“Poor ’Thanase!” said the youths and maidens.
And now the war came to an end. Bonaventure was glad. ’Thanase was expected home, but—let him come. If the absent soldier knew what the young folks at the balls knew, he would not make haste in his return. And he did not, as it seemed. Day after day, in group after group, without shouting and without banners, with wounds and scars and tattered garments, some on horses, but many more on foot, the loved ones—the spared ones, remnants of this command and that command and ’Thanase’s command—came home. But day by day brought no ’Thanase.
Bonaventure began to wish for him anxiously. He wanted him back so that this load might be lifted. Thus the bitter would pass out of the sweet; the haunting fear of evil tidings from the absent rival would haunt no more. Life would be what it was to other lads, and Zoséphine one day fall to his share by a better title than he could ever make with ’Thanase in exile. Come, ’Thanase, come, come!
More weeks passed. The youth’s returnedcomrades were all back at their ploughs again and among their herds. ’Thanase would be along by and by, they said; he could not come with them, for he had not been paroled with them; he had been missing—taken prisoner, no doubt—in the very last fight. But presently they who had been prisoners were home also, and still ’Thanase had not come. And then, instead of ’Thanase coming, Chaouache died.
A terror took up its home in the heart of Bonaventure. Every thing he looked upon, every creature that looked upon him, seemed to offer an unuttered accusation. Least of all could he bear the glance of Zoséphine. He did not have to bear it. She kept at home now closely. She had learned to read, and Sosthène and hisvieillehad pronounced her education completed.
In one direction only could the eyes of Bonaventure go, and meet nothing that accused him: that was into the face of the curé. And lest accusation should spring up there, he had omitted his confession for weeks. He was still child enough not to see that the priest was watching him narrowly and tenderly.
One night, away in the small hours, the curé was aroused by the presence of some one in his room.
“Who is that?” He rose from his pillow.
“It is I, father,” said a low voice, and against the darkness of an inner door he saw dimly the small, long nightdress of the boy he loved.
“What gets you up, Bonaventure? Come here. What troubles you?”
“I cannot sleep,” murmured the lad, noiselessly moving near. The priest stroked the lad’s brow.
“Have you not been asleep at all?”
“Yes.”
“But you have had bad dreams that woke you?”
“Only one.”
“And what was that?”
There was a silence.
“Did you dream about—’Thanase, for example?”
“Yes.”
The priest reached out and took the boy’s small, slender hands in his. They were moist and cold.
“And did you dream”—
“I dreamed he was dead. I dream it every night.”
“But, my child, that does not make it so. Would you like to get into bed here with me? No?—or to go back now to your own bed? No? What, then?”
“I do not want to go back to bed any more. I want to go and find ’Thanase.”
“Why, my child, you are not thoroughly awake, are you?”
“Yes, I want to go and find ’Thanase. I have been thinking to-night of all you have told me—of all you said that day in the garden,—and—I want to go and find ’Thanase.”
“My boy,” said the priest, drawing the lad with gentle force to his bosom, “my little old man, does this mean that you have come to the end of all self-service?—that self is never going to be spelt with a capital S any more? Will it be that way if I let you go?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, my son—God only knows whether I am wise or foolish, but—you may go.”
The boy smiled for the first time in weeks, then climbed half upon the bed, buried his face in the priest’s bosom, and sobbed as though his heart had broken.
“It has broken,” said the curé to himself as he clasped him tightly. “It has broken—thank God!”
In such and such a battle, in the last charge across a certain cornfield, or in the hurried falling back through a certain wood, with the murderous lead singing and hitting from yonder dark mass descending on the flank, and the air full of imperious calls, “Halt!”—“Surrender!” a man disappeared. He was not with those who escaped, nor with the dead when they were buried, nor among the wounded anywhere, nor in any group of prisoners. But long after the war was over, another man, swinging a bush scythe among the overgrown corners of a worm fence, found the poor remnant of him, put it scarcely underground, and that was the end. How many times that happened!
Was it so with ’Thanase? No. For Sosthène’s sake the ex-governor had taken much pains to correspond with officials concerning the missing youth, and had secured some slender re-assurances. ’Thanase, though captured, had not been taken to prison.Tidings of general surrender had overhauled him on the way to it, near, I think, the city of Baltimore—somewhere in that region, at any rate; and he had been paroled and liberated, and had started penniless and on foot, south-westward along the railway-tracks.
To find him, Bonaventure must set out, like him on foot, south-eastward over some fifty miles of wagon-road to the nearest railway; eastward again over its cross-ties eighty miles tola ville, the great New Orleans, there to cross the Mississippi. Then away northward, through the deep, trestled swamps, leagues and leagues, across Bayou La Branche and Bayou Desair, and Pass Manchac and North Manchac, and Pontchatoula River two or three times; and out of the swamps and pine barrens into the sweet pine hills, with their great resinous boles rising one hundred—two hundred feet overhead; over meadows and fields and many and many a beautiful clear creek, and ten or more times over the winding Tangipahoa, by narrow clearings, and the old tracks of forgotten hurricanes, and many a wide plantation; until more than two hundred miles from the great city, still northward across the sinking and swelling fields, the low, dark dome of another State’s Capitol must rise amid spires and trees into the blue, and the green ruins of fortifications be passed, and the iron roads be found branching west, north, and east.
Thence all was one wide sea of improbability. Even before a quarter of that distance should have been covered, how many chances of every sort there were against the success of such a search!
“It is impossible that he should find him,” said the ex-governor.
“Well,”—the curé shrugged,—“if he finds no one, yet he may succeed in losing himself.” But in order that Bonaventure in losing himself should not be lost, the priest gave him pens and paper, and took his promise to write back as he went step by step out into the world.
“And learn English, my boy; learn it with all speed; you will find it vastly, no telling how vastly, to your interest—I should say your usefulness. I am sorry I could not teach it to you myself. Here is a little spelling-book and reader for you to commence with. Make haste to know English; in America we should be Americans; would that I could say it to all our Acadian people! but I say it to you, learn English. It may be that by not knowing it you may fail, or by knowing it succeed, in this errand. And every step of your way let your first business be the welfare of others. Hundreds will laugh at you for it: never mind; it will bring you through. Yes, I will tell Sosthène and the others good-by for you. I will tell them you had a dream that compelled you to go at once. Adieu.” And just as the rising sun’s first beam smote the curé’s brimming eyes, his “little old man” turned his face toward a new life, and set forward to enter it.
