And if I'm not mistaken, it's the same thing that
made you cry the other evening when I spoke to you down yonder in the
cabin." The tears rose hastily once more into Césarine's eyes, and she cried in
a low distressed voice, "Harry, Harry, don't talk to me so. You are too
good to me. You will kill me. You will kill me." I lifted her head from the table, where she had buried it in her arms,
and kissed her tenderly. "Reeney," I said, "I know how you feel, and I
hope Notre Dame will listen to your prayers, and send you what you ask
of her. But if not, you need never be afraid that I shall love you any
the less than I do at present." Césarine burst into a fresh flood of tears. "No, Harry," she said, "you
don't know about it. You can't imagine it. To us, you know, who have the
blood of Africa running in our veins, it is not a mere matter of fancy. It is an eternal disgrace for any woman of our race and descent not to
be a mother. I cannot help it. It is the instinct of my people. We are
all born so: we cannot feel otherwise." It was the only time either of us ever alluded in speaking with one
another to the sinister half of Césarine's pedigree. "You will let me go with you to the mountains, Reeney?" I asked,
ignoring her remark. "You mustn't go so far by yourself, darling." "No, Harry, you can't come with me. It would make my prayers
ineffectual, dearest. You are a heretic, you know, Harry. You are not
Catholic. Notre Dame won't listen to my prayer if I take you with me on
my pilgrimage, my darling." I saw her mind was set upon it, and I didn't interfere. She would be
away all night, she said. There was a rest-house for pilgrims attached
to the chapel, and she would be back again at Maisonette (our bungalow)
the morning after. That afternoon she started on her way on a mountain pony I had just
bought for her, accompanied only by a negro maid. I couldn't let her go
quite unattended through those lawless paths, beset by cottages of half
savage Africans; so I followed at a distance, aided by a black groom,
and tracked her road along the endless hill-sides up to a fork in the
way where the narrow bridle-path divided into two, one of which bore
away to leftward, leading, my guide told me, to the chapel of Notre Dame
de Bon Secours. At that point the guide halted. He peered with hand across his eyebrows
among the tangled brake of tree-ferns with a terrified look; then he
shook his woolly black head ominously. "I can't go on, Monsieur," he
said, turning to me with an unfeigned shudder. "Madame has not taken the
path of Our Lady. She has gone to the left along the other road, which
leads at last to the Vaudoux temple." I looked at him incredulously. I had heard before of Vaudoux. It is the
hideous African canibalistic witchcraft of the relapsing half-heathen
Haitian negroes. But Césarine a Vaudoux worshipper! It was too
ridiculous. The man must be mistaken: or else Césarine had taken the
wrong road by some slight accident. Next moment, a horrible unspeakable doubt seized upon me irresistibly. What was the unknown shrine in her grandmother's garden at which
Césarine had prayed in those awful gutturals? Whatever it was, I would
probe this mystery to the very bottom. I would know the truth, come what
might of it. "Go, you coward!" I said to the negro. "I have no further need of you. I
will make my way alone to the Vaudoux temple." "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." "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 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.