The Flower of the Chapdelaines by George W. Cable

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[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 _poetique_ 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 carre_. 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 Rene 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'mere_ 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'mere_ 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'mere 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.

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