"Oh, I see," said I, in mortal disgust. "Fontenette, I'm going to bed."
And Fontenette went too.
The next day was cloudless—in two hearts; Senda's, and Fontenette's. As to the sky, that is another matter; one of the charms of that warm wet land is that, with all its sunshine, it is almost never without clouds. And indeed it would be truer to say of my two friends' skies, that they had clouds, but the clouds were silvered through with happy reassurances. Jealousy, we are told, once set on fire, burns without fuel; but I must think that that is oftenest, if not always, the jealousy of a selfish love. Or, rather—let me quote Senda, as she spoke the only other time she ever touched upon the subject with us. Our fat neighbor had dragged it in again as innocently as a young dog brings an old shoe into the parlor, and, the Fontenettes being absent, she had the nerve and wisdom not to avoid it. Said she:
"Some of us—not all—have great power to love. Some, not all, who have sis power—to love—have also se power to trust. Me, I rasser be trustet and not loved, san to be loved and not trustet."
"How about a little of each?" asked our neighbor.
"Oh! If se nature iss little, sat iss, maybe, very vell—?" She spoke as kindly as a mother to her babe, but he stole a slow glance here and there, as though some one had shot him with a pea in church, and dropped the theme.
Which I, too, will do when I have noted the one thing I had particularly in mind to say, of Fontenette: that, as Senda remarked—for the above is an abridgment—"I rasser see chalousie vissout cause, san cause vissout chalousie;" and that even while I was witness of the profound ferocity of his jealousy when roused, and more and more as time passed on, I was impressed with its sweet reasonableness.
XI
Time did pass—in days and weeks of that quiet sort which make us forget in actual life that such is the way in good stories also. Innumerable crops were growing in the fields, countless ships were sailing or steaming the monotonous leagues of their long wanderings from port to port, some empty, some heavy-laden, like bees between garden and hive:
The corn-tops were ripe and the meadows were in bloom
And the birds made music all the day.
Many of our days must not be the wine, but only small bits of the vine, of life. We cannot gather or eat them; we can only let them grow, branch, blossom, get here and there green grapes, scarce a tenth of a tithe, in bulk or weight, of the whole growth, and "in due season—if we faint not" pluck the purpled clusters. And as the vine is—much, too, as the vine is tended, so will be the raisins and the wine. There is nothing in life for which to be more thankful, or in which to be more diligent, than its intermissions. This is not my sermonizing. I am not going to put everything off upon "Senda," but really this was hers. I have edited it a trifle; her inability to make, in her pronunciation, a due difference between wine and vine rather dulled the point of her moral.