The Grandissimes by George Washington Cable

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THE GRANDISSIMES

BY GEORGE W. CABLE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ALBERT HERTER

MDCCCXCIX

1899

CONTENTS

I. Masked Batteries.
II. The Fate of the Immigrant.
III. "And who is my Neighbor?"
IV. Family Trees.
V. A Maiden who will not Marry.
VI. Lost Opportunities.
VII. Was it Honore Grandissime?
VIII. Signed--Honore Grandissime.
IX. Illustrating the Tractive Power of Basil.
X. "Oo dad is, 'Sieur Frowenfel'?"
XI. Sudden Flashes of Light.
XII. The Philosophe.
XIII. A Call from the Rent-Spectre.
XIV. Before Sunset.
XV. Rolled in the Dust.
XVI. Starlight in the rue Chartres.
XVII. That Night.
XVIII. New Light upon Dark Places.
XIX. Art and Commerce.
XX. A very Natural Mistake.
XXI. Doctor Keene Recovers his Bullet.
XXII. Wars within the Breast.
XXIII. Frowenfeld Keeps his Appointment.
XXIV. Frowenfeld Makes an Argument.
XXV. Aurora as a Historian.
XXVI. A Ride and a Rescue.
XXVII. The Fete de Grandpere.
XXVIII. The Story of Bras-Coupe.
XXIX. The Story of Bras-Coupe, Continued.
XXX. Paralysis.
XXXI. Another Wound in a New Place.
XXXII. Interrupted Preliminaries.
XXXIII. Unkindest Cut of All.
XXXIV. Clotilde as a Surgeon.
XXXV. "Fo' wad you Cryne?"
XXXVI. Aurora's Last Picayune.
XXXVII. Honore Makes some Confessions.
XXXVIII. Tests of Friendship.
XXXIX. Louisiana States her Wants.
XL. Frowenfeld Finds Sylvestre.
XLI. To Come to the Point.
XLII. An Inheritance of Wrong.
XLIII. The Eagle Visits the Doves in their Nest.
XLIV. Bad for Charlie Keene.
XLV. More Reparation.
XLVI. The Pique-en-terre Loses One of her Crew.
XLVII. The News.
XLVIII. An Indignant Family and a Smashed Shop.
XLIX. Over the New Store.
L. A Proposal of Marriage.
LI. Business Changes.
LII. Love Lies-a-Bleeding.
LIII. Frowenfeld at the Grandissime Mansion.
LIV. "Cauldron Bubble".
LV. Caught.
LVI. Blood for a Blow.
LVII. Voudou Cured.
LVIII. Dying Words.
LIX. Where some Creole Money Goes.
LX. "All Right".
LXI. "No!".

PHOTOGRAVURES

"They paused a little within the obscurity of the corridor, and just to
reassure themselves that everything _was_ 'all right'" _Frontispiece_.

"She looked upon an unmasked, noble countenance, lifted her own mask a
little, and then a little more; and then shut it quickly".

"The daughter of the Natchez sitting in majesty, clothed in many-colored
robes of shining feathers crossed and recrossed with girdles of
serpent-skins and of wampum".

"Aurora,--alas! alas!--went down upon her knees with her gaze fixed upon
the candle's flame".

"The young man with auburn curls rested the edge of his burden upon the
counter, tore away its wrappings and disclosed a painting".

"Silently regarding the intruder with a pair of eyes that sent an icy
chill through him and fastened him where he stood, lay Palmyre
Philosophe".

"On their part, they would sit in deep attention, shielding their faces
from the fire, and responding to enunciations directly contrary to their
convictions with an occasional 'yes-seh,' or 'ceddenly,' or 'of coze,'
or,--prettier affirmation still,--a solemn drooping of the eyelids".

"Bras-Coupe was practically declaring his independence on a slight rise
of ground hardly sixty feet in circumference and lifted scarce above the
water in the inmost depths of the swamp".

"'Ma lill dotter, wad dad meggin you cry? Iv you will tell me wad dad
mague you cry, I will tell you--on ma _second word of honor_'--she
rolled up her fist--'juz wad I thing about dad 'Sieur Frowenfel!'".

