Chita: a Memory of Last Island Part 4

... Almost at the same hour that Laroussel was questioning the child in Creole patois, another expedition, searching for bodies along the coast, discovered on the beach of a low islet famed as a haunt of pelicans, the corpse of a child. Some locks of bright hair still adhering to the skull, a string of red beads, a white muslin dress, a handkerchief broidered with the initials "A.L.B.,"--were secured as clews; and the little body was interred where it had been found.

And, several days before, Captain Hotard, of the relief-boat Estelle Brousseaux, had found, drifting in the open Gulf (lat.i.tude 26 degrees 43 minutes; longitude 88 degrees 17 minutes),--the corpse of a fair-haired woman, clinging to a table. The body was disfigured beyond recognition: even the slender bones of the hands had been stripped by the nibs of the sea-birds-except one finger, the third of the left, which seemed to have been protected by a ring of gold, as by a charm.

Graven within the plain yellow circlet was a date,--"JUILLET--1851"; and the names,--"ADELE + JULIEN,"--separated by a cross. The Estelle carried coffins that day: most of them were already full; but there was one for Adele.

Who was she?--who was her Julien? ... When the Estelle and many other vessels had discharged their ghastly cargoes;--when the bereaved of the land had a.s.sembled as hastily as they might for the du y of identification;--when memories were strained almost to madness in research of names, dates, incidents--for the evocation of dead words, resurrection of vanished days, recollection of dear promises,--then, in the confusion, it was believed and declared that the little corpse found on the pelican island was the daughter of the wearer of the wedding ring: Adele La Brierre, nee Florane, wife of Dr. Julien La Brierre, of New Orleans, who was numbered among the missing.

And they brought dead Adele back,--up shadowy river windings, over linked brightnesses of lake and lakelet, through many a green glimmering bayou,--to the Creole city, and laid her to rest somewhere in the old Saint-Louis Cemetery. And upon the tablet recording her name were also graven the words--

Aussi a la memoire de son mari;

JULIEN RAYMOND LA BRIERRE, ne a la paroisse St. Landry, le 29 Mai; MDCCCXXVIII; et de leur fille, EULALIE, agee de 4 as et 5 mois,-- Qui tous perirent dans la grande tempete qui balaya L'Ile Derniere, le 10 Aout, MDCCCLVI ..... + .....

Priez pour eux!

VII.

Yet six months afterward the face of Julien La Brierre was seen again upon the streets of New Orleans. Men started at the sight of him, as at a spectre standing in the sun. And nevertheless the apparition cast a shadow. People paused, approached, half extended a hand through old habit, suddenly checked themselves and pa.s.sed on,--wondering they should have forgotten, asking themselves why they had so nearly made an absurd mistake.

It was a February day,--one of those crystalline days of our snowless Southern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and outlines sharpen in the light as if viewed through the focus of a diamond gla.s.s;--and in that brightness Julien La Brierre perused his own brief epitaph, and gazed upon the sculptured name of drowned Adele. Only half a year had pa.s.sed since she was laid away in the high wall of tombs,--in that strange colonial columbarium where the dead slept in rows, behind squared marbles lettered in black or bronze. Yet her resting-place,--in the highest range,--already seemed old. Under our Southern sun, the vegetation of cemeteries seems to spring into being spontaneously--to leap all suddenly into luxuriant life! Microscopic mossy growths had begun to mottle the slab that closed her in;--over its face some singular creeper was crawling, planting tiny reptile-feet into the chiselled letters of the inscription; and from the moist soil below speckled euphorbias were growing up to her,--and morning glories,--and beautiful green tangled things of which he did not know the name.

