"Who is that?" He rose from his pillow.
"It is I, father," said a low voice, and against the darkness of an inner door he saw dimly the small, long nightdress of the boy he loved.
"What gets you up, Bonaventure? Come here. What troubles you?"
"I cannot sleep," murmured the lad, noiselessly moving near. The priest stroked the lad"s brow.
"Have you not been asleep at all?"
"Yes."
"But you have had bad dreams that woke you?"
"Only one."
"And what was that?"
There was a silence.
"Did you dream about--"Thanase, for example?"
"Yes."
The priest reached out and took the boy"s small, slender hands in his.
They were moist and cold.
"And did you dream"--
"I dreamed he was dead. I dream it every night."
"But, my child, that does not make it so. Would you like to get into bed here with me? No?--or to go back now to your own bed? No? What, then?"
"I do not want to go back to bed any more. I want to go and find "Thanase."
"Why, my child, you are not thoroughly awake, are you?"
"Yes, I want to go and find "Thanase. I have been thinking to-night of all you have told me--of all you said that day in the garden,--and--I want to go and find "Thanase."
"My boy," said the priest, drawing the lad with gentle force to his bosom, "my little old man, does this mean that you have come to the end of all self-service?--that self is never going to be spelt with a capital S any more? Will it be that way if I let you go?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, my son--G.o.d only knows whether I am wise or foolish, but--you may go."
The boy smiled for the first time in weeks, then climbed half upon the bed, buried his face in the priest"s bosom, and sobbed as though his heart had broken.
"It has broken," said the cure to himself as he clasped him tightly.
"It has broken--thank G.o.d!"
CHAPTER VII.
A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK.
In such and such a battle, in the last charge across a certain cornfield, or in the hurried falling back through a certain wood, with the murderous lead singing and hitting from yonder dark ma.s.s descending on the flank, and the air full of imperious calls, "Halt!"--"Surrender!" a man disappeared. He was not with those who escaped, nor with the dead when they were buried, nor among the wounded anywhere, nor in any group of prisoners. But long after the war was over, another man, swinging a bush scythe among the overgrown corners of a worm fence, found the poor remnant of him, put it scarcely underground, and that was the end. How many times that happened!
Was it so with "Thanase? No. For Sosthene"s sake the ex-governor had taken much pains to correspond with officials concerning the missing youth, and had secured some slender re-a.s.surances. "Thanase, though captured, had not been taken to prison. Tidings of general surrender had overhauled him on the way to it, near, I think, the city of Baltimore--somewhere in that region, at any rate; and he had been paroled and liberated, and had started penniless and on foot, south-westward along the railway-tracks.
To find him, Bonaventure must set out, like him on foot, south-eastward over some fifty miles of wagon-road to the nearest railway; eastward again over its cross-ties eighty miles to _la ville_, the great New Orleans, there to cross the Mississippi. Then away northward, through the deep, trestled swamps, leagues and leagues, across Bayou La Branche and Bayou Desair, and Pa.s.s Manchac and North Manchac, and Pontchatoula River two or three times; and out of the swamps and pine barrens into the sweet pine hills, with their great resinous boles rising one hundred--two hundred feet overhead; over meadows and fields and many and many a beautiful clear creek, and ten or more times over the winding Tangipahoa, by narrow clearings, and the old tracks of forgotten hurricanes, and many a wide plantation; until more than two hundred miles from the great city, still northward across the sinking and swelling fields, the low, dark dome of another State"s Capitol must rise amid spires and trees into the blue, and the green ruins of fortifications be pa.s.sed, and the iron roads be found branching west, north, and east.
Thence all was one wide sea of improbability. Even before a quarter of that distance should have been covered, how many chances of every sort there were against the success of such a search!
"It is impossible that he should find him," said the ex-governor.
"Well,"--the cure shrugged,--"if he finds no one, yet he may succeed in losing himself." But in order that Bonaventure in losing himself should not be lost, the priest gave him pens and paper, and took his promise to write back as he went step by step out into the world.
"And learn English, my boy; learn it with all speed; you will find it vastly, no telling how vastly, to your interest--I should say your usefulness. I am sorry I could not teach it to you myself. 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 Sosthene and the others good-by for you. I will tell them you had a dream that compelled you to go at once. Adieu." And just as the rising sun"s first beam smote the cure"s br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes, his "little old man" turned his face toward a new life, and set forward to enter it.
"Have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man named "Thanase Beausoleil?"--This question to every one met, day in, day out, in early morning lights, in noonday heats, under sunset glows, by a light figure in thin, clean clothing, dusty shoes, and with limp straw hat lowered from the head. By and by, as first the land of the Acadians and then the land of the Creoles was left behind, a man every now and then would smile and shake his head to mean he did not understand--for the question was in French. But then very soon it began to be in English too, and by and by not in French at all.
"Sir, have you seen anywhere, coming back from the war, a young man named "Thanase Beausoleil?"
But no one had seen him.
Travel was very slow. Not only because it was done afoot. Many a day he had to tarry to earn bread, for he asked no alms. But after a while he pa.s.sed eastward into a third State, and at length into the mountains of a fourth.
Meantime the weeks were lengthening into months; the year was in its decline. Might not "Thanase be even then at home? No. Every week Bonaventure wrote back, "Has he come?" and the answer came back, "He is not here."
But one evening, as he paced the cross-ties of a railway that hugged a huge forest-clad mountain-side, with the valley a thousand feet below, its stony river shining like a silken fabric in the sunset lights, the great hillsides clad in crimson, green, and gold, and the long, trailing smoke of the last train--a rare, motionless blue gauze--gone to rest in the chill mid-air, he met a man who suddenly descended upon the track in front of him from higher up the mountain,--a great, lank mountaineer. And when Bonaventure asked the apparition the untiring question to which so many hundreds had answered No, the tall man looked down upon the questioner, a bright smile suddenly lighting up the unlovely chin-whiskered face, and asked:
"Makes a fiddle thess talk an" cry?"
"Yes."
"Well, he hain"t been gone from hyer two weeks."
It was true. Only a few weeks before, gaunt, footsore, and ragged, tramping the cross-ties yonder where the railway comes from the eastward, curving into view out of that deep green and gray defile, "Thanase had come into this valley. So short a time before, because almost on his start homeward illness had halted him by the way and held him long in arrest. But at length he had reached the valley, and had lingered here for days; for it happened that a man in bought clothing was there just then, roaming around and hammering pieces off the rocks, who gave "Thanase the chance to earn a little something from him, with which the hard-marched wanderer might take the train instead of the cross-ties for as far as the pittance would carry him.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE QUEST ENDED.