Part 3 (1/2)
”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 b.a.l.l.s 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 Americain--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 quant.i.ties 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 quant.i.ties 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.
CHAPTER IV
FAMILY TREES
In the year 1673, and in the royal hovel of a Tchoupitoulas village not far removed from that ”Buffalo's Grazing-ground,” now better known as New Orleans, was born Lufki-Humma, otherwise Red Clay. The mother of Red Clay was a princess by birth as well as by marriage. For the father, with that devotion to his people's interests presumably common to rulers, had ten moons before ventured northward into the territory of the proud and exclusive Natchez nation, and had so prevailed with--so outsmoked--their ”Great Sun,” as to find himself, as he finally knocked the ashes from his successful calumet, possessor of a wife whose pedigree included a long line of royal mothers--fathers being of little account in Natchez heraldry--extending back beyond the Mexican origin of her nation, and disappearing only in the effulgence of her great original, the orb of day himself. As to Red Clay's paternal ancestry, we must content ourselves with the fact that the father was not only the diplomate we have already found him, but a chief of considerable eminence; that is to say, of seven feet stature.
It scarce need be said that when Lufki-Humma was born, the mother arose at once from her couch of skins, herself bore the infant to the neighboring bayou and bathed it--not for singularity, nor for independence, nor for vainglory, but only as one of the heart-curdling conventionalities which made up the experience of that most pitiful of holy things, an Indian mother.
Outside the lodge door sat and continued to sit, as she pa.s.sed out, her master or husband. His interest in the trivialities of the moment may be summed up in this, that he was as fully prepared as some men are in more civilized times and places to hold his queen to strict account for the s.e.x of her offspring. Girls for the Natchez, if they preferred them, but the chief of the Tchoupitoulas wanted a son. She returned from the water, came near, sank upon her knees, laid the infant at his feet, and lo! a daughter.
Then she fell forward heavily upon her face. It may have been muscular exhaustion, it may have been the mere wind of her hasty-tempered matrimonial master's stone hatchet as it whiffed by her skull; an inquest now would be too great an irony; but something blew out her ”vile candle.”
Among the squaws who came to offer the accustomed funeral howlings, and seize mementoes from the deceased lady's scant leavings, was one who had in her own palmetto hut an empty cradle scarcely cold, and therefore a necessity at her breast, if not a place in her heart, for the unfortunate Lufki-Humma; and thus it was that this little waif came to be tossed, a droll hypothesis of flesh, blood, nerve and brain, into the hands of wild nature with _carte blanche_ as to the disposal of it. And now, since this was Agricola's most boasted ancestor--since it appears the darkness of her cheek had no effect to make him less white, or qualify his right to smite the fairest and most distant descendant of an African on the face, and since this proud station and right could not have sprung from the squalid surroundings of her birth, let us for a moment contemplate these crude materials.
As for the flesh, it was indeed only some of that ”one flesh” of which we all are made; but the blood--to go into finer distinctions--the blood, as distinguished from the milk of her Alibamon foster-mother, was the blood of the royal caste of the great Toltec mother-race, which, before it yielded its Mexican splendors to the conquering Aztec, throned the jeweled and gold-laden Inca in the South, and sent the sacred fire of its temples into the North by the hand of the Natchez. For it is a short way of expressing the truth concerning Red Clay's tissues to say she had the blood of her mother and the nerve of her father, the nerve of the true North American Indian, and had it in its finest strength.
As to her infantine bones, they were such as needed not to fail of straightness in the limbs, compactness in the body, smallness in hands and feet, and exceeding symmetry and comeliness throughout. Possibly between the two sides of the occipital profile there may have been an Incaean tendency to inequality; but if by any good fortune her impressible little cranium should escape the cradle-straps, the shapeliness that nature loves would soon appear. And this very fortune befell her. Her father's detestation of an infant that had not consulted his wishes as to s.e.x prompted a verbal decree which, among other prohibitions, forbade her skull the distortions that ambitious and fas.h.i.+onable Indian mothers delighted to produce upon their offspring.
And as to her brain: what can we say? The casket in which Nature sealed that brain, and in which Nature's great step-sister, Death, finally laid it away, has never fallen into the delighted fingers--and the remarkable fineness of its texture will never kindle admiration in the triumphant eyes--of those whose scientific hunger drives them to dig for _crania Americana_; nor yet will all their learned excavatings ever draw forth one of those pale souvenirs of mortality with walls of shapelier contour or more delicate fineness, or an interior of more admirable s.p.a.ciousness, than the fair council-chamber under whose dome the mind of Lufki-Humma used, about two centuries ago, to sit in frequent conclave with high thoughts.
”I have these facts,” it was Agricola Fusilier's habit to say, ”by family tradition; but you know, sir, h-tradition is much more authentic than history!”
