Part 12

“I mentioned to Jack, while on my way here, sir, that it seemed to me that you would be safer nearer the American Consulate in case any trouble should arise concerning the concessions to the whites made by Dupree.”

“Oh! I don’t think that there is any occasion for alarm. To bluff and bluster is part of the negro nature. The whole talk is inspired by the agitation caused by the Voo Doo priests and priestesses among the superstitious blacks from the mountains. By the way, Jack, our old friend the witch who wished to sail in your ship with us when we left for Boston, still haunts my premises.” As if to corroborate what the speaker had just said, a wailing chant arose on the tranquil night air, coming from just beyond the wall around the garden,

“Oh! Tu Konk, my Tu Konk” “Send back the black blood.”

“There she is now,” exclaimed Jack and Mr. Dunlap at the same time.

“My black boy who waits at the table told me that the old crone was holding meetings nightly in worship of Voo Doo, and that too in the very suburbs of the city,” said Mr. Dunlap when the sound of old Sybella’s voice died away in the distance.

“Where is Burton tonight?” asked Jack as if recalling something.

“I don’t know. When he does not appear at the established dinner hour I take it for granted that he is at the club in the city or dining with some of his newly made friends. He is quite popular here, being a Haitian himself,” replied the old gentleman.

* * * * *

It was late that night when Walter Burton entered the apartments reserved for his exclusive use in the house of John Dunlap. Throwing off his coat he sat down in a great easy chair in the moonlight by the open window and lighted a cigar.

“I wish that I were free to fly to the mountains and hide myself here in Haiti among my own people forever,” sighed the young man glancing away off to the shadowy outline of the hills against the moonlit sky.

“The sensation of being pitied is humiliating and hateful, and that was what I endured during the voyage from Boston, and have suffered ever since I arrived and have been in enforced association with the Dunlaps. The devoted love for Lucy, my wife, is a source of pain, not pleasure. Her unreasoning antipathy now is more bearable than will surely be the repulsion that must arise if, when restored to reason, she learn that I am the author of the cause of her disappointment, horror and dementia. Woe is mine under any circumstances! The evil consequences of attempted amalgamation of the negro and white races are not borne alone by the white participants but fall as heavily upon those of the negro blood who share in the abortive effort.”

Burton seemed to ruminate for a long while, smoking in silence, then he muttered,

“Am I much happier when with my own race? Hardly! When I am in the society of even the most highly cultivated Haitian negroes I am unable to free myself from the thought that we are much like a lot of monkeys, such as Italian street musicians carry with them. We negroes are togged out in the dignity, education and culture of the white race, but we are only aping the natural, self-evolved civilization and culture of the whites. The clothing does not fit us, the garments were not cut according to our mental and moral measurements, and we appear ridiculous when we don the borrowed trappings of the white race’s mind, and pompously strut before an amused and jeering world.”

“When I imagined the mantle that I wore was my own it set lightly and comfortably on me. Now that I realize that it is the property of another, it has become cumbersome, unwieldy, awkward and is slipping rapidly from my shoulders.”

“On the other side of the subject are equal difficulties. If, weary of imitation and affectation, I seek the society of my race in all its natural purity and ignorance, my senses have become so acute, softened and made tender by the long use of my borrowed mantle that I am shocked, horrified or disgusted. Oh! Son of Ham, escape from the doom pronounced against you while yet time was new seems impossible. In My Book it is writ, saith the Lord!”

In melancholy musing the man tortured by so many contrary emotions and feelings, sat silently gazing at the distant stars and then cried out in anguish of spirit,

“Oh! that I should be forced to feel that the Creator of all this grand universe is unjust! That I should regard education and culture as a curse to those foredoomed to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. That I should realize that refinement is a cankerous limb, a clog and hindrance to a negro, unfitting him for association with his own race and yet impotent to change those innate characteristics inherited by him from his ancestors, that disqualify him from homogeneousness with the white race.”

The young man’s voice was full of despair and even something of reproach as his subtle intellect wove the meshes of the adamantine condition that bound him helpless, in agony, to the rack of race inferiority.

