The Grandissimes Part 34

"But he declines to dress himself--has painted himself all rings and stripes, antelope fas.h.i.+on."

"Tell him Agricola Fusilier says, 'dress immediately!'"

"Oh, Miche, we have said that five times already, and his answer--you will pardon me--his answer is--spitting on the ground--that you are a contemptible _dotchian_ (white trash)."

There is nothing to do but privily to call the very bride--the lady herself. She comes forth in all her glory, small, but oh, so beautiful!

Slam! Bras-Coupe is upon his face, his finger-tips touching the tips of her snowy slippers. She gently bids him go and dress, and at once he goes.

Ah! now the question may be answered without whispering. There is Bras-Coupe, towering above all heads, in ridiculous red and blue regimentals, but with a look of savage dignity upon him that keeps every one from laughing. The murmur of admiration that pa.s.sed along the thronged gallery leaped up into a shout in the bosom of Palmyre. Oh, Bras-Coupe--heroic soul! She would not falter. She would let the silly priest say his say--then her cunning should help her _not to be_ his wife, yet to show his mighty arm how and when to strike.

"He is looking for Palmyre," said some, and at that moment he saw her.

"Ho-o-o-o-o!"

Agricola's best roar was a penny trumpet to Bras-Coupe's note of joy.

The whole masculine half of the indoor company flocked out to see what the matter was. Bras-Coupe was taking her hand in one of his and laying his other upon her head; and as some one made an unnecessary gesture for silence, he sang, beating slow and solemn time with his naked foot and with the hand that dropped hers to smite his breast:

"'_En haut la montagne, zami, Mo pe coupe canne, zami, Pou' fe l'a'zen' zami, Pou' mo baille Palmyre.

Ah! Palmyre, Palmyre mo c'ere, Mo l'aime 'ou'--mo l'aime 'ou'_.'"

"_Montagne?_" asked one slave of another, "_qui est ca, montagne? gnia pas quic 'ose comme ca dans la Louisiana?_ (What's a mountain?" We haven't such things in Louisiana.)"

"_Mein ye gagnein plein montagnes dans l'Afrique_, listen!"

"'_Ah! Palmyre, Palmyre, mo' piti zozo,'

Mo l'aime 'ou'--mo l'aime, l'aime 'ou'_.'"

"Bravissimo!--" but just then a counter-attraction drew the white company back into the house. An old French priest with sandalled feet and a dirty face had arrived. There was a moment of handshaking with the good father, then a moment of palpitation and holding of the breath, and then--you would have known it by the turning away of two or three feminine heads in tears--the lily hand became the don's, to have and to hold, by authority of the Church and the Spanish king. And all was merry, save that outside there was coming up as villanous a night as ever cast black looks in through snug windows.

It was just as the newly-wed Spaniard, with Agricola and all the guests, were concluding the byplay of marrying the darker couple, that the hurricane struck the dwelling. The holy and jovial father had made faint pretence of kissing this second bride; the ladies, colonels, dons, etc.,--though the joke struck them as a trifle coa.r.s.e--were beginning to laugh and clap hands again and the gowned jester to bow to right and left, when Bras-Coupe, tardily realizing the consummation of his hopes, stepped forward to embrace his wife.

"Bras-Coupe!"

The voice was that of Palmyre's mistress. She had not been able to comprehend her maid's behavior, but now Palmyre had darted upon her an appealing look.

The warrior stopped as if a javelin had flashed over his head and stuck in the wall.

"Bras-Coupe must wait till I give him his wife."

He sank, with hidden face, slowly to the floor.

"Bras-Coupe hears the voice of zombis; the voice is sweet, but the words are very strong; from the same sugar-cane comes _sirop_ and _tafia_; Bras-Coupe says to zombis, 'Bras-Coupe will wait; but if the _dotchians_ deceive Bras-Coupe--" he rose to his feet with his eyes closed and his great black fist lifted over his head--"Bras-Coupe will call Voudou-Magnan!"

