by Kate Chopin
True genius is not to be held in abeyance, though a host of Engfelders would rise to quell it with their mundane protests!
Miss Brainard’s rendition was a triumphant achievement of sound, and with the proud flush of success moving her to kind condescension, she asked Miss Von Stoltz to “please play something.”
Paula amiably consented, choosing a selection from the Modern Classic. How little did her auditors appreciate in the performance the results of a life study, of a drilling that had made her amongst the knowing an acknowledged mistress of technique. But to her skill she added the touch and interpretation of the artist; and in hearing her, even Ignorance paid to her genius the tribute of a silent emotion.
When she arose there was a moment of quiet, which was broken by the black-eyed fairy, always ready to cast herself into a breach, observing, flippantly, “How pretty!” “Just lovely!” from another; and “What wouldn’t I give to play like that.” Each inane compliment falling like a dash of cold water on Paula’s ardor.
She then became solicitous about the hour, with reference to her car, and George who stood near looked at his watch and informed her that the last car had gone by a full half hour before.
“But,” he added, “if you are not expecting any one to call for you, I will gladly see you home.”
“I expect no one, for the car that passes here would have set me down at my door,” and in this avowal of difficulties, she tacitly accepted George’s offer.
The situation was new. It gave her a feeling of elation to be walking through the quiet night with this handsome young fellow. He talked so freely and so pleasantly. She felt such a comfort in his strong protective nearness. In clinging to him against the buffets of the staggering wind she could feel the muscles of his arms, like steel.
He was so unlike any man of her acquaintance. Strictly unlike Poldorf, the pianist, the short rotundity of whose person could have been less objectionable, if she had not known its cause to lie in an inordinate consumption of beer. Old Engfelder, with his long hair, his spectacles and his loose, disjointed figure, was hors de combat in comparison. And of Max Kuntzler, the talented composer, her teacher of harmony, she could at the moment think of no positive point of objection against him, save the vague, general, serious one of his unlikeness to George.
Her new-awakened admiration, though, was not deaf to a little inexplicable wish that he had not been so proficient with the banjo.
On they went chatting gaily, until turning the corner of the street in which she lived, Paula saw that before the door stood Dr. Sinn’s buggy.
Brainard could feel the quiver of surprised distress that shook her frame, as she said, hurrying along, “Oh! mamma must be ill—worse; they have called the doctor.”
Reaching the house, she threw open wide the door that was unlocked, and he stood hesitatingly back. The gas in the small hall burned at its full, and showed Berta at the top of the stairs, speechless, with terrified eyes, looking down at her. And coming to meet her, was a neighbor, who strove with well-meaning solicitude to keep her back, to hold her yet a moment in ignorance of the cruel blow that fate had dealt her whilst she had in happy unconsciousness played her music for the dance.
III
SEVERAL MONTHS HAD passed since the dreadful night when death had deprived Paula for the second time of a loved parent.
After the first shock of grief was over, the girl had thrown all her energies into work, with the view of attaining that position in the musical world which her father and mother had dreamed might be hers.
She had remained in the small home occupying now but the half of it; and here she kept house with the faithful Berta’s aid.
Friends were both kind and attentive to the stricken girl. But there had been two, whose constant devotion spoke of an interest deeper than mere friendly solicitude.
Max Kuntzler’s love for Paula was something that had taken hold of his sober middle age with an enduring strength which was not to be lessened or shaken, by her rejection of it. He had asked leave to remain her friend, and while holding the tender, watchful privileges which that comprehensive title may imply, had refrained from further thrusting a warmer feeling on her acceptance.
Paula one evening was seated in her small sitting-room, working over some musical transpositions, when a ring at the bell was followed by a footstep in the hall which made her hand and heart tremble.
George Brainard entered the room, and before she could rise to greet him, had seated himself in the vacant chair beside her.
