The Grandissimes Part 62

But Joseph's rising to go was not immediately upon the close of the discussion; those courtly people would not let even an unwelcome guest go with the faintest feeling of disrelish for them. They were casting about in their minds for some momentary diversion with which to add a finis.h.i.+ng touch to their guest's entertainment, when Clemence appeared in the front garden walk and was quickly surrounded by bounding children, alternately begging and demanding a song. Many of even the younger adults remembered well when she had been "one of the hands on the place," and a pa.s.sionate lover of the African dance. In the same instant half a dozen voices proposed that for Joseph's amus.e.m.e.nt Clemence should put her cakes off her head, come up on the veranda and show a few of her best steps.

"But who will sing?"

"Raoul!"

"Very well; and what shall it be?"

"'Madame Gaba.'"

No, Clemence objected.

"Well, well, stand back--something better than 'Madame Gaba.'"

Raoul began to sing and Clemence instantly to pace and turn, posture, bow, respond to the song, start, swing, straighten, stamp, wheel, lift her hand, stoop, twist, walk, whirl, tiptoe with crossed ankles, smite her palms, march, circle, leap,--an endless improvisation of rhythmic motion to this modulated responsive chant:

Raoul. "_Mo pas l'aimein ca_."

Clemence. "_Miche Igenne, oap! oap! oap!_"

He. "_Ye donne vingt cinq sous pou' manze poule_."

She. "_Miche Igenne, dit--dit--dit--_"

He. "_Mo pas l'aimein ca!_"

She. "_Miche Igenne, oap! oap! oap!_"

He. "_Mo pas l'aimein ca!_"

She. "_Miche Igenne, oap! oap! oap!_"

Frowenfeld was not so greatly amused as the ladies thought he should have been, and was told that this was not a fair indication of what he would see if there were ten dancers instead of one.

How much less was it an indication of what he would have seen in that mansion early the next morning, when there was found just outside of Agricola's bedroom door a fresh egg, not cracked, according to Honore's maxim, but smashed, according to the lore of the voudous. Who could have got in in the night? And did the intruder get in by magic, by outside lock-picking, or by inside collusion? Later in the morning, the children playing in the bas.e.m.e.nt found--it had evidently been accidentally dropped, since the true use of its contents required them to be scattered in some person's path--a small cloth bag, containing a quant.i.ty of dogs' and cats' hair, cut fine and mixed with salt and pepper.

"Clemence?"

"Pooh! Clemence. No! But as sure as the sun turns around the world--Palmyre Philosophe!"

CHAPTER LIV

"CAULDRON BUBBLE"

The excitement and alarm produced by the practical threat of voudou curses upon Agricola was one thing, Creole lethargy was quite another; and when, three mornings later, a full quartette of voudou charms was found in the four corners of Agricola's pillow, the great Grandissime family were ignorant of how they could have come there. Let us examine these terrible engines of mischief. In one corner was an acorn drilled through with two holes at right angles to each other, a small feather run through each hole; in the second a joint of cornstalk with a cavity scooped from the middle, the pith left intact at the ends, and the s.p.a.ce filled with parings from that small callous spot near the knee of the horse, called the "nail;" in the third corner a bunch of parti-colored feathers; something equally meaningless in the fourth. No thread was used in any of them. All fastening was done with the gum of trees. It was no easy task for his kindred to prevent Agricola, beside himself with rage and fright, from going straight to Palmyre's house and shooting her down in open day.

"We shall have to watch our house by night," said a gentleman of the household, when they had at length restored the Citizen to a condition of mind which enabled them to hold him in a chair.

"Watch this house?" cried a chorus. "You don't suppose she comes near here, do you? She does it all from a distance. No, no; watch _her_ house."

Did Agricola believe in the supernatural potency of these gimcracks? No, and yes. Not to be foolhardy, he quietly slipped down every day to the levee, had a slave-boy row him across the river in a skiff, landed, re-embarked, and in the middle of the stream surrept.i.tiously cast a picayune over his shoulder into the river. Monsieur D'Embarras, the imp of death thus placated, must have been a sort of spiritual Cheap John.

Several more nights pa.s.sed. The house of Palmyre, closely watched, revealed nothing. No one came out, no one went in, no light was seen.

They should have watched in broad daylight. At last, one midnight, 'Polyte Grandissime stepped cautiously up to one of the batten doors with an auger, and succeeded, without arousing any one, in boring a hole. He discovered a lighted candle standing in a gla.s.s of water.

"Nothing but a bedroom light," said one.

"Ah, bah!" whispered the other; "it is to make the spell work strong."

"We will not tell Agricola first; we had better tell Honore," said Sylvestre.

"You forget," said 'Polyte, "that I no longer have any acquaintance with Monsieur Honore Grandissime."

They told Agamemnon; and it would have gone hard with the "_milatraise_" but for the additional fact that suspicion had fastened upon another person; but now this person in turn had to be identified.

