Even before their overheated spirits could recover from their amazement, Emil and Lucy had vanished from the ballroom.
2. Another Home, and the Note
On the Rue d’Amour, in the Third District, next to weathered hovels of boards, stands a pretty, friendly little house in the middle of a garden filled with oleanders, magnolias, and lilacs. The little two-story house is pale yellow paint with bright green shutters. Out of the middle of the roof, covered with shingles, rises a belvedere with two little benches, from which one can watch the glimmer of the Southern Cross on a clear night in undisturbed peace.
Even at this late hour, a young man sits in one of the lower rooms in front of the fireplace, engaged in reading a note again and again.
His handsome features were sharply etched by the light of an intense coal fire, giving him and his immediate surroundings the appearance of a painting by Rembrandt.
Two wax candles that stood on either side of an inkstand on a round table with a white marble top had flickered out, and here and there on the wicks little sparks still glimmered on and off.
A high, unstable light flickered on the hearth as the fire rose and fell, flames flexing and licking the inner layer of coal.
The parts of the room beyond the periphery of the fire were wrapped in a magical darkness.
The young man is not alone.
Under the fine mosquito netting of a double bed, a young woman is kneeling as she drives the mosquitos out of the bedding with a peacock feather, carefully closing the curtains when she believes she has expelled them all.
True love has made her, a woman who had been supple and quick as a tiger and quick as a panther in the canebrake of Louisiana or Arkansas, as tame as a llama, cheerfully and patiently bearing her master’s burden.
The young man, meanwhile, was enchanted by the young woman’s fire and would happily let himself be ripped by the claws of this female panther.
It was Emil’s first love.
They were passing their first night as bride and bridegroom.
The young man mused, shuddering over his happy possession. This was the third night he had passed with her.
The young woman was still kneeling beneath the curtains, looking at the spot by the fireplace with an intoxicated gaze.
The young man put the note he had been repeatedly reading on the mantel, supporting his handsome head in his flat hand.
The young woman watched his every move.
“I hope that my answer to these lines will separate me forever from my wife, and that it will cause Jenny not to concern herself with me in the future,” the young man murmured to himself.
“Now I truly believe,” he continued, “that I never felt any love for Jenny, and, beyond that, this relationship hinders me in carrying out the duties the old man has imposed on me; for Jenny would never tolerate what my Lucy gives me. So it would lead to ever more stupid disputes and petty quarrels, which would simply alienate me.
“I do not marvel that she has been able to find out where I live, since little Tiberius ran all over the city—and this note—hm! hm! Forgiven, everything forgotten—return to my hearth and home, hm! hm!—those are sheer stupidities which will no longer trap me. Sentimental nonsense—well, if he tells them about Lucy’s presence, despite his promise not to—any answer is unnecessary, and Frida—she will not try to talk her into contacting me again.
“Since Tiberius, as I recall, saw Lucy weeping—oh, I hope that Tiberius will describe everything down to the last detail—I should not have forbidden him to—and how much Lucy has changed now that she loves me, no, more than that, she is madly in lo …” he was about to say “in love with me”—“No, that is a commonplace word, used, overused and used up—and who have I to thank! Who other than the mysterious stranger …”
Suddenly Emil listened.
Lucy was striking her tongue against her teeth, making the sound peculiar to her race when love was tormenting her.
Emil turned his face away from the coal fire, in which he had been engrossed, and focused his gaze on the magical darkness of the bed curtains.
“Emil my love,” Lucy began, laying her right hand on her heart and turning the index finger of her left hand inward, “look at the movement of the pointer on the sundial of your love, how quickly it moves forward and begs that you do not allow the dark shadows of night to vanish in vain.”
Emil shuddered sensuously at these words. It was the third time Lucy had spoken to him in that way; there was something supernatural about that marvelous conjuration.
“Emil, my love, look not so deeply into the dark glow, and let me clear the clouds away from your forehead … Don’t you hear the raging music in my heart? … Come, lay your lovely head on my heart and listen how the love god plays the zaranda* there … Do you hear it? Now they are clapping their hands—the zaranda is still, and love has once again celebrated a new triumph … and you hesitate, my beloved?”
What Emil means when he sighs “Let me stand here a moment more, I am chilled,” is a mystery that only love is capable of resolving.
“Emil, my love, how can you stare at the coals when you are cold? Don’t you know that your Lucy’s heart will warm you more? When the sun breaks through the lilacs and cypresses again, these coals will be extinguished, but not the glow of my heart…”
Emil responded, just as mysteriously, “It is still too early for me to lie next to your heart, my Lucy, sing me those songs you heard as a child on the plantation—sing me a Negro song!”
“Give me the melody,” Lucy sighed.
Emil approached Lucy, wrapping his arm around her …
Outside the Southern Cross quietly glittered in the deep blue heaven.
