Part 7

But Zouzoune burst into tears. Laroussel was going too!

--"Give her the thing, Laroussel! she gave you a kiss, anyhow--more than she'd do for me," cried the captain.

Laroussel turned, detached the little compass from his watch chain, and gave it to her. She held up her pretty face for his farewell kiss ...

VI.

But it seemed fated that Feliu's waif should never be identified;--diligent inquiry and printed announcements alike proved fruitless. Sea and sand had either hidden or effaced all the records of the little world they had engulfed: the annihilation of whole families, the extinction of races, had, in more than one instance, rendered vain all efforts to recognize the dead. It required the subtle perception of long intimacy to name remains tumefied and discolored by corruption and exposure, mangled and gnawed by fishes, by reptiles, and by birds;--it demanded the great courage of love to look upon the eyeless faces found sweltering in the blackness of cypress-shadows, under the low palmettoes of the swamps,--where gorged buzzards started from sleep, or cottonmouths uncoiled, hissing, at the coming of the searchers. And sometimes all who had loved the lost were themselves among the missing. The full roll call of names could never be made out; extraordinary mistakes were committed. Men whom the world deemed dead and buried came back, like ghosts,--to read their own epitaphs.

... Almost at the same hour that Laroussel was questioning the child in Creole patois, another expedition, searching for bodies along the coast, discovered on the beach of a low islet famed as a haunt of pelicans, the corpse of a child. Some locks of bright hair still adhering to the skull, a string of red beads, a white muslin dress, a handkerchief broidered with the initials "A.L.B.,"--were secured as clews; and the little body was interred where it had been found.

And, several days before, Captain Hotard, of the relief-boat Estelle Brousseaux, had found, drifting in the open Gulf (latitude 26 degrees 43 minutes; longitude 88 degrees 17 minutes),--the corpse of a fair-haired woman, clinging to a table. The body was disfigured beyond recognition: even the slender bones of the hands had been stripped by the nibs of the sea-birds-except one finger, the third of the left, which seemed to have been protected by a ring of gold, as by a charm. Graven within the plain yellow circlet was a date,--"JUILLET--1851"; and the names,--"ADELE + JULIEN,"--separated by a cross. The Estelle carried coffins that day: most of them were already full; but there was one for Adele.

Who was she?--who was her Julien? ... When the Estelle and many other vessels had discharged their ghastly cargoes;--when the bereaved of the land had assembled as hastily as they might for the du y of identification;--when memories were strained almost to madness in research of names, dates, incidents--for the evocation of dead words, resurrection of vanished days, recollection of dear promises,--then, in the confusion, it was believed and declared that the little corpse found on the pelican island was the daughter of the wearer of the wedding ring: Adele La Brierre, nee Florane, wife of Dr. Julien La Brierre, of New Orleans, who was numbered among the missing.

And they brought dead Adele back,--up shadowy river windings, over linked brightnesses of lake and lakelet, through many a green glimmering bayou,--to the Creole city, and laid her to rest somewhere in the old Saint-Louis Cemetery. And upon the tablet recording her name were also graven the words--

.....................

Aussi a la memoire de son mari;

JULIEN RAYMOND LA BRIERRE, ne a la paroisse St. Landry, le 29 Mai; MDCCCXXVIII; et de leur fille, EULALIE, agee de 4 as et 5 mois,-- Qui tous perirent dans la grande tempete qui balaya L'Ile Derniere, le 10 Aout, MDCCCLVI ..... + ..... Priez pour eux!

VII.

Yet six months afterward the face of Julien La Brierre was seen again upon the streets of New Orleans. Men started at the sight of him, as at a spectre standing in the sun. And nevertheless the apparition cast a shadow. People paused, approached, half extended a hand through old habit, suddenly checked themselves and passed on,--wondering they should have forgotten, asking themselves why they had so nearly made an absurd mistake.

