CHAPTER XI.

“Far up the height—Excelsior!”

Also that his friend had liked him, had watched him, would need him, and was willing then and there toassure him a modest salary, whose amount he specified, simply to do whatever he might call upon him to do in his (Claude’s) “line.”

They were walking slowly, and now and then slower still. As they entered the avenue of oaks, Claude declined the offer. Then they went very slowly indeed. Claude learned that Mr. Tarbox, by some chance not explained, had been in company with his friend the engineer; that the engineer had said, “Tarbox, you’re a born contractor,” and that Claude and he would make a “strong team;” that Mr. Tarbox’s favorite study was human nature; that he knew talent when he saw it; had studied Claude; had fully expected him to decline to be his employee, and liked him the better for so doing.

“That was just a kind of test vote; see?”

Then Mr. Tarbox offered Claude a partnership; not an equal one, but withal a fair interest.

“We’ve got to commence small and branch out gradually; see?” And Claude saw.

“Now, you wonder why I don’t go in alone. Well, I’ll tell you; and when I tell you, I’ll astonish you. I lack education! Now, Claude, I’m taking you into my confidence. You’ve done nothing but go to school and study for about six years. I had a different kind of father from yours; I never got one solid year’s schooling, all told, in my life. I’ve picked up cords of information, but an ounce of education’s worth a ton of information. Don’t you believe that? eh? it is so! I say it, and I’m the author of the A. of U. I. I like to call it that, because it brings you and I so neartogether; see?” The speaker smiled, was still, and resumed:

“That’s why I need you. And I’m just as sure you need me. I need not only the education you have now, but what you’re getting every day. When you see me you see a man who is always looking awa-a-ay ahead. I see what you’re going to be, and I’m making this offer to the Claude St. Pierre of the future.”

Mr. Tarbox waited for a reply. The avenue had been passed, the railway crossed, and the hedge skirted. They loitered slowly into the governor’s grove, under whose canopy the beams of the late afternoon sun were striking and glancing. But all their light seemed hardly as much as that which danced in the blue eyes of Mr. Tarbox while Claude slowly said:

“I dunno if we can fix dat. I was glad to see you comin’. I reckon you jus’ right kind of man I want. I jus’ make a new invention. I t’ink ’f you find dat’s good, dat be cawntrac’ enough for right smart while. And beside’, I t’ink I invent some mo’ b’fo’ long.”

But Mr. Tarbox was not rash. He only asked quiet and careful questions for some time. The long sunset was sending its last rays across the grove-dotted land, and the birds in every tree were filling the air with their sunset song-burst, when the two friends re-entered the avenue of oaks. They had agreed to join their fortunes. Now their talk drifted upon other subjects.

“I came back to Vermilionville purposely to see you,” said Mr. Tarbox. “But I’ll tell you privately, you wasn’t the only cause of my coming.”

Claude looked at him suddenly. Was this anotherhaunted man? Were there two men haunted, and only one fantasy? He felt ill at ease. Mr. Tarbox saw, but seemed not to understand. He thought it best to speak plainly.

“I’m courting her, Claude; and I think I’m going to get her.”

Claude stopped short, with jaws set and a bad look in his eye.

“Git who?”

But Mr. Tarbox was calm—even complacent. He pushed his silk hat from his forehead, and said:

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

I refer to the Rose of Vermilionville, the Pearl of the Parish, the loveliest love and fairest fair that ever wore the shining name of Beausoleil. She’s got to change it to Tarbox, Claude. Before yon sun has run its course again, I’m going to ask her for the second time. I’ve just begun asking, Claude; I’m going to keep it up till she says yes.”

“She’s not yondah!” snarled Claude, with the frown and growl of a mastiff. “She’s gone to de city.”

Mr. Tarbox gazed a moment in blank amazement. Then he slowly lifted his hat from his head, expanded his eyes, drew a long slow groan, turned slowly half around, let the inhalation go in a long keen whistle, and cried:

“Oh! taste! taste! Who’s got the taste? Whatdo you take me for? Whoareyou talking about? That little monkey? Why, man alive, it’s the mother I’m after. Ha, ha, ha!”

If Claude said any thing in reply, I cannot imagine what it was. Mr. Tarbox had a right to his opinion and taste, if taste it could be called, and Claude was helpless to resent it, even in words; but for hours afterward he execrated his offender’s stupidity, little guessing that Mr. Tarbox, in a neighboring chamber, alone and in his night-robe, was bending, smiting his thigh in silent merriment, and whispering to himself:

“He thinks I’m an ass! He thinks I’m an ass! He can’t see that I was simply investigating him!”

Claude and his father left the next day,—Saturday. Only the author of the A. of U. I. knew whither they were gone. As they were going he said very privately to Claude:

“I’ll be with you day after to-morrow. You can’t be ready for me before then, and you and your father can take Sunday to look around, and kind o’ see the city. But don’t go into the down-town part; you’ll not like it; nothing but narrow streets and old buildings with histories to ’em, and gardens hid away inside of ’em, and damp archways, and pagan-lookingfemales who can’t talk English, peeping out over balconies that offer to drop down on you, and then don’t keep their word; every thing old-timey, and Frenchy, and Spanishy; unprogressive—you wouldn’t like it. Go up-town. That’s American. It’s new and fresh. There you’ll find beautiful mansions, mostly frame, it’s true, but made to look like stone, you know. There you’ll see wealth! There you’ll get the broad daylight—

‘The merry, merry sunshine, that makes the heart so gay.’

See? Yes, and Monday we’ll meet at Jones’s, 17 Tchoupitoulas Street; all right; I’ll be on hand. But to-day and to-morrow—‘Alabama’—‘here I rest.’ I feel constrained”—he laid his hand upon his heart, closed one eye, and whispered—“to stay. I would fain spend the sabbath in sweet Vermilionville. You get my idea?”

The sabbath afternoon, beyond the town, where Mr. Tarbox strolled, was lovelier than can be told. Yet he was troubled. Zoséphine had not thus far given him a moment alone. I suppose, when a hundred generations more have succeeded us on the earth, lovers will still be blind to the fact that women do not do things our way. How can they? That would be capitulation at once, and even we should find the whole business as stupid as shooting barnyard fowls.