“What an untiring worker you are,” he said, glancing down at the scores before her. “I always feel that my presence interrupts you; and yet I don’t know that a judicious interruption isn’t the wholesomest thing for you sometimes.”
“You forget,” she said, smiling into his face, “that I was trained to it. I must keep myself fitted to my calling. Rest would mean deterioration.”
“Would you not be willing to follow some other calling?” he asked, looking at her with unusual earnestness in his dark, handsome eyes.
“Oh, never!”
“Not if it were a calling that asked only for the labor of loving?”
She made no answer, but kept her eyes fixed on the idle traceries that she drew with her pencil on the sheets before her.
He arose and made a few impatient turns about the room, then coming again to her side, said abruptly:
“Paula, I love you. It isn’t telling you something that you don’t know, unless you have been without bodily perceptions. To-day there is something driving me to speak it out in words. Since I have known you,” he continued, striving to look into her face that bent low over the work before her, “I have been mounting into higher and always higher circles of Paradise, under a blessed illusion that you—cared for me. But to-day, a feeling of dread has been forcing itself upon me—dread that with a word you might throw me back into a gulf that would now be one of everlasting misery. Say if you love me, Paula. I believe you do, and yet I wait with indefinable doubts for your answer.”
He took her hand which she did not withdraw from his.
“Why are you speechless? Why don’t you say something to me!” he asked desperately.
“I am speechless with joy and misery,” she answered. “To know that you love me, gives me happiness enough to brighten a lifetime. And I am miserable, feeling that you have spoken the signal that must part us.”
“You love me, and speak of parting. Never! You will be my wife. From this moment we belong to each other. Oh, my Paula,” he said, drawing her to his side, “my whole existence will be devoted to your happiness.”
“I can’t marry you,” she said shortly, disengaging his hand from her waist.
“Why?” he asked abruptly. They stood looking into each other’s eyes.
“Because it doesn’t enter into the purpose of my life.”
“I don’t ask you to give up anything in your life. I only beg you to let me share it with you.”
George had known Paula only as the daughter of the undemonstrative American woman. He had never before seen her with the father’s emotional nature aroused in her. The color mounted into her cheeks, and her blue eyes were almost black with intensity of feeling.
“Hush,” she said; “don’t tempt me further.” And she cast herself on her knees before the table near which they stood, gathering the music that lay upon it into an armful, and resting her hot cheek upon it.
“What do you know of my life,” she exclaimed passionately. “What can you guess of it? Is music anything more to you than the pleasing distraction of an idle moment? Can’t you feel that with me, it courses with the blood through my veins? That it’s something dearer than life, than riches, even than love?” with a quiver of pain.
“Paula listen to me; don’t speak like a mad woman.”
She sprang up and held out an arm to ward away his nearer approach.
“Would you go into a convent, and ask to be your wife a nun who has vowed herself to the service of
God?”
“Yes, if that nun loved me; she would owe to herself, to me and to God to be my wife.”
Paula seated herself on the sofa, all emotion seeming suddenly to have left her; and he came and sat beside her.
“Say only that you love me, Paula,” he urged persistently.
“I love you,” she answered low and with pale lips.
He took her in his arms, holding her in silent rapture against his heart and kissing the white lips back into red life.
“You will be my wife?”
“You must wait. Come back in a week and I will answer you.” He was forced to be content with the delay.
The days of probation being over, George went for his answer, which was given him by the old lady who occupied the upper story.
“Ach Gott! Fräulein Von Stoltz ist schon im Leipsic gegangen!”—All that has not been many years ago. George Brainard is as handsome as ever, though growing a little stout in the quiet routine of domestic life. He has quite lost a pretty taste for music that formerly distinguished him as a skilful banjoist. This loss his little black-eyed wife deplores; though she has herself made concessions to the advancing years, and abandoned Virginia breakdowns as incompatible with the serious offices of wifehood and matrimony.
