A CRY OF DISTRESS.
Père Jerome's smile and exclamation, as some days later he entered his
parlor in response to the announcement of a visitor, were indicative of
hearty greeting rather than surprise.
"Madame Delphine!"
Yet surprise could hardly have been altogether absent, for though
another Sunday had not yet come around, the slim, smallish figure
sitting in a corner, looking very much alone, and clad in dark attire,
which seemed to have been washed a trifle too often, was Delphine
Carraze on her second visit. And this, he was confident, was over and
above an attendance in the confessional, where he was sure he had
recognized her voice.
She rose bashfully and gave her hand, then looked to the floor, and
began a faltering speech, with a swallowing motion in the throat, smiled
weakly and commenced again, speaking, as before, in a gentle, low note,
frequently lifting up and casting down her eyes while shadows of anxiety
and smiles of apology chased each other rapidly across her face. She was
trying to ask his advice.
"Sit down," said he; and when they had taken seats she resumed, with
downcast eyes:
"You know,--probably I should have said this in the confessional, but"--
"No matter, Madame Delphine; I understand; you did not want an oracle,
perhaps; you want a friend."
She lifted her eyes, shining with tears, and dropped them again.
"I"--she ceased. "I have done a"--she dropped her head and shook it
despondingly--"a cruel thing." The tears rolled from her eyes as she
turned away her face.
Père Jerome remained silent, and presently she turned again, with the
evident intention of speaking at length.
"It began nineteen years ago--by"--her eyes, which she had lifted, fell
lower than ever, her brow and neck were suffused with blushes, and she
murmured--"I fell in love."
She said no more, and by and by Père Jerome replied:
"Well, Madame Delphine, to love is the right of every soul. I believe in
love. If your love was pure and lawful I am sure your angel guardian
smiled upon you; and if it was not, I cannot say you have nothing to
answer for, and yet I think God may have said 'She is a quadroone; all
the rights of her womanhood trampled in the mire, sin made easy to
her--almost compulsory,--charge it to account of whom it may concern.'"
"No, no!" said Madame Delphine, looking up quickly, "some of it might
fall upon"--Her eyes fell, and she commenced biting her lips and
nervously pinching little folds in her skirt. "He was good--as good as
the law would let him be--better, indeed, for he left me property, which
really the strict law does not allow. He loved our little daughter very
much. He wrote to his mother and sisters, owning all his error and
asking them to take the child and bring her up. I sent her to them when
he died, which was soon after, and did not see my child for sixteen
years. But we wrote to each other all the time, and she loved me. And
then--at last"--Madame Delphine ceased speaking, but went on diligently
with her agitated fingers, turning down foolish hems lengthwise of her
lap.
"At last your mother-heart conquered," said Père Jerome.
She nodded.
"The sisters married, the mother died; I saw that even where she was she
did not escape the reproach of her birth and blood, and when she asked
me to let her come"--The speaker's brimming eyes rose an instant. "I
know it was wicked, but--I said, come."
The tears dripped through her hands upon her dress.
"Was it she who was with you last Sunday?"
"Yes."
"And now you do not know what to do with her?"
"_Ah! c'est ça oui_!--that is it."
"Does she look like you, Madame Delphine?"
"Oh, thank God", no! you would never believe she was my daughter, she is
white and beautiful!"
"You thank God for that which is your main difficulty, Madame Delphine."
"Alas! yes."
Père Jerome laid his palms tightly across his knees with his arms bowed
out, and fixed his eyes upon the ground, pondering.
"I suppose she is a sweet, good daughter?" said he, glancing at Madame
Delphine, without changing his attitude.
Her answer was to raise her eyes rapturously.
"Which gives us the dilemma in its fullest force," said the priest,
speaking as if to the floor. "She has no more place than if she had
dropped upon a strange planet." He suddenly looked up with a brightness
which almost as quickly passed away, and then he looked down again. His
happy thought was the cloister; but he instantly said to himself: "They
cannot have overlooked that choice, except intentionally--which they
have a right to do." He could do nothing but shake his head.
