Produced by Al Haines [Frontispiece: Yesterday, for the first time, at that same corner, he had encountered this fair stranger and her urchin escort.] THE FLOWER OF THE CHAPDELAINES BY GEORGE W. CABLE WITH FRONTISPIECE BY F. C. YOHN NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1918 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published March, 1918 The Flower of the Chapdelaines I Next morning he saw her again. He had left his very new law office, just around in Bienville Street, and had come but a few steps down Royal, when, at the next corner below, she turned into Royal, toward him, out of Conti, coming from Bourbon. The same nine-year-old negro boy was at her side, as spotless in broad white collar and blue jacket as on the morning before, and carrying the same droll air of consecration, awe, and responsibility. The young man envied him. Yesterday, for the first time, at that same corner, he had encountered this fair stranger and her urchin escort, abruptly, as they were making the same turn they now repeated, and all in a flash had wondered who might be this lovely apparition. Of such patrician beauty, such elegance of form and bearing, such witchery of simple attire, and such un-Italian yet Latin type, in this antique Creole, modernly Italianized quarter--who and what, so early in the day, down here among the shops, where so meagre a remnant of the old high life clung on in these balconied upper stories--who, what, whence, whither, and wherefore? In that flash of time she had passed, and the very liveliness of his interest, combined with the urchin's consecrated awe--not to mention his own mortifying remembrance of one or two other-day lapses from the austerities of the old street--restrained him from a backward glance until he could cross the way as if to enter the great, white, lately completed court-house. Then both she and her satellite had vanished. He turned again, but not to enter the building. His watch read but half past eight, and his first errand of the day, unless seeing her had been his first, was to go one square farther on, for a look at the wreckers tearing down the old Hotel St. Louis. As he turned, a man neat of dress and well beyond middle age made him a suave gesture. "Sir, if you please. You are, I think, Mr. Chester, notary public and attorney at law?" "That is my name and trade, sir." Evidently Mr. Geoffry Chester was also an American, a Southerner. "Pardon," said his detainer, "I have only my business card." He tendered it: "Marcel Castanado, Masques et Costumes, No. 312, rue Royale, entre Bienville et Conti." "I diz-ire your advice," he continued, "on a very small matter neither notarial, neither of the law. Yet I must pay you for that, if you can make your charge as--as small as the matter." The young lawyer's own matters were at a juncture where a fee was a godsend, yet he replied: "If your matter is not of the law I can make you no charge." The costumer shrugged: "Pardon, in that case I must seek elsewhere." He would have moved on, but Chester asked: "What kind of advice do you want if not legal?" "Literary." The young man smiled: "Why, I'm not literary." "I think yes. You know Ovide Landry? Black man? Secon'-han' books, Chartres Street, just yonder?" "Yes, very pleasantly, for I love old books." "Yes, and old buildings, and their histories. I know. You are now going down, as I have just been, to see again the construction of that old dome they are dim-olishing yonder, of the once state-house, previously Hotel St. Louis. I know. Twice a day you pass my shop. I am compelled to see, what Ovide also has told me, that, like me and my wife, you have a passion for the _poétique_ and the _pittoresque_!" "Yes," Chester laughed, "but that's my limit. I've never written a line for print----" "This writing is done, since fifty years." "I've never passed literary judgment on a written page and don't suppose I ever shall." "The judgment is passed. The value of the article is pronounced great--by an expert amateur." "SHE?" the youth silently asked himself. He spoke: "Why, then what advice do you still want--how to find a publisher?" "No, any publisher will jump at that. But how to so nig-otiate that he shall not be the lion and we the lamb!" Chester smiled again: "Why, if that's the point--" he mused. The hope came again that this unusual shopman and his wish had something to do with _her_. "If that's the advice you want," he resumed, "I think we might construe it as legal, though worth at the most a mere notarial fee." "And contingent on--?" the costumer prompted. "Contingent, yes, on the author's success." "Sir! I am not the author of a manuscript fifty years old!" "Well, then, on the holder's success. You can agree to that, can't you?" "'Tis agreed. You are my counsel. When will you see the manuscript?" "Whenever you choose to leave it with me." The costumer's smile was firm: "Sir, I cannot permit that to pass from my hand." "Oh! then have a copy typed for me." The Creole soliloquized: "That would be expensive." Then to Chester: "Sir, I will tell you; to-night come at our parlor, over the shop. I will read you that!" "Shall we be alone?" asked Chester, hoping his client would say no. "Only excepting my"--a tender brightness--"my wife!" Then a shade of regret: "We are without children, me and my wife." His wife. H'mm! _She_? That amazing one who had vanished within a few yards of his bazaar of "masques et costumes"? Though to Chester New Orleans was still new, and though fat law-books and a slim purse kept him much to himself, he was aware that, while some Creoles grew rich, many of them, women, once rich, were being driven even to stand behind counters. Yet no such plight could he imagine of that bewildering young--young luminary who, this second time, so out of time, had gleamed on him from mystery's cloud. His earlier hope came a third time: "Excepting only your wife, you say? Why not also your amateur expert?" "I am sorry, but"--the Latin shrug--"that is--that is not possible." "Have I ever seen your wife? She's not a tallish, slender young-----?" "No, my wife is neither. She's never in the street or shop. She has no longer the cap-acity. She's become so extraordinarily _un_-slender that the only way she can come down-stair' is backward. You'll see. Well,"--he waved--"till then--ah, a word: my close bargaining--I must explain you that--in confidence. 