"I told him," thought Tarbox, while the girl on his arm talked on in pretty, broken English and sprightly haste about something he had lost the drift of--"I told him I was courting Josephine. But I never proved it to him. And now just look at this! Look at the whole sweet mess!
Something has got to be done." He did not mean something direct and openhanded; that would never have occurred to him. He stopped, and with Marguerite faced the other pair. One glance into Claude"s face, darkened with perplexity, anger, and a distressful effort to look amiable and comfortable, was one too many; Tarbox burst into a laugh.
"Pardon!" he exclaimed, checking himself until he was red; "I just happened to think of something very funny that happened last week in Arkansas--Madame Beausoleil, I know it must look odd,"--his voice still trembled a little, but he kept a sober face--"and yet I must take just a moment for business. Claude, can I see you?"
They went a step aside. Mr. Tarbox put on a business frown, and said to Claude in a low voice,--
"Hi! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon the little dog laughed to see the sport and the dish ran away with the spoon you understand I"m simply talking for talk"s sake as we resume our walk we"ll inadvertently change partners--a kind of Women"s Exchange as it were old Mother Hubbard she went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone but when she got there the cupboard--don"t smile so broadly--was bare and so the poor dog had none will that be satisfactory?"
Claude nodded, and as they turned again to their companions the exchange was made with the grace, silence, and calm unconsciousness of pure oversight,--or of general complicity. Very soon it suited Zosephine and Tarbox to sit down upon a little bench beside a bed of heart"s-ease and listen to the orchestra. But Marguerite preferred to walk in and out among the leafy shadows of the electric lamps.
And so, side by side, as he had once seen Bonaventure and Sidonie go, they went, Claude and Marguerite, away from all windings of disappointment, all shadows of doubt, all shoals of misapprehension, out upon the open sea of mutual love. Not that the great word of words--affirmative or interrogative--was spoken then or there. They came no nearer to it than this,--
"I wish," murmured Claude,--they had gone over all the delicious "And-I-thought-that-you"s" and the sweetly reproachful "Did-you- think-that-I"s," and had covered the past down to the meeting on the bridge,--"I wish," he murmured, dropping into the old Acadian French, which he had never spoken to her before,--"I wish"--
"What?" she replied, softly and in the same tongue.
"I wish," he responded, "that this path might never end." He wondered at his courage, and feared that now he had ruined all; for she made no answer. But when he looked down upon her she looked up and smiled. A little farther on she dropped her fan. He stooped and picked it up, and, in restoring it, somehow their hands touched,--touched and lingered; and then--and then--through one brief unspeakable moment, a maiden"s hand, for the first time in his life, lay willingly in his.
Then, as glad as she was frightened, Marguerite said she must go back to her mother, and they went.
CHAPTER XXII.
A DOUBLE LOVE-KNOT.
Spanish Fort--West End--they are well enough; but if I might have one small part of New Orleans to take with me wherever I may wander in this earthly pilgrimage, I should ask for the old Carrollton Gardens.
They lie near the farthest upper limit of the expanded city. I should want, of course, to include the levee, under which runs one side of the gardens" fence; also the opposite sh.o.r.e of the Mississippi, with its just discernible plantation houses behind their levee; and the great bend of the river itself, with the sun setting in unutterable gorgeousness behind the distant, low-lying pecan groves of Nine-mile Point, and the bronzed and purpled waters kissing the very crown of the great turfed levee, down under whose land side the gardens blossom and give forth their hundred perfumes and bird songs to the children and lovers that haunt their winding alleys of oleander, jasmine, laurestine, orange, aloe, and rose, the grove of magnolias and oaks, and come out upon the levee"s top as the sun sinks, to catch the gentle breeze and see the twilight change to moonlight on the water.
One evening as I sat on one of the levee benches here, with one whose I am and who is mine beside me, we noticed on the water opposite us, and near the farther sh.o.r.e, a large skiff propelled with two pairs of oars and containing, besides the two rowers, half a dozen pa.s.sengers.
Then I remembered that I had seen the same craft when it was farther down the stream. The river is of a typical character about here.
