Strong Hearts Part 9

VIII

But the best of eyes would not have counted this time, for he was not there. He had accepted the offer of a room, where he was giving the day's specimens certain treatments which he believed, or pretended, could not wait until he should reach his far downtown cottage. His hostess and his wife had gone with him, but now some light discussion of house adornment was drawing them to the parlor. As this room was being lighted I saw our guest, evidently through force of an early habit, turn a critical glance to the music on the piano, and as quickly withdraw it. Both of us motioned her solicitously to the music-stool.

"No, I do not play."

"Then you sing."

"No, not now, any more yet." But when she had let us tease her a wee bit just for one little German song, she went to the instrument, talking slowly as she went, and closing the door in the entomologist's direction as she talked.

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

We were amazed. Here, without the slightest splendor of achievement or adventure, seemed to be the most incredible piece of real life we had ever seen. Why, I asked myself, was this woman so short even of German friends as to be condemned to a seamstress's penury? And my best guess was to lay it to the zeal of her old-fas.h.i.+oned--and yet not merely old-fas.h.i.+oned- wifehood, which could accept no friends.h.i.+p that did not unqualifiedly accept him; and he?--Goodness!

When she ceased neither listener spoke; the tears were in our throats. She bent her head slightly over the keys, and said, "I like to sing you a.n.u.sser." We accepted eagerly, and she sang again. There was nothing of personal application in either song, yet now, near the end, where there was a purposed silence in the melody, the silence hung on and on until it was clear she was struggling with herself; but again the strain arose without a tremor, and so she finished. "Oh, no, no," she replied, to our solicitation, with the grateful emphasis of one who declines a third gla.s.s, "se sooneh I stop, se betteh for ever'body," meaning specially herself, I fancy, speaking, as she rose, in a tone of such happy decision, and yet so melodiously, that two or three strings in the piano replied.

Her hostess took her hands and said there was one thing she could and must do; she and her husband must spend the night with us. There was a bed-chamber connected with the room where the Baron was still at work, and, really--this and that, and that and this--until in the heat of argument they called each other "My dear," and presently the ayes had it. The last word I heard from our fair guest was to her hostess at the door of her chamber, the farthest down the hall. It was as to shutting or not shutting the windows. "No," she said, "I sink sare vill be no storm, because sare is yet no sunder vis se lightening." And so it turned out. But at the same time----

IX

My room adjoined the Baron's in frontas his wife's did farther back. A door of his and window of mine stood wide open on the one balcony, from which a flight of narrow steps led down into the side garden. Thus, for some time after I was in bed I heard him stirring; but by and by, with no sound to betoken it except the shutting of this door, it was plain he had lain down.

I awoke with a sense of having been some hours asleep, and in fact the full moon, s.h.i.+ning gloriously, had pa.s.sed the meridian. The balcony was lighted up by it like noon, and on it stood the entomologist, entirely dressed. The door was shut behind him. He was looking in at my window, but he did not know the room was mine, and with eyes twice as good as he had he could not have seen through my mosquito-bar. I wondered, but lay still till he had started softly down the steps. Then I sprang out of bed on the dark side, and dressed faster than a fireman.

When half-clad I went and looked out a parlor window. He was trying the gate, which was locked. But he knew where the key always hung, behind the post, and turned to get it. I went back and finished dressing, stole down the inner, bas.e.m.e.nt stairs and out into the deep shadows of the garden, and presently saw my guest pa.s.sing in through the Fontenettes' gate, whose bolt he had drawn from the outside. As angry now as I had been amazed I hurried after.

To avoid the moonlight I followed the shadows of the sidewalk-trees down to the next corner, to cross there and come back under a like cover on the other side. But squarely on the crossing I was met and stopped by a belated drunkard, who had a proposition to make to me which he thought no true gentleman, such as he was, for instance, could decline. I was alone, he asked me to notice; and he was alone; but if he should go with me, which he would be glad to do, why, then, you see, we should be together.

He stuck like a bur, and it was minutes before I got him well started off in his own right direction. I slipped to the Fontenettes' gate, as near as was best, and instantly saw, between one of its posts and a very black myrtle-orange, Fontenette himself, standing as still as the trees. I was not in so deep a shade as he, but I might have stepped right out into the moonlight without his seeing me, so intensely was he watching his wife's front door. For there stood the entomologist. He had evidently been knocking, and was about to knock again when there came some response from within, to which he replied, in a suppressed yet eager and agitated voice, "Mine Psyche! Oh, mine Psyche! She is come to me undt she is bringing me already more as a hoondredt--vhat?" He had been interrupted from within.

"Vhat you say?"

Fontenette drew his knife.

I stood ready to spring the instant he should stir to advance. I realized almost unbearably my position, stealing thus at such a moment on the heels of my neighbor and friend, but this is not a story of feelings, at any rate, not of mine.

"Vhat?" said the entomologist. "Go avay? Mien Gott! No, I vill not ko avay. Mien gloryform! Gif me first mine gloryform! Dot Psyche ha.s.s come out fon ter grysalis! she ha.s.s drawn me dot room full mit oder Psyches, undt you haf mine pottle of gloryform in your pocket yet! Yes, ko kit ut; I vait; ach!" Presently he seemed to hear from inside a second approach.

