Short Fiction Kate Chopin (best e reader for android .txt) đ
- Author: Kate Chopin
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âNevâ mine, ti chou. I know how take care dat wâat Vieumaite giâ me. You go sleep now. Catârinette goinâ set yere anâ mine you. She goinâ make you well like she all time do. We donâ wanâ no cĂ©lĂ©ra doctor. We drive âem out wid a stick, dey come rounâ yere.â
Miss Kitty was soon sleeping more restfully than she had done since her illness began. Raymond had finally succeeded in quieting the baby, and he tiptoed into the adjoining room, where the other children lay, to snatch a few hours of much-needed rest for himself. Catârinette sat faithfully beside her charge, administering at intervals to the sick womanâs wants.
But the thought of regaining her home before daybreak, and of the urgent necessity for doing so, did not leave Tante Catârinetteâs mind for an instant.
In the profound darkness, the deep stillness of the night that comes before dawn, she was walking again through the woods, on her way back to town.
The mockingbirds were asleep, and so were the frogs and the snakes; and the moon was gone, and so was the breeze. She walked now in utter silence but for the heavy guttural breathing that accompanied her rapid footsteps. She walked with a desperate determination along the road, every foot of which was familiar to her.
When she at last emerged from the woods, the earth about her was faintly, very faintly, beginning to reveal itself in the tremulous, gray, uncertain light of approaching day. She staggered and plunged onward with beating pulses quickened by fear.
A sudden turn, and Tante Catârinette stood facing the river. She stopped abruptly, as if at command of some unseen power that forced her. For an instant she pressed a black hand against her tired, burning eyes, and stared fixedly ahead of her.
Tante Catârinette had always believed that Paradise was up there overhead where the sun and stars and moon are, and that âVieumaiteâ inhabited that region of splendor. She never for a moment doubted this. It would be difficult, perhaps unsatisfying, to explain why Tante Catârinette, on that particular morning, when a vision of the rising day broke suddenly upon her, should have believed that she stood in face of a heavenly revelation. But why not, after all? Since she talked so familiarly herself to the unseen, why should it not respond to her when the time came?
Across the narrow, quivering line of water, the delicate budding branches of young trees were limned black against the gold, orangeâ âwhat word is there to tell the color of that morning sky! And steeped in the splendor of it hung one pale star; there was not another in the whole heaven.
Tante Catârinette stood with her eyes fixed intently upon that star, which held her like a hypnotic spell. She stammered breathlessly:
âMo pĂ© coutĂ©, Vieumaite. Catârinette pĂ© coutĂ©.â (I am listening, Vieumaite. Catârinette hears you.)
She stayed there motionless upon the brink of the river till the star melted into the brightness of the day and became part of it.
When Tante Catârinette entered Miss Kittyâs room for the second time, the aspect of things had changed somewhat. Miss Kitty was with much difficulty holding the baby while Raymond mixed a saucer of food for the little one. Their oldest daughter, a child of twelve, had come into the room with an apronful of chips from the woodpile, and was striving to start a fire on the hearth, to make the morning coffee. The room seemed bare and almost squalid in the daylight.
âWell, yere Tante Catârinette come back,â she said, quietly announcing herself.
They could not well understand why she was back; but it was good to have her there, and they did not question.
She took the baby from its mother, and, seating herself, began to feed it from the saucer which Raymond placed beside her on a chair.
âYas,â she said, âCatârinette goinâ stay; dis time she enât nevâ goinâ âway no moâ.â
Husband and wife looked at each other with surprised, questioning eyes.
âMichĂ© Raymond,â remarked the woman, turning her head up to him with a certain comical shrewdness in her glance, âif somebody want lenâ you tâousanâ dollaâ, wâat you goinâ say? Even if itâs ole nigga âoman?â
The manâs face flushed with sudden emotion. âI would say that person was our besâ frienâ, Tante Catârinette. Anâ,â he added, with a smile, âI would give her a mortgage on the place, of coâse, to secuâ her fâom loss.â
âDas right,â agreed the woman practically. âDen Catârinette goinâ lenâ you tâousanâ dollaâ. Dat wâat Vieumaite give her, dat bâlong to her; donâ bâlong to nobody else. Anâ we go yonâa to town, MichĂ© Raymond, you anâ me. You care me befoâ MichĂ© Paxtone. I want âim foâ put down in writinâ befoâ de cote dat wâat Catârinette got, it foâ Miss Kitty wâen I be dead.â
Miss Kitty was crying softly in the depths of her pillow.
âI enât got no head foâ all dat, me,â laughed Tante Catârinette, good humoredly, as she held a spoonful of pap up to the babyâs eager lips. âItâs Vieumaite tell me all dat clair anâ plain dis moâninâ, wâen I cominâ âlong de Granâ Ecoâ road.â
A Dresden Lady in DixieMadame Valtour had been in the sitting-room some time before she noticed the absence of the Dresden china figure from the corner of the mantelpiece, where it had stood for years. Aside from the intrinsic value of the piece, there were some very sad and tender memories associated with it. A babyâs lips that were now forever still had loved once to kiss the painted âpitty âadyâ; and the baby arms had often held it in a close and smothered embrace.
Madame Valtour gave a rapid, startled glance around the room, to see perchance if it had been misplaced; but she failed to discover it.
Viny, the housemaid, when summoned, remembered having carefully dusted it that morning, and was rather indignantly positive that she had not broken the thing
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