They were carried in the dark of dusk to Don Alonzo’s lodgings; Don Fernando followed, shedding many a bitter tear upon little Philip’s face. He spent the night at Don Alonzo’s, and inventing various excuses, first because his wife was sick, and then, because he did not know how she would judge his actions, he delayed for the longest time informing her of the whole unhappy business; but shortly thereafter, apprised of all that had transpired by a chance visit from a friend, this admirable lady wept her motherly heart out in silence, and fell into his arms and kissed him one morning with a last radiant tear. Hereupon Don Fernando and Donna Elvira took in the little stranger as their adoptive son; and when Don Fernando thought of both Philip and Juan, and reflected on how he had come to be blessed with each, it almost seemed to him as though he ought to be happy.
· · ·
In Port au Prince, on the French part of the Island of Santo Domingo, at the start of this century,* when the blacks slaughtered the whites, there lived on the plantation of Guillaume de Villeneuve a dreadful old Negro named Congo Hoango. Originally from the Gold Coast of Africa, this man, who in his youth appeared to be of a faithful and honest nature, having saved his master from drowning on a crossing to Cuba, was rewarded by the latter with endless kindnesses. Not only did Monsieur Guillaume grant him his freedom on the spot, and upon their return to Santo Domingo, pass to him the title to a house and yard; a few years thereafter, contrary to the custom of the land, he even named him overseer of his considerable land holdings, and because Congo Hoango did not wish to marry again, gave him, in lieu of a bride, an old mulatto woman named Babekan from his plantation with whom the planter was closely related by marriage through his late wife. Indeed, when Congo Hoango turned sixty, he let him retire with a generous pension and topped off his magnanimity by including a bequest to him in his will; and yet all these marks of gratitude did not spare Monsieur Villeneuve from the wrath of this murderous man. In the course of the widespread excesses that flared up on these plantations in the wake of the ill-considered steps taken by the Convention National,* Congo Hoango was one of the first to take up arms, and mindful of the tyranny that had snatched him from his native land, put a bullet through his master’s head. He set fire to the house, in which the master’s wife along with their three children and all the other whites on the estate had taken refuge, lay waste to the entire plantation, to which the heirs who lived in Port au Prince might have laid claim, and once all the Villeneuve holdings had been reduced to ashes, set out for neighboring lands with the band of Negroes he had gathered and armed to aid his brothers in the fight against the whites. Sometimes he lay in wait for the itinerant armed bands of Frenchmen who crisscrossed the land; sometimes in broad daylight he attacked the planters themselves who holed up on their estates and he cut down every living soul he found. In his inhuman bloodlust, he even forced Babekan and her daughter, a fifteen year old mestizo* named Toni, to take part in these grim doings that made him feel young again; and since the main house of the plantation in which he now resided loomed as a lone habitation abutting the highway, and in his absence whites or Creole fugitives would often knock at the door, seeking food or refuge, he instructed the women to delay these white dogs, as he called them, with sustenance and acts of kindness, until his return. In such cases, Babekan, who suffered from consumption as a consequence of a brutal punishment she had endured in her youth, enlisted the aid of young Toni, who, on account of her yellowish complexion, proved particularly useful in these deadly deceptions, to which end the mother dressed up the daughter in her best clothes; she encouraged her not to spare the strangers any tender caresses, except for the most intimate, which were forbidden on pain of death; and when Congo Hoango returned with his troops from their bloody incursions, the poor souls who’d allowed themselves to be taken in by Toni’s charms were promptly put to death.
