Madame Delphine
G >> George W. Cable >> Madame DelphineMothers forget their daughters' stature. Madame Delphine said:
"Yez."
For a few moments neither spoke, and then Monsieur Vignevielle said:
"I will do dad."
"Lag she been you' h-own?" asked the mother, suffering from her own
boldness.
"She's a good lill' chile, eh?"
"Miche, she's a lill' hangel!" exclaimed Madame Delphine, with a look of
distress.
"Yez; I teg kyah 'v 'er, lag my h-own. I mague you dad promise."
"But----" There was something still in the way, Madame Delphine seemed
to think.
The banker waited in silence.
"I suppose you will want to see my lill' girl?"
He smiled; for she looked at him as if she would implore him to decline.
"Oh, I tek you' word fo' hall dad, Madame Carraze. It mague no differend
wad she loog lag; I don' wan' see 'er."
Madame Delphine's parting smile--she went very shortly--was gratitude
beyond speech.
Monsieur Vignevielle returned to the seat he had left, and resumed a
newspaper,--the _Louisiana Gazette_ in all probability,--which he had
laid down upon Madame Delphine's entrance. His eyes fell upon a
paragraph which had previously escaped his notice. There they rested.
Either he read it over and over unwearyingly, or he was lost in thought.
Jean Thompson entered.
"Now," said Mr. Thompson, in a suppressed tone, bending a little across
the table, and laying one palm upon a package of papers which lay in the
other, "it is completed. You could retire from your business any day
inside of six hours without loss to anybody." (Both here and elsewhere,
let it be understood that where good English is given the words were
spoken in good French.)
Monsieur Vignevielle raised his eyes and extended the newspaper to the
attorney, who received it and read the paragraph. Its substance was that
a certain vessel of the navy had returned from a cruise in the Gulf of
Mexico and Straits of Florida, where she had done valuable service
against the pirates--having, for instance, destroyed in one fortnight in
January last twelve pirate vessels afloat, two on the stocks, and three
establishments ashore.
"United States brig _Porpoise_," repeated Jean Thompson. "Do you know
her?"
"We are acquainted," said Monsieur Vignevielle.
CHAPTER VIII.
SHE.
A quiet footstep, a grave new presence on financial sidewalks, a neat
garb slightly out of date, a gently strong and kindly pensive face, a
silent bow, a new sign in the Rue Toulouse, a lone figure with a cane,
walking in meditation in the evening light under the willows of Canal
Marigny, a long-darkened window re-lighted in the Rue Conti--these were
all; a fall of dew would scarce have been more quiet than was the return
of Ursin Lemaitre-Vignevielle to the precincts of his birth and early
life.
But we hardly give the event its right name. It was Capitaine Lemaitre
who had disappeared; it was Monsieur Vignevielle who had come back. The
pleasures, the haunts, the companions, that had once held out their
charms to the impetuous youth, offered no enticements to Madame
Delphine's banker. There is this to be said even for the pride his
grandfather had taught him, that it had always held him above low
indulgences; and though he had dallied with kings, queens, and knaves
through all the mazes of Faro, Rondeau, and Craps, he had done it
loftily; but now he maintained a peaceful estrangement from all.
Evariste and Jean, themselves, found him only by seeking.
"It is the right way," he said to Pere Jerome, the day we saw him there.
"Ursin Lemaitre is dead. I have buried him. He left a will. I am his
executor."
"He is crazy," said his lawyer brother-in-law, impatiently.
"On the contr-y," replied the little priest, "'e 'as come ad hisse'f."
Evariste spoke.
"Look at his face, Jean. Men with that kind of face are the last to go
crazy."
"You have not proved that," replied Jean, with an attorney's obstinacy.
"You should have heard him talk the other day about that newspaper
paragraph. 'I have taken Ursin Lemaitre's head; I have it with me; I
claim the reward, but I desire to commute it to citizenship.' He is
crazy."
Of course Jean Thompson did not believe what he said; but he said it,
and, in his vexation, repeated it, on the _banquettes_ and at the clubs;
and presently it took the shape of a sly rumor, that the returned rover
was a trifle snarled in his top-hamper.
This whisper was helped into circulation by many trivial eccentricities
of manner, and by the unaccountable oddness of some of his transactions
in business.
"My dear sir!" cried his astounded lawyer, one day, "you are not running
a charitable institution!"
"How do you know?" said Monsieur Vignevielle. There the conversation
ceased.
"Why do you not found hospitals and asylums at once," asked the
attorney, at another time, with a vexed laugh, "and get the credit of
it?"
"And make the end worse than the beginning," said the banker, with a
gentle smile, turning away to a desk of books.
