The days and the nights were very lonely for Madame Delisle. Gustave,
her husband, was away yonder in Virginia somewhere, with Beauregard,
and she was here in the old house on Bayou St. John, alone with her
slaves.
Madame was very beautiful. So beautiful, that she found much diversion
in sitting for hours before the mirror, contemplating her own
loveliness; admiring the brilliancy of her golden hair, the sweet
languor of her blue eyes, the graceful contours of her figure, and the
peach-like bloom of her flesh. She was very young. So young that she
romped with the dogs, teased the parrot, and could not fall asleep at
night unless old black Manna-Loulou sat beside her bed and told her
stories.
In short, she was a child, not able to realize the significance of
the tragedy whose unfolding kept the civilized world in suspense. It
was only the immediate effect of the awful drama that moved her: the
gloom that, spreading on all sides, penetrated her own existence and
deprived it of joyousness.
Sépincourt found her looking very lonely and disconsolate one day when
he stopped to talk with her. She was pale, and her blue eyes were dim
with unwept tears. He was a Frenchman who lived near by. He shrugged
his shoulders over this strife between brothers, this quarrel which was
none of his; and he resented it chiefly upon the ground that it made
life uncomfortable; yet he was young enough to have had quicker and
hotter blood in his veins.
When he left Madame Delisle that day, her eyes were no longer dim, and
a something of the dreariness that weighted her had been lifted away.
That mysterious, that treacherous bond called sympathy, had revealed
them to each other.
He came to her very often that summer, clad always in cool, white
duck, with a flower in his buttonhole. His pleasant brown eyes sought
hers with warm, friendly glances that comforted her as a caress might
comfort a disconsolate child. She took to watching for his slim figure,
a little bent, walking lazily up the avenue between the double line of
magnolias.
They would sit sometimes during whole afternoons in the vine-sheltered
corner of the gallery, sipping the black coffee that Manna-Loulou
brought to them at intervals; and talking, talking incessantly during
the first days when they were unconsciously unfolding themselves to
each other. Then a time came--it came very quickly--when they seemed to
have nothing more to say to one another.
He brought her news of the war; and they talked about it listlessly,
between long intervals of silence, of which neither took account. An
occasional letter came by round-about ways from Gustave--guarded arid
saddening in its tone. They would read it and sigh over it together.
Once they stood before his portrait that hung in the drawing-room and
that looked out at them with kind, indulgent eyes. Madame wiped the
picture with her gossamer handkerchief and impulsively pressed a tender
kiss upon the painted canvas. For months past the living image of her
husband had been receding further and further into a mist which she
could penetrate with no faculty or power that she possessed.
One day at sunset, when she and Sépincourt stood silently side by
side, looking across the _marais_, aflame with the western light, he
said to her: "_M'amie_, let us go away from this country that is so
_triste_. Let us go to Paris, you and me."
She thought that he was jesting, and she laughed nervously. "Yes, Paris
would surely be gayer than Bayou St. John," she answered. But he was
not jesting. She saw it at once in the glance that penetrated her own;
in the quiver of his sensitive lip and the quick beating of a swollen
vein in his brown throat.
"Paris, or anywhere--with you--ah, _bon Dieu!_" he whispered, seizing
her hands. But she withdrew from him, frightened, and hurried away into
the house, leaving him alone.
That night, for the first time, Madame did not want to hear
Manna-Loulou's stories, and she blew out the wax candle that till now
had burned nightly, in her sleeping-room, under its tall, crystal
globe. She had suddenly become a woman capable of love or sacrifice.
She would not hear Manna-Loulou's stories. She wanted to be alone, to
tremble and to weep.
In the morning her eyes were dry, but she would not see Sépincourt
when he came. Then he wrote her a letter.
"I have offended you and I would rather die!" it ran. "Do not banish me
from your presence that is life to me. Let me lie at your feet, if only
for a moment, in which to hear you say that you forgive me."
Men have written just such letters before, but Madame did not know it.
To her it was a voice from the unknown, like music, awaking in her a
delicious tumult that seized and held possession of her whole being.
When they met, he had but to look into her face to know that he need
not lie at her feet craving forgiveness. She was waiting for him
beneath the spreading branches of a live-oak that guarded the gate of
her home like a sentinel.
