"The young man with auburn curls rested the edge of his burden upon the counter,tore away its wrappings and disclosed a painting".
"It is your work?"
"'Tis de work of me, Raoul Innerarity, cousin to de disting-wish Honoré Grandissime. I swear to you, sir, on stack of Bible' as 'igh as yo' head!"
He smote his breast.
"Do you wish to put it in the window?"
"Yes, seh."
"For sale?"
M. Raoul Innerarity hesitated a moment before replying:
"'Sieur Frowenfel', I think it is a foolishness to be too proud, eh? I want you to say, 'My frien', 'Sieur Innerarity, never care to sell anything; 'tis for egs-hibby-shun';mais--when somebody look at it, so," the artist cast upon his work a look of languishing covetousness, "'you say,foudre tonnerre!what de dev'!--I take dat ris-pon-sibble-ty--you can have her for two hun'red fifty dollah!' Better not be too proud, eh, 'Sieur Frowenfel'?"
"No, sir," said Joseph, proceeding to place it in the window, his new friend following him about spanielwise; "but you had better let me say plainly that it is for sale."
"Oh--I don't care--mais--my rillation' will never forgive me!Mais--go-ahead-I-don't-care! 'T is for sale."
"'Sieur Frowenfel'," he resumed, as they came away from the window, "one week ago"--he held up one finger--"what I was doing? Makin' bill of ladin', my faith!--for my cousin Honoré! an' now, I ham a hartis'! So soon I foun' dat, I say, 'Cousin Honoré,'"--the eloquent speaker lifted his foot and administered to the empty air a soft, polite kick--"I never goin' to do anoder lick o' work so long I live; adieu!"
He lifted a kiss from his lips and wafted it in the direction of his cousin's office.
"Mr. Innerarity," exclaimed the apothecary, "I fear you are making a great mistake."
"You tink I hass too much?"
"Well, sir, to be candid, I do; but that is not your greatest mistake."
"What she's worse?"
The apothecary simultaneously smiled and blushed.
"I would rather not say; it is a passably good example of Creole art; there is but one way by which it can ever be worth what you ask for it."
"What dat is?"
The smile faded and the blush deepened as Frowenfeld replied:
"If it could become the means of reminding this community that crude ability counts next to nothing in art, and that nothing else in this world ought to work so hard as genius, it would be worth thousands of dollars!"
"You tink she is worse a t'ousand dollah?" asked the Creole, shadow and sunshine chasing each other across his face.
"No, sir."
The unwilling critic strove unnecessarily against his smile.
"Ow much you tink?"
"Mr. Innerarity, as an exercise it is worth whatever truth or skill it has taught you; to a judge of paintings it is ten dollars' worth of paint thrown away; but as an article of sale it is worth what it will bring without misrepresentation."
"Two--hun-rade an'--fifty--dollahs or--not'in'!" said the indignant Creole, clenching one fist, and with the other hand lifting his hat by the front corner and slapping it down upon the counter. "Ha, ha, ha! a pase of waint--a wase of paint! 'Sieur Frowenfel', you don' know not'in' 'bout it! You har a jedge of painting?" he added cautiously.
"No, sir."
"Eh, bien! foudre tonnerre!--look yeh! you know? 'Sieur Frowenfel'? Dat de way de publique halways talk about a hartis's firs' pigshoe. But, I hass you to pardon me, Monsieur Frowenfel', if I 'ave speak a lill too warm."
"Then you must forgive me if, in my desire to set you right, I have spoken with too much liberty. I probably should have said only what I first intended to say, that unless you are a person of independent means--"
"You t'ink I would make bill of ladin'? Ah! Hm-m!"
"--that you had made a mistake in throwing up your means of support--"
"But 'e 'as fill de place an' don' want me no mo'. You want a clerk?--one what can speak fo' lang-widge--French, Eng-lish, Spanish,an'Italienne? Come! I work for you in de mawnin' an' paint in de evenin'; come!"
Joseph was taken unaware. He smiled, frowned, passed his hand across his brow, noticed, for the first time since his delivery of the picture, the naked little boy standing against the edge of a door, said, "Why--," and smiled again.
"I riffer you to my cousin Honoré," said Innerarity.
"Have you any knowledge of this business?"
"I 'ave.'
"Can you keep shop in the forenoon or afternoon indifferently, as I may require?"