Zoséphine had walked out earlier than Tarbox. He had seen her go, but dared not follow. He read “thou shalt not” as plain as print on her back as she walkedquietly away; that same little peremptory back that once in her father’s calèche used to hold itself stiff when ’Thanase rode up behind. The occasional townsman that lifted his slouch hat in deep deference to her silent bow, did not read unusual care on her fair brow; yet she, too, was troubled.

Marguerite! she was the trouble. Zoséphine knew her child could never come back to these old surroundings and be content. The mother was not willing she should. She looked at a photograph that her daughter had lately sent her. What a change from the child that had left her! It was like the change from a leaf to a flower. There was but one thing to do: follow her. So Zoséphine had resolved to sell the inn. She was gone, now, to talk with the old ex-governor about finding a purchaser. Her route was not by the avenue of oaks, but around by a northern and then eastern circuit. She knew Mr. Tarbox must have seen her go; had a genuine fear that he would guess whither she was bound, and yet, deeper down in her heart than woman ever lets soliloquy go, was willing he should. For she had another trouble. We shall come to that presently.

Her suitor walked in the avenue of oaks.

“She’s gone,” he reckoned to himself, “to consult the governor about something, and she’ll come back this way.” He loitered out across fields, but not too far off or out of sight; and by and by there she came, with just the slightest haste in her walk. She received him with kindly reserve, and they went more slowly, together.

She told where she had been, and that the governor approved a decision she had made.

“Yass; I goin’ sell my hotel.”

“He’s right!” exclaimed her companion, with joy; “and you’re right!”

“Well, ’tain’t sold yet,” she responded. She did not smile as she looked at him. He read trouble; some trouble apart from the subject, in her quiet, intense eyes.

“You know sombodie want buy dat?” she asked.

“I’ll find some one,” he promptly replied. Then they talked a little about the proper price for it, and then were very still until Mr. Tarbox said:

“I walked out here hoping to meet you.”

Madame Beausoleil looked slightly startled, and then bowed gravely.

“Yes; I want your advice. It’s only business, but it’s important, and it’s a point where a woman’s instinct is better than a man’s judgment.”

There was some melancholy satire in her responding smile; but it passed away, and Mr. Tarbox went on:

“You never liked my line of business”—

Zoséphine interrupted with kind resentment:

“Ah!”

“No; I know you didn’t. You’re one of the few women whose subscription I’ve sought in vain. Till then I loved my business. I’ve never loved it since. I’ve decided to sell out and quit. I’m going into another business, one that you’ll admire. I don’t say any thing about the man going into it,—

‘Honor and shame from no condition rise:Act well your part; there all the honor lies,’—

but I want your advice about the party I think of going in with. It’s Claude St. Pierre.”

Zoséphine turned upon the speaker a look of steady penetration. He met it with a glance of perfect confiding. “She sees me,” he said, at the same time, far within himself.

It was as natural to Mr. Tarbox to spin a web as it is for a spider. To manœuvre was the profoundest instinct of his unprofound nature. Zoséphine felt the slender threads weaving around her. But in her heart of hearts there was a certain pleasure in being snared. It could not, to her, seem wholly bad for Tarbox to play spider, provided he should play the harmless spider. Mr. Tarbox spoke again, and she listened amiably.

“Claude is talented. He has what I haven’t; I have what he hasn’t, and together we could make each other’s fortunes, if he’s only the square, high-style fellow I think he is. I’m a student of human nature, and I think I’ve made him out. I think he’ll do to tie to. But will he? You can tell me. You read people by instinct. I ask you just as a matter of business advice and in business confidence. What do you think? Will you trust me and tell me—as my one only trusted friend—freely and fully—as I would tell you?”

Madame Beausoleil felt the odds against her, but she looked into her companion’s face with bright, frank eyes and said: “Yass, I t’ink yass; I t’ink’tisso.”

“Thanks!” said her friend, with unnecessary fervorand tenderness. “Then Claude will be my partner, unless—my dear friend, shall you be so kind—I might almost say confiding—to me, and me not tell you something I think you’d ought to know? For I hope we are always to be friends; don’t you?”

“Yass,” she said, very sadly and sweetly.

“Thanks! And if Claude and I become partners that will naturally bring him into our circle, as it were; see?”

The little madame looked up with a sudden austere exaltation of frame and intensity of face, but her companion rushed on with—“And I’m going to tell you, let the risk to me be what it may, that it may result in great unhappiness to Claude; for he loves your daughter, who, I know, you must think too good for him!”

Madame Beausoleil blushed as though she herself were Marguerite and Tarbox were Claude.

“Ah! love Marguerite! Naw, naw! He dawn’t love noboddie but hees papa! Hees papa tell me dat! Ah! naw, ’tisnotso!”

Mr. Tarbox stopped still; and when Zoséphine saw they were in the shadow of the trees while all about them was brightened by the momentary Southern twilight, she, too, stopped, and he spoke.

“What brought Claude back here when by right he should have gone straight to the city? You might have guessed it when you saw him.” He paused to let her revolve the thought, and added in his own mind—“If you had disliked the idea, you’d ’a’ suspected him quick enough”—and was pleased. He spoke again. “But I didn’t stop with guessing.”

Zoséphine looked up to his face from the little foot that edgewise was writing nothings in the dust.

“No,” continued her companion: “I walked with him two evenings ago in this avenue, and right where we stand now, without his ever knowing it—then or now—he as good as told me. Yes, Josephine, he dares to love your beautiful and accomplished daughter! The thought may offend you, but—was I not right to tell you?”

She nodded and began to move slowly on, he following.

