My room adjoined the Baron's in frontas his wife's did farther back. A
door of his and window of mine stood wide open on the one balcony, from
which a flight of narrow steps led down into the side garden. Thus, for
some time after I was in bed I heard him stirring; but by and by, with no
sound to betoken it except the shutting of this door, it was plain he had
lain down.
I awoke with a sense of having been some hours asleep, and in fact the
full moon, shining gloriously, had passed the meridian. The balcony was
lighted up by it like noon, and on it stood the entomologist, entirely
dressed. The door was shut behind him. He was looking in at my window, but
he did not know the room was mine, and with eyes twice as good as he had
he could not have seen through my mosquito-bar. I wondered, but lay still
till he had started softly down the steps. Then I sprang out of bed on the
dark side, and dressed faster than a fireman.
When half-clad I went and looked out a parlor window. He was trying the
gate, which was locked. But he knew where the key always hung, behind the
post, and turned to get it. I went back and finished dressing, stole down
the inner, basement stairs and out into the deep shadows of the garden,
and presently saw my guest passing in through the Fontenettes' gate, whose
bolt he had drawn from the outside. As angry now as I had been amazed I
hurried after.
To avoid the moonlight I followed the shadows of the sidewalk-trees down
to the next corner, to cross there and come back under a like cover on the
other side. But squarely on the crossing I was met and stopped by a
belated drunkard, who had a proposition to make to me which he thought no
true gentleman, such as he was, for instance, could decline. I was alone,
he asked me to notice; and he was alone; but if he should go with me,
which he would be glad to do, why, then, you see, we should be together.
He stuck like a bur, and it was minutes before I got him well started off
in his own right direction. I slipped to the Fontenettes' gate, as near as
was best, and instantly saw, between one of its posts and a very black
myrtle-orange, Fontenette himself, standing as still as the trees. I was
not in so deep a shade as he, but I might have stepped right out into the
moonlight without his seeing me, so intensely was he watching his wife's
front door. For there stood the entomologist. He had evidently been
knocking, and was about to knock again when there came some response from
within, to which he replied, in a suppressed yet eager and agitated voice,
"Mine Psyche! Oh, mine Psyche! She is come to me undt she is bringing me
already more as a hoondredt--vhat?" He had been interrupted from within.
"Vhat you say?"
Fontenette drew his knife.
I stood ready to spring the instant he should stir to advance. I realized
almost unbearably my position, stealing thus at such a moment on the heels
of my neighbor and friend, but this is not a story of feelings, at any
rate, not of mine.
"Vhat?" said the entomologist. "Go avay? Mien Gott! No, I vill not ko
avay. Mien gloryform! Gif me first mine gloryform! Dot Psyche hass come
out fon ter grysalis! she hass drawn me dot room full mit oder Psyches,
undt you haf mine pottle of gloryform in your pocket yet! Yes, ko kit ut;
I vait; ach!" Presently he seemed to hear from inside a second approach.
Then the door opened an inch or so, and with another "Ach!" and never a
word of thanks, he, snatched the vial and, turning to make off with it,
came nose to nose with M. Fontenette, who stood in the moonlight gateway
holding a blazing match to his cigarette.
"Well, sir, good-evening again," said the Creole. I noticed the perfection
of his dress; evidently he had not as yet loosed as much as a shoestring.
And then I observed also that the visitor so close before him was without
his shoes.
"Good-evening--or, good-morning, perchance," said Fontenette. "I suepose
thaz a great thing to remove those old stain' that chloro_form_, eh?"
"Ach! it iss you? Ach, you must coom--coom undt hellup me! Coom! you shall
see _someding_."
"A moment," said the Creole. "May I inquire you how is that, that you call
on us in yo' sock feet?"
"Ach! I am already t'e socks putting on pefore I remember I do not need
t'em! But coom! coom! see a vonderfool!" He led, and Fontenette, when he
had blown a cloud of smoke through his nose, followed, saying exclusively
for his own ear:
"A wonder fool, yes! But a fool is no wonder to me any more; I find myself
to be that kind."
