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Updated: June 11, 2025
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. Adèle Fauquier, riding down to Meade d'Or, her father's plantation.
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.
Great shapeless bundles and bales and packets swathed in cloth and bound with ropes; tubs and urns of palms, evergreens, and tropical flowers; tables, mirrors, chairs, couches, carpets, and pictures all carefully bound and padded against the dangers of transit. Grandemont was among them, the busiest there.
A thousand times had Grandemont conned in his mind the scene of Victor's disappearance. And, at each time that Adèle 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.
The entrance hall was imposing with palms and ferns and the light of an immense candelabrum. At seven o'clock Grandemont, in evening dress, with pearls a family passion in his spotless linen, emerged from somewhere. The invitations had specified eight as the dining hour. He drew an armchair upon the porch, and sat there, smoking cigarettes and half dreaming. The moon was an hour high.
The solicitor had told him that the place was still being cultivated, in accordance with a compromise agreement between the litigants. On the next Sunday after the thought Grandemont rode, horseback, down to Charleroi. The big, square house with its two long ells looked blank and cheerless with its closed shutters and doors. The shrubbery in the yard was ragged and riotous.
The six coloured waiters, in their white jackets, paced, cat-footed, about the table, pretending to arrange where all was beyond betterment. Absalom, in black and shining pumps posed, superior, here and there where the lights set off his grandeur. And Grandemont rested in his chair, waiting for his guests.
A question of heirship was in the courts, and the dwelling house of Charleroi, unless the tales told of ghostly powdered and laced Charleses haunting its unechoing chambers were true, stood uninhabited. Grandemont found the solicitor in chancery who held the keys pending the decision. He proved to be an old friend of the family.
"To-morrow," Grandemont was saying, as he stood by the couch of his guest, speaking the words with his face shining as must have shone the face of Elijah's charioteer when he announced the glories of that heavenly journey "To-morrow I will take you to Her." This is the story of the man manager, and how he held his own until the very last paragraph. I had it from Sully Magoon, viva voce.
In twenty minutes have him ready and dinner served." Louis approached the disreputable guest with the suavity due to a visitor to Charleroi, and spirited him away to inner regions. Promptly, in twenty minutes, Absalom announced dinner, and, a moment later, the guest was ushered into the dining hall where Grandemont waited, standing, at the head of the table.
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