On the afternoon of the same day on which Frowenfeld visited the house of the philosophe, the weather, which had been so unfavorable to his late plans, changed; the rain ceased, the wind drew around to the south, and the barometer promised a clear sky. Wherefore he decided to leave his business, when he should have made his evening weather notes, to the care of M. Raoul Innerarity, and venture to test both Mademoiselle Clotilde's repellent attitude and Aurora's seeming cordiality at Number 19 rue Bienville.
Why he should go was a question which the apothecary felt himself but partially prepared to answer. What necessity called him, what good was to be effected, what was to happen next, were points he would have liked to be clear upon. That he should be going merely because he was invited to come--merely for the pleasure of breathing their atmosphere--that he should be supinely gravitating toward them--this conclusion he positively could not allow; no, no; the love of books and the fear of women alike protested.
True, they were a part of that book which is pronounced "the proper study of mankind,"--indeed, that was probably the reason which he sought: he was going to contemplate them as a frontispiece to that unwriteable volume which he had undertaken to con. Also, there was a charitable motive. Doctor Keene, months before, had expressed a deep concern regarding their lack of protection and even of daily provision; he must quietly look into that. Would some unforeseen circumstance shut him off this evening again from this very proper use of time and opportunity?
As he was sitting at the table in his back room, registering his sunset observations, and wondering what would become of him if Aurora should be out and that other in, he was startled by a loud, deep voice exclaiming, close behind him:
"Eh, bien! Monsieur le Professeur!"
Frowenfeld knew by the tone, before he looked behind him, that he would find M. Agricola Fusilier very red in the face; and when he looked, the only qualification he could make was that the citizen's countenance was not so ruddy as the red handkerchief in which his arm was hanging.
"What have you there?" slowly continued the patriarch, taking his free hand off his fettered arm and laying it upon the page as Frowenfeld hurriedly rose, and endeavored to shut the book.
"Some private memoranda," answered the meteorologist, managing to get one page turned backward, reddening with confusion and indignation, and noticing that Agricola's spectacles were upside down.
"Private! Eh? No such thing, sir! Professor Frowenfeld, allow me" (a classic oath) "to say to your face, sir, that you are the most brilliant and the most valuable man--of your years--in afflicted Louisiana! Ha!" (reading:) "'Morning observation; Cathedral clock, 7 A.M. Thermometer 70 degrees.' Ha! 'Hygrometer l5'--but this is not to-day's weather? Ah! no. Ha! 'Barometer 30.380.' Ha! 'Sky cloudy, dark; wind, south, light.' Ha! 'River rising.' Ha! Professor Frowenfeld, when will you give your splendid services to your section? You must tell me, my son, for I ask you, my son, not from curiosity, but out of impatient interest."
"I cannot say that I shall ever publish my tables," replied the "son," pulling at the book.
"Then, sir, in the name of Louisiana," thundered the old man, clinging to the book, "I can! They shall be published! Ah! yes, dear Frowenfeld. The book, of course, will be in French, eh? You would not so affront the most sacred prejudices of the noble people to whom you owe everything as to publish it in English? You--ah! have we torn it?"
"I do not write French," said the apothecary, laying the torn edges together.
"Professor Frowenfeld, men are born for each other. What do I behold before me? I behold before me, in the person of my gifted young friend, a supplement to myself! Why has Nature strengthened the soul of Agricola to hold the crumbling fortress of this body until these eyes--which were once, my dear boy, as proud and piercing as the battle-steed's--have become dim?"
Joseph's insurmountable respect for gray hairs kept him standing, but he did not respond with any conjecture as to Nature's intentions, and there was a stern silence.
The crumbling fortress resumed, his voice pitched low like the beginning of the long roll. He knew Nature's design.
"It was in order that you, Professor Frowenfeld, might become my vicar! Your book shall be in French! We must give it a wide scope! It shall contain valuable geographical, topographical, biographical, and historical notes. It shall contain complete lists of all the officials in the province (I don't say territory, I say province) with their salaries and perquisites; ah! we will expose that! And--ha! I will write some political essays for it. Raoul shall illustrate it. Honoré shall give you money to publish it. Ah! Professor Frowenfeld, the star of your fame is rising out of the waves of oblivion! Come--I dropped in purposely to ask you--come across the street and take a glass oftaffiawith Agricola Fusilier."
This crowning honor the apothecary was insane enough to decline, and Agricola went away with many professions of endearment, but secretly offended because Joseph had not asked about his wound.
All the same the apothecary, without loss of time, departed for the yellow-washed cottage, Number 19 rue Bienville.
"To-morrow, at four P.M.," he said to himself, "if the weather is favorable, I ride with M. Grandissime."
He almost saw his books and instruments look up at him reproachfully.
The ladies were at home. Aurora herself opened the door, and Clotilde came forward from the bright fireplace with a cordiality never before so unqualified. There was something about these ladies--in their simple, but noble grace, in their half-Gallic, half-classic beauty, in a jocund buoyancy mated to an amiable dignity--that made them appear to the scholar as though they had just bounded into life from the garlanded procession of some old fresco. The resemblance was not a little helped on by the costume of the late Revolution (most acceptably chastened and belated by the distance from Paris). Their black hair, somewhat heavier on Clotilde's head, where it rippled once or twice, was knotteden Grecque, and adorned only with the spoils of a nosegay given to Clotilde by a chivalric small boy in the home of her music scholar.
"We was expectin' you since several days," said Clotilde, as the three sat down before the fire, Frowenfeld in a cushioned chair whose moth-holes had been carefully darned.
Frowenfeld intimated, with tolerable composure, that matters beyond his control had delayed his coming, beyond his intention.
"You gedd'n' ridge," said Aurora, dropping her wrists across each other.
Frowenfeld, for once, laughed outright, and it seemed so odd in him to do so that both the ladies followed his example. The ambition to be rich had never entered his thought, although in an unemotional, German way, he was prospering in a little city where wealth was daily pouring in, and a man had only to keep step, so to say, to march into possessions.
"You hought to 'ave a mo' larger sto' an' some clerque," pursued Aurora.
The apothecary answered that he was contemplating the enlargement of his present place or removal to a roomier, and that he had already employed an assistant.
"Oo it is, 'Sieur Frowenfel'?"
Clotilde turned toward the questioner a remonstrative glance.
"His name," replied Frowenfeld, betraying a slight embarrassment, "is--Innerarity; Mr. Raoul Innerarity; he is--"
"Ee pain' dad pigtu' w'at 'angin' in yo' window?"
Clotilde's remonstrance rose to a slight movement and a murmur.
Frowenfeld answered in the affirmative, and possibly betrayed the faint shadow of a smile. The response was a peal of laughter from both ladies.
"On their part, they would sit in deep attention, shielding their faces from the fire, and responding to enunciations directly contrary to their convictions with an occasional 'yes-seh,' or 'ceddenly,' or 'of coze,' or,--prettier affirmation still,--a solemn drooping of the eyelids".
"He is an excellent drug clerk," said Frowenfeld defensively.
