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'sIsland. "_

The Solitary

I

"The dream of Pharaoh is one. The seven kine are seven years; and theseven good ears are seven years: the dream is one. . . . And for that thedream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice, it is because the thing isestablished. ". . . 

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 istripled or quadrupled unto you three or four times (the number willdepend); it is because in each of its three or four aspects--or separatestories, 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 sayof it also, as he said to the sovereign of Egypt, "The thing isestablished 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 shouldhave learned had I not known the men and women I here tell of--thatreligion without poetry is as dead a thing as poetry without religion. Inour practical use of them, I mean; their infusion into all our doing andbeing. As dry as a mummy, great Joseph would say. 

Shall I be more explicit? Taking that great factor of life which men, withcountless lights, shades, narrownesses and breadths of meaning, callReligion, and taking it in the largest sense we can give it; in likemanner taking Poetry in the largest sense possible; this cluster of talesis one, because from each of its parts, with no argument but the souls andfates they tell of, it illustrates the indivisible twinship of Poetry andReligion; a oneness of office and of culmination, which, as they reachtheir highest plane, merges them into identity. Is that any clearer? Yousee I am no scientist or philosopher, and I do not stand at any dizzyheight, even in my regular business of banking and insurance, except nowand then when my colleagues of the clearing-house or board want somethingdrawn up--"Whereas, the inscrutable wisdom of Providence has taken fromamong us"--something like that. 

I tell the stories as I saw them occur. I tell them for yourentertainment; 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 toincarnate it. Others, through the stained glass of their imperfecthumanity, 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 aworld which, you shall find him saying, God--or somebody--whoever isresponsible for civilization--had made only too good and complex and bigfor him. We may hold that to make life a perfect, triumphant poem we mustkeep in beautiful, untyrannous subordination every impulse of mere self-provision, whether earthly or heavenly, while at the same time we givelife its equatorial circumference. I know that he so believed. Yet, underno better conscious motive than an impulse of pure self-preservation, finding his spiritual breadth and stature too small for half the practicaldemands of such large theories, he humbly set to work to narrow down thecircumference 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 Itell of him first, and why the parts of my story--or the stories--do notfall into chronological order. I break that order with impunity, and adoptthat 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, shapedwell 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'ssurrender; 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 ofa 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 prettygirls 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, asa private, had done nothing glorious, his appearance was always incivilian's dress. Black he wore, from head to foot, in the cut fashionablein 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, andpuffed 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 aromance, I noticed, too late to offer any serviceable warning, thisimpressive black suit and its ungenerously nicknamed contents coming in atthe gate unprotected. Dogs, in the South, in those times, were not thecaressed and harmless creatures now so common. A Mississippi planter'swatch-dogs were kept for their vigilant and ferocious hostility to thenegro of the quarters and to all strangers. One of these, a powerful, notorious, bloodthirsty brute, long-bodied, deer-legged--you may possiblyknow 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. Gregoryswerved, and the brute's fangs, whirling by his face, closed in the sleeveand rent it from shoulder to elbow. At the same time another, one of theold "bear-dog" breed, was coming as fast as the light block and chain hehad to drag would allow him. Gregory neither spoke, nor moved to attack orretreat. 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, andwas coaxed into the house, where the young ladies took his coat away tomend it. While he waited for it in my room I spoke of the terror so manybrave men had of these fierce home-guards. I knew one such beast that wassired of a wolf. He heard me with downcast eyes, at first with evidentpleasure, but very soon quite gravely. 

"They can afford to fear dogs, " he replied, "when they've got no otherfear. " And when I would have it that he had shown a stout heart he smiledruefully. 

"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 theblank leaf opposite, "Richard Thorndyke Smith, from C. O. "--we readsomething like this:

The seed of heroism is in all of us. Else we should not forever relish, aswe do, stories of peril, temptation, and exploit. Their true zest is nomere ticklement of our curiosity or wonder, but comradeship with soulsthat have courage in danger, faithfulness under trial, or magnanimity intriumph or defeat. We have, moreover, it went on to say, a care for humanexcellence _in general_, by reason of which we want not alone our son, orcousin, or sister, but _man everywhere_, the norm, _man_, to be strong, sweet, and true; and reading stories of such, we feel this wish reboundupon us as duty sweetened by a new hope, and have a new yearning for itsfulfilment in ourselves. 

"In short, " said I, closing the book, "those imaginative victories of soulover circumstance become essentially ours by sympathy and emulation, don'tthey?"

"O yes, " he sighed, and added an indistinct word about "spasms of virtue. "But I claimed a special charm and use for unexpected and detachedheroisms, be they fact or fiction. "If adventitious virtue, " I argued, "can spring up from unsuspected seed and without the big roots ofcharacter--"

"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 thereisn't, hasn't it a beauty and a value? Isn't a rose a rose, on the bush oroff? Gold is gold wherever you find it, and the veriest spasm of truevirtue, coined into action, is true virtue, and counts. It may not work mynature's whole redemption, but it works that way, and is just so muchsolid help toward the whole world's uplift. " I was young enough then totalk in that manner, and he actually took comfort in my words, confessingthat it had been his way to count a good act which was not in characterwith 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 alwaysfear. "

"Was it fear this evening?" I asked. 

"Yes, " he replied, "it was. It was fear of a coward's name, and a sort ofabject 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 shouldtry 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 readthe warning accusation in my eye. 

"I'm afraid so, " he responded. "I had a strange experience once, " hepresently added, as if reminded of it by what we had last said. "I took aprisoner. "

"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 takehim 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 oldoak 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 muchlike me_. It was like seeing my own ghost. All the time I had himsomething kept saying to me, 'You're your own prisoner--you're your ownprisoner. ' And--do you know?--that thing comes back to me now every time Iget into the least sort of a tight place!"

"I wish it would come to me, " I responded. A slave girl brought his coatand our talk remained unfinished until five years after the war. 

III

Gregory had been brought up on the shore of Mississippi Sound, a beautifulregion fruitful mainly in apathy of character. He was a skilled lover ofsail-boats. When we all got back to New Orleans, paroled, and cast aboutfor a living in the various channels "open to gentlemen, " he, largely, Ithink, owing to his timid notion of his worth, went into the roughbusiness of owning and sailing a small, handsome schooner in the "Laketrade, " which, you know, includes Mississippi Sound. I married, and forsome time he liked much to come and see us--on rainy evenings, when heknew we should be alone. He was in love yet, as he had been when we werefellow-absentees from camp, and with the same girl. But his passion hadnever presumed to hope, and the girl was of too true a sort ever to thrusthope upon him. What his love lacked in courage it made up in constancy, however, and morning, noon, and night--sometimes midnight too, I ventureto say--his all too patient heart had bowed mutely down toward its holycity across the burning sands of his diffidence. When another fellowstepped in and married her, he simply loved on, in the same innocent, dumb, harmless way as before. He gave himself some droll consolations. Oneof these was a pretty, sloop-rigged sail-boat, trim and swift, on which helavished the tendernesses he knew he should never bestow upon any livingshe. He named her Sweetheart; a general term; but he knew that we all knewit meant the mender of his coat. By and by his visits fell off and I methim oftenest on the street. Sometimes we stopped for a moment's sidewalkchat, New Orleans fashion, and I still envied the clear bronze of his fineskin, which the rest of us had soon lost. But after a while certainchanges began to show for the worse, until one day in the summer of thefifth year he tried to hurry by me. I stopped him, and was thinking what ahandsome fellow he was even yet, with such a quiet, modest fineness abouthim, when he began, with a sudden agony of face, "My schooner's sold fordebt! You know the reason; I've seen you read it all over me every time wehave 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 asmashed fiddle at last!"

I drew him out of the hot sun and into a secluded archway, he talkingstraight 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 vanityof venturing and defying--that bigness of the soul's experiences whichmakes even its anguish seem finer than the old bitterness of tamepropriety--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 awhole criminal performance to apprehend its spiritual experiences. Iunderstood all, and especially what he unwittingly betrayed even now; thatdeep thirst for the dramatic element in one's own life, which, when socialconformity fails to supply it, becomes, to an eager soul, sin's cunningestallurement. 

I tried to talk to him. "Gregory, that day the dogs jumped on you--youremember?--didn't you say if ever you should reach this condition yourfear might save you?"

He stared at me a moment. "Do you"--a ray of humor lighted his eyes--"doyou 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 intothe office said: "I just now saw Crackedfiddle buying a great lot ofpowder and shot and fishing-tackle. Here's a note. He says first read itand 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 hurtmyself, and I'll report again in a month. "_

I delivered it in person on my way uptown, advising his kinswoman to trusthim on his own terms and hope for the best. Privately, of course, I wasdistressed, and did not become less so when, on reaching home, Mrs. Smithtold me that he had been there and borrowed an arm-load of books, sayinghe might return some of them in a month, but would probably keep othersfor two. So he did; and one evening, when he brought the last of themback, he told us fully, spiritual experiences and all, what had occurredto 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 shewas lying at the head of the New Basin, distant but a few minutes' walkfrom the spot where we met and talked. When he left me he went there. Atthe stores thereabout he bought a new hatchet and axe, an extra water-kegor two, and a month's provisions. He filled all the kegs, stowedeverything aboard, and by the time the afternoon had half waned wasrippling down the New Canal under mule-tow with a strong lake breeze inhis face. 

At the lake (Pontchartrain), as the tow-line was cast off, he hoistedsail, and, skimming out by lighthouse and breakwater, tripped away towardPointe-aux-Herbes and the eastern skyline beyond, he and Sweetheart alone, his hand clasping hers--the tiller, that is--hour by hour, and the smallwaves tiptoeing to kiss her southern cheek as she leaned the other awayfrom 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 purpleblack swamps of Manchac; the intervening waters turned crimson and bronzeunder the fairer changes of the sky, while in front of them Fort PikeLight 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, camein friendly recognition, the drone of a conch-shell, the last happysalutation Sweetheart was ever to receive. Then the evening star silveredtheir wake through the deep Rigolets, and the rising moon met them, herand her lover, in Lake Borgne, passing the dark pines of Round Island, andhurrying on toward the white sand-keys of the Gulf. 

The night was well advanced as they neared the pine-crested dunes of CatIsland, in whose lee a more cautious sailor would have dropped anchor tillthe morning. But to this pair every mile of these fickle waters, channeland mud-lump, snug lagoon, open sea and hidden bar, each and all, wereknown as the woods are known to a hunter, and, as he drew her hand closerto his side, she turned across the track of the moon and bounded into thewide south. A maze of marsh islands--huddling along that narrow, half-drowned mainland of cypress swamp and trembling prairie which follows theMississippi out to sea--slept, leagues away, below the western waters. Inthe east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and theshoreless deep, and this was so near that from its farther edge came nowand again its admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulfrolling forever down the prone but unshaken battle-front of the sandyChandeleurs. 

IV

So all night, lest wind or resolve should fail next day, he sailed. How totell just where dawn found him I scarcely know. 

Somewhere in that blue wilderness, with no other shore in sight, yet notover three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered sand-reefs, a ferment of delta silt--if science guesses right--had liftedhigher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mereislet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seawardand a deep, slender lagoon on the landward side filling the whole lengthof its bight. About half the island was flat and was covered with thosestrong marsh grasses for which you've seen cattle, on the mainland, venture so hungrily into the deep ooze. The rest, the southern half, rosein dazzling white dunes twenty feet or more in height and dappled greenwith patches of ragged sod and thin groups of dwarfed and wind-flattenedshrubs. As the sun rose, Sweetheart and her sailor glided through a gap inthe sand reef that closed the lagoon in, luffed, and as a great cloud ofnesting pelicans rose from their dirty town on the flats, ran softly uponthe inner sands, where a rillet, a mere thread of sweet water, trickledacross the white beach. Here he waded ashore with the utensils andprovisions, made a fire, washed down a hot breakfast of bacon and ponewith a pint of black coffee, returned to his boat and slept untilafternoon. Wakened at length by the canting of the sloop with the fall ofthe tide, he rose, rekindled his fire, cooked and ate again, smoked twopipes, and then, idly shouldering his gun, made a long half-circuit of thebeach to south and eastward, mounted the highest dune and gazed far andwide. 

Nowhere on sand or sea under the illimitable dome was there sign of humanpresence on the earth. Nor would there likely be any. Except bymisadventure no ship on any course ever showed more than a topmast abovethis horizon. Of the hunters and fishermen who roamed the islands nearershore, with the Chandeleurs, the storm-drowned Grand Gosiers and the deep-sea fishing grounds beyond, few knew the way hither, and fewer ever sailedit. 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 tofeeding again. Save when the swift Wilderness--you remember the revenuecutter?-chanced this way on her devious patrol, only the steamer of thelight-house inspection service, once a month, came up out of the southwestthrough yonder channel and passed within hail on her way from the stationsof the Belize to those of Mississippi Sound; and he knew--had known beforehe 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 twoat his belt he turned again toward his dying fire. Once on the way hepaused, as he came in sight of the sloop, and gazed upon it with afaintness of heart he had not known since his voyage began. However, itpresently left him, and hurrying down to her side he began to unload hercompletely, and to make a permanent camp in the lee of a ridge of sandcrested with dwarfed casino bushes, well up from the beach. The night didnot stop him, and by the time he was tired enough for sleep he hadlightened the boat of everything stowed into her the previous day. Beforesunrise he was at work again, removing her sandbags, her sails, flags, cordage, even her spars. The mast would have been heavy for two men tohandle, but he got it out whole, though not without hurting one hand sopainfully that he had to lie off for over two hours. But by midday he wasbusy again, and when at low water poor Sweetheart comfortably turned uponher 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'twant to be sentimental--I'm sure I was not sentimental at the time, but--Ifelt as though I were a murderer. All I knew was that it had to be done. Itrembled like a thief. I had to stoop twice before I could take up theaxe, and I was so cold my teeth chattered. When I lifted the first blow Ididn'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. Iwasn't fierce; I was as full of self-delight as an overpraised child. Andyet 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 hadno choice; it was my last chance. "

I told him that anyone might have thought him a madman chopping up hislast chance. 

"Maybe so, " he replied, "but I wasn't; it was the one sane thing I coulddo;" and he went on to tell me that when night fell the tallest fire thatever 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 dayshe felt no repentance of the act nor was in the least lonely. There was aninfinite relief merely in getting clean away from the huge world of men, with all its exactions and temptations and the myriad rebukes and rebuffsof 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 nobesetments but his own circumvented propensities. What humble, happymasterhood! Each dawn he rose from dreamless sleep and leaped into thesurf as into the embrace of a new existence. Every hour of day broughtsome unfretting task or hale pastime. With sheath-knife and sail-needle hemade 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 husbandsalt on the mountains or water in the desert, and loitering in wellcalculated idleness between thoughts many and things of sea and shoreinnumerable, filled the intervals from labor to labor with gentleentertainment. Skyward ponderings by night, canny discoveries under footby 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, anda handful of sand at the door of his tent held him for hours guessing thetitanic battles that had ground the invincible quartz to that crystal mealand fed it to the sea. 

I may be more rhetorical than he was, but he made all the more of theseconditions while experiencing them, because he knew they could not lastout the thirty days, nor half the thirty, and took modest comfort in awill strong enough to meet all present demands, well knowing there was oneexigency yet to arise, one old usurer still to be settled with who had notyet brought in his dun. 

