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Fontenette being still asleep I gave her my place for a moment, and went to the door between the parlor and his wife's room. Mrs. Smith came to it, barely breathing the triumphant word "Just dropped asleep!"
Loath to see him open his eyes, I kept very still, while nearly another hour dragged by, listening hard for Senda's return, but hearing only, once or twice, through the narrow stairway and closets between the two bedrooms, a faint stir that showed Mrs. Fontenette was awake and being waited on.
He had evidently been knocking, and was about to knock again when there came some response from within, to which he replied, in a suppressed yet eager and agitated voice, "Mine Psyche! Oh, mine Psyche! She is come to me undt she is bringing me already more as a hoondredt vhat?" He had been interrupted from within. "Vhat you say?" Fontenette drew his knife.
He never caught one from her nor threw one that she could catch; but, ah! with her coaxing and commanding, her sweet taunting and reprimanding and his utter lack of surprise at them, how much she betrayed! Fontenette came, learned in a few throws, and was charmed with the toys a genuine lover always takes to them kindly but Mrs.
Fontenette who was not a Creole, as her husband was, but had once been a Miss Bangs, or something, and still called blackberries "blackbries," and made root rhyme with foot I fancy if she had been doomed to our entomologist's sort of a house she would have been too broken in spirit to have made anybody's acquaintance.
Well I'll be back in the morning." So ran the time. There were no more new cases in our house; Mrs. Smith and I had had the scourge years before, as also had Senda, who remained over the way. Fontenette passed from one typical phase of the disorder to another "charmingly" as the doctor said, yet he specially needed just such exceptionally delicate care as his wife was giving him.
Fontenette had been ill something over a week, the doctor one evening made us glad by saying as he came through the little dining-room and jerked a thumb back toward Fontenette's door, "Just keep him as he is for one more night and, I promise you, he'll get well; but!" He sat down on the couch Senda's in the parlor, and pointed at the door to Mrs.
I sent the old black woman home and to bed, and may have sat an hour more, when she came back to tell us, that one of the children was very wakeful and feverish. Senda went to see into the matter for us, and the old woman took her place in the little parlor. Mrs. Smith was with Mrs. Fontenette. Fontenette slept.
No butterfly raptures for him; he devoured the one kind of facts he cared for, as a caterpillar devours leaves. How Mrs. Fontenette got Mrs. "Thorndyke-Smith" and me entangled with some six or eight others in her project for a botanizing and butterfly-chasing picnic I do not know; but she did.
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.
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