The Flower of the Chapdelaines by George W. Cable


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Page 1


I

Next morning he saw her again.

He had left his very new law office, just around in Bienville Street,
and had come but a few steps down Royal, when, at the next corner
below, she turned into Royal, toward him, out of Conti, coming from
Bourbon.

The same nine-year-old negro boy was at her side, as spotless in broad
white collar and blue jacket as on the morning before, and carrying the
same droll air of consecration, awe, and responsibility. The young man
envied him.

Yesterday, for the first time, at that same corner, he had encountered
this fair stranger and her urchin escort, abruptly, as they were making
the same turn they now repeated, and all in a flash had wondered who
might be this lovely apparition. Of such patrician beauty, such
elegance of form and bearing, such witchery of simple attire, and such
un-Italian yet Latin type, in this antique Creole, modernly Italianized
quarter--who and what, so early in the day, down here among the shops,
where so meagre a remnant of the old high life clung on in these
balconied upper stories--who, what, whence, whither, and wherefore?

In that flash of time she had passed, and the very liveliness of his
interest, combined with the urchin's consecrated awe--not to mention
his own mortifying remembrance of one or two other-day lapses from the
austerities of the old street--restrained him from a backward glance
until he could cross the way as if to enter the great, white, lately
completed court-house. Then both she and her satellite had vanished.

He turned again, but not to enter the building. His watch read but
half past eight, and his first errand of the day, unless seeing her had
been his first, was to go one square farther on, for a look at the
wreckers tearing down the old Hotel St. Louis. As he turned, a man
neat of dress and well beyond middle age made him a suave gesture.

"Sir, if you please. You are, I think, Mr. Chester, notary public and
attorney at law?"

"That is my name and trade, sir." Evidently Mr. Geoffry Chester was
also an American, a Southerner.

"Pardon," said his detainer, "I have only my business card." He
tendered it: "Marcel Castanado, Masques et Costumes, No. 312, rue
Royale, entre Bienville et Conti."

"I diz-ire your advice," he continued, "on a very small matter neither
notarial, neither of the law. Yet I must pay you for that, if you can
make your charge as--as small as the matter."

The young lawyer's own matters were at a juncture where a fee was a
godsend, yet he replied:

"If your matter is not of the law I can make you no charge."

The costumer shrugged: "Pardon, in that case I must seek elsewhere."
He would have moved on, but Chester asked:

"What kind of advice do you want if not legal?"

"Literary."

The young man smiled: "Why, I'm not literary."

"I think yes. You know Ovide Landry? Black man? Secon'-han' books,
Chartres Street, just yonder?"

"Yes, very pleasantly, for I love old books."

"Yes, and old buildings, and their histories. I know. You are now
going down, as I have just been, to see again the construction of that
old dome they are dim-olishing yonder, of the once state-house,
previously Hotel St. Louis. I know. Twice a day you pass my shop. I
am compelled to see, what Ovide also has told me, that, like me and my
wife, you have a passion for the _po�tique_ and the _pittoresque_!"

"Yes," Chester laughed, "but that's my limit. I've never written a
line for print----"

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Tue 19th Mar 2024, 2:25