that he was acting as substitute for Montéclin. Bitter as the conviction
was, he accepted it. He was patient; he could wait. He hoped some day to
hold her with a lover’s arms. That she was married made no particle of
difference to Gouvernail. He could not conceive or dream of it making a
difference. When the time came that she wanted him,—as he hoped and
believed it would come,—he felt he would have a right to her. So long as
she did not want him, he had no right to her,—no more than her husband
had. It was very hard to feel her warm breath and tears upon his cheek,
and her struggling bosom pressed against him and her soft arms clinging
to him and his whole body and soul aching for her, and yet to make no
sign.
He tried to think what Montéclin would have said and done, and to act
accordingly. He stroked her hair, and held her in a gentle embrace,
until the tears dried and the sobs ended. Before releasing herself she
kissed him against the neck; she had to love somebody in her own way!
Even that he endured like a stoic. But it was well he left her, to
plunge into the thick of rapid, breathless, exacting work till nearly
dawn.
Athénaïse was greatly soothed, and slept well. The touch of friendly
hands and caressing arms had been very grateful. Henceforward she would
not be lonely and unhappy, with Gouvernail there to comfort her.
X.
The fourth week of Athénaïse’s stay in the city was drawing to a close.
Keeping in view the intention which she had of finding some suitable and
agreeable employment, she had made a few tentatives in that direction.
But with the exception of two little girls who had promised to take
piano lessons at a price that would be embarrassing to mention, these
attempts had been fruitless. Moreover, the homesickness kept coming
back, and Gouvernail was not always there to drive it away.
She spent much of her time weeding and pottering among the flowers down
in the courtyard. She tried to take an interest in the black cat, and a
mockingbird that hung in a cage outside the kitchen door, and a
disreputable parrot that belonged to the cook next door, and swore
hoarsely all day long in bad French.
Beside, she was not well; she was not herself, as she told Sylvie. The
climate of New Orleans did not agree with her. Sylvie was distressed to
learn this, as she felt in some measure responsible for the health and
well-being of Monsieur Miché’s sister; and she made it her duty to
inquire closely into the nature and character of Athénaïse’s malaise.
Sylvie was very wise, and Athénaïse was very ignorant. The extent of her
ignorance and the depth of her subsequent enlightenment were
bewildering. She stayed a long, long time quite still, quite stunned,
after her interview with Sylvie, except for the short, uneven breathing
that ruffled her bosom. Her whole being was steeped in a wave of
ecstasy. When she finally arose from the chair in which she had been
seated, and looked at herself in the mirror, a face met hers which she
seemed to see for the first time, so transfigured was it with wonder and
rapture.
One mood quickly followed another, in this new turmoil of her senses,
and the need of action became uppermost. Her mother must know at once,
and her mother must tell Montéclin. And Cazeau must know. As she thought
of him, the first purely sensuous tremor of her life swept over her. She
half whispered his name, and the sound of it brought red blotches into
her cheeks. She spoke it over and over, as if it were some new, sweet
sound born out of darkness and confusion, and reaching her for the first
time. She was impatient to be with him. Her whole passionate nature was
aroused as if by a miracle.
She seated herself to write to her husband. The letter he would get in
the morning, and she would be with him at night. What would he say? How
would he act? She knew that he would forgive her, for had he not written
a letter?—and a pang of resentment toward Montéclin shot through her.
What did he mean by withholding that letter? How dared he not have sent
it?
Athénaïse attired herself for the street, and went out to post the
letter which she had penned with a single thought, a spontaneous
impulse. It would have seemed incoherent to most people, but Cazeau
would understand.
She walked along the street as if she had fallen heir to some
magnificent inheritance. On her face was a look of pride and
satisfaction that passers-by noticed and admired. She wanted to talk to
some one, to tell some person; and she stopped at the corner and told
the oyster-woman, who was Irish, and who God-blessed her, and wished
prosperity to the race of Cazeaus for generations to come. She held the
oyster-woman’s fat, dirty little baby in her arms and scanned it
curiously and observingly, as if a baby were a phenomenon that she
encountered for the first time in life. She even kissed it!
Then what a relief it was to Athénaïse to walk the streets without dread
of being seen and recognized by some chance acquaintance from Red river!
No one could have said now that she did not know her own mind.
