The bay of Port-au-Prince is hot and simmering, a deep basin enclosed in
a ringing semicircle of mountains, with scarce a breath blowing on the
harbour, and with tall cocoa-nut palms rising unmoved into the still air
above on the low sand-spits that close it in to seaward. The town itself
is wretched, squalid, and hopelessly ramshackled, a despondent
collection of tumbledown wooden houses, interspersed with indescribable
negro huts, mere human rabbit-hutches, where parents and children herd
together, in one higgledy-piggledy, tropical confusion. I had never in
my days seen anything more painfully desolate and dreary, and I feared
that Cesarine, who had not been here since she was a girl of fourteen,
would be somewhat depressed at the horrid actuality, after her exalted
fanciful ideals of the remembered Haiti. But, to my immense surprise, as
it turned out, Cesarine did not appear at all shocked or taken aback at
the squalor and wretchedness all around her. On the contrary, the very
air of the place seemed to inspire her from the first with fresh vigour;
her cough disappeared at once as if by magic; and the colour returned
forthwith to her cheeks, almost as soon as we had fairly cast anchor in
Haitian waters.
The very first day we arrived at Port-au-Prince, Cesarine said to me,
with more shyness than I had ever yet seen her exhibit, "If you
wouldn't mind it, Harry, I should like to go at once, this morning--and
see my grandmother."
I started with astonishment. "Your grandmother, Cesarine!" I cried
incredulously. "My darling! I didn't know you had a grandmother living."
"Yes, I have," she answered, with some slight hesitation, "and I think
if you wouldn't object to it, Harry, I'd rather go and see her alone,
the first time at least, please dearest."
In a moment, the obvious truth, which I had always known in a vague sort
of fashion, but never thoroughly realized, flashed across my mind in its
full vividness, and I merely bowed my head in silence. It was natural
she should not wish me to see her meeting with her Haitian grandmother.
She went alone through the streets of Port-au-Prince, without inquiry,
like one who knew them familiarly of old, and I dogged her footsteps at
a distance unperceived, impelled by the same strange fascination which
had so often driven me to follow Cesarine wherever she led me. After a
few hundred yards, she turned out of the chief business place, and down
a tumbledown alley of scattered negro cottages, till she came at last to
a rather better house that stood by itself in a little dusty garden of
guava-trees and cocoa-nuts. A rude paling, built negro-wise of broken
barrel-staves, nailed rudely together, separated the garden from the
compound next to it. I slipped into the compound before Cesarine
observed me, beckoned the lazy negro from the door of the hut, with one
finger placed as a token of silence upon my lips, dropped a dollar into
his open palm, and stood behind the paling, looking out into the garden
beside me through a hole made by a knot in one of the barrel staves.
Cesarine knocked with her hand at the door, and in a moment was answered
by an old negress, tall and bony, dressed in a loose sack-like gown of
coarse cotton print, with a big red bandanna tied around her short grey
hair, and a huge silver cross dangling carelessly upon her bare and
wrinkled black neck. She wore no sleeves, and bracelets of strange beads
hung loosely around her shrunken and skinny wrists. A more hideous old
hag I had never in my life beheld before; and yet I saw, without waiting
to observe it, that she had Cesarine's great dark eyes and even white
teeth, and something of Cesarine's figure lingered still in her lithe
and sinuous yet erect carriage.
"Grand'mere!" Cesarine said convulsively, flinging her arms with wild
delight around that grim and withered gaunt black woman. It seemed to me
she had never since our marriage embraced me with half the fervour she
bestowed upon this hideous old African witch creature.
"He, Cesarine, it is thee, then, my little one," the old negress cried
out suddenly, in her thin high voice and her muffled Haitian _patois_.
"I did not expect thee so soon, my cabbage. Thou hast come early. Be the
welcome one, my granddaughter."
I reeled with horror as I saw the wrinkled and haggard African kissing
once more my beautiful Cesarine. It seemed to me a horrible desecration.
I had always known, of course, since Cesarine was a quadroon, that her
grandmother on one side must necessarily have been a full-blooded
negress, but I had never yet suspected the reality could be so hideous,
so terrible as this.
I crouched down speechless against the paling in my disgust and
astonishment, and motioned with my hand to the negro in the hut to
remain perfectly quiet. The door of the house closed, and Cesarine
disappeared: but I waited there, as if chained to the spot, under a hot
and burning tropical sun, for fully an hour, unconscious of anything in
heaven or earth, save the shock and surprise of that unexpected
disclosure.
At last the door opened again, and Cesarine apparently came out once
more into the neighbouring garden. The gaunt negress followed her close,
with one arm thrown caressingly about her beautiful neck and shoulders.
In London, Cesarine would not have permitted anybody but a great lady to
take such a liberty with her; but here in Haiti, she submitted to the
old negress's horrid embraces with perfect calmness. Why should she not,
indeed! It was her own grandmother.
They came close up to the spot where I was crouching in the thick
drifted dust behind the low fence, and then I heard rather than saw that
Cesarine had flung herself passionately down upon her knees on the
ground, and was pouring forth a muttered prayer, in a tongue unknown to
me, and full of harsh and uncouth gutturals. It was not Latin; it was
not even the coarse Creole French, the negro _patois_ in which I heard
the people jabbering to one another loudly in the streets around me: it
was some still more hideous and barbaric language, a mass of clicks and
inarticulate noises, such as I could never have believed might possibly
proceed from Cesarine's thin and scornful lips.
At last she finished, and I heard her speaking again to her grandmother
in the Creole dialect. "Grandmother, you will pray and get me one. You
will not forget me. A boy. A pretty one; an heir to my husband!" It was
said wistfully, with an infinite longing. I knew then why she had grown
so pale and thin and haggard before we sailed away from England.
The old hag answered in the same tongue, but in her shrill withered
note, "You will bring him up to the religion, my little one, will you?"
Cesarine seemed to bow her head. "I will," she said. "He shall follow
the religion. Mr. Tristram shall never know anything about it."
They went back once more into the house, and I crept away, afraid of
being discovered, and returned to the yacht, sick at heart, not knowing
how I should ever venture again to meet Cesarine.
But when I got back, and had helped myself to a glass of sherry to
steady my nerves, from the little flask on Cesarine's dressing-table, I
thought to myself, hideous as it all seemed, it was very natural
Cesarine should wish to see her grandmother. After all, was it not
better, that proud and haughty as she was, she should not disown her own
flesh and blood? And yet, the memory of my beautiful Cesarine wrapped in
that hideous old black woman's arms made the blood curdle in my very
veins.
As soon as Cesarine returned, however, gayer and brighter than I had
ever seen her, the old fascination overcame me once more, and I
determined in my heart to stifle the horror I could not possibly help
feeling. And that evening, as I sat alone in the cabin with my wife, I
said to her, "Cesarine, we have never spoken about the religious
question before: but if it should be ordained we are ever to have any
little ones of our own, I should wish them to be brought up in their
mother's creed. You could make them better Catholics, I take it, than I
could ever make them Christians of any sort."
Cesarine answered never a word, but to my intense surprise she burst
suddenly into a flood of tears, and flung herself sobbing on the cabin
floor at my feet in an agony of tempestuous cries and writhings.