CHAPTER I.

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BONAVENTURE

A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana

by

GEORGE W. CABLE

New York

International Association of Newspapers and Authors

1901

Copyright, 1887, 1888, by George W. Cable.

Braunworth, Munn & Barber

Printers and Binders

Brooklyn, N. Y.

CONTENTS.

_CARANCRO._

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. SOSTHÈNE 1

II. BONAVENTURE AND ZOSÉPHINE 4

III. ATHANASIUS 9

IV. THE CONSCRIPT OFFICER 15

V. THE CURÉ OF CARANCRO 24

VI. MISSING 33

VII. A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK 42

VIII. THE QUEST ENDED 47

IX. THE WEDDING 55

X. AFTER ALL 62

_GRANDE POINTE._

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. A STRANGER 73

II. IN A STRANGE LAND 77

III. THE HANDSHAKING 81

IV. HOW THE CHILDREN RANG THE BELL 86

V. INVITED TO LEAVE 91

VI. WAR OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT 98

VII. LOVE AND DUTY 103

VIII. AT CLAUDE'S MERCY 111

IX. READY 116

X. CONSPIRACY 119

XI. LIGHT, LOVE, AND VICTORY 129

_AU LARGE._

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. THE POT-HUNTER 142

II. CLAUDE 147

III. THE TAVERN FIRESIDE 152

IV. MARGUERITE 167

V. FATHER AND SON 179

VI. CONVERGING LINES 188

VII. 'THANASE'S VIOLIN 201

VIII. THE SHAKING PRAIRIE 213

IX. NOT BLUE EYES, NOR YELLOW HAIR 221

X. A STRONG TEAM 226

XI. HE ASKS HER AGAIN 235

XII. THE BEAUSOLEILS AND ST. PIERRES 248

XIII. THE CHASE 255

XIV. WHO SHE WAS 263

XV. CAN THEY CLOSE THE BREAK? 269

XVI. THE OUTLAW AND THE FLOOD 271

XVII. WELL HIDDEN 280

XVIII. THE TORNADO 286

XIX. "TEARS AND SUCH THINGS" 294

XX. LOVE, ANGER, AND MISUNDERSTANDING 299

XXI. LOVE AND LUCK BY ELECTRIC LIGHT 305

XXII. A DOUBLE LOVE-KNOT 310

BONAVENTURE.

CARANCRO.

CHAPTER I.

SOSTHÈNE.

Bayou Teche is the dividing line. On its left is the land of bayous,

lakes, and swamps; on its right, the beautiful short-turfed prairies

of Western Louisiana. The Vermilion River divides the vast prairie

into the countries of Attakapas on the east and Opelousas on the west.

On its west bank, at its head of navigation, lies the sorry little

town of Vermilionville, near about which on the north and east the

prairie rises and falls with a gentle swell, from whose crests one

may, as from the top of a wave, somewhat overlook the surrounding

regions.

Until a few years ago, stand on whichever one you might, the prospect

stretched away, fair and distant, in broad level or gently undulating

expanses of crisp, compact turf, dotted at remote intervals by farms,

each with its low-roofed house nestled in a planted grove of oaks, or,

oftener, Pride of China trees. Far and near herds of horses and

cattle roamed at will over the plain. If for a moment, as you passed

from one point of view to another, the eye was shut in, it was only

where in some lane you were walled in by fields of dense tall

sugar-cane or cotton, or by huge green Chickasaw hedges, studded with

their white-petalled, golden-centred roses. Eastward the plain broke

into slight ridges, which, by comparison with the general level, were

called hills; while toward the north it spread away in quieter swells,

with more frequent fields and larger houses.

North, south, east, and west, far beyond the circle of these horizons,

not this parish of Lafayette only, but St. Landry, St. Martin, Iberia,

St. Mary's, Vermilion,--all are the land of the Acadians. This quarter

off here to northward was named by the Nova-Scotian exiles, in memory

of the land from which they were driven, the Beau Bassin. These small

homestead groves that dot the plain far and wide are the homes of

their children. Here is this one on a smooth green billow of the land,

just without the town. It is not like the rest,--a large brick house,

its Greek porch half hid in a grove of oaks. On that dreadful day,

more than a century ago, when the British in far-off Acadie shut into

the chapel the villagers of Grand Pré, a certain widow fled with her

children to the woods, and there subsisted for ten days on roots and

berries, until finally, the standing crops as well as the houses being

destroyed, she was compelled to accept exile, and in time found her

way, with others, to these prairies. Her son founded Vermilionville.

Her grandson rose to power,--sat in the Senate of the United States.

From early manhood to hale gray age, the people of his State were

pleased to hold him, now in one capacity, now in another, in their

honored service; they made him Senator, Governor, President of

Convention, what you will. I have seen the portrait for which he sat

in early manhood to a noted English court painter: dark waving locks;

strong, well-chiselled features; fine clear eyes; an air of warm,

steady-glowing intellectual energy. It hangs still in the home of

which I speak. And I have seen an old ambrotype of him, taken in the

days of this story: hair short-cropped, gray; eyes thoughtful,

courageous; mouth firm, kind, and ready to smile.

It must have been some years before this picture was taken, that, as

he issued from his stately porch,--which the oaks, young then, did not

hide from view as they do now,--coming forth to mount for his regular

morning ride, a weary-faced woman stood before him, holding by the

hand a little toddling boy. She was sick; the child was hungry. He

listened to her tale. Their conversation was in French.

"Widow, are you? And your husband was a Frenchman: yes, I see. Are you

an Acadian? You haven't the accent."

"I am a Creole," she said, with a perceptible flush of resentment. So

that he responded amiably:--

"Yes, and, like all Creoles, proud of it, as you are right to be. But

I am an Acadian of the Acadians, and never wished I was any thing

else."

He found her a haven a good half-day's ride out across the prairies

north-westward, in the home of his long-time acquaintance, Sosthène

Gradnego, who had no more heart than his wife had to say No to either

their eminent friend or a houseless widow; and, as to children, had so

many already, that one more was nothing. They did not feel the burden

of her, she died so soon; but they soon found she had left with them a

positive quantity in her little prattling, restless, high-tempered

Bonaventure. Bonaventure Deschamps: he was just two years younger than

their own little Zoséphine.

Sosthène was already a man of some note in this region,--a region

named after a bird. Why would it not often be well so to name

places,--for the bird that most frequents the surrounding woods or

fields? How pleasant to have one's hamlet called Nightingale, or

Whippoorwill, or Goldfinch, or Oriole! The home of Zoséphine and

Bonaventure's childhood was in the district known as Carancro; in

bluff English, Carrion Crow.

CHAPTER II.

BONAVENTURE AND ZOSÉPHINE.

They did not live _à la chapelle_; that is, in the village of six or

eight houses clustered about the small wooden spire and cross of the

mission chapel. Sosthène's small ground-story cottage, with garret

stairs outside in front on the veranda and its five-acre farm behind,

was not even on a highway nor on the edge of any rich _bas

fond_,--creek-bottom. It was _au large_,--far out across the smooth,

unscarred turf of the immense prairie, conveniently near one of the

clear circular ponds--_maraises_--which one sees of every size and in

every direction on the seemingly level land. Here it sat, as still as

a picture, within its hollow square of China-trees, which every third

year yielded their limbs for fuel; as easy to overlook the first

time--as easy to see the next time--as a bird sitting on her eggs.

Only the practised eye could read aright the infrequent obscure signs

of previous travel that showed the way to it,--sometimes no more than

the occasional soilure of the short turf by a few wheels or hoofs

where the route led into or across the _coolées_--rivulets--that from

_marais_ to _marais_ slipped southward toward the great marshes of the

distant, unseen Gulf.

When I say the parent of one of these two children and guardian of the

other was a man of note, I mean, for one thing, his house was painted.

That he was the owner of thousands of cattle, one need not mention,

for so were others who were quite inconspicuous, living in unpainted

houses, rarely seeing milk, never tasting butter; men who at call of

their baptismal names would come forth from these houses barefooted

and bareheaded in any weather, and, while their numerous progeny

grouped themselves in the doorway one behind another in inverse order

of age and stature, would either point out your lost way, or, quite as

readily as Sosthène, ask you in beneath a roof where the coffee-pot

never went dry or grew cold by day. Nor would it distinguish him from

them to say he had many horses or was always well mounted. It was a

land of horsemen. One met them incessantly; men in broad hats and dull

homespun, with thin, soft, untrimmed brown beards, astride of small

but handsome animals, in Mexican saddles, the girths and bridles of

plaited hair, sometimes a _pialle_ or _arriatte_--lasso, lariat--of

plaited rawhide coiled at the saddle-bow. "Adieu, Onesime"--always

adieu at meeting, the same as at parting. "Adieu, François; adieu,

Christophe; adieu, Lazare;" and they with their gentle, brown-eyed,

wild-animal gaze, "Adjieu."

What did make Sosthène notable was the quiet thing we call thrift,

made graceful by certain rudiments of taste. To say Sosthène, means

Madame Sosthène as well; and this is how it was that Zoséphine

Gradnego and Bonaventure Deschamps, though they went not to school,

nevertheless had "advantages." For instance, the clean, hard-scrubbed

cypress floors beneath their pattering feet; the neat round

parti-colored mats at the doors that served them for towns and

villages; the strips of home-woven carpet that stood for roads--this

one to Mermentau, that one to Côte Gelée, a third _à la chapelle_; the

walls of unpainted pine; the beaded joists under the ceiling; the

home-made furniture, bedsteads and wardrobes of stained woods, and

hickory chairs with rawhide seats, hair uppermost; the white fringed

counterpanes on the high featherbeds; especially, in the principal

room, the house's one mantelpiece, of wood showily stained in three

colors and surmounted by a pair of gorgeous vases, beneath which the

two children used to stand and feast their eyes, worth fifty cents if

they were worth one,--these were as books to them indoors; and out in

the tiny garden, where they played wild horse and wild cow, and lay in

ambush for butterflies, they came under the spell of marigolds,

prince's-feathers, lady-slippers, immortelles, portulaca, jonquil,

lavender, althæa, love-apples, sage, violets, amaryllis, and that

grass ribbon they call _jarretière de la vierge_,--the virgin's

garter.

Time passed; the children grew. The children older than they in the

same house became less and less like children, and began to disappear

from the family board and roof by a mysterious process called marrying,

which greatly mystified Zoséphine, but equally pleased her by the

festive and jocund character of the occasions, times when there was a

ravishing abundance of fried rice-cakes and _boulettes_--beef-balls.

To Bonaventure these affairs brought less mystery and less unalloyed

pleasure. He understood them better. Some boys are born lovers. From

the time they can reach out from the nurse's arms, they must be

billing and cooing and choosing a mate. Such was ardent little

Bonaventure; and none of the Gradnego weddings ever got quite through

its ceremony without his big blue eyes being found full of

tears--tears of mingled anger and desolation--because by some

unpardonable oversight he and Zoséphine were still left unmarried. So

that the pretty damsel would have to take him aside, and kiss him as

they clasped, and promise him, "Next time--next time, without fail!"

Nevertheless, he always reaped two proud delights from these events.

For one, Sosthène always took him upon his lap and introduced him as

his little Creole. And the other, the ex-governor came to these

demonstrations--the great governor! who lifted him to his knee and

told him of those wonderful things called cities, full of people that

could read and write; and about steamboats and steam-cars.

At length one day, when weddings had now pretty well thinned out the

ranks of Sosthène's family, the ex-governor made his appearance though

no marriage was impending. Bonaventure, sitting on his knee, asked why

he had come, and the ex-governor told him there was war.

"Do you not want to make haste and grow up and be a dragoon?"

The child was silent, and Sosthène laughed a little as he said

privately in English, which tongue his exceptional thrift had put him

in possession of:

"Aw, naw!"--he shook his head amusedly--"he dawn't like hoss. Go to

put him on hoss, he kick like a frog. Yass; squeal wuss'n a pig. But

still, sem time, you know, he ain't no coward; git mad in minute;

fight like little ole ram. Dawn't ondstand dat little fellah; he love

flower' like he was a gal."

"He ought to go to school," said the ex-governor. And Sosthène, half

to himself, responded in a hopeless tone:

"Yass." Neither Sosthène nor any of his children had ever done that.

CHAPTER III.

ATHANASIUS.

War it was. The horsemen grew scarce on the wide prairies of

Opelousas. Far away in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, on bloody fields,

many an Acadian volunteer and many a poor conscript fought and fell

for a cause that was really none of theirs, simple, non-slaveholding

peasants; and many died in camp and hospital--often of wounds, often

of fevers, often of mere longing for home. Bonaventure and Zoséphine

learned this much of war: that it was a state of affairs in which dear

faces went away, and strange ones came back with tidings that brought

bitter wailings from mothers and wives, and made _les vieux_--the old

fathers--sit very silent. Three times over that was the way of it in

Sosthène's house.

It was also a condition of things that somehow changed boys into men

very young. A great distance away, but still in sight south-westward

across the prairie, a dot of dark green showed where dwelt a sister

and brother-in-law of Sosthène's _vieille_,--wife. There was not the

same domestic excellence there as at Sosthène's; yet the dooryard was

very populous with fowls; within the house was always heard the hard

thump, thump, of the loom, or the loud moan of the spinning-wheel; and

the children were many. The eldest was Athanase. Though but fifteen he

was already stalwart, and showed that intelligent sympathy in the

family cares that makes such offspring the mother's comfort and the

father's hope. At that age he had done but one thing to diminish that

comfort or that hope. One would have supposed an ambitious chap like

him would have spent his first earnings, as other ambitious ones did,

for a saddle; but 'Thanase Beausoleil had bought a fiddle.

He had hardly got it before he knew how to play it. Yet, to the

father's most welcome surprise, he remained just as bold a rider and

as skilful a thrower of the _arriatte_ as ever. He came into great

demand for the Saturday-night balls. When the courier with a red

kerchief on a wand came galloping round, the day before, from _île_ to

_île_,--for these descendants of a maritime race call their homestead

groves islands,--to tell where the ball was to be, he would assert, if

there was even a hope of it, that 'Thanase was to be the fiddler.

In this way 'Thanase and his pretty little _jarmaine_--first

cousin--Zoséphine, now in her fourteenth year, grew to be well

acquainted. For at thirteen, of course, she began to move in society,

which meant to join in the contra-dance. 'Thanase did not dance with

her, or with any one. She wondered why he did not; but many other

girls had similar thoughts about themselves. He only played, his

playing growing better and better, finer and finer, every time he was

heard anew. As to the few other cavaliers, very willing were they to

have it so. The music could not be too good, and if 'Thanase was

already perceptibly a rival when hoisted up in a chair on top of a

table, fiddle and bow in hand, "twisting," to borrow their own

phrase--"twisting the ears of that little red beast and rubbing his

abdomen with a stick," it was just as well not to urge him to come

down into the lists upon the dancing-floor. But they found one night,

at length, that the music could be too good--when 'Thanase struck up

something that was not a dance, and lads and damsels crowded around

standing and listening and asking ever for more, and the ball turned

out a failure because the concert was such a success.

The memory of that night was of course still vivid next day, Sunday,

and Zoséphine's memory was as good as any one's. I wish you might have

seen her in those days of the early bud. The time had returned when

Sosthène could once more get all his household--so had marriages

decimated it--into one vehicle, a thing he had not been able to do for

almost these twenty years. Zoséphine and Bonaventure sat on a back

seat contrived for them in the family calèche. In front were the

broad-brimmed Campeachy hat of Sosthène and the meek, limp sunbonnet

of _la vieille_. About the small figure of the daughter there was

always something distinguishing, even if you rode up from behind, that

told of youth, of mettle, of self-regard; a neatness of fit in the

dress, a firm erectness in the little slim back, a faint proudness of

neck, a glimpse of ribbon at the throat, another at the waist; a

something of assertion in the slight crispness of her homespun

sunbonnet, and a ravishing glint of two sparks inside it as you got

one glance within--no more. And as you rode on, if you were a young

blade, you would be--as the soldier lads used to say--all curled up;

but if you were an old mustache, you would smile inwardly and say to

yourself, "She will have her way; she will make all winds blow in her

chosen direction; she will please herself; she will be her own good

luck and her own commander-in-chief, and, withal, nobody's misery or

humiliation, unless you count the swain after swain that will sigh in

vain." As for Bonaventure, sitting beside her, you could just see his

bare feet limply pendulous under his wide palm-leaf hat. And yet he

was a very real personage.

"Bonaventure," said Zoséphine,--this was as they were returning from

church, the wide rawhide straps of their huge wooden two-wheeled

vehicle creaking as a new saddle would if a new saddle were as big as

a house,--"Bonaventure, I wish you could learn how to dance. I am

tired trying to teach you." (This and most of the unbroken English of

this story stands for Acadian French.)

Bonaventure looked meek for a moment, and then resentful as he said:

"'Thanase does not dance."

"'Thanase! Bah! What has 'Thanase to do with it? Who was even thinking

of 'Thanase? Was he there last night? Ah yes! I just remember now he

was. But even he could dance if he chose; while you--you can't learn!

You vex me. 'Thanase! What do you always bring him up for? I wish you

would have the kindness just not to remind me of him! Why does not

some one tell him how he looks, hoisted up with his feet in our faces,

scratching his fiddle? Now, the fiddle, Bonaventure--the fiddle would

just suit you. Ah, if you could play!" But the boy's quick anger so

flashed from his blue eyes that she checked herself and with

contemplative serenity added:

"Pity nobody else can play so well as that tiresome fellow. It was

positively silly, the way some girls stood listening to him last

night. I'd be ashamed, or, rather, too proud, to flatter such a

high-headed care-for-nobody. I wish he wasn't my cousin!"

Bonaventure, still incensed, remarked with quiet intensity that he

knew why she wished 'Thanase was not a cousin.

"It's no such a thing!" exclaimed Zoséphine so forcibly that Madame

Sosthène's sunbonnet turned around, and a murmur of admonition came

from it. But the maiden was smiling and saying blithely to

Bonaventure:

"Oh, you--you can't even guess well." She was about to say more, but

suddenly hushed. Behind them a galloping horse drew near, softly

pattering along the turfy road. As he came abreast, he dropped into a

quiet trot.

The rider was a boyish yet manly figure in a new suit of gray

home-made linsey, the pantaloons thrust into the tops of his sturdy

russet boots, and the jacket ending underneath a broad leather belt

that carried a heavy revolver in its holster at one hip. A Campeachy

hat shaded his face and shoulders, and a pair of Mexican spurs tinkled

their little steel bells against their huge five-spiked rowels on his

heels. He scarcely sat in the saddle-tree--from hat to spurs you might

have drawn a perpendicular line. It would have taken in shoulders,

thighs, and all.

"Adjieu," said the young centaur; and Sosthène replied from the

creaking calèche, "Adjieu, 'Thanase," while the rider bestowed his

rustic smile upon the group. Madame Sosthène's eyes met his, and her

lips moved in an inaudible greeting; but the eyes of her little

daughter were in her lap. Bonaventure's gaze was hostile. A word or

two passed between uncle and nephew, including a remark and admission

that the cattle-thieves were getting worse than ever; and with a touch

of the spur, the young horseman galloped on.

It seems enough to admit that Zoséphine's further remarks were silly

without reporting them in full.

"Look at his back! What airs! If I had looked up I should have laughed

in his face!" etc. "Well," she concluded, after much such chirruping,

"there's one comfort--he doesn't care a cent for me. If I should die

to-morrow, he would forget to come to the funeral. And you think I

wouldn't be glad? Well, you're mistaken, as usual. I hate him, and I

just know he hates me! Everybody hates me!"

The eyes of her worshipper turned upon her. But she only turned her

own away across the great plain to the vast arching sky, and patted

the calèche with a little foot that ached for deliverance from its

Sunday shoe. Then her glance returned, and all the rest of the way

home she was as sweet as the last dip of cane-juice from the boiling

battery.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CONSCRIPT OFFICER.

By and by 'Thanase was sixteen. Eighteen was the lowest age for

conscription, yet he was in the Confederate uniform. But then so was

his uncle Sosthène; so was his father. It signified merely that he had

been received into the home guard. The times were sadly unsettled.

Every horseman, and how much more every group of horsemen, that one

saw coming across the prairie, was watched by anxious eyes, from the

moment they were visible specks, to see whether the uniform would turn

out to be the blue or the gray. Which was the more unwelcome I shall

not say, but this I can, that the blue meant invasion and the gray

meant conscription. Sosthène was just beyond the limit of age, and

'Thanase two years below it; but 'Thanase's father kept a horse

saddled all the time, and slept indoors only on stormy nights.

Do not be misled: he was neither deserter nor coward; else the

nickname which had quite blotted out his real name would not have been

Chaouache--savage, Indian. He was needed at home, and--it was not his

war. His war was against cattle-thieves and like marauders, and there

was no other man in all Carancro whom these would not have had on

their track rather than him. But one gray dawn they found there was

another not unlike him. They had made an attempt upon Sosthène's

cattle one night; had found themselves watched and discovered; had

turned and fled westward half the night, and had then camped in the

damp woods of a _bas fond_; when, just as day was breaking and they

were looking to their saddles about to mount--there were seven of

them--just then--listen!--a sound of hoofs!

Instantly every left foot is in stirrup; but before they can swing

into the saddle a joyous cry is in their ears, and pop! pop! pop! pop!

ring the revolvers as, with the glad, fierce cry still resounding,

three horsemen launch in upon them--only three, but those three a

whirlwind. See that riderless horse, and this one, and that one! And

now for it--three honest men against four remaining thieves! Pop! pop!

dodge, and fire as you dodge! Pop! pop! pop! down he goes; well done,

gray-bearded Sosthène! Shoot there! Wheel here! Wounded? Never

mind--_ora!_ Another rogue reels! Collar him, Chaouache! drag him from

the saddle--down he goes! What, again? Shoot there! Look out, that

fellow's getting away! Ah! down goes Sosthène's horse, breaking his

strong neck in the tumble. Up, bleeding old man--bang! bang! Ha, ha,

_ora!_ that finishes--_ora!_ 'Twas the boy saved your life with that

last shot, Sosthène, and the boy--the youth is 'Thanase.

He has not stopped to talk; he and his father are catching the horses

of the dead and dying jayhawkers. Now bind up Sosthène's head, and now

'Thanase's hip. Now strip the dead beasts, and take the dead men's

weapons, boots, and spurs. Lift this one moaning villain into his

saddle and take him along, though he is going to die before ten miles

are gone over. So they turn homeward, leaving high revel for the

carrion-crows.

Think of Bonaventure, the slender, the intense, the reticent--with

'Thanase limping on rude but glorious crutches for four consecutive

Saturdays and Sundays up and down in full sight of Zoséphine, savior

of her mother from widowhood, owner of two fine captured horses, and

rewarded by Sosthène with five acres of virgin prairie. If the young

fiddler's music was an attraction before, fancy its power now, when

the musician had to be lifted to his chair on top of the table!

Bonaventure sought comfort of Zoséphine, and she gave it, tittering at

'Thanase behind his back, giving Bonaventure knowing looks, and

sticking her sunbonnet in her mouth.

