by Bill Bowers
“We shall fill that ditch,” said the men in mud-boots, and brushed close along the chained and padlocked gate of the haunted mansion. Ah, Jean-ah Poquelin, those were not Creole boys, to be stampeded with a little hard swearing.
He went to the Governor. That official scanned the odd figure with no slight interest. Jean Poquelin was of short, broad frame, with a bronzed leonine face. His brow was ample and deeply furrowed. His eye, large and black, was bold and open like that of a war-horse, and his jaws shut together with the firmness of iron. He was dressed in a suit of Attakapas cottonade, and his shirt unbuttoned and thrown back from the throat and bosom, sailor-wise, showed a herculean breast; hard and grizzled. There was no fierceness or defiance in his look, no harsh ungentleness, no symptom of his unlawful life or violent temper; but rather a peaceful and peaceable fearlessness. Across the whole face, not marked in one or another feature, but as it were laid softly upon the countenance like an almost imperceptible veil, was the imprint of some great grief. A careless eye might easily overlook it, but, once seen, there it hung—faint, but unmistakable.
The Governor bowed.
“Parlez-vous français?” asked the figure.
“I would rather talk English, if you can do so,” said the Governor.
“My name, Jean Poquelin.”
“How can I serve you, Mr. Poquelin?”
“My ’ouse is yond’; dans le marais là-bas.”
The Governor bowed.
“Dat marais billong to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“To me; Jean Poquelin; I hown ’im meself.”
“Well, sir?”
“He don’t billong to you; I get him from me father.”
“That is perfectly true, Mr. Poquelin, as far as I am aware.”
“You want to make strit pass yond’?”
“I do not know, sir; it is quite probable; but the city will indemnify you for any loss you may suffer—you will get paid, you understand.”
“Strit can’t pass dare.”
“You will have to see the municipal authorities about that, Mr. Poquelin.”
A bitter smile came upon the old man’s face:
“Pardon, Monsieur, you is not le Gouverneur?”
“Yes.”
“Mais, yes. You har le Gouverneur—yes. Veh-well. I come to you. I tell you, strit can’t pass at me ’ouse.”
“But you will have to see—”
“I come to you. You is le Gouverneur. I know not the new laws. I ham a Fr-r-rench-a-man! Fr-rench-a-man have something aller au contraire—he come at his Gouverneur. I come at you. If me not had been bought from me king like bossals in the hold time, ze king gof—France would-a-show Monsieur le Gouverneur to take care his men to make strit in right places. Mais, I know; we billong to Monsieur le Président. I want you do somesin for me, eh?”
“What is it?” asked the patient Governor.
“I want you tell Monsieur le Président, strit—can’t—pass—at—me—’ouse.”
“Have a chair, Mr. Poquelin;” but the old man did not stir. The Governor took a quill and wrote a line to a city official, introducing Mr. Poquelin, and asking for him every possible courtesy. He handed it to him, instructing him where to present it.
“Mr. Poquelin,” he said with a conciliatory smile, “tell me, is it your house that our Creole citizens tell such odd stories about?”
The old man glared sternly upon the speaker, and with immovable features said:
“You don’t see me trade some Guinea nigga’?”
“Oh, no.”
“You don’t see me make some smuggling.”
“No, sir; not at all.”
“But, I am Jean Marie Poquelin. I mine me hown bizniss. Dat all right? Adieu.”
He put his hat on and withdrew. By and by he stood, letter in hand, before the person to whom it was addressed. This person employed an interpreter.
“He says,” said the interpreter to the officer, “he come to make you the fair warning how you muz not make the street pas’ at his ’ouse.”
The officer remarked that “such impudence was refreshing;” but the experienced interpreter translated freely.
“He says: ‘Why you don’t want?’” said the interpreter.
The old slave-trader answered at some length.
“He says,” said the interpreter, again turning to the officer, “the marass is a too unhealth’ for peopl’ to live.”
