The Grandissimes by George Washington CableA Story of Creole Life (page 3)

thrice, rose, drew a step backward, sank upon the other knee, rapped thrice, rose again, stepped backward, knelt the third time, the third time rapped, and then, rising, murmured a vow to pour upon the ground next day an oblation of champagne–then closed the doors and window and crept back to bed. Then she knew how cold she had become. It seemed as though her very marrow was frozen. She was seized with such an uncontrollable shivering that Clotilde presently opened her eyes, threw her arm about her mother’s neck, and said:

“Ah! my sweet mother, are you so cold?”

“The blanket was all off of me,” said the mother, returning the embrace, and the two sank into unconsciousness together.

* * * * *

Into slumber sank almost at the same moment Joseph Frowenfeld. He awoke, not a great while later, to find himself standing in the middle of the floor. Three or four men had shouted at once, and three pistol-shots, almost in one instant, had resounded just outside his shop. He had barely time to throw himself into half his garments when the knocker sounded on his street door, and when he opened it Agricola Fusilier entered, supported by his nephew Honore on one side and Doctor Keene on the other. The latter’s right hand was pressed hard against a bloody place in Agricola’s side.

“Give us plenty of light, Frowenfeld,” said the doctor, “and a chair and some lint, and some Castile soap, and some towels and sticking-plaster, and anything else you can think of. Agricola’s about scared to death–“

“Professor Frowenfeld,” groaned the aged citizen, “I am basely and mortally stabbed!”

“Right on, Frowenfeld,” continued the doctor, “right on into the back room. Fasten that front door. Here, Agricola, sit down here. That’s right, Frow., stir up a little fire. Give me–never mind, I’ll just cut the cloth open.”

There was a moment of silent suspense while the wound was being reached, and then the doctor spoke again.

“Just as I thought; only a safe and comfortable gash that will keep you in-doors a while with your arm in a sling. You are more scared than hurt, I think, old gentleman.”

“You think an infernal falsehood, sir!”

“See here, sir,” said the doctor, without ceasing to ply his dexterous hands in his art, “I’ll jab these scissors into your back if you say that again.”

“I suppose,” growled the “citizen,” “it is just the thing your professional researches have qualified you for, sir!”

“Just stand here, Mr. Frowenfeld,” said the little doctor, settling down to a professional tone, “and hand me things as I ask for them. Honore, please hold this arm; so.” And so, after a moderate lapse of time, the treatment that medical science of those days dictated was applied–whatever that was. Let those who do not know give thanks.

M. Grandissime explained to Frowenfeld what had occurred.

“You see, I succeeded in meeting my uncle, and we went together to my office. My uncle keeps his accounts with me. Sometimes we look them over. We stayed until midnight; I dismissed my carriage. As we walked homeward we met some friends coming out of the rooms of the Bagatelle Club; five or six of my uncles and cousins, and also Doctor Keene. We all fell a-talking of my grandfather’s _fete de grandpere_ of next month, and went to have some coffee. When we separated, and my uncle and my cousin Achille Grandissime and Doctor Keene and myself came down Royal street, out from that dark alley behind your shop jumped a little man and stuck my uncle with a knife. If I had not caught his arm he would have killed my uncle.”

“And he escaped,” said the apothecary.

“No, sir!” said Agricola, with his back turned.

“I think he did. I do not think he was struck.”

“And Mr. —-, your cousin?”

“Achille? I have sent him for a carriage.”

“Why, Agricola,” said the doctor, snipping the loose ravellings from his patient’s bandages, “an old man like you should not have enemies.”

“I am _not_ an old man, sir!”

“I said _young_ man.”

“I am not a _young_ man, sir!”

“I wonder who the fellow was,” continued Doctor Keene, as he readjusted the ripped sleeve.

“That is _my_ affair, sir; I know who it was.”

* * * * *

“And yet she insists,” M. Grandissime was asking Frowenfeld, standing with his leg thrown across the celestial globe, “that I knocked her down intentionally?”