“Have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man named ’Thanase Beausoleil?”—This question to every one met, day in, day out, in early morning lights, in noonday heats, under sunsetglows, by a light figure in thin, clean clothing, dusty shoes, and with limp straw hat lowered from the head. By and by, as first the land of the Acadians and then the land of the Creoles was left behind, a man every now and then would smile and shake his head to mean he did not understand—for the question was in French. But then very soon it began to be in English too, and by and by not in French at all.
“Sir, have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man named ’Thanase Beausoleil?”
But no one had seen him.
Travel was very slow. Not only because it was done afoot. Many a day he had to tarry to earn bread, for he asked no alms. But after a while he passed eastward into a third State, and at length into the mountains of a fourth.
Meantime the weeks were lengthening into months; the year was in its decline. Might not ’Thanase be even then at home? No. Every week Bonaventure wrote back, “Has he come?” and the answer came back, “He is not here.”
But one evening, as he paced the cross-ties of a railway that hugged a huge forest-clad mountain-side, with the valley a thousand feet below, its stony river shining like a silken fabric in the sunset lights, the great hillsides clad in crimson, green, and gold, and the long, trailing smoke of the last train—a rare, motionless blue gauze—gone to rest in the chill mid-air, he met a man who suddenly descended upon the track in front of him from higher up the mountain,—a great, lank mountaineer. And when Bonaventureasked the apparition the untiring question to which so many hundreds had answered No, the tall man looked down upon the questioner, a bright smile suddenly lighting up the unlovely chin-whiskered face, and asked:
“Makes a fiddle thess talk an’ cry?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he hain’t been gone from hyer two weeks.”
It was true. Only a few weeks before, gaunt, footsore, and ragged, tramping the cross-ties yonder where the railway comes from the eastward, curving into view out of that deep green and gray defile, ’Thanase had come into this valley. So short a time before, because almost on his start homeward illness had halted him by the way and held him long in arrest. But at length he had reached the valley, and had lingered here for days; for it happened that a man in bought clothing was there just then, roaming around and hammering pieces off the rocks, who gave ’Thanase the chance to earn a little something from him, with which the hard-marched wanderer might take the train instead of the cross-ties for as far as the pittance would carry him.
The next sunrise saw Bonaventure, with a new energy in his step, journeying back the way he had come. And so anew the weeks wore by. Once more the streams ran southward, and the landscapes opened wide and fertile.
“Sir,—pardon your stopping,—in what State should I find myself at the present?”
The person inquired of looked blank, examined the questioner from head to foot, and replied:
“In what—oh! I understand; yes. What State—Alabama, yes, Alabama. You must excuse me, I didn’t understand you at first. Yes, this is Alabama.”
“Thank you, sir. Have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man named ’Thanase Beausoleil?”
“Back from the war! Why, everybody done got back from the war long ago.” “Lawng ago-o-o,” the speaker pronounced it, but the pronunciation could not be as untrue as the careless assertion.
A second time, and again a third, Bonaventure fell upon the trail. But each time it was colder than before. And yet he was pushing on as fast as he dared. Many a kind man’s invitation to tarry and rest was gratefully declined. Once, where two railways parted, one leading south, the other west, hefollowed the southern for days, and then came back to the point of separation, and by and by found the lost thread again on the more westward road. But the time since ’Thanase had passed was the longest yet. Was it certainly ’Thanase? Yes; the fiddle always settled that question. And had he not got home? He had not come. Somewhere in the long stretch between Bonaventure and Carancro there must be strange tidings.
On the first New Year’s eve after the war, as the sun was sinking upon the year’s end, Bonaventure turned that last long curve of the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern Railroad, through the rushes, flags, willows, and cypress-stumps of the cleared swamp behind the city of the Creoles, and, passing around the poor shed called the depot, paused at the intersection of Calliope and Magnolia Streets, waiting the turn of chance.
Trace of the lost ’Thanase had brought him at length to this point. The word of a fellow-tramp, pledged on the honor of his guild, gave assurance that thus far the wanted man had come in strength and hope—but more than a month before.
The necessity of moving on presently carried Bonaventure aimlessly into the city along the banks of the New Canal. The lad had shot up in these few months into the full stature, without the breadth, of manhood. The first soft, uneven curls of a light-brown beard were on his thin cheek and chin. Patient weariness and humble perseverance were in his eyes. His coarse, ill-matched attire was whole and, but for the soilureof foot-travel, clean. Companioning with nature had browned his skin, and dried his straight fine hair. Any reader of faces would have seen the lines of unselfish purpose about his lips, and, when they parted nervously for speech, the earnest glow of that purpose in a countenance that neither smiled nor frowned, and, though it was shaded, cast no shadow.
The police very soon knew him. They smiled at one another and tapped the forehead with one finger, as he turned away with his question answered by a shake of the head. It became their habit. They would jerk a thumb over a shoulder after him facetiously.
“Goes to see every unknown white man found dead or drowned. And yet, you know, he’s happy. He’s a heap sight”—sometimes they used other adjectives—“a heap sight happier than us, with his trampin’ around all day and his French and English books at night, as old Tony says. He bunks with old Tony, you know, what keeps that little grocery in Solidelle Street. Tony says his candles comes to more than his bread and meat, or, rather, his rice and crawfish. He’s the funniest crazyIever see. All the crazies I ever see is got some grind for pleasing number one; but this chap is everlastin’ly a-lookin’ out for everybodybutnumber one. Oh, yes, the candles and books,—I reckon they are for number one,—that’s so; but anyhow, that’s what I hear Madame Tony allow.”
The short, wet winter passed. The search stretched on into the spring. It did not, by far, take up the seeker’s whole daily life. Only it was a thread that ran all through it, a dye that colored it. Many otherfactors—observations, occupations, experiences—were helping to make up that life, and to make it, with all its pathetic slenderness, far more than it was likely ever to have been made at Carancro. Through hundreds of miles of tramping the lad had seen, in a singularly complete yet inhostile disentanglement from it, the world of men; glimpses of the rich man’s world with its strivings, steadier views of the poor man’s world with its struggles. The times were strong and rude. Every step of his way had been through a land whose whole civil order had been condemned, shattered, and cast into the mill of revolution for a total remoulding. Every day came like the discharge of a great double-shotted gun. It could not but be that, humble as his walk was, and his years so few, his fevered mind should leap into the questions of the hour like a naked boy into the surf. He made mistakes, sometimes in a childish, sometimes in an older way, some against most worthy things. But withal he managed to keep the main direction of truth, after his own young way of thinking and telling it. He had no such power to formulate his large conclusions as you or even I have; but whatever wrought to enlighten the unlettered, whatever cherished manhood’s rights alike in lofty and lowly, whatever worked the betterment of the poor, whatever made man not too much and not too little his brother’s keeper,—his keeper not by mastery, but by fraternal service,—whatever did these things was to him good religion, good politics. So, at least, the curé told the ex-governor, as from time to time they talked of the absent Bonaventure and of his letters.However, they had to admit one thing: all this did not find ’Thanase.