“I’m not betraying anyone’s confidence,” persisted he; “and I can’t help but have a care for you. Not that you need it, or anybody’s. You can take care of yourself if any man or woman can. Every time your foot touches the ground it says so as plain as words. That’s what first caught my fancy. You haven’t got to have somebody to take care of you. O Josephine! that’s just why I want to take care of you so bad! I can take care of myself, and I used to like to do it; I was just that selfish and small; but love’s widened me. I can take care of myself; but, oh! what satisfaction is there in it? Is there any? Now, I ask you! It may do for you, for you’re worth taking care of; but I want to take care of something I needn’t be ashamed to love!” He softly stole her hand as they went. She let it stay, yet looked away from him, up through the darkling branches, and distressfully shook her head.

“Don’t, Josephine!—don’t do that. I want you to take care of me. You could do better, I know, iflove wasn’t the count; but when it comes to loving you, I’m the edition deloox! I know you’ve an aspiring nature, but so have I; and I believe with you to love and you loving me, and counselling and guiding me, I could climb high. O Josephine! it isn’t this poor Tarbox I’m asking you to give yourself to; it’s the Tarbox that is to be; it’s the coming Tarbox! Why, it’s even a good business move! If it wasn’t I wouldn’t say a word! You know I can, and will take the very best care of every thing you’ve got; and I know you’ll take the same of mine. It’s a good move, every way. Why, here’s every thing just fixed for it! Listen to the mocking-bird! See him yonder, just at the right of the stile. See! O Josephine! don’t you see he isn’t

‘Still singing where the weeping willow waves’?

he’s on the myrtle; the myrtle, Josephine, and the crape-myrtle at that!—widowhood unwidowed!—Now he’s on the fence—but he’ll not stay there,—and you mustn’t either!” The suitor smiled at his own ludicrousness, yet for all that looked beseechingly in earnest. He stood still again, continuing to hold her hand. She stole a furtive glance here and there for possible spectators. He smiled again.

“You don’t see anybody; the world waives its claim.” But there was such distress in her face that his smile passed away, and he made a new effort to accommodate his suit to her mood. “Josephine, there’s no eye on us except it’s overhead. Tell me this; if he that was yours until ten years ago waslooking down now and could speak to us, don’t you believe he’d say yes?”

“Oh! I dunno. Not to-day! Notdisday!” The widow’s eyes met his gaze of tender inquiry and then sank to the ground. She shook her head mournfully. “Naw, naw; not dis day. ’Tis to-day ’Thanase was kill’!”

Mr. Tarbox relaxed his grasp and Zoséphine’s hand escaped. She never had betrayed to him so much distress as filled her face now. “De man what kill’ him git away! You t’ink I git marrie’ while dat man alive? Ho-o-o! You t’ink I let Marguerite see me do dat! Ah! naw!” She waved him away and turned to leave the spot, but he pressed after, and she paused once more. A new possibility lighted his eyes. He said eagerly:

“Describe the man to me. Describe him. How tall was he? How old would he be now? Did they try to catch him? Did you hear me talking yesterday about a man? Is there any picture of him? Have you got one? Yes, you have; it’s in your pocket now with your hand on it. Let me see it.”

“Ah! I di’n’ want you to see dat!”

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

“Hah! easier! Hah! easier! I need somethin’ tohelpme do dat? Hah! ’Tisnotso!” But the weakness of the wordy denial was itself almost a confession.

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

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

Her eyes flashed with injured resentment. “Ah, you! you dawn’t know not’n’—” But he interrupted:

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

“Bonaventure?”

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

“Ah, naw! Bonaventure, maybe; but not me; ah, naw!”

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

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

“Yass,’tisso. ’Tis ri-ght!”

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

Zoséphine’s face had lost its hardness. It was drawn with distress. With a gesture of repulsion and pain she exclaimed:

“I di’n’ mean—I di’n’ mean—Ah!”

“What? private revenge? No, of course you didn’t! But what else would it be? O Josephine! don’tI know you didn’t mean it? Didn’t I tell you so? But I want you to go farther. I want you to put away forever thefeeling. I want to move and stand between you and it, and say—whatever it costs me to say it—‘God forbid!’ I do say it; I say it now. I can’t say more; I can’t say less; and somehow,—I don’t know how—wherever you learned it—I’ve learned it from you.”

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

“I’m not so foolish as I look,” he said, trying to smile away his emotion. “If the State chooses to hunt him out and put him to trial and punishment, I don’t say I’d stand in the way; that’s the State’s business; that’s for the public safety. But it’s too late—you and Bonnyventure have made it too late—for me to help any one, least of all the one I love, to be revenged.” He saw his words were prevailing and followed them up. “Oh! you don’t need it any more than you really want it, Josephine. You mustn’t ever look toward it again. I throw myself and my love across the path. Don’t walk over us. Take my hand; give me yours; come another way; and if you’ll letsuch a poor excuse for a teacher and guide help you, I’ll help you all I can, to learn to say ‘forgive us our trespasses.’ You can begin, now, by forgiving me. I may have thrown away my last chance with you, but I can’t help it; it’s my love that spoke. And if I have spoiled all and if I’ve got to pay for the tears you’re shedding with the greatest disappointment of my life, still I’ve had the glory and the sanctification of loving you. If I must say, I can say,

‘’Tis better to have loved and lostThan never to have loved at all.’

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

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

“Isn’t it most too late to go the rest of the way alone?”

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

“Yass;’tisso,” and they went the short remnant of the way together.

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

However, that is a matter of taste there, and nomatter at all here. All I need to add is that there are good apartments overhead to be rented to women too good for this world, and that in the latter end of April, 1884, Zoséphine and Marguerite Beausoleil here made their home.

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

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

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

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

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

And he did not; at any rate not to know it. She really kept very busy indoors; and in other doors so did he. More than that, there was his father. When the two first came to the city St. Pierre endured the town for a week. But it was martyrdom, doing it. Claude saw this. Mr. Tarbox was with him the latter part of the week. He saw it. He gave his suggestive mind to it for one night. The next day St. Pierre and he wandered off in street-cars and on foot, and by the time the sun went down again a new provision had been made. At about ninety minutes’ jaunt from the city’s centre, up the river, and on its farther shore,near where the old “Company Canal” runs from a lock in the river bank, back through the swamps and into the Baratarian lakes, St. Pierre had bought with his lifetime savings a neat house and fair-sized orangery. No fields? None:

“You see, bom-bye [by-and-by] Claude git doze new mash-in’ all right, he go to ingineerin’ agin, and him and you [Tarbox] be takin’ some cawntrac’ for buil’ levee or break up old steamboat, or raise somet’in’ what been sunk, or somet’in’ dat way. And den he certain’ want somboddie to boss gang o’ fellows. And den he say, ‘Papa, I want you.’ And den I say how I got fifty arpent’ [42 acres] rice in field. And den he say, ‘How I goin’ do widout you?’ And den dare be fifty arpent’ rice gone!” No, no fields.