Whereat Aurora laughed again, leaning over and touching Clotilde's knee with one finger.
"An' excellen' drug cl'--ha, ha, ha! oh!"
"You muz podden uz, M'sieu' Frowenfel'," said Clotilde, with forced gravity.
Aurora sighed her participation in the apology; and, a few moments later, the apothecary and both ladies (the one as fond of the abstract as the other two were ignorant of the concrete) were engaged in an animated, running discussion on art, society, climate, education,--all those large, secondarydesideratawhich seem of first importance to young ambition and secluded beauty, flying to and fro among these subjects with all the liveliness and uncertainty of a game of pussy-wants-a-corner.
Frowenfeld had never before spent such an hour. At its expiration, he had so well held his own against both the others, that the three had settled down to this sort of entertainment: Aurora would make an assertion, or Clotilde would ask a question; and Frowenfeld, moved by that frankness and ardent zeal for truth which had enlisted the early friendship of Dr. Keene, amused and attracted Honoré Grandissime, won the confidence of the f.m.c., and tamed the fiery distrust and enmity of Palmyre, would present his opinions without the thought of a reservation either in himself or his hearers. On their part, they would sit in deep attention, shielding their faces from the fire, and responding to enunciations directly contrary to their convictions with an occasional "yes-seh," or "ceddenly," or "of coze," or,--prettier affirmation still,--a solemn drooping of the eyelids, a slight compression of the lips, and a low, slow declination of the head.
"The bane of all Creole art-effort"--(we take up the apothecary's words at a point where Clotilde was leaning forward and slightly frowning in an honest attempt to comprehend his condensed English)--"the bane of all Creole art-effort, so far as I have seen it, is amateurism."
"Amateu--" murmured Clotilde, a little beclouded on the main word and distracted by a French difference of meaning, but planting an elbow on one knee in the genuineness of her attention, and responding with a bow.
"That is to say," said Frowenfeld, apologizing for the homeliness of his further explanation by a smile, "a kind of ambitious indolence that lays very large eggs, but can neither see the necessity for building a nest beforehand, nor command the patience to hatch the eggs afterward."
"Of coze," said Aurora.
"It is a great pity," said the sermonizer, looking at the face of Clotilde, elongated in the brass andiron; and, after a pause: "Nothing on earth can take the place of hard and patient labor. But that, in this community, is not esteemed; most sorts of it are contemned; the humbler sorts are despised, and the higher are regarded with mingled patronage and commiseration. Most of those who come to my shop with their efforts at art hasten to explain, either that they are merely seeking pastime, or else that they are driven to their course by want; and if I advise them to take their work back and finish it, they take it back and never return. Industry is not only despised, but has been degraded and disgraced, handed over into the hands of African savages."
"Doze Creole' islezzy," said Aurora.
"That is a hard word to apply to those who do notconsciouslydeserve it," said Frowenfeld; "but if they could only wake up to the fact,--find it out themselves--"
"Ceddenly," said Clotilde.
"'Sieur Frowenfel'," said Aurora, leaning her head on one side, "some pipple thing it is doze climade; 'ow you lag doze climade?"
"I do not suppose," replied the visitor, "there is a more delightful climate in the world."
"Ah-h-h!"--both ladies at once, in a low, gracious tone of acknowledgment.
"I thing Louisiana is a paradize-me!" said Aurora. "W'ere you goin' fin' sudge a h-air?" She respired a sample of it. "W'ere you goin' fin' sudge a so ridge groun'? De weed' in my bag yard is twenny-five feet 'igh!"
"Ah! maman!"
"Twenty-six!" said Aurora, correcting herself. "W'ere you fin' sudge a reever lag dad Mississippi?On dit," she said, turning to Clotilde, "que ses eaux ont la propriété de contribuer même à multiplier l'espèce humaine--ha, ha, ha!"
Clotilde turned away an unmoved countenance to hear Frowenfeld.
Frowenfeld had contracted a habit of falling into meditation whenever the French language left him out of the conversation.
"Yes," he said, breaking a contemplative pause, "the climate istoocomfortable and the soil too rich,--though I do not think it is entirely on their account that the people who enjoy them are so sadly in arrears to the civilized world." He blushed with the fear that his talk was bookish, and felt grateful to Clotilde for seeming to understand his speech.
"W'ad you fin' de rizzon is, 'Sieur Frowenfel'?" she asked.
"I do not wish to philosophize," he answered.
"Mais, go hon." "Mais, go ahade," said both ladies, settling themselves.
"It is largely owing," exclaimed Frowenfeld, with sudden fervor, "to a defective organization of society, which keeps this community, and will continue to keep it for an indefinite time to come, entirely unprepared and disinclined to follow the course of modern thought."
"Of coze," murmured Aurora, who had lost her bearings almost at the first word.
"One great general subject of thought now is human rights,--universal human rights. The entire literature of the world is becoming tinctured with contradictions of the dogmas upon which society in this section is built. Human rights is, of all subjects, the one upon which this community is most violently determined to hear no discussion. It has pronounced that slavery and caste are right, and sealed up the whole subject. What, then, will they do with the world's literature? They will coldly decline to look at it, and will become, more and more as the world moves on, a comparatively illiterate people."
"Bud, 'Sieur Frowenfel'," said Clotilde, as Frowenfeld paused--Aurora was stunned to silence,--"de Unitee State' goin' pud doze nigga' free, aind it?"
Frowenfeld pushed his hair hard back. He was in the stream now, and might as well go through.
"I have heard that charge made, even by some Americans. I do not know. But there is a slavery that no legislation can abolish,--the slavery of caste. That, like all the slaveries on earth, is a double bondage. And what a bondage it is which compels a community, in order to preserve its established tyrannies, to walk behind the rest of the intelligent world! What a bondage is that which incites a people to adopt a system of social and civil distinctions, possessing all the enormities and none of the advantages of those systems which Europe is learning to despise! This system, moreover, is only kept up by a flourish of weapons. We have here what you may call an armed aristocracy. The class over which these instruments of main force are held is chosen for its servility, ignorance, and cowardice; hence, indolence in the ruling class. When a man's social or civil standing is not dependent on his knowing how to read, he is not likely to become a scholar."
"Of coze," said Aurora, with a pensive respiration, "I thing id is doze climade," and the apothecary stopped, as a man should who finds himself unloading large philosophy in a little parlor.
"I thing, me, dey hought to pud doze quadroon' free?" It was Clotilde who spoke, ending with the rising inflection to indicate the tentative character of this daringly premature declaration.
Frowenfeld did not answer hastily.
"The quadroons," said he, "want a great deal more than mere free papers can secure them. Emancipation before the law, though it may be a right which man has no right to withhold, is to them little more than a mockery until they achieve emancipation in the minds and good will of the people--'the people,' did I say? I mean the ruling class." He stopped again. One must inevitably feel a little silly, setting up tenpins for ladies who are too polite, even if able, to bowl them down.
