In the meantime Toni had returned with the meal she had prepared in the kitchen, and as she laid the table she asked the old woman, throwing a roguish glance at the stranger: ‘Well, tell me, mother! Has the gentleman recovered from the fright he was in at our door? Is he now convinced that there is no one lying in wait for him with poison and dagger, and the negro Hoango is not at home?’ Her mother said with a sigh: ‘My child, as the proverb says, once burnt twice shy of the fire. The gentleman would have acted foolishly if he had ventured into this house without making sure to what race the people living here belonged.’ The girl, standing in front of her mother, told her how she had held the lantern in such a way that its full beam had fallen on her face. ‘But,’ she said, ‘his imagination was obsessed with blackamoors and negroes, and if a lady from Paris or Marseilles had opened the door to him, he would have taken her for a negress.’ The stranger, putting his arm round her gently, said in some embarrassment that the hat she had been wearing had prevented him from seeing her face. ‘If I had been able,’ he continued, pressing her ardently to his breast, ‘to look into your eyes as I am doing now, then even if everything else about you had been black, I should have been willing to drink with you from a poisoned cup.’ He had flushed red as he said these words, and the girl’s mother now urged him to sit down, whereupon Toni seated herself beside him at the table and, propping her head in her hands, gazed at the stranger as he ate. The latter asked her how old she was and what was her native town; her mother spoke for her and told him that when she had been accompanying her former employer, Madame de Villeneuve she had conceived Toni in Paris and that that was where, fifteen years ago, she had been born. She added that the negro Komar, whom she had afterwards married, had in fact adopted the child, but that her real father had been a rich merchant from Marseilles called Bertrand, and that consequently her name was Toni Bertrand. Toni asked him whether he knew a gentleman of that name in France; the stranger answered he did not, that it was a big country, and that during the short time he had spent there before embarking for the West Indies he had met no one called Bertrand. The old woman added that in any case, according to fairly reliable reports she had received, Toni’s father was no longer living in France. She said that his ambitious and enterprising temperament found no satisfaction within the restrictions of bourgeois life; at the outbreak of the Revolution he had involved himself in public affairs and in 1795 had joined a French diplomatic mission to the Ottoman court; from there, so far as she knew, he had never returned. The stranger, smiling at Toni, took her hand and said: ‘Why, in that case you are a nobly born and rich girl!’ He urged her to make use of these advantages, saying that she might well expect, with her father’s assistance, to rise again to a social position more distinguished than her present one. ‘That can hardly be so,’ replied the old woman, restraining her evident resentment at this remark. ‘During my pregnancy in Paris, Monsieur Bertrand, feeling ashamed of me because he wanted to marry a rich young lady, went before a court and formally repudiated the paternity. I shall never forget the brazen perjury he committed to my face; the consequence was that I fell into a bilious fever, and soon after that Monsieur de Villeneuve ordered me to be given sixty lashes too, as a result of which I have suffered from consumption to this day.’ Toni, resting her head pensively on her hand, asked the stranger who he was, where he had come from and where he was going; to which he replied, after a short pause of embarrassment at the old woman’s embittered speech, that he was accompanying his uncle Herr Strömli’s family from Fort Dauphin and had left them behind him at the seagull pond on the wooded mountainside under the protection of two young cousins. At the girl’s request he gave some details of the outbreak of the rebellion in Fort Dauphin. He told how at midnight, when everyone was asleep, a treacherous signal had been given for the blacks to start massacring the whites; how the leader of the negroes, a sergeant in the French pioneer corps, had had the malevolence to set fire at once to every ship in the harbour in order to cut off the whites’ retreat to Europe; how their family had only just had time to escape from the town with a few possessions and how, the revolt having flared up everywhere simultaneously all along the coast, they had no choice but to set out, with two mules they had managed to find, heading straight across the island for Porte-au-Prince, which being defended by a strong French army was now the only place still holding out against the increasing power of the negroes. Toni asked how it was that the whites had come to incur such hatred in this place. The stranger, a little disconcerted, replied that the cause lay in the general relationship which as masters of the island they had had with the blacks. ‘And to tell you the truth,’ he added, ‘I will not attempt to defend that situation, but it is one which has lasted for many centuries. The mad lust for freedom which has seized all these plantations has driven the negroes and creoles to break the chains that oppressed them, and to take their revenge on the whites for much reprehensible ill-treatment they have had to suffer at the hands of some of us who do our race no credit.’ After a short pause he continued: ‘I was particularly struck and horrified by the action of one young girl, a negress, who was lying sick with yellow fever just at the time when the revolt broke out, for the plight of Fort Dauphin had been greatly worsened by an epidemic of this disease. Three years earlier she had been the slave of a white planter, who because she would not let him have his way with her had vented his spite on her by harsh treatment and later sold her to a creole planter. On the day of the general uprising the girl heard that her former master, pursued by the furious negroes, had taken refuge in a woodshed nearby; remembering his ill-treatment of her, she therefore sent her brother to him as evening fell, inviting him to stay the night with her. The wretched man, who knew neither that the girl was sick nor what disease she was suffering from, came to her room full of gratitude, thinking himself saved, and took her in his arms; but he had scarcely been half an hour in her bed caressing her and fondling her when she suddenly sat up with an expression of cold, savage fury and said: “I whom you have been kissing am infected with pestilence and dying of it: go now and give the yellow fever to all your kind!”’ And as the old woman loudly proclaimed her abhorrence of such a deed, the officer asked Toni: ‘Could you ever do a thing like that?’ ‘No!’ said Toni, casting her eyes down in confusion. The stranger, laying his napkin on the table, declared that it was his deep inner conviction that no tyranny the whites had ever practised could justify a treachery of such abominable vileness. ‘Heaven’s vengeance is disarmed by it,’ he exclaimed, rising passionately from his seat, ‘and the angels themselves, filled with revulsion by this overturning of all human and divine order, will take sides with those who are in the wrong and will support their cause!’ So saying, he walked across for a moment to the window and stared out at the night sky, where stormy clouds were drifting past the moon and the stars; then, as he had the impression that the mother and daughter were looking at each other, although he could see no sign of any communication between them, an unpleasant feeling of annoyance came over him; and turning to them he asked to be shown the room where he could sleep.
