The Flower of the Chapdelaines. George Washington Cable
"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?