Tirar y Soult — Nov. 1887

ROBERT KNIGHT, who was born, bred, and trained in New England, suckled on her creeds and weaned on her doubts, went directly from college to a Louisiana plantation. The change, as he felt, was extreme.

He happened to go in this way. He was a civil engineer. A company was formed among the planters in the Gulf parishes to drain their marshes in order to establish large rice-farms. James B. Eads, who knew Knight, gave his name to them as that of a promising young fellow who was quite competent to do the simple work that they required, and one, too, who would probably give more zeal and time to it than would a man whose reputation was assured.

After Mr. Knight had thoroughly examined the scene of operations, he was invited by the president of the company, M. de Fourgon, to go with him to his plantation, the Lit de Fleurs, where he would meet the directions of the company.

“The change is great and sudden,” he wrote to his confidential friend, Miss Cramer. “From Boston to the Bed of Flowers, from the Concord School of Philosophy to the companionship of ex-slave-holders, from Emerson[1] to Gayarré[2]! I expected to lose my breath mentally. I expected to find the plantation a vast exhibit of fertility, disorder, and dirt; the men, illiterate fire-eaters; the women, houris[3] such as our fathers used to read of in Tom Moore[4]. Instead, I find the farm, huge, it is true, but orderly; the corn-fields are laid out with the exact neatness of a Dutch garden. The Works are run by skilled German workmen. The directors are shrewd and wide-awake. Madame de Fourgon is a fat, commonplace little woman. There are other women—the house swarms with guests—but not an houri among them. Till to-morrow. R.K.”

The conclusion was abrupt, but Knight had reached the bottom of the page of his writing-pad. He tore it off, put it in a business-envelope, and mailed it. He and Miss Cramer observed a certain manly disregard to petty conventionalities. He wrote to her on the backs of old envelopes, scraps of wrapping-paper, anything that came first to hand. She liked it. He was poor and she was poor, and they were two good fellows roughing it together. They delighted in expressing their contempt for elegant nick-hackery of any sort, in dress, literature, or religion.

“Give me the honest—the solid!” was Emma Cramer’s motto, and Knight thought the sentiment very high and fine. Emma herself was a little person, with an insignificant nose, and a skin, hair, and eyes all of one yellowish tint. A certain fluffiness and piquancy of dress would have made her positively pretty. But she went about in a tightly fitting gray gown, with a white pocket-handkerchief pinned about her neck, and her hair in a small knob on top.

But, blunt as she was, she did not like the blunt ending of this letter.

What were the women like who were not houris? He might have known that she would have some curiosity about them. Had they any intellectual training whatever? She supposed they could dance and sing and embroider like those poor things in harems—

Miss Cramer lived on a farm near the village of Throop. That evening, after she had finished her work, she took the letter over to read to Mrs. Knight. There were no secrets in any letter to her from Robert which his mother could not share. They were all intimate friends together, Mrs. Knight being, perhaps, the youngest and giddiest of the three. The Knights knew how her uncle overworked the girl, for Emma was an orphan, and dependent on him. They knew all the kinds of medicine she took for her dyspepsia, and exactly how much she earned by writing book-reviews for a Boston paper. Emma, too, could tell to a dollar what Robert’s yearly expenses had been at college. They had all shared in the terrible anxiety lest no position should offer for him, and rejoiced together in this opening in Louisiana.

Mrs. Knight ran to meet her. “Oh, you have had a letter, too? Here is mine!”

She read the letter with nervous nods and laughs of exultation, the butterfly-bow of yellow ribbon in her cap fluttering as if in triumph. Emma sat down on the steps of the porch with an odd, chilled feeling that she was somehow shut out from the victory.

“The ‘Bed of Flowers?’ What a peculiar name for a farm! And how odd it was in this Mr. de Fourgon to ask Robert to stay at his house! Do you suppose he will charge him boarding, Emma?”

“No, I think not.”