"Bah!" muttered Jean Thompson.
Monsieur Vignevielle betrayed one very bad symptom. Wherever he went he
seemed looking for somebody. It may have been perceptible only to those
who were sufficiently interested in him to study his movements; but
those who saw it once saw it always. He never passed an open door or
gate but he glanced in; and often, where it stood but slightly ajar, you
might see him give it a gentle push with his hand or cane. It was very
singular.
He walked much alone after dark. The _guichinangoes_ (garroters, we
might say), at those times the city's particular terror by night, never
crossed his path. He was one of those men for whom danger appears to
stand aside.
One beautiful summer night, when all nature seemed hushed in ecstasy,
the last blush gone that told of the sun's parting, Monsieur
Vignevielle, in the course of one of those contemplative, uncompanioned
walks which it was his habit to take, came slowly along the more open
portion of the Rue Royale, with a step which was soft without intention,
occasionally touching the end of his stout cane gently to the ground and
looking upward among his old acquaintances, the stars.
It was one of those southern nights under whose spell all the sterner
energies of the mind cloak themselves and lie down in bivouac, and the
fancy and the imagination, that cannot sleep, slip their fetters and
escape, beckoned away from behind every flowering bush and
sweet-smelling tree, and every stretch of lonely, half-lighted walk, by
the genius of poetry. The air stirred softly now and then, and was still
again, as if the breezes lifted their expectant pinions and lowered them
once more, awaiting the rising of the moon in a silence which fell upon
the fields, the roads, the gardens, the walls, and the suburban and
half-suburban streets, like a pause in worship. And anon she rose.
Monsieur Vignevielle's steps were bent toward the more central part of
the town, and he was presently passing along a high, close, board-fence,
on the right-hand side of the way, when, just within this inclosure, and
almost overhead, in the dark boughs of a large orange-tree, a
mocking-bird began the first low flute-notes of his all-night song. It
may have been only the nearness of the songster that attracted the
passer's attention, but he paused and looked up.
And then he remarked something more,--that the air where he had stopped
was filled with the overpowering sweetness of the night-jasmine. He
looked around; it could only be inside the fence. There was a gate just
there. Would he push it, as his wont was? The grass was growing about it
in a thick turf, as though the entrance had not been used for years. An
iron staple clasped the cross-bar, and was driven deep into the
gate-post. But now an eye that had been in the blacksmithing
business--an eye which had later received high training as an eye for
fastenings--fell upon that staple, and saw at a glance that the wood
had shrunk from it, and it had sprung from its hold, though without
falling out. The strange habit asserted itself; he laid his large hand
upon the cross-bar; the turf at the base yielded, and the tall gate was
drawn partly open.
At that moment, as at the moment whenever he drew or pushed a door or
gate, or looked in at a window, he was thinking of one, the image of
whose face and form had never left his inner vision since the day it had
met him in his life's path and turned him face about from the way of
destruction.
The bird ceased. The cause of the interruption, standing within the
opening, saw before him, much obscured by its own numerous shadows, a
broad, ill-kept, many-flowered garden, among whose untrimmed rose-trees
and tangled vines, and often, also, in its old walks of pounded shell,
the coco-grass and crab-grass had spread riotously, and sturdy weeds
stood up in bloom. He stepped in and drew the gate to after him. There,
very near by, was the clump of jasmine, whose ravishing odor had
tempted him. It stood just beyond a brightly moonlit path, which turned
from him in a curve toward the residence, a little distance to the
right, and escaped the view at a point where it seemed more than likely
a door of the house might open upon it. While he still looked, there
fell upon his ear, from around that curve, a light footstep on the
broken shells,--one only, and then all was for a moment still again. Had
he mistaken? No. The same soft click was repeated nearer by, a pale
glimpse of robes came through the tangle, and then, plainly to view,
appeared an outline--a presence--a form--a spirit--a girl!
From throat to instep she was as white as Cynthia. Something above the
medium height, slender, lithe, her abundant hair rolling in dark, rich
waves back from her brows and down from her crown, and falling in two
heavy plaits beyond her round, broadly girt waist and full to her knees,
a few escaping locks eddying lightly on her graceful neck and her
temples,--her arms, half hid in a snowy mist of sleeve, let down to
guide her spotless skirts free from the dewy touch of the
grass,--straight down the path she came!
