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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Strong Hearts, by George W. Cable
+
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+Title: Strong Hearts
+
+Author: George W. Cable
+
+Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9838]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 23, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRONG HEARTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Lazar Liveanu
+and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+STRONG HEARTS
+
+By George W. Cable
+
+
+1899
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+_The Solitary
+
+The Taxidermist
+
+The Entomologist
+
+
+
+In magazine form "The Solitary" appeared under the title of "Gregory's
+Island."_
+
+
+
+The Solitary
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"The dream of Pharaoh is one. The seven kine are seven years; and the
+seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one.... And for that the
+dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice, it is because the thing is
+established."...
+
+In other words: Behind three or four subtitles and changes of time, scene,
+characters, this tale of strong hearts is one. And for that the tale is
+tripled or quadrupled unto you three or four times (the number will
+depend); it is because in each of its three or four aspects--or separate
+stories, if you insist--it sets forth, in heroic natures and poetic fates,
+a principle which seems to me so universal that I think Joseph would say
+of it also, as he said to the sovereign of Egypt, "The thing is
+established of God."
+
+I know no better way to state this principle, being a man, not of letters,
+but of commerce (and finance), than to say--what I fear I never should
+have learned had I not known the men and women I here tell of--that
+religion without poetry is as dead a thing as poetry without religion. In
+our practical use of them, I mean; their infusion into all our doing and
+being. As dry as a mummy, great Joseph would say.
+
+Shall I be more explicit? Taking that great factor of life which men, with
+countless lights, shades, narrownesses and breadths of meaning, call
+Religion, and taking it in the largest sense we can give it; in like
+manner taking Poetry in the largest sense possible; this cluster of tales
+is one, because from each of its parts, with no argument but the souls and
+fates they tell of, it illustrates the indivisible twinship of Poetry and
+Religion; a oneness of office and of culmination, which, as they reach
+their highest plane, merges them into identity. Is that any clearer? You
+see I am no scientist or philosopher, and I do not stand at any dizzy
+height, even in my regular business of banking and insurance, except now
+and then when my colleagues of the clearing-house or board want something
+drawn up--"Whereas, the inscrutable wisdom of Providence has taken from
+among us"--something like that.
+
+I tell the stories as I saw them occur. I tell them for your
+entertainment; the truth they taught me you may do what you please with.
+It was exemplified in some of these men and women by their failure to
+incarnate it. Others, through the stained glass of their imperfect
+humanity, showed it forth alive and alight in their own souls and bodies.
+One there was who never dreamed he was a bright example of anything, in a
+world which, you shall find him saying, God--or somebody--whoever is
+responsible for civilization--had made only too good and complex and big
+for him. We may hold that to make life a perfect, triumphant poem we must
+keep in beautiful, untyrannous subordination every impulse of mere self-
+provision, whether earthly or heavenly, while at the same time we give
+life its equatorial circumference. I know that he so believed. Yet, under
+no better conscious motive than an impulse of pure self-preservation,
+finding his spiritual breadth and stature too small for half the practical
+demands of such large theories, he humbly set to work to narrow down the
+circumference of his life to limits within which he might hope to turn
+_some_ of its daily issues into good poetry. This is the main reason why I
+tell of him first, and why the parts of my story--or the stories--do not
+fall into chronological order. I break that order with impunity, and adopt
+that which I believe to be best in the interest of Poetry and themselves.
+Only do not think hard if I get more interested in the story, or stories,
+than in the interpretation thereof.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The man of whom I am speaking was a tallish, slim young fellow, shaped
+well enough, though a trifle limp for a Louisianian in the Mississippi
+(Confederate) cavalry. Some camp wag had fastened on him the nickname of
+"Crackedfiddle." Our acquaintance began more than a year before Lee's
+surrender; but Gregory came out of the war without any startling record,
+and the main thing I tell of him occurred some years later.
+
+I never saw him under arms or in uniform. I met him first at the house of
+a planter, where I was making the most of a flesh-wound, and was, myself,
+in uniform simply because I hadn't any other clothes. There were pretty
+girls in the house, and as his friends and fellow-visitors--except me--
+wore the gilt bars of commissioned rank on their gray collars, and he, as
+a private, had done nothing glorious, his appearance was always in
+civilian's dress. Black he wore, from head to foot, in the cut fashionable
+in New Orleans when the war brought fashion to a stand: coat-waist high,
+skirt solemnly long; sleeves and trousers small at the hands and feet, and
+puffed out--phew! in the middle. The whole scheme was dandyish, dashing,
+zou-zou; and when he appeared in it, dark, good-looking, loose,
+languorous, slow to smile and slower to speak, it was--confusing.
+
+One sunset hour as I sat alone on the planter's veranda immersed in a
+romance, I noticed, too late to offer any serviceable warning, this
+impressive black suit and its ungenerously nicknamed contents coming in at
+the gate unprotected. Dogs, in the South, in those times, were not the
+caressed and harmless creatures now so common. A Mississippi planter's
+watch-dogs were kept for their vigilant and ferocious hostility to the
+negro of the quarters and to all strangers. One of these, a powerful,
+notorious, bloodthirsty brute, long-bodied, deer-legged--you may possibly
+know that big breed the planters called the "cur-dog" and prized so highly
+-darted out of hiding and silently sprang at the visitor's throat. Gregory
+swerved, and the brute's fangs, whirling by his face, closed in the sleeve
+and rent it from shoulder to elbow. At the same time another, one of the
+old "bear-dog" breed, was coming as fast as the light block and chain he
+had to drag would allow him. Gregory neither spoke, nor moved to attack or
+retreat. At my outcry the dogs slunk away, and he asked me, diffidently,
+for a thing which was very precious in those days--pins.
+
+But he was quickly surrounded by pitying eyes and emotional voices, and
+was coaxed into the house, where the young ladies took his coat away to
+mend it. While he waited for it in my room I spoke of the terror so many
+brave men had of these fierce home-guards. I knew one such beast that was
+sired of a wolf. He heard me with downcast eyes, at first with evident
+pleasure, but very soon quite gravely.
+
+"They can afford to fear dogs," he replied, "when they've got no other
+fear." And when I would have it that he had shown a stout heart he smiled
+ruefully.
+
+"I do everything through weakness," he soliloquized, and, taking my book,
+opened it as if to dismiss our theme. But I bade him turn to the preface,
+where heavily scored by the same feminine hand which had written on the
+blank leaf opposite, "Richard Thorndyke Smith, from C.O."--we read
+something like this:
+
+The seed of heroism is in all of us. Else we should not forever relish, as
+we do, stories of peril, temptation, and exploit. Their true zest is no
+mere ticklement of our curiosity or wonder, but comradeship with souls
+that have courage in danger, faithfulness under trial, or magnanimity in
+triumph or defeat. We have, moreover, it went on to say, a care for human
+excellence _in general_, by reason of which we want not alone our son, or
+cousin, or sister, but _man everywhere_, the norm, _man_, to be strong,
+sweet, and true; and reading stories of such, we feel this wish rebound
+upon us as duty sweetened by a new hope, and have a new yearning for its
+fulfilment in ourselves.
+
+"In short," said I, closing the book, "those imaginative victories of soul
+over circumstance become essentially ours by sympathy and emulation, don't
+they?"
+
+"O yes," he sighed, and added an indistinct word about "spasms of virtue."
+But I claimed a special charm and use for unexpected and detached
+heroisms, be they fact or fiction. "If adventitious virtue," I argued,
+"can spring up from unsuspected seed and without the big roots of
+character--"
+
+"You think," interrupted Gregory, "there's a fresh chance for me."
+
+"For all the common run of us!" I cried. "Why not? And even if there
+isn't, hasn't it a beauty and a value? Isn't a rose a rose, on the bush or
+off? Gold is gold wherever you find it, and the veriest spasm of true
+virtue, coined into action, is true virtue, and counts. It may not work my
+nature's whole redemption, but it works that way, and is just so much
+solid help toward the whole world's uplift." I was young enough then to
+talk in that manner, and he actually took comfort in my words, confessing
+that it had been his way to count a good act which was not in character
+with its doer as something like a dead loss to everybody.
+
+"I'm glad it's not," he said, "for I reckon my ruling motive is always
+fear."
+
+"Was it fear this evening?" I asked.
+
+"Yes," he replied, "it was. It was fear of a coward's name, and a sort of
+abject horror of being one."
+
+"Too big a coward inside," I laughed, "to be a big stout coward outside,"
+and he assented.
+
+"Smith," he said, and paused long, "if I were a hard drinker and should
+try to quit, it wouldn't be courage that would carry me through, but fear;
+quaking fear of a drunkard's life and a drunkard's death."
+
+I was about to rejoin that the danger was already at his door, but he read
+the warning accusation in my eye.
+
+"I'm afraid so," he responded. "I had a strange experience once," he
+presently added, as if reminded of it by what we had last said. "I took a
+prisoner."
+
+"By the overwhelming power of fear?" I inquired.
+
+"Partly, yes. I saw him before he saw me and I felt that if I didn't take
+him he'd either take me or shoot me, so I covered him and he surrendered.
+We were in an old pine clearing grown up with oak bushes."
+
+"Would it have been less strange," I inquired, "if you had been in an old
+oak clearing grown up with pine bushes?"
+
+"No, he'd have got away just the same."
+
+"What! you didn't bring him in?"
+
+
+"Only part of the way. Then he broke and ran."
+
+"And you had to shoot him?"
+
+"No, I didn't even shoot at him. I couldn't, Smith; _he looked so much
+like me_. It was like seeing my own ghost. All the time I had him
+something kept saying to me, 'You're your own prisoner--you're your own
+prisoner.' And--do you know?--that thing comes back to me now every time I
+get into the least sort of a tight place!"
+
+"I wish it would come to me," I responded. A slave girl brought his coat
+and our talk remained unfinished until five years after the war.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Gregory had been brought up on the shore of Mississippi Sound, a beautiful
+region fruitful mainly in apathy of character. He was a skilled lover of
+sail-boats. When we all got back to New Orleans, paroled, and cast about
+for a living in the various channels "open to gentlemen," he, largely, I
+think, owing to his timid notion of his worth, went into the rough
+business of owning and sailing a small, handsome schooner in the "Lake
+trade," which, you know, includes Mississippi Sound. I married, and for
+some time he liked much to come and see us--on rainy evenings, when he
+knew we should be alone. He was in love yet, as he had been when we were
+fellow-absentees from camp, and with the same girl. But his passion had
+never presumed to hope, and the girl was of too true a sort ever to thrust
+hope upon him. What his love lacked in courage it made up in constancy,
+however, and morning, noon, and night--sometimes midnight too, I venture
+to say--his all too patient heart had bowed mutely down toward its holy
+city across the burning sands of his diffidence. When another fellow
+stepped in and married her, he simply loved on, in the same innocent,
+dumb, harmless way as before. He gave himself some droll consolations. One
+of these was a pretty, sloop-rigged sail-boat, trim and swift, on which he
+lavished the tendernesses he knew he should never bestow upon any living
+she. He named her Sweetheart; a general term; but he knew that we all knew
+it meant the mender of his coat. By and by his visits fell off and I met
+him oftenest on the street. Sometimes we stopped for a moment's sidewalk
+chat, New Orleans fashion, and I still envied the clear bronze of his fine
+skin, which the rest of us had soon lost. But after a while certain
+changes began to show for the worse, until one day in the summer of the
+fifth year he tried to hurry by me. I stopped him, and was thinking what a
+handsome fellow he was even yet, with such a quiet, modest fineness about
+him, when he began, with a sudden agony of face, "My schooner's sold for
+debt! You know the reason; I've seen you read it all over me every time we
+have met, these twelve months--O _don't_ look at me!"
+
+His slim, refined hands--he gave me both?-were clammy and tremulous.
+"Yes," he babbled on, "it's a fixed fact, Smith; the cracked fiddle's a
+smashed fiddle at last!"
+
+I drew him out of the hot sun and into a secluded archway, he talking
+straight on with a speed and pitiful grandiloquence totally unlike him.
+"I've finished all the easy parts--the first ecstasies of pure license--
+the long down-hill plunge, with all its mad exhilarations--the wild vanity
+of venturing and defying--that bigness of the soul's experiences which
+makes even its anguish seem finer than the old bitterness of tame
+propriety--they are all behind me, now?-the valley of horrors is before!
+You can't understand it, Smith. O you can't understand----"
+
+O couldn't I! And, anyhow, one does not have to put himself through a
+whole criminal performance to apprehend its spiritual experiences. I
+understood all, and especially what he unwittingly betrayed even now; that
+deep thirst for the dramatic element in one's own life, which, when social
+conformity fails to supply it, becomes, to an eager soul, sin's cunningest
+allurement.
+
+I tried to talk to him. "Gregory, that day the dogs jumped on you--you
+remember?--didn't you say if ever you should reach this condition your
+fear might save you?"
+
+He stared at me a moment. "Do you"--a ray of humor lighted his eyes--"do
+you still believe in spasms of virtue?"
+
+"Thank heaven, yes!" laughed I.
+
+"Good-by," he said, and was gone.
+
+I heard of him twice afterward that day. About noon some one coming into
+the office said: "I just now saw Crackedfiddle buying a great lot of
+powder and shot and fishing-tackle. Here's a note. He says first read it
+and then seal it and send it to his aunt." It read:
+
+_"Don't look for me. You can't find me. I'm not going to kill or hurt
+myself, and I'll report again in a month."_
+
+I delivered it in person on my way uptown, advising his kinswoman to trust
+him on his own terms and hope for the best. Privately, of course, I was
+distressed, and did not become less so when, on reaching home, Mrs. Smith
+told me that he had been there and borrowed an arm-load of books, saying
+he might return some of them in a month, but would probably keep others
+for two. So he did; and one evening, when he brought the last of them
+back, he told us fully, spiritual experiences and all, what had occurred
+to him in the interval.
+
+The sale of the schooner had paid its debt and left him some cash over.
+Better yet, it had saved Sweetheart. On the day of his disappearance she
+was lying at the head of the New Basin, distant but a few minutes' walk
+from the spot where we met and talked. When he left me he went there. At
+the stores thereabout he bought a new hatchet and axe, an extra water-keg
+or two, and a month's provisions. He filled all the kegs, stowed
+everything aboard, and by the time the afternoon had half waned was
+rippling down the New Canal under mule-tow with a strong lake breeze in
+his face.
+
+At the lake (Pontchartrain), as the tow-line was cast off, he hoisted
+sail, and, skimming out by lighthouse and breakwater, tripped away toward
+Pointe-aux-Herbes and the eastern skyline beyond, he and Sweetheart alone,
+his hand clasping hers--the tiller, that is--hour by hour, and the small
+waves tiptoeing to kiss her southern cheek as she leaned the other away
+from the saucy north wind. In time the low land, and then the lighthouse,
+sank and vanished behind them; on the left the sun went down in the purple
+black swamps of Manchac; the intervening waters turned crimson and bronze
+under the fairer changes of the sky, while in front of them Fort Pike
+Light began to glimmer through an opal haze, and by and by to draw near.
+It passed. From a large inbound schooner gliding by in the twilight, came
+in friendly recognition, the drone of a conch-shell, the last happy
+salutation Sweetheart was ever to receive. Then the evening star silvered
+their wake through the deep Rigolets, and the rising moon met them, her
+and her lover, in Lake Borgne, passing the dark pines of Round Island, and
+hurrying on toward the white sand-keys of the Gulf.
+
+The night was well advanced as they neared the pine-crested dunes of Cat
+Island, in whose lee a more cautious sailor would have dropped anchor till
+the morning. But to this pair every mile of these fickle waters, channel
+and mud-lump, snug lagoon, open sea and hidden bar, each and all, were
+known as the woods are known to a hunter, and, as he drew her hand closer
+to his side, she turned across the track of the moon and bounded into the
+wide south. A maze of marsh islands--huddling along that narrow, half-
+drowned mainland of cypress swamp and trembling prairie which follows the
+Mississippi out to sea--slept, leagues away, below the western waters. In
+the east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and the
+shoreless deep, and this was so near that from its farther edge came now
+and again its admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulf
+rolling forever down the prone but unshaken battle-front of the sandy
+Chandeleurs.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+So all night, lest wind or resolve should fail next day, he sailed. How to
+tell just where dawn found him I scarcely know.
+
+Somewhere in that blue wilderness, with no other shore in sight, yet not
+over three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered sand-
+reefs, a ferment of delta silt--if science guesses right--had lifted
+higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere
+islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward
+and a deep, slender lagoon on the landward side filling the whole length
+of its bight. About half the island was flat and was covered with those
+strong marsh grasses for which you've seen cattle, on the mainland,
+venture so hungrily into the deep ooze. The rest, the southern half, rose
+in dazzling white dunes twenty feet or more in height and dappled green
+with patches of ragged sod and thin groups of dwarfed and wind-flattened
+shrubs. As the sun rose, Sweetheart and her sailor glided through a gap in
+the sand reef that closed the lagoon in, luffed, and as a great cloud of
+nesting pelicans rose from their dirty town on the flats, ran softly upon
+the inner sands, where a rillet, a mere thread of sweet water, trickled
+across the white beach. Here he waded ashore with the utensils and
+provisions, made a fire, washed down a hot breakfast of bacon and pone
+with a pint of black coffee, returned to his boat and slept until
+afternoon. Wakened at length by the canting of the sloop with the fall of
+the tide, he rose, rekindled his fire, cooked and ate again, smoked two
+pipes, and then, idly shouldering his gun, made a long half-circuit of the
+beach to south and eastward, mounted the highest dune and gazed far and
+wide.
+
+Nowhere on sand or sea under the illimitable dome was there sign of human
+presence on the earth. Nor would there likely be any. Except by
+misadventure no ship on any course ever showed more than a topmast above
+this horizon. Of the hunters and fishermen who roamed the islands nearer
+shore, with the Chandeleurs, the storm-drowned Grand Gosiers and the deep-
+sea fishing grounds beyond, few knew the way hither, and fewer ever sailed
+it. At the sound of his gun the birds of the beach--sea-snipe, curlew,
+plover--showed the whites of their wings for an instant and fell to
+feeding again. Save when the swift Wilderness--you remember the revenue
+cutter?-chanced this way on her devious patrol, only the steamer of the
+light-house inspection service, once a month, came up out of the southwest
+through yonder channel and passed within hail on her way from the stations
+of the Belize to those of Mississippi Sound; and he knew--had known before
+he left the New Basin--that she had just gone by here the day before.
+
+But to Gregory this solitude brought no quick distress. With a bird or two
+at his belt he turned again toward his dying fire. Once on the way he
+paused, as he came in sight of the sloop, and gazed upon it with a
+faintness of heart he had not known since his voyage began. However, it
+presently left him, and hurrying down to her side he began to unload her
+completely, and to make a permanent camp in the lee of a ridge of sand
+crested with dwarfed casino bushes, well up from the beach. The night did
+not stop him, and by the time he was tired enough for sleep he had
+lightened the boat of everything stowed into her the previous day. Before
+sunrise he was at work again, removing her sandbags, her sails, flags,
+cordage, even her spars. The mast would have been heavy for two men to
+handle, but he got it out whole, though not without hurting one hand so
+painfully that he had to lie off for over two hours. But by midday he was
+busy again, and when at low water poor Sweetheart comfortably turned upon
+her side on the odorous, clean sand, it was never more to rise. The keen,
+new axe of her master ended her days.
+
+"No! O no!" he said to me, "call it anything but courage! I felt--I don't
+want to be sentimental--I'm sure I was not sentimental at the time, but--I
+felt as though I were a murderer. All I knew was that it had to be done. I
+trembled like a thief. I had to stoop twice before I could take up the
+axe, and I was so cold my teeth chattered. When I lifted the first blow I
+didn't know where it was going to fall. But it struck as true as a die,
+and then I flew at it. I never chopped so fast or clean in my life. I
+wasn't fierce; I was as full of self-delight as an overpraised child. And
+yet when something delayed me an instant I found I was still shaking.
+Courage," said he, "O no; I know what it was, and I knew then. But I had
+no choice; it was my last chance."
+
+I told him that anyone might have thought him a madman chopping up his
+last chance.
+
+"Maybe so," he replied, "but I wasn't; it was the one sane thing I could
+do;" and he went on to tell me that when night fell the tallest fire that
+ever leapt from those sands blazed from Sweetheart's piled ribs and keel.
+
+It was proof to him of his having been shrewd, he said, that for many days
+he felt no repentance of the act nor was in the least lonely. There was an
+infinite relief merely in getting clean away from the huge world of men,
+with all its exactions and temptations and the myriad rebukes and rebuffs
+of its crass propriety and thrift. He had endured solitude enough in it;
+the secret loneliness of a spiritual bankruptcy. Here was life begun over,
+with none to make new debts to except nature and himself, and no
+besetments but his own circumvented propensities. What humble, happy
+masterhood! Each dawn he rose from dreamless sleep and leaped into the
+surf as into the embrace of a new existence. Every hour of day brought
+some unfretting task or hale pastime. With sheath-knife and sail-needle he
+made of his mainsail a handsome tent, using the mainboom for his ridge-
+pole, and finishing it just in time for the first night of rain--when,
+nevertheless, he lost all his coffee!
+
+He did not waste toil. He hoarded its opportunities as one might husband
+salt on the mountains or water in the desert, and loitering in well
+calculated idleness between thoughts many and things of sea and shore
+innumerable, filled the intervals from labor to labor with gentle
+entertainment. Skyward ponderings by night, canny discoveries under foot
+by day, quickened his mind and sight to vast and to minute significancies,
+until they declared an Author known to him hitherto only by tradition.
+Every acre of the barren islet grew fertile in beauties and mysteries, and
+a handful of sand at the door of his tent held him for hours guessing the
+titanic battles that had ground the invincible quartz to that crystal meal
+and fed it to the sea.
+
+I may be more rhetorical than he was, but he made all the more of these
+conditions while experiencing them, because he knew they could not last
+out the thirty days, nor half the thirty, and took modest comfort in a
+will strong enough to meet all present demands, well knowing there was one
+exigency yet to arise, one old usurer still to be settled with who had not
+yet brought in his dun.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+It came--began to come--in the middle of the second week. At its familiar
+approach he felt no dismay, save a certain inert dismay that it brought
+none. Three, four, five times he went bravely to the rill, drowned his
+thirst and called himself satisfied; but the second day was worse than the
+first; the craving seemed better than the rill's brief cure of it, and
+once he rose straight from drinking of the stream and climbed the dune to
+look for a sail.
