Chapter XXI: Love and Luck by Electric Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

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

His movement drew their glance, and the next instant Mr. Tarbox, beaming apology and pouring out glad greetings, had him by the hand. Burning, choking, stammering, Claude heard and answered, he knew not how, the voice of the queen of all her kind. Another pair pressed forward to add their salutations. They were Zoséphine and the surveyor.

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

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

"I told him," thought Tarbox, while the girl on his arm talked on in pretty, broken English and sprightly haste about something he had lost the drift of--"I told him I was courting Josephine. But I never proved it to him. And now just look at this! Look at the whole sweet mess! Something has got to be done." He did not mean something direct and openhanded; that would never have occurred to him. He stopped, and with Marguerite faced the other pair. One glance into Claude's face, darkened with perplexity, anger, and a distressful effort to look amiable and comfortable, was one too many; Tarbox burst into a laugh.

"Pardon!" he exclaimed, checking himself until he was red; "I just happened to think of something very funny that happened last week in Arkansas--Madame Beausoleil, I know it must look odd,"--his voice still trembled a little, but he kept a sober face--"and yet I must take just a moment for business. Claude, can I see you?"

They went a step aside. Mr. Tarbox put on a business frown, and said to Claude in a low voice,--

"Hi! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon the little dog laughed to see the sport and the dish ran away with the spoon you understand I'm simply talking for talk's sake as we resume our walk we'll inadvertently change partners--a kind of Women's Exchange as it were old Mother Hubbard she went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone but when she got there the cupboard--don't smile so broadly--was bare and so the poor dog had none will that be satisfactory?"

Claude nodded, and as they turned again to their companions the exchange was made with the grace, silence, and calm unconsciousness of pure oversight,--or of general complicity. Very soon it suited Zoséphine and Tarbox to sit down upon a little bench beside a bed of heart's-ease and listen to the orchestra. But Marguerite preferred to walk in and out among the leafy shadows of the electric lamps.

And so, side by side, as he had once seen Bonaventure and Sidonie go, they went, Claude and Marguerite, away from all windings of disappointment, all shadows of doubt, all shoals of misapprehension, out upon the open sea of mutual love. Not that the great word of words--affirmative or interrogative--was spoken then or there. They came no nearer to it than this,--

"I wish," murmured Claude,--they had gone over all the delicious "And-I-thought-that-you's" and the sweetly reproachful "Did-you- think-that-I's," and had covered the past down to the meeting on the bridge,--"I wish," he murmured, dropping into the old Acadian French, which he had never spoken to her before,--"I wish"--

"What?" she replied, softly and in the same tongue.

"I wish," he responded, "that this path might never end." He wondered at his courage, and feared that now he had ruined all; for she made no answer. But when he looked down upon her she looked up and smiled. A little farther on she dropped her fan. He stooped and picked it up, and, in restoring it, somehow their hands touched,--touched and lingered; and then--and then--through one brief unspeakable moment, a maiden's hand, for the first time in his life, lay willingly in his. Then, as glad as she was frightened, Marguerite said she must go back to her mother, and they went.