She went directly from the oyster-woman’s to the office of Harding &
Offdean, her husband’s merchants; and it was with such an air of
partnership, almost proprietorship, that she demanded a sum of money on
her husband’s account, they gave it to her as unhesitatingly as they
would have handed it over to Cazeau himself. When Mr. Harding, who knew
her, asked politely after her health, she turned so rosy and looked so
conscious, he thought it a great pity for so pretty a woman to be such a
little goose.
Athénaïse entered a dry-goods store and bought all manner of
things,—little presents for nearly everybody she knew. She bought whole
bolts of sheerest, softest, downiest white stuff; and when the clerk, in
trying to meet her wishes, asked if she intended it for infant’s use,
she could have sunk through the floor, and wondered how he might have
suspected it.
As it was Montéclin who had taken her away from her husband, she wanted
it to be Montéclin who should take her back to him. So she wrote him a
very curt note,—in fact it was a postal card,—asking that he meet her at
the train on the evening following. She felt convinced that after what
had gone before, Cazeau would await her at their own home; and she
preferred it so.
Then there was the agreeable excitement of getting ready to leave, of
packing up her things. Pousette kept coming and going, coming and going;
and each time that she quitted the room it was with something that
Athénaïse had given her,—a handkerchief, a petticoat, a pair of
stockings with two tiny holes at the toes, some broken prayer-beads, and
finally a silver dollar.
Next it was Sylvie who came along bearing a gift of what she called “a
set of pattern’,”—things of complicated design which never could have
been obtained in any new-fangled bazaar or pattern-store, that Sylvie
had acquired of a foreign lady of distinction whom she had nursed years
before at the St. Charles hotel. Athénaïse accepted and handled them
with reverence, fully sensible of the great compliment and favor, and
laid them religiously away in the trunk which she had lately acquired.
She was greatly fatigued after the day of unusual exertion, and went
early to bed and to sleep. All day long she had not once thought of
Gouvernail, and only did think of him when aroused for a brief instant
by the sound of his foot-falls on the gallery, as he passed in going to
his room. He had hoped to find her up, waiting for him.
But the next morning he knew. Some one must have told him. There was no
subject known to her which Sylvie hesitated to discuss in detail with
any man of suitable years and discretion.
Athénaïse found Gouvernail waiting with a carriage to convey her to the
railway station. A momentary pang visited her for having forgotten him
so completely, when he said to her, “Sylvie tells me you are going away
this morning.”
He was kind, attentive, and amiable, as usual, but respected to the
utmost the new dignity and reserve that her manner had developed since
yesterday. She kept looking from the carriage window, silent, and
embarrassed as Eve after losing her ignorance. He talked of the muddy
streets and the murky morning, and of Montéclin. He hoped she would find
everything comfortable and pleasant in the country, and trusted she
would inform him whenever she came to visit the city again. He talked as
if afraid or mistrustful of silence and himself.
At the station she handed him her purse, and he bought her ticket,
secured for her a comfortable section, checked her trunk, and got all
the bundles and things safely aboard the train. She felt very grateful.
He pressed her hand warmly, lifted his hat, and left her. He was a man
of intelligence, and took defeat gracefully; that was all. But as he
made his way back to the carriage, he was thinking, “By heaven, it
hurts, it hurts!”
XI.
Athénaïse spent a day of supreme happiness and expectancy. The fair
sight of the country unfolding itself before her was balm to her vision
and to her soul. She was charmed with the rather unfamiliar, broad,
clean sweep of the sugar plantations, with their monster sugar-houses,
their rows of neat cabins like little villages of a single street, and
their impressive homes standing apart amid clusters of trees. There were
sudden glimpses of a bayou curling between sunny, grassy banks, or
creeping sluggishly out from a tangled growth of wood, and brush, and
fern, and poison-vines, and palmettos. And passing through the long
stretches of monotonous woodlands, she would close her eyes and taste in
anticipation the moment of her meeting with Cazeau. She could think of
nothing but him.
It was night when she reached her station. There was Montéclin, as she
had expected, waiting for her with a two-seated buggy, to which he had
hitched his own swift-footed, spirited pony. It was good, he felt, to
have her back on any terms; and he had no fault to find since she came
of her own choice. He more than suspected the cause of her coming; her
eyes and her voice and her foolish little manner went far in revealing
the secret that was brimming over in her heart. But after he had
deposited her at her own gate, and as he continued his way toward the
rigolet, he could not help feeling that the affair had taken a very
disappointing, an ordinary, a most commonplace turn, after all. He left
her in Cazeau’s keeping.