Will she stop? Will she turn aside? Will she espy the dark form in the
deep shade of the orange, and, with one piercing scream, wheel and
vanish? She draws near. She approaches the jasmine; she raises her arms,
the sleeves falling like a vapor down to the shoulders; rises upon
tiptoe, and plucks a spray. O Memory! Can it be? _Can it be?_ Is this
his quest, or is it lunacy? The ground seems to M. Vignevielle the
unsteady sea, and he to stand once more on a deck. And she? As she is
now, if she but turn toward the orange, the whole glory of the moon will
shine upon her face. His heart stands still; he is waiting for her to do
that. She reaches up again; this time a bunch for her mother. That neck
and throat! Now she fastens a spray in her hair. The mocking-bird cannot
withhold; he breaks into song--she turns--she turns her face--it is she,
it is she! Madame Delphine's daughter is the girl he met on the ship.
CHAPTER IX.
OLIVE.
She was just passing seventeen--that beautiful year when the heart of
the maiden still beats quickly with the surprise of her new dominion,
while with gentle dignity her brow accepts the holy coronation of
womanhood. The forehead and temples beneath her loosely bound hair were
fair without paleness, and meek without languor. She had the soft,
lacklustre beauty of the South; no ruddiness of coral, no waxen white,
no pink of shell; no heavenly blue in the glance; but a face that
seemed, in all its other beauties, only a tender accompaniment for the
large, brown, melting eyes, where the openness of child-nature mingled
dreamily with the sweet mysteries of maiden thought. We say no color of
shell on face or throat; but this was no deficiency, that which took
its place being the warm, transparent tint of sculptured ivory.
This side door-way which led from Madame Delphine's house into her
garden was overarched partly by an old remnant of vine-covered lattice,
and partly by a crape-myrtle, against whose small, polished trunk leaned
a rustic seat. Here Madame Delphine and Olive loved to sit when the
twilights were balmy or the moon was bright.
"_Cherie_," said Madame Delphine on one of these evenings, "why do you
dream so much?"
She spoke in the _patois_ most natural to her, and which her daughter
had easily learned.
The girl turned her face to her mother, and smiled, then dropped her
glance to the hands in her own lap, which were listlessly handling the
end of a ribbon. The mother looked at her with fond solicitude. Her
dress was white again; this was but one night since that in which
Monsieur Vignevielle had seen her at the bush of night-jasmine. He had
not been discovered, but had gone away, shutting the gate, and leaving
it as he had found it.
Her head was uncovered. Its plaited masses, quite black in the
moonlight, hung down and coiled upon the bench, by her side. Her chaste
drapery was of that revived classic order which the world of fashion was
again laying aside to re-assume the mediaeval bondage of the stay-lace;
for New Orleans was behind the fashionable world, and Madame Delphine
and her daughter were behind New Orleans. A delicate scarf, pale blue,
of lightly netted worsted, fell from either shoulder down beside her
hands. The look that was bent upon her changed perforce to one of gentle
admiration. She seemed the goddess of the garden.
Olive glanced up. Madame Delphine was not prepared for the movement, and
on that account repeated her question:
"What are you thinking about?"
The dreamer took the hand that was laid upon hers between her own palms,
bowed her head, and gave them a soft kiss.
The mother submitted. Wherefore, in the silence which followed, a
daughter's conscience felt the burden of having withheld an answer, and
Olive presently said, as the pair sat looking up into the sky:
"I was thinking of Pere Jerome's sermon."
Madame Delphine had feared so. Olive had lived on it ever since the day
it was preached. The poor mother was almost ready to repent having ever
afforded her the opportunity of hearing it. Meat and drink had become of
secondary value to her daughter; she fed upon the sermon.
Olive felt her mother's thought and knew that her mother knew her own;
but now that she had confessed, she would ask a question:
"Do you think, _maman_, that Pere Jerome knows it was I who gave that
missal?"
"No," said Madame Delphine, "I am sure he does not."
Another question came more timidly:
"Do--do you think he knows _him_?"
"Yes, I do. He said in his sermon he did."
Both remained for a long time very still, watching the moon gliding in
and through among the small dark-and-white clouds. At last the daughter
spoke again.
"I wish I was Pere--I wish I was as good as Pere Jerome."
"My child," said Madame Delphine, her tone betraying a painful summoning
of strength to say what she had lacked the courage to utter,--"my child,
I pray the good God you will not let your heart go after one whom you
may never see in this world!"
The maiden turned her glance, and their eyes met. She cast her arms
about her mother's neck, laid her cheek upon it for a moment, and then,
feeling the maternal tear, lifted her lips, and, kissing her, said:
"I will not! I will not!"
But the voice was one, not of willing consent, but of desperate
resolution.
"It would be useless, anyhow," said the mother, laying her arm around
her daughter's waist.
Olive repeated the kiss, prolonging it passionately.
"I have nobody but you," murmured the girl; "I am a poor quadroone!"
