“Good luck! Good-by!”
One took the ferry; the other, the west bound train at Gretna.
CHAPTER IX.
NOT BLUE EYES, NOR YELLOW HAIR.
When the St. Pierres found themselves really left with only each other’s faces to look into, and the unbounded world around them, it was the father who first spoke:
“Well, Claude, where you t’ink ’better go?”
There had been a long, silent struggle in both men’s minds. And now Claude heard with joy this question asked in English. To ask it in their old Acadian tongue would have meant retreat; this meant advance. And yet he knew his father yearned for Bayou des Acadiens. Nay, not his father; only one large part of his father’s nature; the old, French, home-loving part.
What should Claude answer? Grande Pointe? Even for St. Pierre alone that was impossible. “Can a man enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” No; the thatched cabin stood there,—stands there now; but, be he happy or unhappy, no power can ever make St. Pierre small enough again to go back into that shell. Let it stand, the lair of one of whom you may have heard, who has retreated straight backward from Grande Pointe and from advancing enlightenment and order,—the village drunkard, Chat-oué.
Claude’s trouble, then, was not that his father’s happiness beckoned in one direction and his in another; but that his father’s was linked on behind his. Could the father endure the atmosphere demanded by the son’s widening power? Could the second nature of lifetime habits bear the change? Of his higher spirit there was no doubt. Neither father nor son had any conception of happiness separate from noble aggrandizement. Nay, that is scant justice; far more than they knew, or than St. Pierre, at least, would have acknowledged, they had caught the spirit of Bonaventure, to call it by no higher name, and saw that the best life for self is to live the best possible for others. “For all others,” Bonaventure would have insisted; but “for Claude,” St. Pierre would have amended. They could not return to Grande Pointe.