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The Entomologist
by
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.
Fontenette remarked to her one Sunday afternoon in our garden, that she must have got her English first from books.
“Yes,” she said, “I didt. Also I have many, many veeks English conversations lessons befo’e Ame’ica. But I cannot se p’onunciation get; because se spelling. Hah! I can not sat spelling get!”
O, but didn’t I want to offer my services? But, like Bunyan’s Christian, I recalled a text and so got by; which text was the wise saying of that female Solomon, “se aunt of my muss-er”–“One man can’t ever’sing have, and mine”–establishment is already complete.
Meantime, Mrs. Fontenette, from farthest off in our group, had slipped around to the Baroness. She spoke something low, stroking her downy fan and blushing with that damsel sweetness of which her husband was so openly fond.
“O no, I sank you!” answered Senda, in an undulating voice. “I sank you v’ey much, but I cannot take se time to come to yo’ house, and I cannot let you take se trouble too come too mine. No, if I can have me only se right soughts, and find me se right vords for se right soughts, I sink I leave se p’onunciation to se mercy of P’ovidence.”
Mrs. Fontenette blushed as prettily as a child, and let her husband take her hand as he said, “The Providence that wou’n’ have mercy on such a pronunshation like that–ah well, ‘twould have to become v’ey unpopular!”
“Anyhow,” cooed Senda, “I risk it;” and then to his wife–“For se present, siss betteh I sew for you san spell for you.”
Thus was our fair neighbor at every turn overmatched by the trustful love of the man and watchful love of the woman, whose fancied inferiority was her excuse for an illicit infatuation; an infatuation which little by little became a staring fact–only not to Fontenette. You know, you can hide such a thing from those who love and trust you, but not long from those who do not; and if you are not old in sin–Flora and the Baron were infants–you will almost certainly think that a condition hid from those who love and trust you is hid from all! O fools! the very urchins of the playground will presently have found you out and be guessing at broken laws, though there be only broken faiths and the anguish of first steps in perfidy.
We could not help but see, and yet for all our seeing we could not help. The matter never took on flagrancy enough to give ever so kind an intervener a chance to speak with effect. It was pitiful to see how little gratification they got out of it; especially she, with that silly belief in her ability to rekindle his spiritual energies and lift him into the thin air of her transcendentalisms; slipping, nevertheless, bit by bit, down the precipitous incline between her vaporous refinements and his wallowing animalisms; too destitute of the love that loves to give, or of courage, or of cunning, to venture into the fires of real passion, but forever craving flattery and caresses, and for their sake forever holding him over the burning coals of unfulfilled desire.