still intelligible route. It is not in truth a chapel at all, but a
consecrated chamber in a very small, very lowly cottage, which stands,
or one might appropriately, if not with absolute novelty, say which
kneels, in the center of a large garden, a garden primeval in
rusticity and size, its limits being defined by no lesser boundaries
than the four intersecting streets outside, and its culture showing
only the careless, shiftless culture of nature. The streets outside
were miracles themselves in that, with their liquid contents, they
were streets and not bayous. However, they protected their island
chapel almost as well as a six-foot moat could have done. There was a
small paved space on the sidewalk that served to the pedestrian as an
indication of the spot in the tall, long, broad fence where a gate
might be sought. It was a small gate with a strong latch. It required
a strong hand to open it. At the sound of the click it made, the
little street ragamuffin, who stood near, peeping through the fence,
looked up. He had worked quite a hole between the boards with his
fingers. Such an anxious expression passed over his face that even
a casual passer-by could not help relieving it by a question--any
question:
"Is this the miracle chapel, little boy?"
"Yes, ma'am; yes." Then his expression changed to one of eagerness,
yet hardly less anxious.
"Here. Take this--"
He did not hold out his hand, the coin had to seek it. At its touch he
refused to take it.
"I ain't begging."
"What are you looking at so through the fence?" He was all sadness
now.
"Just looking."
"Is there anything to see inside?"
He did not answer. The interrogation was repeated.
"I can't see nothing. I'm blind," putting his eyes again to the hole,
first one, then the other.
"Come, won't you tell me how this came to be a miracle chapel?"
"Oh, ma'am,"--he turned his face from the fence, and clasped his hands
in excitement,--"it was a poor widow woman who come here with her baby
that was a-dying, and she prayed to the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin
Mary made the baby live--"
He dropped his voice, the words falling slower and slower. As he
raised his face, one could see then that he was blind, and the
accident that had happened to him, in fording the street. What
sightless eyes! What a wet, muddy little skeleton! Ten? No; hardly ten
years of age.
"The widow woman she picked up her baby, and she run down the walk
here, and out into the street screaming--she was so glad,"--putting
his eyes to the peep-hole again,--"and the Virgin Mary come down the
walk after her, and come through the gate, too; and that was all she
seed--the widow woman."
"Did you know the widow woman?"
He shook his head.
"How do you know it?"
"That was what they told me. And they told me, the birds all begun to
sing at once, and the flowers all lighted up like the sun was shining
on them. They seed her. And she come down the walk, and through the
gate," his voice lowering again to a whisper.
Aye, how the birds must have sung, and the flowers shone, to the
widowed mother as she ran, nay, leaped, down that rose-hedged walk,
with her restored baby clasped to her bosom!
"_They_ seed her," repeated the little fellow. "And that is why you
stand here--to see her, too?"
His shoulder turned uneasily in the clasp upon it.
"They seed her, and they ain't got no eyes."
"Have you no mother?"
"Ain't never had no mother." A thought struck him. "Would that count,
ma'am? Would that count? The little baby that was dying--yes, ma'am,
it had a mother; and it's the mothers that come here constant with
their children; I sometimes hear 'em dragging them in by the hand."
"How long have you been coming here?"
"Ever since the first time I heard it, ma'am."
Street ragamuffins do not cry: it would be better if they did so, when
they are so young and so blind; it would be easier for the spectator,
the auditor.
"They seed her--I might see her ef--ef I could see her once--ef--ef
I could see anything once." His voice faltered; but he stiffened it
instantly. "She might see me. She can't pass through this gate without
seeing me; and--and--ef she seed me--and I didn't even see her--oh,
I'm so tired of being blind!"
"Did you never go inside to pray?" How embarrassing such a question
is, even to a child!
"No, ma'am. Does that count, too? The little baby didn't pray, the
flowers didn't go inside, nor the birds. And they say the birds broke
out singing all at once, and the flowers shined, like the sun was
shining on 'em--like the sun was shining in 'em," he corrected
himself. "The birds they can see, and the flowers they can't see, and
they seed her." He shivered with the damp cold--and perhaps too with
hunger.
"Where do you live?"
He wouldn't answer.
"What do you live on?"
He shook his head.