Frowenfeld, about to answer, was interrupted by a rap on the door.

“That is my cousin, with the carriage,” said M. Grandissime, following the apothecary into the shop.

Frowenfeld opened to a young man,–a rather poor specimen of the Grandissime type, deficient in stature but not in stage manner.

“_Est il mort_?” he cried at the threshold.

“Mr. Frowenfeld, let me make you acquainted with my cousin, Achille Grandissime.”

Mr. Achille Grandissime gave Frowenfeld such a bow as we see now only in pictures.

“Ve’y ‘appe to meck, yo’ acquaintenz!”

Agricola entered, followed by the doctor, and demanded in indignant thunder-tones, as he entered:

“Who–ordered–that–carriage?”

“I did,” said Honore. “Will you please get into it at once.”

“Ah! dear Honore!” exclaimed the old man, “always too kind! I go in it purely to please you.”

Good-night was exchanged; Honore entered the vehicle and Agricola was helped in. Achille touched his hat, bowed and waved his hand to Joseph, and shook hands with the doctor, and saying, “Well, good-night. Doctor Keene,” he shut himself out of the shop with another low bow. “Think I am going to shake hands with an apothecary?” thought M. Achille.

Doctor Keene had refused Honore’s invitation to go with them.

“Frowenfeld,” he said, as he stood in the middle of the shop wiping a ring with a towel and looking at his delicate, freckled hand, “I propose, before going to bed with you, to eat some of your bread and cheese. Aren’t you glad?”

“I shall be, Doctor,” replied the apothecary, “if you will tell me what all this means.”

“Indeed I will not,–that is, not to-night. What? Why, it would take until breakfast to tell what ‘all this means,’–the story of that pestiferous darky Bras Coupe, with the rest? Oh, no, sir. I would sooner not have any bread and cheese. What on earth has waked your curiosity so suddenly, anyhow?”

“Have you any idea who stabbed Citizen Fusilier?” was Joseph’s response.

“Why, at first I thought it was the other Honore Grandissime; but when I saw how small the fellow was, I was at a loss, completely. But, whoever it is, he has my bullet in him, whatever Honore may think.”

“Will Mr. Fusilier’s wound give him much trouble?” asked Joseph, as they sat down to a luncheon at the fire.

“Hardly; he has too much of the blood of Lufki-Humma in him. But I need not say that; for the Grandissime blood is just as strong. A wonderful family, those Grandissimes! They are an old, illustrious line, and the strength that was once in the intellect and will is going down into the muscles. I have an idea that their greatness began, hundreds of years ago, in ponderosity of arm,–of frame, say,–and developed from generation to generation, in a rising scale, first into fineness of sinew, then, we will say, into force of will, then into power of mind, then into subtleties of genius. Now they are going back down the incline. Look at Honore; he is high up on the scale, intellectual and sagacious. But look at him physically, too. What an exquisite mold! What compact strength! I should not wonder if he gets that from the Indian Queen. What endurance he has! He will probably go to his business by and by and not see his bed for seventeen or eighteen hours. He is the flower of the family, and possibly the last one. Now, old Agricola shows the downward grade better. Seventy-five, if he is a day, with, maybe, one-fourth the attainments he pretends to have, and still less good sense; but strong–as an orang-outang. Shall we go to bed?”

CHAPTER XVIII

NEW LIGHT UPON DARK PLACES

When the long, wakeful night was over, and the doctor gone, Frowenfeld seated himself to record his usual observations of the weather; but his mind was elsewhere–here, there, yonder. There are understandings that expand, not imperceptibly hour by hour, but as certain flowers do, by little explosive ruptures, with periods of quiescence between. After this night of experiences it was natural that Frowenfeld should find the circumference of his perceptions consciously enlarged. The daylight shone, not into his shop alone, but into his heart as well. The face of Aurora, which had been the dawn to him before, was now a perfect sunrise, while in pleasant timeliness had come in this Apollo of a Honore Grandissime. The young immigrant was dazzled. He felt a longing to rise up and run forward in this flood of beams. He was unconscious of fatigue, or nearly so–would, have been wholly so but for the return by and by of that same dim shadow, or shadows, still rising and darting across every motion of the fancy that grouped again the actors in last night’s scenes; not such shadows as naturally go with sunlight to make it seem brighter, but a something which qualified the light’s perfection and the air’s freshness.

