BAD FOR CHARLIE KEENE
On the same evening of which we have been telling, about the time that Aurora and Clotilde were dropping their last tear of joy over the document of restitution, a noticeable figure stood alone at the corner of the rue du Canal and the rue Chartres. He had reached there and paused, just as the brighter glare of the set sun was growing dim above the tops of the cypresses. After walking with some rapidity of step, he had stopped aimlessly, and laid his hand with an air of weariness upon a rotting China-tree that leaned over the ditch at the edge of the unpaved walk.
"Setting in cypress," he murmured. We need not concern ourselves as to his meaning.
One could think aloud there with impunity. In 1804, Canal street was the upper boundary of New Orleans. Beyond it, to southward, the open plain was dotted with country-houses, brick-kilns, clumps of live-oak and groves of pecan. At the hour mentioned the outlines of these objects were already darkening. At one or two points the sky was reflected from marshy ponds. Out to westward rose conspicuously the old house and willow-copse of Jean Poquelin. Down the empty street or road, which stretched with arrow-like straightness toward the northwest, the draining-canal that gave it its name tapered away between occasional overhanging willows and beside broken ranks of rotting palisades, its foul, crawling waters blushing, gilding and purpling under the swiftly waning light, and ending suddenly in the black shadow of the swamp. The observer of this dismal prospect leaned heavily on his arm, and cast his glance out along the beautified corruption of the canal. His eye seemed quickened to detect the smallest repellant details of the scene; every cypress stump that stood in, or overhung, the slimy water; every ruined indigo-vat or blasted tree, every broken thing, every bleached bone of ox or horse--and they were many--for roods around. As his eye passed them slowly over and swept back again around the dreary view, he sighed heavily and said: "Dissolution," and then again--"Dissolution! order of the day--"
A secret overhearer might have followed, by these occasional exclamatory utterances, the course of a devouring trouble prowling up and down through his thoughts, as one's eye tracks the shark by the occasional cutting of his fin above the water.
He spoke again:
"It is in such moods as this that fools drown themselves."
His speech was French. He straightened up, smote the tree softly with his palm, and breathed a long, deep sigh--such a sigh, if the very truth be told, as belongs by right to a lover. And yet his mind did not dwell on love.
He turned and left the place; but the trouble that was plowing hither and thither through the deep of his meditations went with him. As he turned into the rue Chartres it showed itself thus:
"Right; it is but right;" he shook his head slowly--"it is but right."
In the rue Douane he spoke again:
"Ah! Frowenfeld"--and smiled unpleasantly, with his head down.
And as he made yet another turn, and took his meditative way down the city's front, along the blacksmith's shops in the street afterward called Old Levee, he resumed, in English, and with a distinctness that made a staggering sailor halt and look after him:
"There are but two steps to civilization, the first easy, the second difficult; to construct--to reconstruct--ah! there it is! the tearing down! The tear'--"
He was still, but repeated the thought by a gesture of distress turned into a slow stroke of the forehead.
"Monsieur Honoré Grandissime," said a voice just ahead.
"Eh, bien?"
At the mouth of an alley, in the dim light of the streep lamp, stood the dark figure of Honoré Grandissime, f.m.c., holding up the loosely hanging form of a small man, the whole front of whose clothing was saturated with blood.
"Why, Charlie Keene! Let him down again, quickly--quickly; do not hold him so!"
"Hands off," came in a ghastly whisper from the shape.
"Oh, Chahlie, my boy--"
"Go and finish your courtship," whispered the doctor.
"Oh Charlie, I have just made it forever impossible!"
"Then help me back to my bed; I don't care to die in the street."
MORE REPARATION
"That is all," said the fairer Honoré, outside Doctor Keene's sick-room about ten o'clock at night. He was speaking to the black son of Clemence, who had been serving as errand-boy for some hours. He spoke in a low tone just without the half-open door, folding again a paper which the lad had lately borne to the apothecary of the rue Royale, and had now brought back with Joseph's answer written under Honoré's inquiry.
