"Cesarine," I answered, "I mean it. I know it. I cannot go away from you and leave you. Something seems to tie me. I am not my own master....
Cesarine, I love you."
My head whirled as I said the words, but I meant them at the time, and heaven knows I tried ever after to live up to them.
She clutched my arm convulsively for a moment. Her face was aglow with a wonderful light, and her eyes burned like a pair of diamonds. "But the other girl!" she cried. "Her! Miss Latham! The one you call Irene! You are ... in love with her! Are you not? Tell me!"
"I have never proposed to Irene," I replied slowly. "I have never asked any other woman but you to marry me, Cesarine."
She answered me nothing, but my face was very near hers, and I bent forward and kissed her suddenly. To my immense surprise, instead of struggling or drawing away, she kissed me back a fervent kiss, with lips hard pressed to mine, and the tears trickled slowly down her cheeks in a strange fashion. "You are mine," she cried. "Mine for ever. I have won you. She shall not have you. I knew you were mine the moment I looked upon you. The hand beckoned me. I knew I should get you."
"Come up into my den, Mr. Tristram, and have a smoke," my host interrupted in his bluff voice, putting his head in unexpectedly at the conservatory door. "I think I can offer you a capital Manilla."
The sound woke me as if from some terrible dream, and I followed him still in a sort of stupor up to the smoking room.
IV.
That very evening I went to see Irene. My brain was whirling even yet, and I hardly knew what I was doing; but the cool air revived me a little, and by the time I reached the Lathams" I almost felt myself again.
Irene came down to the drawing-room to see me alone. I saw what she expected, and the shame of my duplicity overcame me utterly.
I took both her hands in mine and stood opposite her, ashamed to look her in the face, and with the terrible confession weighing me down like a burden of guilt. "Irene," I blurted out, without preface or comment, "I have just proposed to Cesarine Vivian."
Irene drew back a moment and took a long breath. Then she said, with a tremor in her voice, but without a tear or a cry, "I expected it, Harry.
I thought you meant it. I saw you were terribly, horribly in love with her."
"Irene," I cried, pa.s.sionately and remorsefully flinging myself upon the sofa in an agony of repentance, "I do not love her. I have never cared for her. I"m afraid of her, fascinated by her. I love you, Irene, you and you only. The moment I"m away from her, I hate her, I hate her. For heaven"s sake, tell me what am I to do! I do not love her. I hate her, Irene."
Irene came up to me and soothed my hair tenderly with her hand. "Don"t, Harry," she said, with sisterly kindliness. "Don"t speak so. Don"t give way to it. I know what you feel. I know what you think. But I am not angry with you. You mustn"t talk like that. If she has accepted you, you must go and marry her. I have nothing to reproach you with: nothing, nothing. Never say such words to me again. Let us be as we have always been, friends only."
"Irene," I cried, lifting up my head and looking at her wildly, "it is the truth: I do not love her, except when I am with her: and then, some strange enchantment seems to come over me. I don"t know what it is, but I can"t escape it. In my heart, Irene, in my heart of hearts, I love you, and you only. I can never love her as I love you, Irene. My darling, my darling, tell me how to get myself away from her."
"Hush," Irene said, laying her hand on mine persuasively. "You"re excited to-night, Harry. You are flushed and feverish. You don"t know what you"re saying. You mustn"t talk so. If you do, you"ll make me hate you and despise you. You must keep your word now, and marry Miss Vivian."
V.
The next six weeks seem to me still like a vague dream: everything happened so hastily and strangely. I got a note next day from Irene. It was very short. "Dearest Harry,--Mamma and I think, under the circ.u.mstances, it would be best for us to leave London for a few weeks.
I am not angry with you. With best love, ever yours affectionately, Irene."
I was wild when I received it. I couldn"t bear to part so with Irene. I would find out where they were going and follow them immediately. I would write a note and break off my mad engagement with Cesarine. I must have been drunk or insane when I made it. I couldn"t imagine what I could have been doing.
