The sunbeams of a tedious Sabbath began noticeably to slant1.
For two days, night, morning, noon, and afternoon, Geoffry Chester had silently speculated on what he was to see, hear, and otherwise experience when, as early as he might in keeping with the Chapdelaine dignity and his, he should pull the tiny brass2 bell-knob on their tall gate-post.
Chapdelaine! Impressive, patrician3 title. Impressive too those baptismal names; implying a refinement4 invincible5 in the vale of adversity. Killing6 time up one street and down another--Rampart, Ursuline, Burgundy--he pictured personalities7 to fit them: for Corinne a presence stately in advanced years and preserved beauty; for Yvonne a fragile form suggestive of mother-o'-pearl, of antique lace. Knowledge of Aline justified8 such inferences--within bounds. With other charms she had all these, and must have got them from ancestral sources as truly Mlle. Corinne's and Mlle. Yvonne's as hers.
"Oh, of course," he pondered, "there are contrary possibilities. They may easily fall short, far short, of her, in outer graces, and show their kinship only in a reflection of her inner fineness. They may be no more surprising than those dear old De l'Isles, or the Prieurs, or than Mrs. Thorndyke-Smith. So let it be! Aline----"
"Aline-Aline!" alarmingly echoed his heart.
"Aline is enough." Enough? Alas9, too much! He felt himself far too forthpushing in--he would not confess more--a solicitude10 for her which he could not stifle11; an inextinguishable wish to disentangle her from the officious care of those by whom she was surrounded--encumbered. "I've no right to this state of mind," he thought; "none." He reached the gate. He rang.
A footfall of daintiest lightness came running! ["Aline-Aline!"] So might Allegro12 have tripped it. The key rasped round, ["Aline-Aline!"] the portal drew in, and he found himself getting his first front view of Cupid, the small black satellite.
A pleasing object. Smaller than ever. White-collared as ever, starched13 and brushed to the sheen of a new penny and ugly of face as a gargoyle--ugly as his goddess was beautiful. Not merely negroidal, in lips, nose, ears, and tight black wool divided on the absolute equator; not racially but uniquely ugly--till he smiled--and spoke14. He smiled and spoke with a joy of soul, a transparency of innocence15, a rapture16 of love, that made his ugliness positively17 endearing even apart from the entranced recognition they radiated.
"Ladies at home? Yassuh," he said, with an ecstasy18 as if he announced the world's war suddenly over, all oceans safe, all peoples free. He led the way up the cramped19 white-shell walk with a ceremonial precision that gave the caller time to notice the garden. It was hardly an empire. It lay on either side in two right-angled figures, each, say, of sixty by fourteen feet, every foot repeating florally the smile of the child. The rigid20 beds were curbed21 with brick water-painted as red as Cupid's gums. The three fences were green with vines, and here and there against them bloomed tall evergreen22 shrubs23. At one upper corner of the main path was a camellia and at the other a crape-myrtle, symbols respectively, to the visitor, of Aunt Corinne and Aunt Yvonne. The brick doorstep smiled as red as the garden borders, and as he reached the open door Aline, with her two aunts at her back, received him.
"Mr. Chester--Mlle. Chapdelaine. Mr. Chester--my Aunt Yvonne." Never had the niece seemed quite so fair--in face, dress, figure, or mental poise24. She wore that rose whose petals25 are deep red in their outer circle and pass from middle pink to central white and deepen in tints26 with each day's age. If that rose could have been a girl, mind, soul, and all, a Creole girl, there would have been two on one stem.
And there, on either side of her sat the aunts: the elder much too lean, the younger much too dishevelled, and both as sun-tanned as harvesters, betraying their poverty in flimsy, faded gowns which the dismayed youth named to himself not draperies but hangings. Yet they were sweet-mannered, fluent, gay, cordial, and unreserved, though fluttering, twittering, and ultra-feminine.
The room was like the pair. "Doubtlezz Aline she's told you ab-out that 'ouse. No? Ah, chère! is that possible? 'Tis an ancient relique, that 'ouse. At the present they don't build any mo' like that 'ouse is build'! You see those wall', those floor'? Every wall they are not of lath an' plazter, like to-day; they are of solid plank27' of a thicknezz of two-inch'--and from Kentucky!"
The guest recognized the second-hand28 lumber29 of broken-up flatboats.
"Tha'z a genuine antique, that 'ouse! Sometime' we think we ought to egspose that 'ouse, to those tourist', admission ten cent'." [A gay laugh.]
"But tha'z only when Aline want' to compel us to buy some new dresses. And tha'z pritty appropriate, that antique 'ouse, for two sizter' themselve' pritty antique--ha, ha, ha!--as well as their anceztors."
"I fancy they're from 'way back," said Chester.
"We are granddaughter' of two émigrés of the Revolution. The other two they were decapitalize' on that gui'otine............