Wherefore, resolved: that he would compound his life, from this time forward, by a new formula: books, so much; observation, so much; social intercourse, so much; love–as to that, time enough for that in the future (if he was in love with anybody, he certainly did not know it); of love, therefore, amount not yet necessary to state, but probably (when it should be introduced), in the generous proportion in which physicians prescribe _aqua_. Resolved, in other words, without ceasing to be Frowenfeld the studious, to begin at once the perusal of this newly found book, the Community of New Orleans. True, he knew he should find it a difficult task–not only that much of it was in a strange tongue, but that it was a volume whose displaced leaves would have to be lifted tenderly, blown free of much dust, re-arranged, some torn fragments laid together again with much painstaking, and even the purport of some pages guessed out. Obviously, the place to commence at was that brightly illuminated title-page, the ladies Nancanou.

As the sun rose and diffused its beams in an atmosphere whose temperature had just been recorded as 50 deg. F., the apothecary stepped half out of his shop-door to face the bracing air that came blowing upon his tired forehead from the north. As he did so, he said to himself:

“How are these two Honore Grandissimes related to each other, and why should one be thought capable of attempting the life of Agricola?”

The answer was on its way to him.

There is left to our eyes but a poor vestige of the picturesque view presented to those who looked down the rue Royale before the garish day that changed the rue Enghien into Ingine street, and dropped the ‘e’ from Royale. It was a long, narrowing perspective of arcades, lattices, balconies, _zaguans_, dormer windows, and blue sky–of low, tiled roofs, red and wrinkled, huddled down into their own shadows; of canvas awnings with fluttering borders, and of grimy lamp-posts twenty feet in height, each reaching out a gaunt iron arm over the narrow street and dangling a lamp from its end. The human life which dotted the view displayed a variety of tints and costumes such as a painter would be glad to take just as he found them: the gayly feathered Indian, the slashed and tinselled Mexican, the leather-breeched raftsmen, the blue-or yellow-turbaned _negresse_, the sugar-planter in white flannel and moccasins, the average townsman in the last suit of clothes of the lately deceased century, and now and then a fashionable man in that costume whose union of tight-buttoned martial severity, swathed throat, and effeminate superabundance of fine linen seemed to offer a sort of state’s evidence against the pompous tyrannies and frivolities of the times.

The _marchande des calas_ was out. She came toward Joseph’s shop, singing in a high-pitched nasal tone this new song:

“De’tit zozos–ye te assis–
De’tit zozos–si la barrier.
De’tit zozos, qui zabotte;
Qui ca ye di’ mo pas conne.

“Manzeur-poulet vini simin,
Croupe si ye et croque ye;
Personn’ pli’ ‘tend’ ye zabotte– De’tit zozos si la barrier.”

“You lak dat song?” she asked, with a chuckle, as she let down from her turbaned head a flat Indian basket of warm rice cakes.

“What does it mean?”

She laughed again–more than the questioner could see occasion for.

“Dat mean–two lill birds; dey was sittin’ on de fence an’ gabblin’ togeddah, you know, lak you see two young gals sometime’, an’ you can’t mek out w’at dey sayin’, even ef dey know demself? H-ya! Chicken-hawk come ‘long dat road an’ jes’ set down an’ munch ’em, an’ nobody can’t no mo’ hea’ deir lill gabblin’ on de fence, you know.”

Here she laughed again.

Joseph looked at her with severe suspicion, but she found refuge in benevolence.

“Honey, you ought to be asleep dis werry minit; look lak folks been a-worr’in’ you. I’s gwine to pick out de werry bes’ _calas_ I’s got for you.”

