Chapter III

... There is a young white lady, accompanied by an aged negress, already waiting on the south wharf for the boat;--evidently she is to be one of my fellow-passengers. Quite a pleasing presence: slight graceful figure,--a face not precisely pretty, but delicate and sensitive, with the odd charm of violet eyes under black eye-brows....

A friend who comes to see me off tells me all about her. Mademoiselle Lys is going to New York to be a governess,--to leave her native island forever. A story sad enough, though not more so than that of many a gentle creole girl. And she is going all alone, for I see her bidding good-bye to old Titine,--kissing her. "_Adié encò, chè;--Bon-Dié ké béni ou!_" sobs the poor servant, with tears streaming down her kind black face. She takes off her blue shoulder-kerchief, and waves it as the boat recedes from the wooden steps.

... Fifteen minutes later, Mademoiselle and I find ourselves under the awnings shading the saloon-deck of the _Guadeloupe_. There are at least fifty passengers,--many resting in chairs, lazy-looking Demerara chairs with arm-supports immensely lengthened so as to form rests for the lower limbs. Overhead, suspended from the awning-frames, are two tin cages containing parrots;--and I see two little greenish monkeys, no bigger than squirrels, tied to the wheel-hatch,--two _sakiwinkis_. These are from the forests of British Guiana. They keep up a continual thin sharp twittering, like birds,--all the while circling, ascending, descending, retreating or advancing to the limit of the little ropes attaching them to the hatch.

The _Guadeloupe_ has seven hundred packages to deliver at St. Pierre: we have ample time,--Mademoiselle Violet-Eyes and I,--to take one last look at the "Pays des Revenants."

I wonder what her thoughts are, feeling a singular sympathy for her,--for I am in that sympathetic mood which the natural emotion of leaving places and persons one has become fond of, is apt to inspire. And now at the moment of my going,--when I seem to understand as never before the beauty of that tropic Nature, and the simple charm of the life to which I am bidding farewell,--the question comes to me: "Does she not love it all as I do,--nay, even much more, because of that in her own existence which belongs to it?" But as a child of the land, she has seen no other skies,--fancies, perhaps, there may be brighter ones....

... Nowhere on this earth, Violet-Eyes!--nowhere beneath this sun!... Oh! the dawnless glory of tropic morning!--the single sudden leap of the giant light over the purpling of a hundred peaks,--over the surging of the mornes! And the early breezes from the hills,--all cool out of the sleep of the forests, and heavy with vegetal odors thick, sappy, savage-sweet!--and the wild high winds that run ruffling and crumpling through the cane of the mountain slopes in storms of papery sound!--

And the mighty dreaming of the woods,--green-drenched with silent pouring of creepers,--dashed with the lilac and yellow and rosy foam of liana flowers!--

And the eternal azure apparition of the all-circling sea,--that as you mount the heights ever appears to rise perpendicularly behind you,--that seems, as you descend, to sink and flatten before you!--

And the violet velvet distances of evening;--and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning,--when all the heaven seems filled with vapors of a molten sun!...