Her husband lifted her out of the buggy, and neither said a word until
they stood together within the shelter of the gallery. Even then they
did not speak at first. But Athénaïse turned to him with an appealing
gesture. As he clasped her in his arms, he felt the yielding of her
whole body against him. He felt her lips for the first time respond to
the passion of his own.
The country night was dark and warm and still, save for the distant
notes of an accordion which some one was playing in a cabin away off. A
little negro baby was crying somewhere. As Athénaïse withdrew from her
husband’s embrace, the sound arrested her.
“Listen, Cazeau! How Juliette’s baby is crying! Pauvre ti chou, I wonder
w’at is the matter with it?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
After the Winter
After the Winter
I.
Trézinie, the blacksmith’s daughter, stepped out upon the gallery just
as M’sieur Michel passed by. He did not notice the girl but walked
straight on down the village street.
His seven hounds skulked, as usual, about him. At his side hung his
powder-horn, and on his shoulder a gunny-bag slackly filled with game
that he carried to the store. A broad felt hat shaded his bearded face
and in his hand he carelessly swung his old-fashioned rifle. It was
doubtless the same with which he had slain so many people, Trézinie
shudderingly reflected. For Cami, the cobbler’s son—who must have
known—had often related to her how this man had killed two Choctaws, as
many Texans, a free mulatto and numberless blacks, in that vague
locality known as “the hills.”
Older people who knew better took little trouble to correct this ghastly
record that a younger generation had scored against him. They themselves
had come to half-believe that M’sieur Michel might be capable of
anything, living as he had, for so many years, apart from humanity,
alone with his hounds in a kennel of a cabin on the hill. The time
seemed to most of them fainter than a memory when, a lusty young fellow
of twenty-five, he had cultivated his strip of land across the lane from
Les Chêniers; when home and toil and wife and child were so many
benedictions that he humbly thanked heaven for having given him.
But in the early ’60’s he went with his friend Duplan and the rest of
the “Louisiana Tigers.” He came back with some of them. He came to
find—well, death may lurk in a peaceful valley lying in wait to ensnare
the toddling feet of little ones. Then, there are women—there are wives
with thoughts that roam and grow wanton with roaming; women whose pulses
are stirred by strange voices and eyes that woo; women who forget the
claims of yesterday, the hopes of to-morrow, in the impetuous clutch of
to-day.
But that was no reason, some people thought, why he should have cursed
men who found their blessings where they had left them—cursed God, who
had abandoned him.
Persons who met him upon the road had long ago stopped greeting him.
What was the use? He never answered them; he spoke to no one; he never
so much as looked into men’s faces. When he bartered his game and fish
at the village store for powder and shot and such scant food as he
needed, he did so with few words and less courtesy. Yet feeble as it
was, this was the only link that held him to his fellow-beings.
Strange to say, the sight of M’sieur Michel, though more forbidding than
ever that delightful spring afternoon, was so suggestive to Trézinie as
to be almost an inspiration.
It was Easter eve and the early part of April. The whole earth seemed
teeming with new, green, vigorous life everywhere—except the arid spot
that immediately surrounded Trézinie. It was no use; she had tried.
Nothing would grow among those cinders that filled the yard; in that
atmosphere of smoke and flame that was constantly belching from the
forge where her father worked at his trade. There were wagon wheels,
bolts and bars of iron, plowshares and all manner of unpleasant-looking
things littering the bleak, black yard; nothing green anywhere except a
few weeds that would force themselves into fence corners. And Trézinie
knew that flowers belong to Easter time, just as dyed eggs do. She had
plenty of eggs; no one had more or prettier ones; she was not going to
grumble about that. But she did feel distressed because she had not a
flower to help deck the altar on Easter morning. And every one else
seemed to have them in such abundance! There was ’Dame Suzanne among her
roses across the way. She must have clipped a hundred since noon. An
hour ago Trézinie had seen the carriage from Les Chêniers pass by on its
way to church with Mamzelle Euphrasie’s pretty head looking like a
picture enframed with the Easter lilies that filled the vehicle.
For the twentieth time Trézinie walked out upon the gallery. She saw
M’sieur Michel and thought of the pine hill. When she thought of the
hill she thought of the flowers that grew there—free as sunshine. The
girl gave a joyous spring that changed to a farandole as her feet
twinkled across the rough, loose boards of the gallery.