The crowd retreated and the storm fell like a burst of infernal applause. A whiff like fifty witches flouted up the canvas curtain of the gallery and a fierce black cloud, drawing the moon under its cloak, belched forth a stream of fire that seemed to flood the ground; a peal of thunder followed as if the sky had fallen in, the house quivered, the great oaks groaned, and every lesser thing bowed down before the awful blast. Every lip held its breath for a minute--or an hour, no one knew--there was a sudden lull of the wind, and the floods came down.

Have you heard it thunder and rain in those Louisiana lowlands? Every clap seems to crack the world. It has rained a moment; you peer through the black pane--your house is an island, all the land is sea.

However, the supper was spread in the hall and in due time the guests were filled. Then a supper was spread in the big hall in the bas.e.m.e.nt, below stairs, the sons and daughters of Ham came down like the fowls of the air upon a rice-field, and Bras-Coupe, throwing his heels about with the joyous carelessness of a s.m.u.tted Mercury, for the first time in his life tasted the blood of the grape. A second, a fifth, a tenth time he tasted it, drinking more deeply each time, and would have taken it ten times more had not his bride cunningly concealed it. It was like stealing a tiger's kittens.

The moment quickly came when he wanted his eleventh b.u.mper. As he presented his request a silent s.h.i.+ver of consternation ran through the dark company; and when, in what the prince meant as a remonstrative tone, he repeated the pet.i.tion--splitting the table with his fist by way of punctuation--there ensued a hustling up staircases and a cramming into dim corners that left him alone at the banquet.

Leaving the table, he strode upstairs and into the chirruping and dancing of the grand salon. There was a halt in the cotillion and a hush of amazement like the shutting off of steam. Bras-Coupe strode straight to his master, laid his paw upon his fellow-bridegroom's shoulder and in a thunder-tone demanded:

"More!"

The master swore a Spanish oath, lifted his hand and--fell, beneath the terrific fist of his slave, with a bang that jingled the candelabra.

Dolorous stroke!--for the dealer of it. Given, apparently to him--poor, tipsy savage--in self-defence, punishable, in a white offender, by a small fine or a few days' imprisonment, it a.s.sured Bras-Coupe the death of a felon; such was the old _Code Noir_. (We have a _Code Noir_ now, but the new one is a mental reservation, not an enactment.)

The guests stood for an instant as if frozen, smitten stiff with the instant expectation of insurrection, conflagration and rapine (just as we do to-day whenever some poor swaggering Pompey rolls up his fist and gets a ball through his body), while, single-handed and naked-fisted in a room full of swords, the giant stood over his master, making strange signs and pa.s.ses and rolling out in wrathful words of his mother tongue what it needed no interpreter to tell his swarming enemies was a voudou malediction.

"_Nous sommes grigis!_" screamed two or three ladies, "we are bewitched!"

"Look to your wives and daughters!" shouted a Brahmin-Mandarin.

"Shoot the black devils without mercy!" cried a Mandarin-Fusilier, unconsciously putting into a single outflash of words the whole Creole treatment of race troubles.

With a single bound Bras-Coupe reached the drawing-room door; his gaudy regimentals made a red and blue streak down the hall; there was a rush of frilled and powdered gentlemen to the rear veranda, an avalanche of lightning with Bras-Coupe in the midst making for the swamp, and then all without was blackness of darkness and all within was a wild commingled chatter of Creole, French, and Spanish tongues,--in the midst of which the reluctant Agricola returned his dresssword to its scabbard.

While the wet lanterns swung on crazily in the trees along the way by which the bridegroom was to have borne his bride; while Madame Grandissime prepared an impromptu bridalchamber; while the Spaniard bathed his eye and the blue gash on his cheek-bone; while Palmyre paced her room in a fever and wild tremor of conflicting emotions throughout the night, and the guests splashed home after the storm as best they could, Bras-Coupe was practically declaring his independence on a slight rise of ground hardly sixty feet in circ.u.mference and lifted scarce above the water in the inmost depths of the swamp.

