“If my sons should present themselves—” proceeded Toussaint—
“They will not come here—they cannot come here,” interrupted Rubaut. “No one knows that you are here, but some three or four who will never tell.”
“How,” thought Toussaint, “have they secured Mars Plaisir, that he shall never tell?” For the poor man’s sake, however, he would not ask this aloud.
Rubaut continued: “The reason why we cannot have the pleasure of giving you the range of the fortress is, that the First Consul thinks it necessary to keep secret the place of your abode—for the good of the colony, as he says. With one of our own countrymen, this seclusion might not be necessary, as the good people of the village could hardly distinguish features from the distance at which they are; and they have no telescopes—no idea of playing the spy upon us, as we can upon them. They cannot distinguish features, so high up—”
“But they could complexion.”
“Exactly so; and it might get abroad that some one of your colour was here.”
“And if it should get abroad, and some one of my sons, or my wife should come, your answer would be that you remember nothing—that you cannot charge your memory with persons and things that are gone by—that you have had prisoners of all complexions—that some have lived and some have died—and that you have something else to do than to remember what became of each. I hope, however, and (as it would be for the advantage of the First Consul) I believe, that you would have the complaisance to show them my grave.”
“Come, come! no foreboding! Foreboding is bad,” repeated Rubaut.
Toussaint smiled, and said—
“What other employment do you afford me than that of looking into the past and future, in order to avoid the present? If, turning from the sickening view which the past presents of the treachery of your race to mine, of the abuse of my brotherly trust in him by which your ruler has afflicted our hearts if, turning from this mournful past, I look the other way, what do I see before me but the open grave?”