“Well, Robert will save nothing by that. He must make it up somehow. I wouldn’t have him under obligation to the man for his keep. I’ve written to him to put his salary in the Throop Savings Bank till he wants to invest it. He will have splendid chances for investment, travelling over the country—East, West, South—everywhere! House full of women? I hope he will not be falling in love in a hurry. Robert ought to marry well now.”

Miss Cramer said nothing. The sun had set, and a cold twilight had settled down over the rocky fields, with their thin crops of hay. To the right was Mrs. Knight’s patch, divided into tiny beds of potatoes, corn, and cabbage. As Emma’s eyes fell on it she remembered how many years she had helped the widow rake and weed that field, and how they had triumphed in every shilling which they made by the garden-stuff. For Robert—all for Robert!

Now he had laid his hand on the world’s neck and conquered it! North and West and that great tropical South, with its flowers and houris—all were open to him! She looked around the circle of barren fields. He had gone out of doors, and she was shut in!

She bade his mother good-night, and went down the darkening road homeward. What a fool she was! The fact that Robert had a good salary could not change the whole order of the world in a day. Her comradeship with Knight, their plans, their sympathy—this was the order of the world which seemed eternal and solid to poor Emma.

“I am his friend,” she told herself now. “If he had twenty wives, none of them could take my place.”

Now, Knight had not hinted at the possibility of wiving in his letter. There had never been a word or glance of lovemaking between him and Emma; yet she saw him, quite distinctly now, at the altar, and beside him a black-eyed houri.

She entered the farm-house by the kitchen. There was the bacon, cut ready to cook for breakfast, and the clothes dampening for ironing. Up in her own bare chamber were paper and ink and two books for review—“Abstract of Greek Philosophy” and “Subdrainage.”

These reviews were one way in which she had tried to interest him. Interest him! Greek philosophy! Drainage!

She threw the books on the floor, and running to the glass, unloosened her hair and ran her fingers through it, tore the handkerchief from her neck, scanned with a breathless eagerness her pale eyes, her freckled skin, and shapeless nose, and then, burying her face in her hands, turned away into the dark.

The night air that was so thin and chilly in Throop blew over the Lit de Fleurs wet and heavy with the scents, good and bad, of the Gulf marshes. Madame de Fourgon’s guests had left the supper-table, and were seated on the low gallery which ran around the house, or lounged in the hammocks that swung under the huge magnolias on the lawn. There were one or two women of undoubted beauty among them; but Robert Knight was not concerned, that night, with the good- or ill-looks of any woman, either in Throop or Louisiana. He was amused by a new companion, a Monsieur Tirar, who had ridden over from a neighboring plantation. Knight at first took him for an overgrown boy; but on coming close to him, he perceived streaks of gray in the close-cut hair and beard.

Tirar had sung and acted a comic song, after dinner, at which the older men laughed as at the capers of a monkey. While they were at cards he played croquet with the children. The women sent him on errands. “José, my thimble is in the library!” “José, do see where the nurse has taken baby!” etc.

A chair had been brought out now for M. de Fourgon’s aunt, an old woman with snowy hair and delicate, high features. José flew to bring her a shawl and wrapped it about her. She patted him on his fat cheek, telling Knight, as he capered away, how invaluable was the cher enfant.

“He made that Creole sauce to-day. Ah, the petit gourmand has many secrets of crabs and soups. He says the chefs in Paris confide in him, but they are original, monsieur; they are born in José’s level brain”—tapping her own forehead.

“Ah, hear him now! ’Tis the voice of a seraph!” She threw up her hands, to command silence in earth and sky; leaning back and closing her eyes, while the little man, seated with his guitar at the feet of a pretty girl, sang. Even Knight’s sluggish nerves were thrilled. He had never heard such a voice as this. It wrung his heart with its dateless pain and pathos. Ashamed of his emotion, he turned to go away. But there was a breathless silence about him. The Creoles all love music, and José’s voice was famous throughout the Gulf parishes. Even the negro nurses stood staring and open-mouthed.

The song ended and Tirar lounged into the house.

“Queer dog!” said M. de Fourgon. “He will not touch a guitar again perhaps for months.”