V

It came--began to come--in the middle of the second week. At its familiarapproach he felt no dismay, save a certain inert dismay that it broughtnone. Three, four, five times he went bravely to the rill, drowned histhirst and called himself satisfied; but the second day was worse than thefirst; the craving seemed better than the rill's brief cure of it, andonce he rose straight from drinking of the stream and climbed the dune tolook for a sail. 

He strove in vain to labor. The pleasures of toil were as stale as thoseof idleness. His books were put aside with a shudder, and he walked abroadwith a changed gait; the old extortioner was levying on his nerves. And onhis brain. He dreamed that night of war times; found himself commander ofa whole battery of heavy guns, and lo, they were all quaker cannon. Whenhe would have fled, monstrous terrors met him at every turn, till he wokeand could sleep no more. Dawn widened over sky and sea, but its vastbeauty only mocked the castaway. All day long he wandered up and down andalong and across his glittering prison, no tiniest speck of canvas, nofaintest wreath of smoke, on any water's edge; the horror of his isolationgrowing-growing?-like the monsters of his dream, and his whole nature wildwith a desire which was no longer a mere physical drought, but a passionof the soul, that gave the will an unnatural energy and set at naughtevery true interest of earth and heaven. Again and again he would haveshrieked its anguish, but the first note of his voice rebuked him tosilence as if he had espied himself in a glass. He fell on his facevoiceless, writhing, and promised himself, nay, pledged creation and itsCreator, that on the day of his return to the walks of men he would drinkthe 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 workto drag by long and toiling zigzags to a favorable point on the southernend of the island the mast he had saved, and to raise there a flag ofdistress. In the shortness of his resources he dared not choose theboldest exposures, where the first high wind would cast it down; but wherehe placed it it could be seen from every quarter except the north, and anysail approaching from that direction was virtually sure to come withinhail even of the voice. 

Day had come again as he left the finished task, and once more from thehighest wind-built ridge his hungering eyes swept the round sea's edge. But he saw no sail. Nerveless and exhausted he descended to thesoutheastern beach and watched the morning brighten. The breezes, that forsome time had slept, fitfully revived, and the sun leaped from the sea andburned its way through a low bank of dark and ruddy clouds with so unusuala splendor that the beholder was in some degree both quickened andtranquillized. He could even play at self-command, and in child fashionbound himself not to mount the dunes again for a northern look within anhour. This southern half circle must suffice. Indeed, unless these idlezephyrs should amend, no sail could in that time draw near enough tonotice any signal he could offer. 

Playing at self-command gave him some earnest of it. In a whim of thebetter man he put off his clothes and sprang into the breakers. He hadgrown chill, but a long wrestle with the surf warmed his blood, and as hereclothed himself and with a better step took his way along the beachtoward his tent a returning zest of manhood refreshed his spirit. The hourwas up, but in a kind of equilibrium of impulses and with much emptinessof mind, he let it lengthen on, made a fire, and for the first time in twodays cooked food. He ate and still tarried. A brand in his camp fire, apiece from the remnant of his boat, made beautiful flames. He idly cast inanother and was pleased to find himself sitting there instead of gazinghis eyes out for sails that never rose into view. He watched a third brandsmoke and blaze. And then, as tamely as if the new impulse were onlyanother part of a continued abstraction, he arose and once more climbedthe sandy hills. The highest was some distance from his camp. At one pointnear its top a brief northeastward glimpse of the marsh's outer edge andthe blue waters beyond showed at least that nothing had come near enoughto raise the pelicans. But the instant his sight cleared the crown of theridge he rushed forward, threw up his arms, and lifted his voice in along, imploring yell. Hardly two miles away, her shapely canvas leaningand stiffening in the augmented breeze, a small yacht had just gone about, and with twice the speed at which she must have approached was, hurryingback 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 farbehind, and again and again repeating his vain ahoys in wilder and wilderalternations of beseeching and rage. The lessening craft flew straight on, no ear in her skilled enough to catch the distant cry, and no eye alertenough to scan the dwindling sand-hills. He ceased to call, but still, with heavy notes of distress to himself, waved and waved, now here, nowthere, while the sail grew smaller and smaller. At length he stopped thisalso and only stood gazing. Almost on first sight of the craft he hadguessed that the men in her had taken alarm at the signs of changingweather, and seeing the freshening smoke of his fire had also inferredthat earlier sportsmen were already on the island. Oh, if he could havefired one shot when she was nearest! But already she was as hopelesslygone as though she were even now below the horizon. Suddenly he turned andran down to his camp. Not for the gun; not in any new hope of signallingthe yacht. No, no; a raft! a raft! Deliverance or destruction, it shouldbe at his own hand and should wait no longer!

A raft forthwith he set about to make. Some stout portions of his boatwere still left. Tough shrubs of the sand-hills furnished trennels andsuppler parts. Of ropes there was no lack. The mast was easily draggeddown again to the beach to be once more a mast, and in nervous haste, yetwith skill and thoroughness, the tent was ripped up and remade into asail, and even a rude centreboard was rigged in order that one might tackagainst unfavorable winds. 

Winds, at nightfall, when the thing began to be near completion, therewere none. The day's sky had steadily withdrawn its favor. The sun shoneas it sank into the waves, but in the northwest and southeast dazzlingthunderheads swelled from the sea's line high into the heavens, and in theearly dusk began with silent kindlings to challenge each other to battle. As night swiftly closed down the air grew unnaturally still. From thetoiler's brow, worse than at noon, the sweat rolled off, as at last hebrought 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 hemight. Then let the storm fall; the moment it was safely over and the windin the right quarter he would sail. As for the thirst which had been sucha torture while thwarted, now that it ruled unchallenged, it was purely awild, glad zeal as full of method as of diligence. But first he must makehis diminished provisions and his powder safe against the elements; andthis he did, covering them with a waterproof stuff and burying them in anorthern slope of sand. 

He awoke in the small hours of the night. The stars of the zenith werequenched. Blackness walled and roofed him in close about his crumbledfire, save when at shorter and shorter intervals and with more and moredeafening thunders the huge clouds lit up their own forms, writhing oneupon another, and revealed the awe-struck sea and ghostly sands waitingbreathlessly below. He rose to lay on more fuel, and while he was in theact the tornado broke upon him. The wind, as he had forecast, came out ofthe southeast. In an instant it was roaring and hurtling against thefarther side of his island rampart like the charge of a hundred thousandhorse and tossing the sand of the dunes like blown hair into thenorthwest, while the rain in one wild deluge lashed the frantic sea andweltering lagoon as with the whips of the Furies. 

He had kept the sail on the beach for a protection from the storm, butbefore he could crawl under it he was as wet as though he had been tossedup by the deep, and yet was glad to gain its cover from the blindingfloods and stinging sand. Here he lay for more than an hour, the rage ofthe tempest continually growing, the heavens in a constant pulsing glareof lightnings, their terrific thunders smiting and bellowing round andround its echoing vault, and the very island seeming at times to staggerback and recover again as it braced itself against the fearful onsets ofthe wind. Snuggling in his sailcloth burrow, he complacently recalled anearlier storm like this, which he and Sweetheart, the only other time theyever were here, had tranquilly weathered in this same lagoon. On themainland, in that storm, cane- and rice-fields had been laid low and halfdestroyed, houses had been unroofed, men had been killed. A woman and aboy, under a pecan tree, were struck by lightning; and three men who hadcovered themselves with a tarpaulin on one of the wharves in New Orleanswere blown with it into the Mississippi, poor fellows, and were drowned; afact worthy of second consideration in the present juncture. 

This second thought had hardly been given it before he crept hastily fromhis refuge and confronted the gale in quick alarm. The hurricane wasveering to southward. Let it shift but a point or two more, and its entireforce 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 orthree yards away. He sprang to seize it, but in the same instant the wholestorm--rain, wind, and sand--whirled like a troop of fiends round thesouthern end of the island, the ceaseless lightnings showing the way, andcame tearing and howling up its hither side. The white sail lifted, bellied, rolled, fell, vaulted into the air, fell again, tumbled on, andat the foot of a dune stopped until its wind-buffeted pursuer had almostovertaken it. Then it fled again, faster, faster, higher, higher up thesandy 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 aphantom, and vanished forever. 

Gregory turned in desperation, and in the glare of the lightning lookedback toward his raft. Great waves were rolling along and across theslender reef in wide obliques and beating themselves to death in thelagoon, or sweeping out of it again seaward at its more northern end. Onthe dishevelled crest of one he saw his raft, and on another its mast. Hecould not look a second time. The flying sand blinded him and cut theblood from his face. He could only cover his eyes and crawl under thebushes in such poor lee as he could find; and there, with the first lullof the storm, heavy with exhaustion and despair, he fell asleep and sleptuntil far into the day. When he awoke the tempest was over. 

Even more completely the tumult within him was quieted. He rose and stoodforth mute in spirit as in speech; humbled, yet content, in theconsciousness that having miserably failed first to save himself and thento rue himself back to destruction, the hurricane had been his deliverer. It had spared his supplies, his ammunition, his weapons, only hiding themdeeper under the dune sands; but scarce a vestige of his camp remained andof his raft nothing. As once more from the highest sand-ridge he lookeddown upon the sea weltering in the majestic after-heavings of its passion, at the eastern beach booming under the shock of its lofty rollers, andthen into the sky still gray with the endless flight of southward-hurryingscud, 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 soundedsentimental. I said no, and thereupon he actually tried to apologize to meas though I were a professional story-teller, for having had so few deepfeelings in the moments where the romancists are supposed to place them. Itold him what I had once seen a mechanic do on a steep, slated roof nearlya hundred feet from the pavement. He had faced round from his work, whichwas close to the ridge-tiles, probably to kick off the shabby shoes he hadon, when some hold failed him and he began to slide toward the eaves. Wepeople in the street below fairly moaned our horror, but he didn't utter asound. He held back with all his skill, one leg thrust out in front, theother drawn up with the knee to his breast, and his hands flattened besidehim on the slates, but he came steadily on down till his forward footpassed over the eaves and his heel caught on the tin gutter. Then hestopped. We held our breath below. He slowly and cautiously threw off oneshoe, then the other, and then turned, climbed back up the roof andresumed his work. And we two or three witnesses down in the street didn'tthink any less of him because he did so without any show of our glademotion. 

"O, if I had that fellow's nerve, " said Gregory, "that would be anotherthing!"

My wife and I smiled at each other. "How would it be 'another thing?'" weasked. "Did _you_ not quietly get up and begin life over again as ifnothing had occurred?"

"There wasn't anything else to do, " he replied, with a smile. "Thefeelings came later, too, in an easy sort o' gradual way. I never couldquite make out how men get such clear notions of what they call'Providence, ' but, just the same, I know by experience there's all thedifference of peace and misery, or life and death, whether you're inpartnership with the things that help the world on, or with those thathold it back. "

"But with that feeling, " my wife asked, "did not your longing for ourhuman world continue?"

"No, " he replied, "but I got a new liking for it--although, youunderstand, _I_ never had anything against _it_, of course. It's too bigand strong for me, that's all; and that's my fault. Your man on thatslippery roof kicking his shoes off is a sort of parable to me. If yourhand or your foot offend you and you have to cut it off, that's a physicaldisablement, and bad enough. But when your gloves and your shoes are toomuch for you, and you have to pluck _them_ off and cast them from you, youfind each one is a great big piece of the civilized world, and you hardlyknow how much you did like it, till you've lost it. And still, it's no uselonging, 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 theisland, to find his books his best source of interest and diversion. Helearned, he said, a way of reading by which sea, sky, book, island, andabsent humanity, all seemed parts of one whole, and all to speak togetherin one harmony, while they toiled together for one harmony some day to beperfected. Not all books, nor even all good books, were equally good forthat effect, he thought, and the best----

"You might not think it, " he said, "but the best was a Bible I'd chancedto carry along;" he didn't know precisely what kind, but "just one ofthese ordinary Bibles you see lying around in people's houses. " Heextolled the psalms and asked Mrs. Smith if she'd ever noticed the beautyof the twenty-third. She smiled and said she believed she had. 

"Then there was one, " he went on, "beginning, 'Lord, my heart is nothaughty, nor mine eyes lofty; neither do I exercise myself in greatmatters, 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 evenas 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-sixverses. " 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-sixthverse he closed the book. Thus he sat in the nearly motionless air, gazingon 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 agrace of resignation, and sank into the grateful sands like the lines ofthis last verse sinking into his heart; now singly--"I have gone astraylike a lost sheep;" and now by twos--"I have gone astray like a lostsheep; save thy servant;" or by threes--"I have gone astray like a lostsheep; 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 howlittle it counts for. But I knew at the time that when the next day butone should bring the lighthouse steamer I shouldn't be any more fit to goashore, _to stay_, than a jellyfish. " We agreed, he and I that there canbe as wide a distance between fine feelings and faithful doing as, hesaid, "between listening to the band and charging a battery. "

On the islet the night deepened. The moon had not risen, and the starsonly glorified the dark, as it, in turn, revealed the unearthly beautiesof a phosphorescent sea. It was one of those rare hours in which the deepconfessed the amazing numbers of its own living and swarmingconstellations. Not a fish could leap or dart, not a sinuous thing couldturn, but it became an animate torch. Every quick movement was a gleam ofgreen fire. No drifting, flaccid life could pulse so softly along but itbetrayed itself in lambent outlines. Each throb of the water became a beamof 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 thenight too beautiful for slumber he reclined on the dry sands with an armthrown over a small pile of fagots which he had spent the day in gatheringfrom every part of the island to serve his need for the brief remainder ofhis stay. In this search he had found but one piece of his boat, a pineboard. This he had been glad to rive into long splinters and bind togetheragain as a brand, with which to signal the steamer if--contrary to herpractice, I think he said--she should pass in the night. And so, without apremonition of drowsiness, he was presently asleep, with the hoursradiantly folding and expiring one upon another like the ripples on thebeach. 

When he came to himself he was on his feet. The moon was high, his firewas smouldering; his heart was beating madly and his eyes were fixed onthe 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 momentshe would be passing. It was too late for beacon-flame or torch. He sprangfor 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 hastehe loaded and fired again, again wailed out his cry for help, and stillshe kept her speed. He had loaded for the third discharge, stillfrantically calling the while, and was lifting his gun to fire when he sawthe white light at her foremast-head begin to draw nearer to the greenlight at her waist and knew she was turning. He fired, shouted, and triedto 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 fromthe steamer's boat to her deck. "Why, you blasted old cracked fiddle! whatin----"

"Right, the first guess!" laughed Gregory, "there's where I've been!" andin the cabin he explained all. 

"The fiddle's mended, " he concluded. "You can play a tune on it--by beingcareful. "

"But what's your tune?" asked his hearer; "you cannot go back to thatisland. "

"Yes, I'll be on it in a week--with a schooner-load of cattle. I can getthem on credit. Going to raise cattle there as a regular business. They'llfatten in that marsh like blackbirds. "

True enough, before the week was up the mended fiddle was playing itstune. It was not until Gregory's second return from his island that hecame to see us and told us his simple story. We asked him how it was thatthe steamer, that first time, had come so much earlier than she generallydid. 

"She didn't, " he replied. "I had miscounted one day. "

"Don't you, " asked my wife, who would have liked a more religious tone inGregory's recital, "don't you have trouble to keep run of your Sabbathsaway out there alone?"

"Why"--he smiled--"it's always Sunday there. Here almost everybody feelsduty bound to work harder than somebody else, or else make somebody elsework harder than he, and you need a day every now and then for Sunday--orSabbath, at least. Oh, I suppose it's all one in the end, isn't it? Youtake your's in a pill, I take mine in a powder. Not that it's the leastbit 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 herthought was on Last Island, which, you remember, though very large andpopulous, had been, within our recollection, totally submerged, withdreadful loss of life. 