Listening Crane, the tribal medicine-man, one day stepped softly into the lodge of the giant chief, sat down opposite him on a mat of plaited rushes, accepted a lighted calumet, and, after the silence of a decent hour, broken at length by the warrior's intimation that ”the ear of Raging Buffalo listened for the voice of his brother,” said, in effect, that if that ear would turn toward the village play-ground, it would catch a murmur like the pleasing sound of bees among the blossoms of the catalpa, albeit the catalpa was now dropping her leaves, for it was the moon of turkeys. No, it was the repressed laughter of squaws, wallowing with their young ones about the village pole, wondering at the Natchez-Tchoupitoulas child, whose eye was the eye of the panther, and whose words were the words of an aged chief in council.
There was more added; we record only enough to indicate the direction of Listening Crane's aim. The eye of Raging Buffalo was opened to see a vision: the daughter of the Natchez sitting in majesty, clothed in many-colored robes of s.h.i.+ning feathers crossed and recrossed with girdles of serpent-skins and of wampum, her feet in quilled and painted moccasins, her head under a glory of plumes, the carpet of buffalo-robes about her throne covered with the trophies of conquest, and the atmosphere of her lodge blue with the smoke of emba.s.sadors'
calumets; and this extravagant dream the capricious chief at once resolved should eventually become reality. ”Let her be taken to the village temple,” he said to his prime-minister, ”and be fed by warriors on the flesh of wolves.”
The Listening Crane was a patient man; he was the ”man that waits” of the old French proverb; all things came to him. He had waited for an opportunity to change his brother's mind, and it had come. Again, he waited for him to die; and, like Methuselah and others, he died. He had heard of a race more powerful than the Natchez--a white race; he waited for them; and when the year 1682 saw a humble ”black gown” dragging and splas.h.i.+ng his way, with La Salle and Tonti, through the swamps of Louisiana, holding forth the crucifix and backed by French carbines and Mohican tomahawks, among the marvels of that wilderness was found this: a child of nine sitting, and--with some unostentatious aid from her medicine-man--ruling; queen of her tribe and high-priestess of their temple. Fortified by the ac.u.men and self-collected ambition of Listening Crane, confirmed in her regal t.i.tle by the white man's Manitou through the medium of the ”black gown,” and inheriting her father's fear-compelling frown, she ruled with majesty and wisdom, sometimes a decreer of b.l.o.o.d.y justice, sometimes an Amazonian counselor of warriors, and at all times--year after year, until she had reached the perfect womanhood of twenty-six--a virgin queen.
On the 11th of March, 1699, two overbold young Frenchmen of M.
D'Iberville's little exploring party tossed guns on shoulder, and ventured away from their canoes on the bank of the Mississippi into the wilderness. Two men they were whom an explorer would have been justified in h.o.a.rding up, rather than in letting out at such risks; a pair to lean on, n.o.ble and strong. They hunted, killed nothing, were overtaken by rain, then by night, hunger, alarm, despair.
And when they had lain down to die, and had only succeeded in falling asleep, the Diana of the Tchoupitoulas, ranging the magnolia groves with bow and quiver, came upon them in all the poetry of their hope-forsaken strength and beauty, and fell sick of love. We say not whether with Zephyr Grandissime or Epaminondas Fusilier; that, for the time being, was her secret.
The two captives were made guests. Listening Crane rejoiced in them as representatives of the great gift-making race, and indulged himself in a dream of pipe-smoking, orations, treaties, presents and alliances, finding its climax in the marriage of his virgin queen to the king of France, and unvaryingly tending to the swiftly increasing aggrandizement of Listening Crane. They sat down to bear's meat, sagamite and beans.
The queen sat down with them, clothed in her entire wardrobe: vest of swan's skin, with facings of purple and green from the neck of the mallard; petticoat of plaited hair, with embroideries of quills; leggings of fawn-skin; garters of wampum; black and green serpent-skin moccasins, that rested on pelts of tiger-cat and buffalo; armlets of gars' scales, necklaces of bears' claws and alligators' teeth, plaited tresses, plumes of raven and flamingo, wing of the pink curlew, and odors of bay and sa.s.safras. Young men danced before them, blowing upon reeds, hooting, yelling, rattling beans in gourds and touching hands and feet. One day was like another, and the nights were made brilliant with flambeau dances and processions.
Some days later M. D'Iberville's canoe fleet, returning down the river, found and took from the sh.o.r.e the two men, whom they had given up for dead, and with them, by her own request, the abdicating queen, who left behind her a crowd of weeping and howling squaws and warriors. Three canoes that put off in their wake, at a word from her, turned back; but one old man leaped into the water, swam after them a little way, and then unexpectedly sank. It was that cautious wader but inexperienced swimmer, the Listening Crane.
When the expedition reached Biloxi, there were two suitors for the hand of Agricola's great ancestress. Neither of them was Zephyr Grandissime.