As she delivered them she courtesied, first to Joseph and then, lower and with hushed gravity, to a person who passed into the shop behind him, bowing and murmuring politely as he passed. She followed the new-comer with her eyes, hastily accepted the price of the cakes, whispered, “Dat’s my mawstah,” lifted her basket to her head and went away. Her master was Frowenfeld’s landlord.

Frowenfeld entered after him, calas in hand, and with a grave “Good-morning, sir.”

“–m’sieu’,” responded the landlord, with a low bow.

Frowenfeld waited in silence.

The landlord hesitated, looked around him, seemed about to speak, smiled, and said, in his soft, solemn voice, feeling his way word by word through the unfamiliar language:

“Ah lag to teg you apar’.”

“See me alone?”

The landlord recognized his error by a fleeting smile.

“Alone,” said he.

“Shall we go into my room?”

“_S’il vous plait, m’sieu’_.”

Frowenfeld’s breakfast, furnished by contract from a neighboring kitchen, stood on the table. It was a frugal one, but more comfortable than formerly, and included coffee, that subject of just pride in Creole cookery. Joseph deposited his _calas_ with these things and made haste to produce a chair, which his visitor, as usual, declined.

“Idd you’ bregfuz, m’sieu’.”

“I can do that afterward,” said Frowenfeld; but the landlord insisted and turned away from him to look up at the books on the wall, precisely as that other of the same name had done a few weeks before.

Frowenfeld, as he broke his loaf, noticed this, and, as the landlord turned his face to speak, wondered that he had not before seen the common likeness.

“Dez stog,” said the sombre man.

“What, sir? Oh!–dead stock? But how can the materials of an education be dead stock?”

The landlord shrugged. He would not argue the point. One American trait which the Creole is never entirely ready to encounter is this gratuitous Yankee way of going straight to the root of things.

“Dead stock in a mercantile sense, you mean,” continued the apothecary; “but are men right in measuring such things only by their present market value?”

The landlord had no reply. It was little to him, his manner intimated; his contemplation dwelt on deeper flaws in human right and wrong; yet–but it was needless to discuss it. However, he did speak.

“Ah was elevade in Pariz.”

“Educated in Paris,” exclaimed Joseph, admiringly. “Then you certainly cannot find your education dead stock.”

The grave, not amused, smile which was the landlord’s only rejoinder, though perfectly courteous, intimated that his tenant was sailing over depths of the question that he was little aware of. But the smile in a moment gave way for the look of one who was engrossed with another subject.

“M’sieu’,” he began; but just then Joseph made an apologetic gesture and went forward to wait upon an inquirer after “Godfrey’s Cordial;” for that comforter was known to be obtainable at “Frowenfeld’s.” The business of the American drug-store was daily increasing. When Frowenfeld returned his landlord stood ready to address him, with the air of having decided to make short of a matter.

“M’sieu’ —-“

“Have a seat, sir,” urged the apothecary.

His visitor again declined, with his uniform melancholy grace. He drew close to Frowenfeld.

“Ah wand you mague me one _ouangan_,” he said.

Joseph shook his head. He remembered Doctor Keene’s expressed suspicion concerning the assault of the night before.

“I do not understand you, sir; what is that?”

“You know.”

The landlord offered a heavy, persuading smile.

“An unguent? Is that what you mean–an ointment?”

“M’sieu’,” said the applicant, with a not-to-be-deceived expression, “_vous etes astrologue–magicien–“

“God forbid!”

The landlord was grossly incredulous.

“You godd one ‘P’tit Albert.'”

He dropped his forefinger upon an iron-clasped book on the table, whose title much use had effaced.

“That is the Bible. I do not know what the Tee Albare is!”

Frowenfeld darted an aroused glance into the ever-courteous eyes of his visitor, who said without a motion:

“You di’n’t gave Agricola Fusilier _une ouangan, la nuit passe_?”

“Sir?”

“Ee was yeh?–laz nighd?”