Aurora and the visitor began to speak simultaneously; both apologized, and Aurora said:
"'Sieur Frowenfel', w'en I was a lill girl,"--and Frowenfeld knew that he was going to hear the story of Palmyre. Clotilde moved, with the obvious intention to mend the fire. Aurora asked, in French, why she did not call the cook to do it, and Frowenfeld said, "Let me,"--threw on some wood, and took a seat nearer Clotilde. Aurora had the floor.
Alas! the phonograph was invented three-quarters of a century too late. If type could entrap one-half the pretty oddities of Aurora's speech,--the arch, the pathetic, the grave, the earnest, the matter-of-fact, the ecstatic tones of her voice,--nay, could it but reproduce the movement of her hands, the eloquence of her eyes, or the shapings of her mouth,--ah! but type--even the phonograph--is such an inadequate thing! Sometimes she laughed; sometimes Clotilde, unexpectedly to herself, joined her; and twice or thrice she provoked a similar demonstration from the ox-like apothecary,--to her own intense amusement. Sometimes she shook her head in solemn scorn; and, when Frowenfeld, at a certain point where Palmyre's fate locked hands for a time with that of Bras-Coupé, asked a fervid question concerning that strange personage, tears leaped into her eyes, as she said:
"Ah! 'Sieur Frowenfel', iv I tra to tell de sto'y of Bras-Coupé, I goin' to cry lag a lill bebby."
The account of the childhood days upon the plantation at Cannes Brulées may be passed by. It was early in Palmyre's fifteenth year that that Kentuckian, 'mutual friend' of her master and Agricola, prevailed with M. de Grapion to send her to the paternal Grandissime mansion,--a complimentary gift, through Agricola, to Mademoiselle, his niece,--returnable ten years after date.
The journey was made in safety; and, by and by, Palmyre was presented to her new mistress. The occasion was notable. In a great chair in the centre sat thegrandpère, a Chevalier de Grandissime, whose business had narrowed down to sitting on the front veranda and wearing his decorations,--the cross of St. Louis being one; on his right, Colonel Numa Grandissime, with one arm dropped around Honoré, then a boy of Palmyre's age, expecting to be off in sixty days for France; and on the left, with Honoré's fair sister nestled against her, "Madame Numa," as the Creoles would call her, a stately woman and beautiful, a great admirer of her brother Agricola. (Aurora took pains to explain that she received these minutiae from Palmyre herself in later years.) One other member of the group was a young don of some twenty years' age, not an inmate of the house, but only a cousin of Aurora on her deceased mother's side. To make the affair complete, and as a seal to this tacit Grandissime-de-Grapion treaty, this sole available representative of the "other side" was made a guest for the evening. Like the true Spaniard that he was, Don José Martinez fell deeply in love with Honoré's sister. Then there came Agricola leading in Palmyre. There were others, for the Grandissime mansion was always full of Grandissimes; but this was the central group.
In this house Palmyre grew to womanhood, retaining without interruption the place into which she seemed to enter by right of indisputable superiority over all competitors,--the place of favorite attendant to the sister of Honoré. Attendant, we say, for servant she never seemed. She grew tall, arrowy, lithe, imperial, diligent, neat, thorough, silent. Her new mistress, though scarcely at all her senior, was yet distinctly her mistress; she had that through her Fusilier blood; experience was just then beginning to show that the Fusilier Grandissime was a superb variety; she was a mistress one could wish to obey. Palmyre loved her, and through her contact ceased, for a time, at least, to be the pet leopard she had been at the Cannes Brulées.
Honoré went away to Paris only sixty days after Palmyre entered the house. But even that was not soon enough.
"'Sieur Frowenfel'," said Aurora, in her recital, "Palmyre, she never tole me dad,maisI am shoe,shoedad she fall in love wid Honoré Grandissime. 'Sieur Frowenfel', I thing dad Honoré Grandissime is one bad man, ent it? Whad you thing, 'Sieur Frowenfel'?"
"I think, as I said to you the last time, that he is one of the best, as I know that he is one of the kindest and most enlightened gentlemen in the city," said the apothecary.
"Ah, 'Sieur Frowenfel'! ha, ha!"
"That is my conviction."
The lady went on with her story.
"Hanny'ow, I know shecontinue in love wid 'im all doze ten year' w'at 'e been gone. She baig Mademoiselle Grandissime to wrad dad ledder to my papa to ass to kip her two years mo'."
Here Aurora carefully omitted that episode which Doctor Keene had related to Frowenfeld,--her own marriage and removal to Fausse Rivière, the visit of her husband to the city, his unfortunate and finally fatal affair with Agricola, and the surrender of all her land and slaves to that successful duellist.
M. de Grapion, through all that, stood by his engagement concerning Palmyre; and, at the end of ten years, to his own astonishment, responded favorably to a letter from Honoré's sister, irresistible for its goodness, good sense, and eloquent pleading, asking leave to detain Palmyre two years longer; but this response came only after the old master and his pretty, stricken Aurora had wept over it until they were weak and gentle,--and was not a response either, but only a silent consent.
Shortly before the return of Honoré--and here it was that Aurora took up again the thread of her account--while his mother, long-widowed, reigned in the paternal mansion, with Agricola for her manager, Bras-Coupé appeared. From that advent, and the long and varied mental sufferings which its consequences brought upon her, sprang that second change in Palmyre, which made her finally untamable, and ended in a manumission, granted her more for fear than for conscience' sake. When Aurora attempted to tell those experiences, even leaving Bras-Coupé as much as might be out of the recital, she choked with tears at the very start, stopped, laughed, and said:
"C'est tout--daz all. 'Sieur Frowenfel', oo you fine dad pigtu' to loog lag, yonnah, hon de wall?"
She spoke as if he might have overlooked it, though twenty times, at least, in the last hour, she had seen him glance at it.
"It is a good likeness," said the apothecary, turning to Clotilde, yet showing himself somewhat puzzled in the matter of the costume.
The ladies laughed.
"Daz ma grade-gran'-mamma," said Clotilde.
"Dass onefille à la cassette," said Aurora, "my gran'-muzzah;mais, ad de sem tarn id is Clotilde." She touched her daughter under the chin with a ringed finger. "Clotilde is my gran'-mamma."
Frowenfeld rose to go.
"You muz come again, 'Sieur Frowenfel'," said both ladies, in a breath.
What could he say?
"Douane or Bienville?"
Such was the choice presented by Honoré Grandissime to Joseph Frowenfeld, as the former on a lively brown colt and the apothecary on a nervy chestnut fell into a gentle, preliminary trot while yet in the rue Royale, looked after by that great admirer of both, Raoul Innerarity.
"Douane?" said Frowenfeld. (It was the street we call Custom-house.)
"It has mud-holes," objected Honoré.
"Well, then, the rue du Canal?"
"The canal--I can smell it from here. Why not rue Bienville?"
Frowenfeld said he did not know. (We give the statement for what it is worth.)
Notice their route. A spirit of perversity seems to have entered into the very topography of this quarter. They turned up the rue Bienville (up is toward the river); reaching the levee, they took their course up the shore of the Mississippi (almost due south), and broke into a lively gallop on the Tchoupitoulas road, which in those days skirted that margin of the river nearest the sunsetting, namely, theeasternbank.