“He would sing if I ask it,” said the old lady. “He has reverence for the age.”

M. de Fourgon, behind her, lifted his eyebrows. “José,” he said, aside to Knight, “is a good fellow enough up here among the women and babies; but with his own crew, at the St. Charles, there is no more rakehelly scamp in New Orleans.”

“Is he a planter?” asked the curious New Englander. Madame Dessaix’s keen ears caught the question.

“Ah the poor lad! he has no land, not an acre! His father was a Spaniard, Ruy Tirar, who married Bonaventura Soult. The Soult and Tirar plantations were immense on the Bayou Sara. José’s father had his share. But crevasse—cards—the war—all gone!”—opening wide her hands. “When your government declared peace, it left our poor José, at twenty, with the income of a beggar.”

“But that was fifteen years ago,” said Knight. “Could he not retrieve his fortune by his profession—business? What does he do?”

“Do? do?”—she turned an amazed, perplexed face from one to the other. “Does he think that José shall work? José! Mon Dieu!”

“Tirar,” said M. de Fourgon, laughing, “is not precisely a business-man, Mr. Knight. He has countless friends and kinsfolk. We are all cousins of the Tirars or Soults. He is welcome everywhere.”

“Oh!” said Knight, with a significant nod. Even in his brief stay in this neighborhood, he had found other men than José living in absolute idleness in a community which was no longer wealthy. They were neither old, ill, nor incapable. It was simply not their humor to work. They were supported, and as carefully guarded as pieces of priceless porcelain. It is a lax, extravagant feature of life, as natural to Louisiana as it is impossible to Connecticut.

It irritated Knight, yet it attracted him, as any novelty does a young man. He turned away from his companions, and sauntered up and down in the twilight. To live without work on those rich, prodigal prairies, never to think of to-morrow, to give without stint, even to lazy parasites—there was something royal about that. It touched his fancy. He had known, remember, nothing but Throop and hard work for twenty-two years.

The air had grown chilly. Inside, M. Tirar had kindled a huge fire on the hearth. He was kneeling, fanning it with the bellows, while a young girl leaned indolently against the mantel, watching the flames, and now and then motioning to José to throw on another log. The trifling action startled Knight oddly. How they wasted that wood! All through his boyhood he used to gather every twig and chip. How often he had longed to make on big, wasteful fire, as they were doing now.

The young lady was a Miss Venn, who had been civil to him. It occurred to him that she was the very embodiment of the lavish life of this place. He did not, then or afterward, consider whether she was beautiful or not. But the soft, loose masses of reddish hair, and the large, calm, blue eyes, must, he thought, belong to a woman who was a generous spendthrift of life.

Perhaps Knight was at heart a spendthrift. At all events, he suddenly felt a strange eagerness to become better acquainted with Miss Venn. He sought her out, the next morning, among the groups under the magnolias. There could be no question that she was stupid. She had read nothing but her Bible and the stories in the newspapers, and had no opinions about either. But she confessed to ignorance of nothing, lying with the most placid, innocent smile.

“‘Hamlet?’ Oh, yes; I read that when it first came out. But those things slip through my mind like water through a sieve.”

To Robert, whose brain had long been rasped by Emma’s prickly ideas, this dulness was as a downy bed of ease. Emma was perpetually struggling after progress with every power of her brain. It never occurred to Lucretia Venn to plan what she should do to-morrow, or at any future time. In Throop, too, there was much hard prejudice between the neighbors. To be clever was to have a sharp acerbity of wit: Emma’s sarcasms cut like a thong. But these people were born kind; they were friendly to all the world, while in Lucretia there was a warm affluence of nature which made her the centre of all this warm, pleasant life. The old people called her by some pet name, the dogs followed her, the children climbed into her lap. Knight with her felt like a traveller who has been long lost on a bare, cold marsh and has come into a fire-lighted room.

One afternoon he received the card of M. José Tirar y Soult, who came to call upon him formally. The little fop was dazzling in white linen, diamond solitaires blazing on his breast and wrists.

