CONTENTS.

[7]

HARRINGTON.

PROLOGUE.

I.

As hot a day as ever blazed on the lowlands of Louisiana, blazed once in mid-April on the plantation of Mr. Torwood Lafitte, parish of Avoyelles, in the Red River region. Perhaps it was because the heat was so unseasonable that it seemed as if never, not even in midsummer, had there been so hot a day. One might have been pardoned for imagining that heat not of this world. Mr. William Tassle, overseer to Lafitte, was a profane man, but he might have been considered as only a profane poet aiming at the vivid expression of a mystical dark truth, when, speaking of the day, he said it was as hot as Hell.

It was the Sabbath, but an active fancy, brooding over the general condition of man and nature on Mr. Lafitte’s plantation, might have thought it rather the Devil’s Sabbath than the Sabbath of the Lord. Through the vaporous atmosphere, simmering with the heat, swarming with insect life, and reeking with the dense, sickly sweetness of tropic plants and flowers, the fierce sun poured a flood of stagnant, yellow light, which lay in a broad and brassy glare over the low landscape. Veiled by the cruel radiance, rose afar in the west and north the Pine Woods of Avoyelles, and in the southern distance the solemn masses of gloom formed by the cotton-woods, live-oaks[8] and cypresses of the Great Pacondrie Swamp. The eye wandering backward from the depths of the morass, saw the smouldering fire of the atmosphere envelop the enormous trees, draped everywhere with long streamers of black moss, and kindle the broad palmetto bottoms, and the multi-colored luxuriance of tropical vegetation, which sprang into ranker life beneath the vivid and sullen ray. The sluggish tide of the

bayou basked with snaky gleams in the quivering lustre; the red marl of the plantation where mules and negroes were toiling painfully under the oaths and blows of the drivers and overseer, darkly glowed in it; the bright, rank green of the lawn before the mansion was aflare with it; and the mansion itself, with its rose and jasmin vines drooping around the posts of the veranda, looked scorched to a deeper brown in the hot, thick, yellow, intolerable glare.

Shadows that day were the demons of the landscape. Shadows of intense and peculiar blackness, so compact that they seemed to have a substantial being of their own, lurked in the yellow light around and beneath every object. A dark fancy might have dreamed them a host of devils, disguised as shadows, and mustered to prevent the escape of a soul from Hell. Black with a strange blackness, shaped to an ugly goblin resemblance of the thing they accompanied, they were scattered like a host of demon sentries all over the scene, and had watch and ward of everything. The gaunt, stilted bittern standing motionless near the water, had his black goblin duplicate beneath him on the glistering clay. The mud-hued, warty-hided, abominable alligator, as he raised himself on his short legs, had his black, misshapen, shadow-caricature to lumber up with him on the trodden mire, and it went with him as he took his lumpish plunge into the foul bayou. Every plant or shrub had its scraggy imp of shadow sprawling beneath it, and darting and dodging as if to catch it whenever it moved. Every tree—cypress,

live-oak, sycamore, cotton-wood, or gum, all solemnly draped with black moss—had its scrawny phantom to toss and flicker fantastically with the tangled motion of a hundred darting arms, if the branches or their streamers swayed in the furnace-breath of the light wind. Every fallen trunk, or log,[9] or stump, or standing post had its immovable, black sentinel shape of shadow projected beyond it, or crouching by its side. Along the running fences on the plantation ran black, spectral bars on the red marl. In the fields, among the new-sprung corn, sown with the pain and sweat of slaves, a demon-crop of shadow mocked with its ugly color and fantastic shape the green beauty of the pennoned grain. The reeking mules, panting and straining, with drooping heads, as they dragged the groaning ploughs through the soil of the cotton fields, or pulled the clanking harrows over the furrowed rows, had their monstrous jags of sooty shadow, like the malformed beasts of a devil’s dream, jerking along with shapeless instruments beside them. The black drudges, men and women, plodding

and tottering in the sweltering heat, behind the ploughs, beside the harrows, or dropping seed into the drills, had hunched and ugly goblin dwarfs of shadow, vigilantly dogging their footsteps, and bobbing and dodging with their more active movements. The burly overseer on horseback had his horsed demon of lubber shadow, which aped his every gesture and movement, ambling fantastically with him hither and thither among the rows, and grotesquely motioning into squirms of phantom glee the shadows of the writhing slaves on whom his frequent whip-lash fell. Up around the planter’s mansion, shadows as fantastical, as black and demoniacal as these, wavered or lay in the fierce, yellow glow. And among them all there was none uglier or more seemingly sentient than one within the room opening on the veranda—a black, hellion shape which floated softly as in a pool of oil, on an oblong square of sluggish sunshine shimmering on the floor, just behind the chair of Mr. Lafitte.

