 |
| Alfred's drawings of undiscovered ruins were received with polite incredulity. |
An exquisite romantic love story of the glamorous Old South by the distinguished author of that great success - " So Red The Rose"
Shadows on Terrebonne
by STARK YOUNG
Illustrations by Walter Biggs
THE ROAD from the highway to the Raymond house winds for two miles through cotton fields, sometimes with hedges alongside of Cherokee roses and honeysuckle, then the peach orchard and then at last the carriage gate, of brick and iron, standing amid tall grass and palmettos that block the way-you drive nowadays through a side entrance near the stable lot.
 |
| Ellen was seventeen when she fell in love with Stewart Robard of Randolph Gate Plantation. It wast he kind of love affair that pleased everyone. |
To the right lies a pond, with willows, where once the swans floated above their white shadows but now only the frogs would be; no more swans these days and no more peach brandy. And then suddenly, after an avenue of water oaks, you make a turn and come on the house.
It is a rambling old house, though the front is rather correct and unexpected, with a small portico and white columns. The long central hall begins with glass and ends with glass. If you look from, the front through the back door, you see, shimmering and far away, the dark mass of camellia bushes.
In the hall and scattered through the rooms is the furniture that Joseph Carriere Raymond brought over from France when he built the house. There are books, pictures, damasks and vases, and a bust of Napoleon, who was then the rage; you get the impression that this Joseph Raymond on his wedding trip was an extravagant young man. The ceilings are high, with stucco ornaments, the walls all white.
But the interior of the house is soon forgotten, once you pass through the hall door at the back and on to the terrace outside. Everything suddenly becomes quieter; the eye and the ear wait and listen. The birds that flutter in the garden hedges are fewer here; for instead of bushes and boughs, there is a stone terrace spreading out sixty or seventy feet. Old ivy beds, loose and vague as shades themselves, border this terrace, and beyond them is a greensward that slopes towards the water. The level bayou flows past, and from it comes the name of the house, Shadows on Terrebonne.
They said that Joseph Raymond built his house here rather than on his other places, Mantua Plantation, Silence Plantation and Picayune Plantation, which his father had left him, because of the soft water flowing in Terrebonne Bayou. Joseph liked to see water keep its place, his sister, Mrs. Percy, said; by which her sharp tongue meant that cognac was highly esteemed by her brother. Wild fowl came, arid the long moss hung down from the trees along the stream's edge. It was a bayou large enough for the smaller steamboats to travel up and down, stopping at the various plantations, each with its landing. The truth was, a single steamboat, the Lorient, coming once a week, served their needs.
Slowly the bosom of the stream spread its ripples here and there, where a reed or a water hyacinth stood up through the surface. Or now and then a small snake or water bug streaked the smooth stretch of it, or a bird's wing, tipped slantwise, grazed the clear water. It was all like time itself- the shadows, the wings, the passing ripples, against the steady, still stream.
At one end of the garden, against this stillness and the stream with its reflections under the open sky, two columns stand. They are white marble with leafy capitals, in the Corinthian manner more or less, but more extravagant in their design. They rise from a kind of terrace, or rather flight of steps; for there are three marble steps descending toward the bayou.
One end breaks off abruptly, as if there had been more columns to be added. In places, time and the rain through the moss in the branches above have stained the marble to a pale rose color. The columns are ten feet high, perhaps; the years have softened both their fluted lines and the rich leafage of the capitals.
JOSEPH RAYMOND married Julie Therese Deslonde, of the New Orleans family known for the beauty of both its men and its women. To them at Shadows on Terrebonne were born a son and daughter, Alfred Deslonde and Helene. Alfred was seven years older than his sister. He was a proud, noble little boy, with a smile so sweet and eyes so straight and clear that everyone loved him.
His Aunt Percy, coming down from Parish Assumption to visit at The Shadows and seeing this engaging manner and how easily it won everybody's favor and indulgence, thought that discipline would be wise, lest the boy be spoiled. "Don't let. any child grow up thinkin' the world belongs to him," she said.
"Eh?" said his mother, thinking of the time she bent over to kiss him good night, lying in his small bed, and he said, "I thought I heard a roseleaf popping." It was only a game you played in the garden-you doubled up a rose petal and popped it against your lips-but how sweetly and gracefully whispered! "Eh?" his mother said, politely of course, but as if Aunt Percy could just answer that or stew in her own juice.
 |
| The beauty of the furnishings, the loveliness of the gardens at The Shadows were but the background for Joseph Raymond's bride, Julie Therese Deslonde. continued on page 173 |
"I said my say."