"Oh, if the bullet had only gone into the dandy's fiddle-bow arm!" she

whispered gleefully.

"I wish he might never get well!" said the boy.

The girl's smile vanished; her eyes flashed lightning for an instant;

the blood flew to her cheeks, and she bit her lip.

"Why don't you, now while he cannot help himself--why don't you go to

him and hit him square in the face, like"--her arm flew up, and she

smote him with her sunbonnet full between the eyes--"like that!" She

ran away, laughing joyously, while Bonaventure sat down and wept with

rage and shame.

Day by day he went about his trivial tasks and efforts at pastime with

the one great longing that Zoséphine would more kindly let him be her

slave, and something--any thing--take 'Thanase beyond reach.

Instead of this 'Thanase got well, and began to have a perceptible

down on his cheek and upper lip, to the great amusement of Zoséphine.

"He had better take care," she said one day to Bonaventure, her eyes

leaving their mirth and expanding with sudden seriousness, "or the

conscript officer will be after him, though he is but sixteen."

Unlucky word! Bonaventure's bruised spirit seized upon the thought.

They were on their way even then _à la chapelle_; and when they got

there he knelt before Mary's shrine and offered the longest and most

earnest prayer, thus far, of his life, and rose to his feet under a

burden of guilt he had never known before.

It was November. The next day the wind came hurtling over the plains

out of the north-west, bitter cold. The sky was all one dark gray. At

evening it was raining. Sosthène said, as he sat down to supper, that

it was going to pour and blow all night. Chaouache said much the same

thing to his wife as they lay down to rest. Farther away from Carancro

than many of Carancro's people had ever wandered, in the fire-lighted

public room of a village tavern, twelve or fifteen men were tramping

busily about, in muddy boots and big clanking spurs, looking to

pistols and carbines of miscellaneous patterns, and securing them

against weather under their as yet only damp and slightly bespattered

great-coats, no two of which were alike. They spoke to each other

sometimes in French, sometimes in English that betrayed a Creole

rather than an Acadian accent. A young man with a neat _kepi_ tipped

on one side of his handsome head stood with his back to the fire, a

sabre dangling to the floor from beneath a captured Federal overcoat.

A larger man was telling him a good story. He listened smilingly,

dropped the remnant of an exhausted cigarette to the floor, put his

small, neatly booted foot upon it, drew from his bosom one of those

silken tobacco-bags that our sisters in war-time used to make for all

the soldier boys, made a new cigarette, lighted it with the flint and

tinder for which the Creole smokers have such a predilection, and put

away his appliances, still hearkening to the story. He nodded his head

in hearty approval as the tale was finished. It was the story of

Sosthène, Chaouache, 'Thanase, and the jayhawkers. He gathered up his

sabre and walked out, followed by the rest. A rattle of saddles, a

splashing of hoofs, and then no sound was heard but the wind and the

pouring rain. The short column went out of the village at full gallop.

Day was fully come when Chaouache rose and stepped out upon his

galérie. He had thought he could venture to sleep in bed such a night;

and, sure enough, here morning came, and there had been no intrusion.

'Thanase, too, was up. It was raining and blowing still. Across the

prairie, as far as the eye could reach, not a movement of human life

could be seen. They went in again, made a fire of a few fagots and an

armful of cotton-seed, hung the kettle, and emptied the old coffee

from the coffee-pot.

The mother and children rose and dressed. The whole family huddled

around the good, hot, cotton-seed fire. No one looked out of window or

door; in such wind and rain, where was the need? In the little log

stable hard by, the two favorite saddle-horses remained unsaddled and

unbridled. The father's and son's pistol-belts, with revolvers

buttoned in their holsters, hung on the bedposts by the headboards of

their beds. A long sporting rifle leaned in a corner near the chimney.

Chaouache and 'Thanase got very busy plaiting a horse-hair halter, and

let time go by faster than they knew. Madame Chaouache, so to call

her, prepared breakfast. The children played with the dog and cat.

Thus it happened that still nobody looked out into the swirling rain.

Why should they? Only to see the wide deluged plain, the round

drenched groves, the _maraises_ and sinuous _coolées_ shining with

their floods, and long lines of benumbed, wet cattle seeking in

patient, silent Indian file for warmer pastures. They knew it all by

heart.

Yonder farthest _île_ is Sosthène's. The falling flood makes it almost

undiscernible. Even if one looked, he would not see that a number of

horsemen have come softly plashing up to Sosthène's front fence, for

Sosthène's house and grove are themselves in the way. They spy

Bonaventure. He is just going in upon the galérie with an armful of

China-tree fagots. Through their guide and spokesman they utter, not

the usual halloo, but a quieter hail, with a friendly beckon.

"Adjieu." The men were bedraggled, and so wet one could not make out

the color of the dress. One could hardly call it a uniform, and pretty

certainly it was not blue.

"Adjieu," responded Bonaventure, with some alarm; but the spokesman

smiled re-assuringly. He pointed far away south-westward, and asked if

a certain green spot glimmering faintly through the rain was not

Chaouache's _île_; and Bonaventure, dumb in the sight of his prayer's

answer, nodded.

"And how do you get there?" the man asks, still in Acadian French; for

he is well enough acquainted with prairies to be aware that one needs

to know the road even to a place in full view across the plain.

Bonaventure, with riot in his heart, and feeling himself drifting over

the cataract of the sinfullest thing that ever in his young life he

has had the chance to do, softly lays down his wood, and comes to the

corner of the galérie.

It is awful to him, even while he is doing it, the ease with which he

does it. If, he says, they find it troublesome crossing the marshy

place by Numa's farm,--_le platin à coté d' l'habitation à

Numa_,--then it will be well to _virer de bord_--go about, _et

naviguer au large_--sail across the open prairie. "Adjieu." He takes

up his fagots again, and watches the spattering squad trot away in the

storm, wondering why there is no storm in his own heart.

They are gone. Sosthène, inside the house, has heard nothing. The

tempest suffocates all sounds not its own, and the wind is the wrong

way anyhow. Now they are far out in the open. Chaouache's _île_ still

glimmers to them far ahead in the distance, but if some one should

only look from the front window of its dwelling, he could see them

coming. And that would spoil the fun. So they get it into line with

another man's grove nearer by, and under that cover quicken to a

gallop. Away, away; splash, splash, through the _coolées_, around the

_maraises_, clouds of wild fowl that there is no time to shoot into

rising now on this side, now on that; snipe without number, gray as

the sky, with flashes of white, trilling petulantly as they flee;

giant snowy cranes lifting and floating away on waving pinions, and

myriads of ducks in great eruptions of hurtling, whistling wings. On

they gallop; on they splash; heads down; water pouring from soaked

hats and caps; cold hands beating upon wet breasts; horses throwing

steaming muzzles down to their muddy knees, and shaking the rain from

their worried ears; so on and on and on.

The horse-hair halter was nearly done. The breakfast was smoking on

the board. The eyes of the family group were just turning toward it

with glances of placid content, when a knock sounded on the door, and

almost before father or son could rise or astonishment dart from eye

to eye, the door swung open, and a man stood on the threshold, all mud

and water and weapons, touching the side of his cap with the edge of

his palm and asking in French, with an amused smile forcing its way

about his lips:--

"Can fifteen of us get something to eat, and feed our horses?"

Chaouache gave a vacant stare, and silently started toward the

holsters that hung from the bedpost; but the stranger's right hand

flashed around to his own belt, and, with a repeater half drawn, he

cried:

"Halt!" And then, more quietly, "Look out of the door, look out the

window."

Father and son looked. The house was surrounded.

Chaouache turned upon his wife one look of silent despair. Wife and

children threw themselves upon his neck, weeping and wailing. 'Thanase

bore the sight a moment, maybe a full minute; then drew near, pressed

the children with kind firmness aside, pushed between his father and

mother, took her tenderly by the shoulders, and said in their antique

dialect, with his own eyes brimming:--

"Hush! hush! he will not have to go."

* * * * *

At a gentle trot the short column of horsemen moves again, but with

its head the other way. The wind and rain buffet and pelt horse and

rider from behind. Chaouache's door is still open. He stands in it

with his red-eyed wife beside him and the children around them, all

gazing mutely, with drooping heads and many a slow tear, after the

departing cavalcade.

None of the horsemen look back. Why should they? To see a barefoot man

beside a woman in dingy _volante_ and _casaquin_, with two or three

lads of ten or twelve in front, whose feet have known sunburn and

frost but never a shoe, and a damsel or two in cotton homespun dress

made of one piece from collar to hem, and pantalettes of the same

reaching to the ankles--all standing and looking the picture of

witless incapacity, and making no plea against tyranny! Is that a

thing worth while to turn and look back upon? If the blow fell upon

ourselves or our set, that would be different; but these illiterate

and lowly ones--they are--you don't know--so dull and insensible. Yes,

it may be true that it is only _some_ of them who feel less acutely

than _some_ of us--we admit that generously; but when you insinuate

that when we overlook parental and fraternal anguish tearing at such

hearts the dulness and insensibility are ours, you make those people

extremely offensive to us, whereas you should not estrange them from

our tolerance.

Ah, poor unpitied mother! go back to your toils; they are lightened

now--a little; the cooking, the washing, the scrubbing. Spread, day by

day, the smoking board, and call your spared husband and your little

ones to partake; but you--your tears shall be your meat day and night,

while underneath your breath you moan, "'Thanase! 'Thanase!"

CHAPTER V.

THE CURÉ OF CARANCRO.

It was an unexpected and capital exchange. They had gone for a

conscript; they came away with a volunteer.

Bonaventure sat by the fire in Sosthène's cottage, silent and heavy,

holding his small knees in his knit hands and gazing into the flames.

Zoséphine was washing the household's few breakfast dishes. _La

vieille_--the mother--was spinning cotton. _Le vieux_--Sosthène--sat

sewing up a rent in a rawhide chair-bottom. He paused by and by,

stretched, and went to the window. His wife caught the same spirit of

relaxation, stopped her wheel, looked at the boy moping in the

chimney-corner, and, passing over to his side, laid a hand upon his

temple to see if he might have fever.

The lad's eyes did not respond to her; they were following Sosthène.

The husband stood gazing out through the glass for a moment, and then,

without moving, swore a long, slow execration. The wife and daughter

pressed quickly to his either side and looked forth.

There they came, the number increased to eighteen now, trotting

leisurely through the subsiding storm. The wife asked what they were,

but Sosthène made no reply; he was counting them: twelve, thirteen,

fourteen--fourteen with short guns, another one who seemed to wear a

sword, and three, that must be--

"Cawnscreep," growled Sosthène, without turning his eyes. But the next

moment an unusual sound at his elbow drew his glance upon Zoséphine.

"_Diable!_" He glared at her weeping eyes, his manner demanding of her

instant explanation. She retreated a step, moved her hand toward the

approaching troop, and cried distressfully:

"_Tu va oère!_"--"You will see!"

His glance was drawn to Bonaventure. The lad had turned toward them,

and was sitting upright, his blue eyes widened, his face pale, and his

lips apart; but ere Sosthène could speak his wife claimed his

attention.

"Sosthène!" she exclaimed, pressing against the window-pane, "ah,

Sosthène! Ah, ah! they have got 'Thanase!"

Father, mother, and daughter crowded against the window and one

another, watching the body of horse as it drew nigh. Bonaventure went

slowly and lay face downward on the bed.

Now the dripping procession is at hand. They pass along the dooryard

fence. At the little garden gate they halt. Only 'Thanase dismounts.

The commander exchanges a smiling word or two with him, and the youth

passes through the gate, and, while his companions throw each a tired

leg over the pommel and sit watching him, comes up the short, flowery

walk and in at the opening door.

There is nothing to explain, the family have guessed it; he goes in

his father's stead. There is but a moment for farewells.

"Adjieu, Bonaventure."

The prostrate boy does not move. 'Thanase strides up to the bed and

looks at one burning cheek, then turns to his aunt.

"_Li malade?_"--"Is he ill?"

"_Sa l'air a ca_," said the aunt. (_Il a l'air_--he seems so.)

"Bien, n'onc' Sosthène, adjieu." Uncle and nephew shake hands stoutly.

"Adjieu," says the young soldier again to his aunt. She gives her

hand and turns to hide a tear. The youth takes one step toward

Zoséphine. She stands dry-eyed, smiling on her father. As the youth

comes her eyes, without turning to him, fill. He puts out his hand.

She lays her own on it. He gazes at her for a moment, with beseeching

eye--"Adjieu." Her eyes meet his one instant--she leaps upon his

neck--his strong arms press her to his bosom--her lifted face lights

up--his kiss is on her lips--it was there just now, and now--'Thanase

is gone, and she has fled to an inner room.

Bonaventure stood in the middle of the floor. Why should the boy look

so strange? Was it anger, or fever, or joy? He started out.

"_A ou-ce-tu va Bonaventure?_"--"Whereabouts are you going?"

"_Va crier les vaches._"--"Going to call the cows."

"At this time of day?" demanded _la vieille_, still in the same

tongue. "Are you crazy?"

"Oh!--no!" the boy replied, looking dazed. "No," he said; "I was going

for some more wood." He went out, passed the woodpile by, got round

behind a corn-crib, and stood in the cold, wet gale watching the

distant company lessening on the view. It was but a short, dim, dark

streak, creeping across the field of vision like some slow insect on a

window-glass. A spot just beyond it was a grove that would presently

shut the creeping line finally from sight. They reached it, passed

beyond, and disappeared; and then Bonaventure took off the small,

soft-brimmed hat that hung about his eyes, and, safe from the sight

and hearing of all his tiny world, lifted his voice, and with face

kindling with delight swung the sorry covering about his head and

cried three times:

"Ora! Or-r-ra! Ora-a-a-a!"

But away in the night Madame Sosthène, hearing an unwonted noise, went

to Bonaventure's bedside and found him sobbing as if his heart had

broken.

"He has had a bad dream," she said; for he would not say a word.

The curé of Vermilionville and Carancro was a Creole gentleman who

looked burly and hard when in meditation; but all that vanished when

he spoke and smiled. In the pocket of his cassock there was always a

deck of cards, but that was only for the game of solitaire. You have

your pipe or cigar, your flute or violoncello; he had his little table

under the orange-tree and his game of solitaire.

He was much loved. To see him beyond earshot talking to other men you

would say he was by nature a man of affairs, whereas, when you came to

hear him speak you find him quite another sort: one of the Elisha

kind, as against the Elijahs; a man of the domestic sympathies, whose

influence on man was personal and familiar; one of the sort that heal

bitter waters with a handful of salt, make poisonous pottage wholesome

with a little meal, and find easy, quiet ways to deliver poor widows

from their creditors with no loss to either; a man whom men

reverenced, while women loved and children trusted him.

The ex-governor was fond of his company, although the curé only

smiled at politics and turned the conversation back to family matters.

He had a natural gift for divining men's, women's, children's personal

wants, and every one's distinctively from every other one's. So that

to everybody he was an actual personal friend. He had been a long time

in this region. It was he who buried Bonaventure's mother. He was the

connecting link between Bonaventure and the ex-governor. Whenever the

curé met this man of worldly power, there were questions asked and

answered about the lad.

A little after 'Thanase's enlistment the priest and the ex-governor,

who, if I remember right, was home only transiently from camp, met on

the court-house square of Vermilionville, and stood to chat a bit,

while others contemplated from across the deep mud of the street these

two interesting representatives of sword and gown. Two such men

standing at that time must naturally, one would say, have been talking

of the strength of the defences around Richmond, or the Emperor

Maximilian's operations in Mexico, or Kirby Smith's movements, hardly

far enough away to make it seem comfortable. But in reality they were

talking about 'Thanase.

"He cannot write," said the curé; "and if he could, no one at home

could read his letters."

The ex-governor promised to look after him.

"And how," he asked, "does Sosthène's little orphan get on?"

The curé smiled. "He is well--physically. A queer, high-strung child;

so old, yet so young. In some things he will be an infant as long as

he lives; in others, he has been old from the cradle. He takes every

thing in as much earnest as a man of fifty. What is to become of him?"

"Oh! he will come out all right," said the ex-governor.

"That depends. Some children are born with fixed characters: you can

tell almost from the start what they are going to be. Be they much or

little, they are complete in themselves, and it makes comparatively

little difference into what sort of a world you drop them."

"'Thanase, for instance," said the ex-governor.

"Yes, you might say 'Thanase; but never Bonaventure. He is the other

type; just as marked and positive traits, but those traits not yet

builded into character: a loose mass of building-material, and the

beauty or ugliness to which such a nature may arrive depends on who

and what has the building of it into form. What he may turn out to be

at last will be no mere product of circumstances; he is too original

for that. Oh, he's a study! Another boy under the same circumstances

might turn out entirely different; and yet it will make an immense

difference how his experiences are allowed to combine with his

nature." The speaker paused a moment, while Bonaventure's other friend

stood smiling with interest; then the priest added, "He is just now

struggling with his first great experience."

"What is that?"

"It belongs," replied the curé, smiling in his turn, "to the

confidences of the confessional. But," he added, with a little anxious

look, "I can tell you what it will do; it will either sweeten his

whole nature more and more, or else make it more and more bitter, from

this time forth. And that is no trifle to you or me; for whether for

good or bad, in a large way or in a small way, he is going to make

himself felt."

The ex-governor mused. "I'm glad the little fellow has you for a

friend, father.--I'll tell you; if Sosthène and his wife will part

with him, and you will take him to live with you, and, mark you, not

try too hard to make a priest of him, I will bear his expenses."

"I will do it," said the curé.

It required much ingenuity of argument to make the Gradnego pair see

the matter in the desired light; but when the curé promised Sosthène

that he would teach the lad to read and write, and then promised _la

vieille_ that Zoséphine should share this educational privilege with

him, they let him go.

Zoséphine was not merely willing, but eager, to see the arrangements

made. She beckoned the boy aside and spoke to him alone.

"You must go, Bonaventure. You will go, will you not--when I ask you?

Think how fine that will be--to be educated! For me, I cannot endure

an uneducated person. But--ah! _ca sré vaillant, pour savoir lire_.

[It will be bully to know how to read.] _Aie ya yaie!_"--she stretched

her eyes and bit her lip with delight--"_C'est t'y gai, pour savoir

écrire!_ [That's fine to know how to write.] I will tell you a secret,

dear Bonaventure. Any girl of sense is _bound_ to think it much

greater and finer for a man to read books than to ride horses. She may

not want to, but she has to do it; she can't help herself!"

Still Bonaventure looked at her mournfully. She tried again.

"When I say any girl of sense I include myself--of course! I think

more of a boy--or man, either--who can write letters than of one who

can play the fiddle. There, now, I have told you! And when you have

learned those things, I will be proud of you! And besides, you know,

if you don't go, you make me lose my chance of learning the same

things; but if you go, we will learn them together."

He consented. She could not understand the expression of his face. She

had expected gleams of delight. There were none. He went with silent

docility, and without a tear; but also without a smile. When in his

new home the curé from time to time stole glances at his face fixed in

unconscious revery, it was full of a grim, unhappy satisfaction.

"Self is winning, or dying hard. I wish no ill to 'Thanase; but if

there is to be any bad news of him, I hope, for the sake of this boy's

soul, it will come quickly." So spoke the curé alone, to his cards.

CHAPTER VI.

MISSING.

The war was in its last throes even when 'Thanase enlisted. Weeks and

months passed. Then a soldier coming home to Carancro--home-comers

were growing plentiful--brought the first news of him. An officer

making up a force of picked men for an expedition to carry important

despatches eastward across the Mississippi and far away into Virginia

had chosen 'Thanase. The evening the speaker left for home on his

leave of absence 'Thanase was still in camp, but was to start the next

morning. It was just after Sunday morning mass that Sosthène and

Chaouache, with their families and friends, crowded around this bearer

of tidings.

"Had 'Thanase been in any battles?"

"Yes, two or three."

"And had not been wounded?"

"No, although he was the bravest fellow in his company."

Sosthène and Chaouache looked at each other triumphantly, smiled, and

swore two simultaneous oaths of admiration. Zoséphine softly pinched

her mother, and whispered something. Madame Sosthène addressed the

home-comer aloud:

"Did 'Thanase send no other message except that mere 'How-d'ye all

do?'"

"No."

Zoséphine leaned upon her mother's shoulder, and softly breathed:

"He is lying."

The mother looked around upon her daughter in astonishment. The flash

of scorn was just disappearing from the girl's eyes. She gave a little

smile and chuckle, and murmured, with her glance upon the man:

"He has no leave of absence. He is a deserter."

Then Madame Sosthène saw two things at once: that the guess was a good

one, and that Zoséphine had bidden childhood a final "adjieu."

The daughter felt Bonaventure's eyes upon her. He was standing only a

step or two away. She gave him a quick, tender look that thrilled him

from head to foot, then lifted her brows and made a grimace of

pretended weariness. She was growing prettier almost from day to day.

And Bonaventure, he had no playmates--no comrades--no amusements. This

one thing, which no one knew but the curé, had taken possession of

him. The priest sometimes seemed to himself cruel, so well did it

please him to observe the magnitude Bonaventure plainly attributed to

the matter. The boy seemed almost physically to bow under the burden

of his sense of guilt.

"It is quickening all his faculties," said the curé to himself.

Zoséphine had hardly yet learned to read without stammering, when

Bonaventure was already devouring the few French works of the curé's

small bookshelf. Silent on other subjects, on one he would talk till

a pink spot glowed on either cheek-bone and his blue eyes shone like a

hot noon sky;--casuistry. He would debate the right and wrong of any

thing, every thing, and the rights and wrongs of men in every relation

of life.

Blessed was it for him then that the tactful curé was his father and

mother in one, and the surgeon and physician of his mind. Thus the

struggle brought him light. To the boy's own eyes it seemed to be

bringing him only darkness, but the priest saw better.

"That is but his shadow; he is standing in it; it is deepening; that

shows the light is increasing." Thus spake the curé to himself as he

sat at solitaire under his orange-tree one afternoon.

The boy passed out of sight, and the curé's eyes returned to his game

of solitaire; but as he slowly laid one card upon another, now here,

now there, he still thought of Bonaventure.

"There will be no peace for him, no sweetness of nature, no green

pastures and still waters, within or without, while he seeks life's

adjustments through definitions of mere right and rights. No, boy; you

will ever be a restless captive, pacing round and round those limits

of your enclosure. Worse still if you seek those definitions only to

justify your overriding another's happiness in pursuit of your own."

The boy was not in hearing; this was apostrophe.

"Bonaventure," he said, as the lad came by again; and Bonaventure

stopped. The player pushed the cards from him, pile by pile, leaned

back, ran his fingers slowly through his thin gray hair, and smiled.

"Bonaventure, I have a riddle for you. It came to me as I was playing

here just now. If everybody could do just as he pleased; if he had, as

the governor would say, all his rights,--life, liberty, pursuit of

happiness,--if everybody had this, I say, why should we still be

unhappy?"

The boy was silent.

"Well, I did not suppose you would know. Would you like me to tell

you? It is because happiness pursued is never overtaken. And can you

guess why that is? Well, never mind, my son. But--would you like to do

something for me?"

