Bonaventure Part 16

They came. Claude shook hands and stepped inside. Sidonie, with eyes on the ground, put forth her hand. The honored guest held it lingeringly, and the ceremonies were at an end.

"Come," said 'Mian, beckoning away the great G. W.'s probable relative. They pa.s.sed out together. "Come!" he repeated, looking back and beckoning again; "walk een! all han'! walk een house!"

The guardian pair followed, hand in hand.

"Claude," said Bonaventure tenderly; but--

"Claude," more firmly said St. Pierre.

The boy looked for one instant from the master's face to Sidonie's; then turned, grasped his father's hand, and followed the others.

A blaze of light filled Bonaventure's heart. He turned to Sidonie to give his hand--both her hands were clasped upon each other, and they only tightened. But their eyes met--ah! those Acadian maidens, they do it all with their eyes!--and lover and maiden pa.s.sed out and walked forth side by side. They are going that way still, only--with hands joined.

AU LARGE.

CHAPTER I.

THE POT-HUNTER.

The sun was just rising, as a man stepped from his slender dug-out and drew half its length out upon the oozy bank of a pretty bayou. Before him, as he turned away from the water, a small gray railway-platform and frame station-house, drowsing on long legs in the mud and water, were still veiled in the translucent shade of the deep cypress swamp, whose long moss drapings almost overhung them on the side next the brightening dawn. The solemn gray festoons did overhang the farthest two or three of a few flimsy wooden houses and a saw-mill with its lumber, logs, and sawdust, its cold furnace and idle engine.

As with gun and game this man mounted by a short, rude ladder to firmer footing on the platform, a negro, who sat fishing for his breakfast on the bank a few yards up the stream, where it bent from the north and west, slowly lifted his eyes, noted that the other was a white man, an Acadian, and brought his gaze back again to hook and line.

He had made out these facts by the man's shape and dress, for the face was in shade. The day, I say, was still in its genesis. The waters that slid so languidly between the two silent men as not to crook one line of the station-house's image inverted in their clear dark depths, had not yet caught a beam upon their whitest water-lily, nor yet upon their tallest bulrush; but the tops of the giant cypresses were green and luminous, and as the Acadian glanced abroad westward, in the open sky far out over the vast marshy breadths of the "shaking prairie,"[5] two still clouds, whose under surfaces were yet dusky and pink, sparkled on their sunward edges like a frosted fleece.

You could not have told whether the Acadian saw the black man or not.

His dog, soiled and wet, stood beside his knee, p.r.i.c.ked his ears for a moment at sight of the negro, and then dropped them.

[5] The "shaking prairie," "trembling prairie," or _prairie tremblante_, is low, level, treeless delta land, having a top soil of vegetable mould overlying immense beds of quicksand.

It was September. The comfortable air could only near by be seen to stir the tops of the high reeds whose crowding myriads stretched away south, west, and north, an open sea of green, its immense distances relieved here and there by strips of swamp forest tinged with their peculiar purple haze. Eastward the railroad's long causeway and telegraph-poles narrowed on the view through its wide axe-hewn lane in the overtowering swamp. New Orleans, sixty miles or more away, was in that direction. Westward, rails, causeway, and telegraph, tapered away again across the illimitable hidden quicksands of the "trembling prairie" till the green disguise of reeds and rushes closed in upon the attenuated line, and only a small notch in a far strip of woods showed where it still led on toward Texas. Behind the Acadian the smoke of woman's early industry began to curl from two or three low chimneys.

But his eye lingered in the north. He stood with his dog curled at his feet beside a bunch of egrets,--killed for their plumage,--the b.u.t.t of his long fowling-piece resting on the platform, and the arm half outstretched whose hand grasped the barrels near the muzzle. The hand, toil-hardened and weather-browned, showed, withal, antiquity of race.

His feet were in rough muddy brogans, but even so they were smallish and shapely. His garments were coa.r.s.e, but there were no tatters anywhere. He wore a wide Campeachy hat. His brown hair was too long, but it was fine. His eyes, too, were brown, and, between brief moments of alertness, sedate. Sun and wind had darkened his face, and his pale brown beard curled meagre and untrimmed on a cheek and chin that in forty years had never felt a razor.

