The Flower of the Chapdelaines by George W. Cable

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"A li'l', yes," the sisters replied, but Aline's smiling silence said:
"No, a little farther off."

The aunts thanked Mme. De l'Isle for bringing Mrs. Chester and kissed
her cheeks. They walked beside her to the gate, led by Cupid with the
key, and by Marie Madeleine crooking the end of her tail like a
floor-walker's finger. Mrs. Chester and Aline came last. The sisters
ventured out to the sidewalk to finish an apology for a significant
fault in Marie Madeleine's figure, and Mrs. Chester and Aline found
themselves alone.

"Au revoir," they said, clasping hands. Cupid, under a sudden
inspiration, half-closed the gate, the pair stood an eloquent moment
gazing eye to eye, and then----

What happened the mother told her son that evening as they sat alone on
a moonlit veranda.

"Mother!"

"Yes," she said, "and on the lips."

XLIX

Beginning at dawn, an all-day rain rested the travel-wearied lady. But
the night cleared and in the forenoon that followed she shopped--for
things, she wrote her husband, not to be found elsewhere in the
forty-eight States.

The afternoon she gave to two or three callers, notably to Mrs.
Thorndyke-Smith, who was very pleasing every way, but in nothing more
than in her praises of the Royal Street coterie. Next morning, in a
hired car, she had Castanado and Mme. Dubroca, Beloiseau and Mme.
Alexandre, not merely show but, as the ironworker said, pinching
forefinger and thumb together in the air, "elucidate" to her, for
hours, the _vieux carre_. The day's latter half brought Mlles. Corinne
and Yvonne; but Aline--no.

"She was coming till the laz' moment," the pair said, "and then she's
so bewzy she 'ave to sen' us word, by 'Ector, 'tis impossib' to
come--till maybe later. Go h-on, juz' we two."

They sat and talked, and rose and talked, and--sweetly
importuned--resumed seats and talked, of infant days and the old New
Orleans they loved so well, unembarrassed by a maze of innocent
anachronisms, and growingly sure that Aline would come.

When at sunset they took leave Mrs. Chester, to their delight, followed
to the sidewalk, drifted on by a corner or two, and even turned up
Rampart Street, though without saying that it was by Rampart Street her
son daily came--walked--from his office. It had two paved ways for
general traffic, with a broad space between, where once, the sisters
explained, had been the rampart's moat but now ran the electric cars!
"You know what that is, rampart? Tha'z in the 'Star-Spangle' Banner'
ab-oud that. And this high wall where we're passing, tha'z the
Carmelite convent, and--ah! ad the last! Aline! Aline!" Also there
was Cupid.

The four encountered gayly. "Ah, not this time," Aline said. "I came
only to meet my aunts; they had locked the gate! But I _will_ call,
very soon."

They walked up to the next corner, the sisters confusingly instructing
Mrs. Chester how to take a returning street-car. Leaving them, she had
just got safely across from sidewalk to car-track when Cupid came
pattering after, to bid her hail only the car marked "Esplanade Belt."

As he backed off--"Take care!" was the cry, but he sprang the wrong way
and a hurrying jitney cast him yards distant, where he lay unconscious
and bleeding. The packed street-car emptied.

"No, he's alive," said one who lifted him, to the two jitney
passengers, who pushed into the throng. "Arm broke', yes, but he's
hurt worst in the head."

There was an apothecary's shop in sight. They put him and the four
ladies into the jitney and sent them there, and the world moved on.

At the shop he came to, and presently, in the jitney again, he was
blissfully aware of Geoffry Chester on the swift running-board,
questioning his mother and Aline by turns. He listened with all his
might. Neither the child nor his mistress had seen or heard the
questioner since the afternoon he was locked out of the garden.

Nearing that garden now, questions and answers suddenly ceased; the
child had spoken. Limp and motionless, with his head on Aline's bosom
and his eyes closed, "Don't let," he brokenly said, "don't let _him_ go
'way."

To him the answer seemed so long coming that he began to repeat; then
Aline said----

"No, dear, he shan't leave you."

The sisters had telephoned their own physician from the apothecary's
shop, and soon, with Cupid on his cot, pushed close to a cool window
looking into the rear garden, and the garden lighted by an unseen moon,
Mrs. Chester, at the cot's side awaited the doctor's arrival. The
restless sisters brought her a tray of rusks and butter and tea, though
they would not, could not, taste anything themselves until they should
know how gravely the small sufferer--for now he began to suffer--was
hurt.

"Same time tha'z good to be induztriouz"--this was all said directly
above the moaning child--"while tha'z bad, for the sick, to talk ad the
bedside, and we can't stay with you and not talk, and we can't go in
that front yard; that gate is let open so the doctor he needn' ring and
that way excide the patient; and we can't go in the back garden"--they
spread their hands and dropped them; the back garden was hopelessly
pre-empted.

They went to a parlor window and sat looking and longing for the front
gate to swing. They had posted on it in Corinne's minute writing: "No
admittance excep on business. Open on account sickness. S. V. P.
Don't wring the belle!!!"

Cupid lay very flat on his back, his face turned to the open window.
He had ceased to moan. When Mrs. Chester stole to where, by leaning
over, she could see his eyes they were closed. She hoped he slept, but
sat down in uncertainty rather than risk waking him. In the moonlit
garden Aline and Geoffry paced to and fro. To see them his mother
would have to stand and lean over the cot, and neither good mothers nor
good nurses do that. She kept her seat, anxiously hoping that the
moonlight out there would remain soft enough to veil the worn look
which daylight betrayed on her son's face whenever he fell into silence.

The talk of the pair was labored. Once they went clear to the bower
and turned, without a word. Then Geoffry said: "I know a story I'd
like to tell you, though how it would help us in our project--if we now
have a project at all--I don't see."

