The Hour and the Man Part 71

Toussaint left it to Mars Plaisir to answer this question; which he did with indignant volubility, describing the uses and the beauties of the heights of Saint Domingo, from the loftiest peaks which intercept the hurricane, to the lowest, crested with forts or spreading their blossoming groves to the verge of the valleys.

"We too have fortresses on our heights," said the officer. "Indeed, you will be in one of them before night. When we are on the other side of Pontarlier, we will look about us a little."

"Then, on the other side of Pontarlier, we shall meet no people,"

observed Mars Plaisir.

"People! Oh, yes! we have people everywhere in France."

When Pontarlier was pa.s.sed, and the windows of the carriage were thrown open, the travellers perceived plainly enough why this degree of liberty was allowed. The region was so wild, that none were likely to come hither in search of the captives. There were inhabitants; but few likely to give information as to who had pa.s.sed along the road. There were charcoal-burners up on the hill-side; there were women was.h.i.+ng clothes in the stream which rushed along, far below in the valley; the miller was in his mill, niched in the hollow beside the waterfall; and there might still be inmates in the convent which stood just below the firs, on the knoll to the left of the road. But by the wayside, there were none who, with curious eyes, might mark, and with eager tongue report, the complexion of the strangers who were rapidly whirled along towards Joux.

Toussaint s.h.i.+vered as the chill mountain air blew in. Perhaps what he saw chilled him no less than what he felt. He might have unconsciously expected to see something like the teeming slopes of his own mountains, the yellow ferns, the glittering rocks, s.h.i.+ning like polished metal in the sun. Instead of these, the scanty gra.s.s was of a blue-green; the stunted firs were black; and the patches of dazzling white intermingled with them formed a contrast of colour hideous to the eye of a native of the tropics.

"That is snow," exclaimed Mars Plaisir to his master, with the pride of superior experience.

"I know it," replied Toussaint, quietly.

The carriage now laboured up a steep ascent. The _brave homme_ who drove alighted on one side, and the guard on the other, and walked up the hill, to relieve the horses. The guard gathered such flowers as met his eye; and handed into the carriage a blue gentian which had till now lingered on the borders of the snows,--or a rhododendron, for which he had scaled a crag. His officer roughly ordered him not to leave the track.

"If we had pa.s.sed this way two or three months earlier," he said complacently to his prisoners, "we should have found cowslips here and there, all along the road. We have a good many cowslips in early summer. Have you cowslips in your island?"

Toussaint smiled as he thought of the flower-strewn savannahs, where more blossoms opened and perished in an hour than in this dreary region all the summer through. He heard Mars Plaisir compelled to admit that he had never seen cowslips out of France.

At length, after several mountings and dismountings of the driver and guard, they seemed, on entering a defile, to apply themselves seriously to their business. The guard cast a glance along the road, and up the sides of the steeps, and beckoned to the hors.e.m.e.n behind to come on; and the driver repeatedly cracked his whip. Silence settled down on the party within the carriage; for all understood that they drew near the fortress. In silence they wound through the defile, till all egress seemed barred by a lofty crag. The road, however, pa.s.sed round its base, and disclosed to view a small basin among the mountains, in the midst of which rose the steep which bore the fortress of Joux. At the foot of this steep lay the village; a small a.s.semblage of sordid dwellings. At this village four roads met, from as many defiles which opened into this centre. A mountain-stream gushed along, now by the road-side, now winding and growing quieter among the little plot of green fields which lay in the rear of the castle rock. This plot of vivid green cheered, for a moment, the eye of the captives; but a second glance showed that it was but a swamp. This swamp, crags, firs, and snow, with the dirty village, made up the prospect. As for the inhabitants--as the carriage stopped short of the village, none were to be seen, but a girl with her distaff amidst a flock of goats, and some soldiers on the castle walls above.

There appeared to be but one road up the rock--a bridle or foot road to the right, too narrow and too steep for any carriage. Where this joined the main road the carriage stopped; and the prisoners were desired to alight.

"We must trouble you to walk up this hill," said the officer, "unless you prefer to mount, and have your horse led."

