The bachelor was teased. "Ah! come, now; show your usual kindness; he has, really, made a simple, modest agricultural machine that--meets a want long felt. Oh! you may laugh; but he laughs last. He has not only a patent for it, but a good sale also, and is looking around for other worlds to conquer."
"And yet spurns society? Ours!"
"No, simply develops no affinity for it; would like to, if only to please me; but can"t. Doesn"t even make intimate companions among men; simply clings to his fond, lone father, and the lone father to him, closer than any pair of twin orphan girls that ever you saw. I don"t believe any thing in life could divide them."
"Ah, don"t you trust him! Man proposes, Cupid disposes. A girl will stick to her mother; but a man? Why, the least thing--a pair of blue eyes, a yellow curl"--
The bachelor gayly shook his head, and, leaning over with an air of secrecy, said: "A pair of blue eyes have shot him through and through, and a yellow curl is wound all round him from head to heel, and yet he sticks to his father."
"He can"t live," said the lady. Marguerite"s hand pressed her arm, and they rose. As the bachelor drew the light curtain of a long window aside, that they might pa.s.s in, the light fell upon Marguerite"s face.
It was entirely new to him. It seemed calm. Yet instantly the question smote him, "What have I done? what have I said?" She pa.s.sed, and turned to give a parting bow. The light fell upon him. She was right; it was Claude"s friend, the engineer.
When he came looking for them a few minutes later, he only caught, by chance, a glimpse of them, clouded in light wraps and pa.s.sing to their carriage. It was not yet twelve.
Between Marguerite"s chamber and that of one of the daughters of the family there was a door that neither one ever fastened. Somewhere down-stairs a clock was striking three in the morning, when this door softly opened and the daughter stole into Marguerite"s room in her night-robe. With her hair falling about her, her hands unconsciously clasped, her eyes starting, and an outcry of amazement checked just within her open, rounded mouth, she stopped and stood an instant in the brightly lighted chamber.
Marguerite sat on the bedside exactly as she had come from the carriage, save that a white gossamer web had dropped from her head and shoulders, and lay coiled about her waist. Her tearless eyes were wide and filled with painful meditation, even when she turned to the alarmed and astonished girl before her. With suppressed exclamations of wonder and pity the girl glided forward, cast her arms about the sitting figure, and pleaded for explanation.
"It is a headache," said Marguerite, kindly but firmly lifting away the intwining arms.--"No, no, you can do nothing.--It is a headache.--Yes, I will go to bed presently; you go to yours.--No, no"--
The night-robed girl looked for a moment more into Marguerite"s eyes, then sank to her knees, buried her face in her hands, and wept.
Marguerite laid her hands upon the bowed head and looked down with dry eyes. "No," she presently said again, "it is a headache. Go back to your bed.--No, there is nothing to tell; only I have been very, very foolish and very, very selfish, and I am going home to-morrow.
Good-night."
The door closed softly between the two. Then Marguerite sank slowly back upon the bed, closed her eyes, and rocking her head from side to side, said again and again, in moans that scarcely left the lips:
"My mother! my mother! Take me back! Oh! take me back, my mother! my mother!"
At length she arose, put off her attire, lay down to rest, and, even while she was charging sleep with being a thousand leagues away--slept.
When she awoke, the wide, bright morning filled all the room. Had some sound wakened her? Yes, a soft tapping came again upon her door. She lay still. It sounded once more. For all its softness, it seemed nervous and eager. A low voice came with it:
"Marguerite!"
She sprang from her pillow.--"Yes!"
While she answered, it came again,--
"Marguerite!"
With a low cry, she cast away the bed-coverings, threw back the white mosquito-curtain and the dark ma.s.ses of her hair, and started up, lifted and opened her arms, cried again, but with joy, "My mother! my mother!" and clasped Zosephine to her bosom.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SHAKING PRAIRIE.
Manifestly it was a generous overstatement for Claude"s professional friend to say that Claude had outgrown his service. It was true only that by and by there had come a juncture in his affairs where he could not, without injustice to others, make a place for Claude which he could advise Claude to accept, and they had parted with the mutual hope that the separation would be transient. But the surveyor could not but say to himself that such incidents, happening while we are still young, are apt to be turning-points in our lives, if our lives are going to have direction and movement of their own at all.
St. Pierre had belted his earnings about him under the woollen sash that always bound his waist, shouldered his rifle, taken one last, silent look at the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, stood for a few moments with his hand in Bonaventure"s above one green mound in the churchyard at Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster"s care, and had gone to join his son. Of course, not as an idler; such a perfect woodsman easily made himself necessary to the engineer"s party. The company were sorry enough to lose him when Claude went away; but no temptation that they could invent could stay him from following Claude. Father and son went in one direction, and the camp in another.
I must confess to being somewhat vague as to just where they were. I should have to speak from memory, and I must not make another slip in topography. The changes men have made in Southern Louisiana these last few years are great. I say nothing, again, of the vast widths of prairie stripped of the herds and turned into corn and cane fields: when I came, a few months ago, to that station on Morgan"s Louisiana and Texas Railroad where Claude first went aboard a railway-train, somebody had actually moved the bayou, the swamp, and the prairie apart!
However, the exact whereabouts of the St. Pierres is not important to us. Mr. Tarbox, when in search of the camp he crossed the Teche at St.