“You go to ride?” he said, as the horses were brought round. “Lucrezia, my child, you go to ride? It portends rain”—hopping to the edge of the gallery. “You will take cold!”

“There is not a cloud in the sky,” said M. de Fourgon. “Come, Lucretia, mount! José always fancies you on the edge of some calamity.”

“It goes to storm,” persisted Tirar. “You must wear a heavier habit, my little girl.”

Miss Venn laughed, ran to her own room, and changed her habit.

“What way shall you ride?” José anxiously inquired of Knight.

“To the marshes.”

“It is very dangerous there, sir. There are herds of wild cattle, and slippery ground”—fuming up and down the gallery. “Well, well! Tirar himself will go. I will not see the child’s life in risk.”

Knight was annoyed. “What relation does Monsieur Tirar hold to Miss Venn?” he asked his host, apart. “He assumes the control of a father over her.”

“He is her cousin. He used to nurse the child on his knee, and he does not realize that she has grown to be a woman. Oh, yes, the poor little man loves her as if she were his own child! When their grandfather, Louis Soult, died two years ago, he left all his estate to Lucretia, and not a dollar to José. It was brutal! But José was delighted. ‘A woman must have money, or she is cold in the world,’ he said. ‘But to shorn lambs, like me, every wind is tempered.’”

Mr. Knight was thoughtful during the first part of the ride. “I did not know,” he said, presently, to young McCann, from St. Louis, a stranger like himself, “that Miss Venn was a wealthy woman.”

“Oh, yes, the largest land-holder in this parish, and ten thousand a year, clear, besides.”

Ten thousand a year! And Emma drudging till midnight for two or three dollars a column! Poor Emma! A gush of unwonted tenderness filled his heart. The homely, faithful soul!

Ten thousand a year! Knight would have been humiliated to think that this money could change his feeling to the young woman who owned it. But it did change it. She was no longer only a dull, fascinating appeal to his imagination. She was a power; something to be regarded with respect, like a Building Association or Pacific Railway stocks. But for some unexplained reason he carefully avoided her during the ride. Miss Venn was annoyed at this desertion, and showed it as a child would do. She beckoned him again and again to look at a heron’s nest, or at the water-snakes darting through the ridges of the bayou, or at a family of chameleons who were keeping house on a prickly-pear. Finding that he did not stay at her side, she gave up her innocent wiles, at last, and rode on in silence. M. Tirar then flung himself headlong into the breach. He poured forth information about Louisiana for Knight’s benefit, with his own flightly opinions tagged thereto. He told stories and laughed at them louder than anybody else, his brown eyes dancing with fun; but through all he kept a furtive watch upon Lucretia, to see the effect upon her.

They had now reached the marshes which lie along the Gulf. They were covered with a thin grass, which shone bright-emerald in the hot noon. The tide soaked the earth beneath, and drove back the narrow lagoons that were creeping seaward. A herd of rawboned cattle wandered aimlessly over the spongy surface, doubtful whether the land was water, or the water, land. They staggered as they walked, from sheer weakness; one steer fell exhausted, and as Lucretia’s horse passed, it lifted its head feebly, looked at her with beseeching eyes, and dropped it again. A flock of buzzards in the distance scented their prey and began to swoop down out of the clear sky, flashes of black across the vivid green of the prairie, with low and lower dips until they alighted, quivering, on the dying beast and began to tear the flesh from its side.

José rode them down, yelling with rage. He came back jabbering in Spanish and looking gloomily over the vast, empty marsh. “I hate death anywhere, but this is wholesale murder! These wretched Cajans of the marsh raise larger herds than they can feed; they starve by the hundreds. That poor beast is dead—thanks be to God!” After a pause. “Well, well!” he cried, with a shrug, “your syndicate will soon convert this delta into solid grounds, Mr. Knight; it is a noble work! Vast fortunes”—with a magniloquent sweep of his arm—“lie hidden under this mud.”

“Why don’t you take a share in the noble work, then?” asked McCann. “That is, if it would not interfere with your other occupations?”

