University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
Dark Days.

THE cholera was upon us; but
not without warning. Year after
year it had pursued its lonely
march through woodland and
desert, as noiseless and implacable
as Fate. For months and months,
rumor had heralded its fell approach.
Now it stole with the
auras of morning into a populous town; now it
glided with the shades of nightfall into some
happy village.

Graves sprung up in its wake, like thistles.

The lank Arab, munching his few dates in the
desert, looked up from the scanty meal, and

beheld those basilisk eyes. His camel wandered
off without a master.

The be-nighted traveller by the Ganges, sunk
exhausted on the banks of the muddy river; but
the beasts of the jungle did not growl over him,
for even the nameless birds flew, shrieking, away.

The English mother sat by the hamlet-door,
singing to her babe. The tiny hand clutched at
the air, and the soft white eyelids were ringed
with violet.

Beauty saw a baleful visage in her mirror. No
rouge, nor pearl-powder nor balm could make it
comely again.

The miser hugged and kissed his money-bags;
but where he went he could not take his idols.

Then Dives died in his palace, and the leper at
the groined gate-way.

The fingers of lovers were unknitted.

The Cholera, the Scourge!

In a single night the Afreet spread his wings
over the doomed city. A woman had been

stricken down while buying a bunch of flowers in
St. Mary's Market. An unknown man fell headlong
from his horse on the levee. Six persons lay
at the point of death in a café on Rue de Baronne.
The hospitals were already filling up; and the red
flag wilted in the languid breeze at the quarantine.
The streets were strewn with lime, and every precaution
taken by the authorities to extirpate the
plague. And then commenced that long procession
of funerals which never ceased to trail by our
door for so many weary months. It is a question
in my mind, though, whether the cholera is contagious.

How hot, and dull, and dead the days were!

The roofs of the houses lay festering in the
canescent heat; the flowers drooped, and died
cankerous deaths; the outer leaves of the foliage
changed to a livid green hue, and the timid grass
crept up, and withered, in the interstices of the
sidewalk. All day a tawny gold mist hung over
the place. At night, the dews fell, and from

cypress swamps, on the skirts of the city, rose
deadly miasma.

No joyous children played at the door-step in
the twilight. The guttural voice of the strolling
marchand was no longer heard crying his creams
and comfits. The small fruit-booths along the
street were tenantless. The St. Charles Theatre
and The Varieties were closed — only the tragedy
of death drew crowded houses. The glittering
bar-rooms, with their fancy glasses, and mirrors,
and snowy drinks, were almost deserted. Even
rondo, roulette, faro, monte and lansquenet, lost
their fascination. Mass was said morning and
evening in the old cathedral at Place d' Armes;
and many of the churches, catholic and protestant,
were open throughout the day.

The wheel of social life was broken.

As to Howland and myself, we were not panic-stricken.
The fine edge of my fear of death had
been blunted by a similar experience, at Cuba,
during a yellow-fever season; and Howland regarded

the workings of chance with stolid indifference.

When the epidemic first broke out, he had
proposed, for my sake only, a trip across Lake
Ponchartrain, to Pass Christian, or Biloxi; but
I would not listen to him. In overruling Howland's
suggestion, I was simply a puppet, moving
in accordance with my wires. It was predestined
we should remain and face the sorrows of that
year.

I am a fatalist, you see; and have reason to
be one.

We changed our mode of living in no particular;
but ate fruit, drank wine, (rank heresy,)
walked, rode, and slept as usual. And even Cip,
who had somewhat recovered from his first fright,
would sit of an evening by the kitchen-door, and
play plaintive negro melodies on his rickety violin.

“Cip,” I used to say, “this Asiatic cholera is
a countryman of yours.”

“O Lord, marster!”

Still the work went on. People died and lay

for days unburied, in obscure garrets. Oftentimes
one cart bore away an entire family — hurried
them off. Lying in my bed, I have been kept
awake by hearses rumbling by — at midnight.
What I write I saw, and was a part of. I would
it were fiction.

