“Say with me, too: call me a butcher, too! After the long years that you have known my heart, call me a butcher too.”
“Let us talk sense, Toussaint: this is no time for trifling. After August, I shall join you again—to fight, if it be necessary: but I hope it will not.”
“Not if heaven strengthens me to do my work without you, Christophe. After the fever, it is much for the sick to walk: we do not expect the dead to rise.”
“When I join you, after August,” resumed Christophe, “whether for the labours of war or peace, you, and perhaps even Jacques, will wish that your hands were as clean from blood as mine. Your thought, Toussaint!—tell me your thought. If—”
“I was thinking that you will join us, Henri. You will labour till our great work is done. You may err; and you may injure our cause by your error; but you will never be seduced from the rectitude of your own intentions. That is what I was thinking. I would fain keep my judgment of you undisturbed by a grieving heart.”
“You are more than generous, Toussaint: you are just. I was neither. Pardon me. But I am unhappy—I am wretched that you are about to forfeit your greatness, when—Oh, Toussaint! nothing should ever grieve me again, if we could but agree to-day—if I could but see you retire, with your wonted magnanimity, to Pongaudin, there, with your wonted piety, to await the leadings from above. Where is your wonted faith, that you do not see them now, through the clouds that are about us?”
“I cannot but see them now,” said Toussaint, sighing; “and to see is to follow. If you are wholly resolved to make a truce for yourself and your division—”
“I am wholly resolved to do so.”
“Then you compel me to do the same. Without you, I have not force sufficient to maintain an effectual resistance.”
“Thank God! then we shall see you again L’Ouverture, and no longer Toussaint, the outlaw. You will—”