You may have seen in the morning paper, that the renowned pianist, Fräulein Paula Von Stoltz, is resting in Leipsic, after an extended and remunerative concert tour.
Professor Max Kuntzler is also in Leipsic—with the ever persistent will—the dogged patience that so often wins in the end.
A NO-ACCOUNT CREOLE
I
ONE AGREEABLE AFTERNOON in late autumn two young men stood together on Canal Street, closing a conversation that had evidently begun within the club-house which they had just quitted.
“There ’s big money in it, Offdean,” said the elder of the two. “I would n’t have you touch it if there was n’t. Why, they tell me Patchly ’s pulled a hundred thousand out of the concern a’ready.”
“That may be,” replied Offdean, who had been politely attentive to the words addressed to him, but whose face bore a look indicating that he was closed to conviction. He leaned back upon the clumsy stick which he carried, and continued: “It ’s all true, I dare say, Fitch; but a decision of that sort would mean more to me than you ’d believe if I were to tell you. The beggarly twenty-five thousand ’s all I have, and I want to sleep with it under my pillow a couple of months at least before I drop it into a slot.”
“You ’ll drop it into Harding & Offdean’s mill to grind out the pitiful two and a half per cent commission racket; that ’s what you ’ll do in the end, old fellow—see if you don’t.”
“Perhaps I shall; but it ’s more than likely I shan’t. We ’ll talk about it when I get back. You know I ’m off to north Louisiana in the morning”—
“No! What the deuce”—
“Oh, business of the firm.”
“Write me from Shreveport, then; or wherever it is.”
“Not so far as that. But don’t expect to hear from me till you see me. I can’t say when that will be.”
Then they shook hands and parted. The rather portly Fitch boarded a Prytania Street car, and Mr. Wallace Offdean hurried to the bank in order to replenish his portemonnaie, which had been materially lightened at the club through the medium of unpropitious jack-pots and bobtail flushes.
He was a sure-footed fellow, this young Offdean, despite an occasional fall in slippery places. What he wanted, now that he had reached his twenty-sixth year and his inheritance, was to get his feet well planted on solid ground, and to keep his head cool and clear.
With his early youth he had had certain shadowy intentions of shaping his life on intellectual lines. That is, he wanted to; and he meant to use his faculties intelligently, which means more than is at once apparent. Above all, he would keep clear of the maelstroms of sordid work and senseless pleasure in which the average American business man may be said alternately to exist, and which reduce him, naturally, to a rather ragged condition of soul.
Offdean had done, in a temperate way, the usual things which young men do who happen to belong to good society, and are possessed of moderate means and healthy instincts. He had gone to college, had traveled a little at home and abroad, had frequented society and the clubs, and had worked in his uncle’s commission-house; in all of which employments he had expended much time and a modicum of energy.
But he felt all through that he was simply in a preliminary stage of being, one that would develop later into something tangible and intelligent, as he liked to tell himself. With his patrimony of twenty-five thousand dollars came what he felt to be the turning-point in his life,—the time when it behooved him to choose a course, and to get himself into proper trim to follow it manfully and consistently.
When Messrs. Harding & Offdean determined to have some one look after what they called “a troublesome piece of land on Red River,” Wallace Offdean requested to be intrusted with that special commission of land-inspector.
A shadowy, ill-defined piece of land in an unfamiliar part of his native State, might, he hoped, prove a sort of closet into which he could retire and take counsel with his inner and better self.
II
WHAT HARDING & Offdean had called a piece of land on Red River was better known to the people of Natchitoches1 parish as “the old Santien place.”
In the days of Lucien Santien and his hundred slaves, it had been very splendid in the wealth of its thousand acres. But the war did its work, of course. Then Jules Santien was not the man to mend such damage as the war had left. His three sons were even less able than he had been to bear the weighty inheritance of debt that came to them with the dismantled plantation; so it was a deliverance to all when Harding & Offdean, the New Orleans creditors, relieved them of the place with the responsibility and indebtedness which its ownership had entailed.
