Bonaventure Part 24

"Tarbox," persisted the engineer, driving away his own smile, "you know what you are; you are a born contractor! You've found it out, and"--smiling again--"that's why you're looking for Claude."

"Where is he?" asked Mr. Tarbox.

"Well, I told you the truth when I said I didn't know; but I haven't a doubt he's in Vermilionville."

"Neither have I," said the book-agent; "and if I had, I wouldn't give it room. If I knew he was in New Jersey, still I'd think he was in Vermilionville, and go there looking for him. And wherefore? For occult reasons." The two men looked at each other smilingly in the eye, and the boat glided on.

The wind favored them. With only now and then the cordelle, and still more rarely the oars, they moved all day across the lands and waters that were once the fastnesses of the Baratarian pirates. The engineer made his desired observations without appreciable delays, and at night they slept under Achille's thatch of rushes.

As the two travellers stood alone for a moment next morning, the engineer said:

"You seem to be making a study of my pot-hunter."

"It's my natural instinct," replied Mr. Tarbox. "The study of human nature comes just as natural to me as it does to a new-born duck to scratch the back of its head with its hind foot; just as natural--and easier. The pot-hunter is a study; you're right."

"But he reciprocates," said the engineer; "he studies you."

The student of man held his smiling companion's gaze with his own, thrust one hand into his bosom, and lifted the digit of the other: "The eyes are called the windows of the soul,--

'And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.'

"Have you tried to look into his eyes? You can't do it. He won't let you. He's got something in there that he doesn't want you to see."

In the middle of the afternoon, when Achille's skiff was already re-entering the shades of the swamp on his way homeward, and his two landed pa.s.sengers stood on the levee at the head of Harvey's Ca.n.a.l with the Mississippi rolling by their feet and on its farther side the masts and spires of the city, lighted by the western sun, swinging round the long bend of her yellow harbor, Mr. Tarbox offered his hand to say good-by. The surveyor playfully held it.

"I mean no disparagement to your present calling," he said, "but the next time we meet I hope you'll be a contractor."

"Ah!" responded Tarbox, "it's not my nature. I cannot contract; I must always expand. And yet--I thank you.

"'Pure thoughts are angel visitors. Be such The frequent inmates of thy guileless breast.'

"Good luck! Good-by!"

One took the ferry; the other, the west bound train at Gretna.

CHAPTER IX.

NOT BLUE EYES, NOR YELLOW HAIR.

When the St. Pierres found themselves really left with only each other's faces to look into, and the unbounded world around them, it was the father who first spoke:

"Well, Claude, where you t'ink 'better go?"

There had been a long, silent struggle in both men's minds. And now Claude heard with joy this question asked in English. To ask it in their old Acadian tongue would have meant retreat; this meant advance.

And yet he knew his father yearned for Bayou des Acadiens. Nay, not his father; only one large part of his father's nature; the old, French, home-loving part.

What should Claude answer? Grande Pointe? Even for St. Pierre alone that was impossible. "Can a man enter a second time into his mother's womb?" No; the thatched cabin stood there,--stands there now; but, be he happy or unhappy, no power can ever make St. Pierre small enough again to go back into that sh.e.l.l. Let it stand, the lair of one of whom you may have heard, who has retreated straight backward from Grande Pointe and from advancing enlightenment and order,--the village drunkard, Chat-oue.

Claude's trouble, then, was not that his father's happiness beckoned in one direction and his in another; but that his father's was linked on behind his. Could the father endure the atmosphere demanded by the son's widening power? Could the second nature of lifetime habits bear the change? Of his higher spirit there was no doubt. Neither father nor son had any conception of happiness separate from n.o.ble aggrandizement. Nay, that is scant justice; far more than they knew, or than St. Pierre, at least, would have acknowledged, they had caught the spirit of Bonaventure, to call it by no higher name, and saw that the best life for self is to live the best possible for others. "For all others," Bonaventure would have insisted; but "for Claude," St.

Pierre would have amended. They could not return to Grande Pointe.

Where, then, should they go? Claude stood with his arms akimbo, looked into his father's face, tried to hide his perplexity under a smile, and then glanced at their little pile of effects. There lay their fire-arms, the same as ever; but the bundles in Madras handkerchiefs had given place to travelling-bags, and instead of pots and pans here were books and instruments. What reply did these things make? New Orleans? The great city? Even Claude shrank from that thought.

No, it was the name of quite a different place they spoke; a name that Claude's lips dared not speak, because, for lo! these months and months his heart had spoken it,--spoken it at first in so soft a whisper that for a long time he had not known it was his heart he heard. When something within uttered and re-uttered the place's name, he would silently explain to himself: "It is because I am from home.

It is this unfixed camp-life, this life without my father, without Bonaventure, that does it. This is not love, of course; I know that: for, in the first place, I was in love once, when I was fourteen, and it was not at all like this; and in the second place, it would be hopeless presumption in me, muddy-booted vagabond that I am; and in the third place, a burnt child dreads fire. And so it cannot be love.

When papa and I are once more together, this unaccountable longing will cease."

