"AND WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?"
We say matters took a turn; or, better, that Frowenfeld's interest in
affairs received a new life. This had its beginning in Doctor Keene's
making himself specially entertaining in an old-family-history way, with
a view to keeping his patient within doors for a safe period. He had
conceived a great liking for Frowenfeld, and often, of an afternoon,
would drift in to challenge him to a game of chess--a game, by the way,
for which neither of them cared a farthing. The immigrant had learned
its moves to gratify his father, and the doctor--the truth is, the
doctor had never quite learned them; but he was one of those men who
cannot easily consent to acknowledge a mere affection for one, least of
all one of their own sex. It may safely be supposed, then, that the
board often displayed an arrangement of pieces that would have
bewildered Morphy himself.
"By the by, Frowenfeld," he said one evening, after the one preliminary
move with which he invariably opened his game, "you haven't made the
acquaintance of your pretty neighbors next door."
Frowenfeld knew of no specially pretty neighbors next door on either
side--had noticed no ladies.
"Well, I will take you in to see them some time." The doctor laughed a
little, rubbing his face and his thin, red curls with one hand, as
he laughed.
The convalescent wondered what there could be to laugh at.
"Who are they?" he inquired.
"Their name is De Grapion--oh, De Grapion, says I! their name is
Nancanou. They are, without exception, the finest women--the brightest,
the best, and the bravest--that I know in New Orleans." The doctor
resumed a cigar which lay against the edge of the chess-board, found it
extinguished, and proceeded to relight it. "Best blood of the province;
good as the Grandissimes. Blood is a great thing here, in certain odd
ways," he went on. "Very curious sometimes." He stooped to the floor
where his coat had fallen, and took his handkerchief from a
breast-pocket. "At a grand mask ball about two months ago, where I had a
bewilderingly fine time with those ladies, the proudest old turkey in
the theater was an old fellow whose Indian blood shows in his very
behavior, and yet--ha, ha! I saw that same old man, at a quadroon ball a
few years ago, walk up to the handsomest, best dressed man in the
house, a man with a skin whiter than his own,--a perfect gentleman as to
looks and manners,--and without a word slap him in the face."
"You laugh?" asked Frowenfeld.
"Laugh? Why shouldn't I? The fellow had no business there. Those balls
are not given to quadroon _males_, my friend. He was lucky to get out
alive, and that was about all he did.
"They are right!" the doctor persisted, in response to Frowenfeld's
puzzled look. "The people here have got to be particular. However, that
is not what we were talking about. Quadroon balls are not to be
mentioned in connection. Those ladies--" He addressed himself to the
resuscitation of his cigar. "Singular people in this country," he
resumed; but his cigar would not revive. He was a poor story-teller. To
Frowenfeld--as it would have been to any one, except a Creole or the
most thoroughly Creoleized Américain--his narrative, when it was done,
was little more than a thick mist of strange names, places and events;
yet there shone a light of romance upon it that filled it with color and
populated it with phantoms. Frowenfeld's interest rose--was allured into
this mist--and there was left befogged. As a physician, Doctor Keene
thus accomplished his end,--the mental diversion of his late
patient,--for in the midst of the mist Frowenfeld encountered and
grappled a problem of human life in Creole type, the possible
correlations of whose quantities we shall presently find him revolving
in a studious and sympathetic mind, as the poet of to-day ponders the
"Flower in the crannied wall."
The quantities in that problem were the ancestral--the maternal--roots
of those two rival and hostile families whose descendants--some brave,
others fair--we find unwittingly thrown together at the ball, and with
whom we are shortly to have the honor of an unmasked acquaintance.