CHAPTER XXII.
A DOUBLE LOVE-KNOT.
Spanish Fort—West End—they are well enough; but if I might have one small part of New Orleans to take with me wherever I may wander in this earthly pilgrimage, I should ask for the old Carrollton Gardens.
They lie near the farthest upper limit of the expanded city. I should want, of course, to include the levee, under which runs one side of the gardens’ fence; also the opposite shore of the Mississippi, with its just discernible plantation houses behind their levee; and the great bend of the river itself, with the sun setting in unutterable gorgeousness behind the distant, low-lying pecan groves of Nine-mile Point, and the bronzed and purpled waters kissing the very crown of the great turfed levee, down under whose land side the gardens blossom and give forth their hundred perfumes and bird songs to the children and lovers that haunt their winding alleys of oleander, jasmine, laurestine, orange, aloe, and rose, the grove of magnolias and oaks, and come out upon the levee’s top as the sun sinks, to catch the gentle breeze and see the twilight change to moonlight on the water.
One evening as I sat on one of the levee benches here, with one whose I am and who is mine beside me, we noticed on the water opposite us, and near the farther shore, a large skiff propelled with two pairs of oars and containing, besides the two rowers, half a dozen passengers.
Then I remembered that I had seen the same craft when it was farther down the stream. The river is of a typical character about here. Coming around the upper bend, the vast current sweeps across to this, the Carrollton side, and strikes it just above the gardens with an incalculable gnawing, tearing power. Hence the very high levee here; the farther back the levee builders are driven by the corroding waters the lower the ground is under them, and the higher they must build to reach the height they reached before. From Carrollton the current rebounds, and swinging over to the other shore strikes it, boiling like a witch’s caldron, just above and along the place where you may descry the levee lock of the Company Canal.
I knew the waters all about there, and knew that this skiff full of passengers, some of whom we could see were women, having toiled through the seething current below, was now in a broad eddy, and, if it was about to cross the stream, would do so only after it had gone some hundred yards farther up the river. There it could cross almost with the current.
And so it did. I had forgotten it again, when presently it showed itself with all its freight, silhouetted against the crimson sky. I said quickly:
“I believe Bonaventure Deschamps is in that boat!”