The mother looked around upon her daughter in astonishment. The flash of scorn was just disappearing from the girl’s eyes. She gave a little smile and chuckle, and murmured, with her glance upon the man:
“He has no leave of absence. He is a deserter.”
Then Madame Sosthène saw two things at once: that the guess was a good one, and that Zoséphine had bidden childhood a final “adjieu.”
The daughter felt Bonaventure’s eyes upon her. He was standing only a step or two away. She gave him a quick, tender look that thrilled him from head to foot, then lifted her brows and made a grimace of pretended weariness. She was growing prettier almost from day to day.
And Bonaventure, he had no playmates—no comrades—no amusements. This one thing, which no one knew but the curé, had taken possession of him. The priest sometimes seemed to himself cruel, so well did it please him to observe the magnitude Bonaventure plainly attributed to the matter. The boy seemed almost physically to bow under the burden of his sense of guilt.
“It is quickening all his faculties,” said the curé to himself. Zoséphine had hardly yet learned to read without stammering, when Bonaventure was already devouring the few French works of the curé’s small bookshelf. Silent on other subjects, on one he would talk till a pink spot glowed on either cheek-bone and his blue eyes shone like a hot noon sky;—casuistry. He would debate the right and wrong of any thing, every thing, and the rights and wrongs of men in every relation of life.
Blessed was it for him then that the tactful curé was his father and mother in one, and the surgeon and physician of his mind. Thus the struggle brought him light. To the boy’s own eyes it seemed to be bringing him only darkness, but the priest saw better.
“That is but his shadow; he is standing in it; it is deepening; that shows the light is increasing.” Thus spake the curé to himself as he sat at solitaire under his orange-tree one afternoon.
The boy passed out of sight, and the curé’s eyes returned to his game of solitaire; but as he slowly laid one card upon another, now here, now there, he still thought of Bonaventure.
“There will be no peace for him, no sweetness of nature, no green pastures and still waters, within or without, while he seeks life’s adjustments through definitions of mere right and rights. No, boy; you will ever be a restless captive, pacing round and round those limits of your enclosure. Worse still if you seek those definitions only to justify your overriding another’s happiness in pursuit of your own.” The boy was not in hearing; this was apostrophe.