JACK AGROUND
Opening the door with a yawn, and stretching her arms like one lately
roused from sleep, the Quadroon found herself face to face with the
Coromantee, backed by nearly a score of negroes, the idlest and most
dissolute slaves on the estate. All seemed more or less intoxicated,
and Célandine, who knew the African character thoroughly, by no means
liked their looks. She was aware that much disaffection existed in the
plantation, and the absence of this disorderly gang from their work at
so early an hour in the afternoon argued something like open revolt.
It would have been madness, however, to show fear, and the Obi-woman
possessed, moreover, a larger share of physical courage than is usual
with her sex; assuming, therefore, an air of extreme dignity, she
stationed herself in the doorway and demanded sternly what they wanted.
Hippolyte, who seemed to be leader of the party, doffed his cabbage-tree
hat with ironical politeness, and pointing over his shoulder at two
grinning negroes laden with plantains and other garden produce, came to
business at once.
“We buy,—you sell, Missee Célandine. Same as storekeeper down Port
Welcome. Fust ask gentlemen step in, sit down, take something to drink.”
There was that in his manner which made her afraid to refuse, and
inviting the whole party to enter, she accommodated them with difficulty
in the hut. Reviewing her assembled guests, the Quadroon’s heart sank
within her; but she was conscious of possessing cunning and courage, so
summoned both to her aid.
A negro, under excitement, from whatever cause, is a formidable-looking
companion. Those animal points of head and countenance, by which he is
distinguished from the white man, then assume an unseemly prominence. The
lips thicken, the temples swell, the eyes roll, the brow seems to recede,
and the whole face alters for the worse, like that of a vicious horse,
when he lays his ears back, prepared to kick.
Célandine’s visitors displayed all these alarming signs, and several
other disagreeable peculiarities, the result of partial intoxication.
Some of them carried axes, she observed, and all had knives. Their attire
too, though of the gaudiest colours, was extremely scanty, ragged, and
unwashed. They jested with one another freely enough, as they sat huddled
together on the floor of the hut, but showed little of the childish
good-humour common among prosperous and well-ordered slaves; while she
augured the worst from the absence of that politeness which, to do him
justice, is a prominent characteristic of the negro. Nevertheless, she
dissembled her misgivings, affected an air of dignified welcome, handed
round the calabash, with its accompanying stone bottle, to all in turn,
and felt but little reassured to find that the rum was nearly exhausted
when it had completed the circle.
“Thirteen gentlemen, Missee Célandine,” observed the Coromantee, tossing
off his measure of raw spirits with exceeding relish; “thirteen charms,
best Obi-woman can furnish for the price, ’gainst evil eye, snake-bite,
jumbo-stroke, fire, water, and cold steel, all ’counted for, honourable,
in dem plantain baskets. Hi! you lazy nigger, pay out. Say, again,
missee, what day this of the month?”
Célandine affected to consider.
“The thirteenth,” she answered gravely; “the most unlucky day in the
whole year.”
Hippolyte’s black face fell. “Golly?” said he. “Unlucky! for why? for
what? Dis nigger laugh at luck,” he added, brightening up and turning
what liquor was left in the stone bottle down his own throat. “Lookee
here, missee; you Obi-woman, right enough; you nigger too, yaller all
same as black: you go pray Jumbo for luck. All paid for in dat basket.
Pray Jumbo no rain to-night, put um fire out. Our work, make bobbery;
your work, stay up mountain where spirit can hear, and pray Jumbo till
monkeys wake.”
A suspicion that had already dawned on the Quadroon’s mind was now
growing horribly distinct. It was obvious some important movement must
be intended by the gang that filled her hut, and there was every fear a
general rising might take place of all the slaves on the plantation, if
indeed the insurrection spread no further than the Montmirail estate. She
knew, none better, the nature of the half-reclaimed savage. She thought
of her courageous, high-souled mistress, of her delicate, beautiful
nursling, and shivered while she pictured them in the power of this huge
black monster who sat grinning at her over the empty calabash. She even
forgot for the moment her own long-lost son, hidden up within six feet of
her, and the double danger he would run in the event of detection. She
could only turn her mind in one direction, and that was, where Madame
and Mademoiselle were sitting, placid and unconscious, in the rich white
dresses her own fingers had helped to make.
Their possible fate was too horrible to contemplate. She forced it from
her thoughts, and with all her power of self-concentration, addressed
herself to the means of saving them at any cost. In such an emergency
as the present, surrounded, and perhaps suspected, by the mutineers,
dissimulation seemed her only weapon left, and to dissimulation she
betook herself without delay.
“Hippolyte,” said she, “you are a good soldier. You command all these
black fellows; I can see it in your walk. I always said you had the air
of an officer of France.”
The Coromantee seemed not insensible to flattery. He grinned, wagged his
head, rolled his eyes, and was obviously well pleased.
