VII.

A few days later, when we had settled down for a three months' stay at a

little bungalow on the green hills behind Port-au-Prince, Cesarine said

to me early in the day, "I want to go away to-day, Harry, up into the

mountains, to the chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Secours."

I bowed my head in acquiescence. "I can guess why you want to go,

Reeney," I answered gently. "You want to pray there about something

that's troubling you. And if I'm not mistaken, it's the same thing that

made you cry the other evening when I spoke to you down yonder in the

cabin."

The tears rose hastily once more into Cesarine's eyes, and she cried in

a low distressed voice, "Harry, Harry, don't talk to me so. You are too

good to me. You will kill me. You will kill me."

I lifted her head from the table, where she had buried it in her arms,

and kissed her tenderly. "Reeney," I said, "I know how you feel, and I

hope Notre Dame will listen to your prayers, and send you what you ask

of her. But if not, you need never be afraid that I shall love you any

the less than I do at present."

Cesarine burst into a fresh flood of tears. "No, Harry," she said, "you

don't know about it. You can't imagine it. To us, you know, who have the

blood of Africa running in our veins, it is not a mere matter of fancy.

It is an eternal disgrace for any woman of our race and descent not to

be a mother. I cannot help it. It is the instinct of my people. We are

all born so: we cannot feel otherwise."

It was the only time either of us ever alluded in speaking with one

another to the sinister half of Cesarine's pedigree.

"You will let me go with you to the mountains, Reeney?" I asked,

ignoring her remark. "You mustn't go so far by yourself, darling."

"No, Harry, you can't come with me. It would make my prayers

ineffectual, dearest. You are a heretic, you know, Harry. You are not

Catholic. Notre Dame won't listen to my prayer if I take you with me on

my pilgrimage, my darling."

I saw her mind was set upon it, and I didn't interfere. She would be

away all night, she said. There was a rest-house for pilgrims attached

to the chapel, and she would be back again at Maisonette (our bungalow)

the morning after.

That afternoon she started on her way on a mountain pony I had just

bought for her, accompanied only by a negro maid. I couldn't let her go

quite unattended through those lawless paths, beset by cottages of half

savage Africans; so I followed at a distance, aided by a black groom,

and tracked her road along the endless hill-sides up to a fork in the

way where the narrow bridle-path divided into two, one of which bore

away to leftward, leading, my guide told me, to the chapel of Notre Dame

de Bon Secours.

At that point the guide halted. He peered with hand across his eyebrows

among the tangled brake of tree-ferns with a terrified look; then he

shook his woolly black head ominously. "I can't go on, Monsieur," he

said, turning to me with an unfeigned shudder. "Madame has not taken the

path of Our Lady. She has gone to the left along the other road, which

leads at last to the Vaudoux temple."

I looked at him incredulously. I had heard before of Vaudoux. It is the

hideous African canibalistic witchcraft of the relapsing half-heathen

Haitian negroes. But Cesarine a Vaudoux worshipper! It was too

ridiculous. The man must be mistaken: or else Cesarine had taken the

wrong road by some slight accident.

Next moment, a horrible unspeakable doubt seized upon me irresistibly.

What was the unknown shrine in her grandmother's garden at which

Cesarine had prayed in those awful gutturals? Whatever it was, I would

probe this mystery to the very bottom. I would know the truth, come what

might of it.

"Go, you coward!" I said to the negro. "I have no further need of you. I

will make my way alone to the Vaudoux temple."

"Monsieur," the man cried, trembling visibly in every limb, "they will

tear you to pieces. If they ever discover you near the temple, they will

offer you up as a victim to the Vaudoux."

"Pooh," I answered, contemptuous of the fellow's slavish terror. "Where

Madame, a woman, dares to go, I, her husband, am certainly not afraid to

follow her."

"Monsieur," he replied, throwing himself submissively in the dust on the

path before me, "Madame is Creole; she has the blood of the Vaudoux

worshippers flowing in her veins. Nobody will hurt her. She is free of

the craft. But Monsieur is a pure white and uninitiated.... If the

Vaudoux people catch him at their rites, they will rend him in pieces,

and offer his blood as an expiation to the Unspeakable One."