"O yes, " he responded, "there's always something wherever you are. One ofthese 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 shehad half a notion to kiss it. I told her so when he was gone, and kissedhers--for him. 

"I don't care, " she said, dreamily, as it lingered in mine, "I'm glad Imended his coat for him that time. "

* * * * *

The Taxidermist

I

One day a hummingbird got caught in a cobweb in our greenhouse. It had noreal need to seek that damp, artificial heat. We were in the very heart ofthat Creole summer-time when bird-notes are many as the sunbeams. Theflowers were in such multitude they seemed to follow one about, offeringtheir honeys and perfumes and begging to be gathered. Our little boy sawthe embodied joy fall, a joy no longer, seized it, and clasping it tootightly, brought it to me dead. 

He cried so over the loss that I promised to have the body stuffed. Thisis 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 ofhis skill to be seen round about not one was on parade, yet everyone wassomehow an achievement, a happy surprise, a lasting delight. I admit thattaxidermy is not classed among the fine arts; but you know there is a wayof 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-headedmaster. I saw his unsmiling face soften and his eye grow kind as minelighted 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 couldmanipulate frail and tiny things and bring forth delicate results, helooked 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 Ifinished, I knew we were friends. I presently ventured to praise thespecimen of his skill nearest at hand; a wild turkey listening alarmedlyas if it would the next instant utter that ringing "quit!" which makeseach separate drop of a hunter's blood tingle. But with an odd languor inhis gravity, he replied:

"Naw, dass not well make; lill' bit worse, bad enough to put in frontwindow. I take you inside; come. "

II

We passed through into a private workroom immediately behind the shop. Hiswife 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 gotits general flabbiness through much paddling and gnawing from otherwomen's teething babes. She sat still, unintroduced, but welcomed me witha smile. 

I was saying to her husband that a hummingbird was a very small thing toask him to stuff. But he stopped me with his lifted palm. 

"My fran', a hummingbird has de pas-sione'--de ecstacie! One drop of bloodwid the pas-sione in it"--He waved his hand with a jerk of the thumb indisdain 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. Ifeared I had disappointed him. 

"God measures by the soul, not by the size, " I suggested. But he would sayno 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 ofhis 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"--helet a gesture speak the rest. 

"I know, " replied I; "you propose to make the soul seem to come back andleave us its portrait. I believe you will. " Whereupon he gave me hisfirst, 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'--Iplay 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 fiftydollah one time las' year. "

The soft voice of the wife spoke up--"And spend it all to the wife of mydead brother. What use him be reech? I think he don't stoff bird' nobetteh. "

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 muchfineness of soul and life, seen or unseen, must have existed in earliergenerations to have produced this man, I noticed the in conspicuous signover his door, P. T. B. Manouvrier, and as he led me at once into the backroom I asked him playfully what such princely abundance of initials mightstand for. 

"Doze? Ah, doze make only Pas-Trop-Bon. "

I appealed to his wife; but she, with her placid laugh, would only confirmhim:

"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 andbeautiful the artist had made it. Even with him I took pains to besomewhat reserved. As I stood holding and admiring the small green wonder, I remarked that I was near having to bring him that morning another andyet 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 oforange-boughs, jasmine-vines, and white-clouded blue sky, I had found amale ruby-throat circling about the ceiling, not wise enough to stoop, flylow, and pass out by the way it had come in. It occurred to me that itmight be the mate of the one already mine. For some time all the efforts Icould contrive, either to capture or free it, were vain. Round and roundit flew, silently beating and bruising its exquisite little head againstthe lofty ceiling, the glory of its luminous red throat seeming toheighten into an expression of unspeakable agony. At last Mrs. Smith ranfor a long broom, and, as in her absence I stood watching the self-snaredcaptive's struggle, the long, tiny beak which had never done worse than gotwittering with rapture to the grateful hearts of thousands of flowers, began to trace along the smooth, white ceiling a scarlet thread of pureheart's blood. The broom came. I held it up, the flutterer lighted uponit, and at first slowly, warily, and then triumphantly, I lowered it underthe lintel out into the veranda, and the bird darted away into the gardenand was gone like a soul into heaven. 

In the middle of my short recital Manouvrier had sunk down upon the arm ofhis wife's rocking-chair with one huge hand on both of hers folded overher sewing, and as I finished he sat motionless, still gazing into myface. 

"But, " I started, with sudden pretence of business impulse, "how much am Ito pay?"

He rose, slowly, and looked dreamily at his wife; she smiled at him, andhe 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 chargenut'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 laughedhe 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 wouldshift the figures after some notion of magical significance and venture aticket, whole or fractional, in the monthly drawing. 

Scarcely ten days after, as I sat at breakfast with my newspaper spreadbeside my plate, I fairly spilled my coffee as my eye fell upon the nameof P. T. B. Manouvrier, of No. --St. Peter Street. Old Pastropbon had drawnseventy-five thousand dollars in the lottery. 

IV

All the first half of the day, wherever I was, in the street-car, at mycounting-desk, on the exchange, no matter to what I gave my attention, mythought was ever on my friend the taxidermist. At luncheon it was thesame. 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; andyet I hoped. 

A familiar acquaintance, a really good fellow, decent, rich, "born ofpious parents, " and determined to have all the ready-made refinements andtastes 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. Seehere; 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 turkeyyou told me about. I wanted to stand it away up on top of that beautifulold carved buffet I picked up in England last year. I was fully preparedto buy it on your say-so, but, all the same, I saw its merits the moment Iset eyes on it. It has but one fault; did you notice that? I don't believeyou 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; lacksrichness 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 thingsfirst, so he couldn't know which one to stick the fancy price on to, andincidentally I thought I would tell him--you'd told me, you remember, howyour accounts of your two birds had warmed him up and melted hisfeelings----"

"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 himhow I had stuffed a bird once upon a time myself. It was a pigeon, withevery feather as white as snow; a fan-tail. It had belonged to my littleboy who died. I thought it would make such a beautiful emblem at hisfuneral, rising with wings outspread, you know, typical of theresurrection--we buried him from the Sunday-school, you remember. And so Ikilled it and wired it and stuffed it myself. It was hard to hang it in asoaring 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 sostill, looking at me, that I turned and sort o' stroked the turkey andsaid, 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 thebird and says, says he, 'She's not for sale. ' Then he turned to go intohis back room and leave me standing there. Well, that warmed _me_ up. SaysI, 'What in thunder is it here for, then? and if it ain't for sale, comeback here and show me what is!'

"'Nawtin', ' says 'e, with the same polite smile. 'Nawtin' for sale. I comeback when you gone. ' His voice was sweet as sugar, but he slammed thedoor. I would have followed him in and put some better manners into himwith a kick, but the old orang-outang had turned the key inside, and whenI'd had time to remember that I was a deacon and Sunday-school teacher Iwalked 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 onlyyesterday. "

"Oh, that's so. I don't keep run of that horrible lottery business. Itmakes me sick at heart to see the hideous canker poisoning the characterand blasting the lives of every class of our people--why, don't you thinkso?"

"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 wasstill talking of the lottery. 

"Pestilential thing, " he was calling it. "Men blame it lightly on theground 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 allthe tigers back in the woods!"

I assented absently and walked away full of a vague shame. For I know aswell as anyone that a man without a quick, strong, aggressive, insistentindignation 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 yourtaxidermist when he's given you cause. "

"I'm not troubled; I'm simply interested. I'll go down to-morrow and seehim. " A little later it rained, very softly, and straight down, so thatthere was no need to shut the windows, and I slept like an infant untilthe room was full of sunshine. 

All the next day and evening, summer though it was and the levee and sugarsheds and cotton-yards virtually empty, I was kept by unexpected businessand could not go near St. Peter Street. Both my partners were away ontheir vacations. But on the third afternoon our office regained its summerquiet and I was driving my pen through the last matter that prevented mygoing where I pleased, when I was disturbed by the announcement of avisitor. I pushed my writing on to a finish though he stood just at myback. Then I turned to bid him talk fast as my time was limited, when whoshould it be but Manouvrier. I took him into my private office, gave him achair 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 meone wile cat to stoff. Ah! a _so_ fine as I never see! Beautiful like dadev'l! Since two day' an' night' I can't make out if I want to fix datwile 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 imaginationnothing to do. You will always give my imagination strong play and never abit 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 lotterycompany's certified check for the seventy-five thousand dollars. "You keepdat?--lill' while?--for me? Yass; till I mek out how I goin' to spendher. "

"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 herag'in? One doze fine mawning--mebbee--dat sun--going rise hisself in dewes'. Well: when ole Pastropbon see dat, he play dat lott'ree ag'in. Butbiffo' he see dat"--He flirted his thumb. 

Not many days later a sudden bereavement brought our junior partner backfrom Europe and I took my family North for a more stimulating air. BeforeI went I called on my St. Peter Street friend to say that during myabsence either of my partners would fulfil any wish of his concerning themoney. In his wife's sewing-basket in the back room I noticed a batch ofunopened letters, and ventured a question which had been in my mind forseveral days. 

"Manouvrier, you must get a host of letters these days from people whothink 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 pretendedwork. "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 thosefire 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 wasleaving. 

"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 hiskindly gravity was on him again and he said, "Daz all right; I come gither some day. "

VI

I did not get back to New Orleans till late in the fall. In the officethey 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, andwent to see him. 

I found new lines of care on his brow, but the old kindness was still inhis eye. We exchanged a few words of greeting and inquiry, and then therecame 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 stoffhim quite so good like biffo'. " Another pause. Then, "I think I mek outwhat 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 atme 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 tradewith it I thing he don't stoff bird no mo', and I thing he lose itbis-ide--ha, ha, ha!--and if he keep it all time lock in doze bankI 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 delas' I mek dat out. " And the wife interrupted him in a tone that was likethe 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?--wedawn't got some ba-bee'! Dat neveh arrive to her. God know' dass not default 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 womanone 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 dathouse bad enough when she see her. Yass; fifty t'ousan' dollah faw houseand 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 histhumb again, while his hairy lip curled at the grim prospect of beatingFate the second time, and as badly, in the cemetery, as the first time, inthe 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 andprogress. In the room behind the shop he still plied his art and she herneedle as they had done all their married life, with never an inroad upontheir accustomed hours except the calls of the shop itself; but on everygolden morning of that luxurious summer-land, for a little while beforethe carpenters and plasterers arrived and dragged off their coats, thepair spent a few moments wandering through and about the buildingtogether, she with her hen-like crooning, he with his unsmiling face. 

Yet they never showed the faintest desire to see the end. The contractordawdled by the month. I never saw such dillydallying. They only abettedit, and when once he brought an absurd and unasked-for excuse to thetaxidermist's shop, its proprietor said--first shutting the door betweenthem 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 truereason for their apathy. But I guessed it, only too easily, and felt itspang. It was that with the occupancy and care of the house must begin thewife's absence from her old seat beside her husband at his work. 

Another thing troubled me. I did persuade him to put fittings into hiscistern which fire-engines could use in case of emergency, but he wouldnot 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 tellluck 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. Itwas of two and a half stories, broad and with many rooms. Two spacioushalls crossed each other, and there were wide verandas front and back, anda finished and latticed basement. The basement and the entire grounds, except a few bright flower-borders, were flagged, as was also thesidewalk, with the manufactured stone which in that nearly frostlessclimate makes such a perfect and beautiful pavement, and on this fairsurface fell the large shadows of laburnum, myrtle, orange, oleander, sweet-olive, mespelus, and banana, which the taxidermist had not sparedexpense 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 suggestedher living in it a few days so that his wife might herself move in asleisurely as she chose. And six months later, there, in the old back roomin St. Peter Street, the wife still sat sewing and now and then sayingsmall, wise, dispassionate things to temper the warmth of her partner'smore artistic emotions. Every fair day, about the hour of sunset, theywent to see the new house. It was plain they loved it; loved it only lessthan 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 insurancecompany 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 whatsad ruin it might work if fire should start among the frame tenementcottages which made up so many neighborhoods that were destitute ofwatermains, when right at our ear the gong sounded for just such a regionand presently engine after engine came thundering and smoking by our openwindows. Fire had broken out in the street where Manouvrier's new housestood, four squares from that house, but straight to windward of it. 

We knew only too well, without being there to witness, that our firemenwould find nothing with which to fight the flames except a few shallowwells of surface water and the wooden rain-water cisterns above ground, and that both these sources were almost worthless owing to a drouth. A mancame in and sat telling me of his new device for lessening the risks offire. 

"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 Icouldn't make sense of what he said. I kept my eyes laboriously in hisface, but all I could see was a vision of burning cottages; hook-and-ladder-men pulling down sheds and fences; ruined cisterns letting justenough water into door-yards and street-gutters to make sloppy walking;fire-engines standing idle and dropping cinders into their own puddles ina kind of shame for their little worth; here and there one furiouslysucking at an exhausted well while its firemen stood with scorching facesholding the nozzles almost in the flames and cursing the stream ofdribbling mud that fell short of their gallant endeavor. I seemed to seestreets populous with the sensation-seeking crowd; sidewalks and alleysfilled with bedding, chairs, bureaus, baskets of crockery and calicoclothing with lamps spilling into them, cheap looking-glasses unexpectedlyanswering your eye with the boldness of an outcast girl, broken tables, pictures of the Virgin, overturned stoves, and all the dear mantlepiecetrash which but an hour before had been the pride of the toilinghousewife, 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 havehere----"

"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 youwould! Well, good-day. "

The secretary was waiting to speak to me. The fire, he said, had entirelyburned up one square and was half through a second. "By the way, isn'tthat the street where old P. T. B. ----"

"Yes, " I replied, taking my hat; "if anyone wants to see me, you'd bettertell him to call to-morrow. "

I found the shop in St. Peter's Street shut, and went on to the newresidence. As I came near it, its beauty seemed to me to have consciouslyincreased under the threatenings of destruction. 

In the front gate stood the brother-in-law's widow, full of gestures anddistressful smiles as she leaned out with nervously folded arms and lookedup 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 cannotknow 'ow 'tis in danger! Ah! sen' him word? I sen' him fo' five time'--hesen' back I stay righd there an' not touch nut'n'! Ah! my God! I fine datvarrie te-de-ous, me, yass!"

"Is his wife with him?"

"Assuredly! You see, dey git 'fraid 'bout dat 'ouse of de Sister', youknow?"

"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--onesquare mo' down town--'alf square mo' nearer de swamp? Well, I thing 'fyou pass yondeh you fine Pastropbon. "

VIII

Through smoke, under falling cinders, and by distracted and fleeinghouseholds I went. The moment I turned the second corner I espied thehouse. It was already half a square from the oncoming fire, but on thenorthern side of the street, just out of its probable track and not ingreat danger except from sparks. But it was old and roofed with shingles;a decrepit Creole cottage sitting under dense cedars in a tangle of roseand honeysuckle vines, and strangely beautified by a flood of smoke-dimmedyellow sunlight. 