And why, now, should ’Thanase longer be sought? Was there any thing to gain by finding him dead? Not for Bonaventure; he felt, as plainly as though he had seen an angel write the decree, that to Bonaventure Deschamps no kind of profit or advantage under the sun must come by such a way. But was there any thing to be gained in finding that ’Thanase still lived? The police will tell you, as they told Bonaventure, that in these days of steam and steel and yoked lightning a man may get lost and be found again; but that when he stays lost, and is neither dead nor mad, it is because he wants to be lost. So where was to be the gain in finding ’Thanase alive? Oh, much, indeed, to Bonaventure! The star of a new hope shot up into his starless sky when that thought came, and in that star trembled that which he had not all these weary months of search dared see even with fancy’s eye,—the image of Zoséphine! This—this! that he had never set out to achieve—this! if he could but stand face to face with evidence that ’Thanase could have reached home and would not.
This thought was making new lines in the young care-struck face, when—
“See here,” said a voice one day. Bonaventure’s sleeve was caught by the thumb and forefinger of a man to whom, in passing, he had touched his hat. The speaker was a police captain.
“Come with me.” They turned and walked, Bonaventure saying not a word. They passed a corner,turned to the right, passed two more, turned to the left,—high brick walls on either side, damp, ill-smelling pavements under foot,—and still strode on in silence. As they turned once more to the right in a dim, narrow way, the captain patted the youth softly on the back, and said:
“Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”
So Bonaventure asked none. But presently, in one of those dens called sailors’ boarding-houses, somewhere down on the water-front near the Mint, he was brought face to face with a stranger whose manner seemed to offer the reverse proposition. Of him the youth asked questions and got answers.
’Thanase Beausoleil still lived, far beyond seas. How? why? If this man spake truly, because here in New Orleans, at the last turn in the long, weary journey that was to have brought the young volunteer home, he had asked and got the aid of this informant to ship—before the mast—for foreign parts. But why? Because his ambition and pride, explained the informant, had outgrown Carancro, and his heart had tired of the diminished memory of the little Zoséphine.
Bonaventure hurried away. What storms buffeted one another in his bosom!
Night had fallen upon the great city. Long stretches of street lay now between high walls, and now between low-hanging eaves, empty of human feet and rife with solitude. Through long distances he could run and leap, and make soft, mild pretence of shouting and smiting hands. The quest was ended! rivalry gone of its own choice, guilt washed from the hands, lovereturned to her nest. Zoséphine! Zoséphine! Away now, away to the reward of penance, patience, and loyalty! Unsought, unhoped-for reward! As he ran, the crescent moon ran before him in the sky, and one glowing star, dipping low, beckoned him into the west.
And yet that night a great riot broke out in his heart; and in the morning there was a look on his face as though in that tumult conscience had been drugged, beaten, stoned, and left for dead outside the gate of his soul.
There was something of defiance in his eye, not good to see, as he started down the track of the old Opelousas Railroad, with the city and the Mississippi at his back. When he had sent a letter ahead of him, he had no money left to pay for railway passage. Should he delay for that or aught else, he might never start; for already the ghost of conscience was whispering in at the barred windows of his heart:
“It is not true. The man has told you falsely. It is not true.”
And so he was tramping once more—toward Carancro. And never before with such determined eagerness. Nothing could turn him about now. Once a train came in sight in front of him just as he had started across a trestle-work; but he ran forward across the open ties, and leaped clear of the track on the farther side, just when another instant would have been too late. He stood a moment, only half-pausing among the palmettos and rushes as the hurtling mass thundered by; then pushed quickly into the whirling dust of the track and hurried on between the clicking rails, not knowingthat yonder dark, dwindling speck behind was bearing away from him strange tidings from the curé.
The summer was coming on; the suns were hot. There were leagues on leagues of unbroken shaking prairie with never a hand-breadth of shade, but only the glowing upper blue, with huge dazzling clouds moving, like herds of white elephants pasturing across heavenly fields, too slowly for the eye to note their motion; and below, the far-reaching, tremulous sheen of reed and bulrush, the wet lair of serpent, wild-cat, and alligator. Now and then there was the cool blue of sunny, wind-swept waters winding hither and thither toward the sea, and sometimes miles of deep forest swamp through which the railroad went by broad, frowzy, treeless clearings flanked with impassable oozy ditches; but shade there was none.
Nor was there peace. Always as he strode along, something he could not outgo was at his side, gaunt, wounded, soiled, whispering: “Turn back; turn back, and settle with me,” and ever put off with promises—after that fashion as old as the world—to do no end of good things if only the one right thing might be left undone.
And so because there were no shade, no peace, and no turning back, no one day’s march made him stronger for the next; and at length, when he came to the low thatch of a negro-cabin, under the shadow of its bananas he sank down in its doorway, red with fever.
There he had to stay many days; but in the end he was up and on his way again. He left the Atchafalaya behind him. It was easier going now. There wasshade. Under his trudging feet was the wagon-road along the farther levee of the Teche. Above him great live-oaks stretched their arms clad in green vestments and gray drapings, the bright sugar-cane fields were on his left, and on his right the beautiful winding bayou. In his face, not joy, only pallid eagerness, desire fixed upon fulfilment, and knowledge that happiness was something else; a young, worn face, with hard lines about the mouth and neck; the face of one who had thought self to be dead and buried, and had seen it rise to life again, and fallen captive to it. So he was drawing near to Carancro. Make haste, Bonaventure!
A horse and buggy have this moment been stopped and are standing on a faint rise of ground seven miles out beyond the south-western outskirt of Carancro. The two male occupants of the vehicle are lifting their heads, and looking with well-pleased faces at something out over the plain. You know the curé?—and the ex-governor.
In the far distance, across the vast level, something that looks hardly so large on the plain as an ant on the floor, is moving this way across it. This is what the curé and his friend are watching. Open in the curé’s hand, as if he had just read it aloud again, is that lastletter of Bonaventure’s, sent ahead of him from New Orleans and received some days ago. The governor holds the reins.
