Page:Rowland--In the shadow.djvu/143

 "You don't mean to say that you have never been to New York?"

Dessalines' face lowered, became sinister, cruel. "But once, simply to transship. It was the first time that I went to Europe; I was not well treated in New York—" Again he glanced away, and a faint rim of white was all that Giles could see of the brooding eyes. "I was very young, fifteen, perhaps; it was the first time that I had ever been away from the island. We are a peculiar people in Hayti, Giles; I do not to this day know who gave me birth. I never knew a mother, but my father was afterwards the President of Hayti and immensely rich; he was rich at that time, although few knew it, and I grew up in an atmosphere not of luxury as you know it, for Hayti is crude, but taught to believe myself inferior to none. The people about me were my slaves; I had everything. I firmly believed my people to be the greatest on earth; Hayti the garden spot of the world; myself destined to be a power in Hayti; for you see, Giles, my father recognized early that I was the superior of those about me; he was ambitious for me and he needed me to aid in carrying out a long-formed project."

Giles had listened, absorbed, embarrassed at first and uncomfortable at Dessalines' reference to things the mere hint of which was a matter of shame and anger to an Anglo-Saxon. Dessalines' origin had never occurred to him; had been shrouded in the vague glamour of strangeness and mystery which seemed to envelop the man. If he had thought of the matter at all, Giles might have imagined the Haytian's father as the half-naked chief of a cannibal tribe and his mother as an African 133