. . !” But she could neither finish the sentence nor reach him with her hand; drained of all strength, she suddenly fell back into Monsieur Strömli’s lap. “Why?” asked Gustav, kneeling before her, pale as death. After a long while, interrupted only by the rattle in Toni’s throat, during which they waited in vain for a word from her lips, Monsieur Strömli spoke up: “Because, upon Hoango’s return there was no other way to save you, you poor unfortunate man; because she wanted to avoid the mortal combat that you would surely have started; because she wanted to gain time enough for us, dispatched thanks to her ingenuity, to come to your rescue with weapons in hand.” Gustav covered his face in his hands. “Oh God,” he cried out, without looking up, feeling as though the ground gave way beneath his feet, “is what you tell me true?” He wrapped his arms around her and looked her in the eyes with a shattered heart. “Oh,” cried Toni, and these were her last words: “you should not have doubted me!” At which her beautiful soul gave up the ghost. Gustav tore at his hair. “God’s truth,” he cried, as his cousins wrenched him from the corpse, “I should not have doubted you; for you were betrothed to me by an oath, though we had not put it into words!” Sobbing, Monsieur Strömli pressed the displaced pinafore to the girl’s breast. He comforted his servant, who had done his best with the limited tools at hand to remove the bullet, which, he said, had entered her breastbone; but all his efforts, as has already been said, were to no avail, she was pierced by the lead and her soul had already departed for happier climes. In the meantime, Gustav staggered to the window; and while Monsieur Strömli and his sons deliberated with quiet tears on what to do with the body, and whether they ought not to go fetch her mother, Gustav fired the bullet with which the other pistol was loaded through his brain. This new dreadful deed was more than they could bear. All helping hands now turned to him; but, since he had put the pistol in his mouth, his poor shattered skull was in part plastered against the wall. Monsieur Strömli was the first to collect his wits. Since daylight once again shone brightly through the window and servants reported that the Negroes had once again begun to gather in the yard, he had no choice but to immediately think of their retreat. Not wanting to leave the two corpses to the ravages of the Negroes, they lay them on a bed, and after reloading their muskets, the sad party set off for the seagull pond. Monsieur Strömli, with Seppy in his arms, took the lead; he was followed by the two strongest servants carrying the dead bodies on their shoulders; the wounded servant hobbled behind on a stick; and Adelbert and Gottfried covered the slowly advancing funeral cortege with loaded muskets, one on each side. Catching sight of this poorly guarded group, the Negroes emerged from their quarters with pikes and pitchforks in hand, ready to attack; but Hoango, whom Monsieur Strömli had had the foresight to untie, stepped outside onto the steps of the house and signaled to his men to stop. “In Sainte Luce!” he cried to Monsieur Strömli, who had already advanced with the bodies to the gate. “In Sainte Luce!” the latter replied; whereupon the sad party crossed the open field and reached the edge of the woods, without being pursued. At the seagull pond, where they rejoined their family, shedding tears, they dug a grave; and after exchanging the rings of the dead, they lowered the dear ones with whispered prayers into the place of eternal rest. Monsieur Strömli was glad enough to safely reach Sainte Luce five days later with his wife and children; there, true to his word, he released the two Negro boys. He managed to make it to Port au Prince just in time to take to the ramparts shortly before the attack; and when finally, despite stubborn resistance, the city fell to the forces of General Dessalines, he managed to escape along with the French army on ships of the English fleet, sailed to Europe, and without further incident, journeyed home to Switzerland. With what was left of his modest fortune Monsieur Strömli bought lands near the Rigi; and a passing stranger in 1807 could still see in his garden in the shade of the bushes the monument he had erected to the memory of Gustav and his betrothed, the faithful Toni.
* The 19th century
* In 1794 the French Convention National abolished slavery on the French part of the Island of Santo Domingo in what today is Haiti, whereupon the white planters balked, refusing to abide by the law. A bitter struggle that would become the Haitian Revolution broke out between the blacks, at first supported by French revolutionary forces, and their former masters. Atrocities were committed by both sides. Putting economics over ethics, Napoleon subsequently backed the cause of the planters. But Haiti finally won its independence and declared itself a free republic in 1804.
* The child of a white and a mulatto.
† Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), a former black slave who joined the French army, rising to the rank of officer, and subsequently fought the French as a military leader of the Haitian revolution. He became the first ruler of an independent Haiti and thereafter anointed himself Emperor Jacques I.
(A LEGEND)
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At the end of the sixteenth century, as the iconoclast storm of destruction raged in the Netherlands, three brothers, young students in Wittenberg, met up in the City of Aachen with a fourth brother, himself engaged as a preacher in Antwerp. They sought to lay claim to an inheritance left them by an old uncle whom none of them knew, and since no one was there to meet them at the place where they were supposed to apply, they retired to an inn in town.
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