George Washington Cable

“ On the Mississippi a steamer, upward bound, that had whistled to land at Belmont or Belle Alliance plantation, seemed to be staying there afraid to venture away. Miles southward beyond the river and the lands on that side, Lake des Allemands was combing with the tempest and hissing with the rain. Still farther away, on the little bayou and at the railway-station in the edge of the swamp that we already know, and westward over the prairie where Claude had vanished into the world, all life was hidden and mute. ”

“ Yonder was Sosthène hoeing leisurely in the little garden, and possibly the sunbonnet of la vieille half seen and half hidden among her lima-beans; but for the rest there was only the house, silent at best, or, worse, sending out through its half-open door the long, scornful No-o-o! of the maiden’s unseen spinning-wheel. No matter the fame or grace of the rider. All in vain, my lad: pirouette as you will; sit your gallantest; let your hat blow off, and turn back, and at full speed lean down from the saddle, and snatch it airily from the ground, and turn again and gallop away; all is in vain. ”

“ Above him great live-oaks stretched their arms clad in green vestments and gray drapings, the bright sugar-cane fields were on his left, and on his right the beautiful winding bayou. In his face, not joy, only pallid eagerness, desire fixed upon fulfilment, and knowledge that happiness was something else; a young, worn face, with hard lines about the mouth and neck; the face of one who had thought self to be dead and buried, and had seen it rise to life again, and fallen captive to it. So he was drawing near to Carancro. Make haste, Bonaventure! ”

“ Toutou is in it. He gets tremendously wrought up; cannot keep two feet on the ground at once; spells fast when the word is his; smiles in response to the visitor’s smile, the only one who dares; leans out and looks down the line with a knuckle in his mouth as the spelling passes down; wrings one hand as his turn approaches again; catches his word in mid-air and tosses it off, and marks with ecstasy the triumph and pride written on the face of his master.
“But, sir,” cries Bonaventure, “why consume the spelling-book? Give, yourself, if you please, to Toutou, a word not therein comprise’.” ”

“ A poor, unpaid, half-starved man that loves his thankless work better than his life, teaching what not one schoolmaster in a thousand can teach; teaching his whole school four better things than were ever printed in any school-book,—how to study, how to think, how to value knowledge, and to love one another and mankind. What you’d ought to have done was to agree that such a school should keep open, and such a teacher should stay, if jest one, one lone child should answer one single book-question right! ”

“ He had no hunger; he would pass by the Women’s Exchange. There was nothing to stop there for; was not Madame Beausoleil in Terrebonne, and Marguerite the guest of that chattering woman in silk and laces? But when he reached the Exchange doors he drifted in as silently and supinely as any drift-log would float into the new crevasse.
[Pg 303] The same cashier was still on duty. She lighted up joyously as he entered, and, when he had hung his hat near the door, leaned forward to address him; but with a faint pain in his face, and loathing in his heart, he passed on and out into the veranda. ”

“ Many a daughter Madame Sosthène had waltzed that farewell measure with, and now Zoséphine was the last. So they danced it, they two, all the crowd looking on: the one so young and lost in self, the other so full of years and lost to self; eddying round and round each other in this last bright embrace before they part, the mother to swing back into still water, the child to enter the current of a new life. ”

“ She sees again the great clean-swept seed-cotton room of a cotton-gin house belonging to a cousin of the ex-governor, lighted with many candles stuck into a perfect wealth of black bottles ranged along the beams of the walls. The fiddler’s seat is mounted on a table in the corner, the fiddler is in it, each beau has led a maiden into the floor, the sets are made for the contra-dance, the young men stand expectant, their partners wait with downcast eyes and mute lips as Acadian damsels should, the music strikes up, and away they go. ”

“ 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 and [Pg 257] promises; 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. ”

“ There had been a time when he could be idle and whittle, but that time was gone by; that was at Grande Pointe; and now for his son—for Claude—to become a lounger in tavern quarters—Claude had not announced himself to Vermilionville as a surveyor, or as any thing—Claude to be a hater of honest labor—was this what Bonaventure called civilize-ation? Better, surely better, go back to the old pastoral life. How yearningly it was calling them to its fragrant bosom! And almost every thing was answering the call. The town was tricking out its neglected decay with great trailing robes of roses. ”

“ The youth takes one step toward Zoséphine. She stands dry-eyed, smiling on her father. As the youth comes her eyes, without turning to him, fill. He puts out his hand. She lays her own on it. He gazes at her for a moment, with beseeching eye—“Adjieu.” Her eyes meet his one instant—she leaps upon his neck—his strong arms press her to his bosom—her lifted face lights up—his kiss is on her lips—it was there just now, and now—’Thanase is gone, and she has fled to an inner room.
Bonaventure stood in the middle of the floor. Why should the boy look so strange? ”

“ The wet ponies and kine turned away from the north and stood in the slanting storm with bowed heads. The great wall of cypress swamp grew spectral. But its depths, the marshes far beyond sight behind them, and the little, hidden, rushy lakes, were alive with game. No snake crossed the path. Under the roof, on the galérie, the wheel hummed, the loom pounded; inside, the logs crackled and blazed on the hearth; on the board were venison, mallard, teal, rice-birds, sirop de baterie, and quitte; round the fireside were pipes, pecans, old stories, and the Saturday-night contra-dance ”