Before he had finished speaking, Toussaint was many paces in advance of his guards. But few opportunities had he enjoyed, of late, of exercising his limbs. He believed that this would be the last; and he sprang up the rocky pathway with a sense of desperate pleasure. Panting and heated, the most active of the soldiers reached the summit some moments after him. Toussaint had made use of those few moments. He had fixed in his memory the loading points of the landscape towards the east--the bearings of the roads which opened glimpses into two valleys on that side--the patches of enclosure--the nooks of pasture where cows were grazing, and children were at play--these features of the landscape he eagerly comprehended--partly for use, in case of any opportunity of escape; partly for solace, if he should not henceforth be permitted to look abroad.

A few, and but a few, more moments he had, while the drawbridge was lowered, the portcullis raised, and the guard sent in with some order from his officer. Toussaint well knew that that little plot of fields, with its winding stream, was the last verdure that he might ever see.

The snowy summits which peered over the fir-tops were prophets of death to him; for how should he, who had gone hither and thither under the sun of the tropics for sixty years, live chained among the snows? Well did he know this; yet he did not wait to be asked to pa.s.s the bridge.

The drawbridge and the courtyard were both deserted. Not a soldier was to be seen. Mars Plaisir muttered his astonishment, but his master understood, that the presence of negro prisoners in the fortress was not to become known. He read in this incident a prophecy of total seclusion.

They were marched rapidly through the courtyard, into a dark pa.s.sage, where they were desired to stop. In a few moments Toussaint heard the tramp of feet about the gate, and understood that the soldiers had been ordered back to their post.

"The Commandant," the officer announced to his prisoners; and the Commandant Rubaut entered the dim pa.s.sage. Toussaint formed his judgment of him, to a certain extent, in a moment. Rubaut endeavoured to a.s.sume a tone of good-humoured familiarity; but there appeared through this a misgiving as to whether he was thus either letting himself down, on the one hand, or, on the other, encroaching on the dignity of the person he addressed. His prisoner was a negro; but then he had been the recognised Commander-in-Chief of Saint Domingo. One symptom of awkwardness was, that he addressed Toussaint by no sort of t.i.tle.

"We have had notice of your approach," said he; "which is fortunate, as it enables me to conduct you at once to your apartment. Will you proceed? This way. A torch, Bellines! We have been looking for you these two days; which happens very well, as we have been enabled to prepare for you. Torches, Bellines! This way. We mount a few steps, you perceive. We are not taking you underground, though I call for lights; but this pa.s.sage to the left, you perceive, is rather dark.

Yes, that is our well; and a great depth it is--deeper, I a.s.sure you, than this rock is high. What do they call the depth, Chalot? Well, never mind the depth! You can follow me, I believe, without waiting for a light. We cannot go wrong. Through this apartment to the left."

Toussaint, however, chose to wait for Bellines and his torch. He chose to see what he could of the pa.s.sages of his prison. If this vault in which he stood were not underground, it was the dreariest apartment from which the daylight had ever been built out. In the moment's pause occasioned by his not moving on when desired, he heard the dripping of water as in a well.

Bellines appeared, and his torch showed the stone walls of the vault s.h.i.+ning with the trickling of water. A cold steam appeared to thicken the air, oppress the lungs, and make the torch burn dim.

"To what apartment can this be the pa.s.sage?" thought Toussaint. "The grave is warm compared with this."

A glance of wretchedness from Mars Plaisir, seen in the torchlight, as Bellines pa.s.sed on to the front, showed that the poor fellow's spirits, and perhaps some visions of a merry life among the soldiers, had melted already in the damps of this vault. Rubaut gave him a push, which showed that he was to follow the torch-bearer.

Through this vault was a pa.s.sage, dark, wet, and slippery. In the left-hand wall of this pa.s.sage was a door, studded with iron nails thickly covered with rust. The key was in this door. During the instant required for throwing it wide, a large flake of ice fell from the ceiling of the pa.s.sage upon the head of Toussaint. He shook it off, and it extinguished the torch.

