The Grandissimes Part 20

"G.o.d forbid!"

The landlord was grossly incredulous.

"You G.o.dd one 'P't.i.t Albert.'"

He dropped his forefinger upon an iron-clasped book on the table, whose t.i.tle 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 pa.s.se_?"

"Sir?"

"Ee was yeh?--laz nighd?"

"Mr. Fusilier was here last night--yes. He had been attacked by an a.s.sa.s.sin 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n 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 cla.s.s, 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 grat.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 a.s.signed 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 "n.o.bly 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 a.s.surance 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 pa.s.sion, _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 s.h.i.+nd 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 blus.h.i.+ngly 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 a.s.sistant."

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 s.h.i.+ft 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?