“Adjieu, la calége! Adjieu, les mariées!”
CHAPTER X.
AFTER ALL.
Adieu; but only till the fall of night shall bring the wedding ball.
One little tune—and every Acadian fiddler in Louisiana knows it—always brings back to Zoséphine the opening scene of that festive and jocund convocation. She sees again the great clean-swept seed-cotton room of a cotton-gin house belonging to a cousin of the ex-governor, lighted with many candles stuck into a perfect wealth of black bottles ranged along the beams of the walls. The fiddler’s seat is mounted on a table in the corner, the fiddler is in it, each beau has led a maiden into the floor, the sets are made for the contra-dance, the young men stand expectant, their partners wait with downcast eyes and mute lips as Acadian damsels should, the music strikes up, and away they go.
Yes, Zoséphine sees the whole bright scene over again whenever that strain sounds.
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It was fine from first to last! The ball closed with the bride’s dance. Many a daughter Madame Sosthène had waltzed that farewell measure with, and now Zoséphine was the last. So they danced it, they two, all the crowd looking on: the one so young and lost in self, the other so full of years and lost to self; eddying round and round each other in this last bright embrace before they part, the mother to swing back into still water, the child to enter the current of a new life.