1894
A LADY OF BAYOU ST. JOHN
by Kate Chopin
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
A Lady of Bayou St. John
The days and the nights were very lonely for Madame Delisle.
Gustave, her husband, was away yonder in Virginia somewhere, with
Beauregard, and she was here in the old house on Bayou St. John, alone
with her slaves.
Madame was very beautiful. So beautiful, that she found much
diversion in sitting for hours before the mirror, contemplating her
own loveliness; admiring the brilliancy of her golden hair, the
sweet languor of her blue eyes, the graceful contours of her figure,
and the peach-like bloom of her flesh. She was very young. So young
that she romped with the dogs, teased the parrot, and could not fall
asleep at night unless old black Manna-Loulou sat beside her bed and
told her stories.
In short, she was a child, not able to realize the significance of
the tragedy whose unfolding kept the civilized world in suspense. It
was only the immediate effect of the awful drama that moved her: the
gloom that, spreading on all sides, penetrated her own existence and
deprived it of joyousness.
Sepincourt found her looking very lonely and disconsolate one day
when he stopped to talk with her. She was pale, and her blue eyes were
dim with unwept tears. He was a Frenchman who lived near by. He
shrugged his shoulders over this strife between brothers, this quarrel
which was none of his; and he resented it chiefly upon the ground that
it made life uncomfortable; yet he was young enough to have had
quicker and hotter blood in his veins.
When he left Madame Delisle that day, her eyes were no longer dim,
and a something of the dreariness that weighted her had been lifted
away. That mysterious, that treacherous bond called sympathy, had
revealed them to each other.
He came to her very often that summer, clad always in cool, white
duck, with a flower in his buttonhole. His pleasant brown eyes
sought hers with warm, friendly glances that comforted her as a caress
might comfort a disconsolate child. She took to watching for his
slim figure, a little bent, walking lazily up the avenue between the
double line of magnolias.
They would sit sometimes during whole afternoons in the
vine-sheltered corner of the gallery, sipping the black coffee that
Manna-Loulou brought to them at intervals; and talking, talking
incessantly during the first days when they were unconsciously
unfolding themselves to each other. Then a time came- it came very
quickly- when they seemed to have nothing more to say to one another.
He brought her news of the war; and they talked about it listlessly,
between long intervals of silence, of which neither took account. An
occasional letter came by roundabout ways from Gustave- guarded and
saddening in its tone. They would read it and sigh over it together.
Once they stood before his portrait that hung in the drawing-room
and that looked out at them with kind, indulgent eyes. Madame wiped
the picture with her gossamer handkerchief and impulsively pressed a
tender kiss upon the painted canvas. For months past the living
image of her husband had been receding further and further into a mist
which she could penetrate with no faculty or power that she possessed.
One day at sunset, when she and Sepincourt stood silently side by
side, looking across the «marais,» aflame with the western light, he
said to her: «"M'amie,» let us go away from this country that is so
«triste.» Let us go to Paris, you and me."
She thought that he was jesting, and she laughed nervously. "Yes,
Paris would surely be gayer than Bayou St. John," she answered. But he
was not jesting. She saw it at once in the glance that penetrated
her own; in the quiver of his sensitive lip and the quick beating of a
swollen vein in his brown throat.
"Paris, or anywhere- with you- ah, «bon Dieu!"» he whispered,
seizing her hands. But she withdrew from him, frightened, and
hurried away into the house, leaving him alone.
That night, for the first time, Madame did not want to hear
Manna-Loulou's stories, and she blew out the wax candle that till
now had burned nightly in her sleeping-room, under its tall, crystal
globe. She had suddenly become a woman capable of love or sacrifice.
She would not hear Manna-Loulou's stories. She wanted to be alone,
to tremble and to weep.
In the morning her eyes were dry, but she would not see Sepincourt
when he came. Then he wrote her a letter.
"I have offended you and I would rather die!" it ran. "Do not banish
me from your presence that is life to me. Let me lie at your feet,
if only for a moment, in which to hear you say that you forgive me."
Men have written just such letters before, but Madame did not know
it. To her it was a voice from the unknown, like music, awaking in her
a delicious tumult that seized and held possession of her whole being.
When they met, he had but to look into her face to know that he need
not lie at her feet craving forgiveness. She was waiting for him
beneath the spreading branches of a live oak that guarded the gate
of her home like a sentinel.