She threw back her plaited hair for a third embrace, when a sound in the
shrubbery startled them.
"_Qui ci ca?_" called Madame Delphine, in a frightened voice, as the two
stood up, holding to each other.
No answer.
"It was only the dropping of a twig," she whispered, after a long
holding of the breath. But they went into the house and barred it
everywhere.
It was no longer pleasant to sit up. They retired, and in course of
time, but not soon, they fell asleep, holding each other very tight, and
fearing, even in their dreams, to hear another twig fall.
CHAPTER X.
BIRDS.
Monsieur Vignevielle looked in at no more doors or windows; but if the
disappearance of this symptom was a favorable sign, others came to
notice which were especially bad,--for instance, wakefulness. At
well-nigh any hour of the night, the city guard, which itself dared not
patrol singly, would meet him on his slow, unmolested, sky-gazing walk.
"Seems to enjoy it," said Jean Thompson; "the worst sort of evidence. If
he showed distress of mind, it would not be so bad; but his
calmness,--ugly feature."
The attorney had held his ground so long that he began really to believe
it was tenable.
By day, it is true, Monsieur Vignevielle was at his post in his quiet
"bank." Yet here, day by day, he was the source of more and more vivid
astonishment to those who held preconceived notions of a banker's
calling. As a banker, at least, he was certainly out of balance; while
as a promenader, it seemed to those who watched him that his ruling idea
had now veered about, and that of late he was ever on the quiet alert,
not to find, but to evade, somebody.
"Olive, my child," whispered Madame Delphine one morning, as the pair
were kneeling side by side on the tiled floor of the church, "yonder is
Miche Vignevielle! If you will only look at once--he is just passing a
little in----. Ah, much too slow again; he stepped out by the side
door."
The mother thought it a strange providence that Monsieur Vignevielle
should always be disappearing whenever Olive was with her.
One early dawn, Madame Delphine, with a small empty basket on her arm,
stepped out upon the _banquette_ in front of her house, shut and
fastened the door very softly, and stole out in the direction whence you
could faintly catch, in the stillness of the daybreak, the songs of the
Gascon butchers and the pounding of their meat-axes on the stalls of the
distant market-house. She was going to see if she could find some birds
for Olive,--the child's appetite was so poor; and, as she was out, she
would drop an early prayer at the cathedral. Faith and works.
"One must venture something, sometimes, in the cause of religion,"
thought she, as she started timorously on her way. But she had not gone
a dozen steps before she repented her temerity. There was some one
behind her.
There should not be anything terrible in a footstep merely because it is
masculine; but Madame Delphine's mind was not prepared to consider that.
A terrible secret was haunting her. Yesterday morning she had found a
shoe-track in the garden. She had not disclosed the discovery to Olive,
but she had hardly closed her eyes the whole night.
The step behind her now might be the fall of that very shoe. She
quickened her pace, but did not leave the sound behind. She hurried
forward almost at a run; yet it was still there--no farther, no nearer.
Two frights were upon her at once--one for herself, another for Olive,
left alone in the house; but she had but the one prayer--"God protect my
child!" After a fearful time she reached a place of safety, the
cathedral. There, panting, she knelt long enough to know the pursuit
was, at least, suspended, and then arose, hoping and praying all the
saints that she might find the way clear for her return in all haste to
Olive.
She approached a different door from that by which she had entered, her
eyes in all directions and her heart in her throat.
"Madame Carraze."
She started wildly and almost screamed, though the voice was soft and
mild. Monsieur Vignevielle came slowly forward from the shade of the
wall. They met beside a bench, upon which she dropped her basket.
"Ah, Miche Vignevielle, I thang de good God to mid you!"
"Is dad so, Madame Carraze? Fo' w'y dad is?"
"A man was chase me all dad way since my 'ouse!"
"Yes, Madame, I sawed him."
"You sawed 'im? Oo it was?"
"'Twas only one man wad is a foolizh. De people say he's crezzie.
_Mais_, he don' goin' to meg you no 'arm."
"But I was scare' fo' my lill' girl."
"Noboddie don' goin' trouble you' lill' gal, Madame Carraze."
Madame Delphine looked up into the speaker's strangely kind and patient
eyes, and drew sweet re-assurance from them.
"Madame," said Monsieur Vignevielle, "wad pud you hout so hearly dis
morning?"
She told him her errand. She asked if he thought she would find
anything.
"Yez," he said, "it was possible--a few lill' _becassines-de-mer_, ou
somezin' ligue. But fo' w'y you lill' gal lose doze hapetide?"
"Ah, Miche,"--Madame Delphine might have tried a thousand times again
without ever succeeding half so well in lifting the curtain upon the
whole, sweet, tender, old, old-fashioned truth,--"Ah, Miche, she wone
tell me!"