“But we expect to drain his old marsh; it’s not going to be a marsh.”
“Il dit—” The interpreter explained in French.
The old man answered tersely.
“He says the canal is a private,” said the interpreter.
“Oh! that old ditch; that’s to be filled up. Tell the old man we’re going to fix him up nicely.”
Translation being duly made, the man in power was amused to see a thunder-cloud gathering on the old man’s face.
“Tell him,” he added, “by the time we finish, there’ll not be a ghost left in his shanty.”
The interpreter began to translate, but—
“J’ comprends, J’ comprends,” said the old man, with an impatient gesture, and burst forth, pouring curses upon the United States, the President, the Territory of Orleans, Congress, the Governor and all his subordinates, striding out of the apartment as he cursed, while the object of his maledictions roared with merriment and rammed the floor with his foot.
“Why, it will make his old place worth ten dollars to one,” said the official to the interpreter.
“’Tis not for de worse of de property,” said the interpreter.
“I should guess not,” said the other, whittling his chair,—“seems to me as if some of these old Creoles would liever live in a crawfish hole than to have a neighbor.”
“You know what make old Jean Poquelin make like that? I will tell you. You know”—
The interpreter was rolling a cigarette, and paused to light his tinder; then, as the smoke poured in a thick double stream from his nostrils, he said, in a solemn whisper:
“He is a witch.”
“Ho, ho, ho!” laughed the other.
“You don’t believe it? What you want to bet?” cried the interpreter, jerking himself half up and thrusting out one arm while he bared it of its coat-sleeve with the hand of the other. “What you want to bet?”
“How do you know?” asked the official.
“Dass what I goin’ to tell you. You know, one evening I was shooting some grosbec. I killed three, but I had trouble to fine them, it was becoming so dark. When I have them I start’ to come home; then I got to pas’ at Jean Poquelin’s house.”
“Ho, ho, ho!” laughed the other, throwing his leg over the arm of his chair.
“Wait,” said the interpreter. “I come along slow, not making some noises; still, still—”
“And scared,” said the smiling one.
“Mais, wait. I get all pas’ the ’ouse. ‘Ah!’ I say; ‘all right!’ Then I see two thing’ before! Hah! I get as cold and humide, and shake like a leaf. You think it was nothing? There I see, so plain as can be (though it was making nearly dark), I see Jean—Marie—Po-que-lin walkin’ right in front, and right there beside of him was something like a man—but not a man—white like paint!—I dropp’ on the grass from scared—they pass’; so sure as I live ’twas the ghos’ of Jacques Poquelin, his brother!”
“Pooh!” said the listener.
“I’ll put my han’ in the fire,” said the interpreter.
“But did you never think,” asked the other, “that that might be Jack Poquelin, as you call him, alive and well, and for some cause hid away by his brother?”
“But there har’ no cause!” said the other, and the entrance of third parties changed the subject.
Some months passed and the stree
t was opened. A canal was first dug through the marsh, the small one which passed so close to Jean Poquelin’s house was filled, and the street, or rather a sunny road, just touched a corner of the old mansion’s dooryard. The morass ran dry. Its venomous denizens slipped away through the bulrushes; the cattle roaming freely upon its hardened surface trampled the superabundant undergrowth. The bellowing frogs croaked to westward. Lilies and the flower-de-luce sprang up in the place of reeds; smilax and poison-oak gave way to the purple-plumed iron-weed and pink spiderwort; the bindweeds ran everywhere blooming as they ran, and on one of the dead cypresses a giant creeper hung its green burden of foliage and lifted its scarlet trumpets. Sparrows and red-birds flitted through the bushes, and dewberries grew ripe beneath. Over all these came a sweet, dry smell of salubrity which the place had not known since the sediments of the Mississippi first lifted it from the sea.
But its owner did not build. Over the willow-brakes, and down the vista of the open street, bright new houses, some singly, some by ranks, were prying in upon the old man’s privacy. They even settled down toward his southern side. First a wood-cutter’s hut or two, then a market gardener’s shanty, then a painted cottage, and all at once the faubourg had flanked and half surrounded him and his dried-up marsh.
