the foot of the gallery, but we had only our imagination for a guide.
When we came to the huge balloon-like boulders that form a gateway to
a flight of steps, we felt sure that we had found the main entrance
to the inner city. The face of these boulders showed the usual cuts
for the support of rafters, and we could trace about them in masses
of decaying brick the outer walls of what might have been watchmen’s
lodges. Up these steps and a few feet farther on lies the stone that is
called the audience-hall rock. This is the half of a great elliptical
rock laid round side down. Its upper surface has been cut to form a
floor, with an elevated platform at the upper end, and about its edges
a heavy coping, all cut from the rock itself. Here presumably the lord
of the city sat to receive ambassadors and visitors from the outside
world, as no one not a follower of Kassapa was admitted to the central
citadel.
But strangest of all the Sigiriya ruins, as unique in thought and
masterly in execution as the great spiral gallery itself, are the
remains of a pictured procession that some believe once marched across
the whole face of the cliff. The fragments of this great picture show
female figures, larger than life, carrying in their hands bunches of
fruit and flowers. They are painted on smooth, white plaster in colors
that apparently have lost none of their brilliancy, and are so strongly
drawn in face and figure that by some they are held to be portraits of
the women of Kassapa’s court. Though this fresco may have encircled the
rock, it remains now only in the protected crevices of its western face.
For eighteen years Kassapa lived and reigned at Sigiriya. He was as
secure in his fortress as though he lived in the clouds. His army
remained faithful. His colony was thriving, and yet in the end he fell
into the hands of that dreaded Moggallana. One day word was brought
to him that his brother had returned from India, and with an army was
advancing against him. Instead of remaining within his fortifications
and challenging his brother to penetrate to his citadel, he went down
from his rock to meet his enemy.
Even then he might have been victorious had not blind chance
interfered. In the course of the battle, Kassapa, riding in advance of
his army, came to a marsh, and turned his elephant to avoid it. When
his followers saw this, the cry went up that the king was retreating,
and the whole army broke in confusion, and fled through the woods.
Kassapa tried in vain to check the panic, and finally cut his own
throat. And “Moggallana was pleased with this deed of boldness of his
brother, and performed the rite of cremation over his dead body; and
having gathered all his spoils, went up to the royal city.”
So Sigiriya fell from being a kingly citadel, and was given over to the
priesthood. Why it was finally abandoned by the priests we do not know,
but for centuries now it has stood in majestic loneliness watching over
the jungle.
AT THE CLOSED GATE OF JUSTICE
BY JAMES D. CORROTHERS
To be a Negro in a day like this
Demands forgiveness. Bruised with blow on blow,
Betrayed, like him whose woe-dimmed eyes gave bliss,
Still must one succor those who brought one low,
To be a Negro in a day like this.
To be a Negro in a day like this
Demands rare patience--patience that can wait
In utter darkness. ’Tis the path to miss,
And knock, unheeded, at an iron gate,
To be a Negro in a day like this.
To be a Negro in a day like this
Demands strange loyalty. We serve a flag
Which is to us white freedom’s emphasis.
Ah! one must love when truth and justice lag,
To be a Negro in a day like this.
To be a Negro in a day like this--
Alas! Lord God, what evil have we done?
Still shines the gate, all gold and amethyst,
But I pass by, the glorious goal unwon,
“Merely a Negro”--in a day like _this_!
BELLES DEMOISELLES PLANTATION[22]
BY GEORGE W. CABLE
Author of “Old Creole Days,” “The Grandissimes,” “Madame Delphine,” etc.
WITH PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR AND NEW PICTURES BY W. M. BERGER
(NOTEWORTHY STORIES OF THE LAST GENERATION)
The original grantee was Count----
Assume the name to be De Charleu; the old Creoles never forgive a
public mention. He was the French king’s commissary. One day, called
to France to explain the lucky accident of the commissariat having
burned down with his account-books inside, he left his wife, a Choctaw
comtesse, behind.
Arrived at court, his excuses were accepted, and that tract was granted
him where afterward stood Belles Demoiselles Plantation. A man cannot
remember everything. In a fit of forgetfulness he married a French
gentlewoman, rich and beautiful, and “brought her out.” However, “All’s
well that ends well”; a famine had been in the colony, and the Choctaw
comtesse had starved, leaving naught but a half-caste orphan family
lurking on the edge of the settlement, bearing our French gentlewoman’s
own new name, and being mentioned in monsieur’s will.
And the new comtesse--she tarried only a twelvemonth--left monsieur a
lovely son, and departed, led out of this vain world by the swamp-fever.