"When I see signs that Alfred is spoiled, then will be time enough. But have you ever seen a more generous child? Now tell me. Or eyes more eager? Why should I try to break his little will?"
"I reckon there's something in that."
"It's ture he hates to be stopped, but he brings what he's drawing to you as soon as it's completed; he'd give you his head."
"I'm thinkin' of what life may do to Alfred some day. And I'm no fool, either."
"He's the soul of honor, an honorable boy if one ever was; a lie's not in him. My father used to say that that was about all you have; honor was about all you can confront life with. Father had an old sword of his father's with an inscription in Spanish that said, 'Do not draw me without reason, do not sheathe me without honor.' So you see."
"I remember how that plagued sword rattled in the scabbard," said the old lady, screwing up her eyes.
When Alfred was eleven they engaged a gentleman from Boston, a Mr. Abbott, for his tutor. Long as he was with the family, there remained some mystery about this man; they gradually learned that he had been at one time an actor; but before that, when he had money, he had been a great traveler. He never gave any distinct account of himself.
He was a good Latin scholar and knew Greek and French, in which language he sang many songs, as well as in English, and recited poetry with exquisite power. When he declaimed such lines as "The mountains look on Marathon, and Marathon looks on the sea," he would rise from his seat and hold out his arms as if rapt. He slept in the same room with his pupil, so that the process of education was continually going on.
Then Monsieur Dumaine came for a while to stay at The Shadows, giving lessons in drawing to the two Children, and to the children on the neighboring plantations; because Monsieur Dumaine wanted to earn money to go and study with David in Paris. Already Alfred, in place of study, had drawn pictures up and down the margins of his books, so that he became at once the artist's star pupil. This was not, of course, with the idea of becoming a painter-say that, and Alfred's father would have stopped the lessons! It was merely a way of acquiring an agreeable accomplishment. That was how they put it.
A few years later found this boy at The Shadows growing into a youth, very handsome, very much admired by his friends. His impetuous, high nature was eased and made charming by his sweet temper and natural talents. He was generous; he was given to trusting everyone, partly because of his bringing up. "My father used to say," Joseph Raymond said to him, "never suspect people. It's better to be deceived, which is only human after all, than to be suspicious, which is common, like trash."
So the years went on, and the garden at The Shadows, which Joseph had planted at the time of his marriage, filled up with green and flowering plants. The quiet there seemed quieter for those rich green walls. The tall bamboo and the long moss threw farther shadows than even the name of the place implied, over the smooth bayou. The herons and other wild fowl came in their season, and when the day dawned for it, flew away.
Even the plantation bells that called the field hands to and from work seemed to have grown mellow. The boy heard them softly along toward sundown; he would stand sometimes and hear the bells fading away among the rustling leaves.
In the spring of 1816, his sister Helene, at fifteen, became engaged to a young man in Parish Avoyelles, the son and namesake of Judge Hector Thompson, and straight off married him. And in that same season Alfred, who was twenty-two, taking along with him a great deal more money than he could spend, made the voyage to France. The Deslondes, his mother's people, had a cousin there, an old marquis, who had written Latin verses once and knew all the scholars in Paris.
There was also in Paris a lady, Aunt Percy's husband's sister, whom the royal family favored because once the exiled Bourbon princes, traveling in Louisiana, had been guests of her father. One of them, the Duc d’Orleans was to become a long time afterward King of France. At any rate, Alfred would know these cousins and would also see the world.
FROM PARIS Alfred wrote letters home-about the concerts, the people; how he went to balls, evening parties, jetes champetes. In May, a letter came that said he was going off on some Mediterranean ship. He would visit Greece and perhaps the Aegean Islands. In July, from Greece, he wrote that he had taken up his drawing again, and had made a sketch of the Corinth temples. Then he wrote that he was going to travel across some territory east of the Mediterranean; he would write more of this shortly. But the letters broke off. For three months at The Shadows they heard nothing.
That was one of the yellow-fever years, and when Alfred's packet of letters was brought to him at Marseilles, on his return to France, there was added to the pile Father Barbier's letter telling him of the death of his father and mother.