"Eh? Forenoon--afternoon?" was the reply.
"Can you paint sometimes in the morning and keep shop in the evening?"
"Yes, seh."
Minor details were arranged on the spot. Raoul dismissed the black boy, took off his coat and fell to work decanting something, with the understanding that his salary, a microscopic one, should begin from date if his cousin should recommend him.
"'Sieur Frowenfel'," he called from under the counter, later in the day, "you t'ink it would be hanny disgrace to paint de pigshoe of a niggah?"
"Certainly not."
"Ah, my soul! what a pigshoe I could paint of Bras-Coupé!"
We have the afflatus in Louisiana, if nothing else.
MR. Raoul Innerarity proved a treasure. The fact became patent in a few hours. To a student of the community he was a key, a lamp, a lexicon, a microscope, a tabulated statement, a book of heraldry, a city directory, a glass of wine, a Book of Days, a pair of wings, a comic almanac, a diving bell, a Creoleveritas. Before the day had had time to cool, his continual stream of words had done more to elucidate the mysteries in which his employer had begun to be befogged than half a year of the apothecary's slow and scrupulous guessing. It was like showing how to carve a strange fowl. The way he dovetailed story into story and drew forward in panoramic procession Lufki-Humma and Epaminondas Fusilier, Zephyr Grandissime and the lady of thelettre de cachet, Demosthenes De Grapion and thefille à l'hôpital, Georges De Grapion and thefille à la cassette, Numa Grandissime, father of the two Honorés, young Nancanou and old Agricola,--the way he made them
"Knit hands and beat the groundIn a light, fantastic round,"
would have shamed the skilled volubility of Sheharazade.
"Look!" said the story-teller, summing up; "you take hanny 'istory of France an' see the hage of my familie. Pipple talk about de Boulignys, de Sauvés, de Grandprès, de Lemoynes, de St. Maxents,--bla-a-a! De Grandissimes is as hole as de dev'! What? De mose of de Creole families is not so hold as plenty of my yallah kinfolks!"
The apothecary found very soon that a little salt improved M. Raoul's statements.
But here he was, a perfect treasure, and Frowenfeld, fleeing before his illimitable talking power in order to digest in seclusion the ancestral episodes of the Grandissimes and De Grapions, laid pleasant plans for the immediate future. To-morrow morning he would leave the shop in Raoul's care and call on M. Honoré Grandissime to advise with him concerning the retention of the born artist as a drug-clerk. To-morrow evening he would pluck courage and force his large but bashful feet up to the doorstep of Number 19 rue Bienville. And the next evening he would go and see what might be the matter with Doctor Keene, who had looked ill on last parting with the evening group that lounged in Frowenfeld's door, some three days before. The intermediate hours were to be devoted, of course, to the prescription desk and his "dead stock."
And yet after this order of movement had been thus compactly planned, there all the more seemed still to be that abroad which, now on this side, and now on that, was urging him in a nervous whisper to make haste. There had escaped into the air, it seemed, and was gliding about, the expectation of a crisis.
Such a feeling would have been natural enough to the tenants of Number 19 rue Bienville, now spending the tenth of the eighteen days of grace allowed them in which to save their little fortress. For Palmyre's assurance that the candle burning would certainly cause the rent-money to be forthcoming in time was to Clotilde unknown, and to Aurora it was poor stuff to make peace of mind of. But there was a degree of impracticability in these ladies, which, if it was unfortunate, was, nevertheless, a part of their Creole beauty, and made the absence of any really brilliant outlook what the galaxy makes a moonless sky. Perhaps they had not been as diligent as they might have been in canvassing all possible ways and means for meeting the pecuniary emergency so fast bearing down upon them. From a Creole standpoint, they were not bad managers. They could dress delightfully on an incredibly small outlay; could wear a well-to-do smile over an inward sigh of stifled hunger; could tell the parents of their one or two scholars to consult their convenience, and then come home to a table that would make any kind soul weep; but as to estimating the velocity of bills-payable in their orbits, such trained sagacity was not theirs. Their economy knew how to avoid what the Creole-African apothegm callscommerce Man Lizon--qui asseté pou' trois picaillons et vend' pou' ein escalin(bought for three picayunes and sold for two); but it was an economy that made their very hound a Spartan; for, had that economy been half as wise as it was heroic, his one meal a day would not always have been the cook's leavings of cold rice and the lickings of the gumbo plates.
