IC-NRLF 
 
MADAME DELPHHSTE 
 
MADAME DELPHINE 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE W. CABLE 
 
 Author of" Old Creole Days," " The Grandissimes," etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 743 AND 745 BROADWAY 
 
 1881 
 
\ V \ 
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 
 1881 
 BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 i CO., 
 NEW YORK. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 AN OLD HOUSE 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 MADAME DELPHINE 7 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 CAPITAINE LEMAITRE 12 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THREE FRIENDS 18 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 THE CAP FITS , 28 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 A CRY OF DISTRESS 40 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 MlCHE VlGNEVIELLE 50 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 SHE 59 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 OLIVE 68 
 
 iii 
 
IV 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BIRDS 74 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 FACE TO FACE 82 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 THE MOTHER BIRD f 90 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 TRIBULATION 99 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 BY AN OATH 106 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 KYRIE ELEISON . . . 120 
 
jririt] 
 ^^ 
 
 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 CHAPTEK I. 
 
 AN OLD HOUSE. 
 
 A FEW steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in 
 New Orleans, brings you to and across Canal 
 street, the central avenue of the city, and to 
 that corner where the flower-women sit at the 
 inner and outer edges of the arcaded side- 
 walk, and make the air sweet with their fra- 
 grant merchandise. The crowd and if it is 
 near the time of the carnival it will be great 
 will follow Canal street. 
 
 But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow 
 way which a lover of Creole antiquity, in fond- 
 ness for a romantic past, is still prone to call 
 the Rue Eoyale. You will pass a few restau- 
 rants, a few auction rooms, a few furniture 
 warehouses, and will hardly realize that you 
 1 
 
Z MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 have left behind you the activity and clatter 
 of a city of merchants before you find yourself 
 in a region of architectural decrepitude, where 
 an ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life, 
 in second stories, overhangs the ruins of a 
 former commercial prosperity, and upon every- 
 thing has settled down a long Sabbath of de- 
 cay. The vehicles in the street are few in 
 number, and are merely passing through ; the 
 stores are shrunken into shops ; you see here 
 and there, like a patch of bright mould, the stall 
 of that significant fungus, the Chinaman. Many 
 great doors are shut and clamped and grown 
 gray with cobweb ; many street windows are 
 nailed up ; half the balconies are begrimed and 
 rust-eaten, and many of the humid arches and 
 alleys which characterize the older Franco- 
 Spanish piles of stuccoed brick betray a squalor 
 almost oriental. 
 
 Yet beauty lingers here. To say nothing of 
 the picturesque, sometimes you get sight of 
 comfort, sometimes of opulence, through the 
 unlatched wicket in some porte-cochere red- 
 painted brick pavement, foliage of dark palm 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 3 
 
 or pale banana, marble or granite masonry and 
 blooming parterres ; or through a chink be- 
 tween some pair of heavy batten window-shut- 
 ters, opened with an almost reptile wariness, 
 your eye gets & glimpse of lace and brocade 
 upholstery, silver and bronze, and much simi- 
 lar rich antiquity. 
 
 The faces of the inmates are in keeping ; of 
 the passengers in the street a sad proportion 
 are dingy and shabby ; but just when these are 
 putting you off your guard, there will pass you 
 a woman more likely two or three of patri- 
 cian beauty. 
 
 Now, if you will go far enough down this old 
 street, you will see, as you approach its inter- 
 section with . Names in that region elude 
 
 one like ghosts. 
 
 However, as you begin to find the way a 
 trifle more open, you will not fail to notice 
 on the right-hand side, about midway of the 
 square, a small, low, brick house of a story and 
 a half, set out upon the sidewalk, as weather- 
 beaten and mute as an aged beggar fallen 
 asleep. Its corrugated roof of dull red tiles, 
 
4 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 sloping down toward you with an inward curve, 
 is overgrown with weeds, and in the fall of the 
 year is gay with the yellow plumes of the 
 golden-rod. You can almost touch with your 
 cane the low edge of the broad, overhanging 
 eaves. The batten shutters at door and win- 
 dow, with hinges like those of a postern, are 
 shut with a grip that makes one's knuckles and 
 nails feel lacerated. Save in the brick-work 
 itself there is not a cranny. You would say the 
 house has the lock-jaw. There are two doors, 
 and to each a single chipped and battered mar- 
 ble step. Continuing on down the sidewalk, 
 on a line with the house, is a garden masked 
 from view by a high, close board-fence. You 
 may see the tops of its fruit-trees pomegran- 
 ate, peach, banana, fig, pear, and particularly 
 one large orange, close by the fence, that must 
 be very old. 
 
 The residents over the narrow way, who live 
 in a three-story house, originally of much pre- 
 tension, but from whose front door hard times 
 have removed almost all vestiges of paint, will 
 tell you : 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 5 
 
 " Yass, de 'ouse is in'abit ; 'tis live in." 
 
 And this is likely to be all the information 
 you get not that they would not tell, but 
 they cannot grasp the idea that you wish to 
 know until, possibly, just as you are turning 
 to depart, your informant, in a single word and 
 with the most evident non-appreciation of its 
 value, drops the simple key to the whole mat- 
 ter: 
 
 "Dey's quadroons." 
 
 He may then be aroused to mention the bet- 
 ter appearance of the place in former years, 
 when the houses of this region generally stood 
 farther apart, and that garden comprised the 
 whole square. 
 
 Here dwelt, sixty years ago and more, one 
 Delphine Carraze ; or, as she was commonly 
 designated by the few who knew her, Madame 
 Delphine. That she owned her home, and that 
 it had been given her by the then deceased 
 companion of her days of beauty, were facts so. 
 generally admitted as to be, even as far back as 
 that sixty years ago, no longer a subject of gos- 
 sip. She was never pointed out by the deni- 
 
6 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 zens of the quarter as a character, nor her house 
 as a "feature." It would haye passed all 
 Creole powers of guessing to divine what you 
 could find worthy of inquiry concerning a 
 retired quadroon woman ; and not the least 
 puzzled of all would have been the timid and 
 restive Madame Delphine herself. 
 
CHAPTEK II. 
 
 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 DUBING the first quarter of the present cen- 
 tury, the free quadroon caste of New Orleans 
 was in its golden age. Earlier generations 
 sprung, upon the one hand, from the merry 
 gallants of a French colonial military service 
 which had grown gross by affiliation with Span- 
 ish-American frontier life, and, upon the other 
 hand, from comely Ethiopians culled out of 
 the less negroidal types of African live goods, 
 and bought at the ship's side with vestiges of 
 quills and cowries and copper wire still in their 
 head-dresses, these earlier generations, with 
 scars of battle or private rencontre still on the 
 fathers, and of servitude on the manumitted 
 mothers, afforded a mere hint of the splendor 
 that was to result from a survival of the fairest 
 through seventy-five years devoted to the elimi- 
 7 
 
8 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 nation of the black pigment and the cultivation 
 of hyperian excellence and njmphean grace 
 and beauty. Nor, if we turn to the present, is 
 the evidence much stronger which is offered by 
 the gens de couleur whom you may see in the 
 quadroon quarter this afternoon, with " Icha- 
 bod " legible on their murky foreheads through 
 a vain smearing of toilet powder, dragging their 
 chairs down to the narrow gate-way of their 
 close-fenced gardens, and staring shrinkingly 
 at you as you pass, like a nest of yellow kittens. 
 But as the present century was in its second 
 and third decades, the quadroones (for we must 
 contrive a feminine spelling to define the strict 
 limits of the caste as then established) came 
 forth in splendor. Old travellers spare no 
 terms to tell their praises, their faultlessness 
 of feature, their perfection of form, their varied 
 styles of beauty, for there were even pure Cau- 
 casian blondes among them, their fascinating 
 .manners, their sparkling vivacity, their chaste 
 and pretty wit, their grace in the dance, their 
 modest propriety, their taste and elegance in 
 dress. In the gentlest and most poetic sense 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 9 
 
 they were indeed the sirens of this land, where 
 it seemed "always afternoon" a momentary 
 triumph of an Arcadian over a Christian civili- 
 zation, so beautiful and so seductive that it be- 
 came the subject of special chapters by writers 
 of the day more original than correct as social 
 philosophers. 
 
 The balls that were got up for them by the 
 male sang-pur were to that day what the carni- 
 val is to the present. Society balls given the 
 same nights proved failures through the coin- 
 cidence. The magnates of government, muni- 
 cipal, state, federal, those of the army, of the 
 learned professions and of the clubs, in short, 
 the white male aristocracy in everything save 
 the ecclesiastical desk, were there. Tickets 
 were high-priced to insure the exclusion of the 
 vulgar. No distinguished stranger was allowed 
 to miss them. They were beautiful! They 
 were clad in silken extenuations from the throat 
 to the feet, and wore, withal, a pathos in their 
 charm that gave them a family likeness to in- 
 nocence. 
 
 Madame Delphine, were you not a stranger, 
 
10 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 could have told you all about it ; though hardly, 
 I suppose, without tears. 
 
 But at the time of which we would speak 
 (1821-22) her day of splendor was set, and her 
 husband let us call him so for her sake was 
 long dead. He was an American, and, if we 
 take her word for it, a man of noble heart and 
 extremely handsome ; but this is knowledge 
 which we can do without. 
 
 Even in those days the house was always 
 shut, and Madame Delphine's chief occupation 
 and end in life seemed to be to keep well locked 
 up in-doors. She was an excellent person, the 
 neighbors said, a very worthy person; and 
 they were, may be, nearer correct than they 
 knew. They rarely saw her save when she 
 went to or returned from church ; a small, 
 rather tired-looking, dark quadroone of very 
 good features and a gentle thoughtfulness of 
 expression which it would take long to de- 
 scribe : call it a widow's look. 
 
 In speaking of Madame Delphine's house, 
 mention should have been made of a gate in 
 the fence on the Royal-street sidewalk. It is 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 11 
 
 gone now, and was out of use then, being fas- 
 tened ,once for all by an iron staple clasping 
 the cross-bar and driven into the post. 
 
 Which leads us to speak of another per- 
 son. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 CAPITAINE LEMAITEE. 
 
 HE was one of those men that might be any 
 age, thirty, forty, forty-five ; there was no 
 telling from his face what was years and what 
 was only weather. His countenance was of a 
 grave and quiet, but also luminous, sort, which 
 was instantly admired and ever afterward re- 
 membered, as was also the fineness of his hair 
 and the blueness of his eyes. Those pro- 
 nounced him youngest who scrutinized his 
 face the closest. But waiving the discussion 
 of age, he was odd, though not with the odd- 
 ness that he who reared him had striven to 
 produce. 
 
 He had not been brought up by mother or 
 
 father. He had lost both in infancy, and had 
 
 fallen to the care of a rugged old military 
 
 grandpa of the colonial school, whose unceas- 
 
 12 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 13 
 
 ing endeavor had been to make " his boy " as 
 savage and ferocious a holder of unimpeach- 
 able social rank as it became a pure-blooded 
 Frencfi Creole to be who could trace his pedi- 
 gree back to the god Mars. 
 
 "Kemember, my boy," was the adjuration 
 received by him as regularly as his waking 
 cup of black coffee, " that none of your family 
 line ever kept the laws of any government or 
 creed." And if it was well that he should bear 
 this in mind, it was well to reiterate it per- 
 sistently, for, from the nurse's arms, the boy 
 wore a look, not of docility so much as of gen- 
 tle, judicial benevolence. The domestics of 
 the old man's house used to shed tears of 
 laughter to see that look on the face of a babe. 
 His rude guardian addressed himself to the 
 modification of this facial expression ; it had 
 not enough of majesty in it, for instance, or of 
 large dare-deviltry ; but with care these could 
 be made to come. 
 
 And, true enough, at twenty-one (in Ursin 
 Lemaitre), the labors of his grandfather were 
 an apparent success. He was not rugged, nor 
 
14 MADATVTR DELPHINE. 
 
 was he loud-spoken, as his venerable trainer 
 would have liked to present him to society; 
 but he was as serenely terrible as a well-aimed 
 rifle, and the old man looked upon his results 
 with pride. He had cultivated him up to that 
 pitch where he scorned to practice any vice, 
 or any virtue, that did not include the princi- 
 ple of self-assertion. A few touches only were 
 wanting here and there to achieve perfection, 
 when suddenly the old man died. Yet it was 
 his proud satisfaction, before he finally lay 
 down, to see Ursin a favored companion and 
 the peer, both in courtesy and pride, of those 
 polished gentlemen famous in history, the 
 brothers Lafitte. 
 
 The two Lafittes were, at the time young 
 Lemaitre reached his majority (say 1808 or 
 1812), only merchant blacksmiths, so to speak, 
 a term intended to convey the idea of black- 
 smiths who never soiled their hands, who were 
 men of capital, stood a little higher than the 
 clergy, and moved in society among its auto- 
 crats. But they were full of possibilities, men 
 of action, and men, too, of thought, with al- 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 15 
 
 ready a pronounced disbelief in the custom- 
 house. In these days of big carnivals they 
 would have been patented as the dukes of Lit- 
 tle Manchac and Bar at aria. 
 
 Young Ursin Lemaitre (in full the name was 
 Lemaitre-Vignevielle) had not only the hearty 
 friendship of these good people, but also a 
 natural turn for accounts ; and as his two 
 friends were looking about them with an en- 
 terprising eye, it easily resulted that he pres- 
 ently connected himself with the blacksmith- 
 ing profession. Not exactly at the forge in the 
 Lafittes' famous smithy, among the African 
 Samsons, who, with their shining black bodies 
 bared to the w r aist, made the Eue St. Pierre 
 ring with the stroke of their hammers ; but as 
 a there was no occasion to mince the word in 
 those days smuggler. 
 
 Smuggler patriot where was the differ- 
 ence ? Beyond the ken of a community to v 
 which the enforcement of the revenue laws 
 had long been merely so much out of every 
 man's pocket and dish, into the all-devouring 
 treasury of Spain. At this date they had come 
 
16 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 under a kinder yoke, and to a treasury that at 
 least echoed when the customs were dropped 
 into it ; but the change was still new. "What 
 could a man be more than Capitaine Lemaitre^ 
 was the soul of honor, the pink of courtesy, 
 with the courage of the lion, and the magna- 
 nimity -of the elephant ; frank the very ex- 
 chequer of truth ! Nay, go higher still : his 
 paper was good in Toulouse street. To the 
 gossips in the gaming- clubs he was the culmi- 
 nating proof that smuggling was one of the 
 sublimer virtues. 
 
 Years went by. Events transpired which 
 have their place in history. Under a govern- 
 ment which the community by and by saw was 
 conducted in their interest, smuggling began 
 to lose its respectability and to grow disrepu- 
 table, hazardous, and debased. In certain on- 
 slaughts made upon them by officers of the 
 law, some of the smugglers became murderers. 
 The business became unprofitable for a time 
 until the enterprising Lafittes thinkers be- 
 thought them of a corrective " privateering." 
 
