“Claude! I mistook the facts in the case. There is no hope for you! ’Tis futile you try—the poem is not for you! I take every thing back!—all back! You shall not once try! You have grasp’ the advantage! You got no business, you little rascal! You dare venture to attempt making love in my school! Claude St. Pierre, you are dismiss’ the school! Mutiny! mutiny! Claude St. Pierre, for mutinizing, excluded the Gran’ Point’ school.”
He tore himself from his fastenings and hastened back toward the village. The tempest within him was as fierce as ever; but already it, too, had turned and was coming out of the opposite quarter. The better Bonaventure—the Bonaventure purified by fires that Grande Pointe had no knowledge of—was coming back into his gentle self-mastery. And because that other, that old-time Bonaventure, bound in chains deep down within, felt already the triumph of a moment slipping from his grasp, he silently now to the outer air, but loudly within, railed and gnashed and tore himself the more.
He regained the path and hurried along it, hatless, dishevelled, bespattered, and oblivious to every thing save the war within. Presently there came upon him the knowledge, the certain knowledge, that Claude would come the next morning and ring the chapel bell, take his seat in school, stand in all his classes, know every lesson, and go home in the evening happy and all unchallenged of him. He groaned aloud.
“Ah! Claude! To dismiss or not to dismiss, it shall not be mine! But it shall be thine, Sidonie! And whether she is for thee, Claude—so juvenile!—or for me, so unfit, unfit, unfit!—Ah! Sidonie, choose not yet!”—He stood rooted to the spot; while within easy earshot of his lightest word tripped brightly and swiftly across the path from the direction of the chapel a fawn, Claude’s gift, and its mistress, Sidonie—as though she neither saw nor heard.
CHAPTER VIII.
AT CLAUDE’S MERCY.
Time flagged not. The school shone on, within its walls making glad the teacher and the pupils with ever new achievements in knowledge and excellence. Some of the vanguard—Claude, Sidonie, Étienne, Madelaine, Henri, Marcelline—actually going into the Third Reader. Such perfection in lessons as they told about at home—such mastery of English, such satisfactory results in pronunciation and emphasis! Reading just as they talked? Oh, no, a thousand times no! The school’s remoter light, its secondary influences, slowly spreading, but so slowly that only the eyes of enmity could see its increase. There were murmurs and head-shakings; but the thirteenth Sunday of the year’s first quarter came, and the sermon whose withholding had been threatened was preached. And on the thirteenth Monday there was Bonaventure, still moving quietly across the green toward the schoolhouse with the children all about him. But a few days later the unexpected happened.
By this time Claude’s father, whose teacher, you remember, was Claude, had learned to read. One day a surveyor, who had employed him as a guide, seeing the Acadian laboring over a fragment of rural newspaper, fell into conversation with him as they sat smoking by their camp-fire, and presently caught some hint of St. Pierre’s aspirations for himself and his son.
“So there’s a public school at Grande Pointe, is there?”