“Everybody praises him but me,” pursued Jacques. “I find fault with him sometimes; and to-night particularly.”
“Then you are wrong, Jacques. You know you have everybody against you.”
“Time will show that I am right. Time will show the mischief of sending away any whites to do us harm in far countries.”
“Oh, you do not blame him for helping away Monsieur Bayou!”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why, we have been under him ever since we were children—and a kind youth he was then. And he taught my husband to read, and made him his coachman; and then he made him overseer; and he has always indulged the children, and always bought my young guinea-fowl, and—”
“I know that. All that will not prevent the mischief of helping him away. Toussaint ought to have seen that if we send our masters to all the four sides of the world, they will bring the world down upon us.”
“Perhaps Toussaint did see it,” said the man himself, from the other side of his wife’s horse. “But he saw another thing, too—that any whites who stayed would be murdered.”
“That is true enough; and murdered they ought to be. They are a race of tyrants and rebels that our warm island hates.”
“Nobody hated Monsieur Bayou,” said Margot.