Old Creole Days Part 4

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 Pere Jerome's. His entry door was wide open and the parlor door ajar. She pa.s.sed through the one and with downcast eyes was standing at the other, her hand lifted to knock, when the door was drawn open and the white duck shoes pa.s.sed out. She saw, besides, this time the blue cottonade suit.

"Yes," the voice of Pere Jerome was saying, as his face appeared in the door--"Ah! Madame"--

"I lef' my para_sol_," said Madame Delphine, in English.

There was this quiet evidence of a defiant spirit hidden somewhere down under her general timidity, that, against a fierce conventional prohibition, she wore a bonnet instead of the turban of her caste, and carried a parasol.

Pere Jerome turned and brought it.

He made a motion in the direction in which the late visitor had disappeared.

"Madame Delphine, you saw dat man?"

"Not his face."

"You couldn' billieve me iv I tell you w'at dat man purpose to do!"

"Is dad so, Pere Jerome?"

"He's goin' to hopen a bank!"

"Ah!" said Madame Delphine, seeing she was expected to be astonished.

Pere Jerome evidently longed to tell something that was best kept secret; he repressed the impulse, but his heart had to say something. He threw forward one hand and looking pleasantly at Madame Delphine, with his lips dropped apart, clenched his extended hand and thrusting it toward the ground, said in a solemn undertone:

"He is G.o.d's own banker, Madame Delphine."

CHAPTER VII.

MICHe VIGNEVIELLE.

Madame Delphine sold one of the corner lots of her property. She had almost no revenue, and now and then a piece had to go. As a consequence of the sale, she had a few large bank-notes sewed up in her petticoat, and one day--maybe a fortnight after her tearful interview with Pere Jerome--she found it necessary to get one of these changed into small money. She was in the Rue Toulouse, looking from one side to the other for a bank which was not in that street at all, when she noticed a small sign hanging above a door, bearing the name "Vignevielle." She looked in. Pere Jerome had told her (when she had gone to him to ask where she should apply for change) that if she could only wait a few days, there would be a new concern opened in Toulouse Street,--it really seemed as if Vignevielle was the name, if she could judge; it looked to be, and it was, a private banker's,--"U.L. Vignevielle's," according to a larger inscription which met her eyes as she ventured in. Behind the counter, exchanging some last words with a busy-mannered man outside, who, in withdrawing, seemed bent on running over Madame Delphine, stood the man in blue cottonade, whom she had met in Pere Jerome's doorway. Now, for the first time, she saw his face, its strong, grave, human kindness s.h.i.+ning softly on each and every bronzed feature. The recognition was mutual. He took pains to speak first, saying, in a re-a.s.suring tone, and in the language he had last heard her use: "'Ow I kin serve you, Madame?"

"Iv you pliz, to mague dad bill change, Miche."

She pulled from her pocket a wad of dark cotton handkerchief, from which she began to untie the imprisoned note. Madame Delphine had an uncommonly sweet voice, and it seemed so to strike Monsieur Vignevielle.

He spoke to her once or twice more, as he waited on her, each time in English, as though he enjoyed the humble melody of its tone, and presently, as she turned to go, he said:

"Madame Carraze!"

She started a little, but bethought herself instantly that he had heard her name in Pere Jerome's parlor. The good father might even have said a few words about her after her first departure; he had such an overflowing heart. "Madame Carraze," said Monsieur Vignevielle, "doze kine of note wad you '_an_' me juz now is bein' contrefit. You muz tek kyah from doze kine of note. You see"--He drew from his cash-drawer a note resembling the one he had just changed for her, and proceeded to point out certain tests of genuineness. The counterfeit, he said, was so and so.

"Bud," she exclaimed, with much dismay, "dad was de manner of my bill!

Id muz be--led me see dad bill wad I give you,--if you pliz, Miche."

Monsieur Vigneville turned to engage in conversation with an employe and a new visitor, and gave no sign of hearing Madame Delphine's voice. She asked a second time, with like result, lingered timidly, and as he turned to give his attention to a third visitor, reiterated:

"Miche Vignevielle, I wizh you pliz led"--

"Madame Carraze," he said, turning so suddenly as to make the frightened little woman start, but extending his palm with a show of frankness, and a.s.suming a look of benignant patience, "'ow I kin fine doze note now, mongs' all de rez? Iv you p'iz nod to mague me doze troub'."

The dimmest shadow of a smile seemed only to give his words a more kindly authoritative import, and as he turned away again with a manner suggestive of finality, Madame Delphine found no choice but to depart.

But she went away loving the ground beneath the feet of Monsieur U.L.

Vignevielle.

"Oh, Pere Jerome!" she exclaimed in the corrupt French of her caste, meeting the little father on the street a few days later, "you told the truth that day in your parlor. _Mo conne li a c't heure_. I know him now; he is just what you called him."

"Why do you not make him _your_ banker, also, Madame Delphine?"

"I have done so this very day!" she replied, with more happiness in her eyes than Pere Jerome had ever before seen there.

"Madame Delphine," he said, his own eyes sparkling, "make _him_ your daughter's guardian; for myself, being a priest, it would not be best; but ask him; I believe he will not refuse you."

Madame Delphine's face grew still brighter as he spoke.

"It was in my mind," she said.

Yet to the timorous Madame Delphine many trifles became, one after another, an impediment to the making of this proposal, and many weeks elapsed before further delay was positively without excuse. But at length, one day in May, 1822, in a small private office behind Monsieur Vignevielle's banking-room,--he sitting beside a table, and she, more timid and demure than ever, having just taken a chair by the door,--she said, trying, with a little bashful laugh, to make the matter seem unimportant, and yet with some tremor of voice:

"Miche Vignevielle, I bin maguing my will." (Having commenced their acquaintance in English, they spoke nothing else.)

"'Tis a good idy," responded the banker.

"I kin mague you de troub' to kib dad will fo' me Miche Vignevielle?"

"Yez."

She looked up with grateful re-a.s.surance; but her eyes dropped again as she said:

"Miche Vignevielle"--Here she choked, and began her peculiar motion of laying folds in the skirt of her dress, with trembling fingers. She lifted her eyes, and as they met the look of deep and placid kindness that was in his face, some courage returned, and she said:

"Miche."

"Wad you wand?" asked he, gently.

"If it arrive to me to die"--

"Yez?"