And the sight of the pretty lizards, puffing their crimson pouches in the sun, or undulating athwart epitaphs, and shifting their color when approached, from emerald to ashen-gray;--the caravans of the ants, journeying to and from tiny c.h.i.n.ks in the masonry;--the bees gathering honey from the crimson blossoms of the crete-de-coq, whose radicles sought sustenance, perhaps from human dust, in the decay of generations:--all that rich life of graves summoned up fancies of Resurrection, Nature's resurrection-work--wondrous transformations of flesh, marvellous bans migration of souls! ... From some forgotten crevice of that tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and the vast light, a st.u.r.dy weed was growing. He knew that plant, as it quivered against the blue,--the chou-gras, as Creole children call it: its dark berries form the mockingbird's favorite food ... Might not its roots, exploring darkness, have found some unfamiliar nutriment within?--might it not be that something of the dead heart had risen to purple and emerald life--in the sap of translucent leaves, in the wine of the savage berries,--to blend with the blood of the Wizard Singer,--to lend a strange sweetness to the melody of his wooing? ...

... Seldom, indeed, does it happen that a man in the prime of youth, in the possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and the elegances of life, discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to the human aggregate,--how insignificant his part as one living atom of the social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with never a pause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more, Julien had learned in seven merciless days--seven successive and terrible shocks of experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his place therein was not void--society had simply forgotten him. So long as he had moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their petty altruistic roles,--had discharged their small human obligations,--had kept turned toward him the least selfish side of their natures,--had made with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors; and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for his loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in the unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to demand a repet.i.tion ... Impossible to deceive himself as to the feeling his unantic.i.p.ated return had aroused:--feigned pity where he had looked for sympathetic welcome; dismay where he had expected surprised delight; and, oftener, airs of resignation, or disappointment ill disguised,--always insincerity, politely masked or coldly bare. He had come back to find strangers in his home, relatives at law concerning his estate, and himself regarded as an intruder among the living,--an unlucky guest, a revenant ... How hollow and selfish a world it seemed!

And yet there was love in it; he had been loved in it, unselfishly, pa.s.sionately, with the love of father and of mother, of wife and child ... All buried!--all lost forever! ... Oh! would to G.o.d the story of that stone were not a lie!--would to kind G.o.d he also were dead! ...

Evening shadowed: the violet deepened and p.r.i.c.kled itself with stars;--the sun pa.s.sed below the west, leaving in his wake a momentary splendor of vermilion ... our Southern day is not prolonged by gloaming. And Julien's thoughts darkened with the darkening, and as swiftly. For while there was yet light to see, he read another name that he used to know--the name of RAMIREZ ... Nacio en Cienfuegos, isla de Cuba ... Wherefore born?--for what eternal purpose, Ramirez,--in the City of a Hundred Fires? He had blown out his brains before the sepulchre of his young wife ... It was a detached double vault, shaped like a huge chest, and much dilapidated already:--under the continuous burrowing of the crawfish it had sunk greatly on one side, tilting as if about to fall. Out from its zigzag fissurings of brick and plaster, a sinister voice seemed to come:--"Go thou and do likewise! ... Earth groans with her burthen even now,--the burthen of Man: she holds no place for thee!"

VIII.

... That voice pursued him into the darkness of his chilly room,--haunted him in the silence of his lodging. And then began within the man that ghostly struggle between courage and despair, between patient reason and mad revolt, between weakness and force, between darkness and light, which all sensitive and generous natures must wage in their own souls at least once--perhaps many times--in their lives. Memory, in such moments, plays like an electric storm;--all involuntarily he found himself reviewing his life.

Incidents long forgotten came back with singular vividness: he saw the Past as he had not seen it while it was the Present;--remembrances of home, recollections of infancy, recurred to him with terrible intensity,--the artless pleasures and the trifling griefs, the little hurts and the tender pettings, the hopes and the anxieties of those who loved him, the smiles and tears of slaves ... And his first Creole pony, a present from his father the day after he had proved himself able to recite his prayers correctly in French, without one misp.r.o.nunciation--without saying cra.s.se for grace,--and yellow Michel, who taught him to swim and to fish and to paddle a pirogue;--and the bayou, with its wonder-world of turtles and birds and creeping things;--and his German tutor, who could not p.r.o.nounce the j;--and the songs of the cane-fields,--strangely pleasing, full of quaverings and long plaintive notes, like the call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' pays blanc! ... Afterward Camaniere had leased the place;--everything must have been changed; even the songs could not be the same. Tou', tou'

pays blare!--Danie qui commande ...