“Hé, Cami!” she cried, clapping her hands together.
Cami rose from the bench where he sat pegging away at the clumsy sole of
a shoe, and came lazily to the fence that divided his abode from
Trézinie’s.
“Well, w’at?” he inquired with heavy amiability. She leaned far over the
railing to better communicate with him.
“You’ll go with me yonda on the hill to pick flowers fo’ Easter, Cami?
I’m goin’ to take La Fringante along, too, to he’p with the baskets.
W’at you say?”
“No!” was the stolid reply. “I’m boun’ to finish them shoe’, if it is
fo’ a nigga.”
“Not now,” she returned impatiently; “to-morrow mo’nin’ at sun-up. An’ I
tell you, Cami, my flowers’ll beat all! Look yonda at ’Dame Suzanne
pickin’ her roses a’ready. An’ Mamzelle Euphraisie she’s car’ied her
lilies an’ gone, her. You tell me all that’s goin’ be fresh to-moro’!”
“Jus’ like you say,” agreed the boy, turning to resume his work. “But
you want to mine out fo’ the ole possum up in the wood. Let M’sieu
Michel set eyes on you!” and he raised his arms as if aiming with a gun.
“Pim, pam, poum! No mo’ Trézinie, no mo’ Cami, no mo’ La Fringante—all
stretch’!”
The possible risk which Cami so vividly foreshadowed but added a zest to
Trézinie’s projected excursion.
II.
It was hardly sun-up on the following morning when the three
children—Trézinie, Cami and the little negress, La Fringante—were
filling big, flat Indian baskets from the abundance of brilliant flowers
that studded the hill.
In their eagerness they had ascended the slope and penetrated deep into
the forest without thought of M’sieur Michel or of his abode. Suddenly,
in the dense wood, they came upon his hut—low, forbidding, seeming to
scowl rebuke upon them for their intrusion.
La Fringante dropped her basket, and, with a cry, fled. Cami looked as
if he wanted to do the same. But Trézinie, after the first tremor, saw
that the ogre himself was away. The wooden shutter of the one window was
closed. The door, so low that even a small man must have stooped to
enter it, was secured with a chain. Absolute silence reigned, except for
the whirr of wings in the air, the fitful notes of a bird in the
treetop.
“Can’t you see it’s nobody there!” cried Trézinie impatiently.
La Fringante, distracted between curiosity and terror, had crept
cautiously back again. Then they all peeped through the wide chinks
between the logs of which the cabin was built.
M’sieur Michel had evidently begun the construction of his house by
felling a huge tree, whose remaining stump stood in the centre of the
hut, and served him as a table. This primitive table was worn smooth by
twenty-five years of use. Upon it were such humble utensils as the man
required. Everything within the hovel, the sleeping bunk, the one seat,
were as rude as a savage would have fashioned them.
The stolid Cami could have stayed for hours with his eyes fastened to
the aperture, morbidly seeking some dead, mute sign of that awful
pastime with which he believed M’sieur Michel was accustomed to beguile
his solitude. But Trézinie was wholly possessed by the thought of her
Easter offerings. She wanted flowers and flowers, fresh with the earth
and crisp with dew.
When the three youngsters scampered down the hill again there was not a
purple verbena left about M’sieur Michel’s hut; not a May apple blossom,
not a stalk of crimson phlox—hardly a violet.
He was something of a savage, feeling that the solitude belonged to him.
Of late there had been forming within his soul a sentiment toward man,
keener than indifference, bitter as hate. He was coming to dread even
that brief intercourse with others into which his traffic forced him.
So when M’sieur Michel returned to his hut, and with his quick,
accustomed eye saw that his woods had been despoiled, rage seized him.
It was not that he loved the flowers that were gone more than he loved
the stars, or the wind that trailed across the hill, but they belonged
to and were a part of that life which he had made for himself, and which
he wanted to live alone and unmolested.
Did not those flowers help him to keep his record of time that was
passing? They had no right to vanish until the hot May days were upon
him. How else should he know? Why had these people, with whom he had
nothing in common, intruded upon his privacy and violated it? What would
they not rob him of next?
He knew well enough it was Easter; he had heard and seen signs yesterday
in the store that told him so. And he guessed that his woods had been
rifled to add to the mummery of the day.