From this son sprang the proud Creole family of De Charleu. It rose
straight up, up, up, generation after generation, tall, branchless,
slender, palm-like, and finally, in the time of which I am to tell,
flowered, with all the rare beauty of a century-plant, in Artémise,
Innocente, Félicité, the twins Marie and Martha, Léontine, and little
Septima, the seven beautiful daughters for whom their home had been
fitly named Belles Demoiselles.
The count’s grant had once been a long point round which the
Mississippi used so to whirl and seethe and foam that it was horrid
to behold. Big whirlpools would open and wheel about in the savage
eddies under the low bank, and close up again, and others open and
spin and disappear. Great circles of muddy surface would boil up from
the depths below and gloss over and seem to float away; sink, come back
again under water, and with only a soft hiss surge up again, and again
drift off and vanish. Every few minutes the loamy bank would tip down a
great load of earth upon its besieger, and fall back a foot, sometimes
a yard, and the writhing river would press after, until at last the
_pointe_ was quite swallowed up, and the great river glided by in a
majestic curve and asked no more. The bank stood fast, the “caving”
became a forgotten misfortune, and the diminished grant was a long,
sweeping, willowy bend, rustling with miles of sugar-cane.
Coming up the Mississippi in the sailing-craft of those early days,
about the time one first could descry the white spires of the old St.
Louis Cathedral, one would be pretty sure to spy just over to the
right, under the levee, Belles Demoiselles mansion, with its broad
veranda and red-painted cypress roof, peering over the embankment, like
a bird in the nest, half hidden by the avenue of willows which one of
the departed De Charleus--he that married a Marot--had planted on the
levee’s crown.
The house stood unusually near the river, facing eastward, and standing
foursquare, with an immense veranda about its sides, and a flight of
steps in front spreading broadly downward, as we open arms to a child.
From the veranda nine miles of river were seen; and in their compass,
near at hand, the shady garden, full of rare and beautiful flowers;
farther away broad fields of cane and rice and the distant quarters
of the slaves; and on the horizon everywhere a dark belt of cypress
forest.
The master was old Colonel De Charleu--Jean-Albert-Henri-Joseph De
Charleu-Marot, and “Colonel” by the grace of the first American
governor. Monsieur--he would not speak to any one who called him
“Colonel”--was a hoary-headed patriarch. His step was firm; his form
erect; his intellect strong and clear; his countenance classic, serene,
dignified, commanding; his manners were courtly; his voice was musical,
fascinating. He had had his vices all his life, but had borne them,
as his race does, with a serenity of conscience and a cleanness of
mouth that left no outward blemish on the surface of the gentleman.
He had gambled in Royal Street, drank hard in Orleans Street, run his
adversary through in the dueling-ground at Slaughter-House Point, and
danced and quarreled at the St. Phillippe-Street Theater quadroon
balls. Even now, with all his courtesy and bounty, and a hospitality
which seemed to be entertaining angels, he was bitter-proud and
penurious, and deep down in his hard-finished heart loved nothing
but himself, his name, and his motherless children. But these! Their
ravishing beauty was all but excuse enough for the unbounded idolatry
of their father. Against these seven goddesses he never rebelled. Had
they even required him to defraud old De Carlos--I can hardly say.
Old De Carlos was his extremely distant relative on the Choctaw side.
With this single exception, the narrow, thread-like line of descent
from the Indian wife, diminished to a mere strand by injudicious
alliances, and deaths in the gutters of old New Orleans, was extinct.
The name, by Spanish contact, had become De Carlos, but this one
surviving bearer of it was known to all, and known only, as Injin
Charlie.
One thing I never knew a Creole to do: he will not utterly go back on
the ties of blood, no matter what sort of knots those ties may he. For
one reason, he is never ashamed of his or his father’s sins; and for
another, he will tell you, he is “all heart.”
So the different heirs of the De Charleu estate had always strictly
regarded the rights and interests of the De Carloses, especially
their ownership of a block of dilapidated buildings in a part of the
city which had once been very poor property, but was beginning to be
valuable. This block had much more than maintained the last De Carlos
through a long and lazy lifetime, and as his household consisted
only of himself and an aged and crippled Negress, the inference was
irresistible that he “had money.” Old Charlie, though by alias an
“Injin,” was plainly a dark white man, about as old as Colonel De
Charleu, sunk in the bliss of deep ignorance, shrewd, deaf, and, by
repute at least, unmerciful.
