CHAPTER VII.

‘The proper study of mankind is man.* * * * *Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.’

“This season I’ve been studying these Acadian people. And I like them! They don’t like to be reminded that they’re Acadians. Well, that’s natural; the Creoles used to lord it over them so when the Creoles were slave-holding planters and they were small farmers. That’s about past now. The Acadians are descended from peasants, that’s true, while some Creoles are from the French nobility. But, hooh! wouldn’t any fair-minded person”—the horsemenare within earshot; they are staring at the silk hat—“Adjieu.”

“Adjieu.” They pass.

“—Wouldn’t any fair-minded person that knows what France was two or three hundred years ago—show you some day in the ‘Album’—about as lief be descended from a good deal of that peasantry as from a good deal of that nobility? I should smile! Why, my dear—friend, the day’s coming when the Acadians will be counted as good French blood as there is in Louisiana! They’re the only white people that ever trod this continent—island or mainland—who never on their own account oppressed anybody. Some little depredation on their British neighbors, out of dogged faithfulness to their king and church,—that’s the worst charge you can make. Look at their history! all poetry and pathos! Look at their character! brave, peaceable, loyal, industrious, home-loving”—

But Zoséphine was looking at the speaker. Her face is kindled with the inspiration of his praise. His own eyes grow ardent.

“Look at their women! Ah, Josephine, I’m looking at one! Don’t turn away.

—‘One made upOf loveliness alone;A woman, of her gentle sexThe seeming paragon.’

‘The reason firm, the temperate will,Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;A perfect woman nobly planned,To warn, to comfort, and command.’

“You can’t stop me, Josephine; it’s got to come, and come right now. I’m a homeless man, Josephine, tired of wandering, with a heart bigger and weaker than I ever thought I had. I want you! I love you! I’ve never loved anybody before in my life except myself, and I don’t find myself as lovely as I used. Oh, take me, Josephine! I don’t ask you to love as if you’d never loved another. I’ll take what’s left, and be perfectly satisfied! I know you’re ambitious, and I love you for that! But I do think I can give you a larger life. With you for a wife, I believe I could be a man you needn’t be ashamed of. I’m already at the head of my line. Best record in the United States, Josephine, whether by the day, week, month, year, or locality. But if you don’t like the line, I’ll throw up the ‘A. of U. I.’ and go into any thing you say; for I want to lift you higher, Josephine. You’re above me already, by nature and by rights, but I can lift you, I know I can. You’ve got no business keeping tavern; you’re one of Nature’s aristocrats. Yes, you are! and you’re too young and lovely to stay a widow—in a State where there’s more men than there’s women. There’s a good deal of the hill yet to climb before you start down. Oh, let’s climb it together, Josephine! I’ll make you happier than you are, Josephine; I haven’t got a bad habit left; such as I had, I’ve quit; it don’t pay. I don’t drink, chew, smoke, tell lies, swear, quarrel, play cards, make debts, nor belong to a club—be my wife! Your daughter ’ll soon be leaving you. You can’t be happy alone. Take me! take me!” He urges his horse close—her face is averted—andlays his hand softly but firmly on her two, resting folded on the saddle-horn. They struggle faintly and are still; but she slowly shakes her hanging head.

“O Josephine! you don’t mean no, do you? Look this way! you don’t mean no?” He presses his hand passionately down upon hers. Her eyes do not turn to his; but they are lifted tearfully to the vast, unanswering sky, and as she mournfully shakes her head again, she cries,—

“I dunno! I dunno! I can’t tell! I got to see Marguerite.”

“Well, you’ll see her in an hour, and if she”—

“Naw, naw! ’tis not so; Marguerite is in New Orleans since Christmas.”

Very late in the evening of that day Mr. Tarbox entered the principal inn of St. Martinville, on the Teche. He wore an air of blitheness which, though silent, was overdone. As he pushed his silk hat back on his head, and registered his name with a more than usual largeness of hand, he remarked:

“‘Man wants but little here below,Nor wants that little long.’

“Give me a short piece of candle and a stumpy candlestick—and

‘Take me up, and bear me henceInto some other chamber’”—

“Glad to see you back, Mr. Tarbox,” responded the host; and as his guest received the candle and heard the number of his room,—“books must ’a’ went well this fine day.”