'Tis because my wife and me we are anxious to get every picayune we can get for the owners--of that manuscript." Chester thought to be shrewd: "Oh! is _she_ hard up? the owner?" "The owners are three," Castanado calmly said, "and two dip-end on the earnings of a third." He bowed himself away. A few hours later Chester received from him a note begging indefinite postponement of the evening appointment. Mme. Castanado had fever and probably _la grippe_. II Early one day some two weeks after the foregoing incident the young lawyer came out of his _pension francaise_, opposite his office, and stood a moment in thought. In those two weeks he had not again seen Mr. Castanado. Once more it was scant half past eight. He looked across to the windows of his office and of one bare third-story sleeping-room over it. Eloquent windows! Their meanness reminded him anew how definitely he had chosen not merely the simple but the solitary life. Yet now he turned toward Royal Street. But at the third or fourth step he faced about toward Chartres. The distance to the courthouse was the same either way, and its entrances were alike on both streets. Thought he as he went the Chartres Street way: "If I go _one more time_ by way of Royal I shall owe an abject apology, and yet to try to offer it would only make the matter worse." He went grimly, glad to pay this homage of avoidance which would have been more to his credit paid a week or so earlier. His frequent failure to pay it had won him, each time, a glimpse of _her_ and an itching fear that prying eyes were on him inside other balconied windows besides those of the unslender Mme. Castanado. Temptation is a sly witch. Down at Conti Street, on the court-house's upper riverside corner, he paused to take in the charm of one of the most picturesque groups of old buildings in the _vieux carré_. But there, to gather in all the effect, one must turn, sooner or later, and include the upper side of Conti Street from Chartres to Royal; and as Chester did so, yonder, once more, coming from Bourbon and turning from Conti into Royal, there she was again, the avoided one! Her black cupid was at her side, tiny even for nine years. They disappeared conversing together. With his heart in his throat Chester turned away, resumed his walk, and passed into the marble halls where justice dreamt she dwelt. Up and down one of these, little traversed so early, he paced, with a question burning in his breast, which every new sigh of mortification fanned hotter: _Had she seen him_?--this time? those other times? And did those Castanados suspect? Was that why Mme. Castanado had the grippe, and the manuscript was yet unread? A voice spoke his name and he found himself facing the very black dealer in second-hand books. "I was yonder at Toulouse Street," said Ovide Landry, "coming up-town, when I saw you at Conti coming down. I have another map of the old city for you. At that rate, Mr. Chester, you'll soon have as good a collection as the best." The young man was pleased: "Does it show exactly where Maspero's Exchange stood?" he asked. Ovide said come to the shop and see. "I will, to-day; at six." Another man came up, "Ah, Mr. Castanado! How--how is your patient?" "Madame"--the costumer smiled happily--"is once more well. I was looking for you. You didn't pass in Royal Street this morning." [Ah, those eyes behind those windows behind those balconies!] "No, I--oh! going, Landry? Good day. No, Mr. Castanado, I----" "Madame hopes Mr. Chezter can at last, this evening, come at home for that reading." "Mr. Castanado, I can't! I'm mighty sorry! My whole evening's engaged. So is to-morrow's. May I come the next evening after? . . . Thank you. . . . Yes, at seven. Just the three of us, of course? Yes." III Six o'clock found Chester in Ovide's bookshop. Had its shelves borne law-books, or had he not needed for law-books all he dared spend, he might have known the surprisingly informed and refined shopman better. Ovide had long been a celebrity. Lately a brief summary of his career had appeared incidentally in a book, a book chiefly about others, white people. "You can't write a Southern book and keep us out," Ovide himself explained. Even as it was, Chester had allowed himself that odd freedom with Landry which Southerners feel safe in under the plate armor of their race distinctions. Receiving his map he asked, as he looked along a shelf or two: "Have you that book that tells of you--as a slave? your master letting you educate yourself; your once refusing your freedom, and your being private secretary to two or three black lieutenant-governors?" "I had a copy," Landry said, "but I've sold it. Where did you hear of it? From Réné Ducatel, in his antique-shop, whose folks 'tis mostly about?" "Yes. An antique himself, in spirit, eh? Yet modern enough to praise you highly." "H'mm! but only for the virtues of a slave." Chester smiled round from the shelves: "I noticed that! I'm afraid we white folks, the world over, are prone to do that--with you-all." "Yes, when you speak of us at