240
Martinique
Sketches.
they look up and down. But there is a great quiet in the Rue du Morne Mirail ;—the street is empty. . . . Manm-Robert enters very weary : she has been at the sale, trying to save something for the children, but the prices were too high. In silence she takes her accustomed seat at the worn counter of her little shop ; the young ones gather about her, caress her;—Mimi looks up laughing into the kind brown face, and wonders why Manm-Robert will not smile. Then Mimi becomes afraid to ask where the maskers are,—why they do not come. But little Maurice, bolder and less sensitive, cries out :—
—"Manm-Robert, oti masque-à ?" Manm-Robert does not answer ;—she does not hear. She is gazing directly into the young faces clustered about her knee,—yet she does not see them : she sees far, far beyond them,—into the hidden years. And, suddenly, with a savage tenderness in her voice, she utters all the dark thought of her heart for them :—•
—" Toua ti blancs sans lesou!—quitte moin châchê papaou qui adans cimétiè pou vini pouend ou tou !" (Ye three little penniless white ones !—let me go call your father, who is in the cemetery, to come and take you also away !)