CHAPTER IV

The insubordination of the youthful students at Great Oaks was happily at an end, but their educational problems remained. These promised Desmond food for much thought for an indefinite time, and roused him to an ingenuity of expedients to secure the best efforts of the young scholars themselves. For a time success swayed in the balance indeterminate. Sometimes it seemed impossible to break to habits of application, to harness the attention of these wildly roving minds. He did not love the spectacle of wounded pride, but the heroic treatment of bluff ridicule had the happiest effect.

“For a fellow to have passed through the Suez Canal, to have seen the Assouan Dam, and the Sault Canal, and the Segovia Aqueduct, and the Ganges Canal, and the Solani Aqueduct, and have no more conception of the principles of hydraulics than a mule shipped in a stock-car has of the motive powers of a steam-engine! You didn’t notice?—neither does the mule.”

Reginald was letter perfect the next day in such elementary exposition as the text-book on Natural Philosophy afforded concerning locks, dams, jetties, and the varied utilities of controlled waters; and Desmond, with a touch of self-reproach, called him into the library that evening after dinner, and made himself very gay and entertaining with stories of college life, details of hazing, rushes, athletics, such as had but a bitter flavor to his memory now, though likely to please the fancy of a destined collegian. Once or twice afterward Reginald dropped in again, his eyes bright and expectant; but the tutor had no immediate cruelties to atone for, and was dreary and sad himself, and of no mind to lacerate his sensibilities with reminiscences of happier days. He gave himself up to such solace as he could find in a book, and Reginald, quick of apprehension, sat on the other side of the table, a book in his own hands, albeit his attention wandered now and again to the black panes of the windows, where he could see the moon in the sky and a brilliant and shattered luminary fallen below, which he knew was the lunar reflection in the Mississippi River. The very touch of a book Desmond considered salutary, and thus he did not rebuke Reginald’s failure of attention.

In truth, Desmond felt that he needed his evenings apart. He worked so hard with his difficult and unmalleable material during the day that he was likely to forget his disappointments, his perverted destiny, his many feuds with Fate. But he had not ceased when alone to set them in order before him, to canvass futile ways and means for a counter-stroke, to ponder with rancor on men who had made settlement of the financial difficulties impossible, and others who had found profit in pushing him to the wall. He would have his revenge, he resolved; he would pay them back in their own coin, some day,—some day,—and suddenly he would feel the sting of his own sharp ridicule as he would bitterly laugh aloud and demand of his utter helplessness how this might betide. Though it was now little more than a year since his father had died at the critical moment of a business enterprise of magnitude, which wrecked in its collapse his other interests, it had been already demonstrated that, had he lived, it would have succeeded signally,—indeed, in the hands into which it had gone, it was more than justifying the confidence of its projector. Desmond, who could not retain a single share for the lack of means, meditated ruefully on the sums spent in completing his course of study according to his father’s directions, before the condition of the decedent’s estate was definitely ascertained, and how these funds might have been applied to more utilitarian purposes. He was often too depressed, too distrait, too irritated by the untoward results of the day’s labor, to care to read; but a book in the hand was a protection from the intrusion of the family on the polite theory of not seeming to exclude him from their social life. He had been sent for once or twice in the evening to join a game at cards with Mr. Stanlett, Mrs. Faurie, and Reginald; but afterward, when he saw the boy’s figure appear on the veranda without and flit away softly from the library window, he was glad that the report that he was busy with books and papers had protected him from that irksome interruption. His leisure was not of pleasant flavor with his embittered memories, but it was his own bit of time with himself, and if he had come to be not a merry man, he could make no compact with a new identity. Sometimes he had a sudden thought, an abstract thought, as unsolicited, as unexpected, as beneficent as an angel’s visit, and he wrote. So late the light burned from the library windows night after night, so consecutively, that the pilots of the river craft came to reckon that stellular gleam among their nocturnal bearings betokening the Great Oaks mansion.

Desmond soon began to take little note of other interests save indeed his pedagogic duties. He had begged off several times when guests, strangers of course to him, had come to dine. He was writing something, he once told Mrs. Faurie, confidentially; then he was offended by the eager alacrity with which she had excused his presence at the table, and the promptness and deftness with which the brisk waiter had served his dinner alone in the library. He did not write at all, that night. He smoked pipe after pipe of his own strong tobacco, instead of Mr. Stanlett’s fine mild cigars sent in with the dinner tray, although he esteemed it in the nature of “breaking training” as much now as when he was a star “half-back” on a crack Eleven. He meditated much and long over the bitter problems of the various degrees of want and woe expressed in poverty absolute and poverty relative, and in what actual wealth consists, and if the rich are not often paradoxically the poor, and if the poor,—but he felt that the converse was a more difficult proposition to be maintained, to demonstrate that the poor are ever by any fortuitous circumstance to be considered the rich.

The winter was wearing away,—the passing of time marked only by the gradual development of approximate symmetry in the minds of the pupils; the slow budding of the trees of the grove, that had been the favored haunt of deer some fifty years earlier, before the marauding currents of the river had carried away the point called formerly “Faurie’s Landing,” amounting to near a thousand acres, thus bringing the mansion house forward on the banks of the stream, within half a mile of the levee, indeed; the adding of page after page to the record of the thought that had come to him in the deserted library in the midnight;—when there suddenly befell one of those incidents in which he played an important part, that were as links in a chain of events, fettering the lives and fortune of all in the house and many besides. This, the first of these significant happenings, came about in the simplest way, its importance all unrecognized at the time.

