And yet people knew—she knew—that Bonaventure not only enjoyed the acquaintance, but sometimes actually went from one place to another on the business, of the great ex-governor. Small matters they may have been, but, anyhow, just think!
Sometimes as he so went or came he saw her squatting on a board at the edge of a coolée, her petticoat wrapped snugly around her limbs, and a limp sunbonnet hiding her nut-brown face, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle. She was her own housekeeper, chambermaid, cook, washerwoman, gooseherd, seamstress, nurse, and all the rest. Her floors, they said, were always bien fourbis (well scrubbed); her beds were high, soft, snug, and covered with the white mesh of her own crochet-needle.
He saw her the oftener because she worked much out on her low veranda. From that place she had a broad outlook upon the world, with ’Thanase in the foreground, at his toil, sometimes at his sport. His cares as a herder, vacheur,—vaché, he called it,—were wherever his slender-horned herds might roam or his stallions lead their mares in search of the sweetest herbage; and when rains filled the maraises, and the cold nor’westers blew from Texas and the sod was spongy with much water, and he went out for feathered game, the numberless mallards, black ducks, gray ducks, teal—with sometimes the canvas-back—and the poules-d’eau—the water-hens and the rails, and the cache-cache—the snipe—were as likely to settle or rise just before his own house as elsewhere, and the most devastating shot that hurtled through those feathered multitudes was that sent by her husband—hers—her own—possessive case—belonging to her. She was proud of her property.
Sometimes la vieille—for she was la vieille from the very day that she counted her wedding presents, mostly chickens, and turned them loose in the dooryard—sometimes she enjoyed the fine excitement of seeing her vieux catching and branding his yearling colts. Small but not uncomely they were: tougher, stronger, better when broken, than the mustang, though, like the mustang, begotten and foaled on the open prairie. Often she saw him catch two for the plough in the morning, turn them loose at noon to find their own food and drink, and catch and work another pair through the afternoon. So what did not give her pride gave her quiet comfort. Sometimes she looked forth with an anxious eye, when a colt was to be broken for the saddle; for as its legs were untied, and it sprang to its feet with ’Thanase in the saddle, and the blindfold was removed from its eyes, the strain on the young wife’s nerves was as much as was good, to see the creature’s tremendous leaps in air and not tremble for its superb, unmovable rider.
Could scholarship be finer than—or as fine as—such horsemanship? And yet, somehow, as time ran on, Zoséphine, like all the rest of Carancro, began to look up with a certain deference, half-conscious, half-unconscious, to the needy young man who was nobody’s love or lover, and yet, in a gentle, unimpassioned way, everybody’s; landless, penniless, artless Bonaventure, who honestly thought there was no girl in Carancro who was not much too good for him, and of whom there was not one who did not think him much too good for her. He was quite outside of all their gossip. How could they know that with all his learning—for he could read and write in two languages and took the Vermilionville newspaper—and with all his books, almost an entire mantel-shelf full—he was feeling heart-hunger the same as any ordinary lad or lass unmated? Zoséphine found her eyes, so to speak, lifting, lifting, more and more as from time to time she looked upon the inoffensive Bonaventure. But so her satisfaction in her own husband was all the more emphatic. If she had ever caught a real impulse toward any thing that even Carancro would have called culture, she had cast it aside now—as to herself; her children—oh! yes; but that would be by and by.
Even of pastimes and sports she saw almost none. For ’Thanase there was, first of all, his fiddle; then la chasse, the chase; the papegaie, or, as he called it, pad-go—the shooting-match; la galloche, pitch-farthing; the cock-fight; the five-arpent pony-race; and too often, also, chin-chin, twenty-five-cent poker, and the gossip and glass of the roadside “store.” But for Madame ’Thanase there was only a seat against the wall at the Saturday-night dance, and mass à la chapelle once in two or three weeks; these, and infant baptisms. These showed how fast time and life were hurrying along. The wedding seemed but yesterday, and yet here was little Sosthène, and tiny Marguerite, and cooing Zoséphine the younger—how fast history repeats itself!
But one day, one Sunday, it repeated itself in a different way. ’Thanase was in gay humor that morning. He kissed his wife, tossed his children, played on his fiddle that tune they all liked best, and, while Zoséphine looked after him with young zest in her eye, sprang into the saddle and galloped across the prairie à la chapelle to pass a jolly forenoon at chin-chin in the village grocery.
Since the war almost every one went armed—not for attack, of course; for defence. ’Thanase was an exception.
“My fists,” he said, in the good old drawling Acadian dialect and with his accustomed smile,—“my fists will take care of me.”
One of the party that made up the game with ’Thanase was the fellow whom you may remember as having brought that first news of ’Thanase from camp to Carancro, and whom Zoséphine had discredited. The young husband had never liked him since.