Now everyone knows that in 1803, as General Dessalines† advanced on Port au Prince with an army of 30,000 Negroes, every white-skinned soul gathered in that place to resist. For the city represented the last hope of French power on the island, and if it fell all remaining whites were doomed to die. So it came to pass in the darkness of one stormy night, while old Hoango was off with his band of blacks breaking through French lines to bring the general a shipment of gunpowder and lead, that someone knocked on the back door of his house. Old Babekan, who had already gone to bed, got up, and with nothing but a frock wrapped around her hips, opened the window and asked: “Who’s there?” “For the love of Maria and all the saints,” the stranger whispered, pressing up against the wall beneath the window, “just answer this one question before I identify myself!” Whereupon he stretched his hand out in the dark of night to grab hold of the old woman’s hand: “Are you a Negress?” To which Babekan replied: “Well, you’re definitely a white, if you’d rather peer into the pitch black night than into the eyes of a Negress! Come in,” she added, “and have no fear; this is the home of a mulatto, and the only other person left in the house is my daughter, a mestizo!” At that she shut the window, as if she intended to go straight down and open the door for him; but instead, under the pretense of not immediately being able to find the key, grabbing some clothes that she hastily snatched out of the closet, she dashed upstairs to wake her daughter. “Toni!” she said. “What is it, mother?” “Quick!” she said. “Get up and get dressed! Take these, a white petticoat and stockings! A white man on the run is at the door and begs entry!” “A white?” Toni asked, as she roused herself in bed. She took the clothes the old woman held out and said: “Is he alone, Mother? And do we have nothing to fear if we let him in!” “Nothing, nothing at all!” the old woman replied, lighting a lamp. “He’s unarmed and alone, and trembling in every limb with the fear that we may assault him!” With these words, while Toni got up and pulled on frock and stockings, Babekan lit the big lantern that stood in a corner of the room, hastily bound the girl’s hair up in a bun, in the local manner, and after fastening her pinafore, plunked a hat on her head, put the lantern in her hand and bid her go down to the yard to let the stranger in.
Meanwhile, a boy named Nanky, whom Hoango had fathered out of wedlock with a Negress, and who slept with his brother Seppy in the storehouse next door, was awakened by the barking of some yard dogs; and since he saw a man standing alone on the back stoop of the house, he promptly hastened, as he was instructed to do in such cases, to the back gate, through which said person had entered, to lock it behind him. The stranger, who had no idea what to make of all this, asked the boy, whom he recognized with a shock upon drawing near as black: “Who lives on this estate?” And upon the latter’s reply: “Since the death of Monsieur Villeneuve, ownership fell to the Negro Hoango,” the white man was just about to knock the boy down, grab the key to the back gate from him and take flight, when Toni stepped outside, lantern in hand. “Quick,” she said, reaching for his hand and pulling him toward the door, “in here!” She took pains while saying this to tilt the light so that its glow lit up her face. “Who are you?” cried the stranger, stunned for more than one reason, taking in the sight of her lovely young figure. “Who lives in this house, in which, as you maintain, I am to find safe refuge?” “No one, I swear by the light of the sun,” said the girl, “but my mother and me!” and made every effort to pull him in. “No one!” cried the stranger, taking a step back and tearing his hand free. “Did that boy not just tell me that a Negro named Hoango resides here?” “I tell you, no!” said the girl, stamping her foot impatiently, “and even if the house belongs to a ruffian of that name, he’s out at the moment and a good ten miles away!” Whereupon with both her hands she drew the stranger in, instructed the boy to tell no one of his presence, and after shutting the door, took the stranger’s hand and led him up the steps to her mother’s room.
“So,” said the old woman, who had overheard the entire conversation from her perch at the window, and had noticed in the gleam of the light that he was an officer, “what are we to make of the rapier dangling at the ready under your arm? At the risk of our own lives,” she added, putting on her spectacles, “we granted you safe haven in our house. Did you enter, in the manner of your countrymen, to repay our kindness with betrayal?” “Heaven forbid!” replied the stranger, who strode directly in front of her chair. He reached for the old woman’s hand and pressed it against his heart, and after casting a few furtive glances around the room, unbuckled the blade which he wore at the hip, and said: “You see before you the most miserable of men, but not an ingrate and a cad!” “Who are you?” asked the old woman; she shoved a chair in his direction with her foot and ordered the girl to go to the kitchen and prepare him as good a supper as she could hastily throw together. The stranger replied: “I am an officer in the French forces, although, as you yourself will have noticed by my accent, not a Frenchman; I am Swiss by birth and my name is Gustav von der Ried. Oh, if only I had never left my native land and traded it for this godless isle! I come from Fort Dauphin, where, as you know, all the whites have been slaughtered, and it is my intention to reach Port au Prince before General Dessalines and his troops manage to surround and take the city.” “From Fort Dauphin!” cried the old woman. “And you, with the color of your face, managed to make it in one piece such a long way through a country overrun by angry blacks?” “God and all his saints protected me!” the stranger replied.
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