... There is a young white lady, accompanied by an aged negress, already
waiting on the south wharf for the boat;--evidently she is to be one
of my fellow-passengers. Quite a pleasing presence: slight graceful
figure,--a face not precisely pretty, but delicate and sensitive, with
the odd charm of violet eyes under black eye-brows....
A friend who comes to see me off tells me all about her. Mademoiselle
Lys is going to New York to be a governess,--to leave her native island
forever. A story sad enough, though not more so than that of many a
gentle creole girl. And she is going all alone, for I see her bidding
good-bye to old Titine,--kissing her. "_Adié encò, chè;--Bon-Dié ké béni
ou!_" sobs the poor servant, with tears streaming down her kind black
face. She takes off her blue shoulder-kerchief, and waves it as the boat
recedes from the wooden steps.
... Fifteen minutes later, Mademoiselle and I find ourselves under the
awnings shading the saloon-deck of the _Guadeloupe_. There are at least
fifty passengers,--many resting in chairs, lazy-looking Demerara chairs
with arm-supports immensely lengthened so as to form rests for the lower
limbs. Overhead, suspended from the awning-frames, are two tin cages
containing parrots;--and I see two little greenish monkeys, no bigger
than squirrels, tied to the wheel-hatch,--two _sakiwinkis_. These are
from the forests of British Guiana. They keep up a continual thin sharp
twittering, like birds,--all the while circling, ascending, descending,
retreating or advancing to the limit of the little ropes attaching them
to the hatch.
The _Guadeloupe_ has seven hundred packages to deliver at St. Pierre: we
have ample time,--Mademoiselle Violet-Eyes and I,--to take one last look
at the "Pays des Revenants."
I wonder what her thoughts are, feeling a singular sympathy for
her,--for I am in that sympathetic mood which the natural emotion of
leaving places and persons one has become fond of, is apt to inspire.
And now at the moment of my going,--when I seem to understand as never
before the beauty of that tropic Nature, and the simple charm of the
life to which I am bidding farewell,--the question comes to me: "Does
she not love it all as I do,--nay, even much more, because of that in
her own existence which belongs to it?" But as a child of the land,
she has seen no other skies,--fancies, perhaps, there may be brighter
ones....
... Nowhere on this earth, Violet-Eyes!--nowhere beneath this sun!...
Oh! the dawnless glory of tropic morning!--the single sudden leap of the
giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,--over the surging of
the mornes! And the early breezes from the hills,--all cool out of
the sleep of the forests, and heavy with vegetal odors thick, sappy,
savage-sweet!--and the wild high winds that run ruffling and crumpling
through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound!--
And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green-drenched with silent
pouring of creepers,--dashed with the lilac and yellow and rosy foam of
liana flowers!--
And the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea,--that as you
mount the heights ever appears to rise perpendicularly behind you,--that
seems, as you descend, to sink and flatten before you!--
And the violet velvet distances of evening;--and the swaying of palms
against the orange-burning,--when all the heaven seems filled with
vapors of a molten sun!...