“ ‘Annie! Annie!’ I hear it call,
And the voice is the voice of Estwick Hall!”
Up sprang the elder, with eyes aflame,
“Thou liest! He never would call thy name!
“If he did, I would pray the wind and sea
To keep him forever from thee and me!”
Then out of the sea blew a dreadful blast;
Like the cry of a dying man it passed.
The young girl hushed on her lips a groan,
But through her tears a strange light shone,—
The solemn joy of her heart’s release
To own and cherish its love in peace.
“Dearest!” she whispered, under breath,
“Life was a lie, but true is death.
“The love I hid from myself away
Shall crown me now in the light of day.
“My ears shall never to wooer list,
Never by lover my lips be kissed.
“Sacred to thee am I henceforth,
Thou in heaven and I on earth!”
She came and stood by her sister’s bed:
“Hall of the Heron is dead!” she said.
“The wind and the waves their work have done,
We shall see him no more beneath the sun.
“Little will reck that heart of thine;
It loved him not with a love like mine.
“I, for his sake, were he but here,
Could hem and ’broider thy bridal gear,
“Though hands should tremble and eyes be wet,
And stitch for stitch in my heart be set.
“But now my soul with his soul I wed;
Thine the living, and mine the dead!”
MARGUERITE
MASSACHUSETTS BAY, 1760
Upwards of one thousand of the Acadian peasants forcibly taken from their homes on the Gaspereau and Basin of Minas were assigned to the several towns of the Massachusetts colony, the children being bound by the authorities to service or labor.
The robins sang in the orchard, the buds into blossoms grew;
Little of human sorrow the buds and the robins knew!
Sick, in an alien household, the poor French neutral lay;
Into her lonesome garret fell the light of the April day,
Through the dusty window, curtained by the spider’s warp and woof,
On the loose-laid floor of hemlock, on oaken ribs of roof.
The bedquilt’s faded patchwork, the tea-cups on the stand,
The wheel with flaxen tangle, as it dropped from her sick hand!
What to her was the song of the robin, or warm morning light,
As she lay in the trance of the dying, heedless of sound or sight?
Done was the work of her hands, she had eaten her bitter bread;
The world of the alien people lay behind her dim and dead.
But her soul went back to its child-time; she saw the sun o’erflow
With gold the Basin of Minas, and set over Gaspereau;
The low, bare flats at ebb-tide, the rush of the sea at flood,
Through inlet and creek and river, from dike to upland wood;
The gulls in the red of morning, the fish-hawk’s rise and fall,
The drift of the fog in moonshine, over the dark coast-wall.