The colonel and he always conversed in English. This rare
accomplishment, which the former had learned from his Scotch wife,
the latter from up-river traders, they found an admirable medium of
communication, answering better than French could a purpose similar
to that of the stick which we fasten to the bit of one horse and to
the breast-gear of another, whereby each keeps his distance. Once in a
while, too, by way of jest, English found its way among the ladies of
Belles Demoiselles, always signifying that their sire was about to have
business with old Charlie.
Now, a long-standing wish to buy out Charlie troubled the colonel. He
had no desire to oust him unfairly, he was proud of being always fair;
yet he did long to engross the whole estate under one title. Out of his
luxurious idleness he had conceived this desire, and thought little of
so slight an obstacle as being already somewhat in debt to old Charlie
for money borrowed, and for which Belles Demoiselles was of course good
ten times over. Lots, buildings, rents, all, might as well be his, he
thought, to give, keep, or destroy. Had he but the old man’s heritage!
Ah, he might bring that into existence which his _belles demoiselles_
had been begging for “since many years--” a home, and such a home,
in the gay city! Here he should tear down this row of cottages and
make his garden wall; there that long rope-walk should give place to
vine-covered arbors; the bakery yonder should make way for a costly
conservatory; that wine warehouse should come down; and the mansion
go up. It should be the finest in the State. Men should never pass it
but they should say: “The palace of the De Charleus, a family of grand
descent, a people of elegance and bounty, a line as old as France, a
fine old man, and seven daughters as beautiful as happy. Whoever dare
attempt to marry there must leave his own name behind him.”
The house should be of stones fitly set, brought down in ships from the
land of “_les_ Yankees” and it should have an airy belvedere, with a
gilded image tiptoeing and shining on its peak, and from it you should
see, far across the gleaming folds of the river, the red roof of Belles
Demoiselles, the country-seat. At the big stone gate there should be a
porter’s lodge, and it should be a privilege even to see the ground.
Truly they were a family fine enough and fancy-free enough to have fine
wishes, yet happy enough where they were to have had no wish but to
live there always.
To those who by whatever fortune wandered into the garden of Belles
Demoiselles some summer afternoon as the sky was reddening toward
evening, it was lovely to see the family gathered out upon the tiled
pavement at the foot of the broad front steps, gaily chatting and
jesting, with that ripple of laughter that comes pleasingly from a
bevy of girls. The father would be found seated among them, the center
of attention and compliment, witness, arbiter, umpire, critic, by his
beautiful children’s unanimous appointment, but the single vassal, too,
of seven absolute sovereigns.
Now they would draw their chairs near together in eager discussion of
some new step in the dance or the adjustment of some rich adornment.
Now they would start about him with excited comments to see the eldest
fix a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. Now the twins would move down
a walk after some unusual flower, and be greeted on their return with
the high-pitched notes of delighted feminine surprise.
As evening came on they would draw more quietly about their paternal
center. Often their chairs were forsaken, and they grouped themselves
on the lower steps one above another, and surrendered themselves to the
tender influences of the approaching night. At such an hour the passer
on the river, already attracted by the dark figures of the broad-roofed
mansion and its woody garden standing against the glowing sunset,
would hear the voices of the hidden group rise from the spot in the
soft harmonies of an evening song, swelling clearer and clearer as the
thrill of music warmed them into feeling, and presently joined by the
deeper tones of the father’s voice; then, as the daylight passed quite
away, all would be still, and the passer would know that the beautiful
home had gathered its nestlings under its wings.
And yet, for mere vagary, it pleased them not to be pleased.
“Arti,” called one sister to another in the broad hall one morning,
mock amazement in her distended eyes, “something is goin’ to took
place!”
“Comm-e-n-t?” in long-drawn perplexity.
“Papa is goin’ to town!”
The news passed up-stairs.
“Inno,”--one to another meeting in a doorway,--“something is goin’ to
took place!”
“Qu’est-ce-que c’est?” in vain attempt at gruffness.
“Papa is goin’ to town!”
The unusual tidings were true. It was afternoon of the same day that
the colonel tossed his horse’s bridle to his groom, and stepped up
to old Charlie, who was sitting on his bench under a china-tree, his
head, as was his fashion, bound in a madras handkerchief. The “old
man” was plainly under the effect of spirits, and smiled a deferential
salutation, without trusting himself to his feet.
“Eh, well, Charlie,”--the colonel raised his voice to suit his
kinsman’s deafness,--“how is those times with my friend Charlie?”
“Eh?” said Charlie, distractedly.
“Is that goin’ well with my friend Charlie?”
“In the house; call her,” making pretense of rising.