And amid what surroundings! Endless colonnades of cypresses; long, motionless drapings of gray moss; broad sheets of noisome waters, pitchy black, resting on bottomless ooze; cypress knees studding the surface; patches of floating green, gleaming brilliantly here and there; yonder where the sunbeams wedge themselves in, constellations of water-lilies, the many-hued iris, and a mult.i.tude of flowers that no man had named; here, too, serpents great and small, of wonderful colorings, and the dull and loathsome moccasin sliding warily off the dead tree; in dimmer recesses the cow alligator, with her nest hard by; turtles a century old; owls and bats, racc.o.o.ns, opossums, rats, centipedes and creatures of like vileness; great vines of beautiful leaf and scarlet fruit in deadly cl.u.s.ters; maddening mosquitoes, parasitic insects, gorgeous dragon-flies and pretty water-lizards: the blue heron, the snowy crane, the red-bird, the moss-bird, the night-hawk and the chuckwill's-widow; a solemn stillness and stifled air only now and then disturbed by the call or whir of the summer duck, the dismal ventriloquous note of the rain-crow, or the splash of a dead branch falling into the clear but lifeless bayou.

The pack of Cuban hounds that howl from Don Jose's kennels cannot snuff the trail of the stolen canoe that glides through the sombre blue vapors of the African's fastnesses. His arrows send no telltale reverberations to the distant clearing. Many a wretch in his native wilderness has Bras-Coupe himself, in palmier days, driven to just such an existence, to escape the chains and horrors of the barrac.o.o.ns; therefore not a whit broods he over man's inhumanity, but, taking the affair as a matter of course, casts about him for a future.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE STORY OF BRAS-COUPe, CONTINUED

Bras-Coupe let the autumn pa.s.s, and wintered in his den.

Don Jose, in a majestic way, endeavored to be happy. He took his senora to his hall, and under her rule it took on for a while a look and feeling which turned it from a hunting-lodge into a home. Wherever the lady's steps turned--or it is as correct to say wherever the proud tread of Palmyre turned--the features of bachelor's-hall disappeared; guns, dogs, oars, saddles, nets, went their way into proper banishment, and the broad halls and lofty chambers--the floors now m.u.f.fled with mats of palmetto-leaf--no longer re-echoed the tread of a lonely master, but breathed a redolence of flowers and a rippling murmur of well-contented song.

But the song was not from the throat of Bras-Coupe's "_piti zozo_."

Silent and severe by day, she moaned away whole nights heaping reproaches upon herself for the impulse--now to her, because it had failed, inexplicable in its folly--which had permitted her hand to lie in Bras-Coupe's and the priest to bind them together.

For in the audacity of her pride, or, as Agricola would have said, in the immensity of her impudence, she had held herself consecrate to a hopeless love. But now she was a black man's wife! and even he unable to sit at her feet and learn the lesson she had hoped to teach him. She had heard of San Domingo; for months the fierce heart within her silent bosom had been leaping and shouting and seeing visions of fire and blood, and when she brooded over the nearness of Agricola and the remoteness of Honore these visions got from her a sort of mad consent.

The lesson she would have taught the giant was Insurrection. But it was too late. Letting her dagger sleep in her bosom, and with an undefined belief in imaginary resources, she had consented to join hands with her giant hero before the priest; and when the wedding had come and gone like a white sail, she was seized with a lasting, fierce despair. A wild aggressiveness that had formerly characterized her glance in moments of anger--moments which had grown more and more infrequent under the softening influence of her Mademoiselle's nature--now came back intensified, and blazed in her eye perpetually. Whatever her secret love may have been in kind, its sinking beyond hope below the horizon had left her fifty times the mutineer she had been before--the mutineer who has nothing to lose.

"She loves her _candio_" said the negroes.

"Simple creatures!" said the overseer, who prided himself on his discernment, "she loves nothing; she hates Agricola; it's a case of hate at first sight--the strongest kind."

Both were partly right; her feelings were wonderfully knit to the African; and she now dedicated herself to Agricola's ruin.

The senor, it has been said, endeavored to be happy; but now his heart conceived and brought forth its first-born fear, sired by superst.i.tion--the fear that he was bewitched. The negroes said that Bras-Coupe had cursed the land. Morning after morning the master looked out with apprehension toward the fields, until one night the worm came upon the indigo, and between sunset and sunrise every green leaf had been eaten up and there was nothing left for either insect or apprehension to feed upon.