Her only hope was in the brigantine. Her early associations had taught her to place implicit reliance on a boat’s crew of English sailors, and if she could but delay the attack until she had communicated with the privateer, Mademoiselle, for it was of Mademoiselle she chiefly thought, might be rescued even yet. If she could but speak to her son, lying within three feet of her! If she could but make him understand the emergency! How she trusted he overheard their conversation! How she prayed he might not have been asleep the whole time! Hippolyte’s plan of attack was simple enough. It would be dark in a couple of hours. Long before then, he and his little band meant to advance as far as the skirts of the bush, from whence they could reconnoitre the house. Doors and windows would all be open. There was but one white man in the place, and he unarmed. Nothing could be easier than to overpower the overseer, and perhaps, for Célandine’s sake, his life might be spared. Then, it was the Coromantee’s intention to secure the Marquise and her daughter, which he opined might be done with little risk, and at the expense of a shriek or two; to collect in the store-room any of the domestic slaves, male or female, who showed signs of resistance, and there lock them up; to break open the cellar, serve out a plentiful allowance of wine to his guards, and then, setting fire to the house, carry the Marquise and her daughter into the mountains. The former, to be kept as a hostage, slain, or otherwise disposed of, according to circumstances; the latter, as the African expressed it with hideous glee, “for make lilly-face chief wife to dis here handsome nigger!” Célandine affected to accept his views with great enthusiasm, but objected to the time appointed. “The moon,” said she gravely, “is yet in her first quarter. Her spirit is gone a journey to the mountains of Africa to bless the bones of our forefathers. It will be back to-morrow. Jumbo has not been sufficiently propitiated. Let us sacrifice to him for one night more with jar and calabash. I will send down for rum to the stores. Brave colonel, you and your guards shall bivouac here outside her hut, while the Obi-woman remains within to spend the night in singing and making charms. Jumbo will thus be pleased, and to-morrow the whole island may be ours without opposition.” But Hippolyte was not to be deceived so easily. His plans admitted of no delay, and the flames ascending from the roof of Montmirail West, that same night, were to be the signal for a general rising from sea to sea. His short period of influence had already taught him that such a blow as he meditated, to be effectual, must be struck at once. Moreover, the quality of cunning in the savage seems strong in proportion to his degradation; the Coromantee was a very fox for vigilance and suspicion, nor did he fail to attribute Célandine’s desire for procrastination to its true motive.