The Blue Man | Page 5

and behind it moved a
carriage in which a black maid sat weeping.
Madame Clementine came out to her palings and picked some of her
nasturtiums for me. In her mixed language she talked excitedly about
the accident; nothing equals the islander's zest for sensation after his
winter trance when the summer world comes to him.
"When I heard it," I confessed, "I thought of the friend of your blue
gentleman. The description was so like her. But I saw her myself on the
beach by the Giant's Stairway after four o'clock yesterday."
Madame Clementine contracted her short face in puzzled wrinkles.

"There is one gentleman of red head," she responded, "but none of
blue--pas du tout."
"You must know whom I mean--the lodger who has been with you
thirty-five years."
She looked at me as at one who has either been tricked or is attempting
trickery.
"I don't know his name--but you certainly understand! The man I saw
in that room at the foot of the stairs when you were showing my friend
and me the chambers day before yesterday."
"There was nobody. De room at de foot of de stair is empty all season.
Tout de suite I put in some young lady that arrive this night."
"Madame Clementine, I saw a man with a blue skin on the beach
yesterday--" I stopped. He had not told me he lodged with her. That
was my own deduction. "I saw him the day before in this house. Don't
you know any such person? He has been on the island since that young
lady was brought to your house with the cholera so long ago. He
brought her to you."
A flicker of recollection appeared on Clementine's face.
"That man is gone, madame; it is many years. And he was not blue at
all. He was English Jersey man, of Halifax."
"Did you never hear of any blue man on the island, Clementine?"
"I hear of blue bones found beyond Point de Mission."
"But that skeleton found in the hole near the Giant's Stairway was a
woman's skeleton."
"Me loes!" exclaimed Madame Clementine, miscalling her English as
she always did in excitement. "Me handle de big bones, moi-même! Me
loes what de doctor who found him say!"

"I was told it was an Indian girl."
"You have hear lies, madame. Me loes there was a blue man found
beyond Point de Mission."
"But who was it that I saw in your house?"
"He is not in my house!" declared Madame Clementine. "No blue man
is ever in my house!" She crossed herself.
There is a sensation like having a slide pulled from one's head; the
shock passes in the fraction of a second. Sunshine, and rioting
nasturtiums, the whole natural world, including Clementine's puzzled
brown face, were no more distinct to-day than the blue man and the
woman with floating hair had been yesterday.
I had seen a man who shot down to instant death in the pit under the
Giant's Stairway thirty-five years ago. I had seen a woman, who,
perhaps, once thought herself intentionally and strangely deserted, seek
and meet him after she had been killed at four o'clock!
This experience, set down in my note-book and repeated to no one,
remains associated with the Old World scent of ginger. For I remember
hearing Clementine say through a buzzing, "You come in,
madame--you must have de hot wine and jahjah!"

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