Harrington: A Story of True Love

by William Douglas O'Connor

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 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, 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 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.”