all." "Ducatel's opposite neighbor," Chester remarked, "is an antique even more interesting." "Ah, yes! Castanado is antique only in that art spirit which the tourist trade is every day killing even in Royal Street." "That's the worst decay in this whole decaying quarter," the young man said. "And in all this deluge of trade spirit," Ovide continued, "the best dry land left of it--of that spirit of art--is----" "Castanado's shop, I dare say." "Castanado's and three others in that one square you pass every day without discovering the fact. But that's natural; you are a busy lawyer." "Not so very. What are the other three?" "First, the shop of Seraphine Alexandre, embroideries; then of Scipion Beloiseau, ornamental ironwork, opposite Mme. Seraphine and next below Ducatel--Ducatel, alas, he don't count; and third, of Placide La Porte, perfumeries, next to Beloiseau. That's all." "Not the watchmaker on the square above?" "Ah! distantly he's of them: and there _was_ old Manouvrier, taxidermist; but he's gone--where the spirits of art and of worship are twin." Chester turned sharply again to the shelves and stood rigid. From an inner room, its glass door opened by Ovide's silver-spectacled wife, came the little black cupid and his charge. Ah, once more what perfection in how many points! As she returned to Ovide an old magazine, at last he heard her voice--singularly deep and serene. She thanked the bookman for his loan and, with the child, went out. It disturbed the Southern youth to unbosom himself to a black man, but he saw no decent alternative: "Landry, I had not the faintest idea that that young lady was nearer than Castanado's shop!" Ovide shook his head: "You seem yourself to forget that you are here by business appointment. And what of it if you have seen her, or she seen you, here--or anywhere?" "Only this: that I've met her so often by pure--by chance, on that square you speak of, I bound for the court-house, she for I can't divine where--for I've never looked behind me!--that I've had to take another street to show I'm a gentleman. This very morn'--oh!--and now! here! How can I explain--or go unexplained?" Ovide lifted a hand: "Will you leave that to my wife, so unlearned yet so wise and good? For the young lady's own sake my wife, _without_ explaining, will see that you are not misjudged." "Good! Right! Any explanation would simply belie itself. Yes, let her do it! But, Landry----" "Yes?" "For heaven's sake don't let her make me out a goody-goody. I haven't got this far into life without making moral mistakes, some of them huge. But in this thing--I say it only to you--I'm making none. I'm neither a marrying man, a villain, nor an ass." Ovide smiled: "My wife can manage that. Maybe it's good you came here. It may well be that the young lady herself would be glad if some one explained her to you." "Hoh! does an angel need an explanation?" "I should say, in Royal Street, yes." "Then for mercy's sake give it! right here! you! come!" The youth laughed. "Mercy to me, I mean. But--wait! Tell me; couldn't Castanado have given it, as easily as you?" "You never gave Castanado this chance." "How do you know that? Oh, never mind, go ahead--full speed." "Well, she's an orphan, of a fine old family----" "Obviously! Creole, of course, the family?" "Yes, though always small in Louisiana. Creole except one New England grandmother. But for that one she would not have been here just now." "Humph! that's rather obscure but--go on." "Her parents left her without a sou or a relation except two maiden aunts as poor as she." "Antiques?" "Yes. She earns their living and her own." "You don't care to say how?" "She wouldn't like it. 'Twould be to say where." "She seems able to dress exquisitely." "Mr. Chester, a woman would see with what a small outlay that is done. She has that gift for the needle which a poet has for the pen." "Ho! that's _charmingly_ antique. But now tell me how having a Yankee grandmother caused her to drop in here just now. Your logic's dim." "You are soon to go to Castanado's to see that manuscript story, are you not?" "Oh, is it a story? Have you read it?" "Yes, I've read it, 'tis short. They wanted my opinion. And 'tis a story, though true." "A story! Love story? very absorbing?" "No, it is not of love--except love of liberty. Whether 'twill absorb you or no I cannot say. Me it absorbed because it is the story of some of my race, far from here and in the old days, trying, in the old vain way, to gain their freedom." "Has--has mademoiselle read it?" "Certainly. It is her property; hers and her two aunts'. Those two, they bought it lately, of a poor devil--drinking man--for a dollar. They had once known his mother, from the West Indies." "He wrote it, or his mother?" "The mother, long ago. 'Tis not too well done. It absorbs mademoiselle also, but that is because 'tis true. When I saw that effect I told her of a story like it, yet different, and also seeming true, in this old magazine. And when I began to tell it she said, 'It _is_ true! My Vermont _grand'mère_ wrote that! It happened to her!'" "How queer! And, Landry, I see the connection. Your magazine being one of a set, you couldn't let her read it anywhere but here." "I have to keep my own rules." "Let me see it. . . . Oh, now, why not? What was the use of either of us explaining if--if----?" But Ovide smilingly restored the thing to its stack. "Now," he said, "'tis Mr. Chester's logic that fails." Yet as he turned to a customer he let Chester take it down. "My job requires me," the youth said, "to study character. Let's see what a _grand'mère_ of a '_tite-fille_, situated so and so, will do." Ovide escorted his momentary customer to the sidewalk door. As he returned, Chester, rolling