Bonaventure nodded. The curé rose, taking from his bosom as he left

his chair a red silk handkerchief and a pocket-worn note-book. He laid

the note-book on the table, and drawing back with a smile said:

"Here, sit down in my place, and write what I tell you, while I

stretch my legs. So; never mind whether you understand or not. I am

saying it for myself: it helps _me_ to understand it better. Now, as I

walk, you write. 'Happiness pursued is never overtaken, because'--have

you written that?--'because, little as we are, God's image makes us so

large that we cannot live within ourselves, nor even for ourselves,

and be satisfied.' Have you got that down? Very well--yes--the

spelling could be improved, but that is no matter. Now wait a moment;

let me walk some more. Now write: 'It is not good for man to be alone,

because'--because--let me see; where--ah, yes!--'because rightly self

is the'--Ah! no, no, my boy; not a capital S for 'self'--ah! that's

the very point,--small _s_,--'because rightly self is the smallest

part of us. Even God found it good not to be alone, but to

create'--got that?--'to create objects for His love and benevolence.'

Yes--'And because in my poor, small way I am made like Him, the whole

world becomes a part of me'--small _m_, yes, that is right!" From

bending a moment over the writer, the priest straightened up and took

a step backward. The boy lifted his glance to where the sunlight and

leaf-shadows were playing on his guardian's face. The curé answered

with a warm smile, saying:

"My boy, God is a very practical God--no, you need not write it;

just listen a moment. Yes; and so when He gave us natures like

His, He gave men not wives only, but brethren and sisters and

companions and strangers, in order that benevolence, yes, and even

self-sacrifice,--mistakenly so called,--might have no lack of

direction and occupation; and then bound the whole human family

together by putting every one's happiness into some other one's

hands. I see you do not understand: never mind; it will come to you

little by little. It was a long time coming to me. Let us go in to

supper."

The good man had little hope of such words taking hold. At school next

day there was Zoséphine with her soft electric glances to make the boy

forget all; and at the Saturday-night balls there she was again.

"Bonaventure," her manner plainly said, "did you ever see any thing

else in this wide world so tiresome as these boys about here? Stay

with me; it keeps them away." She never put such thoughts into words.

With an Acadian girl such a thing was impossible But girls do not need

words. She drew as potently, and to all appearances as impassively, as

a loadstone. All others than Bonaventure she repelled. If now and then

she toyed with a heart, it was but to see her image in it once or

twice and toss it aside. All got one treatment in the main. Any one of

them might gallop by her father's veranda seven times a day, but not

once in all the seven would she be seen at the window glancing up at

the weather or down at her flowers; nor on the veranda hanging up

fresh hanks of yarn; nor at the well with the drinking-pail, getting

fresh water, as she might so easily have been, had she so chosen.

Yonder was Sosthène hoeing leisurely in the little garden, and

possibly the sunbonnet of _la vieille_ half seen and half hidden among

her lima-beans; but for the rest there was only the house, silent at

best, or, worse, sending out through its half-open door the long,

scornful No-o-o! of the maiden's unseen spinning-wheel. No matter the

fame or grace of the rider. All in vain, my lad: pirouette as you

will; sit your gallantest; let your hat blow off, and turn back, and

at full speed lean down from the saddle, and snatch it airily from the

ground, and turn again and gallop away; all is in vain. For by her

estimate either you are living in fear of the conscript officer; or,

if you are in the service, and here only transiently on leave of

absence, your stay seems long, and it is rumored your leave has

expired; or, worse, you cannot read; or, worst, your age, for all your

manly airs, is so near Zoséphine's as to give your attentions strong

savor of presumption. But let any fortune bring Bonaventure in any

guise--sorriest horseman of all, youngest, slenderest, and stranger to

all the ways that youth loves--and at once she is visible; nay, more,

accessible; and he, welcome. So accessible she, so welcome he, that

more than once she has to waft aside her mother's criticisms by

pleading Bonaventure's foster-brotherhood and her one or two superior

years.

"Poor 'Thanase!" said the youths and maidens.

* * * * *

And now the war came to an end. Bonaventure was glad. 'Thanase was

expected home, but--let him come. If the absent soldier knew what the

young folks at the balls knew, he would not make haste in his return.

And he did not, as it seemed. Day after day, in group after group,

without shouting and without banners, with wounds and scars and

tattered garments, some on horses, but many more on foot, the loved

ones--the spared ones, remnants of this command and that command and

'Thanase's command--came home. But day by day brought no 'Thanase.

Bonaventure began to wish for him anxiously. He wanted him back so

that this load might be lifted. Thus the bitter would pass out of the

sweet; the haunting fear of evil tidings from the absent rival would

haunt no more. Life would be what it was to other lads, and Zoséphine

one day fall to his share by a better title than he could ever make

with 'Thanase in exile. Come, 'Thanase, come, come!

More weeks passed. The youth's returned comrades were all back at

their ploughs again and among their herds. 'Thanase would be along by

and by, they said; he could not come with them, for he had not been

paroled with them; he had been missing--taken prisoner, no doubt--in

the very last fight. But presently they who had been prisoners were

home also, and still 'Thanase had not come. And then, instead of

'Thanase coming, Chaouache died.

A terror took up its home in the heart of Bonaventure. Every thing he

looked upon, every creature that looked upon him, seemed to offer an

unuttered accusation. Least of all could he bear the glance of

Zoséphine. He did not have to bear it. She kept at home now closely.

She had learned to read, and Sosthène and his _vieille_ had pronounced

her education completed.

In one direction only could the eyes of Bonaventure go, and meet

nothing that accused him: that was into the face of the curé. And lest

accusation should spring up there, he had omitted his confession for

weeks. He was still child enough not to see that the priest was

watching him narrowly and tenderly.

One night, away in the small hours, the curé was aroused by the

presence of some one in his room.

"Who is that?" He rose from his pillow.

"It is I, father," said a low voice, and against the darkness of an

inner door he saw dimly the small, long nightdress of the boy he

loved.

"What gets you up, Bonaventure? Come here. What troubles you?"

"I cannot sleep," murmured the lad, noiselessly moving near. The

priest stroked the lad's brow.

"Have you not been asleep at all?"

"Yes."

"But you have had bad dreams that woke you?"

"Only one."

"And what was that?"

There was a silence.

"Did you dream about--'Thanase, for example?"

"Yes."

The priest reached out and took the boy's small, slender hands in his.

They were moist and cold.

"And did you dream"--

"I dreamed he was dead. I dream it every night."

"But, my child, that does not make it so. Would you like to get into

bed here with me? No?--or to go back now to your own bed? No? What,

then?"

"I do not want to go back to bed any more. I want to go and find

'Thanase."

"Why, my child, you are not thoroughly awake, are you?"

"Yes, I want to go and find 'Thanase. I have been thinking to-night of

all you have told me--of all you said that day in the garden,--and--I

want to go and find 'Thanase."

"My boy," said the priest, drawing the lad with gentle force to his

bosom, "my little old man, does this mean that you have come to the

end of all self-service?--that self is never going to be spelt with a

capital S any more? Will it be that way if I let you go?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, my son--God only knows whether I am wise or foolish,

but--you may go."

The boy smiled for the first time in weeks, then climbed half upon

the bed, buried his face in the priest's bosom, and sobbed as though

his heart had broken.

"It has broken," said the curé to himself as he clasped him tightly.

"It has broken--thank God!"

CHAPTER VII.

A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK.

In such and such a battle, in the last charge across a certain

cornfield, or in the hurried falling back through a certain wood, with

the murderous lead singing and hitting from yonder dark mass

descending on the flank, and the air full of imperious calls,

"Halt!"--"Surrender!" a man disappeared. He was not with those who

escaped, nor with the dead when they were buried, nor among the

wounded anywhere, nor in any group of prisoners. But long after the

war was over, another man, swinging a bush scythe among the overgrown

corners of a worm fence, found the poor remnant of him, put it

scarcely underground, and that was the end. How many times that

happened!

Was it so with 'Thanase? No. For Sosthène's sake the ex-governor had

taken much pains to correspond with officials concerning the missing

youth, and had secured some slender re-assurances. 'Thanase, though

captured, had not been taken to prison. Tidings of general surrender

had overhauled him on the way to it, near, I think, the city of

Baltimore--somewhere in that region, at any rate; and he had been

paroled and liberated, and had started penniless and on foot,

south-westward along the railway-tracks.

To find him, Bonaventure must set out, like him on foot,

south-eastward over some fifty miles of wagon-road to the nearest

railway; eastward again over its cross-ties eighty miles to _la

ville_, the great New Orleans, there to cross the Mississippi. Then

away northward, through the deep, trestled swamps, leagues and

leagues, across Bayou La Branche and Bayou Desair, and Pass Manchac

and North Manchac, and Pontchatoula River two or three times; and out

of the swamps and pine barrens into the sweet pine hills, with their

great resinous boles rising one hundred--two hundred feet overhead;

over meadows and fields and many and many a beautiful clear creek, and

ten or more times over the winding Tangipahoa, by narrow clearings,

and the old tracks of forgotten hurricanes, and many a wide

plantation; until more than two hundred miles from the great city,

still northward across the sinking and swelling fields, the low, dark

dome of another State's Capitol must rise amid spires and trees into

the blue, and the green ruins of fortifications be passed, and the

iron roads be found branching west, north, and east.

Thence all was one wide sea of improbability. Even before a quarter of

that distance should have been covered, how many chances of every sort

there were against the success of such a search!

"It is impossible that he should find him," said the ex-governor.

"Well,"--the curé shrugged,--"if he finds no one, yet he may succeed

in losing himself." But in order that Bonaventure in losing himself

should not be lost, the priest gave him pens and paper, and took his

promise to write back as he went step by step out into the world.

"And learn English, my boy; learn it with all speed; you will find it

vastly, no telling how vastly, to your interest--I should say your

usefulness. I am sorry I could not teach it to you myself. Here is a

little spelling-book and reader for you to commence with. Make haste

to know English; in America we should be Americans; would that I could

say it to all our Acadian people! but I say it to you, learn English.

It may be that by not knowing it you may fail, or by knowing it

succeed, in this errand. And every step of your way let your first

business be the welfare of others. Hundreds will laugh at you for it:

never mind; it will bring you through. Yes, I will tell Sosthène and

the others good-by for you. I will tell them you had a dream that

compelled you to go at once. Adieu." And just as the rising sun's

first beam smote the curé's brimming eyes, his "little old man" turned

his face toward a new life, and set forward to enter it.

"Have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man named

'Thanase Beausoleil?"--This question to every one met, day in, day

out, in early morning lights, in noonday heats, under sunset glows,

by a light figure in thin, clean clothing, dusty shoes, and with limp

straw hat lowered from the head. By and by, as first the land of the

Acadians and then the land of the Creoles was left behind, a man every

now and then would smile and shake his head to mean he did not

understand--for the question was in French. But then very soon it

began to be in English too, and by and by not in French at all.

"Sir, have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man

named 'Thanase Beausoleil?"

But no one had seen him.

Travel was very slow. Not only because it was done afoot. Many a day

he had to tarry to earn bread, for he asked no alms. But after a while

he passed eastward into a third State, and at length into the

mountains of a fourth.

Meantime the weeks were lengthening into months; the year was in its

decline. Might not 'Thanase be even then at home? No. Every week

Bonaventure wrote back, "Has he come?" and the answer came back, "He

is not here."

But one evening, as he paced the cross-ties of a railway that hugged a

huge forest-clad mountain-side, with the valley a thousand feet below,

its stony river shining like a silken fabric in the sunset lights, the

great hillsides clad in crimson, green, and gold, and the long,

trailing smoke of the last train--a rare, motionless blue gauze--gone

to rest in the chill mid-air, he met a man who suddenly descended upon

the track in front of him from higher up the mountain,--a great, lank

mountaineer. And when Bonaventure asked the apparition the untiring

question to which so many hundreds had answered No, the tall man

looked down upon the questioner, a bright smile suddenly lighting up

the unlovely chin-whiskered face, and asked:

"Makes a fiddle thess talk an' cry?"

"Yes."

"Well, he hain't been gone from hyer two weeks."

It was true. Only a few weeks before, gaunt, footsore, and ragged,

tramping the cross-ties yonder where the railway comes from the

eastward, curving into view out of that deep green and gray defile,

'Thanase had come into this valley. So short a time before, because

almost on his start homeward illness had halted him by the way and

held him long in arrest. But at length he had reached the valley, and

had lingered here for days; for it happened that a man in bought

clothing was there just then, roaming around and hammering pieces off

the rocks, who gave 'Thanase the chance to earn a little something

from him, with which the hard-marched wanderer might take the train

instead of the cross-ties for as far as the pittance would carry him.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE QUEST ENDED.

The next sunrise saw Bonaventure, with a new energy in his step,

journeying back the way he had come. And so anew the weeks wore by.

Once more the streams ran southward, and the landscapes opened wide

and fertile.

"Sir,--pardon your stopping,--in what State should I find myself at

the present?"

The person inquired of looked blank, examined the questioner from head

to foot, and replied:

"In what--oh! I understand; yes. What State--Alabama, yes, Alabama.

You must excuse me, I didn't understand you at first. Yes, this is

Alabama."

"Thank you, sir. Have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a

young man named 'Thanase Beausoleil?"

"Back from the war! Why, everybody done got back from the war long

ago." "Lawng ago-o-o," the speaker pronounced it, but the

pronunciation could not be as untrue as the careless assertion.

A second time, and again a third, Bonaventure fell upon the trail. But

each time it was colder than before. And yet he was pushing on as fast

as he dared. Many a kind man's invitation to tarry and rest was

gratefully declined. Once, where two railways parted, one leading

south, the other west, he followed the southern for days, and then

came back to the point of separation, and by and by found the lost

thread again on the more westward road. But the time since 'Thanase

had passed was the longest yet. Was it certainly 'Thanase? Yes; the

fiddle always settled that question. And had he not got home? He had

not come. Somewhere in the long stretch between Bonaventure and

Carancro there must be strange tidings.

On the first New Year's eve after the war, as the sun was sinking upon

the year's end, Bonaventure turned that last long curve of the New

Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad, through the rushes,

flags, willows, and cypress-stumps of the cleared swamp behind the

city of the Creoles, and, passing around the poor shed called the

depot, paused at the intersection of Calliope and Magnolia Streets,

waiting the turn of chance.

Trace of the lost 'Thanase had brought him at length to this point.

The word of a fellow-tramp, pledged on the honor of his guild, gave

assurance that thus far the wanted man had come in strength and

hope--but more than a month before.

The necessity of moving on presently carried Bonaventure aimlessly

into the city along the banks of the New Canal. The lad had shot up in

these few months into the full stature, without the breadth, of

manhood. The first soft, uneven curls of a light-brown beard were on

his thin cheek and chin. Patient weariness and humble perseverance

were in his eyes. His coarse, ill-matched attire was whole and, but

for the soilure of foot-travel, clean. Companioning with nature had

browned his skin, and dried his straight fine hair. Any reader of

faces would have seen the lines of unselfish purpose about his lips,

and, when they parted nervously for speech, the earnest glow of that

purpose in a countenance that neither smiled nor frowned, and, though

it was shaded, cast no shadow.

The police very soon knew him. They smiled at one another and tapped

the forehead with one finger, as he turned away with his question

answered by a shake of the head. It became their habit. They would

jerk a thumb over a shoulder after him facetiously.

"Goes to see every unknown white man found dead or drowned. And yet,

you know, he's happy. He's a heap sight"--sometimes they used other

adjectives--"a heap sight happier than us, with his trampin' around

all day and his French and English books at night, as old Tony says.

He bunks with old Tony, you know, what keeps that little grocery in

Solidelle Street. Tony says his candles comes to more than his bread

and meat, or, rather, his rice and crawfish. He's the funniest crazy

_I_ ever see. All the crazies I ever see is got some grind for

pleasing number one; but this chap is everlastin'ly a-lookin' out for

everybody _but_ number one. Oh, yes, the candles and books,--I reckon

they are for number one,--that's so; but anyhow, that's what I hear

Madame Tony allow."

The short, wet winter passed. The search stretched on into the spring.

It did not, by far, take up the seeker's whole daily life. Only it was

a thread that ran all through it, a dye that colored it. Many other

factors--observations, occupations, experiences--were helping to make

up that life, and to make it, with all its pathetic slenderness, far

more than it was likely ever to have been made at Carancro. Through

hundreds of miles of tramping the lad had seen, in a singularly

complete yet inhostile disentanglement from it, the world of men;

glimpses of the rich man's world with its strivings, steadier views of

the poor man's world with its struggles. The times were strong and

rude. Every step of his way had been through a land whose whole civil

order had been condemned, shattered, and cast into the mill of

revolution for a total remoulding. Every day came like the discharge

of a great double-shotted gun. It could not but be that, humble as his

walk was, and his years so few, his fevered mind should leap into the

questions of the hour like a naked boy into the surf. He made

mistakes, sometimes in a childish, sometimes in an older way, some

against most worthy things. But withal he managed to keep the main

direction of truth, after his own young way of thinking and telling

it. He had no such power to formulate his large conclusions as you or

even I have; but whatever wrought to enlighten the unlettered,

whatever cherished manhood's rights alike in lofty and lowly, whatever

worked the betterment of the poor, whatever made man not too much and

not too little his brother's keeper,--his keeper not by mastery, but

by fraternal service,--whatever did these things was to him good

religion, good politics. So, at least, the curé told the ex-governor,

as from time to time they talked of the absent Bonaventure and of his

letters. However, they had to admit one thing: all this did not find

'Thanase.

And why, now, should 'Thanase longer be sought? Was there any thing to

gain by finding him dead? Not for Bonaventure; he felt, as plainly as

though he had seen an angel write the decree, that to Bonaventure

Deschamps no kind of profit or advantage under the sun must come by

such a way. But was there any thing to be gained in finding that

'Thanase still lived? The police will tell you, as they told

Bonaventure, that in these days of steam and steel and yoked lightning

a man may get lost and be found again; but that when he stays lost,

and is neither dead nor mad, it is because he wants to be lost. So

where was to be the gain in finding 'Thanase alive? Oh, much, indeed,

to Bonaventure! The star of a new hope shot up into his starless sky

when that thought came, and in that star trembled that which he had

not all these weary months of search dared see even with fancy's

eye,--the image of Zoséphine! This--this! that he had never set out to

achieve--this! if he could but stand face to face with evidence that

'Thanase could have reached home and would not.

This thought was making new lines in the young care-struck face,

when--

"See here," said a voice one day. Bonaventure's sleeve was caught by

the thumb and forefinger of a man to whom, in passing, he had touched

his hat. The speaker was a police captain.

"Come with me." They turned and walked, Bonaventure saying not a word.

They passed a corner, turned to the right, passed two more, turned to

the left,--high brick walls on either side, damp, ill-smelling

pavements under foot,--and still strode on in silence. As they turned

once more to the right in a dim, narrow way, the captain patted the

youth softly on the back, and said:

"Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies."

So Bonaventure asked none. But presently, in one of those dens called

sailors' boarding-houses, somewhere down on the water-front near the

Mint, he was brought face to face with a stranger whose manner seemed

to offer the reverse proposition. Of him the youth asked questions and

got answers.

'Thanase Beausoleil still lived, far beyond seas. How? why? If this

man spake truly, because here in New Orleans, at the last turn in the

long, weary journey that was to have brought the young volunteer home,

he had asked and got the aid of this informant to ship--before the

mast--for foreign parts. But why? Because his ambition and pride,

explained the informant, had outgrown Carancro, and his heart had

tired of the diminished memory of the little Zoséphine.

Bonaventure hurried away. What storms buffeted one another in his

bosom!

Night had fallen upon the great city. Long stretches of street lay now

between high walls, and now between low-hanging eaves, empty of human

feet and rife with solitude. Through long distances he could run and

leap, and make soft, mild pretence of shouting and smiting hands. The

quest was ended! rivalry gone of its own choice, guilt washed from the

hands, love returned to her nest. Zoséphine! Zoséphine! Away now,

away to the reward of penance, patience, and loyalty! Unsought,

unhoped-for reward! As he ran, the crescent moon ran before him in the

sky, and one glowing star, dipping low, beckoned him into the west.

And yet that night a great riot broke out in his heart; and in the

morning there was a look on his face as though in that tumult

conscience had been drugged, beaten, stoned, and left for dead outside

the gate of his soul.

There was something of defiance in his eye, not good to see, as he

started down the track of the old Opelousas Railroad, with the city

and the Mississippi at his back. When he had sent a letter ahead of

him, he had no money left to pay for railway passage. Should he delay

for that or aught else, he might never start; for already the ghost of

conscience was whispering in at the barred windows of his heart:

"It is not true. The man has told you falsely. It is not true."

And so he was tramping once more--toward Carancro. And never before

with such determined eagerness. Nothing could turn him about now. Once

a train came in sight in front of him just as he had started across a

trestle-work; but he ran forward across the open ties, and leaped

clear of the track on the farther side, just when another instant

would have been too late. He stood a moment, only half-pausing among

the palmettos and rushes as the hurtling mass thundered by; then

pushed quickly into the whirling dust of the track and hurried on

between the clicking rails, not knowing that yonder dark, dwindling

speck behind was bearing away from him strange tidings from the curé.

The summer was coming on; the suns were hot. There were leagues on

leagues of unbroken shaking prairie with never a hand-breadth of

shade, but only the glowing upper blue, with huge dazzling clouds

moving, like herds of white elephants pasturing across heavenly

fields, too slowly for the eye to note their motion; and below, the

far-reaching, tremulous sheen of reed and bulrush, the wet lair of

serpent, wild-cat, and alligator. Now and then there was the cool blue

of sunny, wind-swept waters winding hither and thither toward the sea,

and sometimes miles of deep forest swamp through which the railroad

went by broad, frowzy, treeless clearings flanked with impassable oozy

ditches; but shade there was none.

Nor was there peace. Always as he strode along, something he could not

outgo was at his side, gaunt, wounded, soiled, whispering: "Turn back;

turn back, and settle with me," and ever put off with promises--after

that fashion as old as the world--to do no end of good things if only

the one right thing might be left undone.

And so because there were no shade, no peace, and no turning back, no

one day's march made him stronger for the next; and at length, when he

came to the low thatch of a negro-cabin, under the shadow of its

bananas he sank down in its doorway, red with fever.

There he had to stay many days; but in the end he was up and on his

way again. He left the Atchafalaya behind him. It was easier going

now. There was shade. Under his trudging feet was the wagon-road

along the farther levee of the Teche. Above him great live-oaks

stretched their arms clad in green vestments and gray drapings, the

bright sugar-cane fields were on his left, and on his right the

beautiful winding bayou. In his face, not joy, only pallid eagerness,

desire fixed upon fulfilment, and knowledge that happiness was

something else; a young, worn face, with hard lines about the mouth

and neck; the face of one who had thought self to be dead and buried,

and had seen it rise to life again, and fallen captive to it. So he

was drawing near to Carancro. Make haste, Bonaventure!

CHAPTER IX.

THE WEDDING.

A horse and buggy have this moment been stopped and are standing on a

faint rise of ground seven miles out beyond the south-western outskirt

of Carancro. The two male occupants of the vehicle are lifting their

heads, and looking with well-pleased faces at something out over the

plain. You know the curé?--and the ex-governor.