“Mother Sybella, who has proven herself my great-grandmother, urges me to fly and seek among my own people that surcease from suffering unattainable among the whites. While she fascinates me, she fills me with horror. I am drawn toward her yet I am repelled by something loathsome in the association with her. She seems to possess hypnotic power over my senses; she leads me by some magnetic influence that exerts control over the negro portion of my nature.”

“I am ashamed to be seen by the white people, especially the Dunlaps, in familiar conversation with the grandmother of my mother, but in our secret and frequent interviews she has told me much that I was unaware of concerning my ancestors and my mother. I have promised to attend a meeting of my kinsmen tomorrow night, which will be held in a secluded spot near the city, whither she herself will guide me. I do not wish to go. I did not wish to make the promise and appointment to meet her, but was compelled by the overmastering power she wields over the natural proclivities within me. I must meet her and go with her.”

The struggle in the dual nature of the man between the contending forces of the innate and the acquired was obvious in the reluctant tone in which, while he admitted that he would obey the innate, he lamented the abandonment of the acquired.

“I must go, I feel that I must! My destiny was written ere Shem, Ham and Japhet separated to people the world. I bow to the inevitable! I am pledged to Dupree for dinner tomorrow evening, but I shall excuse myself early, and keep my appointment with Mother Sybella, and accompany her to the meeting of my kindred.”

XVI.

The cleared spot selected by Mother Sybella as the scene of her mystic ceremonies and the gathering place of the worshipers of Voo Doo, though scarcely beyond the outskirts of the city, was so screened by the umbrageous growth of tropical forest, interlaced with vanilla and grape-vines that festoon every woodland of Haiti, that its presence was not even suspected save by the initiated.

On the night that Dictator Dupree entertained, among other guests the wealthy Haitian, Walter Burton, partner in the great American house of “J. Dunlap,” and husband of the heiress to the millions accumulated by the long line of “J. Dunlaps” which had controlled the Haitian trade with the United States, a strange and uncanny drama was enacted almost within sound of the music that enlivened the Dictator’s banquet.

Through trees entwined by gigantic vines, resembling monstrous writhing serpents, glided silently many dark forms carrying blazing torches of resinous wood to guide the flitting figures through the intricacies of the hardly definable pathways that ran in serpentine indistinctness toward the clear spot, where Mother Sybella had set up the altar of Tu Konk, and was calling her children to worship by the booming of an immense red drum upon which she beat at short intervals.

In the center of the clearing, coiled upon the stump of a large tree, was a huge black snake, that occasionally reared its head and, waving it from side to side, emitted a fearful hissing sound as it shot forth its scarlet, flame-like tongue.

Torches and bonfires illuminated the spot and cast gleams of light upon the dark faces and distended, white and rolling eyes of the men and women who, squatting in a circle back in the shade of the underbrush, chanted a monotonous dirge-like invocation to the Voo Doo divinity called by them Tu Konk, and supposed to dwell in the loathsome body of the serpent on the stump.

By almost imperceptible degrees the blows upon the drum increased in frequency; old Sybella seemed some tireless fiend incarnate as gradually she animated the multitude and quickened the growing excitement of her emotional listeners by the ceaseless booming of her improved tom-tom. Soon the forest began to resound with hollow bellowing of conch shells carried by many of the squatters about the circle. The chant became quicker. Shouting took the place of the droning monotonous incantations to Tu Konk.

Higher and higher grew the gale of excitement. The shouting grew in volume and intensity. Wild whoops mingled with the more sonorous shouts that made the forest reverberate.

Suddenly the half-clad figure of a man sprang into the circle of light that girded the stump whereon the now irritated snake was hissing continuously. The man was bare to the waist and without covering on his legs and feet below the knees; his eyes glared about him, the revolving white balls in their ebony colored setting was something terrifying to behold. The man uttered whoop after whoop and began shuffling sideways around the stump, every moment adding to the rapidity and violence of his motions until shortly he was madly bounding into the air and with savage shouts tearing at the wool on his head, while white foam flecked his bare black breast.

