I did not get back to New Orleans till late in the fall. In the office they told me that Manouvrier had been in twice to see if I had returned, and they had promised to send him word of my arrival. But I said no, and went to see him.
I found new lines of care on his brow, but the old kindness was still in his eye. We exchanged a few words of greeting and inquiry, and then there came a pause, which I broke.
"Well, stuffing birds better than ever, I suppose."
"Naw," he looked around upon his work, "I dawn't think. I dunno if I stoff him quite so good like biffo'." Another pause. Then, "I think I mek out what I do wid doze money now."
"Indeed," said I, and noticed that his face was averted from his wife.
She lifted her eyes to his broad back with a quizzical smile, glanced at me knowingly, and dropped them again upon her sewing, sighed:
"Ah-bah!" Then she suddenly glanced at me with a pretty laugh and added, "Since all that time he dunno what he goin' to make with it. If he trade with it I thing he don't stoff bird no mo', and I thing he lose it bis-ide—ha, ha, ha!—and if he keep it all time lock in doze bank I thing, he jiz well not have it." She laughed again.
But he quite ignored her and resumed, as if out of a revery, "Yass, at de las' I mek dat out." And the wife interrupted him in a tone that was like the content of a singing hen.
"I think it don't worth while to leave it to our chillun, en't it?"
"Ah!" said the husband, entirely to me, "daz de troub'! You see?—we dawn't got some ba-bee'! Dat neveh arrive to her. God know' dass not de fault of us."
"Yass," put in his partner, smiling to her needle, "the good God know' that verrie well." And the pair exchanged a look of dove-like fondness.
"Yass," Manouvrier mused aloud once more, "I think I build my ole woman one fine house."
"Ah! I don't want!"
"But yass! Foudre tonnerre! how I goin' spend her else? w'iskee? hosses? women? what da dev'l! Naw, I build a fine 'ouse. You see! she want dat house bad enough when she see her. Yass; fifty t'ousan' dollah faw house and twenty-five t'ousan'"—he whisked his thumb at me and I said for him,
"Yes, twenty-five thousand at interest to keep up the establishment."
"Yass. Den if Pastropbon go first to dat boneyard—" And out went his thumb again, while his hairy lip curled at the grim prospect of beating Fate the second time, and as badly, in the cemetery, as the first time, in the lottery.
He built the house—farther down town and much farther from the river. Both husband and wife found a daily delight in watching its slow rise and progress. In the room behind the shop he still plied his art and she her needle as they had done all their married life, with never an inroad upon their accustomed hours except the calls of the shop itself; but on every golden morning of that luxurious summer-land, for a little while before the carpenters and plasterers arrived and dragged off their coats, the pair spent a few moments wandering through and about the building together, she with her hen-like crooning, he with his unsmiling face.
Yet they never showed the faintest desire to see the end. The contractor dawdled by the month. I never saw such dillydallying. They only abetted it, and when once he brought an absurd and unasked-for excuse to the taxidermist's shop, its proprietor said—first shutting the door between them and the wife in the inner room:
"Tek yo' time. Mo' sloweh she grow, mo' longeh she stan'."
I doubt that either Manouvrier or his wife hinted to the other the true reason for their apathy. But I guessed it, only too easily, and felt its pang. It was that with the occupancy and care of the house must begin the wife's absence from her old seat beside her husband at his work.
Another thing troubled me. I did persuade him to put fittings into his cistern which fire-engines could use in case of emergency, but he would not insure the building.
"Naw! Luck bring me dat—I let luck take care of her."
"Ah! yass," chimed the wife, "yet still I think mebbee the good God tell luck where to bring her. I'm shoe he got fing-er in that pie."
"Ah-ha? Daz all right! If God want to burn his own fing-er——"
At length the house was finished and was beautiful within and without. It was of two and a half stories, broad and with many rooms. Two spacious halls crossed each other, and there were wide verandas front and back, and a finished and latticed basement. The basement and the entire grounds, except a few bright flower-borders, were flagged, as was also the sidewalk, with the manufactured stone which in that nearly frostless climate makes such a perfect and beautiful pavement, and on this fair surface fell the large shadows of laburnum, myrtle, orange, oleander, sweet-olive, mespelus, and banana, which the taxidermist had not spared expense to transplant here in the leafy prime of their full growth.
Then almost as slowly the dwelling was furnished. In this the brother-in- law's widow co-operated, and when it was completed Manouvrier suggested her living in it a few days so that his wife might herself move in as leisurely as she chose. And six months later, there, in the old back room in St. Peter Street, the wife still sat sewing and now and then saying small, wise, dispassionate things to temper the warmth of her partner's more artistic emotions. Every fair day, about the hour of sunset, they went to see the new house. It was plain they loved it; loved it only less than their old life; but only the brother-in-law's widow lived in it.
I happened about this time to be acting as president of an insurance company on Canal Street. Summer was coming in again. One hot sunny day, when the wind was high and gusty, the secretary was remarking to me what sad ruin it might work if fire should start among the frame tenement cottages which made up so many neighborhoods that were destitute of watermains, when right at our ear the gong sounded for just such a region and presently engine after engine came thundering and smoking by our open windows. Fire had broken out in the street where Manouvrier's new house stood, four squares from that house, but straight to windward of it.
We knew only too well, without being there to witness, that our firemen would find nothing with which to fight the flames except a few shallow wells of surface water and the wooden rain-water cisterns above ground, and that both these sources were almost worthless owing to a drouth. A man came in and sat telling me of his new device for lessening the risks of fire.
"Where?" asked I, quickly.
"Why, as I was saying, on steamboats loaded with cotton."
"Oh, yes," said I, "I understand." But I did not. For the life of me I couldn't make sense of what he said. I kept my eyes laboriously in his face, but all I could see was a vision of burning cottages; hook-and- ladder-men pulling down sheds and fences; ruined cisterns letting just enough water into door-yards and street-gutters to make sloppy walking; fire-engines standing idle and dropping cinders into their own puddles in a kind of shame for their little worth; here and there one furiously sucking at an exhausted well while its firemen stood with scorching faces holding the nozzles almost in the flames and cursing the stream of dribbling mud that fell short of their gallant endeavor. I seemed to see streets populous with the sensation-seeking crowd; sidewalks and alleys filled with bedding, chairs, bureaus, baskets of crockery and calico clothing with lamps spilling into them, cheap looking-glasses unexpectedly answering your eye with the boldness of an outcast girl, broken tables, pictures of the Virgin, overturned stoves, and all the dear mantlepiece trash which but an hour before had been the pride of the toiling housewife, and the adornment of the laborer's home.
"Where can I see this apparatus?" I asked my patient interviewer.
"Well—ahem! it isn't what you'd call an apparatus, exactly. I have here——"
"Yes; never mind that just now; I'm satisfied you've got a good thing and —I'll tell you! Can you come in to-morrow at this hour? Good! I wish you would! Well, good-day."