It was morning, and in the library his pupils sat at their books, when there sounded a sudden tap at the door. Desmond turned, frowning, and looked over his shoulder. In response to his summons the footman entered, his face irradiated by subdued excitement; he presented formally, however, the compliments of Mrs. Faurie, who would be glad to see Mr. Desmond and his pupils in the parlor, Colonel and Mrs. Kentopp having arrived.

Chubby sprang up with a whoop. It would be difficult to say whom he would not have welcomed with like enthusiasm to rescue him from the grisly lessons.

Desmond rebuked him sternly, while the young servant looked on in amaze.

“Say to Mrs. Faurie that Mr. Desmond and his pupils beg to be excused, as the hours for lessons are not over.”

It is impossible to describe the look of wall-eyed remonstrance with which the footman hearkened to this message, and to emphasize his own opinion of it he closed the door so slowly that Desmond was sorely tempted to bound up and kick it to after him.

Chub, on the verge of tears, was tempestuous in argument,—his mother had sent for him, he plained, and he was not allowed to go,—in the midst of which a second tap at the door heralded the footman, with a change of face if not of heart. Mrs. Faurie begged Mr. Desmond’s pardon for the interruption, but would be glad if Mr. Desmond would shorten the study hours by ten minutes in order to meet Colonel and Mrs. Kentopp in the parlor before luncheon.

“Hi, Bob, they goin’ to stay to lunch?” cried Chub, hilariously. “Did the children come?”

Bob’s grin of assent was petrified on his face.

“Take your seat, Rufus,” said Desmond, sharply. “You must want to do some extras for penance.” Then to Bob, “Shut—that—door!”

A great gush of talk and laughter issued from the parlor as Desmond approached it before luncheon. It scarcely seemed as if so limited a coterie could keep astir so cheery a conversational breeze, but Mrs. Kentopp was vivacity itself. She was about thirty-eight years of age, of medium height, but very slight. She impressed him at first as somewhat haggard, but he soon perceived that this was the effect of the dye or blondine, which heightened the natural tint of her light hair to a golden hue, that required special freshness of complexion to accord with this embellishment. This disparagement was obviated when she laughed, for a becoming flush came and went in her cheeks, and her light blue eyes danced. She was handsomely gowned in pastel-blue cloth, heavily braided, with a hat of the same shade trimmed with the breast of the golden pheasant. She wore long tan gloves on a hand so small and soft that Desmond almost thought the fingers boneless, for despite her air of condescension, she shook hands with him in the cordial southern fashion on informal occasions.

“You have not given us the opportunity to welcome you earlier to this benighted region, Mr. Desmond,” she said, laughing always. “Misery loves company!”

Her husband was tall, portly, fair, and flushed, with a bright, round, brown eye, dark hair, and a clean-shaven, square face. He was dressed in sedulous conformity to the dictates of the most recent fashion of gentleman’s garb, and this dudish suggestion was queerly accented by his peculiarly open and genial manner and his ringing, hearty voice. He strode quite across the room, and most cordially clasped the stranger’s hand. But Desmond appreciated that it was a very keen, searching, and business-like glance that Colonel Kentopp bent upon him, singularly unrelated to his jovial, haphazard manner and joyous tones. Desmond felt that it held an element of surprise, and that he was altogether different, for some reason, from what Colonel Kentopp had expected to see. Mrs. Kentopp, too, turned after a moment and seriously surveyed him through her gold-handled lorgnette, as he was replying to the civilities addressed to him by her husband. Concerning the newcomers Desmond made his own cursory deductions, almost mechanically, for they did not interest him in the least. He fancied that Colonel Kentopp rather valued himself upon his amiability and popularity, and was even prone to make it evident that his two children, a girl and a boy, were fonder of him than of their mother. They came in ever and anon from the veranda, where they raced and chased with Chubby, to acquaint him with some juvenile news, some change of moment to them, such as they had fed the parrot, or that Chubby had a Shetland pony, and they hung upon him, one on either side, their cheeks against his hair, their arms around his neck. Their neglected mother seemed no whit disconcerted by her supersedure in their affections, and talked on blithely to Mrs. Faurie and Mr. Stanlett—especially to the old gentleman, with whom Mrs. Kentopp exchanged many compliments and affected to hold a very gay flirtation.

At the lunch-table Desmond would have felt quite apart from the occasion, since they were all old friends and had many subjects in common of which he knew naught, but that Colonel Kentopp, with his genius for geniality, persisted in drawing him out, making him talk, appealed again and again directly to him, and would not suffer him to be ignored by Mrs. Kentopp, who seemed disposed now to flaunt her condescension and now to give him the cold shoulder, albeit ever and anon she fixed upon him a surprised, contemplative gaze that temporarily stilled her brilliant, laughing face. Desmond could not imagine and he did not care in what respect he did not meet their expectations, and although he responded in good form to Colonel Kentopp’s lead, he was not sorry when the meal, unusually prolonged, was over at last, and he was free for the afternoon.

