case against him, I see. Not only for malicious trespass, but of theft.
See this bolt?” producing a piece of iron from his coat pocket. “That’s
what gave him away.”
“I en’t no thief!” blurted Mamouche, indignantly. “It’s one piece o’
iron w’at I pick up in the road.”
“Sir,” said Doctor John-Luis with dignity, “I can understand how the
grandson of Théodule Peloté might be guilty of such mischievous pranks
as this boy has confessed to. But I know that the grandson of Stéphanie
Galopin could not be a thief.”
And he at once wrote out the check for twenty-five dollars, and handed
it to the red-faced man with the tips of his fingers.
It seemed very good to Doctor John-Luis to have the boy sitting again at
his fireside; and so natural, too. He seemed to be the incarnation of
unspoken hopes; the realization of vague and fitful memories of the
past.
When Mamouche kept on crying, Doctor John-Luis wiped away the tears with
his own brown silk handkerchief.
“Mamouche,” he said, “I want you to stay here; to live here with me
always. To learn how to work; to learn how to study; to grow up to be an
honorable man. An honorable man, Mamouche, for I want you for my own
child.”
His voice was pretty low and husky when he said that.
“I shall not take the key from the door to-*night,” he continued. “If
you do not choose to stay and be all this that I say, you may open the
door and walk out. I shall use no force to keep you.”
“What is he doing, Marsh?” asked Doctor John-Luis the following morning,
when he took the coffee that Marshall had brought to him in bed.
“Who dat, sah?”
“Why, the boy Mamouche, of course. What is he doing?”
Marshall laughed.
“He kneelin’ down dah on de flo’. He keep on sayin’, ‘Hail, Mary, full
o’ grace, de Lord is wid dee. Hail, Mary, full o’ grace’—t’ree, fo’
times, sah. I tell ’im, ‘W’at you sayin’ yo’ prayer dat away, boy?’ He
’low dat w’at his gran’ma lam ’im, ter keep outen mischief. W’en de
devil say, ‘Take dat gate offen de hinge; do dis; do dat,’ he gwine say
t’ree Hail Mary, an’ de devil gwine tu’n tail an’ run.”
“Yes, yes,” laughed Doctor John-Luis. “That’s Stéphanie all over.”
“An’ I tell ’im: See heah, boy, you drap a couple o’ dem Hail Mary, an’
quit studyin’ ’bout de devil, an’ sot yo’se’f down ter wuk. Dat the
oniest way to keep outen mischief.”
“What business is it of yours to interfere?” broke in Doctor John-Luis,
irritably. “Let the boy do as his grandmother instructed him.”
“I ain’t desputin’, sah,” apologized Marshall.
“But you know, Marsh,” continued the doctor, recovering his usual
amiability. “I think we’ll be able to do something with the boy. I’m
pretty sure of it. For, you see, he has his grandmother’s eyes; and his
grandmother was a very intelligent woman; a clever woman, Marsh. Her one
great mistake was when she married Théodule Peloté.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Sentimental Soul
A Sentimental Soul
I.
Lacodie stayed longer than was his custom in Mamzelle Fleurette’s little
store that evening. He had been tempted by the vapid utterances of a
conservative bellhanger to loudly voice his radical opinions upon the
rights and wrongs of humanity when he finally laid his picayune down
upon Mamzelle Fleurette’s counter and helped himself to _l’Abeille_ from
the top of the diminished pile of newspapers which stood there.
He was small, frail and hollow-chested, but his head was magnificent
with its generous adornment of waving black hair; its sunken eyes that
glowed darkly and steadily and sometimes flamed, and its moustaches
which were formidable.
“Eh bien, Mamzelle Fleurette, à demain, à demain!” and he waved a
nervous good-bye as he let himself quickly and noiselessly out.
However violent Lacodie might be in his manner toward conservatives, he
was always gentle, courteous and low-voiced with Mamzelle Fleurette, who
was much older than he, much taller; who held no opinions, and whom he
pitied, and even in a manner revered. Mamzelle Fleurette at once
dismissed the bell-hanger, with whom, on general principles, she had no
sympathy.
She wanted to close the store, for she was going over to the cathedral
to confession. She stayed a moment in the doorway watching Lacodie walk
down the opposite side of the street. His step was something between a
spring and a jerk, which to her partial eyes seemed the perfection of
motion. She watched him until he entered his own small low doorway, over
which hung a huge wooden key painted red, the emblem of his trade.