 Thereupon the United States Government 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 17 
 
 set a price upon their heads. Later yet it be- 
 came known that these outlawed pirates had 
 been offered money and rank by Great Britain 
 if they would join her standard, then hovering 
 about the water-approaches to their native 
 city, and that they had spurned the bribe ; 
 wherefore their heads were ruled out of the 
 market, and, meeting and treating with Andrew 
 Jackson, they were received as lovers of their 
 country, and as compatriots fought in the 
 battle of New Orleans at the head of their 
 fearless men, and here tradition takes up the 
 tale were never seen afterward. 
 
 Capitaine Lemaitre was not among the killed 
 or wounded, but he was among the missing. 
 
CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 THBEE FBIENDS. 
 
 THE roundest and happiest-looking priest in 
 the" city of New Orleans was a little man fondly 
 known among his people as Pere Jerome. He 
 was a Creole and a member of one of the city's 
 leading families. His dwelling was a little 
 frame cottage, standing on high pillars just 
 inside a tall, close fence, and reached by a 
 narrow out-door stair from the green batten 
 gate. It was well surrounded by crape myrtles, 
 and communicated behind by a descending 
 stair and a plank-walk with the rear entrance 
 of the chapel over whose worshippers he daily 
 spread his hands in benediction. The name 
 of the street ah ! there is where light is 
 wanting. Save the Cathedral and the Ursu- 
 lines, there is very little of record concerning 
 churches at that time, though they were 
 18 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 19 
 
 springing up here and there. All there is 
 certainty of is that Pere Jerome's frame 
 chapel was some little new-born "down-town" 
 thing, that may have survived the passage of 
 years, or may have escaped "Paxton's Di- 
 rectory" "so as by fire." His parlor was 
 dingy and carpetless ; one could smell dis- 
 tinctly there the vow of poverty. His bed- 
 chamber was bare and clean, and the bed in it 
 narrow and hard ; but between the two was a 
 dining-room that would tempt a laugh to the 
 lips of any who looked in. The table was 
 small, but stout, and all the furniture of the 
 room substantial, made of fine wood, and carved 
 just enough to give the notion of wrinkling 
 pleasantry. His mother's and sister's doing, 
 Pere Jerome would explain; they would not 
 permit this apartment or department to 
 suffer. Therein, as well as in the parlor, there 
 was odor, but of a more epicurean sort, that 
 explained interestingly the Pere Jerome's 
 rotundity and rosy smile. 
 
 In this room, and about this miniature 
 round table, used sometimes to sit with P6re 
 
20 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 Jerome two friends to whom lie was deeply 
 attached one, Evariste Yarrillat, a playmate 
 from early childhood, now his brother-in-law ; 
 the other, Jean Thompson, a companion from 
 youngest manhood, and both, like the little 
 priest himself, the regretful rememberers of a 
 fourth comrade who was a comrade no inore. 
 Like Pere Jerome, they had come, through 
 years, to the thick of life's conflicts, the 
 priest's brother-in-law a physician, the other 
 an attorney, and brother-in-law to the lonely 
 wanderer, yet they loved to huddle around 
 this small board, and be boys again in heart 
 while men in mind. Neither one nor another 
 was leader. In earlier days they had always 
 yielded to him who no longer met with them a 
 certain chieftainship, and they still thought of 
 him and talked of him, and, in their conjec- 
 tures, groped after him, as one of whom they 
 continued to expect greater things than of 
 themselves. 
 
 They sat one day drawn thus close together, 
 sipping and theorizing, speculating upon the 
 nature of things in an easy, bold, sophomoric 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 21 
 
 way, the conversation for the most part being 
 in French, the native tongue of the doctor and 
 priest, and spoken with facility by Jean 
 Thompson the lawyer, who was half Ame- 
 ricain; but running sometimes into English 
 and sometimes into mild laughter. Mention 
 had been made of the absentee. 
 
 Pere Jerome advanced an idea something 
 like this : 
 
 " It is impossible for any finite mind to fix 
 the degree of criminality of any human act or 
 of any human life. The Infinite One alone can 
 know how much of our sin is chargeable to us, 
 and how much to our brothers or our fathers. 
 "We all participate in one another's sins. There 
 is a community of responsibility attaching to 
 every misdeed. No human since Adam nay, 
 nor Adam himself ever sinned entirely to 
 himself. And so I never am called upon to 
 contemplate a crime or a criminal but I feel 
 my conscience pointing at me as one of the 
 accessories." 
 
 "In a word," said Evariste Yarrillat, the 
 physician, " you think we are partly to blame 
 
22 MADAME DELPHENE. 
 
 for the omission of many of your Paternosters, 
 eh?" 
 
 Father Jerome smiled. 
 
 " No ; a man cannot plead so in his own de- 
 fense ; our first father tried that, but the plea 
 was not allowed. But, now, there is our ab- 
 sent friend. I tell you truly this whole com- 
 munity ought to be recognized as partners in 
 his moral errors. Among another people, rear- 
 ed under wiser care and with better compan- 
 ions, how different might he not have been ! 
 How can we speak of him as a law-breaker 
 who might have saved him from that name ? " 
 Here the speaker turned to Jean Thompson, 
 and changed his speech to English. " A lady 
 sez to me to-day : * Pere Jerome, 'ow dat is a 
 dreadfool dat 'e gone at de coas' of Cuba to be 
 one corsair ! Aint it ? ' ' Ah, Madame,' I sez, 
 ' 'tis a terrible ! I 'ope de good God will fo'- 
 give me an' you f o' dat ! ' ' 
 
 Jean Thompson answered quickly : 
 
 "You should not have let her say that." 
 
 "Mais, to' w'y?" 
 
 "Why, because, if you are partly respon- 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 23 
 
 sible, yon ought so much, the more to do 
 what you can to shield his reputation. You. 
 should have said," the attorney changed 
 to French, " * He is no pirate ; he has 
 merely taken out letters of marque and re- 
 prisal under the flag of the republic of Car- 
 thagena ! ' " 
 
 " Ah, bah ! " exclaimed Doctor Yarrillat, and 
 both he and his brother-in-law, the priest, 
 laughed. 
 
 " Why not ? " demanded Thompson. 
 
 " Oh ! " said the physician, with a shrug, 
 " say id thad way iv you wand." 
 
 Then, suddenly becoming serious, he was 
 about to add something else, when Pere Je- 
 rome spoke. 
 
 " I will tell you what I could have said. I 
 could have said: 'Madame, yes; 'tis a ter- 
 rible fo' him. He stum'le in de dark; but 
 dat good God will mek it a mo' terrible fo' 
 dat man, oohever he is, w'at put 'at light 
 out!'" 
 
 " But how do you know he is a pirate ?" de- 
 manded Thompson, aggressively. 
 
24 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " How do we know ? " said the little priest, 
 returning to French. " Ah ! there is no other 
 explanation of the ninety-and-nine stories that 
 come to us, from every port where ships ar- 
 rive from the north coast of Cuba, of a com- 
 mander of pirates there who is a marvel of 
 courtesy and gentility 
 
 "And whose name is Lafitte," said the ob- 
 stinate attorney. 
 
 "And who, nevertheless, is not Lafitte," in- 
 sisted Pere Jerome. 
 
 "Daz troo, Jean," said Doctor Varrillat. 
 "We hall know daz troo." 
 
 Pere Jerome leaned forward over the board 
 and spoke, with an air of secrecy, in French. 
 
 "You have heard of the ship which came 
 into port here last Monday. You have heard 
 that she was boarded by pirates, and that 
 the captain of the ship himself drove them 
 off." 
 
 "An incredible story," said Thompson. 
 
 " But not so incredible as the truth. I have 
 
 * See Gazettes of the period. 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 25 
 
 it from a passenger. There was on the ship a 
 young girl who was very beautiful. She came 
 on deck, where the corsair stood, about to is- 
 sue his orders, and, more beautiful than ever 
 in the desperation of the moment, confronted 
 him with a small missal spread open, and, her 
 finger on the Apostles' Creed, commanded him 
 to read. He read it, uncovering his head as 
 he read, then stood gazing on her face, which 
 did not quail ; and then, with a low bow, said : 
 ' Give me this book and I will do your bid- 
 ding.' She gave him the book and bade 
 him leave the ship, and he left it unmo- 
 lested." 
 
 Pere Jerome looked from the physician to 
 the attorney and back again, once or twice, 
 with his dimpled smile. 
 
 "But he speaks English, they say," said 
 Jean Thompson. 
 
 " He has, no doubt, learned it since he left 
 us," said the priest. 
 
 "But this ship-master, too, says his men 
 called him Lafitte." 
 
 " Lafitte ? No. Do you not see ? It is your 
 
26 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 brother-in-law, Jean Thompson ! It is your 
 wife's brother! Not Lafitte, but" (softly) 
 " Lemaitre ! Lemaitre ! Capitaine Ursin Le- 
 na aitre ! " 
 
 The two guests looked at each other with a 
 growing drollery on either face, and presently 
 broke into a laugh. 
 
 " Ah ! " said the doctor, as the three rose up, 
 "you juz kip dad cog-an'-bull fo' yo' negs 
 
 summon." 
 
 Pere Jerome's eyes lighted up 
 
 "Igoin' to do it!" 
 
 "I tell you," said Evariste, turning upon 
 him with sudden gravity, " iv dad is troo, I 
 tell you w'ad is sure-sure ! Ursin Lemaitre 
 din kyare nut'n fo' doze creed; lie fall in 
 love!" 
 
 Then, with a smile, turning to Jean Thomp- 
 son, and back again to Pere Jerome : 
 
 " But anny'ow you tell it in dad summon 
 dad 'e kyare fo' dad creed." 
 
 Pere Jerome sat up late that night, writing 
 a letter. The remarkable effects upon a cer- 
 tain mind, effects which we shall presently 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 2? 
 
 find him attributing solely to the influences of 
 surrounding nature, may find for some a more 
 sufficient explanation in the fact that this let- 
 ter was but one of a series, and that in the 
 rover of doubted identity and incredible ec- 
 centricity Pere Jerome had a regular corre- 
 spondent. 
 
CHAPTEK V. 
 
 THE CAP FITS. 
 
 ABOUT two months after the conversation 
 just given, and therefore somewhere about the 
 Christmas holidays of the year 1821, Pere 
 Jerome delighted the congregation of his little 
 chapel with the announcement that he had 
 appointed to preach a sermon in French on 
 the following Sabbath not there, but in the 
 cathedral. 
 
 He was much beloved. Notwithstanding 
 that among the clergy there were two or three 
 who shook their heads and raised their eye- 
 brows, and said he would be at least as ortho- 
 dox if he did not make quite so much of the 
 Bible and quite so little of the dogmas, yet 
 " the common people heard him gladly." When 
 told, one day, of the unfavorable whispers, he 
 smiled a little and answered his informant, 
 28 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 29 
 
 whom he knew to bo one of the whisperers 
 himself, laying a hand kindly upon his shoul- 
 der : 
 
 "Father Murphy," or whatever the name 
 was, " your words comfort me." 
 
 " How is that ? " 
 
 " Because * Fee quum benedixerint mihi hom- 
 ines! 1 "* 
 
 The appointed morning, when it came, was 
 one of those exquisite days in which there is 
 such a universal harmony, that worship rises 
 from the heart like a spring. 
 
 " Truly," said Pere Jerome to the compan- 
 ion who was to assist him in the mass, " this 
 is a Sabbath day which we do not have to 
 make holy, but only to keep so." 
 
 May be it was one of the secrets of Pere 
 Jerome's success as a preacher, that he took 
 more thought as to how he should feel, than 
 as to what he should say. 
 
 The cathedral of those days was called a 
 very plain old pile, boasting neither beauty 
 
 * " Woe unto me, when all men speak well of mel " 
 
30 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 nor riches ; but to Pere Jerome it was very 
 lovely ; and before its homely altar, not homely 
 to him, in the performance of those solemn 
 offices, symbols of heaven's mightiest truths, 
 in the hearing of the organ's harmonies, and 
 the yet more eloquent interunion of human 
 voices in the choir, in overlooking the wor- 
 shipping throng which knelt under the soft, 
 chromatic lights, and in breathing the sacri- 
 ficial odors of the chancel, he found a deep 
 and solemn joy; and yet I guess the finest 
 thought of his soul the while was one that 
 came thrice and again : 
 
 "Be not deceived, Pere Jerome, because 
 saintliness of feeling is easy here ; you are the 
 same priest who overslept this morning, and 
 overate yesterday, and will, in some way, easily 
 go wrong to-morrow and the day after." 
 
 He took it with him when the Veni Creator 
 
 sung he went into the pulpit. Of the sermon 
 
 ' he preached, tradition has preserved for us 
 
 only a few brief sayings, but they are strong 
 
 and sweet. 
 
 " My friends," he said, this was near the 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 31 
 
 beginning, " the angry words of God's book 
 are very merciful they are meant to drive us 
 home ; but the tender words, my friends, they 
 are sometimes terrible ! Notice these, the ten- 
 derest words of the tenderest prayer that ever 
 came from the lips of a blessed martyr the 
 dying words of the holy Saint Stephen, ' Lord, 
 lay not this sin to their charge.' Is there 
 nothing dreadful in that ? Bead it thus : 
 'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.' Not 
 to the charge of them who stoned him ? To 
 whose charge then? Go ask the holy Saint 
 Paul. Three years afterward, praying in the 
 temple at Jerusalem, he answered that ques- 
 tion: 'I stood by and consented.' He an- 
 swered for himself only ; but the Day must 
 come when all that wicked council that sent 
 Saint Stephen away to be stoned, and all that 
 city of Jerusalem, must hold up the hand and 
 say: 'We, also, Lord we stood by.' Ah! 
 friends, under the simpler meaning of that 
 dying saint's prayer for the pardon of his 
 murderers is hidden the terrible truth that 
 we all have a share in one another's sins." 
 
32 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 Thus Pere Jerome touched his key-note. 
 All that time has spared us beside may be 
 given in a few sentences. 
 
 " Ah ! " he cried once, " if it were merely my 
 own sins that I had to answer for, I might 
 hold up my head before the rest of mankind ; 
 but no, no, my friends we cannot look each 
 other in the face, for each has helped the 
 other to sin. Oh, where is there any room, in 
 this world of common disgrace, for pride? 
 Even if we had no common hope, a common 
 despair ought to bind us together and forever 
 silence the voice of scornj " 
 
 And again, this : 
 
 " Even in the promise to Noe, not again to 
 destroy the race with a flood, there is a whis- 
 per of solemn warning. The moral account of 
 the antediluvians was closed off and the bal- 
 ance brought down in the year of the deluge ; 
 but the account of those who come after runs 
 on and on, and the blessed bow of promise it- 
 self warns us that God will not stop it till the 
 Judgment Day! O God, I thank thee that 
 that day must come at last, when thou wilt 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 33 
 
 destroy the world, and stop the interest on my 
 account ! " 
 
 It was about at this point that Pere Jerome 
 noticed, more particularly than he had done be- 
 fore, sitting among the worshippers near him, 
 a small, sad-faced woman, of pleasing features, 
 but dark and faded, who gave him profound 
 attention. With her was another in better 
 dress, seemingly a girl still in ' her teens, 
 though her face and neck were scrupulously 
 concealed by a heavy veil, and her hands, 
 which were small, by gloves. 
 