"His head was bowed, a heavy grizzled lock fell down upon his dark,
frowning brow, one hand clenched the top of his staff, the other his
knee, and both trembled violently".

"The tall figure of Palmyre rose slowly and silently from her chair, her
eyes lifted up and her lips moving noiselessly. She seemed to have lost
all knowledge of place or of human presence".

"They turned in a direction opposite to the entrance and took chairs in
a cool nook of the paved court, at a small table where the hospitality
of Clemence had placed glasses of lemonade".

_In addition to the foregoing, the stories are illustrated with eight
smaller photogravures from drawings by Mr. Herter_.

CHAPTER I

MASKED BATTERIES

It was in the Theatre St. Philippe (they had laid a temporary floor over
the parquette seats) in the city we now call New Orleans, in the month
of September, and in the year 1803. Under the twinkle of numberless
candles, and in a perfumed air thrilled with the wailing ecstasy of
violins, the little Creole capital's proudest and best were offering up
the first cool night of the languidly departing summer to the divine
Terpsichore. For summer there, bear in mind, is a loitering gossip, that
only begins to talk of leaving when September rises to go. It was like
hustling her out, it is true, to give a select _bal masque_ at such a
very early--such an amusingly early date; but it was fitting that
something should be done for the sick and the destitute; and why not
this? Everybody knows the Lord loveth a cheerful giver.

And so, to repeat, it was in the Theatre St. Philippe (the oldest, the
first one), and, as may have been noticed, in the year in which the
First Consul of France gave away Louisiana. Some might call it "sold."
Old Agricola Fusilier in the rumbling pomp of his natural voice--for he
had an hour ago forgotten that he was in mask and domino--called it
"gave away." Not that he believed it had been done; for, look you, how
could it be? The pretended treaty contained, for instance, no provision
relative to the great family of Brahmin Mandarin Fusilier de
Grandissime. It was evidently spurious.

Being bumped against, he moved a step or two aside, and was going on to
denounce further the detestable rumor, when a masker--one of four who
had just finished the contra-dance and were moving away in the column of
promenaders--brought him smartly around with the salutation:

"_Comment to ye, Citoyen Agricola!_"

"H-you young kitten!" said the old man in a growling voice, and with the
teased, half laugh of aged vanity as he bent a baffled scrutiny at the
back-turned face of an ideal Indian Queen. It was not merely the
_tutoiement_ that struck him as saucy, but the further familiarity of
using the slave dialect. His French was unprovincial.

"H-the cool rascal!" he added laughingly, and, only half to himself;
"get into the garb of your true sex, sir, h-and I will guess who
you are!"

But the Queen, in the same feigned voice as before, retorted:

"_Ah! mo piti fils, to pas connais to zancestres?_ Don't you know your
ancestors, my little son!"

"H-the g-hods preserve us!" said Agricola, with a pompous laugh muffled
under his mask, "the queen of the Tchoupitoulas I proudly acknowledge,
and my great-grandfather, Epaminondas Fusilier, lieutenant of dragoons
under Bienville; but,"--he laid his hand upon his heart, and bowed to
the other two figures, whose smaller stature betrayed the gentler
sex--"pardon me, ladies, neither Monks nor _Filles a la Cassette_ grow
on our family tree."

The four maskers at once turned their glance upon the old man in the
domino; but if any retort was intended it gave way as the violins burst
into an agony of laughter. The floor was immediately filled with
waltzers and the four figures disappeared.

"I wonder," murmured Agricola to himself, "if that Dragoon can possibly
be Honore Grandissime."

Wherever those four maskers went there were cries of delight: "Ho, ho,
ho! see there! here! there! a group of first colonists! One of
Iberville's Dragoons! don't you remember great-great grandfather
Fusilier's portrait--the gilded casque and heron plumes? And that one
behind in the fawn-skin leggings and shirt of birds' skins is an Indian
Queen. As sure as sure can be, they are intended for Epaminondas and his
wife, Lufki-Humma!" All, of course, in Louisiana French.

"But why, then, does he not walk with her?"

"Why, because, Simplicity, both of them are men, while the little Monk
on his arm is a lady, as you can see, and so is the masque that has the
arm of the Indian Queen; look at their little hands."