For many months now, Lacodie had been coming daily to Mamzelle
Fleurette’s little notion store to buy the morning paper, which he only
bought and read, however, in the afternoon. Once he had crossed over
with his box of keys and tools to open a cupboard, which would unlock
for no inducements of its owner. He would not suffer her to pay him for
the few moments’ work; it was nothing, he assured her; it was a
pleasure; he would not dream of accepting payment for so trifling a
service from a camarade and fellow-worker. But she need not fear that he
would lose by it, he told her with a laugh; he would only charge an
extra quarter to the rich lawyer around the corner, or to the top-lofty
druggist down the street when these might happen to need his services,
as they sometimes did. This was an alternative which seemed far from
right and honest to Mamzelle Fleurette. But she held a vague
understanding that men were wickeder in many ways than women; that
ungodliness was constitutional with them, like their sex, and
inseparable from it.
Having watched Lacodie until he disappeared within his shop, she retired
to her room, back of the store, and began her preparations to go out.
She brushed carefully the black alpaca skirt, which hung in long nunlike
folds around her spare figure. She smoothed down the brown, ill-fitting
basque, and readjusted the old-fashioned, rusty black lace collar which
she always wore. Her sleek hair was painfully and suspiciously black.
She powdered her face abundantly with poudre de riz before starting out,
and pinned a dotted black lace veil over her straw bonnet. There was
little force or character or anything in her withered face, except a
pathetic desire and appeal to be permitted to exist.
Mamzelle Fleurette did not walk down Chartres street with her usual
composed tread; she seemed preoccupied and agitated. When she passed the
locksmith’s shop over the way and heard his voice within, she grew
tremulously self-conscious, fingering her veil, swishing the black
alpaca and waving her prayer book about with meaningless intention.
Mamzelle Fleurette was in great trouble; trouble which was so bitter, so
sweet, so bewildering, so terrifying! It had come so stealthily upon her
she had never suspected what it might be. She thought the world was
growing brighter and more beautiful; she thought the flowers had
redoubled their sweetness and the birds their song, and that the voices
of her fellow-creatures had grown kinder and their faces truer.
The day before Lacodie had not come to her for his paper. At six o’clock
he was not there, at seven he was not there, nor at eight, and then she
knew he would not come. At first, when it was only a little past the
time of his coming, she had sat strangely disturbed and distressed in
the rear of the store, with her back to the door. When the door opened
she turned with fluttering expectancy. It was only an unhappy-looking
child, who wanted to buy some foolscap, a pencil and an eraser. The next
to come in was an old mulatresse, who was bringing her prayer beads for
Mamzelle Fleurette to mend. The next was a gentleman, to buy the Courier
des Etats Unis, and then a young girl, who wanted a holy picture for her
favorite nun at the Ursulines; it was everybody but Lacodie.
A temptation assailed Mamzelle Fleurette, almost fierce in its
intensity, to carry the paper over to his shop herself, when he was not
there at seven. She conquered it from sheer moral inability to do
anything so daring, so unprecedented. But to-day, when he had come back
and had stayed so long discoursing with the bellhanger, a contentment, a
rapture, had settled upon her being which she could no longer ignore or
mistake. She loved Lacodie. That fact was plain to her now, as plain as
the conviction that every reason existed why she should not love him. He
was the husband of another woman. To love the husband of another woman
was one of the deepest sins which Mamzelle Fleurette knew; murder was
perhaps blacker, but she was not sure. She was going to confession now.
She was going to tell her sin to Almighty God and Father Fochelle, and
ask their forgiveness. She was going to pray and beg the saints and the
Holy Virgin to remove the sweet and subtle poison from her soul. It was
surely a poison, and a deadly one, which could make her feel that her
youth had come back and taken her by the hand.
II.
Mamzelle Fleurette had been confessing for many years to old Father
Fochelle. In his secret heart he often thought it a waste of his time
and her own that she should come with her little babblings, her little
nothings to him, calling them sins. He felt that a wave of the hand
might brush them away, and that it in a manner compromised the dignity
of holy absolution to pronounce the act over so innocent a soul.
