What of the schoolmaster and the children? Much, much! The good work went on. Intense days for Bonaventure. The clouds of disfavor darkling in some places, but brightening in others, and, on the whole, he hoped and believed, breaking. A few days of vacation, and then a bright re-union and resumption, the children all his faithful adherents save one—Sidonie. She, a close student, too, but growingly distant and reticent. The State Superintendent still believed to be—
“Impending, impending, chil’run! he is impending! Any day he may precipitate upon us!”
Intense days, too, for Claude. Sidonie openly, and oh, so sweetly, his friend. Loving him? He could neither say nor know; enough, for the present, to be allowed to love her. His love knew no spirit of conquest yet; it was star-worship; it was angel adoration; seraphically pure; something so celestially refined that had it been a tangible object you could have held it up and seen the stars right through it. The thought of acquisition would have seemed like coveting the gold of a temple. And yet already the faintest hint of loss was intolerable. Oh! this happy, happy school-going,—this faring sumptuously on one smile a day! Ah, if it might but continue! But alas! how Sidonie was growing! Growing, growing daily! up, up, up! While he—there was a tree in the swamp where he measured his stature every day; but in vain, in vain! It never budged! And then—all at once—like the rose-vine on her galérie, Sidonie burst into bloom.
Her smiles were kinder and more frequent now than ever before; but the boy’s heart was wrung. What chance now? In four long years to come he would not yet be quite nineteen, and she was fifteen now. Four years! He was in no hurry himself—could wait forever and be happy every day of it; but she? Such prize as she, somebody would certainly bear away before three years could run by, run they ever so fast.
Sitting and pondering one evening in the little bayou cabin, Claude caught the father’s eye upon him, leaned his forehead upon the parent’s knee, and silently wept. The rough woodman said a kind word, and the boy, without lifting his burning face, told his love. The father made no reply for a long time, and then he said in their quaint old French:
“Claude, tell the young schoolmaster. Of all men, he is the one to help you.” And then in English, as you would quote Latin, “Knowledge is power!”
The next day he missed—failed miserably—in every lesson. At its close he sat at his desk, crushed. Bonaventure seemed scarce less tempest-tossed than he; and all about the school the distress spread as wintry gray overcasts a sky. Only Sidonie moved calmly her accustomed round, like some fair, silent, wide-winged bird circling about a wreck.
At length the lad and his teacher were left alone. Claude sat very still, looking at his toil-worn hands lying crossed on the desk. Presently there sank an arm across his shoulders. It was the master’s. Drop—drop—two big tears fell upon the rude desk’s sleeve-polished wood. The small, hard, right hand slowly left its fellow, and rubbed off the wet spots.
“Claude, you have something to disclose me?”
The drooping head nodded.