The secretary was waiting to speak to me. The fire, he said, had entirely burned up one square and was half through a second. "By the way, isn't that the street where old P.T.B.——"
"Yes," I replied, taking my hat; "if anyone wants to see me, you'd better tell him to call to-morrow."
I found the shop in St. Peter's Street shut, and went on to the new residence. As I came near it, its beauty seemed to me to have consciously increased under the threatenings of destruction.
In the front gate stood the brother-in-law's widow, full of gestures and distressful smiles as she leaned out with nervously folded arms and looked up and down the street. "Manouvrier? he is ad the fire since a whole hour. He will break his heart if dat fire ketch to dat 'ouse here. He cannot know 'ow 'tis in danger! Ah! sen' him word? I sen' him fo' five time'—he sen' back I stay righd there an' not touch nut'n'! Ah! my God! I fine dat varrie te-de-ous, me, yass!"
"Is his wife with him?"
"Assuredly! You see, dey git 'fraid 'bout dat 'ouse of de Sister', you know?"
"No, where is it?"
"No? You dunno dat lill' 'ouse where de Sister' keep dose orphelin' ba-bee'?-juz big-inning sinse 'bout two week' ago?-round de corner—one square mo' down town—'alf square mo' nearer de swamp? Well, I thing 'f you pass yondeh you fine Pastropbon."
Through smoke, under falling cinders, and by distracted and fleeing households I went. The moment I turned the second corner I espied the house. It was already half a square from the oncoming fire, but on the northern side of the street, just out of its probable track and not in great danger except from sparks. But it was old and roofed with shingles; a decrepit Creole cottage sitting under dense cedars in a tangle of rose and honeysuckle vines, and strangely beautified by a flood of smoke-dimmed yellow sunlight.
As I hurried forward, several men and boys came from the opposite direction at a run and an engine followed them, jouncing and tilting across the sidewalk opposite the little asylum, into a yard, to draw from a fresh well. Their leader was a sight that drew all eyes. He was coatless and hatless; his thin cotton shirt, with its sleeves rolled up to the elbows, was torn almost off his shaggy breast, his trousers were drenched with water and a rude bandage round his head was soaked with blood. He carried an axe. The throng shut him from my sight, but I ran to the spot and saw him again standing before the engine horses with his back close to their heads. A strong, high board fence shut them off from the well and against it stood the owner of the property, pale as death, guarding the precious water with a shotgun at full cock. I heard him say:
"The first fellow that touches this fence——"
But he did not finish. Quicker than his gun could flash and bang harmlessly in the air the man before him had dropped the axe and leaped upon him with the roar of a lion. The empty gun flew one way and its owner another and almost before either struck the ground the axe was swinging and crashing into the fence.
As presently the engine rolled through the gap and shouting men backed her to the edge of the well, the big axeman paused to wipe the streaming sweat from his begrimed face with his arm. I clutched him.
"Manouvrier!"
A smile of recognition shone for an instant and vanished as I added,
"Come to your own house! Come, you can't save it here."
He turned a quick, wild look at the fire, seized me by the arm and with a gaze of deepest gratitude, asked:
"You tryin' save her?"
"I'll do anything I can."
"Oh, dass right!" His face was full of mingled joy and pain. "You go yondeh—mek yo' possible!" We were hurrying to the street—"Oh, yass, faw God's sake go, mek yo' possible!"
"But, Manouvrier, you must come too! Where's your wife? The chief danger to your house isn't here, it's where the fire's between it and the wind!"
His answer was a look of anguish. "Good God! my fran'. We come yondeh so quick we can! But—foudre tonnerre!—look that house here fill' with ba-bee'! What we goin' do? Those Sister' can't climb on roof with bocket' wateh. You see I got half-dozen boy' up yondeh; if I go 'way they dis-cend and run off at the fire, spark' fall on roof an'—" his thumb flew out.
"Sparks! Heavens! Manouvrier, your house is in the path of theflames!"
The man flew at me and hung over me, his strong locks shaking, his great black fist uplifted and the only tears in his eyes I ever saw there. "Damnession! She's not mine! I trade her to God faw these one! Go! tell him she's his, he kin burn her if he feel like'!" He gave a half laugh, fresh witness of his distress, and went into the gate of the asylum.
I smiled—what could I do?—and was turning away, when I saw the chief of the fire department. It took but one moment to tell him my want, and in another he had put the cottage roof under the charge of four of his men with instructions not to leave it till the danger was past or the house burning. The engine near us had drawn the well dry and was coming away. He met it, pointed to where, beneath swirling billows of black smoke, the pretty gable of the taxidermist's house shone like a white sail against a thundercloud, gave orders and disappeared.
The street was filling with people. A row of cottages across the way was being emptied. The crackling flames were but half a square from Manouvrier's house. I called him once more to come. He waved his hand kindly to imply that he knew what I had done. He and his wife were in the Sisters' front garden walk conversing eagerly with the Mother Superior. They neared the gate. Suddenly the Mother Superior went back, the lay-sister guarding the gate let the pair out and the three of us hurried off together.
We found ourselves now in the uproar and vortex of the struggle. Only at intervals could we take our attention from the turmoil that impeded or threatened us, to glance forward at the white gable or back—as Manouvrier persisted in doing—to the Sisters' cottage. Once I looked behind and noticed, what I was loath to tell, that the firemen on its roof had grown busy; but as I was about to risk the truth, the husband and wife, glancing at their own roof, in one breath groaned aloud. Its gleaming gable had begun to smoke.
"Ah! that good God have pity on uz!" cried the wife, in tears, but as she started to run forward I caught her arm and bade her look again. A strong, white stream of water was falling on the smoking spot and it smoked no more.
The next minute, with scores of others, choking and blinded with the smoke, we were flying from the fire. The wind had turned.
"It is only a gust," I cried, "it will swing round again. We must turn the next corner and reach the house from the far side." I glanced back to see why my companions lagged and lo! they had vanished.
I reached the house just in time to save its front grounds from the invasion of the rabble. The wind had not turned back again. The brother-in law's widow was offering prayers of thanksgiving. The cisterns were empty and the garden stood glistening in the afternoon sun like a May queen drenched in tears; but the lovely spot was saved.
I left its custodian at an upper window, looking out upon the fire, and started once more to find my friends. Half-way round to the Sisters' cottage I met them. With many others I stepped aside to make a clear way for the procession they headed. The sweet, clean wife bore in her arms an infant; the tattered, sooty, bloody-headed husband bore two; and after them, by pairs and hand in hand, with one gray sister in the rear, came a score or more of pink-frocked, motherless little girls. An amused rabble of children and lads hovered about the diminutive column, with leers and jests and happy antics, and the wife smiled foolishly and burned red with her embarrassment; but in the taxidermist's face shone an exaltation of soul greater than any I had ever seen. I felt too petty for such a moment and hoped he would go by without seeing me; but he smiled an altogether new smile and said,
"My fran', God A'mighty, he know a good bargain well as anybody!"
