Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty

by John William De Forest

"By Jove!" soliloquized the knowing Colonel, "she is sweeter on him than a pailful of syrup. She puts one in mind of a boa-constrictor. She is licking him all over, preparatory to swallowing him. Not a bad sort of serpent to have around one, either," pursued the Colonel, almost winking to himself, so knowing did he feel. "Not a bad sort of serpent. Only I shouldn't care about marrying her."

Indeed the Colonel reminds one a little of "devilish sly old Joey Bagstock."

The innocent Colburne acknowledged to himself that he did not comprehend Mrs. Larue nor her purposes. He would have inferred from her ways that she wanted him for a husband, only that she spoke in a very cool way of the matrimonial state.

"Marriage will not content me, nor will single life," she said to him one day. "I have tried both, and I cannot recommend either. It is a choice between two evils, and one does not know to say which is the least."

Widows in search of second husbands do not talk publicly in this style, and Colburne intelligently concluded that he was not to be invited to the altar. At the same time Mrs. Larue went on in this way, she treated him to certain appetizing little movements, glances and words, which led him to suspect with some vague alarm that she did not mean to let him off as a mere acquaintance. Finally, as is supposed, an explanation ensued which was not to his liking. There was an interview of half an hour in a back parlor, brought about by the graceful manœuvres of the lady, of which Colburne steadily refused to reveal the secrets, although straitly questioned by the fun-loving Colonel.

"By Jove! he's been bluffing her," soliloquized Carter, who thought he perceived that from this private confabulation the parties came forth on terms of estrangement. "What a queer fellow he is! Suppose he didn't want to marry her—he might amuse himself. It would be pleasant to him, and wouldn't hurt her. Hanged if he isn't a curiosity!"

The next time that Colburne called on Miss Ravenel the Larue took her revenge for that mysterious defeat, the particulars of which I am unable to relate. To comprehend the nature and efficiency of this vengeance, it is necessary to take a dive into the recesses of New Orleans society. There is a geographical fable of civilized white negroes in the centre of Africa, somewhere near the Mountains of the Moon. This fable is realized in the Crescent City and in some of the richest planting districts of Louisiana, where you will find a class of colored people, who are not black people at all, having only the merest fraction of negro blood in their veins, and who are respectable in character, numbers of them wealthy, and some of them accomplished. These Creoles, as they call themselves, have been free for generations, and until Anglo-Saxon law invaded Louisiana, enjoyed the same rights as other citizens. They are good Catholics; they marry and are given in marriage; their sons are educated in Paris on a perfect level with young Frenchmen; their daughters receive the strict surveillance which is allotted to girls in most southern countries. In the street many of them are scarcely distinguishable from the unmixed descendants of the old French planters. But there is a social line of demarkation drawn about them, like the sanitary cordon about an infected district. The Anglo-Saxon race, the proudest race of modern times, does not marry nor consort with them, nor of late years does the pure French Creole, driven to join in this ostracism by the brute force of Henghist and Horsa prejudice. The New Orleanois who before the war should have treated these white colored people on terms of equality, would have shared in their opprobrium, and perhaps have been ridden on a rail by his outraged fellow-citizens of northern descent.

Now these white negroes from the Mountains of the Moon constituted the sole loyal class, except the slaves, which Butler found in Louisiana. They and their black cousins of the sixteenth degree were the only people who, as a body, came forward with joy to welcome the drums and tramplings of the New England Division; and when the commanding General called for regiments of free blacks to uphold the Stars and Stripes, he met a patriotic response as enthusiastic as that of Connecticut or Massachusetts. Foremost in this military uprising were two brothers of the name of Meurice, who poured out their wealth freely to meet those incidental expenses, never acknowledged by Government, which attend the recruiting of volunteer regiments. They gave dinners and presented flags; they advanced uniforms, sabres and pistols for officers; they trusted the families of private soldiers. The youngest Meurice became Major of one of the regiments, which I take to be the nearest approach to a miracle ever yet enacted in the United States of America. Their entertainments became so famous that invitations to them were gratefully accepted by officers of Anglo-Saxon organizations. At their profuse yet elegant table, where Brillât-Savarin would not have been annoyed by a badly cooked dish or an inferior wine, and where he might have listened to the accents of his own Parisian, Colburne had met New Englanders, New Yorkers, and even stray Marylanders and Kentuckians. There he became acquainted (ignorant Baratarian that he was!) with the tasse de cafe noir and the petit verre de cognac which close a French dinner. There he smoked cigars which gave him new ideas concerning the value of Cuba. For these pleasures he was now to suffer at the Caucasian hands of Madame Larue.

"I am afraid that we are doomed to lose you, Captain Colburne," she said with a smile which expressed something worse than good-natured raillery. "I hear that you have made some fascinating acquaintances in New Orleans. I never myself had the pleasure of knowing the Meurices. They are very charming, are they not?"

Colburne's nerves quivered under this speech, not because he was conscious of having done any thing unbecoming a gentleman, but because he divined the clever malice of the attack. To gentle spirits the consciousness that they are the objects of spite, is a dolorous sensation.