On the morning fixed by Joseph Frowenfeld for calling on M. Grandissime, on the banquette of the rue Toulouse, directly in front of an old Spanish archway and opposite a blacksmith's shop,--this blacksmith's shop stood between a jeweller's store and a large, balconied and dormer-windowed wine-warehouse--Aurore Nancanou, closely veiled, had halted in a hesitating way and was inquiring of a gigantic negro cartman the whereabouts of the counting-room of M. Honoré Grandissime.
Before he could respond she descried the name upon a staircase within the archway, and, thanking the cartman as she would have thanked a prince, hastened to ascend. An inspiring smell of warm rusks, coming from a bakery in the paved court below, rushed through the archway and up the stair and accompanied her into the cemetery-like silence of the counting-room. There were in the department some fourteen clerks. It was a den of Grandissimes. More than half of them were men beyond middle life, and some were yet older. One or two were so handsome, under their noble silvery locks, that almost any woman--Clotilde, for instance,--would have thought, "No doubt that one, or that one, is the head of the house." Aurora approached the railing which shut in the silent toilers and directed her eyes to the farthest corner of the room. There sat there at a large desk a thin, sickly-looking man with very sore eyes and two pairs of spectacles, plying a quill with a privileged loudness.
"H-h-m-m!" said she, very softly.
A young man laid down his rule and stepped to the rail with a silent bow. His face showed a jaded look. Night revelry, rather than care or years, had wrinkled it; but his bow was high-bred.
"Madame,"--in an undertone.
"Monsieur, it is M. Grandissime whom I wish to see," she said in French.
But the young man responded in English.
"You har one tenant, ent it?"
"Yes, seh."
"Zen eet ees M. De Brahmin zat you 'ave to see."
"No, seh; M. Grandissime."
"M. Grandissime nevva see one tenant."
"I muz see M. Grandissime."
Aurora lifted her veil and laid it up on her bonnet.
The clerk immediately crossed the floor to the distant desk. The quill of the sore-eyed man scratched louder--scratch, scratch--as though it were trying to scratch under the door of Number 19 rue Bienville--for a moment, and then ceased. The clerk, with one hand behind him and one touching the desk, murmured a few words, to which the other, after glancing under his arm at Aurora, gave a short, low reply and resumed his pen. The clerk returned, came through a gateway in the railing, led the way into a rich inner room, and turning with another courtly bow, handed her a cushioned armchair and retired.
"After eighteen years," thought Aurora, as she found herself alone. It had been eighteen years since any representative of the De Grapion line had met a Grandissime face to face, so far as she knew; even that representative was only her deceased husband, a mere connection by marriage. How many years it was since her grandfather, Georges De Grapion, captain of dragoons, had had his fatal meeting with a Mandarin de Grandissime, she did not remember. There, opposite her on the wall, was the portrait of a young man in a corslet who might have been M. Mandarin himself. She felt the blood of her race growing warmer in her veins. "Insolent tribe," she said, without speaking, "we have no more men left to fight you; but now wait. See what a woman can do."
These thoughts ran through her mind as her eye passed from one object to another. Something reminded her of Frowenfeld, and, with mingled defiance at her inherited enemies and amusement at the apothecary, she indulged in a quiet smile. The smile was still there as her glance in its gradual sweep reached a small mirror.
She almost leaped from her seat.
Not because that mirror revealed a recess which she had not previously noticed; not because behind a costly desk therein sat a youngish man, reading a letter; not because he might have been observing her, for it was altogether likely that, to avoid premature interruption, he had avoided looking up; nor because this was evidently Honoré Grandissime; but because Honoré Grandissime, if this were he, was the same person whom she had seen only with his back turned in the pharmacy--the rider whose horse ten days ago had knocked her down, the Lieutenant of Dragoons who had unmasked and to whom she had unmasked at the ball! Fly! But where? How? It was too late; she had not even time to lower her veil. M. Grandissime looked up at the glass, dropped the letter with a slight start of consternation and advanced quickly toward her. For an instant her embarrassment showed itself in a mantling blush and a distressful yearning to escape; but the next moment she rose, all a-flutter within, it is true, but with a face as nearly sedate as the inborn witchery of her eyes would allow.
He spoke in Parisian French:
"Please be seated, madame."
