Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/94

66 women, whose nails would have torn them to pieces. The court proceedings had revealed abominable mysteries; sham crucifixions, wholesale flagellations, drownings pushed almost to the last extremity, a veritable auto-da-fé. Children had been buried for hours up to their necks, others had been forced to eat revolting things, still others had been forced to fight with each other, though they cherished no animosity.

The verdict removed any suspicion of direct complicity with his underlings on the part of Monsieur Béjard, but his negligence was made manifest in a most crushing manner. The company having dismissed him from its employ, the public was not yet satisfied, and, confusing Béjard's father with the criminals who had been sentenced to hard labor, forced him to leave the city. One circumstance that had been established by all the testimony contributed to their ostracism. The disgraced director's son, then a schoolboy fifteen years old, had presided more than once at these spectacles, and, upon the oath of those concerned, took pleasure in them. Little more would have been necessary to make the public, in their great excitement, urge the imprisonment of the crafty sneak who had taken such good care not to denounce to his father the people responsible for these pleasures.

Twenty-five years later it was rumored that Béjard, junior, was coming back to his natal city. His father had become wealthy in Texas, and had left him important plantations of rice and sugar cane, cultivated by an army of blacks. On the eve of the Civil War, Freddy Béjard liquidated a part of his holdings and placed the proceeds in the principal European banks. He stayed in America for the beginning of the campaign less because of sympathy with the slavery party