“_Non, non_; I don’t want,”--the speaker paused to breathe,--“’Ow is
collection?”
“Oh,” said Charlie, “every day he make me more poorer.”
“What do you hask for it?” asked the planter, indifferently,
designating the house with a wave of his whip.
“Ask for w’at?” said Injin Charlie.
“De _house_. What you ask for it?”
“I don’t believe,” said Charlie.
“What you would _take_ for it?” cried the planter.
“Wait for w’at?”
“What you would _take_ for the whole block?”
“I don’t want to sell him.”
“I’ll give you _ten thousand dollah’_ for it.”
“Ten t’ousand dollah’ for dis house? Oh, no, that is no price. He is
blame’ good old house, that old house.” Old Charlie and the colonel
never swore in presence of each other. “Forty years that old house
didn’t had to be paint’! I easy can get fifty t’ousand dollah’ for that
old house.”
“Fifty thousand picayunes, yes,” said the colonel.
“She’s a good house. Can make plenty money,” pursued the deaf man.
“That’s what make’ you so rich, eh, Charlie?”
“_Non_, I don’t make nothing. Too blame’ clever, me, dat’s de troub’.
She’s a good house; make money fast like a steamboat; make a barrelful
in a week. Me, I lose money all the days. Too blame’ clever.”
“Charlie.”
“Eh?”
“Tell me what you’ll take.”
“Make? I don’t make _nothing_. Too blame’ clever.”
“What will you _take_?”
“Oh, I got enough already; half drunk now.”
“What you will take for the ’ouse?”
“You want to buy her?”
“I don’t know,”--shrug,--“may_be_, if you sell it cheap.”
“She’s a bully old house.”
There was a long silence. By and by old Charlie began:
“Old Injin Charlie is a low-down dog.”
“C’est vrai, oui,” retorted the colonel in an undertone.
“He’s got Injin blood in him.”
The colonel nodded assent.
“But he’s got some blame’ good blood, too, ain’t it?”
The colonel nodded impatiently.
“_Bien._ Old Charlie’s Injin blood says, ‘Sell the house, Charlie, you
blame’ old fool!’ _Mais_, old Charlie’s good blood says, ‘Charlie, if
you sell that old house, Charlie, you low-down old dog, Charlie, what
de Comte De Charleu make for you’ grace-gran’muzzer, de dev’ can eat
you, Charlie, I don’t care.’”
“But you’ll sell it, anyhow, won’t you, old man?”
“No!” And the no rumbled off in muttered oaths like thunder out on the
gulf. The incensed old colonel wheeled and started off.
“Curl!” [“Colonel”] said Charlie, standing up unsteadily.
The planter turned with an inquiring frown.
“I’ll trade with you,” said Charlie. The colonel was tempted. “’Ow’ll
you trade?” he asked.
“My house for yours.”
The old colonel turned pale with anger. He walked very quickly back,
and came close up to his kinsman.
“Charlie,” he said.
“Injin Charlie,” with a tipsy nod.
But by this time self-control was returning. “Sell Belles Demoiselles
to you?” he said in a high key, and then laughed, “Ho! ho! ho!” and
rode away.
* * * * *
A cloud, but not a dark one, overshadowed the spirits of Belles
Demoiselles Plantation. The old master, whose beaming presence had
always made him a shining Saturn, spinning and sparkling within the
bright circle of his daughters, fell into musing fits, started out of
frowning reveries, walked often by himself, and heard business from his
overseer fretfully.
No wonder. The daughters knew his closeness in trade, and attributed
to it his failure to negotiate for the old Charlie buildings, so to
call them. They began to depreciate Belles Demoiselles. If a north
wind blew, it was too cold to ride. If a shower had fallen, it was too
muddy to drive. In the morning the garden was wet. In the evening the
grasshopper was a burden. Ennui was turned into capital, every headache
was interpreted a premonition of ague, and when the native exuberance
of a flock of ladies without a want or a care burst out in laughter
in the father’s face, they spread their French eyes, rolled up their
little hands, and with rigid wrists and mock vehemence vowed and vowed
again that they laughed only at their misery, and should pine to death
unless they could move to the sweet city. “Oh, the theater! Oh, Orleans
Street! Oh, the masquerade, the Place d’Armes, the ball!” and they
would call upon Heaven with French irreverence, and fall into one
another’s arms, whirl down the hall singing a waltz, end with a grand
collision and fall, and, their eyes streaming merriment, lay the blame
on the slippery floor, which some day would be the death of the whole
seven.