Ah! then the common people began to hate him. “The old tyrant!”
“You don’t mean an old tyrant?”
“Well, then, why don’t he build when the public need demands it? What does he live in that unneighborly way for?”
“The old pirate!”
“The old kidnapper!” How easily even the most ultra Louisianians put on the imported virtues of the North when they could be brought to bear against the hermit. “There he goes, with the boys after him! Ah! ha! ha! Jean-ah Poquelin! Ah! Jean-ah! Aha! aha! Jean-ah Marie! Jean-ah Poquelin! The old villain!” How merrily the swarming Américains echo the spirit of persecution! “The old fraud,” they say—“pretends to live in a haunted house, does he? We’ll tar and feather him some day. Guess we can fix him.”
He cannot be rowed home along the old canal now; he walks. He has broken sadly of late, and the street urchins are ever at his heels. It is like the days when they cried: “Go up, thou bald-head,” and the old man now and then turns and delivers ineffectual curses.
To the Creoles—to the incoming lower class of superstitious Germans, Irish, Sicilians, and others—he became an omen and embodiment of public and private ill-fortune. Upon him all the vagaries of their superstitions gathered and grew. If a house caught fire, it was imputed to his machinations. Did a woman go off in a fit, he had bewitched her. Did a child stray off for an hour, the mother shivered with the apprehension that Jean Poquelin had offered him to strange gods. The house was the subject of every bad boy’s invention who loved to contrive ghostly lies. “As long as that house stands we shall have bad luck. Do you not see our peas and beans dying, our cabbages and lettuce going to seed and our gardens turning to dust, while every day you can see it raining in the woods? The rain will never pass old Poquelin’s house. He keeps a fetich. He has conjured the whole Faubourg St. Marie. And why, the old wretch? Simply because our playful and innocent children call after him as he passes.”
A “Building and Improvement Company,” which had not yet got its charter, “but was going to,” and which had not, indeed, any tangible capital yet, but “was going to have some,” joined the “Jean-ah Poquelin” war. The haunted property would be such a capital site for a market-house! They sent a deputation to the old mansion to ask its occupant to sell. The deputation never got beyond the chained gate and a very barren interview with the African mute. The President of the Board was then empowered (for he had studied French in Pennsylvania and was considered qualified) to call and persuade M. Poquelin to subscribe to the company’s stock; but—
“Fact is, gentlemen,” he said at the next meeting, “it would take us at least twelve months to make Mr. Pokaleen understand the rather original features of our system, and he wouldn’t subscribe when we’d done; besides, the only way to see him is to stop him on the street.”
There was a great laugh from the Board; they couldn’t help it. “Better meet a bear robbed of her whelps,” said one.
“You’re mistaken as to that,” said the President. “I did meet him, and stopped him, and found him quite polite. But I could get no satisfaction from him; the fellow wouldn’t talk in French, and when I spoke in English he hoisted his old shoulders up, and gave the same answer to every thing I said.”
“And that was—?” asked one or two, impatient of the pause.
“That it ‘don’t worse w’ile?’”
One of the Board said: “Mr. President, this market-house project, as I take it, is not altogether a selfish one; the community is to be benefited by it. We may feel that we are working in the public interest [the Board smiled knowingly], if we employ all possible means to oust this old nuisance from among us. You may know that at the time the street was cut through, this old Poquelann did all he could to prevent it. It was owing to a certain connection which I had with that affair that I heard a ghost story [smiles, followed by a sudden dignified check]—ghost story, which, of course, I am not going to relate; but I may say that my profound conviction, arising from a prolonged study of that story, is, that this old villain, John Poquelann, has his brother locked up in that old house. Now, if this is so, and we can fix it on him, I merely suggest that we can make the matter highly useful. I don’t know,” he added, beginning to sit down, “but that it is an action we owe to the community—hem!”
