“Young people like to be positive,” said Madame Ogé to the abbess. “But it does not much matter, as they have life before them; time enough to see what is true, and what is not. Is it your doctrine, my dear young lady, that God has given over His wrath towards this island; and that it is to be happy henceforth, with the negroes for masters?”
“With the negroes for equals, I think it may be happy. But I never thought of God being wrathful towards us. I thought our miseries had arisen out of men’s wrath with each other.”
“If ever,” said Madame Ogé, in a low tone, but yet so that every word was heard—“if ever there was a place set apart by cursing—if ever there was a hell upon this earth, it is this island. Men can tell us where paradise was—it was not here, whatever Columbus might say. The real paradise where the angels of God kept watch, and let no evil thing enter, was on the other side of the globe: and I say that this place was meant for a hell, as that was for a heaven, upon earth. It looked like heaven to those who first came: but that was the devil’s snare. It was to make lust sweeter, and cruelty safer, that he adorned the place as he did. In a little while, it appeared like what it was. The innocent natives were corrupted; the defenceless were killed; the strong were made slaves. The plains were laid waste, and the valleys and woods were rifled. The very bees ceased to store their honey: and among the wild game there was found no young. Then came the sea-robbers, and haunted the shores: and many a dying wretch screamed at night among the caverns—many a murdered corpse lies buried in our sands. Then the negroes were brought in from over the sea; and from among their chains, from under the lash, grew up the hatred of races. The whites hated the mulattoes, and despised the blacks. The mulattoes hated both the whites and the blacks; and—”
“And,” interposed Euphrosyne, courageously, “the blacks hated neither. They loved where they could; and where they could not love, they forgave; and there lies the proof that this island is not hell.”
“You have proved nothing, my dear, but that you do not know what has happened, even since you were born. Any white will tell you what the negroes did, so late as the year ninety-one—how they killed their masters by inches—how they murdered infants—how they carried off ladies into the woods—”
A sign from the abbess availed to stop Madame Ogé, even in the midst of a subject on which none usually dared to interrupt her. Euphrosyne, in some agitation, replied, “I am aware of all that you say: but every one allows that the most ignorant and cruel of the negroes did over again exactly what they had seen the whites do to their race. But these revengeful blacks were few, very few, in comparison with the numbers who spared their masters, helped and comforted them, and are now working on their estates—friends with all who will be friends with them. The place is not hell where thousands of men forgot the insults of a lifetime, and bind up the wounds of their oppressors.”
“I cannot doubt,” said the abbess, “that ever since there was a Christian in the island, there have been angels of God at hand, to sanctify the evil which they were not commissioned to prevent. Violence is open to the day. Patience is hidden in the heart. Revenge has shouted his battle-cry at noon, while Forgiveness breathes her lowly prayer at midnight. Spirits from hell may have raged along our high roads; but I trust that in the fiercest times, the very temper of Christ may have dwelt in a thousand homes, in a thousand nooks of our valleys and our woods.”
“Besides,” sister Benoite ventured to say, “our worst troubles were so long ago! For ten years now we have been under the holy rule of a devout man; and, for the most part, at peace.”
“Peace!” exclaimed Madame Ogé, contemptuously.
“There have been disputes among the rulers, as Father Gabriel says there are among all the rulers in the world; but he says (and no one knows better than Father Gabriel) that the body of the people have not been troubled by these disputes, and are not even aware of them.”