"Come with me." He could not resist the grasp on his shoulder, and the
firm directing of his bare, muddy feet through the gate, up the walk,
and into the chamber which the Virgin found that day. He was turned to
the altar, and pressed down on his knees.
One should not look at the face of a blind child praying to the Virgin
for sight. Only the Virgin herself should see that--and if she once
saw that little boy! There were hearts, feet, hands, and eyes enough
hanging around to warrant hope at least, if not faith; the effigies of
the human aches and pains that had here found relief, if not surcease;
feet and hands beholden to no physician for their exorcism of
rheumatism; eyes and ears indebted to no oculist or aurist; and the
hearts,--they are always in excess,--and, to the most skeptical, there
is something sweetly comforting in the sight of so many cured hearts,
with their thanks cut deep, as they should be, in the very marble
thereof. Where the bed must have stood was the altar, rising by easy
gradations, brave in ecclesiastical deckings, to the plaster figure of
her whom those yearning hearts were seeing, whom those murmuring lips
were addressing. Hearts must be all alike to her at such a distance,
but the faces to the looker-on were so different. The eyes straining
to look through all the experiences and troubles that their life has
held to plead, as only eyes can plead, to one who can, if she will,
perform their miracle for them. And the mouths,--the sensitive human
mouths,--each one distorted by the tragedy against which it was
praying.
Their miracles! their miracles! what trifles to divinity! Perhaps
hardly more to humanity! How far a simple looker-on could supply them
if so minded! Perhaps a liberal exercise of love and charity by not
more than half a dozen well-to-do people could answer every prayer in
the room! But what a miracle that would be, and how the Virgin's heart
would gladden thereat, and jubilate over her restored heart-dying
children, even as the widowed mother did over her one dying babe!
And the little boy had stopped praying. The futility of it--perhaps
his own impotence--had overcome him. He was crying, and past the shame
of showing it--crying helplessly, hopelessly. Tears were rolling out
of his sightless eyes over his wordless lips. He could not pray; he
could only cry. What better, after all, can any of us do? But what
a prayer to a woman--to even the plaster figure of a woman! And the
Virgin did hear him; for she had him taken without loss of a moment to
the hospital, and how easy she made it for the physician to remove the
disability! To her be the credit.
THE STORY OF A DAY
It is really not much, the story; it is only the arrangement of it, as
we would say of our dresses and our drawing-rooms.
It began with the dawn, of course; and the skiff for our voyage,
silvered with dew, waiting in the mist for us, as if it had floated
down in a cloud from heaven to the bayou. When repeated, this sounds
like poor poetry; but that is the way one thinks at day dawn, when the
dew is yet, as it were, upon our brains, and our ideas are still half
dreams, and our waking hearts, alas! as innocent as waking babies
playing with their toes.
Our oars waked the waters of the bayou, as motionless as a sleeping
snake under its misty covert--to continue the poetical language or
thought. The ripples ran frightened and shivering into the rooty
thicknesses of the sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds
bathing there into darting to the nearest, highest rush-top, where,
without losing their hold on their swaying, balancing perches, they
burst into all sorts of incoherent songs, in their excitement to
divert attention from the near-hidden nests: bird mothers are so much
like women mothers!
It soon became day enough for the mist to rise. The eyes that saw it
ought to be able to speak to tell fittingly about it.
Not all at once, nor all together, but a thinning, a lifting, a
breaking, a wearing away; a little withdrawing here, a little
withdrawing there; and now a peep, and now a peep; a bride lifting her
veil to her husband! Blue! White! Lilies! Blue lilies! White lilies!
Blue and white lilies! And still blue and white lilies! And still! And
still! Wherever the veil lifted, still and always the bride!
Not in clumps and bunches, not in spots and patches, not in banks,
meadows, acres, but in--yes; for still it lifted beyond and beyond and
beyond; the eye could not touch the limit of them, for the eye can
touch only the limit of vision; and the lilies filled the whole
sea-marsh, for that is the way spring comes to the sea-marshes.
The sedge-roots might have been unsightly along the water's edge,
but there were morning-glories, all colors, all shades--oh, such
morning-glories as we of the city never see! Our city morning-glories
must dream of them, as we dream of angels. Only God could be so
lavish! Dropping from the tall spear-heads to the water, into the
water, under the water. And then, the reflection of them, in all their
colors, blue, white, pink, purple, red, rose, violet!
