Four
ALCÉE LABALLIÈRE Wrote to his wife, Clarisse, that night. It was a loving letter, full of tender solicitude. He told her not to hurry back, but if she and the babies liked it at Biloxi,208 to stay a month longer. He was getting on nicely; and though he missed them, he was willing to bear the separation a while longer—realizing that their health and pleasure were the first things to be considered.
Five
AS FOR CLARISSE, she was charmed upon receiving her husband’s letter. She and the babies were doing well. The society was agreeable; many of her old friends and acquaintances were at the bay. And the first free breath since her marriage seemed to restore the pleasant liberty of her maiden days. Devoted as she was to her husband, their intimate conjugal life was something which she was more than willing to forego for a while.
So the storm passed and every one was happy.
The Godmother
One
TANTE ELODIE ATTRACTED YOUTH in some incomprehensible way. It was seldom there was not a group of young people gathered about her fire in winter or sitting with her in summer, in the pleasant shade of the live-oaks that screened the gallery.
There were several persons forming a half circle around her generous chimney early one evening in February. There were Madame Nicolas’ two tiny little girls who sat on the floor and played with a cat the whole time; Madame Nicolas herself, who only came for the little girls and insisted on hurrying away because it was time to put the children to bed, and who, moreover, was expecting a caller. There was a fair, blonde girl, one of the younger teachers at the Normal School.209 Gabriel Lucaze offered to escort her home when she got up to go, after Madame Nicolas’ departure. But she had already accepted the company of a silent, studious-looking youth who had come there in the hope of meeting her. So they all went away but young Gabriel Lucaze, Tante Elodie’s godson, who stayed and played cribbage210 with her. They played at a small table on which were a shaded lamp, a few magazines and a dish of pralines which the lady took great pleasure in nibbling during the reflective pauses of the game. They had played one game and were nearing the end of the second. He laid a queen upon the table.
“Fifteen-two,” she said, playing a five.
“Twenty, and a pair.”
“Twenty-five. Six points for me.”
“Its a ‘go.”’
“Thirty-one and out. That is the second game I’ve won. Will you play another rubber,211 Gabriel?”
“Not much, Tante Elodie, when you are playing in such luck. Besides, I’ve got to get out, it’s half-past eight.” He had played recklessly, often glancing at the bronze clock which reposed majestically beneath its crystal globe on the mantelpiece. He prepared at once to leave, going before the gilt-framed, oval mirror to fold and arrange a silk muffler beneath his great coat.
He was rather good looking. That is, he was healthy looking; his face a little florid, and hair almost black. It was short and curly and parted on one side. His eyes were fine when they were not bloodshot, as they sometimes were. His mouth might have been better. It was not disagreeable or unpleasant, but it was unsatisfactory and drooped a little at the corners. However, he was good to look at as he crossed the muffler over his chest. His face was unusually alert. Tante Elodie looked at him in the glass.
“Will you be warm enough, my boy? It has turned very cold since six o’clock.”
“Plenty warm. Too warm.”
“Where are you going?”
“Now, Tante Elodie,” he said, turning, and laying a hand on her shoulder; he was holding his soft felt hat in the other. “It is always ‘where are you going?’ ‘Where have you been?’ I have spoiled you. I have told you too much. You expect me to tell you everything; consequently, I must sometimes tell you fibs. I am going to confession. There! are you satisfied?” and he bent down and gave her a hearty kiss.
“I am satisfied, provided you go to the right priests to confession; not up the hill, mind you!”
“Up the hill” meant up at the Normal School with Tante Elodie. She was a very conservative person. “The Normal” seemed to her an unpardonable innovation, with its teachers from Minnesota, from Iowa, from God-knows-where, bringing strange ways and manners to the old town. She was one, also, who considered the emancipation of slaves a great mistake. She had many reasons for thinking so and was often called upon to enumerate this in her wordy arguments with her many opponents.
