Madame Delphine
G >> George W. Cable >> Madame DelphineHe was much beloved. Notwithstanding that among the clergy there were
two or three who shook their heads and raised their eyebrows, and said
he would be at least as orthodox if he did not make quite so much of the
Bible and quite so little of the dogmas, yet "the common people heard
him gladly." When told, one day, of the unfavorable whispers, he smiled
a little and answered his informant,--whom he knew to be one of the
whisperers himself,--laying a hand kindly upon his shoulder:
"Father Murphy,"--or whatever the name was,--"your words comfort me."
"How is that?"
"Because--'_Vae quum benedixerint mihi homines_!'"*
[*"Woe unto me, when all men speak well of me!"]
The appointed morning, when it came, was one of those exquisite days in
which there is such a universal harmony, that worship rises from the
heart like a spring.
"Truly," said Pere Jerome to the companion who was to assist him in the
mass, "this is a Sabbath day which we do not have to make holy, but only
to _keep_ so."
May be it was one of the secrets of Pere Jerome's success as a preacher,
that he took more thought as to how he should feel, than as to what he
should say.
The cathedral of those days was called a very plain old pile, boasting
neither beauty nor riches; but to Pere Jerome it was very lovely; and
before its homely altar, not homely to him, in the performance of those
solemn offices, symbols of heaven's mightiest truths, in the hearing of
the organ's harmonies, and the yet more eloquent interunion of human
voices in the choir, in overlooking the worshipping throng which knelt
under the soft, chromatic lights, and in breathing the sacrificial odors
of the chancel, he found a deep and solemn joy; and yet I guess the
finest thought of his soul the while was one that came thrice and again:
"Be not deceived, Pere Jerome, because saintliness of feeling is easy
here; you are the same priest who overslept this morning, and overate
yesterday, and will, in some way, easily go wrong to-morrow and the day
after."
He took it with him when--the _Veni Creator_ sung--he went into the
pulpit. Of the sermon he preached, tradition has preserved for us only a
few brief sayings, but they are strong and sweet.
"My friends," he said,--this was near the beginning,--"the angry words
of God's book are very merciful--they are meant to drive us home; but
the tender words, my friends, they are sometimes terrible! Notice these,
the tenderest words of the tenderest prayer that ever came from the lips
of a blessed martyr--the dying words of the holy Saint Stephen, 'Lord,
lay not this sin to their charge.' Is there nothing dreadful in that?
Read it thus: 'Lord, lay not this sin to _their_ charge.' Not to the
charge of them who stoned him? To whose charge then? Go ask the holy
Saint Paul. Three years afterward, praying in the temple at Jerusalem,
he answered that question: 'I stood by and consented.' He answered for
himself only; but the Day must come when all that wicked council that
sent Saint Stephen away to be stoned, and all that city of Jerusalem,
must hold up the hand and say: 'We, also, Lord--we stood by.' Ah!
friends, under the simpler meaning of that dying saint's prayer for the
pardon of his murderers is hidden the terrible truth that we all have a
share in one another's sins."
Thus Pere Jerome touched his key-note. All that time has spared us
beside may be given in a few sentences.
"Ah!" he cried once, "if it were merely my own sins that I had to answer
for, I might hold up my head before the rest of mankind; but no, no, my
friends--we cannot look each other in the face, for each has helped the
other to sin. Oh, where is there any room, in this world of common
disgrace, for pride? Even if we had no common hope, a common despair
ought to bind us together and forever silence the voice of scorn!"
And again, this:
"Even in the promise to Noe, not again to destroy the race with a flood,
there is a whisper of solemn warning. The moral account of the
antediluvians was closed off and the balance brought down in the year of
the deluge; but the account of those who come after runs on and on, and
the blessed bow of promise itself warns us that God will not stop it
till the Judgment Day! O God, I thank thee that that day must come at
last, when thou wilt destroy the world, and stop the interest on my
account!"
It was about at this point that Pere Jerome noticed, more particularly
than he had done before, sitting among the worshippers near him, a
small, sad-faced woman, of pleasing features, but dark and faded, who
gave him profound attention. With her was another in better dress,
seemingly a girl still in her teens, though her face and neck were
scrupulously concealed by a heavy veil, and her hands, which were small,
by gloves.
"Quadroones," thought he, with a stir of deep pity.