In the far distance, across the vast level, something that looks

hardly so large on the plain as an ant on the floor, is moving this

way across it. This is what the curé and his friend are watching. Open

in the curé's hand, as if he had just read it aloud again, is that

last letter of Bonaventure's, sent ahead of him from New Orleans and

received some days ago. The governor holds the reins.

What do they see? Some traveller afoot? Can it be that Bonaventure is

in sight? That is not even the direction from which Bonaventure, when

he comes, will appear. No, speck though it is, the object they are

looking at is far larger than a man afoot, or any horse, or horse and

calèche. It is a house. It is on wheels, and is drawn by many yoke of

oxen. From what the curé is saying we gather that Sosthène has bought

this very small dwelling from a neighbor, and is moving it to land of

his own. Two great beams have been drawn under the sills at each end,

the running gear of two heavy ox-wagons is made to bear up the four

ends of these beams, all is lashed firmly into place, the oxen are

slowly pulling, the long whips are cracking, the house is answering

the gentle traction, and, already several miles away from its first

site, it will to-morrow settle down upon new foundations, a homely

type of one whose wreath will soon be a-making, and who will soon

after come to be the little house's mistress.

But what have we done--let time slip backward? A little; not much; for

just then, as the ex-governor said, "And where is Bonaventure by this

time?" Bonaventure had been only an hour or two in the negro-cabin

where fever had dragged him down.

Since then the house had not only settled safely upon its new

foundations, but Sosthène, in the good, thorough way that was his own,

had carried renovation to a point that made the cottage to all

intents and purposes a new house. And the curé had looked upon it

again, much nearer by; for before a bride dared enter a house so

nearly new, it had been deemed necessary for him to come and, before a

temporary altar within the dwelling, to say mass in the time of full

moon. But not yet was the house really a dwelling; it, and all

Carancro, were waiting for the wedding. Make haste, Bonaventure!

He had left the Teche behind him on the east. And now a day breaks

whose sunset finds him beyond the Vermilion River. He cannot go aside

to the ex-governor's, over yonder on the right. He is making haste.

This day his journey will end. His heart is light; he has thought out

the whole matter now; he makes no doubt any longer that the story told

him is true. And he knows now just what to do: this very sunset he

will reach his goal; he goes to fill 'Thanase's voided place; to lay

his own filial service at the feet of the widowed mother; to be a

brother in the lost brother's place; and Zoséphine?--why, she shall be

her daughter, the same as though 'Thanase, not he, had won her. And

thus, too, Zoséphine shall have her own sweet preference--that

preference which she had so often whispered to him--for a scholar

rather than a soldier. Such is the plan, and Conscience has given her

consent.

The sun soars far overhead. It, too, makes haste. But the wasted,

flushed, hungry-eyed traveller is putting the miles behind him. He

questions none to-day that pass him or whom he overtakes; only bows,

wipes his warm brow, and presses on across the prairie. Straight

before him, though still far away, a small, white, wooden steeple

rises from out a tuft of trees. It is _la chapelle_!

The distance gets less and less. See! the afternoon sunlight strikes

the roofs of a few unpainted cottages that have begun to show

themselves at right and left of the chapel. And now he sees the green

window-shutters of such as are not without them, and their copperas or

indigo-dyed curtains blowing in and out. Nearer; nearer; here is a

house, and yonder another, newly built. Carancro is reached.

He enters a turfy, cattle-haunted lane between rose-hedges. In a

garden on one side, and presently in another over the way, children

whom he remembers--but grown like weeds since he saw them last--are at

play; but when they stop and gaze at him, it is without a sign of

recognition. Now he walks down the village street. How empty it seems!

was it really always so? Still, yonder is a man he knows--and yonder a

woman--but they disappear without seeing him.

How familiar every thing is! There are the two shops abreast of the

chapel, Marx's on this side, Lichtenstein's on that, their dingy false

fronts covered with their same old huge rain-faded words of promise.

Yonder, too, behind the blacksmith's shop, is the little schoolhouse,

dirty, half-ruined, and closed--that is, wide-open and empty--it may

be for lack of a teacher, or funds, or even of scholars.

"It shall not be so," said the traveller to himself, "when _she_ and

I"--

His steps grow slow. Yet here, not twenty paces before him, is the

home of the curé. Ah! that is just the trouble. Shall he go here

first? May he not push on and out once more upon the prairie and make

himself known first of all to _her_? Stopping here first, will not the

curé say tarry till to-morrow? His steps grow slower still.

And see, now. One of the Jews in the shop across the street has

observed him. Now two stand together and scrutinize him; and now there

are three, looking and smiling. Plainly, they recognize him. One

starts to come across, but on that instant the quiet of the hamlet is

broken by a sound of galloping hoofs.

Bonaventure stands still. How sudden is this change! He is not noticed

now; every thing is in the highest animation. There are loud calls and

outcries; children are shouting and running, and women's heads are

thrust out of doors and windows. Horsemen come dashing into the

village around through the lanes and up the street. Look! they wheel,

they rein up, they throw themselves from the rattling saddles; they

leave the big wooden stirrups swinging and the little unkempt ponies

shaking themselves, and rush into the _boutique de_ Monsieur

Lichtenstein, and are talking like mad and decking themselves out on

hats and shoulders with ribbons in all colors of the rainbow!

Suddenly they shout, all together, in answer to a shout outside. More

horsemen appear. Lichtenstein's store belches all its population.

"_La calége! La calége!_" The calèche is coming!

Something, he knows not what, makes Bonaventure tremble.

"Madame," he says in French to a chattering woman who has just run

out of her door, and is standing near him tying a red Madras kerchief

on her head as she prattles to a girl,--"madame, what wedding is

this?"

"_C'est la noce à_ Zoséphine," she replies, without looking at him,

and goes straight on telling her companion how fifty dollars has been

paid for the Pope's dispensation, because the bridal pair are first

cousins.

Bonaventure moves back and leans against a paling fence, pallid and

faint. But there is no time to notice him--look, look!

Some women on horseback come trotting into the street. Cheers! cheers!

and in a moment louder cheers yet--the calèche with the bride and

groom and another with the parents have come.

Throw open the church door!

Horsemen alight, horsewomen descend; down, also, come they that were

in the calèche. Look, Bonaventure! They form by twos--forward--in they

go. "Hats off, gentlemen! Don't forget the rule!--Now--silence!

softly, softly; speak low--or speak not at all; sh-sh! Silence! The

pair are kneeling. Hush-sh! Frown down that little buzz about the

door! Sh-sh!"

Bonaventure has rushed in with the crowd. He cannot see the kneeling

pair; but there is the curé standing over them and performing the holy

rite. The priest stops--he has seen Bonaventure! He stammers, and then

he goes on. Here beside Bonaventure is a girl so absorbed in the scene

that she thinks she is speaking to her brother, when presently she

says to the haggard young stranger, letting herself down from her

tiptoes and drawing a long breath:

"_La sarimonie est fait._"

It is true; the ceremony is ended. She rises on tiptoe again to see

the new couple sign the papers.

Slowly! The bridegroom first, his mark. Step back. Now the little

bride--steady! Zoséphine, _sa marque_. She turns; see her, everybody;

see her! brown and pretty as a doe! They are kissing her. Hail, Madame

'Thanase!

"Make way, make way!" The man and wife come forth.--Ah! 'Thanase

Beausoleil, so tall and strong, so happy and hale, you do not look

to-day like the poor decoyed, drugged victim that woke up one morning

out in the Gulf of Mexico to find yourself, without fore-intent or

knowledge, one of a ship's crew bound for Brazil and thence to the

Mediterranean!--"Make way, make way!" They mount the calèches,

Sosthène after Madame Sosthène; 'Thanase after Madame 'Thanase. "To

horse, ladies and gentlemen!" Never mind now about the youth who has

been taken ill in the chapel, and whom the curé has borne almost

bodily in his arms to his own house. "Mount! Mount! Move aside for the

wedding singers!"--The wedding singers take their places, one on this

side the bridal calèche, the other on that, and away it starts,

creaking and groaning.

"_Mais, arretez!_--Stop, stop! Before going, _passez le

'nisette_!--pass the anisette!" May the New-Orleans compounder be

forgiven the iniquitous mixture! "_Boir les dames avant!_--Let the

ladies drink first!" Aham! straight from the bottle.

Now, go. The calèche moves. Other calèches bearing parental and

grandparental couples follow. And now the young men and maidens gallop

after; the cavalcade stretches out like the afternoon shadows, and

with shout and song and waving of hats and kerchiefs, away they go!

while from window and door and village street follows the wedding cry:

"_Adjieu, la calége! Adjieu, la calége!_--God speed the wedding pair!"

Coming at first from the villagers, it is continued at length, faint

and far, by the attending cavaliers. As mile by mile they drop aside,

singly or in pairs, toward their homes, they rise in their stirrups,

and lifting high their ribbon-decked hats, they shout and curvette and

curvette and shout until the eye loses them, and the ear can barely

catch the faint farewell:

"_Adjieu, la calége! Adjieu, les mariées!_"

CHAPTER X.

AFTER ALL.

Adieu; but only till the fall of night shall bring the wedding ball.

One little tune--and every Acadian fiddler in Louisiana knows

it--always brings back to Zoséphine the opening scene of that festive

and jocund convocation. She sees again the great clean-swept

seed-cotton room of a cotton-gin house belonging to a cousin of the

ex-governor, lighted with many candles stuck into a perfect wealth of

black bottles ranged along the beams of the walls. The fiddler's seat

is mounted on a table in the corner, the fiddler is in it, each beau

has led a maiden into the floor, the sets are made for the

contra-dance, the young men stand expectant, their partners wait with

downcast eyes and mute lips as Acadian damsels should, the music

strikes up, and away they go.

Yes, Zoséphine sees the whole bright scene over again whenever that

strain sounds.

[Music]

It was fine from first to last! The ball closed with the bride's

dance. Many a daughter Madame Sosthène had waltzed that farewell

measure with, and now Zoséphine was the last. So they danced it, they

two, all the crowd looking on: the one so young and lost in self, the

other so full of years and lost to self; eddying round and round each

other in this last bright embrace before they part, the mother to

swing back into still water, the child to enter the current of a new

life.

And then came the wedding supper! At one end of the long table the

bride and groom sat side by side, and at their left and right the

wedding singers stood and sang. In each corner of the room there was a

barrel of roasted sweet potatoes. How everybody ate, that night! Rice!

beef-balls! pass them here! pass them there! help yourself! reach them

with a fork! _des riz! des boulettes!_ more down this way! pass them

over heads! _des riz! des boulettes!_ And the anisette!--bad whiskey

and oil of anise--never mind that; pour, fill, empty, fill again!

Don't take too much--and make sure not to take too little! How merrily

all went on! How gay was Zoséphine!

"Does she know that Bonaventure, too, has come back?" the young

maidens whisper, one to another; for the news was afloat.

"Oh, yes, of course; some one had to let it slip. But if it makes any

difference, she is only brighter and prettier than before. I tell

you--it seems strange, but I believe, now, she never cared for anybody

but 'Thanase. When she heard Bonaventure had come back, she only let

one little flash out of her eyes at the fool who told her, then said

it was the best news that could be, and has been as serene as the

picture of a saint ever since."

The serenity of the bride might have been less perfect, and the one

flash of her eyes might have been two, had she known what the curé was

that minute saying to the returned wanderer, with the youth's head

pressed upon his bosom, in the seclusion of his own chamber:

"It is all for the best, Bonaventure. It is not possible that thou

shouldst see it so now, but thou shalt hereafter. It is best this

way." And the tears rolled silently down his cheek as the weary head

in his bosom murmured back:

"It is best. It is best."

The curé could only press him closer then. It was much more than a

year afterward when he for the first time ventured to add:

"I never wanted you to get her, my dear boy; she is not your kind at

all--nay, now, let me say it, since I have kept it unsaid so long and

patiently. Do you imagine she could ever understand an unselfish life,

or even one that tried to be unselfish? She makes an excellent Madame

'Thanase. 'Thanase is a good, vigorous, faithful, gentle animal, that

knows how to graze and lie in the shade and get up and graze again.

But you--it is not in you to know how poor a Madame Bonaventure she

would have been; not now merely, but poorer and poorer as the years go

by.

"And so I say, do not go away. I know why you want to go; you want to

run away from a haunting thought that some unlikely accident or other

may leave Madame 'Thanase a widow, and you step into his big shoes.

They would not fit. Do not go. That thing is not going to happen; and

the way to get rid of the troublesome notion is to stay and see

yourself outgrow it--and her."

Bonaventure shook his head mournfully, but staid. From time to time

Madame 'Thanase passed before his view in pursuit of her outdoor and

indoor cares. But even when he came under her galérie roof he could

see that she never doubted she had made the very best choice in all

Carancro.

And yet people knew--she knew--that Bonaventure not only enjoyed the

acquaintance, but sometimes actually went from one place to another on

the business, of the great ex-governor. Small matters they may have

been, but, anyhow, just think!

Sometimes as he so went or came he saw her squatting on a board at the

edge of a _coolée_, her petticoat wrapped snugly around her limbs, and

a limp sunbonnet hiding her nut-brown face, pounding her washing with

a wooden paddle. She was her own housekeeper, chambermaid, cook,

washerwoman, gooseherd, seamstress, nurse, and all the rest. Her

floors, they said, were always _bien fourbis_ (well scrubbed); her

beds were high, soft, snug, and covered with the white mesh of her own

crochet-needle.

He saw her the oftener because she worked much out on her low veranda.

From that place she had a broad outlook upon the world, with 'Thanase

in the foreground, at his toil, sometimes at his sport. His cares as a

herder, _vacheur_,--_vaché_, he called it,--were wherever his

slender-horned herds might roam or his stallions lead their mares in

search of the sweetest herbage; and when rains filled the _maraises_,

and the cold nor'westers blew from Texas and the sod was spongy with

much water, and he went out for feathered game, the numberless

mallards, black ducks, gray ducks, teal--with sometimes the

canvas-back--and the _poules-d'eau_--the water-hens and the rails, and

the _cache-cache_--the snipe--were as likely to settle or rise just

before his own house as elsewhere, and the most devastating shot that

hurtled through those feathered multitudes was that sent by her

husband--hers--her own--possessive case--belonging to her. She was

proud of her property.

Sometimes _la vieille_--for she was _la vieille_ from the very day

that she counted her wedding presents, mostly chickens, and turned

them loose in the dooryard--sometimes she enjoyed the fine excitement

of seeing her _vieux_ catching and branding his yearling colts. Small

but not uncomely they were: tougher, stronger, better when broken,

than the mustang, though, like the mustang, begotten and foaled on the

open prairie. Often she saw him catch two for the plough in the

morning, turn them loose at noon to find their own food and drink, and

catch and work another pair through the afternoon. So what did not

give her pride gave her quiet comfort. Sometimes she looked forth with

an anxious eye, when a colt was to be broken for the saddle; for as

its legs were untied, and it sprang to its feet with 'Thanase in the

saddle, and the blindfold was removed from its eyes, the strain on the

young wife's nerves was as much as was good, to see the creature's

tremendous leaps in air and not tremble for its superb, unmovable

rider.

Could scholarship be finer than--or as fine as--such horsemanship? And

yet, somehow, as time ran on, Zoséphine, like all the rest of

Carancro, began to look up with a certain deference, half-conscious,

half-unconscious, to the needy young man who was nobody's love or

lover, and yet, in a gentle, unimpassioned way, everybody's;

landless, penniless, artless Bonaventure, who honestly thought there

was no girl in Carancro who was not much too good for him, and of whom

there was not one who did not think him much too good for her. He was

quite outside of all their gossip. How could they know that with all

his learning--for he could read and write in two languages and took

the Vermilionville newspaper--and with all his books, almost an entire

mantel-shelf full--he was feeling heart-hunger the same as any

ordinary lad or lass unmated? Zoséphine found her eyes, so to speak,

lifting, lifting, more and more as from time to time she looked upon

the inoffensive Bonaventure. But so her satisfaction in her own

husband was all the more emphatic. If she had ever caught a real

impulse toward any thing that even Carancro would have called culture,

she had cast it aside now--as to herself; her children--oh! yes; but

that would be by and by.

Even of pastimes and sports she saw almost none. For 'Thanase there

was, first of all, his fiddle; then _la chasse_, the chase; the

_papegaie_, or, as he called it, _pad-go_--the shooting-match; _la

galloche_, pitch-farthing; the cock-fight; the five-arpent pony-race;

and too often, also, _chin-chin_, twenty-five-cent poker, and the

gossip and glass of the roadside "store." But for Madame 'Thanase

there was only a seat against the wall at the Saturday-night dance,

and mass _à la chapelle_ once in two or three weeks; these, and infant

baptisms. These showed how fast time and life were hurrying along. The

wedding seemed but yesterday, and yet here was little Sosthène, and

tiny Marguerite, and cooing Zoséphine the younger--how fast history

repeats itself!

But one day, one Sunday, it repeated itself in a different way.

'Thanase was in gay humor that morning. He kissed his wife, tossed his

children, played on his fiddle that tune they all liked best, and,

while Zoséphine looked after him with young zest in her eye, sprang

into the saddle and galloped across the prairie _à la chapelle_ to

pass a jolly forenoon at _chin-chin_ in the village grocery.

Since the war almost every one went armed--not for attack, of course;

for defence. 'Thanase was an exception.

"My fists," he said, in the good old drawling Acadian dialect and with

his accustomed smile,--"my fists will take care of me."

One of the party that made up the game with 'Thanase was the fellow

whom you may remember as having brought that first news of 'Thanase

from camp to Carancro, and whom Zoséphine had discredited. The young

husband had never liked him since.

But, as I say, 'Thanase was in high spirits. His jests came thick and

fast, and some were hard and personal, and some were barbed with

truth, and one, at length, ended in the word "deserter." The victim

grew instantly fierce and red, leaped up crying "Liar," and was

knocked backward to the ground by the long-reaching fist of 'Thanase.

He rose again and dashed at his assailant. The rest of the company

hastily made way to right and left, chairs were overturned, over went

the table, the cards were underfoot. Men ran in from outside and from

over the way. The two foes clash together, 'Thanase smites again with

his fist, and the other grapples. They tug and strain--

"Separate them!" cry two or three of the packed crowd in suppressed

earnestness. "Separate them! Bonaventure is coming! And here from the

other side the curé too! Oh, get them apart!" But the half-hearted

interference is shaken off. 'Thanase sees Bonaventure and the curé

enter; mortification smites him; a smothered cry of rage bursts from

his lips; he tries to hurl his antagonist from him; and just as the

two friends reach out to lay hands upon the wrestling mass, it goes

with a great thud to the ground. The crowd recoils and springs back

again; then a cry of amazement and horror from all around, the arm of

the under man lifted out over the back of the other, a downward flash

of steel--another--and another! the long, subsiding wail of a strong

man's sudden despair, the voice of one crying,--

"Zoséphine! Ah! Zoséphine! _ma vieille! ma vieille!_"--one long moan

and sigh, and the finest horseman, the sweetest musician, the bravest

soldier, yes, and the best husband, in all Carancro, was dead.

Poor old Sosthène and his wife! How hard they tried, for days, for

weeks, to comfort their widowed child! But in vain. Day and night she

put them away in fierce grief and silence, or if she spoke wailed

always the one implacable answer,--

"I want my husband!" And to the curé the same words,--

"Go tell God I want my husband!"

But when at last came one who, having come to speak, could only hold

her hand in his and silently weep with her, she clung to his with both

her own, and looking up into his young, thin face, cried,--not with

grace of words, and yet with some grace in all her words' Acadian

ruggedness,--

"Bonaventure! Ah! Bonaventure! thou who knowest the way--teach me, my

brother, how to be patient."

And so--though the ex-governor had just offered him a mission in

another part of the Acadians' land, a mission, as he thought, far

beyond his deserving, though, in fact, so humble that to tell you what

it was would force your smile--he staid.

A year went by, and then another. Zoséphine no longer lifted to heaven

a mutinous and aggrieved countenance. Bonaventure was often nigh, and

his words were a deep comfort. Yet often, too, her spirit flashed

impatience through her eyes when in the childish philosophizing of

which he was so fond he put forward--though ever so impersonally and

counting himself least of all to have attained--the precepts of

self-conquest and abnegation. And then as the flash passed away, with

a moisture of the eye repudiated by the pride of the lip, she would

slowly shake her head and say:

"It is of no use; I can't do it! I may be too young--I may be too bad,

but--I can't learn it!"

At last, one September evening, Bonaventure stood at the edge of

Sosthène's galérie, whither Zoséphine had followed out, leaving _le

vieux_ and _la vieille_ in the house. On the morrow Bonaventure was

to leave Carancro. And now he said,--

"Zoséphine, I must go."

"Ah, Bonaventure!" she replied, "my children--what will my children

do? It is not only that you have taught them to spell and read, though

God will be good to you for that! But these two years you have been

every thing to them--every thing. They will be orphaned over again,

Bonaventure." Tears shone in her eyes, and she turned away her face

with her dropped hands clasped together.

The young man laid his hand upon her drooping brow. She turned again

and lifted her eyes to his. His lips moved silently, but she read upon

them the unheard utterance: it was a word of blessing and farewell.

Slowly and tenderly she drew down his hand, laid a kiss upon it, and

said,--

"_Adjieu--adjieu_," and they parted.

As Zoséphine, with erect form and firm, clear tread, went by her

parents and into the inner room where her children lay in their

trundle-bed, the old mother said to _le vieux_,--

"You can go ahead and repair the schoolhouse now. Our daughter will

want to begin, even to-morrow, to teach the children of the

village--_les zonfants à la chapelle_."

"You think so?" said Sosthène, but not as if he doubted.

"Yes; it is certain now that Zoséphine will always remain the Widow

'Thanase."

GRANDE POINTE.

CHAPTER I.

A STRANGER.

From College Point to Bell's Point, sixty miles above New Orleans, the

Mississippi runs nearly from west to east. Both banks, or "coasts,"

are lined with large and famous sugar-plantations. Midway on the

northern side, lie the beautiful estates of "Belmont" and "Belle

Alliance." Early one morning in the middle of October, 1878, a young

man, whose age you would have guessed fifteen years too much, stood in

scrupulously clean, ill-fitting, flimsy garments, on the strong, high

levee overlooking these two plantations. He was asking the way to a

place called Grande Pointe. Grand Point, he called it, and so may we:

many names in Louisiana that retain the French spelling are habitually

given an English pronunciation.

A tattered negro mounted on a sunburnt, unshod, bare-backed mule, down

in the dusty gray road on the land-side of the embankment, was his

only hearer. Fifteen years earlier these two men, with French accents,

strangers to each other, would hardly have conversed in English; but

the date made the difference. We need not inexorably render the

dialect of the white man; pretty enough to hear, it would often be

hideous to print. The letter _r_, for instance, that plague of all

nations--before consonants it disappeared; before vowels the tongue

failed of that upward curve that makes the good strong _r_'s of Italy

and Great Britain.

The negro pointed over his mule's ears.

