“Of whom next, then? Except Christophe, who is there worthy to be named by you?” asked Monsieur Pascal, with emotion.
“Every one who has deserted us, except, perhaps, La Plume. He is sordid; and I dismiss him. As for Clerveaux and his thousands, they have been weak, but not, perhaps, wicked. They may be recovered. I take the blame of their weakness upon myself. Would that I alone could bear the consequences!”
“You take the blame of their weakness? Is not their former slavery the cause of it? Is there anything in their act but the servility in which they were reared?”
“There is much of that. But I have deepened the taint, in striving to avoid the opposite corruption of revenge. I have the taint myself. The stain of slavery exists in the First of the Blacks himself. Let all others, then, be forgiven. They may thus be recovered. I gave them the lesson of loving and trusting the whites. They have done so, to the point of being treacherous to me. I must now give them another lesson, and time to learn it; and they may possibly be redeemed.”
“You will hold out in the mornes—conduct your resistance on a pinnacle, where the eyes of the blacks may be raised to you—fixed upon you.”
“Just so;—and where they may flock to me, when time shall have taught them my principle and my policy, and revealed the temper and purpose of our invaders. Now, then, to prepare!”
Before dawn, the despatches for the French, on the coast and at home, were prepared; and messengers were dismissed, in every direction, with orders by which the troops which remained faithful would be concentrated, the cultivators raised and collected, stores provided in the fastnesses, and the new acquisitions of the enemy rendered useless to them. Never had the heads of these two able men, working in perfect concert, achieved such a mass of work in a single night.
A little after sunrise, the French party appeared in the salon, where already almost every member of the household was collected; all being under the impression that a crisis had arrived, and that memorable words were about to be spoken.
Toussaint acknowledged the apparent discourtesy of appointing the hour for the departure of his guests; but declared that he had no apology to offer:—that the time for courteous observance was past, when his guests were discovered to be sent merely to amuse and disarm him for the hour, while blows were struck at a distance against the liberties of his race. In delivering his despatches, he said, he was delivering his farewell. Within an hour, the deputation and himself must be travelling in different directions.
Monsieur Coasson, on receiving the packets, said that he had no other desire than to be on his way. There could be no satisfaction, and little safety, in remaining in a house where, under a hypocritical pretence of magnanimity and good-will, there lurked a spirit of hideous malice, of diabolical revenge, towards a race to whom nature, and the universal consent of men, had given a superiority which they could never lose.