He betook himself, as soon as the party had scattered sufficiently, to the library, where he sank down in one of the easy chairs to rest, not his bodily frame, but his tired mind and heart. He had not wished to seem to hold aloof from the family by withdrawing to his own room, yet he felt intrusive with them and their friends, who were no friends of his. He found the library a neutral ground; in some sort it befitted him and his calling. The quiet solaced him; the atmosphere of the books was always friendly; the traces of the scholastic labors were all effaced, shut up in the deep abysses of the drawers of the table; the fire glowed upon the hearth. He was more and more at ease as he rested, and the slow hours of the afternoon wore on. The shadows began to slant on the level reaches of the long vistas under the oaks; the sunlight had that dreamy, burnished splendor that embellishes the southern winter; it loitered slow, content, its progress imperceptible. All was still; not a sound reached his ear save the distant chatter of paroquets flitting about the pecan trees as if still in search of nuts. He could see from where he lounged in the great armchair the long stretch of the Mississippi River, the light reddening the hue of its murky floods, the ripples tipped with a sparkle like gold; he noted as often before the peculiar conformation of its surface, the curving centre rising apparently so much higher than the margins, which slanted downward still toward the interior after the manner of the banks of deltaic rivers; the opposite shores were merely distinguishable as a line of soft, tender green. Here and there a trio of white sea-gulls poised, then winged away, and again darted down toward the water, evidently roving hundreds of miles up from the Gulf intent on fishing. He was not reading; his mind seemed quiescent, blank. The intensity of his emotions, the dull discouragements of his position, had worn on him more than he was aware. He was mentally resting. He had no conscious thought, no recognized intellectual process, when suddenly he gave a start to perceive a figure standing at the French window that came down to the floor of the veranda. It was Mrs. Faurie. She opened one of the long sashes from outside, and entered without ceremony.

“Why, how cosy you look in here!” she exclaimed. “‘There are none so deaf as those who will not hear.’ No wonder you did not answer.”

“Were you calling me?” he asked, with an apologetic cadence. He had started to rise, but Mrs. Faurie had herself sunk into a chair, and he resumed his seat.

She was looking about her with an intent, bright interest. “I think that we never quite appreciated this old room. What a scholarly look your rearrangement has brought into it! That old telescope,—why, you have mounted it again! How nice to put it in the centre of the bay-window—it is just the right height for observations of the sky, and can sweep it in three directions. Somebody yanked it off its stand long ago to read the names on passing steamboats from the veranda.”

As she leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and turned her beautifully poised head, he could not keep his eyes from her. She embodied to his mind the poetic ideal of all the beauties of fable or history. She was as a flout to the commonplace aspect of the day, to her associates, her surroundings, her own words and identity, and to himself. He could not accustom his eyes to such peculiar and preëminent perfection. Her charms seemed heightened at the moment by the embellishments of dress; for since luncheon she had made a toilet for the afternoon, of a richness which she had not hitherto affected,—a note of compliment to her guests. She was younger of aspect; her face seemed that of some radiant girl, though proud, assured, dominant. Her gown was of gray silk, quiet in tone and not heavy of texture, the brocaded pattern being a plume shading from darker gray to a tip of white. She wore on her richly tinted brown hair a velvet picture-hat of the same gray hue, with a line of vivid white about the brim, and apparently the ostrich plume of gray, that the brocaded gown simulated, coiled about the crown, its white tip drooping to her shoulder. And against this neutral background the splendor of her beauty glowed, her complexion so exquisite, her lips scarlet, her gray eyes so full and fine and lordly in their expression, and with those imperious brows so delicately drawn above. Somehow he could not hold his own before them. Never heretofore had eyes challenged him that he dared not meet. Her evident unconsciousness of the impression her beauty must make upon him added to his embarrassment. It was like talking to one in a mask or under a disguise. He could not speak to mother of hobbledehoys, householder, butterfly of fashion, while these incongruous characters were blended into the personality of Juno, or the ideal of the moon, or a muse of poetry. He was glad that she busied those radiant glances in scanning the sombre old room, and his chance bedizenment of it with such cast-off gear as had come to his hand.

“Are the lenses of the telescope all right? Well, that’s a blessing! And you have brought out that old geological cabinet.”

“It contains some quite valuable specimens,” said Desmond. He deprecated his tone; it seemed to him as if he were making excuses. “A few are genuinely rare.”

Mrs. Faurie nodded her comprehension. “So I suppose; an uncle of Mr. Faurie’s had quite a fad in that direction.”

“Mr. Stanlett?” asked Desmond, surprised.

“No,—Mr. Stanlett is my uncle. This was a relative of Mr. Faurie’s, with quite literary tastes; and oh,—that old screen!—I had forgotten it completely,—skeleton leaves mounted between plates of crystal.”

“There is nothing so symmetrical, to my mind, in all nature as the various tree-forms,” Desmond commented; “those outlines are grace itself, both in the denuded shape of the leaf and the tracery of the veins. Their preparation is exquisitely done.”

“They look like lace!” she remarked. “If you are fond of tree-forms, you ought to have a beautiful time in the woods at Great Oaks”—she drew a deep sigh. “We have little else to offer as entertainment; but we are long on wilderness! Will the children study botany?”

“Perhaps,—as a reward of merit,—when they shall have learned something in the indispensable branches.”

Mrs. Faurie hastily changed the subject. “I am glad that you find enough interest in these things to resurrect them. I remember now that they were in that big old mahogany press in the alcove.”

She rose suddenly, opened the door of the press, and looked in, her head poised inquiringly. There seemed nothing to attract her explorations, and she returned to her chair.

“That’s where you found the frames for those old steel engravings; the arrangement of them is very inspiring, much better than that ragged old portfolio, which I see you have relegated to the press, where it ought to be. I wonder what used to be in those frames; but they are the very thing for steel engravings.” For between the bookshelves and the row of cupboards below, a blank space of paneled wood had received a series of small framed portraits of the great men in the world of letters and scientific achievement. The pictures were unharmed by time, save for spotted and yellowed margins, but the suggestion of antiquity better accorded with the old and worn fittings of the place than fresher equipment.