“How do you propose to handle the subject?” asked the President.
“I was thinking,” said the speaker, “that, as a Board of Directors, it would be unadvisable for us to authorize any action involving trespass; but if you, for instance, Mr. President, should, as it were, for mere curiosity, request some one, as, for instance, our excellent Secretary, simply as a personal favor, to look into the matter—this is merely a suggestion.”
The Secretary smiled sufficiently to be understood that, while he certainly did not consider such preposterous service a part of his duties as secretary, he might, notwithstanding, accede to the President’s request; and the Board adjourned.
Little White, as the Secretary was called, was a mild, kind-hearted little man, who, nevertheless, had no fear of any thing, unless it was the fear of being unkind.
“I tell you frankly,” he privately said to the President, “I go into this purely for reasons of my own.”
The next day, a little after nightfall, one might have descried this little man slipping along the rear fence of the Poquelin place, preparatory to vaulting over into the rank, grass-grown yard, and bearing himself altogether more after the manner of a collector of rare chickens than according to the usage of secretaries.
The picture presented to his eye was not calculated to enliven his mind. The old mansion stood out against the western sky, black and silent. One long, lurid pencil-stroke along a sky of slate was all that was left of daylight. No sign of life was apparent; no light at any window, unless it might have been on the side of the house hidden from view. No owls were on the chimneys, no dogs were in the yard.
He entered the place, and ventured up behind a small cabin which stood apart from the house. Through one of its many crannies he easily detected the African mute crouched before a flickering pine-knot, his head on his knees, fast asleep.
He concluded to enter the mansion, and, with that view, stood and scanned it. The broad rear steps of the veranda would not serve him; he might meet some one midway. He was measuring, with his eye, the proportions of one of the pillars which supported it, and estimating the practicability of climbing it, when he heard a footstep. Some one dragged a chair out toward the railing, then seemed to change his mind and began to pace the veranda, his footfalls resounding on the dry boards with singular loudness. Little White drew a step backward, got the figure between
himself and the sky, and at once recognized the short, broad-shouldered form of old Jean Poquelin.
He sat down upon a billet of wood, and, to escape the stings of a whining cloud of mosquitoes, shrouded his face and neck in his handkerchief, leaving his eyes uncovered.
He had sat there but a moment when he noticed a strange, sickening odor, faint, as if coming from a distance, but loathsome and horrid.
Whence could it come? Not from the cabin; not from the marsh, for it was as dry as powder. It was not in the air; it seemed to come from the ground.
Rising up, he noticed, for the first time, a few steps before him a narrow footpath leading toward the house. He glanced down it—ha! right there was some one coming—ghostly white!
Quick as thought, and as noiselessly, he lay down at full length against the cabin. It was bold strategy, and yet, there was no denying it, little White felt that he was frightened. “It is not a ghost,” he said to himself. “I know it cannot be a ghost;” but the perspiration burst out at every pore, and the air seemed to thicken with heat. “It is a living man,” he said in his thoughts. “I hear his footstep, and I hear old Poquelin’s footsteps, too, separately, over on the veranda. I am not discovered; the thing has passed; there is that odor again; what a smell of death! Is it coming back? Yes. It stops at the door of the cabin. Is it peering in at the sleeping mute? It moves away. It is in the path again. Now it is gone.” He shuddered. “Now, if I dare venture, the mystery is solved.” He rose cautiously, close against the cabin, and peered along the path.
The figure of a man, a presence if not a body—but whether clad in some white stuff or naked the darkness would not allow him to determine—had turned, and now, with a seeming painful gait, moved slowly from him. “Great Heaven! can it be that the dead do walk?” He withdrew again the hands which had gone to his eyes. The dreadful object passed between two pillars and under the house. He listened. There was a faint sound as of feet upon a staircase; then all was still except the measured tread of Jean Poquelin walking on the veranda, and the heavy respirations of the mute slumbering in the cabin.