"You see Belle Alliance sugah-house yondeh? Well, behine dah you fine

one road go stret thoo the plantation till de wood. Dass 'bout mile,

you know. Den she keep stret on thoo de wood 'bout two mile' mo', an'

dat fetch you at Gran' Point'. Hole on; I show you."

The two men started down the road, the negro on his mule, the stranger

along the levee's crown.

"Dat Gran' Point'," resumed the black; "'tain't no point on de riveh,

you know, like dat Bell' Point, w'at you see yondeh 'twixt dem ah

batture willows whah de sun all spread out on the wateh; no, seh. 'Tis

jis lil place back in de _swamp_, raise' 'bout five, six feet 'bove de

wateh. Yes, seh; 'bout t'ree mile' long, 'alf mile wide. Don't nobody

but Cajun'[1] live back dah. Seem droll you goin' yondeh."

[1] Acadians.

"'Tis the reason I go," said the other, without looking up.

"Yes, seh."--A short silence.--"Dass nigh fifty year', now, dat place

done been settle'. Ole 'Mian Roussel he was gret hunter. He know dat

place. He see 'tis rich groun'. One day he come dare, cut some tree',

buil' house, plant lil tobahcah. Nex' year come ole man Le Blanc; den

Poché, den St. Pierre, den Martin,--all Cajun'. Oh! dass mo'n fifty

year' 'go. Dey all comes from dis yeh riveh coast; 'caze de rich

Creole', dey buy 'em out. Yes, seh, dat use' be de _Côte Acadien'_,

right yeh whar yo' feet stan'in' on. _C'est la côte Acadien', just

ici, oui._" The trudging stranger waived away the right of

translation. He had some reason for preferring English. But his manner

was very gentle, and in a moment the negro began again.

"Gret place, dat Gran' Point'. Yes, seh; fo' tobahcah. Dey make de

bes' Périque tobahcah in de worl'. Yes, seh, right yond' at Gran'

Point'; an' de bes' Périque w'at come from Gran' Point', dass de

Périque of Octave Roussel, w'at dey use call 'im Chat-oué;[2] but he

git tired dat name, and now he got lil boy 'bout twenny-five year'

ole, an' dey call de ole man Catou, an' call his lil _boy_ Chat-oué.

Dey fine dat wuck mo' betteh. Yes, seh. An' he got bruddeh name' 'Mian

Roussel. But dat not de ole, ole 'Mian--like dey say de ole he one.

'Caze, you know, he done peg out. Oh, yes, he peg out in de du'in' o'

de waugh.[3] But he lef' heap-sight chillen; you know, he got a year'

staht o' all de res', you know. Yes, seh. Dey got 'bout hund'ed fifty

peop' yond' by Gran' Point', and sim like dey mos' all name Roussel.

_Sim_ dat way to _me_. An' ev'y las' one got a lil fahm so lil you

can't plow her; got dig her up wid a spade. Yes, seh, same like you

diggin' grave; yes, seh."

[2] Raccoon.

[3] During the war.

The gentle stranger interrupted, still without lifting his eyes from

the path. "'Tis better narrowness of land than of virtue." The negro

responded eagerly:

"Oh, dey good sawt o' peop', yes. Dey deals fair an' dey deals square.

Dey keeps de peace. Dass 'caze dey mos'ly don't let whisky git on deir

blin' side, you know. Dey _does_ love to dance, and dey marries

mawnstus young; but dey not like some niggehs: dey stays married. An'

modess? Dey dess so modess dey shy! Yes, seh, dey de shyes',

easy-goin'es', modesses', most p'esumin' peop' in de whole worl'! I

don't see fo' why folks talk 'gin dem Cajun'; on'y dey a lil bit

slow."

The traveller on the levee's top suddenly stood still, a soft glow on

his cheek, a distension in his blue eyes. "My friend, what was it, the

first American industry? Was it not the Newfoundland fisheries? Who

inaugu'ate them, if not the fishermen of Normandy and Bretagne? And

since how long? Nearly fo' hundred years!"

"Dass so, boss," exclaimed the negro with the promptitude of an

eye-witness; but the stranger continued:--

"The ancestors of the Acadian'--they are the fathers of the codfish!"

He resumed his walk.

"Dass so, seh; dass true. Yes, seh, you' talkin' mighty true; dey a

pow'ful ancestrified peop', dem Cajun'; dass w'at make dey so shy, you

know. An' dey mighty good han' in de sugah-house. Dey des watchin',

now, w'en dat sugah-cane git ready fo' biggin to grind; so soon dey

see dat, dey des come a-lopin' in here to Mistoo Wallis' sugah-house

here at Belle Alliance, an' likewise to Marse Louis Le Bourgeois yond'

at Belmont. You see! de fust t'ing dey gwine ass you when you come at

Gran' Point'--'Is Mistoo Wallis biggin to grind?' Well, seh, like I

tell you, yeh de sugah-house, an' dah de road. Dat road fetch you at

Gran' Point'."

CHAPTER II.

IN A STRANGE LAND.

An hour later the stranger, quite alone, had left behind him the broad

smooth road, between rustling walls of sugar-cane, that had brought

him through Belle Alliance plantation. The way before him was little

more than a bridle-path along the earth thrown up beside a

draining-ditch in a dense swamp. The eye could run but a little way

ere it was confused by the tangle of vegetation. The trees of the

all-surrounding forest--sweet-gums, water-oaks, magnolias--cast their

shade obliquely along and across his way, and wherever it fell the

undried dew still sparkled on the long grass.

A pervading whisper seemed to say good-by to the great human world.

Scarce the note of an insect joined with his footsteps in the coarse

herbage to break the stillness. He made no haste. Ferns were often

about his feet, and vines were both there and everywhere. The soft

blue tufts of the ageratum were on each side continually. Here and

there in wet places clumps of Indian-shot spread their pale scroll

leaves and sent up their green and scarlet spikes. Of stature greater

than his own the golden-rod stood, crested with yellow plumes,

unswayed by the still air. Often he had to push apart the brake-canes

and press through with bowed head. Nothing met him in the path. Now

and then there were faint signs underfoot as if wheels might have

crushed the ragged turf long weeks before. Now and then the print of a

hoof was seen in the black soil, but a spider had made it her home and

spread across it her silken snares. If he halted and hearkened, he

heard far away the hawk screaming to his mate, and maybe, looking up,

caught a glimpse of him sailing in the upper air with the sunlight

glowing in his pinions; or in some bush near by heard the soft rustle

of the wren, or the ruffling whiff and nervous "chip" of the cardinal,

or saw for an instant the flirt of his crimson robes as he rattled the

stiff, jagged fans of the palmetto.

At length the path grew easier and lighter, the woods on the right

gave place to a field half claimed for cotton and half given up to

persimmon saplings, blackberry-bushes, and rampant weeds. A furry pony

with mane and tail so loaded with cockleburs that he could not shake

them, lifted his head and stared. A moment afterward the view opened

to right and left, and the path struck a grassy road at right angles

and ended. Just there stood an aged sow.

"Unclean one," said the grave wayfarer, "where dwells your

master?--Ignore you the English tongue? But I shall speak not in

another; 'tis that same that I am arriving to bring you."

The brute, with her small bestial eye fixed on him distrustfully and

askance, moved enough to the right to let him pass on the other hand,

and with his coat on his arm--so strong was the October sun--he turned

into the road westward, followed one or two of its slight curves, and

presently saw neat fields on either hand, walled in on each farther

side by the moss-hung swamp; and now a small, gray, unpainted house,

then two or three more, the roofs of others peering out over the dense

verdure, and down at the end of the vista a small white spire and

cross. Then, at another angle, two men seated on the roadside. Their

diffident gaze bore that look of wild innocence that belongs to those

who see more of dumb nature than of men. Their dress was homespun. The

older was about fifty years old, the other much younger.

"Sirs, have I already reach Gran' Point'?"

The older replied in an affirmative that could but just be heard, laid

back a long lock of his straight brown hair after the manner of a

short-haired girl, and rose to his feet.

"I hunt," said the traveller slowly, "Mr. Maximian Roussel."

A silent bow.

"'Tis you?"

The same motion again.

The traveller produced a slip of paper folded once and containing a

line or two of writing hastily pencilled that morning at Belle

Alliance. Maximian received it timidly and held it helplessly before

his downcast eyes with the lines turned perpendicularly, while the

pause grew stifling, and until the traveller said:--

"'Tis Mr. Wallis make that introduction."

At the name of the owner of the beautiful plantation the man who had

not yet spoken rose, covered with whittlings. It was like a steer

getting up out of the straw. He spoke.

"M'sieu' Walleece, _a commencé à mouliner_? Is big-in to gryne?"

"He shall commence in the centre of the next week."

Maximian's eyes rose slowly from the undeciphered paper. The

traveller's met them. He pointed to the missive.

"The schoolmaster therein alluded--'tis me."

"Oh!" cried the villager joyously, "_maître d'école!_--schooltitcher!"

"But," said the stranger, "not worthy the title." He accepted

gratefully the hand of one and then of the other.

"Walk een!" said Maximian, "all hand', walk een house." They went,

Indian file, across the road, down a sinuous footpath, over a stile,

and up to his little single-story unpainted house, and tramped in upon

the railed galérie.

"_Et_ M'sieu' Le Bourgeois," said the host, as the schoolmaster

accepted a split-bottomed chair, "he's big-in to gryne?"

Within this ground-floor veranda--chief appointment of all Acadian

homes--the traveller accepted a drink of water in a blue tumbler,

brought by the meek wife. The galérie just now was scattered with the

husband's appliances for making Périque tobacco into "carats"--the

carat-press. Its small, iron-ratcheted, wooden windlass extended along

the top rail of the balustrade across one of the galérie's ends. Lines

of half-inch grass rope, for wrapping the carats into diminished bulk

and solid shape, lay along under foot. Beside one of the doors, in

deep hickory baskets, were the parcels of cured tobacco swaddled in

cotton cloths and ready for the torture of ropes and windlass. From

the joists overhead hung the pods of tobacco-seed for next year's

planting.

CHAPTER III.

THE HANDSHAKING.

There was news in Grande Pointe. The fair noon sky above, with its

peaceful flocks of clouds; the solemn, wet forest round about; the

harvested fields; the dishevelled, fragrant fallows; the reclining,

ruminating cattle; the little chapel of St. Vincent de Paul in the

midst, open for mass once a fortnight, for a sermon in French four

times a year,--these were not more tranquil in the face of the fact

that a schoolmaster had come to Grande Pointe to _stay_ than outwardly

appeared the peaceful-minded villagers. Yet as the tidings floated

among the people, touching and drifting on like thistle-down, they

were stirred within, and came by ones, by twos, slow-stepping,

diffidently smiling, to shake hands with the young great man. They

wiped their own before offering them--the men on their strong thighs,

the women on their aprons. Children came, whose courage would carry

them no nearer than the galérie's end or front edge, where they lurked

and hovered, or gazed through the balustrade, or leaned against a

galérie post and rubbed one brown bare foot upon another and crowded

each other's shoulders without assignable cause, or lopped down upon

the grass and gazed from a distance.

Little conversation was offered. The curiosity was as unobtrusive as

the diffidence was without fear; and when a villager's soft, low

speech was heard, it was generally in answer to inquiries necessary

for one to make who was about to assume the high office of educator.

Moreover, the schoolmaster revealed, with all gentleness, his

preference for the English tongue, and to this many could only give

ear. Only two or three times did the conversation rise to a pitch that

kindled even the ready ardor of the young man of letters. Once, after

a prolonged silence, the host, having gazed long upon his guest, said,

without preface:--

"Tough jawb you got," and waved a hand toward the hovering children.

"Sir," replied the young scholar, "is it not the better to do whilse

it is the mo' tough? The mo' toughness, the mo' honor." He rose

suddenly, brushed back the dry, brown locks of his fine hair, and

extending both hands, with his limp straw hat dangling in one, said:

"Sir, I will ask you; is not the schoolmaster the true patriot? Shall

his honor be less than that of the soldier? Yet I ask not honor; for

me, I am not fit; yet, after my poor capacities"--He resumed his seat.

An awesome quiet followed. Then some one spoke to him, too low to be

heard. He bent forward to hear the words repeated, and 'Mian said for

the timorous speaker:--

"Aw, dass nut'n; he jis only say, 'Is M'sieu' Walleece big-in to

gryne?'"

Few tarried long, though one man--he whom the schoolmaster had found

sitting on the roadside with Maximian--staid all day; and even among

the villagers themselves there was almost no loquacity. Maximian, it

is true, as the afternoon wore along, and it seemed plain that the

reception was a great and spontaneous success, spoke with growing

frequency and heartiness; and, when the guest sat down alone at a

table within, where _la vieille_--the wife--was placing half-a-dozen

still sputtering fried eggs, a great wheaten loaf, a yellow gallon

bowl of boiled milk, a pewter ladle, a bowie-knife, the blue tumbler,

and a towel; and out on the galérie the callers were still coming: his

simple neighbors pardoned the elation that led him to take a chair

himself a little way off, sit on it sidewise, cross his legs gayly,

and with a smile and wave of his good brown hand say:--

"_Servez-vous!_ He'p you'se'f! Eat much you like; till you swell up!"

Even he asked no questions. Only near the end of the day, when the

barefoot children by gradual ventures had at length gathered close about

and were softly pushing for place on his knees, and huddling under his

arms, and he was talking French,--the only language most of them

knew,--he answered the first personal inquiry put to him since arriving.

"His name," he replied to the tiny, dark, big-eyed boy who spoke for his

whispering fellows, "his name was Bonaventure--Bonaventure Deschamps."

As the great October sun began to dip his crimson wheel behind the low

black line of swamp, and the chapel cross stood out against a band of

yellow light that spanned the west, he walked out to see the village,

a little girl on either hand and little boys round about. The children

talked apace. Only the girl whose hand he held in his right was mute.

She was taller than the rest; yet it was she to whom the little

big-eyed boy pointed when he said, vain of his ability to tell it in

English:--

"I don't got but eight year' old, me. I'm gran' for my age; but she,

she not gran' for her age--Sidonie; no; she not gran' at all for _her_

age."

They told the story of the chapel: how some years before, in the

Convent of the Sacred Heart, at the parish seat a few miles away on

the Mississippi, a nun had by the Pope's leave cast off the veil; how

she had come to Grande Pointe and taken charge of her widowed

brother's children; and how he had died, and she had found means, the

children knew not how, to build this chapel. And now she was buried

under it, they said. It seemed, from what they left unsaid as well as

what they said, that the simple influence of her presence had kindled

a desire for education in Grande Pointe not known before.

"Dass my _tante_--my hant. She _was_ my hant befo' she die'," said the

little man of eight years, hopping along the turf in front of the

rest. He dropped into a walk that looked rapid, facing round and

moving backward. "She learn me English, my _tante_. And she try to

learn Sidonie; but Sidonie, Sidonie fine that too strong to learn,

that English, Sidonie." He hopped again, talking as he hopped, and

holding the lifted foot in his hand. He could do that and speak

English at the same time, so talented was Toutou.

Thus the sun went down. And at Maximian's stile again Bonaventure

Deschamps took the children's cheeks into his slender fingers and

kissed them, one by one, beginning at the least, and so up, slowly,

toward Sidonie Le Blanc. With very earnest tenderness it was done,

some grave word of inspiration going before each caress; but when at

last he said, "To-morrow, dear chil'run, the school-bell shall ring in

Gran' Point'!" and turned to finish with Sidonie--she was gone.

CHAPTER IV.

HOW THE CHILDREN RANG THE BELL.

Where the fields go wild and grow into brakes, and the soil becomes

fenny, on the north-western edge of Grande Pointe, a dark, slender

thread of a bayou moves loiteringly north-eastward into a swamp of

huge cypresses. In there it presently meets another like itself, the

Bayou Tchackchou, slipping around from the little farm village's

eastern end as silently as a little mother comes out of a bower where

she has just put her babe to sleep. A little farther on they are

joined as noiselessly by Blind River, and the united waters slip on

northward through the dim, colonnaded, watery-floored, green-roofed,

blue-vapored, moss-draped wilderness, till in the adjoining parish of

Ascension they curve around to the east and issue into the sunny

breadth of Lake Maurepas. Thus they make the Bayou des Acadiens. From

Lake Maurepas one can go up Amite or Tickfaw River, or to Pass Manchac

or Pontchatoula, anywhere in the world, in fact,--where a canoe can

go.

On a bank of this bayou, no great way from Grande Pointe, but with the

shadow of the swamp at its back and a small, bright prairie of rushes

and giant reeds stretching away from the opposite shore, stood, more

in the water than on the land, the palmetto-thatched fishing and

hunting lodge and only home of a man who on the other side of the

Atlantic you would have known for a peasant of Normandy, albeit he

was born in this swamp,--the man who had tarried all day at the

schoolmaster's handshaking.

What a day that had been! Once before he had witnessed a positive

event. That was when, one day, he journeyed purposely to the levee of

Belle Alliance, waited from morning till evening, and at last saw the

steamer "Robert E. Lee" come by, and, as fortune would have it, land!

loaded with cotton from the water to the hurricane deck. He had gone

home resolved from that moment to save his money, and be something

more than he was.

But that event had flashed before his eyes, and in a quarter-hour was

gone, save in his memory. The coming of the schoolmaster, all

unforeseen, had lasted a day, and he had seen it from beginning to

end. All day long on 'Mian's galérie, standing now here, now there, he

had got others to interpret for him, where he could not guess, the

meanings of the wise and noble utterances that fell every now and then

from the lips of the young soldier of learning, and stored them away

in his now greedy mind.

One saying in particular, whose originality he did not dream of

questioning, took profound hold of his conviction and admiration; and

two or three times that evening, as his canoe glided homeward in the

twilight, its one long, smooth ripple gleaming on this side and that

as it widened away toward the bayou's dark banks, he rested for a

moment on his tireless paddle, and softly broke the silence of the

wilderness with its three simple words, so trite to our ears, so

strange to his:--

"Knowledge is power."

In years he was but thirty-five; but he was a widower, and the one son

who was his only child and companion would presently be fourteen.

"Claude," he said, as they rose that evening from their hard supper in

the light and fumes of their small kerosene-lamp, "_I' faut z-ahler

coucher._" (We must go to bed.)

"_Quofoir?_" asked the sturdy lad. (_Pourquoi?_ Why?)

"Because," replied the father in the same strange French in which he

had begun, "at daybreak to-morrow, and every day thereafter, you must

be in your dug-out on your way to Grande Pointe, to school. My son,

you are going to learn how to read!"

So came it that, until their alphabetical re-arrangement, the first of

all the thirty-five names on the roll was Claude St. Pierre, and that

every evening thenceforward when that small kerosene-lamp glimmered in

the deep darkness of Bayou des Acadiens, the abecedarian Claude was a

teacher.

But even before the first rough roll was made he was present, under

the little chapel-tower, when for the first time its bell rang for

school. The young master was there, and all the children; so that

really there was nothing to ring the bell for. They could, all

together, have walked quietly across the village green to the forlorn

tobacco-shed that 'Mian had given them for a schoolhouse, and begun

the session. Ah! say not so! It was good to ring the bell. A few of

the stronger lads would even have sent the glad clang abroad before

the time, but Bonaventure restrained them. For one thing, there must

be room for every one to bear a hand. So he tied above their best

reach three strands of "carat" cord to the main rope. Even then he was

not ready.

"No, dear chil'run; but grasp hold, every one, the ropes, the

cawds,--the shawt chil'run reaching up shawtly, the long chil'run the

more longly."

Few understood his words, but they quietly caught the idea, and

yielded themselves eagerly to his arranging hand. The highest grasp

was Claude's. There was a little empty space under it, and then one

only of Sidonie's hands, timid, smooth, and brown. And still the

master held back the word.

"Not yet! not yet! The pear is not ripe!" He stood apart from them,

near the chapel-door, where the light was strong, his silver watch

open in his left hand, his form erect, his right hand lifted to the

brim of his hat, his eyes upon the dial.

"Not yet, dear chil'run. Not yet. Two minute mo'.--Be ready.--Not

yet!--One minute mo'!--Have the patience. Hold every one in his aw her

place. Be ready! Have the patience." But at length when the little

ones were frowning and softly sighing with the pain of upheld arms,

their waiting eyes saw his dilate. "Be ready!" he said, with low

intensity: "Be ready!" He soared to his tiptoes, the hat flounced from

his head and smote his thigh, his eyes turned upon them blazing, and

he cried, "Ring, chil'run, ring!"

The elfin crew leaped up the ropes and came crouching down. The bell

pealed; the master's hat swung round his head. His wide eyes were

wet, and he cried again, "Ring! ring! for God, light, libbutty,

education!" He sprang toward the leaping, sinking mass; but the right

feeling kept his own hands off. And up and down the children went, the

bell answering from above, peal upon peal; when just as they had

caught the rhythm of Claude's sturdy pull, and the bell could sound no

louder, the small cords gave way from their fastenings, the little

ones rolled upon their backs, the bell gave one ecstatic double clang

and turned clear over, the swift rope straightened upward from its

coil, and Claude and Sidonie, her hands clasped upon each other about

the rope and his hands upon hers, shot up three times as high as their

finest leap could have carried them. For an instant they hung; then

with another peal the bell turned back and they came blushing to the

floor. A swarm of hands darted to the rope, but Bonaventure's was on

it first.

"'Tis sufficient!" he said, his face all triumph. The bell gave a

lingering clang or two and ceased, and presently the happy company

walked across the green. "Sufficient," the master had said; but it was

more than sufficient. In that moment of suspension, with Sidonie's

great brown frightened eyes in his, and their four hands clasped

together, Claude had learned, for his first lesson, that knowledge is

not the only or the greatest power.

CHAPTER V.

INVITED TO LEAVE.

After that, every school-day morning Claude rang the bell. Always full

early his pirogue came gliding out of the woods and up through the

bushy fen to the head of canoe navigation and was hauled ashore.

Bonaventure had fixed his home near the chapel and not far from

Claude's landing-place. Thus the lad could easily come to his door

each morning at the right moment--reading it by hunter's signs in

nature's book--to get the word to ring. There were none of the usual

reasons that the schoolmaster should live close to the schoolhouse.

There was no demand for its key.

Not of that schoolhouse! A hundred feet length by twenty-five breadth,

of earth-floored, clapboard-roofed, tumbling shed, rudely walled with

cypress split boards,--_pieux_,--planted endwise in the earth, like

palisades, a hand-breadth space between every two, and sunlight and

fresh air and the gleams of green fields coming in; the scores of

little tobacco-presses that had stood in ranks on the hard earth

floor, the great sapling levers, and the festoons of curing tobacco

that had hung from the joists overhead, all removed, only the odor

left; bold gaps here and there in the _pieux_, made by that mild

influence which the restless call decay, and serving for windows and

doors; the eastern end swept clean and occupied by a few benches and

five or six desks, strong, home-made, sixty-four pounders.