Toni’s mother, looking at the clock on the wall, observed that in any case it was nearly midnight; and taking a candle she asked the stranger to follow her. She led him to the room assigned to him, at the end of a long corridor; Toni brought his coat and various other things he had discarded; her mother showed him the very comfortably made-up bed where he would sleep, and after telling Toni to get a footbath ready for the gentleman, she wished him good night and took her leave. The stranger put his sword in a corner of the room and laid on the table a pair of pistols he carried at his waist. As Toni pushed the bed forward and spread a white sheet over it he looked round the room. He very soon concluded from the luxury and taste with which it was furnished that this must have been the bedroom of the plantation’s former owner; a feeling of apprehension seized his heart like the beak and talons of a bird of prey, and he began to wish himself back with his friends in the woods, hungry
and thirsty as when he had come here. Meanwhile, from the kitchen nearby, the girl had fetched a basinful of hot water, spiced with aromatic herbs, and invited the officer, who was leaning against the window, to refresh himself with it. The officer, silently removing his neckcloth and his waistcoat, sat down on a chair; he began baring his feet, and as the girl, crouching before him on her knees, continued the little preparations that were needed for his bath, he gazed at her attractive figure. Her hair, in its abundance of dark curls, had rolled over her young breasts when she knelt down; there was something extraordinarily graceful about her limbs and about the long lashes that drooped over her lowered eyes; but for her complexion, which repelled him, he could have sworn that he had never seen anything more beautiful. He was also struck by a remote resemblance, he did not himself yet rightly know to whom, which he had noticed as soon as he entered the house and which drew his whole heart towards her. When she rose after completing her tasks he caught hold of her hand, and knowing that there was only one way of finding out whether the girl had sincere feelings or not he drew her down on to his knees and asked her whether she was already engaged to be married. ‘No!’ she murmured, lowering her great black eyes with a sweet air of modesty; and without stirring on his lap she added that a young negro called Konelly who lived in that neighbourhood had proposed to her three months earlier, but that she had refused him because she was too young. The stranger, embracing her narrow waist with his two hands, replied that in his country there was a proverb that a girl of fourteen years and seven weeks was old enough to marry. As she gazed at the small golden cross he wore around his neck, he asked her how old she was. ‘Fifteen,’ replied Toni. ‘Well then!’ said the stranger. ‘Has he not got enough money to set up house with you in the way you would like?’ Toni, without raising her eyes to him, answered: ‘Oh no! On the contrary,’ she added, letting go of the cross which she was holding in her hand, ‘Konelly has become a rich man as a result of the things that have happened recently; his father has gained possession of the whole settlement that used to belong to his master the planter.’ ‘Then why did you refuse his offer?’ asked the stranger. He tenderly stroked the hair back from her forehead and said: ‘Perhaps he didn’t attract you?’ The girl shook her head briefly and laughed; and when the stranger, whispering playfully into her ear, asked whether it was necessary to be a white man in order to gain her favour, she suddenly, after a fleeting pensive pause, and with a most charming blush spreading suddenly over her sunburnt face, sank against his breast. The stranger, moved by her sweetness and grace, called her his darling girl and clasped her in his arms, feeling that the hand of God had swept away all his anxieties. He could not possibly believe that all these signs of emotion she showed him were merely the wretched antics of cold-hearted, hideous treachery. The thoughts that had preyed on his mind were dispersed like a host of ominous birds; he reproached himself for having failed even for a moment to appreciate her true feelings, and as he rocked her on his knees and drank in the sweet breath that rose from her lips towards him, he pressed a kiss on her forehead, as if in token of reconciliation and forgiveness. Meanwhile the girl had sat upright with a strange startled suddenness, as if listening for steps in the passage approaching the door; in a kind of pensive reverie she readjusted the clothing over her breast which had become disarranged; and only when she realized that her alarm had been mistaken did she turn again to the stranger with a mischievous smile, reminding him that if he did not use the hot water soon it would get cold. ‘Well?’ she asked in some surprise, as the stranger said nothing but went on gazing at her thoughtfully, ‘why are you examining me so closely?’ She tried to conceal the embarrassment that had overcome her by busying herself with lacing up her bodice, then exclaimed laughingly: ‘You strange gentleman, whatever do you find so remarkable in my appearance?’ The stranger had passed his hand across his brow; he suppressed a sigh, lifted her from his lap and replied: ‘An extraordinary resemblance between you and a friend of mine!’ Toni, obviously noticing that his happy mood had left him, took him kindly and sympathetically by the hand and asked: ‘Who is she?’ Whereupon, after reflecting for a moment or two, he made the following answer: ‘Her name was Marianne Congreve and she came from Strasbourg. Her father was a merchant in that city, I had met her there shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution and had been lucky enough to obtain her consent to marry me, as well as her mother’s approval. Oh, she was the most loving, the most faithful creature on earth; and when I look at you, the terrible and moving circumstances in which I lost her come back so vividly to my mind and fill me with such sorrow that I cannot restrain my tears.’ ‘What?’ asked Toni, pressing herself tenderly and lovingly against him, ‘she is no longer alive?’ ‘She died,’ answered the stranger, ‘and it was her death alone that taught me the very essence of all goodness and nobility. God knows,’ he continued, bowing his head in grief upon her shoulder, ‘how I allowed myself to be so utterly reckless as to make certain remarks one evening in a public place about the terrible Revolutionary Tribunal which had just been set up. I was denounced, my arrest was sought; and since I had been fortunate enough to escape to the outskirts of the city, the bloodthirsty band of my pursuers, failing to find me but insisting on some victim or other, even rushed to my fiancée’s house; and so infuriated were they by her truthful declaration that she did not know where I was, that with outrageous cynicism, on the pretext that she was my accomplice, they dragged her instead of me to the scaffold. No sooner had this appalling news been conveyed to me than I emerged from the hiding-place into which I had fled, and hastened, pushing my way through the crowd, to the place of execution, where I shouted at the top of my voice: “Here I am, you inhuman monsters!” But she, already standing on the platform beside the guillotine, on being questioned by some of the judges who as ill-fortune would have it did not know me by sight, gave me one look which is indelibly imprinted on my soul, and then turned away, saying: “I have no idea who that man is!” And a few moments later, amid a roll of drums and a roar of voices, at the behest of those impatient butchers, the iron blade dropped and severed her head from her body. How I was saved I have no idea; a quarter of an hour later I was in a friend’s house, swooning and recovering consciousness by turns, and towards evening, half bereft of my senses, I was lifted into a carriage and conveyed across the Rhine.’ With these words the stranger, letting go of the girl, returned to the window, where she saw him, in deep emotion, bury his face in a handkerchief; at this, for more than one reason, she was overcome by a sense of human compassion, and impulsively followed him, throwing her arms round his neck and mingling her tears with his.
There is no need to report what happened next, for it will be clear to anyone who has followed the narrative thus far. When the stranger regained possession of himself and realized what he had done, he had no idea what its consequences might be; but for the time being at least he understood that he was saved, and that in this house he had entered there was nothing for him to fear from the girl. Seeing her sitting on the bed, with her arms folded across her and weeping, he did everything he could to console her. He took from his breast the little golden cross which was a present from his dead fiancée, the faithful Marianne, and leaning over Toni and caressing her with the utmost tenderness he hung it round her neck, saying that it was his bridal gift to her. As she went on weeping and did not listen to him, he sat down on the edge of the bed, and told her, stroking and kissing her hand, that he would tomorrow morning seek her mother’s permission to marry her. He described to her the little estate he possessed on the banks of the Aar; a house sufficiently comfortable and spacious to accommodate her and her mother as well, if the latter’s age would permit her to make the journey; he described his fields, gardens, meadows and vineyards, and his venerable aged father who would welcome her there with gratitude and love for having saved his son’s life. As her tears continued and poured down over the pillow he embraced her passionately, almost weeping himself, and begged her to tell him how he
had wronged her and whether she could not forgive him. He swore that the love he felt for her would never fade from his heart and that it had only been the turmoil and confusion of his senses, the strange mixture of desire and fear she had aroused in him, that had led him to do such a deed. In the end he reminded her that the morning stars were glistening in the sky and that if she stayed in this bed any longer her mother would come and surprise her there; he urged her, for the sake of her health, to get up and rest for a few hours in her own bed; filled with the direst alarm by her condition, he asked her if she would perhaps like him to lift her in his arms and carry her to her room. But since she made no answer to anything he said and simply lay there motionless among the scattered pillows, cradling her head in her arms and sobbing quietly, and since daylight was already gleaming through both the windows, he had no choice but to pick her up without further ado; he carried her, hanging over his shoulder like a lifeless thing, up the stairs to her bedroom, and after laying her on her bed and with many tender caresses repeating to her again everything he had said already, he once more called her his beloved bride and kissed her on both cheeks, then hurried back to his room.
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 25