Conversation moved sluggishly for a time, halting upon trite topics or swinging easily from polite inquiry to mild affirmation, and back again. They were men of thought, these two, and one of them did not fully understand why he was in his present position; hence some reticence. It was one of those afternoons in early March that make one wonder how the rest of the world avoids emigrating to Louisiana in a body.
"Is not the season early?" asked Frowenfeld.
M. Grandissime believed it was; but then the Creole spring always seemed so, he said.
The land was an inverted firmament of flowers. The birds were an innumerable, busy, joy-compelling multitude, darting and fluttering hither and thither, as one might imagine the babes do in heaven. The orange-groves were in blossom; their dark-green boughs seemed snowed upon from a cloud of incense, and a listening ear might catch an incessant, whispered trickle of falling petals, dropping "as the honey-comb." The magnolia was beginning to add to its dark and shining evergreen foliage frequent sprays of pale new leaves and long, slender, buff buds of others yet to come. The oaks, both the bare-armed and the "green-robed senators," the willows, and the plaqueminiers, were putting out their subdued florescence as if they smiled in grave participation with the laughing gardens. The homes that gave perfection to this beauty were those old, large, belvidered colonial villas, of which you may still here and there see one standing, battered into half ruin, high and broad, among foundries, cotton-and tobacco-sheds, junk-yards, and longshoremen's hovels, like one unconquered elephant in a wreck of artillery. In Frowenfeld's day the "smell of their garments was like Lebanon." They were seen by glimpses through chance openings in lofty hedges of Cherokee-rose or bois-d'arc, under boughs of cedar or pride-of-China, above their groves of orange or down their long, overarched avenues of oleander; and the lemon and the pomegranate, the banana, the fig, the shaddock, and at times even the mango and the guava, joined "hands around" and tossed their fragrant locks above the lilies and roses. Frowenfeld forgot to ask himself further concerning the probable intent of M. Grandissime's invitation to ride; these beauties seemed rich enough in good reasons. He felt glad and grateful.
At a certain point the two horses turned of their own impulse, as by force of habit, and with a few clambering strides mounted to the top of the levee and stood still, facing the broad, dancing, hurrying, brimming river.
The Creole stole an amused glance at the elated, self-forgetful look of his immigrant friend.
"Mr. Frowenfeld," he said, as the delighted apothecary turned with unwonted suddenness and saw his smile, "I believe you like this better than discussion. You find it easier to be in harmony with Louisiana than with Louisianians, eh?"
Frowenfeld colored with surprise. Something unpleasant had lately occurred in his shop. Was this to signify that M. Grandissime had heard of it?
"I am a Louisianian," replied he, as if this were a point assailed.
"I would not insinuate otherwise," said M. Grandissime, with a kindly gesture. "I would like you to feel so. We are citizens now of a different government from that under which we lived the morning we first met. Yet"--the Creole paused and smiled--"you are not, and I am glad you are not, what we call a Louisianian."
Frowenfeld's color increased. He turned quickly in his saddle as if to say something very positive, but hesitated, restrained himself and asked:
"Mr. Grandissime, is not your Creole 'we' a word that does much damage?"
The Creole's response was at first only a smile, followed by a thoughtful countenance; but he presently said, with some suddenness:
"My-de'-seh, yes. Yet you see I am, even this moment, forgetting we are not a separate people. Yes, our Creole 'we' does damage, and our Creole 'you' does more. I assure you, sir, I try hard to get my people to understand that it is time to stop calling those who come and add themselves to the community, aliens, interlopers, invaders. That is what I hear my cousins, 'Polyte and Sylvestre, in the heat of discussion, called you the other evening; is it so?"
"I brought it upon myself," said Frowenfeld. "I brought it upon myself."
"Ah!" interrupted M. Grandissime, with a broad smile, "excuse me--I am fully prepared to believe it. But the charge is a false one. I told them so. My-de'-seh--I know that a citizen of the United States in the United States has a right to become, and to be called, under the laws governing the case, a Louisianian, a Vermonter, or a Virginian, as it may suit his whim; and even if he should be found dishonest or dangerous, he has a right to be treated just exactly as we treat the knaves and ruffians who are native born! Every discreet man must admit that."
"But if they do not enforce it, Mr. Grandissime," quickly responded the sore apothecary, "if they continually forget it--if one must surrender himself to the errors and crimes of the community as he finds it--"
The Creole uttered a low laugh.
"Party differences, Mr. Frowenfeld; they have them in all countries."
"So your cousins said," said Frowenfeld.
"And how did you answer them?"
"Offensively," said the apothecary, with sincere mortification.
"Oh! that was easy," replied the other, amusedly; "but how?"
"I said that, having here only such party differences as are common elsewhere, we do not behave as they elsewhere do; that in most civilized countries the immigrant is welcome, but here he is not. I am afraid I have not learned the art of courteous debate," said Frowenfeld, with a smile of apology.
"'Tis a great art," said the Creole, quietly, stroking his horse's neck. "I suppose my cousins denied your statement with indignation, eh?"
"Yes; they said the honest immigrant is always welcome."
"Well, do you not find that true?"
"But, Mr. Grandissime, that is requiring the immigrant to prove his innocence!" Frowenfeld spoke from the heart. "And even the honest immigrant is welcome only when he leaves his peculiar opinions behind him. Is that right, sir?"
The Creole smiled at Frowenfeld's heat.
"My-de'-seh, my cousins complain that you advocate measures fatal to the prevailing order of society."
"But," replied the unyielding Frowenfeld, turning redder than ever, "that is the very thing that American liberty gives me the right--peaceably--to do! Here is a structure of society defective, dangerous, erected on views of human relations which the world is abandoning as false; yet the immigrant's welcome is modified with the warning not to touch these false foundations with one of his fingers."
"Did you tell my cousins the foundations of society here are false?"
"I regret to say I did, very abruptly. I told them they were privately aware of the fact."
"You may say," said the ever-amiable Creole, "that you allowed debate to run into controversy, eh?"
Frowenfeld was silent; he compared the gentleness of this Creole's rebukes with the asperity of his advocacy of right, and felt humiliated. But M. Grandissime spoke with a rallying smile.
"Mr. Frowenfeld, you never make pills with eight corners eh?"
"No, sir." The apothecary smiled.
"No, you make them round; cannot you make your doctrines the same way? My-de'-seh, you will think me impertinent; but the reason I speak is because I wish very much that you and my cousins would not be offended with each other. To tell you the truth, my-de'-seh, I hoped to use you with them--pardon my frankness."
"If Louisiana had more men like you, M. Grandissime," cried the untrained Frowenfeld, "society would be less sore to the touch."
"My-de'-seh," said the Creole, laying his hand out toward his companion and turning his horse in such a way as to turn the other also, "do me one favor; remember that itissore to the touch."
The animals picked their steps down the inner face of the levee and resumed their course up the road at a walk.
