Page:Rowland--In the shadow.djvu/128

 girl; and as he repeated the word the paddle snapped in his great hand; he pitched slightly backward, recovering his balance with the lithe swing of a cat. "Mon dieu! I have broken the paddle; but, no matter, there is another in the canoe."

Virginia was strongly moved.

"And you would be king?" she asked breathlessly. Dessalines as a king, the savage king of a savage island! Nothing could be more appropriate.

His great blue-black eyes flashed up toward her with an expression almost ferocious.

"I have not said that …!" His quick animal instinct read the admiration in her eyes to which his negro blood could not fail to respond. "I have not said it," he repeated less roughly.

"It would be safe with me," replied Virginia.

"Ah, of that I am sure," he answered swiftly, "and if I were king, Miss Moultrie, do you know what my first act would be?"

"No," replied Virginia, slightly drawing back and oddly stirred at something in the expression of the great, black, mobile face.

"It would be this: to place upon the throne at my side a white queen; a woman of consequence, well born, preferably Anglo-Saxon; and to encourage intermarriage with the better class of whites with both sexes of the aristocracy of my country. It is only by intermarriage that my people can be raised above the stigma with which the world views them. It is my belief that ages ago, before the Fall, before we were driven howling to the antipodes, we may have been a white race; that our difference of somatic type, physical differences, 118