Chapter III: Part 3

At the first glance one might have been inclined to doubt; but at the second anybody would have recognized her--that is, with a little mental rehabilitation: the bright little rouge spots in the hollow of her cheek, the eyebrows well accentuated with paint, the thin lips rose-tinted, and the dull, straight hair frizzed and curled and twisted and turned by that consummate rascal and artist, the official beautifier and rectifier of stage humanity, Robert, the opera _coiffeur_. Who in the world knows better than he the gulf between the real and the ideal, the limitations between the natural and the romantic?

Yes, one could see her, in that time-honored thin silk dress of hers stiffened into brocade by buckram underneath; the high, low-necked waist, hiding any evidences of breast, if there were such evidences to hide, and bringing the long neck into such faulty prominence; and the sleeves, crisp puffs of tulle divided by bands of red velvet, through which the poor lean arm runs like a wire, stringing them together like beads. Yes, it was she, the whilom _dugazon_ of the opera troupe. Not that she ever was a _dugazon_, but that was what her voice once aspired to be: a _dugazon manquée_ would better describe her.

What a ghost! But they always appeared like mere evaporations of real women. For what woman of flesh and blood can seriously maintain through life the rôle of sham attendant on sham sensations, and play public celebrant of other women's loves and lovers, singing, or rather saying, nothing more enlivening than: "Oh, madame!" and "Ah, madame!" and "_Quelle ivresse!_" or "_Quelle horreur!_" or, in recitative, detailing whatever dreary platitudes and inanities the librettist and Heaven connive to put upon the tongues of confidantes and attendants?

Looking at her--how it came over one! The music, the lights, the scene; the fat soprano confiding to her the fact of the "amour extrême" she bears for the tenor, to which she, the _dugazon_, does not even try to listen; her eyes wandering listlessly over the audience. The calorous secret out, and in her possession, how she stumbles over her train to the back of the stage, there to pose in abject patience and awkwardness, while the gallant baritone, touching his sword, and flinging his cape over his shoulder, defies the world and the tenor, who is just recovering from his "ut de poitrine" behind the scenes.

She was talking to me all the time, apologizing for the intrusion, explaining her mission, which involved a short story of her life, as women's intrusions and missions usually do. But my thoughts, also as usual, distracted me from listening, as so often they have distracted me from following what was perhaps more profitable.

The composer, of course, wastes no music upon her; flinging to her only an occasional recitative in two notes, but always ending in a reef of a scale, trill, or roulade, for her to wreck her voice on before the audience. The _chef d'orchestre_, if he is charitable, starts her off with a contribution from his own lusty lungs, and then she--oh, her voice is always thinner and more osseous than her arms, and her smile no more graceful than her train!

As well think of the simulated trees, water-falls, and chateaux leaving the stage, as the _dugazon_! One always imagines them singing on into dimness, dustiness, unsteadiness, and uselessness, until, like any other piece of stage property, they are at last put aside and simply left there at the end of some season--there seems to be a superstition against selling or burning useless and dilapidated stage property. As it came to me, the idea was not an impossibility. The last representation of the season is over. She, tired beyond judgment--haply, beyond feeling--by her tireless rôle, sinks upon her chair to rest in her dressing-room; sinks, further, to sleep. She has no maid. The troupe, hurrying away to France on the special train waiting not half a dozen blocks away, forget her--the insignificant are so easily forgotten! The porter, more tired, perhaps, than any one of the beautiful ideal world about him, and savoring already in advance the good onion-flavored _grillade_ awaiting him at home, locks up everything fast and tight; the tighter and faster for the good fortnight's vacation he has promised himself.

No doubt if the old opera-house were ever cleaned out, just such a heap of stiff, wire-strung bones would be found, in some such hole as the _dugazon's_ dressing-room, desiccating away in its last costume--perhaps in that very costume of _Inez_; and if one were venturesome enough to pass Allhallowe'en there, the spirit of those bones might be seen availing itself of the privilege of unasperged corpses to roam. Not singing, not talking--it is an anachronism to say that ghosts talk: their medium of communication must be pure thought; and one should be able to see their thoughts working, just as one sees the working of the digestive organs in the clear viscera of transparent animalcule. The hard thing of it is that ghosts are chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former existence. What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived and done, the suffered and finished! What a comfort to wake up and find one's self dead, well dead!

I could have continued and put the whole opera troupe in "costume de ghost," but I think it was the woman's eyes that drew me back to her face and her story. She had a sensible face, now that I observed her naturally, as it were; and her hands,--how I have agonized over those hands on the stage!--all knuckles and exaggerated veins, clutching her dress as she sang, or, petrified, outstretched to _Leonore's_ "Pourquoi ces larmes?"--her hands were the hands of an honest, hard-working woman who buckrams her own skirts, and at need could scrub her own floor. Her face (my description following my wandering glance)--her face was careworn, almost to desuetude; not dissipation-worn, as, alas! the faces of the more gifted ladies of opera troupes too often are. There was no fattening in it of pastry, truffles, and bonbons; upon it none of the tracery left by nightly champagne tides and ripples; and consequently her figure, under her plain dress, had not that for display which the world has conventioned to call charms. Where a window-cord would hardly have sufficed to girdle _Leonore_, a necklace would have served her. She had not beauty enough to fear the flattering dangers of masculine snares and temptations,--or there may have been other reasons,--but as a wife--there was something about her that guaranteed it--she would have blossomed love and children as a fig-tree does figs.