As I hurried forward, several men and boys came from the oppositedirection at a run and an engine followed them, jouncing and tiltingacross the sidewalk opposite the little asylum, into a yard, to draw froma fresh well. Their leader was a sight that drew all eyes. He was coatlessand hatless; his thin cotton shirt, with its sleeves rolled up to theelbows, was torn almost off his shaggy breast, his trousers were drenchedwith water and a rude bandage round his head was soaked with blood. Hecarried an axe. The throng shut him from my sight, but I ran to the spotand saw him again standing before the engine horses with his back close totheir heads. A strong, high board fence shut them off from the well andagainst it stood the owner of the property, pale as death, guarding theprecious 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 bangharmlessly in the air the man before him had dropped the axe and leapedupon him with the roar of a lion. The empty gun flew one way and its owneranother and almost before either struck the ground the axe was swingingand crashing into the fence. 

As presently the engine rolled through the gap and shouting men backed herto the edge of the well, the big axeman paused to wipe the streaming sweatfrom 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 agaze 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 goyondeh--mek yo' possible!" We were hurrying to the street--"Oh, yass, fawGod's sake go, mek yo' possible!"

"But, Manouvrier, you must come too! Where's your wife? The chief dangerto 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 soquick we can! But--foudre tonnerre!--look that house here fill' withba-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-cendand 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 greatblack 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! tellhim 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 ofthe fire department. It took but one moment to tell him my want, and inanother he had put the cottage roof under the charge of four of his menwith instructions not to leave it till the danger was past or the houseburning. The engine near us had drawn the well dry and was coming away. Hemet it, pointed to where, beneath swirling billows of black smoke, thepretty gable of the taxidermist's house shone like a white sail against athundercloud, gave orders and disappeared. 

The street was filling with people. A row of cottages across the way wasbeing emptied. The crackling flames were but half a square fromManouvrier's house. I called him once more to come. He waved his handkindly to imply that he knew what I had done. He and his wife were in theSisters' front garden walk conversing eagerly with the Mother Superior. They neared the gate. Suddenly the Mother Superior went back, thelay-sister guarding the gate let the pair out and the three of ushurried off together. 

We found ourselves now in the uproar and vortex of the struggle. Only atintervals could we take our attention from the turmoil that impeded orthreatened us, to glance forward at the white gable or back--as Manouvrierpersisted in doing--to the Sisters' cottage. Once I looked behind andnoticed, what I was loath to tell, that the firemen on its roof had grownbusy; but as I was about to risk the truth, the husband and wife, glancingat their own roof, in one breath groaned aloud. Its gleaming gable hadbegun to smoke. 

"Ah! that good God have pity on uz!" cried the wife, in tears, but as shestarted 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 nomore. 

The next minute, with scores of others, choking and blinded with thesmoke, 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 thenext corner and reach the house from the far side. " I glanced back to seewhy my companions lagged and lo! they had vanished. 

IX

I reached the house just in time to save its front grounds from theinvasion of the rabble. The wind had not turned back again. The brother-inlaw's widow was offering prayers of thanksgiving. The cisterns were emptyand the garden stood glistening in the afternoon sun like a May queendrenched in tears; but the lovely spot was saved. 

I left its custodian at an upper window, looking out upon the fire, andstarted 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 wayfor the procession they headed. The sweet, clean wife bore in her arms aninfant; the tattered, sooty, bloody-headed husband bore two; and afterthem, by pairs and hand in hand, with one gray sister in the rear, came ascore or more of pink-frocked, motherless little girls. An amused rabbleof children and lads hovered about the diminutive column, with leers andjests and happy antics, and the wife smiled foolishly and burned red withher embarrassment; but in the taxidermist's face shone an exaltation ofsoul greater than any I had ever seen. I felt too petty for such a momentand hoped he would go by without seeing me; but he smiled an altogethernew 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 threwopen 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 tohis work, and his wife sat by him sewing as before. But the orphans stayedin their new and better home. Two or three years ago the Sisters--thebrother-in-law's widow is one of them--built a large addition behind; butthe house itself stands in the beauty in which it stood on that day ofdestruction, and my friend always leaves his work on balmy afternoons intime to go with his wife and see that pink procession, four times as longnow as it was that day, march out the gate and down the street for itsdaily 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 likedat. "

* * * * *

The Entomologist

I

An odd feature of New Orleans is the way homes of all ranks, in so manysections of it, are mingled. The easy, bright democracy of the thing iswhat one might fancy of ancient Greeks; only, here there is a generalwooden frailty. 

A notable phase of this characteristic is the multitude of small, frame, ground-story double cottages fronting endwise to the street, on lots thatgive either side barely space enough for one row of twelve-foot rooms withwindows on a three-foot alley leading to the narrow backyard. 

Thus they lie, deployed in pairs or half-dozens, by hundreds, in thevariable intervals that occur between houses and gardens of dignity andelegance; hot as ovens, taking their perpetual bath of the great cleanser, sunshine. Sometimes they open directly upon the banquette (sidewalk), butoften behind as much as a fathom of front-yard, as gay with flowers as agirl's hat, and as fragrant of sweet-olive, citronelle, and heliotrope asher garments. In the right-hand half of such a one, far down on the Creoleside of Canal street, and well out toward the swamp, lived our friend theentomologist. 

Just a glance at it was enough to intoxicate one's fancy. It seemed toconfess newness of life, joy, passion, temperance, refinement, aspiration, modest wisdom, and serene courage. You would say there must live twowell-mated young lovers--but one can't always tell. 

II

We first came to know the entomologist through our opposite neighbors, theFontenettes, when we lived in the street that still bears the romanticname, Sixth. What a pity nothing rhymes to it. _Their_ ground-storycottage 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 Creolefashion, its front garden twelve feet deep, and its street fence, of whitepalings, higher than the passer's head. The parlor and dining-room were onthe left, and the two main bedrooms on the right, next the garden; Mrs. Fontenette's in front, opening into the parlor, Monsieur's behind, lettinginto the dining-room. For there had been a broader garden on the parlorand dining-room side, but that had been sold and built on. I fancy that ifMrs. Fontenette--who was not a Creole, as her husband was, but had oncebeen a Miss Bangs, or something, and still called blackberries"blackbries, " and made root rhyme with foot--I fancy if she had beendoomed to our entomologist's sort of a house she would have been toobroken in spirit to have made anybody's acquaintance. 

For our pretty blonde neighbor had ambitions, or _had_ had, as she oncehinted to me with a dainty sadness. When I somehow let slip to her that Ihad repeated her delicately balanced words to my wife she gave me onemelting glance of reproach, and thenceforth confided in me no more beyondthe limits of literary criticism and theology--and botany. I remember wewere among the few roses of her small flower-beds at the time, and I wastrying 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--asMonsieur Fontenette once said; but he said it with a glance of fondadmiration. Her name was Flora, and yet not flowers, but their book-lore, best suited her subtle capriciousness. She made such a point of names thatshe could not let us be happy with the homely monosyllable by which wewere known, until we allowed her to hyphenate us as the Thorndyke-Smiths. 

There hung in our hall an entire unmarred beard of the beautiful graySpanish moss, eight feet long. I had got this unusual specimen bytiptoeing from the thwarts of a skiff with twelve feet of yellow crevasse-waters beneath, the shade of the vast cypress forest above, and the boughwhence it hung brought within hand's reach for the first time in acentury. Thus I explained it one day to Mrs. Fontenette, as she touchedits ends with a delicate finger. 

"Tillandsia"--was her one word of response. She loved no other part ofbotany quite so much as its Latin. 

"The Baron ought to see that, " said Monsieur. He was a man of quietmanners, not over-social, who had once enjoyed a handsome business income, but had early--about the time of his marriage--been made poor through thepartial 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 adversitycage him for life in the only occupation he knew, while the wife he adoredkept him pecuniarily bled to death, without sharing his silent resigna--There I go again! Somehow I can't talk about her without seeming unjustand 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 alwayssucceeded; 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 acertain disappointed way, as if she would rather have kept him unknown awhile longer. He was, she said, a profoundly learned man, graduate of oneof those great universities over in his native Germany, and a naturalist. Young? Well, eh--comparatively--yes. At which the silent husband smiledhis dissent. 

The Baron was an entomologist. Both the Fontenettes thought we should befascinated 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 themto us. Take us to him?--Oh!--eh--her embarrassment made her prettier, asshe broke it to us gently that the Baroness was a seamstress. She hushedat her husband's mention of shirts; but recovered when he harked back tothe Baron, and beamed her unspoken apologies for the great, brave scholarwho daily, silently bore up under this awful humiliation. 

III

Toward the close of the next afternoon she brought the entomologist. I cansee yet the glad flutter she could not hide as they came up our frontgarden walk in an air spiced by the "four-o'clocks, " with whose smalltrumpets--red, white, and yellow--our children were filling their laps andstringing them on the seed-stalks of the cocoa-grass. He was bent andspectacled, of course; _l'entomologie oblige_; but, oh, besides!--

"Comparatively young, " Mrs. Fontenette had said, and I naturally used herhusband, who was thirty-one, for the comparison. Why, this man? It wouldhave 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, atsixty-five! He was dark, bloodless, bowed, thin, weatherbeaten, ill-clad--a picture of decent, incurable penury. The best thing about his was hishead. It was not imposing at all, but it was interesting, albeit verymeagrely graced with fine brown hair, dry and neglected. I read himthrough without an effort before we had been ten minutes together; a leafstill hanging to humanity's tree, but faded and shrivelled around somesmall worm that was feeding on its juices. 

And there was no mistaking that worm; it was the avarice of knowledge. Hehad lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delvingon, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart onthe locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany, satisfied with themfor their own sake, without reference to God or man; an infant inemotions, who time and again would no doubt have starved outright but forhis wife, whom there and then I resolved we should know also. I was amusedto see, by stolen glances, Mrs. Smith study him. She did not know shefrowned, nor did he; but Mrs. Fontenette knew it every time. 

We all had the advantage of him as to common sight. His glasses wereobviously of a very high power, yet he could scarcely see anything till heclapped his face close down and hunted for it. When he pencilled for methe new Latin name he had given to a small, slender, almost dazzlinggreen, 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 poorclothing 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. Youcould see that no vice of the body nor any lust of material things hadever led him captive. He gave one the tender despair with which we look ona blind babe. 

When we expressed regret that his wife had not come with him, he only bentwith a deeper greed into a book I had handed him, and after a moment laidit down disappointedly, saying that it was "fool of plundters. " Mrs. Fontenette asking to be shown one of them, they reopened the booktogether, she all consciousness as she bent against him over the page, heoblivious of everything but the phrase they were hunting. He gave hisforehead a tap of despair as he showed where the book called this sameTillandsia, or Spanish moss, a parasite. 

"It iss no baraseet, " he explained, in a mellow falsetto, "it iss anepipheet!"

"An air-plant!" said his fair worshipper, softly drinking in a bosomful ofgladness as she made the distance between them more discreet. 

Distances were all one to him. He seemed like a burnt log, still in shapebut gone to ashes, except in one warm spot where glowed this self-consuming, world-sacrificing adoration of knowledge; knowledge sought, asI say, purely for its own sake and narrowed down to names and technicaldescriptions. Men of _perverted_ principles and passions you may findanywhere; but I never had seen anyone so totally undeveloped in all theemotions, affections, tastes that make life _life_. 

IV

A few afternoons later I went to his house. For pretext I carried a hugegreen worm, but I went mainly to see just how unluckily he was married. Hewas not at home. I found his partner a small, bright, toil-worn, prettywoman of hardly twenty-eight or nine, whose two or three children had diedin infancy, and who had blended wifehood and motherhood together, and wastaking care of the Baron as a widow would care for a crippled son, and atthe same time reverencing him as if he were a demigod. Of his utterfailure to provide their daily living she confessed herself by everyimplication, simply--proud! What else should a demigod's wife expect? Atthe same time, without any direct statement, she made it clear that shehad 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 asane winsomeness--she managed to radiate without them. I left her in herclean, bright cottage, like a nesting bird in a flowery bush, and enteredmy own home, declaring, with what I was gently told was unnecessaryenthusiasm, that the Baron's wife was the "unluckily married" one, and thebest piece of luck her husband had ever had. I had seen women make avirtue 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, ifonly 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; hewas not a "baraseet"--oh, no!--yet he hung on. We still have, stowedsomewhere, a large case of butterflies, another of splendid moths, and asmaller one of glistening beetles. Nor can I begrudge their cost, ofwhatever sort, even now when my delight in them is no longer a constantenthusiasm. The cases of specimens have passed from daily sight, butthenceforth, as never before, our garden was furnished with guests--pages, ladies, poets, fairies, emperors, goddesses--coming and going on gorgeouswings, 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 graceand beauty, its marvellous delicacy and minuteness, its glory of color andcuriousness of marking, and its exquisite adaptation of form to need andfunction, that in my meaner depths, or say my childish shallows--Iresented Mrs. Fontenette's making the same avowal for herself--I didn'tbelieve her!

I do not say she was consciously shamming; but I could see she drank inthe Baron's revelations with no more true spiritual exaltation than thequivering twilight moths drew from our veranda honeysuckles. Yet it wasmainly her vanity that feasted, not any lower impulse--of which, you know, there are several--and, possibly, all her vanity craved at first was thetinsel distinction of unusual knowledge. 

One night she got into my dreams. I seemed to be explaining to MonsieurFontenette apologetically that this newly opened world was not at allseparate from my old one, but shone everywhere in it, like our wingedguests in our garden, and followed and surrounded me far beyond theBaron's company, terminology, and magnifying-glass, lightening the burdensand stress of the very counting-room and exchange. Whereat he seemed toflare 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 theutter absence of vanity in the Baron himself. I lay smiling in the dark tothink how much less all our verbal caressings were worth to him than thedrone of the most familiar beetle, and how his life-long delving in booksand nature had opened up this fairy world to him only at the cost ofshutting up all others. If education means calling forth and perfectingour 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 fellasleep chuckling in remembrance of an occasion when Mrs. Fontenette, taking her cue from me, spoke to him of his plant-and-insect lore as oneof the many worlds there are within _the_ world, no more displacing itthan light displaces air, or than fragrance displaces form or sound. Hemade 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 itsgentle hermit. No butterfly raptures for him; he devoured the one kind offacts he cared for, as a caterpillar devours leaves. 

V

How Mrs. Fontenette got Mrs. "Thorndyke-Smith" and me entangled with somesix or eight others in her project for a botanizing and butterfly-chasingpicnic I do not know; but she did. On the evening before the appointed dayI perfidiously crawfished out of it, and our house furnished only onedelegate, whom I urged to go rather than break up the party--I never breakup a party if I can avoid it. "But as for me going, " I said, "my businesssimply won't let me!" At which our pretty neighbor expressed her regretswith a ready resignation that broke into open sunshine as she lamented thesame inability in her husband. To my suggestion that the Baroness beinvited, Mrs. Fontenette smiled a sweet amusement that was perfect in itsway, and said she hoped the weather would be propitious; people were sotimid about rain. 

It was. When I came home, tardily, that afternoon, the picnickers had notreturned, though the oleanders and crape-myrtles on the grounds next ourscast shadows three times their length across our lawn. In an aimless way Iroamed from the house down into our small rear garden, thinking oftenest, of course, of the absentees, and admiring the refined good sense withwhich Monsieur Fontenette seemed to have decided to let this unperilousattack of silliness run itself out in the woman he loved with so muchtenderness and with so much passion. 

"How much distress he is saving himself and all of us, " I caught myselfmurmuring, audibly, out among my fig-trees. 

