CHAPTER XXXMONTMIRAIL WEST
At a distance of less than a league from Port Welcome stood the large and flourishing plantation ofCash-a-crou, known to the European population, and, indeed, to many of the negroes, by the more civilised appellation of Montmirail West. It was the richest and most important establishment on the island, covering a large extent of cultivation, reclaimed at no small cost of labour from the bush, and worked by a numerous gang of slaves. Not a negro was purchased for these grounds till he had undergone a close inspection by the shrewd and pitiless overseer, who never missed a good investment, be it Coromantee, Guinea-man, or Congo, and never bought a hand, of however plausible an appearance, in whom his quick eye could detect a flaw; consequently, no such cheerful faces, fresh lips, sound teeth, strong necks, open chests, sinewy arms, dry, large hands, flat stomachs, powerful loins, round thighs, muscular calves, lean ankles, high feet, and similar physical points of servile symmetry, were to be found in any other gang as in that which worked the wide clearings on theCash-a-crouestate, which, for convenience, we will call by its more civilised name. It was said, however, that in the purchase of female negroes this overseer was not so particular; that a saucy eye, a nimble tongue, and such an amount of good looks as is compatible with African colouring and features, found more favour in his judgment than size, strength, substance, vigorous health, or the prolific qualities so desirable in these investments. The overseer, indeed, was a married man, living, it was thought, inwholesome dread of his Quadroon wife, and so completely did he identify himself with the new character he had assumed, that even Célandine could hardly believe her present husband was the same Stefano Bartoletti who had wooed her unsuccessfully in her girlhood, had met her again under such strange circumstances in France, eventually to follow her fortunes, and those of her mistress, the Marquise, and obtain from the latter the supervision of her negroes on the estate she had inherited by her mother’s will, which she chose to call Montmirail West.
Bartoletti had intended to settle down for the rest of his life in a state of dignified indolence with Célandine. He had even offered to purchase the Quadroon’s freedom, which was generously given to her by the Marquise with that view; but he had accustomed himself through the whole of his early life to the engrossing occupation of money-making, and like many others he found it impossible to leave off. He and his wife now devoted themselves entirely to the acquisition of wealth; she with the object of discovering her long-lost son, he, partly from inborn covetousness, and yet more from force of habit. Quick, shrewd, and indeed enterprising, where there was no personal risk, he had been but a short time in the service of the Marquise ere he became an excellent overseer, by no means neglecting her interests, while he was scrupulously attentive to his own. The large dealings in human merchandise which now occupied his attention afforded scope for his peculiar qualities, and Signor Bartoletti found few competitors in the slave-market who, in caution, cupidity, and knowledge of business, could pretend to be his equals. Moreover, he dearly loved the constant speculation, amounting to actual gambling, inseparable from such transactions, nor was he averse, besides, to that pleasing sensation of superiority experienced by all but the noblest natures from absolute authority, however unjustifiable, over their fellow-creatures.
The Signor was a great man in the plantation, a great man in Port Welcome, a great man on the deck of a trader just arrived with her swarthy cargo from the Bight of Benin or the Gold Coast; but his proportions seemed to shrink and his step to falter when he crossed the threshold of his own home. The older negroes, who knew he had married anObi-woman, and respected him for his daring, were persuaded that he had been quelled and brought into subjection through some charm put upon him by Célandine. To the same magical influence they attributed the Quadroon’s favour with her mistress, and this superstitious dread had indeed been of service to both; for a strong feeling of dissatisfaction was gaining ground rapidly amongst the blacks, and then, as now, notwithstanding all that has been said and written in their favour, they were less easily ruled by love than fear.
It is not that they are naturally savage, inhuman, brutal. Centuries of Christianity and cultivation might probably have done for the black man what they have done for the white; but those centuries have been denied him; and if he is to be taken at once from a state of utter ignorance and degradation to be placed on a footing of social equality with those who have hitherto been his masters—a race that has passed gradually through the successive stages he is expected to compass in one stride—surely it must be necessary to restrain him from the excesses peculiar to the lusty adolescence of nations, as of individuals, by some stronger repressive influence than need be applied to the staid and sober demeanour of a people arrived long ago at maturity, if not already past their prime.
Signor Bartoletti did not trouble himself with such speculations. Intimidation he found answered his purpose tolerably, corporal punishment extremely well.
Passing from the supervision of some five-score hoes, picking their labour out with great deliberation amongst the clefts and ridges of a half-cleared mountain, clothed to its summit in a tangle of luxuriant beauty, he threaded a line of wattled mud cottages, cool with thick heavy thatch, dazzling in whitewash, and interspersed with fragrant almond-trees, breaking the scorching sunlight into a thousand shimmering rays, as they rustled and quivered to the whisper of the land-breeze, not yet exhausted by the heat.
