The Grandissimes Part 2

We may easily imagine the grave group, as they came up one by one from below, that morning of first disappointment, and stood (with a whirligig of jubilant mosquitoes spinning about each head) looking out across the waste, seeing the sky and the marsh meet in the east, the north, and the west, and receiving with patient silence the father's suggestion that the hills would, no doubt, rise into view after a while.

"My children, we may turn this disappointment into a lesson; if the good people of this country could speak to us now, they might well ask us not to judge them or their land upon one or two hasty glances, or by the experiences of a few short days or weeks."

But no hills rose. However, by and by they found solace in the appearance of distant forest, and in the afternoon they entered a land--but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

"The captain told father, when we went to engage pa.s.sage, that New Orleans was on high land," said the younger daughter, with a tremor in the voice, and ignoring the remonstrative touch of her sister.

"On high land?" said the captain, turning from the pilot; "well, so it is--higher than the swamp, but not higher than the river," and he checked a broadening smile.

But the Frowenfelds were not a family to complain. It was characteristic of them to recognize the bright as well as the solemn virtues, and to keep each other reminded of the duty of cheerfulness. A smile, starting from the quiet elder sister, went around the group, directed against the abstracted and somewhat rueful countenance of Joseph, whereat he turned with a better face and said that what the Creator had p.r.o.nounced very good they could hardly feel free to condemn. The old father was still more stout of heart.

"These mosquitoes, children, are thought by some to keep the air pure,"

he said.

"Better keep out of it after sunset," put in the captain.

After that day and night, the prospect grew less repellent. A gradually matured conviction that New Orleans would not be found standing on stilts in the quagmire enabled the eye to become educated to a better appreciation of the solemn landscape. Nor was the landscape always solemn. There were long openings, now and then, to right and left, of emerald-green savannah, with the dazzling blue of the Gulf far beyond, waving a thousand white-handed good-byes as the funereal swamps slowly shut out again the horizon. How sweet the soft breezes off the moist prairies! How weird, how very near, the crimson and green and black and yellow sunsets! How dream-like the land and the great, whispering river!

The profound stillness and breath reminded the old German, so he said, of that early time when the evenings and mornings were the first days of the half-built world. The barking of a dog in Fort Plaquemines seemed to come before its turn in the panorama of creation--before the earth was ready for the dog's master.

But he was a.s.sured that to live in those swamps was not entirely impossible to man--"if one may call a negro a man." Runaway slaves were not so rare in them as one--a lost hunter, for example--might wish. His informant was a new pa.s.senger, taken aboard at the fort. He spoke English.

"Yes, sir! Didn' I had to run from Bras-Coupe in de haidge of de swamp be'ine de 'abitation of my cousin Honore, one time? You can hask 'oo you like!" (A Creole always provides against incredulity.) At this point he digressed a moment: "You know my cousin, Honore Grandissime, w'at give two hund' fifty dolla' to de 'ospill laz mont'? An' juz because my cousin Honore give it, somebody helse give de semm. Fo' w'y don't he give his nemm?"

The reason (which this person did not know) was that the second donor was the first one over again, resolved that the little unknown Monk should not know whom she had baffled.

"Who was Bras-Coupe?" the good German asked in French.

The stranger sat upon the capstan, and, in the shadow of the cypress forest, where the vessel lay moored for a change of wind, told in a _patois_ difficult, but not impossible, to understand, the story of a man who chose rather to be hunted like a wild beast among those awful labyrinths, than to be yoked and beaten like a tame one. Joseph, drawing near as the story was coming to a close, overheard the following English:

"Friend, if you dislike heated discussion, do not tell that to my son."

The nights were strangely beautiful. The immigrants almost consumed them on deck, the mother and daughters attending in silent delight while the father and son, facing south, rejoiced in learned recognition of stars and constellations. .h.i.therto known to them only on globes and charts.

"Yes, my dear son," said the father, in a moment of ecstatic admiration, "wherever man may go, around this globe--however uninviting his lateral surroundings may be, the heavens are ever over his head, and I am glad to find the stars your favorite objects of study."