Some miles away in the direction in which he was looking, the broadening sunlight had struck and brightened the single red lug-sail of a boat whose unseen hull, for all the eye could see, was coming across the green land on a dry keel. But the bayou, hidden in the tall rushes, was its highway; for suddenly the canvas was black as it turned its shady side, and soon was red again as another change of direction caught the sunbeams upon its tense width and showed that, with much more wind out there than it would find by and by in here under the lee of the swamp, it was following the unseen meanderings of the stream. Presently it reached a more open s.p.a.ce where a stretch of the water lay shining in the distant view. Here the boat itself came into sight, showed its bunch of some half-dozen pa.s.sengers for a minute or two, and vanished again, leaving only its slanting red sail skimming nautilus-like over the vast breezy expanse.

Yet more than two hours later the boat's one blue-shirted, barefoot Sicilian sailor in red worsted cap had with one oar at the stern just turned her drifting form into the gla.s.sy calm by the railway-station, tossed her anchor ash.o.r.e, and was still busy with small matters of boat-keeping, while his five pa.s.sengers clambered to the platform.

The place showed somewhat more movement now. The negro had long ago wound his line upon its crooked pole, gathered up his stiffened fishes from the bank, thrust them into the pockets of his shamelessly ragged trousers, and was gone to his hut in the underbrush. But the few amphibious households round about were pa.s.sing out and in at the half-idle tasks of their slow daily life, and a young white man was bustling around, now into the station and now out again upon the platform, with authority in his frown and a pencil and two matches behind his ear. It was Monday. Two or three shabby negroes with broad, collapsed, glazed leather travelling-bags of the old carpet-sack pattern dragged their formless feet about, waiting to take the train for the next station to hire out there as rice harvesters, and one, with his back turned, leaned motionless against an open window gazing in upon the ticking telegraph instruments. A black woman in blue cotton gown, red-and-yellow Madras turban, and some sportsman's cast-off hunting-shoes minus the shoe-strings, crouched against the wall. Beside her stood her shapely mulatto daughter, with head-covering of white cotton cloth, in which female instinct had discovered the lines of grace and disposed them after the folds of the Egyptian fellah head--dress. A portly white man, with decided polish in his commanding air, evidently a sugar-planter from the Mississippi "coast" ten miles northward, moved about in spurred boots, and put personal questions to the negroes, calling them "boys," and the mulattress, "girl."

The pot-hunter was still among them; or rather, he had drawn apart from the rest, and stood at the platform's far end, leaning on his gun, an innocent, wild-animal look in his restless eyes, and a slumberous agility revealed in his strong, supple loins. The station-agent went to him, and with abrupt questions and a.s.sertions, to which the man replied in low, grave monosyllables, bought his game,--as he might have done two hours before, but--an Acadian can wait. There was some trouble to make exact change, and the agent, saying "Hold on, I'll fix it," went into the station just as the group from the Sicilian's boat reached the platform. The agent came bustling out again with his eyes on his palm, counting small silver.

"Here!" But he spoke to the empty air. He glanced about with an offended frown.

"Achille!" There was no reply. He turned to one of the negroes: "Where's that 'Cajun?" n.o.body knew. Down where his canoe had lain, tiny rillets of muddy water were still running into its imprint left in the mire; but canoe, dog, and man had vanished into the rank undergrowth of the swamp.

CHAPTER II.

CLAUDE.

Of the party that had come in the Sicilian's boat four were men and one a young woman. She was pretty; so pretty, and of such restful sweetness of countenance, that the homespun garb, the brand-new creaking gaiters, and a hat that I dare not describe were nothing against her. Her large, soft, dark eyes, more sweetly but not less plainly than the attire, confessed her a denizen of the woods.

Not so the man who seemed to be her husband. His dress was rustic enough; and yet you would have seen at once that it was not the outward circ.u.mstance, but an inward singularity, that had made him and must always keep him a stranger to the ordinary ways of men. There was an emotional exaltation in his face as he hastily led his companions with military directness to the ticket window. Two others of the men were evidently father and son, the son barely twenty years of age, the parent certainly not twice as old; and the last of the group was a strong, sluggish man of years somewhat near, but under, fifty.