"Did you see that man just turn the bend of the road, away yonder?" the Creole asked.
"Yes."
"Did you recognize him?"
"It was--my landlord, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Did he not have a conversation with you lately, too?"
"Yes, sir; why do you ask?"
"It has had a bad effect on him. I wonder why he is out here on foot?"
The horses quickened their paces. The two friends rode along in silence. Frowenfeld noticed his companion frequently cast an eye up along the distant sunset shadows of the road with a new anxiety. Yet, when M. Grandissime broke the silence it was only to say:
"I suppose you find the blemishes in our state of society can all be attributed to one main defect, Mr. Frowenfeld?"
Frowenfeld was glad of the chance to answer:
"I have not overlooked that this society has disadvantages as well as blemishes; it is distant from enlightened centres; it has a language and religion different from that of the great people of which it is now called to be a part. That it has also positive blemishes of organism--"
"Yes," interrupted the Creole, smiling at the immigrant's sudden magnanimity, "its positive blemishes; do they all spring from one main defect?"
"I think not. The climate has its influence, the soil has its influence--dwellers in swamps cannot be mountaineers."
"But after all," persisted the Creole, "the greater part of our troubles comes from--"
"Slavery," said Frowenfeld, "or rather caste."
"Exactly," said M. Grandissime.
"You surprise me, sir," said the simple apothecary. "I supposed you were--"
"My-de'-seh," exclaimed M. Grandissime, suddenly becoming very earnest, "I am nothing, nothing! There is where you have the advantage of me. I am but adilettante, whether in politics, in philosophy, morals, or religion. I am afraid to go deeply into anything, lest it should make ruin in my name, my family, my property."
He laughed unpleasantly.
The question darted into Frowenfeld's mind, whether this might not be a hint of the matter that M. Grandissime had been trying to see him about.
"Mr. Grandissime," he said, "I can hardly believe you would neglect a duty either for family, property, or society."
"Well, you mistake," said the Creole, so coldly that Frowenfeld colored.
They galloped on. M. Grandissime brightened again, almost to the degree of vivacity. By and by they slackened to a slow trot and were silent. The gardens had been long left behind, and they were passing between continuous Cherokee-rose hedges on the right and on the left, along that bend of the Mississippi where its waters, glancing off three miles above from the old De Macarty levee (now Carrollton), at the slightest opposition in the breeze go whirling and leaping like a herd of dervishes across to the ever-crumbling shore, now marked by the little yellow depot-house of Westwego. Miles up the broad flood the sun was disappearing gorgeously. From their saddles, the two horsemen feasted on the scene without comment.
But presently, M. Grandissime uttered a low ejaculation and spurred his horse toward a tree hard by, preparing, as he went, to fasten his rein to an overhanging branch. Frowenfeld, agreeable to his beckon, imitated the movement.
"I fear he intends to drown himself," whispered M. Grandissime, as they hurriedly dismounted.
"Who? Not--"
"Yes, your landlord, as you call him. He is on the flatboat; I saw his hat over the levee. When we get on top the levee, we must get right into it. But do not follow him into the water in front of the flat; it is certain death; no power of man could keep you from going under it."
The words were quickly spoken; they scrambled to the levee's crown. Just abreast of them lay a flatboat, emptied of its cargo and moored to the levee. They leaped into it. A human figure swerved from the onset of the Creole and ran toward the bow of the boat, and in an instant more would have been in the river.
"Stop!" said Frowenfeld, seizing the unresisting f.m.c. firmly by the collar.
Honoré Grandissime smiled, partly at the apothecary's brief speech, but much more at his success.
"Let him go, Mr. Frowenfeld," he said, as he came near.
The silent man turned away his face with a gesture of shame.
M. Grandissime, in a gentle voice, exchanged a few words with him, and he turned and walked away, gained the shore, descended the levee, and took a foot-path which soon hid him behind a hedge.
"He gives his pledge not to try again," said the Creole, as the two companions proceeded to resume the saddle. "Do not look after him." (Joseph had cast a searching look over the hedge.)
They turned homeward.
"Ah! Mr. Frowenfeld," said the Creole, suddenly, "if theimmygranthas cause of complaint, how much more hasthatman! True, it is only love for which he would have just now drowned himself; yet what an accusation, my-de'-seh, is his whole life against that 'caste' which shuts him up within its narrow and almost solitary limits! And yet, Mr. Frowenfeld, this people esteem this very same crime of caste the holiest and most precious of their virtues. My-de'-seh, it never occurs to us that in this matter we are interested, and therefore disqualified, witnesses. We say we are not understood; that the jury (the civilized world) renders its decision without viewing the body; that we are judged from a distance. We forget that we ourselves are toocloseto see distinctly, and so continue, a spectacle to civilization, sitting in a horrible darkness, my-de'-seh!" He frowned.
"The shadow of the Ethiopian," said the grave apothecary.
M. Grandissime's quick gesture implied that Frowenfeld had said the very word.
"Ah! my-de'-seh, when I try sometimes to stand outside and look at it, I amama-azeat the length, the blackness of that shadow!" (He was so deeply in earnest that he took no care of his English.) "It is theNémésisw'ich, instead of coming afteh, glides along by the side of this morhal, political, commercial, social mistake! It blanches, my-de'-seh, ow whole civilization! It drhags us a centurhy behind the rhes' of the world! It rhetahds and poisons everhy industrhy we got!--mos' of all our-h immense agrhicultu'e! It brheeds a thousan' cusses that nevva leave home but jus' flutter-h up an' rhoost, my-de'-seh, on owheads; an' we nevva know it!--yes, sometimes some of us know it."
He changed the subject.
They had repassed the ruins of Fort St. Louis, and were well within the precincts of the little city, when, as they pulled up from a final gallop, mention was made of Doctor Keene. He was improving; Honoré had seen him that morning; so, at another hour, had Frowenfeld. Doctor Keene had told Honoré about Palmyre's wound.
"You was at her house again this morning?" asked the Creole.
"Yes," said Frowenfeld.
M. Grandissime shook his head warningly.
"'Tis a dangerous business. You are almost sure to become the object of slander. You ought to tell Doctor Keene to make some other arrangement, or presently you, too, will be under the--" he lowered his voice, for Frowenfeld was dismounting at the shop door, and three or four acquaintances stood around--"under the 'shadow of the Ethiopian.'"
Sojourners in New Orleans who take their afternoon drive down Esplanade street will notice, across on the right, between it and that sorry streak once fondly known as Champs Élysées, two or three large, old houses, rising above the general surroundings and displaying architectural features which identify them with an irrevocable past--a past when the faithful and true Creole could, without fear of contradiction, express his religious belief that the antipathy he felt for the Américain invader was an inborn horror laid lengthwise in his ante-natal bones by a discriminating and appreciative Providence. There is, for instance, or was until lately, one house which some hundred and fifteen years ago was the suburban residence of the old sea-captain governor, Kerlerec. It stands up among the oranges as silent and gray as a pelican, and, so far as we know, has never had one cypress plank added or subtracted since its master was called to France and thrown into the Bastile. Another has two dormer windows looking out westward, and, when the setting sun strikes the panes, reminds one of a man with spectacles standing up in an audience, searching for a friend who is not there and will never come back. These houses are the last remaining--if, indeed, they were not pulled down yesterday--of a group that once marked from afar the direction of the old highway between the city's walls and the suburb St. Jean. Here clustered the earlier aristocracy of the colony; all that pretty crew of counts, chevaliers, marquises, colonels, dons, etc., who loved their kings, and especially their kings' moneys, with anabandonwhich affected the accuracy of nearly all their accounts.