map and magazine together, said: "It's getting dark. No, don't make a light, it's your closing time and I've a strict engagement. Here's a deposit for this magazine; a fifty. It's all I have--oh, yes, take it, we'll trade back to-morrow. You must keep your own rules and I must read this thing before I touch my bed." "Even the first few lines absorb you?" "No, far from it. Look here." Chester read out: "'_Now, Maud,' said my uncle_--Oh, me! Landry, if the tale's true why that old story-book pose?" "It may be that the writer preferred to tell it as fiction, and that only something in me told me 'tis true. Something still tells me so." "'_Now, Maud_,'" Chester smilingly thought to himself when, the evening's later engagement being gratifyingly fulfilled, he sat down with the story. "And so you were grand'mère to our Royal Street miracle. And you had a Southern uncle! So had I! though yours was a planter, mine a lawyer, and yours must have been fifty years the older. Well, '_Now, Maud_,' for my absorption!" It came. Though the tale was unamazing amazement came. The four chief characters were no sooner set in motion than Chester dropped the pamphlet to his knee, agape in recollection of a most droll fact a year or two old, which now all at once and for the first time arrested his attention. He also had a manuscript! That lawyer uncle of his, saying as he spared him a few duplicate volumes from his law library, "Burn that if you don't want it," had tossed him a fat document indorsed: "_Memorandum of an Early Experience_." Later the nephew had glanced it over, but, like "Maud's" story, its first few lines had annoyed his critical sense and he had never read it carefully. The amazing point was that "_Now, Maud_" and this "_Memorandum_" most incredibly--with a ridiculous nicety--fitted each other. He lifted the magazine again and, beginning at the beginning a third time, read with a scrutiny of every line as though he studied a witness's deposition. And this was what he read: IV THE CLOCK IN THE SKY "Now, Maud," said uncle jovially as he, aunt, and I drove into the confines of their beautiful place one spring afternoon of 1860, "don't forget that to be too near a thing is as bad for a good view of it as to be too far away." I was a slim, tallish girl of scant sixteen, who had never seen a slaveholder on his plantation, though I had known these two for years, and loved them dearly, as guests in our Northern home before it was broken up by the death of my mother. Father was an abolitionist, and yet he and they had never had a harsh word between them. If the general goodness of those who do some particular thing were any proof that that particular thing is good to do, they would have convinced me, without a word, that slaveholding was entirely right. But they were not trying to do any such thing. "Remember," continued my uncle, smiling round at me, "your dad's trusting you not to bring back our honest opinion--of anything--in place of your own." "Maud," my aunt hurried to put in, for she knew the advice I had just heard was not the kind I most needed, "you're going to have for your own maid the blackest girl you ever saw." "And the best," added my uncle; "she's as good as she is black." "She's no common darky, that Sidney," said aunt. "She'll keep you busy answering questions, my dear, and I say now, you may tell her anything she wants to know; we give you perfect liberty; and you may be just as free with Hester; that's her mother; or with her father, Silas." "We draw the line at Mingo," said uncle. "And who is Mingo?" I inquired. "Mingo? he's her brother; a very low and trailing branch of the family tree." As we neared the house I was told more of the father and mother; their sweet content, their piety, their diligence. "If we lived in town, where there's better chance to pick up small earnings," remarked uncle, "those two and Sidney would have bought their freedom by now, and Mingo's too. Silas has got nearly enough to buy his own, as it is." Silas, my aunt explained, was a carpenter. "He hands your uncle so much a week; all he can make beyond that he's allowed to keep." The carriage stopped at the door; half a dozen servants came, smiling, and I knew Sidney and Hester at a glance, they were so finely different from their fellows. That night the daughter and I made acquaintance. She was eighteen, tall, lithe and as straight as an arrow. She had not one of the physical traits that so often make her race uncomely to our eyes; even her nose was good; her very feet were well made, her hands were slim and shapely, the fingers long and neatly jointed, and there was nothing inky in her amazing blackness, her red blood so enriched it. Yet she was as really African in her strong, eager mind as in her color, and the English language, on her tongue, was like a painter's palette and brushes in the hands of a monkey. Her first question to me after my last want was supplied came cautiously, after a long gaze at my lighted lamp, from a seat on the floor. "Miss Maud, when was de conwention o' coal-oil 'scuvvud?" And to her good night she added, in allusion to my eventual return to the North, "I hope it be a long time afo' you make dat repass!" At the next bedtime she began on me with the innocent question of my favorite flower, but I had not answered three other questions before she had placed me where I must either say I did not believe in the right to hold slaves, or must keep silence; and when I kept silence of course she knew. For a long moment she dropped her eyes, and then, with a soft smile, asked if I would tell her some Bible stories, preferably that of "Moses in de boundaries o' Egyp'." She listened in gloating silence, rarely interrupting; but at