She was taller than the rest; yet it was she to whom the little big-eyed boy pointed when he said, vain of his ability to tell it in English:--
"I don"t got but eight year" old, me. I"m gran" for my age; but she, she not gran" for her age--Sidonie; no; she not gran" at all for _her_ age."
They told the story of the chapel: how some years before, in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at the parish seat a few miles away on the Mississippi, a nun had by the Pope"s leave cast off the veil; how she had come to Grande Pointe and taken charge of her widowed brother"s children; and how he had died, and she had found means, the children knew not how, to build this chapel. And now she was buried under it, they said. It seemed, from what they left unsaid as well as what they said, that the simple influence of her presence had kindled a desire for education in Grande Pointe not known before.
"Da.s.s my _tante_--my hant. She _was_ my hant befo" she die"," said the little man of eight years, hopping along the turf in front of the rest. He dropped into a walk that looked rapid, facing round and moving backward. "She learn me English, my _tante_. And she try to learn Sidonie; but Sidonie, Sidonie fine that too strong to learn, that English, Sidonie." He hopped again, talking as he hopped, and holding the lifted foot in his hand. He could do that and speak English at the same time, so talented was Toutou.
Thus the sun went down. And at Maximian"s stile again Bonaventure Deschamps took the children"s cheeks into his slender fingers and kissed them, one by one, beginning at the least, and so up, slowly, toward Sidonie Le Blanc. With very earnest tenderness it was done, some grave word of inspiration going before each caress; but when at last he said, "To-morrow, dear chil"run, the school-bell shall ring in Gran" Point"!" and turned to finish with Sidonie--she was gone.
CHAPTER IV.
HOW THE CHILDREN RANG THE BELL.
Where the fields go wild and grow into brakes, and the soil becomes fenny, on the north-western edge of Grande Pointe, a dark, slender thread of a bayou moves loiteringly north-eastward into a swamp of huge cypresses. In there it presently meets another like itself, the Bayou Tchackchou, slipping around from the little farm village"s eastern end as silently as a little mother comes out of a bower where she has just put her babe to sleep. A little farther on they are joined as noiselessly by Blind River, and the united waters slip on northward through the dim, colonnaded, watery-floored, green-roofed, blue-vapored, moss-draped wilderness, till in the adjoining parish of Ascension they curve around to the east and issue into the sunny breadth of Lake Maurepas. Thus they make the Bayou des Acadiens. From Lake Maurepas one can go up Amite or Tickfaw River, or to Pa.s.s Manchac or Pontchatoula, anywhere in the world, in fact,--where a canoe can go.
On a bank of this bayou, no great way from Grande Pointe, but with the shadow of the swamp at its back and a small, bright prairie of rushes and giant reeds stretching away from the opposite sh.o.r.e, stood, more in the water than on the land, the palmetto-thatched fishing and hunting lodge and only home of a man who on the other side of the Atlantic you would have known for a peasant of Normandy, albeit he was born in this swamp,--the man who had tarried all day at the schoolmaster"s handshaking.
What a day that had been! Once before he had witnessed a positive event. That was when, one day, he journeyed purposely to the levee of Belle Alliance, waited from morning till evening, and at last saw the steamer "Robert E. Lee" come by, and, as fortune would have it, land!
loaded with cotton from the water to the hurricane deck. He had gone home resolved from that moment to save his money, and be something more than he was.
But that event had flashed before his eyes, and in a quarter-hour was gone, save in his memory. The coming of the schoolmaster, all unforeseen, had lasted a day, and he had seen it from beginning to end. All day long on "Mian"s galerie, standing now here, now there, he had got others to interpret for him, where he could not guess, the meanings of the wise and n.o.ble utterances that fell every now and then from the lips of the young soldier of learning, and stored them away in his now greedy mind.
One saying in particular, whose originality he did not dream of questioning, took profound hold of his conviction and admiration; and two or three times that evening, as his canoe glided homeward in the twilight, its one long, smooth ripple gleaming on this side and that as it widened away toward the bayou"s dark banks, he rested for a moment on his tireless paddle, and softly broke the silence of the wilderness with its three simple words, so trite to our ears, so strange to his:--
"Knowledge is power."
In years he was but thirty-five; but he was a widower, and the one son who was his only child and companion would presently be fourteen.
"Claude," he said, as they rose that evening from their hard supper in the light and fumes of their small kerosene-lamp, "_I" faut z-ahler coucher._" (We must go to bed.)
