Mimi welcomed her stepmother, who came briskly down the stairs followed at a respectful distance by her two companions.
“Everything’s just lovely and I don’t know really how to thank you, papa,” she bubbled. “Mimi, you’d better run upstairs and get your face and hands washed. Mrs. Plummer tells me she’s fixed supper for us and we don’t want it to get cold. Jean, you and papa’d better do the same thing and don’t take all night getting back.”
Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander never spoke to common soldiers more brusquely nor with greater assurance that their commands would be obeyed. Nor did it occur to Mimi or Jean to protest—both were too much under the domination of this person who would never be familiar to either of them.
II
During the meal Mme. Daquin and her father talked animatedly of the new life of the Daquins, for which the two of them were so largely responsible. But the thoughts which ran through the heads of Jean Daquin and Mimi dealt with the past and especially with the rapid changes which a few weeks had wrought. Though neither of them knew precisely what the other was thinking, their minds were going over the events which had taken place since that morning which had been the beginning of the new order of things. Had some person possessing the powers of wizardry, an adept in the process of thought amalgamation, been present and woven a picture made of the fragments which filled Jean’s and Mimi’s minds, the product of his labours would have resulted somewhat after this fashion. …
It was a sunny morning in New Orleans several weeks past. Jean Daquin tapped gently on the door. No answer came. Again he tapped—tapped—tapped. Again there was silence. Carefully he pushed open the heavy door, which groaned dismally on its ancient hinges. From within there came the rhythmic inhaling of breath of a sound sleeper. Jean tiptoed to the deep casemented window and drew aside the heavy curtains of dusty wine-coloured velvet.
Warm, intoxicating Louisiana sunshine tumbled into the room as though a giant hand had loosed a celestial sluice-gate. With the yellow flood poured the sensuous blend of odours—of wild honeysuckle, of Cherokee rose in full bloom, of hyacinth, of oleander. Jean stood at the window, his arms raised clutching the draperies, and took deep draughts of the air heady as old wine. The trees and flowers sparkled in the sunshine, covered with glittering beads of water from the recently ended shower.
His tiny garden enclosed with the crumbling brick wall had never seemed so beautiful. He picked out one by one the flowers he had planted and tended—the oleander-bush by the house, which, a generation before, had quartered the slave house servants. It was in bloom now, the ground beneath it covered over with salver-shaped white petals. There near it was the bed of pansies—Bernard Dieux, sleeping the long sleep in old St. Louis cemetery this year and a half had given him the cuttings. Over to the left was the Cherokee rose in whose shade he had spent many happy hours, reading a part of the time, more often just sitting and dreaming. Many a day he had sat there or in the cool quietness of the decaying servant house, two-storied, of brick laid between heavy posts, briqueté entre poteaux. Its walls were slowly crumbling these late years and its bricks were covered with greenish mould but the old house was sturdily standing up, despite its years, against all the furies of rain and sun that beat upon it. There Jean had sat in the rickety chair and sucked into his nostrils the faint fragrance of his orange-trees that grew just inside and along the old wall. He loved to rest his eyes grown weary with the printed page on their blackish green foliage that provided so perfect a background for their tiny fruit—little globules of deep yellow gold. But he loved these best when they were shedding their flowers—“a steam of rich distilled perfumes,” Bernard, who was given to quotation of poetry, used to say of the orange-trees.
“Jean! Why don’t you come down?” a strident, querulous voice from below stirred him. Jean hastily quitted the window and shuffled over to the huge and elaborately carved bed.
“Mimi! Mimi! Wake up! Your mother’s in an awful humour this morning! Get up quickly before she comes and gets us both!”
The sleeper stirred, turned over and recommenced her steady breathing. The rays of the sunlight touched her hair as her head rolled to one side. In the shadow it had seemed brown. Before Jean’s eyes it underwent a miraculous transformation as the tiny rays of light picked out the coppery brilliance that here was auburn, and there shaded off into a deeper reddish colour. It was like spun gold dipped in flaming cochineal. The curls in tangled disarray framed the oval, cream-coloured face. Half full lips were slightly parted, even teeth gleaming from the red frame. Mimi lay stretched on the bed, the bedclothes pushed towards its foot, her slender body covered only with the thin nightdress. Small soft breasts rose and fell gently, the promise of approaching womanhood revealed in the curves of her rapidly maturing body.
Jean looked at his daughter, his eyes half filled with joy at her warm beauty, half with troubled anxiety. He had seen too much of life to be unaware of what his child’s delicate and fragile beauty might bring to her. At times he had almost wished she were less attractive—when he walked with her along the streets he watched with envious, jealous eyes the glances Mimi, though not yet fourteen, drew instinctively from the men, young and old. He was proud of her, of course—many girls of eighteen or nineteen were not half so well formed. Yet, he feared for her and, more often than not, his apprehension