I ran ahead with no more shame of the crowd than Zaccheus of old. I threw open the gate, bounded up the steps and spread wide the door. In the hall, the widow, knowing naught of this, met me with wet eyes crying,
"Ah! ah! de 'ouse of de orphelin' is juz blaze' up h-all over h-at once!" and hushed in amazement as the procession entered the gate.
P.T.B. Manouvrier, Taxidermist!
When the fire was out the owner of that sign went back to his shop and to his work, and his wife sat by him sewing as before. But the orphans stayed in their new and better home. Two or three years ago the Sisters—the brother-in-law's widow is one of them—built a large addition behind; but the house itself stands in the beauty in which it stood on that day of destruction, and my friend always leaves his work on balmy afternoons in time to go with his wife and see that pink procession, four times as long now as it was that day, march out the gate and down the street for its daily walk.
"Ah! Pastropbon, we got ba-bee' enough presently, en't it?"
"Ole woman, nobody else ever strock dat lott'ree for such a prize like dat."
* * * * *
The Entomologist
An odd feature of New Orleans is the way homes of all ranks, in so many sections of it, are mingled. The easy, bright democracy of the thing is what one might fancy of ancient Greeks; only, here there is a general wooden frailty.
A notable phase of this characteristic is the multitude of small, frame, ground-story double cottages fronting endwise to the street, on lots that give either side barely space enough for one row of twelve-foot rooms with windows on a three-foot alley leading to the narrow backyard.
Thus they lie, deployed in pairs or half-dozens, by hundreds, in the variable intervals that occur between houses and gardens of dignity and elegance; hot as ovens, taking their perpetual bath of the great cleanser, sunshine. Sometimes they open directly upon the banquette (sidewalk), but often behind as much as a fathom of front-yard, as gay with flowers as a girl's hat, and as fragrant of sweet-olive, citronelle, and heliotrope as her garments. In the right-hand half of such a one, far down on the Creole side of Canal street, and well out toward the swamp, lived our friend the entomologist.
Just a glance at it was enough to intoxicate one's fancy. It seemed to confess newness of life, joy, passion, temperance, refinement, aspiration, modest wisdom, and serene courage. You would say there must live two well-mated young lovers—but one can't always tell.
We first came to know the entomologist through our opposite neighbors, the Fontenettes, when we lived in the street that still bears the romantic name, Sixth. What a pity nothing rhymes to it.Theirground-story cottage was of a much better sort. It lay broadside to the street, two-thirds across a lot of forty feet width, in the good old Creole fashion, its front garden twelve feet deep, and its street fence, of white palings, higher than the passer's head. The parlor and dining-room were on the left, and the two main bedrooms on the right, next the garden; Mrs. Fontenette's in front, opening into the parlor, Monsieur's behind, letting into the dining-room. For there had been a broader garden on the parlor and dining-room side, but that had been sold and built on. I fancy that if Mrs. Fontenette—who was not a Creole, as her husband was, but had once been a Miss Bangs, or something, and still called blackberries "blackbries," and made root rhyme with foot—I fancy if she had been doomed to our entomologist's sort of a house she would have been too broken in spirit to have made anybody's acquaintance.
For our pretty blonde neighbor had ambitions, orhadhad, as she once hinted to me with a dainty sadness. When I somehow let slip to her that I had repeated her delicately balanced words to my wife she gave me one melting glance of reproach, and thenceforth confided in me no more beyond the limits of literary criticism and theology—and botany. I remember we were among the few roses of her small flower-beds at the time, and I was trying to show her what was blighting them all in the bud. She called them "rose-es."
They rarely bloomed for her; she was always for being the rose herself—as Monsieur Fontenette once said; but he said it with a glance of fond admiration. Her name was Flora, and yet not flowers, but their book-lore, best suited her subtle capriciousness. She made such a point of names that she could not let us be happy with the homely monosyllable by which we were known, until we allowed her to hyphenate us as the Thorndyke-Smiths.
There hung in our hall an entire unmarred beard of the beautiful gray Spanish moss, eight feet long. I had got this unusual specimen by tiptoeing from the thwarts of a skiff with twelve feet of yellow crevasse- waters beneath, the shade of the vast cypress forest above, and the bough whence it hung brought within hand's reach for the first time in a century. Thus I explained it one day to Mrs. Fontenette, as she touched its ends with a delicate finger.
"Tillandsia"—was her one word of response. She loved no other part of botany quite so much as its Latin.
"The Baron ought to see that," said Monsieur. He was a man of quiet manners, not over-social, who had once enjoyed a handsome business income, but had early—about the time of his marriage—been made poor through the partial collapse of the house in Havre whose cotton-buyer he had been, and, in a scant way, still was. "When a cotton-buyer geds down, he stays," was all the explanation he ever gave us. He had unfretfully let adversity cage him for life in the only occupation he knew, while the wife he adored kept him pecuniarily bled to death, without sharing his silent resigna— There I go again! Somehow I can't talk about her without seeming unjust and rude. I felt it just now, even, when I quoted her husband's fond word, that she always chose to be the rose herself. Well, she nearly always succeeded; she was a rose—with some of the rose's drawbacks.
When we asked who the Baron might be it was she who told us, but in a certain disappointed way, as if she would rather have kept him unknown a while longer. He was, she said, a profoundly learned man, graduate of one of those great universities over in his native Germany, and a naturalist. Young? Well, eh—comparatively—yes. At which the silent husband smiled his dissent.
The Baron was an entomologist. Both the Fontenettes thought we should be fascinated with the beauty of some of his cases of moths and butterflies.
"And coleoptera," said the soft rose-wife. She could ask him to bring them to us. Take us to him?—Oh!—eh—her embarrassment made her prettier, as she broke it to us gently that the Baroness was a seamstress. She hushed at her husband's mention of shirts; but recovered when he harked back to the Baron, and beamed her unspoken apologies for the great, brave scholar who daily, silently bore up under this awful humiliation.
Toward the close of the next afternoon she brought the entomologist. I can see yet the glad flutter she could not hide as they came up our front garden walk in an air spiced by the "four-o'clocks," with whose small trumpets—red, white, and yellow—our children were filling their laps and stringing them on the seed-stalks of the cocoa-grass. He was bent and spectacled, of course;l'entomologie oblige; but, oh, besides!—
"Comparatively young," Mrs. Fontenette had said, and I naturally used her husband, who was thirty-one, for the comparison. Why, this man? It would have been a laughable flattery to have guessed his age to be forty-five. Yet that was really the fact. Many a man looks younger at sixty—oh, at sixty-five! He was dark, bloodless, bowed, thin, weatherbeaten, ill-clad— a picture of decent, incurable penury. The best thing about his was his head. It was not imposing at all, but it was interesting, albeit very meagrely graced with fine brown hair, dry and neglected. I read him through without an effort before we had been ten minutes together; a leaf still hanging to humanity's tree, but faded and shrivelled around some small worm that was feeding on its juices.
