“You would have put it out with your tears—hey, Mademoiselle Euphrosyne?”
“Ask Madame, your lady, what she would have done in such a case: she stood beside me. But does L’Ouverture say we must remove?”
“L’Ouverture thinks,” said Toussaint, who heard her question, “that this is still the safest place for the brave women who keep up his heart by their cheerful faces. He is ashamed that they have been negligently guarded. It shall not happen again.”
He was just departing for the Plateaux. As he went out he said to his wife, while he cast a look of tender compassion upon Madame Bellair—
“I shall tell Charles that you will cherish Deesha. It is well that we can let her remain here, beside the graves of her children. Bury them with honour, Margot.”
Chapter Thirty Two.
August far-off.
In time of peace, and if her children had perished by any other mode, it might have been a consolation to Deesha to dwell for a time beside their graves. As it was, the deep bark of the murderous dogs filled her ear perpetually, and their fangs seemed to tear her heart. Her misery in the quiet mansion of the mornes was unendurable; and the very day after the funeral she departed, with her husband, to a place where no woman’s eye could mark her maternal anguish—where no semblance of a home kept alive the sense of desolation. She retired, with her husband and his troop, to a fastness higher up in the Morne-du-Chaos, whence they kept watch over the regular entrenchments below, cut off supplies of provisions from the French, harassed all their marches, and waged a special war against the bloodhounds—the negro’s most dreaded foe. More, however, were perpetually brought over from Cuba, and regularly trained, by means too barbarous for detail, to make negroes their prey. From the hour when Deesha first heard the cry of a bloodhound, more than the barbarism of her native Congo took possession of her. Never more was she seen sowing under the shade of the tamarind-tree. Never more did she spread the table, for husband or guests, within a house. Never more was her voice heard singing, gaily or plaintively, the songs that she had gathered from the palm groves of Africa, or the vineyards of France, or from the flowery fields of a mother’s hopes. Henceforth she carried the rifle, and ate her meal in stern silence, in the cave of the rock. When she laughed, it was as her shot went straight to her victim’s heart. When she spoke, it was of the manoeuvres of her mountain war; and the only time that she was ever seen to shed tears was when a rumour of a truce reached the pinnacle on which she dwelt. Though assured that any truce could be only, as every negro knew, a truce till August, the mere semblance of accommodation with the foe forced tears of vexation from eyes which were for ever after dry. If she felt a gleam of satisfaction before leaving Le Zéphyr, it was at the singular accident by which Juste, always so bent upon being a soldier, shared the honours of a military funeral. Juste and Tobie were buried with the soldiers who had fallen in the defence of the house; and to the father, who followed the coffins, and the mother, who hid herself in the thicket, there was something like pleasure in the roll of the drum, and the measure of the dead march, and the warlike tone of the shrill dirge which was sung round the open graves, and the discharge of firearms over them—a satisfaction like that of fulfilling the last wish of their boy. This done, and the graves fenced and planted, the childless pair departed, wishing, perhaps, in their own hearts, that they could weep their misfortune like those whom they left behind.