And then Paris; and the university, with its wild under-life,--some debts, some follies; and the frequent fond letters from home to which he might have replied so much oftener;--Paris, where talent is mediocrity; Paris, with its thunders and its splendors and its seething of pa.s.sion;--Paris, supreme focus of human endeavor, with its madnesses of art, its frenzied striving to express the Inexpressible, its spasmodic strainings to clutch the Unattainable, its soarings of soul-fire to the heaven of the Impossible ...

What a rejoicing there was at his return!--how radiant and level the long Road of the Future seemed to open before him!--everywhere friends, prospects, felicitations. Then his first serious love;--and the night of the ball at St. Martinsville,--the vision of light!

Gracile as a palm, and robed at once so simply, so exquisitely in white, she had seemed to him the supreme realization of all possible dreams of beauty ... And his pa.s.sionate jealousy; and the slap from Laroussel; and the humiliating two-minute duel with rapiers in which he learned that he had found his master. The scar was deep. Why had not Laroussel killed him then? ... Not evil-hearted, Laroussel,--they used to salute each other afterward when they met; and Laroussel's smile was kindly. Why had he refrained from returning it? Where was Laroussel now?

For the death of his generous father, who had sacrificed so much to reform him; for the death, only a short while after, of his all-forgiving mother, he had found one sweet woman to console him with her tender words, her loving lips, her delicious caress. She had given him Zouzoune, the darling link between their lives,--Zouzoune, who waited each evening with black Eglantine at the gate to watch for his coming, and to cry through all the house like a bird, "Papa, lape vini!--papa Zulien ape vini!" ... And once that she had made him very angry by upsetting the ink over a ma.s.s of business papers, and he had slapped her (could he ever forgive himself?)--she had cried, through her sobs of astonishment and pain:--"To laimin moin?--to batte moin!"

(Thou lovest me?--thou beatest me!) Next month she would have been five years old. To laimin moin?--to batte moin! ...

A furious paroxysm of grief convulsed him, suffocated him; it seemed to him that something within must burst, must break. He flung himself down upon his bed, biting the coverings in order to stifle his outcry, to smother the sounds of his despair. What crime had he ever done, oh G.o.d! that he should be made to suffer thus?--was it for this he had been permitted to live? had been rescued from the sea and carried round all the world unscathed? Why should he live to remember, to suffer, to agonize? Was not Ramirez wiser?

How long the contest within him lasted, he never knew; but ere it was done, he had become, in more ways than one, a changed man. For the first,--though not indeed for the last time,--something of the deeper and n.o.bler comprehension of human weakness and of human suffering had been revealed to him,--something of that larger knowledge without which the sense of duty can never be fully acquired, nor the understanding of unselfish goodness, nor the spirit of tenderness. The suicide is not a coward; he is an egotist.

A ray of sunlight touched his wet pillow,--awoke him. He rushed to the window, flung the latticed shutters apart, and looked out.

Something beautiful and ghostly filled all the vistas,--frost-haze; and in some queer way the mist had momentarily caught and held the very color of the sky. An azure fog! Through it the quaint and checkered street--as yet but half illumined by the sun,--took tones of impossible color; the view paled away through faint bluish tints into transparent purples;--all the shadows were indigo. How sweet the morning!--how well life seemed worth living! Because the sun had shown his face through a fairy veil of frost! ...

Who was the ancient thinker?--was it Hermes?--who said:--

"The Sun is Laughter; for 'tis He who maketh joyous the thoughts of men, and gladdeneth the infinite world." ...

The Shadow of the Tide.

I.

Carmen found that her little pet had been taught how to pray; for each night and morning when the devout woman began to make her orisons, the child would kneel beside her, with little hands joined, and in a voice sweet and clear murmur something she had learned by heart. Much as this pleased Carmen, it seemed to her that the child's prayers could not be wholly valid unless uttered in Spanish;--for Spanish was heaven's own tongue,--la lengua de Dios, el idioma de Dios; and she resolved to teach her to say the Salve Maria and the Padre Nuestro in Castilian--also, her own favorite prayer to the Virgin, beginning with the words, "Madre santisima, toda dulce y hermosa." . . .

