Part 4 (1/2)
And did the orphan, in despite of Indians and soldiers and wilderness, settle down here and make a moderate fortune? Alas, she never gathered a berry! When she--with the aged lady, her appointed companion in exile, the young commandant of the fort, in whose pinnace they had come, and two or three French sailors and Canadians--stepped out upon the white sand of Biloxi beach, she was bound with invisible fetters hand and foot, by that Olympian rogue of a boy, who likes no better prey than a little maiden who thinks she will never marry.
The officer's name was De Grapion--Georges De Grapion. The Marquis gave him a choice grant of land on that part of the Mississippi river ”coast”
known as the Cannes Brulees.
”Of course you know where Cannes Brulees is, don't you?” asked Doctor Keene of Joseph Frowenfeld.
”Yes,” said Joseph, with a twinge of reminiscence that recalled the study of Louisiana on paper with his father and sisters.
There Georges De Grapion settled, with the laudable determination to make a fresh start against the mortifyingly numerous Grandissimes.
”My father's policy was every way bad,” he said to his spouse; ”it is useless, and probably wrong, this trying to thin them out by duels; we will try another plan. Thank you,” he added, as she handed his coat back to him, with the shoulder-straps cut off. In pursuance of the new plan, Madame De Grapion,--the precious little heroine!--before the myrtles offered another crop of berries, bore him a boy not much smaller (saith tradition) than herself.
Only one thing qualified the father's elation. On that very day Numa Grandissime (Brahmin-Mandarin de Grandissime), a mere child, received from Governor de Vaudreuil a cadets.h.i.+p.
”Never mind, Messieurs Grandissime, go on with your tricks; we shall see! Ha! we shall see!”
”We shall see what?” asked a remote relative of that family. ”Will Monsieur be so good as to explain himself?”
Bang! bang!
Alas, Madame De Grapion!
It may be recorded that no affair of honor in Louisiana ever left a braver little widow. When Joseph and his doctor pretended to play chess together, but little more than a half-century had elapsed since the _fille a la ca.s.sette_ stood before the Grand Marquis and refused to wed.
Yet she had been long gone into the skies, leaving a worthy example behind her in twenty years of beautiful widowhood. Her son, the heir and resident of the plantation at Cannes Brulees, at the age of--they do say--eighteen, had married a blithe and pretty lady of Franco-Spanish extraction, and, after a fair length of life divided between campaigning under the brilliant young Galvez and raising unremunerative indigo crops, had lately lain down to sleep, leaving only two descendants--females--how shall we describe them?--a Monk and a _Fille a la Ca.s.sette_. It was very hard to have to go leaving his family name snuffed out and certain Grandissime-ward grievances burning.
”There are so many Grandissimes,” said the weary-eyed Frowenfeld, ”I cannot distinguish between--I can scarcely count them.”
”Well, now,” said the doctor, ”let me tell you, don't try. They can't do it themselves. Take them in the ma.s.s--as you would shrimps.”
CHAPTER VI
LOST OPPORTUNITIES
The little doctor tipped his chair back against the wall, drew up his knees, and laughed whimperingly in his freckled hands.
”I had to do some prodigious lying at that ball. I didn't dare let the De Grapion ladies know they were in company with a Grandissime.”
”I thought you said their name was Nancanou.”
”Well, certainly--De Grapion-Nancanou. You see, that is one of their charms: one is a widow, the other is her daughter, and both as young and beautiful as Hebe. Ask Honore Grandissime; he has seen the little widow; but then he don't know who she is. He will not ask me, and I will not tell him. Oh, yes; it is about eighteen years now since old De Grapion--elegant, high-stepping old fellow--married her, then only sixteen years of age, to young Nancanou, an indigo-planter on the Fausse Riviere--the old bend, you know, behind Pointe Coupee. The young couple went there to live. I have been told they had one of the prettiest places in Louisiana. He was a man of cultivated tastes, educated in Paris, spoke English, was handsome (convivial, of course), and of perfectly pure blood. But there was one thing old De Grapion overlooked: he and his son-in-law were the last of their names. In Louisiana a man needs kinsfolk. He ought to have married his daughter into a strong house. They say that Numa Grandissime (Honore's father) and he had patched up a peace between the two families that included even old Agricola, and that he could have married her to a Grandissime. However, he is supposed to have known what he was about.
”A matter of business called young Nancanou to New Orleans. He had no friends here; he was a Creole, but what part of his life had not been spent on his plantation he had pa.s.sed in Europe. He could not leave his young girl of a wife alone in that exiled sort of plantation life, so he brought her and the child (a girl) down with him as far as to her father's place, left them there, and came on to the city alone.
”Now, what does the old man do but give him a letter of introduction to old Agricole Fusilier! (His name is Agricola, but we shorten it to Agricole.) It seems that old De Grapion and Agricole had had the indiscretion to sc.r.a.pe up a mutually complimentary correspondence. And to Agricole the young man went.