Bonaventure Part 32

Presently their eyes fastened on each other steadily. Tarbox broke the silence.

"_You_ don't care how the creva.s.se turns out. I've asked you a question now twice, and you don't even hear."

"Why you don't a.s.s ag'in?" responded the younger man, reaching over to the meat-dish and rubbing his bread in the last of the gravy. Some small care called St. Pierre away from the board. Tarbox leaned forward on his elbows, and, not knowing he quoted, said softly,--

"There's something up. What is it?"

"Op?" asked Claude, in his full voice, frowning. "Op where?--w'at, _w'at_ is?"

"Ah, yes!" said Tarbox, with affected sadness. "Yes, that's it; I thought so.

'Oh-hon for somebody, oh hey for somebody.'"

Claude stopped with a morsel half-way to his mouth, glared at him several seconds, and then resumed his eating; not like a horse now, but like a bad dog gnawing an old bone. He glanced again angrily at the embodiment of irreverence opposite. Mr. Tarbox smiled. Claude let slip, not intending it, an audible growl, with his eyes in the plate.

Mr. Tarbox's smile increased to a noiseless laugh, and grew and grew until it took hopeless possession of him. His nerves relaxed, he trembled, the table trembled with him, his eyes filled with tears, his brows lifted laboriously, he covered his lips with one hand, and his abdomen shrank until it pained him. And Claude knew, and showed he knew it all; that was what made it impossible to stop. At length, with tottering knees, Mr. Tarbox rose and started silently for the door. He knew Claude's eyes were following. He heard him rise to his feet. He felt as though he would have given a thousand dollars if his legs would but last him through the doorway. But to crown all, St. Pierre met him just on the threshold, breaking, with unintelligent sympathy, into a broad, simple smile. Tarbox laid one hand upon the door for support, and at that moment there was a hurtling sound; something whizzed by Tarbox's ear, and the meat-dish crashed against the door-post, and flew into a hundred pieces.

The book-agent ran like a deer for a hundred yards and fell grovelling upon the turf, the laugh still griping him with the energy of a panther's jaws, while Claude, who, in blind pursuit, had come threshing into his father's arms, pulled his hat over his eyes and strode away towards the skiff ferry. As Mr. Tarbox returned towards the cottage, St. Pierre met him, looking very grave, if not displeased. The swamper spoke first.

"Da.s.s mighty good for you I was yondah to stop dat boy. He would 'a'

half-kill' you."

"He'd have served me ex-actly right," said the other, and laughed again. St. Pierre shook his head, as though this confession were poor satisfaction, and said,--

"Da.s.s not safe--make a 'Cajun mad. He dawn't git mad easy, but when he _git_ mad it bre'k out all ove' him, ya.s.s. He goin' feel bad all day now; I see tear' in his eye when he walk off."

"I'm sorry," said Tarbox sincerely, and presently added, "Now, while you look up a picked gang of timber-men, I'll see if I can charter a little stern-wheel steamer, get that written permission from Madame Beausoleil to cut trees on her land, and so forth, and so forth.

You'll hardly see me before bedtime again."

It was the first hour of the afternoon when Claude left his little workroom and walked slowly down to, and across, Ca.n.a.l Street and into Bourbon. He had spent the intervening hours seated at his work-table with his face in his hands. He was in great bitterness. His late transport of anger gave him no burdensome concern. Indeed, there was consolation in the thought that he should, by and by, stand erect before one who was so largely to blame, and make that full confession and apology which he believed his old-time Grande Pointe schoolmaster would have offered could Bonaventure ever have so shamefully forgotten himself. Yet the chagrin of having at once so violently and so impotently belittled himself added one sting more to his fate. He was in despair. An escaped balloon, a burst bubble, could hardly have seemed more utterly beyond his reach than now did Marguerite. And he could not blame her. She was right, he said sternly to himself--right to treat his portrait as something that reminded her of nothing, whether it did so or not; to play on with undisturbed inspiration; to lift never a glance to his window; and to go away without a word, a look, a sign, to any one, when the least breath or motion would have brought him instantly into her sacred presence. She was right. She was not for him. There is a fitness of things, and there was no fitness--he said--of him for her. And yet she must and would ever be more to him than any one else. He would glory in going through life unloved, while his soul lived in and on the phantom companionship of that vision of delight which she was and should ever be. The midday bells sounded softly here and there. He would walk.

As I say, he went slowly down the old rue Bourbon. He had no hunger; he would pa.s.s by the Women's Exchange. There was nothing to stop there for; was not Madame Beausoleil in Terrebonne, and Marguerite the guest of that chattering woman in silk and laces? But when he reached the Exchange doors he drifted in as silently and supinely as any drift-log would float into the new creva.s.se.

The same cashier was still on duty. She lighted up joyously as he entered, and, when he had hung his hat near the door, leaned forward to address him; but with a faint pain in his face, and loathing in his heart, he pa.s.sed on and out into the veranda. The place was well filled, and he had to look about to find a seat. The bare possibility that _she_ might be there was overpowering. There was a total suspension of every sort of emotion. He felt, as he took his chair and essayed to glance casually around, as light and unreal as any one who ever walked the tight-rope in a dream. The blood leaped in torrents through his veins, and yet his movements, as he fumbled aimlessly with his knife, fork, and gla.s.s, were slow and languid.

A slender young waitress came, rested her knuckles on the table, and leaned on them, let her opposite arm hang limply along the sidewise curve of her form, and bending a smile of angelic affection upon the young Acadian, said in a confidential undertone:

"The cashier told me to tell you those ladies have come."

