One day, M. Sartine sent Marie to call at a house on the highroad that leads across the Morne Parnasse. Her business was to shew some lace to a Spanish lady, Se?ora Vigil, and to sell it if possible.

The Se?ora had come to Martinique by chance; she had taken this house—the Chateau Principe—by chance, and yesterday she had entered M. Sartine’s shop by chance to buy some lace. She might just as easily have gone to the shop of M. Custine, or to the Fleur d’Avril, or to the Bon Marché, but chance—whose other name is Fate—led her into the shop of M. Sartine.

Marie, who had sold the whole quantity of lace to the Se?ora, was returning to St. Pierre well pleased and in high spirits. It was her sixteenth birthday and it had brought her the pleasantest surprise in the world.

Finotte, Dodotte, Florine, Honorine, all her girl friends and acquaintances, had remembered the day; each had brought a little present, a trifle, less than a trifle, a box of sea shells blazing with colour, a scarf, a string of beads—the brazier across the way and the baker, had remembered her; they did not bring presents, but they called out good wishes as she passed. Her aunt gave her the rarest thing she ever gave to anyone—a smile. She had not known that any of these people had cared for her till this morning, when her birthday made them speak.131 And she had told no one of her birthday, or only one girl, Finotte—she must have spread the news.

Then, she had been entrusted with the lace selling by M. Sartine, a most important business, in which she had succeeded. The Se?ora had spoken kindly to her, asked her her age, and discovering that it was her birthday, had given her a little old-fashioned cross wrought in silver and with the blessed Saviour upon it. “It has been blessed by the Archbishop of Santa Cruz,” said the Se?ora, “and whilst you keep it nothing evil can hurt you.”

It had been a wonderful morning. The sun was full in the sky as she came along the road past the Jardin des Plantes. The gates were open, they were always open, rusty and gone to decay; she could see in through the great arch of twilight made by the trees. In there amidst the palms and great tropical trees a bird was singing, calling, filling the echoes with its golden, flute-like notes. It was a siffleur de montagne. She paused and looked in. The great garden, once carefully tended, had gone to decay, the lianas hung like ropes between the trees; palmiste and tree fern, cedar and locust, all were roped and tangled by the lianas, the scent of vanilla came on the air from the green gloom, vanilla, and green orange, wet mould, the sad odour of decaying leaves.

It was a wonderful and mysterious place, the Jardin des Plantes; laid out when Versailles was filled with courtiers, beautiful when Josephine, not yet an empress, walked its paths, nothing dreaming of Napoleon or her fate; long gone to decay and given over now to Nature, who was slowly taking it back to herself.

Marie, when she passed the gates, always looked in fascinated and half frightened at the silent riot of trees and shrubs; but to-day it seemed less gloomy; the voice of the bird seemed to fill it with light.

132 “Marie! Marie! Marie! Bonjour, Marie—Marie de Morne Rouge,” sang the bird. She made a lovely picture as she stood in the sunlit road, li............