 " Quadroones," thought he, with a stir of 
 deep pity. 
 
 Once, as he uttered some stirring word, he 
 saw the mother and daughter (if such they 
 were), while they still bent their gaze upon 
 him, clasp each other's hand fervently in the 
 daughter's lap. It was at these words : 
 
 " My friends, there are thousands of people 
 in this city of New Orleans to whom society 
 gives the ten commandments of God with all 
 the nots rubbed out ! Ah ! good gentlemen ! if 
 God sends the poor weakling to purgatory for 
 3 
 
34 MADAME DELPHINE. * 
 
 leaving the right path, where ought some of you 
 to go who strew it with thorns and briers ! " 
 
 The movement of the pair was only seen 
 because he watched for it. He glanced that 
 way again as he said : 
 
 " O God, be very gentle with those children 
 who would be nearer heaven this day had 
 they never had a father and mother, but had 
 got their religious training from such a sky 
 and earth as we have in Louisiana this holy 
 morning ! Ah ! my friends, nature is a big- 
 print catechism ! " 
 
 The mother and daughter leaned a little 
 farther forward, and exchanged the same spas- 
 modic hand-pressure as before. The mother's 
 eyes were full of tears. 
 
 "I once knew a man," continued the little 
 priest, glancing to a side aisle where he had 
 noticed Evariste and Jean sitting against each 
 other, " who was carefully taught, from infancy 
 to manhood, this single only principle of life : 
 defiance. Not justice, not righteousness, not 
 even gain ; but defiance : defiance to God, de- 
 fiance to man, defiance to nature, defiance 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 35 
 
 to reason; defiance and defiance and de- 
 fiance." 
 
 " He is going to tell it ! " murmured Evariste 
 to Jean. 
 
 "This man," continued Pere Jerome, "be- 
 came a smuggler and at last a pirate in the 
 Gulf of Mexico. Lord, lay not that sin to his 
 charge alone ! But a strange thing followed. 
 Being in command of men of a sort that to 
 control required to be kept at the austerest 
 distance, he now found himself separated from 
 the human world and thrown into the solemn 
 companionship with the sea, with the air, with 
 the storm, the calm, the heavens by day, the 
 heavens by night. My friends, that was the 
 first time in his life that he ever found himself 
 in really good company. 
 
 " Now, this man had a great aptness for ac- 
 counts. He had kept them had rendered 
 them. There was beauty, to him, in a correct, 
 balanced, and closed account. An account un- 
 satisfied was a deformity. The result is plain. 
 That man, looking out night after night upon 
 the grand and holy spectacle of the starry 
 
36 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 deep above and the watery deep below, was 
 sure to find himself, sooner or later, mastered 
 by the conviction that the great Author of this 
 majestic creation keeps account of it ; and one 
 night there came to him, like a spirit walking 
 on the sea, the awful, silent question : vMy ac- 
 count with God how does it stand ? ' Ah ! 
 friends, that is a question which the book of 
 nature does not answer^/ 
 
 " Did I say the book of nature is a cate- 
 chism ? Yes. But, after it answers the first 
 question with 'God,' nothing but questions 
 follow ; and so, one day, this man gave a ship 
 full of merchandise for one little book which 
 answered those questions. God help him to 
 understand it ! and God help you, monsieur, 
 and you, madame, sitting here in your smug- 
 gled clothes, to beat upon the breast with me 
 and cry, 'I, too, Lord I, too, stood by and 
 consented.' ' 
 
 Pere Jerome had not intended these for his 
 closing words ; but just there, straight away 
 before his sight and almost at the farthest 
 door, a man rose slowly from his seat and re- 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 37 
 
 garded him steadily with a kind, bronzed, se- 
 date face, and the sermon, as if by a sign of 
 command, was ended.* While the Credo was 
 being chanted he was still there ; but when, a 
 moment after its close, the eye of Pere Jerome 
 returned in that direction, his place was 
 empty. 
 
 As the little priest, his labor done and his 
 vestments changed, was turning into the Kue 
 Royale and leaving the cathedral out of sight, 
 he just had time to understand that two 
 women were purposely allowing him to over- 
 take them, when the one nearer him spoke 
 in the Creole patois, saying, with some timid 
 haste : 
 
 "Good-morning, Pere Pere Jerome; Pere 
 Jerome, we thank the good God for that ser- 
 mon." 
 
 "Then, so do I," said the little man. They 
 were the same two that he had noticed when 
 he was preaching. The younger one bowed 
 silently ; she was a beautiful figure, but the 
 slight effort of Pere Jerome's kind eyes to see 
 through the veil was vain. He would presently 
 
38 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 have passed on, but the one who had spoken 
 before said : 
 
 " I thought you livecl in the Rue des Ursu- 
 lines." 
 
 " Yes ; I am going this way to see a sick 
 person." 
 
 The woman looked up at him with an ex- 
 pression of mingled confidence and timidity. 
 
 "It must be a blessed thing to be so useful 
 as to be needed by the good God," she said. 
 
 Pere Jerome smiled : 
 
 " God does not need me to look after his 
 sick ; but he allows me to do it, just as you let 
 your little boy in frocks carry in chips." He 
 might have added that he loved to do it, quite 
 as much. 
 
 It was plain the woman had somewhat to 
 ask, and was trying to get courage to ask 
 it. 
 
 "You have a little boy?" asked the priest. 
 
 " No, I have only my daughter ; " she indi- 
 cated the girl at her side. Then she began to 
 say something else, stopped, and with much 
 nervousness asked : 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 39 
 
 "Pere Jerome, what was the name of that 
 man?" 
 
 "His name?" said the priest. "You wish 
 to know his name ? " 
 
 "Yes, Monsieur" (or Miche, as she spoke 
 it); "it was such a beautiful story." The 
 speaker's companion looked another way. 
 
 "His name," said Father Jerome, "some 
 say one name and some another. Some think 
 it was Jean Lafitte, the famous ; you have 
 heard of him ? And do you go to my church, 
 Madame ? " 
 
 " No, Miche ; not in the past ; but from this 
 time, yes. My name" she choked a little, 
 and yet it evidently gave her pleasure to offer 
 this mark of confidence "is Madame Del- 
 phine Delphine Carraze." 
 
CHAPTER YI. 
 
 A CRY OF DISTRESS. 
 
 JEROME'S smile and exclamation, as 
 some days later lie entered his parlor in re- 
 sponse to the announcement of a visitor, were 
 indicative of hearty greeting rather than sur- 
 prise. 
 
 " Madame Delphine!" 
 
 Yet surprise could hardly have been alto- 
 gether absent, for though another Sunday had 
 not yet come around, the slim, smallish figure 
 sitting in a corner, looking very much alone, 
 and clad in dark attire, which seemed to have 
 been washed a trifle too often, was Delphine 
 Carraze on her second visit. And this, ha 
 was confident, was over and above an attend- 
 ance in the confessional, where he was sure he 
 had recognized her voice. 
 
 She rose bashfully and gave her hand, then 
 40 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 41 
 
 looked to the floor, and began a faltering 
 speech, with a swallowing motion in the throat, 
 smiled weakly and commenced again, speak- 
 ing, as before, in a gentle, low note, frequently 
 lifting up and casting down her eyes, while 
 shadows of anxiety and smiles of apology 
 chased each other rapidly across her face. 
 She was trying to ask his advice. 
 
 " Sit down," said he ; and when they had 
 taken seats she resumed, with downcast eyes : 
 
 " You know, probably I should have said 
 this in the confessional, but " 
 
 "No matter, Madame Delphine ; I under- 
 stand ; you did not want an oracle, perhaps ; 
 you want a friend." 
 
 She lifted her eyes, shining with tears, and 
 dropped them again. 
 
 "I" she ceased. "I have done a" she 
 dropped her head and shook it despondingly 
 " a cruel thing." The tears rolled from her 
 eyes as she turned away her face. 
 
 Pere Jerome remained silent, and presently 
 she turned again, with the evident intention of 
 speaking at length. 
 
42 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 "It began nineteen, years ago by" her 
 eyes, which she had lifted, fell lower than 
 ever, her brow and neck were suffused with 
 blushes, and she murmured " I fell in love." 
 
 She said no more, and by and by Pere Je- 
 rome replied : 
 
 "Well, Madame Delphine, to love is the 
 right of every soul. I believe in love. If your 
 love was pure and lawful I am sure your angel 
 guardian smiled upon you ; and if it was not, I 
 cannot say you have nothing to answer for, 
 and yet I think God may have said : * She is a 
 quadroone ; all the rights of her womanhood 
 trampled in the mire, sin made easy to her 
 almost compulsory, charge it to account of 
 whom it may concern." 
 
 " No, no ! " said Madame Delphine, looking 
 up quickly, "some of it might fall upon 
 Her eyes fell, and she commenced biting her 
 lips and nervously pinching little folds in her 
 skirt. "He was good as good as the law 
 would let him be better, indeed, for he left 
 me property, which really the strict law does 
 not allow. He loved our little daughter very 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 43 
 
 much. He wrote to his mother and sisters, 
 owning all his error and asking them to take 
 the child and bring her up. I sent her to them 
 when he died, which was soon after, and did 
 not see my child for sixteen years. But we 
 wrote to each other all the time, and she loved 
 me. And then at last " Madame Del- 
 phine ceased speaking, but went on diligently 
 with her agitated fingers, turning down foolish 
 hems lengthwise of her lap. 
 
 "At last your mother-heart conquered," 
 said Pere Jerome. 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 "The sisters married, the mother died; I 
 saw that even where she was she did not 
 escape the reproach of her birth and blood, 
 and when she asked me to let her come ." 
 The speaker's brimming eyes rose an instant. 
 "I know it was wicked, but I said, come." 
 
 The tears dripped through her hands upon 
 her dress. 
 
 " Was it she who was with you last Sun- 
 day?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
44: MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " And now you do not know what to do with 
 her?" 
 
 "Ah! c'est fa, oui! that is it." 
 
 "Does she look like you, Madame Del- 
 phine ? " 
 
 " Oh, thank God, no ! you would never be- 
 lieve she was my daughter ; she is white and 
 beautiful!" 
 
 " You thank God for that which is your main 
 difficulty, Madame Delphine." 
 
 "Alas! yes." 
 
 Pere Jerome laid his palms tightly across 
 his knees with his arms bowed out, and fixed 
 his eyes upon the ground, pondering. 
 
 " I suppose she is a sweet, good daughter ? " 
 said he, glancing at Madame Delphine without 
 changing his attitude. 
 
 Her answer was to raise her eyes raptu- 
 rously. 
 
 " Which gives us the dilemma in its fullest 
 force," said the priest, speaking as if to the 
 floor. " She has no more place than if she had 
 dropped upon a strange planet." He suddenly 
 looked up with a brightness which almost as 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 45 
 
 quickly passed away, and then he looked down 
 again. His happy thought was the cloister ; 
 but he instantly said to himself : " They can- 
 not have overlooked that choice, except inten- 
 tionally which they have a right to do." He 
 could do nothing but shake his head. 
 
 "And suppose you should suddenly die," 
 he said; he wanted to get at once to the 
 worst. 
 
 The woman made a quick gesture, and bur- 
 ied her head in her handkerchief, with the 
 stifled cry : 
 
 " Oh, Olive, my daughter ! " 
 
 "Well, Madame Delphine," said Pere Je- 
 rome, more buoyantly, " one thing is sure : we 
 must find a way out of this trouble." 
 
 " Ah ! " she exclaimed, looking heavenward, 
 " if it might be ! " 
 
 " But it must be ! " said the priest. 
 
 " But how shall it be ? " asked the despond- 
 ing woman. 
 
 "Ah!" said Pere Jerome, with a shrug, 
 "God knows." 
 
 "Yes," said the quadroone, with a quick 
 
46 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 sparkle in her gentle eye ; " and I know, if God 
 would tell anybody, He would tell you ! " 
 
 The priest smiled and rose. 
 
 " Do you think so ? Well, leave me to think 
 of it. I will ask Him." 
 
 "And He will tell you !" she replied. "And 
 He will bless you ! " She rose and gave her 
 hand. As she withdrew it she smiled. " I had 
 such a strange dream," she said, backing to- 
 ward the door. 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " Yes. I got my troubles all mixed up with 
 your sermon. I dreamed I made that pirate 
 the guardian of my daughter." 
 
 Pere Jerome smiled also, and shrugged. 
 
 "To you, Madame Delphine, as you are 
 placed, every white man in this country, on 
 land or on water, is a pirate, and of all pirates, 
 I think that one is, without doubt, the best." 
 
 "Without doubt," echoed Madame Del- 
 phine, wearily, still withdrawing backward. 
 Pere Jerome stepped forward and opened the 
 door. 
 
 The shadow of some one approaching it 
 
MADAMF. DELPHINE. 4:7 
 
 \O 4 ' 
 
 from without fell upon the threshold, and a 
 
 man entered, dressed in dark blue cottonade, 
 lifting from his head a fine Panama hat, and 
 from a broad, smooth brow, fair where the hat 
 had covered it and dark below, gently stroking 
 back his very soft, brown locks. Madame Del- 
 phine slightly started aside, while Pere Jerome 
 reached silently, but eagerly, forward, grasped 
 a larger hand than his own, and motioned its 
 owner to a seat. Madame Delphine's eyes 
 ventured no higher than to discover that the 
 shoes of the visitor were of white duck. 
 
 " Well, Pere Jerome," she said, in a hurried 
 under-tone, "I am just going to say Hail 
 Marys all the time till you find that out for 
 me!" 
 
 " Well, I hope that will be soon, Madame 
 Carraze. Good-day, Madame Carraze." 
 
 And as she departed, the priest turned to 
 the new-comer and extended both hands, say- 
 ing, in the same familiar dialect in which he 
 had been addressing the quadroone : 
 
 " Well-a-day, old playmate ! After so many 
 years ! " 
 
48 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 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 passed 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 passed 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 ! Ma- 
 dame " 
 
 " I lef my parasoZ," said Madame Delphine, 
 in English. 
 
 There was this quiet evidence of a defiant 
 spirit hidden somewhere down under her gen- 
 eral 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. 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 49 
 
 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 some- 
 thing that was best kept secret ; he repressed 
 the impulse, but his heart had to say some- 
 thing. He threw forward one hand and look- 
 ing 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 God's own banker, Madame Del- 
 phine." 
 
CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 MICHE VIGNEVIELLE. 
 