She sank down.
"Do you wish to see me?"
"No, sir."
She did not see her way out of this falsehood, but--she couldn't say yes.
Silence followed.
"Whom do--"
"I wish to see M. Honoré Grandissime."
"That is my name, madame."
"Ah!"--with an angelic smile; she had collected her wits now, and was ready for war. "You are not one of his clerks?"
M. Grandissime smiled softly, while he said to himself: "You little honey-bee, you want to sting me, eh?" and then he answered her question.
"No, madame; I am the gentleman you are looking for."
"The gentleman she was look--" her pride resented the fact. "Me!"--thought she--"I am the lady whom, I have not a doubt, you have been longing to meet ever since the ball;" but her look was unmoved gravity. She touched her handkerchief to her lips and handed him the rent notice.
"I received that from your office the Monday before last."
There was a slight emphasis in the announcement of the time; it was the day of the run-over.
Honoré Grandissime, stopping with the rent-notice only half unfolded, saw the advisability of calling up all the resources of his sagacity and wit in order to answer wisely; and as they answered his call a brighter nobility so overspread face and person that Aurora inwardly exclaimed at it even while she exulted in her thrust.
"Monday before last?"
She slightly bowed.
"A serious misfortune befell me that day," said M. Grandissime.
"Ah?" replied the lady, raising her brows with polite distress, "but you have entirely recovered, I suppose."
"It was I, madame, who that evening caused you a mortification for which I fear you will accept no apology."
"On the contrary," said Aurora, with an air of generous protestation, "it is I who should apologize; I fear I injured your horse."
M. Grandissime only smiled, and opening the rent-notice dropped his glance upon it while he said in a preoccupied tone:
"My horse is very well, I thank you."
But as he read the paper, his face assumed a serious air and he seemed to take an unnecessary length of time to reach the bottom of it.
"He is trying to think how he will get rid of me," thought Aurora; "he is making up some pretext with which to dismiss me, and when the tenth of March comes we shall be put into the street."
M. Grandissime extended the letter toward her, but she did not lift her hands.
"I beg to assure you, madame, I could never have permitted this notice to reach you from my office; I am not the Honoré Grandissime for whom this is signed."
Aurora smiled in a way to signify clearly that that was just the subterfuge she had been anticipating. Had she been at home she would have thrown herself, face downward, upon the bed; but she only smiled meditatively upward at the picture of an East Indian harbor and made an unnecessary rearrangement of her handkerchief under her folded hands.
"There are, you know,"--began Honoré, with a smile which changed the meaning to "You know very well there are"--"two Honoré Grandissimes. This one who sent you this letter is a man of color--"
"Oh!" exclaimed Aurora, with a sudden malicious sparkle.
"If you will entrust this paper to me," said Honoré, quietly, "I will see him and do now engage that you shall have no further trouble about it. Of course, I do not mean that I will pay it, myself; I dare not offer to take such a liberty."
Then he felt that a warm impulse had carried him a step too far.
Aurora rose up with a refusal as firm as it was silent. She neither smiled nor scintillated now, but wore an expression of amiable practicality as she presently said, receiving back the rent-notice as she spoke:
"I thank you, sir, but it might seem strange to him to find his notice in the hands of a person who can claim no interest in the matter. I shall have to attend to it myself."
"Ah! little enchantress," thought her grave-faced listener, as he gave attention, "this, after all--ball and all--is the mood in which you look your very, very best"--a fact which nobody knew better than the enchantress herself.
He walked beside her toward the open door leading back into the counting-room, and the dozen or more clerks, who, each by some ingenuity of his own, managed to secure a glimpse of them, could not fail to feel that they had never before seen quite so fair a couple. But she dropped her veil, bowed M. Grandissime a polite "No farther," and passed out.
M. Grandissime walked once up and down his private office, gave the door a soft push with his foot and lighted a cigar.
The clerk who had before acted as usher came in and handed him a slip of paper with a name written on it. M. Grandissime folded it twice, gazed out the window, and finally nodded. The clerk disappeared, and Joseph Frowenfeld paused an instant in the door and then advanced, with a buoyant good-morning.
"Good-morning," responded M. Grandissime.
He smiled and extended his hand, yet there was a mechanical and preoccupied air that was not what Joseph felt justified in expecting.
