Chapter 11: The Glowing Hearth

Christened Noel, in honor of the day of his arrival, the puppy thrived and grew toward young doghood in a household atmosphere of serene content. From Christmas to Easter the days flowed by in an untroubled current of time. Day after day, Anthony and Elsie Adriance grew into closer and fuller companionship. The winter was a hard and long one, but never dull to them.

They found so much to do. In return for his reading to her, Elsie sometimes put out the lamp and in the flickering firelight told him quaint, grotesque legends of Creole and negro lore. Her soft accents fell naturally into pâtois; she was a born mimic, and interspersed fragments of plaintive songs, old as the tragedy of slavery or the romance of a pre-Napoleonic France. Her voice could be drowsy as sunshine on a still lagoon, or instinct with life as the ring of a marching regiment’s tread.

She taught him to play chess, too, with a wonderful set of jade-and-ivory men produced from among her few belongings.

“Do you know these must be mighty valuable?” Adriance exclaimed, the first time he saw them.

“I know they are mighty old,” she mocked his seriousness. “And I wouldn’t sell them, so the rest doesn’t matter.”

“Tell me about them.”

“There is nothing very definite to tell.” She regarded him askance from the corner of a laughing eye. “Can you bear the shock of hearing that one of your wife’s ancestors was suspected of having secret relations with the notorious LaFitte?”

“Who was he?”

“LaFitte was a pirate and freebooter, sir, who had a stronghold below New Orleans, where the mouth of the Mississippi widens into the Gulf. Many a ship paid toll to him, many curious prizes fell into his greedy hands; and it was whispered that some of these strange, foreign things mysteriously appeared in the house of Martin Galvez. Negroes were heard to tell, with breath hushed and eyes rolling, of a swift-sailing sloop, black of hull and rigged in black canvas, lines, and all. It slipped up the river at midnight and down again before dawn, past all defences, they said—and its point of landing was Colonel Galvez’s wharf, ten miles above the city. No one ever knew more than a rumor that ran untraced like the black sloop. But it was said the ivory-and-jade chessmen had travelled by that craft, as had great-great-grandmother’s string of pink pearls which are painted around her neck in her portrait. Loud and often her husband laughed at the tales, inviting all who chose to watch his wharf between sunset and sunrise, any night. The chessmen, he declared, were presented to him by a prince of Cairo, whose enemies had betrayed him into the hands of a slave-trader. The Egyptian noble’s dark skin and ignorance of Western speech had made him a helpless victim; he faced the final degradation of the lash when Colonel Galvez saw and rescued him. His gratitude sent the pretty playthings. As for the pink pearls, they came from Vienna, by lawful purchase. At least, so the worthy Colonel was fond of relating, with a convincing detail, over his incomparable French wines and Havana cigars.”

“But, what was truth? Which, I mean?” he questioned.