A few days later, when we had settled down for a three months\' stay at a little bungalow on the green hills behind Port-au-Prince, Césarine said to me early in the day, "I want to go away to-day, Harry, up into the mountains, to the chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Secours."

I bowed my head in acquiescence. "I can guess why[Pg 24] you want to go, Reeney," I answered gently. "You want to pray there about something that\'s troubling you. And if I\'m not mistaken, it\'s the same thing that made you cry the other evening when I spoke to you down yonder in the cabin."

The tears rose hastily once more into Césarine\'s eyes, and she cried in a low distressed voice, "Harry, Harry, don\'t talk to me so. You are too good to me. You will kill me. You will kill me."

I lifted her head from the table, where she had buried it in her arms, and kissed her tenderly. "Reeney," I said, "I know how you feel, and I hope Notre Dame will listen to your prayers, and send you what you ask of her. But if not, you need never be afraid that I shall love you any the less than I do at present."

Césarine burst into a fresh flood of tears. "No, Harry," she said, "you don\'t know about it. You can\'t imagine it. To us, you know, who have the blood of Africa running in our veins, it is not a mere matter of fancy. It is an eternal disgrace for any woman of our race and descent not to be a mother. I cannot help it. It is the instinct of my people. We are all born so: we cannot feel otherwise."

It was the only time either of us ever alluded in speaking with one another to the sinister half of Césarine\'s pedigree.

"You will let me go with you to the mountains, Reeney?" I asked, ignoring her remark. "You mustn\'t go so far by yourself, darling."

"No, Harry, you can\'t come with me. It would make my prayers ineffectual, dearest. You are a heretic, you know, Harry. You are not Catholic. Notre Dame won\'t listen to my prayer if I take you with me on my pilgrimage, my darling."

I saw her mind was set upon it, and I didn\'t interfere. She would be away all night, she said. There was a rest-house[Pg 25] for pilgrims attached to the chapel, and she would be back again at Maisonette (our bungalow) the morning after.

That afternoon she started on her way on a mountain pony I had just bought for her, accompanied only by a negro maid. I couldn\'t let her go quite unattended through those lawless paths, beset by cottages of half savage Africans; so I followed at a distance, aided by a black groom, and tracked her road along the endless hill-sides up to a fork in the way where the narrow bridle-path divided into two, one of which bore away to leftward, leading, my guide told me, to the chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Secours.

At that point the guide halted. He peered with hand across his eyebrows among the tangled brake of tree-ferns with a terrified look; then he shook his woolly black head ominously. "I can\'t go on, Monsieur," he said, turning to me with an unfeigned shudder. "Madame has not taken the path of Our Lady. She has gone to the left along the other road, which leads at last to the Vaudoux temple."

I looked at him incredulously. I had heard before of Vaudoux. It is the hideous African canibalistic witchcraft of the relapsing half-heathen Haitian negroes. But Césarine a Vaudoux worshipper! It was too ridiculous. The man must be mistaken: or else Césarine had taken the wrong road by some slight accident.

Next moment, a horrible unspeakable doubt seized upon me irresistibly. What was the unknown shrine in her grandmother\'s garden at which Césarine had prayed in those awful gutturals? Whatever it was, I would probe this mystery to the very bottom. I would know the truth, come what might of it.

"Go, you coward!" I said to the negro. "I have no further need of you. I will make my way alone to the Vaudoux temple."[Pg 26]

"Monsieur," the man cried, trembling visibly in every limb, "they will tear you to pieces. If they ever discover you near the temple, they will offer you up as a victim to the Vaudoux."

"Pooh," I answered, contemptuous of the fellow\'s slavish terror. "Where Madame, a woman, dares to go, I, her husband, am certainly not afraid to follow her."

"Monsieur," he replied, throwing himself submissively in the dust on the path before me, "Madame is Creole; she has the blood of the Vaudoux worshippers flowing in her veins. Nobody will hurt her. She is free of the craft. But Monsieur is a pure white and uninitiated.... If th............