THE PHILOSOPHE
The apothecary felt an inward nervous start as there advanced into the
light of his hanging lamp and toward the spot where he had halted, just
outside the counter, a woman of the quadroon caste, of superb stature
and poise, severely handsome features, clear, tawny skin and large,
passionate black eyes.
"_Bon soi', Miché_." [Monsieur.] A rather hard, yet not repellent smile
showed her faultless teeth.
Frowenfeld bowed.
"_Mo vien c'erc'er la bourse de Madame_."
She spoke the best French at her command, but it was not understood.
The apothecary could only shake his head.
"_La bourse_" she repeated, softly smiling, but with a scintillation of
the eyes in resentment of his scrutiny. "_La bourse_" she reiterated.
"Purse?"
"_Oui, Miché_."
"You are sent for it?"
"_Oui, Miché_."
He drew it from his breast pocket and marked the sudden glisten of her
eyes, reflecting the glisten of the gold in the silken mesh.
"_Oui, c'est ça_," said she, putting her hand out eagerly.
"I am afraid to give you this to-night," said Joseph.
"_Oui_," ventured she, dubiously, the lightning playing deep back in her
eyes.
"You might be robbed," said Frowenfeld. "It is very dangerous for you to
be out alone. It will not be long, now, until gun-fire." (Eight o'clock
P.M.--the gun to warn slaves to be in-doors, under pain of arrest and
imprisonment.)
The object of this solicitude shook her head with a smile at its
gratuitousness. The smile showed determination also.
"_Mo pas compren_'," she said.
"Tell the lady to send for it to-morrow."
She smiled helplessly and somewhat vexedly, shrugged and again shook her
head. As she did so she heard footsteps and voices in the door at
her back.
"_C'est ça_" she said again with a hurried attempt at extreme
amiability; "Dat it; _oui_;" and lifting her hand with some rapidity
made a sudden eager reach for the purse, but failed.
"No!" said Frowenfeld, indignantly.
"Hello!" said Charlie Keene amusedly, as he approached from the door.
The woman turned, and in one or two rapid sentences in the Creole
dialect offered her explanation.
"Give her the purse, Joe; I will answer for its being all right."
Frowenfeld handed it to her. She started to pass through the door in the
rue Royale by which Doctor Keene had entered; but on seeing on its
threshold Agricola frowning upon her, she turned quickly with evident
trepidation, and hurried out into the darkness of the other street.
Agricola entered. Doctor Keene looked about the shop.
"I tell you, Agricole, you didn't have it with you; Frowenfeld, you
haven't seen a big knotted walking-stick?"
Frowenfeld was sure no walking-stick had been left there.
"Oh, yes, Frowenfeld," said Doctor Keene, with a little laugh, as the
three sat down, "I'd a'most as soon trust that woman as if she
was white."
The apothecary said nothing.
"How free," said Agricola, beginning with a meditative gaze at the sky
without, and ending with a philosopher's smile upon his two
companions,--"how free we people are from prejudice against the negro!"
"The white people," said Frowenfeld, half abstractedly, half
inquiringly.
"H-my young friend, when we say, 'we people,' we _always_ mean we white
people. The non-mention of color always implies pure white; and whatever
is not pure white is to all intents and purposes pure black. When I say
the 'whole community,' I mean the whole white portion; when I speak of
the 'undivided public sentiment,' I mean the sentiment of the white
population. What else could I mean? Could you suppose, sir, the
expression which you may have heard me use--'my downtrodden
country'--includes blacks and mulattoes? What is that up yonder in the
sky? The moon. The new moon, or the old moon, or the moon in her third
quarter, but always the moon! Which part of it? Why, the shining
part--the white part, always and only! Not that there is a prejudice
against the negro. By no means. Wherever he can be of any service in a
strictly menial capacity we kindly and generously tolerate his
presence."
Was the immigrant growing wise, or weak, that he remained silent?
Agricola rose as he concluded and said he would go home. Doctor Keene
gave him his hand lazily, without rising.
"Frowenfeld," he said, with a smile and in an undertone, as Agricola's
footsteps died away, "don't you know who that woman is?"
"No."