+
+He strove in vain to labor. The pleasures of toil were as stale as those
+of idleness. His books were put aside with a shudder, and he walked abroad
+with a changed gait; the old extortioner was levying on his nerves. And on
+his brain. He dreamed that night of war times; found himself commander of
+a whole battery of heavy guns, and lo, they were all quaker cannon. When
+he would have fled, monstrous terrors met him at every turn, till he woke
+and could sleep no more. Dawn widened over sky and sea, but its vast
+beauty only mocked the castaway. All day long he wandered up and down and
+along and across his glittering prison, no tiniest speck of canvas, no
+faintest wreath of smoke, on any water's edge; the horror of his isolation
+growing-growing?-like the monsters of his dream, and his whole nature wild
+with a desire which was no longer a mere physical drought, but a passion
+of the soul, that gave the will an unnatural energy and set at naught
+every true interest of earth and heaven. Again and again he would have
+shrieked its anguish, but the first note of his voice rebuked him to
+silence as if he had espied himself in a glass. He fell on his face
+voiceless, writhing, and promised himself, nay, pledged creation and its
+Creator, that on the day of his return to the walks of men he would drink
+the cup of madness and would drink it thenceforth till he died.
+
+When night came again he paced the sands for hours and then fell to work
+to drag by long and toiling zigzags to a favorable point on the southern
+end of the island the mast he had saved, and to raise there a flag of
+distress. In the shortness of his resources he dared not choose the
+boldest exposures, where the first high wind would cast it down; but where
+he placed it it could be seen from every quarter except the north, and any
+sail approaching from that direction was virtually sure to come within
+hail even of the voice.
+
+Day had come again as he left the finished task, and once more from the
+highest wind-built ridge his hungering eyes swept the round sea's edge.
+But he saw no sail. Nerveless and exhausted he descended to the
+southeastern beach and watched the morning brighten. The breezes, that for
+some time had slept, fitfully revived, and the sun leaped from the sea and
+burned its way through a low bank of dark and ruddy clouds with so unusual
+a splendor that the beholder was in some degree both quickened and
+tranquillized. He could even play at self-command, and in child fashion
+bound himself not to mount the dunes again for a northern look within an
+hour. This southern half circle must suffice. Indeed, unless these idle
+zephyrs should amend, no sail could in that time draw near enough to
+notice any signal he could offer.
+
+Playing at self-command gave him some earnest of it. In a whim of the
+better man he put off his clothes and sprang into the breakers. He had
+grown chill, but a long wrestle with the surf warmed his blood, and as he
+reclothed himself and with a better step took his way along the beach
+toward his tent a returning zest of manhood refreshed his spirit. The hour
+was up, but in a kind of equilibrium of impulses and with much emptiness
+of mind, he let it lengthen on, made a fire, and for the first time in two
+days cooked food. He ate and still tarried. A brand in his camp fire, a
+piece from the remnant of his boat, made beautiful flames. He idly cast in
+another and was pleased to find himself sitting there instead of gazing
+his eyes out for sails that never rose into view. He watched a third brand
+smoke and blaze. And then, as tamely as if the new impulse were only
+another part of a continued abstraction, he arose and once more climbed
+the sandy hills. The highest was some distance from his camp. At one point
+near its top a brief northeastward glimpse of the marsh's outer edge and
+the blue waters beyond showed at least that nothing had come near enough
+to raise the pelicans. But the instant his sight cleared the crown of the
+ridge he rushed forward, threw up his arms, and lifted his voice in a
+long, imploring yell. Hardly two miles away, her shapely canvas leaning
+and stiffening in the augmented breeze, a small yacht had just gone about,
+and with twice the speed at which she must have approached was, hurrying
+back straight into the north.
+
+The frantic man dashed back and forth along the crest, tossing his arms,
+waving his Madras handkerchief, cursing himself for leaving his gun so far
+behind, and again and again repeating his vain ahoys in wilder and wilder
+alternations of beseeching and rage. The lessening craft flew straight on,
+no ear in her skilled enough to catch the distant cry, and no eye alert
+enough to scan the dwindling sand-hills. He ceased to call, but still,
+with heavy notes of distress to himself, waved and waved, now here, now
+there, while the sail grew smaller and smaller. At length he stopped this
+also and only stood gazing. Almost on first sight of the craft he had
+guessed that the men in her had taken alarm at the signs of changing
+weather, and seeing the freshening smoke of his fire had also inferred
+that earlier sportsmen were already on the island. Oh, if he could have
+fired one shot when she was nearest! But already she was as hopelessly
+gone as though she were even now below the horizon. Suddenly he turned and
+ran down to his camp. Not for the gun; not in any new hope of signalling
+the yacht. No, no; a raft! a raft! Deliverance or destruction, it should
+be at his own hand and should wait no longer!
+
+A raft forthwith he set about to make. Some stout portions of his boat
+were still left. Tough shrubs of the sand-hills furnished trennels and
+suppler parts. Of ropes there was no lack. The mast was easily dragged
+down again to the beach to be once more a mast, and in nervous haste, yet
+with skill and thoroughness, the tent was ripped up and remade into a
+sail, and even a rude centreboard was rigged in order that one might tack
+against unfavorable winds.
+
+Winds, at nightfall, when the thing began to be near completion, there
+were none. The day's sky had steadily withdrawn its favor. The sun shone
+as it sank into the waves, but in the northwest and southeast dazzling
+thunderheads swelled from the sea's line high into the heavens, and in the
+early dusk began with silent kindlings to challenge each other to battle.
+As night swiftly closed down the air grew unnaturally still. From the
+toiler's brow, worse than at noon, the sweat rolled off, as at last he
+brought his work to a close by the glare of his leaping camp-fire. Now,
+unless he meant only to perish, he must once more eat and sleep while he
+might. Then let the storm fall; the moment it was safely over and the wind
+in the right quarter he would sail. As for the thirst which had been such
+a torture while thwarted, now that it ruled unchallenged, it was purely a
+wild, glad zeal as full of method as of diligence. But first he must make
+his diminished provisions and his powder safe against the elements; and
+this he did, covering them with a waterproof stuff and burying them in a
+northern slope of sand.
+
+He awoke in the small hours of the night. The stars of the zenith were
+quenched. Blackness walled and roofed him in close about his crumbled
+fire, save when at shorter and shorter intervals and with more and more
+deafening thunders the huge clouds lit up their own forms, writhing one
+upon another, and revealed the awe-struck sea and ghostly sands waiting
+breathlessly below. He rose to lay on more fuel, and while he was in the
+act the tornado broke upon him. The wind, as he had forecast, came out of
+the southeast. In an instant it was roaring and hurtling against the
+farther side of his island rampart like the charge of a hundred thousand
+horse and tossing the sand of the dunes like blown hair into the
+northwest, while the rain in one wild deluge lashed the frantic sea and
+weltering lagoon as with the whips of the Furies.
+
+He had kept the sail on the beach for a protection from the storm, but
+before he could crawl under it he was as wet as though he had been tossed
+up by the deep, and yet was glad to gain its cover from the blinding
+floods and stinging sand. Here he lay for more than an hour, the rage of
+the tempest continually growing, the heavens in a constant pulsing glare
+of lightnings, their terrific thunders smiting and bellowing round and
+round its echoing vault, and the very island seeming at times to stagger
+back and recover again as it braced itself against the fearful onsets of
+the wind. Snuggling in his sailcloth burrow, he complacently recalled an
+earlier storm like this, which he and Sweetheart, the only other time they
+ever were here, had tranquilly weathered in this same lagoon. On the
+mainland, in that storm, cane- and rice-fields had been laid low and half
+destroyed, houses had been unroofed, men had been killed. A woman and a
+boy, under a pecan tree, were struck by lightning; and three men who had
+covered themselves with a tarpaulin on one of the wharves in New Orleans
+were blown with it into the Mississippi, poor fellows, and were drowned; a
+fact worthy of second consideration in the present juncture.
+
+This second thought had hardly been given it before he crept hastily from
+his refuge and confronted the gale in quick alarm. The hurricane was
+veering to southward. Let it shift but a point or two more, and its entire
+force would sweep the lagoon and its beach. Before long the change came.
+The mass of canvas at his feet leapt clear of the ground and fell two or
+three yards away. He sprang to seize it, but in the same instant the whole
+storm--rain, wind, and sand--whirled like a troop of fiends round the
+southern end of the island, the ceaseless lightnings showing the way, and
+came tearing and howling up its hither side. The white sail lifted,
+bellied, rolled, fell, vaulted into the air, fell again, tumbled on, and
+at the foot of a dune stopped until its wind-buffeted pursuer had almost
+overtaken it. Then it fled again, faster, faster, higher, higher up the
+sandy slope to its top, caught and clung an instant on some unseen bush,
+and then with one mad bound into the black sky, unrolled, widened like a
+phantom, and vanished forever.
+
+Gregory turned in desperation, and in the glare of the lightning looked
+back toward his raft. Great waves were rolling along and across the
+slender reef in wide obliques and beating themselves to death in the
+lagoon, or sweeping out of it again seaward at its more northern end. On
+the dishevelled crest of one he saw his raft, and on another its mast. He
+could not look a second time. The flying sand blinded him and cut the
+blood from his face. He could only cover his eyes and crawl under the
+bushes in such poor lee as he could find; and there, with the first lull
+of the storm, heavy with exhaustion and despair, he fell asleep and slept
+until far into the day. When he awoke the tempest was over.
+
+Even more completely the tumult within him was quieted. He rose and stood
+forth mute in spirit as in speech; humbled, yet content, in the
+consciousness that having miserably failed first to save himself and then
+to rue himself back to destruction, the hurricane had been his deliverer.
+It had spared his supplies, his ammunition, his weapons, only hiding them
+deeper under the dune sands; but scarce a vestige of his camp remained and
+of his raft nothing. As once more from the highest sand-ridge he looked
+down upon the sea weltering in the majestic after-heavings of its passion,
+at the eastern beach booming under the shock of its lofty rollers, and
+then into the sky still gray with the endless flight of southward-hurrying
+scud, he felt the stir of a new attachment to them and his wild prison,
+and pledged alliance with them thenceforth.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Here, in giving me his account, Gregory asked me if that sounded
+sentimental. I said no, and thereupon he actually tried to apologize to me
+as though I were a professional story-teller, for having had so few deep
+feelings in the moments where the romancists are supposed to place them. I
+told him what I had once seen a mechanic do on a steep, slated roof nearly
+a hundred feet from the pavement. He had faced round from his work, which
+was close to the ridge-tiles, probably to kick off the shabby shoes he had
+on, when some hold failed him and he began to slide toward the eaves. We
+people in the street below fairly moaned our horror, but he didn't utter a
+sound. He held back with all his skill, one leg thrust out in front, the
+other drawn up with the knee to his breast, and his hands flattened beside
+him on the slates, but he came steadily on down till his forward foot
+passed over the eaves and his heel caught on the tin gutter. Then he
+stopped. We held our breath below. He slowly and cautiously threw off one
+shoe, then the other, and then turned, climbed back up the roof and
+resumed his work. And we two or three witnesses down in the street didn't
+think any less of him because he did so without any show of our glad
+emotion.
+
+"O, if I had that fellow's nerve," said Gregory, "that would be another
+thing!"
+
+My wife and I smiled at each other. "How would it be 'another thing?'" we
+asked. "Did _you_ not quietly get up and begin life over again as if
+nothing had occurred?"
+
+"There wasn't anything else to do," he replied, with a smile. "The
+feelings came later, too, in an easy sort o' gradual way. I never could
+quite make out how men get such clear notions of what they call
+'Providence,' but, just the same, I know by experience there's all the
+difference of peace and misery, or life and death, whether you're in
+partnership with the things that help the world on, or with those that
+hold it back."
+
+"But with that feeling," my wife asked, "did not your longing for our
+human world continue?"
+
+"No," he replied, "but I got a new liking for it--although, you
+understand, _I_ never had anything against _it_, of course. It's too big
+and strong for me, that's all; and that's my fault. Your man on that
+slippery roof kicking his shoes off is a sort of parable to me. If your
+hand or your foot offend you and you have to cut it off, that's a physical
+disablement, and bad enough. But when your gloves and your shoes are too
+much for you, and you have to pluck _them_ off and cast them from you, you
+find each one is a great big piece of the civilized world, and you hardly
+know how much you did like it, till you've lost it. And still, it's no use
+longing, when you know your limitations, and I saw I'd got to keep _my_
+world trimmed down to where I could run barefooted on the sand."
+
+He told us that now he began for the first time since coming to the
+island, to find his books his best source of interest and diversion. He
+learned, he said, a way of reading by which sea, sky, book, island, and
+absent humanity, all seemed parts of one whole, and all to speak together
+in one harmony, while they toiled together for one harmony some day to be
+perfected. Not all books, nor even all good books, were equally good for
+that effect, he thought, and the best----
+
+"You might not think it," he said, "but the best was a Bible I'd chanced
+to carry along;" he didn't know precisely what kind, but "just one of
+these ordinary Bibles you see lying around in people's houses." He
+extolled the psalms and asked Mrs. Smith if she'd ever noticed the beauty
+of the twenty-third. She smiled and said she believed she had.
+
+"Then there was one," he went on, "beginning, 'Lord, my heart is not
+haughty, nor mine eyes lofty; neither do I exercise myself in great
+matters, or in things too wonderful for me;' and by and by it says,
+'Surely, I have quieted myself as a child that is weaned: my soul is even
+as a weaned child.'"
+
+One day, after a most marvellous sunset, he had been reading, he said,
+"that long psalm with twenty-two parts in it--a hundred and seventy-six
+verses." He had intended to read "Lord, my heart is not haughty" after it,
+though the light was fast failing, but at the hundred and seventy-sixth
+verse he closed the book. Thus he sat in the nearly motionless air, gazing
+on the ripples of the lagoon as, now singly, and now by twos or threes,
+they glided up the beach tinged with the colors of parting day as with a
+grace of resignation, and sank into the grateful sands like the lines of
+this last verse sinking into his heart; now singly--"I have gone astray
+like a lost sheep;" and now by twos--"I have gone astray like a lost
+sheep; save thy servant;" or by threes--"I have gone astray like a lost
+sheep; save thy servant; for I do not forget thy commandments."
+
+"I shouldn't tell that," he said to us, "if I didn't know so well how
+little it counts for. But I knew at the time that when the next day but
+one should bring the lighthouse steamer I shouldn't be any more fit to go
+ashore, _to stay_, than a jellyfish." We agreed, he and I that there can
+be as wide a distance between fine feelings and faithful doing as, he
+said, "between listening to the band and charging a battery."
+
+On the islet the night deepened. The moon had not risen, and the stars
+only glorified the dark, as it, in turn, revealed the unearthly beauties
+of a phosphorescent sea. It was one of those rare hours in which the deep
+confessed the amazing numbers of its own living and swarming
+constellations. Not a fish could leap or dart, not a sinuous thing could
+turn, but it became an animate torch. Every quick movement was a gleam of
+green fire. No drifting, flaccid life could pulse so softly along but it
+betrayed itself in lambent outlines. Each throb of the water became a beam
+of light, and every ripple that widened over the strand--still whispering,
+"I have gone astray"--was edged with luminous pearls.
+
+In an agreeable weariness of frame, untroubled in mind, and counting the
+night too beautiful for slumber he reclined on the dry sands with an arm
+thrown over a small pile of fagots which he had spent the day in gathering
+from every part of the island to serve his need for the brief remainder of
+his stay. In this search he had found but one piece of his boat, a pine
+board. This he had been glad to rive into long splinters and bind together
+again as a brand, with which to signal the steamer if--contrary to her
+practice, I think he said--she should pass in the night. And so, without a
+premonition of drowsiness, he was presently asleep, with the hours
+radiantly folding and expiring one upon another like the ripples on the
+beach.
+
+When he came to himself he was on his feet. The moon was high, his fire
+was smouldering; his heart was beating madly and his eyes were fixed on
+the steamer, looming large, moving at full speed, her green light showing,
+her red light hid, and her long wake glowing with comet fire. In a moment
+she would be passing. It was too late for beacon-flame or torch. He sprang
+for his gun, and mounting the first low rise fired into the air, once!--
+twice! --and shouted, "Help!--help!"
+
+She kept straight on. She was passing, she was passing! In trembling haste
+he loaded and fired again, again wailed out his cry for help, and still
+she kept her speed. He had loaded for the third discharge, still
+frantically calling the while, and was lifting his gun to fire when he saw
+the white light at her foremast-head begin to draw nearer to the green
+light at her waist and knew she was turning. He fired, shouted, and tried
+to load again; but as her red light brightened into view beside the green,
+he dropped his gun and leaped and crouched and laughed and wept for joy.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+"Why, Gregory!" the naval lieutenant cried, as the castaway climbed from
+the steamer's boat to her deck. "Why, you blasted old cracked fiddle! what
+in----"
+
+"Right, the first guess!" laughed Gregory, "there's where I've been!" and
+in the cabin he explained all.
+
+"The fiddle's mended," he concluded. "You can play a tune on it--by being
+careful."
+
+"But what's your tune?" asked his hearer; "you cannot go back to that
+island."
+
+"Yes, I'll be on it in a week--with a schooner-load of cattle. I can get
+them on credit. Going to raise cattle there as a regular business. They'll
+fatten in that marsh like blackbirds."
+
+True enough, before the week was up the mended fiddle was playing its
+tune. It was not until Gregory's second return from his island that he
+came to see us and told us his simple story. We asked him how it was that
+the steamer, that first time, had come so much earlier than she generally
+did.
+
+"She didn't," he replied. "I had miscounted one day."
+
+"Don't you," asked my wife, who would have liked a more religious tone in
+Gregory's recital, "don't you have trouble to keep run of your Sabbaths
+away out there alone?"
+
+"Why"--he smiled--"it's always Sunday there. Here almost everybody feels
+duty bound to work harder than somebody else, or else make somebody else
+work harder than he, and you need a day every now and then for Sunday--or
+Sabbath, at least. Oh, I suppose it's all one in the end, isn't it? You
+take your's in a pill, I take mine in a powder. Not that it's the least
+bit like a dose, however, except for the good it does."
+
+"And you're really prospering, even in a material way!" I said.
+
+"Yes," he answered. "O yes; the island's already too small for us."
+
+"It's certainly very dangerously exposed," said my wife, and I guessed her
+thought was on Last Island, which, you remember, though very large and
+populous, had been, within our recollection, totally submerged, with
+dreadful loss of life.
+
+"O yes," he responded, "there's always something wherever you are. One of
+these days some storm's going to roll the sea clean over the whole thing."
+
+"Then, why don't you move to a bigger island closer inshore?" she asked.
+
+"I'm afraid," said Gregory, and smiled.
+
+"Afraid!" said my wife, incredulously.
+
+"Yes," he responded. "I'm afraid my prisoner'll get away from me."
+
+As his hand closed over hers in good-by I saw, what he could not, that she
+had half a notion to kiss it. I told her so when he was gone, and kissed
+hers--for him.
+
+"I don't care," she said, dreamily, as it lingered in mine, "I'm glad I
+mended his coat for him that time."
+
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+
+The Taxidermist
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+One day a hummingbird got caught in a cobweb in our greenhouse. It had no
+real need to seek that damp, artificial heat. We were in the very heart of
+that Creole summer-time when bird-notes are many as the sunbeams. The
+flowers were in such multitude they seemed to follow one about, offering
+their honeys and perfumes and begging to be gathered. Our little boy saw
+the embodied joy fall, a joy no longer, seized it, and clasping it too
+tightly, brought it to me dead.
+
+
+He cried so over the loss that I promised to have the body stuffed. This
+is how I came to know Manouvrier, the Taxidermist in St. Peter Street.
+
+I passed his place twice before I found it. The front shop was very small,
+dingily clean and scornfully unmercantile. Of the very few specimens of
+his skill to be seen round about not one was on parade, yet everyone was
+somehow an achievement, a happy surprise, a lasting delight. I admit that
+taxidermy is not classed among the fine arts; but you know there is a way
+of making everything--anything--an art instead of a craft or a commerce,
+and such was the way of this shop's big, dark, hairy-faced, shaggy-headed
+master. I saw his unsmiling face soften and his eye grow kind as mine
+lighted up with approbation of his handiwork.
+
+When I handed him the hummingbird he held it tenderly in his wide palm,
+and as I was wondering to myself how so huge a hand as that could
+manipulate frail and tiny things and bring forth delicate results, he
+looked into my face and asked, with a sort of magisterial gentleness:
+
+"How she git kill', dat lill' bird?"
+
+I told him. I could feel my mood and words take their tone from him,
+though he outwardly heard me through with no show of feeling; and when I
+finished, I knew we were friends. I presently ventured to praise the
+specimen of his skill nearest at hand; a wild turkey listening alarmedly
+as if it would the next instant utter that ringing "quit!" which makes
+each separate drop of a hunter's blood tingle. But with an odd languor in
+his gravity, he replied:
+
+"Naw, dass not well make; lill' bit worse, bad enough to put in front
+window. I take you inside; come."
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+We passed through into a private workroom immediately behind the shop. His
+wife sat there sewing; a broad, motherly woman of forty-five, fat,
+tranquil, kind, with an old eye, a young voice, and a face that had got
+its general flabbiness through much paddling and gnawing from other
+women's teething babes. She sat still, unintroduced, but welcomed me with
+a smile.
+
+I was saying to her husband that a hummingbird was a very small thing to
+ask him to stuff. But he stopped me with his lifted palm.
+
+"My fran', a hummingbird has de pas-sione'--de ecstacie! One drop of blood
+wid the pas-sione in it"--He waved his hand with a jerk of the thumb in
+disdain of spoken words, and it was I who added,
+
+"Is bigger than the sun?"
+
+"Hah!" was all he uttered in approval, turning as if to go to work. I
+feared I had disappointed him.
+
+"God measures by the soul, not by the size," I suggested. But he would say
+no more, and his wife put in as softly as a kettle beginning to sing,
+
+"Ah, ha, ha! I t'ink dass where de good God show varrie good sanse."
+
+I began looking here and there in heartiest admiration of the products of
+his art and presently we were again in full sympathy and talking eagerly.
+As I was going he touched my arm:
+
+"You will say de soul is parted from dat lill' bird. And--yass; but"--he
+let a gesture speak the rest.
+
+"I know," replied I; "you propose to make the soul seem to come back and
+leave us its portrait. I believe you will." Whereupon he gave me his
+first, faint smile, and detained me with another touch.
+
+"Msieu Smeet; when you was bawn?"
+
+"I? December 9, 1844. Why do you ask?"
+
+"O nut'n'; only I thing you make me luck; nine, h-eighteen, fawty-fo'--I
+play me doze number' in de lott'ree to-day."
+
+"Why, pshaw! you don't play the lottery, do you?"
+
+"Yass. I play her; why not? She make me reech some of doze day'. Win fifty
+dollah one time las' year."