Finding two or three figs fully ripe, I strolled over the way to see himamong his trees and maybe find chance for a little neighborly boasting. Asour custom with each other was, I ignored the bell on his gate, drew thebolt, and, passing in among Mrs. Fontenette's invalid roses, must havemoved, without intention, quite noiselessly from one to another, until Icame around behind the house, where a strong old cloth-of-gold rose-vinehalf covered the latticed side of the cistern shed. In the doorway Istopped in silent amaze. A small looking-glass hanging against the woodencistern showed me--although I was in much the stronger light--MonsieurFontenette. He was just straightening up from an oil-stone he had beenusing, 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 awfullooking in and out at the same time; that was on a man who was stilltrying 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 hisglance did not rise quite to the mirror, but followed the soft thumbingswith which he tried the two edges and point of as murderous a knife asever I saw. 

As softly as a shadow I drew out of sight, turned away, and went almostback 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 ofequanimity on his features which made him always so thoroughly good-looking. He came hitching his waistband with both hands in that innocentCreole 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 Iinstantly decided to get him away from home and keep him away until thepicnickers had got back and scattered. So I proposed a walk, a diversionwe had often enjoyed together. 

"Yes?" he said, "to pazz the time whilse they don't arrive? With thegreates' of pleasu'e!"

I dare say we were both more preoccupied than we thought we were, foroutside the gate we fairly ran into a lady--yes; a seamstress--the wife ofthe 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 myeyes from saying: "A man with you for a wife belongs at home whenever hecan be there!" But whether they spoke it or not, in some way, without wordor glance, by simple radiations from the whole sweet woman, she revealedthat to make that fact plain to him, to _her_, and to all of us, was whatthis new emphasis of charm was for. 

She had come, she said--and scarcely on the lips of the loveliest Creoledid I ever hear a more bewitching broken-English--she had come accordingto a half-promise made to Mrs. Fontenette to show her--"I tidn't etsectlypromised, 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 showher a new vay to remoof, remoof? is sat English? So? A new vay to remoofold stains. "

"A new way--" responded Fontenette, with an air of gravest interest in allmatters of laundry. 

"Yes, " she repeated, as simply as a babe, "a new vay; and I sought I comenow so to go home viss mine hussbandt. " There, at last, she smiled, and tomake the caressing pride of her closing tone still prettier, lifted herfigured muslin out sidewise between thumb and forefinger of each hand witheven more archaic grace than playfulness. 

As the three of us crossed over and took seats on my veranda, we werejoined by the neighbor whose garden-trees I have mentioned; the man ofwhom I have told you, how he failed to strike a bargain with oldManouvrier, 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 myside of the fence. And presently what does the simple fellow do but beginto 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 themore 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 Fontenettemight presently do or say, my blood ran hot and cold. But Monsieur showedneither amusement nor annoyance, only a perfectly gracious endurance. Yethow could I know what instant his forbearance might give way, or whatserpent's eggs the joker's inanities might in the next day or hour turnout to be, laid in the hot heart of the Creole gentleman? Then it was thatthis slender little German seamstress-wife shone forth like the first starof the breathless twilight. 

Seamstress? no; she had left the seamstress totally behind her. You mighthave thought the finest tactics of the drawing-room--not of to-day, but ofthe times when gentlemen wore swords and dirks--had been at her finger-endsall her life. She took our good neighbor's giddy pleasantries as deeptruths lightly put, and answered them in such graceful, mild earnest, andwith such a modest, yet fetching, quaintness, that we were all preached tomore effectively than we could have been by seven priests from one pulpit. Or, at any rate, that was my feeling; every note she uttered wasmelodiously kind, but every sentence was an arrow sent home. 

"You make me, " she said, "you make me sink of se aunt of my musser, vhatshe said to my musser vhen my musser iss getting married. 'Senda, ' shesaid, 'vonce in a vhile'--is sat right, 'vonce in a vhile?'--so?--'voncein a vhile your Rudolph going to see a voman he better had married sanyou. Sen he going to fall a little vay--maybe a good vay--in love vissher; and sen if Rudolph iss a scoundtrel, or if you iss a fool, sare betrouble. But if Rudolph don't be a scoundtrel and you don't be a fool hevill pretty soon straight' up himself and say, One man can't ever'singhave, 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 Countessvon (Something)--sat aunt of my musser. She vas a fine voman. "

"Still, " said our joker, "you know she was only about half right in thatadvice. "

"No, " she replied, putting on a drowsy tone, "I don't know; and I sink youdon'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 wedidn't let each other be each other's keeper; could we, Fontenette?"

No sound from Fontenette. "Hmm!" hummed the little woman, in such softderision 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-eyedmonster. "

"Se creen-eyedt--no, I sink not. Chalousie have destroyed--is satcorrect?--yes? Chalousie have destroyed a sowsand-sowsand times so muchhappiness as it ever saved--ah! see se lightening! I sink sat is sedispleasu'e of heaven to my so bad English. Ah? see it again? vell, I villstop. "

"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 besatisfied viss a vorld not full of vorms and bugs; and I am glad to stayalvays 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 selightening!--a man who can be satisfied viss a vorld no bigger as I can bymineself gif him--mine Kott! I vould not haf such a man! See selightening! but I sink sare vill be no storm; sare is no sunder viss seligh'--Ah! sare are se trhuants!" We rose to meet them. First came thechildren, vaunting their fatigue, then a black maid or two, with twicetheir share of baskets, and then our three spouses; the Baron came lastand was mute. The two ladies called cheery, weary good-byes to anothercontingent, that passed on by the gate, and hail and farewell to our fatneighbor 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--worthcounting--is ever played, exactly as previously planned. One of ourcompany 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 clearproof of it--which it still gives me a low sort of pleasure to recall--wasmy prompt discovery, as we gathered around the tea-board, to eat thepicnic's remains, that our Flora was out of humor with the Baron. It wasplain that the whole day's flood of small experiences had been to herpretty 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 wordsto a ton of dead-sweet insinuation, what a social failure he had chosen tobe. Evidently he had spent every golden hour of sweet spiritualopportunity--I speak from her point of view, or, at least, my notion ofit--not in catching and communicating the charm of any scene or incident, nor in thrilling comparisons of sentiment with anyone, nor in anyimpartation of inspiring knowledge, nor in any mirthful exchange ofcompliments or gay glances over the salad and sandwiches; but inconstantly poking and plodding through thicket and mire and solitarilypeering and prying on the under sides of leaves and stems and up and downand all around the bark of every rough-trunked tree. 

She made the picture amusing, none the less, and to no one more so than tothe Baron's wife, whose presence among us at the board was as fragrant, soto 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 atreat-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 andnussing new found. "

But the Baron had found nothing new. He told us so with his mouth drippingand his nose in the trough--his plate I should say. You could hear himchew across the room. Suddenly, however, he ceased eating and began topour forth an account of his day's observation; in response to which M. Fontenette, to my amused mystification, led us all in the interest withwhich 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 forgotour own. 

As we rose to return to the veranda, the Creole still offered him anundivided attention, which the Baron rewarded with his continueddiscourse. As I gave Fontenette a light for his cigarette I held his eyefor a moment with a brightness of face into which I put as significantapproval as I dared; for I fancied the same unuttered word was brooding inboth 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 theGerman woman courted the pretty New Englander as sweetly as the Creolecourted her husband, and with twice the energy. She was a bubbling springof information in the Baron's science; she was a well of sweet philosophyon life and conduct, and at every turn of their conversation, alwaysletting Mrs. Fontenette turn it, she showed her own to be the better mindand the better training. 

When Mrs. Fontenette, before any one else, rose to go--maybe my dislike ofher only made it seem so--but I believed she did it out of pure bafflementand chagrin. 

Not so believed her husband. He responded gratefully; yet lingered, stilllistening to the entomologist, until she fondlingly chid him forforgetting that while he had been all day in his swivel-chair, she hadpassed the hours in unusual fatigues!

She declined his arm in our garden walk, and positively forbade me to cuta rose for her--but with a grace almost maidenly. As I let them out, theheat-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 ifsare 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 tothose 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 myunholy joy, she stumbled just enough to make the whole performanceunspeakably ridiculous, and flirted into her cottage----

"In tears!" I offered to bet myself as I turned to rejoin my companions onthe veranda, and wished with all my soul the goggled Baron could have seenit. 

VIII

But the best of eyes would not have counted this time, for he was notthere. He had accepted the offer of a room, where he was giving the day'sspecimens certain treatments which he believed, or pretended, could notwait until he should reach his far downtown cottage. His hostess and hiswife had gone with him, but now some light discussion of house adornmentwas drawing them to the parlor. As this room was being lighted I saw ourguest, evidently through force of an early habit, turn a critical glanceto the music on the piano, and as quickly withdraw it. Both of us motionedher 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 bitjust for one little German song, she went to the instrument, talkingslowly as she went, and closing the door in the entomologist's directionas she talked. 

"Siss a great vhile I haf not done siss, " she concluded, as her fingersbegan to drift over the keys, and then she sang, very gently, evenguardedly, but oh, so sweetly!

We were amazed. Here, without the slightest splendor of achievement oradventure, seemed to be the most incredible piece of real life we had everseen. Why, I asked myself, was this woman so short even of German friendsas to be condemned to a seamstress's penury? And my best guess was to layit to the zeal of her old-fashioned--and yet not merely old-fashioned-wifehood, which could accept no friendship that did not unqualifiedlyaccept him; and he?--Goodness!

When she ceased neither listener spoke; the tears were in our throats. Shebent her head slightly over the keys, and said, "I like to sing youanusser. " We accepted eagerly, and she sang again. There was nothing ofpersonal application in either song, yet now, near the end, where therewas a purposed silence in the melody, the silence hung on and on until itwas clear she was struggling with herself; but again the strain arosewithout a tremor, and so she finished. "Oh, no, no, " she replied, to oursolicitation, with the grateful emphasis of one who declines a thirdglass, "se sooneh I stop, se betteh for ever'body, " meaning speciallyherself, 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 andmust do; she and her husband must spend the night with us. There was abed-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 argumentthey called each other "My dear, " and presently the ayes had it. The lastword I heard from our fair guest was to her hostess at the door of herchamber, the farthest down the hall. It was as to shutting or not shuttingthe windows. "No, " she said, "I sink sare vill be no storm, because sareis yet no sunder vis se lightening. " And so it turned out. But at the sametime----

IX

My room adjoined the Baron's in frontas his wife's did farther back. Adoor of his and window of mine stood wide open on the one balcony, fromwhich a flight of narrow steps led down into the side garden. Thus, forsome time after I was in bed I heard him stirring; but by and by, with nosound to betoken it except the shutting of this door, it was plain he hadlain down. 

I awoke with a sense of having been some hours asleep, and in fact thefull moon, shining gloriously, had passed the meridian. The balcony waslighted up by it like noon, and on it stood the entomologist, entirelydressed. The door was shut behind him. He was looking in at my window, buthe did not know the room was mine, and with eyes twice as good as he hadhe could not have seen through my mosquito-bar. I wondered, but lay stilltill he had started softly down the steps. Then I sprang out of bed on thedark side, and dressed faster than a fireman. 

When half-clad I went and looked out a parlor window. He was trying thegate, which was locked. But he knew where the key always hung, behind thepost, and turned to get it. I went back and finished dressing, stole downthe inner, basement stairs and out into the deep shadows of the garden, and presently saw my guest passing in through the Fontenettes' gate, whosebolt he had drawn from the outside. As angry now as I had been amazed Ihurried after. 

To avoid the moonlight I followed the shadows of the sidewalk-trees downto the next corner, to cross there and come back under a like cover on theother side. But squarely on the crossing I was met and stopped by abelated drunkard, who had a proposition to make to me which he thought notrue 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 offin his own right direction. I slipped to the Fontenettes' gate, as near aswas best, and instantly saw, between one of its posts and a very blackmyrtle-orange, Fontenette himself, standing as still as the trees. I wasnot in so deep a shade as he, but I might have stepped right out into themoonlight without his seeing me, so intensely was he watching his wife'sfront door. For there stood the entomologist. He had evidently beenknocking, and was about to knock again when there came some response fromwithin, 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 mealready 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 realizedalmost unbearably my position, stealing thus at such a moment on the heelsof my neighbor and friend, but this is not a story of feelings, at anyrate, not of mine. 

"Vhat?" said the entomologist. "Go avay? Mien Gott! No, I vill not koavay. Mien gloryform! Gif me first mine gloryform! Dot Psyche hass comeout 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 aword 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 gatewayholding a blazing match to his cigarette. 

"Well, sir, good-evening again, " said the Creole. I noticed the perfectionof 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 withouthis shoes. 

"Good-evening--or, good-morning, perchance, " said Fontenette. "I sueposethaz 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 shallsee _someding_. "

"A moment, " said the Creole. "May I inquire you how is that, that you callon us in yo' sock feet?"

"Ach! I am already t'e socks putting on pefore I remember I do not needt'em! But coom! coom! see a vonderfool!" He led, and Fontenette, when hehad blown a cloud of smoke through his nose, followed, saying exclusivelyfor his own ear:

"A wonder fool, yes! But a fool is no wonder to me any more; I find myselfto be that kind. "

X

When, hypocritically clad in dressing-gown and slippers, I stopped at myguest's inner door and Fontenette opened it just enough to let me enter, Isaw, 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 allof a kind, dancing across one another's airy paths in a bewildering mazeor alighting and quivering on this thing and that. The mosquito-net, draping almost from ceiling to floor, was beflowered with themmajestically displaying in splendid alternation their upper and undercolors, or, with wings lifted and vibrant, tipping to one side and anotheras they crept up the white mesh, like painted and gilded sails in afairies' regatta. 

And all this life and beauty, this gay glory and tremorous ecstasy andeffort was here for moth-love of one incarnate fever of frail-wingedloveliness! Oh! to what unguessed archangelic observation, to whatinfinite seraphic compassion, may not our own swarming race, who dare nottoo much pity ourselves, be but just such dainty ephemera! Splendid inpurposes, intelligence, and affections as these in colors and grace, glorious when on the wing, and marvellous still, riddles of wonder, evenwhen crawling and quivering, tipping and swerving from the upright andtrue, 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 ormanliest inspiration, at least it took some uncharity out of me for themoment. As in mechanical silence Fontenette obeyed the busy requests ofthe entomologist, I presently looked more on those two than on the wingedmultitude, and thought on, of the myriad true tales of love-weakness andlove-wrath for which they and their two pretty mates were just now sounlucky as to stand; of the awful naturalness of such things; of thebutterfly beauty and wonder--nay, rather the divine possibilities of thelives such things so naturally speed to wreck; and then of Tom Moorealmost 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 darkhand, as it searched and hurried throughout the room, the flutter of wingshad ceased as under a wind of death. 

"You must have a hundred and fifty of them, " I said as the last victimceased to flutter. 

"Yes. "

"Their sale is slow, of course, but every time you sell one, you ought toget"--I was judging by some prices he had charged me--"you ought to gettwo 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 sevenspecimenss 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. Asto the sky, that is another matter; one of the charms of that warm wetland 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 theyhad clouds, but the clouds were silvered through with happy reassurances. Jealousy, we are told, once set on fire, burns without fuel; but I mustthink that that is oftenest, if not always, the jealousy of a selfishlove. Or, rather--let me quote Senda, as she spoke the only other time sheever touched upon the subject with us. Our fat neighbor had dragged it inagain 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 toavoid it. Said she:

"Some of us--not all--have great power to love. Some, not all, who havesis power--to love--have also se power to trust. Me, I rasser be trustetand 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 askindly 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 thetheme. 