Two
TANTE ELODIE DISTINCTLY HEARD the doctor leave the Widow Nicolas’ at a quarter past ten. He visited the handsome and attractive young woman two evenings in the week and always left at the same hour. Tante Elodie’s double glass doors opened upon the wide upper gallery. Around the angle of the gallery were the apartments of Madame Nicolas. Any one visiting the widow was obliged to pass Tante Elodie’s door. Beneath was a store occasionally occupied by some merchant or other, but oftener vacant. A stairway led down from the porch to the yard where two enormous live-oaks grew and cast a dense shade upon the gallery above, making it an agreeable retreat and resting place on hot summer afternoons. The high, wooden yard-gate opened directly upon the street.
A half hour went by after the doctor passed her door. Tante Elodie played “solitaire.” Another half hour followed and still Tante Elodie was not sleepy nor did she think of going to bed. It was very near midnight when she began to prepare her night toilet and to cover the fire.
The room was very large, with heavy rafters across the ceiling. There was an enormous bed over in the corner; a four-posted mahogany covered with a lace spread which was religiously folded every night and laid on a chair. There were some old ambrotypes212 and photographs about the room; a few comfortable but simple rocking chairs and a broad fire place in which a big log sizzled. It was an attractive room for any one, not because of anything that was in it except Tante Elodie herself. She was far past fifty. Her hair was still soft and brown and her eyes bright and vivacious. Her figure was slender and nervous. There were many lines in her face, but it did not look care-worn. Had she her youthful flesh, she would have looked very young.
Tante Elodie had spent the evening in munching pralines and reading by lamp-light some old magazines that Gabriel Lucaze had brought her from the club.
There was a romance connected with her early days. Romances serve but to feed the imagination of the young; they add nothing to the sum of truth. No one realized this fact more strongly than Tante Elodie herself.
While she tacitly condoned the romance, perhaps for the sake of the sympathy it bred, she never thought of Justin Lucaze but with a feeling of gratitude toward the memory of her parents who had prevented her marrying him thirty-five years before. She could have no connection between her deep and powerful affection for young Gabriel Lucaze and her old-time, brief passion for his father. She loved the boy above everything on earth. There was none so attractive to her as he; none so thoughtful of her pleasures and pains. In his devotion there was no trace of a duty-sense; it was the spontaneous expression of affection and seeming dependence.
After Tante Elodie had turned down her bed and undressed, she drew a gray flannel peignoir over her nightgown and knelt down to say her prayers; kneeling before a rocker with her bare feet turned to the fire. Prayers were no trifling matter with her. Besides those which she knew by heart, she read litanies and invocations from a book and also a chapter of “The Following of Christ.” She had said her Notre Père, her Salve Marie and Je crois en Dieu and was deep in the litany213 of the Blessed Virgin when she fancied she heard footsteps on the stairs. The night was breathlessly still; it was very late.
“Vierge des Vierges: Priez pour nous. Mere de Dieu: Priez—” 214
Surely there was a stealthy step upon the gallery, and now a hand at her door, striving to lift the latch. Tante Elodie was not afraid. She felt the utmost security in her home and had no dread of mischievous intruders in the peaceful old town. She simply realized that there was some one at her door and that she must find out who it was and what they wan
ted. She got up from her knees, thrust her feet into her slippers that were near the fire and, lowering the lamp by which she had been reading her litanies, approached the door. There was the very softest rap upon the pane. Tante Elodie unbolted and opened the door the least bit.
“Qui est là?”215 she asked.
“Gabriel.” He forced himself into the room before she had time to fully open the door to him.
Three
GABRIEL STRODE PAST her toward the fire, mechanically taking off his hat, and sat down in the rocker before which she had been kneeling. He sat on the prayer books she had left there. He removed them and laid them upon the table. Seeming to realize in a dazed way that it was not their accustomed place, he threw the two books on a nearby chair.