Martinville, expected to find it somewhere north-eastward, between that stream and the Atchafalaya. But at the Atchafalaya he found that the work in that region had been finished three days before, and that the party had been that long gone to take part in a new work down in the _prairies tremblantes_ of Terrebonne Parish. The Louisiana Land Reclamation Company,--I think that was the name of the concern projecting the scheme. This was back in early February, you note.
Thither Mr. Tarbox followed. The "Alb.u.m of Universal Information" went along, and "did well." It made his progress rather slow, of course; but one of Mr. Tarbox"s many maxims was, never to make one day pay for another when it could be made to pay for itself, and during this season--this Louisiana campaign, as he called it--he had developed a new art,--making each day pay for itself several times over.
"Many of these people," he said,--but said it solely and silently to himself,--"are ignorant, shiftless, and set in their ways; and even when they"re not they"re out of the current, as it were; they haven"t headway; and so they never--or seldom ever--see any way to make money except somehow in connection with the plantations. There"s no end of chances here to a man that"s got money-sense, and nerve to use it." He wrote that to Zosephine, but she wrote no answer. A day rarely pa.s.sed that he did not find some man making needless loss through ignorance or inactivity; whereupon he would simply put in the sickle of his sharper wit, and garner the neglected harvest. Or, seeing some unesteemed commodity that had got out of, or had never been brought into, its best form, time, or place, he knew at sight just how, and at what expense, to bring it there, and brought it.
"Give me the gains other men pa.s.s by," he said, "and I"ll be satisfied. The saying is, "Buy wisdom;" but I sell mine. I like to sell. I enjoy making money. It suits my spirit of adventure. I like an adventure. And if there"s any thing I love, it"s an adventure with money in it! But even that isn"t my chief pleasure: my chief pleasure"s the study of human nature.
"The proper study of mankind is man.
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled, The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.""
This spoiling of a.s.syrian camps, so to speak, often detained Mr.
Tarbox within limited precincts for days at a time; but "Isn"t that what time is for?" he would say to those he had been dealing with, as he finally snapped the band around his pocket-book; and they would respond, "Yes, that"s so."
And then he would wish them a hearty farewell, while they were thinking that at least he might know it was his treat.
Thus it was the middle of February when at Houma, the parish seat of Terrebonne, he pa.s.sed the last rootlet of railway, and, standing finally under the blossoming orange-trees of Terrebonne Bayou far down toward the Gulf, heard from the chief of the engineering party that Claude was not with him.
"He didn"t leave us; we left him; and up to the time when we left he hadn"t decided where he would go or what he would do. His father and he are together, you know, and of course that makes it harder for them to know just how to move."
The speaker was puzzled. What could this silk-hatted, cut-away-coated, empearled, free lance of a fellow want with Claude? He would like to find out. So he added, "I may get a letter from him to-morrow; suppose you stay with me until then." And, to his astonishment, Mr. Tarbox quickly jumped at the proposition.
No letter came. But when the twenty-four hours had pa.s.sed, the surveyor had taken that same generous--not to say credulous--liking for Mr. Tarbox that we have seen him show for St. Pierre and for Claude. He was about to start on a tour of observation eastward through a series of short ca.n.a.ls that span the shaking prairies from bayou to bayou, from Terrebonne to Lafourche, Lafourche to Des Allemands, so through Lake Ouacha into and up Barataria, again across prairie, and at length, leaving Lake Cataouache on the left, through cypress-swamp to the Mississippi River, opposite New Orleans. He would have pressed Mr. Tarbox to bear him company; but before he could ask twice, Mr. Tarbox had consented. They went in a cat-rigged skiff, with a stalwart negro rowing or towing whenever the sail was not the best.
"It"s all of sixty miles," said the engineer; "but if the wind doesn"t change or drop we can sleep to-night in Achille"s hut, send this man and skiff back, and make Achille, with his skiff, put us on board the Louisiana-avenue ferry-launch to-morrow afternoon."
"Who is Achille?"
"Achille? Oh! he"s merely a "Cajun pot-hunter living on a sh.e.l.l bank at the edge of Lake Cataouache, with an Indian wife. Used to live somewhere on Bayou des Allemands, but last year something or other scared him away from there. He"s odd--seems to be a sort of self-made outcast. I don"t suppose he"s ever done anybody any harm; but he just seems to be one of that kind that can"t bear to even try to keep up with the rest of humanity; the sort of man swamps and shaking prairies were specially made for, you know. He"s living right on top of a bank of fossil sh.e.l.ls now,--thousands of barrels of them,--that he knows would bring him a little fortune if only he could command the intelligence and the courage to market them in New Orleans. There"s a chance for some bright man who isn"t already too busy. Why didn"t I think to mention it to Claude? But then neither he nor his father have got the commercial knowledge they would need. Now"--The speaker suddenly paused, and, as the two men sat close beside each other under an umbrella in the stern of the skiff, looked into Mr. Tarbox"s pale-blue eyes, and smiled, and smiled.
"I"m here," said Mr. Tarbox.
"Yes," responded the other, "and I"ve just made out why! And you"re right, Tarbox; you and Claude, with or without his father, will make a strong team. You"ve got no business to be canva.s.sing books, you"--
"It"s my line," said the canva.s.ser, smiling fondly and pushing his hat back,--it was wonderful how he kept that hat smooth,--"and I"m the head of the line:
"A voice replied far up the height, Excelsior!"
I was acquainted with Mr. Longfellow."