 MADAME DELPHINE sold one of the corner 
 lots of her property. She had almost no rev- 
 enue, 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 ma y b e a fortnight after her tearful in- 
 terview with Pere Jerome she found it neces- 
 sary 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 
 50 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 51 
 
 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. Vigne- 
 vielle's," according to a larger inscription 
 which met her eyes as she ventured in. Be- 
 hind 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 cot- 
 tonade, whom she had met in Pere Jerome's 
 door-way. Now, for the first time, she saw his 
 face, its strong, grave, human kindness shining 
 softly on each and every bronzed feature. The 
 recognition was mutual. He took pains to 
 speak first, saying, in a re-assuring 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 
 
52 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 to her once or twice more, as lie waited on 
 Ler, each time in English, as though he en- 
 joyed the humble melody of its tone, and pres- 
 ently, 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 Vigne- 
 vielle, "doze kine of note- wad you 'an 1 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 Yignevielle turned to engage in 
 conversation with an employe and a new vis- 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 53 
 
 itor, and gave no sign of hearing Madame Del- 
 phine's voice. She asked a second time, with 
 like result, lingered timidly, and as he turned 
 to give his attention to a third visitor, reite- 
 rated : 
 
 "Miche Yignevielle, I wizh you pliz led 
 
 " Madame Carraze," he said, turning so sud- 
 denly as to make the frightened little woman 
 start, but extending his palm with a show of 
 frankness, and assuming a look of benignant 
 patience, " 'ow I kin fine doze note now, mongs' 
 all de rez? Iv you pliz 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 Del- 
 phine found no choice but to depart. But she 
 went away loving the ground beneath the feet 
 of Monsieur U. L. Yignevielle. 
 
 " Oh, Pere Jerome ! " she exclaimed in the 
 corrupt French of her caste, meeting the little 
 father on the street a few days later, "you 
 
54 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 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 re- 
 plied, with more happiness in her eyes than 
 Pere Jerome had ever before seen there. 
 
 " Madame Delphine," he said, his own eyes 
 sparkling, "make Mm your daughter's guar- 
 dian ; 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 impedi- 
 ment to the making of this proposal, and many 
 weeks elapsed before further delay was posi- 
 tively without excuse. But at length, one day 
 in May, 1822, in a small private office behind 
 Monsieur Yignevielle's banking-room, he sit- 
 ting beside a table, and she, more timid and 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 55 
 
 demure than ever, having just taken a chair by 
 the door, she said, trying, with a little bash- 
 ful laugh, to make the matter seem unimpor- 
 tant, and yet with some tremor of voice : 
 
 "Miche Yignevielle, 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 Yignevielle ? " 
 
 "Yez." 
 
 She looked up with grateful re-assurance ; 
 but her eyes dropped again as she said : 
 
 " Miche Yignevielle " Here she choked, 
 and began her peculiar motion of laying folds 
 in the skirt of her dress, with trembling fin- 
 gers. 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?" 
 
56 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 Her words were scarcely audible : 
 
 "I wand you teg kyah my lill' girl." 
 
 " You 'ave one lill' gal, Madame Carraze ? " 
 
 She nodded with her face down. 
 
 "An' you godd some mo' chillen?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " I nevva know dad, Madame Carraze. She's 
 a lill' small gal ? " 
 
 Mothers forget their daughters' stature. 
 Madame Delphine said : 
 
 "Yez." 
 
 For a few moments neither spoke, and then 
 Monsieur Yignevielle said : 
 
 "I will do dad." 
 
 "Lag she been you' h-own?" asked the 
 mother, suffering from her own boldness. 
 
 " She's a good lill' chile, eh ? " 
 
 "Miche, she's a lill' hangel ! " exclaimed 
 Madame Delphine, with a look of distress. 
 
 "Yez; I teg kyah 'v 'er, lag my h-own. I 
 mague you dad promise." 
 
 "But " There was something still in 
 
 the way, Madame Delphine seemed to think. 
 
 The banker waited in silence. 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 57 
 
 "I suppose you will want to see my lill' 
 girl?" 
 
 He smiled ; for she looked at him as if she 
 would implore him to decline. 
 
 " Oh, I tek you' word fo' hall dad, Madame 
 Carraze. It mague no differend wad she loog 
 lag; I don' wan' see 'er." 
 
 Madame Delphine's parting smile she went 
 very shortly was gratitude beyond speech. 
 
 Monsieur Vignevielle returned to the seat 
 he had left, and resumed a newspaper, the 
 Louisiana Gazette in all probability, which 
 he had laid down upon Madame Delphine's 
 entrance. His eyes fell upon a paragraph 
 which had previously escaped his notice. 
 There they rested. Either he read it over and 
 over unwearyingly, or he was lost in thought. 
 Jean Thompson entered. 
 
 "Now," said Mr. Thompson, in a sup- 
 pressed tone, bending a little across the table, 
 and laying one palm upon a package of papers 
 which lay in the other, " it is completed. You 
 could retire from your business any day inside 
 of six hours without loss to anybody." (Both 
 
58 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 here and elsewhere, let it be understood that 
 where good English is given the words were 
 spoken in good French.) 
 
 Monsieur Vignevielle raised his eyes and 
 extended the newspaper to the attorney, who 
 received it and read the paragraph. Its sub- 
 stance was that a certain vessel of the navy 
 had returned from a cruise in the Gulf of 
 Mexico and Straits of Florida, where she had 
 done valuable service against the pirates 
 having, for instance, destroyed in one fort- 
 night in January last twelve pirate vessels 
 afloat, two on the stocks, and three estab- 
 lishments ashore. 
 
 "United States brig Porpoise" repeated 
 Jean Thompson. " Do you know her ? " 
 
 "We are acquainted," said Monsieur Vigne- 
 vielle. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SHE. 
 
 A QUIET footstep, a grave new presence on 
 financial sidewalks, a neat garb slightly out of 
 date, a gently strong and kindly pensive face, 
 a silent bow, a new sign in the Rue Toulouse, 
 a lone figure with a cane, walking in medita- 
 tion in the evening light under the willows of 
 Canal Marigny, a long-darkened window re- 
 lighted in the Rue Conti these were all ; a 
 fall of dew would scarce have been more quiet 
 ..than was the return of Ursin Lemaitre-Vigne- 
 vielle to the precincts of his birth and early 
 life. 
 
 But we hardly give the event its right name. 
 It was Capitaine Lemaitre who had disap- 
 peared ; it was Monsieur Vignevielle who had 
 come back. The pleasures, the haunts, the 
 companions, that had once held out their 
 59 
 
60 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 charms to the impetuous youth, offered no 
 enticements to Madame Delphine's banker. 
 There is this to be said even for the pride his 
 grandfather had taught him, that it had al- 
 ways held him above low indulgences ; and 
 though he had dallied with kings, queens, and 
 knaves through all the mazes of Faro, Kon- 
 deau, and Craps, he had done it loftily ; but 
 now he maintained a peaceful estrangement 
 from all. Evariste and Jean, themselves, 
 found him only by seeking. 
 
 " It is the right way," he said to Pere Je- 
 rome, the day we saw him there. "Ursin 
 Lemaitre is dead. I have buried him. He 
 left a will. I am his executor." 
 
 "He is crazy," said his lawyer brother-in- 
 law, impatiently. 
 
 " On the contr-y," replied the little priest, 
 " 'e 'as come ad hisse'f." 
 
 Evariste spoke. 
 
 "Look at his face, Jean. Men with that 
 kind of face are the last to go crazy." 
 
 " You have not proved that," replied Jean, 
 with an attorney's obstinacy. "You should 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 61 
 
 have heard him talk the other day about that 
 newspaper paragraph. ' I have taken Ursin 
 Lemaitre's head ; I have it with me ; I claim 
 the reward, but I desire to commute it to citi- 
 zenship/ He is crazy." 
 
 Of course Jean Thompson did not believe 
 what he said ; but he said it, and, in his vexa- 
 tion, repeated it, on the banquettes and at the 
 clubs ; and presently it took the shape of a sly 
 rumor, that the returned rover was a trifle 
 snarled in his top-hamper. 
 
 This whisper was helped into circulation by 
 many trivial eccentricities of manner, and by 
 the unaccountable oddness of some of his 
 transactions in business. 
 
 " My dear sir ! " cried his astounded lawyer, 
 one day, " you are not running a charitable in- 
 stitution ! " 
 
 " How do you know ? " said Monsieur Vig- 
 nevielle. ' There the conversation ceased. 
 
 " Why do you not found hospitals and asy- 
 lums at once," asked the attorney, at another 
 time, with a vexed laugh, " and get the credit 
 of it?" 
 
62 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " And make the end worse than the begin- 
 ning," said the banker, with a gentle smile, 
 turning away to a desk of books. 
 
 " Bah ! " muttered Jean Thompson. 
 
 Monsieur Yignevielle betrayed one very bad 
 symptom. Wherever he went he seemed look- 
 ing for somebody. It may have been percep- 
 tible only to those who were sufficiently inter- 
 ested in him to study his movements ; but 
 those who saw it once saw it always. He 
 never passed an open door or gate but he 
 glanced in ; and often, where it stood but 
 slightly ajar, you might see him give it a gen- 
 tle push with his hand or cane. It was very- 
 singular. 
 
 He walked much alone after dark. The 
 guicMnangoes (garroters, we might say), at 
 those times the city's particular terror by 
 night, never crossed his path. He was one of 
 those men for whom danger appears to stand 
 aside. 
 
 One beautiful summer night, when all na- 
 ture seemed hushed in ecstasy, the last blush 
 gone that told of the sun's parting, Monsieur 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 63 
 
 Vignevielle, in the course of one of those con- 
 templative, uncompanioned walks which it 
 was his habit to take, came slowly along the 
 more open portion of the Rue Royale, with a 
 step which was soft without intention, occa- 
 sionally touching the end of his stout cane 
 gently to the ground and looking upward 
 among his old acquaintances, the stars. 
 
 It was one of those southern nights under 
 whose spell all the sterner energies of the 
 mind cloak themselves and lie down in biv- 
 ouac, and the fancy and the imagination, that 
 cannot sleep, slip their fetters and escape, 
 beckoned away from behind every flowejdng 
 bush and sweet-smelling tree, and every 
 stretch of lonely, half-lighted walk, by the 
 genius of poetry. The air stirred softly now 
 and then, and was still again, as if the breezes 
 lifted their expectant pinions and lowered 
 them once more, awaiting the rising of the 
 moon in a silence which fell upon the fields, 
 the roads, the gardens, the walls, and the sub- 
 urban and half-suburban streets, like a pause 
 in worship. And anon she rose. 
 
64 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 Monsieur Vignevielle's steps were bent to- 
 ward- the more central part of the town, and 
 he was presently passing along a high, close, 
 board-fence, on the right-hand side of the 
 way, when, just within this inclosure, and al- 
 most overhead, in the dark boughs of a large 
 orange-tree, a mocking-bird began the first 
 low flute-notes of his all-night song. It may 
 have been only the nearness of the songster 
 that attracted the passer's attention, but he 
 paused and looked up. 
 
 And then he remarked something more, 
 that the air where he had stopped was filled 
 with the overpowering sweetness of the night- 
 jasmine. He looked around ; it could only be 
 inside the fence. There was a gate just there. 
 Would he push it, as his wont was? The 
 grass was growing about it in a thick turf, as 
 though the entrance had not been used for 
 years. An iron staple clasped the cross-bar, 
 and was driven deep into the gate-post. But 
 now an eye that had been in the blacksmith- 
 ing business an eye which had later received 
 high training as an eye for fastenings fell 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 65 
 
 upon that staple, and saw at a glance that the 
 wood had shrunk from it, and it had sprung 
 from its hold, though without falling out. The 
 strange habit asserted itself ; he laid his large 
 hand upon the cross-bar ; the turf at the base 
 yielded, and the tall gate was drawn partly 
 open. 
 
 At that moment, as at the moment whenever 
 he drew or pushed a door or gate, or looked 
 in at a window, he was thinking of one, the 
 image of whose face and form had never left 
 his inner vision since the day it had met him 
 in his life's path and turned him face about 
 from the way of destruction. 
 
 The bird ceased. The cause of the interrup- 
 tion, standing within the opening, saw before 
 him, much obscured by its own numerous 
 shadows, a broad, ill-kept, many-flowered gar- 
 den, among whose untrimmed rose-trees and 
 tangled vines, and often, also, in its old walks 
 of pounded shell, the coco-grass and crab- 
 grass had spread riotously, and sturdy weeds 
 stood up in bloom. He stepped in and drew 
 the gate to after him. There, very near by, 
 
66 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 was the clump of jasmine, whose ravishing 
 odor had tempted him. It stood just beyond 
 a brightly moonlit path, which turned from' 
 him in a curve toward the residence, a little 
 distance to the right, and escaped the view at 
 a point where it seemed more than likely a 
 door of the house might open upon it. While 
 he still looked, there fell upon his ear, from 
 around that curve, a light footstep on the 
 broken shells, one only, and then all was for 
 a moment still again. Had he mistaken ? No. 
 The same soft click was repeated nearer by, a 
 pale glimpse of robes came through the tan- 
 gle, and then, plainly to view, appeared an 
 outline a presence a form a spirit a girl ! 
 From throat to instep she was as white as 
 Cynthia. Something above the medium height, 
 slender,, lithe, her abundant hair rolling in 
 dark, : rich waves back from her brows and 
 down from her crown, and falling in two heavy 
 plaits beyond her round, broadly girt waist 
 and full to her knees, a few escaping locks 
 eddying lightly on her graceful neck and her 
 temples, her arms, half hid in a snowy mist 
 
MADAME DELPHIKE. 67 
 
 of sleeve, let down to guide her spotless skirts 
 free from the dewy touch of the grass, 
 straight down the path she came ! 
 
 Will she stop V Will she turn aside ? Will 
 she espy the dark form in the deep shade of 
 the orange, and, with one piercing scream, 
 wheel and vanish ? She draws near. She ap- 
 proaches the jasmine ; she raises her arms, 
 the sleeves falling like a vapor down to the 
 shoulders ; rises upon tiptoe, and plucks a 
 spray. O Memory ! Can it be ? Can it be ? 
 Is this his quest, or is it lunacy ? The ground 
 seems to M. Yignevielle the unsteady sea, and 
 he to stand once more on a deck. And she ? 
 As she is now, if she but turn toward the 
 orange, the whole glory of the moon will shine 
 upon her face. His heart stands si^iH ; he is 
 waiting for her to do that. She reaches up 
 again ; this time a bunch for her mother. That 
 neck and throat ! Now she fastens a spray in 
 her hair. The mocking-bird cannot withhojd ; 
 he breaks into song she turns she turns her 
 face it is she, it is she ! Madame Delphine's 
 daughter is the girl he met on the ship. 
 
CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 OLIVE. 
 
