The Hour and the Man, An Historical Romance. Harriet MartineauЧитать онлайн книгу.
was touched by her grief. “I can run my boat along to a place I know of, where there are silks and trinkets to be had, as well as brandy. I will bring you and the girls some pretty dresses, Margot.”
“No, Paul, not here. We cannot wear them here. And we shall have no pleasure in anything, now we have lost the only one who could take care of us. And who knows whether we shall ever see our boys again?”
“Curse the war!” muttered Paul, wiping his brows.
“Mother,” said Aimée in a low voice, “have we not God to protect us still? One master may desert us, and another may die; but there is still God above all. Will not he protect us?”
“Yes, my dear. God takes care of the world; but then He takes care of our enemies as well as of us.”
“Does he?” exclaimed Denis, in a tone of surprise.
“Yes; ask your father if Father Laxabon does not say so. The name of God is for ever in the mouths of the whites at Cap; but they reviled the king; and, true enough, the king was altogether on our side—we had all his protection.”
“All that is a good deal changed now, I hear,” said Paul. “The whites at Cap are following the example of the rebels at Paris, and do not rely upon God, as on their side, as they used to do.”
“Will God leave off taking care of them, then?” asked Denis, “and take care only of us?”
“No,” said Aimée. “God is willing, Isaac says, to take care of all men, whether they serve him or not.”
Denis shook his head, as if he did not quite approve this.
“Our priest told Isaac,” continued Aimée, “that God sends his rain on the just and on the unjust. And do not you know that he does? When the rains come next month, will they not fall on all the plantations of the plain, as well as in the valley where the camp is? Our waterfalls will be all the fresher and brighter for the rains, and so will the springs in Cap.”
“But if he is everybody’s master, and takes care of everybody,” said Denis, “what is all this fighting about? We are not fighting for Him, are we?”
“Your father is,” said Margot; “for God is always on the side of kings. Father Laxabon says so.”
The boy looked puzzled, till Aimée said—
“I think there would be none of this fighting if everybody tried to please God and serve Him, as is due to a master—as father did for the king. God does not wish that men should fight. So our priest at Breda told Isaac.”
“Unless wicked rebels force them to it, as your father is forced,” said Margot.
“I suppose so,” said Aimée, “by Isaac’s choosing to go.”
Chapter Six.
The Hour.
The lads found some of the details of military training less heroic and less agreeable than they had imagined—scarcely to be compared, indeed, under either aspect, to the chase of the wild goats, and search for young turtle, to which they had been of late accustomed. They had their pleasures, however, amidst the heats, toils, and laborious offices of the camp. They felt themselves men, living among men: they were young enough to throw off, and almost to forget, the habits of thought which belong to slavery; and they became conscious of a spirit growing up within them, by which they could look before and after, perceive that the future of their lives was in their own hands, and therefore understand the importance of the present time. Their father looked upon them with mixed feelings of tender pride in them, and regret for his own lost youth. The strong and busy years on which they were entering had been all spent by him in acquiring one habit of mind, to which his temperament and his training alike conduced—a habit of endurance. It was at this time that he had acquired the power of reading enough to seek for books; and the books that he had got hold of were Epictetus, and some fragments of Fénélon. With all the force of youth, he had been by turns the stoic and the quietist; and, while busied in submitting himself to the pressure of the present, he had turned from the past, and scarcely dreamed of the future. If his imagination glanced back to the court of his royal grandfather, held under the palm shades, or pursuing the lion-hunt amidst the jungles of Africa, he had hastily withdrawn his mind’s eye from scenes which might create impatience of his lot; and if he ever wondered whether a long succession of ignorant and sensual blacks were to be driven into the field by the whip every day in Saint Domingo, for evermore, he had cut short the speculation as inconsistent with his stoical habit of endurance, and his Christian principle of trust. It was not till his youth was past that he had learned anything of the revolutions of the world—too late to bring them into his speculations and his hopes. He had read, from year to year, of the conquests of Alexander and of Caesar; he had studied the wars of France, and drawn the plans of campaigns in the sand before his door till he knew them by heart; but it had not occurred to him, that while empires were overthrown in Asia, and Europe was traversed by powers which gave and took its territories, as he saw the negroes barter their cocoa-nuts and plantains on Saturday nights—while such things had happened in another hemisphere, it had not occurred to him that change would ever happen in Saint Domingo. He had heard of earthquakes taking place at intervals of hundreds of years, and he knew that the times of the hurricane were not calculable; but, patient and still as was his own existence, he had never thought whether there might not be a convulsion of human affections, a whirlwind of human passion, preparing under the grim order of society in the colony. If a master died, his heir succeeded him; if the “force” of any plantation was by any conjuncture of circumstances dispersed or removed, another negro company was on the shore, ready to re-people the slave-quarter. The mutabilities of human life had seemed to him to be appointed to whites—to be their privilege and their discipline; while he doubted not that the eternal command to blacks was to bear and forbear. When he now looked upon his boys, and remembered that for them this order was broken up, and in time for them to grasp a future, and prepare for it—that theirs was the lot of whites, in being involved in social changes, he regarded them with a far deeper solicitude and tenderness than in the darkest midnight hours of their childish illnesses, or during the sweetest prattle of their Sabbath afternoons, and with a far stronger hopefulness than can ever enter the heart or home of a slave. They had not his habitual patience; and he saw that they were little likely to attain it; but they daily manifested qualities and powers—enterprise, forecast, and aspiration of various kinds, adorning their youth with a promise which made their father sigh at the retrospect of his own. He was amused, at the same time, to see in them symptoms of a boyish vanity, to which he had either not been prone, or which he had early extinguished. He detected in each the secret eagerness with which they looked forward to displaying their military accomplishments to those with whom they were always exchanging thoughts over the ridge. He foresaw that when they should have improved a little in certain exercises, he should be receiving hints about a visit to the shore, and that there would then be such a display upon the sands as should excite prodigious admiration, and make Denis break his heart that he must not go to the camp.
Meantime, he amused them in the evenings, with as many of his officers as chose to look on, by giving them the history of the wars of Asia and Europe, as he had learned it from books, and thoroughly mastered it by reflection. Night after night was the map of Greece traced with his sword’s point on the sand behind his tent, while he related the succession of the conflicts with Persia, with a spirit derived from old Herodotus himself. Night after night did the interest of his hearers arouse more and more spirit in himself, till he became aware that his sympathies with the Greeks in their struggles for liberty had hitherto been like those of the poet born blind, who delights in describing natural scenery—thus unconsciously enjoying the stir within him of powers whose appropriate exercise is forbidden. Amidst this survey of the regions of history, he felt, with humble wonder, that while his boys were like bright-eyed children sporting fearlessly in the fields, he was like one lately couched, by whom the order of