Once, as he uttered some stirring word, he saw the mother and daughter
(if such they were), while they still bent their gaze upon him, clasp
each other's hand fervently in the daughter's lap. It was at these
words:
"My friends, there are thousands of people in this city of New Orleans
to whom society gives the ten commandments of God with all the _nots_
rubbed out! Ah! good gentlemen! if God sends the poor weakling to
purgatory for leaving the right path, where ought some of you to go who
strew it with thorns and briers!"
The movement of the pair was only seen because he watched for it. He
glanced that way again as he said:
"O God, be very gentle with those children who would be nearer heaven
this day had they never had a father and mother, but had got their
religious training from such a sky and earth as we have in Louisiana
this holy morning! Ah! my friends, nature is a big-print catechism!"
The mother and daughter leaned a little farther forward, and exchanged
the same spasmodic hand-pressure as before. The mother's eyes were full
of tears.
"I once knew a man," continued the little priest, glancing to a side
aisle where he had noticed Evariste and Jean sitting against each other,
"who was carefully taught, from infancy to manhood, this single only
principle of life: defiance. Not justice, not righteousness, not even
gain; but defiance: defiance to God, defiance to man, defiance to
nature, defiance to reason; defiance and defiance and defiance."
"He is going to tell it!" murmured Evariste to Jean.
"This man," continued Pere Jerome, "became a smuggler and at last a
pirate in the Gulf of Mexico. Lord, lay not that sin to his charge
alone! But a strange thing followed. Being in command of men of a sort
that to control required to be kept at the austerest distance, he now
found himself separated from the human world and thrown into the solemn
companionship with the sea, with the air, with the storm, the calm, the
heavens by day, the heavens by night. My friends, that was the first
time in his life that he ever found himself in really good company.
"Now, this man had a great aptness for accounts. He had kept them--had
rendered them. There was beauty, to him, in a correct, balanced, and
closed account. An account unsatisfied was a deformity. The result is
plain. That man, looking out night after night upon the grand and holy
spectacle of the starry deep above and the watery deep below, was sure
to find himself, sooner or later, mastered by the conviction that the
great Author of this majestic creation keeps account of it; and one
night there came to him, like a spirit walking on the sea, the awful,
silent question: 'My account with God--how does it stand?' Ah! friends,
that is a question which the book of nature does not answer.
"Did I say the book of nature is a catechism? Yes. But, after it answers
the first question with 'God,' nothing but questions follow; and so, one
day, this man gave a ship full of merchandise for one little book which
answered those questions. God help him to understand it! and God help
you, monsieur and you, madame, sitting here in your _smuggled clothes_,
to beat upon the breast with me and cry, 'I, too, Lord--I, too, stood by
and consented.'"
Pere Jerome had not intended these for his closing words; but just
there, straight away before his sight and almost at the farthest door, a
man rose slowly from his seat and regarded him steadily with a kind,
bronzed, sedate face, and the sermon, as if by a sign of command, was
ended. While the _Credo_ was being chanted he was still there; but when,
a moment after its close, the eye of Pere Jerome returned in that
direction, his place was empty.
As the little priest, his labor done and his vestments changed, was
turning into the Rue Royale and leaving the cathedral out of sight, he
just had time to understand that two women were purposely allowing him
to overtake them, when the one nearer him spoke in the Creole patois,
saying, with some timid haste:
"Good-morning, Pere--Pere Jerome; Pere Jerome, we thank the good God for
that sermon."
"Then, so do I," said the little man. They were the same two that he had
noticed when he was preaching. The younger one bowed silently; she was a
beautiful figure, but the slight effort of Pere Jerome's kind eyes to
see through the veil was vain. He would presently have passed on, but
the one who had spoken before said:
"I thought you lived in the Rue des Ursulines."
"Yes; I am going this way to see a sick person."
The woman looked up at him with an expression of mingled confidence and
timidity.
"It must be a blessed thing to be so useful as to be needed by the good
God," she said.
Pere Jerome smiled:
"God does not need me to look after his sick; but he allows me to do it,
just as you let your little boy in frocks carry in chips." He might have
added that he loved to do it, quite as much.
It was plain the woman had somewhat to ask, and was trying to get
courage to ask it.
"You have a little boy?" asked the priest.
"No, I have only my daughter;" she indicated the girl at her side. Then
she began to say something else, stopped, and with much nervousness
asked:
"Pere Jerome, what was the name of that man?"
"His name?" said the priest. "You wish to know his name?"
"Yes, Monsieur" (or _Miche_, as she spoke it); "it was such a beautiful
story." The speaker's companion looked another way.
"His name," said Father Jerome,--"some say one name and some another.
Some think it was Jean Lafitte, the famous; you have heard of him? And
do you go to my church, Madame----?"
