In the early days of the settlement, a Spanish fisherman had died; and his comrades had built him a little tomb with the surplus of the same bricks and other material brought down the bayou for the construction of Viosca's cottages. But no one, except perhaps some wandering duck hunter, had approached the sepulchre for years. High weeds and grasses wrestled together all about it, and rendered it totally invisible from the surrounding level of the marsh.
Fiddlers swarmed away as Chita advanced over the moist soil, each uplifting its single huge claw as it sidled off;--then frogs began to leap before her as she reached the thicker grass;--and long-legged brown insects sprang showering to right and left as she parted the tufts of the thickening verdure. As she went on, the bitter-weeds disappeared;--jointed grasses and sinewy dark plants of a taller growth rose above her head: she was almost deafened by the storm of insect shrilling, and the mosquitoes became very wicked. All at once something long and black and heavy wriggled almost from under her naked feet,--squirming so horribly that for a minute or two she could not move for fright.
But it slunk away somewhere, and hid itself; the weeds it had shaken ceased to tremble in its wake; and her courage returned.
She felt such an exquisite and fearful pleasure in the gratification of that naughty curiosity! Then, quite unexpectedly--oh! what a start it gave her!--the solitary white object burst upon her view, leprous and ghastly as the yawn of a cotton-mouth. Tombs ruin soon in Louisiana;--the one Chita looked upon seemed ready to topple down. There was a great ragged hole at one end, where wind and rain, and perhaps also the burrowing of crawfish and of worms, had loosened the bricks, and caused them to slide out of place. It seemed very black inside; but Chita wanted to know what was there. She pushed her way through a gap in the thin and rotten line of pickets, and through some tall weeds with big coarse pink flowers;--then she crouched down on hands and knees before the black hole, and peered in. It was not so black inside as she had thought; for a sunbeam slanted down through a chink in the roof; and she could see!
A brown head--without hair, without eyes, but with teeth, ever so many teeth!--seemed to laugh at her; and close to it sat a Toad, the hugest she had ever seen; and the white skin of his throat kept puffing out and going in. And Chita screamed and screamed, and fled in wild terror,--screaming all the way, till Carmen ran out to meet her and carry her home. Even when safe in her adopted mother's arms, she sobbed with fright. To the vivid fancy of the child there seemed to be some hideous relation between the staring reptile and the brown death's-head, with its empty eyes, and its nightmare-smile.
The shock brought on a fever,--a fever that lasted several days, and left her very weak. But the experience taught her to obey, taught her that Carmen knew best what was for her good. It also caused her to think a great deal. Carmen had told her that the dead people never frightened good little girls who stayed at home.
--"Madrecita Carmen," she asked, "is my mamma dead?"
--"Pobrecita! .... Yes, my angel. God called her to Him,--your darling mother."
--"Madrecita," she asked again,--her young eyes growing vast with horror,--"is my own mamma now like That?" ... She pointed toward the place of the white gleam, behind the great trees.
--"No, no, no! my darling!" cried Carmen, appalled herself by the ghastly question,--"your mamma is with the dear, good, loving God, who lives in the beautiful sky, above the clouds, my darling, beyond the sun!"
But Carmen's kind eyes were full of tears; and the child read their meaning. He who teareth off the Mask of the Flesh had looked into her face one unutterable moment:--she had seen the brutal Truth, naked to the bone!
Yet there came to her a little thrill of consolation, caused by the words of the tender falsehood; for that which she had discerned by day could not explain to her that which she saw almost nightly in her slumber. The face, the voice, the form of her loving mother still lived somewhere,--could not have utterly passed away; since the sweet presence came to her in dreams, bending and smiling over her, caressing her, speaking to her,--sometimes gently chiding, but always chiding with a kiss.
And then the child would laugh in her sleep, and prattle in Creole,--talking to the luminous shadow, telling the dead mother all the little deeds and thoughts of the day.... Why would God only let her come at night?
Her idea of God had been first defined by the sight of a quaint French picture of the Creation,--an engraving which represented a shoreless sea under a black sky, and out of the blackness a solemn and bearded gray head emerging, and a cloudy hand through which stars glimmered. God was like old Doctor de Coulanges, who used to visit the house, and talk in a voice like a low roll of thunder.... At a later day, when Chita had been told that God was "everywhere at the same time "--without and within, beneath and above all things,--this idea became somewhat changed. The awful bearded face, the huge shadowy hand, did not fade from her thought; but they became fantastically blended with the larger and vaguer notion of something that filled the world and reached to the stars,--something diaphanous and incomprehensible like the invisible air, omnipresent and everlasting like the high blue of heaven ....