+
+The soft voice of the wife spoke up--"And spend it all to the wife of my
+dead brother. What use him be reech? I think he don't stoff bird' no
+betteh."
+
+But the husband responded more than half to himself,
+
+"Yass, I think mebbe I stoff him lill' more betteh."
+
+When, some days afterward I called again, thinking as I drew near how much
+fineness of soul and life, seen or unseen, must have existed in earlier
+generations to have produced this man, I noticed the in conspicuous sign
+over his door, P.T.B. Manouvrier, and as he led me at once into the back
+room I asked him playfully what such princely abundance of initials might
+stand for.
+
+"Doze? Ah, doze make only Pas-Trop-Bon."
+
+
+I appealed to his wife; but she, with her placid laugh, would only confirm
+him:
+
+"Yass; Pastropbon; he like that name. Tha's all de way I call him--
+Pastropbon."
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The hummingbird was ready for me. I will not try to tell how lifelike and
+beautiful the artist had made it. Even with him I took pains to be
+somewhat reserved. As I stood holding and admiring the small green wonder,
+I remarked that I was near having to bring him that morning another and
+yet finer bird. A shade of displeasure (and, I feared, of suspicion also)
+came to his face as he asked me how that was. I explained.
+
+Going into my front hall, whose veranda-door framed in a sunny picture of
+orange-boughs, jasmine-vines, and white-clouded blue sky, I had found a
+male ruby-throat circling about the ceiling, not wise enough to stoop, fly
+low, and pass out by the way it had come in. It occurred to me that it
+might be the mate of the one already mine. For some time all the efforts I
+could contrive, either to capture or free it, were vain. Round and round
+it flew, silently beating and bruising its exquisite little head against
+the lofty ceiling, the glory of its luminous red throat seeming to
+heighten into an expression of unspeakable agony. At last Mrs. Smith ran
+for a long broom, and, as in her absence I stood watching the self-snared
+captive's struggle, the long, tiny beak which had never done worse than go
+twittering with rapture to the grateful hearts of thousands of flowers,
+began to trace along the smooth, white ceiling a scarlet thread of pure
+heart's blood. The broom came. I held it up, the flutterer lighted upon
+it, and at first slowly, warily, and then triumphantly, I lowered it under
+the lintel out into the veranda, and the bird darted away into the garden
+and was gone like a soul into heaven.
+
+In the middle of my short recital Manouvrier had sunk down upon the arm of
+his wife's rocking-chair with one huge hand on both of hers folded over
+her sewing, and as I finished he sat motionless, still gazing into my
+face.
+
+
+"But," I started, with sudden pretence of business impulse, "how much am I
+to pay?"
+
+He rose, slowly, and looked dreamily at his wife; she smiled at him, and
+he grunted,
+
+"Nut'n'."
+
+"Oh, my friend," I laughed, "that's absurd!"
+
+But he had no reply, and his wife, as she resumed her sewing, said,
+sweetly, as if to her needle, "Ah, I think Pastropbon don't got to charge
+nut'n' if he don't feel like." And I could not move them.
+
+As I was leaving them, a sudden conjecture came to me.
+
+"Did those birthday numbers bring you any luck?"
+
+The taxidermist shook his head, good-naturedly, but when his wife laughed
+he turned upon her.
+
+"Wait! I dawn't be done wid doze number' yet."
+
+I guessed that, having failed with them in the daily drawings, he would
+shift the figures after some notion of magical significance and venture a
+ticket, whole or fractional, in the monthly drawing.
+
+Scarcely ten days after, as I sat at breakfast with my newspaper spread
+beside my plate, I fairly spilled my coffee as my eye fell upon the name
+of P.T.B. Manouvrier, of No.--St. Peter Street. Old Pastropbon had drawn
+seventy-five thousand dollars in the lottery.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+All the first half of the day, wherever I was, in the street-car, at my
+counting-desk, on the exchange, no matter to what I gave my attention, my
+thought was ever on my friend the taxidermist. At luncheon it was the
+same. He was rich! And what, now? What next? And what--ah! what?-at last?
+Would the end be foul or fair? I hoped, yet feared. I feared again; and
+yet I hoped.
+
+A familiar acquaintance, a really good fellow, decent, rich, "born of
+pious parents," and determined to have all the ready-made refinements and
+tastes that pure money could buy, came and sat with me at my lunch table.
+
+"I wonder," he began, "if you know where you are, or what you're here for.
+I've been watching you for five minutes and I don't believe you do. See
+here; what sort of an old donkey is that bird-stuffer of yours?"
+
+"You know, then, his good fortune of yesterday, do you?"
+
+"No, I don't. I know my bad fortune with him last week."
+
+I dropped my spoon into my soup. "Why, what?"
+
+"Oh, no great shakes. Only, I went to his place to buy that wild turkey
+you told me about. I wanted to stand it away up on top of that beautiful
+old carved buffet I picked up in England last year. I was fully prepared
+to buy it on your say-so, but, all the same, I saw its merits the moment I
+set eyes on it. It has but one fault; did you notice that? I don't believe
+you did. I pointed it out to him."
+
+"You pointed--what did he say?"
+
+"He said I was right."
+
+"Why, what was the fault?"
+
+"Fault? Why, the perspective is bad; not exactly bad, but poor; lacks
+richness and rhythm."
+
+"And yet you bought the thing."
+
+"No, I didn't."
+
+"You didn't buy it?"
+
+"No, sir, I didn't buy it. I began by pricing three or four other things
+first, so he couldn't know which one to stick the fancy price on to, and
+incidentally I thought I would tell him--you'd told me, you remember, how
+your accounts of your two birds had warmed him up and melted his
+feelings----"
+
+"I didn't tell you. My wife told your wife, and your wife, I----"
+
+"Yes, yes. Well, anyhow, I thought I'd try the same game, so I told him
+how I had stuffed a bird once upon a time myself. It was a pigeon, with
+every feather as white as snow; a fan-tail. It had belonged to my little
+boy who died. I thought it would make such a beautiful emblem at his
+funeral, rising with wings outspread, you know, typical of the
+resurrection--we buried him from the Sunday-school, you remember. And so I
+killed it and wired it and stuffed it myself. It was hard to hang it in a
+soaring attitude, owing to its being a fan-tail, but I managed it."
+
+"And you told that to Manouvrier! What did he say?"
+
+"Say? He never so much as cracked a smile. When I'd done he stood so
+still, looking at me, that I turned and sort o' stroked the turkey and
+said, jestingly, says I, 'How much a pound for this gobbler?'"
+
+"That ought to have warmed him up."
+
+"Well, it didn't. He smiled like a dancing-master, lifted my hand off the
+bird and says, says he, 'She's not for sale.' Then he turned to go into
+his back room and leave me standing there. Well, that warmed _me_ up. Says
+I, 'What in thunder is it here for, then? and if it ain't for sale, come
+back here and show me what is!'
+
+"'Nawtin',' says 'e, with the same polite smile. 'Nawtin' for sale. I come
+back when you gone.' His voice was sweet as sugar, but he slammed the
+door. I would have followed him in and put some better manners into him
+with a kick, but the old orang-outang had turned the key inside, and when
+I'd had time to remember that I was a deacon and Sunday-school teacher I
+walked away. What do you mean by his good fortune of yesterday?"
+
+"I mean he struck Charlie Howard for seventy-five thousand."
+
+My hearer's mouth dropped open. He was equally amazed and amused. "Well,
+well, well! That accounts for his silly high-headedness."
+
+"Ah! no: that matter of yours was last week and the drawing was only
+yesterday."
+
+"Oh, that's so. I don't keep run of that horrible lottery business. It
+makes me sick at heart to see the hideous canker poisoning the character
+and blasting the lives of every class of our people--why, don't you think
+so?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I--I do. Yes, I certainly do!"
+
+"But your conviction isn't exactly red-hot, I perceive. Come, wake up."
+
+We rose. At the first street corner, as we were parting, I noticed he was
+still talking of the lottery.
+
+"Pestilential thing," he was calling it. "Men blame it lightly on the
+ground that there are other forms of gambling which our laws don't reach.
+I suppose a tiger in a village mustn't be killed till we have killed all
+the tigers back in the woods!"
+
+I assented absently and walked away full of a vague shame. For I know as
+well as anyone that a man without a quick, strong, aggressive, insistent
+indignation against undoubted evil is a very poor stick.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+At dinner that evening, Mrs. Smith broke a long silence with the question:
+
+"Did you go to see Manouvrier?"
+
+"Nn--o."
+
+She looked at me drolly. "Did you go half way and turn back?"
+
+"Yes," said I, "that's precisely what I did." And we dropped the subject.
+
+But in the night I felt her fingers softly touch my shoulder.
+
+"Warm night," I remarked.
+
+"Richard," said she, "it will be time enough to be troubled about your
+taxidermist when he's given you cause."
+
+"I'm not troubled; I'm simply interested. I'll go down to-morrow and see
+him." A little later it rained, very softly, and straight down, so that
+there was no need to shut the windows, and I slept like an infant until
+the room was full of sunshine.
+
+All the next day and evening, summer though it was and the levee and sugar
+sheds and cotton-yards virtually empty, I was kept by unexpected business
+and could not go near St. Peter Street. Both my partners were away on
+their vacations. But on the third afternoon our office regained its summer
+quiet and I was driving my pen through the last matter that prevented my
+going where I pleased, when I was disturbed by the announcement of a
+visitor. I pushed my writing on to a finish though he stood just at my
+back. Then I turned to bid him talk fast as my time was limited, when who
+should it be but Manouvrier. I took him into my private office, gave him a
+chair and said:
+
+"I was just coming to see you."
+
+"You had somet'in' to git stoff'?"
+
+"No; I--Oh, I didn't know but you might like to see me."
+
+"Yass?--Well--yass. I wish you come yesterday."
+
+"Indeed? Why so; to protect you from reporters and beggars?"
+
+"Naw; my wife she keep off all doze Peter an' John. Naw; one man bring me
+one wile cat to stoff. Ah! a _so_ fine as I never see! Beautiful like da
+dev'l! Since two day' an' night' I can't make out if I want to fix dat
+wile cat stan'in' up aw sittin' down!"
+
+"Did you decide at last?"
+
+"Yass, I dis-ide. How you think I diside?"
+
+"Ah! you're too hard for me. But one thing I know."
+
+"Yass? What you know?"
+
+"That you will never do so much to anything as to leave my imagination
+nothing to do. You will always give my imagination strong play and never a
+bit of hard work."
+
+"Come! Come and see!"
+
+I took my hat. "Is that what you called to see me about?"
+
+"Ah!" He started in sudden recollection and brought forth the lottery
+company's certified check for the seventy-five thousand dollars. "You keep
+dat?--lill' while?--for me? Yass; till I mek out how I goin' to spend
+her."
+
+"Manouvrier, may I make one condition?"
+
+"Yass."
+
+"It is that you will never play the lottery again."
+
+"Ah! Yass, I play her ag'in! You want know whan ole Pastropbon play her
+ag'in? One doze fine mawning--mebbee--dat sun--going rise hisself in de
+wes'. Well: when ole Pastropbon see dat, he play dat lott'ree ag'in. But
+biffo' he see dat"--He flirted his thumb.
+
+Not many days later a sudden bereavement brought our junior partner back
+from Europe and I took my family North for a more stimulating air. Before
+I went I called on my St. Peter Street friend to say that during my
+absence either of my partners would fulfil any wish of his concerning the
+money. In his wife's sewing-basket in the back room I noticed a batch of
+unopened letters, and ventured a question which had been in my mind for
+several days.
+
+"Manouvrier, you must get a host of letters these days from people who
+think you ought to help them because you have got money and they haven't.
+Do you read them?"
+
+"Naw!" He gave me his back, bending suddenly over some real or pretended
+work. "I read some--first day. Since dat time I give 'em to old woman--
+wash hand--go to work ag'in--naw use."
+
+"Ah! no use?" piped up the soft-voiced wife. "I use them to light those
+fire to cook those soup." But I felt the absence of her accustomed laugh.
+
+"Well, it's there whenever you want it," I said to the husband as I was
+leaving.
+
+"What?" The tone of the response was harsh. "What is where?"
+
+"Why, the money. It's in the bank."
+
+"Hah!" he said, with a contemptuous smile and finished with his thumb.
+That was the first time I ever saw a thumb swear. But in a moment his
+kindly gravity was on him again and he said, "Daz all right; I come git
+her some day."
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I did not get back to New Orleans till late in the fall. In the office
+they told me that Manouvrier had been in twice to see if I had returned,
+and they had promised to send him word of my arrival. But I said no, and
+went to see him.
+
+I found new lines of care on his brow, but the old kindness was still in
+his eye. We exchanged a few words of greeting and inquiry, and then there
+came a pause, which I broke.
+
+"Well, stuffing birds better than ever, I suppose."
+
+"Naw," he looked around upon his work, "I dawn't think. I dunno if I stoff
+him quite so good like biffo'." Another pause. Then, "I think I mek out
+what I do wid doze money now."
+
+"Indeed," said I, and noticed that his face was averted from his wife.
+
+She lifted her eyes to his broad back with a quizzical smile, glanced at
+me knowingly, and dropped them again upon her sewing, sighed:
+
+"Ah-bah!" Then she suddenly glanced at me with a pretty laugh and added,
+"Since all that time he dunno what he goin' to make with it. If he trade
+with it I thing he don't stoff bird no mo', and I thing he lose it
+bis-ide--ha, ha, ha!--and if he keep it all time lock in doze bank
+I thing, he jiz well not have it." She laughed again.
+
+But he quite ignored her and resumed, as if out of a revery, "Yass, at de
+las' I mek dat out." And the wife interrupted him in a tone that was like
+the content of a singing hen.
+
+"I think it don't worth while to leave it to our chillun, en't it?"
+
+"Ah!" said the husband, entirely to me, "daz de troub'! You see?--we
+dawn't got some ba-bee'! Dat neveh arrive to her. God know' dass not de
+fault of us."
+
+"Yass," put in his partner, smiling to her needle, "the good God know'
+that verrie well." And the pair exchanged a look of dove-like fondness.
+
+"Yass," Manouvrier mused aloud once more, "I think I build my ole woman
+one fine house."
+
+"Ah! I don't want!"
+
+"But yass! Foudre tonnerre! how I goin' spend her else? w'iskee? hosses?
+women? what da dev'l! Naw, I build a fine 'ouse. You see! she want dat
+house bad enough when she see her. Yass; fifty t'ousan' dollah faw house
+and twenty-five t'ousan'"--he whisked his thumb at me and I said for him,
+
+"Yes, twenty-five thousand at interest to keep up the establishment."
+
+"Yass. Den if Pastropbon go first to dat boneyard--" And out went his
+thumb again, while his hairy lip curled at the grim prospect of beating
+Fate the second time, and as badly, in the cemetery, as the first time, in
+the lottery.
+
+He built the house--farther down town and much farther from the river.
+Both husband and wife found a daily delight in watching its slow rise and
+progress. In the room behind the shop he still plied his art and she her
+needle as they had done all their married life, with never an inroad upon
+their accustomed hours except the calls of the shop itself; but on every
+golden morning of that luxurious summer-land, for a little while before
+the carpenters and plasterers arrived and dragged off their coats, the
+pair spent a few moments wandering through and about the building
+together, she with her hen-like crooning, he with his unsmiling face.
+
+Yet they never showed the faintest desire to see the end. The contractor
+dawdled by the month. I never saw such dillydallying. They only abetted
+it, and when once he brought an absurd and unasked-for excuse to the
+taxidermist's shop, its proprietor said--first shutting the door between
+them and the wife in the inner room:
+
+"Tek yo' time. Mo' sloweh she grow, mo' longeh she stan'."
+
+I doubt that either Manouvrier or his wife hinted to the other the true
+reason for their apathy. But I guessed it, only too easily, and felt its
+pang. It was that with the occupancy and care of the house must begin the
+wife's absence from her old seat beside her husband at his work.
+
+Another thing troubled me. I did persuade him to put fittings into his
+cistern which fire-engines could use in case of emergency, but he would
+not insure the building.
+
+"Naw! Luck bring me dat--I let luck take care of her."
+
+"Ah! yass," chimed the wife, "yet still I think mebbee the good God tell
+luck where to bring her. I'm shoe he got fing-er in that pie."
+
+"Ah-ha? Daz all right! If God want to burn his own fing-er----"
+
+At length the house was finished and was beautiful within and without. It
+was of two and a half stories, broad and with many rooms. Two spacious
+halls crossed each other, and there were wide verandas front and back, and
+a finished and latticed basement. The basement and the entire grounds,
+except a few bright flower-borders, were flagged, as was also the
+sidewalk, with the manufactured stone which in that nearly frostless
+climate makes such a perfect and beautiful pavement, and on this fair
+surface fell the large shadows of laburnum, myrtle, orange, oleander,
+sweet-olive, mespelus, and banana, which the taxidermist had not spared
+expense to transplant here in the leafy prime of their full growth.
+
+Then almost as slowly the dwelling was furnished. In this the brother-in-
+law's widow co-operated, and when it was completed Manouvrier suggested
+her living in it a few days so that his wife might herself move in as
+leisurely as she chose. And six months later, there, in the old back room
+in St. Peter Street, the wife still sat sewing and now and then saying
+small, wise, dispassionate things to temper the warmth of her partner's
+more artistic emotions. Every fair day, about the hour of sunset, they
+went to see the new house. It was plain they loved it; loved it only less
+than their old life; but only the brother-in-law's widow lived in it.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+
+
+I happened about this time to be acting as president of an insurance
+company on Canal Street. Summer was coming in again. One hot sunny day,
+when the wind was high and gusty, the secretary was remarking to me what
+sad ruin it might work if fire should start among the frame tenement
+cottages which made up so many neighborhoods that were destitute of
+watermains, when right at our ear the gong sounded for just such a region
+and presently engine after engine came thundering and smoking by our open
+windows. Fire had broken out in the street where Manouvrier's new house
+stood, four squares from that house, but straight to windward of it.
+
+We knew only too well, without being there to witness, that our firemen
+would find nothing with which to fight the flames except a few shallow
+wells of surface water and the wooden rain-water cisterns above ground,
+and that both these sources were almost worthless owing to a drouth. A man
+came in and sat telling me of his new device for lessening the risks of
+fire.
+
+"Where?" asked I, quickly.
+
+"Why, as I was saying, on steamboats loaded with cotton."
+
+"Oh, yes," said I, "I understand." But I did not. For the life of me I
+couldn't make sense of what he said. I kept my eyes laboriously in his
+face, but all I could see was a vision of burning cottages; hook-and-
+ladder-men pulling down sheds and fences; ruined cisterns letting just
+enough water into door-yards and street-gutters to make sloppy walking;
+fire-engines standing idle and dropping cinders into their own puddles in
+a kind of shame for their little worth; here and there one furiously
+sucking at an exhausted well while its firemen stood with scorching faces
+holding the nozzles almost in the flames and cursing the stream of
+dribbling mud that fell short of their gallant endeavor. I seemed to see
+streets populous with the sensation-seeking crowd; sidewalks and alleys
+filled with bedding, chairs, bureaus, baskets of crockery and calico
+clothing with lamps spilling into them, cheap looking-glasses unexpectedly
+answering your eye with the boldness of an outcast girl, broken tables,
+pictures of the Virgin, overturned stoves, and all the dear mantlepiece
+trash which but an hour before had been the pride of the toiling
+housewife, and the adornment of the laborer's home.
+
+"Where can I see this apparatus?" I asked my patient interviewer.
+
+"Well--ahem! it isn't what you'd call an apparatus, exactly. I have
+here----"
+
+"Yes; never mind that just now; I'm satisfied you've got a good thing and
+--I'll tell you! Can you come in to-morrow at this hour? Good! I wish you
+would! Well, good-day."
+
+The secretary was waiting to speak to me. The fire, he said, had entirely
+burned up one square and was half through a second. "By the way, isn't
+that the street where old P.T.B.----"
+
+"Yes," I replied, taking my hat; "if anyone wants to see me, you'd better
+tell him to call to-morrow."
+
+I found the shop in St. Peter's Street shut, and went on to the new
+residence. As I came near it, its beauty seemed to me to have consciously
+increased under the threatenings of destruction.
+
+In the front gate stood the brother-in-law's widow, full of gestures and
+distressful smiles as she leaned out with nervously folded arms and looked
+up and down the street. "Manouvrier? he is ad the fire since a whole hour.
+He will break his heart if dat fire ketch to dat 'ouse here. He cannot
+know 'ow 'tis in danger! Ah! sen' him word? I sen' him fo' five time'--he
+sen' back I stay righd there an' not touch nut'n'! Ah! my God! I fine dat
+varrie te-de-ous, me, yass!"
+
+"Is his wife with him?"
+
+"Assuredly! You see, dey git 'fraid 'bout dat 'ouse of de Sister', you
+know?"
+
+"No, where is it?"
+
+"No? You dunno dat lill' 'ouse where de Sister' keep dose orphelin'
+ba-bee'?-juz big-inning sinse 'bout two week' ago?-round de corner--one
+square mo' down town--'alf square mo' nearer de swamp? Well, I thing 'f
+you pass yondeh you fine Pastropbon."
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Through smoke, under falling cinders, and by distracted and fleeing
+households I went. The moment I turned the second corner I espied the
+house. It was already half a square from the oncoming fire, but on the
+northern side of the street, just out of its probable track and not in
+great danger except from sparks. But it was old and roofed with shingles;
+a decrepit Creole cottage sitting under dense cedars in a tangle of rose
+and honeysuckle vines, and strangely beautified by a flood of smoke-dimmed
+yellow sunlight.
+
+As I hurried forward, several men and boys came from the opposite
+direction at a run and an engine followed them, jouncing and tilting
+across the sidewalk opposite the little asylum, into a yard, to draw from
+a fresh well. Their leader was a sight that drew all eyes. He was coatless
+and hatless; his thin cotton shirt, with its sleeves rolled up to the
+elbows, was torn almost off his shaggy breast, his trousers were drenched
+with water and a rude bandage round his head was soaked with blood. He
+carried an axe. The throng shut him from my sight, but I ran to the spot
+and saw him again standing before the engine horses with his back close to
+their heads. A strong, high board fence shut them off from the well and
+against it stood the owner of the property, pale as death, guarding the
+precious water with a shotgun at full cock. I heard him say:
+
+"The first fellow that touches this fence----"
+
+But he did not finish. Quicker than his gun could flash and bang
+harmlessly in the air the man before him had dropped the axe and leaped
+upon him with the roar of a lion. The empty gun flew one way and its owner
+another and almost before either struck the ground the axe was swinging
+and crashing into the fence.
+
+As presently the engine rolled through the gap and shouting men backed her
+to the edge of the well, the big axeman paused to wipe the streaming sweat
+from his begrimed face with his arm. I clutched him.
