The Flower of the Chapdelaines Part 2

It may well be that the young lady herself would be glad if some one explained her to you."

"Hoh! does an angel need an explanation?"

"I should say, in Royal Street, yes."

"Then for mercy's sake give it! right here! you! come!" The youth laughed. "Mercy to me, I mean. But--wait! Tell me; couldn't Castanado have given it, as easily as you?"

"You never gave Castanado this chance."

"How do you know that? Oh, never mind, go ahead--full speed."

"Well, she's an orphan, of a fine old family----"

"Obviously! Creole, of course, the family?"

"Yes, though always small in Louisiana. Creole except one New England grandmother. But for that one she would not have been here just now."

"Humph! that's rather obscure but--go on."

"Her parents left her without a sou or a relation except two maiden aunts as poor as she."

"Antiques?"

"Yes. She earns their living and her own."

"You don't care to say how?"

"She wouldn't like it. 'Twould be to say where."

"She seems able to dress exquisitely."

"Mr. Chester, a woman would see with what a small outlay that is done.

She has that gift for the needle which a poet has for the pen."

"Ho! that's _charmingly_ antique. But now tell me how having a Yankee grandmother caused her to drop in here just now. Your logic's dim."

"You are soon to go to Castanado's to see that ma.n.u.script story, are you not?"

"Oh, is it a story? Have you read it?"

"Yes, I've read it, 'tis short. They wanted my opinion. And 'tis a story, though true."

"A story! Love story? very absorbing?"

"No, it is not of love--except love of liberty. Whether 'twill absorb you or no I cannot say. Me it absorbed because it is the story of some of my race, far from here and in the old days, trying, in the old vain way, to gain their freedom."

"Has--has mademoiselle read it?"

"Certainly. It is her property; hers and her two aunts'. Those two, they bought it lately, of a poor devil--drinking man--for a dollar. They had once known his mother, from the West Indies."

"He wrote it, or his mother?"

"The mother, long ago. 'Tis not too well done. It absorbs mademoiselle also, but that is because 'tis true. When I saw that effect I told her of a story like it, yet different, and also seeming true, in this old magazine. And when I began to tell it she said, 'It _is_ true! My Vermont _grand'mere_ wrote that! It happened to her!'"

"How queer! And, Landry, I see the connection. Your magazine being one of a set, you couldn't let her read it anywhere but here."

"I have to keep my own rules."

"Let me see it. . . . Oh, now, why not? What was the use of either of us explaining if--if----?"

But Ovide smilingly restored the thing to its stack. "Now," he said, "'tis Mr. Chester's logic that fails." Yet as he turned to a customer he let Chester take it down.

"My job requires me," the youth said, "to study character. Let's see what a _grand'mere_ of a '_t.i.te-fille_, situated so and so, will do."

Ovide escorted his momentary customer to the sidewalk door. As he returned, Chester, rolling map and magazine together, said:

"It's getting dark. No, don't make a light, it's your closing time and I've a strict engagement. Here's a deposit for this magazine; a fifty.

It's all I have--oh, yes, take it, we'll trade back to-morrow. You must keep your own rules and I must read this thing before I touch my bed."

"Even the first few lines absorb you?"

"No, far from it. Look here." Chester read out: "'_Now, Maud,' said my uncle_--Oh, me! Landry, if the tale's true why that old story-book pose?"

"It may be that the writer preferred to tell it as fiction, and that only something in me told me 'tis true. Something still tells me so."

"'_Now, Maud_,'" Chester smilingly thought to himself when, the evening's later engagement being gratifyingly fulfilled, he sat down with the story. "And so you were grand'mere to our Royal Street miracle. And you had a Southern uncle! So had I! though yours was a planter, mine a lawyer, and yours must have been fifty years the older. Well, '_Now, Maud_,' for my absorption!"

It came. Though the tale was unamazing amazement came. The four chief characters were no sooner set in motion than Chester dropped the pamphlet to his knee, agape in recollection of a most droll fact a year or two old, which now all at once and for the first time arrested his attention.

He also had a ma.n.u.script! That lawyer uncle of his, saying as he spared him a few duplicate volumes from his law library, "Burn that if you don't want it," had tossed him a fat doc.u.ment indorsed: "_Memorandum of an Early Experience_." Later the nephew had glanced it over, but, like "Maud's" story, its first few lines had annoyed his critical sense and he had never read it carefully. The amazing point was that "_Now, Maud_"

and this "_Memorandum_" most incredibly--with a ridiculous nicety--fitted each other.

He lifted the magazine again and, beginning at the beginning a third time, read with a scrutiny of every line as though he studied a witness's deposition. And this was what he read:

IV

THE CLOCK IN THE SKY

"Now, Maud," said uncle jovially as he, aunt, and I drove into the confines of their beautiful place one spring afternoon of 1860, "don't forget that to be too near a thing is as bad for a good view of it as to be too far away."

I was a slim, tallish girl of scant sixteen, who had never seen a slaveholder on his plantation, though I had known these two for years, and loved them dearly, as guests in our Northern home before it was broken up by the death of my mother. Father was an abolitionist, and yet he and they had never had a harsh word between them. If the general goodness of those who do some particular thing were any proof that that particular thing is good to do, they would have convinced me, without a word, that slaveholding was entirely right. But they were not trying to do any such thing. "Remember," continued my uncle, smiling round at me, "your dad's trusting you not to bring back our honest opinion--of anything--in place of your own."

"Maud," my aunt hurried to put in, for she knew the advice I had just heard was not the kind I most needed, "you're going to have for your own maid the blackest girl you ever saw."

"And the best," added my uncle; "she's as good as she is black."

"She's no common darky, that Sidney," said aunt. "She'll keep you busy answering questions, my dear, and I say now, you may tell her anything she wants to know; we give you perfect liberty; and you may be just as free with Hester; that's her mother; or with her father, Silas."