 SHE was just passing seventeen that beau- 
 tiful year when the heart of the maiden still 
 beats quickly with the surprise of her new 
 dominion, while with gentle dignity her brow 
 accepts the holy coronation of womanhood. 
 The forehead and temples beneath her loosely 
 bound hair were fair without paleness, and 
 meek without languor. She had the soft, lack- 
 lustre beauty of the South ; no ruddiness of 
 coral, no waxen white, no pink of shell ; no 
 heavenly blue in the glance ; but a face that 
 seemed, in all its other beauties, only a tender 
 accompaniment for the large, brown, melting 
 eyes, where the openness of child-nature min- 
 gled dreamily with the sweet mysteries of 
 maiden thought. We say no color of shell on 
 face or throat; but this was no deficiency, 
 68 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 69 
 
 that which took its place being the warm, 
 transparent tint of sculptured ivory. 
 
 This side door-way which led from Madame 
 Delphine' s house into her garden was over- 
 arched partly by an old remnant of vine-cov- 
 ered lattice, and partly by a crape-myrtle, 
 against whose small, polished trunk leaned a 
 rustic seat. Here Madame Delphine and Olive 
 loved to sit when the twilights were balmy or 
 the moon was bright. 
 
 " Cherie" said Madame Delphine on one of 
 these evenings, "why do you dream so 
 much?" 
 
 She spoke in the patois most natural to 
 her, and which her daughter had easily 
 learned. 
 
 The girl turned her face to her mother, and 
 smiled, then dropped her glance to the hands 
 in her own lap, which were listlessly handling 
 the end of a ribbon. The mother looked at 
 her with fond solicitude. Her dress was white 
 again ; this was but one night since that in 
 which Monsieur Vignevielle had seen her at 
 the bush of night-jasmine. He had not been 
 
70 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 discovered, but had gone away, shutting the 
 gate, and leaving it as he had found it. 
 
 Her head was uncovered. Its plaited masses, 
 quite black in the moonlight, hung down and 
 coiled upon the bench, by her side. Her chaste 
 drapery was of that revived classic order which 
 the world of fashion was again laying aside to 
 re-assume the mediaeval bondage of the stay- 
 lace ; for New Orleans was behind the fash- 
 ionable world, and Madame Delphine and her 
 daughter -were behind New Orleans. A deli- 
 cate scarf, pale blue, of lightly netted worsted, 
 fell from either shoulder down beside her 
 hands. The look that was bent upon her 
 changed perforce to one of gentle admiration. 
 She seemed the goddess of the garden. 
 
 Olive glanced up. Madame Delphine was 
 not prepared for the movement, and on that 
 account repeated her question : 
 
 "What are you thinking about?" 
 
 The dreamer took the hand that was laid 
 upon hers between her own palms, bowed her 
 head, and gave them a soft kiss. 
 
 The mother submitted. Wherefore, in the 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 71 
 
 silence which followed, a daughter's conscience 
 felt the burden of having withheld an answer, 
 and Olive presently said, as the pair sat look- 
 ing up into the sky : 
 
 "I was thinking of Pere Jerome's sermon." 
 Madame Delphine had feared so. Olive had 
 lived on it ever since the day it was preached. 
 The poor mother was almost ready to repent 
 having ever afforded her the opportunity of 
 hearing it. Meat and drink had become of 
 secondary value to her daughter; she fed 
 upon the sermon. 
 
 Olive felt her mother's thought and knew 
 
 that her mother knew her own ; but now that 
 
 she had confessed, she would ask a question : 
 
 "Do you think, maman, that Pere Jerome 
 
 knows it was I who gave that missal ? " 
 
 "No," said Madame Delphine, "I am sure 
 he does not." 
 
 Another question came more timidly : 
 " Do do you think he knows him ? " 
 "Yes, I do. He said in his sermon he 
 did." 
 
 Both remained for a long time very still, 
 
72 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 watching the moon gliding in and through 
 among the small dark-and-white clouds. At 
 last the daughter spoke again. 
 
 " I wish I was Pere I wish I was as good 
 as Pere Jerome." 
 
 " My child," said Madame Delphine, her tone 
 betraying a painful summoning of strength to 
 say what she had lacked the courage to utter, 
 " my child, I pray the good God you will 
 not let your heart go after one whom you may 
 never see in this world ! " 
 
 The maiden turned her glance, and their 
 eyes met. She cast her arms about her moth- 
 er's neck, laid her cheek upon it for a moment, 
 and then, feeling the maternal tear, lifted her 
 lips, and, kissing her, said : 
 
 " I will not ! I will not ! " 
 
 But the voice was one, not of willing con- 
 sent, but of desperate resolution. 
 
 "It would be useless, anyhow," said the 
 mother, laying her arm around her daughter's 
 waist. 
 
 Olive repeated the kiss, prolonging it pas- 
 sionately. 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 73 
 
 "I have nobody but you," murmured the 
 girl ; " I am a poor quadroone ! " 
 
 She threw back her plaited hair for a third 
 embrace, when a sound in the shrubbery start- 
 led them. 
 
 " Qui ci fa ? " called Madame Delphine, in a 
 frightened voice, as the two stood up, holding 
 to each other. 
 
 No answer. 
 
 " It was only the dropping of a twig," she 
 whispered, after a long holding of the breath. 
 But they went into the house and barred it 
 everywhere. 
 
 It was no longer pleasant to sit up. They 
 retired, and in course of time, but not soon, 
 they fell asleep, holding each other very tight, 
 and fearing, even in their dreams, to hear 
 another twig fall. 
 
CHAPTEE X. 
 
 BIRDS. 
 
 MONSIEUR VIGNEYIELLE looked in at no more 
 doors or windows ; but if the disappearance of 
 this symptom was a favorable sign, others 
 came to notice which were especially bad, 
 for instance, wakefulness. At well-nigh any 
 hour of the night, the city guard, which itself 
 dared not patrol singly, would meet him on 
 his slow, unmolested, sky-gazing walk. 
 
 " Seems to enjoy it," said Jean Thompson ; 
 "the worst sort of evidence. If he showed 
 distress of mind, it would not be so bad ; but 
 his calmness, ugly feature." 
 
 The attorney had held his ground so long 
 that he began really to believe it was tenable. 
 
 By day, it is true, Monsieur Vignevielle was 
 at his post in his quiet "bank." Yet here, 
 day by day, he was the source of more and 
 74 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 75 
 
 more vivid astonishment to those who held 
 preconceived notions of a banker's calling. As 
 a banker, at least, he was certainly out of bal- 
 ance ; while as a promenader, it seemed to 
 those who watched him that his ruling idea 
 had now veered about, and that of late he was 
 ever on the quiet alert, not to find, but to 
 evade, somebody. 
 
 " Olive, my child," whispered Madame Del- 
 phine one morning, as the pair were kneeling 
 side by side on the tiled floor of the church, 
 " yonder is Miche Yignevielle ! If you will 
 only look at once he is just passing a little 
 
 in . Ah, much too slow again ; he stepped 
 
 out by the side door." 
 
 The mother thought it a strange providence 
 that Monsieur Vignevielle should always be 
 disappearing whenever Olive was with her. 
 
 One early dawn, Madame Delphine, with a 
 small empty basket on her arm, stepped out 
 upon the banquette in front of her house, shut 
 and fastened the door very ' softly, and stole 
 out in the direction whence you could faintly 
 catch, in the stillness of the daybreak, the 
 
76 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 songs of the Gascon butchers and the pound- 
 ing of their meat-axes on the stalls of the dis- 
 tant market-house. She was going to see if 
 she could find some birds for Olive, the 
 child's appetite was so poor ; and, as she was 
 out, she would drop an early prayer at the 
 cathedral. Faith and works. 
 
 "One must venture something, sometimes, 
 in the cause of religion," thought she, as she 
 started timorously on her way. But she had 
 not gone a dozen steps before she repented 
 her temerity. There was some one behind her. 
 
 There should not be anything terrible in a 
 footstep merely because it is masculine ; but 
 Madame Delphine's mind was not prepared to 
 consider that. A terrible secret was haunting 
 her. Yesterday morning she had found a 
 shoe- track in the garden. She had not dis- 
 closed the discovery to Olive, but she had 
 hardly closed her eyes the whole night. 
 
 The step behind her now might be the fall 
 of that very shoe. She quickened her pace, 
 but did not leave the sound behind. She hur- 
 ried forward almost at a run ; yet it was still 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 77 
 
 there no farther, no nearer. Two frights 
 were upon her at once one for herself, anoth- 
 er for Olive, left alone in the house ; but she 
 had but the one prayer "God protect my 
 child ! " After a fearful time she reached a 
 place of safety, the cathedral. There, panting, 
 she knelt long enough to know the pursuit 
 was, at least, suspended, and then arose, hop- 
 ing and praying all the saints that she might 
 find the way clear for her return in all haste 
 to Olive. 
 
 She approached a different door from that 
 by which she had entered, her eyes in all 
 directions and her heart in her throat. 
 
 "Madame Carraze." 
 
 She started wildly and almost screamed, 
 though the voice was soft and mild. Monsieur 
 Vignevielle came slowly forward from the 
 shade of the wall. They met beside a bench, 
 upon which she dropped her basket. 
 
 "Ah, Miche Vignevielle, I thang de good 
 God to mid you ! " 
 
 " Is dad so, Madame Carraze ? Fo' w'y dad 
 is?" 
 
78 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " A man was chase me all dad way since my 
 'ouse ! 
 
 " Yes, Madame, I sawed him." 
 
 " You sawed 'im ? Oo it was ? " 
 
 " 'Twas only one man wad is a foolizh. De 
 people say he's crezzie. Mais, he don' goin' 
 to meg you no 'arm." 
 
 " But I was scare' fo' my lill' girl." 
 
 " Noboddie don' goin' trouble you' lill' gal, 
 Madame Carraze." 
 
 Madame Delphine looked up into the speak- 
 er's strangely kind and patient eyes, and drew 
 sweet re-assurance from them. 
 
 " Madame," said Monsieur Vignevielle, " wad 
 pud you hout so nearly dis morning ? " 
 
 She told him her errand. She asked if he 
 thought she would find anything. 
 
 " Yez," he said, " it was possible a few lill' 
 becassines-de-mer, ou somezin' ligue. But fo' 
 w'y you lill' gal lose doze hapetide ? " 
 
 "Ah, Miche," Madame Delphine might 
 have tried a thousand times again without ever 
 succeeding half so well in lifting the curtain 
 upon the whole, sweet, tender, old, old-fash- 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 79 
 
 ioned truth, "Ah, Miche, she wone tell 
 me!" 
 
 " Bud, anny'ow, Madame, wad you thing ? " 
 
 " Miche," she replied, looking up again with 
 a tear standing in either eye, and then looking 
 down once more as she began to speak, "I 
 thing I thing she's lonesome." 
 
 " You thing ? " 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 "Ah ! Madame Carraze," he said, partly ex- 
 tending his hand, " you see ? 'Tis impossible 
 to mague you' owze shud so tighd to priv-en 
 dad. Madame, I med one mizteg." 
 
 " Ah, non, Miche ! " 
 
 " Yez. There har nod one poss'bil'ty fo' me 
 to be dad guardian of you' daughteh ! " 
 
 Madame Delphine started with surprise and 
 alarm. 
 
 " There is ondly one wad can be," he con- 
 tinued. 
 
 "But oo, Miche?" 
 
 " God." 
 
 "Ah, Miche Vignevielle " She looked 
 
 at him appealingly. 
 
80 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " I don' goin' to dizzerd you, Madame Car- 
 raze," he said. 
 
 She lifted her eyes. They filled. She shook 
 her head, a tear fell, she bit her lip, smiled, 
 and suddenly dropped her face into both hands, 
 sat down upon the bench and wept until she 
 shook. 
 
 "You dunno wad I mean, Madame Car- 
 raze?" 
 
 She did not know. 
 
 "I mean dad guardian of you' daughteh 
 godd to fine 'er now one 'uzban' ; an' noboddie 
 are hable to do dad egceb de good God 'imsev. 
 But, Madame, I tell you wad I do." 
 
 She rose up. He continued : 
 
 " Go h-open you' owze ; I fin' you' daughteh 
 dad' uzban'." 
 
 Madame Delphine was a helpless, timid 
 thing ; but her eyes showed she was about to 
 resent this offer. Monsieur Yignevielle put 
 forth his hand it touched her shoulder and 
 said, kindly still, and without eagerness. 
 
 " One w'ite man, Madame ; 'tis prattycabble. 
 I know 'tis prattycabble. One w'ite jantleman, 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 81 
 
 Madame. You can truz me. I goin' fedge 'im. 
 H-ondly you go h-open you' owze." 
 
 Madame Delphine looked down, twining her 
 handkerchief among her fingers. 
 
 He repeated his proposition. 
 
 " You will come firz by you'se'f ? " she asked. 
 
 " Iv you wand." 
 
 She lifted up once more her eye of faith. 
 That was her answer. 
 
 " Come," he said, gently, " I wan' sen' some 
 bird ad you' lilT gal." 
 
 And they went away, Madame Delphine's 
 spirit grown so exaltedly bold that she said as 
 they went, though a violent blush followed her 
 words : 
 
 "Miche Yignevielle, I thing Pere Jerome 
 mighd be ab'e to tell you someboddie." 
 
CHAPTEE XL 
 
 FACE TO FACE. 
 
 MADAME DELPHINE found her house neither 
 burned nor rifled. 
 
 " Ah ! ma piti sans popa ! Ah ! my little 
 fatherless one ! " Her faded bonnet fell back 
 between her shoulders, hanging on by the 
 strings, and her dropped basket, with its " few 
 HIT becassiTies-de-mer " dangling from the han- 
 dle, rolled out its okra and soup-joint upon 
 the floor. " Ma piti ! kiss ! kiss ! kiss ! " 
 
 " But is it good news you have, or bad ? " 
 cried the girl, a fourth or fifth time. 
 
 "Dieu salt, ma c'ere; mo pas conne ! " God 
 knows, my darling ; I cannot tell ! 
 
 The mother dropped into a chair, covered 
 her face with her apron, and burst into tears, 
 then looked up with an effort to smile, and 
 wept afresh. 
 82 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 83 
 
 "What have you been doing?" asked the 
 daughter, in a long-drawn, fondling tone. She 
 leaned forward and unfastened her mother's 
 bonnet-strings. " Why do you cry ? " 
 
 " For nothing at all, my darling ; for nothing 
 I am such a fool." 
 
 The girl's eyes filled. The mother looked 
 up into her face and said : 
 
 "No, it is nothing, nothing, only that 
 turning her head from side to side with a slow, 
 emotional emphasis, " Miche Yignevielle is the 
 best best man on the good Lord's earth ! " 
 
 Olive drew a chair close to her mother, sat 
 down and took the little yellow hands into her 
 own white lap, and looked tenderly into her 
 eyes. Madame Delphine felt herself yield- 
 ing ; she must make a show of telling some- 
 thing : 
 
 " He sent you those birds ! " 
 
 The girl drew her face back a little. The 
 little woman turned away, trying in vain to hide 
 her tearful smile, and they laughed together, 
 Olive mingling a daughter's fond kiss with her 
 laughter. 
 
