And here this legend ends. The woman, realizing that her presence in Aachen served no purpose, left behind her a small capital sum to be held in trust by the courts for the benefit of her poor sons, and returned to the Hague, so deeply moved by the whole incident that a year later she was received back into the bosom of the Catholic Church; her sons, for their part, lived to an advanced age and died happily and peacefully, after once more, as was their custom, performing the Gloria in excelsis.
The Betrothal in Santo Domingo
ON Monsieur Guillaume de Villeneuve’s plantation at Port-au-Prince in the French sector of the island of Santo Domingo there lived at the beginning of this century, at the time when the blacks were murdering the whites, a terrible old negro called Congo Hoango. This man, who came originally from the Gold Coast of Africa, had seemed in his youth to be of a loyal and honest disposition, and having once saved his master’s life when they were sailing across to Cuba, he had been rewarded by the latter with innumerable favours and kindnesses. Not only did Monsieur de Villeneuve at once grant him his freedom, and on returning to Santo Domingo make him the gift of a house and home; a few years later, although this was contrary to local custom, he even appointed him as manager of his considerable estate, and since he did not want to re-marry provided him, in lieu of a wife, with an old mulatto woman called Babekan, who lived on the plantation and to whom through his first wife Congo Hoango was distantly related. Moreover, when the negro had reached the age of sixty he retired him on handsome pay and as a crowning act of generosity even made him a legatee under his will; and yet all these proofs of gratitude failed to protect Monsieur de Villeneuve from the fury of this ferocious man. In the general frenzy of vindictive rage that flared up in all those plantations as a result of the reckless actions of the National Convention, Congo Hoango had been one of the first to seize his gun and, remembering only the tyranny that had snatched him from his native land, blew his master’s brains out. He set fire to the house in which Madame de Villeneuve had taken refuge with her three children and all the other white people in the settlement, laid waste the whole plantation to which the heirs, who lived in Port-au-Prince, could have made claim, and when every single building on the estate had been razed to the ground he assembled an armed band of negroes and began scouring the whole neighbourhood, to help his blood-brothers in their struggle against the whites. Sometimes he would ambush travellers who were making their way in armed groups across country; sometimes he would attack in broad daylight the settlements in which the planters had barricaded themselves, and would put every human being he found inside to the sword. Such indeed was his inhuman thirst for revenge that he even insisted on the elderly Babekan and her young daughter, a fifteen-year-old mestiza called Toni, taking part in this ferocious war by which he himself was feeling altogether rejuvenated: the main building of the plantation, in which he was now living, stood in an isolated spot by the road, and since it often happened during his absences that white or creole refugees came there seeking food or shelter, he instructed the two women to offer assistance and favours to these white dogs, as he called them, and thus delay them in the house until his return. Babekan, who suffered from consumption as a result of a cruel flogging that had been inflicted on her when she was a girl, used on these occasions to dress up her young daughter in her best clothes, for Toni’s yellowish complexion made her very useful for the purpose of this hideous deception; she urged her to refuse the strangers no caresses short of the final intimacy, which was forbidden her on pain of death; and when Congo Hoango returned with his negro troop from his expeditions in the surrounding district, immediate death would be the fate of the wretches who had allowed themselves to be beguiled by these stratagems.
Now in the year 1803, as the world knows, when General Dessalines was advancing against Port-au-Prince at the head of thirty thousand negroes, everyone whose skin was white retreated to this stronghold to defend it. For it was the last outpost of French power on this island, and if it fell no white person on Santo Domingo had any chance of escape. And thus it happened that just when old Hoango was not there, having set out with his black followers to take a consignment of powder and lead right through the French lines to General Dessalines, on a dark and stormy and rainy night someone knocked at the back door of his house. Old Babekan, who was already in bed, got up, merely throwing a skirt round her waist, opened the window and asked who was there. ‘By the Blessed Virgin and all the saints,’ said the stranger in a low voice, placing himself under the window, ‘before I tell you, answer me one question!’ And reaching out through the darkness of the night to grasp the old woman’s hand, he asked: ‘Are you a negress?’ Babekan said: ‘Well, you must surely be a white man, since you would rather look this pitch-black night in the face than a negress! Come in,’ she added, ‘there’s nothing to fear; I am a mulatto woman, and the only person except myself who lives in this house is my daughter, a mestiza!’ and so saying she closed the window, as if intending to come down and open the door to him; but instead, on the pretext that she could not at once lay hands on the key, she snatched some clothes out of the cupboard, crept upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom and woke her. ‘Toni!’ she said, ‘Toni!’ ‘What is it, mother?’ ‘Quick!’ said Babekan. ‘Get up at once and dress! Here are clothes, clean white linen and stockings! A white man on the run is at the door and wants to be let in!’ ‘A white man?’ asked Toni, half sitting up in bed. She took the clothes which the old woman handed to her and said: ‘But mother, is he alone? and will it be safe for us to let him in?’ ‘Of course, of course!’ replied the old woman, striking a light, ‘he is unarmed and alone and trembling in every limb for fear of being attacked by us!’ And so saying, as Toni got up and put on her skirt and stockings, she lit the big lantern which stood in the corner of the room, quickly tied the girl’s hair up on top of her head in the fashion of the country, laced up her bodice and put on her hat, gave her the lantern and ordered her to go down to the courtyard and fetch the stranger in.
