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The mother looked up into her face and said: "No, it is nothing, nothing, only that " turning her head from side to side with a slow, emotional emphasis, "Miché Vignevielle is the best best man on the good Lord's earth!" Olive drew a chair close to her mother, sat down and took the little yellow hands into her own white lap, and looked tenderly into her eyes.
A shoe grated softly on the stone step, and Madame Delphine, her heart beating in great thuds, without waiting for a knock, opened the door, bowed low, and exclaimed in a soft perturbed voice: "Miché Vignevielle!" He entered, hat in hand, and with that almost noiseless tread which we have noticed.
The ground seems to Monsieur Vignevielle the unsteady sea, and he to stand once more on a deck. And she? As she is now, if she but turn toward the orange, the whole glory of the moon will shine upon her face. His heart stands still; he is waiting for her to do that. She reaches up again; this time a bunch for her mother. That neck and throat! Now she fastens a spray in her hair.
She sank, trembling, into her chair. "Oh, no, no," she continued, shaking her head, "'tis not Miché Vignevielle w'at's crezzie." Her eyes lighted with sudden fierceness. "'Tis dad law! Dad law is crezzie! Dad law is a fool!" A priest of less heart-wisdom might have replied that the law is the law; but Père Jerome saw that Madame Delphine was expecting this very response.
One beautiful summer night, when all nature seemed hushed in ecstasy, the last blush gone that told of the sun's parting, Monsieur Vignevielle, in the course of one of those contemplative, uncompanioned walks which it was his habit to take, came slowly along the more open portion of the Rue Royale, with a step which was soft without intention, occasionally touching the end of his stout cane gently to the ground and looking upward among his old acquaintances, the stars.
But at length, one day in May, 1822, in a small private office behind Monsieur Vignevielle's banking-room, he sitting beside a table, and she, more timid and demure than ever, having just taken a chair by the door, she said, trying, with a little bashful laugh, to make the matter seem unimportant, and yet with some tremor of voice: "Miché Vignevielle, I bin maguing my will."
He continued: "Go h-open you' owze; I fin' you' daughteh dad uzban'." Madame Delphine was a helpless, timid thing; but her eyes showed she was about to resent this offer. Monsieur Vignevielle put forth his hand it touched her shoulder and said, kindly still, and without eagerness: "One w'ite man, Madame: 'tis prattycabble. I know 'tis prattycabble. One w'ite jantleman, Madame. You can truz me.
Monsieur Vignevielle turned to engage in conversation with an employé and a new visitor, and gave no sign of hearing Madame Delphine's voice. She asked a second time, with like result, lingered timidly, and as he turned to give his attention to a third visitor, reiterated: "Miché Vignevielle, I wizh you pliz led "
But we hardly give the event its right name. It was Capitaine Lemaitre who had disappeared; it was Monsieur Vignevielle who had come back. The pleasures, the haunts, the companions, that had once held out their charms to the impetuous youth, offered no enticements to Madame Delphine's banker.
The dimmest shadow of a smile seemed only to give his words a more kindly authoritative import, and as he turned away again with a manner suggestive of finality, Madame Delphine found no choice but to depart. But she went away loving the ground beneath the feet of Monsieur U. L. Vignevielle.
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