IV

A few afternoons later I went to his house. For pretext I carried a huge

green worm, but I went mainly to see just how unluckily he was married. He

was not at home. I found his partner a small, bright, toil-worn, pretty

woman of hardly twenty-eight or nine, whose two or three children had died

in infancy, and who had blended wifehood and motherhood together, and was

taking care of the Baron as a widow would care for a crippled son, and at

the same time reverencing him as if he were a demigod. Of his utter

failure to provide their daily living she confessed herself by every

implication, simply--proud! What else should a demigod's wife expect? At

the same time, without any direct statement, she made it clear that she

had no disdain, but only the broadest charity, for men who make a living.

It was odd how few her smiles were, and droll how much sweetness--what a

sane winsomeness--she managed to radiate without them. I left her in her

clean, bright cottage, like a nesting bird in a flowery bush, and entered

my own home, declaring, with what I was gently told was unnecessary

enthusiasm, that the Baron's wife was the "unluckily married" one, and the

best piece of luck her husband had ever had. I had seen women make a

virtue of necessity, but I had never before seen one make a conviction,

comfort, and joy of it, and I should try to like the Baron, I said, if

only for her sake.

Of course I became, in some degree, a source of revenue to him.

Understand, there was always a genuine exchange of so much for so much; he

was not a "baraseet"--oh, no!--yet he hung on. We still have, stowed

somewhere, a large case of butterflies, another of splendid moths, and a

smaller one of glistening beetles. Nor can I begrudge their cost, of

whatever sort, even now when my delight in them is no longer a constant

enthusiasm. The cases of specimens have passed from daily sight, but

thenceforth, as never before, our garden was furnished with guests--pages,

ladies, poets, fairies, emperors, goddesses--coming and going on gorgeous

wings, and none ever a stranger more than once. My non-parasitic friend

"opened a new world" to me; a world that so flattered one with its grace

and beauty, its marvellous delicacy and minuteness, its glory of color and

curiousness of marking, and its exquisite adaptation of form to need and

function, that in my meaner depths, or say my childish shallows--I

resented Mrs. Fontenette's making the same avowal for herself--I didn't

believe her!

I do not say she was consciously shamming; but I could see she drank in

the Baron's revelations with no more true spiritual exaltation than the

quivering twilight moths drew from our veranda honeysuckles. Yet it was

mainly her vanity that feasted, not any lower impulse--of which, you know,

there are several--and, possibly, all her vanity craved at first was the

tinsel distinction of unusual knowledge.

One night she got into my dreams. I seemed to be explaining to Monsieur

Fontenette apologetically that this newly opened world was not at all

separate from my old one, but shone everywhere in it, like our winged

guests in our garden, and followed and surrounded me far beyond the

Baron's company, terminology, and magnifying-glass, lightening the burdens

and stress of the very counting-room and exchange. Whereat he seemed to

flare up!

"Ah!--you--I believe yes! But she?" he waved his hand in fierce unbelief.

I awoke concerned, and got myself to sleep again only by remembering the

utter absence of vanity in the Baron himself. I lay smiling in the dark to

think how much less all our verbal caressings were worth to him than the

drone of the most familiar beetle, and how his life-long delving in books

and nature had opened up this fairy world to him only at the cost of

shutting up all others. If education means calling forth and perfecting

our powers and affections, he was ten times more uneducated than his wife,

even as we knew her then. He appeared to care no more for human interests,

far or near, in large or small, than a crab cares for the stars. I fell

asleep chuckling in remembrance of an occasion when Mrs. Fontenette,

taking her cue from me, spoke to him of his plant-and-insect lore as one

of the many worlds there are within _the_ world, no more displacing it

than light displaces air, or than fragrance displaces form or sound. He

made her say it all over again, and then asked: "Vhere vas dat?"

His whole world was not really as wide as Gregory's island was to its

gentle hermit. No butterfly raptures for him; he devoured the one kind of

facts he cared for, as a caterpillar devours leaves.

V

How Mrs. Fontenette got Mrs. "Thorndyke-Smith" and me entangled with some

six or eight others in her project for a botanizing and butterfly-chasing

picnic I do not know; but she did. On the evening before the appointed day

I perfidiously crawfished out of it, and our house furnished only one

delegate, whom I urged to go rather than break up the party--I never break

up a party if I can avoid it. "But as for me going," I said, "my business

simply won't let me!" At which our pretty neighbor expressed her regrets

with a ready resignation that broke into open sunshine as she lamented the

same inability in her husband. To my suggestion that the Baroness be

invited, Mrs. Fontenette smiled a sweet amusement that was perfect in its

way, and said she hoped the weather would be propitious; people were so

timid about rain.