And there was no mistaking that worm; it was the avarice of knowledge. He had lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delving on, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart on the locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany, satisfied with them for their own sake, without reference to God or man; an infant in emotions, who time and again would no doubt have starved outright but for his wife, whom there and then I resolved we should know also. I was amused to see, by stolen glances, Mrs. Smith study him. She did not know she frowned, nor did he; but Mrs. Fontenette knew it every time.
We all had the advantage of him as to common sight. His glasses were obviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till he clapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for me the new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzling green, beetle inhabiting the Spanish moss—his own scientific discovery— he wrote it so minutely that I had to use a lens to read it.
As we sat close around the library lamp, I noticed how often his poor clothing had been mended by a woman's needle. His linen was discouraging, his cravat awry and dingy, and his hands—we had better pass his hands; yet they were slender and refined.
Also they shook, though not from any habit commonly called vicious. You could see that no vice of the body nor any lust of material things had ever led him captive. He gave one the tender despair with which we look on a blind babe.
When we expressed regret that his wife had not come with him, he only bent with a deeper greed into a book I had handed him, and after a moment laid it down disappointedly, saying that it was "fool of plundters." Mrs. Fontenette asking to be shown one of them, they reopened the book together, she all consciousness as she bent against him over the page, he oblivious of everything but the phrase they were hunting. He gave his forehead a tap of despair as he showed where the book called this same Tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a parasite.
"It iss no baraseet," he explained, in a mellow falsetto, "it iss an epipheet!"
"An air-plant!" said his fair worshipper, softly drinking in a bosomful of gladness as she made the distance between them more discreet.
Distances were all one to him. He seemed like a burnt log, still in shape but gone to ashes, except in one warm spot where glowed this self- consuming, world-sacrificing adoration of knowledge; knowledge sought, as I say, purely for its own sake and narrowed down to names and technical descriptions. Men ofpervertedprinciples and passions you may find anywhere; but I never had seen anyone so totally undeveloped in all the emotions, affections, tastes that make lifelife.
A few afternoons later I went to his house. For pretext I carried a huge green worm, but I went mainly to see just how unluckily he was married. He was not at home. I found his partner a small, bright, toil-worn, pretty woman of hardly twenty-eight or nine, whose two or three children had died in infancy, and who had blended wifehood and motherhood together, and was taking care of the Baron as a widow would care for a crippled son, and at the same time reverencing him as if he were a demigod. Of his utter failure to provide their daily living she confessed herself by every implication, simply—proud! What else should a demigod's wife expect? At the same time, without any direct statement, she made it clear that she had no disdain, but only the broadest charity, for men who make a living. It was odd how few her smiles were, and droll how much sweetness—what a sane winsomeness—she managed to radiate without them. I left her in her clean, bright cottage, like a nesting bird in a flowery bush, and entered my own home, declaring, with what I was gently told was unnecessary enthusiasm, that the Baron's wife was the "unluckily married" one, and the best piece of luck her husband had ever had. I had seen women make a virtue of necessity, but I had never before seen one make a conviction, comfort, and joy of it, and I should try to like the Baron, I said, if only for her sake.
Of course I became, in some degree, a source of revenue to him. Understand, there was always a genuine exchange of so much for so much; he was not a "baraseet"—oh, no!—yet he hung on. We still have, stowed somewhere, a large case of butterflies, another of splendid moths, and a smaller one of glistening beetles. Nor can I begrudge their cost, of whatever sort, even now when my delight in them is no longer a constant enthusiasm. The cases of specimens have passed from daily sight, but thenceforth, as never before, our garden was furnished with guests—pages, ladies, poets, fairies, emperors, goddesses—coming and going on gorgeous wings, and none ever a stranger more than once. My non-parasitic friend "opened a new world" to me; a world that so flattered one with its grace and beauty, its marvellous delicacy and minuteness, its glory of color and curiousness of marking, and its exquisite adaptation of form to need and function, that in my meaner depths, or say my childish shallows—I resented Mrs. Fontenette's making the same avowal for herself—I didn't believe her!
I do not say she was consciously shamming; but I could see she drank in the Baron's revelations with no more true spiritual exaltation than the quivering twilight moths drew from our veranda honeysuckles. Yet it was mainly her vanity that feasted, not any lower impulse—of which, you know, there are several—and, possibly, all her vanity craved at first was the tinsel distinction of unusual knowledge.
One night she got into my dreams. I seemed to be explaining to Monsieur Fontenette apologetically that this newly opened world was not at all separate from my old one, but shone everywhere in it, like our winged guests in our garden, and followed and surrounded me far beyond the Baron's company, terminology, and magnifying-glass, lightening the burdens and stress of the very counting-room and exchange. Whereat he seemed to flare up!
"Ah!—you—I believe yes! But she?" he waved his hand in fierce unbelief.
I awoke concerned, and got myself to sleep again only by remembering the utter absence of vanity in the Baron himself. I lay smiling in the dark to think how much less all our verbal caressings were worth to him than the drone of the most familiar beetle, and how his life-long delving in books and nature had opened up this fairy world to him only at the cost of shutting up all others. If education means calling forth and perfecting our powers and affections, he was ten times more uneducated than his wife, even as we knew her then. He appeared to care no more for human interests, far or near, in large or small, than a crab cares for the stars. I fell asleep chuckling in remembrance of an occasion when Mrs. Fontenette, taking her cue from me, spoke to him of his plant-and-insect lore as one of the many worlds there are withintheworld, no more displacing it than light displaces air, or than fragrance displaces form or sound. He made her say it all over again, and then asked: "Vhere vas dat?"
His whole world was not really as wide as Gregory's island was to its gentle hermit. No butterfly raptures for him; he devoured the one kind of facts he cared for, as a caterpillar devours leaves.
How Mrs. Fontenette got Mrs. "Thorndyke-Smith" and me entangled with some six or eight others in her project for a botanizing and butterfly-chasing picnic I do not know; but she did. On the evening before the appointed day I perfidiously crawfished out of it, and our house furnished only one delegate, whom I urged to go rather than break up the party—I never break up a party if I can avoid it. "But as for me going," I said, "my business simply won't let me!" At which our pretty neighbor expressed her regrets with a ready resignation that broke into open sunshine as she lamented the same inability in her husband. To my suggestion that the Baroness be invited, Mrs. Fontenette smiled a sweet amusement that was perfect in its way, and said she hoped the weather would be propitious; people were so timid about rain.
It was. When I came home, tardily, that afternoon, the picnickers had not returned, though the oleanders and crape-myrtles on the grounds next ours cast shadows three times their length across our lawn. In an aimless way I roamed from the house down into our small rear garden, thinking oftenest, of course, of the absentees, and admiring the refined good sense with which Monsieur Fontenette seemed to have decided to let this unperilous attack of silliness run itself out in the woman he loved with so much tenderness and with so much passion.