"How can I serve you, Mr. Frhowenfeld?" asked the merchant, glancing through into the counting-room. His coldness was almost all in Joseph's imagination, but to the apothecary it seemed such that he was nearly induced to walk away without answering. However, he replied:
"A young man whom I have employed refers to you to recommend him."
"Yes, sir? Prhay, who is that?"
"Your cousin, I believe, Mr. Raoul Innerarity."
M. Grandissime gave a low, short laugh, and took two steps toward his desk.
"Rhaoul? Oh yes, I rhecommend Rhaoul to you. As an assistant in yo' sto'?--the best man you could find."
"Thank you, sir," said Joseph, coldly. "Good-morning!" he added turning to go.
"Mr. Frhowenfeld," said the other, "do you evva rhide?"
"I used to ride," replied the apothecary, turning, hat in hand, and wondering what such a question could mean.
"If I send a saddle-hoss to yo' do' on day aftah to-morrhow evening at fo' o'clock, will you rhide out with me for-h about a hour-h and a half--just for a little pleasu'e?"
Joseph was yet more astonished than before. He hesitated, accepted the invitation, and once more said good-morning.
It early attracted the apothecary's notice, in observing the civilization around him, that it kept the flimsy false bottoms in its social errors only by incessant reiteration. As he re-entered the shop, dissatisfied with himself for accepting M. Grandissime's invitation to ride, he knew by the fervent words which he overheard from the lips of his employee that the f.m.c. had been making one of his reconnoisances, and possibly had ventured in to inquire for his tenant.
"I t'ink, me, dat hanny w'ite man is a gen'leman; but I don't care if a man are good like a h-angel, if 'e har not pu'e w'ite 'ow can'e be a gen'leman?"
Raoul's words were addressed to a man who, as he rose up and handed Frowenfeld a note, ratified the Creole's sentiment by a spurt of tobacco juice and an affirmative "Hm-m."
The note was a lead-pencil scrawl, without date.
DEAR JOE: Come and see me some time this evening.I am on my back in bed. Want your help in a littlematter. Yours, Keene.I have found out who ---- ----"
Frowenfeld pondered: "I have found out who ---- ----" Ah! Doctor Keene had found out who stabbed Agricola.
Some delays occurred in the afternoon, but toward sunset the apothecary dressed and went out. From the doctor's bedside in the rue St. Louis, if not delayed beyond all expectation, he would proceed to visit the ladies at Number 19 rue Bienville. The air was growing cold and threatening bad weather.
He found the Doctor prostrate, wasted, hoarse, cross and almost too weak for speech. He could only whisper, as his friend approached his pillow:
"These vile lungs!"
"Hemorrhage?"
The invalid held up three small, freckled fingers.
Joseph dared not show pity in his gaze, but it seemed savage not to express some feeling, so after standing a moment he began to say:
"I am very sorry--"
"You needn't bother yourself!" whispered the doctor, who lay frowning upward. By and by he whispered again.
Frowenfeld bent his ear, and the little man, so merry when well, repeated, in a savage hiss:
"Sit down!"
It was some time before he again broke the silence.
"Tell you what I want--you to do--for me."
"Well, sir--"
"Hold on!" gasped the invalid, shutting his eyes with impatience,--"till I get through."
He lay a little while motionless, and then drew from under his pillow a wallet, and from the wallet a pistol-ball.
"Took that out--a badly neglected wound--last day I saw you." Here a pause, an appalling cough, and by and by a whisper: "Knew the bullet in an instant." He smiled wearily. "Peculiar size." He made a feeble motion. Frowenfeld guessed the meaning of it and handed him a pistol from a small table. The ball slipped softly home. "Refused two hundred dollars--those pistols"--with a sigh and closed eyes. By and by again--"Patient had smart fever--but it will be gone--time you get--there. Want you to--take care--t' I get up."
"But, Doctor--"
The sick man turned away his face with a petulant frown; but presently, with an effort at self-control, brought it back and whispered:
"You mean you--not physician?"
"Yes."
"No. No more are half--doc's. You can do it. Simple gun-shot wound in the shoulder." A rest. "Pretty wound; ranges"--he gave up the effort to describe it. "You'll see it." Another rest. "You see--this matter has been kept quiet so far. I don't want any one--else to know--anything about it." He sighed audibly and looked as though he had gone to sleep, but whispered again, with his eyes closed--"'specially on culprit's own account."
