Short Fiction Kate Chopin (best e reader for android .txt) 📖

Laballière himself was comparatively a newcomer in the parish. It was barely six months since he decided one day to leave the sugar and rice to his brother Alcée, who had a talent for their cultivation, and to try his hand at cotton-planting. That was why he was up in Natchitoches parish on a piece of rich, high, Cane River land, knocking into shape a tumbled-down plantation that he had bought for next to nothing.

He had often during his perambulations observed the trim, graceful figure stepping cautiously over the ties, and had sometimes shivered for its safety. He always exchanged a greeting with the girl, and once threw a plank over a muddy pool for her to step upon. He caught but glimpses of her features, for she wore an enormous sunbonnet to shield her complexion, that seemed marvelously fair; while loosely⁠—fitting leather gloves protected her hands. He knew she was the schoolteacher, and also that she was the daughter of that very pigheaded old Madame St. Denys Godolph who was hoarding her barren acres across the bayou as a miser hoards gold. Starving over them, some people said. But that was nonsense; nobody starves on a Louisiana plantation, unless it be with suicidal intent.

These things he knew, but he did not know why Mademoiselle St. Denys Godolph always answered his salutation with an air of chilling hauteur that would easily have paralyzed a less sanguine man.

The reason was that Suzanne, like everyone else, had heard the stories that were going the rounds about him. People said he was entirely too much at home with the free mulattoes.2 It seems a dreadful thing to say, and it would be a shocking thing to think of a Laballière; but it wasn’t true.

When Laballière took possession of his land, he found the plantation-house occupied by one Giestin and his swarming family. It was past reckoning how long the free mulatto and his people had been there. The house was a six-room, long, shambling affair, shrinking together from decrepitude. There was not an entire pane of glass in the structure; and the Turkey-red curtains flapped in and out of the broken apertures. But there is no need to dwell upon details; it was wholly unfit to serve as a civilized human habitation; and Alphonse Laballière would no sooner have disturbed its contented occupants than he would have scattered a family of partridges nesting in a corner of his field. He established himself with a few belongings in the best cabin he could find on the place, and, without further ado, proceeded to supervise the building of house, of gin, of this, that, and the other, and to look into the hundred details that go to set a neglected plantation in good working order. He took his meals at the free mulatto’s, quite apart from the family, of course; and they attended, not too skillfully, to his few domestic wants.

Some loafer whom he had snubbed remarked one day in town that Laballière had more use for a free mulatto than he had for a white man. It was a sort of catching thing to say, and suggestive, and was repeated with the inevitable embellishments.

One morning when Laballière sat eating his solitary breakfast, and being waited upon by the queenly Madame Giestin and a brace of her weazened boys, Giestin himself came into the room. He was about half the size of his wife, puny and timid. He stood beside the table, twirling his felt hat aimlessly and balancing himself insecurely on his high-pointed boot-heels.

“Mr. Laballière,” he said, “I reckon I tell you; it’s betta you git shed o’ me en’ my fambly. Jis like you want, yas.”

“What in the name of common sense are you talking about?” asked Laballière, looking up abstractedly from his New Orleans paper. Giestin wriggled uncomfortably.

“It’s heap o’ story goin’ roun’ ’bout you, if you want b’lieve me.” And he snickered and looked at his wife, who thrust the end of her shawl into her mouth and walked from the room with a tread like the Empress Eugenie’s, in that elegant woman’s palmiest days.

“Stories!” echoed Laballière, his face the picture of astonishment. “Who⁠—where⁠—what stories?”

“Yon’a in town en’ all about. It’s heap o’ tale goin’ roun’, yas. They say how come you mighty fon’ o’ mulatta. You done shoshiate wid de mulatta down yon’a on de suga plantation, tell you can’t res’ lessen it’s mulatta roun’ you.”

Laballière had a distressingly quick temper. His fist, which was a strong one, came down upon the wobbling table with a crash that sent half of Madame Giestin’s crockery bouncing and crashing to the floor. He swore an oath that sent Madame Giestin and her father and grandmother, who were all listening in the next room, into suppressed convulsions of mirth.

“Oh, ho! so I’m not to associate with whom I please in Natchitoches parish. We’ll see about that. Draw up your chair, Giestin. Call your wife and your grandmother and the rest of the tribe, and we’ll breakfast together. By thunder! if I want to hobnob with mulattoes, or negroes or Choctaw Indians or South Sea savages, whose business is it but my own?”

“I don’ know, me. It’s jis like I tell you, Mr. Laballière,” and Giestin selected a huge key from an assortment that hung against the wall, and left the room.

A half hour later, Laballière had not yet recovered his senses. He appeared suddenly at the door of the schoolhouse, holding by the shoulder one of Giestin’s boys. Mademoiselle St. Denys Godolph stood at the opposite extremity of the room. Her sunbonnet hung upon the wall, now, so Laballière could have seen how charming she was, had he not at the moment been blinded by stupidity. Her blue eyes that were fringed with dark lashes reflected astonishment at seeing him there. Her hair was dark like her lashes, and waved softly about her smooth, white forehead.

“Mademoiselle,” began Laballière at once, “I have taken the liberty of bringing a