The gentle letter said that such calamities were not unique among stricken families, that it was God's will, and that the sooner Alfred returned the better. Picayune Plantation, the farthest distant as well as the largest, had gone to Helene, whose husband would take charge; but there were The Shadows, Silence and Mantua to be managed.
Alfred came home that autumn burnt from the sun, handsomer than ever, bringing with him the gifts he had bought before the news reached him. He brought also a portfolio of drawings. Three or four of his kin had come to The Shadows and waited, so that they might be with Alfred when he first got home.
Of that home-coming to the family that loved him, of the romance of his travels and the glamour of his adventure and the surprise of it, which he had meant to tell them all, his mother especially, what was there to say? where was it gone? All through the empty parlors the candles were lighted, and through the open doors at the back the soft wind brought in the garden fragrance; but there seemed nothing. In the midst of supper Father Barbier arrived.
It was a strange scene in the parlor an hour later that night, with the young master of the plantation come home from abroad, his guests out of the kindness of their hearts entreating him to tell of his journey, and the portfolio of his drawings open on the table. The light of the tall candelabra fell on one drawing after another as Alfred turned them over.
In a wide unbroken desert, columns rose, a whole line of them, their flutings intact, the great leaves and garlands of their capitals still preserved. Or, on another sheet, were drawn the arches of an aqueduct going off into the distance-high arches, solitary, strong. Or here there was a single column on a great base, the capital gone and the shaft broken at the top and, on the ground beneath, long blocks of the entablature with its riotous ornament, under the black shadows of an Asiatic sun.
In one of the drawings there was a whole temple shown, or at least a side of it; beyond the columns the wall of the shrine was still standing. It was drawn as if it were in moonlight, the sky pale and vague with a few stars, the earth lying rapt, but the temple shining out from its shadows, all as if there had been no years, no ruin, no ancient oblivion.
And so one by one the drawings appeared and seemed an agreeable entertainment. There were gasps of admiration, faint cries, polite questions. Father Barbier took the ruins for Greek and spoke of the glory that was Greece.
Certainly if these ancient monuments were Greek, Alfred had drawn them very badly; but he did not correct the gentle old priest who meant so well. Instead, he began to explain to Father Barbier and his other guests that the drawings were not imaginary views, as they seemed to take them, not sheer embroideries on classical models.
Doubtless all men want to travel, Alfred said, and to have various seas and far roads bring them home again. Perhaps his old tutor had filled him with the idea of Greece. However that was, he had gone there as a mere traveler along with other travelers. And then one night in Athens he walked out past the city and down to the Piraeus harbor.
There was a cafe-a sort of arbor-by the waterside, where he sat down. It happened that beside him sat an Arab gentleman and, as people do, they fell to talking. In the course of it the Arab told Alfred of cities and temples in his country, across desert stretches or on the plains. Though they cared little about them, all his people knew of these things. But nobody in Europe had ever reported them.
The Arab gentleman had a ring with a carnelian in it, scratched with Roman letters, which his brother had picked up in a temple porch. Next day, Alfred sailed on the Levantine ship, arrived at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and journeying inland with his new acquaintance to the latter's town, hired escorts and set out, sometimes along with a caravan, sometimes with his own party alone.
Everybody in the parlor listened to what Alfred said about the desert sands, the nights, the caravans, the sudden view of some ruined ancient City or temple columns, but they did not reopen the portfolio. It was clear that the drawings meant no more to them than chromos; in an upstairs hall at The Shadows was there not the Lions to Luxor? But to Alfred, at the time, there seemed nothing prophetic about the way his kin and friends took his drawings.
It was during that winter that he set up the two columns at the garden end, by the water. From the stone platform, graded into steps, a row of columns was to rise. Through them the green vistas would be seen, the sheen of gardenia and camellia and oleander leaves, and Bayou Terrebonne. There was a young Italian in Thibodaux who knew how to work in marble and stone.
Sometimes in the evening Alfred would take out the drawings and divert himself by adding a few touches or making corrections in line and shading. As he looked at the drawings there would come suddenly back to him the memory of his enthusiasm. He saw again the stone, the marbles, their antique beauty, in a forgotten land, under the vast skies. A breathless night, a great moon, the sky fretted with stars, and the solitary marbles standing . . . He would sail for France, when the plantations' affairs were settled, by the end of April!