+
+"Manouvrier!"
+
+A smile of recognition shone for an instant and vanished as I added,
+
+"Come to your own house! Come, you can't save it here."
+
+He turned a quick, wild look at the fire, seized me by the arm and with a
+gaze of deepest gratitude, asked:
+
+"You tryin' save her?"
+
+"I'll do anything I can."
+
+"Oh, dass right!" His face was full of mingled joy and pain. "You go
+yondeh--mek yo' possible!" We were hurrying to the street--"Oh, yass, faw
+God's sake go, mek yo' possible!"
+
+"But, Manouvrier, you must come too! Where's your wife? The chief danger
+to your house isn't here, it's where the fire's between it and the wind!"
+
+His answer was a look of anguish. "Good God! my fran'. We come yondeh so
+quick we can! But--foudre tonnerre!--look that house here fill' with
+ba-bee'! What we goin' do? Those Sister' can't climb on roof with bocket'
+wateh. You see I got half-dozen boy' up yondeh; if I go 'way they dis-cend
+and run off at the fire, spark' fall on roof an'--" his thumb flew out.
+
+"Sparks! Heavens! Manouvrier, your house is in the path of the _flames!_"
+
+The man flew at me and hung over me, his strong locks shaking, his great
+black fist uplifted and the only tears in his eyes I ever saw there.
+"Damnession! She's not mine! I trade her to God faw these one! Go! tell
+him she's his, he kin burn her if he feel like'!" He gave a half laugh,
+fresh witness of his distress, and went into the gate of the asylum.
+
+I smiled--what could I do?--and was turning away, when I saw the chief of
+the fire department. It took but one moment to tell him my want, and in
+another he had put the cottage roof under the charge of four of his men
+with instructions not to leave it till the danger was past or the house
+burning. The engine near us had drawn the well dry and was coming away. He
+met it, pointed to where, beneath swirling billows of black smoke, the
+pretty gable of the taxidermist's house shone like a white sail against a
+thundercloud, gave orders and disappeared.
+
+The street was filling with people. A row of cottages across the way was
+being emptied. The crackling flames were but half a square from
+Manouvrier's house. I called him once more to come. He waved his hand
+kindly to imply that he knew what I had done. He and his wife were in the
+Sisters' front garden walk conversing eagerly with the Mother Superior.
+They neared the gate. Suddenly the Mother Superior went back, the
+lay-sister guarding the gate let the pair out and the three of us
+hurried off together.
+
+We found ourselves now in the uproar and vortex of the struggle. Only at
+intervals could we take our attention from the turmoil that impeded or
+threatened us, to glance forward at the white gable or back--as Manouvrier
+persisted in doing--to the Sisters' cottage. Once I looked behind and
+noticed, what I was loath to tell, that the firemen on its roof had grown
+busy; but as I was about to risk the truth, the husband and wife, glancing
+at their own roof, in one breath groaned aloud. Its gleaming gable had
+begun to smoke.
+
+"Ah! that good God have pity on uz!" cried the wife, in tears, but as she
+started to run forward I caught her arm and bade her look again. A strong,
+white stream of water was falling on the smoking spot and it smoked no
+more.
+
+The next minute, with scores of others, choking and blinded with the
+smoke, we were flying from the fire. The wind had turned.
+
+"It is only a gust," I cried, "it will swing round again. We must turn the
+next corner and reach the house from the far side." I glanced back to see
+why my companions lagged and lo! they had vanished.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+I reached the house just in time to save its front grounds from the
+invasion of the rabble. The wind had not turned back again. The brother-in
+law's widow was offering prayers of thanksgiving. The cisterns were empty
+and the garden stood glistening in the afternoon sun like a May queen
+drenched in tears; but the lovely spot was saved.
+
+I left its custodian at an upper window, looking out upon the fire, and
+started once more to find my friends. Half-way round to the Sisters'
+cottage I met them. With many others I stepped aside to make a clear way
+for the procession they headed. The sweet, clean wife bore in her arms an
+infant; the tattered, sooty, bloody-headed husband bore two; and after
+them, by pairs and hand in hand, with one gray sister in the rear, came a
+score or more of pink-frocked, motherless little girls. An amused rabble
+of children and lads hovered about the diminutive column, with leers and
+jests and happy antics, and the wife smiled foolishly and burned red with
+her embarrassment; but in the taxidermist's face shone an exaltation of
+soul greater than any I had ever seen. I felt too petty for such a moment
+and hoped he would go by without seeing me; but he smiled an altogether
+new smile and said,
+
+"My fran', God A'mighty, he know a good bargain well as anybody!"
+
+I ran ahead with no more shame of the crowd than Zaccheus of old. I threw
+open the gate, bounded up the steps and spread wide the door. In the hall,
+the widow, knowing naught of this, met me with wet eyes crying,
+
+"Ah! ah! de 'ouse of de orphelin' is juz blaze' up h-all over h-at once!"
+and hushed in amazement as the procession entered the gate.
+
+P.T.B. Manouvrier, Taxidermist!
+
+When the fire was out the owner of that sign went back to his shop and to
+his work, and his wife sat by him sewing as before. But the orphans stayed
+in their new and better home. Two or three years ago the Sisters--the
+brother-in-law's widow is one of them--built a large addition behind; but
+the house itself stands in the beauty in which it stood on that day of
+destruction, and my friend always leaves his work on balmy afternoons in
+time to go with his wife and see that pink procession, four times as long
+now as it was that day, march out the gate and down the street for its
+daily walk.
+
+"Ah! Pastropbon, we got ba-bee' enough presently, en't it?"
+
+"Ole woman, nobody else ever strock dat lott'ree for such a prize like
+dat."
+
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+
+The Entomologist
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+An odd feature of New Orleans is the way homes of all ranks, in so many
+sections of it, are mingled. The easy, bright democracy of the thing is
+what one might fancy of ancient Greeks; only, here there is a general
+wooden frailty.
+
+A notable phase of this characteristic is the multitude of small, frame,
+ground-story double cottages fronting endwise to the street, on lots that
+give either side barely space enough for one row of twelve-foot rooms with
+windows on a three-foot alley leading to the narrow backyard.
+
+Thus they lie, deployed in pairs or half-dozens, by hundreds, in the
+variable intervals that occur between houses and gardens of dignity and
+elegance; hot as ovens, taking their perpetual bath of the great cleanser,
+sunshine. Sometimes they open directly upon the banquette (sidewalk), but
+often behind as much as a fathom of front-yard, as gay with flowers as a
+girl's hat, and as fragrant of sweet-olive, citronelle, and heliotrope as
+her garments. In the right-hand half of such a one, far down on the Creole
+side of Canal street, and well out toward the swamp, lived our friend the
+entomologist.
+
+Just a glance at it was enough to intoxicate one's fancy. It seemed to
+confess newness of life, joy, passion, temperance, refinement, aspiration,
+modest wisdom, and serene courage. You would say there must live two
+well-mated young lovers--but one can't always tell.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+We first came to know the entomologist through our opposite neighbors, the
+Fontenettes, when we lived in the street that still bears the romantic
+name, Sixth. What a pity nothing rhymes to it. _Their_ ground-story
+cottage was of a much better sort. It lay broadside to the street,
+two-thirds across a lot of forty feet width, in the good old Creole
+fashion, its front garden twelve feet deep, and its street fence, of white
+palings, higher than the passer's head. The parlor and dining-room were on
+the left, and the two main bedrooms on the right, next the garden; Mrs.
+Fontenette's in front, opening into the parlor, Monsieur's behind, letting
+into the dining-room. For there had been a broader garden on the parlor
+and dining-room side, but that had been sold and built on. I fancy that if
+Mrs. Fontenette--who was not a Creole, as her husband was, but had once
+been a Miss Bangs, or something, and still called blackberries
+"blackbries," and made root rhyme with foot--I fancy if she had been
+doomed to our entomologist's sort of a house she would have been too
+broken in spirit to have made anybody's acquaintance.
+
+For our pretty blonde neighbor had ambitions, or _had_ had, as she once
+hinted to me with a dainty sadness. When I somehow let slip to her that I
+had repeated her delicately balanced words to my wife she gave me one
+melting glance of reproach, and thenceforth confided in me no more beyond
+the limits of literary criticism and theology--and botany. I remember we
+were among the few roses of her small flower-beds at the time, and I was
+trying to show her what was blighting them all in the bud. She called them
+"rose-es."
+
+They rarely bloomed for her; she was always for being the rose herself--as
+Monsieur Fontenette once said; but he said it with a glance of fond
+admiration. Her name was Flora, and yet not flowers, but their book-lore,
+best suited her subtle capriciousness. She made such a point of names that
+she could not let us be happy with the homely monosyllable by which we
+were known, until we allowed her to hyphenate us as the Thorndyke-Smiths.
+
+There hung in our hall an entire unmarred beard of the beautiful gray
+Spanish moss, eight feet long. I had got this unusual specimen by
+tiptoeing from the thwarts of a skiff with twelve feet of yellow crevasse-
+waters beneath, the shade of the vast cypress forest above, and the bough
+whence it hung brought within hand's reach for the first time in a
+century. Thus I explained it one day to Mrs. Fontenette, as she touched
+its ends with a delicate finger.
+
+"Tillandsia"--was her one word of response. She loved no other part of
+botany quite so much as its Latin.
+
+"The Baron ought to see that," said Monsieur. He was a man of quiet
+manners, not over-social, who had once enjoyed a handsome business income,
+but had early--about the time of his marriage--been made poor through the
+partial collapse of the house in Havre whose cotton-buyer he had been,
+and, in a scant way, still was. "When a cotton-buyer geds down, he stays,"
+was all the explanation he ever gave us. He had unfretfully let adversity
+cage him for life in the only occupation he knew, while the wife he adored
+kept him pecuniarily bled to death, without sharing his silent resigna--
+There I go again! Somehow I can't talk about her without seeming unjust
+and rude. I felt it just now, even, when I quoted her husband's fond word,
+that she always chose to be the rose herself. Well, she nearly always
+succeeded; she was a rose--with some of the rose's drawbacks.
+
+When we asked who the Baron might be it was she who told us, but in a
+certain disappointed way, as if she would rather have kept him unknown a
+while longer. He was, she said, a profoundly learned man, graduate of one
+of those great universities over in his native Germany, and a naturalist.
+Young? Well, eh--comparatively--yes. At which the silent husband smiled
+his dissent.
+
+The Baron was an entomologist. Both the Fontenettes thought we should be
+fascinated with the beauty of some of his cases of moths and butterflies.
+
+"And coleoptera," said the soft rose-wife. She could ask him to bring them
+to us. Take us to him?--Oh!--eh--her embarrassment made her prettier, as
+she broke it to us gently that the Baroness was a seamstress. She hushed
+at her husband's mention of shirts; but recovered when he harked back to
+the Baron, and beamed her unspoken apologies for the great, brave scholar
+who daily, silently bore up under this awful humiliation.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Toward the close of the next afternoon she brought the entomologist. I can
+see yet the glad flutter she could not hide as they came up our front
+garden walk in an air spiced by the "four-o'clocks," with whose small
+trumpets--red, white, and yellow--our children were filling their laps and
+stringing them on the seed-stalks of the cocoa-grass. He was bent and
+spectacled, of course; _l'entomologie oblige_; but, oh, besides!--
+
+"Comparatively young," Mrs. Fontenette had said, and I naturally used her
+husband, who was thirty-one, for the comparison. Why, this man? It would
+have been a laughable flattery to have guessed his age to be forty-five.
+Yet that was really the fact. Many a man looks younger at sixty--oh, at
+sixty-five! He was dark, bloodless, bowed, thin, weatherbeaten, ill-clad--
+a picture of decent, incurable penury. The best thing about his was his
+head. It was not imposing at all, but it was interesting, albeit very
+meagrely graced with fine brown hair, dry and neglected. I read him
+through without an effort before we had been ten minutes together; a leaf
+still hanging to humanity's tree, but faded and shrivelled around some
+small worm that was feeding on its juices.
+
+And there was no mistaking that worm; it was the avarice of knowledge. He
+had lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delving
+on, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart on
+the locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany, satisfied with them
+for their own sake, without reference to God or man; an infant in
+emotions, who time and again would no doubt have starved outright but for
+his wife, whom there and then I resolved we should know also. I was amused
+to see, by stolen glances, Mrs. Smith study him. She did not know she
+frowned, nor did he; but Mrs. Fontenette knew it every time.
+
+We all had the advantage of him as to common sight. His glasses were
+obviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till he
+clapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for me
+the new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzling
+green, beetle inhabiting the Spanish moss--his own scientific discovery--
+he wrote it so minutely that I had to use a lens to read it.
+
+As we sat close around the library lamp, I noticed how often his poor
+clothing had been mended by a woman's needle. His linen was discouraging,
+his cravat awry and dingy, and his hands--we had better pass his hands;
+yet they were slender and refined.
+
+Also they shook, though not from any habit commonly called vicious. You
+could see that no vice of the body nor any lust of material things had
+ever led him captive. He gave one the tender despair with which we look on
+a blind babe.
+
+When we expressed regret that his wife had not come with him, he only bent
+with a deeper greed into a book I had handed him, and after a moment laid
+it down disappointedly, saying that it was "fool of plundters." Mrs.
+Fontenette asking to be shown one of them, they reopened the book
+together, she all consciousness as she bent against him over the page, he
+oblivious of everything but the phrase they were hunting. He gave his
+forehead a tap of despair as he showed where the book called this same
+Tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a parasite.
+
+"It iss no baraseet," he explained, in a mellow falsetto, "it iss an
+epipheet!"
+
+"An air-plant!" said his fair worshipper, softly drinking in a bosomful of
+gladness as she made the distance between them more discreet.
+
+Distances were all one to him. He seemed like a burnt log, still in shape
+but gone to ashes, except in one warm spot where glowed this self-
+consuming, world-sacrificing adoration of knowledge; knowledge sought, as
+I say, purely for its own sake and narrowed down to names and technical
+descriptions. Men of _perverted_ principles and passions you may find
+anywhere; but I never had seen anyone so totally undeveloped in all the
+emotions, affections, tastes that make life _life_.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+A few afternoons later I went to his house. For pretext I carried a huge
+green worm, but I went mainly to see just how unluckily he was married. He
+was not at home. I found his partner a small, bright, toil-worn, pretty
+woman of hardly twenty-eight or nine, whose two or three children had died
+in infancy, and who had blended wifehood and motherhood together, and was
+taking care of the Baron as a widow would care for a crippled son, and at
+the same time reverencing him as if he were a demigod. Of his utter
+failure to provide their daily living she confessed herself by every
+implication, simply--proud! What else should a demigod's wife expect? At
+the same time, without any direct statement, she made it clear that she
+had no disdain, but only the broadest charity, for men who make a living.
+It was odd how few her smiles were, and droll how much sweetness--what a
+sane winsomeness--she managed to radiate without them. I left her in her
+clean, bright cottage, like a nesting bird in a flowery bush, and entered
+my own home, declaring, with what I was gently told was unnecessary
+enthusiasm, that the Baron's wife was the "unluckily married" one, and the
+best piece of luck her husband had ever had. I had seen women make a
+virtue of necessity, but I had never before seen one make a conviction,
+comfort, and joy of it, and I should try to like the Baron, I said, if
+only for her sake.
+
+Of course I became, in some degree, a source of revenue to him.
+Understand, there was always a genuine exchange of so much for so much; he
+was not a "baraseet"--oh, no!--yet he hung on. We still have, stowed
+somewhere, a large case of butterflies, another of splendid moths, and a
+smaller one of glistening beetles. Nor can I begrudge their cost, of
+whatever sort, even now when my delight in them is no longer a constant
+enthusiasm. The cases of specimens have passed from daily sight, but
+thenceforth, as never before, our garden was furnished with guests--pages,
+ladies, poets, fairies, emperors, goddesses--coming and going on gorgeous
+wings, and none ever a stranger more than once. My non-parasitic friend
+"opened a new world" to me; a world that so flattered one with its grace
+and beauty, its marvellous delicacy and minuteness, its glory of color and
+curiousness of marking, and its exquisite adaptation of form to need and
+function, that in my meaner depths, or say my childish shallows--I
+resented Mrs. Fontenette's making the same avowal for herself--I didn't
+believe her!
+
+I do not say she was consciously shamming; but I could see she drank in
+the Baron's revelations with no more true spiritual exaltation than the
+quivering twilight moths drew from our veranda honeysuckles. Yet it was
+mainly her vanity that feasted, not any lower impulse--of which, you know,
+there are several--and, possibly, all her vanity craved at first was the
+tinsel distinction of unusual knowledge.
+
+One night she got into my dreams. I seemed to be explaining to Monsieur
+Fontenette apologetically that this newly opened world was not at all
+separate from my old one, but shone everywhere in it, like our winged
+guests in our garden, and followed and surrounded me far beyond the
+Baron's company, terminology, and magnifying-glass, lightening the burdens
+and stress of the very counting-room and exchange. Whereat he seemed to
+flare up!
+
+"Ah!--you--I believe yes! But she?" he waved his hand in fierce unbelief.
+
+I awoke concerned, and got myself to sleep again only by remembering the
+utter absence of vanity in the Baron himself. I lay smiling in the dark to
+think how much less all our verbal caressings were worth to him than the
+drone of the most familiar beetle, and how his life-long delving in books
+and nature had opened up this fairy world to him only at the cost of
+shutting up all others. If education means calling forth and perfecting
+our powers and affections, he was ten times more uneducated than his wife,
+even as we knew her then. He appeared to care no more for human interests,
+far or near, in large or small, than a crab cares for the stars. I fell
+asleep chuckling in remembrance of an occasion when Mrs. Fontenette,
+taking her cue from me, spoke to him of his plant-and-insect lore as one
+of the many worlds there are within _the_ world, no more displacing it
+than light displaces air, or than fragrance displaces form or sound. He
+made her say it all over again, and then asked: "Vhere vas dat?"
+
+His whole world was not really as wide as Gregory's island was to its
+gentle hermit. No butterfly raptures for him; he devoured the one kind of
+facts he cared for, as a caterpillar devours leaves.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+How Mrs. Fontenette got Mrs. "Thorndyke-Smith" and me entangled with some
+six or eight others in her project for a botanizing and butterfly-chasing
+picnic I do not know; but she did. On the evening before the appointed day
+I perfidiously crawfished out of it, and our house furnished only one
+delegate, whom I urged to go rather than break up the party--I never break
+up a party if I can avoid it. "But as for me going," I said, "my business
+simply won't let me!" At which our pretty neighbor expressed her regrets
+with a ready resignation that broke into open sunshine as she lamented the
+same inability in her husband. To my suggestion that the Baroness be
+invited, Mrs. Fontenette smiled a sweet amusement that was perfect in its
+way, and said she hoped the weather would be propitious; people were so
+timid about rain.
+
+It was. When I came home, tardily, that afternoon, the picnickers had not
+returned, though the oleanders and crape-myrtles on the grounds next ours
+cast shadows three times their length across our lawn. In an aimless way I
+roamed from the house down into our small rear garden, thinking oftenest,
+of course, of the absentees, and admiring the refined good sense with
+which Monsieur Fontenette seemed to have decided to let this unperilous
+attack of silliness run itself out in the woman he loved with so much
+tenderness and with so much passion.
+
+"How much distress he is saving himself and all of us," I caught myself
+murmuring, audibly, out among my fig-trees.
+
+Finding two or three figs fully ripe, I strolled over the way to see him
+among his trees and maybe find chance for a little neighborly boasting. As
+our custom with each other was, I ignored the bell on his gate, drew the
+bolt, and, passing in among Mrs. Fontenette's invalid roses, must have
+moved, without intention, quite noiselessly from one to another, until I
+came around behind the house, where a strong old cloth-of-gold rose-vine
+half covered the latticed side of the cistern shed. In the doorway I
+stopped in silent amaze. A small looking-glass hanging against the wooden
+cistern showed me--although I was in much the stronger light--Monsieur
+Fontenette. He was just straightening up from an oil-stone he had been
+using, and the reflection of his face fell full on the glass. Once before,
+but once only, had I seen such agony of countenance--such fierce and awful
+looking in and out at the same time; that was on a man who was still
+trying to get the best of a fight in which he knew he was mortally shot.
+Fontenette did not see me. I suppose the rose-vine screened me, and his
+glance did not rise quite to the mirror, but followed the soft thumbings
+with which he tried the two edges and point of as murderous a knife as
+ever I saw.
+
+
+As softly as a shadow I drew out of sight, turned away, and went almost
+back to the gate before I let my footfall be heard, and called, "M'sieu'
+Fontenette!"
+
+He hallooed from the shed in a playful sham of being a mile or so away,
+and emerged from the lattice and vine with that accustomed light of
+equanimity on his features which made him always so thoroughly good-
+looking. He came hitching his waistband with both hands in that innocent
+Creole way that belongs to the latitude, and how I knew I cannot tell you,
+but I did know--I didn't merely feel or think, but I knew!--_positively_--
+that he had that hideous thing on his person.
+
+Against what contingency I could only ask myself and wonder, but I
+instantly decided to get him away from home and keep him away until the
+picnickers had got back and scattered. So I proposed a walk, a diversion
+we had often enjoyed together.
+
+"Yes?" he said, "to pazz the time whilse they don't arrive? With the
+greates' of pleasu'e!"
+
+I dare say we were both more preoccupied than we thought we were, for
+outside the gate we fairly ran into a lady--yes; a seamstress--the wife of
+the entomologist. My stars! She had seemed winning enough before, but now
+--what a rise in values! As we conversed it was all I could do to keep my
+eyes from saying: "A man with you for a wife belongs at home whenever he
+can be there!" But whether they spoke it or not, in some way, without word
+or glance, by simple radiations from the whole sweet woman, she revealed
+that to make that fact plain to him, to _her_, and to all of us, was what
+this new emphasis of charm was for.
+
+She had come, she said--and scarcely on the lips of the loveliest Creole
+did I ever hear a more bewitching broken-English--she had come according
+to a half-promise made to Mrs. Fontenette to show her--"I tidn't etsectly
+promised, I chust said I vill some time come----"
+
+"And Mrs. Fontenette didn't object," I playfully interrupted--
+
+"No," said the unruffled speaker, "I chust said I vill come; yes; to show
+her a new vay to remoof, remoof? is sat English? So? A new vay to remoof
+old stains."
+
+"A new way--" responded Fontenette, with an air of gravest interest in all
+matters of laundry.
+
+"Yes," she repeated, as simply as a babe, "a new vay; and I sought I come
+now so to go home viss mine hussbandt." There, at last, she smiled, and to
+make the caressing pride of her closing tone still prettier, lifted her
+figured muslin out sidewise between thumb and forefinger of each hand with
+even more archaic grace than playfulness.