“Me? I have no occupations! What work should I do?” asked José, with a fillip of his pudgy fingers. Presently he galloped up to Miss Venn’s side with an anxious face.

“Lucrezia, my child, has it occurred to you that you would like me better if I were doctor, or lawyer, or something?”

She looked at him, bewildered, but said nothing.

“It has not occurred to me,” he went on, seriously. “I have three, four hundred dollars every year to buy my clothes. I have the Tirar jewellery. What more do I want? Everything I need comes to me.”

“Certainly, why not?” she answered, absently, her eyes wandering in search of something across the marsh.

“Then you do not mind?” he persisted, anxiously. “I wish my little girl to be pleased with old José. As for the rest of the world”—he cracked his thumb contemptuously.

Miss Venn smiled faintly. She had not even heard him. She was watching Knight, who had left the party and was riding homeward alone. José fancied there were tears in her eyes.

“Lucrezia!”

No answer.

“Lucrezia, do not worry! I am here.”

“You! Oh, Mon Dieu! You are always here!” she broke forth, pettishly.

José gasped as if he had been struck, then he reined in his horse, falling back, while Mr. McCann gladly took his place.

M. Tirar, after that day, did not return to the plantation. Once he met M. de Fourgon somewhere in the parish, and with a sickly smile asked if Lucretia were in good health. “Remember, Jean,” he added, earnestly, riding with him a little way, “I am that little girl’s guardian. If she ever marry, it is José who must give her away. So ridiculous in her father to make a foolish young fellow like me her guardian!”

“Not at all! No, indeed! Very proper, Tirar,” said M. de Fourgon, politely, at which José’s face grew still paler and more grave.

One day he appeared about noon on the gallery. His shoes were muddy, his clothes the color of a bedraggled moth.

“Ah, mon enfant!” cried Madame Dessaix, kindly, from her chair in a shady corner. “What is wrong? No white costume this day, no diamonds, no laugh? What is it, José?”

“Nothing, madame,” said the little man, drearily. “I grow old. I dress no more as a young man. I accommodate myself to the age—the wrinkles.”

“Wrinkles? Bah! Come and sit by me. For whom is it that you look?”

“But—I thought I heard Lucrezia laugh as I rode up the levee?”

Madame Dessaix nodded significantly and, putting her fingers on her lips, with all the delight that a Frenchwoman takes in lovers, led him, on tip-toe, to the end of the gallery and, drawing aside the vines, showed him Lucretia in a hammock under a gigantic pecan-tree. A mist of hanging green moss closed about her. She lay in it as a soft, white bird in a huge nest. Knight stood leaning against the trunk of the tree, looking down at her, his thin face intent and heated. He had spoken to her, but she did not answer. She smiled lazily, as she did when the children patted her on the cheek.

“Voilà la petite!” whispered Madame Dessaix, triumphantly. Then she glanced at M. Tirar, finding that he looked on in silence. He roused himself, with a queer noise in his throat.

“Yes, yes! Now—what does she answer him?”

“Mère de Dieu! What can she answer? He is young. He is a man who has his own way. He will have no answer but the one! We consider the affair finished!”

Tirar made no comment. He turned and walked away down to the barnyard, where the children were, and stood among them and the cows for awhile. The stable-boys, used to jokes and picayunes from him, turned handsprings and sky-larked under his feet. Finding that he neither laughed nor swore at them, they began to watch him more narrowly, and noticed his shabby clothes with amazed contempt.

“Don José seek, ta-ta!” they whispered. “Don José, yo’ no see mud on yo’ clo’es?”

But he stood leaning over the fence, deaf and blind to them.

His tormentors tried another point of attack. “Don José no seek, but his mare seek. Poor Chiquita! She old horse now.”

“It’s a damned lie!” Tirar turned on the boy with such fury that he jumped back. “She’s not old! Bring her out!”

The negroes tumbled over each other in their fright. The little white mare was led out. José patted her with trembling hands. Whatever great trouble had shaken him turned for the moment into this petty outlet.