"No, Miche; not in the past; but from this time, yes. My name"--she
choked a little, and yet it evidently gave her pleasure to offer this
mark of confidence--"is Madame Delphine--Delphine Carraze."
CHAPTER VI.
A CRY OF DISTRESS.
Pere Jerome's smile and exclamation, as some days later he entered his
parlor in response to the announcement of a visitor, were indicative of
hearty greeting rather than surprise.
"Madame Delphine!"
Yet surprise could hardly have been altogether absent, for though
another Sunday had not yet come around, the slim, smallish figure
sitting in a corner, looking very much alone, and clad in dark attire,
which seemed to have been washed a trifle too often, was Delphine
Carraze on her second visit. And this, he was confident, was over and
above an attendance in the confessional, where he was sure he had
recognized her voice.
She rose bashfully and gave her hand, then looked to the floor, and
began a faltering speech, with a swallowing motion in the throat, smiled
weakly and commenced again, speaking, as before, in a gentle, low note,
frequently lifting up and casting down her eyes, while shadows of
anxiety and smiles of apology chased each other rapidly across her face.
She was trying to ask his advice.
"Sit down," said he; and when they had taken seats she resumed, with
downcast eyes:
"You know,--probably I should have said this in the confessional, but--
"No matter, Madame Delphine; I understand; you did not want an oracle,
perhaps; you want a friend."
She lifted her eyes, shining with tears, and dropped them again.
"I"--she ceased. "I have done a"--she dropped her head and shook it
despondingly--"a cruel thing." The tears rolled from her eyes as she
turned away her face.
Pere Jerome remained silent, and presently she turned again, with the
evident intention of speaking at length.
"It began nineteen years ago--by"--her eyes, which she had lifted, fell
lower than ever, her brow and neck were suffused with blushes, and she
murmured--"I fell in love."
She said no more, and by and by Pere Jerome replied:
"Well, Madame Delphine, to love is the right of every soul. I believe in
love. If your love was pure and lawful I am sure your angel guardian
smiled upon you; and if it was not, I cannot say you have nothing to
answer for, and yet I think God may have said: 'She is a quadroone; all
the rights of her womanhood trampled in the mire, sin made easy to
her--almost compulsory,--charge it to account of whom it may concern."
"No, no!" said Madame Delphine, looking up quickly, "some of it might
fall upon--" Her eyes fell, and she commenced biting her lips and
nervously pinching little folds in her skirt. "He was good--as good as
the law would let him be--better, indeed, for he left me property, which
really the strict law does not allow. He loved our little daughter very
much. He wrote to his mother and sisters, owning all his error and
asking them to take the child and bring her up. I sent her to them when
he died, which was soon after, and did not see my child for sixteen
years. But we wrote to each other all the time, and she loved me. And
then--at last--" Madame Delphine ceased speaking, but went on diligently
with her agitated fingers, turning down foolish hems lengthwise of her
lap.
"At last your mother-heart conquered," said Pere Jerome.
She nodded.
"The sisters married, the mother died; I saw that even where she was she
did not escape the reproach of her birth and blood, and when she asked
me to let her come--." The speaker's brimming eyes rose an instant. "I
know it was wicked, but--I said, come."
The tears dripped through her hands upon her dress.
"Was it she who was with you last Sunday?"
"Yes."
"And now you do not know what to do with her?"
"_Ah! c'est ca, oui!_--that is it."
"Does she look like you, Madame Delphine?"
"Oh, thank God, no! you would never believe she was my daughter; she is
white and beautiful!"
"You thank God for that which is your main difficulty, Madame Delphine."
"Alas! yes."
Pere Jerome laid his palms tightly across his knees with his arms bowed
out, and fixed his eyes upon the ground, pondering.
"I suppose she is a sweet, good daughter?" said he, glancing at Madame
Delphine without changing his attitude.
Her answer was to raise her eyes rapturously.
"Which gives us the dilemma in its fullest force," said the priest,
speaking as if to the floor. "She has no more place than if she had
dropped upon a strange planet." He suddenly looked up with a brightness
which almost as quickly passed away, and then he looked down again. His
happy thought was the cloister; but he instantly said to himself: "They
cannot have overlooked that choice, except intentionally--which they
have a right to do." He could do nothing but shake his head.
"And suppose you should suddenly die," he said; he wanted to get at once
to the worst.
The woman made a quick gesture, and buried her head in her handkerchief,
with the stifled cry:
"Oh, Olive, my daughter!"