“ 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. ”

“ Far away in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, on bloody fields, many an Acadian volunteer and many a poor conscript fought and fell for a cause that was really none of theirs, simple, non-slaveholding peasants; and many died in camp and hospital—often of wounds, often of fevers, often of mere longing for home. Bonaventure and Zoséphine learned this much of war: that it was a state of affairs in which dear faces went away, and strange ones came back with tidings that brought bitter wailings from mothers and wives, and made les vieux—the old fathers—sit very silent. ”

“ Claude, whom once he would have been glad to make a good fisherman and swamper, or at the utmost a sugar-boiler, was now a greater, in rank at least, than the very schoolmaster. Truly “knowledge is power”—alas! yes; for it had stolen away that same Claude. The College Point priest’s warning had come true: it was “good-by to Grande Pointe!”—Nay, nay, it must not be! Is that the kind of power education is? Power to tear children from their parents? Power to expose their young heads to midnight storms? Power to make them eager to go, and willing to stay away, from their paternal homes? ”

“ Here is a little spelling-book and reader for you to commence with. Make haste to know English; in America we should be Americans; would that I could say it to all our Acadian people! but I say it to you, learn English. It may be that by not knowing it you may fail, or by knowing it succeed, in this errand. And every step of your way let your first business be the welfare of others. Hundreds will laugh at you for it: never mind; it will bring you through. Yes, I will tell Sosthène and the others good-by for you. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Think of Bonaventure, the slender, the intense, the reticent—with ’Thanase limping on rude but glorious crutches for four consecutive Saturdays and Sundays up and down in full sight of Zoséphine, savior of her mother from widowhood, owner of two fine captured horses, and rewarded by Sosthène with five acres of virgin prairie. If the young fiddler’s music was an attraction before, fancy its power now, when the musician had to be lifted to his chair on top of the table! ”

“ Bonaventure began to wish for him anxiously. He wanted him back so that this load might be lifted. Thus the bitter would pass out of the sweet; the haunting fear of evil tidings from the absent rival would haunt no more. Life would be what it was to other lads, and Zoséphine one day fall to his share by a better title than he could ever make with ’Thanase in exile. Come, ’Thanase, come, come! ”

“ A native instinct in dress,—even more of it than her mother had at the same age,—and in manners and speech, left only so little rusticity as became itself a charm rather than a blemish, suggested the sugar-cane fields; the orange-grove; the plantation-house, with pillared porch, half-hidden in tall magnolias and laurestines and bushes of red and white camellias higher [Pg 206] and wider than arms can reach, and covered with their regal flowers from the ground to their tops; and the bayou front lined with moss-draped live-oaks, their noonday shadows a hundred feet across. ”

“ And it answered her:
“Be strong! be strong! you shall not love for naught. He shall—he shall come back—he shall come back and lead us into joy.” From that time the violin had more employment than ever before in all its days.
So it and Marguerite were gone away to the great strange city together. The loneliness they left behind was a sad burden to Zoséphine. No other one thing had had so much influence to make so nearly vulnerable the defences of her heart when Mr. Tarbox essayed to storm them. ”

“ He kissed his wife, tossed his children, played on his fiddle that tune they all liked best, and, while Zoséphine looked after him with young zest in her eye, sprang into the saddle and galloped across the prairie à la chapelle to pass a jolly forenoon at chin-chin in the village grocery.
Since the war almost every one went armed—not for attack, of course; for defence. ’Thanase was an exception.
“My fists,” he said, in the good old drawling Acadian dialect and with his accustomed smile,—“my fists will take care of me.” ”

“ Some boys are born lovers. From the time they can reach out from the nurse’s arms, they must be billing and cooing and choosing a mate. Such was ardent little Bonaventure; and none of the Gradnego weddings ever got quite through its ceremony without his big blue eyes being found full of tears—tears of mingled anger and desolation—because by some unpardonable oversight he and Zoséphine were still left unmarried. So that the pretty damsel would have to take him aside, and kiss him as they clasped, and promise him, “Next time—next time, without fail!” ”

“ Day was fully come when Chaouache rose and stepped out upon his galérie. He had thought he could venture to sleep in bed such a night; and, sure enough, here morning came, and there had been no intrusion. ’Thanase, too, was up. It was raining and blowing still. Across the prairie, as far as the eye could reach, not a movement of human life could be seen. They went in again, made a fire of a few fagots and an armful of cotton-seed, hung the kettle, and emptied the old coffee from the coffee-pot. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Could the second nature of lifetime habits bear the change? Of his higher spirit there was no doubt. Neither father nor son had any conception of happiness separate from noble aggrandizement. Nay, that is scant justice; far more than they knew, or than St. Pierre, at least, would have acknowledged, they had caught the spirit of Bonaventure, to call it by no higher name, and saw that the best life for self is to live the best possible for others. “For all others,” Bonaventure would have insisted; but “for Claude,” St. Pierre would have amended. They could not return to Grande Pointe. ”