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

“Nev’ mine, ti chou. I know how take care dat w’at Vieumaite gi’ me. You go sleep now. Cat’rinette goin’ set yere an’ mine you. She goin’ make you well like she all time do. We don’ wan’ no céléra doctor. We drive ’em out wid a stick, dey come roun’ yere.”

Miss Kitty was soon sleeping more restfully than she had done since her illness began. Raymond had finally succeeded in quieting the baby, and he tiptoed into the adjoining room, where the other children lay, to snatch a few hours of much-needed rest for himself. Cat’rinette sat faithfully beside her charge, administering at intervals to the sick woman’s wants.

But the thought of regaining her home before daybreak, and of the urgent necessity for doing so, did not leave Tante Cat’rinette’s mind for an instant.

In the profound darkness, the deep stillness of the night that comes before dawn, she was walking again through the woods, on her way back to town.

The mockingbirds were asleep, and so were the frogs and the snakes; and the moon was gone, and so was the breeze. She walked now in utter silence but for the heavy guttural breathing that accompanied her rapid footsteps. She walked with a desperate determination along the road, every foot of which was familiar to her.

When she at last emerged from the woods, the earth about her was faintly, very faintly, beginning to reveal itself in the tremulous, gray, uncertain light of approaching day. She staggered and plunged onward with beating pulses quickened by fear.

A sudden turn, and Tante Cat’rinette stood facing the river. She stopped abruptly, as if at command of some unseen power that forced her. For an instant she pressed a black hand against her tired, burning eyes, and stared fixedly ahead of her.

Tante Cat’rinette had always believed that Paradise was up there overhead where the sun and stars and moon are, and that “Vieumaite” inhabited that region of splendor. She never for a moment doubted this. It would be difficult, perhaps unsatisfying, to explain why Tante Cat’rinette, on that particular morning, when a vision of the rising day broke suddenly upon her, should have believed that she stood in face of a heavenly revelation. But why not, after all? Since she talked so familiarly herself to the unseen, why should it not respond to her when the time came?

Across the narrow, quivering line of water, the delicate budding branches of young trees were limned black against the gold, orange⁠—what word is there to tell the color of that morning sky! And steeped in the splendor of it hung one pale star; there was not another in the whole heaven.

Tante Cat’rinette stood with her eyes fixed intently upon that star, which held her like a hypnotic spell. She stammered breathlessly:

“Mo pé couté, Vieumaite. Cat’rinette pé couté.” (I am listening, Vieumaite. Cat’rinette hears you.)

She stayed there motionless upon the brink of the river till the star melted into the brightness of the day and became part of it.

When Tante Cat’rinette entered Miss Kitty’s room for the second time, the aspect of things had changed somewhat. Miss Kitty was with much difficulty holding the baby while Raymond mixed a saucer of food for the little one. Their oldest daughter, a child of twelve, had come into the room with an apronful of chips from the woodpile, and was striving to start a fire on the hearth, to make the morning coffee. The room seemed bare and almost squalid in the daylight.

“Well, yere Tante Cat’rinette come back,” she said, quietly announcing herself.

They could not well understand why she was back; but it was good to have her there, and they did not question.

She took the baby from its mother, and, seating herself, began to feed it from the saucer which Raymond placed beside her on a chair.

“Yas,” she said, “Cat’rinette goin’ stay; dis time she en’t nev’ goin’ ’way no mo’.”

Husband and wife looked at each other with surprised, questioning eyes.

“Miché Raymond,” remarked the woman, turning her head up to him with a certain comical shrewdness in her glance, “if somebody want len’ you t’ousan’ dolla’, w’at you goin’ say? Even if it’s ole nigga ’oman?”

The man’s face flushed with sudden emotion. “I would say that person was our bes’ frien’, Tante Cat’rinette. An’,” he added, with a smile, “I would give her a mortgage on the place, of co’se, to secu’ her f’om loss.”

“Das right,” agreed the woman practically. “Den Cat’rinette goin’ len’ you t’ousan’ dolla’. Dat w’at Vieumaite give her, dat b’long to her; don’ b’long to nobody else. An’ we go yon’a to town, Miché Raymond, you an’ me. You care me befo’ Miché Paxtone. I want ’im fo’ put down in writin’ befo’ de cote dat w’at Cat’rinette got, it fo’ Miss Kitty w’en I be dead.”

Miss Kitty was crying softly in the depths of her pillow.

“I en’t got no head fo’ all dat, me,” laughed Tante Cat’rinette, good humoredly, as she held a spoonful of pap up to the baby’s eager lips. “It’s Vieumaite tell me all dat clair an’ plain dis mo’nin’, w’en I comin’ ’long de Gran’ Eco’ road.”

Madame Valtour had been in the sitting-room some time before she noticed the absence of the Dresden china figure from the corner of the mantelpiece, where it had stood for years. Aside from the intrinsic value of the piece, there were some very sad and tender memories associated with it. A baby’s lips that were now forever still had loved once to kiss the painted “pitty ’ady”; and the baby arms had often held it in a close and smothered embrace.

Madame Valtour gave a rapid, startled glance around the room, to see perchance if it had been misplaced; but she failed to discover it.

Viny, the housemaid, when summoned, remembered having carefully dusted it that morning, and was rather indignantly positive that she had not broken the thing