"Well, Madame Delphine," said Pere Jerome, more buoyantly, "one thing is
sure: we _must_ find a way out of this trouble."
"Ah!" she exclaimed, looking heavenward, "if it might be!"
"But it must be!" said the priest.
"But how shall it be?" asked the desponding woman.
"Ah!" said Pere Jerome, with a shrug, "God knows."
"Yes," said the quadroone, with a quick sparkle in her gentle eye; "and
I know, if God would tell anybody, He would tell you!"
The priest smiled and rose.
"Do you think so? Well, leave me to think of it. I will ask Him."
"And He will tell you!" she replied. "And He will bless you!" She rose
and gave her hand. As she withdrew it she smiled. "I had such a strange
dream," she said, backing toward the door.
"Yes?"
"Yes. I got my troubles all mixed up with your sermon. I dreamed I made
that pirate the guardian of my daughter."
Pere Jerome smiled also, and shrugged.
"To you, Madame Delphine, as you are placed, every white man in this
country, on land or on water, is a pirate, and of all pirates, I think
that one is, without doubt, the best."
"Without doubt," echoed Madame Delphine, wearily, still withdrawing
backward. Pere Jerome stepped forward and opened the door.
The shadow of some one approaching it from without fell upon the
threshold, and a man entered, dressed in dark blue cottonade, lifting
from his head a fine Panama hat, and from a broad, smooth brow, fair
where the hat had covered it and dark below, gently stroking back his
very soft, brown locks. Madame Delphine slightly started aside, while
Pere Jerome reached silently, but eagerly, forward, grasped a larger
hand than his own, and motioned its owner to a seat. Madame Delphine's
eyes ventured no higher than to discover that the shoes of the visitor
were of white duck.
"Well, Pere Jerome," she said, in a hurried under-tone, "I am just going
to say Hail Marys all the time till you find that out for me!"
"Well, I hope that will be soon, Madame Carraze. Good-day, Madame
Carraze."
And as she departed, the priest turned to the new-comer and extended
both hands, saying, in the same familiar dialect in which he had been
addressing the quadroone:
"Well-a-day, old playmate! After so many years!"
They sat down side by side, like husband and wife, the priest playing
with the other's hand, and talked of times and seasons past, often
mentioning Evariste and often Jean.
Madame Delphine stopped short half-way home and returned to Pere
Jerome's. His entry door was wide open and the parlor door ajar. She
passed through the one and with downcast eyes was standing at the other,
her hand lifted to knock, when the door was drawn open and the white
duck shoes passed out. She saw, besides, this time the blue cottonade
suit.
"Yes," the voice of Pere Jerome was saying, as his face appeared in the
door--"Ah! Madame--"
"I lef' my para_sol_," said Madame Delphine, in English.
There was this quiet evidence of a defiant spirit hidden somewhere down
under her general timidity, that, against a fierce conventional
prohibition, she wore a bonnet instead of the turban of her caste, and
carried a parasol.
Pere Jerome turned and brought it.
He made a motion in the direction in which the late visitor had
disappeared.
"Madame Delphine, you saw dat man?"
"Not his face."
"You couldn' billieve me iv I tell you w'at dat man pur_pose_ to do!"
"Is dad so, Pere Jerome?"
"He's goin' to hopen a bank!"
"Ah!" said Madame Delphine, seeing she was expected to be astonished.
Pere Jerome evidently longed to tell something that was best kept
secret; he repressed the impulse, but his heart had to say something. He
threw forward one hand and looking pleasantly at Madame Delphine, with
his lips dropped apart, clenched his extended hand and thrusting it
toward the ground, said in a solemn under-tone:
"He is God's own banker, Madame Delphine."
CHAPTER VII.
MICHE VIGNEVIELLE.
Madame Delphine sold one of the corner lots of her property. She had
almost no revenue, and now and then a piece had to go. As a consequence
of the sale, she had a few large bank-notes sewed up in her petticoat,
and one day--may be a fortnight after her tearful interview with Pere
Jerome--she found it necessary to get one of these changed into small
money. She was in the Rue Toulouse, looking from one side to the other
for a bank which was not in that street at all, when she noticed a small
sign hanging above a door, bearing the name "Vignevielle." She looked
in. Pere Jerome had told her (when she had gone to him to ask where she
should apply for change) that if she could only wait a few days, there
would be a new concern opened in Toulouse street,--it really seemed as
if Vignevielle was the name, if she could judge; it looked to be, and it
was, a private banker's,--"U. L. Vignevielle's," according to a larger
inscription which met her eyes as she ventured in. Behind the counter,
exchanging some last words with a busy-mannered man outside, who, in
withdrawing, seemed bent on running over Madame Delphine, stood the man
in blue cottonade, whom she had met in Pere Jerome's door-way. Now, for
the first time, she saw his face, its strong, grave, human kindness
shining softly on each and every bronzed feature. The recognition was
mutual. He took pains to speak first, saying, in a re-assuring tone, and
in the language he had last heard her use:
"'Ow I kin serve you, Madame?"