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

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

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

But all this explains only why Claude did not, to his knowledge, see Marguerite by accident. Yet byintention! Why not by intention? First, there was his fear of sinning against his father’s love. That alone might have failed to hold him back; but, second, there was his helplessness. Love made Tarbox, if any thing were needed to make him, brave; it made Claude a coward. And third, there was that helpless terror of society in general, of which we have heard his friend talk. I have seen a strong horse sink trembling to the earth at the beating of an empty drum. Claude looked with amazed despair at a man’s ability to overtake a pretty girl acquaintance in Canal Street, and walk and talk with her. He often asked himself how he had ever been a moment at his ease those November evenings in the tavern’s back-parlor at Vermilionville. It was because he had a task there; sociality was not the business of the hour.

And now I have something else to confess about Claude; something mortifying in the extreme. For you see the poverty of all these explanations. Their very multitude makes them weak. “Many fires cannot quench love;” what was the real matter? I will tell.

Claude’s love was a deep sentiment. He had never allowed it to assert itself as a passion. The most he would allow it to be was a yearning. It was scarcely personal. While he was with Marguerite, in the inn, his diffidence alone was enough to hide from him the impression she was making on his heart. In all their intercourse he had scarcely twice looked her full in the face. Afterward she had simply become in memory the exponent of an ideal. He found himself often,now, asking himself, why are my eyes always looking for her? Should I actually know her, were I to see her on this sidewalk, or in this street-car? And while still asking himself these silent questions, what does he do one day but fall—to all intents and purposes, at least—fall in love—pell-mell—up to the eyebrows—with another girl!

Do you remember Uncle Remus’s story of Brer Rabbit with the bucket of honey inverted on him? It was the same way with Claude. “He wa’n’t des only bedobble wid it, he wuz des kiver’d.” It happened thus: An artist friend, whose studio was in Carondelet Street just off of Canal, had rented to him for a workroom a little loft above the studio. It had one window looking out over roofs and chimney-pots upon the western sky, and another down into the studio itself. It is right to say friend, although there was no acquaintanceship until it grew out of this arrangement. The artist, a single man, was much Claude’s senior; but Claude’s taste for design, and love of work, and the artist’s grave sincerity, simplicity, and cordiality of character—he was a Spaniard, with a Spaniard’s perfect courtesy—made a mutual regard, which only a common diffidence prevented from running into comradeship.

One Saturday afternoon Claude, thirsting for outdoor air, left his eyrie for a short turn in Canal Street. The matinée audiences were just out, and the wide balcony-shaded sidewalks were crowded with young faces and bright attires. Claude was crossing the “neutral ground” toward Bourbon Street, when he saw comingout of Bourbon Street a young man, who might be a Creole, and two young girls in light, and what seemed to him extremely beautiful dresses; especially that of the farther one, who, as the three turned with buoyant step into Canal Street to their left, showed for an instant the profile of her face, and then only her back. Claude’s heart beat consciously, and he hurried to lessen the distance between them. He had seen no more than the profile, but for the moment in which he saw it, it seemed to be none other than the face of Marguerite!

Claude came on close behind. No; now he could see his mistake, it was not she. But he could not regret it. This was Marguerite repeated, yet transcended. The stature was just perceptibly superior. The breadth and grace of these shoulders were better than Marguerite’s. The hair, arranged differently and far more effectively than he had ever seen it on Marguerite’s head, seemed even more luxurious than hers. There was altogether a finer dignity in this one’s carriage than in that of the little maid of the inn. And see, now,—now!—as she turns her head to glance into this shop window! It is, and it isn’t, it isn’t, and it is, and—no, no, it is not Marguerite! It is like her in profile, singularly like, yet far beyond her;the nose a little too fine, and a certain sad firmness about the mouth and eyes, as well as he could see in the profile, but profiles are so deceptive—that he had never seen in Marguerite.

“But how do I know? What do I know?” he asked himself, still following on. “The Marguerite I know is but a thing of my dreams, and this is not that Marguerite of my actual sight, to whom I never gave a word or smile or glance that calls for redemption. This is the Marguerite of my dreams.”

Claude was still following, when without any cause that one could see, the young man of the group looked back. He had an unpleasant face; it showed a small offensive energy that seemed to assert simply him and all his against you and all yours. His eyes were black, piercing, and hostile. They darted their glances straight into Claude’s. Guilty Claude! dogging the steps of ladies on the street! He blushed for shame, turned a corner into Exchange Alley, walked a little way down it, came back, saw the great crowd coming and going, vehicles of all sorts hurrying here and there; ranks of street-cars waiting their turns to start to all points of the compass; sellers of peanuts and walking-sticks, buyers of bouquets, acquaintances meeting or overtaking one another, nodding bonnets, lifted hats, faces, faces, faces; but the one face was gone.

Caught, Claude? And by a mere face? The charge is too unkind. Young folly, yes, or old folly, may read goodness rashly into all beauty, or not care to read it in any. But it need not be so. Upon the face of youth the soul within writes its confessions andpromises; and when the warm pulses of young nature are sanctified by upward yearnings, and a pure conscience, the soul that seeks its mate will seek that face which, behind and through all excellencies of mere tint and feature, mirrors back the seeker’s own faiths and hopes; and when that is found, that to such a one is beauty. Judge not; you never saw this face, fairer than Marguerite’s, to say whether its beauty was mere face, or the transparent shrine of an equal nobility within.

