"I suppose that cotton cloth covers something that is to have a public unveiling some day, doesn"t it?"
Claude cannot hear the answer; the painter drops his voice even below its usual quiet tone. But Claude knows what he must be saying; that the cloth covers merely a portrait he is finishing of a young man who has sat for it to please a wifeless, and, but for him, childless, and fondly devoted father. And now he can tell by the masculine step, and the lady"s one or two lively words, that the artist has drawn away the covering from his (Claude"s) own portrait. But the lady"s young companion goes on tuning her instrument--"tink, tink, tink;" and now the bow is drawn.
"Why, how singular!" exclaims the elder lady. "Why, my dear, come here and see! Somebody has got your eyes! Why, he"s got your whole state of mind, a reduplication of it. And--I declare, he looks almost as good as you do! If--I"--
The voice stops short. There is a moment"s silence in which the unseen hearer doubts not the artist is making signs that yonder window and curtain are all that hide the picture"s original, and the voice says again,--
"I wish you"d paint my picture," and the violin sounds once more its experimental notes.
But there are other things which Claude can neither hear, nor see, nor guess. He cannot see that the elder lady is already wondering at, and guardedly watching, an agitation betrayed by the younger in a tremor of the hand that fumbles with her music-sheets and music-stand, in the foot that trembles on the floor, in the reddened cheek, and in the bitten lip. He may guess that the painter sits at his easel with kindling eye; but he cannot guess that just as the elder lady is about to say,--
"My dear, if you don"t feel"--the tremor vanishes, the lips gently set, and only the color remains. But he hears the first soft moan of the tense string under the bow, and a second, and another; and then, as he rests his elbows upon the table before him, and covers his face in his trembling hands, it seems to him as if his own lost heart had entered into that vibrant medium, and is pouring thence to heaven and her ear its prayer of love.
Paint, artist, paint! Let your brushes fly! None can promise you she shall ever look quite like this again. Catch the lines,--the waving ma.s.ses and dark coils of that loose-bound hair; the poise of head and neck; the eloquent sway of the form; the folds of garments that no longer hide, but are illumined by, the plenitude of an inner life and grace; the elastic feet; the ethereal energy and discipline of arms and shoulders; the supple wrists; the very fingers quivering on the strings; the rapt face, and the love-inspired eyes.
Claude, Claude! when every bird in forest and field knows the call of its mate, can you not guess the meaning of those strings? Must she open those sealed lips and call your very name--she who would rather die than call it?
He does not understand. Yet, without understanding, he answers. He rises from his seat; he moves to the window; he will not tiptoe or peep; he will be bold and bad. Brazenly he lifts the curtain and looks down; and one, one only--not the artist and not the patroness of art, but that one who would not lift her eyes to that window for all the world"s wealth--knows he is standing there, listening and looking down. He counts himself all unseen, yet presently shame drops the curtain. He turns away, yet stands hearkening. The music is about to end. The last note trembles on the air. There is silence. Then someone moves from a chair, and then the single cry of admiration and delight from the player"s companion is the player"s name,--
"Marguerite Beausoleil!"
Hours afterward there sat Claude in the seat where he had sunk down when he heard that name. The artist"s visitors had made a long stay, but at length they were gone. And now Claude, too, rose to go out. His steps were heard below, and presently the painter"s voice called persuadingly up:--
"St. Pierre! St. Pierre! Come, see."
They stood side by side before the new work. Claude gazed in silence.
At length he said, still gazing:
"I"ll buy it when "tis finish"."
But the artist explained again that it was being painted for Marguerite"s friend.
"For what she want it?" demanded Claude. The Spaniard smiled and intimated that the lady probably thought he could paint. "But at any rate," he went on to say, "she seemed to have a hearty affection for the girl herself, whom," he said, "she had described as being as good as she looked." Claude turned and went slowly out.
When at sunset he stood under the honey-locust tree on the levee where he was wont to find his father waiting for him, he found himself alone. But within speaking distance he saw St. Pierre"s skiff just being drawn ash.o.r.e by a ragged negro, who presently turned and came to him, half-lifting the wretched hat that slouched about his dark brows, and smiling.