“There is not such a horse in Attakapas!” he muttered to himself. “I am old, but she is young!” The mare whinnied with pleasure as he stroked her and mounted.

As he rode from the enclosure a clumsy bay horse was led out of the stable. Knight came down the levee to meet it. José scanned it with fierce contempt. “Ah, the low-born beast! And its master is no otherwise! But who can tell what shall please the little girl?”

But Tirar could not shut his eyes to the fact that the figure on the heavy horse was manly and fine. The courage in his heart was at its lowest ebb.

“José is old and fat—fat. That is a young fellow—he is like a man!” His chin quivered like a hysteric woman’s. The next minute he threw himself on the mare’s neck.

“I have only you now, Chiquita! Nobody but you!”

She threw back her ears and skimmed across the prairie with the hoof of a deer. When he passed Knight, M. Tirar saluted him with profound courtesy.

“Funny little man,” said Robert to McCann, who had joined him. “You might call him a note of exaggeration in the world. But that is a fine horse that he rides.”

“Yes; a famous racer in her day, they tell me. Tirar talks of her as if she were a blood-relation. I wish we had horses of her build just now. That brute of yours sinks in the mud with every step.”

“It is deeper than usual to-day. I don’t understand it. We have had no rain.”

They separated in a few minutes, Knight taking his way to the sea-marshes.

The marshes were always silent, but there was a singular, deep stillness upon them to-day. The sun was hidden by low-hanging mists, but it turned them into tent-like veils of soft, silvery brilliance. The colors and even the scents of the marshes were oddly intensified beneath them; the air held the strong smells of the grass and roses motionless; the lagoons, usually chocolate-colored, were inky black between their fringes of yellow and purple flags; the countless circular pools of clear water seemed to have increased in number, and leaped and bubbled as if alive.

If poor Emma could but turn her eyes from the barren fields of Throop to this strange, enchanted plain!

He checked himself. What right had he to wish for Emma? Lucretia—

But Lucretia would see nothing in it but mud and weeds!

Lucretia was a dear soul; but after all, he thought, with a laugh, her best qualities were those of an amiable cow. That very day he had brought himself to make love to her with as much force as his brain could put into the words, and she had listened with the amused, pleased, ox-like stare of one of these cattle when its sides were tickled by the long grass. She had given him no definite answer.

Knight polished his way through the spongy prairie, therefore, in a surly ill-humor, which the unusual depth of mud did not make more amiable. He was forced to ride into the bayoux every few minutes to wash the clammy lumps from the legs of his horse.

Where M. Tirar went that day, he himself, when afternoon came, could not have told distinctly. He had a vague remembrance that he had stopped at one or two Acadian farm-houses for no purpose whatever. He was not a drinking-man, and had tasted nothing but water all day, yet his brain was stunned and bruised, as if he was rousing from a long debauch. When he came to himself he was on the lower marshes. Chiquita had suddenly stopped, planted her legs apart like a mule, and refused to budge an inch farther. What ailed this bayou? It, too, had come to a halt, and had swollen into a stagnant black pond.

José was altogether awake now. He understood what had happened. A heavy spring tide in the Gulf had barred all outlet for the bayous, which cut through the marshes. The great river, for which they were but mouths, was already forcing its way over their banks and oozing through all the spongy soil. There was no immediate danger of his drowning; but unless he made instant escape, there was a certainty that he would be held and sucked into the vast and rapidly spreading quicksands of mud until he did drown.

If Chiquita—?

He wheeled her head to the land and called to her. She began to move with extreme caution, testing each step, now and then leaping to a hummock of solid earth. Twice she stopped and changed her course. José dismounted several times and tried to lead her. But he soon was bogged knee-deep. He saw that the instinct of the horse was safer than his judgment, and at last sat quietly in the saddle. At ordinary times he would have sworn and scolded, and, perhaps, being alone, have shed tears, for José was at heart a coward and dearly loved his life.

But to-day it was low tide in the little man’s heart. The bulk of life had gone from him with Lucretia. His love for her had given him dignity in his own eyes; without her he was a poor buffoon, who carried his jokes from house to house in payment for alms.