In those days you had to depend for your knowledge of distant lands on the reports of travelers. All you could know was what some traveler said or had drawn or painted. The rest could be only rumor. The drawings would show people things they had never seen, never even heard of.
The upshot of Paris was that Alfred took the drawings to his cousin, the old marquis, with the nose that was yellow from snuff, who sent him to the famous De Vaux in the Palais-Royal, who, scenting a rich colonial, charged double, but in the end turned out plates that hit the drawings to a T. He was four months at it. The plates were bound into portfolios, and Alfred sent them to the scholars recommended by his cousin and to some of the great ladies who had salons.
A copy went, on the recommendation of Miss Percy, to the Duchesse d'Angouleme, sister of the lost Dauphin and daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Thus, before many weeks, the drawings were seen by the best people, both in the learned circles and in society.
What happened was that everybody saw the drawings but nobody believed these things existed.
Monsieur the Marquis had executed another affair beside De Vaux’s engraving the plates: he had planned a marriage for his young cousin. As representative, so to speak, of the Louisiana branch of the family, he proposed to his old friend, the Vicomte Fernay (Victor Ernest Antoine Fernay), a great classical scholar but far from wealthy, an alliance between his rich young cousin and the vicombe’s daughter, Yvonne.
With romance the marquis' counsels proved even more successful than with engraving. His young cousin fell deeply in love with the girl and she with him. The two young people, properly chaperoned, spent many hours together during those four months while De Vaux chose to work on the engravings. "I should not venture to say," the marquis declared, "which of the two my young cousin is in love with, Yvonne or the antiquities."
Yvonne's father, despite the entreaties of the marquis, who thought him a more practical man, turned out to be one of the worst critics of the drawings.
"In the first place," the vicomte said to Alfred, "if you saw these things you must have drawn them badly. Roman architecture is not so coarse, not those crude, bold carvings, not so deep, not that heavy style."
"With all due respect," said the young man, I drew them as they are."
"An affront to classic tradition," the vicomte said; it was clear that he had talked the whole thing over with other scholars.
"But sir, these things are Roman."
"If they look as you depict them, these remains are degenerate architecture, that's all," said the vicomte, the veins swelling on his forehead.
"I've never said they were important. Though if you saw them as I did-how beautiful! All I say is that nobody has described them to us before."
"Not important, certainly. But remarkably complete as you have drawn them. To survive thus extensively! One naturally asks, What proof is there?"
"Proof, sir?" said Alfred, red in the face.
"It is generally known that the Roman Empire flourished in these countries you appear to have seen. And the ancient world, it seems-I know it only by report -is likely to be dotted with fallen shafts and broken marbles. But if there existed ruins so extensive as these you show, we'd know of them."
"Tut, tut!" cried the little marquis, who had just come in and whose hand Yvonne hastened to take. "All this over a cracked architrave! Let me remind you what Epictetus said: the grammarians, he said, who would set the very letters of the alphabet quarreling together. And why should not a young man dream? Why should not a young man, rapturous in the deserted ancient landscape, dream of Paris fame?"
"Nonsense!" Alfred shouted, losing control of himself. "Doubtless they say the same, the noble ladies, the princesses-" But seeing the distress in his cousin's vague old eyes, he stopped abruptly. "I bid you all good day." As he walked to the door he caught sight of Yvonne's pale face. The vicomte did not even glance at him.
Next day he received a formal note from Yvonne's father breaking off the engagement. He wrote her every day for five days, and then the five notes were returned by the vicomte's servant. They were unopened, the seals intact.
"You will not see Yvonne again," said the marquis. "This is Europe."
So Paris would not believe his drawings, Alfred said to himself. They were too stupid to give him even the benefit of the doubt. He made farewell visits to his cousins, the marquis and Miss Percy, and without adieus to anyone else, boarded the Liberte at Boulogne and sailed for home. He had been absent almost a year.
Bad news, they say, travels fast. Word had already gone round New Orleans-at the parties and balls, and among the gentlemen who met at the gambling houses in Royal Street, or at the fencing academies in Exchange Alley-that Joseph Raymond and Therese Deslonde's son, Alfred, had published his classical drawings only to be smiled at by the Parisian scholars, who refused to believe the tale he told.