the words, "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, 'Let my people go,'" the response, "Pra-aise Gawd!" rose from her lips in such volume that she threw her hands to her mouth. After that she spoke only soft queries, but they grew more and more significant, and I soon saw that her supposed content was purely a pious endurance, and that her soul felt bondage as her body would have felt a harrow. So I left the fugitives of Egyptian slavery under the frown of the Almighty in the wilderness of Sin; Sidney was trusting me; uncle and aunt were trusting me; and between them I was getting into a narrow corner. After a meditative silence my questioner asked: "Miss Maud, do de Bible anywhuz capitulate dat Moses aw Aaron aw Joshaway aw Cable _buy_ his freedom--wid money?" Her manner was childlike, yet she always seemed to come up out of deep thought when she asked a question; she smiled diffidently until the reply began to come, then took on a reverential gravity, and as soon as it was fully given sank back into thought. "Miss Maud, don't you reckon dat ef Moses had a-save' up money enough to a-boughtened his freedom, dat'd a-been de wery sign mos' pleasin' to Gawd dat he 'uz highly fitten to be sot free widout paying?" To that puzzle she waited for no answer beyond the distress I betrayed, but turned to matters less speculative, and soon said good night. On the third evening--my! If I could have given all the topography of the entire country between uncle's plantation and my native city on the margin of the Great Lakes, with full account of its every natural and social condition, her questions would have wholly gathered them in. She asked if our climate was very hard on negroes; what clothing we wore in summer, and how we kept from freezing in midwinter; about wages, the price of food, what crops were raised, and what the "patarolers" did with a negro when they caught one at night without a pass. She made me desperate, and when the fourth night saw her crouched on my floor it found me prepared; I plied her with questions from start to finish. She yielded with a perfect courtesy; told of the poor lot of the few free negroes of whom she knew, and of the time-serving and shifty indolence, the thievishness, faithlessness, and unaspiring torpidity of "some niggehs"; and when I opened the way for her to speak of uncle and aunt she poured forth their praises with an ardor that brought her own tears. I asked her if she believed she could ever be happy away from them. She smiled with brimming eyes: "Why, I dunno, Miss Maud; whatsomeveh come, and whensomeveh, and howsomeveh de Lawd sen' it, ef us feels his ahm und' us, us ought to be 'shame' not to be happy, oughtn't us?" All at once she sprang half up: "I tell you de Lawd neveh gi'n no niggeh de rights to snuggle down anywhuz an' fo'git de auction-block!" As suddenly the outbreak passed, yet as she settled down again her exaltation still showed through her fond smile. "You know what dat inqui'ance o' yone bring to my 'memb'ance? Dass ow ole Canaan hymn---- "'O I mus' climb de stony hill Pas' many a sweet desiah, De flow'ry road is not fo' me, I follows cloud an' fiah.'" After she was gone I lay trying so to contrive our next conversation that it should not flow, as all before it had so irresistibly done, into that one deep channel of her thoughts which took in everything that fell upon her mind, as a great river drinks the rains of all its valleys. Presently the open window gave me my cue: the stars! the unvexed and unvexing stars, that shone before human wrongs ever began, and that will be shining after all human wrongs are ended--our talk should be of them. V At the supper-table on the following evening I became convinced of something which I had felt coming for two or three days, wondering the while whether Sidney did not feel the same thing. When we rose aunt drew me aside and with caressing touches on my brow and temples said she was sorry to be so slow in bringing me into social contact with the young people of the neighboring plantations, but that uncle, on his arrival at home, had found a letter whose information had kept him, and her as well, busy every waking hour since. "And this evening," she continued, "we can't even sit down with you around the parlor lamp. Can you amuse yourself alone, dear, or with Sidney, while your uncle and I go over some pressing matters together?" Surely I could. "Auntie, was the information--bad news?" "It wasn't good, my dear; I may tell you about it to-morrow." "Hadn't I better go back to father at once?" "Oh, my child, not for our sake; if you're not too lonesome we'd rather keep you. Let me see; has Mingo ever danced for you? Why, tell Sidney to make Mingo come dance for you." Mingo came; his leaps, turns, postures, steps, and outcries were a most laughable wonder, and I should have begged for more than I did, but I saw that it was a part of Sidney's religion to disapprove the dance. "Sidney," I said, "did you ever hear of the great clock in the sky? Yes, there's one there; it's made all of stars." We were at the foot of some veranda steps that faced the north, and as she and Mingo were about to settle down at my feet I said if they would follow me to the top of the flight I would tell this marvel: what the learned believed those eternal lamps to be; why some were out of view three-fourths of the night, others only half, others not a quarter; how a very few never sank out of sight at all except for daylight or clouds, and yet went round and round with all the others; and why I called those the clock of heaven; which gained, each night, four minutes, and only four, on the time we kept by the sun. "Pra-aise Gawd!" murmured Sidney. "Miss Maud, please