by Kate Chopin
The chair was not empty! He was still there but his face was turned now toward the table, completely away from her and a hand rested upon the pile of letters there. How significant the action!
Madame Martel straightened, steeled herself. “I am losing my mind,” she whispered hoarsely, “I am seeing visions.”
It did not occur to her to call for help. Help? Against what! She knew the servants were away, and even if they were not she shrank from disclosing what she believed to be this morbid condition of mind to the ignorant and unsympathetic.
“I will go in,” she resolved, “place my hand upon — the shoulder; and it will be over; the illusion will vanish.”
In fancy she went through the whole sensation of placing her hand upon a visible, intangible something that would melt away, vanish like smoke before her eyes. An involuntary shudder passed through her frame from head to foot.
As she glided noiselessly into the room in her black garb, Madame Martel, with that light, filmy hair, her wide-open, fearful blue eyes, looked far more like a “spirit” than the substantial figure seated in her armchair before the fire.
She had not time to place her hand upon the shoulder of her ghastly visitant. Before she reached the chair he had turned. She tottered, and springing forward he seized her in his arms.
“Mother! mother! mother! what is it? Are you ill?” He was kissing her hair, her forehead and closed, quivering eyes.
“Wait, Gustave. In a moment, dear son — it will be all right.” She was, in fact, rather faint from the shock. He placed her upon the sofa and after bringing her a glass of water seated himself beside her.
“Idiot that I am!” he exclaimed. “I wanted to surprise you and here I’ve almost thrown you into a swoon.” She was looking at him with eyes full of tenderness but for some reason she did not tell him the whole story of her surprise.
How glad she was to see him — her big, manly son of nineteen. And how like his father at that age! The age at which the old ambrotype had been taken; the picture that she had been weeping over and that Gustave was looking at when she first discovered him there.
“Of course you came on the evening train, Gustave?” she asked him quietly.
“Yes, only a while ago. I got to thinking — well, I had enough of Assumption last year. And after all there’s no place for a fellow at Christmas like home.”
“You knew that I wanted you, Gustave. Confess; you knew it.” Madame was hoping for a little disclosure of thought transference — mental telepathy — occultism in short. But he disabused her.
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid I was purely selfish, mother. I know that you prefer to be alone at this season,” in that tone of subdued respect which was always assumed in approaching the subject of Madame Martel’s sorrow. “I came because I couldn’t help it; because I couldn’t stay away. I wanted to see you, to be with you, mother.”
“You know, Gustave, it won’t be gay here at home,” she said nestling closer to him.
“Oh, well, if we can’t be gay, there’s nothing to keep us from being happy, mom.”
And she was, very, very happy as she rubbed her cheek against his rough coat sleeve and felt the warm, firm pressure of his hand.
THE RECOVERY
She was a woman of thirty-five, possessing something of youthfulness. It was not the bloom, the softness, nor delicacy of coloring which had once been hers; those were all gone. It lurked rather in the expression of her sensitive face, which was at once appealing, pathetic, confiding.
For fifteen years she had lived in darkness with closed lids. By one of those seeming miracles of science, and by slow and gradual stages, the light had been restored to her. Now, for the first time in many years, she opened her eyes upon the full, mellow brightness of a June day.
She was alone. She had asked to be alone at the very first. Glad almost to ecstasy, she was yet afraid. She wanted first to see the light from her open window; to look at the dumb inanimate objects around her before gazing into the dear familiar faces that were stamped with sharp and vivid impress upon her mind.
And how beautiful was the world from her open window!
“Oh, my God!” she whispered, overcome. Her prayer could get no further. There were no words to utter her rapture and thanksgiving at beholding the blue unfathomable June sky; the rolling meadows, russet and green, reaching deep into the purple distance. Close beside her window the maple leaves rippled in the sun; flowers, rich and warm in color, blossomed beneath, and radiant-winged butterflies hovered sensuous in mid-air.
“The world has not changed,” she murmured; “it has only grown more beautiful. Oh, I had forgotten how beautiful!”
Within her room were all the dear, dumb companions comforting her. How well she remembered them all! her mahogany table, bright and polished, just as it had stood fifteen years ago, with a crystal vase of roses and a few books ranged upon it. The sight of chairs, beds, pictures gave her keen joy. The carpet and draperies, even — with their designs as much like the old ones as could be — seemed to her the same.
She touched with caressing fingers the French clock upon the mantel with its pompous little bronze figure of a last-century gentleman posing in buckles and frills beside the dial. She greeted him as an old friend, and delicately wiped his little bronze face with her soft handkerchief. As a child she had thought him an imposing figure. At a later and over-discriminating age she had patronized him as a poor bit of art. Now, nothing could have induced her to part with the old French clock and its little bronze bonhomme.
The mirror was over there in the corner. She had not forgotten it; oh, no, she had not forgotten, only she grew tremulous at the thought of it standing there. She held back, as a young girl who is going to confession is ashamed and afraid, and invites delay. But she had not forgotten.