3. A Key to Remembrance
Emil and Lucy had already lived several days in their lovely little house without receiving a visit from the old man. They had not forgotten him in their silent happiness—they longed for him with every passing hour.
Then, as Lucy was watering her newly planted orange tree, a letter fell at her feet. She turned around, but she saw no one. Without opening the seal or even reading the address, she rushed into the house and gave it to Emil, who was sitting, musing over a book lying open before him on a stand. Emil opened the letter. The hand was new to him, but he swiftly discovered the writer from its contents.
The letter said:
Lucy’s two old Negroes received their letters of emancipation yesterday, and they moved at once to her house in Orleans Street, which is now theirs. No one should now be able to say that Lucy Wilson owns slaves or that they will take their chains to the grave. They should live the few years that they still have free and without concern for their own support, not tossed away like used-up goods, as people do with mules that have become unfit for work.
Lucy and Emil will leave their little house on this day and move to another home, where they will lose for a while all memories of their earlier lives and the distressing relationships that went with them. For the high purpose for which they are being prepared makes such a measure unavoidable.
Later, after they have survived this interval, their memory of the past will no longer stand in the way. A healing gift of nature will take care of that.
The sense of the last words appeared to be an impenetrable riddle to Lucy and Emil. The notion that they were to leave the little house, which they had so come to love, disturbed them. But they complied with the old man’s desires.
Two days later, in the darkness of night, the old man appeared to them in person and led them, after they had taken a farewell drink he had prepared for them, to the lofty apartment in the Atchafalaya Bank, where we met them so unexpectedly in the ninth chapter.
As Emil was rolling the manuscript up, a strip of parchment fell out, which told them the precise location of the treasure.
As the old man had commanded them, they left the Atchafalaya Bank with the treasure that very night, in order to find a residence of their own choice.
Book II
Chapter 1
JENNY AND FRIDA
Among the thousands the Old World sends us every year, who soon learn the vanity of their longed-for desires and golden dreams, those most to be pitied are those who have ennobled their hearts and spirits with fine education and esthetic training, who have given a fine touch to even the most routine phases of their lives.
It is not proper for a man to wring his hands in despair and summon up his household gods, even if all of his hopes have been shattered on the stern rocks of pitiless egoism. He is, after all, in a land where the free development of his material and intellectual abilities are given the widest play, and even if he is poor and abandoned today, a lucky toss tomorrow could put him among persons who value his company and find him irreplaceable.
It is not so with a woman.
If a woman in a foreign land finds no replacement for the goodness and beauty she left behind, or if repellent conditions and the ordinary problems of prosaic life pull her out of her position of being adored and honored, a woman might easily let her tears flow, and look back on her home hearth with doubled intensity and longing. If the same woman commits an offense that sacrifices the paradise of her heart to secure her existence or that makes the decent conclusion of her life dependent on intelligent calculation, then it might be easier to cut the heartstrings that bind her to the fairy-tale dream of earlier days.
There is nothing more elevated and majestic than a woman’s heart bleeding to death on foreign soil from unsatisfied longing. There is, on the other hand, nothing so contemptible and criminal as the heart of a woman who thinks of her homeland with bitter mockery and takes pride in her success at denying it.
Our stars in a blue field can encourage and even enthuse a man, for they remind him of the greatness of the nation called to spread its blessings to the entire globe. But a woman? The woman sees in the stars of our flag only the stars that once shone in the cloudless heavens of her homeland and enchanted her heart with endless longing. What does she care for the greatness of a nation? It is the greatness and richness of a heart that fills up, encourages, and steels life.
Jenny and her sister Frida are the passionflowers of an old noble family, once very rich and propertied. Their father was one of the first officials of the crown in a South German court, as well as a member of the assembly of estates.
The high nobility in the residence was then divided into two parties who constantly feuded over court offices, crown positions, and other important charges. One, the Protestant party, was the weaker, counting only a few favored by the ruling prince; the other, the Catholic, or court party, so called because it contained the former ministers of the electoral principality and hence, on the whole, was more propertied and richer than the Protestant, had precedent in all matters at court, and their members held virtually all important civil and military offices.1
The father of the two sisters was Protestant and thus a target for the intrigues and cabals of the Catholic party.
It was only through the efforts of the Duchess of Braganza, who then resided at court, together with the Duke of L*, that the intrigues of this party were stymied so that Jenny and Frida’s father was able to keep his post for a few years. He owed this to his wife, who was an Italian from the famous house of the Barnardi Taron, related to Doña Maria da Gloria, if rather distantly. Enthusiastic for the principles and faith of her church, she had won the Duchess of Braganza, who held to her own church so intensely, as a close friend, and this explains her efforts to help him keep his status.
There were no important moments in the childhood years of the two sisters, except for their conversion to Catholicism at the age of six. This happened at the express wish of the ruling prince, who was interested in the two angelic children beyond the limits of his usual responsibility. The most that these children won by this act was that their hearts were brought closer to that of their mother.
