His steps grow slow. Yet here, not twenty paces before him, is the home of the cure. Ah! that is just the trouble. Shall he go here first? May he not push on and out once more upon the prairie and make himself known first of all to _her_? Stopping here first, will not the cure say tarry till to-morrow? His steps grow slower still.
And see, now. One of the Jews in the shop across the street has observed him. Now two stand together and scrutinize him; and now there are three, looking and smiling. Plainly, they recognize him. One starts to come across, but on that instant the quiet of the hamlet is broken by a sound of galloping hoofs.
Bonaventure stands still. How sudden is this change! He is not noticed now; every thing is in the highest animation. There are loud calls and outcries; children are shouting and running, and women"s heads are thrust out of doors and windows. Hors.e.m.e.n come dashing into the village around through the lanes and up the street. Look! they wheel, they rein up, they throw themselves from the rattling saddles; they leave the big wooden stirrups swinging and the little unkempt ponies shaking themselves, and rush into the _boutique de_ Monsieur Lichtenstein, and are talking like mad and decking themselves out on hats and shoulders with ribbons in all colors of the rainbow!
Suddenly they shout, all together, in answer to a shout outside. More hors.e.m.e.n appear. Lichtenstein"s store belches all its population.
"_La calege! La calege!_" The caleche is coming!
Something, he knows not what, makes Bonaventure tremble.
"Madame," he says in French to a chattering woman who has just run out of her door, and is standing near him tying a red Madras kerchief on her head as she prattles to a girl,--"madame, what wedding is this?"
"_C"est la noce a_ Zosephine," she replies, without looking at him, and goes straight on telling her companion how fifty dollars has been paid for the Pope"s dispensation, because the bridal pair are first cousins.
Bonaventure moves back and leans against a paling fence, pallid and faint. But there is no time to notice him--look, look!
Some women on horseback come trotting into the street. Cheers! cheers!
and in a moment louder cheers yet--the caleche with the bride and groom and another with the parents have come.
Throw open the church door!
Hors.e.m.e.n alight, horsewomen descend; down, also, come they that were in the caleche. Look, Bonaventure! They form by twos--forward--in they go. "Hats off, gentlemen! Don"t forget the rule!--Now--silence!
softly, softly; speak low--or speak not at all; sh-sh! Silence! The pair are kneeling. Hush-sh! Frown down that little buzz about the door! Sh-sh!"
Bonaventure has rushed in with the crowd. He cannot see the kneeling pair; but there is the cure standing over them and performing the holy rite. The priest stops--he has seen Bonaventure! He stammers, and then he goes on. Here beside Bonaventure is a girl so absorbed in the scene that she thinks she is speaking to her brother, when presently she says to the haggard young stranger, letting herself down from her tiptoes and drawing a long breath:
"_La sarimonie est fait._"
It is true; the ceremony is ended. She rises on tiptoe again to see the new couple sign the papers.
Slowly! The bridegroom first, his mark. Step back. Now the little bride--steady! Zosephine, _sa marque_. She turns; see her, everybody; see her! brown and pretty as a doe! They are kissing her. Hail, Madame "Thanase!
"Make way, make way!" The man and wife come forth.--Ah! "Thanase Beausoleil, so tall and strong, so happy and hale, you do not look to-day like the poor decoyed, drugged victim that woke up one morning out in the Gulf of Mexico to find yourself, without fore-intent or knowledge, one of a ship"s crew bound for Brazil and thence to the Mediterranean!--"Make way, make way!" They mount the caleches, Sosthene after Madame Sosthene; "Thanase after Madame "Thanase. "To horse, ladies and gentlemen!" Never mind now about the youth who has been taken ill in the chapel, and whom the cure has borne almost bodily in his arms to his own house. "Mount! Mount! Move aside for the wedding singers!"--The wedding singers take their places, one on this side the bridal caleche, the other on that, and away it starts, creaking and groaning.
"_Mais, arretez!_--Stop, stop! Before going, _pa.s.sez le "nisette_!--pa.s.s the anisette!" May the New-Orleans compounder be forgiven the iniquitous mixture! "_Boir les dames avant!_--Let the ladies drink first!" Aham! straight from the bottle.
Now, go. The caleche moves. Other caleches bearing parental and grandparental couples follow. And now the young men and maidens gallop after; the cavalcade stretches out like the afternoon shadows, and with shout and song and waving of hats and kerchiefs, away they go!
while from window and door and village street follows the wedding cry:
"_Adjieu, la calege! Adjieu, la calege!_--G.o.d speed the wedding pair!"
Coming at first from the villagers, it is continued at length, faint and far, by the attending cavaliers. As mile by mile they drop aside, singly or in pairs, toward their homes, they rise in their stirrups, and lifting high their ribbon-decked hats, they shout and curvette and curvette and shout until the eye loses them, and the ear can barely catch the faint farewell:
"_Adjieu, la calege! Adjieu, les mariees!_"
CHAPTER X.
AFTER ALL.
Adieu; but only till the fall of night shall bring the wedding ball.
One little tune--and every Acadian fiddler in Louisiana knows it--always brings back to Zosephine the opening scene of that festive and jocund convocation. 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.
Yes, Zosephine sees the whole bright scene over again whenever that strain sounds.
[Music]
It was fine from first to last! The ball closed with the bride"s dance. Many a daughter Madame Sosthene had waltzed that farewell measure with, and now Zosephine 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.
And then came the wedding supper! At one end of the long table the bride and groom sat side by side, and at their left and right the wedding singers stood and sang. In each corner of the room there was a barrel of roasted sweet potatoes. How everybody ate, that night! Rice!
beef-b.a.l.l.s! pa.s.s them here! pa.s.s them there! help yourself! reach them with a fork! _des riz! des boulettes!_ more down this way! pa.s.s them over heads! _des riz! des boulettes!_ And the anisette!--bad whiskey and oil of anise--never mind that; pour, fill, empty, fill again!