X
When, hypocritically clad in dressing-gown and slippers, I stopped at my
guest's inner door and Fontenette opened it just enough to let me enter, I
saw, indeed, a wonderful sight. The entomologist had lighted up the room,
and it was filled, filled! with gorgeous moths as large as my hand and all
of a kind, dancing across one another's airy paths in a bewildering maze
or alighting and quivering on this thing and that. The mosquito-net,
draping almost from ceiling to floor, was beflowered with them
majestically displaying in splendid alternation their upper and under
colors, or, with wings lifted and vibrant, tipping to one side and another
as they crept up the white mesh, like painted and gilded sails in a
fairies' regatta.
And all this life and beauty, this gay glory and tremorous ecstasy and
effort was here for moth-love of one incarnate fever of frail-winged
loveliness! Oh! to what unguessed archangelic observation, to what
infinite seraphic compassion, may not our own swarming race, who dare not
too much pity ourselves, be but just such dainty ephemera! Splendid in
purposes, intelligence, and affections as these in colors and grace,
glorious when on the wing, and marvellous still, riddles of wonder, even
when crawling and quivering, tipping and swerving from the upright and
true, like these palpitating flowers of desire, now this way and now that,
forever drawn and driven by the sweet tyrannies of instinct and impulse.
So rushed the thought in upon me, and if it was not of the divinest or
manliest inspiration, at least it took some uncharity out of me for the
moment. As in mechanical silence Fontenette obeyed the busy requests of
the entomologist, I presently looked more on those two than on the winged
multitude, and thought on, of the myriad true tales of love-weakness and
love-wrath for which they and their two pretty mates were just now so
unlucky as to stand; of the awful naturalness of such things; of the
butterfly beauty and wonder--nay, rather the divine possibilities of the
lives such things so naturally speed to wreck; and then of Tom Moore
almost too playfully singing:
Ah! did we take for Heaven above
But half such pains as we
Take, day and night, for woman's love,
What Angels we should be!
But while I moralized there came a change. Beneath the entomologist's dark
hand, as it searched and hurried throughout the room, the flutter of wings
had ceased as under a wind of death.
"You must have a hundred and fifty of them," I said as the last victim
ceased to flutter.
"Yes."
"Their sale is slow, of course, but every time you sell one, you ought to
get"--I was judging by some prices he had charged me--"you ought to get
two dollars." And I secretly rejoiced for Senda.
"I not can afford to sell t'em," he replied, with his back to me.
"Why, how so?"
"No, it iss t'is kind vhat I can exshange for five, six, maybe seven
specimenss fon Ahfrica undt Owstrahlia. No, I vill not sell t'em."
"Oh, I see," said I, in mortal disgust. "Fontenette, I'm going to bed."
And Fontenette went too.
The next day was cloudless--in two hearts; Senda's, and Fontenette's. As
to the sky, that is another matter; one of the charms of that warm wet
land is that, with all its sunshine, it is almost never without clouds.
And indeed it would be truer to say of my two friends' skies, that they
had clouds, but the clouds were silvered through with happy reassurances.
Jealousy, we are told, once set on fire, burns without fuel; but I must
think that that is oftenest, if not always, the jealousy of a selfish
love. Or, rather--let me quote Senda, as she spoke the only other time she
ever touched upon the subject with us. Our fat neighbor had dragged it in
again as innocently as a young dog brings an old shoe into the parlor,
and, the Fontenettes being absent, she had the nerve and wisdom not to
avoid it. Said she:
"Some of us--not all--have great power to love. Some, not all, who have
sis power--to love--have also se power to trust. Me, I rasser be trustet
and not loved, san to be loved and not trustet."
"How about a little of each?" asked our neighbor.
"Oh! If se _nature_ iss little, sat iss, maybe, very vell--?" She spoke as
kindly as a mother to her babe, but he stole a slow glance here and there,
as though some one had shot him with a pea in church, and dropped the
theme.
Which I, too, will do when I have noted the one thing I had particularly
in mind to say, of Fontenette: that, as Senda remarked--for the above is
an abridgment--"I rasser see chalousie vissout cause, san cause vissout
chalousie;" and that even while I was witness of the profound ferocity of
his jealousy when roused, and more and more as time passed on, I was
impressed with its sweet reasonableness.