“Here comes that boy again,” cried Moyse. “Let us go into the thicket, among the citrons.”
Denis found them, however—found Moyse gathering the white and purple blossoms for Génifrède, while she was selecting the fruit of most fragrant rind from the same tree, to carry into the house.
“You must come in—you must come to dinner,” cried Denis. “Aimée has had a drawing lesson, while you have been doing nothing all this while. They said you were sketching; but I told them how idle you were.”
“I will go back with Denis,” said Génifrède. “You threw away my sketch-book, Moyse. You may find it, and follow us.”
Their path lay together as far as the garden-house. When there, Moyse seized Denis unawares, shot him through the window into the house, and left him to get out as he might, and bring the book. The boy was so long in returning, that his sister became uneasy, lest some snake or other creature should have detained him in combat. She was going to leave the table in search of him, because Moyse would not, when he appeared, singing, and with the book upon his head.
“Who calls Génifrède idle?” cried he, flourishing the book. “Look here!” And he exhibited a capital sketch of herself and Moyse, as he had found them, gathering fruits and flowers.
“Can it be his own?” whispered Génifrède to her lover.
Denis nodded and laughed, while Azua gravely criticised and approved, without suspicion that the sketch was by no pupil of his own.
In the cool evening, Génifrède was really no longer idle. While Denis and Juste were at play, they both at once stumbled and fell over something in the long grass, which proved to be a marble statue of a Naiad, lying at length. Moyse seized it, and raised it where it was relieved by a dark green back-ground. The artist declared it an opportunity for a lesson which was not to be lost: and the girls began to draw, as well as they could for the attempts of the boys to restore the broken urn to the arm from which it had fallen. When Denis and Juste found that they could not succeed, and were only chidden for being in the way, they left the drawing party seated under their clump of cocoa-nut trees, and went to hear what Madame was relating to Bellair and Deesha, in the hearing of Monsieur Molière, Laxabon, and Vincent. Her narration was one which Denis had often heard, but was never tired of listening to. She was telling of the royal descent of her husband—how he was grandson of Gaou Guinou, the king of the African tribe of Arrudos: how this king’s second son was taken in battle, and sold, with other prisoners of war, into slavery: how he married an African girl on the Breda estate, and used to talk of home and its wars, and its haunts, and its sunshine idleness—how he used thus to talk in the evenings, and on Sundays, to the boy upon his knee; so that Toussaint felt, from his infancy, like an African, and the descendant of chiefs. This was a theme which Madame L’Ouverture loved to dwell on, and especially when listened to as now. The Congo chief and his wife hung upon her words, and told in their turn how their youth had been spent at home—how they had been kidnapped, and delivered over to the whites. In the eagerness of their talk, they were perpetually falling unconsciously into the use of their negro language, and as often recalled by their hearers to that which all could understand. Molière and Laxabon listened earnestly; and even Loisir, occupied as he was still with the architecture of the mansion, found himself impatient if he lost a word of the story. Vincent alone, negro as he was, was careless and unmoved. He presently sauntered away, and nobody missed him.
He looked over the shoulder of the architect.