"And suppose you should suddenly die," he said; he wanted to get at once
to the worst.
The woman made a quick gesture, and buried her head in her handkerchief,
with the stifled cry:
"Oh, Olive, my daughter!"
"Well, Madame Delphine," said Père Jerome, more buoyantly, "one thing is
sure: we _must_ find a way out of this trouble."
"Ah!" she exclaimed, looking heavenward, "if it might be!"
"But it must be!" said the priest.
"But how shall it be?" asked the desponding woman.
"Ah!" said Père Jerome, with a shrug, "God knows."
"Yes," said the quadroone, with a quick sparkle in her gentle eye; "and
I know, if God would tell anybody, He would tell you!"
The priest smiled and rose.
"Do you think so? Well, leave me to think of it. I will ask Him."
"And He will tell you!" she replied. "And He will bless you!" She rose
and gave her hand. As she withdrew it she smiled. "I had such a strange
dream," she said, backing toward the door.
"Yes?"
"Yes. I got my troubles all mixed up with your sermon. I dreamed I made
that pirate the guardian of my daughter."
Père Jerome smiled also, and shrugged.
"To you, Madame Delphine, as you are placed, every white man in this
country, on land or on water, is a pirate, and of all pirates, I think
that one is, without doubt, the best."
"Without doubt," echoed Madame Delphine, wearily, still withdrawing
backward. Père Jerome stepped forward and opened the door.
The shadow of some one approaching it from without fell upon the
threshold, and a man entered, dressed in dark blue cottonade, lifting
from his head a fine Panama hat, and from a broad, smooth brow, fair
where the hat had covered it, and dark below, gently stroking back his
very soft, brown locks. Madame Delphine slightly started aside, while
Père Jerome reached silently, but eagerly, forward, grasped a larger
hand than his own, and motioned its owner to a seat. Madame Delphine's
eyes ventured no higher than to discover that the shoes of the visitor
were of white duck.
"Well, Père Jerome," she said, in a hurried undertone, "I am just going
to say Hail Marys all the time till you find that out for me!"
"Well, I hope that will be soon, Madame Carraze. Good-day, Madame
Carraze."
And as she departed, the priest turned to the newcomer and extended both
hands, saying, in the same familiar dialect in which he had been
addressing the quadroone:
"Well-a-day, old playmate! After so many years!"
They sat down side by side, like husband and wife, the priest playing
with the other's hand, and talked of times and seasons past, often
mentioning Evariste and often Jean.
Madame Delphine stopped short half-way home and returned to Père
Jerome's. His entry door was wide open and the parlor door ajar. She
passed through the one and with downcast eyes was standing at the other,
her hand lifted to knock, when the door was drawn open and the white
duck shoes passed out. She saw, besides, this time the blue cottonade
suit.
"Yes," the voice of Père Jerome was saying, as his face appeared in the
door--"Ah! Madame"--
"I lef' my para_sol_," said Madame Delphine, in English.
There was this quiet evidence of a defiant spirit hidden somewhere down
under her general timidity, that, against a fierce conventional
prohibition, she wore a bonnet instead of the turban of her caste, and
carried a parasol.
Père Jerome turned and brought it.
He made a motion in the direction in which the late visitor had
disappeared.
"Madame Delphine, you saw dat man?"
"Not his face."
"You couldn' billieve me iv I tell you w'at dat man purpose to do!"
"Is dad so, Père Jerome?"
"He's goin' to hopen a bank!"
"Ah!" said Madame Delphine, seeing she was expected to be astonished.
Père Jerome evidently longed to tell something that was best kept
secret; he repressed the impulse, but his heart had to say something. He
threw forward one hand and looking pleasantly at Madame Delphine, with
his lips dropped apart, clenched his extended hand and thrusting it
toward the ground, said in a solemn undertone:
"He is God's own banker, Madame Delphine."