"_Quofoir?_" asked the st.u.r.dy lad. (_Pourquoi?_ Why?)
"Because," replied the father in the same strange French in which he had begun, "at daybreak to-morrow, and every day thereafter, you must be in your dug-out on your way to Grande Pointe, to school. My son, you are going to learn how to read!"
So came it that, until their alphabetical re-arrangement, the first of all the thirty-five names on the roll was Claude St. Pierre, and that every evening thenceforward when that small kerosene-lamp glimmered in the deep darkness of Bayou des Acadiens, the abecedarian Claude was a teacher.
But even before the first rough roll was made he was present, under the little chapel-tower, when for the first time its bell rang for school. The young master was there, and all the children; so that really there was nothing to ring the bell for. They could, all together, have walked quietly across the village green to the forlorn tobacco-shed that "Mian had given them for a schoolhouse, and begun the session. Ah! say not so! It was good to ring the bell. A few of the stronger lads would even have sent the glad clang abroad before the time, but Bonaventure restrained them. For one thing, there must be room for every one to bear a hand. So he tied above their best reach three strands of "carat" cord to the main rope. Even then he was not ready.
"No, dear chil"run; but grasp hold, every one, the ropes, the cawds,--the shawt chil"run reaching up shawtly, the long chil"run the more longly."
Few understood his words, but they quietly caught the idea, and yielded themselves eagerly to his arranging hand. The highest grasp was Claude"s. There was a little empty s.p.a.ce under it, and then one only of Sidonie"s hands, timid, smooth, and brown. And still the master held back the word.
"Not yet! not yet! The pear is not ripe!" He stood apart from them, near the chapel-door, where the light was strong, his silver watch open in his left hand, his form erect, his right hand lifted to the brim of his hat, his eyes upon the dial.
"Not yet, dear chil"run. Not yet. Two minute mo".--Be ready.--Not yet!--One minute mo"!--Have the patience. Hold every one in his aw her place. Be ready! Have the patience." But at length when the little ones were frowning and softly sighing with the pain of upheld arms, their waiting eyes saw his dilate. "Be ready!" he said, with low intensity: "Be ready!" He soared to his tiptoes, the hat flounced from his head and smote his thigh, his eyes turned upon them blazing, and he cried, "Ring, chil"run, ring!"
The elfin crew leaped up the ropes and came crouching down. The bell pealed; the master"s hat swung round his head. His wide eyes were wet, and he cried again, "Ring! ring! for G.o.d, light, libb.u.t.ty, education!" He sprang toward the leaping, sinking ma.s.s; but the right feeling kept his own hands off. And up and down the children went, the bell answering from above, peal upon peal; when just as they had caught the rhythm of Claude"s st.u.r.dy pull, and the bell could sound no louder, the small cords gave way from their fastenings, the little ones rolled upon their backs, the bell gave one ecstatic double clang and turned clear over, the swift rope straightened upward from its coil, and Claude and Sidonie, her hands clasped upon each other about the rope and his hands upon hers, shot up three times as high as their finest leap could have carried them. For an instant they hung; then with another peal the bell turned back and they came blushing to the floor. A swarm of hands darted to the rope, but Bonaventure"s was on it first.
""Tis sufficient!" he said, his face all triumph. The bell gave a lingering clang or two and ceased, and presently the happy company walked across the green. "Sufficient," the master had said; but it was more than sufficient. In that moment of suspension, with Sidonie"s great brown frightened eyes in his, and their four hands clasped together, Claude had learned, for his first lesson, that knowledge is not the only or the greatest power.
CHAPTER V.
INVITED TO LEAVE.
After that, every school-day morning Claude rang the bell. Always full early his pirogue came gliding out of the woods and up through the bushy fen to the head of canoe navigation and was hauled ash.o.r.e.
Bonaventure had fixed his home near the chapel and not far from Claude"s landing-place. Thus the lad could easily come to his door each morning at the right moment--reading it by hunter"s signs in nature"s book--to get the word to ring. There were none of the usual reasons that the schoolmaster should live close to the schoolhouse.
There was no demand for its key.
Not of that schoolhouse! A hundred feet length by twenty-five breadth, of earth-floored, clapboard-roofed, tumbling shed, rudely walled with cypress split boards,--_pieux_,--planted endwise in the earth, like palisades, a hand-breadth s.p.a.ce between every two, and sunlight and fresh air and the gleams of green fields coming in; the scores of little tobacco-presses that had stood in ranks on the hard earth floor, the great sapling levers, and the festoons of curing tobacco that had hung from the joists overhead, all removed, only the odor left; bold gaps here and there in the _pieux_, made by that mild influence which the restless call decay, and serving for windows and doors; the eastern end swept clean and occupied by a few benches and five or six desks, strong, home-made, sixty-four pounders.
