The Beckoning Hand and Other Stories - The Original Classic Edition. Allen Grant

you coward!" I said to the negro. "I have no further need of you. I will make my way alone to the Vaudoux temple."[Pg 26] "Monsieur," the man cried, trembling visibly in every limb, "they will tear you to pieces. If they ever discover you near the temple,

       they will offer you up as a victim to the Vaudoux."

       "Pooh," I answered, contemptuous of the fellow's slavish terror. "Where Madame, a woman, dares to go, I, her husband, am certainly not afraid to follow her."

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       "Monsieur," he replied, throwing himself submissively in the dust on the path before me, "Madame is Creole; she has the blood of the Vaudoux worshippers flowing in her veins. Nobody will hurt her. She is free of the craft. But Monsieur is a pure white and uninitiated.... If the Vaudoux people catch him at their rites, they will rend him in pieces, and offer his blood as an expiation to the Unspeakable One."

       "Go," I said, with a smile, turning my horse's head up the right-hand path toward the Vaudoux temple. "I am not afraid. I will come

       back again to Maisonette to-morrow."

       I followed the path through a tortuous maze, beset with prickly cactus, agave, and fern-brake, till I came at last to a spur of the hill, where a white wooden building gleamed in front of me, in the full slanting rays of tropical sunset. A skull was fastened to the lintel of the door. I knew at once it was the Vaudoux temple.

       I dismounted at once, and led my horse aside into the brake, though I tore his legs and my own as I went with the spines of the cactus plants; and tying him by the bridle to a mountain cabbage palm, in a spot where the thick underbrush completely hid us from view, I lay down and waited patiently for the shades of evening.

       It was a moonless night, according to the Vaudoux fashion; and I knew from what I had already read in West Indian books that the orgies would not commence till midnight.

       From time to time, I rubbed a fusee against my hand[Pg 27] without lighting it, and by the faint glimmer of the phosphorus on my

       palm, I was able to read the figures of my watch dial without exciting the attention of the neighbouring Vaudoux worshippers.

       Hour after hour went slowly by, and I crouched there still unseen among the agave thicket. At last, as the hands of the watch reached together the point of twelve, I heard a low but deep rumbling noise coming ominously from the Vaudoux temple. I recognized at once the familiar sound. It was the note of the bull-roarer, that mystic instrument of pointed wood, whirled by a string round the head of the hierophant, by whose aid savages in their secret rites summon to their shrines their gods and spirits. I had often made one myself for a toy when I was a boy in England.

       I crept out through the tangled brake, and cautiously approached the back of the building. A sentinel was standing by the door in front, a powerful negro, armed with revolver and cutlas. I skulked round noiselessly to the rear, and lifting myself by my hands to the level of the one tiny window, I peered in through a slight scratch on the white paint, with which the glass was covered internally.

       I only saw the sight within for a second. Then my brain reeled, and my fingers refused any longer to hold me. But in that second, I had read the whole terrible, incredible truth: I knew what sort of a woman she really was whom I had blindly taken as the wife of my bosom.

       Before a rude stone altar covered with stuffed alligator skins, human bones, live snakes, and hideous sorts of African superstition, a tall and withered black woman stood erect, naked as she came from her mother's womb, one skinny arm raised aloft, and the other holding below some dark object, that writhed and struggled awfully in her hand on the slab of the altar, even as she held it. I saw in[Pg 28] a flash of the torches behind it was the black hag I had watched before at the Port-au-Prince cottage.

       Beside her, whiter of skin, and faultless of figure, stood a younger woman, beautiful to behold, imperious and haughty still, like a Greek statue, unmoved before that surging horrid background of naked black and cringing savages. Her head was bent, and her hand pressed convulsively against the swollen veins in her throbbing brow; and I saw at once it was my own wife--a Vaudoux worshipper--Cesarine Tristram.

       In another flash, I knew the black woman had a sharp flint knife in her uplifted hand; and the dark object in the other hand I recognized with a thrill of unspeakable horror as a negro girl of four years old or thereabouts, gagged and bound, and lying on the altar.

       Before I could see the sharp flint descend upon the naked breast of the writhing victim, my fingers in mercy refused to bear me, and I fell half fainting on the ground below, too shocked and unmanned even to crawl away at once out of reach of the awful unrealizable horror.

       But by the sounds within, I knew they had completed their hideous sacrifice, and that they were smearing over Cesarine--my own

       wife--the woman of my choice--with the warm blood of the human victim.

       Sick and faint, I crept away slowly through the tangled underbrush, tearing my skin as I went with the piercing cactus spines; untied

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       my horse from the spot where I had fastened him; and rode him down without drawing rein, cantering round sharp angles and down horrible ledges, till he stood at last, white with foam, by the grey dawn, in front of the little piazza at Maisonette.[Pg 29]

       VIII.

       That night, the thunder roared and the lightning played with tropical fierceness round the tall hilltops away in the direction of the Vaudoux temple. The rain came down in fearful sheets, and the torrents roared and foamed in cataracts, and tore away great gaps in the rough paths on the steep hillsides. But at eight o'clock in the morning Cesarine returned, drenched with wet, and with a strange frown upon her haughty forehead.

       I did not know how to look at her or how to meet her.

       "My prayers are useless," she muttered angrily as she entered. "Some heretic must have followed me unseen to the chapel of Notre

       Dame de Bon Secours. The pilgrimage is a failure."

       "You are wet," I said, trembling. "Change your things, Cesarine." I could not pretend to speak gently to her.

       She turned upon me with a fierce look in her big black eyes. Her instinct showed her at once I had discovered her secret. "Tell them, and hang me," she cried fiercely.

       It was what the law required me to do. I was otherwise the accomplice of murder and cannibalism. But I could not do it. Profoundly

       as I loathed her and hated her presence, now, I couldn't find it in my heart to give her up to justice, as I knew I ought to do.

       I turned away and answered nothing.

       Presently, she came out again from her bedroom, with her wet things still dripping around her. "Smoke that," she said, handing me a tiny cigarette rolled round in a leaf of fresh tobacco.

       "I will not," I answered with a vague surmise, taking it from her fingers. "I know the smell. It is manchineal. You cannot any longer

       deceive me."

       She went back to her bedroom once more. I sat,[Pg 30] dazed and stupefied, in the bamboo chair on the front piazza. What to do, I

       knew not, and cared not. I was tied to her for life, and there was no help for it, save by denouncing her to the rude Haitian justice.

       In an hour or more, our English maid came out to speak to me. "I'm afraid, sir," she said, "Mrs. Tristram is getting delirious. She

       seems to be in a high fever. Shall I ask one of these poor black bodies to go out and get the English doctor?"

       I went into my wife's bedroom. Cesarine lay moaning piteously on the bed, in her wet clothes still; her cheeks were hot, and her pulse

       was high and thin and feverish. I knew without asking what was the matter with her. It was yellow fever.

       The night's exposure in that terrible climate, and the ghastly scene she had gone through so intrepidly, had broken down even

       Cesarine's iron constitution.

       I sent for the doctor and had her put to bed immediately. The black nurse and I undressed her between us. We found next her bosom, tied by a small red silken thread,