Besides, Claude would have fired up and denied the first word of the charge with unpleasant flatness. To be caught means to be in love, to be in love implies a wish and hope to marry, and these were just what Claude could not allow. May not a man, nevertheless, have an ideal of truth and beauty and look worshipfully upon its embodiment? Humph!

His eyes sought her in vain not only on that afternoon, but on many following. The sun was setting every day later and later through the black lace-work of pecan-trees and behind low dark curtains of orange groves, yet he began to be more and more tardy each succeeding day in meeting his father under the riverside oaks of the Exposition grounds. And then, on the seventh day, he saw her again.

Now he was more confident than ever that this vision and he, except in dreams, had never spoken to each other. Yet the likeness was wonderful. But so, too, was the unlikeness. True, this time, she only flashed across his sight—out of a bank, into a carriage where a very “American”-looking lady sat waiting for her and was gone. But the bank; the carriage; that lady;those earlier companions,—no, this could not be Marguerite. Marguerite would have been with her mother. Now, if one could see Madame Beausoleil’s daughter with Madame Beausoleil at her side to identify her and distinguish her from this flashing and vanishing apparition it would clear away a trying perplexity. Why not be bold and call upon them where they were dwelling? But where? Their names were not in the directory. Now, inventive talent, do your best.

“Well!” said St. Pierre after a long silence. Claude and he were out on the swollen Mississippi pulling with steady leisure for the home-side shore, their skiff pointed half to and half from the boiling current. The sun was gone; a purple dusk wrapped either low bank; a steamboat that had passed up stream was now, at the turning of the bend, only a cluster of soft red lights; Venus began to make a faint silvery pathway across the waters. St. Pierre had the forward seat, at Claude’s back. The father looked with fond perplexity at the strong young shoulders swinging silently with his own, forward and backward in slow, monotonous strokes, and said again:

“Well? Whass matter? Look like cat got yo’ tongue. Makin’ new mash-in?” Then in a low dissatisfied tone—“I reckon somet’in’ mighty curious.” He repeated the last three words in the Acadian speech: “Tcheuque-chose bien tchurieux.”

“Yass,” replied the son, “mighty strange. I tell you when we come at home.”

He told all. Recounted all his heart’s longings, allhis dreams, every least pang of self-reproach, the idealization of Marguerite, and the finding of that ideal incarnated in one who was and yet seemed not to be, or rather seemed to be and yet was not, Marguerite. And then he went on to re-assure his father that this could never mean marriage, never mean the father’s supplanting. A man could worship what he could never hope to possess. He would rather worship this than win such kind as he would dare woo.

He said all these things in a very quiet way, with now and then a silent pause, and now and then a calm, self-contained tone in resuming; yet his sentences were often disconnected, and often were half soliloquy. Such were the only betrayals of emotion on either side until Claude began to treat—in the words just given—his father’s own heart interests; then the father’s eyes stood brimming full. But St. Pierre did not speak. From the first he had listened in silence and he offered no interruption until at length Claude came to that part about the object of his regard being so far, so utterly, beyond his reach. Then—

“Stop! Dass all foolishness! You want her? You kin have her!”

“Ah, papa! you dawn’t awnstand! What I am?”

“Ah, bah! What anybody is? What she is? She invanted bigger mash-in dan you? a mo’ better corn-stubbl’ destroyer and plant-corner?” He meant corn-planter. “She invant a more handier doubl’-action pea-vine rake? What she done mak’ her so gran’? Naw, sir! She look fine in de face, yass; and dassall you know. Well, dass all right; dass de ’Cajun way—pick ’em out by face. You begin ’Cajun way, for why you dawn’t finish ’Cajun way? All you got do, you git good saddle-hoss and ride. Bom-bye you see her, you ride behind her till you find where her daddy livin’ at. Den you ride pas’ yondah every day till fo’, five days, and den you see de ole man come scrape friend wid you. Den he hass you drop round, and fus’ t’ing you know—adjieu la calége!”

Claude did not dispute the point, though he hardly thought this case could be worked that way. He returned in silent thought to the question, how to find Madame Beausoleil. He tried the mail; no response. He thought of advertising; but that would never do. Imagine, “If Madame Beausoleil, late of Vermilionville, will leave her address at this office, she will hear of something not in the least to her advantage.” He couldn’t advertise.

It was midday following the eve of his confession to his father. For the last eleven or twelve days, ever since he had seen that blessed apparition turn with the two young friends into Canal Street out of Bourbon—he had been venturing daily, for luncheon, just down into Bourbon Street, to the Christian Women’s Exchange. Now, by all the laws of fortune he should in that time have seen in there at least once or twice a day already, the face he was ever looking for. But he had not; nor did he to-day. He only saw, or thought he saw, the cashier—I should say the cashieress—glance crosswise at him with eyes that seemed to him to say:

“Fool; sneak; whelp; ’Cajun; our private detectives are watching you.”

Both rooms and the veranda were full of ladies and gentlemen whose faces he dared not lift his eyes to look into. And yet even in that frame there suddenly came to him one of those happy thoughts that are supposed to be the inspirations of inventive genius. A pleasant little female voice near him said:

“And apartments up-stairs that they rent to ladies only!” And instantly the thought came that Marguerite and her mother might be living there. One more lump of bread, a final gulp of coffee, a short search for the waiter’s check, and he stands at the cashieress’s desk. She makes change without looking at him or ceasing to tell a small hunchbacked spinster standing by about somebody’s wedding. But suddenly she starts.

“Oh! wasn’t that right? You gave me four bits, didn’t you? And I gave you back two bits and a picayune, and—sir? Does Madame who? Oh! yes. I didn’t understand you; I’m a little deaf on this side; scarlet fever when I was a little girl. I’m not the regular cashier, she’s gone to attend the wedding of a lady friend. Just wait a moment, please, while I make change for these ladies. Oh, dear! ma’am, is that the smallest you’ve got? I don’t believe I can change that, ma’am. Yes—no—stop! yes, I can! no, I can’t! let’s see! yes, yes, yes, I can; I’ve got it; yes, there! I didn’t think I had it.” She turned again to Claude with sisterly confidence. “Excuse me for keeping you waiting; haven’t I met you at theY. M. C. A. sociable? Well, you must excuse me, but I was sure I had. Of course I didn’t if you was never there; but you know in a big city like this you’re always meeting somebody that’s ne-e-early somebody else that you know—oh! didn’t you ask me—oh, yes! Madame Beausoleil! Yes, she lives here, she and her daughter. But she’s not in. Oh! I’m sorry. Neither of them is here. She’s not in the city; hasn’t been for two weeks. They’re coming back; we’re expecting them every day. She heard of the death of a relative down in Terrebonne somewhere. I wish theywouldcome back; we miss them here; I judge they’re relatives of yours, if I don’t mistake the resemblance; you seem to take after the daughter; wait a minute.”

