Time did pass--in days and weeks of that quiet sort which make us forget
in actual life that such is the way in good stories also. Innumerable
crops were growing in the fields, countless ships were sailing or steaming
the monotonous leagues of their long wanderings from port to port, some
empty, some heavy-laden, like bees between garden and hive:
The corn-tops were ripe and the meadows were in bloom
And the birds made music all the day.
Many of our days must not be the wine, but only small bits of the vine, of
life. We cannot gather or eat _them_; we can only let them grow, branch,
blossom, get here and there green grapes, scarce a tenth of a tithe, in
bulk or weight, of the whole growth, and "in due season--if we faint not"
pluck the purpled clusters. And as the vine is--much, too, as the vine is
tended, so will be the raisins and the wine. There is nothing in life for
which to be more thankful, or in which to be more diligent, than its
intermissions. This is not my sermonizing. I am not going to put
everything off upon "Senda," but really this was hers. I have edited it a
trifle; her inability to make, in her pronunciation, a due difference
between wine and vine rather dulled the point of her moral.
Fontenette remarked to her one Sunday afternoon in our garden, that she
must have got her English first from books.
"Yes," she said, "I didt. Also I have many, many veeks English
conversations lessons befo'e Ame'ica. But I cannot se p'onunciation get;
because se spelling. Hah! I can _not_ sat spelling get!"
O, but didn't I want to offer my services? But, like Bunyan's Christian, I
recalled a text and so got by; which text was the wise saying of that
female Solomon, "se aunt of my muss-er"--"One man can't ever'sing have,
and mine"--establishment is already complete.
Meantime, Mrs. Fontenette, from farthest off in our group, had slipped
around to the Baroness. She spoke something low, stroking her downy fan
and blushing with that damsel sweetness of which her husband was so openly
fond.
"O no, I sank you!" answered Senda, in an undulating voice. "I sank you
v'ey much, but I cannot take se time to come to yo' house, and I cannot
let you take se trouble _too_ come _too_ mine. No, if I can have me only
se right soughts, and find me se right vords for se right soughts, I sink
I leave se p'onunciation to se mercy of P'ovidence."
Mrs. Fontenette blushed as prettily as a child, and let her husband take
her hand as he said, "The Providence that wou'n' have mercy on such a
pronunshation like that--ah well, 'twould have to become v'ey unpopular!"
"Anyhow," cooed Senda, "I risk it;" and then to his wife--"For se present,
siss betteh I sew for you san spell for you."
Thus was our fair neighbor at every turn overmatched by the trustful love
of the man and watchful love of the woman, whose fancied inferiority was
her excuse for an illicit infatuation; an infatuation which little by
little became a staring fact--only not to Fontenette. You know, you can
hide such a thing from those who love and trust you, but not long from
those who do not; and if you are not old in sin--Flora and the Baron were
infants--you will almost certainly think that a condition hid from those
who love and trust you is hid from all! O fools! the very urchins of the
playground will presently have found you out and be guessing at broken
laws, though there be only broken faiths and the anguish of first steps in
perfidy.
We could not help but see, and yet for all our seeing we could not help.
The matter never took on flagrancy enough to give ever so kind an
intervener a chance to speak with effect. It was pitiful to see how little
gratification they got out of it; especially she, with that silly belief
in her ability to rekindle his spiritual energies and lift him into the
thin air of her transcendentalisms; slipping, nevertheless, bit by bit,
down the precipitous incline between her vaporous refinements and his
wallowing animalisms; too destitute of the love that loves to give, or of
courage, or of cunning, to venture into the fires of real passion, but
forever craving flattery and caresses, and for their sake forever holding
him over the burning coals of unfulfilled desire.
How could we know these things so positively?
By the entomologist; the child of science. Science yearns ever to know and
to tell. Truth for truth's sake! He had no strong _moral_ feeling against
a lie; but he had never had the slightest _use_ for a lie, and a
prevarication on his tongue would have been as strange to him as castanets
in his palms. Guile takes alertness, adroitness; and the slim pennyworth
of these that he could command he used up, no doubt, on Fontenette. I
noticed that after an hour with the Creole he always looked tortured and
exhausted. With us he was artless to the tips of his awful finger-nails.
Nor was Mrs. Fontenette a skilful dissembler; she over-concealed things so
revealingly. Then she was so helplessly enamoured and in so childish a
way. I venture one of the penalties almost any woman may have to pay for
bringing to the altar only the consent to be loved is to find herself,
some time, at last, far from the altar, a Titania, a love's fool. Our
Titania pointed us to the fact that the Baron's wife never tried to divert
his mind from the one pursuit that enthralled it; and she borrowed one of
our garden alleys in which to teach him--grace-hoops! He never caught one
from her nor threw one that she could catch; but, ah! with her coaxing and
commanding, her sweet taunting and reprimanding and his utter lack of
surprise at them, how much she betrayed! Fontenette came, learned in a few
throws, and was charmed with the toys--a genuine lover always takes to
them kindly--but Mrs. Fontenette was by this time tired, and she never
again felt rested when her husband mentioned the game.
Furthermore, their countenances!--hers and the entomologist's--especially
when in repose--you could read the depths of experience they had sounded,
by the lines and shadows that came and went, or stayed, as one may read
the depths of a bay by the passing of wind and light, day by day, over its
waters--particularly if the waters are not very deep.
They made painful reading. What degrees of heart-wretchedness came and
went or stayed with them, we may have over--we may have underestimated.
God knows. In two months Mrs. Fontenette grew visibly older and less
pretty, yet more nearly beautiful; while he, by every sign, was gradually
awakening back--or, shall we not say, being now first born?--to life,
through the pangs of a torn mind; mind, not conscience; but pangs never of
sated, always of the famished sort.