The Grandissimes

by George Washington Cable

  CHAPTER II

  THE FATE OF THE IMMIGRANT

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

  We may easily imagine the grave group, as they came up one by one frombelow, that morning of first disappointment, and stood (with a whirligigof jubilant mosquitoes spinning about each head) looking out across thewaste, seeing the sky and the marsh meet in the east, the north, and thewest, and receiving with patient silence the father's suggestion thatthe hills would, no doubt, rise into view after a while.

  "My children, we may turn this disappointment into a lesson; if the goodpeople of this country could speak to us now, they might well ask us notto judge them or their land upon one or two hasty glances, or by theexperiences of a few short days or weeks."

  But no hills rose. However, by and by they found solace in theappearance of distant forest, and in the afternoon they entered aland--but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by giganticcypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

  "The captain told father, when we went to engage passage, that NewOrleans was on high land," said the younger daughter, with a tremor inthe voice, and ignoring the remonstrative touch of her sister.

  "On high land?" said the captain, turning from the pilot; "well, so itis--higher than the swamp, but not higher than the river," and hechecked a broadening smile.

  But the Frowenfelds were not a family to complain. It was characteristicof them to recognize the bright as well as the solemn virtues, and tokeep each other reminded of the duty of cheerfulness. A smile, startingfrom the quiet elder sister, went around the group, directed against theabstracted and somewhat rueful countenance of Joseph, whereat he turnedwith a better face and said that what the Creator had pronounced verygood they could hardly feel free to condemn. The old father was stillmore 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 graduallymatured conviction that New Orleans would not be found standing onstilts in the quagmire enabled the eye to become educated to a betterappreciation of the solemn landscape. Nor was the landscape alwayssolemn. There were long openings, now and then, to right and left, ofemerald-green savannah, with the dazzling blue of the Gulf far beyond,waving a thousand white-handed good-byes as the funereal swamps slowlyshut out again the horizon. How sweet the soft breezes off the moistprairies! How weird, how very near, the crimson and green and black andyellow 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 ofthe half-built world. The barking of a dog in Fort Plaquemines seemed tocome before its turn in the panorama of creation--before the earth wasready for the dog's master.

  But he was assured that to live in those swamps was not entirelyimpossible to man--"if one may call a negro a man." Runaway slaves werenot so rare in them as one--a lost hunter, for example--might wish. Hisinformant was a new passenger, taken aboard at the fort. Hespoke English.

  "Yes, sir! Didn' I had to run from Bras-Coupe in de haidge of de swampbe'ine de 'abitation of my cousin Honore, one time? You can hask 'oo youlike!" (A Creole always provides against incredulity.) At this point hedigressed a moment: "You know my cousin, Honore Grandissime, w'at givetwo hund' fifty dolla' to de 'ospill laz mont'? An' juz because mycousin Honore give it, somebody helse give de semm. Fo' w'y don't hegive his nemm?"

  The reason (which this person did not know) was that the second donorwas the first one over again, resolved that the little unknown Monkshould 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 cypressforest, where the vessel lay moored for a change of wind, told in a_patois_ difficult, but not impossible, to understand, the story of aman who chose rather to be hunted like a wild beast among those awfullabyrinths, than to be yoked and beaten like a tame one. Joseph, drawingnear as the story was coming to a close, overheard the followingEnglish:

  "Friend, if you dislike heated discussion, do not tell that to my son."

  The nights were strangely beautiful. The immigrants almost consumed themon deck, the mother and daughters attending in silent delight while thefather and son, facing south, rejoiced in learned recognition of starsand 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 lateralsurroundings may be, the heavens are ever over his head, and I am gladto find the stars your favorite objects of study."

  So passed the time as the vessel, hour by hour, now slowly pushed by thewind against the turbid current, now warping along the fragrantprecincts of orange or magnolia groves or fields of sugar-cane, ormoored by night in the deep shade of mighty willow-jungles, patientlycrept toward the end of their pilgrimage; and in the length of timewhich would at present be consumed in making the whole journey fromtheir Northern home to their Southern goal, accomplished the distance ofninety-eight miles, and found themselves before the little, hybrid cityof "Nouvelle Orleans." There was the cathedral, and standing beside it,like Sancho beside Don Quixote, the squat hall of the Cabildo with thecalabozo in the rear. There were the forts, the military bakery, thehospitals, 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 backa few hundred yards behind the cathedral, and tapering into a singlerank of gardened and belvedered villas, that studded either horn of theriver's crescent with a style of home than which there is probablynothing in the world more maternally homelike.

  "And now," said the "captain," bidding the immigrants good-by, "keep outof the sun and stay in after dark; you're not 'acclimated,' as theycall 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 camethe young Americain, whom even Agricola Fusilier, as we shall see, byand by thought worthy to be made an exception of, and honored with hisrecognition.