Coming around the upper bend, the vast current sweeps across to this, the Carrollton side, and strikes it just above the gardens with an incalculable gnawing, tearing power. Hence the very high levee here; the farther back the levee builders are driven by the corroding waters the lower the ground is under them, and the higher they must build to reach the height they reached before. From Carrollton the current rebounds, and swinging over to the other sh.o.r.e strikes it, boiling like a witch"s caldron, just above and along the place where you may descry the levee lock of the Company Ca.n.a.l.
I knew the waters all about there, and knew that this skiff full of pa.s.sengers, some of whom we could see were women, having toiled through the seething current below, was now in a broad eddy, and, if it was about to cross the stream, would do so only after it had gone some hundred yards farther up the river. There it could cross almost with the current.
And so it did. I had forgotten it again, when presently it showed itself with all its freight, silhouetted against the crimson sky. I said quickly:
"I believe Bonaventure Deschamps is in that boat!"
I was right. The skiff landed, and we saw its pa.s.sengers step ash.o.r.e.
They came along the levee"s crown towards us, "by two, by two."
Bonaventure was mated with a young Methodist preacher, who had been my playmate in boyhood, and who lived here in Carrollton. Behind him came St. Pierre and Sidonie. Then followed Claude and Marguerite; and, behind all, Zosephine and Tarbox.
They had come, they explained to us, from a funeral at the head of the ca.n.a.l. They did not say the funeral of a friend, and yet I could see that every one of them, even the preacher, had shed tears. The others had thought it best and pleasantest to accompany the minister thus far towards his home, then take a turn in the gardens, and then take the horse-cars for the city"s centre. Bonaventure and Sidonie were to return next day by steamer to Belle Alliance and Grande Pointe. The thoughtful Tarbox had procured Bonaventure"s presence at the inquest of the day before as the identifying witness, thus to save Zosephine that painful office. And yet it was of Zosephine"s own motion, and by her sad insistence, that she and her daughter followed the outcast to his grave.
"Yes," she had said, laying one hand in Bonaventure"s and the other in Sidonie"s and speaking in the old Acadian tongue, "when I was young and proud I taught "Thanase to despise and tease him. I did not know then that I was such a coward myself. If I had been a better scholar, Bonaventure, when we used to go to school to the cure together--a better learner--not in the books merely, but in those things that are so much better than the things books teach--how different all might have been! Thank G.o.d, Bonaventure, one of us was." She turned to Sidonie to add,--"But that one was Bonaventure. We will all go"--to the funeral--"we will all go and bury vain regrets--with the dead."
The influence of the sad office they had just performed was on the group still, as they paused to give us the words of greeting we coveted. Yet we could see that a certain sense of being very, very rich in happiness was on them all, though differently on every one.
Zosephine wore the pear-shaped pearl.
The preacher said good-day, and started down the steps that used to lead from the levee down across a pretty fountained court and into the town. But my friend Tarbox--for I must tell you I like to call him my friend, and like it better every day; we can"t all be one sort; you"d like him if you knew him as I do--my friend Tarbox beckoned me to detain him.
"Christian!" I called--that is the preacher"s real name. He turned back and met Tarbox just where I stood. They laid their arms across each other"s shoulders in a very Methodist way, and I heard Tarbox say:
"I want to thank you once more. We"ve put you to a good deal of trouble. You gave us the best you had: I"ll never forget what you said about "them who through fear of death are all their life-time subject to bondage." I wish you were a Catholic priest."
"Why?"
"So we could pay you for your trouble. I don"t think you ought to take it hard if you get a check in to-morrow"s mail."
"Thy money survive with thee," said the preacher. "Is that all you want me to be a priest for? Isn"t there another reason?" His eyes twinkled. "Isn"t there something else I could do for you--you or Claude--if I should turn priest?"
"Yes," said Tarbox, with grave lips, but merry eyes; "we"ve both got to have one."
In fact they had two. Yet I have it from her husband himself, that Madame Tarbox insists to this day, always with the same sweet dignity, that she never did say yes.
On the other hand, when Claude and Marguerite were kneeling at the altar the proud St. Pierre, senior, spoke an audible and joyously impatient affirmative every time either of them was asked a question.
When the time came for kissing, Sidonie, turning from both brides, kissed St. Pierre the more for that she kissed not Claude, then turned again and gave a tear with the kiss she gave to Zosephine. But the deepest, gladdest tears at those nuptials were shed by Bonaventure Deschamps.