"Well, I'll tell you."
He told him.
* * * * *
On that lonely plantation at the Cannes Brulées, where Aurore Nancanou's
childhood had been passed without brothers or sisters, there had been
given her, according to the well-known custom of plantation life, a
little quadroon slave-maid as her constant and only playmate. This maid
began early to show herself in many ways remarkable. While yet a child
she grew tall, lithe, agile; her eyes were large and black, and rolled
and sparkled if she but turned to answer to her name. Her pale yellow
forehead, low and shapely, with the jet hair above it, the heavily
pencilled eyebrows and long lashes below, the faint red tinge that
blushed with a kind of cold passion through the clear yellow skin of the
cheek, the fulness of the red, voluptuous lips and the roundness of her
perfect neck, gave her, even at fourteen, a barbaric and magnetic
beauty, that startled the beholder like an unexpected drawing out of a
jewelled sword. Such a type could have sprung only from high Latin
ancestry on the one side and--we might venture--Jaloff African on the
other. To these charms of person she added mental acuteness,
conversational adroitness, concealed cunning, and noiseless but visible
strength of will; and to these, that rarest of gifts in one of her
tincture, the purity of true womanhood.
At fourteen a necessity which had been parleyed with for two years or
more became imperative, and Aurore's maid was taken from her.
Explanation is almost superfluous. Aurore was to become a lady and her
playmate a lady's maid; but not _her_ maid, because the maid had become,
of the two, the ruling spirit. It was a question of grave debate in the
mind of M. De Grapion what disposition to make of her.
About this time the Grandissimes and De Grapions, through certain
efforts of Honoré's father (since dead) were making some feeble
pretences of mutual good feeling, and one of those Kentuckian dealers in
corn and tobacco whose flatboat fleets were always drifting down the
Mississippi, becoming one day M. De Grapion's transient guest,
accidentally mentioned a wish of Agricola Fusilier. Agricola, it
appeared, had commissioned him to buy the most beautiful lady's maid
that in his extended journeyings he might be able to find; he wanted to
make her a gift to his niece, Honoré's sister. The Kentuckian saw the
demand met in Aurore's playmate. M. De Grapion would not sell her.
(Trade with a Grandissime? Let them suspect he needed money?) No; but he
would ask Agricola to accept the services of the waiting-maid for, say,
ten years. The Kentuckian accepted the proposition on the spot and it
was by and by carried out. She was never recalled to the Cannes Brulées,
but in subsequent years received her freedom from her master, and in New
Orleans became Palmyre la Philosophe, as they say in the corrupt French
of the old Creoles, or Palmyre Philosophe, noted for her taste and skill
as a hair-dresser, for the efficiency of her spells and the sagacity of
her divinations, but most of all for the chaste austerity with which she
practised the less baleful rites of the voudous.
"That's the woman," said Doctor Keene, rising to go, as he concluded
the narrative,--"that's she, Palmyre Philosophe. Now you get a view of
the vastness of Agricole's generosity; he tolerates her even though she
does not present herself in the 'strictly menial capacity.' Reason
why--_he's afraid of her_."
Time passed, if that may be called time which we have to measure with a
clock. The apothecary of the rue Royale found better ways of
measurement. As quietly as a spider he was spinning information into
knowledge and knowledge into what is supposed to be wisdom; whether it
was or not we shall see. His unidentified merchant friend who had
adjured him to become acclimated as "they all did" had also exhorted him
to study the human mass of which he had become a unit; but whether that
study, if pursued, was sweetening and ripening, or whether it was
corrupting him, that friend did not come to see; it was the busy time of
year. Certainly so young a solitary, coming among a people whose
conventionalities were so at variance with his own door-yard ethics, was
in sad danger of being unduly--as we might say--Timonized. His
acquaintances continued to be few in number.
During this fermenting period he chronicled much wet and some cold
weather. This may in part account for the uneventfulness of its passage;
events do not happen rapidly among the Creoles in bad weather. However,
trade was good.
But the weather cleared; and when it was getting well on into the
Creole spring and approaching the spring of the almanacs, something did
occur that extended Frowenfeld's acquaintance without Doctor Keene's
assistance.