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In his face, not joy, only pallid eagerness, desire fixed upon fulfilment, and knowledge that happiness was something else; a young, worn face, with hard lines about the mouth and neck; the face of one who had thought self to be dead and buried, and had seen it rise to life again, and fallen captive to it. So he was drawing near to Carancro. Make haste, Bonaventure!
Zoséphine! ma vieille! ma vieille!" one long moan and sigh, and the finest horseman, the sweetest musician, the bravest soldier, yes, and the best husband, in all Carancro, was dead. Poor old Sosthène and his wife! How hard they tried, for days, for weeks, to comfort their widowed child! But in vain.
And yet, somehow, as time ran on, Zoséphine, like all the rest of Carancro, began to look up with a certain deference, half-conscious, half-unconscious, to the needy young man who was nobody's love or lover, and yet, in a gentle, unimpassioned way, everybody's; landless, penniless, artless Bonaventure, who honestly thought there was no girl in Carancro who was not much too good for him, and of whom there was not one who did not think him much too good for her.
She replies that she used to see it so in her younger days. The Acadian accent is in her words. She lifts her black eyes, looks toward Carancro, and is silent. "You're thinking of the changes," says her escort. "Yass; 'tis so. Dey got twenty time' many field' like had befo'. Peop' don't raise cattl' no more; raise crop'. Dey say even dat land changin'." "How changing?" "I dunno.
Somewhere in the long stretch between Bonaventure and Carancro there must be strange tidings.
Farther away from Carancro than many of Carancro's people had ever wandered, in the fire-lighted public room of a village tavern, twelve or fifteen men were tramping busily about, in muddy boots and big clanking spurs, looking to pistols and carbines of miscellaneous patterns, and securing them against weather under their as yet only damp and slightly bespattered great-coats, no two of which were alike.
Because his ambition and pride, explained the informant, had outgrown Carancro, and his heart had tired of the diminished memory of the little Zoséphine. Bonaventure hurried away. What storms buffeted one another in his bosom! Night had fallen upon the great city. Long stretches of street lay now between high walls, and now between low-hanging eaves, empty of human feet and rife with solitude.
A horse and buggy have this moment been stopped and are standing on a faint rise of ground seven miles out beyond the south-western outskirt of Carancro. The two male occupants of the vehicle are lifting their heads, and looking with well-pleased faces at something out over the plain. You know the curé? and the ex-governor.
From time to time Madame 'Thanase passed before his view in pursuit of her outdoor and indoor cares. But even when he came under her galérie roof he could see that she never doubted she had made the very best choice in all Carancro.
But away in the night Madame Sosthène, hearing an unwonted noise, went to Bonaventure's bedside and found him sobbing as if his heart had broken. "He has had a bad dream," she said; for he would not say a word. The curé of Vermilionville and Carancro was a Creole gentleman who looked burly and hard when in meditation; but all that vanished when he spoke and smiled.
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