Near our house stood a large brick church, the
Church of the Bleeding Heart, I think it was
called. The exterior of the edifice was left in an
elaborate state of unfinish, the costly interior
decorations having, I suppose, exhausted the
parochial funds. It was a habit of mine to pass
an hour, every day, in wandering about the
dimly-lighted aisles, or sitting by the altar and
looking at a painting of the Crucifixion, which
covered a Gothic window back of the dais. The
sun, early in the forenoon, used to rest for five or
ten minutes on the glass directly above the
Savior's head, and, blending with the aureola
which the artist had placed around the angelic
brows, produced a striking effect.

The painting, and the soothing twilight of the
spot, lifted me into holy atmospheres. Here I
came and thought of life and the world — not
this world, or this life; but the Life and the
World beyond.

Out of my visits to the church grew an incident
which I cannot resist recording. A story within
a story, says Goethe, is a flaw in art. But life is
made up of episodes — a story within a story.

One morning I was leaving the church when I
heard somebody sound the keys of the organ in
the loft. There is a rich, gloomy pathos about
the instrument that always impresses me. I stood
listening to the mellow, irregular notes, touched
at random. Presently the musician lingered on
an octave, as if to gather strength for a prolonged
flight — then the splendid Wedding March of
Mendelssohn broke along the aisles, and soared up
to the shadowy dome.

How magically those unseen fingers wrung the
meaning of the great maestro from the inanimate
keys! with what power and delicacy of touch!

As I listened, the sacred candles were suddenly
lighted, and in their lambent glare a thousand
ghosts crowded into the carven pews, thronged the
gallery; the priest stood in the chancel; and then
the bridal pageant swept by, and then the grand
music burst out beyond control, surging away
among the resonant arches in tumultuous waves
of sound; and then — as if to render the illusion
perfect — the clock in the belfry struck twelve.

At the last stroke, the music ceased, the church
was emptied of its ghostly audience, the scented
candles flickered out, and I stood alone. I could
have wept with an undefined, mysterious sorrow,
— wept the loss of something I had never known,
something that might have been!

Again the music rose, but more gently — a
melody of Beethoven. It was left unfinished.
The organ-lid closed abruptly; I heard the fine
click of the key turning in the wards, and hastened
to the vestibule of the church to catch a glimpse
of the musician.

As I gained the door, a young girl, leading a

little boy by the hand, was slowly descending the
broad oaken staircase.

“Were you playing the organ, a moment
since?” I asked, doubtfully.

“Yes.”

“Are you the organist here?”

“No, sir; but my father was.”

“Was?”

“They took papa away last week,” said the
boy simply; “and this is Clara Dujardine, my
sister, who loves him.”

They passed on.

Every morning for several weeks the child-musician
came to the choir. It was not hard to
understand why the poor girl lingered there, day
after day, playing the same glorious music always
— the music which the old organist had loved.

Suddenly her visits ceased.

The sunshine rested on the head of the painted
Christ, and lighted up the stained windows; the
dreary sexton, and, now and then, a priest or two,
found their way into the sanctuary: but I waited

in vain for the girl with her spiritual eyes and
fragile hands.

In the ancient French burying-ground, is a
humble mound which the delicate grass, I like to
think, takes pleasures in making beautiful; before
it touches the other graves. Spring-time had
muffled it in flowers, the day I bent down and
read the simple inscription:

Clara Dujardine.

Aged 17.

Near the head-stone, with a wreath of immortelles
in his shut hand, sat the little boy — asleep.

The sultry, dreadful days; the huge city in its
swoon-like silence; the busy, busy death! — how
these things stay with my thought. Here, in
pleasant New England, sometimes in the twilight,
invisible fingers play for me the sad strains of
Beethoven, the Wedding March of Mendelssohn.