The Marquise of O and Other Stories (26 page)

On hearing this remark, which despite its apparent mildness barely concealed the old woman's malice, Toni sat on in her room in a state of some consternation. She knew her mother's hatred for the whites too well to be able to believe that Babekan would let an opportunity for gratifying it pass by unused. Alarmed by the thought that she might immediately send out to the neighbouring plantations for negroes to come and overpower the stranger, she got dressed and followed her mother without delay to the living-room downstairs. Babekan appeared to be doing something at the cupboard where the food was kept, but as Toni entered it she left it with an air of confusion and sat down at the spinning-wheel; the girl stood gazing at the proclamation fixed to the door, which on pain of death forbade all blacks to give accommodation and shelter to whites; then, as if frightened into an understanding of the wrong she had committed, she suddenly turned and fell at the feet of her mother, who as she well knew had been watching her from behind. Embracing the old woman's knees, she begged her to forgive the wild things she had said in defence of the stranger, excused herself as having been only half awake when the proposals for outwitting him had been unexpectedly put to her while she was still in bed, and declared herself willing to surrender him utterly to the vengeance of the existing laws of the land, since these had
decreed his destruction. The old woman, after a pause during which she looked the girl straight in the face, said: ‘By heaven, this speech of yours has saved his life, for today at least! For since you were threatening to protect him, I had already poisoned his food, and that would have delivered him, dead at any rate, into the hands of Congo Hoango, in accordance with his orders.' So saying she rose, took a pan of milk that was standing on the table, and poured its contents out of the window. Toni, scarcely believing her senses, stared at her mother in horror. The old woman sat down again by the girl, who was still on her knees on the floor, raised her to her feet, and asked her what could have happened in the course of a single night to change her attitude so suddenly. Had she spent any length of time with the stranger yesterday evening after preparing his bath? And had she had much conversation with him? But Toni, whose heart was beating fast, made no answer, or no definite answer, to these questions; she stood with downcast eyes, pressing her hands to her head, and said that she had had a dream; but one look at her unhappy mother's breast, she added, stooping down quickly to kiss the old woman's hand, had recalled to her mind all the inhumanity of the race to which this stranger belonged. Turning and pressing her face into her apron she assured Babekan that as soon as the negro Hoango arrived she would see what sort of daughter she had.

Babekan was still sitting there pensively, wondering what might be the cause of the girl's strange impassioned mood, when the officer entered the room with a note which he had written in his bedroom, inviting his family to spend a few days in the negro Hoango's plantation. Evidently in the best of spirits, he greeted the mother and daughter very affably, and giving the note to the former, asked her to send someone to the woods with it immediately, at the same time providing for the needs of the party as she had promised. Babekan got up with an air of agitation, putting the note
away in the cupboard and saying: ‘Sir, we must ask you to go back to your bedroom at once. The road is full of negro patrols passing one after another, and they report to us that General Dessalines is about to march through this district with his army. The door of this house is open to all, and you will not be safe in it unless you hide in your bedroom which looks out on the main courtyard, and lock its doors very carefully as well as fastening the window shutters.' ‘What?' said the stranger, surprised, ‘General Dessalines –' but the old woman interrupted him, knocking three times on the floor with a stick. ‘Ask no questions!' she said. ‘I will follow you to your room and explain it all to you there.' As she thrust him out of the living-room with anxious gestures, he turned round again at the door and exclaimed to her: ‘But my people are waiting for me and surely you will at least have to send a messenger to them who –' ‘That will all be attended to,' broke in the old woman and at that moment the bastard negro boy of whom we have already spoken entered the room, summoned by the tapping of her stick. Then Babekan told Toni, who was looking into the mirror with her back turned to the stranger, to pick up a basket containing food which stood in the corner of the room; and the mother, the daughter, the stranger and the boy went upstairs to the bedroom.