Life had broadened with Claude in two directions. On one side opened,

fair and noble, the acquaintanceship of Bonaventure Deschamps, a man

who had seen the outside world, a man of books, of learning, a man who

could have taught even geography, had there been any one to learn it;

and on the other side, like a garden of roses and spices, the

schoolmateship of Sidonie Le Blanc. To you and me she would have

seemed the merest little brown sprout of a thing, almost nothing but

two big eyes--like a little owl. To Claude it seemed as though nothing

older or larger could be so exactly in the prime of beauty; the path

to learning was the widest, floweriest, fragrantest path he had ever

trod.

Sidonie did not often speak with him. At recess she usually staid at

her desk, studying, quite alone but for Bonaventure silently busy at

his, and Claude himself, sitting farther away, whenever the teacher

did not see him and drive him to the playground. If he would only

drive Sidonie out! But he never did.

One day, after quite a contest of learning, and as the hour of

dismission was scattering the various groups across the green, Toutou,

the little brother who was grand for his age, said to Claude, hanging

timidly near Sidonie:--

"_Alle est plus_ smart' _que vous_." (She is smarter than you.)

Whereupon Sidonie made haste to say in their Acadian French, "Ah!

Master Toutou, you forget we went to school to our dear aunt. And

besides, I am small and look young, but I am nearly a year older than

Claude." She had wanted to be kind, but that was the first thorn.

Older than he!

And not only that; nearly fifteen! Why, at fifteen--at fifteen girls

get married! The odds were heavy. He wished he had thought of that at

first. He was sadly confused. Sometimes when Bonaventure spoke words

of enthusiasm and regard to him after urging him fiercely up some hill

of difficulty among the bristling heights of English pronunciation, he

yearned to seek him alone and tell him this difficulty of the heart.

There was no fear that Bonaventure would laugh; he seemed scarce to

know how; and his smiles were all of tenderness and zeal. Claude did

not believe the ten years between them would matter; had not

Bonaventure said to him but yesterday that to him all loveliness was

the lovelier for being very young? Yet when the confession seemed

almost on Claude's lips it was driven back by an alien mood in the

master's face. There were troubles in Bonaventure's heart that Claude

wot not of.

One day who should drop in just as school was about to begin but the

priest from College Point! Such order as he found! Bonaventure stood

at his desk like a general on a high hill, his large hand-bell in his

grasp, passed his eyes over the seventeen demure girls, with their

large, brown-black, liquid eyes, their delicately pencilled brows,

their dark, waveless hair, and sounded one tap! The sport outside

ceased, the gaps at the shed's farther end were darkened by small

forms that came darting like rabbits into their burrows, eighteen

small hats came off, and the eighteen boys came softly forward and

took their seats. Such discipline!

"Sir," said Bonaventure, "think you 'tis arising, f'om the strickness

of the teacher? 'Tis f'om the goodness of the chil'run! How I long the

State Sup'inten'ent Public Education to see them!"

The priest commended the sight and the wish with smiling affirmations

that somehow seemed to lack sympathy. He asked the names of two or

three pupils. That little fellow with soft, tanned, chubby cheeks and

great black eyes, tiny mouth, smooth feet so shapely and small, still

wet to their ankles with dew, and arms that he could but just get

folded, was Toutou. That lad with the strong shoulders, good wide

brows, steady eye, and general air of manliness,--that was Claude St.

Pierre. And this girl over on the left here,--"You observe," said

Bonaventure, "I situate the lambs on the left and the kids on the

right,"--this little, slender crescent of human moonlight, with her

hair in two heavy, black, down-falling plaits, meek, drooping eyes,

long lashes, soft childish cheeks and full throat, was Sidonie Le

Blanc. Bonaventure murmured:--

"Best scholah in the school, yet the _only_--that loves not her

teacher. But I give always my interest, not according to the

interestingness, but rather to the necessitude, of each."

The visit was not long. Standing, about to depart, the visitor seemed

still, as at the first, a man of many reservations under his polite

smiles. But just then he dropped a phrase that the teacher recognized

as an indirect quotation, and Bonaventure cried, with greedy eyes:--

"You have read Victor Hugo?"

"Yes."

"Oh, sir, that grea-a-at man! That father of libbutty! Other patriots

are the sons, but he the father! Is it not thus?"

The priest shrugged and made a mouth. The young schoolmaster's face

dropped.

"Sir, I must ask you--is he not the frien' of the poor and downtrod?"

The visitor's smile quite disappeared. He said:--

"Oh!"--and waved a hand impatiently; "Victor Hugo"--another

mouth--"Victor Hugo"--replying in French to the schoolmaster's

English--"is not of my party." And then he laughed unpleasantly and

said good-day.

The State Superintendent did not come, but every day--"It is perhaps

he shall come to-mo'w, chil'run; have yo' lessons well!"

The whole tiny army of long, blue, ankle-hiding cottonade pantalettes

and pantaloons tried to fulfil the injunction. Not one but had a warm

place in the teacher's heart. But Toutou, Claude, Sidonie, anybody who

glanced into that heart could see sitting there enthroned. And some

did that kind of reconnoitring. Catou, 'Mian's older brother, was much

concerned. He saw no harm in a little education, but took no

satisfaction in the introduction of English speech; and speaking to

'Mian of that reminded him to say he believed the schoolmaster

himself was aware of the three children's pre-eminence in his heart.

But 'Mian only said:--

"_Ah bien, c'est_ all right, _alors_!" (Well, then, it's all right.)

Whether all right or not, Bonaventure was aware of it, and tried to

hide it under special kindnesses to others, and particularly to the

dullard of the school, grandson of Catou and nicknamed _Crébiche_[4].

The child loved him; and when Claude rang the chapel bell, and before

its last tap had thrilled dreamily on the morning air, when the

urchins playing about the schoolhouse espied another group coming

slowly across the common with Bonaventure in the midst of them, his

coat on his arm and the children's hands in his, there among them came

Crébiche, now on one side, now running round to the other, hoping so

to get a little nearer to the master.

[4] _Écrevisse_, crawfish.

"None shall have such kindness to-day as thou," Bonaventure would

silently resolve as he went in through a gap in the _pieux_. And the

children could not see but he treated them all alike. They saw no

unjust inequality even when, Crébiche having three times spelt "earth"

with an _u_, the master paced to and fro on the bare ground among the

unmatched desks and break-back benches, running his hands through his

hair and crying:--

"Well! well aht thou name' the crawfish; with such rapiditive

celeritude dost thou progress backwardly!"

It must have been to this utterance that he alluded when at the close

of that day he walked, as he supposed, with only birds and

grasshoppers for companions, and they grew still, and the turtle-doves

began to moan, and he smote his breast and cried:

"Ah! rules, rules! how easy to make, likewise break! Oh! the shame,

the shame! _If_ Victor Hugo had seen that! And if George Washington!

But thou,"--some one else, not mentioned,--"thou sawedst it!"

The last word was still on the speaker's lips, when--there beside the

path, with heavy eye and drunken frown, stood the father of Crébiche,

the son of Catou, the little boy of twenty-five known as Chat-oué. He

spoke:

"To who is dat you speak? Talk wid de dev'?"

Bonaventure murmured a salutation, touched his hat, and passed.

Chat-oué moved a little, and delivered a broadside:

"Afteh dat, you betteh leave! Yes, you betteh leave Gran' Point'!"

"Sir," said Bonaventure, turning with flushed face, "I stay."

"Yes," said the other, "dass righ'; you betteh go way and

stay. _Magicien_," he added as the schoolmaster moved on,

"_sorcier!_--Voudou!--jackass!"

What did all this mean?

CHAPTER VI.

WAR OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT.

Catou, it seems, had gone one day to College Point with a pair of wild

ducks that he had shot,--first of the season,--and offered them to the

priest who preached for Grande Pointe once a quarter.

"Catou," said the recipient, in good French but with a cruel hardness

of tone, "why does that man out there teach his school in English?"

The questioner's intentions were not unkind. He felt a protector's

care for his Acadian sheep, whose wants he fancied he, if not he only,

understood. He believed a sudden overdose of enlightenment would be to

them a real disaster, and he proposed to save them from it by the kind

of management they had been accustomed to--they and their fathers--for

a thousand years.

Catou answered the question only by a timid smile and shrug. The

questioner spoke again:

"Why do you Grande Pointe folk allow it? Do you want your children

stuffed full of American ideas? What is in those books they are

studying? You don't know? Neither do I. I would not look into one of

them. But you ought to know that to learn English is to learn

free-thinking. Do you know who print those books that your children

are rubbing their noses in? Yankees! Oh, I doubt not they have been

sharp enough to sprinkle a little of the stuff _they_ call religion

here and there in them; 'tis but the bait on the hook! But you silly

'Cadians think your children are getting education, and that makes up

for every thing else. Do you know what comes of it? Discontent.

Vanity. Contempt of honest labor. Your children are going to be

discontented with their lot. It will soon be good-by to sunbonnets;

good-by to homespun; good-by to Grande Pointe,--yes, and good-by to

the faith of your fathers. Catou, what do you know about that man,

anyhow? You ask him no questions, you 'Cadians, and he--oh, he is too

modest to tell you who or what he is. _Who pays him?_"

"He say pay is way behine. He say he don't get not'in' since he come

yondeh," said Catou, the distress that had gathered on his face

disappearing for a moment.

The questioner laughed contemptuously.

"Do you suppose he works that way for nothing? How do you know, at

all, that his real errand is to teach school? A letter from Mr.

Wallis! who simply told your simple-minded brother what the fellow

told him! See here, Catou; you owe a tax as a raiser of tobacco, eh?

And besides that, hasn't every one of you an absurd little sign stuck

up on the side of his house, as required by the Government, to show

that you owe another tax as a tobacco manufacturer? But still you have

a little arrangement to neutralize that, eh? How do you know this man

is not among you to look into that? Do you know that he _can_ teach?

No wonder he prefers to teach in English! I had a conversation with

him the other day; I want no more; he preferred to talk to _me_ in

English. That is the good manners he is teaching; light-headed,

hero-worshipping, free-thinker that he is."

Catou was sore dismayed. He had never heard of hero-worship or

free-thinking before, but did not doubt their atrocity. It had never

occurred to him that a man with a few spelling-books and elementary

readers could be so dangerous to society.

"I wish he clear out from yondeh," said Catou. He really made his

short responses in French, but in a French best indicated in bad

English.

"Not for my sake," replied the priest, coldly smiling. "I shall just

preach somewhere else on the thirteenth Sunday of each quarter, and

let Grande Pointe go to the devil; for there is where your new friend

is sure to land you. Good-day, I am very busy this morning."

These harsh words--harsh barking of the shepherd dog--spread an unseen

consternation in Grande Pointe. Maximian was not greatly concerned.

When he heard of the threat to cut off the spiritual table-crumbs with

which the villagers had so scantily been fed, he only responded that

in his opinion the dominie was no such a fool as that. But others

could not so easily dismiss their fears. They began to say privately,

leaning on fences and lingering at stiles, that they had felt from the

very day of that first mad bell-ringing that the whole movement was

too headlong; that this opening the sluices of English education would

make trouble. Children shouldn't be taught what their parents do not

understand. Not that there was special harm in a little spelling,

adding, or subtracting, but--the notions they and the teacher

produced! Here was the school's influence going through all the place

like the waters of a rising tide. All Grande Pointe was lifting from

the sands, and in danger of getting afloat and drifting toward the

current of the great world's life. Personally, too, the schoolmaster

seemed harmless enough. From the children and he loving each other,

the hearts of the seniors had become entangled. The children had come

home from the atmosphere of that old tobacco-shed, and persuaded the

very grandmothers to understand vaguely--very vaguely and dimly--that

the day of liberty which had come to the world at large a hundred

years before had come at last to them; that in France their race had

been peasants; in Acadia, forsaken colonists; in Massachusetts,

Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, exiles alien to the land, the

language, and the times; in St. Domingo, penniless, sick, unwelcome

refugees; and for just one century in Louisiana the jest of the proud

Creole, held down by the triple fetter of illiteracy, poverty, and the

competition of unpaid, half-clad, swarming slaves. But that now the

slave was free, the school was free, and a new, wide, golden future

waited only on their education in the greatest language of the world.

All this was pleasant enough to accept even in a dim way, though too

good to be more than remotely grasped. But just when, as music in a

sleeper's ear, it is taking hold of their impulses somewhat, comes the

word of their hereditary dictator that this man is among them only for

their destruction. What could they reply? They were a people around

whom the entire world's thought had swirled and tumbled for four

hundred years without once touching them. Their ancestors had left

France before Descartes or Newton had begun to teach the modern world

to think. They knew no method of reasoning save by precedent, and had

never caught the faintest reflection from the mind of that great,

sweet thinker who said, "A stubborn retention of customs is a

turbulent thing, no less than the introduction of new." To such

strangers in the world of to-day now came the contemptuous challenge

of authority, defying them to prove that one who proposed to launch

them forth upon a sea of changes out of sight of all precedent and

tradition was not the hireling of some enemy's gold secretly paid to

sap the foundations of all their spiritual and temporal interests and

plunge them into chaos.

They blamed Bonaventure; he had got himself hated and them rebuked; it

was enough. They said little to each other and nothing to him; but

they felt the sleepy sense of injury we all know so well against one

who was disturbing their slumber; and some began to suspect and

distrust him, others to think hard of him for being suspected and

distrusted. Yet all this reached not his ears, and the first betrayal

of it was from the lips of Chat-oué, when, in his cups, he

unexpectedly invited the schoolmaster to leave Grande Pointe.

After that, even the unconscious schoolmaster could feel the faint

chill of estrangement. But he laid it not to his work, but to his

personal unloveliness, and said to 'Mian he did not doubt if he were

more engaging there would not be so many maidens kept at the wheel and

loom in the priceless hours of school, or so many strapping youths

sent, all unlettered, to the sugar-kettles of the coast plantations

what time M'sieu' Walleece big-in to gryne.

"'Tain't dat," said 'Mian. He had intended to tell the true reason,

but his heart failed him; and when Bonaventure asked what, then, it

was, he replied:

"Aw, dey don't got no time. Time run so fas',--run like a scared dog.

I dunno fo' w'at dey make dat time run so fas' dat way."

"O my friend," cried the young schoolmaster, leaping from his chair,

"say not that! If God did not make time to p'oceed with rapidness, who

would ever do his best?"

It was such lessons as this that made the children--Crébiche among

them--still gather round the humble master and love to grasp his hand.

CHAPTER VII.

LOVE AND DUTY.

Time ran fast. The seasons were as inexorable at Grande Pointe as

elsewhere. But there was no fierceness in them. The very frosts were

gentle. Slowly and kindly they stripped the green robes from many a

tree, from many a thicket ejected like defaulting tenants the blue

linnet, the orchard oriole, the nonpareil, took down all its leafy

hangings and left it open to the winds and rain of December. The wet

ponies and kine turned away from the north and stood in the slanting

storm with bowed heads. The great wall of cypress swamp grew spectral.

But its depths, the marshes far beyond sight behind them, and the

little, hidden, rushy lakes, were alive with game. No snake crossed

the path. Under the roof, on the galérie, the wheel hummed, the loom

pounded; inside, the logs crackled and blazed on the hearth; on the

board were venison, mallard, teal, rice-birds, _sirop de baterie_, and

_quitte_; round the fireside were pipes, pecans, old stories, and the

Saturday-night contra-dance; and every now and then came sounding on

the outer air the long, hoarse bellow of some Mississippi steamer,

telling of the great world beyond the tree-tops, a little farther than

the clouds and nearer than the stars.

Christmas passed, and New Year--time runs so fast! Presently yonder

was 'Mian himself, spading a piece of ground to sow his tobacco-seed

in; then Catou and his little boy of twenty-five doing likewise; and

then others all about the scattered village. Then there was a general

spreading of dry brush over the spaded ground, then the sweet, clean

smell of its burning, and, hanging everywhere throughout the clearing,

its thin blue smoke. The little frogs began to pipe to each other

again in every wet place, the grass began to freshen, and almost in

the calendar's midwinter the smiles of spring were wreathing

everywhere.

What of the schoolmaster and the children? Much, much! The good work

went on. Intense days for Bonaventure. The clouds of disfavor darkling

in some places, but brightening in others, and, on the whole, he hoped

and believed, breaking. A few days of vacation, and then a bright

re-union and resumption, the children all his faithful adherents save

one--Sidonie. She, a close student, too, but growingly distant and

reticent. The State Superintendent still believed to be--

"Impending, impending, chil'run! he is impending! Any day he may

precipitate upon us!"

Intense days, too, for Claude. Sidonie openly, and oh, so sweetly, his

friend. Loving him? He could neither say nor know; enough, for the

present, to be allowed to love her. His love knew no spirit of

conquest yet; it was star-worship; it was angel adoration;

seraphically pure; something so celestially refined that had it been a

tangible object you could have held it up and seen the stars right

through it. The thought of acquisition would have seemed like coveting

the gold of a temple. And yet already the faintest hint of loss was

intolerable. Oh! this happy, happy school-going,--this faring

sumptuously on one smile a day! Ah, if it might but continue! But

alas! how Sidonie was growing! Growing, growing daily! up, up, up!

While he--there was a tree in the swamp where he measured his stature

every day; but in vain, in vain! It never budged! And then--all at

once--like the rose-vine on her galérie, Sidonie burst into bloom.

Her smiles were kinder and more frequent now than ever before; but

the boy's heart was wrung. What chance now? In four long years to come

he would not yet be quite nineteen, and she was fifteen now. Four

years! He was in no hurry himself--could wait forever and be happy

every day of it; but she? Such prize as she, somebody would certainly

bear away before three years could run by, run they ever so fast.

Sitting and pondering one evening in the little bayou cabin, Claude

caught the father's eye upon him, leaned his forehead upon the

parent's knee, and silently wept. The rough woodman said a kind word,

and the boy, without lifting his burning face, told his love. The

father made no reply for a long time, and then he said in their quaint

old French:

"Claude, tell the young schoolmaster. Of all men, he is the one to

help you." And then in English, as you would quote Latin, "Knowledge

is power!"

The next day he missed--failed miserably--in every lesson. At its

close he sat at his desk, crushed. Bonaventure seemed scarce less

tempest-tossed than he; and all about the school the distress spread

as wintry gray overcasts a sky. Only Sidonie moved calmly her

accustomed round, like some fair, silent, wide-winged bird circling

about a wreck.

At length the lad and his teacher were left alone. Claude sat very

still, looking at his toil-worn hands lying crossed on the desk.

Presently there sank an arm across his shoulders. It was the master's.

Drop--drop--two big tears fell upon the rude desk's sleeve-polished

wood. The small, hard, right hand slowly left its fellow, and rubbed

off the wet spots.

"Claude, you have something to disclose me?"

The drooping head nodded.

"And 'tis not something done wrongly?"

The lad shook his head.

"Then, my poor Claude,"--the teacher's own voice faltered for a

moment,--"then--'tis--'tis she!" He stroked the weeping head that sank

into its hands. "Ah! yes, Claude, yes; 'tis she; 'tis she! And you

want me to help you. Alas! in vain you want me! I cannot even try-y-y

to help you; you have mentioned it too lately! 'Tis right you come to

me, despiting discrepancy of years; but alas! the dif_fic_ulty lies in

the con_tra_ry; for alas! Claude, our two heart' are of the one, same

age!"

They went out; and walking side by side toward the failing sun, with

the humble flowers of the field and path newly opened and craving

leave to live about their feet and knees, Bonaventure Deschamps

revealed his own childlike heart to the simple boy whose hand clasped

his.

"Yes, yes; I conceal not from you, Claude, that 'tis not alone 'thou

lovest,' but 'I love'! If with cause to hope, Claude, I know not. And

I must not search to know whilst yet the schoolmaster. And the same to

you, Claude, whilst yet a scholah. We mus' let the dissimulation like

a worm in the bud to h-eat our cheek. 'Tis the voice of honor

cry--'Silence.' And during the meanwhilst, you? Perchance at the last,

the years passing and you enlarging in size daily and arriving to

budding manhood, may be the successful; for suspect not I consider

lightly the youngness of yo' passion. Attend what I shall reveal you.

Claude, there once was a boy, yo' size, yo' age, but fierce, selfish,

distemperate; still more selfish than yo' schoolmaster of to-day." And

there that master went on to tell of an early--like Claude's, an all

too early--rash, and boyish passion, whose ragged wound, that he had

thought never could heal, was now only a tender scar.

"And you, too, Claude, though now it seem not possible--you shall

recuperate from this. But why say I thus? Think you I would inoculate

the idea that you must despair? Nay, perchance you shall achieve her."

They stood near the lad's pirogue about to say adieu; the schoolmaster

waved his hand backward toward the farther end of the village. "She is

there; in a short time she will cease to continue scholah; then--try."

And again, with still more courageous kindness, he repeated, "Try!

'Tis a lesson that thou shouldest heed--try, try again. If _at_ the

first thou doest _not_ succeed, try, try again."

Claude gazed gratefully into the master's face. Boy that he was, he

did not read aright the anguish gathering there. From his own face the

clouds melted into a glad sunshine of courage, resolve, and

anticipation. Bonaventure saw the spark of hope that he had dropped

into the boy's heart blaze up into his face. And what did Claude see?

The hot blood mounting to the master's brow an instant ere he wheeled

and hurried away.

"'Sieur Bonaventure!" exclaimed Claude; "'Sieur Bonaventure!"

But deaf to all tones alike, Bonaventure moved straight away along

the bushy path, and was presently gone from sight. There is a

repentance of good deeds. Bonaventure Deschamps felt it gnawing and

tearing hard and harder within his bosom as he strode on through the

wild vernal growth that closed in the view on every side. Soon he

halted; then turned, and began to retrace his steps.

"Claude!" The tone was angry and imperative. No answer came. He

quickened his gait. "Claude!" The voice was petulant and imperious. A

turn of the path brought again to view the spot where the two had so

lately parted. No one was there. He moaned and then cried aloud, "O

thou fool, fool, fool!--Claude!" He ran; faster--faster--down the

path, away from all paths, down the little bayou's margin, into the

bushes, into the mud and water. "Claude! Claude! I told you wrongly!

Stop! _Arretez-la!_ I must add somewhat!--Claude!" The bushes snatched

away his hat; tore his garments; bled him in hands and face; yet on he

went into the edge of the forest. "Claude! Ah! Claude, thou hast ruin'

me! Stop, you young rascal!--thief!--robber!--brigand!" A vine caught

and held him fast. "Claude! Claude!"--The echoes multiplied the sound,

and scared from their dead-tree roost a flock of vultures. The dense

wood was wrapping the little bayou in its premature twilight. The

retreating sun, that for a while had shot its flaming arrows through

the black boles and branches, had sunk now and was gone. Only a

parting ruby glow shone through the tangle where far and wide the

echoes were calling for Claude.

"Claude! I mistook the facts in the case. There is no hope for you!

'Tis futile you try--the poem is not for you! I take every thing

back!--all back! You shall not once try! You have grasp' the

advantage! You got no business, you little rascal! _You_ dare venture

to attempt making love in my school! Claude St. Pierre, you are

dismiss' the school! Mutiny! mutiny! Claude St. Pierre, for

mutinizing, excluded the Gran' Point' school."

