“Quietly as a cat I slipped down the stairs and out into the night. Not a sound, not a flicker of light came from any of the little houses in the village. I followed the road down the mountain for a way, and then, as I am a tracker and the moon was well up, I found a path which others had taken since the dew. It skirted the hill, then dipped abruptly into the jungle.
“It was easy to guess its course, for with my bushman’s education I saw that many persons had traveled that trail since sunset. Down it went, twisting and turning, this way and that; but all the time the beat of the drum, though muffled by the heavy foliage, was growing nearer and nearer.
“It was dark in the jungle, but the moon was up, and there were open spaces here and there. The smell of the smoke—and another smell—were in the air, and I was growing wary and looking for sentries, when my eye was caught by something white hanging to a thorn. I loosed it and held it in a moon-ray—and recognized a fragment of the gown worn that night by Madame Fouchère.”
Leyden stopped speaking, then began to hum a little German doggerel. Down below the visitors were saying good-night, and I could hear the men kissing each other on their thick lips. “Ah, mon cher!” they kept saying. “Oh—oh, mon cher!—Oh, m’cher!” Then there would be a rattle of very good Parisian French, because the better classes pride themselves upon their elegance of speech.
“And then?” said I, presently, to Dr. Leyden. He threw out his hands with a Teutonic gesture of disgust.
“Ach!—then I went back, of course. I found a muddy spot in the open, just to make sure, and I saw that Fouchère had passed also. He wore the latest French boots—Madame was still in her high-heeled French slippers at twenty francs the pair.”
He turned to me with a languid air. “One does not spy upon one’s host and hostess during their religious devotions, you know. You understand, Doctor. Those things are not quite—shall we say dignified? Besides—by the way, have you a cigar, or shall I ring? Ah, thanks! As I was about to say, the thing had lost its—its glamour. Madame was too nearly white. It was the primitive element that had so strongly appealed to me—not the hyper-æsthetic. One need not go to Hayti for that. Fouchère belonged at the party, perhaps—but Madame....
“No, I went back, and the sound of a bamboula has never since been able to strike a sympathetic chord in me—but I detest the odor of the stephanotis.”