"How much distress he is saving himself and all of us," I caught myself murmuring, audibly, out among my fig-trees.
Finding two or three figs fully ripe, I strolled over the way to see him among his trees and maybe find chance for a little neighborly boasting. As our custom with each other was, I ignored the bell on his gate, drew the bolt, and, passing in among Mrs. Fontenette's invalid roses, must have moved, without intention, quite noiselessly from one to another, until I came around behind the house, where a strong old cloth-of-gold rose-vine half covered the latticed side of the cistern shed. In the doorway I stopped in silent amaze. A small looking-glass hanging against the wooden cistern showed me—although I was in much the stronger light—Monsieur Fontenette. He was just straightening up from an oil-stone he had been using, and the reflection of his face fell full on the glass. Once before, but once only, had I seen such agony of countenance—such fierce and awful looking in and out at the same time; that was on a man who was still trying to get the best of a fight in which he knew he was mortally shot. Fontenette did not see me. I suppose the rose-vine screened me, and his glance did not rise quite to the mirror, but followed the soft thumbings with which he tried the two edges and point of as murderous a knife as ever I saw.
As softly as a shadow I drew out of sight, turned away, and went almost back to the gate before I let my footfall be heard, and called, "M'sieu' Fontenette!"
He hallooed from the shed in a playful sham of being a mile or so away, and emerged from the lattice and vine with that accustomed light of equanimity on his features which made him always so thoroughly good- looking. He came hitching his waistband with both hands in that innocent Creole way that belongs to the latitude, and how I knew I cannot tell you, but I did know—I didn't merely feel or think, but I knew!—positively— that he had that hideous thing on his person.
Against what contingency I could only ask myself and wonder, but I instantly decided to get him away from home and keep him away until the picnickers had got back and scattered. So I proposed a walk, a diversion we had often enjoyed together.
"Yes?" he said, "to pazz the time whilse they don't arrive? With the greates' of pleasu'e!"
I dare say we were both more preoccupied than we thought we were, for outside the gate we fairly ran into a lady—yes; a seamstress—the wife of the entomologist. My stars! She had seemed winning enough before, but now —what a rise in values! As we conversed it was all I could do to keep my eyes from saying: "A man with you for a wife belongs at home whenever he can be there!" But whether they spoke it or not, in some way, without word or glance, by simple radiations from the whole sweet woman, she revealed that to make that fact plain to him, toher, and to all of us, was what this new emphasis of charm was for.
She had come, she said—and scarcely on the lips of the loveliest Creole did I ever hear a more bewitching broken-English—she had come according to a half-promise made to Mrs. Fontenette to show her—"I tidn't etsectly promised, I chust said I vill some time come——"
"And Mrs. Fontenette didn't object," I playfully interrupted—
"No," said the unruffled speaker, "I chust said I vill come; yes; to show her a new vay to remoof, remoof? is sat English? So? A new vay to remoof old stains."
"A new way—" responded Fontenette, with an air of gravest interest in all matters of laundry.
"Yes," she repeated, as simply as a babe, "a new vay; and I sought I come now so to go home viss mine hussbandt." There, at last, she smiled, and to make the caressing pride of her closing tone still prettier, lifted her figured muslin out sidewise between thumb and forefinger of each hand with even more archaic grace than playfulness.
As the three of us crossed over and took seats on my veranda, we were joined by the neighbor whose garden-trees I have mentioned; the man of whom I have told you, how he failed to strike a bargain with old Manouvrier, the taxidermist. He was a Missourian, in the produce business, a thoroughly good fellow, but—well—oh—!
He came perspiring, flourishing a palm-leaf fan and a large handkerchief, to say I might keep all the shade his tall house and trees dropped on my side of the fence. And presently what does the simple fellow do but begin to chaff the three of us on the absence of our three partners!
I held my breath in dismay! The more I strove to change the subject the more our fat wag, fancying he was teasing me to the delight of the others, harped on the one string, until with pure apprehension of what Fontenette might presently do or say, my blood ran hot and cold. But Monsieur showed neither amusement nor annoyance, only a perfectly gracious endurance. Yet how could I know what instant his forbearance might give way, or what serpent's eggs the joker's inanities might in the next day or hour turn out to be, laid in the hot heart of the Creole gentleman? Then it was that this slender little German seamstress-wife shone forth like the first star of the breathless twilight.
Seamstress? no; she had left the seamstress totally behind her. You might have thought the finest tactics of the drawing-room—not of to-day, but of the times when gentlemen wore swords and dirks—had been at her finger-ends all her life. She took our good neighbor's giddy pleasantries as deep truths lightly put, and answered them in such graceful, mild earnest, and with such a modest, yet fetching, quaintness, that we were all preached to more effectively than we could have been by seven priests from one pulpit. Or, at any rate, that was my feeling; every note she uttered was melodiously kind, but every sentence was an arrow sent home.
"You make me," she said, "you make me sink of se aunt of my musser, vhat she said to my musser vhen my musser iss getting married. 'Senda,' she said, 'vonce in a vhile'—is sat right, 'vonce in a vhile?'—so?—'vonce in a vhile your Rudolph going to see a voman he better had married san you. Sen he going to fall a little vay—maybe a good vay—in love viss her; and sen if Rudolph iss a scoundtrel, or if you iss a fool, sare be trouble. But if Rudolph don't be a scoundtrel and you don't be a fool he vill pretty soon straight' up himself and say, One man can't ever'sing have, and mine Senda she is enough!'… Sat vas my Aunt Senda."
"Your mother was named for her?"
"Yes, my musser, and me; I am name' Senda, se same. She vas se Countess von (Something)—sat aunt of my musser. She vas a fine voman."
"Still," said our joker, "you know she was only about half right in that advice."
"No," she replied, putting on a drowsy tone, "I don't know; and I sink you don't know eeser."
"I reckon I do," he insisted. "We're all made of inflammable stuff. Anymanknows that. We couldn't, any of us, pull through life decently if we didn't let each other be each other's keeper; could we, Fontenette?"
No sound from Fontenette. "Hmm!" hummed the little woman, in such soft derision that only he and I heard it; and after a moment she said, "Yes, it is so. But, you know who is se only good keeper? Sat is love."
"And jealousy," suggested Bulk; "the blindfold boy and the green-eyed monster."
"Se creen-eyedt—no, I sink not. Chalousie have destroyed—is sat correct?—yes? Chalousie have destroyed a sowsand-sowsand times so much happiness as it ever saved—ah! see se lightening! I sink sat is se displeasu'e of heaven to my so bad English. Ah? see it again? vell, I vill stop."
"You ought to be in a better world than this," laughed our fat neighbor.