Then the door opened an inch or so, and with another "Ach!" and never a word of thanks, he, s.n.a.t.c.hed the vial and, turning to make off with it, came nose to nose with M. Fontenette, who stood in the moonlight gateway holding a blazing match to his cigarette.

"Well, sir, good-evening again," said the Creole. I noticed the perfection of his dress; evidently he had not as yet loosed as much as a shoestring.

And then I observed also that the visitor so close before him was without his shoes.

"Good-evening--or, good-morning, perchance," said Fontenette. "I suepose thaz a great thing to remove those old stain' that chloro_form_, eh?"

"Ach! it iss you? Ach, you must coom--coom undt h.e.l.lup me! Coom! you shall see _someding_."

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

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

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

X

When, hypocritically clad in dressing-gown and slippers, I stopped at my guest's inner door and Fontenette opened it just enough to let me enter, I saw, indeed, a wonderful sight. The entomologist had lighted up the room, and it was filled, filled! with gorgeous moths as large as my hand and all of a kind, dancing across one another's airy paths in a bewildering maze or alighting and quivering on this thing and that. The mosquito-net, draping almost from ceiling to floor, was beflowered with them majestically displaying in splendid alternation their upper and under colors, or, with wings lifted and vibrant, tipping to one side and another as they crept up the white mesh, like painted and gilded sails in a fairies' regatta.

And all this life and beauty, this gay glory and tremorous ecstasy and effort was here for moth-love of one incarnate fever of frail-winged loveliness! Oh! to what unguessed archangelic observation, to what infinite seraphic compa.s.sion, may not our own swarming race, who dare not too much pity ourselves, be but just such dainty ephemera! Splendid in purposes, intelligence, and affections as these in colors and grace, glorious when on the wing, and marvellous still, riddles of wonder, even when crawling and quivering, tipping and swerving from the upright and true, like these palpitating flowers of desire, now this way and now that, forever drawn and driven by the sweet tyrannies of instinct and impulse.

So rushed the thought in upon me, and if it was not of the divinest or manliest inspiration, at least it took some uncharity out of me for the moment. As in mechanical silence Fontenette obeyed the busy requests of the entomologist, I presently looked more on those two than on the winged mult.i.tude, and thought on, of the myriad true tales of love-weakness and love-wrath for which they and their two pretty mates were just now so unlucky as to stand; of the awful naturalness of such things; of the b.u.t.terfly beauty and wonder--nay, rather the divine possibilities of the lives such things so naturally speed to wreck; and then of Tom Moore almost too playfully singing:

Ah! did we take for Heaven above But half such pains as we Take, day and night, for woman's love, What Angels we should be!

But while I moralized there came a change. Beneath the entomologist's dark hand, as it searched and hurried throughout the room, the flutter of wings had ceased as under a wind of death.

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

"Yes."

"Their sale is slow, of course, but every time you sell one, you ought to get"--I was judging by some prices he had charged me--"you ought to get two dollars." And I secretly rejoiced for Senda.

"I not can afford to sell t'em," he replied, with his back to me.

"Why, how so?"

"No, it iss t'is kind vhat I can exshange for five, six, maybe seven specimenss fon Ahfrica undt Owstrahlia. No, I vill not sell t'em."

"Oh, I see," said I, in mortal disgust. "Fontenette, I'm going to bed."

And Fontenette went too.

The next day was cloudless--in two hearts; Senda's, and Fontenette's. As to the sky, that is another matter; one of the charms of that warm wet land is that, with all its suns.h.i.+ne, it is almost never without clouds.

And indeed it would be truer to say of my two friends' skies, that they had clouds, but the clouds were silvered through with happy rea.s.surances.

Jealousy, we are told, once set on fire, burns without fuel; but I must think that that is oftenest, if not always, the jealousy of a selfish love. Or, rather--let me quote Senda, as she spoke the only other time she ever touched upon the subject with us. Our fat neighbor had dragged it in again as innocently as a young dog brings an old shoe into the parlor, and, the Fontenettes being absent, she had the nerve and wisdom not to avoid it. Said she:

"Some of us--not all--have great power to love. Some, not all, who have sis power--to love--have also se power to trust. Me, I ra.s.ser be trustet and not loved, san to be loved and not trustet."

"How about a little of each?" asked our neighbor.

"Oh! If se _nature_ iss little, sat iss, maybe, very vell--?" She spoke as kindly as a mother to her babe, but he stole a slow glance here and there, as though some one had shot him with a pea in church, and dropped the theme.

Which I, too, will do when I have noted the one thing I had particularly in mind to say, of Fontenette: that, as Senda remarked--for the above is an abridgment--"I ra.s.ser see chalousie vissout cause, san cause vissout chalousie;" and that even while I was witness of the profound ferocity of his jealousy when roused, and more and more as time pa.s.sed on, I was impressed with its sweet reasonableness.