AURORA AS A HISTORIAN
Alas! the phonograph was invented three-quarters of a century too late.
If type could entrap one-half the pretty oddities of Aurora's
speech,--the arch, the pathetic, the grave, the earnest, the
matter-of-fact, the ecstatic tones of her voice,--nay, could it but
reproduce the movement of her hands, the eloquence of her eyes, or the
shapings of her mouth,--ah! but type--even the phonograph--is such an
inadequate thing! Sometimes she laughed; sometimes Clotilde,
unexpectedly to herself, joined her; and twice or thrice she provoked a
similar demonstration from the ox-like apothecary,--to her own intense
amusement. Sometimes she shook her head in solemn scorn; and, when
Frowenfeld, at a certain point where Palmyre's fate locked hands for a
time with that of Bras-Coupé, asked a fervid question concerning that
strange personage, tears leaped into her eyes, as she said:
"Ah! 'Sieur Frowenfel', iv I tra to tell de sto'y of Bras-Coupé, I goin'
to cry lag a lill bebby."
The account of the childhood days upon the plantation at Cannes Brulées
may be passed by. It was early in Palmyre's fifteenth year that that
Kentuckian, 'mutual friend' of her master and Agricola, prevailed with
M. de Grapion to send her to the paternal Grandissime mansion,--a
complimentary gift, through Agricola, to Mademoiselle, his
niece,--returnable ten years after date.
The journey was made in safety; and, by and by, Palmyre was presented to
her new mistress. The occasion was notable. In a great chair in the
centre sat the _grandpère_, a Chevalier de Grandissime, whose business
had narrowed down to sitting on the front veranda and wearing his
decorations,--the cross of St. Louis being one; on his right, Colonel
Numa Grandissime, with one arm dropped around Honoré, then a boy of
Palmyre's age, expecting to be off in sixty days for France; and on the
left, with Honoré's fair sister nestled against her, "Madame Numa," as
the Creoles would call her, a stately woman and beautiful, a great
admirer of her brother Agricola. (Aurora took pains to explain that she
received these minutiae from Palmyre herself in later years.) One other
member of the group was a young don of some twenty years' age, not an
inmate of the house, but only a cousin of Aurora on her deceased
mother's side. To make the affair complete, and as a seal to this tacit
Grandissime-de-Grapion treaty, this sole available representative of the
"other side" was made a guest for the evening. Like the true Spaniard
that he was, Don José Martinez fell deeply in love with Honoré's sister.
Then there came Agricola leading in Palmyre. There were others, for the
Grandissime mansion was always full of Grandissimes; but this was the
central group.
In this house Palmyre grew to womanhood, retaining without interruption
the place into which she seemed to enter by right of indisputable
superiority over all competitors,--the place of favorite attendant to
the sister of Honoré. Attendant, we say, for servant she never seemed.
She grew tall, arrowy, lithe, imperial, diligent, neat, thorough,
silent. Her new mistress, though scarcely at all her senior, was yet
distinctly her mistress; she had that through her Fusilier blood;
experience was just then beginning to show that the Fusilier Grandissime
was a superb variety; she was a mistress one could wish to obey. Palmyre
loved her, and through her contact ceased, for a time, at least, to be
the pet leopard she had been at the Cannes Brulées.
Honoré went away to Paris only sixty days after Palmyre entered the
house. But even that was not soon enough.
"'Sieur Frowenfel'," said Aurora, in her recital, "Palmyre, she never
tole me dad, _mais_ I am shoe, _shoe_ dad she fall in love wid Honoré
Grandissime. 'Sieur Frowenfel', I thing dad Honoré Grandissime is one
bad man, ent it? Whad you thing, 'Sieur Frowenfel'?"
"I think, as I said to you the last time, that he is one of the best, as
I know that he is one of the kindest and most enlightened gentlemen in
the city," said the apothecary.
"Ah, 'Sieur Frowenfel'! ha, ha!"
"That is my conviction."
The lady went on with her story.
"Hanny'ow, I know she _con_tinue in love wid 'im all doze ten year'
w'at 'e been gone. She baig Mademoiselle Grandissime to wrad dad ledder
to my papa to ass to kip her two years mo'."
Here Aurora carefully omitted that episode which Doctor Keene had
related to Frowenfeld,--her own marriage and removal to Fausse Rivière,
the visit of her husband to the city, his unfortunate and finally fatal
affair with Agricola, and the surrender of all her land and slaves to
that successful duellist.
M. de Grapion, through all that, stood by his engagement concerning
Palmyre; and, at the end of ten years, to his own astonishment,
responded favorably to a letter from Honoré's sister, irresistible for
its goodness, good sense, and eloquent pleading, asking leave to detain
Palmyre two years longer; but this response came only after the old
master and his pretty, stricken Aurora had wept over it until they were
weak and gentle,--and was not a response either, but only a
silent consent.
Shortly before the return of Honoré--and here it was that Aurora took up
again the thread of her account--while his mother, long-widowed, reigned
in the paternal mansion, with Agricola for her manager, Bras-Coupé
appeared. From that advent, and the long and varied mental sufferings
which its consequences brought upon her, sprang that second change in
Palmyre, which made her finally untamable, and ended in a manumission,
granted her more for fear than for conscience' sake. When Aurora
attempted to tell those experiences, even leaving Bras-Coupé as much as
might be out of the recital, she choked with tears at the very start,
stopped, laughed, and said:
"_C'est tout_--daz all. 'Sieur Frowenfel', oo you fine dad pigtu' to
loog lag, yonnah, hon de wall?"
She spoke as if he might have overlooked it, though twenty times, at
least, in the last hour, she had seen him glance at it.
"It is a good likeness," said the apothecary, turning to Clotilde, yet
showing himself somewhat puzzled in the matter of the costume.
The ladies laughed.
"Daz ma grade-gran'-mamma," said Clotilde.
"Dass one _fille à la cassette_," said Aurora, "my gran'-muzzah; _mais_,
ad de sem tarn id is Clotilde." She touched her daughter under the chin
with a ringed finger. "Clotilde is my gran'-mamma."
Frowenfeld rose to go.
"You muz come again, 'Sieur Frowenfel'," said both ladies, in a breath.
What could he say?