What do they see? Some traveller afoot? Can it be that Bonaventure is in sight? That is not even the direction from which Bonaventure, when he comes, will appear. No, speck though it is, the object they are looking at is far larger than a man afoot, or any horse, or horse and calèche. It is a house. It is on wheels, and is drawn by many yoke of oxen. From what the curé is saying we gather that Sosthène has bought this very small dwelling from a neighbor, and is moving it to land of his own. Two great beams have been drawn under the sills at each end, the running gear of two heavy ox-wagons is made to bear up the four ends of these beams, all is lashed firmly into place, the oxen are slowly pulling, the long whips are cracking, the house is answering the gentle traction, and, already several miles away from its first site, it will to-morrow settle down upon new foundations, a homely type of one whose wreath will soon be a-making, and who will soon after come to be the little house’s mistress.
But what have we done—let time slip backward? A little; not much; for just then, as the ex-governor said, “And where is Bonaventure by this time?” Bonaventure had been only an hour or two in the negro-cabin where fever had dragged him down.
Since then the house had not only settled safely upon its new foundations, but Sosthène, in the good, thorough way that was his own, had carried renovation toa point that made the cottage to all intents and purposes a new house. And the curé had looked upon it again, much nearer by; for before a bride dared enter a house so nearly new, it had been deemed necessary for him to come and, before a temporary altar within the dwelling, to say mass in the time of full moon. But not yet was the house really a dwelling; it, and all Carancro, were waiting for the wedding. Make haste, Bonaventure!
He had left the Teche behind him on the east. And now a day breaks whose sunset finds him beyond the Vermilion River. He cannot go aside to the ex-governor’s, over yonder on the right. He is making haste. This day his journey will end. His heart is light; he has thought out the whole matter now; he makes no doubt any longer that the story told him is true. And he knows now just what to do: this very sunset he will reach his goal; he goes to fill ’Thanase’s voided place; to lay his own filial service at the feet of the widowed mother; to be a brother in the lost brother’s place; and Zoséphine?—why, she shall be her daughter, the same as though ’Thanase, not he, had won her. And thus, too, Zoséphine shall have her own sweet preference—that preference which she had so often whispered to him—for a scholar rather than a soldier. Such is the plan, and Conscience has given her consent.
The sun soars far overhead. It, too, makes haste. But the wasted, flushed, hungry-eyed traveller is putting the miles behind him. He questions none to-day that pass him or whom he overtakes; only bows, wipes hiswarm brow, and presses on across the prairie. Straight before him, though still far away, a small, white, wooden steeple rises from out a tuft of trees. It isla chapelle!
The distance gets less and less. See! the afternoon sunlight strikes the roofs of a few unpainted cottages that have begun to show themselves at right and left of the chapel. And now he sees the green window-shutters of such as are not without them, and their copperas or indigo-dyed curtains blowing in and out. Nearer; nearer; here is a house, and yonder another, newly built. Carancro is reached.
He enters a turfy, cattle-haunted lane between rose-hedges. In a garden on one side, and presently in another over the way, children whom he remembers—but grown like weeds since he saw them last—are at play; but when they stop and gaze at him, it is without a sign of recognition. Now he walks down the village street. How empty it seems! was it really always so? Still, yonder is a man he knows—and yonder a woman—but they disappear without seeing him.
How familiar every thing is! There are the two shops abreast of the chapel, Marx’s on this side, Lichtenstein’s on that, their dingy false fronts covered with their same old huge rain-faded words of promise. Yonder, too, behind the blacksmith’s shop, is the little schoolhouse, dirty, half-ruined, and closed—that is, wide-open and empty—it may be for lack of a teacher, or funds, or even of scholars.
“It shall not be so,” said the traveller to himself, “whensheand I”—
His steps grow slow. Yet here, not twenty paces before him, is the home of the curé. Ah! that is just the trouble. Shall he go here first? May he not push on and out once more upon the prairie and make himself known first of all toher? Stopping here first, will not the curé say tarry till to-morrow? His steps grow slower still.
And see, now. One of the Jews in the shop across the street has observed him. Now two stand together and scrutinize him; and now there are three, looking and smiling. Plainly, they recognize him. One starts to come across, but on that instant the quiet of the hamlet is broken by a sound of galloping hoofs.
Bonaventure stands still. How sudden is this change! He is not noticed now; every thing is in the highest animation. There are loud calls and outcries; children are shouting and running, and women’s heads are thrust out of doors and windows. Horsemen come dashing into the village around through the lanes and up the street. Look! they wheel, they rein up, they throw themselves from the rattling saddles; they leave the big wooden stirrups swinging and the little unkempt ponies shaking themselves, and rush into theboutique deMonsieur Lichtenstein, and are talking like mad and decking themselves out on hats and shoulders with ribbons in all colors of the rainbow!
Suddenly they shout, all together, in answer to a shout outside. More horsemen appear. Lichtenstein’s store belches all its population.
“La calége! La calége!” The calèche is coming!
Something, he knows not what, makes Bonaventure tremble.
“Madame,” he says in French to a chattering woman who has just run out of her door, and is standing near him tying a red Madras kerchief on her head as she prattles to a girl,—“madame, what wedding is this?”
“C’est la noce àZoséphine,” she replies, without looking at him, and goes straight on telling her companion how fifty dollars has been paid for the Pope’s dispensation, because the bridal pair are first cousins.
Bonaventure moves back and leans against a paling fence, pallid and faint. But there is no time to notice him—look, look!
Some women on horseback come trotting into the street. Cheers! cheers! and in a moment louder cheers yet—the calèche with the bride and groom and another with the parents have come.
Throw open the church door!
Horsemen alight, horsewomen descend; down, also, come they that were in the calèche. Look, Bonaventure! They form by twos—forward—in they go. “Hats off, gentlemen! Don’t forget the rule!—Now—silence! softly, softly; speak low—or speak not at all; sh-sh! Silence! The pair are kneeling. Hush-sh! Frown down that little buzz about the door! Sh-sh!”
Bonaventure has rushed in with the crowd. He cannot see the kneeling pair; but there is the curé standing over them and performing the holy rite. The priest stops—he has seen Bonaventure! He stammers, and then he goes on. Here beside Bonaventure is a girl so absorbed in the scene that she thinksshe is speaking to her brother, when presently she says to the haggard young stranger, letting herself down from her tiptoes and drawing a long breath:
“La sarimonie est fait.”