So pa.s.sed the time as the vessel, hour by hour, now slowly pushed by the wind against the turbid current, now warping along the fragrant precincts of orange or magnolia groves or fields of sugar-cane, or moored by night in the deep shade of mighty willow-jungles, patiently crept toward the end of their pilgrimage; and in the length of time which would at present be consumed in making the whole journey from their Northern home to their Southern goal, accomplished the distance of ninety-eight miles, and found themselves before the little, hybrid city of "Nouvelle Orleans." There was the cathedral, and standing beside it, like Sancho beside Don Quixote, the squat hall of the Cabildo with the calabozo in the rear. There were the forts, the military bakery, the hospitals, the plaza, the Almonaster stores, and the busy rue Toulouse; and, for the rest of the town, a pleasant confusion of green tree-tops, red and gray roofs, and glimpses of white or yellow wall, spreading back a few hundred yards behind the cathedral, and tapering into a single rank of gardened and belvedered villas, that studded either horn of the river's crescent with a style of home than which there is probably nothing in the world more maternally homelike.

"And now," said the "captain," bidding the immigrants good-by, "keep out of the sun and stay in after dark; you're not 'acclimated,' as they call it, you know, and the city is full of the fever."

Such were the Frowenfelds. Out of such a mold and into such a place came the young Americain, whom even Agricola Fusilier, as we shall see, by and by thought worthy to be made an exception of, and honored with his recognition.

The family rented a two-story brick house in the rue Bienville, No. 17, it seems. The third day after, at daybreak, Joseph called his father to his bedside to say that he had had a chill, and was suffering such pains in his head and back that he would like to lie quiet until they pa.s.sed off. The gentle father replied that it was undoubtedly best to do so, and preserved an outward calm. He looked at his son's eyes; their pupils were contracted to tiny beads. He felt his pulse and his brow; there was no room for doubt; it was the dreaded scourge--the fever. We say, sometimes, of hearts that they sink like lead; it does not express the agony.

On the second day, while the unsated fever was running through every vein and artery, like soldiery through the streets of a burning city, and far down in the caverns of the body the poison was ransacking every palpitating corner, the poor immigrant fell into a moment's sleep. But what of that? The enemy that moment had mounted to the brain. And then there happened to Joseph an experience rare to the sufferer by this disease, but not entirely unknown,--a delirium of mingled pleasures and distresses. He seemed to awake somewhere between heaven and earth, reclining in a gorgeous barge, which was draped in curtains of interwoven silver and silk, cushioned with rich stuffs of every beautiful dye, and perfumed _ad nauseam_ with orange-leaf tea. The crew was a single old negress, whose head was wound about with a blue Madras handkerchief, and who stood at the prow, and by a singular rotary motion, rowed the barge with a teaspoon. He could not get his head out of the hot sun; and the barge went continually round and round with a heavy, throbbing motion, in the regular beat of which certain spirits of the air--one of whom appeared to be a beautiful girl and another a small, red-haired man,--confronted each other with the continual call and response:

"Keep the bedclothes on him and the room shut tight, keep the bedclothes on him and the room shut tight,"--"An' don' give 'im some watta, an'

don' give 'im some watta."

During what lapse of time--whether moments or days--this lasted, Joseph could not then know; but at last these things faded away, and there came to him a positive knowledge that he was on a sick-bed, where unless something could be done for him he should be dead in an hour. Then a spoon touched his lips, and a taste of brandy and water went all through him; and when he fell into sweet slumber and awoke, and found the teaspoon ready at his lips again, he had to lift a little the two hands lying before him on the coverlet to know that they were his--they were so wasted and yellow. He turned his eyes, and through the white gauze of the mosquito-bar saw, for an instant, a strange and beautiful young face; but the lids fell over his eyes, and when he raised them again the blue-turbaned black nurse was tucking the covering about his feet.

"Sister!"

No answer.

"Where is my mother?"

The negress shook her head.

He was too weak to speak again, but asked with his eyes so persistently, and so pleadingly, that by and by she gave him an audible answer. He tried hard to understand it, but could not, it being in these words:

"_Li pa' oule vini 'ci--li pas capabe_."

Thrice a day, for three days more, came a little man with a large head surrounded by short, red curls and with small freckles in a fine skin, and sat down by the bed with a word of good cheer and the air of a commander. At length they had something like an extended conversation.