It was. When I came home, tardily, that afternoon, the picnickers had not

returned, though the oleanders and crape-myrtles on the grounds next ours

cast shadows three times their length across our lawn. In an aimless way I

roamed from the house down into our small rear garden, thinking oftenest,

of course, of the absentees, and admiring the refined good sense with

which Monsieur Fontenette seemed to have decided to let this unperilous

attack of silliness run itself out in the woman he loved with so much

tenderness and with so much passion.

"How much distress he is saving himself and all of us," I caught myself

murmuring, audibly, out among my fig-trees.

Finding two or three figs fully ripe, I strolled over the way to see him

among his trees and maybe find chance for a little neighborly boasting. As

our custom with each other was, I ignored the bell on his gate, drew the

bolt, and, passing in among Mrs. Fontenette's invalid roses, must have

moved, without intention, quite noiselessly from one to another, until I

came around behind the house, where a strong old cloth-of-gold rose-vine

half covered the latticed side of the cistern shed. In the doorway I

stopped in silent amaze. A small looking-glass hanging against the wooden

cistern showed me--although I was in much the stronger light--Monsieur

Fontenette. He was just straightening up from an oil-stone he had been

using, and the reflection of his face fell full on the glass. Once before,

but once only, had I seen such agony of countenance--such fierce and awful

looking in and out at the same time; that was on a man who was still

trying to get the best of a fight in which he knew he was mortally shot.

Fontenette did not see me. I suppose the rose-vine screened me, and his

glance did not rise quite to the mirror, but followed the soft thumbings

with which he tried the two edges and point of as murderous a knife as

ever I saw.

As softly as a shadow I drew out of sight, turned away, and went almost

back to the gate before I let my footfall be heard, and called, "M'sieu'

Fontenette!"

He hallooed from the shed in a playful sham of being a mile or so away,

and emerged from the lattice and vine with that accustomed light of

equanimity on his features which made him always so thoroughly good-

looking. He came hitching his waistband with both hands in that innocent

Creole way that belongs to the latitude, and how I knew I cannot tell you,

but I did know--I didn't merely feel or think, but I knew!--_positively_--

that he had that hideous thing on his person.

Against what contingency I could only ask myself and wonder, but I

instantly decided to get him away from home and keep him away until the

picnickers had got back and scattered. So I proposed a walk, a diversion

we had often enjoyed together.

"Yes?" he said, "to pazz the time whilse they don't arrive? With the

greates' of pleasu'e!"

I dare say we were both more preoccupied than we thought we were, for

outside the gate we fairly ran into a lady--yes; a seamstress--the wife of

the entomologist. My stars! She had seemed winning enough before, but now

--what a rise in values! As we conversed it was all I could do to keep my

eyes from saying: "A man with you for a wife belongs at home whenever he

can be there!" But whether they spoke it or not, in some way, without word

or glance, by simple radiations from the whole sweet woman, she revealed

that to make that fact plain to him, to _her_, and to all of us, was what

this new emphasis of charm was for.

She had come, she said--and scarcely on the lips of the loveliest Creole

did I ever hear a more bewitching broken-English--she had come according

to a half-promise made to Mrs. Fontenette to show her--"I tidn't etsectly

promised, I chust said I vill some time come----"

"And Mrs. Fontenette didn't object," I playfully interrupted--

"No," said the unruffled speaker, "I chust said I vill come; yes; to show

her a new vay to remoof, remoof? is sat English? So? A new vay to remoof

old stains."

"A new way--" responded Fontenette, with an air of gravest interest in all

matters of laundry.

"Yes," she repeated, as simply as a babe, "a new vay; and I sought I come

now so to go home viss mine hussbandt." There, at last, she smiled, and to

make the caressing pride of her closing tone still prettier, lifted her

figured muslin out sidewise between thumb and forefinger of each hand with

even more archaic grace than playfulness.

As the three of us crossed over and took seats on my veranda, we were

joined by the neighbor whose garden-trees I have mentioned; the man of

whom I have told you, how he failed to strike a bargain with old

Manouvrier, the taxidermist. He was a Missourian, in the produce business,

a thoroughly good fellow, but--well--oh--!

He came perspiring, flourishing a palm-leaf fan and a large handkerchief,

to say I might keep all the shade his tall house and trees dropped on my

side of the fence. And presently what does the simple fellow do but begin

to chaff the three of us on the absence of our three partners!