"ALL RIGHT"
The sun is once more setting upon the Place d'Armes. Once more the
shadows of cathedral and town-hall lie athwart the pleasant grounds
where again the city's fashion and beauty sit about in the sedate
Spanish way, or stand or slowly move in and out among the old willows
and along the white walks. Children are again playing on the sward;
some, you may observe, are in black, for Agricola. You see, too, a more
peaceful river, a nearer-seeming and greener opposite shore, and many
other evidences of the drowsy summer's unwillingness to leave the
embrace of this seductive land; the dreamy quietude of birds; the
spreading, folding, re-expanding and slow pulsating of the
all-prevailing fan (how like the unfolding of an angel's wing is
ofttimes the broadening of that little instrument!); the oft-drawn
handkerchief; the pale, cool colors of summer costume; the swallow,
circling and twittering overhead or darting across the sight; the
languid movement of foot and hand; the reeking flanks and foaming bits
of horses; the ear-piercing note of the cicada; the dancing butterfly;
the dog, dropping upon the grass and looking up to his master with
roping jaw and lolling tongue; the air sweetened with the merchandise of
the flower _marchandes_.
On the levee road, bridles and saddles, whips, gigs, and
carriages,--what a merry coming and going! We look, perforce, toward the
old bench where, six months ago, sat Joseph Frowenfeld. There is
somebody there--a small, thin, weary-looking man, who leans his bared
head slightly back against the tree, his thin fingers knit together in
his lap, and his chapeau-bras pressed under his arm. You note his
extreme neatness of dress, the bright, unhealthy restlessness of his
eye, and--as a beam from the sun strikes them--the fineness of his short
red curls. It is Doctor Keene.
He lifts his head and looks forward. Honoré and Frowenfeld are walking
arm-in-arm under the furthermost row of willows. Honoré is speaking. How
gracefully, in correspondence with his words, his free arm or
hand--sometimes his head or even his lithe form--moves in quiet gesture,
while the grave, receptive apothecary takes into his meditative mind, as
into a large, cool cistern, the valued rain-fall of his friend's
communications. They are near enough for the little doctor easily to
call them; but he is silent. The unhappy feel so far away from the
happy. Yet--"Take care!" comes suddenly to his lips, and is almost
spoken; for the two, about to cross toward the Place d'Armes at the very
spot where Aurora had once made her narrow escape, draw suddenly back,
while the black driver of a volante reins up the horse he bestrides, and
the animal himself swerves and stops.
The two friends, though startled apart, hasten with lifted hats to the
side of the volante, profoundly convinced that one, at least, of its two
occupants is heartily sorry that they were not rolled in the dust. Ah,
ah! with what a wicked, ill-stifled merriment those two ethereal women
bend forward in the faintly perfumed clouds of their ravishing
summer-evening garb, to express their equivocal mortification
and regret.
"Oh! I'm so sawry, oh! Almoze runned o'--ah, ha, ha, ha!"
Aurora could keep the laugh back no longer.
"An' righd yeh befo' haivry _boddie_! Ah, ha, ha! 'Sieur Grandissime,
'tis _me-e-e_ w'ad know 'ow dad is bad, ha, ha, ha! Oh! I assu' you,
gen'lemen, id is hawful!"
And so on.
By and by Honoré seemed urging them to do something, the thought of
which made them laugh, yet was entertained as not entirely absurd. It
may have been that to which they presently seemed to consent; they
alighted from the volante, dismissed it, and walked each at a partner's
side down the grassy avenue of the levee. It was as Clotilde with one
hand swept her light robes into perfect adjustment for the walk, and
turned to take the first step with Frowenfeld, that she raised her eyes
for the merest instant to his, and there passed between them an exchange
of glance which made the heart of the little doctor suddenly burn like a
ball of fire.
"Now we're all right," he murmured bitterly to himself, as, without
having seen him, she took the arm of the apothecary, and they
moved away.
Yes, if his irony was meant for this pair, he divined correctly. Their
hearts had found utterance across the lips, and the future stood waiting
for them on the threshold of a new existence, to usher them into a
perpetual copartnership in all its joys and sorrows, its
disappointments, its imperishable hopes, its aims, its conflicts, its
rewards; and the true--the great--the everlasting God of love was with
them. Yes, it had been "all right," now, for nearly twenty-four
hours--an age of bliss. And now, as they walked beneath the willows
where so many lovers had walked before them, they had whole histories to
tell of the tremors, the dismays, the misconstructions and longings
through which their hearts had come to this bliss; how at such a time,
thus and so; and after such and such a meeting, so and so; no part of
which was heard by alien ears, except a fragment of Clotilde's speech
caught by a small boy in unintentioned ambush.
"--Evva sinze de firze nighd w'en I big-in to nurze you wid de fivver."
She was telling him, with that new, sweet boldness so wonderful to a
lately accepted lover, how long she had loved him.
Later on they parted at the _porte-cochère_. Honoré and Aurora had got
there before them, and were passing on up the stairs. Clotilde,
catching, a moment before, a glimpse of her face, had seen that there
was something wrong; weather-wise as to its indications she perceived an
impending shower of tears. A faint shade of anxiety rested an instant on
her own face. Frowenfeld could not go in. They paused a little within
the obscurity of the corridor, and just to reassure themselves that
everything _was_ "all right," they--
God be praised for love's young dream!
The slippered feet of the happy girl, as she slowly mounted the stair
alone, overburdened with the weight of her blissful reverie, made no
sound. As she turned its mid-angle she remembered Aurora. She could
guess pretty well the source of her trouble; Honoré was trying to treat
that hand-clasping at the bedside of Agricola as a binding compact;
"which, of course, was not fair." She supposed they would have gone into
the front drawing-room; she would go into the back. But she
miscalculated; as she silently entered the door she saw Aurora standing
a little way beyond her, close before Honoré, her eyes cast down, and
the trembling fan hanging from her two hands like a broken pinion. He
seemed to be reiterating, in a tender undertone, some question intended
to bring her to a decision. She lifted up her eyes toward his with a
mute, frightened glance.
The intruder, with an involuntary murmur of apology, drew back; but, as
she turned, she was suddenly and unspeakably saddened to see Aurora drop
her glance, and, with a solemn slowness whose momentous significance
was not to be mistaken, silently shake her head.
"Alas!" cried the tender heart of Clotilde. "Alas! M. Grandissime!"