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

now to ask you to fulfill that promise; to ask you to be my wife, my companion, the dear treasure of my life.”

She heard his warm and pleading tones as though listening to a strange language, imperfectly understood.

She withdrew her hand from his, and leaned her brow thoughtfully upon it.

“Can you not feel⁠—can you not understand, mon ami,” she said calmly, “that now such a thing⁠—such a thought, is impossible to me?”

“Impossible?”

“Yes, impossible. Can you not see that now my heart, my soul, my thought⁠—my very life, must belong to another? It could not be different.”

“Would you have me believe that you can wed your young existence to the dead?” he exclaimed with something like horror. Her glance was sunk deep in the embankment of flowers before her.

“My husband has never been so living to me as he is now,” she replied with a faint smile of commiseration for Sépincourt’s fatuity. “Every object that surrounds me speaks to me of him. I look yonder across the marais, and I see him coming toward me, tired and toil-stained from the hunt. I see him again sitting in this chair or in that one. I hear his familiar voice, his footsteps upon the galleries. We walk once more together beneath the magnolias; and at night in dreams I feel that he is there, there, near me. How could it be different! Ah! I have memories, memories to crowd and fill my life, if I live a hundred years!”

Sépincourt was wondering why she did not take the sword down from her altar and thrust it through his body here and there. The effect would have been infinitely more agreeable than her words, penetrating his soul like fire. He arose confused, enraged with pain.

“Then, Madame,” he stammered, “there is nothing left for me but to take my leave. I bid you adieu.”

“Do not be offended, mon ami,” she said kindly, holding out her hand. “You are going to Paris, I suppose?”

“What does it matter,” he exclaimed desperately, “where I go?”

“Oh, I only wanted to wish you bon voyage,” she assured him amiably.

Many days after that Sépincourt spent in the fruitless mental effort of trying to comprehend that psychological enigma, a woman’s heart.

Madame still lives on Bayou St. John. She is rather an old lady now, a very pretty old lady, against whose long years of widowhood there has never been a breath of reproach. The memory of Gustave still fills and satisfies her days. She has never failed, once a year, to have a solemn high mass said for the repose of his soul.

La Belle Zoraïde

The summer night was hot and still; not a ripple of air swept over the marais. Yonder, across Bayou St. John, lights twinkled here and there in the darkness, and in the dark sky above a few stars were blinking. A lugger that had come out of the lake was moving with slow, lazy motion down the bayou. A man in the boat was singing a song.

The notes of the song came faintly to the ears of old Manna Loulou, herself as black as the night, who had gone out upon the gallery to open the shutters wide.

Something in the refrain reminded the woman of an old, half-forgotten Creole romance, and she began to sing it low to herself while she threw the shutters open:⁠—

“Lisett’ to kité la plaine,
Mo perdi bonhair à moué;
Ziés à moué semblé fontaine,
Dépi mo pa miré toué.”

And then this old song, a lover’s lament for the loss of his mistress, floating into her memory, brought with it the story she would tell to Madame, who lay in her sumptuous mahogany bed, waiting to be fanned and put to sleep to the sound of one of Manna Loulou’s stories. The old negress had already bathed her mistress’s pretty white feet and kissed them lovingly, one, then the other. She had brushed her mistress’s beautiful hair, that was as soft and shining as satin, and was the color of Madame’s wedding-ring. Now, when she reentered the room, she moved softly toward the bed, and seating herself there began gently to fan Madame Delisle.

Manna Loulou was not always ready with her story, for Madame would hear none but those which were true. But tonight the story was all there in Manna Loulou’s head⁠—the story of la belle Zoraïde⁠—and she told it to her mistress in the soft Creole patois, whose music and charm no English words can convey.

La belle Zoraïde had eyes that were so dusky, so beautiful, that any man who gazed too long into their depths was sure to lose his head, and even his heart sometimes. Her soft, smooth skin was the color of café-au-lait.

As for her elegant manners, her svelte and graceful figure, they were the envy of half the ladies who visited her mistress, Madame Delarivière.

“No wonder Zoraïde was as charming and as dainty as the finest lady of la rue Royale: from a toddling thing she had been brought up at her mistress’s side; her fingers had never done rougher work than sewing a fine muslin seam; and she even had her own little black servant to wait upon her. Madame, who was her godmother as well as her mistress, would often say to her:⁠—

“ ‘Remember, Zoraïde, when you are ready to marry, it must be in a way to do honor to your bringing up. It will be at the Cathedral. Your wedding gown, your corbeille, all will be of the best; I shall see to that myself. You know, M’sieur Ambroise is ready whenever you say the word; and his master is willing to do as much for him as I shall do for you. It is a union that will please me in every way.’

“M’sieur Ambroise was then the body servant of Doctor Langlé. La belle