At the door of one of these huts he spied a comely negro girl, whose duties should have kept her in the kitchen of the great house. He also observed that she concealed something bulky under her snowy apron, and looked stealthily about as if afraid of being seen.
He had a step noiseless and sure as a cat; she never heard him coming, but started with a loud scream when she felt his hand on her shoulder, and incontinently began to cry.
“What have you got there, Fleurette?” asked the overseer, sternly. “Bring it out at once, and show it up!”
“Nothing, Massa,” answered Fleurette, of course, though she was sobbing all the time. “It only Aunt Rosalie’s piccaninny, I take him in please, just now, to his mammy, out of the wind.”
There was but such a light breath of air as kept the temperature below actual suffocation.
“Wind! nonsense!” exclaimed Bartoletti, perspiring and exasperated. “Aunt Rosalie’s child was in the baby-yard half an hour ago; here, let me look at him!” and the overseer snatched up Fleurette’s apron to discover a pair of plump black hands, clasped over a well-fattened turkey, cleaned, plucked, and ready for the pot.
The girl laughed through her tears. “You funny man, Signor!” said she, archly, yet with a gleam of alarm in her wild black eyes; “you no believe only when you see. Piccaninny gone in wash-tub long since; Fleurette talkee trash, trash; dis lilly turkey fed on plantation at Maria Gralante; good father give um to Fleurette a-cause dis nigger say ‘Ave’ right through, and spit so at Mumbo-Jumbo.”
This story was less credible than the last, inasmuch as the adjoining plantation of Maria Galante, cultivated by a few Jesuit priests, although in a thriving condition, and capable of producing the finest poultry reared, was more than an hour’s walk from where they stood, and it was impossible that Fleurette could have been absent so long from her duties at that period of the day. So Bartoletti, placing his hand in his waistcoat, pulled out a certain roll, which the slaves called his “black book,” and inserted Fleurette’s name therein for corporal punishment to the amount of stripes awarded for the crime of theft.
It was a common action enough; scarce a day passed, scarce even an hour, without the production of this black book by the overseer, and a torrent of entreaties, couched in the mingled jargon of French, Spanish, and British, I have endeavoured to render through the conventional negro-English,which, indeed, formed its basis, from the unfortunate culprit whose name was thus inscribed; but on this occasion Fleurette seemed to entertain a morbid terror of the ordeal quite out of proportion to its frequency, and, indeed, its severity—for though sufficiently brutal, the lash was not dangerous to life or limb. She screamed, she wept, she prayed, she caught the overseer by his knees and clasped them to her bosom, entreating him, with a frantic earnestness that became almost sublime, to spare her this degradation! to forgive her only this once! to bid her work night and day till crop-time, and then to send her into the field-gang for the hardest labour they could devise—nay, to sell her to the first trader that touched at Port Welcome, never to look on her home atCash-a-crouagain—anything, anything, rather than tie her to a stake and flog her like a disobedient hound!
But Bartoletti was far too practised an overseer to be in the slightest degree moved by such entreaties. Replacing the black book in his waistcoat, he walked coolly away, without deigning to look back at his despairing suppliant, writhing under such a mixture of grief and shame as soon maddened into rage. Perhaps, had he done so, he would have been frightened into mercy, for a bolder man than the Italian might have been cowed by the glare of that girl’s eyes, when she drew up her slender figure, and clenching her hands till the nails pierced them, spat after him with an intensity of hatred that wanted only opportunity to slake its fierce desire in blood.
The Signor, however, wiping his brow, unconscious, passed quietly on, to report his morning’s work to the Marquise, and obtain her sanction for Fleurette’s punishment, because the mistress never permitted any slave on her estate to be chastised but by her own express command.
Long years ago, when his heart was fresh and high, the Italian had spent a few months in this very island, a period to which he still looked back as to the one bright ray that gilded his dreary, wandering, selfish life. It was here he met Célandine while both were young, and wooed her with little encouragement indeed, for she confessed honestly enough that he was too late, yet not entirely without hope. And now in gleams between the cane-pieces he could catcha glimpse of that silver-spread lagoon by which they had walked more than once in the glowing evenings, till darkness, closing without warning like a curtain, found them together still.