“Mr. Fusilier was here last night–yes. He had been attacked by an assassin and slightly wounded. He was accompanied by his nephew, who, I suppose, is your cousin: he has the same name.”

Frowenfeld, hoping he had changed the subject, concluded with a propitiatory smile, which, however, was not reflected.

“Ma bruzzah,” said the visitor.

“Your brother!”

“Ma whide bruzzah; ah ham nod whide, m’sieu’.”

Joseph said nothing. He was too much awed to speak; the ejaculation that started toward his lips turned back and rushed into his heart, and it was the quadroon who, after a moment, broke the silence:

“Ah ham de holdez son of Numa Grandissime.”

“Yes–yes,” said Frowenfeld, as if he would wave away something terrible.

“Nod sell me–_ouangan_?” asked the landlord, again.

“Sir,” exclaimed Frowenfeld, taking a step backward, “pardon me if I offend you; that mixture of blood which draws upon you the scorn of this community is to me nothing–nothing! And every invidious distinction made against you on that account I despise! But, sir, whatever may be either your private wrongs, or the wrongs you suffer in common with your class, if you have it in your mind to employ any manner of secret art against the interests or person of any one–“

The landlord was making silent protestations, and his tenant, lost in a wilderness of indignant emotions, stopped.

“M’sieu’,” began the quadroon, but ceased and stood with an expression of annoyance every moment deepening on his face, until he finally shook his head slowly, and said with a baffled smile: “Ah can nod spig Engliss.”

“Write it,” said Frowenfeld, lifting forward a chair.

The landlord, for the first time in their acquaintance, accepted a seat, bowing low as he did so, with a demonstration of profound gratitude that just perceptibly heightened his even dignity. Paper, quills, and ink were handed down from a shelf and Joseph retired into the shop.

Honore Grandissime, f.m.c. (these initials could hardly have come into use until some months later, but the convenience covers the sin of the slight anachronism), Honore Grandissime, free man of color, entered from the rear room so silently that Joseph was first made aware of his presence by feeling him at his elbow. He handed the apothecary–but a few words in time, lest we misjudge.

* * * * *

The father of the two Honores was that Numa Grandissime–that mere child–whom the Grand Marquis, to the great chagrin of the De Grapions, had so early cadetted. The commission seems not to have been thrown away. While the province was still in first hands, Numa’s was a shining name in the annals of Kerlerec’s unsatisfactory Indian wars; and in 1768 (when the colonists, ill-informed, inflammable, and long ill-governed, resisted the transfer of Louisiana to Spain), at a time of life when most young men absorb all the political extravagances of their day, he had stood by the side of law and government, though the popular cry was a frenzied one for “liberty.” Moreover, he had held back his whole chafing and stamping tribe from a precipice of disaster, and had secured valuable recognition of their office-holding capacities from that really good governor and princely Irishman whose one act of summary vengeance upon a few insurgent office-coveters has branded him in history as Cruel O’Reilly. But the experience of those days turned Numa gray, and withal he was not satisfied with their outcome. In the midst of the struggle he had weakened in one manly resolve–against his will he married. The lady was a Fusilier, Agricola’s sister, a person of rare intelligence and beauty, whom, from early childhood, the secret counsels of his seniors had assigned to him. Despite this, he had said he would never marry; he made, he said, no pretensions to severe conscientiousness, or to being better than others, but–as between his Maker and himself–he had forfeited the right to wed, they all knew how. But the Fusiliers had become very angry and Numa, finding strife about to ensue just when without unity he could not bring an undivided clan through the torrent of the revolution, had “nobly sacrificed a little sentimental feeling,” as his family defined it, by breaking faith with the mother of the man now standing at Joseph Frowenfeld’s elbow, and who was then a little toddling boy. It was necessary to save the party–nay, that was a slip; we should say, to save the family; this is not a parable. Yet Numa loved his wife. She bore him a boy and a girl, twins; and as her son grew in physical, intellectual, and moral symmetry, he indulged the hope that–the ambition and pride of all the various Grandissimes now centering in this lawful son, and all strife being lulled–he should yet see this Honore right the wrongs which he had not quite dared to uproot. And Honore inherited the hope and began to make it an intention and aim even before his departure (with his half-brother the other Honore) for school in Paris, at the early age of fifteen. Numa soon after died, and Honore, after various fortunes in Paris, London, and elsewhere, in the care, or at least company, of a pious uncle in holy orders, returned to the ancestral mansion. The father’s will–by the law they might have set it aside, but that was not their way–left the darker Honore the bulk of his fortune, the younger a competency. The latter–instead of taking office, as an ancient Grandissime should have done–to the dismay and mortification of his kindred, established himself in a prosperous commercial business. The elder bought houses and became a _rentier_.

