Old Creole Days | Page 9

good as the law would let him be--better, indeed, for he left me property, which really the strict law does not allow. He loved our little daughter very much. He wrote to his mother and sisters, owning all his error and asking them to take the child and bring her up. I sent her to them when he died, which was soon after, and did not see my child for sixteen years. But we wrote to each other all the time, and she loved me. And then--at last"--Madame Delphine ceased speaking, but went on diligently with her agitated fingers, turning down foolish hems lengthwise of her lap.
"At last your mother-heart conquered," said P��re Jerome.
She nodded.
"The sisters married, the mother died; I saw that even where she was she did not escape the reproach of her birth and blood, and when she asked me to let her come"--The speaker's brimming eyes rose an instant. "I know it was wicked, but--I said, come."
The tears dripped through her hands upon her dress.
"Was it she who was with you last Sunday?"
"Yes."
"And now you do not know what to do with her?"
"Ah! c'est ?a oui!--that is it."
"Does she look like you, Madame Delphine?"
"Oh, thank God", no! you would never believe she was my daughter, she is white and beautiful!"
"You thank God for that which is your main difficulty, Madame Delphine."
"Alas! yes."
P��re Jerome laid his palms tightly across his knees with his arms bowed out, and fixed his eyes upon the ground, pondering.
"I suppose she is a sweet, good daughter?" said he, glancing at Madame Delphine, without changing his attitude.
Her answer was to raise her eyes rapturously.
"Which gives us the dilemma in its fullest force," said the priest, speaking as if to the floor. "She has no more place than if she had dropped upon a strange planet." He suddenly looked up with a brightness which almost as quickly passed away, and then he looked down again. His happy thought was the cloister; but he instantly said to himself: "They cannot have overlooked that choice, except intentionally--which they have a right to do." He could do nothing but shake his head.
"And suppose you should suddenly die," he said; he wanted to get at once to the worst.
The woman made a quick gesture, and buried her head in her handkerchief, with the stifled cry:
"Oh, Olive, my daughter!"
"Well, Madame Delphine," said P��re Jerome, more buoyantly, "one thing is sure: we must find a way out of this trouble."
"Ah!" she exclaimed, looking heavenward, "if it might be!"
"But it must be!" said the priest.
"But how shall it be?" asked the desponding woman.
"Ah!" said P��re Jerome, with a shrug, "God knows."
"Yes," said the quadroone, with a quick sparkle in her gentle eye; "and I know, if God would tell anybody, He would tell you!"
The priest smiled and rose.
"Do you think so? Well, leave me to think of it. I will ask Him."
"And He will tell you!" she replied. "And He will bless you!" She rose and gave her hand. As she withdrew it she smiled. "I had such a strange dream," she said, backing toward the door.
"Yes?"
"Yes. I got my troubles all mixed up with your sermon. I dreamed I made that pirate the guardian of my daughter."
P��re Jerome smiled also, and shrugged.
"To you, Madame Delphine, as you are placed, every white man in this country, on land or on water, is a pirate, and of all pirates, I think that one is, without doubt, the best."
"Without doubt," echoed Madame Delphine, wearily, still withdrawing backward. P��re Jerome stepped forward and opened the door.
The shadow of some one approaching it from without fell upon the threshold, and a man entered, dressed in dark blue cottonade, lifting from his head a fine Panama hat, and from a broad, smooth brow, fair where the hat had covered it, and dark below, gently stroking back his very soft, brown locks. Madame Delphine slightly started aside, while P��re Jerome reached silently, but eagerly, forward, grasped a larger hand than his own, and motioned its owner to a seat. Madame Delphine's eyes ventured no higher than to discover that the shoes of the visitor were of white duck.
"Well, P��re Jerome," she said, in a hurried undertone, "I am just going to say Hail Marys all the time till you find that out for me!"
"Well, I hope that will be soon, Madame Carraze. Good-day, Madame Carraze."
And as she departed, the priest turned to the newcomer and extended both hands, saying, in the same familiar dialect in which he had been addressing the quadroone:
"Well-a-day, old playmate! After so many years!"
They sat down side by side, like husband and wife, the priest playing with the other's hand, and talked of times and seasons past, often mentioning Evariste and often Jean.
Madame Delphine stopped short half-way home and returned to P��re Jerome's.