To think of an obscure little Acadian bayou waking to flow the
first thing in the morning not only through banks of new-blown
morning-glories, but sown also to its depths with such reflections as
must make it think itself a bayou in heaven, instead of in Paroisse
St. Martin. Perhaps that is the reason the poor poets think themselves
poets, on account of the beautiful things that are only reflected into
their minds from what is above? Besides the reflections, there were
alligators in the bayou, trying to slip away before we could see them,
and watching us with their stupid, senile eyes, sometimes from under
the thickest, prettiest flowery bowers; and turtles splashing into
the water ahead of us; and fish (silver-sided perch), looking like
reflections themselves, floating through the flower reflections,
nibbling their breakfast.
Our bayou had been running through swamp only a little more solid than
itself; in fact, there was no solidity but what came from the roots of
grasses. Now, the banks began to get firmer, from real soil in them.
We could see cattle in the distance, up to their necks in the lilies,
their heads and sharp-pointed horns coming up and going down in the
blue and white. Nothing makes cattle's heads appear handsomer, with
the sun just rising far, far away on the other side of them.
The sea-marsh cattle turned loose to pasture in the lush spring
beauty--turned loose in Elysium!
But the land was only partly land yet, and the cattle still cattle to
us. The rising sun made revelations, as our bayou carried us through a
drove in their Elysium, or it might have always been an Elysium to
us. It was not all pasturage, all enjoyment. The rising and falling
feeding head was entirely different, as we could now see, from the
rising and falling agonized head of the bogged--the buried alive.
It is well that the lilies grow taller and thicker over the more
treacherous places; but, misery! misery! not much of the process was
concealed from us, for the cattle have to come to the bayou for
water. Such a splendid black head that had just yielded breath! The
wide-spreading ebony horns thrown back among the morning-glories, the
mouth open from the last sigh, the glassy eyes staring straight at the
beautiful blue sky above, where a ghostly moon still lingered, the
velvet neck ridged with veins and muscles, the body already buried in
black ooze. And such a pretty red-and-white-spotted heifer, lying on
her side, opening and shutting her eyes, breathing softly in meek
resignation to her horrible calamity! And, again, another one was
plunging and battling in the act of realizing her doom: a fierce,
furious, red cow, glaring and bellowing at the soft, yielding
inexorable abysm under her, the bustards settling afar off, and her
own species browsing securely just out of reach.
They understand that much, the sea-marsh cattle, to keep out of reach
of the dead combatant. In the delirium of anguish, relief cannot be
distinguished from attack, and rescue of the victim has been proved to
mean goring of the rescuer.
The bayou turned from it at last, from our beautiful lily world about
which our pleasant thoughts had ceased to flow even in bad poetry.
Our voyage was for information, which might be obtained at a certain
habitation; if not there, at a second one, or surely at a third and
most distant settlement.
The bayou narrowed into a canal, then widened into a bayou again, and
the low, level swamp and prairie advanced into woodland and forest.
Oak-trees began, our beautiful oak-trees! Great branches bent down
almost to the water,--quite even with high water,--covered with
forests of oak, parasites, lichens, and with vines that swept our
heads as we passed under them, drooping now and then to trail in the
water, a plaything for the fishes, and a landing-place for amphibious
insects. The sun speckled the water with its flickering patterns,
showering us with light and heat. We have no spring suns; our sun,
even in December, is a summer one.
And so, with all its grace of curve and bend, and so--the description
is longer than the voyage--we come to our first stopping-place. To the
side, in front of the well-kept fertile fields, like a proud little
showman, stood the little house. Its pointed shingle roof covered it
like the top of a chafing-dish, reaching down to the windows, which
peeped out from under it like little eyes.
A woman came out of the door to meet us. She had had time during our
graceful winding approach to prepare for us. What an irrevocable
vow to old maidenhood! At least twenty-five, almost a possible
grandmother, according to Acadian computation, and well in the grip
of advancing years. She was dressed in a stiff, dark red calico gown,
with a white apron. Her black hair, smooth and glossy under a varnish
of grease, was plaited high in the back, and dropped regular ringlets,
six in all, over her forehead. That was the epoch when her calamity
came to her, when the hair was worn in that fashion. A woman seldom
alters her coiffure after a calamity of a certain nature happens
to her. The figure had taken a compact rigidity, an unfaltering
inflexibility, all the world away from the elasticity of matronhood;
and her eyes were clear and fixed like her figure, neither falling,
nor rising, nor puzzling under other eyes. Her lips, her hands, her
slim feet, were conspicuously single, too, in their intent, neither
reaching, nor feeling, nor running for those other lips, hands, and
feet which should have doubled their single life.
