I hope that you will hear no more of this affair."
"And the name of the man who killed him?"
"That I shall never tell."
The gray dawn was stealing on the sleeping world as Rondelet turned his face from the house of death. By the dim cold light he saw the double row of mighty moss-grown oaks, tongueless witnesses of this and many another such an affair of honor. The shrouded trees drooped beneath the heavy, rain-soaked moss like so many forest giants clad in ashen winding-sheets. When he reached Jackson Square, the first sunbeams were fingering the gold cross over the way. What a night had passed since the last beam of the evening sun had fallen on the same spot!
The stairs were still dark; at the top of the first flight his foot encountered some slippery substance, and he fell heavily forward, putting out his arm to save himself.
When he reached his room he found that his left arm was badly sprained. He would have no use of it for several weeks, and would besides be obliged to wear it, for some days at least, in a sling. After binding it up as best he could, he opened the door of his aviary, and his friendly birds flew to greet him with merry roundelay. In the farther corner of the cage he saw something lying stiff and shining. Pax, his milk-white dove, his nearest friend, had died in the night.
CHAPTER III.
New Orleans is pre-eminent among the cities of the New World for more than one reason. Certain characteristics more European than American are here found, and the mingling of the ceremonious politeness of the French people with the just and liberal spirit of the American has brought about a code of manners superior to that either of France or of our purely American cities. Deference to women still obtains, and the chivalrous attitude of men toward them has not diminished, as in so many parts of our country it has done, in proportion as laws, social and municipal, leave less room for oppression of what is so often called the "weaker sex." Is the phrase a satire, and to-day is the balance of power in the hands of men, or women?
For quaint houses no city in the United States—nay, I had almost said in the world—can rival New Orleans. The dear queer, rickety little one-story tenements, with rude red terra-cotta tiles and wide eaves leaning over to the edge of the narrow banquette (a "side-walk" is an unknown term in the Crescent City), and the high dark Spanish buildings, with mysterious passages leading to hidden courts—one hesitates to say which are the most attractive. To Margaret Ruysdale, sculptor, from the North, whose native New England town was anything but picturesque, the choice of habitation had been a difficult one. For days she had wandered about the streets of the older portion of the city looking at houses of all degrees.
One morning as she started on her search she stopped suddenly before a small house which she had passed perhaps a hundred times, and had never seen before. It stood on a wide thoroughfare, which boasted a green ribbon of turf, running through its middle like a cool, verdant river bordered by two rows of trees. The large, pretentious dwellings on either side of the little house seemed to be anxious to elbow their humbler neighbor out of sight. It stood back a dozen feet from the street, and with an effort at self-effacement hid its modest front behind two straight tall magnolia-trees standing on either side of the door. When one did at last obtain a sight of the house, the only wonder was that one had ever looked at anything else in all the wide pleasant street. It was a very low wooden building, of a dull, unaggressive tint of pearl gray, a story and a half in height. A piazza, ran across the front, with delicately carven pillars and lattice-work. The narrow doorway was flanked by quaint side-lights, through which it was impossible to catch a glimpse of the interior. Overhead, two gable windows leaned gravely over the piazza roof, strewn with leaves fallen from the magnolias. It seemed an ideal dwelling for a maiden, quiet, retired, and yet linked with the busy life of the city, from which it seemed to draw modestly back. Three days later the Ruysdales were settled in the little house, whose interior proved in every way as attractive as Margaret had fancied it to be. Beside the main building there was a large airy room in the rear, which was soon converted into a studio; this was detached, and stood at some distance from the house in a pleasant garden shut, in from the thoroughfare in the rear by a high iron fence of very beautiful workmanship. Cunning artificers in iron New Orleans has known, and his must have been a master-hand which moulded the convolvulus vine and flowers twisting about the sheaves of ripe corn in the garden rail. And what a garden it was, with its many tinted roses, one sort for every month in the year, its thick bed of violets all abloom in these first days of February!
Two months have passed since General Stuart Ruysdale and his daughter came to New Orleans—the former in search of health, the latter to bear him company. Stuart Ruysdale was not a general in rank; but the loss of his strong right arm in the war had won for him that title with his fellow-townspeople. He had lost more than his right arm in that terrible struggle—he had lost his health and strength; and he remained for the rest of his days a broken, disappointed man.
When at the breaking out of the Civil War he had been given the commission of captain in a volunteer regiment, Ruysdale had already made some reputation as a sculptor. He had loved his profession with all the passion of a fervent artistic nature springing up in a community where art exists only in its embryonic phase. He had deemed it his mission to nourish that love of the beautiful which is latent in the hearts of men, and to develop sculpture, the greatest of the arts, in his native country, from which he held that all that is best must be evolved, and into which it cannot be imported.
His good right arm had been smitten off, his whole body was maimed and disabled, when, four years later, he came back to Woodbridge at the head of his broken regiment. In his deserted studio he found the tools he could never use again; but in the bitterness of that hour he made a resolve that the power within him should not rest unrevealed, that another hand should give shape to the creations of his brain. The son for whose birth he prayed and looked should be but a finer tool through which his genius should animate the bronze and marble of his native land. He had reckoned, as so many of us do, without his host; for no son was born to him, only a small daughter, who blinked blindly in his face and put out her wee hands to grasp him on the day when her mother died, a month after her birth. Stuart Ruysdale was a man with an iron will. Fate had beaten him at every bout so far, but yield he would not. Son or daughter, his child should be a sculptor; and thus it was that the girl whom Philip Rondelet had met at the house of Mrs. Darius Harden was vowed from her birth a priestess of the plastic art. From her babyhood she had been given wax and clay to model; and, to the passionate delight of her father, the child showed an unusual aptitude for the profession to which he had dedicated her. Her education had been carried on entirely to this end; and at twenty, Margaret Ruysdale had certainly produced uncommonly good work for so young a sculptor. Her father's strong conceptions, growing more delicate in passing through the medium of her mind, were to the man like the children of some dear dead child, dearer to him than his own child had been, because of the suffering that had gone before. Margaret loved her profession and her father, the only two things given her to love, with all the strength of her young heart. The two passions were so blended that the serving of the one meant for her the service of the other. There was none of that strife between love and work which vexes so many a woman's life, making the work seem at times a sin, and the love too great a sacrifice.
On a certain soft February afternoon, when the air which stirred the roses outside the studio door was cool and brilliantly pure, Margaret sat at her work while her father, sitting near her, read aloud. The girl had abandoned the bas-relief she had been modelling, and was moulding a bird's nest, to the delight of a small negro child seated at her feet.
"How many eggs, General?" whispered Margaret. The child, a son of the cook, had been baptized General Jackson.
"Three, missy," said the baby, holding up the requisite number of fat black fingers.
"'When Angelo heard of the proposed alterations in his plans.'—are you paying attention, Margaret?"
"Yes, papa." (Sotto voce) "That 's the mother bird, General." Inarticulate admiration from General Jackson.
"'He left Florence in the greatest haste, and repaired to Rome, where he solicited an interview with the Pope—'"