive them out. Is not Acadie more charming than Nova Scotia, and Chebucto than Halifax?”