To-day she had whispered all her shortcomings into his ear through the
grating of the confessional; he knew them so well! There were many other
penitents waiting to be heard, and he was about to dismiss her with a
hasty blessing when she arrested him, and in hesitating, faltering
accents told him of her love for the locksmith, the husband of another
woman. A slap in the face would not have startled Father Fochelle more
forcibly or more painfully. What soul was there on earth, he wondered,
so hedged about with innocence as to be secure from the machinations of
Satan! Oh, the thunder of indignation that descended upon Mamzelle
Fleurette’s head! She bowed down, beaten to earth beneath it. Then came
questions, one, two, three, in quick succession, that made Mamzelle
Fleurette gasp and clutch blindly before her. Why was she not a shadow,
a vapor, that she might dissolve from before those angry, penetrating
eyes; or a small insect, to creep into some crevice and there hide
herself forevermore?
“Oh, father! no, no, no!” she faltered, “he knows nothing, nothing. I
would die a hundred deaths before he should know, before anyone should
know, besides yourself and the good God of whom I implore pardon.”
Father Fochelle breathed more freely, and mopped his face with a flaming
bandana, which he took from the ample pocket of his soutane. But he
scolded Mamzelle Fleurette roundly, unpityingly; for being a fool, for
being a sentimentalist. She had not committed mortal sin, but the
occasion was ripe for it; and look to it she must that she keep Satan at
bay with watchfulness and prayer. “Go, my child, and sin no more.”
Mamzelle Fleurette made a détour in regaining her home by which she
would not have to pass the locksmith’s shop. She did not even look in
that direction when she let herself in at the glass door of her store.
Some time before, when she was yet ignorant of the motive which prompted
the act, she had cut from a newspaper a likeness of Lacodie, who had
served as foreman of the jury during a prominent murder trial. The
likeness happened to be good, and quite did justice to the locksmith’s
fine physiognomy with its leonine hirsute adornment. This picture
Mamzelle Fleurette had kept hitherto between the pages of her prayer
book. Here, twice a day, it looked out at her; as she turned the leaves
of the holy mass in the morning, and when she read her evening devotions
before her own little home altar, over which hung a crucifix and a
picture of the Empress Eugénie.
Her first action upon entering her room, even before she unpinned the
dotted veil, was to take Lacodie’s picture from her prayer book and
place it at random between the leaves of a “Dictionnaire de la Langue
Francaise,” which was the undermost of a pile of old books that stood on
the corner of the mantelpiece. Between night and morning, when she would
approach the holy sacrament, Mamzelle Fleurette felt it to be her duty
to thrust Lacodie from her thoughts by every means and device known to
her.
The following day was Sunday, when there was no occasion or opportunity
for her to see the locksmith. Moreover, after partaking of holy
communion, Mamzelle Fleurette felt invigorated; she was conscious of a
new, if fictitious, strength to combat Satan and his wiles.
On Monday, as the hour approached for Lacodie to appear, Mamzelle
Fleurette became harassed by indecision. Should she call in the young
girl, the neighbor who relieved her on occasion, and deliver the store
into the girl’s hands for an hour or so? This might be well enough for
once in a while, but she could not conveniently resort to this
subterfuge daily. After all, she had her living to make, which
consideration was paramount. She finally decided that she would retire
to her little back room and when she heard the store door open she would
call out:
“Is it you, Monsieur Lacodie? I am very busy; please take your paper and
leave your cinq sous on the counter.” If it happened not to be Lacodie
she would come forward and serve the customer in person. She did not, of
course, expect to carry out this performance each day; a fresh device
would no doubt suggest itself for tomorrow. Mamzelle Fleurette proceeded
to carry out her programme to the letter.
“Is it you, Monsieur Lacodie?” she called out from the little back room,
when the front door opened. “I am very busy; please take your paper—”
“Ce n’est pas Lacodie, Mamzelle Fleurette. C’est moi, Augustine.”
It was Lacodie’s wife, a fat, comely young woman, wearing a blue veil
thrown carelessly over her kinky black hair, and carrying some grocery
parcels clasped close in her arms. Mamzelle Fleurette emerged from the
back room, a prey to the most contradictory emotions; relief and
disappointment struggling for the mastery with her.
“No Lacodie to-day, Mamzelle Fleurette,” Augustine announced with a
certain robust ill-humor; “he is there at home shaking with a chill till
the very window panes rattle. He had one last Friday” (the day he had
not come for his paper) “and now another and a worse one to-day. God
knows, if it keeps on-well, let me have the paper; he will want to read
it to-night when his chill is past.”
