“Gracious lady, His Royal Majesty wanted to do me the honor of presenting me as the preacher at the Rue des Ramparts and as the father confessor of Mistress Evans.”
“How is His Grace …” the prince began, just as Celestine turned on the stranger with a rage that caused him to pale like a corpse.
“Mother, Father! Mother! Mother!” the children screamed, shrinking back.
“Are you insane, my lady? Leave my poor head in peace—God keep you, what do you want, what are you about? So let loose of me at last—Prince, get me out of the hands of my persecutor!” Dubreuil cried—for our esteemed lady readers will already have recognized him—in confused pathos as Celestine grabbed him by the hair and threatened to throw him down.
“Aunt, leave him alone or I’ll poke you with my knife handle, you dumb old thing, you!” Hugo screamed, grabbing the weapon he had named.
“Hugo!” the count sternly corrected him, “You seem to enjoy being coarse, put the knife back!”
As Hugo avoided his father’s gaze, he encountered his mother’s eyes, which seemed to beseech him not to irritate his father. Then she pulled herself free of Gertrude and Amelie, who had held her back with their embraces, and rushed to Suzie, who been brought into an exposed position in her hat-box.
“No, I will not let go of you,” Celestine cried out, as she pressed Dubreuil’s arms so close together that his elbows touched each other. “No, no, I shall not let you—just look at me, look, look, don’t you recognize me any more—ha, ha! I have not forgotten you—those are your eyes, that is your nose, those are your unctuous lips—Dominique Dubreuil, don’t you know me any more? Look, just look how you are trembling, look into my eyes, holy man, if your memory has vanished, then I ask your God and your saints, and they will tell you the story once again—Abbé Dominique Dubreuil, don’t you know me any more?”
This was not just madness.
Among these words flitted a light blush of conscious thought.
“The lady is insane! Free me … !” the abbé gurgled with uncertain accent, since Celestine lay with her breast on his face, overwhelming him.
The prince of Württemberg and the count went to the two and attempted to pull Aunty Celestine from the preacher.
“No, I will not release you,” she cried repeatedly, wrapping her hands ever tighter around Dubreuil’s thin arms.
“I will not release you, Dominique Dubreuil, until you recognize me again—no, no, no, I will not release you!”
The wind coming in through the window played with the ribbons of the preacher’s black straw hat, which the observant Amelie had rescued from the floor and placed on the table, making the ribbons flap up and down.
The preacher’s long, thin hair stood out at his temples like the wings of a gray-black bird of death on a poisonous tree in Borneo.
“Madame, if you do not release my arms, and if you, Royal Highness, do not liberate me, I will scream, which will bring the whole neighborhood and raise a scandal!” Dubreuil said in such a determined tone that one could see that he intended to carry out his threat at once.
And he did just that.
“For God’s sake, sir—consider—Aunty, Aunty, listen to us—Gertrude, there—take my shawl and hang it over the window. Amelie, stay with me, and don’t open the door again. Sir, consider how this looks—” commanding and begging in turns, Melanie ran nervously about the room and really had no idea what to do.
Dubreuil screamed with his full might.
Suddenly Aunty Celestine let him loose and ran away from him, then toward him, then away, then back, until she finally was able to express her inner pressures with the following words: “Priest of love, how cowardly you are—powerful man of God, you are screaming like a child at the hands of a weak woman. O Dominique Dubreuil, you are smiling because you hold me to be insane—ha, ha! Dominique Dubreuil, how do you look to me? … Do I look so old that you can’t recognize me—I was as young and pretty as Little Constanze—are my cheeks no longer red, my lips so pale? You look so fatherly and pious now—Dubreuil, Dubreuil, should I fall at your feet again in the confessional? Dominique Dubreuil, you have grown so old, so ugly, and yet I still recognize you—and you didn’t recognize me any more? Priest of love, protector of innocence, have you never heard of the beautiful Fräulein Celestine von Nesebeck?”