hol' on tell Mingo run' fetch daddy an' mammy; dey don't want dat sto'y f'om me secon' haynded!" Mingo darted off and we waited. "Miss Maud, what de white folks mean by de nawth stah? Is dey sich a stah as de nawth stah?" I tried to explain that since all this seeming movement of the stars around us was but our own daily and yearly turning, there would necessarily be two opposite points on our earth which would never move at all, and that any star directly in line with those two points would seem as still as they. "Like de p'int o' de spin'le on de spinnin'-wheel, Miss Maud? Oh, yass, I b'lieve I un'stand dat; I un'stan' it some." I showed her the north star, and told her how to find it; and then I took from my watch-guard a tiny compass and let her see how it forever picked out from among all the stars of heaven that one small light, and held quiveringly to it. She hung over it with ecstatic sighs. "Do it _see_ de stah, Miss Maud, like de wise men o' de Eas' see de stah o' Jesus?" I tried to make plain the law it was obeying. "And do it p'int dah dess de same in de broad day, an' all day long?--Pra-aise Gawd! And do it p'int dah in de rain, an' in de stawmy win' a-fulfillin' of his word, when de ain't a single stah admissible in de ske-eye?--De Lawd's na-ame be pra-aise'!" Her father, mother, and brother were all looking at it with her, now, and she glanced from one to another with long heavings of rapture. "Miss Maud," said Silas, in a subdued voice, "dat little trick mus' 'a' cos' you a mint o' money." "Silas," put in Hester, "you know dass not a pullite question!" But she was ravening for its answer, and I said I had bought it for twenty-five cents. They laughed with delight. Yet, when I told Sidney she might have it, her thanks were but two words, which her lips seemed to drop unconsciously while she gazed on the trinket. They all sat down on the steps nearest below me, and presently, beginning where I had begun with Sidney, I went on to point out the polar constellations and to relate the age-worn story of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, Andromeda and the divine Perseus. "Lawd, my Lawd !" whispered the mother, "was dey--was dey colo'd?" I said two of them were king and queen of Ethiopia, and a third was their daughter. "Chain' to de rock, an' yit sa-ave at las'!" exclaimed Sidney. While her husband and children still gazed at the royal stars, Hester spoke softly to me again. "Miss Maud, dass a tryin' sawt o' sto'y to tell to a bunch o' po' niggehs; did you dess make dat up--fo' us?" "Why, Hester," I said, "that was an old, old story before this country was ever known to white folks, or black," and the eyes of all four were on me as the daughter asked: "Ain't it in de Bi-ible?" As all but Sidney bade me good night, I heard her say; "I don' care, I b'lieb dat be'n in de Bible an' git drap out by mista-ake!" In my room she grew queerly playful, and continued so until she had drawn off my shoes and stockings. But then abruptly, she took my feet in her slim black hands, and with eyes lifted tenderly to mine, said: "How bu'ful 'pon de mountain is dem wha' funnish good tidin's!" She leaned her forehead on my insteps: "Us bleeged to paht some day, Miss Maud." I made a poor effort to lift her, but she would not be displaced. "Cayn't no two people count fo' sho' on stayin' togetheh al'ays in dis va-ain worl'," and all at once I found my face in my hands and the salt drops searching through my fingers; Sidney was kissing my feet and wetting them with her tears. At close of the next day, a Sabbath, my uncle and aunt called all their servants around the front steps of the house and with tears more bitter than any of Sidney's or mine, told them that by the folly of others, far away, they had lost their whole fortune at one stroke and must part with everything, and with them, by sale. Their dark hearers wept with them, and Silas, Hester, and Sidney, after the rest had gone back to the quarters, offered the master and mistress, through many a quaintly misquoted scripture, the consolations of faith. "I wish we had set you free, Silas," said uncle, "you and yours, when we could have done it. Your mistress and I are going to town to-morrow solely to get somebody to buy you, all four, together." "Mawse Ben," cried the slave, with strange earnestness, "don't you do dat! Don't you was'e no time dat a-way! You go see what you can sa-ave fo' you-all an' yone!" "For the creditors, you mean, Silas," said my aunt; "that's done." Hester had a question. "Do it all go to de credito's anyhow, Miss 'Liza, no matteh how much us bring?" and when aunt said yes, Sidney murmured to her mother, "I tol' you dat." I wondered when she had told her. Uncle and aunt tried hard to find one buyer for the four, but failed; nobody who wanted the other three had any use for Mingo. It was after nightfall when they came dragging home. "Now don't you fret one bit 'bout dat, Mawse Ben," exclaimed Sidney, with a happy heroism in her eyes that I remembered afterward. "'De Lawd is perwide!'" "Strange," said my aunt to uncle and me aside, smiling in pity, "how slight an impression disaster makes on their minds!" and that too I remembered afterward. As soon as we were alone in my chamber, Sidney and I, she asked me to tell her again of the clock in the sky, and at the end of her service and of my recital she drew me to my window and showed me how promptly she could point out the pole-star at the centre of the clock's vast dial, although at our right a big moon was leaving the tree tops and flooding the sky with its light. Toward this she turned, and lifting an arm with the reverence of a priestess said, in impassioned monotone: "'De moon shine full at His comman' An' all de stahs obey.'" She kissed my hand as she added good-by. "Why, Sidney!" I laughed, "you mean good night, don't you?" She bent low, tittered softly, and then, with a swift return to her beautiful straightness, said: "But still, Miss Maud, who eveh know when dey say good night dat it ain't good-by?" She fondled my hand between her two as she backed away, kissed it fervently again, and was gone. When I awoke my aunt stood in broad though sunless daylight at the bedside, with the waking cup of coffee which it was Sidney's wont to bring. I started from the pillow. "Oh! what--who--wh'--where's Sidney? Why--how long has it been raining?" "It began at break of day," she replied, adding pensively, "thank God." "Oh! were we in such bad need of rain?" "_They_ were--precisely when it came. Rain never came straighter from heaven." "They?"