M’sieur Michel sat himself moodily down beside his table—centuries
old—and brooded. He did not even notice his hounds that were pleading to
be fed. As he revolved in his mind the event of the morning—innocent as
it was in itself—it grew in importance and assumed a significance not at
first apparent. He could not remain passive under pressure of its
disturbance. He rose to his feet, every impulse aggressive, urging him
to activity. He would go down among those people all gathered together,
blacks and whites, and face them for once and all. He did not know what
he would say to them, but it would be defiance—something to voice the
hate that oppressed him.
The way down the hill, then across a piece of flat, swampy woodland and
through the lane to the village was so familiar that it required no
attention from him to follow it. His thoughts were left free to revel in
the humor that had driven him from his kennel.
As he walked down the village street he saw plainly that the place was
deserted save for the appearance of an occasional negress, who seemed
occupied with preparing the midday meal. But about the church scores of
horses were fastened; and M’sieur Michel could see that the edifice was
thronged to the very threshold.
He did not once hesitate, but obeying the force that impelled him to
face the people wherever they might be, he was soon standing with the
crowd within the entrance of the church. His broad, robust shoulders had
forced space for himself, and his leonine head stood higher than any
there.
“Take off yo’ hat!”
It was an indignant mulatto who addressed him. M’sieur Michel
instinctively did as he was bidden. He saw confusedly that there was a
mass of humanity close to him, whose contact and atmosphere affected him
strangely. He saw his wild-flowers, too. He saw them plainly, in bunches
and festoons, among the Easter lilies and roses and geraniums. He was
going to speak out, now; he had the right to and he would, just as soon
as that clamor overhead would cease.
“Bonté divine! M’sieur Michel!” whispered ’Dame Suzanne tragically to
her neighbor. Trézinie heard. Cami saw. They exchanged an electric
glance, and tremblingly bowed their heads low.
M’sieur Michel looked wrathfully down at the puny mulatto who had
ordered him to remove his hat. Why had he obeyed? That initial act of
compliance had somehow weakened his will, his resolution. But he would
regain firmness just as soon as that clamor above gave him chance to
speak.
It was the organ filling the small edifice with volumes of sound. It was
the voices of men and women mingling in the “Gloria in excelsis Deo!”
The words bore no meaning for him apart from the old familiar strain
which he had known as a child and chanted himself in that same
organ-loft years ago. How it went on and on. Would it never cease? It
was like a menace; like a voice reaching out from the dead past to taunt
him.
“Gloria in excelsis Deo!” over and over! How the deep basso rolled it
out! How the tenor and alto caught it up and passed it on to be lifted
by the high, flute-like ring of the soprano, till all mingled again in
the wild pæan, “Gloria in excelsis!”
How insistent was the refrain! and where, what, was that mysterious,
hidden quality in it; the power which was overcoming M’sieur Michel,
stirring within him a turmoil that bewildered him?
There was no use in trying to speak, or in wanting to. His throat could
not have uttered a sound. He wanted to escape, that was all. “Bonæ
voluntatis,”—he bent his head as if before a beating storm. “Gloria!
Gloria! Gloria!” He must fly; he must save himself, regain his hill
where sights and odors and sounds and saints or devils would cease to
molest him. “In excelsis Deo!” He retreated, forcing his way backward to
the door. He dragged his hat down over his eyes and staggered away down
the road. But the refrain pursued him—“ax! pax! pax!”—fretting him like
a lash. He did not slacken his pace till the tones grew fainter than an
echo, floating, dying away in an “in excelsis!” When he could hear it no
longer he stopped and breathed a sigh of rest and relief.
III.
All day long M’sieur Michel stayed about his hut engaged in some
familiar employment that he hoped might efface the unaccountable
impressions of the morning. But his restlessness was unbounded. A
longing had sprung up within him as sharp as pain and not to be
appeased. At once, on this bright, warm Easter morning the voices that
till now had filled his solitude became meaningless. He stayed mute and
uncomprehending before them. Their significance had vanished before the
driving want for human sympathy and companionship that had reawakened in
his soul.
When night came on he walked through the woods down the slant of the
hill again.
“It mus’ be all fill’ up with weeds,” muttered M’sieur Michel to himself
as he went. “Ah, Bon Dieu! with trees, Michel, with trees—in twenty-five
years, man.”