I was right. The skiff landed, and we saw its passengers step ashore. They came along the levee’s crown towards us, “by two, by two.” Bonaventure was mated with a young Methodist preacher, who had been my playmate in boyhood, and who lived here in Carrollton. Behind him came St. Pierre and Sidonie. Then followed Claude and Marguerite; and, behind all, Zoséphine and Tarbox.
They had come, they explained to us, from a funeral at the head of the canal. They did not say the funeral of a friend, and yet I could see that every one of them, even the preacher, had shed tears. The others had thought it best and pleasantest to accompany the minister thus far towards his home, then take a turn in the gardens, and then take the horse-cars for the city’s centre. Bonaventure and Sidonie were to return next day by steamer to Belle Alliance and Grande Pointe. The thoughtful Tarbox had procured Bonaventure’s presence at the inquest of the day before as the identifying witness, thus to save Zoséphine that painful office. And yet it was of Zoséphine’s own motion, and by her sad insistence, that she and her daughter followed the outcast to his grave.
“Yes,” she had said, laying one hand in Bonaventure’s and the other in Sidonie’s and speaking in the old Acadian tongue, “when I was young and proud I taught ’Thanase to despise and tease him. I did not know then that I was such a coward myself. If I had been a better scholar, Bonaventure, when we used to go to school to the curé together—a better learner—not in the books merely, but in those things that are so much better than the things books teach—how different all might have been! Thank God, Bonaventure, one of us was.” She turned to Sidonie to add,—“But that one was Bonaventure. We will all go”—to the funeral—“we will all go and bury vain regrets—with the dead.”
The influence of the sad office they had just performed was on the group still, as they paused to give us the words of greeting we coveted. Yet we could see that a certain sense of being very, very rich in happiness was on them all, though differently on every one.
Zoséphine wore the pear-shaped pearl.
The preacher said good-day, and started down the steps that used to lead from the levee down across a pretty fountained court and into the town. But my friend Tarbox—for I must tell you I like to call him my friend, and like it better every day; we can’t all be one sort; you’d like him if you knew him as I do—my friend Tarbox beckoned me to detain him.
“Christian!” I called—that is the preacher’s real name. He turned back and met Tarbox just where I stood. They laid their arms across each other’s shoulders in a very Methodist way, and I heard Tarbox say:
“I want to thank you once more. We’ve put you to a good deal of trouble. You gave us the best you had: I’ll never forget what you said about ‘them who through fear of death are all their life-time subject to bondage.’ I wish you were a Catholic priest.”
“Why?”
“So we could pay you for your trouble. I don’t think you ought to take it hard if you get a check in to-morrow’s mail.”