Among these stood the great mother-mansion of the Grandissimes. Do not look for it now; it is quite gone. The round, white-plastered brick pillars which held the house fifteen feet up from the reeking ground and rose on loftily to sustain the great overspreading roof, or clustered in the cool, paved basement; the lofty halls, with their multitudinous glitter of gilded brass and twinkle of sweet-smelling wax-candles; the immense encircling veranda, where twenty Creole girls might walk abreast; the great front stairs, descending from the veranda to the garden, with a lofty palm on either side, on whose broad steps forty Grandissimes could gather on a birthday afternoon; and the belvidere, whence you could see the cathedral, the Ursulines', the governor's mansion, and the river, far away, shining between the villas of Tchoupitoulas Coast--all have disappeared as entirely beyond recall as the flowers that bloomed in the gardens on the day of thisfête de grandpère.
Odd to say, it was not the grandpère's birthday that had passed. For weeks the happy children of the many Grandissime branches--the Mandarins, the St. Blancards, the Brahmins--had been standing with their uplifted arms apart, awaiting the signal to clap hands and jump, and still, from week to week, the appointed day had been made to fall back, and fall back before--what think you?--an inability to understand Honoré.
It was a sad paradox in the history of this majestic old house that her best child gave her the most annoyance; but it had long been so. Even in Honoré's early youth, a scant two years after she had watched him, over the tops of her green myrtles and white and crimson oleanders, go away, a lad of fifteen, supposing he would of course come back a Grandissime of the Grandissimes--an inflexible of the inflexibles--he was found "inciting" (so the stately dames and officials who graced her front veranda called it) a Grandissime-De Grapion reconciliation by means of transatlantic letters, and reducing the flames of the old feud, rekindled by the Fusilier-Nancanou duel, to a little foul smoke. The main difficulty seemed to be that Honoré could not be satisfied with a clean conscience as to his own deeds and the peace and fellowships of single households; his longing was, and had ever been-- he had inherited it from his father--to see one unbroken and harmonious Grandissime family gathering yearly under this venerated roof without reproach before all persons, classes, and races with whom they had ever had to do. It was not hard for the old mansion to forgive him once or twice; but she had had to do it often. It seems no over-stretch of fancy to say she sometimes gazed down upon his erring ways with a look of patient sadness in her large and beautiful windows.
And how had that forbearance been rewarded? Take one short instance: when, seven years before this presentfête de grandpère, he came back from Europe, and she (this old home which we cannot help but personify), though in trouble then--a trouble that sent up the old feud flames again--opened her halls to rejoice in him with the joy of all her gathered families, he presently said such strange things in favor of indiscriminate human freedom that for very shame's sake she hushed them up, in the fond hope that he would outgrow such heresies. But he? On top of all the rest, he declined a military commission and engaged in commerce--"shopkeeping,parbleu!"
However, therein was developed a grain of consolation. Honoré became--as he chose to call it--more prudent. With much tact, Agricola was amiably crowded off the dictator's chair, to become, instead, a sort of seneschal. For a time the family peace was perfect, and Honoré, by a touch here to-day and a word there to-morrow, was ever lifting the name, and all who bore it, a little and a little higher; when suddenly, as in his father's day--that dear Numa who knew how to sacrifice his very soul, as a sort of Iphigenia for the propitiation of the family gods--as in Numa's day came the cession to Spain, so now fell this other cession, like an unexpected tornado, threatening the wreck of her children's slave-schooners and the prostration alike of their slave-made crops and their Spanish liberties; and just in the fateful moment where Numa would have stood by her, Honoré had let go. Ah, it was bitter!
"See what foreign education does!" cried a Mandarin de Grandissime of the Baton Rouge Coast. "I am sorry now"--derisively--"that I never sentmyboy to France, am I not? No! No-o-o! I would rather my son should never know how to read, than that he should come back from Paris repudiating the sentiments and prejudices of his own father. Is education better than family peace? Ah, bah! My son make friends with Américains and tell me they--that call a negro 'monsieur'--are as good as his father? But that is what we get for letting Honoré become a merchant. Ha! the degradation! Shaking hands with men who do not believe in the slave trade! Shake hands? Yes; associate--fraternize! with apothecaries and negrophiles. And now we are invited to meet at thefête de grandpère, in the house where he is really the chief--thecaçique!"
No! The family would not come together on the first appointment; no, nor on the second; no, not if the grandpapa did express his wish; no, nor on the third--nor on the fourth.
"Non, Messieurs!" cried both youth and reckless age; and, sometimes, also, the stronger heads of the family, the men of means, of force and of influence, urged on from behind by their proud and beautiful wives and daughters.
Arms, generally, rather than heads, ruled there in those days. Sentiments (which are the real laws) took shape in accordance with the poetry, rather than the reason, of things, and the community recognized the supreme domination of "the gentleman" in questions of right and of "the ladies" in matters of sentiment. Under such conditions strength establishes over weakness a showy protection which is the subtlest of tyrannies, yet which, in the very moment of extending its arm over woman, confers upon her a power which a truer freedom would only diminish; constitutes her in a large degree an autocrat of public sentiment and thus accepts her narrowest prejudices and most belated errors as veriest need-be's of social life.
The clans classified easily into three groups; there were those who boiled, those who stewed, and those who merely steamed under a close cover. The men in the first two groups were, for the most part, those who were holding office under old Spanish commissions, and were daily expecting themselves to be displaced and Louisiana thereby ruined. The steaming ones were a goodly fraction of the family--the timid, the apathetic, the "conservative." The conservatives found ease better than exactitude, the trouble of thinking great, the agony of deciding harrowing, and the alternative of smiling cynically and being liberal so much easier--and the warm weather coming on with a rapidity-wearying to contemplate.
"The Yankee was an inferior animal."
"Certainly."
"But Honoré had a right to his convictions."
"Yes, that was so, too."
"It looked very traitorous, however."
"Yes, so it did."
"Nevertheless, it might turn out that Honoré was advancing the true interests of his people."
"Very likely."
"It would not do to accept office under the Yankee government."
"Of course not."
"Yet it would never do to let the Yankees get the offices, either."
"That was true; nobody could deny that."
"If Spain or France got the country back, they would certainly remember and reward those who had held out faithfully."
"Certainly! That was an old habit with France and Spain."