Meanwhile the barking of some dogs in the yard had wakened a small boy called Nanky, an illegitimate son of Hoango’s by a negress, who slept in the outhouses with his brother Seppy; and seeing in the moonlight a man standing by himself on the steps at the back door, he at once, as he was instructed to do in such cases, rushed to the main gate through which the man had entered, and locked it. The stranger was puzzled by this and asked the boy, whom to his horror he recognized at close quarters as a negro: ‘Who lives in this settlement?’ And on hearing his answer that since Monsieur de Villeneuve’s death the property had been taken over by the negro Hoango, he was just about to hurl the boy to the ground, snatch the key to the main gate from his hand and escape into the open, when Toni, holding the lantern, came out of the house. ‘Quick!’ she said, seizing his hand and drawing him towards the door, ‘come in here!’ As she spoke she was careful to hold the lantern in such a way that its beam would fall full on her face. ‘Who are you?’ exclaimed the stranger, struggling to free himself and gazing, surprised for more reasons than one, at her lovely young figure. ‘Who lives in this house in which you tell me I shall find refuge?’ ‘No one, I swear by the heavens above us, but my mother and myself!’ said the girl. And she renewed with great eagerness her efforts to draw him in after her. ‘What, no one!’ cried the stranger, snatching his hand from hers and taking a step backwards. ‘Did this boy not tell me just now that a negro called Hoango is living here?’ ‘No, I tell you!’ said the girl, stamping her foot with an air of vexation, ‘and although the house belongs to a monster of that name, he is absent just now and ten miles away!’ And so saying she dragged him into the house with both hands, ordered the boy to tell no one who had arrived, seized the stranger by the hand as they passed through the door, and led him upstairs to her mother’s room.
‘Well,’ said the old woman, who had been listening to the whole conversation from the window and had noticed by the lamplight that their visitor was an officer, ‘what’s the meaning of that
sword you’re wearing under your arm all ready to draw?’ And she added, putting on her spectacles: ‘We have risked our own lives by granting you refuge in our house; have you come in here to reward this kindness with treachery, as is customary among your fellow countrymen?’ ‘God forbid!’ replied the stranger, who was now standing right in front of her chair. He seized the old woman’s hand, pressed it to his heart, cast a few diffident glances round the room and then unbuckled his sword, saying: ‘You see before you the most wretched of men, but not an ungrateful villain!’ ‘Who are you?’ asked the old woman, pushing up a chair for him with her foot and telling the girl to go into the kitchen and prepare as good a supper for him as she could manage in a hurry. The stranger replied: ‘I am an officer in the French army, but as you may already have guessed, not myself a Frenchman; my native country is Switzerland and my name is Gustav von der Ried. How I wish I had never left home for this accursed island! I have come from Fort Dauphin, where as you know all the whites have been murdered, and my purpose is to reach Port-au-Prince before General Dessalines succeeds in surrounding and besieging it with the troops under his command.’ ‘From Fort Dauphin!’ exclaimed the old woman. ‘So you actually succeeded, with your white face, in travelling all that way right through a nigger country in revolt?’ ‘God and all the saints protected me!’ replied the stranger. ‘Nor am I alone, my good old woman; I have left some companions behind me, including a venerable old man who is my uncle, with his wife and five children, not to mention several servants and maids who belong to the family; a company of twelve souls, with only two wretched mules to help us, and I have to escort them in indescribably laborious night marches, for we dare not let ourselves be seen by daylight on the highway.’ ‘Why, heaven save us!’ exclaimed the old woman, shaking her head compassionately and taking a pinch of snuff. ‘And where are your travelling companions at this moment?’ The stranger hesitated for a moment and then replied: ‘You are someone I can trust; in your face, like a gleam of light, there is a tinge of my own complexion. I will tell you that my family is hidden a mile from here, by the seagull pond, in the thick woods that cover the hills round it; hunger and thirst forced us the day before yesterday to take refuge there. We sent our servants out last night to try to buy a little bread from the country people, but in vain; for fear of being caught and killed they made no effective attempt to do so, and consequently I myself, at mortal risk, had to leave our hiding-place tonight to try my luck. If I am not much deceived,’ he continued, pressing the old woman’s hand, ‘heaven has led me to compassionate people who do not share the cruel and outrageous resentment that has seized all the inhabitants of this island. Please be kind enough – I will pay you very well for it – to let me have a few baskets full of food and refreshments; we are only five more days’ journey from Port-au-Prince, and if you would provide us with the means to reach that town, we shall forever afterwards think of you both as the saviours of our lives.’ ‘Indeed, indeed, this frenzy of resentment,’ said the old woman hypocritically. ‘Is it not as if the hands of one and the same body or the teeth of one and the same mouth raged against each other simply because they were differently made? Am I, whose father came from Santiago in Cuba, responsible for the faint gleam that appears on my face during the day? And is my daughter, who was conceived and born in Europe, responsible for the fact that the full bright light of that part of the world is reflected in her complexion?’ ‘What!’ exclaimed the stranger, ‘do you mean to say that you yourself, who as the whole cast of your features shows are a mulatto and therefore of African origin, that both you and this charming mestiza who opened the door of the house to me, are condemned to the same fate as us Europeans?’ ‘By heaven!’ replied the old woman, taking her glasses from her nose, ‘do you suppose that this little property, which through years of toil and suffering we acquired by the work of our hands, does not provoke the rapacity of that horde of ferocious plundering devils? If we did not manage to protect ourselves from their persecution by means of the only defence available to the weak, namely cunning and every imaginable dissimulation, then let me assure you that that shadow of kinship with them which lies on our faces would not save us!’ ‘It’s not possible!’ cried the stranger. ‘Who on this island is persecuting you?’ ‘The owner of this house,’ answered the old woman, ‘the negro Congo Hoango! Since the death of Monsieur de Villeneuve, the previous owner of this plantation, whom he savagely murdered at the outbreak of the revolt, we who, as his relatives, keep house for him are subject in every way to his whims and brutalities. Every time we offer, as an act of humanity, a piece of bread or a drink to one or other of the white refugees who sometimes pass this way, he repays us for it with insults and ill-treatment; and it is his dearest wish to inflame the vengeance of the blacks against us white and creole half-dogs, as he calls us, partly in order to get rid of us altogether because we reproach him for his savagery against the whites, and partly in order to gain possession of the little property that we would leave behind us.’ ‘Poor creatures!’ said the stranger, ‘poor pitiable wretches! And where is this monster now?’ ‘With General Dessalines’ army,’ answered the old woman. ‘He set out with the other blacks from this plantation to take him a consignment of powder and lead which the General needed. We are expecting him back in ten or twelve days, unless he has to go off on other business; and if on his return he should discover, which God forbid, that we have given protection and shelter to a white man on his way to Port-au-Prince while he has been devoting all his efforts to the extermination of the entire white race on the island – then believe me, the lives of all of us would be forfeit.’ ‘God, who loves humanity and compassion,’ replied the stranger, ‘will protect you in your kindness to a victim of misfortune! And since in that case,’ he added, moving closer to the old woman, ‘you have incurred the negro’s resentment anyway, so much so that even if you were to go back to obeying him it would no longer do you any good, could you perhaps see your way, for any reward you like to name, to giving shelter for a day or two to my uncle and his family, who are utterly exhausted by our journey, and could here recover their strength a little?’ ‘Young man!’ said the old woman, in amazement, ‘what are you asking of me? How could we possibly lodge a party of travellers as big as yours in a house standing right by the roadway without the fact becoming known to the whole neighbourhood?’ ‘Why not,’ urged the stranger, ‘if I myself were to go out at once to the pond and lead my party back to this settlement before day break? If we were to lodge them all, masters and servants alike, in one and the same room in this house, and perhaps even take the precaution, in case of the worst, of carefully shutting up the doors and windows there?’ The old woman, after considering the suggestion for a little, replied that if he were to attempt to fetch his companions from the mountain ravine and bring them to the settlement that night, he would undoubtedly encounter a troop of armed negroes who were expected to be advancing along the military highway, as some forward patrols had already reported. ‘Very well,’ replied the stranger, ‘then for the present let us content ourselves with sending the poor wretches a basket of food, and postpone till tomorrow night the operation of conducting them to the settlement. Are you willing to do that, my good woman?’ ‘Well,’ said the old woman, as the stranger showered kisses on her bony hand, ‘for the sake of the European who was my daughter’s father I will do this kindness for you, as his fellow countrymen in distress. At daybreak tomorrow sit down and write a letter to your friends inviting them to come here to me in this settlement; the boy you saw in the yard can take them the letter together with some provisions, stay overnight with them in the mountains to make sure they are safe, and at dawn the following day, if they accept the invitation, act as guide to bring the party here.’
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 24