Claude rose quickly and stood looking upon the face before him, speechless. It was to him exactly as if a man in uniform had laid a hand upon his shoulder and said, "You're my prisoner." Then, still gazing, and aware of others looking at him, he slowly sank again into his seat.

"She just told me to tell you," said the damsel. "Yes, sir. Have you ordered?"

"Humph?" He was still looking at her.

"I say, have you given your order?"

"Ya.s.s."

She paused awkwardly, for she knew he had not, and saw that he was trying vainly to make her words mean something in his mind.

"Sha'n't I get you some coffee and rolls--same as day before yesterday?"

"Ya.s.s." He did not know what she said. His heart had stopped beating; now it began again at a gallop. He turned red. He could see the handkerchief that was wadded into his outer breast-pocket jar in time with the heavy thump, thump, thump beneath it. The waitress staid an awful time. At last she came.

"I waited," she sweetly said, "to get _hot_ ones." He drew the refreshments towards him mechanically. The mere smell of food made him sick. It seemed impossible that he should eat it. She leaned over him lovingly and asked, as if referring to the att.i.tude, "Would you like any thing more?--something sweet?" His flesh crawled. He bent over his plate, shook his head, and stirred his coffee without having put any thing into it.

She tripped away, and he drew a breath of momentary relief, leaned back in his chair, and warily pa.s.sed his eyes around to see if there was anybody who was not looking at him and waiting for him to begin to eat.

Ages afterward--to speak with Claude's feelings--he rose, took up his check, and went to the desk. The cashier leaned forward and said with soft blitheness:

"They're here. They're up-stairs now."

Claude answered never a word. He paid his check. As he waited for change, he cast another glance over the various groups at the tables.

All were strangers. Then he went out. On the single sidewalk step he halted, and red and blind with mortification, turned again into the place; he had left his hat. With one magnificent effort at dignity and unconcern he went to the rack, took down the hat, and as he lowered it towards his head cast a last look down the room, and--there stood Marguerite. She had entered just in time, it seemed to him, but just too late, in fact, to see and understand the blunder. Oh, agony! They bowed to each other with majestic faintness, and then each from each was gone. The girl at the desk saw it and was dumb.

CHAPTER XXI.

LOVE AND LUCK BY ELECTRIC LIGHT.

Mr. Tarbox was really a very brave man. For, had he not been, how could he have ventured, something after the middle of that afternoon, in his best attire, up into Claude's workroom? He came to apologize.

But Claude was not there.

He waited, but the young man did not return. The air was hot and still. Mr. Tarbox looked at his watch--it was a quarter of five. He rose and descended to the street, looked up and down it, and then moved briskly down to, and across, Ca.n.a.l Street and into Bourbon. He had an appointment.

Claude had not gone back to his loft at all. He was wandering up and down the streets. About four he was in Bienville Street, where the pleasure-trains run through it on their way out to Spanish Fort, a beautiful pleasure-ground some six miles away from the city's centre, on the margin of Lake Pontchartrain. He was listlessly crossing the way as a train came along, and it was easy for the habit of the aforetime brakeman to move him. As the last platform pa.s.sed the crossing, he reached out mechanically and swung aboard.

Spanish Fort is at the mouth of Bayou St. John. A draw-bridge spans the bayou. On the farther, the eastern, side, Claude stood leaning against a pile, looking off far beyond West End to where the sun was setting in the swamps about Lake Maurepas. There--there--not seen save by memory's eye, yet there not the less, was Bayou des Acadiens. Ah me! there was Grande Pointe.

"O Bonaventure! Do I owe you"--Claude's thought was in the old Acadian tongue--"Do I owe you malice for this? No, no, no! Better _this_ than _less_." And then he recalled a writing-book copy that Bonaventure had set for him, of the schoolmaster's own devising: _Better Great Sorrow than Small Delight._ His throat tightened and his eyes swam.

A pretty schooner, with green hull and new sails, came down the bayou.

As he turned to gaze on her, the bridge, just beyond his feet, began to swing open. He stepped upon it and moved towards its centre, his eyes still on the beautiful silent advance of the vessel. With a number of persons who had gathered from both ends of the bridge, he paused and leaned over the rail as the schooner, with her crew looking up into the faces of the throng, glided close by. A female form came beside him, looking down with the rest and shedding upon the air the soft sweetness of perfumed robes. A masculine voice, just beyond, said:

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Claude started and looked up, and behold, Marguerite on the arm of Tarbox!

His movement drew their glance, and the next instant Mr. Tarbox, beaming apology and pouring out glad greetings, had him by the hand.

Burning, choking, stammering, Claude heard and answered, he knew not how, the voice of the queen of all her kind. Another pair pressed forward to add their salutations. They were Zosephine and the surveyor.

Because the facilities for entertaining a male visitor were slender at the Women's Exchange, because there was hope of more and cooler air at the lake-side, because Spanish Fort was a pretty and romantic spot and not so apt to be thronged as West End, and because Marguerite, as she described it, was tired of houses and streets, and also because he had something to say to Zosephine, Mr. Tarbox had brought the pretty mother and daughter out here. The engineer had met the three by chance only a few minutes before, and now as the bridge closed again he pa.s.sed Zosephine over to Claude, walked only a little way with them down a path among the shrubbery, and then lifted his hat and withdrew.

For once in his life Mr. G. W. Tarbox, as he walked with Marguerite in advance of Claude and her mother, was at a loss what to say. The drollness of the situation was in danger of overcoming him again.

Behind him was Claude, his mind tossed on a wild sea of doubts and suspicions.