“‘I do not want your knife,’ he answers. ‘I want you.’
“‘Well, I’m going cheap, I do assure ’e,’ I said, thinking I’d try how a light heart would serve me. But I weren’t comfortable by a long way, ’cause there’s a lot of madness in them islands, an’ I thought as this chap might be three-halfpence short of a shilling, as we say. However, he was too busy thinking to laugh at my poor fun, an’ for that matter, as I found after, he never laughed easy,—nor talked easy for that matter. Now he fell silent, an’ I walked by him. Then, after a stretch through a reg’lar Garden of Eden, wi’out our first parents, us comed upon a lovely house, whitewashed home to the roof—like snow in all that butivul green. ’Pon sight of it the man spoke again.
“‘I want you to talk to my mother,’ he said suddenly. ‘You’ll just talk and talk in an easy way, as you was talking to yourself when I found you.’
“‘I be only a sailor-man, wi’ nought to say to a lady,’ I told him.
“‘No matter for that,’ he said. ‘Just talk straight on. It do not signify a bit what you say, so you speak natural. In fact, talk to my mother as if madame was your own mother.’
“So then, of course, I reckoned the cat-faced chap was out of his mind—as who wouldn’t have?
“To a great verandah we comed, all crawled over with the butivulest white flowers the sun draws the scent from; an’ there, in a cane chair, sat an ancient lady—lady, I say, though you might have reckoned she was an old brown lizard by the look of her. Old ban’t the word for her. Time’s self would have looked a boy alongside her, if the picture-books be true. A great sunbonnet was over her head, an’ a frill under, an’ just a scanty thread or two of white hair peeping from that. A face all deep lines where the years had run over it; bright eyes peeping from behind great gold spectacles, an’ hands—my word! like joints of an old apple tree. Her was that homely too! A dandy-go-risset gown her wore, an’ a bit of knitting was in her hands, an’ a good book, wi’ very large print, ’pon a table beside her, an’ a li’l nigger gal waved a fan to keep the flies away.
“I took my hat off an’ made a leg; then her son spoke: ‘Sit down there beside her and talk loud, and pretend with yourself that Madame Damian is your grandmother. Don’t try to use fine words; and remember this: if you do rightly as I bid you, you shall never repent this day as long as you live.’
“I was all in a maze, I do assure ’e; but I just reckoned obedience was best, an’ went at her with one eye on my gentleman, for fear as he should change his mind.
“‘Well, my old dear,’ I said, ‘I be very pleased to meet ’e, an’ I do like to have a tell with ’e very much, if you’ll pardon a rough sailor-man. An’ I hopes you’ll put in a word with this here big gen’leman for me, ’cause I’ve eat one of his pomegranates unbeknownst-like, though I’m shot if I’d have touched un come I’d known ’twasn’t wild. An’ to tell ’e gospel, I be in a jakes of a mess as ’tis—far from my home an’ not a friend in the world that I know of.’