In truth, she was just talking about children. The first part of her story had passed: her birthplace, education, situation; and now she was saying:

"I have always had the temptation, but I have always resisted it. Now,"--with a blush at her excuse,--"it may be your spring weather, your birds, your flowers, your sky--and your children in the streets. The longing came over me yesterday: I thought of it on the stage, I thought of it afterward--it was better than sleeping; and this morning"--her eyes moistened, she breathed excitedly--"I was determined. I gave up, I made inquiry, I was sent to you. Would it be possible? Would there be any place" ("any rôle," she said first) "in any of your asylums, in any of your charitable institutions, for me? I would ask nothing but my clothes and food, and very little of that; the recompense would be the children--the little girl children," with a smile--can you imagine the smile of a woman dreaming of children that might be? "Think! Never to have held a child in my arms more than a moment, never to have felt a child's arms about my neck! Never to have known a child! Born on a stage, my mother born on a stage!" Ah, there were tragic possibilities in that voice and movement! "Pardon, madam. You see how I repeat. And you must be very wearied hearing about me. But I could be their nurse and their servant. I would bathe and dress them, play with them, teach them their prayers; and when they are sick they would see no difference. They would not know but what their mother was there!"

Oh, she had her program all prepared; one could see that.

"And I would sing to them--no! no!" with a quick gesture, "nothing from the stage; little songs and lullabys I have picked up traveling around, and," hesitating, "little things I have composed myself--little things that I thought children would like to hear some day." What did she not unconsciously throw into those last words? "I dream of it," she pursued, talking with as little regard to me as on the stage she sang to the prima donna. "Their little arms, their little faces, their little lips! And in an asylum there would be so many of them! When they cried and were in trouble I would take them in my lap, and I would say to them, with all sorts of tenderness--" She had arranged that in her program, too--all the minutiae of what she would say to them in their distress. But women are that way. When once they begin to love, their hearts are magnifying-lenses for them to feel through. "And my heart hungers to commence right here, now, at once! It seems to me I cannot wait. Ah, madam, no more stage, no more opera!" speaking quickly, feverishly. "As I said, it may be your beautiful spring, your flowers, your birds, and your numbers of children. I have always loved that place most where there are most children; and you have more children here than I ever saw anywhere. Children are so beautiful! It is strange, is it not, when you consider my life and my rearing?"

Her life, her rearing, how interesting they must have been! What a pity I had not listened more attentively!

"They say you have much to do with asylums here."

Evidently, when rôles do not exist in life for certain characters, God has to create them. And thus He had to create a rôle in an asylum for my friend, for so she became from the instant she spoke of children as she did. It was the poorest and neediest of asylums; and the poor little orphaned wretches--but it is better not to speak of them. How can God ever expect to rear children without their mothers!

But the rôle I craved to create for my friend was far different--some good, honest bourgeois interior, where lips are coarse and cheeks are ruddy, and where life is composed of real scenes, set to the real music of life, the homely successes and failures, and loves and hates, and embraces and tears, that fill out the orchestra of the heart; where romance and poetry abound _au naturel_; and where--yes, where children grow as thick as nature permits: the domestic interior of the opera porter, for instance, or the clockmaker over the way. But what a loss the orphan-asylum would have suffered, and the dreary lacking there would have been in the lives of the children! For there must have been moments in the lives of the children in that asylum when they felt, awake, as they felt in their sleep when they dreamed their mothers were about them.

THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL

She was coming down on the boat from Cincinnati, the little convent girl. Two sisters had brought her aboard. They gave her in charge of the captain, got her a state-room, saw that the new little trunk was put into it, hung the new little satchel up on the wall, showed her how to bolt the door at night, shook hands with her for good-by (good-bys have really no significance for sisters), and left her there. After a while the bells all rang, and the boat, in the awkward elephantine fashion of boats, got into midstream. The chambermaid found her sitting on the chair in the state-room where the sisters had left her, and showed her how to sit on a chair in the saloon. And there she sat until the captain came and hunted her up for supper. She could not do anything of herself; she had to be initiated into everything by some one else.

She was known on the boat only as "the little convent girl." Her name, of course, was registered in the clerk's office, but on a steamboat no one thinks of consulting the clerk's ledger. It is always the little widow, the fat madam, the tall colonel, the parson, etc. The captain, who pronounced by the letter, always called her the little _convent_ girl. She was the beau-ideal of the little convent girl. She never raised her eyes except when spoken to. Of course she never spoke first, even to the chambermaid, and when she did speak it was in the wee, shy, furtive voice one might imagine a just-budding violet to have; and she walked with such soft, easy, carefully calculated steps that one naturally felt the penalties that must have secured them--penalties dictated by a black code of deportment.