"Iv you pliz, to mague dad bill change, Miche."
She pulled from her pocket a wad of dark cotton handkerchief, from which
she began to untie the imprisoned note. Madame Delphine had an
uncommonly sweet voice, and it seemed so to strike Monsieur Vignevielle.
He spoke to her once or twice more, as he waited on her, each time in
English, as though he enjoyed the humble melody of its tone, and
presently, as she turned to go, he said:
"Madame Carraze!"
She started a little, but bethought herself instantly that he had heard
her name in Pere Jerome's parlor. The good father might even have said a
few words about her after her first departure; he had such an
overflowing heart.
"Madame Carraze," said Monsieur Vignevielle, "doze kine of note wad you
'_an_' me juz now is bein' contrefit. You muz tek kyah from doze kine of
note. You see--" He drew from his cash-drawer a note resembling the one
he had just changed for her, and proceeded to point out certain tests of
genuineness. The counterfeit, he said, was so and so.
"Bud," she exclaimed, with much dismay, "dad was de manner of my bill!
Id muz be--led me see dad bill wad I give you,--if you pliz, Miche."
Monsieur Vignevielle turned to engage in conversation with an employe
and a new visitor, and gave no sign of hearing Madame Delphine's voice.
She asked a second time, with like result, lingered timidly, and as he
turned to give his attention to a third visitor, reiterated:
"Miche Vignevielle, I wizh you pliz led----"
"Madame Carraze," he said, turning so suddenly as to make the frightened
little woman start, but extending his palm with a show of frankness, and
assuming a look of benignant patience, "'ow I kin fine doze note now,
mongs' all de rez? Iv you pliz nod to mague me doze troub'."
The dimmest shadow of a smile seemed only to give his words a more
kindly authoritative import, and as he turned away again with a manner
suggestive of finality, Madame Delphine found no choice but to depart.
But she went away loving the ground beneath the feet of Monsieur U. L.
Vignevielle.
"Oh, Pere Jerome!" she exclaimed in the corrupt French of her caste,
meeting the little father on the street a few days later, "you told the
truth that day in your parlor. _Mo conne li a c't heure_. I know him
now; he is just what you called him."
"Why do you not make him _your_ banker, also, Madame Delphine?"
"I have done so this very day!" she replied, with more happiness in her
eyes than Pere Jerome had ever before seen there.
"Madame Delphine," he said, his own eyes sparkling, "make _him_ your
daughter's guardian; for myself, being a priest, it would not be best;
but ask him; I believe he will not refuse you."
Madame Delphine's face grew still brighter as he spoke.
"It was in my mind," she said.
Yet to the timorous Madame Delphine many trifles became, one after
another, an impediment to the making of this proposal, and many weeks
elapsed before further delay was positively without excuse. But at
length, one day in May, 1822, in a small private office behind Monsieur
Vignevielle's banking-room,--he sitting beside a table, and she, more
timid and demure than ever, having just taken a chair by the door,--she
said, trying, with a little bashful laugh, to make the matter seem
unimportant, and yet with some tremor of voice:
"Miche Vignevielle, I bin maguing my will." (Having commenced their
acquaintance in English, they spoke nothing else.)
"'Tis a good idy," responded the banker.
"I kin mague you de troub' to kib dad will fo' me, Miche Vignevielle?"
"Yez."
She looked up with grateful re-assurance; but her eyes dropped again as
she said:
"Miche Vignevielle----" Here she choked, and began her peculiar motion
of laying folds in the skirt of her dress, with trembling fingers. She
lifted her eyes, and as they met the look of deep and placid kindness
that was in his face, some courage returned, and she said:
"Miche."
"Wad you wand?" asked he, gently.
"If it arrive to me to die----"
"Yez?"
Her words were scarcely audible:
"I wand you teg kyah my lill' girl."
"You 'ave one lill' gal, Madame Carraze?"
She nodded with her face down.
"An' you godd some mo' chillen?"
"No."
"I nevva know dad, Madame Carraze. She's a lill' small gal?"