“What did you find of interest in the cupboards of the bookcases?”

“They are locked,” said Desmond, a trifle out of countenance to have tried doors obviously closed against intrusion.

“Why, how odd! There must be lots of things in them which would interest you.” As if she could not trust the vigor of his experiment, she rose once more and flitted across the room, trying first one, then another of the small doors. They were without knobs, and only a key that might fit could open them. She had evidently broken a nail in her efforts to draw the doors ajar by the moulding, and she was looking somewhat ruefully at her dainty fingers as she returned. Not to remain seated at ease while she labored to open the obdurate cabinets, Desmond had followed her about the room, making similar efforts wherever the door seemed a less close fit; and as she took her chair by the fire he resumed his place near her, listening attentively as she talked on. “I remember that there are many old English periodicals there,—the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ the ‘London Magazine,’ the ‘Annual Register,’ all from the beginning of their issue, and a thousand old scientific and literary pamphlets. Why should they be locked up? Perhaps Uncle Clarence may have the key; if not, we may find one about the house that will fit, or on that little trading-boat where Chubby bought my apple, don’t you know?”—with an animated glance. “It has been off on the bayous and lakes since then, and it dropped down the river to-day and tied up at our landing—it may have a bunch of keys among its treasures of junk. We must try that expedient, at all events. I know you would enjoy exploring those nooks, and you might find something that would interest you. What are you writing?—something for publication?”

He drew back in surprise, embarrassed, half flattered, protesting. “Oh, no,—only jotting down a few thoughts that struck me,—of no value to the public,—for my own entertainment, or rather my own satisfaction,—a sort of argument, pro and con, on some questions of political economy that were never clear to my own mind, never justified to my own point of view. It is in a sort a dialogue, thoughts that, expressed otherwise, would bore the life out of any interlocutor.”

“But why don’t you arrange to write something for publication while you are here, Mr. Desmond?—not history, for of course this library is too general in selection to afford you the data requisite, but—something else; why won’t questions of political economy do? something—I don’t know what,—but something for publication and permanent interest.”

“Why, I couldn’t,” said Desmond, flushing painfully, so close had she come to his grief for the relinquished ambitions of achievement. “I am not capable of that kind of thing. Besides, I came here to teach—”

“Surely you don’t have to sit up o’ nights to prepare for Chubby’s lessons! And you can’t work the boys all day; you have to let them stretch their muscles in the afternoon. You think that more consecutive time would be necessary,—more concentration—well, perhaps,—I am not up to such things myself. Such ideas as I have are originated in the twinkling of an eye. At all events, you have made this a mighty pleasant place to read and rest and jot down any vagrant ideas that may be roaming around when your day’s work is done.”

She lay back in her chair and let her eyes rove smilingly about the changes in the aspect of the room. “I shouldn’t be surprised if you will have to share the library now. I dare say that all the rest of us will want to ‘butt in,’ as the boys say.” She laughed with a mischievous relish of the grotesque phrase and its unseemliness on her dainty lips.

On the low marble mantelpiece were figures in bronze of two of the muses, Clio and Calliope, evidently costly and of some artistic merit, and Desmond had crossed on the wall above them two long swords, that had stood in a corner of the room, genuine relics of warfare that had seen grim service, and in their way carved out records in both history and poetry. An oil painting, a spirited battle-piece, was still above, the scarlet uniforms giving an intense note of color among the prevailing tints of grape-blue with which the room was furnished. Desmond had not inquired as to its subject, and the signature of the painter was not familiar to him. Its execution did not rise above a respectable mediocrity, save for the central figure, a commanding officer, who, with raised hat and mounted on a white charger, seemed galloping down the line of troops and straight out of the picture at the spectator.

All these details did Mrs. Faurie successively scan as she sat languidly pulling on a pair of long gray gloves; all were brought into new significance, into added harmony, in the readjustment of the room. She seemed at great leisure, and it was some time before she spoke again.

“You give a very beguiling aspect to scholastic labor. I don’t think that I should mind learning a thing or two, myself, from you here.”

She looked at him with a smile touching the curving lines of her lips. His cheek flushed. He lifted his head as he returned her look. It was a fine head, and was well poised on his broad shoulders. That wonderful magnetic smile of hers was addressed to him, and he must needs have been more than human had he not responded to its subtle, unconscious flattery. He had been so reduced in pride, in the esteem of the specious world, so thwarted, agonized, deprived, humiliated, that this look of interest, of rallying mirth, of alluring charm, was singularly suave to his sensitive perceptions. For a moment his face was as it used to be; his dark blue eyes had a serene light, confident, spirited; they were smiling in their turn. His expression was lifted out of its wonted cold constraint,—it was earnest, ardent; and he seemed to Colonel Kentopp, pausing at the window on the veranda, as handsome a man as could be found between Lake Itasca and the Balize; he was stricken with amaze by the mutual expression of the two.

“It would be my place and privilege to sit at your feet, Mrs. Faurie,” said Desmond.

Perhaps because she was acclimated to the language of admiration and missed it sorely at Great Oaks, perhaps because she was so genuinely pleased with the tutor as a tutor that she could but approve him as a man, she cast upon him a warm radiance from her beautiful eyes, and broke out laughing and flushing as a much younger woman might have done.

“What a pretty speech, Mr. Desmond,—and how pitifully insincere! What under heaven could you hope to learn from me?”