+
+As the three of us crossed over and took seats on my veranda, we were
+joined by the neighbor whose garden-trees I have mentioned; the man of
+whom I have told you, how he failed to strike a bargain with old
+Manouvrier, the taxidermist. He was a Missourian, in the produce business,
+a thoroughly good fellow, but--well--oh--!
+
+He came perspiring, flourishing a palm-leaf fan and a large handkerchief,
+to say I might keep all the shade his tall house and trees dropped on my
+side of the fence. And presently what does the simple fellow do but begin
+to chaff the three of us on the absence of our three partners!
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I held my breath in dismay! The more I strove to change the subject the
+more our fat wag, fancying he was teasing me to the delight of the others,
+harped on the one string, until with pure apprehension of what Fontenette
+might presently do or say, my blood ran hot and cold. But Monsieur showed
+neither amusement nor annoyance, only a perfectly gracious endurance. Yet
+how could I know what instant his forbearance might give way, or what
+serpent's eggs the joker's inanities might in the next day or hour turn
+out to be, laid in the hot heart of the Creole gentleman? Then it was that
+this slender little German seamstress-wife shone forth like the first star
+of the breathless twilight.
+
+Seamstress? no; she had left the seamstress totally behind her. You might
+have thought the finest tactics of the drawing-room--not of to-day, but of
+the times when gentlemen wore swords and dirks--had been at her finger-ends
+all her life. She took our good neighbor's giddy pleasantries as deep
+truths lightly put, and answered them in such graceful, mild earnest, and
+with such a modest, yet fetching, quaintness, that we were all preached to
+more effectively than we could have been by seven priests from one pulpit.
+Or, at any rate, that was my feeling; every note she uttered was
+melodiously kind, but every sentence was an arrow sent home.
+
+"You make me," she said, "you make me sink of se aunt of my musser, vhat
+she said to my musser vhen my musser iss getting married. 'Senda,' she
+said, 'vonce in a vhile'--is sat right, 'vonce in a vhile?'--so?--'vonce
+in a vhile your Rudolph going to see a voman he better had married san
+you. Sen he going to fall a little vay--maybe a good vay--in love viss
+her; and sen if Rudolph iss a scoundtrel, or if you iss a fool, sare be
+trouble. But if Rudolph don't be a scoundtrel and you don't be a fool he
+vill pretty soon straight' up himself and say, One man can't ever'sing
+have, and mine Senda she is enough!'... Sat vas my Aunt Senda."
+
+"Your mother was named for her?"
+
+"Yes, my musser, and me; I am name' Senda, se same. She vas se Countess
+von (Something)--sat aunt of my musser. She vas a fine voman."
+
+"Still," said our joker, "you know she was only about half right in that
+advice."
+
+"No," she replied, putting on a drowsy tone, "I don't know; and I sink you
+don't know eeser."
+
+"I reckon I do," he insisted. "We're all made of inflammable stuff. Any
+_man_ knows that. We couldn't, any of us, pull through life decently if we
+didn't let each other be each other's keeper; could we, Fontenette?"
+
+No sound from Fontenette. "Hmm!" hummed the little woman, in such soft
+derision that only he and I heard it; and after a moment she said, "Yes,
+it is so. But, you know who is se only good keeper? Sat is love."
+
+"And jealousy," suggested Bulk; "the blindfold boy and the green-eyed
+monster."
+
+"Se creen-eyedt--no, I sink not. Chalousie have destroyed--is sat
+correct?--yes? Chalousie have destroyed a sowsand-sowsand times so much
+happiness as it ever saved--ah! see se lightening! I sink sat is se
+displeasu'e of heaven to my so bad English. Ah? see it again? vell, I vill
+stop."
+
+"You ought to be in a better world than this," laughed our fat neighbor.
+
+"No," she chanted, "I rasser sis one. I sink mine hussbandt never be
+satisfied viss a vorld not full of vorms and bugs; and I am glad to stay
+alvays viss mine hussbandt."
+
+"And I reckon he thinks you're big enough world for him, just yourself,
+doesn't he?"
+
+
+"No." She seemed to speak more than half to herself. "A man--see se
+lightening!--a man who can be satisfied viss a vorld no bigger as I can by
+mineself gif him--mine Kott! I vould not haf such a man! See se
+lightening! but I sink sare vill be no storm; sare is no sunder viss se
+ligh'--Ah! sare are se trhuants!" We rose to meet them. First came the
+children, vaunting their fatigue, then a black maid or two, with twice
+their share of baskets, and then our three spouses; the Baron came last
+and was mute. The two ladies called cheery, weary good-byes to another
+contingent, that passed on by the gate, and hail and farewell to our fat
+neighbor as he went home. Then they yielded their small burdens to us,
+climbed the veranda stairs and entered the house.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+No battle, it is said, is ever fought, and I dare say no game--worth
+counting--is ever played, exactly as previously planned. One of our
+company had planned, very secretly, as he thought, a battle; another,
+almost openly, was already waging hers; while a third was playing a game--
+though probably, I admit, fighting, inwardly, her poor weak battle also;
+and none of the three offered an exception to this rule. The first clear
+proof of it--which it still gives me a low sort of pleasure to recall--was
+my prompt discovery, as we gathered around the tea-board, to eat the
+picnic's remains, that our Flora was out of humor with the Baron. It was
+plain that the whole day's flood of small experiences had been to her
+pretty vanity a Tantalus's cup. She was quick to tell, with an irritation,
+which she genuinely tried to conceal, and with scarcely an ounce of words
+to a ton of dead-sweet insinuation, what a social failure he had chosen to
+be. Evidently he had spent every golden hour of sweet spiritual
+opportunity--I speak from her point of view, or, at least, my notion of
+it--not in catching and communicating the charm of any scene or incident,
+nor in thrilling comparisons of sentiment with anyone, nor in any
+impartation of inspiring knowledge, nor in any mirthful exchange of
+compliments or gay glances over the salad and sandwiches; but in
+constantly poking and plodding through thicket and mire and solitarily
+peering and prying on the under sides of leaves and stems and up and down
+and all around the bark of every rough-trunked tree.
+
+She made the picture amusing, none the less, and to no one more so than to
+the Baron's wife, whose presence among us at the board was as fragrant, so
+to speak, as that of a violet among its leaves and sisters. "Ah! Gustaf,"
+she said, with a cadenced gravity more taking than mirth, "sat iss a
+treat-ment nobody got a right to but me. But tell me, tell se company,
+vhat new sings have you found? I know you have not hunt' all se day and
+nussing new found."
+
+But the Baron had found nothing new. He told us so with his mouth dripping
+and his nose in the trough--his plate I should say. You could hear him
+chew across the room. Suddenly, however, he ceased eating and began to
+pour forth an account of his day's observation; in response to which M.
+Fontenette, to my amused mystification, led us all in the interest with
+which we listened. The Baron forgot his food, and when reminded of it,
+pushed it away with a grunt and talked on and on, while we almost forgot
+our own.
+
+As we rose to return to the veranda, the Creole still offered him an
+undivided attention, which the Baron rewarded with his continued
+discourse. As I gave Fontenette a light for his cigarette I held his eye
+for a moment with a brightness of face into which I put as significant
+approval as I dared; for I fancied the same unuttered word was brooding in
+both our hearts: "A new vay to remoof old stains."
+
+Then he turned and gave all his attention once more to the entomologist,
+as they walked out upon the gallery together behind their wives. And the
+German woman courted the pretty New Englander as sweetly as the Creole
+courted her husband, and with twice the energy. She was a bubbling spring
+of information in the Baron's science; she was a well of sweet philosophy
+on life and conduct, and at every turn of their conversation, always
+letting Mrs. Fontenette turn it, she showed her own to be the better mind
+and the better training.
+
+When Mrs. Fontenette, before any one else, rose to go--maybe my dislike of
+her only made it seem so--but I believed she did it out of pure bafflement
+and chagrin.
+
+Not so believed her husband. He responded gratefully; yet lingered, still
+listening to the entomologist, until she fondlingly chid him for
+forgetting that while he had been all day in his swivel-chair, she had
+passed the hours in unusual fatigues!
+
+She declined his arm in our garden walk, and positively forbade me to cut
+a rose for her--but with a grace almost maidenly. As I let them out, the
+heat-lightning gleamed again low in the west. A playfulness came into M.
+Fontenette's face and he murmured to me, "See se lightening."
+
+"Yes," I replied, pressing his hand, "but I sink sare vill be no storm if
+sare iss no sunder."
+
+Mrs. Fontenette gave a faint gasp of impatience and left us at a run,
+tripping fairily across the rough street at the only point visible to
+those on the veranda. Fontenette scowled unaware as he started to follow,
+and the next moment a short "aha!" escaped him. For, at her gate, to my
+unholy joy, she stumbled just enough to make the whole performance
+unspeakably ridiculous, and flirted into her cottage----
+
+"In tears!" I offered to bet myself as I turned to rejoin my companions on
+the veranda, and wished with all my soul the goggled Baron could have seen
+it.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+But the best of eyes would not have counted this time, for he was not
+there. He had accepted the offer of a room, where he was giving the day's
+specimens certain treatments which he believed, or pretended, could not
+wait until he should reach his far downtown cottage. His hostess and his
+wife had gone with him, but now some light discussion of house adornment
+was drawing them to the parlor. As this room was being lighted I saw our
+guest, evidently through force of an early habit, turn a critical glance
+to the music on the piano, and as quickly withdraw it. Both of us motioned
+her solicitously to the music-stool.
+
+"No, I do not play."
+
+"Then you sing."
+
+"No, not now, any more yet." But when she had let us tease her a wee bit
+just for one little German song, she went to the instrument, talking
+slowly as she went, and closing the door in the entomologist's direction
+as she talked.
+
+"Siss a great vhile I haf not done siss," she concluded, as her fingers
+began to drift over the keys, and then she sang, very gently, even
+guardedly, but oh, so sweetly!
+
+We were amazed. Here, without the slightest splendor of achievement or
+adventure, seemed to be the most incredible piece of real life we had ever
+seen. Why, I asked myself, was this woman so short even of German friends
+as to be condemned to a seamstress's penury? And my best guess was to lay
+it to the zeal of her old-fashioned--and yet not merely old-fashioned-
+wifehood, which could accept no friendship that did not unqualifiedly
+accept him; and he?--Goodness!
+
+When she ceased neither listener spoke; the tears were in our throats. She
+bent her head slightly over the keys, and said, "I like to sing you
+anusser." We accepted eagerly, and she sang again. There was nothing of
+personal application in either song, yet now, near the end, where there
+was a purposed silence in the melody, the silence hung on and on until it
+was clear she was struggling with herself; but again the strain arose
+without a tremor, and so she finished. "Oh, no, no," she replied, to our
+solicitation, with the grateful emphasis of one who declines a third
+glass, "se sooneh I stop, se betteh for ever'body," meaning specially
+herself, I fancy, speaking, as she rose, in a tone of such happy decision,
+and yet so melodiously, that two or three strings in the piano replied.
+
+Her hostess took her hands and said there was one thing she could and
+must do; she and her husband must spend the night with us. There was a
+bed-chamber connected with the room where the Baron was still at work, and,
+really--this and that, and that and this--until in the heat of argument
+they called each other "My dear," and presently the ayes had it. The last
+word I heard from our fair guest was to her hostess at the door of her
+chamber, the farthest down the hall. It was as to shutting or not shutting
+the windows. "No," she said, "I sink sare vill be no storm, because sare
+is yet no sunder vis se lightening." And so it turned out. But at the same
+time----
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+My room adjoined the Baron's in frontas his wife's did farther back. A
+door of his and window of mine stood wide open on the one balcony, from
+which a flight of narrow steps led down into the side garden. Thus, for
+some time after I was in bed I heard him stirring; but by and by, with no
+sound to betoken it except the shutting of this door, it was plain he had
+lain down.
+
+I awoke with a sense of having been some hours asleep, and in fact the
+full moon, shining gloriously, had passed the meridian. The balcony was
+lighted up by it like noon, and on it stood the entomologist, entirely
+dressed. The door was shut behind him. He was looking in at my window, but
+he did not know the room was mine, and with eyes twice as good as he had
+he could not have seen through my mosquito-bar. I wondered, but lay still
+till he had started softly down the steps. Then I sprang out of bed on the
+dark side, and dressed faster than a fireman.
+
+When half-clad I went and looked out a parlor window. He was trying the
+gate, which was locked. But he knew where the key always hung, behind the
+post, and turned to get it. I went back and finished dressing, stole down
+the inner, basement stairs and out into the deep shadows of the garden,
+and presently saw my guest passing in through the Fontenettes' gate, whose
+bolt he had drawn from the outside. As angry now as I had been amazed I
+hurried after.
+
+To avoid the moonlight I followed the shadows of the sidewalk-trees down
+to the next corner, to cross there and come back under a like cover on the
+other side. But squarely on the crossing I was met and stopped by a
+belated drunkard, who had a proposition to make to me which he thought no
+true gentleman, such as he was, for instance, could decline. I was alone,
+he asked me to notice; and he was alone; but if he should go with me,
+which he would be glad to do, why, then, you see, we should be together.
+He stuck like a bur, and it was minutes before I got him well started off
+in his own right direction. I slipped to the Fontenettes' gate, as near as
+was best, and instantly saw, between one of its posts and a very black
+myrtle-orange, Fontenette himself, standing as still as the trees. I was
+not in so deep a shade as he, but I might have stepped right out into the
+moonlight without his seeing me, so intensely was he watching his wife's
+front door. For there stood the entomologist. He had evidently been
+knocking, and was about to knock again when there came some response from
+within, to which he replied, in a suppressed yet eager and agitated voice,
+"Mine Psyche! Oh, mine Psyche! She is come to me undt she is bringing me
+already more as a hoondredt--vhat?" He had been interrupted from within.
+"Vhat you say?"
+
+Fontenette drew his knife.
+
+I stood ready to spring the instant he should stir to advance. I realized
+almost unbearably my position, stealing thus at such a moment on the heels
+of my neighbor and friend, but this is not a story of feelings, at any
+rate, not of mine.
+
+"Vhat?" said the entomologist. "Go avay? Mien Gott! No, I vill not ko
+avay. Mien gloryform! Gif me first mine gloryform! Dot Psyche hass come
+out fon ter grysalis! she hass drawn me dot room full mit oder Psyches,
+undt you haf mine pottle of gloryform in your pocket yet! Yes, ko kit ut;
+I vait; ach!" Presently he seemed to hear from inside a second approach.
+Then the door opened an inch or so, and with another "Ach!" and never a
+word of thanks, he, snatched the vial and, turning to make off with it,
+came nose to nose with M. Fontenette, who stood in the moonlight gateway
+holding a blazing match to his cigarette.
+
+"Well, sir, good-evening again," said the Creole. I noticed the perfection
+of his dress; evidently he had not as yet loosed as much as a shoestring.
+And then I observed also that the visitor so close before him was without
+his shoes.
+
+"Good-evening--or, good-morning, perchance," said Fontenette. "I suepose
+thaz a great thing to remove those old stain' that chloro_form_, eh?"
+
+"Ach! it iss you? Ach, you must coom--coom undt hellup me! Coom! you shall
+see _someding_."
+
+"A moment," said the Creole. "May I inquire you how is that, that you call
+on us in yo' sock feet?"
+
+"Ach! I am already t'e socks putting on pefore I remember I do not need
+t'em! But coom! coom! see a vonderfool!" He led, and Fontenette, when he
+had blown a cloud of smoke through his nose, followed, saying exclusively
+for his own ear:
+
+"A wonder fool, yes! But a fool is no wonder to me any more; I find myself
+to be that kind."
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+When, hypocritically clad in dressing-gown and slippers, I stopped at my
+guest's inner door and Fontenette opened it just enough to let me enter, I
+saw, indeed, a wonderful sight. The entomologist had lighted up the room,
+and it was filled, filled! with gorgeous moths as large as my hand and all
+of a kind, dancing across one another's airy paths in a bewildering maze
+or alighting and quivering on this thing and that. The mosquito-net,
+draping almost from ceiling to floor, was beflowered with them
+majestically displaying in splendid alternation their upper and under
+colors, or, with wings lifted and vibrant, tipping to one side and another
+as they crept up the white mesh, like painted and gilded sails in a
+fairies' regatta.
+
+And all this life and beauty, this gay glory and tremorous ecstasy and
+effort was here for moth-love of one incarnate fever of frail-winged
+loveliness! Oh! to what unguessed archangelic observation, to what
+infinite seraphic compassion, may not our own swarming race, who dare not
+too much pity ourselves, be but just such dainty ephemera! Splendid in
+purposes, intelligence, and affections as these in colors and grace,
+glorious when on the wing, and marvellous still, riddles of wonder, even
+when crawling and quivering, tipping and swerving from the upright and
+true, like these palpitating flowers of desire, now this way and now that,
+forever drawn and driven by the sweet tyrannies of instinct and impulse.
+
+So rushed the thought in upon me, and if it was not of the divinest or
+manliest inspiration, at least it took some uncharity out of me for the
+moment. As in mechanical silence Fontenette obeyed the busy requests of
+the entomologist, I presently looked more on those two than on the winged
+multitude, and thought on, of the myriad true tales of love-weakness and
+love-wrath for which they and their two pretty mates were just now so
+unlucky as to stand; of the awful naturalness of such things; of the
+butterfly beauty and wonder--nay, rather the divine possibilities of the
+lives such things so naturally speed to wreck; and then of Tom Moore
+almost too playfully singing:
+
+
+     Ah! did we take for Heaven above
+       But half such pains as we
+     Take, day and night, for woman's love,
+       What Angels we should be!
+
+But while I moralized there came a change. Beneath the entomologist's dark
+hand, as it searched and hurried throughout the room, the flutter of wings
+had ceased as under a wind of death.
+
+"You must have a hundred and fifty of them," I said as the last victim
+ceased to flutter.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Their sale is slow, of course, but every time you sell one, you ought to
+get"--I was judging by some prices he had charged me--"you ought to get
+two dollars." And I secretly rejoiced for Senda.
+
+"I not can afford to sell t'em," he replied, with his back to me.
+
+"Why, how so?"
+
+"No, it iss t'is kind vhat I can exshange for five, six, maybe seven
+specimenss fon Ahfrica undt Owstrahlia. No, I vill not sell t'em."
+
+"Oh, I see," said I, in mortal disgust. "Fontenette, I'm going to bed."
+And Fontenette went too.
+
+The next day was cloudless--in two hearts; Senda's, and Fontenette's. As
+to the sky, that is another matter; one of the charms of that warm wet
+land is that, with all its sunshine, it is almost never without clouds.
+And indeed it would be truer to say of my two friends' skies, that they
+had clouds, but the clouds were silvered through with happy reassurances.
+Jealousy, we are told, once set on fire, burns without fuel; but I must
+think that that is oftenest, if not always, the jealousy of a selfish
+love. Or, rather--let me quote Senda, as she spoke the only other time she
+ever touched upon the subject with us. Our fat neighbor had dragged it in
+again as innocently as a young dog brings an old shoe into the parlor,
+and, the Fontenettes being absent, she had the nerve and wisdom not to
+avoid it. Said she:
+
+"Some of us--not all--have great power to love. Some, not all, who have
+sis power--to love--have also se power to trust. Me, I rasser be trustet
+and not loved, san to be loved and not trustet."
+
+"How about a little of each?" asked our neighbor.
+
+"Oh! If se _nature_ iss little, sat iss, maybe, very vell--?" She spoke as
+kindly as a mother to her babe, but he stole a slow glance here and there,
+as though some one had shot him with a pea in church, and dropped the
+theme.
+
+Which I, too, will do when I have noted the one thing I had particularly
+in mind to say, of Fontenette: that, as Senda remarked--for the above is
+an abridgment--"I rasser see chalousie vissout cause, san cause vissout
+chalousie;" and that even while I was witness of the profound ferocity of
+his jealousy when roused, and more and more as time passed on, I was
+impressed with its sweet reasonableness.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Time did pass--in days and weeks of that quiet sort which make us forget
+in actual life that such is the way in good stories also. Innumerable
+crops were growing in the fields, countless ships were sailing or steaming
+the monotonous leagues of their long wanderings from port to port, some
+empty, some heavy-laden, like bees between garden and hive:
+
+     The corn-tops were ripe and the meadows were in bloom
+     And the birds made music all the day.
+
+Many of our days must not be the wine, but only small bits of the vine, of
+life. We cannot gather or eat _them_; we can only let them grow, branch,
+blossom, get here and there green grapes, scarce a tenth of a tithe, in
+bulk or weight, of the whole growth, and "in due season--if we faint not"
+pluck the purpled clusters. And as the vine is--much, too, as the vine is
+tended, so will be the raisins and the wine. There is nothing in life for
+which to be more thankful, or in which to be more diligent, than its
+intermissions. This is not my sermonizing. I am not going to put
+everything off upon "Senda," but really this was hers. I have edited it a
+trifle; her inability to make, in her pronunciation, a due difference
+between wine and vine rather dulled the point of her moral.
+
+Fontenette remarked to her one Sunday afternoon in our garden, that she
+must have got her English first from books.
+
+"Yes," she said, "I didt. Also I have many, many veeks English
+conversations lessons befo'e Ame'ica. But I cannot se p'onunciation get;
+because se spelling. Hah! I can _not_ sat spelling get!"
+
+O, but didn't I want to offer my services? But, like Bunyan's Christian, I
+recalled a text and so got by; which text was the wise saying of that
+female Solomon, "se aunt of my muss-er"--"One man can't ever'sing have,
+and mine"--establishment is already complete.
+
+Meantime, Mrs. Fontenette, from farthest off in our group, had slipped
+around to the Baroness. She spoke something low, stroking her downy fan
+and blushing with that damsel sweetness of which her husband was so openly
+fond.
+
+"O no, I sank you!" answered Senda, in an undulating voice. "I sank you
+v'ey much, but I cannot take se time to come to yo' house, and I cannot
+let you take se trouble _too_ come _too_ mine. No, if I can have me only
+se right soughts, and find me se right vords for se right soughts, I sink
+I leave se p'onunciation to se mercy of P'ovidence."
+
+Mrs. Fontenette blushed as prettily as a child, and let her husband take
+her hand as he said, "The Providence that wou'n' have mercy on such a
+pronunshation like that--ah well, 'twould have to become v'ey unpopular!"
+
+"Anyhow," cooed Senda, "I risk it;" and then to his wife--"For se present,
+siss betteh I sew for you san spell for you."