Angry words had been uttered in that room within the last few minutes—angry at least on the part of Madame Lafitte, who sat away from the sunlight, opposite her husband, with a table laid with fruit and wine between them. She was of the superbest type of southern beauty—and there is no beauty more exquisite; but now her lovely olive face was dusky white with fury and agony—its pallor heightened by contrast with her intense black hair, which she wore in heavy tresses drooping[10] almost to the broad gold ornaments in her ears. Silent at present, she sat with her white arms tightly clasped below her bosom, which convulsively rose and fell beneath its muslin folds, and with dilated nostrils, and pale lips curved with hate and grief, kept her dark eyes, lustrous with passion, fixed on the evil visage of her husband.

“You are well named,” she broke forth again, her voice, a rich contralto, trembling with vehemence; “but you are worse than your pirate namesake. Worse than the worst of that Baratarian crew. Lafitte! Lafitte, indeed! You are worse than he. Worse than Murrell. Worse than anybody. Devil that you are!”

She paused again, speechless with fury. The tornado which many thought the brassy flare upon the landscape portended, had its proper fulfillment in the raging whirl of passions within her. Mr. Lafitte sat at ease, slowly tilting his chair to and fro, the jewelled fingers of his brown left hand clasped around the stem of a crystal goblet on the table, his right hand carelessly thrust into a side pocket of his white coat, and regarded her with a sardonic smile on his dark visage, while slipping to and fro in the sluggish pool of light upon the floor, his shadow, like a black familiar, moved with an oily motion behind him.

“Anything more, my angel?” he asked in a soft, smooth, courteous voice, habitual with him: “any more epithets? Pray continue. Go on, light of my life, go on. Indulge your own Lafitte—your pirate lover. He loves to hear you.”

Maddened by his calm mockery, she did not reply, but kept her blazing eyes fixed upon his face. A weaker man than Mr. Lafitte might have shrunk from that gaze. But its burning fire was wasted on his eyes as flame upon asbestos. Strange eyes had Mr. Lafitte—true tokens of the nature which else his other features might have betrayed less surely. His form was muscular and manly, and his face, though dark and sinister, might have been justly called handsome, if only for the richness of its brunette complexion. Dark, wavy auburn hair, which he wore long, and a thick moustache of the same color, drooping over the mouth, conferred a certain[11] lordly grace upon the countenance. The nose, not finely cut, was bold, aquiline, and deeply curved in the nostrils, and the line of the jaw and chin was vigorous and masterful. In the full visage, suffused with the dense and sultry glow of a highly vascular organization, tropic passions basked in strong repose. But the motor passion of all was evident in the eyes. Large eyes which at a yard’s distance might have seemed grey, but

nearer were tawny and flecked with minute blood-specks. Steadfast, watchful, glossy, unwinking eyes—without depth, without sympathy—obdurate, rapacious and cruel—they confirmed the expression of the receding brow above them, which, broad and full, with a marked depression down its centre, was thus divided into two lobes, and bore resemblance to the forehead of the tiger. A physiognomist, looking at that face, would have declared Mr. Lafitte a man organized for ferocity as the beast he resembled is organized. A believer in the doctrine of transmigration might have held that the spirit of a tiger dwelt in his frame, and looked out of those tawny, blood-specked orbs.

It looked out of them now as with a feline playfulness he spoke his smooth taunts, meanwhile swaying slowly to and fro in his chair, as though balancing for a spring.