The count, who had stationed himself with his back against the closed door, and Melanie, who stood beside him, had hoped in vain for a quick end to Aunty’s excesses. These episodes, which had already occurred so often, usually lasted only a few moments, and then Aunty Celestine would quietly sit back down on her travel bag. They now wanted to wait quietly for this moment, and they told the prince not to do anything but to let her go ahead. There would then be plenty of time to explain their situation to monsieur Dubreuil and make amends for his distress through a strong show of sympathy.
They were wrong this time. Even more, they found Aunty’s words this time to have a rare clarity and conscious intonation. At Celestine’s last words, Dubreuil visibly trembled, despite the restraint that he sought to display. His pale, sweaty face seemed to grow longer, his knees knocked and his eyes were bolted desperately on Celestine’s face.
“Let me go before you experience a yet greater scandal—your mad lady seems to want to go to extremes,” Dubreuil said, turning to the count and Melanie and moving to the door.
The count opened the door.
“Do not speak of this episode, my good abbé—it is not our fault,” the count said quietly to Dubreuil, who rushed out without hearing him.
Celestine did not hinder him.
She had set herself before the fireplace and appeared to be calm.
Melanie’s shawl, which Gertrude had hung over the window to keep passersby from getting a glimpse of this dreadful scene, fell to the ground as a result of the count’s heavy footsteps, opening up a vista for everyone to view with the greatest awe.
The setting sun cast a bright red into the mean room, illuminating the entire family. A light red spot that the oblong hat-box broke into ellipses swam over Suzie’s head, giving her the appearance of a baby Jesus.
Behind the hanging limbs of live oak lay the blood-red head of the setting sun, and the moss of the live oak swaying in the light west wind seemed as if the breeze were parting the sun’s hair.
“Mother, look how pretty Aunty is!” Gertrude called to Melanie. She, along with all the rest, obeyed this call.
The last ruby of the evening sun was leaving Celestine’s face, swaying for an instant on her forehead like a small meteorite, until the family’s eye caught her.
Celestine turned her back on the fireplace, which she had earlier been studying, and now stood like a mourning Niobe at the grave of the evening sun.
“Mother, see how strange Aunty looks—she does not seem as crazy any more,” Gertrude said once more to her mother, tugging her dress.
“Madame Countess,” the prince whispered in Melanie’s ear, “Your sister must have once been a stunningly beautiful woman!”
“That is a strange remark, Prince,” Melanie responded with shock.
“Just look, Countess!”
“Prince, pardon me—that is very strange talk.”
“But Mother, what is happening with Aunty?” Gertrude interrupted in a rather loud voice.
“Look, Countess, and you, too, Fräulein Gertrude—”
“What, Fräulein Gertrude?” Melanie interrupted the prince, “what are you talking about?”
An amazing change was indeed taking place in Celestine. Although she had earlier always been bowed and kept her head to one side, she now stood erect with head held high. She seemed to have become taller in an instant, and her hands rested calmly on her bosom.
Was it the unexpected appearance of her seducer that so transformed her in posture, dignity, and speech? Or had the light shadows of madness that had crossed her brain now and then since her release from the asylum simply slipped away all at once? Would she be able to look back
on her dreadful past with a steady gaze in her old age? Would the matron be able to weep over what the girl could not, since her brain had been oppressed by the evil demon of madness? Did the Celestine of twenty-six years of age still harbor the feelings of a girl? Perhaps the blooming heart of the virgin had slumbered thirty-two years only to awake in its full beauty and fullness one day? Would the bosom of this matron begin to heave once more, after so many years, like a pair of wilted leaves hanging on a dry stick? Would Cupid flutter about her gray hair, having been so long banned from these luxuriant locks?
Why not? Doesn’t the flower spread itself to the world once more for a few moments before its end?
Celestine was no longer insane. At her first glimpse of the priest she had looked back to her youth with dreadful clarity. The departing spirits of her long night of madness only danced here and there on the wildly coiling clouds of her thought.
The prince, Melanie, the count, Hugo, and Constanze quietly recollected the words Celestine had directed at the priest.