“Dese niggers make me deir colonel,” said he, springing from the floor
to an attitude of military attention. “Hab words of command like buckra
musketeer. _Par file à droite—Marche! Volte-face!_ Run for your lives!”
“I knew it,” she replied, “and you ought to have learned already to trust
your comrades. Are we not in the same ranks? You say yourself, yellow and
black are all one. You and I are near akin; your people are the people
of my mother’s mother; whom you trust, I trust; whom you hate, I hate,
but far more bitterly, because my injuries are older and deeper than
yours.”
He opened his eyes wondering, but the rum had taken effect, and nothing,
not even the Quadroon’s disloyalty to her mistress, seemed improbable
now. An Obi-woman too, if really in earnest, he considered a valuable
auxiliary; so signed his approval by another grin and a grunt of
acquiescence.
“I live but for one object now,” continued Célandine, in a tone of
repressed fury that did credit to her power of acting. “I have been
waiting all my life for my revenge, and it seems to have come at last.
The Marquise should have given me my freedom long ago if she wished me
to forgive. Ay, they may call me _Mustee_, but I am black, black as
yourself, my brave Hippolyte, at heart. She struck me once,—I tell you,
struck me with her riding-whip, far away yonder in France, and I will
have her blood.”
It is needless to observe this imputed violence was a fabrication for the
especial benefit of Hippolyte, and the energy with which he pronounced
the ejaculation, “Golly!” denoted that he placed implicit reliance on its
truth.
“You are brave,” continued Célandine; “you are strong; you are the fine
tall negro whom we call the Pride of the Plantation. You do not know what
it is to hate like a poor weak woman. I would have no scruple, no mercy;
I would spare none, neither Madame nor Mademoiselle.”
“Ma’amselle come into woods with me,” interrupted Hippolyte, with a
horrible leer. “Good enough wife for Pride of Plantation. Lilly-face look
best by um side of black man. Ma’amselle guess me come for marry her.
When floggee Fleurette, look at me so, afore all de niggers, sweet as
molasses!”
Again Célandine shivered. The wretch’s vanity would have been ludicrous,
had he not been so formidable from his recklessness, and the authority he
seemed to hold over his comrades. She prepared to learn the worst.
“They will both be in our power to-night, I suppose,” said she,
repressing with a strong effort her disgust and fierce desire to snatch
his long knife and stab him where he stood. “Tell me your plan of attack,
my brave colonel, and trust me to help you to the utmost.”
The Coromantee looked about him suspiciously, rolling his eyes in
obvious perplexity. The superstition inherent in his nature made him
desirous of obtaining her assistance, while the Quadroon’s antecedents,
and particularly her marriage with the overseer, seemed to infer that
she would prove less zealous than she affected to be in the cause of
insurrection. He made up his mind therefore to bind her by an oath, which
he himself dictated, and made her swear by the mysterious power she
served, and from which she derived her influence, to be true, silent,
and merciless, till the great event had been accomplished, all the
whites in authority massacred, and the whole estate in the power of the
slaves. Every penalty, both horrible and ludicrous, that the grotesque
imagination of a savage could devise, was called down upon her head
in the event of treachery; and Célandine, who was a sufficiently good
Catholic at heart, swallowed all these imprecations imperturbably enough,
pledging herself, without the slightest hesitation, to the conspiracy.
Then Hippolyte was satisfied and unfolded his plans, while the others
gathered round with fearful interest, wagging their heads, rolling their
eyes, grinning, stamping, and ejaculating deep gutturals of applause.
His scheme was feasible enough; nor to one who knew no scruples of
gratitude, no instincts of compassion, did it present any important
obstacles. He was at the head of an organised body, comprising nearly all
the male slaves on the plantation; a body prepared to rise at a moment’s
notice, if only assured of success. The dozen negroes who accompanied him
had constituted themselves his guards, and were pledged to strike the
first blow, at his command. They were strong, able-bodied, sensual, idle,
dissolute, unscrupulous, and well enough fitted for their enterprise,
but that they were arrant cowards, one and all. As, however, little
resistance could be anticipated, this poltroonery was the more to be
dreaded by their victims, that in the hour of triumph it would surely
turn to cruelty and excess.
Hippolyte, who was not deficient in energy, had also been in
communication with the disaffected slaves on the adjoining estates; these
too were sworn to rise at a given signal, and the Coromantee, feeling
that his own enterprise could scarcely fail, entertained a fervent hope
that in a few hours the whole of the little island, from sea to sea,
would be in possession of the negroes, and he himself chosen as their
chief. The sack and burning of Port Welcome, the massacre of the planters
and abduction of their families, were exciting little incidents of the
future, on which he could hardly trust himself to dwell; but the first
step in the great enterprise was to be taken at Montmirail West, and to
its details Célandine now listened with a horror that, while it curdled
her blood, she was forced to veil under a pretence of zeal and enthusiasm
in the cause.
