The Flower of the Chapdelaines

The Flower of the Chapdelaines

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Title: The Flower of the Chapdelaines
Author: George W. Cable
Release Date: May 23, 2005 [EBook #15881]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FLOWER OF THE CHAPDELAINES ***

Produced by Al Haines

[Frontispiece: Yesterday, for the first time, at that same corner, he had
encountered this fair stranger and her urchin escort.]

THE FLOWER OF THE CHAPDELAINES
BY
GEORGE W. CABLE

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
F. C. YOHN

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1918

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published March, 1918

The Flower of the Chapdelaines
I
Next morning he saw her again.
He had left his very new law office, just around in Bienville Street, and
had come but a few steps down Royal, when, at the next corner below,
she turned into Royal, toward him, out of Conti, coming from Bourbon.
The same nine-year-old negro boy was at her side, as spotless in broad
white collar and blue jacket as on the morning before, and carrying the
same droll air of consecration, awe, and responsibility. The young man
envied him.
Yesterday, for the first time, at that same corner, he had encountered
this fair stranger and her urchin escort, abruptly, as they were making
the same turn they now repeated, and all in a flash had wondered who
might be this lovely apparition. Of such patrician beauty, such elegance
of form and bearing, such witchery of simple attire, and such un-Italian
yet Latin type, in this antique Creole, modernly Italianized
quarter--who and what, so early in the day, down here among the shops,
where so meagre a remnant of the old high life clung on in these
balconied upper stories--who, what, whence, whither, and wherefore?
In that flash of time she had passed, and the very liveliness of his
interest, combined with the urchin's consecrated awe--not to mention
his own mortifying remembrance of one or two other-day lapses from
the austerities of the old street--restrained him from a backward glance
until he could cross the way as if to enter the great, white, lately
completed court-house. Then both she and her satellite had vanished.
He turned again, but not to enter the building. His watch read but half
past eight, and his first errand of the day, unless seeing her had been his
first, was to go one square farther on, for a look at the wreckers tearing

down the old Hotel St. Louis. As he turned, a man neat of dress and
well beyond middle age made him a suave gesture.
"Sir, if you please. You are, I think, Mr. Chester, notary public and
attorney at law?"
"That is my name and trade, sir." Evidently Mr. Geoffry Chester was
also an American, a Southerner.
"Pardon," said his detainer, "I have only my business card." He
tendered it: "Marcel Castanado, Masques et Costumes, No. 312, rue
Royale, entre Bienville et Conti."
"I diz-ire your advice," he continued, "on a very small matter neither
notarial, neither of the law. Yet I must pay you for that, if you can
make your charge as--as small as the matter."
The young lawyer's own matters were at a juncture where a fee was a
godsend, yet he replied:
"If your matter is not of the law I can make you no charge."
The costumer shrugged: "Pardon, in that case I must seek elsewhere."
He would have moved on, but Chester asked:
"What kind of advice do you want if not legal?"
"Literary."
The young man smiled: "Why, I'm not literary."
"I think yes. You know Ovide Landry? Black man? Secon'-han' books,
Chartres Street, just yonder?"
"Yes, very pleasantly, for I love old books."
"Yes, and old buildings, and their histories. I know. You are now going
down, as I have just been, to see again the construction of that old
dome they are dim-olishing yonder, of the once state-house, previously
Hotel St. Louis. I know. Twice a day you pass my shop. I am
compelled to see, what Ovide also has told me, that, like me and my
wife, you have a passion for the _poétique_ and the pittoresque!"
"Yes," Chester laughed, "but that's my limit. I've never written a line
for print----"
"This writing is done, since fifty years."
"I've never passed literary judgment on a written page and don't
suppose I ever shall."
"The judgment is passed. The value of the article is pronounced
great--by an