But, instead of ceasing, it had grown. The name of the place was still the only word the heart would venture; but it meant always one pair of eyes, one young face, one form, one voice. Still it was not love--oh, no! Now and then the hospitality of some plantation-house near the camp was offered to the engineers; and sometimes, just to prove that this thing was not love, he would accept such an invitation, and even meet a pretty maiden or two, and ask them for music and song--for which he had well-nigh a pa.s.sion--and talk enough to answer their questions and conjectures about a surveyor's life, etc.; but when he got back to camp, matters within his breast were rather worse than better.

He had then tried staying in camp, but without benefit,--nothing cured, every thing aggravated. And yet he knew so perfectly well that he was not in love, that just to realize the knowledge, one evening, when his father was a day's march ahead, and he was having a pleasant chat with the "chief," no one else nigh, and they were dawdling away its closing hour with pipes, metaphysics, psychology, and like trifles, which Claude, of course, knew all about,--Claude told him of this singular and amusing case of haunting fantasy in his own experience. His hearer had shown even more amus.e.m.e.nt than he, and had gone on smiling every now and then afterward, with a significance that at length drove Claude to bed disgusted with him and still more with himself. There had been one offsetting comfort; an unintentional implication had somehow slipped in between his words, that the haunting fantasy had blue eyes and yellow hair.

"All right," the angry youth had muttered, tossing on his iron couch, "let him think so!" And then he had tossed again, and said below his breath, "It is not love: it is not. But I must never answer its call; if I do, love is what it will be. My father, my father! would that I could give my whole heart to thee as thou givest all to me!"

G.o.d has written on every side of our nature,--on the mind, on the soul, yes, and in our very flesh,--the interdict forbidding love to have any one direction only, under penalty of being forever dwarfed.

This Claude vaguely felt; but lacking the clear thought, he could only cry, "Oh, is it, _is it_, selfishness for one's heart just to be hungry and thirsty?"

And now here sat his father, on all their worldly goods, his rifle between his knees, waiting for his son's choice, and ready to make it his own. And here stood the son, free of foot to follow that voice which was calling to-day louder than ever before, but feeling a.s.sured that to follow it meant love without hope for him, and for this dear father the pain of yielding up the larger share of his son's heart,--as if love were subject to arithmetic!--yielding it to one who, thought Claude, cared less for both of them than for one tress of her black hair, one lash of her dark eyes. While he still pondered, the father spoke.

"Claude, I tell you!" his face lighted up with courage and ambition.

"We better go--Mervilionville!"

Claude's heart leaped, but he kept his countenance. "Vermilionville?

No, papa; you will not like Vermilionville."

"Yaas! I will like him. 'Tis good place! Bonaventure come from yondah.

When I was leav' Gran' Point', Bonaventure, he cry, you know, like I tole you. He tell Sidonie he bringin' ed'cation at Gran' Point' to make Gran' Point' more better, but now ed'cation drive bes' men 'way from Gran' Point'. And den he say, 'St. Pierre, may bee you go Mervilionville; dat make me glad,' he say: 'dat way,' he say, 'what I rob Peter I pay John.' Where we go if dawn't go Mervilionville? St.

Martinville, Opelousas, New Iberia? Too many Creole yondah for me.

Can't go to city; city too big to live in. Why you dawn't like Mervilionville? You write me letter, when you was yondah, you like him fus' cla.s.s!"

Claude let silence speak consent. He stooped, and began to load himself with their joint property. He had had, in his life, several sorts of trouble of mind; but only just now at twenty was he making the acquaintance of his conscience. Vermilionville was the call that had been sounding within him all these months, and Marguerite was the haunting fantasy.

CHAPTER X.

A STRONG TEAM.

I would not wish to offend the self-regard of Vermilionville.

But--what a place in which to seek enlargement of life! I know worth and greatness have sometimes, not to say ofttimes, emerged from much worse spots; from little lazy villages, noisy only on Sunday, with grimier court-houses, deeper dust and mud, their trade more entirely in the hands of rat-faced Isaacs and Jacobs, with more frequent huge and solitary swine slowly scavenging about in abysmal self-occupation, fewer vine-clad cottages, raggeder negroes, and more decay.

Vermilionville is not the worst, at all. I have seen large, and enlarging, lives there.

Hither came the two St. Pierres. "No," Claude said; "they would not go to the Beausoleil house." Privately he would make himself believe he had not returned to any thing named Beausoleil, but only and simply to Vermilionville. On a corner opposite the public square there was another "hotel;" and it was no great matter to them if it was mostly pine-boards, pale wall-paper, and transferable whitewash. But, not to be outdone by its rival round the corner, it had, besides, a piano, of a quality you may guess, and a landlady's daughter who seven times a day played and sang "I want to be somebody's darling," and had no want beyond. The travellers turned thence, found a third house full, conjectured the same of the only remaining one, and took their way, after all, towards Zosephine's. It was quite right, now, to go there, thought Claude, since destiny led; and so he let it lead both his own steps and the thrumping boots of this dear figure in Campeachy hat and soft untrimmed beard, that followed ever at his side.