Hector, the eldest, and Grégoire, the youngest of these Santien boys, had gone each his way. Placide alone tried to keep a desultory foothold upon the land which had been his and his forefathers’. But he too was given to wandering—within a radius, however, which rarely took him so far that he could not reach the old place in an afternoon of travel, when he felt so inclined.
There were acres of open land cultivated in a slovenly fashion, but so rich that cotton and corn and weed and “cocoa-grass” grew rampant if they had only the semblance of a chance. The negro quarters were at the far end of this open stretch, and consisted of a long row of old and very crippled cabins. Directly back of these a dense wood grew, and held much mystery, and witchery of sound and shadow, and strange lights when the sun shone. Of a gin-house there was left scarcely a trace; only so much as could serve as inadequate shelter to the miserable dozen cattle that huddled within it in wintertime.
A dozen rods or more from the Red River bank stood the dwelling-house, and nowhere upon the plantation had time touched so sadly as here. The steep, black, moss-covered roof sat like an extinguisher above the eight large rooms that it covered, and had come to do its office so poorly that not more than half of these were habitable when the rain fell. Perhaps the live-oaks made too thick and close a shelter about it. The verandas were long and broad and inviting; but it was well to know that the brick pillar was crumbling away under one corner, that the railing was insecure at another, and that still another had long ago been condemned as unsafe. But that, of course, was not the corner in which Wallace Offdean sat the day following his arrival at the Santien place. This one was comparatively secure. A gloire-de-Dijon, thick-leaved and charged with huge creamy blossoms, grew and spread here like a hardy vine upon the wires that stretched from post to post. The scent of the blossoms was delicious; and the stillness that surrounded Offdean agreeably fitted his humor that asked for rest. His old host, Pierre Manton, the manager of the place, sat talking to him in a soft, rhythmic monotone; but his speech was hardly more of an interruption than the hum of the bees among the roses. He was saying:—
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br /> “If it would been me myse’f, I would nevair grumb’. W’en a chimbly breck, I take one, two de boys; we patch ’im up bes’ we know how. We keep on men’ de fence’, firs’ one place, anudder; an’ if it would n’ be fer dem mule’ of Lacroix—tonnerre! I don’ wan’ to talk ’bout dem mule’. But me, I would n’ grumb’. It ’s Euphrasie, hair. She say dat ’s all fool nonsense fer rich man lack Hardin’-Offde’n to let a piece o’ lan’ goin’ lack dat.”
“Euphrasie?” questioned Offdean, in some surprise; for he had not yet heard of any such person.
“Euphrasie, my li’le chile. Escuse me one minute,” Pierre added, remembering that he was in his shirt-sleeves, and rising to reach for his coat, which hung upon a peg near by. He was a small, square man, with mild, kindly face, brown and roughened from healthy exposure. His hair hung gray and long beneath the soft felt hat that he wore. When he had seated himself, Offdean asked:—
“Where is your little child? I have n’t seen her,” inwardly marveling that a little child should have uttered such words of wisdom as those recorded of her.
“She yonder to Mme. Duplan on Cane River. I been kine espectin’ hair sence yistiday—hair an’ Placide,” casting an unconscious glance down the long plantation road. “But Mme. Duplan she nevair want to let Euphrasie go. You know it ’s hair raise’ Euphrasie sence hair po’ ma die’, Mr. Offde’n. She teck dat li’le chile, an’ raise it, sem lack she raisin’ Ninette. But it ’s mo’ ’an a year now Euphrasie say dat ’s all fool nonsense to leave me livin’ ’lone lack dat, wid nuttin’ ’cep’ dem nigger’—an’ Placide once a w’ile. An’ she came yair bossin’! My goodness!” The old man chuckled, “Dat ’s hair been writin’ all dem letter’ to Hardin’-Offde’n. If it would been me myse’f”—