"Go," I said, with a smile, turning my horse's head up the right-hand

path toward the Vaudoux temple. "I am not afraid. I will come back again

to Maisonette to-morrow."

I followed the path through a tortuous maze, beset with prickly cactus,

agave, and fern-brake, till I came at last to a spur of the hill, where

a white wooden building gleamed in front of me, in the full slanting

rays of tropical sunset. A skull was fastened to the lintel of the door.

I knew at once it was the Vaudoux temple.

I dismounted at once, and led my horse aside into the brake, though I

tore his legs and my own as I went with the spines of the cactus plants;

and tying him by the bridle to a mountain cabbage palm, in a spot where

the thick underbrush completely hid us from view, I lay down and waited

patiently for the shades of evening.

It was a moonless night, according to the Vaudoux fashion; and I knew

from what I had already read in West Indian books that the orgies would

not commence till midnight.

From time to time, I rubbed a fusee against my hand without lighting

it, and by the faint glimmer of the phosphorus on my palm, I was able to

read the figures of my watch dial without exciting the attention of the

neighbouring Vaudoux worshippers.

Hour after hour went slowly by, and I crouched there still unseen among

the agave thicket. At last, as the hands of the watch reached together

the point of twelve, I heard a low but deep rumbling noise coming

ominously from the Vaudoux temple. I recognized at once the familiar

sound. It was the note of the bull-roarer, that mystic instrument of

pointed wood, whirled by a string round the head of the hierophant, by

whose aid savages in their secret rites summon to their shrines their

gods and spirits. I had often made one myself for a toy when I was a boy

in England.

I crept out through the tangled brake, and cautiously approached the

back of the building. A sentinel was standing by the door in front, a

powerful negro, armed with revolver and cutlas. I skulked round

noiselessly to the rear, and lifting myself by my hands to the level of

the one tiny window, I peered in through a slight scratch on the white

paint, with which the glass was covered internally.

I only saw the sight within for a second. Then my brain reeled, and my

fingers refused any longer to hold me. But in that second, I had read

the whole terrible, incredible truth: I knew what sort of a woman she

really was whom I had blindly taken as the wife of my bosom.

Before a rude stone altar covered with stuffed alligator skins, human

bones, live snakes, and hideous sorts of African superstition, a tall

and withered black woman stood erect, naked as she came from her

mother's womb, one skinny arm raised aloft, and the other holding below

some dark object, that writhed and struggled awfully in her hand on the

slab of the altar, even as she held it. I saw in a flash of the torches

behind it was the black hag I had watched before at the Port-au-Prince

cottage.

Beside her, whiter of skin, and faultless of figure, stood a younger

woman, beautiful to behold, imperious and haughty still, like a Greek

statue, unmoved before that surging horrid background of naked black and

cringing savages. Her head was bent, and her hand pressed convulsively

against the swollen veins in her throbbing brow; and I saw at once it

was my own wife--a Vaudoux worshipper--Cesarine Tristram.

In another flash, I knew the black woman had a sharp flint knife in her

uplifted hand; and the dark object in the other hand I recognized with a

thrill of unspeakable horror as a negro girl of four years old or

thereabouts, gagged and bound, and lying on the altar.

Before I could see the sharp flint descend upon the naked breast of the

writhing victim, my fingers in mercy refused to bear me, and I fell half

fainting on the ground below, too shocked and unmanned even to crawl

away at once out of reach of the awful unrealizable horror.

But by the sounds within, I knew they had completed their hideous

sacrifice, and that they were smearing over Cesarine--my own wife--the

woman of my choice--with the warm blood of the human victim.

Sick and faint, I crept away slowly through the tangled underbrush,

tearing my skin as I went with the piercing cactus spines; untied my

horse from the spot where I had fastened him; and rode him down without

drawing rein, cantering round sharp angles and down horrible ledges,

till he stood at last, white with foam, by the grey dawn, in front of

the little piazza at Maisonette.