The man’s madness became contagious. Figure after figure sprang within the lighted space about the serpent. Men, women, and even children all more or less nude, the few garments worn presenting a heterogeneal kaleidoscope of vivid, garish colors as the frenzied dancers whirled about in the irregular light of the torches and bonfires.

Soon spouting streams of red stained the glistening black bodies, and joined the tide of white foam pouring from the protruding, gaping, blubber lips of the howling, frantic worshipers.

The fanatic followers of Voo Dooism were wounding themselves in the delirium of irresponsible emotion. Blood gushed from long gashes made by sharp knives on cheeks, breasts, backs and limbs. The gyrations of the gory, crazed and howling mass were hideous to behold.

When the tempest of curbless frenzy seemed to have reached a point beyond which increase appeared impossible, old Sybella rushed forward, like the wraith of the ancient witch of Endor, dashing the dancers aside, springing to the stump she seized the snake and winding its shining coils about her she waved aloft the long, glittering blade of the knife that she held in hand, and shrieked out, in the voice of an infuriated fiend,

“Bring forth the hornless goat. Let Tu Konk taste the blood of the hornless one!”

A crowd of perfectly naked and bleeding men darted forward bearing in their midst an entirely nude girl, who in a perfect paroxysm of terror fought, writhed and struggled fearfully, yelling wildly all the time, in the grip of her merciless and insensate captors.

The men stretched the screaming wretch across the stump on which the snake had rested, pressed back the agonized girl’s head until her slender neck was drawn taut. Quick as the serpent’s darting tongue, Sybella’s bright, sharp blade descended, severing at one stroke the head almost from the quivering body.

A fiercer, wilder cry arose from the insane devotees as a great tub nearly full of fiery native rum was placed to catch the gushing stream that flowed in a crimson torrent from the still twitching body of the sacrifice to Voo Doo.

Sybella stirred the horrible mixture of blood and rum with a ladle, made of an infant’s skull affixed to a shin-bone of an adult human being, and having replaced the snake upon his throne, on the stump, in an abject posture presented to the serpent the ladle filled with the nauseating stuff. The re-incarnate Tu Konk thrust his head repeatedly into the skull-bowl and scattered drops of the scarlet liquid over his black and shining coils.

Then Sybella using the skull-ladle began filling enormous dippers made of gourds, that the eager, maddened crowd about the Voo Doo altar held expectantly forth, craving a portion in the libation to Tu Konk.

The maniacal host gorged themselves with the loathsome fluid, gulped down in frenzied haste, great draughts of that devilish brew, from the large calabashes that Sybella filled.

Now hell itself broke forth. No longer were the worshipers men and women. The lid was lifted from hell’s deepest, most fiendish caldron. A crew of damned demons was spewed out upon earth. With demoniac screams that rent the calmness of the night, they beat and gashed themselves, their slabbering, thick lips slapping together as they gibbered, like insane monkeys, sending flying showers of foam over their bare and bleeding bodies. Human imps of hell’s creation fell senseless to the ground or writhing in hideous, inhuman convulsions twined their distorted limbs about the furious dancers who stamped upon their hellish faces and brought the dancers shrieking to the earth.

In the midst of this pandemonium, redolent with the odor of inferno, a dark figure, that, crouched in the deep shade of the clustering palm plants, and covered with a dark mantle, had remained unnoticed a spectator of the scene, sprang up, hurled to one side the concealing cloak and bounded toward the stump whereon the serpent hissed defiance at his adorers.

With an unearthly yell, half-groan, half-moan, but all insane, frantic and wild, the neophyte leaped about in erratic gyrations of adoration before the snake, that embodiment of Tu Konk, the Voo Doo divinity.

As whirling and, in an ecstacy of emotion, waving aloft his hands the howling dancer turned and the light of the bonfire fell upon his face, the brutalized features of Walter Burton were revealed.

