Little conversation was offered. The curiosity was as unobtrusive as the diffidence was without fear; and when a villager’s soft, low speech was heard, it was generally in answer to inquiries necessary for one to make who was about to assume the high office of educator. Moreover, the schoolmaster revealed, with all gentleness, his preference for the English tongue, and to this many could only give ear. Only two or three times did the conversation rise to a pitch that kindled even the ready ardor of the young man of letters. Once, after a prolonged silence, the host, having gazed long upon his guest, said, without preface:—
“Tough jawb you got,” and waved a hand toward the hovering children.
“Sir,” replied the young scholar, “is it not the better to do whilse it is the mo’ tough? The mo’ toughness, the mo’ honor.” He rose suddenly, brushed back the dry, brown locks of his fine hair, and extending both hands, with his limp straw hat dangling in one, said: “Sir, I will ask you; is not the schoolmaster the true patriot? Shall his honor be less than that of the soldier? Yet I ask not honor; for me, I am not fit; yet, after my poor capacities”—He resumed his seat.
An awesome quiet followed. Then some one spoke to him, too low to be heard. He bent forward to hear the words repeated, and ’Mian said for the timorous speaker:—
“Aw, dass nut’n; he jis only say, ‘Is M’sieu’ Walleece big-in to gryne?’”
Few tarried long, though one man—he whom the schoolmaster had found sitting on the roadside with Maximian—staid all day; and even among the villagers themselves there was almost no loquacity. Maximian, it is true, as the afternoon wore along, and it seemed plain that the reception was a great and spontaneous success, spoke with growing frequency and heartiness; and, when the guest sat down alone at a table within, where la vieille—the wife—was placing half-a-dozen still sputtering fried eggs, a great wheaten loaf, a yellow gallon bowl of boiled milk, a pewter ladle, a bowie-knife, the blue tumbler, and a towel; and out on the galérie the callers were still coming: his simple neighbors pardoned the elation that led him to take a chair himself a little way off, sit on it sidewise, cross his legs gayly, and with a smile and wave of his good brown hand say:—
“Servez-vous! He’p you’se’f! Eat much you like; till you swell up!”
Even he asked no questions. Only near the end of the day, when the barefoot children by gradual ventures had at length gathered close about and were softly pushing for place on his knees, and huddling under his arms, and he was talking French,—the only language most of them knew,—he answered the first personal inquiry put to him since arriving. “His name,” he replied to the tiny, dark, big-eyed boy who spoke for his whispering fellows, “his name was Bonaventure—Bonaventure Deschamps.”
As the great October sun began to dip his crimson wheel behind the low black line of swamp, and the chapel cross stood out against a band of yellow light that spanned the west, he walked out to see the village, a little girl on either hand and little boys round about. The children talked apace. Only the girl whose hand he held in his right was mute. She was taller than the rest; yet it was she to whom the little big-eyed boy pointed when he said, vain of his ability to tell it in English:—
“I don’t got but eight year’ old, me. I’m gran’ for my age; but she, she not gran’ for her age—Sidonie; no; she not gran’ at all for her age.”