"Bud, anny'ow, Madame, wad you thing?"
"Miche," she replied, looking up again with a tear standing in either
eye, and then looking down once more as she began to speak, "I thing--I
thing she's lonesome."
"You thing?"
She nodded.
"Ah! Madame Carraze," he said, partly extending his hand, "you see? 'Tis
impossible to mague you' owze shud so tighd to priv-en dad. Madame, I
med one mizteg."
"Ah, _non_, Miche!"
"Yez. There har nod one poss'bil'ty fo' me to be dad guardian of you'
daughteh!"
Madame Delphine started with surprise and alarm.
"There is ondly one wad can be," he continued.
"But oo, Miche?"
"God."
"Ah, Miche Vignevielle----" She looked at him appealingly.
"I don' goin' to dizzerd you, Madame Carraze," he said.
She lifted her eyes. They filled. She shook her head, a tear fell, she
bit her lip, smiled, and suddenly dropped her face into both hands, sat
down upon the bench and wept until she shook.
"You dunno wad I mean, Madame Carraze?"
She did not know.
"I mean dad guardian of you' daughteh godd to fine 'er now one 'uzban';
an' noboddie are hable to do dad egceb de good God 'imsev. But, Madame,
I tell you wad I do."
She rose up. He continued:
"Go h-open you' owze; I fin' you' daughteh dad' uzban'."
Madame Delphine was a helpless, timid thing; but her eyes showed she was
about to resent this offer. Monsieur Vignevielle put forth his hand--it
touched her shoulder--and said, kindly still, and without eagerness.
"One w'ite man, Madame; 'tis prattycabble. I _know_ 'tis prattycabble.
One w'ite jantleman, Madame. You can truz me. I goin' fedge 'im.
H-ondly you go h-open you' owze."
Madame Delphine looked down, twining her handkerchief among her fingers.
He repeated his proposition.
"You will come firz by you'se'f?" she asked.
"Iv you wand."
She lifted up once more her eye of faith. That was her answer.
"Come," he said, gently, "I wan' sen' some bird ad you' lill' gal."
And they went away, Madame Delphine's spirit grown so exaltedly bold
that she said as they went, though a violent blush followed her words:
"Miche Vignevielle, I thing Pere Jerome mighd be ab'e to tell you
someboddie."
CHAPTER XI.
FACE TO FACE.
Madame Delphine found her house neither burned nor rifled.
"_Ah! ma piti sans popa_! Ah! my little fatherless one!" Her faded
bonnet fell back between her shoulders, hanging on by the strings, and
her dropped basket, with its "few lill' _becassines-de-mer_" dangling
from the handle, rolled out its okra and soup-joint upon the floor. "_Ma
piti_! kiss!--kiss!--kiss!"
"But is it good news you have, or bad?" cried the girl, a fourth or
fifth time.
"_Dieu sait, ma c'ere; mo pas conne!_"--God knows, my darling; I cannot
tell!
The mother dropped into a chair, covered her face with her apron, and
burst into tears, then looked up with an effort to smile, and wept
afresh.
"What have you been doing?" asked the daughter, in a long-drawn,
fondling tone. She leaned forward and unfastened her mother's
bonnet-strings. "Why do you cry?"
"For nothing at all, my darling; for nothing--I am such a fool."
The girl's eyes filled. The mother looked up into her face and said:
"No, it is nothing, nothing, only that--" turning her head from side to
side with a slow, emotional emphasis, "Miche Vignevielle is the
best--_best_ man on the good Lord's earth!"
Olive drew a chair close to her mother, sat down and took the little
yellow hands into her own white lap, and looked tenderly into her eyes.
Madame Delphine felt herself yielding; she must make a show of telling
something:
"He sent you those birds!"
The girl drew her face back a little. The little woman turned away,
trying in vain to hide her tearful smile, and they laughed together,
Olive mingling a daughter's fond kiss with her laughter.
"There is something else," she said, "and you shall tell me."
"Yes," replied Madame Delphine, "only let me get composed."
But she did not get so. Later in the morning she came to Olive with the
timid yet startling proposal that they would do what they could to
brighten up the long-neglected front room. Olive was mystified and
troubled, but consented, and thereupon the mother's spirits rose.
The work began, and presently ensued all the thumping, the trundling,
the lifting and letting down, the raising and swallowing of dust, and
the smells of turpentine, brass, pumice and woollen rags that go to
characterize a housekeeper's _emeute_; and still, as the work
progressed, Madame Delphine's heart grew light, and her little black
eyes sparkled.