* * * * *

The landlord handed the apothecary the following writing:

MR. JOSEPH FROWENFELD:

Think not that anybody is to be either poisoned by me nor yet to be made a sufferer by the exercise of anything by me of the character of what is generally known as grigri, otherwise magique. This, sir, I do beg your permission to offer my assurance to you of the same. Ah, no! it is not for that! I am the victim of another entirely and a far differente and dissimilar passion, _i.e._, Love. Esteemed sir, speaking or writing to you as unto the only man of exclusively white blood whom I believe is in Louisiana willing to do my dumb, suffering race the real justice, I love Palmyre la Philosophe with a madness which is by the human lips or tongues not possible to be exclaimed (as, I may add, that I have in the same like manner since exactley nine years and seven months and some days). Alas! heavens! I can’t help it in the least particles at all! What, what shall I do, for ah! it is pitiful! She loves me not at all, but, on the other hand, is (if I suspicion not wrongfully) wrapped up head and ears in devotion of one who does not love her, either, so cold and incapable of appreciation is he. I allude to Honore Grandissime.

Ah! well do I remember the day when we returned–he and me–from the France. She was there when we landed on that levee, she was among that throng of kindreds and domestiques, she shind like the evening star as she stood there (it was the first time I saw her, but she was known to him when at fifteen he left his home, but I resided not under my own white father’s roof–not at all–far from that). She cried out “A la fin to vini!” and leap herself with both resplendant arm around his neck and kist him twice on the one cheek and the other, and her resplendant eyes shining with a so great beauty.

If you will give me a _poudre d’amour_ such as I doubt not your great knowledge enable you to make of a power that cannot to be resist, while still at the same time of a harmless character toward the life or the health of such that I shall succeed in its use to gain the affections of that emperice of my soul, I hesitate not to give you such price as it may please you to nominate up as high as to $l,000–nay, more. Sir, will you do that?

I have the honor to remain, sir,

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

H. Grandissime.

Frowenfeld slowly transferred his gaze from the paper to his landlord’s face. Dejection and hope struggled with each other in the gaze that was returned; but when Joseph said, with a countenance full of pity, “I have no power to help you,” the disappointed lover merely looked fixedly for a moment in the direction of the street, then lifted his hat toward his head, bowed, and departed.

CHAPTER XIX

ART AND COMMERCE

It was some two or three days after the interview just related that the apothecary of the rue Royale found it necessary to ask a friend to sit in the shop a few minutes while he should go on a short errand. He was kept away somewhat longer than he had intended to stay, for, as they were coming out of the cathedral, he met Aurora and Clotilde. Both the ladies greeted him with a cordiality which was almost inebriating, Aurora even extending her hand. He stood but a moment, responding blushingly to two or three trivial questions from her; yet even in so short a time, and although Clotilde gave ear with the sweetest smiles and loveliest changes of countenance, he experienced a lively renewal of a conviction that this young lady was most unjustly harboring toward him a vague disrelish, if not a positive distrust. That she had some mental reservation was certain.

“‘Sieur Frowenfel’,” said Aurora, as he raised his hat for good-day, “you din come home yet.”