Here the old woman, settling herself comfortably into an armchair, explained that the campfires of General Dessalines' army had been seen flickering all through the night on the hills that cut off the horizon – this was in fact the case, although until the moment of speaking not a single negro from among his troops, who were advancing south-westwards towards Port-au-Prince, had yet been observed in this area. She thus succeeded in plunging the stranger into a turmoil of anxiety which, however, she was later able to calm, assuring him that she would do everything in her power to save him, even if the worst came to the worst and the troops were billeted on her. When he repeatedly
and urgently reminded her that in these circumstances she must at least assist his family with provisions, she took the basket from her daughter's hand, gave it to the boy and told him to go out to the seagull pond in the nearby wood on the hillside and deliver it to the foreign officer's kinsmen whom he would find there. She added that he must inform them that the officer himself was well; he was to say that friends of the white people, who for taking sides with them had themselves to suffer a great deal from the blacks, had taken him into their house out of compassion. Finally, she said, he must tell them that as soon as the highway was clear of the expected negro troops, steps would at once be taken to offer shelter in the house to the family as well. ‘Do you understand?' she asked when she had finished speaking. The boy, putting the basket on his head, replied that he knew very well the seagull pond which she had described to him, having sometimes gone there with his friends to fish, and that on finding the foreign gentleman's family who had camped there he would convey to them exactly the message that he had been given. When the old woman asked the stranger whether he had anything to add he pulled a ring from his finger and handed it to the boy, telling him to deliver it to the head of the family, Herr Strömli, as a token that the information he was bringing was correct. Babekan then made various arrangements designed, as she said, to ensure the stranger's safety; she ordered Toni to close the shutters, and in order to dispel the resulting darkness in the room she herself lit a candle, using a tinder box which she took from the mantelshelf and which gave her some trouble as at first it would not kindle a light. The stranger took advantage of this moment to put his arm gently round Toni's waist and asked her, whispering in her ear, how she slept and whether he ought to inform her mother of what had happened; but Toni made no reply to the first question and to the second, freeing herself from his arm, she answered: ‘No, not a word, if you
love me!' She concealed the anxiety which all these deceitful preparations by her mother aroused in her, and on the pretext that she must make some breakfast for the stranger, she rushed downstairs to the living-room.

From her mother's cupboard she took the letter in which the stranger in his innocence had invited his family to follow the boy back to the settlement, and taking a chance on whether her mother would miss it, she hurried after the boy who was already on his way along the road. She was resolved, if the worst should happen, to perish with the young officer whom she now regarded, in her heart and before God, no longer as a mere guest to whom she had given protection and shelter, but as her betrothed husband; and she had decided, as soon as he was strongly enough supported in the house by his followers, to declare this to her mother who would in these circumstances, as she reckoned, be thrown into confusion. Hastening breathlessly along the road she overtook the negro boy. ‘Nanky,' she said, ‘my mother has changed her plan about Herr Strömli's family. Take this letter! It is to Herr Strömli, the old man who is the head of the family, and it invites him to spend a few days in our settlement with his whole party. Be a clever boy and do everything you possibly can to persuade him to accept this arrangement; the negro Congo Hoango will reward you for your help when he comes back!' ‘Very well, Cousin Toni,' answered the boy, carefully folding up the letter and putting it in his pocket. ‘And am I,' he asked, ‘to act as guide to bring the party back here?' ‘Of course,' replied Toni. ‘That is obvious, because they don't know the district. But it is possible that there may be troops marching along the highway, so you must not set out before midnight; after that, however, you must be as quick as you can to get them back here before dawn. Can we rely on you?' she asked. ‘You can rely on Nanky!' answered the boy. ‘I know why you are enticing these white fugitives into the plantation, and I shall serve the negro Hoango well!'

