Bonaventure Part 27

Mr. Tarbox relaxed his grasp and Zosephine's hand escaped. She never had betrayed to him so much distress as filled her face now. "De man what kill' him git away! You t'ink I git marrie' while dat man alive?

Ho-o-o! You t'ink I let Marguerite see me do dat! Ah! naw!" She waved him away and turned to leave the spot, but he pressed after, and she paused once more. A new possibility lighted his eyes. He said eagerly:

"Describe the man to me. Describe him. How tall was he? How old would he be now? Did they try to catch him? Did you hear me talking yesterday about a man? Is there any picture of him? Have you got one?

Yes, you have; it's in your pocket now with your hand on it. Let me see it."

"Ah! I di'n' want you to see dat!"

"No, I don't suppose, as far as you know yourself, you did." He received it from her, and with his eyes still on her, continued: "No, but you knew that if I got a ghost of a chance, I'd see you alone. You knew what I'd ask you;--yes, you did, Josephine, and you put this thing into your pocket to make it easier to say no."

"Hah! easier! Hah! easier! I need somethin' to _help_ me do dat? Hah!

'Tis _not_ so!" But the weakness of the wordy denial was itself almost a confession.

They moved on. A few steps brought them into better light. Mr. Tarbox looked at the picture. Zosephine saw a slight flash of recognition. He handed it back in silence, and they walked on, saying not a word until they reached the stile. But there, putting his foot upon it to bar the way, he said:

"Josephine, the devil never bid so high for me before in his life as he's bidding for me now. And there's only one thing in the way; he's bid too late."

Her eyes flashed with injured resentment. "Ah, you! you dawn't know not'n'--" But he interrupted:

"Stop, I don't mean more than just what I say. Six years ago--six and a half--I met a man of a kind I'd never met, to know it, before. You know who' I mean, don't you?"

"Bonaventure?"

"Yes. That meeting made a turning-point in my life. You've told me that whatever is best in you, you owe to him. Well, knowing him as I do, I can believe it; and if it's true, then it's the same with me; for first he, and then you, have made another man out of me."

"Ah, naw! Bonaventure, may_be_; but not me; ah, naw!"

"But I tell you, yes! you, Josephine! I'm poor sort enough yet; but I could have done things once that I can't do now. There was a time when if some miserable outlaw stood, or even seemed, maybe, to stand between me and my chances for happiness, I could have handed him over to human justice, so called, as easy as wink; but now? No, never any more! Josephine, I know that man whose picture I've just looked at. I could see you avenged. I could lay my hands, and the hands of the law, on him inside of twenty-four hours. You say you can't marry till the law has laid its penalties on him, or at least while he lives and escapes them. Is that right?"

Zosephine had set her face to oppose his words only with unyielding silence, but the answer escaped her:

"Ya.s.s, _'tis_ so. 'Tis ri-ght!"

"No, Josephine. I know you _feel_ as if it were; but you don't _think_ so. No, you don't; I know you better in this matter than you know yourself, and you don't think it's right. You know justice belongs to the State, and that when you talk to yourself about what _you_ owe to justice, it means something else that you're too sweet and good to give the right name to, and still want it. You don't want it; you don't want revenge, and here's the proof; for, Josephine, you know, and I know, that if I--even without speaking--with no more than one look of the eye--should offer to buy your favor at that price, even ever so lawfully, you'd thank me for one minute, and then loathe me to the end of your days."

Zosephine's face had lost its hardness. It was drawn with distress.

With a gesture of repulsion and pain she exclaimed:

"I di'n' mean--I di'n' mean--Ah!"

"What? private revenge? No, of course you didn't! But what else would it be? O Josephine! don't I know you didn't mean it? Didn't I tell you so? But I want you to go farther. I want you to put away forever the _feeling_. I want to move and stand between you and it, and say--whatever it costs me to say it--'G.o.d forbid!' I do say it; I say it now. I can't say more; I can't say less; and somehow,--I don't know how--wherever you learned it--I've learned it from you."

Zosephine opened her lips to refuse; but they closed and tightened upon each other, her narrowed eyes sent short flashes out upon his, and her breath came and went long and deep without sound. But at his last words she saw--the strangest thing--to be where she saw it--a tear--_tears_--standing in his eyes; saw them a moment, and then could see them no more for her own. Her lips relaxed, her form drooped, she lifted her face to reply, but her mouth twitched; she could not speak.

