Old Creole Days | Page 4

customs
were dropped into it; but the change was still new. What could a man
be more than Capitaine Lemaitre was--the soul of honor, the pink of
courtesy, with the courage of the lion, and the magnanimity of the
elephant; frank--the very exchequer of truth! Nay, go higher still: his
paper was good in Toulouse Street. To the gossips in the gaming-clubs
he was the culminating proof that smuggling was one of the sublimer
virtues.
Years went by. Events transpired which have their place in history.
Under a government which the community by and by saw was
conducted in their interest, smuggling began to lose its respectability

and to grow disreputable, hazardous, and debased. In certain onslaughts
made upon them by officers of the law, some of the smugglers became
murderers. The business became unprofitable for a time until the
enterprising Lafittes--thinkers--bethought them of a
corrective--"privateering".
Thereupon the United States Government set a price upon their heads.
Later yet it became known that these outlawed pirates had been offered
money and rank by Great Britain if they would join her standard, then
hovering about the water-approaches to their native city, and that they
had spurned the bribe; wherefore their heads were ruled out of the
market, and, meeting and treating with Andrew Jackson, they were
received as lovers of their country, and as compatriots fought in the
battle of New Orleans at the head of their fearless men, and--here
tradition takes up the tale--were never seen afterward.
Capitaine Lemaitre was not among the killed or wounded, but he was
among the missing.
CHAPTER IV.
THREE FRIENDS.
The roundest and happiest-looking priest in the city of New Orleans
was a little man fondly known among his people as Père Jerome. He
was a Creole and a member of one of the city's leading families. His
dwelling was a little frame cottage, standing on high pillars just inside a
tall, close fence, and reached by a narrow out-door stair from the green
batten gate. It was well surrounded by crape myrtles, and
communicated behind by a descending stair and a plank-walk with the
rear entrance of the chapel over whose worshippers he daily spread his
hands in benediction. The name of the street--ah! there is where light is
wanting. Save the Cathedral and the Ursulines, there is very little of
record concerning churches at that time, though they were springing up
here and there. All there is certainty of is that Père Jerome's frame
chapel was some little new-born "down-town" thing, that may have
survived the passage of years, or may have escaped "Paxton's

Directory" "so as by fire." His parlor was dingy and carpetless; one
could smell distinctly there the vow of poverty. His bed-chamber was
bare and clean, and the bed in it narrow and hard; but between the two
was a dining-room that would tempt a laugh to the lips of any who
looked in. The table was small, but stout, and all the furniture of the
room substantial, made of fine wood, and carved just enough to give
the notion of wrinkling pleasantry. His mother's and sister's doing, Père
Jerome would explain; they would not permit this apartment--or
department--to suffer. Therein, as well as in the parlor, there was odor,
but of a more epicurean sort, that explained interestingly the Père
Jerome's rotundity and rosy smile.
In this room, and about this miniature round table, used sometimes to
sit with Père Jerome two friends to whom he was deeply attached--one,
Evariste Varrillat, a playmate from early childhood, now his brother
in-law; the other, Jean Thompson, a companion from youngest
manhood, and both, like the little priest himself, the regretful
rememberers of a fourth comrade who was a comrade no more. Like
Père Jerome, they had come, through years, to the thick of life's
conflicts,--the priest's brother-in-law a physician, the other an attorney,
and brother-in-law to the lonely wanderer,--yet they loved to huddle
around this small board, and be boys again in heart while men in mind.
Neither one nor another was leader. In earlier days they had always
yielded to him who no longer met with them a certain chieftainship,
and they still thought of him and talked of him, and, in their conjectures,
groped after him, as one of whom they continued to expect greater
things than of themselves.
They sat one day drawn thus close together, sipping and theorizing,
speculating upon the nature of things in an easy, bold, sophomoric way,
the conversation for the most part being in French, the native tongue of
the doctor and priest, and spoken with facility by Jean Thompson the
lawyer, who was half Américain; but running sometimes into English
and sometimes into mild laughter. Mention had been made of the
absentee.
Père Jerome advanced an idea something like this:

"It is impossible