He tore himself from his fastenings and hastened back toward the

village. The tempest within him was as fierce as ever; but already it,

too, had turned and was coming out of the opposite quarter. The better

Bonaventure--the Bonaventure purified by fires that Grande Pointe had

no knowledge of--was coming back into his gentle self-mastery. And

because that other, that old-time Bonaventure, bound in chains deep

down within, felt already the triumph of a moment slipping from his

grasp, he silently now to the outer air, but loudly within, railed and

gnashed and tore himself the more.

He regained the path and hurried along it, hatless, dishevelled,

bespattered, and oblivious to every thing save the war within.

Presently there came upon him the knowledge, the certain knowledge,

that Claude would come the next morning and ring the chapel bell, take

his seat in school, stand in all his classes, know every lesson, and

go home in the evening happy and all unchallenged of him. He groaned

aloud.

"Ah! Claude! To dismiss or not to dismiss, it shall not be mine! But

it shall be thine, Sidonie! And whether she is for thee, Claude--so

juvenile!--or for me, so unfit, unfit, unfit!--Ah! Sidonie, choose not

yet!"--He stood rooted to the spot; while within easy earshot of his

lightest word tripped brightly and swiftly across the path from the

direction of the chapel a fawn, Claude's gift, and its mistress,

Sidonie--as though she neither saw nor heard.

CHAPTER VIII.

AT CLAUDE'S MERCY.

Time flagged not. The school shone on, within its walls making glad

the teacher and the pupils with ever new achievements in knowledge and

excellence. Some of the vanguard--Claude, Sidonie, Étienne, Madelaine,

Henri, Marcelline--actually going into the Third Reader. Such

perfection in lessons as they told about at home--such mastery of

English, such satisfactory results in pronunciation and emphasis!

Reading just as they talked? Oh, no, a thousand times no! The school's

remoter light, its secondary influences, slowly spreading, but so

slowly that only the eyes of enmity could see its increase. There were

murmurs and head-shakings; but the thirteenth Sunday of the year's

first quarter came, and the sermon whose withholding had been

threatened was preached. And on the thirteenth Monday there was

Bonaventure, still moving quietly across the green toward the

schoolhouse with the children all about him. But a few days later the

unexpected happened.

By this time Claude's father, whose teacher, you remember, was Claude,

had learned to read. One day a surveyor, who had employed him as a

guide, seeing the Acadian laboring over a fragment of rural newspaper,

fell into conversation with him as they sat smoking by their

camp-fire, and presently caught some hint of St. Pierre's aspirations

for himself and his son.

"So there's a public school at Grande Pointe, is there?"

"Oh, yass; fine school; hondred feet long! and fine titcher; splendid

titcher; titch English."

"Well, well!" laughed the surveyor. "Well, the next thing will be a

railroad."

St. Pierre's eyes lighted up.

"You t'ink!"

"Why, yes; you can't keep railroads away from a place long, once you

let in the public school and teach English."

"You t'ink dass good?"

"What, a railroad? Most certainly. It brings immigration."

"Whass dat--'migrash'n?"

The surveyor explained.

The next time St. Pierre came to Grande Pointe--to sell some fish--he

came armed with two great words for the final overthrow of all

opponents of enlightenment: "Rellroad!--'Migrash'n!"

They had a profound and immediate effect--exactly the opposite of what

he had expected.

The school had just been dismissed; the children were still in sight,

dispersing this way and that. Sidonie lingered a moment at her desk,

putting it in order; Claude, taking all the time he could, was getting

his canoe-paddle from a corner; Crébiche was waiting, by the master's

command, to repair some default of the day; and Toutou, outside on his

knees in the grass catching grasshoppers, was tarrying for his sister;

when four or five of the village's best men came slowly and

hesitatingly in. It required no power of divination for even the

pre-occupied schoolmaster to guess the nature of their errand. 'Mian

was not among them. Catou was at their head. They silently bowed. The

schoolmaster as silently responded. The visitors huddled together.

They came a step nearer.

"Well," said Catou, "we come to see you."

"Sirs, welcome to Gran' Point' school.--Sidonie, Crébiche, Claude,

rest in yo' seats."

"Mo' betteh you tu'n 'em loose, I t'ink," said Catou amiably; "ain't

it?"

"I rather they stay," replied Bonaventure. All sat down. There was a

sustained silence, and then Catou said with quiet abruptness:

"We dawn't want no mo' school!"

"From what cause?"

"'Tain't no use."

"Sir--sirs, no use? 'Tis every use! The schoolhouse? 'tis mo' worth

than the gole mine. Ah! sirs, tell me: what is gole without

education?"

They confronted the riddle for a moment.

"Ed'cation want to change every thin'--rellroad--'migrash'n."

"Change every thing? Yes!--making every thing better! Sirs, where is

that country that the people are sorry that the railroad and the

schoolhouse have come?" Again the riddle went unanswered; but Catou

sat as if in meditation, looking to one side, and presently said:

"I t'ink dass all humbug, dat titchin' English. What want titch

English faw?"

"Sir," cried Bonaventure, "in America you mus' be American! Three

Acadians have been governor of Louisiana! What made them thus to

become?" He leaned forward and smote his hands together. "What was it?

'Twas English education!"

The men were silent again. Catou pushed his feet out, and looked at

his shoes, put on for the occasion. Presently--

"Yass," he said, in an unconvinced tone; "yass, dass all right: but

how we know you titch English? Nobody can't tell you titchin' him

right or no."

"And yet--I do! And the time approach when you shall know! Sirs, I

make to you a p'oposition. Time is passing. It must be soon the State

Sup'inten'ent Public Education visit this school. The school is any

time ready. Since long time are we waiting. He shall come--he shall

examine! The chil'run shall be ignorant this arrangement! Only these

shall know--Claude, Sidonie, Crébiche; they will not disclose! And the

total chil'run shall exhibit all their previous learning! And welcome

the day, when the ad_ver_saries of education shall see those dear

chil'run stan' up befo' the assem'led Gran' Point' spelling co'ectly

words of one to eight syllable' and _reading from their readers_! And

if one miss--if _one_--_one!_ miss, then let the school be shut and

the schoolmaster banish-ed!"

It was so agreed. The debate did not cease at once, but it languished.

Catou thought he had made one strong point when he objected to

education as conducive to idle habits; but when the schoolmaster

hurled back the fact that communities the world over are industrious

just in proportion as they are educated, he was done. He did not know,

but when he confronted the assertion it looked so true that he could

not doubt it. He only said:

"Well, anyhow, I t'ink 'tain't no use Crébiche go school no mo'." But

when Bonaventure pleaded for the lad's continuance, that too was

agreed upon. The men departed.

"Crébiche," said the master, holding the boy's hand at parting, "ah!

Crébiche, if thou become not a good scholar"--and read a promise in

the boy's swimming eyes.

"Claude, Claude, I am at yo' mercy now." But the honest gaze of Claude

and the pressure of his small strong hand were a pledge. The grateful

master turned to Sidonie, and again, as of old, no Sidonie was there.

CHAPTER IX.

READY.

Summer came. The song-birds were all back again, waking at dawn, and

making the hoary cypress wood merry with their carollings to the wives

and younglings in the nests. Busy times. Foraging on the helpless

enemy--earth-worm, gnat, grub, grasshopper, weevil, sawyer,

dragon-fly--from morning till night: watching for him; scratching for

him; picking, pecking, boring for him; poising, swooping, darting for

him; standing upside down and peering into chinks for him; and all for

the luxury--not of knowledge, but of love and marriage. The

mocking-bird had no rest whatever. Back and forth from dawn to dark,

back and forth across and across Grande Pointe clearing, always one

way empty and the other way with his beak full of marketing; and then

sitting up on an average half the night--sometimes the whole of it--at

his own concert. And with military duties too; patrolling the earth

below, a large part of it, and all the upper air; driving off the

weasel, the black snake, the hawk, the jay, the buzzard, the crow, and

all that brigand crew--busy times! All nature in glad, gay earnest.

Corn in blossom and rustling in the warm breeze; blackberries ripe;

morning-glories under foot; the trumpet-flower flaring from its dense

green vine high above on the naked, girdled tree; the cotton-plant

blooming white, yellow, and red in the field beneath; honey a-making

in the hives and hollow trees; butterflies and bees lingering in the

fields at sunset; the moth venturing forth at the first sign of dew;

and Sidonie--a wild-rose tree.

Mark you, this was in Grande Pointe. I have seen the wild flower taken

from its cool haunt in the forest, and planted in the glare of a city

garden. Alas! the plight of it, poor outshone, wilting, odorless

thing! And then I have seen it again in the forest; and pleasanter

than to fill the lap with roses and tulips of the conservatory's

blood-royal it was to find it there, once more the simple queen of

that green solitude.

So Sidonie. Acadian maidens are shy as herons. They always see you

first. They see you first, silently rise, and are gone--from the

galérie. They are more shy than violets. You would think they lived

whole days with those dark, black-fringed eyes cast down; but--they

see you first. The work about the house is well done where they are;

there are apt to be flowers outside round about; while they themselves

are as Paul desired to see the women in bishop Timothy's church,

"adorned in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety."

Flowers sprang plentifully where Sidonie dwelt. Her best homespun gown

was her own weaving; the old dog lying on the galérie always thumped

the floor with his tail and sank his obsequious head as that robe

passed; the fawn--that Claude had brought--would come trotting and

press its head against it; all the small living things of the dooryard

would follow it about; and if she stood by the calf-pen the calves

would push each other for the nearest place, lay their cheeks upon the

fence's top, and roll their eyes--as many a youth of Grande Pointe

would have done if he might. Chat-oué,--I fear I have omitted to

mention that the father of Crébiche, like the father of Claude, had

lost his wife before he was of age,--Chat-oué looked often over that

fence.

When matters take that shape a girl _must_ quit school. And yet

Sidonie, when after a short vacation the school resumed its sessions,

resumed with it. Toutou, who had to admit now that his sister was even

more grand for her age than he, was always available for protection.

There was no wonder that Sidonie wished to continue; Bonaventure

explained why:

"So in_ter_esting is that McGuffey's Third Reader!"

Those at home hesitated, and presently it was the first of October.

Now it was too late to withdraw; the examination was to take place.

The school's opponents had expressed little impatience at the State

Superintendent's weary delay, but at length Catou asked, "Why dat man

don't nevva come!"

"The wherefore of his non-coming I ignore," said Bonaventure, with a

look of old pain in his young face; "but I am ready, let him come or

let him come not."

"'Tain't no use wait no longer," said Catou; "jis well have yo' lil

show widout him."

"Sir, it shall be had! Revolution never go backwood!"

Much was the toil, many the anxieties, of the preparation. For

Bonaventure at once determined to make the affair more than an

examination. He set its date on the anniversary of the day when he had

come to Grande Pointe. From such a day Sidonie could not be spared.

She was to say a piece, a poem, an apostrophe to a star. A child,

beholding the little star in the heavens, and wondering what it can

be, sparkling diamond-like so high up above the world, exhorts it not

to stop twinkling on his account. But to its tender regret the school

knew that no more thereafter was Sidonie to twinkle in its firmament.

"Learn yo' lessons hard, chil'run; if the State Sup'inten'ent, even at

the last, you know"--Bonaventure could not believe that this important

outpost had been forgotten.

CHAPTER X.

CONSPIRACY.

About this time a certain Mr. Tarbox--G. W. Tarbox--was travelling on

horseback and touching from house to house of the great sugar-estates

of the river "coast," seeing the country and people, and allowing the

_élite_ to subscribe to the "Album of Universal Information."

One Sunday, resting at College Point, he was led by curiosity to

cultivate the acquaintance of three men who had come in from Grande

Pointe. One of them was Chat-oué. He could understand them, and make

them understand him, well enough to play _vingt et un_ with them the

whole forenoon. He won all their money, drank with them, and took

their five subscriptions, Chat-oué taking three--one for himself, one

for Catou, and one for Crébiche. There was no delivery of goods there

and then; they could not write; but they made their marks, and it was

agreed that when Mr. Tarbox should come along a few days later to

deliver the volumes, they were not to be received or paid for until

with his scholarly aid the impostor who pretended to teach English

education at Grande Pointe had been put to confusion and to flight.

"All right," said Tarbox; "all _right_. I'm the kind of State

Superintendent you want. I like an adventure; and if there's any thing

I just love, it's exposing a fraud! What day shall I come? Yes, I

understand--middle of the day. I'll be on hand."

The fateful day came. In every house and on every galérie the morning

tasks were early done. Then the best of every wardrobe was put on, the

sun soared high, and by noon every chair in Grande Pointe was in the

tobacco-shed where knowledge poured forth her beams, and was occupied

by one or two persons. And then, at last, the chapel bell above

Claude's head pealed out the final signal, and the schoolmaster moved

across the green. Bonaventure Deschamps was weary. Had aught gone

wrong? Far from it. But the work had been great, and it was now done.

Every thing was at stake: the cause of enlightenment and the fortunes

of his heart hung on the issue of the next few hours. Three pupils,

one the oftenest rebuked of all the school, one his rival in love,

one the queen of his heart, held his fate in their hands and knew it.

With these thoughts mingled the pangs of an unconfessed passion and

the loneliness of a benevolent nature famishing for a word of thanks.

Yea, and to-day he must be his own judge.

His coat was on his arm, and the children round about him in their

usual way as they came across the common; but his words, always so

kind, were, on this day of all days, so dejected and so few that the

little ones stole glances into his face and grew silent. Then, all at

once, he saw,--yea, verily, he _saw_,--standing near the school

entrance, a man from the great outer world!

He knew it by a hundred signs--the free attitude, the brilliant silk

hat, the shaven face, and every inch of the attire. As plainly as one

knows a green tree from a dead one, the Crusoe of Grande Pointe

recognized one who came from the haunts of men; from some great

nerve-centre of human knowledge and power where the human mind,

trained and equipped, had piled up the spoils of its innumerable

conquests. His whole form lighted up with a new life. His voice

trembled with pent feeling as he said in deep undertone:

"Be callm, chil'run; be callm. Refrain excitement. Who you behole

befo' you, yondeh, I ignore. But who shall we expect to see if not the

State Sup'inten'ent Public Education? And if yea, then welcome, thrice

welcome, the surprise! We shall not inquire him; but as a stranger we

shall show him with how small reso'ce how large result." He put on his

coat.

Mr. Tarbox had just reached the school-ground. His horse was fastened

by the bridle to a picket in a fence behind him. A few boys had been

out before the schoolhouse, and it was the sudden cessation of their

clamor that had drawn Bonaventure's attention. Some of them were still

visible, silently slipping through the gaps in the _pieux_ and

disappearing within. Bonaventure across the distance marked him beckon

persuasively to one of them. The lad stopped, came forward, and gave

his hand; and thereupon a second, a third, fourth, fifth, tenth,

without waiting for invitation, emerged again and advanced to the same

grave and silent ceremony. Two or three men who stood near did the

same. The handshaking was just ending when Bonaventure and the

stranger raised their hats to each other.

"Trust I don't intrude?"

"Sir, we are honored, not intruded, as you shall witness. Will you

give yourself the pain to enter the school-place? I say not

schoolhouse; 'tis, as its humble teacher, not fitly so nominated. But

you shall therein find a school which, the more taken by surprise, not

the less prepared."

"The State ought to build you a good schoolhouse," said the stranger,

with a slight frown that seemed official.

"Ah! sir," cried the young schoolmaster, beaming gratitude from his

whole surface, "I--I"--he smote his breast,--"I would reimburst her in

good citizen' and mother' of good citizen'! And both reading, writing,

and also ciphering,--arithmeticulating, in the English tongue, and

grammatically! But enter and investigate."

A hush fell upon the school and the audience beyond it as the two men

came in. Every scholar was in place--the little ones with bare,

dangling feet, their shapely sun-tanned ankles just peeping from

pantaloons and pantalettes of equal length; the older lads beyond

them; and off at the left the larger girls, and Sidonie. The visitor,

as his eye fell last upon her, silently and all to himself drew a long

whistle of admiration. The master stood and eyed him with unspoken but

confessed pride. A little maiden of six slipped from the bench to the

earth floor, came forward, gave her hand, and noiselessly returned.

One by one, with eyes dropped, the remaining sixteen girls followed.

It seemed for a moment as if the contagion might break out in the

audience, but the symptom passed.

There was just room on the teacher's little platform for Bonaventure

to seat his visitor a little at one side and stand behind his desk.

The fateful moment had come. The master stood nervously drawn up, bell

in hand. With a quick, short motion he gave it one tap, and set it

down.

"That, sir, is to designate attention!" He waved a triumphant hand

toward the spectacle before them.

"Perfect!" murmured the stranger. A look of earnest ecstasy broke out

upon the master's face. He turned at first upon the audience and then

upon the school.

"Chil'run, _chil'run_, he p'onounce you perfect!" He turned again upon

the visitor, threw high his right hand, flirted it violently, and

cried:--

"At random! exclusively at random; state what class! at random!"

"I--I doubt if I under"--

"Name any class, exclusively at random, and you shall see with what

promptness and quietude the chil'run shall take each one their exactly

co'ect places."

"Oh, I understand. You want me to designate"--

"Any class! at yo' caprice."

"Well, if you have--third class in geography."

"Or spelling?" cried Bonaventure, a momentary look of dismay giving

place to fresh enthusiasm.

"Yes--spell--I meant spelling."

"Third spelling!" The tongue of the bell fell with the emphasis, and

as silently as sleep the tiniest seven in the school, four pairs of

pantaloons, three of pantalettes, with seven of little bare feet at

their borders and seven of hands pointed down stiffly at their sides,

came out and stood a-row. The master turned to the visitor.

"Now, commencing wherever, even at the foot if desired! ask, sir, if

you please, any English word of one syllable, of however difficult!"

"No matter how difficult?"

"Well, they are timid, as you see; advance by degrees."

"Very well, then," said the visitor with much kindness of tone; "I

will ask the little boy at this end"--

"At the foot--but--still, 'tis well. Only--ah, Crébiche! every thing

depend! Be prepared, Crébiche!"

"Yes," said the stranger; "I will ask him to spell hoss."

The child drew himself up rigidly, pointed his stiffened fingers down

his thighs, rounded his pretty red mouth, and said slowly, in a low,

melodious, distinct voice:--

"'O-double eth, awth."

Bonaventure leapt from the platform and ran to the child.

"_Ah! mon p'tit garçon_--ah! my lil boy! 'O-double eth, listten, my

chile. O, sir, he did not hear the word precisely. Listten, my chile,

to yo' teacher! remember that his honor and the school's honor is in

yo' spelling!" He drew back a step, poised himself, and gave the word.

It came like an anchor-chain crashing through a hawse-hole.

"Or-r-r-r-rus-seh!" And the child, winking at vacancy in the intensity

of his attention, spelled:--

"Haich-o-r-eth-e, 'Orthe."

The breathless audience, leaning forward, read the visitor's

commendation in his face. Bonaventure, beaming upon him, extended one

arm, the other turned toward the child, and cried, shaking both hands

tremulously:--

"Another! another word! another to the same!"

"Mouse," said the stranger, and Bonaventure turned and cried:--

"Mah-ooseh! my nob'e lil boy! Mah-ooseh!" and Crébiche, a speaking

statue, spelled:--

"M-o-u-eth-e, mouthe."

"Co'ect, my chile! And yet, sir, and yet, 'tis he that they call

Crébiche, because like the crawfish advancing backwardly. But to the

next! another word! another word!"

The spelling, its excitements, its moments of agonizing suspense, and

its triumphs, went on. The second class is up. It spells in two, even

in three, syllables. Toutou is in it. He gets tremendously wrought up;

cannot keep two feet on the ground at once; spells fast when the word

is his; smiles in response to the visitor's smile, the only one who

dares; leans out and looks down the line with a knuckle in his mouth

as the spelling passes down; wrings one hand as his turn approaches

again; catches his word in mid-air and tosses it off, and marks with

ecstasy the triumph and pride written on the face of his master.

"But, sir," cries Bonaventure, "why consume the spelling-book? Give,

yourself, if you please, to Toutou, a word not therein comprise'." He

glanced around condescendingly upon the people of Grande Pointe.

Chat-oué is in a front seat. Toutou gathers himself for the spring,

and the stranger ponders a moment and then gives--"Florida!"

"F-l-o, flo, warr-de-warr-da,--Florida!"

A smile broke from the visitor's face unbidden, but--

"Right! my chile! co'ect, Toutou!" cried Bonaventure, running and

patting the little hero on the back and head by turns. "Sir, let

us"--He stopped short. The eyes of the house were on Chat-oué. He had

risen to his feet and made a gesture for the visitor's attention. As

the stranger looked at him he asked:--

"He spell dat las word r-i-i-ight?" But the visitor with quiet gravity

said, "Yes, that was all right;" and a companion pulled the Raccoon

down into his seat again. Bonaventure resumed.

"Sir, let us not exhoss the time with spelling! You shall now hear

them read."

The bell taps, the class retires; again, and the reading class is up.

They are the larger girls and boys. But before they begin the master

has a word for their fathers and mothers.

"Friends and fellow-citizens of Gran' Point', think not at the

suppi-zing goodness of yo' chil'run' reading. 'Tis to this branch has

been given the largest attention and most as_sid_u'ty, so thus to

comprise puffection in the English tongue, whether speaking aw

otherwise." He turned to the stranger beside him. "I am not satisfied

whilst the slightest accent of French is remaining. But you shall

judge if they read not as if in their own vernaculary. And you shall

choose the piece!"

The visitor waived the privilege, but Bonaventure gently insisted, and

he selected Jane Taylor's little poem, "The Violet," glancing across

at Sidonie as he himself read out the first two lines:--

"Down in a green and shady bed

A modest violet grew."

Bonaventure proclaimed the title and page and said:--

"Claude, p'oceed!" And Claude read:--

"'Dthee vy--ee-lit. Dah-oon-a hin hay grin and-a shad-y bade--A

mo-dest-a vy-ee-lit gr[)o]o--Hits-a stallk whoz baint hit hawngg-a

hits hade--Has hif-a too hah-ed-a frawm ve-[)o]o. Hand h-yet it whoz a

lo-vly flow'r--Hits-a co-lors-a brah-eet and fair-a--Heet maheet-a

h[=a]ve grass-ed a rozzy bow'r--Heenstade-a hof hah-ee-dingg there"--

"Stop!" cried Bonaventure; "stop! You pronounciate' a word faultily!"

He turned to the visitor. "I call not that a miss; but we must

inoculate the idea of puffection. So soon the sly-y-test

misp'onounciating I pass to the next." He turned again: "Next!" And a

black-haired girl began in a higher key, and very slowly:--

"Yate there eet whoz cawntaint-a too bulloom--Heen mo-dest-a teent

z-arrayed--And there-a heet sprade-a heets swit pre-fume-a--Whit-hin

thee sy-y-lent-a shade"--

"Stop! Not that you mistook, but--'tis enough. Sir, will you give

yourself the pain to tell--not for my sake or reputation, but to the

encouragement of the chil'run, and devoid flattery--what is yo'

opinion of that specimen of reading? Not t'oubling you, but, in two or

three word' only--if you will give yo'self the pain"--

"Why, certainly; I think it is--I can hardly find words--it's

remarkable." Bonaventure started with joy.

