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She bore him a boy and a girl, twins; and as her son grew in physical, intellectual, and moral symmetry, he indulged the hope that the ambition and pride of all the various Grandissimes now centering in this lawful son, and all strife being lulled he should yet see this Honoré right the wrongs which he had not quite dared to uproot.
She was a "study," the gossiping circle at Frowenfeld's used to say; and any observant hearer of her odd aphorisms could see that she herself had made a life-study of herself and her conditions; but she little thought that others some with wits and some with none young hare-brained Grandissimes, Mandarins and the like were silently, and for her most unluckily, charging their memories with her knowing speeches; and that of every one of those speeches she would ultimately have to give account.
One afternoon it seems to have been some time in June, and consequently earlier than Doctor Keene's return the Grandissimes were set all a-tremble with vexation by the discovery that another of their number had, to use Agricola's expression, "gone over to the enemy," a phrase first applied by him to Honoré. "What do you intend to convey by that term?" Frowenfeld had asked on that earlier occasion.
The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius, the author of 'the Grandissimes. In him the South has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history.
Then, at the right moment, Honoré made a single happy stroke, and even the hot Grandissimes, they of the interior parishes and they of Agricola's squadron, slaked and crumbled when he wrote each a letter saying that the governor was about to send them appointments, and that it would be well, if they wished to evade them, to write the governor at once, surrendering their present commissions. Well!
Here clustered the earlier aristocracy of the colony; all that pretty crew of counts, chevaliers, marquises, colonels, dons, etc., who loved their kings, and especially their kings' moneys, with an abandon which affected the accuracy of nearly all their accounts. Among these stood the great mother-mansion of the Grandissimes. Do not look for it now; it is quite gone.
As he did so, he said to himself: "How are these two Honoré Grandissimes related to each other, and why should one be thought capable of attempting the life of Agricola?" The answer was on its way to him.
The male Grandissimes were not surprised at this exhibition of weak clemency in their lovely women; they were proud of it; it showed the magnanimity that was natural to the universal Grandissime heart, when not restrained and repressed by the stern necessities of the hour. But Agricola disappointed them.
Yet he too was elegiac, sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his representations most engaging. Quaintness was his second nature; romance was in his blood. Bras-Coupé, the great, proud, rebellious slave in The Grandissimes, belongs to the ancient lineage of those African princes who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and have escaped from them by dying.
The doctor resumed a cigar which lay against the edge of the chess-board, found it extinguished, and proceeded to relight it. "Best blood of the province; good as the Grandissimes. Blood is a great thing here, in certain odd ways," he went on. "Very curious sometimes." He stooped to the floor where his coat had fallen, and took his handkerchief from a breast-pocket.
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