Life had broadened with Claude in two directions. On one side opened, fair and n.o.ble, the acquaintanceship of Bonaventure Deschamps, a man who had seen the outside world, a man of books, of learning, a man who could have taught even geography, had there been any one to learn it; and on the other side, like a garden of roses and spices, the schoolmateship of Sidonie Le Blanc. To you and me she would have seemed the merest little brown sprout of a thing, almost nothing but two big eyes--like a little owl. To Claude it seemed as though nothing older or larger could be so exactly in the prime of beauty; the path to learning was the widest, floweriest, fragrantest path he had ever trod.
Sidonie did not often speak with him. At recess she usually staid at her desk, studying, quite alone but for Bonaventure silently busy at his, and Claude himself, sitting farther away, whenever the teacher did not see him and drive him to the playground. If he would only drive Sidonie out! But he never did.
One day, after quite a contest of learning, and as the hour of dismission was scattering the various groups across the green, Toutou, the little brother who was grand for his age, said to Claude, hanging timidly near Sidonie:--
"_Alle est plus_ smart" _que vous_." (She is smarter than you.)
Whereupon Sidonie made haste to say in their Acadian French, "Ah!
Master Toutou, you forget we went to school to our dear aunt. And besides, I am small and look young, but I am nearly a year older than Claude." She had wanted to be kind, but that was the first thorn.
Older than he!
And not only that; nearly fifteen! Why, at fifteen--at fifteen girls get married! The odds were heavy. He wished he had thought of that at first. He was sadly confused. Sometimes when Bonaventure spoke words of enthusiasm and regard to him after urging him fiercely up some hill of difficulty among the bristling heights of English p.r.o.nunciation, he yearned to seek him alone and tell him this difficulty of the heart.
There was no fear that Bonaventure would laugh; he seemed scarce to know how; and his smiles were all of tenderness and zeal. Claude did not believe the ten years between them would matter; had not Bonaventure said to him but yesterday that to him all loveliness was the lovelier for being very young? Yet when the confession seemed almost on Claude"s lips it was driven back by an alien mood in the master"s face. There were troubles in Bonaventure"s heart that Claude wot not of.
One day who should drop in just as school was about to begin but the priest from College Point! Such order as he found! Bonaventure stood at his desk like a general on a high hill, his large hand-bell in his grasp, pa.s.sed his eyes over the seventeen demure girls, with their large, brown-black, liquid eyes, their delicately pencilled brows, their dark, waveless hair, and sounded one tap! The sport outside ceased, the gaps at the shed"s farther end were darkened by small forms that came darting like rabbits into their burrows, eighteen small hats came off, and the eighteen boys came softly forward and took their seats. Such discipline!
"Sir," said Bonaventure, "think you "tis arising, f"om the strickness of the teacher? "Tis f"om the goodness of the chil"run! How I long the State Sup"inten"ent Public Education to see them!"
The priest commended the sight and the wish with smiling affirmations that somehow seemed to lack sympathy. He asked the names of two or three pupils. That little fellow with soft, tanned, chubby cheeks and great black eyes, tiny mouth, smooth feet so shapely and small, still wet to their ankles with dew, and arms that he could but just get folded, was Toutou. That lad with the strong shoulders, good wide brows, steady eye, and general air of manliness,--that was Claude St.
Pierre. And this girl over on the left here,--"You observe," said Bonaventure, "I situate the lambs on the left and the kids on the right,"--this little, slender crescent of human moonlight, with her hair in two heavy, black, down-falling plaits, meek, drooping eyes, long lashes, soft childish cheeks and full throat, was Sidonie Le Blanc. Bonaventure murmured:--
"Best scholah in the school, yet the _only_--that loves not her teacher. But I give always my interest, not according to the interestingness, but rather to the necessitude, of each."
The visit was not long. Standing, about to depart, the visitor seemed still, as at the first, a man of many reservations under his polite smiles. But just then he dropped a phrase that the teacher recognized as an indirect quotation, and Bonaventure cried, with greedy eyes:--
"You have read Victor Hugo?"
"Yes."
"Oh, sir, that grea-a-at man! That father of libb.u.t.ty! Other patriots are the sons, but he the father! Is it not thus?"