CHAPTER III
MADAME JOZAIN
Madame Jozain was a creole of mixed French and Spanish ancestry. She was a tall, thin woman with great, soft black eyes, a nose of the hawk type, and lips that made a narrow line when closed. In spite of her forbidding features, the upper part of her face was rather pleasing, her mild eyes had a gently appealing expression when she lifted them upward, as she often did, and no one would have believed that the owner of those innocent, candid eyes could have a sordid, avaricious nature, unless he glanced at the lower part of her face, which was decidedly mean and disagreeable. Her nose and mouth had a wily and ensnaring expression, which was at the same time cruel and rapacious. Her friends, and she had but few, endowed her with many good qualities, while her enemies, and they were numerous, declared that she was but little better than a fiend incarnate; but Father Ducros, her confessor, knew that she was a combination of good and evil, the evil largely predominating.
With this strange and complex character, she had but two passions in life. One was for her worthless son, Adraste, and the other was a keen desire for the good opinion of those who knew her. She always wished to be considered something that she was not,—young, handsome, amiable, pious, and the best blanchisseuse de fin in whatever neighborhood she hung out her sign.
And perhaps it is not to be wondered at, that she felt a desire to compensate herself by duplicity for what fate had honestly deprived her of, for no one living had greater cause to complain of a cruel destiny than had Madame Jozain. Early in life she had great expectations. An only child of a well-to-do baker, she inherited quite a little fortune, and when she married the débonnair and handsome André Jozain, she intended, by virtue of his renown and her competency, to live like a lady. He was a politician, and a power in his ward, which might eventually have led him to some prominence; but instead, this same agency had conducted him, by dark and devious ways, to life-long detention in the penitentiary of his State—not, however, until he had squandered her fortune, and lamed her for life by pushing her down-stairs in a quarrel. This accident, had it disabled her arms, might have incapacitated her from becoming a blanchisseuse de fin, which occupation she was obliged to adopt when she found herself deprived of her husband’s support by the too exacting laws of his country.
In her times of despondency it was not her husband’s disgrace, her poverty, her lameness, her undutiful son, her lost illusions, over which she mourned, as much as it was the utter futility of trying to make things seem better than they were. In spite of all her painting, and varnishing, and idealizing, the truth remained horribly apparent: She was the wife of a convict, she was plain, and old, and lame; she was poor, miserably poor, and she was but an indifferent blanchisseuse de fin, while Adraste, or Raste, as he was always called, was the worst boy in the State. If she had ever studied the interesting subject of heredity, she would have found in Raste the strongest confirmation in its favor, for he had inherited all his father’s bad qualities in a greater degree.
On account of Raste’s unsavory reputation and her own incompetency, she was constantly moving from one neighborhood to another, and, by a natural descent in the scale of misfortune, at last found herself in a narrow little street, in the little village of Gretna, one of the most unlovely suburbs of New Orleans.
The small one-story house she occupied contained but two rooms, and a shed, which served as a kitchen. It stood close to the narrow sidewalk, and its green door was reached by two small steps. Madame Jozain, dressed in a black skirt and a white sack, sat upon these steps in the evening and gossiped with her neighbor. The house was on the corner of the street that led to the ferry, and her greatest amusement (for, on account of her lameness, she could not run with the others to see the train arrive) was to sit on her doorstep and watch the passengers walking by on their way to the river.
On this particular hot July evening, she felt very tired, and very cross. Her affairs had gone badly all day. She had not succeeded with some lace she had been doing for Madame Joubert, the wife of the grocer, on the levee, and Madame Joubert had treated her crossly—in fact had condemned her work, and refused to take it until made up again; and Madame Jozain needed the money sorely. She had expected to be paid for the work, but instead of paying her that “little cat of a Madame Joubert” had fairly insulted her. She, Madame Jozain, née Bergeron. The Bergerons were better than the Jouberts. Her father had been one of the City Council, and had died rich, and her husband—well, her husband had been unfortunate, but he was a gentleman, while the Jouberts were common and always had been. She would get even with that proud little fool; she would punish her in some way. Yes, she would do her lace over, but she would soak it in soda, so that it would drop to pieces the first time it was worn.
Meantime she was tired and hungry, and she had nothing in the house but some coffee and cold rice. She had given Raste her last dime, and he had quarreled with her and gone off to play “craps” with his chums on the levee. Besides, she was very lonesome, for there was but one house on her left, and beyond it was a wide stretch of pasture, and opposite there was nothing but the blank walls of a row of warehouses belonging to the railroad, and her only neighbor, the occupant of the next cottage, had gone away to spend a month with a daughter who lived “down town,” on the other side of the river.
So, as she sat there alone, she looked around her with an expression of great dissatisfaction, yawning wearily, and wishing that she was not so lame, so that she could run out to the station, and see what was going on: and that boy, Raste, she wondered if he was throwing away her last dime. He often brought a little money home. If he did not bring some now, they would have no breakfast in the morning.