So Conchita--for a new name had been given to her with that terrible sea christening--received her first lessons in Spanish; and she proved a most intelligent pupil. Before long she could prattle to Feliu;--she would watch for his return of evenings, and announce his coming with "Aqui viene mi papacito?"--she learned, too, from Carmen, many little caresses of speech to greet him with. Feliu's was not a joyous nature; he had his dark hours, his sombre days; yet it was rarely that he felt too sullen to yield to the little one's petting, when she would leap up to reach his neck and to coax his kiss, with--"Dame un beso, papa!--asi;--y otro! otro! otro!" He grew to love her like his own;--was she not indeed his own, since he had won her from death? And none had yet come to dispute his claim. More and more, with the pa.s.sing of weeks, months, seasons, she became a portion of his life--a part of all that he wrought for. At the first, he had had a half-formed hope that the little one might be reclaimed by relatives generous and rich enough to insist upon his acceptance of a handsome compensation; and that Carmen could find some solace in a pleasant visit to Barceloneta. But now he felt that no possible generosity could requite him for her loss; and with the unconscious selfishness of affection, he commenced to dread her identification as a great calamity.

It was evident that she had been brought up nicely. She had pretty prim ways of drinking and eating, queer little fashions of sitting in company, and of addressing people. She had peculiar notions about colors in dress, about wearing her hair; and she seemed to have already imbibed a small stock of social prejudices not altogether in harmony with the republicanism of Viosca's Point. Occasional swarthy visitors,--men of the Manilla settlements,--she spoke of contemptuously as negues-marrons; and once she shocked Carmen inexpressibly by stopping in the middle of her evening prayer, declaring that she wanted to say her prayers to a white Virgin; Carmen's Senora de Guadalupe was only a negra! Then, for the first time, Carmen spoke so crossly to the child as to frighten her. But the pious woman's heart smote her the next moment for that first harsh word;--and she caressed the motherless one, consoled her, cheered her, and at last explained to her--I know not how--something very wonderful about the little figurine, something that made Chita's eyes big with awe. Thereafter she always regarded the Virgin of Wax as an object mysterious and holy.

And, one by one, most of Chita's little eccentricities were gradually eliminated from her developing life and thought. More rapidly than ordinary children, because singularly intelligent, she learned to adapt herself to all the changes of her new environment,--retaining only that indescribable something which to an experienced eye tells of hereditary refinement of habit and of mind:--a natural grace, a thorough-bred ease and elegance of movement, a quickness and delicacy of perception.

She became strong again and active--active enough to play a great deal on the beach, when the sun was not too fierce; and Carmen made a canvas bonnet to shield her head and face. Never had she been allowed to play so much in the sun before; and it seemed to do her good, though her little bare feet and hands became brown as copper. At first, it must be confessed, she worried her foster-mother a great deal by various queer misfortunes and extraordinary freaks;--getting bitten by crabs, falling into the bayou while in pursuit of "fiddlers," or losing herself at the conclusion of desperate efforts to run races at night with the moon, or to walk to the "end of the world." If she could only once get to the edge of the sky, she said, she "could climb up." She wanted to see the stars, which were the souls of good little children; and she knew that G.o.d would let her climb up. "Just what I am afraid of!"--thought Carmen to herself;--"He might let her climb up,--a little ghost!" But one day naughty Chita received a terrible lesson,--a lasting lesson,--which taught her the value of obedience.

She had been particularly cautioned not to venture into a certain part of the swamp in the rear of the grove, where the weeds were very tall; for Carmen was afraid some snake might bite the child.

But Chita's bird-bright eye had discerned a gleam of white in that direction; and she wanted to know what it was. The white could only be seen from one point, behind the furthest house, where the ground was high. "Never go there," said Carmen; "there is a Dead Man there,--will bite you!" And yet, one day, while Carmen was unusually busy, Chita went there.