It is true; the ceremony is ended. She rises on tiptoe again to see the new couple sign the papers.
Slowly! The bridegroom first, his mark. Step back. Now the little bride—steady! Zoséphine,sa marque. She turns; see her, everybody; see her! brown and pretty as a doe! They are kissing her. Hail, Madame ’Thanase!
“Make way, make way!” The man and wife come forth.—Ah! ’Thanase Beausoleil, so tall and strong, so happy and hale, you do not look to-day like the poor decoyed, drugged victim that woke up one morning out in the Gulf of Mexico to find yourself, without fore-intent or knowledge, one of a ship’s crew bound for Brazil and thence to the Mediterranean!—“Make way, make way!” They mount the calèches, Sosthène after Madame Sosthène; ’Thanase after Madame ’Thanase. “To horse, ladies and gentlemen!” Never mind now about the youth who has been taken ill in the chapel, and whom the curé has borne almost bodily in his arms to his own house. “Mount! Mount! Move aside for the wedding singers!”—The wedding singers take their places, one on this side the bridal calèche, the other on that, and away it starts, creaking and groaning.
“Mais, arretez!—Stop, stop! Before going,passez le ’nisette!—pass the anisette!” May the New-Orleans compounder be forgiven the iniquitousmixture! “Boir les dames avant!—Let the ladies drink first!” Aham! straight from the bottle.
Now, go. The calèche moves. Other calèches bearing parental and grandparental couples follow. And now the young men and maidens gallop after; the cavalcade stretches out like the afternoon shadows, and with shout and song and waving of hats and kerchiefs, away they go! while from window and door and village street follows the wedding cry:
“Adjieu, la calége! Adjieu, la calége!—God speed the wedding pair!”
Coming at first from the villagers, it is continued at length, faint and far, by the attending cavaliers. As mile by mile they drop aside, singly or in pairs, toward their homes, they rise in their stirrups, and lifting high their ribbon-decked hats, they shout and curvette and curvette and shout until the eye loses them, and the ear can barely catch the faint farewell:
“Adjieu, la calége! Adjieu, les mariées!”
Adieu; but only till the fall of night shall bring the wedding ball.
One little tune—and every Acadian fiddler in Louisiana knows it—always brings back to Zoséphine the opening scene of that festive and jocund convocation.She sees again the great clean-swept seed-cotton room of a cotton-gin house belonging to a cousin of the ex-governor, lighted with many candles stuck into a perfect wealth of black bottles ranged along the beams of the walls. The fiddler’s seat is mounted on a table in the corner, the fiddler is in it, each beau has led a maiden into the floor, the sets are made for the contra-dance, the young men stand expectant, their partners wait with downcast eyes and mute lips as Acadian damsels should, the music strikes up, and away they go.
Yes, Zoséphine sees the whole bright scene over again whenever that strain sounds.
Untitled music notation, no lyrics
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It was fine from first to last! The ball closed with the bride’s dance. Many a daughter Madame Sosthène had waltzed that farewell measure with, and now Zoséphine was the last. So they danced it, they two, all the crowd looking on: the one so young and lost in self, the other so full of years and lost to self; eddying round and round each other in this last bright embrace before they part, the mother to swing back into still water, the child to enter the current of a new life.
And then came the wedding supper! At one end ofthe long table the bride and groom sat side by side, and at their left and right the wedding singers stood and sang. In each corner of the room there was a barrel of roasted sweet potatoes. How everybody ate, that night! Rice! beef-balls! pass them here! pass them there! help yourself! reach them with a fork!des riz! des boulettes!more down this way! pass them over heads!des riz! des boulettes!And the anisette!—bad whiskey and oil of anise—never mind that; pour, fill, empty, fill again! Don’t take too much—and make sure not to take too little! How merrily all went on! How gay was Zoséphine!
“Does she know that Bonaventure, too, has come back?” the young maidens whisper, one to another; for the news was afloat.
“Oh, yes, of course; some one had to let it slip. But if it makes any difference, she is only brighter and prettier than before. I tell you—it seems strange, but I believe, now, she never cared for anybody but ’Thanase. When she heard Bonaventure had come back, she only let one little flash out of her eyes at the fool who told her, then said it was the best news that could be, and has been as serene as the picture of a saint ever since.”
The serenity of the bride might have been less perfect, and the one flash of her eyes might have been two, had she known what the curé was that minute saying to the returned wanderer, with the youth’s head pressed upon his bosom, in the seclusion of his own chamber:
“It is all for the best, Bonaventure. It is notpossible that thou shouldst see it so now, but thou shalt hereafter. It is best this way.” And the tears rolled silently down his cheek as the weary head in his bosom murmured back:
“It is best. It is best.”
The curé could only press him closer then. It was much more than a year afterward when he for the first time ventured to add:
“I never wanted you to get her, my dear boy; she is not your kind at all—nay, now, let me say it, since I have kept it unsaid so long and patiently. Do you imagine she could ever understand an unselfish life, or even one that tried to be unselfish? She makes an excellent Madame ’Thanase. ’Thanase is a good, vigorous, faithful, gentle animal, that knows how to graze and lie in the shade and get up and graze again. But you—it is not in you to know how poor a Madame Bonaventure she would have been; not now merely, but poorer and poorer as the years go by.
“And so I say, do not go away. I know why you want to go; you want to run away from a haunting thought that some unlikely accident or other may leave Madame ’Thanase a widow, and you step into his big shoes. They would not fit. Do not go. That thing is not going to happen; and the way to get rid of the troublesome notion is to stay and see yourself outgrow it—and her.”
Bonaventure shook his head mournfully, but staid. From time to time Madame ’Thanase passed before his view in pursuit of her outdoor and indoor cares. But even when he came under her galérie roof he couldsee that she never doubted she had made the very best choice in all Carancro.
And yet people knew—she knew—that Bonaventure not only enjoyed the acquaintance, but sometimes actually went from one place to another on the business, of the great ex-governor. Small matters they may have been, but, anyhow, just think!
Sometimes as he so went or came he saw her squatting on a board at the edge of acoolée, her petticoat wrapped snugly around her limbs, and a limp sunbonnet hiding her nut-brown face, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle. She was her own housekeeper, chambermaid, cook, washerwoman, gooseherd, seamstress, nurse, and all the rest. Her floors, they said, were alwaysbien fourbis(well scrubbed); her beds were high, soft, snug, and covered with the white mesh of her own crochet-needle.