[Illustration: Engraved on wood by Timothy Cole
GEORGE W. CABLE
Author of “Belles Demoiselles Plantation.”
FROM AN EARLY PORTRAIT BY ABBOTT H. THAYER]
Three times more the fond father, thus goaded, managed, by
accident--business accident--to see old Charlie and increase his offer;
but in vain. He finally went to him formally.
“Eh?” said the deaf and distant relative. “For what you want him, eh?
Why you don’t stay where you halways be ’appy? This is a blame’ old
rat-hole; good for old Injin Charlie, tha’s all. Why you don’t stay
where you be halways ’appy? Why you don’t buy somewhere else?”
“That’s none of your business,” snapped the planter. Truth was, his
reasons were unsatisfactory even to himself.
A sullen silence followed. Then Charlie spoke:
“Well, now, look here; I sell you old Charlie’s house.”
“_Bien_, and the whole block,” said the colonel.
“Hold on,” said Charlie. “I sell you de ’ouse and de block. Den I go
and git drunk and go to sleep; de dev’ comes along and says: ‘Charlie,
old Charlie, you blame’ low-down old dog, wake up! What you doin’ here?
Where’s de ’ouse what Monsieur le Comte give your grace-gran’muzzer?
Don’t you see dat fine gentyman De Charleu done gone and tore him down
and make him over new, you blame’ old fool, Charlie, you low-down old
Injin dog!’”
“I’ll give you forty thousand dollars,” said the colonel.
“For de ’ouse?”
“For all.”
The deaf man shook his head.
“Forty-five,” said the colonel.
“What a lie? For what you tell me ‘What a lie?’ I don’t tell you no
lie.”
“_Non, non_; I give you _forty-five_,” shouted the colonel.
Charlie shook his head again.
“Fifty.”
He shook it again.
The figures rose and rose to “Seventy-five.”
The answer was an invitation to go away and let the owner alone, as he
was, in certain specified respects, the vilest of living creatures,
and no company for a fine “gentyman.”
The fine “gentyman” longed to blaspheme; but before old Charlie, in the
name of pride, how could he? He mounted and started away.
“Tell you what I’ll make wid you,” said Charlie.
The other, guessing aright, turned back without dismounting, smiling.
“How much Belles Demoiselles howes me now?” asked the deaf one.
“One hundred and eighty thousand dollars,” said the colonel, firmly.
“Yass,” said Charlie. “I don’t want Belles Demoiselles.”
The old colonel’s quiet laugh intimated it made no difference either
way.
“But me,” continued Charlie--“me, I’m got le Comte De Charleu’s blood
in me, any’ow--a litt’ bit, any’ow, ain’t it?”
The colonel nodded that it was.
“_Bien._ If I go out of dis place and don’t go to Belles Demoiselles,
de peoples will say--dey-will say: ‘Old Charlie he been all doze time
tell a blame’ _lie_. He ain’t no kin to his old grace-gran’muzzer, not
a blame’ bit. He don’t got nary drop of De Charleu blood to save his
blame’ low-down old Injin soul.’ No, sare! What I want wid money, den?
No, sare! My place for yours.”
He turned to go into the house just too soon to see the colonel make an
ugly whisk at him with his riding-whip. Then the colonel, too, moved
off.
Two or three times over, as he ambled homeward, laughter broke through
his annoyance as he recalled old Charlie’s family pride and the
presumption of his offer. Yet each time he could but think better of
not the offer to swap, but the preposterous ancestral loyalty. It
was so much better than he could have expected from his “low-down”
relative, and not unlike his own whim withal, the proposition which
went with it was forgiven.
This last defeat bore so harshly on the master of Belles Demoiselles
that the daughters, reading chagrin in his face, began to repent. They
loved their father as daughters can, and when they saw their pretended
dejection harassing him seriously, they restrained their complaints,
displayed more than ordinary tenderness, and heroically and
ostentatiously concluded there was no place like Belles Demoiselles.
But the new mood touched him more than the old, and only refined his
discontent. Here was a man, rich without the care of riches, free
from any real trouble, happiness as native to his house as perfume to
his garden, deliberately, as it were with premeditated malice, taking
joy by the shoulder and bidding her be gone to town, whither he might
easily have followed only that the very same ancestral nonsense that
kept Injin Charlie from selling the old place for twice its value
prevented him from choosing any other spot for a city home.
[Illustration: Drawn by W. M. Berger. Half-tone plate engraved by R.
Varley
“‘I’LL GIVE YOU TEN THOUSAND DOLLAH’ FOR IT’”]
Heaven sometimes pities such rich men and sends them trouble.