Tante Elodie raised the lamp and looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot, as they were when he drank or experienced any unusual emotion or excitement. But he was pale and his mouth drooped excessively, and twitched with the effort he made to control it. The top button was wrenched from his coat and his muffler was disarranged. Tante Elodie was grieved to the soul, seeing him thus. She thought he had been drinking.
“Gabriel, w‘at is the matter?” she asked imploringly. “Oh, my poor child, w’at is the matter?” He looked at her in a fixed way and passed a hand over his head. He tried to speak, but his voice failed, as with one who experiences stage fright. Then he articulated, hoarsely, swallowing nervously between the slow words:
“I—killed a man—about an hour ago—yonder in the old Nigger-Luke Cabin.” Tante Elodie’s two hands went suddenly down to the table and she leaned heavily upon them for support.
“You did not; you did not,” she panted. “You are drinking. You do not know w‘at you are saying. Tell me, Gabriel, who ’as been making you drink? Ah! they will answer to me! You do not know w’at you are saying. Boute!216 how can you know!” She clutched him and the torn button that hung in the button-hole fell to the floor.
“I don’t know why it happened,” he went on, gazing into the fire with unseeing eyes, or rather with eyes that saw what was pictured in his mind and not what was before them.
“I’ve been in cutting scrapes and shooting scrapes that never amounted to anything, when I was just as crazy mad as I was to-night. But I tell you, Tante Elodie, he’s dead. I’ve got to get away. But how are you going to get out of a place like this, when every dog and cat”—His effort had spent itself, and he began to tremble with a nervous chill; his teeth chattered and his lips could not form an utterance.
Tante Elodie, stumbling rather than walking, went over to a small buffet and pouring some brandy into a glass, gave it to him. She took a little herself. She looked much older in the peignoir and the handkerchief tied around her head. She sat down beside Gabriel and took his hand. It was cold and clammy.
“Tell me everything,” she said with determination, “everything; without delay; and do not speak so loud. We shall see what must be done. Was it a negro? Tell me everything.”
“No, it was a white man, you don’t know, from Conshotta,217 named Everson. He was half drunk; a hulking bully as strong as an ox, or I could have licked him. He tortured me until I was frantic. Did you ever see a cat torment a mouse? The mouse can’t do anything but lose its head. I lost my head, but I had my knife; that big hornhandled knife.”
“Where is it?” she asked sharply. He felt his back pocket.
“I don’t know.” He did not seem to care, or to realize the importance of the loss.
“Go on; make haste; tell me the whole story. You went from here—you went—go on.”
“I went down the river a piece,” he said, throwing himself back in the chair and keeping his eyes fixed upon one burning ember on the hearth, “down to Symund’s store where there was a game of cards. A lot of the fellows were there. I played a little and didn’t drink anything, and stopped at ten. I was going”—He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging between. “I was going to see a woman at eleven o’clock; it was the only time I could see her. I came along and when I got by the old Nigger-Luke Cabin I lit a match and looked at my watch. It was too early and it wouldn’t do to hang around. I went into the cabin and started a blaze in the chimney with some fine wood I found there. My feet were cold and I sat on an empty soap-box before the fire to dry them. I remember I kept looking at my watch. It was twenty-five minutes to eleven when Everson came into the cabin. He was half drunk and his face was red and looked like a beast. He had left the game and had followed me. I hadn’t spoken of where I was going. But he said he knew I was off for a lark and he wanted to go along. I said he couldn’t go where I was going, and there was no use talking. He kept it up. At a quarter to eleven I wanted to go, and he went and stood in the doorway.
“ ‘If I don’t go, you don’t go,’ he said, and he kept it up. When I tried to pass him he pushed me back like I was a feather. He didn’t get mad. He laughed all the time and drank whiskey out of a bottle he had in his pocket. If I hadn’t got mad and lost my head, I might have fooled him or played some trick on him—if I had used my wits. But I didn’t know any more what I was doing than the day I threw the inkstand at old Dainean’s head when he switched me and made fun of me before the whole school.”