Her only hope was in the brigantine. Her early associations had taught
her to place implicit reliance on a boat’s crew of English sailors,
and if she could but delay the attack until she had communicated with
the privateer, Mademoiselle, for it was of Mademoiselle she chiefly
thought, might be rescued even yet. If she could but speak to her son,
lying within three feet of her! If she could but make him understand
the emergency! How she trusted he overheard their conversation! How she
prayed he might not have been asleep the whole time!
Hippolyte’s plan of attack was simple enough. It would be dark in
a couple of hours. Long before then, he and his little band meant
to advance as far as the skirts of the bush, from whence they could
reconnoitre the house. Doors and windows would all be open. There was
but one white man in the place, and he unarmed. Nothing could be easier
than to overpower the overseer, and perhaps, for Célandine’s sake,
his life might be spared. Then, it was the Coromantee’s intention to
secure the Marquise and her daughter, which he opined might be done with
little risk, and at the expense of a shriek or two; to collect in the
store-room any of the domestic slaves, male or female, who showed signs
of resistance, and there lock them up; to break open the cellar, serve
out a plentiful allowance of wine to his guards, and then, setting fire
to the house, carry the Marquise and her daughter into the mountains.
The former, to be kept as a hostage, slain, or otherwise disposed of,
according to circumstances; the latter, as the African expressed it
with hideous glee, “for make lilly-face chief wife to dis here handsome
nigger!”
Célandine affected to accept his views with great enthusiasm, but
objected to the time appointed.
“The moon,” said she gravely, “is yet in her first quarter. Her spirit
is gone a journey to the mountains of Africa to bless the bones of our
forefathers. It will be back to-morrow. Jumbo has not been sufficiently
propitiated. Let us sacrifice to him for one night more with jar and
calabash. I will send down for rum to the stores. Brave colonel, you
and your guards shall bivouac here outside her hut, while the Obi-woman
remains within to spend the night in singing and making charms. Jumbo
will thus be pleased, and to-morrow the whole island may be ours without
opposition.”
But Hippolyte was not to be deceived so easily. His plans admitted of
no delay, and the flames ascending from the roof of Montmirail West,
that same night, were to be the signal for a general rising from sea to
sea. His short period of influence had already taught him that such a
blow as he meditated, to be effectual, must be struck at once. Moreover,
the quality of cunning in the savage seems strong in proportion to his
degradation; the Coromantee was a very fox for vigilance and suspicion,
nor did he fail to attribute Célandine’s desire for procrastination to
its true motive.
“To-night, Obi-woman!” said he resolutely. “To-night, or no night at
all. Dis nigger no leave yaller woman here, fear of accidents. Perhaps
to-morrow free blacks kill you same as white. You come with us down
mountain-side into clearing. We keep you safe. You make prayer and sing
whole time.”
With a mischievous leer at a couple of his stalwart followers, he pointed
to the Quadroon. They sprang from the ground and secured her, one on each
side. The unfortunate Obi-woman strove hard to disarm suspicion by an
affectation of ready compliance, but it was obvious they mistrusted her
fidelity and had no intention of letting her out of their sight. It was
with difficulty that she obtained a few moments’ respite, on the plea
that night was about to fall, for the purpose of winding her shawl more
carefully round her head, and in that brief space she endeavoured to warn
her son of the coming outbreak, with a maddening doubt the while that
he might not understand their purport, even if he could hear her words.
Turning towards the door, behind which he was concealed, under pretence
of arranging her head-gear at a bit of broken looking-glass against the
panel, she sang, with as marked an emphasis as she dared, a scrap of some
doggrel sea-ditty, which she had picked up from her first love in the old
happy days, long ago:—
“The boatswain looked upon the land,
And shrill his whistle blew,
The oars were out, the boat was manned,
Says he, ‘My gallant crew,
“‘Our captain in a dungeon lies,
The sharks have got him flat,
But if we fire the town, my boys,
We’ll have him out of that!
“‘We’ll stop their jaw, we’ll spike their guns!
We’ll larn ’em what they’re at—
You bend your backs, and pull, my sons,
We’ll have him out of that!’”
This she sang twice, and then professed her readiness to accompany
Hippolyte and his band down the mountain, delaying their departure,
however, by all the means she could think of, including profuse offers
of hospitality, which had but little effect, possibly because the guests
were personally satisfied that there was nothing left to drink.
Nay, even on the very threshold of the hut she turned back once more,
affecting to have forgotten the most important of the amulets she
carried about her person, and, crossing the floor with a step that must
have awakened the soundest sleeper, repeated, in clear loud tones, the
boatswain’s injunction to his men—
“You bend your backs, and pull, my sons,
We’ll have him out of that!”