He had conceived for himself then an ideal of Paradise, which had never in after years faded completely away. To win the Quadroon for his own—to make himself a peaceful home in easy circumstances, somewhere amidst this tangled wilderness of beauty from which Port Welcome peeped out on the Caribbean Sea—to sit in his own porch and watch the tropical sunset dying off through its blended hues of gold, and crimson, and orange, into the pale, serene depths of opal, lost ere he could look again, amongst the gathering shades of night—such were his dreams, and at last he had realised them to the letter; but he never watched the sunset now, nor walked by the cool glistening lagoon with the woman whom in his own selfish way he had loved for half a lifetime. She was his wife, you see, and a very imperious wife she proved. When he had leisure to speculate on such matters, which was seldom, he could not but allow that he was disappointed; that the ideal was a fallacy, the romance a fiction, the investment a failure; practically, the home was dull, the lagoon damp, and the sunset moonshine!
Therefore, as he walked on, though the material Paradise was there, as it had always been, he never wasted a look or thought on its glowing beauties, intent only on the dust that covered his shoes, the thirst that fired his throat, and the perspiration that streamed from his brow. Yet palm, cocoa, orange, and lime-tree were waving overhead; while the wild vine, pink, purple, and delicate creamy-white, winding here about his path, ran fifty feet aloft round some bare stem to which it clung in a succession of convolvulus-like blossoms from the same plant he trod beneath his very feet. Birds of gaudy feather—purple, green, and flaming scarlet, flashed from tree to tree with harsh, discordant cries, and aLouis d’orflitted round him in its bright, golden plumage, looking, as its name implies, like a guinea upon wings.
The grass-grown road he followed was indeed an avenue to the great house, and as he neared his destination he passed another glimpse of tropical scenery without a glance. It was the same view that delighted the eyes of the Marquisedaily from her sitting-room, and that Cerise would look at in quiet enjoyment for hours.
A slope of vivid green, dotted with almond-trees, stretched away from the long, low, white building to a broad, clear river, shining between the plantains and bananas that clothed its banks; beyond these, cattle pasture and cane-pieces shot upward in variegated stripes through the tangled jungle of the steep ascent, while at short intervals hog-plum, or other tall trees of the forest, reared their heads against the cloudless sky, to break the dark thick mass that clothed the mountain to its very summit—save where some open, natural savannah, with its crop of tall, rank, feathering grass, relieved the eye from the vivid colouring and gaudy exuberance of beauty in which nature dresses these West Indian islands.
Bartoletti knew well that he should find the Marquise in her sitting-room, for the sun was still high and the heat intense; none therefore but slaves, slave-drivers, or overseers would be abroad for hours. The Signor had however been reduced to such proper subjection by Célandine that he never ventured to approach the Marquise without making a previous report to his wife, and as the Quadroon had not yet returned from the visit to Port Welcome, in which she made acquaintance with Slap-Jack, some considerable delay took place before the enormity of Fleurette’s peculations could be communicated to her mistress.
Mother and daughter were inseparable here, in the glowing tropical heat, as under the cool breezes and smiling skies of their own beautiful France, a land to which they constantly reverted with a longing that seemed only to grow more and more intense as every hour of their unwelcome banishment dragged by.
They were sitting in a large low room, with the smallest possible amount of furniture and the greatest attainable of air. To insure a thorough draught, the apartment occupied the whole breadth of the house, and the windows, scarcely closed from year’s-end to year’s-end, were placed opposite each other, so that there was free ingress on all sides for the breeze that, notwithstanding the burning heat of the climate, blows pretty regularly in these islands frommorning till night and from night till morning. It wafted through the whole apartment the fragrance of a large granadilla, cut in half for the purpose, that stood surrounded by a few shaddocks, limes, and pomegranates, heaped together like acornucopiaon a small table in the corner; it fluttered the leaves of a book that lay on Mademoiselle de Montmirail’s knee, who was pretending to read, with her eyes resting wearily on a streak of blue sea, far off between the mountains; and it lifted the dark hair from the temples of the Marquise, fanning with grateful breath, yet scarce cooling, the rich crimson of her cheek.
The resemblance between these two grew closer day by day. While the mother remained stationary at that point of womanly beauty to which the daughter was approaching, figure and face, in each, became more and more alike; and though the type of the elder was still the richer and more glowing, of the younger, the more delicate and classical, Cerise seemed unaccountably to have gained some of that spirit and vitality which the Marquise seemed as unaccountably to have lost.
Also on the countenance of each might be traced the same expression—the longing, wistful look of those who live in some world of their own, out of and far beyond the present, saddened in the woman’s face with memory as it was brightened in the girl’s by hope.