Mr. Tarbox fixed him with his eye, drew a soft step closer, said in a low tone:

“‘My only booksWere woman’s looks,And folly’s all they’ve taught me.’”

The landlord raised his eyebrows, rounded his mouth, and darted out his tongue. The guest shifted the candle to his left hand, laid his right softly upon the host’s arm, and murmured:

“List! Are we alone? If I tell thee something, wilt thou tell it never?”

The landlord smiled eagerly, shook his head, and bent toward his speaker.

“Friend Perkins,” said Mr. Tarbox, in muffled voice—

“‘So live, that when thy summons comes to joinThe innumerable caravan which movesTo that mysterious realm where each shall takeHis chamber in the silent halls of death,Thou go not, like the quarry-slave, at night,Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothedBy an unfaltering trust, approach thy graveLike one that wraps the drapery of his couchAbout him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.’

“Don’t let the newspapers get hold of it—good-night.”

But it was only at daybreak that Mr. Tarbox disordered the drapery of his couch to make believe he had slept there, and at sunrise he was gone to find Claude.

Had Marguerite gone to New Orleans the better to crush Claude out of her heart? No, no! Her mother gave an explanation interesting and reasonable enough, and at the same time less uncomfortably romantic. Marguerite had gone to the city to pursue studies taught better there than in Opelousas; especially music.

Back of this was a reason which she had her mother’s promise not to mention,—the physician’s recommendation—a change of scene. He spoke of slight malarial influences, and how many odd forms they took; of dyspepsia and its queer freaks; of the confining nature of house cares, and of how often they “ran down the whole system.” His phrases were French, but they had all the weary triteness of these; while Marguerite rejoiced that he did not suspect the real ailment, and Zoséphine saw that he divined it perfectly.

A change of scene. Marguerite had treated the suggestion lightly, as something amusingly out of proportion to her trivial disorder, but took pains not to reject it. Zoséphine had received it with troubled assent, and mentioned the small sugar-farm and orangery of the kinsman Robichaux, down on Bayou Terrebonne. But the physician said, “If that would not be too dull;” mentioned, casually, the city, andsaw Marguerite lighten up eagerly. The city was chosen; the physician’s sister, living there, would see Marguerite comfortably established. All was presently arranged.

“And you can take your violin with you, and study music,” he said. Marguerite had one, and played it with a taste and skill that knew no competitor in all the surrounding region.

It had belonged to her father. Before she was born, all Lafayette parish had known it tenderly. Before she could talk she had danced—courtesied and turned, tiptoed and fallen and risen again, latter end first, to the gay strains he had loved to wring from it. Before it seemed safe, for the instrument, to trust it in her hands, she had learned to draw its bow; and for years, now, there had been no resident within the parish who could not have been her scholar better than to be her teacher.

When Claude came, she had shut the violin in its case, and left the poor thing hidden away, despising its powers to charm, lost in self-contempt, and helpless under the spell of a chaste passion’s first enchantment. When he went, she still forgot the instrument for many days. She returned with more than dutiful energy to her full part in the household cares, and gave every waking hour not so filled to fierce study. If she could not follow him—if a true maiden must wait upon faith—at least she would be ready if fate should ever bring him back.

But one night, when she had conned her simple books until the words ran all together on the page,some good angel whispered, “The violin!” She took it and played. The music was but a song, but from some master of song. She played it, it may be, not after the best rules, yet as one may play who, after life’s first great billow has gone over him, smites again his forgotten instrument. With tears, of all emotions mingled, starting from her eyes, and the bow trembling on the strings, she told the violin her love. And it answered her:

“Be strong! be strong! you shall not love for naught. He shall—he shall come back—he shall come back and lead us into joy.” From that time the violin had more employment than ever before in all its days.

