_April 28th._
--_Tam-tam-tam!--tam-tam-tam!_... It is the booming of the auction-drum
from the Place: Yzore's furniture is about to change hands.
The children start at the sound, so vividly associated in their minds
with the sights of Carnival days, with the fantastic mirth of the great
processional dance: they run to the sunny street, calling to each
other,--_Vini ouè!_--they look up and down. But there is a great quiet
in the Rue du Morne Mirail;--the street is empty.
... Manm-Robert enters very weary: she has been at the sale, trying to
save something for the children, but the prices were too high. In
silence she takes her accustomed seat at the worn counter of her little
shop; the young ones gather about her, caress her;--Mimi looks up
laughing into the kind brown face, and wonders why Manm-Robert will not
smile. Then Mimi becomes afraid to ask where the maskers are,--why they
do not come. But little Maurice, bolder and less sensitive, cries out:--
--"_Manm-Robert, oti masque-à?_"
Manm-Robert does not answer;--she does not hear. She is gazing directly
into the young faces clustered about her knee,--yet she does not see
them: she sees far, far beyond them,--into the hidden years. And,
suddenly, with a savage tenderness in her voice, she utters all the dark
thought of her heart for them:--
--"_Toua ti blancs sans lesou!--quitté main châché papa-ou qui adans
cimétiè pou vint pouend ou tou!_" (Ye three little penniless white
ones!--let me go call your father, who is in the cemetery, to come and
take you also away!)
[Illustration]