He did not understand until he had crimsoned and answered he knew not what–something about having intended every day. He felt lifted he knew not where, Paradise opened, there was a flood of glory, and then he was alone; the ladies, leaving adieus sweeter than the perfume they carried away with them, floated into the south and were gone. Why was it that the elder, though plainly regarded by the younger with admiration, dependence, and overflowing affection, seemed sometimes to be, one might almost say, watched by her? He liked Aurora the better.

On his return to the shop his friend remarked that if he received many such visitors as the one who had called during his absence, he might be permitted to be vain. It was Honore Grandissime, and he had left no message.

“Frowenfeld,” said his friend, “it would pay you to employ a regular assistant.”

Joseph was in an abstracted mood.

“I have some thought of doing so.”

Unlucky slip! As he pushed open his door next morning, what was his dismay to find himself confronted by some forty men. Five of them leaped up from the door-sill, and some thirty-five from the edge of the _trottoir_, brushed that part of their wearing-apparel which always fits with great neatness on a Creole, and trooped into the shop. The apothecary fell behind his defences, that is to say, his prescription desk, and explained to them in a short and spirited address that he did not wish to employ any of them on any terms. Nine-tenths of them understood not a word of English; but his gesture was unmistakable. They bowed gratefully, and said good-day.

Now Frowenfeld did these young men an injustice; and though they were far from letting him know it, some of them felt it and interchanged expressions of feeling reproachful to him as they stopped on the next corner to watch a man painting a sign. He had treated them as if they all wanted situations. Was this so? Far from it. Only twenty men were applicants; the other twenty were friends who had come to see them get the place. And again, though, as the apothecary had said, none of them knew anything about the drug business–no, nor about any other business under the heavens–they were all willing that he should teach them–except one. A young man of patrician softness and costly apparel tarried a moment after the general exodus, and quickly concluded that on Frowenfeld’s account it was probably as well that he could not qualify, since he was expecting from France an important government appointment as soon as these troubles should be settled and Louisiana restored to her former happy condition. But he had a friend–a cousin–whom he would recommend, just the man for the position; a splendid fellow; popular, accomplished–what? the best trainer of dogs that M. Frowenfeld might ever hope to look upon; a “so good fisherman as I never saw! “–the marvel of the ball-room–could handle a partner of twice his weight; the speaker had seen him take a lady so tall that his head hardly came up to her bosom, whirl her in the waltz from right to left–this way! and then, as quick as lightning, turn and whirl her this way, from left to right–“so grezful ligue a peajohn! He could read and write, and knew more comig song!”–the speaker would hasten to secure him before he should take some other situation.

The wonderful waltzer never appeared upon the scene; yet Joseph made shift to get along, and by and by found a man who partially met his requirements. The way of it was this: With his forefinger in a book which he had been reading, he was one day pacing his shop floor in deep thought. There were two loose threads hanging from the web of incident weaving around him which ought to connect somewhere; but where? They were the two visits made to his shop by the young merchant, Honore Grandissime. He stopped still to think; what “train of thought” could he have started in the mind of such a man?

He was about to resume his walk, when there came in, or more strictly speaking, there shot in, a young, auburn-curled, blue-eyed man, whose adolescent buoyancy, as much as his delicate, silver-buckled feet and clothes of perfect fit, pronounced him all-pure Creole. His name, when it was presently heard, accounted for the blond type by revealing a Franco-Celtic origin.

“‘Sieur Frowenfel’,” he said, advancing like a boy coming in after recess, “I ‘ave somet’ing beauteeful to place into yo’ window.”

He wheeled half around as he spoke and seized from a naked black boy, who at that instant entered, a rectangular object enveloped in paper.