But only the prince interpreted these awful hieroglyphs correctly and detected the abbé’s dreadful deed. “A madwoman,” the prince thought to himself, “does not speak that way—how did Celestine know the priest, who was being presented to the family for the first time, and only the count had met him once before? Other than the count, the rest of the family knows of him only by hearsay. ‘Dubreuil, Dubreuil, should I fall at your feet again in the confessional?’—didn’t she say that? And Dubreuil was involved in some sort of mission in Germany in his youth, as he told me himself! ‘Don’t you recognize the beautiful Fräulein von Nesebeck?’ Didn’t Aunty ask him in that way? When she was still beautiful, young, sought-after—that monster of a priest violated her in the confessional, and she went mad as a result! Now it is all clear before my eyes—the devil himself shudders before the servant of God. And you intend the same with that angel of a girl, the daughter of Mistress Evans—you are preparing the same fate for Miss Dudley Evans? So that is why you are so close to her, for that very reason you became her father confessor?”
So it went on in the prince’s interior as he reviewed all of Aunty’s words, and his swift mind quickly brought order out of chaos.
He looked closely at Aunty Celestine.
Her face shone, transfigured, when she turned from the window and sought Melanie with her eyes. Melanie stood for a moment dumb with amazement and wonder. Celestine spoke not a word at first, but her eyes said with greater clarity what her lips still had to keep silent. They were no longer the beset eyes of a matron but the stars of a young, hopeful girl. Her face was pale, but this paleness had a purity and transparency without equal.
She rushed toward Melanie, who went to meet her, and they embraced. Then she did the same with each other member of the family.
They were deeply moved by Aunty’s tenderness.
Even the prince received her attentions.
For several seconds she stood before him, hesitating, pulling back then advancing again—then she grasped his hand and kissed it. With a long look she regarded the prince, who was utterly confounded by Celestine’s extraordinary beauty and majestic presence, and he returned her tender greeting with a soft press of his hand.
Hugo and Constanze hardly dared breathe—they were so taken by this elevated, solemn moment.
Celestine’s gaze now moved to Emil’s portrait over the fireplace.
“How beautiful, how beautiful!” she suddenly cried out in enthusiasm, “that is your god, Melanie! Isn’t that correct, Sister?”
“Yes, dear Sister,” she replied in a woeful tone, “he is the god of my heart, my son—but what has happened in your soul, Celestine? How your eyes hang intoxicated on that picture!”
“Aunty was in love with Emil!” Hugo said to Constanze, no longer in mockery but in sympathy. “Did she ever meet Emil in person, Constanze?”
“I don’t know, Brother—but you are as pretty. Emil always seemed more like a girl or a young woman. I don’t like it when men are too beautiful—they normally don’t have much spirit,” Constanze answered.
“You might be right,” Hugo agreed, creasing his forehead as if he wanted to appear thoughtful and at the same time give his sister proof of the correctness of her remark.
“You are vain, Hugo,” Constanze said, who had not missed her brother’s forced game.
“Vanity is not my smallest virtue,” he remarked dryly, “if I weren’t a little vain, I would already be rid of all my civilization.”
“I saw an Indian at the market whom you would not call a civilized man, and he still seemed rather vain.”
“That is not a just comparison, Constanze—you don’t understand me at all.”
Now Aunty’s conduct called for their attention once more. She hung sobbing on her half-sister’s neck and seemed almost suffocated by her tears.
“Celestine, my dear good sister, what is the matter with you now? You seemed so friendly and happy before.” Melanie asked.
“For that very reason, Sister,” Celestine responded as she sobbed. “What was I? What am I now?”
“It is a dreadful revenge of nature to break madness so that understanding can torment and torture the soul,” the prince said quietly to the count, looking in his eyes with a question.
“Now I can only marvel, Royal Highness, but perhaps the future will provide some guidance,” the count said slowly, moving somewhat closer to Celestine and Melanie, his arms crossed.
Gertrude would not move from the princes side. Now and then she looked up at him as if she wanted to ask a question.
Amelie moved anxiously between her mother and Aunty Celestine, trying to get them apart, since she believed Celestine might do her mother some harm. They did not part, so she began to weep.