"You mean to murder us," said he, "if you propose to place us here. Do you not know that ice and darkness are the negro's poison? Snow, too,"

he continued, advancing to the cleft of his dungeon wall, at the outward extremity of which was his small grated window. "Snow piled against this window now! We shall be buried under it in winter."

"You will have good fires in winter."

"In winter! Yes! this night; or I shall never see winter."

"This night! Oh, certainly! You can have a fire, though it is not usual with us at this season. Bellines--a fire here immediately."

He saw his prisoner surveying, by the dim light from the deep window, the miserable cell--about twenty-eight feet by thirteen, built of blocks of stone, its vaulted ceiling so low that it could be touched by the hand; its floor, though planked, rotten and slippery with wet; and no furniture to be seen but a table, two chairs, and two heaps of straw in opposite corners.

"I am happy," said the Commandant, "to have been able to avoid putting you underground. The orders I have had, from the First Consul himself, as to your being _mis au secret_, are very strict. Notwithstanding that, I have been able, you see, to place you in an apartment which overlooks the courtyard; and which, too, affords you other objects"-- pointing through the gratings to the few feet of the pavement without, and the few yards of the perpendicular rock opposite, which might be seen through the loop-hole.

"How many hours of the day and night are we to pa.s.s in tills place?"

"How many hours? We reckon twenty-four hours to the day and night, as is the custom in Europe," replied Rubaut; whether in ignorance or irony, his prisoner could not, in the dim twilight, ascertain. He only learned too surely that no exit from this cell was to be allowed.

Firewood and light were brought. Rubaut, eager to be busy till he could go, and to be gone as soon as possible, found fault with some long-deceased occupant of the cell, for having covered its arched ceiling with grotesque drawings in charcoal; and then with Bellines, for not having dried the floor. Truly the light gleamed over it as over a pond. Bellines pleaded in his defence that the floor had been dried twice since morning; but that there was no stopping the melting of the ice above. The water would come through the joints till the winter frosts set in.

"Ay, the winter frosts--they will set all to rights. They will cure the melting of the ice, no doubt." Turning to his prisoners, he congratulated himself on not being compelled to search their persons.

The practice of searching was usual, but might, he rejoiced to say, be dispensed with on the present occasion. He might now, therefore, have the pleasure of wis.h.i.+ng them a good evening.

Pointing to the two heaps of straw, he begged that his prisoners would lay down their beds in any part of the cell which pleased them best.

Their food, and all that they wanted, would be brought to the door regularly. As for the rest, they would wait upon each other. Having thus exhausted his politeness, he quitted the cell; and lock, bolt, and bar were fastened upon the captives.

By the faint light, Toussaint then perceived that his companion was struggling with laughter. When Mars Plaisir perceived by his master's smile that he had leave to give way, he laughed till the cell rang again, saying--

"Wait upon each other! His Excellency wait upon me! His Excellency wait upon anybody!"

"There would be nothing new in that. I have endeavoured to wait upon others all my life. Rarely does Providence grant the favour to wait upon so many."

Mars Plaisir did not comprehend this, and therefore continued--

"These whites think that we blacks are created to be serving, serving always--always serving."

"And they are right. Their mistake is in not seeing that the same is the case with all other men."

In his incessant habit of serving those about him, Toussaint now remembered that it would be more kind to poor Mars Plaisir to employ him, than to speak of things which he could not comprehend. He signed to him, therefore, to shake down the straw on each side the fireplace.

Mars Plaisir sacrificed some of his own bundle to wipe down the wet walls; but it was all in vain. During the silence, while his master was meditating at the window, the melancholy sound of falling water--drip, drip--plash, plash--was heard all around, within and without the cell.

When he had wiped down the walls, from the door in the corner round to the door again, the place from which he had set out was as wet as ever, and his straw was spoiled. He angrily kicked the wet straw into the fire; the consequence of which was that the cell was filled with smoke, almost to suffocation.

"Ask for more," said Toussaint.

Mars Plaisir shouted, knocked at the door, and used every endeavour to make himself heard; but in vain. No one came.

"Take some of mine," said Toussaint. "No one can lie on this floor."