So it and Marguerite were gone away to the great strange city together. The loneliness they left behind was a sad burden to Zoséphine. No other one thing had had so much influence to make so nearly vulnerable the defences of her heart when Mr. Tarbox essayed to storm them. On the night following that event, the same that he had spent so sleeplessly in St. Martinville, she wrote a letter to Marguerite, which, though intended to have just the opposite effect, made the daughter feel that this being in New Orleans, and all the matter connected with it, were one unmixed mass of utter selfishness. The very written words that charged her to stay on seemed to say, “Come home!” Her strong little mother! always quiet and grave, it is true, and sometimes sad; yet so well poised, so concentrated, so equal to every passing day and hour!—she to seem—in thisletter—far out of her course, adrift, and mutely and dimly signalling for aid! The daughter read the pages again and again. What could they mean? Here, for instance, this line about the mother’s coming herself to the city, if, and if, and if!

The letter found Marguerite in the bosom of a family that dwelt in the old Rue Bourbon, only a short way below Canal Street, the city’s centre. The house stands on the street, its drawing-room windows opening upon the sidewalk, and a narrow balcony on the story above shading them scantily at noon. A garden on the side is visible from the street through a lofty, black, wrought-iron fence. Of the details within the enclosure, I remember best the vines climbing the walls of the tall buildings that shut it in, and the urns and vases, and the evergreen foliage of the Japan plum-trees. A little way off, and across the street, was the pleasant restaurant and salesroom of the Christian Women’s Exchange.

The family spoke English. Indeed, they spoke it a great deal; and French—also a great deal. The younger generation, two daughters and a son, went much into society. Their name was that of an ancient French noble house, with which, in fact, they had no connection. They took great pains to call themselves Creoles, though they knew well enough they were Acadians. The Acadian caterpillar often turns into a Creole butterfly. Their great-grandfather, one of the children of the Nova-Scotian deportation, had been a tobacco-farmer on the old Côte Acadien in St. John the Baptist parish. Lake des Allemands lay there,just behind him. In 1815, his son, their grandfather, in an excursion through the lake and bayou beyond, discovered, far south-eastward in the midst of the Grande Prairie des Allemands, a “pointe” of several hundred acres extent. Here, with one or two others, he founded the Acadian settlement of “La Vacherie,” and began to build a modest fortune. The blood was good, even though it was not the blood of ancient robbers; and the son in the next generation found his way, by natural and easy stages, through Barataria and into the city, and became the “merchant” of his many sugar and rice planting kinsmen and neighbors.

It was a great favor to Marguerite to be taken into such a household as this. She felt it so. The household felt it so. Yet almost from the start they began to play her, in their social world, as their best card—when they could. She had her hours of school and of home study; also her music, both lessons and practice; was in earnest both as to books and violin, and had teachers who also were in earnest; and so she found little time for social revels. Almost all sociality is revel in New-Orleans society, and especially in the society she met.

But when she did appear, somehow she shone. A native instinct in dress,—even more of it than her mother had at the same age,—and in manners and speech, left only so little rusticity as became itself a charm rather than a blemish, suggested the sugar-cane fields; the orange-grove; the plantation-house, with pillared porch, half-hidden in tall magnolias and laurestines and bushes of red and white camellias higherand wider than arms can reach, and covered with their regal flowers from the ground to their tops; and the bayou front lined with moss-draped live-oaks, their noonday shadows a hundred feet across. About her there was not the faintest hint of the country tavern. She was but in her seventeenth year; but on her native prairies, where girls are women at fourteen, seventeen was almost an advanced stage of decay. She seemed full nineteen, and a very well-equipped nineteen as social equipments went in the circle she had entered. Being a schoolgirl was no drawback; there are few New-Orleans circles where it is; and especially not in her case, for she needed neither to titter nor chatter,—she could talk. And then, her violin made victory always easy and certain.

Sometimes the company was largely of down-town Creoles; sometimes of up-town people,—“Americans;” and often equally of the two sorts, talking French and English in most amusing and pleasing confusion. For the father of the family had lately been made president of a small bank, and was fairly boxing the social compass in search of depositors. Marguerite had not yet discovered that—if we may drag the metaphor ashore—to enter society is not to emerge upon an unbroken table-land, or that she was not on its highest plateau. She noticed the frequency with which she encountered unaccomplished fathers, stupid mothers, rude sons and daughters, and ill-distributed personal regard; but she had the common-sense not to expect more of society than its nature warrants, guessed rightly that she would find the samething anywhere else, and could not know that these elements were less mixed with better here than in many other of the city’s circles, of whose existence she had not even heard. However:

Society, at its very best, always needs, and at its best or worst always contains, a few superior members, who make themselves a blessing by working a constant, tactful redistribution of individuals by their true values, across the unworthy lines upon which society ever tends to stratify. Such a person, a matron, sat with Marguerite one April evening under a Chinese lantern in the wide, curtained veranda of an Esplanade-street house whose drawing-room and Spanish garden were filled with company.