That was Adorine Mérionaux, otherwise the most industrious Acadian and
the best cottonade-weaver in the parish. It had been short, her story.
A woman's love is still with those people her story. She was thirteen
when she met him. That is the age for an Acadian girl to meet him,
because, you know, the large families--the thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen, twenty children--take up the years; and when one wishes
to know one's great-great-grandchildren (which is the dream of the
Acadian girl) one must not delay one's story.
She had one month to love him in, and in one week they were to have
the wedding. The Acadians believe that marriage must come _au point_,
as cooks say their sauces must be served. Standing on the bayou-bank
in front of the Mérionaux, one could say "Good day" with the eyes to
the Zévérin Theriots--that was the name of the parents of the young
bridegroom. Looking under the branches of the oaks, one could see
across the prairie,--prairie and sea-marsh it was,--and clearly
distinguish another little red-washed house like the Mérionaux, with
a painted roof hanging over the windows, and a staircase going up
outside to the garret. With the sun shining in the proper direction,
one might distinguish more, and with love shining like the sun in the
eyes, one might see, one might see--a heart full.
It was only the eyes, however, which could make such a quick voyage to
the Zévérin Theriots; a skiff had a long day's journey to reach them.
The bayou sauntered along over the country like a negro on a Sunday's
pleasuring, trusting to God for time, and to the devil for means.
Oh, nothing can travel quickly over a bayou! Ask any one who has
waited on a bayou-bank for a physician or a life-and-death message.
Thought refuses to travel and turn and double over it; thought, like
the eye, takes the shortest cut--straight over the sea-marsh; and in
the spring of the year, when the lilies are in bloom, thought could
not take a more heavenly way, even from beloved to beloved.
It was the week before marriage, that week when, more than one's whole
life afterward, one's heart feels most longing--most--well, in fact,
it was the week before marriage. From Sunday to Sunday, that was all
the time to be passed. Adorine--women live through this week by
the grace of God, or perhaps they would be as unreasonable as the
men--Adorine could look across the prairie to the little red roof
during the day, and could think across it during the night, and get
up before day to look across again--longing, longing all the time.
Of course one must supply all this from one's own imagination or
experience.
But Adorine could sing, and she sang. One might hear, in a favorable
wind, a gunshot, or the barking of a dog from one place to the other,
so that singing, as to effect, was nothing more than the voicing of
her looking and thinking and longing.
When one loves, it is as if everything was known of and seen by the
other; not only all that passes in the head and heart, which would
in all conscience be more than enough to occupy the other, but the
talking, the dressing, the conduct. It was then that the back hair was
braided and the front curled more and more beautifully every day, and
that the calico dresses became stiffer and stiffer, and the white
crochet lace collar broader and lower in the neck. At thirteen she was
beautiful enough to startle one, they say, but that was nothing; she
spent time and care upon these things, as if, like other women, her
fate seriously depended upon them. There is no self-abnegation like
that of a woman in love.
It was her singing, however, which most showed that other existence
in her existence. When she sang at her spinning-wheel or her loom, or
knelt battling clothes on the bank of the bayou, her lips would kiss
out the words, and the tune would rise and fall and tremble, as if
Zepherin were just across there, anywhere; in fact, as if every blue
and white lily might hide an ear of him.
It was the time of the new moon, fortunately, when all sit up late in
the country. The family would stop in their talking about the
wedding to listen to her. She did not know it herself, but it--the
singing--was getting louder and clearer, and, poor little thing, it
told everything. And after the family went to bed they could still
hear her, sitting on the bank of the bayou, or up in her window,
singing and looking at the moon traveling across the lily prairie--for
all its beauty and brightness no more beautiful and bright than a
heart in love.