"But if they did not get the country back--"
"Yes, that is so; Honoré is a very good fellow, and--"
And, one after another, under the mild coolness of Honoré's amiable disregard, their indignation trickled back from steam to water, and they went on drawing their stipends, some in Honoré's counting-room, where they held positions, some from the provisional government, which had as yet made but few changes, and some, secretly, from the cunning Casa-Calvo; for, blow the wind east or blow the wind west, the affinity of the average Grandissime for a salary abideth forever.
Then, at the right moment, Honoré made a single happy stroke, and even the hot Grandissimes, they of the interior parishes and they of Agricola's squadron, slaked and crumbled when he wrote each a letter saying that the governor was about to send them appointments, and that it would be well, if they wished toevadethem, to write the governor at once, surrendering their present commissions. Well! Evade? They would evade nothing! Do you think they would so belittle themselves as to write to the usurper? They would submit to keep the positions first.
But the next move was Honoré's making the whole town aware of his apostasy. The great mansion, with the old grandpère sitting out in front, shivered. As we have seen, he had ridden through the Place d'Armes with the arch-usurper himself. Yet, after all, a Grandissime would be a Grandissime still; whatever he did he did openly. And wasn't that glorious--never to be ashamed of anything, no matter how bad? It was not everyone who could ride with the governor.
And blood was so much thicker than vinegar that the family, that would not meet either in January or February, met in the first week of March, every constituent one of them.
The feast has been eaten. The garden now is joyous with children and the veranda resplendent with ladies. From among the latter the eye quickly selects one. She is perceptibly taller than the others; she sits in their midst near the great hall entrance; and as you look at her there is no claim of ancestry the Grandissimes can make which you would not allow. Her hair, once black, now lifted up into a glistening snow-drift, augments the majesty of a still beautiful face, while her full stature and stately bearing suggest the finer parts of Agricola, her brother. It is Madame Grandissime, the mother of Honoré.
One who sits at her left, and is very small, is a favorite cousin. On her right is her daughter, the widowed señora of José Martinez; she has wonderful black hair and a white brow as wonderful. The commanding carriage of the mother is tempered in her to a gentle dignity and calm, contrasting pointedly with the animated manners of the courtly matrons among whom she sits, and whose continuous conversation takes this direction or that, at the pleasure of Madame Grandissime.
But if you can command your powers of attention, despite those children who are shouting Creole French and sliding down the rails of the front stair, turn the eye to the laughing squadron of beautiful girls, which every few minutes, at an end of the veranda, appears, wheels and disappears, and you note, as it were by flashes, the characteristics of face and figure that mark the Louisianaises in the perfection of the new-blown flower. You see that blondes are not impossible; there, indeed, are two sisters who might be undistinguishable twins but that one has blue eyes and golden hair. You note the exquisite pencilling of their eyebrows, here and there some heavier and more velvety, where a less vivacious expression betrays a share of Spanish blood. As Grandissimes, you mark their tendency to exceed the medium Creole stature, an appearance heightened by the fashion of their robes. There is scarcely a rose in all their cheeks, and a full red-ripeness of the lips would hardly be in keeping; but there is plenty of life in their eyes, which glance out between the curtains of their long lashes with a merry dancing that keeps time to the prattle of tongues. You are not able to get a straight look into them, and if you could you would see only your own image cast back in pitiful miniature; but you turn away and feel, as you fortify yourself with an inward smile, that they know you, you man, through and through, like a little song. And in turning, your sight is glad to rest again on the face of Honoré's mother. You see, this time, that sheishis mother, by a charm you had overlooked, a candid, serene and lovable smile. It is the wonder of those who see that smile that she can ever be harsh.
The playful, mock-martial tread of the delicate Creole feet is all at once swallowed up by the sound of many heavier steps in the hall, and the fathers, grandfathers, sons, brothers, uncles and nephews of the great family come out, not a man of them that cannot, with a little care, keep on his feet. Their descendants of the present day sip from shallower glasses and with less marked results.
The matrons, rising, offer the chief seat to the first comer, the great-grandsire--the oldest living Grandissime--Alcibiade, a shaken but unfallen monument of early colonial days, a browned and corrugated souvenir of De Vaudreuil's pomps, of O'Reilly's iron rule, of Galvez' brilliant wars--a man who had seen Bienville and Zephyr Grandissime. With what splendor of manner Madame Fusilier de Grandissime offers, and he accepts, the place of honor! Before he sits down he pauses a moment to hear out the companion on whose arm he had been leaning. But Théophile, a dark, graceful youth of eighteen, though he is recounting something with all the oblivious ardor of his kind, becomes instantly silent, bows with grave deference to the ladies, hands the aged forefather gracefully to his seat, and turning, recommences the recital before one who hears all with the same perfect courtesy--his beloved cousin Honoré.
Meanwhile, the gentlemen throng out. Gallant crew! These are they who have been pausing proudly week after week in an endeavor (?) to understand the opaque motives of Numa's son.
In the middle of the veranda pauses a tall, muscular man of fifty, with the usual smooth face and an iron-gray queue. That is Colonel Agamemnon Brahmin de Grandissime, purveyor to the family's military pride, conservator of its military glory, and, after Honoré, the most admired of the name. Achille Grandissime, he who took Agricola away from Frowenfeld's shop in the carriage, essays to engage Agamemnon in conversation, and the colonel, with a glance at his kinsman's nether limbs and another at his own, and with that placid facility with which the graver sort of Creoles take up the trivial topics of the lighter, grapples the subject of boots. A tall, bronzed, slender young man, who prefixes to Grandissime the maternal St. Blancard, asks where his wife is, is answered from a distance, throws her a kiss and sits down on a step, with Jean Baptiste de Grandissime, a piratical-looking black-beard, above him, and Alphonse Mandarin, an olive-skinned boy, below. Valentine Grandissime, of Tchoupitoulas, goes quite down to the bottom of the steps and leans against the balustrade. He is a large, broad-shouldered, well-built man, and, as he stands smoking a cigar, with his black-stockinged legs crossed, he glances at the sky with the eye of a hunter--or, it may be, of a sailor.
"Valentine will not marry," says one of two ladies who lean over the rail of the veranda above. "I wonder why."
The other fixes on her a meaning look, and she twitches her shoulders and pouts, seeing she has asked a foolish question, the answer to which would only put Valentine in a numerous class and do him no credit.
Such were the choice spirits of the family. Agricola had retired. Raoul was there; his pretty auburn head might have been seen about half-way up the steps, close to one well sprinkled with premature gray.
"No such thing!" exclaimed his companion.
(The conversation was entirely in Creole French.)
"I give you my sacred word of honor!" cried Raoul.
"That Honoré is having all his business carried on in English?" asked the incredulous Sylvestre. (Such was his name.)
"I swear--" replied Raoul, resorting to his favorite pledge--"on a stack of Bibles that high!"
"Ah-h-h-h, pf-f-f-f-f!"
This polite expression of unbelief was further emphasized by a spasmodic flirt of one hand, with the thumb pointed outward.
"Ask him! ask him!" cried Raoul.
"Honoré!" called Sylvestre, rising up. Two or three persons passed the call around the corner of the veranda.