Don"t take too much--and make sure not to take too little! How merrily all went on! How gay was Zosephine!
"Does she know that Bonaventure, too, has come back?" the young maidens whisper, one to another; for the news was afloat.
"Oh, yes, of course; some one had to let it slip. But if it makes any difference, she is only brighter and prettier than before. I tell you--it seems strange, but I believe, now, she never cared for anybody but "Thanase. When she heard Bonaventure had come back, she only let one little flash out of her eyes at the fool who told her, then said it was the best news that could be, and has been as serene as the picture of a saint ever since."
The serenity of the bride might have been less perfect, and the one flash of her eyes might have been two, had she known what the cure was that minute saying to the returned wanderer, with the youth"s head pressed upon his bosom, in the seclusion of his own chamber:
"It is all for the best, Bonaventure. It is not possible that thou shouldst see it so now, but thou shalt hereafter. It is best this way." And the tears rolled silently down his cheek as the weary head in his bosom murmured back:
"It is best. It is best."
The cure could only press him closer then. It was much more than a year afterward when he for the first time ventured to add:
"I never wanted you to get her, my dear boy; she is not your kind at all--nay, now, let me say it, since I have kept it unsaid so long and patiently. Do you imagine she could ever understand an unselfish life, or even one that tried to be unselfish? She makes an excellent Madame "Thanase. "Thanase is a good, vigorous, faithful, gentle animal, that knows how to graze and lie in the shade and get up and graze again.
But you--it is not in you to know how poor a Madame Bonaventure she would have been; not now merely, but poorer and poorer as the years go by.
"And so I say, do not go away. I know why you want to go; you want to run away from a haunting thought that some unlikely accident or other may leave Madame "Thanase a widow, and you step into his big shoes.
They would not fit. Do not go. That thing is not going to happen; and the way to get rid of the troublesome notion is to stay and see yourself outgrow it--and her."
Bonaventure shook his head mournfully, but staid. From time to time Madame "Thanase pa.s.sed before his view in pursuit of her outdoor and indoor cares. But even when he came under her galerie roof he could see that she never doubted she had made the very best choice in all Carancro.
And yet people knew--she knew--that Bonaventure not only enjoyed the acquaintance, but sometimes actually went from one place to another on the business, of the great ex-governor. Small matters they may have been, but, anyhow, just think!
Sometimes as he so went or came he saw her squatting on a board at the edge of a _coolee_, her petticoat wrapped snugly around her limbs, and a limp sunbonnet hiding her nut-brown face, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle. She was her own housekeeper, chambermaid, cook, washerwoman, gooseherd, seamstress, nurse, and all the rest. Her floors, they said, were always _bien fourbis_ (well scrubbed); her beds were high, soft, snug, and covered with the white mesh of her own crochet-needle.
He saw her the oftener because she worked much out on her low veranda.
From that place she had a broad outlook upon the world, with "Thanase in the foreground, at his toil, sometimes at his sport. His cares as a herder, _vacheur_,--_vache_, he called it,--were wherever his slender-horned herds might roam or his stallions lead their mares in search of the sweetest herbage; and when rains filled the _maraises_, and the cold nor"westers blew from Texas and the sod was spongy with much water, and he went out for feathered game, the numberless mallards, black ducks, gray ducks, teal--with sometimes the canvas-back--and the _poules-d"eau_--the water-hens and the rails, and the _cache-cache_--the snipe--were as likely to settle or rise just before his own house as elsewhere, and the most devastating shot that hurtled through those feathered mult.i.tudes was that sent by her husband--hers--her own--possessive case--belonging to her. She was proud of her property.
Sometimes _la vieille_--for she was _la vieille_ from the very day that she counted her wedding presents, mostly chickens, and turned them loose in the dooryard--sometimes she enjoyed the fine excitement of seeing her _vieux_ catching and branding his yearling colts. Small but not uncomely they were: tougher, stronger, better when broken, than the mustang, though, like the mustang, begotten and foaled on the open prairie. Often she saw him catch two for the plough in the morning, turn them loose at noon to find their own food and drink, and catch and work another pair through the afternoon. So what did not give her pride gave her quiet comfort. Sometimes she looked forth with an anxious eye, when a colt was to be broken for the saddle; for as its legs were untied, and it sprang to its feet with "Thanase in the saddle, and the blindfold was removed from its eyes, the strain on the young wife"s nerves was as much as was good, to see the creature"s tremendous leaps in air and not tremble for its superb, unmovable rider.
Could scholarship be finer than--or as fine as--such horsemanship? And yet, somehow, as time ran on, Zosephine, like all the rest of Carancro, began to look up with a certain deference, half-conscious, half-unconscious, to the needy young man who was n.o.body"s love or lover, and yet, in a gentle, unimpa.s.sioned way, everybody"s; landless, penniless, artless Bonaventure, who honestly thought there was no girl in Carancro who was not much too good for him, and of whom there was not one who did not think him much too good for her. He was quite outside of all their gossip. How could they know that with all his learning--for he could read and write in two languages and took the Vermilionville newspaper--and with all his books, almost an entire mantel-shelf full--he was feeling heart-hunger the same as any ordinary lad or la.s.s unmated? Zosephine found her eyes, so to speak, lifting, lifting, more and more as from time to time she looked upon the inoffensive Bonaventure. But so her satisfaction in her own husband was all the more emphatic. If she had ever caught a real impulse toward any thing that even Carancro would have called culture, she had cast it aside now--as to herself; her children--oh! yes; but that would be by and by.