"A yellow primrose was to him----"
Yonder in the parlor with the Ducatels, ignorant of the poet's lines as
they, the two aunts--those two consciously irremovable, unadjustable,
incarnated interdictions to their niece's marriage--saw the primrose,
the "business," as the pair in the bower thought they saw it
themselves. Were not Aline and Chester immersed in that tale of
servile insurrection so destitute of angels, guiding stars, and lovers?
And was not Hector with them? And are not three as truly a crowd in
French as in American?
"Well, to begin," Chester urged, "your grandfather, Théophile
Chapdelaine, was born in this old quarter, in such a street. Royal?"
"Yes. Nearly opposite the ladies' entrance of that Hotel St. Louis now
perishing."
"Except its dome. I hear there's a movement----
"Yes, to save that. I hope 'twill succeed. To me that old dome is a
monument of those two men."
"But if it comes down the home remains, opposite, where both were born,
were they not?"
"Yes. Yet I'd rather the dome. We Creoles, you know, are called very
conservative."
"Yet no race is more radical than the French."
"True. And we Chapdelaines have always been radical. _Grandpère_ was,
though a slaveholder."
"Oh, none of _my_ ancestors justified slavery, yet as planters they had
to own negroes."
"But the Chapdelaines were not planters. They were agents of ships.
Fifty times on one page in the old _Picayune_, or in _L'Abeille_--'For
freight or passage apply to the master on board or to T. Chapdelaine &
Son, agents.' Even then there were two Théophiles, and grandpapa was
the son. They were wholesale agents also for French exporters of
artistic china, porcelain, glass, bronze. Twice they furnished the
hotel with everything of that kind; when it first opened, and when it
changed hands. That's how they came to hold stock in it. Grandpapa,
outdoor man of the firm, was every day in the rotunda, under that dome."
"Yes," Chester said, "it was a kind of Rialto, I know. They called it
the 'Exchange,' as earlier they had called Maspero's."
"You love our small antiquities. So do I. Well, grandpapa did much
business there, both of French goods and of ships; and because the
hotel was the favorite of the sugar-planters its rotunda was one of the
principal places for slave auctions."
"Yes, they were, I know, almost daily. The old slave-block is shown
there yet, if genuine."
"Ah, genuine or not, what difference? From one that _was_ there
_grandpère_ bought many slaves. He and his father speculated in them."
"Why! How strange! The son? _your_ grandfather? the radical, who
married--'Maud'?"
"Yes, the last slave he bought was for her."
"Why, why, why! He couldn't have met her be'--well--before the year of
Lincoln's election."
"No, let me tell you. You remember 'Sidney'?"
"'Maud's' black maid? my uncle's Euonymus? Yes."
"Well, when she came to Maud, at Maud's home, in the North, she was
still in agony about Mingo, who'd been recaptured. So Maud wrote
South, to her aunt, who wrote back: 'Yes, he had been brought home, and
at creditor's auction had been sold to a slave-trader to be resold here
in New Orleans.' So then Sidney begged Maud, who by luck was coming
here, to bring her here to find him."
"Brave Sidney. Brave Euonymus."
"Yes--although--her Southern mistress--I know not how legally--had sent
to her her free-paper. That made it safer, I suppose, eh?"
"Yes. But--who told you all this so exactly--your _grand'mère_
herself, or your _grandpère_?"
"Ah--she, no. I never saw her. And _grandpère_--no, he was killed
before I was born."
"_What_?"
"Yes, all that I'll come to. This I'm telling now is from my own papa.
He had it from _grandpère_. _Grand'mère_ and Sidney came with friends,
a gentleman and his wife, by ship from New York."
"And all put up at Hotel St. Louis?"
"Yes. From there Maud and Sidney began their search. But now, first,
about that speculating in slaves: those two Théophiles, first the
father, then both, hated slavery. 'Twas by nature and in everything
that they were radical. Their friends knew that, even when they only
said, 'Oh, you are extreme!' or 'Those Chapdelaines are extremist.' In
those years from about eighteen-forty to 'sixty----"
"When the slavery question was about to blaze----"
"Yes--they voted Whig. That was the most antislavery they could vote
and stay here. But under the rose they said: 'All right! extremist,
yet Whig; we'll be extreme Whig of a new kind. We'll trade in slaves.'"
Chester laughed. "I begin to see," he said, and by a sidelong glance
bade Aline note the rapt attention of Cupid. Her answering smile was
so confidential that his heart leaped.
"I'll tell you by and by about that also," she murmured, and then
resumed: "While _grandpère_ was yet a boy his father had begun that,
that slave-buying. On that auction-block he would often see a slave
about to be sold much below value, or whose value might easily be
increased by training to some trade. You see?--blacksmith, lady's
maid, cook, hair-dresser, engine-driver, butler?"