In the early days of the settlement, a Spanish fisherman had died; and his comrades had built him a little tomb with the surplus of the same bricks and other material brought down the bayou for the construction of Viosca's cottages. But no one, except perhaps some wandering duck hunter, had approached the sepulchre for years. High weeds and gra.s.ses wrestled together all about it, and rendered it totally invisible from the surrounding level of the marsh.

Fiddlers swarmed away as Chita advanced over the moist soil, each uplifting its single huge claw as it sidled off;--then frogs began to leap before her as she reached the thicker gra.s.s;--and long-legged brown insects sprang showering to right and left as she parted the tufts of the thickening verdure. As she went on, the bitter-weeds disappeared;--jointed gra.s.ses and sinewy dark plants of a taller growth rose above her head: she was almost deafened by the storm of insect shrilling, and the mosquitoes became very wicked. All at once something long and black and heavy wriggled almost from under her naked feet,--squirming so horribly that for a minute or two she could not move for fright. But it slunk away somewhere, and hid itself; the weeds it had shaken ceased to tremble in its wake; and her courage returned.

She felt such an exquisite and fearful pleasure in the gratification of that naughty curiosity! Then, quite unexpectedly--oh! what a start it gave her!--the solitary white object burst upon her view, leprous and ghastly as the yawn of a cotton-mouth. Tombs ruin soon in Louisiana;--the one Chita looked upon seemed ready to topple down.

There was a great ragged hole at one end, where wind and rain, and perhaps also the burrowing of crawfish and of worms, had loosened the bricks, and caused them to slide out of place. It seemed very black inside; but Chita wanted to know what was there. She pushed her way through a gap in the thin and rotten line of pickets, and through some tall weeds with big coa.r.s.e pink flowers;--then she crouched down on hands and knees before the black hole, and peered in. It was not so black inside as she had thought; for a sunbeam slanted down through a c.h.i.n.k in the roof; and she could see!

A brown head--without hair, without eyes, but with teeth, ever so many teeth!--seemed to laugh at her; and close to it sat a Toad, the hugest she had ever seen; and the white skin of his throat kept puffing out and going in. And Chita screamed and screamed, and fled in wild terror,--screaming all the way, till Carmen ran out to meet her and carry her home. Even when safe in her adopted mother's arms, she sobbed with fright. To the vivid fancy of the child there seemed to be some hideous relation between the staring reptile and the brown death's-head, with its empty eyes, and its nightmare-smile.

The shock brought on a fever,--a fever that lasted several days, and left her very weak. But the experience taught her to obey, taught her that Carmen knew best what was for her good. It also caused her to think a great deal. Carmen had told her that the dead people never frightened good little girls who stayed at home.

--"Madrecita Carmen," she asked, "is my mamma dead?"

--"Pobrecita! .... Yes, my angel. G.o.d called her to Him,--your darling mother."

--"Madrecita," she asked again,--her young eyes growing vast with horror,--"is my own mamma now like That?" ... She pointed toward the place of the white gleam, behind the great trees.

--"No, no, no! my darling!" cried Carmen, appalled herself by the ghastly question,--"your mamma is with the dear, good, loving G.o.d, who lives in the beautiful sky, above the clouds, my darling, beyond the sun!"

But Carmen's kind eyes were full of tears; and the child read their meaning. He who teareth off the Mask of the Flesh had looked into her face one unutterable moment:--she had seen the brutal Truth, naked to the bone!

Yet there came to her a little thrill of consolation, caused by the words of the tender falsehood; for that which she had discerned by day could not explain to her that which she saw almost nightly in her slumber. The face, the voice, the form of her loving mother still lived somewhere,--could not have utterly pa.s.sed away; since the sweet presence came to her in dreams, bending and smiling over her, caressing her, speaking to her,--sometimes gently chiding, but always chiding with a kiss. And then the child would laugh in her sleep, and prattle in Creole,--talking to the luminous shadow, telling the dead mother all the little deeds and thoughts of the day.... Why would G.o.d only let her come at night?