Toni then took the stranger his breakfast, and after it had been cleared away the mother and daughter went back into the living-room at the front of the house to go on with their domestic tasks. After some time, inevitably, the old woman went to the cupboard and naturally enough missed the letter. She pressed her hand for a moment against her head, not trusting her memory, and asked Toni where she could have put the note that the stranger had given her. Toni, after remaining silent for a moment with downcast eyes, answered that to her knowledge the stranger himself had put it back in his pocket and then torn it up, in the presence of both of them, upstairs in his room. Her mother stared at the girl wide-eyed, saying she was sure she could remember him handing it to her and that she had put it in the cupboard; but since after much vain searching she failed to find it and since a number of similar incidents had made her regard her memory as unreliable, she finally had no choice but to accept her daughter's account of the matter. She could not, however, conceal her extreme vexation at this occurrence, pointing out that the letter would have been of the greatest importance to the negro Hoango as a means of luring the family to the plantation. At midday and in the evening, as Toni was serving food to the stranger and she sat at the corner of the table to talk to him, she several times took the opportunity of asking him about the letter; but Toni, whenever this dangerous point was approached, cleverly changed the subject or confused the conversation, so that her mother was never able to make any sense of what the stranger said about the letter or discover what had really become of it. Thus the day passed; after the evening meal Babekan locked the stranger's room, for his own safety, as she said; and after some further discussion with Toni about what trick she might use to get possession of a similar letter on the following day, she went to bed and ordered her daughter to do the same.

As soon as Toni, who had longingly waited for this moment, reached her bedroom and had convinced herself
that her mother was asleep, she took the picture of the Holy Virgin from where it hung by her bed, placed it on a chair, and knelt down before it with clasped hands. She besought the Saviour, the divine Son of Our Lady, in a prayer of infinite fervour, to grant her enough courage and constancy to confess to the young man to whom she had surrendered herself the crimes that burdened her young soul. She vowed at all costs, whatever pain it might bring to her heart, to conceal nothing from him, not even the pitiless and terrible intention with which she had enticed him into the house on the previous day; yet she hoped that for the sake of what she had already done towards securing his rescue he would forgive her, and take her back with him to Europe as his faithful wife. Wonderfully strengthened by this prayer, she rose and took the master key that opened all the rooms in the house, and with it crept carefully, not lighting a candle, along the narrow passage that ran across the building, to the door of the stranger's bedroom. She opened it softly and approached his bed, where he was lying in a deep sleep. The moonlight shone on his fresh, youthful face, and the night breeze, blowing through the open windows, ruffled the hair on his brow. She leaned gently over him, breathing in his sweet breath, and called him by name; but he was immersed in a deep dream, which seemed to be about her: at all events she repeatedly heard him, with trembling lips, ardently whisper the syllables ‘Toni!' She was overcome by a feeling of indescribable sadness, and could not bring herself to drag him down from the heights of enchanting fantasy into the depths of base and miserable reality; and sure in any case that he would wake of his own accord, she knelt down by his bed and covered his dear hand with kisses.

But what words can describe the horror that seized her a few moments later when suddenly, from inside the courtyard, she heard the noise of men and horses and weapons, and could quite clearly recognize the voice of the negro
Congo Hoango, who with the whole band of his followers had unexpectedly returned from General Dessalines' camp. She rushed to hide behind the window curtains, carefully avoiding the moonlight which might have betrayed her presence, and sure enough she could at once hear her mother delivering a report to the negro of everything that had happened during his absence, including the European refugee's arrival in the house. The negro, lowering his voice, commanded silence among his troops in the courtyard, and asked the old woman where the stranger was at that moment; whereupon she pointed out the room to him and at the same time took occasion to inform him of the strange and remarkable conversation she had had with her daughter about the fugitive. She assured the negro that the girl was betraying them and that the entire project of overpowering the stranger was therefore at risk. At all events, she said, she had well noted that the treacherous slut had crept secretly to his bed at nightfall, and there she would be still taking her ease at this very moment; she would even now, if indeed the stranger had not got away already, be warning him and devising with him some means of effecting his escape. The negro, who had had proof in the past of the girl's loyalty in similar cases, exclaimed in reply: ‘Surely what you tell me is impossible!' Then in a fury he shouted: ‘Kelly! Omra! Bring your guns!' And thereupon, without another word, he climbed the stairs with all his negroes following him, and entered the stranger's room.