She was dressed in deep mourning. Her black straw hat was trimmed with stiff new crape, and her stiff new bombazine dress had crape collar and cuffs. She wore her hair in two long plaits fastened around her head tight and fast. Her hair had a strong inclination to curl, but that had been taken out of it as austerely as the noise out of her footfalls. Her hair was as black as her dress; her eyes, when one saw them, seemed blacker than either, on account of the bluishness of the white surrounding the pupil. Her eyelashes were almost as thick as the black veil which the sisters had fastened around her hat with an extra pin the very last thing before leaving. She had a round little face, and a tiny pointed chin; her mouth was slightly protuberant from the teeth, over which she tried to keep her lips well shut, the effort giving them a pathetic little forced expression. Her complexion was sallow, a pale sallow, the complexion of a brunette bleached in darkened rooms. The only color about her was a blue taffeta ribbon from which a large silver medal of the Virgin hung over the place where a breast pin should have been. She was so little, so little, although she was eighteen, as the sisters told the captain; otherwise they would not have permitted her to travel all the way to New Orleans alone.

Unless the captain or the clerk remembered to fetch her out in front, she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back--oh, no! always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain, and particularly of the clerk. Every one knows the fund of humor possessed by a steamboat clerk, and what a field for display the table at meal-times affords. On Friday she fasted rigidly, and she never began to eat, or finished, without a little Latin movement of the lips and a sign of the cross. And always at six o'clock of the evening she remembered the angelus, although there was no church bell to remind her of it.

She was in mourning for her father, the sisters told the captain, and she was going to New Orleans to her mother. She had not seen her mother since she was an infant, on account of some disagreement between the parents, in consequence of which the father had brought her to Cincinnati, and placed her in the convent. There she had been for twelve years, only going to her father for vacations and holidays. So long as the father lived he would never let the child have any communication with her mother. Now that he was dead all that was changed, and the first thing that the girl herself wanted to do was to go to her mother.

The mother superior had arranged it all with the mother of the girl, who was to come personally to the boat in New Orleans, and receive her child from the captain, presenting a letter from the mother superior, a facsimile of which the sisters gave the captain.

It is a long voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans, the rivers doing their best to make it interminable, embroidering themselves _ad libitum_ all over the country. Every five miles, and sometimes oftener, the boat would stop to put off or take on freight, if not both. The little convent girl, sitting in the cabin, had her terrible frights at first from the hideous noises attendant on these landings--the whistles, the ringings of the bells, the running to and fro, the shouting. Every time she thought it was shipwreck, death, judgment, purgatory; and her sins! her sins! She would drop her crochet, and clutch her prayer-beads from her pocket, and relax the constraint over her lips, which would go to rattling off prayers with the velocity of a relaxed windlass. That was at first, before the captain took to fetching her out in front to see the boat make a landing. Then she got to liking it so much that she would stay all day just where the captain put her, going inside only for her meals. She forgot herself at times so much that she would draw her chair a little closer to the railing, and put up her veil, actually, to see better. No one ever usurped her place, quite in front, or intruded upon her either with word or look; for every one learned to know her shyness, and began to feel a personal interest in her, and all wanted the little convent girl to see everything that she possibly could.

And it was worth seeing--the balancing and _chasséeing_ and waltzing of the cumbersome old boat to make a landing. It seemed to be always attended with the difficulty and the improbability of a new enterprise; and the relief when it did sidle up anywhere within rope's-throw of the spot aimed at! And the roustabout throwing the rope from the perilous end of the dangling gang-plank! And the dangling roustabouts hanging like drops of water from it--dropping sometimes twenty feet to the land, and not infrequently into the river itself. And then what a rolling of barrels, and shouldering of sacks, and singing of Jim Crow songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps; and black skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through red lips, and laughing, and talking and--bewildering! entrancing! Surely the little convent girl in her convent walls never dreamed of so much unpunished noise and movement in the world!

The first time she heard the mate--it must have been like the first time woman ever heard man--curse and swear, she turned pale, and ran quickly, quickly into the saloon, and--came out again? No, indeed! not with all the soul she had to save, and all the other sins on her conscience. She shook her head resolutely, and was not seen in her chair on deck again until the captain not only reassured her, but guaranteed his reassurance. And after that, whenever the boat was about to make a landing, the mate would first glance up to the guards, and if the little convent girl was sitting there he would change his invective to sarcasm, and politely request the colored gentlemen not to hurry themselves--on no account whatever; to take their time about shoving out the plank; to send the rope ashore by post-office--write him when it got there; begging them not to strain their backs; calling them mister, colonel, major, general, prince, and your royal highness, which was vastly amusing. At night, however, or when the little convent girl was not there, language flowed in its natural curve, the mate swearing like a pagan to make up for lost time.

The captain forgot himself one day: it was when the boat ran aground in the most unexpected manner and place, and he went to work to express his opinion, as only steamboat captains can, of the pilot, mate, engineer, crew, boat, river, country, and the world in general, ringing the bell, first to back, then to head, shouting himself hoarser than his own whistle--when he chanced to see the little black figure hurrying through the chaos on the deck; and the captain stuck as fast aground in midstream as the boat had done.

