United States -- History -- Constitutional period, 1789-1809 -- Fiction
Heaven?" and "Will you go to Fontenoy?" The one seemed as remote, as
unattainable, and as happy as the other. The advantage was possibly with
Fontenoy, for he could picture that to himself. He could not have
described the mansions in the skies, but, thanks to Jacqueline, he knew
every room at Fontenoy. Before he was laid in it, he had known the blue
room, the roses on the curtains, and the peacock-feathered mandarin
forever climbing a dull yellow screen. The library should be below, with
the bookshelves, and the glass door opening on the snowball bushes.
Outside his window was the flower garden. He had seen the garden with
his bodily eyes, for there was the morning he had spent at Fontenoy. In
the desert of his hardly-treated, eager, and longing youth the place and
the life of which the girl who came to Mrs. Selden's had told him was
become the vision of an oasis and a paradise. The magic word was
Fontenoy. If Gideon Rand or Adam Gaudylock chanced to pronounce it, it
was as though the Captain of the Thieves had said, "Open Sesame!" The
cave door opened, and he saw strange riches.
That day at Fontenoy! He tried to recall it, but it did not stand out in
his memory; it was curiously without edge. Trying to remember was like
remembering a dream, delicious and evasive. The child named Jacqueline
had changed to a girl named Jacqueline. She had spoken to him shyly, and
he had answered with much greater shyness, with a reddening cheek and a
stumbling tongue. He remembered her dress, a soft blue stuff that he was
afraid of touching, and he remembered how burning was his consciousness
of his coarse shoes, his shirt of osnaburg, the disreputable hat upon
his sunburnt hair. Then they had walked in the garden, and sat on the
steps of a summer house, and he had been very happy after all. And then
a black boy had come to tell him that the Colonel was ready with the
receipt he was to carry back to the Three-Notched Road. He said good-bye
with great awkwardness, and went away, and he saw the girl no more for a
long, long time, for so long a time that insensibly her image faded. It
was in the October of that year that he went to Richmond with Gideon,
and met Mr. Jefferson in the bookshop by the bridge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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