84 MADAME DELPHINE. . 
 
 "There is something else," she said, "and 
 you shall tell me." 
 
 "Yes," replied Madame Delphine, "only let 
 me get composed." 
 
 But she did not get so. Later in the morn- 
 ing she came to Olive with the timid yet start- 
 ling proposal that they would do what they 
 could to brighten up the long-neglected front 
 room. Olive was mystified and troubled, but 
 consented, and thereupon the mother's spirits 
 rose. 
 
 The work began, and presently ensued all 
 the thumping, the trundling, the lifting and let- 
 ting down, the raising and swallowing of dust, 
 and the smells of turpentine, brass, pumice and 
 woollen rags that go to characterize a house- 
 keeper's emeute; and still, as the work pro- 
 gressed, Madame Delphine's heart grew light, 
 and her little black eyes sparkled. 
 
 " We like a clean parlor, my daughter, even 
 though no one is ever coming to see us, eh ? " 
 she said, as entering the apartment she at last 
 sat down, late in the afternoon. She had put on 
 her best attire. 
 
MADAMS DELPHINE. 85 
 
 Olive was not there to reply. The mother 
 called but got no answer. She rose with an 
 uneasy heart, and met her a few steps beyond 
 the door that opened into the garden, in a path 
 which came up from an old latticed bower. 
 Olive was approaching slowly, her face pale 
 and wild. There was an agony of hostile dis- 
 may in the look, and the trembling and appeal- 
 ing tone with which, taking the frightened 
 mother's cheeks between her palms, she said : 
 
 " Ah ! ma mere, qui vini 'ci ce sair ? " Who is 
 coming here this evening? 
 
 " Why, my dear child, I was just saying, we 
 like a clean " 
 
 But the daughter was desperate : 
 
 "Oh, tell me, my mother, who is com- 
 ing?" 
 
 " My darling, it is our blessed friend, Miche 
 Vignevielle ! " 
 
 " To see me ? " cried the girl. 
 
 Yes." 
 
 " Oh, my mother, what have you done ? " 
 
 " Why, Olive, my child," exclaimed the little 
 mother, bursting into tears, " do you forget it 
 
86 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 is Miche Yignevielle who has promised to pro- 
 tect you when I die ? " 
 
 The daughter had turned away, and entered 
 the door ; but she faced around again, and 
 extending her arms toward her mother, 
 cried : 
 
 " How can he is a white man I am a 
 
 poor 
 
 " Ah ! clierie" replied Madame Delphine, 
 seizing the outstretched hands, " it is there 
 it is there that he shows himself the best man 
 alive ! He sees that difficulty ; he proposes to 
 meet it ; he says he will find you a suitor ! " 
 
 J / 
 
 Olive freed her hands violently, motioned 
 her mother back, and stood proudly drawn up, 
 flashing an indignation too great for speech ; 
 but the next moment she had uttered a cry, 
 and was sobbing on the floor. 
 
 The mother knelt beside her and threw an 
 arm about her shoulders. 
 
 " Oh, my sweet daughter, you must not cry ! 
 I did not want to tell you at all ! I did not 
 want to tell you ! It isn't fair for you to cry so 
 hard. Miche Vignevielle says you shall have 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 87 
 
 the one you wish, or none at all, Olive, or none 
 at all." 
 
 " None at all ! none at all ! None, none, 
 none ! " 
 
 " No, no, Olive," said the mother, " none at 
 all. He brings none with him to-night, and 
 shall bring none with him hereafter." 
 
 Olive rose suddenly, silently declined her 
 mother's aid, and went alone to their chamber 
 in the half-story. 
 
 Madame Delphine wandered drearily from 
 door to window, from window to door, and 
 presently into the newly-furnished front room 
 which now seemed dismal beyond degree. 
 There was a great Argand lamp in one corner. 
 How she had labored that day to prepare it 
 for evening illumination ! A little beyond it, 
 on the wall, hung a crucifix. She knelt under 
 it, with her eyes fixed upon it, and thus silently 
 remained until its outline was undistinguish- 
 able in the deepening shadows of evening. 
 
 She arose. A few minutes later, as she was 
 trying to light the lamp, an approaching step 
 
88 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 on the sidewalk seemed to pause. Her heart 
 stood still. She softly laid the phosphorus- 
 box out of her hands. A shoe grated softly on 
 the stone step, and Madame Delphine, her 
 heart beating in great thuds, without waiting 
 for a knock, opened the door, bowed low, and 
 exclaimed in a soft perturbed voice : 
 
 "Miche Vignevielle!" 
 
 He entered, hat in hand, and with that almost 
 noiseless tread which we have noticed. She 
 gave him a chair and closed the door ; then 
 hastened, with words of apology, back to her 
 task of lighting the lamp. But her hands 
 paused in their work again, Olive's step was 
 on the stairs ; then it came off the stairs ; then 
 it was in the next room, and then there was 
 the whisper of soft robes, a breath of gentle 
 perfume, and a snowy figure in the door. She 
 was dressed for the evening. 
 
 "Maman?" 
 
 Madame Delphine was struggling desperately 
 with the lamp, and at that moment it responded 
 with a, tiny bead of light. 
 
 " I am here, my daughter." 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 89 
 
 She hastened to the door, and Olive, all un- 
 aware of a third presence, lifted her white 
 arms, laid them about her mother's neck, and, 
 ignoring her effort to speak, wrested a fervent 
 kiss from her lips. The crystal of the lamp 
 sent out a faint gleam ; it grew ; it spread on 
 every side ; the ceiling, the walls lighted up ; 
 the crucifix, the furniture of the room came 
 back into shape. 
 
 " Maman ! " cried Olive, with a tremor of 
 consternation. 
 
 " It is Miche Yignevielle, my daughter 
 
 The gloom melted swiftly away before the 
 eyes of the startled maiden, a dark form stood 
 out against the farther wall, and the light, ex- 
 panding to the full, shone clearly upon the 
 unmoving figure and quiet face of Capitaine 
 Lemaitre. 
 
CHAPTEE XH. 
 
 THE MOTHER BIED. 
 
 ONE afternoon, some three weeks after Capi- 
 taine Lemaitre had called on Madame Del- 
 phine, the priest started to make a pastoral 
 call and had hardly left the gate of his cottage, 
 when a person, overtaking him, plucked his 
 gown : 
 
 "Pere Jerome " 
 
 He turned. 
 
 The face that met his was so changed with 
 excitement and distress that for an instant he 
 did not recognize it. 
 
 " Why, Madame Delphine " 
 
 " Oh, Pere Jerome ! I wan' see you so bad, 
 so bad ! Mo oule dit quic'ose, I godd some' to 
 tell you." 
 
 The two languages might be more success- 
 ful than one, she seemed to think. 
 90 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 91 
 
 " We had better go back to my parlor," said 
 the priest, in their native tongue. 
 
 They returned. 
 
 Madame Delphine's very step was altered, 
 nervous and inelastic. She swung one arm as 
 she walked, and brandished a turkey-tail fan. 
 
 " I was glad, yass, to kedge you," she said, 
 as they mounted the front, outdoor stair ; fol- 
 lowing her speech with a slight, unmusical 
 laugh, and fanning herself with unconscious 
 fury. 
 
 " Fe diaud" she remarked again, taking the 
 chair he offered and continuing to ply the fan. 
 
 Pere Jerome laid his hat upon a chest of 
 drawers, sat down opposite her, and said, as he 
 wiped his kindly face : 
 
 "Well, Madame Carraze ? " 
 
 Gentle as the tone was, she started, ceased 
 fanning, lowered the fan to her knee, and com- 
 menced smoothing its feathers. 
 
 " Pere Jerome " She gnawed her lip 
 
 and shook her head. 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 She burst into tears. 
 
92 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 The priest rose and loosed the curtain of 
 one of the windows. He did it slowly as 
 slowly as he could, and, as he came back, she 
 lifted her face with sudden energy, and ex- 
 claimed : 
 
 " Oh, Pere Jerome, de law is brogue ! de law 
 is brogue ! I brogue it ! 'Twas me ! 'Twas 
 me!" 
 
 The tears gushed out again, but she shut 
 her lips very tight, and dumbly turned away 
 her face. Pere Jerome waited a little before 
 replying ; then he said, very gently : 
 
 " I suppose dad muss 'ave been by accyden', 
 Madame Delphine ? " 
 
 The little father felt a wish one which he 
 often had when weeping women were before 
 him that he were an angel instead of a man, 
 long enough to press the tearful cheek upon 
 his breast, and assure the weeper God would 
 not let the lawyers and judges hurt her. He 
 allowed a few moments more to pass, and then 
 asked : 
 
 " N'est-ce-pas, Madame Delphine ? Daz ze 
 way, aint it ? " 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 93 
 
 " No, Pere Jerome, no. My daughter oh, 
 Pere Jerome, I bethroath my lill' girl to a 
 w'ite man ! " And immediately Madame Del- 
 phine commenced savagely drawing a thread 
 in the fabric of her skirt with one trembling 
 hand, while she drove the fan with the other. 
 "Dey goin' git marry." 
 
 On the priest's face came a look of pained 
 surprise. He slowly said : 
 
 " Is dad possib', Madame Delphine ? " 
 
 " Yass," she replied, at first without lifting 
 her eyes; and then again, "Yass," looking full 
 upon him through her tears, " yass, 'tis tru'." 
 
 He rose and walked once across the room, 
 returned, and said, in the Creole dialect : 
 
 " Is he a good man without doubt ? " 
 
 " De bez in God's world ! " replied Madame 
 Delphine, with a rapturous smile. 
 
 " My poor, dear friend," said the priest, " I 
 am afraid you are being deceived by somebody." 
 
 There was the pride of an unswerving faith 
 in the triumphant tone and smile with which 
 she replied, raising and slowly shaking her 
 head : 
 
94 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " Ah-h, no-o-o, Miche ! Ah-h, no, no ! Not 
 by Ursin Lemaitre-Yignevielle ! " 
 
 Pere Jerome was confounded. He turned 
 again, and, with his hands at his back and his 
 eyes cast down, slowly paced the floor. 
 
 " He is a good man," he said, by and by, as 
 if he thought aloud. At length he halted be- 
 fore the woman. 
 
 " Madame Delphine 
 
 The distressed glance with which she had 
 been following his steps was lifted to his 
 eyes. 
 
 " Suppose dad should be true w'at doze 
 peop' say 'bout Ursin." 
 
 "Qw ci qa? What is that?" asked the 
 quadroone, stopping her fan. 
 
 " Some peop' say Ursin is crezzie." 
 
 " Ah, Pere Jerome ! " She leaped to her feet 
 as if he had smitten her, and putting his words 
 away with an outstretched arm and wide-open 
 palm, suddenly lifted hands and eyes to heaven, 
 and cried : " I wizh to God I unzh to God de 
 whole worl' was crezzie dad same way ! " She 
 sank, trembling, into her chair. " Oh, no, no," 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 95 
 
 she continued, shaking her head, "'tis not 
 Miche Yignevielle w'at's crezzie." Her eyes 
 lighted with sudden fierceness. " 'Tis dad law ! 
 Dad law is crezzie ! Dad law is a fool ! " 
 
 A priest of less heart-wisdom might have 
 replied that the law is the law ; but Pere 
 Jerome saw that Madame Delphine was ex- 
 pecting this very response. Wherefore he 
 said, with gentleness : 
 
 " Madame Delphine, a priest is not a bailiff, 
 but a physician. How can I help you? " 
 
 A grateful light shone a moment in her eyes, 
 yet there remained a piteous hostility in the 
 tone in which she demanded : 
 
 " Mais, pou'quoi yefe cette mechanique Id?" 
 What business had they to make that contrap- 
 tion? 
 
 His answer was a shrug with his palms ex- 
 tended and a short, disclamatory " Ah." He 
 started to resume his walk, but turned to her 
 again and said : 
 
 " Why did they make that law ? Well, they 
 made it to keep the two races separate." 
 
 Madame Delphine startled the speaker with 
 
96 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 a loud, harsh, angry laugh. Fire came from 
 her eyes and her lip curled with scorn. 
 
 " Then they made a lie, Pere Jerome ! Sepa- 
 rate ! No-o-o ! They do not want to keep us 
 separated ; no, no ! But they do want to keep 
 us despised ! " She laid her hand on her 
 heart, and frowned upward with physical pain. 
 " But, very well ! from which race do they want 
 to keep my daughter separate ? She is seven 
 parts white ! The law did not stop her from 
 being that ; and now, when she wants to be a 
 white man's good and honest wife, shall that 
 law stop her ? Oh, no ! " She rose up. " No ; 
 I will tell you what that law is made for. It is 
 made to punish my child for not 
 choosing her father ! Pere Jerome - my 
 God, what a law ! " She dropped back into 
 her seat. The tears came in a flood, which she 
 made no attempt to restrain. 
 
 " No," she began again and here she broke 
 into English " fo' me I don' kyare ; but, Pere 
 Jerome, 'tis fo' dat I come to tell you, dey 
 slidd not punizh my daughter ! " She was 
 on her feet again, smiting her heaving bosom 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 97 
 
 with the fan. " She shall marrie oo she 
 want ! " 
 
 Pere Jerome had heard her out, not inter- 
 rupting by so much as a motion of the hand. 
 Now his decision was made, and he touched 
 her softly with the ends of his fingers. 
 
 " Madame Delphine, I want you to go at 
 'ome. Go at 'ome." 
 
 " Wad you goin' mague ? " she asked. 
 
 " Nottin'. But go at 'ome. Kip quite ; don' 
 put you'se'f sig. I goin' see Ursin. "We trah 
 to figs dat law fo' you." 
 
 " You kin figs dad ! " she cried, with a gleam 
 
 "We goin' to try, Madame Delphine. 
 Adieu ! " 
 
 He offered his hand. She seized and kissed 
 it thrice, covering it with tears, at the same 
 time lifting up her eyes to his and murmuring : 
 
 " De bez man God evva mague ! " 
 
 At the door she turned to offer a more con- 
 ventional good-bye ; but he was following her 
 out, bareheaded. At the gate they paused an 
 instant, and then parted with a simple adieu, 
 
98 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 she going home and he returning for his hat, 
 and starting again upon his interrupted busi- 
 ness. 
 
 Before he came back to his own house, he 
 stopped at the lodgings of Monsieur Vigne- 
 vielle, but did not find him in. 
 
 " Indeed," the servant at the door said, " he 
 said he might not return for some days or 
 weeks." 
 
 So Pere Jerome, much wondering, made a 
 second detour toward the residence of one of 
 Monsieur Yignevielle's employes. 
 
