“Very well, then, the Governor and the militia must come back.  Rebecca, you are the most sensible as well as the weakest in the arms.  You will stay here to-night, and you will not falter for a moment.  As soon as it is dark Flora and Esther will row me across the channel, and I will send the Buckra’s agent on a fast horse with a note to the Governor.  If the other house servants return, you will tell them that I am ill and that Flora and Esther are nursing me.  You will lock the gates, and open them to no one unless your Buckra should return.  Do you understand?”

The slave rolled her eyes, but nodded.  She might have defied the Captain-General, but not one of the Fawcetts.

There were two hours before dark.  Rachael was conscious of every nerve in her body, and paced up and down the long line of rooms which terminated in the library, until Alexander’s legs were worn out trotting after her, and he fell asleep on the floor.  Twice she went to the roof to look for Hamilton’s sloop, but saw not a sail on the sea; and the streets of Charles Town were packed with negroes.  England sent no soldiers to protect her Islands, and every free male between boyhood and old age was forced by law to join the militia.  It was doubtful if there were a dozen muscular white men on Nevis that night, for the birthday of a Governor was a fete of hilarities.  Unless the militia returned that night, the blacks, if they really were plotting vengeance, and she knew their superstitions, would have burned every house and cane-field before morning.

The brief twilight passed.  The mist rolled down from the heights of Nevis.  Rachael, with Alexander in her arms, and followed by her maids, stole along the shore through the thick cocoanut groves, meeting no one.  They were far from the town’s centre, and all the blacks on the Island seemed to be gathered there.  The boat was beached, and it took the combined efforts of the three women to launch it.  When they pushed off, the roar of the breakers and the heavy mist covered their flight.  But there was another danger, and the very physical strength of the slaves departed before it.  They had rowed their mistress about the roadstead before St. Kitts a hundred times, but the close proximity of the reef so terrified them that Rachael was obliged to take the oars; while Flora caught Alexander in so convulsive an embrace that he awoke and protested with all the vigour of his lungs.  His mother’s voice, to which he was peculiarly susceptible, hushed him, and he held back his own, although the gasping bosom on which he rested did not tend to soothe a nervous child.  But there were other ways of expressing outraged feelings, and he kicked like a little steer.

Rachael herself was not too sure of her knowledge of the dangerous channel, although she had crossed it many times with Hamilton; and the mist was floating across to St. Kitts.  The hollow boom of the reef seemed so close that she expected to hear teeth in the boat every moment, and she knew that far and wide the narrows bristled.  She wondered if her hair were turning white, and her straining nerves quivered for a moment with a feminine regret; for she knew the power of her beauty over Hamilton.  But her arms kept their strength.  Life had taught her to endure more than a half-hour of mortal anxiety.