It was just past the middle of the week, a Thursday night. The moon
was so bright the colors of the lilies could be seen, and the singing,
so sweet, so far-reaching--it was the essence of the longing of love.
Then it was that the miracle happened to her. Miracles are always
happening to the Acadians. She could not sleep, she could not stay in
bed. Her heart drove her to the window, and kept her there, and--among
the civilized it could not take place, but here she could sing as she
pleased in the middle of the night; it was nobody's affair, nobody's
disturbance. "Saint Ann! Saint Joseph! Saint Mary!" She heard her song
answered! She held her heart, she bent forward, she sang again. Oh,
the air was full of music! It was all music! She fell on her knees;
she listened, looking at the moon; and, with her face in her hands,
looking at Zepherin. It was God's choir of angels, she thought, and
one with a voice like Zepherin! Whenever it died away she would sing
again, and again, and again--
[Illustration: "HER HEART DROVE HER TO THE WINDOW".]
But the sun came, and the sun is not created, like the moon, for
lovers, and whatever happened in the night, there was work to be done
in the day. Adorine worked like one in a trance, her face as radiant
as the upturned face of a saint. They did not know what it was, or
rather they thought it was love. Love is so different out there, they
make all kinds of allowances for it. But, in truth, Adorine was
still hearing her celestial voices or voice. If the cackling of the
chickens, the whir of the spinning-wheel, or the "bum bum" of the loom
effaced it a moment, she had only to go to some still place, round
her hand over her ear, and give the line of a song, and--it was
Zepherin--Zepherin she heard.
She walked in a dream until night. When the moon came up she was at
the window, and still it continued, so faint, so sweet, that answer to
her song. Echo never did anything more exquisite, but she knew nothing
of such a heathen as Echo. Human nature became exhausted. She fell
asleep where she was, in the window, and dreamed as only a bride can
dream of her groom. When she awoke, "Adorine! Adorine!" the beautiful
angel voices called to her; "Zepherin! Zepherin!" she answered, as if
she, too, were an angel, signaling another angel in heaven. It was too
much. She wept, and that broke the charm. She could hear nothing more
after that. All that day was despondency, dejection, tear-bedewed
eyes, and tremulous lips, the commonplace reaction, as all know, of
love exaltation. Adorine's family, Acadian peasants though they were,
knew as much about it as any one else, and all that any one knows
about it is that marriage is the cure-all, and the only cure-all, for
love.
[Illustration: "ALL THAT DAY WAS DESPONDENCY, DEJECTION."]
And Zepherin? A man could better describe his side of that week; for
it, too, has mostly to be described from imagination or experience.
What is inferred is that what Adorine longed and thought and looked
in silence and resignation, according to woman's way, he suffered
equally, but in a man's way, which is not one of silence or
resignation,--at least when one is a man of eighteen,--the last
interview, the near wedding, her beauty, his love, her house in sight,
the full moon, the long, wakeful nights.
He took his pirogue; but the bayou played with his impatience,
maddened his passion, bringing him so near, to meander with him again
so far away. There was only a short prairie between him and ----, a
prairie thick with lily-roots--one could almost walk over their
heads, so close, and gleaming in the moonlight. But this is all only
inference.
The pirogue was found tethered to the paddle stuck upright in the soft
bank, and--Adorine's parents related the rest. Nothing else was found
until the summer drought had bared the swamp.
There was a little girl in the house when we arrived--all else were in
the field--a stupid, solemn, pretty child, the child of a brother. How
she kept away from Adorine, and how much that testified!
It would have been too painful. The little arms around her neck, the
head nestling to her bosom, sleepily pressing against it. And the
little one might ask to be sung to sleep. Sung to sleep!
The little bed-chamber, with its high mattressed bed, covered with
the Acadian home-spun quilt, trimmed with netting fringe, its bit of
mirror over the bureau, the bottle of perfumed grease to keep the
locks black and glossy, the prayer-beads and blessed palms hanging
on the wall, the low, black polished spinning-wheel, the loom,--the
_métier d' Adorine_ famed throughout the parish,--the ever goodly
store of cotton and yarn hanks swinging from the ceiling, and the
little square, open window which looked under the mossy oak-branches
to look over the prairie; and once again all blue and white
lilies--they were all there, as Adorine was there; but there was
more--not there.
ANNE MARIE AND JEANNE MARIE