“It is suffocating!” exclaimed the former, rising restlessly from her seat, and pushing the hair off her temples with a gesture of impatience. “Cerise, my darling, are you made of stone that you do not cry out at this insupportable heat? It irritates me to see you sit reading there as calmly as if you could feel the wind blowing off the heights of Montmartre in January. It seems as if the sun would never go down in this oven that they call an island.”
Cerise shut her book and collected her scattered ideas with an obvious effort. “I read, mamma,” she answered smiling, “because it is less fatiguing than to think, but I obtain as little result from the one process as the other. Do you know, I begin to believe the stories we used to hear in Paris about the West Indies, and I am persuaded that we shall not only be shrivelled up to mummies in a few more weeks, but that our tongues will be so dry and cracked asto be incapable of expressing our thoughts, even if our poor addled brains could form them. Look at Pierrot even, who is a native; he has not said a syllable since breakfast.”
Pierrot, however, like the historical parrot of all ages, though silent on the present occasion, doubtlessthoughtthe more, for the attitude in which he held his head on one side, peering at his young mistress with shrewd unwinking eye, implied perceptions more than human, nay, even diabolical in their malignant sagacity.
“What can I do?” said the Marquise, vehemently, pacing the long room with quick steps ill suited to the temperature and the occasion. “While the Regent lives I can never return to Paris. For myself, I sometimes fancy I could risk it; but when I think of you, Cerise—I dare not—Idarenot; that’s the truth. An insult, an injury, he might forgive, or at least forget; but a scene in which he enacted the part of thePantaleone, whom everybody kicks and cuffs; in which he was discovered as a coxcomb, an intruder, and apolisson, and through the whole of which he is conscious, moreover, that he was intensely ridiculous—I protest to you I cannot conceive any outrage so horrible as to satisfy his revenge. No, my child, for generations my family have served the Bourbons, and we should know what they are: with all their good qualities there are certain offences they can never forgive, and this Regent is the worst of the line.”
“Then, mamma,” observed Cerise cheerfully, though she smothered a sigh, “we must have patience and live where we are. It might be worse,” she added, pointing to the streak of deep-blue sea that belted the horizon. “This is a wider view and a fairer than the dead wall of Vincennes or the gratings of the Bastile, and some day, perhaps, some of our friends from France may drop in quite unexpectedly to offer their homage to Madame la Marquise. How the dear old Prince-Marshal would gasp in this climate, and how dreadfully he would swear at the lizards, centipedes, galley-wasps, red ants, and cockroaches! He who, brave as he is, never dared face a spider or an earwig! Mamma, I think if I could see his face over a borer-worm, I should have one more good laugh, even in such a heat as this.”
“You might laugh, my dear,” answered her mother,“but I think I should be more inclined to cry—yes, to cry for sheer joy at seeing him again. I grant you he was a little ridiculous; but what courage! what sincerity! what a true gentleman! I hear that he too is out of favour at the Palais Royal, and has returned to his estates at Chateau-Guerrand. His coach was seen near the Hôtel Montmirail the night of Monsieur le Duc’s creditableescapade, and that is crime enough, I conclude, to balance a dozen battles and forty years of loyal service to the throne. No, Cerise, I tell you while the monster lives we must remain exiled in this purgatory of fire. But my friends keep me well informed of passing events. I hear his health is failing. They tell me his face is purple now in the mornings when he comes to Council, and he drinks harder than ever with hisrouésat night. Of course, my child, it would be wicked to wish for the death of a fellow-creature, but while there is a Regent in France you and I must be content with the lizards and the cockroaches for society, and for amusement, the supervision of these miserable, brutalised negro slaves.”
“Poor things!” said the younger lady, tenderly. “I am sure they have kind hearts under their black skins. I cannot but think that if they were taught and encouraged, and treated less like beasts of burden, they would show as much intelligence as our own peasants at La Fierté or therealMontmirail. Why, Fleurette brought me a bouquet of jessamines and tuberoses yesterday, with a compliment to the paleness of my complexion that could not have been outdone by Count Point-d’Appui himself. Oh! mamma, I wish you would let me establishmycivil code for the municipal government of the blacks.”