 " Yes," said the clerk, " his instructions are 
 to hold the business, as far as practicable, in 
 suspense, during his absence. Everything is 
 in another name." And then he whispered : 
 
 " Officers of the Government looking for 
 him. Information got from some of the pris- 
 oners taken months ago by the United States 
 brig Porpoise. But " a still softer whisper 
 " have no fear ; they will never find him : Jean 
 Thompson and Evariste Yarrillat have hid him 
 away too well for that." 
 
CHAPTEE XIII. 
 
 TRIBULATION. 
 
 THE Saturday following was a very beautiful 
 day. In the morning a light fall of rain had 
 passed across the town, and all the afternoon 
 you could see signs, here and there upon the 
 horizon, of other showers. The ground was 
 dry again, while the breeze was cool and 
 sweet, smelling of wet foliage and bringing 
 sunshine and shade in frequent and very 
 pleasing alternation. 
 
 There was a walk in Pere Jerome's little 
 garden, of which we have not spoken, off on 
 the right side of the cottage, with his chamber 
 window at one end, a few old and twisted, but 
 blossom-laden, crape-myrtles on either hand, 
 now and then a rose of some unpretending va- 
 riety and some bunches of rue, and at the 
 other end a shrine, in whose blue niche stood 
 99 
 
100 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 a small figure of Mary, with folded hands and 
 uplifted eyes. No other window looked down 
 upon the spot, and its seclusion was often a 
 great comfort to Pere Jerome. 
 
 Up and down this path, but a few steps in 
 its entire length, the priest was walking, taking 
 the air for a few moments after a prolonged 
 sitting in the confessional. Penitents had 
 been numerous this afternoon. He was think- 
 ing of Ursin. The officers of the Government 
 had not found him, nor had Pere Jerome seen 
 him ; yet he believed they had, in a certain 
 indirect way, devised a simple project by 
 which they could at any time " figs dad law," 
 providing only that these Government officials 
 would give over their search ; for, though he 
 had not seen the fugitive, Madame Delphine 
 had seen him, and had been the vehicle of 
 communication between them. There was an 
 orange-tree, where a mocking-bird was wont 
 to sing and a girl in white to walk, that the 
 detectives wot not of. The. law was to be 
 "figs " by the departure of the three frequent- 
 ers of the jasmine-scented garden in one ship 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 101 
 
 to France, where the law offered no ob- 
 stacles. 
 
 It seemed moderately certain to those in 
 search of Monsieur Vignevielle (and it was true) 
 that Jean and Evariste were his harborers ; 
 but for all that the hunt, even for clues, was 
 vain. The little banking establishment had 
 not been disturbed. Jean Thompson had told 
 the searchers certain facts about it, and about 
 its gentle proprietor as well, that persuaded 
 them to make no move against the concern, if 
 the same relations did not even induce a re- 
 laxation of their efforts for his personal dis- 
 covery. 
 
 Pere Jerome was walking to and fro, with 
 his hands behind him, pondering these mat- 
 ters. He had paused a moment at the end of 
 the walk furthest from his window, and was 
 looking around upon the sky, when, turning, 
 he beheld a closely veiled female figure stand- 
 ing at the other end, and knew instantly that it 
 was Olive. 
 
 She came forward quickly and with evident 
 eagerness. 
 
102 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " I came to confession," she said, breathing 
 hurriedly, the excitement in her eyes shining 
 through her veil, " but I find I am too late." 
 
 " There is no too late or too early for that ; 
 I am always ready," said the priest. "But 
 how is your mother ? " 
 
 Ah! " 
 
 Her voice failed. 
 
 " More trouble ? " 
 
 "Ah, sir, I have made trouble. Oh, Pere 
 Jerome, I am bringing so much trouble upon 
 my poor mother ! " 
 
 Pere Jerome moved slowly toward the house, 
 with his eyes cast down, the veiled girl at his side. 
 
 "It is not your fault," he presently said. 
 And after another pause : " I thought it was all 
 arranged." 
 
 He looked up and could see, even through 
 the veil, her crimson blush. 
 
 " Oh, no," she replied, in a low, despairing 
 voice, dropping her face. 
 
 "What is the difficulty?" asked the priest, 
 stopping in the angle of the path, where it 
 turned toward the front of the house. 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 103 
 
 She averted her face, and began picking the 
 thin scales of bark from a crape-myrtle. 
 
 " Madame Thompson and her husband were 
 at our house this morning. He had told Mon- 
 sieur Thompson all about it. They were very 
 
 kind to me at first, but they tried " She 
 
 was weeping. 
 
 "What did they try to do?" asked the 
 priest. 
 
 " They tried to make me believe he is in- 
 sane." 
 
 She succeeded in passing her handkerchief 
 up under her veil. 
 
 " And I suppose then your poor mother grew 
 angry, eh ? " 
 
 " Yes ; and they became much more so, and 
 said if we did not write, or send a writing, 
 to him, within twenty-four hours,, breaking 
 the " 
 
 " Engagement," said Pere Jerome. 
 
 "They would give him up to the Govern- 
 ment. Oh, Pere Jerome, what shall I do ? It 
 is killing my mother ! " 
 
 She bowed her head and sobbed. 
 
104 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " Where is your mother now ? " 
 
 "She has gone to see Monsieur Jean 
 Thompson. She says she has a plan that will 
 match them all. I do not know what it is. I 
 begged her not to go ; but oh, sir, she is crazy, 
 and I am no better." 
 
 " My poor child," said Pere Jerome, " what 
 you seem to want is not absolution, but relief 
 from persecution." 
 
 " Oh, father, I have committed mortal sin, 
 I am guilty of pride and anger." 
 
 "Nevertheless," said the priest, starting to- 
 ward his front gate, "we will put off your con- 
 fession. Let it go until to-morrow morning ; 
 you will find me in my box just before mass ; 
 I will hear you then. My child, I know that 
 in your heart, now, you begrudge the time it 
 would take ; and that is right. There are mo- 
 ments when we are not in place even on peni- 
 tential knees. It is so with you now. We 
 must find your mother. Go you at once to 
 your house ; if she is there, comfort her as 
 best you can, and keep her in, if possible, until 
 I come. If she is not there, stay ; leave me to 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 105 
 
 find her ; one of you, at least, must be where I 
 can get word to you promptly. God comfort 
 and uphold you. I hope you may find her at 
 home ; tell her, for me, not to fear," he lifted 
 the gate-latch, "that she and her daughter 
 are of more value than many sparrows ; that 
 God's priest sends her that word from Him. 
 Tell her to fix her trust in the great Husband 
 of the Church, and she shall yet see her child 
 receiving the grace-giving sacrament of matri- 
 mony. Go ; I shall, in a few minutes, be on 
 my way to Jean Thompson's, and shall find 
 her, either there or wherever she is. Go ; 
 they shall not oppress you. Adieu ! " 
 
 A moment or two later he was in the street 
 himself. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV. 
 
 BY AN OATH. 
 
 PERE JEROME, pausing on a street-corner in 
 the last hour of sunlight, had wiped his brow 
 and taken his cane down from under his arm 
 to start again, when somebody, coming noise- 
 lessly from he knew not where, asked, so sud- 
 denly as to startle him : 
 
 " Miche, commin ye 'pette la rie id ? Jiow do 
 they call this street here ? " 
 
 It was by the bonnet and dress, disordered 
 though they were, rather than by the haggard 
 face which looked distractedly around, that he 
 recognized the woman to whom he replied in 
 her own patois: 
 
 11 It is the Rue Burgundy. Where are you 
 going, Madame Delphine ? " 
 
 She almost leaped from the ground. 
 
 " Oh, Pere Jerome ! mo pas conne, I dunno. 
 106 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 107 
 
 You know w'ere's dad 'ouse of Miche Jean 
 Tomkin ? Mo courri 'ci, mo courri Id, mo pas 
 capdbe li trouve. I go (run) here there I 
 cannot find it," she gesticulated. 
 
 " I am going there myself," said he ; " but 
 why do you want to see Jean Thompson, Ma- 
 dame Delphine ?" 
 
 " I 'blige' to see 'im ! " she replied, jerking 
 herself half around away, one foot planted for- 
 ward with an air of excited preoccupation ; " I 
 god some' to tell 'im wad I 'blige* to tell 'im ! " 
 
 " Madame Delphine - 
 
 " Oh ! Pere Jerome, fo' de love of de good 
 God, show me dad way to de 'ouse of Jean 
 Tomkin ! " 
 
 Her distressed smile implored pardon for 
 her rudeness. 
 
 " What are you going to tell him ? " asked 
 the priest. 
 
 "Oh, Pere Jerome," in the Creole patois 
 again, " I am going to put an end to all this 
 trouble only I pray you do not ask me about 
 it now ; every minute is precious ! " 
 
 He could not withstand her look of entreaty. 
 
108 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 " Come," he said, and they went. 
 
 Jean Thompson and Doctor Yarrillat lived 
 opposite each other on the Bayou road, a lit- 
 tle way beyond the town limits as then pre- 
 scribed. Each had his large, white-columned, 
 four-sided house among the magnolias, his 
 huge live-oak overshadowing either corner of 
 the darkly shaded garden, his broad, brick 
 walk leading down to the tall, brick-pillared 
 gate, his square of bright, red pavement on 
 the turf-covered sidewalk, and his railed plat- 
 form spanning the draining- ditch, with a pair 
 of green benches, one on each edge, facing 
 each other crosswise of the gutter. There, any 
 sunset hour, you were sure to find the house- 
 holder sitting beside his cool-robed matron, 
 two or three slave nurses in white turbans 
 standing at hand, and an excited throng of fair 
 children, nearly all of a size. 
 
 Sometimes, at a beckon or call, the parents 
 on one side of the way would join those on the 
 other, and the children and nurses of both 
 families would be given the liberty of the op- 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 109 
 
 posite platform and an ice-cream fund ! Gen- 
 erally the parents chose the Thompson plat- 
 form, its outlook being more toward the sunset. 
 
 Such happened to be the arrangement this 
 afternoon. The two husbands sat on one 
 bench and their wives on the other, both pairs 
 very quiet, waiting respectfully for the day to 
 die, and exchanging only occasional comments 
 on matters of light moment as they passed 
 through the memory. During one term of 
 silence Madame Varrillat, a pale, thin-faced, 
 but cheerful -looking lady, touched Madame 
 Thompson, a person of two and a half times 
 her weight, on her extensive and snowy bare 
 elbow, directing her attention obliquely up 
 and across the road. 
 
 About a hundred yards distant, in the direc- 
 tion of the river, was a long, pleasantly shaded 
 green strip of turf, destined in time for a side- 
 walk. It had a deep ditch on the nearer side, 
 and a fence of rough cypress palisades on the 
 farther, and these were overhung, on the one 
 hand, by a row of bitter orange-trees inside 
 the in closure, and, on the other, by a line of 
 
110 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 slanting china-trees along the outer edge of 
 the ditch. Down this cool avenue two figures 
 were approaching side by side. They had first 
 attracted Madame Yarrillat's notice by the 
 bright play of sunbeams which, as they walked, 
 fell upon them in soft, golden flashes through 
 the chinks between the palisades. 
 
 Madame Thompson elevated a pair of glasses 
 which were no detraction from her very good 
 looks, and remarked, with the serenity of a re- 
 connoitering general : 
 
 11 Per e Jerome et cette milatraise." 
 
 All eyes were bent toward them. 
 
 " She walks like a man," said Madame Var- 
 rillat, in the language with which the conver- 
 sation had opened. 
 
 " No," said the physician, " like a woman in 
 a state of high nervous excitement." 
 
 Jean Thompson kept his eyes on the woman, 
 and said : 
 
 " She must not forget to walk like a woman 
 in the State of Louisiana," as near as the 
 pun can be translated. The company laughed. 
 Jean Thompson looked at his wife, whose ap- 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. Ill 
 
 plause he prized, and she answered by an as- 
 severative toss of the head, leaning back and 
 contriving, with some effort, to get her arms 
 folded. Her laugh was musical and low, but 
 enough to make the folded arms shake gently 
 up and down. 
 
 " Pere Jerome is talking to her," said one. 
 The priest was at that moment endeavoring, 
 in the interest of peace, to say a good word 
 for the four people who sat watching his ap- 
 proach. It was in the old strain : 
 
 " Blame them one part, Madame Delphine, 
 and their fathers, mothers, brothers, and fel- 
 low-citizens the other ninety-nine." 
 
 But to everything she had the one amiable 
 answer which Pere Jerome ignored : 
 
 " I am going to arrange it to satisfy every- 
 body, all together. Tout a fait" 
 
 " They are coming here," said Madame Yar- 
 rillat, half articulately. 
 
 " Well, of course," murmured another ; and 
 the four rose up, smiling courteously, the doc- 
 tor and attorney advancing and shaking hands 
 with the priest. 
 
112 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 No Pere Jerome thanked them he could 
 not sit down. 
 
 " This, I believe you kn jw, Jean, is Madame 
 Delphine - 
 
 The quadroone curtsied. 
 
 " A friend of mine," he added, smiling kindly 
 upon her, and turning, with something imper- 
 ative in his eye, to the group. " She says she 
 has an important private matter to commu- 
 nicate." 
 
 " To me ? " asked Jean Thompson. 
 
 " To all of you ; so I will - Good-even- 
 ing." He responded nothing to the expressions 
 of regret, but turned to Madame Delphine. 
 She murmured something. 
 
 "Ah! yes, certainly." He addressed the 
 company : " She wishes me to speak for her 
 veracity; it is unimpeachable. Well, good- 
 evening." He shook hands and departed. 
 
 The four resumed their seats, and turned 
 their eyes upon the standing figure. 
 
 " Have you something to say to us ? " asked 
 Jean Thompson, frowning at her law-defying 
 bonnet. 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 113 
 
 " Oui" replied the woman, shrinking to one 
 side, and laying hold of one of the benches, 
 " mo ouU di* tou' c'ose " I want to tell every- 
 thing. "Miche Vignevidle laplis bon Jiomme di 
 moune " the best man in the world ; " mo pas 
 capabe life tracas " I cannot give him trouble. 
 11 Mo pas capabe,non; m'ole di' toiisc'ose." She 
 attempted to fan herself, her face turned away 
 from the attorney, and her eyes rested on the 
 ground. 
 
 " Take a seat," said Doctor Yarrillat, with 
 some suddenness, starting from his place and 
 gently guiding her sinking form into the cor- 
 ner of the bench. The ladies rose up ; some- 
 body had to stand ; the two races could not 
 both sit down at once at least not in that 
 public manner. 
 
 " Your salts," said the physician to his wife. 
 She handed the vial. Madame Delphine stood 
 up again. 
 
 "We will all go inside," said Madame 
 Thompson, and they passed through the gate 
 and up the walk, mounted the steps, and en- 
 tered the deep, cool drawing-room. 
 
114 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 Madame Thompson herself bade the quad- 
 roone be seated. 
 
 "Well?" said Jean Thompson, as the rest 
 took chairs. 
 