Marguerite was secretly cast down. This lady had brought her here, having met her but a fortnight before and chosen her at once, in her own private counsels, for social promotion. And Marguerite had played the violin. In her four months’ advanced training she had accomplished wonders. Her German professor made the statement, while he warned her against enthusiastic drawing-room flattery. This evening she had gotten much praise and thanks. Yet these had a certain discriminative moderation that was new to her ear, and confirmed to her, not in the pleasantest way, the realization that this company was of higher average intelligence and refinement than any she had met before. She little guessed that the best impression she had ever made she made here to-night.

Of course it was not merely on account of the violin. She had beauty, not only of face and head, but ofform and carriage. So that when she stood with her instrument, turning, as it were, every breath of air into music, and the growing volume of the strains called forth all her good Acadian strength of arms and hand, she charmed not merely the listening ear, but the eye, the reason, and the imagination in its freest range.

But, indeed, it was not the limitations of her social triumphs themselves that troubled her. Every experience of the evening had helped to show her how much wider the world was than she had dreamed, and had opened new distances on the right, on the left, and far ahead; and nowhere in them all could eye see, or ear hear, aught of that one without whom to go back to old things was misery, and to go on to new was mere weariness. And the dear little mother at home!—worth nine out of any ten of all this crowd—still at home in that old tavern-keeping life, now intolerable to think of, and still writing those yearning letters that bade the daughter not return! No wonder Marguerite’s friend had divined her feelings, and drawn her out to the cool retreat under the shadow of the veranda lanterns.

A gentleman joined them, who had “just come,” he said. Marguerite’s companion and he were old friends. Neither he nor Marguerite heard each other’s name, nor could see each other’s face more than dimly. He was old enough to be twitted for bachelorhood, and to lay the blame upon an outdoor and out-of-town profession. Such words drew Marguerite’s silent but close attention.

The talk turned easily from this to the ease with which the fair sex, as compared with the other, takes on the graces of the drawing-room. “Especially,” the two older ones agreed, “if the previous lack is due merely to outward circumstances.” But Marguerite was still. Here was a new thought. One who attained all those graces and love’s prize also might at last, for love’s sake, have to count them but dross, or carry them into retirement, the only trophies of abandoned triumphs. While she thought, the conversation went on.

“Yes,” said her friend, replying to the bachelor, “we acquire drawing-room graces more easily; but why? Because most of us think we must. A man may find success in one direction or another; but a woman has got to be a social success, or she’s a complete failure. She can’t snap her fingers at the drawing-room.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Marguerite, “she can if she want!” She felt the strength to rise that moment and go back to Opelousas, if only—and did not see, until her companions laughed straight at her, that the lady had spoken in jest.

“Still,” said the bachelor, “the drawing-room is woman’s element—realm—rather than man’s, whatever the reasons may be. I had a young man with me last winter”—

“I knew it!” thought Marguerite.

“—until lately, in fact; he’s here in town now,—whom I have tried once or twice to decoy into company in a small experimental way. It’s harder thanputting a horse into a ship. He seems not to know what social interchange is for.”

“Thinks it’s for intellectual profit and pleasure,” interrupted the ironical lady.

“No, he just doesn’t see the use or fun of it. And yet, really, that’s his only deficiency. True, he listens better than he talks—overdoes it; but when a chap has youth, intelligence, native refinement, integrity, and good looks, as far above the mean level as many of our society fellows are below it, it seems to me he ought to be”—

“Utilized,” suggested the lady, casting her eyes toward Marguerite and withdrawing them as quickly, amused at the earnestness of her attention.

“Yes,” said the bachelor, and mused a moment. “He’s a talented fellow. It’s only a few months ago that he really began life. Now he’s outgrown my service.”

“Left the nest,” said the lady.

“Yes, indeed. He has invented”—

“Oh, dear!”

