Gregory had been brought up on the shore of Mississippi Sound, a beautiful
region fruitful mainly in apathy of character. He was a skilled lover of
sail-boats. When we all got back to New Orleans, paroled, and cast about
for a living in the various channels "open to gentlemen," he, largely, I
think, owing to his timid notion of his worth, went into the rough
business of owning and sailing a small, handsome schooner in the "Lake
trade," which, you know, includes Mississippi Sound. I married, and for
some time he liked much to come and see us--on rainy evenings, when he
knew we should be alone. He was in love yet, as he had been when we were
fellow-absentees from camp, and with the same girl. But his passion had
never presumed to hope, and the girl was of too true a sort ever to thrust
hope upon him. What his love lacked in courage it made up in constancy,
however, and morning, noon, and night--sometimes midnight too, I venture
to say--his all too patient heart had bowed mutely down toward its holy
city across the burning sands of his diffidence. When another fellow
stepped in and married her, he simply loved on, in the same innocent,
dumb, harmless way as before. He gave himself some droll consolations. One
of these was a pretty, sloop-rigged sail-boat, trim and swift, on which he
lavished the tendernesses he knew he should never bestow upon any living
she. He named her Sweetheart; a general term; but he knew that we all knew
it meant the mender of his coat. By and by his visits fell off and I met
him oftenest on the street. Sometimes we stopped for a moment's sidewalk
chat, New Orleans fashion, and I still envied the clear bronze of his fine
skin, which the rest of us had soon lost. But after a while certain
changes began to show for the worse, until one day in the summer of the
fifth year he tried to hurry by me. I stopped him, and was thinking what a
handsome fellow he was even yet, with such a quiet, modest fineness about
him, when he began, with a sudden agony of face, "My schooner's sold for
debt! You know the reason; I've seen you read it all over me every time we
have met, these twelve months--O _don't_ look at me!"
His slim, refined hands--he gave me both?-were clammy and tremulous.
"Yes," he babbled on, "it's a fixed fact, Smith; the cracked fiddle's a
smashed fiddle at last!"
I drew him out of the hot sun and into a secluded archway, he talking
straight on with a speed and pitiful grandiloquence totally unlike him.
"I've finished all the easy parts--the first ecstasies of pure license--
the long down-hill plunge, with all its mad exhilarations--the wild vanity
of venturing and defying--that bigness of the soul's experiences which
makes even its anguish seem finer than the old bitterness of tame
propriety--they are all behind me, now?-the valley of horrors is before!
You can't understand it, Smith. O you can't understand----"
O couldn't I! And, anyhow, one does not have to put himself through a
whole criminal performance to apprehend its spiritual experiences. I
understood all, and especially what he unwittingly betrayed even now; that
deep thirst for the dramatic element in one's own life, which, when social
conformity fails to supply it, becomes, to an eager soul, sin's cunningest
allurement.
I tried to talk to him. "Gregory, that day the dogs jumped on you--you
remember?--didn't you say if ever you should reach this condition your
fear might save you?"
He stared at me a moment. "Do you"--a ray of humor lighted his eyes--"do
you still believe in spasms of virtue?"
"Thank heaven, yes!" laughed I.
"Good-by," he said, and was gone.
I heard of him twice afterward that day. About noon some one coming into
the office said: "I just now saw Crackedfiddle buying a great lot of
powder and shot and fishing-tackle. Here's a note. He says first read it
and then seal it and send it to his aunt." It read:
_"Don't look for me. You can't find me. I'm not going to kill or hurt
myself, and I'll report again in a month."_
I delivered it in person on my way uptown, advising his kinswoman to trust
him on his own terms and hope for the best. Privately, of course, I was
distressed, and did not become less so when, on reaching home, Mrs. Smith
told me that he had been there and borrowed an arm-load of books, saying
he might return some of them in a month, but would probably keep others
for two. So he did; and one evening, when he brought the last of them
back, he told us fully, spiritual experiences and all, what had occurred
to him in the interval.
The sale of the schooner had paid its debt and left him some cash over.
Better yet, it had saved Sweetheart. On the day of his disappearance she
was lying at the head of the New Basin, distant but a few minutes' walk
from the spot where we met and talked. When he left me he went there. At
the stores thereabout he bought a new hatchet and axe, an extra water-keg
or two, and a month's provisions. He filled all the kegs, stowed
everything aboard, and by the time the afternoon had half waned was
rippling down the New Canal under mule-tow with a strong lake breeze in
his face.
At the lake (Pontchartrain), as the tow-line was cast off, he hoisted
sail, and, skimming out by lighthouse and breakwater, tripped away toward
Pointe-aux-Herbes and the eastern skyline beyond, he and Sweetheart alone,
his hand clasping hers--the tiller, that is--hour by hour, and the small
waves tiptoeing to kiss her southern cheek as she leaned the other away
from the saucy north wind. In time the low land, and then the lighthouse,
sank and vanished behind them; on the left the sun went down in the purple
black swamps of Manchac; the intervening waters turned crimson and bronze
under the fairer changes of the sky, while in front of them Fort Pike
Light began to glimmer through an opal haze, and by and by to draw near.
It passed. From a large inbound schooner gliding by in the twilight, came
in friendly recognition, the drone of a conch-shell, the last happy
salutation Sweetheart was ever to receive. Then the evening star silvered
their wake through the deep Rigolets, and the rising moon met them, her
and her lover, in Lake Borgne, passing the dark pines of Round Island, and
hurrying on toward the white sand-keys of the Gulf.
The night was well advanced as they neared the pine-crested dunes of Cat
Island, in whose lee a more cautious sailor would have dropped anchor till
the morning. But to this pair every mile of these fickle waters, channel
and mud-lump, snug lagoon, open sea and hidden bar, each and all, were
known as the woods are known to a hunter, and, as he drew her hand closer
to his side, she turned across the track of the moon and bounded into the
wide south. A maze of marsh islands--huddling along that narrow, half-
drowned mainland of cypress swamp and trembling prairie which follows the
Mississippi out to sea--slept, leagues away, below the western waters. In
the east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and the
shoreless deep, and this was so near that from its farther edge came now
and again its admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulf
rolling forever down the prone but unshaken battle-front of the sandy
Chandeleurs.