But, as I say, ’Thanase was in high spirits. His jests came thick and fast, and some were hard and personal, and some were barbed with truth, and one, at length, ended in the word “deserter.” The victim grew instantly fierce and red, leaped up crying “Liar,” and was knocked backward to the ground by the long-reaching fist of ’Thanase. He rose again and dashed at his assailant. The rest of the company hastily made way to right and left, chairs were overturned, over went the table, the cards were underfoot. Men ran in from outside and from over the way. The two foes clash together, ’Thanase smites again with his fist, and the other grapples. They tug and strain—
“Separate them!” cry two or three of the packed crowd in suppressed earnestness. “Separate them! Bonaventure is coming! And here from the other side the curé too! Oh, get them apart!” But the half-hearted interference is shaken off. ’Thanase sees Bonaventure and the curé enter; mortification smites him; a smothered cry of rage bursts from his lips; he tries to hurl his antagonist from him; and just as the two friends reach out to lay hands upon the wrestling mass, it goes with a great thud to the ground. The crowd recoils and springs back again; then a cry of amazement and horror from all around, the arm of the under man lifted out over the back of the other, a downward flash of steel—another—and another! the long, subsiding wail of a strong man’s sudden despair, the voice of one crying,—
“Zoséphine! Ah! Zoséphine! ma vieille! ma vieille!”—one long moan and sigh, and the finest horseman, the sweetest musician, the bravest soldier, yes, and the best husband, in all Carancro, was dead.
Poor old Sosthène and his wife! How hard they tried, for days, for weeks, to comfort their widowed child! But in vain. Day and night she put them away in fierce grief and silence, or if she spoke wailed always the one implacable answer,—
“I want my husband!” And to the curé the same words,—
“Go tell God I want my husband!”
But when at last came one who, having come to speak, could only hold her hand in his and silently weep with her, she clung to his with both her own, and looking up into his young, thin face, cried,—not with grace of words, and yet with some grace in all her words’ Acadian ruggedness,—
“Bonaventure! Ah! Bonaventure! thou who knowest the way—teach me, my brother, how to be patient.”
And so—though the ex-governor had just offered him a mission in another part of the Acadians’ land, a mission, as he thought, far beyond his deserving, though, in fact, so humble that to tell you what it was would force your smile—he staid.
A year went by, and then another. Zoséphine no longer lifted to heaven a mutinous and aggrieved countenance. Bonaventure was often nigh, and his words were a deep comfort. Yet often, too, her spirit flashed impatience through her eyes when in the childish philosophizing of which he was so fond he put forward—though ever so impersonally and counting himself least of all to have attained—the precepts of self-conquest and abnegation. And then as the flash passed away, with a moisture of the eye repudiated by the pride of the lip, she would slowly shake her head and say: