It was the last of January, 1815. The harbor of the city of Charleston
was enveloped in a cold gray fog, that rose above the ramparts of the sea
wall and advanced its phantom cohorts upon the houses facing the Battery,
capturing their outposts one by one, gradually submerging gable-end
and piazza, surmounting tiled roof and overtopping chimney, until at
nightfall the city, like a second Germe Ishausen, although resting upon
the surface of one ocean, was buried in the impalpable profundity of
another.
Invisible to the eye, even at the distance of a few yards, the street
lamps were mere ineffectual points of light in the dense and watery
atmosphere.
The solid wooden shutters of the Battery houses were tightly battened so
that they presented an impenetrable front to the fog, which nevertheless
insinuated itself beneath threshold and window-sill and made its ghostly
presence felt upon the very hearths where fires of pitch-pine and
seasoned ash were lighted to dispel the dampness.
At the conjunction of the South and the East Battery, the mansion of
Governor Grantham occupied the right angle of the corner, its stone
steps encroaching upon the narrow sidewalk. Overhanging them, at the
second story, the iron balcony bore upon the middle panel of its rail the
entwined “G. G.” of the eldest son of the house of Grantham from time
immemorial.
A visitor admitted beyond the front door would have found himself in
a dark and somewhat cramped hall, or entry, from the center of which
mounted a flight of carefully waxed stairs, leading to an upper hall of
dimensions more in keeping with the outward aspect of the building.
Turning to the right and guiding one’s steps warily over its icy surface,
converted into a mirror by the daily brush of the slave, one would have
been ushered into the drawing room, an apartment high of ceiling, scant
of furniture, also slippery of floor, extending perhaps fifty feet along
the west side of the mansion. On this account it was easily convertible
into a ball room.
Although it was half an hour since the conclusion of the last meal of
the day, this room was unoccupied—at least at first glance. Then in
its extreme end appeared a pleasing tableau in the blazing firelight—a
tableau that in the fifty feet of polished perspective might have been
mistaken for an oil-painting by a master-hand for mural decoration.
A divan of turquoise-blue damask had been rolled up to the chimney-piece
and upon the soft white fur of an immense cloak thrown over one end of
it, reclined a woman. Her white draperies were scarcely distinguishable
against the fur, in which she sank luxuriously. Closer inspection would
have remarked the rise and fall of her bosom but partially concealed—one
might say almost entirely revealed—by the transparent material of
her bodice; for she was attired _a la Grecque_, in an Indian muslin
embroidered in silver lama, whose diaphanous skirt clung to her lower
limbs as the wet sheet clings to the sculptor’s model.
The short puffed sleeves of her Josephine waist left her beautiful arms
entirely naked save for the cameo medallion in white and rose-color,
set in thin gold, at her wrists. Her figure so openly displayed was
of sufficient elegance to excuse the frankness, but beautiful as were
its proportions, attentive admiration would have been first bestowed
upon her face, oval, ivory-tinted, under a superb quantity of pale
red hair confined by a classic fillet of gold with a pendant of pearl
upon her white forehead. Her elongated eyes, half closed in reverie,
were apparently dark grey, with heavy lids whose lashes cast crescented
shadows upon her cheeks.
Her full, red lips were slightly open, disclosing the even edges of
milkwhite teeth, giving a luxurious, sensuous and somewhat cruel
expression to her vivid countenance. Her languid head leaned upon one
fair hand, whose long fingers were embedded in the thick mass of hair,
the elbow supported by the curved shoulder of the divan. The other hand,
dazzling with jewels, held in her lap an ivory-handled fan of flamingo
feathers, rose-colored like her cameos and the knot of velvet ribbon at
the depression between the soft elevations of her bosom.
Occasionally she surveyed the foot resting upon the blue damasked
hassock; it was slim and arched, encased in a heelless white satin
slip-shoe which barely covered the toes and was strapped about the ankle
and visibly halfway up the leg by narrow white ribbons. The flesh-colored
stockings met skin-tight silk under-garments of the same hue, conveying
the impression of a body clad in a single dress, according to the fashion
of the day for those whose perfection of figure permitted or excused it.
When the contemplation of the foot lost interest, the young woman—for she
was hardly more than twenty-three—would draw from its hiding-place behind
the rose-colored velvet loveknot a medallion set in brilliants attached
to a slender gold chain of exquisite workmanship, whose fine thread fell
upon her delicate shoulders from the necklace of spinel rubies which
embraced her swan’s throat like linked pomegranate seeds or tiny drops of
transparent blood.
An East Indian screen with numerous painted silk panels framed in ebony,
stood in fantastic zigzags behind the divan, and the thick, blue-flowered
damask curtains of the shuttered casements had been carefully drawn;
nevertheless she shivered now and then and pulled up about her arms her
yellow scarf of Canton crepe heavy with silk embroidery and fringe.
Wax candelabra in silver-gilt were reflected from the paneled mirrors and
in the shining floor of polished rosewood, pervading the apartment with a
light at once soft and lustrous.
Just above the mantelpiece, dominating the entire _mise en scène_, hung
an oil painting, a portrait by Copley of the master and mistress of the
mansion. The lady in becoming a Grantham could not forget that she had
been a Vizard, and therefore closely related to the last of the Royal
Governors of the Province.
The two figures were represented seated at a table engaged in a game of
chess, the position of the pieces indicating a decided “check” on the
part of the lady, whose haughty countenance appeared somewhat flushed
with anticipated victory.
The motive of the composition had evidently been at her suggestion, for
her husband’s face expressed polite resignation either to superiority of
skill or the triumph of accidental good fortune, giving him a position of
secondary importance more or less unmerited.
His daughter-in-law half asleep before the fire, glanced up at the
two figures for the hundredth time and yawned as one—even a pretty
woman—yawns in the freedom of solitude: that is to say, open-mouthed.
The tap, tap of a cane came across the desert of waxed rosewood.
“My dear Nadège, I sympathize most cordially with you,” said a voice at
the young woman’s elbow.
Nadège turned her ruddy head languidly and opened her sleepy grey eyes
upon the fantastic figure before them.
“Why do you sympathize with me, my dear cousin?” she inquired. Her
English was perfect, with, perhaps, a slight foreign precision rather
than accent.
The dear cousin sat down upon the divan beside her. She was an ancient
dame whose much wrinkled face, surmounted by the mingled purple and
yellow dyes of an extraordinary turban, was still alive with a pair of
malicious, sparkling black eyes. She grasped a tall cane at arm’s length
in her skinny left hand, confronted the yawning beauty sharply, pressing
a pointed forefinger of her equally skinny right claw upon the middle of
the loveknot.
“You were stretching your mouth in the very face of Madam and the
Governor. I saw you. It was done openly, without so much as the
interposition of fan or finger. How often have I done it myself!” She
chuckled at the thought. “You are bitterly regretting that you ever left
St. Petersburg to bury yourself alive in this provincial capital of a
republican colony. Is it not so, _ma chère_?”
“Perhaps you are right,” admitted the accused, “but it is only because
Geoffrey is away. I declare, you people are so amusing.”
“Amusing? Then why do you yawn at us?”
“Ah! If I were only in Paris! How I hate the English.”
“Sh!... Reflect! Madam Grantham is English” (with an upward glance of
deviltry), “the Governor, my cousin, is English, I am English, Geoffrey
is English, you are—”
“No, no! I am not. Not in the very least bone of me. That is why I find
you so amusing. You cherish English blood, you boast loudly of your
English connections, you cultivate English manners—which God knows thrive
without much cultivation—! You emblazon your English coats of arms with
their bastard French mottoes, on your carriage doors, your silver plate,
your slaves—”
“One would think we branded them, to hear you,” interpolated the old
lady, with amusement, “but go on—go on. Let us have the full extent of
the indictment.”
“And where is Geoffrey now?” continued Geoffrey’s wife; “and where were
the Granthams in 1719, in 1749, in 1775? Why, fighting the English for
dear life.”
“That is more English than anything else,” retorted her cousin-in-law.
“What would you have Geoffrey do? Stay at home?”
“By no means. I encouraged him to go. But then I thought he would take me
with him since he was so absolute of victory.”
“Take you with him? On board a privateer?”
“There were other modes of transportation.”
“My dear child! He could not be willing to have you exposed to danger.”
“Ah!—so he said.”
“Surely you do not blame him for that? Why do you not amuse yourself in
his absence?”
“With whom, pray?”
“If the gallants of the city could but hear you!”
“Perhaps I would endeavor to find amusement in any other place than this.
Truly I am dazed with ennui.”
“I know, I know! I have not lived elsewhere myself for nothing. These
ridiculous provincials forget that the Nevsky Prospekt and the Boulevards
were ancient ways when King and Queen streets were Indian trails and the
Battery a sandbank.”
She gazed into the glowing fire and fell into a retrospection; the path
of memory led from the past to the present, so she said after a time:
“I heard something to-day that may interest you.”
“I thought there was scandal in the wag of your turban, and gossip in the
tap of your cane.”
“Oh, you did? Well, you are an impudent baggage, madam. This is neither
the one nor the other, yet, inasmuch as recounted to an indiscreet ear it
might cause both, I think I should not repeat it.”
“I assure you, cousin, you may rely upon my discretion. Since Leonora’s
absence there is no one but yourself to talk to.”
“Thank you, madam, for the implication,” retorted the old lady, rising
and executing an extraordinary courtesy with her most witchlike
expression, then sitting down again: “The Governor, my cousin, is of your
mind. Poor man, he confides in me, and I would not betray his confidence.
But you are a foreigner—forgive the phrase, as it only means that you
will understand without being prejudiced—and I run no risk in telling
you what he said to me. It was more to ease his mind than to obtain
advice; for which I was properly grateful, as I had only sympathy and not
counsel in the simples of my pharmacy.”
While she discoursed in this illustrative strain the listener said to
herself:
“Lord, will she never come to the point? What a garrulous old parroquet.”
