“You’ll find on the table in the hall the telegram to Atlanta telling them you’ll be there ready for work on the first. Wait until I finish,” she demanded when Jean started to speak. “Today is the sixteenth—that gives us less than two weeks in which to pack and move. Papa writes me he has sent his cheque for the house he’s giving us and it’s all ready for us to move into—”
“But what about this house?” Jean broke in, panic in his voice at the unexpected imminence of quitting his beloved New Orleans forever.
“I’ve seen to that, too,” Mary answered methodically but, withal, a note in her voice of pride in her own farsightedness and efficiency. “Laroux, the real-estate man on Canal Street, telephoned me yesterday he’s found a buyer—a company that plans to build an apartment house here—and Laroux tells me he’ll be ready to close the deal by the end of the week.”
“Sell this house, papa!” broke in Mimi. “No—no! We can’t let them tear our house down!”
“Yes, sell this house,” affirmed Mary before Jean could reply. “I can’t for the life of me see why you are so crazy about these draughty, moth-eaten old places. If I had the money I’d tear all of them down, build nice, modern places and make ten—twenty times the money off of them.”
Before Jean could speak Mary swept conqueringly from the room. Mimi slipped her hand into Jean’s and squeezed it comfortingly, the pair of them too full for speech.
Ignoring the dreaded telegram, Jean and Mimi left the cool shadows of the house for the cheery brightness of sun-swept Dumaine Street. Oblivious of passersby, answering salutations and the greetings of friends methodically, they walked slowly through the streets, down the Esplanade, on and on until they found themselves at the gates of St. Louis cemetery. Yet in silence they wandered through the confused, close-packed vieux carré of the dead, past tombs piled one upon the other, their walls lined with row upon row of ghostly storehouses, “the ovens” like those of a baker-shop, each large enough only to hold a coffin. Crumbling bricks, covered with vines within which scampered in the dazzling, warming sunlight lizards of green or of gold. Here and there the Ci-git and the Ici Repos and the names, birth and death dates of those buried within had been eaten away by countless storms of rain and sunlight until none could tell who had been buried there.
“It’s just as well,” thought Jean. “If there are those, relative or friend, who yet remain alive, they know which tomb holds their friends. And if there are none left—what difference does it make? Silly curiosity-seekers who ramble through a place like this as they would a penny arcade during Mardi Gras seeking new thrills—what do their wishes count?”
Their reveries were unbroken until they heard a noise behind them. From beyond a pile of “ovens” a silver crucifix flashed in the sunlight, raised high above the tombs. Soon the cortége appeared, winding its slow way through the tortuous maze of irregularly built tombs, the “Chant for the Dead” rolling out on the still air in lugubrious and chilling melody, rising or dropping as the tombs opened or closed in about the procession. Here and there, where the turning of a passage was too narrow to permit the carrying of the casket at its usual height, Jean and Mimi saw it raised high on a level with the crucifix. They stood hand in hand until the chanting died down in the distance.
“Mimi, that’s how I feel today,” said Jean softly. “Leaving New Orleans, the old houses, the old friends—it makes me feel as though it were I in that coffin—”
“Papa, why don’t you put your foot down?” burst out Mimi; “tell Mme. Daquin you just won’t go—let her go on back to Chicago if she doesn’t like it—and you and I stay here and be happy?”
“It’s too late now, petite Mimi,” he answered. “My word’s been given—they’re tearing down so many of the old houses—my old friends are dying off, one by one—”
“But you’re not old! You’re only fifty-two, yet you talk as though you were a hundred—”
“Sometimes I feel a hundred—a thousand. Oh, well, I’ve made my decision and I’ll stick to it. It wasn’t about that I wanted to talk with you. It’s related to it but—but it isn’t easy to talk about—” he broke off.
They walked slowly in silence as she waited for him to speak. An inexpressible tenderness filled her for this gentle old man—he seemed very old to her today. The growing surliness and quarrelsomeness of her stepmother, the alien who would never fit into the scheme of things as she and Jean knew it, infuriated her for the pain it was causing her dear Jean. She felt within her a steadily growing bitterness against Mary and her petty shopkeeper attitude, her scorn for traditions so dear to Jean and herself. As she had dressed, the notion of leaving New Orleans (she had never been more than a few miles beyond the city’s limits) had appealed to her, offering as it did new experiences, new scenes, new people, naturally attractive to a girl of fourteen. Her mind had dwelt more on the favourable aspects of the change than on the severance of old and dear ties of tradition and friendship, of quitting familiar scenes, with all the instinctive optimism and disregard of consequences of youth.
But now she felt, on seeing Jean’s reluctance to go, as though she were in some subtle manner guilty of disloyalty to Jean. Suddenly contrite, her eyes filled with tears and she clung to Jean in passionate repudiation of her joy at leaving. She realized Jean was speaking—had been talking to her for some minutes. “… And yet it ought not to be hard