Some one coming up to pay looked at Claude to see what the daughter was like, and the young man slipped away, outblushing the night sky when the marshes are afire.

The question was settled; settled the wrong way. He hurried on across Canal Street. Marguerite had not been, as he had construed the inaccurate statement, in the city for two weeks. Resemblances need delude him no longer. He went on into Carondelet Street and was drawing near the door and stairway leading to his friend’s studio and his own little workroom above it, when suddenly from that very stairway and door issued she whom, alas! he might now no longer mistake for Marguerite, yet who, none the less for lessening hope, held him captive.

For a moment somewhat more than her profile shone upon Claude’s bewildered gaze.

“I shall see her eye to eye at last!” shouted his heart within: but the next moment she turned away, and with two companions who came across the same threshold, moved up the street, and, at the nearest corner, vanished. Her companions were the American lady and the artist. Claude wheeled, and hurried to pass around the square in the opposite direction, and, as he reached the middle of its third side, saw the artist hand them into the street-car, lift his hat, and return towards the studio. The two men met at the foot of the stairs. The Spaniard’s countenance betrayed a restrained elation.

“You goin’ see a picture now,” he said, in a modestly triumphant tone. “Come in,” he added, as Claude would have passed the studio door.

They went in together. The Spaniard talked; Claude scarcely spoke. I cannot repeat the conversation literally, but the facts are these: A few evenings before, the artist had been one of the guests at a musical party given by a lady whose name he did not mention. He happened—he modestly believed it accidental—to be seated beside the hostess, when a young lady—“jung Creole la-thy,” he called her—who was spending a few days with her, played the violin. The Spaniard’s delicatepropriety left her also nameless; but he explained that, as he understood, she was from the Teche. She played charmingly—“for an amateur,” he qualified: but what had struck him more than the music was her beauty, her figure, her picturesque grace. And when he confessed his delight in these, his hostess, seemingly on the inspiration of the moment, said:

“Paint her picture! Paint her just so! I’ll give you the order. Not a mere portrait—a picture.” And he had agreed, and the “jung” lady had consented. The two had but just now left the studio. To-morrow a servant would bring violin, music-rack, etc.; the ladies would follow, and then—

“You hear music, anyhow,” said the artist. That was his gentle way of intimating that Claude was not invited to be a looker-on.

On the next day, Claude, in his nook above, with the studio below shut from view by the curtain of his inner window, heard the ladies come. He knows they are these two, for one voice, the elder, blooms out at once in a gay abundance of words, and the other speaks in soft, low tones that, before they reach his ear, run indistinguishably together.

Soon there comes the sound of tuning the violin, while the older voice is still heard praising one thing and another, and asking careless questions.

“I suppose that cotton cloth covers something that is to have a public unveiling some day, doesn’t it?”

Claude cannot hear the answer; the painter drops his voice even below its usual quiet tone. But Claude knows what he must be saying; that the cloth coversmerely a portrait he is finishing of a young man who has sat for it to please a wifeless, and, but for him, childless, and fondly devoted father. And now he can tell by the masculine step, and the lady’s one or two lively words, that the artist has drawn away the covering from his (Claude’s) own portrait. But the lady’s young companion goes on tuning her instrument—“tink, tink, tink;” and now the bow is drawn.

“Why, how singular!” exclaims the elder lady. “Why, my dear, come here and see! Somebody has got your eyes! Why, he’s got your whole state of mind, a reduplication of it. And—I declare, he looks almost as good as you do! If—I”—

The voice stops short. There is a moment’s silence in which the unseen hearer doubts not the artist is making signs that yonder window and curtain are all that hide the picture’s original, and the voice says again,—

“I wish you’d paint my picture,” and the violin sounds once more its experimental notes.

But there are other things which Claude can neither hear, nor see, nor guess. He cannot see that the elder lady is already wondering at, and guardedly watching, an agitation betrayed by the younger in a tremor of the hand that fumbles with her music-sheets and music-stand, in the foot that trembles on the floor, in the reddened cheek, and in the bitten lip. He may guess that the painter sits at his easel with kindling eye; but he cannot guess that just as the elder lady is about to say,—

“My dear, if you don’t feel”—the tremor vanishes, the lips gently set, and only the color remains. Buthe hears the first soft moan of the tense string under the bow, and a second, and another; and then, as he rests his elbows upon the table before him, and covers his face in his trembling hands, it seems to him as if his own lost heart had entered into that vibrant medium, and is pouring thence to heaven and her ear its prayer of love.

Paint, artist, paint! Let your brushes fly! None can promise you she shall ever look quite like this again. Catch the lines,—the waving masses and dark coils of that loose-bound hair; the poise of head and neck; the eloquent sway of the form; the folds of garments that no longer hide, but are illumined by, the plenitude of an inner life and grace; the elastic feet; the ethereal energy and discipline of arms and shoulders; the supple wrists; the very fingers quivering on the strings; the rapt face, and the love-inspired eyes.

Claude, Claude! when every bird in forest and field knows the call of its mate, can you not guess the meaning of those strings? Must she open those sealed lips and call your very name—she who would rather die than call it?