The bachelor was teased. “Ah! come, now; show your usual kindness; he has, really, made a simple, modest agricultural machine that—meets a want long felt. Oh! you may laugh; but he laughs last. He has not only a patent for it, but a good sale also, and is looking around for other worlds to conquer.”

“And yet spurns society? Ours!”

“No, simply develops no affinity for it; would like to, if only to please me; but can’t. Doesn’t even make intimate companions among men; simply clingsto his fond, lone father, and the lone father to him, closer than any pair of twin orphan girls that ever you saw. I don’t believe any thing in life could divide them.”

“Ah, don’t you trust him! Man proposes, Cupid disposes. A girl will stick to her mother; but a man? Why, the least thing—a pair of blue eyes, a yellow curl”—

The bachelor gayly shook his head, and, leaning over with an air of secrecy, said: “A pair of blue eyes have shot him through and through, and a yellow curl is wound all round him from head to heel, and yet he sticks to his father.”

“He can’t live,” said the lady. Marguerite’s hand pressed her arm, and they rose. As the bachelor drew the light curtain of a long window aside, that they might pass in, the light fell upon Marguerite’s face. It was entirely new to him. It seemed calm. Yet instantly the question smote him, “What have I done? what have I said?” She passed, and turned to give a parting bow. The light fell upon him. She was right; it was Claude’s friend, the engineer.

When he came looking for them a few minutes later, he only caught, by chance, a glimpse of them, clouded in light wraps and passing to their carriage. It was not yet twelve.

Between Marguerite’s chamber and that of one of the daughters of the family there was a door that neither one ever fastened. Somewhere down-stairs a clock was striking three in the morning, when this door softly opened and the daughter stole intoMarguerite’s room in her night-robe. With her hair falling about her, her hands unconsciously clasped, her eyes starting, and an outcry of amazement checked just within her open, rounded mouth, she stopped and stood an instant in the brightly lighted chamber.

Marguerite sat on the bedside exactly as she had come from the carriage, save that a white gossamer web had dropped from her head and shoulders, and lay coiled about her waist. Her tearless eyes were wide and filled with painful meditation, even when she turned to the alarmed and astonished girl before her. With suppressed exclamations of wonder and pity the girl glided forward, cast her arms about the sitting figure, and pleaded for explanation.

“It is a headache,” said Marguerite, kindly but firmly lifting away the intwining arms.—“No, no, you can do nothing.—It is a headache.—Yes, I will go to bed presently; you go to yours.—No, no”—

The night-robed girl looked for a moment more into Marguerite’s eyes, then sank to her knees, buried her face in her hands, and wept. Marguerite laid her hands upon the bowed head and looked down with dry eyes. “No,” she presently said again, “it is a headache. Go back to your bed.—No, there is nothing to tell; only I have been very, very foolish and very, very selfish, and I am going home to-morrow. Good-night.”

The door closed softly between the two. Then Marguerite sank slowly back upon the bed, closed her eyes, and rocking her head from side to side, said again and again, in moans that scarcely left the lips:

“My mother! my mother! Take me back! Oh! take me back, my mother! my mother!”

At length she arose, put off her attire, lay down to rest, and, even while she was charging sleep with being a thousand leagues away—slept.

When she awoke, the wide, bright morning filled all the room. Had some sound wakened her? Yes, a soft tapping came again upon her door. She lay still. It sounded once more. For all its softness, it seemed nervous and eager. A low voice came with it:

“Marguerite!”

She sprang from her pillow.—“Yes!”

While she answered, it came again,—

“Marguerite!”

With a low cry, she cast away the bed-coverings, threw back the white mosquito-curtain and the dark masses of her hair, and started up, lifted and opened her arms, cried again, but with joy, “My mother! my mother!” and clasped Zoséphine to her bosom.

Manifestly it was a generous overstatement for Claude’s professional friend to say that Claude had outgrown his service. It was true only that by and by there had come a juncture in his affairs where he could not, without injustice to others, make a place forClaude which he could advise Claude to accept, and they had parted with the mutual hope that the separation would be transient. But the surveyor could not but say to himself that such incidents, happening while we are still young, are apt to be turning-points in our lives, if our lives are going to have direction and movement of their own at all.