He saw her the oftener because she worked much out on her low veranda. From that place she had a broad outlook upon the world, with ’Thanase in the foreground, at his toil, sometimes at his sport. His cares as a herder,vacheur,—vaché, he called it,—were wherever his slender-horned herds might roam or his stallions lead their mares in search of the sweetest herbage; and when rains filled themaraises, and the cold nor’westers blew from Texas and the sod was spongy with much water, and he went out for feathered game, the numberless mallards, black ducks, gray ducks, teal—with sometimes the canvas-back—and thepoules-d’eau—the water-hens and the rails, and thecache-cache—the snipe—were as likely to settle orrise just before his own house as elsewhere, and the most devastating shot that hurtled through those feathered multitudes was that sent by her husband—hers—her own—possessive case—belonging to her. She was proud of her property.
Sometimesla vieille—for she wasla vieillefrom the very day that she counted her wedding presents, mostly chickens, and turned them loose in the dooryard—sometimes she enjoyed the fine excitement of seeing hervieuxcatching and branding his yearling colts. Small but not uncomely they were: tougher, stronger, better when broken, than the mustang, though, like the mustang, begotten and foaled on the open prairie. Often she saw him catch two for the plough in the morning, turn them loose at noon to find their own food and drink, and catch and work another pair through the afternoon. So what did not give her pride gave her quiet comfort. Sometimes she looked forth with an anxious eye, when a colt was to be broken for the saddle; for as its legs were untied, and it sprang to its feet with ’Thanase in the saddle, and the blindfold was removed from its eyes, the strain on the young wife’s nerves was as much as was good, to see the creature’s tremendous leaps in air and not tremble for its superb, unmovable rider.
Could scholarship be finer than—or as fine as—such horsemanship? And yet, somehow, as time ran on, Zoséphine, like all the rest of Carancro, began to look up with a certain deference, half-conscious, half-unconscious, to the needy young man who was nobody’s love or lover, and yet, in a gentle, unimpassionedway, everybody’s; landless, penniless, artless Bonaventure, who honestly thought there was no girl in Carancro who was not much too good for him, and of whom there was not one who did not think him much too good for her. He was quite outside of all their gossip. How could they know that with all his learning—for he could read and write in two languages and took the Vermilionville newspaper—and with all his books, almost an entire mantel-shelf full—he was feeling heart-hunger the same as any ordinary lad or lass unmated? Zoséphine found her eyes, so to speak, lifting, lifting, more and more as from time to time she looked upon the inoffensive Bonaventure. But so her satisfaction in her own husband was all the more emphatic. If she had ever caught a real impulse toward any thing that even Carancro would have called culture, she had cast it aside now—as to herself; her children—oh! yes; but that would be by and by.
Even of pastimes and sports she saw almost none. For ’Thanase there was, first of all, his fiddle; thenla chasse, the chase; thepapegaie, or, as he called it,pad-go—the shooting-match;la galloche, pitch-farthing; the cock-fight; the five-arpent pony-race; and too often, also,chin-chin, twenty-five-cent poker, and the gossip and glass of the roadside “store.” But for Madame ’Thanase there was only a seat against the wall at the Saturday-night dance, and massà la chapelleonce in two or three weeks; these, and infant baptisms. These showed how fast time and life were hurrying along. The wedding seemed but yesterday, and yet here was little Sosthène, and tiny Marguerite,and cooing Zoséphine the younger—how fast history repeats itself!
But one day, one Sunday, it repeated itself in a different way. ’Thanase was in gay humor that morning. He kissed his wife, tossed his children, played on his fiddle that tune they all liked best, and, while Zoséphine looked after him with young zest in her eye, sprang into the saddle and galloped across the prairieà la chapelleto pass a jolly forenoon atchin-chinin the village grocery.
Since the war almost every one went armed—not for attack, of course; for defence. ’Thanase was an exception.
“My fists,” he said, in the good old drawling Acadian dialect and with his accustomed smile,—“my fists will take care of me.”
One of the party that made up the game with ’Thanase was the fellow whom you may remember as having brought that first news of ’Thanase from camp to Carancro, and whom Zoséphine had discredited. The young husband had never liked him since.
But, as I say, ’Thanase was in high spirits. His jests came thick and fast, and some were hard and personal, and some were barbed with truth, and one, at length, ended in the word “deserter.” The victim grew instantly fierce and red, leaped up crying “Liar,” and was knocked backward to the ground by the long-reaching fist of ’Thanase. He rose again and dashed at his assailant. The rest of the company hastily made way to right and left, chairs were overturned, over went the table, the cards were underfoot. Menran in from outside and from over the way. The two foes clash together, ’Thanase smites again with his fist, and the other grapples. They tug and strain—
“Separate them!” cry two or three of the packed crowd in suppressed earnestness. “Separate them! Bonaventure is coming! And here from the other side the curé too! Oh, get them apart!” But the half-hearted interference is shaken off. ’Thanase sees Bonaventure and the curé enter; mortification smites him; a smothered cry of rage bursts from his lips; he tries to hurl his antagonist from him; and just as the two friends reach out to lay hands upon the wrestling mass, it goes with a great thud to the ground. The crowd recoils and springs back again; then a cry of amazement and horror from all around, the arm of the under man lifted out over the back of the other, a downward flash of steel—another—and another! the long, subsiding wail of a strong man’s sudden despair, the voice of one crying,—
“Zoséphine! Ah! Zoséphine!ma vieille! ma vieille!”—one long moan and sigh, and the finest horseman, the sweetest musician, the bravest soldier, yes, and the best husband, in all Carancro, was dead.
Poor old Sosthène and his wife! How hard they tried, for days, for weeks, to comfort their widowed child! But in vain. Day and night she put them away in fierce grief and silence, or if she spoke wailed always the one implacable answer,—
“I want my husband!” And to the curé the same words,—
“Go tell God I want my husband!”
But when at last came one who, having come to speak, could only hold her hand in his and silently weep with her, she clung to his with both her own, and looking up into his young, thin face, cried,—not with grace of words, and yet with some grace in all her words’ Acadian ruggedness,—
“Bonaventure! Ah! Bonaventure! thou who knowest the way—teach me, my brother, how to be patient.”
And so—though the ex-governor had just offered him a mission in another part of the Acadians’ land, a mission, as he thought, far beyond his deserving, though, in fact, so humble that to tell you what it was would force your smile—he staid.