Frowenfeld’s window was fast growing to be a place of art exposition. A pair of statuettes, a golden tobacco-box, a costly jewel-casket, or a pair of richly gemmed horse-pistols–the property of some ancient gentleman or dame of emaciated fortune, and which must be sold to keep up the bravery of good clothes and pomade that hid slow starvation–went into the shop-window of the ever-obliging apothecary, to be disposed of by _tombola_. And it is worthy of note in passing, concerning the moral education of one who proposed to make no conscious compromise with any sort of evil, that in this drivelling species of gambling he saw nothing hurtful or improper. But “in Frowenfeld’s window” appeared also articles for simple sale or mere transient exhibition; as, for instance, the wonderful tapestries of a blind widow of ninety; tremulous little bunches of flowers, proudly stated to have been made entirely of the bones of the ordinary catfish; others, large and spreading, the sight of which would make any botanist fall down “and die as mad as the wild waves be,” whose ticketed merit was that they were composed exclusively of materials produced upon Creole soil; a picture of the Ursulines’ convent and chapel, done in forty-five minutes by a child of ten years, the daughter of the widow Felicie Grandissime; and the siege of Troy, in ordinary ink, done entirely with the pen, the labor of twenty years, by “a citizen of New Orleans.” It was natural that these things should come to “Frowenfeld’s corner,” for there, oftener than elsewhere, the critics were gathered together. Ah! wonderful men, those critics; and, fortunately, we have a few still left.

The young man with auburn curls rested the edge of his burden upon the counter, tore away its wrappings and disclosed a painting.

He said nothing–with his mouth; but stood at arm’s length balancing the painting and casting now upon it and now upon Joseph Frowenfeld a look more replete with triumph than Caesar’s three-worded dispatch.

The apothecary fixed upon it long and silently the gaze of a somnambulist. At length he spoke:

“What is it?”

“Louisiana rif-using to hanter de h-Union!” replied the Creole, with an ecstasy that threatened to burst forth in hip-hurrahs.

Joseph said nothing, but silently wondered at Louisiana’s anatomy.

“Gran’ subjec’!” said the Creole.

“Allegorical,” replied the hard-pressed apothecary.

“Allegoricon? No, sir! Allegoricon never saw dat pigshoe. If you insist to know who make dat pigshoe–de hartis’ stan’ bif-ore you!”

“It is your work?”

“‘Tis de work of me, Raoul Innerarity, cousin to de disting-wish Honore 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 Honore! an’ now, I ham a hartis’! So soon I foun’ dat, I say, ‘Cousin Honore,'”–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 Honore,” 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-Coupe!”

We have the afflatus in Louisiana, if nothing else.

CHAPTER XX

A VERY NATURAL MISTAKE

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 Creole _veritas_. 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 the _lettre de cachet_, Demosthenes De Grapion and the _fille a l’hopital_, Georges De Grapion and the _fille a la cassette_, Numa Grandissime, father of the two Honores, young Nancanou and old Agricola,–the way he made them

“Knit hands and beat the ground
In 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 Sauves, de Grandpres, 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. Honore 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 calls _commerce Man Lizon–qui assete 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. Honore 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 Honore Grandissime; but because Honore 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. Honore 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.

Honore 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 Honore 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 Honore, with a smile which changed the meaning to “You know very well there are”–“two Honore 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 Honore, 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.

CHAPTER XXI

DOCTOR KEENE RECOVERS HIS BULLET

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 little matter. 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.

CHAPTER XXII

WARS WITHIN THE BREAST

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 aerial 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 Honore’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. Honore 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 do _I_ know? I had to wait a shameful long time to see _Monsieur le prince_,–just because I am a De Grapion, I know. When at last I saw him, he says, ‘Madame, this is the other Honore 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 Lebat (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, about _so 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 Honore 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 never _do 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 Honore 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.

CHAPTER XXIII

FROWENFELD KEEPS HIS APPOINTMENT

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.

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, Miche_?” 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.

CHAPTER XXIV

FROWENFELD MAKES AN ARGUMENT

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. Honore 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 of _taffia_ with 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 knotted _en 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.

“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, secondary _desiderata_ which 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 Honore 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’ is _lezzy_,” said Aurora.

“That is a hard word to apply to those who do not _consciously_ deserve 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 propriete de contribuer meme a multiplier l’espece 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 is _too_ comfortable 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.

CHAPTER XXV

AURORA AS A HISTORIAN