He had not seen before that exquisite dimple in her cheek, for she seldom laughed with such exuberant mirth, or perhaps he might not have answered with such definite aplomb.

“I should learn those higher things beyond the ken of books,” he declared.

Before the fire was quenched in Desmond’s eyes, the pose of his head shifted, the flush on his cheek faded, while yet the whole changed aspect of the man was patent, Colonel Kentopp conceived it beneath his dignity to stand on the veranda and look in the library window at what seemed to him singularly like a flirtation between his hostess and the tutor of her sons. He forthwith laid his hand on the window-catch, and as it clicked in opening, Mrs. Faurie turned and burst into a peal of silvery laughter while he slowly and ponderously entered.

“How funny!” she exclaimed. “Where is our walk on the levee? Have all our party fallen by the way or dispersed? I took upon me the mission to find Mr. Desmond, and I suppose the rest sent you to find me.”

Colonel Kentopp could not smooth out the frown that would gather and be dissipated to corrugate his brow anew as he listened. She seemed all joyous unconsciousness and insouciance, yet this might be affected. He could not judge whether she was merely carrying off the awkwardness of having been so absorbed in the tutor’s conversation as to forget her waiting guests and her own errand, which was to invite him to join the party in a walk along the levee, or whether she was genuinely interested as she called Colonel Kentopp’s attention to the changes by which Mr. Desmond had so enhanced the attractions of the library. Colonel Kentopp, who was as far removed from the possibility of the appreciation of any literary point as a man of intelligence and education can well be, surveyed with blank assent the details which she indicated to him.

“I thought,” he could not refrain from saying, “that you always declared that you did not care _un sou marqué_ how things look at Great Oaks Plantation.”

“But this is not ‘things’—it is thought; it was done with an idea,—an inspiration. There never was a duller and a dowdier old room, and now it is replete with suggestion, with charm, with all the allurements of learning; and miracle of all, without the expenditure of a cent of money.”

“Take care, Mrs. Faurie,” said Colonel Kentopp, laughing in that mirthless, rallying way in which privileged friends give themselves the pleasure of saying a disagreeable thing in the guise of jest; “after all your open-handed career, you may become a miser yet.”

“Heaven send the day!” she exclaimed. And long, long afterward Desmond remembered the phrase and her look as she uttered the words. “It might be better for me and mine if the open hand had been always the close fist.” Then she broke off suddenly,—“Why, there is Mrs. Kentopp.”

For that lady was coming in, laughing very much, which always started her pink flush to justify her blonded hair, and declaring that she had almost gone to sleep on the sofa in the parlor, while they neglected her and kept her waiting. If Colonel Kentopp had had scant appreciation of the esthetic value of the changes that Desmond had wrought in the aspect of the library, Mrs. Kentopp’s glacial, superficial glance at its details implied absolute disregard. It might have been a lesson to reduce the vanity of those purblind insects denominated men of science, who grope about the hidden meanings of the universe, who seek to “unclench from the granite hand of Nature her mighty secrets,” to bring near the stars, to revive the dead life of the rocks, to discern the brush that paints the flower and leaf, to descry whence comes the fashion of the cloud, to find out the paths of the trackless oceans, could they have appraised the degree of Mrs. Kentopp’s contempt for their objects as her eyes rested upon the insignia afforded by the telescope, the geological cabinet, the skeleton leaves, the epitome of history and poetry above the mantelpiece. Her flout of intentional inattention was so patent, her air of minimizing, almost ridiculing the importance of the tutor and all which to him pertained, that it became obvious to the other two that the afternoon walk was in order, and they were presently sauntering down the veranda, while Desmond ran for his hat.

To Desmond’s surprise, he was not in the slightest degree mortified, nor intimidated, nor crushed by Mrs. Kentopp’s manner, as she had doubtless intended he should be. He was noting the fact that, despite their apparent intimacy, these people did not call each other by their Christian names after the manner of their sort elsewhere. It had never been the custom in this region, where a certain formality of the old regime still lingers, and he felt a kind of special gratitude that he was not called upon to endure to hear Mrs. Faurie address Colonel Kentopp as “Tom,” and his wife as “Annetta,” and their responsive familiarity to her as “Honoria.”

The four walked abreast along the winding avenue under the boughs of the dense trees of the grove, which was perfectly clear of undergrowth and as level as a floor. Now and again the colonnades formed by the great boles parted to show beautiful open, grassy vistas amongst the gigantic growths that had given the place its name; but the eye could reach no limits of the forest, save on one side where the river had come “cranking in and cut a monstrous cantle out.” The party struck off presently into a byway, which at length brought them into the road at the base of the levee. Here they climbed the great embankment covered with Bermuda grass. The short, dense growth was evidently feeling the spring of the year in its thick mat of roots that held the earth together, being an almost impervious network of innumerable, interlacing fibres, and of special utility because of its imperviousness in times of “fighting water.” As they took their way along the broad path upon the summit, they could view from the elevation, of peculiar advantage in so flat a country, a vast circuit of the surrounding landscape. The water was high and the river was still on the rise. The space outside the levee seemed to Desmond to have shrunken very perceptibly since he had seen it a few days before. This strip varied greatly in width; now it looked at the distance as if it might measure a mile or more, and at certain points it showed only a few hundred yards, with here and there marshy intimations and disconnected pools where the water stood and reflected the light like oval mirrors. The sun, down-dropping, vermilion red, had turned all the currents of the great stream to crimson, and as it sunk lower and lower the shadows began to gloom in the dense woods on the hither shore, albeit there was still a line of gilding sunlight glinting along the forest summits.