"I'm not so foolish as I look," he said, trying to smile away his emotion. "If the State chooses to hunt him out and put him to trial and punishment, I don't say I'd stand in the way; that's the State's business; that's for the public safety. But it's too late--you and Bonnyventure have made it too late--for me to help any one, least of all the one I love, to be revenged." He saw his words were prevailing and followed them up. "Oh! you don't need it any more than you really want it, Josephine. You mustn't ever look toward it again. I throw myself and my love across the path. Don't walk over us. Take my hand; give me yours; come another way; and if you'll let such a poor excuse for a teacher and guide help you, I'll help you all I can, to learn to say 'forgive us our trespa.s.ses.' You can begin, now, by forgiving me.

I may have thrown away my last chance with you, but I can't help it; it's my love that spoke. And if I have spoiled all and if I've got to pay for the tears you're shedding with the greatest disappointment of my life, still I've had the glory and the sanctification of loving you. If I must say, I can say,

''Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.'

Must I? Are you going to make me say that?"

Zosephine, still in tears, silently and with drooping head pushed her way across the stile and left him standing on the other side. He sent one pleading word after her:

"Isn't it most too late to go the rest of the way alone?"

She turned, lifted her eyes to his for an instant, and nodded. In a twinkling he was at her side. She glanced at him again and said quite contentedly:

"Ya.s.s; _'tis_ so," and they went the short remnant of the way together.

CHAPTER XII.

THE BEAUSOLEILS AND ST. PIERRES.

You think of going to New Orleans in the spring. Certainly, the spring is the time to go. When you find yourself there go some day for luncheon--if they haven't moved it, there is talk of that,--go to the Christian Women's Exchange, already mentioned, in the Rue Bourbon,--French Quarter. You step immediately from the sidewalk into the former drawing-room of a house built early in the century as a fas.h.i.+onable residence. That at least is its aspect. Notice, for instance, in the back parlor, crowded now, like the front one, with eating-tables, a really interesting old wooden mantelpiece. Of course this is not the way persons used to go in old times. They entered by the porte-cochere and open carriage-way upon which these drawing-rooms still open by several gla.s.s doors on your right. Step out there. You find a veranda crowded with neat white-clothed tables. Before some late alterations there was a great trellis full of green suns.h.i.+ne and broken breezes entangled among vines of trumpet-creeper and the Scuppernong grape. Here you will be waited on, by small, blue-calico-robed damsels of Methodist unsophistication and Presbyterian propriety, to excellent refreshment; only, if you know your soul's true interest, eschew their fresh bread and insist on having yesterday's.

However, that is a matter of taste there, and no matter at all here.

All I need to add is that there are good apartments overhead to be rented to women too good for this world, and that in the latter end of April, 1884, Zosephine and Marguerite Beausoleil here made their home.

The tavern was sold. The old life was left far behind. They had done that dreadful thing that everybody deprecates and everybody likes to do--left the country and come to live in the city. And Zosephine was well pleased. A man who had tried and failed to be a merchant in the city, he and his wife, took the tavern; so Zosephine had not reduced the rural population--had not sinned against "stastistics."

Besides, she had the good conscience of having fled from Mr.

Tarbox--put U. and I. apart, as it were--and yet without being so hid but a suitor's proper persistency could find her. Just now he was far away prosecuting the commercial interests of Claude's one or two inventions; but he was having great success; he wrote once or twice--but got no reply--and hoped to be back within a month.

When Marguerite, after her mother's receipt of each of these letters, thought she saw a cloud on her brow, Zosephine explained, with a revival of that old look of sweet self-command which the daughter so loved to see, that they contained matters of business not at all to be called troubles. But the little mother did not show the letters. She could not; Marguerite did not even know their writer had changed his business. As to Claude, his name was never mentioned. Each supposed the other was ignorant that he was in the city, and because he was never mentioned each one knew the other was thinking of him.

Ah, Claude! what are you thinking of? Has not your new partner in business told you they are here? No, not a word of it. "That'll keep till I get back," Mr. Tarbox had said to himself; and such shrewdness was probably not so ungenerous, after all. "If you want a thing done well, do it yourself," he said one evening to a man who could not make out what he was driving at; and later Mr. Tarbox added to himself, "The man that flies the kite must hold the thread." And so he kept his counsel.