Mamzelle Fleurette handed the paper to Augustine, feeling like an old
woman in a dream handing a newspaper to a young woman in a dream. She
had never thought of Lacodie having chills or being ill. It seemed very
strange. And Augustine was no sooner gone than all the ague remedies she
had ever heard of came crowding to Mamzelle Fleurette’s mind; an egg in
black coffee—or was it a lemon in black coffee? or an egg in vinegar?
She rushed to the door to call Augustine back, but the young woman was
already far down the street.
III.
Augustine did not come the next day, nor the next, for the paper. The
unhappy looking child who had returned for more foolscap, informed
Mamzelle Fleurette that he had heard his mother say that Monsieur
Lacodie was very sick, and the bellhanger had sat up all night with him.
The following day Mamzelle Fleurette saw Choppin’s coupé pass clattering
over the cobblestones and stop before the locksmith’s door. She knew
that with her class it was only in a case of extremity that the famous
and expensive physician was summoned. For the first time she thought of
death. She prayed all day, silently, to herself, even while waiting upon
customers.
In the evening she took an _Abeille_ from the top of the pile on the
counter, and throwing a light shawl over her head, started with the
paper over to the locksmith’s shop. She did not know if she were
committing a sin in so doing. She would ask Father Fochelle on Saturday,
when she went to confession. She did not think it could be a sin; she
would have called long before on any other sick neighbor, and she
intuitively felt that in this distinction might lie the possibility of
sin.
The shop was deserted except for the presence of Lacodie’s little boy of
five, who sat upon the floor playing with the tools and contrivances
which all his days he had coveted, and which all his days had been
denied to him. Mamzelle Fleurette mounted the narrow stairway in the
rear of the shop which led to an upper landing and then into the room of
the married couple. She stood a while hesitating upon this landing
before venturing to knock softly upon the partly open door through which
she could hear their voices.
“I thought,” she remarked apologetically to Augustine, “that perhaps
Monsieur Lacodie might like to look at the paper and you had no time to
come for it, so I brought it myself.”
“Come in, come in, Mamzelle Fleurette. It’s Mamzelle Fleurette who comes
to inquire about you, Lacodie,” Augustine called out loudly to her
husband, whose half consciousness she somehow confounded with deafness.
Mamzelle Fleurette drew mincingly forward, clasping her thin hands
together at the waist line, and she peeped timorously at Lacodie lying
lost amid the bedclothes. His black mane was tossed wildly over the
pillow and lent a fictitious pallor to the yellow waxiness of his drawn
features. An approaching chill was sending incipient shudders through
his frame, and making his teeth claque. But he still turned his head
courteously in Mamzelle Fleurette’s direction.
“Bien bon de votre part, Mamzelle Fleurette—mais c’est fini. J’suis
flambé, flambé, flambé!”
Oh, the pain of it! to hear him in such extremity thanking her for her
visit, assuring her in the same breath that all was over with him. She
wondered how Augustine could hear it so composedly. She whisperingly
inquired if a priest had been summoned.
“Inutile; il n’en veut pas,” was Augustine’s reply. So he would have no
priest at his bedside, and here was a new weight of bitterness for
Mamzelle Fleurette to carry all her days.
She flitted back to her store through the darkness, herself like a slim
shadow. The November evening was chill and misty. A dull aureole shot
out from the feeble gas jet at the corner, only faintly and for an
instant illumining her figure as it glided rapidly and noiselessly along
the banquette. Mamzelle Fleurette slept little and prayed much that
night. Saturday morning Lacodie died. On Sunday he was buried and
Mamzelle Fleurette did not go to the funeral, because Father Fochelle
told her plainly she had no business there.
It seemed inexpressibly hard to Mamzelle Fleurette that she was not
permitted to hold Lacodie in tender remembrance now that he was dead.
But Father Fochelle, with his practical insight, made no compromise with
sentimentality; and she did not question his authority, or his ability
to master the subtleties of a situation utterly beyond reach of her own
powers.
It was no longer a pleasure for Mamzelle Fleurette to go to confession
as it had formerly been. Her heart went on loving Lacodie and her soul
went on struggling; for she made this delicate and puzzling distinction
between heart and soul, and pictured the two as set in a very death
struggle against each other.