A year went by, and then another. Zoséphine no longer lifted to heaven a mutinous and aggrieved countenance. Bonaventure was often nigh, and his words were a deep comfort. Yet often, too, her spirit flashed impatience through her eyes when in the childish philosophizing of which he was so fond he put forward—though ever so impersonally and counting himself least of all to have attained—the precepts of self-conquest and abnegation. And then as the flash passed away, with a moisture of the eye repudiated by the pride of the lip, she would slowly shake her head and say:
“It is of no use; I can’t do it! I may be too young—I may be too bad, but—I can’t learn it!”
At last, one September evening, Bonaventure stood at the edge of Sosthène’s galérie, whither Zoséphine had followed out, leavingle vieuxandla vieillein thehouse. On the morrow Bonaventure was to leave Carancro. And now he said,—
“Zoséphine, I must go.”
“Ah, Bonaventure!” she replied, “my children—what will my children do? It is not only that you have taught them to spell and read, though God will be good to you for that! But these two years you have been every thing to them—every thing. They will be orphaned over again, Bonaventure.” Tears shone in her eyes, and she turned away her face with her dropped hands clasped together.
The young man laid his hand upon her drooping brow. She turned again and lifted her eyes to his. His lips moved silently, but she read upon them the unheard utterance: it was a word of blessing and farewell. Slowly and tenderly she drew down his hand, laid a kiss upon it, and said,—
“Adjieu—adjieu,” and they parted.
As Zoséphine, with erect form and firm, clear tread, went by her parents and into the inner room where her children lay in their trundle-bed, the old mother said tole vieux,—
“You can go ahead and repair the schoolhouse now. Our daughter will want to begin, even to-morrow, to teach the children of the village—les zonfants à la chapelle.”
“You think so?” said Sosthène, but not as if he doubted.
“Yes; it is certain now that Zoséphine will always remain the Widow ’Thanase.”
From College Point to Bell’s Point, sixty miles above New Orleans, the Mississippi runs nearly from west to east. Both banks, or “coasts,” are lined with large and famous sugar-plantations. Midway on the northern side, lie the beautiful estates of “Belmont” and “Belle Alliance.” Early one morning in the middle of October, 1878, a young man, whose age you would have guessed fifteen years too much, stood in scrupulously clean, ill-fitting, flimsy garments, on the strong, high levee overlooking these two plantations. He was asking the way to a place called Grande Pointe. Grand Point, he called it, and so may we: many names in Louisiana that retain the French spelling are habitually given an English pronunciation.
A tattered negro mounted on a sunburnt, unshod, bare-backed mule, down in the dusty gray road on the land-side of the embankment, was his only hearer. Fifteen years earlier these two men, with French accents, strangers to each other, would hardly have conversed in English; but the date made the difference.We need not inexorably render the dialect of the white man; pretty enough to hear, it would often be hideous to print. The letterr, for instance, that plague of all nations—before consonants it disappeared; before vowels the tongue failed of that upward curve that makes the good strongr’s of Italy and Great Britain.
The negro pointed over his mule’s ears.
“You see Belle Alliance sugah-house yondeh? Well, behine dah you fine one road go stret thoo the plantation till de wood. Dass ’bout mile, you know. Den she keep stret on thoo de wood ’bout two mile’ mo’, an’ dat fetch you at Gran’ Point’. Hole on; I show you.”
The two men started down the road, the negro on his mule, the stranger along the levee’s crown.
“Dat Gran’ Point’,” resumed the black; “’tain’t no point on de riveh, you know, like dat Bell’ Point, w’at you see yondeh ’twixt dem ah batture willows whah de sun all spread out on the wateh; no, seh. ’Tis jis lil place back in deswamp, raise’ ’bout five, six feet ’bove de wateh. Yes, seh; ’bout t’ree mile’ long, ’alf mile wide. Don’t nobody but Cajun’[1]live back dah. Seem droll you goin’ yondeh.”
“’Tis the reason I go,” said the other, without looking up.
“Yes, seh.”—A short silence.—“Dass nigh fifty year’, now, dat place done been settle’. Ole ’Mian Roussel he was gret hunter. He know dat place. He see ’tis rich groun’. One day he come dare, cut some tree’, buil’ house, plant lil tobahcah. Nex’ year comeole man Le Blanc; den Poché, den St. Pierre, den Martin,—all Cajun’. Oh! dass mo’n fifty year’ ’go. Dey all comes from dis yeh riveh coast; ’caze de rich Creole’, dey buy ’em out. Yes, seh, dat use’ be deCôte Acadien’, right yeh whar yo’ feet stan’in’ on.C’est la côte Acadien’, just ici, oui.” The trudging stranger waived away the right of translation. He had some reason for preferring English. But his manner was very gentle, and in a moment the negro began again.
“Gret place, dat Gran’ Point’. Yes, seh; fo’ tobahcah. Dey make de bes’ Périque tobahcah in de worl’. Yes, seh, right yond’ at Gran’ Point’; an’ de bes’ Périque w’at come from Gran’ Point’, dass de Périque of Octave Roussel, w’at dey use call ’im Chat-oué;[2]but he git tired dat name, and now he got lil boy ’bout twenny-five year’ ole, an’ dey call de ole man Catou, an’ call his lilboyChat-oué. Dey fine dat wuck mo’ betteh. Yes, seh. An’ he got bruddeh name’ ’Mian Roussel. But dat not de ole, ole ’Mian—like dey say de ole he one. ’Caze, you know, he done peg out. Oh, yes, he peg out in de du’in’ o’ de waugh.[3]But he lef’ heap-sight chillen; you know, he got a year’ staht o’ all de res’, you know. Yes, seh. Dey got ’bout hund’ed fifty peop’ yond’ by Gran’ Point’, and sim like dey mos’ all name Roussel.Simdat way tome. An’ ev’y las’ one got a lil fahm so lil you can’t plow her; got dig her up wid a spade. Yes, seh, same like you diggin’ grave; yes, seh.”
The gentle stranger interrupted, still without lifting his eyes from the path. “’Tis better narrowness of land than of virtue.” The negro responded eagerly:
“Oh, dey good sawt o’ peop’, yes. Dey deals fair an’ dey deals square. Dey keeps de peace. Dass ’caze dey mos’ly don’t let whisky git on deir blin’ side, you know. Deydoeslove to dance, and dey marries mawnstus young; but dey not like some niggehs: dey stays married. An’ modess? Dey dess so modess dey shy! Yes, seh, dey de shyes’, easy-goin’es’, modesses’, most p’esumin’ peop’ in de whole worl’! I don’t see fo’ why folks talk ’gin dem Cajun’; on’y dey a lil bit slow.”