It was a February day,--one of those crystalline days of our snowless Southern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and outlines sharpen in the light as if viewed through the focus of a diamond glass;--and in that brightness Julien La Brierre perused his own brief epitaph, and gazed upon the sculptured name of drowned Adele. Only half a year had passed since she was laid away in the high wall of tombs,--in that strange colonial columbarium where the dead slept in rows, behind squared marbles lettered in black or bronze. Yet her resting-place,--in the highest range,--already seemed old. Under our Southern sun, the vegetation of cemeteries seems to spring into being spontaneously--to leap all suddenly into luxuriant life! Microscopic mossy growths had begun to mottle the slab that closed her in;--over its face some singular creeper was crawling, planting tiny reptile-feet into the chiselled letters of the inscription; and from the moist soil below speckled euphorbias were growing up to her,--and morning glories,--and beautiful green tangled things of which he did not know the name.

And the sight of the pretty lizards, puffing their crimson pouches in the sun, or undulating athwart epitaphs, and shifting their color when approached, from emerald to ashen-gray;--the caravans of the ants, journeying to and from tiny chinks in the masonry;--the bees gathering honey from the crimson blossoms of the crete-de-coq, whose radicles sought sustenance, perhaps from human dust, in the decay of generations:--all that rich life of graves summoned up fancies of Resurrection, Nature's resurrection-work--wondrous transformations of flesh, marvellous bans migration of souls! ... From some forgotten crevice of that tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and the vast light, a sturdy weed was growing. He knew that plant, as it quivered against the blue,--the chou-gras, as Creole children call it: its dark berries form the mockingbird's favorite food ... Might not its roots, exploring darkness, have found some unfamiliar nutriment within?--might it not be that something of the dead heart had risen to purple and emerald life--in the sap of translucent leaves, in the wine of the savage berries,--to blend with the blood of the Wizard Singer,--to lend a strange sweetness to the melody of his wooing? ...

... Seldom, indeed, does it happen that a man in the prime of youth, in the possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and the elegances of life, discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to the human aggregate,--how insignificant his part as one living atom of the social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with never a pause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more, Julien had learned in seven merciless days--seven successive and terrible shocks of experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his place therein was not void--society had simply forgotten him. So long as he had moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their petty altruistic roles,--had discharged their small human obligations,--had kept turned toward him the least selfish side of their natures,--had made with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors; and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for his loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in the unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to demand a repetition ... Impossible to deceive himself as to the feeling his unanticipated return had aroused:--feigned pity where he had looked for sympathetic welcome; dismay where he had expected surprised delight; and, oftener, airs of resignation, or disappointment ill disguised,--always insincerity, politely masked or coldly bare. He had come back to find strangers in his home, relatives at law concerning his estate, and himself regarded as an intruder among the living,--an unlucky guest, a revenant ... How hollow and selfish a world it seemed! And yet there was love in it; he had been loved in it, unselfishly, passionately, with the love of father and of mother, of wife and child ... All buried!--all lost forever! ... Oh! would to God the story of that stone were not a lie!--would to kind God he also were dead! ...

Evening shadowed: the violet deepened and prickled itself with stars;--the sun passed below the west, leaving in his wake a momentary splendor of vermilion ... our Southern day is not prolonged by gloaming. And Julien's thoughts darkened with the darkening, and as swiftly. For while there was yet light to see, he read another name that he used to know--the name of RAMIREZ ... Nacio en Cienfuegos, isla de Cuba ... Wherefore born?--for what eternal purpose, Ramirez,--in the City of a Hundred Fires? He had blown out his brains before the sepulchre of his young wife ... It was a detached double vault, shaped like a huge chest, and much dilapidated already:--under the continuous burrowing of the crawfish it had sunk greatly on one side, tilting as if about to fall. Out from its zigzag fissurings of brick and plaster, a sinister voice seemed to come:--"Go thou and do likewise! ... Earth groans with her burthen even now,--the burthen of Man: she holds no place for thee!"

VIII.

... That voice pursued him into the darkness of his chilly room,--haunted him in the silence of his lodging. And then began within the man that ghostly struggle between courage and despair, between patient reason and mad revolt, between weakness and force, between darkness and light, which all sensitive and generous natures must wage in their own souls at least once--perhaps many times--in their lives. Memory, in such moments, plays like an electric storm;--all involuntarily he found himself reviewing his life.