+
+Thus was our fair neighbor at every turn overmatched by the trustful love
+of the man and watchful love of the woman, whose fancied inferiority was
+her excuse for an illicit infatuation; an infatuation which little by
+little became a staring fact--only not to Fontenette. You know, you can
+hide such a thing from those who love and trust you, but not long from
+those who do not; and if you are not old in sin--Flora and the Baron were
+infants--you will almost certainly think that a condition hid from those
+who love and trust you is hid from all! O fools! the very urchins of the
+playground will presently have found you out and be guessing at broken
+laws, though there be only broken faiths and the anguish of first steps in
+perfidy.
+
+We could not help but see, and yet for all our seeing we could not help.
+The matter never took on flagrancy enough to give ever so kind an
+intervener a chance to speak with effect. It was pitiful to see how little
+gratification they got out of it; especially she, with that silly belief
+in her ability to rekindle his spiritual energies and lift him into the
+thin air of her transcendentalisms; slipping, nevertheless, bit by bit,
+down the precipitous incline between her vaporous refinements and his
+wallowing animalisms; too destitute of the love that loves to give, or of
+courage, or of cunning, to venture into the fires of real passion, but
+forever craving flattery and caresses, and for their sake forever holding
+him over the burning coals of unfulfilled desire.
+
+How could we know these things so positively?
+
+By the entomologist; the child of science. Science yearns ever to know and
+to tell. Truth for truth's sake! He had no strong _moral_ feeling against
+a lie; but he had never had the slightest _use_ for a lie, and a
+prevarication on his tongue would have been as strange to him as castanets
+in his palms. Guile takes alertness, adroitness; and the slim pennyworth
+of these that he could command he used up, no doubt, on Fontenette. I
+noticed that after an hour with the Creole he always looked tortured and
+exhausted. With us he was artless to the tips of his awful finger-nails.
+
+Nor was Mrs. Fontenette a skilful dissembler; she over-concealed things so
+revealingly. Then she was so helplessly enamoured and in so childish a
+way. I venture one of the penalties almost any woman may have to pay for
+bringing to the altar only the consent to be loved is to find herself,
+some time, at last, far from the altar, a Titania, a love's fool. Our
+Titania pointed us to the fact that the Baron's wife never tried to divert
+his mind from the one pursuit that enthralled it; and she borrowed one of
+our garden alleys in which to teach him--grace-hoops! He never caught one
+from her nor threw one that she could catch; but, ah! with her coaxing and
+commanding, her sweet taunting and reprimanding and his utter lack of
+surprise at them, how much she betrayed! Fontenette came, learned in a few
+throws, and was charmed with the toys--a genuine lover always takes to
+them kindly--but Mrs. Fontenette was by this time tired, and she never
+again felt rested when her husband mentioned the game.
+
+Furthermore, their countenances!--hers and the entomologist's--especially
+when in repose--you could read the depths of experience they had sounded,
+by the lines and shadows that came and went, or stayed, as one may read
+the depths of a bay by the passing of wind and light, day by day, over its
+waters--particularly if the waters are not very deep.
+
+They made painful reading. What degrees of heart-wretchedness came and
+went or stayed with them, we may have over--we may have underestimated.
+God knows. In two months Mrs. Fontenette grew visibly older and less
+pretty, yet more nearly beautiful; while he, by every sign, was gradually
+awakening back--or, shall we not say, being now first born?--to life,
+through the pangs of a torn mind; mind, not conscience; but pangs never of
+sated, always of the famished sort.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+It was he who finally put the very seal of confirmation upon both our
+hopes and our fears.
+
+The time was the evening of the same Sunday in whose afternoon his wife
+had declined those transparent spelling-lessons. A certain preacher, noted
+for his boldness, was drawing crowds by a series of sermons on the text
+"Be thou clean," and our fat neighbor and his wife took us, all six, to
+hear him. Their pew was well to the front and we were late, so that going
+down the aisle unushered, with them in the lead--husband and spouse,
+husband and spouse, four couples--we made a procession which became
+embarrassingly amusing as the preacher simultaneously closed the Scripture
+lesson with, "And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons'
+wives with him into the ark."
+
+That has been our fat neighbor's best joke ever since, though he always
+says after it, "The poor Baron!" and often adds--"and poor Mrs.
+Fontenette! Little did we think," etc. But he has never even suspected
+their secret.
+
+The entomologist was the last of our pew-full to give heed to the pulpit.
+When the preacher said that because it was a year of state elections, for
+which we ought already to be preparing, he had in his first discourse
+touched upon political purity--cleanness of citizenship--the Baron showed
+no interest. He still showed none when the speaker said again, that
+because the pestilence was once more with us--that was in the terrible
+visitation of 1878--he had devoted his second discourse to the hideous
+crime of a great city whose voters and tax-payers do not enable and compel
+it to keep the precept, "Be thou clean." I thought of the clean little
+home from whose master beside me came no evidence that he thought at all.
+But the moment the preacher declared his purpose to consider now the
+application of this great command to the individual life and character of
+man and woman as simply man and woman, the entomologist became the closest
+listener in the crowded throng.
+
+The sermon was a daring one. I was struck by the shrewd concessions with
+which the speaker defined personal purity and the various false
+conceptions of it that pass current; abandoning the entrenched hills, so
+to speak, of his church's traditional rigor and of many conventional
+rules, and drawing after him into the unfortified plain his least
+persuadable hearers of whatever churchly or unchurchly prejudice, to
+surround them finally at one wide sweep and receive their unconditional
+surrender. His periods were not as embarrassing to a mixed audience as my
+citations would indicate. Those that I bring together were wisely
+subordinated and kept apart in the discourse, and ran together only in
+minds like my own, eager for one or two other hearers to be specially
+impressed by them. And one, at least, was. Before the third sentence of
+the main discourse was finished the fierceness of the Baron's attention
+was provoking me to ask myself whether a conscience also was not coming to
+birth in him.
+
+In a spiritual-material being, said the speaker, the spirit has a
+rightful, happy share in every physical delight, and no physical delight
+need be unclean in which the spirit can freely enjoy its just share as
+senior member in the partnership of soul and body. Without this spiritual
+participation it could not be clean, though church, state, and society
+should jointly approve and command it. Mark, I do not answer for the truth
+of these things; I believe them, but that is quite outside of our story.
+
+The commonest error, he said, of those who covet spiritual cleanness is to
+seek a purification of self for self-purification's sake.
+
+The Baron grunted. He was drinking in the words; had forgotten his
+surroundings.
+
+Only those are clean, continued the speaker, whose every act, motive,
+condition is ordered according to their best knowledge of the general
+happiness, whether that happiness is for the time embodied in millions, or
+in but one beyond themselves. Through errors of judgment they may fall
+into manifest outward uncleannesses; but they, and none but they, are
+clean within.
+
+Because women, he went on, are in every way more delicately made than men,
+we easily take it for granted they are more spiritual. From Genesis to
+Revelation the Bible never does so. It is amazing how feeble a sense of
+condemnation women--even as compared with men--often show for the _spirit_
+of certain misdeeds if only it be unaccompanied by the misdeed's
+performance; or what loathing so many of them--"of you," he really said,
+and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of
+them--what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without
+reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their
+nobility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, entirely depends.
+
+Nothing is unclean that is to no one anywhere unjust or unkind; and
+nothing is unjust, unkind, or unclean which cannot easily be shown to be
+so without inventing an eleventh commandment. To him, he said, no
+uncleanness was more foul than that which, not for kindness, or for
+righteousness, but for a fantastical, self-centred refinement, invents
+some eleventh commandment to call that common which God hath cleansed; to
+call anything brutish which the incarnation of the soul has made sacred to
+spotless affections.
+
+The Baron muttered something in German, and Fontenette shut his mouth
+tight and straightened up in approbation.
+
+
+At the close of the service we were not out of the pew before our escort
+was introducing Senda to his friends in front and behind as busily and
+elaborately as if that was what we had come for. Twice and again she cast
+so anxious an eye upon her husband--from whom Mrs. Fontenette had wisely
+taken shelter behind hers--that I softly said to her, "We'll take care of
+him."
+
+A care he was! All the way down the aisle, amid the peals of the organ, he
+commented on the sermon aloud, mostly to himself but also to whichever of
+us he could rub his glasses against. Sometimes he mistook others for us
+until they stared. His face showed a piteous, weary distress, his thin
+hair went twenty ways, he seemed scarcely to know where he was or how to
+take his steps, and presently was saying to a strange lady crowded against
+him, as though it was with her he had been talking all along:
+
+"Undt vhy shall we haf t'at owfool troubple? No-o, t'at vould kill me! I
+am not a cat to keep me alvays clean--no more as a hogk to keep me always
+not clean. No, I keep me--owdside--inside--always so clean as it comes
+eassy, undt I leave me so dirty as it comes eassy."
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+I took his arm into mine--his hand was hot--and drew him on alone. "Undt
+t'ose vomens," he persisted in the vestibule, "t'ey are more troubple yet
+as t'eir veight in goldt! I vish, mine Gott! t'ere be no more any vomens
+ut all, undt we haf t'e shiltern by mutchinery."
+
+On the outer steps I sprang with others to save a young girl, who had
+stumbled, from pitching headlong to the sidewalk. Once on her feet again,
+after a limp or two she walked away uninjured; but when I looked around
+for my real charge he was not in sight. I hurried to Fontenette and his
+wife a few steps away, but he was not with them. The three of us turned
+back and came upon the rest of our group, but neither had they seen him.
+Our other neighbor said he must have got into a car. I asked Senda if it
+was likely he would go home without trying to find us, and she replied
+that he might; but when we had all looked at one another for a moment she
+dded, with a distinct tremor of voice--and I saw that she feared
+temptation and conscience had unsettled his wits--"I sink he iss not ve'y
+vell. I sink he is maybe--I ton't know, but--I--I sink he iss not ve'y
+vell." She averted her face.
+
+She agreed with us, of course, that there was no call for alarm, and Mrs.
+Smith and I had to plead that we could not, the six of us, let her go
+home, away downtown, alone, while we should go as far the other way and
+remain all night ignorant of her husband's whereabouts. So our next door
+neighbor, my wife and I went with her, and his wife and the Fontenettes
+went home; for a conviction probably common to us all, but which no one
+cared to put into downright words, was that the entomologist, whether
+dazed or not, might wander up to one of our homes in preference to his
+own. In the street-car and afterward for a full hour at her house, Senda
+was very silent, only saying now a little and then a little more.
+
+"_He_ iss all right! _He_ vill sure come. Many times he been avay se
+_whole_ night. Sat is se first time I am eveh afraid; is sat se vay when
+commencing to grow old? Yes, I sink sat is se reason."
+
+When we had been at her cottage for nearly an hour, my neighbor started
+out on a systematic search; and half an hour later, I left Mrs. Smith with
+her and went also.
+
+About one o'clock in the night, I came back as far as the corner nearest
+her house, but waited there, by appointment, with my neighbor; and very
+soon--stepping softly--he appeared.
+
+"No sign of him?"
+
+"None."
+
+"You don't suppose he's done himself any violence, do you?" he asked.
+
+"No, no. O no."
+
+"And yet," he said, "I think we ought to tell the police at once."
+
+I advanced some obvious objections. "At any rate," I said, "go in, will
+you, please, and see if he hasn't come home, while we were away."
+
+"Why, yes, that _is_ the first thing," laughed he, and went.
+
+As I waited for him in the still street, I heard far away a quick
+footstep. By and by I saw a man pass under a distant lamp, coming toward
+me. I looked with all my eyes. Just then my neighbor came back. "Listen,"
+I murmured. "Watch when that man comes under the next light."
+
+He watched. "It's Fontenette!"
+
+"Well," said the Creole as he joined us, "he's yondeh all right--except
+sick.
+
+"Yes, he cou'n't tell anybody where to take him, and a doctor found that
+letteh on him print' outside with yo' uptown address; and so he put him in
+a cab an' sen' him yondeh, and sen' word he muz 'ave been sick sinze sev'l
+hours, an' get him in bed quick don't lose a minute."
+
+"And so he's in bed at my house!" I put in approvingly.
+
+"Ah, no! I coul'n' do like that; but I do the bes' I could; he is at _my_
+'ouse in bed. An' my own doctor sen' word what to do an' he'll come in the
+mawning. And (to our neighbor) yo' madame do uz that kineness to remain
+with Madame Fontenette whiles I'm bringing his wife."
+
+At the cottage my companions remained outside. As I entered Senda caught
+one glance and exclaimed, "Ah, mine hussbandt is foundt and is anyhow
+alife!"
+
+"Yes," I replied, "but he's ill. Mr. Fontenette met him and took him to
+his house. He's there now with Mrs. Fontenette and Mrs. Blank. Get a
+change of dress and come, we'll all go together."
+
+Senda stared. "A shange of dtress?" Then, with a most significant mingling
+of relief and new disturbance, she said, "Ah, I see!" and looking from me
+to Mrs. Smith and from Mrs. Smith to me, while she whipped her bonnet
+ribbons into a bow, she cried, with shaking voice and streaming eyes:
+
+"Oh, sank Kott! sank Kott! it iss only se yellow feveh."
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+No sick man could have been better cared for than was the entomologist at
+our neighbor's over the way. "The fever," as in the Creole city it used to
+be sufficiently distinguished, is not so deadly, nor so treacherous, nor
+nearly so repulsive, as some other maladies, but none requires closer
+attention. After successive days and nights of unremitting vigilance,
+should there occur a momentary closing of the nurse's eyes, or a turning
+from the bedside for a quarter of a minute, the irresponsible patient may
+attempt to rise and may fall back dying or dead. So, the attendant must
+have an attendant. In the case of the entomologist, his wife became the
+bedside nurse and sentinel.
+
+In the next room, now and then Mrs. Smith, and now and then our fat
+neighbor's wife, waited on her, but by far the most of the time, Mrs.
+Fontenette was her assistant. When Senda, while the patient dozed, stole
+brief moments of sleep to keep what she could of her overtasked powers,
+her place, at the bedside, was always filled by Fontenette, who as often
+kept his promise to call her the instant her husband should rouse.
+
+Thus we brought our precious entomologist through the disorder's first
+crisis, which generally comes exactly on the seventy-second hour, and in
+due time through the second, which falls, if I remember aright, on the
+ninth day. What I do recall with certainty, was that it came on one of the
+days of the city's heaviest mortality and that two of our children, and my
+next neighbor's wife, came down with the scourge.
+
+And O, the beautiful days and the beautiful nights! It seemed the illusion
+of a dream, that between such land and sky, there should be not one street
+in that embowered city unsmitten by sorrow and death. Out of yonder fair
+home on the right, they carried yesterday, the loved mother of five
+children--but the Baron is better. From this one on the left, will be
+borne to-morrow such a man as no city can lightly spare, till now a living
+fulfilment of the word "Be thou clean"--but the entomologist will be ever
+so much better.
+
+To be glad of it, you needed only to hear Senda allude to him as "Mine
+hussbandt." Why did she never mention him in any other way? The little
+woman was a riddle to me. I did not see how she could give such a man such
+a love, and yet I never could see but she was as frank as a public record.
+Stranger still was it how she could be the marital partner--the mate, to
+speak plainly--of such a one, without showing or feeling the slightest
+spiritual debasement. Finally, however, I caught some light. I had stepped
+over to ask after "Mine hussbandt," everyone else of us being busy with
+our own sick. Senda was letting Fontenette take her place in the
+sick-room, which, of course, was shut close. I silently entered the room
+in front of it, and perceiving that Mrs. Fontenette had drawn her into the
+other front room, adjoining--a door stood half open between--and was
+tempting her with refreshments, I sat down to await their next move. So
+presently I began to hear what they said to each other in their gentle
+speculations.
+
+"A wife who has realized her ideal," Mrs. Fontenette was saying, when
+Senda interrupted:
+
+"Ah! vhat vife is sat? In vhat part of se vorldt does she lif, and how
+long she is marriedt? No-o, no! Sare is only vun _kindt_ of vife in se
+_whole_ vorldt vhat realize her ideal hussbandt; and sat is se vife vhat
+idealize her real hussbandt. Also not se hussbandt and se vife only; I
+sink you even cannot much Christ-yanity practice vis anybody--close
+related--vissout you idealize sem. But ze hussbandt and vife--
+
+"You remembeh sat sehmon, 'Be'--O yes, of course. Vell, sat is vun sing se
+preacher forget to say--May be he haf not se time, but I sink he forget:
+sat sare is no hussbandt in se whole vorldt--and also sare is no vife--so
+sp'--spirit'--spirited? no? Ah, yes--spiritual!--yes, sank you. Vhen I
+catch me a bigk vord I am so proudt, yet, as I hadt a fish caught!"
+
+I was willing to believe it, but thought how still more true it was of
+Mrs. Fontenette. But the gentle speaker had not paused. "Sare iss no vife
+so _spiritual_," she repeated, triumphantly, "and who got a hussbandt so
+spiritual, sat eeser vun--do you say 'eeser vun'?"
+
+"Either one," said her hostess, reassuringly.
+
+"Yes, so spiritual sat eeser vun can keep sat rule inside--to be pairfect'
+clean, if sat vun do not see usseh vun _idealize_."
+
+I made a stir--"Hmm!" Whereupon she came warily to the door. I sat
+engrossed in a book and wishing I could silently crawl under it snake
+fashion; but I could feel her eyes all over me, and with them was a
+glimmering smile that helped them to make me tingle as she softly spoke.
+
+"Ah!--See se book-vorm! He iss all eyes--and ee-ahs. Iss it _not_ so?"
+
+"Pardon," I murmured; "did you spe'--has  any one been speaking and I have
+failed to give attention?"
+
+"O no, sir! I sink not! Vell, you are velcome to all you haf heardt; but I
+am ve'y much oblige' to you for yo' 'hmm.' It vas se right sing in se
+right place. But do you not sink I shouldt haf been a pre-eacheh? I love
+to preach."
+
+I said I knew of three men in one neighborhood with whom she might start a
+church, and asked how was the Baron.
+
+Improving--would soon be able to sit up. She inquired after my children.
+
+It was quite in accord with a late phase of Mrs. Fontenette's demeanor
+that on this occasion she did not appear until I mentioned her. She had
+not come near me by choice since the night the Baron was found and sent to
+my address, although I certainly was in every way as nice to her as I had
+ever been, and I was not expecting now to be less so.
+
+When she appeared I asked her if a superb rose blooming late in August was
+not worth crossing to our side of the way to see. She knew, of course,
+that sooner or later, as the best of a bad choice, she must allow me an
+interview; yet now she was about to decline on some small excuse, when her
+eyes met mine, and she saw that in my opinion the time had come. So she
+made her excuses to her guest and went with me.
+
+She gave the rose generous notice and praise, and as she led the way back
+lingered admiringly over flower after flower. Yet she said little; more
+than once she paused entirely to let me if I chose change the subject, and
+when at the gate I did so, she stood like a captive, looking steadily into
+my face with eyes as helpless as a half-fledged bird's and as lovely as
+its mother's. When I drew something from my breastpocket, they did not
+move.
+
+"This," I said, "is the letter that was found on the Baron the night he
+was taken ill. Your husband handed it to me supposing, of course, I had
+written it, as it was in one of my envelopes, and he happens not to know
+my handwriting. But I did not write it. I had never seen it, yet it was
+sent in one of my envelopes. I haven't mentioned it to anyone else,
+because--you see?--I hope you do. I thought--well, frankly, I thought if I
+should mention it first to you I might never need to mention it to anyone
+else." I waited a moment and then asked, eyes and all: "Who could have
+sent it?"
+
+"Isn't," she began, but her voice failed, and when it came again it was
+hardly more than a whisper, "isn't it signed?"
+
+Now, that was just what I did not know. Whatever the thing was, I had
+never taken it from the envelope. But the moment she asked I knew. I knew
+it bore no signature. We gazed into each other's eyes for many seconds
+until hers tried to withdraw. Then I said--and the words seemed to drop
+from my lips unthought--"It didn't have to be signed, Mrs. Fontenette,
+although the handwriting is disguised."
+
+Poor Flora! I can but think, even yet, I was kinder than if I had been
+kind; but it was brutal, and I felt myself a brute, thus to be holding her
+up to herself there on the open sidewalk where she dared not even weep or
+wring her hands or hide her face, but only make idle marks on the brick
+pavement with her tiny boots--and tremble.
+
+
+"I--I had to write it," she began to reply, and her words, though they
+quivered, were as mechanical as mine. "He was so--so--imprudent--my
+husband's happiness required----"
+
+I stopped her. "Please don't say that, Mrs. Fontenette. Pardon me, but--
+not that, please." I felt for an instant quite cruel enough to have told
+her what ebb tides she had given that husband's happiness; what he had
+been so near doing and had been led back from only by the absolute
+christliness of that other woman and wife, whose happiness scarcely seemed
+ever to have occurred to her; but that was his secret, not mine.
+
+She broke a silence with a suppressed exclamation of pain, while for the
+eyes of possible observers I imitated her in a nonchalant pose. "You
+wouldn't despise me if you knew the half I've suffered or how I've striv--
+--"
+
+I interrupted again. "O Mrs. Fontenette, any true gentleman--at thirty-
+five--knows it _all--himself_. And he had better go and cut his throat
+than give himself airs, even of pity, over a lady who has made a misstep
+she cannot retrace."
+
+Her foot played with a brick that was loose in the pavement, but she gave
+me a melting glance of gratitude. After a considerable pause she murmured,
+"I will retrace it."
+
+"I have kept you here a good while," I said. "After a moment or so drop
+your handkerchief, and as I return it to you the letter will be with it.
+Or, better, if you choose to trust me, we'll not do that, but as soon as I
+get into the house I'll burn it."
+
+"I can trust you," she replied, "but----"
+
+"What; the Baron--when he misses it? O I'll settle that."
+
+She gave a start as though I had shouted.
+
+I thought it a bad sign for the future, and the words that followed seemed
+to me worse. "Isn't it my duty," she asked--and her eyes betrayed
+unconsciously the desperateness of her desire--"to explain to him myself?"
+
+I answered with a question. "Would that be in the line of retracement,
+Mrs. Fontenette?"
+
+"It would!" she responded, with solemn eagerness. "O it would be! It shall
+be! I promise you!"
+
+"Mrs. Fontenette," said I, "consider. If his wife"--she flinched; she
+could do so now, for the sudden semi-tropical darkness had fallen--"if his
+wife-or your husband"--she bit her lip--"knew all--would they think that
+your duty? Would it take them an instant to refuse their consent? Would
+they not firmly insist that it is your duty never again to see him alone?"
+
+Her only reply was an involuntary moan and a whitening of the face, and
+for the first time I saw how deep into her soul the poison had gone.