“I stooped by the fire and looked at my watch; he was talking all kinds of foolishness I can’t repeat. It was eleven o’clock. I was in a killing rage and made a dash for the door. His big body and his big arm were there like an iron bar, and he laughed. I took out my knife and stuck it into him. I don’t believe he knew at first that I had touched him, for he kept on laughing; then he fell over like a pig, and the old cabin shook.”
Gabriel had raised his clinched hand with an intensely dramatic movement when he said, “I stuck it into him.” Then he let his head fall back against the chair and finished the concluding sentences of his story with closed eyes.
“How do you know he is dead?” asked Tante Elodie, whose voice sounded hard and monotonous.
“I only walked ten steps away and went back to see. He was dead. Then I came here. The best thing is to go give myself up, I reckon, and tell the whole story like I’ve told you. That’s about the best thing I can do if I want any peace of mind.”
“Are you crazy, Gabriel! You have not yet regained your senses. Listen to me. Listen to me and try to understand what I say.”
Her face was full of a hard intelligence he had not seen there before; all the soft womanliness had for the moment faded out of it.
“You ‘ave not killed the man Everson,” she said deliberately. “You know nothing about ’im. You do not know that he left Symund’s or that he followed you. You left at ten o’clock. You came straight in town, not feeling well. You saw a light in my window, came here; rapped on the door; I let you in and gave you something for cramps in the stomach and made you warm yourself and lie down on the sofa. Wait a moment. Stay still there.”
She got up and went shuffling out the door, around the angle of the gallery and tapped on Madame Nicolas’ door. She could hear the young woman jump out of bed bewildered, asking, “Who is there? Wait! What is it?”
“It is Tante Elodie.” The door was unbolted at once.
“Oh! how I hate to trouble you, chérie. Poor Gabriel ‘as been at my room for hours with the most severe cramps. Nothing I can do seems to relieve ’im. Will you let me ‘ave the morphine which doctor left with you for old Betsy’s rheumatism? Ah! thank you. I think a quarter of a grain218 will relieve ’im. Poor boy! Such suffering! I am so sorry dear, to disturb you. Do not stand by the door, you will take cold. Good night.”
Tante Elodie persuaded Gabriel, if the club were still open, to look in there on his way home. He had a room in a relative’s house. His mother was dead and his father lived on a plantation several miles from town. Gabriel feared that his nerve would fail him. But Tante Elodie had him up again with a glass of brandy. She said that he must get the fact lodged in his mind that he was innocent. She inspected the young man carefully before he went
away, brushing and arranging his toilet. She sewed the missing button on his coat. She had noticed some blood upon his right hand. He himself had not seen it. With a wet towel she washed his face and hands as though he were a little child. She brushed his hair and sent him away with a thousand reiterated precautions.
Four
TANTE ELODIE WAS not overcome in any way after Gabriel left her. She did not indulge in a hysterical moment, but set about accomplishing some purpose which she had evidently had in her mind. She dressed herself again; quickly, nervously, but with much precision. A shawl over her head and a long, black cape across her shoulders made her look like a nun. She quitted her room. It was very dark and very still out of doors. There was only a whispering wail among the live-oak leaves.
Tante Elodie stole noiselessly down the steps and out the gate. If she had met anyone, she intended to say she was suffering with toothache and was going to the doctor or druggist for relief.
But she met not a soul. She knew every plank, every uneven brick of the side walk; every rut of the way, and might have walked with her eyes closed. Strangely enough she had forgotten to pray. Prayer seemed to belong to her moments of contemplation, while now she was all action; prompt, quick, decisive action.
It must have been near upon two o’clock. She did not meet a cat or a dog on her way to the Nigger-Luke Cabin. The hut was well out of town and isolated from a group of tumbled-down shanties some distance off, in which a lazy set of negroes lived. There was not the slightest feeling of fear or horror in her breast. There might have been, had she not already been dominated and possessed by the determination that Gabriel must be shielded from ignominy—maybe, worse.