  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 tohis bedside to say that he had had a chill, and was suffering such painsin his head and back that he would like to lie quiet until they passedoff. 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 pupilswere contracted to tiny beads. He felt his pulse and his brow; there wasno room for doubt; it was the dreaded scourge--the fever. We say,sometimes, of hearts that they sink like lead; it does not expressthe agony.

  On the second day, while the unsated fever was running through everyvein and artery, like soldiery through the streets of a burning city,and far down in the caverns of the body the poison was ransacking everypalpitating corner, the poor immigrant fell into a moment's sleep. Butwhat of that? The enemy that moment had mounted to the brain. And thenthere happened to Joseph an experience rare to the sufferer by thisdisease, but not entirely unknown,--a delirium of mingled pleasures anddistresses. He seemed to awake somewhere between heaven and earth,reclining in a gorgeous barge, which was draped in curtains ofinterwoven silver and silk, cushioned with rich stuffs of everybeautiful dye, and
perfumed _ad nauseam_ with orange-leaf tea. The crewwas a single old negress, whose head was wound about with a blue Madrashandkerchief, and who stood at the prow, and by a singular rotarymotion, rowed the barge with a teaspoon. He could not get his head outof the hot sun; and the barge went continually round and round with aheavy, throbbing motion, in the regular beat of which certain spirits ofthe air--one of whom appeared to be a beautiful girl and another asmall, red-haired man,--confronted each other with the continual calland response:

  "Keep the bedclothes on him and the room shut tight, keep the bedclotheson him and the room shut tight,"--"An' don' give 'im some watta, an'don' give 'im some watta."

  During what lapse of time--whether moments or days--this lasted, Josephcould not then know; but at last these things faded away, and there cameto him a positive knowledge that he was on a sick-bed, where unlesssomething could be done for him he should be dead in an hour. Then aspoon touched his lips, and a taste of brandy and water went all throughhim; and when he fell into sweet slumber and awoke, and found theteaspoon ready at his lips again, he had to lift a little the two handslying before him on the coverlet to know that they were his--they wereso wasted and yellow. He turned his eyes, and through the white gauze ofthe mosquito-bar saw, for an instant, a strange and beautiful youngface; but the lids fell over his eyes, and when he raised them again theblue-turbaned black nurse was tucking the covering about his feet.

  "Sister!"

  No answer.

  "Where is my mother?"

  The negress shook her head.

  He was too weak to speak again, but asked with his eyes so persistently,and so pleadingly, that by and by she gave him an audible answer. Hetried hard to understand it, but could not, it being in these words:

  "_Li pa' oule vini 'ci--li pas capabe_."

  Thrice a day, for three days more, came a little man with a large headsurrounded by short, red curls and with small freckles in a fine skin,and sat down by the bed with a word of good cheer and the air of acommander. At length they had something like an extended conversation.

  "So you concluded not to die, eh? Yes, I'm the doctor--Doctor Keene. Ayoung lady? What young lady? No, sir, there has been no young lady here.You're mistaken. Vagary of your fever. There has been no one here butthis black girl and me. No, my dear fellow, your father and mother can'tsee you yet; you don't want them to catch the fever, do you? Good-bye.Do as your nurse tells you, and next week you may raise your head andshoulders a little; but if you don't mind her you'll have a backset, andthe devil himself wouldn't engage to cure you."

  The patient had been sitting up a little at a time for several days,when at length the doctor came to pay a final call, "as a matter ofform;" but, after a few pleasantries, he drew his chair up gravely, and,in a tender tone--need we say it? He had come to tell Joseph that hisfather, mother, sisters, all, were gone on a second--a longer--voyage,to shores where there could be no disappointments and nofevers, forever.

  "And, Frowenfeld," he said, at the end of their long and painful talk,"if there is any blame attached to not letting you go with them, I thinkI can take part of it; but if you ever want a friend,--one who iscourteous to strangers and ill-mannered only to those he likes,--you cancall for Charlie Keene. I'll drop in to see you, anyhow, from time totime, till you get stronger. I have taken a heap of trouble to keep youalive, and if you should relapse now and give us the slip, it would be adeal of good physic wasted; so keep in the house."

  The polite neighbors who lifted their cocked hats to Joseph, as he spenta slow convalescence just within his open door, were not bound to knowhow or when he might have suffered. There were no "Howards" or"Y.M.C.A.'s" in those days; no "Peabody Reliefs." Even had the neighborschosen to take cognizance of those bereavements, they were not sounusual as to fix upon him any extraordinary interests an object ofsight; and he was beginning most distressfully to realize that "greatsolitude" which the philosopher attributes to towns, when matters took adecided turn.