Which I, too, will do when I have noted the one thing I had particularlyin mind to say, of Fontenette: that, as Senda remarked--for the above isan abridgment--"I rasser see chalousie vissout cause, san cause vissoutchalousie;" and that even while I was witness of the profound ferocity ofhis jealousy when roused, and more and more as time passed on, I wasimpressed with its sweet reasonableness. 

XI

Time did pass--in days and weeks of that quiet sort which make us forgetin actual life that such is the way in good stories also. Innumerablecrops were growing in the fields, countless ships were sailing or steamingthe monotonous leagues of their long wanderings from port to port, someempty, 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, oflife. 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, inbulk 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 istended, so will be the raisins and the wine. There is nothing in life forwhich to be more thankful, or in which to be more diligent, than itsintermissions. This is not my sermonizing. I am not going to puteverything off upon "Senda, " but really this was hers. I have edited it atrifle; her inability to make, in her pronunciation, a due differencebetween wine and vine rather dulled the point of her moral. 

Fontenette remarked to her one Sunday afternoon in our garden, that shemust have got her English first from books. 

"Yes, " she said, "I didt. Also I have many, many veeks Englishconversations 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, Irecalled a text and so got by; which text was the wise saying of thatfemale 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 slippedaround to the Baroness. She spoke something low, stroking her downy fanand blushing with that damsel sweetness of which her husband was so openlyfond. 

"O no, I sank you!" answered Senda, in an undulating voice. "I sank youv'ey much, but I cannot take se time to come to yo' house, and I cannotlet you take se trouble _too_ come _too_ mine. No, if I can have me onlyse right soughts, and find me se right vords for se right soughts, I sinkI leave se p'onunciation to se mercy of P'ovidence. "

Mrs. Fontenette blushed as prettily as a child, and let her husband takeher hand as he said, "The Providence that wou'n' have mercy on such apronunshation 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 loveof the man and watchful love of the woman, whose fancied inferiority washer excuse for an illicit infatuation; an infatuation which little bylittle became a staring fact--only not to Fontenette. You know, you canhide such a thing from those who love and trust you, but not long fromthose who do not; and if you are not old in sin--Flora and the Baron wereinfants--you will almost certainly think that a condition hid from thosewho love and trust you is hid from all! O fools! the very urchins of theplayground will presently have found you out and be guessing at brokenlaws, though there be only broken faiths and the anguish of first steps inperfidy. 

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 anintervener a chance to speak with effect. It was pitiful to see how littlegratification they got out of it; especially she, with that silly beliefin her ability to rekindle his spiritual energies and lift him into thethin air of her transcendentalisms; slipping, nevertheless, bit by bit, down the precipitous incline between her vaporous refinements and hiswallowing animalisms; too destitute of the love that loves to give, or ofcourage, or of cunning, to venture into the fires of real passion, butforever craving flattery and caresses, and for their sake forever holdinghim 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 andto tell. Truth for truth's sake! He had no strong _moral_ feeling againsta lie; but he had never had the slightest _use_ for a lie, and aprevarication on his tongue would have been as strange to him as castanetsin his palms. Guile takes alertness, adroitness; and the slim pennyworthof these that he could command he used up, no doubt, on Fontenette. Inoticed that after an hour with the Creole he always looked tortured andexhausted. With us he was artless to the tips of his awful finger-nails. 

Nor was Mrs. Fontenette a skilful dissembler; she over-concealed things sorevealingly. Then she was so helplessly enamoured and in so childish away. I venture one of the penalties almost any woman may have to pay forbringing 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. OurTitania pointed us to the fact that the Baron's wife never tried to diverthis mind from the one pursuit that enthralled it; and she borrowed one ofour garden alleys in which to teach him--grace-hoops! He never caught onefrom her nor threw one that she could catch; but, ah! with her coaxing andcommanding, her sweet taunting and reprimanding and his utter lack ofsurprise at them, how much she betrayed! Fontenette came, learned in a fewthrows, and was charmed with the toys--a genuine lover always takes tothem kindly--but Mrs. Fontenette was by this time tired, and she neveragain felt rested when her husband mentioned the game. 

Furthermore, their countenances!--hers and the entomologist's--especiallywhen 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 readthe depths of a bay by the passing of wind and light, day by day, over itswaters--particularly if the waters are not very deep. 

They made painful reading. What degrees of heart-wretchedness came andwent or stayed with them, we may have over--we may have underestimated. God knows. In two months Mrs. Fontenette grew visibly older and lesspretty, yet more nearly beautiful; while he, by every sign, was graduallyawakening 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 ofsated, always of the famished sort. 

XII

It was he who finally put the very seal of confirmation upon both ourhopes and our fears. 

The time was the evening of the same Sunday in whose afternoon his wifehad declined those transparent spelling-lessons. A certain preacher, notedfor 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, tohear him. Their pew was well to the front and we were late, so that goingdown the aisle unushered, with them in the lead--husband and spouse, husband and spouse, four couples--we made a procession which becameembarrassingly amusing as the preacher simultaneously closed the Scripturelesson 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 alwayssays after it, "The poor Baron!" and often adds--"and poor Mrs. Fontenette! Little did we think, " etc. But he has never even suspectedtheir 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, forwhich we ought already to be preparing, he had in his first discoursetouched upon political purity--cleanness of citizenship--the Baron showedno interest. He still showed none when the speaker said again, thatbecause the pestilence was once more with us--that was in the terriblevisitation of 1878--he had devoted his second discourse to the hideouscrime of a great city whose voters and tax-payers do not enable and compelit to keep the precept, "Be thou clean. " I thought of the clean littlehome from whose master beside me came no evidence that he thought at all. But the moment the preacher declared his purpose to consider now theapplication of this great command to the individual life and character ofman and woman as simply man and woman, the entomologist became the closestlistener in the crowded throng. 

The sermon was a daring one. I was struck by the shrewd concessions withwhich the speaker defined personal purity and the various falseconceptions of it that pass current; abandoning the entrenched hills, soto speak, of his church's traditional rigor and of many conventionalrules, and drawing after him into the unfortified plain his leastpersuadable hearers of whatever churchly or unchurchly prejudice, tosurround them finally at one wide sweep and receive their unconditionalsurrender. His periods were not as embarrassing to a mixed audience as mycitations would indicate. Those that I bring together were wiselysubordinated and kept apart in the discourse, and ran together only inminds like my own, eager for one or two other hearers to be speciallyimpressed by them. And one, at least, was. Before the third sentence ofthe main discourse was finished the fierceness of the Baron's attentionwas provoking me to ask myself whether a conscience also was not coming tobirth in him. 

In a spiritual-material being, said the speaker, the spirit has arightful, happy share in every physical delight, and no physical delightneed be unclean in which the spirit can freely enjoy its just share assenior member in the partnership of soul and body. Without this spiritualparticipation it could not be clean, though church, state, and societyshould jointly approve and command it. Mark, I do not answer for the truthof 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 toseek a purification of self for self-purification's sake. 

The Baron grunted. He was drinking in the words; had forgotten hissurroundings. 

Only those are clean, continued the speaker, whose every act, motive, condition is ordered according to their best knowledge of the generalhappiness, whether that happiness is for the time embodied in millions, orin but one beyond themselves. Through errors of judgment they may fallinto manifest outward uncleannesses; but they, and none but they, areclean 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 toRevelation the Bible never does so. It is amazing how feeble a sense ofcondemnation women--even as compared with men--often show for the _spirit_of certain misdeeds if only it be unaccompanied by the misdeed'sperformance; or what loathing so many of them--"of you, " he really said, and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves ofthem--what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things withoutreference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which theirnobility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, entirely depends. 

Nothing is unclean that is to no one anywhere unjust or unkind; andnothing is unjust, unkind, or unclean which cannot easily be shown to beso without inventing an eleventh commandment. To him, he said, nouncleanness was more foul than that which, not for kindness, or forrighteousness, but for a fantastical, self-centred refinement, inventssome eleventh commandment to call that common which God hath cleansed; tocall anything brutish which the incarnation of the soul has made sacred tospotless affections. 

The Baron muttered something in German, and Fontenette shut his mouthtight and straightened up in approbation. 

At the close of the service we were not out of the pew before our escortwas introducing Senda to his friends in front and behind as busily andelaborately as if that was what we had come for. Twice and again she castso anxious an eye upon her husband--from whom Mrs. Fontenette had wiselytaken shelter behind hers--that I softly said to her, "We'll take care ofhim. "

A care he was! All the way down the aisle, amid the peals of the organ, hecommented on the sermon aloud, mostly to himself but also to whichever ofus he could rub his glasses against. Sometimes he mistook others for usuntil they stared. His face showed a piteous, weary distress, his thinhair went twenty ways, he seemed scarcely to know where he was or how totake his steps, and presently was saying to a strange lady crowded againsthim, 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! Iam not a cat to keep me alvays clean--no more as a hogk to keep me alwaysnot clean. No, I keep me--owdside--inside--always so clean as it comeseassy, 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. "Undtt'ose vomens, " he persisted in the vestibule, "t'ey are more troubple yetas t'eir veight in goldt! I vish, mine Gott! t'ere be no more any vomensut all, undt we haf t'e shiltern by mutchinery. "

On the outer steps I sprang with others to save a young girl, who hadstumbled, from pitching headlong to the sidewalk. Once on her feet again, after a limp or two she walked away uninjured; but when I looked aroundfor my real charge he was not in sight. I hurried to Fontenette and hiswife a few steps away, but he was not with them. The three of us turnedback 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 itwas likely he would go home without trying to find us, and she repliedthat he might; but when we had all looked at one another for a moment shedded, with a distinct tremor of voice--and I saw that she fearedtemptation and conscience had unsettled his wits--"I sink he iss not ve'yvell. I sink he is maybe--I ton't know, but--I--I sink he iss not ve'yvell. " 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 gohome, away downtown, alone, while we should go as far the other way andremain all night ignorant of her husband's whereabouts. So our next doorneighbor, my wife and I went with her, and his wife and the Fontenetteswent home; for a conviction probably common to us all, but which no onecared to put into downright words, was that the entomologist, whetherdazed or not, might wander up to one of our homes in preference to hisown. In the street-car and afterward for a full hour at her house, Sendawas 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 whencommencing to grow old? Yes, I sink sat is se reason. "

When we had been at her cottage for nearly an hour, my neighbor startedout on a systematic search; and half an hour later, I left Mrs. Smith withher and went also. 

About one o'clock in the night, I came back as far as the corner nearesther house, but waited there, by appointment, with my neighbor; and verysoon--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, willyou, 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 quickfootstep. By and by I saw a man pass under a distant lamp, coming towardme. 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--exceptsick. 

"Yes, he cou'n't tell anybody where to take him, and a doctor found thatletteh on him print' outside with yo' uptown address; and so he put him ina cab an' sen' him yondeh, and sen' word he muz 'ave been sick sinze sev'lhours, 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 themawning. And (to our neighbor) yo' madame do uz that kineness to remainwith Madame Fontenette whiles I'm bringing his wife. "

At the cottage my companions remained outside. As I entered Senda caughtone glance and exclaimed, "Ah, mine hussbandt is foundt and is anyhowalife!"

"Yes, " I replied, "but he's ill. Mr. Fontenette met him and took him tohis house. He's there now with Mrs. Fontenette and Mrs. Blank. Get achange of dress and come, we'll all go together. "

Senda stared. "A shange of dtress?" Then, with a most significant minglingof relief and new disturbance, she said, "Ah, I see!" and looking from meto Mrs. Smith and from Mrs. Smith to me, while she whipped her bonnetribbons 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 atour neighbor's over the way. "The fever, " as in the Creole city it used tobe sufficiently distinguished, is not so deadly, nor so treacherous, nornearly so repulsive, as some other maladies, but none requires closerattention. After successive days and nights of unremitting vigilance, should there occur a momentary closing of the nurse's eyes, or a turningfrom the bedside for a quarter of a minute, the irresponsible patient mayattempt to rise and may fall back dying or dead. So, the attendant musthave an attendant. In the case of the entomologist, his wife became thebedside nurse and sentinel. 

In the next room, now and then Mrs. Smith, and now and then our fatneighbor's wife, waited on her, but by far the most of the time, Mrs. Fontenette was her assistant. When Senda, while the patient dozed, stolebrief moments of sleep to keep what she could of her overtasked powers, her place, at the bedside, was always filled by Fontenette, who as oftenkept his promise to call her the instant her husband should rouse. 

Thus we brought our precious entomologist through the disorder's firstcrisis, which generally comes exactly on the seventy-second hour, and indue time through the second, which falls, if I remember aright, on theninth day. What I do recall with certainty, was that it came on one of thedays of the city's heaviest mortality and that two of our children, and mynext neighbor's wife, came down with the scourge. 

And O, the beautiful days and the beautiful nights! It seemed the illusionof a dream, that between such land and sky, there should be not one streetin that embowered city unsmitten by sorrow and death. Out of yonder fairhome on the right, they carried yesterday, the loved mother of fivechildren--but the Baron is better. From this one on the left, will beborne to-morrow such a man as no city can lightly spare, till now a livingfulfilment of the word "Be thou clean"--but the entomologist will be everso much better. 

To be glad of it, you needed only to hear Senda allude to him as "Minehussbandt. " Why did she never mention him in any other way? The littlewoman was a riddle to me. I did not see how she could give such a man sucha 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, tospeak plainly--of such a one, without showing or feeling the slightestspiritual debasement. Finally, however, I caught some light. I had steppedover to ask after "Mine hussbandt, " everyone else of us being busy withour own sick. Senda was letting Fontenette take her place in thesick-room, which, of course, was shut close. I silently entered the roomin front of it, and perceiving that Mrs. Fontenette had drawn her into theother front room, adjoining--a door stood half open between--and wastempting her with refreshments, I sat down to await their next move. Sopresently I began to hear what they said to each other in their gentlespeculations. 

"A wife who has realized her ideal, " Mrs. Fontenette was saying, whenSenda interrupted:

"Ah! vhat vife is sat? In vhat part of se vorldt does she lif, and howlong 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 vhatidealize her real hussbandt. Also not se hussbandt and se vife only; Isink you even cannot much Christ-yanity practice vis anybody--closerelated--vissout you idealize sem. But ze hussbandt and vife--

"You remembeh sat sehmon, 'Be'--O yes, of course. Vell, sat is vun sing sepreacher 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--sosp'--spirit'--spirited? no? Ah, yes--spiritual!--yes, sank you. Vhen Icatch 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 ofMrs. Fontenette. But the gentle speaker had not paused. "Sare iss no vifeso _spiritual_, " she repeated, triumphantly, "and who got a hussbandt sospiritual, 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 satengrossed in a book and wishing I could silently crawl under it snakefashion; but I could feel her eyes all over me, and with them was aglimmering 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 havefailed to give attention?"

"O no, sir! I sink not! Vell, you are velcome to all you haf heardt; but Iam ve'y much oblige' to you for yo' 'hmm. ' It vas se right sing in seright place. But do you not sink I shouldt haf been a pre-eacheh? I loveto preach. "

I said I knew of three men in one neighborhood with whom she might start achurch, 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 demeanorthat on this occasion she did not appear until I mentioned her. She hadnot come near me by choice since the night the Baron was found and sent tomy address, although I certainly was in every way as nice to her as I hadever 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 wasnot 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 aninterview; yet now she was about to decline on some small excuse, when hereyes met mine, and she saw that in my opinion the time had come. So shemade her excuses to her guest and went with me. 