A few older men like the bishop, the Chevalier Le Moyne, the tutor, Mr. Edmonds from Yale or Mr. Henry Perrault, the bookseller, who were academically minded and wanted the logic of fact upheld, talked gravely to people about the matter. They, too, said that if any such classic remains existed, the scholars in Paris would have known it.
Otherwise, but for the brief gossip- this classical matter, and the vicomte's breaking off his daughter's engagement - nobody cared two straws, except Alfred himself. He had, however, too much character to take on a profession of melancholy, too much pride to pity himself, and too much taste to go on with the argument for which no proof was likely. But he was hurt at the center somewhere; something had been broken that sprang from a generous and honorable nature. In the cabinet room at The Shadows hung portraits of his father and mother. He had some of the drawings framed and hung in this room.
Years passed and middle age came on Alfred Raymond. He was in his late fifties when his sister died and left to him her daughter Ellen-Tellie. The child was Helene’s youngest, born to her after forty; her other children had died, killed, so their cousin Thankful Percy said, by the nurses while Helene was waltzing at Mardi Gras.
Ellen's father had been a man of fashion in his time and had gambled away most of his possessions. And his widow had not done much to better what estate was left her, a part of which-Picayune Plantation-had long since gone to pay the mortgages; she liked a fine carriage horse and collected laces. So that, in the end, Ellen was by no means an heiress.
The little girl of ten came to live at Shadows on Terrebonne, bringing there her black mammy, Cydalise, whom her mother had willed to her along with the rosepoint and Alencon. She was given the chamber with the dressing room, over the parlor, and here she and her mammy lived, and Ellen slept in the Empire bed whose rosewood frame would have held a dozen of her, lengthwise and crosswise. In fact, old Cydalise used to put two or three of the little cousins in with Ellen sometimes, when they came visiting. To watch over them in one bed was easier.
Alfred saw the bed one night with three in it. "Might as well get in yourself, Mammy," he said.
"Naw, suh, I ain' go' be sleepin' wid no wildcats."
"Considering how many beds there are in this house-the blue room; Father's room; the room Aunt Percy always has-"
"Marse Alfred, I puts all my eggs in one basket."
"Mammy puts all her eggs in one basket!" Ellen cried, laughing and whirling over between the sheets.
Sometimes after supper, when the weather was mild, Ellen walked up and down on the terrace with her uncle, and he talked to her of those youthful scenes which he had known-the ancient walls, the sculptured images, the marble columns.
"Are they as tall as the columns in the garden, uncle?" said the little voice.
"Yes, Tellie."
Meantime, if her uncle had been troubled as to whether or not Ellen would inherit the Deslonde beauty, a few years more served to show how uselessly he had worried. The brown eyes were open and soft, luminous like a deer's, shadowed with passionate emphasis, strong with some loyalty of feeling, but shy and waiting.
By the time Ellen was seventeen, it was clear that plenty of young men from the plantations around would have come oftener to The Shadows if she had so much as dropped a handkerchief. So far that seemed unlikely enough. Then in June, when her cousins came out to their plantation in Iberia, not far away from Terrebonne Parish, Ellen met a young man visiting there and fell in love. His name was Stewart Robard, and he lived at Randolph Gate in Parish Vermilion. His mother had been to school with her mother, and so it was the kind of love affair that pleased everyone.
This young man, whose eyes were so gay, who sat his horse so well, who could shoot glass balls thrown in the air when there was a riding tournament, who was so often hunting in the pine woods or fishing in the Blanche Cote bays, would have come every day to The Shadows if he had lived near enough and if Ellen had let him. As it was, he came often those summer months, driving his clay-bank Arabians; and Tellie saw him also in New Orleans, at the D'Estrees’. But somehow, nothing came of it.
She watched her uncle and Stewart together. They conversed like gentlemen-about the racing season, the hunting, the new roads in Parish St. Mary. But it seemed to her that neither of them said much that he cared to say.
"Do you think there are many people, Uncle AI," she said one day, "who say things to one that one likes?"
"Sometimes," he said, "I think the point is not so much that we should like what people say to us. The point is that we should like what we say to them."
Her sweet, perplexed heart whispered to her that this remark was very like Uncle Alfred. How intelligent it was; something to think over!
She saw her uncle sometimes walking late in the evening up and down the terrace; saw the columns shining against the dusk and beyond them the pale sheen of the bayou water.
"Darling Uncle Al," she said to herself, as she gazed at him from her window, "why do we not die? why don't we fly south as the birds do? Uncle, I will stay by you; I'll never leave you."
