We both laughed, and there rose in my mind a picture of a twentieth-century house decorated with Aunt Janes nine-patches and rising suns. How could the dear old woman know that the same esthetic sense that had drawn from their obscurity the white and blue counterpanes of colonial days would forever protect her loved quilts from such a desecration as she feared? As she lifted a pair of quilts from a chair nearby, I caught sight of a pure white spread in striking contrast with the many-hued patchwork.
Where did you get that Marseilles[27] spread, Aunt Jane? I asked, pointing to it. Aunt Jane lifted it and laid it on my lap without a word. Evidently she thought that here was something that could speak for itself. It was two layers of snowy cotton cloth thinly lined with cotton, and elaborately quilted into a perfect imitation of a Marseilles counterpane. The pattern was a tracery of roses, buds, and leaves, very much conventionalized, but still recognizable for the things they were. The stitches were fairylike, and altogether it might have covered the bed of a queen.
I made every stitch o that spread the year before me and Abram was married, she said. I put it on my bed when we went to housekeepin; it was on the bed when Abram died, and when I die I want em to cover me with it. There was a life-history in the simple words. I thought of Desdemona[28] and her bridal sheets, and I did not offer to help Aunt Jane as she folded this quilt.
I reckon you think, she resumed presently, that Im a mean, stingy old creetur not to give Janie the counterpane now, instead o hoardin it up, and all these quilts too, and keepin folks waitin for em till I die. But, honey, it aint all selfishness. Id give away my best dress or my best bonnet or an acre o ground to anybody that needed em moren I did; but these quilts Why, it looks like my whole life was sewed up in em, and I aint goin to part with em while life lasts.
There was a ring of passionate eagerness in the old voice, and she fell to putting away her treasures as if the suggestion of losing them had made her fearful of their safety.
I looked again at the heap of quilts. An hour ago they had been patchwork, and nothing more. But now! The old womans words had wrought a transformation in the homely mass of calico and silk and worsted. Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the souls longing for earthly immortality.
I reckon you think, she resumed presently, that Im a mean, stingy old creetur not to give Janie the counterpane now, instead o hoardin it up, and all these quilts too, and keepin folks waitin for em till I die. But, honey, it aint all selfishness. Id give away my best dress or my best bonnet or an acre o ground to anybody that needed em moren I did; but these quilts Why, it looks like my whole life was sewed up in em, and I aint goin to part with em while life lasts.
There was a ring of passionate eagerness in the old voice, and she fell to putting away her treasures as if the suggestion of losing them had made her fearful of their safety.
I looked again at the heap of quilts. An hour ago they had been patchwork, and nothing more. But now! The old womans words had wrought a transformation in the homely mass of calico and silk and worsted. Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the souls longing for earthly immortality.
No wonder the wrinkled fingers smoothed them as reverently as we handle the garments of the dead.
Kate Chopin
Maame Pelagie
I
When the war began, there stood on an imposing mansion of red brick, shaped like the Pantheon[29]. A grove of majestic live-oaks surrounded it.
Thirty years later, only the thick walls were standing, with the dull red brick showing here and there through a matted growth of clinging vines. The huge round pillars were intact; so to some extent was the stone flagging of hall and portico. There had been no home so stately along the whole stretch of Cote Joyeuse. Everyone knew that, as they knew it had cost Philippe Valmet sixty thousand dollars to build, away back in 1840. No one was in danger of forgetting that fact, so long as his daughter Pelagie survived. She was a queenly, white-haired woman of fifty. Maame Pelagie, they called her, though she was unmarried, as was her sister Pauline, a child in Maame Pelagies eyes; a child of thirty-five.
The two lived alone in a three-roomed cabin, almost within the shadow of the ruin. They lived for a dream, for Maame Pelagies dream, which was to rebuild the old home.
It would be pitiful to tell how their days were spent to accomplish this end; how the dollars had been saved for thirty years and the picayunes hoarded; and yet, not half enough gathered! But Maame Pelagie felt sure of twenty years of life before her, and counted upon as many more for her sister. And what could not come to pass in twenty in forty years?