Those refined, aesthetic features that had made the man “the observed of all observers” at Miss Stanhope’s musicale in Boston, had scarcely been recognized as the same in the strangely flattened nose, the thickened lips, the popped and rolling eyes of the man who, in the forest glade of Haiti danced before the Voo Doo god Tu Konk the serpent.

Burton’s evening dress was torn and disarranged, his hair disheveled, his immaculate linen spotted with blood, his shoes broken and muddy, his face contorted and agonized, as twisting and squirming in every limb he sprang and leaped in a fiercely violent dance before the snake. Yells of long pent-up savage fury rang through the dank night air, as Burton threw back his head and whooped in barbarous license.

Sybella’s flashing eyes gleamed with joy as she gazed at this reclaimed scion of the negro race. She stole toward the flying figure that spun around, transported to the acme of insane emotion, singing in triumphant screeches as she crept forward,

“Tu Konk, the Great one Tu Konk, I thank thee Back comes black blood No longer childless Tu Konk, I praise thee.”

* * * * *

Mr. Dunlap was aroused at daylight by a messenger wearing the naval uniform of the United States, who waited below with an important communication from Lieutenant Maxon.

Two hours before Mr. Dunlap heard the rap on his bedroom door, a pale and trembling figure, clothed in a dilapidated evening suit, had slunk stealthily past his chamber and entered the apartments occupied by the husband of the Dunlap heiress.

“Dear Mr. Dunlap.—I am instructed by Admiral Snave to inform you that an uprising of the blacks is imminent; that it will be impossible to protect you in your exposed position should such an event take place. The admiral suggests that you remove your family at once to the American Consulate, where protection will be furnished all Americans. Very respectfully,

Thomas Maxon, Lieut. U.S.N.”

“P.S.—Please adopt the Admiral’s suggestion. I think you had better let Jack know about this.

T.M.”

Such were the contents of the letter of which the U.S. marine was bearer and it was answered as follows:

“Dear Mr. Maxon.—Express my gratitude to Admiral Snave for the suggestion, but be good enough to add that the health of my niece demands absolute quiet and that I shall remain here instead of going to the crowded Consulate; that I deem any disturbance as exceedingly improbable from my intimate acquaintance with the character of the natives of this island.

Very respectfully,

J. Dunlap.

P.S.—Will notify Jack to bring a man or two from his ship to guard premises for a night or so.”

In the evening, as the shadows of night fell upon the house of Mr. John Dunlap and the owls began to flutter from their roosts and hoot, Mr. Brice, first officer, and McLeod, the big, bony carpenter of the “Adams” were seated on the steps of the piazza in quiet contentment, puffing the good cigars furnished by Mr. Dunlap after, what seemed to them, a sumptuous banquet.

“I declare, Jack, were it not that the consequences might be serious, I should rather enjoy seeing long-limbed Brice and that wild, red-haired Scotchman of yours, led by you, charging an angry mob of blacks, armed with those antiquated cutlasses that your fellows brought from the ship. The blacks would surely run in pure fright at the supposed resurrection of the ancient buccaneers. No scene in a comic opera could compare with what you and your men would present,” said Mr. Dunlap in an amused tone, as he rocked back and forth in an easy chair on the veranda, and chatted with his namesake, Jack.

“It might be amusing to you, sir,” replied Jack laughing, “but it would be death to any black who came within the swing of either of the cutlasses carried by Brice and McLeod. I picked up a half dozen of those old swords at a sale in Manila, and decorated my cabin with them. When I told the men that there might be a fight they could find no other weapons on board ship so denuded my cabin of its decorations and brought them along. Of course I have a revolver but in a rush those old cutlasses could do fearful execution. They are heavy and as sharp as razors.”

“While I am unwilling to take even a remote risk with Lucy and your mother in the house, still in my opinion there is not one chance in a million that anything but bluff and bluster will come of this muttering. Admiral Snave is always anxious for a fight, and the wish is father of the thought in this alarm,” said the old gentleman.

“Why isn’t Burton here?” asked Jack almost angrily.

“He is up stairs. He has been feeling ill all day and asked not to be disturbed unless he be needed. I shall let him rest. However, he has a revolver and is an excellent shot and will prove a valuable aid to us should the fools attempt to molest the premises.”