For a brief moment he held her hands, which trembled. Then he folded
her in his arms and kissed her many times. "You will go with me,
_m'amie_? I love you--oh, I love you! Will you not go with me,
_m'amie_?"
"Anywhere, anywhere," she told him in a fainting voice that he could
scarcely hear.
But she did not go with him. Chance willed it otherwise. That night
a courier brought her a message from Beauregard, telling her that
Gustave, her husband, was dead.
When the new year was still young, Sépincourt decided that, all things
considered, he might, without any appearance of indecent haste, speak
again of his love to Madame Delisle. That love was quite as acute
as ever; perhaps a little sharper, from the long period of silence
and waiting to which he had subjected it. He found her, as he had
expected, clad in deepest mourning. She greeted him precisely as she
had welcomed the curé, when the kind old priest had brought to her the
consolations of religion--clasping his two hands warmly, and calling
him "cher ami." Her whole attitude and bearing brought to Sépincourt
the poignant, the bewildering conviction that he held no place in her
thoughts.
They sat in the drawing-room before the portrait of Gustave, which
was draped with his scarf. Above the picture hung his sword, and
beneath it was an embankment of flowers. Sépincourt felt an almost
irresistible impulse to bend his knee before this altar, upon which he
saw foreshadowed the immolation of his hopes.
There was a soft air blowing gently over the _marais_. It came to
them through the open window, laden with a hundred subtle sounds and
scents of the springtime. It seemed to remind Madame of something
far, far away, for she gazed dreamily out into the blue firmament. It
fretted Sépincourt with impulses to speech and action which he found it
impossible to control.
"You must know what has brought me," he began impulsively, drawing
his chair nearer to hers. "Through all these months I have never
ceased to love you and to long for you. Night and day the sound of
your dear voice has been with me; your eyes"--She held out her hand
deprecatingly. He took it and held it. She let it lie unresponsive in
his.
"You cannot have forgotten that you loved me not long ago," he went on
eagerly, "that you were ready to follow me anywhere,--anywhere; do you
remember? I have come now to ask you to fulfill that promise; to ask
you toy be my wife, my companion, the dear treasure of my life."
She heard his warm and pleading tones as though listening to a strange
language, imperfectly understood.
She withdrew her hand from his, and leaned her brow thoughtfully upon
it.
"Can you not feel--can you not understand, _mon ami_," she said calmly,
"that now such a thing--such a thought, is impossible to me?"
"Impossible?"
"Yes, impossible. Can you not see that now my heart, my soul, my
thought--my very life, must belong to another? It could not be
different."
"Would you have me believe that you can wed your young existence to the
dead?" he exclaimed with something like horror. Her glance was sunk
deep in the embankment of flowers before her.
"My husband has never been so living to me as he is now," she replied
with a faint smile of commiseration for Sépincourt's fatuity. "Every
object that surrounds me speaks to me of him. I look yonder across
the _marais_, and I see him coming toward me, tired and toil-stained
from the hunt. I see him again sitting in this chair or in that one.
I hear his familiar voice, his footsteps upon the galleries. We walk
once more together beneath the magnolias; and at night in dreams I feel
that he is there, there, near me. How could it be different! Ah! I
have memories, memories to crowd and fill my life, if I live a hundred
years!"
Sépincourt was wondering why she did not take the sword down from her
altar and thrust it through his body here and there. The effect would
have been infinitely more agreeable than her words, penetrating his
soul like fire. He arose confused, enraged with pain.
"Then, Madame," he stammered, "there is nothing left for me but to take
my leave. I bid you adieu."
"Do not be offended, _mon ami_," she said kindly, holding out her hand.
"You are going to Paris, I suppose?"
"What does it matter," he exclaimed desperately, "where I go?"
"Oh, I only wanted to wish you _bon voyage_" she assured him amiably.
Many days after that Sépincourt spent in the fruitless mental effort of
trying to comprehend that psychological enigma, a woman's heart.
Madame still lives on Bayou St. John. She is rather an old lady now, a
very pretty old lady, against whose long years of widowhood there has
never been a breath of reproach. The memory of Gustave still fills and
satisfies her days. She has never failed, once a year, to have a solemn
high mass said for the repose of his soul.