"'Tis of the _vieux carre_, that story?"

"It's of the _vieux carre_ of the world's heart."

"I think I know it."

"May I not tell it?"

"Yes, you may tell it--although--yes, tell it."

"Well, there was once a beautiful girl, as beautiful in soul as in
countenance, and worshipped by a few excellent friends, few only
because of conditions in her life that almost wholly exiled her from
society. Even so, she had suitors--good, gallant men; not of wealth,
yet with good prospects and with gifts more essential. But other
conditions seemed, to her, to forbid marriage."

"Yes," Aline interrupted. "Mr. Chester, have you gone in partnership
with Mr. Castanado--'Masques et Costumes'? Or would it not be maybe
better honor to me--and yourself--to speak----"

"Straight out? Yes, of course. Aline, I've been racking my brain--I
still am--and my heart--to divine what it is that separates us. I had
come to believe you loved me. I can't quite stifle the conviction yet.
I believe that in refusing me you're consciously refusing that which
seems to you yourself a worthy source of supreme happiness if it did
not threaten the happiness of others dearer than your own."

"Of my aunts, you think?"

"Yes, your aunts."

"Mr. Chester, even if I had no aunts----"

"Yes, I see. That's my new discovery: you've already had my assurance
that I'd study their happiness as I would yours, ours, mine; but you
think I could never make your aunts and myself happy in the same
atmosphere. You believe in me. You believe I have a future that must
carry me--would carry us--into a world your aunts don't know and could
never learn."

"'Tis true. And yet even if my aunts----"

"Had no existence--yes, I know. I know what you think would still
remain. You can't hint it, for you think I would promptly promise the
impossible, as lovers so easily do. Aline, I would not! 'Twouldn't be
impossible. It shall not be. My mother is helping to prove that even
to you, isn't she--without knowing it? I promise you as if it were in
the marriage contract and we were here signing it, that if you will be
my wife I never will, and you never shall, let go, or in any way relax,
your hold--or mine--on the intimate friendship of the coterie in Royal
Street. They are your inheritance from your father and his father, and
I love you the more adoringly because you would sooner break your own
heart than forfeit that legacy." He took one of her hands. "You are
their 'Clock in the Sky'; you're their 'Angel of the Lord.' And so you
shall be till death do you part." He took the other hand, held both.

Cupid turned his face from the window and audibly sobbed.

"Oh, child, what is it? Does it pain so?"

He shook his head.

"Doesn't it pain? Is it not pain at all? Why, then, what is it?"

"Joy," he whispered as the doctor came in.

L

The child's hurts were not so grave, after all.

"He may sit up to-morrow," the doctor said. The fractured arm was put
into a splint and sling, and a collar-bone had to be wrapped in place;
but the absorbent cotton bandaged on his head was only for contusions.

"Corinne!" Mlle. Yvonne gasped, "contusion"! Ah, doctor, I 'ope tha'z
something you can't 'ave but once!"

"You can't in fatal cases. Mrs.--eh--those scissors, please? Thank
you."

"Well, Aline, praise be to heaven, any'ow his skull, from ear to ear
'tis solid! Ah, I mean, of co'se, roun' the h-outside. Inside 'tis
hollow. But outside it has not a crack! eh, doctor?"

"Except the sutures he was born with. Now, my little man----"

"Ah, ah, Corinne! Born with shuture'! and we never suzpeg' that!"

"Ah, but, Yvonne, if he's had those sinz' that long they cann' be so
very fatal, no!"

Partly for the little boy's sake three days were let pass before Aline
made her announcement. There was but one place for it--the Castanados'
parlor. All the coterie were there--the De l'Isles, even Ovide--butler
_pro tem_.

"You will have refreshments," he said, with happiest equanimity; "I
will serve them"; and the whole race problem vanished. Melanie too was
present, with an announcement of her own which won ecstatic kisses,
many of them tear-moistened but all of them glad. As for Mme.
Alexandre and Beloiseau, they announced nothing, but every one knew,
and said so in the smiling fervency of their hand-grasps.

All of which made the evening too hopelessly old-fashioned to be dwelt
on, though one point cannot be overlooked. It was the last
proclamation of the joyous hour, and was Chester's. He had bought--on
wonderfully easy terms--_vieux carre_ terms--the large house and
grounds opposite the Chapdelaine cottage, and there the aunts were to
dwell with the young pair.

"Permanently?"

"Ah, only whiles we live!"

The coterie adjourned.

Already the sisters had begun to move in. Mrs. Chester helped them
"marvellouzly." Also Aline. Also Cupid--that was now his only name.
The cat really couldn't; she was too preoccupied. The sisters touched
Mrs. Chester's arm and drew a curtain.

"Look! . . . Eight! Ah, thou unfaithful, if we had ever think you are
going to so forget yo'seff like that, we woul'n' never name you Marie
Madeleine! And still ad the same time you know, Mrs. Chezter, we are
sure she's trying to tell us, right now, that this going to be the laz'
time!"

"And me," Yvonne added, "I feel sure any'ow that, as the poet say--I'm
prittie sure 'tis the poet say that--she's mo' sin' ag-ainz' than
sinning."

At length one evening so many relics of the Chapdelaine infancy had
been gathered in the new home that the sisters went over there to pass
the night, and took puss and her offspring along. But not a wink did
either of them sleep the night through, and the first living creature
they espied the next morning was Marie Madeleine, with a kitten in her
teeth, moving back.

"Aline," they sobbed as soon as they could find her, "we are sorry,
sorry, sorry, to make you such unhappinezz like that, and so soon;
continue, you and Geoffry, to live in that new 'ouse; but whiles we
live any plaze but heaven we got to live in that home of our in-fancy."

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