He did what he could, however, to save his life, rationally enough—threw off his heavy boots, and the Spanish saddle, to lighten the load on the mare, patted her, sang and laughed to cheer her. Once, when the outlook was desperate, he jumped off. “She shall not die!” he said, fiercely. He tried to drive her away, but she stood still, gazing at him, wistfully.

“Aha!” shouted José, delighted, nodding to some invisible looker-on. “Do you see that? She will not forsake me! So, my darling! You and Tirar will keep together to the last.” He mounted again.

Chiquita, after that, made slow but steady progress. She reached a higher plateau. Even there the pools were rapidly widening; the oozing water began to shine between the blades of grass. In less than an hour this level also would be in the sea.

But in less than an hour Chiquita would have brought him to dry ground.

José talked to her incessantly now, in Spanish, arguing as to this course or that.

“Ha! What is that?” he cried, pulling her up. “That black lump by the bayou? A man—no! A horse and man! They are sinking—held fast!”

He was silent a moment, panting with excitement. Then—“It is Knight!” he cried. “Caught like a rat in a trap! He will die—thanks be to God!”

If Knight were dead, Lucretia would be his own little girl again.

The thought was the flash of a moment. Knight’s back was toward him. José, unseen, waited irresolute.

After the first murderous triumph he hoped Robert could be saved. Tirar was a coward, but at bottom he was a man—how much of a man remained to be proved. The longer he looked at the engineer, the more he hated him, with a blind, childish fury.

“But I am not murderer—I!” he said to himself, mechanically, again and again.

Chiquita pawed, impatient to be off. The water was rising about her hoofs. It sparkled now everywhere below the reeds. Death was waiting for both the men—a still, silent, certain death—the more horrible because there was no fury or darkness in it. The silvery mist still shut the world in, like the walls of a tent; the purple and yellow flags shone in the quiet light.

Chiquita could save one, and but one.

The Tirars and Soults had been men of courage and honor for generations. Their blood was quickening in his fat little body.

A thought struck him like a stab from a knife. “If Knight dies, it will break her heart. But me!” Then he cracked his thumb contemptuously. “What does she care for poor old José?”

We will not ask what passed in his heart during the next ten minutes.

He and his God were alone together.

He came up to Knight and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hello! What’s wrong?”

“I’m bogged. This brute of a horse is sinking in the infernal mud.”

“Don’t jerk at him! I’ll change the horses with you, if you are in a hurry to reach the plantation. Chiquita can take you more quickly than he.”

“But you?—I don’t understand you. What will you do?”

“I am in no hurry.”

“This horse will not carry you. It seems to me that the mud is growing deeper.”

“I understand the horses and mud of our marshes better than you. Come, take Chiquita. Go!”

Knight alighted and mounted the mare, with a  perplexed face. He had begun to think himself in actual danger, and was mortified to find that José made so light of the affair.

“Well, good-day, Monsieur Tirar!” he said. “It is very kind in you to take that confounded beast off my hands. I’ll sell him to-morrow if I can.” He nodded to José, and jerked the bridle sharply. “Come, get up!” he said, touching Chiquita with a whip.

José leaped at him like a cat. “Damnation! Don’t dare to touch her!”—wrenching the whip from his hand, and raising it to strike him. “Pardon, sir,” stiffening himself, “my horse will not bear a stroke. Do not speak to her and she will carry you safely.” His hand rested a moment on the mare’s neck. He muttered something to her in Spanish, and then he turned his back that he might not see her go away.

Mr. Knight reached the upper marshes in about two hours. He caught sight of a boat going down the bayou, and recognizing M. de Fourgon and some other men from the plantation in it, rode down to meet them.

“Thank God, you are safe, Knight!” exclaimed M. de Fourgon. “How’s that? Surely that is Chiquita you are riding! Where did you find her?”

“That queer little Mexican insisted that I should swap horses with him. My nag was bogged, and—“

The men looked at each other.

“Where did you leave him?”

