Along the National Road you find many paths like these. Short cuts to villages, paths used by the cane cutters and market folk, often mere traces half smothered by the tropical grasses.
He followed the path which led towards a wood of ceibas and angelines, palms with enormous trunks, thick as the trunks of full grown oak trees; tree ferns and wild pines.
As he came a voice hailed him from the liquid shadow of the trees, it was the voice of the siffleur de montagne; clear, silvery, bell-like, the voice of the bird came through the silence of the sultry noon. There was no other sound but the stirring of the palm fronds in the wind.
Here, amidst the trees, by this old forgotten pathway lay a shrine to the Virgin; one of the thousand shrines that are found on the roads and pathways of Martinique. As he pushed the lianas and the air shoots of the wild pine aside, a voice other than the voice of the siffleur de montagne met his ear. The bird had ceased, and through the murmur of the wind in the trees came this voice; the voice of a woman, sweeter than the voice of the bird.
* * * * *
Moving silently as a shadow, pushing the leafy veils aside, scarcely breathing, he reached a point from which he could see vaguely in the twilight of the trees the shrine and the woman kneeling before it.
Her voice was clear now, and the soft, childish Creole words of the votary came to him for whom she was giving thanks.
No supplicatory prayer was this, but an assured thanksgiving for the safety of one who had been spared the darkness and the terror of chaos, the horror of death, the fate of her ruined world, for one who was safe and who would return. “At morning, noon, and evening, I have praised thee on my knees—”
It was the noonday prayer—and it passed devoutly from a prayer of praise to one of supplication. Supplication for the souls of the dead and for the living, for Missie Seguin who had been spared even as she had been spared; for herself, a creature not deserving the protection that had saved her, that had led her away to the safety of Grande Anse when Pelée had spoken and the world had fallen in ruins.
Then she rose to her feet, the white magic of Love and Faith still like a light upon her face. As her eyes fell upon the man standing beneath the trees, for one divine second she paused with breath caught back, spirit like, and ringed with the twilight as with a charm.