Frowenfeld was silent: but the invalid was waiting for an answer, and, not getting it, stirred peevishly.
"Do you wish me to go to-night?" asked the apothecary.
"To-morrow morning. Will you--?"
"Certainly, Doctor."
The invalid lay quite still for several minutes, looking steadily at his friend, and finally let a faint smile play about his mouth,--a wan reminder of his habitual roguery.
"Good boy," he whispered.
Frowenfeld rose and straightened the bedclothes, took a few steps about the room, and finally returned. The Doctor's restless eye had followed him at every movement.
"You'll go?"
"Yes," replied the apothecary, hat in hand; "where is it?"
"Corner Bienville and Bourbon,--upper river corner,--yellow one-story house, doorsteps on street. You know the house?"
"I think I do."
"Good-night. Here!--I wish you would send that black girl in here--as you go out--make me better fire--Joe!" the call was a ghostly whisper.
Frowenfeld paused in the door.
"You don't mind my--bad manners, Joe?"
The apothecary gave one of his infrequent smiles.
"No, Doctor."
He started toward Number 19 rue Bienville, but a light, cold sprinkle set in, and he turned back toward his shop. No sooner had the rain got him there than it stopped, as rain sometimes will do.
The next morning came in frigid and gray. The unseasonable numerals which the meteorologist recorded in his tables might have provoked a superstitious lover of better weather to suppose that Monsieur Danny, the head imp of discord, had been among the aërial currents. The passionate southern sky, looking down and seeing some six thousand to seventy-five hundred of her favorite children disconcerted and shivering, tried in vain, for two hours, to smile upon them with a little frozen sunshine, and finally burst into tears.
In thus giving way to despondency, it is sad to say, the sky was closely imitating the simultaneous behavior of Aurora Nancanou. Never was pretty lady in cheerier mood than that in which she had come home from Honoré's counting-room. Hard would it be to find the material with which to build again the castles-in-air that she founded upon two or three little discoveries there made. Should she tell them to Clotilde? Ah! and for what? No, Clotilde was a dear daughter--ha! few women were capable of having such a daughter as Clotilde; but there were things about which she was entirely too scrupulous. So, when she came in from that errand profoundly satisfied that she would in future hear no more about the rent than she might choose to hear, she had been too shrewd to expose herself to her daughter's catechising. She would save her little revelations for disclosure when they might be used to advantage. As she threw her bonnet upon the bed, she exclaimed, in a tone of gentle and wearied reproach:
"Why did you not remind me that M. Honoré Grandissime, that precious somebody-great, has the honor to rejoice in a quadroon half-brother of the same illustrious name? Why did you not remind me, eh?"
"Ah! and you know it as well as A, B, C," playfully retorted Clotilde.
"Well, guess which one is our landlord?"
"Which one?"
"Ma foi! how doIknow? I had to wait a shameful long time to seeMonsieur le prince,--just because I am a De Grapion, I know. When at last I saw him, he says, 'Madame, this is the other Honoré Grandissime.' There, you see we are the victims of a conspiracy; if I go to the other, he will send me back to the first. But, Clotilde, my darling," cried the beautiful speaker, beamingly, "dismiss all fear and care; we shall have no more trouble about it."
"And how, indeed, do you know that?"
"Something tells it to me in my ear. I feel it! Trust in Providence, my child. Look at me, how happy I am; but you--you never trust in Providence. That is why we have so much trouble,--because you don't trust in Providence. Oh! I am so hungry, let us have dinner."
"What sort of a person is M. Grandissime in his appearance?" asked Clotilde, over their feeble excuse for a dinner.
"What sort? Do you imagine I had nothing better to do than notice whether a Grandissime is good-looking or not? For all I know to the contrary, he is--some more rice, please, my dear."
But this light-heartedness did not last long. It was based on an unutterable secret, all her own, about which she still had trembling doubts; this, too, notwithstanding her consultation of the dark oracles. She was going to stop that. In the long run, these charms and spells themselves bring bad luck. Moreover, the practice, indulged in to excess, was wicked, and she had promised Clotilde,--that droll little saint,--to resort to them no more. Hereafter, she should do nothing of the sort, except, to be sure, to take such ordinary precautions against misfortune as casting upon the floor a little of whatever she might be eating or drinking to propitiate M. Assonquer. She would have liked, could she have done it without fear of detection, to pour upon the front door-sill an oblation of beer sweetened with black molasses to Papa Lébat (who keeps the invisible keys of all the doors that admit suitors), but she dared not; and then, the hound would surely have licked it up. Ah me! was she forgetting that she was a widow?