“In the sea-marsh, near the mouth of this bayou. Why, what do you mean? Is he in danger? Stop!” he shouted, as they pulled away without a word. “For God’s sake, let me go with you!” He left Chiquita on the bank and leaped into the boat, taking an oar.

“You do not mean that Tirar has risked his life for mine?” he said.

“It looks like it,” McCann replied. “And yet I could have sworn that he disliked you, especially.”

“The old Tirar blood has not perished from off the earth,” said M. de Fourgon, in a low voice. “Give way! Together now! I fear we are too late.”

The whole marsh was under water before they reached it. They found José’s body submerged, but wedged in the crotch of a pecan-tree, into which he had climbed. It fell like a stone into the boat.

M. de Fourgon laid his ear to his heart, pressed his chest, and rose, replying by a shake of the head to their looks. He took up his oar and rowed in silence for a few minutes.

“Pull, gentlemen!” he said, hoarsely. “The night is almost upon us. We will take him to my house.”

But Knight did not believe that José was dead. He stripped him, and rubbed and chafed the sodden body in the bottom of the boat. When they reached the house and, after hours of vain effort, even the physician gave up, Knight would not listen to him.

“He shall not die, I tell you! Why should his life be given for mine? I did not even thank him, brute that I am!”

It was but a few minutes after that, that he looked up from his rubbing, his face growing suddenly white. The doctor put his hand on Tirar’s breast. “It beats!” he cried, excitedly. “Stand back! Air—brandy!”

At last José opened his eyes, and his lips moved. “What is it, my dear fellow?” they all cried, crowding around him. But only Knight caught the whisper. He stood up, an amazed comprehension in his eyes.

Drawing M. de Fourgon aside, he said, “I understand now! I see why he did it!” and hurried away abruptly, in search of Miss Venn.

The next morning M. Tirar was carried out in a steamer-chair to the gallery.

He was the hero of the day. The whole household, from Madame Dessaix to the black pickaninnies, buzzed around him. Miss Venn came down the gallery, beaming, flushed, her eyes soft with tears. She motioned them all aside and sat down by him, stroking his cold hand in her warm ones.

“It is me that you want, José? Not these others? Only me?”

“If you can spare for me a little time, Lucrezia?” he said, humbly.

She did not reply for so long that he turned and looked into her face.

“A little time? All of the time,” she whispered.

José started forward. His chilled heart had scarcely seemed to beat since he was taken from the water. Now it sent the blood hot through his body.

“What do you mean, child?” he said, sternly. “Think what you say. It is old José. Do you mean—?”

“Yes; and I always meant it,” she said, quietly. “Why, there are only us left—you and me. And Chiquita,” she added, laughing.

A week later Mrs. Knight received a letter from Robert, with the story of his rescue. She cried over it a good deal.

“Though I don’t see why he thinks it such an extraordinary thing in that little man to do!” she reflected. “Anybody would wish to save Robert, even a wild Mexican. And, why upon earth, because his life was in danger, he should have written to offer it to Emma Cramer, passes me! She hasn’t a dollar.”

Through the window she saw the girl crossing the fields, with quick, light steps.

“She’s heard from him! She’s coming to tell me. Well, I did think Robert would have married well, having his pick and choice—“

But the widow’s heart had been deeply moved. “Poor Emma! She’s been as faithful as a dog to Robert. If she has no money, she will save his as an heiress would not have done. Providence orders all things right,” she thought, relenting. “If that girl has not put on her best white dress on a week-day! How glad she must be! I’ll go and meet her, I guess. She has no mother now, to kiss her, or say God bless her, poor child!” and she hurried to the gate.

Notes

1. Massachusetts Transcendentalist lecturer and author, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

2. Louisiana historian, author, and playwright, Charles Étienne Arthur Gayarré (1805-1895).

3. From the Arabic huriyah, the beautiful women who inhabit Paradise in the Islamic tradition.

4. Irish poet, Thomas Moore (1779-1852).

Key Words

Charles Gayarre, Louisiana bayou stories, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Moore

Creator

Abigail Fagan