It was all very quiet; not a craft was visible on the currents; the vast river was absolutely mute. Despite the fact that this is one of the great highways of the world, a natural channel from boreal to subtropical climes, designed, one might fancy, to bring man near his brother man, without reference to his own ingenuity of device,—in conquering the wilderness, harnessing the steam, annulling time, and obliterating distance,—it could have seemed no lonelier were theirs the first of human eyes to rest upon it. There was no trace, no suggestion of man’s presence, save the great embankment of the levee along the river-side, now and again receding so far inland as to elude the sight, and the newly arrived “shanty-boat” lying at the landing.

This craft held the degree of comparison with the usual trading-boat of these waters that a junk-shop bears to a warehouse. Desmond’s attention was first attracted to the humble and grotesque nondescript vessel when Chub, nimbly footing it in his trim little knickerbockers and well-filled stockings and natty Paris shoes, to overtake the group, joined his mother; he began to bang upon her, his arm about her waist, his head lolling against her arm, begging and pleading with her to buy him a bicycle,—a beautiful second-hand wheel,—which the amphibious trader had assured him was as good as new.

“But you have your own wheel,” she remonstrated. “You actually want another? You would have to be a quadruped to ride both.”

“And a long-eared one at that!” Colonel Kentopp declared, somewhat nettled; for his own small son had come up on the other side, casting up lustrous, anxious eyes, beseeching that if Chub did not secure this treasure, dear, _dear_ papa would open his heart and purse and bestow it upon him; for woe to tell! he had no bicycle whatever,—he had only a tricycle, and a bitter blow it was to his pride when Chub rode a safety and he could only accompany him, bowed to the earth, as it were, on a humiliating three-wheeler.

“My wheel?—Gracious! my wheel is all out of whack!” cried the tumultuous Chub. “Just look at it, mamma,—that is all I ask. Just go down to the trading-boat and look at the wheel,—a—beautiful—second-hand—bike!”

“But, Chubby, it would be out of the question for you to own two wheels and both already used—”

“Mine’s got a punctured tire,” wailed Chub.

“Gimme second choice,—if Chub don’t make it; lemme have it, papa dear,” beguiled the Kentopp hopeful.

It had been Desmond’s firm determination, rigidly observed so far, that he would have no concern with his pupils other than scholastic. He would consider the trend of the conversation in their presence, as indeed is necessary always in association with young persons, that the equilibrium of their moral, political, or religious convictions be not shaken till they are of sufficient age and discretion to exercise a sober and independent judgment. He would direct their thoughts to subjects of value in their general reading. He would impart information or correct mistaken impressions in the course of casual chat. He would in moments of recreation narrate details of special interest or amusement, and thus further incidentally the judicious development of their mental faculties. But with the problems of their control outside the schoolroom, their sports, their manners, their moral training, he would not tax himself. This was in a manner interference, however salutary, and might be resented by those in actual authority, resulting in anarchy for the youths, and their last estate would be worse than their first. He thus argued that he did not stand in _loco parentis_; he was simply a machine for the furtherance of learning, a paid purveyor of wisdom, and when his day’s work was ended his responsibility ceased for the day. Therefore he was surprised at himself when he stepped forward briskly, as Mrs. Faurie, with a somewhat doubtful and disconsolate air, yielded so far as to agree to examine the treasure, and turned to the descent of the levee on the outer side.

“Let me go and examine the wheel, Mrs. Faurie, and report its condition to you; I understand these machines better, probably, than you do.”

She turned back with a wave of the hand,—a fine, free gesture at arm’s length. “A rescue!” she exclaimed. “I was just wondering if I could survive the unmitigated boredom of the tires, and the bell, and the handle-bar, and the pedals, and the saddle. Is the date set for your canonization, Mr. Desmond? Go, by all means, and add another to your deeds of grace.”

But Chub emitted a disconcerted whine. “I don’t wish you to go, Mr. Desmond,” he plained, with the unwitting insolence of juvenile sincerity.

Desmond was not out of countenance; he even sustained the furtive sneer in Mrs. Kentopp’s face. “Just as it happens, I don’t care in the least what you wish.”

“Now, there it is, mamma. I want the bike, and Mr. Desmond doesn’t care what I want; _he says so_.”

“It ought to be little trouble to teach the logical ideas of the clever Chub to shoot straight,” commented Colonel Kentopp.

“Well, then,” Mrs. Faurie could not resist, “suppose I go, too. Mr. Desmond can instruct me as to the perfection of the tires and the bell and the handle-bar, and the tumbling guaranty, warranted to give the best headers in the market,”—she was looking down with her gracious maternal smile at Chub, as in his tumultuous callowness he clamored and clung about her skirts (“Oh, rats! mamma, it’s got no tumbling guaranty,” he interposed),—“and in the mean time I can meditate on the price.”

“But, mamma, it is cheap, it is dirt cheap, it is dog cheap.”

“What is the price?” Desmond demanded.

When Chub responded, the tutor might have had a salutary monition of the discretion of his resolution to keep apart from the affairs of his pupils outside the schoolroom. “You just wait and see,” said Chub, sullenly.

“Come!” cried Mrs. Faurie, her foot poised on the verge of the outer descent of the levee, her skirts held daintily clear of the grass with her left hand, her right about the shoulders of the enterprising Chub. She looked back with bright expectation at the Kentopps as they stood motionless.

“Thank you, no,” said Colonel Kentopp. “We will await you here. I shan’t put myself in temptation’s way. To be dragooned into buying a crippled bike from such a trading-boat as that would be the final blow to my paternal authority.”

