Old Creole Days | Page 7

may be given in a few sentences.
"Ah!" he cried once, "if it were merely my own sins that I had to
answer for, I might hold up my head before the rest of mankind; but no,
no, my friends--we cannot look each other in the face, for each has
helped the other to sin. Oh, where is there any room, in this world of
common disgrace, for pride? Even if we had no common hope, a
common despair ought to bind us together and forever silence the voice
of scorn!"
And again, this:
"Even in the promise to Noë, not again to destroy the race with a flood,
there is a whisper of solemn warning. The moral account of the
antediluvians was closed off, and the balance brought down in the year
of the deluge; but the account of those who come after runs on and on,
and the blessed bow of promise itself warns us that God will not stop it
till the Judgment Day! O God, I thank thee that that day must come at
last, when thou wilt destroy the world, and stop the interest on my
account!"
It was about at this point that Père Jerome noticed, more particularly
than he had done before, sitting among the worshippers near him, a
small, sad-faced woman, of pleasing features, but dark and faded, who
gave him profound attention. With her was another in better dress,
seemingly a girl still in her teens, though her face and neck were
scrupulously concealed by a heavy veil, and her hands, which were
small, by gloves.

"Quadroones," thought he, with a stir of deep pity.
Once, as he uttered some stirring word, he saw the mother and daughter
(if such they were), while they still bent their gaze upon him, clasp each
other's hand fervently in the daughter's lap. It was at these words:
"My friends, there are thousands of people in this city of New Orleans
to whom society gives the ten commandments of God with all the nots
rubbed out! Ah! good gentlemen! if God sends the poor weakling to
purgatory for leaving the right path, where ought some of you to go
who strew it with thorns and briers!"
The movement of the pair was only seen because he watched for it. He
glanced that way again as he said:
"O God, be very gentle with those children who would be nearer
heaven this day had they never had a father and mother, but had got
their religious training from such a sky and earth as we have in
Louisiana this holy morning! Ah! my friends, nature is a big-print
catechism!"
The mother and daughter leaned a little farther forward, and exchanged
the same spasmodic hand-pressure as before. The mother's eyes were
full of tears.
"I once knew a man," continued the little priest, glancing to a side aisle
where he had noticed Evariste and Jean sitting against each other, "who
was carefully taught, from infancy to manhood, this single only
principle of life: defiance. Not justice, not righteousness, not even gain;
but defiance: defiance to God, defiance to man, defiance to nature,
defiance to reason; defiance and defiance and defiance."
"He is going to tell it!" murmured Evariste to Jean.
"This man," continued Père Jerome, "became a smuggler and at last a
pirate in the Gulf of Mexico. Lord, lay not that sin to his charge alone!
But a strange thing followed. Being in command of men of a sort that
to control required to be kept at the austerest distance, he now found

himself separated from the human world and thrown into the solemn
companionship with the sea, with the air, with the storm, the calm the
heavens by day, the heavens by night. My friends, that was the first
time in his life that he ever found himself in really good company.
"Now, this man had a great aptness for accounts. He had kept
them--had rendered them. There was beauty, to him, in a correct,
balanced, and closed account. An account unsatisfied was a deformity.
The result is plain. That man, looking out night after night upon the
grand and holy spectacle of the starry deep above and the watery deep
below, was sure to find himself, sooner or later, mastered by the
conviction that the great Author of this majestic creation keeps account
of it; and one night there came to him, like a spirit walking on the sea,
the awful, silent question: 'My account with God--how does it stand?'
Ah! friends, that is a question which the book of nature does not
answer.
"Did I say the book of nature is a catechism? Yes. But, after it answers
the first question with 'God,' nothing but questions follow; and so, one
day, this man gave a