“Go on, my beautiful one,” he continued. “Favor me with more of those choice similitudes. Choice? And yet—as a matter of taste, my angel, purely as a matter of taste—that phrase—pirate, though bold and graphic, I admit, might be artistically improved. Corsair, now. What do you think of corsair? Is not corsair better, more poetical, more Byronesque? Yes,” he went on reflectively, as though the proposed change were a matter of vital seriousness, “yes, corsair is a finer word. Soul of my soul, let it be corsair. Suffer Lafitte to be your Conrad; you shall be his Zuleika. Have I ‘one virtue,’ my Zuleika? You will readily concede me the ‘thousand crimes,’ I know, but have I the ‘one virtue?’”

“Why,” she wailed passionately, taking no heed of his badinage; “why am I treated thus! Why am I kept here on this hateful plantation, in this remote parish, without life,[12] without society, without pleasure of any kind. Nothing but this routine of dull farm life. No faces but your servants’ and your overseer’s around me. No company but these planters, these planters’ wives, these planters’ daughters, these people that ride over here sometimes, that I fatigue myself with visiting, that I care nothing about, anyway. Bad enough to come here once a year for the hot months—but three years, winter and summer, have I spent here. Three, Lafitte. Not once have I been in New Orleans for three years. Not once near the house where seven years of marriage with you were endurable with friends, with society, with life, with pleasures, with things I cared for, and which diverted me. Cut off from them all. You go when you please. Weeks, months, you are away, and leave me here sick, mad, frantic with ennui. Here, up the river, alone, what have I here to enjoy?”

“Here, my Josephine,” he replied, in an unruffled voice; “here, do you ask? What have you here? Here you have books, novels, without end, music in reams, your guitar, your piano, this elegant simplicity, this charming country prospect, your own sweet thoughts, the pleasures of imagination, the pleasures of memory, the pleasures—yes, even the pleasures of hope. And then, too,” sinking his voice to a softer tone, while his smile became a shade more sardonic and his eyes more cruel, “then, too, you have me.”

“You,” she raved, her pallid face convulsed with the refluent fury, and her eyes flashing. “You! Yes, I have you. Whom I hate, whom I loathe, whom I abhor! Yes, I have you; you who torture me.”

“I who torture you?” interrupted Mr. Lafitte blandly. “And yet, my angel, they say we are a model couple. They are never tired of talking of my unvarying gallant courtesy to you. You, yourself, could not name this moment in a court of law one word or action that would seem incompatible with the tenderest affection for you.”

“I know it,” she moaned. “Yes, that is the misery of it. I am insulted, I am profaned, I am outraged, I am tortured till I could go mad, or kill myself; and it is all done—my[13] God! I know not how. Done with smoothness and calmness and courtesy; done with civility; done with sweet stabbing words. Others could only see the sweetness; none but I can feel the stabs. But they kill me daily, and you know it. Subtle and sweet is your cruelty to me—cruel, cruel devil that you are! Cruel to me, cruel to your slaves, cruel to everyone.”

“Cruel to my slaves, eh,” said Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly, his voice still equable, his face still wearing its sardonic smile: “Cruel to you and cruel to my slaves. Antony, for example.”

“Yes, Antony,” she replied, speaking in a calmer voice, as of one whose sufferings, whatever they might be, were remote from her, or as nothing to her own, “Antony is one. I saw the wretch just now, as I went down to the cabins. There you have him bucked in this scorching heat, his head bleeding where you and Tassle beat him with your whipstocks, and the flies tormenting him. Is there another planter in the parish that would treat that boy so? No wonder he ran away, like his brother before him. He might as well be in Hell as on this plantation. They might all as well be in Hell—as they are. Sweltering in the cotton-field, on a Sunday, too, there they are, fifty miserable wretches—hark, now! Tassle is laying it on to some of them. That is the howl of some of the wenches. Listen to that!”

Softened by the distance, but heard distinctly in the sultry stillness, came up from the cotton-fields a confusion of dismal screeches. Madame Lafitte sullenly listened, till they wailed away, the planter meanwhile calmly drinking his goblet of iced claret, and then filling the glass again from a slender bottle standing in a cooler on the table.

“These are the sounds I have to listen to, day after day, and year after year,” hoarsely murmured Madame Lafitte, her bosom heaving convulsively above her clasped arms, and her eyes burning with dark fire in the pale gloom of her face. “Every hour in the day they come from the field. All through the evening from the gin-house. Day and night, night and day, the yelling of those unhappy creatures is dinned into my ears. That is my music.”