He does not understand. Yet, without understanding, he answers. He rises from his seat; he moves to the window; he will not tiptoe or peep; he will be bold and bad. Brazenly he lifts the curtain and looks down; and one, one only—not the artist and not the patroness of art, but that one who would not lift her eyes to that window for all the world’s wealth—knows he is standing there, listening and looking down. He counts himself all unseen, yet presently shame dropsthe curtain. He turns away, yet stands hearkening. The music is about to end. The last note trembles on the air. There is silence. Then someone moves from a chair, and then the single cry of admiration and delight from the player’s companion is the player’s name,—

“Marguerite Beausoleil!”

Hours afterward there sat Claude in the seat where he had sunk down when he heard that name. The artist’s visitors had made a long stay, but at length they were gone. And now Claude, too, rose to go out. His steps were heard below, and presently the painter’s voice called persuadingly up:—

“St. Pierre! St. Pierre! Come, see.”

They stood side by side before the new work. Claude gazed in silence. At length he said, still gazing:

“I’ll buy it when ’tis finish’.”

But the artist explained again that it was being painted for Marguerite’s friend.

“For what she want it?” demanded Claude. The Spaniard smiled and intimated that the lady probably thought he could paint. “But at any rate,” he went on to say, “she seemed to have a hearty affection for the girl herself, whom,” he said, “she had described as being as good as she looked.” Claude turned and went slowly out.

When at sunset he stood under the honey-locust tree on the levee where he was wont to find his father waiting for him, he found himself alone. But within speaking distance he saw St. Pierre’s skiff just beingdrawn ashore by a ragged negro, who presently turned and came to him, half-lifting the wretched hat that slouched about his dark brows, and smiling.

“Sim like you done fo’got me,” he said. “Don’t you ’member how I use’ live at Belle Alliance? Yes, seh. I’s de one what show Bonaventure de road to Gran’ Point’. Yes, seh. But I done lef’ dah since Mistoo Wallis sole de place. Yes, seh. An’ when I meet up wid you papa you nevva see a nigger so glad like I was. No, seh. An’ likewise you papa. Yes, seh. An’ he ass me is I want to wuck fo’ him, an’ I see he needin’ he’p, an’ so I tu’n in an’ he’p him. Oh, yes, seh! dass mo’ ’n a week, now, since I been wuckin’ fo’ you papa.”

They got into the skiff and pushed off, the negro alone at the oars.

“Pow’ful strong current on udder side,” he said, pulling quietly up-stream to offset the loss of way he must make presently in crossing the rapid flood. “Mistoo Claude, I see a gen’leman dis day noon what I ain’t see’ befo’ since ’bout six year’ an’ mo’. I disremember his name, but——”

“Tarbox?” asked Claude with sudden interest.

“Yes, seh. Dass it! Tah-bawx. Sim like any man ought to ’member dat name. Him an’ you papa done gone down de canal. Yes, seh; in a pirogue. He come in a big hurry an’ say how dey got a big crevasse up de river on dat side, an’ he want make you papa see one man what livin’ on Lac Cataouaché. Yes, seh. An you papa say you fine you supper in de pot. An’ Mistoo Tah-bawx he say he want you teckone hoss an’ ride up till de crevasse an’ you fine one frien’ of yose yondah, one ingineer; an’ he say—Mistoo Tah-bawx—how he ’low to meet up wid you at you papa’ house to-morrow daylight. Yes, seh; Mistoo Tah-bawx; yes, seh.”

The towering cypresses of the far, southern swamps have a great width of base, from which they narrow so rapidly in the first seven or eight feet of their height, and thence upward taper so gradually, that it is almost or quite impossible for an axe-man, standing at their roots, to chop through the great flare that he finds abreast of him, and bring the trees down. But when the swamps are deep in water, the swamper may paddle up to these trees, whose narrowed waists are now within the swing of his axe, and standing up in his canoe, by a marvel of balancing skill, cut and cut, until at length his watchful, up-glancing eye sees the forest giant bow his head. Then a shove, a few backward sweeps of the paddle, and the canoe glides aside, and the great trunk falls, smiting the smooth surface of the water with a roar that, miles away, reaches the ear like the thunder of artillery. The tree falls: but if the woodsman has not known how to judge and choose wisely when the inner wood is laid bare under the first bigchip that flies, there are many chances that the fallen tree will instantly sink to the bottom of the water, and cannot be rafted out. One must know his craft, even in Louisiana swamps. “Knowledge is power.”

When Zoséphine and Mr. Tarbox finished out that Sunday twilight walk, they talked, after leaving the stile behind, only on business. He told her of having lately been, with a certain expert, in the swamps of Barataria, where he had seen some noble cypress forests tantalizingly near to navigation and market, but practically a great way off, because the levees of the great sugar estates on the Mississippi River shut out all deep overflows. Hence these forests could be bought for, seemingly, a mere tithe of their value. Now, he proposed to buy such a stretch of them along the edge of the shaking prairie north of Lake Cataouaché as would show on his part, he said, “caution, but not temerity.”

He invited her to participate. “And why?” For the simple reason that the expert, and engineer, had dropped the remark that, in his opinion, a certain levee could not possibly hold out against the high water of more than two or three more years, and that when it should break it would spread, from three to nine feet of water, over hundreds of square miles of swamp forests,prairies tremblantes, and rice and sugar fields, and many leagues of railway. Zoséphine had consented; and though Mr. Tarbox had soon after gone upon his commercial travels, he had effected the purchase by correspondence, little thinking that the first news he should hear on returning to New Orleanswould be that the remotely anticipated “break” had just occurred.

And now, could and would the breach be closed, or must all Barataria soon be turned into, and remain for months, a navigable yellow sea? This, Claude knew, was what he must hasten to the crevasse to discover, and return as promptly to report upon, let his heart-strings draw as they might towards the studio in Carondelet Street and the Christian Women’s Exchange.

What suffering it costs to be a coward! Some days before the crevasse occurred, he whom we know as the pot-hunter stood again on the platform of that same little railway station whence we once saw him vanish at sight of Bonaventure Deschamps. He had never ventured there since, until now. But there was a new station agent.

His Indian squaw was dead. A rattlesnake had given her its fatal sting, and the outcast, dreading all men and the coroner not the least, had, silently and alone, buried her on the prairie.