Incidents long forgotten came back with singular vividness: he saw the Past as he had not seen it while it was the Present;--remembrances of home, recollections of infancy, recurred to him with terrible intensity,--the artless pleasures and the trifling griefs, the little hurts and the tender pettings, the hopes and the anxieties of those who loved him, the smiles and tears of slaves ... And his first Creole pony, a present from his father the day after he had proved himself able to recite his prayers correctly in French, without one mispronunciation--without saying crasse for grace,--and yellow Michel, who taught him to swim and to fish and to paddle a pirogue;--and the bayou, with its wonder-world of turtles and birds and creeping things;--and his German tutor, who could not pronounce the j;--and the songs of the cane-fields,--strangely pleasing, full of quaverings and long plaintive notes, like the call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' pays blanc! ... Afterward Camaniere had leased the place;--everything must have been changed; even the songs could not be the same. Tou', tou' pays blare!--Danie qui commande ...

And then Paris; and the university, with its wild under-life,--some debts, some follies; and the frequent fond letters from home to which he might have replied so much oftener;--Paris, where talent is mediocrity; Paris, with its thunders and its splendors and its seething of passion;--Paris, supreme focus of human endeavor, with its madnesses of art, its frenzied striving to express the Inexpressible, its spasmodic strainings to clutch the Unattainable, its soarings of soul-fire to the heaven of the Impossible ...

What a rejoicing there was at his return!--how radiant and level the long Road of the Future seemed to open before him!--everywhere friends, prospects, felicitations. Then his first serious love;--and the night of the ball at St. Martinsville,--the vision of light! Gracile as a palm, and robed at once so simply, so exquisitely in white, she had seemed to him the supreme realization of all possible dreams of beauty ... And his passionate jealousy; and the slap from Laroussel; and the humiliating two-minute duel with rapiers in which he learned that he had found his master. The scar was deep. Why had not Laroussel killed him then? ... Not evil-hearted, Laroussel,--they used to salute each other afterward when they met; and Laroussel's smile was kindly. Why had he refrained from returning it? Where was Laroussel now?

For the death of his generous father, who had sacrificed so much to reform him; for the death, only a short while after, of his all-forgiving mother, he had found one sweet woman to console him with her tender words, her loving lips, her delicious caress. She had given him Zouzoune, the darling link between their lives,--Zouzoune, who waited each evening with black Eglantine at the gate to watch for his coming, and to cry through all the house like a bird, "Papa, lape vini!--papa Zulien ape vini!" ... And once that she had made him very angry by upsetting the ink over a mass of business papers, and he had slapped her (could he ever forgive himself?)--she had cried, through her sobs of astonishment and pain:--"To laimin moin?--to batte moin!" (Thou lovest me?--thou beatest me!) Next month she would have been five years old. To laimin moin?--to batte moin! ...

A furious paroxysm of grief convulsed him, suffocated him; it seemed to him that something within must burst, must break. He flung himself down upon his bed, biting the coverings in order to stifle his outcry, to smother the sounds of his despair. What crime had he ever done, oh God! that he should be made to suffer thus?--was it for this he had been permitted to live? had been rescued from the sea and carried round all the world unscathed? Why should he live to remember, to suffer, to agonize? Was not Ramirez wiser?

How long the contest within him lasted, he never knew; but ere it was done, he had become, in more ways than one, a changed man. For the first,--though not indeed for the last time,--something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and of human suffering had been revealed to him,--something of that larger knowledge without which the sense of duty can never be fully acquired, nor the understanding of unselfish goodness, nor the spirit of tenderness. The suicide is not a coward; he is an egotist.

A ray of sunlight touched his wet pillow,--awoke him. He rushed to the window, flung the latticed shutters apart, and looked out.

Something beautiful and ghostly filled all the vistas,--frost-haze; and in some queer way the mist had momentarily caught and held the very color of the sky. An azure fog! Through it the quaint and checkered street--as yet but half illumined by the sun,--took tones of impossible color; the view paled away through faint bluish tints into transparent purples;--all the shadows were indigo. How sweet the morning!--how well life seemed worth living! Because the sun had shown his face through a fairy veil of frost! ...