Toward the close of the next afternoon she brought the entomologist. I can
see yet the glad flutter she could not hide as they came up our front
garden walk in an air spiced by the "four-o'clocks," with whose small
trumpets--red, white, and yellow--our children were filling their laps and
stringing them on the seed-stalks of the cocoa-grass. He was bent and
spectacled, of course; _l'entomologie oblige_; but, oh, besides!--
"Comparatively young," Mrs. Fontenette had said, and I naturally used her
husband, who was thirty-one, for the comparison. Why, this man? It would
have been a laughable flattery to have guessed his age to be forty-five.
Yet that was really the fact. Many a man looks younger at sixty--oh, at
sixty-five! He was dark, bloodless, bowed, thin, weatherbeaten, ill-clad--
a picture of decent, incurable penury. The best thing about his was his
head. It was not imposing at all, but it was interesting, albeit very
meagrely graced with fine brown hair, dry and neglected. I read him
through without an effort before we had been ten minutes together; a leaf
still hanging to humanity's tree, but faded and shrivelled around some
small worm that was feeding on its juices.
And there was no mistaking that worm; it was the avarice of knowledge. He
had lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delving
on, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart on
the locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany, satisfied with them
for their own sake, without reference to God or man; an infant in
emotions, who time and again would no doubt have starved outright but for
his wife, whom there and then I resolved we should know also. I was amused
to see, by stolen glances, Mrs. Smith study him. She did not know she
frowned, nor did he; but Mrs. Fontenette knew it every time.
We all had the advantage of him as to common sight. His glasses were
obviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till he
clapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for me
the new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzling
green, beetle inhabiting the Spanish moss--his own scientific discovery--
he wrote it so minutely that I had to use a lens to read it.
As we sat close around the library lamp, I noticed how often his poor
clothing had been mended by a woman's needle. His linen was discouraging,
his cravat awry and dingy, and his hands--we had better pass his hands;
yet they were slender and refined.
Also they shook, though not from any habit commonly called vicious. You
could see that no vice of the body nor any lust of material things had
ever led him captive. He gave one the tender despair with which we look on
a blind babe.
When we expressed regret that his wife had not come with him, he only bent
with a deeper greed into a book I had handed him, and after a moment laid
it down disappointedly, saying that it was "fool of plundters." Mrs.
Fontenette asking to be shown one of them, they reopened the book
together, she all consciousness as she bent against him over the page, he
oblivious of everything but the phrase they were hunting. He gave his
forehead a tap of despair as he showed where the book called this same
Tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a parasite.
"It iss no baraseet," he explained, in a mellow falsetto, "it iss an
epipheet!"
"An air-plant!" said his fair worshipper, softly drinking in a bosomful of
gladness as she made the distance between them more discreet.
Distances were all one to him. He seemed like a burnt log, still in shape
but gone to ashes, except in one warm spot where glowed this self-
consuming, world-sacrificing adoration of knowledge; knowledge sought, as
I say, purely for its own sake and narrowed down to names and technical
descriptions. Men of _perverted_ principles and passions you may find
anywhere; but I never had seen anyone so totally undeveloped in all the
emotions, affections, tastes that make life _life_.