Then aloud:
“Your introduction is perfumed with interest. I am more curious to hear
than ever. What has happened, or is going to happen, that excites your
sympathy, or would justify advice? (I will let her see that I can turn an
English period as glibly as herself!)”
“Well, then, to be brief, Mistress Geoffrey, Captain Grantham is coming
home. Hence the arrival, post-haste, of the Governor at a time that
affairs of state should have detained him in the capital.”
“_Captain_ Grantham? Who is he?”
“A well-known officer in the French army. A personal friend of Prince
Eugène de Beauharnais.”
“Ah, yes; I saw him once in Paris. A very young man at that time. But
handsome, gallant and dashing. Altogether the _Frenchman_.”
“Geoffrey should hear you,” replied the old lady dryly. The other laughed:
“Seeing that Geoffrey is an officer in the American navy I do not think
he would have any fault to find with my eulogy of French gallantry. I am
rejoiced to hear that this flower of chivalry is coming home. Now that
the Bourbons are in power again I suppose he finds his occupation gone.”
But Miss Anne was looking into the fire, the ghost of a smile puckering
her bloodless lips disagreeably.
“You might be rejoiced to hear it in Paris or Petersburg, but not in this
place; no, not in this place.”
“You are right, I daresay. In Charleston I have discovered that a
brother-in-law is a blood relation, not a flimsy connection by marriage.
Flirtation with one is therefore robbed of all its venom—of all its
fascination, also. Still, as I remember Captain Grantham—”
“This is not the one you remember.”
“You said Geoffrey’s brother?”
“_Sans doute_! But Reginald’s brother also.”
“Reginald’s brother? You speak in riddles; you have just said it was
Reginald’s self. Is he not Captain Grantham?”
“No; I should have said his _alter ego_. Reginald is now _Colonel_ of
artillery.”
“Another Grantham!”
“Truly; and about the same age.”
“Oh, a twin.”
“By no means. You saw one brother in Paris, but I do not think you saw
the other. Yet, very likely you did; they are, I am told, wonderfully
alike. They were at the Ecole Militaire together. The relationship is
unmistakable except to those who will not see.”
The old gossip laughed aloud, enjoying the other’s mystification.
“What singularity!” exclaimed Nadège. “Pray go on. I am no longer bored.
I can even regard this portrait without a yawn. Who is this Captain
Grantham? And why should I not know him here or see him in Paris? You
tell me he is famous and the companion of princes.”
“He has a name of his own. It is descriptive and picturesque, besides
being symbolic.”
“Ah? Pray pronounce it.”
“Brugnon.”
“What then? Where is the symbolism?”
“Well, then, this Monsieur Brugnon is like his brothers Reginald,
Garrick, and Geoffrey in all respects save one; unfortunately, the most
important one of all.”
“What is it? Why have I been kept in ignorance of this, since it is
evidently a family affair? What is this difference of such vital
importance?”
“His color.”
Mistress Geoffrey sank back into her furry nest, her expression of lively
curiosity and irritation instantly effaced by one of bland indifference.
“I see. Why does he not remain in Europe? He is a fool to come here.”
“So he is,—but he does not know it. He wrote to his father, the
Governor, your father-in-law and my cousin, to say that since the
abdication of the Emperor and the enforced residence of Prince Eugène
in Vienna, he revolts from the service of a _lackey at court_ after the
activity of the battlefield, and now desires to _see his own people_ once
more and his home—the home of his childhood, the plantation, the other
_Court_ hardly less celebrated than—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” exclaimed Nadège hastily, “named for the English
estate of the Granthams near Twickenham, Middlesex, which contains
‘fourteen hundred acres of land, and gardens, fishponds, hedges, terraces
and fountains unsurpassed by anything in the South.’ My memory, you see,
is excellent.”
“You have been reading the family annals of late?”
“Oh, no; it was not necessary! Tell me, cousin, is this _petite histoire_
generally known?”
“Yes: the Governor was much censured for sending the boy to France, and
his rapid promotion has been a sore on the foot of those who will tread
him in the very mire when he comes to see _his own people_, poor devil.”
“Why does the Governor permit his return?”
“He cannot help it. Brugnon wrote that he would take ship at once.”
“Who is his mother?” was the next question.
“Ah, who knows?” And Miss Ann peaked up her sharp shoulders under their
gay flowered silk covering and wagged her oriental headgear until the
filigree silver ornaments in the lobes of her large ears jingled audibly.
“I think I could guess,” she added, with a wizened smile at her
companion, “but what difference? Society here, my dear Nadège, as you
have already discovered, is in the hands of the men. We women are the
vases on the mantelpiece.” She grinned in Mistress Geoffrey’s face: “Some
of us are particularly decorative. Mistress Grantham, for example.”
The younger woman eyed meditatively the sharp yellow face under the
resplendent turban.
“One has a good view from the mantelpiece,” she began, when a young man
entered the room and advanced to the fireplace.
[_To be continued._]