“Holy Mother, keep me alive—not for life alone, sweet as it is for me, but that I may be with her to guide her steps and protect her!” he often prayed as Mimi knelt beside him at mass, innocent of the anxiety bordering on agony which filled the breast of her father.
“Jean! Must I come up for you?” came again the voice from below, anger sharpening its usual petulance.
“Mimi! Get up, chérie! At once, or we’ll both be raked over the coals!” Jean pleaded.
Mimi stirred again, opened her eyes, sat up and smiled.
“Here’s your coffee—I’m afraid it’s cold but drink it quickly and slip on your clothes. Your mother’s all out of sorts this morning and we’ll both catch it if you keep breakfast waiting much longer.”
“Let her fuss, papa. It’s too pretty a morning to bother with maman. She’ll quarrel anyhow,” smiled Mimi as she took the cup of black coffee and stirred it slowly. “Ugh—it’s all cold—I don’t want it!” she grimaced as she pushed the cup away. “You go down, papa, and I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
Jean took the cup but made no motion of leaving. “Mimi, we’re going to move away from New Orleans—”
“Move away? Where? Why? Leave this old house?” the questions tumbled out of her mouth, her eyes now wide-awake with surprise.
“It’s your mother—she’s had her way at last—we’re going to move to a more ‘progressive’ town where folks get ahead faster—” His words, despite conscious effort to sound matter-of-fact, were tinged with a bit of irony, with a fragment of bitterness and pain. “Your mother—”
“Stop calling her my mother!” Mimi half angrily de manded, all the cheerfulness gone from her voice and face. “She’s only a stepmother!”
“All right! All right!” Jean hastily agreed. “I can’t tell you all of it now—but I can’t stand this nagging any longer. I’ve got to have peace even if I have to go to the North Pole to get it—”
“Why do you yield so easily to her? Why don’t you tell her right out you won’t go and she must stop fussing at you all the time? If I were you I certainly wouldn’t let her run all over me!” Mimi declared as she slipped out of the bed and began to dress.
“Mimi!” Jean chided; the hurt her words caused were evident in his voice.
“Forgive me, papa. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything.” Mimi caught him as he started to the door, tray in hand, and kissed him warmly. Even as he forgave her, he was troubled at the moist softness of her lips.
“After breakfast we’ll go for a walk down to the Basin. I’ll tell you all about it then and a lot of other things I’ve been planning to tell you for a long time. Don’t be long now!” he cautioned as he left the room.
Mimi smiled as she heard his carpet slippers pat-pat-patting down the hall. Poor, gentle, lovable old Jean. He would never learn the combination to the intricately devised safe called Life, Mimi thought for the thousandth time. Fumbling in his aimless way, living in a world of his own filled with ghostly figures of silken clad ladies and velvet garmented gentlemen—Mandevilles, Marignys, de Pontalbas and Gayarres—he would never understand nor master bustle and hurry and pep of the newer years.
She did not consciously think these things as she dressed hurriedly, yet Mimi sensed that Jean was living in a day that had passed and would never return. Though her stepmother irritated her almost to frenzy, Mimi was aware of the fact that Mme. Daquin was better armed for present-day life than either Jean or herself. She who was Mary Robertson of Chicago, American for many generations, was unencumbered with the hoary traditions which kept Jean with his pride of Creole ancestry content with his dreams, caring little whether his house was better furnished than those of his neighbours and friends, worrying not at all and wholly free from envy if his bank balance was more or less than the man’s next door.
Mimi often wondered what course their lives might have taken had her mother lived. And even as she wondered she knew the answer—Jean and her mother and she would have lived on and on and on in the old house on Dumaine Street until Jean and Margot had died and Mimi had married some Creole whose ideas about life had dovetailed with those of the Daquin family. Growing poorer and poorer year by year, the sleepy cycle of uneventful days would have continued, as untouched by the outside world as the bayous that bordered the rushing, ever changing Mississippi.
Into these quiet backwaters Mary Robertson had swept. Her coming had been like the digging of a channel that linked the sluggish bayou with the pellmell hurtling stream nearby. Mimi’s mother died when she was nine. His beloved Margot gone, Jean had floundered about, terrified by loneliness, panic-stricken when he found himself the sole keeper and guardian and nurse of a perturbingly active child of nine. He felt as though some malevolent power had inveigled him into a boat, rowed him far from shore and then deftly removed the bottom of the craft. He felt himself splashing, treading water, frantically feeling for solid earth beneath his feet and finding none.
Margot with quiet efficiency had guided him, consoled him, upheld him. With gentle self-effacement she had suggested solutions to the problems which arose in his little sick-and-accident insurance company, woefully lacking as it was in modern business methods, but which furnished sufficient revenue to satisfy their simple needs. So cleverly had she managed these hints, he never knew until after her death how she had planted the seed of these ideas in his head, watched them grow until they met the little crises which arose and then flattered his gentle and simple soul by telling him how cleverly he had solved the perplexities of the moment.
Jean had often
