V
How Mrs. Fontenette got Mrs. "Thorndyke-Smith" and me entangled with some six or eight others in her project for a botanizing and butterfly-chasing picnic I do not know; but she did. On the evening before the appointed day I perfidiously crawfished out of it, and our house furnished only one delegate, whom I urged to go rather than break up the party—I never break up a party if I can avoid it. "But as for me going," I said, "my business simply won't let me!" At which our pretty neighbor expressed her regrets with a ready resignation that broke into open sunshine as she lamented the same inability in her husband. To my suggestion that the Baroness be invited, Mrs. Fontenette smiled a sweet amusement that was perfect in its way, and said she hoped the weather would be propitious; people were so timid about rain.
It was. When I came home, tardily, that afternoon, the picnickers had not returned, though the oleanders and crape-myrtles on the grounds next ours cast shadows three times their length across our lawn. In an aimless way I roamed from the house down into our small rear garden, thinking oftenest, of course, of the absentees, and admiring the refined good sense with which Monsieur Fontenette seemed to have decided to let this unperilous attack of silliness run itself out in the woman he loved with so much tenderness and with so much passion.
"How much distress he is saving himself and all of us," I caught myself murmuring, audibly, out among my fig-trees.
Finding two or three figs fully ripe, I strolled over the way to see him among his trees and maybe find chance for a little neighborly boasting. As our custom with each other was, I ignored the bell on his gate, drew the bolt, and, passing in among Mrs. Fontenette's invalid roses, must have moved, without intention, quite noiselessly from one to another, until I came around behind the house, where a strong old cloth-of-gold rose-vine half covered the latticed side of the cistern shed. In the doorway I stopped in silent amaze. A small looking-glass hanging against the wooden cistern showed me—although I was in much the stronger light—Monsieur Fontenette. He was just straightening up from an oil-stone he had been using, 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 awful looking in and out at the same time; that was on a man who was still trying 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 his glance did not rise quite to the mirror, but followed the soft thumbings with which he tried the two edges and point of as murderous a knife as ever I saw.
As softly as a shadow I drew out of sight, turned away, and went almost back 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 of equanimity on his features which made him always so thoroughly good- looking. He came hitching his waistband with both hands in that innocent Creole 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 I instantly decided to get him away from home and keep him away until the picnickers had got back and scattered. So I proposed a walk, a diversion we had often enjoyed together.
"Yes?" he said, "to pazz the time whilse they don't arrive? With the greates' of pleasu'e!"
I dare say we were both more preoccupied than we thought we were, for outside the gate we fairly ran into a lady—yes; a seamstress—the wife of the 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 my eyes from saying: "A man with you for a wife belongs at home whenever he can be there!" But whether they spoke it or not, in some way, without word or glance, by simple radiations from the whole sweet woman, she revealed that to make that fact plain to him, to her, and to all of us, was what this new emphasis of charm was for.
She had come, she said—and scarcely on the lips of the loveliest Creole did I ever hear a more bewitching broken-English—she had come according to a half-promise made to Mrs. Fontenette to show her—"I tidn't etsectly promised, 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 show her a new vay to remoof, remoof? is sat English? So? A new vay to remoof old stains."
"A new way—" responded Fontenette, with an air of gravest interest in all matters of laundry.
"Yes," she repeated, as simply as a babe, "a new vay; and I sought I come now so to go home viss mine hussbandt." There, at last, she smiled, and to make the caressing pride of her closing tone still prettier, lifted her figured muslin out sidewise between thumb and forefinger of each hand with even more archaic grace than playfulness.
As the three of us crossed over and took seats on my veranda, we were joined by the neighbor whose garden-trees I have mentioned; the man of whom I have told you, how he failed to strike a bargain with old Manouvrier, 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 my side of the fence. And presently what does the simple fellow do but begin to chaff the three of us on the absence of our three partners!