"I said, "I do not deny that Mossy is a n.o.ble gentleman;"--I had to say that, had I not, General?"
"Certainly, Madame," said the General, "my son is a gentleman, yes."
""But," I said, "he should not make Monsieur, his father, angry.""
"True," said the General, eagerly.
"But that lady said: "Monsieur, his father, makes himself angry," she said. "Do you know, Madame, why his father is angry so long?" Another lady says, "I know!" "For what?" said I. "Because he refused to become a soldier; mamma told me that." "It cannot be!" I said."
The General flushed. Madame saw it, but relentlessly continued:
""_Mais oui_," said that lady. "What!" I said, "think you General Villivicencio will not rather be the very man most certain to respect a son who has the courage to be his own master? Oh, what does he want with a poor fool of a son who will do only as he says? You think he will love him less for healing instead of killing? Mesdemoiselles, you do not know that n.o.ble soldier!""
The n.o.ble soldier glowed, and bowed his acknowledgments in a dubious, half remonstrative way, as if Madame might be producing material for her next confession, as, indeed, she diligently was doing; but she went straight on once more, as a surgeon would.
"But that other lady said: "No, Madame, no, ladies, but I am going to tell you why Monsieur, the General, is angry with his son." "Very well, why?"--"Why? It is just--because--he is--a little man!""
General Villivicencio stood straight up.
"Ah! mon ami," cried the lady, rising excitedly, "I have wounded you and made you angry, with my silly revelations. Pardon me, my friend. Those were foolish girls, and, anyhow, they admired you. They said you looked glorious--grand--at the head of the procession."
Now, all at once, the General felt the tremendous fatigues of the day; there was a wild, swimming, whirling sensation in his head that forced him to let his eyelids sink down; yet, just there, in the midst of his painful bewilderment, he realized with ecstatic complacency that the most martial-looking man in Louisiana was standing in his spurs with the hand of Louisiana"s queenliest woman laid tenderly on his arm.
"I am a wretched tattler!" said she.
"Ah! no, Madame, you are my dearest friend, yes."
"Well, anyhow, I called them fools. "Ah! innocent creatures," I said, "think you a man of his sense and goodness, giving his thousands to the sick and afflicted, will cease to love his only son because he is not big like a horse or quarrelsome like a dog? No, ladies, there is a great reason which none of you know." "Well, well," they cried, "tell it; he has need of a very good reason; tell it now." "My ladies," I said, "I must not"--for, General, for all the world I knew not a reason why you should be angry against your son; you know, General, you have never told me."
The beauty again laid her hand on his arm and gazed, with round-eyed simplicity, into his sombre countenance. For an instant her witchery had almost conquered.
"Nay, Madame, some day I shall tell you; I have more than one burden _here_. But let me ask you to be seated, for I have a question, also, for you, which I have longed to ask. It lies heavily upon my heart; I must ask it now. A matter of so great importance"--
Madame"s little brown aunt gave a faint cough from a dim corner of the room.
""Tis a beautiful night," she remarked, and stepped out on the balcony.
Then the General asked his question. It was a very long question, or, maybe, repeated twice or thrice; for it was fully ten minutes before he moved out of the room, saying good-evening.
Ah! old General Villivicencio. The most martial-looking man in Louisiana! But what would the people, the people who cheered in the morning, have said, to see the fair Queen Delicieuse at the top of the stair, sweetly bowing you down into the starlight,--humbled, crestfallen, rejected!
The campaign opened. The Villivicencio ticket was read in French and English with the very different sentiments already noted. In the Exchange, about the courts, among the "banks," there was lively talking concerning its intrinsic excellence and extrinsic chances. The young gentlemen who stood about the doors of the so-called "coffee-houses"
talked with a frantic energy alarming to any stranger, and just when you would have expected to see them jump and bite large mouthfuls out of each other"s face, they would turn and enter the door, talking on in the same furious manner, and, walking up to the bar, click their gla.s.ses to the success of the Villivicencio ticket. Sundry swarthy and wrinkled remnants of an earlier generation were still more enthusiastic. There was to be a happy renaissance; a purging out of Yankee ideas; a blessed home-coming of those good old Bourbon morals and manners which Yankee notions had expatriated. In the cheerfulness of their antic.i.p.ations they even went the length of throwing their feet high in air, thus indicating how the Villivicencio ticket was going to give "doze Americains" the kick under the nose.
In the three or four weeks which followed, the General gathered a surfeit of adulation, notwithstanding which he was constantly and with pain imagining a confused chatter of ladies, and when he shut his eyes with annoyance, there was Madame Delicieuse standing, and saying, "I knew not a reason why you should be angry against your son," gazing in his face with hardened simplicity, and then--that last scene on the stairs wherein he seemed still to be descending, down, down.
Madame herself was keeping good her resolution.
"Now or never," she said, "a reconciliation or a quarrel."
When the General, to keep up appearances, called again, she so moved him with an account of certain kindly speeches of her own invention, which she imputed to Dr. Mossy, that he promised to call and see his son; "perhaps;" "pretty soon;" "probably."
Dr. Mossy, sitting one February morning among his specimens and books of reference, finishing a thrilling chapter on the cuticle, too absorbed to hear a door open, suddenly realized that something was in his light, and, looking up, beheld General Villivicencio standing over him.
Breathing a pleased sigh, he put down his pen, and, rising on tiptoe, laid his hand upon his father"s shoulder, and lifting his lips like a little wife, kissed him.
"Be seated, papa," he said, offering his own chair, and perching on the desk.
The General took it, and, clearing his throat, gazed around upon the jars and jars with their little Adams and Eves in zoological gardens.
"Is all going well, papa?" finally asked Dr. Mossy.
"Yes."
Then there was a long pause.
""Tis a beautiful day," said the son.
"Very beautiful," rejoined the father.
"I thought there would have been a rain, but it has cleared off," said the son.
"Yes," responded the father, and drummed on the desk.
"Does it appear to be turning cool?" asked the son.
"No; it does not appear to be turning cool at all," was the answer.
"H"m "m!" said Dr. Mossy.
"Hem!" said General Villivicencio.
Dr. Mossy, not realizing his own action, stole a glance at his ma.n.u.script.
"I am interrupting you," said the General, quickly, and rose.
"No, no! pardon me; be seated; it gives me great pleasure to--I did not know what I was doing. It is the work with which I fill my leisure moments."
So the General settled down again, and father and son sat very close to each other--in a bodily sense; spiritually they were many miles apart.
The General"s finger-ends, softly tapping the desk, had the sound of far-away drums.
"The city--it is healthy?" asked the General.
"Did you ask me if"--said the little Doctor, starting and looking up.
"The city--it has not much sickness at present?" repeated the father.
"No, yes--not much," said Mossy, and, with utter unconsciousness, leaned down upon his elbow and supplied an omitted word to the ma.n.u.script.