In the evening the little convent girl would be taken on the upper deck, and going up the steep stairs there was such confusion, to keep the black skirts well over the stiff white petticoats; and, coming down, such blushing when suspicion would cross the unprepared face that a rim of white stocking might be visible; and the thin feet, laced so tightly in the glossy new leather boots, would cling to each successive step as if they could never, never make another venture; and then one boot would (there is but that word) hesitate out, and feel and feel around, and have such a pause of helpless agony as if indeed the next step must have been wilfully removed, or was nowhere to be found on the wide, wide earth.

It was a miracle that the pilot ever got her up into the pilot-house; but pilots have a lonely time, and do not hesitate even at miracles when there is a chance for company. He would place a box for her to climb to the tall bench behind the wheel, and he would arrange the cushions, and open a window here to let in air, and shut one there to cut off a draft, as if there could be no tenderer consideration in life for him than her comfort. And he would talk of the river to her, explain the chart, pointing out eddies, whirlpools, shoals, depths, new beds, old beds, cut-offs, caving banks, and making banks, as exquisitely and respectfully as if she had been the River Commission.

It was his opinion that there was as great a river as the Mississippi flowing directly under it--an underself of a river, as much a counterpart of the other as the second story of a house is of the first; in fact, he said they were navigating through the upper story. Whirlpools were holes in the floor of the upper river, so to speak; eddies were rifts and cracks. And deep under the earth, hurrying toward the subterranean stream, were other streams, small and great, but all deep, hurrying to and from that great mother-stream underneath, just as the small and great overground streams hurry to and from their mother Mississippi. It was almost more than the little convent girl could take in: at least such was the expression of her eyes; for they opened as all eyes have to open at pilot stories. And he knew as much of astronomy as he did of hydrology, could call the stars by name, and define the shapes of the constellations; and she, who had studied astronomy at the convent, was charmed to find that what she had learned was all true. It was in the pilot-house, one night, that she forgot herself for the first time in her life, and stayed up until after nine o'clock. Although she appeared almost intoxicated at the wild pleasure, she was immediately overwhelmed at the wickedness of it, and observed much more rigidity of conduct thereafter. The engineer, the boiler-men, the firemen, the stokers, they all knew when the little convent girl was up in the pilot-house: the speaking-tube became so mild and gentle.

With all the delays of river and boat, however, there is an end to the journey from Cincinnati to New Orleans. The latter city, which at one time to the impatient seemed at the terminus of the never, began, all of a sudden, one day to make its nearingness felt; and from that period every other interest paled before the interest in the immanence of arrival into port, and the whole boat was seized with a panic of preparation, the little convent girl with the others. Although so immaculate was she in person and effects that she might have been struck with a landing, as some good people might be struck with death, at any moment without fear of results, her trunk was packed and repacked, her satchel arranged and rearranged, and, the last day, her hair was brushed and plaited and smoothed over and over again until the very last glimmer of a curl disappeared. Her dress was whisked, as if for microscopic inspection; her face was washed; and her finger-nails were scrubbed with the hard convent nail-brush, until the disciplined little tips ached with a pristine soreness. And still there were hours to wait, and still the boat added up delays. But she arrived at last, after all, with not more than the usual and expected difference between the actual and the advertised time of arrival.

There was extra blowing and extra ringing, shouting, commanding, rushing up the gangway and rushing down the gangway. The clerks, sitting behind tables on the first deck, were plied, in the twinkling of an eye, with estimates, receipts, charges, countercharges, claims, reclaims, demands, questions, accusations, threats, all at topmost voices. None but steamboat clerks could have stood it. And there were throngs composed of individuals every one of whom wanted to see the captain first and at once: and those who could not get to him shouted over the heads of the others; and as usual he lost his temper and politeness, and began to do what he termed "hustle."

"Captain! Captain!" a voice called him to where a hand plucked his sleeve, and a letter was thrust toward him. "The cross, and the name of the convent." He recognized the envelop of the mother superior. He read the duplicate of the letter given by the sisters. He looked at the woman--the mother--casually, then again and again.

The little convent girl saw him coming, leading some one toward her. She rose. The captain took her hand first, before the other greeting, "Good-by, my dear," he said. He tried to add something else, but seemed undetermined what. "Be a good little girl--" It was evidently all he could think of. Nodding to the woman behind him, he turned on his heel, and left.

One of the deck-hands was sent to fetch her trunk. He walked out behind them, through the cabin, and the crowd on deck, down the stairs, and out over the gangway. The little convent girl and her mother went with hands tightly clasped. She did not turn her eyes to the right or left, or once (what all passengers do) look backward at the boat which, however slowly, had carried her surely over dangers that she wot not of. All looked at her as she passed. All wanted to say good-by to the little convent girl, to see the mother who had been deprived of her so long. Some expressed surprise in a whistle; some in other ways. All exclaimed audibly, or to themselves, "Colored!"

