Seraphine Bedaut was sitting on her small gallery, stringing red peppers, when Madame Valtour approached.
“I’m so distressed, Madame Bedaut,” began the planter’s wife, abruptly. But the ’Cadian woman arose politely and interrupted, offering her visitor a chair.
“Come in, set down, Ma’me Valtour.”
“No, no; it’s only for a moment. You know, Madame Bedaut, yesterday when I returned from making a visit, I found that an ornament was missing from my sitting-room mantel-piece. It’s a thing I prize very, very much—” with sudden tears filling her eyes—“and I would not willingly part with it for many times its value.” Seraphine Bedaut was listening, with her mouth partly open, looking, in truth, stupidly puzzled.
“No one entered the room during my absence,” continued Madame Valtour, “but Agapie.” Seraphine’s mouth snapped like a steel trap and her black eyes gleamed with a flash of anger.
“You wan’ say Agapie stole some’in’ in yo’ house!” she cried out in a shrill voice, tremulous from passion.
“No; oh no! I’m sure Agapie is an honest girl and we all love her; but you know how children are. It was a small Dresden figure. She may have handled and broken the thing and perhaps is afraid to say so. She may have thoughtlessly misplaced it; oh, I don’t know what! I want to ask if she saw it.”
“Come in; you got to come in, Ma’me Valtour,” stubbornly insisted Seraphine, leading the way into the cabin. “I sen’ ’er to de house yistiddy wid some Creole aiggs,” she went on in her rasping voice, “like I all time do, because you all say you can’t eat dem sto’ aiggs no mo’. Yere de basket w’at I sen’ ’em in,” reaching for an Indian basket which hung against the wall—and which was partly filled with cotton seed.
“Oh, never mind,” interrupted Madame Valtour, now thoroughly distressed at witnessing the woman’s agitation.
“Ah, bien non. I got to show you, Agapie en’t no mo’ thief ’an yo’ own child’en is.” She led the way into the adjoining room of the hut.