"Sim like you done fo"got me," he said. "Don"t you "member how I use"
live at Belle Alliance? Yes, seh. I"s de one what show Bonaventure de road to Gran" Point". Yes, seh. But I done lef" dah since Mistoo Wallis sole de place. Yes, seh. An" when I meet up wid you papa you nevva see a n.i.g.g.e.r so glad like I was. No, seh. An" likewise you papa.
Yes, seh. An" he a.s.s me is I want to wuck fo" him, an" I see he needin" he"p, an" so I tu"n in an" he"p him. Oh, yes, seh! da.s.s mo" "n a week, now, since I been wuckin" fo" you papa."
They got into the skiff and pushed off, the negro alone at the oars.
"Pow"ful strong current on udder side," he said, pulling quietly up-stream to offset the loss of way he must make presently in crossing the rapid flood. "Mistoo Claude, I see a gen"leman dis day noon what I ain"t see" befo" since "bout six year" an" mo". I disremember his name, but----"
"Tarbox?" asked Claude with sudden interest.
"Yes, seh. Da.s.s it! Tah-bawx. Sim like any man ought to "member dat name. Him an" you papa done gone down de ca.n.a.l. Yes, seh; in a pirogue. He come in a big hurry an" say how dey got a big creva.s.se up de river on dat side, an" he want make you papa see one man what livin" on Lac Cataouache. Yes, seh. An you papa say you fine you supper in de pot. An" Mistoo Tah-bawx he say he want you teck one hoss an" ride up till de creva.s.se an" you fine one frien" of yose yondah, one ingineer; an" he say--Mistoo Tah-bawx--how he "low to meet up wid you at you papa" house to-morrow daylight. Yes, seh; Mistoo Tah-bawx; yes, seh."
CHAPTER XV.
CAN THEY CLOSE THE BREAK?
The towering cypresses of the far, southern swamps have a great width of base, from which they narrow so rapidly in the first seven or eight feet of their height, and thence upward taper so gradually, that it is almost or quite impossible for an axe-man, standing at their roots, to chop through the great flare that he finds abreast of him, and bring the trees down. But when the swamps are deep in water, the swamper may paddle up to these trees, whose narrowed waists are now within the swing of his axe, and standing up in his canoe, by a marvel of balancing skill, cut and cut, until at length his watchful, up-glancing eye sees the forest giant bow his head. Then a shove, a few backward sweeps of the paddle, and the canoe glides aside, and the great trunk falls, smiting the smooth surface of the water with a roar that, miles away, reaches the ear like the thunder of artillery. The tree falls: but if the woodsman has not known how to judge and choose wisely when the inner wood is laid bare under the first big chip that flies, there are many chances that the fallen tree will instantly sink to the bottom of the water, and cannot be rafted out. One must know his craft, even in Louisiana swamps. "Knowledge is power."
When Zosephine and Mr. Tarbox finished out that Sunday twilight walk, they talked, after leaving the stile behind, only on business. He told her of having lately been, with a certain expert, in the swamps of Barataria, where he had seen some n.o.ble cypress forests tantalizingly near to navigation and market, but practically a great way off, because the levees of the great sugar estates on the Mississippi River shut out all deep overflows. Hence these forests could be bought for, seemingly, a mere t.i.the of their value. Now, he proposed to buy such a stretch of them along the edge of the shaking prairie north of Lake Cataouache as would show on his part, he said, "caution, but not temerity."
He invited her to partic.i.p.ate. "And why?" For the simple reason that the expert, and engineer, had dropped the remark that, in his opinion, a certain levee could not possibly hold out against the high water of more than two or three more years, and that when it should break it would spread, from three to nine feet of water, over hundreds of square miles of swamp forests, _prairies tremblantes_, and rice and sugar fields, and many leagues of railway. Zosephine had consented; and though Mr. Tarbox had soon after gone upon his commercial travels, he had effected the purchase by correspondence, little thinking that the first news he should hear on returning to New Orleans would be that the remotely antic.i.p.ated "break" had just occurred.
And now, could and would the breach be closed, or must all Barataria soon be turned into, and remain for months, a navigable yellow sea?