"No," she chanted, "I rasser sis one. I sink mine hussbandt never be satisfied viss a vorld not full of vorms and bugs; and I am glad to stay alvays viss mine hussbandt."
"And I reckon he thinks you're big enough world for him, just yourself, doesn't he?"
"No." She seemed to speak more than half to herself. "A man—see se lightening!—a man who can be satisfied viss a vorld no bigger as I can by mineself gif him—mine Kott! I vould not haf such a man! See se lightening! but I sink sare vill be no storm; sare is no sunder viss se ligh'—Ah! sare are se trhuants!" We rose to meet them. First came the children, vaunting their fatigue, then a black maid or two, with twice their share of baskets, and then our three spouses; the Baron came last and was mute. The two ladies called cheery, weary good-byes to another contingent, that passed on by the gate, and hail and farewell to our fat neighbor as he went home. Then they yielded their small burdens to us, climbed the veranda stairs and entered the house.
No battle, it is said, is ever fought, and I dare say no game—worth counting—is ever played, exactly as previously planned. One of our company had planned, very secretly, as he thought, a battle; another, almost openly, was already waging hers; while a third was playing a game— though probably, I admit, fighting, inwardly, her poor weak battle also; and none of the three offered an exception to this rule. The first clear proof of it—which it still gives me a low sort of pleasure to recall—was my prompt discovery, as we gathered around the tea-board, to eat the picnic's remains, that our Flora was out of humor with the Baron. It was plain that the whole day's flood of small experiences had been to her pretty vanity a Tantalus's cup. She was quick to tell, with an irritation, which she genuinely tried to conceal, and with scarcely an ounce of words to a ton of dead-sweet insinuation, what a social failure he had chosen to be. Evidently he had spent every golden hour of sweet spiritual opportunity—I speak from her point of view, or, at least, my notion of it—not in catching and communicating the charm of any scene or incident, nor in thrilling comparisons of sentiment with anyone, nor in any impartation of inspiring knowledge, nor in any mirthful exchange of compliments or gay glances over the salad and sandwiches; but in constantly poking and plodding through thicket and mire and solitarily peering and prying on the under sides of leaves and stems and up and down and all around the bark of every rough-trunked tree.
She made the picture amusing, none the less, and to no one more so than to the Baron's wife, whose presence among us at the board was as fragrant, so to speak, as that of a violet among its leaves and sisters. "Ah! Gustaf," she said, with a cadenced gravity more taking than mirth, "sat iss a treat-ment nobody got a right to but me. But tell me, tell se company, vhat new sings have you found? I know you have not hunt' all se day and nussing new found."
But the Baron had found nothing new. He told us so with his mouth dripping and his nose in the trough—his plate I should say. You could hear him chew across the room. Suddenly, however, he ceased eating and began to pour forth an account of his day's observation; in response to which M. Fontenette, to my amused mystification, led us all in the interest with which we listened. The Baron forgot his food, and when reminded of it, pushed it away with a grunt and talked on and on, while we almost forgot our own.
As we rose to return to the veranda, the Creole still offered him an undivided attention, which the Baron rewarded with his continued discourse. As I gave Fontenette a light for his cigarette I held his eye for a moment with a brightness of face into which I put as significant approval as I dared; for I fancied the same unuttered word was brooding in both our hearts: "A new vay to remoof old stains."
Then he turned and gave all his attention once more to the entomologist, as they walked out upon the gallery together behind their wives. And the German woman courted the pretty New Englander as sweetly as the Creole courted her husband, and with twice the energy. She was a bubbling spring of information in the Baron's science; she was a well of sweet philosophy on life and conduct, and at every turn of their conversation, always letting Mrs. Fontenette turn it, she showed her own to be the better mind and the better training.
When Mrs. Fontenette, before any one else, rose to go—maybe my dislike of her only made it seem so—but I believed she did it out of pure bafflement and chagrin.
Not so believed her husband. He responded gratefully; yet lingered, still listening to the entomologist, until she fondlingly chid him for forgetting that while he had been all day in his swivel-chair, she had passed the hours in unusual fatigues!
She declined his arm in our garden walk, and positively forbade me to cut a rose for her—but with a grace almost maidenly. As I let them out, the heat-lightning gleamed again low in the west. A playfulness came into M. Fontenette's face and he murmured to me, "See se lightening."
"Yes," I replied, pressing his hand, "but I sink sare vill be no storm if sare iss no sunder."
Mrs. Fontenette gave a faint gasp of impatience and left us at a run, tripping fairily across the rough street at the only point visible to those on the veranda. Fontenette scowled unaware as he started to follow, and the next moment a short "aha!" escaped him. For, at her gate, to my unholy joy, she stumbled just enough to make the whole performance unspeakably ridiculous, and flirted into her cottage——
"In tears!" I offered to bet myself as I turned to rejoin my companions on the veranda, and wished with all my soul the goggled Baron could have seen it.
But the best of eyes would not have counted this time, for he was not there. He had accepted the offer of a room, where he was giving the day's specimens certain treatments which he believed, or pretended, could not wait until he should reach his far downtown cottage. His hostess and his wife had gone with him, but now some light discussion of house adornment was drawing them to the parlor. As this room was being lighted I saw our guest, evidently through force of an early habit, turn a critical glance to the music on the piano, and as quickly withdraw it. Both of us motioned her solicitously to the music-stool.
"No, I do not play."
"Then you sing."
"No, not now, any more yet." But when she had let us tease her a wee bit just for one little German song, she went to the instrument, talking slowly as she went, and closing the door in the entomologist's direction as she talked.
"Siss a great vhile I haf not done siss," she concluded, as her fingers began to drift over the keys, and then she sang, very gently, even guardedly, but oh, so sweetly!
We were amazed. Here, without the slightest splendor of achievement or adventure, seemed to be the most incredible piece of real life we had ever seen. Why, I asked myself, was this woman so short even of German friends as to be condemned to a seamstress's penury? And my best guess was to lay it to the zeal of her old-fashioned—and yet not merely old-fashioned- wifehood, which could accept no friendship that did not unqualifiedly accept him; and he?—Goodness!
When she ceased neither listener spoke; the tears were in our throats. She bent her head slightly over the keys, and said, "I like to sing you anusser." We accepted eagerly, and she sang again. There was nothing of personal application in either song, yet now, near the end, where there was a purposed silence in the melody, the silence hung on and on until it was clear she was struggling with herself; but again the strain arose without a tremor, and so she finished. "Oh, no, no," she replied, to our solicitation, with the grateful emphasis of one who declines a third glass, "se sooneh I stop, se betteh for ever'body," meaning specially herself, I fancy, speaking, as she rose, in a tone of such happy decision, and yet so melodiously, that two or three strings in the piano replied.
