Tales of Louisiana Life. Kate Chopin
Читать онлайн книгу.
which made no difference. Suzanne and Hector spoke but French to each other.
Hector did not tarry a moment longer than was needed to place his young friend and charge in the older woman's care. He would not even stay to take a bite of supper with them. Maman Chavan watched him as he hurried down the steps and out into the gloom. Then she said to Suzanne: "That man is an angel, Mademoiselle, un ange du bon Dieu."
"Women, my dear Maman Chavan, you know how it is with me in regard to women. I have drawn a circle round my heart, so—at pretty long range, mind you—and there is not one who gets through it, or over it or under it."
"Blagueur, va!" laughed Maman Chavan, replenishing her glass from the bottle of sauterne.
It was Sunday morning. They were breakfasting together on the pleasant side gallery that led by a single step down to the garden. Hector came every Sunday morning, an hour or so before noon, to breakfast with them. He always brought a bottle of sauterne, a paté, or a mess of artichokes or some tempting bit of charcuterie. Sometimes he had to wait till the two women returned from hearing mass at the cathedral. He did not go to mass himself. They were both making a Novena on that account, and had even gone to the expense of burning a round dozen of candles before the good St. Joseph, for his conversion. When Hector accidentally discovered the fact, he offered to pay for the candles, and was distressed at not being permitted to do so.
Suzanne had been in the city more than a month. It was already the close of February, and the air was flower-scented, moist, and deliciously mild.
"As I said: women, my dear Maman Chavan"—
"Let us hear no more about women!" cried Suzanne, impatiently. "Cher Maître! but Hector can be tiresome when he wants. Talk, talk; to say what in the end?"
"Quite right, my cousin; when I might have been saying how charming you are this morning. But don't think that I have n't noticed it," and he looked at her with a deliberation that quite unsettled her. She took a letter from her pocket and handed it to him.
"Here, read all the nice things mamma has to say of you, and the love messages she sends to you." He accepted the several closely written sheets from her and began to look over them.
"Ah, la bonne tante," he laughed, when he came to the tender passages that referred to himself. He had pushed aside the glass of wine that he had only partly filled at the beginning of breakfast and that he had scarcely touched. Maman Chavan again replenished her own. She also lighted a cigarette. So did Suzanne, who was learning to smoke. Hector did not smoke; he did not use tobacco in any form, he always said to those who offered him cigars.
Suzanne rested her elbows on the table, adjusted the ruffles about her wrists, puffed awkwardly at her cigarette that kept going out, and hummed the Kyrie Eleison that she had heard so beautifully rendered an hour before at the Cathedral, while she gazed off into the green depths of the garden. Maman Chavan slipped a little silver medal toward her, accompanying the action with a pantomime that Suzanne readily understood. She, in turn, secretly and adroitly transferred the medal to Hector's coat-pocket. He noticed the action plainly enough, but pretended not to.
"Natchitoches has n't changed," he commented. "The everlasting can-cans! when will they have done with them? This is n't little Athénaïse Miché, getting married! Sapristi! but it makes one old! And old Papa Jean-Pierre only dead now? I thought he was out of purgatory five years ago. And who is this Laballière? One of the Laballières of St. James?"
"St. James, mon cher. Monsieur Alphonse Laballière; an aristocrat from the 'golden coast.' But it is a history, if you will believe me. Figurez vouz, Maman Chavan—pensez donc, mon ami"—And with much dramatic fire, during which the cigarette went irrevocably out, she proceeded to narrate her experiences with Laballière.
"Impossible!" exclaimed Hector when the climax was reached; but his indignation was not so patent as she would have liked it to be.
"And to think of an affront like that going unpunished!" was Maman Chavan's more sympathetic comment.
"Oh, the scholars were only too ready to offer violence to poor little André, but that, you can understand, I would not permit. And now, here is mamma gone completely over to him; entrapped, God only knows how!"
"Yes," agreed Hector, "I see he has been sending her tamales and boudin blanc."
"Boudin blanc, my friend! If it were only that! But I have a stack of letters, so high—I could show them to you—singing of Laballière, Laballière, enough to drive one distracted. He visits her constantly. He is a man of attainment, she says, a man of courage, a man of heart; and the best of company. He has sent her a bunch of fat robins as big as a tub"—
"There is something in that—a good deal in that, mignonne," piped Maman Chavan, approvingly.
"And now boudin blanc! and she tells me it is the duty of a Christian to forgive. Ah, no; it's no use; mamma's ways are past finding out."
Suzanne was never in Hector's company elsewhere than at Maman Chavan's. Beside the Sunday visit, he looked in upon them sometimes at dusk, to chat for a moment or two. He often treated them to theatre tickets, and even to the opera, when business was brisk. Business meant a little note-book that he carried in his pocket, in which he sometimes dotted down orders from the country people for wine, that he sold on commission. The women always went together, unaccompanied by any male escort; trotting along, arm in arm, and brimming with enjoyment.
That same Sunday afternoon Hector walked with them a short distance when they were on their way to vespers. The three walking abreast almost occupied the narrow width of the banquette. A gentleman who had just stepped out of the Hotel Royal stood aside to better enable them to pass. He lifted his hat to Suzanne, and cast a quick glance, that pictured stupefaction and wrath, upon Hector.
"It's he!" exclaimed the girl, melodramatically seizing Maman Chavan's arm.
"Who, he?"
"Laballière!"
"No!"
"Yes!"
"A handsome fellow, all the same," nodded the little lady, approvingly. Hector thought so too. The conversation again turned upon Laballière, and so continued till they reached the side door of the cathedral, where the young man left his two companions.
In the evening Laballière called upon Suzanne. Maman Chavan closed the front door carefully after he entered the small parlor, and opened the side one that looked into the privacy of the garden. Then she lighted the lamp and retired, just as Suzanne entered.
The girl bowed a little stiffly, if it may be said that she did anything stiffly. "Monsieur Laballière." That was all she said.
"Mademoiselle St. Denys Godolph," and that was all he said. But ceremony did not sit easily upon him.
"Mademoiselle," he began, as soon as seated, "I am here as the bearer of a message from your mother. You must understand that otherwise I would not be here."
"I do understan', sir, that you an' maman have become very warm frien's during my absence," she returned, in measured, conventional tones.
"It pleases me immensely to hear that from you," he responded, warmly; "to believe that Madame St. Denys Godolph is my friend."
Suzanne coughed more affectedly than was quite nice, and patted her glossy braids. "The message, if you please, Mr. Laballière."
"To be sure," pulling himself together from the momentary abstraction into which he had fallen in contemplating her. "Well, it's just this; your mother, you must know, has been good enough to sell me a fine bit of land—a deep strip along the bayou"—
"Impossible! Mais, w'at sorcery did you use to obtain such a thing of my mother, Mr. Laballière? Lan' that has been in the St. Denys Godolph family since time untole!"
"No sorcery whatever, Mademoiselle, only an appeal to your mother's intelligence and common sense; and she is well supplied with both. She wishes me to say, further, that she desires your presence very urgently