Paula started, and turned to Charter whose gaze sank into her brain.... And so it came about unexpectedly; in the fire-light among the priest's beloved, under the Seven Palms and the ardent mystic smile of the Empress....
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God hath already accepted thy works.... Let thy garments be always white; and let not thy head lack ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest, all the days of thy life.
The words rang in their ears, when they were alone in the city's darkness, and the fire-lights far behind.
On the third day following, they stood together on the Morne d'Orange—the three. Father Fontanel had been in feverish haste to gaze once more upon his city; while Charter and Paula had a mission among the ruins.... The Saragossa was sitting for a new complexion in the harbor of Fort de France, so they had been driven over from the Capital, along the old sea-road. The wind was still; the sun shone through silent towers of smoke, and it was noon. Sunlight bathed the stripped fields of cane, and, seemingly inseparable from the stillness, brooded upon the blue Caribbean. The wreck of the old plantation-house was hunched closer to the ground.
They left Father Fontanel in the carriage, and approached the cistern. Charter halted suddenly at the edge of the stricken lianas, grasping Paula's arm. The well-curbing was broken away, and the earth, for yards surrounding, had caved into the vault. They stood there without speaking for a moment or two, and then he led her back to the carriage.... Father Fontanel did not seem aware of their coming or going, but smiled when they spoke. His eyes, charmed with sunlight, were lost oversea.
At last they stood, the priest between them, at the very edge of the Morne overlooking the shadowed Rue Victor Hugo—a collapsed artery of the whited sepulchre.... The priest caught his breath; his hands lifted from their shoulders and stretched out over the necropolis. His face was upraised.
"God, love the World!" he breathed, and the flesh sank from him.... Much death had dulled their emotions, but this was translation. For an instant they were lifted, exalted, as by the rushing winds of a chariot.
They did not enter the city that day, but came again, the fourth day after the cataclysm. Out of the heat from the prone city, arose a forbidding breath, so that Paula was prevailed upon to stay behind on the Morne.... Sickened and terrified by the actualities, dreadful beyond any imaging, Charter made his way up the cluttered road into Rue Rivoli. Saint Pierre, a smoky pestilential charnel, was only alive now through the lamentations of those who had come down from the hills for their dead.