He and his wife looked gravely after the pedestrians while standing together on the summit of the levee. The sparkle and suavity of their countenances, addressed to the exigencies of society, were dying out. They both seemed years older in a moment. Mrs. Kentopp’s haggard pallor was unrelieved by the flush that was wont to come and go as she laughed, and a certain pendulous effect of the cheeks became noticeable in the immobile contemplativeness of her expression. Her husband was more saturnine than one could have imagined from his arrogations of bonhomie. He had a spark of irritation in his eyes, too sharply flashing to have been kindled merely by the persistence of his little son, now picking his way after the group bound toward the trading-boat, now pausing irresolute.

“Mr. Stanlett is certainly in his dotage!” Colonel Kentopp exclaimed acridly. “I never could have imagined him guilty of such folly as to bring that man here.”

“Why, what is the matter with the man?”—his wife had a short, crisp tone, level and direct, and all devoid of the little aspirations and sudden rising inflections and exclamatory interludes which interspersed the tenor of her usual discourse.

“The matter,—why, he is as handsome as a picture! He has the dignity of a lord, and I never saw a man who seemed more highly bred.”

“Well,”—she drawled, “don’t you consider those facts advantages? A stranger in one’s house is always a nuisance, but it is better that a tutor or governess should be as genteel as possible.”

“Great Scott! Annetta, how can you be so dense? He is a man whom Honoria Faurie might very well elect to fall in love with and marry.”

Mrs. Kentopp laughed in derision,—not her breathy, flushing, becoming laughter, but a simple cackle of scorn. “Why, he is young enough to be her son.”

“He is ten years younger,—that is all.”

“_All!_ Ten years is enough. No doubt she seems an old lady to him.”

“You wouldn’t think so if you had caught a glimpse of his face as I saw them talking together in the library. They would make a very comely married couple.”

“Why, Tom Kentopp, you are wild! She would have to give up that big income if she married, thirty thousand dollars of it every year are as certain as taxes, chargeable on the whole estate, and the Great Oaks crops besides,—and take instead only her dower rights in Tennessee,—just a life-interest in a third of the real property, with that old Nashville residence, in a locality that is awfully unfashionable nowadays,—she has never lived there since Mr. Faurie’s death,—and a fourth of the Mississippi property. And such a sacrifice for such a man,—a penniless tutor! Why, if it were not way down here in the swamp, he would seem hardly of more consequence than a courier.”

“Exactly; it is a mighty lonesome country for a pretty widow, and he is a mighty fine man.”

Mrs. Kentopp grew grave. “I never was more surprised than when he came into the parlor. I expected to see a little lean, wizened body, like the man they had last,—little Mr. ——, Mr. ——, I have forgotten the little animal’s name. This man is not at all what a tutor should be in appearance; he carries himself as if he owned the world. And his look of cool, assured gravity is positively insulting. I don’t think that he gave himself the trouble to fetch out a smile throughout luncheon.”

“He was not amused, perhaps,” Colonel Kentopp suggested.

“But he should be amused when his betters choose to be merry,” the lady retorted.

“It would be a deuced unpleasant thing for us,” her husband resumed the matrimonial speculation. “As long as Mrs. Faurie is in the world among her peers, and the value of that large and certain income is forever in her mind, with the bliss of spending it, and living like a princess, I am not afraid. Besides, the lords and counts would back out the instant the settlements would reveal the awful trap that Faurie set for his successor. But this man, this Desmond, would be mighty well satisfied with the division that gives her a life-interest in one third of the Tennessee real estate and a fourth part of the personalty there, and a fourth absolutely of everything in Mississippi. It would be a long sight better than tutoring. He would be mighty glad for another fellow to be hired to teach Chub,—especially with Chub’s own money. Mrs. Faurie is at no expense on her sons’ account—except such as is voluntary; she gives them those costly foreign trips, for instance.”

“But _she_,—she wouldn’t be satisfied with that provision;—she would not give up her income for any man living.”

“This is a very exceptional man, and this is the jumping-off place of all creation,” persisted Kentopp.

Mrs. Kentopp’s shallow eyes scanned the far reaches of the Mississippi. The sun was no longer visible, but the vermilion reflection was still red upon the rippling waters, for the afterglow was in the sky. “I don’t see how Honoria Faurie manages so badly as to come to the end of her income in this way; it is positively ridiculous,” she said, with a sort of petulance.

Colonel Kentopp bit off the end of his cigar and spat it forth with an expression that suggested it might be bitter, but his thought was wormwood. “Oh, she even anticipates her income as far as she can,—she spends at such a clip! She bought her steam yacht with her _savings_, Chub told me.” He smiled derisively. “It is in dock now; it ought to have been chartered while she is on dry land.”

“And her automobile is another extravagance; why couldn’t she hire a touring-car for the little time that she is rusticating while abroad?”

“Princesses don’t stoop to such economies, that is, abroad. Economy befits the swamp. I have nothing to say against the diamonds, although I think she might well have been satisfied with the Faurie family jewels,—nor yet those wonderful emeralds, for such ‘savings’ have an intrinsic value. But it does seem a most mischievous mischance that she should have to _faire maigre_ here in the swamp just at this time, with such a hero of romance as Mr. Stanlett has introduced as tutor.”

“Mr. Stanlett never saw him till he was engaged and had arrived. I heard him say that the whole matter was arranged by correspondence through Mr. Keith, the boys’ guardian. It seems that he and the tutor had some mutual friends. I understand that this fellow has an exceptional collegiate record,—though if he has, I should think he could get a better place. But why should his presence here concern us, do you think?”