Her hostess took her hands and said there was one thing she could and must do; she and her husband must spend the night with us. There was a bed-chamber connected with the room where the Baron was still at work, and, really—this and that, and that and this—until in the heat of argument they called each other "My dear," and presently the ayes had it. The last word I heard from our fair guest was to her hostess at the door of her chamber, the farthest down the hall. It was as to shutting or not shutting the windows. "No," she said, "I sink sare vill be no storm, because sare is yet no sunder vis se lightening." And so it turned out. But at the same time——
My room adjoined the Baron's in frontas his wife's did farther back. A door of his and window of mine stood wide open on the one balcony, from which a flight of narrow steps led down into the side garden. Thus, for some time after I was in bed I heard him stirring; but by and by, with no sound to betoken it except the shutting of this door, it was plain he had lain down.
I awoke with a sense of having been some hours asleep, and in fact the full moon, shining gloriously, had passed the meridian. The balcony was lighted up by it like noon, and on it stood the entomologist, entirely dressed. The door was shut behind him. He was looking in at my window, but he did not know the room was mine, and with eyes twice as good as he had he could not have seen through my mosquito-bar. I wondered, but lay still till he had started softly down the steps. Then I sprang out of bed on the dark side, and dressed faster than a fireman.
When half-clad I went and looked out a parlor window. He was trying the gate, which was locked. But he knew where the key always hung, behind the post, and turned to get it. I went back and finished dressing, stole down the inner, basement stairs and out into the deep shadows of the garden, and presently saw my guest passing in through the Fontenettes' gate, whose bolt he had drawn from the outside. As angry now as I had been amazed I hurried after.
To avoid the moonlight I followed the shadows of the sidewalk-trees down to the next corner, to cross there and come back under a like cover on the other side. But squarely on the crossing I was met and stopped by a belated drunkard, who had a proposition to make to me which he thought no true gentleman, such as he was, for instance, could decline. I was alone, he asked me to notice; and he was alone; but if he should go with me, which he would be glad to do, why, then, you see, we should be together. He stuck like a bur, and it was minutes before I got him well started off in his own right direction. I slipped to the Fontenettes' gate, as near as was best, and instantly saw, between one of its posts and a very black myrtle-orange, Fontenette himself, standing as still as the trees. I was not in so deep a shade as he, but I might have stepped right out into the moonlight without his seeing me, so intensely was he watching his wife's front door. For there stood the entomologist. He had evidently been knocking, and was about to knock again when there came some response from within, to which he replied, in a suppressed yet eager and agitated voice, "Mine Psyche! Oh, mine Psyche! She is come to me undt she is bringing me already more as a hoondredt—vhat?" He had been interrupted from within. "Vhat you say?"
Fontenette drew his knife.
I stood ready to spring the instant he should stir to advance. I realized almost unbearably my position, stealing thus at such a moment on the heels of my neighbor and friend, but this is not a story of feelings, at any rate, not of mine.
"Vhat?" said the entomologist. "Go avay? Mien Gott! No, I vill not ko avay. Mien gloryform! Gif me first mine gloryform! Dot Psyche hass come out fon ter grysalis! she hass drawn me dot room full mit oder Psyches, undt you haf mine pottle of gloryform in your pocket yet! Yes, ko kit ut; I vait; ach!" Presently he seemed to hear from inside a second approach. Then the door opened an inch or so, and with another "Ach!" and never a word of thanks, he, snatched the vial and, turning to make off with it, came nose to nose with M. Fontenette, who stood in the moonlight gateway holding a blazing match to his cigarette.
"Well, sir, good-evening again," said the Creole. I noticed the perfection of his dress; evidently he had not as yet loosed as much as a shoestring. And then I observed also that the visitor so close before him was without his shoes.
"Good-evening—or, good-morning, perchance," said Fontenette. "I suepose thaz a great thing to remove those old stain' that chloro_form_, eh?"
"Ach! it iss you? Ach, you must coom—coom undt hellup me! Coom! you shall seesomeding."
"A moment," said the Creole. "May I inquire you how is that, that you call on us in yo' sock feet?"
"Ach! I am already t'e socks putting on pefore I remember I do not need t'em! But coom! coom! see a vonderfool!" He led, and Fontenette, when he had blown a cloud of smoke through his nose, followed, saying exclusively for his own ear:
"A wonder fool, yes! But a fool is no wonder to me any more; I find myself to be that kind."
When, hypocritically clad in dressing-gown and slippers, I stopped at my guest's inner door and Fontenette opened it just enough to let me enter, I saw, indeed, a wonderful sight. The entomologist had lighted up the room, and it was filled, filled! with gorgeous moths as large as my hand and all of a kind, dancing across one another's airy paths in a bewildering maze or alighting and quivering on this thing and that. The mosquito-net, draping almost from ceiling to floor, was beflowered with them majestically displaying in splendid alternation their upper and under colors, or, with wings lifted and vibrant, tipping to one side and another as they crept up the white mesh, like painted and gilded sails in a fairies' regatta.
And all this life and beauty, this gay glory and tremorous ecstasy and effort was here for moth-love of one incarnate fever of frail-winged loveliness! Oh! to what unguessed archangelic observation, to what infinite seraphic compassion, may not our own swarming race, who dare not too much pity ourselves, be but just such dainty ephemera! Splendid in purposes, intelligence, and affections as these in colors and grace, glorious when on the wing, and marvellous still, riddles of wonder, even when crawling and quivering, tipping and swerving from the upright and true, like these palpitating flowers of desire, now this way and now that, forever drawn and driven by the sweet tyrannies of instinct and impulse.
So rushed the thought in upon me, and if it was not of the divinest or manliest inspiration, at least it took some uncharity out of me for the moment. As in mechanical silence Fontenette obeyed the busy requests of the entomologist, I presently looked more on those two than on the winged multitude, and thought on, of the myriad true tales of love-weakness and love-wrath for which they and their two pretty mates were just now so unlucky as to stand; of the awful naturalness of such things; of the butterfly beauty and wonder—nay, rather the divine possibilities of the lives such things so naturally speed to wreck; and then of Tom Moore almost too playfully singing:
Ah! did we take for Heaven aboveBut half such pains as weTake, day and night, for woman's love,What Angels we should be!
But while I moralized there came a change. Beneath the entomologist's dark hand, as it searched and hurried throughout the room, the flutter of wings had ceased as under a wind of death.
"You must have a hundred and fifty of them," I said as the last victim ceased to flutter.
"Yes."
"Their sale is slow, of course, but every time you sell one, you ought to get"—I was judging by some prices he had charged me—"you ought to get two dollars." And I secretly rejoiced for Senda.
"I not can afford to sell t'em," he replied, with his back to me.
"Why, how so?"
"No, it iss t'is kind vhat I can exshange for five, six, maybe seven specimenss fon Ahfrica undt Owstrahlia. No, I vill not sell t'em."
"Oh, I see," said I, in mortal disgust. "Fontenette, I'm going to bed."And Fontenette went too.