In another part of the room the four were greeted with, "Ha, ha, ha!
well, that is magnificent! But see that Huguenotte Girl on the Indian
Queen's arm! Isn't that fine! Ha, ha! she carries a little trunk. She is
a _Fille a la Cassette!_"

Two partners in a cotillion were speaking in an undertone, behind a fan.

"And you think you know who it is?" asked one.

"Know?" replied the other. "Do I know I have a head on my shoulders? If
that Dragoon is not our cousin Honore Grandissime--well--"

"Honore in mask? he is too sober-sided to do such a thing."

"I tell you it is he! Listen. Yesterday I heard Doctor Charlie Keene
begging him to go, and telling him there were two ladies, strangers,
newly arrived in the city, who would be there, and whom he wished him to
meet. Depend upon it the Dragoon is Honore, Lufki-Humma is Charlie
Keene, and the Monk and the Huguenotte are those two ladies."

But all this is an outside view; let us draw nearer and see what chance
may discover to us behind those four masks.

An hour has passed by. The dance goes on; hearts are beating, wit is
flashing, eyes encounter eyes with the leveled lances of their beams,
merriment and joy and sudden bright surprises thrill the breast, voices
are throwing off disguise, and beauty's coy ear is bending with a
venturesome docility; here love is baffled, there deceived, yonder takes
prisoners and here surrenders. The very air seems to breathe, to sigh,
to laugh, while the musicians, with disheveled locks, streaming brows
and furious bows, strike, draw, drive, scatter from the anguished
violins a never-ending rout of screaming harmonies. But the Monk and the
Huguenotte are not on the floor. They are sitting where they have been
left by their two companions, in one of the boxes of the theater,
looking out upon the unwearied whirl and flash of gauze and light
and color.

"Oh, _cherie, cherie!_" murmured the little lady in the Monk's disguise
to her quieter companion, and speaking in the soft dialect of old
Louisiana, "now you get a good idea of heaven!"

The _Fille a la Cassette_ replied with a sudden turn of her masked face
and a murmur of surprise and protest against this impiety. A low, merry
laugh came out of the Monk's cowl, and the Huguenotte let her form sink
a little in her chair with a gentle sigh.

"Ah, for shame, tired!" softly laughed the other; then suddenly, with
her eyes fixed across the room, she seized her companion's hand and
pressed it tightly. "Do you not see it?" she whispered eagerly, "just by
the door--the casque with the heron feathers. Ah, Clotilde, I _cannot_
believe he is one of those Grandissimes!"

"Well," replied the Huguenotte, "Doctor Keene says he is not."

Doctor Charlie Keene, speaking from under the disguise of the Indian
Queen, had indeed so said; but the Recording Angel, whom we understand
to be particular about those things, had immediately made a memorandum
of it to the debit of Doctor Keene's account.

"If I had believed that it was he," continued the whisperer, "I would
have turned about and left him in the midst of the contra-dance!"

Behind them sat unmasked a well-aged pair, "_bredouille_," as they used
to say of the wall-flowers, with that look of blissful repose which
marks the married and established Creole. The lady in monk's attire
turned about in her chair and leaned back to laugh with these. The
passing maskers looked that way, with a certain instinct that there was
beauty under those two costumes. As they did so, they saw the _Fille a
la Cassette_ join in this over-shoulder conversation. A moment later,
they saw the old gentleman protector and the _Fille a la Cassette_
rising to the dance. And when presently the distant passers took a final
backward glance, that same Lieutenant of Dragoons had returned and he
and the little Monk were once more upon the floor, waiting for
the music.

"But your late companion?" said the voice in the cowl.

"My Indian Queen?" asked the Creole Epaminondas.

"Say, rather, your Medicine-Man," archly replied the Monk.

"In these times," responded the Cavalier, "a medicine-man cannot dance
long without professional interruption, even when he dances for a
charitable object. He has been called to two relapsed patients." The
music struck up; the speaker addressed himself to the dance; but the
lady did not respond.

"Do dragoons ever moralize?" she asked.

"They do more," replied her partner; "sometimes, when beauty's enjoyment
of the ball is drawing toward its twilight, they catch its pleasant
melancholy, and confess; will the good father sit in the confessional?"