They bought but one ticket; but, as one may say, they all bought it, the youngest extricating its price with difficulty from the knotted corner of his red handkerchief, and the long, thin hand of the leader making the purchase, while the eyes of the others followed every movement with unconscious absorption.

The same unemotional attentiveness was in their forms as their slow feet drifted here and there always after the one leader, their eyes on his demonstrative hands, and their ears drinking in his discourse. He showed them the rails of the track, how smooth they were, how they rested on their cross-ties, and how they were spiked in place always the same width apart. They crowded close about him at the telegraph-window while he interpreted with unconscious originality the wonders of electricity. Their eyes rose slowly from the window up and out along the ascending wires to where they mounted the poles and eastward and westward leaped away sinking and rising from insulator to insulator. One of the party pointed at these green dots of gla.s.s and murmured a question, and the leader's wife laid her small hand softly upon his arm to check the energy of his utterance as he said, audibly to all on the platform, and with a strong French accent:

"They?--are there lest the heat of the telegraph fluid inflame the post-es!" He laid his own hand tenderly upon his wife's in response to its warning pressure, yet turned to the sugar-planter and asked:

"Sir, pardon; do I not explain truly?"

The planter, with restrained smile, was about to reply, when some one called, "There she comes!" and every eye was turned to the east.

"Truly!" exclaimed the inquirer, in a voice made rich with emotion.

"Truly, she comes! She comes! The iron horse, though they call him 'she'!" He turned to the planter--"Ah! sir, why say they thus many or thus many horse-power, when truly"--his finger-tip pattered upon his temple--"truly it is mind-power!"

The planter, smiling decorously, turned away, and the speaker looked again down the long vacant track to where the small dark focus of every one's attention was growing on the sight. He spoke again, in lower voice but with larger emotion.

"Mind-power! thought-power! knowledge-power! learning and thinking power!" He caught his wife's arm. "See! see, Sidonie, my dear! See her enhancing in magnitude so fastly approaching!" As he spoke a puff of white vapor lifted from the object and spread out against the blue, the sunbeams turned it to silver and pearl, and a moment later came the far-away, long, wild scream of the locomotive.

"Retire!" exclaimed the husband, drawing back all his gazing companions at once. "Retire! retire! the whisttel is to signify warning to retire from too close the edge of the galerie! There! rest at this point. 'Tis far enough. Now, each and all resolve to stand and shrink not whilst that iron mare, eating coal, drinking hot water, and spitting fire, shall seem, but falsely, threatening to come on the platform. Ah! Claude!" he cried to the youngest of the group, "now shall you behold what I have told you--that vast am-azement of civilize-ation anni-_high_-lating s.p.a.ce and also time at the tune of twenty miles the hour!" He wheeled upon the planter--"Sir, do I exaggerate?"

"Forty miles," replied the planter; "sometimes fifty."

"Friends,--confirmated! more than twicefold confirmated. Forty, sometimes fifty! Thou heardest it, Maximian Roussel! Not from me, but from the gentleman himself! Forty, sometimes fifty! Such the march, the forward march of civilize-ation!"

His words were cut short by the unearthly neigh of the engine. Sidonie smote herself backward against her husband.

"Nay, Sidonie, fear thou nothing! Remember, dear Sidonie, thy promise of self-control! Stand boldly still, St. Pierre; both father and son, stand." The speaker was unheard. Hissing, clanging, thundering, and shaking the earth, the engine and train loomed up to the platform and stopped.

"Come!" cried Bonaventure Deschamps; "lose no moment, dear friends.

Tide and time--even less the railroad--wait for n.o.body. Claude, remember; give your ticket of pa.s.sage to none save the conductor only.

'Tis print' in letter' of gold on front his cap--'Conductor'--Stop! he is here.--Sir, this young man, inexperienced, is taking pa.s.sage for"--

"Shoot him aboard," replied a uniformed man, and walked on without a pause. Claude moved toward the train. Bonaventure seized him by both arms and gazed on him.

"Claude St. Pierre! Claude, my boy, pride of Grande Pointe, second only with Sidonie, farewell!"