 "C'est drole" it's funny said Madame Del- 
 phine, with a piteous effort to smile, "that no- 
 body thought 1 of it. It is so plain. You have 
 only to look and see. I mean about Olive." 
 She loosed a button in the front of her dress 
 and passed her hand into her bosom. " And 
 yet, Olive herself never thought of it. She 
 does not know a word." 
 
 The hand came out holding a miniature. 
 Madame Varrillat passed it to Jean Thompson. 
 
 " Ouala so popa," said Madame Delphine. 
 "That is her father." 
 
 It went from one to another, exciting ad- 
 miration and murmured praise. 
 
 " She is the image of him," said Madame 
 Thompson, in an austere under-tone, return- 
 ing it to her husband. 
 
 Doctor Varrillat was watching Madame Del- 
 phine. She was very pale. She had passed a 
 trembling hand into a pocket of her skirt, and 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 115 
 
 now drew out another picture, in a case the 
 counterpart of the first. He reached but for 
 it, and she handed it to him. He looked at it 
 a moment, when his eyes suddenly lighted up 
 and he passed it to the attorney. 
 
 " Et la " Madame Delphine's utterance fail- 
 ed "et Id, ouala sa moman." (That is her 
 mother.) 
 
 The three others, instantly gathered around 
 Jean Thompson's chair. They were much im- 
 pressed. 
 
 " It is true beyond a doubt ! " muttered Ma- 
 dame Thompson. 
 
 Madame Varrillat looked at her with aston- 
 ishment. 
 
 " The proof is right there in the faces," said 
 Madame Thompson. 
 
 " Yes ! yes ! " said Madame Delphine, ex- 
 citedly ; " the proof is there ! You do not 
 want any better ! I am willing to swear to it ! i 
 But you want no better proof ! That is all 
 anybody could want ! My God ! you cannot 
 help but see it ! " 
 
 Her manner was wild. 
 
116 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 Jean Thompson looked at her sternly. 
 
 " Nevertheless you say you are willing to take 
 your solemn oath to this." 
 
 "Certainly " 
 
 "You will have to doit." 
 
 "Certainly, Miche Thompson, of course I 
 shall ; you will make out the paper and I will 
 swear before God that it is true ! Only " turn- 
 ing to the ladies " do not tell Olive ; she will 
 never believe it. It will break her heart ! 
 It " 
 
 A servant came and spoke privately to 
 Madame Thompson, who rose quickly and went 
 to the hall. Madame Delphine continued, ris- 
 ing unconsciously : 
 
 "You see, I have had her with me from a baby. 
 She knows no better. He brought her to me 
 only two months old. Her mother had died in 
 the ship, coming out here. He did not come 
 straight from home here. His people never 
 knew he was married ! " 
 
 The speaker looked around suddenly with 
 a startled glance. There was a noise of excited 
 speaking in the hall. 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 117 
 
 " It is not true, Madame Thompson ! " 
 a girl's voice. 
 
 Madame Delphine's look became one of wild- 
 est distress and alarm, and she opened her lips 
 in a vain attempt to utter some request, when 
 Olive appeared a moment in the door, and then 
 flew into her arms. 
 
 " My mother ! my mother ! my mother ! " 
 
 Madame Thompson, with tears in her eyes, 
 tenderly drew them apart and let Madame 
 Delphine down into her chair, while Olive 
 threw herself upon her knees, continuing to 
 cry : 
 
 " Oh, my mother ! Say you are my mother ! " 
 
 Madame Delphine looked an instant into the 
 upturned face, and then turned her own away, 
 with a long, low cry of pain, looked again, and 
 laying both hands upon the suppliant's head, 
 said: 
 
 "Oh, chere piti amain, to pa 1 ma fie! " (Oh, my 
 darling little one, you are not my daughter !) 
 Her eyes closed, and her head sank back; the 
 two gentlemen sprang to her assistance, and 
 laid her upon a sofa unconscious. 
 
118 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 When they brought her to herself, Olive was 
 kneeling at her head silently weeping. 
 
 " Maman, chere maman ! " said the girl softly, 
 kissing her lips. 
 
 " Ma courri cez moin " (I will go home), said 
 the mother, drearily. 
 
 " You will go home with me," said Madame 
 Yarrillat, with great kindness of manner "just 
 across the street here ; I will take care of you 
 till you feel better. And Olive will stay here 
 with Madame Thompson. You will be only 
 the width of the street apart." 
 
 But Madame Delphine would go nowhere 
 but to her home. Olive she would not allow to 
 go with her. Then they wanted to send a ser- 
 vant or two to sleep in the house with her for 
 aid and protection; but all she would ac- 
 cept was the transient service of a messenger 
 to invite two of her kinspeople man and 
 wife to come and make their dwelling with 
 her. 
 
 In course of time these two a poor, timid, 
 helpless, pair fell heir to the premises. Their 
 children had it after them ; but, whether in 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 119 
 
 those hands or these, the house had its habits 
 and continued in them ; and to this day the 
 neighbors, as has already been said, rightly ex- 
 plain its close-sealed, uninhabited look by the 
 all-sufficient statement that the inmates "is 
 quadroons." 
 
CHAPTEE XV. 
 
 KYBIE ELEISON. 
 
 THE second Saturday afternoon following was 
 hot and calm, the lamp burning before the 
 tabernacle in Pere Jerome's little church might 
 have hung with as motionless a flame in the 
 window behind. The lilies of St. Joseph's wand, 
 shining in one of the half opened panes, were 
 not more completely at rest than the leaves 
 on tree and vine without, suspended in the 
 slumbering air. Almost as still, down under 
 the organ-gallery, with a single band of light 
 falling athwart his box from a small door which 
 stood ajar, sat the little priest, behind the lat- 
 tice of the confessional, silently wiping away 
 the sweat that beaded on his brow and rolled 
 down his face. At distant intervals the shadow 
 of some one entering softly through the door 
 would obscure, for a moment, the band of light, 
 and an aged crone, or a little boy, or some gentle 
 120 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 121 
 
 presence that the listening confessor had known 
 only by the voice for many years, would kneel 
 a few moments beside his waiting ear, in prayer 
 for blessing and in review of those slips and 
 errors which prove us all akin. 
 
 The day had been long and fatiguing. First, 
 early mass ; a hasty meal ; then a business 
 call upon the archbishop in the interest of 
 some projected charity ; then back to his cot- 
 tage, and so to the banking-house of " Vigne- 
 vielle," in the Rue Toulouse. There all was 
 open, bright, and re-assured, its master vir- 
 tually, though not actually, present. The 
 search was over and the seekers gone, person- 
 ally wiser than they would tell, and officially 
 reporting that .(to the best of their knowledge 
 and belief, based on evidence, and especially 
 on the assurances of an unexceptionable eye- 
 witness, to wit, Monsieur Vignevielle, banker) 
 Capitaine Lemaitre was dead and buried. At 
 noon there had been a wedding in the little 
 church. Its scenes lingered before Pere Je- 
 rome's vision now-^-the kneeling pair : the 
 bridegroom, rich in all the excellences of man, 
 
122 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 strength and kindness slumbering interlocked 
 in every part and feature ; the bride, a saintly 
 weariness oix her^pale Jace, her awesome eyes 
 lifted in adoration upon the image of the Sa- 
 viour; the small knots of friends behind: 
 Madame Thompson, large, fair, self-contained ; 
 Jean Thompson, with the affidavit of Madame 
 Delphine showing through his tightly but- 
 toned coat ; the physician and his.,wife, shar- 
 ing onaexpression of amiable consent ; and last 
 yet first one small, shrinking female figure, 
 here at one side, in faded robes and dingy 
 bonnet. She sat as motionless as stone, yet 
 wore a look of apprenension, and in the small, 
 restless black eyes which peered out from the 
 pinched and wasted face, betrayed the peace- 
 lessness -of a harrowed mind ; and neither the 
 recollection of bride, nor of groom, nor .of po- 
 tential friends behind, nor the occupation of 
 the present hour, could shut out from the 
 tired priest the image of that woman, or the 
 sound of his own low words of invitation to 
 her, given as the company left the church 
 " Come to. confession this afternoon." 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 123 
 
 By and by a long time passed without the 
 approach of any step, or any glancing of light 
 or shadow, save for the occasional progress 
 from station to station of some one over on 
 the right who was noiselessly going the way 
 of the cross. Yet Pere Jerome tarried* 
 
 " She will surely come," he said to himself ; 
 " she promised she would come." 
 
 A moment later, his sense, quickened by the 
 prolonged silence, caught a subtle evidence or 
 two of approach, and the next moment a peni- 
 tent knelt noiselessly at the window of his 
 box, and the whisper came tremblingly, in 
 the voice he had waited to hear : 
 
 " Benissez-moin, mo' Pere, price que mo peche." 
 (Bless me, father, for I have sinned.) 
 
 He gave his blessing. 
 
 " Ainsi soit-il Amen," murmured the peni- 
 tent, and then, in the soft accents of the Creole 
 patois, continued : 
 
 " ' I confess to Almighty God, to the blessed 
 Mary, ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the 
 Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the 
 holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and to all the 
 
124 MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 saints, that I have sinned exceedingly in 
 thought, word, and deed, through my fault, 
 through my fault, through my most grievous fault. 9 
 I confessed on Saturday, three weeks ago, and 
 received absolution, and I have performed the 
 penance enjoined. Since then There 
 
 she stopped. 
 
 There was a soft stir, as if she sank slowly 
 down, and another as if she rose up again, and 
 in a moment she said : 
 
 " Olive is my child. The picture I showed 
 to Jean Thompson is the half-sister of my 
 daughter's father, dead before my child was 
 born. She is the image of her and of him ; 
 but, O God ! Thou knowest ! Oh Olive, my 
 own daughter ! " 
 
 She ceased, and was still. Pere Jerome 
 waited, but no sound came. He looked through 
 the window. She was kneeling, with her fore- 
 head resting on her arms motionless. 
 
 He repeated the words of absolution. Still 
 she did not stir. 
 
 " My daughter," he said, " go to thy home in 
 peace." But she did not move. 
 
MADAME DELPHINE. 
 
 125 
 
 He rose hastily, stepped from the box, raised 
 her in his arms, and called her by name : 
 
 " Madame Delphine ! " Her head fell back 
 in his elbow ; for an instant there was life in 
 the eyes it glimmered it vanished, and tears 
 gushed from his own and fell upon the gentle 
 face of the dead, as he looked up to heaven 
 and cried : 
 
 " Lord, lay not this sin to her charge 1 " 
 
George W. Cable's Novels. 
 
 THE GRAXDImES; 
 
 A STORY OF CREOLE LIFE. 
 One Vol., 12mo ............................. $t.5<) 
 
 " In every respect the most remarkable American story 
 that has ever been written." Atlanta Constitution. 
 
 " TJie Grandissimes is a novel that repays study. It 
 opens to most of us an unknown society, an unknown 
 world, absolutely fresh characters, a dialect of which we 
 had only fragments before, and it illuminates a historical 
 period that was in the dark. * * * It is in many respects 
 the most original contribution to American fiction." Hart- 
 ford Courant. 
 
 "In point of steady, continued power, displayed alike 
 in plot and description, in point of the rarest local coloring 
 evidently derived from the closest study and observation of 
 Creole life, we rank this book among the very first of Amer- 
 ican fictions. " Christian Intelligencer. 
 
 OLD CREOLE 
 
 One Vol., 16mo, extra Cloth ..... ...... $1.0O 
 
 " These charming stories attract attention and commen- 
 dation by their quaint delicacy of style, their faithful de- 
 lineation of Creole character, and a marked originality. 
 The careful rendering of the dialect reveals patient study 
 of living models ; and to any reader whose ear is accus- 
 tomed to the broken English, as heard in the parts of our 
 city every day, its truth to nature is striking." New 
 Orleans Picayune. 
 
 "Here is true art at work. Here is poetry, pathos, 
 tragedy, humor. Here is an entrancing style. Here is a 
 new field, one full of passion and beauty. Here is local 
 color with strong drawing. Here, in this little volume, is 
 life, breath, and blood. The author of this book is an 
 artist, and over such a revelation one may be permitted 
 strong words." Cincinnati Times. 
 
 *** These books are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, 
 prepaid, upon receipt of price, by 
 
 CHARLES SCRBNER'S SONS, 
 
 Nos. 743 and 745 Broadway, New York* 
 
Mrs, Burnett's Novels. 
 
 THAT LASS O' LOWRIE'S. 
 
 12mo, Illustrated. Cloth, $l.5O ; Paper, 9O cents. 
 
 " We know of no more powerful work from a woman's hand 
 in the English language." Boston Transcript. 
 
 " The best original novel that has appeared in this country for 
 many years." Phil. Press. 
 
 HAWOltTII'S. 
 
 12mo, Illustrated ........................ ..... $1.5O 
 
 " Haworth's is a product of genius of a very high order." 
 2V. Y. Evening Post. 
 
 "It is but faint praise to speak of Haworth's as merely a good 
 novel. It is one of the few great novels." Hartford Courant. 
 III. 
 
 LOUISIANA. 
 
 12mo ............................................ $1.0O 
 
 "A delightful Little story, original and piquant in design, and 
 carried out with great artistic skill." Boston Sat. Eve. Gazette. 
 
 The increasing popularity of Mrs. Burnett's writings 
 has led her publishers, Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, 
 to re-issue her famous novels, "THAT LASS O' 
 LOWRIES," "HAWORTH'S" and "LOUISIANA." 
 These new editions are uniformly bound in a new and 
 attractive style, in new designs, and it is believed that 
 they will prove most welcome to the large and constantly 
 increasing circle of Mrs. Burnett's readers. 
 \ The price of Louisiana is reduced from $1.25 to $1.00. 
 
 Also, Now Ready, new supplies of Mrs. Burnett's Shorter Stories. 
 
 " Each of these narratives has a distinct spirit, and can ~be pro- 
 fitably read by all classes of people. They are told not only with 
 true art, but deep pathos." BOSTON POST. 
 
 J. SURliY TIM, and otlxer Stories. 1 vol.,16mo, cloth, $1.35 
 
 IT. LINDSAY'S I/TCK 1 vol., 16mo, paper, 3O 
 
 ITT V KTTY POLL.Y PEMBERTON ' K 4O 
 
 IV. KATHLEEN " 40 
 
 V. THEO .. , " " 30 
 VT. MISS CRESPIGNY " " " 3O 
 
 *** These books are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, pre- 
 paid, upon receipt of price, by 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 
 
 Nos. 743 and 745 Broadway, New York. 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, 
 or on the date to which renewed. Renewals only: 
 
 Tel. No. 642-3405 
 
 Renewals may be made 4 days prior to date due. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 ItEC'DlD MAR 1V72-9'PW95 
 
 3 6 TO & 4 
 
 LD2lA-50m-2,'71 
 (P2001slO)476 A-32 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley 
 
 LD 21-100m-2,'55 
 (Bl39s22)476 
 
 General Library 
 University of California