He would stop in his pacing and, standing there with his arms folded, look back at the house that his father had built, and then at the two columns with their classic line against the dim fields beyond.
"I'll never leave you," she thought.
She considered this emotion in herself loyal and deep. Dear Uncle Alfred, what have they done to you?
When she saw the birds fly up from the bayou, there came to her the thought of birds drifting in the sky above ancient marbles. At the same moment, she thought of Stewart Robard. The lines of a ballad they had taught her long ago came back:
Oh, gentle wind that bloweth south, Where my true love repaireth, Convey a kiss to his dear mouth, And tell me how he fareth.
"Y'all could sing, Miss Tellie, if you jes' try," Mammy said.
By virtue of her youth and her lovely heart's imagination, the story at Shadows on Terrebonne now turns toward Ellen. It belongs to her rather than to an old man grown tired now even of ironic peace. By June, her cousin Thankful Percy was saying that Ellen would be an old maid before she knew it. She was going on eighteen now, and her mother when she married was little better than sixteen. Could anybody imagine a girl kicking every man that courted her? Though some way or other it was all her uncle's fault, trust a man! And truly it was as plain as your nose on your face that Stewart Robard had been graduated at the new state university in Mississippi and had gone straight on home without stopping at The Shadows.
The full summer came on in the Louisiana country, In the garden at Shadows on Terrebonne, rather neglected of late years and touched with extravagant growth, the roses had passed their prime. Their fragrance mingled with jasmine and honeysuckle, and, when the sun was hot, with the sweet Betsies. The lemon lilies were sweet, and the heliotrope. The red amaryllises, spread long ago beyond their beds, swung in heavy clusters; the water hyacinths, pale as lilacs, crowded the edge of the bayou. At night the constellations shone close in the open sky; the stars spread out; and from the grass, the trees, the water, you heard the sounds of the small life there.
Sometimes the girl would begin a mimicry of these sounds-the cicadas, the bird across the bayou whose call was a short flute-note, half finished, and the shrill tree frogs; then, pausing, would listen to them all again as if they were her echoes.
So the year 1859 passed into August; and in the orchard near the house Alfred Raymond, as he lay awake at night, heard the heavy fruit dropping to the ground. Another season would soon end; then another year. But on the second Tuesday in the month, the Lorient, as she passed up the bayou, brought a visitor. Cydalise. whom nothing short of calamity could have prevented from watching for the boat every week, showed him into the hall where Ellen sat.
The young man, still under thirty, was tall, with a high forehead and good, frank eyes. He made his apologies for not having written, but his time had been short. He had come because he had been on a journey-well, a sort of expedition, as it were, through the same country that her uncle had visited, taking along a camera. He knew well her uncle's drawings; it was only that people had been too ignorant to believe them. He wanted to pay his respects and to present her uncle with an album of photographs.
He ran through the pages for her to see, while Cydalise went upstairs to announce the visitor.
"If it just won't smother me to death!" Ellen thought, as she felt her heart beating. She was in her own room now, standing at the open window; but her heart beat like that.
There would be the photographs lying open on the table, her uncle and the young man gazing down on them and then up at the drawings on the walls. Here the camera showed a scene, and here her uncle's drawing. The line of columns, fluted, their capitals all graceful garlands and leaves, appeared in both. On the wall and in the album it was the same aqueduct, with the high arches going off into the distance, ruined but splendid. There was the same temple with the black shadows.
And so science, which everybody talked so much about these days, had at last supplied the proof.
She saw from the window the two columns at that end of the garden near the bayou. How long it was since her uncle had put them there, but had never finished his plan! On the wall downstairs and on a page of the album would be the picture of the single column on a great base-the shaft was broken; the long stone blocks of the magnificent entablature had fallen.
Outside, it was past noon, and under the noon sky the garden lawn and the fields of the air were-shadowless. The, bayou was still as a mirror.
She got up for the black writing desk with mother-of-pearl flowers.
"I do hope and believe," she began, not writing the loved name just yet, "that you will forgive whatever-" Then she said to herself that you would get the letter more like what you wanted if you waited. Write first his address on the envelope. She began again, bending over the desk on her knees and not letting her hand tremble: "Randolph Gate Plantation, Parish Vermillion."-vermilion."
No comments:
Post a Comment