Presently, she came out again from her bedroom, with her wet things
still dripping around her. "Smoke that," she said, handing me a tiny
cigarette rolled round in a leaf of fresh tobacco.
"I will not," I answered with a vague surmise, taking it from her
fingers. "I know the smell. It is manchineal. You cannot any longer
deceive me."
She went back to her bedroom once more. I sat, dazed and stupefied, in
the bamboo chair on the front piazza. What to do, I knew not, and cared
not. I was tied to her for life, and there was no help for it, save by
denouncing her to the rude Haitian justice.
In an hour or more, our English maid came out to speak to me. "I'm
afraid, sir," she said, "Mrs. Tristram is getting delirious. She seems
to be in a high fever. Shall I ask one of these poor black bodies to go
out and get the English doctor?"
I went into my wife's bedroom. Cesarine lay moaning piteously on the
bed, in her wet clothes still; her cheeks were hot, and her pulse was
high and thin and feverish. I knew without asking what was the matter
with her. It was yellow fever.
The night's exposure in that terrible climate, and the ghastly scene she
had gone through so intrepidly, had broken down even Cesarine's iron
constitution.
I sent for the doctor and had her put to bed immediately. The black
nurse and I undressed her between us. We found next her bosom, tied by a
small red silken thread, a tiny bone, fresh and ruddy-looking. I knew
what it was, and so did the negress. It was a human finger-bone--the
last joint of a small child's fourth finger. The negress shuddered and
hid her head. "It is Vaudoux, Monsieur!" she said. "I have seen it on
others. Madame has been paying a visit, I suppose, to her grandmother."
For six long endless days and nights I watched and nursed that doomed
criminal, doing everything for her that skill could direct or care could
suggest to me: yet all the time fearing and dreading that she might yet
recover, and not knowing in my heart what either of our lives could ever
be like if she did live through it.
A merciful Providence willed it otherwise.
On the sixth day, the fatal _vomito negro_ set in--the symptom of the
last incurable stage of yellow fever--and I knew for certain that
Cesarine would die. She had brought her own punishment upon her. At
midnight that evening she died delirious.
Thank God, she had left no child of mine behind her to inherit the curse
her mother's blood had handed down to her!