[14]

Mr. Lafitte, who had resumed his former attitude, and was still tilting his chair, paused, with his eyes fixed upon his wife, and shook with long, silent, devilish merriment, his black familiar wobbling meanwhile in the pool beneath him. Then, in his softest, smoothest voice, he began to curse and swear, if what was rather a flood of profane exclamations may be so described. All names held sacred, grotesquely conjoined with secular names and titles, and poured forth in fluent and rapid succession, composed the outflow of a profanity inexpressibly awful, both from its nature and from the smooth and serene tones in which it found utterance. Madame Lafitte listened to him aghast, for she had never heard this from his lips before, and a dim, blind foreboding that it portended some horrible change in his attitude toward her, filled her soul. Ending it presently in another spasm of chuckling merriment, as if what seemed a mere depraved desire for blasphemy was satisfied, Mr. Lafitte took up the conversation.

“It is positively delightful, Josephine,” he remarked, “to hear you lamenting the trouncing of the dear negroes. But, not to dwell upon this touching outbreak of philanthropy, permit me—for I feel refreshingly wicked to-day—permit me to ask you, my angel, if you know what made me marry you?”

She looked at him for a moment with a face of mingled wonder, scorn and loathing.

“What made you marry me?” she repeated, “your love, I suppose—at least, what you call love.”

“Indeed, no Josephine,” he coolly replied. “It was not love at all. What makes a man keep a mistress? For that was it, and nothing more.”

At this atrocious declaration, Madame Lafitte, the very inmost temple of her soul profaned and defiled, as it never had been till then, bowed her head in an agony of shame.

“Yes, Josephine,” he continued, “that was it. You were a queen of a girl when I first saw you. Young, innocent, gentle, enchanting, the most beautiful woman then, as I think you are now, that I ever beheld, and though your family was poor, you were accomplished as few of your sex ever become. I wanted you for one of my mistresses, and I got you at the[15] little expense of a marriage ceremony. A strict moralist might say that, at best, you were only my— ah, the coarse word! but in this country you are called my wife. And, apropos, do you know what they call this union of ours, contracted on my part from such a motive? They call it holy matrimony.”

Mr. Lafitte, with a negrine ptchih, went off in a spasm of devilish merriment, keeping his eyes fixed on the bowed and pallid face of the woman opposite him.

“You were in love with young Raynal when I married you,” he continued, “and you were bullied and badgered by your amiable family into wedlock with me. Of that, however, I will not speak now. But suppose, Josephine, that you wish a divorce. How are you going to get it? On what grounds? Now apropos of my mistresses: by the law of Louisiana, were you false to me, I could get a divorce from you. By the same laws—oh, how I love them!—you could only get that divorce from me if I kept my mistress in your dwelling, or publicly and openly. Suppose you emigrated to another State where they grant divorces on the ground of the husband’s infidelity. Could you get a separation then? No. Why not? Because you have no evidence, and I have taken good care that you can have none. Ha! my dear, what do you think of your position?”

“My God, my God!” she moaned, “what have I done that I should be outraged thus! How have I borne this life—how can I bear it! I tell you, Lafitte,” she cried, raising her voice, hoarse with anger and agony, into a higher key, and throwing out her arms with a furious gesture, “I tell you that this life is Hell. I know now, what I wondered when I was a child—where Hell is and what it looks like. It is here and it looks like this. This is one of its chambers, and this one of its mansions. These walls, those books, those pictures, this furniture, that fruit, that wine, they all belong to it. Those are its flowers clambering around the windows—this is its light and these are its shadows—this scorching heat is the heat of it, that sun is the sun of it, these slaves swelter in it—I, a slave like them, am tortured in it, and you are the fiend[16] of it, hard, cruel, sensual, heartless, pitiless devil that you are!”

Flinging her arms together again in a convulsive clasp on her bosom, her frame shuddering, her breath coming and going in quick gasps through her clenched teeth, which gleamed behind lips deadly white and tensely drawn, she glared at him with fixed nostrils and flaming eyes, like a beautiful maniac. Save that he had ceased his balancing, that his eyes were a shade more tigerish, and that his form crouched slightly forward in his chair, Mr. Lafitte was as cool and collected as ever, and his face wore the same sardonic smile.