PAGE 5
At Chênière Caminada
by
She was incapable of conceiving the full force and extent of his infatuation. She did not dream that under the rude, calm exterior before her a man’s heart was beating clamorously, and his reason yielding to the savage instinct of his blood.
“I hear the Angelus ringing at Chênière, Tonie,” she said. “I didn’t know it was so late; let us go back to the island. ” There had been a long silence which her musical voice interrupted.
Tonie could now faintly hear the Angelus bell himself. A vision of the church came with it, the odor of incense and the sound of the organ. The girl before him was again the celestial being whom our Lady of Lourdes had once offered to his immortal vision.
It was growing dusk when they landed at the pier, and frogs had begun to croak among the reeds in the pools. There were two of Mlle Duvigné’s usual attendants anxiously awaiting her return. But she chose to let Tonie assist her out of the boat. The touch of her hand fired his blood again.
She said to him very low and half-laughing, “I have no money tonight, Tonie; take this instead,” pressing into his palm a delicate silver chain, which she had worn twined about her bare wrist. It was purely a spirit of coquetry that prompted the action, and a touch of the sentimentality which most women possess. She had read in some romance of a young girl doing something like that.
As she walked away between her two attendants she fancied Tonie pressing the chain to his lips. But he was standing quite still, and held it buried in his tightly closed hand; wanting to hold as long as he might the warmth of the body that still penetrated the bauble when she thrust it into his hand.
He watched her retreating figure like a blotch against the fading sky. He was stirred by a terrible, an overmastering regret, that he had not clasped her in his arms when they were out there alone, and sprung with her into the sea. It was what he had vaguely meant to do when the sound of the Angelus had weakened and palsied his resolution. Now she was going from him, fading away into the mist with those figures on either side of her, leaving him alone. He resolved within himself that if ever again she were out there on the sea at his mercy, she would have to perish in his arms. He would go far, far out where the sound of no bell could reach him. There was some comfort for him in the thought.
But as it happened, Mlle Duvigné never went out alone in the boat with Tonie again.
IV
It was one morning in January. Tonie had been collecting a bill from one of the fishmongers at the French Market, in New Orleans, and had turned his steps toward St Philip street. The day was chilly; a keen wind was blowing. Tonie mechanically buttoned his rough, warm coat and crossed over into the sun.
There was perhaps not a more wretched-hearted being in the whole district, that morning, than he. For months the woman he so hopelessly loved had been lost to his sight. But all the more she dwelt in his thoughts, preying upon his mental and bodily forces until his unhappy condition became apparent to all who knew him. Before leaving his home for the winter fishing grounds he had opened his whole heart to his mother, and told her of the trouble that was killing him. She hardly expected that he would ever come back to her when he went away. She feared that he would not, for he had spoken wildly of the rest and peace that could only come to him with death.