The train rolled up to the station again as before. Claude’s friend, the surveyor, stepped off with a cigar in his mouth, to enjoy in the train’s momentary stay the delightful air that came across the open prairie.The pot-hunter, who had got rid of his game, ventured near his former patron. It might be the engineer could give him work whereby to earn a day’s ready money. He was not disappointed. The engineer told him to come in a day or two, by the waterways the pot-hunter knew so well, across the swamps and prairies to Bayou Terrebonne and the little court-house town of Houma. And then he added:

“I heard this morning that somebody had been buying the swamp land all around you out on Lake Cataouaché. Is it so?”

The Acadian looked vacant and shook his head.

“Yes,” said the other, “a Madame Beausoleil, or somebod—What’s the matter?”

“All aboard!” cried the train conductor.

“The fellow turned pale,” said the surveyor, as he resumed his seat in the smoking-car and the landscape began again to whirl by.

The pot-hunter stood for a moment, and then slowly, as if he stole away from some sleeping enemy, left the place. Alarm went with him like an attendant ghost. A thousand times that day, in the dark swamp, on the wide prairie, or under his rush-thatch on the lake-side, he tortured himself with one question: Why had she—Zoséphine—reached away out from Carancro to buy the uncultivable and primeval wilderness round about his lonely hiding-place? Hour after hour the inexplicable problem seemed to draw near and nearer to him, a widening, tightening, dreamlike terror, that, as it came, silently pointed its finger of death at him. He was glad enough to leave his cabin next dayin his small, swift pirogue—shot-gun, axe, and rifle his only companions—for Terrebonne.

It chanced to be noon of the day following, when he glided up the sunny Terrebonne towards the parish seat. The shores of the stream have many beauties, but the Acadian’s eyes were alert to any thing but them. The deep green, waxen-leaved casino hedges; the hedges of Cherokee rose, and sometimes of rose and casino mingled; the fields of corn and sugar-cane; the quaint, railed, floating bridges lying across the lazy bayou; the orange-groves of aged, giant trees, their dark green boughs grown all to a tangle with well-nigh the density of a hedge, and their venerable trunks hairy with green-gray lichens; the orange-trees again in the door-yards, with neat pirogues set upon racks under their deep shade; the indescribable floods of sunlight and caverns of shadow; the clear, brown depths beneath his own canoe; or, at the bottom, the dark, waving, green-brown tresses of water-weeds,—these were naught to him.

But the human presence was much; and once, when just ahead of him he espied a young, sunbonneted woman crouching in the pouring sunshine beyond the sod of the bayou’s bank, itself but a few inches above the level of the stream, on a little pier of one plank pushed out among the flags and reeds, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle, he stopped the dip of his canoe-paddle, and gazed with growing trepidation and slackening speed. At the outer end of the plank, the habitual dip of the bucket had driven aside the water-lilies, and made a round, glassy space thatreflected all but perfectly to him her busy, young, downcast visage.

“How like”—Just then she lifted her head. He started as though his boat had struck a snag. How like—how terribly like to that young Zoséphine whose ill-concealed scorn he had so often felt in days—in years—long gone, at Carancro! This was not, and could not be, the same—lacked half the necessary years; and yet, in the joy of his relief, he answered her bow with a question, “Whose was yonder house?”

She replied in the same Acadian French in which she was questioned, that there dwelt, or had dwelt, and about two weeks ago had died, “Monsieur Robichaux.” The pot-hunter’s paddle dipped again, his canoe shot on, and two hours later he walked with dust-covered feet into Houma.

The principal tavern there stands on that corner of the court-house square to which the swamper would naturally come first. Here he was to find the engineer. But, as with slow, diffident step he set one foot upon the corner of the threshold, there passed quickly by him and out towards the court-house, two persons,—one a man of a county court-room look and with a handful of documents, and the other a woman whom he knew at a glance. Her skirts swept his ankles as he shrank in sudden and abject terror against the wall, yet she did not see him.

He turned and retreated the way he had come, nothing doubting that only by the virtue of a voodoo charm which he carried in his pocket he had escaped, for the time being, a plot laid for his capture. For the small,neatly-robed form that you may still see disappearing within the court-house door beside the limping figure of the probate clerk is Zoséphine Beausoleil. She will finish the last pressing matter of the Robichaux succession now in an hour or so, and be off on the little branch railway, whose terminus is here, for New Orleans.

When the pot-hunter approached Lake Cataouaché again, he made on foot, under cover of rushes and reeds taller than he, a wide circuit and reconnoissance of his hut. While still a long way off, he saw, lighted by the sunset rays, what he quickly recognized as a canoe drawn half out of the water almost at his door. He warily drew nearer. Presently he stopped, and stood slowly and softly shifting his footing about on the oozy soil, at a little point of shore only some fifty yards away from his cabin. His eyes, peering from the ambush, descried a man standing by the pirogue and searching with his gaze the wide distances that would soon be hidden in the abrupt fall of the southern night.

The pot-hunter knew him. Not by name, but by face. The day the outlaw saw Bonaventure at the little railway station this man was with him. The name the pot-hunter did not know was St. Pierre.

The ambushed man shrank a step backward into his hiding-place. His rifle was in his hand and he noiselessly cocked it. He had not resolved to shoot; but a rifle is of no use until it is cocked. While he so stood, another man came into view and to the first one’s side. This one, too, he knew, despite the soft hat that had taken the place of the silk one; for thiswas Tarbox. The Acadian was confirmed in his conviction that the surveyor’s invitation for him to come to Houma was part of a plot to entrap him.

While he still looked the two men got into the canoe and St. Pierre paddled swiftly away. The pot-hunter let down the hammer of his gun, shrank away again, turned and hurried through the tangle, regained his canoe, and paddled off. The men’s departure from the cabin was, in his belief, a ruse. But he knew how by circuits and short cuts to follow after them unseen, and this he did until he became convinced that they were fairly in the Company Canal and gliding up its dark colonnade in the direction whence they had evidently come. Then he returned to his cabin and with rifle cocked and with slow, stealthy step entered it, and in headlong haste began to prepare to leave it for a long hiding-out.

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