--I stared. "Yes; Silas and Hester--and Sidney--and Mingo. They must have started soon after moonrise, and had the whole bright night, with its black shadows, for going." "For going where, auntie; going where?" "Then the rain came in God's own hour," she continued, as if wholly to herself, "and washed out their trail." I sprang from the bed. "Aunt 'Liza!" "Yes, Maud, they've run away, and if only they may _get_ away. God be praised!" Of course, I cried like an infant. I threw myself upon her bosom. "Oh, auntie, auntie, I'm afraid it's my fault! But when I tell you how far I was from meaning it----" "Don't tell me a word, my child; I wish it were my fault; I'd like to be in your shoes. And, I don't care how right slavery is, I'll never own a darky again!" One day some two months after, at home again with father. Just as I was leaving the house on some errand, Sidney--ragged, wet, and bedraggled as a lost dog--sprang into my arms. When I had got her reclothed and fed I eagerly heard her story. Three of the four had come safely through; poor Mingo had failed; if I ever tell of him it must be at some other time. In the course of her tale I asked about the compass. "Dat little trick?" she said fondly. "Oh, yass'm, it wah de salvation o' de Lawd 'pon cloudy nights; but time an' ag'in us had to sepa'ate, 'llowin' fo' to rejine togetheh on de bank o' de nex' creek, an' which, de Lawd a-he'pin' of us, h-it al'ays come to pass; an' so, afteh all, Miss Maud, de one thing what stan' us de bes' frien' night 'pon night, next to Gawd hisse'f, dat wah his clock in de ske-eye." VI "Landry," Chester said next day, bringing back the magazine barely half an hour after the book-shop had reopened, "that's a true story!" "Ah, something inside tells you?" "No need! You remember this, near the end? '_Poor Mingo had failed [to escape]; if I ever tell of him it must be at another time_.' Landry, it's so absurd that I hardly have the face to say it; I've got--ha-ha-ha!--I've got a manuscript! and it fills that gap!" The speaker whipped out the "Memorandum"; "Here's the story, by my own uncle, of how the three got over the border and how Mingo failed. I'd totally forgotten I had it. I disliked its beginning far more than I did 'Maud's' yesterday. For I hate masks and costumes as much as Mr. Castanado loves them; and a practical joke--which is what the story begins with, in costume, though it soon leaves it behind--nauseates me. Comical situation it makes for me, this 'Memorandum,' doesn't it--turning up this way?" Ovide replied meditatively: "To lend it, even to me, would seem as though you sought----" "It would put me in a false light! I don't like false lights." "It would mask and costume you." "Why, not so badly as if I were really in society; as, you know, I'm not! The only place where any man, but especially a society man, can properly seek a girl's society is in society. The more he's worthy to meet her, the more hopelessly--I needn't say hopelessly, but completely--he's cut off from meeting her any other way. Isn't that a gay situation? Ha-ha-ha!" "You would probably move much in society, even Creole society, without meeting mademoiselle; she has less time for it than you." "Is that so?" Cupid, the evening before, had carried a flat, square parcel like a shop's account-books to be written up under the home lamp. Staring at Landry, Chester rather dropped the words than spoke them: "Think of it! The awful pity! For the like of her! Of her! Why, how on earth--? No, don't tell! I know what I'd think of any other man following in her wake and asking questions while hard fortune writes her history. A girl like her, Landry, has no business with a history!" "Mr. Chester." "Yes?" "Has that 'Memorandum' never been printed? I can find out for you, in _Poole's Index_." "Do it! It's good enough, and it's named as if to be printed. See? 'The Angel of----'" "Then why not have Mr. Castanado, while selecting a publisher for mademoiselle's manuscript, select for both?" Chester shone: "Why--why, happy thought! I'll consider that, indeed I will! Well, good mor'----" "Mr. Chester." "Well?" "Why did you want that new book yesterday?" "I've met that nice old man the book calls 'the judge,' and he's coaxed me to break my rules and dine with him, at his home uptown, to-night." "I'm glad. Madame, his wife, was my young mistress when I was a slave. I wish her granddaughter and his grandson--they also are married--were not over in the war--Red Cross. You'd like them--and they would like you." "Do they know mademoiselle?" "Indeed, yes! They are the best of her very few friends. But--the Atlantic rolls between." Chester went out. In the rear door Ovide's wife appeared, knitting. "Any close-ter?" she asked over her silver-bowed spectacles. "Some," he said, taking down _Poole's Index_. She came to his side and they placidly conversed. As she began to leave