+
+"My friend," I continued, "you must not think me meddlesome--officious. I
+can no more wait for your permission to help you than if you were
+drowning. Perhaps for good reasons within _me_, I know, better than you,
+that you-and he--are on a slippery incline, and that whether you can stop
+your descent and creep back to higher ground than either of you has
+slipped from is not to be told by the fineness of your promises or
+resolves. I cannot tell; you cannot tell; only God knows." ...
+
+"Please, sir," said a new maid--in place of one who had gone home fever
+struck and had died--"yo' lady saunt me fo' to tell you yo' little boy a
+sett'n on de back steps an' sayin' his head does ache him, an' she wish
+you'd 'ten' to him, 'caze she cayn't leave his lill' sisteh, 'caze she
+threaten with convulsion'."
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+Mrs. Fontenette and the maid silently ran in ahead of me; I went first to
+the mother. When I found Mrs. Fontenette again she had the child undressed
+and in his crib, and I remembered how often I had, in my heart, called her
+a coward.
+
+She saw me pencil on a slip of paper at the mantelpiece, and went and read
+-"You mustn't stay. He has the fever. You've never had it."
+
+She wrote beneath--"I should have got it weeks ago if God paid wages every
+day. Don't turn me off."
+
+I dropped the paper into the small firegrate, added the other from my
+breastpocket, and set them ablaze, and the new maid, entering, praised
+burning paper as one of the best deodorizers known.
+
+So my dainty rose-neighbor stayed; stayed all night, and all the next day
+and night, and on and on with only flying visits to her home over the way,
+until we were amazed at her endurance. The little fellow was never at ease
+with her out of his wild eyes. Her touch was balm to him, and her words
+peace. Oh, that they might have been healing also! But that was beyond the
+reach of all our striving. His days were as the flowers and winged things
+of the garden-kingdom, wherein he had been--without ever guessing it--
+their citizen-king.
+
+It awakens all the tenderness at once that I ever had for Mrs. Fontenette,
+to recall what she was to him in those hours, and to us when his agonies
+were all past, and he lay so stately on his short bier, and she could not
+be done going to it and looking--looking--with streaming eyes.
+
+As she stood close by the tomb, while we dumbly watched the masons seal
+it, I began to believe that she blamed herself for the child's sickness
+and death, and presently I knew it must be so. One of those quaint burial
+societies of Negro women, in another quarter of the grounds, but within
+plain hearing, chose for the ending of their burial service--with what
+fitness to their burial service I cannot say, maybe none--a hymn borrowed,
+I judge, from the rustic whites, as usual, but Africanized enough to
+thrill the dullest nerves; and the moment it began my belief was
+confirmed.
+
+
+     My sin is so dahk, Lawd, so dahk and so deep,
+       My grief is so po', Lawd, so po' and so mean,
+     I wisht I could weep, Lawd, I wisht I could weep,
+       Oh, I wisht I could weep like Mary Mahgaleen!
+
+     Oh, Sorroh! sweet Sorroh! come, welcome, and stay!
+       I'd welcome thy swode howsomever so keen,
+     If I could jes' pray, Lawd, if I could jes' pray,
+       Oh! if I could jes' pray, like Mary Mahgaleen!
+
+
+My belief was confirmed, I say; but I was glad to see also that no one
+else read as I read the signs by which I was guided. At the cemetery gate
+I heard some one call--"Yo' madam is sick, sih," and, turning, saw Mrs.
+Fontenette, deathly white, lift her blue eyes to her husband and he get
+his arm about her just in time to save her from falling. She swooned but a
+moment, and, in the carriage, before it started off, tried to be quite
+herself, though very pale.
+
+"It's nothing but the reaction," said to me the lady who fanned her, and
+we agreed it was a wonder she had held up so long.
+
+"Hyeh, honey," put in the child's old black nurse, in a voice that never
+failed to soothe, however grotesque its misinterpretations, "lay yo' head
+on me; an' lay it heavy: dass what I'm use-en to. Blessed is de pyo in
+haht; she shall res' in de fea' o' de Lawd, an' he shall lafe at heh
+calamity."
+
+I was glad to send the old woman with them, for as we turned away to our
+own carriage, I said in my mind, "All that little lady needs is enough
+contrition, and she'll give away the total of any secret of which she owns
+an undivided half."
+
+But a night and a day passed, and a second, and a third, and I perceived
+she had told nothing.
+
+It was a terrible time, with many occasions of suspense more harrowing
+than that. Our other children were getting on, yet still needed vigilant
+care; the Baron was to be let out of his room in a day or two, but my fat
+neighbor had come down with the disease, while his wife still lay between
+life and death--how they finally got well, I have never quite made out,
+they were so badly nursed--and all about us were new cases, and cases
+beyond hope, and retarded recoveries, and relapses, and funerals, and
+nurses too few, and ice scarce, and everybody worn out with watching--
+physicians compelled to limit themselves to just so many cases at a time,
+to avoid utterly breaking down.
+
+As I was in my fat neighbor's sick chamber one evening, giving his nurse a
+respite, word came that Fontenette was at my gate. I went to him with
+misgivings that only increased as we greeted. He was dejected and
+agitated. His grasp was damp and cold.
+
+"It cou'n' stay from me always," he said in an anguished voice, and I
+cried in my soul, "She's told him!"
+
+But she had not. I asked him what his bad news was that had come at last,
+but his only reply was,
+
+"Can you take _him_? Can you take him out of my house--to-night--this
+evening--now?"
+
+"Who, the Baron? Why, certainly, if you desire it?" I responded; wondering
+if the entomologist, by some slip, had betrayed _her_. There was an awe in
+my visitor's eyes that was almost fright.
+
+"Fontenette," I exclaimed, "what have you heard--what have you done?"
+
+"My frien', 'tis not what I 'ave heard, neitheh what I 'ave done; 'tis
+what I 'ave got."
+
+"Got? Why, you've got nothing, you Creole of the Creoles. Your skin's as
+cool as mine."
+
+"Feel my pulse," he said. I felt it. It wasn't less than a hundred and
+fifty.
+
+"Go, get into bed while I bring the Baron over here," I said, and by the
+time I had done this and got back to him his skin was hot enough! An hour
+or two after, I recrossed the street on the way to my night's rest,
+leaving his wife to nurse him, and Senda to attend on her and keep house.
+I paused in the garden and gazed up among the benignant stars. And then I
+looked onward, through and beyond their ranks, seemingly so confused, yet
+where such amazing hidden order is, and said, for our good Fontenette, and
+for his watching wife, and for all of us--even for my wife and me in our
+unutterable loss--"Sank Kott! sank Kott! it iss only se yellow fevah!"
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+Three days more. In the third evening I found the doctor saying to Mrs.
+Fontenette:
+
+
+"Nine o'clock. It's now seven-thirty. Well, you'd better begin pretty soon
+to watch for the change.
+
+"O, you'll know it when you see it, it will be as plain as something
+sinking in water right before your eyes. Then give him the beef-tea, just
+a teaspoonful; then, by and by, another, and another, as I told you,
+always keeping his head on the pillow--mind that."
+
+Out beside his carriage he continued to me: "O yes, a nurse or patient may
+break that rule, or almost any rule, and the patient may live. I had a
+patient, left alone for a moment on the climacteric day, who was found
+standing at her mirror combing her hair, and to-day she's as well as you
+or I. I had another who got out of bed, walked down a corridor, fell face
+downward and lay insensible at the crack of a doorsill with the rain
+blowing in on him under the door--and he got well. As to Fontenette, all
+his symptoms so far are good. Well--I'll be back in the morning."
+
+So ran the time. There were no more new cases in our house; Mrs. Smith and
+I had had the scourge years before, as also had Senda, who remained over
+the way. Fontenette passed from one typical phase of the disorder to
+another "charmingly" as the doctor said, yet he specially needed just such
+exceptionally delicate care as his wife was giving him. In the city at
+large the deaths per day were more and more, and one night when it
+showered and there was a heavenly cooling of the air, the increase in the
+mortality was horrible. But the weather, as a rule, was steady and
+tropically splendid; the sun blazed; the moonlight was marvellous; the
+dews were like rains; the gardens were gay with butterflies. Our
+convalescent little ones hourly forgot how gravely far they were from
+being well, and it became one of our heavy cares to keep the entomologist
+from entomologizing--and from overeating.
+
+From time to time, when shorthanded we had used skilled nurses; but when
+Mrs. Fontenette grew haggard and we mentioned them, she said
+distressfully: "O! no hireling hands! I can't bear the thought of it!" and
+indeed the thought of the average hired "fever-nurse" of those days was
+not inspiring; so I served as her alternate when she would accept any and
+throw herself on the couch Senda had spread in the little parlor.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+At length one day I was called up at dawn and went over to take her place
+once more, and when after several hours had passed I was still with him,
+Fontenette said, while I bent down,
+
+"I have the fear thad's going to go hahd with my wife, being of the
+Nawth."
+
+"Why, what's going to go hard, old fellow?"
+
+"The feveh. My dear frien', don't I know tha'z the only thing would keep
+heh f'om me thad long?"
+
+"Still, you don't know her case will be a hard one; it may be very light.
+But don't talk now."
+
+"Well--I hope _so_. Me, I wou'n' take ten thousand dollahs faw thad feveh
+myself--to see that devotion of my wife. You muz 'ave observe', eh?"
+
+"Yes, indeed, old man; nobody could help observing. I wouldn't talk any
+more just now."
+
+"No," he insisted, "nobody could eveh doubt. 'Action speak loudeh than
+word,' eh?"
+
+"Yes, but we don't want either from you just now." I put his restless arms
+back under the cover; not to keep the outer temperature absolutely even
+was counted a deadly risk. "Besides," I said, "you're talking out of
+character, old boy."
+
+He looked at me mildly, steadily, for several moments, as if something
+about me gave him infinite comfort. It was a man's declaration of love to
+a man, and as he read the same in my eyes, he closed his own and drowsed.
+
+Though he dozed only at wide intervals and briefly, he asked no more
+questions until night; then--"Who's with my wife?"
+
+"Mine."
+
+He closed his eyes again, peacefully. It was in keeping with his perfect
+courtesy not to ask how the new patient was. If she was doing well,--well;
+and if not, he would spare us the pain of informing or deceiving him.
+
+Senda became a kind of chief-of-staff for both sides of the street. She
+would have begged to be Mrs. Fontenette's nurse, but for one other
+responsibility, which we felt it would be unsafe, and she thought it would
+be unfair, for her to put thus beyond her own reach: "se care of mine
+hussbandt."
+
+She wore a plain path across the unpaved street to our house, and another
+to our neighbor's. "Sat iss a too great risk," she compassionately
+maintained, "to leaf even in se daytime sose shiltren--so late sick--alone
+viss only mine hussbandt and se sairvants!"
+
+The doctor was concerned for Mrs. Fontenette from the beginning. "Terribly
+nervous," he said, "and full from her feet to her eyes, of a terror of
+death--merely a part of the disease, you know." But in this case I did not
+know.
+
+"Pathetic," he called the fevered satisfaction she took in the hovering
+attentions of our old black nurse, who gave us brief respites in the two
+sick-rooms by turns, and who had according to Mrs. Fontenette, "such a
+beautiful faith!" The doctor thought it mostly words, among which "de Lawd
+willin'" so constantly recurred that out of the sick-room he always
+alluded to her as D.V., though never without a certain sincere regard.
+This kind old soul had nursed much yellow fever in her time, and it did
+not occur to us that maybe her time was past.
+
+When Mrs. Fontenette had been ill something over a week, the doctor one
+evening made us glad by saying as he came through the little dining-room
+and jerked a thumb back toward Fontenette's door, "Just keep him as he is
+for one more night and, I promise you, he'll get well; but!"--He sat down
+on the couch--Senda's--in the parlor, and pointed at the door to Mrs.
+Fontenette's room--"You've got to be careful _how_ you let even that be
+known--in there! She can get well too--if--" And he went on to tell how in
+this ailment all the tissues of the body sink into such frail
+deterioration, that so slight a thing as the undue thrill of an emotion,
+may rend some inner part of the soul's house and make it hopelessly
+untenable.
+
+"Iss sat not se condition vhat make it so easy to relapse?" asked Senda.
+
+He said it was, I think, and went his way, little knowing to what a night
+he was leaving us--except for its celestial beauty, upon which he
+expatiated as I stepped with him to the gate.
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+He had not been gone long enough for me to get back into the house-
+Fonteette's--when I espied coming to me, in piteous haste from her home
+around the corner, the young daughter of another neighbor. Her hair was
+about her eyes and as she saw the physician had gone, she wrung her hands
+and burst into violent weeping. I ran to her outside the gate, pointing
+backward at Mrs. Fontenette's room, with entreating signs for quiet as she
+called--"Oh, _where_ is he gone? Which way did he go?"
+
+"I can't tell you, my dear girl!" I murmured. "I don't know! What is the
+trouble?"
+
+"My father!" she hoarsely whispered.
+
+"My father's dying! dying in a raging delirium, and we can't hold him in
+bed! O, come and help us!" She threw her hands above her head in wild
+despair, and gnawed her fingers and lips and shook and writhed as she
+gulped down her sobs, and laid hold of me and begged as though I had
+refused.
+
+I found her words true. It took four men to keep him down. I did not have
+to stay to the end, and when I reached Fontenette's side again, was glad
+to find I had been away but little over an hour.
+
+I sent the old black woman home and to bed, and may have sat an hour more,
+when she came back to tell us, that one of the children was very wakeful
+and feverish. Senda went to see into the matter for us, and the old woman
+took her place in the little parlor. Mrs. Smith was with Mrs. Fontenette.
+
+Fontenette slept. Loath to see him open his eyes, I kept very still, while
+nearly another hour dragged by, listening hard for Senda's return, but
+hearing only, once or twice, through the narrow stairway and closets
+between the two bedrooms, a faint stir that showed Mrs. Fontenette was
+awake and being waited on.
+
+I was grateful for the rarity of outdoor sounds; a few tree-frogs piped,
+two or three solitary wayfarers passed in the street; twice or more the
+sergeant of the night-watch trilled his whistle in a street or two behind
+us, and twice or more in front; and once, and once again, came the distant
+bellow of steamboats passing each other--not the famous boats whose
+whistle you would know one from another, for they were laid up. I doubt if
+I have forgotten any sound that I noticed that night. I remember the
+drowsy rumble of the midnight horse-car and tinkle of its mule's bell,
+first in Prytania street and then in Magazine. It was just after these
+that at last a black hand beckoned me to the door, and under her breath
+the old nurse told me she was just back from our house, where her mistress
+had sent her, and that--"De-eh--de-eh"--
+
+"The Baroness?"
+
+"Yass, sih, de--de outlayndish la-ady--"
+
+Senda had sent word that the child had only an indigestion--a thing
+serious enough in such a case--and though still slightly feverish was now
+asleep, but restless.
+
+"Sih? Yass, sir--awnressless--dass 'zac'ly what I say!"
+
+Wherefore Senda would either remain in the nursery or return to us, as we
+should elect.
+
+"O no, sih, she no need to come back right now, anyhow; yass, sih, dass
+what de Mis' say, too."
+
+"Then you'll stay here," I whispered.
+
+"Yass, sih, ef de Lawd wil'--I mean ef you wants me, sih--yass, sih,
+thaynk you, sih. I loves to tend on Mis' Fontenette, she got sich a bu'ful
+fa aith, same like she say I got. Yass, sih, I dess loves to set an' watch
+her--wid dat sweet samtimonious fa-ace."
+
+Fontenette being still asleep I gave her my place for a moment, and went
+to the door between the parlor and his wife's room. Mrs. Smith came to it,
+barely breathing the triumphant word--"Just dropped asleep!"
+
+When I replied that I would take a little fresh air at the front door she
+asked if at my leisure I would empty and bring in from the window-sill,
+around on the garden side of her patient's room a saucer containing the
+over-sweetened remains of some orange-leaf tea, that "D.V." had made "for
+to wrench out de nerves." She wanted the saucer.
+
+I went outside a step or two and took in a long draught of good air--the
+air of a yellow-fever room is dreadful. It was my first breath of mental
+relief also; almost the first that night, and the last.
+
+I paced once or twice the short narrow walk between the front flower-beds,
+surprised at their well-kept and blooming condition until I remembered
+Senda. The moths were out in strong numbers, and it was delightful to
+forget graver things for a moment and see the flowers bend coyly under
+their passionate kisses and blushingly rise again when the sweet robbery
+was finished. So it happened that I came where a glance across to my own
+garden showed me, on the side farthest from the nursery, a favorite bush,
+made pale by a light that could come only from the entomologist's window!
+I went in promptly, told what I proposed to do, and hurried out again.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+I crossed into my garden and silently mounted the balcony stairs I have
+mentioned once before. His balcony door was ajar. His room was empty. He
+had occupied the bed. A happy thought struck me--to feel the spot where he
+had lain; it was still warm. Good! But his clothes were all gone except
+his shoes, and they, you remember, were no proof that he was indoors.
+
+I stole down into the garden once more, and looked hurriedly in several
+directions, but saw no sign of him. I am not a ferocious man even when
+alone, but as I came near the fence of our fat neighbor--once fat, poor
+fellow, and destined to be so again in time--and still saw no one, I was
+made conscious of waving my fist and muttering through my gritting teeth,
+by hearing my name softly called. It was an unfamiliar female voice that
+spoke, from a window beyond the fence, and it flashed on my remembrance
+that two kinswomen of my neighbor were watching with his wife, whose case
+was giving new cause for anxiety. It was Mrs. Soandso, the voice
+explained, and could I possibly come in there a moment?--if only to the
+window!
+
+"Is our friend the Baron over here?" I asked, as I came to it. He was not.
+"Well, never mind," I said; "how is your patient?"
+
+"Oh that's just what we wish we knew. In some ways she seems better, but
+she's more unquiet. She's had some slight nausea and it seems to increase.
+Do you think that is important?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "very. I hear some one cracking ice; you are keeping ice on
+her throat--no? Well, begin it at once, and persuade her to lie on her
+back as quietly as she can, and get her to sleep if possible! Doctor--no;
+he wouldn't come before morning, anyhow; but I'll send Mrs. Smith right
+over to you, if she possibly can come."
+
+I turned hurriedly away and had taken only a few steps, when I lit upon
+the entomologist. "Well, I'll just--what _are_ you doing here? Where were
+you when I was in your room just now?" His shoes were on.
+
+"Vhat you vanted mit me? I vas by dot librair' going. For vhat you moof
+dot putterfly-net fon t'e mandtelpiece? You make me _too_ much troubple to
+find dot vhen I vas in a hurry!" He shook it at me.
+
+"Hurry!" In my anger and distress I laughed. "My friend"--laying a hand on
+him--"you'll hurry across the street with me."
+
+He waved me off. "Yes; go on, you; I coom py undt py; I dtink t'ere iss
+vun maud come into dot gardten, vhat I haf not pefore seen since more as
+acht years, alreadty!"
+
+"Yes," I retorted, "and so you're here at the gate alone. Now come right
+along with me! Aren't there enough lives in danger to-night, but you must"
+-He stopped me in the middle of the street.
+
+"Mine Gott! vhat iss dot you say? Who--_who_--mine Gott! _who_ iss her
+life in dtanger? Iss dot--mine Gott! is dot he-ere?" He pointed to Mrs.
+Fontenette's front window.
+
+I could hardly keep my fist off him. "Hush! you--For one place it's
+_here_." I pushed him with my finger.
+
+"Ach!" he exclaimed in infinite relief. "I dt'ought you mean--I--I
+dt'ought--hmm!--hmm! I am dtired." He leaned on me like a sick child and
+we went into the cottage parlor. The moment he saw the lounge he lay down
+upon it, or I should have taken him back into the dining-room.
+
+"Sha'n't I put that net away for you?" I murmured, as I dropped a light
+covering over him.
+
+But he only hugged the toy closer. "No; I geep it--hmm!--hmm!--I am
+dtired--"
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+Both patients, I found, were drowsing; the husband peacefully, the wife
+with troubled dreams. When the Baron spoke her eyes opened with a look,
+first eager and then distressful, but closed again. We put the old black
+woman temporarily into her room and Mrs. Smith hurried to our other
+neighbors, whence she was to despatch one of their servants to bid Senda
+come to us at once. But "No battle"--have I already used the proverb? She
+gave the message to the servant, but it never reached Senda. Somebody
+forgot. As I sat by Fontenette with ears alert for Senda's coming and was
+wondering at the unbroken silence, he opened his eyes on me and smiled.
+
+"Ah!" he softly said, "thad was a pleasan' dream!"
+
+"A pleasant dream, was it?"
+
+"Yes; I was having the dream thad my wife she was showing me those rose-
+_bushes_; an' every rose-_bush_ it had roses, an' every rose it was
+perfect."
+
+I leaned close and said that he had been mighty good not to ask about her
+all these many days, and that if he would engage to do as well for as long
+a time again, and to try now to have another good dream I would tell him
+that she was sleeping and was without any alarming symptoms. O lucky
+speech! It was true when it was uttered; but how soon the hour belied it!
+
+As he obediently closed his eyes, his hand stole out from the side of the
+covers and felt for mine. I gave it and as he kept it his thought seemed
+to me to flow into my brain. I could feel him, as it were, thinking of his
+wife, loving her through all the deeps of his still nature with seven--
+yes, seventy--times the passion that I fancied would ever be possible to
+that young girl I had seen a few hours earlier showing her heart to the
+world, with falling hair and rending sobs. As he lay thus trying to court
+back his dream of perfect roses, I had my delight in knowing he would
+never dream-what Senda saw so plainly, yet with such faultless modesty--
+that all true love draws its strength and fragrance from the riches not of
+the loved one's, but of the lover's soul.
+
+His grasp had begun to loosen, when I thought I heard from the wife's room
+a sudden sound that made my mind flash back to the saucer I had failed to
+bring in. It was as though the old-fashioned, unweighted window-sash,
+having been slightly lifted, had slipped from the fingers and fallen shut.
+I hearkened, and the next instant there came softly searching through
+doors, through walls, through my own flesh and blood, a long half-wailing
+sigh. Fontenette tightened on my hand, then dropped it, and opening his
+eyes sharply, asked, "What was that?"
+
+"What was what, old fellow?" I pretended to have been more than half
+asleep myself.
+
+"Did I only dream I 'eard it, thad noise?"
+
+"That isn't a hard thing to do in your condition," I replied, with my
+serenest smile, and again he closed his eyes. Yet for two or three minutes
+it was plain he listened; but soon he forbore and began once more to
+slumber. Then very soon I faintly detected a stir in the parlor, and
+stealing to the door to listen through the dining-room, came abruptly upon
+the old black woman. Disaster was written on her face and when she spoke
+tears came into her eyes.
+
+"De madam want you," she said, and passed in to take my place.