The traveller on the levee’s top suddenly stood still, a soft glow on his cheek, a distension in his blue eyes. “My friend, what was it, the first American industry? Was it not the Newfoundland fisheries? Who inaugu’ate them, if not the fishermen of Normandy and Bretagne? And since how long? Nearly fo’ hundred years!”
“Dass so, boss,” exclaimed the negro with the promptitude of an eye-witness; but the stranger continued:—
“The ancestors of the Acadian’—they are the fathers of the codfish!” He resumed his walk.
“Dass so, seh; dass true. Yes, seh, you’ talkin’ mighty true; dey a pow’ful ancestrified peop’, dem Cajun’; dass w’at make dey so shy, you know. An’ dey mighty good han’ in de sugah-house. Dey des watchin’, now, w’en dat sugah-cane git ready fo’ biggin to grind; so soon dey see dat, dey des come a-lopin’in here to Mistoo Wallis’ sugah-house here at Belle Alliance, an’ likewise to Marse Louis Le Bourgeois yond’ at Belmont. You see! de fust t’ing dey gwine ass you when you come at Gran’ Point’—‘Is Mistoo Wallis biggin to grind?’ Well, seh, like I tell you, yeh de sugah-house, an’ dah de road. Dat road fetch you at Gran’ Point’.”
An hour later the stranger, quite alone, had left behind him the broad smooth road, between rustling walls of sugar-cane, that had brought him through Belle Alliance plantation. The way before him was little more than a bridle-path along the earth thrown up beside a draining-ditch in a dense swamp. The eye could run but a little way ere it was confused by the tangle of vegetation. The trees of the all-surrounding forest—sweet-gums, water-oaks, magnolias—cast their shade obliquely along and across his way, and wherever it fell the undried dew still sparkled on the long grass.
A pervading whisper seemed to say good-by to the great human world. Scarce the note of an insect joined with his footsteps in the coarse herbage to break the stillness. He made no haste. Ferns were often about his feet, and vines were both there andeverywhere. The soft blue tufts of the ageratum were on each side continually. Here and there in wet places clumps of Indian-shot spread their pale scroll leaves and sent up their green and scarlet spikes. Of stature greater than his own the golden-rod stood, crested with yellow plumes, unswayed by the still air. Often he had to push apart the brake-canes and press through with bowed head. Nothing met him in the path. Now and then there were faint signs underfoot as if wheels might have crushed the ragged turf long weeks before. Now and then the print of a hoof was seen in the black soil, but a spider had made it her home and spread across it her silken snares. If he halted and hearkened, he heard far away the hawk screaming to his mate, and maybe, looking up, caught a glimpse of him sailing in the upper air with the sunlight glowing in his pinions; or in some bush near by heard the soft rustle of the wren, or the ruffling whiff and nervous “chip” of the cardinal, or saw for an instant the flirt of his crimson robes as he rattled the stiff, jagged fans of the palmetto.
At length the path grew easier and lighter, the woods on the right gave place to a field half claimed for cotton and half given up to persimmon saplings, blackberry-bushes, and rampant weeds. A furry pony with mane and tail so loaded with cockleburs that he could not shake them, lifted his head and stared. A moment afterward the view opened to right and left, and the path struck a grassy road at right angles and ended. Just there stood an aged sow.
“Unclean one,” said the grave wayfarer, “wheredwells your master?—Ignore you the English tongue? But I shall speak not in another; ’tis that same that I am arriving to bring you.”
The brute, with her small bestial eye fixed on him distrustfully and askance, moved enough to the right to let him pass on the other hand, and with his coat on his arm—so strong was the October sun—he turned into the road westward, followed one or two of its slight curves, and presently saw neat fields on either hand, walled in on each farther side by the moss-hung swamp; and now a small, gray, unpainted house, then two or three more, the roofs of others peering out over the dense verdure, and down at the end of the vista a small white spire and cross. Then, at another angle, two men seated on the roadside. Their diffident gaze bore that look of wild innocence that belongs to those who see more of dumb nature than of men. Their dress was homespun. The older was about fifty years old, the other much younger.
“Sirs, have I already reach Gran’ Point’?”
The older replied in an affirmative that could but just be heard, laid back a long lock of his straight brown hair after the manner of a short-haired girl, and rose to his feet.
“I hunt,” said the traveller slowly, “Mr. Maximian Roussel.”
A silent bow.
“’Tis you?”
The same motion again.
The traveller produced a slip of paper folded once and containing a line or two of writing hastily pencilledthat morning at Belle Alliance. Maximian received it timidly and held it helplessly before his downcast eyes with the lines turned perpendicularly, while the pause grew stifling, and until the traveller said:—
“’Tis Mr. Wallis make that introduction.”
At the name of the owner of the beautiful plantation the man who had not yet spoken rose, covered with whittlings. It was like a steer getting up out of the straw. He spoke.
“M’sieu’ Walleece,a commencé à mouliner? Is big-in to gryne?”
“He shall commence in the centre of the next week.”
Maximian’s eyes rose slowly from the undeciphered paper. The traveller’s met them. He pointed to the missive.
“The schoolmaster therein alluded—’tis me.”
“Oh!” cried the villager joyously, “maître d’école!—schooltitcher!”
“But,” said the stranger, “not worthy the title.” He accepted gratefully the hand of one and then of the other.
“Walk een!” said Maximian, “all hand’, walk een house.” They went, Indian file, across the road, down a sinuous footpath, over a stile, and up to his little single-story unpainted house, and tramped in upon the railed galérie.
“EtM’sieu’ Le Bourgeois,” said the host, as the schoolmaster accepted a split-bottomed chair, “he’s big-in to gryne?”
Within this ground-floor veranda—chief appointmentof all Acadian homes—the traveller accepted a drink of water in a blue tumbler, brought by the meek wife. The galérie just now was scattered with the husband’s appliances for making Périque tobacco into “carats”—the carat-press. Its small, iron-ratcheted, wooden windlass extended along the top rail of the balustrade across one of the galérie’s ends. Lines of half-inch grass rope, for wrapping the carats into diminished bulk and solid shape, lay along under foot. Beside one of the doors, in deep hickory baskets, were the parcels of cured tobacco swaddled in cotton cloths and ready for the torture of ropes and windlass. From the joists overhead hung the pods of tobacco-seed for next year’s planting.