“This is folly,” she uttered suddenly, passing the handkerchief nervously over her face. With quick resolution she crossed the room and faced her reflected image in the glass.
“Mother!” she cried, involuntarily, turning swiftly; but she was still alone. It had happened like a flash — an unreasoning impulse that knew not control or direction. She at once recovered herself and drew a deep breath. Again she wiped her forehead, that was a little clammy. She clutched the back of a low chair with her shaking hands and looked once more into the mirror. The veins in her wrists swelled like cords and throbbed.
You or I or anyone looking upon that same picture in the glass would have seen a rather well-preserved, stately blonde woman of thirty-five or more. Only God knows what she saw. It was something that held her with terrible fascination.
The eyes, above all, seemed to speak to her. Afflicted as they had been, they alone belonged to that old, other self that had somewhere vanished. She questioned, she challenged them. And while she looked down into their depths she drew into her soul all the crushing weight of the accumulated wisdom of years.
“They lied; they all lied to me,” she said, half aloud, never taking her eyes from those others. “Mother, sisters, Robert — all, all of them lied.”
When the eyes in the glass had nothing more to tell her, she turned away from them. The pathos of her face had vanished; there was no longer the appeal that had been there a while ago; neither was there confidence.
The following day she walked abroad leaning upon the arm of the man whose untiring devotion to her had persisted for years. She would not fulfill her promise to marry him when blindness had overtaken her. He had endured the years of probation, wanting no other woman for his wife; living at her side when he could, and bringing himself close to her inner life by a warm, quick, watchful sympathy born of much love.
He was older than she — a man of splendid physique. The slim stripling of fifteen years ago was hardly the promise of this man of forty. His face had settled into a certain ruggedness accentuated by a few strong lines, and white hairs were beginning to show among the black ones on the temples.
They walked across the level stretch of lawn
toward a sheltered garden seat no great distance away. She had spoken little since that moment of revelation before her mirror. Nothing had startled her after that. She was prepared for the changes which the years had wrought in all of them — mother, sisters, friends.
She seemed to be silently absorbing things, and would have lingered in ecstasy before a flower, or with her gaze penetrating the dense foliage beyond. Her senses had long been sharpened to the sounds and odors of the good, green world, and now her restored vision completed a sensuous impression such as she had never dreamed could be borne in upon a human consciousness.
He led her away to the bench. He fancied that seated he could better hold her attention to what was in his mind to say to her.
He took her hand in his. She was used to this and did not draw it away, but let it lie there.
“Do you remember the old plans, Jane?” he began, almost at once, “all that we were to have done, to have seen, all that we were going to live together? How we had chosen to start away in the early spring time upon our travels — you and I — and only come back with the frosts of winter. You have not forgotten, dearest?” He bent his face down over her hand and kissed it. “The spring is over; but we have the summer with us, and God willing, the autumn and winter left to us. Tell me, Jane — tell me — speak to me!” he entreated.
She looked into his face and then away, and back again, uncertainly.
“I — oh, Robert,” she said, gropingly, “wait — I — the sight of things confuses me,” and with a faint smile, “I am not used; I must go back into the dark to think.”
He still held her hand, but she turned half away from him and buried her face in her arm that she leaned upon the back of the garden seat.
What could she hope to gather from the darkness that the light had not given her! She might hope, and she might wait and she might pray; but hope and prayer and waiting would avail her nothing.
The blessed light had given her back the world, life, love; but it had robbed her of her illusions; it had stolen away her youth.
He drew close to her, pressing his face near hers for his answer; and all that he heard was a little low sob.
AUNT LYMPY’S INTERFERENCE
The day was warm, and Melitte, cleaning her room, strayed often to the south window that looked out toward the Annibelles’ place. She was a slender young body of eighteen with skirts that escaped the ground and a pink-sprigged shirt-waist. She had the beauty that belongs to youth — the freshness, the dewiness — with healthy brown hair that gleamed and honest brown eyes that could be earnest as well as merry.
Looking toward the Annibelles’ place, Melitte could see but a speck of the imposing white house through the trees. Men were at work in the field, head and shoulders above the cotton. She could occasionally hear them laugh or shout. The air came in little broken waves from the south, bringing the hot, sweet scent of flowers and sometimes the good smell of the plowed earth.
Melitte always cleaned her room thoroughly on Saturday, because it was her only free day; of late she had been conducting a small school which stood down the road at the far end of the Annibelle place.
Almost every morning, as she trudged to school, she saw Victor Annibelle mending the fence; always mending it, but why so much nailing and bracing were required, no one but himself knew. The spectacle of the young man so persistently at work was one to distress Melitte in the goodness of her soul.
“My! but you have trouble with yo’ fence, Victor,” she called out to him in passing.
His good-looking face changed from a healthy brown to the color of one of his own cotton blooms; and never a phrase could his wits find till she was out of ear-shot; for Melitte never stopped to talk. She would but fling him a pleasant word, turning her face to him framed, buried, in a fluted pink sunbonnet.
He had not always been so diffident — when they were youngsters, for instance, and he lent her his pony, or came over to thrash the pecan-tree for her. Now it was different. Since he had been long away from home and had returned at twenty-two, she gave herself the airs and graces of a young lady.