She gave the rose generous notice and praise, and as she led the way backlingered admiringly over flower after flower. Yet she said little; morethan once she paused entirely to let me if I chose change the subject, andwhen at the gate I did so, she stood like a captive, looking steadily intomy face with eyes as helpless as a half-fledged bird's and as lovely asits mother's. When I drew something from my breastpocket, they did notmove. 

"This, " I said, "is the letter that was found on the Baron the night hewas taken ill. Your husband handed it to me supposing, of course, I hadwritten it, as it was in one of my envelopes, and he happens not to knowmy handwriting. But I did not write it. I had never seen it, yet it wassent 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 Ishould mention it first to you I might never need to mention it to anyoneelse. " I waited a moment and then asked, eyes and all: "Who could havesent it?"

"Isn't, " she began, but her voice failed, and when it came again it washardly more than a whisper, "isn't it signed?"

Now, that was just what I did not know. Whatever the thing was, I hadnever taken it from the envelope. But the moment she asked I knew. I knewit bore no signature. We gazed into each other's eyes for many secondsuntil hers tried to withdraw. Then I said--and the words seemed to dropfrom 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 beenkind; but it was brutal, and I felt myself a brute, thus to be holding herup to herself there on the open sidewalk where she dared not even weep orwring her hands or hide her face, but only make idle marks on the brickpavement with her tiny boots--and tremble. 

"I--I had to write it, " she began to reply, and her words, though theyquivered, were as mechanical as mine. "He was so--so--imprudent--myhusband'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 toldher what ebb tides she had given that husband's happiness; what he hadbeen so near doing and had been led back from only by the absolutechristliness of that other woman and wife, whose happiness scarcely seemedever to have occurred to her; but that was his secret, not mine. 

She broke a silence with a suppressed exclamation of pain, while for theeyes of possible observers I imitated her in a nonchalant pose. "Youwouldn'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 throatthan give himself airs, even of pity, over a lady who has made a misstepshe cannot retrace. "

Her foot played with a brick that was loose in the pavement, but she gaveme 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 dropyour 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 Iget 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 seemedto me worse. "Isn't it my duty, " she asked--and her eyes betrayedunconsciously 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 shallbe! I promise you!"

"Mrs. Fontenette, " said I, "consider. If his wife"--she flinched; shecould do so now, for the sudden semi-tropical darkness had fallen--"if hiswife-or your husband"--she bit her lip--"knew all--would they think thatyour duty? Would it take them an instant to refuse their consent? Wouldthey 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, andfor 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. Ican no more wait for your permission to help you than if you weredrowning. 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 stopyour descent and creep back to higher ground than either of you hasslipped from is not to be told by the fineness of your promises orresolves. I cannot tell; you cannot tell; only God knows. " . . . 

"Please, sir, " said a new maid--in place of one who had gone home feverstruck and had died--"yo' lady saunt me fo' to tell you yo' little boy asett'n on de back steps an' sayin' his head does ache him, an' she wishyou'd 'ten' to him, 'caze she cayn't leave his lill' sisteh, 'caze shethreaten with convulsion'. "

XV

Mrs. Fontenette and the maid silently ran in ahead of me; I went first tothe mother. When I found Mrs. Fontenette again she had the child undressedand in his crib, and I remembered how often I had, in my heart, called hera 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 everyday. Don't turn me off. "

I dropped the paper into the small firegrate, added the other from mybreastpocket, and set them ablaze, and the new maid, entering, praisedburning paper as one of the best deodorizers known. 

So my dainty rose-neighbor stayed; stayed all night, and all the next dayand 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 easewith her out of his wild eyes. Her touch was balm to him, and her wordspeace. Oh, that they might have been healing also! But that was beyond thereach of all our striving. His days were as the flowers and winged thingsof 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 agonieswere all past, and he lay so stately on his short bier, and she could notbe done going to it and looking--looking--with streaming eyes. 

As she stood close by the tomb, while we dumbly watched the masons sealit, I began to believe that she blamed herself for the child's sicknessand death, and presently I knew it must be so. One of those quaint burialsocieties of Negro women, in another quarter of the grounds, but withinplain hearing, chose for the ending of their burial service--with whatfitness to their burial service I cannot say, maybe none--a hymn borrowed, I judge, from the rustic whites, as usual, but Africanized enough tothrill the dullest nerves; and the moment it began my belief wasconfirmed. 

 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 oneelse read as I read the signs by which I was guided. At the cemetery gateI 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 gethis arm about her just in time to save her from falling. She swooned but amoment, and, in the carriage, before it started off, tried to be quiteherself, though very pale. 

"It's nothing but the reaction, " said to me the lady who fanned her, andwe 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 neverfailed to soothe, however grotesque its misinterpretations, "lay yo' headon me; an' lay it heavy: dass what I'm use-en to. Blessed is de pyo inhaht; she shall res' in de fea' o' de Lawd, an' he shall lafe at hehcalamity. "

I was glad to send the old woman with them, for as we turned away to ourown carriage, I said in my mind, "All that little lady needs is enoughcontrition, and she'll give away the total of any secret of which she ownsan undivided half. "

But a night and a day passed, and a second, and a third, and I perceivedshe had told nothing. 

It was a terrible time, with many occasions of suspense more harrowingthan that. Our other children were getting on, yet still needed vigilantcare; the Baron was to be let out of his room in a day or two, but my fatneighbor had come down with the disease, while his wife still lay betweenlife 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 casesbeyond hope, and retarded recoveries, and relapses, and funerals, andnurses 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 arespite, word came that Fontenette was at my gate. I went to him withmisgivings that only increased as we greeted. He was dejected andagitated. His grasp was damp and cold. 

"It cou'n' stay from me always, " he said in an anguished voice, and Icried 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--thisevening--now?"

"Who, the Baron? Why, certainly, if you desire it?" I responded; wonderingif the entomologist, by some slip, had betrayed _her_. There was an awe inmy 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; 'tiswhat I 'ave got. "

"Got? Why, you've got nothing, you Creole of the Creoles. Your skin's ascool as mine. "

"Feel my pulse, " he said. I felt it. It wasn't less than a hundred andfifty. 

"Go, get into bed while I bring the Baron over here, " I said, and by thetime I had done this and got back to him his skin was hot enough! An houror 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 Ilooked onward, through and beyond their ranks, seemingly so confused, yetwhere such amazing hidden order is, and said, for our good Fontenette, andfor his watching wife, and for all of us--even for my wife and me in ourunutterable 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 soonto watch for the change. 

"O, you'll know it when you see it, it will be as plain as somethingsinking in water right before your eyes. Then give him the beef-tea, justa 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 maybreak that rule, or almost any rule, and the patient may live. I had apatient, left alone for a moment on the climacteric day, who was foundstanding at her mirror combing her hair, and to-day she's as well as youor I. I had another who got out of bed, walked down a corridor, fell facedownward and lay insensible at the crack of a doorsill with the rainblowing in on him under the door--and he got well. As to Fontenette, allhis 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 andI had had the scourge years before, as also had Senda, who remained overthe way. Fontenette passed from one typical phase of the disorder toanother "charmingly" as the doctor said, yet he specially needed just suchexceptionally delicate care as his wife was giving him. In the city atlarge the deaths per day were more and more, and one night when itshowered and there was a heavenly cooling of the air, the increase in themortality was horrible. But the weather, as a rule, was steady andtropically splendid; the sun blazed; the moonlight was marvellous; thedews were like rains; the gardens were gay with butterflies. Ourconvalescent little ones hourly forgot how gravely far they were frombeing well, and it became one of our heavy cares to keep the entomologistfrom entomologizing--and from overeating. 

From time to time, when shorthanded we had used skilled nurses; but whenMrs. Fontenette grew haggard and we mentioned them, she saiddistressfully: "O! no hireling hands! I can't bear the thought of it!" andindeed the thought of the average hired "fever-nurse" of those days wasnot inspiring; so I served as her alternate when she would accept any andthrow 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 placeonce 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 theNawth. "

"Why, what's going to go hard, old fellow?"

"The feveh. My dear frien', don't I know tha'z the only thing would keepheh 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 fevehmyself--to see that devotion of my wife. You muz 'ave observe', eh?"

"Yes, indeed, old man; nobody could help observing. I wouldn't talk anymore just now. "

"No, " he insisted, "nobody could eveh doubt. 'Action speak loudeh thanword, ' eh?"

"Yes, but we don't want either from you just now. " I put his restless armsback under the cover; not to keep the outer temperature absolutely evenwas counted a deadly risk. "Besides, " I said, "you're talking out ofcharacter, old boy. "

He looked at me mildly, steadily, for several moments, as if somethingabout me gave him infinite comfort. It was a man's declaration of love toa 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 morequestions until night; then--"Who's with my wife?"

"Mine. "

He closed his eyes again, peacefully. It was in keeping with his perfectcourtesy 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. Shewould have begged to be Mrs. Fontenette's nurse, but for one otherresponsibility, which we felt it would be unsafe, and she thought it wouldbe unfair, for her to put thus beyond her own reach: "se care of minehussbandt. "

She wore a plain path across the unpaved street to our house, and anotherto our neighbor's. "Sat iss a too great risk, " she compassionatelymaintained, "to leaf even in se daytime sose shiltren--so late sick--aloneviss only mine hussbandt and se sairvants!"

The doctor was concerned for Mrs. Fontenette from the beginning. "Terriblynervous, " he said, "and full from her feet to her eyes, of a terror ofdeath--merely a part of the disease, you know. " But in this case I did notknow. 

"Pathetic, " he called the fevered satisfaction she took in the hoveringattentions of our old black nurse, who gave us brief respites in the twosick-rooms by turns, and who had according to Mrs. Fontenette, "such abeautiful faith!" The doctor thought it mostly words, among which "de Lawdwillin'" so constantly recurred that out of the sick-room he alwaysalluded 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 didnot occur to us that maybe her time was past. 

When Mrs. Fontenette had been ill something over a week, the doctor oneevening made us glad by saying as he came through the little dining-roomand jerked a thumb back toward Fontenette's door, "Just keep him as he isfor one more night and, I promise you, he'll get well; but!"--He sat downon 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 beknown--in there! She can get well too--if--" And he went on to tell how inthis ailment all the tissues of the body sink into such fraildeterioration, 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 hopelesslyuntenable. 

"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 nighthe was leaving us--except for its celestial beauty, upon which heexpatiated 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 homearound the corner, the young daughter of another neighbor. Her hair wasabout her eyes and as she saw the physician had gone, she wrung her handsand burst into violent weeping. I ran to her outside the gate, pointingbackward at Mrs. Fontenette's room, with entreating signs for quiet as shecalled--"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 thetrouble?"

"My father!" she hoarsely whispered. 

"My father's dying! dying in a raging delirium, and we can't hold him inbed! O, come and help us!" She threw her hands above her head in wilddespair, and gnawed her fingers and lips and shook and writhed as shegulped down her sobs, and laid hold of me and begged as though I hadrefused. 

I found her words true. It took four men to keep him down. I did not haveto stay to the end, and when I reached Fontenette's side again, was gladto 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 wakefuland feverish. Senda went to see into the matter for us, and the old womantook 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, whilenearly another hour dragged by, listening hard for Senda's return, buthearing only, once or twice, through the narrow stairway and closetsbetween the two bedrooms, a faint stir that showed Mrs. Fontenette wasawake 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 thesergeant of the night-watch trilled his whistle in a street or two behindus, and twice or more in front; and once, and once again, came the distantbellow of steamboats passing each other--not the famous boats whosewhistle you would know one from another, for they were laid up. I doubt ifI have forgotten any sound that I noticed that night. I remember thedrowsy 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 thesethat at last a black hand beckoned me to the door, and under her breaththe old nurse told me she was just back from our house, where her mistresshad 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 thingserious enough in such a case--and though still slightly feverish was nowasleep, 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 weshould elect. 

"O no, sih, she no need to come back right now, anyhow; yass, sih, dasswhat 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'fulfa aith, same like she say I got. Yass, sih, I dess loves to set an' watchher--wid dat sweet samtimonious fa-ace. "

Fontenette being still asleep I gave her my place for a moment, and wentto 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 sheasked 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 theover-sweetened remains of some orange-leaf tea, that "D. V. " had made "forto wrench out de nerves. " She wanted the saucer. 

I went outside a step or two and took in a long draught of good air--theair of a yellow-fever room is dreadful. It was my first breath of mentalrelief 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 rememberedSenda. The moths were out in strong numbers, and it was delightful toforget graver things for a moment and see the flowers bend coyly undertheir passionate kisses and blushingly rise again when the sweet robberywas finished. So it happened that I came where a glance across to my owngarden 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 havementioned once before. His balcony door was ajar. His room was empty. Hehad occupied the bed. A happy thought struck me--to feel the spot where hehad lain; it was still warm. Good! But his clothes were all gone excepthis shoes, and they, you remember, were no proof that he was indoors. 

I stole down into the garden once more, and looked hurriedly in severaldirections, but saw no sign of him. I am not a ferocious man even whenalone, but as I came near the fence of our fat neighbor--once fat, poorfellow, and destined to be so again in time--and still saw no one, I wasmade conscious of waving my fist and muttering through my gritting teeth, by hearing my name softly called. It was an unfamiliar female voice thatspoke, from a window beyond the fence, and it flashed on my remembrancethat two kinswomen of my neighbor were watching with his wife, whose casewas giving new cause for anxiety. It was Mrs. Soandso, the voiceexplained, and could I possibly come in there a moment?--if only to thewindow!

"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, butshe'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 onher throat--no? Well, begin it at once, and persuade her to lie on herback 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 rightover to you, if she possibly can come. "

I turned hurriedly away and had taken only a few steps, when I lit uponthe entomologist. "Well, I'll just--what _are_ you doing here? Where wereyou 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 moofdot putterfly-net fon t'e mandtelpiece? You make me _too_ much troubple tofind 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 onhim--"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 issvun maud come into dot gardten, vhat I haf not pefore seen since more asacht years, alreadty!"

"Yes, " I retorted, "and so you're here at the gate alone. Now come rightalong 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 herlife 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--Idt'ought--hmm!--hmm! I am dtired. " He leaned on me like a sick child andwe went into the cottage parlor. The moment he saw the lounge he lay downupon 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 lightcovering over him. 

But he only hugged the toy closer. "No; I geep it--hmm!--hmm!--I amdtired--"

XX

Both patients, I found, were drowsing; the husband peacefully, the wifewith troubled dreams. When the Baron spoke her eyes opened with a look, first eager and then distressful, but closed again. We put the old blackwoman temporarily into her room and Mrs. Smith hurried to our otherneighbors, whence she was to despatch one of their servants to bid Sendacome to us at once. But "No battle"--have I already used the proverb? Shegave the message to the servant, but it never reached Senda. Somebodyforgot. As I sat by Fontenette with ears alert for Senda's coming and waswondering 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 wasperfect. "

I leaned close and said that he had been mighty good not to ask about herall these many days, and that if he would engage to do as well for as longa time again, and to try now to have another good dream I would tell himthat she was sleeping and was without any alarming symptoms. O luckyspeech! 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 thecovers and felt for mine. I gave it and as he kept it his thought seemedto me to flow into my brain. I could feel him, as it were, thinking of hiswife, loving her through all the deeps of his still nature with seven--yes, seventy--times the passion that I fancied would ever be possible tothat young girl I had seen a few hours earlier showing her heart to theworld, with falling hair and rending sobs. As he lay thus trying to courtback his dream of perfect roses, I had my delight in knowing he wouldnever dream-what Senda saw so plainly, yet with such faultless modesty--that all true love draws its strength and fragrance from the riches not ofthe loved one's, but of the lover's soul. 

