After that, even the unconscious schoolmaster could feel the faint chill of estrangement. But he laid it not to his work, but to his personal unloveliness, and said to ’Mian he did not doubt if he were more engaging there would not be so many maidens kept at the wheel and loom in the priceless hours of school, or so many strapping youths sent, all unlettered, to the sugar-kettles of the coast plantations what time M’sieu’ Walleece big-in to gryne.
“’Tain’t dat,” said ’Mian. He had intended to tell the true reason, but his heart failed him; and when Bonaventure asked what, then, it was, he replied:
“Aw, dey don’t got no time. Time run so fas’,—run like a scared dog. I dunno fo’ w’at dey make dat time run so fas’ dat way.”
“O my friend,” cried the young schoolmaster, leaping from his chair, “say not that! If God did not make time to p’oceed with rapidness, who would ever do his best?”
It was such lessons as this that made the children—Crébiche among them—still gather round the humble master and love to grasp his hand.
CHAPTER VII.
LOVE AND DUTY.
Time ran fast. The seasons were as inexorable at Grande Pointe as elsewhere. But there was no fierceness in them. The very frosts were gentle. Slowly and kindly they stripped the green robes from many a tree, from many a thicket ejected like defaulting tenants the blue linnet, the orchard oriole, the nonpareil, took down all its leafy hangings and left it open to the winds and rain of December. The wet ponies and kine turned away from the north and stood in the slanting storm with bowed heads. The great wall of cypress swamp grew spectral. But its depths, the marshes far beyond sight behind them, and the little, hidden, rushy lakes, were alive with game. No snake crossed the path. Under the roof, on the galérie, the wheel hummed, the loom pounded; inside, the logs crackled and blazed on the hearth; on the board were venison, mallard, teal, rice-birds, sirop de baterie, and quitte; round the fireside were pipes, pecans, old stories, and the Saturday-night contra-dance; and every now and then came sounding on the outer air the long, hoarse bellow of some Mississippi steamer, telling of the great world beyond the tree-tops, a little farther than the clouds and nearer than the stars.
Christmas passed, and New Year—time runs so fast! Presently yonder was ’Mian himself, spading a piece of ground to sow his tobacco-seed in; then Catou and his little boy of twenty-five doing likewise; and then others all about the scattered village. Then there was a general spreading of dry brush over the spaded ground, then the sweet, clean smell of its burning, and, hanging everywhere throughout the clearing, its thin blue smoke. The little frogs began to pipe to each other again in every wet place, the grass began to freshen, and almost in the calendar’s midwinter the smiles of spring were wreathing everywhere.