“Because if there were a prospect that the Faurie property might come on the market for division, as the result of her marriage, at any reasonably early day, we should never be able to sell Dryad-Dene Plantation to Jack Loring. He evidently much prefers Great Oaks.”

Her face lowered heavily. “I was just beginning to think of that,” she said, now dully out of sorts.

“There are actual advantages,” he argued. “Dryad-Dene Plantation is subject to overflow, and Great Oaks rarely goes under unless their cross levee breaks. Our lands are cut up with bayous and sloughs, while Great Oaks has thousands of acres as level as a floor and as dry as a bone. And then the old house, the groves and the glades. Loring is as new as yesterday, himself, but he wants a place reeking of ancestors and aristocratic traditions.”

“I don’t see why; it is his one merit that he grew in a single night! It is Jack that has shot up so surprisingly this time, and not the beanstalk,” said Mrs. Kentopp, sourly.

“He isn’t going to stay new. That is the reason he does not locate somewhere else. The Great Oaks air of the _ancien régime_, its shabbiness and out-at-elbows look of romantic poverty, the ruin of princes, on account of that woman’s grudging neglect, when it is really bursting with richness and luxury, would fill his bill exactly. Loring would be furnished with all manner of aristocratic hereditaments, and in ten years people would forget that he was not born at Great Oaks. His people were natives of this region, and his name is familiar in Deepwater Bend; he would rather own Great Oaks than anything else his millions can buy. Let him once hear of that prince-in-disguise-looking tutor, of fine family and exceptional cultivation, in constant association with the beautiful Mrs. Faurie! He is not precipitate at best. He will wait till the division of the Faurie estate consequent upon a second marriage puts Great Oaks up at auction to the highest bidder.”

Mrs. Kentopp’s face seemed in anxiety to suffer somewhat of a collapse. How, it might be impossible to describe, but now her blonde hair showed that much of it near her face was false, when its naturalness of arrangement had rendered this suspicion impossible hitherto. She was one of the women not pretty, but who contrive to compass that reputation by assuming the pose, the conscious attire, the bridling expression. As she looked now, the coquettishness of her equipment was a painful commentary upon her appearance, haggard with disappointment and foreboding. For the Kentopps had scant affinity with this secluded life in the Mississippi bottom, and they had not had such resources as Mrs. Faurie for shaking its mud—one cannot say its dust—from their feet for indefinite periods of absence. The sale of Dryad-Dene Plantation, with its elaborate industrial equipment and beautiful modern residence, would make possible the dream of their lives,—its transmutation into a handsome town house in New Orleans and a summer cottage on the Gulf coast, with lands enough somewhere at the minimum price to rent out to tenants to make cotton, as lands are created to do, to furnish an income for the absentees. But purchasers for a property of such value as Dryad-Dene are rare, and the _ci-devant_ swamper, Loring, who had grown very rich by speculation, was one of the few men who cared to invest in so inconvertible an asset as a fine house and large plantation in Deepwater Bend. A species of self-assertion it was to him, perchance. Here where he was born, as poor as poverty, though of genteel and respectable parentage, he could, as a bit of luxury, own the finest estate around which the river curved, and in the scene of his early privations have its magnates in hot competition to place their splendid holdings in the best light for his somewhat supercilious appraisement.

“It would be idiotic,—it would positively be ridiculous—and she ten years older,” Mrs. Kentopp declared bitterly.

Suddenly, like the lightning-change effect of a performer on the stage, she resumed her wonted aspect as if by magic. Her cheeks rounded out; her flush came and went; her lips were again curving and plump with distending smiles over her white teeth; her eyes were all a-sparkle; and she was waving the end of her long feather boa in a response of exaggerated mirth to a fancied greeting from the door of the “shanty-boat” far below. Mrs. Faurie was issuing thence, lifting one of her delicate hands, gloved to the elbow in gray kid; but the gesture was one of protest. She was not looking at her guests, but after a loutish, grotesque, thick-set man, of amphibious suggestions, who was springing with great leaps up the bank with an open knife in his hand. With this he so swiftly cut die rope that held the boat to a gnarled old tree, that the craft, feeling the impulse of the current, began to move from the shore before Mrs. Faurie could step from the gang-plank of the deck to the ground. As it was, the ripples ran over her feet, and she exclaimed aloud in agitation and sudden fright. She was safely on the bank when Desmond, still on the deck, sprang lightly across the ever-widening interval of water, now almost impracticable, swinging Chub ashore with a hand under each of the boy’s arms. As the boatman came running down the bank Desmond paused, and meeting him at the margin, struck him between the eyes a blow so fair and furious that the fellow was weltering saurian-like in the water before he scarcely realized that he had been felled. Perhaps the deficiencies of his craft, with no propelling power, constrained his attention; perhaps the vigor of the blow tamed his rancorous rage. He made no effort at reprisal, though Desmond lingered on the bank, but struck out swimming after his boat, and turned, only when once more safe on deck and out of Desmond’s reach, to gaze lowering and askance across the water, with a look at once vengeful, amazed, and dismayed.

“What can have happened?” exclaimed Mrs. Kentopp, watching the scene from afar with wondering eyes. “Mr. Paragon is a muscular Christian, it seems.”

“He is very injudicious,” said Colonel Kentopp, gravely. “These water-side vagrants are often dangerous rascals,—river pirates. Their good-will is safer than their grudges.”