St. Pierre had belted his earnings about him under the woollen sash that always bound his waist, shouldered his rifle, taken one last, silent look at the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, stood for a few moments with his hand in Bonaventure’s above one green mound in the churchyard at Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster’s care, and had gone to join his son. Of course, not as an idler; such a perfect woodsman easily made himself necessary to the engineer’s party. The company were sorry enough to lose him when Claude went away; but no temptation that they could invent could stay him from following Claude. Father and son went in one direction, and the camp in another.

I must confess to being somewhat vague as to just where they were. I should have to speak from memory, and I must not make another slip in topography. The changes men have made in Southern Louisiana these last few years are great. I say nothing, again, of the vast widths of prairie stripped of the herds and turned into corn and cane fields: when I came, a few months ago, to that station on Morgan’s Louisiana and Texas Railroad where Claude first went aboard a railway-train, somebody had actually moved the bayou, the swamp, and the prairie apart!

However, the exact whereabouts of the St. Pierres is not important to us. Mr. Tarbox, when in search of the camp he crossed the Teche at St. Martinville, expected to find it somewhere north-eastward, between that stream and the Atchafalaya. But at the Atchafalaya he found that the work in that region had been finished three days before, and that the party had been that long gone to take part in a new work down in theprairies tremblantesof Terrebonne Parish. The Louisiana Land Reclamation Company,—I think that was the name of the concern projecting the scheme. This was back in early February, you note.

Thither Mr. Tarbox followed. The “Album of Universal Information” went along, and “did well.” It made his progress rather slow, of course; but one of Mr. Tarbox’s many maxims was, never to make one day pay for another when it could be made to pay for itself, and during this season—this Louisiana campaign, as he called it—he had developed a new art,—making each day pay for itself several times over.

“Many of these people,” he said,—but said it solely and silently to himself,—“are ignorant, shiftless, and set in their ways; and even when they’re not they’re out of the current, as it were; they haven’t headway; and so they never—or seldom ever—see any way to make money except somehow in connection with the plantations. There’s no end of chances here to a man that’s got money-sense, and nerve to use it.” He wrote that to Zoséphine, but she wrote no answer. A day rarely passed that he did not findsome man making needless loss through ignorance or inactivity; whereupon he would simply put in the sickle of his sharper wit, and garner the neglected harvest. Or, seeing some unesteemed commodity that had got out of, or had never been brought into, its best form, time, or place, he knew at sight just how, and at what expense, to bring it there, and brought it.

“Give me the gains other men pass by,” he said, “and I’ll be satisfied. The saying is, ‘Buy wisdom;’ but I sell mine. I like to sell. I enjoy making money. It suits my spirit of adventure. I like an adventure. And if there’s any thing I love, it’s an adventure with money in it! But even that isn’t my chief pleasure: my chief pleasure’s the study of human nature.

‘The proper study of mankind is man.* * * * *Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.’”

This spoiling of Assyrian camps, so to speak, often detained Mr. Tarbox within limited precincts for days at a time; but “Isn’t that what time is for?” he would say to those he had been dealing with, as he finally snapped the band around his pocket-book; and they would respond, “Yes, that’s so.”

And then he would wish them a hearty farewell, while they were thinking that at least he might know it was his treat.

Thus it was the middle of February when at Houma, the parish seat of Terrebonne, he passed the last rootlet of railway, and, standing finally under the blossomingorange-trees of Terrebonne Bayou far down toward the Gulf, heard from the chief of the engineering party that Claude was not with him.

“He didn’t leave us; we left him; and up to the time when we left he hadn’t decided where he would go or what he would do. His father and he are together, you know, and of course that makes it harder for them to know just how to move.”

The speaker was puzzled. What could this silk-hatted, cut-away-coated, empearled, free lance of a fellow want with Claude? He would like to find out. So he added, “I may get a letter from him to-morrow; suppose you stay with me until then.” And, to his astonishment, Mr. Tarbox quickly jumped at the proposition.