For a brief moment he held her hands, which trembled. Then he folded
her in his arms and kissed her many times. "You will go with me,
«m'amie?» I love you- oh, I love you! Will you not go with me,
«m'amie?"»
"Anywhere, anywhere," she told him in a fainting voice that he could
scarcely hear.
But she did not go with him. Chance willed it otherwise. That
night a courier brought her a message from Beauregard, telling her
that Gustave, her husband, was dead.
When the new year was still young, Sepincourt decided that, all
things considered, he might, without any appearance of indecent haste,
speak again of his love to Madame Delisle. That love was quite as
acute as ever; perhaps a little sharper, from the long period of
silence and waiting to which he had subjected it. He found her, as
he had expected, clad in deepest mourning. She greeted him precisely
as she had welcomed the cure, when the kind old priest had brought
to her the consolations of religion- clasping his two hands warmly,
and calling him «"cher ami."» Her whole attitude and bearing brought
to Sepincourt the poignant, the bewildering conviction that he held no
place in her thoughts.
They sat in the drawing room before the portrait of Gustave, which
was draped with his scarf. Above the picture hung his sword, and
beneath it was an embankment of flowers. Sepincourt felt an almost
irresistible impulse to bend his knee before this altar, upon which he
saw foreshadowed the immolation of his hopes.
There was a soft air blowing gently over the «marais.» It came to
them through the open window, laden with a hundred subtle sounds and
scents of the springtime. It seemed to remind Madame of something far,
far away, for she gazed dreamily out into the blue firmament. It
fretted Sepincourt with impulses to speech and action which he found
it impossible to control.
"You must know what has brought me," he began impulsively, drawing
his chair nearer to hers. "Through all these months I have never
ceased to love you and to long for you. Night and day the sound of
your dear voice has been with me; your eyes-"
She held out her hand deprecatingly. He took it and held it. She let
it lie unresponsive in his.
"You cannot have forgotten that you loved me not long ago," he
went on eagerly, "that you were ready to follow me anywhere- anywhere;
do you remember? I have come now to ask you to fulfill that promise,
to ask you to be my wife, my companion, the dear treasure of my life."
She heard his warm and pleading tones as though listening to a
strange language, imperfectly understood.
She withdrew her hand from his, and leaned her brow thoughtfully
upon it.
"Can you not feel- can you not understand, «mon ami,"» she said
calmly, "that now such a thing- such a thought, is impossible to me?"
"Impossible?"
"Yes, impossible. Can you not see that now my heart, my soul, my
thought- my very life, must belong to another? It could not be
different."
"Would you have me believe that you can wed your young existence
to the dead?" he exclaimed with something like horror. Her glance
was sunk deep in the embankment of flowers before her.
"My husband has never been so living to me as he is now," she
replied with a faint smile of commiseration for Sepincourt's
fatuity. "Every object that surrounds me speaks to me of him. I look
yonder across the «marais,» and I see him coming toward me, tired
and toil-stained from the hunt. I see him again sitting in this
chair or in that one. I hear his familiar voice, his footsteps upon
the galleries. We walk once more together beneath the magnolias; and
at night in dreams I feel that he is there, there, near me. How
could it be different! Ah! I have memories, memories to crowd and fill
my life, if I live a hundred years!"
Sepincourt was wondering why she did not take the sword from her
altar and thrust it through his body here and there. The effect
would have been infinitely more agreeable than her words,
penetrating his soul like fire. He arose confused, enraged with pain.
"Then, Madame," he stammered, "there is nothing left for me but to
take my leave. I bid you adieu."
"Do not be offended, «mon ami,"» she said kindly, holding out her
hand. "You are going to Paris, I suppose?"
"What does it matter," he exclaimed desperately, "where I go?"
"Oh, I only wanted to wish you «bon voyage,"» she assured him
amiably.
Many days after that Sepincourt spent in the fruitless mental effort
of trying to comprehend that psychological enigma, a woman's heart.
Madame still lives on Bayou St. John. She is rather an old lady now,
a very pretty old lady, against whose long years of widowhood there
has never been a breath of reproach. The memory of Gustave still fills
and satisfies her days. She has never failed, once a year, to have a
solemn high mass said for the repose of his soul.
THE END
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