The next day was cloudless—in two hearts; Senda's, and Fontenette's. As to the sky, that is another matter; one of the charms of that warm wet land is that, with all its sunshine, it is almost never without clouds. And indeed it would be truer to say of my two friends' skies, that they had clouds, but the clouds were silvered through with happy reassurances. Jealousy, we are told, once set on fire, burns without fuel; but I must think that that is oftenest, if not always, the jealousy of a selfish love. Or, rather—let me quote Senda, as she spoke the only other time she ever touched upon the subject with us. Our fat neighbor had dragged it in again as innocently as a young dog brings an old shoe into the parlor, and, the Fontenettes being absent, she had the nerve and wisdom not to avoid it. Said she:
"Some of us—not all—have great power to love. Some, not all, who have sis power—to love—have also se power to trust. Me, I rasser be trustet and not loved, san to be loved and not trustet."
"How about a little of each?" asked our neighbor.
"Oh! If senatureiss little, sat iss, maybe, very vell—?" She spoke as kindly as a mother to her babe, but he stole a slow glance here and there, as though some one had shot him with a pea in church, and dropped the theme.
Which I, too, will do when I have noted the one thing I had particularly in mind to say, of Fontenette: that, as Senda remarked—for the above is an abridgment—"I rasser see chalousie vissout cause, san cause vissout chalousie;" and that even while I was witness of the profound ferocity of his jealousy when roused, and more and more as time passed on, I was impressed with its sweet reasonableness.
Time did pass—in days and weeks of that quiet sort which make us forget in actual life that such is the way in good stories also. Innumerable crops were growing in the fields, countless ships were sailing or steaming the monotonous leagues of their long wanderings from port to port, some empty, some heavy-laden, like bees between garden and hive:
The corn-tops were ripe and the meadows were in bloomAnd the birds made music all the day.
Many of our days must not be the wine, but only small bits of the vine, of life. We cannot gather or eatthem; we can only let them grow, branch, blossom, get here and there green grapes, scarce a tenth of a tithe, in bulk or weight, of the whole growth, and "in due season—if we faint not" pluck the purpled clusters. And as the vine is—much, too, as the vine is tended, so will be the raisins and the wine. There is nothing in life for which to be more thankful, or in which to be more diligent, than its intermissions. This is not my sermonizing. I am not going to put everything off upon "Senda," but really this was hers. I have edited it a trifle; her inability to make, in her pronunciation, a due difference between wine and vine rather dulled the point of her moral.
Fontenette remarked to her one Sunday afternoon in our garden, that she must have got her English first from books.
"Yes," she said, "I didt. Also I have many, many veeks English conversations lessons befo'e Ame'ica. But I cannot se p'onunciation get; because se spelling. Hah! I cannotsat spelling get!"
O, but didn't I want to offer my services? But, like Bunyan's Christian, I recalled a text and so got by; which text was the wise saying of that female Solomon, "se aunt of my muss-er"—"One man can't ever'sing have, and mine"—establishment is already complete.
Meantime, Mrs. Fontenette, from farthest off in our group, had slipped around to the Baroness. She spoke something low, stroking her downy fan and blushing with that damsel sweetness of which her husband was so openly fond.
"O no, I sank you!" answered Senda, in an undulating voice. "I sank you v'ey much, but I cannot take se time to come to yo' house, and I cannot let you take se troubletoocometoomine. No, if I can have me only se right soughts, and find me se right vords for se right soughts, I sink I leave se p'onunciation to se mercy of P'ovidence."
Mrs. Fontenette blushed as prettily as a child, and let her husband take her hand as he said, "The Providence that wou'n' have mercy on such a pronunshation like that—ah well, 'twould have to become v'ey unpopular!"
"Anyhow," cooed Senda, "I risk it;" and then to his wife—"For se present, siss betteh I sew for you san spell for you."
Thus was our fair neighbor at every turn overmatched by the trustful love of the man and watchful love of the woman, whose fancied inferiority was her excuse for an illicit infatuation; an infatuation which little by little became a staring fact—only not to Fontenette. You know, you can hide such a thing from those who love and trust you, but not long from those who do not; and if you are not old in sin—Flora and the Baron were infants—you will almost certainly think that a condition hid from those who love and trust you is hid from all! O fools! the very urchins of the playground will presently have found you out and be guessing at broken laws, though there be only broken faiths and the anguish of first steps in perfidy.
We could not help but see, and yet for all our seeing we could not help. The matter never took on flagrancy enough to give ever so kind an intervener a chance to speak with effect. It was pitiful to see how little gratification they got out of it; especially she, with that silly belief in her ability to rekindle his spiritual energies and lift him into the thin air of her transcendentalisms; slipping, nevertheless, bit by bit, down the precipitous incline between her vaporous refinements and his wallowing animalisms; too destitute of the love that loves to give, or of courage, or of cunning, to venture into the fires of real passion, but forever craving flattery and caresses, and for their sake forever holding him over the burning coals of unfulfilled desire.
How could we know these things so positively?
By the entomologist; the child of science. Science yearns ever to know and to tell. Truth for truth's sake! He had no strongmoralfeeling against a lie; but he had never had the slightestusefor a lie, and a prevarication on his tongue would have been as strange to him as castanets in his palms. Guile takes alertness, adroitness; and the slim pennyworth of these that he could command he used up, no doubt, on Fontenette. I noticed that after an hour with the Creole he always looked tortured and exhausted. With us he was artless to the tips of his awful finger-nails.
Nor was Mrs. Fontenette a skilful dissembler; she over-concealed things so revealingly. Then she was so helplessly enamoured and in so childish a way. I venture one of the penalties almost any woman may have to pay for bringing to the altar only the consent to be loved is to find herself, some time, at last, far from the altar, a Titania, a love's fool. Our Titania pointed us to the fact that the Baron's wife never tried to divert his mind from the one pursuit that enthralled it; and she borrowed one of our garden alleys in which to teach him—grace-hoops! He never caught one from her nor threw one that she could catch; but, ah! with her coaxing and commanding, her sweet taunting and reprimanding and his utter lack of surprise at them, how much she betrayed! Fontenette came, learned in a few throws, and was charmed with the toys—a genuine lover always takes to them kindly—but Mrs. Fontenette was by this time tired, and she never again felt rested when her husband mentioned the game.
Furthermore, their countenances!—hers and the entomologist's—especially when in repose—you could read the depths of experience they had sounded, by the lines and shadows that came and went, or stayed, as one may read the depths of a bay by the passing of wind and light, day by day, over its waters—particularly if the waters are not very deep.
They made painful reading. What degrees of heart-wretchedness came and went or stayed with them, we may have over—we may have underestimated. God knows. In two months Mrs. Fontenette grew visibly older and less pretty, yet more nearly beautiful; while he, by every sign, was gradually awakening back—or, shall we not say, being now first born?—to life, through the pangs of a torn mind; mind, not conscience; but pangs never of sated, always of the famished sort.