This, Claude knew, was what he must hasten to the creva.s.se to discover, and return as promptly to report upon, let his heart-strings draw as they might towards the studio in Carondelet Street and the Christian Women"s Exchange.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE OUTLAW AND THE FLOOD.
What suffering it costs to be a coward! Some days before the creva.s.se occurred, he whom we know as the pot-hunter stood again on the platform of that same little railway station whence we once saw him vanish at sight of Bonaventure Deschamps. He had never ventured there since, until now. But there was a new station agent.
His Indian squaw was dead. A rattlesnake had given her its fatal sting, and the outcast, dreading all men and the coroner not the least, had, silently and alone, buried her on the prairie.
The train rolled up to the station again as before. Claude"s friend, the surveyor, stepped off with a cigar in his mouth, to enjoy in the train"s momentary stay the delightful air that came across the open prairie. The pot-hunter, who had got rid of his game, ventured near his former patron. It might be the engineer could give him work whereby to earn a day"s ready money. He was not disappointed. The engineer told him to come in a day or two, by the waterways the pot-hunter knew so well, across the swamps and prairies to Bayou Terrebonne and the little court-house town of Houma. And then he added:
"I heard this morning that somebody had been buying the swamp land all around you out on Lake Cataouache. Is it so?"
The Acadian looked vacant and shook his head.
"Yes," said the other, "a Madame Beausoleil, or somebod--What"s the matter?"
"All aboard!" cried the train conductor.
"The fellow turned pale," said the surveyor, as he resumed his seat in the smoking-car and the landscape began again to whirl by.
The pot-hunter stood for a moment, and then slowly, as if he stole away from some sleeping enemy, left the place. Alarm went with him like an attendant ghost. A thousand times that day, in the dark swamp, on the wide prairie, or under his rush-thatch on the lake-side, he tortured himself with one question: Why had she--Zosephine--reached away out from Carancro to buy the uncultivable and primeval wilderness round about his lonely hiding-place? Hour after hour the inexplicable problem seemed to draw near and nearer to him, a widening, tightening, dreamlike terror, that, as it came, silently pointed its finger of death at him. He was glad enough to leave his cabin next day in his small, swift pirogue--shot-gun, axe, and rifle his only companions--for Terrebonne.
It chanced to be noon of the day following, when he glided up the sunny Terrebonne towards the parish seat. The sh.o.r.es of the stream have many beauties, but the Acadian"s eyes were alert to any thing but them. The deep green, waxen-leaved casino hedges; the hedges of Cherokee rose, and sometimes of rose and casino mingled; the fields of corn and sugar-cane; the quaint, railed, floating bridges lying across the lazy bayou; the orange-groves of aged, giant trees, their dark green boughs grown all to a tangle with well-nigh the density of a hedge, and their venerable trunks hairy with green-gray lichens; the orange-trees again in the door-yards, with neat pirogues set upon racks under their deep shade; the indescribable floods of sunlight and caverns of shadow; the clear, brown depths beneath his own canoe; or, at the bottom, the dark, waving, green-brown tresses of water-weeds,--these were naught to him.
But the human presence was much; and once, when just ahead of him he espied a young, sunbonneted woman crouching in the pouring sunshine beyond the sod of the bayou"s bank, itself but a few inches above the level of the stream, on a little pier of one plank pushed out among the flags and reeds, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle, he stopped the dip of his canoe-paddle, and gazed with growing trepidation and slackening speed. At the outer end of the plank, the habitual dip of the bucket had driven aside the water-lilies, and made a round, gla.s.sy s.p.a.ce that reflected all but perfectly to him her busy, young, downcast visage.
"How like"--Just then she lifted her head. He started as though his boat had struck a snag. How like--how terribly like to that young Zosephine whose ill-concealed scorn he had so often felt in days--in years--long gone, at Carancro! This was not, and could not be, the same--lacked half the necessary years; and yet, in the joy of his relief, he answered her bow with a question, "Whose was yonder house?"
She replied in the same Acadian French in which she was questioned, that there dwelt, or had dwelt, and about two weeks ago had died, "Monsieur Robichaux." The pot-hunter"s paddle dipped again, his canoe shot on, and two hours later he walked with dust-covered feet into Houma.