“I cannot help it, father. I try, but I cannot help it. To love him is
like breathing; I do not know how to help it. I pray, and pray, and it
does no good, for half of my prayers are for the repose of his soul. It
surely cannot be a sin, to pray for the repose of his soul?”
Father Fochelle was heartily sick and tired of Mamzelle Fleurette and
her stupidities. Oftentimes he was tempted to drive her from the
confessional, and forbid her return until she should have regained a
rational state of mind. But he could not withhold absolution from a
penitent who, week after week, acknowledged her shortcoming and strove
with all her faculties to overcome it and atone for it.
IV.
Augustine had sold out the locksmith’s shop and the business, and had
removed further down the street over a bakery. Out of her window she had
hung a sign, “Blanchisseuse de Fin.” Often, in passing by, Mamzelle
Fleurette would catch a glimpse of Augustine up at the window, plying
the irons; her sleeves rolled to the elbows, baring her round, white
arms, and the little black curls all moist and tangled about her face.
It was early spring then, and there was a languor in the air; an odor of
jasmine in every passing breeze; the sky was blue, unfathomable, and
fleecy white; and people along the narrow street laughed, and sang, and
called to one another from windows and doorways. Augustine had set a pot
of rose-geranium on her window sill and hung out a bird cage.
Once, Mamzelle Fleurette in passing on her way to confession heard her
singing roulades, vying with the bird in the cage. Another time she saw
the young woman leaning with half her body from the window, exchanging
pleasantries with the baker standing beneath on the banquette.
Still, a little later, Mamzelle Fleurette began to notice a handsome
young fellow often passing the store. He was jaunty and debonnaire and
wore a rich watchchain, and looked prosperous. She knew him quite well
as a fine young Gascon, who kept a stall in the French Market, and from
whom she had often bought charcuterie. The neighbors told her the young
Gascon was paying his addresses to Mme. Lacodie. Mamzelle Fleurette
shuddered. She wondered if Lacodie knew! The whole situation seemed
suddenly to shift its base, causing Mamzelle Fleurette to stagger. What
ground would her poor heart and soul have to do battle upon now?
She had not yet had time to adjust her conscience to the altered
conditions when one Saturday afternoon, as she was about to start out to
confession, she noticed an unusual movement down the street. The
bellhanger, who happened to be presenting himself in the character of a
customer, informed her that it was nothing more nor less than Mme.
Lacodie returning from her wedding with the Gascon. He was black and
bitter with indignation, and thought she might at least have waited for
the year to be out. But the charivari was already on foot; and Mamzelle
need not feel alarmed if, in the night, she heard sounds and clamor to
rouse the dead as far away as Metairie ridge.
Mamzelle Fleurette sank down in a chair, trembling in all her members.
She faintly begged the bellhanger to pour her a glass of water from the
stone pitcher behind the counter. She fanned herself and loosened her
bonnet strings. She sent the bell hanger away.
She nervously pulled off her rusty black kid gloves, and ten times more
nervously drew them on again. To a little customer, who came in for
chewing gum, she handed a paper of pins.
There was a great, a terrible upheaval taking place in Mamzelle
Fleurette’s soul. She was preparing for the first time in her life to
take her conscience into her own keeping.
When she felt herself sufficiently composed to appear decently upon the
street, she started out to confession. She did not go to Father
Fochelle. She did not even go to the Cathedral; but to a church which
was much farther away, and to reach which she had to spend a picayune
for car fare.
Mamzelle Fleurette confessed herself to a priest who was utterly new and
strange to her. She told him all her little venial sins, which she had
much difficulty in bringing to a number of any dignity and importance
whatever. Not once did she mention her love for Lacodie, the dead
husband of another woman.
Mamzelle Fleurette did not ride back to her home; she walked. The
sensation of walking on air was altogether delicious; she had never
experienced it before. A long time she stood contemplative before a shop
window in which were displayed wreaths, mottoes, emblems, designed for
the embellishment of tombstones. What a sweet comfort it would be, she
reflected, on the 1st of November to carry some such delicate offering
to Lacodie’s last resting place. Might not the sole care of his tomb
devolve upon her, after all! The possibility thrilled her and moved her
to the heart. What thought would the merry Augustine and her
lover-husband have for the dead lying in cemeteries!