For an hour or two Brice and McLeod exchanged an occasional word or two but gradually these brief speeches became less frequent and finally ceased altogether. Mr. Dunlap and Jack carried on a desultory conversation for some time, but had sat in silent communion with their own thoughts for possibly an hour when, under the somnific influence of the night songsters, the Scotch ship-carpenter yawned, rose to his feet and stretched his long, hairy arms. He paused in the act and thrust forward his head to catch some indistinct sound, then growled,

“I hear murmuring like surf on a lee-shore.”

Brice arose and listened for a minute then called out,

“Captain, I hear the sound of bare feet pattering on the highway.”

Jack was on his feet in an instant and ran down the walk to the gate in the high brick wall that surrounded the premises. He came running back almost immediately and said in low voice as he reached the piazza.

“There is a mob coming toward the house, along the road leading from the mountains. They carry torches and may mean mischief. Cousin John, will you have Burton called and will you please remain here to look after the women. Brice you and McLeod get cutlasses and bring me one also. We will meet the mob at the gate.”

“Oh! It is nothing Jack, maybe a negro frolic. No use arousing Burton,” said the elder Dunlap.

“If you please, sir, do as I ask. I will be prepared in any event,” said Jack Dunlap tersely.

“All right, Commander, the laugh will be at your expense,” cried the amused old gentleman as he ordered a servant to call Burton.

Jack and his two stalwart supporters had barely reached the gate when the advance guard of the savage horde of black mountaineers appeared before it. Instantly it flashed upon the mind of the skipper that if he barred the gate, that then part of the mob might go around and break over the wall in the rear of the house and attack the defenceless women.

“Throw open the gate, McLeod, we will meet them here,” commanded Captain Dunlap, and turning as some one touched his shoulder, he found Burton at his side, very pale and but half clad, with a revolver in his hand.

“Glad you are here, Burton.”

“I did not have time to put on my shoes.” said Burton.

The main body of the mob now came up and gathered about the open gate. The men were armed with clubs and knives and some few, who were evidently woodsmen, carried axes. Many torches shed their light over the black and brutal faces, making them appear more ebony by the white and angry eyes that glared at the men who stood ready to do battle just within the gateway.

“I wish you people to understand that if you attempt to enter this gate many of you will be killed.”

Young Dunlap spoke in a quiet voice, as he stood between the pillars of the gate, but there was such an unmistakable menace in the steady tone that even the ignorant barbarians understood what he meant.

For the space of a minute of time the mob hesitated. Suddenly a tall woodsman struck a sweeping, chopping blow with his ax. The skipper sprang aside just in time, and as quick as a flash of lightning a stream of flame poured out of the pistol he held in his hand, and that woodsman would never chop wood again.

Brice and McLeod had cast aside their coats, and with their long, sinewy arms bared to the elbows, cutlasses grasped in their strong hands, they were by Jack’s side in a second.

As the pistol shot rang out it seemed to give the signal for an assault. With a howl, like wild and enraged animals, the mob rushed upon the men at the gate. The rush was met by the rapid discharge of the revolvers held by Dunlap and Burton; for a moment it was checked, then a shrill voice was heard screaming high above the howling of the savages,

“Kill the white cow! She has stolen our son from us! Kill the Yankee robbers! Spare my black goat!”

Sybella could be heard though concealed by the tall black men of the mountains who again hurled themselves on the white men who guarded the gateway.

The revolvers were empty. Jack sent his flying into a black face as he gripped the hilt of his cutlass and joined old Brice and the carpenter in the deadly reaping they were doing. Burton having no other weapon than the revolver, threw it aside and seized a club that had dropped from the hands of one of the slain blacks.

The sweep of those old cutlasses in the powerful hands that held them was awful, magnificent; no matter what may have been the history of those old blades they had never been wielded as now. But numbers began to tell and the infuriated negroes fought like fiends, urged on by the old siren Sybella who shrieked out a kind of battle song of the blacks.