Short Fiction, Kate Chopin [sci fi books to read txt] 📗

says it’s a disgrace like it’s neva been in the family. But it’s good for Maman to talk, her. W’at trouble she ever had? She says I mus’ go by all means consult with Père Duchéron⁠—it’s my confessor, you undastan’⁠—Well, I’ll go, Judge, to please Maman. But all the confessor’ in the worl’ ent goin’ make me put up with that conduc’ of Célestin any longa.”

A day or two later, she was there waiting for him again. “You know, Judge, about that divo’ce.”

“Yes, yes,” responded the lawyer, well pleased to trace a new determination in her brown eyes and in the curves of her pretty mouth. “I suppose you saw Père Duchéron and had to brave it out with him, too.”

“Oh, fo’ that, a perfec’ sermon, I assho you. A talk of giving scandal an’ bad example that I thought would neva en’! He says, fo’ him, he wash’ his hands; I mus’ go see the bishop.”

“You won’t let the bishop dissuade you, I trust,” stammered the lawyer more anxiously than he could well understand.

“You don’t know me yet, Judge,” laughed Madame Célestin with a turn of the head and a flirt of the broom which indicated that the interview was at an end.

“Well, Madame Célestin! And the bishop!” Lawyer Paxton was standing there holding to a couple of the shaky pickets. She had not seen him. “Oh, it’s you, Judge?” and she hastened towards him with an empressement that could not but have been flattering.

“Yes, I saw Monseigneur,” she began. The lawyer had already gathered from her expressive countenance that she had not wavered in her determination. “Ah, he’s a eloquent man. It’s not a mo’ eloquent man in Natchitoches parish. I was fo’ced to cry, the way he talked to me about my troubles; how he undastan’s them, an’ feels for me. It would move even you, Judge, to hear how he talk’ about that step I want to take; its danga, its temptation. How it is the duty of a Catholic to stan’ everything till the las’ extreme. An’ that life of retirement an’ self-denial I would have to lead⁠—he tole me all that.”

“But he hasn’t turned you from your resolve, I see,” laughed the lawyer complacently.

“For that, no,” she returned emphatically. “The bishop don’t know w’at it is to be married to a man like Célestin, an’ have to endu’ that conduc’ like I have to endu’ it. The Pope himse’f can’t make me stan’ that any longer, if you say I got the right in the law to sen’ Célestin sailing.”

A noticeable change had come over lawyer Paxton. He discarded his workday coat and began to wear his Sunday one to the office. He grew solicitous as to the shine of his boots, his collar, and the set of his tie. He brushed and trimmed his whiskers with a care that had not before been apparent. Then he fell into a stupid habit of dreaming as he walked the streets of the old town. It would be very good to take unto himself a wife, he dreamed. And he could dream of no other than pretty Madame Célestin filling that sweet and sacred office as she filled his thoughts, now. Old Natchitoches would not hold them comfortably, perhaps; but the world was surely wide enough to live in, outside of Natchitoches town.

His heart beat in a strangely irregular manner as he neared Madame Célestin’s house one morning, and discovered her behind the rosebushes, as usual plying her broom. She had finished the gallery and steps and was sweeping the little brick walk along the edge of the violet border.

“Good morning, Madame Célestin.”

“Ah, it’s you, Judge? Good morning.” He waited. She seemed to be doing the same. Then she ventured, with some hesitancy, “You know, Judge, about that divo’ce. I been thinking⁠—I reckon you betta neva mine about that divo’ce.” She was making deep rings in the palm of her gloved hand with the end of the broom-handle, and looking at them critically. Her face seemed to the lawyer to be unusually rosy; but maybe it was only the reflection of the pink bow at the throat. “Yes, I reckon you need n’ mine. You see, Judge, Célestin came home las’ night. An’ he’s promise me on his word an’ honor he’s going to turn ova a new leaf.”

A Matter of Prejudice

Madame Carambeau wanted it strictly understood that she was not to be disturbed by Gustave’s birthday party. They carried her big rocking-chair from the back gallery, that looked out upon the garden where the children were going to play, around to the front gallery, which closely faced the green levee bank and the Mississippi coursing almost flush with the top of it.

The house⁠—an old Spanish one, broad, low and completely encircled by a wide gallery⁠—was far down in the French quarter of New Orleans. It stood upon a square of ground that was covered thick with a semitropical growth of plants and flowers. An impenetrable board fence, edged with a formidable row of iron spikes, shielded the garden from the prying glances of the occasional passerby.

Madame Carambeau’s widowed daughter, Madame Cécile Lalonde, lived with her. This annual party, given to her little son, Gustave, was the one defiant act of Madame Lalonde’s existence. She persisted in it, to her own astonishment and the wonder of those who knew her and her mother.

For old Madame Carambeau was a woman of many prejudices⁠—so many, in fact, that it would be difficult to name them all. She detested dogs, cats, organ-grinders, white servants and children’s noises. She despised Americans, Germans and all people of a different faith from her own. Anything not French had, in her opinion, little right to existence.

She had not spoken to her son Henri for ten years because he had married an American girl from Prytania street. She would not permit green tea to be introduced into her house, and those who could not or would not