She was in poor plight to meet the all but icy gray morning; and, to make her misery still greater, she found, on dressing, that an accident had overtaken her, which she knew to be a trustworthy sign of love grown cold. She had lost--alas! how can we communicate it in English!--a small piece of lute-string ribbon, aboutso long, which she used for--not a necktie exactly, but--
And she hunted and hunted, and couldn't bear to give up the search, and sat down to breakfast and ate nothing, and rose up and searched again (not that she cared for the omen), and struck the hound with the broom, and broke the broom, and hunted again, and looked out the front window, and saw the rain beginning to fall, and dropped into a chair--crying, "Oh! Clotilde, my child, my child! the rent collector will be here Saturday and turn us into the street!" and so fell a-weeping.
A little tear-letting lightened her unrevealable burden, and she rose, rejoicing that Clotilde had happened to be out of eye-and-ear-shot. The scanty fire in the fireplace was ample to warm the room; the fire within her made it too insufferably hot! Rain or no rain, she parted the window-curtains and lifted the sash. What a mark for Love's arrow she was, as, at the window, she stretched her two arms upward! And, "right so," who should chance to come cantering by, the big drops of rain pattering after him, but the knightliest man in that old town, and the fittest to perfect the fine old-fashioned poetry of the scene!
"Clotilde," said Aurora, turning from her mirror, whither she had hastened to see if her face showed signs of tears (Clotilde was entering the room), "we shall never be turned out of this house by Honoré Grandissime!"
"Why?" asked Clotilde, stopping short in the floor, forgetting Aurora's trust in Providence, and expecting to hear that M. Grandissime had been found dead in his bed.
"Because I saw him just now; he rode by on horseback. A man with that noble face could neverdo such a thing!"
The astonished Clotilde looked at her mother searchingly. This sort of speech about a Grandissime? But Aurora was the picture of innocence.
Clotilde uttered a derisive laugh.
"Impertinente!" exclaimed the other, laboring not to join in it.
"Ah-h-h!" cried Clotilde, in the same mood, "and what face had he when he wrote that letter?"
"What face?"
"Yes, what face?"
"I do not know what face you mean," said Aurora.
"What face," repeated Clotilde, "had Monsieur Honoré de Grandissime on the day that he wrote--"
"Ah, f-fah!" cried Aurora, and turned away, "you don't know what you are talking about! You make me wish sometimes that I were dead!"
Clotilde had gone and shut down the sash, as it began to rain hard and blow. As she was turning away, her eye was attracted by an object at a distance.
"What is it?" asked Aurora, from a seat before the fire.
"Nothing," said Clotilde, weary of the sensational,--"a man in the rain."
It was the apothecary of the rue Royale, turning from that street toward the rue Bourbon, and bowing his head against the swirling norther.
Doctor Keene, his ill-humor slept off, lay in bed in a quiescent state of great mental enjoyment. At times he would smile and close his eyes, open them again and murmur to himself, and turn his head languidly and smile again. And when the rain and wind, all tangled together, came against the window with a whirl and a slap, his smile broadened almost to laughter.
"He's in it," he murmured, "he's just reaching there. I would give fifty dollars to see him when he first gets into the house and sees where he is."
As this wish was finding expression on the lips of the little sick man, Joseph Frowenfeld was making room on a narrow doorstep for the outward opening of a pair of small batten doors, upon which he had knocked with the vigorous haste of a man in the rain. As they parted, he hurriedly helped them open, darted within, heedless of the odd black shape which shuffled out of his way, wheeled and clapped them shut again, swung down the bar and then turned, and with the good-natured face that properly goes with a ducking, looked to see where he was.
One object--around which everything else instantly became nothing--set his gaze. On the high bed, whose hangings of blue we have already described, silently regarding the intruder with a pair of eyes that sent an icy thrill through him and fastened him where he stood, lay Palmyre Philosophe. Her dress was a long, snowy morning-gown, wound loosely about at the waist with a cord and tassel of scarlet silk; a bright-colored woollen shawl covered her from the waist down, and a necklace of red coral heightened to its utmost her untamable beauty.