It takes about a month to make the round trip from New Orleans to Cincinnati and back, counting five days' stoppage in New Orleans. It was a month to a day when the steamboat came puffing and blowing up to the wharf again, like a stout dowager after too long a walk; and the same scene of confusion was enacted, as it had been enacted twelve times a year, at almost the same wharf for twenty years; and the same calm, a death calmness by contrast, followed as usual the next morning.

The decks were quiet and clean; one cargo had just been delivered, part of another stood ready on the levee to be shipped. The captain was there waiting for his business to begin, the clerk was in his office getting his books ready, the voice of the mate could be heard below, mustering the old crew out and a new crew in; for if steamboat crews have a single principle,--and there are those who deny them any,--it is never to ship twice in succession on the same boat. It was too early yet for any but roustabouts, marketers, and church-goers; so early that even the river was still partly mist-covered; only in places could the swift, dark current be seen rolling swiftly along.

"Captain!" A hand plucked at his elbow, as if not confident that the mere calling would secure attention. The captain turned. The mother of the little convent girl stood there, and she held the little convent girl by the hand. "I have brought her to see you," the woman said. "You were so kind--and she is so quiet, so still, all the time, I thought it would do her a pleasure."

She spoke with an accent, and with embarrassment; otherwise one would have said that she was bold and assured enough.

"She don't go nowhere, she don't do nothing but make her crochet and her prayers, so I thought I would bring her for a little visit of 'How d' ye do' to you."

There was, perhaps, some inflection in the woman's voice that might have made known, or at least awakened, the suspicion of some latent hope or intention, had the captain's ear been fine enough to detect it. There might have been something in the little convent girl's face, had his eye been more sensitive--trifle paler, maybe, the lips a little tighter drawn, the blue ribbon a shade faded. He may have noticed that, but-- And the visit of "How d' ye do" came to an end.

They walked down the stairway, the woman in front, the little convent girl--her hand released to shake hands with the captain--following, across the bared deck, out to the gangway, over to the middle of it. No one was looking, no one saw more than a flutter of white petticoats, a show of white stockings, as the little convent girl went under the water.

The roustabout dived, as the roustabouts always do, after the drowning, even at the risk of their good-for-nothing lives. The mate himself jumped overboard; but she had gone down in a whirlpool. Perhaps, as the pilot had told her whirlpools always did, it may have carried her through to the underground river, to that vast, hidden, dark Mississippi that flows beneath the one we see; for her body was never found.

GRANDMOTHER'S GRANDMOTHER

As the grandmother related it fresh from the primeval sources that feed a grandmother's memory, it happened thus:

In the early days of the settlement of Georgia--ah, how green and rustic appears to us now the world in the early days of the settlement of Georgia! Sometimes to women, listening to the stories of their grandmothers, it seems better to have lived then than now--her grandmother was at that time a young wife. It was the day of arduous, if not of long, courtship before marriage, when every wedding celebrated the close of an original romance; and when young couples, for bridal trips, went out to settle new States, riding on a pillion generally, with their trousseaux following as best they could on sumpter mules; to hear the grandmother describe it made one long to be a bride of those days.

The young husband had the enumeration of qualities that went to the making of a man of that period, and if the qualities were in the proportion of ten physical to one intellectual, it does not follow that the grandmother's grandfather was not a man of parts. For, to obtain the hand of his bride, an only child and an heiress, he had to give test of his mettle by ignoring his fortune, studying law, and getting his license before marriage, and binding himself to live the first year afterward on the proceeds of his practice; a device of the time thought to be a wholesome corrective of the corrupting influence of over-wealth in young domesticities.

Although he had already chosen the sea for his profession, and was a midshipman at the time, with more of a reputation for living than for learning, such was he, and such, it may be said, was the incentive genius of his choice, that almost before his resignation as midshipman was accepted, his license as a lawyer was signed. As for practice, it was currently remarked at his wedding, at the sight of him flying down the room in the reel with his bride for partner, that his tongue was as nimble as his heels, and that if he only turned his attention to criminal practice, there was no man in the country who would make a better prosecuting attorney for the State. And with him for prosecuting attorney, it was warranted that sirrahs the highwaymen would not continue to hold Georgia judge-and-jury justice in quite such contemptible estimation, and that the gallows would not be left so long bereft of their legitimate swingings. As for fees, it was predicted that the young fellow as he stood, or rather "chassé'd," could snap his fingers at both his and his bride's trustees.

He did turn his attention to criminal law, was made prosecuting attorney for the State in his county, and, before his six months had passed, was convincing the hitherto high and mighty, lordly, independent knights of the road that other counties in Georgia furnished more secure pasturage for them.

It was a beautiful spring morning. The young wife bade him a hearty good-by, and stood in the doorway watching him, gay and _debonair_, riding off, on his stout black charger Beetle, in the direction of the town in which court was to be held that week.

