The Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of Adventure
opened for him, and he had seen it in the raw. On his hands was the
blood of a fellow-man; on his lips the fragrance of a kiss that set his
veins afire.
"I say, Roly, where _have_ you been?" Miss Banniman's strident voice
demanded, as he entered the café.
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed her father, waving his prospective son-in-law
to a chair with a pudgy hand. "We thought you were lost in the tall
grass. You missed tea, but you're in time for a cocktail. Eleanor is
quite cranky if she misses hers."
"Beastly stupid place, don't you think?" Miss Banniman inquired of her
sweetheart.
"Um-m! I haven't found it so," Roly said, with a sigh of relief. "Fact
is, I've been quite entertained."
"You have _such_ absurd tastes. A dash of absinthe in mine, if you
please, waiter. Papa has ordered the car attached to the evening train,
and we're dining aboard. What d'you say to Pinehurst and a week of
golf?"
Roly felt a sudden distaste for Pinehurst, for golf, for all the places
and people he had known. "Lovely!" he managed to say; then, summoning
his courage: "I'll join you later, perhaps. Sorry to break up the party,
but I've a little business here that will take a day or so."
"Business? _You?_ How funny!" exclaimed Eleanor.
"Too bad!" her father said. "It's blooming hot here, and the flies are
awful."
The others joined in commiserating the young man. When they arose to go
up-stairs and prepare for the train, Roly fell in behind them with Miss
Banniman.
"See here, Eleanor, are you sure you love me?" he asked.
She lifted her brows slightly. "Not at all. What put such an idea into
your head? You're a charming boy, even if you are a bit romantic. But
love--I thought we understood each other."
"I've been thinking--something unusual for me--and I don't believe we're
either of us quite ready to take the fatal plunge. How does it strike
you?"
"I'm in no hurry," Miss Banniman said, indifferently. "Let's call it off
for the present. We can try it on again in the autumn, if we feel like
it."
"Mighty sensible of you," Van Dam told her, with relief.
"Oh, that's all right! Don't let this keep you away from Pinehurst,
however. The season's nearly over, and we'll need you for a foursome."
She extended her hand, and Van Dam took it gratefully.
Her father called from the elevator: "See you in a few days, Roly. Good
luck with your business, and don't take any bad money." Mr. Banniman's
use of slang was neither brilliant nor original, but he was chuckling as
the car shot up out of sight.
Van Dam hastened to the desk and called for a city directory, then ran
through it to the L's.
"_L-a, L-e--_" Ah, there it was! "Le Duc, Félice--wid. res. 247 Boule
St."
He made a note of the address, then settled his hat upon his head, lit a
cigarette, and walked jauntily out into the evening and turned toward
Canal Street. It was growing cool; the street lights were gleaming; long
rows of them were festooned for blocks in all directions, blazing forth
in fanciful designs. In a short time now the Rex parade would be under
way, with its countless floats depicting "The Age of Romance."
"Romance, indeed!" smiled Mr. Van Dam, contentedly. Why _this_ was the
age of romance. Something recalled Mr. Banniman's parting words to
him--"bad money!" The young man paused abruptly. "Bad money!" What a
coincidence! He pictured a safe sunk into a library wall, an open
cash-drawer jammed with neatly pinned packages of crisp, new ten-dollar
bank-notes. Then he recalled the story of the garrulous old shop-woman.
Roly came to himself with a jerk. He began to laugh.
"Good Lord!" said he, aloud. "I wonder if Cousin Alfred's money was
counterfeit!"
He was still smiling as he bought a white gardenia and placed it in his
buttonhole.
ROPE'S END
I
A round moon flooded the thickets with gold and inky shadows. The night
was hot, poisonous with the scent of blossoms and of rotting tropic
vegetation. It was that breathless, overpowering period between the
seasons when the trades were fitful, before the rains had come. From the
Caribbean rose the whisper of a dying surf, slower and fainter than the
respirations of a sick man; in the north the bearded, wrinkled Haytian
hills lifted their scowling faces. They were trackless, mysterious,
darker even than the history of the island.
Beneath a thatched roof set upon four posts was a table, spread with
food, and on it a candle burned steadily. No wind came out of the hot
darkness; the flame rose straight and unwavering. Under a similar
thatched shed, a short distance away, a group of soldiers were busy
around a smoldering cook-fire. There were other huts inside the jungle
clearing, through the dilapidated walls of which issued rays of light
and men's voices.
Petithomme Laguerre, colonel of tirailleurs, in the army of the
Republic, wiped the fat of a roasted pig from his lips with the back of
his hand. Using his thumb-nail as a knife-blade, he loosened a splinter
from the edge of the rickety wooden table, fashioned it into a
toothpick, then laid himself back in a grass hammock. He had expected to
find rum in the house of Julien Rameau, but either there had been none
or his brave soldiers had happened upon it; at any rate, supper had been
a dry meal--only one of several disappointments of the day. The sack of
the village had not been at all satisfactory to the colonel; one yellow
woman dead, a few prisoners, and some smoldering ruins--surely there was
no profit in such business.
Reclining at ease, he allowed himself to admire his uniform, a splendid
creation of blue and gold which had put him to much pains and expense.
It had arrived from Port au Prince barely in time to be of service in
the campaign. As for the shoes, they were not so satisfactory. Shoes of
any sort, in fact, cramped Colonel Petithomme Laguerre's feet, and were
refinements of fashion to which he had never fully accustomed himself.