him, "No," she said, "we kin wish, but we mustn' meddle. All any of us want' or got any rights to want is to see 'em on speakin' terms. F'om dat on, hands off. Leave de rest to de fitness o' things, de everlast'n' fitness o' things!" VII At the Castanados', the second evening after, Chester was welcomed into a specially pretty living-room. But he found three other visitors. Madame, seated on a sort of sofa for one, made no effort to rise. Her face, for all its breadth, was sweet in repose and sweeter when she spoke or smiled. Her hands were comparatively small and the play of her vast arms was graceful as she said to a slim, tallish, comely woman with an abundance of soft, well-arranged hair: "Seraphine, allow me to pres-ent Mr. Chezter." She explained that this Mme. Alexandre was her "neighbor of the next door," and Chester remembered her sign: "Laces and Embroideries." "Scipion," said Castanado to a short, swarthy, broad-bearded man, "I have the honor to make you acquaint' with my friend Mr. Chezter." Chester pressed the enveloping hand of "S. Beloiseau, Artisan in Ornamental Iron-work." "Also, Mr. Chezter, Mr. Rene Ducatel; but with him you are already acquaint', I think, eh?" Chester shook hands with a small, dapper, early-gray, superdignified man, recalling his sign: "Antiques in Furniture, Glass, Bronze, Plate, China, and Jewelry." M. Ducatel seemed to be already taking leave. His "anceztral 'ome," he said, was far up-town; he had dropped in solely to borrow--showing it--the _Courrier des Etats-Unis_. That journal, Castanado remarked to Chester as at a corner table he poured him a glass of cordial, brought the war, the trenches, the poilu and the boche closer than any other they knew. Beloiseau and Mme. Alexandre, he softly explained, had come in quite unlooked-for to discuss the great strife and might depart at any moment. Then the reading! But Chester himself interested those two and they stayed. When he said that Beloiseau's sidewalk samples had often made him covet some excuse for going in and seeing both the stock and the craftsman, "That was excuse ab-undant!" was the prompt response, and Castanado put in: "Scipion he'd rather, always, a non-buying connoisseur than a buying Philistine." "Come any day! any hour!" said Beloiseau. Presently all five were talking of the surviving poetry of both artistic and historic Royal Street. "Twenty year' ag-o," said the ironworker, "looking down-street from my shop, there was not a building in sight without a romantic story. My God! for example, that Hotel St. Louis!" Chester--"had heard one or two of its episodes only the evening before, at that up-town dinner, from a fine old down-town Creole, a fellow guest, with whom he was to dine the next week." "Aha-a-a! precizely ac-rozz the street from Mme. Alexandre!" said the hostess. "M'sieu' et Madame De l'Isle! Now I detec' that!" "Have they no son?--or--or daughter?" he asked. "Not any," Mme. Alexandre broke in with a significant sparkle; "juz' the two al-lone." "They live over my shop," Beloiseau said. "You muz' know that double gate nex' adjoining me." "Oh, that lovely piece of ironwork? I took that for a part of your establishment." "I have only the uze of it with them. My _grandpère_ he made those gate', for the father of Mme. De l'Isle, same year he made those great openwork gate' of Hotel St. Louis. You speak of episode'! One summer, renovating that hotel, they paint' those gate'--of iron openwork--in imitation--_mon Dieu_!--of marbl'! _Ciel_! the tragedy of _that_! Yes, they live over me; in the whole square, both side' the street, last remaining of the 'igh society." When Mme. Alexandre finally rose to go, and had kissed the upturned brow of her hostess, she went by an inner door and rear balcony. And when Chester and Beloiseau began to take leave their host said to Chester: "You dine with M. De l'Isle Tuesday. Well, if you'll come again here the next evening we'll attend to--that business." "Wouldn't that be losing time? I can just as well come sooner." "No," said madame, "better that Wednesday." Chester was nettled, but he recovered when the ironworker walked with him around into Bienville Street and at his _pension_ door lamented the pathetic decay of the useful arts and of artistic taste, since the advent of castings and machinery. The pair took such liking for each other's tenets of beauty, morals, art, and life that Chester walked back to the De l'Isle gates, and their parting at last was at the corner half-way between their two domiciles. Meanwhile madame was saying to her spouse, "Aha! you see? The power of prayer! Ab-ove all, for the he'pless! By day the fo' corner' of my room, by night the fo' post' of my bed, are----" "Yes, _chérie_, I know." "Yes, they're to me for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! Since three days every time I heard the cathedral clock I've prayed to them; and now----!" "Well, my angel? Now?" "Well, now! He's dining there next Tuesday!" "Truly. Yet even now we can only hope----" "Ah, no! Me, I can also continue to supplicate! From now till Wednesday, every time that clock, I'll pray those four _évangélistes_! and Thursday you'll see--the power of prayer! Oh, 'tis like _magique_, that power of prayer!" VIII On Tuesday evening Chester, a country boy yet now and then, was first at the De l'Isles'. Madame lauded him. "Punctualitie! tha'z the soul of pleasure!" She had begun to explain why her other guests included but one young lady, when here they came. First, the Prieurs, a still handsome Creole couple whom he never met again. Then that youthful-aged up-town pair,
{'title': 'The Flower of the Chapdelaines by George Washington Cable', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}