"That is all," said the other Honoré, standing partly behind the first, as the eyes of his little menial turned upon him that deprecatory glance of inquiry so common to slave children. The lad went a little way down the corridor, curled up upon the floor against the wall, and was soon asleep. The fairer Honoré handed the darker the slip of paper; it was received and returned in silence. The question was:
"Can you state anything positive concerning the duel?"
And the reply:
"Positively there will be none. Sylvestre my sworn friend for
life."
The half-brothers sat down under a dim hanging lamp in the corridor, and except that every now and then one or the other stepped noiselessly to the door to look in upon the sleeping sick man, or in the opposite direction to moderate by a push with the foot the snoring of Clemence's "boy," they sat the whole night through in whispered counsel.
The one, at the request of the other, explained how he had come to be with the little doctor in such extremity.
It seems that Clemence, seeing and understanding the doctor's imprudence, had sallied out with the resolve to set some person on his track. We have said that she went in search of her master. Him she met, and though she could not really count him one of the doctor's friends, yet, rightly believing in his humanity, she told him the matter. He set off in what was for him a quick pace in search of the rash invalid, was misdirected by a too confident child and had given up the hope of finding him, when a faint sound of distress just at hand drew him into an alley, where, close down against a wall, with his face to the earth, lay Doctor Keene. The f.m.c. had just raised him and borne him out of the alley when Honoré came up.
"And you say that, when you would have inquired for him at Frowenfeld's, you saw Palmyre there, standing and talking with Frowenfeld? Tell me more exactly."
And the other, with that grave and gentle economy of words which made his speech so unique, recounted what we amplify:
Palmyre had needed no pleading to induce her to exonerate Joseph. The doctors were present at Frowenfeld's in more than usual number. There was unusualness, too, in their manner and their talk. They were not entirely free from the excitement of the day, and as they talked--with an air of superiority, of Creole inflammability, and with some contempt--concerning Camille Brahmin's and Charlie Mandarin's efforts to precipitate a war, they were yet visibly in a state of expectation. Frowenfeld, they softly said, had in his odd way been indiscreet among these inflammables at Maspero's just when he could least afford to be so, and there was no telling what they might take the notion to do to him before bedtime. All that over and above the independent, unexplained scandal of the early morning. So Joseph and his friends this evening, like Aurora and Clotilde in the morning, were, as we nowadays say of buyers and sellers, "apart," when suddenly and unannounced, Palmyre presented herself among them. When the f.m.c. saw her, she had already handed Joseph his hat and with much sober grace was apologizing for her slave's mistake. All evidence of her being wounded was concealed. The extraordinary excitement of the morning had not hurt her, and she seemed in perfect health. The doctors sat or stood around and gave rapt attention to her patois, one or two translating it for Joseph, and he blushing to the hair, but standing erect and receiving it at second hand with silent bows. The f.m.c. had gazed on her for a moment, and then forced himself away. He was among the few who had not heard the morning scandal, and he did not comprehend the evening scene. He now asked Honoré concerning it, and quietly showed great relief when it was explained.
Then Honoré, breaking a silence, called the attention of the f.m.c. to the fact that the latter had two tenants at Number 19 rue Bienville. Honoré became the narrator now and told all, finally stating that the die was cast--restitution made.
And then the darker Honoré made a proposition to the other, which, it is little to say, was startling. They discussed it for hours.
"So just a condition," said the merchant, raising his whisper so much that the rentier laid a hand in his elbow,--"such mere justice," he said, more softly, "ought to be an easy condition. God knows"--he lifted his glance reverently--"my very right to exist comes after yours. You are the elder."
The solemn man offered no disclaimer.
What could the proposition be which involved so grave an issue, and to which M. Grandissime's final answer was "I will do it"?
It was that Honoré f.m.c. should become a member of the mercantile house of H. Grandissime, enlisting in its capital all his wealth. And the one condition was that the new style should be Grandissime Brothers.