"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' to help me do dat? Hah! 'Tis not so!" But the weakness of the wordy denial was it self 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 nut'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, may be; 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, I could 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, 't is so. 'Tis ri-ight!" "No, Josephine. I know you feel as if it were; but you don't think so. 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 what you owe 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." Ah!" 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 "What? private revenge? No, of course you did n't! But what else would it be? O Josephine! don't I know you did n't mean it? Did n't I tell you so? But I want you to go farther. I want you to put away forever the feeling. 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 chose 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 Bonaventure have made it too late for me to help any one, least of all the one I love, to be trumpet-creeper and the Scuppernong grape. revenged." He saw his words were prevailing Here you will be waited on, by small, blueand followed them up. "Oh! you don't need calico-robed damsels of Methodist unsophistiit any more than you really want it, Josephine. cation and Presbyterian propriety, to excellent You must n't ever look toward it again. I refreshment; only, if you know your soul's true throw myself and my love across the path. interest, eschew their fresh bread and insist on Don't walk over us. Take my hand; give me having yesterday's. yours; come another way; and if you 'll let such 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 for the tears you're shedding I've got to pay 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, "T is better to have loved and lost, Than 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: "Is n'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; 't is so," and they went the short remnant of the way together. XII. THE BEAUSOLEILS AND THE ST. PIERRES. - 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— to the Christian Women's Exchange, already mentioned, in the Rue Bourbon, French Quarter. You step immediately from the sidewalk into the former drawingroom 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 mantel-piece. Of course this is not the way persons used to go in old times. They entered in by the porte-cochère and carriageway upon which these drawing-rooms still open by several glass doors on your right. Step out there. You find a veranda crowded with neat whiteclothed tables. Before some late alterations, there was a great trellis full of green sunshine and broken breezes entangled among vines of However, that is a matter of taste there, and no matter 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, 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 find her. Just now he was far away prosecuthid but a suitor's proper persistency could ing the commerical 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 the city, 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." 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 center is very small. Even by accident, on the street, Canal street especially, he should have seen her time and again. 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 streetcars 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 center, 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 Claude git doze new mash-in all right, he go to ingineerin' ag'in,. 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 someboddie to boss gang o' fellows. And den he say, 'Papa, I want you.' And den I say how I got fifty arpent'* rice in field. And den he say, 'How I goin' do wid out 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; a commercial operator in the wild products of the swamp, the prairies tremblantes, the lakes, and in the small harvests of the pointes and bayou margins: moss, saw-logs, venison, wild-duck, fish, crabs, shrimp, melons, garlic, oranges, Perique to bacco. "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 three odd sorts of lowly human kind. Self-command is dominion; I do not say the bottle never went to his lips, but it never was lifted high. And now to the blessed maxim gotten from Bona* Forty-two acres. venture 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 "TimesDemocrat." 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 by intention! 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 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 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 Vermillionville. It was because he had a task there; sociality was not the business of the hour. 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 rite's. The hair, arranged differently, and far her full in the face. Afterward she had simply more effectively than he had ever seen it on become in memory the exponent of an ideal. Marguerite's head, seemed even more luxuriHe found himself often, now, asking himself, ous than hers. There was altogether a finer Why are my eyes always looking for her? dignity in this one's carriage than in that of Should I, actually, know her, were I to see the little maid of the inn. And see, now,— her on this sidewalk or in this street-car? And now!- as she turns her head to glance into while still asking himself these silent questions, this shop window! It is, and it is n't, it is n't and what does he do one day but fall-to all intents it is, and-no, no, it is not Marguerite! It is like and purposes, at least-fall in love-pell-mell her, in profile; singularly like, yet far beyond up to the eyebrows with another girl! her; the nose a little too fine, and a certain sad Do you remember Uncle Remus's story of firmness about the mouth and eyes, as well Brer Rabbit with the bucket of honey inverted as he could see in the profile,- but profiles on him? It was the same way with Claude. are so deceptive,—that he had never seen in "He wa' n't des only bedobble wid it, he wuz Marguerite. des kiver'd." It happened thus: An artist friend whose studio was in Carondelet street, just off 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 aerie 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 coming out of it 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! XIII. THE CHASE. 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 Margue "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 thrilled with 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 and 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 excellences 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 river-side oaks of the Exposition grounds. 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 homeside shore, their skiff pointed half to and half from the boiling current. The sun was gone; a purple dusk wrapped each 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: "Tcheuquechose bien tchurieux." "Yes," replied the son; "mighty strange. I tell you when we come at home.' He told all, recounted all his heart's longings, all his dreams, every least pang of selfreproach, 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. Then he went on to reassure 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 mo' handier doubl'-action pea-vine rake? What she done, mak' her so gran'? Naw, sir! She look fine in de face, yass; and dass all 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 saddlehoss 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 Vermillionville, will leave her address at this office, she will hear of something not in the least to her advantage." He could n'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 |