His grasp had begun to loosen, when I thought I heard from the wife's rooma sudden sound that made my mind flash back to the saucer I had failed tobring 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 throughdoors, through walls, through my own flesh and blood, a long half-wailingsigh. Fontenette tightened on my hand, then dropped it, and opening hiseyes sharply, asked, "What was that?"

"What was what, old fellow?" I pretended to have been more than halfasleep myself. 

"Did I only dream I 'eard it, thad noise?"

"That isn't a hard thing to do in your condition, " I replied, with myserenest smile, and again he closed his eyes. Yet for two or three minutesit was plain he listened; but soon he forbore and began once more toslumber. Then very soon I faintly detected a stir in the parlor, andstealing to the door to listen through the dining-room, came abruptly uponthe old black woman. Disaster was written on her face and when she spoketears 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'sdoor, beckoned me. As I drew near I made an inquiring motion in thedirection of our neighbor across the way. 

"I'm hopeful, " was her whispered reply; "but--in here"--she shook herhead. Just then the new maid came from our house, and Mrs. Smith whisperedagain-- "Go over quickly to the Baron; he's in his room. 'Twas he came forme. He'll tell you all. But he'll not tell his wife, and she mustn'tknow. "

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 theBaron asleep on the parlor lounge, but they could have done no harm, evenwhen Senda did not come, had it not been for two other facts which I hadfailed to foresee; one, that we had unwittingly overtasked our willing oldnurse, and in her chair in Mrs. Fontenette's room she was going to fallasleep; and the other that the entomologist would waken. 

XXI

And now see what a cunning trap the most innocent intentions may sometimesset. There was a mirror in the sick-room purposely so placed that, withthe parlor door ajar, the watcher, but not the patient, could see into theparlor, and could be seen from the parlor when sitting anywhere betweenthe mirror and the window beyond it. This window was the one that lookedinto the side garden. Purposely, too, the lounge had been placed so as togive and receive these advantages. A candle stood on the window's innerledge and was screened from the unseen bed, but shone outward through thewindow and inward upon the mirror. The front door of the parlor openedreadily to anyone within or without who knew enough to use its two latchesat once, but neither within nor without to--the Baron, say--who did notknow. 

Do you see it? As he lay awake on the lounge his eye was, of course, drawnconstantly to the mirror by the reflected light of the candle, and to itsimages of the nodding watcher and of the window just beyond. So lying andgazing, he had suddenly beheld that which brought him from the lounge inan instant, net in hand, and tortured to find the front door--by which hewould have slipped out and around to the window--fastened! What he saw wasthe moth--the moth so many years unseen. Now it sipped at the saucer ofsweet stuff, now hovered over it, now was lost in the dark, and nowfluttered 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 eyesfixed, moth-mad, on the window, he glided in, passed the two sleepers, andstealthily lifted the sash with one hand, the other poising the net. Themoth 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, halfstarting from her seat with frightened stare, and then the entomologistspeechless, motionless, and looming like an apparition, she gave that cryher 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 beawake 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 bedat once, putting his clothes beyond his reach, and even locking hisbalcony door, without a sign of objection from him. Then I left him for amoment, and calling Senda from the nursery to the parlor told her thestate of the different patients, including her husband, but without thehows and whys except that I had found him in our garden with his preciousnet. "And now, as it will soon be day, Mrs. Smith and I--with the servantsand others--can take care of the four. "

"If I"--meekly interrupted the sweet woman--"vill go for se doctors? Ivill go. " Soon she was off. 

Then I went back to her husband, and finding his mood so changed that hewas eager to explain everything, I let him talk; which I soon saw was ablunder; for he got pitifully excited, and wanted to go over the sameground again and again. One matter I was resolved to fix in his mindwithout delay. "Mark you, " I charged him, "your wife must never know aword of this!"

"Eh?--No"--and the next instant the sick woman across the way was fillingall 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 notgo in, if I dhink she would do dot. Hmm! Hmm! I am sorry!--Undt I tidt nott'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! sherice oop scaredt in t'e bedt, choost so!" Thus round and round. What to dofor him I did not know!

Yet he grew quiet, and was as good as silent, when Senda, long before Ibegan to look for her, stood unbonneted at my side in a soft glow ofphysical animation, her anxiety all hidden and with a pink spot on eachcheek. 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 hafbeen running alreadty. Sat iss not so tiresome as to valk. Also it issafeh. I runned all se vay. Vill you sose drops drop faw me?" Her handtrembled. 

I took the vial but did not meet her glance: for I was wondering if therewas anything in the world she could ask of me that I would not do, and atsuch a time it is good for anyone as weak as I am to look at inanimatethings. 

"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, broughtfresh courage; for the Baron--"would most likely be all right again, before the day was over"; our child was "virtually well"; and from nextdoor-"better!" was the rapturous news. The third physician, too, waspleased 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 noquestions. In the parlor he said to us:

"Well, . . . You've done your best; . . . I've done mine; . . . And it's of nouse. "

"Oh, Doctor!" exclaimed Mrs. Smith. 

"Why, didn't you know it?" He jerked his thumb toward the sick-room. "Sheknows 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, onewhole room apart, as if in two squares of a checkerboard that touch onlyat one corner. 

"Well, " he said, "we must move her at once. I'll show you how; I'll stayand help you. "

It seemed more as though we helped him--a very little--as we first movedher 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 greatcomfort of mind to her--for she knew why we did it. Then I made all hasteto my own house again and had the relief to see, as Senda came toward mefrom her husband's room, that he had told her nothing. "Vell?" she eagerlyasked. 

"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, andthat there was no longer any hope of her life. At which she lighted upwith a lovely defiance. 

"Ho-o! no long-eh any hope! Yes, sare _iss_ long-er any hope! Vhere isssat doc-toh? Sare _shall_ be hope! Kif _me_ sat patient! I can keep sevatch of mine huss-bandt at se _same_ time. He hass not a relapse! Kif mese patient! Many ossehs befo'e I haf savedt vhen hadt sose doctohs nolong-eh any hope! Mine Gott! vas sare so much hope vhen she and herhussbandt mine sick hussbandt and me out of se street took in? Vill youlet stay by mine hussbandt, anyhow a short vhile, one of yo' so goodtsairvants?" 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 withothers. He asked me only one question: "Hmm! Hmm! How she iss?"

"Why, " said I, brightly, "I think she feels rather more comfortable thanshe did. "

"Hmm!--Hmm!--I am sorry--Hmm!--Ach! mine Gott, I am so hoongary!--Hmm! Iam so dtired mit dot sou-oup undt dose creckers!--Hmm! I vish I haf voncea whole pifshtea-ak undt a glahss beer--hmm!"

"Hmm!" I echoed, "your subsequent marketing wouldn't cost much. " I wentdown town on some imperative office business, came back in a cab, gaveword to be called at such an hour, and lay down. But while I slept myorder was countermanded and when I awakened it was once more midnight. Iwent 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 myclothes and sped across the street. 

I went first around to the outer door of the dining-room, and was brieflytold the best I could have hoped, of Fontenette. I returned to the frontand stepped softly into what had been Mrs. Fontenette's room. Finding noone in it I waited, and when I presently heard voices in the other room, Itouched its door-knob. Mrs. Smith came out, closed the door carefully, andsank into a seat. 

"It's been a noble fight!" she said, smiling up through her tears. "Whenthe doctor came back and saw how wonderfully the--the worst--had been heldoff, 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. Butshe was back almost at once, whispering:

"She knows you're here, and says she has a message to her husband whichshe 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 thedoor. 

I drew near in silence and she began at once to speak, bidding me take thechair Senda had left, and with a tender smile thanking me for coming. 

Then she said faintly and slowly, but with an unfaltering voice, "I wantyou to know one or two things so that if it ever should be my husband'saffliction to find out how foolish and undutiful I have been, you can tellthem to him. Tell him my wrongdoing was, from first to last, almosttotally--almost totally----"

"Do you mean--intangible?"

"Yes, yes, intangible. Then if he should say that the intangible part isthe priceless part--the life, the beauty, the very essence of the wholematter--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 wasslipping 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 Iwish he'd marry again; only let him first be sure the woman loves him astruly and deeply as he is sure to love her. I find I've never truly lovedhim till now. If he doesn't know it don't ever tell him; but tell him Idied loving him and blessing him--for the unearned glorious love he gaveme all my days. That's all. That's all to him. But I would like to sendone 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 tocall ourselves and each other children of nature, but we have no right tobe such. The word is 'Be thou clean, ' and if we are not masters of naturewe can't do it. Tell him that, will you? And tell him he has nothing togrieve for; I was only a dangerous toy, and I want him to love the dearFather 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 justfor 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. Shetried to speak again, but her voice failed. I bent my ear and shewhispered--"Senda. "

As I beckoned Senda in, Mrs. Smith motioned for me to come to her whereshe stood at a window whose sash she had slightly lifted; the same towhich the moth had once been lured by the little puddle of sweet drink andthe candle. 

"Do you want to see a parable?" she whispered, and all but blinded withtears, 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 byanyone's choice, but because there are so many things in this universethat 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 thedying. We went in noiseless haste, and found her just relaxing on Senda'sarm. Yet she revived an instant; a quiver went through her frame like thedying 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 Ihave told it. Pardon that; and pardon, too, the self-consciousness thatmakes me beg not to be remembered as I seem to myself in the tale--atiptoeing, peeping figure prowling by night after undue revelations, andusing them--to the humiliation of souls cleaner than mine could everpretend to be. 

Next day, by stealth again, we buried the little rose-lady, unknown to herhusband. We could not keep the fact long from the entomologist, for he wasup and about the house again. Nor was there equal need. So when the lastrites were over I told him, but without giving any part of her message--Icouldn't do it! I just said she had left us. 

His eye did not moisten, but he paled, trembled, wiped his brow. Then Ihanded 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 allowedto take a walk alone beyond the gate and the corner. With some misgivingshis wife let him go, and when she was almost anxious enough over his tardystay to start after him he came back looking very much better. But thenext morning, when we found him in the burning fever of an unmistakablerelapse, he confessed that the German keeper of an eating-stall in theneighboring market, for his hunger's and the Fatherland's sake, hadtreated him to his "whole pifshtea-ak undt glahss be-eh. "

He lived only a few days. Through all his deliriums he hunted butterfliesand beetles, and died insensible to his wife's endearments, repeating theLatin conjugations of his inconceivable boyhood. 

So they both, caterpillar and rose, were gone; but the memory of themstays, green--yes, and fragrant--not alone with Fontenette, and not onlywith Senda besides, but with us also. How often I recall the talks ontheology I had used sometimes to let myself fall into with the littleunsuccessful mistress of "rose-es" who first brought the miser ofknowledge into our garden, and whenever I do so I wonder, and wonder, andlose my bearings and find and lose them again, and wonder and wonder--whatGod has done with the entomologist. 

We never had to tell Fontenette that he was widowed. We had only to belong enough silent, and when he ceased, for a time, to get better, andrather lost the strength he had been gaining, and on entering his room wefound him always with his face to the wall, we saw that he knew. So forhis sake I was glad when one day, without facing round to me, his handtightened 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 withholdthe rest, like the unscrupulous friend I always try to be; and when he hadheard quite through--"Tell him I died loving him and blessing him for theunearned glorious love he gave me all our days"--he made as if to say theword was beyond all his deserving, turned upon his face, and soaked thepillow with his tears. But from that day he began slowly but steadily toget well. 

We kept Senda with us as long as we could, and when at length she put herfoot down so that you might have heard it--say like the dropping of a nutin 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, grewviolent, and retook her entrenchments. And then, when she offered theultimatum that we must take pay for keeping her, we took our turn again atthe three forms of demonstration, and a late moon rose upon a drawnbattle. Since then we have learned to count it one of our dearest rightsto get "put out" at Senda's outrageous reasonableness, but she doesn'tfret, 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' officeto go at France?"

"You can raise twice enough, Fontenette, if it's to try to bring back somenew 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, whilseI'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 todo. "

When I told Senda I had said that, the tears stood in her eyes. "Ah, satvass 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 hisnew business but could not come back that year, nor the second, nor thethird. The hither-side of his affairs he assigned for the time to arelative, a very young fellow, but ever so capable--"a hustler, " as ourfat friend would say in these days. We missed the absentee constantly, butforgave his detention the easier because incidentally he was clearing up amatter of Senda's over there, in which certain displeased kindred hadoverreached her. Also because of his letters to her, which she so oftendid us the honor to show us. 

The first few were brief, formal and colorless; but after some time theybegan to take on grace after grace, until at length we had to confess thatto have known him only as we had known him hitherto would have been tohave been satisfied with the reverse of the tapestry, and never fully tohave 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 theircaptivating glow was reflected from Senda's replies--of which she neverwould tell us a word. The faults in his written English were surprisinglyfew, and to our minds only the more endeared it and him. Maybe we were notjudicial critics. 

Yet we could pass strictures, and as the months lengthened out into yearsthese winged proxies stirred up, on our side of the street, a profound andever-growing impatience. O, yes, every letter was a garden of beautifulthoughts, 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 attea with us. Our mood was chastened, but peaceful. We had come fromvisiting at the sunset hour the cemetery where in the morning the twowomen and our old nurse had decked the tombs of our dead with flowers. Ihad noticed that at no tomb front were these tokens piled more abundantly, or more beautifully or fragrantly, than at those of Flora and theentomologist; it was always so. I had remarked this on the spot, andSenda, with her rearranging touch still caressing their splendid masses, replied, "So?--vell--I hope siss shall mine vork and mine pleassure be untilmineself I shall fade like se floweh. "

I inwardly resented the speech, but said nothing. I suppose it was over myhead. 

Now, at the table, she explained as to certain costly blooms about which Ihad inquired, that they were Fontenette's special offering, for which healways sent the purchase money ahead of time and with detailed requests. Whereat, remembering how she had formerly glozed and gilded theentomologist's unthrift, I remarked, one-fourth in play, three-fourths inearnest, "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, meditativebreath, she added, very slowly, "Se koot Kott makes not all men for se same high calling. If Kott make aman to do no betteh san make a living or a fawtune, it iss right for seman to make it; se _man_ iss not to blame. And now I vant to tell you senews of sat letteh from----"

"The other side, " we suggested, and invited her smile, but withoutsuccess. 

"Yes, from se osseh si-ide; sat letteh vhat you haf brought me since moreas a veek ago; and also vhy I haf not sat letteh given you to read. Satiss--if you like to know--yes?

"Vell, sen I vill tell you. And sare are two sings to tell. Se fairst is ave'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, neverwould 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 awsree. And se fairst is sat Monsieur Fontenette vill like ve'y--ve'y muchto come home--now--right avay. "

We lifted hands to clap and opened mouths to hurrah, but she raised awarning 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 vunqvestion to vich sare can be only--se--vun--answeh. "

At this we gulped our breath like schoolgirls and glowed. But the moreshow we made of hopeful and pleading smiles, the more those dear eyes, soseldom wet, filled up with tears. 

"_He_ sinks sare can two answehs be, and he like to heah which is seansweh I shall gif him, so he shall know if he shall come--now--aw if heshall come--neveh. 

"O my sweet friend, "--to Mrs. Smith, down whose, face the salt drops stoleunhindered--"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 amsorry to take such a long time to tell you sat--but--I--I find sat--ve'yhahd--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 Ihaf 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 seocean. "