No letter came. But when the twenty-four hours had passed, the surveyor had taken that same generous—not to say credulous—liking for Mr. Tarbox that we have seen him show for St. Pierre and for Claude. He was about to start on a tour of observation eastward through a series of short canals that span the shaking prairies from bayou to bayou, from Terrebonne to Lafourche, Lafourche to Des Allemands, so through Lake Ouacha into and up Barataria, again across prairie, and at length, leaving Lake Cataouaché on the left, through cypress-swamp to the Mississippi River, opposite New Orleans. He would have pressed Mr. Tarbox to bear him company; but before he could ask twice, Mr. Tarbox had consented. They went in a cat-rigged skiff, with a stalwart negro rowing or towing whenever the sail was not the best.

“It’s all of sixty miles,” said the engineer; “but if the wind doesn’t change or drop we can sleep to-night in Achille’s hut, send this man and skiff back, and make Achille, with his skiff, put us on board the Louisiana-avenue ferry-launch to-morrow afternoon.”

“Who is Achille?”

“Achille? Oh! he’s merely a ’Cajun pot-hunter living on a shell bank at the edge of Lake Cataouaché, with an Indian wife. Used to live somewhere on Bayou des Allemands, but last year something or other scared him away from there. He’s odd—seems to be a sort of self-made outcast. I don’t suppose he’s ever done anybody any harm; but he just seems to be one of that kind that can’t bear to even try to keep up with the rest of humanity; the sort of man swamps and shaking prairies were specially made for, you know. He’s living right on top of a bank of fossil shells now,—thousands of barrels of them,—that he knows would bring him a little fortune if only he could command the intelligence and the courage to market them in New Orleans. There’s a chance for some bright man who isn’t already too busy. Why didn’t I think to mention it to Claude? But then neither he nor his father have got the commercial knowledge they would need. Now”—The speaker suddenly paused, and, as the two men sat close beside each other under an umbrella in the stern of the skiff, looked into Mr. Tarbox’s pale-blue eyes, and smiled, and smiled.

“I’m here,” said Mr. Tarbox.

“Yes,” responded the other, “and I’ve just made out why! And you’re right, Tarbox; you and Claude,with or without his father, will make a strong team. You’ve got no business to be canvassing books, you”—

“It’s my line,” said the canvasser, smiling fondly and pushing his hat back,—it was wonderful how he kept that hat smooth,—“and I’m the head of the line:

‘A voice replied far up the height,Excelsior!’

I was acquainted with Mr. Longfellow.”

“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 passengers stood on the levee at the head of Harvey’s Canal 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 suchThe frequent inmates of thy guileless breast.’

“Good luck! Good-by!”

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

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 shell. 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-oué.

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 noble 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 passion—and talk enough to answer their questions and conjectures about a surveyor’s life, etc.; but when he got back tocamp, 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 amusement 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!”

God 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. ThisClaude 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 assured 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, NewIberia? 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’ class!”

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.

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,” Claudesaid; “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 Zoséphine’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.

And then, after all!—looking into those quiet black eyes of Zoséphine’s,—to hear that Marguerite was not there! Gone! Gone to the great city, the place “too big to live in.” Gone there for knowledge, training, cultivation, larger life, and finer uses! Gone to study an art,—an art! Risen beyond him “like a diamond in the sky.” And he fool enough to come rambling back, blue-shirted and brown-handed, expecting to find her still a tavern maid! So, farewell fantasy! ’Twas better so; much better. Now life was simplified. Oh, yes; and St. Pierre made matters better still by saying to Zoséphine:

“I dinn’ know you got one lill gal. Claude never tell me ’bout dat. I spec’ dat why he dawn’t want ’come yeh. He dawn’t like gal; he run f’om ’em like dog from yalla-jacket. He dawn’t like none of ’m. What he like, dass his daddy. He jus’ married to his daddy.” The father dropped his hand, smilingly, upon his son’s shoulder with a weight that would have crushed it in had it been ordinary cast-iron.

Claude took the hand and held it, while Zoséphine smiled and secretly thanked God her child was away. In her letters to Marguerite she made no haste to mention the young man’s re-appearance, and presently a small thing occurred that made it well that she had left it untold.

With Claude and his father some days passed unemployed. Yet both felt them to be heavy with significance. The weight and pressure of new and, to them, large conditions, were putting their inmost quality to proof. Claude saw, now, what he could not see before; why his friend the engineer had cast him loose without a word of advice as to where he should go or what he should do. It was because by asking no advice he had really proposed to be his own master. And now, could he do it? Dare he try it?