Until the age of eleven they were under the control of a splendid governess, whose goodness of heart and pure goodwill had a positive influence on both the sisters.
After the sudden death of their guardian, they were brought to the noble residential school of the court town, where their hearts and spirits were developed and ennobled in the finest manner. Heaped with prizes, they left the school at sixteen and were introduced to the wider world.
Surrounded and treasured by cavaliers young and old, the two girls were queens of the balls whenever they were being staged. When Jenny and Frida appeared, a swarm of devotees gathered about them, warming themselves and basking in the glow of their youth. Yet no one was ever able to draw one of the two sisters to himself.
Their talkative amiability and unbounded naiveté never crossed the limits of being charming, enchanting, and exciting; but they also drove their sentimental devotees crazy.
High-level gossip designated first this man, then that, as the favored of the two graces; indeed, opinions were occasionally voiced which, had they gone unchecked, would have been dangerous to their continued liberty.
So, one fine day, people were surprised with the astonishing news that there were two more canonesses in the court, bearing the cross of the Order of St. Anna.2
With this unexpected news, all suitors and courtiers might as well have been struck by lightning, as they ran from one antechamber and boudoir to another spreading this dreadful news with the swiftness of the wind, giving free rein to the gushings of their hearts.
But when it became known, not long after, that the father of these new canonesses of the Order of St. Anna had fallen into disfavor with the old prince and would not receive any more subsidies for his finances, the disturbed moods were calmed and suitors sought their blossoms elsewhere.
Yet when Venus turns her eyes to the floor, Cupid takes the sharpest arrows out of his quiver and sends them truly and accurately, preferably into an immaculate lap.
Where Cupid is on the prowl, heaven and hell can do what they like—he will upend them both with the quiet whir of his little wings. He can build his nest as comfortably under the naked timbers of a peasant’s hut as beneath the gilded vaults of a throne room. He ripens his rascality just as well under the bosom-kerchief of a seamstress as in the folds of a queen’s purple gown. He flies with the same cheerfulness into the lap of a song-girl as into that of a Priestess of Vesta.
It was one of the most splendid galas the court had ever seen. In the court chapel, the high mass proper to such occasions was being celebrated. The archbishop himself in full regalia, buried in a gold-embroidered baldachin beset with diamonds, presided at the altar. His ministrants were two suffragan bishops, for the court assembled here, abounding with high nobles and the most elevated officers, would not have tolerated the lower clergy functioning before them.
Then—at the very instant the high priest of the sole salvific Church was raising the holy of holies to show it to the assembled, two sets of eyes, which had never before seen each other, met and blazed with devouring flames. One of the court pages, standing on the lowest steps of the altar with a wax candle in his hands, looked into the deep blue eyes of a young lady who was then a mere two steps away. Instead of rising to contemplate the holy of holies, her eyes had encountered the heavenly blue eyes of the young blond noble.
The young woman wore the black satin habit of a canoness. On the broad light-blue silk ribbon across her breasts, the Cross of the Order of St. Anna flickered in the purest enamel.
• • •
And so love entered Jenny’s immaculate heart, to take her thousands of miles from her altars, to find a faithless spouse in Emil, the blond, passionate page.
Jenny stripped herself that day of her habit, as it was too tight for a throbbing, quivering heart.
For her father, it was the last day he would stand at his prince’s side.
The bestowal of the Order of St. Anna on his two daughters, which had been tied to a considerable annual pension, had been his total compensation for the offices he had lost.
His property was insignifican
t, and he was barely able to cover the needs of a life at court.
One can then well imagine how distressing it was to him when a determined Jenny came to her father to tell him that she had ceased being a canoness, since the young Count Emil * was now the betrothed of her heart.
The old noble was at first distressed because Emil was without property and could only hope for rapid advancement in state service, and even that depended on him giving up his page’s post and completing his academic studies. Still, he made his peace with his daughter’s decision, for he knew her character only too well and perceived that nothing could be accomplished by force, since it would only alienate his child’s heart.
So he gave in to the inevitable, and when Jenny informed him a year later of her wish to accompany her betrothed, Emil’s brother, and Frida to settle in America, this double blow was particularly hard, but he gave his blessing. The considerable sum provided for them to buy property in the southern states was made even larger through her mother’s unexpected contribution, so nothing more stood in the way of their journey across the wide ocean.
In most recent times, an uncanny voice sounds from our own shores toward the Old World, heard by its most wayward children. These listeners are often repelled and made sick by Columbia, and they soon long for their old household gods. But others regain their strength on the transatlantic soil and grow up like giants, in tireless striving. To them, the New World is the revenge of a repressed people; the New World takes them up with joy, happily showing them the paths they must take to forget their earlier humiliations.
The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures) Page 15