"So you concluded not to die, eh? Yes, I'm the doctor--Doctor Keene. A young lady? What young lady? No, sir, there has been no young lady here.

You're mistaken. Vagary of your fever. There has been no one here but this black girl and me. No, my dear fellow, your father and mother can't see you yet; you don't want them to catch the fever, do you? Good-bye.

Do as your nurse tells you, and next week you may raise your head and shoulders a little; but if you don't mind her you'll have a backset, and the devil himself wouldn't engage to cure you."

The patient had been sitting up a little at a time for several days, when at length the doctor came to pay a final call, "as a matter of form;" but, after a few pleasantries, he drew his chair up gravely, and, in a tender tone--need we say it? He had come to tell Joseph that his father, mother, sisters, all, were gone on a second--a longer--voyage, to sh.o.r.es where there could be no disappointments and no fevers, forever.

"And, Frowenfeld," he said, at the end of their long and painful talk, "if there is any blame attached to not letting you go with them, I think I can take part of it; but if you ever want a friend,--one who is courteous to strangers and ill-mannered only to those he likes,--you can call for Charlie Keene. I'll drop in to see you, anyhow, from time to time, till you get stronger. I have taken a heap of trouble to keep you alive, and if you should relapse now and give us the slip, it would be a deal of good physic wasted; so keep in the house."

The polite neighbors who lifted their c.o.c.ked hats to Joseph, as he spent a slow convalescence just within his open door, were not bound to know how or when he might have suffered. There were no "Howards" or "Y.M.C.A.'s" in those days; no "Peabody Reliefs." Even had the neighbors chosen to take cognizance of those bereavements, they were not so unusual as to fix upon him any extraordinary interests an object of sight; and he was beginning most distressfully to realize that "great solitude" which the philosopher attributes to towns, when matters took a decided turn.

CHAPTER III

"AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?"

We say matters took a turn; or, better, that Frowenfeld's interest in affairs received a new life. This had its beginning in Doctor Keene's making himself specially entertaining in an old-family-history way, with a view to keeping his patient within doors for a safe period. He had conceived a great liking for Frowenfeld, and often, of an afternoon, would drift in to challenge him to a game of chess--a game, by the way, for which neither of them cared a farthing. The immigrant had learned its moves to gratify his father, and the doctor--the truth is, the doctor had never quite learned them; but he was one of those men who cannot easily consent to acknowledge a mere affection for one, least of all one of their own s.e.x. It may safely be supposed, then, that the board often displayed an arrangement of pieces that would have bewildered Morphy himself.

"By the by, Frowenfeld," he said one evening, after the one preliminary move with which he invariably opened his game, "you haven't made the acquaintance of your pretty neighbors next door."

Frowenfeld knew of no specially pretty neighbors next door on either side--had noticed no ladies.

"Well, I will take you in to see them some time." The doctor laughed a little, rubbing his face and his thin, red curls with one hand, as he laughed.

The convalescent wondered what there could be to laugh at.

"Who are they?" he inquired.

"Their name is De Grapion--oh, De Grapion, says I! their name is Nancanou. They are, without exception, the finest women--the brightest, the best, and the bravest--that I know in New Orleans." The doctor resumed a cigar which lay against the edge of the chess-board, found it extinguished, and proceeded to relight it. "Best blood of the province; good as the Grandissimes. Blood is a great thing here, in certain odd ways," he went on. "Very curious sometimes." He stooped to the floor where his coat had fallen, and took his handkerchief from a breast-pocket. "At a grand mask ball about two months ago, where I had a bewilderingly fine time with those ladies, the proudest old turkey in the theater was an old fellow whose Indian blood shows in his very behavior, and yet--ha, ha! I saw that same old man, at a quadroon ball a few years ago, walk up to the handsomest, best dressed man in the house, a man with a skin whiter than his own,--a perfect gentleman as to looks and manners,--and without a word slap him in the face."

"You laugh?" asked Frowenfeld.

"Laugh? Why shouldn't I? The fellow had no business there. Those b.a.l.l.s are not given to quadroon _males_, my friend. He was lucky to get out alive, and that was about all he did.