"Silently regarding the intruder with a pair of eyes that sent an icy chill through himand fastened him where he stood, lay Palmyre Philosophe".
An instantaneous indignation against Doctor Keene set the face of the speechless apothecary on fire, and this, being as instantaneously comprehended by the philosophe, was the best of introductions. Yet her gaze did not change.
The Congo negress broke the spell with a bristling protest, all in African b's and k's, but hushed and drew off at a single word of command from her mistress.
In Frowenfeld's mind an angry determination was taking shape, to be neither trifled with nor contemned. And this again the quadroon discerned, before he was himself aware of it.
"Doctor Keene"--he began, but stopped, so uncomfortable were her eyes.
She did not stir or reply.
Then he bethought him with a start, and took off his dripping hat.
At this a perceptible sparkle of imperious approval shot along her glance; it gave the apothecary speech.
"The doctor is sick, and he asked me to dress your wound."
She made the slightest discernible motion of the head, remained for a moment silent, and then, still with the same eye, motioned her hand toward a chair near a comfortable fire.
He sat down. It would be well to dry himself. He drew near the hearth and let his gaze fall into the fire. When he presently lifted his eyes and looked full upon the woman with a steady, candid glance, she was regarding him with apparent coldness, but with secret diligence and scrutiny, and a yet more inward and secret surprise and admiration. Hard rubbing was bringing out the grain of the apothecary. But she presently suppressed the feeling. She hated men.
But Frowenfeld, even while his eyes met hers, could not resent her hostility. This monument of the shame of two races--this poisonous blossom of crime growing out of crime--this final, unanswerable white man's accuser--this would-be murderess--what ranks and companies would have to stand up in the Great Day with her and answer as accessory before the fact! He looked again into the fire.
The patient spoke:
"Eh bi'n, Miché?" Her look was severe, but less aggressive. The shuffle of the old negress's feet was heard and she appeared bearing warm and cold water and fresh bandages; after depositing them she tarried.
"Your fever is gone," said Frowenfeld, standing by the bed. He had laid his fingers on her wrist. She brushed them off and once more turned full upon him the cold hostility of her passionate eyes.
The apothecary, instead of blushing, turned pale.
"You--" he was going to say, "You insult me;" but his lips came tightly together. Two big cords appeared between his brows, and his blue eyes spoke for him. Then, as the returning blood rushed even to his forehead, he said, speaking his words one by one;
"Please understand that you must trust me."
She may not have understood his English, but she comprehended, nevertheless. She looked up fixedly for a moment, then passively closed her eyes. Then she turned, and Frowenfeld put out one strong arm, helped her to a sitting posture on the side of the bed and drew the shawl about her.
"Zizi," she said, and the negress, who had stood perfectly still since depositing the water and bandages, came forward and proceeded to bare the philosophe's superb shoulder. As Frowenfeld again put forward his hand, she lifted her own as if to prevent him, but he kindly and firmly put it away and addressed himself with silent diligence to his task; and by the time he had finished, his womanly touch, his commanding gentleness, his easy despatch, had inspired Palmyre not only with a sense of safety, comfort, and repose, but with a pleased wonder.
This woman had stood all her life with dagger drawn, on the defensive against what certainly was to her an unmerciful world. With possibly one exception, the man now before her was the only one she had ever encountered whose speech and gesture were clearly keyed to that profound respect which is woman's first, foundation claim on man. And yet, by inexorable decree, she belonged to what we used to call "the happiest people under the sun." We ought to stop saying that.
So far as Palmyre knew, the entire masculine wing of the mighty and exalted race, three-fourths of whose blood bequeathed her none of its prerogatives, regarded her as legitimate prey. The man before her did not. There lay the fundamental difference that, in her sight, as soon as she discovered it, glorified him. Before this assurance the cold fierceness of her eyes gave way, and a friendlier light from them rewarded the apothecary's final touch. He called for more pillows, made a nest of them, and, as she let herself softly into it, directed his next consideration toward his hat and the door.
It was many an hour after he had backed out into the trivial remains of the rain-storm before he could replace with more tranquillizing images the vision of the philosophe reclining among her pillows, in the act of making that uneasy movement of her fingers upon the collar button of her robe, which women make when they are uncertain about the perfection of their dishabille, and giving her inaudible adieu with the majesty of an empress.