+
+As I went on to the parlor, Mrs. Smith, just inside Mrs. Fontenette's
+door, beckoned me. As I drew near I made an inquiring motion in the
+direction of our neighbor across the way.
+
+"I'm hopeful," was her whispered reply; "but--in here"--she shook her
+head. Just then the new maid came from our house, and Mrs. Smith whispered
+again-- "Go over quickly to the Baron; he's in his room. 'Twas he came for
+me. He'll tell you all. But he'll not tell his wife, and she mustn't
+know."
+
+As I ran across the street I divined almost in full what had taken place.
+
+I had noticed the possibility of some of the facts when I had left the
+Baron asleep on the parlor lounge, but they could have done no harm, even
+when Senda did not come, had it not been for two other facts which I had
+failed to foresee; one, that we had unwittingly overtasked our willing old
+nurse, and in her chair in Mrs. Fontenette's room she was going to fall
+asleep; and the other that the entomologist would waken.
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+And now see what a cunning trap the most innocent intentions may sometimes
+set. There was a mirror in the sick-room purposely so placed that, with
+the parlor door ajar, the watcher, but not the patient, could see into the
+parlor, and could be seen from the parlor when sitting anywhere between
+the mirror and the window beyond it. This window was the one that looked
+into the side garden. Purposely, too, the lounge had been placed so as to
+give and receive these advantages. A candle stood on the window's inner
+ledge and was screened from the unseen bed, but shone outward through the
+window and inward upon the mirror. The front door of the parlor opened
+readily to anyone within or without who knew enough to use its two latches
+at once, but neither within nor without to--the Baron, say--who did not
+know.
+
+Do you see it? As he lay awake on the lounge his eye was, of course, drawn
+constantly to the mirror by the reflected light of the candle, and to its
+images of the nodding watcher and of the window just beyond. So lying and
+gazing, he had suddenly beheld that which brought him from the lounge in
+an instant, net in hand, and tortured to find the front door--by which he
+would have slipped out and around to the window--fastened! What he saw was
+the moth--the moth so many years unseen. Now it sipped at the saucer of
+sweet stuff, now hovered over it, now was lost in the dark, and now
+fluttered up or slid down the pane, lured by the beam of the candle.
+
+If he was not to lose it, there was but one thing to do. With his eyes
+fixed, moth-mad, on the window, he glided in, passed the two sleepers, and
+stealthily lifted the sash with one hand, the other poising the net. The
+moth dropped under, the net swept after it, and the sash slipped and fell.
+Mrs. Fontenette rose wildly, and when she saw first the old woman, half
+starting from her seat with frightened stare, and then the entomologist
+speechless, motionless, and looming like an apparition, she gave that cry
+her husband heard, and fell back upon the pillow in a convulsion.
+
+I found the Baron sitting on the side of his bed like a child trying to be
+awake without waking. No, not _trying_ to do or be anything; but aimless,
+dazed, silent, lost.
+
+He obeyed, automatically, my every request. I set about getting him to bed
+at once, putting his clothes beyond his reach, and even locking his
+balcony door, without a sign of objection from him. Then I left him for a
+moment, and calling Senda from the nursery to the parlor told her the
+state of the different patients, including her husband, but without the
+hows and whys except that I had found him in our garden with his precious
+net. "And now, as it will soon be day, Mrs. Smith and I--with the servants
+and others--can take care of the four."
+
+"If I"--meekly interrupted the sweet woman--"vill go for se doctors? I
+vill go." Soon she was off.
+
+Then I went back to her husband, and finding his mood so changed that he
+was eager to explain everything, I let him talk; which I soon saw was a
+blunder; for he got pitifully excited, and wanted to go over the same
+ground again and again. One matter I was resolved to fix in his mind
+without delay. "Mark you," I charged him, "your wife must never know a
+word of this!"
+
+"Eh?--No"--and the next instant the sick woman across the way was filling
+all his thought: "Mine Gott! she rice oop scaredt in t'e bedt, choost so!"
+and up he would start. Then as I pressed him down--"Mine Gott! I vould not
+go in, if I dhink she would do dot. Hmm! Hmm! I am sorry!--Undt I tidt not
+t'e mawdt get.
+
+"Hmm! Even I titn't saw vhere it iss gone. Hmm! Hmm! I am sorry!
+
+"Undt dot door kit shtuck! Hmm! Undt dot vindow iss not right made. Hmm!
+
+"I tidn't vant to do dot--you know? Hmm! I am sorry!--Ach, mine Gott! she
+rice oop scaredt in t'e bedt, choost so!" Thus round and round. What to do
+for him I did not know!
+
+Yet he grew quiet, and was as good as silent, when Senda, long before I
+began to look for her, stood unbonneted at my side in a soft glow of
+physical animation, her anxiety all hidden and with a pink spot on each
+cheek. I was startled. Had _I_ slept--or had she somehow ridden?
+
+"Are the street-cars running already?" I asked.
+
+"No," she murmured, producing a vial and looking for a glass. "'Tis I haf
+been running alreadty. Sat iss not so tiresome as to valk. Also it is
+safeh. I runned all se vay. Vill you sose drops drop faw me?" Her hand
+trembled.
+
+I took the vial but did not meet her glance: for I was wondering if there
+was anything in the world she could ask of me that I would not do, and at
+such a time it is good for anyone as weak as I am to look at inanimate
+things.
+
+"You got word to all three doctors?"
+
+"Yes;" she gave her chin the drollest little twist--"sey are all coming
+--vhen sey get ready."
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+That is what they did; but the first who came, and the second, brought
+fresh courage; for the Baron--"would most likely be all right again,
+before the day was over"; our child was "virtually well"; and from next
+door-"better!" was the rapturous news. The third physician, too, was
+pleased with Fontenette's case, and we began at once to send the night-
+watchers to their rest by turns.
+
+But there the gladness ended. At Mrs. Fontenette's bedside he asked no
+questions. In the parlor he said to us:
+
+"Well, ... you've done your best; ... I've done mine; ... and it's of no
+use."
+
+"Oh, Doctor!" exclaimed Mrs. Smith.
+
+"Why, didn't you know it?" He jerked his thumb toward the sick-room. "She
+knows it. She told me she knew it, with her first glance."
+
+He pondered. "I wish she were not so near _him_. If she were only in here
+--you see?"
+
+Yes, we saw; the two patients would then be, on their either hand, one
+whole room apart, as if in two squares of a checkerboard that touch only
+at one corner.
+
+"Well," he said, "we must move her at once. I'll show you how; I'll stay
+and help you."
+
+It seemed more as though we helped him--a very little--as we first moved
+her and then took the light bedstead apart, set it up again in the parlor,
+and laid her in it, all without a noticeable sound, and with only great
+comfort of mind to her--for she knew why we did it. Then I made all haste
+to my own house again and had the relief to see, as Senda came toward me
+from her husband's room, that he had told her nothing. "Vell?" she eagerly
+asked.
+
+"Well, Monsieur Fontenette is greatly improved!"
+
+"O sat iss goodt! And se Madame; she, too, is betteh?--a little?--eh--
+no-o?"
+
+I said that what the doctor had feared, a "lesion," had taken place, and
+that there was no longer any hope of her life. At which she lighted up
+with a lovely defiance.
+
+"Ho-o! no long-eh any hope! Yes, sare _iss_ long-er any hope! Vhere iss
+sat doc-toh? Sare _shall_ be hope! Kif _me_ sat patient! I can keep se
+vatch of mine huss-bandt at se _same_ time. He hass not a relapse! Kif me
+se patient! Many ossehs befo'e I haf savedt vhen hadt sose doctohs no
+long-eh any hope! Mine Gott! vas sare so much hope vhen she and her
+hussbandt mine sick hussbandt and me out of se street took in? Vill you
+let stay by mine hussbandt, anyhow a short vhile, one of yo' so goodt
+sairvants?" The instant I assented she flew down the veranda steps,
+through the garden, and out across the street.
+
+I lingered a few moments with the entomologist before leaving him with
+others. He asked me only one question: "Hmm! Hmm! How she iss?"
+
+"Why," said I, brightly, "I think she feels rather more comfortable than
+she did."
+
+"Hmm!--Hmm!--I am sorry--Hmm!--Ach! mine Gott, I am so hoongary!--Hmm! I
+am so dtired mit dot sou-oup undt dose creckers!--Hmm! I vish I haf vonce
+a whole pifshtea-ak undt a glahss beer--hmm!"
+
+"Hmm!" I echoed, "your subsequent marketing wouldn't cost much." I went
+down town on some imperative office business, came back in a cab, gave
+word to be called at such an hour, and lay down. But while I slept my
+order was countermanded and when I awakened it was once more midnight. I
+went to my open window and heard, through his balcony door--locked, now,
+and its key in my pocket--the Baron, snoring. Then I sprang into my
+clothes and sped across the street.
+
+I went first around to the outer door of the dining-room, and was briefly
+told the best I could have hoped, of Fontenette. I returned to the front
+and stepped softly into what had been Mrs. Fontenette's room. Finding no
+one in it I waited, and when I presently heard voices in the other room, I
+touched its door-knob. Mrs. Smith came out, closed the door carefully, and
+sank into a seat.
+
+"It's been a noble fight!" she said, smiling up through her tears. "When
+the doctor came back and saw how wonderfully the--the worst--had been held
+off, he joined in the battle! He's been here three times since!"
+
+"And can it be that she is going to pull through?"
+
+My wife's face went down into her hands. "O, no--no. She's dying now--
+dying in Senda's arms!"
+
+Her ear, quicker than mine, heard some sign within and she left me. But
+she was back almost at once, whispering:
+
+"She knows you're here, and says she has a message to her husband which
+she can give only to you."
+
+We gazed into each other's eyes. "Go in," she said.
+
+As I entered, Senda tenderly disengaged herself, went out, and closed the
+door.
+
+I drew near in silence and she began at once to speak, bidding me take the
+chair Senda had left, and with a tender smile thanking me for coming.
+
+Then she said faintly and slowly, but with an unfaltering voice, "I want
+you to know one or two things so that if it ever should be my husband's
+affliction to find out how foolish and undutiful I have been, you can tell
+them to him. Tell him my wrongdoing was, from first to last, almost
+totally--almost totally----"
+
+"Do you mean--intangible?"
+
+"Yes, yes, intangible. Then if he should say that the intangible part is
+the priceless part--the life, the beauty, the very essence of the whole
+matter--isn't it strange that we women are slower than men to see that--
+tell him I saw it, saw it and confessed it when for his sake I was
+slipping away from him by stealth out of life up to my merciful Judge.
+
+"I may not be saying these things in their right order, but--tell him I
+wish he'd marry again; only let him first be sure the woman loves him as
+truly and deeply as he is sure to love her. I find I've never truly loved
+him till now. If he doesn't know it don't ever tell him; but tell him I
+died loving him and blessing him--for the unearned glorious love he gave
+me all my days. That's all. That's all to him. But I would like to send
+one word to"--she lifted her hand--
+
+"Across the street?" I murmured.
+
+Her eyes said yes. "Tell _him_--you may never see the right time for it,
+but if you do--tell him I craved his forgiveness."
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Yes--yes, tell him so; it was far the most my fault; he is such a child;
+such a child of nature, I mean. Tell him I said it sounds very pretty to
+call ourselves and each other children of nature, but we have no right to
+be such. The word is 'Be thou clean,' and if we are not masters of nature
+we can't do it. Tell him that, will you? And tell him he has nothing to
+grieve for; I was only a dangerous toy, and I want him to love the dear
+Father for taking it away from him before he had hurt himself.
+
+"Now I am ready to go--only--that hymn those black women--in the cemetery
+--you remember? I've made another verse to it. You'll find it--afterward--
+on a scrap of paper between the leaves of my Bible. It isn't good poetry,
+of course; it's the only verse I ever composed. May I say it to you just
+for my--my testimony? It's this:
+
+     Yet though I have sinned, Lord, all others above,
+     Though feeble my prayers, Lord; my tears all unseen;
+     I'll trust in thy love, Lord; I'll trust in thy love--
+     O I'll trust in thy love like Mary Mahgaleen."
+
+An exalted smile lighted her face as she sunk deeper into the pillows. She
+tried to speak again, but her voice failed. I bent my ear and she
+whispered--"Senda."
+
+As I beckoned Senda in, Mrs. Smith motioned for me to come to her where
+she stood at a window whose sash she had slightly lifted; the same to
+which the moth had once been lured by the little puddle of sweet drink and
+the candle.
+
+"Do you want to see a parable?" she whispered, and all but blinded with
+tears, she pointed to the lost moth lying half in, half out of the window,
+still beautiful but crushed; crushed with its wings full spread, not by
+anyone's choice, but because there are so many things in this universe
+that not even God can help from being as they are.
+
+At a whispered call we turned, and Senda, in the door, herself all tears,
+made eager signs for us to come. The last summons had surprised even the
+dying. We went in noiseless haste, and found her just relaxing on Senda's
+arm. Yet she revived an instant; a quiver went through her frame like the
+dying shudder of a butterfly, her eyes gazed appealingly into Senda's,
+then fixed, and our poor little Titania was gone.
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+The story is nearly told. Before I close let me confess how heartlessly I
+have told it. Pardon that; and pardon, too, the self-consciousness that
+makes me beg not to be remembered as I seem to myself in the tale--a
+tiptoeing, peeping figure prowling by night after undue revelations, and
+using them--to the humiliation of souls cleaner than mine could ever
+pretend to be.
+
+Next day, by stealth again, we buried the little rose-lady, unknown to her
+husband. We could not keep the fact long from the entomologist, for he was
+up and about the house again. Nor was there equal need. So when the last
+rites were over I told him, but without giving any part of her message--I
+couldn't do it! I just said she had left us.
+
+His eye did not moisten, but he paled, trembled, wiped his brow. Then I
+handed him the crushed moth, and he was his convalescent self again.
+
+"Hmm!--Dot iss a pity she kit smashed; I titn't vant to do dot."
+
+I thought maybe he felt more than he showed, for he fretted to be allowed
+to take a walk alone beyond the gate and the corner. With some misgivings
+his wife let him go, and when she was almost anxious enough over his tardy
+stay to start after him he came back looking very much better. But the
+next morning, when we found him in the burning fever of an unmistakable
+relapse, he confessed that the German keeper of an eating-stall in the
+neighboring market, for his hunger's and the Fatherland's sake, had
+treated him to his "whole pifshtea-ak undt glahss be-eh."
+
+He lived only a few days. Through all his deliriums he hunted butterflies
+and beetles, and died insensible to his wife's endearments, repeating the
+Latin conjugations of his inconceivable boyhood.
+
+So they both, caterpillar and rose, were gone; but the memory of them
+stays, green--yes, and fragrant--not alone with Fontenette, and not only
+with Senda besides, but with us also. How often I recall the talks on
+theology I had used sometimes to let myself fall into with the little
+unsuccessful mistress of "rose-es" who first brought the miser of
+knowledge into our garden, and whenever I do so I wonder, and wonder, and
+lose my bearings and find and lose them again, and wonder and wonder--what
+God has done with the entomologist.
+
+We never had to tell Fontenette that he was widowed. We had only to be
+long enough silent, and when he ceased, for a time, to get better, and
+rather lost the strength he had been gaining, and on entering his room we
+found him always with his face to the wall, we saw that he knew. So for
+his sake I was glad when one day, without facing round to me, his hand
+tightened on mine in a wild tremor and he groaned, "Tell it me--tell it."
+
+I told it. I thought it well to give him one of her messages and withhold
+the rest, like the unscrupulous friend I always try to be; and when he had
+heard quite through--"Tell him I died loving him and blessing him for the
+unearned glorious love he gave me all our days"--he made as if to say the
+word was beyond all his deserving, turned upon his face, and soaked the
+pillow with his tears. But from that day he began slowly but steadily to
+get well.
+
+We kept Senda with us as long as we could, and when at length she put her
+foot down so that you might have heard it--say like the dropping of a nut
+in the wood--and declared that go she must-must-must! we first laughed,
+then scoffed, and then grew violent, and the battle forced her backward.
+But when we tried to salary her to stay, _she_ laughed, scoffed, grew
+violent, and retook her entrenchments. And then, when she offered the
+ultimatum that we must take pay for keeping her, we took our turn again at
+the three forms of demonstration, and a late moon rose upon a drawn
+battle. Since then we have learned to count it one of our dearest rights
+to get "put out" at Senda's outrageous reasonableness, but she doesn't
+fret, for "sare is neveh any sundeh viss se lightening."
+
+The issue of this first contest was decided the next day by Fontenette,
+still on his bed of convalescence. "Can I raise enough money in yo' office
+to go at France?"
+
+"You can raise twice enough, Fontenette, if it's to try to bring back some
+new business."
+
+"Well--yes, 'tis for that. Of co'se, besides--"
+
+"Yes, I know: of course."
+
+"But tha'z what puzzle' me. What I'm going do with that house heah, whilse
+I'm yondeh! I wou'n' sell it--ah no! I wou'n' sell one of those roses! An'
+no mo' I wou'n' rent it. Tha's a monument, that house heah, you know?"
+
+"Yes, I know." He never found out how well I knew.
+
+"Fontenette, I'll tell you what to do with it."
+
+"No, you don't need; I know whad thad is. An' thaz the same I want--me.
+Only--you thing thad wou'n' be hasking her too much troub'?"
+
+"No, indeed. There's nothing else you could name that she'd be so glad to
+do."
+
+When I told Senda I had said that, the tears stood in her eyes. "Ah, sat
+vass ri-ight! O, sare shall neveh a veed be in sat karten two dayss oldt!
+An' sose roses--sey shall be pairfect ever' vun!"
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+As perfect as roses every one were her words kept. And Fontenette got his
+new business but could not come back that year, nor the second, nor the
+third. The hither-side of his affairs he assigned for the time to a
+relative, a very young fellow, but ever so capable--"a hustler," as our
+fat friend would say in these days. We missed the absentee constantly, but
+forgave his detention the easier because incidentally he was clearing up a
+matter of Senda's over there, in which certain displeased kindred had
+overreached her. Also because of his letters to her, which she so often
+did us the honor to show us.
+
+The first few were brief, formal and colorless; but after some time they
+began to take on grace after grace, until at length we had to confess that
+to have known him only as we had known him hitherto would have been to
+have been satisfied with the reverse of the tapestry, and never fully to
+have seen the excellence of his mind or the modest nobility of his spirit.
+Frequently we felt very sure we saw also that no small share of their
+captivating glow was reflected from Senda's replies--of which she never
+would tell us a word. The faults in his written English were surprisingly
+few, and to our minds only the more endeared it and him. Maybe we were not
+judicial critics.
+
+Yet we could pass strictures, and as the months lengthened out into years
+these winged proxies stirred up, on our side of the street, a profound and
+ever-growing impatience. O, yes, every letter was a garden of beautiful
+thoughts, still; but think of it! _pansies_ where roses might have been;
+and a garden wherein--to speak figuratively--the nightingale never sang.
+
+On a certain day of All Saints, the fourth after the scourge, Senda sat at
+tea with us. Our mood was chastened, but peaceful. We had come from
+visiting at the sunset hour the cemetery where in the morning the two
+women and our old nurse had decked the tombs of our dead with flowers. I
+had noticed that at no tomb front were these tokens piled more abundantly,
+or more beautifully or fragrantly, than at those of Flora and the
+entomologist; it was always so. I had remarked this on the spot, and
+Senda, with her rearranging touch still caressing their splendid masses,
+replied,
+
+"So?--vell--I hope siss shall mine vork and mine pleassure be until
+mineself I shall fade like se floweh."
+
+I inwardly resented the speech, but said nothing. I suppose it was over my
+head.
+
+Now, at the table, she explained as to certain costly blooms about which I
+had inquired, that they were Fontenette's special offering, for which he
+always sent the purchase money ahead of time and with detailed requests.
+Whereat, remembering how she had formerly glozed and gilded the
+entomologist's unthrift, I remarked, one-fourth in play, three-fourths in
+earnest,
+
+"A good plain business man isn't the least noble work of God, after all."
+
+"No," said Senda, without looking up; and, after a long, meditative
+breath, she added, very slowly,
+
+"Se koot Kott makes not all men for se same high calling. If Kott make a
+man to do no betteh san make a living or a fawtune, it iss right for se
+man to make it; se _man_ iss not to blame. And now I vant to tell you se
+news of sat letteh from----"
+
+"The other side," we suggested, and invited her smile, but without
+success.
+
+"Yes, from se osseh si-ide; sat letteh vhat you haf brought me since more
+as a veek ago; and also vhy I haf not sat letteh given you to read. Sat
+iss--if you like to know--yes?
+
+"Vell, sen I vill tell you. And sare are two sings to tell. Se fairst is a
+ve'y small, but se secondt iss a ve'y lahge. And se fairst is sat that _I_
+am now se Countess.
+
+"So? you are glad? I sank you ve'y much. I sink sat iss not much trouble
+--to be a countess--in Ame'ica?
+
+"Se secondt sing"--here a servant entered, and, it seemed to me, never
+would go out, but Senda waited till we were again alone--"se secondt--
+pahdon me, I sink I shall betteh se secondt sing divide again into two aw
+sree. And se fairst is sat Monsieur Fontenette vill like ve'y--ve'y much
+to come home--now--right avay."
+
+We lifted hands to clap and opened mouths to hurrah, but she raised a
+warning hand.
+
+"No, vait--if you pleass.
+
+"Se secondt of sose two or sree sings--it is sat--he--Monsieur Fontenette
+--hass ask me--"  Our hearts rose slowly into our throats--"Ze vun
+qvestion to vich sare can be only--se--vun--answeh."
+
+At this we gulped our breath like schoolgirls and glowed. But the more
+show we made of hopeful and pleading smiles, the more those dear eyes, so
+seldom wet, filled up with tears.
+
+"_He_ sinks sare can two answehs be, and he like to heah which is se
+answeh I shall gif him, so he shall know if he shall come--now--aw if he
+shall come--neveh.
+
+"O my sweet friend,"--to Mrs. Smith, down whose, face the salt drops stole
+unhindered--"sare iss nossing faw _you_ to cry." She smiled heroically.
+
+I could be silent no longer. "Senda, what have you answered?"
+
+"I haf answered"--her lips quivered till she gnawed them cruelly--"I am
+sorry to take such a long time to tell you sat--but--I--I find sat--ve'y
+hahd--to tell." She smiled and gnawed her lips again. "I haf answered--
+
+"Do you sink, my deah, sat siss is ri-ight to tell the we'y vords sat I
+haf toldt him?--yes?--vell--he tell me I shall se answeh make in vun vord
+--is sat not like a man?
+
+"But I had to take six. And sey are sese: I cannot vhispeh across se
+ocean."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Strong Hearts, by George W. Cable
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