It was decided not to report progress to old Agricola, but to wait and seek further developments. Agricola, having lost all ability to sleep in the mansion, moved into a small cottage in a grove near the house. But the very next morning, he turned cold with horror to find on his doorstep a small black-coffined doll, with pins run through the heart, a burned-out candle at the head and another at the feet.

"You know it is Palmyre, do you?" asked Agamemnon, seizing the old man as he was going at a headlong pace through the garden gate. "What if I should tell you that by watching the Congo dancing-ground at midnight to-night, you will see the real author of this mischief--eh?"

"And why to-night?"

"Because the moon rises at midnight."

There was firing that night in the deserted Congo dancing-grounds under the ruins of Fort St. Joseph, or, as we would say now, in Congo Square, from three pistols--Agricola's, 'Polyte's, and the weapon of an ill-defined, retreating figure answering the description of the person who had stabbed Agricola the preceding February. "And yet," said 'Polyte, "I would have sworn that it was Palmyre doing this work."

Through Raoul these events came to the ear of Frowenfield. It was about the time that Raoul's fis.h.i.+ng party, after a few days' mishaps, had returned home. Palmyre, on several later dates, had craved further audiences and shown other letters from the hidden f.m.c. She had heard them calmly, and steadfastly preserved the one att.i.tude of refusal. But it could not escape Frowenfeld's notice that she encouraged the sending of additional letters. He easily guessed the courier to be Clemence; and now, as he came to ponder these revelations of Raoul, he found that within twenty-four hours after every visit of Clemence to the house of Palmyre, Agricola suffered a visitation.

CHAPTER LV

CAUGHT

The fig-tree, in Louisiana, sometimes sheds its leaves while it is yet summer. In the rear of the Grandissme mansion, about two hundred yards northwest of it and fifty northeast of the cottage in which Agricola had made his new abode, on the edge of the grove of which we have spoken, stood one of these trees, whose leaves were beginning to lie thickly upon the ground beneath it. An ancient and luxuriant hedge of Cherokee-rose started from this tree and stretched toward the northwest across the level country, until it merged into the green confusion of gardened homes in the vicinity of Bayou St. Jean, or, by night, into the common obscurity of a starlit perspective. When an unclouded moon shone upon it, it cast a shadow as black as velvet.

Under this fig-tree, some three hours later than that at which Honore bade Joseph good-night, a man was stooping down and covering something with the broad, fallen leaves.

"The moon will rise about three o'clock," thought he. "That, the hour of universal slumber, will be, by all odds, the time most likely to bring developments."

He was the same person who had spent the most of the day in a blacksmith's shop in St. Louis street, superintending a piece of smithing. Now that he seemed to have got the thing well hid, he turned to the base of the tree and tried the security of some attachment. Yes, it was firmly chained. He was not a robber; he was not an a.s.sa.s.sin; he was not an officer of police; and what is more notable, seeing he was a Louisianian, he was not a soldier nor even an ex-soldier; and this although, under his clothing, he was encased from head to foot in a complete suit of mail. Of steel? No. Of bra.s.s? No. It was all one piece--_a white skin_; and on his head he wore an invisible helmet--the name of Grandissime. As he straightened up and withdrew into the grove, you would have recognized at once--by his thick-set, powerful frame, clothed seemingly in black, but really, as you might guess, in blue cottonade, by his black beard and the general look of a seafarer--a frequent visitor at the Grandissime mansion, a country member of that great family, one whom we saw at the _fete de grandpere_.

Capitain Jean-Baptiste Grandissime was a man of few words, no sentiments, short methods; materialistic, we might say; quietly ferocious; indifferent as to means, positive as to ends, quick of perception, sure in matters of saltpetre, a stranger at the custom-house, and altogether--_take him right_--very much of a gentleman. He had been, for a whole day, beset with the idea that the way to catch a voudou was--to catch him; and as he had caught numbers of them on both sides of the tropical and semi-tropical Atlantic, he decided to try his skill privately on the one who--his experience told him--was likely to visit Agricola's doorstep to-night. All things being now prepared, he sat down at the root of a tree in the grove, where the shadow was very dark, and seemed quite comfortable. He did not strike at the mosquitoes; they appeared to understand that he did not wish to trifle. Neither did his thoughts or feelings trouble him; he sat and sharpened a small penknife on his boot.

His mind--his occasional transient meditation--was the more comfortable because he was one of those few who had coolly and unsentimentally allowed Honore Grandissime to sell their lands. It continued to grow plainer every day that the grants with which theirs were cla.s.sed--grants of old French or Spanish under-officials--were bad. Their sagacious cousin seemed to have struck the right standard, and while those t.i.tles which he still held on to remained unimpeached, those that he had parted with to purchasers--as, for instance, the grant held by this Capitain Jean-Baptiste Grandissime--could be bought back now for half what he had got for it. Certainly, as to that, the Capitain might well have that quietude of mind which enabled him to find occupation in perfecting the edge of his penknife and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g his nails in the dark.