When ominous events and unexpected episodes so rapidly storm past one another in this family, so visited by trouble, one wishes we could place a pen in the hand of a higher power so that it could better register the horrors on paper.
Celestine hung with the full weight of her body on her sister’s neck, which made it hard for Melanie to keep her feet. Celestine’s face had turned to the picture over the fireplace.
Celestine’s features were beautiful, as pure and pale as alabaster—and as cold.
“Merciful God! Aunty is dead!” Melanie screamed in terror, looking for her husband.
“Dead?” they all cried almost at the same time, except the prince, who went to Melanie to free her from the embrace of her departed sister.
“I was prepared for it, it couldn’t have gone any other way—this sudden transfiguration of her face—that picture—my dear Countess, there was no other way,” the prince said quietly, with an element of solemnity in the intonation of his words.
“Her recovery was her death, Prince,” Melanie responded with a shaking voice.
“Awakened fire had to kill the heart—it came too quickly.”
Hugo, who had rushed out of the room on his father’s signal to get a physician, was lucky enough to run into one a few steps from the house, and he came right back through the door accompanied by the doctor.
“Doctor, is it true that Aunty is dead? Isn’t she just asleep?” Amelie chattered and kissed the dead woman on the lips. After several vain attempts to find life, the physician finally held a mirror before her half-open mouth and said: “No breath fogs the surface—she is dead.”
The superficial verdict of the coroner read: death of stroke.
• • •
The prince of Württemberg remained with the family the entire night and helped keep watch at Aunty’s bed, which had been made into a daybed as best as could be done hastily with the available material by heaping up mattresses.
Hugo went into the city and fetched at the prince’s behest several lights and wax candles, together with various other utensils and objects needed for the present situation. By this means it was possible for the prince to realize a peculiar but proper wake in this poor apartment. It would not have been at
all difficult to move the count’s family to a decent apartment this very evening—since all the furnishings other than the picture could be abandoned—but the prince was certain that this haste would hit upon the couple’s opposition, and it would also disturb the quiet dignity of this moment with an improper, fancy exterior.
“Brother, I never expected that when we pulled the moss down from the live oaks we were preparing a deathbed. Poor Aunty, she dragged it over so quickly and happily, so that you and I could have a good bed,” Constanze said to Hugo with a sorrowful manner. She had pushed two chests together to make a bed for the night and now sat on a bundle of washing, laying her head in her brother’s arms.
“I could slap myself,” Hugo said, “when I think that I was so rude to her a few moments before her death—but you know yourself, Constanze, that I meant no harm by it.”
Gertrude had fallen asleep with her head in the lap of the prince, who sat next to the count and his spouse beside the improvised daybed. Little Amelie lay next to her on the floor, her back next to Gertrude’s little legs, breathing in a soft, sweet slumber. Her reddened eyelids showed that sleep had crept up on her while she was weeping for the dead, cold Aunty.
As the sun was reddening the dark moss on the highest branches of the live oaks, the prince left the house on Washington Avenue for a while, so that he could weave flowered wreathes for the future of his beloved friends.
Chapter 7
IN THE HAMBURG MILL
For connoisseurs of mankind and portraitists of morals, it is of no small interest to seek out the sources of names of places where crime and shame have triumphed, where painstaking maneuvering and unrelenting strictness of criminal plotting have prospered despite the Argus eyes of the police and even continue to flourish long after public opinion has condemned them.
The Hamburg Mill had once been a boardinghouse for sailors, with a Spaniard named Viala as its owner. Viala himself had been a sailor until his fifty-fourth year, but in all this time he’d never managed to advance further than second mate. On a voyage from Marseilles to New Orleans, he had fallen from the highest crow’s-nest on the mainmast during a severe storm, smashing both arms and his right shin. In those days the brig Dolores still was a credit to our wharf, and its captain, Antoine Du Ponteil, gave second mate Viala every possible assistance. He had such a generous manner that he entrusted the man, disabled for sea duty, to the care of a capable physician at his own expense, and he helped him establish a boardinghouse in the Third Municipality. Since the unfortunate man had lost both arms and his left leg, this kindness saved his life.
The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures) Page 33
