第74章

THE RENAISSANCE AT CHARLEROI Grandemont Charles was a little Creole gentleman, aged thirty-four, with a bald spot on the top of his head and the manners of a prince.

By day he was a clerk in a cotton broker's office in one of those cold, rancid mountains of oozy brick, down near the levee in New Orleans.By night, in his three-story-high /chambre garnier/ in the old French Quarter he was again the last male descendant of the Charles family, that noble house that had lorded it in France, and had pushed its way smiling, rapiered, and courtly into Louisiana's early and brilliant days.Of late years the Charleses had subsided into the more republican but scarcely less royally carried magnificence and ease of plantation life along the Mississippi.Perhaps Grandemont was even Marquis de Brasse.There was that title in the family.But a Marquis on seventy-five dollars per month! /Vraiment/! Still, it has been done on less.

Grandemont had saved out of his salary the sum of six hundred dollars.

Enough, you would say, for any man to marry on.So, after a silence of two years on that subject, he reopened that most hazardous question to Mlle.Adele Fauquier, riding down to Meade d'Or, her father's plantation.Her answer was the same that it had been any time during the last ten years: "First find my brother, Monsieur Charles."

This time he had stood before her, perhaps discouraged by a love so long and hopeless, being dependent upon a contingency so unreasonable, and demanded to be told in simple words whether she loved him or no.

Adele looked at him steadily out of her gray eyes that betrayed no secrets and answered, a little more softly:

"Grandemont, you have no right to ask that question unless you can do what I ask of you.Either bring back brother Victor to us or the proof that he died."

Somehow, though five times thus rejected, his heart was not so heavy when he left.She had not denied that she loved.Upon what shallow waters can the bark of passion remain afloat! Or, shall we play the doctrinaire, and hint that at thirty-four the tides of life are calmer and cognizant of many sources instead of but one--as at four-and-

twenty?

Victor Fauquier would never be found.In those early days of his disappearance there was money to the Charles name, and Grandemont had spent the dollars as if they were picayunes in trying to find the lost youth.Even then he had had small hope of success, for the Mississippi gives up a victim from its oily tangles only at the whim of its malign will.

A thousand times had Grandemont conned in his mind the scene of Victor's disappearance.And, at each time that Adele had set her stubborn but pitiful alternative against his suit, still clearer it repeated itself in his brain.

The boy had been the family favourite; daring, winning, reckless.His unwise fancy had been captured by a girl on the plantation--the daughter of an overseer.Victor's family was in ignorance of the intrigue, as far as it had gone.To save them the inevitable pain that his course promised, Grandemont strove to prevent it.Omnipotent money smoothed the way.The overseer and his daughter left, between a sunset and dawn, for an undesignated bourne.Grandemont was confident that this stroke would bring the boy to reason.He rode over to Meade d'Or to talk with him.The two strolled out of the house and grounds, crossed the road, and, mounting the levee, walked its broad path while they conversed.A thunder-cloud was hanging, imminent, above, but, as yet, no rain fell.At Grandemont's disclosure of his interference in the clandestine romance, Victor attacked him, in a wild and sudden fury.Grandemont, though of slight frame, possessed muscles of iron.

He caught the wrists amid a shower of blows descending upon him, bent the lad backward and stretched him upon the levee path.In a little while the gust of passion was spent, and he was allowed to rise.Calm now, but a powder mine where he had been but a whiff of the tantrums, Victor extended his hand toward the dwelling house of Meade d'Or.

"You and they," he cried, "have conspired to destroy my happiness.

None of you shall ever look upon my face again."

Turning, he ran swiftly down the levee, disappearing in the darkness.

Grandemont followed as well as he could, calling to him, but in vain.

For longer than an hour he pursued the search.Descending the side of the levee, he penetrated the rank density of weeds and willows that undergrew the trees until the river's edge, shouting Victor's name.

There was never an answer, though once he thought he heard a bubbling scream from the dun waters sliding past.Then the storm broke, and he returned to the house drenched and dejected.

There he explained the boy's absence sufficiently, he thought, not speaking of the tangle that had led to it, for he hoped that Victor would return as soon as his anger had cooled.Afterward, when the threat was made good and they saw his face no more, he found it difficult to alter his explanations of that night, and there clung a certain mystery to the boy's reasons for vanishing as well as to the manner of it.

It was on that night that Grandemont first perceived a new and singular expression in Adele's eyes whenever she looked at him.And through the years following that expression was always there.He could not read it, for it was born of a thought she would never otherwise reveal.