Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

Heavy footsteps were now heard hurrying on the stairs, and whispered voices urging contrary directions, but all with the same purport. There seemed to be no thought of compassion, no talk of mercy. Even while hearing their victims, Hippolyte and Achille, who was his second in command, scrupled not to discuss the fate of the ladies when they should have gained possession of their persons—a fate which turned the daughter’s blood to ice, the mother’s to fire. It was no time now to think of compromise or capitulation, or aught but selling life at the dearest, and gaining every moment possible by the sacrifice of an enemy.

Even in the last extremity, however, the genius of system, so remarkable in all French minds, did not desert the Marquise. She counted the charges in her pistol-case, and calculated the resources of her foes with a cool, methodical appreciation of the chances for and against her, totally unaffected by the enormous disproportion of the odds. She was good, she argued, for a dozen shots in all. She would allow for two misses; sagely reflecting that in a chance medley like the present she could hardly preserve a steadiness of hand and eye that had heretofore so discomfited Madame de Sabran in the shooting galleries of Marly and Versailles. Eight shots would then be left, exclusive of two that she determined at all risks to reserve for the last. The dead bodies of eight negroes she considered, slain by the hand of one white woman, ought to put the whole black population of the island to the rout; but supposing that the rum they had drunk should have rendered them so reckless as to disregard even such a warning, and that, with her defences broke down, she found herself and daughter at their mercy, then—and while the Marquise reasoned thus, the blood mounted to her eyes, and a hand of ice seemed to close round her heart—the two reserve shots should be directed with unerring hand, the one into her daughter’s bosom, the other through her own.

And Cerise, now that the crisis had arrived at last, in so far as they were to be substantiated by the enforced composure of a passive endurance, fully vindicated her claims to noble blood. She muttered many a prayer indeed, that arose straight from her heart, but her eyes were fixed on her mother the while, and she had disposed the ammunition on a chair beside her in such a manner as to reload for the Marquise with rapidity and precision. “We are like a front and rear rank of the Grey Musketeers,” said the latter, with a wild attempt at hilarity, in which a strong hysterical tendency, born of over-wrought feelings, was with difficulty kept down. “The affair will soon commence now, and, my child, if worst comes to worst, remember there is no surrender. I hear them advancing to the assault. Courage! my darling. Steady! and Vive la France!”

The words were still upon her lips, when a swarm of negroes, crowding and shouldering up the narrow passage, halted at her door. Hippolyte commenced his summons to the besieged by a smashing blow with the crowbar, that splintered one of the panels and set the whole wood-work quivering to its hinges. Then he applied his thick lips to the keyhole, and shouted in brutal glee—

“Time to wake up now, missee! You play ’possum no longer, else cut down gum-tree at one stroke. Wot you say to dis nigger for buckra bridegroom? Time to come out now and dance jigs at um wedding.”

There was not a quiver in her voice while the Marquise answered in cold imperious tones—

“You are running up a heavy reckoning for this night’s work. I know your ringleaders, and refuse to treat with them. Nevertheless, I am not a severe mistress. If the rest of the negroes will go quietly home, and resume their duties with to-morrow’s sunrise, I will not be hard upon them. You know me, and can trust my word.”

Cheers of derision answered this haughty appeal, and loud suggestions for every kind of cruelty and insult, to be inflicted on the two ladies, were heard bandied about amongst the slaves. Hippolyte replied fiercely—

“Give in at once! Open this minute, or neither of you shall leave the house alive! For the Marquise—Achille! I give her to you! For lilly ma’amselle—I marry her this very night. See! before the moon goes down!”

Cerise raised her head in scornful defiance. Her face was livid, but it was stamped with the same expression as her mother’s now. There could be no question both were prepared to die game to the last.