He wore them religiously, in public, for a colonel who would be a
general must observe the niceties of military deportment, even in the
Haytian army, but now he kicked them off and exposed his naked yellow
soles gratefully.
On three sides of the clearing were thickets of guava and coffee trees,
long since gone wild. A ruined wall along the beach road, a pair of
bleaching gate-posts, a moldering house foundation, showed that this had
once been the site of a considerable estate.
These mute testimonials to the glories of the French occupation are
common in Hayti, but since the blacks rose under Toussaint l'Ouverture
they have been steadily disappearing; the greedy fingers of the jungle
have destroyed them bit by bit; what were once farms and gardens are now
thickets and groves; in place of stately houses there are now nothing
but miserable hovels. Cities of brick and stone have been replaced by
squalid villages of board and corrugated iron, peopled by a
shrill-voiced, quarreling race over which, in grim mockery, floats the
banner of the Black Republic inscribed with the motto, "Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity."
Once Hayti was called the "Jewel of the Antilles" and boasted its
"Little Paris of the West," but when the black men rose to power it
became a place of evil reputation, a land behind a veil, where all
things are possible and most things come to pass. In place of monastery
bells there sounds the midnight mutter of voodoo drums; the priest has
been succeeded by the "papaloi," the worship of the Virgin has changed
to that of the serpent. Instead of the sacramental bread and wine men
drink the blood of the white cock, and, so it is whispered, eat the
flesh of "the goat without horns."
As he picked his teeth, Colonel Petithomme Laguerre turned his eyes to
the right, peering idly into the shadows of a tamarind-tree, the
branches of which overtopped the hut. Suspended from one of these was an
inert shape, mottled with yellow patches where the moonbeams filtered
through the leaves. It stirred, swayed, turned slowly, resolving itself
into the figure of an old man. He was hanging by the wrists to a rawhide
rope; his toes were lightly touching the earth.
"So! Now that Monsieur Rameau has had time to think, perhaps he will
speak," said the colonel.
A sigh, it was scarcely a groan, answered.
"Miser that you are!" impatiently exclaimed the colonel. "Your money can
do you no good now. Is it not better to part with it easily than to rot
in a government prison? You understand, the jails are full; many
mulattoes like you will be shot to make room."
"There is no--money," faintly came the voice of the prisoner. "My
neighbors will tell you that I am poor."
Both men spoke in the creole patois of the island.
"Not much, perhaps, but a little, eh? Just a little, let us say."
"Why should I lie? There is none."
"Bah! It seems you are stubborn. Congo, bring the boy!" Laguerre spoke
gruffly.
A man emerged from the shadows at the base of the tree and slouched
forward. He was a negro soldier, and, with musket and machete, shuffled
past the corner of the hut in the direction of the other houses, pausing
as the colonel said:
"But wait! There is a girl, too, I believe."
"Yes, monsieur. The wife of Floréal."
"Good! Bring them both."
Some moments later imploring voices rose, a shrill entreaty in a woman's
tones, then Congo and another tirailleur appeared; driving ahead of them
a youth and a girl. The prisoners' arms were bound behind them, and
although the girl was weeping, the boy said little. He stepped forward
into the candle-light and stared defiantly at the blue-and-gold officer.
Floréal Rameau was a slim mulatto, perhaps twenty years old; his lips
were thin and sensitive, his nose prominent, his eyes brilliant and
fearless. They gleamed now with all the vindictiveness of a serpent,
until that hanging figure in the shadows just outside turned slowly and
a straying moonbeam lit the face of his father; then a new expression
leaped into them. Floréal's chin fell, he swayed uncertainly upon his
legs.
"Monsieur--what is this?" he said, faintly.
The girl cowered at his back.
"Your father persists in lying," explained Laguerre.
"What do you--wish him to say?"
"A little thing. His money can be of no further use to him."
"Money?" Floréal voiced the word vacantly. He turned to his wife,
saying, "Monsieur le Colonel asks for money. We have none."
The girl nodded, her lips moved, but no sound issued; she also was
staring, horror-stricken, into the shadows of the tamarind-tree. Her
arms, bound as they were, threw the outlines of her ripe young bosom
into prominent relief and showed her to be round and supple; she was
lighter in color even than Floréal. A little scar just below her left
eye stood out, dull brown, upon her yellow cheek.
Laguerre now saw her plainly for the first time, and shook off his
indolence. He swung his legs from the hammock and sat up. Something in
the intensity of his regard brought her gaze away from the figure of
Papa Rameau. She saw a large, thick-necked, full-bodied black, of bold
and brutal feature, whose determined eyes had become bloodshot from
staring through dust and sun. He wore a mustache, and a little pointed
woolly patch beneath his lower lip. Involuntarily the girl recoiled.
"Um-m! So!" The barefoot colonel rose and, stepping forward, took her
face in his harsh palm, turning it up for scrutiny. His roving glance
appraised her fully. "Your name is--"
"Pierrine!"
"To be sure. Well then, my little Pierrine, you will tell me about this,
eh?"
"I know nothing," she stammered. "Floréal speaks the truth, monsieur.
What does it mean--all this? We are good people; we harm nobody. Every
one here was happy until the--blacks rose. Then there was fighting