She herself feeling as full of ambition and work as if she also were prosecuting attorney, with a perennial spring of eloquence bubbling in her brain, turned to her domestic duties, and, without going into the detail of them, it suffices to say that, according to the grandmother's estimation, one morning's list of duties for a healthy young bride of that period would shame the week's work of a syndicate of them to-day. Finding herself nearing the limit of diminution of several household necessities, and the spring suggesting the beginning of new ones, she made up her mind to profit by her husband's absence and the fair weather to make a trading visit to the neighboring town next day.

So, early in a morning as beautiful as the preceding one, mounted on her own stanch mare Maid Marion, she ambled down the green over-hung forest-road, in the vista of which she had watched her husband disappear the day before; thinking about what she had to buy, and thinking, no doubt, much more, as brides will, of the absent lord and master--as brides of those days loved to consider and denominate their husbands.

Coming into the little town, the freshly painted, swinging sign-board of the new tavern, "The Honest Georgian," as usual was the thing to catch her eye; but the instant after what should she see but Black Beetle hitched to the rack under the tree that shadowed the hostelry!

It was not decorous; but she was young, and the day of her first separation from her husband had been so long; and was he not also, against the firmest of resolutions and plans, hastening back to her, the separation being too long for him also?

Slipping her foot from the stirrup, she jumped to the ground, and ran into the tavern. There he stood calling hastily for a drink; and her heart more than her eyes took in his, to her, consecrated signalment--the riding-boots, short clothes, blue coat, cocked hat, ruffles. She crept up behind to surprise him, her face, with its delight and smiles, beyond her control. She crept, until she saw his watch-fob dangling against the counter, and then her heart made a call. He turned. He was not her husband! Another man was in her husband's clothes, a man with a villainous countenance! With a scream she gave the alarm. The stranger turned, dropped his drink, bounded to the door and out, leaped to the back of Beetle, gave rein and spur, and the black horse made good his reputation. In a second all was hue-and-cry and pursuit. While men and horses made, for all they were worth, down the road after Beetle, she on Maid Marion galloped for her life in the opposite direction, the direction of the court town whither her husband had journeyed. The mare's hide made acquaintance with the whip that day if never before, for not even the willing Maid Marion could keep pace with the apprehensions on her back.

Scouring with her eyes the highway ahead of her, shooting hawk's glances into the forest on each side of her, the wife rode through the distance all, all day, praying that the day might be long enough, might equal the distance. The sun set, and night began to fall; but she and Maid Marion were none the less fresh, except in the heart.

The moon rose straight before them down the road, lighting it and them through the threatened obscurity. And so they came to trampled earth and torn grass, and so she uncovered concealed footsteps, and so, creeping on her hands and knees, she followed traces of blood, through thicket and glade, into the deep forest, to a hastily piled hillock of earth, gravel, and leaves. Burrowing with her hands, she came to it, the naked body of her young husband, cold and stiff, foully murdered. Maid Marion approached at her call. She wrapped him in her cloak, and--a young wife of those times alone would do it--put him in the saddle before her: the good mare Maid Marion alone knows the rest. In the early gray dawn, from one highway there rode into the town the baffled pursuers, from the other the grandmother's grandmother, clasping the corpse of her husband with arms as stiff as his own; loving him, so the grandmother used to say, with a love which, if ever love could do so, would have effected a resurrection.

THE OLD LADY'S RESTORATION

The news came out in the papers that the old lady had been restored to her fortune. She had been deprived of it so long ago that the real manner of her dispossession had become lost, or at least hidden under the many versions that had been invented to replace lapses of memory, or to remedy the unpicturesqueness of the original truth. The face of truth, like the face of many a good woman, is liable to the accident of ugliness, and the desire to embellish one as well as the other need not necessarily proceed from anything more harmful than an overweighted love of the beautiful.

If the old lady had not been restored to her fortune, her _personalia_ would have remained in the oblivion which, as one might say, had accumulated upon everything belonging to her. But after that newspaper paragraph, there was such a flowering of memory around her name as would have done credit to a whole cemetery on All Saints. It took three generations to do justice to the old lady, for so long and so slow had been her descent into poverty that a grandmother was needed to remember her setting out upon the road to it.

She set out as most people do, well provided with money, diamonds, pretty clothing, handsome residence, equipage, opera-box, beaus (for she was a widow), and so many, many friends that she could never indulge in a small party--she always had to give a grand ball to accommodate them. She made quite an occasion of her first reverse,--some litigation decided against her,--and said it came from the court's' having only one ear, and that preempted by the other party.

She always said whatever she thought, regardless of the consequences, because she averred truth was so much more interesting than falsehood. Nothing annoyed her more in society than to have to listen to the compositions women make as a substitute for the original truth. It was as if, when she went to the theater to hear Shakspere and Molière, the actors should try to impose upon the audience by reciting lines of their own. Truth was the wit of life and the wit of books. She traveled her road from affluence so leisurely that nothing escaped her eyes or her feelings, and she signaled unhesitatingly every stage in it.