Honoré came with a chain of six girls on either arm. By the time he arrived, there was a Babel of discussion.
"Raoul says you have ordered all your books and accounts to be written in English," said Sylvestre.
"Well?"
"It is not true, is it?"
"Yes."
The entire veranda of ladies raised one long-drawn, deprecatory "Ah!" except Honoré's mother. She turned upon him a look of silent but intense and indignant disappointment.
"Honoré!" cried Sylvestre, desirous of repairing his defeat, "Honoré!"
But Honoré was receiving the clamorous abuse of the two half dozens of girls.
"Honoré!" cried Sylvestre again, holding up a torn scrap of writing-paper which bore the marks of the counting-room floor and of a boot-heel, "how do you spell 'la-dee?'"
There was a moment's hush to hear the answer.
"Ask Valentine," said Honoré.
Everybody laughed aloud. That taciturn man's only retort was to survey the company above him with an unmoved countenance, and to push the ashes slowly from his cigar with his little finger. M. Valentine Grandissime, of Tchoupitoulas, could not read.
"Show it to Agricola," cried two or three, as that great man came out upon the veranda, heavy-eyed, and with tumbled hair.
Sylvestre, spying Agricola's head beyond the ladies, put the question.
"How is it spelled on that paper?" retorted the king of beasts.
"L-a-y--"
"Ignoramus!" growled the old man.
"I did not spell it," cried Raoul, and attempted to seize the paper. But Sylvestre throwing his hand behind him, a lady snatched the paper, two or three cried "Give it to Agricola!" and a pretty boy, whom the laughter and excitement had lured from the garden, scampered up the steps and handed it to the old man.
"Honoré!" cried Raoul, "it must not be read. It is one of your private matters."
But Raoul's insinuation that anybody would entrust him with a private matter brought another laugh.
Honoré nodded to his uncle to read it out, and those who could not understand English, as well as those who could, listened. It was a paper Sylvestre had picked out of a waste-basket on the day of Aurore's visit to the counting-room. Agricola read:
"What is that layde want in thare with Honoré?""Honoré is goin giv her bac that proprety--that isAurore De Grapion what Agricola kill the husband."
That was the whole writing, but Agricola never finished. He was reading aloud--"that is Aurore De Grap--"
At that moment he dropped the paper and blackened with wrath; a sharp flash of astonishment ran through the company; an instant of silence followed and Agricola's thundering voice rolled down upon Sylvestre in a succession of terrible imprecations.
It was painful to see the young man's face as, speechless, he received this abuse. He stood pale and frightened, with a smile playing about his mouth, half of distress and half of defiance, that said as plain as a smile could say, "Uncle Agricola, you will have to pay for this mistake."
As the old man ceased, Sylvestre turned and cast a look downward to Valentine Grandissime, then walked up the steps, and passing with a courteous bow through the group that surrounded Agricola, went into the house. Valentine looked at the zenith, then at his shoe-buckles, tossed his cigar quietly into the grass and passed around a corner of the house to meet Sylvestre in the rear.
Honoré had already nodded to his uncle to come aside with him, and Agricola had done so. The rest of the company, save a few male figures down in the garden, after some feeble efforts to keep up their spirits on the veranda, remarked the growing coolness or the waning daylight, and singly or in pairs withdrew. It was not long before Raoul, who had come up upon the veranda, was left alone. He seemed to wait for something, as, leaning over the rail while the stars came out, he sang to himself, in a soft undertone, a snatch of a Creole song:
"La pluie--la pluie tombait,Crapaud criait,Moustique chantait--"
The moon shone so brightly that the children in the garden did not break off their hide-and-seek, and now and then Raoul suspended the murmur of his song, absorbed in the fate of some little elf gliding from one black shadow to crouch in another. He was himself in the deep shade of a magnolia, over whose outer boughs the moonlight was trickling, as if the whole tree had been dipped in quicksilver.
In the broad walk running down to the garden gate some six or seven dark forms sat in chairs, not too far away for the light of their cigars to be occasionally seen and their voices to reach his ear; but he did not listen. In a little while there came a light footstep, and a soft, mock-startled "Who is that?" and one of that same sparkling group of girls that had lately hung upon Honoré came so close to Raoul, in her attempt to discern his lineaments, that their lips accidentally met. They had but a moment of hand-in-hand converse before they were hustled forth by a feminine scouting party and thrust along into one of the great rooms of the house, where the youth and beauty of the Grandissimes were gathered in an expansive semicircle around a languishing fire, waiting to hear a story, or a song, or both, or half a dozen of each, from that master of narrative and melody, Raoul Innerarity.
"But mark," they cried unitedly, "you have got to wind up with the story of Bras-Coupé!"
"A song! A song!"
"Une chanson Créole! Une chanson des nègres!"
"Sing 'yé tolé dancé la doung y doung doung!'" cried a black-eyed girl.
Raoul explained that it had too many objectionable phrases.
"Oh, just hum the objectionable phrases and go right on."
But instead he sang them this:
"La prémier' fois mo té 'oir li,Li té posé au bord so lit;Mo di', Bouzon, bel n'amourèse!L'aut' fois li té si' so la saiseComme vié Madam dans so fauteil,Quand li vivé cóté soleil.So giés yé té plis noir passé la nouitte,So dé la lev' plis doux passe la quitte!Tou' mo la vie, zamein mo oirEin n' amourèse zoli comme ça!Mo' blié manzé--mo' blié boir'--Mo' blié tout dipi ç' temps-là--Mo' blié parlé--mo' blié dormi,Quand mo pensé aprés zami!"
"And you have heard Bras-Coupé sing that, yourself?"
"Once upon a time," said Raoul, warming with his subject, "we were coming down from Pointe Macarty in three pirogues. We had been three days fishing and hunting in Lake Salvador. Bras-Coupé had one pirogue with six paddles--"
"Oh, yes!" cried a youth named Baltazar; "sing that, Raoul!"
And he sang that.
"But oh, Raoul, sing that song the negroes sing when they go out in the bayous at night, stealing pigs and chickens!"
"That boat song, do you mean, which they sing as a signal to those on shore?" He hummed.
"Dé zabs, dé zabs, dé counou ouaïe ouaïe,Dé zabs, dé zabs, dé counou ouaïe ouaïe,Counou ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe,Counou ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe,Counou ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe, momza;Momza, momza, momza, momza,Roza, roza, roza-et--momza."
This was followed by another and still another, until the hour began to grow late. And then they gathered closer around him and heard the promised story. At the same hour Honoré Grandissime, wrapping himself in a greatcoat and giving himself up to sad and somewhat bitter reflections, had wandered from the paternal house, and by and by from the grounds, not knowing why or whither, but after a time soliciting, at Frowenfeld's closing door, the favor of his company. He had been feeling a kind of suffocation. This it was that made him seek and prize the presence and hand-grasp of the inexperienced apothecary. He led him out to the edge of the river. Here they sat down, and with a laborious attempt at a hard and jesting mood, Honoré told the same dark story.