On my way round to inquire at the Latham"s, a carriage came suddenly upon me at a sharp corner. A lady bowed to me from it. It was Cesarine with her father. They pulled up and spoke to me. From that moment my doom was sealed. The old fascination came back at once, and I followed Cesarine blindly home to her house to luncheon, her accepted lover.
In six weeks more we were really married.
The first seven or eight months of our married life pa.s.sed away happily enough. As soon as I was actually married to Cesarine, that strange feeling I had at first experienced about her slowly wore off in the closer, commonplace, daily intercourse of married life. I almost smiled at myself for ever having felt it. Cesarine was so beautiful and so queenly a person, that when I took her down home to Devonshire, and introduced her to the old manor, I really found myself immensely proud of her. Everybody at Teignbury was delighted and struck with her; and, what was a great deal more to the point, I began to discover that I was positively in love with her myself, into the bargain. She softened and melted immensely on nearer acquaintance; the Faustina air faded slowly away, when one saw her in her own home among her own occupations; and I came to look on her as a beautiful, simple, innocent girl, delighted with all our country pleasures, fond of a breezy canter on the slopes of Dartmoor, and taking an affectionate interest in the ducks and chickens, which I could hardly ever have conceived even as possible when I first saw her in Seymour Crescent. The imperious, mysterious, terrible Cesarine disappeared entirely, and I found in her place, to my immense relief, that I had married a graceful, gentle, tender-hearted English girl, with just a pleasant occasional touch of southern fire and impetuosity.
As winter came round again, however, Cesarine"s cheeks began to look a little thinner than usual, and she had such a constant, troublesome cough, that I began to be a trifle alarmed at her strange symptoms.
Cesarine herself laughed off my fears. "It"s nothing, Harry," she would say; "nothing at all, I a.s.sure you, dear. A few good rides on the moor will set me right again. It"s all the result of that horrid London. I"m a country-born girl, and I hate big towns. I never want to live in town again, Harry."
I called in our best Exeter doctor, and he largely confirmed Cesarine"s own simple view of the situation. "There"s nothing organically wrong with Mrs. Tristram"s const.i.tution," he said confidently. "No weakness of the lungs or heart in any way. She has merely run down--outlived her strength a little. A winter in some warm, genial climate would set her up again, I haven"t the least hesitation in saying."
"Let us go to Algeria with the yacht, Reeney," I suggested, much rea.s.sured.
"Why Algeria?" Cesarine replied, with brightening eyes. "Oh, Harry, why not dear old Haiti? You said once you would go there with me--you remember when, darling; why not keep your promise now, and go there? I want to go there, Harry: I"m longing to go there." And she held out her delicately moulded hand in front of her, as if beckoning me, and drawing me on to Haiti after her.
"Ah, yes; why not the West Indies?" the Exeter doctor answered meditatively. "I think I understood you that Mrs. Tristram is West Indian born. Quite so. Quite so. Her native air. Depend upon it, that"s the best place for her. By all means, I should say, try Haiti."
I don"t know why, but the notion for some reason displeased me immensely. There was something about Cesarine"s eyes, somehow, when she beckoned with her hand in that strange fashion, which reminded me exactly of the weird, uncanny, indescribable impression she had made upon me when I first knew her. Still I was very fond of Cesarine, and if she and the doctor were both agreed that Haiti would be the very best place for her, it would be foolish and wrong for me to interfere with their joint wisdom. Depend upon it, a woman often knows what is the matter with her better than any man, even her husband, can possibly tell her.
The end of it all was, that in less than a month from that day, we were out in the yacht on the broad Atlantic, with the cliffs of Falmouth and the Lizard Point fading slowly behind us in the distance, and the white spray dashing in front of us, like fingers beckoning us on to Haiti.
VI.
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 coa.r.s.e 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 m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sionately 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 coa.r.s.e 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 ma.s.s 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?"