"My dear, do you know there is really such a thing as existence without a carriage and horses?"--"I assure you it is perfectly new to me to find that an opera-box is not a necessity. It is a luxury. In theory one can really never tell the distinction between luxuries and necessities."--"How absurd! At one time I thought hair was given us only to furnish a profession to hair-dressers; just as we wear artificial flowers to support the flower-makers."--"Upon my word, it is not uninteresting. There is always some _haute nouveauté_ in economy. The ways of depriving one's self are infinite. There is wine, now."--"Not own your residence! As soon not own your tomb as your residence! My mama used to scream that in my ears. According to her, it was not _comme il faut_ to board or live in a rented house. How little she knew!"

When her friends, learning her increasing difficulties, which they did from the best authority (herself), complimented her, as they were forced to do, upon her still handsome appearance, pretty laces, feathers, jewelry, silks, "Fat," she would answer--"fat. I am living off my fat, as bears do in winter. In truth, I remind myself of an animal in more ways than one."

And so every one had something to contribute to the conversation about her--bits which, they said, affection and admiration had kept alive in their memory.

Each city has its own roads to certain ends, its ways of Calvary, so to speak. In New Orleans the victim seems ever to walk down Royal street and up Chartres, or _vice versa_. One would infer so, at least, from the display in the shops and windows of those thorough-fares. Old furniture, cut glass, pictures, books, jewelry, lace, china--the fleece (sometimes the flesh still sticking to it) left on the brambles by the driven herd. If there should some day be a trump of resurrection for defunct fortunes, those shops would be emptied in the same twinkling of the eye allowed to tombs for their rendition of property.

The old lady must have made that promenade many, many times, to judge by the samples of her "fat or fleece" displayed in the windows. She took to hobbling, as if from tired or sore feet.

"It is nothing," in answer to an inquiry. "Made-to-order feet learning to walk in ready-made shoes: that is all. One's feet, after all, are the most unintelligent part of one's body." Tea was her abomination, coffee her adoration; but she explained: "Tea, you know, is so detestable that the very worst is hardly worse than the very best; while coffee is so perfect that the smallest shade of impurity is not to be tolerated. The truly economical, I observe, always drink tea." "At one time I thought if all the luxuries of the world were exposed to me, and but one choice allowed, I should select gloves. Believe me, there is no superfluity in the world so easily dispensed with."

As may be supposed, her path led her farther and farther away from her old friends. Even her intimates became scarce; so much so, that these observations, which, of course, could be made only to intimates, became fewer and fewer, unfortunately, for her circumstances were becoming such that the remarks became increasingly valuable. The last thing related of her was apropos of friends.

"My friends! My dear, I cannot tell you just so, on the spur of the moment, but with a little reflection and calculation I could tell you, to a picayune, the rent of every friend in the market. You can lease, rent, or hire them, like horses, carriages, opera-boxes, servants, by year, month, day, or hour; and the tariff is just as fixed.

"Christians! Christians are the most discreet people in the world. If you should ask me what Christianity has most promoted in the world, I should answer without hesitation, discretion. Of course, when I say the world I mean society, and when I say Christianity I mean our interpretation of it. If only duns could be pastors, and pastors duns! But of course you do not know what duns are; they are the guardian angels of the creditor, the pursuing fiends of the debtor."

After that, the old lady made her disappearance under the waves of that sea into the depths of which it is very improbable that a single friend ever attempted to pursue her. And there she remained until the news came that she was restored to fortune.

A week passed, two weeks; no sight or sound of her. It was during this period that her old friends were so occupied resuscitating their old friendships for her--when all her antique sayings and doings became current ball-room and dinner-table gossip--that she arose from her obscurity like Cinderella from her ashes, to be decked with every gift that fairy minds could suggest. Those who had known her intimately made no effort to conceal their importance. Those who did not know her personally put forward claims of inherited friendship, and those who did not know her traditionally or otherwise--the _nouveaux riches_ and _parvenus_, who alone feel the moneyed value of such social connections--began making their resolutions to capture her as soon as she came in sight of society.

The old residence was to be re-bought, and refurnished from France; the _avant scène_ at the opera had been engaged; the old cook was to be hired back from the club at a fabulous price; the old balls and the old dinners were to gladden the city--so said they who seemed to know. Nothing was to be spared, nothing stinted--at her age, with no child or relative, and life running short for pleasure. Diamonds, laces, velvets, champagne, Château Yquem--"Grand Dieu Seigneur!" the old Creole servants exclaimed, raising their hands at the enumeration of it.

Where the news came from nobody knew, but everything was certified and accepted as facts, although, as between women, the grain of salt should have been used. Impatience waxed, until nearly every day some one would ring the bell of the old residence, to ask when the mistress was going to move in. And such affectionate messages! And people would not, simply could not, be satisfied with the incomprehensible answers. And then it leaked out. The old lady was simply waiting for everything to arrive--furniture, toilets, carriage, etc.--to make a grand _entrée_ into her old sphere; to come riding on a throne, as it were. And still the time passed, and she did not come. Finally two of the clever-heads penetrated the enigma: _mauvaise honte_, shyness--so long out of the world, so old; perhaps not sure of her welcome. So they determined to seek her out.

"We will go to her, like children to a grandmother, etc. The others have no delicacy of sentiment, etc. And she will thus learn who really remember, really love her, etc."