“You had better let it alone, my child,” answered the Marquise, gravely. “Wiser brains than yours have puzzled over the problem, and failed to solve it. I have obtained all the information in my power from those whose experience is reliable, and considered it for myself besides, till my head ached. It seems to me that young colonists, and all who know nothing about negroes, are for encouragement and indulgence; old planters, and those who are well acquainted with their nature, for severity and repression. I would not be cruel; far from it; but as for treating them like white people, Cerise, in my opinion all such liberalityis sheer nonsense. Jaques and Pierre, at home, are ill-fed, ill-clothed (I wish it were not so), up early, down late, and working often without intermission from sunrise till sunset; nevertheless, Jaques or Pierre will doff his red cap, tuck up his blouse, and run a league bareheaded, after a hard day’s work, if you or I lift up a finger; and why?—because we are La Fiertés or Montmirails. But Hippolyte or Achille, fat, strong, lazy, well-fed, grumbles if he is bid to carry a message to the boiling-house after his eight hours’ labour, and only obeys because he knows that Bartoletti can order him a hundred lashes by my authority at his discretion.”
“I do not like the Italian, mamma! I am sure that man is not to be trusted,” observed Cerise, inconsequently, being a young lady. “What could make my dear oldbonnemarry him, I have never been able to discover. He is an alchemist, you know, and a conjuror, and worse. I shudder to think of the stories they told about him at home, and I believe he bewitched her!”
Here Mademoiselle de Montmirail crossed herself devoutly, and her mother laughed.
“He is a very good overseer,” said she, “and as for his necromancy, even if he learned it from the Prince of Darkness, which you seem to believe, I fancy Célandine would prove a match for his master. Between them, the Signor, as he calls himself, and his wife, manage my people wonderfully well, and this is no easy matter at present, for I am sorry to say they show a good deal of insubordination and ill-will. There is a spirit of disaffection amongst them,” added the Marquise, setting her red lips firmly together, “that must be kept down with the strong hand. I do not mind your going about amongst the house negroes, Cerise, or noticing the little children, though taking anything black on your lap is, in my opinion, an injudicious piece of condescension; but I would not have you be seen near the field-gang at present, men or women, and above all, never trust them. Not one is to be depended on except Célandine, for I believe they hate her as much as her husband, and fear her a great deal more.”
The Marquise had indeed cause for uneasiness as to the condition of her plantation, although she had never before hinted so much to her daughter, and indeed, like the generalityof people who live on the crust of a volcano, she forced herself to ignore the danger of which she was yet uncomfortably conscious. For some time, perhaps ever since the arrival of the Italian overseer, there had been symptoms of discontent and disaffection among the slaves. The work indeed went on as usual, for Bartoletti was unsparing of the lash, but scarce a week passed without a runaway betaking himself to the bush, and vague threats, forerunners of some serious outbreak, had been heard from the idlest and most mutinous of the gang when under punishment. It would not have been well in such difficulties to relax the bonds of discipline, yet it was scarcely wise to draw them tighter than before. The Marquise, however, came of a race that had never yet learned to yield, and to which, for generations, the assertion of his rights by an inferior had seemed an intolerable presumption that must be resisted to the death. As her slaves, therefore, grew more defiant she became more severe, and of late the slightest offences had been visited with the utmost rigour, and under no circumstances passed over without punishment. It was an unfortunate time therefore that poor Fleurette had chosen to be detected in the abstraction of a turkey ready plucked for cooking, and she could not have fallen into worse hands than those of the pitiless Italian overseer.
The Marquise had scarce concluded her warning, ere Bartoletti entered the sitting-room with his daily report. His manner was extremely obsequious to Madame de Montmirail, and polite beyond expression to Mademoiselle. The former scarcely noticed his demeanour at any time; the latter observed him narrowly, with the air of a child who watches a toad or any such object for which it feels an unaccountable dislike.
Cerise usually left the room soon after the Signor entered it, but something in her mother’s face on the present occasion, as she ran her eye over the black book, induced her to remain.
The Marquise read the punishment list twice; frowned, hesitated, and looked discomposed.
“It is her first offence?” said she, inquiringly. “And the girl is generally active and well-behaved enough.”
“Pardon, Madame la Marquise,” answered Bartoletti.“Madame forgave her only last week when she lost half-a-dozen of Mademoiselle’s handkerchiefs, that she had taken to wash; orsaidshe lost them,” he added pointedly.
“Oh, mamma!” interposed Cerise, but the Marquise checked her with a sign, and Bartoletti proceeded.
“One of her brothers is at the head of a gang ofMaroons,[6]who infest the very mountains above our cane-pieces, and another ran away to join him last week. They say at the Plantation wedarenot punish any of the family, and I am pledged to make an example of the first that comes into my hands.”
“Very well,” said the Marquise, decidedly, returning his black book to her overseer, and observing to Cerise, who was by this time in tears, “A case, my dear, that it would be most injudicious to pardon. After all, the pain is not much, and the disgrace, you know, to these sort of people is nothing!”