The first step he took was taken, I suppose, instinctively rather than intelligently; certainly it was perilous: he retreated into himself. St. Pierre found work afield, for of this sort there was plenty; the husbandmen’s year, and the herders’ too, were just gathering good momentum. But Claude now stood looking on empty-handed where other men were busy with agriculturalutensils or machines; or now kept his room, whittling out a toy miniature of some apparatus, which when made was not like the one he had seen, at last. A great distress began to fill the father’s mind. There had been a time when he could be idle and whittle, but that time was gone by; that was at Grande Pointe; and now for his son—for Claude—to become a lounger in tavern quarters—Claude had not announced himself to Vermilionville as a surveyor, or as any thing—Claude to be a hater of honest labor—was this what Bonaventure called civilize-ation? Better, surely better, go back to the old pastoral life. How yearningly it was calling them to its fragrant bosom! And almost every thing was answering the call. The town was tricking out its neglected decay with great trailing robes of roses. The spade and hoe were busy in front flower-beds and rear kitchen-gardens. Lanes were green, skies blue, roads good. In thebas fondsthe oaks of many kinds and the tupelo-gums were hiding all their gray in shimmering green; in these coverts and in the reedy marshes, all the feathered flocks not gone away north were broken into nesting pairs; in the fields, crops were springing almost at the sower’s heels; on the prairie pastures, once so vast, now being narrowed so rapidly by the people’s thrift, the flocks and herds ate eagerly of the bright new grass, and foals, calves, and lambs stood and staggered on their first legs, while in the door-yards housewives, hens, and mother-geese warned away the puppies and children from downy broods under the shade of the China-trees. But Claude? Even his books lay unstudied, and hisinstruments gathered dust, while he pottered over two or three little wooden things that a boy could not play with without breaking. At last St. Pierre could bear it no longer.

“Well, Claude, dass ten days han’-runnin’ now, we ain’t do not’in’ but whittlin’.”

Claude slowly pushed his model from him, looked, as one in a dream, into his father’s face, and suddenly and for the first time saw what that father had suffered for a fortnight. But into his own face there came no distress; only, for a moment, a look of tender protestation, and then strong hope and confidence.

“Yass,” he said, rising, “dass true. But we dawn’t got whittle no mo’.” He pointed to the model, then threw his strong arms akimbo and asked, “You know what is dat?”

“Naw,” replied the father, “I dunno. I t’ink ’taint no real mash-in’ [machine] ’cause I dawn’t never see nuttin’ like dat at Belle Alliance plant-ation, neider at Belmont; and I know, me, if anybody got one mash-in’, any place, for do any t’in’ mo’ betteh or mo’ quicker, Mistoo Walleece an’ M’sieu Le Bourgeois dey boun’ to ’ave ’im. Can’t hitch nuttin’ to dat t’ing you got dare; she too small for a rat. What she is, Claude?”

A yet stronger hope and courage lighted Claude’s face. He laid one hand upon the table before him and the other upon the shoulder of his sitting companion:

“Papa, if you want to go wid me to de city, we make one big enough for two mule’. Dass a mash-in’—a new mash-in’—my mash-in’—my invention!”

“Invench? What dat is—invench?”

Some one knocked on the door. Claude lifted the model, moved on tiptoe, and placed it softly under the bed. As he rose and turned again with reddened face, a card was slipped under the door. He took it and read, in a pencil scrawl,—

“State Superintendent of Public Education,”—

looked at his father with a broad grin, and opened the door.

Mr. Tarbox had come at the right moment. There was a good hour and a half of the afternoon still left, and he and Claude took a walk together. Beyond a stile and a frail bridge that spanned a gully at one end of the town, a noble avenue of oaks leads toward Vermilion River. On one side of this avenue the town has since begun to spread, but at that time there were only wide fields on the right hand and on the left. At the farther end a turn almost at right angles to the left takes you through a great gate and across the railway, then along a ruined hedge of roses, and presently into the oak-grove of the old ex-governor’s homestead. This was their walk.

By the time they reached the stile, Claude had learned that his friend was at the head of his line, and yet had determined to abandon that line for another

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