He did not dare to call her “Melitte,” he was ashamed to call her “Miss,” so he called her nothing, and hardly spoke to her.
Sometimes Victor went over to visit in the evenings, when he would be amiably entertained by Melitte, her brother, her brother’s wife, her two little nieces and one little nephew. On Saturdays the young man was apparently less concerned about the condition of his fences, and passed frequently up and down the road on his white horse.
Melitte thought it was perhaps he, calling upon some pretext, when the little tot of a nephew wabbled in to say that some one wanted to see her on the front gallery. She gave a flurried glance at the mirror and divested her head of the dust-cloth.
“It’s Aunt Lympy!” exclaimed the two small nieces, who had followed in the wake of the toddling infant.
“She won’t say w’at she wants, ti tante,” pursued one of them. “She don’t look pleased, an’ she sittin’ down proud as a queen in the big chair.”
There, in fact, Melitte found Aunt Lympy, proud and unbending in all the glory of a flowered “challie” and a black grenadine shawl edged with a purple satin quilling; she was light-colored. Two heavy bands of jet-black hair showed beneath her bandanna and covered her ears down to the gold hoop earrings.
“W’y, Aunt Lympy!” cried the girl, cordially, extending both hands. “Didn’t I hear you were in Alexandria?”
“Tha’s true, ma’ Melitte.” Aunt Lympy spoke slowly and with emphasis. “I ben in Alexandria nussin’ Judge Morse’s wife. She well now, an’ I ben sence Chuseday in town. Look like Severin git ‘long well ‘idout me, an’ I ant hurry to go home.” Her dusky eyes glowed far from cheerfully.
“I yeard some’in’ yonda in town,” the woman went on, “w’at I don’ wan’ to b’lieve. An’ I say to myse’f, ‘Olympe, you don’ listen to no sich tale tell you go axen ma’ Melitte.’”
“Something you heard about me, Aunt Lympy?” Melitte’s eyes were wide.
“I don’ wan’ to spick about befo’ de chillun,” said Aunt Lympy.
“I yeard yonda in town, ma’ Melitte,” she went on after the children had gone, “I yeard you was turn school-titcher! Dat ant true?”
The question in her eyes was almost pathetic.
“Oh!” exclaimed Melitte; an utterance that expressed relief, surprise, amusement, commiseration, affirmation.
“Den it’s true,” Aunt Lympy almost whispered; “a De Broussard turn school-titcher!” The shame of it crushed her into silence.
Melitte felt the inutility of trying to dislodge the old family servant’s deep-rooted prejudices. All her effort was directed toward convincing Aunt Lympy of her complete self-satisfaction in this new undertaking.
But Aunt Lympy did not listen. She had money in her reticule, if that would do any good. Melitte gently thrust it away. She changed the subject, and kindly offered the woman a bit of refreshment. But Aunt Lympy would not eat, drink, unbend, nor lend herself to the subterfuge of small talk. She said good-by, with solemnity, as we part from those in sore affliction. When she had mounted into her ramshackle open buggy the old vehicle looked someway like a throne.
Scarcely a week after Aunt Lympy’s visit Melitte was amazed by receiving a letter from her uncle, Gervais Leplain, of New Orleans. The tone of the letter was sad, self-condemnatory, reminiscent. A flood of tender recollection of his dead sister seemed to have suddenly overflowed his heart and glided from the point of his pen.
He was asking Melitte to come to them there in New Orleans and be as one of his own daughters, who were quite as eager to call her “sister” as he was desirous of subscribing himself always henceforward, her father. He sent her a sum of money to supply her immediate wants, and informed her that he and one of his daughters would come for her in person at an early date.
Never a word was said of a certain missive dictated and sent to him by Aunt Lympy, every line of which was
either a stinging rebuke or an appeal to the memory of his dead sister, whose child was tasting the bitter dregs of poverty. Melitte would never have recognized the overdrawn picture of herself.
From the very first there seemed to be no question about her accepting the offer of her uncle. She had literally not time to lift her voice in protest, before relatives, friends, acquaintances throughout the country raised a very clamor of congratulation. What luck! What a chance! To form one of the Gervais Leplain household!
Perhaps Melitte did not know that they lived in the most sumptuous style in la rue Esplanade, with a cottage across the lake; and they travelled — they spent summers at the North! Melitte would see the great, the big, the beautiful world! They already pictured little Melitte gowned en Parisienne; they saw her name figuring in the society columns of the Sunday papers! as attending balls, dinners, luncheons and card parties.
The whole proceeding had apparently stunned Melitte. She sat with folded hands; except that she put the money carefully aside to return to her uncle. She would in no way get it confounded with her own small hoard; that was something precious and apart, not to be contaminated by gift-money.
“Have you written to yo’ uncle to thank him, Melitte?” asked the sister-in-law.
Melitte shook her head. “No; not yet.”
“But, Melitte!”
“Yes; I know.”
“Do you want yo’ brother to write?”