Provided with congratulatory bouquets, they set forth. It is very hard to find a dweller on the very sea-bottom of poverty. Perhaps that is why the effort is so seldom made. One has to ask at grocers' shops, groggeries, market-stalls, Chinese restaurants; interview corner cobblers, ragpickers, gutter children. But nothing is impossible to the determined. The two ladies overcame all obstacles, and needled their way along, where under other circumstances they would not have glanced, would have thought it improper to glance.

They were directed through an old, old house, out on an old, old gallery, to a room at the very extreme end.

"Poor thing! Evidently she has not heard the good news yet. We will be the first to communicate it," they whispered, standing before the dilapidated, withered-looking door.

Before knocking, they listened, as it is the very wisdom of discretion to do. There was life inside, a little kind of voice, like some one trying to hum a song with a very cracked old throat.

The ladies opened the door. "Ah, my friend!"

"Ah, my friend!"

"Restored!"

"Restored!"

"At last!"

"At last!"

"Just the same!"

"Exactly the same!"

It was which one would get to her first with bouquet and kiss, competition almost crowding friendship.

"The good news!"

"The good news!"

"We could not stay!"

"We had to come!"

"It has arrived at last!"

"At last it has arrived!"

The old lady was very much older, but still the same.

"You will again have a chance!"

"Restored to your friends!"

"The world!"

"Your luxuries!"

"Your comforts!"

"Comforts! Luxuries!" At last the old lady had an opportunity to slip in a word. "And friends! You say right."

There was a pause--a pause which held not a small measure of embarrassment. But the two visitors, although they were women of the world, and so dreaded an embarrassment more than they did sin, had prepared themselves even to stand this.

The old lady standing there--she was very much thinner, very much bent, but still the same--appeared to be looking not at them, but at their enumeration.

"Comfort!" She opened a pot bubbling on the fire. "Bouillon! A good five-cent bouillon. Luxury!" She picked up something from a chair, a handful of new cotton chemises. "Luxury!" She turned back her bedspread: new cotton sheets. "Did you ever lie in your bed at night and dream of sheets? Comfort! Luxury! I should say so! And friends! My dear, look!" Opening her door, pointing to an opposite gallery, to the yard, her own gallery; to the washing, ironing, sewing women, the cobbling, chair-making, carpentering men; to the screaming, laughing, crying, quarreling, swarming children. "Friends! All friends--friends for fifteen years. Ah, yes, indeed! We are all glad--elated in fact. As you say. I am restored."

The visitors simply reported that they had found the old lady, and that she was imbecile; mind completely gone under stress of poverty and old age. Their opinion was that she should be interdicted.

A DELICATE AFFAIR

"But what does this extraordinary display of light mean?" ejaculated my aunt, the moment she entered the parlor from the dining-room. "It looks like the kingdom of heaven in here! Jules! Jules!" she called, "come and put out some of the light!"

Jules was at the front door letting in the usual Wednesday-evening visitor, but now he came running in immediately with his own invention in the way of a gas-stick,--a piece of broom-handle notched at the end,--and began turning one tap after the other, until the room was reduced to complete darkness.

"But what do you mean now, Jules?" screamed the old lady again.

"Pardon, madame," answered Jules, with dignity; "it is an accident. I thought there was one still lighted."

"An accident! An accident! Do you think I hire you to perform accidents for me? You are just through telling me that it was accident made you give me both soup and gumbo for dinner today."

"But accidents can always happen, madame," persisted Jules, adhering to his position.

The chandelier, a design of originality in its day, gave light by what purported to be wax candles standing each in a circlet of pendent crystals. The usual smile of ecstatic admiration spread over Jules's features as he touched the match to the simulated wicks, and lighted into life the rainbows in the prisms underneath. It was a smile that did not heighten the intelligence of his features, revealing as it did the toothless condition of his gums.

"What will madame have for her dinner tomorrow," looking benignantly at his mistress, and still standing under his aureole.

"Do I ever give orders for one dinner, with the other one still on my lips?"

"I only asked madame; there is no harm in asking." He walked away, his long stiff white apron rattling like a petticoat about him. Catching sight of the visitor still standing at the threshold: "Oh, madame, here is Mr. Horace. Shall I let him in?"

"Idiot! Every Wednesday you ask me that question, and every Wednesday I answer the same way. Don't you think I could tell you when not to let him in without your asking?"

"Oh, well, madame, one never knows; it is always safe to ask."

The appearance of the gentleman started a fresh subject of excitement.

"Jules! Jules! You have left that front door unlocked again!"

"Excuse me," said Mr. Horace; "Jules did not leave the front door unlocked. It was locked when I rang, and he locked it again most carefully after letting me in. I have been standing outside all the while the gas was being extinguished and relighted."

"Ah, very well, then. And what is the news?" She sank into her arm-chair, pulled her little card-table closer, and began shuffling the cards upon it for her game of solitaire. "I never hear any news, you know. She [nodding toward me] goes out, but she never learns anything. She is as stupid tonight as an empty bottle."