"Chil'run, do you hear? Remawkable! But do you not detect no

slight--no small faultiness of p'onounciating?"

"No, not the slightest; I smile, but I was thinking of something

else." The visitor's eye, wandering a trifle, caught Chat-oué giving

him one black look that removed his disposition to smile, yet he

insisted, "No, sir; I can truthfully say I never heard such a

pronunciation." The audience drank his words.

"Sir," cried the glad preceptor, "'tis toil have p'oduce it! Toil of

the teacher, in_dust_ry of the chil'run! But it has p'oduce' _beside_!

Sir, look--that school! Since one year commencing the A B C--and now

spelling word' of eight syllabl'!"

"Not _this_ school?"

"Sir, you shall see--or, more p'operly, hear. First spelling!"

"Yes," said the stranger, seeing Sidonie rise, "I'd like to hear that

class;" and felt Chat-oué looking at him again.

CHAPTER XI.

LIGHT, LOVE, AND VICTORY.

The bell tapped, and they came forth to battle. There was the line,

there was the leader. The great juncture of the day was on him. Was

not here the State's official eye? Did not victory hover overhead? His

reserve, the darling regiment, the flower of his army, was dressing

for the final charge. There was Claude. Next him, Sidonie!--and

Étienne, and Madelaine, Henri and Marcelline,--all waiting for the

word--the words--of eight syllables! Supreme moment! Would any betray?

Banish the thought! Would any fail?

He waited an instant while two or three mothers bore out great

armfuls of slumbering or fretting infancy and a number of young men

sank down into the vacated chairs. Then he stepped down from the

platform, drew back four or five yards from the class, opened the

spelling-book, scanned the first word, closed the book with his finger

at the place, lifted it high above his head, and cried:

"Claude! Claude, my brave scholar, always perfect, ah you ready?" He

gave the little book a half whirl round, and dashed forward toward the

chosen scholar, crying as he came:

"In-e-rad-i-ca-bility!"

Claude's face suddenly set in a stony vacancy, and with his eyes

staring straight before him he responded:

"I-n, in-, e, inerad-, r-a-d, rad-, inerad-, ineraddy-, ineradica-,

c-a, ca, ineradica-, ineradicabili-, b-i-elly-billy, ineradicabili-,

ineradicabili-, t-y, ty, ineradicability."

"Right! Claude, my boy! my always good scholar, right!" The master

drew back to his starting-place as he spoke, re-opened the book, shut

it again, lifted it high in air, cried, "Madelaine, my dear chile,

prepare!" whirled the book and rushed upon her with--

"In-de-fat-i-ga-bil-ly-ty!"

Madelaine turned to stone and began:

"I-n, een, d-e, de-, inde-, indefat-, indefat--fat--f-a-t, fat,

indefat, indefatty, i, ty, indefati-, indefatiga-, g-a, ga,

indefatiga-, indefatigabilly, b-i-elly, billy, indefatigabili-, t-y,

ty, indefatigability."

"O, Madelaine, my chile, you make yo' teacher proud! prah-ood, my

chile!" Bonaventure's hand rested a moment tenderly on her head as he

looked first toward the audience and then toward the stranger. Then he

drew off for the third word. He looked at it twice before he called

it. Then--

"Sidonie! ah! Sidonie, be ready! be prepared! fail not yo' humble

school-teacher! In-com"--He looked at the word a third time, and then

swept down upon her:

"In-com-pre-hen-si-ca-_bility_!"

Sidonie flinched not nor looked upon him, as he hung over her with the

spelling-book at arm's-reach above them; yet the pause that followed

seemed to speak dismay, and throughout the class there was a silent

recoil from something undiscovered by the master. But an instant later

Sidonie had chosen between the two horns of her agonizing dilemma, and

began:

"I-n, een, c-o-m, cawm, eencawm, eencawmpre, p-r-e, pre, eencawmpre,

eencawmprehen, prehen, haich-e-n, hen, hen, eencawmprehensi, s-i, si,

eencawmprehensi-, b-i-l"--

"Ah! Sidonie! Stop! _Arretez!_ Si-do-nie-e-e-e! Oh! listen--_écoutez_--

Sidonie, my dear!" The master threw his arms up and down in distraction,

then suddenly faced his visitor, "Sir, it was my blame! I spoke the word

without adequate distinction! Sidonie--_maintenant_--now!" But a voice

in the audience interrupted with--

"_Assoiez-vous la_, Chat-oué! Seet down yondeh!" And at the potent

voice of Maximian Roussel the offender was pushed silently into the

seat he had risen from, and Bonaventure gave the word again.

"In-com-pre-hen-si-ca-bil-i-ty!" And Sidonie, blushing like fire,

returned to the task:

"I-n, een"--She bit her lip and trembled.

"Right! _Right!_ Tremble not, my Sidonie! fear naught! yo' loving

school-teacher is at thy side!" But she trembled like a red leaf as she

spelled on--"Haich-e-n, hen, eencawmprehen, eencawmprehensi, s-i, si,

eencawmprehensi-, eencawmprehensi-billy-t-y, ty, incomprehensibility!"

The master dropped his hands and lifted his eyes in speechless

despair. As they fell again upon Sidonie, her own met them. She

moaned, covered her face in her hands, burst into tears, ran to her

desk and threw her hands and face upon it, shaking with noiseless sobs

and burning red to the nape of her perfect neck. All Grande Pointe

rose to its feet.

"Lost!" cried Bonaventure in a heart-broken voice. "Every thing lost!

Farewell, chil'run!" He opened his arms toward them and with one dash

all the lesser ones filled them. They wept. Tears welled from

Bonaventure's eyes; and the mothers of Grande Pointe dropped again

into their seats and silently added theirs.

The next moment all eyes were on Maximian. His strong figure was

mounted on a chair, and he was making a gentle, commanding gesture

with one hand as he called:

"Seet down! Seet down, all han'!" And all sank down, Bonaventure in a

mass of weeping and clinging children. 'Mian too resumed his seat, at

the same time waving to the stranger to speak.

"My friends," said the visitor, rising with alacrity, "I say when a

man makes a bargain, he ought to stick to it!" He paused for them--as

many as could--to take in the meaning of his English speech, and, it

may be, expecting some demonstration of approval; but dead silence

reigned, all eyes on him save Bonaventure's and Sidonie's. He began

again:

"A bargain's a bargain!" And Chat-oué nodded approvingly and began to

say audibly, "Yass;" but 'Mian thundered out:

"_Taise toi_, Chat-oué! Shot op!" And the silence was again complete,

while the stranger resumed.

"There was a plain bargain made." He moved a step forward and laid the

matter off on the palm of his hand. "There was to be an examination;

the school was not to know; but if one scholar should make one mistake

the schoolhouse was to be closed and the schoolmaster sent away. Well,

there's been a mistake made, and I say a bargain's a bargain." Dead

silence still. The speaker looked at 'Mian. "Do you think they

understand me?"

"Dey meck out," said 'Mian, and shut his firm jaws.

"My friends," said the stranger once more, "some people think

education's a big thing, and some think it ain't. Well, sometimes it

is and sometimes it ain't. Now, here's this man"--he pointed down to

where Bonaventure's dishevelled crown was drooping to his

knees--"claims to have taught over thirty of your children to read.

Well, what of it? A man can know how to read, and be just as no

account as he was before. He brags that he's taught them to talk

English. Well, what does that prove? A man _might_ speak English and

starve to death. He claims, I am told, to have taught some of them to

write. But I know a man in the penitentiary that can write; he wrote

too much."

Bonaventure had lifted his head and was sitting with his eyes upon the

speaker in close attention. At this last word he said:

"Ah! sir! too true, too true ah yo' words; nevertheless, their

cooelty! 'Tis not what is print' _in_ the books, but what you learn

_through_ the books!"

"Yes; and so you hadn't never ought to have made the bargain you made;

but, my friends, a bargain's a bargain, and the teacher's"--He paused

invitingly, and an answer came from the audience. It was Catou who

rose and said:

"Naw, sah. Naw; he don't got to go!" But again 'Mian thundered:

"_Taise toi_, Catou. Shot op!"

"I say," continued the stranger, "the mistake's been made. _Three_

mistakes have been made!"

"Yass!" roared Chat-oué, leaping to his feet and turning upon the

assemblage a face fierce with triumph. Suspense and suspicions were

past now; he was to see his desire on his enemy. But instantly a dozen

men were on their feet--St. Pierre, Catou, Bonaventure himself, with a

countenance full of pleading deprecation, and even Claude, flushed

with anger.

"Naw, sah! Naw, sah! Waun meesteck?"

"Seet down, all han'!" yelled 'Mian; "all han' seet dah-oon!" Only

Chat-oué took his seat, glancing upon the rest with the exultant look

of one who can afford to yield ground.

"The first mistake," resumed the stranger, addressing himself

especially to the risen men still standing, and pointedly to Catou,

"the first mistake was in the kind of bargain you made." He ceased,

and passed his eyes around from one to another until they rested an

instant on the bewildered countenance of Chat-oué. Then he turned

again upon the people, who had sat down, and began to speak with the

exultation of a man that feels his subject lifting him above himself.

"I came out here to show up that man as a fraud. But what do I find? A

poor, unpaid, half-starved man that loves his thankless work better

than his life, teaching what not one schoolmaster in a thousand can

teach; teaching his whole school four better things than were ever

printed in any school-book,--how to study, how to think, how to value

knowledge, and to love one another and mankind. What you'd ought to

have done was to agree that such a school should keep open, and such a

teacher should stay, if jest one, one lone child should answer one

single book-question right! But as I said before, a bargain's a

bargain--Hold on there! Sit down! You sha'n't interrupt me again!" Men

were standing up on every side. There was confusion and a loud buzz of

voices. "The second mistake," the stranger made haste to cry, "was

thinking the teacher gave out that last word right. He gave it wrong!

And the third mistake," he shouted against the rising commotion, "was

thinking it was spelt wrong. _She spelt it right!_ And a bargain's a

bargain! The schoolmaster stays!"

He could say no more; the rumble of voices suddenly burst into a cheer.

The women and children laughed and clapped their hands,--Toutou his feet

also,--and Bonaventure, flirting the leaves of a spelling book till he

found the place, looked, cried--"In-com-pre-hen-_sibility_!" wheeled and

dashed upon Sidonie, seized her hands in his as she turned to fly, and

gazed speechlessly upon her, with the tears running down his face.

Feeling a large hand upon his shoulder, he glanced around and saw 'Mian

pointing him to his platform and desk. Thither he went. The stranger had

partly restored order. Every one was in his place. But what a change!

What a gay flutter throughout the old shed! Bonaventure seemed to have

bathed in the fountain of youth. Sidonie, once more the school's

queen-flower, sat calm, with just a trace of tears adding a subtle

something to her beauty.

"Chil'run, beloved chil'run," said Bonaventure, standing once more by

his desk, "yo' school-teacher has the blame of the sole mistake; and,

sir, gladly, oh, gladly, sir, would he always have the blame rather

than any of his beloved school-chil'run! Sir, I will boldly ask

you--_ah_ you not the State Sup'inten'ent Public Education?"

"No, I"--

"But surely, sir, than a greater?--Yes, I discover it, though you

smile. Chil'run--friends--not the State Sup'inten'ent, but

greater!--Pardon; have yo' chair, sir."

"Why, the examination's over, isn't it? Guess you'd better call it

finished, hadn't you?" He made the suggestion softly, but Bonaventure

answered aloud:

"Figu'atively speaking, 'tis conclude'; but--pardon--you mention'

writing. Shall you paht f'om us not known--not leaving yo' name--in a

copy-book, for examp'?"

"With pleasure. You do teach writing?"

"If I teach writing? To such with desks, yes. 'Twould be to all but

for the privation of desks. You perceive how we have here nothing less

than a desk famine. Madelaine! Claude! Sidonie!--present copy-book'!

Sir, do you not think every chile should be provided a desk?--Ah! I

knew 'twould be yo' verdic'. But how great trouble I have with that

subjec'! Me, I think yes; but the parents,"--he looked tenderly over

among them,--"they contend no. Now, sir, here are three copy-books.

Inspect; criticise. No, commence rather, if you please, with the

copy-book of Madelaine; then _p'oceed_ to the copy-book of Claude, and

finally conclude at the copy-book of Sidonie; thus rising by degrees:

good, more good, most good."

"How about," asked the stranger, with a smile, as he turned the

leaves, "about Toutou and Crébiche; don't they write?"

"Ah! sir," said Bonaventure, half to the stranger and half to the

assemblage, "they write, yes; but--they ah yet in the pot-hook and

chicken-track stage. And now, chil'run, in honor of our eminent

friend's visitation, and of the excellence with which you have been

examine', I p'onounce the _exhibition_ finish'--dispensing with

'Twink', twink' lil stah.' And now, in the book of the best writing

scholar in the school--you, sir, deciding that intricacy--shall now be

written the name of the eminent frien' of learning hereinbefo'

confronting.--Claude! a new pen!"

The stranger made his choice among the books.

"Chil'run, he has select' the book of Sidonie!" Bonaventure reached

and swung a chair into place at his desk. The visitor sat down.

Bonaventure stood over him, gazing down at the hand that poised the

pen. The silence was profound.

"Chil'run--sh-sh-sh!" said the master, lifting his left arm but not

his eyes. The stranger wrote a single initial.

"G! chil'run; G!--Sir, does it not signify George?"

"Yes," murmured the writer; "it stands for George." He wrote another.

"W! my chil'run; George W!--Sir, does it not sig--_My_ chil'run!

George Washington! George Washington, my chil'run! George Washington,

the father of his country! My chil'run and fellow-citizen' of Gran'

Point', he is nominated for George Washington, the father of his

country! Sir, ah you not a relation?"

"I really can't tell you," said the writer, with a calm smile. "I've

always been too busy to look it up." He finished his signature as he

talked. Bonaventure bent over it.

"Tar-box. Chil'run and friends and fellow-citizen', I have the

p'oudness to int'oduce you the hono'able George Washington Tarbox! And

now the exhibition is dismiss'; but stop! Sir, if some--aw all--desire

gratefully to shake hand'?"

"I should feel honored."

"Attention, everybody! Make rank! Everybody by two by two, the

school-chil'run coming last,--Claude and Sidonie resting till the

end,--pass 'round--shake hand'--walk out--similah a fu-nial."

So came, shook hands, and passed out and to their simple homes, the

manhood, motherhood, maidenhood, childhood of Grande Pointe, not

knowing that before many days every household in the village was to be

a subscriber to the "Album of Universal Information."

One of the last of the householders was Chat-oué. But when he grasped

the honored hand, he also held it, fixing upon its owner a generous

and somewhat bacchanalian smile.

"I'm a fool, but _I_ know. You been put op a jawb on me. Dass four,

five days now I been try to meck out what dat niggah at Belle Alliance

holla to me when I gallop down de road." (Chat-oué's English had been

acquired from negroes in the sugar-house, and was like theirs.) "He

been braggin' dat day befo'"--turning to Bonaventure--"how 'twas him

show you de road to Gran' Point' las' year; and so I git mad and tell

him, me," addressing the stranger again, "how we goin' git school

shot op. Well, dat night I mit him comin' fum Gran' Point' and he hol'

at me. I been try evva since meck out what he say. Yass. An' I _jis_

meck it out! He say, 'Watch out, watch out, 'Mian Roussel and dat

book-fellah dawn't put op jawb on _you_.' Well, I'm a fool, but I

know. You put op jawb on me; I know. But dass all right--_I don't take

no book._" He laughed with the rest, scratched his tipsy head, and

backed out through the _pieux_.

Only a fairy number remained, grouped around the honorable Tarbox.

They were St. Pierre, Bonaventure,--Maximian detaining a middle-aged

pair, Sidonie's timorous guardians,--and two others, who held back,

still waiting to shake hands.

"Claude," cried Bonaventure; "Sidonie."

They came. Claude shook hands and stepped inside. Sidonie, with eyes

on the ground, put forth her hand. The honored guest held it

lingeringly, and the ceremonies were at an end.

"Come," said 'Mian, beckoning away the great G. W.'s probable

relative. They passed out together. "Come!" he repeated, looking back

and beckoning again; "walk een! all han'! walk een house!"

The guardian pair followed, hand in hand.

"Claude," said Bonaventure tenderly; but--

"Claude," more firmly said St. Pierre.

The boy looked for one instant from the master's face to Sidonie's;

then turned, grasped his father's hand, and followed the others.

A blaze of light filled Bonaventure's heart. He turned to Sidonie to

give his hand--both her hands were clasped upon each other, and they

only tightened. But their eyes met--ah! those Acadian maidens, they do

it all with their eyes!--and lover and maiden passed out and walked

forth side by side. They are going that way still, only--with hands

joined.

AU LARGE.

CHAPTER I.

THE POT-HUNTER.

The sun was just rising, as a man stepped from his slender dug-out and

drew half its length out upon the oozy bank of a pretty bayou. Before

him, as he turned away from the water, a small gray railway-platform

and frame station-house, drowsing on long legs in the mud and water,

were still veiled in the translucent shade of the deep cypress swamp,

whose long moss drapings almost overhung them on the side next the

brightening dawn. The solemn gray festoons did overhang the farthest

two or three of a few flimsy wooden houses and a saw-mill with its

lumber, logs, and sawdust, its cold furnace and idle engine.

As with gun and game this man mounted by a short, rude ladder to

firmer footing on the platform, a negro, who sat fishing for his

breakfast on the bank a few yards up the stream, where it bent from

the north and west, slowly lifted his eyes, noted that the other was a

white man, an Acadian, and brought his gaze back again to hook and

line.

He had made out these facts by the man's shape and dress, for the

face was in shade. The day, I say, was still in its genesis. The

waters that slid so languidly between the two silent men as not to

crook one line of the station-house's image inverted in their clear

dark depths, had not yet caught a beam upon their whitest water-lily,

nor yet upon their tallest bulrush; but the tops of the giant

cypresses were green and luminous, and as the Acadian glanced abroad

westward, in the open sky far out over the vast marshy breadths of the

"shaking prairie,"[5] two still clouds, whose under surfaces were yet

dusky and pink, sparkled on their sunward edges like a frosted fleece.

You could not have told whether the Acadian saw the black man or not.

His dog, soiled and wet, stood beside his knee, pricked his ears for a

moment at sight of the negro, and then dropped them.

[5] The "shaking prairie," "trembling prairie," or

_prairie tremblante_, is low, level, treeless delta

land, having a top soil of vegetable mould overlying

immense beds of quicksand.

It was September. The comfortable air could only near by be seen to

stir the tops of the high reeds whose crowding myriads stretched away

south, west, and north, an open sea of green, its immense distances

relieved here and there by strips of swamp forest tinged with their

peculiar purple haze. Eastward the railroad's long causeway and

telegraph-poles narrowed on the view through its wide axe-hewn lane in

the overtowering swamp. New Orleans, sixty miles or more away, was in

that direction. Westward, rails, causeway, and telegraph, tapered away

again across the illimitable hidden quicksands of the "trembling

prairie" till the green disguise of reeds and rushes closed in upon

the attenuated line, and only a small notch in a far strip of woods

showed where it still led on toward Texas. Behind the Acadian the

smoke of woman's early industry began to curl from two or three low

chimneys.

But his eye lingered in the north. He stood with his dog curled at his

feet beside a bunch of egrets,--killed for their plumage,--the butt of

his long fowling-piece resting on the platform, and the arm half

outstretched whose hand grasped the barrels near the muzzle. The hand,

toil-hardened and weather-browned, showed, withal, antiquity of race.

His feet were in rough muddy brogans, but even so they were smallish

and shapely. His garments were coarse, but there were no tatters

anywhere. He wore a wide Campeachy hat. His brown hair was too long,

but it was fine. His eyes, too, were brown, and, between brief moments

of alertness, sedate. Sun and wind had darkened his face, and his pale

brown beard curled meagre and untrimmed on a cheek and chin that in

forty years had never felt a razor.

Some miles away in the direction in which he was looking, the

broadening sunlight had struck and brightened the single red lug-sail

of a boat whose unseen hull, for all the eye could see, was coming

across the green land on a dry keel. But the bayou, hidden in the tall

rushes, was its highway; for suddenly the canvas was black as it

turned its shady side, and soon was red again as another change of

direction caught the sunbeams upon its tense width and showed that,

with much more wind out there than it would find by and by in here

under the lee of the swamp, it was following the unseen meanderings of

the stream. Presently it reached a more open space where a stretch of

the water lay shining in the distant view. Here the boat itself came

into sight, showed its bunch of some half-dozen passengers for a

minute or two, and vanished again, leaving only its slanting red sail

skimming nautilus-like over the vast breezy expanse.

Yet more than two hours later the boat's one blue-shirted, barefoot

Sicilian sailor in red worsted cap had with one oar at the stern just

turned her drifting form into the glassy calm by the railway-station,

tossed her anchor ashore, and was still busy with small matters of

boat-keeping, while his five passengers clambered to the platform.

The place showed somewhat more movement now. The negro had long ago

wound his line upon its crooked pole, gathered up his stiffened fishes

from the bank, thrust them into the pockets of his shamelessly ragged

trousers, and was gone to his hut in the underbrush. But the few

amphibious households round about were passing out and in at the

half-idle tasks of their slow daily life, and a young white man was

bustling around, now into the station and now out again upon the

platform, with authority in his frown and a pencil and two matches

behind his ear. It was Monday. Two or three shabby negroes with broad,

collapsed, glazed leather travelling-bags of the old carpet-sack

pattern dragged their formless feet about, waiting to take the train

for the next station to hire out there as rice harvesters, and one,

with his back turned, leaned motionless against an open window gazing

in upon the ticking telegraph instruments. A black woman in blue

cotton gown, red-and-yellow Madras turban, and some sportsman's

cast-off hunting-shoes minus the shoe-strings, crouched against the

wall. Beside her stood her shapely mulatto daughter, with

head-covering of white cotton cloth, in which female instinct had

discovered the lines of grace and disposed them after the folds of the

Egyptian fellah head--dress. A portly white man, with decided polish

in his commanding air, evidently a sugar-planter from the Mississippi

"coast" ten miles northward, moved about in spurred boots, and put

personal questions to the negroes, calling them "boys," and the

mulattress, "girl."

The pot-hunter was still among them; or rather, he had drawn apart

from the rest, and stood at the platform's far end, leaning on his

gun, an innocent, wild-animal look in his restless eyes, and a

slumberous agility revealed in his strong, supple loins. The

station-agent went to him, and with abrupt questions and assertions,

to which the man replied in low, grave monosyllables, bought his

game,--as he might have done two hours before, but--an Acadian can

wait. There was some trouble to make exact change, and the agent,

saying "Hold on, I'll fix it," went into the station just as the group

from the Sicilian's boat reached the platform. The agent came bustling

out again with his eyes on his palm, counting small silver.

"Here!" But he spoke to the empty air. He glanced about with an

offended frown.

"Achille!" There was no reply. He turned to one of the negroes:

"Where's that 'Cajun?" Nobody knew. Down where his canoe had lain,

tiny rillets of muddy water were still running into its imprint left

in the mire; but canoe, dog, and man had vanished into the rank

undergrowth of the swamp.