The pair turned slowly about and moved toward the box from which they
had come, the lady remaining silent; but just as they were entering she
half withdrew her arm from his, and, confronting him with a rich sparkle
of the eyes within the immobile mask of the monk, said:

"Why should the conscience of one poor little monk carry all the
frivolity of this ball? I have a right to dance, if I wish. I give you
my word, Monsieur Dragoon, I dance only for the benefit of the sick and
the destitute. It is you men--you dragoons and others--who will not help
them without a compensation in this sort of nonsense. Why should we
shrive you when you ought to burn?"

"Then lead us to the altar," said the Dragoon.

"Pardon, sir," she retorted, her words entangled with a musical,
open-hearted laugh, "I am not going in that direction." She cast her
glance around the ball-room. "As you say, it is the twilight of the
ball; I am looking for the evening star,--that is, my little
Huguenotte."

"Then you are well mated."

"How?"

"For you are Aurora."

The lady gave a displeased start.

"Sir!"

"Pardon," said the Cavalier, "if by accident I have hit upon your real
name--"

She laughed again--a laugh which was as exultantly joyous as it was
high-bred.

"Ah, my name? Oh no, indeed!" (More work for the Recording Angel.)

She turned to her protectress.

"Madame, I know you think we should be going home."

The senior lady replied in amiable speech, but with sleepy eyes, and the
Monk began to lift and unfold a wrapping. As the Cavalier' drew it into
his own possession, and, agreeably to his gesture, the Monk and he sat
down side by side, he said, in a low tone:

"One more laugh before we part."

"A monk cannot laugh for nothing."

"I will pay for it."

"But with nothing to laugh at?" The thought of laughing at nothing made
her laugh a little on the spot.

"We will make something to laugh at," said the Cavalier; "we will unmask
to each other, and when we find each other first cousins, the laugh will
come of itself."

"Ah! we will unmask?--no! I have no cousins. I am certain we are
strangers."

"Then we will laugh to think that I paid for the disappointment."

Much more of this childlike badinage followed, and by and by they came
around again to the same last statement. Another little laugh escaped
from the cowl.

"You will pay? Let us see; how much will you give to the sick and
destitute?"

"To see who it is I am laughing with, I will give whatever you ask."

"Two hundred and fifty dollars, cash, into the hands of the managers!"

"A bargain!"

The Monk laughed, and her chaperon opened her eyes and smiled
apologetically. The Cavalier laughed, too, and said:

"Good! That was the laugh; now the unmasking."

"And you positively will give the money to the managers not later than
to-morrow evening?"

"Not later. It shall be done without fail."

"Well, wait till I put on my wrappings; I must be ready to run."

This delightful nonsense was interrupted by the return of the _Fille a
la Cassette_ and her aged, but sprightly, escort, from a circuit of the
floor. Madame again opened her eyes, and the four prepared to depart.
The Dragoon helped the Monk to fortify herself against the outer air.
She was ready before the others. There was a pause, a low laugh, a
whispered "Now!" She looked upon an unmasked, noble countenance, lifted
her own mask a little, and then a little more; and then shut it quickly
down again upon a face whose beauty was more than even those fascinating
graces had promised which Honore Grandissime had fitly named the
Morning; but it was a face he had never seen before.

"Hush!" she said, "the enemies of religion are watching us; the
Huguenotte saw me. Adieu"--and they were gone.

M. Honore Grandissime turned on his heel and very soon left the ball.

"Now, sir," thought he to himself, "we'll return to our senses."

"Now I'll put my feathers on again," says the plucked bird.

CHAPTER II

THE FATE OF THE IMMIGRANT

It was just a fortnight after the ball, that one Joseph Frowenfeld
opened his eyes upon Louisiana. He was an American by birth, rearing and
sentiment, yet German enough through his parents, and the only son in a
family consisting of father, mother, self, and two sisters, new-blown
flowers of womanhood. It was an October dawn, when, long wearied of the
ocean, and with bright anticipations of verdure, and fragrance, and
tropical gorgeousness, this simple-hearted family awoke to find the bark
that had borne them from their far northern home already entering upon
the ascent of the Mississippi.

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 passage, 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 pronounced 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 assured 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 passenger, 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 hitherto 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 passed 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 passed
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:

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