But that does not explain. For we remember that Claude already knew that Marguerite was in the city, at least had her own mother's word for it. Here, weeks had pa.s.sed. New Orleans is not so large; its active centre is very small. Even by accident, on the street, Ca.n.a.l Street especially, he should have seen her time and again.

And he did not; at any rate not to know it. She really kept very busy indoors; and in other doors so did he. More than that, there was his father. When the two first came to the city St. Pierre endured the town for a week. But it was martyrdom, doing it. Claude saw this. Mr.

Tarbox was with him the latter part of the week. He saw it. He gave his suggestive mind to it for one night. The next day St. Pierre and he wandered off in street-cars and on foot, and by the time the sun went down again a new provision had been made. At about ninety minutes' jaunt from the city's centre, up the river, and on its farther sh.o.r.e, near where the old "Company Ca.n.a.l" runs from a lock in the river bank, back through the swamps and into the Baratarian lakes, St. Pierre had bought with his lifetime savings a neat house and fair-sized orangery. No fields? None:

"You see, bom-bye [by-and-by] Claude git doze new mash-in' all right, he go to ingineerin' agin, and him and you [Tarbox] be takin' some cawntrac' for buil' levee or break up old steamboat, or raise somet'in' what been sunk, or somet'in' dat way. And den he certain'

want somboddie to boss gang o' fellows. And den he say, 'Papa, I want you.' And den I say how I got fifty arpent' [42 acres] rice in field.

And den he say, 'How I goin' do widout you?' And den dare be fifty arpent' rice gone!" No, no fields.

Better: here with the vast wet forest at his back; the river at his feet; the ca.n.a.l, the key to all Barataria, Lafourche, and Terrebonne, full of Acadian fishermen, hunters, timber-cutters, moss-gatherers, and the like; the great city in sight from yonder neighbor's bal.u.s.traded house-top; and Claude there to rally to his side or he to Claude's at a moment's warning; he would be an operator--think of that!--not of the telegraph; an operator in the wild products of the swamp, the _prairies tremblantes_, the lakes, and in the small harvests of the _pointes_ and bayou margins: moss, saw-logs, venison, wild-duck, fish, crabs, shrimp, melons, garlic, oranges, Perique tobacco. "Knowledge is power;" he knew wood, water, and sky by heart, spoke two languages, could read and write, and understood the ways and tastes of two or three odd sorts of lowly human kind. Self-command is dominion; I do not say the bottle went never to his lips, but it never was lifted high. And now to the blessed maxim gotten from Bonaventure he added one given him by Tarbox: "In h-union ees strank!" Not mere union of hands alone; but of counsels! There were Claude and Tarbox and he!

For instance; at Mr. Tarbox's suggestion Claude brought to his father from the city every evening, now the "Picayune" and now the "Times-Democrat." From European and national news he modestly turned aside. Whether he read the book-notices I do not know; I hope not. But when he had served supper--he was a capital camp cook--and he and Claude had eaten, and their pipes were lighted, you should have seen him scanning the latest quotations and debating the fluctuations of the moss market, the shrimp market, and the garlic market.

Thus Claude was rarely in the city save in the busy hours of the day.

Much oftener than otherwise, he saw the crimson sunsets, and the cool purple sunrises as he and St. Pierre pulled in the father's skiff diagonally to or fro across the Mississippi, between their cottage and the sleepy outposts of city street-cars, just under the levee at the edge of that green oak-dotted plain where a certain man, as gentle, shy, and unworldly as our engineer friend thought Claude to be, was raising the vast buildings of the next year's Universal Exposition.

But all this explains only why Claude did not, to his knowledge, see Marguerite by accident. Yet by intention! Why not by intention?

First, there was his fear of sinning against his father's love. That alone might have failed to hold him back; but, second, there was his helplessness. Love made Tarbox, if any thing were needed to make him, brave; it made Claude a coward. And third, there was that helpless terror of society in general, of which we have heard his friend talk.

I have seen a strong horse sink trembling to the earth at the beating of an empty drum. Claude looked with amazed despair at a man's ability to overtake a pretty girl acquaintance in Ca.n.a.l Street, and walk and talk with her. He often asked himself how he had ever been a moment at his ease those November evenings in the tavern's back-parlor at Vermilionville. It was because he had a task there; sociality was not the business of the hour.