Maddened by his calm mockery, she did not reply, but kept her blazing eyes fixed upon his face. A weaker man than Mr. Lafitte might have shrunk from that gaze. But its burning fire was wasted on his eyes as flame upon asbestos. Strange eyes had Mr. Lafitte—true tokens of the nature which else his other features might have betrayed less surely. His form was muscular and manly, and his face, though dark and sinister, might have been justly called handsome, if only for the richness of its brunette complexion. Dark, wavy auburn hair, which he wore long, and a thick moustache of the same color, drooping over the mouth, conferred a certain lordly grace upon the countenance. The nose, not finely cut, was bold, aquiline, and deeply curved in the nostrils, and the line of the jaw and chin was vigorous and masterful. In the full visage, suffused with the dense and sultry glow of a highly vascular organization, tropic passions basked in strong repose. But the motor passion of all was evident in the eyes. Large eyes which at a yard’s distance might have seemed grey, but nearer were tawny and flecked with minute blood-specks. Steadfast, watchful, glossy, unwinking eyes—without depth, without sympathy—obdurate, rapacious and cruel—they confirmed the expression of the receding brow above them, which, broad and full, with a marked depression down its centre, was thus divided into two lobes, and bore resemblance to the forehead of the tiger. A physiognomist, looking at that face, would have declared Mr. Lafitte a man organized for ferocity as the beast he resembled is organized. A believer in the doctrine of transmigration might have held that the spirit of a tiger dwelt in his frame, and looked out of those tawny, blood-specked orbs.
It looked out of them now as with a feline playfulness he spoke his smooth taunts, meanwhile swaying slowly to and fro in his chair, as though balancing for a spring.
“Go on, my beautiful one,” he continued. “Favor me with more of those choice similitudes. Choice? And yet—as a matter of taste, my angel, purely as a matter of taste—that phrase—pirate, though bold and graphic, I admit, might be artistically improved. Corsair, now. What do you think of corsair? Is not corsair better, more poetical, more Byronesque? Yes,” he went on reflectively, as though the proposed change were a matter of vital seriousness, “yes, corsair is a finer word. Soul of my soul, let it be corsair. Suffer Lafitte to be your Conrad; you shall be his Zuleika. Have I ‘one virtue,’ my Zuleika? You will readily concede me the ‘thousand crimes,’ I know, but have I the ‘one virtue?’”
“Why,” she wailed passionately, taking no heed of his badinage; “why am I treated thus! Why am I kept here on this hateful plantation, in this remote parish, without life, without society, without pleasure of any kind. Nothing but this routine of dull farm life. No faces but your servants’ and your overseer’s around me. No company but these planters, these planters’ wives, these planters’ daughters, these people that ride over here sometimes, that I fatigue myself with visiting, that I care nothing about, anyway. Bad enough to come here once a year for the hot months—but three years, winter and summer, have I spent here. Three, Lafitte. Not once have I been in New Orleans for three years. Not once near the house where seven years of marriage with you were endurable with friends, with society, with life, with pleasures, with things I cared for, and which diverted me. Cut off from them all. You go when you please. Weeks, months, you are away, and leave me here sick, mad, frantic with ennui. Here, up the river, alone, what have I here to enjoy?”
“Here, my Josephine,” he replied, in an unruffled voice; “here, do you ask? What have you here? Here you have books, novels, without end, music in reams, your guitar, your piano, this elegant simplicity, this charming country prospect, your own sweet thoughts, the pleasures of imagination, the pleasures of memory, the pleasures—yes, even the pleasures of hope. And then, too,” sinking his voice to a softer tone, while his smile became a shade more sardonic and his eyes more cruel, “then, too, you have me.”
“You,” she raved, her pallid face convulsed with the refluent fury, and her eyes flashing. “You! Yes, I have you. Whom I hate, whom I loathe, whom I abhor! Yes, I have you; you who torture me.”
“I who torture you?” interrupted Mr. Lafitte blandly. “And yet, my angel, they say we are a model couple. They are never tired of talking of my unvarying gallant courtesy to you. You, yourself, could not name this moment in a court of law one word or action that would seem incompatible with the tenderest affection for you.”
“I know it,” she moaned. “Yes, that is the misery of it. I am insulted, I am profaned, I am outraged, I am tortured till I could go mad, or kill myself; and it is all done—my God! I know not how. Done with smoothness and calmness and courtesy; done with civility; done with sweet stabbing words. Others could only see the sweetness; none but I can feel the stabs. But they kill me daily, and you know it. Subtle and sweet is your cruelty to me—cruel, cruel devil that you are! Cruel to me, cruel to your slaves, cruel to everyone.”
“Cruel to my slaves, eh,” said Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly, his voice still equable, his face still wearing its sardonic smile: “Cruel to you and cruel to my slaves. Antony, for example.”
“Yes, Antony,” she replied, speaking in a calmer voice, as of one whose sufferings, whatever they might be, were remote from her, or as nothing to her own, “Antony is one. I saw the wretch just now, as I went down to the cabins. There you have him bucked in this scorching heat, his head bleeding where you and Tassle beat him with your whipstocks, and the flies tormenting him. Is there another planter in the parish that would treat that boy so? No wonder he ran away, like his brother before him. He might as well be in Hell as on this plantation. They might all as well be in Hell—as they are. Sweltering in the cotton-field, on a Sunday, too, there they are, fifty miserable wretches—hark, now! Tassle is laying it on to some of them. That is the howl of some of the wenches. Listen to that!”